20x11: Things I don’t like

This list is only half the 20x11, because in general I think it’s a good practice to try to focus on things you like more than on things you don’t like. Besides, anyone who has met me has heard at least 20x5.5 number of things I don’t like and can therefore supplement the list with those complaints.

In completely random order:

Hot seatbelt after the car’s been sitting in the summer sun; missing puzzle pieces; Internet spam; yapping dogs; children crying in that way where their faces turn red and they choke on their own crying; stepping on the bottom of your jeans outside in the rain or snow so they get wet and dirty; William J. Vader II; Alicia Silverstone; people who try to explain predestination by repeating their argument louder instead of saying something different; when something falls in the trash accidentally

Vomiting; reading Agatha Christie novels when I’m not on long train rides; mirrors with shiny silvery metallic frames; mirrors with shiny gold-like metallic frames; people who tell you not to do something and then go and do it themselves, anyway; people who condescend to you; the self-centeredness of making lists of stuff you like on your personal blog; not being able to control the whininess in your voice when you’ve been crying or are upset; when people give away what “Rosebud” means; getting cut off in traffic; being told “you’ll understand when you’re older,” especially since you never do

When the person you’re with is paying more attention to someone else than to you; going to parties where you don’t know anyone; pretzels; cream cheese on anything but a bagel; The Itchy and Scratchy Show; the American flag – aesthetically; “the American flag” – as a rallying point for people who don’t have an actual well-thought-out opinion on issues; Jean-Ralphio on Parks and Recreation; when people use second person to distance themselves from the stuff they’re saying; making errors in spelling; Mike Rappaport

Saurkraut; not understanding German; Screech from Saved By The Bell; the fact that some of the shows I really liked aren’t out on DVD, or that they stopped after releasing the first season or two; that time I had just gotten my training wheels off and fell into the kiddie pool as I rode around the driveway, at the time; living on the third floor or higher; drying clothes on a clothesline, because of the time it takes and how I have to schedule laundry around the weather report; drinking alcohol; spending more than an hour at the aquarium; waiting in line; when I tell someone to stop tickling me and they don’t

Wearing high heels; not having a place to put all the stuff I want to hoard; not knowing everything in the world; touching raw chicken; meat pies; the phrase “humble abode”; having to check the pockets of pants before putting them in the washer; not having a dishwasher; washing the dishes; My Antonia by Willa Cather; burning my tongue on a too-hot beverage even though I blew on it for a long time and it seemed safe to drink

The word “discombobulate”; A Day No Pigs Would Die by a guy whose name I can’t remember; not remembering that guy’s name; cheesy and sweet flavors together; cheesecake; the recent years of Garfield; when people gather in the kitchen at parties even though everything is set up in the other room; troubleshooting lost Internet connections; competing publicly; karaoke; people who immediately begin saying a word that someone just said they hated, as if to test out the hatred of the person who hates that word, or to torture them

Swimming at the YWCA when I was little; my stupid phone battery that dies all the time; potato salad; cranberry sauce with other stuff in it, like celery; celery; having multiple plates and bowls per-person, per-meal, at a home dinner party; orange-scented things; wracking my brain for a movie title on the tip of my tongue and still not being able to think of it; doing my taxes; back pain; any phrase combining a body part and food word, such as “head cheese” or “toe jam”

Carrying a purse that doesn’t go over the shoulder; when DVDs won’t let you skip ahead to the main menu; this weird digital TV signal thing that causes me to not get any channels; giant corporations that are secretly running the world; the Tea Party; Power Bars; the idea of climbing a mountain; imaginary friends, when adults have them and speak to them in public; prices on food at concession stands; Carrot Top; people who never stop complaining

Cursing; the virgin/whore dichotomy; lima beans; AOL; dogs that lick you; “dog-hand” – the smell your hand has after you pet a smelly dog; the fatty edge of ham; cigarette smoke, or the smell of it; when people name their kids stupid names; sharp knives; dickies

Canadian bacon; the way the new Oprah channel is being advertised as if she didn’t already have her own TV network; when people accidentally break my stuff; American cheese; those wheelie shoes; shoes that you have to shine; when people back down just to appease someone else who is wrong; when people back down just to appease someone else who is a jerk; movies where the lead woman is an idiot; movies where the lead man is an idiot; movies where everyone else has to be an idiot to make the lead man look like a normal guy

Shoulder and neck pain; Valentine’s Day clichés; the idea of “figgy pudding”; the rudeness of guests who would demand that you “bring it right here”; dancing; the portions of songs I otherwise like, particularly 80's ballads, where the band "breaks it down" and includes a long musical interlude, often of a saxophone solo (.5)

20x11: Things I like

In completely random order:

George Elliot’s Middlemarch; “Good Idea/Bad Idea” from Animaniacs; NPR; driving long distances to arrive somewhere awesome; the idea of shopping sprees; Will Arnett; Paradise Pizza; salads with croutons; William J. Vader III; the dog from New Jersey voice; The National; watching P.C. play video games

Parks and Recreation; Willow Brook park; breakfast food for dinner; breakfast food for breakfast; particularly bacon; copyediting; showing that simple things are often complicated; coconut-scented hand lotion; Joe Biden’s hilarious out-takes; London; Los Abandoned

Aziz Ansari; those gingerbread cookies Laura makes; friend Jenny; Dujiangyan, China; the Oxford Tube; allowing myself to watch the Harry Potter movies even though to evangelicals they’re evil; allowing myself to listen to the Harry Potter books even though to evangelicals they’re evil; Jim Dale’s reading of the Harry Potter books; swings; fresh flowers on the table at a friend’s house; Washington, D.C.

Swimming at the Lion’s pool when I was little; Chuck; reading Agatha Christie novels on long train rides; lamps; mirrors with nice wooden frames, particularly ones that look kind of retro; fitted sweaters that can be layered; Stuff White People Like; writing fun stuff on my blog; pretending my opinions are of grand importance; the quirkiness of making lists of stuff you like on your personal blog; friend Carl

The Simpsons; carving stamps; memories of 7-11 Slurpees; watching movies with friends in my dorm room; watching movies with friends in my apartment; having themed parties, such as the “T party”; Edwards key lime pie, from your grocer’s freezer; pepper-jack cheese; pointillism; friend Becca; e-friend Jason

Chester, England; my old car Betty; hatchbacks in general; velvety sofas, such as the purple sofabed; velvety sofas such as the gold loveseat; eject buttons on DVD player remotes; watching endless hours of TV until I feel I’m a part of the characters’ lives; when someone editing my writing tells me something I already kind of knew but hadn’t dealt with yet; chocolate Vitasoy; memories of eating spinach quesadillas in Thailand, with English Breakfast tea, every morning in Chiang Mai; knowing DVD math

