little ms. "sweet and innocent."

Saturday, June 23, 2001
The thing about the J. Peterman catalog is...
on the one hand, very seductive writing, and when the catalogs occasionally showed up at my house, that's what I read them for. It's not quite Gigi's lingerie writing in the Scruples series (she buys antique lingerie to give as gifts, and makes up stories about the women who originally owned each outfit), but it seems to be as close as you'll find to it in real catalogs. I certainly don't relate to the humongous money aspects of it, but wow, it's so fictional sometimes, and can tell a story well.
On the other hand, some of what they write is downright disturbing. Nice implied racism there, guys. "J. Peterman is marketing an utterly ersatz colonialism, and that's what makes it more offensive: that a group of marketroids decided that the "plantation" thing was, heh, a neat selling point. What next?
"Pith helmets: perfect for re-enacting the days of the Raj. Cha-wallah and bullwhip supplied separately."
Sassy, many eons ago, did a rant about this catalog, specifically citing this hat and this writing about it. I'm shocked that it's still in the catalog after what, at least five years?

Saturday, June 23, 2001
A return for Polly Esther?
Fillerama has (a) archived Fillers and (b) a mailing list.

Saturday, June 23, 2001
So the Boy Scouts hate gays because they want to keep molesters away
"Indeed, to judge by the latest edition of the Cub Scout Wolf Book, today's heterosexuals-only Boy Scouts of America is crawling with child molesters. How else to explain why the first 23 pages of the book address the question of how to prevent child abuse? But it's actually a "Bobcat Requirement" to quiz Cub Scouts about a variety of highly specific scenarios. (Example: "What if an adult invites you on a camping trip and suggests that you allow him to take your picture when you are not wearing clothes?") Apparently these elaborate precautions are necessary because every third scout master yearns to fondle the tender flesh in his care. Indeed, the very founder of the Boy Scouts was reputed to harbor an unwholesome fancy for young boys."

Saturday, June 23, 2001
Rocky Wars!
How the three Atlanta casts hate each other, accuse each other of alcoholism, arson, etc.- all because they do their shows differently. Weird, wild stuff. However, I've been informed recently by Q that all the casts were misquoted. Somehow I'm not surprised to hear it...

Saturday, June 23, 2001
Review of American Gods...
which I finished a few days ago. It's good. Perhaps not quite what I expected in some ways, but good. I have to agree with this reviewer's point that Jesus doesn't show up here, but then again, this does seem to be about smaller gods, so maybe he didn't fit in.

Friday, June 22, 2001
Origami Genitalia
God, I find weird stuff for this page.

Friday, June 22, 2001
The automated Dave Barry column generator

Friday, June 22, 2001
Chip Rowe
Lotta funny articles here, including: all you ever wanted to know about the Bionic Man and Woman, tech support, what God told people to do, why women date older guys, celebrity poems critiqued, movie cliches, and journalists who nitpick over celebrity lunches.

Friday, June 22, 2001
The Date My Sister Project
In which Christian sets up his sister with a few dates and takes mucho joy in stalking her, including silly costumes and bugging her apartment.

Friday, June 22, 2001
Micro$oft gets even more evil by the day.
On a similar topic, I was amused by this article about the fools who choose to use stuff like Outlook.

Friday, June 22, 2001
The Chronicles of George
The FAQ is my favorite, I think.

Friday, June 22, 2001
David Sedaris loves his tip jar
(Finished Naked this weekend, nearly done with Me Talk Pretty.) Joining in on the current trend of everyone asking for tips, he's now (a) asking for tips when he goes to book signings 'cause he doesn't get paid for them, (b) charges $50 to do Billie Holliday impersonations, (c) charges $5 to autograph books that aren't his- basically, everything he doesn't like, he charges for.

"The hard thing is, when you write about yourself incessantly, and you don't have a very adventurous life, it's hard coming up with material. Every time I get on a plane I hope it's hijacked. I do. I'm so jealous of, like, people who go to the Philippines and get kidnapped. Whenever I hear that someone got kidnapped, like in the Philippines, I think, "Now, how would you turn that into a book?" If you were, I don't know, in a hut for three weeks--is that enough for a book?"

I spent a day or so listening to taped Sedaris stuff, and some of it read aloud is even funnier than the paper stuff (some of these audio links I've already linked in previous logs to the print version.). He's not that fond of silly photographers (direct sound file link), for example, who want him to wear a shirt saying "Deliveries in rear" while scrubbing a bathroom. This site features "Jesus Shaves" (French students attempt to explain Easter with a limited vocabulary) and "You Can't Kill The Rooster" (David's redneck foulmouthed little brother). They are hilarious. He's got some issues with French (direct sound file link), as you'll see. I related quite well, as I didn't do too well speaking it either. This one goes on about the bizarre "genders" of each word, like why is vagina a he?

"Sedaris will do anything to avoid talking to a French person. He screens his calls. He hides when the doorbell rings. On the street, he pretends to be mute.
Despite six months of daily French classes, he still can't carry on a conversation with a native speaker. The French, he insists, terrorize him. They approach him everywhere -- at the dry cleaner's, in the store, on the street. They want things. Cigarettes. Spare change. They want him to speak French." (This is why I don't go to Europe too.)
"Sedaris says he doesn't go searching for the eccentrics who populate his writing; they find him. He is a lunatic magnet.
``In New York, if I go to the park and sit on a bench, somebody who's just got out of prison is going to sit next to me. They know I don't have any willpower.'' Again, I relate (see that quote at the top of the page).

