Mood:  party time!

The Spice Girls are reuniting, Paris Hilton is out of jail, Kevin Sorbo is filming a big-screen gay spoof of '300', and all's right with the world.

So today, I was thinking about Live Journal memes -- you know, those ubiquitous questionnaire/self-interview things that people post about whether they prefer tea or coffee and what time they got up this morning -- and it occurred to me, there is a huge Daisy gap.  Not one of these memes mentions David (except for the "Who would you shag?" one).  Can you believe it?  Also, the questions are really boring and not nearly nonsensical enough.  So let's rectify that, shall we?  Presenting.... the world's first Wenmeme!

1.  Who's your favorite David character?   Faramir

2.  Who's your favorite David character besides Faramir?   Why?  You got a problem with Faramir?

3.  Of course not.  I'm just asking.    So why can't I say Faramir?

4.  Everybody always says Faramir.  Say something else.    Fine, Mister Clever Pants.  Who's YOUR favorite?

5.  Wait a minute.  I'M the meme.  I ask the questions around here.  Fair enough.  Let's move on.

6.  What's your favorite David flick?   Are you going to get another prickly burr up your tailpipe if I say "Lord of the Rings"?

7.  Yes.  Don't even try it.     I see.  All righty then.  "After The Deluge". 

8.  Least favorite David flick?  Ummmm...*squirm*.....I've only seen "Van Helsing" once.  It's just a little too werewolfy and y'know, with the flying fanged naked chicks and the running and the Translyvanian tapestries and the exploding stagecoaches.  Hugh Jackman's sidekick was really cute, though.

9.  Favorite scene?  Doug's rap from Cosi.  This brilliant piece of physical comic satire should be seized, held up to the light, and admired, like a precious jewel.

10.  Who are you thinking about right now?  Il Duce, the Italian dictator.

11.  What were you wearing when you attended 300?  Oh good Lord, I don't remember.   Probably a cummerbund, a monocle, and a pair of spats.

12.  What do you snack on while watching DVDs?  Loganberries

13.  Do you have a separate David section in your DVD library?  I'm embarrassed to admit this, but yes I do.

14.  Are there any David movies you don't own?  I don't, technically, own "Dust".  That is, the neighborhood video store has physical custody of my copy.  I lend it out to anyone who wants to see it.  Because that's just the kind of swell gal I am.

15.  Got any crushes on any other actors?  Hey!  I don't go around getting "crushes" on just any old two-dimensional stranger on a screen, ya know.  What kind of floozy do you think I am? 

But MAYBE...just maybe....in my younger days I was an eentsy bit smitten with Ryan O'Neal.  Maybe.  Nobody else does "exasperated straight man" as adorably as he does.

"Paper Moon" was mainly responsible for this hypothetical state of smittitude.  It was (and still is) one of my favorite movies of all time.  The father-daughter bonding story has a simple, charming humanity, told through the lens of Laszlo Kovacs' stark and gorgeous cinematography.

Please, Deity, accept this overly toasted bagel and see to it that they never, ever remake this film.  Or, if they do, that David gets the lead as the slick con-man & reluctant father.

For you see, Deity, David can also be ruggedly dapper and rock a Depression-era mustache.

Ay-men.

16.  Do you own any LOTR action figures?  I have a couple of Faramirs that were given to me by my nice friends from inside the computer.  Sometimes when no one else is around I'll take the Rangers down and re-enact scenes from "Lady Windermere's Fan".

17.  Robert Connolly or Zach Snyder?  Robert Connolly.  Yes, definitely Robert Connolly.  Sometimes Zach Snyder.  But only on weekends.

18.  Wet dog or dessicated coconut?  Wet dog.  Coconut makes my teeth itch.

19.  Is it hotter in Boston or July?  Um....what? 

20.  Sorry, do I know you?  Wha...?

21.  I don't recall what we were talking about either.  Buh...?

22.  A portly, balding man with glasses just came in here.  Never met him before.  He claims his name is "Karl".  And hey...what is this list of attorneys to fire now doing in my...uh....appendage at the end of my arm?  Oh, I get it.  You work for the Justice Department.  Very funny. 

You might want to try doing crossword puzzles to improve your memory.

