Primrose Road

The Passover Haggadah, told in Facebook.

(I like God's "25 Things You Didn't Know About Me" list and the random Bernie Madoff appearance.)

Tonight I went to Purim services (description for the uninitiated) dressed as my dissertation.

I pinned a title page to the front of my shirt and a few pages of footnotes to the back, then printed out random pages from drafts and pinned them to my sleeves and trousers. During the service, I kept turning around to find people reading my back!

Still, nothing beat the grown man dressed in a full Tigger suit.

And the winning search that brought someone to Primrose Road in the month of January is ....

peple with low iqs [sic]

SigOther: When we have a kid, we should name it so its initials spell "God." Something like George Edward D----.

PrimroseRoad: That spells G.E.D.

SigOther: Right. G-E-D.

(Beat. Sound of wheels turning.)

SigOther: Oh no! "God" is spelled G-O-D!


Needless to say, "praise Ged!" is now a catchphrase around here.

My mother is throwing us an engagement party in April, which we believe is just a ploy to get us to set up a wedding registry even though the wedding is not until June of next year. So, this Sunday, we will be driving out to Long Island and venturing into registry territory.

While Bed, Bath, & Beyond seems to offer a helpful list of recommended items on their webpage, Crate and Barrel's seems to go *justalittle* overboard. Their list includes:

- a muffin pan AND a mini-muffin pan
- a regular wok AND an electric wok
- bathroom weight scale (raise your hand if you'd buy someone a scale as an engagement/shower/wedding gift)
- sectional sofa
- bedside carafe

This should be fascinating.

5 percent of visitors to Primrose Road in December got here via a search for "plagiarizing hilarious," which makes me think I should start a blog called "Hilarious Plagiarism" in which secondary school and college-level teachers share the most hilarious instances of plagiarism they've ever encountered.

Though I think there already is a site for that. Hmm.

When I was a child, my Catholic cousins rather innocently explained to me that the reason I didn't get presents from Santa Claus was that Santa skipped over all of the Jewish kids' houses. After that, I received one gift from "Santa" under the menorah every year because my parents feared that I would otherwise believe that Jolly Old St. Nick was anti-Semitic.

Tonight, while looking at the Norad Santa Tracker, I notice that while Santa has been to much of the North Caucasus and Middle East (including Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, the Sudan, and Oman), he has clearly avoided Israel. Thus, we can only conclude that Santa does indeed skip over all the Jewish kids' houses.

(Meanwhile, SigOther wonders why Santa is only stopping for three minutes at a time in Southern Hemisphere cities, where he should be sitting out in the sun and getting a tan. SigOther's goal is to someday have a Chanukah beach party in Australia; he lived in Boston during Boston's coldest winter ever and now vehemently crusades against winter.)

Merry Christmas and happy holidays to all! Take good care of yourselves, kinderlekh. :)

Bing of Happy Jihad's House of Pancakes tells a story that may indeed sum up everything you need to know.

Though I'm not a huge fan of New York's tabloidier rags (the Daily News and Post), I found it somewhat hilarious that the Daily News successfully stole the Empire State Buidling. Actually, they were trying to show how easy it is, armed with only a $30 fake notary stamp, for crooks in NYC to transfer the deeds to properties to themselves. One 22-year-old woman reassigned the deed to her grandmother's house to herself and then took out a $500,000 mortgage.

If only the News hadn't "withheld key details" of the scheme, I'd have a great way to pay off student loans.

Many wedding planning websites exist entirely for the purpose of selling you stuff.

Big shocker, I know. On the Internet, we're all free to sell each other crap, as long as we have the resources to be able to sell crap to others. Rock on, cyberlibertarians. ;)

But my favorite bit of wedding-based consumerism thus far is the following "idea" from The Knot magazine:

Trash the Dress
The wedding is over and now you have a gown you'll likely never wear again hanging in your closet. Giving it to a local charity that supports low-income brides is a wonderful gesture, but if you've been dying to let off some of the steam that built up in the planning stages, consider a "Trash the Dress" video. Brides jump in a puddle of mud, let kids put their sticky little hands all over it, or rip it to shreds with their friends -- this video is all about having fun. While it's not a necessary piece of wedding memorabilia, it could be one of your favorite keepsakes.

I'd like to let this speak for itself, but here's my translation: "Dear brides, while it *might* be nice to donate your dress to a charity program, it's probably better to create a keepsake for yourself and de-stress instead."

The magazine also recommends that I get one oxygen facial per month before the wedding.