TDS: May 30, 2011

I spent today on a m---f---ing boat.

TDS: May 29, 2011

I went to my blog and there were weird characters on the top where the "search" and "new post" were supposed to be -- again -- and I wondered if I was drunk from that pre-mixed mojito stuff I got with a Groupon last week.

TDS: May 28, 2011

Last night I scratched my side (over my shirt) with one good, normal scratch, and more than half ripped off a mole, which makes me wonder whether I might have some sort of skin cancer or possibly zombie virus.

TDS: May 27, 2011

Going to the post office feels like doing the dishes, particularly because I often have to trick myself into doing either one using radio shows.

TDS: May 26, 2011

The other night I had a dream that I met Hilary Winston (who wrote My Boyfriend Wrote a Book About Me, and for My Name Is Earl, and now for Community), or that I was about to meet her, and mentioned to a coworker of hers in the elevator that I'd first encountered her through Twitter and enjoyed the little interactions, and her coworker said "oh, she HATES Twitter," and I said "oh, so do I, but Hilary Winston is one exception that makes me keep coming back to Twitter," but I don't think the coworker believed me.

TDS: May 25, 2011

Yesterday I saw an old Cadillac, and I totally and finally understood why our Polish landlord in the 1980s wanted (and had) one of those -- even though our driveway was too narrow for it, and one side of said driveway was a scratchy rock wall -- because it looked exactly like the car a Polish man in America would want.

TDS: May 24, 2011

"Assorted" usually means you'll get some things/sizes/flavors you like or need, crammed in with some things/sizes/flavors nobody likes or needs.

TDS: May 23, 2011

Gertrude hung up on him while he was still in the middle of a sentence because she thought she would rather guess at what he was about to say than to ever know.

TDS: May 22, 2011

I may want to live my life thoughtfully and creatively and it may happen that it's much easier to do that as a lower-level employee than as a manager or boss.

The Daily Sentence

Starting today, one sentence a day, until I have something longer to say.

Night at the High School Musical

Me: "So, anything on TV tonight?"

Girl: "Yeah, High School Museum 3."

PSA: Blogger ruins my one moment of inspiration in May

I did try to post something once this month. It just happened to be at exactly the same time Blogger was down.

I'll try to recapture the magic I'm sure was in store for us all then. I haven't quantified any living lately, or told famous people how they should live, or even complained a lot about my recent car quests, which have wiped out my brain and bank account. I've mostly (when I'm not complaining in person to P.C. about my car problems, or requiring that he give an opinion on something I've determined is a dilemma) been watching comedy TV and horror films.

Perhaps I'll elaborate on my recently invented half-hour comedy TV show category "observational comedy," as opposed to the "sitcom." Perhaps I'll give you all my opinion on Hostel as compared to the recently reviewed Saw movie cycle. Or perhaps I'll watch these two "trapped!" subgenre horror films I just rented -- Devil (trapped in an elevator) and Frozen (trapped on a ski lift) -- and review those.

But I think what you, my three-person public, probably want is something funny and possibly cute, and if that fails, something delicious.

I'll work on that. In the meantime, look at these delicious blogged things from friend Maryellen at Love & Scraps.

TDS: May 31, 2011

The other night I dreamed that bears were mauling everyone, like in a concerted effort to eat everybody, and we'd all already voted friend Carl into a spot for the ten people who would go into these escape pods and be saved; I realized just before waking up that this must have been the apocalypse that had been predicted, happening with bears first, and sure to move on to other plague-like, nature-turning-on-you disasters.

An account of my dream, obviously about the royal wedding

So P.C. and I and a bunch of other people were on this semi-tropical island for a medical conference that was also some kind of modeling competition, and his mother, who in the dream was cruel and spiteful toward all the other women in his life (and therefore played very ably by Angelica Huston, and definitely not his real-life mom), was also there, along with a long list of players who I don't know in real life.

The basic plot of the dream was that P.C. and I were in a solid relationship, but that for some reasons not made perfectly clear, he had to also pretend to be in a relationship sometimes with another woman (doctor) named Jane. And eventually, since he's a nice guy (and in the dream, he was less weird and silly than in real life, which was the first clue), the relationship with Jane began to make me question our relationship.

But there was also a young blond model named Crystal -- not the kind who are waif-thin and annoyingly obsessed with food, but a very cute young woman who was the "life of the party" sort (which was the second clue). P.C. paid some friendly attention to her as well, which in retrospect within the dream, also seemed somewhat alarming to me.

Then I was going to go to a community college in Michigan to study some course that only that community college had, possibly in storytelling. (Which is ridiculous, because the only college that has that course of study in the entire nation is ETSU in Tennessee.) But I wasn't sure I should, since the medical/model conference seemed to be pretty fun and suddenly I wasn't sure if P.C. would end up marrying Jane or not if I left.

Then the news hit: Jane had not been chosen for some sort of medical internship award. She wasn't good enough. Angelica Huston was very cruel, at this point telling her what a terrible person and doctor she was. I witnessed the whole thing -- and learned that Angelica Huston hated Jane at least as much as she hated me (the under-achieving, Michigan-community-college-attending girlfriend) -- but Jane rebuffed my attempts to comfort her at first.