Fried fish; the story of how I learned some Chinese; knowing some Chinese; friend Carmen; friend Vivian; friend Apple; when the DVD logo bounces exactly in the corner of the screen when the player is on screensaver; that scene in The Office where the whole office is waiting for the DVD logo to bounce exactly in the center of the screen and Michael thinks they’re having a great meeting; riding in a red wagon with my family to Laura’s house; quoting the old Ames “two-day sale” commercial where the man says “I was holding her weenie…and poof! My Doris was gone!”; going through the entire Bill Nye dialogue on being a fathead with my fathead brother

The smell of laundry dried on a clothesline; clean flannel sheets; clean flannel pajamas; holding hands with P.C.; calling people “cheater” instead of jerk or other rude terms; the theme music to NYPD Blue; having AAA; saying “release the Kraken!” whenever we open the Kraken brand rum; biscuits; Belgian waffles with strawberries and whipped cream; the memory of walking the streets in Belgium

Star Trek: The Next Generation; reading my horoscope from Rob Breszny; getting packages in the mail; the Elaine painting; quoting Strong Bad; super-local music; Tilly and the Wall; friend Heather; letterboxing; my awesome winter coat; hating New Jersey

Lots of pillows; my $3 winter boots from the Goodwill; Where the Red Fern Grows; Garfield without Garfield; the Allen and Craig show on youtube; Matt & Kim; eating cookies; the “yesterday’s bread” rack at the Bristol Stop & Shop; the Acme Steel sign visible from the New Britain Stop & Shop; flatbread; calling it “Fartford”

Star Trek: Voyager; owning an extra DVD player so I can keep one at work for overnights; space heaters; River Raid, the Atari game; pineapple, particularly a quarter of a pineapple on a stick; chef’s coats on chefs; swimming at the YMCA when I was little; Fifties Television by William Boddy; putting a candy cane in hot chocolate; looking at the blue and green Christmas lights on my tree; buying half-price wrapping paper in bulk after the holiday

Queer studies; brownies with coconut; brownies without coconut; Caroline in the City; knowing something about football; Battlestar Galactica (the new one); King of the Wind by Marguerite Henry; banter; verbing words; Calvin and Hobbes; those VH1 “Remembering the [X]ties” marathons (mainly the ones about the 80s)

Cranberry sauce, jellied; sleeping; the weird things introduced to me by Nigel Frith, including the Pangeia room; coconut Vitasoy; inventing new types of purses; President Obama; jasmine tea; yogurt; talking with my friends on the phone until we run out of things to say; talking with my friends on the phone until we can barely breathe through the laughter; quoting “Behind the Laughter”

Diet Dr Pepper; tuna subs from Subway with lots of onions; saying “for reals”; ironic cross-stitches; peanut-walnut milk; cilantro; T-shirts from thinkgeek; 30 Rock; the idea of living in a box truck; the idea of living in a schoolbus; the fact that I just typed “schoolbux” by accident

Big Bang Theory; Judith Halberstam’s thoughts on horror as described in Skin Shows; being good at helping people move; my grandparents; making mix CDs; my students from Academy of Hope; saying “that’s what she said”; staying up really late; sleeping until 10 a.m.; talking to myself when I’m alone; singing loudly along with certain songs in the car

Teamwork; the episode of Reading Rainbow with the song “Teamwork” starring Levar Burton; regular Doritos; falafel; Amsterdam Falafel in D.C.; libraries; the way the Parks and Rec staff have a vendetta with the “punk-ass book jockeys” at the Pawnee Library; the way food tastes when it comes from a concession stand at a baseball game; heckling; Patton Oswalt; cleverness

Raw almonds; milkshakes; Jim Gaffigan; pretending to shout “apt!” when relevant; panang curry; the way so many people on TV and in the movies look like friend Jeff; arranging things in the fridge or car with Tetris-like efficiency; crab meat; being proud of something a friend has written; So You Think You Can Dance; ironic viewing of Gidget movies

When people admit that they’re wrong (when they are); the Best of Craigslist listings; Mad Men; crocheted blankets from the Goodwill; Cool Whip; hard-boiled eggs; the yeariversary plans to visit a different state capital on every yeariversay with P.C.; volunteering for things I care about; taking the bus in foreign countries; The Office; unresolved sexual tension between work partners in sitcoms

Designating my boyfriend “Prince Certainpersonio” on my blog; calling my boyfriend “buttface” in real life; bringing P.C. donuts for breakfast when his day at work is terrible; Lewis Black; Valentine’s Day horror movie marathons; using a tray for eating in the living room in front of the TV or elsewhere; Tina Fey; Amy Poehler; Adam Baldwin in all his roles so far; taking long walks; smart people

Watermelon flavored things, including a drink made by blending watermelon with just some water; warm cardigans; Carebears; taking frivolous things seriously; friend Emily; ironic use of yearbook clichés such as “reach for the stars!”; Joseph Gordon-Leavitt; Persuasion, the movie with Ciaran Hinds; chocolate-covered gummy bears; chocolate-covered frozen bananas; the word “satchel”

Resolved: 20x10 New Year's resolution update

Here are the resolutions I made last year, and an update on how I did.

1. I will drink more chocolate Vitasoy this year than I did last year by remembering how awesome it is whenever I go to the Asian market.

Alas, I remembered how awesome chocolate Vitasoy is this year, but I'd have to drink about two gallons of it in the next twelve hours to keep this resolution.

2. I will take at least three "significant" trips.

Let's see: I went to Tennessee for friend Becca's wedding to friend Brad; went to RR'10 at friend Sharon's in Virginia; and visited friend Carl in NYC a few times. I also went with P.C. to a Matt & Kim concert in Rhode Island, my first time getting out of the car in that state. Perhaps that counts as three.

3. I will cultivate my prejudice against people who drive mini-vans through rehearsal and witty, biting commentary.

This was clearly the most successful of my resolutions, though my witty, biting commentary often devolved into simple mockery after awhile. Still, I uttered the words "stupid mini vans" more this year than any previous year in memory.

4. I will watch at least one episode of American Idol, since Ellen is on it as a judge this year.

I did not watch an entire episode of American Idol, though I did catch a few minutes of Ellen judging, and while waiting for a doctor's appointment in August I watched most of an episode of the Ellen Show. Mixed success, I'd say, in following the resolution -- though any year I fail to watch even one episode of American Idol seems like a win overall.

5. I will complete my M.A. in Cultural Production (December 2010).

Done. I need to make a few minor, sentence-level changes in my capstone paper and mail two paper copies to the CP office, but the paperwork is in, and my paper has been accepted toward the degree -- so basically done.

