Events that are current, or at least not hideously outdated just yet

I generally refrain from commenting about current events on any of my blogs for fear of sounding like the uninformed dunce that I, incidentally, am.

An uninformed dunce I may be, but I am also a huge fan of US Politics. I mean this in the most superficial, teenybopper-ish way possible. Every so often I get very excited or very impassioned, but I have the attention span of a gnat and very quickly move on to the next thing. The next thing might be my hair. It might be an amusing cartoon about talking squirrels. You just never know.

This morning I was still riding on a nice Iowa-caucus information high while looking for my next hit of politico-crack. Oh look! Edwards accuses Obama of once compromising with someone, the bastard. Surprise! Rudy Giuliani is invoking 9/11 again. What a shock to my poor nerves. It would seem that today is clearly a day to take a break from news about the Primaries, since nothing is going to happen until the debates tomorrow. I decided to venture off the beaten path of the (I admit it!) fairly biased election coverage I so prefer.

Lo and behold I found yet another way that I am already a criminal! I thought it might be important to share it with you, fellow denizens of life’s dark underbelly, so that you too can be on the lookout for The Man. He is coming, armed with Cease and Desist letters and an arrest warrant for your iPod.

While I was reading the article, which I had arrived at via a link, I noticed the list of “most read” stories in a sidebar. “Self, what kind of alarmist website am I reading?” I inquired. “Not only am I breaking the law by listening to music I have paid for, but apparently I too could be at risk from lightsaber wielding tots and people are accusing Britney of being a bad parent!”

It was Fox News, and here are today’s most frequently read headlines.

• Report: Hospitalized Britney Spears May Lose Visitation; Federline in Court
• 8-Month-Old Boy Mauled to Death by Family Dog in New York
• British Girl, 4, Accidentally Hangs Herself Imitating Cartoon Stunt
• Two British Women Die From Identical Infection After Giving Birth on Same Day at Same Hospital
• Oregon Family Finds Bullet on Boy’s Pillow, Hole in Bedroom Ceiling
• Boy, 11, Uses Toy Lightsaber to Defend Mom From Attacker
• Arizona Man Charged With Running Child-Prostitution Ring
• Pop Tarts: Penelope Cruz, Sister Engage in Lesbian Lip-Lock
• Person of Interest Named as Search for Missing Georgia Hiker Continues
• Hospital Launches Investigation After Man Discharged in Storm Found Dead in Snowbank
• Couple Gets Letter, $20 from Woman Claiming She Took Dog
• Kneeboarder Finds Lost Nose Ring Inside Fish Boyfriend Caught
• Severe Storms Bear Down on California; Could Trigger Slides, Flooding
• Model Sues Jewelry Company, Saying Ad Makes Her Look Lewd
• Report: Madeleine McCann’s Parents Named as Prime Suspects
• Swiss Tennis Star Hingis Banned for 2 Years After Testing Positive for Cocaine at Wimbledon

Tomorrow: a return to the sanity of a US Presidential election.

How to Cope with 24+ Hours of Intense Family Togetherness

It’s Christmas Eve babe, and if you’re not spending it in the drunk tank you are probably spending it with your family [1]. Come to that, you are probably spending all of Christmas Day with your family too. Heck, you may even be stuck with them on the 26th, aka Boxing Day! This is the day you unpack presents from boxes, or engage in a refreshing post-holiday round of fisticuffs, or watch the big match or something. I don’t know. I’m an American and we prefer to spend the day in the department store returns line with 340, 394 of our closest friends.

Well crap Kirsten, you’re thinking. How am I supposed to cope with all this family togetherness? I’m not here to expound on that (the answer is usually booze, by the way. Booze and of course the love and Christmas spirit we all carry in our hearts, thanks to the barnyard birth of that adorable, chubby Savior approximately 1,974 years ago. Hi Mom.) but rather to offer a cautionary tale of what not to do.

When you’re spending 24-72 hours with your family you have 3 options: eat, talk or stare at a flickering screen in companionable silence. Though we tend to ignore the physics of it around Christmastime, our stomachs have a limited capacity and there is but so much conversation you can have about Aunt Ida’s goiter surgery or your cousin’s hush-hush marriage and subsequent hurried divorce from that Balinese prostitute he met over Spring Break. This leaves us with TV Christmas specials! There are some you should definitely skip. Take a nap and sleep off that sherry; there’s no need to watch Mickey and Minnie galavanting around Orlando, Florida wearing fur-trimmed costumes in 90 degree weather. Sure, the cast of High School Musical might make an appearance, but some things are just more important than Zach Efron.

