I am beside myself!

So we have a lot of empty wallspace in our apartment, and today I was looking through allposters.com's treasure trove of Disney art, and I had several ideas for filling in the walls. I would like to buy three similarly-themed art prints, frame them, and hang them in a row somewhere. First! The villains!
Or
Allison suggested Scar when I couldn't find a print of Jafar, and I would agree with her, except Simba is ruining this print for me. And while Snow White's Wicked Queen has the worst motive of any Disney villain ever (she's jealous that her step-daughter is hotter than her--and that's it), she looks pretty effing evil in that picture. So I like it.

Next! The lovers!
Who doesn't love that shared spaghetti strand moment in Lady and the Tramp? Aw.

Third! These have no theme connecting them, but I really like them anyway!

I especially like the Sorcerer's Apprentice print, as that is my favorite incarnation of Mickey Mouse of all time.

And then this is not a print--it is a full-sized poster, and it costs twenty dollars, but I really like it. I was totally into Mickey and Minnie Mouse when I was a very little child.
What do you think, internet?

Day old blues

Man, the more I hear that song "Use Somebody," the more it bothers me. I mean, I didn't even know until, like, a month ago that that song was from Kings of Leon. I thought it was some whiny bastards who wanted to be The Fray.

Stop. Let's wrap our minds around this. I thought Kings of Leon were the poor man's The Fray for almost the entire summer.

WHAT?

I saw them live one time, and they were opening for Ben Kweller at Axis (fuckin' Axis), and like most of the cool music I like, they were given to me by Jess Bannon, and we were in college at the time, neither of us with cars, and we still found our way to Boston to see Kings of Leon and Ben Kweller, and I remember Ben Kweller seemed to think they were the coolest band ever, and he played a cover of "Molly's Chambers" in his own set, and damn, that was an excellent show.

And now they are the poor man's The Fray. And I am sad.

Therapy

Right now, I'm in the middle of rereading all the Madeleine L'Engle novels I own, which is almost all of them, I think, and I am having such trouble getting through A House Like a Lotus.

I haven't reread it since before I came to the full realization that I was a giant dyke, and it might be because of the thing that happens to Polly at the end of the book (but toward the beginning of the chronology of the story).

I was almost going to go into a long explanation, but let's just cut to the chase. Basically, Polly gets sexually assaulted by her mentor, a wealthy, sophisticated lesbian named Max. Now, Max is painfully dying of cancer (or some other wasting disease--I forget, and I can't bring myself to look it up right now), and she's out of her mind with pain when she attacks Polly, and Polly escapes into the arms of Max's partner, Ursula, but still. The predatory lesbian thing. It just...

I feel like Madeleine L'Engle has betrayed me. When I read the book for the very first time, I was too young and naive to even really grasp what Max had done. By the time I did, I wasn't really out to myself, and now...

I don't want to read my literary idol, my never-fail source of comfort, telling a story of the predatory lesbian, no matter what Max's excuse for her behavior might be. It hurts it hurts it hurts.

This all may seem melodramatic to you, but Madeleine L'Engle has had an enormous influence on me as a human being, and books in general can affect me much more deeply than anything else in the world can, and I just can't bear this kind of story coming from her--when she has no other positive homosexual stories to balance it out.

I almost feel like Polly does, unable to stand the thought of Max, even though she's brought so much good into her life and meant so much to her.

It hurts it hurts it hurts.

Long one

Days ago, I said something about following up with my thoughts on Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and I have finally found the motivation to do it. Spoilers abound, because there was a lot of shit from the book left out.

First, let's talk about how I like it when they leave shit from the book out. For example, that whole thing with Tonks and Lupin is so gross, and Tonks spends the book being so pathetic, and ugh. They're still in the movie; they're together in the movie--I imagine because they're two of the three big deaths at the end--but it's not gross. And it's not a bleeding waste of time.

The only important bit of information we pick up from this whole werewolf romance shit is that a person's Patronus can change its shape. This becomes important in relation to Snape some hundreds of pages into the last book. I don't know if they'll, like, make that explicit in the movie, but the shape of Snape's Patronus is the reason Dumbledore trusted him.

As much as I lament the lack of older Weasley brothers in the movies, it is a relief that the whole weirdness with adding Fleur to the family is dropped completely. So is Percy's feud with the family--he was in the last movie, with the Minister, but no one ever talks about it. That's fine by me.

The Ministry of Magic is completely absent from the movie, which I found to be odd, if only because it becomes very important in the next book who is controlling the Ministry. I guess we don't really need to worry about that until the Ministry is in the hands of the Death Eaters, but still, there's this whole back and forth with the Ministry and Harry--now that they believe him, they want him to be their poster boy, and Harry's like, "Fuck you, dillweeds."

The trouble with making these books into movies is that there is so much information packed into the books, readers expect to see at least most of it presented in the movie. We learn so much about Tom Riddle in the book that is nowhere in the movie. What infuriated me most about the movie was its treatment of horcruxes. We get the explanation of what they are from Slughorn's memory, finally, and then Harry's like, "Ack! They could be anything!"

And Dumbledore actually says, "They could be common household objects," or something close to that, and I was like, "No! That was the whole point of your 'lessons' with Harry! To understand the way Voldemort thinks--to know that he would use trophies as horcruxes! Something from each of the Hogwarts founders, for example!" Blarg.

The way the movie ends, Harry has no idea where to find another horcrux. The way the book ends, he knows he is after Voldemort's snake, Helga Hufflepuff's goblet, and something owned by Rowena Ravenclaw or possibly Godric Gryffindor. The diary and the Peverell family crest ring have been destroyed, and Salazar Slytherin's locket is missing, possibly destroyed already. Three known horcruxes/three guessed horcruxes.

One thing I noticed in re-reading the book (spoiler!) is that Harry actually runs into Ravenclaw's diadem when he's hiding the Prince's book in the Room of Requirement. He puts a tiara on a bust of someone near his hiding spot so he can find it again. If only he'd known what it was, eh?

Anyway. One of the things I never really understand is why, when a movie leaves so much of a book out, it finds time to add things in. There is this truly bizarre scene in the middle of the movie where Bellatrix Lestrange just apparates right up to the Burrow, with two other Death Eaters, and sets it on fire. Like, what? The best I can come up with is that it was the movie's way of showing us how deep we are in the shit at this point. Throughout the book, we get news of Hogwarts students' family members being killed, and all the Ministry stuff and the emptiness of Diagon Alley and all that are a pretty good indication, but the movie uses the destruction of the Burrow, I think, to show us that no one is safe anymore. Nothing will ever be the same now.

Something else I find weird is how Lavender and Parvati have only shown up in the movies in relation to the boys. Parvati and Padma have to be in the fourth movie, because they're Ron and Harry's dates to the Yule Ball, and Parvati gets to face the boggart in the third movie, and Neville tell the boys he heard Parvati saying Hermione was bawling in the ladies' in the first movie, but we never even hear of Lavender until this movie, where she must appear because Ron starts going with her and making Hermione jealous. But now Parvati's missing. The books treat them as a pair, basically, so it feels lacking to have one without the other. At one point in the book, Harry and Parvati even briefly--and mostly non-verbally--commiserate over the madness their best friends are entangled in, which I thought was a nice touch.

Now I'm just over-nit-picking, so I guess I'll call it a day. On the whole, I enjoyed this movie a lot, but there's always so much trouble when you try to squash a giant book into 2 and a half hours. That's why I feel like the Narnia movies are such successful adapations--they took something small and expanded it into something wondrous. Anyway. When's the first part of the final installment come out, again?

Selfish post

There are a number of internet t-shirts I want, like, right now. But I cannot buy them.

from Threadless
from Glarkware
Anyone rich? I take guys size large.

I've been updating

Only I've been doing it here.

I think blogspot and I are breaking up.

Justice Moreno gets it

Justice Carlos Moreno was the only member of the Supreme Court of California to stand up for us, and this is the best part of his dissenting opinion:

"There is no 'underlying' principle more basic to our Constitution than that the equal protection clause protects the fundamental rights of minorities from the will of the majority."

That does not apply only to the Constitution of the State of California, either. This is why we have constitutions; this is why we have a representative republic, not a pure democracy, because sometimes the majority will get carried away, and the minority needs someone to protect its rights.

Thank you, Justice Moreno, for understanding that.

Eh, I almost deleted this

Do you know what I was thinking about earlier? Snow White and how the Wicked Queen had the worst motivation ever. She was jealous of her step-daughter's physical beauty, so she tried to kill her. What?

