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I am startled to discover that an ex-boyfriend has started a little production company in LA. He was a good kid, but it was a college relationship and you know how those normally go. So I'm glad he's making stuff, because he really is an interesting person and if they can actually get something off the ground it would probably be good to watch. They don't appear to have actually finished anything yet, but who cares, it's fun. Sort of a more professional two-person version of my closet-writing-office thing.
This entry, and possibly the next couple of posts, are going to be pretty tediously selfish. Meish. I've been a little edgy lately, and I need to figure out why, so I'll be using my blog as a sort of bargain-basement therapist. If you're interested in reading about my inner turmoil: huzzah, you're in luck. Otherwise, you may wish to skip to the last paragraph, which contains the word "anus."
You know what would be kind of neat? If you could triple-tap any word on the iPhone, and get a dictionary definition of it.
And then you could quadruple-tap to copy it to the clipboard. And quintuple-tape to hear it pronounced. And sextuple-tap to set that pronunciation as your ringtone. And septimple-tap to see the word spelled out by divers arranging themselves in a pool beneath a downward-looking camera. An octopple-tap to have it do something octopus-related.
Of course by now you're familiar with the story about the Idaho senator, arrested for soliciting sex in a mens' room. (Hee hee!) But have you seen the arresting officer? Now that's what I call a good cop.
I might've solicited him myself, bathroom or not.
Also in the news, a Sacramento newscast staged a dramatic recreation of the crime. As I said, hee hee. (PS: Get a load of those kicks! It looks like the guy stuck his feet into two dead lobsters. No wonder they only shoot them from the waist up.)
So I was sitting at home on Saturday night watching Fergie music videos on YouTube (like I do). And the captain in "Glamorous" caught my eye. What a heart-throb. Wikipedia informs me that his name is Freddie Rodriguez (an ethnic!) so I browsed him a bit on IMDB. That's when I found this photo:
What the fuck! He looks like a character from Street Fighter. I can't look away.
Update: I just found a picture of Freddie with Martin Sheen. This photo makes me want to hug both men.
Courtesy of my mom, here's the recipe for the birthday cake I made myself.
Preheat oven to 375 degrees
butter and flour a bundt or angel food pan
Ingredients:
2 sticks unsalted butter, room temp
1 1/4 cups sugar
4 eggs, room temp
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 1//2 cups sifted flour
1/2 cup sifted cornstarch
2 tsp baking powder
pinch of salt
4 oz (3/4 cup) semisweet choco chips
1. whip butter 'til light & fluffy (use whipper blade of mixer), then
*gradually* add sugar (1 Tbsp at a time)
2. while whipping butter & adding sugar, sift together flour, cornstarch,
baking powder & salt (I do this on wax paper)
3. after all sugar added to butter, add eggs, one at a time, beating well &
stirring down sides/bottom of pan between each egg.
4. add vanilla
5. change to beater blade & add flour mix 'til just barely blended
6. fold in choco chips (do this gently by hand)
7. pour into pan bake for 50 minutes - do toothpick test, might take 5-10
minutes longer (careful! this cake is easy to overcook)
8.cool in pan for 10 minutes before unmolding onto a cake rack to cool
thoroughly.
Matt - This is a very easy cake to make-- here are some tips
A. do take time whipping the butter/sugar/egg part - this incorporates the
air that keeps this from becoming a nicely flavored brick.
B. first sift the flour & cornstarch, then sift all the dry ingredients
together again.
C. butter & eggs must be at room temp -- you can warm up eggs in about 10
minutes by putting them in a bowl of *hot* tap water. Butter warms up more
quickly if you chop it up. . .
D. after taking the cake out of the oven, I set the timer for 10 minutes so
I remember to come back to unmold it. If you leave the cake in the pan too
long, steam will make the cake soggy & prevent you from unmolding it in one
piece. Ask me how I know (sigh).
E. make this cake at least one day before you want to eat it - the cake
tastes much better the next day
Love you lots,
Mom
You know what's weird? If you combine a bunch of ugly faces, you get one hot one.
I've been having a very customer-servicey few days, what with Apple and AT&T and everything. But this is the best story yet, because it involves me getting an email from the 407th richest person in the world.
Some background: Dan Rather is like a mythical figure to me, as my earliest childhood memories include the cultivation of a deep respect for the CBS Evening News. The mere glimpse of Dan's face fills me with the sort of deep abiding respect that usually can only be felt by wizened Indians for the natural beauty that was once this country.
Dan's new show only airs on HDNet, which is apparently some kind of television thing. I only use TVs for internet stuff -- NetFlix and YouTube -- because it's too much work to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to broadcast TV. (Not that YouTube isn't overflowing with chaff; but at least you can subscribe to the users you like.) So I wrote to HDNet, regarding Dan Rather Reports:
Hi,
Is the show available on iTunes? I don't watch TV, but I'd gladly pay to subscribe to this program.
Matt
Just a few hours later, this arrived from a generic customer support email address:
Hi Matt-
Thanks for the email. We hope to offer "Dan Rather Reports" over iTunes in the near future, however, in the meantime, please feel free to check out last night's episode in its entirety at the following link:
http://www.hd.net/danrather.html
Thanks, again and please feel free to contact us with any other comments or questions.
And then just a few minutes after that, this arrived:
You can stream it from www.hd.net/danrather
...and sitting there, all sweet and innocent in the "To" field, was the name of the sender ... Mark Cuban.
Now, wait. Does this mean that Mark Cuban personally sent me instructions for watching his network's shows? Maybe not -- it could have been his secretary; or he could have a whole army of "Mark Cuban" emailers, sending out these little rejoinders, just to make potential customers feel cool.
