People are douchenozzles.

Seriously.

This is some guys netflix review of Heroes season 1:


I've found that most people seem to love this show. I saw a few people that did not like this review, claiming that the people weren't "believable" or "relatable." I think that on some level, that's true...because they have abilities and we do not. So yeah, we can't relate in that sense. But everytime I watch this, I feel I relate in some way. Whether it's a feeling of being lost or alone, we've all felt that way sometime (new job or school, moving to a new location, etc). I think this is a great series, and has so many "inside marks" that people miss. The "helix symbol" reappearing all the time, as well as the eclipse showing up a few times. My favorite is the cockroach in the cell with Sylar. While this show is great as far as entertainment and story value, it's also really good for the detail that put into each scene. I'd definitely recommend it for anyone that needs a new favorite. :)

Mmm hmm. Inside marks? Also, "inside marks"? What the fuck? First, they're not subtle or inside if they're obvious and flagrant. Second, what's with the quotes? Are you using them correctly because if you are then that might negate my first point? So if you mean, "I love these so called 'inside marks' that are not so much inside as obvious and flagrant" then I may owe you an apology. But I'm pretty sure that you're not using them correctly because you also said "helix symbol."

But beyond that, did you consider that maybe people found the characters unrelatable not because they have super powers but because many of them--after half the season--stop working actual jobs but still manage to find large sums of money to travel the country? I mean, I'm gonna give people the benefit of the doubt and assume that when they watch a show about superheroes they're not gonna be like, "Ahh man! These fucking people have super powers. I don't have super powers. That's totally unrelatable!"

No. What people are annoyed about is that the show touts itself as ordinary people with extraordinary abilities but people are not oridnary--even when you disregard their powers. They live in very attractive spaces (even Isaac's studio is very New York artist chic), have money from seemingly no source (except for the obvious exceptions of Nikki/Jessica and Nathan Petrelli), and are attractive as all get out. We know that Peter shunned his family's money to put himself through school and become a nurse. But now that he's quit nursing are we to believe that he's relying once again on the family fortune? No. It's too inconsistent for the character. The Peter we know wouldn't fall back on his family's money. So where does he get money to eat, pay his rent, or travel to Texas and back? Clearly, there's no source. Maybe he has savings. But let's get real. He doesn't make THAT much money. And he's living in a really nice apartment in NY with no roommates.

I digress. Now I'm done.

DVDs

Sunday evening I was walking back from buying a soda in the laundry room and I heard a small voice somewhere behind me. I turned around and saw a woman walking in the opposite direction with her two young daughters. The youngest girl--maybe 4 years old--kept using a singsong voice to repeat the words hung over. It was weird and awesome.

Amazon has been having some ridiculous DVD sales. Carnivale is now going for $20 a season as opposed to its former $50-$60 a season. You can get all 3 seasons of Deadwood for about $165. I, Claudius and Band of Brothers are both around $35. (Christ, I wish I had some money.) And yesterday I saw Buffy for $95. Unfortunately for anyone that's interested, the Buffy sale was apparently one day only.

The shipping for some things is considerably slower. They said it could take 2-5 weeks for Carnivale to ship but what the hell do I care? I ordered both seasons and figured it'd be a gift to me from my mom.

I called my mom and told her that my Christmas gift from her was ordered and she could just send me a check to pay for it. That's how we do things. My mom says to pick something out that's around $50 and she'll send me the money. Sometimes she wants me to bring it home so that she can wrap it and I can have the lackluster experience of opening it. This year that won't happen. Since the shipping takes so long, I told her I was having it sent to my apartment. That way, if it arrives after Christmas I won't have to have her ship it up to me or go to WV to get it. And if it arrives before Christmas, then I'll tell her it didn't so I can open it and watch them again.

If you haven't seen Carnivale, you should. It was a seriously good show that had an unfortunately slowish narrative pacing. This led to people getting bored quickly and not hanging around for the major payoff that was season 2.

