Not a Trekkie, but ...

I would TOTALLY watch this!

The Onion| New 'West Wing' Animated Series
SAN DIEGO—On day two of the 2008 San Diego SorCon, the biggest Aaron Sorkin convention in the world, screenwriter and producer Aaron Sorkin revealed plans for his next project, an animated continuation of his most popular franchise, The West Wing.

"I'm excited to bring my Emmy Award–winning writing to the field of animation," Sorkin said in a speech before approximately 30,000 screaming fans, many of whom were dressed up in the business-suit costumes of their favorite Sorkin characters. "[A]animation technology will enable us to provide fans with extended 40-minute walk-and-talks, digitally compressed dialogue for faster delivery, and a cast of over 70 main characters."

...The pilot ends, Sorkin said, with a 15-minute speech from President Santos about holding unpopular ideals.

"And I can promise SorCon that there will be at least two filibusters in the first season."

*Sigh*

A beach, a highway, beautiful ...

In the first post-SCOTUS testing of Washington State's Top Two primary system (in which the top two vote-getters advance to the general election, regardless of party), all of our candidates advanced! Also, at one election night celebration, I got a kick-ass T-shirt and won a dim sum gift certificate. Causes indeed to celebrate...

The morning after brings much reflection on the summer's bizarre connection between keys, cars, karaoke, and campaigns. Such introspection almost always calls for the Second Person Narrative and the illusion of emotional impartiality.

Maybe mental notes are the same thing as speeches you imagine giving to the person you were three weeks ago, before the madness...

******

Lesson learned the hard way #1749: Keys are tricky, sneaky creatures
When you're holding down the office fort, they sometimes make you lock the doors without remembering, and then magically reappear inside the locked office. You then have to wander around the building to search for the security guard to let you back in. (Also see Lesson #1755.)

It being your podunk hometown, said security guard might recognize you from your previous job because the same company manages many buildings downtown. He might decide to tell you about several personal issues that went unresolved even after repeatedly contacting the legal department at your old job... You have no qualms about playing a ditz to get out of this awkward scenario. (Also see Lesson #1756.)

Lesson learned the hard way #1750: Cars are tricky, sneaky creatures
Cars are also in cahoots with the American Automobile Association to humiliate spacey drivers everywhere. Weeks and weeks ago, while dining and theatre-going with The Scot, it took AAA an hour to get downtown to let you back into La Madre's car, where you had locked the car keys.
(Unlike Pastor X, you did not leave them in the ignition with the engine still running in the middle of rural Maine while on your way to Torgo's rehearsal dinner).

Then, about a week later, you allegedly killed the battery by leaving the overhead light on overnight, thus making La Madre late for work in the wee hours of the morning.... Once again, it took AAA an hour to get to a neighborhood with a lot of auto body shops, to jumpstart the car.

Which brings us to...

Lesson learned the hard way #1751: If you're no longer young, you need sleep
The one night you leave the regular karaoke place before midnight so you can get a full night's sleep the day before your state's primary election, you somehow also kill the battery in La Otra Hermana's car and have to call AAA again, to jumpstart a different vehicle. Thankfully, it took less than an hour ... but you lost an hour's worth of much-needed sleep the night before a busy, busy day.

Sleep was especially needed since you only got 4 hours of sleep the previous night. You had a few glasses of wine with one friend and then had to sober up at a different friend's house after closing down a different karaoke bar.

And somewhere, in the glasses and glasses of water and a 7-11 hot dog and Cheetos, you encountered...

Lesson learned the (frustratingly) hard way #1752: You have moments of quasi-maturity after all.
Even if kind of hurts. Again. See Lesson #1748.

Lesson learned the (not-so-) hard way #1753: Choose the whisky
Again, 100% of your PAC's candidates survived the Top Two primary, advancing to the general election. When your drink ticket at one of the evening's many parties gets you either a bottle of beer, a glass of cheap wine, a mixed drink, or a dram of Talisker, there is NO contest. The family whisky gods might even bless you with a server who pours a generous portion into a wine glass...

It being podunk Seattle, you might run into an old family friend who tells you, "Days like this I miss your grandfather" and you can reminisce together about how unapologetically partisan he was. So when your coworkers say "Hurry up and drink your wine so we can get to the next party," you can tell them "This is not wine, it's scotch." Then you can let them know it was also your Grandfather's favorite, that you and four of your cousins downed an entire bottle at his ash-spreading ceremony, that he was the first person in your life to talk to you about political events and take you precinct-walking, that you get your rambling tendencies from him, and why you miss him a hell of a lot this election cycle.

