By I.B. scribbling (a.k.a Max Kupperman)

A field guide to friendship

If you want to know how to kickbox a giant panda, this is not the field guide for you. However, still keep this at hand. You never know when you might need it.

Part one: Making Friends

Need help making friends? If you answered yes, this is the paragraph for you! To make a friend, you find someone that is both willing to be your friend and someone you’d accept.  In other words, if you don’t like someone, don’t make him/her a friend of yours, unless you don’t know that much about that person, then, do what natural detectives do: investigate!

Part Two:  Investigation

Investigating someone requires a high amount of skill… just kidding!  Actually it is pretty easy.  If you are able to sit at the same lunch table as the person who you want to become your friend, sit there.  You will find out a lot about the person whom you want to be your friend. This is one of the strategies used by the “Department of Friends,” “DF” for short.  (Yes, it’s real.) One of our top-ranked detectives, flapjack, made a couple of friends in this way.  Nine out of every ten DF members make friends in this way.

Part three:  Trust

You’ve made a friend using the method above (or another one), and you feel like you’re being tossed around by the friend you’ve made.  These are the top ten indicators that you should leave your friend for good:

• Number 10:  “Friend” is taking advantage of you.
• Number 9: “Friend” is making you eat foods that you don’t like.
• Number 8: “Friend” is taking advantage of you by making you eat foods that you don’t like.
• Number 7: When partnered with “Friend,” in a writing/drawing assignment, “Friend” does both the writing and the drawing.
• Number 6: “Friend” bombards you with paintballs for no good reason.
• Number 5: “Friend” “bombarfs” you with vomit for no good reason.
• Number 4: “Friend” ignores you because of a certain thing, such as your “friend” wants to play on the swings while you want to play basketball.
• Number 3: “Friend” plays the fifth marine division in the dishwasher trick on you.
• Number 2:  “Friend” is just plain bossy.
• Number 1:  “Friend” does all of the above.

As you see, these are all very good reasons to dump your friend.  But if your friend doesn’t do any of these, he is a very good friend. Unless, of course, if your friend dumps you, Then, he/she is not a good friend.

Now the longer a friend stays with you, the better that friend should be.  If your friendship has survived extreme situations, such as large arguments over something totally stupid, or, being that your friend is going to a different school than you, you have a very good friend on your hands. Some people have kept friends for a very long time.  They are good friends.  Some friends only keep you for an hour. they are not good friends.  If you are about eight years older than me, I’d give you the same advice for dating.

Part four:  one last thing

Whether you’re going to keep a friend or not depends on your personality as well.  The friend won’t keep you unless you treat the friend like you’d like the friend to treat you. And, even if you don’t want to, it’s nice to do what your friend wants to do once in a while.  This will make your friendship stronger.  That’s just about all the advice I can give you.  What happens in your life is up to you.

Cassoulet, wine, dog, and French firearms -- this video represents a pretty big fraction of Gary Murphy's life...

http://youtube.com/watch?v=wwrN6QfzMK8

We weren't organized enough to make new year's cards this year, so we're making do with a New Year Blog.  On the plus side, we can include a lot more pictures, like this one of the snow that started falling almost exactly at midnight new year's eve:

We had a pretty low-key Hannukah and Christmas....

... punctuated by a short trip to Chicago for fish-viewing and pizza-eating:

And if Susanna, Max, and Ollie ever form a band, we have the album cover picture:

We're looking forward to the Year of the Rat, which of course means lots of cooking...

... a topic that Ollie has already taken to heart:

Best wishes for 2008!

Jeff, Susanna, Max, and Ollie

Beware, the Venus Fly Trap!

A ladybug, but in this picture she looks a lot like the Humbug from The Phantom Toll Booth....

"You make me laugh"

Froggy went a-courting

Until now, if you wanted to get your hands (or your kids' hands) on one of the laptops being made for the "One Laptop Per Child" program, you basically had to be the government of a developing country. But for one week in November, individuals in the U.S. can buy one through the Give 1 Get 1 program: For $399 you buy 2 laptops, one for yourself, and one that is donated to a child in a developing nation. (The donation part is even tax deductible.) The laptop itself looks, well, really great, so it's a good bet they will sell out in far less than a week.