Too tired from a full day in rome to post anything coherent, but I
thought you might want to hear about the food. The sweet, sweet food.
Thus follows an index of all my dinners so far:
Sat: at trattoria dardano in cortona. Pici alla contadina (thick round
noodles in a slightly spicy duck sauce); yummy roasted rabbit. Gelato at
the ridiculously named but totally awesome gelateria snoopy.
Sun: spend afternoon drinking wine at a couple of enotecas in cortona
and eating their delicious bruschetta. Dinner is a quick two slices of
pizza-truffle and spinach-and gelato from my friend snoopy. Mmm hazelnut
gelato.
Mon: after a day in perugia and assisi, we go back to la grotta in
cortona for what is, so far, the best meal of the trip. Tommy and I
split the mixed antipasti, which included some wonderful prosciutto e
melone. I had the truffle ravioli, then, and I lie not, the best
porkchop of my life-braised in vinegar and topped wirh green
peppercorn.
Tues: we head to osteria la tufa in the nearby town of ossaia. Iread it
recommended on a blog I found by an american woman who just moved to
cortona. It's naomi's birthday, and after she and four others in our
group spent the day skydiving, they are ready to go all out. I started
with the crostini caldi - little pieces of toast toppeds with cheese and
anchovy or prosciutto. Next was penne alla norcina, a cream sauce with
flavorful sausage. Then the BEST MEAT OF MY LIFE. A filetto di ferri -
I'm not sure what it is, but it was some kind of steak or something, and
it blew my mind. Dude.
And I can't even begin to recount the 476 times I had gelato.
Tonight I want to hit up trattoria dardano again, if we're not too tired
to move from running around rome. We're on a train back to cortona right
now, passing hilltop towns and green fields streaked with vineyards.
I'll make sure to record the rest of my meals, but for now I think I'll
stare out the window.

Flickr seems not to be posting the entries I send it. Weird. It was
working find before. Well, if a jumble of entries suddenly appear,
that's the reason why.

How do comment spammers KNOW WE ARE ON VACATION AND THEREFORE UNABLE TO
DELETE THEIR SORRY ASSES? I have 72 new comment spam emails! VA FANCULO
suckers!
Anyway I will have to make do with my glass of wine and travel journal.
Yes, I have rediscovered these things called "pen" and "paper." And Ilm
writing a fair amount, with the intention of typing up the notes when I
get back. So blogging might be a little light. Especially considering I
cannot take lovely pictures to send to flickr :( this breaks my heart.
The only reasons I come to italy anymore are to eat and take pictures!
Oh well, I'll just have to double my eating then. Sigh. Care for some
food porn? Dinner last nite was pici alla contadina, little swirls of
pasta in a hearty duck sauce, and buttery rabbit for a secondi. Followed
by copious amounts of gelato and wine when we returned. Tonight just had
a quick slice of truffle pizza and a slice of spinach and ricotta piazza
before, um, more gelato, and, um, more wine (not tomention the two wine
bars we visited earlier in the day). Now I'm off to drink EVEN more and
perhaps do some reading. Ciao ciao.
-catherine

I should probably point out that, while we're over here, every post will
show up under my name. We'll go through and change them when we get
back, but I was too strapped for time to set things up properly for
Catherine, too. So, for example, the forgotten-battery post was hers.
I'll try to get Catherine to identify herself when she posts under my
name, but for now you'll have to do your best to figure it out on your
own.

Some helpful hints: posts about nuclear power or approving ruminations
on Roman techniques for slaughtering one another -- probably Tom.
Discussions of objects/people's relative levels of charmingness, or
recountings of difficulties related to personal grooming -- probably
Catherine. Posts measuring wine consumption in liters can be considered
to speak for both of us.

In wine bar. Love wine. Forgot camera battery at home. Hate entire
world. (Charles, can you unplug it and maybe express mail it to me, eh?)

Thanks to a combination of flickr and MEOW we're now moblog-, photomoblog-, and photomofoblog-enabled. Oh yeah!

Sorry. I get this way when I have a good excuse to set up a crontab.

I always get a giddy sense of glee when I find out a new means or degree of subtle manipulation to which I'm subject. Maybe you do, too. If so, go check out Paul Graham's discussion of how PR works.

Blogging... sweet blogging. How I miss her caustic phosphorescent embrace.

I haven't been writing much because I've either been busy or uninspired. My job usually lets me control these two unfortunate conditions so that they overlap, and then the rest of the time I lie on the couch, drink a lot of caffeine and key the resulting mania into the internet. But that's been impossible while I've been at this client site, subject as I am to regimented schedules, watchful eyes, weak coffee and this one guy who says "having fun yet?" to... no, at me, often several times a day.

But Catherine and I are going on vacation tomorrow, and all of that should change. If I get my work-related to-do pile fully taken care of I plan to install a nifty blog-by-email script I've got handy, allowing Catherine and I to post updates from my phone. Given the delays involved in getting around the damn country, there should be ample opportunity.

So prepare yourself for insights including but not limited to: "Italians move their hands when they talk!"; "food and wine are enjoyable!"; "the quirks of Italian culture sure are endearing/infuriating and therefore must be revered/eliminated!"; and of course, perennial favorite, "Im soooo drunk rigt now!!" If you're very good you might even get some shitty cameraphone pics.

If that's not enough for you, just imagine the painful thumb cramps that accompany typing on a miniscule keyboard, and the exorbitant international data charges I'll be paying. Doesn't art always seems better when you know there's suffering involved?

on the elevator this morning

WOMAN 1: How's X^* doing?
WOMAN 2: He's okay. He's still pretty out of it, but he'll be alright.
WOMAN 1: I'm so glad to hear that.
WOMAN 2: It was really strange, though -- last night he kept jumping up off the bed and running around. All night long.
WOMAN 1: Must be the anesthesia wearing off.

silence. the door opens and I begin to leave. Woman 1 has a mini-epiphany.