Cinderella's step-mother wanted her dead husband's money. Maleficent had some grudge against the king. Ursula wanted to rule Atlantica.

The Wicked Queen didn't want anyone to be prettier than her. WHAT THE FUCK?

Thus concludes this issue of bitching about things I love*.

*I hate Snow White, though. But I love Disney.

Another installment of Emily hates religion

I still can't reconcile my unabashed adoration for everything Madeleine L'Engle has ever written with my utter disdain for religion, especially Christianity. I think especially Christianity because it's the major world religion with which I'm most familiar, but also because it centers on some dude coming back from the dead. And also because it insists that it is the one true religion, which is a characteristic it shares with Islam, I believe. Judaism is the only one of those three not interested in converting anyone, and that is why I love the Jews the best. Even though plenty of Jews can be just as retarded about things like homosexuality and feminism as Christians and Muslims, at least they're not trying to make the whole world Jewish.

Why I love Futurama

Recruitment officer: Sign here on the dotted line, patriots, and I'll give you your discount cards.
Fry: Just outta curiosity, we can use the cards to buy gum, then immediately quit the army, right?
Bender: You know, playin' you all for chumps?
Recruitment officer: Correct. There's no obligation.
[Fry and Bender sign.]
Recruitment officer: Unless, of course, war were declared.
[Siren]
Fry: What's that?
Recruitment officer: War were declared.If that didn't make you laugh like a donkey, I'm just gonna tell myself it's because you haven't seen it.

Weekly mix tape 16

I haven't done one of these in many weeks, so I thought I would showcase my playlist-creating brilliance here. Also, I make digital copies of these things for cute girls or people who ask nicely. (Let me pretend anyone still reads this, dammit.)

1. That's How You Know - Amy Adams
2. Never Had Nobody Like You - M. Ward with Zooey Deschanel
3. Mahna Mahna - Cake
4. Modern Girls & Old Fashion Men - The Strokes & Regina Spektor
5. And Your Bird Can Sing - The Beatles
6. People Got a Lotta Nerve - Neko Case
7. Wantin' Her Again - Ben Kweller
8. My Name Is Jonas - Weezer
9. Taper Jean Girl - Kings of Leon
10. On a Plain - Nirvana
11. Creep - Radiohead
12. We Get On - Kate Nash
13. Add It Up - Guster
14. Paper Bag - Fiona Apple
15. Vibrate - Rufus Wainwright
16. Fuck Was I - Jenny Owen Youngs
17. If There Was No You - Brandi Carlile
18. I Am Trying to Break Your Heart - Wilco
19. Turn to Stone - Ingrid Michaelson
20. Maps - Yeah Yeah Yeahs
21. Explain It to Me - Liz Phair

"Gayer than a plaid rabbit"

So the first time I read Wicked, I was all "OMG, Glinda is totally gay for Elphaba," but I was pretty sure I was just projecting. I project gaiety everywhere. But then I read Wicked again.

And OMG, you guys, Glinda is totally gay for Elphaba. I don't know how I didn't register this fully the first time I read it, but check this:

The Witch in fact alarmed her a little. It was not just the novelty of seeing her again, but the strange charisma Elphaba possessed, which had always put Glinda in the shade. Also there was the thrill, basis indeterminable, which made Glinda shy, and caused her to rush her words, and to speak in a false high voice like an adolescent.

If that is not how one behaves around a girl one likes, then what the fuck else is it? Now this passage is from toward the end of the book, when the Wicked Witch of the West and the Good Witch of the North meet again after the Wicked Witch of the East has been squashed. Apparently, Glinda has always behaved like a doofus around Elphaba, but I hardly recall such a thing. Oh well.

I can't really tell Elphaba's feelings--she's obviously fond of Glinda--but I'm pretty sure the only person she had romantic feelings for was Fiyero. Unless this means what I was projecting it to mean:

[Glinda] could scarcely dredge up an ounce of recollection about that daring meeting with the Wizard. She could recall far more clearly how she and Elphie had shared a bed on the way to the Emerald City. How brave that had made her feel, and how vulnerable too.

Here, again, it's obvious Glinda has a massive crush on Elphaba, but does "shared a bed" have the euphemistic meaning? The only thing that makes me think so is that last part: "How brave that had made her feel, and how vulnerable too."

Oh, and then there was this one thing Nanny says to Elphaba later, "You were devoted to Glinda, you were. Everyone knew it." That's a little gay. No?

There's a lot of explicit gayness in the Wicked books, but it's almost exclusively dude-on-dude. Elphaba's pops, Crope and Tibbett, Liir. Glinda has that unrequited thing for Elphaba that she can barely even understand, and I really couldn't pick out any other lesbianish thing. And you know I'd be able to pick out all the lesbianish things.

That makes me sad.

While I'm here, my favorite thing Glinda ever did was speak to the Wizard for Elphaba, when she was all paralyzed in front of him. And then Elphaba deserted her, and I was sad. Again.

Live Free or Die

"House Republicans said the Senate version had important flaws. ... They said it will lead to lawsuits against non-clergy -- those with strong religious beliefs that prevent them from participating in any phase of a gay marriage, such as catering or photography.

Rep. Peter Bolster, R-Alton, said, 'This does not protect the Christian conference center, the church with a social hall, or its individual members who run limousine or photographic services who may conscientiously object to participating in a same-sex marriage.'" --from the Union Leader

That is the dumbest god damn thing I've ever heard. Any self-respecting gay couple would not engage the services of someone who was so opposed to their having equal rights. A caterer isn't obligated to serve anyone's damn wedding, for whatever reason he or she likes. Homophobia is a nasty reason, but hey. It's a free country. Right?

I mean, really. I would find a gay-friendly caterer. Or a gay caterer. Come on. There are plenty of actual gay people working in the industries that serve weddings. Even in barely-civilized New Hampshire! No one is going to make anyone take part in a gay wedding.

I can't take this anymore. My heart is going to explode from frustration, hope, and disappointment.

I've decided. Ella es la mujer más hermosa en el mundo.

There was this part in Grey's last night that I can't stop watching. And it's not even the part with Sara Ramirez covered only by a bed sheet. It's this brief part at the wedding, in the montage of guests while Alex and Izzie make out at the altar (like, seriously, making out), when Baskin Robbins bumps Callie's shoulder and smiles at her, and then Callie leans over and kisses her cheek. It is adorable. And has finally converted me on Baskin Robbins.
Look, I loved Erica Hahn probably more than any lesbian who watched primetime ABC television, and Brooke Smith and Sara Ramirez were so hot together, but their story was a fucking disaster. Callie made the first move and then spent every episode after that freaking out and being weird and dicking around until the very end when she would finally tell Erica what her damn deal was, and then Erica would fix it. Because she is awesome. I had hopes that Callie would eventually get past the awkward part, and she and Hahn would be able to be cute like she and Baskin Robbins get to be, and from that interview with Shonda Rhimes from AfterEllen, I'm pretty sure the whole storyline with Callie's crazy dad was conceived with Hahn in mind as Callie's partner, so I swear they just subsituted (an allegedly) prettier, (inarguably) younger actress for Brooke Smith, and that's why I was mad.

But I can't hang onto principles when Sara Ramirez is kissing pretty ladies and getting naked on the tv. I just can't.Okay, but now I need to talk about this. I get that Callie is upset because she has no money to go on nice dates with her girlfriend, but hello, why didn't she fucking tell her girlfriend before being dragged out to apparently the most expensive place in Seattle? They're dating. Baskin Robbins is sweet. She will understand. Which she did. She understood. And I know Callie's proud; she doesn't want to cry about her money problems, but Jesus. Be smarter than going to out to a fancy place just because your girlfriend wants to when you can't pay. No one who matters is going to think any less of you.

Especially because Baskin Robbins is, like, the reason you have no money. I know it's her father's fault, but he never would have cut her off if she hadn't started dating a lady. And Callie could have easily said fuck this and chosen her family and her money over this girl. She didn't. And Arizona already knew that! So why did she even take Callie out to a fancy restaurant in the first place? She was there when Callie told Cristina she couldn't afford the rent!

And what is Callie's issue with communicating? She can't do it unless she comes face to face with losing the girl. She played that game with Hahn, like, eleventy times.

Also, also, as far as we know, Cristina is not an heiress. She's even a few years behind Callie in her surgical residency. How can she afford half their rent, but Callie can't? Hmm?

