Contribution from a friend

From my friend Cormac:
I'm pretty sure this is the foulest thing ever uttered in a financial report: "Countrywide's taint even spread this month to the presidential campaign". Eeeeww.

I like a man with an eagle eye on financial times. I countered with a 'pullout' joke about Iraq but really that's so pre surge 2007.
Give me overnight to think of a good one.

PS. Could he be cuter? Any more cute? Of more directly cute decent?

Burn, Baby, Burn

Okay, so here's your second installment of BURN!
This one will focus on Mike Myers's new movie, The Love Guru. It came out this past weekend and was trompled all over by Get Smart in a showdown of the truly horrible summer comedies. I chose The Love Guru to burn instead of Get Smart because of all the love I have for Steve Carell and Anne Hathawy.













First of all, this is one of my all time pet peeves- am I really supposed to believe that this is a real couple??? I get that it's fantasy, but just not for 50% of the viewing audience.


Yeah, this is her real husband, and even though he's not totally in her league looks wise I can def fantasize about doing him.











Now on to the BURN. I really, really enjoyed looking up these review. As usual it's all from the white male perspective bc movie critic is still sort of an old (dorky) boys club, but they had a good time hating on this movie too.
Okay, Roger Ebert, crotchety, but gets a pass for having cancer and loosing his power of speech. Plus he dated Oprah. Here's a good opener from his review in the Chicago Sun Times

Myers has made some funny movies, but this film could have been written on toilet walls by callow adolescents...He acts as if he’s getting away with something, but in fact all he’s getting away with is selling tickets to a dreary experience...Even his fellow actors seem to realize no one is laughing. That’s impossible, because they can’t hear the audience, but it looks uncannily like they can, and don’t.

Hee, hee, that kind of makes me want to see it.
But then A.O. Scott (who looks exactly like the image you have in your head of a soft, white, mid 40's film reviewer for the NY Times. You can google image search him but they're all glamor shots, so I didn't use one) disabused me of any idea of a 'so bad it's good' Showgirls kind of movie.

...Which might sum up “The Love Guru” in its entirety but only at the risk of grievously understating the movie’s awfulness. A whole new vocabulary seems to be required. To say that the movie is not funny is merely to affirm the obvious...No, “The Love Guru” is downright antifunny, an experience that makes you wonder if you will ever laugh again.

Make's you 'wonder if you'll ever laugh again' Wow, I do not want to be put in that position! NPR's Bob Mondello warns,

Those suckered into seeing this relentless exercise in juvenilia, meanwhile, may well recoil from sports comedies, Bollywood musicals, self-help spiritualists, puns and even characters with beards for the foreseeable future.

My boyfriend has a beard!! There's no way I'm seeing this movie.
So we all know, don't see the Love Guru, no good will come of it, but I couldn't help but save my favorite for last just in case you might be harboring some Wayne's World related sympathy. Here's Dana Stevens on Slate.com.

...once in a while there is a movie so bad that it takes you to a place beyond good and evil and abandons you there, shivering and alone.

This tale of a guru who brings joy to all who meet him is the most joy-draining 88 minutes I've ever spent outside a hospital waiting room.

(Me: Mike Myers, slightly preferable to being on dialysis)

Some of the lowest moments involve Sir Ben Kingsley...I've read that Kingsley, who was made a knight of the realm in 2001, often alienates the English press by insisting on the usage of his full title, even in casual social situations. If he's that concerned about maintaining his dignity, he might reconsider taking on roles in which people swordfight with mops soaked in their own piss.

Mops soaked in urine, down right Shakespearian.
I am sort of surprised that I found very little mention of how crassly the movie treats little people like Vern 'Mini Me' Troyer or how much backlash there's been from the world's Hindi community. But like I said it's all from the over educated, over 40, white guy perspective.

Related: There's a really interesting article in Entertainment Weekly about how many bridges Myers has burned in Hollywood. If you're like me this comes as a total surprise because you think he is the guy from So I Married an Ax Murderer.

