Not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be

Back on track

Wed, 06 Jan 2010 20:52:21 GMT

It took not remotely long at all to ramp up from "Welcome back from two weeks off!" to "We're all in high-speed panic mode!" On Monday, spreadnparanoia's brother started working with us as an intern, and he dropped by my desk to say hi, and ask if I had a busy day ahead.

And I said "No, we're just getting back, so things are pretty slow. Everyone else seems to be scrambling, but all I really have to do today is check this week's print proofs and edit tomorrow's web pieces. Oh, and sort through a couple dozen emails and assign pieces for an inventory. Oh, and write a couple of DVD briefs and a game piece. And send out an AVQA solicitation. Oh crap, and edit cinema for the week and pull it together. And, well, I have to sort through all this mail, and get the books in it sent out to reviewers. And, uh, get the next month of book review assignments worked out. And actually I'm working on this book-editing project right now…"

He said watching my face as that all sank in was pretty hilarious.

Still, I got through all of that (except the book project, which is ongoing, oh and actually I still have to write those DVD briefs and the game piece), and I figured out a simple way to organize the book stuff, so simple it makes me feel stupid because I should have started doing it this way more than a year ago. And Monday night I came home burned out and useless, but last night I was able to come home, work on the book, make a nutritious healthy dinner (wild rice soup with asparagus and kale) that broke down neatly into leftovers for the week, dissect a cantaloupe into a couple of days' worth of breakfast, plant an indoor winter herb garden, do the dishes, de-polish my nails, and get some basic cleaning in. If I could be this productive every day, I would have a lot more time to freely lounge around on the fainting couches, eating bonbons. Which I seem to be doing none of just now for some reason.

Instead, I'm eating a lot of fruit. I don't know what's going on, but here in the dead of winter in Chicago, the fruit is diverse and awesome just now. In the past week, I've had some amazing Chilean cherries, some of the best oranges I've ever eaten, and some really terrific kiwi fruit. I have pears waiting for me at home, and the cantaloupe was really good too. I know there are other places in the world that aren't as bitterly cold and everything-dead-y as Chicago right now, but with the outside world currently so inimical to life, it's sort of weird to be eating some of the best tropical fruit ever. Not that I'm complaining, om nom nom nom.

Oh, and speaking of om nom nom, I only recently realized that it came from Cookie Monster, and that's why it became so instantly universal — half of us grew up watching him nom things. Here he is talking about it in a surprisingly erudite and philosophical recent interview:

SWAT hand-signals

Sat, 02 Jan 2010 15:59:38 GMT

Hee hee hee. But they left out the "Black power!" fist-raise.

And of course now I have to find the original and figure out what these really mean. Aha, here we go.

ETA: Man, there are a lot of these out there. Including longer ones with signals for "Aim for the ass" and "There's no way I'm going in there." This guy claims he originated it, and seems so amused by all the copying and later iterations that I'm inclined to believe him.

Hooray old me!

Fri, 01 Jan 2010 21:19:43 GMT

Periodically, Cass will discover that he's outsmarted himself — that he had some critical piece of paperwork, or other item that he didn't want to lose, so he put it somewhere Incredibly Clever And Out Of The Way, and now he can't remember where it is. Or maybe he put off making some decision until he had more information, and then he realizes later that the decision still has to be made, but he forgot what the information was, or lost some other piece of information in the meantime.

At times like this, he usually excoriates his unhelpful past self thusly: "Curse you, Cass-Sub-1! Always one step ahead of me!"

I just had kind of the opposite thing happen. I've been cleaning my office, and I finally realized I'd sorted out every possible pile of accumulated stuff without finding the 2010 calendar I bought for my office months ago. I'd gotten pretty frustrated about it. But since I was throwing away a huge pile of stuff anyway, I took the 2009 calendar off its nail and tossed it in the garbage. Behind it, on the same nail, already hanging on the wall, I found the 2010 calendar. Clearly Tasha-Sub-1 was on the ball a couple months ago about where that calendar needed to go so I wouldn't lose it.

Speaking of calendars, I'm feeling fairly ruthless about all the Stuff in the house right now, and I'm cleaning out closets and getting rid of things, particularly dusty old things that have been sitting in the backs of closets for years, unneeded and untouched. One such thing I ran across was a cache of art calendars, the oldest of which was from 2003 — I'd kept them because I liked the art, and who knows, one day I might cut some of it out of the wall calendar and frame it or something. I think six years is long enough to wait and see whether I was going to get around to that; into the trash they go. Same with the vast heap of grimy old unloved posters, most of them mounted on cardboard and shrink-wrapped (with the shrink-wrap in tatters), and the pile of bulletin boards covered with filthy scraps of paper dating back to, in some cases, junior high. Goodbye extremely old in-jokes printed out on dot-matrix printers via long-defunct programs like Print Shop. Hellooooooooooooooo closet space.

Wind her up and watch her go

Wed, 30 Dec 2009 22:48:16 GMT

I believe my sister is at her funniest when doing the banterz, but her solo rants sometimes give me giggle fits too. Case in point: today the whole family went to lunch and ran some errands together. We were walking back to the car, when suddenly, without a word of warning, Mom lunged into a nail salon, threw her arms around some woman's neck, and kissed her. (On the cheek, presumably. I missed it.) Dad and Tara and I all meandered on, being emotionally reserved types who generally do not want to engage with Mom-level gushy enthusiasts who will want to pinch our cheeks and babble about how much we've grown, or worse yet, kiss us. But when we got to the parking lot, Dad turned back to see if Mom had come out and was following us.

Whereupon Tara grabbed his arm and tugged him car-wards, announcing "She isn't coming out of there any time soon. Face it, she's lost to us! She's never coming back! You need to move on, Dad, you need to accept that she's gone! In fact, it's time you got over her and moved on with your life! That's what she would want! It's what she always said she would want! We know she loved you and would only want what's best for you! You're strong and will make it through this difficult time, thanks to the support of your loving daughters! Let's go!"

(We got in the car and drove over to the nail salon, where we sat for another five minutes before Mom emerged with her VERY SPIRITED AND ENERGETIC friend, who lunged halfway through my car window to shout in my ear about how she couldn't believe we didn't remember her, and to demand to know our ages and how long it had been and whatnot. I think Tara had the right idea and we should have run for our lives.)

But anyway. The other day Tara outdid herself with the ranting. She has a bitter running joke about how her life is cursed; every time something good happens to me, she rolls her eyes and says it must be nice to have an uncursed life. At some point I started bragging up my uncursed life, comparing us to Wolverine and Cyclops from X-Men II and pointing out that every time I reach into my pocket I find a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup.