6. I will visit at least one museum.

A few weeks ago I took my girl to the Wilton Historical Society's "Great Trains" exhibit, which was of seven model trains in various gauges. I also visited the Tobacco Museum at Northwest Park in Windsor on a letterboxing expedition. Friend Carl took us to a museum at Yale, and P.C. and I wandered around a British museum down there. And since I took that museum education class, I also ended up at the Peabody-Essex and the DeCordova Sculpture Garden and Museum in MA, the Barker Character, Cartoon and Comic Museum, and probably a few others.

Still, despite the overwhelming success of following this resolution, since museums are less fun than disparaging mini-vans, I consider resolution 3 my best success.

7. I will make at least one new friend.

Done, and done -- though since I'm no longer living near said new friends in MA, I have to settle for Facebook-friending them.

8. I will invent at least two new kinds of purses.

Technically, I only invented one new kind of purse this year -- the book purse -- though because of the different binding methods, I've had to invent two different ways of rolling the paper to create the same effect. I also improved the look and stability of the final product by switching up the way the butcher's cotton twine was attached to the book cover, though this still may need some work to properly balance the purse.

You can decide whether this counts as one or two kinds of purse, though I'm inclined to count it as just one.

9. I will work the following quotes into conversation as often as possible: "Godzilla doesn't care what humans do"; "you can't just go around..."; "I'm not a real doctor but I am a real worm."

I forgot about this resolution, and so did not work these phrases into conversation as much as I now wish I had.

Perhaps I shot myself in the foot on this one by making two of the quotes related to weird animals (a giant lizard and a worm).

10. I will save the request for P.C. to do "the dog from New Jersey voice" for real emergencies.

P.C. was able to help me keep this resolution by refusing to do the "dog from New Jersey voice" on request.

Perhaps my next year's resolution will be to request the "dog from New Jersey" voice with profligate abandon, hoping to hear it as often as possible...

P.S. on "We're Democrats"

Quote from saveprospect.com: "It's about a right to property ownership without conditions and impositions."

Personally, I'm perfectly willing to allow people to own property "without conditions and impositions" if they're willing to haul their own water for sewage and other use, create electricity on their land, refrain from using public land, and agree to inflict no "conditions and impositions" on anyone else.

Otherwise, I'm afraid they're stuck living in a community instead of the nonexistent old West of John Wayne movies.

Local Trivia: We're Democrats first, then environmentalists. But mostly we just want the status quo to stay the same.

Driving through town last week, probably on the Big Lots shopping expedition that had me combing the state for additional seasons of Star Trek Voyager for $10 (they had season 3 at one Big Lots, making me hopeful for more -- alas, as in the series' episodes, my journey brought me to many other items along the way but did not achieve my original goal), I saw a sign that said, simply, "saveprospect.com."

Naturally, since it was past campaign season, I jotted down the web address to look up later. Such simple signs raise my curiosity and make me hope for a crackpot angelfire home page that would have been otherwise unGoogleable.

I didn't find a crackpot angelfire home page -- I'm pretty sure those have all been imploded anyway -- but I was surprised by the site I found. That is, I was surprised by the news that Prospect, CT is considering installing wind turbines (or a wind turbine). I was much, much less surprised that Connecticut residents had formed a committee to stop the turbines from being installed.

Read it for yourself, but the controversy is over the annoying sounds the turbines might make, the fall in property values, and -- most interestingly, I thought -- the wildlife and regulatory issues at stake in putting up a wind turbine in a state that so far has (they seem to claim, though I have no knowledge of this) insufficient regulation re: wind turbines.

Interesting argument on the regional level here, over an issue I thought was restricted to "Cape Wind" controversy (offshore "wind farms), and one that I think perfectly epitomizes how Connecticut and southern New England in general tends to look at things: it appeals at once to the property owner, the environmentalist, and the regulation-happy Democrat. That is a tough tightrope to walk...but it's the Connecticut way. (Note also that ultimately the hoped-for outcome is a conservative one, since it would leave things, at least in Prospect, pretty much the same.)

Unfortunately for all of us, Prospect is on a bunch of high hills and so gets a lot of wind, while Bridgeport, New Britain and Hartford, etc. are pretty much flat -- meaning we can't just move the annoying turbines to lower-class neighborhoods like we might do with other unsightly energy-producing machines or, on occasion, toxic waste.

Which means that probably, instead of wind turbines being installed, we'll end up doing what we tend to do -- being New Englanders -- and change nothing.

That's the true advantage of appealing to the disparate masses: everyone agrees with you, and nothing gets done.

PSA: HD-DVD is the new 8-Track.

I'm sure HD-DVD owners already know this, but I think it's funny to compare things to 8-tracks, especially when they're in the same hilarious situation.

Silly HD.

PSA: Mehhhhhhhhhhhrry Christmas!

That is all.

If as your Christmas gift you would like me to answer some particular superlative category for my New Year's prep post, please suggest such categories in the comments here, or via email. Examples include "your most frustrating class in the M.A. program" or "number of days you believe so-and-so would survive in a zombie apocalypse." You know, that kind of thing.

Hope your day is merry and bright.

PSA: Random books available to all readers

In deference to my recent desire to have a bedroom, rather than the library-where-I-sleep that I've had since I moved back to Local Town, CT, I've been culling the giant herd of books I'd accumulated for communal use.

If any of you would like a carefully selected, but still semi-random packet of books for Christmas, or for any other purpose, email me your address and I will send you three, or fewer, or more if you request it.

I always loved walking into the D.C. public library, whose shelving systems I could never understand, and pulling a few random books off the shelf, checking them out and then seeing what I had. This would be that, for you, but with the bonus of also getting a package in the mail around the holidays.

Let me know if there are any themes you would like your random selection of books to explore, or if you'd like them to be utterly randomized, or chosen for some other feature, such as how impressive they will look on your shelf.

Local Trivia: First I quit my job...

Hey, all.

You may have noticed over the last year or so of your religious reading of this blog (har har) that my posts on "my girl" quotes have been missing. This is mainly because I've only been working with the girl at the Pizza Hut, or had been until she was let go by a new manager who cleaned shop and then was subsequently cleaned out of the shop himself.

And things aren't really funny at the Pizza Hut. In fact, things haven't been really funny anywhere with my girl for awhile.

So I've done what I had intended to do when I began my M.A. at Brandeis, which is to quit working with her. Or at least I've indicated that I will not be working with her starting in 2011.

This is exciting for me, as I've been ready to quit for awhile. I'll still be working at my other direct care job, and probably still working with the other girl I work with. But it will definitely be a relief to have a break.

