Scott ‘Cosmo Boy’ Brown may brag about his NRA credentials, but Elizabeth Warren has mad knife skills:
… I really, really didn’t want to arm twelve little girls with knives, particularly when a couple of the girls were fairly excitable. But I couldn’t deny the girls’ argument that the safe use of a knife was a basic cooking skill, and they all absolutely, positively promised to be responsible, calm and careful. So I agreed. The hardest part was borrowing extra paring knives from all the neighbors with the explanation that I wanted to give them to children.
__
The big day came, and we drilled on the basics: how to walk with a knife (at your side, never in front of you), how to hold a knife for cutting, and how to care for a cutting board. We successfully cut bananas with table knives, bread with serrated knives, and — the pinnacle — we cut celery, tomatoes, and green peppers with sharp paring knives, and best of all, without injury.
__
I don’t know if these girls graduated to fancier knife work, but I do know that they learned friendship, leadership and fun. Even now, I sometimes think of the rules of knife use — and I miss my Brownies….
Well, it made me laugh. Yes, I was a Brownie once, and a Junior Scout too, although I was never very good at group participation projects. And while Juliette Gordon Low (good Suthrun lady that she was) doesn’t seem to have been much of a suffragette, her very public activism despite significant hearing loss made her a disability rights activist by the standards of her era.
Apart from celebrating a hundred years of proto-female empowerment, what’s on the agenda for the upcoming week?
Yutsano
Extra shifts, some OT, then prep for six weeks of post-surgery recoup time. And trying not to kill myself before I get there.
JGabriel
Elizabeth Warren:
… and don’t fuck with them, ’cause every single one of them knows how to cut a motherfucker.
.
JGabriel
By the way, does anyone know where the phrase “cut a motherfucker” comes from? Is it a rap lyric or a movie reference?
I see it all over the place, and have no idea where it started.
.
Politically Lost
Day two of 800 calories. Resolve is strong but defenses are weak.
Edit: STOP TALKING ABOUT COOKIES!
Xenos
@Politically Lost: Yikes. Did you decide to give up metabolizing for Lent? After a daily bottle of wine that will leave you like with zero calories.
srv
Catholic diocese buys the Crystal Cathedral
Politically Lost
For Lent it was believing that I was smart.
The starvation diet is because I’m a disgusting day body that has flung himself at medically supervised weight loss.
Gretchen
@Xenos:
I like your diet.
Brian S
Crazy amount of work between now and Wednesday, then 6 days in London, assuming my expedited passport shows up.
MariedeGournay
@JGabriel: Girl Scouts: making Boy Scouts nervous since 1912.
John M. Burt
Continuing my seemingly hopeless job search, playing with my four-year-old, possibly talking on phone with my 27-year-old (which is a big deal because he’s been out of touch), checking Amazon to see if any more of my Kindle stories have sold.
BethanyAnne
Just finished Mass Effect 3. Holy shit, does that ending SUCK. I mean, just dayam. Nothing you do in the earlier game seems to matter. You go from Space marine, kicking ass to … “What’s behind door #2?” “Bzzzt! A big can of fuck you! Gratz!” Between this ending and the shite that was Dragon Age 2, I’m thinking that maybe avoiding anything with a Bioware tag might be a good idea.
Mnemosyne
I don’t know if it’s because we’re having a mild winter or what, but the Girl Scouts are freakin’ EVERYWHERE I GO with their goddamned cookies right now.
Usually they’re out in front of grocery stores and pharmacies, but for some reason this year they’ve been hitting indie bookstores and Panera Bread. Very weird.
Martin
Quite topical. I taught the 11 year old girl scout how to use the chop saw tonight. She had a school project. Fuck those paper mache kids – mine was rocking a Dewalt DW716 12″ dual compound miter saw.
Martin
@Mnemosyne: They can only sell for a little while longer – so they’re trying to wrap up. I forget it it’s 3/15 or 3/31 but it’s this month. Mine cleared out inventory tonight.
Panera Bread is a shitty place to sell. I keep telling the moms that they need to just camp at Home Depot. Not only are guys suckers for cute little girls, but if the guys are alone, they’re unsupervised and they’ll suck that box of cookies down before they get home and dispose of the evidence, AND guys like to look generous, so they’ll tip as well.
Suffern ACE
I was one of the unfortunate souls who went to see John Carter. Which I only did for him. Him being that guy who is about to be downgraded to “guy who I’ve been seeing for the past seven years” if he doesn’t stop selecting movies because “It’ll look cool on the IMax in 3-D.” This whole “it’s your birthday. So you choose the movie” practice has got to go.
