Teeny Manolo

My how time flies! Today marks exactly a year since my fantabulous colleague raincoaster and I began writing on this here little blog called Teeny Manolo.

It’s been a privilege writing here for you, my friends.  Stick with us, we’ve got lots more up our sleeves.

Here is a look back upon some of my favorite posts from the last year:

It’s That Time of Year Again

Teeny Manolo’s Dating Advice For Single Men

Smashing Pumpkin Shoes

Oh Cindy…

Moms With More Hair Use Velcro

Parents With Picky Eaters Holiday Handbook

It’s All in the Details

Angry Young Man

Nice Try, Kid

He Bravely Ran Away*

They’ll Get a REACTION, All Right

An Open Letter to My Mother-in-Law

Stuck in a (Mom) Rut

And now if you’ll excuse me, I need to get a hanky and wipe a tear or two from my eye. They grow up so fast!

Actually, I have no way of knowing how old this fellow is. He’s just some anonymous complainer on a complaint board set up so as to allow ranters to rant in peace. But something tells me that, when he’s not hitting nails on heads w/r/t raising children, he’s holding the Venetian blinds apart with two meaty fingers and yelling “GET OFFA MY LAWN!” I love him anyway; we shall grow old together, in matching lawn chairs and Bermuda shorts, crankily waving our canes at any child who unplugs from the electric teat long enough to step foot on OUR LAWN!

From the Seattle Times:

Rant “To the couple pushing a toddler in a stroller around Green Lake on Aug. 13. Your little boy was watching a DVD on his lap, complete with headphones for easy listening. Are you kidding me? Your child does not need an activity to keep him occupied while on a walk; the walk is the activity! If your child can’t go for 60 minutes without watching TV, you have a big problem. Whatever happened to watching the scenery and talking about what you see? Please, at least give him a book to look at instead.”

With a record-breaking 238 entries, it will soon be time to announce the winner of the first Stila prize package.

But first…

If you didn’t win, don’t fret, I’ve got more! Two more prize packages, to be exact. There will be a Grand Prize filled to the brim with Stila products, retailing for over $175. Also, a runner-up will be awarded another prize package with over $100 in yummy Stila goodness, all provided by the lovely folks at Stila Cosmetics.

The runner-up package includes: Vintage Shadow Pot, Eye Shadow Duo, High Shine Lip Color, Lip Glaze Stick, and a Smoky Eye Palette.

The Grand Prize consists of: Eye Shadow Trio, a gorgeous Mazatlan Eye Shadow Trio, Smoky Eye Palette, SPF 15 Illuminating Tinted Moisturizer, High Shine Lip Color, Glitter Eye Liner and a Lip Glaze.

And how do you win such fabulous stuff?

By penning a winning haiku, of course! The subject of the haiku must be somehow related to beauty/makeup. It can be funny, serious, outrageous, whatever kind of haiku you do best. You will be using the classic 5/7/5 format, with five syllables in the first line, seven in the second, and five again in the last line. An example has kindly been written for you by raincoaster:

Stila will be mine
Ain’t no two ways about it.
No three-ways neither.

Assisting me with the judging will be my esteemed colleague raincoaster, as well as El Jefe, The Manolo himself.

So, here are the official rules, blabbity blah…

1. One entry per person.
2. Haiku not adhering to the subject matter outlined above will be disqualified.
3. Contest open to residents of the US and Canada.
4. Contest ends at midnight (Pacifc) August 29, 2008.

And now, the moment you have all been waiting for, the winner of the first prize package from the first giveaway!

Danielle of Elle in Wonderland, you have just made 237 people extremely jealous!

And the rest of you, come up with your best haiku and leave it below in the comments! Good luck and good haiku-ing!

Also, while you are here, why not add Teeny Manolo to your RSS feed? I promise you won’t regret it!

Here are our fearsome subjects for Friday’s Caption Contest. Don’t listen to their silvery tongues; they will try to tempt you with cookies!

This kid-based trailer for The Dark Knight from Wizard Universe is perhaps the most glorious single YouTube in all of recorded history. Why so serious indeed!

via Defamer

The Olympics never fail to make me cry. There is just something so grand, so wonderful, so inspiring about it that every darn opening ceremony will force me to bring out the hankie. Sentimental much, Glinda?

Sports can be a great way to let your child learn the values of discipline and commitment, while at the same time allowing them to test their physical limits and abiliites. Let your child experiment with different sports, even the more obscure or less popular ones here in the United States. Why have them compete against millions of other kids in the most popular sports?  Go for the ones that nobody plays and they have a much better shot at standing out. Who knows, there may be a gold medal in your future. And hey, it may be in archery, but a gold medal is a gold medal, baby.