23.  Favorite David quote?  "I could be the Evil Wiggle!"

Posted by dessicatedcoconut at 2:31 PM EDT

Updated: June 29, 2007 5:31 PM EDT

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Mood:  suave

"I hate banks."  -- Jim Doyle

Actually, to be honest, I like my bank.  They've always been very friendly and helpful.  Though I do wonder why, when the bank "borrows" your money, they give you a paltry 1.5% interest in return, but when you borrow money from them, you're charged 19% interest.  Funny, that.

No, today's hated faceless bureaucratic institution is my credit card company.  For two reasons:

1) They send my bill out all of 4 days before the due date, thus setting themselves up nicely for a late payment (with a hefty 21% interest penalty tacked on...isn't that usury?).  They're trying to make me switch from paper bills to on-line payments.  NOTHING WILL MAKE ME SUCCUMB.  I am immune to your modern ways, heartless credit card company!  My home computer is powered by arthritic gerbils and has a dial-up connection!  Ha ha ha!

Oh wait.  That's not really something to brag about.

2) Annoying changes to the terms of service are wrapped in the phrase "For Your Convenience".  For example, I used to get 5% back on all my gas purchases, which was the reason I got the card in the first place.  Six weeks later, the credit card company notified me that "For your convenience, we have changed the rebate on gas purchases to 1%."  How is that more convenient?  For whom?  I guess they realized they were losing money on all their Humvee customers.

So, I've been reading "Half Mile Down", William Beebe's fascinating account of his descents into the waters off Bermuda inside the first bathysphere 70 years ago.  Even today, we know very little about the bottom of the ocean.  It's like a whole different planet down there.  There are ocean mountain ranges bigger than the Himalayas, and canyons that make the Grand Canyon look tiny.  You could sink Mt. Everest without a trace inside the Marianas trench.  The abyss is inhabited by bizarre, Salvador Dali-esque creatures, of which 10 - 30 million species remain undiscovered.  Their names are right out of a surreal children's fable: naked butterflies, spookfish, pigbutt worms, helmet jellies, glassheaded grenadiers, yeti crabs, Ping Pong tree sponge, giant squid.  They have hooks and fangs and hooded eyes.  Many are bioluminescent, or look like living water.  There are sparkling pink octopi that look like children's squeeze toys, and squid with corkscrew tails, and fish that look like Pokemon cartoons.  The form and variety of life is astounding.

It's fascinating to think that, with virtually all of Earth's landmass mapped and explored and mined and settled and catalogued, there is a vast territory beneath the ocean that is still unknown, and may never be known.  Unfortunately, deep-sea trawlers are scraping up areas the size of Europe off the ocean floor every year.  They drag fishing nets weighted with rollers and chains across the seabed, crushing everything in its path - corals, sponges, deep-sea reefs.  Billions of tons of unwanted sea life are discarded every year.  It's like cutting down an entire rainforest to get a handful of Brazil nuts.  We're losing species before they've even been identified.  In response to the threat, a group of scientists from 69 countries has petitioned the United Nations to insititute laws protecting the ocean beds and regulating fishing practices around the globe.

In his book, William Beebe writes that as he was descending in the bathysphere, he became overwhelmed by the color blue.  At about 300 feet down, all but the longest wavelengths of light are filtered out, and all that's left is blue.  The light streaming in from the porthole became so intensely blue that it literally wiped all memory of any other color out of his head.  All was blue.  Blue was all.  Like Frodo on Mt. Doom, who couldn't remember the taste of strawberries, Beebe couldn't remember what red looked like, or yellow.   There was nothing in the world but an eerie blue twilight.  He grabbed his field book and opened it, desperate to see another color, any other color, but couldn't tell the difference between a blank page and a color plate.

The reason I mention this book is partly because of the Live Earth concerts coming up (oceans play a key role in the global ecosystem), and partly because Beebe's blue experience is a little reminiscent of what happens when I see David on a television screen.  For a brief moment, I can't remember that any other men exist in the world.

Posted by dessicatedcoconut at 3:44 PM EDT

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Mood:  lazy

I swear I am not making this up.  The other night, on the local news, there was a short interview with an oncologist named Dr. Richard Polkinghorn.  And here I'd always thought "Richard Shorkinghorn" was a completely invented and ridiculous name, but it turns out he has a real-life counterpart not five miles from here.  However, the resemblance ends there.  The real Dr. Polkinghorn is white-haired and distinguished, with no whiff of chickens about him.  I doubt he's ever told a fart joke in his life, but he looks like he'd be good at charades.

