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His way of eating and driving are driving his Guardian Angel INSANE!

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Not part of any challenge, but I never did anything this big and was excited to share. :)
16 x 20"
okay, bye. :)

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One of the first angels I made friends with is Joss, aka Soulbrush.

No wonder she wanted me to make sure I looked in the folder! There were 2 exquisite cards with this image. It took my breath away! And she was so thoughtful to ask me to send the extra one to none other than my "Raven Sister", Renee! Yes Renee, it's in the mail ;) xoxo

Margaret said she was in her favorite store in Illinois when something called out to her..."Lolo!!!"

OH-MY-GOSH!!!!

I photographed her next to my Jobi Pottery dish from my dear old friend Barbara for taking care of her kitty. They look great together but I know Miss Raven will be happier under my beautiful birth mandala by Marianne.

Perfect choice!

Margaret, thank you from the bottom of my heart for sending me all of these goodies. I feel like you know me so well. I hope we meet one day! xoxo

Before I end this post I also want to thank KJ for her wonderful cards that make me smile and for her daily emails just checking in with me.

Many of you know I met KJ once and this weekend we're going to Provincetown for 4 days of fun. We'll be meeting up with Debra Kay (yay!) and maybe Suki??? We'll have to work on her. We'll be missing Mim who is by her MIL's side post surgery along with her hubby. Big hugs Mim!!

Soulbrush and Marianne were hoping to make the long journey, but work and other things have made it impossible. We'll share our memories with you when we get back. I know we'll meet one day!!

Oh, I almost forgot. It's my 3rd Blogiversary!!

Thanks for coming along for the ride ;)

xoxoxo

Lolo

Cartoon for the Dutch Nu.nl news website, about the death of Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett.

More at Sevensheaven.nl

Join me at Twitter [I mainly write in the Dutch language]

Cassie Ammerman, Publicity

Mark Peters, the genius behind the blog Wordlustitude in addition to being a Contributing Editor for Verbatim: The Language Quarterly, and a language columnist for Good, and the author of Yada, Yada, Doh!: 111 TV Words That Made the Leap from the Screen to Society, is our guest blogger this week. Check out his past OUPblog posts here. In this post, Mark looks at how the -y suffix seems to have gone completely bananas.

Many lessons can be gleaned from watching reruns of Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Indirect sunlight is not an unlife-ender for vampires. Some small-town mayors may yearn to become giant unholy snake things (no surprise there). As Cordelia Chase said, “People, you’ve got to leave your tombs earthed.” (Whoops, that was on the Buffy spinoff Angel—but whatever).

Amidst these practical tips for living, a lexical lesson emerged on the Joss Whedon show: the –y suffix is on a rampage, and it can attach to almost anything, as shown by on-show coinages such as crayon-breaky, heart-of-darkness-y, out-of-the-loopy, stammery, twelve-steppy, and unminiony, which were discussed by Michael Adams in Slayer Slang: A Buffy the Vampire Slayer Lexicon. Adams follows up on the adventures of the –y suffix in his new book Slang: The People’s Poetry, which records other wild examples from the web and elsewhere, including beliefy, four-lettery, Jesusy, super-protecty, and co-y—a blend of prefix and suffix without a traditional root, meaning codependent-y.

As friends and countrymen know, I am a modest soul who wouldn’t dare compete with the remarkable Adams in the octagon or elsewhere, but I’ll stack my pile of wacky –y suffixed words up against his any day. While collecting nonce words for my dictionary-blog Wordlustitude, I’ve scooped up plenty of Buffy-esque adjectives, such as come-hither-y, creepy-uncle-y, forbidden-love-y, gone-to-the-darksidey, homicidal maniac-y, pins-and-needles-y, post-traumatic stress syndromey, princess of darkness-y, self-hatey, and special-forces-y. Nuff said on the –y suffix, right?

Nuh-uh. Holy guacamole, there is a lot more to the story.

I’ve noticed a sub-species of unlikely –y suffixed words that is even more of a wonder, words that might be the biological equivalent of discovering a wombat that is half meerkat and maybe one-eighth Don Rickles: words like military-y, Monday-y, prophecy-y, and yay-y have a double-y construction that shows the –y suffix is even more versatile than Adams imagined and the Buffy writers demonstrated.

Before getting to the good stuff, it should be noted that odd-looking –y suffixed words are not entirely new-ish and Buffy-influenced. The OED records some infrequently used older terms with a contemporary zing: weekendy (1930), newspapery (1864), skeletony (1852), gossamery (1790), and heatheny (1580) are just a few examples. One oldie in particular is the lost cousin of the words I’ve been collecting: clayey, which popped up as far back as 1024 and is still turning up more recently: “PS: Don’t text during ceramics class, gets your phone all clay-y.” (March 17, 2009, Off-Screen I Ramble).

