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I never thought that I would have to explicitly state this fact here because I assume that people would infer this from reading this blog. But I was mistaken and I’m now here to rectify this.
It all started when I received this email a few days ago:
Hey kim,
How’s everything going lately? It’s been a while, and I’ve been meaning to reach out to you.
I’ve been keeping an eye on your website and articles https://sagittariusdolly.wordpress.com and have heard quite a few success stories. Achieving so much in just a few years is truly inspiring and keeps us motivated to keep pushing ourselves.
I apologize if my colleagues have already been in touch with you [sorry for any inconvenience]. I’m [Name Redacted] from [Company Name], a sex doll manufacturer based in Hong Kong. We specialize in selling premium doll products like Zelex, Irontech, WM, and more.
We’ve been hoping for an opportunity to discuss the possibility of collaboration with you. It’s not just about the scale of your platform but, more importantly, your strict standards for website content, which align with our own product requirements.
I may have rambled on a bit here, kim team. I hope you can forgive my eagerness for potential collaboration.
Wishing you a joyous and successful new year!
[Name Redacted]
And here’s my response:
[Name Redacted]:
You say that you have been reading my blog but I wonder if you have really read any of my doll posts closely. The largest dolls I have in my collection are 60 cm [2 feet]. They are Asian ball-jointed dolls. They are anatomically correct but they aren’t life-sized nor do they have openings so it would be extremely difficult for anyone to get intimate with them.
Most of my dolls are 1/6 scale [10-13 inch] fashion dolls, such as Volks Dollfie Plus, Barbie, and Monster High. Again they are a far cry from the sex dolls you advertise on your site.
I have never featured any sex dolls on my blog and I really don’t have the money or the space in my home to get a sex doll to do my own research with.
I’m going to have to pass for now. If you ever start selling smaller dolls that are 60 cm [2 feet] or smaller, I might be open to a collaboration in the future.
Sincerely,
Kim Keyes
Sagittarius Dolly blog
Proportion your Charity to the strength of your Estate, or God will Proportion your Estate to the Weakness of your Charity.
I still remember a time, especially prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, when stores used to advertise about how they had these super-cheap deals for Black Friday, such as a $200 laptop or a $150 big screen TV. The stores initially began to open at 6 a.m. Then they pushed it earlier to 3 a.m. Then they pushed it even further back to midnight. Then some stores even had the audacity to open at 7 p.m. on Thanksgiving Day itself so the employees had to interrupt their own observance of the holiday to go to work.
Then there were the horror stories of customers who literally fought over that super-cheap item. Sometimes there were store employees and customers who were seriously injured. Even more tragically were the people who literally lost their lives because they were either trampled by the crowd or someone pulled out a gun and were shot to death.
Today I came across this video that explains in detail how Black Friday is now becoming a thing of the past in the United States.
My response to that video is just one word: Good! All Black Friday did was to promote excessive materialism and encouraged people to succumb to their most primitive instincts all in the pursuit of a cheap DVD player. The silver lining of online shopping is that it convinced people of the stupidity of camping out overnight outside of a BestBuy on a cold November night in the hopes of being lucky enough to snag one of only twenty $100 TV sets that the store happened to have in stock. Why put yourself through that hassle when you can just pull out a laptop, tablet, or cellphone and shop online while you’re still in your pajamas sitting in your warm home.
The decline of Black Friday means that the stores are no longer open on Thanksgiving Day and they now open at the usual 10 a.m. time on the following day. I’m sure that’s a relief to the employees who no longer have to interrupt their own holiday so they could report to work. It also means that we will no longer have to hear about people getting injured or killed over those cheap deals. That’s great!
I can’t believe it’s 2023 already. This time last year I had hopes that the COVID-19 pandemic will further recede from being the major threat that it was in 2020 and 2021. I wanted 2022 to be relatively placid in terms of bad news.
But then Vladimir Putin had to ruin it by deciding to launch his stupid invasion of Ukraine on February 24. (Yes, next month will be the one-year anniversary of that disaster.) The Ukrainians are fighting back way harder than the Russians expected. It’s gotten to the point where there’s no way Russia can achieve its goal of conquering Ukraine but Putin isn’t listening to reason. I’ve heard rumors that Russia is going to do another mass mobilization of young men to send to Ukraine pretty soon. Never mind the fact that the last mass mobilization has resulted in numerous Russians fleeing to neighboring countries like Georgia and Kazakstan.
