Sunday, August 31, 2008

Look what Bombs Away Barbie has to say about the whole "foreign policy experience" thing...



I mean, its only natural for Barbie to defend Midge, she's her oldest friend! And she's got kids!




Okay, so...if Sarah Palin is evangelical, and anti-birth control, does this mean she will stop sleeping with her husband while she's in the White House? Or are we going to have a constantly knocked up VP? I'm not against women being in office cause they might get pregnant, but I would like to know my elected official is at least TRYING not to get pregnant while being Vice President of the United States.

Of course...this last one could not be hers....:)






Thanks to Ergotism for the video...

A tiger's stripes will blur from a distance

Last night, Marty made satay! And Rebecca found Jupiter! It was hiding in the front yard. Rebecca is a planet hunter, first rate. The stripes were orange, and there were three moons! She tried to track Neptune and Uranus, but they were below the treeline. Then we settled down for a nice snug evening of The Forbidden Zone. Isn't Danny Elfman cute? The cutest in fact? He's like a squid.



Today I'm full of thoughts about people I've left behind. I like that phrase, it makes it seem like I'm moving forward, and they're in the background somewhere disintegrating. What I regret sometimes are not my blatant acts of stupidity or craziness that multiply like a culture across the blanket of the last six years, but really the people I didn't talk to. The ones I deliberately didn't write or call. Even the ones I knew were probably bad for me, or for sure bad for me. It's just that you start to think maybe if you put yourself in the exact same position you were in so long ago, then maybe it will be just as if nothing ever happened, and you can start over, like a choose your own adventure book. Then I would know how it works both ways. Or triple ways. Quadruple ways. I like this life. But its curiosity, simple and plain. Just another excuse not to do the dishes.

Friday, August 29, 2008


Has anyone else noticed how McCain is looking at her like the creepiest, most lecherous uncle ever? It's like he's completely senile and he thinks he's already won. I'm mildly terrified.

Also, what a shame Tina Fey isn't on Saturday Night Live for this election now.

Its Not Selling Out if You're stuck in a Paralyzed Temporal Distortion for the rest of your life

So somebody at the record label decided one day that what they needed was a stable of expendable talent. They were tired of having to pick the IT department's brains every time they needed a new song for a car commercial, or an opening theme for a primetime soap. It was demeaning and time wasting, their considerable talents needed more room to grow, without worrying about the public's mediocre taste. This particular person, who was nothing if not resourceful, took their summer vacation in Switzerland that year. When they came back, surprisingly tan, they had a plan.

They rounded up an army of 27 yr olds, and gathered them in the conference room of a Los Angeles Mariott.
"Here is what you are going to do..." they said.
A room of shiny Puma clad feet shuffled.
That night, 234 gray hoody sweatshirts departed into the mist on Mega Buses.

The recruiters scoured the land, coast to coast. They paid special attention to Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma, the Dakotas. They drank 50 million cherry bombs in bars with women twice their age. They consumed 750,000 pounds of chex mix. They collected 200,000 radio station bumper stickers with funny sayings " The Dawg Pound never sleeps!" and " f--- you, I'm tuned to 106.9". They visited 500 wet t-shirt contests in post college suburban bars.

The result of all this tireless labor was that 365 sleepless nights later, they had signed every classic rock cover band (but they really write original stuff too) with members under 40 in the United States of America. Signed them to contracts that none of them had read, but really, they didn't care to anyway. A contract was a contract was something to tell their girlfriends right before they dumped them, moved to L.A. and started dating Kate Bosworth or that girl from The Hills.

Somebody rubbed her fingers together in secret glee as she surveyed the auditorium, filled to breaking with baseball caps and foil pattern t-shirts.
"We are going to invest in a timeshare" she said.

Not a few weekends in Boca a year, but a bubble of stasis in the 9th dimension where they would spend the rest of their lives frozen, paused like a scratched xbox game. And she would take them out, band by band, as she needed them. They would record an album, the same album, again and again. And as they lived out their usefulness, she would throw them back in the bubble for another 5 years. The market never even knew their names. But they knew that background rock sound, the sense that this was a hard rocking number for a band that usually did ballads, that there was a mention of love or god or country in there somewhere, that the lead singer would always sound like the guy from Third Eye Blind. Muted olive dress shirt, black leather pants, stringy shoulder length blonde hair or maybe buzzed black crew cut. Lots of vines, abandoned houses, flaring suns in their videos. Or maybe some t-shirts, skinny ties, one ugly guys. A video of sentimental pictures from some girl they dated right after college.