This fucking show. It wasn't just because of Brooke Smith that I stopped watching...

Oh the things that set me off

Last night I was watching Veronica Mars with Allison, and some rando on there said, "Frak!" and then had to explain to Veronica and whomever else that frak is from Battlestar Galactica and is "the swear of the future," and I got all het up and said, "Actually, it's the swear of the past!" foamed at the mouth, and fell into the hole between my bed and the wall. As I disobeyed Allison's advice not to get mad.

I am still mad. So mad I haven't even illegally downloaded Caprica, because Netflix says there's a very long wait for it. Eff you, Caprica, with your creepy Eric Stoltz.

ETA: I'm so glad I didn't let Ryan ruin Veronica Mars for me. He tried, but by that point in our relationship, I was really good at only pretending to listen to him.

She didn't shudder at my paw

In honor of my trip to Disney World on Saturday, I have compiled a playlist of all the Disney songs in my iTunes library. I have called it "Disney Explosion!" and I am posting it here just in case any of you had any lingering feelings that I might be considered, as the kids say, "cool."

Disney Explosion!
1. Belle
2. Belle (Reprise)
3. Gaston
4. Gaston (Reprise)
5. Be Our Guest
6. Something There
7. The Mob Song
8. Beauty and the Beast
9. Circle of Life
10. I Just Can't Wait to Be King
11. Be Prepared
12. Hakuna Matata
13. Can You Feel the Love Tonight
14. Cruella de Vil
15. Arabian Nights
16. One Jump Ahead
17. Friend Like Me
18. Prince Ali
19. A Whole New World
20. Prince Ali (Reprise)
21. Yo Ho! (A Pirate's Life for Me)
22. Long Ago... (Hercules intro)
23. The Gospel Truth I/Main Titles
24. The Gospel Truth II
25. The Gospel Truth III
26. Go the Distance
27. Go the Distance (reprise)
28. One Last Hope
29. Zero to Hero
30. I Won't Say (I'm in Love)
31. A Star Is Born
32. He's a Tramp
33. Sister Suffragette
34. The Life I Lead
35. The Perfect Nanny
36. A Spoonful of Sugar
37. Pavement Artist
38. Jolly Holiday
39. Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious
40. Stay Awake
41. I Love to Laugh
42. A British Bank (The Life I Lead)
43. Feed the Birds (Tuppence a Bag)
44. Fidelity Fiduciary Bank
45. Chim Chim Cher-ee
46. Step in Time
47. A Man Has Dreams
48. Let's Go Fly a Kite
49. Honor to Us All
50. Reflection
51. I'll Make a Man Out of You
52. A Girl Worth Fighting For
53. Prologue
54. Carrying the Banner
55. Santa Fe
56. The World Will Know
57. Seize the Day
58. King of New York
59. High Times, Hard Times
60. Seize the Day (Chorale)
61. Santa Fe (Reprise)
62. Once and for All
63. The World Will Know (Reprise)
64. Carrying the Banner (Finale)
65. I'll Try
66. Fathoms Below
67. Daughters of Triton
68. Part of Your World
69. Under the Sea
70. Part of Your World (Reprise)
71. Poor Unfortunate Souls
72. Les Poissons
73. Kiss the Girl
74. This Is Halloween
75. Jack's Lament
76. What's This?
77. Town Meeting Song
78. Jack's Obsession
79. Kidnap the Sandy Claws
80. Making Christmas
81. Oogie Boogie's Song
82. Sally's Song
83. Poor Jack
84. Finale/Reprise
85. When She Loved Me
86. The Bells of Notre Dame
87. Out There
88. Topsy Turvy
89. God Help the Outcasts
90. Heaven's Light/Hellfire
91. A Guy Like You
92. The Court of Miracles
93. The Belles of Notre Dame (Reprise)
94. Once Upon a Dream

1-8 from Beauty and the Beast, 9-13 from The Lion King, 14 from 101 Dalmatians, 15-20 from Aladdin, 21 from Disneyland's Pirates of the Caribbean ride, 22-31 from Hercules, 32 from Lady and the Tramp, 33-48 from Mary Poppins, 49-52 from Mulan, 53-64 from Newsies, 65 from Return to Neverland, 66-73 from The Little Mermaid, 74-84 from The Nightmare Before Christmas, 85 from Toy Story 2, 86-93 from The Hunchback of Notre Dame, 94 from Sleeping Beauty

Just in case you haven't seen this

I love this even more than Prop 8: The Musical. Thanks for being so ridiculous, NOM!

I know I've already said this before

For some reason, the line "O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?" is, like, the most famous line from Romeo and Juliet. I guess cuz it's from the balcony scene, and that's the most famous scene? And I'm sure we're all familiar with various modern allusions to it, in which people always seem to be looking for someone when they say that. But let me show you something. The line is:

O Romeo, Romeo! Wherefore art thou Romeo?

NOT

O Romeo, Romeo! Wherefore art thou, Romeo?

Do you see what I did there? Fucking everyone, when they say "wherefore art thou," uses it as a direct address. But it's not. Juliet is bemoaning the fact that she and Romeo are children of feuding houses--"wherefore art thou Romeo" means, "Why the fuck is your name Romeo Montague, you unfortunate son of a bitch? If it weren't we could be together!" Roughly.

Yes, he's spying on her while she says this, but she's not looking for him. She's moping. Here's the whole thing she says:

O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?
Deny thy father and refuse thy name!
Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love
and I'll no longer be a Capulet.

She might as well be saying, "Wherefore am I Juliet?" But that's not very poetic, is it?

Even aside from all of this, I just don't understand how you would see this word, wherefore, and just assume it's, what, like some archaic version of where. Use your brains.

Shortest fuse

My 10 favorite Kelly Clarkson songs:
10. Beautiful Disaster
9. Long Shot
8. I Do Not Hook Up
7. Don't Waste Your Time
6. Maybe
5. Be Still
4. Chivas
3. Since U Been Gone
2. I Want You
1. Addicted

My favorite song she's ever sung, ever, though? The minute and a half of "Stuff Like That There" on her season of Idol. Still gives me shivers.

I don't even watch Idol anymore, but I read the Television Without Pity recaps, because Jacob Clifton writes them, and I think he is a recapping genius. The first thing I read of his was a Mondo Extra recap of the disastrous movie version of A Wrinkle in Time, and I've been in love ever since. So I am aware of what's going down on Idol, but actually dealing with it, with Ryan and Paula and the guy with the dead wife and the blind kid? I don't have the energy.

However, I do occasionally think about how fucking huge the show has gotten compared to the ghetto-tastic first season, where they auditioned for the top ten with only one plinky piano to back them up, and where they only had live musicians for the top six performance show. And I daydream sometimes about what it would have been like to hear and watch Kelly and, like, Tamyra Gray interact with a live band. I mean, the big band episode was the pinnacle of that season, and for the rest of the episodes, the contestants had to sing with canned music and backup vocals, which was the fucking worst.

Around season three, people started saying, "No fucking way Kelly Clarkson would have even made the top 36 this year," which infuriated me, because Kelly Clarkson is the best contestant the show has ever had and certainly the most successful winner, but now I wonder if those idiots may have been right, because she barely made the top 30 in her own season, when far fewer people even auditioned, because the judges were too dumb to pick up on her talent until America noticed her for them. Good work, America.

I don't know, I think the show has tried to get more interesting after the disaster that was Taylor Hicks, ostensibly giving the contestants more creative control over the songs they perform, but I just haven't seen anyone with Kelly Clarkson's talent, showmanship, and broad appeal. Which is really what this dumb show is about--broad appeal.

Also, I actually watched an episode on Tuesday, and it was awful. The judges are even worse than I remember--even Simon was not impressing me. Paula was a fuckin' hot mess, but not even in the fun way anymore. I mean, I like knowing what's going on, but I just cannot watch this disasterpiece theater. Give me some more stuff like that there.

I guess since it's April Fools, I should have written a post not about books

For a long, long, looooooong time I was of the opinion that a movie could never, ever get a book right. Every time I watched a movie based on a book, I would simply be disappointed. This is largely true: movies always seem to leave out or change parts of the book I enjoy. It's just inevitable, because movies are limited in what they can present. I mean, you try to base a movie on a 1,000 page book, and you get four hours of Vivien Leigh being INTOLERABLE. You know? Sometimes you just gotta cut some stuff.

