See!? I'm NOT the only blogger who's an awful, awful person.

For the record, pigeon = squab with worse branding. Nothing wrong with that (except the creepy little feet, if you ask Catherine, which you probably shouldn't).

ps: for anyone looking to get into the holiday spirit by being terrified by animatronic, horrible, children-blinding christmas displays, i suggest you check out this post over at PIB.

i'm trying to put off wrapping my christmas presents. you would think this might be something i look forward to, but since i have all the wrapping talent of a limbless orangutan, and my presents always end up looking like something that came out of the Children's Home for Retarded Woodchippers, well, i don't.

so i'm going to copy the meme kevin drum put up today:

Four jobs you've had in your life: real jobs, relatively few. so i'll include a couple of internships. CIA intern, intern at washingtonpost.com, elementary teaching assistant, editorial assistant.

Four movies you could watch over and over: pride & prejudice the six hour version. pride & prejudice the new two hour version. princess bride, the sound of music (well, the first half anyway) (also i realize these answers make me thoroughly detestable but, uh, fuck off)
UPDATE OHMIGOD forgot bring it on. that is actually at least probably #2 for me on the rewatchable movie meme.

Four places you've lived: washington, d.c., milan, italy, charlottesville, va, chicago, il.

Four TV shows you love to watch: veronica mars (well documented here), lost, grey's anatomy, america's next top model. (ack. have to make it five. forgot futurama)

Four places you've been on vacation: i won't count italy since i've been all over the place there, so: wyoming, cape ann, ma., scotland, slovenia

Four websites you visit daily: washingtonpost.com, dcist.com, gmail.com, bloglines.com (sorry, but if you've got bloglines, what else do you need? i admit sometimes i'll visit unfogged.com outside of reading its entries in bloglines to see what is going on the comments, but i can rarely keep up, so usually not)

Four of your favorite foods: pizza, cheese, grapefruit, chocolate

Four places you'd rather be: i could give four locations in italy as an answer, or i could say, at this moment: at a bar, in a pool (in 85 degree weather), on a train (i love riding trains) or back in bed.

Yesterday we went to Pentagon City Mall to do some Christmas shopping. I was a miserable failure. All I managed to buy was a bag of chocolates for Catherine, then a stack of DVD-R blanks and an SD card reader for myself. But I now have plans! Good plans — no, very good plans. In fact, I'd go so far as to characterize them as some of my best laid plans. Doubtless everything will go flawlessly.

But on the off chance that it doesn't, it will be because I don't deserve for it to. Christmas shopping is a karmic investment, and yesterday — since we were shopping in the middle of a weekday — simply wasn't bad enough to earn me a happy holiday. Normally my yuletide mall experience transitions smoothly and rapidly from laserlike focus; to fatigued despair; to agoraphobic dread; to bottomless hatred for my fat fellow consumers as they amble mindlessly into my way, their meanderings every bit as slow and pointless as the path of a child's bowling ball as it slides down a lane with closed-off gutters. It's not that my own materialistic existence is any less existentially depressing, it's just that it involves walking quickly and in straight lines.

But like I said: there wasn't as much mall-based misanthropy this year. I didn't get anything but pictures, though.

Who else thinks L'Occitane changed the spelling just so they don't have to give Borf a cut?

If someone told me that "Dawson Fit" means something unrelated to the television show, I would probably believe them. Still, surely there are other ways to express whatever it is that "Dawson Fit" expresses. But no — the sickness deeply rooted in the brainpans of the Banana Republic corporate office chose to go with "Dawson". Man, I hate that store. The clothes are fine, but the aesthetic is strange. J Crew: comfortably in the "look, my dad can fire your dad!" aesthetic, it can be safely ignored. Gap: expresses the "I wish I wished I was a rock star" ethos/hypocrisy that fits me so well. What is BR's driving theme? Clothes that won't make you look out of place in the hi-tech, totalitarian city-states of the not-too-distant future? That's the best I can come up with.

I desperately want someone to read this, head to Barnes & Noble, and make a terrible mistake.

Today: Best Buy, aka "throwing money at the problem". Wish me luck.

driving back from a fairly successful christmas shopping journey in the wilds of the 'burbs (well, successful for me. tommy came back with: nothing), tommy and i were stopped at the intersection in arlington near harris teeter. not having been back there in a while, i was checking out the strip mall sign to see if any new stores or restaurants had moved in. and lo and behold, something had! but it was confusing. it was ugly. it was a place called...PIE-TANZA!

pie-tanza, tommy and i muttered under our breath, looking at each other. pie-tanza? pie-tanza! piiiiiiiiiiiie-tanza.

what the fuck.

who names their restaurant pie-tanza? (it's a pizza place, for the record, not that we had to look it up on the internet or anything to figure that out. i thought initially it was a pie store). TANZA is not a word. it is not attached to any word. it makes no sense. it has nothing to do with anything related to pizza. it has nothing to do with anything related to the fabulousness of pizza (ie, pie-tastic would make a smidgen of sense). pie-tanza. pie-tanza. pie-tanza.

the word is, less than 24 hours after our realization that it existed, now legend in tommy's and my vocbaulary. i plan on saying it when "what the fuck" would suffice. "you got me THIS for christmas? pie-tanza?!"

but how could somebody have thought of so terribly awful of a name? what is the motivation behind it? WHY GOD WHY PIE-TANZA?!?! and so i turn to the internets, as i so often do, to try to figure out what madness could have been in play behind this insane decision. why, internets, would you ever name your pizza place pie-tanza? help out a girl who has spent a large chunk of the morning puzzling over this inanity.

pie-tanza.