David's had some interesting character names.  I like Eddie Harnovey and Murray Whelan; they sound like they could actually be names belonging to real people in the phone book.  It's a nice change from hastily chosen action hero names like "Jack Dexter", that are meant to clonk you over the head with their manliness.  Mark Waldman sounds like your accountant, or your neighbor.

The all-time winner, though, has to be "Bank Teller With A History".

Posted by dessicatedcoconut at 3:35 PM EDT

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Mood:  quizzical

Well now, here's an unusual thesis:  Men are funnier than women, according to Warren Bell, writing in the National Review Online (one of the least funny publications ever.  And that includes Meat & Poultry Digest, which my gynecologist subscribes to for some reason.  She enjoys making patients look at photos of plucked chickens while they wait to be poked and prodded).

Now, as empirical arguments go, Bell's thesis is what we humor scientists call "a ton of horse manure in a half-ton bag".  First of all, how do you measure average funniness across entire populations?  By median number of pies thrown?  Number of pairs of underpants worn on head?  Secondly, humor is so deeply subjective, you can't even begin to make generalizations.  Most women aren't deeply tickled by Jim Carrey, armpit fart noises, or the Three Stooges, but that doesn't mean our sense of humor is underdeveloped.  On the other side of the coin, none of my straight male friends would be caught dead watching Ab Fab.

Bell also fails to make the distinction between being funny, and acting funny.  For example, he asks:  "How many girls memorized all the dialogue from Monty Python and the Holy Grail when they were 14? No one? Not a surprise. But I did, and a ton of other guys did, followed by Steve Martin routines, Coneheads sketches, and the big John Belushi "Who's with me?" speech at the end of Animal House".

But quoting Monty Python skits doesn't prove that you're funny.  It only proves that Monty Python is funny (and that teenage boys are more willing to act like idiots than teenage girls).  And besides, nobody ever recited entire Coneheads sketches.  They simply looked for opportunities to say "We come from France" and "Consume mass quantities".

So Bell's original question, "Why are there so few female comedians?" remains unanswered, and he goes off on a straw-man tangent.  A more useful question might be "Why isn't funniness valued as highly in females?"  Or, "If a girl looked like John Belushi/Chris Farley/Michael Richards/John Candy would she have an equal chance at a successful show biz career?"  Or "Why do men have greater latitude for humor?  Why is it funny when men cross-dress (hellooo Audrey), but not women?"

An even more useful question (for purposes of this blog) would be "Is David Wenham funnier than David Wenham?"  That is, on average, has David done more funny roles or more serious roles?

A quick glance at David's career reveals that, of 30 randomly sampled characters going back to Horrie Young, 11 roles were Funny, and 19 were Not.  David is therefore 37% funny.

Methodology notes: Theater roles were excluded, since they skew heavily towards drama, and also they weren't listed.  Two characters fell into both the Funny and Not categories (Sam Flynn and Diver Dan), so I counted them as half a point each.

One interesting observation: David has not done a funny role since the Murray Whelan telemovies.

This really doesn't prove anything scientifically.  I just wanted an excuse to go look at imdb.

And now, I leave you with a joke that people of all genders can enjoy:

A man walks into a bar with a chunk of concrete under one arm.  He says to the bartender, "I'll have one for me, and one for the road."

Posted by dessicatedcoconut at 11:59 PM EDT

Updated: June 11, 2007 9:59 AM EDT

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Mood:  rushed

I ran across another new word today: gingerism.  (Never let it be said that we neglect your vocabulary, here in the Grove).   A BBC article, Is Gingerism As Bad As Racism?, claims that a red-haired family in Newcastle was recently driven out of their homes because of the color of their hair.  Local thugs were spraying graffiti on their house and beating up the children as soon as they set foot on the street.

I didn't know this, but apparently gingerism is a big problem in Britain, where it originated in the 19th century as a form of discrimination against the Irish.  Over there, red-haired people are ripe targets for abuse and bullying.  Prejudice is embedded in phrases like "red-headed stepchild", and ancient superstitions and myths based on the association of the color red with blood, fire, danger, passion and warning.