Basically Vladimir Putin is hell-bent on reconstructing the former Soviet Union no matter how many Russians get killed, no matter how many economic sanctions that other countries have placed on that country, no matter how often people are comparing him to Adolf Hitler so much that I’ve seen his name written as Vladof Putler online. He’s so determined in his unrealistic dream (and, yes, it is unrealistic—if you look at the history of the USSR, you’d realize that there’s a reason why Ukraine, Georgia, Kazakstan, and other former Soviet Republics had declared independence when the Soviet Union fell apart back in the early 1990s) that there is even a phenomenon of members of the Russian oligarchy who have died under mysterious circumstances last year. There’s even a Wikipedia page devoted to this bizarre and deadly phenomenon. Some of the oligarchs were apparently unenthusiastic about the idea of Russia invading Ukraine and they ended up dead.
Meanwhile COVID-19 is still around. There’s now a new variant called XBB.1.5 that’s on the rise. What’s really frustrating is that I still continue to wear masks whenever I’m in an indoor public place but there are fewer people wearing masks these days. This is what happens when some anti-maskers had filed enough lawsuits that most public places have given up and now make mask-wearing optional (but still recommended). I’m only still wearing a mask despite being vaccinated because I’m trying to avoid getting the Coronavirus. So far I’ve been lucky in not even getting infected.
For this year I’m just not going to hope for anything because they’re just going to end up being dashed. The only hope I have is to find a steady day job so I won’t have to rely on the payment from my late mother’s life insurance to keep me afloat. I’ve heard a lot about the Great Resignation plus there are fewer workers overall because so many of them had perished in the COVID-19 pandemic. (At least the Coronavirus death rate has slowed down since Joe Biden became president. The death rate has stabilized at 1.1 million dead Americans.)
My only New Year’s resolution is to cut back on social media because I’d rather be artistic in creating new things than just scroll through posts after posts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. That’s the main reason why I haven’t tried going on the Twitter alternatives that people have flocked to since Elon Musk purchased that platform a couple of months ago and has been running amok ever since. I just don’t want to have one more thing to get hooked on.
And some of the newer social media sites just don’t even excite me at all. One example is this much-hyped new platform called BeReal. The idea is to move away from those perfect curated photos that Instagram promotes in favor of photographing yourself in the moment with no filters to manipulate the photos. Sounds good on the surface but there’s a catch that I’m not too keen about. Apparently every day you’ll get a new notification at a random time of the day that says “Time to BeReal.” As soon as you get that notification, you have two minutes to take a simultaneous selfie and back camera photo of what you are doing at that very moment. If you choose to wait to post a picture later in the day when you look better or are doing something fun, all your friends will be able to see that you waited and aren’t being real.
Here’s my problem with this. Suppose I’m so busy doing something else that I don’t have the time to take a picture at that moment that BeReal tells me to take one. That issue will come up if I’m working a day job or if I’m doing a side project with a deadline and I simply don’t have the time to take a BeReal photograph. Suppose I’m driving a car when the BeReal notification comes up. I don’t think the state of Maryland would like the idea of me taking a BeReal photograph while I’m driving at the same time. (The state already has a ban on talking on cell phones and texting while driving.) I’m sure other states would take a dim view of taking BeReal pictures while driving as well. Suppose I have a day when I feel less than perky and I’m simply not in the mood to take a BeReal picture. Suppose I get a BeReal notification while I’m sleeping. Am I expected to wake up and take a photo of myself looking exhausted with messy hair?
BeReal is a hard pass for me. I’d rather submit content online when I want to than have some app tell me that I need to submit new content within two minutes of a random notification.
