From salon.com

Which They Might Be Giants album are you?

My sister got engaged.

The inscription on the inside of her ring reads "mmm...Kangaroos".

I think he'll fit in just fine.

so if information and Empire moves east-west, as it seems to have been doing for the past few thousand years....

....teach your kids Mandarin.

For those of you living in isolation tanks, the Chinese government has decided to dam the Yangtze river. I think we might ask the dragon first.

The unthinkable happened today.

For those of you who know me, I have long hair. Like, REALLY long hair. I can sit on it. And I *like* my long hair. It's kind of a signature piece.

I'm a bit weird about haircuts, as for some reason I have had several horrible experiences with hairstylists thinking that "three inches" means "at least a foot". So I go infrequently to get my hair cut.

I went today. I asked for 3-4 inches to be taken off. She whacked off nine inches of hair.

NINE INCHES.

NINE............INCHES.

My hair is now just below my shoulder blades. When I saw it I immediately went into shock. Right now I'm coping by very pointedly NOT THINKING ABOUT IT.

I get ten points for not bursting into tears and going into foetal position on the floof of the hair salon.

So if you ever ask me, "Why don't you get your hair cut?"--this is why.

Timeless Advice of the Ageless Sages

"Al: What do you think the youth of today need, Ben?

Ben: Guns.

Ben's Mom: [angry] Oh, Benjamin!

Al: You think? I think they need to eat more watermelon. My dad always told me, "Al..." Actually, he said Alfred. He said, "Alfred, you know, watermelon is a happy fruit. If you're ever suicidal at four o'clock in the morning, don't jump out the window. Just run to the supermarket and get yourself a big old watermelon and stick your face in it. You'll cheer right up."

Ben: Does it work?

Al: Yeah, we keep a spare watermelon on the bus, just in case anyone starts to crack."

--The Onion A.V. Club interview of "Weird Al" Yankovic by 13-year-old Benjamin, a fan.

Today I visited American Science and Surplus, quite possibly the coolest place for Christmas gifts in the explored universe. My friend Nicole, who is also one of the coolest people in the explored universe, reminded me today how I'd been meaning to visit after drooling over their webpage for years.

American Science and Surplus is...well, it has to be seen to be believed. I almost bought a dermatome puzzle (for those of you who aren't anatomy geeks dermatomes are the areas of your body affected by spinal injuries, kinda), I drooled over a 1950's era radiation detector (it was the size of a large suitcase!), stared at the mummy mask, dreamed about the awesome lab glassware they have, and stared at the parts and parts and parts of STUFF they have. Need some rubber stoppers, a collection of plastic insects, some small electric motors, trophy parts, a preserved frog, and some specimen jars? American Science and Surplus is your one-stop shop!

The preserved frog was awesome. I almost bought it for my sister's boyfriend but then I thought, would this be somehow offensive? I may just get it anyway.

If you're very, very, VERY good this year, I just might buy you a Walligator.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHH!

Please read this. AND THEN VOTE THE BASTARDS OUT!

So what's the deal with Qatar?

As you may well be aware, the U.S. government has shown sudden interest in Qatar--which we are expected to believe has "nothing to do" with Iraq, although we are moving 1/3 of our Central Command Post from MacDill Air Force Base to a base in Qatar--but there are further strange connections with this tiny Middle Eastern country. (Incidentally, I believe that if the U.S. government really thinks that the American public will believe that moving a sizeable chunk of Central Command to the Middle East has "nothing to do" with Iraq, they should start offering us prime real estate in Florida.)

So Qatar. Outside of Middle Eastern history buffs and sophomore geography, when was the last time anybody you knew mentioned Qatar? Then does anybody know why a bunch of shady corporate goons were having a WTO meeting there?

Is any one else extraordinarily nervous? Perhaps it's just coincidence. But don't big international meetings historically take place in Geneva?

Hmmm...

Yes. We should all poke around on this website for a bit, folks. Later.