WOMAN 1: We're talking about a dog, not a husband!

^* Name redacted/forgotten. It wasn't an obviously doggy name, though.

walking home from work on this near-90 degree day, and passing people who were exposing much more flesh than they really needed to be exposing, and spending 67% of my walk home wincing, i was reminded of something susan and i talked about in chicago. one day, probably while drunk (because as i remember the trip, i was drunk for 75% of the time), i said something to the effect of "godDAMN there are a lot of attractive people in this city." everywhere i looked i saw cute girls, cute guys, cute babies, cute old people. i wondered if it was just chicago that was particularly good looking, or if most cities were this way (my domestic travel is pretty limited to the east coast). susan turned to me very seriously and said "catherine. you must know. DC is a Very Ugly City."

now i wasn't sure this was true. i'm of the opinion that all of my female friends are, well, hotties, and the guys aren't terrible either. but maybe it's just that, having lived in the area all of my life except for my italy stint, i have become accustomed to the mediocrity that are the asymmetrical, pockmarked, flabby faces and bodies of the DC elite. i mean, i have long known that DC is an Unfashionable City (yglesias argued a while back that DC's reputation as an unfashionable city is merely due to unfortunate and excessive comparisons with NYC and LA; but have you SEEN how the boy dresses? he knows nothing, nothing!), but are we an Ugly City? a Fugly City, even? and if we are excessively ugly, why is that? i know our congressional representatives are nasty-looking, but their ugliness hasn't taken over the entire city, has it? i would think that the hotness of the southern belles and gentlemen that have invaded the city since the bushies took over would balance everything out. but it seems not...

sonic youth are opening for the pixies when they come to merriweather this june! if merriweather weren't a hellhole of a venue, that'd be a pretty amazing show.

(hat tip to the 9:30 club forum)

skinny bird neck food network woman giada de laurentiis is given the treatment in the post today.

i have to admit, i'm coming around to giada, especially since we made her recipe for chocolate zabaglione. but her strained smile still freaks me out to no end.

the post includes recipes for her "torta di pasta," an orechiette dish and a vodka sauce.

don't know how i missed this: washingtonienne, and her freakishly wonky eye, get covered in usa today (along with a bunch of other bloggers with book deals).

via Slashdot, check out these pics of a Bender-shaped computer case. Includes mouth-mounted slot-feed CDROM drive!

As impressive as Justin's Bender costume? One can be plugged in, the other can consume beer. Tough call.

this day did not start off too well. as you know through my unrelenting whining, i've been sick, and so after getting out of the shower this morning, i popped a couple of dayquil in my mouth. nothing like a dayquil to get the day started when you've got snot slobbering down your face, or so i've heard.

but i made the fatal mistake of taking the dayquil on an empty stomach (i'm not a breakfast sort of gal). did you know you're not supposed to do this? i didn't, at least until i entered SuperSpecial DayQuil World sometime around 9:45 am. admission to SuperSpecial DayQuil World grants you a head that feels like a cork about to pop off a bottle of bubbly, and the supernatural power to hover two inches above your chair. or, at least the supernatural power to feel like you are hovering two inches above your chair. it was actually kind of cool until my eyes started to cross and i IM'd tommy, noting that i seemingly was floating on a drug-induced cushion of air and wondering what was up with that. he immediately ordered me to go buy a can of coke and some sort of food to get my blood sugar up, or something, i dunno. and it worked, because he is smart, and knows that you do not take chair-hovering drugs without first eating food.

i'm a little concerned, though, that i am becoming some sort of -quil addict. while in chicago, i confessed to susan that i was a recreational nyquil abuser and was thrilled to find out that she was, too! i mean, i'm not downing the stuff on a regular basis. but i don't just take it when i'm sick. i take it sometimes when i'm healthy, having trouble sleeping and just need the sweet, sweet nyquil blanket to fall over me. is this normal? i'm a little concerned that i'm the kind of person who could become easily addicted to sleeping pills. i just love the sensation of getting so sleepy that your head lolls about and you say words but your mouth is too tired to form them, resulting in a sort of "imasolepybuhcahnatalsoshleeepeee..." (btw, tommy could probably put up some relatively funny footage of me, high on nyquil, right before i pass out and proceed to start drooling all over him, if he had a video camera, and was cruel).

i dunno. i also found this super awesome tea that i used for a week while tommy was gone and i had trouble sleeping by myself. it was called sleepytime EXTRA tea. i loved that it was EXTRA sleep inducing, and hell, did that stuff knock you out. the first evening i tried it i brewed one large mug around 9:30 pm, because i'm an old lady, and was slurring by 10:15. it contains "folklore favorite" valerian, an herb "used most commonly for its sedative and hypnotic properties," though i certainly never was hypnotized while drinking it. or so i believe.

anyway, i'm obviously rambling and don't know where i meant to go with this post, except to say: drugs are good, sleeping is nice, and i am apparently addicted to both.

Not the food; not the drug; not the terrifying drunken running hobby. No no no, a FAR more exciting type of hash: the algorithmic kind! Party!

See, these things have been in the news lately because a couple of popular hashing techniques have started to look susceptible to attack. This might seem mind-numbingly boring, but it's important -- in a broad sense, because of security and encryption. In practice, because defeating hashing could in theory allow record companies bring P2P to a halt.

i bought a new pair of shoes.

i had to. nevermind that i don't let myself spend more than $5 on lunch; nevermind that i own about 47 pairs of shoes; nevermind that i spent four hours at my parents' house this weekend, figuring out that i will owe $25,000 in student loans. nevermind! it's spring, and that means new shoes for my gigantic feet. praise be!