We all went out (this being a semi-tropical island) to hear the presentation of awards along with a marimba concert on the patio area in the back of the very strange hotel we were staying in (third clue), and P.C. was emceeing. I finally cornered Jane -- literally speaking to her right in front of a corner, though one that poked out rather than in, so it shouldn't have trapped her -- and asked if she wanted a hug, which she did. She explained that she'd thought before that I was going to scold her just like Angelica Huston.

In this dream, there was also an ad (this being some kind of model conference) for "Eddy Waters Makeup." I thought even in the dream that this was an extremely clever and inappropriate name for a makeup company.

Then P.C. went up to emcee the ceremony, except that as soon as he started, he pointed back through the crowd along the side of the stage to where Jane and I were standing at a corner, and I knew he was calling Jane up to explain whatever recent work she'd been doing or to extol her virtues and generally redeem her. But she'd already headed toward the stage, so I pointed into the crowd where she seemed to be, and when I saw her step up onto it, I pointed to the spot where she'd disappeared onto stage with the marimba band.

It turned out P.C. hadn't been pointing at her, but at me. And also, he was holding a microphone shaped like a rosebud slightly opened, which he brought directly up to me, too close for me to comment. Luckily, I had nothing to say anyway.

And then he proposed, somehow. The dream logic is vague, but the important thing is that I suddenly realized that our relationship had been solid all along, and if it had ever been in danger from Jane or Crystal or Angelica Huston, it wasn't anymore.

And that was my dream, obviously, about William & Kate. I had that dream instead of watching them get married, though I imagine there'll be coverage available throughout the day, and I'll probably catch some of it.

Good luck to them.

I'm dating a troll.

[That commercial comes on where the white man falls into the black family's living room couch, and the black woman kind of looks at him and then smiles knowingly.]

Me: "Now, that white hipster guy just drops into that family's living room, and the black family just sits there and the lady is like 'hey, white guy' and just smiles at him. Now imagine if that had been the opposite, and a black guy dropped from the sky into a white family's living room. Would their reaction be the same, just like 'hey, black guy, welcome to the living room'? No it would not."

P.C.: [playing Minecraft, does not respond.] ...

[Half an hour later, same commercial comes on again.]

Me: "See what I mean? See that white guy just fall into that family's living room?"

P.C.: "Hey, do you think that would be different if the white guy was a black guy?"

Me: "Are you trolling me? You better be trolling me. You're either trolling me or we're broken up."

P.C.: [Smiles] "What is trolling?"

Me: "Trolling means I'm gonna punch you in the face. Your choice is I can punch you in the face or we're broken up."

P.C.: [Thinks about it.] "Can it be both?"

Me: [Thinks about it.] "Yes."

Local Trivia: If it's just a fact that we're all white people, is that still racist? (Yes. Yes it is.)

To be fair, my mother and I were crossing the road, and we're both white.

Local Trivia: Subway sign update

Here's a pictorial update of what went down with that old Subway/Family Dollar/Liquor Store/Discount Tobacco sign being held up by a hefty yellow strap a few months ago, in picture form:

It completely fell apart. The bushes are all crunched up in the middle where doubtless the bits of Subway and Family Dollar fell on them. Today there were workers out there upgrading the sign to a form that will never be able to be held up by a strap:


And the punchline: the Subway shares space with Discount Tobacco.

The 5 "people" who wrote me spam today.

"Congratulations!!!
CONGRATULATIONS
"Congratulations!!!
CONGRATULATIONS
Congratulations!!!

That depends on what the meaning of the word "sample" is.

Me, reading the subject of a spam-mail I received: "No risk Natalie Portman sample."

P.C.: "Ooh."

Me: "No, not 'ooh.' You'd probably get a toe or something. It wouldn't be something good, like an eye."

P.C.: "But it's no risk."

Me: "That doesn't mean you're going to get something good, it means you won't get a disease."

P.C.: "Well, I thought it would be a sampling of Natalie Portman over the years...and it's no risk, so you're not gonna get Star Wars."

MFHTDWF #12

Note: With the recent explosion in popularity of the already inexplicably popular Charlie Sheen, based almost solely on his antics as a famous person, we at Continue Unprotected have decided to resume publication of the “Manual For How To Deal With Fame.” We begin where we left off, at principle #12.

Principle: Do threaten to take other people to court.

While principle #11 states that you should never get caught up in a boring court case, the air of litigiousness surrounding famous people who threaten legal action can effectively add to their fame, but only if you never actually approach the courtroom.

Remember, your purpose as a famous person is to fascinate and terrify, which means you can go one of two directions in your faux-litigiousness.

First, you can focus on one individual who has supposedly harmed you. Make sure to choose someone for whom your fans have no sympathy, but don’t choose an easy mark either, like tobacco companies or people that hunt pelicans. The target of your supposed lawsuit should be surprising, but also someone about whom your fans will say “I always knew there was something wrong with that guy” – i.e. Steve Buscemi.

Make sure your statements in reference to the possible lawsuit, however focused on one person, remain randomly strewn about your speech. Do not give Steve Buscemi’s lawyers a chance to charge you with libel or you will end up in court.

