June 23 '06

I'm going to tackle something serious today, which anyone who ever stops by here knows I rarely do. But this issue is simply too weighty and important for me, a citizen of not only the United States but of the planet Earth (I consider myself a student of the great philosopher Angelina Jolie, and I hope and pray that very soon she and her man-meat figure out which country will produce a child that will mesh with the delicious rainbow of cultures currently residing in her household. To you naysayers I say this: Her remarks in that regard were not racist! How dare you imply such a thing, the woman is as close to a saint as I'm sure I'll see in my lifetime) to ignore; it speaks to the irresponsibility and blatant disregard of the truth and all that is right by the newspaper.

Earlier this week, the Minneapolis Star/Tribune ran a recipe for something called "Black Pepper Brownies", along with the promise that said brownies were a chewy, dark chocolaty, pepper-infused delight.

I'm ashamed and embarrassed to say I fell for it hooklineandsinker and I sit in front of this keyboard alone, afraid and short 6 eggs (I doubled it) but compelled to speak out. If I can save one person from wasting 27 dollars on ingredients for a recipe that in a just world would be called "Big Brown Brick", well then I will feel victorious.

I'll be honest; I fear the repurcussions of my actions...I've never been particularly brave. But at least I'll be able to sleep at night, knowing I did my part to expose this great molestation of the truth.

Crying out in the wilderness like a muskrat caught in a barbed wire fence....my voice will be heard....if only by that fat kid who erected the fence a couple of years ago because his dad thought he was playing too much ps2, and now he hangs around it way too often hoping small animals get tangled in it. His folks don't know what to think.

I'm sure I must've done something wrong, even though I followed the recipe faithfully. I mean yeah, I doubled it, but it didn't specify "Don't double it, doubling it makes it turn into something you might use to prop a door open or try to chop in half at karate class." However, I may not know which sitcom character is most like me but I will admit when something in the kitchen goes terribly wrong there's a pretty good chance the blame belongs on my shoulders. It just makes me so mad! These damn brownies took 7 hours to make and it was all for naught. And you know how when you're hankering for brownies, you get your hopes up and nothing else will do...curses! Curses!

On disc 3 of season 2 Rescue Me. Soooo GREAT.

June 21 '06

Saw "The Lake House" last night. Terrible....I know, you're so surprised you just lost control of your bladder, but please don't send me your dry cleaning bills. Urine comes out in the washing machine.

"The Lake House" is a blatant rip-off of The Time Traveler's Wife, which I LOVED. Same basic idea, but with all the good parts/ parts that make any sense removed, and without the charming characters.

Sandra Bullock looks gawgeous but plays a draggy mope no man in his right mind would find attractive; I think she smiles once the whole movie. Keanu Reeves plays a plank who wears turtleneck sweaters, a slight variation of his other characters, a plank who wears a trench coat (The Matrix 1,2,and 3) and a plank who used to be a star quarterback from Ohio State (Point Break, The Replacements).

I have to admit there were moments that got me, and even with Keanu's crap acting I felt like with just a little more effort and thought, it could've been good. Look, when it comes to sap, I'm an incredibly easy mark, but it doesn't take much for me to release the hounds, either. It's a fine line.

Anyoots, Sandra's a doctor (Of course. She's smart and thoughtful and cares about people! But her love life is a mess, poor dear,) who rents a lake house, and when she moves out, she leaves a note in the mailbox for the new owner to please forward her mail. He writes her back, and leaves his note to her... in his mailbox. What?? Why would he do that?

Why would anyone invite a complete stranger to come root through their mailbox? In reality, he would've read the note, tossed it, and possibly made a halfhearted effort to forward her mail if he remembered to. But no, he writes her back, and then she writes him back again, a somewhat mean note that she signs, "By the way, idiot, it's 2006, has been all year," and again, she drives all the way out to the lake house to stick it in his mailbox.

Has anyone ever heard of stamps? Or better yet, email? And if she has time to do that, why doesn't she drive to the offices of her respective utilities and straighten out the mail situation? And when he reads her snotty note, why doesn't he crumple it up, mutter "Crazy bitch, eff you and your stupid mail" like I and probably you and anyone with a busy life and an ounce of normalcy would do?

After a few more of these bizarre exchanges, it dawns on them: He lives in 2004, she lives in 2006! My God, they're obviously perfect for each other!

Romantic entanglements, heartbreaking scenes of anguish and longing and a few Jane Austen references ensue.

