Ridiculousness

Why Dune is Motherfucking Awesome.

2011-02-05T15:18:00.001-05:00

I don't update this blog anymore, nor does anyone read it, but I wanted a place to post my entry into the Lazy Reviewer's Dune essay contest, so here I am. It didn't turn out as well as I wanted it to, but nothing I do ever does, so there you go. Anyway, without further ado...

Why Dune is Motherfucking Awesome

Okay, so it turns out I really didn't know what I was getting myself into when I decided to do this. "Dune?" I thought, "It's, like, sandworms in space or some shit, right? I could write a couple paragraphs about that." Holy. Crap. (Or should I say, "Merciful Mother!") Boy, was I wrong. I really thought Dune was going to be five hundred pages of this. I was not expecting to open up the book and only understand about 13% of the words on the page. Gom jabbar? Kwisatz Haderach? Bene Gesserit? Are you serious? Reading the first few sections of the book was like being in French class all over again, like when you'd forget the word for "shoe" mid-sentence so you'd just say "LE SHOO!" and keep talking. You're not quite sure what the fuck is going on but you hope you're getting the gist of it right. And then (oh, Lordy!) they started talking about the Kwisatz Haderach and my eyes started to roll. "Oh, I see how it is. These powerful shaman women who have directed the path of humanity since ancient times have spent the past 26,000 years waiting for one special GUY. Let me guess: it's Colin Firth, isn't it? Hundreds of generations of Bene Gesserit have been praying for Mr. Darcy to come and save them. Of course! TYPICAL!" Still, I wanted to give Dune a fair shot, so I kept on reading.

Then, at a certain point, it all started to come together for me. I don't know when, exactly, but I suspect it was right about when the Duke Leto showed up. The Duke Leto: former resident of Cala-damn you fine, the new leader of Arra-kiss me you fool, from the House of Atrei-dis ass won't quit, Leto the Just a little bit lower! Yes, right there! Keep going! I can't be the first girl to get a hard-on for the Duke Leto. That was one smooth motherfucker. You just know that guy was an epic lay, too. He was with Jessica for sixteen years and he still took the time to eye bang her in the Great Hall before a state dinner? Yeah, you know she wore those warm colors for you. You like that, don't you, Leto? Yeah, you do. I loved when he spotted the wormsign while they were flying over Dune (piloting the 'thopter himself, thank you very much, in a very Bill-Pullman-as-the-President-in-Independence-Day-who-was-also-a-fighter-pilot kind of move) and he gave away the spotter bonus. Well played, Leto, but more importantly, well played Frank Herbert, because that scene was when the planet Arrakis really solidified for me: the ripples in the sand, the stranded Fremen, the industry around the spice, it all clicked.

At that point, there's really no turning back. Once you allow yourself to be sucked into the Dune universe, there's really nothing you can do to stop it. You just want to immerse yourself in it, bathe in it, soak in it. Then you start to feel guilty for using such extravagant moisture-based metaphors when the people of Arrakis have to pee in their pants and drink it through a straw. You open up your kitchen cabinets and see the jars of cinnamon and nutmeg in there and you think, "What riches to behold!" You leave your office and you step, slide, step step, pause across the parking lot to your car because if you walk without rhythm, then you won't attract the worm. You wake up in the middle of the night, tossing and turning, muttering to yourself, "Dune! Fucking DUNE!!" There's the story, there's the mythology, there's the philosophy, there's the religion, there's the history, and then - oh, and this is when you really start to tear your hair out - you start to wonder about how all this relates to us here on Earth. Saguaro? Ramadan? Arabic words? Chemistry? Botany? Geology? Get me my fucking encyclopedia because I got shit to research. Dune is serious. Dune is intense. Dune is epic. Dune is motherfucking awesome.

2010-10-27T19:02:00.001-04:00

Don't you hate it when Jezebel posts video of Russell Crowe from a late-80s Australian production of Rocky Horror wearing thigh highs and garters and your work computer blocks the video so you have to wait until you get home so you can enjoy it at your leisure and anyway your coworkers/the general public in your office would probably think you're a weirdo for watching it in the first place but it nags at you ALL DAY that it's there and you just can't see it? Yeah, I hate that too.

"Craig Ferguson's hair looks greyer in person" or "Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and BLAH" or "The deeper meaning of Goofy Ball"

2010-10-24T19:45:00.003-04:00

Hello, blog, my old friend. I've come to talk with you again. Remember when I was unemployed and I posted something every day? Good times.

Anyway, here are some things:

1. I saw Craig Ferguson LIVE! at Carnegie Hall this week! Yes! I don't have a picture because the batteries in my camera were dead. Also, unlike everyone else in the theater, I follow the rules, and they said NO PHOTOGRAPHY. Bunch of savages at Carnegie Hall.

Here's the quick rundown:
His opening act was awful. The guy opened with a joke about pierced labia, then moved on to jokes about Mexicans, gay people, Muslims, suicide bombers, old ladies... I could go on, but you get the picture. In any case, it wasn't funny. Then Craig came out, and he was adorable as usual. He brought the little guy in the leather shorts and the black guy with the saxophone along with him. They did a little dance. Then he moved into his stand-up, which was pretty much exactly what you think it would be. Then the other two guys came back out and they did "Oops I Did It Again." The whole thing was about an hour and a half long. Some people in the front row brought puppets and kept waving them in front of him. It was kind of embarrassing. PUT THE BUNNY RABBIT DOWN. This is Carnegie Hall, for chrissakes. Have some respect. To his credit, Craig did not acknowledge the embarrassing puppet situation. He was very charming and funny and sexy and tall and distinguished and clever and handsome and where was I? Oh yeah. I saw Craig Ferguson in person, and unless I go to Los Angeles sometime soon, I can consider that crossed off my bucket list. The end.

2. I've been listening to Simon & Garfunkel in my car for the past couple weeks. That kind of feels like saying "I've been hiding under the covers and sucking my thumb for the past couple weeks." Know what I mean? I've been listening to the same Greatest Hits CD that my dad always had in heavy rotation in our house while I was growing up, and which I stole from him in high school after he moved out and left all his CDs behind. I spend about two and a half to four hours in my car every day, and to be honest, I usually skip "For Emily, Wherever I May Find Her," "Kathy's Song," "El Condor Pasa," and "Bookends," and I tend to hit repeat a couple times when I'm enjoying a song, and I've had this CD going in my car for approximately two weeks, so if my calculations are correct... yep, I've listened to "Cecilia" roughly seven thousand, six hundred, and thirty three times. And it still makes me think of my dad spackling the bathroom wall after my brothers punched a hole through it. Isn't it weird how these things stick with you? Someone asked me at work the other day how long it takes to get to Michigan and I almost told them that it's four days to hitchhike to Saginaw, but then the guy started fiddling with his bowtie and the man in the gabardine suit started whispering into his cufflinks! So I didn't say anything. Toss me a cigarette - I think there's one in my raincoat. I smoked the last one how many months ago? Well, that's depressing.

3. I have also been watching reruns of NewsRadio on Netflix/Hulu/YouTube, which also kind of feels like confessing that I've been hiding under the covers and sucking my thumb for the past couple weeks. But come on, it was such a funny show. And if my opinion isn't good enough, check out The Onion AV Club's episode by episode analysis of the show from the past few summers (it looks like they're doing a season per summer, and just finished covering season four this August). Their review for the episode "Super Karate Monkey Death Car" actually includes the phrase "like a rococo icing flourish on top of an architecturally sound wedding cake" in describing how well crafted the plot is. That's how serious the comedy nerds are about this show. I don't know if that kind of detailed analysis of comedic technique actually makes the show funnier, but it does make me feel like I'm not the only dork that thinks this show was hilarious. "The Cane." "Goofy Ball." "Complaint Box." "Smoking." I think my favorite was "Stocks." It's just a good show. Leave me alone. DON'T TELL ME HOW TO LIVE MY LIFE.

(Also: http://www.newsradioart.com/)

So that's it for now. I've been in kind of a funk lately. Do I listen to Simon & Garfunkel because I've been feeling down or am I feeling down because I've been listening to too much Simon & Garfunkel? I comfort myself with the thought that people have been asking themselves that same question for fifty years now. I AM A ROCK. I AM AN ISLAND. Also, I don't like to talk about work things on here or really anything that could even remotely identify me to strangers, (which is why I mostly stick to talking about TV and silliness,) but next Wednesday I'm going to Arizona for two weeks with work! Yay! Wish me luck! I'M OFF TO LOOK FOR AMERICA! Well, not right now. Right now I'm going to crawl under the covers with my laptop and my bottle of wine and watch more NewsRadio. YOU CAN'T TELL ME HOW TO LIVE MY LIFE.

"Mad Men are Mad and also Men" or "By 'Mad' just then I meant crazy, and by 'Men' I meant that like, 'Men! Typical!' Know what I mean?"

2010-10-17T23:26:00.000-04:00

Oh my God, Mad Men! Gahh! So romantic and so frustrating and What. The. Hell. But also good for them! Very romantic. But also: What the fuck. Seriously? Seriously. Talk amongst yourselves. I'd like to express my reaction in gif format:

Yup, that pretty much sums up my reaction. And knowing there won't be another episode until next summer makes me feel like this:

2010-10-15T12:51:00.002-04:00

BY THE WAY IF YOU LOVE ME YOU WILL BUY THESE FOR ME

"Best driving songs" or "Where we're going we don't need roads!"

2010-10-14T18:13:00.002-04:00

You know what? This sucks. Nothing I was promised in Back to the Future Part II has materialized, and we're less than five years away from 2015. I always thought that I would be getting a flying car for my 30th birthday (a gift from my husband, Chandler Bing). But no. No hoverboards, no men wearing holographic ties, no books with dust-repellent paper, no self-belting Nikes (although we're close on that one), no pizza rehydrators, and NO FLYING CARS.

And just to rub salt in the wound, I found out this week that the world is taking car technology in the opposite direction: not only will we not be driving flying cars, we're not going to be driving at all! Seriously, Google, way to take all the fun out of everything. Cars are going to be driving themselves so we're free to sit back and Tweet? Fuck that noise. Some of us like sensory experiences. Some of us like to feel a car rumble beneath our feet. Some of us enjoy a little adrenaline rush on the highway first thing in the morning.

If the future is autopiloted cars, then you know what we're going to get? Highways full of Nissan Cubes - mobile livingrooms with plush carpets, fish tanks, and touch screen computers. This will be the end of the muscle car. Speed will be preprogrammed, so what difference would power make? You're not going to be steering, so who cares about the handling? Sport suspension? Sounds nice, but I'll be in the back playing games on my iPad. I read that this technology will probably be commercially available in about eight years, which means that it will probably be ubiquitous in about 20 years, which is just around the time that I'll finally be able to afford a sports car. I will likely never get my Camaro. (Have you seen the new Camaro? My God, you could hump that hood!) Nissan 370-Z, you sure looked sexy on the highway. Hyundai Genesis Coupe, I've heard delicious things about you.

Mitsubishi Evo, I wanted you. Bad. Real bad.

Sigh.

Anyway, for those of you who still take as much pleasure in driving as I do, and would rather drive a flying car than NOT drive a terrestrial car, here is my submission for the ten best driving songs, in no particular order. These are not necessarily the best songs ABOUT driving or ABOUT cars or ABOUT the road. They're just the ones that, for me, just feel really fucking good behind the wheel. The ones that make me press the gas pedal a little more than I should. For your consideration:

1. "The Great Defector" by BellX1. I always develop a serious case of heavy foot whenever the chorus starts up. Also I love the line "You're the chocolate at the end of my cornetto." I don't know what it means, though. Probably something filthy.

2. "Born to Run" by Bruce Springsteen. Especially tasty while driving on the Garden State Parkway.

3. London Calling by the Clash (the whole album). I got my first speeding ticket listening to this album (my third one, too). Ironically I was on my way to a church youth group thing. I was so enjoying the drive that I went right past the church and got pulled over doing 55 in a 35. Praise Jeebus!

4. "Authority Song" by John Mellencamp. It just is. Don't question it.

5. "A Sort of Homecoming" by U2. I listened to this on a bus trip up to Quebec in high school, and it will always sound like that drive to me. It was overcast that day and the trees hadn't quite regained their leaves, and this song hit the perfect note for the ride, watching the Adirondacks pass by. "The earth moves beneath your own dream landscape..." If you asked me what passing through a bleak landscape sounds like, I'd say the rhythm section on this song. I mean that in a good way in case that's not clear. This is more of the romantic side of driving than the previous items.

6. "I'm So Free" by Lou Reed. Because driving is freedom.

7. "Rental Car" by Beck. Because... duh. "Far as a rental car can go." Also, depending on how limber my tongue is on a given day I can totally sing the "la la la la la" part right along with the song. Yes.

8. "Darts of Pleasure" by Franz Ferdinand. Perfect tempo. And what goes better with fine German engineering (cough) than screaming "Ich heisse super fantastische!" at those you leave in your dust?

9. "Roam" by The B-52s. You're insulting my intelligence by asking me to explain this. If we were going by lyrics/thematic elements alone, this would be number one. But that's not what we're going by, so it's not. And we're not ranking anyway.

10. "In a Big Country" by Big Country. Majestic. Fun. Soulful. Upbeat. Downbeat. Perfect.

Special mentions: "Holiday Road" by Lindsey Buckingham, "Lust for Life" by Iggy Pop, "Sheena is a Punk Rocker" by the Ramones (or "Rockaway Beach" or really any Ramones because all their songs sound the same) and all the others I'm forgetting.

"Why feminism matters: the little things" or "Choosing how you spend your money"

2010-10-09T17:33:00.003-04:00

Gather round, children. Story time.

My grandparents (my mom's parents) traveled extensively throughout their lives. They took two big trips every year, and they went all over the world (except for Germany and Japan; my grandfather was a WWII vet and he refused to give them any of his money). I always thought that was very cool, and I especially thought it was cool after I got older and put it together that they were two public elementary school teachers who took two big (often international) trips per year. Impressive, no? I guess the cost of living was lower then.

Anyway, my grandmother was up here visiting from Florida this week, and my mom relayed a story to me. While I was at work doing work things, they were visiting with another relative, who was gushing to my Nana that she always thought it was so great how they had traveled so much while my Poppa was alive. My Nana responded by confiding (and obviously I'm paraphrasing) that every year, when he would start planning their trips, she would tell him that this year she would rather spend the money on a washer and a dryer, because she hated going to the laundromat. He would say no. He'd say, "Which is more important: doing laundry or seeing the world?" and, knowing Nana, she would probably just sigh and go make sure she had enough quarters for the laundromat. She never got her washer and dryer. Eventually they retired and moved out of their house and into a series of apartments, none of which had in-unit washer/dryers. The pre-fab mobile home she lives in now has a washer and a dryer, but she just moved there a few years ago, long after Poppa died. My mom told me this story and said, "That made me so sad, that he wouldn't let her have that. I remember her going to the laundromat and she always hated it. I had no idea that he wouldn't buy it for her. I mean, what the hell? She worked her whole life, didn't she deserve that?"

Now, I can't fault Poppa too much, since, at this very moment, I'm putting off medical issues and car repairs in preparation for my big two week trip I'm taking in November, so, you know where my priorities are. He died when I was about 8 or 9, so I don't remember a lot about him. I loved him very much and he was very cuddly and there are plenty of pictures of him and me when I was little and he has a big grin on his face, and my mom always told me that he loved me very much and I was his favorite. But still this story makes me sad.

It was upsetting first because the story came up in the context of me and my mom talking about how sad we are for Nana for other, more personal reasons that I won't share here. But after mulling this story over all day, it's also because they were both teachers. They were both making money, and he couldn't have been making that much more money than she was. I know that he made more money for two simple reasons: 1) He taught fourth grade while she taught second, and it's well known that the younger the students the less the teachers get paid, and 2) because he was a man and she was a woman, and this was the '50s-'80s. But still, they were both public elementary school teachers in Nassau County, Long Island. The pay difference couldn't have been that much, but no matter who made what, clearly it was all still his money and it was spent at his discretion. Even though she was also working full time in nearly the same position, she didn't have even as much money as a washer and dryer would have cost at her disposal. The money was not hers to spend.

The other reason this annoys me is that, even though, like I said, I don't remember much about Poppa, one of the things I do know about him was that he was a neat freak. My dad has told me more than once that every Wednesday, for his whole life, NO MATTER WHAT, Poppa cleaned the house. The whole house. Top to bottom. No exceptions. HE CLEANED ALL THE THINGS (in the internet parlance of our times). The other story I associate with him: when he was dying of cancer in the hospital, a nurse came in and told Nana that she was going to take his teeth out. Nana said, "What!? Why!?" The nurse said, "To make him more comfortable." Nana said, "What!? Why!?" It went back and forth like that a while until someone put it together that the nurse assumed he was wearing dentures, since his teeth were in such good shape. He was a flosser. Hygiene and cleanliness were priorities for him. Clean clothes had to be a priority for him. But making Nana's chores easier was not.

So for forty or fifty years, my Nana quietly pined for a washer and dryer of her own, so she wouldn't have to lug Poppa's, my mom's, my uncle's, and her crap back and forth to the laundromat twice a week. My mom said to me, "If she didn't have one now I'd go out and buy one for her this minute. That broke my heart." It broke mine, too. I sort of understand why every time I see her now she does my laundry, even when I explicitly ask her not to. I say, "Nana, please don't touch my laundry. I don't want you handling my underwear." But still I come home from work and my panties are washed and dried and folded. And now every time I see one of those vintage, Mad Men-esque ads for washers and dryers, I'm going to think of how many of those Poppa saw over those forty or fifty years, and how many times Nana asked him for one and he said no. Or how many times Nana saw those in the magazines she read at the laundromat while he was booking tours of Belgium.

Choosing how you spend your own money. It's the little things.

"Unlikely Style Icons" or "This is an unwelcome realization in my life"

2010-10-06T19:32:00.000-04:00

Today I wore a version of the outfit I wear pretty often, if not most of the time: shirt, sweater/cardigan, skirt/dress, opaque tights, flats.

Why do I bring this up today of all days? Because today I looked in the mirror and realized that I basically dress like a bigger, bustier, Walmart version of Kathleen Kelly, the proprietor of The Shop Around the Corner, as portrayed by Meg Ryan in the movie You've Got Mail. The only difference is that she favors beige tones and high collars whereas I prefer low cut tops in red, green, and purple hues.

WHAT THE FUCK. WHAT DOES THIS MEAN? Have I actually been a cutesy, nostalgic school marm type this whole time without even knowing it? Am I destined to start dating a foppish pseudo-intellectual nerd writer in tortoiseshell glasses who opines about typewriters only to subsequently be conquered and then wooed by a bigger, corporate version of myself? I DON'T WANT THAT!

"Things I Like: Beer Commercial Edition" or "The Least Interesting Blog In The World"

2010-10-05T18:46:00.000-04:00

In case you thought I was done liking things, here are a few more things I like:

Dos Equis' Most Interesting Man In The World commercials.

Bud Light's Real Men of Genius radio ads.

...I'm easily amused, I guess.

"Thing I Like: Craig Ferguson" or "Thing I Love: The Scottish Conan Guy"

2010-10-04T13:50:00.007-04:00

In my house, we record The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson every night. I love him. My brother and I were watching his show the other day and we started talking about why he's so great. I told you, we really love him around these parts. Here's some of what we came up with (with a few of my own):

1. When the show opens, he's already out there and the audience is already laughing. He also interacts with the audience and brings them on camera pretty often. It's almost like he's already in the middle of the show when the show starts.

2. The more bootleg the show is, the better it is. If he got, like, a band and a fancy studio, the show would not be nearly as good. My brother likened it to Wayne's World, but without Garth. Just some guy in a basement somewhere. Leave it to CNN to do a whole segment on how busted Craig's show is:

3. He's funnier off the cuff than when he's working from pre-written material (which he rarely does anyway). Like this bit he did on Friday when someone clapped once at Australia: (I thought I had this set to skip straight to that bit, but apparently not. 5:45 ish.)

4. He's funny without being mean.

5. He's very smart, and is just as likely to make jokes about Gustave Flaubert as he is about Snooki. By the way, this is Gustave Flaubert:

According to Craig, he is so named because he has contempt for the bourgeoisie. (Excuse me: ze bougeoisie.)

6. His autobiography is great and you should read it. I suppose that it's naive of me to believe that he actually wrote it, but he wrote a novel a few years ago of his own volition, so why would he have his autobiography ghostwritten? Or why would an obscure late night host have an obscure novel ghostwritten for him? I guess the world may never know. Obscure is a weird word; I never noticed that before. Obscure. Obscure.

7. And um... other things. He's just the best. The end.

Oh, I guess you could get serious and talk about how he's deconstructing the talk show to its bare bones and commenting on the sad state of the format, what with the awkward pauses to show how fake the rapport is between guest and host and the robot skeleton sidekick to show how phony the "sidekick" thing is and the way he doesn't button his shirt all the way and occasionally wears sneakers or a t-shirt instead and the times he's been like "Why am I at a desk? Are we pretending this is my office? What's the point of this?" or that time he interviewed Stephen Fry with no audience and things like that, but come on, it's not that serious. Shut up.

Things I like!

"Things I Like: Now Animated!" or "Moving pictures move make laugh ha ha"

2010-10-03T13:33:00.002-04:00

Another thing I like: animated gifs! Disclaimer: I did not make any of these, and I don't know how to make one even if I wanted to. I just save them whenever I come across them, and I've been doing that for a few years now, so they've accumulated. A very small selection:

"Crystal Bowl Meditations" or "Would you like a crayon, Foofy?"

2010-09-30T21:49:00.003-04:00

I spent most of my night last night laying on the floor listening to crystal bowls. I know what you're thinking: "I thought you were sitting on the couch writing about how much you like Bill Bryson! That stuff has to be live! There's no way to write things at one time and program them to post at another time, even days later! Impossible!" But yes, it's true. I was actually at a chakra workshop and crystal bowl meditation. Because that's how I roll.