So the other day we were shopping and I was looking at pants, and this happened:

Me: Ever since I found that store that was closing and bought a dozen pairs of jeans for $4 each, I've had trouble gearing myself up to pay $50 for a pair.

Tara: Why would you even need pants if you bought a dozen pairs of jeans?

Me: I lost a bunch of weight, so now I can't wear half of them.

Tara: Oh look at me, my name is Tasha and my life is NOT cursed, and it is so terribly hard! Why, I simply do not know what to do with myself sometimes! For instance, just the other day, I won the lottery, and now these stupid people appear every day and shower me with money! Sometimes I can barely even move because the money piles are so deep! And I'm all "Thank you, but I couldn't even spend all the money you gave me yesterday, because there was so much of it!" But they never listen! They just keep throwing money at me like crazy money people! And also everywhere I go, awesome people want to be my friend! Everybody famous and terrific is all like "You're that Tasha Robinson I've heard so much about, I would like you to come hang out with me on my private island, which I will take you to on my private jet while feeding you private grapes!" Also I have lost so much weight that I can barely even find clothing to fit me! I just walk into a store and everybody says "Oh no, all our clothes are too big for you, what will you even do now!" Oh, I am so TERRIBLY sympathizing with your miserable, hard, awful life!

Note that as she says all this, she's following me through the store, and I am trying not to fall over laughing. TRULY MY LIFE IS SO VERY UNCURSED AND DIFFICULT.

Leavin' on a jet plane yet again

Wed, 30 Dec 2009 16:14:52 GMT

Hooray! In spite of clearly being some sort of wanted terrorist or felon or something, I was able to use advance check-in normally for my flight back from Maryland to Chicago. No more middle of the back row for me. Or massive anxiety about whether they'll let me on the flight.

Better yet, we're hearing that the TSA is already backing off the ridiculous policies recommended immediately after the Nigerian plane-bomber incident on Christmas. I actually lay awake the other night fuming over the idea of having to fly home without a book or any other "personal item" in hand for the last hour of a flight — the whole thing smacked of "One kid in the class acted up, so the rest of us will just sit here quietly with our hands folded for the rest of the period." The whole policy seemed more designed to make millions of travelers antsy, bored, and mad than to actually successfully prevent terrorist activity.

But now it sounds like I get to fly home AND read on the way, which is all I really ask for. I got two new Spider Robinson books for Christmas, and I'm looking forward to catching up with him after a long break. Speaking of which, his wife Jeanne is fighting cancer right now, and apparently the financial outlook isn't all that rosy, as it tends to not be when working artists have serious medical problems. So if you're a fan, this would be an excellent time to buy his recent books through his website, or check in for periodic benefit auctions on eBay, or even just donate to their medical fund via PayPal. And if you aren't a fan, I highly recommend reading Stardance, one of my favorite novels of all time, and becoming a fan.

Bagel-makin' mania!

Wed, 30 Dec 2009 06:06:23 GMT

So… I made bagels! Months ago, someone here — sorry, I no longer remember who — posted a link to a blog post about making homemade bagels, and I decided that was something I wanted to try at some point when I had several hours free for an essentially foolish project. (I've made many types of bread at this point, and always find it an interesting process that's really more trouble than it's worth.) But hey, I overvalue novelty and I like baking, and this seemed like an interesting project.

I had some trouble with the dough, because I tried to start out with a half-batch to see how it would work, and then I halved everything but the water. So I ended up with liquid dough. Oops. At which point I said the hell with it, and made a full batch. Turned out to only be eight bagels anyway, so no big deal. Here's stage one, with the flat dough separated into balls, and left to rise:

I was not confident about any step of this process whatsoever, since this recipe doesn't have a proofing stage for the yeast: You just bung it in with the dry ingredients and some warm water, and let it proof within the dough. Which I hadn't encountered before in a bread recipe, and I wasn't sure it would work. But the dough did rise noticeably, and by the time I rolled them into bagel-esque loops, they were definitely more substantial.

Boiling them also made them puff up until they almost looked like finished bagels, except for being fish-belly white and kinda icky-soft and swollen to the touch.

And here's where I found out why sesame and poppy bagels are so common, and sunflower-seed bagels aren't: Sesame seeds stick to wet bagels REALLY WELL. Sunflower seeds not as much. I wound up sprinkling a bunch of extras on top of the seed ones.

Some oven time later, et voilá! They actually look like real bagels, both inside and out. The taste was a little flat and disappointing, but that's because the recipe is ultra-basic, just flour, sugar, and moisture. At some point, I'd like to try the same technique on a more complicated recipe, like rye or sourdough or whole wheat. I'm betting those would come out really well. And these were tasty with butter or cream cheese or peanut butter or jelly, they just weren't very impressive entirely on their own, which is how I usually eat bagels.

Unsurprising moral of the story: Baking yeast bread products is still, as I said, a multi-hour project that's generally more trouble than it's worth. On the other hand, this recipe works fine, and it was neat to see in action and to know more about how bagels come to be.

Next step, if I have time tomorrow, on my last day in Maryland: making my own English muffins. Yay!

Avatar

Tue, 29 Dec 2009 15:55:51 GMT

My primary thought on Avatar:

I'm thinking at this point that the story of the genocide of a close-to-the-land native people by a technologically superior, morally compromised people operating strictly out of greed and profit motive, is America's Holocaust Narrative. It's the story we keep telling ourselves over and over and over, partially out of guilt, partially out of hope that This Will Never Happen Again, partially because we know it's a topic freighted with easy emotion, which makes for dramatic cinema.

And I wouldn't dare theorize about which motive is most prominent in any given film or filmmaker. But the fact that we as a society haven't really learned much about NOT doing things for the profit motive gives the story an added depressing twist; we're still lamenting our selfish mistakes of past centuries while finding ways to repeat them now.

Avatar struck me as surprisingly adept at not just telling the same story over again. Yeah, it's riddled with clichés, including the nasty, narrow-minded warrior who's engaged to the chief's daughter and is the protagonist's all-in-one rival, physically, emotionally, spiritually, and sexually. But it isn't just a cowboys-vs.-indians story, it's about Iraq and Afghanistan and 9/11 and Middle East terrorism and the destruction of the rainforests and Blood For Oil and Western imperialism in general. I thought occasional AVC contributor Sam Adams did an excellent job of summing up the politics, and explaining why the film's messages are pretty shocking, in a way that even goes beyond countering the "support our troops" paradigm and encouraging audiences to cheer for the murder of American soldiers.

But as Sam says, critical response to the film has been focused far more on the mo-cap and the 3D and the technological developments than on the story. Which makes me wonder what Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea are getting out of it on a message level. Mostly what I got is "We're going to keep telling ourselves this story over and over as long as I live, but we're probably never going to actually LEARN anything from the telling."

