S n a r k A t t a c k

Lousy Reputation

Good lord, that was a long hiatus from the blogosphere.  Over a month!  What sort of treatment is that, to neglect poor blog for so long?  Inhumane.  Imagine as poor blog was thisclose to wandering about in the lonely woods, to forage about for comments and trackbacks wherever it could find them.  As it was, blog has reemerged, thinner, stronger and snarkier than ever.  If only the same could be said for me.   I shall just say this and then comment no more upon the subject: my love of hashbrowns and bacon nearly undid me over the holiday break.  But oh, bacon!  How I love thee...  (Incidentally, and then really, we're never discussing it again, but I must mention that in an ongoing attempt to eat better, I bought turkey bacon.  As I bought it, I wondered to myself, exactly where on the turkey might one find the baconny part?  Where indeed.  After cooking up a few slices this morning, I was left with four rather horrifying strips whose appearance suggested not the imminent arrival of deliciousness, but "Look, it's healthy protein matter.  Let us partake and then do our sit-ups, shall we?"  Do this:  take some paper, cut it lengthwise into strips (approx. 1" x 5"), take a pencil (#2 will do nicely) and then make some squiggles down the length of the strips.  Then eat the strips.)

So, hiatus.  Inadvertent, really, but I got busy with some other writing projects which, while not paid, at least seem to be on the track to my eventually getting a paying gig which would be delightful.   Money is nice.  I miss money.  Sometimes I think about the track that I was on before:  attorney in giant law firm >> partner in law firm >> partner jumping out of law firm window.  (I know - it's always that last one that kills me.)   And I think, wow, I walked away from what could have been an extraordinarily lucrative career, and instead I'm trying to get a job writing television.  And aside from a few close-calls on the nervous breakdown front, I couldn't be happier. 

Movin' Right Along

Well.

Let's just say that the self-imposed sabbatical from Blogistan has perhaps paid off:  I found out on Monday that I got accepted to a writers' program here in LA.  I am positively gobsmacked, thrilled, over the moon and generally rendered into an ecstatic puddle of goo.

This is huge.  But let's not talk about that, shall we? For there are other more immediate things to ponder, like the Muppets. (And since I've been remiss in posting of late, this post is more link-a-licious than most for your time-wasting pleasure.  Hey, who knew there was Muppet wiki?  Well, now you do, silly goose.)

Now, when I was a kid I was the Isadora Duncan of our living room.  I would bounce about, limbs made of jelly, moving to the crazy syncopation of Sedaka's Back.  Though you have to wonder about a kid who could create a dance number out of Laughter in the Rain:  Oh, I hear laughter in the rain, walking hand in hand with the one I love.  A ballad, I seem to recall making it a tragic number, nearly starting a friction fire with all the writhing about on our puke and piss colored shag carpet.  (It's as though the interior decorators of 1973 found inspiration after a particularly nasty encounter with a food-borne illness.)  But that all changed as I grew older and we got a turntable for a room which was called Smedley.  (I believe I've mentioned this before but it bears repeating: when you let a certain boy, who was apparently obsessed with a particular sugary cereal, name the newly converted garage, you will end up with a room named after a cartoon elephant who was first mate to the eponymous captain of the ship, and this name will stick for thirty years and counting.  In fairness, had it been my choice, my parents would now be burdened by a room called Monchichi.  A nice room, really. Oh so soft and cuddly.  Though, apparently not so soft in certain Japanese circles.)

Out in Smedley I could blast up the record player as loud as I wanted.  Out there I could turn up the volume on my favorite records:  Village People and the soundtrack to Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.  The soundtrack, for those unfamiliar with it, is one of those great-on-paper-at-the-time disasters.   Hey, it was the '70s.  The Bee-Gees are HUGE.  The Beatles are legendary.  I know! Let's do a musical movie based on the album, and let's have the Bee-Gees star in it!  It was bad then, it's execrable now but for some reason I couldn't get enough of it.  Even today, I can't hear Maxwell's Silver Hammer without seeing Steve Martin.  Yes, a terrible movie which somehow rooked a number of folks who ought to have known better into starring in it.  I would include scratch golfer and mascara aficionado Alice Cooper in the mix.

But the record player would see happier days, when my parents bought me the soundtrack to the Muppet Movie. 