No explanation is ever given as to why they live in different years, or whether or not when they finally meet (oh, like you were gonna see it) he actually lives in 2008, or how he got stuck in 2004 anyway or why, for God's sake, she never just flipping looks him up in 2006. Wouldn't that have been simple? "Hi, remember me? You fell in love with me two years ago. Wanna get married?"

Or if something had happened to him (Oh c'mon, you know something happens to him!) wouldn't she just find out and tell him? "Hey, I tried to look you up and guess what? You're dead. The public record shows you were mowed down by a car on Valentine's Day, so stay home that day and I'll see you in two years. Oh, and put all your money on the Patriots in '05. We are gonna Partaaaaay!!!"

You might be thinking, "But if they did all those things, there wouldn't have been a movie." In this case, that probably wouldn't have been such a bad thing. Besides, the characters do all those things in Time Traveler's Wife and it still works, because Audrey Niffenegger probably took more than twenty-four minutes to write it, unlike whatever dink wrote this piece of dung.

Having said all that, I didn't hate it, and if I'm being honest it's probably because for all his woodeness, Keanu is cute and I like looking at him. Sue me.

I'm at Walgreen's yesterday and I see that at the checkout they're selling these devices called Angel Alert; it's a two piece alarm, half of which you attach to your kid and half that you carry, and if your kid gets too far away it beeps. I have one, and I used it all the time when we were traveling through a foreign city last year, but seeing it made me remember something John said about mine: "Angel Alert: Because why should you have to watch your child?"

I also bought some Dawn, and I'm happy to see they finally stopped with the "antibacterial" nonsense which did nothing but make stronger germs. Any neat freak worth her salt knows that you can't out-brawn germs and the best way to defeat them is through trickery and humiliation. Er, wait...is that germs or rabbits? Or high school girls? I can't remember

June 15 '06

(The following was actually written last night, as I sat in front of the tube with one ice pack on my back, the other on my knee.)

Watching Matt Lauer interview Britney Spears. The whole gist is that she wants everyone to stop picking on her. OK fine, lady, you win, but answer me this: if you want people to stop saying you're a trashy redneck, why are you on TV pouring out of an outfit that was too small for you three sizes ago? And why are you made-up like Tammy Faye Bakker? And why are you sweating so much? And why do you have a mustache? For rizzle, she does. I know she's preggie and stuff but that didn't stop her from bleaching her hair Courtney Love white, so why not go the distance and bleach that caterpillar crawling under her nose?

More off-putting is Matt, though, who is practically talking baby talk to her. And he's wearing these super sad loafers with no socks and jeans. Her fake eyelash is coming off. So far she's said, "Love conquers all" and "Where there's a will, there's a way." Wow. Is that Britney Spears or Winston Churchill?

I'm only watching this because Windfall is on next and I CAN'T WAIT TO WELCOME LUKE PERRY BACK TO PRIME TIME!

Britney just said "Everything happens for a reason", and Matt is back in the studio, signing off, wearing some sort of pimp costume.

Interior: A dorm room. Miserable looking co-ed to her roommate:

"Ugh...I'm so bloated...finals make me eat like crud..."(she looks over at a half-eaten pizza) "I haven't taken a dump in a week. How do you stay so regular?"

Roommate: "I eat this weird yogurt, Activia. It's got active cultures and a bunch of other stuff that keeps me running to the can all day long. I feel great!"

(Cue animated segment showing yellow arrows going downward on a human belly, in case we didn't understand what the co-eds were talking about.)

Activia. You'll crap your brains out all through finals.

Sailing was cancelled today on the grounds thunderstorms theatened to hit town, and of course they never materialized, but nevertheless I was stuck entertaining the babes when I was supposed to be entertaining myself. No big deal, hard to complain about what turned out to be a simply spectacular day spent splashing in our big fat blow-up pool with a revolving cast of neighbor kids.

Before they could use it, however, I had to empty it of the sludge left over from the day before, that last three inches that simply will not come out of it's absurdly inadequete drain.

So I rolled it up on one side, managed to get it alllllllmost flipped over until those innocent three inches of muck pooled together and it suddenly weighed more than a Rhino. That I was now trapped under.

Putitdown putitdown OHGODPUTITDOWN!!

Oh Nelly. Whew! Guess all those core exercises haven't really been doing the trick..oof....Catch my breath, roll up my sleeves and try again.

Heeeeeeeeeeeeeeave hooooooooo putitdownputitdown PUTITDOWN!

I slammed it back down, but not before backing out of my flip-flops, which were now trapped underneath it. I was also completely covered in the wet dirt and grass that had been stuck to the underside of this big slimy beast. I didn't care too much about either of those things, though, since I was a tad more concerned with finding and re-installing my kidneys, which had blown out my back.

