Saying Something Nice About Celebs Wednesdays!™

Welcome back to the only blog on the Internets to say nice things about celebs on a weekly basis! There was no obvious celeb to salute this week: I didn't want to rehash Oscar stuff, I've been pretty good about avoiding any "news" items featuring celebrities, not to mention I don't have cable and haven't been around my beau's cable. And let's face it, famous people are not exactly knocking themselves out being respectable.

Then I remembered Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. Businesses whose proceeds benefit progressive charities: check. Sense of humor: check. Great-looking: check. Seem kinda normal despite being famous: check.

The "but" factor: But what I really admire about them is that they seem like they have a solid, loving relationship after 49 years (!!!!) of marriage. (I'm partially basing this claim on hearsay from Kim and Thurston, Who I Have Totally Talked To, As I Might Have Mentioned, and I have nothing but nice things to say about that model couple as well.)

Good show, old chaps!

Pop will eat itself

If you're like me and you think mmmmaybe a little too much about where that stuff we call "food" comes from, it's creepy enough to spy a pigeon in the gutter pecking merrily away at a chicken bone.

Never mind that we have cannibalistic mascots embedded in our pop culture. As friend and reader julepandme pointed out when we were talkin' supermarkets, Piggly Wiggly's mascot is a swine butcher.




Which reminded me of his Mexican counterpart I discovered in Acapulco, who takes it a little further by marinading himself over an open flame.




Which reminded me of an old cartoon where the bad guy (wolf?) is trying to make either Woody Woodpecker or Bugs Bunny into his dinner and puts him in a pot on a stove and tells him it's his bed, then cuts some carrot rounds into the pot and tells him it's soap chips. ("Soap chips? In bed?") I think it was Woody; I don't see Bugs falling for that for very long.

This other guy julepandme shared, though, takes it to the ultimate extreme. It would seem that pigs just find themselves really delicious.



















Some pig! All of which reminds me of these guys. You've seen them around before, in NYC's East Village and elsewhere.



Not only are they openly chowing down on their own genetic matter, but they're (if I may) relishing it! Clearly these guys are waaaaayste-ola and have the munchies. But how wasted do you have to be to try to eat yourself? I'll have what they're having! (No I won't.)

And Raisin Bran raisins are so fired up to get eaten by anything that they're lining up for it.



"Cereal Shall Set You Free," ehh, raisins? By normalizing the consumption of anthropomorphized foodstuffs by themselves or showing their eagerness to be eaten, corporations condition you to think that it's OK to eat whimsical creatures! In conclusion, a lot of food is gross if you think about it. And that's how I keep my girlish figure.

Things I learned this weekend

* Strangers will strike up a friendly conversation with you, at the DMV, if you are knitting. Knitting also makes the wait more pleasant. (It's common when knitting anywhere in public to catch someone watching you fondly in a welcomely non-pervy way, thinkin' about their mom or grandma or some homey memory; or they're just mesmerized by the motions of the needles and yarn. Often kids watch and their minds are being blown because they've never seen such an activity before.) So the DMV doesn't have to be a hellish Babel experience and can actually be OK. As a side note, the woman in this photo looks like Jessie from Saved by the Bell.

* Newborns look like old people, and according to hearsay, what you looked like as a newborn is what you'll look like as a senior citizen.

* According to my two-and-half year-old niece, her right foot is female and her left foot is male.

* In my family, being Irish and therefore incurably morbid, we like to think we can spot a look of death in people. Using this trained/inherited/intuited ability during last night's viewing of the Oscars, I learned that Clint Eastwood and Peter O'Toole are going to die soon. Because they weren't wearing gowns, I haven't been able to find photos of them from last night so far, but if you saw them, I think you'll know what I mean.

