sunday best-of blogging: the dirty issue

best mood music: pj harvey's rid of me. rowwrrr.

most equivocally dirty vacation destination: tacoma, washington, as evidenced here and here by my trusty on-the-scene double-entendre reporter, spine.

best indicator of your need to seek professional assistance in conquering your homophobia: i recently had to treat a pomeranian (a very small, very poofy dog) for a spinal injury that had left him unable to control his hind legs. the owner had kicked him after he had mounted another dog because he was ashamed of him for "acting gay." now, anyone who knows anything at all about dogs recognizes that mounting behavior* has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with the top dog asserting his (or her, because confident girl dogs will do it too) dominance over the, um, bottom dog, whatever gender it might be. it's nothing more than proving one's rank, and, while you probably want to control it to keep your dog from becoming too dominant in its dealings with you, it's far less suggestive of one's intimate nature than walking around with a tiny fluffy moppet at the end of a ribbon. go ahead, call me judgmental, but i really do believe that a person's taste in pets says ten thousand times more about that person's character than their taste in anything else. the dog is back on all four feet now, at least physically, and hopefully there's some group therapy in that man's future.

mr. winkle says, "i wufv coochie!"

best educational short or series: the senior chemistry collection put out in the early 80s by TVOntario. i caught the pieces on covalent and ionic bonding at 4:30 in the morning this past wednesday (thanks, new hampshire public television!). i paused on the channel initially because i thought monotonous chemspeak would be something comforting and familiar enough to lull me at last to sleep, but when the animation started i couldn't tear my eyes away. here's the visual offered with the explanation of the formation of a water molecule: a giant red oxygen atom with full, pouty lips and half-closed eyelids tipped by long, luxurious lashes is bouncing gently at the center of the screen. one small hydrogen atom enters from each side of the screen, grinning dully. when the hydrogen atoms spot the object of their irrepressible attraction, their eyes bug out of their electron clouds and they lunge at her, one glomming on to either side of her plump scarlet form. as they unite, madam oxygen closes her eyes and emits a satisfied sigh as her smile stretches from ear to ear. a moment later, the film attempts to explain to us why the two male hydrogen atoms can't help but struggle against their attraction for each other. as their protons and electrons lead them in a dizzying series of towards-then-away dance steps, their confused and saddened faces tell the deeper story. we believe the tale is going to end in wuthering heights–style heartbreak as the atoms retreat, defeated and ashamed, but suddenly the narrator swoops in and reminds us that the farther the atoms get from each other, the stronger their attraction becomes, as the distance overrides their repulsion. from across the room their gazes meet, and at last the two rush at each other and fuse, their eyes swirling ecstatically in their sockets. cue the bass line! i had to get up for a glass of water. no wonder they can only show this between 4 and 5 a.m.

some other things that i'd loved to have snickered at while watching this in my actual high school chemistry class:

• the non-anthropomorphized illustration of two ionically bonded hydrogen atoms looks like a pair of giant, firm, perfectly pert black breasts, complete with cherry-red nuclei for nipples.

• when the short is trying to explain how sometimes a flash of bright light is enough to break certain weak chemical bonds, they use the example of a man taking a flash photograph. the man is wearing nothing but a speedo and a leer.

best flavored lip gloss: lady licious's pussy pucker pot in "don't need no MANgo," which, in addition to being deliciously vegan and life-affirming in an "even those bitches from sex and the city couldn't rock it bachelorette style like i can" kind of way, also bears the giggle-behind-your-hand-worthy slogan, "for the tastiest lips north of the hips." the site offers all kinds of cruelty-free goodies, including vegan condoms, so now not one of you has any gosh-darned excuse. not that that will keep you from making them.

bonus quiz!

which of the following quotes were dirty in their original contexts? the answers will be published in next sunday's best-of post, so don't bother pleading with me for hints in the meantime.

1. "it smells like a wicked good pickle back here!"

2. "when we're on football, we get the best high school action around!"

3. "come on, my little femur, give me purchase…"

4. "wooooooo!!! wooo hooooooo!!! wooo—OW! oh, shit. [crashbangscuffle] OWWWWW!!!"
"are you okay? what—did you fall?"
"yeah, i'm… my leg cramped and i… forget it. whatever. yeah, i'm fine. sorry."

5. "dusty tells jennifer that if he sees her going down he is coming in after her."

6. "all right richard walsh!"
"ready to go over? knee up, take it on top. reach up ... one more time like this ... now make it tighter ... turn front, let's see it now, here we go..."
"you've got it!"
"squeeze hard ... that's it, squeeze tight ... michael, you ready?"
"ready!"
"let's do it!"
"open it up! hold it on the side, knee comes up ... over ... squeeze it tight ... point those toes..."


now, everyone wish my grandma a happy birthday! happy birthday grandma! grandma was thrown out of high school one month before her graduation because her mother had gone to the principal and told him my grandmother was secretly pregnant. (great-grandma was, by all accounts, an especially nasty woman. i never met her, myself, because she disowned my mother a few days before her wedding.) my grandmother was also married at the time, but even if she hadn't been, to refuse to let her finish her last few weeks of school because she'd been sexually active is nonsensical at its surface and reprehensible at its heart. it isn't like she was in danger of going into labor while taking a final exam; she wasn't even beginning to show. while i'm in no way suggesting that high school is a great time to start your family, if it happens, people in positions to do so should help you make the best of it, not punish you arbitrarily. bad 1950s america! but good grandma, who toughed it out and raised herself a mighty fine daughter.






* not to be confused with mountie behavior, which can be more than a little flamboyant.

a halloween love story

let me tell you about my crush on haunted fafblog. it's big. first it was so big that i had to move it from its bowl into a ten-gallon terrarium, but it kept making sad bambi eyes at me so i kept giving it one more popcorn shrimp, and after a little while of things going on like that it was so much bigger that i had to move it into the bathtub. man, were my roommates ever hopping mad, but i said, "listen, roommates, i never pitched a whizzy when your parrot ate my favorite shoes/cd/chair/book or when your rotten cat peed on my favorite fuzzy orange bath mat, so suck it up; this here's my crush on haunted fafblog, and it's here to stay! you all can wash your hair in the kitchen sink, and while you're there you might think about doing some of those dishes. hmph."