Today I made a short video featuring my Disney Nuimos. It’s basically an online Christmas card using reindeer and sleigh props that I found at Target for $5 each. I also have a small Christmas tree that I purchased at Target for around $5 two years ago with small ornaments that I found at Walmart for $5 last year. I even found a small bottle of raspberry-flavored sparkling wine imported from Italy that was in a bottle that was small enough for 1-2 glasses. (Which is good enough for me because I was spending the New Year’s holiday alone so it didn’t make sense for me to buy a big bottle. By the way, the sparkling wine tasted very good.) I wanted to make such a video sooner but with the bad weather (such as the heavy rain that plagued New Year’s Eve yesterday) and the Arctic chill that plagued the entire region over the Christmas holiday, I wasn’t able to finish my video until today. (The temperature reached a high of 60 degrees Fahrenheit, which I loved.) I uploaded my video on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube.
I’m going to end this post with a hilarious animation I found that was originally aired on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert a few weeks ago. It features Santa Claus fighting Vladimir Putin with a little help from Joe Biden and it’s a hoot! Enjoy!
Climate change activist Greta Thunberg has been doing everything possible to warn the world about the dangers of climate change since she was 15 when she would spend her Fridays going on strike from school by spending time protesting outside of the Swedish Parliament in Stockholm. She’s now 19 years old and she’s still trying to alert the world about climate change. This year the day before New Year’s Eve (which you could call New Year’s Eve Eve) falls on a Friday and she is still there protesting outside of the Swedish Parliament with a few other activists.
Her tireless efforts on behalf of the planet is a good enough reason on why she should win the Nobel Peace Prize. But there’s another reason, which has become the feel-good story of the Christmas/Kwanzaa/New Year’s 2022 Holiday Season.
There is a guy named Andrew Tate who initially started out as a kickboxer. After he retired from that sport he became a contestant on the UK version of the reality TV show Big Brother, where he became infamous for being kicked off of the show after he was caught on camera beating a fellow female contestant with a belt.
From that moment he began to style himself as a social media influencer and self-help guru for men who proudly proclaims himself as a misogynist. He has said that women belong in the home, women shouldn’t drive, a woman is a man’s property, and rape victims should take responsibility for their own attacks. He has gained a huge following, especially on TikTok, for his public statements on how he only dates 18-19 year-old-women so he can make an “imprint” on them, he boasts about hitting and choking women, has boasted about trashing a girlfriend’s personal belongings and forbidding her from going out on her own, and has even called an ex-girlfriend “a dumb ho.”
He even mentioned that he bought a home in Romania because he claimed that it would be easier for him to avoid rape charges while adding “I’m not a rapist, but I like the idea of just being able to do what I want. I like being free.”
In short, Andrew Tate is a total asshole and proud of it.
So, for reasons that are only fully known to Andrew Tate, he decided to go on Twitter to pick on Greta Thunberg by bragging about his personal fleet of gas guzzling cars while tweeting: “Hello @GretaThunberg I have 33 cars. My Bugatti has a w16 8.0L quad turbo. My TWO Ferrari 812 competizione have 6.5L v12s. This is just the start. Please provide your email address so I can send a complete list of my car collection and their respective enormous emissions.” For added measure, he included a photo of himself at a gas station pumping gas into one of his 33 cars with their “enormous emissions.”
Greta Thunberg gave a reply that’s full of slick burn: “yes, please do enlighten me. email me at smalldickenergy@getalife.com”
With an epic retort like that, you’d think that Andrew Tate would move on to something else. Well you thought wrong. Andrew Tate decided to respond with this tweet: “Thank you for confirming via your email address that you have a small penis @GretaThunberg The world was curious. and I agree that you should get a life ♥️” He also included a video where he is smoking a cigar while bragging about contributing to greenhouse gasses and ordering someone to bring him a couple of pizza boxes and telling that off-screen person to make sure that those boxes are not recycled.
Meanwhile the authorities in Romania have been investigating allegations that Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan have been striking up online relationships with various women, going to the countries where their online female friends lived, begin romantic relationships with them, then entice them to visit them in their Romanian home. Once the women arrived to their home, the women were forced to work as pornographic models for sites like OnlyFans while being constantly threatened with physical violence and mental coercion through intimidation, constant surveillance, control and invoking alleged debts.
When Andrew Tate uploaded his video on Twitter featuring the pizza boxes, someone in Bucharest noticed that the boxes were from Jerry’s Pizza, which is the name of a local pizza chain in that city. The Romanian authorities realized that Andrew Tate was in their country so he and his brother were arrested and charged with rape, human trafficking, and forming an organized crime group. The Tate brothers are currently in a 30-day pretrial detention.