Daniel Knauf, the show's creator, had originally written the show as a movie but then rewrote it as a series that would play out in 3 books, each book spanning 2 seasons. So 6 seasons total. Season 1 was nominated for 7 emmys and won 5, while season 2 was nominated form 8 emmys. Apparently, HBO had no plans to cancel the show but once they reviewed the ratings to season 2 they pulled the plug anyway.

In addition to impressive costuming and gorgeous cinematography, the mythology of the show is engaging to the point of frustration. The wikipedia page helps a lot. You just have to remember a few key things. There are two houses (light and dark), the mantle of the house is passed patrilineally to the first born son (called an avatar), a new avatar is born into each house in each generation, and the female children with the blood of the house are called vectori and they cannot carry the mantle. The oldest generational avatar of a house is called the prophet and he has the blue blood or vitae divina. The next in line is the ascendant prince. If the ascendent prince kills the prophet, then he gets the blue blood and a boon (the previous prophet's full measure of power). If the prophet dies in some other way, the ascendent prince will get the blue blood and be raised to prophet but not the boon.

The only exception to the patrilineal rule is the Usher and the Omega. Both the Usher and the Omega can be of either sex. Generally speaking, the Usher and the Omega are pretty confusing dudes and babes...maybe totally evil...maybe not.

Also, each house is mixed. An avatar that is evil may have a son (the next generational avatar) that is good. So if you're an ascendent prince, the dude you have to kill to get your boon and the blue blood may be someone unrelated to you...then again, it might be your dad. Just depends on the luck of the draw.

So yeah...totally nuts. Totally awesome. And totally left unfinished.

Tasty success.

I made the best vegan pot pie last night. Not because I'm vegan but because I wanted to see if I could make a more traditional meal into a vegan meal.

2 pre-made pie crusts (9 inches)
4-5 small potatoes diced
1 stem broccoli cut
1 medium yellow onion cut into half moons
2 big carrots chopped
frozen peas
8ish white mushrooms sliced
2-3 cloves garlic
2 tbsp. corn starch
2 vegetable boullion cubes
1-2 tsp. olive oil
2 tbsp. soy sauce

Boil potatoes and carrots together for about 5 minutes then add broccoli. Cook until they begin to get tender. Remove from heat and drain. Set aside.

Add olive oil, onions, and garlic in a skillet and cook until slightly tender. Then add some frozen peas and mushrooms and cook until onions are transluscent and mushrooms are done. Set aside.

Dissolve boullion cubes in 2 1/2 cups water then put in sauce pan. Add 2 tbsp. soy sauce and bring to a boil. In the meantime, add 2 tbsp. corn starch to about 4 tbsp. water. Once broth comes to a boil reduce heat to low and add corn starch mixture, stirring constantly until thickened. Remove from heat.

Combine all vegetables with gravy and stir together. Set aside.

Place 9 inch pie crust in the bottom of a round casserole dish. Dish should be small enough that the crust reaches the top of the walls of the dish. Fill with vegetable and gravy mixture. Cover with other 9 inch pie crust and trim edges. Cut a few slits in top crust.

Bake at 350 degrees for 45 minutes to an hour until crust is browned and filling is bubbly.

Is that SIM Starbuck?

What the crap is going on with Katee Sackhoff's face in this BSG promo shot? She looks like a SIM.

And from the same batch of promo shots comes this exercise in complete babe hotness. How did they get one photo so wrong and the other so right?

Seasame Street in NY Times

November 18, 2007
The Medium
Sweeping the Clouds Away
By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN

Sunny days! The earliest episodes of “Sesame Street” are available on digital video! Break out some Keebler products, fire up the DVD player and prepare for the exquisite pleasure-pain of top-shelf nostalgia.

Just don’t bring the children. According to an earnest warning on Volumes 1 and 2, “Sesame Street: Old School” is adults-only: “These early ‘Sesame Street’ episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today’s preschool child.”