WELL, today i went to check on my crush, and guess what? it told me, "joon! JOOOOOOOOOON! i'm too big for the bathtub, you have to take me to the harbor and set me free!" and i said, "but crush on haunted fafblog, i don't wanna set you free! i wanna keep you forever and ever and ever! besides, i already pissed off my roommates for you, and i'm too stubborn and bitchy to let them think they were right!" so i built a pool for my crush in the backyard, and when it gets hungry i put on my mexican wrestling mask and hold up the japanese restaurant down the street, and sometimes i make them throw in some avo-kyu maki for me, even though i shouldn't. but if it gets any bigger i really won't be able to keep it, so i need to put some distance between me and faf until after halloween. but you should check in with him, provided you aren't scared of having to feed your own monstrous amphibian crush, and maybe you can tell me how he's doing. but don't let me look, 'cause those poor sushi chefs are positively threadbare.

get your filthy nymphette-loving hands off of my childhood!

i understand that preying on our nostalgia is sometimes how toy industry executives make their living. when my friends and i were in college we spent hours upon hours listing our favorite cartoons and toys, most of which, obviously, overlapped. not all, though; i found it interesting that, while everyone had owned about four dozen plush popple dolls, almost no one had watched the cartoon, and even though everyone had watched the smurfs regularly, i was the only one with a collection of two-inch-tall plastic figurines. maybe all that really demonstrates is that i watched too much tv and owned too much plastic crap, and i'll tell you right now that i wouldn't have needed empirical evidence to convince me of the truth in that statement. but forget that; we dragged these items up in the middle of the night because they were important to us. these characters had captivated and shaped us, we were enthralled by them, we adored and looked up to them; they were our role models.

i think they were pretty good ones, too. they saved the planet over and over, either through teamwork, mutual respect and selfless and uninhibited affection (care bears, rainbow brite, rose petal) or overwhelming inner strength and physical prowess (he-man, she-ra, thundercats). we thought of them as rock stars, either literally (what little girl didn't bounce around in front of her mirror pretending to be jem? and someone tell me i'm not the only little girl who tried to give her sister aja's crazy layered haircut) or figuratively (i think my inability to completely separate rainbow brite from cyndi lauper only enhanced my frenzied worship of both). and then there were some, like my little pony and strawberry shortcake, who just comforted us with their sweet, placid faces and fruity-powdery aromas, like being wrapped in a blanket that's still toasty from the dryer after an apple-scented bubble bath. look at them, look how warm and soothing they are:


ss image found here

ponies found here

aren't they soft and sweet and darling? couldn't you hug them until they became embedded in your chest? didn't you think it would be swell to be able to share them with your own kids someday?

yeah, you did. and so did bandai and hasbro, for a minute or two. then they thought your kids would be better off with this crap instead:




now, undoubtedly, fashion tastes change and evolve over time, and there may have been a need to modernize certain aspects of the characters. but strawberry shortcake was never supposed to represent the pop starlet next door; she was a magical baker who lived inside of a dessert. she was not a princess, or a bride, or a denim diva, and she was definitely not skinnier than a ck model. she was a little girl with freckles who liked pastries. childhood obesity is a problem, and we want kids to be conscious of their eating habits, sure, but do we want to tip the scales in the opposite direction? new strawberry lolita doesn't eat pastries. she doesn't eat anything. her elastic-waisted pants are ballooning out over her bony hips. she used to smell like berries because she had a yummy surprise for you in the oven, and now it's because she read an article that said the smell of food was sometimes enough to trick your brain into thinking you had satisfied its craving. and what have they done to my pony? i don't mind the ankle tattoo, that's kosher, you can buy rub-ons identical to the one she's wearing by the dozen, but why does she have no subcutaneous fat? if the spca came to your farm and found a real pony in this condition, they'd confiscate it and fine you. this is a pony:



it's not the same thing at all, is it? no, it's quite different really, isn't it? i think piña colada pony has even had a chin tuck and a nose job. for shame! is this why lindsay lohan turned into lara flynn boyle? (and let's not even discuss the thing lara flynn boyle has turned into.) when i thought about recapturing my youth, i meant all of it, not what was left after it was highjacked by trimspa, baby. so listen up, execs: i want my 80s icons returned to me in good health, with full rosy cheeks and thighs that are wider around than their upper arms, and i want it done promptly and with a heartfelt written apology.

at this point i would like to tip my hat to femme feral at fluffy dollars, who introduced the reappearance of these toys in the context of a larger and more serious societal problem, freeing me to discuss it on this questionable and self-interested level.

sunday best-of blogging: the family/unfamily issue

best $10,000 wedding theme:



this trounces any wedding i've ever heard of, including the spectacle a friend of mine witnessed where the couple rose up through the floor in a glass box to the theme from rocky and the plan shane koyczan and i came up with to perform all of our vows as charades. and look, there are accessories:



it'd almost be enough to make me want to go through with it, if i didn't know better; $10,000 is a hefty sum, and i can think of a lot of things i'd rather set it aside for. i can't really see the point of ostentatious weddings. i mean, marriage should be something that you enter into strictly for the sake of yourself and the person you're marrying, right? why the need to put on a big show for other people? i feel like weddings are how couples prove to other people that they're in love, but if all the right reasons for getting married are really there, you shouldn't need the bells and whistles. maybe if i met someone who'd let me have hello kitty and the charades . . . maybe not. i wouldn't eat that cake, anyway.

best song to abandon someone at the altar to: "in a big country" by big country.