In America, gingerism is fairly unknown.  In fact, we seem to value red hair pretty highly.  Hair bigotry in the US is generally confined to blond jokes, salons that charge women triple the price for a haircut, and baldness.  Men with a full head of executive hair have a natural head start in the career arena (no pun intended), especially if they can get it to turn a distinguished silver by age 31.  I'm convinced that was the main reason the CEO of our company was hired.  He doesn't appear to serve any practical function, other than having hair as lushly manicured as the golf courses on which he spends 70 hours a week "making deals", as they say in the industry.

On the other hand, rumor has it that you can't make partner at Goldman Sachs unless you're bald.

Personally, I've always thought men with red hair are incredibly sexy.  My fetish got started early, in the sixth grade, when I met my first Twue Wuvv (sic). Tom was the boy almost-next-door, who lived a few houses down.  With a thick mop of dark red hair and a spray of freckles across his face, he bore an uncanny resemblance to the young Kris Kringle in "The Year Without A Santa Claus".  He carried my books, sat next to me in math class, and always made sure there was a seat on the bus.  It was all very apple-cheeked and Norman Rockwell.  Such was my reciprocal adoration for Tom that one Christmas when his family went on vacation, I did his entire paper route with a broken ankle, in the snow, on crutches.

Soon afterwards, without warning, they moved out of the state, and we were sundered forever.  (I hope it wasn't because Mrs. Baird complained that I kept leaving her paper on the porch instead of in the mailbox over Christmas.  Did they have to go on the lam?  Does the Federal Witness Protection program accept paperboys?)  I missed being able to pick him out instantly in a crowded lunchroom, and the way his hair clashed violently with the autumn leaves.

You may remember the book Lolita, where Humbert Humbert's lifelong fetish for young girls begins as a result of his thwarted love for Annabel, at age 13.  As a result of Tom, I became the Humbert Humbert of red hair.  Never mind jungle fever...I've got ginger fever.

Anyway, I do feel deep empathy with people who grew up hearing taunts like "bloodnut" and "carrot top" (as one woman pointed out, aren't carrot tops green, not red?)   I too was a target of hair abuse, in grade school, by people who later spent a fortune in salons to get theirs to look the same way.  (The hair is always so much greener on the other side of the fence.)  My hair is curly - not frizzy-curly, more of a loopy, loose every-which-way kind of curly - but curly enough to trigger the occasional playground witticism about Brillo pads and fingers stuck in electric light sockets.  Enough to make me spend many pre-adolescent hours in the bathroom with Dippity-Doo, a hot iron, and a ski hat, trying to get it to look like everyone else's, until I eventually gave in and accepted that I am one of the Curly People.  A Ringlet-American.  The Differently Coiffed.

I suppose kids always zoom in on whatever everyone's most salient physical feature is, whether it's glasses or freckles or a large nose or whatever.  But that doesn't excuse hair discrimination.  Until we eradicate it, humanity will never be truly free.

Posted by dessicatedcoconut at 6:01 PM EDT

Updated: June 8, 2007 10:35 PM EDT

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Mood:  lazy

This weekend, I finally did see "The Full Monty", and it was utterly wonderful.  (The audience, by my rough estimate, was about 140% women.)  It was very well cast.  The play was all the more charming and plausible for being a small-town production - you could actually believe that these were out-of-work steel workers, which I'm not sure would have come across quite as convincingly in the context of a big Broadway production.  The kid who played the main character's son (Gaz in the movie, Jerry in the play) was wonderful.  He had a very strong resemblance to the boy who played Red Whelan, with the same sort of self-possessed, more-grown-up-than-Dad personality.

I've also been watching Empire Falls, which was directed by Fred Schepisi, the director David would be working with on Last Man, assuming that funding can be found.  Empire Falls was filmed not too far from here, in Skowhegan and Waterville.  The area was all a-flutter while they were making the movie (not unlike Bowen, I would imagine).  The newspapers were full of Paul Newman and Ed Harris spottings, as though they were rare birds that had accidentally blown in on an Arctic storm.