I knew a guy who escaped from it. He said he had been trapped there for fifteen years. I asked him how he escaped. He said that she gotten lazy about putting the musicians back in, that if you made a break for it, she no longer cared to chase them. He was going to try and reach the next chosen band, to bring a message back to the others. He was going to devote his entire life to freeing the rest. Except the FireFlies. "Those guys are screwed," he said in a haunted whisper,"she'll never let them go."

Thursday, August 28, 2008

They had fireworks instead of balloons!

Of course I'm cynical and sarcastic and wary. But tonight did exactly what it wanted to do to me. It twisted me around it's crepe paper draped finger. Thank god for PBS, so I can sit, hunched forward, alone, focused, my eyes glued to the tv I will be embarrassed to have owned ten years from now, in a room filled with my thrift store furniture, in my first apartment that is all mine, and I can watch without the background cawing of pundits, one of the greatest (presidential) speeches I've seen so far in my life. And the man up there is great, The Man, but it's the spectacle all together that gets me. The stadium and the crying throngs and the royal children laughing and the chanting and the absolute joy of all of them being together, believing in the same things. The joy of being in a packed football stadium that cheers when he says gay people deserve the same rights,or women deserve equal pay or George Bush is an abysmal failure. The kind of joy we get when we talk to each other at the bar, or at game night, or we're having a cigarette at work, the talk we've been repeating to ourselves every night of "how can they? why do they? what are they thinking? What the fuck?" The joy of solidarity fueling those millions of tiny forest fires burning in our brains, and tonight swept all our indignation into a maelstrom of joy. The gleeful childish pure joy of finding someone, finally, you understand. Someone we can love. It's love for everyone in that stadium and at the rallies and on the blogs and on the Daily Show and NPR. It's love for the human race, showing us we are not alone in what we think is fundamentally right and wrong. That no matter what the tv/radio/newspapers says, no matter what they tell us is "opinion", here is physical proof! There are people that agree with me! We are not totally a nation of selfish witless idiots! Maybe we can actually talk to each other like adults, about things that require brainpower! Maybe we can let ourselves be swept up in a romance without feeling like we're being had. Maybe that's really what inspiration is.

Tonight was the surreal experience of watching a history lesson and a science fiction movie at the same time. I cried. It was very, very well done. And it left me with the feeling of "Who cares what you say McCain? You are nothing. These stories on Fox are nothing. They're not real. When we look back, they will be greened pennies at the bottom of the jar." It took the taste of metal out of my mouth.

Postscript: coming down from the high hours later, I realize that what I have described is not hope, but relief.

Post Post script: One day later...it would seem that maybe alcohol, desperation, and politics works better than coke...

Why haven't I been posting?

Oh my god, do you KNOW what's going on this week?
What's going on is that I'm being reminded, knocked on the head really, of the fact that there are people in politics who can GIVE A GOOD SPEECH! They're everywhere!
I had forgotten....(makes a mournful face).....

Best quote so far? Speech that restored a little bit of my faith in humanity?

"The Petro-Dictators will never own American wind and sunshine, and we should never again be beholden to their barrels of crude"

- Gov. Brian Schweitzer, Montana

Monday, August 25, 2008

Open Source Election Software!

I stole this from Goofballs

Open Voting Consortium tested an open source voting machine at Linux World 2008.

Sunday, August 24, 2008

I wake up thinking of strange things.



The red tide blooms off the coast, I can see the purple tint of it from my bedroom window. It's sucking the oxygen out of the water. We've heard stories of how it's spreading, from Canada to Florida, and the corpses washing up on shore,otters and seals and birds oh my. It's brevetoxin they tell us. Accumulated in the shellfish, who feed on the algae, filter the poisonous little creatures into their castles, which are then stormed and sieged by marine life. It's a neurotoxin, we can see the creatures stumbling on the shore like zombies, unable to control their limbs, collapsing into still breathing heaps on the rocks. Shellfish consumption by humans is illegal, whole towns and ports are closed for business. We retreat from the coasts, scurry inland. No point in living by the water anymore. Can't swim in it, can't eat anything from it. The few that stay behind for reasons either aesthetic or economic, we don't talk about the water. It's the silent monster to the east, inexorably growing.