Some other holiday specials you should definitely skip include:

1. The Yule Log. Honestly, there’s probably something burning in the kitchen if you really feel the need to indulge your pyromania. Or you could go somewhere with a fireplace. Santa’s not coming via the TV, kids.
2. A Christmas Carol, starring Kelsey Grammar. This was a delightful Broadway play with music that didn’t make your ears bleed and acting that didn’t make you want to die with a stake of holly through your heart and be boiled in your own pudding. Then they filmed this atrocious TV adaptation, let Kelsey Grammar pretend to sing, and ruined it forever. And how often do I say bad things about anything involving Jesse L. Martin? Approximately never. That’s how bad it is. (If you need a Dickens fix, I recommend the best Christmas Carol adaptation of all, The Muppet Christmas Carol. We’re Marley & Marley, wooooOOOOO!)
3. Hogfather. A Terry Pratchett classic. It takes 4 hours to watch. Incidentally, it also takes about 4 hours to read. I recommend going the reading route, because it’s an excellent story but a terrible movie. I just watched it yesterday. It was bad. Don’t listen to the crazy people who’ve posted IMDB reviews; they’re crazy! I guess it’s a noble attempt. I guess it was made for TV. I guess you can sort of follow what’s going on if you’ve read the book. Whatever.
4. The Christmas Shoes. I haven’t seen it, but the song makes me want to hurl so I can’t imagine that extending those 5 minutes of listening pleasure into a 2 hour movie is anything but terrible.
5. Anything on Lifetime or the Hallmark channel. Unless you want your heart warmed by tales like A Grandpa for Christmas, A Dad for Christmas or A Very Married Christmas. Definitely not recommended if you are a sentimental drunk.

I hope this guide will help you safely navigate the schmaltz-infested waters of holiday television, even though I know I haven’t even touched the tip of the iceberg. There’s so much out there! So much of it is bad!

But do you know what is good? Most of the other stuff about Christmas like Peace on Earth, Goodwill to Men, Jesus and cookies. Hooray cookies. So Merry Christmas to you, and I’ll probably update in another month or two.

[1] A million bonus points if you’re an American and you get the reference. Zero bonus points if you’re from a country where they play this at last call.

The World Series of Ketchup

When I was but a wee lass I thought that there really was a game called Ketchup. It was what adults played when they had fallen behind. As someone who is ostensibly an adult (I have all of the parts, at any rate) and who has fallen behind rather hideously, I think it is time for a little first-class sporting action in the recently renamed Heinz Arena.

Please bear with me as I try to tie up all the loose ends I have left in previous entries. This could get ugly!

•  Hullo Interweb! and Artery Clogging Sausage Stuffing don’t really have any loose ends. The stuffing is still delicious and lethal, and the only question that might arise from the first entry is that of which person I am in the photograph. The answer is, of course, the attractive one. Or the one on the left. Whichever.

• Why I Can’t Be Arsed To Come Up With a Witty Headline asks the age old question of “what the heck is this blog about?” Like most cosmic queries, it has proven unanswerable. So sorry. I still love the New York Public Library as much as I did when I made this entry, though I have not looked at the available Rosetta Stone software even once. What can I say; I am a lazy American and my monolingualism is imprinted on my DNA.

• Next up was my pièce de résistance, Not So Live Satire Blogging, also known as the only entry of mine ever read by more than a dozen people. Well whaddaya know! Apparently The 1/2 Hour News Hour was picked up by the Fox News Channel, which has been airing it ever since. (Thanks Wikipedia!) I couldn’t be bothered to sit through it again, not to mention that it airs in the same time slot as The Tudors, and I can think of very few television shows that take precedence over Jonathan Rhys Meyers frolicking shirtless and being Machiavellian. Also, um, all that history.

• A Soul Crushing Work of Staggering Idiocy. Where to begin? I’m still pretty idiotic. However, I did finish my personal statements, did hear back from my recommenders, and have been accepted by my top three Museum Studies programs. Oops, programmes. I will most likely be accepting a place at the University of Leicester for the 2007-2008 MA course. Now of course I must stress over finances, visas, health, housing, fitting my copious belongings into one suitcase, etc. I never did make a follow-up entry on the International Spy Museum, but suffice it to say that I got to crawl through an air duct. It kind of shames the museum dork in me, but that was probably the most satisfying experience I have ever had in a museum, and I could have done something similar in a local junkyard. There was probably less of a tetanus risk in the museum though. (Really that’s just me being facetious. I’m a big advocate of making museums more interactive, though that line between Disney World and Learning is a little blurry and hard to pin down. I’m not going to even pretend to start on this topic… I’m supposed to be tying up loose ends not raising more questions!)