Rudies can't fail in the Fulton Mall

I know I'm turning into Oldie Crankers McGee with my "people are too mean these days" this and my "I have no party stamina anymore but that's OK" that. But at the risk of sounding like Andy Rooney, I will never cease to be amazed by the multitude of inconsiderate ways people act in public. And as much as I enjoy the folksy outdoor Fulton Mall in Downtown Brooklyn, it is also pretty much rudeness ground zero.



For me, most of the recently sold doomed Fulton Mall's offenses are of an auditory fashion. After more than six years of living on its fringes, I usually filter out the everyday tinny "La Cucaracha" horn honks, booming booty bass of cars' sound systems, and regular sidewalk disputes. That's just part of the milieu of hangin' in my bedroom, on high. Down at street level, though, it's more annoying to have someone "talking" to someone else in what is literally a yelling blast, like a foot away from your ear, which if you walk around Fulton Mall, will occur approximately every block.

So tonight as I made my way briskly home in the cold, I stopped at one of the more unpleasant windy corners of the trip, where you can sometimes (if you're lucky!) actually feel the city dirt blowing into your face. I closed my eyes against the chilly wind, one minute away from being inside. A young woman got my attention, presumably to get directions. No; she wanted me to call a cab for her so she could get home to her baby. OK, didn't seem like too much to ask at first. I called the number, was put on hold, then waited through at least three or four cycles of walk signals. Finally I indicated my eagerness to get going and crossed the street with her. Now, I could have excused myself but thought I was helping someone. I noticed loose dollar bills in her purse and wondered why she preferred to stand with me on hold than call on a pay phone. Finally the cab service answered and she grabbed the phone, and without introduction demanded to know when her cab was coming. "Oh, it's on the way? Do you know when it get here? Oh, because I am waiting here cold."

So wait. Do you mean to tell me that this woman stopped a total stranger and had her wait on the phone for like 10 minutes in the cold, so that she could find out how soon her cab, that she had already called to order, was coming? Huh. It took a minute to sink in. Did she happen to notice, while informing the cab service she was cold, who else was waiting here cold? I should've asked if there was anything else I could do for her while she was waiting.

She barely muttered a "thanks" over her shoulder as she headed into the pizza place on the corner. Joke's on me, I guess, and it's one more reason to not talk to strangers. But really, who does that? To directly quote my parents, Was she raised in a barn?

Bride of... Korea!

Apparently in Korea, due to male births being favored over female births, there is now a disproportionate amount of males and it's a buyer's market for single women, so much so that Korean men are now seeking their brides in nontraditional ways. The New York Times just ran a story about Korean men using brokers to find Vietnamese brides:

“Nowadays, Korean women have higher standards,” said Lee Eun-tae, the owner of Interwedding, an agency that last year matched 400 Korean bachelors with brides from Vietnam, China, the Philippines, Mongolia, Thailand, Cambodia, Uzbekistan and Indonesia. “If a man has only a high school degree, or lives with his mother, or works only at a small- or medium-size company, or is short or older, or lives in the countryside, he’ll find it very difficult to marry in Korea.”

So, you know, he can buy a poor woman from somewhere else. Less sinister but still shady is this mating-themed Korean trip arranged by a bank for its marriageable female employees, as posted in the pop culture travel blog Jaunted.

All of this proves that my friend Kristina's college project Big Bad Chinese Mama is still relevant. If you're bummed by the above items, be sure to check this one out for comic relief.

Little daytime dramas

I'm home sick and recently woke up from dreaming about delicious fresh-made juice smoothies. I turned on the cable-less tv, hoping for Huxtables, but settled (for anthropology's sake) on The Young and the Restless.

The first scene grabbed me because it featured two beautiful blonde women talking in baby voices and dancing sexy with each other for the benefit of a watching hunk who said something like, "I could get used to this!" So I got a bit riled up, because, this is nothing unusal for other genres of programming, but when did soaps stop being about the fantasies of women?! Are even soaps now adopting this "hot women totally get lesbo--but not dykey!--on each other and this should be universally appealing to everyone including straight women" claim?

