Let's talk about Gossip Girl

I got distracted during the season premiere, so I missed a lot of it, and I finally got to watch it again, so here are some thoughts!

We were clearly meant to think that blonde lady Nate was making out with in the beginning was Serena, huh? I didn't fall for it. You know who she is? (This was bugging me all Monday night.) Sherry from Gilmore Girls. You know what this reminds me of? Pacey and the English teacher. Except all Upper East Side-y.

Dan the playboy is pretty gross. Dan the anything is pretty gross. He's so judgmental! I don't know. Serena is too good for him.

And what happened to Serena's evil grandmother? I liked it better when she hated Dan.

But this was pretty awesome. Serena catches Dan's hypocrisy in action!
You know the one character who hit me in the gut this time? Chuck. Chuck's still icky, and his heart is still two sizes too small, but he has one! And it has feelings! Even if icky Chuck can't tell Blair he loves her he does, as well as his Grinch-sized heart can. Blair deserves better than a Grinch-sized heart, of course, so I don't blame her for walking away, but it was so. Sad.
I have to say... I kind of still hate Jenny, even though she's being nice again. And Eric needs a friend! Maybe Eric can make her likable. I love Eric. I love him--I love him even more when he's bonding with Chuck. I love how Chuck was the one he told about being gay. I can't believe I love the boys more than the girls these days. I can't believe I felt worse for Chuck than I did for Blair.

What has become of me?

Oh, wait. This'll bring things back to normal.
Oh, white parties. Brilliant idea, apparently. (Even Dan looks good! What is happening?)

We'll see who's a Genius

So Apple is allegedly releasing new iPods next Tuesday, as well as launching iTunes 8 which will have some interesting new features. The iPods that look like they're being updated are the nano and the touch, which does me no good, unless the iPod touch magically gets a 160GB hard drive. Then I might do something stupid, because I've been in a bad mood all month, and something new and shiny could probably cheer me up for at least a day.

Stupid disease.

Anyway, the thing I'm interested in this time, since the iPod classics look to be staying the same, is a new rumored feature in iTunes called Genius, which can apparently generate playlists from your library of songs that just, like, go perfectly together. I am eager to see how well this works because few people have a more eclectic music collection than I. These recommendation generator things always fail to impress me, because while I seem to share big chunks of my taste in music (and books) with a bunch of other people, it never really matches up. I wonder what it'll do with my collection. I love making playlists--I don't think Genius will be better at it than me. Twice, I made a 350-song playlist for a roadtrip, and they were both super awesome, if rather similar. I'd like to see an automated program make a playlist that'll take me out of the country and back! Boo-yah!

In lieu of purchasing a 160GB iPod touch that doesn't exist, I just bought season one of Gossip Girl on iTunes. (I almost bought the first season of Doug, but I decided Gossip Girl would keep me more occupied.) More economical anyway, if not as shiny. (Hee, one of the early episodes is called "Bad News Blair.")

In other geek news, I've been using my (interminable) convalescent period to rip my DVDs to my iMac, and I totally just ran out of room on the hard drive, and I am not even anywhere near halfway done. I've only just begun the Cs in movies, and the tv shows I haven't been doing in any particular order (for shame!), but they're not halfway done either. I do have a shiny external hard drive that I've only been using to back up my non-media files, so I'll start copying new media files there, but I think I'll run out of room on that long before the halfway point, too. I should have gotten the 500GB iMac, but that shit is expensive, yo.

Anyway, I wanted to do this because of Apple's Front Row application that lets you access your media library with a remote control, so I could just lie in bed and watch whatever movie or tv show I wanted without having to get up and put in a DVD. I know that sounds like the epitome of sloth (and perhaps it is), but something about having your entire media library instantly accessible is just so appealing. Then! I could invest in an AppleTV, and I could watch all my movies on the big widescreen tv without having to bother to go downstairs and get the DVD. It would be super awesome for something like a Pirates or Harry Potter marathon. Or, like, a Gossip Girl or Top Model or Futurama marathon.

The only thing I don't like about Front Row is that you can't make video playlists, so you can't just watch all the episodes of one season of a tv show without individually selecting each episode. It's a small thing, I suppose, but it's kind of annoying when the episodes are half-hour ones.