"And he has a bunch of dead animals around the house.
"I love things made out of animals," Sedaris says, holding a knife with a hoof for a handle. "It's just so funny to think of someone saying, `I need a letter opener. I guess I'll have to kill a deer.'
Dennis was one of the 42 cats the actress Sandy Dennis left behind when she died a couple of years ago, and Sedaris renamed him after his former owner. I don't ask what will happen to the cat's body when his time comes."

Friday, June 22, 2001
Poor Melissa
This reminds me of the scene in The Wedding Singer where Linda shows up at Robbie's the day after she ran out on their wedding, and the little nephew comes out to say hi, then says "You a bitch!"

Friday, June 22, 2001
Friends ends next year, Ross says
Or not.

Friday, June 22, 2001
The return of Mr. Bribery Babes
If you've been on the Internet awhile you've probably already heard of Mr 10K4awife.com offering bucks to whoever introduces him to whoever he married (no, the woman gets no $). Well, someone's out of the running 'cause he's out of a long term relationship and back on the loose again! What I find funny about this are the bottom two pictures- one of him making a silly face and pulling kelp out of his head, and one of him cuddling another woman, only he's blurred her face out and cut off parts of their bodies! I'm lost as to why you'd put a shot like that on your get-me-a-wife page. He apologizes for "x" being in there..."thought it was a good picture of me." Well, it is, but what stopped you from say, cropping down the photo to just your head? Sara's suggestion: "because then you can't prove you got laid." Given what he says here, perhaps she's right. Though I can see why he'd er, want to reiterate that given the subject of the page.

In the meantime, I'm puzzled at this page where he says (after mentioning he wants kids in a few years) "If she wants to pursue a career I am all for that. She should believe that if we can afford for her not to work, then daycare is out of the question for our children." Kinda contradictory there, I think.

Friday, June 22, 2001
Interview with Drew, creator of Fark
For those who haven't checked the sidebar link, Fark is cool. I found a lot of this interview to be interesting, especially given certain topics I keep returning to around here.

"If I didn't own an ISP, Fark would have died a while ago. Our bandwidth bill would be several thousand a month if I was charging a client that used that f*cking much.
John Hawkins: Several thousand a month? Wow....That's ironic..killed by your own success...
Drew Curtis: We would have been. Actually that's not too uncommon these days, it's the way things are these days. A lot of great sites had died lately. Suck, Bianca's, and Metafilter almost ate it but they lived."

While I don't necessarily agree with the next paragraph (I find those articles funny in a different way), he does have a point.

"The Onion introduced us to the concept of the lazy satire article. Which is: take an every day event and write an article about it. Such as: Area man doesn't understand his girlfriend. Oh for chrissakes you can't write an entire article about that. I used to love the Onion, but one day they stopped being funny. From talking to one or two guys who used to work there, the day they died was when the owner sold it. Which I can't say as I blame him for doing it, but they are a shadow of their former selves. It's a tragedy. I've seen signs lately that they might be getting back on track but they've got to stop doing those stupid obvious satire articles like I was talking about before. Maybe I'm nuts but I've hated all of those articles. Every last one. Except for Area Man Eats Whole Godd@mn Bag of Chips. I thought that was funny because my dad used to do that. All the others have sucked. Their best stuff is when they break away from that. I really wish they were as good as they were. Don't get me wrong, I don't hate the Onion. I hate the fact that they used to be so cutting edge and now they're just cranking out crap every week. I think they can turn it around, someone just needs to tell them their sh*t sucks. Ok here's what I don't like: Author wishes she hadn't blown personal tragedy on first book. Why the f*ck would I read that? I already know every possible permutation of the entire article by reading the headline."

Thursday, June 21, 2001
God. My collection of stinky schools grows larger and larger.
"A persistent parent has been booted from his kid's school and threatened with jail for demanding that officials make it safer and better, parent leaders said yesterday.
Unlike other parents, Sid Blauner is barred from entering PS 165 in Manhattan Valley without prior authorization.
Blauner cares too much about the school, said other leaders of the parent association." When did this become a BAD THING????

Continuing the theme, some schools are saying only write nice things in the yearbook, please. You can get punished or have to pay for another yearbook. Oddly enough I relate to this one as my friends used to draw pictures of people masturbating, signed my crack, etc., etc. and every year my mother snuck into my room while I was asleep, found my yearbook and read it, then bitched about what everyone wrote (even the fairly innocuous stuff) the next day. By the end of high school I was having no one sign my yearbook- it wasn't worth it.

This, however, is perhaps the worst story ever. The sheer total utter RIDICULOUSNESS of it astounds and disgusts me. It's practically satire it's so out of whack. And always, just as you think it can't get any worse, IT DOES.