The rotting garbage washes up on the beaches, like bloody innards, baking in the sun. At first we tried to shovel it off, we fed it to farm animals, we used it as compost. It's not toxic anymore, once it's dead, but its noxious. The stinking pestilence now just lays there, we've given up. It builds on the beach, and it reminds me of a coral reef, layers upon layers, pressing on each other, someday becoming fortresses of fossilized rock. The intrepid ones, who have not yet surrendered to the tide, will go down to the beach and study the dead animals that wash up with the refuse. Sharks, squid, some monstrous things we've never seen before, being carried from the cold polluted depths of the oceans, telling us how far the plague has spread.

Saturday, August 23, 2008

Where's my wake-up call?

So instead of receiving my Obama text at 3:14am like everyone else, (the 3am call? Get it? Dude, I would have killed you, average working pennsylvania americans have to get up for work you know), I was awoken this morning by several other texts, from various associates of mine. I’m sure we can guess the theme of these texts, most of them were pretty much “Biden? Oh.”, but the ones from my friend Doug really do justice to the general feeling….

9:22am: I’m really not happy about it, Biden is just like mccain. Obama loses cred.

10:23am: And contradicts a lot of what obama stands for. I’m really getting irritated with obama. Even if he wins he could b a ‘carter’


I did my standard half-ass read on Biden this morning, nytimes, wonkette, wikipedia.
The impression I get of Biden is that he’s old school Irish Catholic Democrat. Obama is a Daley Democrat, so it's a very Chicago choice for him, but that’s not necessarily something I oppose. His voting record is a little erratic, but he supports Roe vs. Wade, Social Security, and Clean Air. He’s opposed to drilling. He’s been in Washington forever, which means he’s probably very slick and very paid for. He voted in support of the war, but thinks it’s a mistake now. In other words, he’s Hillary Clinton, but a man. I’m not going to go so far as calling him McCain (really Doug?). He doesn’t strike me as senile or infantile. But you know, hopefully he’ll strike other people that way cause that seems to be the popular thing these days. If he reminds the diehards of McCain and they hate him for it, maybe that’s a good thing.

He seems like a very good Lyndon Johnson. And you know what, it's kinda disturbing that the media keeps referring to how qualified he is to be president...should the occasion occurr...

And if Obama is Carter? Then what of it? What was so freaking awful about Carter? Better Carter than Kennedy. Maybe we need a few more speeches like this….

The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways. It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation.
In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we've discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning.
...
I'm asking you for your good and for your nation's security to take no unnecessary trips, to use carpools or public transportation whenever you can, to park your car one extra day per week, to obey the speed limit, and to set your thermostats to save fuel..I have seen the strength of America in the inexhaustible resources of our people. In the days to come, let us renew that strength in the struggle for an energy-secure nation”


Carter gave that speech 5 days after I was born. 29 years ago.
Also, let it be known in my blue heart of hearts, I was really hoping it would be Gore :P

Friday, August 22, 2008

I know we're all waiting on tenterhooks for the VP pick, but I think this is gonna be pretty anti-climatic. I'm not sure I even understand why they chose text messaging...I mean, a bunch of kids are gonna be standing around going "Biden? Oh."

Thursday, August 21, 2008

Sneaky bastards

1. I swear to god my bank is trying to fake me out. I had some overdraft charges last week, and since then they've been putting all my authorizations for things through right away, which is kinda unheard of. You know, the "gas dollar" you see waiting there all the time? It's going through like the next day. So either the processors at the bank have suddenly become Starbucks fans, or I've been entered in some database of risky customers who they are fucking with now. Like, they know if they keep trying, I'll screw up somehow and they'll get some more money out of me. For example...I have an Old Navy purchase from last week that's been pending for a while now, but all of sudden now its not there. I've been caught by this trick before. The bank tells me that when they're putting a transaction through, it gets non-pended for a day before it clears. I don't believe them, but whatever, I'll pretend I buy it. However this particular 53.00 is just not anywhere to be found, for the last three days. I don't care if I have to eat socks all weekend, I am not touching my bank account until that damn thing clears. They are not gonna trap me.

2. I've noticed that my period makes me slightly paranoid. I get all self-conscious around other people, and I see the tics I have in this whole different light, like I go from being a cool person in my head to being the weirdest awkwardest slightly mentally handicapped old lady. It's an awful combination of emotions, cause my period also makes me preternaturally sensitive to any male pheromones, so I'm socially inept and shivering like a cat in heat all at the same time. But I don't care, cause I can crave pickles and yet be completely confident I'm not pregnant. Any pain on earth is worth that glory once a month. Or in my case, every two months. It's not really painful anyway, its kinda relaxing and relieving, like a really good puke when you know you drank too much/ Messy and smelly, and the physical sensation of bleeding for days leaves me lightheaded and throbbing, like someone punched me in the gut. I think I'm the only girl on the planet who truly enjoys her period... and being punched in the gut.

