Teeny Manolo

I recently read this question posed on Ask Hadley, a fashion advice column in London’s The Guardian newspaper.

Why don’t boys wear dresses?

Catherine Gardom, Bristol, age 3¾

Because boys are stupid, Catherine, and I’m very pleased to teach you this lesson at such an early dawn in your young life. There is much evidence to prove this point, not least that no boy under the age of four has ever written into this column, whereas you, you little female prodigy, do your sex proud.

There is more, but this is the paragraph that really rubbed me the wrong way. Now, one can say Glinda, this is just a frothy advice column! That anything said is all in good fun!

But this answer isn’t even funny. It didn’t even try to be funny, it was simply a lazy answer that took an easy way out.

Would a similar reply from a male advice columnist to a young male (with the sexes reversed, of course) be thought of as even remotely humorous?

I think you know the answer. 

Notorious pitching star and supermodel Naomi Campbell has the all-clear for reproduction!

Naomi underwent an operation to remove what she thought was a small cyst,but turned out to be something more. …”[doctors] thought it was a cyst. When they opened it up they realized it was more.I was not able to have children up until March. Now it’s in God’s hands. I would love to have a family but it’s up to God. I do want to have kids. I’m 38 years old.”

It’s in God’s hands, but I do hope her parole officer at least gives testimony at the hearing.

It’s the 21st Century, my friends, and we are ALL jaded, including the kidlets. Oh, they may not hang around streetcorners wearing berets and quoting Camus (except behind your back) but they, too, affect poses of ennui and world-weariness.

Which is particularly amusing when they are four, but don’t tell them. You know how they sulk!

So they turn to the Dark Side. And not just Darth Tater.

Emily Strange had her day.

Bad Batz Maru is my personal favorite (”Don’t mess with me: it’s a BAD FEATHER DAY!”).

But no flash in the pan shines as brightly, nor burns out as fast, as a jaded hipster trend and it is my solemn duty to report that all of those are, like, SO TWENTIETH CENTURY.

These days we’re all about the Ice Bat Ugly Doll.

Have you and your kids got your $250 tickets to celebrate Miley Cyrus’s Sweet Sixteen at Disneyland on October 5th (Miley Cyrus born Destiny Hope Cyrus on November 23rd)? Disney’s taking no chances on party guests being thin on the ground; they’ve piggybacked events in a way which would make even Porky blush:

Miley Cyrus is celebrating her Sweet Sixteen at Gay Days at Disneyland.

The 11th annual Gay Days event, which attracted 30,000 gays and lesbians to the park last year, actually takes place October 3-5. Gay Days describes itself as a “mix-in with straight parkgoers,” where the LGBT crowd wears red shirts.

Dress accordingly.

via Defamer

Family.com, a Disney site, is sponsoring a contest in which you can actually win a prize for being badly dressed!  Well, when you were a kid, anyway.  Or maybe you can cash in on badly dressing your own child.

I’m thinking back to my own childhood, and for a while, my mother was dressing my sister and me like twins. Uh, except we were almost six years apart. I remember one year we were particularly resplendent in matching red Christmas outfits of scratchy polyester with peter pan collars and white rickrack trim. Good times, good times…

Photos Courtesy of Family.com

Angry and upset that their children cannot hit a baseball thrown by a fellow nine year old, parents forfeit the game and leave him standing on the mound, looking at an empty home plate.

Is this a scene edited out of The Incredibles?

No, it happened in the Newhaven, Conneticut Little League! Just last week!

Because Jericho Scott is so talented, they want his team to disband and be redistributed among the other teams.  Except for, I’m assuming, poor Jericho.

I don’t know what makes me feel worse about this story.  Is it that Jericho is essentially being punished for excelling at pitching?  Or that the parents from the other teams chose to impart a very harsh lesson upon a child, even though they claim it was the safety of their own children at stake? It’s a toss-up, really.

Although Jericho has never hit anyone, his top spitching peed of 40mph made some parents nervous.  I get that, I really do.  But is he not supposed to pitch to the best of his ability? 

Or is it really a case of Jericho being just too good?

