Friday, March 24, 2006

She Blowed Up Real Good

I finally got to watch the final episode of this season's "Battlestar Galactica". Okay laugh, but next to "Lost" its the best show on TV. If you haven't seen it then put the Lorne Greene/Dirk Benedict '70s TV answer to "Star Wars" out of your mind. (Well, you can't really do that because Richard Hatch is in this one too.) Its always surprising and never goes where you'd expect. So the Cylons can look like humans and its been a big ping pong match for two seasons with the crew of the Galactica outrunning the machines, although they've been infiltrated by sleeper agents and psychotic fantasies of tall blonde sexy Cylons. Gaius Balthar, the mad scientist who actually had a hand in helping the Cylons almost wipe-out mankind, is elected president. He says, "Right-o, we're moving down to this barely hospitable planet." Then the Cylon he loves blows herself up with a nuclear device and he starts sleeping with many sexy nameless intergalactic broads. And then you get a "One Year Later" subtitle -- say what? Balthar is like totally nuts, the former president is teaching school, Starbuck (who in this one is a female) has long hair and a husband and seems to have had some sort of falling out with Apollo. And just to make sure you know that time has passed, Edward James Olmos (Adama) grows a moustache.

And then guess what? Yeah, you guessed it. The Cylons show up. Ta da.

So I'm guessing a lot of next season will be filling in that year that just sped by. I hate waiting. Posted by Picasa

Sweet Sioux

I just love it when the underdog comes up off the mat to swing hard just when everyone has counted him (or in this case her) out. According to Democracy Now, the Oglala Sioux tribe in South Dakota have agreed to let Planned Parenthood open an abortion clinic on tribal land, seriously sticking it to the state government who recently voted to ban abortion in the state. The Sioux lands are governed by tribal law and therefore are exempt from the law. I can't help but think that the Native Americans in South Dakota are taking great pleasure in driving a truck through this loophole. Posted by Picasa

Thursday, March 23, 2006

Tweedledee


The next time I hear about Halliburton charging $40,000 for a roll of toilet paper I’ll know where they got the idea. Boss Tweed and his Tammany Ring were quite the creative book cookers back in the 1860s and 1870s. And Ken Ackerman’s book “Boss Tweed: The Rise and Fall of the Corrupt Pol Who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York” is actually quite entertaining. If politics or history aren’t your bag, the book is still good for more than a few laughs. I mean the Tammany boys just had such balls! They were like, “Yeah, we’re taking the money…watcha gonna do about it?” (A quote often attributed to Tweed but actually coined by his arch nemesis Thomas Nast.) So yeah, it only cost $250,000 to build the new city courthouse, but we’re gonna write it up as $13 million. And when the New York Times starts saying, “Hey you crooks, show us your books” Tweed invites John Jacob Astor and other scions of Victorian society to tea and lets them look around for a few hours. The bluebloods don’t dig too deep so find nothing wrong. Tweed flaunts it all over New York. The Time and Nast eventually bought the Ring down but at least the man has a few bars named after him. Nast was an anti-Catholic, anti-immigration racist who regularly drew Irishmen as simian-faced goons with gin bottles protruding from ragged clothing. Nice guy. So what if he did draw Santa Claus—I’ve yet to see a bar named after him. Posted by Picasa

Wednesday, March 22, 2006

Ohio Bad...West Virginia...Good

Dubya is continuing his laughable talkshow circuit this week, trying to persuade the nation that his policies in Iraq are sound and that he is not a blithering idiot. It's going about as well as his last road show did; remember that little flop entitled "The Social Security Reform Review". Little old ladies in Ohio actually asked the president tough questions (not including Helen Thomas). And none of Bush's political Ohio brethren even bothered to show up...they were all "too busy" trying to distance themselved from a 36% approval rating.

