sabi suki

obligatory cranky finals post

2007-04-30T22:43:00.000-07:00

so at the starbucks on wilshire & union there's only one bathroom, which is bisexual, and in order to use it, there is a bathroom key attached to some large carrying item (usually a ruler or stick or spatula, recently a big scooper spoon thingy).

admittedly, the concept isn't the most hygienic - you are, after all, trekking this item into a public bathroom, where it's placed who knows where before being brought back out into an area of dining establishment - but you know what, i don't fault starbucks for doing it that way, b/c if i were working behind the counter, it sure as hell would beat making me walk over to open the damn door for customers all day. i usually make do by putting the key-plus-spoon on the paper towel dispenser, which is aaaallll the way across the room from the toilet (it's a pretty big space), and then only touching it with my sleeve or something. also, i try not to think about it.

it's the way it is. so there is really no excuse to be a bitch.

today i walked out of the bathroom and there was a girl in her young twenties, same as me, waiting to use it next. i hold open the door for her, and hand her the key to take with her into the bathroom.

this girl shoots me a look of disdain and superiority. do i expect her to touch that?, the look says. look, lady, i reply by giving a little reminder shake of the key in mid-air, we all gotta suck it up, so take the damn key.

then - i kid you not - a grin flashes across her face for a split second before she sneers, "uhh, you can put that back for me." and then closes the door behind her. clearly she believes this to be a moment of mild genius: she doesn't have to handle the bathroom key! leave it to the proletariats!

now, i'm exhausted, and stressed, and frankly don't particularly like bitches, so i'm a bit put off by this exchange. moreover, wtf kind of way is that to talk to somebody? oh, i can put it back for you? you'll f-ing LET me? gee, thanks.

anyway, seeing that she closed the door behind her as a way of ending our interaction, it's not like i had much of a choice anyway, so i put the key back on the counter.

and i totally didn't stop the dude who grabbed the key next and opened the door on her.

*karma dance*

everybody gets one

2007-04-29T14:41:00.000-07:00

everybody gets one obsession.
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the side of a downtown LA building:

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days left til may 4: 5
finals btwn now and may 4: 2
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family guy spidey 1:

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female character i hate: mj
female character i love: gwen
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family guy spidey 2:

the chinese are awesome - article

2007-04-26T16:23:00.000-07:00

the reaction by my male friends has been surprisingly enthusiastic:

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"Women's town" to put men in their place

BEIJING (Reuters) - Chinese tourism authorities are seeking investment to build a novel concept attraction -- the world's first "women's town," where men get punished for disobedience, an official said Thursday.

The 2.3-square-km Longshuihu village in the Shuangqiao district of Chongqing municipality, also known as "women's town," was based on the local traditional concept of "women rule and men obey," a tourism official told Reuters.

"Traditional women dominate and men have to be obedient in the areas of Sichuan province and Chongqing, and now we are using it as an idea to attract tourists and boost tourism," the official, surname Li, said by telephone.

The tourism bureau planned to invest between 200 million yuan ($26 million) and 300 million yuan in infrastructure, roads and buildings, Li said.

"We welcome investors from overseas and nationwide to invest in our project," he added.

The motto of the new town would be "women never make mistakes, and men can never refuse women's requests," Chinese media have reported.

When tour groups enter the town, female tourists would play the dominant role when shopping or choosing a place to stay, and a disobedient man would be punished by "kneeling on an uneven board" or washing dishes in restaurant, media reports said.

The project, begun in the end of 2005, was expected to take three to five years to finish.

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find the article here. and if you're not grateful i shared this with you, i WILL make you kneel on an uneven board.

one more day

2007-04-05T16:34:00.000-07:00

one more day!

so, i've been trying to keep my expectations in check since there's plenty of skepticism about grindhouse . . . but f**k if it doesn't just look so f-ing cool.

3D rooms

2007-03-24T16:11:00.000-07:00

there are, i think, very few things in life as cool as this.

rooms that are painted a certain way such that when you stand in one position, a 3D image appears. badass. SEE THE REST HERE.

and check out the outdoor version of this trick here!

i judge you when you use poor grammar.

2007-03-21T04:25:00.000-07:00

dear sharers of the internets,

look. i'm sorry if this appears condescending, i really am. but it's time you knew. every time you mix up "their" and "they're" a little part of me dies. it's not about the typos - we all make mistakes - but after so many times i'm starting to think you honestly don't know the difference. and if that's the case, well...this isn't going to work.

another chance? well. i suppose we could try again. as long as you get yourself into rehab. get a sponsor. and really study those 12 steps, or, at the very least, this quick & dirty primary. i know it can be embarrassing, but i just want what's best for you, after all. i'm doing this FOR you.

call me?
jadis
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-'s - indicates possessive (ownership).
-s - plural. use when you mean "more than one".

its vs. it's - aaah, thank you, strongbad.

similarly:
whose - possessive.
who's - "who is".

your - possessive!
you're - short for "you are".

their - possessive! possessive!!
they're - "THEY. ARE." JUST SAY IT IN YOUR HEAD WITHOUT THE APOSTROPHE, PEOPLE.

and for the love of god:

discrete - separate; distinct.
discreet - not obvious; innocuous. YOU MEAN THIS ONE WHEN YOU ARE TELLING ME ABOUT YOUR NINJA SKILLS.

principle - a rule or standard. "it's the principle of the matter."
principal - 1. the first or leading ("the principal concern..."). 2. Mr. Belding! Mr. Feeney! Principal Scudworth!

grammar - the correct spelling. note: that's TWO A's.
grammer - fraiser (kelsey grammer)'s last name.

peak - highest point.
peek - to glance quickly or furtively. like, peek-a-boo.
pique - to arouse an emotion. ANYTIME YOU USE THE PHRASE "PIQUE MY INTEREST" YOU NEED TO SPELL IT THIS WAY. I KNOW IT LOOKS WEIRD. GO WITH IT. Q's ARE RARE. GIVE THEM A CHANCE.

per se - by itself, or inherently/intrinsically true.
NOT per say - "for every say"? no!

sheek - THIS IS NOT A WORD.
sheik - islamic leader or patriarch. DOES NOT MEAN HIP OR STYLISH.
chic - hip, stylish. THIS IS THE WORD YOU MEAN. I KNOW IT LOOKS FUNNY. IT'S FRENCH. BUT TRUST ME. IT'S THIS ONE.

read this! look smart!

2007-03-19T02:16:00.000-07:00

there were a flurry of articles last month about how to fake it...no, not like that, ladies. i'm talking about how to appear more well-read and literate than, let's face it, you really are. (pop on over to loni's blog for links to all those articles).

this one was the most unique though - a fun post by bookslut about five specific works that lit snobs might expect you know. the author's suggestion for the best way to fake that you've actually read them? cruise by on one specific scene.

all right. go on, get to it, and don't say i never did anything for you.

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How To Talk Like You've Read Something You Haven't

There are certain books that tend to come up in conversation over and over again. Some of the time I have read it and can hold my own. Other times, however, I’ll either say I’ve read it and then just nod and remain quiet when they try to pry a conversation out of me, or I’ll just admit I have no idea what they’re talking about.

I figured there were two remedies to the end of the conversation that comes with having not read the book. I could either read the books or I could find a way to convincingly bluff my way through the conversation.

I decided to bluff. I do have a reputation as a bookslut to uphold.

All that’s needed for a successful bluff is mentioning a scene from the book. If the book was made into a movie, don’t try to reference a scene that made it to film. Everyone does that. To make it more believable, be vague. If you don’t mention characters’ names, you can then say, “Oh, it was such a long time ago, I’m a bit hazy on the details…” when you are asked your opinion on another specific scene.

Here are some examples of books that tend to come into my conversations and scenes you can use to bluff your way through a conversation. No one will be any wiser.

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

There is a wealth of material to reference in this book. The scene I tend to mention is early in the book: a character’s apartment is full of cockroaches, but he too afraid to kill them. Instead, he traps them in glasses until his apartment is an obstacle course of upside down glasses with a cockroach in each, lethargically refusing to die.

However, that scene is pretty early on in the book. If you want people to think you read at least a bit more, there’s always the rehab. A man escapes from rehab every night to put cats in bags and set them on fire. That might be harder to work into polite conversation, however.

Ulysses by James Joyce

Masturbation should always be a great cocktail party topic. And if there’s such a thing as a great masturbation scene from literature, I think James Joyce has a fine contender with his Gerty / Leopold Bloom scene.

The scene itself doesn’t consist of much. Gerty sees Bloom on a hill, and being a romantic schoolgirl, she envisions him as a heroic character. Joyce satirizes a great deal of romance novels with Gerty’s inner monologue. The kicker of the scene is that while Gerty is imagining them running away together into the sunset, Bloom is jerking off to her hemline. When she stands to walk away, he notices she walks with a limp. His reaction? “Glad I didn’t know it when she was on show.”

Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk

The movie is very faithful to the book until the end, so the ending is what you’ll want to use. It’s best to just get indignant to how they changed the ending, because that’s the complaint I hear the most.

The buildings didn’t explode in the book because Tyler favored a more faulty type of bomb. The narrator shot himself surrounded by Marla and an assortment of the support group members.

Or you could mention that the soap in the book was made from the liposuctioned fat of Marla’s mother.

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

The scene that creeped me out the most was always hearing the S.O.S. tapping through the strange doorway.

However, if you mention the letters from Truant’s (the narrator of the story) mother in the hospital, you can pretend like you’ve read two books, House of Leaves and The Whalestoe Letters. Truant’s mother was institutionalized and died in the hospital. One theory I’ve seen mentioned a few times is that the entire book is her delusion. Doesn’t hold up well, but can inspire passionate conversations about the book. All you have to do is bring it up, then stand back and nod.

The Invisibles by Grant Morrison

There is some controversy over whether The Matrix ripped off The Invisibles. Even Morrison seems to think it’s true. If this ever comes up, this is what Kenan thinks you should say:

“What a load of bullshit. If Morrison wants to be angry at someone for ripping him off, he should be mad at Osama bin Laden for stealing his idea for decentralized cells of terrorists. Jesus.”

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find the article here if you'd like. how about that liposuctioned fat, eh?

comics 3 - the wonder of it all

2007-03-14T14:18:00.000-07:00

so captain america is dead! this is one that the new boy, who's not into comics at all, actually heard about before i did. maybe because it made headline news on cnn last week?? hell, even the uber-legitimate wall street journal ran a cool opinion piece on it.

to be honest, i can't tell if this is big news or not. as the article itself even notes,

There is an old joke about death in the comic-book world: No one stays dead except Bucky, Jason Todd and Uncle Ben.

and right the author is - bad guys in comic book movies are notorious for saying things like, "don't you ever die?!", simply because, well, if the heroes do, there's no story.

i had never read anything involving captain america until a friend of mine lent me the new ultimates, which features the cap as a character, but his death and this wsj article make a nice segue into my ongoing series on what i love about graphic novels (parts one and two here). i know there's a political point to this stunt, of course there is. blah blah, george bush, rape of the meaning of the term "democracy," blah. i'm not in the mood for those political implications tonight. here's what i see from it.

the wonder of it all

[I]t's worth pausing to appreciate that even at this late date, Captain America's death still meant something. Partially, this was due to the simple fact that Marvel was able to keep his murder a surprise--something of a wonder in an age when every other happening comes prehyped and presold. (Mr. Quesada reveals that the editors went to great lengths to keep the secret, engaging in a quiet campaign of disinformation and even going so far as to leak fake covers to throw fans off the scent.)

Ultimately, it is wonder that we need most from comic books. The wonder that a man can fly or that a skinny American kid with a stout heart can pick up a shield and deck the Führer. With his death last week, Captain America gave us that sense of wonder once more.

so much of growing up involves being too in the know - the old "now that i know how movies are made, i don't enjoy them anymore" attitude. i feel like we need to sit back and be awed every once in a while! not just 'isn't it cool that marvel kept it a secret' but - isn't it cool that they killed off captain america?! it's freaking awesome. isn't it cool that there are news articles and scholarly debate about what a comic book's message and purpose is? :] i think it is.

abby cadabby - article

2007-03-13T03:56:00.000-07:00

i love news like this - reminders that there are certain staples of youth that are every bit as prevalent today as when we were kids!

sesame street is adding a new female character, the new york times reports. the interesting thing about this article is that the show was not only aiming to re-vamp the cast of characters (and monsters!), but also had to think about the implications of creating a new female role model for young viewers.

“If Cookie Monster was a female character,” said Carol-Lynn Parente, executive producer of the show, “she’d be accused of being anorexic or bulimic. There are a lot of things that come attached to female characters.” For example, said Deborah Aubert, associate director of national programs and training services at Girls, Inc., a nonprofit advocacy group. “It would be hard to have a female character with Elmo’s whimsy who didn’t also seem ditzy.”

what a great point. it truly is a delicate balance to create characters that are simultaneously fierce and feminine, and unafraid to be who they are, whether that means overly girlie or not girlie at all.

still though, i don't think it's a wrong move to design the type of character that they did - a frilly, flighty fairy, with pom-pom hair, batty eyelashes, and a cute button nose...admittedly a girlie girl. i think we're past the age of bra-burning and forced tomboyishness for the sake of rebellion, to where embracing being flirty and fun (all right, the muppet is 3 years old and not 'flirty,' i know, i'm just sayin'...) is good as long as it's truly you.

the other thing i find interesting when reading behind-the-scenes stuff about television and movies is that there are SO many things about the process that never even cross your mind as a viewer. after all, who knew things like this had to be considered:

Careful attention was paid too to how much eyelid would be visible; the more eyelid, the more vulnerable-looking the character. “Her eyes look up,” Mr. Geiss said. “They can look beseeching, and they can be sad as well as happy.”

the article goes on to mention that the new muppeteer who will be bringing abby to life plays the character as "enthusiastic, eager, occasionally bashful but never coy." wow! i wish i could accomplish that personality mix. ^_~

one last blogworthy note, raised by my friend hilarie in a letter to the editor:

To the Editor:

Re “A Girly-Girl Joins the ‘Sesame’ Boys” by Susan Dominus [Aug. 6]:

How disheartening that as the Sesame Workshop makes a much-needed improvement in its show’s gender representation — by introducing a new female Muppet, Abby Cadabby — one of its executives would disparage Lulu, an earlier attempt at a female character, by saying, “She wasn’t that attractive.” As unintentional as this counterpoint may have been, it indicates that the continued use of physical attractiveness as a measure of girls’ personal worth is still too prevalent in American society.

Hilarie A.
Manhattan

(full page found here). i gotta agree, folks. if the point is to teach girls to embrace who they are, and be who they want to be, is it really fair that the selling point of that role model is that she's "very, very pretty"?

mahna mahna.

maybe brokeback helped :) - article

2007-03-08T17:25:00.000-08:00

in an ongoing effort to make the blog more readable, this post has been revamped. :) thanks to the loyal readership for sticking with me.

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thanks to marcos for this article. maybe there is some hope for the republican party yet.

Zwonitzer said he never sought to be a "Republican hero" for gay rights.

"But maybe for human rights," he said.

the other great note from the article is Zwoniter's recognition that this is truly THE civil rights fight of our generation. i'm glad it's crossing party lines.

equality shouldn't have to be bestowed. if i can date someone who's not my own race, then the guy next door should be able to date whomever he pleases.

live and let love. please.

2007-02-19T18:47:00.000-08:00

i was doing research for a paper that i'm writing and came across this really eloquent piece. i'm not sure if it's reproduced entirely accurately, but i'll keep looking for its original. from what i understand, this was a letter written in 2000 by Sharon Underwood, from a small town in vermont, printed in her local paper.

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As the mother of a gay son, I've seen firsthand how cruel and misguided people can be.

Many letters have been sent to the Valley News concerning the homosexual menace in Vermont. I am the mother of a gay son and I've taken enough from you good people.

I'm tired of your foolish rhetoric about the "homosexual agenda" and your allegations that accepting homosexuality is the same thing as advocating sex with children. You are cruel and ignorant. You have been robbing me of the joys of motherhood ever since my children were tiny.

My firstborn son started suffering at the hands of the moral little thugs from your moral, upright families from the time he was in the first grade. He was physically and verbally abused from first grade straight through high school because he was perceived to be gay. He never professed to be gay or had any association with anything gay, but he had the misfortune not to walk or have gestures like the other boys. He was called "fag" incessantly, starting when he was 6.

In high school, while your children were doing what kids that age should be doing, mine labored over a suicide note, drafting and redrafting it to be sure his family knew how much he loved them. My sobbing 17-year-old tore the heart out of me as he choked out that he just couldn't bear to continue living any longer, that he didn't want to be gay and that he couldn't face a life without dignity.

You have the audacity to talk about protecting families and children from the homosexual menace, while you yourselves tear apart families and drive children to despair. I don't know why my son is gay, but I do know that God didn't put him, and millions like him, on this Earth to give you someone to abuse.

...If you want to tout your own morality, you'd best come up with something more substantive than your heterosexuality. You did nothing to earn it; it was given to you. If you disagree, I would be interested in hearing your story, because my own heterosexuality was a blessing I received with no effort whatsoever on my part. It is so woven into the very soul of me that nothing could ever change it. For those of you who reduce sexual orientation to a simple choice, a character issue, a bad habit or something that can be changed by a 10-step program, I'm puzzled. Are you saying that your own sexual orientation is nothing more than something you have chosen, that you could change it at will? If that's not the case, then why would you suggest that someone else can?

A popular theme in your letters is that Vermont has been infiltrated by outsiders. Both sides of my family have lived in Vermont for generations. I am heart and soul a Vermonter, so I'll thank you to stop saying that you are speaking for "true Vermonters."

You invoke the memory of the brave people who have fought on the battlefield for this great country, saying that they didn't give their lives so that the "homosexual agenda" could tear down the principles they died defending. My 83-year-old father fought in some of the most horrific battles of World War II, was wounded and awarded the Purple Heart.

He shakes his head in sadness at the life his grandson has had to live. He says he fought alongside homosexuals in those battles, that they did their part and bothered no one. One of his best friends in the service was gay, and he never knew it until the end, and when he did find out, it mattered not at all. That wasn't the measure of the man.

You religious folk just can't bear the thought that as my son emerges from the hell that was his childhood he might like to find a lifelong companion and have a measure of happiness. It offends your sensibilities that he should request the right to visit that companion in the hospital, to make medical decisions for him or to benefit from tax laws governing inheritance. How dare he? you say. These outrageous requests would threaten the very existence of your family, would undermine the sanctity of marriage.

You use religion to abdicate your responsibility to be thinking human beings. There are vast numbers of religious people who find your attitudes repugnant. God is not for the privileged majority, and God knows my son has committed no sin. The deep-thinking author of a letter to the April 12 Valley News who lectures about homosexual sin and tells us about "those of us who have been blessed with the benefits of a religious upbringing" asks: "What ever happened to the idea of striving . . . to be better human beings than we are?"

Indeed, sir, what ever happened to that?

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i want to be able to write like this. simple, clear, from the heart.

she makes so many good points that we don't think about everyday - that 90% of the population does NOTHING to earn the heterosexuality that is given to them; that if "switching" from gay to straight were possible, so too would be its inverse; and, of course, reminding us that hatred hurts not just the victim, but also his family and those who love him as he suffers.

it's 2007, people. aren't we done with this?

romance & science. i'm yours! - article

2007-02-14T20:40:00.000-08:00

happy valentine's day! :)

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Loving with all your ... brain
By Elizabeth Cohen, CNN Medical Correspondent

(CNN) -- Close your eyes for a minute and envision all the romantic parts of the human body.

Her beautiful eyes. His strong shoulders. We'll stop there, but you go right ahead and think about all the body parts you want.

Bet you didn't think about the caudate and the ventral tegmental areas, did you?

These areas of the brain, while little known to most people, are helping scientists explain the physiological reasons behind why we feel what we feel when we fall in love.

By studying MRI brain scans of people newly in love, scientists are learning a lot about the science of love: Why love is so powerful, and why being rejected is so horribly painful.

In a group of experiments, Dr. Lucy Brown, a professor in the department of neurology and neuroscience at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, and her colleagues did MRI brain scans on college students who were in the throes of new love.

While being scanned, the students looked at a photo of their beloved. The scientists found that the caudate area of the brain -- which is involved in cravings -- became very active. Another area that lit up: the ventral tegmental, which produces dopamine, a powerful neurotransmitter that affects pleasure and motivation.

Dr. Brown said scientists believe that when you fall in love, the ventral tegmental floods the caudate with dopamine. The caudate then sends signals for more dopamine.

"The more dopamine you get, the more of a high you feel," Dr. Brown says.

Or as her colleague, Dr. Helen Fisher put it: When you fall in love, "exactly the same system becomes active as when you take cocaine. You can feel intense elation when you're in love. You can feel intense elation when you're high on cocaine."

Is it love -- or sex?

Scientists then wondered: Does a brain in love look much like a sexually stimulated brain? After all, we associate love and sex and sometimes confuse them.

The answer is: Brains in love and brains in lust don't look too much alike.

In studies when researchers showed erotic photos to people as they underwent brain scans, they found activity in the hypothalamus and amygdala areas of the brain. The hypothalamus controls drives like hunger and thirst and the amygdala handles arousal, among other things.

In the studies of people in love, "we didn't find activity in either," according to Dr. Fisher, an anthropologist and author of "Why We Love -- the Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love."

"We now have physiological data that suggests there are different brain systems for sex and love," says Dr. Fisher.

At some point, the two do become linked. People in love have elevated levels of dopamine. Lots of dopamine, in turn, triggers the production of testosterone, which is responsible for the sex drive in both men and women.

This helps explain why falling in love can make someone all of a sudden seem sexy.

"Three weeks ago he was just another nice guy in the office and now everything about him is sexual," says Dr. Fisher.

All this research into sex and love got the researchers thinking: Most other mammals don't have this drive for romantic love and attachment. Why do humans have it? After all, we could easily propagate the species just with our sexual urges.

Dr. Fisher thinks it has a lot to do with how difficult it once was to raise children.

"Go back millions of years to the grasslands of Africa. A woman was carrying the equivalent of a 20-pound bowling ball in one arm, and sticks and rocks in another arm to protect herself in this dangerous environment. She needed a partner to help her. She couldn't do it alone," Dr. Fisher says.

And even today, when we have strollers and the environment isn't quite as dangerous, having a mate still helps. "There are women who raise a baby by themselves, but it's a lot harder," she says.

Male brain - female brain

In their work with the lovestruck, the scientists found brain differences between men and women.

"The men had quite a bit more activity in the brain region that integrates visual stimuli. This isn't surprising considering that men support the porn industry and women spend their lives trying to look good for men," says Dr. Fisher.

But she adds there's probably a more anthropological reason at work. Simply put: A man's evolutionary mission is to spread his seed. That won't work if he mates with an 80-year-old grandmother.

"Men have to be able to size up a woman visually to see if she can bear babies," says Dr. Fisher.

The women's brain activities were a bit more puzzling.

The scientists found that women in love had more activity than men in the areas of the brain that govern memories. Dr. Fisher theorizes that this is a "female mechanism for mate choice." There are no visual clues for whether a man is fertile, but if a woman really studies a man and remembers things about his behavior, she can try to determine whether he'd make a reliable mate and father.

Thus, if it sometimes seems like a woman remembers everything -- good and bad -- about a man, "it's not just her being picky. It's an old Darwinian evolutionary strategy."

What's love got to do with it?

In the end, Drs. Fisher and Brown say what they learned from lovers' brains is that romantic love isn't really an emotion -- it's a drive that's based deep within our brains, right alongside our urges to find food and water.

"This helps explain why we do crazy things for love," says Dr. Brown. "Why did Edward VIII give up the throne for Wallis Simpson? The systems that are built into us to find food and water are the things that were also active when he renounced the throne of England."

Now their research is centered on the flip side of love. They've recruited college students who'd just been rejected by their sweethearts. Again, the scientists performed MRI's while these students looked at photos of the objects of their affection.

This time, the results were different, Dr. Brown says. The insular cortex, the part of the brain that experiences physical pain, became very active.

"People came out of the machine crying," she said. "We won't be doing that experiment again for a long time."

how to analyze something like love? - article

2007-01-13T09:21:00.000-08:00

a fantastic article on the psychology of love, and mating thought processes!
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Love's Loopy Logic

Encounters with the opposite sex skew our psyches in such a special way that reason and bias climb right into bed with each other. In this mode, it sometimes pays to deceive ourselves. Welcome to the paradoxical world of mating intelligence.
By: Kaja Perina

Let's talk about the most important interview you'll ever be granted. Seated at a well-appointed table, you mull the choice between crab cakes and seared tuna, but truly you are sorting through a mental repertoire of wisecracks and war stories. If you are secure in your improvisational charms, you might use this moment to appraise the cleavage or cufflinks of the woman or man across the table. There's no predicting discussion topics, but you can be sure they'll pertain to your marital status, extracurricular activities, and your job. (There are no verboten questions at this interview.) You are applying for a new and expanded life. Or, you simply want a one-night pass that can be renewed indefinitely. And you need to know whether your dining companion is up to the task.

A date makes us both spectator and performer at a two-ring circus: We troll for wit, kindness, curiosity, and "chemistry," hoping that we radiate these same attributes in the right amounts. From strategic winks and blinks to elaborate grooming to gifts of gorgeous baubles, men and women employ an arsenal of tricks in their romantic lives, all in the service of a demanding master at the far reaches of conscious awareness. Eons of evolution have honed our behavior to aid and abet a reproductive payoff. The sum of the stratagems we employ, and the wisdom of nature in crafting them without our explicit awareness, are now the subject of intense study by evolutionary psychologists.

Our sexual calculations and character reconnaissance, it turns out, call for smart, but not always accurate, judgments. That's because mating intelligence is as oxymoronic as the term suggests. We routinely bring both cold reason and outsized misconceptions to a relationship. Both serve a purpose. A woman will accurately gauge her date's personality on first meeting, but she will grow more convinced of his good humor and charm if they stick together. To woo a woman, a guy will grossly exaggerate his income, commitment, and affection for cuddly creatures. But he may have to correctly read microgestures as fine as tea leaves to discern whether she's truly impressed.

Male and female mating intelligence part ways when it comes to each sex's competing procreative goals. Inscrutable though our machinations may be to our partners (and to ourselves), romantic behavior is driven by a deep logic. Our minds have evolved to warp reality. Even so, we have unique skews in the mating realm. We've all got blind spots about the opposite sex. And sometimes that's for the best.

"She Wants Me" and Other Erotic Errata

Jane Austen nailed women's intricate courtship calculus, but The Onion has the beat on simple male arithmetic: "Area Man Going to Go Ahead and Consider That a Date." The article in the satirical rag details a man's random encounter with a woman that blossomed into a 45-minute conversation. "It wasn't official or anything, but if I had asked her to have coffee with me, and she were to have said yes, the result would have been exactly the same," he says. "It's pretty clear that she's really into me."

Men have a notoriously elastic take on women's romantic receptivity. You might call it a "take-all-prisoners" approach to flirting, so frequently do men presume sexual interest on the part of a potentially available woman. The "She Wants Me" bias serves a convenient purpose for men—it actually increases their sexual opportunities. Because men invest less of themselves in offspring relative to women, it is in their genetic interests to reproduce as much as possible. Therefore, perceptions that promote sexual assertiveness tend to be functional. This inclination doesn't mean the average guy is delusional about his sex appeal, it just means that if he has a great date he will probably report more interest on the part of his consort than she herself reports.

Women, for their part, are biased right back. They skittishly insist that men are more keen on no-strings-attached sex than is the case. This "men are pigs" bias pits suspicious women against oversolicitous men in what Geoffrey Miller, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of New Mexico, labels a "never-ending arms race of romantic skepticism and excess." It could lead to great repartee: Think Bacall and Bogie, Josephine and Napoleon, Condi and Kim Jong Il.

Glenn Geher, an associate professor of psychology at SUNY at New Paltz, who, with Miller, edited a forthcoming volume on mating intelligence, is developing a mathematical model to demonstrate what many a grandmother has long cautioned: Women who are de facto skeptical of a man's intentions are almost always better off than women who spend hours deconstructing the first date. ("He gave me his home number, he asked about my family, he mentioned a concert this spring—he must be into me!") Geher found that if a woman cannot accurately judge a man's romantic designs at least 90 percent of the time, she's better off being biased. "Women using a 'men are always pigs' decision-making rule may be more likely to actually end up with honest, committed, and long-term-seeking males," insists Geher.

We have a radar for opposite-sex interest and intentions that has its own unique calibrations. And it follows Darwinian, rather than Aristotelian, logic, because the very survival of our genes is at stake. Men and women need to minimize reproductive mistakes that could thwart their mating goals: For men, missing a chance to score constitutes an error. For women it is dangerous to trust a man who simply wishes to score and move on.

Martie Haselton of UCLA and David Buss of the University of Texas, Austin, have empirically demonstrated the existence of these error-management strategies in men and women. Haselton likens a biased decision pathway to a smoke alarm that can make one of two errors. It can go off in the absence of fire—a false positive: irritating, but far from lethal. The more dangerous error is the false negative, which fails to signal a real fire. "Engineers can't minimize both errors, because there's a trade-off," explains Haselton. "If you lower the threshold for noting fires, you're going to have more false alarms. Natural selection created decision-making adaptations not to maximize accuracy but to minimize the more costly error." Faced with uncertainty about people and predators throughout human history, we again and again took the safe road.

Seeing the world through our own warped force field is standard operating procedure. "Biased mechanisms are not design defects of the human mind, but rather design features," says Haselton. We don't commit them just in mating mode. They're present in our everyday perceptions, protecting our egos and all types of relationships. We imbue the powerful and beautiful with personal and intellectual qualities that they likely don't possess, overestimate our own abilities, and downgrade the importance of skills that elude us. We're also paranoiacally primed to detect threats to our status, to our children—any domain in which the stakes are high. This is why women are fiercely protective of their newborns, why we agonize if the boss idly snaps at us.

Biases are human universals: A Park Avenue socialite may be as guarded around her suitors, or as worried about her husband's fidelity, as a Chinese field hand, though each woman will filter the concern through her own cultural prism. But the intensity of a bias may vary from person to person. Geher found that smart men are more likely to exhibit the "She Wants Me" bias. To discern this, Geher asked male subjects how they thought women would respond to personal ads in which men sought a short-term partner. He found that the most intelligent men grossly overestimated women's interest in ads offering explicit no-strings-attached sex. (Geher quips that among his research findings, this is the gem that his wife likes the least.)

