Today was the first day it felt like autumn and this puts us in a good mood. Don’t worry about us getting complacent or anything. Just because we’re in a good mood it doesn’t mean we’re not still totally crazy. We feel fairly confident that no matter what our mood, we will still be just as snarky as ever. So here are the things that helped to contribute to our benevolence.

 1. Steve Jobs. Visionary. Genius. He died much too young. The Sisters have iPods and iPads, but none of us uses a Mac. We love our Apple products, but we really, really, really love Pixar. Toy Story – enough said. Rest in peace, Mr. Jobs.

2. Comments. How much do the Sisters love comments on our blog? Sooooo much. Mountains of happiness. Tsunamis of glee. Hurricanes of giggles every time we see notes from readers. Even when those notes are from our moms and aunts. One time we got a comment from a writer we really respect and it took hours for Cloud 9 to come back down to Earth. 

Doesn't he look like he'd be a laugh riot?

there with it, you’ll be a happy, happy drunk. And we didn’t even mention the Ranch Fries.

4. Christopher Columbus. So in the year 2011, we all know at this point that Chris did not discover America. We know that he was lost and possibly a fifteenth century buffoon. However, he did get rid of all those pesky indigenous people with small pox and such, so that was good. In all seriousness, we love dear Chris because whatever he managed to accomplish, he did manage to secure two of the Sisters a paid day off work. We don’t want to insinuate that we don’t love our jobs or anything, but if Chris happened to wander into our vicinity, we’d be hard pressed not to give him a tongue kiss.

We’re certain that over the course of this week you’ve contemplated, pondered, perhaps even meditated over what five things intrigued us this week. Well, wait no more. We will not leave you in wonderment any further. TA DA!

1. Wee wee dogs. You may know that Amylynn is totally obsessed with getting another puppy. Yes, we do know the definition of

click to enlarge

obsess, and we are not hyperbolizing the word. Puppies do “haunt and excessively preoccupy her mind”. With that concept in the fore, it shouldn’t surprise any of you that she checks out the puppy listings in the newspapers. That’s when we found this little gem. We don’t think we even need to comment. The ad speaks for itself.

2. Ben & Jerry. Two of the patron saints of The Quill Sisters have introduced a new flavor – Schweddy Balls. That causes no end of the snickering and mirth. As big fans of Saturday Night Live and any episode that has Alec Baldwin as the host, we immediately got the joke. Of course, the crazy, humorless right-wingers take offense calling it vulgar and repulsive. We ask you – what exactly is repulsive about vanilla ice cream with fudge covered rum and malt balls? Not a damn thing. And you can giggle while you eat it. Some people just need to relax.

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3. Circus Smircus. Normally, we don’t even bother with Family Circus. Normally it’s not amusing. But this one caught our eye and all we can say is, “Us, too, PJ.”

4. Orbiting Garbage. There is all kinds of news of this satellite falling to Earth and subsequently the media has planted irrational fears about the possibility of getting hit by the thing. We pooh-poohed the idea as absurd until we read a statistic that the odds of getting hit were 1 in 3,200. Those statistics look pretty good to us. Now if NASA could just give us a better idea where it’s crashing down, we’d be happy to go stand in a field and wait patiently.

5. Clinique.  You know the Sisters went shopping this week at the makeup counter. The experience wasn’t lovely – in fact, they were treated rather shabbily. Clearly they didn’t know the power of the blog (ha!). Regardless, the Sisters handed over their money and came home with Lid Smoothie Antioxident 8-Hour Eye Color. It’s just lovely. It lasts forever and the colors are ever so subtle. Go to the Dillards now – they’re giving away their fall samples and get yourself some. Maybe your clerk won’t be a total bitch.  You never know.

Nothing we write today is going to beat last week’s five things.  But never say the Sister’s are quitters. The following is a mishmash of the five things we were going to use last week and some new ones as well. Here we go…

1. Visiting Bats. There was a strange influx of bats in Romania. Some people may recognize Romania better by it’s older name – Transylvania. As in Dracula. Yeah, that Transylvania. Anyway, some high school students went

Yeah - we'll just take an F on the test

in to take an exam and found a colony of bats flying around the room and a bunch more asleep on the floor. Well, this being Transylvania after all, the students didn’t think much of it and moved the exam to another room so as not to disturb the bats. We hope at the very least they pulled up their turtlenecks. PS – while doing a wee bit of research on bats, we learned the babies are called “pups”. HA! That’s cute, huh?