As you doubtless remember, the Muppet Show was genius.  There's something inspired (and rare) about a show aimed at children that still works on a grownup level as well.  Of course, this depends on your definition of grownup, as the adult humor was built upon terrible, mind-melting puns - a hotel named the Furry Arms (technically only on Sesame Street), naming a pig 'Link' - or references that I wouldn't get until years later.  Statler and Waldorf were hotels?  In New York?   For a kid reared in the sticks of Northern California, they might as well have been the names of moons on distant planets.  Then of course there was my favorite sketch: Veterinarian's Hospital.  Say it with me:  "And now, for the continuing stoooooooory of a quack - who's gone to the dogs."  Any emergency room where you've got Nurse Piggy and Nurse Janice?  Comic gold.   

When the Muppet Movie came out, I was in fuzzy puppet heaven.  Not only did it have an exciting plot involving someone trying to kill - yes, kill - Kermit for his frog legs (natch), the tunes were catchy and, as I would later prove in the privacy of Smedley, danceable.   But while everyone remembers the Rainbow Connection, for me the go-to song on the album was Movin' Right Along.  A road tune! 

But don't take my word for it.

And - on a completely different note - your new favorite joke.

Little Boxes

Shortest post ever!

But one more reason to watch 'Weeds' on Showtime (besides Mary-Louise Parker and Elizabeth Perkins): the theme song will be re-interpreted by a new singer every week.  Read about it here.  And since we're talking music, you'd be remiss if you didn't check out these podcasts.  See the blogs in the sidebar; there are some good ones, often with free downloads... And if you really have nothing better to do, owing to this extraordinarily short - and anxiety-free - post, check out the war to end all wars:  Kittenwar!

Bad Mamma Jamma

I blame a friend of mine for forever ruining Jennifer Garner for me by describing her as looking like she just sucked some bad cock.

Once you get that in your head, no matter how many international spies she slays or foreign intrigues she uncovers - her guileless dimplly West Virginny mug still evokes that one nasty image. Then when she married Ben Affleck, I figured she was irredeemable. I won't even spend two hours on one of his crap-a-thons and here she is, betrothed for all eternity to the Talking Chin. Of course, she seems perhaps - how to say this delicately? - not like the sharpest tool in the shed. Not sharp but nice. She comes off as sweet. Adorable. But when you see her do her 'Thriller' dance in 13 Going on 30, you think, maybe this movie is worth it for this one scene. Who doesn't love a little Thriller action in their life? Exactly no one. But these singing and dancing scenes where everyone knows the choreography and knows all the words and the black DJ begins breakdancing must be one-off affairs. Here's the rule: you're testing our patience with THIS scene. You do not get to follow it up with the other cliche crowd-pleasing scene of everyone lip-syncing at a slumber party and singing into hairbrushes because your audience will never see the ending of this treacle-fest for they will have drowned in a sea of vomit. A sea. Of vomit.

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking that I don't seem like the kind of sailor on the sea of mediocrity that would go for 13 on Thirty. True. (You know me so well.) I have an excuse, though a paltry one:

I am still coming out of my Three Months of Having Only Eight TV Channels which means I feel the need to watch a little bit of every single one of my cousin's four hundred cable channels every single day. A little Noggin? Why not? Some Oxygen? I have the XX chromosomes to prove it, yo. Some ESPN? Sure thing, honey child.

Then there are the countless movie channels which compel me to watch all those flicks I managed to miss over the last, oh, two or three years. Mostly because they're crap. I give you the aforementioned 13 Going on Thirty. I give you Raising Helen. I give you, lord help me, The Day After Tomorrow. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. What's colder than the glacier devouring New York City? Emmy Rossum's wahini. Brrr!

These thousands of channels are a form of aversion therapy. I am the old photo of the toothless geezer with a hundred cigarettes shoved into his mouth. I am the cabbage soup diet, the grapefruit diet, the Atkins diet. Eat all you want - you'll hate this soon enough and move onto books, magazines, long walks in the park...

A few more days of this and I will never watch t.v. again.

Of course, Battlestar Galactica comes on at 10 tonight. I know it's set in space and all, but really: it's awesome.

As Bad as I Wanna Be

Say what you will about Tahoe, it is a small town. Not small like the town I grew up in, but small enough where it's tough to get things done quickly. That's the price you pay - time. I read once about the big difference between being truly rich and merely rich is that the truly rich can pay to have anything done NOW, whereas everyone else has to wait before they can have their driveway redone with imported white pebbles that won't damage the tires on their Maybach. Plus if you're really, really rich, you can just have the servants lie down in the driveway and roll over them, being all soft and squishy which will just coddle the fine automobile. (I saw one once. It's like butter on four tires.)