Say what? At a recent all-ages home screening, a hush fell over the room. “What did they do to us?” asked one Gen-X mother of two, finally. The show rolled, and the sweet trauma came flooding back. What they did to us was hard-core. Man, was that scene rough. The masonry on the dingy brownstone at 123 Sesame Street, where the closeted Ernie and Bert shared a dismal basement apartment, was deteriorating. Cookie Monster was on a fast track to diabetes. Oscar’s depression was untreated. Prozacky Elmo didn’t exist.

Nothing in the children’s entertainment of today, candy-colored animation hopped up on computer tricks, can prepare young or old for this frightening glimpse of simpler times. Back then — as on the very first episode, which aired on PBS Nov. 10, 1969 — a pretty, lonely girl like Sally might find herself befriended by an older male stranger who held her hand and took her home. Granted, Gordon just wanted Sally to meet his wife and have some milk and cookies, but . . . well, he could have wanted anything. As it was, he fed her milk and cookies. The milk looks dangerously whole.

Live-action cows also charge the 1969 screen — cows eating common grass, not grain improved with hormones. Cows are milked by plain old farmers, who use their unsanitary hands and fill one bucket at a time. Elsewhere, two brothers risk concussion while whaling on each other with allergenic feather pillows. Overweight layabouts, lacking touch-screen iPods and headphones, jockey for airtime with their deafening transistor radios. And one of those radios plays a late-’60s news report — something about a “senior American official” and “two billion in credit over the next five years” — that conjures a bleak economic climate, with war debt and stagflation in the offing.

The old “Sesame Street” is not for the faint of heart, and certainly not for softies born since 1998, when the chipper “Elmo’s World” started. Anyone who considers bull markets normal, extracurricular activities sacrosanct and New York a tidy, governable place — well, the original “Sesame Street” might hurt your feelings.

I asked Carol-Lynn Parente, the executive producer of “Sesame Street,” how exactly the first episodes were unsuitable for toddlers in 2007. She told me about Alistair Cookie and the parody “Monsterpiece Theater.” Alistair Cookie, played by Cookie Monster, used to appear with a pipe, which he later gobbled. According to Parente, “That modeled the wrong behavior” — smoking, eating pipes — “so we reshot those scenes without the pipe, and then we dropped the parody altogether.”

Which brought Parente to a feature of “Sesame Street” that had not been reconstructed: the chronically mood-disordered Oscar the Grouch. On the first episode, Oscar seems irredeemably miserable — hypersensitive, sarcastic, misanthropic. (Bert, too, is described as grouchy; none of the characters, in fact, is especially sunshiney except maybe Ernie, who also seems slow.) “We might not be able to create a character like Oscar now,” she said.

Snuffleupagus is visible only to Big Bird; since 1985, all the characters can see him, as Big Bird’s old protestations that he was not hallucinating came to seem a little creepy, not to mention somewhat strained. As for Cookie Monster, he can be seen in the old-school episodes in his former inglorious incarnation: a blue, googly-eyed cookievore with a signature gobble (“om nom nom nom”). Originally designed by Jim Henson for use in commercials for General Foods International and Frito-Lay, Cookie Monster was never a righteous figure. His controversial conversion to a more diverse diet wouldn’t come until 2005, and in the early seasons he comes across a Child’s First Addict.

The biggest surprise of the early episodes is the rural — agrarian, even — sequences. Episode 1 spends a stoned time warp in the company of backlighted cows, while they mill around and chew cud. This pastoral scene rolls to an industrial voiceover explaining dairy farms, and the sleepy chords of Joe Raposo’s aimless masterpiece, “Hey Cow, I See You Now.” Chewing the grass so green/Making the milk/Waiting for milking time/Waiting for giving time/Mmmmm.

Oh, what’s that? Right, the trance of early “Sesame Street” and its country-time sequences. In spite of the show’s devotion to its “target child,” the “4-year-old inner-city black youngster” (as The New York Times explained in 1979), the first episodes join kids cavorting in amber waves of grain — black children, mostly, who must be pressed into service as the face of America’s farms uniquely on “Sesame Street.”