The class was at the yoga studio by me, and I mainly went because I'm in love with the teacher - she's so cute! Her name is Audrey and she calls everyone "foofy" and the first class I had with her she grabbed my hips and pulled them towards her and ahhh it was a special moment. I love her.

So anyway, the chakra seminar. It was pretty good. We did like an hour and a half of opening up the chakra moves, which were nice, but, like, as much as I love Audrey, I really don't feel like we loosen up enough with her. I always feel really stiff, like I need to stretch before we start stretching. But anyway, then the second half of the class she played her crystal bowls (she's such a hippie, she's so cute) for chakra meditation, and that was pretty cool, except I think I'm, like, totally incapable of meditating. I mean, it felt really good, but then at the end Audrey was like, so does anyone have any experiences they'd like to share? Did anyone feel any colors or symbols? And I was thinking like, no, I kept thinking about the menfolk and whether or not I'll have time to do laundry when I get home and wondering if the guy from the Mirage will give me the rate he promised and how that pose earlier was like giving birth, and wondering what that would (will?) feel like and thinking how amazing a post-yoga boot-knockin' would feel if I had someone to knock boots with and hoping my purse was safe out in the cubbies because my laptop is in there and I definitely did not see colors! BUT I did feel my chakras tingling as the bowls' vibrations moved from one chakra to the next and then at the end, at the crown chakra, my whole head was buzzing. It felt fucking amazing. So maybe I'm not completely spiritually vacant even though I don't know how to meditate. And then! And this is how cute Audrey is - she says "And I brought crayons and paper in case anyone wants to express this experience artistically!"

And that was how I spent my night last night.

PS: I'm labeling this post "religion" because whenever I leave I always think that it kind of feels like leaving mass, what with Audrey's little "go in peace" schtick, and also her "om shanti shanti" at the end of class always makes me think like "the spirit and power are yours Almighty Father forever and eeeeevveeeeerrrrrrrr....."

AAAAAAAMMMMEEEEEEEENNNNN

Namaste

"Greg Giraldo"

2010-09-29T23:51:00.000-04:00

While I was off blissed out on crystal bowl meditations (more on that later), Greg Giraldo died. I'm very sad about this. He was a funny and intelligent performer and it was always a treat when he showed up on my television. He will be missed. Rest in peace.

"Even More Things I Like" or "You like even more things? Yes, I like many things!"

2010-09-29T21:15:00.001-04:00

Thing I Like: Bill Bryson! Have you read any Bill Bryson books? You should! He's pretty much the greatest ever and I desperately want to be him when I grow up. In a Sunburned Country is my favorite. It will cause serious LOLs. And it's educational! Yes. You. Go. Read. Now. Yes. Yay!

New Thing I Think I Like But Am Still Not 100% Sure About: Goodreads! Are you on Goodreads? If so, be my friend. Because I have no friends on Goodreads. I'm still not even sure what the purpose of this site is. I think it's like the ratings part of Netflix without the borrowing part of Netflix, but for books. So I just sit at work and rate books I've read. It's hard to remember books you've read, isn't it? But we can be friends! Be my friend!

Something Unrelated To The Above In Every Way Except That I Also Like It: Keri Russell. I luurrrve her. She's so pretty and I like her voice and I love her from "The Mickey Mouse Club" to Honey I Blew Up The Kid (which I was weirdly obsessed with as a kid - probably because she was so pretty... also Rick Moranis) to "Felicity" to Waitress (oh my god that movie's so good I'm crying now just thinking about it) to other things and now she's in some TV show with Will Arnett tangentially related to Arrested Development. I haven't seen the show, but it still counts. I love her. I love you, Keri Russell!

And those are three more things I like.

"More Things I Like" or "Yay for things!"

2010-09-28T21:27:00.001-04:00

Continuing with Things I Like Week, here are some more things I like:

Purple nail polish.

"Waterloo"

Also, I watched Betty White on Inside the Actor's Studio tonight while I made my lunch for tomorrow and, you guys, I got a little choked up. I did! When she was talking about losing the other Golden Girls and seeing Rue McClanahan on this year's Emmy Awards In Memorium and she got misty I totally got misty, too. And then when he asked her what she would like God to say when she got to heaven she said she wanted him to say that her husband was waiting for her... that did me in. Oh, but we have the same favorite curse word: son of a bitch. Yes it's four words but I don't care.

So there are three more things I like.

"Sarah Haskins" or "Things I Like!"

2010-09-27T19:35:00.002-04:00

I was watching the old Sarah Haskins "Target Women" segments today and I was LOLing - I think the "Doofy Husbands" one was my favorite:

And I was thinking, wow, I feel like I only ever post about things that I'm mad at! That's so negative of me! I only post bad reviews of things. I should really make more of an effort to share things that I like. So, with that in mind, I'm going to inaugurate the "things I like" tag, and I'm going to go back and add it to posts I wrote previously about things I like. Although, now that I'm looking at my tag list, most of them are things I like: Russell Crowe, Top Chef, Arrested Development, Back to the Future, food, True Blood, sketch comedy, travel... so maybe it's just lately I haven't been liking anything. In any case, let's all try to be positive and think about things that we do like instead of dwelling on disappointments.

The power of positivity!

And hey! Here's another thing I like! Bonus round! I like Seth MacFarlane. And Family Guy. I also like his twitter. I know that many feminists consider him Public Enemy #1 because of his propensity for rapey humor, but I don't care. He makes me laugh very much so. I may start a Twitter account next week, although I haven't decided yet. We'll see.

"Robin Hood" or "Russell Crowe Update"

2010-09-26T23:58:00.001-04:00

I feel obligated to let you all know that this weekend I watched Robin Hood. Well, okay... I watched the first ten minutes, then bits and pieces of the next 45 minutes, then turned it off before it was over. It was not very good. This was a historical action drama Russell Crowe movie. And Robin Hood was my favorite Disney movie when I was little! It was practically titled "Obligatory Russell Crowe Movie for Joanna Because She Loves This Shit," and still I didn't like it. That's bad. I will say, though, that the opening battle scene was pretty badass. And boyfriend's looking old, but I still would. Is it weird that I kind of like him better as he gets older? Yes, I guess that's a little weird. It's really not fair that men get better looking as they get older and women do not. Well, men get better looking up until the tipping point where they suddenly start sprouting hair from their ears and they become drooling mouth breathers who wear beige socks under their Teva sandals. The point is that Russell Crowe has not hit that tipping point yet. Let's all just hope that we get at least one more good movie out of him before he does. Oodelally!

2010-09-26T21:16:00.000-04:00

I went to the Outback tonight, and I got the pork tenderloin with mashed potatoes and green beans. It was okay; I didn't really like the sauce. But anyway, it reminded me that I used to make a pretty bangin' pork tenderloin back in the day. That shit was for real, as my brother would say. Oh, man, I'm remembering it now - I'd marinate it with this tangy sweet marinade and grill it and it would get all deliciously grilled on the outside and juicy on the inside and ooohhhhh man, it was delicious. Shit was for real. It just made me think about how much I miss cooking. I hope that someday I will have people to cook for and enough money to buy decent cuts of meat and fresh vegetables. That's all.

"Dan Savage on Gay Adoption" or "I think this falls under 'and shiz.'"

2010-09-23T22:45:00.003-04:00

I've always liked Dan Savage, and yes I do read Savage Love regularly (if you're new, try last week's, September 16). I think that even if I didn't agree with him, I'd still like his style. Straightforward, calm, logical, and likes to use the word "fuck." My kind of guy.

Oh, except that, if I remember correctly from Social Evolution with Professor Trivers, the theory that gays and lesbians evolved to help raise others' children has been debunked.

“Confessions of a Binge Reader” or “Fuck you, Sookie Stackhouse. And fuck you twice, Eric Northman.”

2010-09-22T14:45:00.002-04:00

I finished the tenth Sookie Stackhouse novel today. I am officially up-to-date until the next installment is published.

Just to remind you, last Monday I mentioned that I was in the midst of book three. Tuesday I said that I was finishing up book four. Now today, Wednesday morning the following week, I have finished the tenth and most recent book. What the fuck is wrong with me? I feel like I just ate an entire package of Oreos in one sitting.

I've been plowing through these at a rate of nearly one per day. Over the weekend I read the sixth, seventh, and half of the eighth book, and do you know what the most pathetic part of that is? It's not even like that's all I did this weekend. I worked out, I spent time with my brothers, I cooked a fair amount, I caught up on Craig Ferguson, I went out for breakfast, hell, I didn't even start reading until mid-afternoon on Saturday, and yet when I turned out the lights on Sunday night I'd put two and a half of these things behind me.

I don't even think I enjoyed them. I mean, of course I did; I devoured eight of them in the past week. I feel like I fell into a Sookie Stackhouse vortex. I feel like this. And just to give you a sample of the kind of weird pull these books have had on me, let me tell you about how I came to pull up that cartoon: I sent it a few months ago to my friend Alex when we had been talking about Twilight. I signed into Gmail, and in order to find the email, I typed Alex's name in the search bar. I typed E-R-I-C and pushed enter. And then nothing came up, of course, because I don't know anyone named Eric. And then I sat here and stared at the computer for a good fifteen seconds trying to figure out why it couldn't find Alex's name. And then I made a face somewhat like this:

Okay, now I feel I need to make an explanation for why I'm acting like such a snob and saying they're so dumb while I clearly ate them up. (Spoilers ensue, so be warned.) I'm not going to say anything about the writing style. I've said enough about that and I'm tired of being such a jealous bitch. Charlaine Harris is very successful and writing is hard and I wish her well. And my writing has fallen down the tubes in the last couple of months, so I feel no sense of superiority about that. So we'll skip that nonsense. Leaving that aside, there are two reasons why I'm not jumping up and down and screaming about how much I loved them.

The first reason is that, despite what you may think, I'm really not a sci-fi/fantasy fan. So much of the books had to do with supernatural politics and were-battles and fairy wars: the kind of stuff that really doesn't interest me or hold my attention. I read through it because it was there and I felt compelled and I wanted to at least make some kind of an attempt to keep all the side characters straight. There were still a few characters I wasn't sure on, but most of them are dead now, so who cares, right? But there were entire sections that I read through and at the end caused me to think, “Wait, what just happened? Do I care enough to go over it again? No, probably not.” Harris is very good about slipping in big obvious reminders to the reader about what had already happened (even in the tenth book, she still had Sookie saying, “Bill was the first vampire I ever met, and we dated a while, but that didn't end well!”) so if something was important, I knew she'd lay it out for me three or four times.

The second reason why I'm more annoyed about these books than happy about them is this, and this is really the crux of the matter: the books are like a tantric exercise in delayed gratification. All I wanted was to find out what happened between Eric and Sookie, and their story is thinly stretched out over TEN BOOKS, and still, at the end of the tenth book, I still felt like I was waiting for their story to climax. Not that they didn't climax. Oh, no, they climaxed all over the damned place. They exchanged a blood bond, they got fucking vampire married, they fucked each other all over Louisiana, and still at the end it was like, “Well, Sookie? Are you going to MAKE A GOD DAMN DECISION YET? Are you and Eric in lurrrve or not?” She was still like, “I don't know how I feel, Eric, you're my boyfriend... I guess...” and he was like, “Um, no, Sookie, I'm your 1000 year old vampire husband. Don't call me a boy.” And Sookie was all, “Well, we can talk about this later.” Later? LATER? I need closure! Graahhhh!!!! So after all that, I still feel like I haven't been satisfied, and it pisses me off.

And the flip side of this is that I don't even like the Eric in the books! Eric is such a good villain on True Blood, or at least he was in Season Two. Ruthless and charming and evil and sardonic and kind of funny; the kind of guy who will torture you in a dungeon for weeks and yet you'll still have sex dreams about him when he finally releases you. Right, Lafayette?

Then in the last two or three books, you had Eric crooning over Sookie, saying, “Come here, my lover,” and being all sappy and lovey-dovey... that shit ain't right. I was kind of cringing at a lot of it. A vampire shouldn't be all sweetness and light like that, especially not one you've come to love for his evil side.

And yet, he has completely taken over my brain for the last week or two.

And now I'm sad that I don't have any more of them to read.

I feel like I've been glamored.

On a side note, and completely coincidentally, I've been listening to The Gaslight Anthem's album American Slang almost nonstop in my car for the past two weeks, so now the album will forever make me think of Eric Northman. It's a total non sequitur, though, because there's nothing vampiric or supernatural or even Southern about it; in fact, it's a very very Jersey album. The Gaslight Anthem is from New Brunswick, NJ, and they even sound Jersey. They basically sound like Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band... if Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band came out of the New Brunswick punk scene. And of course, since they're from Jersey, nearly every one of their songs is about New York City. Typical Jersey stuff. Except now it makes me think of the Sheriff of Louisiana's Area Five. Sigh. Let's have that gif again.

"A quick addendum to yesterday's rant about True Blood" or "Spoilers? Maybe? Who cares?"

2010-09-14T22:36:00.002-04:00

I really need to go to sleep, but I just wanted to say that I take back what I said about the sex scenes in the Sookie Stackhouse novels being less than sexy.

Book Four, Dead to the World. Chapter Six.

Oh my.

I could barely hold it together while reading at work. I think my face must have looked something like this: <:-O !!! Except giddier. But what was I going to do? Turn around in my office and shout to my coworker, "Hey, Jennifer! Eric just fingered Sookie in the shower!" And what was she going to do? Shout back? "Wait til you see what happens when they get out of the shower! He bites her boob and sucks her blood and her nipple at the same time!" Of course not. Especially since Jennifer doesn't read the books or watch the show and she would have no idea what I was talking about. Also she was reading Harry Potter on her computer, so I didn't want to interrupt her. (I'm a bad influence.)

And yet, even when it's hot, it's still SO CHEESY. Allow me to excerpt that section:

It all took longer than I thought, and by the time I had finished with the tale, Eric's hands were busy again. He latched onto one breast with his fangs extended, drawing a little blood and a sharp gasp from me, and he sucked powerfully. It was a strange sensation, because he was getting the blood and my nipple. Painful and very exciting—I felt like he was drawing the fluid from much lower. I gasped and jerked in arousal, and suddenly he raised my leg so he could enter me. It wasn't such a shock this time, and it was slower. Eric wanted me to be looking into his eyes; that obviously flicked his Bic.

"That obviously flicked his Bic!?!" I don't even know what to say. And just to prove that this is not a fluke of Charlaine Harris's otherwise stellar writing, let me just tell you that I had trouble deciding whether to share that bit with you or this one:

I stroked Eric's hair, tucking some behind his ear. His eyes on mine were intent, and I knew he was waiting for me to speak. "I wish," I said, "I could save orgasms in a jar for when I need them, because I think I had a few extra."

It's called masturbation, Sookie! To be fair, that was followed with Eric laughing hysterically at her.

Oh! And also! The girl next to me at yoga tonight was wearing the Bon Temps football t-shirt I referenced here. She hated the season finale, too. I liked her. She was a major improvement over the lady next to me last week, who kept farting.

Okay, good night, imaginary friends!

"Cranky" or "True Blood shit, so, you know, SPOILERS, I guess"

2010-09-13T18:37:00.003-04:00

Blogging at you LIVE! from the library!

I've stopped at the county library on my way home from work this evening because it's pouring rain and I knew the traffic would be nightmarish. I figured I could find a copy of the third Sookie Stackhouse novel, which I'd been reading on an illegally acquired PDF file at work, and finish it while I wait for the rain to subside. This plan has failed on nearly all accounts. To begin with, they don't have Club Dead in their inventory. Not that it's checked out; they don't have it at all. They have some of the others, but those ones actually are checked out. So I sat down at one of the public computers, where I am right now, to read it from my flash drive as I've been doing all day at work. Which is fine, I guess. My eyes will recover eventually. Three whole minutes after I sat down at the computer, an old man sat down next to me who insists on breathing, nay WHEEZING, excessively loudly. I want to tell him to shut the fuck up and stop breathing so damn much, but I don't think that's within the library's code of conduct. And I don't know why I even care about finishing this stupid book; I should just find their copy of Backlash, the next book on my list, and save that Stackhouse trash for lulls at work.

Oh, wait, I remember why I want to read the Stackhouse trash! Because this season of True Blood was such shit that I don't care about spoiling it anymore! Not that I haven't been watching it faithfully; I mean, I am fully aboard the Eric Northman bandwagon and I still do enjoy the show. Mostly. Unfortunately, the plots this season have been completely dumb, and in the end they amounted to nothing. The season's over and I don't think one plotline was resolved, and they were all so blah that I don't even care. They've also ruined all my favorite characters. Tara spent the entire season whining and quivering her lip. (She started out ballsy and hilarious, remember that?) Sookie vacillates between being a whiny creampuff sniveling over Bill and a nasty bitch who cackles while sending vampire entrails through a garbage disposal. Jason's not funny at all anymore and WTF hillbilly werepanthers? That's a storyline I can't wait to die. Bill's always been fairly useless, so no big loss there. And, just to rub salt in the wound, they gave my scruffy, hardworking, nice guy Sam a mudering grifter backstory. Scruffy hardworking nice guys are rarer than vampires. This just proves it. As far as I'm concerned, HBO can just chuck the whole show and turn it into the Eric and Pam Happy Hour featuring Jesus and LaLa, with occasional interludes of Hoyt and Jessica sexytimes, because that shit is hot. Or it could be Eric and Lafayette selling V and solving mysteries all over Louisiana with occasional interludes of Hoyt and Jessica sexytimes. Or maybe they could solve the mysteries by having Hoyt and Jessica make sexytimes at the problem! "Hooker, we got a murder up in here. Hoyt! Jessica! Fuck each other in the direction of the body and maybe we'll find a clue." Don't tell me that's dumber than an orgy-inciting demi-goddess who wanders the woods with a giant shapeshifting pig.

Oh, good. The wheezer has left. (In case you're wondering, the monitors are set in the desks so neighbors can't see the screen.) And I don't hear the rain anymore, so with that, I think I'm going to hit the road again.

Previously about True Blood here and here.

Edited to add:

My big prediction for the season was that Jessica was going to turn Hoyt against the wishes and advice of all the older vampires around her because he has nothing left for him in his human life, and then he was going to suck at being a vampire because he's too nice and something would cause him to breakup with Jessica, and then because he lost everything in his human life, became a vamp, and then lost Jessica, and was facing an eternity of misery, he was going to go on a crazy vampire rampage and kill a lot of people and then in the end someone would have to stake Hoyt and put him out of his misery.

I'm now officially pushing this prediction to next season. FYI.

"The Switch" or "About A Boy: minus Hugh Grant, plus sperm"

2010-09-04T21:41:00.002-04:00

I didn't feel like sitting home feeling poor, like I usually do, and I had a prepaid movie ticket floating around the bottom of my purse, so I went to see The Switch. (Spoilers, as if you can't guess what those spoilers are. If you can't guess what the spoilers are, you don't watch enough romantic comedies.)

I kind of loved it. I also kind of found it super disappointing. Let's break it down, shall we?

Good things:

I love Jason Bateman, and he was perfect, as usual, and he can hijack my pregnancy any time he likes. His bonding with the little boy was done well and it really tugged at my heartstrings. I definitely want to be a father some day. I'm such a sucker for father/son stuff. Probably because my brothers and my dad get along so well and I don't really get along with my brothers or my dad, but that's another story for another day.
The kid was very cute, and his face was about 60% big brown eyes. Apparently no one in casting thought it was weird that all three of his potential parents had blue eyes. I'm reaching for a joke about Gregor Mendel leaving the monastery to become a casting agent but I can't quite put it together. I probably wouldn't have noticed it, but that kid was seriously all eyes! He was a cutie.
I loved the tone of the movie. The movie is told from the point of view of Bateman's character, Wally, who is cynical, sarcastic, kind of depressed, and sort of a loner, and that aura really permeated the film. I don't suppose sarcastic, cynical, depressed, and lonely is the kind of tone you want to set for a romantic comedy, but it felt right. It was just dark enough and just light enough. They could have gone full tilt and made it a dark comedy, but they stopped just short.
Jeff Goldblum. Always.
It's based on a short story by Jeffrey Eugenides. I have not read the short story, but I have read some of his other works, including Middlesex, which I read straight through, closed, opened, and read straight through again, and then I sank into a two week long depression because what in God's name was the point of going on because it was basically the book that I always wanted to write but didn't know how and even if I had he did it a hundred times better than I ever could and so what was the point of my life!?! I still feel that way sometimes.

Not so good things:

The movie was supposed to span over seven years. Someone please tell Jennifer Aniston that her character is allowed to age, because they didn't age her at all. In fact I don't think she's allowed herself to publicly age since the 7th season of Friends. At one point she had the front part of her hair pinned right above her eye in a way that was so Rachel it was distracting. Otherwise I like her, though.
Okay, and here's my big gripe with the movie: Way too much of the plot was devoted to whether or not Wally was going to tell Cassie that he was the baby's real father. Most of the final third of the movie was playing the will-he-or-won't-he card. It was a complete waste of time. Of course he's going to tell her. He has to tell her. The real suspense was wondering how she would react. Would she be happy? Would she be angry? Would she sue him and the movie would turn into a courtroom drama? Would she be relieved that she was no longer doomed to spend the rest of her life in the Upper Peninsula with the gay Mormon from Angels in America? What would the kid's reaction be? Would he be upset? Thrilled? Confused? We didn't get any of that. We got forty minutes of Wally chickening out of telling her, and then in the last five minutes, he tells her, she slaps him and tells him to get out, flash forward a couple months, she shows up and tells him she loves him and they get married and move to Jersey as one big happy family. We don't get any of what was going on within her, any of her reaction except standard romcom bullshit. It all gets wrapped up super fast. The screenwriters completely missed the mark of what the drama actually was. The movie should have had him tell her midway through the movie and then dealt with the fallout, because the fallout was the drama. They skipped the drama. They pretty much lost me after the second time he chickened out of telling her.