best reason to live with toadie until my dying day: she gives the most amazing gifts. look at this stuff:





fun! and then there was a mag-mirror compact with this on the lid:



the "ride with hitler" thing is sort of an inside joke; when the united states was making its first baby steps in the invasion of iraq, i got into an argument with my dad (a two-term busher, which he is, at least, less proud of now than he was a year ago, though i can't say he's truly repentant) about the premise of confiscating weapons of mass destruction. my argument was that i was nearly completely sure we were never going to find any such things in iraq. my father started out calmly enough by telling me i was a callow and idealistic pinhead, and he finished up by throwing something possessing a significant amount of mass across the room and shouting that people like me would have let hitler take over the entire planet. i was a bit taken aback by this. i knew there had been a lot of hitler references and comparisons being bandied about by the gung-ho wingers, but i hadn't expected my own flesh and blood to be suckered by them. we got into a lot of knock-down political brawls about bush leading up to and throughout the first four years, but this was one of the worst. it was also one of the last of the truly ghastly battles, though, since i was completely right, and because since then bush has managed to do nothing right for this or any other country. my dad voted for him initially because he didn't want gore to foster an era of Big Government, and he voted for him again because he thought he would Safeguard the Nation Against Terror . . . . well, the ridiculous "if you won't invade iraq, then you *heart* nazis" debate is one of my favorite wounds to tear open and rub salt in whenever i find myself watching the news with my dad. he's never out-and-out apologized, because that wouldn't be his style, but his new politics-related silence speaks volumes.

holy sidetracked, batman. anyway, toadie gave me these wonderful things and a red vinyl Devil Bear wallet, and she wrapped all of them in faux-mexican wrapping paper featuring icons like El Roadside Santa and La Unconscionably Cute Duckie. i wuv her, even if her parrot does eat my chairs and wake me up with his shrieking every morning.

best thing about the einstein doll featured above: you can take all of his clothes off to reveal more clothes, which you can not take off. under the pants and sweater, albert is wearing another pair of pants and a white undershirt—FOREVER. his sweater is very well-made, by the way, and something i wouldn't mind wearing myself. did you know einstein was only 26 when he broke his relativity theory? it's okay, i've still got time to one-up buddha and/or jesus.

best reason for my subtle* canadian accent: it's an insupportable theory, of course, but i tend to blame the accent on the outlandish quantities of you can't do that on television that i ingested as a child. my frequent lapses into southern and irish accents are much harder to explain, but i've stopped worrying about them. i ams what i ams.

best reason** to stick your tongue out at the parents television council:

We were alarmed to find that the three worst shows on prime time broadcast television are being marketed as family-friendly when, in fact, these shows are none other than wolves in sheep's clothing.

Families should not be deceived. The top three worst shows all contain crude and raunchy dialogue with sex-themed jokes and foul language. Even worse is the fact that Hollywood is peddling its filth to families with cartoons like The Family Guy and American Dad. These two shows have contained scenes in which characters are shown having sex and topics such as masturbation, incest, bestiality, and necrophilia are routinely discussed.

There are several high quality shows on this list that families can watch together and not be caught by surprise over filthy dialogue or graphic sex and violence. However, it is clear that Hollywood does not care about families as evidenced by the fact that we could only cite nine shows on prime time that were deemed safe for family viewing. That is outrageous. Network executives should be ashamed and millions of families should be offended at their actions.

you're right, parents television council, hollywood doesn't care about families. hollywood cares about money and ratings, because that's its job. millions of families probably would be offended by its actions, if they weren't so busy providing it with money and ratings. how about instead of spending hours and hours watching all of these evil, smut-peddling, rakishly irreverent programs just so you can shake your finger at their producers once a year, you turn off your fucking televisions? i would like to remind you at this point that britney spears and christina aguilera, two of the foulest little strumpets i've ever laid eyes on, made their debut on the cloyingly family-friendly mickey mouse club, so maybe "more 7th heaven marathons" isn't the answer after all. but what do i know? i'm just a freak with a red vinyl jacket who likes to get drunk while watching adult swim, whose new sunday lineup is to die for, by the way, which brings me to my final item:

best newfound reasons to be a goofy child instead of have one: squidbillies and 12 oz. mouse. awwww yeah.



* it's subtle overall, but my oots and aboots can be glaring at times. i have no theory as to why the accent is more pronounced on some days than it is on others.

** second best reason: it's parents' television council, you twits.

it's good! it's good!

i have very shamelessly stolen this capote still from rotten tomatoes, and they can punish me however they'd like; i stole it, and i'd steal it again, because i am so enamored of philip seymour hoffman at this moment that it is chewing a ragged and soon-to-be septic hole in my swirly girly guts.

he. is. AMAZING. there's nothing he can't do. i think if a role required that he spin straw into gold while breathing underwater through gills he'd engineered the genetic mutation for himself using nothing but a plasma lightning ball, an easy-bake oven and a can of tuna fish, if he liked the character enough, he'd just fucking find a way, because he's that hardcore. the first time he really knocked me on my ass was when i saw todd solondz's happiness, and he's never given me any reason to try to get back up. i'd pay ten dollars to spend two hours watching him drool in his sleep.

everyone in this movie is good, but it's called capote for a reason; the other characters only exist as surfaces for him to bounce himself off of or gaze at his reflection in, and this effectively brings home the idea that that's exactly how the actual capote felt about the people in his life. manipulative, narcissistic, calculatingly ambitious--these are the adjectives the viewer will most strongly attach to him, and there won't be many positive ones to balance them out. so what? i already knew everything i needed to know about the man; i went to see a movie, and there's nothing better in a movie than an accurate and unapologetic portrayal of a questionable human being. hoffman loves these flawed individuals, he rolls them all around his mouth until he's found every earthy undertone and hint of citrus, and man, when he's got it, he's got it.

i'm at the point where i'm likely to start echoing my previous gushes in similarly worded circles, so i'm going to stop here by giving it both thumbs and all of my toes way up. if you see it, tell me what you think, and if you see philip seymour, tell him to call me.

how old is leon kass?

kieran healy at crooked timber has posted a piece on the bizarro stance of leon kass, chairman in the president's commitee on bioethics. while some are blaming the dismantling of our once-great nation's ethics on same-sex lovin', and still others are blaming it, as ever, on fox, kass has finally had the balls to stand up and point the finger in the right direction: at the emergence of females from their chastity belts and chin-high victorian bodices.