(creepy foot fetishists need not comment)

i'm gonna interview bob mould for DCist! (i think)
i love blogging!
any questions that you are just dying to ask him?
btw, he is doing a live set at blowoff this saturday at the 9:30 club.

continuing my bizarre obsession with bizarre animal hybrids...sea life park presents the wholphin!

The calf was born on Dec. 23 to Kekaimalu, a mix of a false killer whale and an Atlantic bottlenose dolphin. Park officials said they waited to announce the birth until now because of recent changes in ownership and operations at the park.

The young as-yet unnamed wholphin is one-fourth false killer whale and three-fourths Atlantic bottlenose dolphin. Her slick skin is an even blend of a dolphin's light gray and the black coloring of a false killer whale.

The calf still depends fully on her mother's milk, but sometimes snatches frozen capelin from the hands of trainers, then toys with the sardine-like fish.

She is jumbo-sized compared to purebred dolphins, and is already the size of a one-year-old bottlenose.

i have become increasingly sick over the past three days. i've been on a steady diet of nyquil, dayquil, pom juice and emergen-c. any other tried and true tricks for getting healthy? i'm leaving for italy on friday and I MUST NOT BE SICK FOR MY PERFECT TUSCAN VACATION!

by the way, i love the way italians type. i've been emailing various restaurants in cortona to make sure they're open on april 25, a national holiday, and apparently when emailing/typing/etc, italians understand my need to constantly type in capital letters. from one restaurant:

Buongiono Catherine sono Romano della Bucaccia di Cortona SiAMO SEMPRE APERTI SIA PRANZO CHE A CENA E BENE PERO' SEMPRE PRENOTARE

CIAO GRAZIE A PRESTO

ROMANO E AGOSTINA

translated: "hello catherine, i'm Romano from Bucaccia in Cortona WE ARE ALWAYS OPEN WHETHER FOR LUNCH OR DINNER BUT YOU MUST ALWAYS MAKE RESERVATIONS

BYE THANKS SEE YOU SOON"

SEE? it's FUN!

For those interested, I've got a post up over at BTD explaining the new AACS system which will be replacing the CSS copy protection in the HD-DVD format. You can get to it by clicking here.

It might sound a little dry, but these things are important to keep track of. More and more DRM is going to get shoved down our throats in the coming years, until consumers finally get sick of being inconvenienced for the sake of the companies they buy from.

Last night, thanks to the generosity of Charles' folks, he, Kriston, Reid and I got to go to the Nationals home opener.

There it is: DC baseball. I won't lie and say I never thought I'd see the day, or that I've been waiting all of my life for baseball to come back to town. The truth is that as a kid I didn't play it, watch it, or really even care for it. But now I'm settling into it. I don't get excited about the scandals or stars or pennant races. But I do find watching games to be a soothing way to spend an afternoon or evening. To me, baseball is like a nice hammock. I'm glad it's here.

Besides, when middle-class white guys hit their fifties, natural law mandates that they become obsessed with either delta blues or the romanticized timelessness of baseball. At the moment both seem pretty detestable -- but only one prominently features hot dogs, so I'm planning to go with baseball.

At least, baseball is supposed to feature hot dogs. That's right -- here comes the official "whining" portion, required in order for this to qualify as a real blog post. We had all met up at Gordon Biersch for a few beers and some garlic fries prior to metroing over to the stadium. GB's garlic fry portions are pretty measly, so by the third inning or so I was getting hungry. Off to the concession stand!

Here's the line for food outside of our section. I would say that this picture doesn't capture how bad it was, but in a way it does: this picture doesn't move, and neither did the line. As four innings ticked away I watched the clueless Aramark employees run out of hot dogs twice (hint: start cooking more before you sell all of the ones in the hot dog machine) and peanuts and pretzels once -- but the peanut/pretzel shortage was more definitive. Charles scoured the stadium. They were out them everywhere.

Why did I spend four innings in line? Well, because I'm stupid. I know, sunk costs and all that. But it really kept looking like finally, FINALLY things were going to get moving. But some new catastrophe always arose. Still, I was hungry, and I had committed to getting food for other folks.

By the time I got to the front of the line I wanted nothing more than to club the cashiers' skulls in with a gigantic animal femur. But viewing the spectacle up close, I couldn't muster too much anger. Yes, they could've done better -- but they were clearly new to the job, and had obviously received no training at all from Aramark. Every employee would stop and chat happily -- and langorously -- with customers. Every route to the soda machine was a new and distinct odyssey. My cashier didn't even count out change properly, picking at the top of a stack of bills with her index fingers rather than deftly shuffling them along with her thumb. A few games from now these folks will be efficient foodservice automatons, appropriately dead to the world. Last night, though, Aramark tried its very hardest to ruin the game for a lot of fans.

But it ended up alright. The other guys purchased emergency backup beers for me while I was in line. The Nats won, I got a hot dog, and after the game we went to Ben's, where at least the inefficient distribution of sausages is intentional.

Oh, one other thing: protestor guy. Yeah you, the guy with the southern accent SCREAMING chants about DC schools at the fans going through security. Take a cue from the thoughtful vet(?) who went after you: know your audience, make some sense, and/or shut the fuck up. I'm anti-voucher, I'd like to see a privately financed stadium, and I, too, think DC ought to do something about educating its residents. But trying to link the construction of a stadium to the war in Iraq seemed like a bit of stretch. By the time you had finished speaking I wanted to fill DC's schools with explosives and drop them on Syria.

check out the mad props the city paper gave blue state in this week's issue! mad, mad props. big ups. bovs stizzle. i just keep typing and am not sure why. anyway, i'll be out at the black cat saturday night, dancing the night away to the sweet sounds of djs leafblower, seeking irony, dc sob and weirdcurves.

also check out the dceiver's first blogplay, wherein i take on an entire crowd of dcist-hating d.c. hipsters, cockpunch/uma-kill bill style. HIIIIIIIIIIYAH!

mom and dad, i know you tried real hard, and you raised me real good, but there ain't no denying - your firstborn child is a huge fucking lush.