"Mrs. G. recalls it as "the darkest year of my life." She cried all the time. She had trouble speaking in complete sentences. She lost 15 pounds. One of her friends remembers fearing that the stylish blond mother of two, and owner of both an Upper East Side apartment and a Long Island beachfront home, was suicidal.
A child stricken with cancer? The collapse of her husband's business? The death of a beloved parent? Menopause? No, the darkest year of Mrs. G.'s life came the year her son was rejected from kindergarten.
Manhattan parents are now applying to six or seven nursery schools. Several years ago, the 92nd Street YMHA, a school whose director, according to the parents' grapevine, has a way with Baby Ivy admissions people, held eight meetings for prospective parents, some of them packed with 50 families. The school had only 25 openings and applications from so many sisters of current students that they told the desperate masses, "If you're a girl, don't apply."
Add the diversity imperative to the number of children of alumni and siblings of current students, both of whom get preferential treatment in admissions, and what you have left is only a handful of openings. One Upper East Side nursery school director making her routine yearly phone call to discuss her applicant pool was told by the director of admissions at one top school: "We're only looking for diversity. We're not interested in your Caucasian kids."
So, just how do admissions directors measure braininess in a four-year-old? Through an IQ test, the revised Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence, required of all children applying to kindergarten in Manhattan private schools. Actually, people never call it an IQ test; they refer to it as the ERB, after the Educational Records Bureau that administers it. One Upper East Side nursery school director speculates that today many schools base 50 percent of their decision on IQ scores. "Now I hear all the time 'He didn't do so well on his mazes [one of the tasks on the ERB].' You never heard that ten years ago. [At that time] I could have said to a director of admissions, 'We have a wonderful child,' and they would take another look. Now they say, 'No. I can see this dumpling is adorable, but his fine motor skills are a little weak.'"
Take this statement from one nursery school director: "I have one family this year with a son at a well-known coed school. They want a very competitive girls' school; they've limited themselves to the Ivy League. But the child is totally ordinary. She clung to her mother during one interview. [The Baby-Ivy-bound four-year-old is far too self-confident to demonstrate any separation anxiety or shyness.] Her ERBs are ordinary. She's not particularly verbal in class; she has no insightful comments after we read to her. . . . She's a darling, ordinary child who needs to go to Amherst, not Harvard. The father has come to see me 98 times. 'I know this person on the board. I've heard you're really good at getting kids into good schools. I expect to be one of those families. You know how supportive I've been.' He gave me a modest check at the auction. This child will get in nowhere."
The aspiring Spence or Collegiate tot doesn't waste much time swinging on monkey bars at the playground. By 15 months, he has a busy schedule of four or five activities. One Upper East Side "feeder" nursery school director read me one applicant's Attachment A (Attachment B was a letter from a high-profile businessman whose child had gone to the school): Jodi's Gym, Hands On (a music course), and various classes at Rhinelander Center, 92nd Street Y, and 74th Street Magic. It also lists (as does almost every other application she has received) the Upper East Side baby fad-du-jour, "Language for Tots," a foreign-language program for kids starting at six months.
One mother puzzled over why her son was rejected at the five schools that she applied to last year. She had gotten the letters from influential people, she and her husband had avoided any grave faux pas at their interview, and the child had evidently scored well. "He had great ERBs. Listen to the last line: 'A delightful child.' And on top of that, he interviewed well." Then she paused in a way few parents or educators had paused in the scores of interviews I'd had. "I can't believe I'm saying this about a four-year-old."

Thursday, June 21, 2001
Nasty naked Marlon. EW.
(Okay, this may tie with Jar Jar for nastiest headline). Why the hell do they pay $10 million for this guy when he isn't doing his job and shows up NAKED for no good reason (though he's insecure about his ass size- why the hell would you show up naked then?)?

Thursday, June 21, 2001
More about Tom Cruise's sexuality.
"Yep, this is the same Tom Cruise who showed what a stud he was by flirting with the gorgeous Shelly Long in Losin' It.
The same Tom Cruise who seduced Brad Pitt and sucked his warm bodily fluids in Interview With The Vampire.
The same Tom Cruise that shouts "Respect The Cock!" in Magnolia.
The same Tom Cruise that gets called a fag by some street thugs in Eyes Wide Shut.
The same Tom Cruise that tells a shirtless Cuba Gooding, Jr, "You're My Motherfucker!" in Jerry Maguire.
The same Tom Cruise who yells, "Penis! Penis! Big fucking erect penis, ma!" in Born on The Fourth of July.
The same Tom Cruise who starred in a movie called Cocktail.
How could being gay hurt a career built on this type of heterosexual magic?" HAH! Too funny.

Then there's Mark Morford's Tom Cruise Is Not Gay. Unless he is. But he's not. Probably. "Because it's an amazing thing, really, how every gay man I know and every gay man you know undoubtedly has a story in which they know a girl who knows a guy who runs a private downtown club wherein the bartender claims he absolutely witnessed Tom Cruise hitting on this other gay guy this one time, for sure it was him, no really, I saw it. Which of course means Tom Cruise really is gay. Or not.
"My sister's gay male friend went to college at Pepperdine, and he had a gay male roommate who had an affair with Tom Cruise. Absolutely true," swears a well-informed acquaintance who shall remain nameless. "Oh, he's totally gay. It's like, a given." These stories are everywhere, and they are always told by smart people with a matter-of-fact, in-the-know veracity.
Because ultimately, it doesn't matter one whit whether or not Tom Cruise is gay. Or if Rosie likes leather, or Willis is a queen, or Ricky's a latex fetishist, or the NFL a breeding ground for rampant homoeroticism (oh come on, just admit it). But the Puritans and the homophobes, the self-righteous and the Bible Belters of America, they can rally, they can still trash a career in a nanosecond, if they smell unwanted ickiness in their royalty, if they sense the wrong kind of betrayal in their role models.
There is massive terror in the truth. There are vapid but vicious issues within the Hollywood studios and stars alike about maintaining image, sustaining the ruse of perfection, about clinging to those things that guarantee bloated box-office draw.
There is massive coverup about celebs and what they're really like. You could call it a conspiracy, but that would imply intelligence. Let's call it a neverending panicky shell-game, designed to keep those who buy the product from knowing too much, and those who may or may not be gay from admitting anything at all."