So its off to Wheeling, West Virginia and an audience of 2,000 carefully screened military family members. Posted by Picasa

Tuesday, March 21, 2006

Bridal Hell

The more I dive into planning a wedding, the more I'm convinced that the majority of the people who make their living in this industry should be lined up against a wall and shot... a lot. What the wedding industry doesn't take into account is people like me -- the "over 30" (okay well over 30) bride who has been working for 20 years, owns a house, has a brain, and doesn't watch "Oprah" and, therefore, knows that they're a bunch of crooks who automatically tack a minimum of 25% onto every cost the minute you mention the word "wedding" in a sentence. KM and I are planning a modest shindig that is getting more modest as the days go by. He just about had a heart attack on me last night when I finally got a chance to run numbers with him. I mean, the average price of wedding in this country is $20,000. Twenty grand! That is freakin' insane people. Insane. Who in their right minds would spend that kind of money on a party? I'm having trouble wrapping my brain around spending a quarter of that.

What really makes me sick are the parasites who feed on these romantic little girls who buy (quite literally) into the whole fantasy that the industry has contructed. Basically the mantra is "it's your wedding day...you deserve to have whatever you want." Well yeah, George Bush might deserve to be stripped, and chained to a chair in a fetid Middle Eastern prison with a black hood over his head, but that don't necessary mean he's gonna get it does it?

Average dress cost? $1,200
Average reception fee? $14,000
Average marriage length? 9.4 years

Now I freely admit that after I got engaged I got caught up (briefly thank god) in all the hoopla. One trip to David's Bridal however convinced me that the cookie-cutter, so-called fairy tale wedding currently marketed in the U.S. of A. was not in the stars. It was actually kind of humerous. I told the twentysomething bridal consultant at David's, "I don't want anything strapless or poofy." Well that pretty much eliminated about 9,995 of the 10,000 gowns they had on display. I humored my friend Scully and tried on a few. "How do you feel," David's girl asked after hauled my tulled ass up before the floor-to-ceiling mirror. She was all mock sincerity. "I feel like an imposter," I replied. "I feel like an idiot. I feel like I need to explain the meaning of the words 'age appropriate' to you again. I feel like taking this off." The exercise wasn't completely fruitless...at least I know what I don't want.

And that is:
a cake no one will eat
a dress I'll never wear again
a band that will take too many breaks and eat my food
a ceremony in a church I no longer attend
a boatload of debt

What do I want?
To marry my friend
To have a fun party
To eat chocolate cake
To have a few nice pictures to remember it by

Think the bridal industry will go for that?

Monday, March 20, 2006

Happy Anniversary

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The Angry One

Teddy Velvet says of me: "She's got a mind full of rabid, frothing hate ans she's ready to unleash it."

Well thank you...

But I'm not all pre-menopausal, low-seratonin angst and ire. I can be a girlie girl at times. For instance, this is my dream wedding dress. I would have weigh what I was my senior year in high school in order to look like Lolita there, but it's still gorgeous and one can dream, can't one. Of course it's Italian -- La Spousa di Gio -- no American bridal house could make something this simple and elegant. There's no poof; there's no glitz; there's no 600 yards of lace with a train that actually needs a caboose to haul it. Just beautiful lines, gorgeous fabric, and a color that would make any bride blush. Bella bella. Posted by Picasa

When Great Voices are Silenced

My brother had a blast at the Pogues concert in NYC this weekend and I even got the t-shirt to prove it. Couldn't help but start relistening to Shane McGowan's whiskey soaked growl. Woke up this morning with a "Fairytale of New York" earworm and kept thinking about the song all morning -- how it takes me straight back to my days prowling Katonah Avenue in the Bron-ix with my sister and one of my best friends. As pathetically evocative as Shane's lyrics are, anyone whose ever heard "Fairytale" knows that the song would be no where near as brilliant without Kirstie Macoll's perfect harpy lament, "you scumbag, you maggot, you cheap lousy faggot, happy Christmas you're ass, I pray God it's our last..." seguing into an oh so melodic refrain. Kirsty died in 2000 in the worst possible way a talented musician can perish -- by accident. She was swimming in Mexico and some rich bastard in a speedboat slammed into her in front of her two kids!!! Now everyone knows that the Mexican government would never accept a bribe, so there has to be some reason why they haven't been able to figure out who was actually piloting the boat. Kirstie's 80 year old Mom is still fighting to make sure someone pays for playing with his toy in a swimming area and snuffing out the life of her daughter.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/documentaries/features/kirsty-maccoll.shtml