But then the hunk goes, "It's gettin' hot in here...I'm gonna have to get myself another coldie," and Ambrosia goes to get him a coldie aka a beer, and slips him a mickey. Oh-kaaay, now I see...it's a trap!
"I tend bar," he was saying.
"You could be one of those Thunder From Down Under* boys," Not Ambrosia said.
"Down under, ehhh?" came Hunky's suggestive reply.

In the next scene he starts stripping his shirt off, saying, "This is really...good beer," then collapses on the bed. They pants him and take his wallet, and then stage a fake Vegas wedding, where Non-Ambrosia (the less attractive gal) is in drag (as Hunky) but is still clearly a woman. (The marriage officer is played by Donna's dad from That '70s Show, looking very strange sans Afro.)

More interesting and sad to me was the portrait painted of the viewership based on the commercials. Judging by the ads, the women watching are:

smelly: Gas-X Thin Strips
incontinent: Bladder control Enablex to "help reduce leaks and accidents for 24 hours"
rickety: "Hips: You love them, you hate them, but to stay healthy, you've got to protect them. Only with Oscal."
sick or tending to sick: Robitussen (finally, something that applies to me); Tylenol Sinus Pain; NyQuil and NyQuil Sinus
mousey: Loreal Preference hair dye; a Loreal Protectiv commercial using a Franz Ferdinand song; Natural Instincts haircolor
irregular: Benefiber; Dannon Activia for regularity (and Activia Light, of course)
moms: baby furniture at KMart; a spot with a fake reggae song featuring a white chubby family getting Manwich all over their faces; Kelloggs' Frosted Mini Wheats where it is implied that the new pink strawberry frosted mini-wheat is not manly enough or possibly gay but still delicious
housekeepers: Clorox; Rid X for septics; Glade Scented Oil Candles; Mr. Clean Magic Reach (this actually looks handy, if wasteful, for lazy cleaning)

And the viewership doesn't apparently have any interests outside the home. There were no ads for entertainment (other than a few TV promo spots), politicians, banks, travel, electronics, or education.


*For the benefit of those who do not work at a naked man magazine, "Thunder From Down Under" is a Vegas-based male revue.

Please make it stop

According to Google, the word "snarky" appears 2,930,000 on the Internet. Although I think it's percieved by users as being a punchy, fresh word, what I think we can reasonably extrapolate from this data is that "snarky" has long ceased to be a powerful word to use. Some might even say the term is overused. The number one person saying that would be me. Please, enough already with this grating word!

Saying Something Nice About Celebs Wednesdays!™

My goodness, it's already time for another SSNACW™®©! And what a week to have something nice to say about those wacky and wild celebrities. Surely there must be a gossip shitstorm raging about certain Blonde Crazy Ladies, one recently deceased, and one whose newfound lack of curtains finally matches her well-publicized lack of carpet. All's I have to say about the latter is that I hope she gets it together before she ends up like the former. Sad.

This week's celeb: Alec Baldwin. It's well-established that I have a soft spot for famous people who pimp lefty liberal causes, and especially vegetarian celebs, and especially dashing ones, and especially ones with a great sense of humor. (Remember Alec and Adam Sandler's Canteen Boy sketch on SNL?) Go figure, right?

But here is a guy who appears to revel in emanating a refined demeanor with an undercurrent of twisted scumbag, a combination that equals comedy for this girl. And the reason I bring up this fabulous Baldwin boy today is his underappreciated television show 30 Rock (airing Thursdays on NBC, and you can watch clips and have Alec call your friends (!) here). Haven't seen this yet? Dont' be a jerk. Arrested Development, one of the funniest shows of all time, died because everyone's attention span has been blasted to hell by instant everything and most people wouldn't give it more than a five-second chance. Do you want to be responsible for the murder of 30 Rock? I'm just saying.

