If I can't be the Prince of Darkness, can I at least be the Marquis of Moral Relativism?

This is really cool

Friendster
To: eevin
From: vanessa
Re: a staggering work of writing a nonboring profile

Eevinevil!
How are you?
All things, large and small, are as they should be. I'm looking for work, currently interviewing at Univision. Have been working at ugh Citigroup as assistant to Managing Director. Nice people, but not really my thing. I live in Park Slope with my plant (nameless) and maybe some spiders. It's cool. People visit.
But what about you? What have you been up to? Last time we spoke I think you were working at the Museum of Teeve. Still there?
Glad to be rebefriended,
Vanessa


Eevin wrote:
> Beatrice!
> We are befriended.
>
> How's every little thing with you?
> What news?
>
> Ee
>
> Vanessa wrote:
> > hello lovely eevin,
> > this is vanessa, now rejoining the world of the
> > computerable. want to befriend me?
> > have a wonderful day!
> > v

This is getting publicity on CNN now. Angels and ministers of grace defend us...

Which John Cusack Are You?

oh, gregory

In a message dated 3/19/2004 1:00:54 PM Eastern Standard Time, CBotana2 writes:
To allay anyone's concerns that Vanessa may be the only woman this wide world over that is incompatible with another human being, I too am confirmed to have no man nor woman match in all continents, according to eHarmony. A Buddhist monk might have more luck in love than either of us. Alas, I am not even suitable for Vanessa whose profile must have been scanned against mine.

Watch this:

and listen closely at the begining.
Mad? Learn more at Move On.org

it's a choice...



great shots at chrismilk.com

'The Penguin is Mightier than The Sword'

From: Berkeley Breathed
Date: Fri, Oct 10, 2003, 1:51 AM
Subject: Fwd: salon interview

> Last we heard from you, via the Onion interview a few years back,
> the odds of you ever doing a strip again seemed pretty slim
> (to put it mildly). What changed?

The world went and got silly again. I left in 1995 with things properly, safely dull, and couldn't imagine why anyone would feel it necessary again to start behaving ridiculously. It would have been at least courteous of the Republicans to warn a few of us inclined to retire our ink-swords that they had King George waiting in his zoom-zoom jetsuit aching to start the Crusades again.

I can't believe that George W. Bush soundbite I just heard on The Daily Show referring to Sen. Kerry about not making accusations without proof to back them up. That man is too, too much.

check this

Also, I love Jon Stewart and I need to marry him. squeep.

Reality TV snark quote of the day, from Television Without Pity's America's Next Top Model II forums:

pontoon, Couch Potato
Mar 16, 2004 @ 10:07 pm
"I was watching the show with Mrs. Pontoon and when Shandi's boyfriend wailed his quavering, sobbing, girly "Oh my gawwwd!", we both lost our shit. I think you'd have to be overly technical not to react thusly."

Thinking about this later, it just seems like such an awful situation for both of them. I can't imagine the producers and editors having a clear conscience about televising this scene. And yet, it was cringey and fascinating to watch. The weird paradoxes of reality TV. If we've all been through it one way or another, is it a 'larger human theme' or 'universal archetype'? Or is that an easy way around the fact that the tears of misery or humiliation of these poor schmos are just as unique and personal as yours or mine in the stall in the office bathroom or in bed at 4pm and should be left the heck alone.

I don't really know, but I have to say it makes for some undeniably compelling and satifying programming. Sometimes reality TV is just soooo real.

I went to see the Nederlands Dans Theatre's 'ballets' Claude Pascal and others at the Brooklyn Academy of Music the other night with my friend James. It was unfortunately just awful, but had one redeeming moment, when a woman in a black Edwardian bustled gown with a fan stepped forward and pronounced "I like darrrknesss, and solllitude, and spaghetti."

That was the one thing in a performance full of random that was sort of random in a nice way.

From Dan Renzi's weblog, by way of Gawker.com

"Real World Miami star Dan Renzi has renounced reality television -- except, admirably, for one show: "I have decided that, when I die, I want to be reincarnated as a contestant on America's Next Top Model," he writes in his weblog. (Yes, in case you forgot, he was the gay one.)"

