Is this thing on?

Hey Internets, just wanted to let you know I'm not, like, giving that last post extra airtime because I think it kicks so much ass -- I am in Texass for Thanksgiving with the Gleemonex fam, and I'm not getting much Internets time with you all, my beloveds. Can't promise another post before Monday, so y'all talk amongst y'selves for awhile and I'll catch you on the flip side. Don't y'all do any work between now and then, you hear?

Makes Francine Paschal look like Harper Fucking Lee.

Girl next to me on the bus was reading a book – a “trade paperback,” as we say in the biz, not a romance novel, and my eye fell upon this actual, apparently non-ironic sentence:

Nikki(1) blushed, thinking of Eric’s devil-may-care attitude(2), bad-boy smile(3) and chiseled body.(4)”

Wait a minute. Did Michael Patterson write this?

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(1) It’s always Nikki, isn’t it?
(2) "Devil-may-care”? Really? In a contemporary “novel”?
(3) Come ON.
(4) I just bet. And considering that the setup is that it’s been 10 years since she’s seen him, I wouldn’t hold out too terribly much hope for the chiseling. “Bad boys” don’t tend to age well, sister.

What is the frequency, Kenneth?

Madam, you smell of multiple cats and a too-infrequently-changed mega-maxi pad, besides which on the way home I am often treated to your side of a neverending cellular-phone conversation in re: what is or is not in the oven that you may or may not make for dinner for a person or persons who may or may not wait up for you and whether they have or have not given yet a third party his or her medications today. So don’t get all shirty with me, asking if I want to switch seats when Mister Chatty Motherfucker won’t stop his dain-bramaged babbling even after he and I are seated (deliberately on my part) on opposite sides of you and I settle in for what I fondly hope is twenty minutes of swaying, jostling near-sleep on this goddamned crazy-train bus.

Quadra-Question Monday

1) Must we – really, must we – allow Fred Armisen to go on living?

2) Have y’all read this? You should. Sample quote: “ …and legalizing gay marriage, while it may annoy those people, will not force them to meet any gays, eat any gay wedding cake, RSVP to any gay invitations, or otherwise get any gay cooties on themselves.”

3) Is there any organized group of persons that is a bigger bunch of economy-sized douchebags than MENSA?

4) Where is the smiting? I was told by the people writing in to my hometown newspaper that there would be rains of fire, rending of garments, gnashing of teeth, dogs and cats living together (total anarchy), attacks by jihadis and the killer undead and whatnot if Obama were elected, and, well, I’m still here. I ain’t seen anybody Raptured up, either, so I don’t think it’s the End of Days – but maybe that’s actually scheduled for Inauguration Day, when he’s sworn in on the Koran, wearing a dashiki, exchanging "terrorist fist-jabs" with Seekrit Black Panther Michelle, and refusing to salute the flag (which he fears and loathes) all the while?

I like my coffee like I like my men.

How hard is it to pretend that there’s liquid in the paper coffee cup that you, an actor, hand to another actor onscreen? Seriously. You do this job for a living, so you get paid to pretend stuff semi-accurately all day, and as a bipedal humanoid who requires water to sustain life, presumably you are familiar – if not specifically with a Starbucks-style coffee cup full of hot caffeinated beverage material, capped with a plastic top which has a drinking hole and an air hole in it – at least with the concept of liquid in a cup and the general physical properties thereof, w/r/t sloshing, spillage, heat conduction, &c. So for us, the viewing public, couldja please, for the love of Shatner, go Method, draw on all that vast life experience, and act like there’s some fucking coffee in there, instead of handing it to the other actor like it’s a flashlight or a relay baton? Thanks.

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This post brought to you by the increasingly douchey and useless Rob Morrow, who continues to crap all over the legacy of Northern Exposure (which, in retrospect, was clearly good despite him, not because of him, and anyway I always liked Ed and Chris way better except I shared Fleischman’s NYC obsession) with his edgeless, chemistry-free performance in Numbers, a show which owes its place on the Gleemonex household TiVo solely to the tenacious grip of one David “Luck Be a Lady” Krumholtz. The incident in question involved the numbnuts Morrow bringing coffee for himself and Bunk from The Wire in one of this show’s endless stand-and-chat-on-the-aerial-walkway-outside-the-FBI-building scenes. But yay, Bunk getting work, eh?

Fashion plates / [something something something] / fashion plates

Y’all, my hair, at the advanced age of 34 and ¾, is finally pretty much exactly like I want it: straight, reasonably full, smooth, longish and a nice color (thanks to a bit of warming up at the salon … the greys began advancing somewhere around age 28, and until I have a nice snowy overall thing going on, or else a kickass robust Bonnie Raitt streak, I’m going to keep on with the rinse).