So I grew up a little and realized that the movie had to find its own way to tell the story of its source novel, and I began to see that some of them can do a good job, even changing things from the source. The Little Women with Winona Ryder is probably the best example of this; there are plenty of things that are different in the movie, but the movie still captures the story, the family bonds, everything. And so I love it. Plus, Winona Ryder is hot when she cuts off all her hair for money for her mother.

Lately, I've started to enjoy some movies better than the books upon which they were based, but this was only because I did not enjoy the books upon which they were based. The Pride and Prejudice with Keira Knightley, which purists hate, totally slayed me, because it was so fun. Like, the movie demonstrated what I did not get from the book at all, that these five girls were a family who loved each other, who laughed and teased and shared secrets and acted like a modern bunch of sisters might. I liked that a lot, how the movie showed you the affection between the Bennetts and the goofiness of Mr. Bingley, presenting these upper class characters from two hundred years ago as people we could know. These period dramas always present characters as, like, so far removed from the way modern people behave, and that is just not accurate at all. People may have had to put on more ridiculous airs in previous time periods, but everyone has always teased their sisters or gotten nervous around pretty girls, no matter how many undergarments they're forced to wear.

And Jane Austen's writing just did not convey that any of these people really liked each other. That made me sad. Don't tell me I was reading it wrong, either. I know how to read a book, motherfuckers.

Anyway, just a few days ago, I realized that this is why I really liked the Narnia movies: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Prince Caspian showed the Pevensies as a real family, siblings who fight and tease and love each other. That was largely absent in the novels, which were mostly about the plot. I guess you just have to take it on faith that the Pevensies are fond of each other in the books--I mean, there are a few scenes, of course, where you see how close Peter and Lucy are, for instance, but it's just not enough. Mostly, they feel like strangers thrown together on an adventure. In the movies, the kids got to be playful, to act like real kids, and the best part, for me, was that Susan was included. Susan feels much more like part of the family in the movies than she ever did in the books. Even Edmund, who full on betrays them in the first story, gets to belong to the family more fully than Susan.

So, you know, if The Last Battle actually gets made, and the director wants to let Susan into heaven? Totally fine with me.

Cranky

Instead of Hera being, like, I don't know, the first us, she should have been the symbol of learning to live with the robots, instead of depending on them and growing complacent and having it all blow up in our faces. That way, when they start over again on the place where humanity first frakked up big time, all this will not happen again.

Having the Fleet populate this planet is still the dumbest god damn thing I've ever heard.

Hate
Hate
HATE.

I'd have joined your mutiny, Felix, if I'd known this is what it was coming to.

Frak Earth

I could frakkin' let loose about my extreme disappointment with the finale of Battlestar Galactica, but I really want to just say this:

From the beginning, I'd been hoping and hoping and hoping that this wouldn't be how it ended. That they wouldn't find our Earth and basically be the first humans there. Because that is the dumbest god damn thing I've ever heard. When they got to Earth at the end of the first half of the last season, and it was all bombed out, I was like, "Oh! Yay!" But then they were like, "All these remains are Cylons," and I was like, "Whuh? That's not Earth, then, huh?"

And then they ended up here, on Africa, and they just... Ugh! Aside from being cheesy and stupid, it doesn't make any anthropological sense, but I don't even know enough about anthropology to tell you why, so I'll just skip that.

What I wanted to happen, ever since we found out Earth wasn't this planet we're living on, was that they would eventually find this ball of rock, and they would find the ruins of humanity's first try at civilization. And it would be enough thousands of years for the planet to be recovering from whatever kind of bombs and crap would have destroyed humanity in the first place. They could find humanity's real origins, not some place called Kobol where the Earthlings would have gone to start over and forget the disaster of Earth ever happened.

Instead they landed here before anything got going, and the whole series turned into a warning for us, the latest modern incarnation of humanity, not to frak too much with technology, because the robots will turn on you and blow your entire world to pieces.

In retrospect, "All this has happened before, and all this will happen again," is fucking depressing. I mean, it has been demonstrated that humanity is slow to learn from its mistakes, but the way the fleet decided to settle on Earth meant that they didn't even want to try. Because, you know, we modern-day Earthlings are entirely unaware of this civilization that went before us, so everything those 38,000 people may have learned was lost--literally hurled into the frakking sun.

And then there's all the things that came from this Earth that have appeared throughout the series. We'll ignore the most obvious, "All Along the Watchtower," and the Greek gods and the zodiac for now. What I want to talk about is the words--the words that Baltar and Roslin and Sam used that came from English writers. Baltar and Roslin both quoted Shakespeare. When Sam was all brain-broken, he babbled words from Milton, from Paradise Lost. Now. The way I was hoping things had happened, that literature had made it from Earth to Kobol to the Colonies, maybe in tattered form and not well-documented or something, but still, it had been written before, and it had been able to last through the years, because it was that pervasive throughout human civilization. Shakespeare, especially, has that gift.

But the way it seems to have happened now, after the finale, is that artists are just being divinely inspired to say the same things over and over again. Sam, Kara's dad, and Bob Dylan all wrote the same song. Sam and John Milton have the same exact words to say about existence and God and whatever.

The Shakespeare stuff, I guess I could overlook, because he is so pervasive it might be the writers didn't even realize they were quoting, but "shuffle off this mortal coil"? That just occurred to Gaius Baltar the way it occurred to William Shakespeare?

You know me. I think divine inspiration is absolute bullshit. So this is what bugs more than anything else. That there's no explanation for why Sam knows the words to Paradise Lost or why Laura Roslin would use the specific phrase "pound of flesh" in some kind of political situation. Damn, I can't remember why she used that--it was way back in the first season, I think--but I jumped on it right away as being the entire point of the play The Merchant of Venice. And since Roslin was using it metaphorically--you know, no one was asking for a literal pound of flesh, like in the play--where did she get it from???

Argh. I don't even care anymore about the lame thing they did with Starbuck: angel, demon, messiah, whatever the fuck. The language thing is such an issue. Like, the fleet arrived before homo sapiens sapiens even developed, because the people on the planet didn't even have language, and all the foreign humans spoke the same language, and yet, all these bazillions of different languages developed? And went through various stages of development? I'm sure no one on the staff thought about that, but oh my god, it is bugging the shit out of me.

And then the Greek gods, who have the same names as the Lords of Kobol. Did the Geminese (they were the fanatic planet, right?) end up in the Mediterranean and immediately establish their religion? I don't understand. It makes so much more sense to me if the humans who got to Kobol set up a new religion, a new civilization with the alleged best pieces of all the old ones from Earth, and over the years the story of how civilization on Kobol all started got lost, because I don't know, maybe it's because of the limited scope of the story, but it seems to me that all the people from the colonies speak the exact same language and have the exact same history/religion, and each colony has a variant take on aspects of this culture, but they have the same core. That seems to me more like what would happen after humanity's first collapse--they'd rebuild with bits and pieces of what they knew before. But here, on this Earth, a whole bunch of different cultures and religions and histories and languages developed, basically independently of each other. They all share certain similarities, certain myth patterns, because there are certainly shared aspects of humanity, but they're not similar enough to have the same core story as their base.

It was the easy way to go: to have the Kobol as the birthplace of humanity story be literal and to have the fleet be the first human inhabitants of Earth. They should have turned that story around, explored what Kobol meant, but I guess they didn't want to do another season, so they came up with this predictable-ass ending. Science fiction television has been doing this preachy "don't fuck with robots" ending over and over and over again. And that was what I liked most about Battlestar Galactica: it went beyond standard sci-fi tropes, like Ray Bradbury can do, like I thought the first season of Roswell did, and it was about the people, not about some message. But it ended up in a cliche sci-fi place: technology is fucking dangerous. The end. I mean, that was the actual end: fake Six and Baltar arguing about whether or not humanity would repeat its doomed relationship with technology.

And so I hated it. Hated it, hated it, hated it.

Tempering my crazy

Kelly Clarkson songs I can't stand:
"Breakaway"
"Because of You"
"If No One Will Listen"

And "A Moment Like This" and "Before Your Love," of course, but those weren't her fault. I almost hate "Miss Independent," but she loves performing it live, and that has saved it.

There. I am that objective when it comes to Kelly Clarkson. Ahem.

Hard-hitting interviews on Entertainment Tonight

"Just because I'm single and don't date a lot, that doesn't make me a lesbian."

Well, duh, Kelly. That's not what makes you a lesbian.