3. At the beginning of summer, I was all freaked out over gas. Like I would break myself trying to fill up when I thought it was the cheapest. Now I'm passing 3.48 everywhere, and I'm not even sweating it. Cause the election ain't till November. I'd like to point out that RUSSIA invaded a neighboring country and gas went down.

4. This whole houses versus patriotic arugula thing is the funniest shit ever. Is half of the country really that much smarter than the other half? Really? Are they going to be publishing books 500 years from now that attribute our elections and resulting decimation on the synapse suppressing affects of a lethal Tylenol/corn syrup lifestyle? Wait, maybe God is entering his "satire" phase.
Sometimes lately I wonder if I'm just a secondary narrator in a book, and Condoleezza Rice is the main character, and we're trapped in the plot of an Oscar contender wannabe that's borrowing heavily from Tom Clancy and Upton Sinclair.

5. Last night's episode made me understand why Project Runway is moving to Lifetime. Oh god, wouldn't it be awful if McCain chose Condi as a running mate? Condi vs. Michelle in the tabloids. See, I believe this stuff can happen because I thought of it, so therefore someone else has thought of it too. Anyway, what the hell Project Runway, why did you not get rid of Keith? I HATE Keith. Was it just because you couldn't take Daniel anymore? I understand. It was a hard choice. Just don't fuck up next week.

My fridge is a piece of history

I've decided that all the really good foods could have never been invented by modern man. For example, cheese. No person in their right mind these days would be like "Look, I kept this milk in a sheep's stomach for too long in hot weather, and now it's a solid! Let's eat it!" Or, "wow, these cucumbers have turned a weird color and shrunk to look like warty baby penises, I bet they'd go great on some burned meat!" Cheese, pickles, wine, beer, OLIVES, which is absolutely the weirdest. I mean, the fruit turns black. Black food is never a good thing. But someone, probably someone really really starving, tried them. And then hopefully made a fortune of them and didn't have to eat any more rotten fruit mixed with lye.

Even bacon wouldn't have happened except out of desperation. If everyone had enough cows to kill all the time, no one would have thought to pack their meat in ground up rock. They probably stored it in some cave with a salt vein, or tried keeping it in ocean water? Or found it on a shipwreck.

So my point is...modern refrigeration has killed our history of awesome gross food invention. Sure, we have hot dogs and astronaut ice cream. But they're not exactly staple foods, or rather, they shouldn't be. So in the interest of humanity's survival, I am going to invent the next portable, non-refrigerated, staple food.

I'm starting by leaving this opened jar of strawberry jelly on my counter for the next 6 months.
Fuck with all your friends who are anxiously waiting by their cell phones for the Obama VP pick.

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Lucky Girl

When she was born, the doctor warned Elizabeth's parents that their child was a mutant, a genetic freak. She had been born with 2 sets of eyelashes, like a shark has rows of teeth. And then there were her eyes.

"Your child has what is commonly known as Alexandra's Genesis. She is descended from a race of ancient Egyptian spirit people who disappeared 8000 years ago. She will never grow body hair, menstruate, or get sick. However, she will never find true love. "

"But her eyes doctor! What about her eyes?"

Her parents, who had envisioned a life in the movies for their baby girl before she was even born (and had in fact sold her soul to MGM 4 months before she emerged from the womb), immediately took advantage of her father's contacts in the German government, where in 1932 all the great advances in ocular science were taking place. The desperate family moved to Berlin, and Elizabeth's mother set up shop near Humboldt University, as a technical editor for the sciences and part time prostitute. With the help of a cadre of young brash Czech optometrists, the Taylors designed the world's first pair of colored contacts, which were a wonderful violet color, her mother's favorite color.

MGM, with the resources of all of Hollywood, eventually tracked down the fugitives, and there followed the famous shoot-out which took Elizabeth's father's life and set back the science of lenses more than thirty years. The studio carted Elizabeth and her mother back to the States under lock and key, and installed them in a guarded bungalow, where Elizabeth would live out the rest of her life as a cinematic concubine.

The Taylors never divulged Elizabeth's secret. They kept no close friends, made a practice of eating in, never went abroad if they could help it. Her mother learned to make the contact lenses by hand in kitchen. When her mother died, Elizabeth took on the responsibility, even though by this time there were commercial colored contacts available. Her eyes had become such legend, she couldn't risk the knowledge leaking out to anyone in the press. Not even her many husbands knew, with the exception of one, who died the day after he discovered her secret, purportedly in a plane crash. The examiner never explained the nail gouges around his eyes, or the apparent ritualized scarring on his torso.

