Of course I peed myself. Man gets hit by a car, you think he has full control over his bladder? Come on!

As a general rule, I hate commercials (and thanks to TiVo, I rarely endure them) but I caught this Clearasil ad during the Emmy telecast and I actually rewound and watched it three times.  And saved it in my TiVo.  And watched it a couple of more times.  And then looked it up on the internet and watched it once or twice.  A day.  It’s that last lick to the ice cream cone that gets me every time.

In other news that can only be expressed through capslock and lack of spaces:

OMFGILEFTMYIPODINMYPOCKETANDSENTITTHROUGHTHE

WASHINGMACHINEANDITSTILLWORKS.

I have no words, only ::glee::

light 'em up, 'cause we're going down

If you know me IRL, I am sure you aware that I work for an unnamed financial institution that has recently been seized by the FDIC and sold to another, larger, less screwed financial institution.  This is not good.  Understatement!  My phone and e-mail inboxes have been inundated with queries as to my job status and future plans.  Please, take a deep breath and do not panic.  I am fine.  I will probably be fine for quite some time as mergers cannot be completed overnight, or indeed, with companies of this magnitude, in several months.  I am not out on the street just yet. Naturally, I am apprehensive about my professional future (especially since I have a non-finance job in a financial institution), but I am being proactive about resumes and cover letters and applications and such. 

Intellectually, I am fascinated with the developing stories of our financial system.  I mean, there is some mad Great Depression shit going on right now.  Think about how we have come full circle—the New Deal creates FNMA and this financial meltdown of Aught-Eight destroys it and anything else that gets in its way.  Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, Lehman, IndyMac, WaMu (and coming soon, Wachovia…spoiler!)— who knew the face of Wall Street could change so drastically and in such a short time?  We are totally living history! 

So if I'm hearing you right, you're calling me a dumb-ass

On this stupid, rainy Sunday, I’d like to introduce a new segment called, “Thanks, CW!”  Sarcasm or Sincerity:  you be the judge. 

I have come away from three weeks of the excruciatingly boring 90210 2.0 with exactly one thing: “Mama Who Bore Me (Reprise)” from the musical Spring Awakening.  Apparently, this is THE ONLY SONG the Drama Club needs to practice!  In all 57 awkwardly dance-filled rehearsal scenes!  And now it’s wedged so far into my head that it would take an earthquake to dislodge it! 

Thanks, CW!

It's like we got a contract on us. Think it's because we're so awesome? I think it's 'cause we're so awesome.

In other news: Hurrah for the Fall Television Season! It’s like everyday is Wednesday! (Wednesday is when the new comic books come out, for all you non-nerdlings.)  I am currently obsessed with:

Supernatural: The fourth season premieres tonight and I am sickeningly excited.  In my pants.  After a writer’s strike-shortened third season, I am chomping at the bit for some new episodes of cock rock-scored internecine brother-fighting with an extra-large helping of ghosts, monsters and gore.  I’m also hoping that Kripke will continue the epic battle of good vs evil mythology he has constructed.  I’d love it if, since Sam is the anti-Christ, we’ll get to meet, you know, the new Jesus.  Bonus points if it’s a newly resurrected Dean!

 

Mad Men:  I adore this show for the same reason I am so horribly in love with Friday Night Lights—most television drama wants to dazzle you with big concepts, long-winded dialogue and huge, dramatic turns of events, whereas for Mad Men the importance is in the details, the silences, in the hundreds of tiny things that make up one brilliant episode.  I am enthralled by the gorgeous (and insanely meticulous) production and costume design.  Sidenote:  Of all the bothersome elements exhibited by the characters:  sexual harassment, alcoholism, dubious business practices, adultery, etc., the one thing that horrified me the most (I gasped out loud) was when Don Draper and his family picnic in the countryside and as they pack up to leave, Don chucks an empty can of beer into the foliage and his wife shakes off all of their trash onto the grass and they LEAVE IT THERE.  Smoke, drink, cheat on your wife—sure, fine, whatever—but LITTER?  How dare you!
 

Gossip Girl:  Guilty pleasure or not, this show is one incredibly addictive treat.  The fleet, sly dialogue and over-the-top situations may not be believable, but way these teenagers act is, at times, unbearably realistic.  One of the great universal constants is that teenagers are stupid and do stupid things, care about stupid things and cry over stupid things like these stupid things are the most important stupid things in all the world.  Sure, they don’t all connive, cavort and canoodle to a popular music soundtrack, but you know if they could, they would.  Bonus:  the almost painfully homoerotic-yet-platonic male friendship between Chuck Bass and Nate Archibald.

 

Officially off my Season Pass list:  The Hills.  Heidi’s battered wife syndrome, Lauren’s vapid inanity, Spencer’s douchebaggery, Audrina’s dead-eyed fish mouth are just not enough to keep me hooked.  I am actually ashamed to watch this program.  That’s a first, you know.  I mean, I still have an episode of Hidden Palms saved in my TiVo.  Beat that!