The supreme virtue of the virtuous woman was modesty, a form of sexual self-control, manifested not only in chastity but in decorous dress and manner, speech and deed, and in reticence in the display of her well-banked affections. A virtue, as it were, made for courtship, it served simultaneously as a source of attraction and a spur to manly ardor, a guard against a woman’s own desires, as well as a defense against unworthy suitors. A fine woman understood that giving her body (in earlier times, even her kiss) meant giving her heart, which was too precious to be bestowed on anyone who would not prove himself worthy, at the very least by pledging himself in marriage to be her defender and lover forever.

aaahhhhh, the good old 1820s. they don't make dames like they used to, that's for sure. i don't know even one who's interested in being protected from her own desires, and clearly that's the source of global warming--all those flushed and sweaty ladies exposing their hot, pink, musky skin day in and day out, without waiting or even caring to be sufficiently wooed.

well, stop it, girls! you're ruining everything! drop out of college, cover up your ankles, stop looking men in the eye and seal up your vagina with bedding epoxy; it's not just for your own sake, it's for the sake of america.

27 is not a number that brings you sesame street.

welcome! you have opened the tiny paper door to the first day of my most important fiscal advent calendar, that counting down my twenty-seventh year.

ever since high school, i have viewed this particular age with overwhelming dread and superstition, due to the tendency of my role models to keel over and feed the tree once they'd reached it. the most damaging was, of course, kurt cobain, who had made his appearance just as i was starting to really pay attention to those things, and who affected all sorts of stuff in my life, directly and indirectly. i bought my first issue of sassy because he was on the cover, and that magazine induced more formative changes in me than almost any other source i can think of. i actually still have all of my back-issues for the period between that first one and august 1994, when the magazine was taken over by the editors of ym and achieved a previously unthinkable level of suckiness. nirvana and pearl jam were the first bands in what became a long line that changed the way i listened to music, and that changed all of my social interactions, and now i'm me, and i'd like to say thanks to kurt but he died at twenty-seven. and so did jimi hendrix, and janis joplin, and jim morrison and kristen pfaff (i would still beat courtney love to death with a can of beans if i ran into her in the supermarket, but i felt okay about hole in the beginning) and i thought shannon hoon, but he was actually 28 . . . anyway, the number lodged itself in my subconscious as a literal do-or-die hurdle, and i've never been able to think of it as anything but ominous. every time one of my friends reached it, i threw a little salt over my shoulder and lit a candle while facing east at the subject's exact time of birth. no, i didn't, but i did write a long message in each of their cards asking them to please be extra careful for the next twelve months, and to not do drugs or handle live ammo if they could help it. no one's succumbed yet. i suppose it might help that none of them is a rock star in anyone's eyes but my own.

so, now it's me, and i'm no rock star, either, but it feels very strange, especially since i'm currently finalizing plans for my first-ever overseas voyage, and the person i'm traveling with is also twenty-seven. maybe we were supposed to be rock stars and somehow went astray, and now the muses will take their revenge for our negligence. no, i'm just batty. but if around the middle of december you realize you haven't heard from me in a couple of weeks, um, rock on, my bitches. rock on.

i love it when i'm right.

so, i just got back from mirrormask, and it was all of the dreamily abstract things i'd hoped it would be. it is geared towards the young ones a bit, so don't go if you're apt to be disappointed by a lack of challenging subtext, but if you can shush your insistently adult and analytical mind for about an hour and a half you'll be enchanted. the things neil gaiman and dave mckean absently ponder while they're brushing their teeth must make my most outrageous hallucinatory escapades look like 1950s hygiene films. lucky bastards. don't read any further if you'd rather not know more about the movie than you already do, but for the rest of you, here are the three moments that most made me tap my toes on the floor and grin big as a five-year-old faced with a wading pool full of gumdrops:

1. helena, the main character, spends most of the movie in an angular, rust-colored cityscape whose streets are crawling with sphinxes in the place of stray cats. the sphinxes are very much like cats, temperament-wise, but have lurid paper-mask man-faces and rainbowy wings, and speak with classy london accents. at one point a group of them gathers at her feet and demands cake. they look up at her, all cat even with their flat people eyes, and very calmly say exactly what any cat, and certainly my cat, would say in this situation: "hungry." half the audience died laughing, presumably the half who have shared their homes with cats.

2. helena (for reasons i probably shouldn't disclose, in case you're thinking of taking my very good advice and going to see it for yourself) finds herself in a room filled with hexagonal clock-topped boxes. these things

pop out of them and proceed to sing the most brilliantly, chillingly gorgeous version of the carpenters' "close to you" that one could ever hope to hear. i already miss it, in fact, and will probably end up buying the soundtrack just for its sake. the scene reminded me of the bit in legend where the shadow-girl dances lily into that fabulous black dress. i didn't want to go to my prom, and when my friends tried to coax me into it i told them that i would go if and only if they found a way for me to do it wearing that dress. so, i spent a fulfilling spring evening watching a friday the 13th marathon on usa and trying (in vain) to make s'mores in my living room with hershey miniatures and a yankee candle. neither here nor there.

3. this one's special on a just-for-me level, but i can tell you, because it's okay for us to have secrets: helena falls through a hole in the floor and lands in the middle of a circle of creatures of indeterminate anthropoid origin. she tells them her name, and they respond just enough for her to understand that there are about a dozen bobs... and one malcolm. when the shadows come for her, someone flies her to safer ground—and it ain't bob.

why do birds suddenly appear?

good night, my darlings. because you're good babies, and because you like me too, dream something you didn't know you could dream.

sunday best-of blogging: the food issue

best album to eat cold, messy, saucy noodles to: the lemonheads' it's a shame about ray*.

best vegan** cookies: liz lovely's cowgirl cookies, no contest. i used to be able to buy these at the co-op down the road, and then i had to go to a different branch of the same co-op in central square, and then the only place to get them was a tiny natural-foods store all the way back in worcester, which i couldn't get to at all after i gave up my car unless i made the two-hour trip by commuter rail… so for a long time i have had no cowgirl cookies, and let me tell you, it's been a downer. the flavor had expanded in my memory into something mythical and life-saving, the cookie that would result if the batter were slowly churned by faeries inside of the holy grail while a greek chorus of sirens sang cocteau twins songs in the background. in other words, they was yummy. and i missed them.

but now they have returned to me! or at least, for the cost of shipping and handling across a state line they can be persuaded to return to me, because liz lovely has finally decided to offer direct mail orders. that means you can try them too, and i recommend that you do. if there were a way for me to enforce it i would insist, but i'll have to leave it up to your best judgment this time.