I'm getting worried about this summer. Kriston, Jeff and I have all expressed the same concern: there's no clear candidate for Album of the Summer.

I'm sure you know what I mean. It's the CD that ends up being played at the most cookouts, the most road trips. It's great to have in the background on a sunny day, but still works as the evening descends and you decide to put on some shoes. It's probably breezy pop, but not something so sugary sweet that you'll be sick of it by mid-July.

These things usually happen by accident, but I still think it's worth worrying about. We've got some candidates, but they're of dubious strength: the new Malkmus, Weezer and the Fountains of Wayne B-sides collection all have some promise, but I'll be surprised if any one of them turns out to be a home run.

So, two things. First: suggestions? What have been good summer albums for you, and what are you looking forward to?

And second: why don't we put together a playlist here, in comments. If you've got 1-3 songs you think would go well on a mix CD for the uses described above, list them briefly. It doesn't have to be new stuff. It doesn't have to impress the world with your astounding indie cred. It just has to be something that you can drink beer to. I'll get the ball rolling:

1. Stephen Malkmus - Jo Jo's Jacket


2. Rilo Kiley - Portions For Foxes


3. Neutral Milk Hotel - In the Aeroplane Over the Sea

You might remember the flash drive to the right from such keychains as: my keychain. Well, treasure that memory, 'cause Iomega's keychain connector is a piece of junk. It broke once; I reattached it to a link higher up the chain. Now it's broken a second time, and my poor little flash drive is lost out in a big, uncaring world. Nothing too desperately important was on it, although there *is* an openVPN configuration file on there that would make it very easy for malevolent people to do bad things to my mom's PC.

Anyway, my point: these things are pleasantly tiny, but if you buy one don't use the hardware that comes with it.

What do you do when you like money and elitism, but don't have enough money to be really elitist? Do the indie self-identification shuffle: cyclical self-loathing and self-deprecation. Alternately, if your monetary or indie cred prospects aren't looking good, take a preemptive turn to vitriol (joke's on their subtitle: my blogging sucks and they don't seem to know about it).

It's all pretty predictable and tiresome -- but why wait for affluence and middle age to wipe it from your troubled mind? Oddly enough, Pitchfork offers the wisest solution to the unsustainability of the scenester psyche.

I've been jealous of my friends' brushes with DC fame -- Kriston got to tell off Bob Novak! Yglesias knows Wonkette! Catherine's spotted Stephanopolous! The best I've managed so far is peering at Condi Rice's birthday party on my way to the bathroom at Galileo. That's okay... I guess.

Last night I came a little closer to evening the score. On my way home from the Y, stopping at Whole Foods to buy some organic cruelty-free skim milk (lactated in the presence of soothing quartz crystals, no doubt) I saw Dennis Kucinich. Well, okay, I didn't see him. The guy ahead of me in line saw him as I stupidly fiddled with my phone. The exchange went something like this:

Guy (sarcastically): Looks like it'd be a blast to work for him (points).
Me: Huh?
Guy: Over there. Kucinich.
Me: (thinking: what is he trying to say? "goose and finch"? "kaja goo goo"?)
Guy: Dennis Kucinich. He ran for president.
Me: That's like, uh, king, right?

At last I gathered my wits and snapped a cameraphone picture, which I seem to have immediately deleted on my way out of the store. But trust me: the three or four pixels you're missing out on would have been indisputably Kucinichesque. Other fascinating bits of Kucinichiania:

• even shorter than you'd think


• hair is made of plastic


• was giving the people at the bread counter a hard time vis a vis loaf selection, apparently

I finally got around to reading Carl Sagan's Dragons of Eden. I didn't pick it up to get a cutting edge review of the science of the mind -- it's almost three decades old, after all -- but like all of Sagan's writing, it's accessible and interesting. Even if Sagan's guesses about the brain don't entirely pan out, they're still amazingly impressive given the foreignness of the field to his primary area of expertise. And although Sagan's left versus right versus oldbrain paradigm has problems, echoes of it can be found in ideas like Dennett's multiple drafts model.

But since the book's no longer that relevant, the best bits come from just enjoying Sagan for his own sake, and for the moments of the book that reveal something about the extraordinary guy that wrote it. And to that end, some of the most illuminating are the parts of the book directly or tangentially related to marijuana.

Sagan was a pot enthusiast. His last wife, Ann Druyan, is vice-chair of NORML's board of directors, and Sagan spoke about the drug enthusiastically, albeit quietly and rarely. In DOE Sagan talks about pot by recounting the experiences of an unnamed third party "informant" -- it's easy to read between the lines. He even goes so far as to take various strange, irrelevant jabs at alcohol in a weird sort of reefer elitism.

The only part where Sagan's enthusiasm for the drug really intrudes is in his suggestion that marijuana's mechanism of action might involve suppressing the activity of the left hemisphere of the brain in order to free the creative and associative powers of the right. So far as I know there has never been evidence to back up this flight of fancy.

But it's fascinating to read Sagan's hypotheses about the evolution and future of intelligence on this and other planets through the lens of his enthusiasm for pot, because many of his ideas really do have the ring of typical stoner philosophizing... with the caveat that they're blown out to the level of genuine insight by Sagan's genius. This strange intersection between undeniable scientific merit and cartoonish burnout-isms comes into sharp focus in this interview with Ms. Druyan, which contains both a thoughtful discussion of Sagan's heartfelt belief in the liberating power of science, and the phrase "I'd like to ride on a solar sail and smoke a joint in space!"* It also reveals that Sagan and Druyan collaborated to have an EEG recording of her meditating about human history, nuclear war and love included on the Voyager Interstellar Message. I mean, c'mon -- you'd have to be totally high to come up with that idea.

