Month: August 2008

It is over

The first 3 seasons of NCIS are done.  Hiatus I and II sucked wind at a hundred p.s.i., but maybe I’m just mad because they never filmed a dream sequence of Mark Harmon and Michael Weatherly getting it on.  I mean, three seasons in, and Whedon would have done it, but I guess Bellisario is molto square, although he sure makes room for all the slash fic you can think of, what with everybody bein’ so touchy and all.  Boy, does Mark Harmon hug Pauley Perrette a lot in Season 3!?  Then, further to the slashfic.  I’m imagining a mashup consisting of “You’re the Top” sung by Barbara and Ryan with every mention of top and bottom showing DiNozzo and McGee with nice linking motion caps.  Mm.  Could go places.

Really,  really,  I should change the subject.

Unicode

你好!

If the above noted is garbage, my apologies, but I just inserted ni hao, which is hello in Mandarin (literal translation.. you good?)

Took me forever to find the right characters.  Just playing around, can’t really start the laundry until later….

Katie K

FINALLY – after literally months – I got together with Katie K in her ‘impressively staged’ condo.  Why, when I recollect what it looked like the last time I was there…. okay, maybe I’d better rephrase that.  There is virtually nothing in the condo.  I mean, a hotel suite has more furniture in it.  The repulsive colours on the walls are now amazingly similar to the Dusty Roads Paul and I painted the Augur Inn (note, that was really Unca Dave who painted it), and the hunter green carpet is now the same laminate flooring Paul and I put in the basement after the flood.  All in all, it looks lovely & you can actually see all the closet space, of which, given the size of the condo, it has a lot.  Yes, the condo is still for sale. Her new place closes in a month. Insert vicious comments about the horrors of getting a mortgage when you’re a woman on your own, bridge financing lamentations, etc., etc.

After we be trading smoking hot gossip and footrubs (when, pray tell, are footrubs NOT in order?) she got a thoughtful look on her face and showed off all the fancy lingerie she got in Vegas (okay, boys, you can all go to your happy place now) and she mentioned her weight loss, and then said, “Try these on” so I now have a really nice fitting pair of Gap jeans and the knowledge that Katie K is a size smaller than me.  At least in the ass department.  I’d need a really venal plastic surgeon to be able to approach the magnificence of her balcony. There followed a discussion about shipping ourselves off to a fat farm for a month next summer, this summer being jammed full of other things as well as almost over.  Maybe I should just get my jaw wired shut; it would get me off the phone at work, my brother wouldn’t have to listen to my yammering, and I’d quit eating as if I had a tapeworm.  Mm, tapeworm.  I could always try that too.

Jeff and I had considered going to the Harlan Ellison biomovie at Cinémathèque but when I got home from Katie’s we just looked at each other and went meh.  Then more NCIS.  Pretty soon Season 3 will be all gone, so we’ll have to go back to watching movies.  With respect to NCIS, I have noticed some really glaring continuity errors, and I’ve finally warmed up to Michael Weatherly.  The Ziva character, of course, is wonderful.

I woke up to “Young Dumb and Crazy” playing in my head, with full 60’s style accompaniment, kinda a cross between Nelson Riddle and Bert Kaempfert (aaaarrrrgggghhh!) and some beardless tenor wailing out the lyrics.  Let me tell you something.  You know how you can get a song stuck in your head?  Try having written the damned thing, c’est pas un cadeau.

Spoke to Paul yesterday about kid stuff.  I am so happy to be able to communicate with him reasonably well about the important issues without being all hissy towards him.   Human communication is such a fragile thing.

Today, laundry.  And other cleaning matters…..

Robof9 sends me a virtual octopus chandelier

Isn’t it sweet? Don’t quite like the colours but I’m all over the design.

Mike, Jeff and I hung out for a bit last night and we saw a Robot Chicken I had never seen before.  There’s this one blackout of Chewbacca imitating the Fonz which was cherce.  Then some more Futurama (the alternate universe one) so FOR ONCE we didn’t watch any NCIS, which I realized has dominated my television viewing for the last while.  But it’s so good!  The plots bump up against, and frankly sometimes stampede over, both plausibility and the likely continued employment of the principals, but the editing and dialogue and sheer charm of the show – when people aren’t being gruesomely murdered or turned into propane powered chunks by law enforcement – continue to dazzle.