Oh! The other thing about Front Row that bugs the crap out of me is that it doesn't order tv shows by season, or episodes by number. It orders them by how recently you added them to your library. Why doesn't it just mimic the iTunes library? Everything in there is anal-retentively arranged. Because that's how I roll.

The first week of mono, I went on a book reading tear, by which I mean I read two books in one week, but ever since then I've read like 40 pages of Memoirs of a Geisha. I'm so tired, y'all. Too tired to read. And that is a bad sign.

If you must insist on the comparison

You know, maybe Tina Fey could enlighten Sarah Palin as to what it is the Vice President of the United States of America does. There was this one "Update" when she was talking about Al Gore (so it was one of her first ones ever), and she said something like, "What most people don't know is that he's also the President of the Senate, so he sits up there on a throne with a lion," and maybe there was something else, but I forget, and it made me laugh so, so hard.

I used to have all the Jimmy and Tina "Update"s on my computer, but then it died, and I never recovered them, and that was a very sad day in my life, because the website that provided them totally doesn't have them up anymore. And! I can't even find a transcript of it, so...maybe I'm making it all up!

Your decision. Choose wisely.

Things I want to eat

Sushi: California roll, spider roll, dragon roll, rainbow roll, tuna with avocado roll
Cheesy gordita crunch
Crunch wrap supreme
Nachos with fake cheese
Nachos with real cheese
Macaroni and cheese
Cheeseburger
Burrito
Guacamole (only if homemade or from the Cheesecake Factory)
Ribs
Mashed potatoes

I would also like to feel better in time to go to a motherfucking Red Sox game. I have a whole month. Oh lord. If I'm not better in a month, I'll probably be dead.

My mom talks a lot during movies

I saw the pants movie with my mom today, which is about all the excitement I can handle in one day, and it was exactly what I expected it would be, cheesy fluff featuring four pretty, pretty ladies. Amber Tamblyn is the best when she's being funny; Alexis Bledel will never be anything but Rory Gilmore (but she's pretty, so I don't care); America Ferrera is the hottest; and Gossip Girl starts on Monday, so Blake Lively is my current favorite. Goodness, she's so beautiful. And! They left out the Bridget messes around with a married man part of her storyline, so that was a big plus for the movie as far as I was concerned. Plus, the hot foreign lady they got to play her archaeological mentor was hot. And foreign. Two thumbs up. Oh my! And it was Blythe Danner as her grandma. I was like, "Hey, that lady looks like Blythe Danner." I'm a genius.

The movie tried to squish all three of the sequels into one thing, more or less, and I remember almost nothing from books two and three, and I read the fourth book in May, and that's a little shaky, but on the whole, I think it did a pretty admirable job. Not like the books are that great--but I still remember being all, "Well, that's not how it happened in the book" during the movie. I can't help it--it's a complusion. Though, I have no idea what I was thinking that in reference to.

Let's talk about Sarah Palin, shall we?

I don't even know if I can get this all out, but, like... What a ri-god-damn-diculous choice for vice president. I was watching The Daily Show last night, and they had an actual clip of this woman saying something like, "I wish I could comment on all this vice president talk, but I can't really say anything until someone tells me what it is the vice president does."

Seriously?

Okay, so we have this issue here that a lot of Hillary supporters don't want to vote for Obama, so maybe it would seem like kind of a good idea for McCain to pick a woman as his running mate. The thing about Hillary supporters, though, that the Republicans don't get is that they're not behind Hillary because she is a lady. They're behind Hillary because she is Hillary. Plus! He could not have picked a woman who is more politically opposite. I mean, she's anti-choice, pro-drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (the governor of Alaska, people, wants to rape her own state), pro-NRA, and she's a creationist. She has nothing in common with Hillary Clinton except reproductive organs. Which was basically the point they made on The Daily Show.

How condescending is that, by the way? There are a block of voters who want a woman in the White House--we'll just pick a woman! Any woman will do! Oh! The best thing on The Daily Show was Samantha Bee's final word on the VP selection: "McCain knows that women don't vote with the big head--they vote with the little hood."