Also, Tina Fey, who writes, stars in, and executive-produces this fine program, totally rules. (Duh) Tracy Morgan is quite funny in it as well, and recent guest stars have included Pee-Wee Herman, Isabella Rossellini, and Rachel Dratch. All of them awesome.

Climb every mountain

Three pals, two dogs, and I packed into one car Thursday night for a semi-annual six-hour trek to our friend's family's incredible vacation home in Vermont. We knew Vermont had just gotten a four-foot snow dump, but learned on the way up that our destination's driveway had not yet been plowed. Our destination's quarter-mile long, uphill, unlit driveway.

We arrived at the bottom of the driveway around 2 a.m. and strapped all of our bags on. Being in the middle of a wooded area at night, at first it was a little monster-scary, but as we started up the hill through four feet of standing snow plus deeper drifts, it quickly became more survival-scary. Like, "finish this extremely exhausting task before you freeze in place" kind of scary. We were out of breath after the first 100 feet and it only got steeper and more difficult from there. The bulk and weight of my three bags had been quite obvious that morning on the halting, standing-room-only subway, but now had taken a backseat to my overall fatigue and breathlessness.

We all kept calling out to other members of the party to make sure no one was getting too comfortable during one of their doubled-over, panting rest breaks. One of the dogs (a boxer, not designed for such events) had to be carried part way. At one point, as I blinked in the post-flash from my friend's camera (because this was the kind of story we can exaggerate to grandchildren and so was a Kodak moment), his black Lab looked like my beau's yellow Lab back home, and I briefly thought..."Cooper? What're you doing here?" Then recognized that lightheaded feeling I get before fainting. I had to walk it off or things were going to get a lot worse, and so pressed on.

It was a beautiful night, though, with unlimited cold, clean air to gasp into our overworked lungs. The night sky in Vermont is so clear that you can be close to surrendering to hypothermia, just flakes away from that deceptive warmth that means your jig is permanently up, and you'll be like, "My God, would you look at those stars!"

The end of the journey, the house's turnaround, was the most comically drifty. (We're talking like 6 foot drifts?) By that time, I was laughing giddily at everything and our bare-handed host was moaning loudly that he couldn't feel his hands. He abandoned his bag, grapple-scooted over the top of the snow the last 15 feet to the door and collapsed. Realizing that distributing your body's weight like a human snowshoe was the way to go, the rest of us roll-crawled our way over, and finally, about 40 minutes after parking the car, we burst dramatically inside while setting off the burglar alarm and rushing to nurse our host's frostbitten hands (feeling in his fingertips is now mostly all back--no amputations necessary). And so we didn't die.




























The rest of the trip was happily much less extreeeeeme. We were joined Friday by three more friends, and once a monster truck plowed the driveway, our former foe made an excellent sledding track. We were somewhat snowed in, but with fires to warm by, plenty of DVDs to watch, books to read, and good company, I had no complaints.






















A lot of Vermont looks like it hasn't changed in hundreds of years...open fields with cows and horses, old barns, quaint homes with smoking chimneys, and epic-size mountains.















Even strip malls look this quaint (ignoring, of course, my friends' homicidal icicle battle):















And when the weather gets crazy, the folks are caszh enough leave up notes like this in their store windows:

















Big, non-frostbit thumbs up, VT.

Who knew?

I was tagged by the very funny Jackie Clarke to share five things you didn't know about me. (Read her postings on same topic for rampant evidence of funniness.) Now it is my solemn blogger duty to tag five of my blog buddies to do the same, so I choose: Lioux, CR III, Mandy Stadtmiller, Emily Rems, and Misanthrope Girl. I hope they will view this as I did: A welcome opportunity to procrastinate!

1. I have a collection of fake Dr. Peppers

1. I'm an Irish citizen. If you have a parent or grandparent born in Ireland, you can claim dual citizenship. This may come in handy next year if George W decides God told him to stay in the White House as Exalted Lord of Americaland, or something.

