Here’s a quick shout out to those of you who are looking for great deals, as set of coupons to help you pay less at SimplyBe, the fabulous plus size retailer.
Start with that most basic item, the blue jean. SimpleBe has an excellent selection of jeans from size 14 and up at great prices.
It’s hard enough to find decent items in the right sizes, and double difficult to find them at decent prices, so you have to move fast when you see them.
Wow.
You know how to make things hard on a blogger, don’t you?
Last week, I whalloped you all with this deathless image:
… and you assaulted me right back with six deliciously deranged responses featuring leisure and fashion.
You hit me on my weakest possible sides with geek references galore. You made me cackle multiple times.
Frankly, this one made me waffle more than an IHoP. And while they may not be the ultimate winners, I would like to give special love to Jade Wombat for this delicious combo plate of sci-fi and kidlit:
The Santa robot aliens, after their defeat in London by Dr. Who, invaded America where they were confronted by Dr. Pooh.
… and to our own, our very, very own Gemdiva for this classic movie reference:
Now listen up, I’m hot, cranky and I hate undercover work, so make yourselves comfortable. We are NOT leaving this field until I find out which one of you usual suspects is Kaiser Soze.
In the end, though, there can be but one.
This time, and even though it’s kind of long to be a caption, it’s TeleriB for causing a huge mess on my monitor screen with this gloriously crazed response:
“And when I say ‘Sacks up!” I mean sacks up NOW! Not ‘in just a second,’ not when you feellike it! IS THAT CLEAR, SANTA JOHNSON?”
“Sergeant Bear, yes, Sergeant Bear!”
“Good! Now pick that sack UP and let’s get jolly! We will be adding five additional rooftop sprints this afternoon to help Santa Johnson remember his sack. Santas! Move out!”
Congratulations, Jade Wombat, Gemdiva, and most of all TeleriB! And thanks to everyone who played.
I don’t remember much about 2007, the year that Manolo for the Big Girl opened its virtual gates, so I certainly don’t recall what I wrote in my application to be one of two fearsome editrixes for The Manolo’s new plus-size project. I do remember my entry was late since a friend sent me the cattle call (as it were) week after the deadline passed. I also remember (spoiler alert) that I got it.
On my first entry I wrote:
The great thing about being the biggest gal in the room is that you can be the BIGGEST gal in the room: the fiercest, the most fabulous, the most confident. With a big attitude you can work looks that would overwhelm our slender sisters and make drag queens want to pull your hair from sheer glam envy.
Now as Manolo for the Big Girl, along with the rest of the Manolosphere, prepares to hang up our heels and close shop forever, I stand by that statement.
When I got the news on Friday, I was too jetlagged to say anything but “well, it was a good run.”
And it was, but it was also something else.
It was the chance to be the voice I wish I’d had when I was but a young fatling, trying to eke out an ounce of self-confidence, and a drop of glamor in an unfriendly world.
I thank you for that. I thank you for every comment (well, almost every comment) every email, every linkback and “you’ve gotta read this” message.
Most of all I thank you for the community. MftBG wasn’t a pretty blog, it didn’t fit nicely into any one category. I was never interested in being part of some fat blog clique or kowtowing to advertisers, but you stuck with me, with one of the smartest, funniest comments sections I’ve had the pleasure to read.
So what to do now?
Well, I don’t know about the rest of the gang, but I’m going to keep working on my book, enjoying life in Mexico and because old habits die hard, writing at my new blog, After Plumcake.
It won’t be the same as the big girl blog, there comes a time when even I have run out of things to say about pretty shoes and being fat, but it will have some of the same flavor, plus a broader range of topics, possibly shirtless footballers and if the past two days are any indication, way more f-bombs.
I hope you’ll join me there.
This is Wilbur Olin Atwater. He was a pioneer in human nutrition, back in the day. He was also one of the major causes of the Great Malnutrition Scare of 1907-21.
You see, Atwater was one of the first people to try to figure out how much of what nutrients people need to function. And like many who are among the first to quantify something… he got a lot of stuff wrong. The amount of protein he decided the average person needs is today known to lead to kidney failure, just as a f”rinstance.
And between his miscalculations, misinterpretation of both his data and poorly gathered information, racially skewed height and weight charts, along with a great big ol’ dollop of cultural aesthetic preferences and prejudice over evidence, the Great Malnutrition Scare of 1907 – 21 began.
Helloooo my beauties!
It’s time once again to play Twistie’s Sunday Caption Madness. You all know how this works. I post a picture that’s lying awake nights longing desperately for a funny caption or seven. You provide said captions via the comments function. Next week I declare a winner and we all break into a merry chorus of the Yes, We Have No Bananas Blues.
This week’s image comes from the depths of the Where’s Salvador Dali When You Need Him File, and it looks a little like this:
Ready… set… snark!
Before we get going, I’d like to apologize for the lack of posts last weekend. WordPress kept shutting me out, and I don’t know why. But it’s forgiven me now and I can post again.
Thanksgiving is over. All that’s left over are, well, a few leftovers. And, if we’re lucky, some good memories. Mr. Twistie and I wound up having a different holiday than we’d expected. The friend we were planning to visit came down with a nasty bronchial sludge she didn’t care to share, so we stayed home and made a few adjustments. We watched old movies, I made a delicious dinner, we ate until we were happily sated, he played a little guitar, and we finished our day playing with Jake the cat.
All in all, it was a good day. The memories are, indeed, happy.
The day after Thanksgiving I have a ritual. When I get up, I have coffee and pumpkin pie for breakfast… and then I don’t go shopping. When I worked retail I quickly learned that Black Friday and Christmas Eve are typically the angriest shopping days of the year and so I avoid buying anything more emotionally charged than a bottle of milk on those two days. Okay, we did break down and get Jake some crunchies, but we went to a grocery store that wasn’t in a mall.
Today I will most likely do my traditional change of holiday seasons activity:
I’ll watch The Nightmare Before Christmas. It never fails to get me into the right mood for the next few weeks.
How about all of you? How do you make the transition from Thanksgiving to the Christmas/Hanukkah/Solstice/Kwanzaa/et al season? Do you have a tradition at all? I’d love to hear what you do.
