Smartass

goatfucker:  guess which parade i’ll be working at tomorrow

cupcake:  thanksgiving day?

goatfucker:  close

Twinkle Toes

I have in fact signed up for ballroom dancing lessons with a tall bald accordion player. This is going to be a riot.

So Much For the Evils of Modernity

For some reason this story fascinates me. An “idyllic” little island in the South Pacific that has only 47 inhabitants and refuses access to outsiders turns out to be not paradise but a place where girls were commonly raped by the men, including the mayor.

Such disturbing crimes are often attributed to the influences of modern society, from pornography on the Internet to the dissolution of the nuclear family. But on the remote island of Pitcairn, you can’t tune in to a single TV channel, while Internet access is only a recent innovation. And the ties of community are very strong; there are only nine families, sharing four surnames. Everything commonly denounced as corrupting is absent. So why is such a pocket-sized island not Paradise, but an outcrop of Hell?

At a distance, a small community like Pitcairn seems an Eden compared to the dangers of urban life. We feel such a self-reliant place will provide a blueprint for a rosier future. But as this week’s verdicts reveal, isolated communities are neither happier nor healthier places to raise our children. Free from the moderating gaze of outsiders and the rule of impartial law, abuse can continue unchecked.

Call Me Gimpy

I am in pain. Am typing one-handed. No I don’t mean that in a dirty way, I mean RSI is crippling my right hand. My mouse hand. I can’t turn doorknobs. Can’t grip things. Luckily I’m left-handed so I can still write. Maybe I’ll write my posts longhand and scan them from now on. Need a break from the computer.

Voter Registration Shadiness in Somerville

I haven’t received any notifications about where to go vote so I called the Somerville elections office and asked what was up. Apparently I failed to return a little card they sent out a few months ago that asked me to confirm that I was still living in Somerville, so they put me on an “inactive” list and therefore they didn’t send any voting info. Shady! But I am still registered, only I have to show photo ID with my Somerville address on voting day in order to prove that I do in fact still live here. This whole thing feels very suspicious. Did people in other areas get this card sent to them? I’ve never heard of such a thing in all my voting years. But at least I can still vote. Anyone else who hasn’t recieved info about where to vote should call your local government asap.

Go Sox

Guy’s is my favorite account of the Red Sox victory.

sox owner john henry said that not only people in new england have been waiting for this for 86 years but people all over the united states have been waiting for this moment hell people all over the world actually. ignoring the fact that people ‘all over the world’ do really not care about baseball at all.

And there are some here that don’t care about it either.

Wanderlust

Hugh is moving to Paris and is very excited. I wish I was moving to Paris.

Thief Alert

Someone stole three trays of leftover colloquium food from our seminar room while a staff member had turned her back to lock up some cabinets. If you know where this food is or who is the food-bandit, please contact Department authorities. We have a lot of hungry staffers.

Blogger Down?

Is something wrong with Blogger today? I can’t get on Tangerine Torpedo’s blog or Logans Dave. But Seasull loads just fine. What’s with that?

Netflix Attack

Netflix has been averaging a one-day turnaround for me lately. And now they’re lowering their fee. I’m not complaining, of course, but it feels like someone’s trying to stay competitive …

Honestly, even if WalMart dropped its price to $5 a month I wouldn’t switch to those Nazis. They’d probably edit the penis shots out of Sex & Lucia. (A great movie by the way.)

Adaptation

I didn’t know they made a movie of Enduring Love. I loved the book, but apparently the film doesn’t quite work:

“There is almost nothing in the movie that is not about love …. In a novel, or a poem, such concentrated attention would be hard to fault. On film, sadly, it feels as if somebody were sitting on your head.”

via Greencine

Postcript: NYT Interview with Rhys Ifans:

DAVID EDELSTEIN Many people will want to know how you go about playing a guy who’s so repulsive.

RHYS IFANS He’s head over heels in love. He’s not repulsive. I take issue with people who are hard on Jed. He’s the only character in that film who is capable of true love.

Q. The way you stare at Daniel Craig, it looks as if you’re trying to fill yourself up with him.

A. That’s completely what I did. I didn’t want to go the stereotypical stalker route. I’m not in a thriller of any sort; I’m in one of the most beautiful love stories ever told.

Q. You sing him Brian Wilson’s “God Only Knows What I’d Be Without You.” Were there other love songs in your head?

A. Every love song that’s ever been written was running through my head the whole time. I was learning how to flirt again, very schoolboyishly and clumsily. Jed is even filled with joy when Joe is angry at him. He just wants a response, regardless of whether that’s negative or positive. It’s like … like the purity of a child’s love for its mother. It’s not some homosexual obsession. It’s higher. Because he can’t explain this feeling to himself, he can only associate it with divinity because of its size.

I wonder if movie viewers will be able to see it this way. It’s pretty clear in the book that Jed is as much a symbol of purity as insanity, but I don’t know if that will come across in film.

Post-Postscript: Looks like the worst may be true:

Because Joe and Claire have done nothing to merit Jed’s increasingly scary attentions, the plotline makes Enduring Love seem like a stalker picture posing as an arthouse-ready existential wallow (rather like In the Bedroom, which could have been retitled John Cheever’s Death Wish). Enduring Love could have said useful things about the false intimacy conjured by chaos, but it mostly avoids the topic. It also loses interest in the question of how much responsibility Joe bears for his fellow rescuer’s death. The film’s inability to focus hobbles strong lead performances from Ifans (who invests what might have been just another unhinged role with ragged warmth) and from Craig and Morton as supposedly rational people whose love is crushed by fate.