In an email interview, Adams said “As you know, when it comes to word formation, almost anything is possible, but when a word ends with a vowel, it’s unlikely to take -y.” That said, Adams’ own work has turned up vowel-vowel combos such as wicca-y and zebraey, while I’ve spotted the recently useful swine-flu-y. Some of the double-y words I’ve found are basically in the same category: birthday-y, doomsday-y, holiday-y, hoyay-y, killjoy-y, Monday-y, slay-y, soy-y, and yay-y repeat a letter but not a sound, so they look a little stranger than they are. That said, they are still damn strange.

Far odder and more unlikely are the double-y words where the same sound is repeated, such as biology-y, Buffy-y, comedy-y, conspiracy-y, democracy-y, gravy-y, history-y, jealousy-y, lady-y, memory-y, military-y, mythology-y, prophecy-y, secret-identity-y, spy-y, strawberry-y, synergy-y, technology-y, and theory-y. The repeated sound is also found in words like bee-y, me-y, pee-y, squee-y, and tree-y which look more normal alphabet-wise, but are just as weird soundwise. As Adams says, “That is simply the least likely pattern, and one wonders if such forms ever occur in speech; it’s a pattern easily constructed in Webtext—it’s readable, even if it’s not sayable.”

But it is sayable! Or at least it’s performable, as I discovered while watching the ultra-disturbing Christopher Reeve episode of South Park (”Krazy Kripples,” March 26, 2003), which contained this line from a reporter: “Tom, the irony is even more irony-y as it appears that the stem cells have given Christopher Reeve almost superhuman strength.” That example is also interesting for breaking the “all X-y” formula that encompasses just about all of my examples, which refer to people “being all guy-y,” getting “all Hillary-y,” “feeling all holiday-y,” and “smelling all strawberry-y.” It appears that this productive formula is stronger than the phonetic taboo of the double-y, allowing for a wide array of square, rhombus, and hippo-shaped pegs to be placed in this round hole.

But the –y suffix is also mighty, and there are other examples that show double-y words can occur outside this formula, like this Battlestar Galactica-related comment from Television Without Pity: “As for the moniker, at last night’s LA show the question came up again, and we got a pretty firm response from Verheiden that it was purely an aesthetic decision, made at the last minute—they thought ‘Zeus’ sounded ‘too mythology-y’ and preferred the rhythm of ‘Jupiter.’” Then there’s hoyay-y—a variation of the fan abbreviation meaning “Homoeroticism, yay!”: “I really like the Poconos one, but isn’t that a bit too hoyay-y for the friendship thread?” So the formula certainly helps, but it isn’t necessary to produce these whacked-out words.

Now if all that isn’t enough to give you new respect/loathing for the –y suffix as it expands/desecrates the English language, let me make your mind go kaboom once more.

After years of weird-word collecting, I’m pretty unfazed by words with multiple, redundant, exuberant suffixes. As the collector of battle-tastic-tacular-gasm-worthy and mega-legal-robo-proctologist, it’s going to take some pretty fancy suffixation to turn my head. However, even I was gobsmacked out of my chair when I spotted mystery-y-ish-y.

Yowza. That is a triply redundant suffix, plus a double-y, with sort of a triple-y. Mystery-y-ish-y is a lexical wonder, but it does have some slightly less wondrous near-relatives: I spotted analogue-y-ish-y, emo-y-ish-y, and orange-y-ish-y in the wild, so that particular combo of suffixes isn’t a total anomaly. But it is, dare I say, in my best Mr. Spock voice, quite anomaly-y.

More evidence of extreme suffixation can be found in the following list of examples, which may inspire your own uses of the –y suffix. After studying the evidence, I can strongly recommend that this suffix be used with no caution whatsoever. Like doughnuts—according to Homer Simpson and my own privately funded research—it really can do anything.