Teenage music critic

Ohhh, tater tots, let's talk about Kelly Clarkson's new album. Obviously, it's been leaked for at least a week (I am always the last person to find out about that), but I am dumb and always wait for the official release date. Basically so I can put the music on my iPod without even thinking about it. But anyway, Kelly!
My theory is that this will appease the people who thought My December sucked, as it's more of a return to "Since U Been Gone" form, which is what everyone's been saying, I know, but it's true. Not to say that this album is in any way Breakaway, redux (it's much better), but it's much more in that vein than My December for sure. As for me, I'm taking the sure-to-be unpopular stance and declaring it not as good as My December. Nevertheless, I already love it fiercely.

I've already been obsessed with "My Life Would Suck Without You" and how adorable she looks in the video, so we'll skip that, and I'll just talk about some standouts.

First! "I Do Not Hook Up" is fun, but it sounds like a song I've already heard, and of course I can't fucking figure out what song or even when I might have heard it (recently? in elementary school? who knows). Also, there's this line: "I fall deeply," which, um, I heard as "I fuck deeply" while I was brushing my teeth this morning, and oh. It made me laugh and laugh and laugh.

2. "Already Gone" severely bummed me out, but I think it's my favorite song, which is odd, because I hate things that make me sad. Also, being laid low by a pop song? Embarrassing. If it weren't Kelly, though, with that voice, I'd never listen to it again.

C. "Whyyawannabringmedown" is my other favorite, because it's all...wail-y and stuff. And she reminded me of Tia Carrere wailing "Ballroom Blitz" in Wayne's World so forcefully that I loved it before I'd even heard the whole thing. Like, seriously. I'm sure no one else will draw this parallel (and if anyone does, I'll ask her to marry me), but it made me so happy. Also, it features the line "I'm not your love monkey," which makes me laugh every time. I love songs that are silly by accident.

IV. The other song I love is "I Want You," which is kind of a '60s doo-wop thing that seems to be popular these days, and it kind of comes across as taking advantage of that trend, because the rest of the album is pretty pop-rockish, but I don't care. It's adorable.

Anyway, the album is nothing less than I expected, but I was trying to think if I'd like any of these songs if Kelly weren't singing them. I really don't know, maybe "My Life Would Suck Without You" and "Whyyawannabringmedown" (except the wailing is crucial to that one, and so few bitches out there can really wail), but I do know this: Kelly's voice is what makes them worth listening to for me, and it's why I will pre-order every album she releases. Even if she actually does dive off the deep-end and put out a country album. Erp.

The girliest thing about me is my enjoyment of Bath & Body Works products

I went back to Bath & Body Works last Friday because I wanted to buy a candle, and the White Barn candles they sell are the best candles around, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that they updated the candles, so they sell all the signature Bath & Body Works smells as small, medium, and large candles instead of in just one frosted glass, medium-ish sized jar. So I bought the coconut lime verbena one, because that is far and away the best Bath & Body Works smell, but this is not really the point of the story.
The point of the story is that the theme of the month was apparently promoting the different families of smells, which were "the sexys," "the romantics," "the freshes," and "the cuddlers." Hilarious names, first of all. Second, moonlight path, the worst Bath & Body Works smell, is included in "the cuddlers" family, and girl, no one is gonna wanna cuddle you if you're wearing that smell, except your grandmother. Believe it.

Also, Mike's boyfriend works at Bath & Body Works down in Georgia somewheres, and he had to do a floorset on Sunday night, and oh, the sense of relief that I won't have to deal with that bullshit ever again was so delicious. David was heading off to work at 5:00 p.m., and I was still sitting on the couch in my pajamas, playing Super Paper Mario. That's what Sunday nights are for. I bet it's not that bad in other stores, though, because seriously, the Bath & Body Works at the Pheasant Lane Mall is quite possibly the largest Bath & Body Works of all time, and it makes changing the store around a grueling, thankless, hideous experience. Especially when the Devil was running the scene.

I miss the 30 percent discount, though, because $9.50 for a four ounce candle? Highway robbery!

Half-baked analysis

In all the uproar over the remake of The Neverending Story, I keep seeing people lauding its "message," which is, I guess, "do what you dream," more or less, and that is the cheesiest (and possibly worst) thing about the movie. That's not what the story is about, okay? Remaking the movie and making the themes more compelling and less overt would be a good move. The Neverending Story is not about achieving anything; The Neverending Story doesn't have a moral. The Neverending Story is about using your imagination, for good and ill. What's evil in the novel is not what we would consider evil, not G'mork (although, as a servant of the Nothing, perhaps he would count...) or Xayide, but the Nothing. You can see this in the Childlike Empress; though she is the ruler of Fantastica, she does not condemn evil or praise good--what she fights against is the Nothing, against the thing that is destroying all of Fantastica, good and bad. And the Nothing is taking over Fantastica because people from our world are not using their imaginations--not creating anything. I forget, too, but I believe the Nothing threatens our world as well, because Fantastica is falling.

So while Bastian needs to obtain a kind of belief in himself in order to play his role in this story, that's not the point.

Look, it's been a while since I had to English major out on a book, but if I had to say what the book is really about it, it is about walking the line between imagination and reality. When you live too much in the dismal real world, that world itself suffers for lack of creativity, but if you live too much in a fantasy land, that world also suffers, even while the real world loses you--and you lose yourself. Creation is the theme of this book, filling the Nothing with Something over and over in an infinite number of ways.

It's not about achieving your dreams or whatever damn thing. It's about imagination and how that shapes you and the corner of the world you inhabit.

Venting my digital spleen

There are some things I would like to know about Front Row, which I almost want to marry, but I can't quite make the commitment because it has some serious flaws.

On the real, I would really like to know where it's grabbing the files--does it go through iTunes at all, or does it just take the folders and files in the Music and Movies folders and vomit them onto its interface? I mean, it would seem to bypass parts of the iTunes library, because no matter what I do, I can't get Front Row to look like my iTunes library, particularly in the area of television shows.

So I get that Apple thought it was a brilliant idea to list the episodes of each show in reverse order, keeping the most recent on top for easy viewing after iTunes has downloaded the latest episode of the show. Fine. And I know there are dicey legal issues about ripping DVDs, even for personal use, so they just ignored that and organized based on episodes bought from the iTunes store, but come on. Plenty of OCD nerds want the episodes displayed in the correct order. So why can't Apple create user preferences for Front Row, so it displays content the way you, the OCD nerd, would prefer? Doesn't Apple understand about OCD nerds?!

Basically, my real problem is that Front Row will not display seasons of television shows in the proper order. Some of them are listed 1,2,3, etc. Some are listed 4,3,2,1 (for example). And some are listed ridiculously 7,6,1,2,3,4,5 (Gilmore Girls) or 11,5,10,6,4,3,2,1 (South Park). Friday Night Lights goes 2,3,1, and Grey's Anatomy goes 3,2,1,4. How does this happen??? I've tried organizing the files into folders named by season, and that worked on Popular and Xena, but that's it. So what is the deal? I feel like I should tell Apple that this is a big problem, but would they even listen? And then do I want to get into the fact that I've ripped hundreds of DVDs onto an external hard drive so I can watch them on my iMac because, maybe you missed this, but I am a(n OCD) nerd?

Really, I would just like to know how Front Row works, because this is driving me bananas. Also, why can't you play video playlists in Front Row? Come on, Apple. This interface could be totally awesome, and yet it's stuck at almost awesome but simultaneously fucking frustrating. Let's develop this, please. I give you the input; your OCD nerd engineers write the updates. This could be a beautiful partnership. And then you could give me a free Apple TV as thanks for my invaluable insight.

Yes, I know Blake Sennett also sings

So I enjoy Rilo Kiley quite a bit, so their songs often make appearances on the Weekly Mix Tapes, which I play in the car, and Mike has asked me "who is this?" at least twice during a Rilo Kiley song, and every time I tell him, he goes, "I like her." He has heard of Rilo Kiley before, I know, but he doesn't seem aware that they're a band. This drives me crazy, that he thinks Rilo Kiley is the name of the singer (it's Jenny Lewis, nerds), and I corrected him once a million years ago, and he got all defensive and brought up, like, No Doubt and Gwen Stefani to defend his use of "her" instead of "them," but who ever listened to a No Doubt song and only referred to "her"? So I haven't brought it up since, but both subsequent times I have wanted to say, "Rilo Kiley is a band, you know," but I keep fighting this snobbish urge.

I guess I'm growing or some shit.