But so it took a long time to get here, and during the teen years, there were some … well, I was going to say “missteps,” but these were tragedies. Behold my shame:

Hair Tragedies of My Past

1) The spiral perm. This I convinced myself I needed, during my obsession-with-Major-League-and-consequently-with-Rene-Russo phase. It was the New Thing in perms – there’s always a New Thing in perms, with much weeping and angst following – and I wanted those awesome low-key ringlets of hers. Well. Yeah. So, no. Plus also it lasted about a week. My hair wants what it wants, and it wants to be UNCURLY goddammit.

2) The Sun-In episode. My hair is a sort of brown, which can lighten considerably when exposed to long summers of actual sun and chlorine and whatnot. But I am an impatient girl at times, and round about 7th grade, me and my friend Julie W. got heavy into the Sun-In. Her hair ended up a passable blond; mine, a strange orangey … something or other. There are some odd xmas photos of me with this hair and some green eyeshadow, about which the less said the better.

3) The perm that only took on one side. Lotta hair, only one home perm kit. Ma Gleemonex tried, Shatner bless ‘er, but it was not to be. Too bad that was the year I was in the newspaper and on TV a lot.

4) The Regis Hairstylists debacle at the Golden Triangle Mall. What can I say – I was twelve and hadn’t been to a salon since my great-grandmother quit the biz, and their ads made them seem really cool and hip. There were bangs involved, and layers. Also mousse. I can barely think of it without physically cringing, over 22 years later.

5) The year of the crimping iron. Sixth grade, I think, and I was hardly alone in my maniacal pursuit of MAXIMUM CRIMPAGE. Particularly in AWESOME PATTERNS. This may or may not have coincided with the summer of those weird little hair-paint mascara wands (I had a three pack of hot pink, screaming yellow and electric blue). We all looked like tiny little whorey music-video escapees with a thing for Grace Jones.

Good times. Good times.

Half a Dozen Awesome: Things That are Fucking Awesome

I am in a kickass mood these days, what with President-Elect Obama coolin' it up all over the place. So, for a happy Friday, enjoy these, my preciousssssesss:

1) will.i.am on Anderson Cooper/CNN on Election Night ... via hologram!!! They didn't explain it or talk about the fact of it, they were just like, "Oh hey, here's will.i.am via hologram. Hey man, what's up?" I hereby declare that any appearance I ever do on any kind of televised media will henceforth be via fucking HOLOGRAM. People are going to start to wonder whether I do, in fact, exist or am I some kind of foulmouthed avatar or am I from the future or what. It's going to rule.

2) Palin 2012. Oh my god, y'all, that is fucking HYSTERICAL! Please, Republickans. PLEASE do this. It will be the funniest Presidential race in history. Y'all won't carry a single precinct. Except maybe my own personal hometown, because them peoples is crazy. And frankly, most of them are suspicious of anyone who DOES know that Africa is a continent and that the countries comprising North America are us, Canada & Mexico.

3) LL Bean Wicked Good Slippers. I just got mine. They're red, they're lined with shearling, they are the best $49.95 I've spent in a long long time.

4) The Happy Fun Box. Y'all, teevee is really good right now, even though there'll be no more Mad Men for like a billion more years (aka nine months or so). Two particular mentions, if I may: I love 30 Rock with the openhearted love you can give a warm soft Labrador puppy, only it's more verbal and cerebral and ... just, goddamn I love that show. And Friday Night Lights (exclusively on HD Seekrit Channel $%--niner Whiskey Hotel Charlie Bravo): Shatner bless you kids. Can we just pretend Season 2 never happened? I don't even care about the timeline fudgery that has Saracen & Julie (S1 sophomores) and Riggins & Lyla & Tyra (S1 seniors) all currently seniors, with Street & Smash (also S1 seniors) both done graduated ... who fucking cares? Welcome back!

5) This article on Salon, from my GenX to the goddamn Boomers, essentially saying that with Obama's election, we get it now. But the best part is how the writer really gets us: "We aren't joiners. We don't like carrying signs. We tend to disagree, if only on principle." "We went to church and learned about God's divine plan every Sunday, but all it took was one Dr. Seuss cartoon about an entire world that existed on a speck of dust, and our belief in God was deconstructed in an instant. Our childhoods were one long existential crisis. We ate Happy Meals while watching the space shuttle blow into tiny bits." "Things were much worse now, worse than ever -- but we'd always expected that they would be, eventually. That's one of the few rewards of being deeply pessimistic, of being trained to lower our expectations, of living in a constant state of distrust and learned helplessness." There's more, and it's really pretty uplifting. Read it, y'all!

