Sassistas! Our dish on the social soup.

Child's Play

When it comes to storytelling, how true is the popular adage, "Boys will be boys and girls will be girls?"

Flannista is in the middle of a fascinating book called The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human by Jonathan Gottschall. "Boys engage in much more rough-and-tumble play; fantasy play is more frequent in girls, more sophisticated, and more focused on pretend parenting; boys are generally more aggressive and less nurturing than girls . . . (p. 39)".

About a month ago, Flann decided to test out this theory with her First Graders.  She divided them into two groups -- girls and boys and then presented each group with the same problem:  "A frog has lost its eyes. You need to help it. Working together as a team, you need to figure out what to do."

Following is what happened.

 

 It took FOREVER for the girls to settle down. Several ran to a cubby hole near the classroom door and then didn't allow a couple of the girls to be part of the group. "We were here first," they said.  "Stop pushing!" said another. "Miss Flann, she's cheating!" And on and on. Once I finally settled them down, this is the story they came up with -- though it took them FOREVER to choose a storyteller:

A frog lost its eyes.  Just like that we found the eyes and hid the frog and his eyes in a desk so no one could find them. Then we did the frog dance.

Then the group did, in fact, do the frog dance, jumping up and down and making "ribbet, ribbet" sounds.

 

 

 

 

 

The boys, on the other hand, quickly settled down and sat with their arms around each other. They whispered among themselves quietly.  One boy kept a keen eye on the girls. When they were finished, they voted on a storyteller who stood up and said:

Once upon a time, there was a frog that lost its eyes.  We looked for the eyes and found them. We put the eyes in a plastic bag and took the frog and the eyes to the vet. The vet fixed the eyes. The frog is better now. The End.

The storyteller then bowed and was applauded by the members of his team.

What's the real story here?

 

Smash!

 

The Sassistas! noticed that yesterday's Sunday New York Times magazine featured the Williams sisters, of American tennis fame. Click here to see the actual cover.

Exclusive to the sassosphere is this cover . . . thanks to Matissta . . . that depicts the REAL POWER behind Venus and Serena!

GO PEACEsista!  Happy Birthday and WE LOVE YOU!

The Twinkie Endures

 

The Sassistas! would like to acknowledge and thank Sista C for dishing today's sass.

Remember getting an allowance, or scoring some change when you were a kid?  What did you spend it on?  For me it was a constant struggle between a roll of caps for my cap gun, or a package of Twinkies.

The first time that I ever had a twinkie was around 1962 when they cost all of a dime.  My visiting cousing waxed eloquently on the rapture of the sweet vanilla filled cake as we walked up Gammil Street to Miss Nichols store.  I listened, torn.  My usual order was a box of caps and a Big Daddy sucker.  But now, my small world was being inundated with change, choice . . . conundrum.  Miss Nichols' was little more than a glorified tar paper shack surrounded by a sea of discarded bottle caps that pinched my tough, bare feet.  She cupped her hand up to her ear and stooped down to hear my request from the glass-fronted case that housed the penny candy and sweets my grubby coins would purchase.  I pivoted my head, eyeballing one end of the case to the other.  The blood roared in my ears, somewhere a drumroll gathered speed and volume . . . "Twinkies!" I said, casting my lot with my kin.

I never went back to caps.

Regardless of your take on Twinkies, there are 17 Hostess bakeries cranking out 500 million of the cakes a year.  So even this scorned, Rodney Dangerfield of the food community still gets plenty of takers.  And through the years it's captured a few headlines, too -- remember the infamous "twinkie defense" and "twinkiegate"?  And Roger Bennatii?  Roger,attempting to find out the shelf life of a Twinkie, hung a package on the edge of his blackboard 30 years ago.  "It never spoiled," he says and claims if you '"dusted it off', it would probably still be edible."

No matter that they're the poster child of everything wrong with the American diet, that they're full of empty calories and an artillery of preservatives and fat, the Twinkie endures.  A true American icon.

Open Olympics 2012

 

The Olympic rings are open and on fire!

Dish whatever Olympic sass you'd like.

The Sassistas! are cheering!

 

Stuffed

When people walk into Flannista's home, they immediately notice art EVERYWHERE. Art on the walls, art leaning against bookshelves, art leaning against tables, art leaning against music speakers -- if there's a space, art is somehow stuffed into it.

So what should we make of the above photo? An image from this past Sunday's New York Times Magazine slideshow of big-game rooms? The woman who bagged all these beasts, now in her 70s, is never identified (to protect her from animal rights activists). When she was first married 50 years ago, she refused to go hunting with her husband, but then kind of took a liking to it. "I don't know if I would go out ever again," she says today.

Duh. Why bother, when there doesn't seem anything left to stuff except Big Foot?

To view all the images in the slideshow, please click here. Then please sass in your two cents on what you think of these big-game rooms. Or think of a caption for the above image. Best caption wins one of Flann's stuffed Goofy toys, pictured below:

 

 

Sno Fun Like Sno-Caps

Talk about hitting pay chocolate! 

