So the other day my Six-Year-Old Friend suggested we go to see The Bee Movie. Against my better judgment I agreed. To spread the joy I begged my Favorite Mother to come with us, so that SHE could endure it as well as me.

For those who haven't seen it, don't bother. There is only one funny line in the whole movie, and it's one of the last lines in it. To save everyone the pain and aggravation of sitting still for an hour and a half, I will tell you this joke at the end of this post. But first I will break so if for some reason you WANT to sit through it you may. And I warn you: it's a rather tired, unoriginal lawyer joke. Mojo's insisting that it's the best part of the movie should be a warning to you all.  MORE Mojo! »

As regular Craptacular readers know, Mojo often hangs out with five-year-olds, probably because older sorts are too smart to put up with her. Consequently Mojo has gained insight into the human five-year-old mind.  MORE Mojo! »

No, NOT in the sense that I have multiple personalities or an abusive childhood, but in the oracular sense.

One of Mojo's skills in her decidedly checkered past include the rather technical ability to create very sophisticated multimedia training materials for academic and corporate clients. And by "sophisticated multimedia" I mean the real deal, NOT people who put the "schwoosh!" sound effect on each and every page of their powerpoint presentation until you just want to scream. I worked with a highly sophisticated software package you probably never heard of, called Authorware, as well as Macromedia's other products, like Director and Flash. And I still know an awful lot about the biz, so I am sometimes called in as a consultant to discuss people's needs.  MORE Mojo! »

Mojo's Favorite Mother's Various Stabs at Artistry

Mojo's mom is a quilter, we all know, and quilters, if you don't have the good fortune of knowing one, are a Breed Apart, an eccentric and fun group of (mostly) ladies who can kill their own snakes, as the vernacular puts it, although to be perfectly honest Mojo likes snakes and does not appreciate those who blindly kill them just because they happen to be snakes. Spiders, too. Both spiders and snakes play important respective roles in the ecosystem and for the most part just want to be left alone and try to run away from humans as soon as they can. Mojo's Favorite Mother of course is responsible for passing on this Boundless Love for All of God's Creatures--so long as Mojo's blood is not spilled, of course--and I always thought that the following anecdote was indicative of the sort of open-minded and fair person Mom was and is. For according to HER, Mojo's Favorite Mother was actually afraid of spiders and snakes, but she did not wish to pass this illogical bias on to her children. So when we were kids, Mom used to encourage us to handle daddy longlegs--who, granted, Mojo now knows are not actual spiders but a type of arachnid called a Harvestman--and would sometimes let them crawl on her to actively show us they were harmless. Snakes were another matter, for as try as she might she never got over her fear of them, but when she encountered one in the garden she would just calmly walk to the house and ask one of us to temporarily remove the fellow from her presence. And once when I was young and stupid I accidentally stepped on a very large rat snake that was sunning itself and got very badly bitten. My mother was afraid, since I was in hysterics, that I would grow to be afraid of snakes, so all the way to the doctor's office (for a tetanus shot) I was lectured on how it was my thoughtless actions that caused the poor snake to have to defend itself. So by the time I got to the doctor's my snivelling was substantially reduced and indeed later that summer my dad specifically took me out snake-hunting (just catching them, not hurting them) just to make sure there were no ill effects from my traumatic encounter. I did not realize that was what he was doing until in retrospect, but we all know some of us are rather slow on the uptake.  MORE Mojo! »

I will preface this, for those arriving late, by restating Mojo's Rule of Celebrity, which goes as follows: While there are sometimes exceptions, it's a fairly safe bet that a celebrity on television did NOT assume their celebrity through being really really smart. Talented, maybe; lucky, certainly, but smart? I doubt it. Smart people recognize the odds and try something more steady and/or lucrative. Because for every one celebrity out there, rest assured there are another hundred thousand who didn't make it, and are just as "talented" and would probably do the job for far less if given the chance. The competition for celebrityhood is extreme, and who wants to wade through all that? No one in their right mind, that's for sure.  MORE Mojo! »