Would you be interested in partaking of a little show of force?

From days of long ago, from uncharted regions of cyberspace, comes a legend; the legend of Goatse.cx, Scourge of the Internet, a mighty .jpg, loved by evil, feared by good. As Goatse.cx’s legend grew, unrest spread across the galaxy. On Planet Earth, a Galaxy Alliance was formed. Together with the good moderators of the internet, they maintained peace throughout cyberspace, until a new horrible menace threatened the World Wide Web—Tubgirl. Voltron was needed once more. This is the story of the super force of web explorers, specially trained and sent by the Alliance to bring back Voltron, Defender of the Internet!

As I am sure you’re aware, the internet has a long and storied history of presenting viral videos and shock sites—I’m sure you’ve seen or heard about content like 2 Girls 1 Cup and Kids in a Sandbox. Maybe you even remember being goatse’d back in 2001 (I sure do…thanks Neil!).  As far as I can tell, the basic idea is to trick unsuspecting people into viewing content that they will almost surely find disturbing and/or disgusting.   Personally, I have a weak stomach for that kind of thing and have never made it through an entire video of, oh say, girls eating poop like it’s a tasty cup of gelato.  For years, I believed that nothing good ever came out of these ridiculous links, but as it happens, I have been proven wrong.  Apparently, it is popular to record (via hidden camera or otherwise) the reactions of your friends and family viewing these unsettling links for the first time.  Frat boy shenanigans, clearly.  Not worth the time it took to upload said videos to the interwebs.  Then, as is true of every popular whatzamahoozen on the internet, the parodies arise and lo, they make me laugh for they are funny.  And also?  Not safe for work, if your work disapproves of implied puppet masturbation.

In other news, I just caught The Mangler on cable.  I remember vaguely pondering seeing the movie when it came out because as loathe as I am to admit it, I am quite the fan of Stephen King’s books/stories that aren’t part of The Dark Tower series.  The Mangler is loosely based on the short story of the same name from Night Shift which I read roughly eight thousand times between 1990 and 1997.  I am certain that I could done another five or six hundred if my copy hadn’t been this super creepy edition with cuts outs on the cover and the hand with the eyeballs on it that give me the wiggins so badly I had to hide the book in my closet so I wouldn’t accidentally see the cover in the middle of the night.  True story.  So, The Mangler.  I only TiVo-skipped over about a quarter of it, which is more than I can say for the last episode of the new 90210.   On a scale of Death Bed: The Bed That Eats to Gingerdead Man, with Death Bed being the lowest and Gingerdead Man being the second lowest, The Mangler rates a pretty solid Monkey Shines.  Not over-the-top bad enough to be truly hilarious, but you know, still terrible in its own right.

buggre alle this for a larke

As I am sure you know, I never met a book about adventure on the high seas that I didn’t love.  Since April introduced me and my father to the Bolitho books, I’ve been scouring used bookstores for tattered, dog-eared copies of installments of the series.  I was deeply involved in this book (Dick finally finds his brother—and he’s a traitor to the Crown!):

Then, I hit this page:

What the deuce?  Flip it over:

!!!  There is an ad for dirty cigarettes for filthy smokers in my awesome book!  Shenanigans!  I protest!

This is a lot of dolls…and they’re nice, you know, not super creepy at all.

As I type these words, I am sitting at my breakfast bar, faithfully watching my pot o’sweetened condensed milk, lest the water level dip. Something tells me I will be very, very sorry if a can of caramel explodes in my kitchen. Thanks to Annie and Jessica for the tip—I can’t wait to taste the end product. Though I may regret it if it is so good that I end up licking the can clean.

I know that I promised you some Red State Adventures, but on careful consideration, nothing really exciting happened. I did show up out of nowhere (seriously, I just turned up at random in a mall that my family was visiting and nearly gave my mother a coronary at the jewelry counter in Macy’s) and surprise the heck out of everyone, which was so worth the effort. My mother looks wonderful and healthy—hell, my dad seems to have borne the brunt of my mother’s illness as in the past four months, his hair has turned almost completely white. Once the preliminaries were out of the way, it was family business as usual.

I’m not sure if you are familiar with the area, but in the absence of snow for winter sports, there is all kinds of nothing to do in Nevada if you’re not a dirty hippie heading to Burning Man.  These are the more rewarding options:

1. Sunbathing:  Nevada is ALWAYS sunny.  Unfortunately, in the summer, it’s roughly 450 degrees.
2. Chain Restaurants:  Mimi’s and Macaroni Grill are the devil—evil and yet, so delicious.
3. Movies:  Always a  viable option, unless, like my parents, you like 45 minutes form the nearest movie theatre.
4. Satellite TV: You can’t go wrong with 700 channels.  No, seriously, you can’t go wrong.  I tried!
5. Find The Hipster:  This game gets harder and harder every time I visit.  where are all the indie kids hiding?!
6. Find The Douchebag Teenage Poser:  Perhaps a little too easy.  Every child between the ages of 12 and 18 in Nevada looks like he/she was chewed up and spit out by either Wet Seal, Abercrombie & Fitch or Hot Topic.  THERE IS NO MIDDLE GROUND.