2. Bulletin Board. In honor of the whack-a-loon Tea Party “debates”, enjoy this cartoon by Ted Rall.

3. Drunk moose. We’re not sure what the legal drinking age is in Sweden, but even then, we don’t suspect they condone animal intoxication. Per Johansson heard a loud noise he described as “a roar” coming from his neighbor’s garden. We’ll bet he didn’t expect to find a drunk moose up in a tree. The Swedish authorities guess she’d been eating fermented apples. They don’t, however, explain how the hell she got into a tree. Have you seen a moose? They aren’t wee, petite little animals. Wouldn’t you think the antlers

Imagine this...in a tree...drunk

would hinder tree climbing?  The sister’s are going to compose a letter to the Associated Press extolling them to please stop sending out articles that bring up more questions than they answer. Honestly, the wondering is killing us.

4. Red Pandas. Isn’t this the cutest set of faces you’ve ever seen? These sweet pumpkins are called Kit and Kitty and they live in a German zoo. We have no idea how we’re going to be able to afford feeding all these animals once we liberate them all. How could we not though. Quick – look at ’em again. Oooooooh, they’re so cute.

Red Panda Back Story: When Ava was approximately 17 years old she was rudely ejected from the Bronx Zoo for trying to steal a red panda and was told to never return in her lifetime.  She never felt that this was truly understood by her friends but after everyone sees this photo she knows that everyone will understand what happened that day and commiserate with her that she didn’t actually get away with it.

5. Some very sage advice. We often find Wiley Miller’s Non Sequitur cartoons to be amazingly apt. Just this past week, something very significant could have been avoided at one of the Sister’s houses if the following advice had been heeded. Why is this suggestion so hard for some people to follow? Why? Just think of all the stupid crap that could be avoided if some people just did this one little thing. Really – is it so hard? (click on the image for a larger image)

For the five things this week, we had carefully selected five outstandingly amusing stories, but then Tuesday came around and everything in the Quills universe ground to a halt. Tuesday was the season premier of Sons of Anarchy and, well, you’ll see why.  Note from Ava: Amylynn thinks this is lazy.  It’s not lazy, it’s truthful.  Truthfully, how can any other five things top this????

#1. Jackson Teller

#2. As played by Charlie Hunnam

#3. Known as Jax on the show.

#4. He’s also British so there’s that nifty accent as well although he doesn’t use it on the show.

#5. Sigh.

What a weird week it’s been. All kinds of odd news – there was so much to find amusing this week it was almost too hard to limit it to five! What an excellent change of pace, huh? Sit back and enjoy this weeks five things…

1. Fabulous Libyans. The following was chanted by Libyan rebels to mock their leader, Muammar Gaddafi: It’s over, Frizzhead. Isn’t that great? At once it’s so childish and yet, we don’t know, it’s so spur of the moment. Do you think Gaddafi found this playground taunt threatening in any way? Probably not, but we like it. If Gaddafi wasn’t such a dick, the Sisters would recommend an excellent, affordable hair dresser and maybe a good leave in conditioner.

2. Japanese money. Wow! Are the Japanese honest or what? After the disaster of the earthquake and the tsunami, the Japanese people have returned almost 6,000 safes holding around 78,000,000 dollars. Of course, it’s actually 2.3 billion in yen. We can’t imagine what the Japanese would be doing with 78M in US dollars in their safes. Honestly, the place to lose anything is in Japan.

3. Guillermo del Toro. Senor del Toro is a movie director. He’s also our hero. Senor del Toro has his own house seperate from his family where he keeps his books, posters and art work. The Sisters are 100% positive this became necessary because the short people in his house wouldn’t stop touching his stuff. The Sister’s have been trying to figure out how they could get their own apartment for months now. We figure a nice townhouse in the middle of town would work. There are only a few requirements. It wouldn’t necessarily have to be big because we may not always be there together nor all the time. Just a few nights a week or maybe once week a month – just when you need a break. Or like one sad, sweaty Sister – when she needs some air conditioning.

just imagine it in gold - sigh

4. Shoe sales. Short of a crazy sale at a bakery or wild bargains at a book store, a shoe sale is the best thing in the world. This week it was at Dillards. An additional 60% off the clearance shoes makes a Sister squeal. These particular shoes came in a lovely mulberry, a stunning silver, and jet black with crazy zipper flowers. Eeeeee! Schlick – that’s the sound of a Visa card sliding out of a wallet. Happiness abounds. Except for the one Sister who meanly refused to allow another Sister to buy a gorgeous pair of Michael Kors gold leather wedge sandals for 30.00 just because Sister #1 insisted Sister #2 wouldn’t be able to walk in them. Sister #2 is still pining after them.