If you are reading this, chances are very good that you, like me, are a BFA (Big Fat American). Many people in the world--believe it or not, MOST people--are not BFAs.

In keeping with the constant feeling of great humility that you and I should constantly strive for--humility that your parents and mine fucked in the great old U. S. of A, and not Nepal, Somalia, or Colombia, I think you should go check out this website, and consider donating a small amount of your time and/or money. Because even if you're "broke", if you're a BFA, chances are, you're a rich sonofabitch compared to 98.3% of the world's population. Keep in mind that in 1999 the per capita income of El Salvador was US$1,900.

We are indeed lucky. And, if you help, more people like this woman can be lucky, too.

Plus, there's nothing more satisfying than telling mystified coworkers "I just bought a goat for charity!"

There is increasing evidence that autism is an autoimmune disease. This is interesting, since many parents have found that an extremely restrictive diet free of wheat, food additives, dyes, and milk protein causes fairly profound behavioral changes in some autistic children.

If a link is found--which I believe it will be--this will be further evidence of the startling interconnectivity of the body, and increase our understanding of the body as a whole which CANNOT be broken down into discrete functional entities. There is no such thing as a digestive system.

You know, one of the best things about dirty rotten scoundrels is that sooner or later, they'll say something stupid and reveal themselves. I'm very sorry, Mister Lott, but I for one am going to find it impossible to "move on to other issues".

I quit my job! Finally! I wrote my resignation today and my last day will be December 21!

I'm really starting an herb business!

phew!

Enough long, serious posts. Here's some award winning cheese, a sheep quiz (don't ask me. It's from New Zealand.), some rubber ducks (I really, really, really want the devil duck), and some Mae West quotes.

This has been an incredibly difficult year for me, although at the moment it really doesn't seem so. While I've been quite busy this year, and a lot has changed, I feel like I've been stuffed with cotton wool and left out in the rain to turn to felt. Immobile, grey, and slightly musty. I can only assume that stress has caused me to drain out and block most of the year so that only the last month--which has been mostly work and frozen pizzas--comes to mind. It has not been made any easier by the recent release of a new Tori Amos album.

The one language that I shared with my father was music. One of my first memories is holding my head against one of his massive Stonehengian speakers, listening to "Blackbird" off of the White Album, with him softly singing along. With all of the myriad difficulties I had with the man--and they were legion--I never once broke with the musical tradition that I learned in his house. I knew my father trusted me the day that he let me keep his album collection--hundreds and hundreds of perfectly preserved LPs--in my bedroom. He showed me the careful ritual of cleaning record and needle before carefully, gently, placing vinyl on turntable and then slowly dropping the needle. I listened to Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon on his massive studio quality headphones so many times that I can still hear the faint heartbeat , free of crackle and pop due to his fanatical care, on Side One, building to the vocals of "Breathe". He listened to music that was good. Bach and Beethoven, Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and the Allman Brothers, what mattered was the quality of the music, not the style or the popularity. I learned to play the cello. I learned to listen to music as a tapestry, a maze, an entire universe. I don't think it's exaggerating to say that listening to music is a skill, and it is one I have in spades, mostly thanks to my father the audiophile. Every now and then, even when we were barely speaking, one of us would say, "Listen to this" and play a song or two.

One of the only minor sources of dischord in this relationship was his stubborn idea that modern music was trash--one commonly held by parents about their childrens' music, but in his case, an opinion that I feel was unfortunately formed by the drek and sludge played on Top 40 radio stations in the past 10 years or more. Every now and then he would grudgingly admit that someone "wasn't bad"--usually an indie band my sister or I were playing, but occasionally someone a bit bigger. He liked the Red Hot Chili Pepper's version of "Rollercoaster".

Once, while listening to Tori Amos' "Under the Pink" at top volume (one of the ultimate benefits to living with a music lover for a father--my mother often told us to turn down our music, but my father never did, as he was likely to be playing something even louder than we were) he paused in my doorway to listen, and left with the comment "I would have listened to that when I was your age", which was pretty much an ultimate complement, coming as it did from someone who was convinced that popular music had pretty much topped out when he was "that age" that I currently was.

