it's not just the roses that smell like poopoo

i'm so wide awake
i could balance the budget
with an abacus.



here are a few of the benignly bewildering things a person in my time zone might happen upon if she were awake and browsing her available cable television channels at, oh, say, 4:17 am:

* dweezil & lisa, a program about a couple that I for one shudder at the existence of, dweezil zappa and lisa loeb. lisa loeb, as we know, attended brown university, contributed a soul-sucking why-me whinefest of a song to the reality bites soundtrack, rode that song into the bloody ground, and then blessedly vanished from the face of the earth. and now here she is on the freaking food network, dragging poor, sweet dweezil through soho, trying desperately to keep him from noticing what a wash she is by stuffing him with pizza and tandoori chicken. it just goes to show you, kids, that knowing ethan hawke might carry you for a while, but that ivy league degree probably won't mean shit ten years from now.

* kevin mcdonald, of the kids in the hall and, more recently, invader zim, breaking up a mock fight between feuding fans of the opposing halves of outkast

* <¡destinos! in high school we were required to watch the "educational" hispanic soap opera destinos in our upper-level spanish classes. it was excruciating. i was a model student, but i was still driven far enough over the edge to hide all of the destinos video tapes (along with our spanish teacher's shoes) in a filing cabinet. i never thought anyone would ever watch this junk unless they were being forced to, so i definitely can't imagine who would be watching it on public access at four-thirty in the morning.

* zia mastatabi, who will reach his retirement goals 8 years ahead of schedule!†

* salvador dali's castle, which was fucking insane, and his friend ultraviolet, who is actually pretty normal. i want to say that it's odd that dali was chummy with alice cooper, but i don't know that much about either of them personally, so who knows. they may have been two perfectly matched peas in a comfy cozy pod.

* who is this, good charlotte? linkin park? well, some poster children of the mid-dial quasi-alternative bourgeoisie have decided that a little rough-edged animation will bolster their street cred. they are mistaken. sadly, sadly mistaken.

* here's some scary, scary, scary claymation of a knight in a furry hat and his red-haired damsel swinging in a wheat field outside of mary poppins' london. oh, no, they've been asked to leave. they'll have to sleep in that foggy field with the broken scarecrow. what, he's leaving without her? what a jerk! she'll have to wait for him at the top of that hill until the blizzard buries her alive, because god knows he ain't coming back. he's riding gleefully in a sleigh pulled by two horses made out of doilies beneath the doily moon. he wants to catch the doves, but they keep turning into soap bubbles. how tragic. i'm beside myself with melancholia. seasons by ivan ivanov-vano, apparently, if you're rapt, and how could you not be. i'm not kidding, by the way. i'm not doing this justice, it's crazy to watch.

and this wasn't televised, but flannel shirts are once again being featured for $35 a pop in the urban outfitters catalog. like no one saw that coming. please, please, in the name of all that is good and right, do not allow the fashion world to run grunge up the flagpole twice in under twenty years. eddie vedder has only just begun to heal.




† unique case, results may vary