All in all, I will definitely watch this on TBS in five years.

Also, I loved that Bateman's character's defining trait was cowardliness and that his name was Wally, because when my brothers were little, my dad used to read them a picture book about a raccoon named Wally who was always too afraid to try things, and for years whenever my brothers were whining and complaining and didn't want to try something new, my dad would say, "Don't be such a Wally." And that is exactly what this Wally was like. Perfect.

Top Chef Recap: Season 7 Episode 11

2010-08-26T21:32:00.030-04:00

I forgot to do a Top Chef post last week. I don't know why I bother giving myself assignments. I never complete them. Anyway, what did we miss? Last week they did a CIA themed challenge and Ed told us that his spy name is Muffin Winthrop. That is an awesome alias. I had been using Duchess von Cashdollar as my go-to nom de guerre, but I think I may have to start using Muffin Winthrop. What do you think? Which suits me more: Duchess von Cashdollar or Muffin Winthrop? I'm leaning towards Muffin Winthrop, to be honest. Oh, and Alex was sent home, but not before we found out that before he was a chef he was a wedding videographer. And by wedding videographer, he meant amateur porn director. Moving on...

This week's episode was all about the ladies:

Lady #1: Muffin Winthrop

Muffin Winthrop looks great in yellow, doesn't she?

She even made her dish to match. "I want to do these shrimp and corn poppers. I decided each customer will equal three pieces. If you do the math, with a hundred and fifty people, I've got to make five hundred and fifty of these things in an hour." Girls can't do math! Oh, Muffin!

This frame of Muffin and Tiffany is only notable for this little bit of conversation that took place: "More pickle?" "That's what she said." "Pork! Pork in the window!"

In the end, Muffin won for her corn fritters. Doesn't she look happy? I hope she enjoyed the moment, because she is surely not happy today. Muffin's real life restaurant, Plein Sud, was eviscerated in the New York Times. The review contains the sentence:

"...the cooking at Plein Sud reveals itself to be lacking in flavor, texture, temperature or interest: room-service fare that leads to increased loneliness, raiding of the minibar, sleepless hours staring at the television in blue light, thinking about home."

Ouch.

Lady #2: Kelly

Kelly went missing in the middle of the episode, so the producers drove over to a mall parking lot to find a look alike to fill in the gap in narration. This lady almost looks like Kelly, doesn't she? For reference, here's what Kelly looks like normally (five minutes later in the show):

Reality TV! They wouldn't fudge any timelines, would they? Nooo!

Lady #3: The Future Mrs. Angelo

Here we see Angelo talking on the phone to his fiance in Russia. This is a completely normal way to make a phone call. We also learned this episode that he has only met his future bride "a couple times" and "when" he wins he's going to ship her to New York. If he does not win, she gets shipped in a crate to Siberia. I'm not saying she's a mail order bride.

Also, like Kelly, there is something weird going on with Angelo's hair. Why is it swept to the side like that? Oh, and PS: the word on the street is that Angelo's restaurant Xie Xie is currently undergoing renovations. Let's all hope that does not mean he won Top Chef.

Lady #4: Queen Eric Ripert

How out of place does she look? How dare they ask Eric Ripert to mingle with commoners at a baseball game? They really should have brought Bourdain in for this episode.

Lady #5: Amanda

Oh, Amanda. How I'll miss her! She was eliminated this episode, so let's all take a moment to appreciate the spastic joy she brought Top Chef. That's her running across the screen in the background asking for paper towels. Because that's how she spent most of every episode: running around screaming about something and asking for salt, pepper mills, paper towels, vodka, shoes, a spare tire, anything that would enhance her terrible/brilliant/terrible ideas for dishes.

This is a woman who thinks a pork chop is a side dish, let's not forget. (That does look delicious, though.)

Full of brilliant ideas, this one! "I'm going to run my tuna through a meat grinder the day before I serve it to Eric Ripert and let it get gray from sitting out for 24 hours! How can this possibly go wrong?"

"Day old tuna tartare with fennel, lemon, and fava beans are exactly what everyone wants to eat at a baseball game! Duh! What are you doing, Tiffany? Italian meatball subs? Who would want to eat that?"

Aww, I really will miss Amanda. I liked her quirky energy and her terrible ideas and her confidence and her overly expressive face. Fare thee well, Amanda! And, in parting, here is a collection of some of Amanda's facial expressions:

"The Bounty Hunter" or "How I knew in the first three minutes that this movie was going to suck donkey balls"

2010-08-21T20:57:00.000-04:00

At 1:10, Jennifer Aniston punched Gerard Butler in the nads.

"He is cute, though," I thought, "It can't be that bad. And I liked Nim's Island."

And then he opened his mouth and this accent came out:

"Ey yoo, ya deeng dong! Comm eer!"

Oof.

And then, at 2:35, he got punched in the nads again

And then, at 2:36, Gerard Butler punched the other guy in the nads. For retaliation, natch.

And then at 2:42, as the second guy was writing in pain on the ground, some other background guy kicked him in the nads. See, that's him in the khakis on Butler's left, and the other guy is on the ground between Butler and turquoise pants. This one is a little more subtle. If you consider kicking a guy in the nads for no reason when he's down subtle.

So there you have it. The first three minutes of The Bounty Hunter. You're on your own for the other 107.

"About Me" or "Beat that, sucka!"

2010-08-21T17:32:00.002-04:00

Two things about me:

First of all, I'd like you all to take a look at the lunch I brought to work this week:

Isn't it adorable!? Don't you wish I packed your lunch for work? I also wrote myself a note:

Have a good day at work, honey!

I love you!

:) <3

No, I didn't really. But I should have! And yes that is my lunchroom at work. Fortunately I had the place to myself otherwise I would never have photographed my lunch. I don't need to be that coworker.

And the second reason I"m proud of myself today:

Can you tell what that is? Okay: I balanced my remote keyboard and mouse on a plank of wood across the handles on my treadmill and hooked up the TV as the screen. I"m walking while I write this post! Suck on that! Compu-treadmill! Except I've already knocked the keyboard off the plank of wood once while writing this, sending the batteries flying out the back of it and me nearly clonking my head on the 2x4. But that's okay! I"ll get the hang of it! I feel like a fucking genius. Except I was really looking for a table leaf to perform this task as it would be a wider surface to support the keyboard but I couldn't find one. The 2x4 will have to do for now. Still, I am a fucking genius.

Okay, ta-ta for now!

"Happy Anniversary, Bitches" or "We've been voting for 90 years! Time flies, huh?"

2010-08-18T21:06:00.004-04:00

Today is the 90th Anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which prohibited the states from denying citizens the right to vote based on their sex.

(I was going to put a martini glass in her hand, but Susan B. Anthony was a Quaker and a temperance advocate and I didn't think she'd approve.)

(Wow, three feminist posts in a row. I must be on the rag.)

In honor of this anniversary, here are some things that may be of interest to you:

Have you seen the movie Iron Jawed Angels? You should watch it. Or at least watch its depiction of Alice Paul being force fed during her hunger strike in jail. (They were imprisoned for "obstructing traffic" while picketing for suffrage in front of the White House.) Please don't forget that women - real women - fought - FOUGHT- for SEVENTY YEARS - for your right to vote against Sarah Palin.
Speaking of Sarah Palin, one of our most prominent female politicians, only the second Vice Presidential nominee from a major party and the first from the Republican party, a woman who, if not for the women's movement, probably would have had to spend her life preparing frozen moose burgers in Alaskan perpetual twilight, decided to take this opportunity to shit all over feminists. On behalf of all feminist rads, you're welcome, Sarah!
(As a side note, I was totally behind Sarah Palin when McCain first announced her as his running mate. I will still correct people who think she said she could see Russia from her house - no, Tina Fey said that. Palin made a more subtly stupid statement: when asked if she had any experience in international relations she said Alaska was very near Russia. Tina Fey was making fun of that. I also defended the "Bridge to Nowhere." Alaska is not like New Jersey. They don't have the kind of infrastructure we take for granted here. Sometimes small towns need bridges if they're ever going to grow. I sincerely felt that a lot of her early criticism stemmed from the fact that she was an attractive woman running for office. But then the offenses started piling up and I officially removed my support a couple months into her campaign. It still genuinely pains and disappoints me every time I see her wasting all that has been given to her. And now, with this tweet, we are OVER. OVEEEERRRRRR!!!!!)
Also, does she think the early women's rights activists weren't radicals? They were preaching women's rights in the 1840s. You think that Elizabeth Cady Stanton's ideas weren't radical then? They're still radical now. Read her Declaration of Sentiments from the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848. In case you forgot, as a married woman in 1848, she had absolutely no legal existence. And she publicly questioned the validity of the United States Government as a result. Now that's fucking radical. And most women today still wouldn't have the balls to say half of that. They'd say, "I'm not a feminist, but..."
Oh, that thing about no legal existence. That was real. Coverture. Look it up.
Here are a few things that happened in between the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 and the ratification of the 19th amendment in 1920: the Civil War, the Spanish American War, World War I, slavery was abolished, all men were given the right to vote regardless of race, Reconstruction, the invention of the steam engine, the invention of Mormonism, much of American westward expansion, the Gold Rush, Teddy Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, the Gettysburg Address, the sinking of the Titanic, the invention and popularization of movies, Henry Ford and the Model T, Oscar Wilde, and... um... lots of other things. SEVENTY YEARS. Just want to remind you all that it was a long fight, and by the time women were able to vote most of the women who started the fight were dead. This was the third generation of suffragists by then.
And this gives me the excuse to pull out one of my favorite jokes: Women are tricky. They got the right to vote without being able to vote!

Now everyone go do something radical in celebration! Hoorah!

2010-08-17T10:45:00.000-04:00

"Men are people and women are women" or "Even feminists accidentally promote the patriarchy sometimes"

2010-08-14T21:35:00.006-04:00

One thing that we feminazi boner-killer lesbian shitasses are known for is the predilection for pointing out seemingly small things and complaining about them and declaring them visible signs of an invisible overruling patriarchy bent on keeping women in their place (i.e. the kitchen). This is one of my favorite things about feminism because, once you're tuned into it, these signs are everywhere. It's like "Where's Waldo?" or one of those hidden picture things. Some feminists are into noticing beauty pressures or signs of the Wedding Industrial Complex (you ain't worth shit if you ain't hitched/weddings are the the entire point of female existence/don't even think about eloping because then we can't judge you by your taste in bridesmaids' dresses) or quantifiable social injustices (like lower pay, lack of representation in government, etc) or signs of rape culture (way too big to provide examples; please see here here here here here here if you're unfamiliar) or there are feminists who simply love to apply the Bechdel Test anywhere and everywhere (it's amazing how many "chick flicks" supposedly aimed at women don't pass this test).

All of these are fun, but my particular pet feminist interest is the idea that men are the default and women are a special category. It's subtle, but it's everywhere. Like the aforementioned chick flicks, for example. Are there dude flicks? Sure, but they're called "all other movies" and women are expected to also watch and enjoy them. But okay, that's a cliche. What else have you got? Besides the corresponding book category: chick lit, the category seemingly founded by Bridget Jones' Diary, an excellent book based off another excellent book, Pride and Prejudice, written by certified woman Jane Austen back in the 18th century. The chick lit thing is especially interesting to me, seeing as how, as this article from NPR says so nicely:

When it comes to fiction, the gender gap is at its widest. Men account for only 20 percent of the fiction market, according to surveys conducted in the U.S., Canada and Britain. By this measure, "chick-lit" would have to include Hemingway and nearly every other novel, observes Lakshmi Chaudhry in the magazine In These Times. "Unlike the gods of the literary establishment who remain predominately male—both as writers and critics—their humble readers are overwhelmingly [female].

So basically all literature is read by women, but only books written by women about women-things are derogatorily termed "chick lit" by men who... aren't reading much of anything, actually. But they're still the ones writing and selling and making money off of their manly books! That are mostly being read by women.

And again, okay, chick lit, chick flicks... old news. What else have you got? I'd say more, but I'd have to talk to my lawyer first. Ahh - when I just wrote lawyer, you immediately imagined a man, didn't you? Unless I say lady lawyer, lady doctor, lady director, lady writer, lady architect, lady vice president of marketing, lady artist, lady chef, lady police officer, lady judge, lady store manager, whathaveyou, the default is a man. A white man, presumably. When we talk about people, unless stated otherwise, we're talking about men.

How about something more concrete? I'd like to preemptively thank Sociological Images for being so good about documenting this phenomenon because, though I see it all the time, I don't carry a camera around with me. Here's a nice post on it, but I'd like to post my favorite:

Because Target doesn't want intermingling of armpits. No doubt the women's deodorant costs more. Like how, on that same post, the extra-long sleeping bag for tall people costs $269 while the sleeping bag for women (which is different from men's sleeping bags how, exactly? Does it have a pocket for boobs?) costs $299. You would think that the long sleeping bag would cost more as there's actually more of it, but there is no logic in the patriarchy. This is why I rarely-to-never buy things labeled "for women," especially not toiletries or drugs. Did you know that Pamprin Max is exactly the same as Excedrin Extra Strength? 250mg acetaminophen, 250mg aspirin, 65mg caffeine. Go ahead, check it. Pamprin Max is packaged in pink (feminine); Excedrin is packaged in green (masculine/neutral). Pamprin costs $6.49 for 24 tablets; Excedrin costs $4.79 for 24 tablets. But our ladybrains are too scrambled from being on the rag to notice, right? We're just so desperate for HALP!! Our uteruses hurt!!

Sociological Images also did a nice post about t-shirts. I'm sure we're all familiar with t-shirts. You're probably wearing one right now. I am, and, actually, I buy my t-shirts in packages of 3 for ten bucks in the mens' underwear section for the reasons I outlined above. Because, as you well know, there are regular, normal t-shirts (men's/unisex) and there are women's t-shirts, which usually cost more. For example, here you can get a Bon Temps Football t-shirt, available in "T-Shirt" and "Female." I feel dumb having to post a visual because anyone who's been to a souvenir stand at a concert or visited a t-shirt shop on the boardwalk knows the binary I'm talking about, but here you see it:

(And if you read any of those rape culture links I'm sure you enjoy the slogan.)

Here's a closer image:

You can get it in "Basic" or "Unisex" ... or ladies. Because men are the basic default and women are the special category. And the ladies shirts cost more.

Which leads me to what started me on this tangent today. I was on the Bitch Magazine website and wandered over to the BitchMart and look what I found:

The same goddamn t-shirt binary. Whaaaaaat? Sure, they're labeled "slim fit" and "classic," but they've got a dude modeling the classic! And, yes, of course, my first thought was "A dude wearing a Bitch Magazine t-shirt! Hopefully not ironically! That's awesome! I'd like to hang out with and/or bang a dude like that!" And if they had another dude modeling, say, one of the hats or something, I wouldn't think anything of it. But they only brought him in to model the "classic" t-shirt. And for "classic" read "men's." Because words like "classic" or "basic" or "standard" or "generic" or "traditional" always - ALWAYS - mean "men."

I'd also like to take this moment to correct a major oversight: I can't believe I never posted I Blame the Patriarchy to the links section. One of my all-time favorite blogs. Please read the FAQ. If you laugh, feel free to proceed. If you don't, you have been warned.

Top Chef Recap: Season 7 Episode 9

2010-08-14T15:23:00.004-04:00

1. For the Quickfire, each chef had to prepare a dish using only ketchup, arugula, calf livers, and marzipan. The bottom three were killed by firing squad.

2. "At my whistle... FIRE!!!"

3. And if it wasn't for that snooping, nosy Pelosi, who had to walk in and witness it all, they would have gotten away with it.

4. Her word against theirs, though. "All we need to do," Angelo told Ed, "is get rid of the bodies. They've got nothing on us! We dispose of the bodies, get off this stupid competition, and flee to Thailand. Then we can be together!"

5. Ed agreed and told Tiffany the plan over walkie-talkie: "We're going to feed the bodies to the judges. This will be the greatest Top Chef challenge of all time! We'll disguise the bodies in our dishes! Tom and Gail will never know the difference!"

6. Fortunately, Angelo has some experience in this area, so he was able to direct Ed and Alex while they were butchering Kelly.

7. While Ed, Angelo, and Tiffany were putting the final touches on the menu, Alex went out to give his ninja army a pep talk. "Remember: you're not ninjas today. You're waiters," he told them, "We're infiltrating Washington from the inside out. Ed and Angelo just want this to succeed so they can go be gay together somewhere, but we have a more important agenda. If we pull this off, we will no longer live in fear. We will serve our enemies confit with pea puree to senators and world leaders! There will be no stopping us!"

8. The plan went off without a hitch. Kevin was disguised as halibut. Kelly was distilled into soup and dressed up with crab. And Amanda, of course, was grilled up medium well.

9. The judges ate it up, literally and figuratively. "I don't know what it was about that steak, but it was unlike anything I've ever eaten before!" Gail raved. Tom said, "I've definitely tasted something similar before, but I can't think where. Gail's right, though, it was definitely something special. It was seasoned perfectly. Well done."

10. But someone had to go home, so they killed Kenny. You bastards!

"Jersey Pride" or "Reason #524 Why New Jersey is Better Than Your State"

2010-08-12T22:38:00.001-04:00

"Is there a Jewish way to fill a pot hole? Is there a Muslim way to plow the streets?"

Diversity: You're doing it right.

EDIT: The fucking video embed didn't work. Here's a link: Teaneck, a Small Town Big Enough for Everyone

"In case you missed it" or "Good stuff from other sources"

2010-08-10T21:01:00.002-04:00

Did you know there are other things on the internet besides my useless piece of shit blog? I know, I was surprised, too! Anyway, there's been a lot of really good stuff on the interwebs in the last week or so, and since I haven't written much in a while, I thought I'd share some of it with all a' y'all.

For fans of Mad Men: Pete Campbell's Bitchface. "A tumblelog dedicated to everyone's favorite little shit from Mad Men and his beautifully bitchy facial expressions."

For fans of masturbation: "How To Know It's Time For A New Vibrator" Tracie's servicy guide to figuring out when to retire your vibe. Hilarious and informative.

For fans of equal rights: Judge Walker's Ruling on Prop 8. Absolutely worth reading the whole thing. Best thing I've read in weeks. Brilliant.

For fans of photoshop disasters: Check out this doozy. I always enjoy Photoshop Disasters, but this one is a standout. Really, what body part is this supposed to be? Has the artist ever seen a... I was going to say "seen a woman naked" but I think "seen another human" is more appropriate.

For fans of the Old Spice guy: Look! He's inspired Nathan Bransford to name a writing tic after him! Look again: the writing tic is now diamonds!

For fans of stupid people: I can't decide which is my favorite. Door #1. Door #2. I love Not Always Right. I've submitted a couple anecdotes to them, but none has been published yet. I'll let you know.

I think this one goes without saying.

Okay, that's all for now. Til next time, kiddies.

Top Chef Recap: Season 7 Episode 8

2010-08-08T16:08:00.000-04:00

Uhh... This episode was kind of boring. But Jose Andres was the guest judge. So in lieu of a recap, here's Jose Andres on Craig Ferguson.

"Inception" or "My dreams were already weird before I saw this movie last weekend"

2010-08-06T14:40:00.000-04:00

Last night I dreamt that I drove down to the Outer Banks after work, and when I got there I had to hide out in this hotel because the whole area was engulfed in a monsoon. We kept being hit by these big tsunami tidal waves and the whole hotel would rock and sway like a boat in choppy waters. I had to call out from work because I was stuck in the Outer Banks and would not make it back in time. (I have a lot of dreams about being sucked under by waves. I don't know why.)

Anyway, as I was thinking about my dream while driving into work this morning, I remembered that Jennifer Aniston was working the front desk at this hotel. Why? I don't know. But there she was, giving me my key and telling me to hold onto the railing because the whole hotel was about to go under. And I realized something: that's what was missing from Inception. No odd celebrity cameos in anyone's dreams. Like when you're having a conversation with your dad in a dream and it's not your dad, but more like your dad as played by Mel Gibson or somebody. That really should have happened in Inception. They all look up and Sandra Bullock is walking an alligator down the street. Or, even better, the mark looks up and says, "Leonardo DiCaprio? What the hell?"

Top Chef Recap: Season 7 Episode 7

2010-08-02T20:25:00.000-04:00

Ten things about this week's Top Chef:

1. I don't know which is more interesting in this picture: Padma's Na'vi braid or Mr. Pocket Congressman. I think that may actually just be a Ken doll.

Isn't he cute? Don't you just want to give him a wedgie and shove him in a locker?

Ew, he's kind of a slimeball, too! Here he's saying, "I do like Asia without the long plane flight, though. That's a nice touch." And Padma's thinking, "You probably bang your interns in the supply closet, don't you, dweeb?"

2. By the way, there's something going on with these two. Aren't they cute? I just want to draw a little heart around them. In fact, I think I will.

3. I don't think I've given Tiffany enough love. They haven't featured her much, which probably means she'll be around for a while. But everything she cooks looks crazy delicious and she's the smiliest one in the show, so I like her. If Crazy Pants McGee Amanda doesn't make it, I'll switch to Team Tiffany.

4. What? Another Ken doll? Does every man in D.C. look like this? Maybe I don't want to move to D.C. after all!

Oh, wait. Hang on. Which is worse: Ken doll or Chucky doll?

5. Also, I hope we haven't forgotten how pretty Gail is.

6. Do you see that Slimer-green pea puree under the salmon below? That slop of baby food was the crux of the drama in this episode. Ed was making pea puree, then he lost his pea puree, then suddenly Alex had a plate of pea puree.

Hey, Alex, where did you get your pea puree?

Yeah, that's what I thought. All told, the words "pea," "puree," and "pea puree" were uttered 29 times this episode. (Yes, I counted, but not very carefully, I admit.) And it wasn't even the baby food challenge!