Thursday, June 21, 2001
Technology ruins fiction plots
You just can't really have anyone incommunicado any more.

Thursday, June 21, 2001
An update on Kristin, Queen of Revenge's dye story

Thursday, June 21, 2001
Jar Jar Masturbation Toy
That's probably the worst headline I'll ever put here. Though the Tickle Me Elmo vibrator is about as bad.

Thursday, June 21, 2001
Boy band in orbit
Can we leave them there?

Thursday, June 21, 2001
More TV news sucks
"Note to young people now graduating from high schools and colleges: You can go into journalism or you can go into TV news. But you really can't do both. Coming up: My lunch. But first . . ."

Thursday, June 21, 2001
Guests Forced to Pretend Wedding A Good Thing
God, I've been there, done that. One out of two of these couples have split, the other couple I'm amazed has lasted long enough to breed. Especially since they constantly bicker and fight, and the last time I saw them she told him to take me on a tour of the house, but DON'T show me the bedroom. That was the first thing he showed me. I think the divorce train will chug through in five years at the max.

Thursday, June 21, 2001
The Onion's Pet Care Tips
"When going on vacation, be sure to leave cans of dog food and a can opener where your dog can easily reach them.
Is thick pus coming out of your cat's eyes? Are its gums red or swollen? Are its ears clogged with a crumbly brown substance? Cool.
Take your snake outside regularly. If not, no one will know you're one of those freaky snake guys.
If your dog or cat starts wearing pointy, '50s-era women's eyeglasses, contact cartoonist Gary Larson immediately.
Owning a colorful cockatiel or mynah bird is a great way to make you wake up one morning, slap yourself on the forehead, and say, "Holy shit! I'm gay!"
If you have a pot-bellied pig, you're on your own, Mr. Individuality."

Thursday, June 21, 2001
What Cartoon Character Are You?
Eh...what's up, doc?

Thursday, June 21, 2001
Bird snitches on cheating husband

Thursday, June 21, 2001
Will y'all please stop stealing those bowling shoes?
(Yes, that's the ACTUAL OPENING of that story.) When did BOWLING SHOES become a "hot fashion statement?"

Thursday, June 21, 2001
Why are you such a freak?
Ah, the ravings of religious wackos. How fun they are. But I just love how God promised him to some chick in a dream and he asks someone to find her for him because her phone number's unlisted. Gee, ya think it's because she DOESN'T EXIST? I dreamed that I slept with Luke Perry once (weird, given that I don't find him attractive) and he was heading off to Noah, Arkansas (his boxes said NOAH ARK. Interesting, huh?), but that doesn't mean I want anyone to go find him for me there.

Thursday, June 21, 2001
I normally don't plug stuff from work too much here, but...
I just liked Jay's article on this kid without a hand who plays sports, particularly his opening: "This isn't so much a story about Jeff Rodvold, the kid who lives life with only one hand, as it is a story about you. Because as far as I can tell, Jeff's doing just fine." I really wish I could share with you our entertainment editor's cranky story on being stuck on a train for over an hour with some foulmouthed skanky people trying to pick each other up, but alas, it's not online.

Thursday, June 21, 2001
Decorator Gravel
Why?

Thursday, June 21, 2001
Surprise! Paul Reubens sucks!
"Now, I know I shouldn't typecast a man as talented as Reubens, straitjacketing him as his most famous character. But let's face it: Reubens' post-scandal efforts to branch out -- his stint on ''Murphy Brown''; his critically praised role in the recent movie flop ''Blow'' -- haven't added to his luster.
Neither does ''You Don't Know Jack,'' to put it mildly. As Troy Stevens, Reubens dons what looks like an old Beatle wig and introduces contestants with lines like, ''Let's cheat -- I mean, let's meet them now!'' Sounds like crap to me.

On a similar note, here's an article on nasty game show hosts.

Monday, June 18, 2001
I hate personal ads with the white hot passion of a thousand suns
Between this page and this one, EW.

Monday, June 18, 2001
Pamie's traumatic lists

Monday, June 18, 2001
Some people can't take a joke.
Once upon a time, this site created joke web pages announcing that someone was gay. One day, some idjit took it personally (and didn't exactly pay attention to how the site worked) and called lawyers. Now there's this amusing front page snarkiness...

Monday, June 18, 2001
Evil high school filtering
Once upon this time, a kid went to a high school that went filter-crazy, blocking off large areas of the Internet.

"Huge swaths of the Internet containing unobjectionable content are blocked because one page on that domain or host may have at one time contained one objectionable word or picture. At the same time, thousands of porn sites and hate sites and terrorism sites are left accessible. Huge swaths of the Internet containing unobjectionable content are blocked because one page on that domain or host may have at one time contained one objectionable word or picture. At the same time, thousands of porn sites and hate sites and terrorism sites are left accessible." Can you believe this?

