New Wave is New Again

Heard Florence and the Machine on the car radio for the first time this afternoon, and the first thought that popped into my head was that this song is the love child of Siouxsie Sioux and Adam Ant. I believe the video bears me out. Catchy. I particularly love the blue-skinned Star Trek go-go dancers. Also, the fact that everybody in the video look's like an extra from either the Tom Baker iteration of Doctor Who or Blake's 7.

Let the Bodies Hit the Floor

A postcard in the mail has informed me that the season's flu vaccines are in.

Appointments have been made, and due to circumstances beyond my control, I will be the only parent present at the ceremonial bloodletting. I hope the nurses are wearing body armor this year. I don't know how my kids got to be such weenies, but I've come to realize that when the zombies rise, they're going to be all but useless. In attempt to ward off the inevitable wailing and rending of garments, I've promised them breakfast at McDonald's and $5 a piece to spend over the weekend, but I fear that will be totally inadequate.

Maybe for the rest of the week I should secret myself in various locations and jump out ninja-style and poke them with a pin, as to desensitize them. It probably wouldn't work, but it might be amusing.

As for everyone else, if you are in a target group, get the innoculation. As per the CDC, the target group includes:

•Pregnant women
•Household and caregiver contacts of children younger than 6 months of age (e.g. parents, siblings, and child care providers)
•Health care and emergency medical services personnel
•Persons from 6 months to 24 years of age
•People aged 25 to 64 years with medical conditions associated with a higher risk of flu complications (e.g. asthma, diabetes)
 
Even if you're not in a target group, get the shot. I repeat: get innoculated. I could go into all the microbiology hoo-haw (hey, I even have a degree!), but trust me, getting a flu shot is important. Creating a pool of resistance keeps everybody healthier.  There are also people who can't, for legitimate medical reasons, have the flu shot. They are often vulnerable, and depend on an immune population. Also, the life you save may not just be your own, but the life of some poor kid whose parents are too boneheaded to get the innoculation.

What's the Opposite of Funny?

Devoted 12 minutes of my life last night to watching Running Wilde. In retrospect, that seems quite generous.

It was like someone got an old hat and filled it with scraps of paper on which were scrawled stereotypical characters, plot cliches, and over-used narrative devices, then they just started picking them out and arranging them willy-nilly on a corkboard. Then they played beer pong for several hours and rearranged them. Voila!

Will Arnett should be glad that Amy Poehler has her own show.

It's Amazing Any of Us Reached Adulthood, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Greg Garcia

Some people are going to have  problems with Greg Garcia's new Fox series Raising Hope. A lot of problems. I'm not one of them. Funniest moment from the premier for me? The car seat scene, where Jimmy (Lucas Neff) and his mother Virginia (Martha Plimpton) are driving the baby home in the new car seat Jimmy just traded for at the pawn shop. 





You know why that's funny? Because when I was a kid, we DIDN'T have car seats, hell, I don't think we even had seatbelts. You know what was the only thing standing between little jammy-clad you and a metal dashboard? Your MOM'S RIGHT ARM. That's right, your life depended on your mom's reflexes. God forbid she was trying to tune the radio or light a cigarette or was leaned over the back seat trying to break up a wrestling match between your siblings and then had to make a sudden stop. Well into high school, if I was riding in the front seat and my mom was driving, every time she stopped, her right arm would shoot out and whack me in the chest. And this was AFTER we had the new-fangled seatbelts.

Our childhoods were an obstacle course of hazards worthy of Indiana Jones. Anybody remember lawn darts? Or the Creepy Crawlies creature oven, the one that was made of super-heated metal that would literally fuse your fingers together if you accidentally touched it? How about Wacky Clackers? It was a toy you could get at Shakey's Pizza which consisted of a string with a huge solid glass ball on either end, and you would whack them together to make the most glorious noise. But still, they were GIANT BALLS OF GLASS. THAT YOU SLAMMED TOGETHER REPEATEDLY.

Which brings me back to Greg Garcia, purveyor of the visual Wacky Clacker. Garcia last graced the airwaves with My Name is Earl, which I thoroughly enjoyed, so sue me. That loopy, low-brow, poor-white-trash, Snopes-next-door* comedy is hard to pull off. Comedy is hard, but Snopes comedy is double-hard. It's a fine line between hilarious and pathetic. When you hit is right, you get Malcolm in the Middle or Roseanne, when you miss it, you get Sons of Tucson. When you miss it, it becomes brittle and mean-spirited and uncomfortable.