What color are Elizabeth Taylor's eyes? Though we may never know for sure, at least until her body is in the coffin, there are rumours. There are the tales of servants, whispered secrets from paparazzi dismissed as the ramblings of alcoholics, reports from the asylums. When Elizabeth Taylor takes out her contacts, her eyes are black. Black like her soul.

Monday, August 18, 2008

Amalgam

God so loved Mary that he gave her 20,000$ worth of snowglobes, and said "my will be done".

That's roughly 1400 snowglobes, and they filled up Mary's exposed brick loft. Snowglobes on the counter, the shelves in the bathroom, the window sills. Mary's bonsai tree was relegated to the top of the tv where it chilled with a Paris snowglobe and a World Trade Center snowglobe, she thought it was appropriate to have a theme for each section, some sort of catalog structure. Every day she woke up, ate breakfast, and started shaking. She'd shake for about eight hours, order some pizza, shake some more with one hand while watching Lifetime.

Eventually the pizza guy Joe asked what was going on. He's had a thing for Mary for years, used to go to high school with her. Mary invited him in to shake one night, and he never left.

The unspoken goal was to get them all going at once, hoping that some miraculous event would happen when all the snow was drifting in identical plastic drifts. There were a few times in the early years when it actually seemed possible, but they were always off by only one or two globes. They could have recruited more people to help them, but neither one wanted to have strangers in the apartment, so they went on...year after year....shaking. Their efforts became more and more orchestrated, so that by the fifth year they were no longer really trying, but going through the same motions that had failed them yesterday.

In the sixth year, Mary got pregnant. Joe assumed it was his, but actually Mary had been having an affair with this guy Darren who was a graphics designer, lived across the hall, and thought this whole god/snowglobes/global mission thing was hot. Their son Jesus was born, and as he grew up, became the key third person in the shake structure. One morning, on his 33rd birthday, as they were doing a celebratory shake session, the snowglobes became aligned.

It was a magical moment, standing in the room, realizing they had finally achieved their lifetime goal. As the moment passed, the last snowflake drifted down, they looked around in excited anticipation. And thats when Joe realized he didn't believe in God, and also that his son was black.

Sunday, August 17, 2008

I think it must be pretty awkward to be the flower delivery guy. You never know if the person is going to be happy to see you, or less than thrilled, or down right pissed. "Who would be pissed to get flowers delivered?" Well, let's see. The girlfriend with a black eye? The girl who mistakenly told the weird guy at the bar where she works? The being-cheated-on wife? The woman who's father just died? The girl who knows they are from her ex-boyfriend even though he promised he wasn't going to do anything like that if she kept talking to him? A guy? The person who sits in the cubicle next to any of them and is really allergic?

Also, it must be awkward to work at the porn store and see people you know from high school come in. Or your parents' friends. The girl behind the counter at the porn store is always SO exuberant. She's like, giving you the details of the product as she tests it. Yes I know its waterproof. Didn't you just see me wandering around for 20 minutes, whispering to my friend, and trying to figure out if the 50 dollar one is really a better buy than the 25 dollar one which is way cuter? (that same thought process is pretty much the same with guys...is trying to figure out which vibrator to buy the same as figuring out which guy you should date? Cuter vs more reliable? Portable vs. Power cord? Flexible vs. Stronger? Of course, there are ones that advertise all of the above, but they're too expensive for me)

Thursday, August 14, 2008

Gripes or Pizza? Gripes or Pizza?

Okay, how about this for a mid-week recap:

Why do you people not understand your insurance policies? I hate that stupid State Farm commercial (where the girl is asking everyone what kind of deductible she should have) MORE THAN ANYTHING. It's a deductible. You pay it. How much can you afford to pay? That's the EASY part. What you should be asking is "does my uninsured motorist coverage pay for a hit&run?" Because that is what's gonna happen to you. Some jackass is going to scrape up the side of your 04 Accord, and you're gonna come crying to me about how its not your fault and you shouldn't have to pay anything and what do you have insurance for and do I know how much you pay a month and why is the world out to get you like this? And I'm going to say "I'm so sorry, but Uninsured Motorist Property Damage in Ohio only pays if we can identify the person and prove they don't have insurance, so for a hit & run you will have to pay your 1000 collision deductible" and you'll say "no one told me!" which I know is patently untrue because I sold the stuff to people like you, and you chose the 1000 deductible because you wanted to save the ten bucks a month, which I don't blame you for by the way, but don't cry to me because WE SENT YOU A POLICY TO READ which you didn't read and we would have happily explained it to you anytime you called up and asked, it would have taken five minutes. Because for some UNFATHOMABLE reason, you are okay with paying 100 bucks a month to some company without having any idea what you are buying. Also, it is NOT MY FAULT YOU DIDN'T BUY RENTAL. And its not my fault if you live in the middle of nowhere South Dakota and I can't get you a rental at 7pm. I AM SORRY, I FEEL BAD FOR YOU, but I am not an Enterprise employee and also I don't keep the trains running or the water flowing or the earth turning. I sit here in my cubicle, trying my hardest to make things easy on people like you. But there's only so much I can do, at some point we rely upon you KNOWING HOW TO READ AND OPENING YOUR MAIL.

AND YES, WE CAN TELL THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SOMEBODY HITTING YOUR PARKED CAR AND YOU HITTING THE POLE AT THE GAS STATION. Usually the latex paint is a good indicator. AND NO, I DON'T BELIEVE THAT THE DEER SLID OVER THE TOP OF YOUR CAR AND BROKE OUT YOUR TAILLIGHTS WITH ITS ANTLERS. I'm pretty sure the laws of physics apply in Nebraska too.

Cmon people. I like you. Help me help you.

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Not joking. I just had more occasion to sign on to Myspace and THIS was the ad listed underneath whale mamas....


Angels' Eyes-Tear Stains

Eliminate Tear Stains in Cats. Works From the Inside Out


What?

Maybe you should stop fucking with your cat so much, dickwad. Maybe it's starting to get a little insecure. How about you stop taking it for granted that YOU'RE the one with the food and YOU'RE the one with the bed, and the shoes, and the car and the pretty smelling body soaps. What's your cat got, huh? That silly pink catnip ball, a collection of corks, and his tongue. So leave the poor beast alone. And that goes DOUBLE for you, Mr. LOL cats guys. Your cat didn't ask for captions. He didn't ask for you to dope him up and pile remote controls on his belly or socks or tonka trucks. He certainly didn't ask to be stuck in a goddamn bottle.


I really really wanted an excuse to use this image.

You know what I think? I think the internet hates cats.

Also I just got spam in my inbox for drug rehab services with the title "I'm Not That Innocent".




More poems from the Internets

The Feeds by Bridget

Running 'can slow ageing process'
Pain 'linked with low vitamin D'
Bomb hits Pakistan air force bus
Olympic curbs
Renewed violence in west China
Harvest of death
Cuba 'jailing fewer dissidents'
Olympic ceremony star mimed
Probe into S Africa drugs recall
Israel 'proposes West Bank deal'
Venezuela choice
Stark beauty
Perfumed pong - herbal remedy for smelly rubbish
Protesters gather at Stiller film
Population Bomb Author's Fix For Next Extinction: Educate Women [News]
Hacking Memory to Break Drug Addiction
Hughes vows to stay at Man City
German ice-cream murders probed



MySpace?
by Bridget

Humpback Whales Huge selection, great deals on Humpback Whales
Baja Gray Whale Watching Camp beside whale birthing lagoons 3-6 days. Kayaks. Friendly whales.
Meet Locals Into Punk Rock Tonight. View Profiles 100% Free. Join Now! Punk Rock Dating www.GothScene.com




Once more into the Green Primeval (the Amazon suggests...) by Bridget

Every Mountain Goats album ever made.
Every Belle and Sebastian album ever made.
The Complete Idiots Guide to Cooking - For Guys
China Road - A Journey Into the Future of a Rising Power
Sway - The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior
Ganges - on Blu-Ray
SuperCrunchers - Why Thinking By Numbers is the New Way To Be Smart


Sunday, August 10, 2008

Things I learned from Star Trek (the next generation) and the Olympics

1. We like to be reassured that people in the future will be like us, that we ourselves could live in the future. The characters in Star Trek are recognizable and familiar, despite having cured war, invented interstellar travel, and eradicated shoetie laces.

2. We like to see that our flaws and virtues make us superior to every race in the universe, and also that we remain humble enough to deny it.

3. We wish we could dress in pajamas all the time.

4. Why would anyone play chess with Data?

5. It's good to know that even when aliens have superpowers we want, like telepathy, they will still be flat stilted characters without our sexy human complexity.

6. There are a million ways to imagine heaven and hell, and most of them include temporal distorting crystalline beings that suck the memories from your soul.