The second direction you could take is a period of over-litigiousness, during which you may be prone to declaring that you will sue anyone who crosses your path for any reason whatsoever. The waitress brought your toast to you cold? You will sue her, sue the restaurant, sue the entire city! The cat groomer clipped your Siamese’s coat a bit too short? Threaten to sue Thailand.

If you take the second route, be sure to lay off the threats after a few months, or it will become as boring as an actual court case. During this time, you may choose to associate yourself with the church of Scientology, as such a church and over-litigiousness go hand in hand. Leaving this church at the end of your over-litigious period will also provide narrative closure for fans who wonder why you stopped threatening to sue all the time.

Examples of famous people who succeed at this principle: Charlie Sheen, John Travolta*

Examples of famous people who succeed at this principle inversely, by virtue of constantly being associated with lawsuits but never being the instigators: Steve Buscemi

Examples of famous people who fail at this principle: Everyone related to Anna Nicole Smith

*Scientologist

In Defense of Poppery, XVI: Saws 1-7

Pop example: Saw film cycle, I-VII

Problematic critical reception: “The Problem of Saw: ‘Torture Porn’ and the Conservatism of Contemporary Horror” by Christopher Sharrett – excerpts:

“Most important, [in the 1960’s] the horror film began to eschew the supernatural in favor of the psychological, as the genre looked to horror as the product of middleclass life, not caused by external demons or a mad scientist's freak accident. The genre investigated the neurosis that is basic, as the heirs of Freud inform us, to the creation of notions of normality and otherness.”

“The psychological themes of the horror film, with their adjacent social criticism, became grossly transmogrified into the misogynist teen-kill "slasher" films of the Eighties, the most degraded example being the Friday the 13th cycle.”

What redeems it: Oh, how sad for us. All the “good” horror happened in the 1960’s and had socially liberal messages. And now all we have is this unreasonable, meaningless Saw cycle and its subgeneric cohort to watch.

Anyone who cannot see a reason for a horror film or, even worse, a series of horror films, is not thinking creatively enough or is too elitist to see the truth. Christopher Sharrett seems to be both: calling a horror subgenre “misogynist teen-kill ‘slasher films of the Eighties” and then citing its ‘most degraded example,” the Friday the 13^th movies, implies that those films weren’t expressing a real fear felt by people (perhaps particularly teens) at the time they were produced…and implying that there are fears that are somehow more worthy of expression.

Really? Fears that become ‘worthy’ of horror flicks? How does that work, exactly?

Acting as though certain types of fear are somehow more civilized than others, perhaps even assuming that on viewing these movies we’ll all instantly give in to our ids and become serial killers (assuming also that we’re all, at heart, serial killers minus opportunity), is acting as if we are all basically evil and must, even in our expressions of primal fear, strive to “rise above.”

We, the horror viewers, are not children. We know that this is make believe but also that it in some way reflects our reality. If there is misogyny in our horror films, that’s probably because misogyny exists and has to be dealt with. Showing women tortured may titillate as well as horrify, but if it does so, that’s because the problem of torturing women being sexy already existed. The job of horror is not to pretend these issues don’t exist, but to draw them out and resolve them.

This is not a problem, because horror isn’t an Aesop fable. Horror films are not normalizing. We do not learn how to be by watching horror films, not directly. Everyone knows you go to a scary movie to be scared and confront yourself and fears, not to figure out how to function properly in society.

Horror is a subversive genre, and while Sharrett says “the subversive component nearly vanished, as the genre was relegated to a lowbrow vehicle for shouting "boo!" that its snobbish attackers accused it of being since its inception” way back in 1980, I say this in reference not only to the “great” horror movies of the 1960’s (some of which are definitely great: Psycho, Night of the Living Dead, for instance. Watch them), but even to the “torture porn” we’ve been seeing recently.

Horror is about showing the unshowable truths that comedy and drama reign in. Our bodies degrade. We die. Time never returns us to where we think now we probably were happiest. And when we were there/then, we weren’t as happy as now we think we must have been. The things we love flee from us, somehow or other. We don’t get beautiful monologues on our deathbeds, declaring “the rest is silence” – it just is. Saying so subverts those narrative myths and the politenesses that allow us to live narrated lives.

Horror is unruly, and that should make analysis of it that much more rich. There are narratives that “don’t work,” that don’t function as they should, because those are controlled accounts of our lives (or the lives of characters), but horror films that terrify – ones that are popular being the best guess as to which ones definitely do terrify us – do “work.” They obviously work. They’re meant to scare us, and if they do, they’re working.

So this brings me to my defense of the Saw movies, which I believe this reviewer has completely – perhaps willfully – misunderstood. The premise of the cycle of films is, more or less, that a serial killer called Jigsaw has begun setting traps for his victims that end up with most of those victims murdering themselves, mainly through failure to adhere to the extremely rigid rules set by Jigsaw, or by being physically incapable of fulfilling them. (Spoilers to follow) Each movie reveals more about the previous movie’s events as well as furthering the torture in what becomes a smorgasbord of physical torture; Russian doll style, these films nest together such that layers of information filter down through the viewer’s understanding of each previous movie to change “what you know” to “what you thought you knew.” Jigsaw’s original intent, the one he repeats throughout, seems to be to teach people to “truly live,” in a needlessly complex set of Raymond-K.-Essel scenarios. What took Fight Club thirty seconds takes the Saw franchise seven movies.