It's a fact that women are more likely to have one-night stands with bright, creative men, so it's possible that Geher's smart male subjects were simply projecting their actual success onto the ads. But since overestimating a woman's interest in a short-term fling is smart insofar as it increases sexual opportunities, it's also possible that over millennia, intelligent men have unconsciously honed the bias for that purpose. Geher expects that both possibilities probably operate in the real world, and that future research will show that while smart men have more short-term success with women, they also display more bias.

Bright women, for their part, misread men in one key area. When Geher asked men and women to rate how upset their mates would be about sexual or emotional infidelity, he found that sharper people are better at the task, but smart women exhibit a markedly conservative bent: They assume men will be more distraught over a sexual affair than is in fact the case. This is beneficial, argues Geher, because "women who think that infidelity bothers men even more than it does (which is a lot), may be less likely to be the victims of relationship violence." These women may be more likely to avoid affairs and be more covert when they do engage in them.

Men are excellent judges of what women want in a long-term partner, exhibiting keen mind reading abilities on limited display in other areas of their lives. A guy who is clueless about his friends' opinions of him and oblivious to his wife's sulking can still craft a potent profile on Match.com. That's because millennia of avid pursuit have honed masculine minds into fine-tuned sensors of female interest. "Heterosexual men have a discriminating clientele," says Geher. "They need to know women's desires."

Men and women selectively tune into the noisy channel of opposite-sex interest depending on their own gender-specific needs: Men scan for sexiness and availability; women scavenge for clues to personality and commitment readiness. The errors of engagement we make in the early stages of courtship, before we're certain of opposite-sex intentions, might appear to set men and women on a permanent collision course. But each one of us is evidence that men and women do in fact connect. The sexes actually have overlapping, if not identical, goals: Men and women both want stable relationships in which to raise children. Women just tend to rally for an earlier commitment. The result: When our tracks finally converge in commitment, our biases overlap as well, because we now share important goals. The most important of these is preserving the relationship.

If You Could See What I See

If you never experience a twinge of jealousy or concern about your relationship, you may want to take a hard look at it. Established couples often reboot their emotional smoke detectors to make them extra sensitive to relationship threats. For example, both men and women who have offended a lover tend to remain overly convinced that the partner harbors resentment about the act. This "negative forgiveness" bias nudges us to err on the side of caution, rather than risk further offense by assuming we're off the hook. This bias is even stronger among men and women already in rocky romances.

Couples also grow hyperattuned to potential rivals. That's why if we see our partner in a heated exchange with an attractive member of the opposite sex, we're far more likely to assume something's afoot than is a third party observing the exchange.

Skewed thinking doesn't just make us suspicious about our lovers; some biases have a noble goal—they embellish our perception of a mate. Positive illusions turn up the volume on the traits you love: Everyone agrees that your husband comes from attractive stock, but you insist that he's the best-looking guy in the family. Your wife is no slouch, but you're convinced she's the unheralded star of the office. Faby Gagné, a research consultant and visiting scholar at Wellesley College, found that 95 percent of people think their paramour is above average in appearance, intelligence, warmth, and sense of humor. There's deep wisdom in these sunny views: People who believe they've struck romantic gold are more satisfied with their relationship and more committed to their mate.

Romantic illusions are so critical that they may actually balloon during key decision-making phases of a relationship, such as whether to get married, or when to have children. That's because, says Gagné, biases can buffer us against the angst of dicey deliberations. You might unconsciously offset your ambivalence about becoming a father by focusing on what a great mother your wife will be. I may be terrified to accept a job that keeps me on the road, but at least I know my husband will remain faithful.

When Gagné first investigated biased thinking and decision making, she assumed that tough choices would dampen positive illusions. To her surprise, she found the opposite: People are especially motivated to enhance their lover's stellar qualities at key junctures, while simultaneously becoming more accurate in judgments related to the decision. "When you enter deliberation mode, the goal is to be accurate. This accuracy can be unsettling. To cope with the anxiety, you increase your biased evaluation of a partner. But in a deliberative frame of mind, accuracy and bias do not seem to contaminate one another. So intimates gain the capacity to be accurate because of their positive bias, rather than despite their positive bias," explains Gagné. It sounds paradoxical, but reason and bias readily co-exist in every corridor of our thinking. Illusion alone makes life a dangerous joyride, but unchecked accuracy leads to a seriously depressurized flight.

Why the Wife Is Always The Last to Know

Positive illusions help us marvel at our mates; biased thinking places safe bets on their behavior. But there's a type of mating intelligence that's even more paradoxical. Self-deception softens the conjugally unpalatable and pushes the envelope on what constitutes an intelligent strategy. When it comes to defending a relationship to ourselves, we're like lawyers who routinely manipulate—but outright lie when the need arises.

Sometimes we just give irritating actions a pass: Her rudeness to telephone solicitors has an upside (decisiveness). His tax returns don't add up? OK, he massaged the numbers after one bad year, and he'll surely make up for it in charitable donations. But God help his thieving brother, who took one deduction too many.

Most people who offend us in life will be deemed thoroughly flawed rather than temporarily challenged. This rush to judge a person's disposition, rather than considering the context surrounding their actions, is known as the fundamental attribution error. This bias likely evolved to keep our ancestors from aligning with dangerous individuals, a sort of one-strike-and-you're-out law of character judgment. But for a beloved partner we will make an exception, suspending censure like a president on an executive-pardon binge.

Chronic self-deception is more complicated. Hillary Clinton's admission that she believed Bill's early protestations about Monica engendered a global eye roll. But to some, this quiet acknowledgment of her own casuistry humanized her and made her more sympathetic. She was, after all, declaring her membership in one of the oldest women's leagues: Wives Who Are the Last to Know.

Women can be highly motivated to stay in relationships, and that often means overlooking noxious male behavior, especially if a split jeopardizes children, finances, or status. Turning a blind eye to infidelity is the Faustian pact many a First Lady has made. (Among the myriad reasons women tolerate cheating husbands, a stint in the White House is surely the best payoff.) Here, too, mating intelligence is at work.

All-or-nothing thinking about infidelity (your own or your mate's), divorce, or any act that will destabilize a relationship is often a smart—if unconscious—gambit. Consider the alternative: Uncertainty, distrust, and fractured loyalties make for paranoia, heartache, and paralysis. Miller suggests that one of the very functions of mating intelligence may be to navigate the emotional tipping points at which a decision can be made or a behavior acknowledged. "If you have to settle for one strategy or another, and if in-between strategies just aren't viable, then the emotions that motivate those strategies will also have tipping points." In other words, before we make a move, we are better off if we can avoid tormenting ourselves about the signs of an affair, or equivocating about ditching a spouse. Black-or-white thinking protects us from such protracted agony. It may also make our eventual decision (to leave, to cheat) appear rapid and fickle to a perplexed partner. And it explains why, when the light finally goes on, a betrayed spouse is quickly out the door.

Self-deception is an equal opportunity bias. It's a core feature of mating intelligence both for males and females. But women display more self-serving beliefs about their own behavior in relationships. When Maureen O'Sullivan, a professor of psychology at the University of San Francisco, queried college students about their lies to the opposite sex, she found that women assert that they themselves lie less than do other women. Men have no corresponding illusions about their mendacity relative to other guys. O'Sullivan sees the gap between women's self-reported lies versus their beliefs about other women's lies as evidence of internal sophistry. Self-deception makes sense for a woman who needs male resources, even if the guy himself isn't optimally committed. "Women have to put more of their central processing units into maintaining a relationship," says O'Sullivan. "It's easier to do that emotional work if you have a certain amount of self-deception." For some women, the skepticism that comes so naturally during courtship switches off once a commitment's been made, and they may overestimate a man's investment in the relationship or the odds that he's being faithful.

Battered women may be an extreme example of self-deception, points out O'Sullivan. Women who remain convinced of an abusive partner's devotion are arguably lying to themselves with an intensity that can appear delusional. But such women may be acting on a runaway impulse to ignore objectionable male behavior, an impulse that in effect prevents them from leaving when it's clearly to their advantage.

The emotional benefits of giving men a pass also explain why females are so quick to blame the "other woman" for a partner's infidelity. "If a man is susceptible to the flirtations of another woman, it's economically and emotionally easier to think that this other woman is a slut than that your husband's a slimeball," notes O'Sullivan.

Infidelity highlights the ultimate challenge to mating intelligence: staying sexually engaged in a long-term relationship. People differ greatly in the degree to which they can dazzle during courtship or retain a plum mate. But the Hollywood glitterati struggle as epically as your local minister and postman to keep a long-term union romantically vibrant. No one is immune to habituation. This is not to say that everyone simply lusts after new partners. Humans are a moderately monogamous species: We treasure our mates and guard them assiduously. At the same time, we've inherited the tendency to have a roving eye.

Plus, our ancestors barely lived until middle age, and those who survived had more to worry about than endless seduction on the savannah. The duration of today's relationships, and our heated expectations for them, depart radically from the unions of most couples who ever walked the earth. The golden anniversary is virtually as new as air travel. And just as a plane's oxygenated cabin allows us to zip around the globe, couples need to introduce novelty into a long-term relationship to simulate a state of courtship.

Welcome to the Meet Market

If you've clocked enough years (or months) as a couple to begin taking one another for granted, you may pine for the giddy perplexity with which you first approached your relationship. That doesn't mean hot pursuit always felt good. Recall your 14-year-old self attempting big-screen seduction moves while stationed at an overflowing locker, or enduring merciless teasing for physical attributes that barely compute as your own. Such humiliation was hardly for naught: Teen angst serves a purpose.

We need reality checks to figure out how the opposite sex perceives us and how we measure up relative to the competition. Adolescence is just that gauge. Teens pull no punches in acclimating their peers to the mating market. Mating intelligence is perhaps the most important life skill cultivated during junior high and high school—the grand rollout of the traits we hope will attract partners, with an emphasis on the splashy and superficial. That's why being dateless for a dance or relegated to Friendster Siberia can be torturous; peer judgments of our social standing are the first honest appraisal of our market value. They can endure. Because self-esteem roars to life during adolescence, when rejection begins to matter in a new way, our early opposite-sex encounters can influence our self-appraisal for years to come.

Peer judgments may be supremely influential in today's world. Traditionally, teens mixed more with adults and extended family, so they received feedback on their mate value from their clan as much as from their clique. But today teens are schooled and socialized in lockstep, creating an unprecedented separation from adults that Miller argues may warp accurate self-appraisal. A 17-year-old girl, he contends, compares herself mercilessly to her equally nubile peers; she doesn't mingle with adults enough to realize that she and her friends are all in the top-10 percent of women, reproductively speaking. "Forty years ago," says Miller, "a girl might have entered the workforce at age 18 and gotten a lot of attention in the office relative to the 28-year old 'spinster.' " Today, she'll enter college, still socializing and competing with a gaggle of equally young, pretty girls.

Boys also rank themselves heavily against peers. But because high school shelters them from the status wars waged among professional men, Miller believes boys actually overestimate their mate value during adolescence, and none more so than jocks. "Young men who were captains of the football team graduate thinking they're God's gift to women, and women respond, 'I'm interested in corporate attorneys and well-cited professors. Who the hell are you?' " The bottom line, he says, is that the longer you extend age-segregated higher education, the more you delay accurate calibration to the overall mating market.

Glenn Geher argues that health class would do well to teach the rudiments of opposite-sex mind reading and mate preferences, not just opposite-sex plumbing. Miller agrees: "It would help enormously if boys were told, 'your sense of humor and ability to be interesting matter.' It would help if girls heard, 'No, you don't have to be ultrathin. If you're best friends with a guy, he might make a good boyfriend.' There's so much misunderstanding between the sexes, and adults seem unwilling to take a stand."

Teens are often equally clueless about the character strengths that make for a good partner. It takes a few years of experimental hookups and baffling breakups to learn the value of conscientiousness, trustworthiness, and emotional stability. Indeed, it is thanks in part to the cheek-scorching travails of young love that personality becomes by and large a spin-free zone. Adults' snap judgments about emotionally healthy individuals are amazingly accurate. (The personality-disordered are a more complex challenge to mating intelligence.)

Still, no personality type makes for a superior mate. Context, not character, is destiny. The extroverted dervish may have an exhausting aversion to downtime. And chances are you're not the only person drawn to a woman with an operatic ability to connect. Because they're highly sought after, extroverts tend to have more affairs and end relationships more often, reports Daniel Nettle of the University of Newcastle. An agreeable man may be a helpmate, power-listener, and faithful husband, but he is also less likely to be an alpha earner than is his hard-charging, narcissistic brother. Yes, highly creative men are more attractive—Nettle's colleague Helen Clegg found that artists who amassed the most gallery exhibitions also racked up the most sexual partners—but they're not always prize mates. "I'm not sure many people want to marry Salvador Dali," says Nettle. "For me that's a bad job to get."

Yet Dali was married, to a diva named Gala. The Russian-émigrée, 10 years his senior, ditched surrealist poet Paul Éluard to take up with the painter. Gala, one might presume, sat in a left-bank café and weighed the evidence ("attractive but acutely flamboyant, warped sense of time...") before accepting the tempestuous gig. It may be impossible to fully grasp the weird logic of any one person's romantic choices. But thanks to evolution, all relationships share the canny subterfuge and emotional acrobatics of mating intelligence to which, in some measure, they owe their success.

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i think my favorite tidbit is that women are more self-delusional than men, essentially - that women judge themselves to lie less than their female peers, while men have no such bias comparative to other men. :P

find the original article, and more interesting fun things, at the psychology today site.

happy new year, my dears

2007-01-01T04:53:00.000-08:00

a haunting, must-read article from a NYT editor whose husband was killed in iraq. knowing he might not live to see his infant son grow up, he left a sprawling notebook filled with all the fatherly wisdom he wanted to pass on.

it's so sad.

happy 2007, all - may the new year bring new experiences and new happinesses for us. i think we deserve it.

bookworms vs. nerds - article/blog

2006-12-16T03:34:00.000-08:00

what do you think, kids, does this explain me? a recent study by the british psychological society found that the "more fiction a person reads, the more empathy they have and the better they perform on tests of social understanding and awareness. By contrast, reading more non-fiction, fact-based books shows the opposite association."

"this american life" tries a new medium - article

2006-12-11T17:21:00.000-08:00

so i'm a television fanatic, but there is something timeless about stories told and heard over the radio as well.

"this american life" is my favorite program on npr - it feeds into my addiction to good storytelling, and probably was the reason i first began to appreciate non-fiction. (some choice selections for the uninitiated all from the staff favorites page, or you can just go to the site and search for anything and everything david sedaris has ever done.)

and now, it looks as though the npr staple is crossing over.

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'This American Life' Is Ready for Its TV Close-Up
by Lynn Neary
All Things Considered, December 5, 2006

OK. Rats. They could film rats running in circles. It would be creepy. It would be cool.

No, scratch that. Humans in rat suits!

That's just one of the many odd discussions that took place in the process of transforming a radio program into a television series. The show is This American Life. The host is Ira Glass. The TV series will debut in March on the Showtime cable channel.

There's a certain simplicity to the art of radio. At its heart, it's all about storytelling. And This American Life is a radio show that revels in storytelling -- quirky stories, sad stories, scary stories.

This American Life seems so wedded to the medium of radio that when the Showtime cable network first approached Glass about turning it into a TV show, he couldn't imagine it.

"We basically said 'no' for a year and half," Glass recalls. "And we kept saying we have no idea how to... be filmmakers. You have to hook us up with people who could design something that got across the feeling of the radio show."

They found those experts in cinematographer Adam Beckman and director Chris Wilcha. Sometimes Beckman and Wilcha have to tell people steeped in radio that their ideas just won't work on television. Other times, they take the ideas and turn them into compelling visual images.

Like the rats. This story, dealing with erasing memory in rats, caught the staff's attention when they heard that real people had called the researchers because they wanted their own bad memories erased. But Wilcha was struggling with the visuals. While Beckman and his crew worked, Wilcha pulled Glass aside to pitch his ideas, which included humans in rat suits.

It's not the first time Glass has been a bit taken aback by one of Wilcha's ideas. Take the desk, for example. They'd been trying to figure out Glass's role as host. Would he just be an off-camera voice? And if not, would he do stand-ups on location or would he appear on a set?

In the end, they decided to give him a desk. But not just any desk.

"What if your desk appeared out on the landscape?" Wilcha wondered. "On an abandoned freeway, on the Salt Flats, in the woods. But you never make mention of it or point to it."

So Glass, staring at the audience through his big, black-framed glasses, introduces the show and the stories from behind a sleek, art deco desk made of shiny, red wood. In one shot, the desk and Ira sit in the middle of Utah's Salt Flats, looking like an inconsequential speck in a vast moonscape.

Perhaps the most painful adjustment for Glass was having to perform for the camera. Not only did he have to say his lines over and over again -- on camera, in a very public setting, surrounded by a huge crew -- he also had to watch himself over and over again.

"I don't see any positive aspect of being on camera," Glass says. "I am 47 years old, I don't like looking at myself. After a certain point, no one likes looking at themselves on television. There's just no up side."

But for all the complications of television, producer Nancy Updike says there have been moments of unexpected pleasure. A longtime radio producer, Updike wasn't sure This American Life would translate to a visual medium. Then she saw the pilot.

In a story about efforts to bring a bull named Chance back from the dead, Updike was surprised that they had managed to transfer the feel of the radio show to television. And the images of the bull provided a pleasure that radio could not.

"They're almost glamour shots of the bull, different parts of him, and he's in shadow and it's breathtaking," Updike says. "It's a moment you can't have in a radio show, a moment of pure visual reverie."

And that's no bull.

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found here, and you can listen to it here.

"TELL ME THIS AIN'T TRUE." - article

2006-12-06T09:48:00.000-08:00

MattR26 (8:46:44 AM): so they're moving veronica mars away from the long arcs format to self-contained episodes
xcr253 (9:30:26 AM): so its gonna fucking be like CSI?! F that shit!
MattR26 (9:30:58 AM): yeah, it kinda sucks
MattR26 (9:31:49 AM): they said its getting hard to make up storylines that the characters are emotionally bonded to without having to bring in a whole new group of characters every time
xcr253 (9:32:28 AM): :( i dont care! you're a writer, its your job!
MattR26 (9:33:02 AM): wow, this is really bothering you
xcr253 (9:33:19 AM): lol you know what? it IS. i saw your msg before i hopped in the shower
xcr253 (9:33:26 AM): so it was ALL i thought about for 20mins
MattR26 (9:33:38 AM): haha
MattR26 (9:34:17 AM): this is from tv guide
xcr253 (9:34:24 AM): F TV GUIDE.
MattR26 (9:34:30 AM): Question: I've just read the news about how Rob Thomas wants to make Veronica Mars into a boring, lousy, "safe" stand-alone show. No arc episodes anymore, only emotional drama will connect the episodes. Tell me this ain't true.
xcr253 (9:34:31 AM): :'(
MattR26 (9:35:02 AM): Ausiello: It's true — the stand-alone part, not the "boring, lousy, safe" part — and here's Rob Thomas' reasoning: "Our fear is that the big mysteries are keeping casual TV viewers away, and it's very difficult to engage Veronica in a multi-episode mystery without making it extremely personal. Season 1 was built around the mystery. Veronica's best friend was dead. Every series regular was intertwined with the mystery.
MattR26 (9:35:08 AM): Without replacing the cast with each mystery and/or killing Wallace, I'm not sure we can devise enough personal connection to a case to keep the momentum we had in Season 1." I'm of the opinion that a self-contained Veronica is better than no Veronica.
xcr253 (9:35:44 AM): no, man.
xcr253 (9:35:57 AM): i disagree.
MattR26 (9:36:22 AM): yeah
xcr253 (9:36:56 AM): i would rather have three box sets of a brilliant tv show that was brazenly ripped off the air by The Man than have a crap veronica.
MattR26 (9:37:13 AM): hahhaa
xcr253 (9:37:36 AM): lol, it's true! it's as if Arrested Development tried to "cater more to the masses" or something
xcr253 (9:37:49 AM): that's bullshit
MattR26 (9:38:08 AM): yeah, thats true
xcr253 (9:38:27 AM): all right. well, and thus begins the internet campaign, i suppose
xcr253 (9:38:32 AM): *goes off to blog about this*
MattR26 (9:38:44 AM): hahahahaah
MattR26 (9:38:47 AM): :)

the new love of my life - article

2006-12-03T01:47:00.000-08:00

okay, this is so weird.

first, a confession: i have spent the last three days - literally, the last 72 hours - watching every kristin chenoweth video on youtube. yes, it is finals time. so no, i dont have class.

it started when i was doing a bit of wicked research (going to see it at the pantages in march - w00t!). actually, it started cause i wanted to find more indina menzel clips...but then i found kristin's 1999 tony awards performance (a performance which she won for, btw!) and that shit was all over. the woman is AMAZING. i proceeded to watch everything else youtube had on her.

i've also been interested in her lately b/c i've been watching "studio 60 on the sunset strip," and aaron sorkin has been pretty obvious about modeling lead female character harriet after cheno, who is his ex. (you may also know her as annabeth from west wing.) both cheno and harriet (the character on studio 60) are multi-talented comedy and hollywood stars, very cute and endearing, who happen to be tolerant and open-minded christians, alternately shunned by the gay/liberal community and the religious one, for straddling the line between the two.

[as an aside, i *am* irritated by how dumb harriet's character is. there is a lot of good potential in this character, and i feel like the show treats her poorly to illustrate some pretty obvious psychological/societal points. a lot more depth could be found with her if the show made her less of an idiot; then we could have some real discourse on these issues. c'mon aaron.]

anyway, i gotta tell you, kristin chenoweth is all personality. she's adorable, sexy, and talented through the roof - she has, i think, near perfect pitch and perfect relative pitch (her roots are in opera, and she switches easily between that and any other form of music). as a physical comedienne she's a complete scene-stealer. (her *other* roots are in ballet.) more than that, she is humble and gracious, incredibly hardworking, and handles herself with such elegance. all of hollywood should be striving to handle publicity and fame the way she does. i adore her.

i am not presumptuous enough to say that seeing kristin on stage makes me miss theater, but watching a ton of stage stuff, and planning to go see a lot of stage stuff next semester does remind me of that whole world. i fully intend to get back in to it. some of you know i [kind of] stage managed a show this summer, but LA, unfortunately, is NOT really the place for small, indie on-the-side stuff. the big name tv stars can anchor a show in a professional space, but theater doesn't hum the way it does in new york city. still, once i can afford it =/ i'll be doing it again.

anyway, i was saying it's weird b/c after my weekend of obsession with her, the ny times ran this article! about cheno! so timely!

okay, this is my favorite clip that i want to share with you - i watched this like a million times. i am not kidding you. she's so ridiculously watchable.

talent like that is totally amazing.

raze the palm

2006-11-25T22:59:00.000-08:00

well, twin-looking blogs have got to share content at some point, eh? many thanks to my lovely ny-based scatteredpaper, who noticed this article on LA's decision to start weeding out palm trees.

i'm of slightly mixed mind about this, mainly b/c i am one who believes strongly in iconic images and i do love how those trees look on our skylines. still, i have to agree - if the concern is an environmental one (the palms aren't pulling their weight to clean our air - at least not as much as other trees could), then it's more important to put in more efficient trees. gotta look out for our kids, kids.

veronica's gotta grow - article/blog post

2006-11-21T21:28:00.001-08:00

my favorite tv show:

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Going Away To College: Or, Why We Should All Cut Riley Finn Some Slack
by Dan Carlson

In case it's escaped the notice of even the dullest reader out there, I've got a pretty special place in the black rock I call my heart for "Veronica Mars." Now cruising gamely along in its third season, despite low ratings and a network dumb enough to pair it with "Gilmore Girls" (a show about absolutely, positively nothing at all), "Veronica Mars" is still one of the best shows on TV. But after two full years of exploring high school life, Veronica up and graduated, and is now attending Hearst College. Her matriculation mirrors not just the show's transfer from the defunct UPN to the new CW, but also the fact that the show itself is at a crossroads, namely, the elimination of its premise — high-school private eye — and a gradual change in its mission statement.

This is bound to be a polarizing time for the show's hardcore fans, and it's reminiscent of the similar struggle faced by what some have called the show's ancestor, "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." Granted, I think that comparing any two shows beyond a certain point is unwise, and most people are just linking "Buffy" and "Veronica Mars" out of a well-meaning laziness: Both shows were centered around a strong, flawed, complex female character in high school; both shows placed a premium on witty dialogue and interpersonal relationships; both shows are on low-rated pseudo-networks; etc. But the shows do have their similarites [sic], primarily their ability to explore the hell of growing up through the archetypal lens of high school, the one experience that unites us all in common misery. After its third season, "Buffy" went through the same growing pains now working their way through "Veronica Mars," as Buffy went off to college and the show struggled to find its larger purpose even as its core dynamic was forever altered. More than just having key characters removed and assigned to a spin-off, the "Buffy" universe had to deal with its very own existential crisis: What happens when the teenage superhero starts to grow up?

The show dealt with the inevitable problems the only way it knew how: By pushing through them. The first episode of the fourth season features another pack of vampires led by one of the lamest ringleaders the show ever came up with, but the villain of the week did one thing right: She broke Buffy's umbrella, a symbol of the good work she'd done in high school. It was a crushing, visceral way for the show to proclaim that the times were changing in a big way.

The fourth season, though certainly not a favorite of some fans, nevertheless turned out some great episodes — the experimental "Hush," the crossover "Pangs," the enjoyable one-off "Superstar," the excellent "Fear, Itself" — and, much more importantly, broadened its worldview. College is a world of gray tones next to the starkly defined areas of high school, and Buffy interacted with a greater variety of people with more darkly human (as opposed to demonic) traits, including Parker, who slept with Buffy and never called her again. He wasn't supernaturally evil, just a tool. It was in important step for the show, and one that paved the way for more complex relationships in the characters' collective futures. The fourth season was radically different from the first three because it had to be.

That's the problem, and possible solution, facing "Veronica Mars." The show's first two seasons delved into the dark sides of class warfare between the haves and have-nots of the small town of Neptune, smartly recognizing that cash is the biggest dividing line between the lunch tables in the cafeteria. But university life is rarely that stratified, and the only people who cling to such dated notions of how to define themselves are the jerks who seem to think college is basically Grade 13. "Veronica Mars" is going to have to figure out how to let go of the rich-poor struggle that so often defines the stories.

Veronica used to be a high-school snoop, and but she's going to have to transform into a bigger, more nuanced character to get the show over the tough bumps coming out of two solid years of stories. The show should set about trying to define Veronica in grander terms, like what kind of person does she want to be, in order to work. The central group of characters has been altered — Duncan's gone, Beaver's dead — and the remaining ones aren't what they used to be, none more than Weevil, who's gone from ruthless gang leader to the equivalent of wacky sitcom neighbor in only a few months (seriously, making Weevil the janitor at Hearst was a low blow, especially after offering up the tantaloizing [sic] possibility that he might work with Keith). But "Veronica Mars" can and will succeed if it pushes the characters to grow, and if it becomes comfortable with somewhat redefining itself. You don't go back; you go on to the next place, whatever that is.

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find the article here, at slowly going bald.

invisibility cloaks - article

2006-11-15T14:04:00.000-08:00

science is so awesome. and the japanese are so awesome, too. check out this article on the science behind invisibility cloaks and some potential real-world applications of this technology. i've heard of this before but it's neat to read up on exactly how far we've gotten with it, and where we could be using it.

television and learning - article

2006-11-13T20:09:00.000-08:00

yet another great article that discusses the nexus of psychology and pop culture. i love stuff like this b/c it's rather intuitive - not necessarily obvious - but awesome to have research back it up.

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Prime time to learn
In law dramas, medical shows and comedies, science is invading TV story lines. Good thing they try to get it right.
By Susan Brink
Times Staff Writer

November 13, 2006

AMERICANS more than just believe the health information they get from fictional television shows. Spurred by what they see on shows like "ER" or "The Bold and the Beautiful," surveys suggest, they take action. They go to the doctor. They tell a friend to have that cough checked. They ask a lover to use a condom.

Fans develop trusting relationships with the characters who come into their homes each week, and industry insiders can't betray that trust. "I'm aware of the number of people who are paying attention to the facts around the fiction," says Jan Nash, executive producer of "Without a Trace." Thanks in part to the Internet, where health sites consistently rank at the top of those most visited, more and more viewers know when something doesn't ring true.

They're getting a lot of chances to make such calls. Science is invading scripts. Disease is increasingly a backdrop to plots. The woes of the nation's healthcare system are punch lines. Heroic characters have mental diseases or incurable neurological disorders.

And behind the scenes, a body of communications research and an eager network of health and policy advocates are working with writers and producers to get the facts right. The shows milking medicine for back stories or main plot lines aren't limited to the medical genre such as "ER," "Grey's Anatomy" or "Scrubs." Sick, damaged or dying characters are showing up in shows about crime, politics, the legal profession, or wacky families and friends.

But seeing how profoundly true prime-time television can be was a shock, nonetheless, for Robert T. Brennan, a statistician at the Harvard School of Medicine and his daughter, Emma Brennan-Wydra, 13. On Jan. 3, 2006, they thought the night was winding down like hundreds of others, just another evening of TV viewing in their Somerville, Mass., home. It was 10 p.m., and Emma, a devotee of "Law & Order," was curled up watching the episode "Infected" with her father. "No popcorn. Nothing special, just uneventful viewing," says Brennan.

Little did they know, within their pajama-clad coziness on the other side of the country, that they were about to get an insider's glimpse into one of the latest trends in Hollywood.

Brennan and his daughter sat, mesmerized as the crime drama got closer and closer to home. It was about a grammar school-aged boy who, after seeing his mother shot to death, killed her murderer and went on trial as an adult.

"Annie Potts is addressing the jury," Brennan says, still amazed that his study, published in the May 27, 2005, journal Science, was quoted, statistic by statistic, by actress Potts, who played the boy's defense attorney, Sophie Devere. "She talked about kids being two to three times more likely to commit gun violence after they've been exposed to gun violence." As the character gave closing arguments, she referred to Science, gave the number of study participants and said the research took place in Chicago. There was no doubt. She was talking about Brennan's study.