It's a well-done miniseries, worth watching if you can find it.  The premise is similar to Seachange, in that it focuses on the doings of quirky characters in a little coastal town, but in other respects it's the mirror image of Seachange.  Miles, who, like Laura, is divorced with a teenage daughter, wants to escape out of the small-town life, instead of into the small-town life.  The town is also seriously lacking in charming, ginger-bearded, kerchief-wearing rogues.  I'm just glad they didn't overdo the "ayuh" accents.

So, following up on the "foefiction" post from the other day...I forgot to mention, the main difficulty I'd have with writing foefiction is that there just aren't a lot of books/movies that I really dislike.  Most movies have at least one or two redeeming qualities.  The ones that are truly terrible and brain-destroying (like Spice World) I steer clear of altogether.  But sometimes, due to circumstance, you find yourself watching something that wasn't exactly your choice.  And when it's over, you're so relieved that you'll never have to go through that again.

The list of Films I Never Want To See Again is short, but potent:

1.  Cool World  A Ralph Bakshi movie in which wooden nickels devour children, limousines sprout breasts, and Brad Pitt has to say lines like "You're a wacka-doo".  And very bad things happen if people have sex with cartoon characters.

I saw this film with a group of friends one night, when we were stuck in the middle of Kansas with nothing to do.  It turned out, after the movie, that we'd all been sitting there separately thinking "Oh God...I really really really wish I could walk out, but I'm with a group of people."  Sometimes peer pressure isn't such a good thing.

2.  Independence Day  My boyfriend wanted to see this.  I wanted to see "The Importance Of Being Earnest".  The boyfriend won.

After two hours of unremitting preposterousness, the final straw, for me, was being asked to believe that the alien mothership ran on the Windows operating system.

3.  Twilight of the Gods  Did you know that Marton Csokas made a gay Maori porn flick?  Neither did I, until a Marton-obsessed friend brought it over and made me watch it.  I suppose there are worse movies in the world, but I felt mildly dirty and violated after watching Celeborn cavorting naked in a rain forest.  (My opinion of the film wasn't elevated by its inclusion on a DVD compilation called "Boys In Love".)

4. The "Barfing Immigrants" Film We Were Forced To Watch In Eighth Grade  I don't even remember the title of this - something like "Land Of The Free" or "The New World".  One day, the entire eighth grade was herded into the auditorium.  The doors were chained shut, and we were shown a movie about eastern Europeans emigrating to America.  It was supposed to make us appreciate what our ancestors went through to get here.

At the beginning of the movie, a little girl eats some raw bread dough.  The yeast rises inside her stomach, bloats her up, and kills her, in a scene disturbingly reminiscent of "Alien".  After a brief mourning period, the immigrants all cram into the steerage area of a clipper ship and get busy throwing up all over each other.  Mothers spew on children, husbands puke on wives, brother blows chunks on brother.  Buckets of mixed barf and diarrhea jiggle and slop onto the floor.  The walls run slick with amoebic dysentery.  Just when you think it's over, the hurling starts anew.  (The vomit budget of this movie had to be well into six figures.)  In the middle of all this, the filmmakers inserted the mandatory Childbirth During An Ocean Storm scene, with lots of blood and screaming.

When the movie ended, it was lunch period.  One hundred whey-faced eighth graders staggered into the cafeteria on shaky legs, vowing never to immigrate anywhere.  That day, the menu was gluey cheese pizza, and a canned pear in syrup that looked like a medical experiment.  I vividly remember thinking: "If I just sit here quietly at the lunch table, without moving, I won't have to throw up."

For the coveted #4 slot of Movies I Hope Never To See Again, it's a difficult choice between the immigrant movie, and The Little Girl Who Slipped On A Snowbank And Got Run Over By The School Bus, part of a Bus Safety series that we were shown in elementary school.  Both were about equally traumatizing.  I wish I could say the same of the sex-ed movies we saw in fifth grade, but they were so vague that nobody knew what they were talking about.  The "girl film" showed a girl wandering in a dreamy haze through a meadow.  The "boy film" showed a boy sitting on his bed looking out the window.  To me, it looked like the kid was suffering from clinical depression.  "Soon", the narrator informed us loftily, "you'll be getting taller and going through changes."  It was never specified what these changes were, though the playground grapevine rumored that they had something to do with armpit hair.