NotMax
Saw several Girl Scouts today in front of one of the larger drug stores, selling their wares.
But not a one of them was wearing her uniform.
What’s up with that?
Suffern ACE
@NotMax: Keebler trying to discredit the girl scouts by selling counterfeit cookies made of lint, I bet. Don’t want to be caught impersonating a girl scout though. That doubles the sentence and gets the girls prosecuted under super-predator laws.
Mnemosyne
@Martin:
Actually, the Panera Bread girl seemed to be doing fairly well. Though I could tell that she is destined to get her business degree in marketing someday, because her signs said, “$4 a box — 5 boxes for $20.” Veeerry clever.
ETA: And I mean that seriously — not being very math-minded, it did fool me for a few minutes, though I was only buying two boxes anyway.
Spaghetti Lee
Have to call my folks at some point and tell them I didn’t get accepted to the study abroad program I was trying for, not looking forward to that. In between, I don’t know, draw some shit.
Martin
@Mnemosyne: When I brought the girl to Home Depot, there’s always be a guy or two that would buy a case of Thin Mints. No fucking around – give me a case of them – they’ll go in the freezer in the garage next to the deer. $400 in 3 hours isn’t a stretch. Sending them out in pairs wearing opposing team gear during the Superbowl is pretty damn good too. The parties are easy to spot, and little girls in football gear is too cute to not buy cookies from.
ruemara
write something, draw something. take some pics and digest this heaping sum of food while the first week of my diet starts. but I did get to drink, so I’m happy.
PurpleGirl
All this talk about Girl Scout cookies has forced me to find a place locally where I can get some. (And the GS web site helps with a couple of ways to locate places, sales dates and times.)
ETA: At least in NYC it appears that the sales continue into May.
Phyllis
Off to the capital city mid-week for work. My alma mater play the Gamecocks in baseball Tuesday night and I’ve got a damn hard to come by ticket. And, three weeks until spring break, woo-hoo!
Yutsano
@Spaghetti Lee: Oh man that’s rough. Do you have a back-up plan in place?
slag
@JGabriel:
I’m pretty sure it was first seen in the Girl Scout handbook. Under the merit badge section.
Martin
Oh, and for the dieters. I started out in January with 100 cases of GS cookies in my garage. That’s 1200 boxes. I’ve had at least 20 boxes sitting there, appealingly in my office to entice my coworkers since then.
So far I’ve eaten a total of 2 cookies. Not boxes. Cookies. Just 2. And I’ve lost 6 pounds since they arrived – and without much exercise because I’ve been working 80 hour weeks.
You can do it. You won’t really even miss them after a little while.
Yutsano
@Martin: “What do you mean you only opened two? Well I can’t figure out two! So let’s just say you opened two hundred…”
Citizen_X
@Suffern ACE:
What do you think the knife skillz are for?
Or, as the Girl Scouts say, “Maybe next time you’ll buy the fucking cookies.” (Oh, and that story is about some seriously demented–er, mainstream–wingnuterry. Don’t read unless you really want to get pissed off.)
ETA: @slag: Shit, I can’t beat that.
Steph
From this weekend’s Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me, prediction section the panelists predict where we will next see an NFL-style bounty system… Bob Babylon’s prediction: The girl scouts will give $1000 to anyone who can sell a box of thin mints to a person a diet.
JGabriel
@srv:
Reuters:
So nice to see the church honoring the vow of poverty.
.
JGabriel
@Martin:
Cool! That’ll complete the badge for body disposal.
.
Indylib
I actually had to go through that with my daughter’s Brownie troop. 14 Brownies, 14 crappy paring knives dug out of the “camping” gear for the troop, 3 lbs of carrots, 3 lbs of potatoes and a pound of onions for campfire foil dinners (we bought the meat already cubed, for obvious reasons), 1 picnic table and a heartfelt prayer to FSM that everyone would go home with the same number of fingers they started the camp-out with. And I’ll tell you the most lucrative place ever to sell girl scout cookies – pier side of a US Navy aircraft carrier. My daughter and I sold 600 boxes of cookies in less than 2 hours.
Martin
@JGabriel: Nah. Woodchipper is a later lesson. No cutting corners.
Bago
@BethanyAnne: It works if you go with a synthetic-biological harmony path. I resolved the Geth Quarian conflict, romanced Tali, chose symbiosis, and got cyber-joker hooking up with EDI, and Tali surviving. I feel satisfied.
opie jeanne
The little darlings have been camped out in front of our grocery store for weeks, and I’ve bought cookies from them every time we go to the store. Today I laughingly asked when they would stop and they told me they had one week left.