A couple of months ago, Sista C and Flannista made a bet on some NFL play-off game and if Sista C won, she got a box of Cracker Jacks and if Flann won, she got a box of Sno-Caps. Look what arrived for Flann from Sista C last week: 18 LARGE BOXES OF SNO-CAPS!!! As far as the eye can see!!!

Flann figures that there's at least 300 caps per box, meaning she's has about 5,400 caps in her house. What should she do with them?  Seems like there could be a million uses, from dessert toppings to industrial cleaning.

Pinpoint some uses so not one cap goes to waste. Thanks so much!

Sassy Sally

 

The Sassistas! would like to acknowledge and thank Justista for dishing today's sass.

The Public Interest Law Students held a charity auction in March. They auctioned off luncheons with professors, designer purses and two-night stays at a spa. The first item up for auction was a picture of a neon sign that reads, "Sassy." I saw it and bid way too much money for it because the sassosphere had to have it. Flannista has it now (pictured above, leaning against Flann's piano).

Sassy Sally's is one of the original downtown casinos, a little worse for wear but very proud. Sassy Sally herself is a neon girl who sits above the "Girls of Glitter Gulch" across from "Vegas Vic."  (See photos left.)  Sassy Sally unfortunately was renamed Vegas Vicky when downtown was remodeled. I still think of her as Sassy Sally, though. Even though she is ancient and some of her bulbs are burnt out she kicks her leg up there with attitude.

That's my girl.

EDITOR'S NOTE:  The Sassistas! love this objet d'art and thank Justista not only for buying it to raise money for charity, but also for sending it to SassistaLand East. Now all we need to do is open our own casino/bar.  

Speaking of which, what are some your favorite bars and why?

Royal Bash

As you know, the Sassistas! were invited to tour the White House last Saturday afternoon. What you don't know is that we went immediately from that event to another top-secret event in London.  Yes, we were two of the 20 invited guests to Prince William's bachelor party (or, as the Brits call it, his "stag do"). 

All the guests were sworn to secrecy about what occurred at this royal bash, but we can tell you that it involved a pub that could only be accessed by boat, lots of booze, a red-and-white checkered tablecloth . . . and tassels we lifted from a couple White House curtains.

We were also surprised to learn that the term bachelor -- previously meaning a young knight or a student with a bachelor's degree -- first appeared in reference to an unmarried man in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in the 14th century.  The term bachelor party didn't appear until 1922, however, when it was first used in the Scottish publication, Chamber's Journal of Literature, Science and Arts to describe a "jolly old" party. The event is known by different names in different countries: the stag party in the U.K., Ireland and Canada; the buck's party in Australia; and, with typical panache, the enterrement de vie de garçon in France (translation: "the burial of the life as a boy").

The Sassistas! also learned that in the past a bachelor party actually involved a black-tie dinner hosted by the groom's father.  WHAT HAPPENED?  

Have you ever been to a bachelor party?   How about a bachelorette party?

 

Exuberance

The Sassistas! would like to acknowledge and thank Jerseysista for dishing today's sass.

This past Monday evening, as I sat in my new home, a passing car sent out a staccato of horn blasts as it went by. It was the Sassistas! And it was only their first turn around the block before coming back and doing it again. I could just picture them, like sixteen-year-olds, arms waving beer bottles out open windows, music blaring, muffler scraping up sparks from the pavement as they careened around the corner hootin' and hollerin'. I fully expected a police siren to follow on their heels.

Even though my imagination got ahead of reality, I have to say their horn-blowing escapade, tame as it was, seemed outrageous for women their age -- especially when they combined it with a phone call preening about their carousing. Why is that? We spoke earlier this week about exuberance tempered with caution and we wondered if we give caution too much of the upper hand. I have to say, if I have gotten to the point of thinking a drive-by horn-blowing is outrageous, I have certainly been living a life where exuberance has been much too restrained by caution.

What about you?

 

Squinkies

It's that time of year again, sistas and mistas!  Yes, it's time for our annual post about this year's HOTTEST holiday toy!  Remember our post about last year's hottest toy -- Zhu Zhu Pets?  This year, the hottest toy is SQUINKIES!  Let's pause for 30 seconds as you view the above video.

Like Zhu Zhu Pets, Beanie Babies, Cabbage Patch Dolls or Larry King's wives, Squinkies are collectible -- the hundreds of characters include a Lhasa apso dog and a tiny bride -- but they are much cheaper, selling for $10 for a 16-pack.  And kids can't seem to resist scooping up these things as they come in plastic bubbles, as a vending machine would dispense.  

And to think Squinkies started at 16-person company called Blip Toys in Minnetonka, Minnesota?  Sixteen people and now millions of these things which are sold out or on back order at many stores.  In development are sets for boys based on characters like Spider-Man and new dolls based on Barbie and Hello Kitty.

But surely Squinkies can be re-purposed for adults!  Please share your ideas and the Sassistas! will get them to Blip ASAP!