A hell of a hell of a hell of a lot...

Lesson learned the hard way #1754: J-Lo's "If I Had Your Love" is difficult for karaoke
It's also OK to sing only if election night is also your state director's birthday and she specifically requests it. Never, ever anytime else!

Lesson learned the hard way #1755: Post-election "mornings" bring spaced-out behavior
You might wake up at noon, then accidentally leave the house with your purse (and cell phone, wallet, and keys) still inside. With nothing but your bus pass, which is inexplicably in your pocket, and sporting your newly-acquired blatantly partisan gubernatorial T-shirt, you can head to the office and email La Otra Hermana to pleasepleaseplease bring you the spare key, after the peak hour bus fares go back down to regular prices in six hours and you can once again head back to the Westside.

Lesson learned the hard way #1756: You might be crazy after all
Additionally, the Second Person Introspection process might make you realize you have boozylicious and slightly schizophrenic tendencies. (But tell yourself at least you're not in denial, and to buy yourself a drink sometime...) ;-P

******

If Present Me had only imparted these words of wisdom to Past Me several weeks ago!

Eh. I probably still would've chosen the red pill.

C'est la ... quelle?

Surveying Mr. and Mrs. Smith

The Drum Major Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, has just released its First Annual Survey on the Middle Class and Public Policy.

A telling highlight:

"When it comes to gas prices specifically, adults are skeptical that gas prices will normalize – despite regular reports of Hollywood breakups, 56% of households believe that Brangelina is more likely to celebrate their 25^th anniversary (56%) than gas prices are to return to $3 per gallon (19%). (Another 18% believe neither option will come to bear.)"

Also in the report: Americans disapprove of Congressional job performance but overall don't know how their members of Congress voted on certain issues or bills. (Actually, that seems like a contradiction, but it's not.)

More fascinating data to mine while waiting out today's state Primary Election!

Pop goes the...

I have long been obsessed with the pop/soda question, and finally, a linguist has made a map of it! I love how it's broken down by county...

Our long national nightmare is finally over.

Also, I remember freshman year in college, sitting around with some friends in a dorm lounge, we ascertained that the pop/soda border was somewhere in central Pennsylvania. Guess we were right!

Woo hoo, $10.50 so far this summer!

Though I loves me my medieval mysteries, sometimes I accidentally stash them underneath old Atlantic Monthly magazines, and leave them to fester. (This can cause momentarily delight upon re-discovery of the books, followed by severe panic and heart palpitations at the thought of the overdue fines incurred.)

The fifth book in the Catherine LeVendeur series has our heroine travelling to Scotland and northern England with her four-month-old baby, to help investigate gruesome murders in her husband's family. The book is filled with the typical detective work, mysterious goings-on, and dramatic end-of-tale confessions.

A major theme for the series is Jewish life in medieval Europe. Obviously, said life was not the happiest, though some areas were less anti-Semitic than others. Cursed in the Blood compared Jewish history in various French cities (the previous four books) to the diaspora's English contingent. In this fifth book, though, Newman adds another new element: the gays! There's a minor subplot involving a nobleman and a man of the cloth.

Newman had a shocker for an ending, too. Whereas the previous four books have ended on relatively happy notes, this one was both shocking and heartbreaking. I did not expect the violent ending with the dismembering of a major character! It'll be interesting to see how Newman develops this in the next few books...

... which I will make sure are not overdue at the library.

Space oddity

Connie Willis' and J.K. Potter's D.A. was a quick read, which took all of like 20 minutes. Since I'm nowhere near approaching my self-imposed moratorium on the word "cute," I can use it to describe this short story (which, bizarrely, is not in a collection with other short stories).

It was cute. A high school senior is mysteriously selected for an elite space cadet program to which she did not apply, and she and her computer hacker friend try to uncover the conspiracy that launch her into orbit in the first place. Sarcasm and mucho mocking of teen speech patterns abound.

The book, along with several others, is also about a month overdue at the library. So much for trying to live debt-free...

Municipal charters and the 25th Amendment

I've been a little obsessed with the Detroit text message scandal, and today's news brings such political horror on several levels:

Kilpatrick will spend night in jail
Judge unmoved by mayor's apology

[Judge] Giles’ jailing of Kilpatrick leaves no clear line of authority in who is running the city ... because there currently is no deputy mayor.