This reminds me of the time Carlos and I made fun of Jess for thinking Led Zeppelin was a guy, not a band, but apparently it wasn't Jess who thought that. I was sure this happened, and now I'm hoping it did, except Lauren was the maroon who thought Led Zeppelin was a guy, but she's that smart. Or maybe it was Martha! Oh, god, it could have been any one of our friends, huh.

(As an utter aside, I wikipedia'd Rilo Kiley to look up Blake's last name, and dude. He was Ronnie Pinsky on Salute Your Shorts. Bangarang.)

It shall be told another time! (I hope.)

So, according to the internet, a remake of The Neverending Story is in the works, and really, I am super excited to see how that develops, but also super wary, because the original movie was such a mess.

Anyway, here's what I said a year and a half ago, after I read the book for the first time:

I really wish someone would make this a movie again, like Lord of the Rings style, because it could make a really great film. They could do it in two parts, you know, ending the first one right after Bastian finally saves Fantastica and beginning with his adventures in the forest/desert. But I doubt that Michael Ende's estate will ever let that happen--or that anyone would even want it to happen except for me.

Apparently, I was mostly right about that last thing. The place I found this information was full of maroons bemoaning the fact that this movie was being remade, because it's a childhood classic for them or whatever. And, listen, I understand hanging onto things you loved when you were a kid, but people: The Neverending Story was not a good movie. The plot was a mess; the acting was horrible; the sets were hideous, and it left out all the most interesting parts of the book.

As far as I'm concerned, the remake has nothing but potential. It can tell the story Michael Ende told; it can cast some decent child actors; it can make Fantastica a real place, like they were able to do with Middle Earth and Narnia. They can even make Atreyu green! But there's always a giant suckhole for error when making a movie based upon a novel, and since the first attempt was a fucking failure (I'm sorry--I know I am the only person in America (maybe even literally) who holds this opinion), the second attempt could quite possibly also be a disaster.

But oh man. Please, please, please, I would love to see Fantastica Middle-Earth- and Narnia-style.

And the navel-gazing continues

While I'm somewhat loath to apparently be turning this blog into a dream diary, I keep having the most troubling dreams that I need to exorcise, so feel free to skip this one.

Anyway, last night I had a dream that my parents got back together (somewhat reluctantly? No one was particularly happy about it, and in fact my dad was not present in the dream at all) and bought a gigantic old house that was allegedly in New York City, even though, uh, New York City is not known for its gigantic old houses. But, you know, that was obviously not the weirdest part of the dream. So we all moved to this house, and I was lodged in the attic, and Tommy was lodged on the first floor, and Jeff was somewhere in between, I guess, and I remember very clearly what the downstairs of this ancient mansion looked like, but I'll be damned if I could actually describe it.

So we're living in this house, and my parents are still working at their New England jobs, and this all seems so very real, and I begin to panic, because how am I supposed to get to my job? Did I quit my job? Should I be looking for a new job? Then I remember that I moved out with Mike, and I have a place in Nashua, and apparently I'm just here in New York to see the new family pad. Then my mom comes home and pulls out this day-glo bottle that looks like Gatorade or something but turns out to be rodent poison gel, because apparently the house had a rat problem? The rats weren't in my dream, thank god, but now I am recalling the giant rats we saw outside the dining hall senior year. Ugh. So I express my concern for the animals that aren't rats in the house, namely Charles Wallace and for some reason, my dad's dumb dog, and my mom gives me this look, so I amended it to "animal," because we clearly both hate the dog, which is fucked up, but it isn't so much about the dog as, you know, my dad's wife. Which is the only tangible thing that ocurred in this dream that I can point to as evidence that my parents weren't, like, enjoying being back together. Because my parents are not supposed to be back together, ever.

So I was so nervous during the dream, and it all seemed so real, like I could touch the floorboards of the attic, and I was trying to figure out what the fuck was going on, and I couldn't until I remembered about my new house. I didn't wake up from that dream--it went away, and I woke up at 5:00 when Mike's stupid alarm went off, and but I still felt so much better to be awake, in my apartment, with parents who don't have any intention of reconciling for any reason ever.

Ugh. My dreams suck these days.

Sometimes I am close-minded

There are several vehicles in my apartment complex with this bumper sticker that says, "Nashua belongs to Jesus Christ." Actually, it's "NASHUA BELONGS TO JESUS CHRIST," so I always feel like they're yelling at me. I've seen these fucking bumper stickers before, but now I have to see them when I go home, and they're making me madder than usual. Often, I just laugh and say, "Please, like Jesus wants Nashua," but seriously. It's so obnoxious. Who gave Nashua to Jesus? How many non-Christians are there in this city? I don't know, but there are plenty! There's even a synagogue in Nashua!

Fuck, people. Keep your outdated beliefs to yourself already. Jesus is unable to take possession of an entire town. Why? Because he is dead. And he's not coming back. You know who else is supposed to come back at a time of great crisis? King Arthur. How many people really believe that's going to happen? It's exactly as likely as this Jesus fellow coming back to claim pitiful cities in southern New Hampshire as his own.

Amen.

Nonsense

Oh man, remember that time Chief thought he was a Cylon and went mental, and Cavil was the one who talked him down, even though Cavil was a Cylon and all, and Cavil knew he wasn't one of the seven (eight!), but holy balls, he knew Chief was one of the five.

Madness!

And he killed the favorite son (seven) because he was jealous and then wreaked utter destruction on humanity, which is, uh, way worse than anything Cain ever did. I mean, Cain killed one favorite son and was doomed to wander the Earth forever, unable to find rest. I guess that's true of Cavil--he'll have to wonder the universe forever, unable to find rest, because he will never get the acceptance from the five, Ellen especially, that he wants and refuses to admit he wants.

Cavil wants to be a machine, but the five made him the humanest (weakest?) of all the models, all old and stuff.

I am having such trouble with the religious allusions on this show, because the significance never quite hits me--or exists.
Like this promo image for season 4 from the iTunes store with Roslin, Xena, Tigh, Lee, Baltar, Six, Starbuck, Sam, Chief, Athena, Helo, and Adama is framed almost exactly like The Last Supper, except there's someone missing, and Roslin and Adama seem to be apart from everyone else. And it puts Six in the Jesus position. What is the significance of this? It's not an effin' accident. Baltar's in almost the right spot to be Judas, though, you guys.

And the amazingly Biblical names of some of the male Cylons (all of them except Leoben and Galen, actually):
Saul - a king of Israel
Samuel - a prophet, who anointed Saul and David kings of Israel
John - harbinger of the Messiah
Daniel - a prophet
Simon - the original name of Peter, Jesus's head disciple
Aaron - Moses's brother

None of them connect! Why bother with this if it doesn't mean something???

And this "twelve but not really" thing--twelve tribes of Kobol, oh except for this renegade thirteenth. Twelve cylon models, oh except there was one more, but oh he was broken, so never mind. Twelve tribes of Israel, twelve Olympic gods, twelve signs of the Zodiac after which the Kobolios named their planets. Those are constellations you can see from Earth!

How does Earth really fit into this? Did we abandon it and go to Kobol, and a couple thousand years later the thirteenth tribe returned?

When Ellen said Daniel was an artist, I immediately connected that with Kara, because of her eye of Jupiter painting and whatever, but Daniel's genetic code is broke, and his model never got off the shelf, except for one, obviously, for Cavil to be jealous of. And you know what the one Daniel did? Come on. He clearly fathered Kara Thrace. Ba-dah!

Are the final five machines or not? If they weren't, it would make sense for why Tigh and Six were able to make a baby. The centurion/human combo models can't reproduce with each other, but they can with the five, because the five aren't part machine! Hey? I don't effin' know. But then the thirteenth tribe, who went to Earth, were all Cylon. Were they Cylon when they left Kobol? Did humanity engineer the Centurions before the thirteenth tribe to its ticket outta there, or did they build robots separately from the robots the twelve tribes built?

The robots blew up Earth because they were mad at the way they were being treated, so the five, who had prepared the technology for resurrection, took a long, slow journey back to Kobol to warn them to treat their robots right--so the robots must have been created before the thirteenth tribe went to Earth, since they knew the Kobolios had robots. When they got there too late, they engineered the armistice by promising to help the Centurions build biological models. Thus, the Powerpuff Girls Cavil, Leoben, Xena, Simon, Doral, Six, Daniel, and Sharon were born, unbeknowst to the rest of humanity.