Anyway, said kid, who's the school's computer troubleshooter, gets the bright idea to e-mail everyone in the district about how to bypass the filtering system that drives everyone insane and says that teachers and students have asked him a lot to come up with a way to bypass the system. He makes the mistake of saying he's trying to open a dialogue. You guys can probably guess what happened from there even before I tell you.

"Afraid that students and teachers would be able to get around the filter, it pulled the plug on the InterGate server, taking down the entire district's Internet access. I explained that I had done nothing to the computers, that I had used no school systems for my letter and that the district's network was perfectly safe. The district officials threatened me with suspension and prosecution, promised to bill me for their time and insinuated that I might not be able to attend graduation. I told them that I had broken no school rules and they had no case.
School staff berated me with questions as I walked through the halls that day: Why did I do it? What was I thinking? Did I want to graduate? Did I expect that I would go unpunished for my blatant mocking of school authority? Did I really think they would stand around while something as awful as what I had done took place?
"Stop with the censorship bullshit," they said. "Didn't you really do this just to draw attention to yourself?"
Sure, they blocked my bypass site, they removed my administrator account on the school computer system and they banned me permanently from school computers. This was an issue of trust, and the school didn't trust me on its system anymore. I understand this, even if I don't agree with it. However, they were not able to find anything with which to charge me -- no ground for suspension, no civil or criminal charges."

Monday, June 18, 2001
General Leadership Style
I'm George Washington. Whaddlyaknow.

Monday, June 18, 2001
Keep the Hitchhiker movie alive petition
Not that I know if it'll do any good, but what the hell.

Monday, June 18, 2001
Coins of the Realm
A two part series on micropayments. This (particularly the last one) is the most convincing argument on the whole thing I've ever seen. Plastic then has plenty of arguments against it. And someone also came up with a parody.

Monday, June 18, 2001
Online bitches

Monday, June 18, 2001
A for-profit college paper doesn't sound like the best idea...
Not only did they put the usual campus paper out of business, they're apparently total ad whores. "Often as much as 70 percent of each edition of the FSView & Florida Flambeau is advertisements, a figure higher than those of even the most competitively run student newspapers. A typical edition is 48 to 56 tabloid pages long."

Monday, June 18, 2001
Uh, yeah, sure you had NO idea what smoking does to you for umpteen years...
This chick and this guy have it right: How this guy got away with claiming he had NO idea about the dangers of smoking for twenty years I have no idea.

Monday, June 18, 2001
Pamela's IM experiment- what happens when the filters come off
The results are not good. Which makes me rather nervous since I put AIM on last night. I slapped on the "buddy list only" thingie, but someone told me today that means no one can message me unless I message them first. Crap.

Anyway, Pamela's results:
"63 - the total number of people who IM'd me
31 - the number of people who thought I was someone they knew (and were wrong)
Most people are idiots and can't tell the difference between a name and a screenname.
Most people think the Pamela they know is the only one on the planet. Anyone claiming otherwise is deemed an imposter.
Most people can't accept, "I don't know you," at face value."

Monday, June 18, 2001
I Want A Fat Babe
A spoof of the Backstreet Boys's "I Want It That Way" (this one by the "Snacktreat Boys"). While I was kinda icked out by a shot of two of the boys in the girl's underwear, I was amused by the pop-up section where one of the boys was said to be 42, hiding a wife and kids, and possibly the father of another one of the Boys.

Monday, June 18, 2001
D&D Alignment Test
Not that I've ever played D&D, but I found this interesting.

Monday, June 18, 2001
Kinda annoying article on swinging
The stupid stuff:

1. The tone of "Ewwww! Swingers are mostly OLD!!!" Well, duh, that's because there's a lot more hippie-types in that generation, whereas GenX (I don't know why I'm using this term when I hate it) has had more of the whole disease fear, must be monogamous upbringing stuff compared to them. The people I know who er, boink around on one level or another are usually near thirty. People my age? Oh HELL NO, they wouldn't dream of boinking nonmonogamously unless they were totally drunk.

2. "The Lifestyle" sounds so cutesy I could barf.

3. "However welcoming the Lifestyle can seem to a couple's peculiarities and perversions, there is one unwritten rule: Most women are bi/curious, but all the men are straight. A couple who swings in all directions would be politely asked to leave most clubs. If that's your bag, mister, please keep it to yourself." What's with that?

I was, however, amused at the term "dodecahard-on."

For further commentary on the issue, you may now check out Mouthorgan.

Monday, June 18, 2001
Failed Sanrio characters
My favorites: Mello Kitty and Punkchacco.

Monday, June 18, 2001
The Top 10 Conservative Idiots
In all fairness, there's a few columns of The Top 10 Liberal Idiots, but it looks like she got bored with doing a list. I'm not going to deny that Barbra and some others on it are idiots, either. I'm trying to be a semi-less pissy ex-Republican today for some odd reason.

I'm mainly linking to this because it's got great examples and lovely snipy comments, like this week, which featured "Trent Lott - Sneakier than a one-eyed ferret, slippier than an eel in heat, he's HYPOCRISY MAN!" and "Chris Matthews - "Hardball" my ass. The only time Chris Matthews gets hard is when he's interviewing Ari Fleischer."