It was great to see Mike.  He had to skate off as he had a date with Heather, but it was worth it just to see his new hairstyle.  Oh… it’s still long.  It was inflated to about 15 PSI though.  I’ll leave those of you who know him to picture that.

creative jus and structural integrity

My experiences with certain young people and the young couple formerly downstairs have me in the middle of writing a song.  This will be an ‘anti love song’.

Picture 50’s / 60’s doowop.

Young dumb and crazy

Young dumb and crazy

You can’t be serious

Love makes us delirious

We have trouble with bound’ries; we have issues at borders;

Court appointed attorneys; and restraining or-or-ders

I dosed her with chloral; she hit me with crock’ry

Our manners and morals are mostly a mock’ry

I’m smelling trouble; she’s smelling perfume

And on the double, up goes the volume

Young dumb and crazy

Young dumb and crazy

I want to be passionate

My hope – you are dashing it

Other than that, not much to report.  I am in receipt of an email from the Luddite outlining his latest activities, with one disgruntled comment about the weather, which has been dreadful for a cyclist.  Not too much fun for me either, as I have lost my umbrella and not replaced it, because that’s what umbrellas re FOR, to be lost, and there really seems little point to get into this infinite loop again of purchasing umbrellas, being happy with them for the first little while, watching them slowly lose structural integrity and then about the time you want to pitch them you conveniently leave them on the bus.  It’s been 15 years since I left something on a bus, I feel really dumb, but on the other hand, it was just an umbrella, and not a very good one at that. It’s a recursive loopy kinda day!

Grr

After my exalted state yesterday, OF COURSE I don’t get to keep it.  Instead, here it is 6:30 in the morning and raining comme un batard (I think I’m missing a circonflex in there) and I’m feeling ill and sad, because I just accidentally read somebody else’s correspondence on my computer.  I was looking for all the midi files on my Mac so I can fire them over to Mr. Music and he can sort through what he likes…. but smacked into Katie’s IM with Dax at midnight because it was the first thing that came up on the search.  How’s that for a coincidence?  Now that I’ve admitted I’m a jerk, I think I’ll have some more coffee.  I have no witnesses to the fact I did not go looking for this intel; I hope you’ll take my word for it.

Yup – Katie is visiting.  I’m not entirely sure how long she will be here, but I think it’s safe to say she will need a lot of love and support over the next little while.  She’s scheduled to start school at VCC in September; she says she’s looking forward to it and I believe her.  The rest is me being silent, but if you can visualize me squirming in sympathy, that’ll cover it.

I can’t get the Angstones version of the Lonely Goatherd out of my head.  That infernal yodelling!  It’s bouncing off the inside of my skull like a veritable Pachinko of billiard balls.

The CEO of a 17 billion Euro company is coming through the office today.  No, I’m not making that up either.  My response was to go to his corporate website, print out his picture, and stick it up over my desk with a cheerfully deflatory comment; I know that the cubicle police will come through at dawn and take it down, so I’m perfectly safe.  They will never comment.  They know what I’m like.  Hey, he said on his bio on the corporate site that he had a sense of humor (also that he likes white water rafting).  It’s everybody else’s reaction that I’m going for….

Jeff has once again improved the house, this time by putting sound dampening on the toilet lid.  NO, not fur trim.  Blech.  He put it on the toilet tank so that the bathroom no longer rings like a gong when you put the lid up.  We leave it down because the cats like to drink from the john, which we judge to be lacking in aesthetics and hygiene both.

Last night we fed Keith, Katie and Paul something of a feast.  It was very good to see all of them, and we watched a couple of NCIS episodes, which have Ziva in them, trying to gel with her new team…  Mike was supposed to drop over, but it’s like waiting for the bridegroom.  I have to keep the lamp trimmed at all times.  Or maybe he didn’t want to drop into a family gathering; that would not surprise me.

Back to the midi files.  Having revealed the cause of my unhappiness, I feel somewhat better.