Long before the second holocaust, Cavil killed his creators and placed them strategically throughout humanity. What was he doing while he waited? How did Daniel get to Caprica?

I am so confused.

And also where did the five get the genetic material to make the eight models? From themselves? Then some of them are, say, Ellen and Saul's children and some Tory and Chief's? So, for real, Six is Saul's daughter. Eeeeeeew.

I don't go to sleep to dream. Dammit.

Oh my GOD, I had the worst dream ever this morning. I was back in college, and for some reason, I'd skipped, like, two weeks of class just before midterms, and I might have missed the midterms, but I was too freaked out to check my syllabuses to see if I had indeed missed midterms or handing in papers or something, so I was just gonna wait until I had class again to find out what I had missed, and then in the middle of this, I just started fuh-reaking out, and I knew, in the dream, that there was some reason this would be all right, that this hadn't actually happened or something, but I couldn't calm myself down.

Then my cat knocked over everything on my bedside bookshelf, and I woke up. And I was like, "Oh yeah. You know why it's gonna be all right? Cuz I graduated. Three years ago, suckas!" God, that was such sweet, sweet relief.

All of that happened in the middle of a larger, even more bizarre dream about my having to destroy rings with gemstones that contained evil spirits, but I don't remember enough of that mess to tell you a coherent story about it. Plus, the midterms thing was way scarier. God! Skipping two whole weeks of class and not even keeping up with the syllabus! Who DOES that???

A collection of things I thought yesterday

So I was lookin' up Brandi tickets at the Portsmouth Music Hall for April Fools' Day, and they had this whole paragraph about her, and it ended with this: "Come find out why one critic said, 'When she took the stage, you'd think the crowd was welcoming Jim Morrison, circa 1965.'" Which just made me snort, because, yeah, we lesbians can be pretty effin' enthusiastic. And then I was like, hey! Even Brandi Carlile is a better song-writer than effin' Jim Morrison. What was the deal with that douche, anyway? Have you listened to the lyrics to "Light My Fire"? "Wallow in the mire"? Is he an actual, literal pig? Someone abused that rhyming dictionary!

Anyway, yeah, I am so over my crazed Brandi Carlile obsession, but she's gonna be in NH, and her live shows are always awesome, so I'm gonna take my mom, since I have no friends, and I'm broke, and she'll pay!
Then I read something somewhere on the internet about someone studying for "the dbq," and my body went rigid, and I was like, "How do I know that acronym?" Then I fell down dead. DBQ stands for "Document-Based Question," and I experienced its wrath during the AP U.S. history exam. And I spent most of AP U.S. history practicing for that mess. And Mrs. Deblasio hated me. But it was cool--I hated her narrow-minded, preachy ass right back! God damn, I was in her class the year Bush stole the election from Al Gore, and that Wednesday in November was just odious. The only reason I took the class was that, clearly, I had to take as many AP classes as possible, and since the maths and sciences were so far out of the question, and AP Spanish wasn't even offered (!!!), I had to go with U.S. history, both Englishes, and U.S. government.

Sorry, that story was boring, but I had to exorcise those high school demons.
So I caved and watched two minutes of last week's Grey's on youtube, because I'm sorry, but I love to see Sara Ramirez kiss a lady, and then I was going to write this whole rant about how the Grey's people clearly just replaced Brooke Smith with a younger, "hotter" model (no offense to Jessica Capshaw--she's lovely in her own right, but I would pick Brooke Smith over her any day of the week), but I just don't have the energy. Mostly, that kiss was kinda lame. The elevator kiss was way hotter, and Callie was being taken by surprise there too! Boo! Brooke Smith 4-EVA!

I guess Callie has a rather specific type, huh?
In conclusion, I bought Ingrid Michaelson's iTunes Live E.P. today, and she does a cover of "Creep" with a ukulele, which is quite interesting indeed. Mostly, I love this album for another live version of "The Chain." That song hits me right were it counts--the hearthole.

Ingrid Michaelson is a talented and pretty lady who wears glasses, and every time she comes to Boston, she sells out her show before I even know about it. I need to be more on top of these things.

Wednesday afternoon answers!

1. Who Will Save Your Soul? - Jewel
2. Building a Mystery - Sarah McLachlan
3. Every Day Is a Winding Road - Sheryl Crow
4. No Rain - Blind Melon
5. Fast Car - Tracy Chapman
6. Why Can't I? - Liz Phair
7. Everybody Hurts - R.E.M.
8. Something to Talk About - Bonnie Raitt
9. The Weight - The Band
10. Touch of Grey - Grateful Dead
11. Spiderwebs - No Doubt
12. The World Has Turned and Left Me Here - Weezer
13. Sleep to Dream - Fiona Apple
14. Don't Bother - Shakira
15. Stand - R.E.M.
16. Sunny Came Home - Shawn Colvin
17. Closing Time - Semisonic
18. Two Princes - Spin Doctors
19. Hand in My Pocket - Alanis Morissette
20. The Remedy (I Won't Worry) - Jason Mraz
21. Breakfast at Tiffany's - Deep Blue Something
22. Why - Annie Lennox (I skipped the "whyyyyyyyyyy" at the beginning, is that cheating?)
23. Me and Bobby McGee - Janis Joplin (aka Janet Jopler)
24. Til I Hear It from You - Gin Blossoms
25. Why Georgia - John Mayer
26. A Long December - Counting Crows
27. Babylon - David Gray
28. Ants Marching - Dave Matthews Band
29. Celebrity Skin - Hole
30. Found Out About You - Gin Blossoms

iTunes had a serious '90s thing going on. And two Gin Blossoms songs! Those are, like, the only two Gin Blossoms songs I have. I'll rework the shufflable pool again next time and see what spits out. This sure is fun for me.

An observation or two

One day, when I was twitter surfing, I read on some rando's feed something like, "If Jack Kerouac were alive, twenty-three [I think? I don't know if Tegan and Sara were 23 when this song came about, but that's what the twit said], and a pair of gay Canadian twins, he would have written the song 'Nineteen.'" iTunes played me that song this morning, and the line "I felt you in my legs before I ever met you" totally made me remember that random twit I read. I don't know about the rest of the song being Kerouac-esque, but I've read four Kerouac books, and that first line totally jolted me for being like his writing. Also, I love the iTunes Live version of that song. The end!

I've been hard-up for mix tape inspiration these days, and even though the mix tapes are just for my own personal enjoyment, and no one notices when I don't update the sidebar, I love making them and listening to them in the car, and two weeks listening to the same one is too long, and then Sunday night my iPod got mad at me and only accepted 4 or 5 songs from each playlist, which of course I didn't realize until Monday morning in the car, trying to decide what to listen to on the way to work. I don't know what that mess was supposed to reveal to you, except that I need new mixes! And I really like calling them mix tapes, even though no one has tapes anymore, and I don't even put these mixes on compact discs--they exist entirely digitally--but whatever. So, anyway, for this week I decided to cheat with Genius. I picked a song (in this case, "She'll Come Back to Me" by Cake) and let Genius fly. I deleted the extra songs from the same artist, added four or five myself, and voila! Mix tape. So I don't hate Genius anymore, because it does dig up songs I would sometimes tend to overlook, but for making complete mixes, it's still lacking. I tried to do a Ditty Bops song, and it only gave me ten songs, even though it's supposed to do 25 at minium. Lacking!

Tuesday morning blog fun!

Because this amuses me and possibly one other person, I wanted to do this again. I modified the shuffle settings a little bit, by which I mean I shrunk my library pool with the hope of eliminating the obscure songs and the Muppets soundtracks, so hopefully this one should be more entertaining. (The way I play this game for myself is that I try to write out the first line before it's actually sung. Just so you know what I get out of this.)

1. People live their lives for you on tv
2. You come out at night
3. I hitched a ride with a vending machine repairman
4. All I can say is that my life is pretty plain
5. You got a fast car
6. Get a load of me, get a load of you
7. When the day is long, and the night, the night is yours alone
8. People are talkin', talkin' 'bout people
9. I pulled into Nazareth, was feelin' about half-past dead
10. Must be getting early, clocks are running late
11. You think that we connect
12. The world has turned and left me here
13. I tell you how I feel, but you don't care
14. She's got the kind of look that defies gravity
15. Stand in the place where you live
16. Sunny came home to her favorite room
17. Closing time, open all the doors and let you out into the world
18. One, two princes lived before you
19. I'm broke but I'm happy
20. Well I saw fireworks from the freeway
21. You'll say that we've got nothing in common
22. How many times do I have to try to tell you that I'm sorry for the things I've done
23. Busted a flat in Baton Rouge, waitin' for a train
24. I didn't ask--you shouldn't have told me
25. I am driving up 85 in the kind of morning that lasts all afternoon
26. A long December, and there's reason to believe
27. Friday night, I'm going nowhere
28. He wakes up in the morning
29. Oh make me over
30. All last summer, in case you don't recall

Answers tomorrow afternoon! Guess away, anyone. Full disclosure: I got 25 of these, so they're definitely easier.