best food fact i never would have thought of, but that makes perfect sense to me now that i do think about it: a cucumber is a gourd. see? it's weird for a second, but then it's not.

best reason not to pass H.R. 3824: in order to get to the reason, i have to first exemplify my argument. hang in there for a minute, okay? this won't take so long.

fifty percent of peru's economy depends on brazil nuts. because of their importance, the country passed legislation protecting the trees, but, unfortunately, none protecting the surrounding flora or fauna. this is unfortunate for all sorts of reasons, but especially because brazil nut trees are only able to grow in undisturbed forests, a fact that no one was aware of until people started clearing what they thought of as extraneous plant life away from the trees in an attempt to give them access to more space and soil. the assumption was that the trees would spread and thrive, the way most crops do when allowed free reign of a designated space, making for a larger and more profitable brazil nut harvest. but no, my lovelies, that was not what happened; the trees in areas of swept ground failed to bear any fruit at all. hmmmm, people thought, what's happening here? so they went back to the intact forests to find out what they had missed, and here it is:

the Euglossine, or orchid, bee is native to and prolific in brazil nut forests. the trees are cross-pollinated by the bees (primarily the females), the only insects able to work around the curled stamens of the trees' flowers. in addition, the male bees are essential, and almost exclusively responsible, for the pollination of the numerous species of orchid that grow throughout the forest. in turn, the orchids are every bit as responsible for the bees' survival: the females are drawn to the males only when they are coated in the pollen of one particular type of orchid, the gongora. without the flower's one-of-a-kind perfume, the girl and boy bees pass right by one another without pause, like so many asexual ships in the night. so when people attempted to create brazil nut pastures free from all other plant life, they eliminated the orchid bees from the ecosystem and made life impossible for the one crop they'd been trying to promote. because a significant amount of the rainfall in the peruvian forests is generated by the trees and the atmospheric impact of their dense leaf canopy, plants and animals that depend on water from surrounding rivers and flood runoff are threatened by changes in the amount of precipitation; when the trees aren't pollinated and able to propagate themselves, the rainforest breakdown ultimately extends for miles beyond the trees themselves.

the disappearance of one wildflower from an area of a few thousand acres can disrupt, maybe even devastate, the functional balance of an entire rainforest, and the loss of a rainforest can cause irreparable damage to climates across the globe. but no one knew that that flower mattered until it started to disappear. so why save condors, manatees, otters? why save lichens and clovers and shrubs? because we have no idea what will happen if we don't, but it's in everybody's best interest to assume that the absolute worst will happen and take every possible precaution against it (i have said this OVER and OVER and OVER so many times that a) i'm sick of myself and b) there's a worn, shiny, bloodstained spot on the wall here next to my desk where i've spent countless into-the-void hours banging my head). the balance is unimaginably fragile, and its elements are connected by hair-thin threads that we should know to want to keep intact. we should know it. that's my best reason not to pass H.R. 3824—if we, as a species, could sublimate our ego enough to think objectively about the idea, we'd see instantly how completely brainless it is. it should be dismissed out of hand on the grounds that infinite narcissism is not an admirable trait in any human being, let alone an entire nation of them.

bad house of representatives! you've broken my heart, and believe me, it was not crying out for another breaking.

best engrish: ban chiang, a thai restaurant on centre street in jamaica plain, has put a large, colorful, eye-catching sign up in its front window that proudly proclaims, "YES!!! we're delivery!"






* this is also the best album to shower and clean kitchen surfaces to, but, ironically, not the best album to clean the bathroom to.

** blogger's dictionary doesn't recognize this as a word. that's discrimination, and i won't stand for it***.

*** yes i will. i love you, blogger, i just wish you could accept me for who i am. *sniff*

*gasp* NO!

it can't be true. it really can't. or at least, i can't believe it could be true, but...

is that a leprechaun riding my wish‐granting unicorn's back?

the new yorker, august 29, page 36, paragraph 2, line 17:

The liberal guests fall into a few subcategories: "center left" opinion journalists (Hewitt considers himself "center right"), such as Peter Beinart, the editor of The New Republic; "'way left" bloggers, such as Matthew Yglesias, who calls himself "A Proud Member of the Reality-Based Community," and who also writes for The American Prospect; and, more rarely, people with supposedly non-ideological jobs with mainstream news outlets.

i guess if i'm willing to accept their "coöperate"s, then i ought to accept their insistence on italicizing semicolons immediately following other italicized text, as they've done above, instead of keeping them consistent with the main font. i ought to, i know—but it's harder to do than you think. never mind that, that's just me being neurotic and obsessive; what i really want to draw your attention to is that apostrophe before the word "way" in "way left." isn't it odd? doesn't it seem utterly out of place and unfounded and, well, wrong? what is it up to, anyhow? is "way" short for something in this context? is there a history to the slang that i'm unaware of that makes that punctuation appropriate? i'm really asking, because if not and it's just a bizarro error, then i'm going to run out into the rainy leaf-strewn street and do me some jigging.

i will OWN YOU, finder! i will rule you with my iron, blue-pencil-wielding fist!

unless i'm completely mistaken, in which case i will continue to sit here quietly and proofread soap opera plot summaries on a volunteer basis.

update, 10/15/05: the "'way" appears to be deliberate, as it's written again in the same manner toward the end of the article, so i'm not doing any jigging; i am, however, hopping up and down on one foot with a fiercely defiant look on my face, because i can't think of any reason to include that apostrophe aside from a belligerent and snobbish refusal to accept mainstream slang, even when its usage is confirmed in reputable dictionaries. all i can think of is that "way," in this adverbial sense, is assumed to be a shortening of "far away." in that case the apostrophe may have been called for at some point in the distant past, but i vehemently reject it now, on evolutionary grounds. i think this is probably the first time i've ever said this, but, for pete's sake, new yorker, get over yourself.

