One of my NUGGETS is 20 minutes late for training.

Couple things, now that I've seen the latest episode of BSG:

Cally: You are a whiny bitch and a professional provocateur. You live to wind your husband and others up, then stand back and watch them twist in the breeze, and THEN bitch at them for the consequences. Your bullshit instigating nearly got you shot, and I don’t think I’m the only one who would’ve cheered for that. Ugh.

Madame President & Admiral Adama: stop setting my TV screen on fire! Stop it! I can’t stand the hottness.

Starbuck: I love you. As much of a mess as you are, you rule my world.

I been sayin it. TEN YEARS I been sayin it.

O Internets, I love you so very very much. Every time I think of a thing, the Internets can supply it.

Thems over there are the Duggars, an Arkansas fundie family with 16 kids (and #17 on the way). Crazy, scary, scary-crazy, what have you ... but also, HI-larious.

And the Oscar goes to: Your Mom

Not the worst Academy Awards show I've ever seen, eh.

Ellen was OK, most of the dresses were great (except for you, Gwyneth Paltrow, you ugly snobby bitch, and you, Cameron Diaz -- YOU ARE NOT HOT, AND THAT LIPSTICK SUCKED -- and also Nicole Kidman needs to get her hair out of her face -- see Reese Witherspoon for a lesson in how long hair is done, you Botox-addicted freak), loved the Errol Morris short at the beginning, hated the Yay America montage, nearly had a breakdown thinking we'd missed the death montage (and then got very sad about Darren McGavin and Peter Boyle), acknowledged the force of nature that is The Clooney (the living embodiment of the word and the attribute "Handsome"), knew Scorsese was winning when the three tenors came out to present Best Director (yay!), loved Al Gore (and how genuinely chuffed Larry DiCaprio was to be hangin with him), was fascinated by the naked full-body shadow puppetry in spite of my lifelong hatred of things similar, LOVED the Jack Black/Will Ferrell/John C. Reilly musical number ("I was in both 'Boogie' and 'Talladega' Niiiiiights!"), adored Dame Helen Mirren, gave a sincere "Well played!" to Downey and his awesome new look, haaaaaaaaaated the tidbitty factoid shit they announced as each winner made his or her way to the stage, and of course, became completely enraged at the excessive overtime (which caused me to have to cancel Amazing Race, reschedule BSG for the Tuesday replay, and miss Law & Order: Criminal Intent because of said BSG Tuesday replay -- faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahq! -- and they were STILL doing "bits" and stupid shit like following ex-MTV-VJ-whatshisnuts around backstage when they were an HOUR OVER ALREADY. Blooooat.

And also! I won 3rd in the office Oscar pool -- ten fat American dollars to me! Suck it, Internets! Bring the March Madness signup sheet -- I got my THIRD-PLACE MOJO WORKIN!

Hijacked democracy at prices so low, they're INSAAANE!

This one's from a reader tip, folks -- the news that you, too, can buy a bunch of e-voting machines for what's left after buying a round at Starbucks for the gang on your way back from your morning trip to the ATM.

All the silly-ass excuses the proponents of these machines throw out -- they're encrypted! they're sealed! no one has access to the machines! the code is secure and sooper sekrit, we swear! what you see on the screen is totally your vote, and will be recorded and reported as such, honest Injun, just trust us! -- were completely laid waste by a bunch of Princeton kids in a matter of minutes, working on machines bought by their professor over the Internets.

So yeah, I'm sleepin' real easy over Election 2008 -- you?

The knights who say "Niii!"

Prince Harry, son of Diana and Charles, third in line for the British throne, has not only graduated from Sandhurst, an elite military academy, but is now headed for service in Iraq.

Chew on that one, Bush twins. And his dad didn’t even start this war, you useless bitches.

Maybe he’ll get a relatively cushy assignment, but the dude was trained as a fuckin tank commander, and is likely to be sent on recon missions — and besides, he’ll be serving, on the ground, in Iraq. IRAQ. And word is, he won’t get any special protection (partly because to do so would be to write “HIGH PROFILE TARGET” in giant red neon above his and his unit’s heads).