... "Last week was a tremendous wake-up call to me," [Mayor Kilpatrick] said, referring to Giles' rebuke last month after he allegedly assaulted law enforcement officials trying to serve a subpoena . . . . Kilpatrick further said he was not "frolicking" in Windsor [Canada] but trying to make a deal that would let him avoid laying off more than a thousand city workers....

"The defendant left the state of Michigan, left the country, without prior notice to the court," [Prosecutor] Moran said, referring to a recent trip to Windsor. . . .

Suddenly Seattle's mayor's problems seem really small.

GolGotham

This is somewhat belated, but I finally saw the long-awaited new Batman movie a few weekends ago. A couple of friends had warned me that I would be uncomfortable with the many, many blatant civil liberties violations in the film. And I was -- very much so! It was disturbingly prescient. Warrants? Telecoms? Yeah....

But all that aside, the movie kicked ass. There's really nothing more to say other than that I concur with The Common Man's review. Heath Ledger and Aaron Eckhardt were both incredible. Great action sequences, especially the car chase scenes involving the Batmobile.

And also, I spotted two blatant rip-off scenes: one suspiciously similar to Pan's Labrynth, and another highly akin to Inside Man. (Those are just the ones I caught, and I don't really watch movies that often....)

But again, aside from all that, the movie kicked ass.

It did get me thinking again about the superhero genre, though. A coworker mentioned that Batman doesn't actually have any superpowers, he's just a guy who has a lot of money and awesome gadgets, and uses them to fight crime. I hadn't really thought of that before, but she's right.

I waffle between loving the genre and being suspicious of it. I'm suspicious of it only in that in most superhero flicks and books, "the City" is almost always a place of evil, where people are greedy bastards and everyone's lost in violent and crime-ridden anonymity, and the happy Jeffersonian idyllic farm is where the "true" values of family and love and innocence are. And I am, after all, a die-hard City Mouse....

But car chases and explosions and shootouts onscreen are totally seductive.

Ditat Deus indeed

Last night, I watched Raising Arizona against the base of this building, which freaked out Torgo when he was briefly in town last month:
(Every Thursday, there's a free outdoor theatre on the rooftop of a lower building.)

Of course, it being podunk Seattle, I went with one set of friends and ran into another group of friends, sitting two blankets away.

After three glasses of wine with a light dinner, though, I was more easily distracted by seagulls flying around the buildings downtown at dusk. (It was really cool. Seagulls rock. And they look neat soaring between skyscrapers against just-emerging stars.)

The movie, not so much. I know everybody loves the Coen Brothers, but I tend to be hit-or-miss with them, and this was definitely one of the misses. One of the friends I ran into muttered afterwards, "I hate campy." I don't, but this one wasn't my thing. Also, for some odd reason I thought the plot of the movie would be similar to Losing Isaiah, so I was a little thrown off.

For one, I'm not the biggest Nicolas Cage fan (except for National Treasure). In this one, he and Holly Hunter play a cop-and-felon couple who can't have children and so decide to take one quintuplet from a local business owner.
Inexplicably, everyone in the film has an unidentifiable and yet very strong Southern accent.

Secondly, the whole time I kept thinking that all the characters kidnapping a baby should have had to feed him and change his diaper and make him take a nap more frequently than they do. And the baby never cries! Obviously, this was on my mind only because I babysat for the first time ever last weekend (yes, ever -- never had younger relatives, never had an afterschool babysitting job). The stint lasted twice as long as anticipated, and I ended up having to change the neffy's diaper after all, which I'd previously managed to avoid for his entire five months of existence. And feed him. And walk around with a squirming 20-lb bundle. (Yet again, btw, "Flower of Scotland" seems to be the magic lullaby song.) Anyways, if I suffered while watching a pretty chill baby for a mere two hours, the various kidnappers and bank robbers and bounty hunters should have had to suffer more in the course of their adventures, with an even chiller fictional baby! Damn it...

Lastly, as is well documented, I dislike endings where "they get married and have kids and grandkids, and live happily ever after."

Then again, the seagulls were awfully distracting, so maybe I missed a lot of subtleties.

But now I have a default Thursday night outing for the rest of the summer!