Plus now I can spend all my time reading again, like I used to. Perhaps 2011 will show a revival of the "book a week" goal. Or maybe I'll watch all those TV show seasons I didn't get to while I was busy the last year and a half critiquing all the TV show seasons I've already seen.

Or perhaps I'll actually start writing stuff on my blog again.

PSA: TV reality check

Alright, New York Times article. I actually agree with your general premise that we should look very carefully at a merger between NBC and COMCAST, in terms of the monopoly it might create. But you're marshaling some silly points to your cause.

First, yes, if NBC and Comcast are allowed to merge, it will mean that one company will own both distribution and programming capabilities.

On the other hand, that's happened before, like when TV first started and RCA owned this little broadcasting company called (what was it again? Oh yeah--) NBC. In fact, RCA created NBC in order to sell more televisions. Now, given, the production of programming and the distribution network of, well, networks (local affiliate stations) weren't taking place in exactly the same company. But affiliate stations and the network had a give-and-take (mostly take-and-take on the network side) relationship that can't be easily distinguished from what NBC and Comcast propose.

Second, if you're looking back to the old halcyon days of when cable companies had nothing to do with television production, cable networks and distributors (though not Comcast) have also been able to produce and control programming for years.

Third, there's no such thing as "online TV." TV is on TV, and online is on computers. If you mean "television programming distributed via the internet," then that's still not "online TV."

A television set is an item, and it is not a computer.

It's possible that in the future we'll still refer to short, episodic, scripted or edited shows as "TV shows," even if they've been produced and distributed with no reference to the television sets that we use increasingly even now for viewing stuff from our computers, from "online," or from various digital media players (or VCRs, if we're the lucky owners of a copy of Isaac Asimov's Robots VCR Mystery Game). It's true that those lines are blurring. But "TV" right now still means those devices that receive a broadcast signal, and cable.

Fourth, cable companies have ALWAYS fooled with pricing to make money off of distribution. This is mainly because they are companies designed to make money off of distribution.

Cable companies stand in contrast to the public good of broadcast stations, which were allotted distribution networks in the form of bandwidth when TV "came online" (haha) in the 1950s. The federal government regulated that distribution of distribution because the airwaves were a public asset. Cable companies are private, and therefore have always been after profits rather than public good. They own the cables; they get to say what they're charging to use them.

It's too late after the fact to make a private enterprise into a government-regulated one. This is partly why I was against the switch to whatever this digital system of distribution is. (That, and the fact that I can't get a freaking signal anymore. And also that poor people got screwed with those converter-box dealies.)

Those cats are out of the bag, and it's unhelpful to stand around wringing your hands and worrying about them as they run around peeing on things.

If "online TV," should it ever exist, actually wants to do anything, it's going to have to do what TV did originally, and innovate. There's no reason that new forms of distribution -- internet-based ones -- can't get as much traffic as TV has had, eventually. We're in the middle of transition, here, from a TV-based distribution model (in which actual TV shows are simply made available also online), to a web-based model.

It makes sense to me, given this transition, that behemoths of the old age, like NBC and Comcast, would begin banding together to fight the coming tide. They won't win, ultimately. The reason they're all starting to look the same is that we've already left them behind us, and from a distance, everything starts to blur.

PSA: For those who are afraid of goats (you know who you are)

There is finally help for victims of petting-zoo-related trauma -- at least for the human victims.

I'm not sure what the goats can do about petting-zoo-related trauma. ("Okay, show us on the doll where he touched you, Billie...")

"We've been poisoned by these fairy tales"

Now that my capstone paper's "final" draft is turned in, I have a little room to breathe -- or, no, wait. I still have 45 hours of internship work to do by Monday.

Okay, but I'm taking some breathing room anyway simply to register my intense irritation -- an irritation that's been building over the process of writing my paper on Criminal Minds, a paper that interrogates the fictions of the heteronormative patriarchal protector and how those are predicated on black-and-white categorizations of people who are actually, essentially, uncategorizable -- with the idea of the (pure, facist) war hero.

My objections have been stated better than I'm stating them here in Chris Hedges War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2002), and in The Hurt Locker, a movie that I thought successfully portrayed the ambivalence of war in our post-9/11 world in a compelling personal narrative.

In the context of my hating the Grand Narrative of the war hero (which doesn't mean hating soldiers, so don't send me any comments saying "WHY DO YOU HATE THE TROOPS??" [Actually, that would be pretty funny. Go ahead and send 'em.]), I've had a renewed interest in Don Henley's "End of the Innocence" of late. In my evangelical fervor to attain a holiness that amounted to 100% purity, I probably would have found this song scandalous as a kid and teenager. In my loosening, "maybe I'm not the boss of everyone," post-college liberalism, I probably didn't think much about it at all.

In my current state of mind, after so many months of reading about detective narratives and watching detective television shows, and seeing the connections between these (interpretive) narratives and the (heroic) war narratives we've heard -- in both their "conquering hero" and "ambivalent adrenaline-addict" iterations -- I've gone back to believing in its scandal.

In my reading of "End of the Innocence," Don Henley is proposing a personal stand against the narrative of purity that activates the "war myth" Chris Hedges refers to...in the form of loss of virginity.

Well, Don. Hold on there, buddy. I mean, how do we (women) know you don't just want to "do it," and that you're making up these political excuses for a base drive?

Except that I think women (or this one woman -- OR MAYBE IT'S NOT A WOMAN AT ALL -- who's in the song) have agency in this song. And I think that partly because the lyrics I'm focused on are contradictory, in a way that fails to fit the narrative of the virgin/whore. Henley says "let your hair fall all around me.../Offer up your best defense/But this is the end/The end of the innocence." It sounds like he might be giving an order. But it mostly sounds like he might be proposing a response to things that have already occurred, an acknowledgment that "the innocence" has already been taken. His proposed response is a political act, and one that really only women can make.

(Why can only women make this response? Basically, because theirs is the only virginity anyone cares about.)

To me, the message of this song as a whole is that there are ways to creatively and productively "opt out" of the Grand Narratives we're given, and that option necessarily involves both taking action and the renegotiation of identity in terms other than pure/impure.

In the first chorus, he's saying this in response, apparently, to a divorce. Heteronormative formations of family have failed, and his response is to propose that they (he and the person he's singing to) go back to a more natural setting (where "we'll sit and watch the clouds go by / and the tall grass wave in the wind"), a place removed from the constructs of the "normal family." The "naturalness" of this pastoral imagery is also suspect (again, is Don just trying to "get some" by going all Romantic on us?), but in combination with his statement that "we've been poisoned by these fairy tales," the relatively unscripted space of the "natural" setting allows for an alternative to the (fairy tale) heteronormative ideal.