7. This week's mid-commercial aside: Steven gave a seminar on how to be on the bottom (on Top Chef, not sexually). He even set up a box as a podium for his inspirational speech.

8. Alex won with his salmon and pea puree of unknown origins. He looks so proud of himself, doesn't he?

9. Andrea went home for making vanilla swordfish. Yes, vanilla swordfish.

10. And, finally, in the previews for next (this) week's episode, Alex tripped on a mat and fell on his ass.

"Lazy Bitch" or "Gif, Please!"

2010-08-01T21:58:00.000-04:00

Hello, all. I had a pretty productive weekend, all things considered, but I still haven't watched Top Chef yet. Here are some gifs to hold you over. I'll watch it tomorrow. Or the next day. When I get around to it.

(No I did not make any of these myself.)

Top Chef Recap: Season 7 Episode 6

2010-07-25T15:42:00.000-04:00

Errg. Top Chef airs on Wednesdays and it's Sunday and I'm only just now getting around to watching it. To be fair, I have been busy with work and actual writing and laziness... okay mostly laziness. Wow, have I gotten to a point in my life where I'm too lazy to watch TV? That's depressing. Anywhoo, here we go:

1. This week was the Wacky Ingredients episode! Obligatory. Whatever.

2. Usually this show makes me feel really down about whatever I'm snacking on while watching it, but not this week. Oh, rice cakes, I'd choose you over duck testicles any day!

3. Okay, the rules for this elimination challenge are really convoluted and complicated. I'm not even going to try to explain them because they're just over-the-top ridiculous in an effort to make the contestants pull all kinds of fucked up strategies on each other. I both hate this and love this. I hate it because, really, they never used to have this many ins and outs and whathaveyous on the rules for these challenges, at least nothing more complicated than "You must make breakfast out of this cardboard box" or "You're working in pairs; try not to kill each other." Now they're designing these challenges to be less about the food and more about setting up the contestants to throw each other under the bus (in the parlance of our times). However, I also love it, because in the last few seasons the contestants have been coming onto this show and taking it super seriously. A lot of them really are top chefs, like, out in the real world outside of reality TV. There are several award winners and genuinely successful chefs on a national scale on the show this season. And they seem to think this is an actual cooking competition. So I kind of like it that the show's producers are like, "No, bitch, this is reality TV. Get shady. Now which one of your colleagues are you going to fuck over this week for our viewing pleasure?"

4. Angelo decided to make sockeye salmon because he thinks it's sexy. All sockeye salmon makes me think of is this... so... yeah... kind of sexy.

5. Have I mentioned lately that Amanda is my favorite contestant? Everyone seems to think she's really annoying, but for some reason, in my eyes she's so annoying that she's looped back around to endearing and I totally want her to win. She has terrible ideas for her dishes (sherry chicken thighs for middle schoolers, chicken galantine, I expect next she'll make an aspic) but she has a very animated, expressive face and she'll defend her terrible ideas to the death. She also gets bleeped out more than any other contestant, which of course I fucking love her for. She said this while grinding up chicken bones this episode: "I'm about ready to !&$# robo coo this #?%@." At least that's what it sounded like. Tamesha says that she could strangle her in a heartbeat. Whatever, Tamesha. I'm all for Amanda winning this thing. As a gesture of love, I'm going to put the dumbest picture I grabbed of Amanda here. She looks like she's growling and clawing the air, but really she's just looking for cheese cloth. Go, girl!

6. The contestants were split in half and each team had to judge the dishes from the other team. And let me tell you: the first group were such bitches. They did not have one nice thing to say about the other folks' plates. Really? They couldn't say ONE nice thing? What bitches. Tell me that's not strategy.

7. This was the shot they cut to after the Bitchy Panel hated Amanda's chicken galantine. Deer in headlights! This girl cracks me up. She looks like a baby Catherine Keener, doesn't she? If Catherine Keener just served chicken cartilage to a bunch of bitches.

7. Angelo's instructions to the waiter: "Be careful. It's like a baby. Thank you."

8. Oh, and by the way: There was a whole other thing going on in this episode because Michelle Bernstein was the guest judge (she's been on the show as a judge several times before - and she's generally considered one of the toughest judges) and apparently she and Andrea have some kind of rivalry. They're about the same age, they look alike, they're both from Miami, and, according to Andrea, "they were rising at about the same time" but then Andrea got married and had babies while Michelle continued to rise in the food world, and Andrea was still a chef but "maybe wasn't in the limelight" (her words). So now she thinks Michelle's judging her too harshly...? Because there's a rivalry...? And she's jealous...? It's the personal success vs professional success meta-narrative thing. And of course, since personal success is considered more important for women, Andrea seems to think that Michelle Bernstein, feared Top Chef guest judge for many seasons, is going after her because she pooped out three kids and Michelle didn't? Or something. And I'd like to think that long-standing HBIC Michelle Bernstein is too above all that to give two shits, but maybe not, or at least maybe the producers/writers/editors think rivalries between women on such matters are important enough or entertaining enough to make it seem that way. Someone else can parse this out because, as I have neither professional nor personal success in my life, I kind of don't care. Just an interesting little tidbit to point out, being feministy and servicey and all.

9. Enough with the fucking duos already! It's getting to be annoying. Everyone's making duos of things. If I were the drinking type I'd say do a shot every time a contestant makes a duo of something. If someone makes an uno of something, finish the bottle. I counted three duos of things, and I wasn't counting.

10. Tamesha went home. I don't really have anything to say about it, but there you go.

"Who says the New York Times isn't funny?" or "But what about the movie stars!?!"

2010-07-23T08:45:00.000-04:00

Look at the front page of the New York Times' website this morning:

A reminder that movie stars matter? Why? Because movie stars don't get enough attention? This is front page news, guys: Don't forget about movie stars! They're important! They matter!

It also makes me laugh that they're suggesting something to me called "Addicted to Bush." HAHAHAHA!!! Bush. They know me so well.

"Maine" and "The X-Files" and "True Blood"

2010-07-20T21:19:00.003-04:00

I have a few things to quickly catch up on. Please excuse the poor writing.

First of all: Maine.

This past weekend I decided to spend some quality time with my significant other. And by significant other I mean my car, and by quality time I mean I drove up to Maine. It was beautiful and it was hotter than hell and I'm glad I went. I was considering writing a whole thing about the trip but I'm feeling kind of tired and lazy right now and for the moment that trumps my desire to be the female Bill Bryson. Instead I'll just say this: Portsmouth, NH is a fantastic and beautiful town in the summer and not at all overrun with tourists like I expected it to be or like Ogunquit was, though Ogunquit has that great rocky coast which is fantastic and stunning, especially walking that path along the cliff even though the parking was about a million dollars. And Kennebunkport was cute and surprisingly less crowded than Ogunquit, and I'm sorry to say I forgot to find out where the Bush compound is before I went up there so I didn't get to go looking for it, and Portland was nice but it was totally empty so I only stayed there about ten minutes before I said "Fuck this shit" and went back to Portsmouth. Also, road side clam shacks are pretty much the best thing in the world. I took about a million pictures, but I'm pretty sure you don't care to look at them, but if you do, I'll put a couple at the bottom here under the jump.

Moving on... I discovered that The X-Files is available on Netflix Instant, and so I've been re-watching the Mytharc episodes (the episodes pertaining to the overall mythology of the show, rather than the standalone episodes). I haven't watched them since middle school, when I was OBSESSED with the show, so I thought it would be fun to watch them again.

Sidenote: I must say this and get it out of the way. In the last movie, when they showed Mulder and Scully back at their house all cozy and beardy together living happily ever after, I swooned hardcore. Aww...! Mulder! Why weren't there any little red headed Mulder-babies running around!?! (OH wait. I forgot about William. Nevermind.)

Anyway, I was watching these episodes, and I must say, the show has not aged well. The main cast was still great, but the guest actors were uniformly awful, the writing was sometimes choppy, and the technology really just looks quaint and silly now. My favorite was when Deep Throat called Mulder and told him to turn on the news, and Mulder put a VHS tape into the VCR and pushed record, then he brought the tape into FBI Headquarters the next day, put the tape in a big machine, paused it on a frame, and then printed a single photograph from the screen that popped out the side of the machine. Watch this: I'm now going to take a screen shot of that in under ten seconds on my 10.1 inch netbook while sitting in my bed in my underwear.

Look, that's the photo printing of the screen! Oh, the nineties.

Also, yeah, Mulder's still pretty cute, but he really does sound like a paranoid psychopath conspiracy lunatic a lot of the time. "But Skinner! They've been injected with a virus made from alien DNA engineered by the government!" I mean, I watched them inject the stuff and even I, as a viewer, was like, "Oh, please, give me a break, Spooky!" I don't know if that means that his acting wasn't great or the writing wasn't great to make me believe it, or if I'm just so not tuned into sci-fi that I don't know how to watch it properly, but whatever. Between dialogue like that and the dated fashions and technology and the terrible acting, the whole show reads as campy to me and I've been laughing through a lot of it. Shame. I feel like my middle-school self would be so disappointed in me right now. Mulder's still hot, though.

And, finally, True Blood. I love True Blood and I'd love to spend the next 7-10 minutes of my life right now writing about how much I want to see Eric and Talbot get it on and what an amazing/hilarious character Franklin is and how Terry Bellefleur (AKA Zack from Gilmore Girls) is so adorable and when he talked about saving the baby armadillo I wanted to squeeze him and when he gave his little speech about how happy he was to be moving in with Arlene and "This is what people do and this is normal and I'm actually going to get to have all this!" that whole speech gave me a little lump in my throat and so on... but I have serious things to talk about regarding True Blood (and anyway I think I've already surpassed my girly swoon limit for one post).

The serious thing I want to talk about is the gender thing. (Okay, I've lost people there. Bye! If anyone's still reading...) Here's an interesting thing about True Blood, especially this season: it's very focused on the man candy. I can't think of any other scripted show aimed at both men AND women that spends as much time making the MEN desirable and taking the time to present them as sex objects. Every major male character has done some topless time: Bill, Eric, Sam, Jason (every episode, nearly), Lafayette, Hoyt, Alcide, plus Sam's brother, the various human toys the vampires keep around to feed on, and plenty of others, too. And, of course, there was that lovely full body shot from behind of Eric... The point here is not a tit for tat thing (although I think we would all like to see Eric's tat) where you say, "Oh, women are always being objectified, here's a taste of your own medicine!" No, it's more subtle than that. It's about the female gaze. Is it possible that this show is shot with the woman's eye in mind? That, for once, the default audience is female instead of male? (Great post about the female gaze in Twilight here.)

Well, let's consider that. What are the women up to? Well, let's see. Tara's been kidnapped and tied up by a deranged (and hilarious) vampire. Sookie's whining and crying over Bill again and being banged up by werewolves at their stupid bar while searching for the man that dumped her. My favorite HBIC, Pam, is strung up spread-eagle in a dungeon being tortured. Lorena's being hate-fucked and having her head twisted around by Bill. That were-chick was publicly branded... Wow, there's a lot of violence against women here this season. So is that what Alan Ball thinks we want to see? Women want to see Eric topless and men want to see the women helpless? Nearly every woman on the show has been a victim of some kind of violence this season. What's up with that? I'm starting to get a little uncomfortable/annoyed by how much the show is relying on violence against women for entertainment. ...But Eric's so hot! Am I right, lay-deez?!?

Oh, and by the way, it's really starting to bug me that no one wants to help Tara. We're halfway through the third season, and by this time Sookie's had Bill, Sam, Eric, Alcide, that guy who snuck into the church with her, Jason, Andy Bellefleur, and Lafayette all trying to protect her and make sure she's safe. And Tara's been fucked all sorts of ways every damn episode and no one ever tries to help her. They keep saying, "Oh, she's tough." So what then? A girl's got to be a fucking southern belle pixie telepath to get a little help? Shit.

Also, what's up with werewolves that shave their chests? What's that about? Beards are back in style but chest hair isn't? Now that it's been pointed out to me, I'm seeing it everywhere. I'm looking at you, Alcide.

Okay, that's all. I promise. Maine pictures after the jump.

PS HOYT + JESSICA 4 EVA!

"Top Chef Product Placement" or "Non-recap for the week"

2010-07-16T22:02:00.002-04:00

In lieu of the usual recaps, for this episode I decided to count product placements. The grand total?

77 instances of product placement.

By the way, the other recaps usually only take me about ten minutes over the actual runtime of the show to put together; this took FOREVER. So either snaps to me for working hard or I'm an idiot for thinking this would be quicker than a recap.
As far as what constitutes a product placement, here are the rules that I just made up:

Visual images of a product and verbal mentions of a product count separately.
If it is mentioned verbally AND shown on the screen, it counts twice.
If the logo/product/brand is not clear on the screen, it must be identified verbally to count, and it counts once.
If I could see the label but couldn't catch the brand name/couldn't identify it, it did not count.
Mentions of the contestants' home restaurants/businesses do not count, but others, such as those of the hosts/judges, do.
If the same shot/camera angle is used twice, if there was something going on in between, it counts twice.
Bravo's own intrusive advertising does not count.
I'm in charge here and it counts if I say it counts.

So here are the three products that received the most placement on last night's Top Chef:

Toyota - 11 instances of product placement, which totally makes sense for a cooking show, right?

Calphalon - 17 instances of product placement

Aaannnd.... Twister! With 14 instances of product placement

Other brands that got name checked: Whole Foods' 365, Farmland Dairies, Seattle's Best Coffee, Starr Hill (I think that was the beer they were drinking in the Stew Room), Swanson, Aspen (the city - pro-tourism dollars paid for that), The Aspen Food and Wine Festival, Dial soap, Old Bay, Morton Salt, Marlboro, Hilton, GE Monogram Appliances, Food and Wine Magazine, Ayrshire Farms, The Inn at Little Washington, Le Bernardin, and the Bocuse d'Or.

And before you start quibbling with me, here's some proof that ALL LABELS HAD TO BE APPROVED. Here's a shot of two contestants hanging out in their bedroom. Note the shampoo bottles on the nightstand. The labels are blacked out. Not approved. So, yes, that means someone at Hasbro gave Bravo permission to show the Twister label (at least) 14 times.

"I write like David Foster Wallace" or "I write like Dan Brown"

2010-07-14T19:54:00.002-04:00

So there's a website out there called "I Write Like..." You paste in some of your text and the computer calculates whose writing style yours most resembles.

When I put one of my rants about Jamie Oliver's show, I got this response:

I write like
David Foster Wallace

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

(No, I haven't read Infinite Jest yet.)

When I put in my review of Lori D. Ginzberg's Elizabeth Cady Stanton biography, I got this:

I write like
Dan Brown

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

When I put in my (better written) review of To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells, I got this:

I write like
David Foster Wallace

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

When I put in the first two pages of my as-yet-unfinished novel (gag me), I got this:

I write like
David Foster Wallace

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

So what does it all mean? I have no fucking clue. I thought my Elizabeth Cady Stanton review was really well written, but I thought The Da Vinci Code sucked donkey balls and put it down a third of the way through. Meanwhile I generally think my book is shit on a stick and I put little to no effort into the blog writing, and yet Wallace was supposedly one of the better writers of our time, no? I don't know, really: I haven't read any of his work yet. Eh, what the fuck do computers know anyway, right?

ETA: I realize this is only interesting to me, but for the sake of full disclosure I started obsessing and popped in a couple other chapters from the book. I got Mario Puzo, Stephen King, Arthur C. Clarke (who?), James Joyce, James Joyce again, and James Joyce again, Dan Brown, and, finally, David Foster Wallace again. So what does this mean? It means that my book is as inconsistent as I thought it was. Either that or this computer program doesn't mean shit. I'm going to go with my work being inconsistent, though. Excuse me while I mope around, go for a drive, take a shower, and pull out my red pen.

"More Serbian Swearing" or "Serbian Swearing: World Sports Edition"

2010-07-11T22:54:00.001-04:00

Darko Milicic Swears And Threatens Referees (English Sub) - Click here for this week’s top video clips

Top Chef Recap: Season 7 Episode 4

2010-07-11T12:07:00.000-04:00

Ten things about this week's Top Chef:

0. I realized this morning that I forgot to do my little Top Chef thing this week when I went to catch up with Nathan Bransford's blog and saw that he did a post comparing Gail's critique last episode to the critiques he gives aspiring writers. I'd hate to think what he'd say about that last sentence. Hoo, boy. You should read his blog, though, if you don't already.

1. Okay, so, the Quickfire Challenge was to make a dish for Tom and Padma and then a baby food version of that same dish for their kidlets. I was really excited about this because I assumed that meant one of two things: either their babies were going to make an appearance or Padma was going to chew the food up and spit it into Tom's mouth like a baby bird. Unfortunately, neither of those things happened. A girl can dream, though.

2. I haven't caught this guy's name yet, but he's growing on me. In the span of less than thirty seconds he said he'd use the prize money to buy himself "a hooker and an eight-ball" (right after Arnold said he'd donate it to orphanages in Thailand. I want to be a reality TV editor/writer when I grow up. Brilliant) and then said he'd only ever practiced making babies, not baby food. Keep an eye on this guy; he's going places.

3. Aren't babies not supposed to eat honey? Idiot. Congratulations, you just gave Padma's baby botulism.

4. The product placement on this show is so over the top. This image was spliced into a montage. Why? I don't know. Maybe they'll have to create a dish inspired by the new Venza. (I'd imagine it would be similar to the baby food above.) I miss Erica and the Glad Family of Products. Maybe next episode I'll keep track of each instance of product placement.

5. They did a little side note thing between commercials wherein Angelo claimed that he was sweet on Tamesha and he wanted to "bring out her inner lion." Tamesha was all, "You wish. Bish please." This makes me like both of them much more than I had previously.

6. This episode's Elimination Challenge (my god, I've so drank the Kool-Aid. Look at me. I'm capitalizing "Elimination Challenge") was one of those overly complicated ones with different rounds and pairs, and basically they had to make a breakfast, lunch, and dinner for Hilton Hotels (product placement). I love breakfast, it's my favorite meal, and I would have happily eaten any one of the breakfasts they made, but look at this one. Does that look over the top delicious or what? Holy hell.

7. By the way, I can't stand this bitch, and I can't figure out why. I'll let you know if I figure it out.

8. Also, I want to apologize for calling Kenny a dick right off the bat, because he seems like a really good guy. My bad, Kenny. My bad. He just needs to smile once in a while and not speak in such a monotone. Look at this. This was the happiest frame I could catch from this guy:

9. Best line of the episode: "With short ribs it's all about the jus or the liquid that you cook it in. It's the business. When Kenny and Kevin are plating their short rib it seems like there's not a lot of sauce on it. So they don't have the business." And, PS, I love that I caught a frame with her finger sticking up, pointing and gesturing about "the business."

10. Arnold and Lynn were eliminated.

Arnold will be missed, but for Lynn, I think I speak for everyone when I say, "Her?"

"Activia" or "Please don't film your poop"

2010-07-09T22:13:00.001-04:00

I'm tired and I have to work in the morning, but this has been bothering me for a while and so I'm taking it out on you:

Does anyone else get totally grossed out when this commercial comes on and Jamie Lee Curtis says that she asked people to film themselves taking the Activia Challenge? And then the camera goes to a close-up personal shot of Mary-Ellen? And then you think, "Oh, God, she's taking the flip-cam into the bathroom with her! Why, Jamie Lee? Why!?"

Top Chef Recap: Season 7 Episode 3

2010-07-01T20:46:00.003-04:00

This week on Top Chef...

They had to make pie, desserts are hard, whine whine, bitch bitch, barbecue, blah blah blah. MEANWHILE...

Stefan from Season Five had a cameo in this week's season premiere of Entourage!

HA HA HA! Awesome. You know he's my favorite. Rock on, Stefan.

You know what? All this does is remind me how little I want to bang any of this season's contestants.

"Holiday Road by Lindsey Buckingham" or "Great song, shitty video"

2010-06-28T21:21:00.000-04:00

Can I make a nomination for all-time worst music video?

Why not just show two minutes of Chevy Chase driving down the highway waving at Christie Brinkley?

Why is Lindsey Buckingham wearing so much makeup?

Is that why he looks so miserable through the whole thing?

Why is the water cooler filled with blue Kool-Aid?

Is this where Conan got the idea for taking the desk for a ride?

What's with the homeless bricklayer and why is he wearing a yellow headband?

Could they possibly come up with a bleaker concept for a more upbeat song?

Where is Bill Hader in all of this?

So many questions...

Top Chef Recap: Season 7 Episode 2

2010-06-25T19:45:00.000-04:00

Ten quick items about this week's Top Chef:

1. This guy says he's here to win and it is what it is.

I'm just spitballing here, but I'm going to guess that he's here for a reason, he's not here to make friends, he doesn't want to be thrown under the bus, and he's got people back home rooting for him.

2. This guy is asking: "Who got high and came up with this idea?"

Doesn't that make you miss the days when Padma was stoned through the whole show? Now they're playing her as some kind of Earth mother goddess type. Whatever. I liked her better as the half baked supermodel drooling over the food.

3. By the way, this is the idea he was referring to:

Double aprons! Conjoined twins! Making sandwiches! Sack races are next, guys.

4. I would eat the shit out of this sandwich. For realsies.

5. If I was on Top Chef, this would be me:

I would definitely be the overenthusiastic loud one holding on by the skin of my teeth. I would also definitely be the one to come up with a terrible idea like SHERRY BRAISED CHICKEN THIGHS for MIDDLE SCHOOL KIDS on a fixed budget and then defend it as, like, duh, of COURSE, why didn't YOU think of that? And I would definitely be making this face.

6. Angelo put his peanut butter mousse in a piping bag and declared that he "turned a rock into a wheel."

7. I told you they were trying to sell her as the earth mother goddess type.

8. This was Angelo's face when he found out he was in the bottom of the pack.

Mmmm... schadenfreude. Savor the moment.