Speaking of stupid conservatives (so much for my being nice to Republicans, huh?), here's my favorite Jenna Bush Doonesbury strips. And did you know that Dubya loves to matchmake? Man, that's the plot of the That's My Bush episode I saw, too. Spooky, isn't it? And here's a new one: Bush ogles boobies! (It's just funny.)

Friday, June 15, 2001
Bye bye Salon...
"And that's the sentiment Talbot is counting on as, during the course of the next year, he draws up plans to push more of the site's free content "behind the gate" of the subscription service, thereby making the $30 service more valuable.
"We're going to be even more aggressive about playing Salon Premium," he said. "It's not going to be a static group of editorial items like 'Bushed!' that's there now."
As more of Salon's content is pushed only to subscribers, Talbot thinks people will say, "Hey -- some of the best stuff is behind the gate now. I should sign up." As early as next year, "the model that we have now will be flipped around," Talbot said. "Most of the stuff will be by subscription. There is even a school of thought within Salon management that we should go there sooner."

To put it bluntly, no, I don't think more people will sign up as the site goes quickly over to subscription only. Speaking as a weblogger (I'm TRYING to not use the word blogger, but it's creeping into my speech already, sigh), I can't use sites that are barred off to the public. So much for my reading Salon in the future. Enjoy any links I put from there while you still can.

On a similar note, the Daily Whatever makes a damn good point about online content. "Everyone who writes original content online needs to get a day job.
No one seems to be making money putting original content online. Indeed, it's entirely possible that no one will ever make a good living putting original content up on the Web. The Web has many advantages, but being an ad-friendly environment (the classic bottom line for a profitable medium) is not one of them. That's what you get for taking a medium designed by geeks and scientists to pass notes and nuclear launch codes and trying to make it into a magazine rack. Weep not that Suck is dead, stand in awe that Suck survived as long as it did. I personally pegged it for dead sometime in 1998 -- God bless the Sucksters, they went into extra innings.
There's no shame in writing something online and expecting no direct compensation from someone else. The Web is uniquely designed to accommodate amateur sites ("amateur" being used in the "for the love of it" sense, not the "too lame to get paid for it" sense) -- it's cheap to get onto, it's got a worldwide reach, and it's filled with people looking for something to read in those long, lonely hours between their coffee break and lunch. It offers fame (or more accurately notoriety, fame's slightly disreputable relation) if not fortune -- and that fame can translate into something else: Job opportunities, paid writing opportunities, whatever."

Friday, June 15, 2001
What it would have been like if the guys involved with the American Revolution had had a message board.
A bunch of them big smiley faces, ROFL, all your 13 colonies are belong to us...

Friday, June 15, 2001
No, I'm not rolling my own blackout.
I presume that I'm a selfish, environment hating bitch for saying this, but I'm against this entire idea. Mainly because of the following things:
a. They're calling this a protest against the utilities, but um, why is doing what they want a protest when this is something the utilities would want? I'm lost on this one.
b. 7-10 PM on a Thursday is not the best time to conserve energy. 7-10 AM would be much more effective. And yes, I realize that would be involving businesses, but I'd rather push for businesses to use less power than this situation. I'd be more likely to do it if this was during all-daylight hours.
c. On the selfish personal note, I don't want to have to sit in the dark on my free non-working hours (and yes, I know it's on the solstice day, but it's still dark in CA around 9 pm then) with nobody around and nothing much to do beyond, well...wandering to stores where they're using electricity. Sitting in the dark alone isn't fun, especially when you're not tired enough to just go to bed.

And what's sad about this? Look how many people would have to do this for them to even notice.

On a more fun note, while reading through the local altweekly (and flipping past the pages and pages of porn ads), this one caught my eye- it's by "Goldie's Adult Superstore," a place my roommate thinks is hilarious.
The ad says: "Rolling blackouts: are YOU prepared?" and has checkboxes for battery-powered sex toys, glow-in-the-dark condoms, inflatable partners, romantic candles, light-up vibes, board games and massage oils.
I showed this to my roommate and she said "Put it up in the bathroom." (There's already a "Swim at Your Own Risk" sign in there. This summer she wants to steal a "No Parking" sign for it.)

Update on this story, 6/21: I mentioned this during a work meeting today and the first thing out of my coworker's mouth was "What kind of a protest is THAT?" Another suggested that I protest the protest by using tons of electricity. Taking up her suggestion, I have done the following tonight: used the oven, turned on lights in the house, used the fan, been on the computer, and did laundry. I'm so evil and proud of myself.

Reading the Metafilter comments was amusing- someone suggested that a better way to get them to notice was to not pay the bill, and others er, acted much the same as I did. "This is just... silly. It reminds me of my other favorite form of protest, California-style: the regular shutting down of San Francisco's downtown streets at rush hour on a Friday afternoon by bike riders called Critical Mass. Yeah, that gets a lot of people to see your point of view ("Wow, I can't get home in under four hours because a bunch of bike messengers have nothing better to do but pretend they're enviro-activists... I think I'll just go sell my Range Rover!"). I'm sure there are plenty of effective, positive things you can do if you're really worried about the California energy "crisis" - sitting around in semi-darkness for three hours just doesn't seem like one of them."-m.polo

Friday, June 15, 2001
Hookers find way to get out of being busted.
Wow, that's smart.

