2 As a 1930s wife, I am Very Poor (Failure) Take the test!

i think it’s because i don’t wear red nail polish.

last week i was kvetching about monday’s late-winter snowstorm and subsequent single-digit temps. today it’s nearly 65 degrees at 9 a.m. yay, march.

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atheists are responsible for the dwindling percentage of christians in the united states. (maybe they’re eating them?) and i should move to vermont. except for that cold thing.

nifty charts here.

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almost everything i read online this weekend was about death and dying. one friend’s father passed away in late february. another friend’s mother, over the weekend. my great-uncle, on thursday. g’s grandmother was hospitalized with chest pains. then a friend’s dog had to be put down. isn’t spring supposed to be a time of rebirth?

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as i tweeted on saturday, the best time to watch watchmen is the 9:00 showing. with the coming distractions and a run time of 163 minutes, it means you’ll be out of the theater at five to 12:00. freaky. even freakier: billy crudup’s blue CGI dingle, which doesn’t dangle much.

great flick, btw. and fantastic use of leonard cohen on the soundtrack (and muzak tears for fears), but other people differ. (contains some spoilers.) although i have to ask: how do you put together a 3-hour movie set in 1985 without a single duran duran song? they’d released duran duran, rio, and 7 and the ragged tiger by that point!

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i’m not much of a batman fan, but the first issue of neil gaiman’s two-part “death of” is storytelling at its finest. and what a story it is.

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and finally, in news of the sane, today obama will “issue a presidential memorandum aimed at insulating scientific decisions across the federal government from political influence.” the circular argument about that itself being political influence that will affect scientific decisions aside, it’s good to see obama continuing to dismantle the politicoreligious machine of the bush administration.

from his prepared remarks:

“This Order is an important step in advancing the cause of science in America. But let’s be clear:¹ promoting science isn’t just about providing resources — it is also about protecting free and open inquiry. It is about letting scientists like those here today do their jobs, free from manipulation or coercion, and listening to what they tell us, even when it’s inconvenient — especially when it’s inconvenient. It is about ensuring that scientific data is never distorted or concealed to serve a political agenda — and that we make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology.”

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¹ am i the only one who would be happy if obama excised “but let’s be clear” from his vocabulary? i’m getting tired of being lectured at.

first coastal brewing company bought old dominion and closed their brewpub. then they announced that they were closing VA operations entirely, and moving production to delaware.

granted, this is old news to those in the local beer know (the brewpub closed in ‘07 and the move was announced in october ‘08). i just found out about it this morning. it’s grumpifying (although not to the level of tuesday’s grump-inducing events).

i’m not a die-hard OD fan, but their beer (except for the burnt-tasting stout) is generally solid stuff. the founder of OD was a colleague of my parents’, and i went to a launch party of sorts for the beer in ‘89‘90, the summer before i started after my first year of college. (don’t do the math.¹ i was advised to keep my mouth shut about my age as i walked to the bar with several people from the office where i was interning.) it’s just a shame we’ll be losing our only local brewery.

obviously, there’s only one appropriate response to this: james, it’s time for you to get off your butt and make some more homebrew.

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saw rob riggle at the 6th & i synagogue last night. hilarity ensued.
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¹ my mother, of course, did the math and informed me i was off by a year. so i wasn’t quite as underage as i thought.

i’m having dinner at dino tonight with parents, brother & BIL. review likely to follow.¹ last time i ate there was during summer ‘08 restaurant week, and was gastronomically impressed. in august we sat on the patio, though – i don’t think that will be happening today.²

oh – and maybe i’ll blog about the great beignet experiment of 2009. it’s funny how once you’ve acquired a deep fryer, everything starts to look like batter…
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¹ this is as much to remind me i’m having dinner out tonight as to remind me to write a review. life has been not-calm lately, although not nearly as hectic as alejna’s is sounding. without written reminders, i’m likely to forget to eat at all, never mind meeting family at a restaurant.

² that link will expire, of course, at least as it pertains to today’s weather. if you’re randomly interested in the weather at my work zip in the future, by all means, go ahead and click on it. in the future, that is.

streets of fire has an amazingly hysterical cast. rick moranis and willem dafoe? diane lane and bill paxton? amy madigan? damn. 1984 was a great year for randomness.

this is what came to mind, resurfacing from the dregs of browsing the stacks in 11th grade, looking for interesting poetry that would sufficiently shock an english teacher i detested in a school that was tolerant in some ways, and oddly provincial in others. in retrospect, probably the only shock value to the teacher was the fact that someone had located the one volume of e e cummings in the library.

the boys i mean are not refined
they go with girls who buck and bite
they do not give a fuck for luck
they hump them thirteen times a night

one hangs a hat upon her tit
one carves a cross on her behind
they do not give a shit for wit
the boys i mean are not refined

they come with girls who bite and buck
who cannot read and cannot write
who laugh like they would fall apart
and masturbate with dynamite

the boys i mean are not refined
they cannot chat of that and this
they do not give a fart for art
they kill like you would take a piss

they speak whatever’s on their mind
they do whatever’s in their pants
the boys i mean are not refined
they shake the mountains when they dance

(background on the poetry reading here.)

i’m not a huge stickler for the formal rules of the english language (as evidenced by my aversion to capitalization), but there are some things that bug me. using apostrophes improperly, for example, or not using the subjunctive when expressing sentiments that are contrary to the facts at present. i also tend to wonder when people use homophones or the wrong similarly-sounding word. when i come across them on blogs or emails, i usually chalk it up to overly-nimble fingers. when i see it in a transcription of an oral remark, i wonder if the transcriber erred.

so, the following snippet in today’s paper piqued my interest, in an article on O’s executive order to close the prison at gitmo:

Obama added, “We believe that the Army Field Manual reflects the best judgment of our military, that we can abide by a rule that says we don’t torture, but that we can still effectively attain the intelligence that we need.”

did you see it? yup, it’s that “we can still effectively attain the intelligence that we need.” attain. not obtain, which i believe would be the correct word, unless O really means that the government needs to achieve intelligence, rather than acquire it.

(i’ll throw in my two cents about closing the guantanamo bay detention center: it must be done very, very carefully.)

1. i got up too late to get across a bridge into the district.
2. it was cold outside. really, really cold.
3. i was hungry, and food was more readily accessible in my kitchen than on the mall.
4. jesse and justin and james and i (yes, four “j”s if you’re counting) got sucked into the comfy sun room furniture.
5. the beer fridge was stocked.

so, there’s my excuse. i attended clinton’s and both gwb inaugurals. i missed this one – didn’t even pay that close attention to it on the television. and what i did see was michelle o. in an outfit that would’ve turned me into a lalocasicle.¹ and almost-president obama giggling right before taking his oath of office in a way that reminded me rather unfortunately of my first wedding vows. (hopefully his tenure will last longer than my first marriage.)

james and i did scope out the mall on monday, though, and i took some pictures – but it was overcast, so they’re not great.
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¹ it was in the 20s, woman!

…quite like a meteorologist saying that tonight will be frigid. “three to five degrees downtown.”

if that’s not a good reason for curling up in bed, or in front of the fire, i don’t know what is.