We think we are hilarious, chapter XLVII

Mon, 28 Dec 2009 18:37:54 GMT

Me: Look, there's a place in that strip mall called Kabobs And Pizza. Have you ever been there for pizza?

Mom: No, but I've been there for kabobs.

Me: Can you go in and get kabob pizza?

Tara: NO. It's Kabobs And Pizza, not Kabob Pizza! Can't you read?

Me: Couldn't you ask them to just leave out the And?

Tara: NO. Everything served there comes with extra And. It is non-negotiable!

Me: Aw, maaaaan.

Tara: Also with spam.

…and SCENE.

Every time I hang out with more than a couple members of my family, I become aware all over again that our sense of humor is TERRIBLE, predicated entirely on repetition, sarcasm, absurdist nonsense, cheap irony, and really bad puns. It's dumb, awful humor. I pity anyone subjected to it.

And yet as ashamed as I am of this humor, it's so comforting being around people who get it and go along with it. We all groan mightily at each other's jokes, but we laugh too, and we perpetuate them. We're terrible people, but at least we're comfortably all alike.

Brain foldier; nails shinier

Mon, 28 Dec 2009 03:46:27 GMT

Well, Dad officially won Christmas.

For the last I don't even know how many years — eight, maybe? nine? — he's given me, my sister, and my mom each a single pair of socks every Christmas. Nice indoor socks, with the grippy non-skid pattern thingies on the bottom, or ultra-fuzzy chenille slipper-socks, but socks nonetheless. It's a running joke, where the first thing we'd open every year would be our identical squashy packages. Inevitably, because we think we are hilarious, someone would say "Why, what could THIS possibly be?" and everyone else would say "Oh, I have NO IDEA. Maybe it's a puzzle! Shake it and see what kind of noise it makes!" Every. Year. And he'd sit there and grin at us the whole time, and when we opened them, he'd say "Surprise! This is the year you get socks!" or some such.

I come by my ironic sense of humor honestly, through genetics.

This year, we observed the Sock Ritual as usual, but when we actually opened the packages, each one contained a single kinda grubby old athletic sock, wrapped around a $50 gift certificate for a local nail salon/spa. So Dad got the satisfaction of seeing all the Big Fake Shock melt into real actual shock. And he got to laugh as he pulled the rug out from under our sarcastic childish asses.

And today Mom and I went there and I got my first-ever manicure/pedicure. It's a little embarrassing to be mrph-ity years old and have never had a manicure or pedicure, and Mom and I have been talking about going together for many, many years now.

Well, there's one more rite of feminine passage observed, dutifully but very late. And frankly, it was interesting, but nothing to put up on the Lifetacular Accomplishments Wall. There were massage chairs and a footbath and a hot-rock leg massage, and I got my eyebrows waxed and had umpty billion gels and unguents and fixatives and lacquers applied to my fingernails and toenails, and had my hands and feet buffed and scrubbed with many things. And the end result is about what I would have gotten if I'd painted my nails at home. Except a little worse, because I thought my fingernails were finally dry and I could put my shoes back on my cold feet, but they weren't quite, and I smudged the thumbs. We could have gotten them fixed, but by that time we'd been there more than an hour, and we were running late and expecting guests, and we wanted to be out the door.

So hey, been there, done that, got the Girl Scout Badge, and may well never do it again. But it was a nifty Christmas present, and Dad gets points for innovation, for fooling us all, and for keeping a straight face while we mocked his sock-present for the ninth or tenth year in a row.

And next year, I can honestly say I'd rather get the socks. That's probably worth something to him too.

I can't help it, I find my sister hilarious.

Sat, 26 Dec 2009 07:00:48 GMT

So I got back to Maryland without undue troubles. The lines at the airport weren't that bad. When I checked in, the computer told me "ADDITIONAL IDENTIFICATION VERIFICATION REQUIRED: PRESENT IDENTIFICATION TO AGENT," which meant to hand over my driver's license as usual. And something kinda weird did happen when I did; the lady behind the counter, who was punchy and joking around with me and everyone else around her suddenly frowned and went quiet and poked at her keyboard for five silent minutes. I was seriously expecting a hand on my elbow and "Will you come with me, please?" after the first few minutes. But then she handed me a boarding pass and told me my gate, and that was it. Maybe she was just frowny because she had to go through some lengthy procedure to prove I was me. I was so startled and relieved that I didn't ask, I just went to my gate and watched a movie while I waited for the next three hours. My flight was half an hour late, but considering there were ruffled-looking people desperately waiting for standby on every flight around me, people who had clearly been there for a while and were going through Hardships, I counted myself extremely lucky that I hadn't been trying to travel a day earlier. And I even managed to get an aisle seat next to a lovely young man and his very well-behaved small daughter, and my luggage even arrived at the airport when I did, so I consider myself preposterously fortunate.

Since then, I've fallen into the reverie I always seem to wind up in when I get to Maryland. I went out by myself and did some last-minute shopping. I made Nanaimo Bars and cherry-almond shortcake dough, which we'll bake tomorrow. I've been staying up too late and sleeping a lot and spending a lot of time talking to my mom and showing my sister different casual games online. It's been very chill. The days seem to last forever without any structure or deadlines, and yet I never get anything much done — I have movies to watch which I can't seem to start, and books I'm not reading. I am forever at everyone else's disposal and sort of waiting on them to have time for me, so starting projects is difficult. When in doubt, I clean something.

It has not yet been a hilarity-filled holiday. I don't know if we're all less bantery than usual or just not being funny, but I'm less minded to write down everything my family says. Except for this year's inevitable running joke, which goes like this:

My sister Tara: Oh my gosh, she is eating a WHOLE BANANA again.

Me: Yup. Mmm-mmm, a whole banana. In your face, sucker.

Tara: Oh yeah? Well, same to you, you… banana… whole thing… eater… of… okay, I think I need to go work on that one.

AND LATER

Tara: Where are you going?

Me: To have the most fun ever, and you can't come.

Tara: Oh yeah? Well, I hope you don't… the most… ever… fun… have… not… okay, I'm going to go away and work on that one.

UNTIL

Me: So while we were in Seattle, we actually ran across a pie diner. Here's a picture. It's an Australian pie diner, but I think it still counts.

Tara: So clearly I win forever.

Me: Oh yeah? Well I hope you… uh… don't.

Tara: …yeaaaaaaaah. You get to go away and work on that one.

For your inconvenience

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 18:16:34 GMT

Well, this is preposterously frustrating. I'm due to fly back to Maryland today, to spend the holidays with my parents and sister. I went to check in for my flight last night per usual — especially since I'm flying on Southwest, which means no reserved seating, which means early check-in is a must if you don't want to be in the middle of the back row — and the website said (cutely and unhelpfully) "Oops! Your itinerary is not eligible for online check-in."