9. This was Kenny's face when he was informed that tomato is a fruit, not a vegetable.

10. Last week she made a grainy chicken liver mousse. This week she made a grainy banana pudding. Pack your knives and go, grainy biatch!

"A Back to the Future Update" or "I didn't make this graphic, but I wish I did"

2010-06-24T20:19:00.000-04:00

Via The Daily Dish.

Top Chef Recap: Season 7 Episode 1

2010-06-17T22:04:00.003-04:00

Ten items on the first episode of Top Chef: D.C.

1. This guy's reppin Jersey. And talking out the side of his mouth. THAT'S HOW IT'S DONE, BRO! For the elimination challenge the chefs were required to cook something that showed where they were from, so he made Taylor ham, egg, and cheese on a hard roll. No, he didn't, but he should have.

2. Tom made the contestants peel potatoes and chop onions while he strut back and forth behind them with a whistle and examined their work (and their asses).

Strut, Tom! Strut! Someone somewhere is turning this into foreplay. I guarantee it.

3. This is only the first quickfire and already someone has done a duo of something. If I was a judge and someone said they made a duo of chicken, I'd scream, "YOU DO IT ONCE AND YOU DO IT RIGHT!" Then I'd put the chicken in my mouth, chew it up, and spit it back in their face.

4. These two guys are both dicks. That means they'll both make it to the final four.

Actually, to be fair, Angelo (the guy on the left with the shiteating smirk) is a dick. Kenny (on the right with the head so shiny it appears to be flat) isn't so much a dick, more just arrogant without the charm to get away with it. Either way, yeah, these two dickwads are going all the way.

5. I love love love this guy. He's so goofy and adorable, and totally into the whole vampire trend. (Check the fangs.)

Also, his diary is the cutest. Do we think it was planted by Bravo? The product placement makes me want to say yes, but it's so precious that I hope it's genuine.

(click to enlarge)

6. This lady thought she'd win by making chicken liver mousse. Sorry, girlfriend, but no one has ever, in the history of chickens or livers, won anything by making chicken liver mousse.

That's her saying, "Whaaaat!?! What are you talking about? Everyone loves chicken liver mousse! This is going to be so delicious, those chickens are going to want to rip out their own livers just to be a part of my GENIUS!"

7. Oh, look. It's our old friend from Item #5!

...but he has seen this show before, hasn't he? Doesn't he recognize those words as the kiss of death? You're basically guaranteed a train ticket home if you decide to experiment. That's why when I finally get on Top Chef I'm making nothing but cereal and carrot sticks.

8. Holy crap. Padma's boobs are now bigger than Gail's. This may alter the entire dynamic of the show.

9. Oh, hey! Remember when I said that if I saw another duo I'd chew it up and spit it back out? This is the result of that.

By the way, those cups are made out of apples. I think that's really cool. They would be better filled with peanut butter, though.

10. Our friend was eliminated. Sad. He was such a sweetheart. The nice guys always get the axe, don't they? Sigh...

"The Creative Process" or "This is what it feels like to write a book"

2010-06-14T13:13:00.000-04:00

Humiliating, isn't it? From Hamlet 2.

"Top Chef" or "This is what you've been missing"

2010-06-12T23:21:00.003-04:00

Top Chef starts again this week on Bravo. ARE YOU AS EXCITED AS I AM!?!? I hope you are, because Top Chef rules, and I think I'm even going to do some kind of coverage on here about it. Yes, I'm that excited about watching egomaniacs argue over risotto. DRAMA!

If you haven't seen Top Chef, here's one of my favorite clips from the show to whet your appetite. (Pun intended.)

Things to watch for in the clip:

General badassitude brought to you by my boyfriend, Stefan
General whiny-ness and sour grapes brought to you by big baby Hosea
The spark of love that ignites between Eric Ripert and Stefan around 1:50 (aw!)
The horrified expressions on everyone's faces when they see the eel
"Skinning eel is like riding a bike," he says as he HAMMERS A NAIL THROUGH THE EEL'S SKULL! Bad. Ass.

Top Chef on Bravo

PS: I just watched the video again. Notice how every time Stefan does something perfectly, they immediately cut to Hosea doing the same thing sloppily.

"Pro-ana" or "When did this become a thing?"

2010-06-11T21:12:00.001-04:00

You know that thing where you've never heard a word before in your life and then suddenly people won't shut up about it? That's what's happening with me right now with the word "pro-ana."

When the fuck did "pro-ana" become a word? I read a lot, kiddies, and I read a lot of blogs, and I read a lot of feministy, pro-lady, sex-and-vagina positive, love your body and have lots of orgasms and cupcakes type blogs, and I swear to God I'd never read the word "pro-ana" on any of them until a week ago. And now I'm seeing it every day, seems like, and not just on one site or another - it's all over the fucking interwebs this week. What's the deal, yo?

The first time I saw it was on Jezebel (natch) where it was reported that Perez Hilton pulled a t-shirt from his online store because of its "pro-ana" slogan: "Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels." Now, here's how my stupid-ass mind works: I thought maybe it was some kind of typo-riddled reference to Anna Wintour, because she's militant about weight (she famously made Oprah lose weight before she allowed her to be photographed for Vogue) and also because I thought that was one of her quotes. Actually it's attributed to Kate Moss. Whatevs. Fashion people. They're all the same.

But then the very next day, also on Jezebel, there was this headline: Urban Outfitters Pushes Pro-Ana Movement. And then it came up a couple of other times in a couple of other places over the past few days, and then I saw Marianne Kirby at The Rotund call an ad for something called "Bagel Thins" "pro-ana" and that's when I said, "OKAY! FINE! I'LL GOOGLE IT! SHEESH!"

So what does pro-ana mean? Wikipedia defines it as "the promotion of anorexia nervosa as a lifestyle choice rather than an eating disorder." So... what does that mean? It means that we're letting the powers that be (fashion people, marketing majors, skinny bitches, the patriarchy, whathaveyou) get away with telling us that none of the cool kids, like, eat FOOD (gross! only fat people eat food!). Or something. I'm not sure. It's a new term for me. But, like, those powers that be (fashion people, sorority girls, the movie studios, lizards, BP, whathaveyou) have been pushing that agenda for years, haven't they? What with that whole "can't be too rich or too thin" thing?

I guess the point here is that sometimes it's nice to have a new way of looking at things. Sometimes a new perspective can sharpen your critical eye and make you... revisit... look at things again... and you start to see it around you... I don't know, dude. To be honest, I started working on my book again this week and I've basically decided to chuck and rewrite most of it, so my brain's a little mushy right now. Anyway, hope you enjoy the term "pro-ana," and next time you see some fifteen year old stick figure at the mall buy a Mrs. Fields cookie, smell it, and throw it in the garbage, you'll have a term to describe it. You're welcome.

...I'm going to go try to revive my brain now and maybe write a few pages. But if this is how my writing is tonight, maybe I should just go watch cartoons.

BREAKING NEWS

2010-06-10T19:46:00.001-04:00

Russell Crowe is not dead. He did not fall off a mountain. Just FYI.

http://www.usmagazine.com/moviestvmusic/news/rep-russell-crowe-is-not-dead-2010106

BREAKING NEWS

2010-06-09T20:54:00.002-04:00

Prosecutors in Mojave County, Arizona have dropped all charges against Warren Jeffs. The state of Texas has begun extradition proceedings.

http://www.abc15.com/dpp/news/region_northern_az/lake_havasu/charges-against-polygamist-leader-warren-jeffs-dismissed

"Jersey Church Sign" or "Yes, this really is the church down the road from me"

2010-06-07T20:44:00.000-04:00

"Craig Ferguson's awesome Mark Twain impression" or "MARK TWAIN HATES BABIES!"

2010-06-05T10:53:00.002-04:00

(I have it set to skip straight to it, so you don't have to watch the whole 10 minute monologue, FYI. Worth watching to the end, though.)

"This week in TV feminism" or "Yes I've seen every episode a hundred times, what of it?"

2010-06-03T21:17:00.000-04:00

A couple notes on two of my favorite TV shows:

1. Rue McClanahan died today. Rest in peace. A sad day for TV feminism. We're down to one Golden Girl. Stay strong, Betty White! I'm not going to lie: I'm worried that when all the Golden Girls have passed away, they'll stop showing the reruns, and that would be a damn shame.

2. And now for some slightly more upbeat news. Okay, it's not really news, but I enjoyed it so I'm sharing. For some reason my grandmother subscribed me to Entertainment Weekly. Usually it's just one long extended advertisement, but every once in a while there's something fun in there. This week, Roseanne Barr wrote her take on what she thought Roseanne Conner might have gotten herself up to after the show ended. I love Roseanne like no other, so I got a big kick out of it. I'll transcribe it below. (Emphasis theirs.)

Roseanne wrote a book, and the rights to it were bought by Oprah and turned into a mildly successful reality show starring Jackee Harry. The show lasted two seasons, made millions for Harpo Studios, and relaunched Harry's television career. Roseanne made enough money from that - and from selling her cafe and her house - to move to Hilo, Hawaii, where she opened a shop selling crystals, spiritual books, and DVDs. Her youngest son, Jerry Garcia Conner, runs it. They live upstairs from it in a large apartment next to the center for the Church of Cannabis.
She dates an old surfer named Johnny, who also manages the nightclub in the Hilo Hotel and plays jazz piano in a quartet with her son, who plays lead guitar.
Roseanne had a scare with her heart, takes Lipitor, and still halfheartedly tries one diet after another. She goes to a gym and pedals an exercise bike listlessly, ambles along on a treadmill, bored and dutiful, while chatting with whichever girlfriend talks her into meeting her there. She eats sorbet but looks around, as if someone is watching, and then douses it with chocolate syrup.
She got excited about running for Hilo town council for a while, but the reality of a full-blown campaign just seemed too demanding - what with all the showing up for appearances and kissing people's butts that she wouldn't even want to shake hands with. Today, she is getting more and more interested in joining the Church of Cannabis and launching her own ministry called Seriously Revolting Women!

"Gulf Coast Catastrophe" or "BP Cares... I mean doesn't give a shit"

2010-05-28T18:50:00.000-04:00

I've remarked to a few people that the BP disaster in the Gulf makes me want to cry. Well, this video finally did it to me, and I cried like a baby. Or like when Jenny died in Forest Gump. In Alabama. Where the waters that hosted the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company are dying. And I never got to see them. Oops, I'm crying again.

Via Gawker.

"True Blood/The Sookie Stackhouse Novels" or "Loretta Lynn's Van Lear Rose"

2010-05-25T20:27:00.003-04:00

Last month I watched the first two seasons of HBO's True Blood, and, as I've said to a couple of people I know in real life (imagine that!), it's like The X-Files meets Gilmore Girls, except in the Deep South, and so of course I loved it. Today I downloaded the Sookie Stackhouse novels, the series on which the television show is based, to read at work. And I have to tell you: I'm so, so disappointed.

First of all, I had to go to the Google machine after reading a couple of chapters to find out whether or not these are YA novels. They're not - but probably only because of the sex. Otherwise, the text is easily at an eighth or ninth grade reading level. I read about 80% of the first novel during my down time at work today, and I don't read particularly fast. The text is just that simplistic. Not that there's anything wrong with YA novels necessarily, but I was really hoping for the darkness and the depth and the lushness of the television series, and that's absolutely impossible when the story is basically written in outline form. Description and character are at a minimum here, so if you want to be immersed in lusty Louisiana nights with foreboding creatures, go elsewhere. And speaking of the sex, the television series is downright gratuitous. I thought the book would at least provide some good sex scenes, but no! Even those are... well... kind of lame. It's hard to write a good sex scene, so I give the author a little leeway, but come on. The only thing I enjoyed about the scene when Sookie loses her virginity to Bill (in the book) was that he called her "darling" while they were doing it. That's very sweet, and I'm an old softie, but when MOST of the television show looks more like this (see below), "darling" just doesn't quite cut it.

Oh, and you know what else? There's no Tara! NO TARA! Whaaa!?! I love Tara! She's the tough bitch I wish I could be, and I love her big brown eyes and her vulnerability. But then again, I don't think the novels' author could have effectively conveyed Tara's depth and subtleties the way that the show does. (Someone nominate Rutina Wesley for... something! Quick!) Lafayette's still in there, but hardly in his full glory.

All in all, I'll probably keep reading them because it's good dumb reading to fill time at work, but the true credit goes to Alan Ball, the creator of True Blood, the television show (and Six Feet Under, fyi). He's the one who brought the Sookie Stackhouse saga to its full potential.

The day wasn't a total artistic loss, though, because I was listening to Loretta Lynn's album Van Lear Rose in the car, and that satiated my Southern romantic lust far more than Sookie Stackhouse did. The album is rich and compelling and enchanting. And, by the way, "Have Mercy" is way sexier than Bill "Whiney" Compton.

"Serbian/Croatian Swear Words Explained" or "I'll fuck your dead mother on your fathers grave with a bleeding cock up the eye sockets"

2010-05-18T21:48:00.000-04:00

I have to say, the Serbs(/Croats) seem pretty cool. A few months ago, I wrote a post about my interest in Serbian swearwords - they're incredibly elaborate, poetic, and fucking filthy. The post has gotten a lot of hits, and I've gotten several positive responses from Serbs. Every time I've mentioned Serbs on the internet (in various places) I've gotten enthusiastic responses from Serbs and Croats who were more than happy to chat about their language and their culture. They seem to have a really good sense of humor about themselves, too. So anyway, last month I received an amazing email from someone named Luka, who gave me an exhaustive explanation of Serbian/Croatian swearing that I just had to share. It's amazing. (There are actually two emails, but as they're very long - but totally worth reading - I'm going to put the second email after the jump.) Please read it if you have any interest whatsoever in swearing, Balkan culture, blasphemy, necrophilia, shit, or violent ass rape. Thank you so, so much, Luka. Without further ado:

(First email)
Hello,

I ran into an old post on your blog, and felt compelled to text wall you. Hope you don't mind, and you might find this interesiting. I'm not Serbian, but Croatian, and our languages are for all practical purposes quite simmilar dialects the same basic language. The swearing is legendary in world terms and Serbo-Croatian swearing is (reputedly) second only to Hungarian, but I can't really imagine that, for reasons that might be obvious to you allready. I shudder to think that somewhere out there is a culture that could outdo either of us in swearing.

I actually wrote a paper on the northern Balkan swearing in colledge (can't seem to find it now) - is practicaly, in some cases factualy, POETRY. Thing is, plenty of the stuff that comes up in these swearwords can have deeper meaning, making for an interesting phenomenon: a foreigner who thinks the curses are mindbogglingly offensive is not nearly close to how insanely offensive some of the things REALLY are. Seriously, people can get killed over such an insult, but as a general rule the more embellished and outlandish a swearword is the less it is taken seriously.

For example: "Jebem ti mater" ("I (will) fuck/shit on your mother") or "Jebem ti Boga" ("I (will) fuck/shit on your God") can get you beaten up, knifed, or shot in certain rural places if you aim it at someone. It's the kind of thing people used to deliberately start a fight. On the other hand "Jebem ti juvu od čavala Isusovih" (Fuck the soup made with the nails Jesus was crucified with) is sometihng you might yell if you drop a tray you were carrying, hit yourself on the thumb with a hammer, or are just frustrated because you can't seem to expalin sometihing to someone. The embelished ones are more like a contest of experssing frustration, agony or exasperation and are surprisingly common but, as a rule, if it includes God or someone's Mother and "Jebem ti" - them's fighting words.

"Jebem ti" actually means "(I) fuck your", as for example "Jebem ti seme i pleme (serb.)" or "Jebem ti rod i porod (cro.)" means "I fuck both your ancestors and your progeny". The fucking part is methaphorical, what youre actually saying, in an incredibly offensive and clear fashion is "I consider the entire strain of humanity that resulted in you, and all humans that will descend from you, to be worth fuck-all". Only, in serbian and croatian it rolls of the tongue and doesn't sound that academic. "Jebem ti" and "Serem ti se" ("I shit on your") are interchangable, "Serem ti se" being a lot more typical for Serbian. "Serem ti se u čarapu" ("I shit in your sock") became part of the modern folklore as a part of a Balkan you-tube meme called "Kita u Billa" (Bill's Dick), a short clip from Kill Bill vol.1 with a Serbian dub that is untraslatably offensive.

If you want to give "Jebem ti" it an "especially rude and primordial" feel you can use "Prčim ti" as Prčenje (prchenye, with a slavic hard r, and a very hard ch like in the end of russian surnames) is violent anal sex done by incredibly crude macho redneck types to women, men, goats or basicaly anything. There is, and I kid you not, serious debate wether true Prčenje can be done in real life as it is ment to be incredibly one sided, depraved and demeaning to the party being, well, ass raped, yet if the other person doesn't find it iresistable, you are just raping someone. At the same time the person doing it to somebody else is required not to feel in any way interested, or god forbid ASK if the party being buggered is having fun. Seriously, we have a couple of hundred years old word for the cencept of "violent ass rape of your life". Although, actual successfull performance of that in real life has of yet only being speculated upon. However, women have been coming to Croatia for sex tourism for years, can't imagine why...

But that is just a tip of the iceberg. You got the "Dabogda" curses. "Da Bog da" means, literaly, "May God intervene on my behalf and make it so". The fun about those is that that phrase is a part of Christian tradition/liturgy so pairing it of with an obscene profanity could make southern baptist heads explode if they could compredhend what is being said. "Dabogda te mater u čevapu prepoznala" you allready know ("May God personally make it so that your mother recognizes you in kebab meat") or the even more mean spirited "Dabogda te mater kukom po Neretvi tražila" ("May God personaly make it so that your mother ends up sarching for you all over the Neretva river with a hook on a pole"). These full meaning translations don't really convey three things 1) you snuck both God and Mother in there 2) it rolls of the tongue and can be said in a single breath 3) it's indirectly offensive to christians on so many levels - it's EPIC, nay, BIBLICAL blasphemy. In the part where I come from there is a tendency to line up half a dozen obscenities aimed at someone and punctuate it with "daboda" basicaly challenging God to strike you down if the other guy doesn't deserve it. A popular rap song did a take on that as a voice-solo, it is considered mind blowingly obscene even for our standards.

Then you have the "collorfull" ones that can range from daily usable ones like "Jebem ti sunce na nebu" that could be the one about fucking the sun out of the sky, but the really masterfull ones come up when people are trying to shock their friends with what they herd or came up with. These can get to be psychadellic clusterfucks, and are basically poetry so they are required to have a certain rythm and flow to them (rap is incredibly popular in these parts) and that is lost unless you are a native speaker. Needless to say they are by default incredbly offensive. For example: "Prčim ti tri silosa žita zno po zrno a na svakom zrnu četiri isukrsta na karte igraju" - "(Because of how angry you're making me I am just about ready to) analy violate three silos worth of wheat, grain by grain, and on each grain do the same to the four Jesus Christs that are playing cards there". Its got it all, anal rape, absurdity, disrespect for food (also a major no-no in our culture), blasphemy, sugesting that not only is there is not one Jesus... you get the picture. The "Jebem ti mrtvu mater na ćaćinom grobu krvavim kurcem u očne duplje" ("I'll fuck your dead mother on your fathers grave with a bleeding cock up the eye sockets"), of which you have a variant on your blog, falls into this category as it too poetic to be spontaneous and kind of like a gore version of some famous Serbian/Croatian modernist poetry.

I hope I haven't disgusted you or bored you too much.

Regards,
Luka

(Second email)

Hi again, Joanna

sorry for taking so long to reply, and yes I don't mind if you post all this on your blog, as youre not the first person interested in all that, and the phenomenon of northern Balkans swearing is sort of a pinnacle of human achievement in that area, if I may say so, what with me being from the said region... Either that, or a link to olden times that wasn't really written down in the history books as i can't imagine any church, gouvernment or cultural authority really approving of that kind of stuff, but I see a lot of them trying to stamp it out. Basicaly, one of the biggest reasons people in Croatia don't take their TV program seriously is that swearing is sort of forbidden even in drama shows, and because of that the media products around here feel fake.

What do I mean by that?

"Kurac" means cock in Croatian and Serbian, but it is used in coloquial conversation as a comma, punctuation mark, universal pronoun, much like "fuck" is in English, yet you can't hear it on television. That makes all talk on television seem incredibly uptight, official, insincere and unauthentic. Which brings me to the fact that i haven't explained a good part of Croatian (and possibly Serbian) swearing, slang and incredibly offensive phrases that you might be interested in (as I didn't know if you still were interested in them)

So, without further ado, here is some more Balkan swearnig in the form of a text wall :)

"Pička materina" means "Mothers pussy", and it is the byword for swearing as in the popular phrase "Odi u pičku materinu!" - "Go back into your mothers pussy!", or the more harsh "Mrš u pičku materinu!" - "March off into your mothers pussy!". They are both common everyday dismissals of basicaly anything thats bothering you. "Pička ti materina!" (full literal meaning being "By your mothers cunt!" or "May you soon be inevitably bound straight for your mothers cunt") is sort of a reply to someone or something who pissed you off in some way. It could be accurately treanslated to mean "Go meet you maker in a profane and uncomfortable fashion!"

Now, where this common phrase take a turn for the bizzare is the EVEN MORE common phrase that derives from it: "Odi u tri pičke materine!" which is a paradoxical statement verging on the "Stick your elbow up your nose" and it means either "Go back into three of your mothers' pussies" or "Go back into your mothers three pussies". I'll let you wrap your head around that one yourself, I don't think it was ever meant to make any sense. One explanation about how that one came to be, besides everything being more fun with cool numbers like three, seven or a hundred, is the common phrase "kurvin sin" - "son of a whore (prostitute)", which would imply having more than one "father", and this would make the person in question an incredible bastard as that person would be the bioloical offspring of three different mothers (not even counting fathers).