So far I like Raising Hope a lot. Lucas Neff is sweet and earnest, and I adore Martha Plimpton (and have ever since Goonies). Add in Garrett Dillahunt and Cloris Leachman, and there's a lot of promise there. The thing about Snopes comedy,  it's a throwback to the Three Stooges, which is a throwback to the Keystone Kops. It's the bastard child of slapstick and William Faulkner, and it's not for all tastes. But then again, neither were Wacky Clackers.


*For those of you who only know the word "snopes" from the urban legend debunking website, my use of Snopes goes back to a trilogy of novels by William Faulkner and is our family shorthand for bascially ignorant, ill-bred, trashy people. Think of the Bumpasses, Ralphie's next door neighbors in A Christmas Story.

We actually had Snopes-next-door not that long ago. The kind of people who burn their old lawn furniture in the yard, even though it's plastic. They weren't actually next door, but around the corner, so that their back yard abutted our side yard. Instead of backing out of their driveway, they would drive through their back yard into our side yard and then across our front yard to use our driveway. The S/O repeatedly accused the kids' friends of driving on our lawn until one day he came home unexpectedly and found the Snopeses actually driving their pickup truck (Snopeses always have at least one pickup truck) through our front yard. Caught red-handed, with their means of egress blocked, the Snopeses did not apologize, but merely did a donut  on our lawn and went back the way they came. Eventually they were evicted by the sheriff's department, which I imagine is an end quite a few Snopeses come to.

April Smith Should Be The Next Big Thing

In addition to "Terrible Things" featured on Weeds and on college stations around the nation, some more April Smith:

Why I'm No Fun To Watch TV With

I've noticed something recently, I'll call it the "Theory of Guest Star Relevance to the Mystery Plot," or more simply "He Did It!" Basically, if you're watching a mystery/detective/police prodecural/crime story on TV, you can accurately predict the perpetrator by their relative name recognition. You don't have to know the plot, you don't have to pay attention to clues, you don't even have to watch the damn thing, all you have to do is look at the guest stars, and realize which name is most recognizable. If this person is not the victim, they will almost certainly be the criminal.

I first stumbled upon this years ago, while watching the movie Striking Distance with Bruce Willis. Robert Pastorelli was in the credits, and he was relatively famous at the time, coming off of Murphy Brown and the American reboot of Cracker. It seemed he had a relatively minor, walk-on role, but the moment I saw him, I realized he was the killer. You werent going to have an actor with his name recognition have three lines at the beginning of the film and never be seen again. Sure enough, at the end, he did it.

Just in the last several weeks this has been borne out again and again. Brian Dennehy on Rizzoli & Isles? He did it. Lochlyn Munro on The Mentalist? He did it. Kay Lenz on The Closer? She did it.

Of course, it only spoils it for you if you're an absolute TV nerd and have some bizarre mental database of everybody who's ever been in the movies or on TV, and have assigned your own imaginary Q number to them in your head so that they can be appropriately stratified. But what kind of crazy person does that?

OMG I love This Song

I want to marry this song and have its babies. I want to sit parked at the stoplight and jam to it while people honk at me and make rude gestures. This song makes me HAPPY. I pity the fool  who does not love this song.



Cee Lo Green "Fuck You"
Uploaded by Push36. - Music videos, artist interviews, concerts and more.

Not Your Grandparent's Hawaii Five-0

People in my age group have fond memories of '70s TV, a certain stripe of '70s TV, what I call "grandparent's TV." Shows like Mannix, Cannon, Gunsmoke, Ironsides, The FBI, and my personal favorites, the NBC Mystery Movie, which consisted of Columbo, McCloud, McMillan and Wife, and a rotating fourth slot that spawned another favorite from my formative years Quincy, ME. Nostalgia TV at it's best, evocative of mac 'n' cheese, cherry kool-aid, and the faint aroma of Ben Gay.

Another one of those iconic shows was Hawaii Five-0, which has just gotten a reboot on CBS (fitting, because CBS is the ultimate grandparent's TV network. Just ask my mom, who never misses NCIS, Los Angeles because she adores LL Cool J. Proving once and for all that, yes, the ladies do love Cool James, especially the 70-year-old ones.)