The Best TV Show Ever:

"I want to be Shandi. I want to have a criminal record and a messy, drug-addicted past. I want to have wild sex with hot Italian men, and then call my boyfriend in suburban Kansas City and crumble into guilt-riddled, emotionally-unstable breakdowns. I want to win dance contests because I'm the only one in the room who knows how to "do levels."

I love this guy!

George Michael, long may he live:

Giving it away for free: George Michael has announced that he won't be releasing albums in the traditional sense and will instead just put music out via the Internet for free download -- with the option for fans to donate money to charity should they so choose. "I've been very well remunerated for my talents over the years so I really don't need the public's money," the musician told BBC Radio 1. (Soundgenerator)


*having a Pump up the Volume / Grosse Pointe Blank moment*

So this one goes out to all the folks at Callahan's, from Spider, Mike and Jake-


Well I guess it would be nice
If I could touch your body
I know not everybody
Has got a body like you

But I've got to think twice
Before I give my heart away
And I know all the games you play
Because I play them too

Oh but I
Need some time off from that emotion
Time to pick my heart up off the floor
And when that love comes down
Without devotion
Well it takes a strong man baby
But I'm showing you the door

'Cause I gotta have faith...

Baby
I know you're asking me to stay
Say please, please, please, don't go away
You say I'm giving you the blues
Maybe
You mean every word you say
Can't help but think of yesterday
And another who tied me down to loverboy rules

Before this river
Becomes an ocean
Before you throw my heart back on the floor
Oh baby I reconsider
My foolish notion
Well I need someone to hold me
But I'll wait for something more

Yes I've gotta have faith...

Free Will Astrology:

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): Imagine that your life is a detective story.
The goal is not to solve a crime, but to solve the mystery of why you're
here on earth so you can carry out the special mission you've come to
accomplish. Sometimes you go for months without even looking for clues.
You sleepwalk through the world, reacting blindly to the tricks that the
gods use to try to wake you up. Then there are those phases when hot leads
and fresh evidence pop up all over the place, convincing you beyond a
doubt that magic is one of the fundamental properties of reality. This is
one of *those* times, Pisces.

Hubble Ultra Deep Field

baby, you're Canadian, she said...

...


i had a dream last night that I was recently married to a jewish artist in his late thirties. we had a tiny baby, just a few weeks old. his name was isaac einstein and his parents didn't seem to overwhelmingly approve of me. for sure, my parents didn't approve of him because we lived in an apartment underground between several subway lines with a bunch of other people, including lizzy. our families had come to visit us, and we were trying to convince isaac that we should move to a nice two-bedroom in brooklyn, rather than raise our baby dodging trains and climbing down access ladders, but isaac refused to leave manhattan, despite my pleading. the baby was beautiful, and my husband was not bad either; he wasn't tall and was a bit dorky, with a nice face, and short straight brown hair and a funny leather jacket. at one point in the dream, i hugged him and felt very safe indeed. i was very attached to both of them, and felt so odd when i woke up.

as ever, i wonder if someplace in manhattan, a stubborn artist called isaac woke up this morning wondering about a dream he had in which he was married to a shiksa named vanessa and had a little baby...

hmm.

-----Original Message-----
From: Soto, Vanessa B
Sent: Tuesday, March 09, 2004 1:44 PM
To: Tanya; Amit; Dhaya; Oscar; Rick; Piyush; Gachi; Nick
Subject: Thanks!


Hi guys,
Thanks so much for coming to lunch to celebrate the eleventh anniversary of my fifteenth birthday. Please forget those figures immediately, of course...
Love,
V

I think this is really interesting, and I usually agree with Heather Havrilesky. I'm also usually a huge sucker for Stephen King's (better) written work, though very rarely his televised/feature film projects. Kingdom Hospital, in keeping with tradition, is leaving me with an overwhelming feeling of meh, though my geekly email from SK.com advises me to "Remember that Kingdom Hospital is a 'novelization for television'. Like a novel, it will pay back dividends but you will have to give it a little bit of time." Well, I hope so, but in the meantime, our pal Heather had a few choice things to say about the miniseries premiere, and they go a little something like this:

My kingdom for a Band-Aid

But you know, as a devoted slave to "Paradise Hotel," I may be a little biased. Which brings us to an important distinction: There are critics who prefer to give the illusion that their word is final. They would like you to think that they have some privileged powers of perception, that they alone can separate what is Good from what is Bad.