"Pička" (pronounced pitchka, like in "pitch") itself is sort of weird, as it is much harder than "pussy", its more like "cunt", but there is no softer term for the vagina that is not seen as kindergarden talk. Vaigina, the latin term, is used very very rarely, only in medical textbooks, and the thin itself is ussually reffered in polite company as "the female sex organ" (same for "kurac" - "cock"). I guess most people having sex reffer to it as "down there" as it is considered incredibly offensive to refer to a particular, present vagina as "pička". Funny as it is, the term "pička" started at some point to be used to describe an incredibly gorgeous and desirable woman, even by women themselves, and it can be taken as quite a compliment in certain situations where people are close. Telling someone she is a "pička" would mean "you are the girl people would pick over any other girl in a dance club" for example. It got so out of hand that people are using the term "spičkati se" - "to pussy up" whenever they put effort in their appearance, even if they are guys (it's sort of like saying you "pimped yourself").

However if you call a guy a "pička", you are calling him a "pussy", the meaning is the same as in english. The term for a throphy boyfriend or partner, or a romantically sucessfull, attractive or handsome guy is "jebač" - "fucker", implying not only is he getting laid, but is also good at it so he should be adimred by other guys not envied. A girl or woman could describe a love interest or a partner in a relationship revolving around sex as her "jebač" to her frinds (not in front of him, as he wouldn't call a girl his "pička" in front of her without makin it clear form his tone that it is meant as a compliment). This is taken so far that anything well done or quality made is refered to as "jebački" - "done/made lika a fucker would, or like a fucker deserves". On the other hand, a guy that is primarily rich, wealthy is reffered to as a "mudonja" - "guy with big balls" as he is assumed to have a large "sack" (of money). "Imati muda", "To have balls" however, still means to be brave, "to have the guts", as "mudonja" has a pejorative and disdainfull maning attached to it.

"Pizda", however, is a sinonym for "pička" that is considerd slimy and disgusting, and refering to any woman as "pizda" in any situation whatsoever is simply unthinkable. Women can refer to their own sex organs as "pizda" but it is ment to show disdain and provoke unease. Guys however get called a "pizda" often, and it means they are gullible, naive or bitchy. It can be used in "Odi u tri pizde materine", the one about going into 3 of your mothers' pussies. It is also used in the ever popular curse: "Pizda ti se ogadila" which means: "May you become disgusted with pussy". Also used as a part of a phrase "StrmoPIZDITI se" which means to "tumble accidentally down the stairs/off a steep cliff" implying you will end up in "three mothers pussies" (i.a. meet your maker in an embarassing and umpleasant fashion)"

A popular "stealth" blasphemy having ot do with sex is "Svaka ti dala". It is a form of "thank you" which means: "May every (girl) put out for you", pronounced with the same pious expression and earnest thankfullness as "God bless you mercy". It's a way of saying you really appriciate what someone has done for you, with blasphemy on the side. Added bonus is if you say it to a straight girl.

Scatoloical ones abound in these parts as well. A very nice one that is used when someone is faking knowledge about someting "Vrit si bil i govno znaš" - "You've been up the ass, and you know shit!". "Govnu brat" - "Brother to a turd" is an implication that someone or something is in fact piece of shit himself/itself, just not worth paying attention to. "Nije govno nego se pas posra" would literally mean "It's not a turd it's just dogshit" and fully translate as "Ah, I see, so you're not in fact bullshiting me, youre taking a dump!". "Đubre", pronounced (Jubreh, with an r like Dracula would pronounce it) meaning "Manure", is the default negative descriptor for any malicious or "bad" person, and can be used in a variation af the colourfull phrase "Rasulo ga kao đubre po nikšićkom drumu" - "He's got himself thrown all over the place like manure all over the road in Nikšić", which is a colurfull way of sayin somebody really beat somebody at something (like a bar fight, or a football match).

So that's all for now, not so many bizzare ones, but kind of giving you the basics, and for the end the fun way make an instant clusterfuck:

"Jebo te Bog te jebo da te jebo! (.. te Bog da te jebo dabogda! repeat ad nauseum)". Basicaly untranslatable but meaning "May God fuck you, may He fuck you, God - that's who, may he fuck you, and may God allow God to fuck you, by God....." I'ts meant to sugest a surge of rage and loss for words. Sort of like an agressive mantra :D

Also fun one I just remembered: "Jebo te Bog na današnji dan!" - "May God fuck you on this very day!" implying the monumental historical ocassion of the impending fuck you will recieve from God which will put this day into the calendar to be further on reffered to as "the day God really fucked that guy".

hope you enjoyed it, Luka

Oh, yes, just remembered one more phrase, not sure about it being Serbian, but Croatian it deffinitely is:

"Odjeb" is a noun which somehow came to be, and it means "a fuckoff". As in, if you're using any phrase to put some down, to refuse someone you're giving him a "fuckoff", or you're getting one. If, say, they refuse your job application, if they hang the phon up on you, if a potential partner rebukes your proposal, if the bank refuses ou credit. There is a popular rap song called "Odjeb je lansiran" which means "A fuckoff has been launched" which lists the nuber of things/people the guys are sending their fondest "fuck you's" to.

"Odjebi!" would be the same thing in verb form, imperative, a command meaning "Fuck off!" Where it takes a turn for the bizzare is the phrase "Odjebi u skokovima!" which is ment to be nonsensical and literally translates as "Fuck off while hopping (in a direction away from here)!".

"The King's Arms Tavern: Cream of Peanut Soup" or "There's no fucking way George Washington ate this shit"

2010-05-15T19:15:00.000-04:00

I was researching Williamsburg at work (colonial, not Brooklyn) and it turns out that the historic taverns' websites actually supply some recipes - "authentic" "colonial" "historic" recipes, that include such ingredients as Tabasco sauce, canned almond paste, liquid smoke, and potato flakes. Obviously I had to try one of these recipes. I decided to go for the King's Arms Tavern's recipe for Cream of Peanut Soup. Why? Because I already had all the ingredients, and also because what the fuck kind of weirdo soup is that?? The recipe is here. I halved it, because who needs 10-12 servings of that shit?

Cream of Peanut Soup

The recipe calls for all purpose flour, but I only had whole wheat. It also called for light cream, but I had some heavy cream, so I just used a smaller portion of that. Anyway, chop up the celery (yuck). Chop up the onion (cry). Saute it in a couple tablespoons of butter.

Yummy smells. Add the flour and the chicken stock, boil it up, then pull out the IMMERSION BLENDER YAY! My favorite kitchen toy.

Then add the peanut butter and the cream and... that's when it got weird. The peanut butter didn't really melt into the soup - probably because PEANUT BUTTER IS NOT MEANT TO BE SOUP! I used the blender again to smooth it out. Then I tentatively poured it into a bowl. It smelled like boiled peanuts, but not in a good way.

So how did it taste? Well... it tasted like liquid peanuts. It was kind of weird. I love peanut butter and I cook all kinds of things with peanut butter, but damn, this was weird. I ended up dipping graham crackers in it, and that was pretty good. The recipe didn't call for salt and pepper, which I also thought was strange. I put salt and pepper on everything. Like, I salt and pepper my toothpaste. (No, not really. Dummy.) Maybe I should have seasoned it a bit. Or maybe I should have put marshmallows in it. Not sure.

"Arrested Development vs 30 Rock" or "...but it's Jon Hamm"

2010-05-14T20:36:00.003-04:00

Last night on 30 Rock, Liz Lemon discovered that her handsome, dumb ex-boyfriend, played by Jon Hamm, lost both his hands to idiotic carelessness and had them temporarily replaced with hooks. As far as things to rip off, Arrested Development ranks pretty high on that list, but I gotta say, you're never going to do it better than they did. And, of course, Jon Hamm with two hooks was no match for Buster Bluth with one.

On the other hand (or hook), Jon Hamm is very handsome, so this one's probably a wash. 30 Rock also gets points for referencing Lucretia Mott in last week's episode. I'll call it a draw for now.

Also, this guy thinks Jon Hamm looks like President Franklin Pierce. I can kind of see it. Now if I ever read anything about President Pierce in the future, he will be played (in my head) by Jon Hamm. Thank you, LA Times Blog Person.

"Self Assessment" or "Last thing from class, I swear!"

2010-05-13T21:48:00.001-04:00

Turns out I had to also write a self assessment to go along with my final paper. I'm so burnt out, I'm not sure if it makes any sense whatsoever. I'm not even sure I really wrote it, so much as just closed my eyes and started typing. Ahh, whatevs, here it is, after the jump.

No one is a harsher critic than I am, especially when it comes to my own writing. In fact, I do not think I am doing myself any favors by writing a self-assessment. That being said, I feel that I was successful in accomplishing what I set out to in my biography of Candace Wheeler. While I did not make any major attempts to capture her personality, and I decided to leave out the one instance of casual racism in her autobiography (when she lamented the way that American beauty had been diluted by the ugly Irish and German immigrants, and remarked how glad she was that the new immigrants were the more attractive Italians), I do think that I was able to capture the arc of her life story and gave due credit to her work and her place in history. I am also quite proud of myself for not letting her previous biographers sway my opinion of her work: I thought that I was going to be profiling an artist, but what I found was more of a patron of the arts and a supporter of women searching for a place for themselves in the working world.

When I initially chose her as a subject, my goals were much loftier than what they were when I actually began to write my paper: I wanted to examine the history of women’s craft work and the “internal female economy” alluded to by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich in A Midwife’s Tale, and how Candace Wheeler’s Society of Decorative Art fit into a larger story of women selling homemade objects. That paper, however, probably would have been about fifty pages long, and would have pushed Wheeler out of the foreground. For some reason, when I started, I had it in my head that the assigned length was thirty pages, and not twenty, and I did not think a profile of an obscure interior decorator would be enough to fill such a long paper. I was pleasantly surprised to learn, upon beginning my research into Mrs. Wheeler’s life, that her story was much longer and more interesting and varied than I had expected, and even a basic overview of her life would fill twenty pages easily. As a result, I feel that the weakest part of my paper is the fact that I had to narrow my focus. I wish I could have talked more about the craft fairs, like the one held by the Sanitary in 1864, and more about the women who worked with Wheeler. I also would have liked to have spent more time on the fun periods of Wheeler’s life, like the years at Nestledown, her travels in Europe, or her life at the artists’ retreat she established in the 1880s. An account of the historical cameos from her life alone would have filled 20 pages, and I am disappointed that I had to leave most of them out. However, within the narrower scope of the paper, I feel that I covered everything that I needed to, and did proper justice to Candace Wheeler and her place in history.

As far as the paper-writing checklist goes, there are two points that stand out to me. The first is the part about completing one thought before moving on to another, and making sure that the paper does not revisit earlier points. Mrs. Wheeler was a great help to me for the first part of that advice, as her life progressed through several distinct stages. I was a bit concerned, though, that I would repeat my thesis too many times: that Mrs. Wheeler expanded the ways in which middle class women could earn money. I hope that I was able to walk the line of reinforcing my position without simply repeating it. The other point on the checklist that catches my eye is the reminder to make smooth transitions between paragraphs. That is my weakest writing skill. I hope that my transitions worked in the paper. I think they did. Although I don’t think this one is going to be very good.

My favorite part of the research process was also the part I dreaded the most: Candace Wheeler’s autobiography, Yesterdays in a Busy Life. Once I got into it, and got to know her, I really enjoyed hearing this voice from the past. There were entire sections of the book that consisted of little more than name dropping, but that was part of the fun. The only quibble I had was that she never had anything bad to say about anybody (except for George Eliot, funnily enough) and never even hinted at hard times. For that reason, I was incredibly grateful to her two biographers, who were able to dig up some of the darker moments in Wheeler’s life. Yesterdays in a Busy Life ended with Wheeler missing her late husband, enjoying her retirement in Georgia, and reflecting on how far women had come in the working world. Mary Warner Blanchard, thankfully, discussed Wheeler’s struggle late in life to remain relevant and pay her bills. I otherwise would never have known. Wheeler also made her trips to Europe sound like a dream; Amelia Peck showed that her tours through Germany, Italy, and Switzerland were partially an attempt to allay her depressed husband’s financial troubles. The research process was pretty painless, as I actually enjoyed the materials I had to work with.

All in all, I am proud and relieved that I successfully finished this research project. I have not written a research paper in at least two years, and it has probably been at least three years since I have written one more than seven pages long. I was extremely nervous about writing it, and I was convinced that I would write the whole thing only to discover that I only had six pages worth of material. This is also my first attempt at graduate-level research writing, so that extra bit of pressure was always in the back of my mind. No matter what, I am happy with what I learned and what I accomplished this semester, and I enjoyed spending the past few weeks with Candace Wheeler.

"Candace Wheeler Biography" or "The bitch is done"

2010-05-11T19:51:00.000-04:00

Today I finally finished my big research paper on Candace Wheeler. Yes, I wrote most of it today, yes the day it was due. So what. I'm a master procrastinator. Of course, when I signed into my University account to submit it a few minutes ago, I saw that my professor had given us an extension until Friday morning, but whatever, I submitted it anyway, because I know I'm too lazy to do any more work on it during the week. I just hope it makes some kind of sense. Anyway, here it is. No citations and no formatting, because it's almost 20 pages long. And now I can go back to being stupid and watching True Blood and reading for pleasure without having attacks of guilt. Hooray for that! Goodbye, masters level history class! It was fun while it lasted.

Candace Wheeler

    Published in 1898, the book What Women Can Earn opens by asserting that “nearly every trade and profession is open” to women in search of employment. The book is intended as a guide for women either in the workforce or in need of a trade, and lists such varied categories of occupation as dressmakers, clerks and operators, journalism, law, dentistry, goldfish farming, piano playing, telephone girls, factory girls, authorship, and, of course, “household science.”   The book is filled with advisories and testimonials from women and men from each field, describing the work, the training required, and the pay to be expected for each position. The section titled “Industrial Arts: Art Designing a Trade” is authored by interior decorator and founder of the Society of Decorative Art in New York, Mrs. Candace Wheeler. She writes, “This is the point I wish to make: That even without really artistic expression a designer who has thoroughly mastered the technical difficulties of his particular line of manufacture – and there are many special lines – can secure regular employment. Technical ability alone is worth a salary, and if united with artistic ability it is proportionately valuable.”
    After the Civil War, women across the United States faced an uncertain future: the war had wiped out untold numbers of husbands, fathers, brothers, and uncles who would have been the primary means of support for their female relatives. These women were now widowed and abandoned, and had to find new ways to support themselves. The three most common professions for women during the nineteenth century were secretary, teacher, and nurse.   Outside of those old standbys, opportunities for women to make a respectable living were few and far between. With a generation of American women forced to fend for themselves, new opportunities needed to be created.
    In 1877, Candace Wheeler founded the New York Society of Decorative Art, a combination school, workshop, exhibition gallery, and sales outlet.   Many women had grown up with the practice of needlepoint and other craft work, and she believed that, if properly trained, this work was good enough for sale, and not as an act of charity. As the New York Times wrote about the Society in May of 1880, “Art… is a commodity bringing bread and butter to men and women, and since there are certain things in art which woman can do better than man, would it not be a wise thing, a most humane one, if a school of instruction could be founded where that delicacy of manipulation which women possess could be made to express itself more wisely, and, therefore, become more profitable?”   Candace Wheeler helped to open a new field, wherein women could profit from the skills they had grown up with and make their own living within a traditional field of women’s expertise.   Through the Arts and Crafts Movement, their art was legitimized and won prizes not just locally but globally as well. The quaint home crafts of women’s work became a serious trade that earned women real money during a time when opportunities for respectable employment were few.

    Wheeler herself had grown up in a household that demanded handcraft. She was born in 1827 in the Upstate New York settlement of Delhi, about twenty miles south of Oneonta. In addition to the cheese and butter-making that would naturally accompany life on a dairy farm, the family also practiced candle-making, smoking and curing meats, making sausages, they pickled and preserved fruits and vegetables of all kinds, and spun and wove their own cloth. Her mother, Lucy Dunham Thurber, was a woman of the kind who would be approaching extinction by the late nineteenth century, assisting her husband in maintaining the farm and producing hats for his hat shop.   Candace repeatedly asserted in her autobiography, Yesterdays in a Busy Life, that their family lived behind the times; one hundred years behind the times, to be exact.   She called her childhood “puritan,” an apt descriptor and a direct result of her father’s extremism.   Her father, Abner Thurber, was a dedicated preacher and abolitionist, so much so that their family refused such staples as cotton or white sugar, as they were the products of Southern slave labor. Instead, the family grew flax to spin and weave their own linens, and they manufactured their own maple sugar.   From the perspective of her later years, Wheeler claimed that making maple sugar was a fun activity, and she fondly recalled moonlit April nights drizzling boiling maple over the frozen snow.
The workload at the Wheeler home was grueling, though, and the environment was strict; even from the starry-eyed distance of her old age, she recalled tortured dreams of religious retribution, longing for non-religious reading materials, and being called “the nigger queen” by classmates for her father’s kindnesses toward fugitive slaves.   (Their house was a stop on the Underground Railroad. ) In her childhood she was restricted to reading the Bible and The Pilgrim’s Progress; she spent her final two days reciting poems, without ever repeating one.   As a young girl she was restricted to home-spun flax linen; as an adult she made a career of fine fabrics.
    Candace learned the value of beauty from a young age. Her first memory, in fact, was of her mother telling her father that she was “a pretty thing.”   She stole glimpses into a mirror at every opportunity afterwards, despite the sin of vanity, in an attempt to discover what, exactly, her mother had been referring to. As she said herself, she was “an imaginative and intrepid child, who could bear the consequences of sin for the pleasure of sinning.”
    When she was sixteen years old, Candace’s parents allowed her to visit New York with friends of hers from the local choir. There she met her friend’s cousin, Thomas M. Wheeler, and they were married within the year. The newly married couple made their home in lower Manhattan first before moving to Brooklyn, and by the end of their first year of marriage, they had a baby girl.
Candace and Tom’s marriage spanned over fifty years, and seems to have been an altogether happy one. Not much about his character has survived to the twenty-first century, but from the few mentions of him in her autobiography, Yesterdays in a Busy Life, he seems to have been a gregarious man with a talent for getting strangers to tell him their stories. Several of her anecdotes from her travels abroad begin with her husband (“who was skillful in such processes”) getting some piece of information out of a fellow traveler.   It seems as though he was a kind, educated man, who loved her very much, and was supportive not only of her work but of the women’s movement in general. Of her being a working woman, Candace remarked to a friend that he said it was his way of making it up to her for not voting.
    Most importantly, though, it was by marrying Tom Wheeler that Candace was able to fall in with a crowd of artists and writers in and around New York. Several of their new friends had been classmates of Tom’s during his college years at Wesleyan University, among them poet John Godfrey Saxe, and painter and author Thomas Bangs Thorpe.   By the time the Wheelers moved to Jamaica, NY after the birth of their fourth child, to a cottage Candace named “Nestledown,” they had become so entrenched in New York’s artistic society that poets and painters of all stripes would wander out to their home to spend the weekend. Weekends at Nestledown would sprawl out over three or four days, and offer cameo appearances from members of the Hudson River School, the Pre-Raphaelites, and New York’s Tenth Street Studios. Her friend George Henry Hall, a Pre-Raphaelite painter known for his still lifes, would become her painting teacher in the early 1860s.
Candace Wheeler depicts the early years of her marriage as a whirl of art and artists, and she reveled in it. She was so consumed in her personal life that she was not even affected much at all by the Civil War, a fact she puzzled over later in life.   The only time she really came face to face with the reality of the time period was during the New York Draft Riots of 1863, which she described as “a human thunder-storm.”   Her husband, Tom, was away in Washington, and she was in Manhattan with only her two youngest children and her black servant, Joe. Fearing that the mob would come for Joe, they fled the city for Nestledown, where she hid him and some of his friends overnight. They armed themselves and hunkered down, prepared for a mob that never came.   It was not until the war was over, and the economic recession that began in 1873, that the Civil War’s effects would be felt in Candace’s life.
After the war ended, Tom and Candace Wheeler took two extended trips to Europe. The first appears to have been mostly for pleasure, but the second trip, in the early 1870s, was probably because Tom Wheeler was out of work and facing personal depression, and the cost of living in Europe was lower than in the United States.   For their first trip, their two middle children, James and Dora, were mostly left in boarding schools in Germany during their travels, but the couple brought their eldest, twenty-one year old Cannie, and their youngest, four year old Dunham, along with them as they traveled throughout the art world of Germany, Italy, and Switzerland.   At one point in their second round of travels, the Wheelers had the occasion to meet Mr. and Mrs. Lewes (George Eliot), whom they found to be pleasant, but self-absorbed and unsympathetic. Wheeler’s daughter Dora found herself drawn into a lengthy conversation with Mrs. Lewes, leaving her afterwards to remark that she felt “like a turned out glove.” “I did not get much from her,” Dora told her family later, “in the way of intellectual sensation, but she got lots from me in the way of domestic experiences. I wonder what she wanted to do with them?”
“It is just one of the ways in which authors get their facts,” her father explained.
Before embarking on their second extended tour in 1871, the family auctioned off all of their possessions at Nestledown, further indication that the second trip was more for necessity than recreation.   When they returned in June 1873, they sold their Manhattan home, began renting an apartment at 244 Lexington Avenue, and Tom went to work for Candace’s brother.   The years following their return from Europe were also marked by the ill health of their eldest daughter, Cannie. By that time she was married and had already had two children, and was suffering from kidney failure. She died on June 7, 1876. The loss of her daughter, Candace said, “changed my whole attitude toward life and taught me its duties, not only to those I loved, but to all who needed help and comfort.”