7. In the future, all government employees will be chosen based on their level of attractiveness.

8. When in doubt, say you are from France. Never play poker with the guy who says he's from France.

9. In the future we will have eradicated cows, pigs, and chickens.

10. Curiousity didn't kill the cat. Instead, the cat built a warp core and used it to build the biggest U.N. ever. And it was a good thing. Never discount the importance of allies, and technology capable of defeating your allies.
I desperately need coffee, but instead I'm trolling FunnyOrDie.com looking for God.

Change You Deserve
See more Adam "Ghost Panther" McKay videos at Funny or Die


Being Nice to Girls Will Only Get Your Friends Laid
See more funny videos at Funny or Die


I HAVE to leave the house. NOW. I have to overly caffeinate myself, then I have to come BACK to the house and CLEAN THE HOUSE. GODDAMNIT.

Friday, August 8, 2008

Cute outfits

The real Chinese human rights violation?

Forcing 200,000 Chinese cheerleaders to cheer for more than three hours
during the Parade of Nations. In gogo boots.

China's apparent strategy? Win the world over with pre-games pictorials.

Of course, McCain ran another "celebrity Obama" ad DURING THE OLYMPICS. Which is petty. What, does he feel a little left out of the global scene?

But then there was this awesome one: try and guess what it's a commercial for....



Finally, the most exciting news of the day
(cause lets face it, Russia being fucked up Russia is not news to the iPod culture)

The Particle Accelerator to end all Particle Accelerators
The Large Hadron Collider will taste first proton blood this weekend, with the hopes of starting Sept. 10th. So keep that in mind. Sept 10th we will all be destroyed by millions of mini black holes riddling our fabric of space and time.

To help us understand...CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) made a rap video. (though I'm not sure how "official" it is :)



"My law has just been violated
That don't make sense!
There's gotta be another
Particle to make this balance!"

Thursday, August 7, 2008

Just a few things to add here....

First the good news. I've played this song about ten times in the car today...



At dinner with Tara tonight, eating fake chinese chicken, I discovered that she hadn't seen this awesomeness yet, so if you haven't either, here. If you don't watch it, I'll look down on you. I swear I will. I'll give you my patented withering look, and deep in the core of your soul you'll die a little.

See Tara, this came first:



Then there was this:

See more Paris Hilton videos at Funny or Die


And then there was this:



And this:



Now, I hope you took notes on our conversation tonight, cause here's a short pop quiz:

1. What did John famously call Cindy?
2. What famous starlet's energy policy has McCain adopted in the last fifteen minutes?
3. What does McCain do with puppies?
4. What is growing on McCain's head? ( I actually find this depressing, because I thought if you had enough money, you could get rid of moles/age spots/enraged Asiatic fungi. But I guess I'm wrong)

Monday, August 4, 2008

The bottle says Pink Merlot, therefore it DOES exist

Yesterday, Sunday that is, was as productive as any true Lakewood Princess would want. I drove back from Macedonia in the morning, hungover Drank coffee. Put stuff in my coffee and drank more. Watched Gidget (Sandra Dee gave me little Ashley flashbacks and also its kinda creepy how she was 15 and the guys were all in their 30s). Groomed the cat. Had a series of nice little texts inviting me to a place on the lake. Which I guess I'm not supposed to tell you about, which is of course not true, but I'm sticking to that bit of fiction, cause its fun to suppose my life more secretive than it is. Drank more on the lake. Went over to one of those newbie condo townhouses north of Detroit, had more drinks and a spectacular Ohio City view, which almost makes me forgive the siding atrocities they commit. They're really nice inside. Flirted with a guy 12 years older than me. Played the whole "sticking around after everyone else has left". Note: this is where I wished I had maybe not been so drunk. Remember that very recent post about not hooking up with anyone? Well, I didn't this time either, but man did I want to, and we all know thats the mortar coming loose from the bricks right? But slept on the couch instead. Aren't you proud of me? I'm proud of me. Sort of. I'd be more proud if I hadn't stayed up till three watching Chilean strippers, but gone home like a good girl. Then when I went to work this morning, I wouldn't have been so obviously comatose. I do like my job for waking me up though, it's so much more interesting than what I was doing before. And because it was OT today, I got to cut out of the shift early, so I could go home and drink this very pepto bismol colored bottle of wine I've had sitting there since Friday. I watched Mr. Deeds Goes To Town, the original. You know, I've watched the Adam Sandler/Winona Ryder remake so many times, and it's okay, you know, it's sweet. But the original? When the first homeless farmer comes in with the gun, and starts talking about bread lines and hungry children? I cried hot liberal tears. Bonus: Jean Arthur has more attitude in her little eyebrow than Winona could ever hope to emote, and much better hats.