my body is wicked smaht

for the past two weeks, i have been suffering from shockingly intense chocolate cravings. i yearn for it all the time, and i'll take it any way i can get it--ice cream (well, the non-dairy equivalent thereof), cookies, beverages, flavored lip gloss; i am the quintessential junkie. this is unlike me on a couple of levels. one, i've never cared all that much for chocolate; i mean, i don't hate it or anything, but when it comes to cravings i've always been a salty-snack kind of girl. two, i'm a mild-mannered individual with no prior evidence of an addictive personality. true, i smoked menthol cigarettes for seven years, but i never smoked more than six a day, and when i decided it was time to quit, i quit. just like that. i chewed nicorette gum for a few days and found it decidedly unpleasant, as much because of its disgusting peppered-creamsicle flavor as the havoc it wreaked on my misaligned right temporomandibular joint, and i donated the remaining 80 pieces or so to a friend who was also trying to quit. i never relapsed; nicotine, one of the most addictive substances on the planet, i shrugged off like so much nothing. but lately when i don't eat any chocolate during the day, i wake up at two o'clock in the morning with the shakes and start digging at the kitchen counter with my thumbnail in the hopes of scraping up some tiny amount of residue from the cocoa powder i finished off three days ago. what the hell?

what i suddenly realized is that the onset of the cravings falls in line nicely with the time it first began getting dark before i made it home after work. i may not have a history of addiction, but i do have a history of seasonal affective disorder (SAD--what a punnily apropos acronym), my symptoms ranging from mild anxiety to profound depression; in my third year of college i stayed in bed for an entire month--from october to november. there were additional precipitating factors that year, and things wouldn't have gone as badly without them, but the transition from summer to fall is always a difficult one for me to make.

i knew, because i researched it pretty thoroughly while in school, that the main neurotransmitter involved in SAD is serotonin. it's involved in a number of mood-related interactions in the brain, and its levels tend to drop when an individual isn't routinely exposed to full-spectrum light, like sunlight. well, guess what i found out?

The combination of sugar (carbohydrate) and saturated fat in chocolate also produces a neurotransmitter called serotonin that acts as an opiate or sedative in the brain--kind of like antidepressants. Small amounts of chocolate will produce serotonin, however, binging on chocolate can cause the serotonin to rise to almost a sedative effect and then crash. This type of effect might cause an addictive response for more chocolate in pursuit of elevating the serotonin.

awwww, what a good body i have! she's been trying extra-hard to stabilize me and keep me safe and happy, and my despicable lack of willpower sent her into a flaming tailspin of insatiable choco-desire. but no more; now that i understand her motivation she and i should be able to glide through our days almost as though we shared one brain. and i do mean "almost"; i'll never understand why she keeps kicking the inside of my left ankle like that when she walks. but i think this is a pretty solid start.

mirrormask

mirrormask is opening nationwide any second now, and it's already playing in a lot of independent theaters, so get off your butt and buy some tickets already. hell, you probably don't even have to get off your butt until you actually leave for the theater, and you can sit back down on it the second you get there, so you've got absolutely no excuse not to see this movie. neil gaiman, dave mckean, jim henson studios--how could you go wrong? you couldn't, that's how, so watch the trailer, thank me profusely for the tip, and, for the love of all that is holy, stay away from that evil fake butter.

i win! i win!

nothing makes me happier than finding a typo in the new yorker, mainly because there are typically no such things; it's like finding a four-leaf clover in a hundred-acre meadow, or a bit of karl rove's soul that isn't putrid and black. today my wish-granting unicorn has taken the form of a failure to insert a space between the end of one sentence and the beginning of the next. hooray! i mark this day with a white stone.

august 22 edition (yes, i'm ashamed of how far behind i've fallen), page 70, paragraph 2, line 6:

. . . gets them wrong."The bullshitter's. . .

BAM! bitch went down.

sunday best-of blogging

most thinly veiled inappropriate comment: a coworker went out of his way to tell me how much he liked my outfit on monday. my outfit was exactly the same as every other outfit i've ever worn, except that the pants were tighter. this same coworker once told toadie, on a day when she was wearing an especially fitted shirt, how much better it looked than the "sacks" she usually wore. poor guy. he tries.

most porn-star-licious pet name: baby seemore, and yes, that is the actual spelling, but hold on to your hats, kids, because it gets better: baby is a little white dog who was brought to the hospital because he was vomiting, and when the doctor asked if he might have gotten into anything, the owner said he had been known to eat lotion and vaseline.

best forgotten bit of dane cook trivia: i seem to be the only person on earth who remembers that several years ago the cookster was chubby and doing promotional spots for the crocodile hunter on animal planet. this is a shame, because they were as funny as anything else he's ever done, and he's a damned funny guy. there's no need to worry about him not receiving proper recognition, though; every spot won an award while it was airing (you'll have to scroll down a ways for the evidence). i, personally, treasure their memory the way i do jon stewart's mtv stand-up appearance and file them similarly under the heading, "moment birds first suddenly appeared."

best gesture of selfless and unpremeditated affection: a man was walking with his dog when the dog suddenly sat down and began to struggle fruitlessly to scratch a spot that it couldn't quite reach, directly behind its right ear. the man, who had gotten more than a few steps ahead of his dog before he realized it had stopped walking, turned around, ran back to it, and scratched the bejeezus out of his dog's head. when he and his dog were satisfied, they gazed adoringly at each other for a moment and then went on their way.

best rescue of a cherished philosophy: the winners of the nobel prize in physics were announced on tuesday. roy j. glauber of harvard university won half the prize for his work demonstrating how the particle nature of light can affect its behavior, and john l. hall and theodor w. haensch shared the remaining half for other work that can be used to refine the precision of laser optics. now, the first article i read said this:

Hall, 71, of the University of Colorado, and Haensch, 63, of the Ludwig-Maximilian-Universitaet in Munich, won "for their contributions to the development of laser-based precision spectroscopy, including the optical frequency comb technique." Their research determined the color of light at the atomic and molecular level.