I'd never seen that message before, so I called Southwest, and they said that as part of the new Secure Flight Resolution (or some such), I had been "randomly selected to check in at the airport." Meaning, randomly selected to get on the plane dead last and sit in the middle of the back row. WTF? They told me it was an internal system thing, and there was nothing they could do about it except advise me to call the TSA.

So I called the TSA, and they told me it's probably because my middle name isn't on the itinerary, and I probably have the same name as someone on their no-fly list. So I basically have to show up at the airport and prove my identity. And if I want to make sure this doesn't happen again, SOP is for me to request they do a background security check on me to make sure I'm not a flight hazard. That involves filling out a bunch of forms and waiting 30 to 45 days. Though she thinks probably just adding my middle name to future airline tickets will solve the problem.

As much as I hate bureaucratic bullshit and resent the petty inconvenience, this whole thing actually kinda makes sense to me; my dad bought these plane tickets for me back in September, and if someone else with my name has gotten in trouble in the interim, it's no big surprise that I can't get a boarding pass remotely without showing any form of ID. I can't fault them on that. And "You have the same name as a criminal" is still less apoplexy-inducing than "Our computer has randomly selected you to be screwed out of using our standard system." I'm just anxious and frustrated, because it's snowing in Chicago, and I'm flying into a city that was just buried under two feet of snow and is still reeling from days of flight delays, and it's the holidays and in my experience, the check-in line at Midway right now will snake through the airport and take an hour to get through, and that's already three forms of uncertainty about whether this flight will actually happen. So I don't need one more, particularly in the form of "Wait an hour in line to be told you can't fly."

And I hate sitting in the middle of the back row. And given all the other problems, if I can't make my flight, who knows when I'll make it home.

So basically I'm just a sullen ball of vibrating anxiety right now. The problem with being singled out for faceless bureaucracy inconvenience is that you never know how far it's going to go, you just know that you're doomed to hear a lot of "Well, there's nothing I can do about that, sorry."

The TSA lady I talked to sounded like she was about 16 years old, and not very experienced; she sounded like she was reading from a script, but she stumbled over it a lot, and kept repeating herself. And once she'd convinced me that I had no recourse, and I was about to hang up, she added "Oh! Make sure to mention that this is happening because of our new Secure Flight Initiative, which makes everyone's flights safer."

I honestly couldn't get any words out. Mention that… where? Did she just assume, in this day and age, that everyone blogs or tweets or journals everything, and that I'd necessarily be telling this story to someone? Or am I supposed to pass that on when I complain to… my senator? The local paper? In this strange TSA-mandated script, why would I make a point of passing on, to whomever I bitch to about this, that it's happening entirely for my convenience and security?

Oh wait, I did. The system works!

Best Of Film 2009: The Unilateral Edition

Thu, 17 Dec 2009 19:32:42 GMT

Today The A.V. Club posted its consensus list of the best films of 2009, though as always, "consensus" is pretty shaky when you're working with such a small group of people with such strong, divergent opinions — for instance, everyone else had the Coen brothers' A Serious Man on their best-of lists, while I wrote it up as Most Overrated Movie Of The Year. (To be fair, Nathan wrote up my No. 1 movie of the year as HIS Most Overrated choice. This is typical of what goes on behind the scenes.)

Frankly, we get to a point with the consensus list where two out of five writers strongly liking a film is enough to put it on our "group" best-of list, which is frustrating to me when I either actively disliked that film (A Serious Man), felt pretty indifferent to it (Fantastic Mr. Fox, Humpday) or, sadly, didn't manage to see it. (Still Walking, Summer Hours.) Not to mention when one of my favorite films (Moon) was something only one other person on staff saw. And I think I'm the only one who saw Ponyo. But that's the nature of the beast. It's all just grist for discussion anyway.

So for the sake of that discussion, and because I had to come up with it for voting purposes anyway, here's my top 20 of the year so far. (This still feels wildly incomplete, given that I have at least a dozen films at home that I feel I still need to see to properly round out 2009, and there are a handful of others, like Lorna's Silence, for which we didn't get screeners, and there's no word on a DVD release. So… this may change over time, but here it is at the moment.

1. Where The Wild Things Are
2. The Hurt Locker
3. District 9
4. Ponyo
5. The Informant!
6. The Brothers Bloom
7. Julia
8. Coraline
9. Big Fan
10. Moon
11. Up
12. Inglorious Basterds
13. An Education
14. Sugar
15. A Single Man
16. Duplicity
17. The Imaginarium Of Doctor Parnassus
18. Thirst
19. Antichrist
20. Up In The Air

Giger comes to Cancun breakfast

Thu, 17 Dec 2009 05:11:26 GMT

Still no time to talk about Cancun, given that I'm still sorting through pictures, and we're trying to get three issues of the paper to print simultaneously at work, and I barely have time to think coherently. But while sorting pictures, I came across this set, and I just have to ask.

See, our resort was all-inclusive, with meals provided, and we could go to any of a number of different mini-restaurants on the grounds: Thai, Mediterranean, Italian, sushi, Brazilian steakhouse, or "international buffet." The buffets weren't that great, but they always had a wide variety of tropical fruit, including stuff I'd never seen before, like guava and some kind of incredibly bright scarlet cactus. Also, one day at breakfast there was a huge pile of these:

Granted, they didn't look very appealing, given that they were all spotty and a little shriveled, and vaguely dried-out and crunchy to the touch. But hey, I liked the guava and the cactus, and I'm generally eager to try new things, so I took one of these back to our table.

And when I opened it, an alien facehugger baby fell out. The innards were actually pretty dry to the touch, inside a little caul of skin that formed a tight shrouded packet. But when I breached the caul, liquid oozed everywhere. This entire process was like a practical joke; I couldn't entirely believe what I was seeing. It was just too weird.

Does anyone have any idea what this fruit is called? That slimy alienbaby thing was actually kind of tasty — Cass thought I was crazy for putting any of it in my mouth, but I figured I'd opened it, I had to eat some of it. The liquid was very sweet, like pear syrup, and the seeds were crunchy and very mildly nutty, like toasted pumpkin seeds. If I was trapped on a desert island with nothing to eat but alienfruit, I'd probably survive. But I couldn't bring myself to eat the whole thing. And I didn't even try with the rind, which was extremely dry and bumpy, kind of like the inside of a dried-out orange rind. What do you think? Were these things meant to be eaten, or was I chewing on a centerpiece and wondering why it tasted funny?

Breaking radio silence

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 18:58:25 GMT

Haven't been on LJ lately: I spent four days in NYC without Internet, then a day and a half back at home scrambling to catch up, then four days in Cancun without Internet, just getting back at 2 a.m. yesterday. There's so much I want to say about both trips, but I lack time or focus.

