My Christmas was surprisingly uneventful. My family and I spent the night Christmas Eve at my sister's house and opened presents the next morning. My brother and brother-in-law (my sister's husband) are both big jerks albeit in different ways. My mother is really unassertive and my sister is overly sensitive about…

On Saturday my girlfriend and I saw a movie, ate at a Mexican restaurant and exchanged gifts — a mix CD, nice yarn, a photo of us in a picture frame and bag of snowflake-shaped pretzels for her, plus a cookbook, a nice thrift store neck-tie, and fancy tea for me. All of that was fine enough for me.

Oh, Fred Phelps, trying so hard to stay relevant ...

Fuck yeah! It's the places you never expect ...

Thanks for this, Hortense! I'm going to see it with my girlfriend in about an hour. My film snob of a best friend enjoyed it, and I listened to an interview with Jim Cameron on NPR at least twice yesterday, so I HAD to go see it.

@CKash: Hot damn! Thanks for the tip.

Realistic: A new pair of black Converse hi-tops, a griddle, or the ingredients for making margaritas from scratch.

I just wikipedia'd 'Jersey Shore.' It sounds horribly boring. Can anyone explain the appeal to me?

Last year, a bunch of my friends who had a thing for making home brew and they made one that was the color of pale anti-freeze. Their home brew involved water, yeast and orange slices for their (natural) sugar content. The pale anti-freeze color came from some packets of blue Gatorade powder one of them had added on a…

@hfree: What did you do with it? I like anise so I've been wanting to try it, but I don't know how to drink it.

@Kitten is an 80s rocker: There's one just about every year where I go to college. The ensuing injuries are epic.

Johnny Depp looks like Elijah Wood in this movie. There. I said it.

Yeah, but what did Queen Elizabeth think of meeting Lady Gaga?!

I have a pair of jeans with a big hole in the left thigh. I wear tights or leggings under the pants, and it looks fine. Sometimes I get embarrassed, but thank you Free People, for showing me that folks would buy shorts in much worse condition for a lot of money.

So, basically this show is the pop music equivalent to Thorton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth? (Sorry, I've been getting back in touch with my high school theater nerd lately.)

Whenever I Google my name, I always get info about this mountain climber who sort of has my last name, but not really.

@Aesop's Foibles. YES.: Recently I've asked my girlfriend multiple times what she wants for Christmas. Her response was 'Figure it out!' until I told her I really feel incompetent at knowing what kinds of material things she likes, so she finally relented and told me what to buy her.

@Inkymonkey: I only way I can guarantee that she isn't is the fact that she's vegetarian.

@LutherNipperkin: Several weeks ago my roommate smoked pot while she took a dump in order to mask the smell of the latter. I'm still bothered by that fact.

I use a lavender-scented ... cologne (er, it's from Bath and Body Works and it's a step up from body spray, but a step down from perfume) and my girlfriend really likes it. For whatever reason, the other day she went to a BBW and she spritzed some on herself just out of curiosity. She said it didn't really smell like…