Signs of life

For some bizarre reason, I had no idea Wall-E was a pro-environmentalist animated film. Maybe I merely scanned the reviews... but I thought I was going to see a simple robot love story and adventure set 700 years in the future.

Oops. Turns out, the only reason Wall-E the small trash compactor is alone on Earth is because humans have produced too much garbage and abandoned their home planet. Eve, a robot probe, is sent to Earth centuries later to find signs of life. Most of the story takes place not on Earth but on the huge Noah's Ark-type spaceship where all of humankind lives in an obese, lazy, desensitized existence, unknowingly governed by their gadgets. (Incidentally, Wall-E seemed like a PC and Eve like a Mac: he kept having to reboot, and she just looked sexier, sleeker, and more hip...)

Yeah, was not expecting any of that! Innovative story, though, if you accept that robots or computers are inherently gendered and can evolve feelings. There is one little robot close to my heart, though: the little OCD guy perpetually vacuuming. Cute.

What was really fascinating, though, were the bits where actors or scenes from The Music Man were inserted into the animation (which was also at times eerily lifelike). Through the same repeated image vestiges of human life on Earth, these snippets of actual humans, their music, and their films reminded both Wall-E and the brainwashed homo sapiens (not to mention viewers) of what humanity really is, or at least once was.

I cringed, though, when the CEO of the "Big N Large" Corporation urged humans to "stay the course" and not change their diets or wasteful habits. The scene shortly after that one is the creepiest in the film, where the same character admits off-camera that humans have made Earth uninhabitable, and need the wool pulled over their eyes in order to maintain a happy, consumerist facade of life. The Matrix, indeed!

Overturning precedent

Lesson learned the hard way #1748: Stare decisis doesn't have to prevail, at least not in the personal arena.

Emerging from Lesson #1747, certain policies and attitudes and behaviors can be reshaped and redefined (possibly fueled by a lot of whisky, possibly in a not-so-smooth manner). But maybe the skeleton disintegrates when you open the closet.

It's best to travel light anyway. . . .

Wonderflonium ist wunderbar

As I've been watching Season 1 of How I Met Your Mother as the DVDs arrive via Netflix (I AM TED, btw) and have re-watched a few episodes of Firefly with Ms. Tungsten, perhaps it's appropriate that Joss Whedon's latest project rocks my mid-July house. An internet short, Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog features both NPH from HIMYM as a lovable wannabe villain and Firefly's Nathan Fillion as his seemingly purer nemesis.

I love it. It's brilliantly clever as well as that word I vowed not to use in my last post....

However, all things being political because I can't turn my brain off even when I try, Penny the love interest needs some serious lessons in how to gather signatures on a street corner. My God, it was awful watching her. I know the scene was supposed to show insight into her caring, selfless personality as well as illustrate her insecurities. But how did the Helping Hands Homeless Shelter ever let her out in public with a clipboard for something as serious as petitioning the City for a new location? Helloooo, train your volunteers! Messaging, people! If they can't speak in public, highlight another talent of theirs in-office!

Or just hire me in 10 months as a consultant...

...Wootsy

Damn, I just looked over the last few posts and realized I overuse the word "cute."

Note to self: do not use "cute" in consecutive posts.

Action shots

Packed between happy hour, a house party, a beach trip, brunch, and time with the neffy, watching movies is a great way to escape what passes for a weekend heat wave in Seattle.

Gracie was the typical girl sports story, about a girl who wants to join her school's all-boys soccer team in the late '70s because there is no girls' team. It followed the predictable formula: personal tragedy, professional humiliation, ultimate shot at redemption in the final minutes of the championship game. But though it's formulaic, I have a soft spot for the sport-film genre. Especially soccer movies. And movies that mention Title IX. (What I didn't know was that the movie is loosely based on the childhood experiences of actress Elizabeth Shue, who plays Gracie's mother. Also, it was a little weird to see Dermot Mulroney as a gray-haired New Jersey father.) But overall it was a cute movie. When the cutest niece in the world is older, maybe I'll re-watch it with her.

Then Ms Tungsten the chem nerd wanted to watch Main Hoon Na, in which Shah Rukh Khan has crush on his chemistry teacher. To be fair, he's actually supposed to be India's top military operative under cover at a school to protect a general's daughter from a terrorist kidnapping plot aimed at preventing an exchange of prisoners between India and Pakistan. And whereas the adult-posing-as-a-student thing was really, really creepy in Never Been Kissed (seriously, I felt gross watching it), it worked a little better with SRK because there were jokes thrown around constantly about him being a decade older than the other students. They didn't try to pretend he was a minor, thus virtually negating the ick factor.

