Mom quote of the week

"If really believed Bust Sculpt worked, I would sit in a bathtub full of it."

No, I mean my Mom REALLY likes panda bears

With a great debt of gratitude to my mother for giving me permission to post this:



This is what it's like visiting the Dziura household for Christmas. Oh, and also we drink the blood of Christian children, but that's not in the video (just pandas).

Mideast tour: my mom's response to this photo from Camp Virginia, Kuwait

Dear Jen,

Camp VIRGINIA? Who knew? This is one part of Virginia I have no desire to visit. I've been enjoying your blog. This is a cute picture. There's enough fabric in your skirt to make a lot of hotpants.

Love Mom


Please sign the petition to convince my mom to start her own blog.

You know, the photo above looks all sunny and nice, but it was actually so painfully hot and dry -- 127 degrees, like being baked on a cookie sheet -- that I could barely stand out of the shade for long enough to shoot a photo. The first couple attempts looked like this:


Hence the sunglasses.

New Yorkiness

Here are two cellphone pictures I took in midtown:

This ad has a treasure trail! Like, an eight-foot-long treasure trail. That's just dirty! Semi-naked people in ads should be all shaved and airbrushed and plasticky. It's not right to get the tourists all hot and bothered.

I thought my Mom would find this funny. Hi, Mom!

women behaving badly

My mom and I went to a late-night showing at the second-run movie house of Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters. The theater started the movie 45 minutes late, the tickets were $1.50 each, and in keeping with the environment, I ordered an enormous plate of nachos and a cheap Merlot.

This is how my mother and I spend time together. Who needs flower shows and movies in which Meryl Streep plays both herself and her mother, while making references to dead, oppressed women writers? My mom is awesome.

The Wikipedia plot synopsis, if you're interested in this sort of thing, is quite lengthy and contains sentences such as "Meanwhile, a triangular slice of watermelon is flying about in a ship made from a hollowed-out watermelon, observing the events unfolding according to his plan - the slice is joined in the ship by Neil Peart from Rush."

Also not inappropriately, the IMDB page happens to say, "This plot synopsis is empty."

I always wanted to operate a popular grammar blog

I explained the semicolon while teaching class today, and then, strangely, I came home to a missive from my mother, also inquiring about the semicolon. For the benefit of all, this is my quick and dirty explanation of the semicolon:

Use a semicolon when you are combining two complete clauses and you don't want to have to say "and." So basically, use a semicolon instead of a comma with an 'and.'

Both of these sentences are correct:

I like Bill, and we are going to the prom.

I like Bill; we are going to the prom.

(See how "I like Bill" and "we are going to the prom" are complete clauses? Yay!)


But I CANNOT say:

If I like Bill; we will go to the prom.

(That one's no good because "If I like Bill" isn't a complete clause!)

I have now explained semicolons; you can use them whenever you like! In a paragraph, a semicolon can add variety to your writing; many writing experts consider this a plus. However, the overuse of semicolons can seem forced; this is bad.

It is even possible (although quite unusual) to use two semicolons in one sentence! For instance:

Some people learn how to use semicolons in high school; others learn from grammar books; a few learn from their adult daughters.

p.s. My mom is smart; she has been articulate for many years without the need of semicolons.

I took pictures of her taking pictures of things

I have shirked my blogging duties because my mother has been visiting. She has discovered she enjoys both falafel and the World Famous *BOB*.

The photo at right is Mom at the Guggenheim. The green rectangular stickers all over the railings are part of the Daniel Buren exhibit. If you go there, you can read a whole bunch of artspeak about why the guy has a thing for stripes.

And now, an open confession to my mother:

Those "hash browns" were really tater tots. They had been in my freezer for a long time, and I dug them out because you like potatoes, but then I didn't cook them right, so I mashed them up and cooked them again and falsely implied they'd been hash browns all along.

Mea culpa!