So do you see? Maybe you should have written down all those brilliant insights instead of just eating three dozen chicken wings. Oh well -- spilled milk.

* To be fair, Druyan doesn't say this, the interviewer does. But she was building the solar sail in question and, presumably, would be fine with any of its potential passengers smoking joints.

kriston and matt are doing a meme which is "invitation only," but i'm crashing the party because it looks like fun: List five things that people in your circle of friends or peer group are wild about, but you can’t really understand the fuss over.

Those who don't frequent political blogs but maintain an interest in Warriorcentric stories: this one's for you. Yes, you, Jon.

The Ultimate Warrior's in the news because of his homepage being featured on SomethingAwful last week as their Awful Link of the Day. The Legal Counsel of the Warrior issued a C&D letter, which SA ignored.

Oh, and he was recently invited to UConn to speak to the Young Republicans club. It didn't go so well, as you can tell from the statements here, here, here or here. For Warrior's full-length ramble on the subject, see here.

But that's just one incident. You really need to get a broader perspective on the contemporary Warrior phenomenon to fully appreciate it. You might start with his list of key concepts -- among them, "foke" and "destrucity". As far as I can tell he's trying to put together a political movement/cult centered around a wrestling-flavored varietal of the ubermensch concept, sprinkled with generous portions of homophobia and a homoerotic body obsession. It almost makes Adam Yoshida sound reasonable.

I can't write anything lately -- my snarky bioequilibirum is all screwed up. I'm still trudging (well, biking) down to Foggy Bottom every day to sit in a cubicle and wait for instructions. This wouldn't be all that terrible, except a) the desk/chair situation seems to be causing my spine to turn to rock candy, brittle and sharp (bad for me); and b) the inspiration presented to me by the enveloping beige walls and empty corkboards results in little more than warmed-over Office Space rehashes (bad for you).

Yesterday was an exception, though! Thanks to our company's innovative LALALAICAN'THEARYOU approach to customer service, a set of lingering issues erupted into across-the-board programming crises and I got to take a one-day return to working from home. Admittedly, I had to put in 10 or 11 hours. But they were pajama-clad hours, dammit.

Anyway, while at this client site I use a different windows account, and I found yesterday that my normal account's browser has started to forget the URLs of the blogs I like to visit. This is surprisingly disconcerting, like not being able to remember your friends' names. And the result is that I feel like I can't definitively eliminate the possibility that I'm actually in the thrall of an evil wizard of some sort, and my friends are screaming "YOU HAVE TO FIGHT" because I'm poised to plunge the ancient relic of X into the enchanted somethingorother of Y and open a portal to Z, all the while thinking I'm just reloading the paper tray.

Fucking evil wizards. They're always pulling this kind of shit.

charles just put on the buffy the vampire slayer musical that he tivo'd the other day. goddammit. and i was going to go to bed early, too.

best musical ever? discuss. when giles and tara go into that duet, i always die a little bit on the inside.

right here, you mofo.

i would so be there if it weren't, like, 5 billion miles away in california. even so, it's tempting....

i've been freaking out a lot lately, which is probably why i haven't been blogging so much. i'm so busy having mini crises that i can't think of superfluous things to dump here. of course my mini crises are pretty damn superfluous and stupid when viewed from a rational point of view, but if you know me, you know rationality is not my strong point. anyway, i feel like i've been suspended in some sort of weird anxiety time warp, where all i do is sit on the couch with my laptop, shove hummus in my mouth and slave obsessively through craigslist listings. because, nearly five months before i have to move to chicago, i am already freaking out about what to do.

see, i've made the perhaps premature and self-destructive decision that when i go to northwestern, i want to live by myself. probably in a studio apartment. this of course leads me to think of several questions: how am i going to find a good place to rent in a city that's very very far away from me? through telepathy? will i end up in a 10x10 box? am i going to become an hermetic alcoholic? (hermetic as in "the hermetic confines of an isolated life", not, like, literally sealed.) how many cats am i going to have (because it is a foregone conclusion that, as an alcoholic hermetic journalism student, i am going to have at least a dozen)? how long can i keep eating delicious hummus before i get too fat to fit in my tiny cat-filled studio apartment? etc.

you see, the idea of living all by myself is both appealing and terrifying. on one hand, i have sort of this idealized grad school student existence in mind, wherein i am studying all the time at a cute ikea desk that'll fit perfectly in the corner of my room and being all academic and thoreau-esque (well, except in a city instead of on a wild lake or whatever) and having a lot of plants on my windowsill and FINALLY BEING ABLE TO DECORATE MY SPACE HOWEVER THE HELL I WANT which has been a lifelong dream of mine.

on the other hand, pesky reality keeps edging in on this hyperidealized existence, wherein i realize that a) i have never, in all of my 25 years, lived alone b) i'll have no money to decorate anything and c) i have never been able to keep even one plant alive. so i have an alternate, probably uberpessimistic view of my life alone, wherein i am drunk all the time, surrounded by dead plants and talking to "eileen," my imaginary friend.

i dunno. on the other other hand, i have this strange thought in the back of my mind that living alone could "be good for me" or something. like, character-building. is that idiotic? or will i end up like the bluth's father in the attic, hosting tea parties with glassy-eyed dolls and spying on people through a vent? which, to be honest, sounds kinda fun.

and naomi and me at the soft opening of avenue:

The next XBox will be revealed May 12 on MTV. Good for them -- I'm sure this will be a mostly information-free event ("new giga-X processing makes games 300% more extreme!"), but it's never made sense that new consoles are revealed at trade shows to hordes of slavering adult geeks. When you'll actually be able to buy one of these remains a mystery (Christmas seems like a good guess), but at least we'll have plenty of advance opportunity to dismantle our social and romantic lives to make way for all those additional gigapixels.