Look buddy, I understand where you're coming from. We don't have some kind of monopoly on producing stupid, panda-related memes. You're welcome to continue your campaign to have people call the baby panda "Bandit" (although: don't you think you're confusing pandas and raccoons? Admittedly, I'm not a zoologist. Perhaps you have some unique insight in this area that's not immediately apparent. I'll reserve judgment.).

So look, you're free to keep tilting at wwwindmills. But don't steal my bit, goddammit.

Strangely enough, I came across the following in the middle of a Slashdot bitchfest about the merits of various programming languages. This can't possibly be true, can it?

You thought fashion fads just happened? It's much more organized than that. The "in" colors for US fashion are chosen 22 months in advance, by the little-known Color Association of the United States [colorassociation.com]. Color forecasts are issued to subscribers, and the textile mills, dye manufacturers, and clothiers start to gear up for the coming seasons. Because there are some long manufacturing lead times to produce fabrics in huge volume, the style decisions have to be organized.

"Pinks and fuchsia were everywhere in spring 2003; CAUS members knew this in spring of 2001."

Here's the activewear color plan for 2006-2007:

• Colors are anchored by light and dark neutrals in addition to the ever important white.


• Red will return as a leading bright, in coral and raspberry shades. - In color combinations, tonalities of one shade look new and dynamic.


• Cool colors like Apple Green, Indigo and teals are soothing, and especially attractive when matched with brown-influenced neutrals like Wheat and Terracotta. Finishes such as metallicizing add dimension and interest to color and fabrications.

Color changes in fashion do not happen by accident.

everybody's doing it. unfortunately, and pathetically, i don't think i even LISTENED to enough records this year to make a top ten list out of them, even if i had hated some of them. this is what you get for turning 25 (almost 26! holy cripes!). you get old; you get lame; you pass the torch to the littlest andrews who, for the past few years, have been asking you to buy them cds for christmas by bands who names have never even skimmed your consciousness. sigh. oh well. at least i can claim a peak of music coolness from 1995-1999, MAYBE 2000, and that's a pretty good run. anyway, here are the records i can claim to have really enjoyed in the past year. i present, with much fanfare, my TOP FOUR ALBUMS LIST. yes, i liked four albums over the whole past year. but that also may have to do with the fact that i am old and can't remember anything anymore. maybe i liked six. but i forgot 'em.

1. new pornographers - twin cinema
i can't tell you how initially disappointed i was with this record. WHY ARE NOT ALL THE SONGS HUMMABLE, was my primary thought. but i knew what carl newman was capable of, so i stuck with it, and i'm super glad i did. there are classic pop gems on this album (obviously sing me spanish techno and bleeding heart show), but most of the reward comes from the layers and lushness of the more dramatic and serious songs. and now i must go be executed because i just said layers and lushness when talking about indie rock and that means immediate death by smothering of rolling stone magazines.

2. spoon - gimme fiction
frankly, i also thought this record kind of sucked at first. it seemed too pensive and, um, like, a little melodramatic? or something. they were always so brilliantly spare before, making it work with the basics, and there seemed to be too much production stuff going on on a lot of the songs here. and many of the songs were not immediately catchy (aka catherine not willing to work hard enough to appreciate non earworms). but, lo and behold, the album is one of those "grower" things, and thus it grew. into my cold, black heart. it's got sass. and it's totally sexy. somehow weird coming from britt daniel who perpetually looks and sounds like he's going to sneeze a sheet of snot all over you, but it works.

3. brendan benson - alternative to love
kyle says he immediately thought of sloan when listening to this record, and i totally agree. the sheer popiness of it all is likely to make your ears bleed from the catchiness. it's got some depth to it too, but mostly i like it because it hurts my head if i have to listen to too much music that doesn't immediately present itself as accessible. i am easy for the pop.

4. nada surf - the weight is a gift
i always feel a little guilty for saying i like nada surf so much because i am pretty sure most of the indie rock hawtness people think they are thorougly mediocre, but, oh well. beautiful pop music for the over-25-easy-listening set. and gorgeous harmonies. i'm a sucker for those.

UPDATE: oh yeah! i forgot bloc party's silent alarm. that's a good'un too.