Thus, living in a small town is like not having the big bucks because you have to wait for everything, which is why it took two weeks before I could have my car looked at by one of the five garages in town, all this due to the Check Engine light turning on right before Christmas and then later doing a disco/flashing thing which is like Defcon 2 or 3. This was later followed by a sputtering thing where the rally car got all herky-jerky which coincided with a lovely thing I like to call a Highly Suspicious Smell Which Heralds the Imminent Explosion of Your Car During Which Time You Will Be Immolated. In order not to be made into a Mexi-melt, I stayed at home, got some writing done, read a lot and then basically kept to myself.

Here's the thing. I am an introvert. I will go out with my friends and have a great time - not a shrinking violet or anything - but then after a couple of days of having dinner out, visiting with people and so forth - I need to come home and recharge my batteries. If I don't, Terrible Things Happen.

Here's the other thing I've discovered recently. When an introvert is left alone for too long, she becomes MORE introverted.

My god I need to get out and hang with people my own age. (I say 'my own age' because spending time with your parents invites its own species of disfunction which is not appropriate for discussion on any kind of website because one day - one day! - the nice orderly with some semblance of technical skills will help the old couple in the room at the end of the hall and he will print out every page of this blog and that is when I will get a phone call that will last several weeks and from which none of us will ever recover.)

What worries me - aside from that phone call - is that I like being alone. I like having my space and doing things the way I want. But I have to nip this trend in the bud, and cut my fingernails and take a shower so that is why I'm finally - finally! - heading down to LA this week. Oh, social contact! Come to me! Don't be scared! These bottles? Heh heh... Why they're full of, ahhhh, ginger ale...

I tease.

You see I am currently reeling from a series of betrayals. First it was that lovely JT Leroy being found out to be a fake, and then it was that spazzy James Frey being shown to be a Mister Pants-On-Fire which just goes to show that there is payback for never indenting your paragraphs. Apparently, everything my English teacher said was true. Given my penchant for never properly using quotations and overly capitalizing things (a la Christoper Robin), I know that I will contract the dropsy by the age of forty.

In other news, I know you want to hear all about the L Word which started its season this week. Here's the thing:

It's a train wreck of a show. Too often the storylines came and disappeared without resolution, apparently because they were able to get a high-profile cameo or two (and last year high-profile equaled Camryn Mannheim Steamroller, so that gives you an idea of what we're up against). Other times the stories are just ridiculous.

Somewhere, the head writer for Passions is going, Dial it back, girl!

I would gingerly venture to say that the casting of Margot Kidder as crazy Jenny's mother was inspired and now Margot can afford to add another room to her House of Kooky. I will give Crazy Jenny this: while everyone was out getting their teeth whitened and growing out their hair in the off season, Crazy Jenny was getting it done. Crazy Jenny did not dawdle. Crazy Jenny did not putter. No: Crazy Jenny found a skinny butch lesbian, in Skokie and she finished a novel. People, do you have any idea how rare skinny butches are? Really. Hats off to Jenny for that.

Oh, and here's the funny bit: the butch lesbian is named Moira. Thankfully she pronounces it Moy-Ra, which I do not, and her hair looks like shit. So we'll never be confused. And she's twelve. And she's super butch. (I don't even think I own flannel, except maybe ironically.)

But as I've said repeatedly before, the show may make us cringe and may do what the so-called Christian Right has failed to do (by filling us with self-loathing) but lesbians will watch. It's all we've got. Cue that maudlin k.d. lang song and play us out! What? Well, just pick one. Whaddaya mean you left it in the Subaru? Then play that Tegan & Sara weepfest! Can't find it? Oh, hell: "Okay, Sinead. Hit it."

Late Night with - Oh, forget it.

Now that I'm back in Tahoe, I've found myself watching far more television than normal and I've noticed two things: local commercials are REALLY crappy and aging rock stars have realized that no one wants to hear their new stuff. Hence, Robert Plant sang Goin' to California late one night and the next afternoon everyone's favorite second favorite special needs child, Billy Joel, sang Only the Good Die Young, causing all the women in the audience to dance in their seats, their mom bellies swinging to the beat as they relived a driving trip they once took when they were seventeen and wasn't that just so rad? Of course it was. Billy knows. Billy loves road trips. Why do you think he crashes his car so much? He's a-comin' to getcha, that's why! Nice performance by the Joelster but I was disappointed when he didn't divorce, marry, cheat on and then divorce his wife during the show. Maybe you need a two hour show for that sort of thing.