Percolatin’

Okay, so me and Mr. Music got together last night and started messing with this ‘thing’ I have in my mind.  I’ve wanted to write a musical since I was in my teens, and his self-appointed job is to fix me with his kindly yet piercing gaze and say, “So nu? you going to write this thing already?”  Last night I laid out what I want to be the linking device between the songs… Gizmo is ‘quacking’ again, lost my train of thought…. oh yeah, and then recited the lyrics to the pirate song.  Because any modern musical must have pirates and ninjas. OH and unicorns, more than one kind of fairy, zombies (I haven’t written the ‘song’ they will sing yet but I know how the chorus will go), squid (as mentioned).

When he showed me a printout of my blogpost from yesterday, wishing to expand on it, I almost burst into tears.  Then, abruptly, I thought I might be standing on the edge of one of those hills in the badlands, the ones made out of solid bentonite clay, during a heavy rainstorm.  I’m about to slide down one of those bastards, and when I get to the bottom, I’ll be filthy, scuffed and exhausted, but it will have been a hell of a ride.

Then we had a LONG discussion about libretto, composition, the role of insanity in creativity (I’ve got some stuff to look up now), ignoring cost and just writing what we want.  Because the most exhilarating aspect of this is that my luck has provided me with the perfect partner for this enterprise;  if I could express in words my longing for such a thing, and how I’ve longed for it over the course of my whole life, then I’d be a GOOD writer.  Musicals are all about longing….. and how to most perfectly delineate it, elaborate on it, and then satisfy it. I don’t want to be part of Rodgers and Hammerstein.  But if I could get a corner torn off the page of Comden and Green and stick it in my scrapbook, my word, I would be happy.  There’s only one way to leave the theatre!  Singing!  Thanks, Mr. Music, I’m in a very up kind of mood today, which is good, because the weather is VILE.

Marcus Aurelius

Chipper sent this link to me under the rather cryptic header “Big Head”.  Marcus Aurelius was a great writer and his contribution to the philosophy of Stoicism should not be forgotten. Here’s a link to the Meditations.

I’m off to see Music Man tonight.  I am starting to think about writing a musical and rather than having a discernable plot, it’s a thirties style attempt to jam about 100 songs with the most minimal amount of plot or discursive linking possible into 2 hours. Like, my parents hate the plot and fast forward to the musical numbers.  Eddie Izzard in an enormous red ball gown as the Master of Ceremonies?  A little girl asking for pirates and ninjas, and she gets the pirates but you never see the ninjas? Of such is the coloured marzipan from which I wish to confect a musical….  A giant squid sings a sad song about the depths of the sea, with its limbs operated by the cast members?  I even have a name for the opus.

OMG. Gizmo, when he’s cleaning his nether regions, makes a noise like the quacking of a really subdued duck.  He just gave about five demonstrations in a row. The quack he emitted on the sofa last night cracked me and Jeff up.

Soon, the mandolin lessons.

Quiet evening

Paul brought some more of that awesome chard, leftover pork roast (yum!) and a very nice cuke from the downstairs neighbour’s garden.  We all had ourselves a little feast and watched some NCIS (he was not previously familiar with it but fortunately the story arc is such that you can watch single episodes without getting lost).  Must tell Paul to stop filling the dishwasher.

Shame about Stargate Atlantis getting cancelled, but it had a good run and there will be movies.

Keith said, “We shoulda talked about story ideas!” but the call of the computer, now that Jeff’s got the big screen set up for multiplayer gaming, was TOO much for him.  I know exactly what he means, I still haven’t finished the laundry although I did do the bog.  Oh, and you can see the floor in my bedroom, how outré is that?  I thought Keith was going to vibrate a filling loose when he asked me where his Alan Moore comic was and I said, “I think it’s in my bed.”  Then I pulled it loose from the bedding and it was in perfect condition.  Okay, I’m sick, I sleep with comic books.

I’ve got about two minutes to get clean and get dressed and get out the door. More later….

Dang! I should never post without checking my email

Uber-cousin Alex has forwarded yet another cute pic of her jet-setting offspring, Darwin. Here he is lounging by a pool in Switzerland them there furrin’ parts. As corrected, France.  Hey, I’m flying to the north end of France in November.  I’ll be doing my own little war re-creation, slogging through the rain.

Catching some rays.....
Catching some rays.....