I tried to slip him Tori Amos after that, but he, like always, was grudging in his praise and complained that she "never sang anything happy".

The release of her recent album was one I was excited about for many reasons, but the foremost was that everything that I'd heard about it pointed toward it being an album that I could finally give to him. He could enjoy it as music without being made uncomfortable by too much female politics (I could hardly blame him for being uncomfortable about songs referring to female masturbation, rape, and sex, as he had three adolescent daughters).

He died in September. The album was released in October. I bought it within a few days of its release. And it was exactly what I expected. My father would have liked this album a great deal.

So now I am in an interesting position. On one hand, I have a brilliant piece of work from the ground up. All of it--the arrangement, the lyrics, the musicians, the vocals, the engineering--is extremely good. Some of the songs are, frankly, amazing. The technical excellence alone makes the album worth purchasing. But listening to it is some ways an act of mourning, and in other ways it is a memorial, incense in the aural realm instead of the smoke of burnt offerings to the ancestors.

As anyone who has chanced upon the smallest blurb on this album has no doubt read, it is a sonic roadtrip of America. It is a post-9/11 trip, an explanation of the soul of the land that needs to be claimed by her people, a catalogue of interesting people met all over the country throughout the life of a woman named Scarlet, and a personal and sometimes cryptic journey taken by Scarlet. In other words, it's a Tori Amos album.

We begin with a fading porn star, and immediately move into a road trip to New Mexico. We meet a tarnished genius in "Carbon", threaten a wayward niece in "Don't Make Me Come to Texas", mourn a dead friend in "Taxi Ride", and experience a piece of the loss in New York during "I Can't See New York".

The chords of "A Sorta Fairytale" are like sweet, full drops of sweet Tokay. The vocal treatments of this album are perhaps her best, controlled and masterfully chorused. Those who complain of "histrionics" won't find that on this album, which shows more vocal restraint than on any of her albums. I have never heard better percussion on any of her albums, which the exception of the tracks Manu Katche contributed to on "Boys for Pele".

Like many of her songs, "Carbon" is perfect for driving alone on a desolate highway. ("iieee" and "yes, anastasia" are also good for this. "iieee" sounds exactly like driving through the res in New Mexico feels. I have friends who will confirm this. And I spent about 30 minutes driving along back roads in Wisconsin listening to "yes, anastasia" during August one summer.)

When she sings "the jacaranda tree/She's telling me/of the trouble you're in/just by the way She bends" in "Don't Make Me Come to Vegas" the words scale down beautifully around the sinuous bassline in a way that Joni Mitchell would be absolutely green with envy over. The deliciously crunchy synth in "Sweet Sangria" goes directly to your spine, looks around with hard eyes, and instantly reminds you of desert scorpions. The same song has an unexpectedly beautiful piano chorus that breaks out of the song in a way that still surprises you on the fifth listen. I can't listen to "Sweet Virginia" without tearing up. It is a song about the lost youth of the land, and for someone who has seen a lot of destruction in places that should be holy, it is beautiful and sad.

"Wednesday" is pure Beatles pop, one of those Lennon/McCartney tunes that was mostly Lennon.

"Taxi Ride"--a song about a friend's death-- contains the cryptic, but enjoyable, lyrics "And I'm down to/Your last cigarette and/this "We are one" crap"

And the lyrics to "Crazy" are uncomfortably close to one of my own failed relationships that finally died in the desert.

But all the same, it is not my favorite album. Second favorite, possibly. Top three, probably. Depends on when you ask me, in what mood, and what the moon has done to me that month. Boys for Pele is my favorite album of all time, and short of a major musical outburst of monumental proportions (always a possibility) I don't see that changing anytime soon. Still, from a technical sense, this is probably the best album Tori Amos has ever done. I am completely willing to admit that my attachment to Pele is mostly emotional. Scarlet is an awesome achievement, and will stand up extremely well .