Sometimes this seems ridiculous. And young teen boys, which over and over again I see listed as the supposed audience for these films, probably do have a stake in proving their nascent manliness by being “less scared” or “less grossed-out” than their friends at the extremely torturous traps set by Jigsaw, making the torture for them an end in itself. But set those imaginary boys aside for a second, and set aside the visceral gruesomeness of the movies, and take a look at what’s going on with Jigsaw’s supposed motivations, an “inane morality” that Sharrett dismisses without even bothering to interrogate it. You’ve missed the point, fellow reviewer. This statement of motivation, and Jigsaw’s moral system, is the point of these movies. The torture is about the morality, not the other way around.

Specifically, the torture is the effect of the stringent and extremely specific morality of Jigsaw. He creates these traps assuring the audience, whatever audience he can get, that if they play by the rules, his victims will emerge victorious and more full of life than they ever were. Most don’t survive, which he sees as weakness deserving of death.

But here’s the kicker, and for my part the whole meaning of the cycle (and a major spoiler): some appear to survive the torture. Some appear to go on living after their ordeals. But none of them do.

In the end, the Russian dolls, so brilliant in their constant re-framing of the events of previous movies, reveal the truth about Jigsaw’s hard-ass morality, which is that nobody ever survives it. Ever.

Jigsaw doesn’t survive, obviously, because he had cancer when he started his escapades. But every single victim he puts through “a test” or “a game,” as he likes to call them, either becomes one of his cohort, putting others to constant tests and being tested themselves, committing the same atrocities he does, in fact; or they die. Once you have started down the path of an absolutist morality that “takes no prisoners” and shows no mercy, you have already sealed your doom. You are already either also evil or dead by your own hand.

The fact that his victims die by machines, or die by their own hands in some way or another, or that they’re willing to kill others once they’ve been traumatized by their own horrible experiences, supports my hypothesis that the films are about the personal standards we hold ourselves and others to...and in fact the horror of believing that (in this modern, machine-filled, medically supported world) we have the choice to be perfect, but somehow can never make that choice, can never achieve it. If we could, somehow we could have lived forever.

No killer needs to lay a hand on us for us to “die” psychologically in this way. This level of stringent morality, this perspective on life, is suicide.

Jigsaw fails. He fails every single time to produce the effect he says he seeks, which is the production of a fully alive, grateful, absolutely moral human being. His failures betray the principle he adheres to. They show that such mercilessness cannot help but destroy.

And from that perspective, I can see the point of the torture. It’s a physical manifestation of a psychological reality – a physical inducement of that psychological reality, in fact. The physicality is not the point. “Mortify the flesh”: that is the point. "Mind over matter" is the point. The point is the psychological and metaphorical link between the body and “the flesh,” the parts of us that keep requiring critique, that keep failing at perfection, and the supposed liberation of the mind from that flesh that can only/supposedly be achieved through torture.

But then we torture ourselves, and the torture always fails.

My point, here, is that this is to me a revolutionary message for a horror film to be sending, that a judgmental eye will always end up gouging itself out. And it does not, definitely does not, read as a conservative message to me, something that Sharrett accuses it of doing.

In fact, to the contrary: I'd say Saw is one of the most effectively liberal cycles of film I have seen in a long time – more effective even (perhaps) than bleeding-heart documentary because, like a good bleeding-heart documentary, it gets us mad, but unlike many of those documentaries, it also makes us fear for our lives in our guts and not just in our brains.

What could be more internal and psychologically basic than that?

PSA: NPR writes sarcastic article!

Check out this article on which people will benefit, and how, if the government shuts down due to idiocy.

It's a very short, thin list -- so thin, in fact, that I can only conclude it's a sarcastic statement on the state of American politics today as well as an indirect indictment of the journalist's credo to "tell both sides of a story." There isn't another side to this story, and trying to tell it just makes that more glaringly obvious.

I can understand the desire to be "out of debt" (although that desire seems to have gotten us into at least as much economic trouble in the past as the supposed spend-thriftiness mostly Democrats have been accused of). I can even relate to the hard-headedness that will cause people to say "at all costs!" when they speak of the deficit. But that doesn't stop me from saying that those people are stupid...specifically, stupid the way a very young child is stupid when they say "no, Mommy! You're bad!"

First, they don't seem to know what they're talking about (those who do manage to have real and civil conversations about this are exempt, here), and yet they feel they must know better thanks to "common sense" than the experts. (Who would want to drink a beer with an economist?) Same crowd that believes in creationism and refuses to acknowledge global warming (because...??? Because coal is so super awesome that using wind or solar power would be an insult to God? I still don't understand what dog they have in this fight).

Second, they -- and in this case, I suppose I mean Republicans, or whoever would dig in their heels and "insist" the government do such-and-such "or it gets shut down!"; more likely Tea Partiers -- are acting paternal, which is annoying to begin with, but doing so in exactly the way a toddler would do it: by holding others hostage with a temper tantrum. Toddlers assert their independence by acting like their parents on the one hand, scolding and waving fingers, but also by being big babies, which means throwing their bodies on the ground and screaming until we either give them what they want or take them away.