I was excited for the new Hawaii 5-0. I remember the old one fondly, not so much the plots or for the acting, but for the indelible theme song, and the exotic local (exotic at least for a kid from Wyoming.) And of course for the fact that in the days before the DVR and a TV in every bedroom, you actually had destination TV, where you had to finish dinner, chores, and homework before literally gathering around the TV set. And you watched what your parents (or grandparents) watched. None of this shutting the door and reveling in the illicit and dubious pleasures of The Suite Life of Zach and Cody. Blegh.

Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed the new Hawaii Five-0. The opening sequence included a massive firefight and lots of explosions, and cameos from Norman Reedus, Bill Sadler (You sunk my battleship! Best two out of three.) and James Marsters. (Yes, my cat is named Spike, because I am a pathetic, pathetic fangirl.) Every time someone showed up, I punched the S/O in the arm and excitedly rattled off some character actor trivia. Eventually he moved out of reach. So, hey, they had me in the first five minutes.


They wisely didn't mess with the theme song, and the opening credits were very reminiscent of the old ones. Alex O'Loughlin isn't much more than a pretty piece of wood, which I guess makes him fit perfectly into the mold left by Jack Lord. That's okay, because Scott Caan has enough charisma for the both of them. Plus Daniel Dae Kim! Plus Grace Park!

The action is crisp and excellently choreographed. Sure it's over-the-top, but I like that. This is popcorn TV, not high art. Caan is hilarious. Scenery is gorgeous. I'm definitely looking forward to the rest of the season.

And since it's on CBS, it's probably in no danger of being unceremoniously canceled. (I'm looking at you, ABC -- I still haven't forgiven you for Better Off Ted and Pushing Daisies. It's only by the grace of Nathon Fillion that I don't come slash your tires and TP your house.)

Another Brick in the Wall

Kids played their first games of soccer today, on fields roughly the tempurature of the SUN. I had bench duty for kid number #5 team, since the S/O is a masochist who loves to try to get tiny demonic children all to run in one direction.

Kid #4's team lost 2-4. Kid #5's team won 5-3. By all rights, it should have been 5-1, but it's hard to get 5-year-olds to remember that you switch ends of the field at the half. So we scored more goals for the other team than they did for themselves.

The other team was diving like Portugal in the World Cup. One kid went down, untouched, and proceeded to scream until he was carried off the field. Another little girl sobbed the entire game, even when running the ball down the field. There were two kids on the other team that I swear -- I swear -- looked just like the little planitum-haired kids off Village of the Damned. I half-expected them to just stop in their tracks and start staring while all the grownups lost consciousness and dropped to the ground.

Village of the Damned was one of my favorite movies growing up. (Also loved the source novel The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham -- one of the best spec fic writers of all time). The scene that stuck with me the most was when George Sanders was in the classroom with all the children, waiting for the bomb to go off and destroy both him and the children and knowing that they can see his thoughts, so he builds a brick wall in his mind. As the time ticks off, the children start probing and the wall starts to crumble. I can remember being probably 8 or 9 and just being amazed at the elegance of the whole concept, and the execution of the scene.

At least I can rest easy knowing that those kids at soccer weren't actually telekinetic little sociopaths. Probably not, anyway. Most likely not. Well...

Postcards from the edge

Failed the Birthday Cake Test. Again. Although it was only half my fault this time. I definitely ordered marble cake, but recieved white cake. But I am heartily sorry for forgetting to mention that the hot pink trim needed to whipped cream frosting and not buttercream. Most definitley NEVER buttercream. On the upside, I'm sending the S/O back to demand a gratis cake, this time MARBLE. So we can do this all again next weekend, when child #3 come to babysit the small children while we go out for our "anniversary." Maybe we'll beg for mercy at the all you can eat Brazilian beef place and they'll let us stay as indentured servants.

Awakened from slumber this morning by child #4 (soccer games today, concurrent ones) and dragged myself out of bed, creaking. Child #4 happily offers, "Look on the bright side, you only have to do this for 30 more years!" Didn't have the heart to tell him that as this rate I WON'T LIVE THAT LONG. In fact, next weekend is looking iffy.

Bonus thought: Do you ever think The Edge walks up behind Bono, slaps him really hard on the back of the head and says, "I love you, man, but do you have to be such a pretentious git?"

Underused Word of the Day

Amaze your friends, confound your enemies, use three-dollar words when 50 cent ones will do!

Word of the day is...... farrago.

Farrago: a confused mixture of things or persons, a motley assortment. A melange, a galligaufry, a hodgepodge, a jumble.