"Emma and I looked at each other in total disbelief. Literally, I was flushed and my hair was standing up on my neck. The exact details of the study were on television," says Brennan. "And the accuracy of it was really amazing. I hate to say this, but it was more accurate than anything I've ever had covered in a newspaper."

His research ended up on the airwaves after Dr. Neal Baer, pediatrician and executive producer of "Law & Order: SVU," read the study on childhood violence by Brennan and coauthors Jeffrey Bingenheimer and Felton Earls. With all due respect, the paper was "wonky policy stuff, research that almost nobody reads," says Baer. But for a doctor who is also a television writer, it triggered an idea for a plot. "Just as you're exposed to flu when someone sneezes on you, this boy was exposed to violence. He was infected, and he committed a violent act," Baer says of his TV character.

What Baer did with a dry study illustrates the challenge to television writers: Take timely, important topics and make them entertaining. Accuracy and responsibility matter, industry insiders say, but their job is to attract and hold television viewers, not lecture or teach.

"Ultimately, our responsibility is to the drama of the show," says Nash. If writers start getting preachy, she says, viewers will hit the button on the remote.

At a time when reliance on traditional news media is slipping, entertainment communication becomes an important health issue. Prime-time television is where Americans gather, and it's where they learn. It makes sense to put the information where people are likely to get it.

The emphasis on the human and emotional drama behind the science, it turns out, is exactly what helps messages stick with viewers, according to communications research. Movies have a powerful effect too, but television fans come to know the characters they watch each week. Done well, the messages play out in the lives of familiar characters, and viewers learn something.

Premiering a theory

One of the first proofs that popular shows can educate large numbers of people came in 1977, in Mexico. Broadcast pioneer Miguel Sabido decided to make use of a classic learning theory, called social cognitive learning, in a soap opera. The theory, developed by Stanford social scientist Albert Bandura in 1961, holds that one way people learn is from watching others, particularly if they identify with the people and observe long enough to see a successful outcome. Sabido's telenovela was called "Acompañame," or "Accompany Me." The characters, including a poor but strong young woman who had two children and didn't want any more, grappled with family planning.

In its first year, it was apparent that the people who listened also learned — and acted. The Mexican government's National Population Council reported that monthly phone calls requesting family planning information increased from next to none to 500. Contraceptive sales increased 23% the first year the show aired, compared with an increase of 7% the previous year.

Following Mexico's success, the entertainment-education movement spread to India, China and Africa, where people in even the most remote villages tune their portable radios to soap operas. Characters routinely deal with the reality of AIDS. "You put up a billboard saying 'AIDS Kills, Use a Condom,' and it doesn't tell a woman how to approach her husband to talk about condoms," says Sonny Fox, whose Studio City consulting company works internationally to advise media and public health advocates. "In a radio drama, you put that right into the story. The listener has to be able to say, 'If she can do it, I can do it.' "

At a recent workshop in Johannesburg, South Africa, a survey presented Nov. 6 by researchers from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health examined the effect of one such program. It found that reported condom use during the last sexual encounter increased from 34% among people who did not tune into a soap opera called "Tsha Tsha" to 60% among those who watched 10 or more of the programs.

Third World successes got the attention of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. If people in poor countries learn from radio and television entertainment shows, maybe Americans would too.

The CDC analyzed U.S. health survey data in 1999. Researchers concluded that of the 38 million Americans who regularly watch daytime soap operas, almost half said they learned something about diseases and how to prevent them. Even better, about a third of viewers said they took some action based on what they saw on a soap opera, including 7% who visited a doctor and 6% who did something to prevent a health problem.

A year later, the CDC looked at prime-time television. It found that of Americans who tuned in twice a week or more, 52% said they trusted the health information they see to be accurate, and 26% said that prime-time TV was among their top three sources for health information.

Inspiring ideas, facts

Inspired by such research, health advocates are figuring out how to work with entertainment television, without raising the hackles of creative types. The Kaiser Family Foundation and CBS and Viacom, for example, hold annual briefings in which writers and producers hear the real-life stories of people living with HIV.

Writers listen, awaiting the muse. And advocates cross their fingers, hoping that truth morphs into broadcast fiction.

Just such a briefing sparked the imagination of Nash and Greg Walker, executive producers of "Without a Trace." "We heard these testimonials, and we were moved by the accounts," says Walker. Adds Nash, "We would drive home and think, 'We have to figure out a way to do this.' " In the 2005 HIV-AIDS briefing, they heard the true story of Jennifer Jako, a pregnant HIV-positive woman who felt the judgment of people who thought she shouldn't have risked passing the virus to her child.

Her story inspired an April 13, 2006, episode called "Expectations," about a pregnant HIV-positive woman who resents the judgmental comments of a nurse, who tells her she should never have gotten pregnant. The character disappears shortly before her baby is due. The suspense builds as the missing woman calls from her cellphone to say she is in labor. She needs a cesarean section, and she needs it now.

To get the AIDS facts straight, Nash and Walker worked with Tina Hoff, director of the Media Entertainment Program of the Kaiser Family Foundation. "We're not the creative visionaries," Hoff says. "But once a story line is developed, we can help ensure that it's accurate."

In reality, the baby of an HIV-infected mother has a less than 2% chance of being born with the disease provided the mother has taken appropriate medications during pregnancy and the delivery is cesarean. If the audience didn't know that before they saw the show, they did after.

In the show, the woman was found in time to deliver a healthy baby by cesarean section. In real life, Jako gave birth — C-section of course — to a healthy daughter in July.

The influence of a popular television show can make physicians' everyday advice pale, says Dr. Mark Morocco, an emergency room physician who was a technical advisor to "ER." "I might see 20 to 30 people a day," he says on his morning shift at the real emergency department of Brotman Medical Center in Culver City. "A show like 'ER' at one time was reaching 30 million people a week. You just can't beat that for power."

The magnitude of the impact of that one show was measured in classic studies by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the CDC. They surveyed "ER" viewers before and after specific episodes. One episode included a vignette on date rape. The victim was advised that she could take a morning-after pill to prevent pregnancy. Before it aired, the study found that only 10% of viewers were aware that high-dose birth control pills were an option to prevent pregnancy. In the week after the episode aired, 33% of viewers were aware of the morning-after option. Another episode dealt with HPV as a cause of cervical cancer, and before the show ran, 24% of "ER" viewers knew about HPV. A week after the show aired, 47% said they had heard of HPV.

"That research reinforced that you just can't ignore the role of entertainment media in people's lives," says Hoff.

Such studies have encouraged shows to use the expertise of real doctors to go deeper than helping actors correctly pronounce medical words, or showing them how to attach electrocardiographic leads. Morocco helped the show's writers figure out how to write Anthony Edwards, who played Dr. Mark Greene on "ER," out of the script after Edwards announced he'd be leaving the show. "What could we give him that would be accurate, that could kill him in 15 months?" says Morocco. The answer: glioblastoma, an aggressive brain tumor whose sufferers have a life expectancy of about 18 months.

Viewers watched, week after week, the dramatic arc of Dr. Greene's diagnosis, treatment success, relapse and decline. "We were able to show what people with a bad brain tumor really go through," Morocco says. "How it affects your family, the real roller coaster ride you're on when you get this kind of diagnosis." Until, finally, the fictional Dr. Greene died, in the May 9, 2002, episode.

Premiering this week may be one of the most intense efforts to get the science right. A new series, "3 Lbs.," named for the weight of the average human brain, is about two neurosurgeons. The pilot shows symptoms, brain scans and neurosurgery wrapped around the lives of two patients shocked that their brains have gone haywire. "It's all research-based," says executive producer Peter Ocko. "There's not a neurological condition we deal with that's not documented in research. We consult with two neurosurgeons. We gather case histories. There's a doctor and a nurse on the set for every medical moment. And we do just as much research on the patient's perspective." From there, poetic license comes in.

Even nonmedical shows are hiring researchers whose job it is to ferret out what's new and true in multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer's disease, obsessive-compulsive disorder, cancer, diabetes or even policy issues such as the growing number of uninsured Americans or the vast disparity between donated organs and the need for organ transplants. All those topics have made their way into recent prime-time shows.

Hollywood insiders

The effort to educate while entertaining goes beyond doctors and staff researchers working within television.

The granddaddy of the industry-science collaboration is probably the Entertainment Industries Council, started in 1983, just about the time John Belushi died of a drug overdose and Richard Pryor set himself ablaze freebasing cocaine. Created to promote health and social issues via entertainment, the council first tackled drug abuse. It quickly expanded. "We're the folks who got actors to put their seat belts on for driving scenes," says Larry Deutchman, executive vice president of marketing and industry relations for the council.

Now there is a growing industry in Hollywood made up of advocates who are neither entertainers nor insiders, but who want their disease or issue to get dramatic play before a mass audience. Similar to product placement, it's a kind of ideas placement. A group called the Entertainment Professionals Resource Assn. pulls dozens of these groups together, including the American Cancer Society, Down Syndrome in Arts and Media, the American Heart Assn. and the Mental Health Media Partnership.

"We're trying to shift the norm," says Deborah Glik, director of the UCLA Health and Media Research Group, who is affiliated with the entertainment group. "When you're going to portray a health issue anyway, and you're working with a platform that reaches millions of people, you should do it accurately."

Members make themselves available with scientific facts and a bank of real citizens willing to tell their stories. They carefully push their causes, knowing they walk a delicate line between sparking creativity and triggering annoyance.

David Sampson, director of media relations at the American Cancer Society, has learned that it's better if his organization stays away from pitching specific plots. Policy wonks, it turns out, aren't so good at recognizing the germ of a compelling story line. "Writers come to us," he says, "and almost invariably, they'll pick up on some bit of information that we had no intention of relaying."

But the society doesn't hesitate to advise, when asked. When Alexis on the soap opera "General Hospital" was diagnosed with lung cancer despite being a nonsmoker, Sampson heard that writers wanted to attribute her disease to asbestos exposure. "About 4,000 non-smokers a year come down with lung cancer," he says. "But short of working in a mine, you only get lung cancer from asbestos exposure if you're also a smoker." Exposure to second-hand smoke, the society suggested, was a far better explanation.

The idea is to present entertainment insiders with powerful real stories, inundate them with facts, and then sit back and hope the creative juices take over. "I believe the writer is king or queen," says Lisa Allen, director of the Media Project, which provides entertainment industry professionals with information on reproductive issues. "We don't preach, we don't proselytize."

But sometimes, when the people who understand the power of the medium watch TV, they do a slow burn. Glik recalls one of those moments. She was watching a prime-time drama in which a character had hepatitis. "I got so upset," she says. "They should have talked about immunizations. It was a missed opportunity."

Missed opportunities and programs that are just plain wrong persist. Soap opera characters can still come out of comas as though they simply took a long nap. Prime-time shows can still depict death as though it's as quick and painless as fainting.

And while television may have become more daring in portraying how disease affects real people, network television pulls its punches on some controversial topics. Abortion, for example, has become more taboo over the years. In 1972, Maude, played by Bea Arthur, had an abortion, a decision that unfolded over two episodes on the sitcom "Maude," watched by 65 million viewers. Thirty years later, Claire Fisher, played by actress Lauren Ambrose on the HBO drama "Six Feet Under," whose viewership peaked at 5 million, had an abortion. In between the two shows, almost all unplanned television pregnancies ended either in miscarriage, adoption or a decision to keep the baby.

No issue unaired

But because truth can be stranger, and more entertaining, than fiction, increasingly even the most tedious of topics — the economics of the healthcare delivery system, for example — are finding their way onto the airwaves. What "Friends" fan will ever forget the time that Joey, an aspiring actor, faced losing his health coverage, an all too real dilemma for 46 million Americans? In the Oct. 14, 1999, episode, Joey's coverage through the Screen Actors Guild was going to lapse unless he chalked up more work hours. Then he got a hernia, the pain of which required treatment but also interfered with his ability to work the hours he needed to remain insured.

Joey does solve his problem, recalls Kate Langrall Folb of Nightingale Entertainment, who works to get stories on health policy, including the uninsured, onto television shows. "He gets a gig portraying a dying guy in pain," she says. He earned his hours, kept his insurance and got his hernia treated.

It was, after all, television. Everything must be tidied up within 30 to 60 minutes.
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from the la times.

if google were a person . . .

2006-11-03T23:20:00.000-08:00

check this site out - ChaCha.com - it's a search engine that has actual people to assist you via live chat if you like.

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i typed in: black and white angelina jolie yelling

Status: Looking for a guide ...
Status: Connected to guide: MelissaJ
MelissaJ: Hi there. I will be helping with your search.
You: hi melissa
MelissaJ: Hi, how are you?
You: i'm looking for a specific angie photo
You: i'm good, thanks, and you!
MelissaJ: Okay, I was wondering what the search meant!
MelissaJ: Can you describe it to me?
You: lol yes, it's a b&w photo
You: from just her shoulders up
You: her hands are raised and she's grabbing her hair
You: so that it fans out above her head
You: and she looks like she's yelling
MelissaJ: Okay, do you know approximately how old it is? Recent or a few years ago
You: a few yrs ago
You: i believe from a magazine publication
MelissaJ: Okay, let me try to find it for you
You: thank you.
MelissaJ: I found one that may be it
MelissaJ: Click on the link to the right, is that it?
You: oooh almost!
MelissaJ: Ok, it's close though? Maybe from the same photo shoot?
You: i think it's from the same shoot

MelissaJ: Okay, let me keep searching for you
You: the one i recall was with her mouth open i think
MelissaJ: Okay
You: this is great, though - do you have this as anything bigger than a thumbnail?
MelissaJ: Not yet, let me check
You: oh, nm, i just erased "thumb" and got it
MelissaJ: Still searching...
You: k!
You: if it helps, i recall it being slightly closer cropped to her head
MelissaJ: Okay, thanks!
You: you know, the more i look at it, perhaps this is it after all
MelissaJ: You think?
MelissaJ: Ill keep looking anyway, give me a few more minutes
You: yeah, i keep closing it and coming back to it, it seems more familiar
You: okay!
You: thank you
MelissaJ: I'm having trouble finding anything else.
You: okay
You: this is great, thank you
MelissaJ: I looked through all of the thumbnails of photos of her on google, yahoo and dogpile
You: this is probably it
MelissaJ: just so you know what's already been looked for...
You: lol at least it was probably pretty fun doing that
MelissaJ: and i couldn't find any other from that shoot either
You: okay, this must be it then
You: thank you
MelissaJ: well, i'm a female so she really doesn't do anything for me,
MelissaJ: haha
You: lol i'm a girl, too, but she is so purdy
MelissaJ: haha okay
You: i have a question about chacha
MelissaJ: sure
You: are you guys for searching images only?
You: or websites/content as well?
MelissaJ: no not at all
MelissaJ: anything
MelissaJ: anything you can think of
You: ic
You: very good, thank you
MelissaJ: yep, have a good night!
MelissaJ: Please RATE ME. Thanks for using ChaCha.
Status: Session ended.

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this is another post brought kindly to you by kirk, who had a slightly more hilarious, slightly less angie-obsessed experience with his searchers (read it here).

jesus fucking christ... - article

2006-11-02T12:32:00.000-08:00

i...i can't even imagine.

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November 2, 2006
Tending a Fallen Marine, With Skill, Prayer and Fury
By C. J. CHIVERS

KARMA, Iraq, Oct. 30 — Petty Officer Third Class Dustin E. Kirby clutched the injured marine’s empty helmet. His hands were coated in blood. Sweat ran down his face, which he was trying to keep straight but kept twisting into a snarl.

He held up the helmet and flipped it, exposing the inside. It was lined with blood and splinters of bone.

“The round hit him,” he said, pausing to point at a tiny hole that aligned roughly with a man’s temple. “Right here.”

Petty Officer Kirby, 22, is a Navy corpsman, the trauma medic assigned to Second Mobile Assault Platoon of Weapons Company, Second Battalion, Eighth Marines. Everyone calls him Doc. He had just finished treating a marine who had been shot by an Iraqi sniper.

“It was 7.62 millimeter,” he continued. “Armor piercing.”

He reached into his pocket and retrieved the bullet, which he had found. “The impact with the Kevlar stopped most of it,” he said. “But it tore through, hit his head, went through and came out.”

He put the bullet in his breast pocket, to give to an intelligence team later. Sweat kept rolling off his face, mixed with tears. His voice was almost cracking, but he managed to control it and keep it deep. “When I got there, there wasn’t much I could do,” he said.

Then he nodded. He seemed to be talking to himself. “I kept him breathing,” he said.

He looked at Lance Cpl. Matias Tafoya, his driver, and raised his voice. It was almost a shout. “When I told you that I do not let people die on me, I meant it,” he said. “I meant it.”

He scanned the Iraqi houses, perhaps 150 yards away, on the other side of a fetid green canal. Marines were all around, pressed to the ground, peering from behind machine-gun turrets or bracing against their armored vehicles, aiming rifles at where they thought the sniper was.

The sniper had made a single shot just as the marines were leaving a rural settlement on the western edge of Karma, a city near Falluja in Anbar Province.

The marines had been searching several houses on this side of the canal, where they found five Kalashnikov assault rifles and bomb components, and were getting back into their vehicles when everyone heard the shot. It was a single loud crack.

No one was precisely sure where it had come from. Everyone knew precisely where it hit. It struck a marine who was peering out of the first vehicle’s gun turret. He collapsed.

Petty Officer Kirby rushed to him and found him breathing. He bandaged the marine’s head as the vehicle lurched away. Soon he helped load the wounded marine into a helicopter, which touched down beside the convoy within 12 minutes of the shot.

Once the helicopter lifted away, he ran back to his vehicle, ready to treat anyone else. He was thinking about the marine he had already treated.

“If I had gone with him,” he said, and glanced to where the helicopter had flown away, over the line of date palms at the end of a field. His voice softened. “But I’m not with him,” he said.

He turned, faced a reporter and spoke loudly again. “In situations and times like this, I am bound to start yelling and shouting furiously,” he said. “Don’t think I am losing my mind.”

He held his bloody hands before his face, to examine them. They were shaking. He made fists so tight his veins bulged. His forearms started to bounce.

“His name was Lance Cpl. Colin Smith,” he said. “He said a prayer today right before we came out, too.”

“Every time before we go out, we say a prayer,” he said. “It is a prayer for serenity. It says a lot about things that do pertain to us in this kind of environment.”

The only sounds were Doc’s voice and the vehicle’s engine thrumming.

He recited the prayer. There was a few moments of silence. “It’s a platoon kind of thing, if you know what I mean,” he said.

He listened to his radio headset and looked at Lance Corporal Tafoya, relaying word of the marines’ movements. “Right now the grunts are performing a hard hit on a house,” he said. He turned back to the subject of Lance Corporal Smith, 19.

“The best news I can throw at anybody right now, and that I am throwing to myself as often as I can, is that his eyes were O.K.,” he said. “They were both responsive. And he was breathing. And he had a pulse.”

He listened to his radio. “Two houses they’ve hit so far have both been swept and cleared.”

He looked at the reporter beside him. “Do you pray?” he asked. “Do that. I’d appreciate it.”

After a few minutes he started talking again. “You see, having a good platoon, one that you know real well, it’s both a gift and a curse. And Smith? Smith has been with me since I was...”

He stopped. “He was my roommate before we left,” he said.

He refilled his lungs and raised his voice. “His dad was his best friend,” he said. “He’s got the cutest little blond girlfriend, and she freaks out every time we call because she’s so happy to hear from him.”

He sat quietly again. A few minutes passed. “The first casualty we had here — his name was James Hirlston — he was his good friend.”

“Hirlston got shot in the head, too,” he said.

He said something about Iraqi snipers that could not be printed here.

Then he was back to the subject of Lance Corporal Smith.

“I really thank God that he was breathing when I got to him, because it means that I can do something with him,” he said. “It helps. People ask you, ‘What are you doing? What are you doing?’ It helps, because if he’s breathing, you’re doing something.”

There had been many Iraqi civilians outside a few minutes before the sniper made his shot. Most of them had disappeared. Now an Iraqi woman walked calmly between the sniper and the marines, as if nothing had happened.

She passed down the street.

Petty Officer Kirby began to list the schools he had attended to be ready for this moment. Some he had paid for himself, he said, to be extra-prepared.

In one course, an advanced trauma treatment program he had taken before deploying, he said, the instructors gave each corpsman an anesthetized pig.

“The idea is to work with live tissue,” he said. “You get a pig and you keep it alive. And every time I did something to help him, they would wound him again. So you see what shock does, and what happens when more wounds are received by a wounded creature.”

“My pig?” he said. “They shot him twice in the face with a 9-millimeter pistol, and then six times with an AK-47 and then twice with a 12-gauge shotgun. And then he was set on fire.”

“I kept him alive for 15 hours,” he said. “That was my pig.”

“That was my pig,” he said.

He paused. “Smith is my friend.”

He looked at his bloody hands. “You got some water?” he said. “I want some water. I just want to wash my wedding band.”

He listened to the tactical radio. The platoon was sweeping houses but could not find the sniper.

The company started to move. It stopped at another house. The marines were questioning five Iraqi men. Doc watched from the road, waiting for the next call.

“I would like to say that I am a good man,” he said. “But seeing this now, what happened to Smith, I want to hurt people. You know what I mean?”

The marines had not fired a shot.

They took one of the men into custody, mounted their vehicles and drove back to Outpost Omar, their company base, passing knots of Iraqi civilians on the way. The civilians looked at them coldly.

Inside the wire, First Lt. Scott R. Burlison, the company commander, gathered the group and told them that Lance Corporal Smith was alive and in surgery. He was critical, but stable. They hoped to fly him to Germany.

Doc had scrubbed himself clean. A big marine stepped forward with a small Bible, and the platoon huddled. He began with Psalm 91, verses 5 and 11.

“Thou shall not be afraid for the terror by night, nor for the arrow that flieth by day,” said the big marine, Lance Cpl. Daniel B. Nicholson. “For he shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways.”

Then he asked for the Lord to look after Lance Corporal Smith and whatever was ahead, and to take care of everyone who was still in the platoon.

“Help us Lord,” he said. “We need your help. It’s the only way we’re going to get through this.”

Doc stood in the corner, his arm looped over a marine. “Amen,” he said. There were some hugs, and then the marines and their Doc went back to their bunks and their guns.

-----------
original article here, and here is a slideshow and oral report by the author of the article.

freakin' finally! - article

2006-10-31T22:26:00.000-08:00

aah. a nice follow-up to some recent thoughts.

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New male contraceptive Pill with no side effects
By JULIE WHELDON
Last updated at 22:00pm on 30th October 2006

Men could soon be able to use a 'male Pill' that has no side effects, scientists have revealed.

The chemical implant acts as a contraceptive but does not change the balance of a man's sex hormones.

Scientists have discovered a substance that can temporarily block the development of sperm without altering testosterone levels and without causing unwanted side effects.

They hope human trials of a new contraceptive for men based on their discovery could begin within a few years.

Other versions of the 'male Pill' are already in development but work by altering hormone levels in the man's body.

In trials so far these have produced no worrying side effects - however scientists think men may still worry about whether introducing female hormones could harm their virility in some way.

The new approach would therefore avoid this problem. The common perception is that few women would actually believe a man who said he was on the Pill.

However a study published in the British Medical Journal in 2000 found that only two per cent of women said they would not trust their partner to take a male Pill.

Several teams of scientists have therefore been working on trying to develop an equivalent of the female Pill for men.

Until now this has involved using hormones to try to prevent sperm production.

But the new approach reported in the latest edition of the journal Nature Medicine involves a substance called adherin.

It works by interfering with the way cells in the testes help nurture the development of mature sperm.

It blocks the normal bond which develops between immature sperm and tissue called Sertoli cells. This then stops the cells developing into mature sperm which are capable of fertilising an egg.

A study found that when given to rats, sperm production dropped to such low levels as to render them infertile.

However once the drug was stopped, the animals' sperm production soon returned to normal.

Lead researcher Chuen Yan Cheng of the Population Council in New York said this would be vital for any kind of pill to become acceptable to men.

"If you give the consumer the peace of mind that their fertility will be restored and that their hormones are not going to be affected, they may feel that it is safer to use this contraceptive," he said.

Adherin on its own is known to have toxic effects on the body, but the team overcame this problem by ensuring it would only attach to one cell in the body - the Sertoli cells.

The team tested it on vital organs such as the kidneys, liver, heart and brain, and found it had no harmful side effects.

Dr Cheng and his team hope their finding will lead to a male contraceptive - although say it is likely to be an implant rather than a pill as the tablet would be broken down in the digestive tract.

Dr Cheng said the approach taken by other researchers of using hormone-based contraceptives was not wrong. However he said it was important to give people a choice.

Earlier this year researchers working on a hormonal-based male contraceptive said an implant or injection could be available within five years.

Another study, published in the Lancet found that men given a hormonal-based contraceptive drug saw their sperm count return to normal just over three months after they stopped using it.

---------
thanks kirk for the heads up on this one...

tpfd? why, yes

2006-10-26T02:06:00.000-07:00

so it occurs to me i've been very article-heavy lately in my blog.

jon always gives me a hard time that my longer posts slow down his compulsion to fully cyberstalk everyone he knows within a certain time frame -- he always has to save mine for later, like some heavy dessert waiting around for the right holiday or something.

but if he'd found the time to ping me lately, he'd be right. i've done a LOT of articles. sorry, all you bored figment of my imagination readers - or skimmers. so i decided to go with a smattering of my favorite toothpaste for dinner comics.

like cleansing your pallete before i hit you with a nyt article about how the NJ high court granted equivalent legal rights to gay couples. kidding! (but you can see it here. yay!)

-----------------
"no underwater level"
love this one. took me a minute to get it.

great gamer joke.
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"melodrama"
ah. this one holds a special place in my heart.

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"what's for lunch"
you know how you can point back to a specific moment in time when you fell in love?

i'm pointing at this comic.
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no, i don't own them. go to the site. drew's a genius. drew, don't sue me. copyright drew, okay? look, linkys everywhere!

the theatrics of government - article

2006-10-25T16:42:00.000-07:00

this slate author dares to say that if, given the choice, democrats wouldn't take back the page scandal to spare the boys. brave stance.

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Folier Than Thou
The po-faced contest between Republicans and Democrats.
By Michael Kinsley
Posted Friday, Oct. 20, 2006, at 6:49 AM ET

Here in Washington, we're all competing to see who can be more po-faced about Mark Foley and the congressional pages. Who can deplore Foley's behavior the most? Democrats, sensing a deeply wounded Republican Party, are going in for the kill. It's the final evidence that the GOP is terminally corrupt: A congressman was cyber-molesting teenage boys, and his party leaders evidently didn't even care. Republicans answer: Hey, we invented child molesting! As an issue, that is. We own family values, and we're not about to let the party of Monica Lewinsky and Heather Has Two Mommies outflank us on the sexual morality front. And then there are gay voices, eager to remind people that being gay and molesting children are two different things, which, of course, they are. But just to make the point clear, gays want everyone to know that they defer to no one in their distaste for Foley's behavior.

So, everyone claims to be terribly distressed. We glare at each other, looking as grim as possible, and the first one to break into a grin or a smirk or a snort loses. Stop it! It's not funny! But then, who are all the people watching Letterman and Leno, Stewart and Colbert, and laughing—laughing!—at Mark Foley's shenanigans? Who are the people cracking jokes on the Internet? They are so distressed that they can't stop giggling, and they find the whole subject so distasteful that they can't get enough of it. This is not a traditional case of politicians' hypocrisy. This is politicians accommodating the hypocrisy of voters.

Perhaps it would be a better world if everybody were as disgusted by the Foley episode as almost everybody claims to be. But the truth is that most people are enjoying this story and can't get enough of it. If you gave them the secret power to wish the whole thing away, they'd say, "Are you nuts? This is terrific!" Poor Dennis Hastert is suspected, probably falsely, of being willing to sacrifice a child for the good of his party, and now the other party reaps the benefit. Do you think that if the devil told Nancy Pelosi she could undo the scandal, save these 17-year-olds from the trauma of e-mail from a sicko congressman, and give up her hopes of being speaker, that she would find such an offer tempting? I don't. And I don't think Nancy Pelosi is callous or cruel. If she thought it through, she might conclude that the good that can come from a Democratic Congress exceeds the evil that a few randy e-mails may have done to a few teenage pages. Meanwhile, most Americans, I strongly suspect, would happily sacrifice a few more pages just to keep the story going for entertainment purposes.

Then there is Gerry Studds (who, by a weird coincidence, died suddenly last week). Studds was a Democratic congressman who, in 1983, was censured for having an actual, physical affair with a congressional page 10 years before that. After his censure, he continued to run in his district (in Massachusetts, natch), to win, and to serve in Congress until 1997. Compare and contrast Mark Foley: It develops that he may have had physical something-or-other with a page after all. But even before this came out, he had resigned under pressure on the basis of those e-mails alone. Doesn't that prove that Republicans are more serious about Protecting Our Children than Democrats are? Don't they win the po-faced contest?

The Studds case is troubling. Do the Republicans have a point? Maybe, but there are a few points in mitigation, as well. One is the huge random element in what becomes a Washington scandal. You don't need ideological conspiracies or grand cultural tectonic shifts. Whether something becomes a scandal depends on how close we are to an election, on what else is in the news, on what Michael Isikoff had for lunch, and so on.

The Studds case came paired with that of Republican congressman Dan Crane, who had an affair with a female page. In a mutual disarmament agreement, both miscreants were "censured," which was actually a ratchet up from "reprimanded," or "scolded," or "tickled," or some other term recommended by an outside committee. Speaker Dennis Hastert says that if Mark Foley hadn't resigned immediately, he would have been bounced. Maybe. But Crane, like Studds, was renominated by his party in the 1984 election. That would be the Republican Party. (Unlike Studds, Crane lost.)

Back in 1983, Studds took the position that the page had been over the age of consent in the District of Columbia, which is 16, and consent for the affair had, in fact, been mutual. This, of course, left out the question of whether, as a member of Congress, he had some special duty to protect even 17-year-old congressional pages from middle-aged men like himself. He probably did have such a duty, though he never paraded around as a protector of children, as Foley did.