In related news, MS has also announced that new titles for the original XBox will be arriving through 2007. Sounds to me like a "no" vote on the new console being backward-compatible, but what do I know? Some people think it means exactly the opposite.

If you're craving photos without noise, focus problems or a persistent blue tint on the lefthand side, have a look at Jeff and Marie's photos of their trip to Japan. Lots of good stuff there, and plenty of posed peace signs -- which are actually V-for-victory signs adopted from conquering US soldiers. What, you thought giant radioactive lizard fantasies were the only outet for their a-bomb neuroses?

Did somebody say "crappy cameraphone pictures"?

No?

Well, that's a pity.

what a beautiful weekend! from vodka tasting to a bbq at kriston and matt's to attending the soft opening of avenue, to biking rock creek parkway with tommy and checking out the FREAKY FREAKY fish at the zoo's amazonia house, it was packed full o' fun. i'll try to write about it more tomorrow ("major league" is on and apparently i should devote my full attention to it) but for now i'll leave you with a recipe i found this weekend for a cookie that's turned out to be one of my favorites - hazelnut cookies. add a bit of extra orange zest and vanilla for super yumminess (and double the recipe because it doesn't make as nearly as many cookies as it says it does).

Douglas Adams fans: prepare to be disappointed. (Slashdotted -- cached copy here).

(The author of the review, MJ Simpson, is the late Mr. Adams' biographer).

West Virginia is spending ten grand to study whether schoolkids can be convinced to lose weight through the use of Dance Dance Revolution. Awesome. I love seeing states spend money on harebrained schemes, and I especially love seeing states spend money on harebrained scheme that, strangely, might actually work -- the folks at GetUpMove.com certainly make a compelling (albeit sponsored) anecdotal case for DDR's defattening powers.

Up next: a persistent online roleplaying game based around not getting pregnant. The input device might be tricky to figure out...

The Great Vodka Experiment commences around ten. Ish. I've got scorecards for twenty printed. Depending on how everyone feels and whether it's raining, I imagine we might go out after we finish collecting data.

i don't know what's stupider: that somebody wrote a book called Truth and Fiction in The Da Vinci Code, or that people are willing to pay $125 to watch him speak.

well, it's official! or nearly so. i'm about to mail in my intent to register and tuition deposit to the medill school of journalism at northwestern. see how official it is - i even created a new blog category! UBER official.

only problem is that, along with the deposit and intent to register form, you must also send in a "who's who" form - wherein you list your name, undergrad instution and major, and, worst of all, a biography IN THE THIRD PERSON. like, "catherine a. is an unbashed cheese lover who discovered her passion for new media while creating a web site about cheese." or whatever! i hate writing these stupid things. they're intended so that you can write self-congratulatorily about yourself in as one-dimensional detail as possible. like, who's going to care if i write that i enjoy running or am an avid fan of junk reality tv shows? bah! maybe i'll just include the blog URL in the bio and let people assume what they will from it. and what they will assume is "crazy ass materialistic pop culture whore." which is fine by me.

UPDATE: i just wrote my three-sentence bio - it is the stupidest POS you have ever seen, and no one will learn anything about me from it except that i am a tool who's bad at writing three-sentence bios. oh well.

To conduct an investigative study into the effects of activated charcoal/ion exchange resin filters on very cheap vodka. Unaffiliated research groups have reported positive results, but the scientific method demands independent verification -- we don't want another cold fusion on our hands, people.

Study Date: Friday evening.
Compensation: Primarily headache-based.

okay, i'm admittedly in a pretty bad mood today (at work at 8am, working nonstop all day including a lot of physical labor which my delicate lithe body cannot handle; the only bright spot so far was meeting tommy at galileo's again for another awesome grill sandwich) but i just have to bitch about a very petty and minor subject of annoyance. and that would be certain comments on DCist.

i love most of the comment threads on DCist; they're incredibly helpful and can draw on enormous collections of resources and thoughts. they're great. you can find out recommendations for cafes, record stores, concerts, etc. i like it because i don't think we try to pretend like we know everything about the city, and commentors can fill in gaps in what we say with their great insight and wisdom about specific areas.

that said, we get some TOTAL PIG FARKER people leaving nasty comments all over the site. they are like our total unwanted self-appointed-yet-unwanted-ombudsman-holier-than-thou commentors who leave at least three or four negative comments a week that don't even pretend to offer up constructive criticism; they just try to be the most pointedly clever and acerbic comments of the day (that are very rarely clever or funny or relevant). i don't know if they get off by feeling that they're really better than DCist or cooler than it or what, but the hell? yes, we get 7-8,000 readers a day, and we're putting ourselves out there, so this is bound to happen. i accept that. but if you hate the site, then DON'T FRIGGIN READ IT! or, if you really think you have ideas to help us be a better blog, then, you know, state them in a way that will actually help us and not make me want to cut off your tiny balls and shove them in your eardrums!

anyway, i realize the pointlessness of my venting, but i'm still going to bitch vociferously. because that is what i do. and i am SO buying like six bottles of wine on the way home tonight. i obviously could use some alcohol.

A painfully and weirdly strained upper back is keeping me from thinking of anything actually worth writing, but I do want to say that in the last twenty-four hours I've been having a particularly good time in the city. Last night we got (sort of) half-priced Belgian beers at Bohemian Cavern; a bizarre antisemitic tract handed to us by a passing weirdo; unsuccessfully shaken down for cigarettes by a homeless guy; amazing chicken and mac & cheese from Oohs and Ahhs; offered the opportunity to purchase stolen bikes by two guys at the bus stop (thankfully, not our own); and grilled sausage sandwiches and pizza for $10 in Galileo's backyard.