2. I have been known to display behavior that may be classified as obsessive and/or compulsive. In the spirit of not oversharing, I won't give the worst examps, but here's a good one: from 1983 when I received my first cassette (Michael Jackson's Thriller) until sometime in college about ten years later when the collection may have approached the hundreds (I'd gotten involved in college radio, so the promos were rolling in), I kept all my cassettes in the exact order I had received them in, so that I could always view my musical taste progression. It went like this: pop -> hair metal -> metal -> alternative/grunge/riot grrrl/punk/hardcore/etc. In case some evildoer were to come in and rearrange some of my cassettes, I had them all logged in a notebook. I probably still have that notebook somewhere, and maybe one day I'll scan in those pages and show them here. I think I worked through multiple strange childhood hangups around the early-20s time when I finally shook this habit.

3. I am a decent artist. In high-school art classes I especially dug the assignments where I could go nutso on the detail (see item # 2) such as pointillism. I did a portrait of Sebastian Bach that the substitute told me looked like a very intense lady. Here's a watercolor I did from a photo of the place I lived in in Dublin. Pictured are two of my roommates (the gal on the left comments on this blog as meanieteacher) and the guy on the far right was our neighbor who was totally out of his mind.



4. In what remains my favorite bizarro day on the job at Naked Men Magazine™, I was once requested to party on the tour bus by Tracii Guns. You know, the "Guns" in Guns 'n' Roses? That's a story for another time.

5. Most embarassing moment of all time: I took Amtrak cross country solo since I didn't have anyone to road-trip-it with me at the time. That's not the embarassing part. We stopped for a break somewhere in Colorado, and this being the pre-cell-phone era, I decided to give the folks an update using what was known as a "pay phone" in the train station. I was mid-sentence when from the corner of my eye, I saw the train start pulling out of the station--and these trains only come through once a day--and all my stuff was on the train. I bolted, phone reciever swinging in my wake, and started pounding on the train as it slowly started up. Of course everyone on the whole train was watching the spectacle, and the train stopped for me. But then I almost wished it hadn't, because first I got a scolding from one of the conductors, then I had to do the ultimate walk of shame back to my seat. I went through the (always full) dining car and then the worst--the viewing car, where it's all glass especially for sightseeing. I kept a pretty low profile the rest of that leg, which fortunately ended in Denver.


That's all for now, I'm heading up to Vermont for the holiday weekend!
xo

Saying Something Nice About My Old Man Valentine's Day™

...and a celebrity.

I think my BF has a resemblance to a certain young celebrity, in the eyes department.



And if I had to say something nice about that celebrity, it would be that he is dashingly handsome. Hint: this celeb has had relations with Scarlett Johansson™®©. (It's not Benicio Del Toro.)

I hope this is not equivalent to new parents making everyone agree that their raisiny newborn totally looks like various family members and not a red raisin. No one has to agree; I'm just sayin' somethin' nice, is all.

The Lone Ringer rides again

Last night I returned for the first time in many moons to a Brooklyn supermarket known as Chaos Pathmark, where the lines always stretch into the grocery aisles and the shelves are always ravaged, where the clerks scream their announcements into the P.A. system* and the air is thick with buffalo wing.

Whereas mainstream food markets tend to give me the fear these days, they also hold a special place in my heart. Because from my start as a lowly bagger at Shop Rite in eighth grade for the 1988 minimum wage of $3.35 an hour through my seasoned senior year at Grand Union, supermarket jobs provided my disposable income. (And BTW, my BFFs and I used to go pester visit the fellow now known as my #1 commenter Lioux when he worked Friday nights at Rival Supermarket, Inc.™ Yep, boredom visits used to happen in person, back before the Internets, ya whippersnappers!)