Now, this is a guy who really never has to do anygoddamnthing with himself in his whole life; HE IS A FUCKING PRINCE. He could, if he wanted, just sit on his ass in one of his family’s palaces, diddling the servants and getting shitfaced on champagne at the occasional charity whatnot until he dies. Prince Harry chose to do this insane shit — not drafted, not forced by his family (in fact, they’d’ve considered his military obligation pretty much fulfilled just by him going to Sandhurst, if he’d wanted it so), not coerced in any way.

Pretty ballsy, no?

The semester without REM cycles

OK, for some reason, this link to an evil and Wrong item called Clocky -- courtesy of dooce -- hucked me almost bodily into the fall of 1992. The walls of my cube were suddenly replaced with the cinderblock of the dorm room I shared with one K.L., a freak and total spasmoid of the first order (and I mean that in a bad way), and I recalled -- nay, lived! for a moment! -- the early mornings of that watershed first semester of freshman year.

Among her many other bizarre fantasies and confabulations, K.L. fancied herself a rower of crew, having been (allegedly) a Junior Olympic competitor in kayaking. This meant that she (allegedly) got up at 5:00 a.m. three mornings a week -- OF COLLEGE -- to go to some godforsaken part of Manhattan with the team to practice. She may -- MAY -- have actually gone thrice.

But all goddamned semester, the bitch most definitely set four -- FOUR -- alarm clocks for times ranging from 4:30 to 5:10. That's a.m., ante meridien, as in, IN THE MORNING. They'd ring -- sometimes right next to young Gleemonex's sleepy and/or hungover head in the top bunk, because K.L. moved them EVERY NIGHT to make it harder for her to snooze them and/or sleep straight through -- and they'd ring and ring and ring and ring and ring and rinnnnnnnnng.

And she wouldn't even get up. She'd torture my ass for over an hour, most mornings, with the ringing and the snoozing, and the lurching all over the room knocking stuff over in the dark trying to find the clocks and hit snooze, and the throwing herself back onto her bunk with the greatest possible force and maximum shakeage of Gleemonex, and then finally decide, fuck it, she's missed the van to the river, and she'll go work out later.

Homicidal rage, people. Homi-fucking-cidal.

Oh, and there was also her high school friend and fellow alleged rower of crew, a Russian guy (not her boyfriend, another person entirely, whom she'd get bizzy wit on the lower bunk while I "slept" on the top bunk) with no social skills named Orgo or Olga or Oly or some shit, whom she invited, sans discussion with me, to bunk on our floor on crew nights because he lived off campus -- that motherfucker was there 2-3 times a week, smelling up the place, taking up the entire floor of our tiny double, and participating in the alarm clock derby.

I was getting the shakes from this, the DTs -- my hair was falling out, my sentences became gibberish, I tried earplugs and discussions with K.L. and all manner of remedies, and nothing worked. I don't even remember why this all finally came to an end, but mercifully, it did, and a couple of weeks into the spring semester, I moved down the hall into my best friend's room (her roommate having dropped out to get married, if I recall), K.L. moved to another floor to be closer to some crew jock she was infatuated with, and life resumed a little normalcy.

But I came so close to killing her in the wee hours, Internets -- thisclose, I swear to you. If she had had Clocky, I'd be blogging this FROM JAIL.

Keep your girls off the pole ..

(The first of probably several posts inspired by perhaps the single most perfect hour of television in the whole current lineup, Friday Night Lights. You should totally be watching it, and if you aren't, you are MISSING OUT and do not make me have to tell you twice.)

OK, so in the most recent episode of this show, Julie and Tyra have to stop by the strip club -- which Tyra calls "the palace of women's low self-esteem" -- where Tyra's older sister works (place is called the "Landing Strip," hee) so Tyra can collect some money sis owes her. They pop in through the back door (shut up) and Tyra goes about badgering sis for the money while the other strippers do their makeup and loll around waiting to go on. Julie's clearly uncomfortable but trying to be so kewl about it all, because Tyra is the slightly-dangerous older, cooler friend who has sort of taken Julie in, and Julie wants some of that badassery to rub off on her even though it scares her. So Julie's un-BF, Matt Saracen (they're on the outs at the moment), calls her cell for like the third time, and finally ignoring Tyra's advice to let his cheese hang in the wind awhile longer, she answers. He says he has to talk to her, so she relents and tells him he can meet her there (saying "the, um, the Landing Strip?" with as much dignity as she can muster). Long story short, he shows up, friend Landry in tow (or towing HIM, actually, because Matt has no car and Landry always has to drive him around). So Matt starts trying to talk to her about serious relationshippy stuff, and she stops him, saying, "Can we not talk about this here? It's kind of gross and depressing."