Answers!

If you wanna play my dumb little game, skip this post and go here. Then come back to see how you did!

1. Right Through You – Alanis Morissette
2. Late Morning Lullaby – Brandi Carlile
3. Ashes and Wine – A Fine Frenzy
4. What’s This? – from The Nightmare Before Christmas
5. Made to Last – Semisonic
6. Circle of Life – from The Lion King
7. Chains – The Beatles
8. Hello Operator – The White Stripes
9. Least Complicated – Indigo Girls
10. Gravedigger – Dave Matthews
11. Night of the Iguana – Joni Mitchell
12. Can’t Cry Anymore – Sheryl Crow
13. Hey a Movie! – from The Muppet Movie
14. Don’t Cha Wanna Ride – Joss Stone
15. Daria – Cake
16. Seek Up – Dave Matthews Band
17. Summer Rains – The Ditty Bops
18. Movin’ Right Along – from The Muppet Movie
19. Careful – Guster
20. The Captain – Guster
21. Dusty – Kings of Leon
22. Your Body Is a Wonderland – John Mayer
23. Fantasize – Liz Phair
24. Follow – Brandi Carlile
25. I’ve Got a Theory – from “Once More with Feeling!”
26. Strong Enough – Sheryl Crow
27. Misunderstood – Wilco
28. I’m Looking Through You – The Beatles
29. Santa Fe – from Rent
30. Big Railroad Blues – The Greatful Dead

For some reason, iTunes was all over Sheryl Crow and the Muppets. And Dave Matthews and Brandi Carlile and those two Guster songs right in a row! Maybe I'll try again next weekend and see if I can get a more varied list of thirty songs.

iPod tweaks

I wrote this a few years ago, when I still had a PC, long before everyone was using Vista (or maybe even before Vista had been released), but it might still come in handy to someone, so I decided to transfer it over here. Hopefully, these instructions work for Vista. If not, I can tweak them as I learn about Vista.

To transfer music from your iPod to your computer:

1. Connect the iPod to the computer. If iTunes opens and gives you bullshit about different libraries or whatever, tell it to cram it, then close iTunes.

2. Open My Computer.

3. Double click the icon for your iPod (should be Drive E: or F:).

4. Select Folder Options from the Tools menu in the iPod window.

5. Click the View tab.

6. In the Advanced Settings pane, select Show hidden files and folders. Click OK.

7. You should see a folder in the iPod window called iPod_control. Double click it.

8. Double click the Music folder. You should see a bunch of folders labeled F00, F01, F02, etc. All of your music files are in these folders.

9. Choose Select All from the Edit menu to highlight all the folders.

10. Choose Copy to Folder from the Edit menu.

11. Choose the folder to which you'd like to copy your music files, and then click Copy. It may take a while, but eventually, all your music files will be transferred to the designated folder on your computer.

12. Once the file transfer is complete, you can import these songs into iTunes--just choose Add folder to library from the File menu and select the folder in which your F00, F01, F02, etc. folders are now located (I would recommend the My Music folder).

*Your music files themselves will have shortened names, but as long as you have the track/artist/album info entered in the tags, all of that should be preserved once you add them to iTunes. And if you have iTunes set up to do so, it will rename the files and reorganize them into folders by artist and album name. Any troubles, let me know.

Saturday morning blog fun

So I've seen this meme thing around the internet for a while, were you put your music library on shuffle and type the first lines of the first thirty songs and try to get your friends to guess, and I finally said, "Hey! I like songs!" so I did it. I don't know if anyone would want to play along--maybe I'd have better luck on Facebook where I would reach a broader audience, but truth be told, I have this blog so I don't post notes on Facebook. So anyway, here are my first 30 songs, except for the tracks that weren't actually songs (such as comedy from Margaret Cho or the Historian's Introduction to Act I of Spamalot and also that one Spanish-language song from Shakira I figured would be entirely impossible.

1. Wait a minute, man, you mispronounced my name.
2. Soon as my eyes shut the slideshow begins
3. Don’t know what to do anymore; I’ve lost the only love worth fighting for
4. What’s this? What’s this? There’s color everywhere.
5. Made to last a while and roll on
6. From the day we arrive on the planet and, blinking, step into the sun
7. Chains, my baby’s got me locked up in chains
8. Hello, operator, can you give me number nine?
9. I sit two stories above the streets
10. Cyrus Jones, 1810-1913, made his great-grandchildren believe you could live to 103.
11. The tourbus came yesterday; the driver’s a mess today
12. Took your car and drove to Texas
13. There’ll be spectacle; there’ll be fantasy; there’ll be derring-do and stuff like you would never see
14. I know you got the hummer for the summer, baby
15. When you tried to kiss me I only bit your tongue
16. Sometimes I feel like I'm falling
17. When the ices melt I admit I felt a lifting in my heart
18. Movin’ right along, in search of good times and good news
19. You walked out when I asked you to stay
20. I’ve come down with somethin’
21. Dusty and you are, dirty from chain
22. We got the afternoon
23. He’s a friend of mine, kind of special guy
24. Follow your heart and see where it might take you
25. I’ve got a theory that it’s a demon
26. God, I feel like hell tonight
27. You’re back in your old neighborhood
28. I’m looking through you—where did you go?
29. New York City—center of the universe
30. Well my mama told me, my papa told me too

Full disclosure: I wouldn't have gotten all of these, and they're from my own damn library. Anyone who gets more than half wins my love and respect. Feel free to comment with your guesses (song title AND artist), and I'll post the answers on Sunday night.

A film critic I am not

So when I was a senior at my Catholic high school, we actually got to choose which religion classes we wanted to take. Well, I think we all had to take one semester of some bullshit called "Christian living," but the second semester, we could choose between, like, the banality of evil or Christian themes in film. Guess which one I chose. Seriously, there were like twelve people who didn't take Christian themes in film, and they're all maroons. But anyway, this class was basically a regular film class, because you can find Christian themes anywhere. It was a grand class--I don't think I did any work except present my film (American Beauty), and I got an A.

Anyway, the point of this story was that it was in that class that I first watched Fried Green Tomatoes, and it was right at the time when I was like, "Ohhh, I am, maybe, possibly, gaaaay," and watching Mary Stuart Masterson and Mary Louise Parker together in that movie made me feel all funny. And that food fight, man. So. Gay. So after a few classes of watching the movie, the group who'd chosen it did their presentation or whatever, and I think it was actually our teacher who brought up the, "Are Idgie and Ruth more than friends?" question.

People said no! Can you even believe that? Okay, so yeah, high school students at a Catholic school aren't exactly all up ons the lesbian subtext, but I was still like, "Hello, that food fight?" And come on, Idgie is so gay. Apparently, though, in the movie Idgie is actually Ninny, the old lady Kathy Bates visits in the nursing home? I never got that. That just doesn't make any sense--that old lady is no way Idgie Threadgoode. In the book, Ninny married one of Idgie's brothers, and that's how she knows all about the Threadgoodes. Anyway, that is neither here nor there, really, except I didn't get that from the movie at all.

One of the girls in the presenting group put the debate to bed by saying, "Yo, in the book they're totally more than friends. Idgie's a big dyke, and Ruth falls in love with her." (I am, perhaps, paraphrasing.) And everyone was kinda uncomfortable, the end, I kind of forgot about the movie/book.

I finally read the book last year, and I totally loved it, and the best part for me was how much of a non-issue the whole gay thing was not only to Idgie's family, but to the entire town. My favorite part is when, I think, the mother of the Threadgoode clan matter-of-factly informs all the children that Idgie has a crush on Ruth and not to make fun of her for it. This story takes place in the deepest of the Deep South, in the 1930s, and Idgie never has to hide who she is. As impossible as that seems, it was still nice to see it like that.

Mary Stuart Masterson and Mary Louise Parker are lovely in the film, but the part with Kathy Bates just drives me crazy, which is why I've only actually watched the entire movie once, in my religion class.