Now, I have never been fast at, well, anything ever (other than my wit of course! HAHAHHAHA ahhahahaha ha ha haaaaa), and if I try to do anything speedier than my natural pace, I'll do it wrong. But when it came to cashiering, I wasn't just quick and accurate; if all the newjack cashiers I've encountered in the past 15 years could've seen me in action, their eterno-bored faces would melted off. I was not unlike the Roadrunner: deadpan upper half, bottom half a blur. What's that, you say? It's the Shop-Rite Can-Can sale? Save on lots of brands of anything in can cans? [doing gangsta two-finger "c'mere" gesture with both hands] Bring it. In a span of seconds: Bananas:code4128, Chicory 6027, that'sawinesapappleifnotthey'llnevernotice 8614. Crazy old lady who buys 50 cans of store-brand cat food at once? Sure, you can type "50 x" and then scan one can once, or if you were ME, you could scan all those cans in about the same amount of time without batting an eyelash! beepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeep
And so on.



If this was the Old West and it was between the quick and the dead, I would be the quick, and all these comatose cashiers who turn every transaction into a neverending story would be the dead.

Back to 2007. There I was last night at Chaos Pathmark's scan-it-yourself express lanes. I prepared to whip through my 15 items or less in .05 seconds and razzle-dazzle everyone in the process. Who was that fast woman? As it turns out, those scanners are crap and get hung up on nearly every item. If the machine doesn't sort itself out, you have to summon the nearby employee who appeared to be nursing a mean oral herpes outbreak, all a-shine with medicine. The dismal timing of my performance wasn't my fault, but I walked away feeling decidedly non-kickass, skills unproven. But the good news is: Robots aren't quite ready to take over yet, and human labor is not yet obsolete.



*It wasn't always this way. According to legend, in the late '90s, early '00s, just before I moved to Brooklyn, an enigmatic man with a smooooooooth-jazz voice ruled the P.A. system. They called him The Voice.

A little Monday TCB

1. Last night's American Dad featured a storyline dedicated to Mr Pibb, the most well-known of all fake Dr. Peppers, which I'd blogged about just the day before: This should conclusively prove that I am psychic.

2. My bf actually did look into making us reservations for candlelit dinner at White Castle on VD, but they were already full. Um, darn?

3. I forgot to add another very welcome benefit of trapper hats: on a subway commute, especially when combined with iPods, they help block noise from rude people/ crying babies/ rude crying babies/ loud train/ other people's loud-ass music.

4. Saw Letters from Iwo Jima, and started forming a half-baked theory that war movies are to dudes as romcoms are to women. Like, this is a genre where it's OK for guys to feel emotions, mourn losses, miss their loved ones, and generally feel things guys aren't always allowed to feel in our culture. And it's not wussy because they are also shooting people.

5. Pan's Labyrinth was really good and freaky! And not for the faint of heart. I felt seriously harrowed by this film.

6. Factory Girl? See it on DVD. Although if its portrayal of the personalities surrounding Edie Sedgwick was true or close to the truth, it confirmed my opinion that the young Bob Dylan was a talented and nattily-dressed jerkface (just watch the 1965 Don't Look Back documentary for evidence), and also I hadn't realized what a badly-complexioned creepo Warhol was.

Doctor love

Today my Becoming a Successful Writer Train made an unscheduled but necessary all-day stop in the Organization Station. This entailed, among other things, going through a large collection of old photos and realizing I didn't look so good until around when I moved to New York about six years ago. So either I just keep getting better-looking and better put-together, or with the advent of digital photogaphy I choose to delete all unflattering pictures. Either way, I look better now, and that's the most important thing.

I admire people who can keep spartan living and work spaces, but I'm also suspicious of them. Are they even alive? I am much better about packratting than I used to be, but I still write a loooot of notes to self. I have decades of journals, notes, letters, and sketches, and generally just by existing I amass a clutter that accumulates in folders and bags and boxes and shelves and drawers.

Another thought that arose as I sifted through evidence from my first 30-odd years was, I was a NERD! Nowhere was this more evident than in my collection of alternative Dr. Peppers from across our fine land. Beginning in the late '90s, anytime I went somewhere that was far away enough to have its own weird sodas (or, as they might say, "colas" or "pops,") I made sure to see what their Doc Pepper ripoff was called.