More stuff happens, awesome stuff because this show RULES, but "It's kind of gross and depressing" is what I'm talking about here. When she said that, I could totally smell that stripper dressing room -- smoke machine smoke, B.O., cigarettes, synthetic strawberry scent, unwashed flooring, hairspray and despair.

I've only been to a strip club featuring ladies one time (dragged there on a co-ed bachelor/bachelorette party), and that was Enough for me for a lifetime. Bad juju all around. Total embarrassment, sadness, inappropriate bug-eyed hilarity, the feeling that the upholstery of the chairs -- indeed, every surface -- was harboring organisms of a distinctly sordid nature. (You should see the grimace I'm wearing as I type this, and it was three and a half years ago.) The girls' bodies were pretty good, but not as good as I expected from this "upscale" joint, and their eyes were just ... dead. Ugh. Couldn't stand to look too long, honestly. And of course there was that smell.

I've also been to a strip club featuring the gents -- this one time, when I was 18, and a friend turning 18 wanted to go to one for her birthday. So we all loaded up in an SUV, with a bunch of wine coolers and the makins for whiskey sours, all of which we drank all the way to exurban Dallas (the club was called "La Bare," I think?) because the club wouldn't serve us alcohol. Everybody but me and one other girl piled out of the rig and into the club; we stayed behind to down a few more Bartles & Jaymeses, me because I was nervous and terribly ill-at-ease about the whole thing, and her ... I think just to keep me company (you'd think we'd've known better than to underage-drink in a parking lot, considering she and I were among a group that was arrested for same in another county not a year prior to this, but kids are stupid). Finally we went in, found our friends, and endured an hour or so of huge, beefy, hairless, oiled-up men gyrating in banana hammocks to the worst music of our time, at a deafening volume, while "the ladies" shrieked their heads off all around us. And of course there was that smell ... Birthday Girl was having The Best Time Ever, and everyone else seemed to be having fun, but me -- oh MAN. I was so embarrassed, so mortified, so squicked out by the whole thing -- it was the unsexiest night of my whole life.

Half a dozen awesome: Cure songs

(In no particular order)

--Wrong Number
--Fascination Street
--Catch
--The Blood
--Killing an Arab
--Three Imaginary Boys

And the strange dust lands on your hands, and on your face

After what we pansy-assed Californians consider a frigid couple-three weeks, it's 70 degrees right now in downtown San Francheesy. And it's the day before a holiday weekend (though not for us, because my company, while otherwise great, is stingy bitches with the paid official holidays).

People are bagging off work right and left -- there are tumbleweeds in my acre of the cube farm; people are taking 45 minute "coffee breaks" to the Starbucks that's 40 feet away as the pigeon flies; people are playing with MS Paint and sending inept bitmap artwork (featuring tumbleweeds) to each other all over the place. Friends who work elsewhere have already bagged off work, and are calling us poor cubies and urging us to bag off too.

My friend the drummer/Living Lebowski sent me a mini-movie on my cell phone at 2:37 p.m. showing the bartender at our favorite cantina putting a fresh margarita on the bar in front of him. I texted him back: "You bastard."

Rocket! Yea-ah! Satellite of looove!

Well, now that the Festival of Ridonculous is over -- aka Valentine's Day -- I thought I'd show up late to the party as always and jabber about it.

I've always thought of Feb. 14 as at best an excuse to eat too much and abuse me some alcohol (bonus points if it's a weeknight), and at worst a cliched and entirely cynical marketing job and cheaply-made-Chinese-crap sale. I can't imagine being torqued up about not having a date or being in a couple for the Festival of Ridonculous, and I also can't imagine going to any trouble at all to make it a Speshul Day for My Beloved (or him going to any trouble about it for me).

