Should I be working for The Daily Show?

Posted on October 30, 2008
Filed Under Blather, me and my brain, politics, the telly | 1 Comment

Okay, maybe not.  But…

Watching the presidential debate on October 15, I wrote this:  “McCain talks about her [Palin] in a weirdly condescending way… like she’s his daughter, not his running mate. Compare how he talked about her to the way Obama talks about Biden. I think McCain said he was “proud” of her. Proud? Obama doesn’t have to be “proud” of Biden.”

Anybody see The Daily Show on October 16th?

On the 15th I also wrote: “Please, no more “Joe the Plumber”. I’m waiting for Jon Stewart to do a “Bob the Builder” on that one.”

It took The Daily Show a bit longer to pick up on that.  (See the October 29th episode.)

I’ll dig up some transcripts eventually…

Remember when Penn State fans used to tear down the goal post after almost every home win?

Posted on October 25, 2008
Filed Under Blather, Pennsylvania, me and my brain, sports in general | 3 Comments

Imagine that feeling, because that’s what tonight’s win at Ohio State was like.  The goal post in the part of me that belongs to Penn State is coming down.

* Yeah, I know that ACTUALLY tearing down a goal post is really stupid.  Work with me here.

Political rant–first of the season

Posted on September 2, 2008
Filed Under Blather, me and my brain, politics, rant | 9 Comments

Anyone who knows me knows that I would LOVE to see a female president in my lifetime. BUT, just like I wouldn’t want just any man to be president, the fact that someone happens to be a woman does not make me want to vote for her. The McCain campaign’s pick for VP wasn’t going to sway my vote–even before either candidate’s campaign announced a VP pick I knew how I felt about Obama and McCain and their stances on the issues, but the pick did initially raise my eyebrows a little. I’d barely heard of Sarah Palin. McCain has never seemed like a particularly pro-woman candidate; I wouldn’t have expected him to have much faith in a woman’s ability to successfully hold a position of power. Picking her was gutsy, yeah. It pulled the spotlight over to their campaign a bit, which is something they needed to do. But her resume is extraordinarily–almost shockingly–flimsy, and an investigation of her possible abuse of power and illegal activities in her home state of Alaska is looking fairly damning.

In case you haven’t seen this already, here’s a rundown of her experience and track record:

She served for 4-5 years on the Wasilla, AK (a town of less than 7000 people) city council. She then served for 6 years as the mayor of that town. She’s been the governor of Alaska for a year and 8 months. Before starting her career in public service she was a sportscaster for a couple of years. She’s a lifetime member of the NRA, is pro-life, and has deep connections to the oil industry.

In terms of her worldview, political positions, and legislative experience, Mike Doogan of the Anchorage Daily News puts it this way, “If Palin has two thoughts about foreign policy, she’s managed to keep them to herself. Ditto health care. National energy policy. Fiscal policy. You could make a long, long list, but I’ll stop there.[...] There’s no way on God’s green earth that she’s prepared to be president of the United States.” CNN’s Paul Begala writes that “For a man who is 72 years old and has had four bouts with cancer to have chosen someone so completely unqualified to become president is shockingly irresponsible.” I have to agree with Begala, especially after seeing the now oft-shown video clip of Palin asking, “What is it exactly that the VP does every day?” Oh boy.

Before her election as a Republican, she was a member of the Alaskan Independence Party, whose members aim to secure a vote on seceding from the U.S. The AIP motto is “Alaska First, Alaska Always.” As the BBC points out, “that may cause the most trouble for McCain. The Republican’s campaign slogan this year is “Country First”.” (*EDIT:  Okay, so the reports on this are now conflicting.  The McCain campaign is denying that Palin was ever registered with the party, though her husband definitely was and she addressed the party’s convention earlier this year.)

Palin’s selection and the surrounding hubbub seems to be having the effect of taking the heat off of Joe Biden. I don’t really hear anybody talking about him… maybe because he’s actually fairly well qualified?? Biden has a law degree and has been serving in the U.S. Senate since 1973. He’s served as the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and is the current chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. Biden has promoted the idea of partitioning as a possible resolution in Iraq. His son Beau, who spoke at the DNC, is set to be deployed to Iraq soon. Joe Biden helped write the Violence Against Women Act and has promoted college financial aid programs. Prior to his service in the Senate, he served on the New Castle County Council (New Castle County in Delaware currently has a population of over 500,000) from 1970-1972. Biden has been more qualified than Palin for the last 30+ years.

Yeah, Biden has made a few verbal gaffes in the past, and I’m not impressed by those, but a few verbal gaffes pale in comparison for me to the alternative Palin presents–a near complete lack of relevant experience or understanding of the scope of what is one of the most important jobs in the world today.

End of rant (for now).

The First Signs of Fall!