oh, this upset me. this upset me terribly, because one of my favorite ideas in atomic physics, and in general, is this, from werner heisenberg's on the history of the physical interpretation of nature:

according to democritus, atoms had lost the qualities like colour, taste, etc., they only occupied space, but geometrical assertions about atoms were admissible and required no further analysis. in modern physics, atoms lose this last property, they possess geometrical qualities in no higher degree than colour, taste, etc. the atom of modern physics can only be symbolized by a partial differential equation in an abstract multidimensional space. only the experiment of an observer forces the atom to indicate a position, a colour and a quantity of heat. all the qualities of the atom of modern physics are derived, it has no immediate and direct physical properties at all, i.e. every type of visual conception we might wish to design is, eo ipso, faulty. ...the knowledge of the colour of a body is only made possible at the expense of the knowledge of the atomic and electronic movements within this body.

an observable macroscopic body possesses a nature entirely different from the individual natures of its microscopic parts, and even that observed nature exists only at the insistence of the observer, and according to his or her enforced parameters. light can have color, based on the arrangement and movement of the photons making up the stream, but the photons themselves don't exhibit any such properties in any honest sense. we inflict a nature upon the objects around us, rather than truly understanding the full inherent nature of those objects, because that's the most our senses allow us to do. you can have the sum or you can have the parts, but you can't have it all simultaneously. of course, the idea of simultaneity is the subject of a different debate, one that i'll spare you today. my obscure point is that i adore this idea, that our most strongly supported knowledge is still at some level inference and supposition, because it keeps me, personally, humble and grounded. we can do the best we can do and that's all, even if it's never the best that can be done. i also think it's a great argument for not attempting to greatly alter or constrain naturally occurring phenomena, because there isn't a way to grasp the fullest full extent of your actions.

*whew* so, hearing that some men had determined the color of light at the atomic level made me very sad. it made me so sad that i couldn't accept it and went rummaging through the internet looking for some facts to refute it with, and, as it turned out, i didn't have to look at all far. differently, probably more appropriately, worded versions of the same article said this:

"...John Hall and Theodor Haensch share the other half of the prize for their development of laser-based precision spectroscopy, that is, the determination of the colour of the light of atoms and molecules with extreme precision," the assembly said in its citation.

"The important contributions by John Hall and Theodor Haensch have made it possible to measure frequencies with an accuracy of 15 digits," the assembly added. "Lasers with extremely sharp colours can now be constructed and with the frequency comb technique precise readings can be made of light of all colours."

that's better. the color of the light of atoms is quite different from the color of atoms. a photon is an energy-carrying particle emitted by an atom, so an atom can give off multiple photons that could collectively create light that was observed to be of a given color, while the atom itself was still free of any such characteristic. and i can carry on in my own private, gloriously unknowable idaho.

best collection of high-quality, easy-access shirley q. liquor sound clips: thank you, k.r. wilson kirkpatrick! shirley's section is at the bottom of his page. he doesn't have "the 12 days of kwanzaa," and that's sad, but if you play "hamsters" and "the white woman song" back to back, you'll cheer right up. please take the boy's advice and download these to your computer if you're going to listen to them multiple times, so the site can continue to function and we can all bask in ms. liquor's garishly eyeshadowed glow.

catchiest line in advertising: "want incredible entertainment experiences in your lap?"

some notes on neglect

i've been especially busy this week, and some suffering has resulted from it. the most tragic victim is undoubtedly my little cat; i do all i can to keep her purring contentedly, but sometimes i have to move around, and being forcibly ejected from my lap seems to make her want to die. lately, whenever she feels neglected, depressed or overwhelmed, she trolls the kitchen baseboards looking for tiny bits of rubbish that she can eat in a bizarro ritual of kitty purification. no matter how many times i interrupt her or how hard i try to distract her, she isn't finished until she decides she's atoned fully. it's like internal self-flagellation. here are some of the glossy cracker-jack prizes she expelled this morning:

• a fragment of the serrated edge of a foil cereal-bar wrapper
• a piece of stained wood, two or three millimeters in length
• brown paper from a grocery bag
• fur
• human hair
• green vegetable matter, possibly broccoli florets
• the plastic tab from a clothing tag

note the complete absence of any substance resembling cat food. now, she does eat, i see her doing it. it seems that she's found a way to time her scavenging around periods when her stomach is empty, so that she regurgitates only those objects that are meant to bring tears to my eyes. evil, evil girl. i have tried on countless occasions to explain to her that i, too, would give anything to be able to lie around in bed with her all day every day, but she won't believe me. cats. what can you do?

my own diet has taken a turn for the worse, as well. i've been eating mostly cookies, tortilla chips, chocolate and faux deli meats. my hair is falling out at an impressive rate, probably due pretty heavily to the fact that i've been every bit as bad about taking my vitamins as i've been about eating balanced meals, but when i got on the scale today i found that i'd lost two pounds. not what i would have expected; maybe it's just what i've lost in hair. i did manage to get to the market yesterday and am currently enjoying a very yummy dinner of baby carrots, bell peppers, baba ganoush and marinated tofu, so things are starting to look up.

i've punished you, too, my darlings, and don't think it isn't gnawing away at my very bones. i miss you when i'm gone, and i'm grateful to those of you who continually check up on and nag me. some of you have expressed some concern about my failure to comment on malcolm gladwell's most recent new yorker piece on the ivy league's admissions process; "joon," you asked, your voices tremulous with adorably sweet concern, "you and your secret boyfriend aren't having problems, are you? don't tell us the magic has begun to fade!" and of course you should never have got yourselves all worked up about an idea as silly as that, my little chickens. contrariwise, it simply took me an extra-long time to finish the article because i had to keep stopping to hug it. but i've read it twice now, and i'll discuss it soon. in the meantime, if you get a chance to read it and have comments to make, please feel free, and i'll try to address as many of your points as i can. unless, of course, your comments are negative, in which case you will be hated and shunned. no, not really. well, maybe. it'll depend on whether or not i've had my coffee yet. forget that, though; you should never let my limitless potential for irrational nonsense keep you from speaking your mind. i sure don't.


postscript, 11:22 p.m.: speaking of irrational nonsense, can i just tell you how much i wish the show numb3rs were a boy so i could make out with it? A LOT. the only math major i knew in college was a girl, and even if i had wanted to venture down that path, she was in a very committed relationship. besides, she never wanted to talk about math when we were together. i think i need to start spending more of my free afternoons on the MIT campus. why were all of my math and physics professors so skittish and curiously odored? *pout* i got robbed.

lsz, you watch this show; did you think of me when charlie got an anonymous love note from someone who was a big fan of his work and his hair? because i thought of you, you afro-dreamin' kook.

on harriet miers

so, conservatives hate her, the rnc is touting her as the second sandra day o'connor, and she appears to have taken a firm stance in support of the rights of homosexuals (in the past, at least; who knows what she'll say about it tomorrow). i should be happy about all of these things, and mostly i am. but the conservatives who are opposed to her feel the way they do in response to not only her evil moderate tendencies, but also to her lack of experience and, seemingly, professional motivation. and even if i did have substantial evidence that there was more behind this nomination than her eerie rock-star-crush adulation of gw, do any of us really want someone who uses this many exclamation points making decisions that will affect any part of our lives?

when i find out who's actually behind that pink monster, i'm going to buy him or her the totally bestest pony ever.