Much easier to describe: The scene on the train last night as I went to meet Chris for dinner. My book throughout the whole Cancun trip was Stephen King's Under The Dome, a 1074-page hardcover monster that I didn't much like at first, but that eventually caught me. I wanted to finish the book and hand it off to Chris at dinner, and besides, it got extremely tense at the end. So I was reading quickly and intently, and I finished the last page as I was pulling into my stop. And then I closed it, and put it into my bag and looked up — into the faces of an elderly gentleman and lady, who were both grinning at me with great amusement from the seat across from me. He said "Well! It must have been good! What's it about? I want the Reader's Digest version!"

For some reason, what registered in that moment was the Reader's Digest crack, and I assumed he was laughing about the length of the book, and how he didn't want to invest the necessary time in it. And the train doors were already open, so I smiled back and said "It's the new Stephen King, it's about a bunch of people trapped under a giant magical bubble. There's probably going to be a TV version, so you can get the easy version that way." Then we all shared a friendly chuckle and I stepped off the train and they pulled away.

Thirty seconds later, the penny dropped — the fact that they'd both been kinda staring and laughing at me when I looked up, the "Well! It must have been good!" They'd been sitting there watching me zooming through pages, with who knows what kind of bug-eyed intent look on my face. Apparently it was entertaining. And embarrassing. I kinda giggled uncomfortably all the way to dinner.

I like a man with high self-esteem

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 20:15:49 GMT

Editor Genevieve: Hey, is there a screener copy of Invictus in the office?

Editor Josh: Psshhh. Are you really going to watch that?

Genevieve: Why not? It's just what I want for the weekend.

Josh: Oh, it's just that I don't want to see it, and my opinion is more important than anyone else's.

Me: In that case, shouldn't you be writing more reviews for us?

Josh: What, and blow the roof off the world of reviewing? I would like SOME of all the other writers in the world to be able to keep their jobs.

Frankly, it's surprising that there hasn't been more goofery in the office lately. We're all kind of grim and punchy at the same time, from consistently trying to do two issues at a time first for the Thanksgiving holidays, now because so many of us are headed for New York and not coming back until sometime next week, and then with Christmas looming in the distance. Add on top of that that there have been roughly four screenings a day all week, and our schedules are all out of whack. Some of those screenings are for movies some of us have already seen, or have screeners of, or know aren't best-of-year contenders, so we aren't all in theaters ALL the time. But for instance, on Wednesday, I spent an eight-hour work day (10 a.m. to 6 p.m.) in screening rooms, then went home and tried to get a day's worth of work done in the evening. We're far ahead of where we normally are at this time of the week — in large part, I think, thanks to heroic organizing and supplemental editing efforts on the part of Mr. My Opinions Are More Important Than Anyone Else's — but still trying to get even more done. Also, I get on the plane for New York in six hours.

I've got my hotel reservations (thanks, neillparatzo, and thanks to everyone else who made suggestions — The Jane looks like a blast, and we'll have to try that next time we're in town with more warning, at which point they'll hopefully have openings), and I've got reservations for a shuttle into Manhattan from the airport, and I've got a stupidly ambitious list of things I'd like to do, such that hopefully I'll wear myself out during the day and then crash at night with my intimidatingly huge stack of screeners. There are SO MANY MOVIES left to watch, ya'll. I hope you appreciate the things I do for you*.

* By which I mean not for you at all. Sorry**.

** I'm not really sorry. Oops.

Surely there's a hotel in New York

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 06:01:29 GMT

So, anyone out there have any brilliant suggestions for places to stay while in New York City this weekend? Last time Cass and I went, we stayed in a little family-run inn in Morningside Heights, which was great — the shared bathrooms were skeevy, but the rooms were clean and the staff was friendly and there was a great corner grocery store around the corner, with stacks of fresh fruit outside and homemade baked goods and salads on the inside. And it was $60 or so a night.

And I can't find it again, mostly since I don't remember its name. After hours of frustrating Internet searches, I finally just used Google Street View to take a virtual walk around Morningside Heights and find the address where the place had been, but there's no signage, and Google doesn't acknowledge that there's a hotel in that area.

The last time we stayed in New York, a casual Internet search turned up a dozen or so places like that — semi-sketchy family-run inns with shared bathrooms and cheap rooms. But that was years ago. Now Google is only giving me hostels (as low as $19 a night!) and places in Newark and downtown luxury hotels with rooms up to $995 a night. Was there an entire industry of fly-by-night hotels that got shut down over the last four or five years?

At any rate, I'm flying into town late Friday night, spending the weekend wandering around on my own, probably working in The Onion's NYC office on Monday, and then Monday night, appearing with Keith, Josh, Nathan, and others at Union Hall in Brooklyn to do a reading / presentation on behalf of our new book Inventory. (30% off on Amazon, though for a while it was 75% off, which propelled it into the top 100 bestselling books on the site.)

So if you find yourself in the area on Monday night, you should absolutely come out and say hi.

And in the meantime, I'm actually considering a hostel, since I've never stayed in one, and I'm curious. It'd be an adventure. Besides, when traveling, I pretty much just view a hotel room as a place to be unconscious for a while when exhausted, so I don't really want to pay $250 for a bed I'll use exactly the same way whether it's in a nice private room or a hostel. Though I am also considering staying at the Chelsea, just to stay at the Chelsea. Unfortunately, they have rooms available Sunday and Monday night, but not Friday or Saturday. So… I dunno. I'm perilously close to pulling a catechism and sleeping on a park bench. That also would be an adventure.

Warning: crude AND silly

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 05:39:34 GMT

Shortly after I came home from my night screening…

Cass: Yeah, so [some friends] are busy tonight with something that involved a lot of giggling over the phone. I'm not sure whether that means sex, or World Of Warcraft, or what. Or maybe World Of Sexcraft.

Me: Ohhhhhh. I am fairly sure I do not want to know anything more about World Of Sexcraft.

Cass: But it's MASSIVELY multiplayer!

Me: Really? Perhaps we should check and see if they have enough people in their party. They might need more fps.

Cass: First-person shooter?

Me: Oh. I was thinking "fucking per second," since dps, damage per second, is such a big thing.

Cass: See, I would have just kept that as "dps," for "double penetrations."

Me: Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

Cass: What, did I go too far?

Me: No, yours was just funnier than mine, which is way worse.

Four on the floor and one on Cass's bike

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 23:27:07 GMT

So I kinda ran over Cass with my bike today. But it was totally his fault, cause he was the one who suggested we bike in the rain.

