... never ceases to amaze me. I get my experiment up and running and what do I get in my inbox? Take a wild guess kiddies! The move go ahead. They've decended. I won't be able to blog for about a week while we escape the bowels of 73rd St. Wish me luck.
Goodnight America, and all the ships at sea...
... is rather an unsettling thing. Operation Fuck With My Experiments is in full swing. They've brought in the big guns. There are now two trucks perched outside, the movers ready to decend at any second. In fact, word on the street says that they could move us as early as this afternoon. Does this mean I'm packing? No, because if they don't move us I'll have wasted another whole fucking day and I'm not going to waste another whole fucking day reading marriagedebate.com again.
But Murphy says that if my experiment goes well, smack in the middle I'm going to have to start breaking down my rig. And if that happens, Murphy can duil mo slat....
Today's Center for Neuronal Signaling lecture:
Alcohol and Brain Function: Small Molecule, Complex Actions
R. Ardon Harris, Ph.D.
Director
Waggoner Center for Alcohol and Addiction Research
University of Texas at Austin
Wine and cheese reception to follow in Griffis Faculty Club.
So I got to work today and the moving van was poised and ready outside of our building. What's this? I thought, perchance that we might move today? I asked what they were doing there. They replied, waiting. Waiting for what? I thought. Should I do an experiment today? Should I start packing? And what, if any, information has come from the Powers That Be? There was but one directive, from the chair to the peons here in the bowels of hell: the movers are not to move us until we are ready to be received in the new space. Until that time, upon which we will receive notice from the PTBs, we are to "resist all attempts" of the movers to start packing us down.
Resist all attempts? What are we, the Alamo? It is as if they are the enemy, poised to attack and upon the charge signal we will have ten minutes to evacuate the premises or risk being packed into a box ourselves. I'm just hoping that whatever day they actually decide to move has really nice weather cuz I'm going to the beach...
Today's Center for Neuronal Signaling lecture:
Alcohol and Brain Function: Small Molecule, Complex Actions
R. Ardon Harris, Ph.D.
Director
Waggoner Center for Alcohol and Addiction Research
University of Texas at Austin
Wine and cheese reception to follow in Griffis Faculty Club.
I called up Time Warner to take away my Starz! and add a DVR. I figured this would cost me nominally more a month (Starz! was 7 bucks, the DVR was 9), but probably worth it in the long-run, considering I'm thinking of dropping Netflix soon. I ended up managing to get my DVR, keep Starz!, all my On-Demands, and pay $7 LESS than I'm paying now. How, you ask me? Jedi mind trick. "This is not the rate you want to charge me."
My services are available upon request.
My lab has been in a temporary, window-less hell-hole for over a year now, while our previous hell-hole was being turned into the Taj Mahal, complete with marble floors, mahogany walls and wavy, modern ceilings. We have been told, repeatedly, that we would be moving very soon. Our first offical date was in March. Remember March? Three months ago? Have you heard me blog about my new palatial space? No? Right...
Our last official date was May 17. Maybe I was too wrapped up with the fags getting married and missed the move? Nope. If it did happen on May 17, everyone else missed it too. But now nobody's saying anything official. In fact, nobody's saying anything it all. You see there are known knowns and there are known unknowns. For instance, we know that we know that we have to move before June 1. That is a known known. We know that we have absolutely no idea exactly when we are going to move. That is a known unknown. But there are also unknown unknowns. These I cannot speculate on.
All I do know is that we have no idea when we're going to be moving so I've been working under immense tension. I'm ready to receive a phone call any second now informing me that the movers are on their way and I better be ready to go right now. Which means I'd have to drop everything and shut my rig down immediately. But I can't preemptively stop experimenting because I theoretically have a good week left of work in me, depending on whenever the hell the Powers That Be decide it's time to go.
Life is becoming increasingly surreal. I'm half expecting to wake up one morning next to Suzanne Plachette and realize it's all just been a bad dream.
Well did they all die or not? The series finale of Angel last night has given me pause. I don't know what to think. In some ways it was a perfect coda; we got to see a glimpse of all the characters' internal desires as they spend their 'last day' before the final battle. And yet they go into battle alone. Angel signs away his Shanshu but for what? And where were the Powers That Be? Don't get me wrong, it was a better ending than Buffy, but it didn't come full circle. The mission of the show seemed to have been lost somewhere along the way. Whereas Buffy's journey ended with Willow, Xander and Giles right their with her, Angel doesn't have Doyle or Cordelia and Wesley is dead by the time the shit truly hits the fan. It didn't ring as true as it could have.