(Just think what a great job Dilios could have done narrating those sex ed films...."Only the strong can become men.  Only the pimply.  Only the strong.  Only the pimply and strong and manly can become manly pimply men."  As for the girls:  "Soon, you will be giving birth to real Spartan men.")

I learned nothing useful about male anatomy from these films, despite having grown up in a house full of brothers, and despite playing "doctor" with my best friend Matthew at age 6.  Matthew was the Eddie to my Amanda.  We always picked each other first in gym class, spent hours hiding in trees in the woods, and were planning to get married someday.  He was going to be an astronaut, and I was going to be a doctor, and we were going to live in a treehouse.  A year later, our family moved to the next town over, where the school system had a better library of scary bus films, and that was that.

In a strange case of life nearly imitating art, I ran into Matthew again 8 1/2 years later, when we were 15, at a bookstore.  It was a pretty gangly and awkward encounter.  We probably didn't even have sixty cents between us, let alone three dollars.

Wow, this post wandered WAY off topic.  I can already sense all of you slotting it at #2 under "Posts I Never Want To Read Again".

Posted by dessicatedcoconut at 3:23 PM EDT

Updated: June 4, 2007 5:42 PM EDT

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Mood:  smelly

I came across an interesting term today: "foefiction".  Apparently, it's the opposite of fan fiction.  In foefiction, you write about characters you hate.

Now, I would have a hard time coming up with books or movies to write foefiction about.  If I fail to warm up to a book, it's usually because the main characters are two-dimensional and totally subordinate to the plot (*cough thedavincicode cough*).  By definition, they just wouldn't be very interesting to write about.  Who wants to read Silas Marner slash?

It could be that foefiction is a form of artistic revenge, where the object is to write characters that are more rounded and believable than they were in the original work.  More often, it seems to be an excuse to electrocute, torment, and beat up despised characters.

Oh, wait a minute.  That happens a lot in Faramir fanfiction, too.

*abrupt subject change*

Close your eyes and take a nice, deep breath.

Step into an alternate universe for a moment.

Now, imagine that there is a school for aspiring David apprentices.  Call it the Shaolin Kung-Fu Daisy Monastery.  Here, young postulants practice for hours on end, trying to attain transcendent hair.  Thick, luscious, tufty hair.  Hair with Buddha-nature.

Now, imagine that one of them is competing to be a pirate on a reality television show.  (This is a very alternate universe.)

Will he be voted off the ship (or keelhauled, or whatever they make contestants do*) for not having real pirate hair?  Or does Daisy hair win at everything?

And with that, I'm off to write some "Pirate Master" foefiction.

*Remember, kids: don't watch reality TV.  If you want to be entertained by amateurs, go outside and watch your neighbors toss pasta out the window.

BONUS JOKE:

How do you know you're a pirate?

You just arrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

Posted by dessicatedcoconut at 4:27 PM EDT

Updated: June 1, 2007 5:32 PM EDT

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Mood:  chatty

"My character was the most inept policeman who had ever been given a badge. He was a motorcycle policeman - whoever came up with this concept I don't know - who wore red socks which attracted the local dogs, so the dogs would pull him off his motorbike. And there were kids who had flour bombs and he thought they were cocaine. Sadly it wasn't an ongoing role."

-- David Wenham, speaking of his role in "A Country Practice" in Wenham Goes True West

I think I have an idea what happened to this policeman: he was hired by the Berkshire County sheriff's department.

Back in college, I had a friend whom we'll call Eliot (although his real name was Mike).  Eliot, a hardcore Deadhead and budding white-collar felon, lived across the hall.  Eliot's hobbies included hacking the school computer system, smuggling tubs of peanut butter out of the dining hall, disproving all of Western philosophical thought, making avant-garde recordings, and cooking up interesting postmodern room decor schemes involving 200 votive candles, an ice pack lashed to the dorm thermostat, and a single helium balloon in perpetual motion.  It was like having Andy Warhol as a neighbor.

One afternoon, Eliot took some bad LSD and went off on a nature spree across campus.  He was apprehended two hours later, stark naked, on the lawn of the college president's house.