So no, I don't believe there's a bright side to the idea the government may shut down, because I believe the shutdown would be motivated by idiots.

And don't be fooled by the NPR's only serious-seeming claim to benefit from the shutdown, the International Spy Museum.

I've been. It's pretty boring and can't compete with Smithsonian.

PSA: The Children of the Corn probably just needed social workers.

This was the photo that showed up with an ad for a 1 yr. social work degree on my Facebook page.

This completely confirms my decision not to become a social worker.

Local-ish Trivia: Quite a disturbing sentence.

"Police suspect a serial killer but so far have no suspects."

Ooh. Creepy.

Pretty disturbing content. But what also disturbs me about this sentence is the double-use of the word "suspect," even though in one case it's a verb and in the other it's a noun.

I am then meta-disturbed that word choice disturbs me here, since obviously there are more important things going on than the use of words that have legitimate meaning, if not the poetic sensibility I appear to expect from aggregated crime reporting.

And on further reflection I also feel disturbed that this whole scenario -- four women (one from CT) found dead on the side of the road, more or less, and four more bodies recovered in addition to those -- refers me automatically to TV rather than any real-life events. Murders are almost entirely mediated in my mind, not visceral or impactful at all.

But maybe that last one's for the best.

(Note: In writing this post, I had originally copied the characterization of the women found in the article -- "four prostitutes" -- but when I actually wrote it out, I found myself resisting that label. Why specify that they were prostitutes, as though that's a different kind of human than "women"? Nobody finds four dudes dead on the side of the road and says "the four investment bankers [blah blah blah]." And if they did, despite the fact that investment bankers have screwed us all, while prostitutes have only screwed a small fraction of us -- and then at our request, and for our apparent benefit, and to their own peril -- we'd probably think something like "oh, they were investment bankers -- upstanding citizens who probably had families." These women had families, too. Probably. If this kind of sensationalist reportorial nonsensical characterization continues, I'll be forced to take a defensive position in favor of legalized prostitution, rather than continuing to believe that investment bankers should probably be made illegal.)

Update: 27 seasons of TV (since 1/1/11)

Modern Family, s1 (x2)

Rescue Me, s4

Drop Dead Diva, s1

30 Rock, s4

Damages, s2

Caroline in the City, s2

Stella, s1

Grey’s Anatomy, s6

Rescue Me, s5.0

L-Word, s4

L-Word, s5

L-Word, s6

Big Love, s4

Community, s1 (x3)

Drop Dead Diva, s2

Lie to Me, s2

Lie to Me, s3

The Walking Dead, s1

House, s6

BBT, s3

Grosse Pointe

Starter Wife

Chuck, s3

Weeds, s6

Edit: The Guild! I forgot to add to my personal list The Guild, s3 and 4. You can also watch The Guild.

Update: 20x11 New Year's Resolution

For those of you who may have been keeping close track of my New Year's resolutions, distressed at the lack of information gathered on how I've been following up on those -- due probably to your not living within binocular-distance of my apartment, in tandem with me not posting anything on it here -- I'm happy to report my progress.

In terms of the rest of the stuff, there's not much progress -- I mean, I have tried to find a new job, I've gotten rid of a bookshelf's worth of books (though not all the ones I've marked to be culled), and I'm preparing for a themed party by "renting" plates from the Goodwill (that is, buying them with the intention of re-donating after the party), so if anyone wants to come, you're all totally invited -- but I think we all knew which resolution would be right in my wheelhouse, anyway.

Perhaps I should have resolved something related to the use of dashes to set off long parentheticals. But it's too late now.

The resolution in question: "I will watch 52 seasons of TV."

I'm happy to report that I am now just over halfway through this resolution, having just finished watching Weeds (s6). I'll post the 27 seasons of TV I've watched since Jan 1 in a separate, dash-free post, and you are all welcome and encouraged to comment.

Just don't say "wow, Alicia, why don't you get a life instead of watching TV all the time," because you were warned in the resolutions, and if you were gonna say something, you should've said it then.

*Note: Also don't go back to the resolutions post and put a comment up there and pretend it was there all along. I'll know.

20x11: ***SPOILER ALERT***

It's the sled.

It's actually planet Earth.

It's made out of people!

He wrote it on himself knowing it wasn't true.

He wasn't actually a detective, he was a patient.

Everyone dies at the end.

Everyone dies at the end.

He was the dead body in the room the whole time.

He was actually Luke's father.

He was actually a ghost.

They're actually the same person.

Thing you know, I

You know a TV show is going to be crappy when the only ads on the DVD are for movies you've also never heard of.

You know it's not going to be a "down to earth, genuine romp" when someone uses the phrase "designer water."

You know there was a mis-cast when someone in the front credits has the same name as your grandmother, but is not your grandmother.

PSA: Spam spam spam spam baked beans spam spam spam

In my spam email folder, the funniest spammer ID I've seen in awhile, advertising a "No risk Katy Perry Free trial."

The way I figure it, this must mean either that you can get an NSA one-time hookup with Katy Perry, or that the trial will be "Katy Perry Free," with no risk of her showing up.

I'm not writing back to ask, so reader's choice.

