Peacable Kingdom

This may not constitute a proper blog post but I’m sorry, this is the cutest thing ever. Sad too, what with the part where the tigers will eventually wish to eat their best friends, but cute nonetheless.

Up next, some day when I get home before 7pm, Fisticuffs with Jesus: 5 People Who Want to Sucker-punch the Lord. I’m only up to 3 right now (and I will give you a hint: James Cameron is getting his wag of the finger), and I don’t want to cop out and just list Hilary Clinton a bunch of times. Clearly this means I need to be reading more news sources with a conservative bent. (Although I realized the other day that I read more with a conservative slant than with a liberal one…and me a liberal! I simply don’t have time to read any more anything. You should see the backlog of books I have to tackle.)

So, until next time…

A Soul-Crushing Work of Staggering Idiocy

Thesis: I am dumb.

How dumb? Pretty pea-brained, thanks for asking. It seems, in my attempt to accidentally-on-purpose miss all of the US application deadlines for grad school, I have inadvertently missed several UK deadlines as well. When I say “missed” I mean “I haven’t done a damn thing and several deadlines ARE IN A WEEK.” So my having missed them is only theoretical at this point, but is nonetheless a reality.

I have heard back from only one of my recommenders, which leaves me a bit worried. Is the other on leave? Ignoring me? Trying to think of a kind way to say that he can’t a) remember who I am or b) find anything nice to write about me? Are my emails being caught in his spam filter? So, you know, panic and stuff. Other than that, UK applications are pretty straightforward and, best of all, free. I do need to write a personal statement at some point (or rather, a 500 word personal statement and a 1000 word one…because universities are fickle) but I need to wait until I am in another time-crunch induced tizzy to do so. I wouldn’t even have requested recommendations if I wasn’t in a blind panic. (You would not believe how much faster and more fluently I write when I am running on pure adrenaline. It is a beautiful thing.)

Do you need further proof that I am not fit to walk amongst intelligent human beings? On this blog I have linked to the blog of one of the programs I would like to attend. And I know this and am making this post anyway. *waves*

Oh look, I used stars to denote action. That might be my third strike.

But hey, on the plus side I wouldn’t be sharing this if it were still an actual crisis.

Off to DC this weekend. I will (hopefully) be visiting the International Spy Museum, so maybe I will have some anecdotes to share on my return.

Not-So-Live Satire Blogging

My original intent was to post a play-by-play of the almost certain train-wreck of Fox News Channel’s The Half-Hour News Hour for my non-existent audience. Laziness and a poignant sense of my own limitations stopped me, but lo, I bravely soldier on.

When I was younger my parents subscribed to a magazine called (rather aptly) Parents. It was full of useful tips for raising kids from birth through, I think, 12 or 13. Being my paranoid self I thought that my own parents were using these techniques to manipulate me, their guinea pig first-born. I started reading incoming issues before anyone else could get their hands on them, thus cleverly keeping myself updated on any potential enemy action.

Tonight I thought I would continue to keep myself updated on any potential enemy action (Is your tin hat adjusted? No, mine neither. Really I just have a New Years Resolution to follow the news from all perspectives.) AND repay these perceived slights by turning the tables and using my parents as guinea pigs. Ha! I am clearly still just about as clever as my 7 year old self.

Being a lucky member of the Boomerang Generation, I am a 23 year old who lives with her parents. I am neither proud of this fact nor much delighted by any aspect of it, but it will probably come up again so I may as well mention it to you now. My family gets along best while sitting silently in front of some sort of flickering image, so it’s not that shocking that we wound up watching The Half Hour News Hour tonight. I’m sure it didn’t hurt that I turned it on, either. The opinions floating around the internet have invariably been biased: liberals were/are determined not to like it, and many conservative bloggers were/are determined to portray it as hilarious and successful. So how to get an impartial reaction to cable’s newest fake news show? Poll your parents giggles.

This works especially well with my parents, since my mother is relatively moderate liberal who used to be a hippie and my father is an in-denial libertarian masquerading as a rabid conservative (who is actually registered as an Independent). A cross-section of the American public in two people! Thus I give you, segment by segment, though probably not really in order, Not-So-Live Satire Blogging.