We're still not sure entirely what happened, but we were biking down to Devon to meet his mom, sister, and brother-in-law for lunch, and I was following him, and he was going slowly because he was pulling one of his gloves on, so I was too close behind him, and I called out to let him know it was okay to go faster, and he looked back to see where I was. And probably then his front wheel turned slightly with his body, and he hit a puddle or some wet leaves — it was raining lightly — and he skidded and then went down in the road on his side right in front of me, sliding on the road with his bike partly on top of him.

And everything slowed down enough for me to think If I brake I'll just slide into him, but if I veer right I'll hit a parked car and if I veer left I might be pulling into the path of a moving vehicle and crap I'm going to hit him, and then I swore and slammed into him, and of course with the sudden stop, my bike flipped and I went over the handlebars and mostly landed on top of him. Which was a fairly odd sensation — I felt my ribcage sort of bounce off his and both of them compressed and we both went "Whoof!" and then I was rolling off him.

Surprisingly enough, we mostly came out of it fine — he went down slow enough that he didn't get road rash, especially since his coat absorbed most of the impact, and me, I landed on something soft. We both have bruises in new and interesting places, and his knees aren't happy with him, and something in my lower back feels very weird, but all in all, we came out of it pretty close to unscathed.

Unfortunately, on the way home after late-lunch and a stroll around Indian Barrier Park, his back tire went flat and we made most of the trip with him jogging his bike and me sloooooowly peddling along next to him, or waiting as he reinflated it. At one point while he was doing that, we were near an elementary school, so I cycled around its grounds to see what it was like, and I noticed there was a hopscotch grid stenciled on the playground (do kids still play hopscotch?), plus a couple of squares divided into four numbered quadrants. And I took one look at those and thought Those are for foursquare, even though I've never played foursquare, never seen a foursquare grid that I'm aware of, and have absolutely no idea what the rules to foursquare are.

So I came home and looked 'em up, and it turns out there's an International Foursquare League and foursquare clubs and tournaments and a world's record (28 hours) and college teams and all kinds of wacky stuff. Which just proves once again something we talked about a bunch over Thanksgiving: The world is big and there are a lot of people in it, and they occupy themselves with some pretty odd stuff sometimes.

But I really wonder whether any of the kids who go to school there actually know the rules to foursquare, and play it obsessively at recess, the way we used to play kickball Back In The Day.

We aren't talking about the same thing

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 15:31:29 GMT

In the locker room of the health club the other day, a middle-aged woman near me was singing loudly and enthusiastically:

Middle-aged woman: Back in the saaaaddle again…

Older woman walking up: I wish.

Middle-aged woman: You aren't back in the saddle?

Older woman: No, unfortunately.

Middle-aged woman: You aren't making it to class today? Why not? You have an ailment?

Older woman: WHAT? Oh. No, no, I mean… y'know, THAT saddle.

Middle-aged woman: [Confused pause, then…] OH. [Awkward silence on both sides.]

How entirely random.

The annual movies to watch list

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 17:13:51 GMT

So I decided this might be a good week to not spend any time, y'know, thinking. Which hasn't been hard. It's involved going to the gym every morning and pushing myself until I ache. Then going to work, which has been a fucktastrophe of intense overclocking due to all the huge, complicated Best Of The Decade pieces on top of our normal workload, plus having to get the print edition together a day and a half early due to Thanksgiving deadlines. Then I've seen one or two movies — usually two — every night, which has meant a lot of dragging home at 1 a.m., then getting up at 7:30 to go back to the gym.

At least this has been good for getting caught up before our best of the year in film coverage. Every year, our film editor Scott Tobias puts out a list of films we should all try to watch before writing our best-in-film pieces, and every year I post it for the generally curious and completist. Here 'tis. I'm way behind this year, though as usual, many of these haven't even come out yet, and the next few weeks will be packed with screenings and screeners. Also, this is the year I finally accept that my tastes and Scott's do not overlap all that often; in particular, I just don't get much out of gory horror films, and I have no particular intentions of taking him up on watching The House Of The Devil. Probably not Paranormal Activity, either. I'm still mad at him and Keith for suckering me into seeing Drag Me To Hell.

Coraline
Two Lovers
Duplicity
The Girlfriend Experience
Drag Me To Hell
Up
The Hurt Locker
Humpday
Thirst
District 9
Ponyo
Inglourious Basterds
The Informant!
A Serious Man
An Education
Where The Wild Things Are
Antichrist
Fantastic Mr. Fox
The Road
Adventureland
(500) Days Of Summer
Sugar
Anvil: The Story Of Anvil
In The Loop
Police, Adjective

Tokyo Sonata
Hunger
Goodbye Solo
Tulpan
Il Divo
The Limits Of Control
Revanche
Julia
Jerichow
Summer Hours
Food Inc.
Public Enemies
Somers Town
Lorna’s Silence
Beeswax
The Headless Woman
World’s Greatest Dad
Big Fan
Still Walking
Crude
Bright Star
35 Shots Of Rum
Capitalism: A Love Story
Afterschool
Bronson
Paranormal Activity
Night And Day
The House Of The Devil
Collapse
Precious
Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans
Broken Embraces
Me And Orson Welles
Up In The Air
A Single Man
Invictus
The Lovely Bones
Avatar
Nine
The White Ribbon

As an addendum, here are Noel Murray's additions to the list, which include two films likely to be on my year-end best-of list:

The Brothers Bloom
Harry Potter & The Half-Blood Prince
Julie & Julia
Moon
Star Trek
Zombieland
Passing Strange

Afghan Star
American Swing
The Beaches Of Agnes
Every Little Step
Gomorrah
Good Hair
The Hangover
The Invention Of Lying
The Maid
Phoebe In Wonderland
Pontypool
Robert Blecker Wants Me Dead
You The Living

How stories happen

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 16:59:37 GMT

The thing that bothers me most about our cat's death is that she used to be a cat — a complicated ongoing process of personality and interaction — and now she's just a story, a couple of bloodless lines of text. She was a feral rescue. She was shy around strangers but very affectionate. We had her for 12 1/2 years. She developed liver cancer and we had to put her to sleep. The end. And one reason I got so emotional when she was diagnosed was that we were doing this before she was even dead: pruning her story down to base elements, simplifying it into a form that we could agree on with strangers. Streamlining the horrible, fearful days of illness and diagnosis and second-guessing down to She developed cancer. Turning more than a decade together into She was shy but sweet. We told the same few lines of story to several vets and techs who asked for it, including the one who euthanized her, and the more I heard the story in my own mouth, the more it didn’t have anything to do with her, or with what I was experiencing—it was just a bunch of pro forma stuff to say. But I felt like we were discarding most of her.