Not to mention she hasn't even been governor of Alaska for two years, and McCain's whole attack on Obama is that he doesn't have enough experience to lead the country. If you're running on experience, how smart is it to pick a second-in-command who's still wet behind the ears? It would seem that by picking this woman, McCain has totally doomed his chances, but... This country is terrifying.

But, really, there have to be other Republican women who have more experience than Palin. Why on earth did he pick her? There is nothing whatsoever to recommend her. You've already secured the religious right, Republicans. Do you really need someone who believes in teaching creationism in public schools on your ticket?

Listen. This woman cannot be our first female anything. And John McCain is old, people--what if he were to die in office? If Sarah Palin became the first female President of the United States of America, I would move to France. That's right, France. Because America hates France. Or maybe Spain. Just beacuse it would be easier to be somewhere I speak the language.

I hate that I have to bash this woman, too, because this country needs more women in high political office, but I mean... I can't just support her because of that. She is everything I hate about Republicans. How can a woman be anti-choice? (I can understand a woman being anti-abortion, but how can she deny other women the right to make that decision for themselves? How?) How can the governor of Alaska support destroying the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge? How can a mother of four oppose gun control?

Also. People keep saying she looks like Tina Fey! Stop comparing her to Tina Fey! Tina Fey would be a much better first female vice president!

If Barack Obama is not the next President of the United States, I do not know what will become of me.

More baseball, minimal Sox talk

Once upon a time, the Toronto Blue Jays were good. They must have actually been better than the Yankees and the Red Sox at least one year, because I can just barely remember their being in the World Series against...the Braves? (Not because I was wicked young or anything, but because I was only marginally aware of baseball in the '90s. My dad was a Yankees' fan, and that's all I knew.) The one time I went to Cooperstown, I bought a Blue Jays hat, because I was obsessed with collecting baseball caps at the time, and I liked the logo, and it must have been the summer after they were in the World Series. (Did they even win? I do not know.)

Anyway, these days, the Blue Jays suck, despite the fact that they totally murdalized Boston the other day--that was painiful--and their logo is so lame now, with the angry bird and the letter J. Or is it a T? I don't know. Maybe it's both! How clever.

Ahem. So the point of this story is that I found this description of the team on stubhub kind of hilarious:

"The Blue Jays are a Toronto tradition. Their fans keep showing up to games despite the fact that the Yankees and Red Sox have been winning a lot lately. Whenever those two teams come to town, fans of the Jays get extra jazzed up and the whole community of Toronto rallies for the 'Outsiders.' This year, the Toronto Blue Jays are for real."

Mostly that last part cracked me up. The Blue Jays are "for real." (Not for fake.) Okay, so they're not in last place anymore, and they seem to always be able to beat the Yankees and the Red Sox (infruriatingly!), but this year is...not their year.

Also, I have been in Toronto twice this baseball season, and the Blue Jays were on road trips both times, so I hate them, because it is my dream to see a game in every major league stadium somehow, and they're making it really difficult for me. (I'm 2 for...30 as of this writing.)

Oh. The other thing: there were plenty of Blue Jays fans at the Rogers Center when the Red Sox were in town this weekend, but I could see and hear a sizeable portion of Red Sox nation there. It wasn't as bad as it is at Camden Yards, but... I think the Blue Jays fans might have been outnumbered.

I probably totally don't have that hat anymore, which is sad. It was fitted and all official, just like the players wore. They must have won the World Series--otherwise I'm sure I never would have even heard of them.

Did it really take 5 seasons for this?

Of course Joe can't handle the queens. Jesus Christ, you're a fashion designer--you'd best love the gays. If you're straight and a designer, you should be able to be into the drag queens and not worry that it makes you look like less of a man. Because, come on, fashion design is not the most stereotypically masculine thing in the world, so fuck it. How did he win? His sailor suit or whatever was hids. Korto should have had that for sure.

And Daniel was a turd, so I won't miss him. But I didn't like Keith either. So. Hopefully he'll be gone next week.

I have to say I kind of have a crush on Leeanne, against my better judgment. Why, you ask? Guess.