I mean, have you ever tried going out to dinner on Festival of Ridonculous Day? What a nightmare. I accidentally went on a first date on Feb. 14 once, back in high school -- we'd made the date for Friday, neither of us realizing it was Festival of Ridonculous Day. So Friday arrived, and I was like, "Oh, crap -- now what?" I got ahold of one of those kid valentines, you know the ones, that are like 2X3 with little cheap envelopes and some sort of licensed character on them, the kind you're supposed to give to every kid in your second-grade class? Yeah, so I found one of those, wrote his name on it, and gave it to him in the car -- he thought it was hilarious, but then got anxious because he hadn't gotten anything for me, and I was all, "DO NOT WORRY ABOUT IT, bro." And finally he believed me. So then we went to see Wayne's World, and then waited for a table at Chili's for like TWO HOURS. Chili's -- fucking CHILI'S -- had a two-hour wait. At least they didn't have one of those scamtastic "special" V-day menus with like a triple-priced prix fixe set dinner, ugh.

But so anyway, Mr. Gleemonex and I have been together quite some time -- I belive this was our 15th Festival of Ridonculous together -- and we have our "thing" down really well: Good food, booze, and what have you. We always enjoy the hell out of ourselves, and we don't have to shoulder past insecure overdressed sorority chicks and tourists to do it. I told him if he ever buys me jools (like that shit from Kay or whatever) I will know he is cheating on me, and I'm totally serious about that.

Be Mine, Festival of Ridonculous-tine!

Reasons Why TiVo Exists: The Grammys

The Police rawked. Mr. Gleemonex and I will be paying whatever it takes (sources say $225 for the good seats) to see them on their tour this summer.

Prince just can't help himself -- he kicks more ass than you've ever even seen.

There are at least five gunshot-destroyed televisions being carted out of mansions today -- the members of the Eagles must've stroked out when they heard the American Idol reject and the useless Brawndo-suckled cuntry singer [on edit: the stroke-inducingly-badly-named "Rascal Flatts"] butchering "Life in the Fast Lane."

Why were all the women presenters A)spray-painted orangey-brown, and B)sweating balls?

Bitch, please

I can't get outraged over this shit -- it just annoys me and wears me out. Two items of note today:

--Some NY legislator with a nanny complex and no dumbass filter wants to ban people using iPods and cell phones in crosswalks. What are we supposed to do, take them off and fold them up every time we get to a fuckin street corner? How are you planning to police this? Doesn't NYC have a couple or three slightly more pressing problems than idiots who think the laws of physics (i.e. human vs. automobile) don't apply to them when they're in their invisible happy place with a phone or music?

--Ooooh, naughty, naughty Prince! That silhouetted part of his performance (which by the way, was fucking cool -- in fact, the whole thing RAWKED) -- the one where his guitar sorta looked like it was coming out of his junkular region as if it were long, curved, pointy, barbed, erect junk? LET'S ALL FREAK RIGHT THE FUCK OUT! THINK OF THE CHILLLLDRRENNNNNNN! MY EEEEEYYYEES! NOW I AM IMPURE AND WON'T GET IN TO HEAVEN! OH, THE HUMANITY!

How'm I supposed to cure a hangover NOW?

Son of a bitch. The inexorable gentrification of the Upper Upper West Side has claimed another victim: La Rosita.

Internets, back when I was in skool there, it was less than four dollars for a big-ass plate of yellow rice, black beans, two eggs, Cuban toast, a thimbleful of OJ, and a damn fine cup of cafe con leche. It saved many a bag-o-dicks hungover morning, and fueled many an all-night paper-writing marathon, and it was a must-hit destination every time I've been back to the East Coast since graduation. It fucking RULED.

And it fucking kills me to use the past tense here. FUCK.

"Are you tryin to tell me Jesus Christ can't hit a curveball?"

The best thing about February 5 is: Only nine days till pitchers and catchers report.

And now, a slice of awesome from a guy who won't have to report till a little later:

"I want to be remembered as someone who had a lot of respect for the game, his teammates and opponents, and I want to be remembered as a winner. But most importantly I want to be remembered as a Yankee." - Derek Jeter

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book ...