A final difference between Studds and Foley is that the Foley case exposed the tawdry mechanics of a congressman trolling for action among teenage pages. No doubt the Studds affair involved the pre-e-mail equivalent of these mechanics, but they never became public. Obviously, that doesn't excuse Studds. But it also does not establish anything superior about Republican moral values.

Michael Kinsley is American editor of Guardian Unlimited (London) and the founding editor of Slate.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2151859/

no more blaming pms for being bitchy - article

2006-10-24T10:43:00.000-07:00

i've briefly covered this topic before, but medicine, like technololgy, is always changing:

----------------

Girl Talk
A new pill that stops your period.
By Sarah E. Richards
Posted Wednesday, Oct. 18, 2006, at 5:04 PM ET

If a new brand of birth control gets approved early next year, that time of the month could become the time of, like, the decade. Lybrel, a birth-control pill made by Wyeth, would be the first oral contraceptive to deliver an uninterrupted supply of hormones. Seventy percent of women who took it for six months were period-free, according to a preliminary study by the company.

Wyeth isn't the first pharmaceutical company to reimagine the menstrual cycle. In 1992, the FDA approved Depo-Provera, an injection that is repeated every three months. In 2003, Seasonale rescheduled the monthly period to four times a year. And in July, the government gave the go-ahead for Implanon, an implant that delivers a steady hormone stream for up to three years. But the pill is the favorite means of birth control of the nearly quarter of American women of childbearing age who take hormonal contraceptives. That means Lybrel—and the other brands that will surely follow—could change the menstrual cycle as we know it. The appeal is obvious: No more bloating, cramping, food cravings, and PMS jokes, not to mention the savings in unpurchased tampons and such. But in the end, for reasons both medical and cultural, it's not clear that putting the kibosh on the curse is a good idea.

Traditional pill packs contain a week of placebos for each monthly cycle, and, as a result, women who take them appear to menstruate. But it turns out that the bleeding serves no reproductive purpose. Since there's no egg to flush out, the bleeding is a symptom of withdrawal from progestin and estrogen, the hormones in the pill—in essence, it's a fake period. The inventors of the pill, which debuted in 1960, supposedly decided to mimic the menstrual cycle because they thought that would make women more psychologically comfortable with the product.

Western women today are estimated to average about 400 menstrual cycles over the course of their lifetimes. Pregnancy and nursing halt periods for a time, of course. And for years physicians have informally advised women with painful periods to practice "menstrual suppression" by taking hormonal contraceptives continuously. Birth-control medications tend to lessen menstrual and premenstrual symptoms to begin with, and some studies show that fewer periods may mean even more relief.

Now Lybrel is explicitly selling all of this, by prescription, at a drug store near you. Women can shut off their systems for law school, a trip around the world—even their entire 20s. Random spotting is common while using Lybrel, especially at the start. But in a study of another brand called Alesse, 90 percent of participants did not bleed at all after a year of use, according to Leslie Miller, associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Washington. "We can manipulate menstruation," she says.

Life without getting your period, though, would be life without one of the touchstones of the female experience: a sisterhood of shared empathy, tampons and chocolate, and laundry lessons passed from grandmother to granddaughter. Liberation from premenstrual emotional peaks and valleys sounds great, but we would also lose the surge of creativity and libido that comes with the urge to strangle your houseplants. Would movies be as poignant, or garlic mashed potatoes ever taste as good?

In two different surveys of college women, Ingrid Johnston-Robledo, associate professor of psychology and women's studies at the State University of New York, College at Fredonia, found that women who were asked to name positive aspects of menstruation reported that it was a sign of health and fertility and that it helped connect them to other women and the rhythms of nature.* This may sound like an ode to the inner moon goddess, but it has relevance. Johnston-Robledo found that women who didn't like their periods were also more ashamed of their bodies.

At the same time, there may be some medical arguments for suppressing one's period, at least for a limited period of time. Hormonal contraceptives are known to decrease the risk of ovarian and endometrial cancers, so some doctors think a continual dose of the pill would further reduce those risks. No blood loss also means less anemia. And then there is the provocative argument of Brazilian gynecologist Elsimar Coutinho. In his 1999 book Is Menstruation Obsolete? (co-authored with Sheldon J. Segal), he writes that modern women experience "incessant ovulation," in contrast to our ancestors, who started menarche later and had many fewer periods because they gave birth and breastfed far more frequently. Women's bodies may not have evolved to handle so many periods and would appreciate a break, Coutinho thinks.

But if modern menstruation isn't completely natural, by prehistoric standards, suppressing one's period by taking hormones is even less so. No one knows the health effects for menstruating women of long-term continuous exposure, especially the risks of blood clots and breast cancer and the effect on later fertility. The uncertainties are especially troubling for adolescents whose reproductive systems continue to develop after they start menstruating, explains Jerilynn Prior, director of the Centre for Menstrual Cycle and Ovulation Research in British Columbia. Nearly one in five teens uses a form of hormonal birth control. Given the unknowns, perhaps doctors should consider setting a minimum age requirement for Lybrel, or limiting how long women can stay on it.

Nor is the pharmaceutical industry's track record on birth control exactly reassuring in weighing the risks and benefits. In 2002, the implant Norplant was pulled from the market after questions about its effectiveness and lawsuits by women claiming they were not adequately warned of side effects. In 2004, the FDA required that Depo-Provera include a label warning of risk to bone density. And last year, the FDA warned that the high levels of estrogen found in the Ortho-Evra patch increased the risk of blood clots after about a dozen young women died from clotting believed to be related to it. Maybe Lybrel will prove to be a dream drug with none of these problems; at the moment, we don't have the data to know. Periods, on the other hand, are time-tested. They tell you that you're not pregnant, and they're a sign that your body is working as it should. That's worth some fuss.

Sarah E. Richards is a freelance writer based in New York City. She can be reached at sarah@saraherichards.com.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2151746/

i truly, truly believe in this - article

2006-10-21T21:57:00.000-07:00

Friends for Life: An Emerging Biology of Emotional Healing
By DANIEL GOLEMAN
Published: October 10, 2006

A dear friend has been battling cancer for a decade or more. Through a grinding mix of chemotherapy, radiation and all the other necessary indignities of oncology, he has lived on, despite dire prognoses to the contrary.

My friend was the sort of college professor students remember fondly: not just inspiring in class but taking a genuine interest in them — in their studies, their progress through life, their fears and hopes. A wide circle of former students count themselves among his lifelong friends; he and his wife have always welcomed a steady stream of visitors to their home.

Though no one could ever prove it, I suspect that one of many ingredients in his longevity has been this flow of people who love him.

Research on the link between relationships and physical health has established that people with rich personal networks — who are married, have close family and friends, are active in social and religious groups — recover more quickly from disease and live longer. But now the emerging field of social neuroscience, the study of how people’s brains entrain as they interact, adds a missing piece to that data.

The most significant finding was the discovery of “mirror neurons,” a widely dispersed class of brain cells that operate like neural WiFi. Mirror neurons track the emotional flow, movement and even intentions of the person we are with, and replicate this sensed state in our own brain by stirring in our brain the same areas active in the other person.

Mirror neurons offer a neural mechanism that explains emotional contagion, the tendency of one person to catch the feelings of another, particularly if strongly expressed. This brain-to-brain link may also account for feelings of rapport, which research finds depend in part on extremely rapid synchronization of people’s posture, vocal pacing and movements as they interact. In short, these brain cells seem to allow the interpersonal orchestration of shifts in physiology.

Such coordination of emotions, cardiovascular reactions or brain states between two people has been studied in mothers with their infants, marital partners arguing and even among people in meetings. Reviewing decades of such data, Lisa M. Diamond and Lisa G. Aspinwall, psychologists at the University of Utah, offer the infelicitous term “a mutually regulating psychobiological unit” to describe the merging of two discrete physiologies into a connected circuit. To the degree that this occurs, Dr. Diamond and Dr. Aspinwall argue, emotional closeness allows the biology of one person to influence that of the other.

John T. Cacioppo, director of the Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience at the University of Chicago, makes a parallel proposal: the emotional status of our main relationships has a significant impact on our overall pattern of cardiovascular and neuroendocrine activity. This radically expands the scope of biology and neuroscience from focusing on a single body or brain to looking at the interplay between two at a time. In short, my hostility bumps up your blood pressure, your nurturing love lowers mine. Potentially, we are each other’s biological enemies or allies.

Even remotely suggesting health benefits from these interconnections will, no doubt, raise hackles in medical circles. No one can claim solid data showing a medically significant effect from the intermingling of physiologies.

At the same time, there is now no doubt that this same connectivity can offer a biologically grounded emotional solace. Physical suffering aside, a healing presence can relieve emotional suffering. A case in point is a functional magnetic resonance imaging study of women awaiting an electric shock. When the women endured their apprehension alone, activity in neural regions that incite stress hormones and anxiety was heightened. As James A. Coan reported last year in an article in Psychophysiology, when a stranger held the subject’s hand as she waited, she found little relief. When her husband held her hand, she not only felt calm, but her brain circuitry quieted, revealing the biology of emotional rescue.

But as all too many people with severe chronic diseases know, loved ones can disappear, leaving them to bear their difficulties in lonely isolation. Social rejection activates the very zones of the brain that generate, among other things, the sting of physical pain. Matthew D. Lieberman and Naomi Eisenberg of U.C.L.A. (writing in a chapter in “Social Neuroscience: People Thinking About People,” M.I.T. Press, 2005) have proposed that the brain’s pain centers may have taken on a hypersensitivity to social banishment because exclusion was a death sentence in human prehistory. They note that in many languages the words that describe a “broken heart” from rejection borrow the lexicon of physical hurt.

So when the people who care about a patient fail to show up, it may be a double blow: the pain of rejection and the deprivation of the benefits of loving contact. Sheldon Cohen, a psychologist at Carnegie-Mellon University who studies the effects of personal connections on health, emphasizes that a hospital patient’s family and friends help just by visiting, whether or not they quite know what to say.

My friend has reached that point where doctors see nothing else to try. On my last visit, he and his wife told me that he was starting hospice care.

One challenge, he told me, will be channeling the river of people who want to visit into the narrow range of hours in a week when he still has the energy to engage them.

As he said this, I felt myself tearing up, and responded: “You know, at least it’s better to have this problem. So many people go through this all alone.”

He was silent for a moment, thoughtful. Then he answered softly, “You’re right.”

Daniel Goleman is the author of “Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships.”

it's almost like you're asking for it

2006-10-18T13:04:00.000-07:00

thought of this today - married celebrities who have reality tv shows about their marriage are dropping like flies.

nick & jessica

whitney & bobby

shanna & travis...

is the only one left, like, britney & kevin??

the family shows (osbournes, hogans) seem to be doing a bit better, but still...when will you people learn?

what will you capture?

2006-10-11T21:41:00.000-07:00

You'll learn that even the one person who wasn't supposed to ever let you down, probably will.

You'll have your heart broken and you'll break others' hearts.

You'll blame a new love for things an old love did.

You'll fight with your best friend, you'll cry because time is flying by, and you'll eventually lose someone you love.

So take too many pictures, laugh too much, forgive freely, and love like you've never been hurt, because every second you spend angry or upset is a second of happiness you can never get back.

~ a words submission to the faith category of an electronic anthropology collection... ^_~ an e-time capsule.

the end of an era? hopefully - article

2006-10-08T14:54:00.000-07:00

this is a long article from time magazine, but it's really worth the read. hopefully the forecast is dead-on.

note - it's not just the content that makes this worth it; i think this is quite elegantly worded as well. enjoy.

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Sunday, Oct. 8, 2006

End of the Revolution
Sex, lies and power games are just the latest symptoms of a Republican party adrift from its ideals
By KAREN TUMULTY

Every revolution begins with the power of an idea and ends when clinging to power is the only idea left. The epitaph for the movement that started when Newt Gingrich and his forces rose from the back bench of the House chamber in 1994 may well have been written last week in the same medium that incubated it: talk radio. On conservative commentator Laura Ingraham's show, the longest-serving Republican House Speaker in history explained why he would not resign despite a sex scandal that has produced a hail of questions about his leadership and the failure to stop one of his members from cyberstalking teenage congressional pages. "If I fold up my tent and leave," Dennis Hastert told her, "then where does that leave us? If the Democrats sweep, then we'd have no ability to fight back and get our message out."

That quiet admission may have been the most damning one yet in the unfolding scandal surrounding Florida Congressman Mark Foley: holding on to power has become not just the means but also the end for the onetime reformers who in 1994 unseated a calcified and corrupted Democratic majority. Washington scandals, it seems, have been following a Moore's law of their own, coming at a faster clip every time there is a shift in control. It took 40 years for the House Democrats to exhaust their goodwill. It may take only 12 years for the Republicans to get there.

If you think politicians clinging to power isn't big news, then you may have forgotten the pure zeal of Gingrich's original revolutionaries. They swept into Washington on the single promise that they would change Capitol Hill. And for a time, they did. Vowing to finish what Ronald Reagan had started, they stood firm on the three principles that defined conservatism: fiscal responsibility, national security and moral values. Reagan, who had a few scandals in his day, didn't always follow his own rules. But his doctrine turned out to be a good set of talking points for winning elections in a closely divided country, and the takeover was completed with the inauguration of George W. Bush as President.

But after controlling both houses of Congress and the White House for most of Bush's six years in office, the party has a governing record that has come unmoored from those Grand Old Party ideals. The exquisite political machinery that aces the elections has begun to betray the platform. To win votes back home, lawmakers have been spending taxpayer money like sailors on leave, producing the biggest budget deficits in U.S. history. And the party's approach to national security has taken the country into a war that most Americans now believe was a mistake and that the government's own intelligence experts say has shaped "a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives."

One of the problems is that after the Republicans got into power, the system began to change them, not just the other way around. Among the first promises the G.O.P. majority broke was the setting of term limits. Their longtime frustrations in the minority didn't necessarily make them any better at reaching across the aisle either. Compromise, that most central of congressional checks and balances, has been largely replaced by a kind of calculated cussedness that has left the G.O.P. isolated and exposed in times of crisis.

The current crisis arrived with a sex scandal that has muddied one of the G.O.P.'s few remaining patches of moral high ground: its defense of family values and personal accountability. Although Hastert and other Republican leaders say they heard last fall about the "overfriendly" approaches of a not-so-secretly-gay Congressman to a 16-year-old former page

Both majority leader John Boehner and campaign chairman Tom Reynolds say they brought it up with Hastert as long ago as last spring—they insist they never imagined anything like the more graphic instant messages that subsequently came to light. But shouldn't they have got chills at learning that a 52-year-old man had sent a teenager a creepy e-mail asking for a "pic of you"? Certainly the page understood what the e-mail meant, which is why he forwarded it in August 2005 to the office of Louisiana Congressman Rodney Alexander, who had sponsored him for the page program. "This freaked me out," the teenager wrote. "Sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick."

The House response was political from the start. Last November, Jeff Trandahl, then clerk of the House, told John Shimkus, the Republican head of the board that oversees the page program, about the less incriminating e-mails. But nobody bothered to inform the board's lone Democrat. Shimkus and Trandahl appear to have done nothing more than give Foley a private warning. When Alexander expanded the circle of those aware of the e-mails the following spring, one of the two people he chose to loop in was Reynolds, head of the National Republican Congressional Committee, whose job is managing the election. Foley wasn't even stripped of his co-chairmanship of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children.

Even after a batch of truly sleazy instant messages was discovered by abc News, Reynolds' chief of staff Kirk Fordham, who was also a former aide to Foley, tried to solve the political problem by attempting to talk the network out of publishing the worst of the messages. Fordham resigned last week, but he didn't go quietly, the way House leaders had hoped. On his way out, he threw fuel on the political fire by announcing that he had warned Hastert's staff of Foley's "inappropriate behavior" at least three years ago—a charge that Hastert's chief of staff, Scott Palmer, denied.

All this suggests that the Republican leaders were motivated much more by fear of electoral fallout than concern for the young pages in their care. And if they were worried that the revelation would hurt their chances of holding on to the House, they turned out to be right. Before the scandal broke, they were beginning to believe that the clouds were finally clearing for them. Their fabled get-out-the-vote and fund-raising operations were nearing full stride just as gas prices were dropping and the national debate was refocusing on their home-court issue of terrorism.

It seems likely that the party will instead need to reckon with sex and scandal throughout the final weeks of the election. As conservative George F. Will, writing in the Washington Post last week, put it, the Foley affair is "a maraschino cherry atop the Democrats' delectable sundae of Republican miseries." In the latest Time poll, conducted the week after the news broke, nearly 80% of respondents said they were aware of the scandal, and two-thirds of them were convinced that Republican leaders had tried to cover it up. Among the registered voters who were polled, 54% said they would be more likely to vote for the Democratic candidate for Congress, compared with 39% who favored the Republican—nearly a perfect reversal of the 51%-40% advantage the G.O.P. enjoyed as recently as August. There was even worse news in a poll by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center that showed a precipitous drop in Republican support among frequent churchgoers, one of the most important and loyal elements of the G.O.P. base. There's no indication that they are clamoring to be Democrats, but the risk is that they will simply stay home on Election Day.

One of the victims may turn out to be campaign chairman Reynolds, who suddenly found himself running as many as 8 points behind in his upstate New York House-seat re-election bid, which had appeared fairly safe a week earlier. Hastert's job seems secure for the moment, barring any big new revelations, in part because the House Speaker is not merely a party leader; the role was established under the Constitution. It would be difficult to replace Hastert without summoning Congress back into town from the campaign trail. Nor would an ugly fight over who would succeed him be good for the party's prospects in November. Still, Republicans are not particularly eager to be seen with him. His campaign schedule is starting to look a lot lighter, as House candidates across the country are turning down his offers to do fund raisers for them. Even the leadership's much vaunted discipline seems to be in tatters. Majority leader Boehner defended himself last week by attacking Hastert: "My position is, it's in his corner, it's his responsibility." And the third in command, whip Roy Blunt, suggested that things would have been different if he had been informed. Not incidentally, both men are expected to consider making a bid for the top job if Hastert ultimately steps down—and maybe if he doesn't. But by then the job description may be House minority leader.

G.O.P. leaders are so desperate to find someone else to blame that they have been reduced—with no indication that they see the irony—to blaming a vast left-wing conspiracy. "The people who want to see this thing blow up," Hastert told the Chicago Tribune, "are abc News and a lot of Democratic operatives, people funded by George Soros," the liberal financier who has become a bogeyman of the right. Hastert went on to say, without producing any proof, that the revelation was the work of Bill Clinton's operatives. But that line of argument, of course, suggests that Republicans would have preferred to keep Foley's secrets locked away, presumably at the pages' peril. And the Democrats for once are showing the good sense to stay out of the way when the other side is self-destructing. Sighed one of the younger House Republican aides who sits in on key meetings: "Foul play on the Democrats' side? If that is the only card left to play, then we are in serious trouble."

The "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" Problem

As Hastert and his forces have been trumpeting their charges against the Democrats, a whisper campaign has been launched in Washington to blame an internal culprit: a "velvet mafia" at the upper levels of G.O.P. leadership on Capitol Hill. Foley, that line of argument went, had been protected by gay staff members like Fordham, Trandahl and others whose names were being widely circulated. Says a top aide: "It looks like they may have tried to handle this among themselves because they were similarly situated."

In many ways, that story line is the product of the strains within the party over homosexuality. It's a tension nearly as deep and tortured as those the Democrats grappled with over race a half-century ago, when they tried—unsuccessfully—to keep an uneasy coalition of Southern segregationists and Northern civil rights advocates from tearing their party apart. Even though many of the G.O.P.'s policies have been hostile to gay rights, its leaders have long followed a "Don't ask, don't tell" policy with what pretty much everyone in Washington knows is a sizable number of closeted Republicans among members of Congress, upper-level staff and top party operatives. Says Patrick Sammon, executive vice president of the gay group Log Cabin Republicans: "There are a lot of gay Republicans who are working behind the scenes to advance the priorities of this party."

Until now, Republicans were able to manage the conflict. And they managed it by ignoring it. That even became part of an electoral strategy dating back to the 2000 election that suggested there was nothing to be gained by moderation. In a memo he wrote to Karl Rove, Bush pollster Matthew Dowd estimated that truly independent voters had fallen to a mere sliver of the electorate. There were, Dowd concluded, not enough percentage points in being "a uniter, not a divider." The key to winning in a polarized country was mobilizing the conservative base. That year, Bush refused to meet with the Log Cabin Republicans, choosing instead to see a handpicked group of gay Republicans, but only after the party's nomination was secured. In 2004, even as Vice President Dick Cheney's daughter Mary was a potential symbol of the party's openheartedness, Republicans put anti-gay-marriage measures on 11 state ballots to drive voter turnout.

But the Foley scandal is making it difficult for the party to look the other way. Last week some conservatives went so far as to insinuate that Foley proves that every gay person is a pedophile waiting to happen. "You don't need 'gaydar' to understand he has certain dispositions," Utah Congressman Chris Cannon told the Deseret News. Televangelist Pat Robertson recommended that G.O.P. leaders simply explain the situation this way: "Well, this man's gay. He does what gay people do."

The resignations of Foley and Fordham sparked fears that other gay Republicans would also soon be forced out of both their closets and their jobs. "Kirk is the fall guy," says gay-rights activist Hilary Rosen. "It's going to be open season on gay Republicans. It's the right wing's perfect storm. They never wanted gays in their party anyway."

Ruling with an Iron Fist

Oddly enough, it was a sex scandal in 1998 that brought Hastert from obscurity to the Speaker's chair in the first place. Gingrich had been ousted because his brand of fiery leadership had become such a drag on the party that it lost seats rather than gained them amid the Monica Lewinsky scandal. But his anointed successor, Robert Livingston of Louisiana, suddenly backed out amid revelations of an extramarital affair. That's when the party turned to Hastert, a former high school wrestling coach whose affability and low-key demeanor seemed to guarantee calmer times ahead. He was, after all, the man who said he was too humble to brag about being humble. And yet the way the House has operated under Hastert has been anything but humble. He quickly came to be viewed as little more than a genial front for then majority leader Tom DeLay, whose nickname—the Hammer—pretty much summed up his leadership touch.

"There has been no institutional rule, means, norm or tradition that cannot be set aside to advance a partisan political goal," says Brookings Institution political scientist Thomas Mann, co-author of the recently published book whose title describes Congress as The Broken Branch. In 2003, instead of fashioning a compromise that might woo a few Democrats, Hastert and DeLay held what was supposed to be a 15-min. vote open for three full hours as they squeezed the last Republican votes they needed to pass a bill to provide an expensive prescription drug benefit to the Medicare program. Far more than in the past, they brought bills to the floor with no chance of amendment and allowed the normal appropriations process to be circumvented so that pet projects could be funded without scrutiny. When DeLay faced indictment by a Texas grand jury, Hastert changed the Republican rules so that DeLay could stay on as leader—though in the ensuing outcry, he had to reverse himself. Hastert was successful, however, in purging the ethics committee of its chairman and two Republican members who had reprimanded DeLay for misconduct. Stretching the limits of arcane House rules and shuffling committees around may not seem like earthshaking offenses, but they are the same type of procedural strangleholds and power plays that the G.O.P. had hoped to excise from the body politic 12 years ago.

"The Republican Party of 2006 is a tired, cranky shell of the aggressive, reformist movement that was swept into office in 1994 on a wave of positive change," Frank Luntz, one of the strategists of the G.O.P. takeover, wrote this week in a column for Time.com. "I worked for them. They were friends of mine. These Republicans are not those Republicans."

On policy matters, Hastert's leadership approach has been to act as though the Democrats—and sometimes the Senate—simply do not exist. He squeezes hard-edged partisan bills through the House to please the G.O.P. base, even though they have no chance of ever getting through the Senate and reaching the President's desk. "There have been numerous occasions when bipartisan approaches, which would have benefited our conference more than Democrats, have been rebuffed by the Speaker," complains a senior Republican aide, who says he likes and respects the Speaker. "His strategy seems to be, 'Well, don't worry about it. We'll blame [Democratic Leader Nancy] Pelosi.' That might work in isolated circumstances, but when your party's numbers start to tank, and people want to see that you can govern, that approach is not a solid one."

Party leaders concede the point that their revolution hasn't lived up to everything they promised. But they say voters still see the difference between where the parties stand. Former Republican chairman Ed Gillespie—one of the authors of the Contract with America, on which House Republicans ran in 1994—says, "Our party is still better when it comes to spending than the Democrats, stronger on national security than the Democrats and more likely to share concerns about the coarsening of our culture that a majority of Americans share than the Democrats are." Strategists are putting an optimistic face even on the effects of the Foley scandal, saying their internal polling shows little movement against the G.O.P. Will the Democrats behave any differently if they retake Congress in November? Some would undoubtedly try to use their majority power to exact revenge for Republican overreach. And history has shown them to be just as capable of the type of ideological drift that is tearing at the G.O.P.

For now, though, the question on everyone's mind is, How do the Republicans find their way from here? A number of conservatives have begun to wonder aloud if it wouldn't be better for the party to lose the House or Senate in November. If the revolutionaries have become the redcoats, then perhaps it's time for another uprising. Send the Republicans back into the wilderness so they can forage for the kind of fresh ideas and guerrilla tactics that made them such a force during their previous march on Washington. They could very well be ready in time for the presidential election in 2008. And while they're out there on the campaign trail, they just might rally around their old general, who will be looking to cap his own hardscrabble journey from political pariah to rehabbed revolutionary. That general, of course, is none other than former Speaker Gingrich, who has been spotted in Iowa, New Hampshire and other battleground states for more than a year now, taking potshots at the Establishment he helped create and rearming himself to storm the next barricade.

i want to feel this way again

2006-10-07T22:45:00.000-07:00

from post secret

-------Email Message-------
Sent: Saturday, September 30, 2006 8:30 PM

My boyfriend and I knew we had to do something important or else our relationship would fall apart. So we took markers and wrote our deepest secrets on the backs of each other.

I never read his secrets, and he never read mine, but the perilousness of such close contact between us and the other's demons was what we needed to save our relationship.

doesn't that sound beautiful?

get out of my government!! - article

2006-09-30T14:42:00.000-07:00

please. please leave young kids alone. please. jesus christ.

from the new york times

September 30, 2006

Lawmaker Quits Over Messages Sent to Teenage Pages
By KATE ZERNIKE and ABBY GOODNOUGH

WASHINGTON, Sept. 29 — In six terms representing a wealthy swath of southern Florida, Representative Mark Foley, a Republican, became well known for his ardent efforts to safeguard the young and vulnerable, leading the House caucus on missing and exploited children and championing laws against sexual predators.

On Friday, Mr. Foley resigned abruptly after being confronted with a series of sexually explicit Internet messages he is reported to have sent to under-age Congressional pages. He stands accused of being the very kind of predator he had denounced.

“I am deeply sorry,” Mr. Foley, 52, said in a three-sentence statement released by his office, “and I apologize for letting down my family and the people of Florida I have had the privilege to represent.” The statement did not refer specifically to the Internet messages.

The first e-mail messages to one male page, sexually suggestive but not explicit, were reported by ABC News on Thursday. Mr. Foley, a member of the House Republican leadership, dismissed them as “overly friendly” but not inappropriate.

But by Friday, other pages had come forward with more blatant instant messages. “What ya wearing?” Mr. Foley wrote to one, according to the network. “Tshirt and shorts,” the teenager responded. “Love to slip them off of you,” Mr. Foley replied.

ABC News said it had read him other messages that were far more graphic. Within hours, Mr. Foley resigned in a one-sentence letter to Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida. He left the Capitol without answering questions.

The resignation threw Congressional Republicans off stride on the day they were breaking to campaign for the midterm elections just five weeks away. It also gave Democrats hopes of capturing another seat in November. Even by the standards of Washington, this revelation stunned Mr. Foley’s colleagues for how openly he had courted danger.

According to ABC, he exchanged instant messages with the pages using his initials and year of birth: “MAF54.” And he might have known he would be watched; the pages, teenagers in navy blue uniforms who open doors and carry messages and water to members on the House and Senate floors, are closely guarded, not only for their vulnerability, but because they have been the object of past Congressional scandals.

The page who received the first e-mail messages told ABC News that people in the program had warned his class to watch out for Mr. Foley. The page worked for Representative Rodney Alexander, Republican of Louisiana, and sent the messages to a colleague in the office with a note saying they had “freaked me out.”

Investigators would not say whether they were looking into the matter.

Mr. Foley’s rise in Florida politics had been striking. He told interviewers of getting hooked on politics after he moved to Florida from Massachusetts as a small child, watching people flock around the local congressman as he shook hands at a shopping center in southern Florida.

He started a small family restaurant at age 20 and by 23 was elected to the city commission in Lake Worth, a working-class town south of West Palm Beach. He was known as a tireless campaigner and was elected to the State Legislature in 1990, and to Congress in 1994, at age 40. He was appointed to the powerful Ways and Means committee and was named one of the party’s deputy whips by Tom DeLay, then the House Republican leader.

“He had a meteoric rise,” said Al Cardenas, a former leader of the Florida Republican Party who described himself as a longtime friend of Mr. Foley. “In a span of six years he went through an incredible ascension in our party. He worked real hard, he had a very engaging personality, and people took him very seriously at a young age.”

As a moderate Republican in Congress, Mr. Foley proved a good ideological match for his district, centered in the wealthy northern end of Palm Beach County. He was fiscally conservative but more moderate on social and environmental issues.

He spoke vehemently about the need to protect children from pedophiles. “We track library books better than we do sexual predators,” he said, arguing the need for the Children’s Safety Act, passed by the House in 2005.

Questions about his sexuality swirled beginning with his first run for Congress, when his opponent in the Republican primary sent out mailings saying Mr. Foley was gay. He was single and seemed uncommonly focused on politics. He sometimes referred to his sister, Donna, who often served as his campaign manager, as his “surrogate wife.”

In 2003, when he was considered the front-runner in a crowded primary race for the Senate seat being vacated by Bob Graham, Mr. Foley gave a news conference to condemn rumors that he was gay but refused to say whether he was. A few months later, he dropped out of the race, saying he needed to spend more time with his father, who had prostate cancer. Many believed he had left the race to avoid questions about his sexual orientation.