In East Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant in 1978, 95 percent of households with kids ages 2 to 5 watched “Sesame Street.” The figure was even higher in Washington. Nationwide, though, the number wasn’t much lower, and was largely determined by the whims of the PBS affiliates: 80 percent in houses with young children. The so-called inner city became anywhere that “Sesame Street” played, because the Children’s Television Workshop declared the inner city not a grim sociological reality but a full-color fantasy — an eccentric scene, framed by a box and far removed from real farmland and city streets alike.

The concept of the “inner city” — or “slums,” as The Times bluntly put it in its first review of “Sesame Street” — was therefore transformed into a kind of Xanadu on the show: a bright, no-clouds, clear-air place where people bopped around with monsters and didn’t worry too much about money, cleanliness or projecting false cheer. The Upper West Side, hardly a burned-out ghetto, was said to be the model.

People on “Sesame Street” had limited possibilities and fixed identities, and (the best part) you weren’t expected to change much. The harshness of existence was a given, and no one was proposing that numbers and letters would lead you “out” of your inner city to Elysian suburbs. Instead, “Sesame Street” suggested that learning might merely make our days more bearable, more interesting, funnier. It encouraged us, above all, to be nice to our neighbors and to cultivate the safer pleasures that take the edge off — taking baths, eating cookies, reading. Don’t tell the kids.

I've said it before...

and I'll say it again...it's totally fucking crazy to me that people steal babies. I mean, they just take them.

Why would you ever take a baby?

I understand the appeal of taking a car or a mansion or an identity but a baby? How could that possibly benefit you? And what the hell are you going to do with it? I might be wrong here but from what I can tell, people that want to kill a kid or rape a kid usually kidnap an actual kid...like, one that can talk and that has a subjet position that can be damaged by the perpetrator's actions. People that kidnap babies just want a baby...not as a means to an end but an end in itself. Why?

I'm especially impressed by the people--mostly women--that cut a nearly full term fetus out of its mother's womb and then leave the woman to die. Clearly, these baby thieves want a fresh baby. Not those day old babies they keep laying around hospitals.

Popular

Lots of people went as Amy Winehouse for Halloween. If you flickr search for Amy Winehouse photos, you'll come across a bunch of costumes. Many of them are seriously good. I wish I had thought of that.

Major Purchase Satisfaction

In October I ordered a couch.

Not a fancy couch. Not a terribly expensive couch. Rather, a simple couch that looks like it will hold up well in an apartment with 2 cats. A couch that's large enough for 2 reasonably sized human beings to lay down on together. A couch that felt like a good place to nap when watching some Buffy. A couch that screamed, "I'm totally within your price range!"

When I bought the couch, I also picked out the upholstery. Some dark green/gray color called seaweed. It'll look good against the brick colored walls in my living room, won't show dirt, and--most importantly--the fabric was soft but tough. Durable. This is the couch of a sensible woman that also enjoys affordable comfort. This is the couch that I'll lounge upon in the coming years. This is the couch that they're delivering Tuesday.

It couldn't last.

I had 2 1/2 weeks of having perfectly clear skin. Whenever this happens I get really excited and think that I've finally hit the age where I'll never breakout again.

And I don't mean those sissy little pimples you assholes get. I mean nodules. Those terrible hard lumps under your skin that are sore and make your entire face hurt. The soreness usually lasts a week or two and the hard lump itself sometimes takes months to totally go away. They're gross and painful and no one should have to have them.

I don't get them terribly often and lately I've been lucky. In the past 6 months or so I 've managed to catch them early and coax them into receeding before they become a hassle. But when one does take hold, I can pretty much assume that the next two weeks or a month will involve a serious crisis of confidence and I'll wish I could scrub it off with a cheese grater. Gnarly.

But today I learned about a type of acne called acne conglobata and knowing about it makes me feel better about my life. Acne conglobata is when multiple nodules or cysts form and connect to each other. They destroy underlying cells and basically create tunnels in your skin, thereby destorying the integrity of the tissue. Google image search it and you'll be freaked the fuck out.