5. Crazy news. We already discussed with you the crazy bodiless shoes in Vancouver, British Colombia. In Illinois a man wandered into his garden for some broccoli and found a bag with $150,000 in it. He called the police who then wandered around among the greenery some more and discovered another bag with $150,000. The police have no leads but they suspect the money was from a criminal endeavor. In an absolutely brilliant example of police work, they left a business card with a note written on the back to please call the police

imagine this at 8 feet long

station then they kindly left a phone number. How does that note go? “Dear criminals, missing anything? Love, the Police.”  Then in Norway, a man dressed in a black leather coat and hat stole an 8 foot whale tooth from a museum. The only other information they have on the man was the fact that he and the tooth ran off with a large, white dog that he’d left outside. All three of these stories have been making the Sisters wonder if perhaps these stories are so absurd because they are written in code by the CIA. Or maybe they are fraternity pranks. Especially the tooth business with the giant dog. All we know for sure is that this crap probably doesn’t go on in Japan.

We keep a list during the week of the things we want to recognize each Friday. Usually we make an effort not to include food because after a while, Dear Reader, you’re going to assume we are obsessed. We would like to state emphatically that we are not “obsessed” just very, very interested. This week we decided to just forget that policy because almost every single thing on the list was food related in one manner or another. Grab a napkin and a glass of something chilled and enjoy.

1. Swiss Chocolate. A very dear friend of the Sisters just returned from a vacation in Paris and Zurich – without us. The only reason we’re still speaking to said friend is because she brought us Swiss chocolate. Apparently, our jealousy does know a boundary and it is very clearly chocolate. Bravo Switzerland.

2. The French baker who invented the Baguette Dispenser. Jean-Louis Hecht, the owner of a French boulanger, has created a vending machine that dispenses warm baguettes twenty-four hours a day. This story brings a tear to our eye. Does anything sound more magnificent that this? All of that glorious, warm sumptuousness for one, thin Euro. That’s about $1.42 US. There is nothing we’d rather spend $1.42 on than warm bread. Unless it’s chocolate (see above).

3. Chris Christie, Republican governor of New Jersey. Our interest in Mr. Christie has absolutely nothing to do with his politics or the fact that one Sister was born and raised in New Jersey. We have no idea what his political platform is or whether we’d vote for him. What we do love is the following quote: “I weigh too much because I eat too much. And I eat some bad things too.” That’s right. Just embrace it.

4. Emanuel Cleaver, Democratic Congressman from Missouri and chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus. Again, Mr. Cleaver may be a complete dog of a congressman, or he could be heaven sent. We don’t know and honestly don’t really care. What we do appreciate about Mr. Cleaver is his ability to string several words together to form an amusing alliteration. This one just happens to contain food. Behold: “A sugarcoated Satan sandwich” referring to the debt-limit deal.

5. Snackage. We love made up words. If you recall “snackeral”, created by Salmon Rushdie, was submitted several weeks ago. This week we discovered “snackage” as included in an August 5th Get Fuzzy cartoon by Darby Conley.

click to enlarge for better reading

It wasn’t easy but we did manage to come up with five things this week.  Here they are.

1. Wikipedia.  We know that Wikipedia should not really be used as an official reference, but as an unofficial one it can’t be beat.  There is an article on just about every single thing under the sun. Everything from Veruca Salt to Ancient Greek characters and that’s what prompts our love for this week.  One of the Sisters was reading The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan.  For those of you unfamiliar, the series of books are very Harry Potter-esque except that they revolve around the ancient Greek myths.  This is a topic that has always fascinated this Sister and, as she was reading, she frequently looked up the more obscure characters to find out more.  For instance, Thalia. This was the first line of the Wikipedia entry: Thalia or Thaleia (both pronounced /θəˈlaɪ.ə/) is spelled Θάλεια in Greek and derives from the same stem as θάλλειν “to bloom”.  Are you able to use the pronunciation guide? This sister laughed and laughed.  In this particular instance, we think Wikipedia blew it.