Then there are people like me. I've got some good ideas, sure, but I also have a lot of personal preferences and prejudices based on a tangled set of psychosocial and cultural influences. Who knows, maybe if I didn't love ham so much, I would have enjoyed "Charlotte's Web" a little more when I was younger. Maybe if my parents got along better when I was a kid, I wouldn't love "Ordinary People" and "The Corrections" and "Six Feet Under" as much as I do.

Look, it's nice to pretend that you're objective. We all like to offer up this illusion whenever we can. But there comes a time when a writer must admit his or her prejudices. I watched Stephen King's "Kingdom Hospital," based on "The Kingdom" by Lars von Trier, and I tried to form an unsullied opinion of it. But here's the problem: I think Stephen King sucks.

To me, Stephen King is the worst kind of a sensationalist hack, the kind who puts a toddler in front of a 16-wheeler, or has a jilted lover masturbate all over his former girlfriend's bed, and he does it all without style or finesse or even an original turn of phrase or two. He's full of creepy stories, sure, but he's also full of hackneyed phrases and clichés. Sweet doggies turned rabid. Possessed toddlers. Brand new cars that smell almost as good as "pussy." I hate the stuff this guy writes about, the way he writes it, the way he takes his coffee, you name it.

So, let's take a scene from "Kingdom Hospital," just to see if you can understand where I'm coming from. A famous artist leaves his magnificent house to go for a run. As he's leaving, his wife tells him not to run on the road, because it's dangerous. Then she mentions that his latest painting is really weird. The artist leaves without saying goodbye, apparently angry at this comment. Guess what happens next? Instead of staying off the road, which we hear is quite dangerous, the artist runs right for it, and promptly gets mowed down by a guy in a van who's been swerving all over the road for several miles because he's trying to keep his Rottweiler away from a big raw steak which is, for some reason, within reach of the dog. The artist hits the windshield and ends up in a gruesome broken tangle on the ground -- just like a squashed ant, except with lots of blood and wild eyes staring up, helplessly. The guy in the van gets out, tells the bleeding tangled mess that he's really sorry, but he can't stick around because he's got an ounce of some unspecified drug in his dashboard.

Now, if the artist weren't famous, if the wife hadn't warned him about running on the road, if the guy in the van were trying to keep a poodle away from a bag of Cheetos instead of a Rottweiler from a steak, if he had no good excuse for leaving his victim bleeding on the road, aside from a fear of being charged with vehicular manslaughter, maybe I could excuse this scene. But everything here is so fundamentally filthy with Stephen King's grubby fingerprints, I really can't stand to watch. Did I mention that a crow lands on the bleeding guy's chest and threatens to eat his eyes out? A crow, get it? Crows are really creepy! Then, as I sit in amazement at the overly obvious, absurd details King has chosen, I vaguely recall something about his being in some kind of a serious accident a few years ago. A 10-second Google search later, I discover that every "absurd" detail I just listed, except the part about the drugs and the guy leaving the scene of the crime, is taken straight from the true story of King getting hit by a van while taking a walk through the country.

Has there ever been clearer proof of a critic's utter lack of objectivity? I am now willing to admit that I'm in no way qualified to analyze Stephen King's work. Obviously, I've disliked his books and movies for far too long to have anything reasonable to say about him.

...


Oooh. Burn! Well, she certainly has some excellent points about the sensationalist and arguably exploitative nature of King's work, but I thought it was a fascinating little blurb. It's amazing how when you let someone or something get on your nerves it can color your perceptions so totally.

Oddly, she didn't even mention the menacing saber-toothed anteater totem, which I thought was just screamingly funny.

Ohh buttery bday goodness

-----Original Message-----
From: Soto, Vanessa B
Sent: Friday, March 05, 2004 10:25 AM
To: 'Erik Kang'
Subject: butt trek


i hope i don't tell him to take this nightmare of a job and shove it where no photon has gone before.

-----Original Message-----
From: Chantal
Sent: Friday, March 05, 2004 10:01 AM
To: Soto, Vanessa B
Subject: Re: needed to share this with someone


i think you need to go on the oysters and lemon herb martini diet. it's my favorite. it promises to make you thin, drunk and horny.