In the second chorus (the one that makes me connect this directly to the war hero myth), he's responding to America "beating plowshares into swords" -- dystopic as that is -- and ends with "when daddy had to lie," which I think relates directly to the lie of "happily ever after" and the lie of the war myth.

[And then I took a break for several hours and when I came back I was no longer in what is obviously paper-writing mode.]

Anyway, I like that song. And you should probably like it, too.

PSA: William J. Vader III is born.

That's right, everybody: I basically have a new computer.

I say basically because in terms of externalia, William J. is the same compu-box (Toshiba Satellite Some-Numbers) I've been using for the last year and a half; but after a thorough-going repair and restore (or "store," since William J. II was always running Vista, and therefore was never fully "with it" to begin with) project run by my very own Prince Certainpersonio, William J. Vader II ceased to be in any relevant sense, and has given way to William J. Vader III, complete with Windows 7 and a new (much bigger) hard drive.

William III, I have to say, is probably the best William yet. He's faster and more capable of getting things done -- in part because my old tagalong/whiner/two-years-expired Norton antivirus is now completely gone and doesn't interrupt everything I try to do (including making formatting changes on a Word document) -- and actually seems significantly friendlier than the old, irascible William.

The end result is that I can now do things like save documents and download pictures from my camera, which may then be put on my blog.

And we all have P.C. to thank...or blame.

Huzzah.

Local Trivia: In which I become obsessed with headstones (predictably)

Lately I've been touring cemeteries in search of letterboxes related to some actual, practical artisans of colonial times -- that is, the guys who carved the lunettes at the tops of colonial (and post-colonial) tombstones.

One letterboxer in particular includes in the clues a side-trip through the old cemeteries he plants his stamps in, to view the work (gravestone-carving work) of particular artisans, and tells you a bit about each artist in the process. It's that combination of historical detail and actual, real-life experience (of the art, in this case) that makes for grade A letterboxing, in my opinion.

That letterboxer has definitely piqued my interest in wandering through ye olde cemeteries -- if you're the morose, Byronic sort, you might also get a kick out of this kind of stuff (a kick into the wind, that is, in reaction to the futility of life and the meaningless of passion and emotion in the face of that futility -- and yet you can't NOT kick, because what if some attractive women are watching, and how will they know you're thinking such deep thoughts otherwise: a Byronic kick, in other words), and so I offer you a bit of tids here. (Not just one tidbit, but a few.)

A lunette is the semi-circular part of the tops of vertical tombstones. (See more info on the parts of gravestones here.) You can see an example of an hourglass lunette here (because I took this picture of it):


This stone is from Mount Feake Cemetery in Waltham, MA and memorialized George Barker Pope and Sarah Mason Pope, both born in 1842. I'm planning on putting a letterbox version of this image nearby in the cemetery, as part of my letterboxing internship. (More on that later.)

This particular stone, as a(nother) clever blogger better informed than me pointed out, is somewhat rare, as the winged hourglass usually shows up as part of the lunette image but not the entire thing. I was less impressed with the rarity when I found that it was, like the stone mentioned by said other clever blogger, not a colonial-era stone, but crafted in the early twentieth century in a "colonial revival" age of tombstonery. (Sarah died in 1929, George in 1899.)

On the other hand, this stone and others like it, with that old-tyme-but-updated feel, certainly seems better to me than some of the contemporary gravestones I've seen: one shaped like a snare drum, one with a VW Beetle carved in relief, one with a long-haired guitar player depicted on the top. It's a bit like seeing a graveyard for hippies, but more "camp" than that.

At any rate, I imagine in 200 years someone's going to come across the long-haired guitarist, or the VW stone, and feel they've won the jackpot of tombstones. I wish I could know whether people in the early 1900's thought the "colonial revival" stones seemed pretentious and tacky.

In the meantime, I might wander Byronically around local cemeteries, seeming (but not being) pretentious and tacky.

Local Trivia: Behold the unicorns!

In search of my "Goodwill items" from a nearby city's Goodwill last week -- that is, the items I'll make stamps of, which will be planted near the Goodwill store I got said items from -- I hit the motherlode.

That's right.

Unicorns.

Not just any unicorns, though: these two identical unicorns, painted on a slant, on mirrors, by a surprisingly talented artist, are simultaneously reminiscent of The Last Unicorn (for those of you who wept at this movie when it was televised in the late 80's) and Charlie the unicorn on his way to Candy Mountain. (To those who wonder how I could have bought these, therefore, I say "Shun the nonbeliever. Shunnnnnnn.")

The first one is obviously an ode to that candy mountain: I call it "happy unicorn."

The second I call, for I think equally obvious reasons, "unicorn in Mordor."

Awesome.

PSA: No time for cameras, we'll use our eyes instead.

P.C. and I, after inexplicably missing Friday's show in New Haven, are going to see Matt & Kim tonight in Rhode Island.

Huzzah! I love going to see Matt & Kim in other states, as you may recall.

I also love it when they have new albums, and though I'm not sure how they could top Grand in terms of albums I loved to hear was out and loved to hear in general, Sidewalks seems like a pretty good next album. The "single," if such a thing exists for the indie scene, appears to be "Cameras," which nicely epitomizes both the hipster-indie aesthetic (and objection to mediation) and the evolution of new-new wave music.

The cover art also lends itself very nicely to carving into a stamp -- say, a commemorative stamp of the going-to-the-show, perhaps to be planted in Rhode Island.

Go listen to the video and be jealous of us.

Local Trivia: Welcome to 4:30 at night

Well, Daylight Savings time shenanigans have hit us again, leaving southern New-Englanders in the dark starting at around 4:30 p.m.

I know it's coming every time, but it's always a strange and confusing experience to look out into the pitch black and then look at the clock and realize it's not even dinner time yet. It's made all the more poignant this year by my letterboxing-related desire to be outside during daylight: darnitol, you Daylight Savings and your time changes, you are messing up my schedule -- and it wasn't that awesome to begin with.

In related news, I wonder if the 9:30 club in D.C. changes its name to "The 8:30 Club" for this portion of the year. Probably not, but I think they should consider it.

Local Trivia: Nutmeg-related crisis!

No, the crisis is not a lack of nutmeg, the spice -- after all, I mistakenly bought a second little jar of that last year, even though I'd never used or opened the first one -- but rather a lack of Nutmeg, the local cable access TV station.

It turns out that when I got the internship position I need to graduate this term at Nutmeg TV, that it didn't really exist; it was being granted to me by someone who didn't have the authority to make that decision; the staff member who hired me was fired soon after and left no records of the interview or his agreement to take me on as intern; and it's impossible to do the internship anyway because the station is shut down while they move to a new office. The move won't be finished until mid-December, which is exactly when my term ends.