And now...I have to go feel sorry for myself and my painful face.

"Check" it out.

Look to your right and you'll see a list of links. For the love of God, check out the "Blog" of "unnecessary" quotation marks.

Why didn't I come up with that?

Let's get a Maine Coon! They chirp!

True Life

The other day in the gym I watched an episode of MTV's True Life. The topic was stutterers. They followed a young girl in Pittsburgh, a beauty queen in New York, and a speech pathologist graduate student in Morgantown. Yes. Morgantown. As in, WV.

I was pretty amped because:

A) It's Morgantown. I'm happy when Morgantown gets a little attention (but please don't let it entice too many people to move there) and I figured I'd get to see some of my favorite places from home on TV. That seems like a pretty sweet deal when you're homesick.

B) The dude was a speech pathology student and I used to do work study for a professor there, Dr. Ken St. Louis. (Man, working for Ken St. Louis is a story in and of itself.)

Anyway, it was clear that the audience was supposed to feel really bad for the guy in Morgantown because his stutter prevented him from getting a job. He'd call up to ask if someone was hiring but the person on the other end would hang up on him. They showed his bare refrigerator and how he made a sandwich and then realized that the bread was moldy and had to throw it out. They showed him talking to his landlord about why his rent was a month late. Aww. I mean, it's so sad tha...

Huh?

What?

Wait.

Where does this guy live again?

Oh snap, he's living in Chateau Royale! (If you're not from Morgantown, let me assure you that that's really the name of this apartment complex.)

What kind of fucking idiot lives in Chateau Royale and then complains that they can't pay their rent? Oh, that's right. This moron is from out of state. He's so stupid that he thinks he's getting a good deal living there.

That pretty much did it for me. I felt no sympathy for this dude who was paying at least twice as much as any person should pay for living in WV. Idiot.

Plus, he kept being picky about the jobs he was being offered. Boston Beanery in Evansdale offered him a job in the kitchen but he wouldn't take it. He said he couldn't pay his rent on that kind of money.

Hello! McFly! Is anyone home? You're already not paying your rent, asshole. Jeebus.

But no, this nozzle wanted to be a bartender or a server. Something where he could make tips. Woe is him that his stutter makes it hard for him to provide good service and makes potential customers feel uncomfortable. Seriously, I want my bartenders and servers blending into the background and not sticking out in any way that could ruin or interrupt my evening and employers know that.

Is it unfortunate that he has trouble finding the work he wants for such a silly reason? Maybe.

But it sure as hell isn't sad or unusual. I mean, I want to be a fucking model but it turns out that I'm only 5'2" tall and thick like a rhino. Some people. I swear.

I'm not hittin' that.

Does anyone remember what Mickey Rourke looked like when he was still hot?

Ahh, yes. There he is.


But behold, the ravages of age, smoking, and too many punches to the face.

Terrifying.

Dear Mickey Rourke:

There's no way I'd hit it now. Thanks anway.

Damn the man.

I bet these kids are all lathered up.

WVa parents target Pat Conroy books
By JOHN RABY, Associated Press WriterWed Nov 7, 12:39 PM ET

Graphic depictions of violence, suicide and sexual assault in two Pat Conroy books are at the heart of a First Amendment debate, pitting offended parents against high school students who object to being told what they can't read.

Even Conroy has interjected himself into the debate. In an e-mail to a student, Conroy slams those who would ban his works as "idiots."

A student group is vowing to sue the Kanawha County Board of Education if the removal of "Beach Music" and "The Prince of Tides" from two Nitro High School classes is made permanent and expanded countywide.

In a move that appeased neither side, the board decided Monday to explore using advisory labels on books that show content for violence, language, sexual content or adult situations.

The book challenge is one of hundreds reported to the American Library Association every year on requests to have materials removed from schools or libraries, including the popular Harry Potter series, which some Christians believe promotes witchcraft.