So Greta Thunberg not only fights on behalf of the environment but she also was instrumental in breaking up a shady human trafficking operation by making a burning reply that led to Andrew Tate reacting in such a way that he ultimately ended up hoisting himself on his own petard. And she even responded to recent events with this one short tweet: “this is what happens when you don’t recycle your pizza boxes”.
Give that woman the Nobel Peace Prize!
UPDATE (January 7, 2023): Remember those cars with their “enormous emissions” that Andrew Tate taunted Greta Thunberg with in his initial tweet to her that began the whole chain of events that led to his arrest? The Romanian police have seized 15 of those cars along with 10 of his houses, which makes the whole thing even more hilarious. By the way, I came across this interesting video that shows Andrew Tate bragging about how he is a big supporter of Vladimir Putin. Given that guy’s toxic macho asshole personality, I’m not surprised that he is such a Putin admirer.
UPDATE (January 20, 2023): Andrew Tate’s arrogant personality is digging a deeper hole for him. Vice did an expose where one of Tate’s ex-girlfriends, who have accused him of raping her back in 2013, provided a message that he sent on WhatsApp where he wrote “I love raping you.” NBC News did its own expose where Tate boasted that his sexually explicit webcam business is a total scam, he boasted that he lured women to his business by getting them to fall in love with him, and he claimed to have broken a woman’s jaw in a bar fight and got away with it. A few Romanian teens have told BBC News about how Tate had approached them on social media. With these revelations, it’s no wonder that a Romanian court have ordered Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan to remain locked up for another 30 days.
Last New Year’s Eve there was a sudden death. Betty White was relatively healthy in her old age and she was going to celebrate her 100th birthday on January 17, 2022. But then the Grim Reaper decided that she shouldn’t live past 2021 and she died on New Year’s Eve at the age of 99. I still remember this anguished post that was on the gossip blog Dlisted.
This New Year’s Eve is more of the same. Former Roman Catholic Pope Benedict XVI has died at the age of 95. His death wasn’t a surprise because he had been in ill health for a while.
Late last night I learned of the sudden death of another famous person. Barbara Walters has died at the age of 93. Much has been made about how she was a trailblazer who had entered the TV news business in the 1950s at a time when women were encouraged to be full-time housewives and mothers. It’s true that she broke through the fabled glass ceiling, which paved the way for other women to enter television journalism, while she frequently faced all kinds of hostilities from her male colleagues. Along the way she interviewed heads of state, athletes, celebrities, and other types of famous people.
But there’s one very notorious interview she did in 2015 that won’t be mentioned in the various tributes today. It was one of the last interviews she did before she retired and, based on what she said during that interview, it was just as well that she retired soon afterwards. She interviewed an infamous couple who initially started their relationship when one of them was a 12-year-old boy while the other was his married elementary school teacher. She even got pregnant as a result, which was how this whole story came to a head. She ended up serving prison time for statutory rape and the couple got married after she was released. Barbara Walters heralded it as a love story for the ages, which I personally found so personally disgusting that I wrote a rant about it in this blog a few years ago.
So if you want a look at the dark side of Barbara Walters, then check out my 2015 rant on ABC News Legitimizes Pedophilia and Child Rape.
The Muses starve in a Cook’s Shop.
I finally went back to the annual Christkindlesmarkt that is held at Zion Lutheran Church in Baltimore for the first time in five years. Between financial struggles and the pandemic, I just wasn’t able to go back to that event. But, then again, I believe this event was also canceled for the last two years due to COVID-19.
In any case I went back for a visit and I was struck by how there were fewer items for sale than in previous years. Or I think there were fewer items for sale than previously. (It’s just that I have memories of previous years when the tables were literally cluttered with all kinds of German things for sale. But I didn’t buy too much stuff due mainly to tight finances.) On top of it I left home around 1 p.m. and, thanks to traffic and dealing with Baltimore public transportation, I didn’t arrive until an hour and a half before the event closed at 4 p.m. so it’s quite possible that there were more things on sale but they were sold by the time I arrived.
The Christmas Train Garden was still up and running and it looks the same as it did back in 2014 and 2017. This time I decided to shoot a short video instead of still pictures. I uploaded it on to TikTok, Clapper, Instagram, and YouTube.