I found this out today because I emailed said staff member last week asking when I could begin my internship, and indicating that this week would be a good time for me to start.

I have about four weeks to cram in 100 hours of required interning time. And I have no place to cram it.

I've sent frazzled emails to everyone I know who could possibly be or have a media contact; since my focus is on visual studies, it would be nice to intern at a TV station (which is exactly what I was thinking when I sent my resume to Nutmeg).

But at this point, I'm gonna take whatever I can get.

Suggestions are welcome.

It puts the wireless router in, or else it gets the hose again.

Finally, finally, I have the internets in my apartment.

Technically, they're not in my apartment, but they're being beamed magically from below by a wireless router my landlords put in -- or had put in by the official people who do such things.

P.C. handed them a wireless router a few months ago in an effort to get free internet up to the apartment, and it worked perfectly...for about two hours. When their phone stopped working (which it had done several times before), they pulled the plug on the wireless internet, convinced the way people who observed a black cat crossing their paths right before their crops failed are convinced by the coincidence, that somehow the unrelated router had ruined their already bad phone service.

But this time, oh, this time, with an officially sanctioned router, after paying the officially sanctioned $75 installation fee, I'm hoping it lasts.

It will help me continue my capstone paper research into movies and TV shows featuring serial killers, for one thing -- and to make more witty title references in blog postings.

PSA: Canadian politics GONE WILD!

"GONE WILD," that is, just like one would expect Canadian girls to "go wild" on their spring break, in 42 degree Manitoban weather: Canadian style (that is to say, not at all).

But they are hilarious, in their self-deprecating way (who remembers the Olympics closing ceremonies? Very funny stuff, Canada), despite the overall lack of Mardi Gras beads and politicking.

Here's a funny, satirical campaign video about Canadian mayor of Winnipeg, Sam Katz, to prove it. It's gone viral, so you may have seen it, but heck, watch it again. (It's not always working, so you may have to go to youtube and type in things like "Winnipeg" and "Sam Katz" -- you'll know when you find it.)

Oh, PATKITFOC. If only America could have a three-party system, you'd get my vote, straight down the party line. As far as I know, neither Democrats nor Republicans have a really strong view on kicking children in the face.

I guess in the meantime, if I want to strongly support not kicking kids in the face, I can always move to Winnipeg.

PSA: It's DEMocracy, not dumbocracy.

It seems that Iowans are going to vote with their votes on whether to allow a few appointed judges to remain in office, after said judges (actually Iowa Supreme Court justices) ruled that same-sex marriage should be legal.

That is, of course, they ruled that gay people can marry other gay people. That is all. They did not rule that gay people should be allowed to marry just whoever they want and force those other people to marry them back unfairly, even if you're not gay yourself. They did not rule that everyone has to be gay. And they did not rule that you had to stop raising your kids to cross to the other side of the street if you saw a "suspected gay person" walking down the sidewalk.

So presumably, like all other gay marriage laws, this law amounts to telling people to mind their own business and let other people mind theirs.

Apparently, Iowans don't vote for justices, but they can vote justices out. Now, I can actually understand the concept of disliking "legislating from the bench," since we're supposed to be a democracy and all that, but recently it's come to my attention that equally annoying and interruptive to public processes is what I'm going to call "benching from the ballot box."

Injecting politics into something that's supposed to be impartial and beyond us all -- "The Law" -- happens all the time in legislation, but judges' chambers are supposed to be free of that. I understand that the side that believes in "saving marriage" for only white heterosexual Protestants uses the same argument to say the judges leaned left in their ruling.

But I have to believe that judges, especially ones who refuse to pour money into a campaign to save their jobs, are at least impartial enough to be bound by the law, whether or not they personally fully agree with it...which means gay people may have the right to get married whether anybody likes it or not. That's just the way our laws are stacking up.

It's our own fault, ultimately, for giving blacks and women the right to vote, and setting all those silly human rights precedents.

In Defense of Poppery, XIII: The Human Centipede

Okay, disclaimers: I'm not saying that anyone should watch this movie. In fact, only two-point-five of the people possibly reading this should consider picking it up at the local Blockbuster, or putting it into their Netflix queue -- you know who you are. If you think it might not be you, it's not.

I'm not even particularly interested in "redeeming" The Human Centipede, any more than I would try to redeem the equally-tellingly-titled Snakes on a Plane. I'm more interested in discussing where Centipede fits into the generally available oeuvre of horror films, why it has a spot there (why that spot exists), and in proclaiming my disappointment with less-well-done horror films, such as the movie so bad I can't remember its title (IMDB reveals that it's called The Fear Chamber, and shockingly came out just last year).

The plot of The Human Centipede is simple: there's a mad scientist doctor who's only recently gone mad, who wants to sew three people together, mouth to anus, into a "human centipede." He was previously a world-class surgeon who separated conjoined twins. Spoiler alert: He succeeds.

P.C. and I chose to rent this movie (from the local, now bankrupt Blockbuster) because I felt it had been following me around for a few months; perhaps it was first hearing about it on NPR-like Sirius radio on the way to friend Becca's wedding in part of a comedy routine. Perhaps it was having it somehow pop up in ads online or somewhere I can't quite identify. Maybe it stuck with me because it's such a simple and grotesque idea. But yesterday, after an afternoon of reading about the "philosophy of horror," I felt ready to descend into the macabre world of a torture-film, and The Human Centipede seemed as good as any other.

In fact, it's better than most others, which was a pleasant surprise.

The front of the DVD quotes Eli Roth saying the movie made him sick, which was a high compliment for horror, and it's reviewed as being "surprisingly straight-forward," which is exactly what it is. Unlike The Collector, which makes a small attempt to explain the sadistic torturer's motives for entering the homes of families and then butchering them slowly ("he collects people" -- but what this means is never exactly clear), The Human Centipede has a certain elegant lack of explanation that is only elegant because an explanation is unnecessary.

In addition to the austerity of exposition (or lack of it), there's a modernist aesthetic to the German (of course German -- also, it's an apparently Dutch director's movie, though mostly in English, and subtitled, making the Japanese businessman's "Nazi!" epithet even more interesting) doctor's home, where most of the action takes place. The co-eds who find themselves victims to the doctor's plan aren't as stupid as they usually are in these movies, nor as deserving of torture, and that also streamlines the plot somehow. In general, this is a well-wrought, spare movie that revolves around a simple and simply revolting premise.