Everyone else is at Radiohead tonight, but I'm feeling okay. In the past 24 hours I've broken a chair, played a lot of Paul Simon, had a guy tell me things he'd do to my ass, and watched Gary Cooper save the world. So it's not a bad start to the week. Plus there's a Lifetime movie on right now about the Texas Cheerleader Scandal (I'm writing this now cause it's taking them a little time to get to the scandal part). Viva La Semana. Go Team!

Postscript: Awesome is watching a lifetime movie about cheerleaders and a history channel special about the Chinese Unification wars at the same time. I mean Qin Shi Huangdi? Totally a Brooke.

Sunday, August 3, 2008

So Friday night I went over Jay's, to see the emptied apartment (the tv is WHERE now?). We fried tofu and made spring rolls. Jay's spring rolls were much prettier than mine. Jay is one of those people that are good to have long conversations with at least every two months. It's like getting a mental massage, you just feel much more self-assured after talking to them. It runs little diagnostics on your brain, defragments the neurons. I run home all inspired by the storm, but forced to bed.

Then work on Saturday, and afterwards Audrey asked me to come and have a drink, so we sit in Fox and Hound debriefing our current department. Audrey and I have gone through three positions now with each other at this company, we're playing Follow the Leader. So work gossip for an hour, then off to Marty and Rebecca's. Todd is there, and also Laura and Brian and their son Van. Van is five and runs off with the neighbor kids for the night, playing in and out of the woods while the grownups sit on the deck discussing sturgeon plastic surgery and local politics. Marty makes his best ribs ever. Later we play basketball, and yes it is fairly suburbia idyllic, adults in the driveway with drinks and kids running back and forth shrieking. Then there's a moment of parent-child magic, when Laura just starts reciting Where The Wild Things Are, and not only Van is enrapt at his mother's performance, but also all the other drunk people in the room. Laura scares the shit out of me by telling me there's a Daddy Long Legs (the monster of the deck) behind me on the wall, and I spill kahlua all over the white carpet. The child successfully negotiates the giant telescope into the driveway, and we all take turns looking for planets. Rebecca finds one. I find that I can't look through a telescope because I can't manage to keep my eyelashes out of the picture, which makes me frustrated so I drink more. The night ends with showing Todd the first episode of Firefly, and me falling asleep against my wishes, I don't want to go to sleep these days. I want to do other things.

Now this morning......Holy latte full of grace, the Buzz is with you. Blessed are you amongst beverages, and blessed is the fruit of your womb, Espresso. Holy latte, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our waking. Starbucks.

Saturday, August 2, 2008

6AM Saturday Video (woohoo!)

Electrons soaking into the space between cells


Tonight is an electrifying night. There's lightning everywhere, it's a strobe light outside, but no rain and no thunder. I got so nervous looking at the flashes from Jay's living room, I practically raced out the door, into my car, down the highway and EVERYONE is driving like they're outdistancing the storm faster and faster, bikes speeding past me, speeding up on the turns and yellow lights the rain will come any second and mute this, the wind will raise any minute now, the sound will come and break everything. The music in the car is playing louder, the cigarette smoke is whisked away before I even breathe it out. Break Break Break clouds! Break moon! Break streetlight! Pop!

But it doesn't. We're all pent up, pacing inside our little houses on the lake, twitching inside our skins. The electronics in our bodies, the millions of tiny charged particles which are our thoughts and feelings and bodily functions, ache to be up in the clouds, strain against their cellular prison walls, aware with every other spark tonight of something beyond their unnatural confinement, and we look up at the lights in the sky scared of completely disintegrating but pleading for that confirmation of fate. There's no control in Cleveland tonight. The entire city is about to turn into a pillar of salt. We are doomed.

There is a deconstructed hurricane blowing down America. In South Dakota, winds of 115mph, no tornadoes but roof ripping and root ripping winds. The furnace of hot air pushes east, an advancing army of humidity and misery. Electricity is out across the Midwest, in the Plain states people stand in line, waiting for 20 pound bags of ice from the back of a municipal truck. They search for emergency generators, to turn the fans on. In Mid-Atlantic, the trees dig down as deep as they can. Virginia is set upon by avenging angels of stream and water, that cast deep relief shadows on the billboards and highways...the permanent things are powerless.


photo by David Woodley