“There were accusations made that he was gay, and clearly that had an impact on him deciding not to run for Senate,” said Jim Kane, the chief pollster for Florida Voter, a nonpartisan polling organization. “He knew the scrutiny was clearly going to be much different once he stepped up a notch.”

Mr. Foley reportedly sent the messages to the first page in August 2005.

Representative John Shimkus, Republican of Illinois and chairman of the House Page Board, issued a statement late Friday saying he had known of the first e-mail messages “in late 2005.” Mr. Foley, Mr. Shimkus said, had said he was simply acting as a mentor, but Mr. Shimkus told him to cut off contact with the page and “be especially mindful of his conduct” with pages.

Representative Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leader, called late Friday for an investigation into who knew of the messages, and when. After Republicans criticized her move on the floor, the House referred the request to the ethics committee.

Although his current race was considered competitive, Mr. Foley had been favored to win re-election; President Bush won his district in 2004 with 54 percent of the vote. And yet the campaign between Mr. Foley and his Democratic opponent, Tim Mahoney, had been combative. Mr. Mahoney, a businessman and former Republican, sued Mr. Foley this month, saying Mr. Foley had defamed him in campaign advertisements.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee had included the campaign in its list of “emerging races,” or the 50 seats most primed for takeover. Mr. Mahoney, Democrats said, was a good candidate even before the scandal, with $1 million in his campaign chest.

State Republican Party leaders said they would meet with officials from each of the counties in Mr. Foley’s district to nominate someone to replace him. But an election official in Florida said Friday night that Mr. Foley’s name would have to remain on the ballot. Any votes for him will be counted for his replacement, the official said.

better put a patent on it

2006-09-19T23:12:00.000-07:00

(by tom stoppard)

AEH. If only an army should be made up of lovers and their loves! - that's not me, that's Plato...'although a mere handful, they would overcome the world, for each would rather die a thousand deaths than be seen by his beloved to abandon his post or throw away his arms, the veriest coward would be inspired by love.' ...But there was such an army, a hundred and fifty pairs of lovers...At the end of that day, says Plutarch, the victorious Philip of Macedon went forth to view the slain, and when he came to that place where the three hundred fought and lay dead together, he wondered, and understanding that it was the band of lovers, he shed tears and said, whoever suspects baseness in anything these men did, let him perish.

HOUSMAN. I would be such a friend to someone.

AEH. To dream of taking the sword in the breast, the bullet in the brain -

HOUSMAN. I would.

AEH. - and wake up to find the world goes wretchedly on and you will die of age and not of pain....Lay down your life like a pack on the roadside though your days of march are numbered and end with the grave. Love will not be deflected from its micheif by being called comradeship or anything else.

HOUSMAN. I don't know what love is.

AEH. Oh, but you do. In the Dark Ages, in Macedonia, in the last guttering light from classical antiquity, a man copied out bits from old books for his young son, whose name was Septimius; so we have one sentence from "The Loves of Achilles." Love, said Sophocles, is like the ice held in the hand by children. A piece of ice held fast in the fist. I would I could help you, but it's not in my gift.

HOUSMAN. Love it is, then, and I will make the best of it.

(from the invention of love)

she told him, don't forget about me

2006-09-10T01:35:00.000-07:00

will i be forgotten?

more at exploding dog

it's like a place i remember being once

2006-09-08T15:39:00.000-07:00

fellow collegemate and blogger jaggd has some interesting thoughts on happiness.

meanwhile, a more academic and new-york-centric look at the same topic. it's v. long but well worth a skim.

as for me, i'm not where i want to be right now, but working on it. or toughing it out at least. or surviving. aren't they all just words for each other, anyway??

there's no business...

2006-08-28T13:10:00.001-07:00

i want everything.

i want to be the center of attention, the center of the universe, the universal answer, the answer to no question.

that's a lie. i want to be a black hole. i want nothing to come near me out of fear of what i may do, what i may take, how i may ruin.

i want to be understood, but i don't want to put in the effort.

i want to be insulated from everything that hurts. twice over. i want to be strong enough that pain never breaches my outer walls, that it never pierces my armor and stabs through the skin. i want to have no achillles' heel, no soft spot, no sweet spot. i want to be all sweet spot.

i feel like i deserve to be punished. like my whole life is a righting of wrongs. unsuccessfully so. i want to be successful. but i want the world to measure success with the same barometer i'm using, not the impossible, daunting scale it has now where my efforts don't even register.

i want to be loved, but i don't want to put in the effort. i've already put in the effort. i want it to be given to me instead of being taken from me. but i don't want anyone to know.

i want nothing.

and, on a related note...

2006-08-24T17:12:00.000-07:00

comics 2 - form // story

2006-08-24T16:40:00.000-07:00

aah. this is one of my top favorite concepts. i kid you not, i am actually excited to write this. (check here for the first ridiculously nerdy post.)

when form parallels the story

okay, so i absolutely love when the form or structure of a story parallels, or accentuates, the story itself - i think it's a smart, slick move on the writer's part, and tough to pull off, but ever so satisfying when done correctly. i'll give you an example - the movie memento, or adaptation. the way these stories are told are, in a sense, imperative to get the greatest impact of the story, imperative to understanding what the story itself is all about. ever read nabokov's pale fire? (ohmygod, or mark danielewski's house of leaves?!?!! purchase it. immediately. it is a suspense film AND an indie drug film, somehow disguised as a postmodern book. i am still not sure how it is quite able to do that.)

it's all about how the storytellers really f-ing USE their medium, and push the boundaries of what they are trying to do in order to tell a .better. story. okay, these are obvious, glaring examples; but this is also something that i love when used subtlely...a good example of this is in an author's rhythm. have you ever noticed how a writer can "stop" a reader - just by changing his sentence structure? like, in the middle of a story, all of a sudden there is one line: "The phone rang." and, it's the shortest sentence in the entire book so far, and you get there, and its simplicity just makes you stop. when i read this (nabokov short story), i was just like, this is brilliant! because the characters in the story had also just stopped from the startling ring as well - and here we were, the characters in the story and me, just holding our breadth for one split second, because nabokov TOLD us to. this is why dan brown can essentially write a page-turner/movie book, but his prose is god-awful -- he has no sense of how to use the medium, and really affect his readers with his words.

all right, so what does this have to do with comic books, yeah? i think that graphic art is (*sigh* or WAS, even just a couple of years ago. maybe not anymore) very much a medium that does not know its place, and thus isn't restricted by it. the whole concept of a "panel" IS this idea of making your form tell your story. the very fact that an artist looks at a blank page, sections it off however he chooses, and then translates that stillness and those restrictions (sections) into movement is awesome. it's the parallel to peter parker keeping his hero identity quarantined from his "real" life (and loves) and being unable to do so . . . or to professor x trying to tear down the hatred that divides mutants but finding that dividing lines happen no matter what one does. it's many, many individual stories and lives (be it individual characters, or even individual issues) being stitched and patchworked together into a whole. and there you go.

love and loss

2006-07-25T22:26:00.000-07:00

krisana marie. i love you.

11/23/82 - 07/25/01

photo blog 3 - anime expo 2006

2006-07-03T21:38:00.000-07:00

anime expo, at the anaheim convention center, 2006.

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gundam wing cosplayers

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tiff and i waited in line behind shuya, from battle royale. =D he has my favorite weapon on the island - a pot lid. lol.

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i have no idea who these cosplayers are supposed to be, but their costumes were amazing...

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amazing black kimono. she had a lovely pose, as well.

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look at those red tulips pop! this is from an anime called ouran high school host club.

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sanosuke from kenshin. lol, elaine would have a fit, ne?

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tiff's friend mike as sora, from kingdom hearts - he was the best sora there, by far. ^_^ i love the motion behind him in this photo, like one of those moments in film when the focus of the camera is still, but everything is still humming around him. (prime example.)

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the paper umbrellas and the great poses really make this shot...

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sweet lolita. her wig was the most gorgeous white-blonde :) i wish i could have captured it better...

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it's-ah me, ah-mario

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i don't know what anime she's from, but she is striking. (ps. she is a he! *sigh* some people are so talented.)

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gorgeous costume - look at the colors

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the green hair. the cigarette. the drinking problem. yellow collar, blue suit, hands in pockets - if i could have spike's arms around me every day i would never complain again.

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even though i was already a schoolgirl for halloween, my cuz and i also joined the fun with a japanese version. =)

quadruple bypass blogging

2006-06-20T22:23:00.000-07:00

fellow blogger jaggd wrote a really interesting post recently about his motivation for blogging...or, as the post explains, perhaps his recent lack thereof.

ever since i moved to blogspot from pitas, i've been trying to keep my posts minimally about my personal life; i enjoy putting up interesting articles and recommendations so people can see what i am interested in, but i've been trying not to get too detailed. my biggest exception, as i think is natural, is when i am upset; this is the time when i feel most alone, and thus need to "vent" the most.

ironically, this is the time when words are most difficult for me to form. how do you talk about yourself and your issues without sounding really, painfully, self-involved? tricky.

what's more, it is during these periods that i feel zero motivation to write. part of it is that, like my friend, i think that no one is going to read it anyway. no one cares. that is a powerful toxin to creative expression, i think.

another part of it is that lack of motivation comes part and parcel with feeling blue; it's a defining characteristic, in fact.

the other thing that happens is that i write, and then i hate what i produce. i strive to be funny, insightful, interesting...then i end up positive i sound ridiculous, like i am trying too hard. it's an interesting beast. [blogger's note: another fellow blogger and old friend sakusha also has some very eloquent words about inspiration and writing. click the link & search the page for post title "broken silence" and "disjointed ramble."]

anyway, i had a blog post planned tonight to touch a bit on the topic of hospitals. my grandfather is going in for a quadruple bypass tomorrow. the post might have reflected on my decision tonight that i really do not like hospitals (tonight being only my third hospital experience i can remember), also fattened up a bit with facts that i gathered about the procedure from web md (which, if you have never visited, is an awesome site - UNLESS YOU ARE SICK), and, as can only be expected, perhaps a couple thoughts on death as well.

but you know what? it just seemed too personal.

so i got to thinking about blogging. i used to (and still do) blog about personal things, and as you can probably already tell, i certainly have no problem not shutting up! about philosophical/psychological things. so what's the issue? i'm not sure.

somewhere between planning my post tonight and typing it up, the elusive feeling i was trying to capture somehow . . . changed. and you know, maybe that is the point of blogging? to just capture those really thin slivers of perspective in that one teensy, particular moment, before all the other emotions/fears/things you are trying to express take center stage for their moment.

honey, where are my shades?

2006-06-17T18:33:00.000-07:00

i have a ton of family staying with us this week. a fun fact i learned from my aunt, while we were chatting about the rain in seattle and the high suicide rates:

"did you know that seattle also has the highest purchasing rate for sunglasses? it's because we use our sunglasses so infrequently. lots of time to get lost. here, you use them every day - but try finding them after nine months of rain! everyone just goes out and buys a new pair!"

hehe!

comics 1 - plight of the hero

2006-06-12T01:55:00.000-07:00

okay, so a really long time ago i mentioned that i was working (intermittently) on a post about why i love comics/graphic novels. with the rapidly rising interest in the comic book realm in mainstream media (this is the goldmine that filmmakers will be mining steadily for the next few years), i figure i'd better start posting installments or my thoughts may become outdated ridiculously soon.

here is part 1 - some thoughts on the heroes of these stories.

plight of the hero(ine)

my main example here is buffy. i know it's not a comic book per say, but the theme that i love most about it is the same - she alone is the one girl who has been given the exceptional responsibility of having to save the world from everything that has ever and could ever go wrong. the way joss tells the story, no one else, not even the others in her scooby gang, can begin to understand what she goes through, and the sacrifices she has to make; she didn't ask for it, it's a life destined for hardship and sacrifice, and yet she does it, she puts herself on the line every time there's peril, in order to save those she loves (as well as those who will never know what she's done).

it's the same concept as in xmen, and rising stars and to a lighter extent spiderman, and i love it, the whole sense of forced loneliness and duty, that no one else could possibly understand what it means to live life the way you do, cause nothing is easy and no one can help and no one appreciates you, even though you try your damndest and you have the best of intentions. the paradox here, of course, is that as a viewer or reader is meant to empathize with the character, to feel just as they do. paradoxical since the idea is that each of us are the only ones who do. we are the only ones who get close-ups of buffy's off-screen melancholy glances, and peter parker's interior monologues via thought balloons as he flies through new york city. i'm being cheeky now, but it's true, and it's the whole point - that's *why* our superheroes are our age and that's why joss whedon and stan lee give them everyday woes on top of their superhero woes, we're *meant* to align ourselves with them. and that is why we love them!

there is also very much a sense of anger about the forced mediocrity that comes with hiding that secret identity. i just re-watched the incredibles tonight, and this is a thought that movie handles very well, the idea that the world might verbally tell you that to be special is what to strive for, but punishes you if you are. x-men adds an extra twist to this by having the core group divided, a clear line between those mutants who could pass as human, versus those who couldn't (mystique, nightcrawler, beast).

for those with that option, it's an intriguing concept because, particularly drawing the parallel with teens, it's a toss up for how one is going to be able to survive those high school hallways...stand up for what your tastes are, and let the bullies have at it, or suffer the fools and their stupid ideas while protecting yourself. the kids who succeed at school (and i don't mean academically) will tell you that it's possible to do both ("don't compromise, people will respect that"), but most of the rest of us know better.

mmm victory is sweeter when it's over your boss - article

2006-05-28T15:14:00.000-07:00

i love articles about the psychology of pop culture:

Who's the Boss?
By Clive Thompson
02:00 AM May, 08, 2006
Games Without Frontiers

I was barely one hour into playing Kingdom Hearts II, gaming's latest bona-fide hit, when I encountered the first "boss battle." It was a three-story tall gray monstrosity -- I barely came up to his knee. We lunged about, frantically trading blows, until I finally located his weak spot and plunged my "keyblade" in. Boom: He dissolved into black dust, leaving me with a sore thumb and a system full of adrenaline.

And the curious sense of satisfaction that comes from a boss battle. They're among the most cherished tropes in gaming: Get a bunch of gamers together to talk about adventure games or action titles, and sure -- everyone will praise the wonderful characters, the superb graphics, the intriguing narrative. But it's the boss battles that leave scars on their souls. They wind up sounding like grizzled war veterans, reminiscing wild-eyed about facing The Flood in Halo, four-armed Goro in Mortal Kombat or even Bowser in Super Mario Bros. Bosses dominate the psychic landscape of games.

It's partly because a boss battle is the most mythopoeic part of gaming. An adventure game, after all, typically puts you on some dread quest in which the foes get bigger and nastier until you face one final, hellish climactic baddie. This is a pure apocalyptic narrative -- the same story line that has obsessed the West for millennia, from the Bible to Das Kapital to the Epic of Gilgamesh. Boss battles make games seem cosmic.

But personally, I think the allure is much more straightforward than that, and also, in its own way, more complex. We love boss battles because they represent game design at its purest and trickiest.

Every game has to strike a careful balance: It has to be teasingly difficult, but not overly frustrating. But when the boss battle comes along, the game is supposed to become suddenly more difficult. That makes the balance all the harder to strike.

"The really good bosses seem impossible at first -- but they provide incremental clues to weaken them," said Ian Bogost, a game-design theorist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, when I called him about the subject. "That's where the sense of mastery comes from. A good boss has to kill you a few times first. It has to be arduous, physically and mentally." His favorite villians were the overlords in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, partly because their gargantuan size came as a thrilling shock after the hobbit-like proportions of everyone else in the rest of the game.

The danger, of course, is a game that goes too far: Nothing grinds a game to a halt more than a boss that is hair-pulling impossible to kill. Such was the case when Luke Smith -- a friend of mine who works at 1UP -- took a band of high-level World of Warcraft characters to battle with C'Thun, a squid-like creature that spawns endless "flay eyes" and "claw tentacles". "For months it was improperly tuned, literally unkillable," Smith ranted. "You simply could not put out the damage required to kill everything before the fight spiraled out of control. It kept spawning, and you never caught up."

With an overly-fierce boss, nothing you've learned in the game seems to work -- which makes you think, I slogged through weeks of this game only to be repaid with this?

The well-tuned boss vibrates in perfect harmony with the skill level of the game. Tom Byron, the editor in chief of the Official US PlayStation Magazine, told me his favorite boss was the vizier at the end of Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones. "He's flying up in the air, and whipping these stones down at you -- so you need to use literally all of the prince's acrobatics that you've learned. You're doing all these wall-runs, and there are fireballs, like, everywhere," Bryon gushed. "It's just awesome!"

That's the key: A good boss demands you to call upon every technique you've painstakingly learned over hours of play -- each special jump and magic combos. In Kingdom Hearts II, for example, I'd played around a bit with the different settings for Donald Duck's magic-healing ability (boy, that's a weird sentence) -- but I'd never understood how important it was to tweak it until I faced down the Hydra, and was getting flayed alive by its seven heads.

It's like bosses are the SATs of the game world: "It's a culmination," Byron notes. "It's not asking you to suddenly learn new skills. It's asking you to remember everything you've learned." You're aiming for that "aha" moment when, desperate for some way to topple the boss, you suddenly hit upon a clever new way to apply your powers -- and the insurmountable becomes manageable.

That's one of the best feelings ever -- and it's also one we rarely get in everyday life. The enemies we face in our contemporary world are so much more ambiguous and internal, and half the time it's ourselves. We try to find a meaningful job, to hack through a bad relationship, to blunder through the red tape of money and taxes. Even our modern literature of struggle has been blunted. The Greeks and Romans imagined their lives through metaphors of heroes facing down arcane monsters; we read The Corrections or Indecision or A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, tales of neurotics struggling just to get out of bed.

Our enemies are nowhere, and everywhere. Targets of resistance melt away in all directions. Terrorists seem frightening only so long as they elude the authorities. Death creeps slowly in hospital wards. And so, perhaps, it's a comfort to see our fears rear up in an honest-to-god monstrosity. Bring it on.

secrets, secrets, secrets...

2006-05-21T11:21:00.000-07:00

"secrets"

from cave canum, an anonymous forum for secrets:

10141.

There is this thing you do with a computer server where you can “ping” it. It means you send a message to the computer asking if it is OK. The computer responds back with the equivalent of a “yep”. That’s it. A status check in the simplest form possible.

I wish I could “ping” my friends. I don’t have the time everyday to call each of them and ask about their day. I don’t have the bandwidth to get the full download and hear stories about what he said and what the jerk in the office did and how your sister was mean. Sometimes a simple “ping” would be so much better.

“You OK?”

“Yep.”

I think we have a lot to learn from computers.

check it out. which secrets were posted by someone you know?

"secrets"

from postsecret, art form and therapy packaged together:

it's haunting. updated every sunday.

"secrets"

last semester, i had this breakdown. it was during finals, when i honestly thought there was no hope for me, which is silly, but silliness doesn't necessarily preclude me from feeling it.

i think i just get delicate when i get stressed. like, everything is precarious, there is a genuine need for someone else to ground me, for perhaps only the simple reason that during those times, i just don't know that i can do it myself. when sam was here, he was my grounding factor. without him, it's more of a toss up; i have friends but they have their lives as well, and i can't really blame them for not having the time to pick up the slack that i - in all reality - DO have the ability to handle myself.

it's all about perspective, i think. when you're in the thick of it, it just doesn't seem...doable. the road, the path, on and out, isn't obvious. it's like spelling lisp with an s. fuck that shit. isn't that when you need the clarity of mind the most, when you're stuck and hurting and need to be anywhere but where you are, and THAT's when the mind chooses to show you no options?

so here's my secret. i try and i try to be the most rational creature i can. but sometimes being a girl takes over, and i can't disentangle from the wicked self-esteem issues. the trick is to be able to hide it, i suppose, which brings forth another question:

what happens to those few whom you rely on to help get you out of those messes? my friends, the ones who know not only when i need their help but also what to do - does their being privy to the more pathetic Me mean that they think i'm sad? that they don't want to come back and help the next time?

it's a delicate balance, no?

a little power...

2006-05-08T18:54:00.000-07:00

an open letter. to the librarian who keeps telling me how to sit in the library.

LOOK!

i am asian! i like to be barefoot! i especially like to be barefoot when i study! because studying law, my friend, SUCKS.

it is a miserable experience. there is too much to know. and not enough time to learn aforementioned knowledge. and it's not just that i have to know some stuff about the law! i am also expected to know MORE THAN EVERYONE ELSE about the law. do you see?! do you see how those three elements combined are inherently counterintuitive to the concept of doing well?

so anything that i can do to make myself feel better - I NEED right now!

YES. that does include me showing up in your library in sweatpants and subjecting you to the unfortunate sight of my un-makeup-ed, undone hair "ensemble." to be fair, i always try to pair said pants with a cute tank top, but trust me, i understand it's not a pleasant sight. when you consider it in a package with my less-than-sparkling personality right now, I GET THAT I AM NOT A SYMPATHETIC SOUL.

BUT I NEED THIS. i need to be able to sit cross-legged on your incredibly uncomfortable wooden chairs and bang my forehead alternately on the glass table top and my casebook. please don't tell me it is a "health risk." i buy on average 10 books from your used bookstore every six weeks! you make a profit on me! DONT YOU FEEL I HAVE EARNED THIS? *sobbing* GO AWAY...

deep breaths. in closing, thank you for your free wifi. thank you for your fabulous comic book collection. but leave me alone with how i sit. thanks.

jadis.

ps. how about staying open a lil' later than 9pm, eh? smooches.

so we'll go no more a-roving

2006-05-08T01:03:00.000-07:00

so, we'll go no more a-roving
so late into the night,
though the heart be still as loving,
and the moon be still as bright.

for the sword outwears its sheath,
and the soul wears out the breast,
and the heart must pause to breathe,
and love itself must rest.

though the night was made for loving,
and the day returns too soon,
yet we'll go no more a-roving
by the light of the moon.

[thanks, lord b.]

manipulating wiki?? politians, have some dignity! - article

2006-04-27T18:45:00.000-07:00

seriously? politics leaves such a bad taste in my mouth.

Campaign manager resigns amid Wikipedia flap
Biography altered to include candidate's son's DUI arrest

From Peter Hamby
CNN
Wednesday, April 26, 2006; Posted: 9:10 p.m. EDT (01:10 GMT)

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A Georgia gubernatorial candidate accepted the resignation of her campaign manager Wednesday after he was accused of changing the online Wikipedia biography of an opponent in the upcoming Democratic primary.

Secretary of State Cathy Cox's opponent, Lt. Gov. Mark Taylor, said Cox campaign manager Morton Brilliant altered an online encyclopedia entry to include a reference to Taylor's son being arrested for DUI after an accident that killed his passenger.

Wikipedia may be edited by anyone.

"We have reviewed the situation carefully and everything I have seen in this short period of time indicates that the posting originated from my campaign office," Cox said. "I am genuinely sorry for any anguish this incident has caused the Taylor family."

The resignation came after Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales confirmed that the addition to the biography came from an IP address affiliated with the Cox campaign.

Taylor spokesman Rick Dent said earlier Wednesday that the Cox campaign was "exploiting a tragedy for political reasons." He also asked for an apology from Cox and for Brilliant to be fired.

Cox said she made it clear to her staff that the incident with Taylor's son was off limits during the campaign.

"Today, I have once again made it clear to my staff that personal attacks, especially on the family members of candidates, are completely off limits and not at all in keeping with my desire to change the mean and bitter tone of politics," Cox said.

The original addition to Taylor's Wikipedia biography read: "Taylor's son Fletcher recently was involved in an alcohol-related car accident. The passenger in his car, whom Fletcher identified as his best friend, was killed. Currently, Fletcher is in an alcohol treatment facility awaiting trial."

By Wednesday night, it had been edited to read, "Taylor's son, Fletcher, was charged with driving under the influence (DUI) after crashing his car on August 18, 2005, in Charleston, South Carolina, killing his passenger."

The biography also included a reference to Brilliant resigning.

Taylor and Cox are to square off in the Georgia Democratic primary July 18. The winner will challenge Republican Gov. Sonny Perdue.

This is not the first time a Wikipedia entry has caused a flap. Because anyone may edit an entry, the site has become a popular tool among politicians wishing to slam a rival or laud themselves.

According to The Associated Press, the problem is so widespread that Wikipedia has tightened its submission guidelines and set up alerts so that its operators know when Capitol Hill staffers edit online profiles.

One of the most well-known instances of an error on the site involved John Seigenthaler Sr., whose Wikipedia biography said that he was linked to the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy. The man who posted the false information later said he was playing a joke, but only after the information had been on the site for 132 days and had been picked up by other Web sites.

Seigenthaler, a retired journalist and Robert Kennedy's administrative assistant in the early 1960s, wrote a November column in USA Today calling Wikipedia a "flawed and irresponsible research tool."

"When I was a child, my mother lectured me on the evils of 'gossip,' " Seigenthaler wrote in the column. "She held a feather pillow and said, 'If I tear this open, the feathers will fly to the four winds, and I could never get them back in the pillow. That's how it is when you spread mean things about people.' For me, that pillow is a metaphor for Wikipedia."

kindly borrowed from a codejoy post. go check out his site & his flickr photos, they are lovely!

movie reviews, movie reviews, x2 - inside man & v for vendetta

2006-04-03T11:10:00.000-07:00

whew! so, after quite some time of not posting, here I am in a triumphant return with not one, but two - yes, count them, two! – movie reviews for the faithful readership. ah, the gods must be smiling, and there must be work that I need to procrastinate on.

first things first! the new release, spike lee’s inside man.

disclaimer: there’s a heavy bias b/c I adore clive owen. I can’t imagine a better time than lying around with him in bed all day, snogging, and having him talk into my ear in that f-ing accent. that said, spike lee’s done well here…it’s an interesting mystery, and the three principals are solid as to be expected - although clive, the most engaging and subtle of the three, spends nearly all his time behind a mask, whereas on the other end of the spectrum, Jodie foster’s and denzel washington’s characters really felt canned at certain points. by that I mean, not quite that they were playing stereotypes, but…there were not a lot of personal motivations revealed, either, and so they just became caricatures at times.

the film is well shot and very interesting to watch – new york is always a fine supporting actor, and spike knows how to set up a shot so that the environment, and the framing, help underscore the tone of what’s going on. the biggest issue I had was really with the ending, which I didn’t find as satisfying as a mystery should end. neither of the big reveals meant that much to me emotionally, and – dare I compare it – ocean’s 11 is actually a lot slicker with its conclusion. naturally, the two are trying to accomplish different things - inside man has some on-point commentary about race and suspicion in our day and age, along with its fair share of snarky one liners – but all the same, the emotional impact I came to expect after 25th hour just wasn’t there.

an interesting tangent. I was thinking about what could have been done to make me react differently to this aspect - that is, what element the film could have had that I’d give it more emotional investment. and I came across a sad answer! I would have liked for denzel’s character to be put in more danger somehow, so that I would care more about him solving the mystery. the reason this is a sad answer is b/c I am essentially asking for an element of emotional manipulation…I’m hyper aware of this fact, usually, and it’s one of the beefs I have with the end of crash - it’s a great movie, but I HATE how it manipulates me emotionally. yet, here I sat, kind of wishing for something to happen to denzel’s girlfriend or partner or something. I think, in the end, there must be some middle ground – that the answer is neither the typical movie cop-out (think of every bruce willis cop movie you’ve ever seen, were his loved ones EVER safe?), nor the cold, sterile route that was taken…not quite sure what that could have been, yet. let me think on it.

next – the fabulous v for vendetta!

Natalie Portman is just stupendous as the face of this movie. everything she does is spot-on, never too thick, always captivating to watch. surprisingly, she comes off as older here than in closer; although I’m not sure exactly what age she was supposed to be in that film, but for a stripper she had a surprisingly innocent ingénue quality that didn’t seem quite coherent with the rest of the movie & actors. here, she’s far more grounded, and it suits both her style and her character. hugo weaving’s acting is all in his voice, and here is the impressive thing about that – both his matrix and lotr characters had uniquely pronounced voices as well, yet the one he dons for this movie is entirely distinct in different ways. it’s perfect for the lyrical quality his lines have – even days after seeing the film, I can hear clearly his intonation of the movie’s clutch phrases, “remember, remember the fifth of November” and “people should not be afraid of their governments. governments should be afraid of their people.” the voice he uses even lets him get away with an otherwise fairly cheesy monologue filled to the brim with words beginning with “v” (a writer’s feat, to be sure, but even when done correctly is borderline too much for some).

beware, for those of you who are not really comic book fans, this movie IS very stylistic, from its colors to its language to the sets and costumes. of course, I loved this about it. =) go watch. enjoy.

i wish i had a perfect memory! - article

2006-03-25T16:03:00.000-08:00

Woman With Perfect Memory Baffles Scientists

James McGaugh is one of the world's leading experts on how the human memory system works. But these days, he admits he's stumped.

McGaugh's journey through an intellectual purgatory began six years ago when a woman now known only as AJ wrote him a letter detailing her astonishing ability to remember with remarkable clarity even trivial events that happened decades ago.

Give her any date, she said, and she could recall the day of the week, usually what the weather was like on that day, personal details of her life at that time, and major news events that occurred on that date.

Like any good scientist, McGaugh was initially skeptical. But not anymore.

"This is real," he says.

Soon after AJ took over his life, McGaugh teamed with two fellow researchers at the University of California at Irvine. Elizabeth Parker, a clinical professor of psychiatry and neurology (and lead author of a report on the research in the current issue of the journal Neurocase), and Larry Cahill, an associate professor of neurobiology and behavior, have joined McGaugh in putting AJ through an exhaustive series of interviews and psychological tests. But they aren't a lot closer today to understanding her amazing ability than they were when they started.
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"We are trying to find out, but we haven't hit 'bingo' yet," says McGaugh.

His initial hypothesis, like several others, has turned out to be wrong -- or at least incomplete.

McGaugh has spent decades studying how such things as stress hormones and emotions affect memory, and at first he thought AJ's memories were of such emotional power that she couldn't forget them.

But that hypothesis fell short of the mark when it became obvious that "the woman who can't forget" remembers trivial details as clearly as major events. Asked what happened on Aug 16, 1977, she knew that Elvis Presley had died, but she also knew that a California tax initiative passed on June 6 of the following year, and a plane crashed in Chicago on May 25 of the next year, and so forth. Some may have had a personal meaning for her, but some did not.