''I honestly root against him.'' Penelope Spheeris, who directed Myers in his first film, the 1992 smash Wayne's World, says she has shared war stories with others who've worked with the actor. ''Maybe he could open, like, a children's hospital to clean up his rep,'' she jokes darkly. ''He's got to do something pretty quick.''

And then she goes on about a screaming fit he threw because there was no margarine on the set. What????? Bonus insight: He's total besties with Deepak Chopra. Sorry I can't go on, my mind is too occupied with being blown.

Less Obvious Signs of the Apocolypse

George Will wearing a regular tie! I saw it on the news yesterday and I didn't even recognize him for a second!










General Motors is SELLING the Hummer Brand due to rising gas prices. How will you overcompensate this summer!?!







And, I got a job. Graduate advising at an art school in SF.
Wooooo!
I already miss my 3pm dates with Dr. Phil. Thank god for Tivo

Totally Off Topic but...

One thing I'm super interested in that has nothing to do with weight loss surgery or crippling brain disorders or reality tv is particle and astro physics. Not interested as in, go get a degree, no, no, no. In fact I have a hard enough time wrapping my brain around articles and books that have been dumbed down for the general public.
I've been reading Death by Black Hole by Neil deGrasse Tyson for 3 months because I need to reread the chapters like Cosmic Plasma aprox 3 times. Unless you're retarded smart I'm sure you have to too, example:

Astrophysical plasmas are remarkable for their ubiquity, they they're hardly ever discussed in introductory textbooks or the popular press...A plasmas has freely moving atoms and molecules, just like a gas, but a plasma can conduct electricity as well as lock onto magnetic fields that pass through it. Most atoms within a plasma have had electrons stripped from them by one mechanism or another and the combination of high temperature and low density is such that the electrons only occasionally recombine with their host atoms. Taken as a whole, the plasma remains electrically neutral because the total number of (negatively charged) electrons equals the total number of (positively charged) protons. But inside, plasma seethes with electrical currents and magnetic fields...

Um, got that?
Anyway, I like to know what's going on, what forces are shaping my day to day, what I'm really looking at when I look up at the sky, what evs. Plus I like to read things that blow my mind.
There's also tons of mysteries left out there like what in the fuck is 'dark matter'? And is there a Higgs particle that can explain why fundamental particles weigh anything at all when they should should be massless?
(ps. How amazing is Neil deGrasse Tyson?? Why is he not my godfather?)

Wait! What? Why am I talking about this? Because this summer scientists at CERN (The European Organization for Nuclear Research) are going to flip the switch on the biggest, baddest super conductor EVER!!! It's stylishly named the Large Hadron Particle Collider and it's either going to prove some super real wizzbang theories of 'New Physics' or its going to cause the pulling of hair and rending of clothes of many an egghead. Or it's going to swallow Earth in a man made black hole. But probably not.

So to get you up to date here's a great article from last May's New Yorker called Crash Course because duh, it's about colliding particles and no one at the New Yorker has any imagination. There's a lot of info and a little back stabbing -

“If I occasionally neglect to cite a theorist, it’s not because I’ve forgotten,” Leon Lederman, another Nobel-winning experimentalist, writes in his chronicle of the search for the Higgs. “It’s probably because I hate him.”

Hee, hee, you see experimentalists hate theorists. Scan-dal!!!
And here's a slide show from Time that I got via The morning News
Hello, prepare to have your mind blown!

Shout out!!

Just have to give one to one of my very B, GBFs, Dimitri, who is coming to see me all the way from Sunny Phoenix this 4th of July. I even told him that the 4th is almost always the coldest week of the summer, but he was not deterred.
(But for reals!!! I can never get over having to wearing mittens to the fire works! This is not how California looks on TV to a young, impressionable Jersey girl.)

Just to prove his awesome-nicity here's an excerpt from his email to me about visiting:

Anyway, I AM SOOO EXCITED! Break out the Asti Spumante, cause I'm getting ready to rock with your posse!