1. The Opening: One of the segments floating around YouTube recently, featuring Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter as President and Vice President. I had already seen it and didn’t think it funny, but my father got a kick just from the fact that Limbaugh and Coulter were present. Honestly I don’t think he reacted to any of the “jokes,” but he did launch into a little anecdote about how Coulter is Colmes of Hannity and Colmes’s sister or sister-in-law? Or something. My mother didn’t react at all. I’d say this segment was neutral to mildly successful in the target demographic. If people in their 50s are even a target demographic for satire
2. The Requisite Hillary Bating: Both of my parents are ardent Hillary Haters. Neither of them gave a peep. This segment, part of the larger “Weekend Update” segment, was unsuccessful. But is it really Fox’s fault? All the jokes about her have been around for 10 years already.
3. Ed Begley Jr’s Magnificent Electric Car: Or: How To Kill Your Running Gag Dead Almost Immediately. I admit they had me fooled here. At first I really thought they were going to have Ed Begley Jr. on as a guest, and I was a little flabbergasted. “How big of them,” I thought. Well that didn’t last long. This was run into the ground by the end of the show. I even caught my father reading during all these mentions of human-waste fueled hybrids and liberals who look like homeless people. Embarrassment on behalf of whoever came up with this stuff? One can only hope. Highly unsuccessful.
4. BO Magazine: The intellectual height of comedy! Another “leaked” YouTube segment, the big draw here was the BO joke. My mother cracked a smile at the “Should We Even Bother to Hold the 2008 Election?” headline, and my father chortled at most everything, but his big belly-laugh was reserved for body odor. I thought this was all extremely lame and played out, but the laugh-o-meter tells me it was successful.
5. Children’s Book Parodies: Very weak. We’re lovers of …And Tango Makes Three around my place, so my mother and I exchanged sympathetic “awww!”s when it came on, but the rest of it drew no reaction. From anyone. Except maybe more embarrassment for whoever writes this drivel. Unsuccessful.
6. Che Guevara T-Shirt Salesman: One of two segments that I am shocked drew no reaction from my father, who went on a rant about what a criminal Che Guevara was as recently as yesterday. We all giggled at some of the t-shirt slogans. Mildly successful.
7. ACLU Commercials: The other segment(s) I’m shocked my father didn’t react to. I can’t even begin to count the number of rants he’s gone on about the ACLU. I expected at least some grunts of agreement or the start of another rant. Perhaps he was being silent so that I would have time to let the innate truth of what he has been saying all along seep into my brain? I may never know. What I do know is that, while he might have found it truthful, he didn’t laugh. Mildly to completely unsuccessful.
8. 6 Degrees of Global Warming: BOMB BOMB BOMB BOMB BOMB. My mother went to bed. My father went to go get something and only returned when it was over. I don’t know if this is related to the segment in any way, but I like to think it is. Chalk it up to the tendency to idealize one’s parents, though I have already cited in this entry my childhood fears that they were cunningly manipulating me for unknown and surely nefarious reasons. In the absence of any of my (admittedly highly scientific) data I am going to go with my own gut and the sense of shame I felt watching this clown, and call this one completely unsuccessful. Completely.

When it was (blissfully) over, my father summarized it like this: “Well, parts of it were funny.” I have to agree. There were moments I giggled, though like many on the internet I would not say that the things I laughed at qualify as satire. In addition to lacking the charisma and talent of a Jon Stewart or a Stephen Colbert, the anchors were such bad actors it was painful. But that’s my biased opinion. So why not go by my biased opinion of the biased and nonverbally expressed opinion of others? Clearly it is more accurate.

Why I Can’t Be Arsed To Come Up With a Witty Headline…

…Because I can’t figure out what to put after it.

I have spent a great deal of time musing over what the heck to do with this blog. Being no great wit, I am wary of attempting a typical personal blog. Not only do I lack a clever way of telling you what I had for breakfast, but there’s also the fact that what I had for breakfast is likely even more dull than whatever you ate. (That is my polite way of saying that my life is not all that interesting. A word of advice: do not take a gap year after graduating college. If you must, do not move back home. Go be poor somewhere else!) Still, a personal blog is essentially all I know how to do, having kept a Livejournal (oh the wangst!) for years.

So what to do? Pick a subject to focus on? OK, I’m game. What subject? I guess I could talk about education, particularly my place of employment the New York City Department of Education? No: others do it better, I’m not that entrenched in the politics and culture (this is a gap-year stopgap), and as I have gotten in trouble for journaling—because for whatever snobbish reason I am drawing a distinction between blogging (here) and journaling (LJ)—about real life in the past, you might say that I am “once bitten, twice shy.” Well, then what about culture and the arts? Nope. Again, other people do it better, though I suspect I will end up not blogging at all if I refuse to write anything that isn’t shiny and perfect. Plus, being the nerdgasming nerd I am, I’m a bit terrified of writing about anything that will cause my ignorance and naïveté to show too glaringly. That knocks religion and politics right out of the running too! In fact, it knocks out just about anything that doesn’t have to do with 17th and 18th Century American history… and you just KNOW that would be fodder for some fascinating blogging! Today’s post: making tobacco barrels in colonial Virginia…

I am going to spare you that post, though you might be interested to know that I once sat through an hour and a half lecture on that very topic. Instead, I am going to throw off the shackles of crippling blog insecurity and just make a darn post already. Coherent subject and theme be damned!

Well, really I just thought that maybe since today is Valentine’s Day I could get a thematic freebie. Last year my Valentine was beer (a very Love You and Leave You Hurting and Broke sort of chap), and this year I am following it up with another inanimate lover (remember when I mentioned that my life isn’t that interesting?): the New York Public Library. I feel this is fittingly nerdy for a blog called Nerdgasms, and as such might even be on theme!

If I could write poetry I would compose a Petrarchan Sonnet unto my love the NYPL. It giveth me unlimited free books, movies, and CDs! It alloweth me to download some of these directly onto my computer! It permiteth me to request exactly what I want and have it delivered to the library nearest me (which in my case is about 3 blocks away…sweet)! It even granteth me access to Rosetta Stone language software for free! …OK that’s getting old.

Basically, unlike beer, the NYPL wants me to save lots of money AND remember things the following day. Instead of renting videos and spending billions of dollars at Barnes and Noble, I can get (almost) everything I want to read or watch for FREE! Or, at least it would be free if I returned things on time. I’m actually pretty awful at that. Also, I get to GROW brain cells instead of killing them! It’s brilliant!

It’s also pretty convenient for someone such as myself who is going through severe college withdrawals. Trust me, the brain does not stay alive all on its own.

And I still love beer. It only hits me because it loves me back.