• I was such a huge cock-tease in Peaceable Kingdom. What kind of person promises sensationally titled entries like “Fisticuffs with Jesus: 5 People Who Want to Sucker-punch the Lord” and then doesn’t deliver? A real bastard, that’s who.

• Have I mentioned that I managed to finish my personal statement? Because I have. It doesn’t have anything to do with The Universal Curatorial Impulse, though I’m still trying to work out how to build my Master’s thesis around this (completely made-up) concept. You wouldn’t know it from this particular blog, but I am a great fan of making up concepts. If I were a great philosophical genius (or just a genius) I could take these crackpot ideas and turn them into accepted scholarship, but instead I am a passably intelligent crackpot, so I turn them into blog posts.

• I am not even going to attempt to re-type the title of this entry, but know that in the interim my grandmother has attempted to set me up with (among others) distant relatives, parents of my mother’s students, and 40 year old men. There is some overlap in these categories, particularly the “40 year old men” one.

• I came in last place in all my NCAA pools, much as I predicted I would. Also, I still find the kid who plays Harry Potter to be disconcertingly attractive. I console myself with the fact that his haircut in the upcoming Order of the Phoenix movie was a regrettable choice that causes his head to somewhat resemble a penis.

• I never actually experienced Saturday, Computerless Saturday, as I unsurprisingly chickened out and checked the weather online. It was all downhill from there. It was in this entry that I mentioned my “upcoming trip to Costa Rica.” I went and I had a great time. As you might have noticed from the entry previous to this one, there were monkeys there. There were AN OBSCENE NUMBER OF MONKEYS there. This might require more significant follow-up than I can provide in this bulleted list. No promises, of course.

• Unsurprisingly, the majority of Americans do not think the solution to school shootings such as the tragedy at Virginia Tech is to arm students to the teeth so that they can return fire. After those involved had time to mourn, I am pleased that public opinion blew in this direction.

Just so everyone is aware, there is some large and scary bug flying around my room right now. I thought you might like to be informed. Also this entry has not been proofread. At all. I didn’t even intend to write it right now… I wanted to go to bed!

Pardon me, do you mind if I exploit your tragedy?

This has not been a good day, either personally (a kid urinated on me) or nationally (“Virginia Tech Shooting Kills at Least 33″). Join me in marveling over how disparate those two events are.

Now I did not go to Virginia Tech; I do not even know many people who went to Tech. But I went to another public university in Virginia, the College of William & Mary, so I know many people who know many people who went to Tech. And so, untouched, I am still affected. I don’t yet know which of my friends are hurting right now, but some of them could be, and for that reason I am hurting. My thoughts and prayers go out to everyone affected by this truly disturbing and upsetting event.

It is amazing to me (now and after every tragedy in recent memory) how quickly we all turn each happening into another check-mark in the great column of Why We Are Right, how quickly each disaster is exploited by everyone with a point to prove. (I am not trying to set myself above the guilty parties here. I’m sure this entry evinces some sort of bias, and I’m sure someone will quite happily point it out to me.) If the tragedy wasn’t so great it might even be amusing to see how the gun lobby and anti-gun activists have both seized on the same event to talk about how inherently correct they are. My own politics aside, this event is not about gun control. It is not a testament to how all college students should be packing heat so they’re not sitting ducks in case a madman decides to open fire. It is not unequivocal proof that banning all guns will prevent future incidents like this. Yes, it’s a nice talking point for both sides, but this is about the Virginia Tech community and about a human tragedy. To quote Democratic Conversation (I’m sure you can guess their stance):

This fact is the epicenter from which all the spin will radiate. With all of that, here is the worst part: the students, teachers, and staff of Virginia Tech will be drowned within the vortex of this spin.

Do the world a favor (I’m looking at you blogosphere! I promise that someone–where by someone I mean the mainstream media–will still be spinning this even if you refrain for a few days) and forget the politics for a minute and remember the people. Think about thepirateroyal’s description of college, “It’s a home. It’s comfortable and safe. It’s like walking into the place you grew up in, only the hallways happen to be outside and your “parents” happen to be people with multiple PhDs and more brainpower than anyone you’ve met previously,” and remember the people for whom that safety, that second home, was forever ruined.

Quick edit for clarification 16 April 2007 at 11:11pm: I in no way intend to imply that this situation shouln’t be looked at in terms of gun control. Surely there’s a lesson or an example in here somewhere, and I recognize that partisan bickering and bipartisan dialogue share many common elements, the most important of which is the free exchange of ideas and opinions. My point is that we should mourn first, debate later. Now, not even 24 hours later, it is a time for mourning.

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.