birthday-y
“yay other! Hope today’s all birthday-y and fun!”
(Nov. 6, 2007, Stationzer0)

candy-y
“decorations were amazing, i mean it’s all candy-y and fantasy like…. like from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, they had candy trees, ginger bread house, candy house… and loads of HUGE christmas trees…”
(Dec. 25, 2006, The One in Penang)

conspiracy-y
“i’m trying not to sound all conspiracy-y here, (trilateralists? bilderbergers? shadow government established by the 1947 roswell alien visit?), but…he’s not a stupid guy. i firmly believe he’s advancing his agenda, whatever it might be….and the fact that we conservatives, his alleged base, don’t like it means nothing to him at all.”
(Jan. 8, 2007, Riehl World View)

history-y
“But, unfortunately, the Declaration isn’t official policy of any country anywhere or at any time. It was a statement of intent written by a small group of people who acted without sanction of any governing body. The US didn’t exist for more than a decade after that. I mean, since we’re being all history-y here.”
(Sept. 4, 2008, The Edge of the American West)

holiday-y
“Are you feeling all holiday-y now? All the special Chrisma-hanau-kwanza-kah feeling that’s in the air, and also on Starbucks’s annoying playlist is already starting to grate on my nerves.”
(Dec. 3, 2008, Food in Mouth)

jealousy-y
“maaan, i need to see this movie. and i’m gonna be all jealousy-y when claira gets it for Christmas. hahaa”
(Dec. 6, 2008, Livejournal)

killjoy-y
“After fueling all kinds of fun ‘What if X bought Moto?’ mashups with rumors they were fleeing the handset business like a burning building, Motorola gets all killjoy-y today, affirming that they’re ‘fully committed’ to the mobile biz. Hey, there have been bigger turnarounds.”
(Feb. 11, 2008, Matt Buchanan, Gizmodo)

lady-y
“My parents are awesome. My Dad’s all nature-y and work-y and my Mum’s all lady-y and they’re both daft and then I am a super combo of their awesome points (and then their tempers >__>;; ) and then yesssss. I win.”
(March 28, 2009, Ultimate Guitar Community)

memory-y
“And now I’m all memory-y thinking about ice-skating at the rink right around the corner from that theater when I was growing up.”
(Nov. 13, 2006, Whedonesque)

mystery-y-ish-y
“My faith tells me that marital sex, like all acts blessed with holiness, is a great mystery — and from thence comes its beauty.
Well, it WOULD be wouldn’t it? Since Dawn’s not married, she can’t be having marital sex. It’s all mystery-y-ish-y. And she can imagine it’s pretty, if she wants.”
(May 23, 2006, Pandagon)

philosophy-y
“I’m sorry to get all philosophy-y here, but I think these supposedly philosophical questions matter an awful lot to the politics at stake here.”
(May 24, 2008, Pandagon)

secret identity-y
“And don’t be all sneaky when you come in. Y’know … all secret identity-y, and then come back on here and post about how dumb I am and stuff. ‘Cause that would be just plain mean.”
(Dec. 15, 2006, Comic Books Resources Forums)

secret society-y
“I love it when they get all secret society-y”
(April 19, 2003, Livejournal)

soy-y
“i’ve just made my latest incredible discovery - boysenberry soy yoghurt, or as i like to call it, ’soyghurt’. it doesn’t upset my lactose-unfriendly stomach and doesn’t taste all soy-y and is creamy and filled with delicious boysenberries and 99% fat free! and it was on special at coles barkly square! brilliant!”
(Jan. 17, 2006, from the irish meaning ‘ditch/canal builder’)

spy-y
“It was all spy-y and computery. The poor man’s Tom Clancy, I guess.”
(May 16, 2007, The Sheila Variation)

technology-y
“They are orange! They are cute! They are all technology-y and stuff! They feel like nothing I’ve ever worn before, and they feel goooood!! I’m very psyched. They even come with a DVD to teach me how to wear them, they are so advanced!”
(Feb. 24, 2007, Asparagus and Mayonnaise)

Hi! Here are 2 of my favorite old pieces from the Avatar handbook by Green Ronin publishing. I believe the left angel was to be Gabriel. I loved working in different wings in the book (and this was one of the first times a bunny appeared in my work ;) I always enjoy the chance to draw winged people.Jennifer-

At Book Expo America 2008 in LA, OUP held a raffle to win a free OED. Many enthusiastic attendees assured us they had sturdy a shelf that could hold the voluminous set. Let’s hope Angel Castellanos of Distant Lands, Traveler’s Bookstore & Outfitters in Pasadena, CA actually has a good sturdy bookshelf because he is this year’s winner of the free OED raffle. Congratulations Angel!

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Moleskin sketch. Yes, moleskin. I bought a new one--plain paper. We are beginning to bond. Today our electric went out on the whole street! I was meaning to work on the computer but had to throw the plans out the window. Instead, I sketched. And I feel so much better for it! Creative juices are flowing. Yummmmm.

Moleskin sketch. Yes, moleskin. I bought a new one--plain paper. We are beginning to bond. Today our electric went out on the whole street! I was meaning to work on the computer but had to throw the plans out the window. Instead, I sketched. And I feel so much better for it! Creative juices are flowing. Yummmmm.