Oh, and tell you BF that I am gay and he won't have to worry...I want to be you, not sleep with you!!!!

I think you could all learn a lesson about admitting you want to be me.
Don't be scared, no one will judge you.

Oh, and this is how he responded to me asking what airport he was flying into:

Oakland, Duh. SF is for hippies:)

Asserting Oakland's superiority over San Francisco is always like a sucker punch to the heart for me. Some people are just disgustingly perfect.

What do you do when you're unemployeed?

I had a very interesting unemployed week this week. I say unemployed though I did do a few things that involved getting paid. I mean unemployed in a 'regular gig' kind of way.

One of the ways that I scavenge money from the landscape is by doing contract work for my previous employer. If you're thinking write a press release, or design a web page then you don't have my kind of work history mister sister. Contract work for me meant getting up at 8am on Saturday morning to lead 15 Bay Area singles on a 4 hour hike in the rain. Wheeeee!

Monday I repainted 2 dressers, I have all the time in the world, but limited paint. I have only the choice of colors my friends have painted their walls. Leftovers-ville, but honestly they look pretty good, and significantly less like furniture I bought or found on the street.

Wednesday I made the mistake of going to one of those 'Job Fairs' that sometimes spring up in downtown hotels. Since I am not interested in becoming an SF police officer (I don't care how many posters they put up in BART showing smiling cops patrolling the Presidio on bikes, I am not buying what you are selling.) nor do I want to drive a MUNI bus, it was kind of a waste of an interview shirt.

Wednesday night I got a text from Alika at 10pm saying 'I'm at the Alley if you get a wild hair'. I think is was her use of wild hair that really got me, even though I was already in my pjs. 10 may be late to go out if you have a job but...

Also if you don't live in Oakland, and you don't know the Alley, it's kind of special, to me anyway. the decor can best be described as a set for a hobo comedy set in the 20's complete with fake pawnshop exterior and old laundry hanging from the wall. I searched google but couldn't find a photo of the awesome portrait of the owner but here's a pretty good photo of the interior.














What the Alley is really known for though is Ron Dibble.
He's somewhere around 200 years old and he knows the words and music to every American song written before 1965. Frustrated musical theater majors have been gathering around his piano for decades and it lends a really rad vibe to the hobo theme.

BC unemployment I snuck in my own liquor and just ordered soda water all night (don't worry I tipped luxuriously). When the drinks are basically free and you don't have to work in the morning the night can easily lead you to the late night karaoke box when the bars close.
You have not lived till you've heard me sing the Pussycat Dolls 'Stickwitu'

However, sometimes it takes till 3:30am to remember that you have a phone interview at 9:30 in the morning. Yikes!

So at 9am Thursday morning I dragged myself out of bed, and I'm old so I was spectacularly hung over, to talk about my experience with a man who sells sex toys, and to convince him that I would be a natural for setting up sex education seminars for him.

Then another reality hit me, I had to drive to Fremont, which is 40 miles away, to participate in a market research study. Another creative money making venture. I won't go into the details but I was probably the most negative study participant they ever had. For some reason when it was over I couldn't find my car in the parking lot and had to walk around locking and unlocking the door with the little key chain thing that does just that.
Don't worry, I found it, I'm not still in Fremont.
(Fremont fun fact: Fremont has the largest population of Afghanis outside of Afghanistan. It's true!)

Today, Friday, I got to do the radest unemployed thing of all! There's a semi new publication out of SF called Meatpaper (there's a link to the right) and yes I'm a vegetarian, but it's like the most interesting magazine ever. A week or 2 ago I wrote them saying I had an abundance of nothing but free time and would love to meet up to help out in some way, and today I got to have lunch with one of the editors. Yes!!! So hopefully I will be able to start working with them in some way soon. Not really as a job but just as an awesome side dish.

So that's my week in unemployment! Enjoy it while it lasts because some grade A shit like me is not going to be on the market forever.