    In 1876, after her daughter’s death, Wheeler visited the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, where she saw needlework from London’s Kensington School of Art Needlework, which was established “to aid economically deprived gentlewomen.”   The Kensington School functioned as a combination school, workshop, exhibition gallery, and sales outlet, where women could both learn the craft of needlework and potentially sell their wares.   Although she was not altogether impressed by the embroideries on display, which she called “very simple and almost inadequate,” Wheeler was struck by the prospect of a woman-owned business that existed to benefit other women.   Specifically, she was impressed that such an organization would exist to benefit the kind of women she knew: middle class, educated women, who may have desperately needed money, but were “ashamed to beg & untrained to work.”   She rejected the term used by the Kensington School: “decayed gentlewomen,” but was so motivated that she immediately wrote up a circular to send to her friends in New York on her idea for an American answer to the Kensington School.   Thus inspired, Wheeler founded the New York Society of Decorative Art.
    The Society of Decorative Art gave a face to a network of amateur female artists that already existed. Women of the growing middle class often belonged to women’s organizations, church auxiliaries, neighborhood clubs, and other groups that regularly hosted programs in arts and crafts.   And, of course, evidence of a female economy based on local trade and sale of home crafted goods persisted in small towns in America for generations before.   Instead of trading their work amongst friends and neighbors, or treating it simply as a distracting hobby, women’s crafts were treated as serious works of art, with real, monetary, practical value.     The Society of Decorative Art offered “the beginning of self help among educated women.” By selling painted china or little works of embroidery, women were able to earn their own wages and broaden their lives without making themselves societal outcasts, for the work they were doing remained appropriate, and did not compromise their femininity.
Against the advice of friends and mutual acquaintances, Wheeler contacted Mrs. David (Caroline Lamson) Lane, one of the chief organizers of the Metropolitan Fair for the Sanitary Commission in New York. “Don’t call Mrs. David Lane,” a friend begged Wheeler, “She will make it a success, but she will absorb it!”   The United States Sanitary Commission was a women-run organization dedicated to raising funds and materials to aid Northern soldiers, chiefly by holding fund-raising fairs. The fairs were mainly crafts fairs, where women sold their handiwork and food for charity: likely models for the Society of Decorative Arts and, later, the Women’s Exchange. The largest of these fairs was held in New York City: the Metropolitan Fair, which ran for about a month in April of 1864 at Seventeenth Street and Sixth Avenue, with an auxiliary building at Union Square and Seventeenth Street. The Metropolitan Fair raised over $1.3 million. As the first vice president of the fair, Mrs. Lane was among the women publicly lauded for the great success, and one of two of its leaders Wheeler would recruit to become founding officers at the Society of Decorative Art.
Wheeler decided to make Lane the president of the Society and herself its secretary, so that she could devote her time to establishing sister societies in other cities around the country. Today, Mrs. Lane would be considered brilliant at public relations. Thanks to her, the Society lined up a board of managers that included “all the great names in New York,” including Mrs. J. J. Astor and Mrs. William Cullen Bryant.   Mrs. Lane was also the one who brought in Mrs. George (Elizabeth Bacon) Custer. Mrs. Lane heard that General Custer’s widow had come to New York in search of work because the pension she was receiving after her husband’s untimely death at Little Bighorn was too small for her to live on. Wheeler had objections to the potential new hire initially, but Lane knew how valuable her name would be for the organization. Wheeler gave in and hired her as a secretary, and their working relationship grew “into an intimacy of love and appreciation that has been the treasured solace of years.”
What exactly possessed Candace Wheeler to take on such an enormous project is not immediately clear. She was always a fairly charitable woman in her personal life (she confessed to often buying friends’ work just to support them, and allowed friends and family to stay in her homes for extended periods of time) but she makes no mention of active participation in any major organizations prior to her involvement in the ones she helped create. In Candace Wheeler: The Art and Enterprise of American Design, 1875-1900, Amelia Peck states that Wheeler worked for the Sanitary, but in her autobiography, Wheeler only vaguely says that everyone contributed to the Sanitary; she was likely not a major contributor to the organization.   She mentions that the Kensington School aided women in the same predicaments that she saw around her, but she names no one in particular that she knew who had fallen into “untoward circumstances.”   She was not a wealthy woman with charitable money to burn. By founding the Society of Decorative Art, it appears she was just responding to her own caretaker nature, her belief in the duty of self-help, and the tenor of the times.
    The historical moment in which Candace Wheeler decided to take up this task was perhaps the most fortuitous factor of all, for she had two artistic movements working in her favor: the aesthetic movement and the Arts and Crafts movement. Candace Wheeler is most associated with America’s Arts and Crafts movement. Originating in England by men like John Ruskin and William Morris, the movement was a rejection of the industrialization and mass production of art.   Instead, artists worked to promote handmade goods. The earliest generation of Arts and Crafts women, of which Candace Wheeler was the most prominent member, “believed that art could proactively generate change.”   They worked to promote the value of and demand for Arts and Crafts objects, as they were often made by women. With the ensuing expansion of demand came the expansion of production and the creation of jobs that were not only respectable and appropriate for a woman, but also offered the potential of a viable career.
With the aesthetic movement, American fashion and culture began to reject the aggressive machismo that characterized the first half of the nineteenth century in favor of a new appreciation for art and beauty in daily life after the turmoil of the Civil War. Traditional masculinity became more fluid, providing a climate that would embrace men like Oscar Wilde, who flaunted unorthodox dress and homoeroticism. The soldier/hero model was suppressed after the nation watched 620,000 of their men die on the battlefield. Americans did not want aggressive art in their homes; the painted flowers and embroideries of the kind made available at the Society of Decorative Art were very attractive.
    Mary Warner Blanchard calls Candace Wheeler the ultimate aesthetic woman and offers her as an American female parallel to Oscar Wilde.   She cites her commitment to beauty in daily life as evidence, but Wheeler was more a patron of the arts than an artist herself. Despite her occasionally prize-winning designs, her daily work was as a supervisor, and her most lasting legacy was as the founder of organizations that enabled other women to become artists, including her daughter, Dora. Wheeler greatly enjoyed the artistic personalities with which she surrounded herself, but she does not seem to have particularly been one of them. She was not famous for unorthodox dress or experimentations with gender norms, like Oscar Wilde, or for personal eccentricities, like those displayed by her Brooklyn neighbor, the unnamed “poetess” who wore bloomers and cropped hair and who traveled daily to the Bronx to visit Edgar Allen Poe on his death bed.   Nor was she a famous wit, like her longtime friend Mark Twain. Perhaps if she had been a famous or notorious personality and artist, her name would have achieved more lasting recognition. Candace Wheeler worked and moved within the aesthetic movement, but she was not a definer of it.
She is not even a great example of the aesthetic movement, especially considering Blanchard’s main argument in her work, Oscar Wilde’s America: Counterculture in the Gilded Age: that the movement’s rejection of Civil War soldier/hero bravado made way for a reexamination of gender norms.   Wheeler made no contest to gender norms. In fact, her work was to find women employment within gender norms, and the application of those gender norms in the workplace. Some men even viewed organizations such as hers as a way to keep women in their place, rather than “so unsex themselves as to seek to engage in men’s affairs.”   The prime example of gender play raised by Blanchard in Wheeler’s art is Wheeler’s interest in establishing an Indian squaw and corn as new symbols for America: both positioned as feminine, peaceful representations of order and discipline, a contrast to the eagles and soldiers and aggression of other national symbols.   While this places her work within the aesthetic movement, it does not make her, as a woman, the female parallel of Oscar Wilde. If anything, she was solidly moving within expectations of her as a female artist to create something soft and peaceful. The one example of gender bending in Wheeler’s home in Blanchard’s book is a photo of Mark Twain dancing around in a skirt with his daughter while visiting Wheeler’s Bear and Fox Inn at Onteora in 1890.   A friend being in silly in one’s home while on vacation does not a gender-bender make.

The question of the day for the women who came to the Society was not just “What do you do?” It was: “What do you do well?” The Society of Decorative Art and the Women’s Exchange, a salesroom founded by Wheeler and Mrs. William Choate in 1878, where women could sell any type of product they cared to, made room for women in need wherever they could.   When the question was posed to one young Southern mother, who had recently arrived in New York with three children and a husband still in search of work, the only talent she could think of was, “I can make the best chicken pies in North Carolina!” So she was hired to make chicken pies for the Women’s Exchange lunch room.
    One of the Society’s immediate concerns was that, as the works were all made by women, the patrons would no doubt be expecting lower prices. As it was written in the New York Times in June of 1877, “If it be understood that the sales-room is for the work of women only, people will enter it with the fixed determination to pay lower prices for what they buy.”   For a short time, the Society of Decorative Art decided to accept works by men as well in order to prevent the depreciation of the Society’s works’ value as a result of the gender gap: the works of both men and women would be available and the contributors would remain anonymous so that “men’s prices” could be charged for all available merchandise. This strategy did not last long, though, and the Society’s first annual report was clear in its objective to exhibit and sell women’s work.
    The Society did employ men, however, most usually as instructors in the school’s classes and as judges of work that had been submitted for sale.   Women were encouraged to send in their work, and, if it was deemed salable by the Society’s judges, it would be displayed for three months. Artists were notified within a week if their work was deemed worthy of display. If the work sold, the Society would collect ten percent of the price; if it did not sell, the work was returned to the artist at her expense.
Among the teachers hired for the school was Louis C. Tiffany, whose father founded Tiffany and Company, the jewelry company, and who would ultimately achieve his most lasting fame for his stained-glass lamps.   In 1879, frustrated with his teaching post at the Society, Tiffany resigned, and invited Wheeler to join him in creating a professional decorating firm, which would become (after several incarnations, including the Louis C. Tiffany Co. and Tiffany & Wheeler,) Louis C. Tiffany and Company Associated Artists.   The firm was a partnership between four artists who each controlled their own separate departments: Louis C. Tiffany was in charge of glass, Lockwood de Forest had carvings and wood decoration, Samuel Colman was the color man, and Wheeler’s field was, of course, textiles and embroideries.   All three of these men had been members of the “Committee on Design,” the judging panel for incoming works to the Society of Decorative Art.   The firm was most famous for its use of color and for its devotion to American themes and materials. Native American flora was a recurring motif. Patterns of ivy, lilies, pinecones, and thistle dominated the work, especially that of Wheeler.
Candace Wheeler’s role was mainly as the director of the workshop that would produce the embroideries; Tiffany considered her expertise to be more in stitching techniques than in design.   Although she is credited with several important designs, she was more often the person overseeing the construction of others’ work, primarily made from Tiffany’s designs.   Of course, that is not to say that Wheeler’s designs were not successful. For example, design competitions were common, and in 1881 Candace Wheeler and three of her female colleagues in the embroidery department of Associated Artists entered a competition for wallpaper design. The four women took all four of the prizes.   Wheeler won first prize for her honeybee-patterned wallpaper, earning her $1000 in prize money.
    Under the leadership of Tiffany, his Associated Artists gained several notable commissions. Among them, the drop curtain for the Madison Square Theater, rooms in the Seventh Regiment Armory on Park Avenue (with architectural detailing by Stanford White), the Union League Club of New York, the homes of Mark Twain and Cornelius Vanderbilt II, and the privilege of redecorating the White House after President James A. Garfield’s assassination.   Chester A. Arthur refused to move into the Presidential home after the tragedy until it had been renovated and redecorated, and Associated Artists accepted the challenge.
    Associated Artists, in its original incarnation, dissolved in 1883. Samuel Colman had been working mostly on his own, “stepping in as an ‘associate’ only when Tiffany asked him to.”   Lockwood de Forest left New York for India on his honeymoon in 1880, where he opened his own workshop from which he would send Tiffany decorative items until he returned in November 1882. After his return, he continued his work with the firm largely from a distance.   This left only Tiffany and Wheeler as the firm’s full time principles, and by 1883, Candace Wheeler was ready to set out on her own.   That same year, Wheeler went on to establish her own firm, also called Associated Artists. This new Associated Artists was more directly interested in moving commercial art in a direction that would benefit women. As Amelia Peck wrote, “Designing textiles and encouraging women in their quest to become self-supporting professional designers and artists would be the two most important activities of Associated Artists.”   The firm would find a fair amount of success and win numerous awards; its most visible commission would be to decorate the Woman’s Building for the Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago.
    Also during this time, Wheeler constructed an artists’ retreat in the country, called the Onteora Club, in upstate New York, near Tannersville.   Wheeler laid out the roads, and several houses were built (with names like “Pennyroyal,” “Lotus Land,” “Wild Muir,” and “Outlook”).   Initially the property was meant to be a family retreat, but after several lonely summers in the Catskills, Candace and her sister-in-law, desperate for more company, proposed to their husbands that they expand in order to accommodate visiting friends. The men agreed, and purchased more land, on which Candace’s son, Dunham Wheeler, by then an architect, constructed more homes under the name The Catskill Mountain Camp and Cottage Company.   Within a decade, the retreat expanded beyond Candace’s comfort, and the community grew too large for her to control who, exactly, was visiting.   The Onteora Club housed such authors and artists as Mariana Van Rensselaer, Richard Watson Gilder, Mary Mapes Dodge, John Burroughs, and the Wheelers’ longtime friend, Mark Twain.   The homes were decorated rustically, in typical Arts and Crafts style, of course.

    Although the American Arts and Crafts movement was dominated by women in the beginning, it is historically associated with men. Its most famous figures were Louis Comfort Tiffany, Gustav Stickley, who popularized Craftsman-style architecture, and Frank Lloyd Wright, the leader of the “Prairie School.”   These men’s careers persisted into the twentieth century, and, in bringing the movement towards architecture, steered it away from its roots in homespun domestic objects. The aesthetic movement gradually came to a close at the turn of the century, after Oscar Wilde was convicted of “gross indecency” in London in 1985, and American publications denounced his philosophy of art-for-art’s-sake.   The rise of Theodore Roosevelt, with his celebration of battlefield bravado and virile American manliness, also contributed to a social shift toward a more masculine culture.   By the close of the nineteenth century, Candace Wheeler was a relic, and her work was passé.
    Subscribers to her Society of Decorative Art in New York were dwindling in 1898. Department stores were underselling its works, and designs were being stolen by mass-market manufacturers; its doors were shuttered in 1905.   Wheeler’s Associated Artists continued until 1907. Candace’s husband, Tom, died in 1895 at seventy-seven years old, and Candace continued to be listed as the firm’s president until 1900, when her son Dunham took over.   While her former associate Louis Comfort Tiffany entered the twentieth century famous, wealthy, and successful, Candace Wheeler faced the new era broke and struggling to find work.   Between 1900 and her death in 1923, Wheeler published several books, most of them instructional and related to her field, such as How To Make Rugs (1902), but also her autobiography in 1918, and the fictional Doubledarling and the Dream Spinner (1905), a fairy tale about a Victorian child whose father gave her a “dream machine” that told her stories while she slept.   The writing barely covered her expenses, though; manuscripts were turned down by publishers, and she complained about how little profit she saw from the work.   For years she wrote desperate letters to her niece, Candace Stevenson, offering her partnership, asking for assistance selling her work, and offering to be paid only half or even a third of the profits.   “We may shrivel up and die for want of help,” she wrote her niece melodramatically, complaining about the lack of servants in her home. “$75 just now would be a sort of temporary barrier between me and starvation,” wrote the woman who glorified her rustic childhood.   Candace Wheeler spent her final years in Georgia with her daughter, Dora, at a home she dubbed “Wintergreen.” Her mind was already fading by 1908, but she spent her final two days reciting poetry, until she passed away on August 5, 1923, at ninety-six years old.
    Candace Wheeler’s daughter and long-time artistic associate, Dora Wheeler Keith, donated twenty-seven pieces of her mother’s textiles to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1928, when most of the pieces were already fifty years old and “hopelessly old fashioned.”   They were accepted by the curator of decorative arts, even though Wheeler had already slipped into obscurity five years after her death, because the Museum’s charter stated a goal of encouraging “the application of arts to manufacture.”   Though mentioned in an article in the Museum’s Bulletin in May 1928, not a single piece of Wheeler’s work was displayed until 1970, in an exhibition titled “19th Century America.” Several of her textiles were later displayed in the 1986 exhibition “In Pursuit of Beauty: Americans and the Aesthetic Movement,” but she did not receive a full exhibition until 2001, with Amelia Peck’s exhibition, “Candace Wheeler: The Art and Enterprise of American Design, 1875-1900.”
    That Wheeler’s work as an artist has fallen into obscurity is not surprising; it is surprising that her work as an entrepreneur and in encouraging women to pursue their own careers in the art world has been largely forgotten. Candace Wheeler was a successful artist, but she was also a groundbreaker who believed that there was a place for women’s work in the world, and that, if properly trained, women could survive on their talent, and not on charity. The Society of Decorative Art and the Women’s Exchange provided remunerative work that was socially acceptable for middle class ladies, even though the stigma of women at work remained strong, even within Wheeler’s progressive circle. During a luncheon at her home one day, attended by a dozen successful women from a variety of fields, Wheeler’s old friend Mrs. Custer looked around the room and exclaimed, “Why, we are all working women; not a lady among us!”   Wheeler was a lady, but she was also a working woman, an artist, and an entrepreneur, and thanks to her, hundreds of “decayed gentlewomen” found a new life in the decorative arts.

2010-05-09T11:04:00.002-04:00

"Kohls sucks" or "Fuck you, lady"

2010-05-08T17:09:00.003-04:00

I attempted to go clothes shopping at Kohl's today because someone at work gave me a 15% off Friends and Family coupon to use. First of all, the selection sucked and nothing fit, and so I only got two pairs of pants for work. I'm sure I could have found more, but I was just getting really discouraged wandering around there feeling like they did not want me as a customer and couldn't deal with it. The underwear section was actually much better, so I ended getting a bunch of bras and some lingerie. I brought my things up to the register, and as this lady was ringing up my purchases, she started muttering to herself and arching her eyebrows and making these judgey faces. I couldn't believe it! I felt like saying, "Excuse me for having BOOBS, lady!" God forbid I buy lingerie. If you have some kind of moral qualms about ringing up lacy black underthings, go work in a pet store or something. Geez. I was so upset, I very nearly called her out on it, and as I was sitting in my car, I thought about calling up and asking to speak to the manager to complain or something. The thing was, when she was actually speaking to me and not herself, she was perfectly nice, so I thought maybe she was just some sort of crazy who talked to herself, and what kind of bitch would I be to get someone with a mental illness fired? And in this economy? And what would I say to a manager anyway? "She arched her eyebrows when she saw the pink polka dot bra I was buying?" So I decided to let it go and I was probably overreacting. I came home and tried the stuff on, and... I can't keep it. All it does is make me think of that lady's face? I mean, really. These things were supposed to be fun and sexy, and looking at them now just makes me feel really depressed and bad about myself. I don't want it in my house, and even though I really should be working on my paper, I think I'm going to go back there (1/2 hour away) and return the stuff. Except I can't find the receipt. God damn it. So the moral of the story is... I'm not sure what it is. But I'm never shopping at Kohl's again.

"Tales of the 19th Century" or "Paper Scraps"

2010-05-04T21:53:00.003-04:00

Nerd alert time. If you're not interested in history, click away.

My big paper on Candace Wheeler is officially due in a week, and there are some anecdotes from her life that I think are great, but I don't think I'll be able to get them into my paper, so I'll put them here.

ULYSSES S. GRANT AND JULIA GRANT

Okay, so Julia Grant, President Grant's wife, was a total ditz, and he was a notorious alcoholic. They must have been quite a pair. Actually, when Lincoln was assassinated, Grant was supposed to be assassinated also, but Julia had a sort of airhead premonition and as a result they managed to get away in time to avoid the plot against him. Someone should really write a historical slapstick of the alcoholic and the ditz trying to escape the assassins. Like, Julia and Ulysses Go To White Castle or something. Anyway, that's not the story related to Candace Wheeler.

The Wheelers were staying in Washington DC after the Civil War and the Grants happened to be down the hall, and Candace would see Mrs. Grant out in the hallway brushing her hair and chatting with the maid (totally not cool). Then later Candace overheard some lady lecturing Julia over how she should be dressing as the wife of General Grant, and told her she should be wearing India shawls (whatever they were) and of course Julia was like, "Ooo, what's that?" Then two years later the Wheelers were invited to tea by the Grants around the time he was running for President. Mrs. Grant took Candace Wheeler's shawl and said, "Oh, my! Is this an India shawl?" and Wheeler was like, "Uh... yeah." And the subtext in her autobiography (she said it much nicer) was, "It's been two years and she still can't tell the difference?" But then she had a really nice thing to say about Ulysses that I'll quote here:

[Mrs. Grant] was very communicative and unconventional, and I was delighted when, a propos of the care of children, she told me that she always "made Ulyss' walk with the baby if it cried after twelve at night." He looked as if he would willingly do it, I thought, as I saw him with his arm around his eldest little boy, his chin resting upon the boy's head, as we still sat at the table after supper. ... Altogether I liked him when I could consciously separate the man from the general-in-chief who had sat furiously whittling a piece of willow at the door of his tent between giving orders for the advance to certain death of thousands of marching men, every one of them as real and living at the moment as he himself. "But he could do it!" I thought, as I looked at him, and he could also "walk the baby." It was a curious inside glimpse into the life of a man who at that moment was in the eye of the world.

MARK TWAIN.

Mr. and Mrs. Wheeler were good, longtime friends of Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Clemens, aka Mark Twain. I don't know much of anything about Mark Twain, and I don't think I've ever even read any of his books, but Candace Wheeler, in her autobiography, makes him sound like the nicest man to ever walk the earth. She says that they were just the happiest family, "all of Mr. Clemens's eccentricities and peculiarities being as delightful to his wife as to the world; while to Mr. Clemens the one perfect woman in existence was his wife, and I think he wondered every moment of his life how he came to be so fortunate as to be her husband." She tells a story of one morning when he heard his youngest daughter was sick, and so he ran up to her room to be with her, and while there overheard her asking God why he didn't love her anymore, praying, "I asked you to stop my earache, and you didn't, and I asked you to get me a goat, and you didn't, and I don't believe you care anything about me anymore!" When Twain returned from comforting his daughter, he declared to his wife, "If there is a goat in Hartford that prayer is going to be answered!" Awww! And if that doesn't make you awww, look at the epitaph he wrote for his wife's headstone after she died:

Warm summer sun, shine kindly here;
Warm summer wind, blow softly here;
Green sod above, lie light, lie light;
Good night, dear heart, good night, good night.