2. Handsome, dumb husbands. The Sisters have been very fortunate when it came to looks in the husband department. All three of the men fortunate enough to be espoused to the Sisters are quite handsome – and usually intelligent. It was the intelligent thing that got them married to us in the first place. But sometimes being pretty helps. We’d love to give you a specific incident where being pretty was a viable survival skill in their arsenal, but we can’t.  All you ladies out there know exactly what we mean.

3. 300 in Spanish. The movie 300 is, well, hold on.  This Sister is going to need a moment alone just thinking about this movie. We will watch this movie every single time it’s on TV. In fact, one spectacular summer when it was on HBO 7,000 times a week, one of the handsome husbands walked in on a Sister watching it – again – and he yelled, “Oh my God! I’m going to get a complex!” With the one noted exception of the hunchback, every single character in that film is drool worthy – even the queen. One of the Sisters found the movie on TV this week and, with a squeal of joy, settled herself on the couch to watch.  It took her almost twenty minutes to realize the movie was in Spanish. That linguistic fact did absolutely NOTHING to diminish the gloriousness of the viewing experience.  The movie is that good.  It’s like the female version of, “We read it for the articles.” Prepare for glory, indeed.

4. Olivia Wilde.  The Sisters have developed a fascination with this actress.  She is absurdly beautiful and a talented. She appears in a highly anticipated movie this weekend with James Bond and Indiana Jones.  Additionally, she is also remarkably intelligent.  Olivia comes from an American/Irish family of critical thinkers such as novelists and journalists. She married and divorced an Italian Prince.  A prince! Her godfather is Christopher Hitchens. That little fact alone elevates her in our esteem. That gets us 1 degree closer to Mr. Hitchens in the 6 degrees of separation theory.  Now if someone would just introduce us to Ms. Wilde.

5. Project Runway. We love this reality show of highly talented fashion designers. There are so many entertaining things about this show: We love Tim Gunn, when we grow up, we want to be Heidi Klum, and we are big fans of the Michael Kors look. In the season premier of the show on Thursday evening, the contestants were awakened at 5:30 am and drug “as they were” to the studio. The challenge was to make an outfit out of one bed sheet and the designer’s pajamas. This is the winning design – the orange checked section was the designer’s boxer shorts and the remainder was a dyed cotton bed sheet.  Absolutely gorgeous.

We would like it noted that none of the five things involve food this week.  Well, one sort of does but we’d NEVER eat it. Just read on – you’ll see.

1. Giraffes.  There was a tragic, senseless death at the zoo this week involving an apprentice zookeeper, oleander clippings, and two

This giraffe looks like she's a reader

 giraffes.  We don’t pretend to know what really happened, who was at fault, or exactly how in the hell oleander clippings got in the giraffe barn to begin with because our information is coming from local news and the Picayune – neither of which is reliable.  At this point, one of the two giraffes who were fed the poison has died and the other looks like she will make it. Nevertheless, while we’re still in negotiations with Groupon for Kibblesmith the Cat and Spice the Pony, we are more than happy to take the remaining three giraffes into our custody.  Many things go wrong at the Sister’s respective houses, but at this time no one has been poisoned – not that we haven’t considered it.  PS – there are rumors the lioness might be pregnant.  Stay tuned for more zoo high jinks as soon as we figure out a way to get ourselves a lion cub.

2. Snackerel. One Sister is currently reading The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie.  The man writes in a lovely lyrical style that makes us swoon.  So lovely in fact, one particular Sister has him on her short list of people she’d leave her husband for (that’s a blog post I’ve been begging her to write). This is a passage we find particularly delightful: When the giant came to life that night he saw Argalia and said, “Aha! A snackerel! Excellent!”  We’re totally keeping that word.

3. Angelina Jolie is a wack-a-loon.  We discovered that Angelina’s children enjoy eating fried crickets.  She

Here she is eating something totally normal

 likens them to potato chips.  She claims they love them so much “I had to actually ban the cricket eating at a certain point because I was afraid they were going to get sick from too many.” We say exactly one is too many.  We’re sick just thinking of it. Also, if she thinks fried crickets taste like potato chips then she’s eating the wrong potato chips.  We suggest Lays Classic as an alternative.  Ava has a particular fondness for barbecue flavor (She is certain they are served in hell).  One last thing to prove our assessment of Ms. Jolie.  She claims at this point to have not eaten “tarantulas on a stick” or “spider soup”. “It does seem like an odd thing to eat,” Jolie admits of the tarantula pop. “I don’t know if I can get around the fur, but you’ve got to try everything.” FUR!?! Oh, hell no. Our policy is never to eat things with legs numbering more than four – unless they are from the ocean.