Yes. It's the totally nerdy glasses. They make me swoon. Also, she totally lampooned Blayne's "licious" fetish, so she gets big points for that. "If I hear that word one more time, I'm gonna barf. And that would be barflicious, I guess." Well done.

Oh my, that queen, LeMay, who was all, "I don't need costumes--look at this" like she was so foine. And, um, she was not. The gay boys are always like that, thinking they're the hottest of the hot no matter what. I guess it's good to have self-confidence, but...that's like dillusionally conceited.

Also, I wasn't paying attention, I guess, when Heidi introduced the guest judge, but at some point, I was like, "Holy shit, is that actually Ru Paul?" She looked like crap, you guys. That wig was a disaster--did she steal that from Tyra Banks's trash? And what is with the sunken in cheeks? What happened to you, Ru Paul?

A League of Their Own

Did Dottie drop the ball on purpose? Discuss.

When forming your opinion (or backing it up or whatever), here are two points in the movie I believe are important to keep in mind:
1. At the very beginning, old lady Dottie tells her older grandson to go easy on his little brother and tells the younger to murdalize (as my little brothers would say) his older brother while they're playing basketball.
2. Somewhere in the middle of the film we see Dottie make the exact same play: she covers the plate; the runner bowls her over, and she hangs onto the ball.

What do we make of these things? I think it's pretty significant, too, that Dottie has the ball in her bare hand; it doesn't get knocked out of her glove by the impact--her hand opens, and it rolls out. That at least looks an awful lot like losing on purpose, but there is the nagging fact that she would be letting down an entire team of women she's obviously fond of after coming back for the last game of the World Series. She came back, so the game and the team must have been important to her.

But. Is her baby sister more important?

I still don't know what I've decided. Anyone have an opinion?

Things I don't need

Who loves me enough to buy this for me?

August 2008: Worst. Month. Ever.

So I have mono. I blame Melissa and that carton of fried rice she let me finish. I totally forgot she'd had mono earlier in the spring. And apparently mono can be contagious for up to eighteen months after your symptoms are gone! MADNESS. Also, I read this thing that suggested waiting six months until you open mouth kiss someone. That's also madness. Good thing I don't have anyone around here to open mouth kiss, I suppose.

Anyway, this mono has effectively ruined my summer. I had some fun things planned for the next few weeks, and I don't think I can really do any of them. Maybe the Pirates marathon if I'm feeling up to it. But those rickety roller coasters at Canobie Lake probably wouldn't be good for my spleen. And forget that trip to see my grandparents and my baby cousin--I can't give old people and infants mono. Good grief. Though, I would probably have to open mouth kiss them all to spread it, it's better not to take chances, I'm thinking. Maybe I can see them at Christmas. Jake will be so big by then! Oh, god, listen to me, gushing about babies. But he is the cutest, you guys. The cutest.

Probably one of the worst things about this disease is that it makes you tired all the time, right, but I can't sleep. Every time I doze off, I wake up like an hour later with my mouth all dry, because my sinuses are clogged, and I can't breathe. Plus, it's hard to fall asleep in the first place because my tonsils are so swollen it hurts to swallow, and I don't know if you know this, but you swallow all the time, even when you're trying to fall asleep. Or at least I do.

The weird thing is that my doctor kept telling me "no contact sports!" I was like, "Yeah, okay, I'm not in high school; my sports playing days are over." By "no contact sports," did she mean "no sex"? Since mono is known as the kissing disease, I would think that sex would be implicitly off the table. Don't need to spell it out for me. Even euphemistically.

Jock crush!

So the Olympics are awesome, huh? Crazy baseball rules, scantily clad women... Let's talk about the latter, shall we? I finally caught some women's beach volleyball today, and oh, it was lovely. Now I have a new object of affection.
Nicole Branagh may have just blown the set for her and Elaine Youngs, preventing them from getting to the medal round, but that's ok. She is a babe.
The one match I saw her play, she did not impress me, but she made it to the Olympics so she must be pretty good.
She and her partner, Elaine Youngs, were getting kinda mouthy with each other towards the end--can you even imagine the pressure of playing in the Olympics to get into the medal round? Plus, they were playing against a Chinese team, so I bet it was crazy in there.

Oh well. Better luck next time, Nicole.