"Tomorrow I want to wake up and feel like a new person. Because if music can't change my life, I don't know what can."

--Glenn Mcdonald

close your eyes

I like art and artists which do not insult me by trying to simplify things. A lot of books, and music, and paintings which I love I've often heard described as "perplexing" or "unnecessarily complicated" or even sometimes "pretentious". But I often think that those that would denigrate something that they don't understand as little better than unfortunatel simpletons. When I'm confronted by something I don't immediately understand, it delights me. If someone has managed to create a work of art with enough facets that I can read or look or listen many times and still feel that I'm learning something--that to me is wonderful.

The great thing about the internet:

You can be really tired and equally bored, enter in a strange word like frogging into some strange search engine that a friend's website has sent you to, and actually get something.

Gotta love it.

Something woke me up last night, some thought important enough that it managed to filter through sleep and the fatigue borne of carrying heavy trays for rich motherfuckers for eight hours straight.

I have no idea what it was.

But here's another one:

Has it occurred to anyone that the British Invasion never ended, just expanded into other media? And--even more insidious and tricky--they've even managed to co-opt the mythos of America. What gall.

I realized the other day that one of my absolute favorite modern American novels --American in the sense that it takes place in America, that it discusses a lot of the American soul, and that a lot of very, very, VERY American archetypes are major players--was written by a bloody Scotsman.

This novel is of course Garth Ennis' Preacher. While the Texan accents may not always be quite right, in large part it is an exploration of the myth of the American West. If the fact that the lead protagonists are both gun-slingin', whiskey drinkin', cussin' free spirits didn't give it away, the presence of a ghostly John Wayne certainly does. Preacher is of course much more than a postmodern Western, and it is the variety of themes that makes it a masterpiece, but still, it is at heart a Western. An apocalyptic acid-soaked Western, sure, but still a Western.

A lot of comic book authors across the Pond have chosen to explore America . (Neil Gaiman comes to mind). I think their status as foreigners has actually helped them to create the mythos of AMERICA which makes for a good story. In the same way as a citizen of Dubuque, Iowa might associate jolly old England with beefeaters, tea, quaint cottages, and Monty Python, these Brits have watched our movies and regurgitated an America rife with salt-of-the-earth farmers, fast cars, McDonald's, and cowboys.

To me, this becomes a safe way to explore the myth of America without getting too close to home. The AMERICA of someone like Ennis is far more abstract than the america of Maya Angelou or John Steinbeck. American authors, when writing about America, usually hit too close to the bone. We squirm uncomfortably. Our collars seem too tight. Is this room hot, or is it just me? But the New World of someone who hasn't been close enough to see the blood--now, there's a fun place. Cowboys are much more fun when you use John Wayne movies instead of history books to build a character.

Still, we know that this is a fantasyland. This is not the America we live in. The myth of America is global now. It has successfully been exported, and we see it return in all sorts of enchanting ways.

This is interesting, and kind of fun. Go take the Dialect Survey. Do it for science.

What a cat-ass-trophy

I Have Decided:

That I will spend more time on my toenails. Break out the slutty red nailpolish!
That it is an inaliable human right to have tasty hot beverages when the tempurature is below 35 degrees, or 45 when it's wet. This goes for work, home, or school.
That raspberry leaf and licorice tea (and GOOD raspberry leaf that tastes of raspberry, none of this oxidised astringent Celestial Seasonings nonsense) is quite possibly the nectar of the gods. Even people that hate licorice like this one.
That someday I will go shoe shopping with either Margaret Cho, Tori Amos, or Camille Paglia. Or all of them.
That it is the responsibility of every Volkswagen Golf-owning Sierra Club-donating neo-green person to get off their ass and VOTE for a decent third party if we are ever to get this country back on track.

The Queen has spoken. So mote it be.

If you go to just one web site this week, let it be this one.