!!!

hey, bandwagon, wait for me!

i've begun to feel aimless and a bit resentful of other more mission-oriented bloggers, so i'm instituting a weekly column. welcome to the first installment of sunday best-of blogging!

album i can't stop climbing up on top of kitchen chairs to dance to: the bravery - the bravery

best double-take: in response to the following line off of death cab for cutie's new album, plans: "love is watching someone die--so who's gonna watch you die?" i was hoping to die alone without anyone even knowing; does that mean i can't bear to be loved? ben gibbard says yes. but ben is, historically, a little mopey.

best new television program: hgtv's handmade modern with todd oldham. oh, such happy-making! i'm not, as a rule, a sucker for d.i.y. shows, but i've been a sucker for todd oldham all my life, and he has great tips for people who know a lot about contact paper and nothing about power tools. he also shares my passion for too-bright freeze-pop color palettes and, apparently, laboratory glassware. i'm thinking about taping the shows and putting them away for the day when i (hopefully) have a place of my own that i can decorate without having to worry about cranky, tasteless roommates or volatile, undisciplined, woodwork-munching parrots.

best act of youthful rebellion: on my way home from work i was nearly knocked over by a boy, maybe seven or eight years old, lurching awkwardly yet rapidly down the sidewalk in sweatpants, an x-men t-shirt and a pair of black open-toed platform high heels. he was shouting to a woman across the street, "hey mom, wait up! wait for me! mom! mommy! don't leave me, i love you!" the woman was walking briskly in the opposite direction with her eyes glued firmly to her feet.

best your-mama joke: "what are you eating?"
"your mama."
"seriously."
"seriously? i ate so much of your mama last night that i'm gonna be full for days, so if you want the rest of this eggplant it's yours."

best example of prison reform at work: i dosed a cat named sebastian this week with I-131 to treat his hyperthyroidism, and he's going to be living in my ward until he's no longer radioactive. when sebastian was admitted on monday he was pure evil. he lunged at me through his cage door from across the room, and during his physical exam he chased a doctor up onto a counter. he was still evil on wednesday and wanted very much to tear out a sizable portion of my calf every time i walked in front of his cage, but yesterday he let me reach right inside it to give him his breakfast without even standing up, and he only growled when i made eye contact. prolonged eye contact still drives him to shoot his angry kitty leg through the grating to scratch out my heart, but undeniable progress is being made. he'll love me in a week and a half, i'm sure of it.

best cartoon by an english madman: 10 different types of soup

the stars of track and field are beautiful people

the daily blague has a good post about malcolm gladwell's talk on, i guess, how precociousness early in childhood is not a reliable indicator of "success," whatever that's defined as, later in life. the post becomes personal, which is always fine, and especially fine here because it's well written and relevant, but it does make it a little harder to extrapolate the honest line of the lecture. i think the gist was that kids who are naturally sharp don't always learn how to learn, so if their talents level off as their peers catch up, they'll remain average instead of working harder to stay as far ahead of the herd as they had been before. basically, it's counterproductive to praise young kids profusely for being naturally good at something.

this makes perfect sense to me, but adults can be very, very strange when it comes to things like this. i, for whatever reason, learned to read at a very young age--i was fully literate before i turned three. when i started kindergarten, around the time i turned five, my teacher didn't want me to be limited by the rest of the class, who, with the exception of one other student, couldn't read yet. her solution was to routinely exclude and isolate us. any time she handed out a worksheet that had written instructions on it, she would send me into one corner of the room and that boy into another so we could read to ourselves, while she read the instructions aloud to the rest of the class and they worked on the project together. it was completely inane, to start with, since there was no part of the room far enough away from her that we wouldn't have heard her reading and been distracted by the other kids. but more important, when you're five and you want to color with your friends, being sent into a corner is always a punishment. i did everything i could to hide the fact that i was intelligent because i hated being singled out, but at the same time, schoolwork was pretty much all i was good at. i wanted to impress my teachers and my family, but i didn't want to be the nerd in the room. the result was that i wound up turning into a restless, unmotivated, semi-problem student who could either get straight As or Ds and incompletes, depending on my mood and how closely i was watched. (none of this has anything to do with malcolm gladwell or the daily blague, and i realize that, but i do so love whining about how terribly maligned i was as a child. it's actually how i began this blog: "and then i turned my back on dinosaurs forever, wah, wah, wah.") this went on until high school, when other kids started to care about grades, too, and being smart wasn't so stigmatic. i finished high school first in my class, but i refused to make the valedictory speech because i didn't feel like i had worked as hard as the girl who had been second. i got yelled at for that, by a lot of people, who felt like i was spitting in their eyes, but i really felt that it was a case of recognition being given where it was due. maybe i had gotten better grades, but i wasn't a better student. i'm sure our first-year college transcripts would verify that. i'm also sure that if i hadn't been so focused on impressing those other people, i'd have made some very different education and career choices. so it goes; i'm plodding along a more natural track now, like a good little tortoise. i'll never own a house, but i'm happy and rested, and that's a lot more important to me these days.

anyway. if i've misinterpreted things please tell me so, i'd hate to be putting an inaccurate spin on it. i'd love to hear from other people who were there, too, who had different or additional points to make. you know me, i can't get enough of that gladwell. and for the record, it's more than a little rude to keep asking me why.