6) Satsuma Mandarins from Capay Organic Farms (but you can get them anywhere). Heaven in a tiny orange seedless easy-to-peel globe.

And crown thy good / with brotherhood / from sea to shining sea

Internets, I have to tell you: I wept actual tears of joy last night. Little old foul-mouthed cynical black-hearted me, blubbering like a loon, starting when they called Ohio and going pretty much right straight through Obama’s awesome, awesome speech. I am so thrilled, it’s hard to put it into words – or at least, words that don’t make me sound like a sappy-ass fool. Conditioned as I was to expect the rug pulled out from under me (see: 2000, 2004; see also: shenanigans; see also: crushing/bewildering defeat pertaining thereto), I half-expected even to wake up to headlines about McCain rescinding his concession, or some nightmarish vote challenge in Pennsylvania or similar horrific shit. But it’s true, it’s really really true:

PRESIDENT. OBAMA.

Gives you goosebumps, don’t it? In one day, the whole world changed – we shucked off that scaly skin we’ve been wearing around for eight long, dark years, we told the rest of humanity that we’re ready to join them again, we’re ready to be our best selves, we’re tired of the ceaseless grinding shit-machine we’d become and we as a nation are transformed. Obama is not magic, he’s not perfect, he’s not God – but he is a great leap forward for hope, for change, for the future. Holy SHIT, it feels good to feel good again!

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But this joy, unfortunately, is not the unalloyed variety. I speak, of course, of the loathsome Proposition 8, the willful entrenchment of vile and hateful bigotry into our state’s Constitution. I can’t walk around grinning my face off and doing my little happy dance about Obama, lest someone think I’m celebrating Prop 8’s (all-but-certain) passage, and I can’t mope around all glum, lest someone think I’m mourning McCain’s loss. It’s weird around my office, here in SF, among my co-workers – several of whom have married their partners recently in this window of opportunity, fearing they might not have the chance later.

It is astonishing to me that so many of the two-thirds of Californians who voted for Obama – a vote for change, progress, inclusion – simultaneously voted to strip a basic right from their co-workers, neighbors, friends and family members. It’s so ugly, so cruel and unnecessary – I’m so disappointed in my fellow Californians, and so heartsick for the people whose lives and marriages are directly affected by this loss of equality. It’s ridiculous, and it sucks, and I hate that so much of the energy behind it came from out-of-state religionists (it’s all “states’ rights, yay!” until it’s something THOSE motherfuckers don’t like, ain’t it?). Mr. Gleemonex blames “that jackass Newsom” (whose grandstanding “whether they like it or not” clip featured prominently in a lot of Pro-8 ads), and I can’t say I disagree; a lady who rides the bus with me furiously demanded that any church that posted signs, paid for mailers, or mentioned it from the pulpit should have its tax-exempt status revoked immediately (I definitely second that!).

I’m trying desperately to find some silver lining – I’m assuming there will be legal challenges, and that some lucky couple will eventually find their way to the U.S. Supreme Court (HHL, is that how it would work?), and maybe – MAYBE – the right to marry will go national in one blow, and these fucknuts will have won the battle (Prop 8) but lost the war.

We have to hope. And with President Obama at the helm, there is reason to hope.

May Shatner bless us, every one.

Commencing countdown, engines on

So for you, my beloveds, I am trying very hard to keep focused on important topics such as People I Just Don’t Have Time For (Madonna, porn “stars” as a concept, the new douchetards who took over what used to be Ebert & Roeper’s show, people who use the word “pap” to denote “paparazzi”), Injustices of the World (King of the Hill cancelled while piles of unfunny bullshittery like Family Guy keep schlepping forward), Things That Are Awesome (the 1976 Lafite Rothschild we drank this weekend, courtesy of friends who know people), and Shit-Stirring (some high-school girl wrote in to the hometown paper about how she’s going to do the Silent Day anti-choice protest with her little friend, so I had to jump in and foul the waters full of people saying what a courageous and wonderful thing that was for her to do).

But this election – my god, Internets. It’s T-minus 36 hours, give or take, before the crushing ball of anxiety in my upper chestal region either lets up for the first time in years, turned to vapor and exhaled on a happy drunken cloud of jubilant celebration, or becomes a charred, stinking thing that slowly chokes the very life out of me. Odds are good for the former – but the latter won’t be off the table till a certain mean old unprincipled asshole makes a certain phone call conceding what’s been apparent for weeks, if not months. I’m worried about shenanigans, and about the people desperate and vile and scary enough to pull them. I’m unable to look at political stories, news about the election, whatever scaly, tentacled bloody horrors the Republicans are inventing even as I blog. I just can’t deal. Tomorrow night cannot come soon enough.

NO ON 8. NO ON 4. YES ON OBAMA.