I also took photos of what I saw while I was there and I did a video slideshow that you can see on TikTok, Clapper, Instagram, and YouTube.
On this day in 2011 my husband suddenly returned home from work, announced that he was moving out and that he found a room, threw some documents at me—one was a schedule that I was required to adhere to and it would result in our eventual divorce, one was a letter where he blamed me for his decision to leave home because I had purchased a doll a few months earlier on the day before my scheduled hip surgery and he said that it added to the clutter in our home, and one was the first alimony check that he had written to me. He never once indicated that he was the least bit unhappy until the night he left home for good.
On top of it, he left me three months after I had undergone hip surgery so I couldn’t run after him as he ran out the door after throwing those documents in my direction. He also left three days after we shared a lovely Christmas Day together.
It turned out that he had left me for a friend of ours who had long suffered from severe mental health issues. He got engaged to her in 2012—just eight months after he moved out (while he was still legally married to me). He sent me divorce papers in a .pdf format that was attached to an email that he sent on December 24, 2012 (Christmas Eve). He married her just two months after our divorce was final in June, 2013. All that I remember that his sudden remarriage not only shocked me but it also shocked several of our friends as well.
In the years since I’ve heard from longtime friends who told me that they’ve run into my ex and his second wife from time to time and, according to them, the couple look unhappy and miserable. During the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 I saw my husband walking outside while I drove past him and he looked very miserable so my friends were right in their assessment of him. (I haven’t seen his wife in a long time and I don’t want to either.)
The good news is that I rarely see him. This year I only saw him twice and they were both within a few days of each other back in July. The first time I saw him was at a local farmers market while I was looking for a parking space. I saw a familiar looking man but I wasn’t sure who it was. He had very long curly hair that was dark with streaks of grey hair and his beard also looked long and unkempt. He was wearing dull grey clothes. His stomach had such a pronounced bulge that he looked like he was four or five months pregnant. He suddenly turned around and I got a shocking look at his face. I’m glad I was in the car when I saw him because I don’t know if I could handle reacting to him if we had physically ran into each other. Try to imagine a hermit who has been living in a cave for the past 10 years who was subsisting on an unhealthy diet with very little exercise and you’d get my ex-husband.
I saw him the next day when I was about to leave on my trip to Ocean City and Rehoboth Beach for a few days. I needed to buy a few things at the local store before I could head on the highway. After I made my purchases I went back in my car where I was straightening a few things on the passenger side of the seat before I started my car. Meanwhile another car had parked next to me. I paid that car no mind because I was focused on myself and my upcoming trip. As I was driving away I saw a man get out and he looked vaguely familiar. I realized that it was, once again, my ex-husband! He was wearing the same dull grey clothes I saw him wear at the farmers market the day before. I was glad to get out of that area without having to say anything to him.
I haven’t seen him since and, if my luck holds out, I probably won’t be running into him before 2023 arrives in four days.
In the years since my marriage suddenly ended I did a lot of looking back on my past life with him as well as talking to other relatives for insight. I now know that my husband isn’t as intelligent as I thought he was and the main reason why he got ahead in his life was because he was admitted to Oberlin College as a legacy student. (Both of his parents and one of his aunts had attended that same college.) On top of it, his father was an executive at a tech company (which has since gone through so many mergers that it no longer exists) and he pulled some strings to get my future ex some plum summer jobs that were related to his college major, which gave him a definite advantage in terms of experience when he learned through his school that NASA was looking to hire programmers and he got the job soon after he graduated. I wrote more about this in detail two years ago so I’m not going to regurgitate it here other than to mention that I recently came across this article in The Guardian about nepo babies and, in some ways, my ex fits that description. (In fact he does have a famous relative. His grandfather was the diabetes researcher Michael Somogyi who has his own Wikipedia page.)
Let’s face it, if my ex-husband was very intelligent, he would have never left me for a seriously dysfunctional woman because he would have predicted that entering into a relationship of any kind with her could a potential disaster for him.