Steve Shamblin, who teaches honors and Advanced Placement courses at Nitro High, said the graphic depictions in Conroy's books are found in newspapers every day. He also noted that several literary groups have deemed the books as age-appropriate for high school upperclassmen.

"As long as we stay in a 1950s utopian mind-set, we're not going to get past the 20th century," he said.

Parents Ken and Leona Tyree found certain scenes in "The Prince of Tides" "obscene and offensive." Leona Tyree said she was unable to finish the book. Their son has since left Shamblin's Advanced Placement literature class.

Another parent, Karen Frazier, complained about violence in "Beach Music," and told school board members last month she wants guidelines for books used in public schools.

"If a teacher was on a computer and sending this filth to underage students, they'd probably be arrested," Frazier said at last month's meeting.

Neither Frazier nor the Tyrees have listed phone numbers.

Makenzie Hatfield, who teamed with fellow students to form a coalition against censorship, said her group is prepared to go to court if the school board sides with the parents.

"This is a college class," said Hatfield, a senior at Kanawha County's George Washington High. "We chose to take this class. The school didn't tell us to. We chose."

Conroy did not respond to requests for comment from The Associated Press, but defended his books in an e-mail to Hatfield.

Because the two books were temporarily banned "every kid in that county will read them, every single one of them. Because book banners are invariably idiots," Conroy wrote in the letter published Oct. 24 in The Charleston Gazette. "They don't know how the world works — but writers and English teachers do."

Conroy referred to the books as "two of my darlings, which I would place before the altar of God and say, 'Lord, this is how I found the world you made.'"

He said his late father fought in three wars and turned violent on his wife and seven children; his youngest brother committed suicide; a female relative was raped; eight classmates at the Citadel were killed in Vietnam, and his best friend died last summer in a car accident.

"The world of literature has everything in it, and it refuses to leave anything out," he wrote. "I've been in ten thousand cities and have introduced myself to a hundred thousand strangers in my exuberant reading career, all because I listened to my fabulous English teachers and soaked up every single thing those magnificent men and women had to give."

Dude, it's a small price to pay for freedom. Am I right? Hey...you guys. Am I right?

Man angry with son-in-law fingers him as terrorist to FBI
Fri Nov 2, 8:47 AM ET

A man in Sweden who was angry with his daughter's husband has been charged with libel for telling the FBI that the son-in-law had links to al-Qaeda, Swedish media reported on Friday.
The man, who admitted sending the email, said he did not think the US authorities would stupid enough to believe him.

The 40-year-old son-in-law and his wife were in the process of divorcing when the husband had to travel to the United States for business.

The wife didn't want him to travel since she was sick and wanted him to help care for their children, regional daily Sydsvenska Dagbladet said without disclosing the couple's names.

When the husband refused to stay home, his father-in-law wrote an email to the FBI saying the son-in-law had links to al-Qaeda in Sweden and that he was travelling to the US to meet his contacts.

He provided information on the flight number and date of arrival in the US.

The son-in-law was arrested upon landing in Florida. He was placed in handcuffs, interrogated and placed in a cell for 11 hours before being put on a flight back to Europe, the paper said.

The FBI contacted Swedish intelligence agency Saepo, which discovered that the email tipping off the FBI had been sent from the father-in-law's computer.

The father-in-law has been charged with aggravated libel.

He has admitted sending the email, but said he didn't think "the authorities were so stupid that they would believe anything. But apparently they are."

He said he "couldn't help the US authorities' paranoid reaction".

_________________________________________________

There's also a super super good article from Congressional Quarterly about the FBI tracking sales of food items (falafel) in an attempt to locate terrorists in California. The article is too long to paste but you can find it here if you're interested: http://cqpolitics.com/wmspage.cfm?parm1=5&docID=hsnews-000002620892. Woo! USA!

I want to party with this girl.