Awww!

GENERAL CUSTER

Okay, this I probably will put in my paper, but I thought it was interesting so I'll put it here, too. Guess who was Candace Wheeler's secretary? General Custer's widow. Apparently the pension she was receiving after her husband's death at Little Bighorn wasn't enough, and so Wheeler hired her, and they became lifelong friends.

Umm... I feel like there were a couple more, but that's all I can think of right now.

PS: I got an A on my Ida B. Wells book review. My professor's comments were very flattering. I still think it's shit.

"Mickey Graduation March" or "I earned my ears!"

2010-05-03T18:39:00.000-04:00

Which do you think is more likely to get me laid: my Disney degree or my Rutgers degree?

"I wish I was Betty Draper" or "I miss Mad Men"

2010-05-02T21:56:00.000-04:00

"To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells" or "Last book review for class"

2010-04-27T21:00:00.002-04:00

(Ugh, this was painful to write. I did not like this book.)

To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells

The best thing about Mia Bay’s biography, To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells, is the way that so many of the featured photographs of Wells show her with a hint of a smile on her face. Most photographic portraits from the nineteenth century show their subjects with a grim expression, showing little more than the fact that they were probably annoyed at having to sit still for so long. Out of the eleven pictures of Wells scattered throughout the book, nearly half of them show her with a bit of a smirk on her lips or a sparkle in her eye. It was a welcome bit of life in the midst of such a somber book. Mia Bay’s biography of Wells is a thorough, detailed, poignant, eloquent account of Wells’ impressive life and career. It effectively conveys not only her personal accomplishments but their historical contexts. It shows not only what she did, but why she did it, and why it mattered. It is an incredibly interesting book; it is just not a very intriguing one, and not a very easy one to read.

The overall tone of the book is restrained. The reader can almost see Bay clenching her fists as she writes, trying to maintain a professional air while discussing Wells’ outrage. She writes like a woman on a mission, and the whole book feels like it is leading up to something great without actually acknowledging when it has gotten there. It is as though Bay was so determined to prove Wells’ historical worthiness that she forgot to enjoy Wells’ life along the way. If Bay fell in love with her subject, it is not evident in the text. Even the happy personal moments in Wells’ life are diluted by tales of oppression and struggle. The story of Ida B. Wells’ marriage to Ferdinand Lee Barnett, for example, trickles out over the course of nearly thirty pages, buried amongst passages on white hostility, a rivalry with Booker T. Washington, slanderous newspaper articles, murders in Tennessee, and an extended conflict with Frances Willard. And all this is within a chapter titled “ ‘Although a Busy Woman, She Has Found the Time to Marry.’” Considering the way that women are constantly told that their wedding is supposed to be the most important day of their lives, it is either refreshing or frustrating that Bay managed to resist making it a major focal point. It is hard to tell if it was the happiest day in Wells’ life; Mia Bay would rather write about more serious days.

Of course, to write about the fight against Lynch Law in any way that is less than completely serious and solemn would be inappropriate and distasteful. Even when written in the most restrained, professional manner, the stories of men being beaten, burned, shot, cut to pieces, hung before a mob, and then featured in a newspaper are horrific. (As a personal aside, I used to work with a black man named Henry Smith, who was kind, soft-spoken, sweet, gentlemanly, kind of nerdy, and just plain nice. He and I were pretty friendly, and I thoroughly enjoyed his company while working an awful job. Reading the account of a man named Henry Smith die “of slow torture in the midst of smoke from his own burning flesh,” I could only think of my friend, and I had to put the book down for a while to recover. I have to commend Wells for her ability to face these acts, committed several times on people she actually knew, and for doing it gracefully and effectively. I could barely read it.) Reading the bare facts about the lynchings that occurred at the tail end of the nineteenth century is shocking and painful. One of the most effective aspects of Bay’s book is the way that she establishes America’s reaction to these despicable acts: complacency. She shows Americans of all stripes (black, white, male, female, wealthy, poor) shrugging off lynchings as the inevitable result of black men’s propensity for rape. Even more surprising was the contrast between how Wells was treated by her fellow Americans versus the treatment she received from Brits both at home and abroad. Though the book does not claim to be about the overall state of race relations post-Reconstruction, it manages to paint a vivid if not gruesome picture of life as an African-American in that time period. In that regard, Bay was right to adopt a modest tone. The facts speak for themselves, and any embellishment would have weakened the text and reduced it to hysteria.

When Ida B. Wells manages to expose how threadbare the allegations of rape were, it comes with both a wave of relief and a sting of horror. It is hard to decide which is worse: the idea that these men had committed the alleged rapes against young girls and innocent women, or that these men were so brutally tortured and killed out of pure hatred and the belief of white supremacy. Her findings were a revelation, and her courage to expose them was phenomenal. That she was able to expose the hypocrisy of the racial-sexual politics of the post-Reconstruction South while under constant threat of violent retribution, and to do it as a black woman in the 1880s, is nothing less than inspiring. She stood up to an entire culture armed only with facts. She deserves a medal.

With so many incredible things happening in To Tell The Truth Freely, it is disappointing that the book is so difficult to wade through. It is well written and tightly packed. There are no technical problems with the text. It just does not have that spark of life, like the one in Wells’ eyes in so many of her photographs. Mia Bay’s biography succeeds on almost every level: it functions as a historical biography, it does what it set out to do in establishing Ida B. Wells’ place in American history, it provides a stunning story of courage. It just does not succeed as a good read. While Mia Bay’s biography effectively conveyed the time period and the struggle that Wells faced in her career, it did not capture the smiling woman in the photographs.

"On Russell Crowe, Celebrity Crushes, and Zeitgeisty Moments" or "Why I don't care"

2010-04-26T21:10:00.002-04:00

I have a paper to write, so I have to make this fairly quick, but I feel like I have something to say, and I've been slacking on the ol' blog, so I may as well have at it.

So, today Gawker wrote a piece on Russell Crowe (titled "'I Will Kill You With My Bare Hands,' and other fun tales of Russell Crowe") and why he is an asshole. Also today, Jezebel wrote a piece on celebrity crushes being, well, crushed by revelations about the actor in question. It struck me as funny that my celebrity love of the moment was "exposed" as an asshole while the Jezebel Nation nostalgically mused and mourned over the losses of celebrity crushes from their past. So was my heart broken by the anecdotes of Russell throwing hissy fits and beating the shit out of random people and having egotistical screaming matches?

No. And why? Because I don't give two shits about Russell Crowe as a person.

That sounds callous, but it's kind of true. I don't think I've seen more than one or two interviews with him, and when I did, I found it unsettling. I don't want to know about him. I'm vaguely aware that he's married to some blond lady and I know he has at least one kid because of this unendingly adorable video I stumbled on one day, but thinking about him, like, him, I'm just, ugh, I'm not interested. He's an actor, a wealthy and successful one, and from the little about actors I've learned from working in local theaters for several years, that is so not sexy. He's a grown man playing dress up and make believe, and he's probably got a fleet of assistants and employees, and, let's face it, we can all assume he's probably an enormous douche bag. If I ever had the chance to meet him, I'd probably turn it down. I don't want to know the real him. Captain Jack Aubrey is sexy; Ben Wade is sexy; Maximus Decimus Meridius, Richie Roberts, Jim Braddock, hell, even Cal McAffrey. But not Russell Crowe. I'm not trying to say that I don't like him. Absolutely not. I enjoy the hell out of him and I love his movies and I'd have no trouble casting him in the role of any character I'm working on in my head or playing the part of an imaginary boyfriend. But he would not be the imaginary boyfriend, he'd be the one playing my imaginary boyfriend, know what I mean? So to read that he's a giant dick just made me laugh, not only because I assumed as much, but because that Russell Crowe is some weird Australian dude who means nothing to me.

I was thinking about all this after reading the Gawker piece when I came across that article on Jezebel about losing celebrity crushes and it made me wonder: do other people actually like the actors when they have their silly celebrity crushes? Because I so do not. But I guess that they must. Why else would we have this culture that is so devoted to prying open the private lives of actors? And why else would so many people eat it up with a spoon? I'm as guilty as anybody of reading gossip. I admit it: I do it. But I wonder if, when people have crushes on actors, do they really love these actors as people? I always thought that people's crushes were hollow like mine, but I'm starting to think they're not. That kind of weirds me out.

So what's my point? Well, I guess my point is that I don't care how many people Russell Crowe's punched in the face because I don't care about him. I don't know him. He's some actor guy. Just because he's captured my imagination for the moment doesn't mean that I feel any kind of devotion to him or that I feel any kind of attachment to him above and beyond the silly superficial kind that makes me want to Photoshop him into a picture with a piece of cheese.

In conclusion:

Edited to add: Now I have this weird feeling that I just insulted Russell Crowe, and I feel really bad about it. I really do have a crush on the guy, but, like, not him, know what I mean? I just don't know him. I'm sure he's lovely. That cute video of him with his kid leads me to think he's probably adorable. So... don't come find me and punch me in the face, Russell. Please.

"Oops" or "Day Off!"

2010-04-24T19:01:00.000-04:00

Um, so I haven't posted in ages. I feel kind of guilty about that, although I'm not sure why. There's probably only one or two people who read this, and I'm pretty sure they'd forgive me for my slacking. I only started this blog to keep me busy during my unemployment and distracted while my mom was sick. Both of those periods in my life are over; things are looking up and I'm feeling pretty good and have plenty of more positive things to occupy my thoughts. However, I do feel obligated to the blog, and I'd like to make a better effort to maintain this thing, even if it's only for my own personal amusement. (It always was.) It's not that I don't have things to write about. Actually, I always think of things I'd like to write about while I'm driving to work in the morning, but by the time I get home at night I've forgotten them and all I really want to do is read my book, watch last night's Craig Ferguson, and go to sleep.

Today I'm finally off, my first day off from work since last Thursday. I woke up, played on the internet, did some reading for class, ate Thai food, watched the first three episodes of True Blood (Sam is the sex, FYI, and I love Tara), and now I'm going to go back to my reading. The perfect day off after eight stressful days. I have a lot of work to get done for class, but when I get the chance of it, I hope I'll be able to post all of the stuff I've been aching to write about these past few weeks.

"Andre Leon Talley shakes a stick at an ANTM contestant while wearing wizard robes and a horn around his neck" or "GENIUS"

2010-04-16T21:33:00.000-04:00

As promised. Thank you, fourfour.

"Candace Wheeler Progress Report" or "I'm an asshole, as per usual"

2010-04-12T22:58:00.000-04:00

(This is totes professional and not at all an inappropriate progress report for turning in to my professor, right? Whatever, I go where my strengths are: general assholery.)

Candace Wheeler: An Informal Progress Report

I think I need to start with a couple of confessions: First of all, I don’t actually like biographies. I’m a fairly avid reader, yet I can only recall ever reading two biographies. The first one that comes to mind is comedian Craig Ferguson’s recent autobiography, American On Purpose, because I adore him. The other was a biography of the author Jack London, whose penchants for adventure travel, raw hamburger meat, opium, Nietzsche, socialism, and boxing made him a sort of literary combination of Bear Grylls and Kevin Kline’s character in A Fish Called Wanda. To put it simply, he was a badass. I must also confess that the nineteenth century doesn’t much appeal to me. My historical interests have always fallen more towards the Enlightenment, the Age of Discovery, witch hunts, colonial America, and the Jamestown colony in particular. So in embarking on a biography of Candace Wheeler, a nineteenth century artist and businesswoman, I find myself fairly far out of my element. If you ask me, her story is seriously lacking in ritualistic murder, religious zealotry, and cannibalism. I’m sure I could work a little cannibalism into her biography, but I’d probably fail the class.

The most difficult part of tackling this project has been the actual biography aspect of it. As I mentioned above, traditional biography is not my area. I have a tendency to focus more on the “what does it all mean” kind of analysis, and when I try to steer myself more towards passport-type details (birth, family, location, who, what, where, when, etc) I have a hard time keeping interested. Yet this is a biography; those are the parts that should be the meat of the matter. It doesn’t help that my main source of this information is Wheeler’s own autobiography, Yesterdays in a Busy Life: over four hundred pages of Victorian tedium. Skimming this source for salient points has been downright painful, and most of the more interesting anecdotes (her grandmother’s recollections of witches in Salem, for instance) are of no use to me at this juncture. As a result, I have not gotten as much out of it for the purposes of this rough draft as I should have. Amelia Peck and Carol Irish of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art wrote what appears to be a biography of Wheeler just in 2001, but I have not been able to track it down. It would be a huge help, I am sure, but I have not yet gotten to the Chang Library to ask for assistance in retrieving it, nor have I been able to get to the Met’s library personally. The best biographical source I have currently is Mary Warner Blanchard’s book Oscar Wilde’s America: Counterculture in the Gilded Age. In it, she devotes an entire biographical chapter to Wheeler, to whom Wilde paid a visit during his journeys in the United States.

The references in the rough draft are few compared to how many I’ve sourced. I have a lot more material to go through, including a whole set of her census records over the years and copies of the patents she filed, procured for me by my dad’s wife, a volunteer at the National Archives in Manhattan. Unfortunately, it seems I’ve misplaced them at the moment, but I’m sure they’ll turn up. I also still need to get to the bottom of some of the sources I did use. For example, Blanchard spends a good 10-15 pages talking about Wheeler’s obsession with corn as a symbol. I’m sure this is fascinating, but I’d have to read it about fourteen more times before it means anything substantial to me. Which brings me to my other big problem: the art. I’m no art historian, it’s all a bit blurry to me, and I don’t know how I will adequately explain Wheeler’s work or its larger context in the Arts and Crafts Movement, the artistic period with which she is chiefly associated, without simply repeating other people’s analysis. I mean, really, I might as well write about the biology of seahorses for all I know about art history.

The biggest thing missing in my rough draft is a middle. And an end. I’m also not crazy about my introduction. (Minor details.) Much of it is little more than an outline; I realize that some sections are lacking citations. It is my hope, O Noble Professor and Dear Peer Reader, that you will be able to get the gist of Candace Wheeler’s story and where I’m going with this whole thing. The idea that Wheeler had a hand in legitimizing traditional women’s work, which is so often considered automatically inferior to men’s work just by its very nature, is really genuinely interesting to me, and I hope that I will be able to adequately communicate that theme in the final draft of this biography.

"Laziness" or "Reasons why I'm not cut out for graduate level education"

2010-04-10T14:40:00.002-04:00

Things I did today instead of starting my research paper, due on Tuesday night:

Went shopping.

Drove around aimlessly.

Painted my nails.

Watched Craig Ferguson.

Ate a grapefruit.

Finished reading "Master and Commander"

Gave in and watched the movie for the thirty-seventh time.

And, of course, wrote this dumb waste of a blog post.

I suppose I should beat to quarters and get working on that paper. (See what I did there?) There was a great line in the book, after Captain Aubrey makes another terrible pun and one of the men says something like, "I've never seen someone derive so much laughter from so little wit." I can't find it now, though it would be appropriate. I could spend the afternoon searching for it, or I could work on my paper. One must choose the lesser of two weevils.

"ANTM" or "The Funniest Show on Television"

2010-04-08T21:20:00.000-04:00

I just watched last night's America's Next Top Model. Andre Leon Talley actually shook a stick at one of the girls while wearing wizard robes and a horn around his neck. I could not stop laughing. I rewound it four or five times. This is the best show on television and I don't care who knows it. It's a parody of a self-parody of a parody of a self-parody that was once vaguely a modeling competition, but really it was only ever a vehicle for Tyra Banks' enormous ego. Unstoppably hilarious. The worse it gets, the better it gets, and I hope it continues to get worse/better for years to come.

And I can't wait for fourfour to gif that shit.

"New job blues" or "I'm a Cancer, I can't help it"

2010-04-08T19:48:00.002-04:00

So it seems I've reached that awful "growing pains" stage of new job-dom. That time when people think you should know things that you don't, and don't think you know things that you already do, and you still aren't clear who exactly people are and yet they expect you to be overtly friendly with them anyway, and when being the new person is no longer a novelty but just a source of continued embarrassment and frustration.

For example: Fifteen minutes before the end of the day, one of the people on the other side of the room, who I met once or twice and whose name I don't remember, called the coworker sitting next to me to complain that my shelves weren't neat. I'm responsible for two office bookshelves. Now, first of all, I stocked the shelves yesterday, and they had a couple gaps from the day, but nothing noticeable. Secondly, my coworker's shelves were a wreck, but they're on the other side of the room, away from people's desks, so apparently he can get away with being a slob, but I let three books slide and it's worth notifying the whole room. I was feeling like a hot shot thinking my shelves looked so much better than everyone else's! But whatever, I went and stocked the shelves. And then she points out a legitimate gap where some Washington DC maps should be. I said we're out of them; I was told by the two people who were covering the shelves before I came along that they were out. She asked me if I checked the closet. I said no, our inventory guy said we don't have any. So fine, I went and checked the other place, and sure enough, there weren't any. So I let her know that I confirmed it and we're out of those maps, and she gave me a look like, "Whatever, why are you telling me?" Because, bitch, you're the one who made a stink about it! This is an example of one of those things that a new person needs a little leeway with. I've only been dealing with the shelves for four days; it's going to take me longer than that to figure out the pace of replacing books and finding my workday habit for the bookshelves. Unfortunately, the last time they had new hires was two years ago, and before that I think six years ago, so I don't think they're very understanding of the learning curve for things like this.

By the time I was done with that, to my satisfaction but probably not hers (as if it's her responsibility anyway), it was twenty minutes past my clock-out time and I was cranky and tired and wanted to get the fuck out of there. So I grabbed my bag, gave a quick goodbye, and headed for the door. And then from behind me I hear: "Hey, KIDDO." I thought, Oh fuck no I was not just called kiddo. Of course, yes, I was the kiddo in question, so I turned around, and this other old guy, who has not been demonstrably friendly, said to me, "When you walk past my desk, even if I'm on the phone, a 'Good Morning' is in order." Oh, no he did not. I can't imagine what the look on my face was. I squeaked out something along the lines of, "Well, I try to wave or smile or something..." And he smiled and sarcastically was like, "Well, a WAVE would be okay." And I just kind of grumbled and blushed and left. Ohhh shit.

A note: If you want someone to say hello to you, try saying hello to them. I don't know what the culture of morning greetings is around there. Show me. Don't announce to the whole room that I'm a frigid bitch, because all that does is make me want to drive off a cliff because they all hate me. So now I'm going to spend the whole night, and especially all of tomorrow morning, and all of my drive to work tomorrow, freaking out over proper morning greetings, and how I have to say good morning to this asshole who embarrassed me and who I never want to see again, and how am I going to do it in a way that doesn't make me look like I'm afraid of him or only doing it because he embarrassed me, and now every morning for the rest of my life, I'm going to be obsessing over proper morning greetings. Thanks. That's exactly what I needed on my way home today.

The thing is, I remember having this feeling at other jobs. I don't remember what the incidents were that caused them, but I remember the feelings they caused. I'm old enough now, and I've had enough work experience, to know that it will blow over. That doesn't make it any better. I don't think that people who have been at their jobs a long time remember how being the new person can make you feel so exhausted and nervous and tense and paranoid and vulnerable. And I know that I'm especially prone to feelings like this because (warning: lameness) I'm a Cancer, and one of the traits we're known for is taking things very personally, and completely recoiling and shutting down at even the slightest hint of an insult. I know I'm like that. Knowing that they were talking about my bookshelves made me want to quit the job and never come back. I wouldn't, obviously, and I'm aware of my overreaction, but the feeling is still there. Like, much as I like the actual job, I really don't want to go back there tomorrow. In high school if something like this happened, I'd cut class until I was ready to come out of my proverbial crab shell and face it. Usually a day or two. I know it's good that I've, like, matured or whatever, and I'll go in and face this guy and say good morning to him and fix my bookshelves up nice, but trust, I will be freaking out inside the entire time. And I will probably be bright red and everyone will ask if I'm sick or something. And then I'll be even more embarrassed.

So there you go. This phase of new job-dom will probably last another month or two, and I can't wait for it to be over and I'm settled in.

And now you know that you can look up typical Cancer traits and you will know me completely. I'm a total Cancer cliche. (Oh, except for the nipple play, according to this site. TMI? This one's downright eerie, though.)

"High school all over again" or "Early Bird Special"

2010-04-05T21:03:00.002-04:00

I just want to put it out there that I've been working for only six days and already I'm sick of this 6am shit. Sure, there's Saved by the Bell reruns in the morning, and Matt Pinfield with his gigantic head, decent song selection, and compulsive name dropping... but getting up at six o'clock in the morning has put a serious damper on some of my favorite things, like sleeping and staying up until 3am watching Golden Girls and Roseanne reruns while reading and being an asshole all over the internet. It's no fun. And all for what? Money? I'm a whore.

"Happy Easter!" or "Bunny Cake"

2010-04-04T19:18:00.000-04:00

This year my mom was so happy that my brothers and I would be spending the day with her instead of my dad's family, as we usually do, that she made us a bunny cake like she did when we were little. Then, of course, my brothers said they had no memory of ever eating a bunny cake in their lives, so she was very disappointed, but we ate the ears anyway and then my mom made my brother put up new curtain rods for her. And now I'm hiding in the other room on the internet while he sweats and curses and tries not to kill himself with the electric drill. Happy Easter, everybody!

"I'm a cliche" or "Hopefully I won't be making this list again any time soon"

2010-04-01T21:18:00.000-04:00

Stuff Unemployed People Like has been updated: #149 Obeying All Traffic Laws to Avoid Fines. You may remember such incidents as me driving from Florida to New Jersey in three days without breaking the speed limit once for fear of being pulled over. Just thought that was hilarious and wanted to share.