"Here's a woman who has very strong memories, but she has very strong memories of things for which I have no memory at all," McGaugh says.

That became particularly clear one day when he asked her out of the blue if she knew who Bing Crosby was.

"I wasn't sure she would know, because she's 40 and wasn't of the Bing Crosby era," he says.

But she did.

"Do you know where he died?" McGaugh asked.

"Oh yes, he died on a golf course in Spain," she answered, and provided the day of the week and the date when the crooner died.

When the researchers asked her to list the dates when they had interviewed her, she "just reeled them off, bang, bang, bang."

She also told McGaugh that on the day after a particular interview, which took place several years ago, he flew to Germany.

"I said what? I went to Germany? I couldn't even remember what year I had gone to Germany," he says.

That level of recall suggests another hypothesis. Some people are able to recall past events by categorizing them. Certain events, or facts, are associated with others, and filed away together so that they may be easier to access. That's a trick that is often used by entertainers who use feats of memory to wow their audience.

AJ does have "some sort of compulsive tendencies. She wants order in her life," McGaugh says. "As a child, she would get upset if her mother changed anything in her room because she had a place for everything and wanted everything in its place.

"So she does categorize events by the date, but that doesn't explain why she remembers it."

Also, her degree of recall is so much greater than any other person's in the scientific literature that it seems unlikely to be the complete answer, McGaugh adds.

She is also quite different from savants who have surfaced from time to time with extraordinary abilities in music, art or memory.

"Some of them can remember every single detail about the particular hobby that they have, such as baseball or calendars or art, but they are very narrow," he says. McGaugh described one person who could memorize a piece of music instantly, and not forget it, but who "couldn't make change or couldn't take a bus because he didn't know where he was."

By contrast, AJ is a " fully functioning person," McGaugh says.

The researchers are preparing to take their work in a new direction in hopes of understanding what is going on here. It's possible AJ's brain is wired differently, and that may show up through magnetic resonance imaging. Testing is expected to begin within six months.

"We will be looking at her brain, using brain scanning techniques, to see if there's anything that is dramatically different that we can point to," McGaugh says.

Those of us with normal, very fallible memories function somewhat like a computer in that different areas of our brains are interconnected and thus better-suited for general memories. We know where we live and how to get to work, but we may not know what the weather was like on this date four years ago.

It's possible that AJ's brain has some "disconnections" that help her recall past events from her memory bank without interference from the parts of her brain that act as general processors. But the problem is that even if they find some interesting wiring through brain scans, the researchers will be limited in their conclusions by the fact that AJ seems to be unique.

So unique, in fact, that the Irvine team has given her condition a new name. They call it hyperthymestic syndrome, based on the Greek word thymesis for "remembering" and hyper, meaning "more than normal."

Some day, the researchers say, they hope to know what's different about AJ's brain, but they are still a ways off.

"In order to explain a phenomenon you have to first understand the phenomenon," McGaugh says. "We're at the beginning."

your studies of fringe new york streets...

2006-02-08T16:47:00.000-08:00

last night i dreamt that i was you. i was dressed all in black with dark glasses and attitude.
such a pose i could simply not hold through days in a northern town that i had once called a home.
your studies of fringe new york streets... i was reading the pavement in every work you would speak.
to a "brownstone up three flights of stairs" and it's on...
buying drinks for the poets upstate, this southern corruption towed you down the interstate,
and they all said that you were the king of gloomy disruption that surfaced when you would speak.
this town simply cannot compete so i'm packing my bullets and silverstones
and heading east to a "brownstone up three flights of stairs" and it's on...
if i could have had my way this year would bridge '66 again
trust fund hipsters were casing the room chock full of amphetamines.
the overturned kick drum book set the pace with incomparable cool.
and if the tempo was lousy it was lost on all but you...

(death cab)

photo blog 2 - eddie money says, take me home tonight

2006-01-28T02:49:00.000-08:00

everyday, i take the metro home from downtown LA.

union station is the primary hub in downtown; i love it, it's very quintessential LA - you know, palm trees out front, always a movie being shot (actually, the tv shows numbers and alias both like to shoot here, too). i like how the architecture is very old style hollywood, right down to the font (i love the font!), and the interior is big but not bustling in an intimidating way, like grand central or anything.

LOL this dude was crazy. look at his outfit!!

stairs that lead down to the red line.

the red line approaches.

i like this shot. i wanted to see what my ears would look like with the ipod earbuds, and when i looked at the photo, i was surprised - i forgot about the flower in my hair.

i wondered what this guy's story was. who were those flowers for? =) lucky person.

The train passes over the LA reservoir.

she's alive!!!

2005-12-31T01:13:00.000-08:00

i present to you, a post in bits.

currently
* on vacation in seattle
* apologetic about lack of posts. i blame finals.
* just read a graphic novel version of kafka's "the metamorphosis" (grazi, erin). reminded me of the gregors in my apartment, but unfortunately i am neither as kind nor as beautiful a young woman as grete; thus i am unsympathetic to their plight. i swear if i find another one i am going to bitch to my f-ing weird-ass landlord.
* currently navigating my way through james frey's "a million little pieces." haunting, riveting.

to come...
* photo blog about my metro commute.
* a rare personal post about my complete breakdown during finals period. you know i don't do personal stuff often. i'm still trying to decide if i want to post it.
* a great, in-depth post about why i love comic books. people have heard various bits of this on and off, but i wanted to compile it all...i am so nerdy. you love it. don't hide it.
* flickr updates on the Haircut and donation.

happy new beard, people.

i was an indie in my other, successful, life - article

2005-11-25T11:26:00.000-08:00

Hung Up on Tentpoles, Studios Think Too Big
November 22, 2005
By Anne Thompson

Because the studios are trying to respond to a clear audience demand for more material that's fresh and unpredictable, they are greenlighting riskier fare. The results this fall were disastrous. A spate of fall movies crashed and burned, movies that if they had been produced and marketed at the independent level might have worked.

Twentieth Century Fox released Curtis Hanson's family drama "In Her Shoes," starring Cameron Diaz, and the twisted Marc Forster thriller "Stay," starring Ewan McGregor; Warner Bros. Pictures failed with Niki Caro's feminist drama "North Country," starring Charlize Theron, and Shane Black's well-reviewed "Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang"; Paramount Pictures released Cameron Crowe's $54 million "Elizabethtown," starring Orlando Bloom, and "The Weather Man," starring Nicolas Cage. None are working at the boxoffice.

These films were all worth making. But they were too expensive for what they were. And the studios don't know how to market them. "They can get away with marketing tentpoles," says one marketing maven, "but with the smaller pictures, they don't have a clue."

Personal filmmakers such as Crowe, Wes Anderson ("The Royal Tenenbaums") and Paul Thomas Anderson ("Punch Drunk Love") shouldn't be making movies at the studio level. (And even a proven commercial writer-director like James L. Brooks shouldn't spend $80 million on a movie like "Spanglish.") They should be doing it the hard way on the indie side, with the right cast and shooting schedule. They're spoiled. No filmmaker in his right mind wants to give up the fat studio gravy train. But the studios need to wake up and recognize what business they're in.

What makes 2005 a watershed year is that the message of the marketplace, where the boxoffice is down some 8% over last year, rang loud and clear. And the smartest people in Hollywood are scrambling for answers. (The others are insisting that nothing is wrong.) "Fundamentally, this is an industry in transition," ICM chairman Jeff Berg says. "Every studio has to rethink itself. Change is hard when existing systems are in place that are used to doing business a certain way."

The heads of the studios are paid to figure out where the market is going and what audiences want to see two years in advance. Each studio has $1 billion allocated, more or less, to plunk down on producing about 20 movies a year. They bet their stacks of chips on the movies that will go forward.

The heart of the problem is that the studios do one thing really well. They know how to throw their enormous resources at making and marketing event movies. Their primary job is to find tentpoles. These are the powerful drivers for the rest of their slate. Warners has Harry Potter, Batman and Superman. Universal Pictures has "The Bourne Identity." Paramount has the "Mission: Impossible" series. Sony Pictures has Spider-Man and now MGM's James Bond. Fox has its X-Men. Disney has its animated family features like "Chicken Little."

It is justifiable for a studio to spend hundreds of millions on a real potential revenue generator, banking that it will surely satisfy the masses of moviegoers around the world. The trick, though, is to launch the tentpole in the first place: a movie that is so satisfying to all four audience quadrants (men and women, old and young) that it generates a franchise. In order to get that movie, the studios will put the best writers, directors, stars, effects and creative teams on board. And they will shower the marketplace with advertising, promotion and hype to get people to see it. The problem now is that, as one agent puts it, "a generation of viewers is not buying the dog food."

Once a studio actually launches a tentpole -- which is a bitch to do -- they can ride it for a few films assuming they don't mess it up. For example, if Sony wanted to turn the sequel to a sexy romp like "The Mask of Zorro" into the PG family film "The Legend of Zorro," they should have telegraphed that to the audience instead of selling Catherine Zeta-Jones busting out of her bodice. Audiences were confused. The studio also should have recognized that selling "Zathura" as a sequel to the 10-year-old "Jumanji" was a mistake. Whoever argued in favor of changing the title and selling the movie as an original was right. But it's always much harder to start from scratch. The trouble with such would-be blockbusters as Sony's "Stealth" and DreamWorks' "The Island" is that they don't always work.

So many movies try to be tentpoles -- and fail. It's the equivalent of striking out when you're trying to hit a home run. You can't afford to do that every time at bat. Tom Pollock, the ex-chairman of Universal Pictures (who now runs Montecito Pictures with Ivan Reitman), tells his students at the University of California at Santa Barbara that the studios invest too much in one-shot movies that never will yield any sequels.

That's because the studios have become so accustomed to throwing money at the movies they want to score with that it's impossible for them to give up their free-spending ways. They also rely on foreign boxoffice and DVD sales to pull them out of the red. And instead of cutting back on costs and banking on what they really believe in, they bring in partners to cut their risk.

Sony justifies spending $85 million on "Memoirs of a Geisha" -- which could well be an Oscar contender but is an unlikely cash cow or sequel generator -- by bringing in Spyglass Entertainment as a partner.

To follow Pollock's argument, only tentpoles justify outlays of serious studio cash. Everything else should be cheap genre fare: comedies, thrillers and horror movies. Basically, that's the business that the wildly successful Lions Gate and Dimension are in. But these indies do what they do for a price. They and the studio "indie" subsidiaries, such as Fox Searchlight and Focus Features, are equipped to pay less for everything.

As Paramount reconfigures its specialty film division, which John Lesher is taking over, it should be able to take a movie like "Elizabethtown" and shrink its budget in half.

In Hollywood, there's a studio price and an indie price. There's a two-tiered system in place. On the studio side, the top movie stars cost $20 million against a share of the gross, and the top directors command $10 million (unless you're Peter Jackson coming off "The Lord of the Rings").

Movie stars know the rules today: Sucker the studios into paying your price and go to the indies for the quality parts that will sustain your career. If you're George Clooney, you recognize the value of putting yourself in quality work that will stand the test of time.

No studio is going to admit the obvious: They can't afford to make all their movies at top-tier prices. And if they only make a few tentpoles a year, what are they going to do with the rest of their slate? None of the studios is willing to slash the fat from their motion picture divisions. When Warners instituted job cuts, they got rid of two top people from Warner Independent Pictures, the one division they should be beefing up.

The best way for the studios to make the tricky one-shot movies in the "middle" that are neither tentpoles nor genre flicks is to beef up their acquisitions departments and let the indies make those movies for a price. They can pick up movies from studio suppliers like Mandate Pictures ("The Grudge," starring Sarah Michelle Gellar) or Sidney Kimmel Entertainment (the upcoming "Trust the Man," starring Julianne Moore), which can produce commercial movies at far less than studio rates. For the studios, indie producers who can consistently deliver low-cost commercial movies, such as Mandate's Joe Drake, SKE's Bill Horberg and Michael London ("Sideways"), are worth their weight in gold.

harry potter!!!!!!!!!

2005-11-18T16:44:00.000-08:00

harry potter 4 is awesome!!

quick review -
- best of the 4 movies, i think. direction was great.
- the entire thing is very FAST, in particular the beginning. i think this is a bit of a necessary evil, when there is so much to get done, and really very limited amount of time to do it in. maybe 10 seconds at most on the portkey, ~3 minutes on the world cup, ~1 1/2 minutes on the death eater terrorizing...
- the images are great - really nice shots, and the magic is looking more seamless.
- cho chang! whoo hoo scottish asian girls! she didn't have enough lines, though, but she was so cute.
- no veela! ;_;
- generally good acting. it's always a bit touch and go with the kids -- daniel radcliffe does an overall good job in this one, better than the other movies i think, especially since the book calls for a ton of range from him and he has to carry the whole thing. rupert grint is getting a liiittle too big (too tall, too old looking) to be fussy and sad lipped and pulling the covers up while he simmers, all -mad- at harry. and emma watson, while getting to be quite pretty, is also the Queen of Overacting and Stylized Voice. as in the previous movies, the adults are all much, much better - mad-eye moody is the primary force here, just enough quirkyness and lunacy to make his character tick, plus miranda richardson as rita skeeter is lovely even without some of the finer plot details that the book gives her. i love alan rickman, enough said. and as for the triwizards...holy ****, cedric diggory is so f-ing hot! eek! i have always imagined pavel as krum (jess, you are with me on that one, right?), so i was "meh" on him...and overall disappointed in fleur. the plot is structured so that she is the weakest contestant already, she wasn't particularly striking in any way, or impressive, and since they didn't introduce veela, there was no explanation for ron finding her so incredible.
- ray fiennes as voldemort? perfect. so, so good.
- midnight movie audience choice quotes:

(at 12.06am, 5 mins past when the movie was supposed to start, and the slideshow ads looped for the billionth time) "this is...torture!"

(in response to the slew of girls in the audience who hooted when harry took off his shirt in the bathtub scene) "HE'S FOURTEEN!"

neurotic

2005-11-09T01:36:00.000-08:00

overthinking has made me nauseous...

sometimes i wish things could be easy.
easier. easier for me.

i'm my own worst enemy...i want it to come naturally.

no, i want it to appear to come naturally. i don't want people to suspect.

and as a result, when i'm at my breaking point, i have no one to go to. since in the end i'm just a damn girl.

photo blog 1 - halloween, pt. 1

2005-11-07T01:38:00.000-08:00

erin and i, dressed to go out to west hollywood on halloween night. i've never been to mardi gras, but i have heard it is essentially the same kind of riotous party in the streets.

saw this, thought of marcos, HAD to get the photo!

always a bridesmaid, never a ... transvestite bride?

OMFG i f-ing freaked out when i saw them. literally, screamed across the street to ask if i could get a photo. LOOK at her gail costume, it is PERFECT, i am having my own little frank miller-induced personal thrill right now...

i love this photo - these guys were dancing together, and with the colors it looked simply incredible.

now that's one big fairy.

we actually got drinks at fiesta cantina.

our waiter offered to shoot us with an arrow so we could get some lovin'.

LOL diane...is so pleased in this moment.

more photos here.

grab bag 1 - mcsweeney's, jello art, chickens

2005-11-02T00:28:00.000-08:00

a little grab bag of things today, to tie over the scant but loyal readership - stay tuned for scandalous halloween photos to be posted...

an old post from mcsweeney's, but possibly my favorite, from "open letters to people or entities who are unlikely to respond":

AN OPEN LETTER TO EVERYONE WHO, WHEN APPROACHING THE DOOR TO THE OFFICE SUITE WHERE I AM THE RECEPTIONIST, TURNS THE HANDLE DOWN, THEN PUSHES THE DOOR IN, THEREBY CAUSING A LOUD OBNOXIOUS BANGING SOUND, LOOKS UP AT ME WITH FEAR AND FRUSTRATION IN THEIR EYES, TURNS THE HANDLE UP THIS TIME, BUT STILL PUSHES THE DOOR IN, CAUSING THAT SAME OBNOXIOUS BANGING SOUND, GIVING ME THE SAME TERRIFIED LOOK, THEN RINGS THE DOORBELL, WHICH IS EVEN LOUDER AND MORE PIERCING, THEN STANDS THERE, PETRIFIED, ANGRY AT MY INCOMPETENCE TO UNLOCK THE DOOR WITH THE REMOTE-CONTROL DEVICE.

March 22, 2005

To you people,

Pull.

PULL the door open. Turn the handle any old way you want. But then PULL. Don't push. Stop pushing the door. Pull. Pull it. The door will open if you pull it. I can't stand that banging sound. No, it's not locked. It's unlocked. I unlocked it. Yes, I see you there. And I unlocked it. It works. The battery is not dead. I checked. I'm not playing a trick on you. Stop looking at me like that. And stop ringing the doorbell. Just pull. Pull the door.

Pull.
Pull.
Pull.

Pull,
Kurt Chiang

[lol. i think he has the perfect rhythm there.]

check this out - san francisco in jello!!! awesome.

look at those colors.

doesn't that remind you of full house? (shut up. marcos, you know it does.) see the full album here, and espeically check out the cooooool bay bridge photo. (did someone say...earthquake?)

and finally, a little bit of web sillyness borrowed from miss meiris:

chicken aerobics. dance, puppet, dance!

bookshelves

2005-10-27T22:05:00.000-07:00

i adore my books. currently they are all affectionately crammed three-deep into my mid-height lame ass billy bookshelf, but as soon as i have enough money to not have to begin sentences with, "as soon as i have enough money," i am going to purchase at least two more, maybe a tall one with opaque glass doors and certainly a nice big wooden one (real wooden, not ikea particleboard wooden, though that's working fine for me for now).

alas, at this time i shall be content to merely pine. i think a lot of it is erin's influence - her (unhealthy) obsession with furniture design has rubbed off on me to an extent, and i'm enjoying thinking about not only the different ways form and function can work together (or not), but how they can also be real design strengths.

(okay, can you tell i'm sick of law reading and just ready to go back to analyzing useless crap again? give me chekhov! bf skinner, godard! f, i'll even do an essay on f-ing bookshelves and herman miller, just NO MORE CIV PRO).

anyway, bookshelves.

this is neat, huh?? tilt, tilt... i can imagine putting all my plays into these, or, um, my cliff's notes.

i also love this:

that's f-ing badass, man! i probably wouldn't want it for my house, but those lines are so nice and crisp, and i love how it just pops. (not to mention that titanic lamp kind of tricks out your eyes...)

now, see, this on the other hand is a bad idea. there is no respect! no organization! i am not a fan.

and this is just impractical and ugly.

you sick of these yet? i want to end on the best one. ladies and gentlemen, i give you:

what, not impressed, you say?? well, i'll admit, empty, this design makes little sense. looks a bit like tigger's stripes or something, but they are a little irrelevant.

until you put books on there.

i am not kidding:

holy shit, man!!!!!! was i not kidding?!?! look at what this design does - it creates open space, not just on the sides of the books but above them, too. (granted, there aren't that many in here, but the way the shelves go it *does* create that negative space.) it accomodates varying heights and thicknesses of volumes, and it's all tilt-y, which breaks up the lines at soft angles. i fucking love it, man, i am not kidding. plus, it's crazy enough to catch the eye, but it's not absolutely atrocious to have in a home. neat, right?!?!

*[blogger's note: the site changed the photos, so there's no longer a full-length shot with books on the shelves. =( sorry, kids! i'll keep checking back, and upload the handsomer ones if they ever get put back online. meanwhile, apologies for the comments not really fitting the photos...]

put what where? - article

2005-10-23T21:26:00.000-07:00

from the times (london)

Put what where? 2,000 years of bizarre sex advice

Tight corsets cause nymphomania, orgasms can kill and wasps are a turn-on. John Naish looks at the top sex tips over the ages

Mating. Reproduction. Nothing is more crucial to humanity’s survival, so it would be logical to expect us to have got it sussed early in our evolution. But since the start of civilisation, the fundamentals of human sex — where to put it, how and when — have been absurdly confused by a parade of moralists, pundits and visionaries all claiming to know the magic secrets and only too happy to pass them on at a very reasonable price.

Just as every generation thinks that it invented sex, we also think we invented lovemaking manuals, or at least based them on a few prototypes such as the Kamasutra and Marie Stopes’s 1918 Married Love. But today’s maelstrom of books, videos and DVDs has a far richer, more twisted heritage than that.

The tradition of bestselling love guides goes back to the Ancient Chinese. [blogger's note: we are so racy!] Our earliest known manuals were first written in 300BC and buried in a family tomb at Mawangdui, in Hunan province. Recent translation reveals the timeless nature of the subjects they tackled.

Written as Cosmo coverlines, they would look like this: Four Seasons of Sex — and Why Autumn is Hot, Hot, Hot; Wild New Positions; Tiger Roving, Gibbon Grabbing and Fish Gobbling; Aphrodisiacs to Keep You Up All Night! Plus Exclusive! Your Love Route to Immortality.

As ever, it was all nonsense: home-made Viagra recipes involved ingredients such as beetle larvae, wasps and dried snails. The books also promised that any man who had sex with a different virgin every night for 100 nights without ejaculating would live for ever (albeit rather uncomfortably).

These odd beginnings set a trend: weird tips from strange authors, many of whom became manual martyrs. Ovid, the Roman poet, advised women on the best positions to suit their bodies in his poem Ars Amatoria. For example: “If you are short, go on top/If you’re conspicuously tall, kneel with your head turned slightly sideways.” The prudish Emperor Augustus banished poor Ovid to a chilly outpost of empire (a small town on the Black Sea in modern Romania).

Medieval European sex advice followed the strait-laced trend: most of it said “don’t”. Pleasure paved Hell’s roads and misogynistic manuals such as De Secretis Mulierum (The Secrets of Women) claimed that females used sex to drain men of their power and that some hid sharp shards of iron inside themselves to injure innocent lovers.

A technological breakthrough in the Renaissance put us back on our lascivious tracks. The printing press enabled publishers to churn out dodgy books faster than the Church authorities could ban them. Readers were treated to gems such as Mrs Isabella Cortes’s handy hint from 1561 that a mixture of quail testicles, large-winged ants, musk and amber was perfect for straightening bent penises. The era also brought us the earliest recorded recommendation of slippers as a sex aid (“Cold feet are a powerful hindrance to coition,” warned Giovanni Sinibaldi in his 1658 book Rare Verities.) But to find history’s oddest advisers, we must look to the Victorians and Edwardians. William Chidley, for example, believed that he could best promote his ideas by walking around in a toga. Chidley, an Australian, advised readers in his 1911 pamphlet The Answer that heavy clothing caused erections, which would lead to sexual overexcitement, illness and death, as well as being “ugly things” of which “we are all ashamed”.

He urged people to live on fruit and nuts and to practise a method of flaccid intercourse apparently based on horses’ sex lives. Yet it wasn’t his ideas that got him repeatedly arrested, but his silk toga, which the authorities thought indecent. After his death, supporters continued propounding his theories into the 1920s.

For the ultimate proof that you don’t need relevant qualifications to become a world expert, we turn to Marie Stopes. She was married and in her late thirties when she wrote one of Britain’s most enduring sex guides, Married Love. But she was also a virgin.

Stopes was inspired by her betrothal to Reginald “Ruggles” Gates, who, she told a divorce court, had failed ever to become “effectively rigid”. When Married Love hit the shelves early in 1918 it outsold the bestselling contemporary novels by a huge margin. By 1925, sales had passed the half-million mark.

Stopes was a fan of Hitler’s eugenics and arrogant enough to offer Rudyard Kipling and George Bernard Shaw advice on writing. Her main sex-manual innovation was a theory that women have a “sex tide” of passion that ebbs and flows on a fortnightly basis — and woe betide the man who didn’t understand this. In case her second husband, the manufacturing magnate Humphrey Verdon Roe, got it wrong, she made him sign a contract releasing her to have sex with other men.

So that’s our sexual forebears, a weird lot with funny ideas. Compared with them we might appear at the zenith of sexual enlightenment. Our age is remarkable for the sheer volume of sex advice being consumed: one woman in four now owns a sex manual, says a survey by the publishers Dorling Kindersley. Everyone from porn stars to the car-manual firm Haynes has one out. Well, I wonder. In 50 years’ time, I foresee the students at a university faculty of s exual semiotics studying the early Twenty-Ohs with the same mirth, incredulity and horror that shake us when we consider our ancestors’ obsessions. Perhaps they will wonder why we bought so many manuals, videos and DVDs but seemed to have so little time or energy left for sex. Maybe they will link our obsession with orgasms to our endless need to go shopping. They might also connect our avid consumption of sex advice to our growing terror of personal embarrassment and “getting it wrong”. They may even have a name for us; perhaps the erotic neurotics.

Put What Where? Over 2,000 Years of Bizarre Sex Advice, by John Naish (HarperElement £9.99), is available from Times Books First at £9.49 p&p free. Call 0870 1608080 or visit www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirstbuy

Wisdom of the ancients

How to pull
“Pick the woman’s worst feature and then make it appear desirable. Tell an older woman that she looks young. Tell an ugly woman that she looks ‘fascinating’.” Philaenis, papyrus sex manual (2BC)

Go blondes!
“All women are lascivious but auburn blondes the most. A little straight forehead denotes an unbridled appetite in lust.” Giovanni Sinibaldi, Rare Verities: the Cabinet of Venus Unlock’d (1658)

Buns and corsets cause nymphomania
“Constricting the waist by corsets prevents the return of blood to the heart, overloads sexual organs and causes unnatural excitement of the sexual system. The majority of women follow the goddess Fashion and so also wear their hair in a heavy knot. This great pressure on their small brains produces great heat and chronic inflammation of their sexual organs. It is almost impossible that such women should lead other than a life of sexual excess.” Dr John Cowan, The Science of a New Life (1888)

On the other hand . . .
“The majority of women (happily for them) are not very much troubled with sexual feelings of any kind.” Dr William Acton, Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs (1858)

Indian enlargement
“Rub your penis with the bristles of certain insects that live in trees, and then, after rubbing it for ten nights with oils, rub it with the bristles as before. Swelling will be gradually produced. Then lie on a hammock with a hole in it and hang the penis through the hole. Take away the pain from the swelling by using cool concoctions. The swelling lasts for life.” Kamasutra, translated by Sir Richard Burton and F. F. “Bunny” Arbuthnot (1883)

Climaxes can kill
“Fainting, vomiting, involuntary urination, epilepsy and defecation have occurred in young men after first coitus. Lesions of various organs have taken place. In men of mature age the arteries have been unable to resist the high blood pressure and cerebral haemorrhage with paralysis has occurred. In elderly men the excitement of intercourse with young wives or prostitutes has caused death.” Havelock Ellis, Psychology of Sex: a Manual for Students (1933)

How often?
“The ordinary man can safely indulge about four times a month. More than that would be excess for a large majority of civilised men and women.” Lyman B. Sperry, Confidential Talks with Husband and Wife: a Book of Information and Advice for the Married and Marriageable (1900)

Single-handed signs
“Look at the habitual masturbator! See how thin, pale and haggard he appears; how his eyes are sunken; how long and cadaverous is his cast of countenance; how irritable he is and how sluggish, mentally and physically; how afraid he is to meet the eye of his fellow, feel his damp and chilling hand, so characteristic of great vital exhaustion.” Dr Henry Guernsey, Plain Talks on Avoided Subjects (1882)

Never marry these women
“Redheads. Any girl named after a mountain, a tree, a river or a bird. Ones with rough hands or feet. Ones who sigh, laugh or cry at meals. Any girl with inverted nipples, a beard, uneven breasts, flap ears, spindle legs or who is scrawny. Girls whose big toes are disproportionately small. Girls who make the ground shake when they walk past.” Koka Shastra, The Indian Scripture of Koka (12th century)

And, if you can’t find it, don’t worry
“The clitoris, while important, is not nearly as important as many of us have been taught or led to believe.” Edward Podolsky, Sex Technique for Husband and Wife (1947)

But whatever you do ...
“Never fool around sexually with a vacuum cleaner.” Dr Alex Comfort, The Joy of Sex (1972)

non-recommendations 2 - microsoft word

2005-10-18T01:31:00.000-07:00

i fucking hate word with the loathing that most reserve for puppy kickers. i hate it so much my delicate facial features start to twitch when i think too much about it.

fucking presumptuous, piece of shit software, that thinks it knows what i want but only serves to FUCK UP MY COURSE OUTLINE. don't autoformat me, fucking bitch! no, i don't mean "torturous" when i write "tortious"! no, i dont mean "iii." indented halfway in the middle of the page when i write "2)" on the left!!

AND FUCK YOU for RETROACTIVELY CHANGING ALL MY NUMBERS TO "1." and all my LETTERS TO "a." WHEN I AM NEARLY FINISHED YOU ASSHOLE! (weeps) when i need to memorize a 5 step process, it does me no good to have all the steps labeled one!!!!

all right. in all fairness, i have a midterm on saturday, and in addition to completely ignoring my emails (that's you jess, alana, ari, em, rhi...my response is coming...) i have been shunning daylight and naps as well, so i am a tad grumpy, and part of this post is that. also, i will admit that word does not proclaim to be an outlining software, only a word processing one.

THAT SAID, I STILL FUCKING HATE IT. you do NOT know what i want, so stop changing things without at least labelling what you're changing and checking with me first. this is the second time i've had to go back over the entire thing and relabel my numbers/indentations. i know you are confused by my disorganized style of outlining, but FOR THE LOVE OF GOD AND ALL THAT IS HOLY LEAVE ME ALONE!!

you know what else bothers me, is that i am actually quite proficient at word. i know how to work it with relative dexterity, and i can fix most formatting problems that other people can't, just by virtue of having used it specifically for formatting purposes, etc. so, it just drives me nuts that there's no, i dunno, loyalty reciprocated at all, like, word doesn't appreciate that i know its ins and outs, it just wants to f-ing dupe me along with all the other suckers. well fuck you! word! you friggin bastard.

...i am calming down now, and adding addendums that are less screaming but not less irritated. word should let me "lock" pages. like, the first fifteen pages of my outline? i should be able to "lock" them and not let the program just shuffle margins and labels as it pleases, since, i dunno, it took me the better part of three weeks to get this shit done, and i dont think some fucking program should be allowed to fuck around with it.

admit it. you're bored.