The Fear Chamber, a movie I picked up with seven others for less than a dollar each (a pack which includes the great classic Night of the Living Dead, making the other hideously bad movies worth the purchase), is the opposite in every way of The Human Centipede. The premise is so unclear that I can hardly state it here: there's a guy who likes to butcher women, for some reason, and later on he shows up in clown make-up. He stabs the detective-hero in the heart, but magically the detective doesn't die, even though he went to chase the killer alone on an abandoned roof in L.A. without calling for backup (but then, there are only 2 other cops on the LAPD force in this movie, anyway, and their investigative headquarters look suspiciously like a janitor's closet), and even though he got stabbed in the heart. But this all adds up at the end when it's revealed that the killer was selling organs on the black market, but that somehow the heart he'd removed from a psychic had been the transplanted heart that saved detective-hero's life.

In other words, it's a poorly written, poorly directed, slightly more macabre version of Return to Me.

But it's convoluted, non-sense-making movies like Fear Chamber (the title is never referenced in the movie, and its location is unclear; is the "fear chamber" the weird warehouse space the killer uses to kill victims, even though his locations appear to change? Or is it the janitor's closet where the 3 members of the LAPD meet?) that make The Human Centipede stand out. And for that, I suppose we must thank those movies that fail in their badness even to become fun camp films.

But in general, torture films do need an apologetic, even if I can argue successfully that The Human Centipede is a "good" version of such a genre. And the arguments in favor of the moral possibility of torture films (or the possibility of torture films being moral) are on about as wide a spread as the quality of the films themselves.

The best argument I've read so far, and the one that echoed in my brain as I looked over the Blockbuster's selection last night, finally to settle on the Centipede, is that great horror films -- particularly ones featuring sadistic torture scenes -- recognize, exploit, and make the viewer aware of the deep ambivalence in the human soul. While we feel the terror and pain of the victim, we are also often led (and Human Centipede is no exception in this; it dwells at length on the doctor's maniacal smiles and at times almost orgasmic pleasure with his creation, and also on the signs of his loneliness) to feel the sadistic pleasure of torture with the torturer.

This is disturbing. But it's supposed to be disturbing, and for me, that's the key. You're supposed to be disturbed by horror films.

People who don't like being disturbed, or perhaps more importantly people who aren't disturbed (but are instead turned on or made curious by these movies), probably shouldn't be watching horror films.

The most convoluted argument I've read in favor of allowing for torture films brought in the question of pornography (apparently relevant since these movies are often referred to as "torture porn"), comparing arguments about the suggestiveness of pornography (i.e., feminist argument that seeing women as objects in magazines will cause viewers to want to treat women the same way in real life) to supposed arguments about the suggestiveness of torture movies (i.e., you see someone pulling out another person's teeth in the movie and think "hey, that might be fun").

The author of that essay then spent a few sentences "debunking" the arguments against pornography, then attempted to apply the same logic to torture films, despite the fact that a few sentences don't suffice to redeem all porn from the arguments listed, and that if we agree that torture films aren't pornography, then the correlation in arguments is moot to begin with.

It was like Fear Chamber all over again; because I'm familiar with the genre, I can kind of see what he was trying to do, but it was clearly unsuccessful.

So if you like theorizing about, or pointing out the flaws in, badly made torture films and arguments about them, see The Fear Chamber and then read the third essay's final page in The Philosophy of Horror.

If, on the other hand, you like a good, well-founded disturbance now and then, but you want to feel okay about it, read the first essay in Philosophy of Horror and then catch a showing of The Human Centipede.

I can't say you won't regret it, but I can say that I didn't.

PSA: My computer is probably going slow because it's busy spamming you.

Fair warning -- don't open any emails from me that don't have a subject line. Anyone who's been reading my blog for any length of time at all should know intuitively that I can't resist putting in a subject line, and William J. Vader II has been hijacked by the viruses before, and made to do their bidding.

It's partly probably because I don't have the internets at home, and am forced to use public wireless at local libraries, that I've gotten this virus. (Or, alternately, it could be from opening non-subjected emails sent to me before this.)

I wish I could say it seemed like William was being made to spam against his will, but William II has always been a recalcitrant, reluctant-to-please machine, and it's more likely he's gleefully sending out email after email for "heath rx" or whatever Viagra is calling itself online these days, remorselessly.

Then again, maybe he's not that smart. I mean, this is a machine that has believed for several months that he has absolutely no audio output, when in reality he is even supposedly equipped with a DVD-R burner. Not that he's ever burned anything successfully for me onto a DVD, mind you. Just that he was supposed to be able to.

So be warned...and now be super-warned. Because William J. II is either stupid, or now he's really, really mad.

PSA: "Isaac Asimov's Robots VCR Mystery Game" exists.

That's right, everbody. There is such a thing as "Isaac Asimov's Robots VCR Mystery Game." This should finally put to rest all those questions that have kept you up at night, and the fears that have you bolting upright in bed soaked in sweat.

Don't worry. It's here. It's always been here. (Well, for the last twenty years or so.) You can even buy it if you need to immediately own your own copy, which, as an owner of a copy of the Atari 2600 "E.T. game," is a reaction I would understand and endorse.

I discovered this while searching for awesome things at a Goodwill in Less Local City. Obviously, I struck gold.

P.C. and I have played it once, of course, and in addition to the awesomeness you would expect to find in a campy, vintage-80's (if such a thing existed) VHS-tape-based game, it actually had some merit. I was surprised by some of the things that happened in the 40-minute video, though the fact that it never actually changes ensures that I wouldn't be surprised every time. Still, I can usually "call" the killer, motive and method at the beginning of most post-9/11 one-hour-detective/procedural dramas, and those are supposed to be the most sophisticated video-based crime-drama plots humans have produced so far (according to some criticism I read at some point) -- so good for Asimov's Robots.

The point of the game is to solve the mystery of who tried to assassinate a prominent "Spacer" scientist -- "Spacers" being the race of people who left earth for space long ago, and are as a result taller, healthier and generally more attractive than "Earthers," and also have significantly more developed technology, allowing them human-like robots and the ability to live exceedingly long lives (as long as they aren't exposed to "Earth" germs) -- and the answer to the question is different in every permutation of clue combinations.

Because the video never changes, the clues are written on double-sided cards separated into four decks (beginner to expert). You can use the clue on either side of each card, which changes the outcome; at six cards per deck, the combinations of six-clue games allow for "over 250" different results.

Of course, there aren't really 250 different characters in a 40 minute video, but part of the game is figuring out opportunity and motive, which may change with every difference in clue combination. P.C. and I found that even the beginner level cards we tried when we played required pretty sophisticated reasoning when we tried to determine why one of the robots had done it. (That time! Next time it could be a person! An Earther! Or a Spacer! Or a different robot!)

To answer your most burning questions about the details of the video, yes, the game does endorse the once firmly held theory that sophisticated people in the future would wear mute-toned spandex (for the men) and very large shoulderpads (for the women). Yes, it is full of no-name actors I haven't seen in anything else, and yes, the main character does look directly at you, the viewer, when "receiving" new clues. No, they do not use transporters.