Oh jeez, Saint Michael's book just got bought. He gets a $25K (Canadian) advance, and this adjective-and-adverb-riddled piece of smeg's going to be added to "the fall lineup" with "only minor edits."

AS. IF.

I don't even know where to start, with the total ridiculousness of this scenario. For one thing, even pretending it IS the Great Canadian Novel, WHERE IS HIS AGENT IN ALL OF THIS? They wouldn't send any kind of contract directly to him -- that shit all goes through your AGENT, which this purple-prose-scribblin' twit appears not to have.

This is seriously like some 12-year-old -- naive about such matters as agents and contracts and edits and politics and money and the whole lurching grinding apparatus of the publishing world -- some 12-year-old thinking that if they just have the moxie to send their MS directly to the President of their Bestest Most Favorite Publishing House, he or she will read it, love it, and make you the richest and famousest young writer in the whole wide world!

And as stupid as this would be in any case, it's absolutely inexcusable coming from someone who's been in the publishing world for 25 frickin years. Lynn, have you had a rough blow to the head recently? Are you letting your 6th-grade neighbor write for you these days? WTF?

All hail the mighty state

Internets, I want to share some good news with y'all today: My State of Origin, Texass, has become the first of fiddy to require that young girls get vaccinated against the sexually transmitted virus that causes cervical cancer.

Yes, Texass, the state in which abstinence-only sex ed is the rule (not coincidentally leading to one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the nation [PDF]), the state in which the entire chapter on human sexuality was torn neatly out of the health books used by young Gleemonex's state-mandated Health Ed class in public high school. THAT Texass.

Governor Rick Perry has signed an executive order to this effect, and the requirement will kick in in the fall of 2008. Amen!

Now, the nationwide, state-by-state effort to enact legislation requiring this vaccine is bankrolled by Merck (the makers of the vaccine, called Gardasil) -- Big Pharma, yo -- which leaves Gov. Goodhair's motives less than pure. But the Gov is still going to take a whole lot of misogynist, unreasoned and unreasonable aggro bullshit from his wingnut constituents for it. And in Texass, that group is small neither in number nor in influence. It's a risk, so good on him for, well, staying bought (Merck contributed to his campaign and to PACs that lobby the TX lege).

I'm just so glad to see this happening that I'm not going to angst out over how it came to be. Now on to the other 49 ...

Mustn't confuse hair with moral fiber

Gav, Gav, Gav. How could you?

With an entire city -- nay, the entire population of the Bay Area -- more or less at your disposal, many of whom are NOT A)married and B)working for you, you had to saddle up on this broad.

You dumbass.

Chutes 'n ladders

Back in the day, we had this metal swing/slide/monkey-bar set in the back yard. My brother hit upon the idea of greasing the slide with Crisco, and then -- sitting upon a sheet of waxed paper -- having someone (me) push him with all their might, in order to get the fastest ride down. Man, you could fly.

That's the image that sprang to mind when I caught a show called "Kids by the Dozen," on TLC (their site sucks, so I can't find anything but the schedule, no show information). TiVo hadn't grabbed anything good that day, so I hit "live TV" (which I never do), and there it was. This ep was on the Jeub family, of Colorado -- mom, dad, and thirteen kids. Only one set of twins (the current babies). That lady has given birth twelve times so far!

Leaving aside the issue of the fundie Christianity that leads these families to embiggen themselves till mom's equipment gives out, and that whole scary-ass "Quiver Full" movement, which chills me to the bone -- I have to wonder why anyone would ever do this. This is not a family -- it's a litter. As parents, you don't fuckin know all those kids -- there aren't enough hours in the day, even if you homeschool and home-church (which they all do). It's a person-factory, no more and no less. I can't imagine my scattered attention span dealing well with, say, three kids, much less double digits. The oldest kids will never really know their younger siblings, either -- same principle, that you don't have enough mental space for all that. Plus, what about college, travel, meeting people outside the family circle? As insular as these families are, that kind of thing will never happen, and they'll never meet anyone who isn't exactly like them. Hellooooo, inbreeding.

Which is to say: This is some fucked-up shit, y'all.