The film was hilarious, though -- it was the perfect combination of campy, parodic, and cute. (The ending credits were also fun and creative and, like the tongue-in-cheek nature of the film too, bore a resemblance to Om Shanti Om, possibly because Farah Khan directed both.)

Good stuff.

Ursus Americanus

The Bear Went Over the Mountain was a cute, easy read. (It was on last summer's suggested reading list from the library, but I never got around to cracking it open.) The idea: a bear in Maine steals an English professor's manuscript for a novel, gets it published as his, and becomes a bestselling author. The bear just wants to be seen as human, but is paranoid that everyone will see through him. (Plus he can't quite shed his animal instincts.) As he navigates the publishing world in NYC and goes on his book tour, he encounters different types of humans, each of which is a hilarious caricature (the corporate lawyer, the Hollywood agent, the radio talk-show host, the TV evangelist).

I think it's meant to be a humorous indictment of human interactions: with no exceptions, all the humans project their own opinions and thoughts onto the bear's very simple (often one-word!) statements and ignore what he is actually trying to communicate.

The chapters alternate between the bear's journey through various chaotic human cities, and the wronged professor's gradual decline into paranoia back in Maine.

Decent, light reading while sweltering in the summer heat!

The sixth sheik's sick sheep

Doing more research at work, and saying this slogan from a great national organization makes me feel like I've been drinking on the job (and I haven't at this one yet, I swear*):

"When women run, women win"

It's impossible to say twice correctly!



*except for the work-related happy hours or late-night events

What a difference a day makes...

... especially if it's the first Tuesday in November!

On a slightly more uplifting note, my internship lets me say all the partisan and election-related stuff I couldn't at my previous (excellent) job.

Such as: people in Pierce County need to vote out homophobic councilmembers who refuse to even pass a Pride Day proclamation! (I get to say this now, instead of merely urging constituents to contact their already-elected officials... It's very liberating.)

Gay advocates blast Pierce council over lack of support
"Proclamations — in which government leaders go on record to support an event or group —rarely face opposition. Elected officials approve dozens every year. It usually takes about five minutes to rubber-stamp the mostly ceremonial items.

The amendment failed 4-3 on Tuesday, with [four councilmembers]casting the “No” votes. They’re all Republicans...."

One more progressive Democrat could swing that vote the other way...

However, I'm still holding out until the end of the summer to figure out if I like the election or legislative side of politics more...

Warranting a reality check

So the Senate FISA vote was not cool. Daily Kos had a really good post about Democrats kowtowing to the Bush administration in an election year, and the nature of presidential electoral politics. TechCrunch also had a good post, as well as this great image:

But at least my two Senators voted on the side of the Constitution ... as did one in the state where I go to school (the other one didn't vote), and the two in the state where the cutest niece in the world lives. (Oh yes. Yes, I check the roll call votes...)

National politics can be depressing. DONATE NOW.

Meltdown!

I swear, I didn't just over-analyze cheesy '80s comedies this sweltering weekend while overdosing on Emergen-C and sniffling... I also had dinner and went shoe shopping with a friend, skipped the Pride Parade (it's easier to do if it's disgustingly hot, you have residual snifflage, and don't have to attend for work), and then read Fire Watch, another compilation of Connie Willis' short stories.

Turns out, half the stories in Fire Watch were in Winds of Marble Arch. The ones that weren't were equally as good. There was, once again, an emotional range: disturbing ("The Sidon in the Mirror," another space pioneer story about death and dying); humorous ("Father of the Bride," detailing the aftermath of the Sleeping Beauty tale); and weird ("Lost and Found," about the end times as prophesied in the Revelation of St. John). Good, quick, enjoyable reads!

Since we'd watched the sequel last week and Ms. Tungsten lent me her copy of Dhoom, I was curious to see if the original film was as good as Part 2.

It wasn't. But it was still a decent tongue-in-cheek action flick. It's very different from the second in that the criminals are actually, well, criminals. In Dhoom 2 the audience (or at least this viewer) was rooting for Hrithik to succeed in stealing pieces of art and to escape from the police, but in the first it was impossible to sympathize with the villains because they were clearly crafted to be evil and unlikeable.