But yes, Earth robots do look like people dressed in silver-painted cardboard with silver-painted fishbowls over their heads, as I think we all knew, deep down, that they would.

There's also a VCR mystery game, also by Kodak, of Clue. Without having seen it, I feel I can recommend it, though of course slightly less than the significantly more bizarre (and thus more awesome) "Isaac Asimov's Robots."

Local Trivia: Turtle and bunny released into the wilds, which causes me some carver's block.

I recently let loose two "fleas," which are tiny stamps that travel from person to person or person to letterbox or box to person. I promised that when a person "found" both fleas, they would gain access to a clue to another, totally awesome stamp (set). This can be difficult to do, finding two small fleas in an international hobby, so I don't anticipate scads of success.

Still, because these boxes will be so hard to find, I wanted them to be awesome. The two fleas I refer to were a turtle and a bunny, so the mystery box will be on a "tortoise and the hare" theme. I scoured the internet looking for images but stopped immediately when I saw these schematics of Jeff Zugale (L.A. artist)'s submission to the 2009 Steampunk Challenge.

His concept is a reinvention of "The Tortoise and the Hare," which in his telling becomes the tale of a scrappy backyard inventor's success over the efficient and presumably German "Hare" racing and transportation system. Look it over, and marvel at the level of detail.

Then shudder thinking about how on earth I'm going to carve that out of a flat block of 4"x6" pink rubber. And then look at the hare.

I'll stamp and scan them when I'm done.

PSA: Stamps available for some.

Hey, all. I've been slacking on the blog front, lately, in part because I've been letterboxing so much.

A one of you may have already seen stamps that were carved for her personally, on account of her getting married. But the rest of you...well, you have no proof so far that I'm being awesome at something that isn't this blog, and I feel I owe you.

If you want a rubber stamp made for you, possibly for you to "plant" somewhere in your area of the country, or for you to stamp stuff with (I won't do address label stamps, because come ON, guys), I need you to select an image that will look good in black and white and either figure out how to post it in the comments, or email it to me, or both.

I promised this wouldn't become a letterboxing blog, but I didn't promise you wouldn't get letterboxing-related presents.

PSA: What they should have done about Terry Jones

The president shouldn't have to call up a guy in Florida and ask him politely not to burn the Qur'an. I mean, President Obama is busy doing things like making sure that that guy still has the right to burn stuff, and simultaneously trying to ensure that his right to burn stuff doesn't get a whole lot of other people killed.

What they should have done, because media attention probably felt a lot like the attention of God to Terry Jones, is sent down Robert Duvall. Jones reminded me, more than anything, of Duvall's character in The Apostle, flawed and yet compelling, and Duvall recently completed another film that deals with religious themes, Get Low. His ability to listen and natural gravitas would have pulled Jones back into line with mainstream America's (for once) well-reasoned stance against burning holy books.

And that would have been good for Jones, too, who didn't seem to consider in all this hulabaloo (and it wasn't pointed out to him by the media) that God doesn't really tell Christians to burn other holy texts, and that when God was offerred "strange fire" in the Old Testament, it didn't really go well for the fire-starters.

I'm pretty sure Duvall would have brought that up.

Local Trivia: We suck much more than our ancestors. At least in pictures.

While looking for images to carve stamps out of, I found this website for Local City's historic photos, comparing images of main streets in downtown Local City from 1899, 1950, and 2002.

I find it fascinating to look at how things have changed. Perhaps you'll find it less fascinating because you're not as familiar with Local City and are not (probably) sitting in Local City's public library while viewing them. But the thing that most strikes me, and that will be able to strike you even if you've never been to Local City, is the apparent change in the quality of life (and reflected in the increasing quality of the digital version of the photos): maybe 1899's horses and buggies aren't your cup of tea, but all the awesome old-tyme cars of the 50s crowding Local City's streets hold a certain appeal to me.

I wish this "Then and Now" listing also included a photo from the 80s, when I was growing up in Local City. Before Reagonomics set in, and before all the factory work moved elsewhere (not that I blame it), I remember downtown Local City as a happening place, with a sandwich shop that sold awesome milkshakes and a toy shop from which I made my first toy purchases: a doll and a marionette, both of which I still have (somewhere).

Local City now makes me a little bit sad, because I remember what it was, and what I was, and how connected I was to Local City. Maybe it's not that the 50s were better, but that the images of the recent past, as technologically advanced and populated with "normal" contemporary cars and people as they are, seem so empty and disconnected.

Happy Birthday (observed)!

I decided to celebrate my birthday (obs.) today.

A friend made me a version of a pineapple upside-down cake, and another friend re-glued my letterboxing logbook, which fell apart in a cemetery two days ago. We're currently watching I Love You, Man for the fourth time or so, as it's a very hilarious movie (though risque -- don't watch it with the kids or the parents).

Much improved from Tonsilitis-a-thon 2010, aka "my real birthday." So happy birthday (observed) to me!

Local Trivia: Letterbox series I'm planning

My Art Nemesis: Sol LeWitt artworks

Birdhouse in your soul (Jason and the Argonauts, blue canary, outlet by a lightswitch, bee in a bonnet, lighthouse, fresh-baked yummy dessert, birdhouse)

"Where's the pineapple?" an ode to Psych

Firehouse patches

Goodwill (a stamp at every state Goodwill depicting something I've bought from that store)

...and as always, the grand scheme of things: stamps to honor They Might Be Giants.

Confessions XLVI

I lied to a cop last night while letterboxing.

It was the stupidest lie I've ever told, and possibly the stupidest I've ever heard. I can't even remember most of it now.

I feel significantly worse about the stupidity of the lie than the fact that I didn't tell the truth.

PSQ: Primary sources...

I'm in need of a whittling down of all the television shows (and possibly movies) produced since 9/11 that have some sort of detective element in them (including, say Criminal Minds, but also House), for the sake of my sanity and my capstone Cultural Production paper, which I'd like to be awesome.

I've been considering Dexter, and as such am rewatching it in the nonchalant way normal people might rewatch things -- casually, without the several episode, several day gorging I normally do "for the sake of science" -- but it would throw a bunch of interesting wrenches in my proposed thesis to focus on a show where the detective is actually also a serial killer.

I also started watching The Shield, though ditto to that one.

All suggestions are welcome. I won't bore you with the details of my thesis here, unless you request them, so I realize it's a shot in the dark, but hey -- it's all helpful in whittling.

PSA: Why I'm excited about the 21st:

"The fourth slap in "Slapsgiving 2: Revenge of the Slap" (ep.9)"