Part of this specimen is faded because I had it on my fridge. Because I'm classy.




Now, not only do I not particularly like Dr. Pepper, but I don't even drink soda.




I just think it's funny to copy something and partially change the name.



And I also liked the element of surprise and randomness from store to store. I wonder who gets to name their store brand's ripoff of Dr. Pepper? Whoever that person was at Big K decided to do a little propagandizing with their cola labeling: "TASTE IS ALL THAT MATTERS." (I disagree: looks are!)



At the height of faux-Pepper fever, I had a bf who named his leather jacket Dr. Thunder.



And on a camping trip when we found Dr. Wow, another ex & I composed a commercial jingle for it.



I did keep one can as a representative of another Doctor, when a 2-liter or case of cans (preferred for their cutable labels) hadn't been available. But I realized that although this collection amounted to saving garbage in the name of some half-assed, wise-assed hobby, saving an empty soda can was really garbagey. So I think I threw it out. I want to say that the name on that can was Dr. Awesome, but maybe that's just wishful thinking.

As my collection (and my pride in it) grew, so did a little thing called the Internet. Eventually it occurred to me to see if anyone else had had the same collection idea. My lesson that sad day was: There's always someone much nerdier than you. And you can find them... on the Internets. I have to say, although that nerd (and others: there used to be a fakedrpepper.com) totally destroyed me, we dont' have much overlap in our collections. Makes you wonder what else is out there. Maybe I should bequeath my collection to the champ.

Myself, I'm a trapper keeper

OK, I'm just going to sling one pebble at the Gawker Goliath, and then do my best to never think about them again (aka, give them more power, according to The Secret™).

Normally I avoid this site that the world can't seem to get enough of. But I grudgingly gave it a quick scan the other day because they linked to a story my friend wrote. Hey! What do you know? Here's an unflattering picture of Britney Spears with some snide caption expressing hope that she'll stop being a brunette. Wow! Great job, guys! Make fun of some mess who can't get it together. That's like shooting fish...with a camera. But that kind of thing is everywhere. What did give me somewhat more pause was someone's "what's up with..." posting about trapper hats.



I won't even link it because I'd have to go back there and I'll just see more stuff to piss me off. I mean, right now, they're probably having a laff riot about the death of Anna Nicole Smith. Let's see, who can make the most inappropriate comment combining various tragedies from her sad life? Whoever is the most cruel wins.

So annnyway the gist of this particular post was, What's up with trapper hats? They are so ugly, and everyone wears them! Then the writer quoted someone else's would-be bon mot, "such a big hat to cover such a small brain."

Yeah, what IS up with trapper hats? Oh I don't know, they're only FUNCTIONAL and WARM!!! I thought that was pretty much the reason you would wear a hat, but I guess my small brain was wrong. I should go back to reading their coverage of the oh-so practical fashions showcased on the runways in fashion week. Terrific reporting, oh raconteur of Gawker! Might I suggest a follow-up posting: What's up with hoods? Or you know what would be really good: What's up with parkas? What's up with Gore-Tex? What's up with shelter?

OK, calm down, Kane, breathe. Postitive thoughts...

Hint hint, to any BFs who might be reading

I'm pretty sure this is going to be my first Valentine's Day (or as I insist on calling it, VD, har de har) ever with an official bf. I WONDER HOW I EVER SURVIVED VDAY BEFORE THIS! But now that we're at a new level in our relationship where he signs his name when commenting on my blog, I think it's time for a STEAMY Valentine's Day.



Ewwwww. How dare they say "steamy" in all caps. So very close to "steamer." Which I believe now brings us around to a very romantic Cleveland steamer discussion. Have at it, preverts!

SSNACW™®

Fun CoKane fact: my first Naked Men Magazine™ © business card ever was given to Darryl Hannah. And she is the subject of today's Saying Something Nice About Celebs Wednesdays©.