Used in a sentence: I have a veritable farrago of excuses for why I haven't done the laundry yet, many of them semi-plausible, some illegal.

New Season Update - The Defenders

Accidentally watched The Defenders last night. Yes, you can accidentally watch a TV show, I do it all the time.

My goodness, but that was terrible. Not David Caruso terrible, but still. Just not even trying. Despite the fact that Stephen Root was in the episode. It was like you took the worst lawyer TV shows of the '70s, put them in a blender and set it on puree, then poured it into a cocktail glass. Then you accidentally dropped the cocktail glass on the kitchen floor, leaving a sticky puddle full of broken glass and out-of-date olives that you found at the back of the fridge. Then you had to quickly stop the dog from licking it up, because, man, that stuff will kill you.

But it's on CBS and it stars Jim Belushi, meaning that it will probably be on TV for eleventy-billion years.

The New Phone Books Are Here, The New Phone Books Are Here!

Pre-season hockey has begun.

Favorite random Avalanche roster name: Jason Bacashihua. Of course he won't make the final roster cut because you can only have so many goalies.

Where is Marek Svatos? I can't seem to find him.

We have remarkably few non-North-American players: two Czechs, one Slovakian, and a Norwegian. (Yay Norway!)

Looked at the October schedule and it's brutal.

I miss Peter Forsberg. :(

Terriers May Be My New Favorite Show

Terriers wasn't even on my radar, and I tuned in on whim. Didn't find out until the day afterward that Tim Minear was attached, or I would have been more enthusiastic earlier.

Terriers has a real indie movie feel to it -- the acting, the way it's shot (kind of washed out and casual), the rambling and unpredictable story lines. Donal Logue, Michael Raymond-James, Laura Allen, and Rockmond Dunbar are great. They seem like real people instead of conveniant shorthand caricatures and it's not hard to imagine that they continue to exist after the camera stops rolling. It actually plays like good serial detective fiction reads.

It feels very authentic and not at all pretentious, and it seems in no hurry to get where it's going.

Plus, the theme song is way catchy.

Random Thoughts For Today

Annie Walker on Covert Affairs drives exactly the same car as I do, except it's a different color. So technically I have a spy car. Which means I am way cooler than people realize.

It is time for the annual Birthday Cake Test. Every year kid #3 gives me specific, detailed, precise instructions for her birthday cake. I dutifully write them down, drive to the bakery, and dutifully recite them and have them read back to me. When D-day arrives, I pick up the cake and carefully transport it home. It always looks great to me, just like she asked for. But it is never, never, never right. The stripes are too thin, the trim is the wrong shade of black, the hearts are pink, not hot pink, or -- famously, once -- they mispelled her name. This of course means that I never really loved her enough and all she will have to remember is a broken, empty childhood. I have yet to successfully pass the Birthday Cake Test. Maybe this is my year!

Kid #4 has tried out for drama club and been awarded the part of a squirrel in Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. If you knew kid #4, you would realize this is blatant typecasting.

Serendipitously, I managed to escape watching the pilot for The Event on NBC. They didn't play it on our local affiliate so they could broadcast the Saints game instead. Magically, I feel no obligation to hunt down the missing episode, thus being able to remove it from the TV I MUST WATCH database. Small victories. I will pretend it wasn't happenstance, and that I actually chose not to watch it because I learned my lesson with Lost, Persons Unknown, and the Brit version of Life on Mars, said lesson being that if something sounds intriguing and mysterious, the writers will find a way to fuck it up and make you wish you'd never gotten involved in the first place.

Thank god for college radio, because regular broadcast radio SUCKS. Just found April Smith and the Great Picture Show, which is seriously, seriously cool. Sampled the new album and ordered it off Amazon. She is amazing and manages to pull together the best of every musical decade from the '20s onward (except for the '70s, which everybody knows musically was useless except for David Bowie; the late, late entry of ska/new wave; Nick Lowe and Dave Edmunds). She's like nothing else out there, and trust me, that's a good thing. You can find April Smith here.

Eureka Summer Season Finale

A lot of cyber ink is spilled dissecting "serious" TV show, i.e. The Wire, Mad Men, Battlestar Galactica. I've got nothing against serious, but I've come to a real appreciation the last few years to what might be considered the next level down from the "serious shows," what I think of in my own head as the "comfort food" shows. These are shows that make you happy just watching them, give you characters you want to spend time with. They're always well-acted and well-written, which is really a lot harder to find than you think, especially in the era of godawful reality crap and copy-catty cannon fodder.