Yeah, I know: "it's all quirky local color until you get mugged, you idiot gentrifier". And you're right. In the past I've found myself decidedly less charmed by bicycle thieves. But with enough beer and enough sun, it's nearly impossible to get very upset about anything. I'll return to withered misanthropy as soon as I can, I promise.

Incidentally, if you have any inclination to get in on this Galileo grillin' action, you really ought to. They don't do it every day, but they will be tomorrow -- have a look at the menu (and sign up for grilling notifications) here. Folks queue up in the laboratorio, grab their choice of sandwich and then head out back to munch in the sun. Best $10 meal I've had a in a long time.

millenium park bandstand
Originally uploaded by CatherineA.

UPDATE: the rest of the photos are up!

hullo, d.c. world! back safe and sound from my adventures in chicago with susan. and oh, what adventures we had...joe, a friend from college, was kind enough to let us stay at his apartment right in the middle of downtown. our first day in town consisted of walking around millenium park, up and down michigan avenue, up and down the magnificent mile, eating large quanities of deep dish pizza (verdict: awesome. anything made almost entirely out of cheese is just fine by me) and strolling around the lakeview area. later that night we headed out to matilda's to hang out with some of joe's friends, and carl was also able to drop by. sunday, susan and i headed out check out wicker park, where we spent like six bazillion hours shopping and just walking around after an awesome breakfast at the bongo room. we then made the fatal mistake of sitting down at pontiac, where we made the even more fatal mistake of going on a TOTAL BENDER. and as susan said, "some people get weepy when they're drunk, or angry - you and i get PATRIOTIC." we spent like two hours waxing on about how much we loved america and democracy and musing about ways the democratic party can not be afraid of nationalism or patriotism and take on the mantle more of supporting the military and..god knows what else. i'm lucky i didn't end up on top of the table singing "god bless america" and tap dancing. one beer and three *strong* margaritas later, i nearly died before forcing myself to go to a second city showing. thank god for the restorative qualities of boston market macaroni (yeah, i didn't eat as well during the trip as i would have liked).

monday susan and i split up to go visit our respective schools - she to do an orientation/reception thing at uchicago, and i was off to chat with the director of the new media program at northwestern. we talked for almost two hours, and it was really gratifying - i think he totally gets new media and is directing the program more towards a business model/structural idea of new media rather than worrying about traditional journalism. not that i don't enjoy traditional journalism, and god knows i'm going to have to take a lot of reporting/writing classes, but i don't want to be a newspaper reporter. i want to be a JOURNALISM FUTURIST. i just made that up. i don't really know what i want to be - something along the lines of a media consultant who can figure out how to help traditional media outlets adapt to technology and use said technology to better serve the public. and i think northwestern can help me do that.

ANYWAY. i'm going to try to put up my flickr stream later, and i know susan took a bunch of pictures, too - one sure-to-be classic is the miniseries that should be called "why tequila is evil"; it consists of one photo of me in the cab looking absolutely smashed - you can pratically see the words slurring out of my mouth - a second photo of me sort of hunched over, and a third photo of me near passed out on my own lap, eyes closed, looking like death would be a welcome respite.

as for general impressions of chicago - i liked it quite a bit. the buildings there are VERY TALL, which after living in d.c., land of the midget skyscrapers, was continually freaking me out. we had gorgeous weather, so i repressed the ideas of nuclear winters, and i thought all the little neighborhoods were adorable. but i was also homesick and half-freaked out for a lot of the weekend - the trip just made it that much more of a reality that i'm going to be moving halfway across the country in less than six months, and i'm not really ready for that at this point. but i'll get over it. i'm excited. i know this is what i want to do, and even though it means leaving d.c. behind for a year, i'm ready.

• The prolific Scott Moschella of PlasticBugs.com has hacked the free, powerful GIMP image editing program to present an interface that's a clone of Photoshop. Have a look here. For now it's only for OS X and Linux, but GIMP exists for Windows as well, so I'd imagine a win32 port will show up sooner or later.


• All this wrestling talk reminded me that, strangely enough, DC's own Bob Mould used to be a booker for the now-defunct World Championship Wrestling (meaning he, along with others, was responsible for scheduling matches and scripting storylines). Also, he's got a blog. This probably isn't news to anyone but me.

Oh, and this is useless, but still pretty slick.

I wrote a review of Sin City over at BTD this past Sunday. Got this in my inbox today:

Futurama, episode 4.12...
Leela: I didn't want to leave them either Fry but what are we supposed to do?
Fry: Well, usually on the show someone would come up with a
complicated plan then explain it with a simple analogy.
Leela: Hmm. If we can reroute engine power through the primary weapons
and reconfigure them to Melllvar's frequency that should overload his
electro-quantum structure.
Bender: Like putting too much air in a ballon!

Tom...
The tropes of film noir that Miller triumphantly collected, distilled
and unleashed as epic archetypes don't always fare well in the
transition back to their source medium, like an audio cassette copied
too many times.

love,
-jeff

Damn you, Nye! That's what I get for letting my brain's thesaurus function run amok while the rest of it is still hungover.

Ah, Wrestlemania. Where champions are crowned! Or at least given gigantic belts. Last night Jon and Kanishka joined Charles and myself to take in the spectacle. Having not watched wrestling in a couple of years, I was expecting to be adrift among the new faces and nuanced plotlines, but with the help of Kanishka's encyclopedic wrestling knowledge, I was able to piece together the web of relationships: it turns out that if a wrestler dislikes girls, America or drinking beer, their activities may not be entirely on the up-and-up. Something to keep in mind.