Sometimes, in the course of watching all these talk shows, I think to myself, 'where's MY talk show?' And lest you think I'm just some Moira-come-lately who figures if Tony Danza has one show and Rachael Ray has no fewer than FOUR that it's quickly going to be my turn, that is so not the case for I've long believed that I would be an ideal talk show host. I am a delightful raconteuse, I excel at witty banter and my band would be comprised of the Brian Jonestown Massacre - every night a fight on the bandstand! But then as I've gotten older and had some much-needed time to discover Who Is Moira: Delusional Paranoiac or Friend to All Non-Scary Woodland Creatures? - I have realized, with the help of many a dear friend, that I have a hard time feigning interest in dear friends. With strangers, I predict that boredom will quickly segue into open hostility. "It's Die Hard meets When Harry Met Sally, and I, of course, play the love interest," says the buxom blonde twenty-something who's plugging what is sure to be the summer's loudest blockbuster. "Was it hard transitioning from modelling to acting?" I ask, and as she answers I pick up my pen and return to that day's sudoku.

I'm exaggerating, of course.

I don't even play sudoku.

Apropos of nothing, how lovely is this? Even a snowy pier cannot quell the flames of my dog's OCD. Throw the ball, woman!

In Which It Looks Nothing Like the Glamour of Television

The downside to living alone is that there is no one to blame stuff on. Who set the alarm for 7:30 am? What kind of monster leaves the dirty dishes on the stove top, thus enabling last night's artery-clogging meal to coagulate on the skillet in an all-too-frightening representation of, yes, my arteries clogging? Who was the yahoo who left a suitcase on the stairs so that this morning, before properly caffeinating, I would have to defy death by negotiating obstacles on the landing while an eager-to-be fed retriever danced around me? Alas.

Let's deal with that later and discuss what may be my newest television obsession: Mythbusters.

As I've discussed previously, one of my favorite professors of all time was my professor of folklore, Alan Dundes. What better way to understand a culture than to examine their obsession with their own poo? Folklore's more accessible and entertaining than a lot of cultural anthropology studies which seem to focus on who can't mate with who and why menstruating women are terrifying to men. (Short answer: girls are icky! Leading to several thousand years of treehouses with No Girls Allowed signs, some written in cunieform.)

Urban legends provide a glimpse into how our modern fears are rooted in good, old fashioned primitive fears - fears of the unknown, fears of the new, fears of physical infiltration by creepy-crawlies, fears to scare girls into keeping their doors (and legs) closed and fears of foreigners and of course, the fears of foreigners crossed with a fear of creepy crawlies.

Mythbusters is sort of like Alton Brown's Good Eats. While I'm not a huge fan of cooking shows (sometimes I like a little mystery in my life), Good Eats generally rocks because it's part Phil Nye, Science Guy with a soupcon of Rachael Ray and her too-perky can-opening mix-fests. Alton Brown explains the chemistry and physics behind recipes and cooking techniques which makes it, for me anyway, more entertaining, even if the result is often recipes that no one would ever realistically use - he once described making the perfect cup of coffee. Obviously, the subject made me perk up (hey-O!) but the process would take anyone a good half hour and was thus unrealistic: I would need to drink a cup of coffee before making my coffee, which is exactly the sort of snake-eats-tail thinking that no one should do without benefit of caffeine.

Mythbusters takes urban myths and proves or disproves them by recreating them in painstaking detail, like Alton, and like him, they use lots of zippy diagrams and helpful interviews with anthropologists and whenever an anthropologist gets a working gig, a tribeman gets a loincloth. Ding!

Plus a satisfyingly large number of the experiments involve explosions. Which is awesome. So far I've seen them tackle myths like whether

using your cell phone while pumping gas will make your car explode
you can cheat a breathalyzer with household items
the crash position in a plane is designed to kill you - because deaths are cheaper for airlines than severe injuries
and whether you can use salsa to melt prison bars

Did I mention they blow shit up? Did I mention it's based in the Bay Area? Thus, all water-related myths take place in the Bay or in Monterey and all explosions seem to happen in Alameda. I don't know why, but this just makes it all the more appealing.