Chantal

STREET SPIRIT [fade out] (4:14)
radiohead

Rows of houses, all bearing down on me
I can feel their blue hands touching me
All these things into position
All these things we'll one day swallow whole
And fade out again and fade out

This machine will, will not communicate
These thoughts and the strain I am under
Be a world child, form a circle
Before we all go under
And fade out again and fade out again

Cracked eggs, dead birds
Scream as they fight for life
I can feel death, can see its beady eyes
All these things into position
All these things are one to swallow whole
And fade out again and fade out again

Immerse your soul in love
Immerse your soul in love


Thom: "'Street Spirit' is our purest song, but I didn't write it.... It wrote itself. We were just its messengers... Its biological catylysts. It's core is a complete mystery to me... and (pause) you know, I wouldn't ever try to write something that hopeless... All of our saddest songs have somewhere in them at least a glimmer of resolve... 'Street Spirit' has no resolve... It is the dark tunnel without the light at the end. It represents all tragic emotion that is so hurtful that the sound of that melody is its only definition. We all have a way of dealing with that song... It's called detachment... Especially me.. I detach my emotional radar from that song, or I couldn't play it... I'd crack. I'd break down on stage.. that's why its lyrics are just a bunch of mini-stories or visual images as opposed to a cohesive explanation of its meaning... I used images set to the music that I thought would convey the emotional entirety of the lyric and music working together... That's what's meant by 'all these things are one to swallow whole'.. I meant the emotional entirety, because I didn't have it in me to articulate the emotion... (pause) I'd crack.... Our fans are braver than I to let that song penetrate them, or maybe they don't realize what they're listening to.. They don't realize that 'Street Spirit' is about staring the fucking devil right in the eyes... and knowing, no matter what the hell you do, he'll get the last laugh...and it's real...and true. The devil really will get the last laugh in all cases without exception, and if I let myself think about that to long, I'd crack. I can't believe we have fans that can deal emotionally with that song... That's why I'm convinced that they don't know what it's about. It's why we play it towards the end of our sets. It drains me, and it shakes me, and hurts like hell everytime I play it, looking out at thousands of people cheering and smiling, oblivious to the tragedy of it's meaning, like when you're going to have your dog put down and it's wagging it's tail on the way there. That's what they all look like, and it breaks my heart.
I wish that song hadn't picked us as its catalysts, and so I don't claim it. It asks too much. (very long pause). I didn't write that song."

NO SURPRISES (3:49)
radiohead

A heart that's full up like a landfill
A job that slowly kills you
Bruises that won't heal

You look so tired and unhappy
Bring down the government
They don't, they don't speak for us
I'll take a quiet life
A handshake of carbon monoxide

No alarms and no surprises
No alarms and no surprises
No alarms and no surprises
Silent, silent

This is my final fit, my final bellyache with

No alarms and no surprises
No alarms and no surprises
No alarms and no surprises please

Such a pretty house, such a pretty garden

No alarms and no surprises (let me out of here)
No alarms and no surprises (let me out of here)
No alarms and no surprises please (let me out of here)

silence, silence, please


i'm sorry if this is all a bit maudlin and boring but i'm having a bad day here and i'd like to buy the world a coke, or marry some gay folks-

[edited for extreme moodiness]

News flash: Mean people make me cry. Fuck you, mean people.

Thanks to Alert Reader Erik:
Don't mess with Karma Ghosts!

Message from my Dad:

Apparently, the word “lethologica” describes the state of not being able to remember the word you want.

Also, slugs have four noses?

Cool!
Thanks, Dad!

In the meantime, here's something frighteningly cool from our old friends, Mr. Douglas Adams and Auntie Beebe.

the best thing i've come up with this morning, by way of a 'Hi, Morgan,' inspired in part by Homer's disability search in "King-Size Homer" and partly by my televisual crisis of an evening- nothing to do tonight, so should i watch Angel out of order, before Nibblz gives me vids, last week's Apprentice, which I missed, or check out Kingdom Hospital, which, if it's good, how surprised would I be?

i'm suffering from juggler's despair.
boreanaz v. trump v. reanimated stumps,
mimetic paralysis, career antiperistalsis,
failed-limeric analysis?
maybe i'll just wash my hair.

Pig have meme!