Minced Oath

"Minced Oath" n. a euphemistic expression formed by misspelling, mispronouncing, or replacing a part of a profane, blasphemous, or taboo term to reduce the original term's objectionable characteristics.

I remember being about 9 or 10 years old when I first got in trouble for swearing. Truth be told, I didn't even really know I was swearing. The situation was similar to the moment I realized ASAP stood for "As Soon As Possible"– I'd just learned that "peed off" was a euphemism for another term, and I wanted to show off my new knowledge. As I remember, we were eating dinner at the table, and the scene played out something like this:

Dad (discussing an elaborate Halloween display he'd been designing for months):

"I've strung the cable from the chimney to the tree, and the motion detector is in the bushes. The witch should cackle and fly from one end of the yard, to the other, whenever a kid steps onto the driveway!"

Me:

"Can you imagine if you'd gone to all this effort and she didn't even work? You'd be so pissed off!"

Dad:

Evidently, however my Father responded was inadequately scarring, as many years later, I grew into a bit of a sailor-mouth. You could blame my love of Tarantino movies, or the many teenage years I spent working in the service industry, but one way or another, swearing became commonplace for me. 

Boyfriend swears a lot too. It doesn't bother me at all, but last night he issued a bit of a challenge. He's decided the two of us should make an effort to stop swearing. Completely. I'm not sure if there was any particular motivation – it could be because our best friends are going to have a baby in November and he doesn't want to slip up around it, or it could just be because we swear a lot and there's really no need to. Whatever the reason, here are the terms:

• Neither Boyfriend, nor I, can swear, unless it's part of a contextually-relevant, direct quote for which we identify the speaker beforehand.

• As punishment for any infractions of the above rule:
• Boyfriend must perform 20 Strict-form Push-Ups for every swear-word
• I must perform 5 Push-Ups for every swear-word

• Punishment must be performed immediately following any infractions, regardless of our location or attire.

That's it! If you're wondering why Boyfriend has to do more Push-Ups than me, it's because Boyfriend is a professional athlete with crazy Hulk-strength, whereas I'm a pathetic weakling, presently incapable of performing a single Push-Up in anything resembling proper form. 

If I'm totally ripped in a few weeks, you'll know my sailor-mouth prevailed.

We could've done the "Swear Jar" thing, since we already have a travel jar which we're using to save for a trip to Scotland. However, if we made the punishment monetary, with the mindset that we'd be putting the money towards something we both wanted, the results probably would have looked like that old Bud Light Superbowl commercial:

I figured, if I'm going to succeed at all in this, I'll need some sort of swearing alternatives, or "Minced Oaths" to satiate my desire to curse. While "dang-it" and "effing" would technically work, they just don't feel angry enough to suffice. I'm thinking I'll take my inspiration from the recent movie adaptation of Fantastic Mr. Fox. If you haven't seen it, it's a kids movie where they use "cuss" in place of all profanities, like so:

 

 

I love the way they did this. Plus "cuss" still has that nice hard consonant sound that makes real profanities satisfying.  If anyone has any other clever curse alternatives, I'm all ears!

P.S. Happy Canada Day, everybody!

Don't Let Her Down, Canucks!

This will not end well...

DogWithNoEars (showing her ears!) and PsychoKitty

There's something wrong with my case of beer...

MOVIE REVIEW: Chaotic Ana (aka The Worst Movie I've Ever Seen)

Genre: Drama

Rated: 18A

Language: Spanish

Run Time: 118 min. too long

My dear readers, I’ve spent four years of my life studying films, their history, their production, and attending numerous student film festivals, but none of that prepared me for what I just viewed. In the traumatizing wake of watching Chaotic Ana I am left in a rare state of speechlessness, forcing me to use the plot summary on the director’s webpage to tell you the story. Here is what this film claims to be about:

“Chaotic Ana is the story-journey of Ana [Manuel Vellés] during four years of her life, from 18 to 22. A countdown, 10, 9, 8, 7... until 0, like in hypnosis, through which Ana proves that she does not live alone, that her existence seems like a continuation of other lives of young women who died in a tragic way, all at the age of 22, and who live in the abyss of her unconscious memory. This is her chaos. Ana is the princess and the monster of this feminist fable against the tyranny of the white man.”

…

Really? I must have missed something, because I thought it was the cinematic reproduction of the day the film’s director, Julio Medem, dawned some tie-dyed footy pajamas, downed a two-six of Absinthe and then spent a day in a House of Mirrors. After I watched this, a friend asked me, “Was it a good movie?”, to which I replied, “As a movie, it’s terrible. But if you’re looking for an inexpensive substitute for a self-indulgent, pornographic acid trip, then buy multiple copies”. My brother described it as a B-movie, but one would need to move much further down the alphabet in order to adequately distance this vulgar schlock from the relative beauty of standard B fare.

That being said, one has to compliment all the production members (who presumably cannot be blamed for the non-existent plot) for producing some very interesting visuals and imaginative lighting techniques. However, these fleeting droplets of interest were no match for the monsoon of pretentious and inexplicable semi-porn surrounding them, including a truly charming sequence where Ana is seen defecating on a man. Anyone whose retinas were fouled by this steaming turd of simulated entertainment surely knew exactly how that man felt.

And I still don’t understand the relevance of the massive, throbbing horse cock that flashed across the screen near the beginning of this cinematic abomination.

118 minutes of my life I will never get back. Thanks for nothing, Julio.

I've Decided to Start A Blog

But I suppose you guessed that already...

I've always enjoyed writing- ever since I had the dexterity to grasp pencil. That's not to say I was necessarily always good at it. No, a pérouse through some early diaries would reveal I couldn't write worth shit in the early days. Then again, I didn't have much to write about back then, did I?

"Today my brother hit me on the hand very hardly end then called himself a champion"

Yes, that was an actual entry from one of my first diares. Safe to say I imagine I have a few more things to say now.