PSA: Stupid, lying ad taglines

"It's not TV, it's HBO" (HBO)

"More car than electric" (Chevy Volt)

Blog Fail, re: Failblog

Sorry it's been so long between posts -- I won the Microsoft Email Lottery, which as you must understand was a pretty big deal. Plus, in the interim I've been busy putting up pictures of Japan as my Facebook profile picture to help with the aftermath of the tsunami.

I've also been reading (the entirety of) Failbook. Enjoy.

Accusations XVIII

People who keep posting the following as their Facebook statuses in response to the earthquake and tidal wave(s) off the coast of Japan:

´¯`·.´¯`·.¸¸.·´¯`·.¸PRAYER WAVE¸.·´¯`·.´¯`·.¸¸.·´¯`·.¸ Going out to all those affected in Japan, the Pacific and everywhere else affected by the earthquake and tsunami. Keep this going ♥

Isn't this a bit like wishing a "gas chamber of peace and happiness" would envelop Jews after the atrocities they experienced in the death camps? Using the word "prayer" before the explicit (and illustrated) reminder of the devastating waves washing away Japanese coastal buildings and towns doesn't actually make it okay, dudes.

Sensitive response fail.

PSA: Twitter = new commercial delivery system

Well, today I joined twitter... @ohTHATalicia.

Follow me if you want. But read this warning first, because if you're a late adopter like me, you might expect things well past the beta stage of international acceptance to not suck by the time you get there: Twitter kind of sucks.

Maybe I'll get the hang of all that hash-tagging and @-signing and re-tweeting, and maybe in the future it will be SO FUN, but for now all my twitter feed (if that's even what it's called) looks like to me is a list of all the commercials I've been missing out on over the last few years of watching exclusively DVD'd content. Making each "tweet" 140 characters or less actually makes them worse; imagine if those 30 second spots that used to be so familiar to us TV viewers were crammed into 5 seconds each and you had to watch 30 of them in each commercial break. Yeesh.

Next I'll have to figure out what all this Angry Birds fuss is about.

PSA: Zombie Sheen

Last night I had a dream that Charlie Sheen's rantics were the result of a zombie virus. We were all waiting anxiously to see how it would progress and whether it would spread or not.

My dream was probably due in equal parts to the fact that I've got a bad cold, that I've been a pretty anxious person lately, and that I saw part of a zombie movie last night and had the Charlie Sheen "Winning" autotune song stuck in my head when I went to sleep.

It's also interesting considering my views on the fascination with Charlie (in terms of class), and what many scholars have observed about zombies (that they represent the lower class and fear of its uprising). I think it actually sums up my overly long post on this topic pretty well.

This is probably my most successful dream mash-up of ideas, with "Sesame Streets ahead" as a relatively close second.

New Word: Rantics

n. combination of "ranting" and "antics"; used to describe celebrities or other manic individuals whose strange behaviors include crazy diatribes, i.e. Charlie Sheen circa March 2011

In Defense of Poppery, XV: Why Charlie Sheen's crazy ranting matters to us.

Pop example: Charlie Sheen's crazy ranting, and subsequent media coverage of said ranting

What redeems it: Well, nothing. It's crazy ranting.

Okay, then what makes it important, or why do we want to watch it?:
I've seen two kinds of media coverage of Charlie Sheen's recent claims to being from Mars (a claim John Gray would probably back him up on, though I haven't seen that angle covered), having tiger blood, and doing more cocaine than the human body can handle.

I've seen the actual Charlie-Sheen ranting in highlight reel forms (such as with bunnies or on autotune), and I've seen the semi-ranting meta-coverage of the media and commenters asking us all why we're so interested in the crazy ranting of Charlie Sheen.

It's the second kind of coverage I want to discuss first, and then I'll justify our possible collective interest in the first kind of coverage.

Most people who are upset with Charlie Sheen coverage (we'll call it CSc) claim to have one of two reasons (or both) for annoyance:

1. Charlie Sheen is clearly mentally deranged or ill (either from drugs or a pre-existing condition, such as bipolar disorder), and we need to pity him -- or ignore him. (Odd combination of prescribed responses, but there it is.)

2. Charlie Sheen's crazy ranting is not "real news" because "real news" is hearing about unemployment, the unrest in Libya, etc. Under this umbrella falls also laments that CSc is taking up time that should go to those topics, as well as protests that "it's just TV" and so we shouldn't care.

To the first objection, that Charlie Sheen is mentally deranged/ill, I honestly see no way in which either pitying or ignoring him would actually help Charlie Sheen. Perhaps it's schadenfreude for us to be so fascinated by his rants (though I'll discuss later why I don't believe it is), and perhaps we should "be better than that," but neither pity nor ignoring actually make us "better than that." The fact is that no collective attitude we take toward CS or CSc will improve Charlie's chances of rehabilitating himself or finding an appropriate cocktail of prescribed medications to deal with whatever disorder we've decided he has.

Pity and ignorance don't help people, and pretending that our pity or ignorance is morally better than our fascination is kind of silly.

To the second objection, that CSc is preempting more important coverage of more important events, I would say that the news people wish we would be hearing more about is either boring, difficult to watch, or both. This is the trap that environmental groups and human rights organizations and Tea-partiers all fall into: no sense of humor, and an urgency that implies no time to develop one.