And when they met, it was MURDER. (Hee!)

Always on the lookout for money-making schemes, this morning while brushing my teeth I briefly considered re-packaging Cetaphil into smart little glass jars, calling it Dr. M Facial Rejuvenation Serum and charging twenty forty dollars a pop. I could make meeelions!

When did they start calling stuff a serum? When I was a kid, serum was always preceded by the word truth and usually only during an episode of Hart to Hart. Oh, that Max! Who doesn't love a curmudgeonly man-servant who walks the dog and provides witty bon mots while the Harts gallivanted about on cigarette boats and figured out which evil socialite poisoned Maxwell Caulfield with an arsenic-laced madeleine? "It's 54 minutes after the hour, Max, and we've solved the caper! Get the martinis ready!" "Aye-aye, Missus H!" (In my version, this is the part where he winks at the dog.)

But now we just torture people to get them to talk and so serum has been transmogrified into fancy skincare. Some genius realized if you sold skin care in tiny bottles and marked it up eight thousand percent that you couldn't call it lotion. Ho, NO. Lotion says commodity. Lotion says ashy skin. Lotion says basic maintenance. But serum - oh, serum is redolent of lab coats, beakers and tiny vials (or, if you like, phials) and the seriousness of anti-wrinkle technology. Serum is the future.

But then, I wonder. Serums are mostly used by gullible women whose faces are reminiscent of this great first baseman's glove that I had when I was in high school. (I just made that up. Except for the bit about the glove. That was actually pretty awesome.) So, if I can consistently mistake correlation for causation, and refuse to buy serums because they will make me, like their most avid users, wrinkly, then I may just save up enough money to get Hart to Hart on DVD. It will be astonishing in its cheesy magnificence.

Next week on DeGrassi High: our heroine develops an eating disorder.

Next, on Love Boat

Last week I had a touch of the flu and this weekend I lost my voice. In fact, I still don't have it back. I went from Ellen James to Brenda Vaccaro to... Danny Bonaduce.

And now a word about Danny Bonaduce. Is anyone else watching Breaking Bonaduce? See, here's the lovely thing about having the flu and being mute: carte blanche to watch as much really bad t.v. as possible. All Sunday I monkey barred from one bad show to another, catching movies halfway in, flipping through reality shows which, in a healthy state, I'd never watch. Of course, Breaking Bonaduce isn't one of them - it's on my Tivo because it's awesome.

It's the story of this guy who was one some t.v. show I think way back when or maybe he killed someone in the 70s - I can't remember which - and in just the few episodes I saw he a) fell off the wagon, b) started taking steroids and c) tried to commit suicide. Best show ever. Of course, watching it makes me feel slightly less human but then, that was probably just the Sudafed.

Incidentally...

My cardiologist called. No more pork- or lard-related posts for a while. Jeebus, you read these last couple of weeks and you'd think I was about to melt into my couch with only a stick and rag for a bath. I would also like to point out that beyond the lard/pork bidness that I have been very busy with other things.

Take last night, for example. I went to Slim's to see the Posies where, true to form, I found the opening acts too loud and got up to get earplugs. (Remember that Janeane Garofalo bit where she complains of having to leave a Weezer concert because it was TOO LOUD? Yes, it's like that. JG and I are likethis. Tune in next week as I dye my hair white-blonde and lose my sense of humor. I will then turn up, brunette again, on the West Wing where that delightful Alison Janney will descend from the mesosphere in order to hear my witty bon mots relating to GDP and the Latino vote, which is to say that I will discuss the Hey-Deh-Peh.) I have zero compunction about wearing earplugs at a concert, especially for opening acts, reasoning that I will accept some hearing loss but only for good music. Yes, I'm talking to you, Death Ray Davies and your odd Cat Stevens-meets-Billy Chenoweth band member who did nothing but hog the middle of the stage and shake his maracas and NO THAT IS NOT A EUPHEMISM. So I went hunting for earplugs.

Bottom of the Hill sells them at the bar, I think, for fifty cents, while the Fillmore asks for a donation at coat check. Slim's gives them out for free at the bar, which I learned only after asking the guy at the merch table for them. "Actually, I have no idea. You see, I'm with the band." "Really?" I asked. "Which band is that?" It's at this point that it should become painfully obvious that while I've listened to the Posies, and I was there to hear the Posies, that I nonetheless had no idea what their lead singer looked like.

I do now.