Babolat junior Roddick 125 Tennis Racquet One of the best raquets, but pint-sized and with a price tag to match. Only a bit more expensive than other rackets, but you get a better raquet.

Sock’em Boppers I’m not sure that boxing is a sport for young kids, but they can sort of get the feel for it with these.

Bouncer Now why did I not know that the trampoline was an Olympic event? Well, it is, and we all know that kids LOVE to bounce.

Badminton Set A bit challenging for wee ones, but badminton can actually be a lot of fun! If you’re playing with the right crowd, of course.

Monkey Business Surefire Compound Bow I admit that this is a compound bow which looks a bit intimidating, but shooting foam arrows is fun no matter how it’s done.

Table Tennis Set Don’t want to spend all that money for a big official table? Use this set to turn any table into a table tennis court!

Practice Fencing Foil The USA Women’s Team just swept all three medals in fencing, so why not enroll your child in a class and try it out? I know quite a few people who have fenced and greatly enjoyed it, and you can buy a child-sized blade for this foil.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but it’s August out there, and around the ol’ raincoaster homestead that means one thing and one thing only: making a laughingstock of yourself trying to play with the kids’s beach toys.

You name it: hula hoops. skipping ropes. beach balls. shovels and pails and pimped-out sandcastle engineering equipment. swimming pool badminton. trac ball. nerf football. water balloons. boogie boards. that stupid little rope on the ring with the dooie at the end of it that you stick on your ankle and dance around like Ed Grimley rolling on E.

They whup my sorry ass every damn time.

But among the glories of summer toys too tempting for even those of positively Malkovichian gravitas, one stands supreme, like the lone cherry on the very summit of the quadruple chocolate-mint meltie with extra crushed hazelnut praline that lives in my dreams, if not in my diet.

The SuperSoaker.

And, as with all the many immortal archetypes which chime agreeably in our collective unconscious like the orchestra of the divine Big Band which plays at the right hand of God (except when the bagpiper is there), the history of the SuperSoaker is nothing less than an epic of human achievement and a moral fable of the most exquisitely resonant irony.

And iSoaker has it; here’s a snippet:

The year of 1989 began the water weaponry revolution. The origin of the Super Soaker® actually dates back to 1982 when Dr. Lonnie Johnson, a nuclear engineer, first had the idea of making a high performance toy water gun. At the time, he was employed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena California as a spacecraft systems engineer on the Galileo mission to Jupiter. As a part time inventor, it took eight (8) years before the gun was finally introduced to consumers…

The idea behind the Power Drencher was actually derived from some work Lonnie was doing on a heat pump that used water as opposed to freon. He hooked up the model of the pump to his bathroom sink at his home. “I turned around and I was shooting this thing across the bathroom into the tub and the stream of water was so powerful that the curtains were swirling in the breeze it sent out,” he said. “I thought, ‘This would make a great water gun.’” (Quote from a Weekend Edition interview between Lonnie Johnson and Liane. Click here for more information.)

Unlike its motorized predecessors, Johnson developed a gun that relied on air pressure and arm pumping for pressurizing the firing chamber. The end result was a water blaster capable of delivering more water farther and faster than any other water gun on the market. The brand name, Super Soaker®, was introduced nation-wide in 1991 through a series of TV-advertisements.

If we, the adults, cannot beat those darn kids at their own game, the least we can do is learn enough to bore them stupid on the subject, right?

I know the Ice Cream War was a movie, but the Marshmallow War should not only be a movie; it should be a whole series, like American Gladiators only sticky.

Last Friday, Darlene Ake’s Wewahitchka Elementary School Pre-Kindergarteners discovered a loophole in the district’s Code of Conduct.

No guns, no knives, no weapons of mass destruction are allowed on Gulf County school grounds, no exceptions.

But nothing in the district’s Code of Conduct prohibits the possession of jumbo marshmallows or their use in waging attacks against fellow Pre-Kindergarteners, their parents and School Superintendent Tim Wilder.

Nothing could stop Ake’s students from engaging in a ritual marshmallow fight on school grounds and in plain view of the Wewahitchka public.

I would so TOTALLY watch that show.

Love home-made pancakes and waffles, but just don’t have those lazy three minutes to throw the ingredients together? Well fret no more: the organic Batter Blaster is here!

Yes, this is real. Aerosol pancake batter.

God, I’m a sucker for ridonkulous retro commercials.

Leave it to the Japanese to make a toilet training device with no sense of shame but an overdeveloped sense of theatre and the bizarre. Stolen from JapanProbe, here is the World Famous Shimajiro Toilet Training video, subtitled in English. Over at JP they have the actual sounds the machine makes as MP3 files as well: if only this little device looked like the Dora the Explorer aquapet, my day would be complete!