Do little Danny’s parents get upset because his team gets shut out every time they play against Jericho’s team?  Is Danny depressed because he is not yet good enough to hit pitching of Jericho’s caliber?

Oh well.

Get used to it, young Danny.

It’s about time parents got their heads out of their collective derrieres and taught their children that they will not always be the best at something.  That even though there is someone better than them (and trust me, 99% of the time, there will always be someone better than them at something) it doesn’t mean they can’t try hard and do their own personal best.

And even if their own personal best doesn’t get a home run, or even a single, that it is ok.  The earth will not spin off its axis.  It just means that you put your head down and try harder next time.

Nobody likes to lose.

But learning how to lose, and how to be a gracious loser, is one of the most important lessons we can teach our kids.

I would not be surprised if soon young Jericho is forced to relocate to another city, change his name, and become an insurance salesman.

Just so everyone else can feel better about themselves.

Thanks to Dr. Nic for the story idea! 

I attended private schools until 12th grade, which spared me from the horrors that seem to be school cafeteria lunches. We had monthly “Hot Dog Days” in which we were supposed to be very excited about paying a quarter for a cold hot dog and a bag of chips. It was purported to be a fundraiser, but I have my doubts.

In high school, on Mondays and Wednesdays we were allowed to purchase sandwiches provided by a local restaurant. Then there was the lunch truck experiment. They thought it would be a good idea to bring a lunch truck on campus, which would promptly be swarmed by a hundred or more hungry teenaged girls. The lunch truck didn’t last long, but not because of the futility of trying to feed so many people in twenty minutes. No, it was for an entirely different reason. You see, the owners had to give up because they were being robbed blind by a bunch of relatively well-off Catholic girls. Nice.

Based on these pictures of honest-to-goodness cafeteria food provided by a school district in Virgina, the school should have instituted mandatory cafeteria food right then and there. That would have taught ‘em.

One order of food issues, coming right up!

via Holy Taco

Many and varied are the sorry tales of bloggers betrayed. From Dooce getting … dooced to blog scrapers scraping the bottom of the barrel, ripping off bloggers, it seems, is the new black. Well, now this loathesome crime wave has come to TeenyManolo.

We … we feel so violated.

Undoubtably, it happened this way: some Hollywood assistant was trawling Google Alerts for her boss’s name and stumbled across our very own Glinda’s patented (but, regrettably, not trademarked) Celebrity Dad Faceoff series. Lightning or some other substance struck, jolting the normally torpid PA into action; TeenyManolo would be milked dry and left, dessicated and violated, by the side of the Information Superhighway.

Celebrity Dad Faceoff would be made real. But as any denizen of Oz could have told you, you do not mess with Glinda without getting your posterior put in a sling and additionally several Tupperware containers of various sizes. Yes, you can rip her off, but you will be accurst forevermore! And so it has come to pass.

How can we tell this ripoff is cursed? Just look at the only two they could find to star in it:

OK! Magazine claims Michael Lohan intends to challenge K-Fed to a boxing match. Michael tells OK! “Everyone wants me to fight K-fed because he’s a notorious celebrity dad and so am I. It’s for charity.”

…

Michael goes on to say “It’s serious boxing. You have to go get a trainer. I have to register with the Mature Boxing Association.”

One would have to have some maturity first, you’d think.

Like some ambiguous, night-cloaked Drosselmeyer of the velvet underground, demented couturier Karl Lagerfeld continually brings the gift of confused, vaguely uncomfortable delight to little bloggers everywhere.

Yesterday, cougars. Today, bears. Tomorrow???

He’s made a fancypants teddy bear that will retail at Neiman Marcus for a completely reasonable $1,500. Lagerfeld is very optimistic about the ursine species “bears are very nice, as long as you are nice to them.”

That is probably true, although I’m only guessing. Something tells me that our dear, sweet Uncle Karl has a lot more experience with bears than I do.

Oh, the many delightful, horrifying things I thought of calling this post…the many amusing, appalling things which I shall not use so as to leave them for your deployment in your witty captions in the comments section. Here now, almost late enough to be a Saturday Caption Contest, is our picture for this week. Click to enlarge, if you DARE!

from Good Morning America and Universal Royalty