The sequel did mirror the first film (as most heist movie sequels must) -- right down to the final climactic cliff scene. And I do feel a little sorry for Abhishek Bachchan -- he clearly has a sense of beat but his shoulder movements and posture make it look like he's a clumsy dancer. (Many of the dance sequences are shot so that he either doesn't have many complicated moves, or is generally frolicking rather than dancing. It's obvious.)

But all in all, a good cops-and-robbers movie to watch while hydrating and sitting in front of the fan...

Make our bed and we'll say our grace

Back in April, Mi Cuñado, the SoCal boy raised on movie culture, was shocked --shocked-- that Mi Hermana and I had never seen Coming to America. He tried to convince me that it was, in part, a unique take on the immigrant experience. Sometimes I can never tell when he's kidding (like when he said he might caucus for McCain because on closer inspection his immigration stance is "stronger"). But that's cool.

At any rate, turns out he was pulling my leg about Coming to America. Again. I think. . . .

As is well documented, I am not the biggest fan of any story involving a romance plot with a prince or princess, mythical or real: all of my defensive heckles about classicism and gender imbalances are immediately raised. Sometimes the genre is clever, but most of the time it just reinforces unhealthy socioeconomic hierarchies and the stereotypic gender roles that go with them.

This one wasn't all that different. As a royal-heir-escapes-pampered-life-to-find-self-and-future-spouse tale, it's the saaaame storyline as Enchanted and The Prince and I and a host of other stories. The only difference is that in Coming to America the mythical kingdom is the always-vague "somewhere in Africa," and all the people in the movie are black. Only difference. (Unfortunately, that difference might lead some to automatically categorize the film as immediately intellectually inferior or aimed a "specific" audience.)

Coming to America wasn't wonderfully hilarious, but it wasn't bad. I liked it. The viewer does have to take the slightly offensive (but tongue-in-cheek?) depictions of "Africans" in light of the fact that the fairy tale genre does the same thing with "Europeans." It does get booster points for satire, though -- especially for making fun of McDonald's! Also, the scene where the Queens residents steal the prince's suitcases and the unsubtle shot of blood on the walls in the apartment that Eddie Murphy and Arsenio Hall eventually rent cracked me up more than they probably should have.

Mi Cuñado was perhaps speaking with a grain of truth, though, when he attempted to pass off the film as one sympathetic to the immigrant experience. As a fairy tale movie, it follows the genre's standard formula. But if you look at it instead through the lens of the "fairy tale" of the American rags-to-riches story, it's much more fascinating. And what is the American Dream, which includes American immigration experiences, but a type of fairy tale? One that, as one of my college professors used to reiterate and reiterate and reiterate, "we tell ourselves about ourselves"?

The first plot line viewed this way is the most obvious: the prince and his equally spoiled servant, no matter how educated or important in their country of origin, are frequently the butt of jokes, discrimination, and targeting in America, and with few credentials recognized in a new country take on jobs scoffed at by "regular" Americans. The second American fairy tale is the McDowell's restaurant owner, who builds his Golden Arches-like restaurant from nothing and wants his daughters not to have to struggle like he did. Lastly, woven throughout the story are snippets of homeless guys getting unexpected donations, poor residents opportunistically making off with the prince's suitcases, and tons of references to "hot" or stolen items bringing a "better" lifestyle.

Money always equals "success" in any version of any fairy-tale story, which is cynical but perhaps a tad realistic in any capitalist economy: money buys security and food and warmer clothes and safer schools and better health . . . The Disney-fied analogy brings freedom from a curse, an overbearing stepmother, fabulous clothes, and an ever-after that is happy generally only if it is in an isolated, suburban-like manor. This is half of the reason I'm skeptical of fairy tales. (The other half is how women are expected to act, but then that was obvious.)

So as fairy tale stories go (however "fairy tale" is interpreted), I liked this one better than most. The overall story arc was predictable and boring and irritatingly sappy. (It was also one huge reminder of the terrible fashion trends of the '80s, and why it's okay to hide old photographs.) But the better moments were in the details.

Or rather, what the viewer can project onto the details... Maybe Mi Cuñado knew that. ;-P

Sniffling and snuffling this summer

One of the few perks about being home sick is catching up on reading or movies. I was finally able to finish The Winds of Marble Arch, a collection of Connie Willis' short stories. As usual, it did not disappoint. Some of the stories I'd already read in Miracle and Other Christmas Stories, but most of them were new to me. They ranged from depressing ("Chance," a different take on the "butterfly's wings" idea, and "Cash Crop," about a virus that kills off pioneers in space ) to truly disturbing ("All My Darling Daughters," which is so unsettling I prefer not to summarize it) to cute ("Blued Moon," a sweet little tale about linguists and love).