But the point is: OMFG. One pithy email, and all of a sudden I'm automatically basking in Executive Customer Support, and by Executive, I mean the actual freaking Chairman of the board. Goodbye, chaff! Hello, wheat!
Remember how close to tears I was about how the My iTunes widget wasn't populating with very much data? There's a "feedback" link when you get the embed code, so I went ahead and fedback because I can't resist giving everyone a piece of my mind.
Three days later, I heard back from Apple: the widgets only show data for songs that you purchase. Ah. Shrewd. Tellingly, the email came not from tech support or customer service, but from someone in the marketing department.
So I have two options:
- Delete the limping doodad; or
- Spend some money to fill it up with more data.
I wasn't planning on buying anything anytime soon; mostly I use iTunes for podcasts and shows. And even if I really wanted to get something, I can't bear to be so transparently manipulated by marketing: made to want something not for what it is but just for the process of getting it. It's like putting 51 cents into one of those flatten-a-penny machines.
So, I got an email the other night from a person whom I consider a colleague, in that we're both writers who blog in similar circles and exchange emails from time to time. She wants to interview me for an online video documentary about a particular genre of onanism.
That is to say, she wants me to have a chat with the Internet about how I jerk off.
On one hand, if I may use that expression: she's a very cool person, and the specifics of the project itself are very cool. It has some particularly A-list talent involved behind the camera.
But: I do not wish for every stranger I meet for the rest of my life have potential familiarity with my particular methods of self-abuse.
And I wonder why, exactly, I feel that way and so strongly. Obviously this is a bad idea (for me, I mean; not necessarily for other people). It is an idea so bad that it is visible from space; so colossally inadvisable that I am unable to accurately describe its parameters as they bow from one horizon to another. But the only reason I can muster at the moment is, "I just feel like it is." Which isn't particularly logical.
Our social evolution has brought us to a place where most people would decline to publicly delineate this particular topic. There's obviously a reason that we are allowed to talk about, for example, being attracted to Daniel Radcliffe; but we must never reveal the physical extent of our attraction. Why? What's the benefit to keeping that a secret?
Here are some of IMDB's plot keywords assigned to The Bourne Supremacy:
- Shot In The Back
- Shot In The Chest
- Shot In The Face
- Shot In The Forehead
- Shot In The Head
- Shot In The Shoulder
- Revenge
- Slap In The Face
(Parenthetical: is it "turnabout" or "turnaround"?)
From time to time, folks ask me what's up with the Henson company, since I used to work there, sort of.
There's just no good news.
Check out their latest project, The Skrumps, featuring utterly charismaless computer-generated mocap characters who are dull, dull, dull. (There's no embedding; and it'll load up at a very low res, but you can click "video quality" to fix it. Laurie, please talk to someone about Yahoo's broken YouTube ripoff.)
After spending years and years and millions and millions of dollars of a digital performance system, they've gotten quite good at animating digital puppets in a way that very closely resembles human movement ... and it all doesn't matter, because nobody ever saw Kermit and sighed, "I'd like him, if only he walked realistically."
Aren't there any talented people interested in working for the Muppets?
So, I've got these sleeves.
I cut them off of an old sweater in the process of making a vest. The sleeves themselves are rather fetching -- biggish, argyled, soft and yarny. I can't bear to throw them away; but what should I make them into? So far, all I can think of is about thirty iPhone cozies.
Last time I posted a "what should I use it for," I got no suggestions at all; so I'm hoping that the visitors from TJICistan will be more constructive than my useless regular readers. Useless! All of you!
This weekend SPUR, a generally thoughtful organization, linked to a truly insane op-ed in the NY Daily News:
The top 10% of income earners owns 70% of the wealth in the United States. The wealthiest 1% have more stuff than 95% of the rest of us. This article suggests some remedies to this growing inequality, assuming you think it's a problem, of course.
No, as a matter of fact, I don't think I do. Interesting, sure. But a problem? Essentially what the article is saying is, "some people have more things than other people! Somebody do something!" But who? WHO can possibly do something?
Government
Oh.
has more than a right to confront the problem. It has an obligation to do so. ... The most direct way to address inequality is to reimpose higher income tax rates.
So, imagine you rescued a cat from a tree, and a little old lady was like, "oh thank you! Here's a reward," and she gives you twenty bucks, but then the cops come and take it and evenly divide it and dole it out in twenty-cent chunks to the hundred other kids in the neighborhood. Because they have an obligation to do so.
Frankly, in that position, I'd put the cat back up in the tree.
I've added Apple's new "My iTunes" to the sidebar, but it's acting kind of weird -- it's only listing "Hellogoodbye" and "Junior Boys" as my favorites, and not listing any albums under either, and I don't know why. Belle and Sebastian, Frou Frou, and Decomposure should all be in there, too ... oh well.
I've had this document lying around on my desktop for months, and I didn't really know what to do with it, so I'm just sticking it in the black hole that is a blog.
It's the path that we took to get from Massachusetts to Los Angeles, back in 2002, when we were just starting our big scary life together. Things sure did work out differently than we could have imagined. For example, we spent 3 extra days in Chicago, and then to make up the time drove straight to Reno without stopping.
Other aspects of the intervening 5 years have worked out a bit more pleasantly.
Driving Distance: 3917.3 miles Time: 6 days, 2 hours, 47 minutes...
Did they misspell "balm," or what's going on here?
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If you want to know more about me, you can check out my social networking profiles.
Also, check out my Stop8.org project for info about restoring marriage equality in CA, and my MuniAlerts feed for alerts about Muni.
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