2005-10-15T01:09:00.000-07:00

here's my tank!
Originally uploaded by jadis.

so, explore my fish tank. click the photo to learn more.

what if? - article

2005-10-07T23:40:00.000-07:00

from the washington post...

What If Gene Were a Genius?
Oh, never mind . . .

By Gene Weingarten
Sunday, October 2, 2005; W32

Critics sometimes complain that my columns lack intellectual depth. So today I thought I would examine fundamental epistemological questions of life in a contextual fashion, by postulating alternative realities and extrapolating likely results.

What if Freud had been a woman?

Sex would not be considered the primary force that drives human behavior. Instead, it would be Fear of Having a Large Behind. All men would be haunted by a condition known as "penis shame." The mind would not be divided into the Id, the Ego and the Superego but the Shoe-Desire Region, the Weeping Center, and the If-You-Don't-Know-What-You-Did-Wrong-I'm-Not-Going-to-Tell-You Lobe. Also, sometimes a dried apricot is just a dried apricot.

What if wishes were horses?

Then beggars would ride. But so would everyone else. We would each have, like, 7,000 horses. They would completely paralyze civilization, consuming all vegetable matter in a week or less. Continents would rise several feet, just from accumulated poo. And anytime anyone wished for no more horses, another horse would appear. The world would end in a terrifying, thundering apocalypse of horses, is what would happen.

What if Hitler had beaten us to the bomb?

Humor wäre heutzutage verboten, und Humoristen würde man in der Öffentlichkeit erschiessen.*

What if Shakespeare had been born in Teaneck, N.J., in 1973?

He would call himself Spear Daddy. His rap would exhibit a profound, nuanced understanding of the frailty of the human condition, exploring the personality in all its bewildering complexity: pretension, pride, vulnerability, emotional treachery, as well as the enduring triumph of love. Spear Daddy would disappear from the charts in about six weeks.

What if our thoughts scrolled across our foreheads, like a TV news crawl?

All men would be incarcerated for public lewdness, conspiracy, fraud and crimes against humanity.

What if, as originally predicted, heavier-than-air flight had actually been impossible?

Rocket-propelled blimps. Travel would take a little longer, but the 9/11 plot would have failed, comically.

What if celebrities were punished by God every time they took money to endorse a product they don't use?

It's happening already! Consider Rafael Palmeiro, who did those obnoxious ads for Viagra even though he claimed he didn't need it and hadn't used it. Now he's ruined.

Is this, finally, empirical evidence for the existence of the deity?

It is hard to deny.

What if all snowmen could walk and talk, like Frosty?

They'd be gone as soon as we made them. You think snowmen would sit around here just to entertain kids, waiting until the first warm spell melted them? No way. Responding to some primitive instinct for survival, they'd hoof it for Antarctica, or climb Kilimanjaro. The only time anyone would ever see a snowman is by climbing a mountain. We'd expect them to be gurus, and ask them about the meaning of life. But they would just say things like, "Me want toy." Snowmen are idiots.

What if you could smell air? And it smelled like B.O.?

That would be real bad.

What if the wheel had never been invented?

Even worse mileage for SUVs.

What if the U.S. Constitution required presidential candidates to campaign wearing only a sombrero and a cummerbund?

The only people who would run for president would be shameless, contemptible, power-mad, ego-crazed, narcissistic exhibitionists. So, basically, this one's a wash.

What if dogs were as dumb as chickens, but chickens were as smart as chimpanzees?

No one would notice the difference in dogs, but we'd feel a lot worse about continuing to eat all those plump, delicious chickens.

What if there were a doomsday Web site, where if any-one logged on, it would instantly annihilate the world in a fiery inferno? And what if the url were published in a news-paper? You know, something like "Log on to www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/mmedia/endofworld.html and the world will end?" How long would it take some irresponsible jackass to do that?

Probably no more than three sec

*Humor would be illegal today, and humor writers would be taken out back and shot.

my perfect sunday

2005-10-02T21:55:00.001-07:00

if i had my way, i would spend sundays just devouring the new york times.

i'd start at the crossword puzzle, and do every answer i could, snuggled in bed, letting the sunlight and strain of thought wake me up. i'd spill egg whites on the grey pages of arts & leisure, and sip my coffee while taking in the full-page color cinema ads & off-broadway theatre descriptions. i'd give my boyfriend the sports section and take a shower while he read out unfinished crossword clues and summarized book review titles. i'd flip through the food & travel sections in my towel, and clip coupons, and check television listings as i dried my hair. and when half the day is gone, after i'd dress and pat my hair dry and feel ready to greet the world outside my world, i'd read the front page: headlines and photo captions first. national news, then global. and all the sadness, and all the past, and all the news that some editor deemed fit to be printed would soak through my narrow life as i left my week behind.

take me out tonight

2005-10-01T15:36:00.000-07:00

To days of inspiration,
Playing hookie,
Making something out of nothing.

The need to express, to communicate

To going against the grain - going insane, going mad

To loving tension,
No pension,
To more than one dimension,
To starving for attention,
Hating convention, hating pretension
Not to mention (of course), hating dear old mom and dad

To riding your bike midday past the three-piece suits,
To fruits,
To no absolutes!
To Absolut.
To choice,
To the Village Voice
To any passing fad...

To hand-crafted beers made in local breweries
To yoga, to yogurt, to rice and beans and cheese
To leather, to dildos, to curry vindaloo
To huevos rancheros and Maya Angelou

Emotion, devotion, to causing a commotion
Creation, vacation, mucho masturbation

Compassion.

To fashion,

To passion when it's new

To Sontag, to Sondheim, to anything taboo
Ginsberg, Dylan, Cunningham and Cage
Lenny Bruce, Langston Hughes,

To the stage!

To Uta, to Buddha, Pablo Neruda, too

Why Dorothy and Toto went over the rainbow? To blow off Auntie Em

La vie Boheme.

Bisexuals, trisexuals, homo sapiens,
Carcinogens, hallucinogens,
Men, Pee Wee Herman
German wine, turpentine, Gertrude Stein
Antonioni, Bertolucci, Kurosawa, Carmina Burana

To apathy, to entropy, to empathy,

ecstasy.

Vaclav Havel - The Sex Pistols, 8BC,
To no shame,
Never playing the Fame Game
To marijuana!
To sodomy (it's between God and me)
To S and M!

La vie Boheme...

when trailers are better than their films

2005-09-26T01:21:00.000-07:00

am i crazy for thinking this? there are definitely examples of movie trailers that outshine the films they advertise. i'm one of those people who must be at the theater early enough that i get to see all the trailers, cause it's neat to get excited about an upcoming feature, but it's just disappointing when the movie doesn't live up to it...and ever since i discovered apple's movie trailer page a couple years ago, my predicament has gotten worse b/c i'll obsess over the trailers that i like, only to build up to a full length that makes me wish i could just have seen a, well, longer trailer.

a primary example:

the most notable is sin city. now, i enjoyed this movie, and i think robert rodriguez did a freaking incredible job bringing frank miller's artwork directly from the page to the screen. (i know some people will disagree with me on how good this movie is, but i would argue with those who dispute the second point - it looks simply incredible, like the panels just came alive.) still, even though i liked the film, it was just .nothing. compared to the trailer (#1).

there are two main reasons for why this trailer is stunning. (1) the music ("cells" by the servant). i've heard, briefly, the full song with words, but the instrumental version used in the trailer is so much better - i really think the beat makes your heart and breath synch with the rhythm (yeeeees i know that's hokey), but the music is helped out a LOT by (2) the PERFECT editing. this is a great example of EXACTLY what editing should be like - how it works with the music, how it introduces the visual elements and the noir, how it chooses which color shots to use and when. you get glimpses of all 3 story lines and all the major characters. it's just a really fine piece of work, that trailer.

theatre pretentiousness - post from a sister blog

2005-09-22T02:02:00.000-07:00

doing theatre in a very restrictive department at williams meant that i heard the gist of the below sentiment quite often. unfortunately, it was often accompanied by a bit of anger, which always finds a way to mar good argument.

jess's testimony below, i think, strikes a great balance between the expression of her thought and her reaction to that thought...i don't agree with her on all points, but a great majority of them are dead-on, and i think she's hit the exact right pitch with her tone. it's a very good post.

visit her site here, and a link to her direct post here.

I am rebelling.

I am, first and foremost, rebelling against the idea that theatre cannot succeed simply by being enjoyable. When I say enjoyable, I don't mean catered to the lowest common denominator, but I do mean accessible, I mean funny, I mean uplifting, I mean (dare I say it) entertaining.

I think, if theatre can make you smile, can make you laugh, can make you realize for a moment a good feeling or a better feeling than the one you walked in with, that can be considered a success.

I think, too, that if theatre can bring you to some other moment of emotion--if it can stir you to anger, if it can bring you to tears, if it can give you some peace or clarity, that is successful theatre.

And, quite frankly, if that end is achieved despite a straightforward structure, simple dialogue, unoriginal ideas, predictable music, basic sets, shoddy costumes, ineffective blocking, odd direction, or mere lack of pretension--I don't care.

I'm taking a stand. I got into theatre because nothing gave me more pleasure in elementary school than to stand on the stage of my coffee table and sing--gasp--The Sound of Music. And quite honestly, I don't know if I've gotten that much pure joy from theatre since then. I've had fun, I've learned a lot, and I think that that's great. But I find the notion of theatre as Art And Only Art to be...bizarre. Experimenting with forms and ideas and theories is immensely interesting on an intellectual level and often results in some really amazing, thought-provoking, emotion-eliciting, beautiful work. But to judge everything else in the realm of theatre against whatever idea of "Good" is in vogue at the moment is to discard so much of value.

I'll let you in on a little secret, one that could get me kicked out of all Theatredom. I still adore Sound of Music. I still cherish Annie. I think that Evita--the Madonna version, 'cause Patti LuPone scares the crap out of me--is fantastic. I think Les Mis is great and I sing On My Own all the time. And I will say this and I will say it loud and clear. THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH ANY OF THAT.

For years, I've been taught by jeers, jests, comments, and criticisms of the other theatre folk to whom I have been exposed that things like Andrew Lloyd Weber and Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals are, essentially, worthless. That's snobbish, that's pretentious, and that's untrue. They are simple, they are straightforward, some of them due to time period, etc, are sexist/racist. That last is unfortunate, but generally society does not dismiss Lear because Goneril and Regan are crappy women, or Othello because people look down on his race. Producing plays from other times is not typically seen as an endorsement of the values of those times. But really, when it comes down to it, it's the simplicity, the predictability, and the familiarity of shows like that that are most criticized. Beckett it ain't, but Sound of Music is, legitimately, good theatre when performed with joy.

I never want to be someone who scoffs when they mention musical theatre, or sneers at the name "Neil Simon." If you don't care for something, that's a matter of personal opinion, and not something that should be dictated by anyone else's ideas of what constitutes Art or Theatre or Good or whatever. I appreciate very much being in an academic environment where I'm exposed to so many ideas and theories about what can be good, and where people try things and do obscure theatre and not just what is familiar and safe. At the same time, I think a lot of people here (faculty and students alike) tend to categorically reject pieces that are more popular simply because of their popularity. It's that attitude, and not individual preference, that bothers me.

I'm fairly certain that anyone working or studying in the field got into it because at some point they just did it because it was fun. That's what this comes down to for me--I'm not against hard work, challenging, frustrating creative processes, strange, obscure plays or choices, or straying from the beaten path. I am against the view so very neatly encapsulated for us (however facetiously) by none other than William Finn, that "If you're having a good time, you're not doing theatre." He was half-joking, and had been put on the spot when he walked into our workshop the other day, but some part of him meant it. My burning question: Why the hell not?

"All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players." PLAYERS. Theatre is something, at its most basic, that must be done out of joy, out of love, out of passion. I'm absolutely not putting forward the notion that every show must be one big tap number or a screaming laugh riot, but even when working on the sharpest, darkest tragedy, in order for it to be worth anything, it has to be somehow about the joy of creating and the intense, overwhelming need to communicate on a level other than the analytical, intellectual one that so many of us tend toward. It's possible for every level--design, tech, directing, performing--to be technically perfect, and for a play to fail because it does not inspire something in its audience. I've seen children of ten imbue performances with an intensity and passion that make a half-hour day camp musical genuinely riveting and hilarious, and I've seen adult actors on gorgeous sets in famous venues give performances that move me to look at my watch almost more often than I look at the stage.

This is theatre. If it's not, on some level, "a good time", then WHY would any of us be here? Theatre can have important messages, absolutely, but most kids don't get into theatre for political reasons. We got here because it was fun, it was intense, it was a real challenge artistically and intellectually but also emotionally...it's not brain surgery. It's not feeding the homeless. It's not saving the rainforest and it's not keeping the peace. It can occasionally try to work towards things like that...I think that's great, actually. But if that was all it was, people would just become brain surgeons or work for non-profits or whatever. It's something bigger. Theatre has the power to affect people personally by connecting with something deep and internal. If it lacks that, it's sunk. If it lacks that, it's a bunch of grown-ups playing dress-up and spending lots of money to create gigantic visual art installments that, in and of themselves, lack their final layer.

So, going forward, that's how I'll judge theatre. If it genuinely affects me, then it's successful for me. If it's theatre I'm making, I damn well better find a way to connect with it and with the audience, or I'm really not interested. Theatre for its own or, worse, for pretension's sake, is really not worth anything to me, and I no longer intend to let anyone tell me what's good theatre or to participate in any way that I can't find any passion for. I know that's not the way to make a living at it, and that's ok with me. I've realized that, as much as I love performing, I want my life's work to be bigger than that and to match more closely with all of this that's been percolating in my brain for the last few weeks. I want to keep doing theatre with kids--as a camp counselor, as a classroom teacher, or in an outside theatre group that I someday aspire to start. In my ideal world, this would be a program in a city that would allow kids of all ages to play on the stage, free of charge, simply for love of it. I really think that theatre with kids is one of the most amazing things I've ever witnessed. For the last six summers I worked at a plain, ordinary YMCA day camp, helping to run the drama program. We got 25 kids every Monday, and by Friday, without fail, those kids would put on a show (almost always a musical) that was leagues beyond what could possibly have been expected of them. Their desire to express the fun they were having and share it with the other campers, the staff, their parents--while perhaps not consciously expressed in their minds--absolutely shone through every second of their shows. And THAT is why I got into this business, and for me, THAT is where the whole value of it still lies.

Mass rejects gay marriage ban - article

2005-09-14T13:09:00.000-07:00

Gay Marriage Ban Is Rejected in Mass.
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

BOSTON (AP) -- The Massachusetts Legislature on Wednesday rejected a proposed constitutional amendment that sought to ban gay marriage but legalize civil unions, a year after the state performed the nation's first government-sanctioned same-sex weddings.

It was the second time the Legislature had confronted the measure, which was intended to be put before voters on a statewide ballot in 2006. Under state law, lawmakers were required to approve it in two consecutive sessions before it could move forward.

After less than two hours of debate Wednesday, a joint session of the House and Senate voted 157-39 against the measure.

It was a striking departure from a year earlier, when hundreds of protesters converged on Beacon Hill and sharply divided legislators spent long hours debating the issue. In that session, in March 2004, lawmakers voted 105-92 in favor of the amendment.

This year, the crowds were tamer and some legislators who had initially supported the proposed change to the state constitution said they no longer felt right about denying the right of marriage to thousands of same-sex couples.

''Gay marriage has begun, and life has not changed for the citizens of the commonwealth, with the exception of those who can now marry,'' said state Sen. Brian Lees, a Republican who had been a co-sponsor of the amendment. ''This amendment which was an appropriate measure or compromise a year ago, is no longer, I feel, a compromise today.''

The proposal also was opposed by critics of gay marriage, who want to push for a more restrictive measure.

''The union of two women and two men can never consummate a marriage. It's physically impossible,'' said state Rep. Phil Travis, a Democrat. ''The other 49 states are right and we are wrong.''

Lawmakers already are preparing for a battle over another proposed amendment that would ban both gay marriage and civil unions. The earliest that initiative could end up on the ballot is 2008.

The state's highest court ruled in November 2003 that same-sex couples had a right under the state constitution to marry. The first weddings took place on May 17, 2004 -- two months after lawmakers began the process of trying to change the constitution to reverse the court's ruling.

Since then, more than 6,100 couples have married.

Within a year of the first Massachusetts marriages, 11 states pushed through constitutional amendments banning gay marriage, joining six others that had done so earlier.

The Connecticut Legislature approved civil unions in April, joining Vermont in creating the designation that creates the same legal rights as marriage without calling it such. Earlier this month, California lawmakers passed legislation legalizing same-sex marriage, though Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has promised to veto it.

Although more than 6,100 same-sex couples were married in Massachusetts, the state barred out-of-state couples from getting married here, citing a 1913 law that prohibits couples from marrying in Massachusetts if their union would be illegal in their home states. A lawsuit challenging the legality of that law is pending before the SJC.

my favorite monologue from dogma

2005-09-11T18:53:00.000-07:00

Bartleby: The humans have besmirched everything bestowed on them. They were given Paradise, they threw it away. They were given this planet, they destroyed it! They were favored best among all His endeavors, and some of them don't even believe He exists! And in spite of it all, He's shown them infinite fucking patience at every turn. What about us? I asked you, once, to lay down the sword because I felt sorry for them. What was the result? Our expulsion from Paradise! WHERE WAS HIS INFINITE FUCKING PATIENCE THEN?! It's not right - it's not FAIR! We've paid our debt. Don't you think it's time?

Don't you think its time we went home?

i love mcsweeney's - 2

2005-09-07T20:28:00.000-07:00

Things My Brother Has That I Don't.
BY SCOTT EVAN NEWCOMB

- - - -

A driver's license
My parents' love
A doctorate
A sense of pride and dignity
Checking account
Ballerina as a girlfriend
Respect
Herpes

i am *such* a nerd!! i love this:

Klingon Fairy Tales.
BY MIKE RICHARDSON-BRYAN

- - - -

"Goldilocks Dies With Honor at the Hands of the Three Bears"

"Snow White and the Six Dwarves She Killed With Her Bare Hands and the Seventh Dwarf She Let Get Away as a Warning to Others"

"There Was an Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe With a Big Spike on It"

"The Three Little Pigs Build an Improvised Explosive Device and Deal With That Damned Wolf Once and for All"

"Jack and the Giant Settle Their Differences With Flaming Knives"

"Old Mother Hubbard, Lacking the Means to Support Herself With Honor, Sets Her Disruptor on Self-Destruct and Waits for the Inevitable"

"Mary Had a Little Lamb. It Was Delicious"

"Little Red Riding Hood Strays Into the Neutral Zone and Is Never Heard From Again, Although There Are Rumors ... Awful, Awful Rumors"

"Hansel and Gretel Offend Vlad the Impaler"

"The Hare Foolishly Lowers His Guard and Is Devastated by the Tortoise, Whose Prowess in Battle Attracts Many Desirable Mates"

this weekend.

2005-09-02T19:51:00.000-07:00

very. very. stressed.

not handling it well.

katrina & CL

2005-08-31T22:45:00.000-07:00

i was trolling craigslist and, for the first time in a long time, checked out the rants and raves. the topic of choice right now for fucking insane people is hurricane katrina, and - heartbreakingly - the majority of posts involve arguments over comments like, "THERE IS NO KATRINA BUSH IS JUST TRYING TO DIVERT ATTENTION FROM HIS FAILURE IN IRAQ" and "KATRINA = GOD'S PUNISHMENT OF HOMOSEXUALS".

nothing. makes me madder than shit like this. nothing.

i fucking think bush is a narrow-minded idiot, but...honestly, to imagine all those people, husbands, wives, children, businesses, and *hisotry* in louisiana and mississippi, completely devastated, lives lost, families with nothing...and then to turn around and say that it's something the government made up? are you seriously writing that?? how can you assholes SAY something like that, it's so insensitive - even if it's a joke, it's heartless, there is real tragedy happening.

and, bringing back memories of crazy talk back in christmastime when the popular hate theory was that god was punishing the southeast asian nations (oh, and sweden.) for, i dont even know, for whatever, with the tsunami, we have the radical right saying this is a big God is punishing gays/decadence/deviance issue. fuck you. god did this to punish homosexuals? i don't fucking think so, and how dare you. there are people homeless, spouseless, penniless, hungry, scared, and hopeless out there, and you choose to make this a gay thing? FUCK. YOU.

*sigh* my heart goes out to all those in the gulf states. donate where you can, guys.

stop by flickr to see more of hurricane katrina photos.

things breaking

2005-08-28T01:40:00.000-07:00

y aquel reloj	and the clockface
cuyo sonido	whose cadences
era	uttered
la voz de nuestras vidas,	our lifetimes,
el secreto	the serective
hilo	thread
de las semanas	of the weeks,
que una a una	one after another,
ataba tantas horas	yoking the hours
a la miel, al silencio,	to the honey and quietude,
a tantos nacimientos y trabajos,	the travails and births without end -
aquel reloj también	even the clock
cayó y vibraron	plunges downward, the delicate blues
entre los vidrios rotos	of its viscera
sus delicadas vísceras azules,	pulse in the splintering glass
su largo corazón	and its great heart
desenrollado.	springs open.

from pablo neruda's " oda a las cosas rotas (ode to things breaking)"

non-recommendations 1 - the brothers grimm

2005-08-27T17:15:00.000-07:00

the brothers grimm

terry gilliam, WHY?! *weeps* matt damon & heath ledger - no...no. this movie is horrible:

it's too long.
it's not interesting.
characters are annoying.
the love plotline makes no sense.
the accents (the french accents) are cringe-inducing.
moves too slowly.
it's not funny, but thinks it is.
BAD WRITING.

on the upside...the women are beautiful, lena headey as the reluctant ally to the boys, and monica bellucci as the mirror queen. and, um, some of the sets are quite nice, good job props guy. that's probably it, though. avoid this one.

criminal law blurb.

2005-08-23T00:44:00.000-07:00

Though law and morality are not the same,

and many things may be immoral which are not necessarily illegal,

yet the absolute divorce of law from morality would be of fatal consequence;

and such divorce would follow if the temptation to murder in this case

were to be held by law an absolute defence of it.

*sigh* so there is some hope...and poetry in this after all.

steve & jeff explain to patrick...

2005-08-21T14:45:00.000-07:00

Patrick: It was just so embarassing. I didn't know what to do.
Steve: Happens to us all, mate.
Jeff: All of us, in our time, are visited by the Melty Man.
Patrick: The what?
Jeff: Don't say his name, Patrick. Don't even think his name or he will rise from the shadow dimensions to do his evil work on your terrified pants.
Patrick: [chuckle] Terrified pants?
Steve: [gravely] There's nothing funny about the Melty Man, Patrick.
Patrick: [face falls] You know about the Melty Man, too?
Steve: We all know the Melty Man.

Patrick: Who is he?
Steve: The archenemy of trouser confidence.
Jeff: Professor Moriarty. In groin form.
Steve: Darth Vader.
Jeff: Without the helmet.

Patrick: [terrified and shocked] What does he do?!
Jeff: Patrick, you *know* what he does.
Patrick: [looks down] Oh... right.
Jeff: You're in bed with a woman. Everything's going fine. That's when the Melty Man strikes.

Steve: Suddenly you find yourself thinking, "Maybe she's really bored."
Jeff: Maybe you're licking her neck too much. Are you over-wetting her neck?!
Steve: Are you spending an equal amount of time on each breast? I mean, what if one breast gets ahead?
Jeff: Should you be switching between them really quickly or should you squish 'em both together and do them at once?! [demonstrates. Patrick frowns.]
Steve: Or should you skip one breast completely just to save time?
Jeff: She's wriggling about! Is that a good sign - or is she just trying to draw her neck?!
Steve: Should you kiss her now or does that mean you gotta start from the top again?
Jeff: Should you be making noises yet? Is it too soon to grunt?

Steve: [snaps fingers] And then, the killer - out of nowhere, for no reason you can think of, you call her *huskily* "baby."
Jeff: You never called her baby before.
Steve: You've never called anyone baby before.
Jeff: So why did you just call her baby? - Suddenly, you're starting to blush.
Steve: Now, you're blushing *and* you've got and erection. NO ONE'S got enough blood!
Jeff: The engines cut. They can't take it.

Steve: Then the Melty Man hits you with his secret weapon.
Jeff: Just one single thought is placed in your mind at this crucial time.
Steve: Please God! Don't let me lose my erection!
Jeff: [hand goes down] Pufff.

Patrick: [with terror and disblief] How do you guys manage to have sex?
Steve: We don't.
Jeff: I haven't had sex in years.
Steve: It's just not possible anymore.
Jeff: We are followers of the Melty Man.
Steve: And you're one of us now.

Coupling, 2x04, "the melty man cometh"

recommendations 3 - zb, jg, and tv

2005-08-16T19:51:00.000-07:00

garden state

gorgeously shot film. zach braff is so talented i want to buy him dinner, let him tell me all about his life, make me laugh, and then make out for a couple of hours. in addition to being a joy to look at (oops, the movie now, not the boy), there are scenes of such quiet meaningfulness in this movie that just resonate so well with me. it's like the graduate: lite, it's got the same sense of, where do we as young people fit in to this world, and with each other? what grounds us?

jean grey

red hair. tall, gorgeous. telekinetic. mildly telepathic, but in a way that's cooler than deanna troi. attracts the good boys (scott, ugh, sooo boring) and the bad ones (hell-o logan). not as much baggage as rogue (until the phoenix/cloning stuff).

on a related note, i gotta recommend gambit, too. hot accent. wildly mysterious. badass power, nice choice with the playing cards. and supersexy relationship with rogue.

television without pity

i know it's the off season for tv, but i freaking love this site, and you should too. the genius writers at twop obsess about tv pretty much as much as i do, only then they'll take an episode, recap it, and inject enough snark to make your mouth pucker. the very first time i read an episode recap, i loved that i had mentally made a bunch of the same criticisms that they harped on. some of the writers are funnier than others, and some shows just lend themselves better to being made fun of (the oc, alias, most reality tv...24's isn't as good, for example).

side notes: the recaps are by episode, and it's much better if you've just seen the episode you're reading about. the pull-out quotes are for some reason much more hilarious than the same words are in context! and finally, it's awesome when the writer thinks the show they are recapping is good tv; they're hard on it, but they acknowledge all the elements done well, too. check it out.

al qaeda - article

2005-08-12T10:43:00.000-07:00

Al-Qaeda Sitcom Filmed Before Live Studio Hostages

AL BHURBAN'Q, AFGHANISTAN — Filming of the second season of al-Qaeda's surprise hit situation comedy Ba'athtime For Abdul will take place before live studio hostages. "We shall not rest until the vassals of the Great Satan know what it is to live, love, and learn as a member of al-Qaeda," said a spokesman for the show, who assured fans that the laugh- and scream-tracks would not be sweetened in post-production. The videotaped statement, like the episodes of the show itself, was delivered to Al-Jazeera's Afghanistan headquarters in a plain box containing the tape and three severed heads of studio hostages.

girl crush - article

2005-08-11T07:59:00.000-07:00

...oh my god. they are on to me.

She's So Cool, So Smart, So Beautiful: Must Be a Girl Crush

By STEPHANIE ROSENBLOOM

THE woman's long black hair whipped across her pale face as she danced to punk rock at the bar. She seemed to be the life of the party. Little did she know that she was igniting a girl crush. Susan Buice was watching, and she was smitten.

Ms. Buice, 26, and the dancer (actually a clothing designer) happen to live in the same Brooklyn apartment building, so Ms. Buice, a filmmaker, was later able to soak up many other aspects of her neighbor's gritty yet feminine style: her layered gold necklaces; her fitted jackets; her dark, oversize sunglasses; and her Christian Dior perfume.

"I'm immediately nervous around her," Ms Buice said. "I stammer around her, and it's definitely because I think she's supercool."

Ms. Buice, who lives with her boyfriend, calls her attraction a girl crush, a phrase that many women in their 20's and 30's use in conversation, post on blogs and read in magazines. It refers to that fervent infatuation that one heterosexual woman develops for another woman who may seem impossibly sophisticated, gifted, beautiful or accomplished. And while a girl crush is, by its informal definition, not sexual in nature, the feelings that it triggers - excitement, nervousness, a sense of novelty - are very much like those that accompany a new romance.

This is not a new phenomenon. Women, especially young women, have always had such feelings of adoration for each other. Social scientists suspect such emotions are part of women's nature, feelings that evolution may have favored because they helped women bond with one another and work cooperatively. What's new is the current generation's willingness to express their ardor frankly.

"Historically, talking about these kinds of feelings has gone in and out of fashion," said Paula J. Caplan, a sociologist who this fall will teach a course about the psychology of sex and gender at Harvard. Women have not been this blunt in expressing their crushes for several generations, Dr. Caplan said.

The phenomenon has been little studied, but some social scientists say they are glad that it is being discussed more, because it can be a window into how women mature emotionally.

"It's a little bit like when you're in elementary school and you first fall in love with someone," said Leslie Hunt, 34, who manages an arts internship program in New York and who once had such a potent crush on woman that she became sweaty in her presence.

Still, a crush is a relatively mild form of infatuation. People have killed themselves over true love, said Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University who has written extensively on human love. Think of Romeo and Juliet. With a girl crush, Dr. Fisher said, "you won't kill yourself if she doesn't want to jump rope with you." For that reason, girl crushes can give women safe and valuable experience in the emotions of love.

Dr. Fisher, the author of "Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love," said girl crushes are as natural as any other kind of love. But they are romantic without being sexual. Love and lust are distinct urges, Dr. Fisher said.

This was one of the findings she and colleagues from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the State University at Stony Brook made when they analyzed brain scans of people 18- to 26-years-old who were experiencing new love. Love and lust, it turned out, could be mapped to several separate parts of the brain.

"The brain system for romantic love is associated with intense energy, focused energy, obsessive things - a host of characteristics that you can feel not just toward a mating sweetheart," Dr. Fisher said, adding that "there's every reason to think that girls can fall in love with other girls without feeling sexual towards them, without the intention to marry them."

Wendy Lim, 26, a student at Harvard Business School, experienced such feelings about a year ago when she met another young woman in a Boston bar. The woman was open and outgoing, and when the evening was over, Ms. Lim very much wanted to talk to her again. "I remember at the end of the night wanting her phone number," Ms. Lim said, who felt awkward about asking. "I wouldn't ask a guy for his number."

