Find of the Week

It shouldn't surprise any of my housemates to know I'm a little behind in the pop culture realm. Even though this video is over a year old, I still think it's supremely shareable.

Paul's Tree

Paul making his tree

The beginning of Fall Term in 2008 saw a lot of new Janetites enter the house. Paul, Ashley, Mary, and Jeff tore the place up--sometimes literally--and instituted "English Alley." Minus Jeff, who was neither in English, nor upstairs.

Paul also made an inside tree for his room (or a Cthulhu grapevine sculpture...take your pick.)

The finished tree

Ashley and Paul playing Paul and Ashley

What sort of end-of-term stress inspired our tallest bloke and our smallest woman to switch clothes and impersonate each other? Like the number of licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop, the world may never know.

But damn, was it funny.

Inter-lude

"Lude," as you may know, is a French word that comes from the word "luddite," a person in the middle-ages who rejected the new technology of heavy clothing. No chainmail, wimples, chastity belts, or corsets, these people insisted on breathable togas and taigas and frocks. Hence, the English word "lewd," for all ye scantily-clad wenches. You can find all of these definitions on the innernet.

But Janet Smithers luv the innernet! So we aren't exactly luddites in the contemporary sense. We can't rescue every word from the pitfalls of modern misusage, but we can certainly recuperate "lude" by wearing less clothing. It's that simple. Plus, it's springtime.

We chose the word "inter" to capture a key part of cooperation: shit we share. "Inter" is not just a button on the keyboard. It's a prepositional prefix that shows how ideas relate. In this case, we relate by sharing the same house, food, air, bacteria, viruses, consensus practices, toothpaste, toilets, stds, etc. What a great world!

Coming soon: "janetary"

Find of the Day

How great is this?

De le nom de noir blog

I've been learning some French lately, but that's not why A+ and I decided to name our blog interjanetaryluv. Actually, none of those words are French or French translations.

"luv" is a 20th c. middle-class single-working mother corruption of the English word "love," which means according to the OED "not hate" and is nearly all you need to function in the world. Love is [also] a verb, but we don't have to go into vague acts of sacrifice or pledges of fidelity. For now, think of "luv" in terms of nounage or interjections: all those notes your mom scribbled onto sack lunches, graffiti-shorthand when the spray paint can began to run dry, thumbed to fill the last three characters of a text message.

Luv breaks in when we least expect it and only just.

More on other words l8r.

Hit the deck!

Luke and Jeff building our amazing deck

Every time I think of Luke, Jeff, and C building our deck, I hear that annoying line from Field of Dreams: "If you build it, they will come."

I know there's a good sex joke in there.

Incredible deck, though. I think I'll go enjoy it today while I do my homework. Hooray Oregon sun!