What truly bothered me was that the Senior Partners' plans seem to have become entirely inconsistent. They spent five years meticulously trying to get Angel to turn evil yet keep him alive and then he ticks them off a bit so they crush him? Dammit, I wanted an apocalypse. They probably just didn't have the budget.
At least Spike got his recognition as a poet, even if he's still bloody awful.
And once again I am painfully reminded how much I miss Cordelia.
Well, Joss, you didn't piss me off entirely so I might give you another chance someday. It's been a good 8 years, and I'll definitely miss your world.
he boy and I had an amazing opportunity to see Andrew Sullivan read from his book and speak about marriage. What was so amazing about it was that it was on the day that same-sex couples were allowed to wed in Massachusetts. Some of what he said was political, some of what he said was personal but all of it was spot-on correct. I later got to see him on MSNBC "debating" (and I use this term loosely) Bishop Paul Morton, a black Baptist from Louisiana. Andrew was, of course, engaging, witty and intelligent and the poor Bishop could only state and re-state that God told him that gay marriage is wrong. Of course what pissed me off the most were his vitriolic statements of outrage that the gay community would use comparisons of black civil rights for what he sees as an abomination. I'm outraged that he is outraged and values my civil liberties less than his. And of course, when Andrew respectfully pointed out that many prominent black leaders, including John Lewis and Coretta "God-forbid-we-say-anything-bad-about-her-because-she-was-married-to-a-saint" Scott King, are in full support of equal marriage rights for all, the only thing the poor misguided bishop could say was, well, that God told him it was wrong. Way to enter into a debate about civil marriage there, Paulie...
I'm becoming more and more convinced each day that the reason that equal marriage rights opponents can't come up with any rational and articulate way to state their opposition is because there is no rational or articulate opposition.
Today we are witnessing the fall-out of the "Fiat Heard 'Round the World." Today the queers are gettin' hitched! I don't know about you, but when I woke up this morning I could feel it; husbands and wives looking at each other over the kitchen table and sighing in despair. Their marriages mean nothing anymore. They might as well just throw their rings down the sink. I'm sure that already, before the first homogomous vows were taken, straights were lining up to get their divorces. Four thousand children have already been abandoned to the streets. And if you listen carefully enough you can actually hear the very fabric of society unraveling. In fact, on my way to work today I saw a man crying on the sidewalk because this morning his wife decided to go find herself a woman to marry instead now that homosex is the new black.
Pretty soon our children will be left to fend for themselves, while their parents sodomize each other freely and legally. They will lament "The Before Time" when family meant moral and religiously upstanding heterosexual couples with 2.4 children and when the dog wasn't married to a dozen polyamorous heathens, a time when children were conceived by a means called "vaginal intercourse" where a man inserted his penis into a woman (can you imagine! A woman!) rather than be created in a test tube by a team of queer geneticists bent on stamping out heterosexuality completely.
If we allow this to continue, the terrorists have already won.
The existential poetry of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld set to chamber music. I love this man more and more each day.
So I haven't actually watched this video yet, because I'm not entirely sure that I can stomach it. But a few people have raised concerns of media bias (of course!) insomuch that if the mass media can graphically publicize the atrocities committed by U.S. soldiers, why not Iraqi dissidents? I agree. This isn't the same situation as not airing close-up images of people falling from the World Trade Center. No, for better or worse, we're stuck in the middle of a big ol' messy war and while the actions of Zarqawi in no way justify Abu Ghraib, it's a good idea to put things into perspective. We still have a few motes to clear out of our eyes but the beheading of an innocent civilian is not the fault of undertrained, misguided soldiers but a heinous crime of pure hatred.
And speaking of heinous crimes, Angel's second to last episode is tonight and it would be a heinous crime if Joss disappoints me yet again...
I would make a horrible eyewitness. I don't know how some people do it. They can get mugged in a dark alley, without there glasses, and be like, "Yeah, I saw him, he was 5'9", 167 lbs, size 11 shoe, auborn hair, hazel eyes and was wearing a Gap sweatshirt which a small hole under the arm and Tag Heuer knock-off he probably bought in Chinatown. Oh, and from his accent I'd say he was from Williamsburg but probably went to highschool in Manhattan."
Me, I'd be more like the woman I heard on the news this morning who was attacked in Central Park. Apparently her attacker was an Hispanic male, no height, 150-200 lbs and wearing a soccer jersey. Um, that narrows it down, thank you very much. You might as well just arrest all of the Barrio and half of Inwood. It's like saying you were attacked by a woman on the Upper East Side wearing Burberry plaid and carrying a Louis Vuitton hand-bag.