You guys have probably already heard about this girl but I still think it's so awesome. She has 8 limbs from a parasitic twin that her body only partially absored in utero. And now the fucking doctors have gone and cut them off. So lame. Plus, in the first article I read about her they explained that her entire village thought she was a goddess. People really fucked up a good thing for this girl.

Astrobiology and my coffee.

There was a story in the news today about a new planet being discovered in the Cancer constellation. [http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071106/ap_on_sc/planetary_system] The new planet is orbiting a star called 55 Cancri. Like the other planets in the system, scientists believe that the planet could have liquid water and mild temperatures. But overall the planet appears to be more like Saturn than Earth and so scientists are ruling out the possibility of life there...though--according to the article--they're holding out the hope of finding an Earth-like planet in the system.

I understand why we focus our efforts on finding life that is like our own and requires the same things we require. It's the only thing we have experience with and so it's the only thing we understand. If we were to extend our search to places that could sustain life very much unlike our own, we would have no idea how to best direct our resources. To avoid this, we've decided to draw conclusions about life on Earth and translate that into the search for other life. This makes the task far more manageable. All life is carbon based, all life needs water, and life can only develop on sun-like stars. These conclusions are not arbitrary. We didn't pluck them from the sky. They didn't grow out of Zeus's head wearing full armor. These are solid conclusions that hold true when applied to our own experience of life.

But still, it's a fallacy of composition. Life on Earth requires carbon, water, and a sun-like star. So life in the universe requires carbon, water, and a sun-like star. You can't transfer a conclusion from a part to a whole. But lots of things that are fallacious are actually true. I'm not really going anywhere with this. At all. I just think it's fun to think about astrobiology and how it's such a completely made up field of study.

There was a dead bug in my coffee this morning. It floated to the top and I scooped it out and drank my coffee. Is that bad?

It scares me.

I am not a very photogenic person. And that's fine. I'm aware of the angles that I look good from...close up with my head turned in profile. From far away my head is mushroomy, my cheeks are about to gyranosaur off my face, and I have no neck. It's grotesque to say the least. Every picture that is not from my ideal angle makes me pause and wonder "how the hell do I ever get laid?"

The problem with not being a photogenic person is that, at some point, you realize that your entire life is lived from multiple perspectives and angles. Nothing gets frozen in time. At any given moment I look as bad as I think I do and as good as I think I do. It just depends on where you're sitting. But for you, the viewer, it's a cohesive whole. When I walk far away you don't think I look significantly different. For me, far away self is a totally different person than up close self. I have no way of knowing myself from all these angles and--here's another key part--no way of knowing myself in motion. I can't see myself move. I see what it looks like from up here, looking down...but that's it. So yes, I have no way to know if I'm reasonably attractive when I'm all put together. And that scares me.

What if I've been wrong? What if I actually look like all of my bad photos? Because, the truth is, the evidence is mounting in favor of that. There are more bad photos than good and the people saying, "Oh, don't worry. You don't really look like that," are starting to sound more and more disingenuous.

Joss

So, I knew that Joss Whedon's Wonder Woman project didn't go anywhere but apparently he's now working on a movie called Goners. And apparently, everyone but me has known about Goners for a while now. The idea is vague so I can't say that I'm amped yet. The interwebs are telling me it's like Buffy but scary. Hmm.

The actually exciting news is that Joss is returning to television with a series on Fox called Dollhouse. It'll star Eliza Dushku as Echo. The premise is that there's a small group of people--threeish--that can be imprinted with custom personalities and traits to take on different assignments. Upon completion they can be wiped clean. You can read a synopsis and an interview with Joss here: http://www.tvweek.com/blogs/james-hibberd/2007/10/joss_whedon_returns_to_fox_wit.php. He also talks about the writers' strike and the Ripper series (the story of Giles, pre-Buffy) that never seems to manifest.

As for Dollhouse, I don't like Eliza Dushku. She was terrible as Faith. Well...hang on. Faith was a terrible character--or caricature--to begin with. And Eliza Dushku just annoyed the crap out of me. Except that there's that one episode in season 1 of Angel where she's feeling all guilty about being an annoying bitch and turns herself into the police. Not for being annoying. For killing people. But to me, her worst crime is being annoying.