People can't be constantly being reminded that polar bears are about to become extinct without either becoming apathetic or blowing their brains out. You need to give people some down time.

[Tangent 1: The Middle East has not been giving us very much down time in this 24-hour news cycle. We're obviously not living it (making the caring actually a lot more difficult to sustain), but we've been through a change of regime in Egypt, political unrest in several other countries, and (still) the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In other words, if you want us to care about Libya and unemployment and the crushing federal deficit, you need to let us watch Charlie Sheen for awhile to clear our brains.]

To the related objection that "it's only TV," and so we shouldn't care, I say that I agree that Two and a Half Men, as far as I can tell from the few five-second blurbs I've seen while changing channels, is a crappy show. But TV is the touchstone for all generations born since 1950. Saying that it's "only" a TV show is like saying "what's the big deal? He's just a famous person everyone in the realm recognizes and normally pays homage to, the modern equivalent of the king!" or perhaps more pointedly, "what's the big deal? It's just the English language, the mother-tongue through which we understand the world!"

We all speak TV. That's how you know that you wish evening news shows would show what you think of as serious evening news instead of Charlie Sheen rants. You weren't born thinking "the evening news should be about crime, the economy, politics, and other boring serious things, only." You know that because TV taught it to you. Your elitist expectations actually came from TV.

Which brings me, I think, to my observations on the bifurcation of the American mind when it comes to television. We all think it's important, and we all also know that we "shouldn't" think so because other things are "more important." (I mean, when people actually like a TV show, they describe themselves as helpless in relation to it; "I'm addiction to X show" they say. As though TV is a drug that we'd quit if only we had the moral fortitude.)

We watch CSc, and we simultaneously gripe about the fact that we're watching it.

I believe this relates directly to capitalism, since television is one of capitalism's greatest inventions -- a tool of the economic system from the start -- and the way capitalism needs us to be simultaneously consuming a massive amount of product, and also dissatisfied with the products we consume so that as soon as we're "finished" with the first thing, we move on to consume the next one.

[Tangent 2: The fact that TV is so obviously a capitalist tool is what makes it seem "low class." Low class things are characterized by their exposure of/to the mechanics of capitalism: the prototypical lower class people are factory workers, even though farmers may make about the same amount of money (or less). Farmers are portrayed as having "other benefits," ones indigenous to the countryside that disintegrate (literally) the closer they get to the city -- pastoral scenery, simplicity, nutrition, "down home" wisdom, etc. -- and that are viewed as "outside" the capitalist structure and the hurly burly world of money.

"They're poor in money but rich in spirit," we say about farmers. Those who leave the land for mechanized labor are "selling out"; those who stay on the land but begin to use factory-like mechanized labor devices are also "selling out."

How would a factory worker "sell out"? Would it even be possible?

Think about it for a minute. I'll wait.

If you thought of a way a factory worker could sell out, it probably involved some vestige of human bonds, like betraying a union or coworker. But the point is that machines and mechanical labor cannot be "sold out" -- they are the sellout. And so it is with TV.]

The complex structure of our society relies on urban spaces, factories, and television, and it so obviously relies on those things that they become the "low" -- while objects, people, artists and media that appear not to rely on those "low" things give the illusion of "rising above" and managing to be "high class." (In modernism, at least...where cities necessarily also produce the "high class," which is partly defined by its association with human production, standards, and "cultured-ness." If capitalism defines the lower class, so does it define the higher within its own workings, leaving farmers out of the spectrum despite/because of their supposed spiritual riches.)

So here's my long-awaited point: Charlie Sheen is a lunatic. And I think part of the fascination with his particular lunacies is that he has been completely unpredictable in a high/low kind of way.

He is a "low" kind of guy, in that his fame comes mainly from TV and some Oscar-unworthy movies. And he's acting "low," in that he claims to have done a ton and a half of drugs, and in that he is clearly bragging about himself, and in that he may be mentally ill.

But he's refusing to apologize for all those things in the way that "low" things should -- Charlie Sheen doesn't have a bifurcated mind about CSc, loving it and hating it at the same time. He just freaking loves it, as he tells us again and again. And instead of the usual apology, he's saying things that are actually out-of-control, insanely creative. They're far more like poetry than any script of Two and a Half Men.

Tiger blood? Adonis? One-armed children?? Where is he getting this stuff?

That's what everyone wants to know. That's why we keep listening. That's why it seems like such a killjoy when others attempt to diagnose him (again making him "low," controlled, in need of our help), because it seems to explain what's going on when he opens his mouth.

And maybe it does.

But maybe we also see our own possibilities and servitudes exposed in some of the craziness Charlie has been exhibiting. We are, after all, a nation that both polices the world and polices our policing of the world (that watches TV and says "we wish we didn't"). In Charlie Sheen, we see the specter of that hubris if it were unleashed, if we stopped policing ourselves. We see the destruction and creativity unleashed by that kind of arrogance.