Of course, I probably wouldn't have even noticed the soccer jersey...
So I've been listening to Launchcast radio because it's free and supposedly customized to play things that it thinks you want to hear. Well apparently it thinks I want to hear William Hung of American Idol infamy sing "Shake Your Bon Bon" because that's what I just heard. It's off his new album, Inspiration, which contains some great classics as "I Believe I Can Fly", "Circle of Life" and of course "She Bangs." It also has "inspirational thoughts". I've now put him on heavy rotation because it so God-awful bad that it's mmm-mmm good. I also had the pleasure of hearing his private voicemail due to a friend of a friend in the business. Everything about this man rocks my world. I might have to buy the CD. Maybe Launchcast is smarter than I thought.
Ok, so pretty much Hugh Jackman's Van Helsing has absolutely no redeeming qualities, aside from Kate Beckinsale's heaving breasts and 18th century stretch-pants. Oh, and of course Jackman gets naked and bruised at the end. Otherwise it was overacted and over-CGI'd. And we never really get to know who Van Helsing the man really is. Or what the actual plot might be. Or what the Vatican was doing with her own version of Q....
I am, however, waiting patiently for the sequel, because I'm dying to figure out the answers to all the intriguing loose ends they left...
... and Angel is one of them. I swear Mutant Enemy has not only systematically mutilated every character on Angel but now they've attacked the Buffyverse as well. We've got two episodes left. Count them; one, two. And what do we get? Angel and Spike in a teenaged pissing contest over an ex-girlfriend. What about the apocalypse? Or the grand plans of Wolfram and Hart? Or that uber-demon who's inhabited the body of Amy Acker and given her the ability to act decently? No, instead we get a bad buddy-movie chase scene in a cheesy sound-staged Italian street, not to mention the dolce vita, devil-may-care Italian CEO and mafia demons wearing masks that Mutant Enemy apparently pulled out of the overstock bin in a Halloween store. And this "the apocalypse is happening all around you" crap-ola is, um, crap-ola. This show stopped being a metaphor somewhere around Pylea and not only is this plotline over-done shyte, it's over-done shyte from the second season of this very television show! Even the Dru and Darla cameo wasn't worth it. The one shining moment was, believe it or not, Andrew, who was wearing a Strong Bad t-shirt. Seriously, it's no wonder Sarah Michelle Gellar wants nothing to do with this any more. I swear if the next two episodes don't have me crapping my pants with awe, I'm officially declaring Joss Whedon a hack and will refuse to watch anything he makes ever again.
On a more positive note, Shorties Watching Shorties on Comedy Central is surprising good. The concept is simple (animated shorts set to audio clips of stand-up comics) but the execution is pretty solid. Patrice O'Neal and Nick DiPaolo need to find their voice as overly precocious infants, an over-used trope that doesn't quite resonate and I don't think ever will. But the shorts are frickin' hysterical, although I think it helps if you have an encyclopedic knowledge of stand-up.
Well, after the lab was Sasserized and I was without internet access for a whole day and a half, it appears as everything is up and running. Wah-hoo!
Saw 20th Century last night with Alec Baldwin and Anne Heche. It was, um, entertaining. I wouldn't say that Baldwin is a comic genius, but be overacted the part to a tee. As did Heche. And there was unintentional Christ, The Passion of the irony. ("I can't find the second act. But I have it memorized. The Christus; He dies.")
I also didn't win a prize at DuVigneaud. I think it was the glitter.
Well, I don't know about you guys, but my Third of the Month has been awesome so far! Totally gnarly, dudes and dudettes! First of all, I got to do arts and crafts today making my poster. I got to use posterboard and scissors and glue sticks. And I even used a trace amount of glitter to make a certain someone (and you know who you are) happy. I also got to try a new food today (borek) and I'm wearing plaid underwear so things just keep getting better and better.
Now we all know that today is the day we celebrate ourselves, because we're beautiful, intelligent, wonderful people. So in the spirit of self-gratification I'm going to officially plug HBO's Deadwood and warn you off of FX's Nip/Tuck. The former has more swears and better acting and dialogue. The latter has more lesbian sex and plastic surgery. You be the judge.
But anywho, I'm much too tired to attempt to be witty or anything today so I'll just leave you with this thought: sticks and stones may break my bones but moist towelettes make for good hygeine.
Love yourself. You deserve it.