My eyes are watering (but not so much that I can't see the stars swimming in front of them) I'm clutching at my back, I'm using words I didn't even know I knew and guess what? The gate of my privacy fence was open, and the construction workers currently erecting a house directly across from me are all watching my little wrestling match/dance of pain curiously. Thanks, fellas.

I stomped over and shut the gate, called Molly and her girlfriends over and dang it if I didn't give it one more try...I lifted one side up, barked "NOW" and the little girl posse ran under it to buttress it up, then I lifted the other side and pushed like the fate of the Intergalactic Alliance depended on it.

It worked; that mother flipped over and in the process catapulted three tiny girls across the yard, who all thought it was the greatest ride ever. They spent the next four hours splashing and laughing, and I sat in a chair and drank ice water and prayed for the spasms to stop. I do have a nice tan going now, though.

Windfall on...not great.

June 12 '06

Had the fam over for dinner Saturday night, all 387 of them. The next day my neighbor mentioned, in a slightly hurt voice, she noticed we were having a party.

"No, not a party, just my brothers and sisters," I said.

And their 10 million kids. It was great fun, it always is, and as usual after a while we all wondered why were desecrating perfectly good tequila with Margarita mix. The next morning it looked like John Belushi and Johnny Depp threw a joint New Year's Eve party at my place. The kids were lovely good helpers, though, and by noon all was clean and therefore good in my universe. The outatowners are gone now, so I can dry out and concentrate on other things, like laundry and my credit card debt.. I hate when they leave.

Molly also celebrated her 5th birthday, and she woke up on the big day (which we've been counting down since Christmas) and said quite convincingly, "It's my birthday. Everyone has to follow my directions!" That is all she's ever wanted, after all. She got a flapper outfit, which she loves, and a bike with training wheels which she also loves and rides dressed in the flapper outfit. She buzzes down the block like a sparkly, feathery pink comet. Last night, Mike's sister came over at about 8:30 and gave her another sparkly pink outfit, and she promptly put it on and disappeared. We're chatting and not really paying much attention and I realize I haven't seen her in a while, so I go lookin', it's past her bedtime after all, and I find her...at the neighbor's house, showing off her new duds.

What if I did that? Just ran next door at 8:30 at night and yelled, "Hey come look at my new shirt!"

Tony Awards were on. I feel a need for another trip to NYC, I must see all the shows. Love theater actors, love how big and over-the-top they are, how they milk the drama out of every single moment and how they don't bother to disguise their contempt for their interloping screen cousins who foul up Broadway every year with the acid rain that is stunt casting. Let them lord it over Julia Roberts for one night, Pretty Woman's got it all, don't she, her Oscar, her millions, her cameraman husband but over Bernadette Peters' dead rotten corpse will she get a Tony, not this year Erin Brokovich, not this time, your smile might be called "megawatt" but it ain't bright enough to illuminate the great white way, go home.

I was surprised Jersey Boys won best musical, my money was on The Drowsy Chaperone.

June 9 2006

I'm embarrassed to even say where I am right now...at a Starbucks. Drinking an afternoon coffee with my laptop open, tapping away like a busy little beaver...I might as well be wearing a sign that says "I'm an asshole."

Flug this coffee's hot!

But no way will I add cream to it, I won't. I have to draw the line somewhere. I'm not usually one for the afternoon coffee break, but dang if the out-of-towners aren't sucking the life from me like Shiloh at the teet of Angelina. It happens every year, not usually this early of course, and it's always a wing-dingitty good time but it's exhausting. So I'm loading up on caffeine before I go meet everyone in an hour for some pizza.

Motherf***** this coffee is hot!!

I haven't showered yet today, either, so I stink. But if you were to say to someone, "She's that stinky girl in Starbucks with a laptop" whomever you were talking to, in my case probably a bill collector, would be like "Which one?" Oop, all this time I've had my feet propped up on the coffee table...is that kosher? I don't know from Starbucks ettiquette.

When is this coffee gonna cool off? It's napalm hot.

I'm happy to report that the Twin Cities music radio market seems to have gone out on a limb and added The Fray to Rob Thomas. (To be fair, sometimes it's just Rob Thomas and sometimes it's him with Matchbox Twenty; sometimes it's just him and Santana and sometimes, on very special ocassions like when it's fifteen past the hour, he's unplugged but make no mistake, Rob T is innahaiyouse, Twin Citays!) And now apparently The Fray is, too. We are nothing if not progressive.