I think we see both what we have created as the (semi)omnipotent audience and what we fear we could become as Americans. We are the crazy ranters who never thought we could be taken down, that we were "too big to fail" -- and here we are in a recession. Charlie Sheen stinks of impending disaster because we can smell it on ourselves, not because he's actually faced any disaster...because he's very specifically not facing disaster and is blissful in what we feel must be his ignorance. He's a metaphor for us that we created by our attentions. In a way, the narrative of his "breakdown" proves our power; in a more literal way, our attention to his recent crazy ramblings allowed more crazy ramblings.

And I think we can't look away because both halves of our capitalist minds are attracted to these rantings: reveling in the low, low class obsession with and proximity to bald power, and also the implied freedom in the creative claiming of that power -- without apology, as if Manifest Destiny had come back into vogue. Charlie Sheen seems to be rising above us as he speaks, not in the ways he describes (he's not actually from Mars, he doesn't have only one speed [Go], and he probably doesn't really have any tiger blood), but in his descriptions themselves. He is free from our capitalist anxiety and obsessive self-consciousness (though not our self-obsession).

He makes us wonder what "winning" means. Could he be winning? Could it be that this nut-casery is what we are exhibiting when we say we're winning? In the split seconds between watching a video of CSc and making an amateur diagnosis and dismissal of him as "crazy," Charlie makes us think about what winning is.

And therein lies the value of CSc, I believe.

Local Trivia: Subway sign strap

PSA: You're such a tees.

So lately, instead of blogging, I've been obsessing over t-shirts. Not all of them are 100% white-person approved, but most of them are extremely limited-edition, and that adds on a few percents. (Wear them to farmer's markets and I'm sure you can still manage to be the right kind of white person.)

I figure I'll tell you about some of my favorites.

Hands down, I think my best discovery has been Megan Lara's Princess Peach nouveau-style shirt, which can still be purchased here, though I bought mine in a different color from teefury.com. Teefury has a new shirt every day, which then descends into the "gallery" never to return again. While that's pretty awesome, what's even awesomer is getting to see Megan create art nouveau prints of all the fave Nintendo and otherwise-geeky princesses (think Zelda and Samus, and Phoenix and Mystique) on her facebook fan page.

I also love "Wicked Mess," a shirt.woot shirt, which can also no longer be purchased, though shirt.woot keep shirts up for at least a week before they're "reckoned" off the site. (If you're interested in the inspiration for my "Poe's answering machine" post, see the "reckoning" page on shirt.woot and note how long the "Nevermore" shirt has been on the charts...as well as the Poe bird-face shirt, depending on when you read this. Apparently the "Nevermore" shirt has been selling like hotcakes for years now, every single week. I just don't see it, personally.)

I excitedly ordered three random shirts for myself from 6dollarshirts.com, which turned out to be this one, this one, and a "Sabre" logo shirt (haha -- The Office). The first two were actually identical (except in color) to the shirts I ordered as a surprise for P.C. at the same time. I also purposely ordered this one for myself, as an Arrested Development fan. (Note also the Human Centipede shirt, though if you're squeamish, please don't note it.)

And when I left for Baltimire last weekend (typo intended), I issued a challenge to P.C. -- that he purchase me a shirt that I would like, as a surprise.

P.C. being the Prince Certainpersonio that he is, he ended up getting me five. I won't link to all of them, since I don't know where most came from, and most are TV-related (since I heart TV).

But here, finally, is a shirt you can order for yourself -- for now -- and one that I think does an excellent job of being hilarious, poignant, and instantly recognizable all at once.

If only all tees were as good, designations like "white-person approved" would cease to have meaning, and we could all live in cotton-poly blended harmony.

Accusations XVII

Extreme stupidities found in the online training I had to go through to be certified in safety, and prevention of abuse, neglect and exploitation of disabled individuals:

1. the multiple-choice question that asked examees to select
A. [answer]
B. [different answer]
C. both A and B
D. only A

That's right: A is A, and D is also A.

2. the closed captioning for the audio files that didn't work on my computer, which occasionally read "a direct service provider telling about a time when safety was an issue on the job. Preferably someone with an ethnically diverse voice," instead of giving an actual transcript of the selected audio file.

3. the chapters of the training in which the closed captioning actually advised trainees to "listen to the clip below and then go to the next page." In a training for people learning how to interact with those with various physical and mental disabilities, assuming that anyone who needs to use closed captioning to access the test can still hear the voice clip calls into question your right to teach the material.

Poe's answering machine, 9:30 p.m.

*Beep*

"Hey, it's Lenore. I'm calling at a time I know you're going to be out at the bar to leave this message on your home machine, because I want you to stop calling me. It's over, Ed, and if you show up at my house again, I'm going to call the cops.

I'll come by tomorrow to pick up the volumes of lore I forgot. I'd like you to put them in a box and set them outside your door if you can manage that through the drunken haze, but otherwise just leave your chamber door unlocked when you go out and I'll collect them myself.

Also, if you see Nevil, please just feed him, and I'll get him when I come by, too. He should be fine out there unless the weather's too bad, in which case you should let him in. You know how he loves perching on people's heads, though, so don't complain to me if you've got bird shit in your hair in the morning, because I'm not going to clean it up. I'm done cleaning up your messes.

Seriously, Eddie, don't call me again, and don't be at home tomorrow afternoon when I come to get my lore and pet raven. This is the last you'll hear from me.

Good-bye forever. [Mumbling] Good riddance."

*Click*