The cops raided his dorm room, thinking that Eliot had a stash hidden away somewhere.  They found two plastic bags of clear aquarium gravel, which they identified as a quarter of a million dollars' worth of crack.  Then they found several needles belonging to Eliot's diabetic roommate, Frank.  Obviously, they were dealing with a hardcore junkie here.  Possibly even a dealer. They impounded his wastebasket (to dust for illegal substances), hard drive, and answering machine (to check for incriminating messages from local addicts).  From across the hall, I could hear them yakking on the 2-way walkie-talkies: Biggest drug bust in the history of Berkshire County!  Front page news! This is gonna be huge!

In all of the excitement, they missed the 19 pot seedlings growing on the windowsill.

In the end, the cops were only able to charge Eliot with public intoxication & lewdness.  In return for not pressing charges, the dean gently persuaded Eliot to take a year off.  Like Huck Finn, Eliot promptly lit out for the Territory (aka the U.S. Trust Territories of the South Pacific).  Periodically I'd get cryptic postcards scrawled on cardboard torn from miniature cornflake boxes:  "I HAVE DRIED FLOWERS AND A COW PARADE!!"  or  "JULIE = BITCH  PLEASE READ AND DESTROY".  (I never did find out who Julie was.)

Eliot returned from exile the semester after I left.  I saw him once more, at the following year's graduation (my then-boyfriend was in the same class).  After that we slowly lost touch.  Probably he's either in prison now, or a dot-com millionaire.

I was telling this story to a friend over lattes at Starbuck's a few weeks ago.  The guy in the next armchair over seemed very interested in listening in. When I was finished he came over to us, said "You two seem like a pair of nice ladies.  If you want to know a great way to relax, try dunking a teabag of pot into some hot water", waggled his eyebrows, and sauntered off.

My friend looked at me and said, "You are the biggest weirdo magnet."

Posted by dessicatedcoconut at 2:37 PM EDT

Updated: May 31, 2007 4:13 PM EDT

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Mood:  surprised

Saturday being sunny and nice, me and a bunch of my tree-nerd pals went to the Arnold Arboretum.  We spent 6 hours walking around the tranquil grounds, ooh-ing and ah-ing over centenarian katsuras and bonsai that predate the Articles of Confederation.  And looky what I found, tucked away in a sacred grove:

Check out that Latin name!  Yep.  The Davidia, or Dove tree, has huge white blossoms that look like a peace lily (or remnants of toilet paper after Halloween):

Other species in the genera include Davidia Spitierii "Weeping Mullet",  D. Cyrano "Tragic Nose", D. Diliosum "Sweet 300", D. Basiliskii "Creeping Strangler", and D. Edenii "Bloodstained Fop".  All Davidia species thrive on full sunlight (tropics, Zone 9 - 10).

Posted by dessicatedcoconut at 10:20 PM EDT

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Mood:  quizzical

"Though the concept of being held in place in the dark and licked by an orc was dreadful in the extreme to Faramir, to his horror and confusion the sensation itself was not...wholly unpleasant."

    --  Captain of Mordor by Draylon 

Licked by an orc?  Is that like being touched by an angel? 

I have a new obsession besides Engrish: lolcats.  What are lolcats, you ask? (or rather, I ask rhetorically on your behalf, since I can't hear you through the computer screen).  Lolcats are captioned photos of cats making faces and/or engaged in weird activities.  The captions are written in misspelled, pidgin English, as though typed by the cats themselves.  I love them.  They're utterly ridiculous, cute, and addictive.

Example of a lolcat:

Lolcats are often posted on messageboard forums as a commentary on the discussion:

Lolcat captions frequently take one of two forms:

1. "I has X" (where X is an attribute or a prop, like a wig, or swim goggles, or a minivan).  Examples:

2. "I'm in your X, doing Y".  This type of caption comes from an old video game taunt, "I'm in your base, killing ur d00dz".  Examples:

(note the "trompe l'oeil" laptop screen...)

Other lolcats are just...well, they speak for themselves:

There are even lolpresidents:

Now, I was tempted to create a batch of loldaves.  For example, Jim Doyle: "i'm in ur hard drive, wrekking ur credit record".  Or Carl: "i has jingl bellz on my hatt."  But they're just not as funny as with the cats.

(To enjoy more lolcats, visit I Can Has Cheezburger?)

Posted by dessicatedcoconut at 2:05 PM EDT

Updated: May 25, 2007 3:50 PM EDT

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