After talking with other people, I also came to the conclusion that the real reason why he wanted to marry me was just so he could prove to his parents that he wasn’t destined to become a bachelor. He used to tell me from time to time that it would be cool if our marriage outlasted his parents’ marriage (which ended in a divorce) but it never occurred to me that he only wanted to stay married to me long enough so he could have bragging rights about how our marriage lasted exactly one year longer than his parents’. I already wrote about that in more detail last year so I’m not going to get into it here.
Here is where my ex-husband’s stupidity has totally impacted his life. Had he and the mentally ill woman whom he left me for were simply living together and one or both of them realized that their relationship wasn’t working out, they probably could have a situation where one or both of them simply move out of the townhouse that they currently share together. But since he legally married her, neither one of them can just simply move out without involving lawyers.
Of course making a decision to separate would require one or both of them to admit that they made a mistake and they should go for a legal separation than a divorce. The worst thing I could say about my ex-husband is that he is the type of person who will not admit that he made the wrong decision about something that he is passionate about. There were times when my husband exerted pressure on me to go to art school part-time while working full-time to the point where he even called the school I attended at the time inquiring about whether I had received the course catalogue without even consulting me first. I was livid when he told me this after the fact because he made me feel like a small irresponsible child instead of a wife and it reminded me too much of my parents being so strict on me when I was growing up that they didn’t trust me, not even when I got good grades in school. For years he would never admit that he was wrong for calling the school without talking to me first.
So, yes, I can easily imagine him preferring to be in a miserable marriage because he was so sure that it was the right thing for him to do instead of facing facts and realizing that maybe he would be better off separated. Because doing that would require him to admit to himself that he was wrong and he doesn’t want to do that.
I don’t feel sorry for either one of them. In fact, I feel more sorry for the 34 people in Buffalo who recently lost their lives as the result of a major snowstorm (which is excessive even by Buffalo standards) than I feel sorry for my ex-husband and his wife. Hell, I feel more sorry for the number of Ukrainians who have lost their lives this year as a result of Russia invading their country than I do for my ex-husband and his wife.
To be honest, I don’t give a damn if their marriage continues to exist or not because I have little interest in reuniting with my ex-husband. He has never apologized for the hell he had put me through during the separation and divorce and he has refused to even examine his role in the end of our marriage. (At least I did attend weekly meetings of a support group for people who are separated or divorced although I haven’t attended one in a long time and I even went to weekly private sessions with a therapist until I had a hard time affording the $40 per hour sessions.) If I was to reunite with my ex and we got remarried, it would only be a matter of time before another seriously mentally ill woman moved into our area, my ex decided that he fancied her, and he would once again suddenly run away from home, convince her to marry him while pressuring me to adhere to his personal separation schedule yet refuse to talk to me in person or on the phone. (During our separation he only communicated with me via email and he refused to answer any emails I sent him. He also frequently threatened to sue me if I asked him to at least slow down a little bit on that schedule he had put out. That frequent lawsuit threat via email makes him a cyberbully.) That’s because I now know that he now prefers severely mentally ill women.
By the way I recently came across this TikTok video on my For You page about how nerds make great husbands and fathers. My ex did appear as a nerd where he read a lot of science fiction novels, watched the original 1960s Star Trek TV series to the point where if he could identify an episode based on just watching one or two minutes of an episode, played a continuous Dungeons & Dragons game with two of his friends from Oberlin College every time the three of them got together (which petered out in the late 1990s when two of his friends had a falling out for reasons that had little to do with their game and stopped speaking to each other), and watched every Star Wars movie up to the year that our marriage broke up in 2011. (I have no idea if he has recently seen the recent Star War movies or other Star Wars spinoff series on Disney+.) If TikTok had existed prior to late 2011 and I came across this video, I would’ve been in full agreement with the woman in that video because my ex seemed very stable and solid. I never had to worry about him taking drugs or screwing around with other women or doing something totally illegal.
All that changed for good when he suddenly left me without him ever telling me that he was unhappy or anything like that. I had no idea that he had a thing for mentally ill women like pedophiles have a thing for young children. It never occurred to me that something like being obsessed with having sex with the mentally ill even existed until he left me for her. It all goes to show that nerds or men who pretend to be nerds are just as capable of suddenly self-destructing or permanently fucking up their lives as non-nerds.
As for me, I feel more peaceful being alone these days. I’d rather be alone for the rest of my life than reunite with my ex-husband.
Sagittarius Dolly 
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