The simplifying process happens with everyone and everything eventually, and it's always tragic. That's actually a favorite theme of mine in fiction — the generational story where you find out that a person’s neatly packaged—in fact possibly deliberately repackaged—story handed down to the next generation really has nothing to do with the actual life from the previous generation. (Margaret Atwood's book Alias Grace and John Sayles' film Lone Star are particularly terrific examples of this.) But where reading about it can be fascinating, being part of the process is just depressing.

I couldn’t help realize at various points, as people asked about her, how easy it would have been to tell them any damn bullshit we wanted. We only got her a year ago. We liberated her from a testing lab. She was an experiment in animal cloning. How would they know? They hadn't shared her real story.

Granted, a housecat's story is not really worth sharing with the world, no matter that a billion Internet sites think differently. Even the vastly expanded version, the "real" version, would just be a lot of variants on mundane habits — the way she liked to sleep on my butt when I slept on my stomach. The way we had to hide our hands under the blankets at night, or she'd come poke her wet nose into them to see if she could nudge them into petting mode. The way she carried our other cat around by the neck when they were both barely out of kittenhood, and she was only a little bigger than him, so his feet dragged on the ground, but he passively accepted it anyway. None of this is relevant in the way even the shortest or more mundane human life is. But there’s no way to bring it across to other people.

All of this is the kind of irrational emotional reaction that takes over a brain in times of stress; I don’t know that any of it means anything. It’s just been bugging me the last few days. I’m feeling better; as I told komainu, I’m intellectually where I need to be with all this, I just haven’t caught up emotionally. To which she wisely replied that there’s no particular hurry on that.

Weirdly, we’re probably going to adopt more cats almost instantly. Cass has been wanting a third cat for years now, and I was reluctant to bring a new one into the mix, given how stranger-shy both of ours were. But the surviving cat, Balrog, has become increasingly needy and neurotic on his own, and we’re gone most of the day, and Cass thinks it’s cruel to leave him on his own all the time, especially since he was always more cat-social than people-social. So we’re going to the anti-cruelty society by my office tomorrow to meet new cats. It’s going to be very, very strange, but I imagine any cats we take home will be grateful for a new life.

RIP Morgoth, 1997-2009

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 02:52:06 GMT

So as I said in the last post, our cat Morgoth started declining rapidly a little over a week ago. She's always been an aggressively affectionate lap-cat, but suddenly she wasn't interested in us any more. She lost weight, and she'd already been bony to begin with. She couldn't sit down or lie on her side, and spent all her time in a hunched position with her legs tucked under her. Her fur started coming out by the handful. Her pads were inflamed. She would spend hours in a sort of reverie, staring at a bowl of food or at the stairs without tackling either. Cass took her to the vet for blood and urine and stool tests, and came back with a painkiller, an antibiotic, and a list of problems — a UTI, gum disease, a flaky rash on her belly that we hadn't known about because she wasn't coming to us to be touched anymore. The vet suggested an ultrasound.

We took her in for that on Thursday. The results weren't great, but they weren't conclusive, either, so their tech suggested a needle biopsy. The results would take a few days and we only had about a 60% chance of a solid diagnosis, but the alternative was anesthetizing her and cutting a hole in her for a full biopsy, and given her weakened, miserable, shaky state, I just didn't think she could take that.

We got the call this morning with the results — inappropriately enough, while we were downtown at a critics' screening for a cotton-candy-like animated kids' comedy. Biliary carcinoma — essentially a form of liver cancer. Inoperable, untreatable, time remaining measured in days rather than weeks. We talked about it for a while, but putting it off just seemed cruel, for our comfort – or worse yet, our convenience — so we got on public transit, went straight home, spent a little time with her, and took her to the clinic just before they closed for the weekend.

And we had her euthanized. I've had a huge number of pets over the years, starting from my earliest childhood, but I've never had to put one down before. Even knowing she was suffering, that she trembled half the time and the painkillers weren't doing much for her, that she couldn't deal with the litterbox anymore because she couldn't sit or squat, even though she was barely eating and didn't seem to be sleeping so much as zoning out… even through all of that, it was a phenomenally difficult, painful thing to do. I've dealt with a lot of dead pets — misadventure with cars, disease, other animals, even in one grisly case, a housepet that killed and ate another housepet — but I've never had to look at one and say "Yeah, it is time for you to die. Right now." It's normally awful dealing with the suddenness and arbitrariness of death, in animals and in friends and family and acquaintances, but until now there's always been a sort of feeling of "This was outside my scope, and I had no control over the situation," which is simultaneously frightening and comforting.

But deciding to kill one of our pets — which, in spite of all the kind euphemisms available, is exactly what it came down to — was new and horrible to both of us. I started crying in the multiplex while on the phone with the vet, and continued crying all the way home, all the way to the vet's, and all the way through the procedure. And I am not a crier. I think it's literally been years since I last cried. This was just… beyond.

I can't recommend Cat Hospital Of Chicago (where catechism sent us when Morgoth first started acting ill) enough. They've been extremely patient and caring and knowledgeable about all the exams and tests and treatments, and they lived up to that standard today. The doctor gently walked us through the entire procedure beforehand and let us know exactly what to expect at each stage. She didn't make a big deal about my crying or try to comfort me, which would have made me profoundly uncomfortable, but she didn't seem fazed or put off or embarrassed by it either; she treated it as natural and unremarkable, which is what I needed. They gave us a private room and plenty of time alone with Morgoth to get her calmed down from the trip and stop her shaking, and eventually, we got her purring. They never rushed us or made us feel like time was an issue. They were gentle and compassionate with the actual process, and afterward, they gave us some privacy with her body and let us leave on our own when we were ready. They're obviously experienced with this kind of thing, and they made it as easy as it could possibly be. I hope we get that level of care when we're ready to go.

We have a lot of friends who've gone through this in the past two years, more or less all in the same pattern — as we keep hearing, cats are predators and competitors, and it's in their nature to not show weakness until they're too sick to hide it any more, and a lot of times by the time something's visibly wrong, it's already too late. I know all the aphorisms, about how it was time, and how we did it to stop her suffering. I know a lot of people have been through this, and I want to thank everyone who talked to us about it, here and in person. But oh God, is it ever hard.

This is her in healthier times. She was a feral rescue; she had 12 and a half good years with us, four times the life expectancy of a feral cat. She was an incredibly sweet girl. And as Cass says, right now the house is full of ghosts of her.