Plus, Fox sucks. Sure, they have good shows but they always cancel them or, like Firefly, air them out of order so people get confused and the show never finds its fanbase.

Still, I have faith in Joss and in all things Joss does. Don't you?

blarg blarg blarg

Wednesday, October 31st

Lucero show at the Black Cat was much better than expected. The last time I saw them, they were determined to play songs off their latest album and, while it's good, it's not their best work. This time around, they played a lot of stuff from Tennessee and That Much Further West and I jumped and wiggled like a total idiot. It was great.

Sean was nice enough to drive and even managed to not hate me too much while I got confused and flustered and annoyed by the way streets, streetlights, and traffic behave in DC. We parked at least a mile away from the Black Cat and started walking there. About 3/4 of the way, we decided that it would be wise to go all the way back to get the car and park closer.

I had 2 sodas and a flask in my bag and one of the sodas went rogue and leaked. It was sticky. But it's a small price to pay for covert drunkenness.

Thursday, November 1st

Kicked Sean off the couch so I could make bacon and watch Buffy while he slept. Piddled around the house, had some hot chocolate, and talked to the cats a lot. Put a pot roast in the crock pot and turned it on.

Sean got up and there was more piddling around the house. I asked Sean to say "Oi!" It was funny.

Around 3:00pm we each put on a scarf and drove to College Park to walk around Northeast Branch Trail up to Lake Artemisa. (What a nice name that is...Artemisa.) Northeast Branch Trail has a bunch of "fitness stations" where you can stop and do some kind of silly exercise. It's basically jungle gym equipment without a full-on jungle gym. There are signs that explain how you're meant to use the equipment. Each one shows a featureless, sexless person in a wheelchair. It feels so forced that I half think I'm looking at the cover of my 6th grade health book. The one with a group of people on the front...young and old, light and dark, attractive and not, limbs intact and limbs out-of-tact...all of them sharing a common interest in the lumbering beast of the human body, yearning to know its hows and whys...touching arm to arm or hand to hand to show that they're not so different that they can't be friends. That's what these signs are like. We laughed and then I laughed more when Sean used the equipment in a way that I'm sure is not considered safe by the instructor in the wheelchair.

We collected leaves and tried to find the most perfect ones we could. I dropped mine in the creek and watched it float for a while. I could have dropped it in another spot where the trail goes by the creek but I held on to it, waiting to get to that specific spot. Not because it meant something to me but because there was less trash in the water and it seemed wrong somehow to drop my perfect leaf beside old soda bottles and grocery store bags.

After the walk, we went to Safeway and got the stuff to make pumpkin pie. Back at my place we ate pot roast and--eventually--pumpkin pie. Then I fell asleep while Sean watched Beyond Thunderdome.

Friday, November 2nd

Watched Nightmare Before Christmas with Sean. Sean left and I cleaned the apartment. Watched something else...I can't recall what. Talked to Bryn. Went to bed early.

Saturday, November 3rd

Did absolutely nothing for most of the day. Watched Buffy...napped...read some David Sedaris.

Went to Brewer's Art around 9pm. It took flipping forever to find parking and I probably wasn't supposed to park where I finally ending up parking. It was near a fire hydrant on Maryland. They could have gotten to the hydrant but I was pretty close. Hmm.

Drank a Woodchuck and a Natty Boh. Chatted. Smelled the garlic and rosemary fries. People say they're really good. I'll have to try them sometime.

Chatted more and had a pretty fun evening. I labeled it a success and drove home.

Sunday, November 4th

Went to Target and bought a new coat. It wasn't my intention to buy a new coat but there was one there and it was perfection on a hanger. It makes me look like a girl in a coat only impressivley so. Big, voluminious hood that a few heads could fit inside of. It's nice and makes me look forward to snow.