Wednesday, June 13, 2001
Today's Themed Quotes
"You know what college is? It's high school, only without the actual going to class. Well, high school was kinda like that too." ~Buffy the Vampire Slayer

"You can present the material, but you can't make me care." ~Calvin and Hobbes

"I'm finished being everybody's butt monkey." ~Buffy the Vampire Slayer"

"School-days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence. They are full of dull, unintelligible tasks, new and unpleasant ordinances, brutal violations of common sense amd common decency. It doesn't take a reasonably bright boy long to discover that most of what is rammed into him is nonsense, and that no one really cares very much whether he learns it or not." -H. L. Mencken

Principal Snyder: "Congratulations to the Class of 1999. You all proved more or less adequate. This is a time of celebration. So sit still and be quiet. Spit out that gum. Please welcome our distinguished guest speaker, Richard Wilkins III. I saw that gesture. You see me after graduation.
Mayor: Well. What a day this is. A special day. Today is our centennial. The 100th anniversary of the founding of Sunnydale. And I know what that means to all you kids.... Not a darn thing.
Buffy: My god, he's gonna do the entire speech.
Willow: Man, just ascend already.
Buffy: Evil."

Professor Walsh: "Those of you who fall into my good graces will come to know me as Maggie. Those of you who don't, will come to know me by the name my TA's use and think I don't know about, "The Evil bitch-monster of death."

Eddie: A lot of the courses are really tough.
Buffy: I'm a little upset. I had it on good authority that this was a party school."

(not linked to anything)
"It is an unknown side effect of being an English major that when one spends too much time reading misanthropic literature that spews hate at the whole world, you begin to find humanity's little idiosyncrasies sucking your will to live." -Karen Wilson

"We blew up the school! This is the best day ever!" -Xander Harris, a line cut from the episode "Graduation Day, Part 2" of Buffy the Vampire Slayer

What that means, folks, is I had my LAST DAY OF SCHOOL EVER TODAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

For those that enjoyed the Buffy quotes, here's more.

Wednesday, June 13, 2001
Panhandling magazines
Weirdly enough, some people have said they can't get this NYT link to come up without having to register. I haven't had this problem (I will only link to NYT pages that won't make me register) and I have no idea why some pages make you register and some don't. If you can't read this then just check the Plastic summary.

All about tip jars, Amazon, PayPal, and every other "puhLEEZE give us money" thing going on lately. Boy, does this remind me of why I don't want to get my own domain, host, etc.

Wednesday, June 13, 2001
Evil bitch replaced with scary bitch
Man, WHAT are the casting agents of Charmed THINKING? Since Shannen pissed off everyone there, they decide to cast someone even freakier? Oh yeah, that was BRILLIANT.

Wednesday, June 13, 2001
Why the Noah story isn't true

Wednesday, June 13, 2001
This is THE WORST REALITY TV SHOW EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER
I think this is the worst thing I've ever heard of in my entire life. I kid you not. This poor Japanese dude, Nasubi, was once a comedian auditioning for "a show-business related job." Upon "winning", he was immediately blindfolded, brought to an apartment, stripped naked and locked in with nothing but magazines, postcards, a cushion, a table, a small radio, a telephone, some notebooks, and a few pens. He was supposed to win ALL THE NECESSITIES OF LIFE through magazine contests. Oh, and they didn't mention that they were videotaping him for TV and the Internet and he wouldn't be let out until he won $10,000 in prizes. Supposedly the guy never developed scurvy or anything, but I'm surprised that didn't happen without some secret vitamin supplements a la Survivor.

Here's what happened when he finally made it: "Finally, he was given back his clothes, and for the first time in a year, he knew what it was like to wear clothes other than women's underwear. They gave him a bowl of ramen, and let him out on the street. They also took him to an amusement park and to Korea to eat his favourite food, Korean barbecue. After his 'rest' was over, he found himself back in a room, all alone again, but this time in Korea, a country whose language he could neither speak nor write! This time however, his goal was to earn his airfare home. It was about $400 US."

Man, do I want to go to Japan and arrest these assholes. That is such abuse. I can't believe they got away with it for over a year!

As Columbine said (not that we don't do a little mutual theft from time to time ;), "The only reason we're not doing this is logistics. Everyone knows no one ever wins any of OUR magazine contests."

Meanwhile, Turkish TV is making two kids live off of the minimum wage as a reality show.

Wednesday, June 13, 2001
The young'uns know the truth.
"We're throwing our money down a hole when it comes to Social Security because we're not going to see any of it," says Ricardo Reyes, a spokesman for Young America's Foundation, a conservative educational institute. "The whole guarantee is bogus — and we know it's bogus."
Numerous public opinion surveys show as many as three-quarters of Generation Xers — people between the ages of 18 and 30 — do not believe they'll get the benefits they're entitled to. In one frequently cited poll, twice as many young Americans said they believed in UFOs as believed they'd receive their Social Security payments."

Wednesday, June 13, 2001
Yet even more stuff to add to the Angelina's a freak collection
Not only does she have weird ideas as to how to commit suicide, she likes to be molested by a horse. As you can perhaps figure out from the above picture, she's not really Croft-sized. And finally, here's a pictorial review of Tomb Raider.

Wednesday, June 13, 2001
Total Britney Spears ripoff
Let's see. "Britney Spears" versus "Brittany Cleary" (sounds like a satire version of Britney's name, doesn't it?), both originally brunette with big smile. Britney has "E-mail my heart" (GAG GAG GAG GAG GAG), Brittany has "I.M. Me," which may be even worse. I refuse to listen to either.