 The fact that the reviewer thinks this film is missing an opportunity to say “useful things about the false intimacy conjured by chaos” indicates that either the reviewer misses the point or the film is totally not in the spirit of the book. It would be obvious to think Jed is experiencing “false intimacy conjured by chaos”, but the book is suggesting the opposite.

MIT Hack

I finally remembered to bring my camera so I could snap this photo. 

I’ve walked past this bike rack outside Walker Memorial (MIT) several times a week for the past couple of years, and this bike carcass had been chained there for at least a year. About a month ago the moss appeared on it.

For more MIT hacks, click here.

Moment of Bitterness

There are several films I’ve seen lately but have no desire to write about them. Lately it feels like watching movies is simply an exercise in consumption, and writing about them then becomes merely a record of my consumption. Whether I loved the film or hated it, write eloquently or haphazardly, it’s all the same, all consumption. Might as well start a food blog.

Someone Please Punch Her

Denise Austin’s motivational spam tip of the day:

“When you can’t avoid the grumps altogether, put on an imaginary “mood mask” to protect yourself. There you go! Don’t you feel better already?”

Home Alone

My oatmeal cookies came out kinda dry. Oatmeal is a difficult cookie to make.

Who’s home tonight? I’m home tonight. Making dry oatmeal cookies and watching a bad movie, Pieces of April. It’s a movie whose intentions I admire, but which just comes out all wrong. I think the biggest problem is the star. Katie Holmes is cute as a button, but can’t emote for the life of her. And she’s just not believable as a SuicideGirl. She looks the part, but just doesn’t have the spirit. They can put all the black eyeliner and black nail polish and black boots on her, but her inner corn-fed sunshine girl shines right through it all. She just can’t do dysfunction.

More Freaky Synchronicity

How’s this for weird: I get an email from someone inviting me to a party for the Red Sox on Sunday, and I don’t recognize the name so I assume they got the email address wrong. But then I notice the directions that the person provided in the body of the email and their address is two doors down from mine. Freaky! So I respond to the email saying I don’t think the invitation was intended for me, but strangely enough, you’re my neighbor! They respond saying how uncanny that is, and say that I should come to the party anyway since I’m a neighbor. So a freak email mistake is causing me to make new friends in my very own neighborhood.

And separately, there has been a car on our street with an alarm that goes off every five minutes for the past two days. It’s almost like someone is pressing the alarm button on their key ring every five minutes compulsively. It’s very irritating. It goes on all night. So when I responded to my new neighbor-friend’s email I also asked them if they had any idea who the jerk is whose alarm keeps going off. I didn’t get a response, but, coincidentally, I never heard the alarm again. Could my new freaky email neighbor friend have been the culprit? Stay tuned.

Strangers Love Me

Today some stranger in his car called out that he loved me as I crossed the crosswalk. Sweet. Almost as sweet as the guy outside the grocery store the other day who looked me over and said, “Hey, Mommy.” The catcallers of Somerville are apparently in need of a li’l affection.

Austin or Seattle?

I think I want to move to Seattle. Where the hell does an alternative newspaper get the money to be handing out a bunch of $5000 “Genius” awards to local artists?

It’s true that we notify the Genius Award winners with cheap chocolate cakes. It’s true that the artists we select are free to spend the money however they choose–on their work, on a trip to Fiji, on a new kitchen floor. And it’s true that, in the pages that follow, we’ve asked them the same questions that Playboy asks its centerfolds. But we take the responsibility of handing out these awards very seriously.

And as a guilt-ridden critic myself, I admire their reasoning for the awards:

It will come as no shock to you to learn that The Stranger has a prickly and–okay, all right–combative relationship with the arts in this town. We are tough on Seattle filmmakers and theater artists and writers and visual artists because we care about Seattle film and theater and writing and visual art, and we want it to be as good as it can be. (We constantly call attention to the good stuff too; sometimes people lose sight of that.) If occasionally it seems like we actually enjoy tearing apart book festivals and glass art and shows by Sharon Ott, well, the Genius Awards give us a chance to reverse that critical energy. For one week a year, we devote ourselves to unreservedly celebrating the emerging and established artists, writers, and filmmakers who make this damn town worth living in.

Pardon My Ignorance

I am not a native Bostonian nor a baseball fan, so this is a question from an amused outsider. The story of the Red Sox win is truly a heartwarming and dramatic and breathtaking one. But my question is this, and it is perhaps a naive one: How does a sports team, which is a collective made up of many many many moving parts, get defined with a certain personality? How can the Sox be considered the ugly duckling etc., when what makes up the Sox–or any team–is constantly changing? Is it the management? Few if any of the players are actually from Boston, and the players are often changed, traded, etc., plus no player plays forever, so how can one team made up of people from all over the world be given a certain personality? For 80-some years? I don’t really understand it. Some say things like “The Sox are at their best when their back is to the wall,” or that they “are so good at digging holes for themselves.” The facts are the facts, of course–their record is what it is–but I don’t really see how a constantly moving target comes to have such definition. If the Sox were a single person, it could make sense. But a team of highly-paid highly-trained professionals who are brought to one location to play a game? I don’t get it. Perhaps this is why the curse legend thrives. If it can’t be blamed on any stable target, maybe it’s supernatural.

It seems the only constant is the fans, and their long and stressful ride to this point. A fan base can have a personality, definitely. They all have ties to a certain location, they all have the same shared pain and disappointment they’ve been carrying for years, and now they all have the same relief and jubilation.

But a team?

She’s Amazing

Lovely, lovely Kitty Bukkake. New addition to the blogroll.