Darryl Hannah is great at playing a badass mf. If you've seen Kill Bill, there is no denying this. Between her & Uma, that's two of my girl crushes in one(/two) movie(s).



When I met Ms. Hannah, I was alone at a book launch event at a raw foods restaurant trying to fend off the most annoying weirdo guy in the room who of course was drawn to me. Kyle MacLachlan was also there and no help, even though I cast my eyes toward him with the silent plea, "Help me, Agent Cooper...Diane? Anyone?" So I hit Darryl up for an interview and then was pretty much like, "'member when you were a mermaid?...That was awesome."

What makes me even softer on this lady is that she's up for idealistic protest methods such as hanging out in trees. Not to mention that she drives a muscle car that runs on vegetable oil and has a solar-powered house. If I had a little cashola, I would totally do those things, too. (Well, maybe not the tree part.)

It's a secret!

OK, so I've gotten sucked in by some philosophical/metaphysical/coo-coo California stuff thanks to my pal Kristina, who sent me a copy of The Secret DVD. But it's not just aspirational showbiz folks into this, Oprah is devoting a whole show to The Secret tomorrow.

Basically the secret is, you can make your life into whatever you want. The universe is like a catalog, and you can select the kinds of people and things that you want in your life, focus on getting them, and eventually succeed. It involves the laws of attraction. You notice that some people just attract craziness into their lives, or bad luck, or shady characters. Why, in the past, have nut jobs made a beeline for me on the street? Because, says this school of thought, I think about the crazy folks who always seem to approach me, and directing this energy toward something (whether in favor of or against it) makes it happen more. So, the philosophy goes, if you're thinking about your debt, you're just going to keep attracting debt; but if you direct your energy instead towards getting lots of money, the money will find you.

Perfect example: my friend really wanted to be on the show Cash Cab, and for a month or two, she told everyone so. Lo and behold, someone she told was the right person. About two weeks ago, she was on Cash Cab and won $1500! Or for a personal example, in '05 I made it a yearlong project to find a boyfriend (and of course I documented the follies of my search), and I described the kind of dude I was looking for to friends, so they could possibly help. My description had some personality and physical attributes, and went all the way down to what kind of pet he would have (a real dog, not the kind of yipyip I'd want to punt into orbit) and the kind of vehicle he drove (a pickup truck). Then in '06 without the aid of any of those friends I'd told, that person found me, fitting the description, with the dog, with the pickup.

I think these kinds of phenomena are related to prayer, which is just focusing your energy toward something. There was some study (and I like to cite studies I've heard about years ago without finding the actual facts somewhere, because I'm lazy) where people in a hospital who were being prayed for did better than the poor slobs who weren't. I don't think it matters who you are praying to, although I suspect a lot of people would disagree on that.

Even if this is hogwash, it's not like I had to buy anything, and it resulted in a better attitude. I already knew I should avoid the negativity that seems to run unchecked and feed on itself and cause more negativity, and I feel much more positive since watching this DVD. So yesterday morning, when the street sweeper whipped a tornado of street dirt onto me, instead of putting yet more energy towards hating the waste of taxpayer money that is street sweeping, I thought about a future living somewhere pretty. And when the subways were all backed up and packed to capacity and that "I'm in a living hell" feeling tried to crop up, and the platform looked like this:



I pictured a future of never having to commute on the subway again because I'm such a successful writer. That is going to totally rule.

The height of humor, Sunday, 2:30 a.m.

Crazy kids with their rock and roll

I'm increasingly starting to view today's popular rock and roll combos as looking about 12 years old, especially this tyke in My Chemical Romance. He is like Billy Corgan Jr. Jr., which is to say, the son of Jamie from Small Wonder.





And look at this cherubic-faced youth third from the left on the cover of the latest Rolling Stone. Panic and the Discos, or what have you. Give the lad some pudding! He looks like a very nice young man.