As it turned out, the woman asked Ms. Lim for her number. The two saw each other again, and Ms. Lim's crush quickly blossomed into friendship, a friendship the women now cherish.

Crushes are typically fleeting, and infatuation often turns to friendship in this way. Lisa Lerer, a journalist, and Laila Hlass, a law student, both 25 and both of New York, started their friendship several years ago with a mutual crush. "We're still in love," Ms. Lerer said, "but the wooing period is over."

Tammea Tyler, 28, assistant director of child development services at the Y.M.C.A. of Greater New York, has a crush that looks as if it soon will make the change. The object of her infatuation is a colleague, Denise Zimmer, senior executive for government operation, who is 48.

Ms. Tyler said she admires Ms. Zimmer's intellect and her inner strength. "She really knows her stuff, and there's something almost sexy about that," Ms. Tyler said. "There's just something really sexy and powerful."

Ms. Zimmer, when a reporter told her about Ms. Tyler's feelings, said: "I was very surprised. Sometimes, when you don't have a direct relationship with someone, you don't really understand how they're observing you."

And while Ms. Zimmer did not say she had a reciprocal crush, she did say that she considers Ms. Tyler talented and grounded and that "it's exciting to work with someone who has shown that kind of interest." She added, "It's a mutual respect."

Once a crush is revealed, it can change the dynamics of a relationship. "I think that I will be more sensitive and more focused on sharing things with her that I think will help her achieve some of the goals that she has," Ms. Zimmer said.

Sometimes, though, a girl crush is so strong it makes the object of affection uneasy, killing the possibility of friendship.

Jane Weeks, 44, a freelance art and creative director in Truckee, Calif., knows what it is like to be the object of another woman's crush. She has encountered a few women who have eagerly adopted her tastes in food and interior design, her favorite colors, even her hairdresser. "At first it's flattering you're inspiring them," she said. "When they parrot back parts of yourself, it's extremely uncomfortable."

Ms. Weeks, an outdoorswoman who has hiked through the Andes from Argentina to Chile, said some women are more enamored with what she represents - "some National Geographic chick" - than with who she is. "When you're on a pedestal, there's no way but down," she said. "And it's lonely up there. You can't share your weaknesses."

Pepper Schwartz, a professor of sociology at the University of Washington and the relationship expert at PerfectMatch.com, said she also has been a frequent subject of girl crushes - from her students. Some have made it obvious by bringing gifts, including earrings, flowers and even poems. But Dr. Schwartz does not encourage her students to look at her with starry eyes. She would rather they look to her for guidance on developing their careers.

"You're a hero because they think you've done something unimaginably powerful," Dr. Schwartz said. "Your job is to show them that they own something equally special."

Perhaps the last time that young women were as willing as they are now to admit to their attraction to each other was in the 19th century. "Back when Louisa May Alcott was writing, women were writing these letters to each other," Dr. Caplan said. "They wrote: 'I miss you desperately. I long to hug you and talk to you all night.' " Referring to another woman as a girl crush, she said, is not dissimilar to that 19th century behavior.

But such impassioned expressions of affection were uncommon, for instance, in the 1960's and 70's, when homophobia was even more rampant than it is today, Dr. Caplan said. Women were often uncomfortable admitting to strong feelings for other women, fearing that their emotions would seem lesbian, she said. And those same women, older now, can still be shy about expressing their emotions for each other. "Women my age are more likely to say 'I adore' or 'I value' my women friends,' not girl crush," she said.

As for men, to the extent they may feel such emotions for each other, Dr. Caplan said they are less likely than women to express them. They are not reared to show their emotions. "A man talking about emotions about another man? Everybody's homophobic feelings are elicited by that, and that's because men aren't supposed to talk about feelings at all," Dr. Caplan said.

Susan Malsbury, 24, who lives in Brooklyn and is a booking agent for bands, said that because a girl crush has the potential to become an important part of one's life, she cannot help but feel a tinge of excitement whenever she meets a fascinating woman to add to her collection of crushes.

"They're better than boy crushes," Ms. Malsbury said, with more than a hint of mischief in her voice. "You don't have to break up with them after two weeks."

sex and drugs - article

2005-08-03T13:57:00.000-07:00

Sex and drugs
Jul 21st 2005
From The Economist print edition

Men and women seem to perceive pain in different ways. That may mean they sometimes need different pain-relief drugs

MALES and females respond to pain differently, even as children. In most places, boys are expected to show a stiff upper lip when they get hurt, while in girls wailing is, well, girlie. In part, this difference is learnt—or, at least, reinforced by learning. But partly, it is innate. It is hard, for instance, to blame upbringing for the finding that boy and girl babies show different responses to pain six hours after birth, or that male rats are more long-suffering than females. It is also life-long. Ed Keogh of the University of Bath, in England, and his colleagues have found that women report feeling pain in more bodily areas than men, and also feel it more often over the course of their lives.

Jeffrey Mogil, director of the pain genetics laboratory at McGill University in Montreal, is one of the leading advocates of such “pink and blue” painkillers. Pick a disease at random, he says, and the chances are that females and males will handle the pain associated with it differently. That seems to be true in mice, at least. When new mouse “models” of human disease are created by genetic engineers, Dr Mogil and his colleagues are often asked to test the engineered mice for their responses to pain. They consistently find differences in the way the mutant, diseased mice and their non-mutation-carrying brethren respond to painful stimuli. But, generally, those differences are seen more strongly in one sex than the other.

A prescribing headache

The latest example of such a difference is in migraine, a condition that is three times more common in women than in men. In 2004, a group of researchers led by Michel Ferrari of Leiden University in the Netherlands reported that they had created what they believed to be the first mouse model of migraine. Since some researchers argue that migraine is associated with heightened sensitivity to pain, they sent their creation to Dr Mogil for testing. He stresses that his data are preliminary. However, he does find a lowered pain threshold in the mouse migraine model compared with healthy mice—but only in females.

Dr Mogil is now convinced that the pain response in men and women is mediated by different brain circuits—and not only because of his own observations. Obstetricians and gynaecologists have long known that certain drugs are particularly effective in women. Mothers in childbirth prefer nalbuphine to morphine, for instance. Men, however, report the opposite preference when they are in pain.

Both nalbuphine and morphine work by stimulating the brain's endogenous-opioid receptors (endogenous opioids are the molecules that opium-derived drugs mimic). But opioid receptors come in several varieties, two of the most important of which are known as mu and kappa. Morphine binds to the mu receptors, while nalbuphine stimulates the less well-studied kappa receptors. Kappa-receptor agonists, as molecules such as nalbuphine are known, appear to have little or no pain-relieving effect in men.

Two years ago, Dr Mogil identified the first gene known to be involved in modulating pain thresholds in women. Variations in this gene have no effect on men's responses to a kappa-receptor agonist called pentazocine, but they do affect the response in women. The protein produced by this gene, melanocortin-1 receptor, also affects hair and skin colour. Working in collaboration with Roger Fillingim of the University of Florida, Gainesville, Dr Mogil found that redheaded women with fair skin—who have a particular version of the receptor—have a heightened response to pentazocine.

Jon Levine and Robert Gear, of the National Institutes of Health Pain Centre at the University of California, San Francisco, also think that there are fundamental differences between the sexes when it comes to pain. They have explored the effects of nalbuphine on post-operative pain in men and women who have had their wisdom teeth removed. The results suggest that kappa-opioid agonists not only fail to alleviate pain in men, they can actually make it worse.

Dr Gear and Dr Levine believe that as well as an analgesia (ie, pain-suppression) circuit, the brain contains what they call an anti-analgesia circuit—one which, when activated, pumps pain up. They have shown that which circuit is activated depends not only on the type of receptor a drug acts on, but also the dose given. Among their dental patients, low doses of nalbuphine had a short-lasting analgesic effect in the women, but profoundly enhanced pain in the men. However, when they added a low dose of naloxone—a drug that blocks all types of opioid receptor—to the nalbuphine, the sex difference disappeared and pain relief was significantly enhanced in everyone. After refining the relative proportions of the two drugs in the mixture, they have succeeded in finding (and patenting) a combination that is effective in both sexes.

Nor is it only the mechanism of pain perception that differs between the sexes. Dr Keogh and his colleagues argue that there are significant differences in the ways men and women cope with pain, as well.

This conclusion is based on studies involving hospital patients, as well as others on volunteers who were exposed to a painful stimulus, such as an ice-water arm-bath. Using this, the researchers were able to measure the point at which people first notice pain, as well as their tolerance—the point at which they can no longer stand it. Men were able to minimise their experience of pain by concentrating on the sensory aspects—their actual physical sensations. But this strategy did not help women, who focused more on the emotional aspects. Since the emotions associated with pain, such as fear and anxiety, tend to be negative, the researchers suggest that the female approach may actually exacerbate pain rather than alleviating it.

Dr Keogh, a psychologist, sees this difference as an effect of social conditioning—and uses it to point up the dangers of under-estimating social influences in favour of those of the genes. But it is not obvious why such male and female “coping strategies” should not be underpinned by genetics, in the same way that perceptions are.

The evolutionary reason why men resist pain better than women is, however, a mystery. After all, pain is there to stop you doing bad things to yourself. Perhaps it is because males and females are exposed to different sorts of pain. Males, for instance, get into fights much more often than females do, and thus get wounded more often. On the other hand, they do not have to undergo the visceral pain of childbirth. And perhaps a willingness to tolerate less pain than men do helps to explain why women live longer than their menfolk.

the 3 variable humor test

2005-08-02T19:07:00.000-07:00

the Ham

(43% dark, 52% spontaneous, 22% vulgar)

your humor style:
CLEAN | SPONTANEOUS | LIGHT

Your style's mostly goofy, innocent and feel-good. Perfect for parties and for the dads who chaperone them. You can actually get away with corny jokes, and I bet your sense of humor is a guilty pleasure for your friends. People of your type are often the most approachable and popular people in their circle. Your simple & silly good-naturedness is immediately recognizable, and it sets you apart in this sarcastic world.

PEOPLE LIKE YOU: Will Ferrell - Will Smith

My test tracked 3 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender:

You scored higher than 20% on dark
You scored higher than 68% on spontaneous
You scored higher than 22% on vulgar

Link: The 3 Variable Funny Test written by jason_bateman on OkCupid Free Online Dating

happy birthday, craig

2005-08-02T15:17:00.000-07:00

On 8/2/05, cyndi wrote:
ps. dont forget to tell craig happy birthday today, you bastard. you forgot!

On 8/2/05, marcos wrote:
i so totally, i emailed him this morning and IM'ed him

HAHAHHAHA AYOU LOSE NOW YOU MUST SHOW ME YOUR OLYMPIAN BREASTS

zombies, the pill, and anniversaries

2005-07-25T16:58:00.000-07:00

i woke up this morning after having spent all night battling zombies in my dreams. somehow claudia (my coworker girlfriend) and i were at the remains of a completely destroyed degrassi high (lol), slaying badguys with automatic weapons (and even syringes at one point – that’s badass! except the zombie pulled it out and chucked it back at me, which sucked). i do admit that i felt a bit like a videogame heroine when i wasn’t scared out of my wits, but i was in the middle of the climactic scene when my alarm went off, and even when you’re having a bad dream, you still want to see how it plays out…so there were several snooze sessions that involved my attempted regression into the battlefield of my mind to try to finish my adventure (it didn't work).

anyway, a couple hours later i was at work, and started feeling super sore in my shoulders, my back and my ribs (which is practically your whole body when you’re talking about places to be sore). i figured it was either all the laps i did over the weekend, or that i had slept really fitfully in some strange position and freaked out my system. basically, my body just feels uncomfortable in my skin today. everything is sore, my eye is a little irritated, it’s freezing at work so my fingers and toes are twenty well-polished little ice cubes, and my stomach is hurting.

which should be a clue, right ladies? of course the first thing claudia suggests is that my time of the month is coming up. instantly, i know she’s right, but it hadn’t occurred to me b/c i’ve been on the pill for so long that i’m used to (1) knowing exactly when everything is going to happen, (2) if i’m not feeling like it, skipping this part of my cycle entirely, (3) oh, i dunno, not having stomach cramps and full-body aches when i haven’t done the requisite mis-eating or exercise to deserve it.

but since toyota doesn’t give full health benefits to us humble interns, and i’m certainly not going to pay $50 a month for birth control when, um, there’s really nothing to control at this point, i decided to do without it until september when i start school again.

here’s some fun facts you may not know:

1) pms-ing sucks. yeeeees, it sucks for guys that have to deal with us (i am sorry), and yeeeees i do know girls who use it as an excuse to be fussy. but honestly? i feel just ridiculously icky in my body right now—everything hurts, no matter how i sit i can’t get my back pain to go away, etc, etc. i don’t know if it’s just my body recoiling from the lack of the drugs for the first time in a year, but pms-ing is like a full-blown body rebellion! so guys! have some sympathy. it’s not great.

2) the pill is great! it is great, great, great. there are many subreasons for this! they include:

3) it prevents children! this is great when you are 22!

4) it clears up your skin! i am not kidding. i’m starting to break out again on my forehead and it’s like….*sigh* nooooot thiiiis agaaaaaaaain. i thought i was dooooone with thiiiiis.

5) it prevents serious cramping. not such a big deal when your cramping was not serious to begin with. very big deal when you had very serious, work-stopping, can’t focus on anything else, i would cut out my uterus and give it to a homeless guy except i think he wouldn’t appreciate it very much cramps.

6) YOU CAN SKIP YOUR PERIOD. THIS IS MAGIC. you can do this at NO harm to your body, INDEFINITELY.

there’s one more item that belongs on this list, but not for me. the pill will also increase your bust size! oh, yes, great for many of you, not so much something i want—i can’t have my boobs any bigger! i’ll fall over! so i went the low-estrogen route, which is supposed to minimize that effect.

anyway, the point of all this was: i had a crazy dream, and i miss the pill.

confidential…to those who find it: today marks 4 years. i like to think she’d be in med school by now, probably a really good one, and probably on a scholarship! dearest miss k…she was so awesome. if i could tell her, i would thank her for always being such an awesome girlfriend to me. i miss you so, so, so much.

star wars hunger

2005-07-19T16:56:00.000-07:00

From: Rudy
Sent: Thursday, July 14, 2005 9:54 AM
To: Wesley
Subject: hungry

Can u hear my stomach rumbling from over there? It’s goin crazy man!

From: Wesley
Sent: Thursday, July 14, 2005 9:56 AM
To: Rudy
Subject: RE: hungry

I don’t hear it, but I sense a disturbance in the force.

From: Rudy
Sent: Thursday, July 14, 2005 9:59 AM
To: Wesley
Subject: RE: hungry

I can FEEL your hunger! It gives you focus!

From: Wesley
Sent: Thursday, July 14, 2005 10:06 AM
To: Rudy
Subject: RE: hungry

“I shouldn’t have eaten that. It’s not the Jedi way.”

From: Rudy
Sent: Thursday, July 14, 2005 10:08 AM
To: Wesley
Subject: RE: hungry

You must defeat your hunger! Then, and only then, a Jedi will you be.

From: Cyndi
Sent: Thursday, July 14, 2005 11:04 AM
To: Wesley
Subject: Re: FW: hungry

omg, that's hilarious. This is his most desperate hour! Help him, Wesley Lee Kano-lee, you're his only hope!

From: Wesley
Sent: Thursday, July 14, 2005 11:11 AM
To: Cyndi
Cc: Rudy
Subject: RE: FW: hungry

If you devour me, I will become more powerful than you can ever imagine

From: Rudy
Sent: Thursday, July 14, 2005 11:14 AM
To: Wesley
Cc: Cyndi
Subject: RE: FW: hungry

Your powers are weak, old man. When I left you I was the student, but now I am the master!

From: Cyndi
Sent: Thursday, July 14, 2005 11:15 AM
To: Rudy
Cc: Wesley
Subject: RE: FW: hungry

cyndi: "your quotes are only funny if they pertain to food."
rudy: "my quotes are only funny if they pertain to food."
cyndi: "your next joke will be better."
rudy: "my next joke will be better."

From: Rudy
Sent: Thursday, July 14, 2005 11:20 AM
To: 'Cyndi’
Cc: Wesley
Subject: RE: FW: hungry

Don’t underestimate the hunger in my stomach!
It will be your undoing.

From: Wesley
Sent: Thursday, July 14, 2005 11:50 AM
To: Rudy
Cc: Cyndi
Subject: RE: FW: hungry

Red wing standing by. Chicken wing standing by. Buffalo wing standing by. Locking wings in S(auce)-foil position. We’re going in!

From: Rudy
Sent: Thursday, July 14, 2005 11:53 AM
To: Wesley
Cc: Cyndi
Subject: RE: FW: hungry

My stomach can’t hold it, she’s gonna blow!

From: Cyndi
Sent: Thursday, July 14, 2005 3:02 PM
To: Rudy
Cc: Wesley
Subject: RE: FW: hungry

Search your feelings. You know your fullness to be true.

From: Rudy
Sent: Friday, July 15, 2005 7:01 AM
To: Cyndi
Cc: Wesley
Subject: RE: FW: hungry

In a whiny cry: “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!! NOOOOOOO!!!!!”

From: Wesley
Sent: Friday, July 15, 2005 8:33 AM
To: Rudy
Cc: Cyndi
Subject: RE: FW: hungry

“You ate that thing? You’re braver than I thought.”

From: Rudy
Sent: Friday, July 15, 2005 8:35 AM
To: Cyndi
Cc: Wesley
Subject: RE: FW: hungry

You’ll find my stomach is full of surprises.

From: Cyndi
Sent: Friday, July 15, 2005 8:43 AM
To: Rudy
Cc: Wesley
Subject: RE: FW: hungry

I don't like this email thread. It's hard, and rough.

Not like you.

You're soft...and smooth...

From: Wesley
Sent: Friday, July 15, 2005 8:50 AM
To: Cyndi
Subject: RE: FW: hungry

Ok, that one made me laugh out loud.

From: Rudy
Sent: Friday, July 15, 2005 8:48 AM
To: Cyndi
Cc: Wesley
Subject: RE: FW: hungry

It’s all Wesley’s fault! He’s jealous of me. He’s holding me back from my DVD’s! I hate him!!! I HATE HIM!!!!

From: Cyndi
Sent: Friday, July 15, 2005 8:54 AM
To: Rudy
Cc: Wesley
Subject: RE: FW: hungry

You'd better apologize to Wesley, for your sake. He is not as forgiving as I am.

From: Rudy
Sent: Friday, July 15, 2005 8:59 AM
To: Cyndi
Cc: Wesley
Subject: RE: FW: hungry

I can destroy Wesley. He has forseen it. It is my destiny!

From: Wesley
Sent: Friday, July 15, 2005 10:35 AM
To: Rudy
Subject: RE: FW: hungry

You cannot! The Fooood is what gives a Jedi his power. It’s an energy field created by all cooked things. It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together.

From: Rudy
Sent: Thursday, July 15, 2005 10:38 AM
To: Wesley
Cc: Cyndi
Subject: RE: FW: hungry

I find your lack of food disturbing…

From: Cyndi
Sent: Friday, July 15, 2005 10:51 AM
To: Rudy
Cc: Wesley
Subject: RE: FW: hungry

What, you couldn't tell me about your lunch plans? Did you tell Wes? Is that who you could tell?

From: Rudy
Sent: Thursday, July 15, 2005 10:53 AM
To: Cyndi
Cc: Wesley
Subject: RE: FW: hungry

No, it’s not like that. It’s not like that at all… He’s my waiter.

From: Cyndi
Sent: Friday, July 15, 2005 10:56 AM
To: Rudy
Cc: Wesley
Subject: RE: FW: hungry

OMG that's hilarious, LOL

From: Rudy
Sent: Friday, July 15, 2005 11:00 AM
To: Cyndi
Cc: Wesley
Subject: RE: FW: hungry

LOL

i love mcsweeneys

2005-07-13T13:22:00.000-07:00

Authorial Candy Bars, with Their Respective Tag Lines, That Weren't as Successful as the Oh Henry! Candy Bar.
BY JONATHAN SHIPLEY

- - - -

Nietzsche Bar—"Chocolate is dead."

Orwell Bar—"Eat this treat and help blot out the bloody stain of Stalin's Russia."

Barrie's Berry Snacks—"The official candy of faeries."

Chaucer Sweet Cheese Bar—"Of harmes two the lesse is for to cheese."

Melville Bar—"Call me tasty."

Dollop of Trollope—"Victorianesque in its chocolate decadence."

James Joyce Candy Bar—"Episode I: Tele-munch-us."

E.A. Poe Candy Balls—"Keeping time, time, time, / In a sort of Runic rhyme, / To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells / From the Candy Balls, Candy Balls, Candy Balls."

Mrs. Dalloway Treats—"Woolf these down!"

Wilde Bar—"A taste so good it'll be better than being sentenced to two years of hard labor for the crime of sodomy."

Things Not Overheard at a Conceptual-Art Gallery Opening.
BY JASON PERSSE

- - - -

"White wine, red wine. Who do I have to fuck to get a Capri Sun around here?"

"Now that you mention it, I have no idea who designed this shirt."

"Does naming the work 'Chaos' belie the artist's reliance upon a sparse, monochromatic field, or am I just a pretentious douchebag?"

"Well, that's obvious, but what do the other three midgets represent?"

"Let me get this straight—the artist is gay and German? You just blew my mind."

"I can't. I have to work tomorrow."

obligatory tomkat satire - article

2005-07-11T09:38:00.000-07:00

Holmes Sweet Holmes
She's landed the role of a lifetime - the beautiful bride of the world's biggest movie star. What's so weird about that?

By Robert Haskell

The statistics on arranged marriage are surprising. In every country where it is still common practice, including Afghanistan, India, Iraq, Iran and, to a lesser extent, Japan, an arranged marriage has a higher success rate than a so-called "love marriage."

It's impossible to say what this augurs for Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise. Of course, theirs isn't an arranged marriage—though it was certainly arranged quickly. The awesomely public couple had all of six weeks, during much of which Holmes was on the Batman Begins junket, to decide that they loved each other, that they wanted to spend their lives together and that they would buck Hollywood convention, to say nothing of common sense, and sing their joy from the mountaintops (or from flashbulb-blitzed press conferences, red carpets and vastly popular TV talk shows). Arranged marriages are measured, often solemn affairs; the fist-pumping pomp of the Cruise-Holmes union is another story. And the more times Holmes tells it, the stranger it sounds.

"I've found the man of my dreams," says the 26-year-old actress, sitting in a bathrobe as a manicurist paints her nails the color of kryptonite and a stylist teases her hair into wavelets in preparation for her W photo shoot. It's 8 a.m., and Holmes looks astonishingly fresh for a woman who taped several television shows the previous day before heading back to Cruise's New York apartment, putting on her sweatpants and UGG slippers, and settling in for a late movie with her sweetheart. "From the moment I met him," she continues, "it just felt like I'd known him forever. I was blown away. He's the most incredible man. He's so generous and kind, and he helps so many people, and, um, he makes me laugh like I've never laughed, and he's a great friend.…"

This is how the conversation begins; this is also how it continues, and how it ends. No question can do much to change its course.

Do you worry that this might be a rebound romance for either of you?

"I've never met anyone like Tom," Holmes replies, her beautiful green eyes focused on nothing in particular.

Do you ever wonder whether this is just a honeymoon phase?

"Tom and I will always be in our honeymoon phase."

Did you learn anything in your previous relationship (five years with actor Chris Klein, which came to an end when they called off their engagement this past winter) that has been a benefit to this one?

"Chris and I care about each other and we're still friends. Tom is the most incredible man in the world."

Do you feel that, with more relationship experience, you get better at resolving conflicts?

"Meeting Tom—I'm just exhilarated. He makes me laugh, we have fun, we understand each other, everything is so aligned. I feel so lucky and so—like I've been given such a gift, such a gift, you know?" She pauses. "And it's just really amazing."

If Holmes were actually answering the questions posed—rather than simply reciting the same mantralike love letter—she'd be making a somewhat provocative point: Her relationship is not like other relationships, with their conflicts, compromises and complications; there will be no apology flowers, nights spent on the couch or couples therapy for these two (as a practicing Scientologist, Cruise strongly disapproves of psychiatry).

Is there anything you guys don't have in common?

"You know, we appreciate each other."

Has it been a challenge to make his kids feel comfortable?

"They're just exceptional people."

Isn't it an adjustment to move in with someone—and after only a month? (In late May, Holmes packed up her apartment in Hollywood's El Royale complex and moved into Cruise's Beverly Hills manse.)

"He's the man of my dreams."

Does he leave his dirty socks on the bedroom floor? Something? Anything?

"No."

The lady doth protest not nearly enough. It's impossible, even for a moment, to slip under the halo of cartoon hearts dancing around Holmes's head—which partly explains why the media has so relished the project of puncturing her happiness ever since it was first broadcast, from the David di Donatello awards in Rome, on April 29. (Even People magazine, a typically unwavering Hollywood celebrant, has published polls indicating that the majority of its readers believe "TomKat" is a hoax.) Though Holmes's star has surely risen, its motion is more akin to the teacup ride at the fairground: a spin that brings queasiness, not thrills.

Anyone who has seen photos from the couple's June tour of European capitals in support of their summer movies will recognize the tall, cold-eyed Jessica Rodriguez, a third wheel at all of Holmes's recent public appearances. Rodriguez, 29, was described to me as Holmes's "Scientologist chaperone," and it was clear that she would be on hand during our interview despite my protests. Polite and restrained but alert to troublesome questions, Rodriguez chimes in only to offer an amen following one of Holmes's rhapsodies. ("You adore him," Rodriguez says after the actress explains that she can't keep her hands off Cruise.) But she rises from her chair when Holmes is asked how she feels about the widespread disbelief in her new union.

"The truth is, we don't read that stuff because it's just rude," Rodriguez says—referring to rumors that Cruise made a financial arrangement with Holmes (after auditioning a field of other young starlets, including Scarlett Johansson, Jessica Alba and Kate Bosworth). When I suggest that the televised hyperbolizing of their happiness may have undercut its credibility, Rodriguez asks, "Have you ever been in love? You just want to share it with the world." I suggest that many couples prefer to cherish the feeling privately, especially in the delicate first months. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, whatever the nature of their relationship, come to mind.

"But why can't they go public, you know what I mean?" Rodriguez continues. "Like, Brad and Angelina—that's just a shame for them. Right, Katie?"

"Yeah. I mean, I'm just so happy," Holmes says in reply as a makeup artist begins to powder her cheeks. (Holmes's skin, in contrast to the evidence of a recent barrage of embarrassing tabloid photos, is perfect.) "And I love celebrating our happiness. I can't keep it in."

Meanwhile, the tabloids report that friends back in Toledo, Ohio, where Holmes grew up, are worried about her. ("People who say that aren't my friends," she says.) They wonder whether Cruise is sabotaging her career by steering her away from roles that deal with subject matter that Scientology disapproves of?in particular, the role of the drug-addled Edie Sedgwick in George Hickenlooper's upcoming Factory Girl, which Holmes pulled out of. "Tom's so supportive and he's such an inspiration," she protests.

"I just felt that the role wasn't right for me, and in light of my Batman Begins schedule and everything, it was just not the right time. When I pick roles, I ask, first, Is this a story that I want to tell? Can I help move this story along, and will I be an asset to it? I'm excited to keep expanding and finding different roles to play." What about a film with Cruise? "That would be such an honor. Such an honor."

Cruise may not be imposing his will on Holmes's career, but, with Rodriguez's help, he appears to have made a strong bid for her soul. After the interview, when I ask Rodriguez how long she's worked with Holmes—reports call her a longtime employee of the Church of Scientology—she waves her hand and says, "Oh, no, we're just best friends.… Well, Katie has a lot of friends." And how long have you been friends? "Oh, a while," Rodriguez answers. "I don't know."

It turns out the two women were introduced only six weeks earlier—right around the time when Holmes met Cruise. (Holmes prefers to keep the details of the couple's first date to herself, but Cruise is said to have invited her to a sushi dinner on his plane.) Rodriguez comes from a family of wealthy Bay area Scientologists; she attended a boarding school in Oregon linked to Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, then went to work for the church, reportedly attaining membership in the Sea Org—Scientology's elite religious order, whose members commit to the church for one billion years—in 1998. No one close to Holmes will venture to say exactly what Rodriguez's role in the actress's life is these days.

On the day we meet, Holmes tells me she's not a Scientologist. (Three days later, in Europe, she will announce that she has converted.) "You know, it's really exciting," the actress says of the religion. "I just started auditing"—Scientology's word for receiving spiritual counseling—"and I'm taking some courses, and I really like it. I feel it's really helping. What I like about it is that, you know, I was raised Catholic, and you can be a Catholic and a Scientologist, Jewish and a Scientologist." Holmes went to Notre Dame Academy, a Catholic high school in Toledo, and was accepted at Columbia University before she landed the role of the lovelorn tomboy Joey Potter on Dawson's Creek. Her parents, devout Catholics, are said to be a weekly fixture at Christ the King church in Toledo. "I'm learning," Holmes says, as the makeup artist applies eye shadow, "to celebrate my own spirit, my own being."

No pressure from Cruise, she swears: "That's really ludicrous because, I mean, you have to know Tom. He is the most loving, generous man who… first of all, he wants to help people. He doesn't put pressure on people. He is the kindest, smartest, most adoring man. It's a pleasure and a privilege to be with him."

As if that weren't already perfectly clear, just then a security guard lumbers into the dressing room and presents Holmes with a giant silver box tied in a thick purple ribbon. A small crowd gathers to watch her gleefully tear open the package and pluck out a Chanel diamond necklace—a gift, naturally, from Cruise. "He's my man! He's my man!" she screams, then jumps up on her chair to do an impression of her fiancé's now-famous sofa shtick from Oprah.

People begin to cheer. "This is your moment!" cries the manicurist.

[blogger's note: that is MY FAVORITE line in the entire article, LOL - '"This is YOUR MOMENT!" cries the manicurist.']

"I can do splits too," Holmes says, jumping down and splaying herself across the floor. On that note, I suggest, we should probably get the photo shoot started.

"On that note," she replies, "I love him."

"Holmes Sweet Holmes" by Robert Haskell has been edited for Style.com; the complete story appears in the August 2005 issue of W.