This summer, the creative talent behind Eureka did a very smart thing. Several seasons in a lot of shows fall into a rut. Even really great shows can just start following the same grooves around the track after a while. (Burn Notice, I'm glancing your way). But Eureka rebooted with the whole alternate time/changed future arc. It could have fallen flat, but I think it really accomplished what it set out to do. It changed character dynamics, changed relationships, opened up a lot of possibilities for going in directions that wouldn't have been possible otherwise.

The best part for me, though, was the Jack/Allison relationship. I don't know why I care about Jack and Allison's relationship so much, but I suppose a lot of it has to do with the considerable charm of both Colin Ferguson and Sallie Richardson Whitfield, and their obvious chemistry. Also the fact that this has been building very quietly for the entire duration of the series, yet never veered off into sappy melodrama. (I still recall how heartbreaking it was when Jack had to fix time a couple of seasons ago and give Allison up, knowing she wouldn't remember, but he always would.)

This season, when Jack finally told her that he had been head over heels in love with her since the first moment he met her, I actually got a little teary, a little lumpy-throated.

All in all, it was a fun season, and my favorite season finale this year.

Summer Series Scorecard

Why, when I was a kid, you didn't watch TV in the summer. You actually had to go outside and do things, like dangerous bike stunts, or putting on a show in the barn. Cable TV has shot all that to hell. In addition to the returning shows (like Burn Notice, Leverage, and The Closer) there was a whole slew of new summer shows. Some of them were even -- gasp! -- on network TV. Rundown:

Haven, SciFi*: A -- Only partially through the season on the DVR, but it's one of those shows that just makes me feel all warm and happy inside.

The Glades, A&E: A -- Matt Passmore is seriously charming. Even though it's a bit like all the other crime procedural/detective shows I watch, the writing and delivery are top-notch. And there's not a bunch of side characters to drag things down.

Persons Unknown, NBC: A- -- Haven't finished it yet, but am thoroughly enjoying it so far. Either they pull it off, or it falls like a souffle when the oven door shuts. Whichever, I'll find out soon.

Rizzoli & Isles, TNT: B -- I was prepared to hate this. In fact, I don't even know why I watched an episode in the first place. For one thing, the books by Tess Gerritsen were awful, at the least the ones I read. Maybe they got better. But just hackneyed dialogue, horrible character development. Blegh. And I have a hard time thinking of Angie Harmon without wanting to kick her in the shin. So that was a lot to overcome. But really quite an entertaining show. Harmon is quite good -- and you don't know how much it pains me to say that. With the added plus of Bruce McGill who is good in anything. Falls under the category of TV comfort food.

Covert Affairs, USA: B --Very catchy opening credits/song. Enjoy the show. Piper Perabo is good at walking the line between vulnerable and badass. The only downside is that guy who used to be on Heroes. I refuse to even look up the correct spelling of his name. I just know that I hated him with the white hot intensity of a thousand incandescent suns on Heroes and nothing has washed that taste out yet. That's how bad he was on Heroes: I'm still blinded by the horror of it. I really, really hope he's a bad guy and is dispatched in some heinous way.

Good Guys, Fox: B -- Really pretty hilarious, although it never quite lived up to the first episode. Looking forward to it coming back in the fall.

Rubicon, AMC: ? -- Sitting on the DVR, staring at me. Will probably get around to it after the full season of The Closer and Mad Men, and the remainder of Haven and Persons Unknown.

That was the good -- now for the bad and the ugly.

The Gates, ABC: D+ -- The only thing that put that plus there was Paul Blackthorne. And you had vampires and werewolves and witches and succubi, but no zombies? WTF?

Memphis Beat, TNT: D -- I tried, I really tried. I wanted to like it, honest. But I actually deleted the final three episodes off the DVR, unwatched. Just to give you an idea of what was wrong with the show, two glaring problems. One, they didn't let Jason Lee do his own singing. Look, if the singing is that important, let the actor sing. If you don't think his singing is good enough, either find a way to cut the singing, or get an actor whose singing you like! Don't go the road of lip-synching. That's just a big, fat cheat.

Also, the show wasn't even fucking filmed in Memphis. It was filmed in New Orleans. Pardon? That's just stupid, stupid, stupid. If you're not going for authenticity, why base it in an iconic city? Why not just call it "Des Moines"?