I don’t mind, though. After the attacks on the GSA from the nutcases, if I had more money and sufficient self-control, I’d buy caseloads of their cookies.
Martin
@Indylib:
Ohhhhhh. Man, San Diego is a drive, though. But yeah, that’s the best.
Arclite
I was a boy scout, but with their recent political turn to the right, there’s no way I’m enrolling my son.
Indylib
@Martin: We were in Japan at the time and even though the sailors over there could shop at the commissary when they were in port, the way they bought the Girl Scout cookies you’d have thought they hadn’t seen an American cookie in years. My daughter was out of Girl Scouts by the time we lived in San Diego, I’m not sure they’d let them sell pier side on base in the States.
Schlemizel
@Indylib:
I ran a cooking clinic for my Boy Scout troop & included how to cut up food. All the boys went home with all their fingers . . . if not on their hand for sure on the spiffy lanyards they made!
Marcellus Shale, Public Dick
as the tactical wing of planned parenthood, i think its imparative that the girl scouts move beyond knife skills. i do believeclose quarters fighting has its place, but they need to focus on bomb throwing. its time for a molotov cocktail merit badge.
if you want to talk game changers, imagine the day when announcers marvel at the outfielder for the yankees who throws like a girl scout.
Xenos
@Arclite: Any chance the Girl Scouts could do a hostile takeover? Co-ed scouting works pretty well for the UK.
Schlemizel
@Arclite:
Check around – my sons troop was very welcoming & non-judgmental. It was a great experience for him. Many of the local troops don’t push the God thing despite the “requirement” and I know the kids troop would not tolerate any bullying of kids who were “different”. The higher up the organization I saw the bigger the assholes I saw and there certainly some inflamed rectums at the troop level but not as many as I had feared.
Pseudonym
I really hope Ms. Warren pulls out a win in Massachusetts. I think she’s one of the only candidates I’ve seen who is voicing a full-throated justification for the good that society can accomplish in the form of representative government to better the lives of so many people in need. It was depressing to read that she’s apparently fallen behind the smarmy “People’s Senator” Scott Brown in the polls lately. I dropped her a big G a while ago and I hope it’s going to a good cause. Damn it, I wish I were smart enough and motivated enough to make some kind of difference myself.
MonkeyBoy
I don’t know why more kids are not taught basic knife safety and knife skills. I learned them in summer camp when I was around 11.
As an adult I was with my son and a bunch of other 7 year olds when I got out my pocket knife to trim down a twig and split the end for something we were going to do. Suddenly I found myself spinning in circles and it took a revolution to realize that my unconscious knife skills were clicking in – namely never direct the movement of a blade toward live flesh. The kids crowded in front of me to watch what I was doing so I shifted to the side so the knife movements weren’t directed towards them. So the kids moved to see better and I had to move in turn, and so on.
I’ve witnessed too many people who don’t know and haven’t internalized his basic precaution – people wind up like a neighbor who used a knife to cut a heavy string on a package and wound up slicing her nose open.
Linda Featheringill
A little something to help you start your week. Pics of Obama hugging people:
http://media.talkingpointsmemo.com/slideshow/obama-hug-controversy
[hugs and kisses to all]
Bootlegger
March Madness brackets for the Normal and the Weird.
When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.
~HST
BethanyAnne
@Bago: I didn’t even know there was such a path until I read the forums. I saw the 2 big choices on either side, and didn’t know that I could just go down the middle. I killed the Quarians, romanced Liara, and then, you know, killed all the machines that I just worked so hard to save, meanwhile destroying all galactic trade, and much of the population. Go me!
JJ
Really? We’re excited that the example she picked for female empowerment is *basic knife safety IN THE KITCHEN?* Shouldn’t all kids be taught basic knife safety? And, really? knife safety? I live in MA and will be voting for her but jesez, I thought we were supposed to be allowed outside of the kitchen.
Schlemizel
@MonkeyBoy:
@JJ:
I think in the old dys kids had pocket knives & whittled & played mumbly-peg so basic knife safety was taught early and often. Now when having a plastic fork at school can get you life without parole it is becoming a forgotten skill. The kitchen is the only socially acceptable place to have a knife.
I was surprised by the Boy Scouts, many of whom were 15-16 who couldn’t boil water without package instruction. All kids should know how to fix a at least a basic meal ^ learn to handle kitchen tools including knives.
rb
@Arclite: Yup, same here, in principle (only a daughter so far.)
bemused senior
Circle of Safety!
(Yes, I am a life Girl Scout and former GS leader.)
The Other Chuck
@srv:
Now they really do live in a glass house.