4. Pluto. The planet not the Disney character, although we’re sure he’s

We think they're all jealous of his cool moons

perfectly nice, too.  The Sisters have all felt bad since Pluto was demoted, but now astronomers have found another moon orbiting around the little bugger. That’s four moons! We say Rock on, Pluto! Good for you! Earth is an actual planet (at least we think so but we’re still waiting for our latest issue of Astronomical Stuff We’re Not Really Smart Enough to Have Valid Opinions On) and we only have the one lame moon. ALSO, Pluto’s moons all have really cool names like Charon, Nix, and Hydra while Earth just gets “moon”. Boring.  I think we could have tried a lot harder, don’t you?

5. Shelley & Carol at FedEx Office and Ric at the United States Post Office.Amylynn sent off the manuscript of her second book to her AGENT today.  Shelly, Carol and Ric were instrumental in making that happen.  Honestly, Amylynn went to the FedEx office full of trepidation as a previous experience didn’t go well.  Not this time.  Shelley was a dream. Ric, who’s name really is missing a “k” even though his mother named him Richard (we asked), offered excellent and polite advice without rolling his eyes even once.  That, dear readers, is an accomplishment.  We’re fairly sure he asked for a medical leave of absence after we left.

In the spirit of getting along with other people during the hot summer months, here is our list nifty things this week.

1. Chicken & Waffles.  If you’ve not experienced the weird wonderfulness of chicken and waffles together we suggest you high tail it to a restaurant that specializes in that particular delicacy.  Amylynn firmly believes that food on your plate SHOULD NOT TOUCH and even she is on the chicken and waffle band wagon.  When the Sisters met for lunch there this week we discovered they will now add extra yummies to your waffle – such things as bacon bits, fresh blueberries or **get this** Reese’s Pieces!  YUM!

2. Corporate Speak. In our various occupations we are doomed to hear a ton of corporate speak during conference calls and such.  Our feelings about our day jobs have been well documented on this site, so I don’t think I need to dwell on that.  The one thing that gives us any measure of relief is laughing hysterically at the the absurd corporate double- talk spouted during said conference calls.  Some examples you ask? How about: transitional summer, hub & spoke, low-hanging fruit, backwards waterfall, customer relationship model, and ambassador of our brand were all said during this week alone.  Don’t ask us what any of them mean.  No one knows. We aren’t meant to know. Theirs not to reason why.  Theirs but to do and die. Our jobs are hardly worthy of great poetry, but maybe while we’re sitting around we can come up with a haiku using corporate speak.

3. Groupon Descriptions. You know we wrote a letter to Groupon’s head dude, Andrew Mason, with some questions we had based on a Vanity Fair article.  The Sisters have long been fans of Groupon and their hysterical, tongue in cheek, snarky descriptions of their products.  But what is really not to be missed are the daily “Groupon Says” essays at the bottom of the page.  Excellent entertainment value. By the way, neither Mr. Mason or anyone else from Groupon has responded to our email.  Frankly this disappoints us. A lot. We’ll keep you posted.

4. Which doctor? The Witch Doctor. One of the Sisters called to make a doctor’s appointment with a specialist.  While on the phone with the receptionist who was taking down all her vital information necessary to determine if she was eligible for an appointment to see a real live doctor (things like: insurance card number, whether she was Republican or Democrat, who she picked in the Angelina/Jennifer debate) she inadvertently asked the bored Sister a question that started a whole Abbott & Costello type conversation. “Which doctor referred you?” “The witch doctor.” Things spiraled downward from that point on. The moral of this story is don’t start something with a bored Quill Sister you’re not prepared to finish.

5.  Throat lozenges. There was an absolutely enormous bug in our office today.  The biggest bug you’ve ever seen.  Seriously. It was practically a bug with its own horror movie.  It scared Ava so badly she climbed over the receptionist counter to avoid it.  Amylynn was drawn by the screaming.  Not Ava screaming so much as the security guard screaming.  Just like a little girl. Amylynn got brave enough to put a plastic garbage can over it with the plan to move it towards the door. The bug growled and snarled at Amylynn and waved its antennae at her in a very threatening manner which, of course, brought on a whole new round of screaming and leaping about.  The office underwriter ultimately killed it, screaming, “Denied!”  Now that all the hysteria over here is concluded, let’s say a big round of thanks to the Ricola company.  Riiiiiiiicoooooolaaaaaaa.