Brain full, mouth empty

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 18:54:08 GMT

I've been in one of my non-communicative moods lately. It isn't quite like depression — I can function fine, I just have nothing to say to anyone. Even coming up with 140 worthwhile characters for Twitter is a stretch. I seem to be coming out of it, but I'm still not feeling verbose. So briefly:

We went down to Halsted Street again this year for Halloween. It was cold, so we did a quick tour, just an hour or so of wandering around goggling. The best costume I saw was a group: Minnie Mouse, Mighty Mouse, and Speedy Gonzales… all blind, tail-less, and using canes. Best moment, though, was when two guys dressed in standard prefab Ernie and Bert costumes ran into two guys dressed in the exact same costumes… plus bondage gear. Bondage Bert pointed and shrieked like Donald Sutherland at the end of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, and the other Ernie and Bert pair backed off nervously.
I'm reading Cory Doctorow's Makers and alternating between loving it, and wanting to smack him for his Michael Moore-esque blinkeredness about anything that falls outside his narrow agenda.
And weirdly, I'm listening to a lot of heavy metal lately, courtesy of Pandora Radio. I've never been a fan before, but maybe it's the only thing that expresses how mute and frustrated I feel right now. I've been discovering a lot of artists everyone else in the world already knew about, and enjoying them, but I'm betting this phase doesn't last long.
Last week was hugely stressful, in large part due to an interview scheduled at the end of the day Thursday and conducted on Friday. Stressed myself into nausea last-minute-prepping for it, and then it turned out to be profoundly boring and disappointing. No, I'm not saying with who.
I also interviewed Glen Hansard (who was not boring; in fact, he talked about how he almost ended up as Rorschach in Watchmen) and co-wrote a piece on how to survive in a Stephen King story. Comments for both were pretty disappointing, but those two pieces are topping our most-emailed list.
Consuming most of my mind at the moment: One of our cats is seriously ill of as-yet-unclear causes, and we're having to contemplate putting her to sleep. I've never had to make this decision about a pet before. It's horrible and we're constantly second-guessing ourselves as we wait for more test results and contemplate further tests and surgery that might help, or might just be spending thousands of dollars to make her even more miserable. We're medicating her twice a day (antibiotics and painkillers) and sometimes once the meds kick in, she seems almost normal, and I think "How could we possibly even contemplate putting her down?" and then hours later she's a trembling little ball of wretched bony misery with falling-out fur, and I think we shouldn't even bother waiting for the test results. People keep telling us "You'll know when it's time," which is one of the things you're supposed to say at a time like this, and I've always believed that. Except that her state changes from day to day, and no, we really just don't know. I suspect we'll have to decide in the next few days, and either way, I'll feel like I've made the wrong choice.

Some things

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 16:39:14 GMT

If you're in Chicago tonight, come hang out with the A.V. Club crew. We're reading at the Book Cellar (4736 N Lincoln Ave, Lawrence) at 7 p.m., in support of our new book Inventory. It's currently the last Chicago reading planned for the book, so it might be now or never. The Milwaukee reading was postponed due to swine flu and other absences, and is now on Tuesday, November 10, still at Boswell Book Company, 2559 N. Downer Ave., at 7.
This morning, coming out of the health club, I didn't have my contacts on, and I walked by their little church-front marquee advertising the title of the next sermon. It was "Do not pass me by," but I momentarily misread it as "Do not piss me off," and I thought "Man, the church must be having problems with its neighbors."
Watched more final-season BSG last night — resolution of the big Gaeta plotline, and a core-dump about Cylon history from Anders. SO MUCH LESS ANNOYING than our previous viewing. The show had me back in minutes. Onscreen, there was only one angry sweeping of things off tables, and no other tantruming. Offscreen, there was still a little yelling at the TV — mostly Kevin, very frustrated over Doc Cottle's "let's let any old person into the ER to stand over critically ill people and confront them and make them worse" policy. But overall, much less screaming by the characters and by us. Cass says the key to good BSG is just more Cylons, all the time, and he seems to be right.
Someone made pumpkin-apple-nut muffins and brought them in for the staff. Editor Genevieve just asked if I want to split one. I told her no thanks, I don't like pumpkin anything. She gave me a pitying look and said "So… you basically aren't planning on eating anything during this two-month period?" I have to admit that my consumption of baked goods has been down lately. And that my local grocery store now has pumpkin donuts, pumpkin cookies, pumpkin coffee cake, pumpkin muffins, and pumpkin cheesecake all up by the front door.
Genevieve also just sent me this high-larious link. Clearly I am not the only one tickled by terrible bootleg costumes. Cyber-Man! Eurasian Traveler! Green Guy! The names of these rip-off costumes sound like the crazy boss on The IT Crowd naming off the members of The A-Team: Body! Doyle! Tiger! The Jewelry Man!
Plants Vs. Zombies ate my brains, but they seem to be slowly growing back; I've just about exhausted all the mini-games and puzzles and "survival mode," and after a one-week intense love affair, I'm finally starting to see daylight again. It looks strangely non-zombie-shaped.
Saw The Road and Fantastic Mr. Fox yesterday, as the first salvo in prestige-movie season. Can't talk much about either yet, but I'll note that what stuck with me most about Mr. Fox was that Wes Anderson replaced all swear words with "cuss," as in "What the cuss?" and "Holy cuss!" and "I swear to cuss…" By the end of the movie, people are saying things like "I like to cuss with their heads," and "This is a total clustercuss." Finally, there's a scene in a city where, off in the background is a huge, colorful, gang-tag-style graffito on the wall that just says "CUSS." The whole movie is about that level of tweedorable. Plan your viewing or non-viewing accordingly.

Playin' catch-up

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 22:19:28 GMT

Three updates on this post, about general office wackiness:

As far as I know, everyone in the office is back after the H1N1 scare, and things are largely back to normal. But I just walked into the bathroom, and the floor was soaking wet and smelled chokingly of bleach. Like "We spilled a bottle of bleach in here and just smeared it around" levels of stench. The office manager walked in a minute later and told me that the cleaning crew has been bleaching the floors twice a day to prevent the swine flu from spreading. WTF? Is the primary method of transference people licking unbleached bathroom floors?
Also back to normal: I got up at a decent hour today and got in a full, non-curtailed workout for the first time in weeks. So I feel awesome about myself, except for the part where I spent the first couple hours of work prepping to fall on my face sound asleep, both from the working out and from low blood sugar.
Bronson Pinchot called Nathan at home on Saturday to say hi and to discuss the wacky world of being suddenly famous as that guy who called Tom Cruise a homophobe. He apparently was "pleased and a little overwhelmed" by the sudden media attention, but promised to call Nathan again the next time he needs to stir up a big controversy. He also said more hilarious things about Tom Cruise that are not for public consumption. And now he's Tweeting 50 times a day — he started the account back in August and then seemed to immediately lose interest, but he's back with a vengeance, and quite frankly, he sounds lonely and a little unhinged. Go be Bronson Pinchot's friend! He needs the validation, and he's funny as hell, and he probably knows more celebrities than you.