But my absolute, utter favorite was "The Soul Selects Her Own Society," written as if it were an academic paper. The "thesis" is that H.G. Wells documented an alien landing in Amherst, MA, and that in fact, aliens contacted Dickinson and helped inspire her more "WTF" poems. I was ROLLING while reading it! It pokes fun at Emily Dickinson nonstop, and it's wonderfully irreverent and awesome. (Most of her poems can be sung to the tune of "The Yellow Rose of Texas," she has dashes every other word, she floated notes down to visitors... ) Hilarious.

Collections of short stories are great for the ADHD sufferers as well as people with colds, who have to zonk out every couple of hours or crawl to the store for more food and meds.

My plan yesterday while recuperating was also to watch Dhoom, but then the neffy came over and I didn't want to infect him so I hid (à la Emily Dickinson) in my room.

Last week, I actually watched Dhoom 2 with Ms. Tungsten... even though I haven't seen the first movie, Dhoom 2 stood alone as an awesome heist movie. Abhishek Bachchan plays the cop (again), and Hrithik Roshan is the art thief. There are some decent, clever art a-thievin' scenes. But of course, the music sequences are the best.

In fact, when the cutest niece in the world was in town last week, me whistling the opening tune from the theme song "Dhoom Again" always made her laugh deliriously. Or maybe it was her perpetual lack of sleep. Or my funny dance moves....

At any rate, it's a fun film. Also, this is the movie with the controversial kiss! The scandal! Hrithik (quite possibly the hottest man alive) actually kisses Aishwarya Rai (quite possibly the hottest woman ever)- and actual kissing is virtually unheard of in Hindi films. We rewound that bit several times, which then inspired us to bust out the Main Prem Ki Deewani Hoon DVD and re-watch the scenes where Hrithik is well-oiled on a beach, in the firelight.

My favorite, favorite line from Dhoom 2 is uttered by Abhishek Bachchan at the end (SPOILER ALERT):

"I watched you fall off that cliff, and I thought, what a great love story! And then I thought, what crap!"

Love it.

Happy feet

Staying home with the sniffles in the summer sucks. But this made me happy:


My sister forwarded me the dude's website, and some of the outtakes are funny.

Backwards and in heels

The Goddess has a messed-up sense of humor.

This morning, I was busy summarizing a study by the Brookings Institute that highlights the gender gap in political candidates and tracks reasons why women might not run for office, when a phone company salesperson walked in to try and convince us to switch our service.

The dude tried to chat and figure out what our organization does, and made an attempt at commenting on how busy it must be with elections and politics, commented on the large photo we have of Bobby Kennedy (which is right next to a large, framed article on the state's first Native American female state senator), then pitched his company's phone service. Right after I said "Thanks, but that decision would be up to our state director" the guy said "Well maybe he could give me a call when he's free."

I smiled as politely as I could before pausing and saying pointedly, "She."

Two weeks ago we had an all-day training for candidates on the importance of framing, messaging, and leaving impressions. With a minute or less to pitch a campaign spiel while doorbelling or phonebanking, the images voters are left with often say more than someone's actual policy stances -- whether it's too-short shorts (as one guy at the training traumatically demonstrated) or a misguided but well-intentioned phrase (like "Cuban-style health care").

Tangential impressions matter, especially if you have an important message you want to get across to someone. After five years of issue-based advocacy and lobbying, one of the things you know is that impressions you leave with staffers (often college students or temps) are just as important as the rare meetings with elected officials themselves, if not more so.

Also interns!

When the phone rep left, I tossed his brochure in the recycling bin and went back to drafting the summary of the gender gap study.

Geez.

Thursday morning woes

I am really, really scared that McCain will choose Bobby Jindal as his running mate.

Gack.

Gaaaaaaack!!!!!

Meanwhile, "uniting the party" might be at odds with "getting a Democrat elected" in the three uber-key swing states.

Must find more coffee...

History nerd geek-out!

Found this awesome, awesome site courtesy of Daily Kos. A sample of the ingenuity:



Awesomeawesomeawesomeawesomeawesomeawesomeawesome! \(^_^)/