Aaaaand, that’s about it.  I spent the bulk of my visit getting my ass handed to me at Texas Hold ‘Em by my card sharp younger brothers, watching BBC-America, listening to my dad wax lyrical about whichever Bolitho book he was reading at the time and eating my mother’s wonderful cooking.  Time well spent, I’d say.

shun the non-believer...shuuuuuuuuuunnnnnn

Sometimes people have too much time on their hands and do stupid things on the internet.  And sometimes, people have too much time on their hands and do BRILLIANT things on the internet:

Christian the Frog/Kermit Bale

not my fault! monkey bastard hands...

To Whom It May Concern:

I am sick and I hate you, leave me alone.  I wasted a perfectly good three day weekend languishing in bed, suffering fever dreams and tearing through kleenex by the double handful.  Beth had a Brain Candy/Rock Star party that I totally missed AND I could not attend Rira’s Gossip Girl Premiere Hootenanny.  SO STUPID.  HATE EVERYTHING AND EVERYONE.  And, my nose is so plugged up that I can’t taste anything, not that I’m eating anything but soup and bread, but still—it’s the principle of the thing.  I mean, I brewed up a big vat of hot/sour soup, filled it with a handful of ground-up super scary Mexican peppers my ex-work husband gave me and then doused it with a grip of rooster sauce and NOTHING.  You know that episode of the Simpsons where Homer eats the Insanity Pepper (and I’m not even going to pretend like I don’t know the title: El Viaje Misterioso de Nuestro Jomer)?  Yeah, like that.  Basically, that soup should have landed me in a crazy vision talking to a Space Coyote and I didn’t even BLINK.

My only solace is Hulu.  

Colbert Report: Sarah Palin for VP  (My thoughts exactly.)

Two A-Holes In A Live Nativity Scene

They also have feature-length movies that I’d be ashamed to waste a netflix on, like Master and Commander and Finding Forrester AND full episodes of tons of awesome TV shows.  God bless the internets.

Gotta dash, things happening. Well, four things. Well, four things and a lizard.

La Lechera, light of my life, fire of my loins, has introduced this newfangled drip-proof squeeze bottle, so now I can enjoy some sweetness on my strawberries without futzing about with can openers and ignoring that metallic rim taste.  Do you love sweetened condensed milk as much as I do?  I feel like it’s not as popular in the states as it is on the rest of the planet, which is a shame, although, more for me, I guess.   I discovered the true and uncontested beauty of sweetened condensed milk for the first time in Singapore.  A street vendor sold me a rolled up waffle that had been coated in butter and smeared liberally with that sugary-creamy goodness and I was hooked, now and forevermore, world without end, amen.  The taste reminded me so strongly of home—like a big bowl of corn flakes. 

Perhaps that doesn’t make as much sense to you as it does to me.   It’s like this:  the cost of living is incredibly high in Hawai’i—it’s in the top 5 in the nation.  The last time I was there, I literally gasped at the prices in the grocery store.  The issue, as I am sure you’ve gathered, is that Hawai’i is in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.  Over 80 percent of food items, both perishable and non- have to be imported, which drives up prices significantly.  At any given time, there is only a week’s worth of food in the state.  Granted, anything vaguely tropical (pineapples, mangos, papayas, guava, bananas—the good ones too, not those starchy gross ones you get here) is cheap,  but that doesn’t exactly offset the 7 bucks you’re shelling out for a gallon of milk.  This is a roundabout way of explaining that I grew up drinking powdered and evaporated milk.  I hail from a big, milk-drinking family; a gallon a day would be a conservative estimate.  Instead of half-and-half for my mother’s coffee, my grandfather would go out to the PX and buy a crate of evaporated milk which, for some reason, we also put on our cereal.  I was the sort of child who doused her otherwise healthy cereal with sugar—I wasn’t fucking around either, I would upend the canister over my bowl and pour until I couldn’t see the corn flakes anymore.  If my mom wouldn’t buy me sugar frosty flakey os, I goddamn well would MAKE them.  Then, I drowned the entire concoction in evaporated milk.  The best part was the sugar/milk sludge left on the bottom of the bowl, which is, you guessed it, pretty much exactly like sweetened condensed milk, but with little Corn Flake dregs floating around.  Mmmm, cornflake dreg-y sugar sludge.

 

Years ago, when I read Good Omens, I was fascinated by one of the character’s habits of swigging the stuff straight from the can.  This is a bad idea.   For serious.  You think you can handle the sweet attack, but you can’t.  I couldn’t and I can eat half a cake and, I’m pretty sure, a whole pie, if I tried.

Stay tuned for Ahe’s Red State Adventures.