Also, it made Alfre Woodard just seem annoying, which is a feat. She wasn't quirky or interesting, just breathtakingly annoying. That's not character development, that's the LACK of character development. And Jason Lee was like some know-it-all savant, like someday he'd be a grandpa on a porch, dispensing platitudes from around his corn-cob pipe. Again, NOT CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT.

Moment that made me delete the remaining episodes? Jason Lee -- whose dad was a cop and who has been a cop his entire adult life and who knows everything about cops -- finds a bunch of money cut in half in some of his dad's old books. Being totally flummoxed, he goes to a cute ADA to ask her what this means. She blithely tells him, "Oh, that means it was a crooked cop with a crooked partner. They took their ill-gotten gains and cut them in half so that neither one would be tempted to spend the money until the heat is off." She spits this out like it's the most common knowledge in the world.

And yet Jason Lee -- whose dad was a cop and who has been a cop his entire life and who knows everything about cops -- does not know this. He has no fucking clue. And you know why he has no fucking clue?? Because the writers wanted to take a shortcut and have it explained to the audience right away what the cut-up money meant. So he had to immediately run across town in the pouring rain and ask some 27-year-old prosecutor what it meant. I HATE FUCKING LAZY WRITING.

Happy Town, ABC : F- -- Why, Happy Town was so long ago now, it seems like a dream, a terrible, hazy dream from which you wake up screaming. It was so bad it was good. It was like a parody wrapped in a satire then rolled in crunchy bacon bits and soft, soft mini-marshmallows. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.... Wait, where was I?

Happy Town made no sense. It was filled with characters who made no sense, characters who made up their own slang and talked in riddles. It was like Twin Peaks, if Twin Peaks was an expensive cashmere sweater that had been put through the wash cycle on hot, dried on high, and then been thrown out into the yard and trampled by goats. It was written by mentally deficient woodchucks high on jimson weed.

On the plus side it had Amy Acker, who I'm sure still wakes up screaming.




*Yes, I refuse to use "SyFy" because that's just stupid. Forry Ackerman would be rolling in his grave.

New Fall Shows I'll Actually Watch

Caught Terriers on FX by accident. Was actually pretty good, so now I'll be forced to follow it.

Me and TV is kind of like the obscure legends about vampires being obsessive/compulsives, always having to stop to tie their shoes or button their vests. Seriously, the best way to stop a vampire who is chasing you is to throw down a few handfuls of rice, because they will be irresistiblely compelled to stop and count the grains. That is your vampire escape tip of the day.

That said, the offerings for the fall TV season look pretty anemic. (see what I did there?)

There are a few shows I'm actively looking forward to.

1) Hawaii 5-0 on CBS. This really needs no explanation. But I will add it has both Scott Caan and Daniel Dae Kim!

2) Undercovers on NBC.

3) Luther on BBCA, with Idris Elba

4) Walking Dead on AMC. ZOMBIES! An actual series about zombies! And supposedly it's good enough that it's already been picked up for a second season beyond the 6 initial episodes.

Beyond that, slim pickings. There are a few other things I might try to catch. I suppose I'll have enough to do to follow the other 40 series that I'm currently compelled to follow. Like I said, vampires and rice.

Paranoid Much?

Before I'm off to errands, I must wonder, how in the fucking hell did I get subscribed to Newsmax at my secret email address? Nobody even knows the secret email address. And someone would have to be very malicious indeed to subscribe me to Newsmax.

Luckily I haven't sidled off into paranoid dementia yet or I'd have to instruct the cat to shoot off a couple emails expressing my extreme displeasure at this obviously sinister turn of events.

And now for something completely different

Got the Margaret St. Clair anthology in the mail yesterday. Woot! Now I just have to find time to read it.

Have to find time to work. A page a day, that's what I should ask for. Not that asking for anything has ever worked out real well. I only ever got things I didn't really need, regardless of how much I thought I needed them at the time. Gah, why do I have to keep feeding the kids and paying for their education? One of them damn well better turn out not to be shiftless and support me in my old age.

DVR almost under control. Almost. My DVR queue must be some bizarre metaphor for my life, or the state of the interior of my mind, or something. It would be a waste if it didn't have some metaphorical meaning.

Away to the grocery for sprouts and a Barbie. Because nothing says "Happy sixth birthday, little girl," like an unrealistic body image and a sharp decline into sad feminine stereotypes. Whee!!