Posted on July 30, 2008
Filed Under Blather, craft, knitting, me and my brain | 5 Comments

Okay, I can almost hear most of you saying, “Fall? Girlfriend, it’s just barely summer.” But then, you all probably also know how I think. So yeah, FALL!!

Vogue Knitting Fall 2008

I have taken up my knitting needles again (now you keep hush if you know what I’m working on), AND I got the fall issue of Vogue Knitting in the mail today. Hip. Hip. Hip. Hoooo-ray!!!

The Calamity, a book review with which some of you will disagree

Posted on July 30, 2008
Filed Under Blather, Literary, friends, me and my brain, rant | 2 Comments

A few days ago I finished Special Topics in Calamity Physics. It was a strange book for me, because it was a page-turner (at least, some of it was), but the writing style annoyed me, and overall I ended up really disappointed.


I didn’t believe any of the characters. There’s little in the story that I could relate to my own life–and I don’t just mean in terms of things that happen, because lots of things happen in lots of books that have nothing to do with my life. I feel like the author tried too hard to describe everything so that she didn’t leave room to fill in anything–at least, nothing superficial. Somehow, even after all of that, I felt like the characters lacked any sort of depth. With all the glowing reviews at the front of the book, I would have guessed that the main character would be appealing. She’s not. I found her annoying, not very believable, and pretty stupid for how smart she’s supposed to be. I kept trying to give a lot of characters a pass, because they’re supposed to be smarty-pants high schoolers, but it just doesn’t work. And the adults don’t act like adults, either. The things they say and do with the young people are just totally implausible. Okay, maybe one or two oddball characters would act strangely with kids, but all of them? It just doesn’t work.

And the similes!! No, the LISTS of similes. It was painful.

Shortly before I finished the book, I was talking to Amy, who read and enjoyed the book–though she had some issues with it, too. We were talking about bad similes in books, and she said something about a book she’d read (not this one, or so she thought, anyway) having a ridiculous simile that compared someone’s eyes to olives. Well, lo and behold, toward the end of Special Topics, the narrator compares someone’s eyes to olives. I guess maybe in this case it’s supposed to be funny. It isn’t the worst bit of the book, though. It isn’t even so much that all the similes are bad, it’s that there are too many of them… The author couldn’t just pick a few of the most poetic and spot-on ones or find some other way of describing things.

And all the endless referencing and faux referencing… it isn’t clever, it’s annoying. I hate all that b.s..

For all of the supposed unpredictability of the book, I feel like I totally nailed the ending long before it happened.

It isn’t a painful read in that somehow most of the time it flows (except in the part where the main character is supposedly figuring everything out–which to me felt too convenient and very boring), but her writing is often painful in other ways. There’s something self-congratulatory about it that’s really off-putting. I can’t recommend it. Read Donna Tartt or something instead.

Can she meet the challenge?

Posted on July 1, 2008
Filed Under Blather, art, me and my brain, photography, the interweb | 5 Comments

Every day from now on, I’m going to try to post a photo I’ve taken. It’ll force me to post more often, so likely you’ll get not only more pictures from me, but also more words.

Here’s today’s photo. Kim mentioned it in her comments on a previous post, and it seems to be one of the most successful of my recent self-portraits.

In other news, today I heard from an old college friend I’ve been seeking out for years. I’m thrilled to hear from her. This is why the internet is a good thing. I imagine we would never have connected again without it.

Self-portraits

Posted on June 20, 2008
Filed Under Blather, art, me and my brain, photography | 2 Comments



More here.

New cell phone

Posted on May 6, 2008
Filed Under Blather, me and my brain | Leave a Comment

I finally got a new cell phone, so I am taking yet another little step toward catching up to the 21st century. I can now text message (ho-ho!), and my phone has weight, volume, length, temperature, and other conversion tools and will even wash my car (okay, unfortunately it will not–yet–wash my car). It’s shiny. It takes pictures (although I really don’t need it to do so) and short video clips. It slices. It dices. It dances the hoochie coochie. It plays music. It sings songs.

Welcome, new phone!

Oh, and I’m on a mission to update my address book, so get me your number if you think I might need it.

You know you’re a knitter when…

Posted on March 27, 2008
Filed Under Blather, craft, knitting, me and my brain | 3 Comments

You know you’re a knitter when you see a New York Times headline that reads “Supplier Under Scrutiny for Aging Arms for Afghans” and the first thing you think is that it has something to do with yarn companies and knitters’ arms getting tired while knitting blankets… and then you realize.

Funny thing just heard in a coffee shop: “Egg and cheese on everything!” Yes! How about that? Okay, maybe not.

The Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland

Posted on March 24, 2008
Filed Under Blather, films, me and my brain | 8 Comments

Those of you who read Ezra’s blog will have seen this coming.

Recently, Ezra and I watched The Wizard of Oz. I hadn’t seen it in a long time, and I’m not sure if I’d ever seen it without commercials. It’s always interesting to go back to things you consumed as a kid, especially iconic things that, whether you knew it not, played a part in shaping your life.