I know I've been quite absent lately...not enough time to do all that I'd like.
Just wanted to stop by and wish everyone a very Happy Valentine's DAy!

xo
Di

IRL (In Real Life): The Bronze Documentary Project, which was written, directed, produced and edited by Stevie Tuszynski, is now available on DVD. Get it at createspace.com and use the discount code V3BNN4DJ to save $5! The disc is NTSC, region-free, and includes the complete 55-minute documentary plus promotional trailers, a gag reel, and more.

The first feature-length documentary to take on the subject of online relationships, IRL (In Real Life) chronicles the life, death and afterlife of an online community called The Bronze, made up of fans from the official website for Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

The documentary looks at what happens when online relationships move from the Internet into "real life." In their own words, Bronzers talk about what lead them to seek out the community, the prejudices and misconceptions they had to face from family and friends about their Internet activities, and the effect the experience had on their lives.

...a world of Peace.

I sure hope people and animal heaven are not seperate places.

This is old...and not very good...but it fits...I think.

irisz

Rebecca OUP-US

Depictions of nature often reflect the mood in Tess of the D’Urbervilles. For example as Tess sits listening to Angel play the harp, “The floating pollen seemed to be in his notes made visible, and the dampness of the garden the weeping of the garden’s sensibility. Though near nightfall, the rank-smelling weed-flowers glowed as if they would not close, for intentness, and the waves of colour mixed with the waves of sound” (page 139). (more…)

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I created the following meme about books and organization just for fun. Feel free to leave your answers in the comments here or post your answers at your own blog and link back to Bildungsroman.

1. How do you organize your books? By genre, by last name, by title, by publication date?
   
2. Do you have a shelf reserved for your favorite books and/or authors?
   
3. What is the first title and author on your bookshelf?
   
4. What is the last title and author on your bookshelf?
   
5. What genre dominates your collection?
   
6. Which author is the most represented? (You own the most number of books by . . . )
   
7. You own all of the books written by . . .
   
8. You own the entire series of . . .

1. How do you organize your books?
   I split my books into fiction and non-fiction, then arrange them alphabetically by author. Books by the same author are organized by publication date, with the first release on the left and the newest on the right, with trilogies and series in number order.
   
   
2. Do you have a shelf reserved for your favorite books and/or authors?
   Yes. I have a shelf specifically for the works of Lewis Carroll and other Alice-related titles. I have multiple shelves for the works of Christopher Golden, the last shelf shared his frequent collaborator, Thomas E. Sniegoski. However, my other favorites are mixed in on the main shelves, alphabetically by author. For example, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald is sandwiched between So You Want to Be a Wizard by Diane Duane and Stay With Me by Garret Freymann-Weyr.
   
   
3. What is the first title and author on your bookshelf?
   The Pursuit of Happiness by Tara Altebrando
   
   
4. What is the last title and author on your bookshelf?
   The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
   
   
5. What genre dominates your collection?
   I own more fiction than non-fiction. My non-fiction section mostly consists of Ancient Egyptian history, as well as books about cats, otters, and the Salem Witchcraft Trials. Most of my books from my childhood and most of my classics are in storage, though I want them to be here in my home. Thus, most of the fiction I do have here is contemporary adult and teen fiction that I've acquired over the past few years.
   
   
6. Which author is the most represented? (You own the most number of books by . . . )
   Christopher Golden
   
   
7. You own all of the books written by . . .
   I won't list authors who have written three books or less, because it's easy to say, "I own all of the books by Lady X," when she's only written one book so far.
   
   I have a lovely used copy of The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll, so I suppose that qualifies.
   
   I am missing some Christopher Golden books. Perish the thought!
   
   I have read all of Sarah Dessen's books, and I own all but two: Dreamland and Just Listen.
   
   You see, "own" and "read" are very different. If I had the means to own every single book I wanted to own, I would. I am so grateful to the public library for keeping me in books. I would go nuts without it. There's no way I could afford to buy 30+ books a month.
   
   
8. You own the entire series of . . .
   I don't own every single The Baby-Sitters Club book, but I want to have them all. I am serious. I have a list of the titles I am missing and I always go to the juvenile series section of used bookstores in hopes of finding BSC books.
   
   I also read and collected the original Buffy the Vampire Slayer novels* faithfully in their heyday - the same with the Angel novels - but when some of my favorite authors stopped writing for the line and when the series stopped airing, I stopped reading and collecting the series.
   
   * My favorite is The Lost Slayer by Christopher Golden.