Wednesday, June 13, 2001
Win a scholarship for doing a duct(k) tape prom
There's at least 20 pages of these outfits.

Wednesday, June 13, 2001
Performance art in a display window.
"Everything's on display except for the toilet," Thomas explains over breakfast the day before the display-window lockdown begins. "We figure that everyone sort of knows the theater of the toilet. We don't need to go there."

I went to a performance art show/party the other day, and frankly, the stuff that went on was unbelieveable. Way, way, WAY over the White Queen threshold.

Wednesday, June 13, 2001
So much for quitting the porn biz
"Women who have publicly embraced their sexuality should just go away, quietly wearing their scarlet letters. Society may forget them, but it will never forgive."

Wednesday, June 13, 2001
Some people take these RPG's all too seriously.
"And that's what amazes me--that anyone could think it's normal to spend thousands of dollars upgrading your place in an online role-playing game. Not paying to play the game--paying someone else to play the game for you, win some stuff that they then transfer to you."

Wednesday, June 13, 2001
Basic Instinct II: Return of the Dragon Lady.
In which the LA Times speculates on Sharon Stone's plot to kill her husband.

"Not to read into this. But Stone and Bronstein hadn't been married 10 minutes when, out of the blue, he develops a heart problem. And then, with a rebuilt ticker and no note from his cardiologist, she sends him into the cage with a dragon.
The dragon, by the way, is doing fine, not that anyone asked. Lora LaMarca, zoo spokeswoman, described a dragon that seemed to be quite pleased with itself.
Or maybe there's a cosmic force for universal justice, and it says that if you're going to win Sharon Stone as your wife, at some point you're going to be attacked by a 7-foot reptile."

"The defining characteristic of Bronstein's horrible experience is that it is not available to ordinary people. If you or I were to ask the L.A. Zoo if we could cozy up to a dangerous wild animal, we'd be told to get lost. Bronstein, however, was permitted to risk life and limb because the request was made by his famous, beautiful, and rich wife." However, the zoo plans to keep up the tours because they want the $$$. "We need to have behind-the-scenes tours, that's a fact of life," Mollinedo said. "Personally, I wish we could stop them." Not because of the danger, he said, but because they consume so much staff time. But, he adds, "Our zoo needs to be rebuilt. We need the money. Potential donors want to be treated in a special way."

"Sharon and I want to adopt the dragon," Bronstein joked. "It's L.A.," deadpanned the man known around the San Francisco Chronicle as "El Macho." "I was just taking a meeting."
Stone, who helped put a tourniquet to his foot, says: "He was so brave. In the 21st century, a woman doesn't often see her knight send off a real dragon."

While that last comment makes me feel kinda sick, I think I'm liking Phil more and more as I read about this whole thing. He's cracking me up: "Still, Bronstein calls Stone's gift "pretty creative. I just hope Sharon isn't so spooked by this that next year she gets me a tie." His son gave him a stuffed dragon as a present.

Meanwhile, plenty of people are finding this hilarious. "I only wish the person who suggested Mr. Bronstein remove his shoes had advised him to go in naked," Mayor Willie Brown offered, cackling.
"What everyone wants to know is, is it true that he tasted like chicken?" hooted Michael McCourt, who tends bar in the Marina District and who is the brother of Frank and Malachy McCourt, the authors.
"What were the last words Bronstein heard before he stepped into the cage? 'Tom Cruise would do it!' " reported San Francisco Weekly staffer Peter Byrne.
"Geez, I hope the dragon's OK," worried Clint Reilly, the former political consultant who, in 1993, walked into Bronstein's newsroom to complain about one of his reporters and left with a broken ankle. Reilly's injury, which required nine screws and a metal plate to fix, coincidentally put his left foot out of commission.
"Yeah, just talking about it, the steel plate in my leg is bending!" Reilly shivered. "Seriously, I was thinking of donating $10,000 to the L.A. Zoo for the perpetual care and feeding of that dragon. I heard it got food poisoning."
"Obviously what happened to [Bronstein] was a horrifying and terrifying experience," concurred Cindi Berger, Sharon Stone's publicist. Berger, however, was stifling amusement in her next breath. Yes, she confirmed, she'd been the source for that New York gossip item in which Bronstein was said to be mulling a dragon adoption from his Los Angeles hospital bed."

It is, after all, animal story week. Look, woman bites dog!

Wednesday, June 13, 2001
unHip
Wow, this one's cool. I was particularly amused by the Tom Cruise rant, where it says that "lawyers have gone to great lengths to explain that Mr. Cruise "likes and even knows" gay people." Um, yeah, hi, I live in Hollywood and I even know gay people! Who woulda thunk it? They're not totally awful, as long as they're not me!

Wednesday, June 13, 2001
The sequel to Dictator or Sitcom Character...
it's Guess the TV Show or Movie!

Just to continue the perversity of typing my own traits into the previous game and finding out what character it thought I was, I decided to pretend my life was fictional and see what it came out with. Apparently I'm on "A Different World." and as for movie, I came out with "Summer School." It's definitely harder to play it this way.

Wednesday, June 13, 2001
Gay Wedding Etiquette
"Superstition suggests that for good luck the couple should have: Something bold, something flirty, something trashy, something dirty.
It's considered bad luck for either of the grooms to have dated the priest." HAH!