I noticed a few things watching the film now, and put into words some things I’d always thought but never really discussed with anyone. First off, the “black and white” segments aren’t black and white at all, they’re sepia. To me, the sepia tone achieves a number of things. It underscores the earthiness of the Kansas setting, the down-home-ness of it. It gives it a faded look rather than a sophisticated one. It’s sort of soft rust versus the polished look that black and white might render. When the tornado approaches, the sepia dust spins and billows around… The twister itself throws up a violent cloud not entirely unlike the poof of red the Wicked Witch sends up when she makes her dramatic exit from the scene at the tip of the Yellow Brick Road.

And how great is Margaret Hamilton? She sure did scare the bejesus out of many generations of kiddies (and probably some adults). The music that accompanies her riding around on the bike (when she is Miss Gulch in Kansas) is the best. I find myself using it quite a bit.

More of a revelation, maybe, is Ray Bolger as the Scarecrow. I don’t know about you, but though the Lion had a good song or two, the Scarecrow was always my favorite. He was Dorothy’s favorite as well, it seems, as she tells him right before leaving Oz that she thinks she’ll miss him most of all. I always identified Bolger’s stumbling lanky walk and dance moves with the Scarecrow character, but actually he was dancing like that for years before The Wizard of Oz, on Broadway and then in the film The Great Ziegfeld, his second film ever and first for MGM.


Ray Bolger in The Great Ziegfeld

As Ezra mentioned in his blog, I’d love to see a double feature of those two films. They’re both full of song and dance numbers, they both deal with fantasy and reality, and they both feature vaudeville and Broadway stars like Ray Bolger and Frank Morgan. Ziegfeld’s real-life wife, Billie Burke–played by Myrna Loy in The Great Ziegfeld, plays Glinda, the Good Witch of the East in The Wizard of Oz. Both films are also iconic for certain eras in entertainment. The Great Ziegfeld pays tribute to the massive production numbers of the Ziegfeld Follies. (According to Wikipedia, “The MGM blockbuster’s show-stopper was “A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody”, which, by itself, cost more to produce than one of Ziegfeld’s whole shows.”) The Wizard of Oz is a hugely colorful film from an era when the vast majority of films were still black and white. And both films are, at least at times, decidedly over-the-top.

One thing that struck me watching The Wizard of Oz this time are all the parallels between Oz (I’m referring strictly to the film here, as I haven’t read the book) and Alice in Wonderland (I refer both to the book and to Disney’s Alice in Wonderland). Alice’s life is comfortable, though perhaps a bit boring. She has an animal companion, her cat Dinah, just as Dorothy has her Toto. (Alas for Alice, Dinah does not accompany her to Wonderland… at least, not exactly.) When Dorothy watches things going by outside her window as she is sucked up in the twister, it’s like when Alice watches things go past her as she’s falling down the rabbit hole. Maybe it’s just because of the Disney film, but Dorothy’s outfit looks pretty appropriate for Alice, except maybe for the shoes.

Some interpretations of Alice’s look:




And Dorothy:


(Okay, so the colors are inverted.)

Dorothy’s not sure which way to go on the Yellow Brick Road, just as a Alice isn’t sure which path to take in the woods. When Dorothy meets the Munchkins, they think she’s a witch. When Alice encounters a pigeon, it accuses her of being a serpent. Looking around at the start of the Yellow Brick Road, Dorothy says something like, “What a curious place”–much like Alice’s “Curiouser and curiouser!” And then there are double meanings or very literal meanings–a horse of a different color in Oz, for example, and “a long sad tale” versus “a long tail” in Alice (among many others). Both Dorothy and Alice are trying to get somewhere, and neither knows quite what to expect. Both are rather disappointed with what they find when they finally get there (the wizard is a bit of a sham and can’t help Dorothy get home, the tea party is full of nonsense–as is the Queen). Then, of course, there are veiled or not so veiled drug references… the caterpillar smoking, Alice eating cakes that change her, the field of poppies in the Wizard of Oz that puts Dorothy to sleep and then the snow that awakens her. In Disney’s Alice, at least, the flowers can talk. Flowers in Oz pop up and turn out to be Munchkins. In Disney’s Alice, the woods are scary and seem alive. In Oz, the trees can talk and throw things.

The Queen in Alice is a little like the Wicked Witch of the West. The playing cards are her guards, and like the witch’s guards, they do her bidding but they don’t like it or her–they’re afraid of her. Consider this sentence from Alice in Wonderland and then think about the Wicked Witch directing the guards: “Get to your places!” shouted the Queen in a voice of thunder, and people began running about in all directions, tumbling up against each other [...]”

And, of course, in both cases it was all a dream that incorporated bits from real life.

AND… both stories have been examined as political satires.

And then there’s the relationship between Oz in the film and Dr. Seuss. I could go on!

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