If you're genuinely interested, wrestling columnist/dimwitted fascist Mr. Tito has got a full run-down of the show. For my part, I'll say that the HBK/Kurt Angle match didn't disappoint, and Randy Orton/Undertaker was every bit as entertaining as you'd expect a showdown between a pampered wrestling scion and an unstoppable undead juggernaut to be. And the ladder match was, as usual, a testament to the inspiring human capacity for inventing new ways to hit each other with ladders.

But the evening's most offensive -- and therefore most entertaining -- moment came early, when Eugene, a wrestler who pretends to be developmentally disabled, took the mic to share his childlike enthusiasm for Wrestlemania with the sold-out Staples Center crowd. Unfortunately for him, the sinister Muhammad Hassan, a wrestler who pretends to be Iraqi, didn't take kindly being denied a piece of Wrestlemania (and the political self-determination that it clearly represents). Long story short, Eugene ended up in the excruciating Camel Clutch while Hassan's associate screamed faux-Arabic gibberish at him.

Well, thank goodness someone put a stop to this outrage. Resplendent in a yellow and red feather boa, and accompanied by his signature theme "Real American", Hulk Hogan strode into the arena with a creaky determination. Although he's in his fifties, Hogan's iconic status and sheer Americanousity were enough to paralyze Hassan, leaving him little more than a punching bag for Hogan's deliberately-paced geriatric onslaught. "Probably the greatest American, ever," was Jon's assessment and, not knowing very much about American history, I am inclined to agree. We immediately formulated plans to rechristen our nearest traffic roundabout "Hogan Circle".

Okay, the marquee matches were a little boring -- maybe it was just that the novelty begins to wear off around hour 3. But hometown hero Batista took the title, good mostly triumphed over evil, and nobody got paralyzed. What more can be said? Only this: I love this stupid shit.

Well, my fortunes in my various NCAA pools aren't looking too good at the moment. But that's alright, because flipping through the channels on Thursday I was reminded that the INDISPUTABLY LARGEST SPORTS entertainment EVENT OF THE YEAR IS OCCURRING THIS SUNDAY!

That's right folks, Wrestlemania XXI is upon us, and there's drama a-plenty. Will underdog caucasian rapper/wrestler John Cena be able to stand up to the plutocratic might of Texan blueblood/financial analyst/wrestler John "Bradshaw" Layfield? Will the relative no-name Randy Orton pose a challenge to the undefeated, undead Undertaker? Will Rowdy Roddy Piper's geriatric status keep Stone Cold Steve Austin from crippling and/or spilling beer on him? There's just no way to know. Well, no way that doesn't involve dropping $50.

I haven't watched pro wrestling in quite a while, but back in the day I fashioned myself a so-called "smart mark", one of those guys who would watch every week for the spectacle, the nasty backstage gossip and, let's face it, the ludicrous macho pageantry. This Sunday evening seems like a good time to catch up on who's on top, who's popping pills, and who's dead. So who's in?

rob just added a neat new feature to DCist.com (i know, how could it get EVEN NEATER?) - flickr photos that automatically post themselves to www.dcist.com/photos.php. just upload your photo, tag it with "dcist", or email it to fact18working at photos.flickr.com with a title and description. it's purty cool.

also purty cool was phoenix last night at the 9:30 club - i've got a brief review up here. they were indescribably slick and french, and first thing kyle said to me when their set was finished was, "all six of them are totally getting laid tonight." and even though they all probably weighed about 105 pounds soaking wet, had greasy hair and skinny, skinny pants, it was true. they were sorta like maroon 5, if maroon 5 was french and awesome. or maybe like jameraquai, except minus all the annoying crap. i recommend you check out some of their videos here.

April 1st is a pretty bad day for the internet, particularly its nerdier corners. For some reason techies get way into April Fools, and a lot of unfunny disinformation is generated. Sometimes it doesn't even try to be funny -- it's just lying for its own sake. It makes it tough to find information, or even genuine entertainment.

Oh well. The folks at Penny Arcade, at least, have something funny to contribute.

Last night Julie was nice enough to let me take her car on a refresher course at driving stick. And it was glorious. Allow me to rhapsodize.

You see, my friends, driving a manual, like every other analogizable thing, is like making love to a woman. Yes, it's a matter of instinct, but mostly I mean that it's awkward and embarrassing, full of fits and starts and thrashing around. Going too fast will prompt unhappy yelps from underneath you; go too slow and the whole operation will grind to a halt, leaving you to frantically flail about, all the time keenly aware of the disapproving gaze of the owner of the equipment to which you have foolishly been granted access.

But through persistence and experience things can eventually be made to click, and you'll have a few precious moments of clarity before the need to repeat the ordeal begins to mount anew, and someone starts screaming at you to get off the road.

Anyway, after driving around Arlington for half an hour I felt pretty confident about my ability to get a stick-shift rental car off the lot without it bursting into flames. So I went to Microcenter and bought myself two wireless routers to celebrate, then went home and slept like a baby.

As I was locking my bike to a lamppost this morning around 20th and Penn, another biker came whizzing by and said "keep riding, goombah." Given his appearance and the location, I'd say he was probably a GW student. He didn't seem to say this with any malice. But what the hell does it mean? Was it an entreaty from a fellow cyclist to throw off the shackles of wage slavery and enjoy the beautiful day? A bizarre, xenophobic assault on my not-actually-Italian heritage? An NES non sequitur?

Exhibit A: my bike's frame was made by an Italian company, so it does have some little Italian flag decals on it.

Exhibit B: I am wearing a ridiculously striped shirt today, a style that I think Catherine has told me got started in Italy. I'm pretty sure this shirt is from the Gap, though. So it's actually more of a Malaysian shirt, if you ask me.

But I guess my appearance this morning probably was unusually eurotrashy. So was it actual xenophobia? From someone in their early twenties? Directed against Italians?! It seems unlikely.

Which leads me to a dire and inescapable conclusion: I just don't understand the kids these days. Already.