books i read and enjoyed during the beach weekend:

three junes (thanks, anonymous commenter!)
a venetian affair
and, surprisingly, this.

...my nerd transformation is complete.

I am sorry to have to be writing this to you. Any online anecdote about something that happened at the gym always comes off as a thinly veiled excuse for the author to suggest what a rippling, broad-chested and, yes, sexually potent demigod he is. Normally this would not be a problem, but unfortunately I am also incredibly humble.

Despite this, I feel I must say the following: you should really stop doing your bicep curls on the squat rack. I realize that you've paid a lot of money for the privilege of coming to the Y and lifting heavy things. Probably it seems like there ought to be more to it than there is, prompting you to want to stand next to a largeish piece of equipment while doing your exercises. I can understand where you're coming from. The squat rack is one of the largest pieces of equipment in the room, and would by far be the most effective defensive fortification available if we were to suddenly be attacked by, say, a pack of crazed orangutans. But let's be honest: that rarely happens.

Besides, doesn't using that barbell hurt your wrists? The bar is straight. It's not really meant for what you're using it for. Plus it's heavy, so you only put the five pound plates on it. When you count the bar, this is a perfectly reasonable amount of weight. But the effect is still to make you look like kind of a weenie.

Perhaps you could just be a little faster about the exercise. I think you'll find that if you make fewer "OHMYGODTHISISHARD" noises in the course of the exercise it will go by much more quickly. The pauses in between sets where you roll up your sleeves and lean down to examine your biceps (or "guns") could also probably be trimmed from your routine. To your credit, when you do this you never actually kiss the muscle you're scrutinizing. But I can tell you want to. Every time it happens I feel like I am watching a poorly written gay coming of age drama.

But that's not really any of my business. Normally I am content to ignore my fellow gym-goers. Sure, one has to size up which men are physically stronger, which are weaker, and which women one would like to have sex with. But that's just in case the world ends while I'm in the shower, leaving the surviving YMCA patrons to mercilessly fight for survival in a savage postapocalyptic wasteland. By this point the sorting process is pretty much automatic. I usually do it while I'm stretching.

No, the reason I bring all this up is that there's only one squat rack, and it is integral to my ongoing campaign to completely destroy my knees (they know what they've done). I would like to be able to get on with this process, thank you very much.

I guess what I'm saying is that your disgusting indulgence of personal vanity is interfering with my own. Seeing as mine is clearly more important, please knock it off.

EliteTorrents.org, a site I've referred to in previous posts, has been taken down by the FBI and Customs. Coverage here. The notice on the ET site makes it sound like they'll be using ET's database to go after users. Ouch. I'm not too worried; the last time I even visited the ET website was months ago. Still, this highlights the inherent danger of ratio-maintaining torrent communities: tracking ratios means keeping records, and records can be seized.

Maybe more to the point, though, is that some believe this action is a response to ET's posting of a DVD workprint of the new Star Wars movie 6 hours before it hit theaters. I've got some doubts about the timetable necessary for that to be true -- but who knows? Maybe it was the nail in their coffin.

Check out this post of Yglesias's over at TAPPED. Don't try blogging like this at home, kids.

instapundit likes the new pornographers? aren't there laws against this sort of thing? in any case, you can get an mp3 off their upcoming album, twin cinema, here. since carl newman has yet to put out something unlikeable, i'm very excited. just as long as he lets neko case sing lead more...

other cds i've been enjoying: as you know, i can't get enough of the spoon, and while we were doing deck-related repairs last night, charles put on the french kicks' "the trial of the century," which i hadn't heard before and which is very, very pretty. at least the first half - the second kind of loses momentum.

cds i haven't been enjoying: the new stephen malkmus. it's just weird. maybe it's a grower, but as for now i have no blinking idea why pitchfork gave it an 8.7. or why everybody in the world is jocking on it. is it just me that's missing its blinding brilliance?

last night while tommy and i were watching "lost" with susan and kriston, susan referred to some plot point as "like they are heading into mordor." rereading a blog post below, i referred to someone as "pulling an anakin."

this is a problem. and it will be a problem until i hear one of our boyfriends refer to a moment in pop culture as "totally acting like mr. big!!!" and then drinking a bacardi breezer.

or until many diamonds are bought to pay for the decimation of our feminine popular culture mental landscapes.

dan castellaneta, who does the voice for homer on the simpsons, also did the voice for the "robot devil" on futurama. does this boggle anybody else's mind, or is the fact that i just drank three vodka tonics playing into the equation?

it's over! and guess what? WE FOUND OUT ABSO-FUCKING-LUTELY NOTHING!

thoughts posted behind the cut; include detailed plan to tie up and torture j.j. abrams.

I just heard an ad on the radio for the Nationals that included the line

"See the Nats make cowards of the Atlanta Braves this Saturday and Sunday!"

Is that great or what? Run with it, DC ad execs. I would love to see a promotional campaign for Redskins season tickets based around the phrase "the lamentations of their women".

can you believe they *still* haven't changed the freedom back to french?

Walter Jones, the Republican congressman for North Carolina who was also the brains behind french toast becoming freedom toast in Capitol Hill restaurants, told a local newspaper the US went to war "with no justification".

Mr Jones, who in March 2003 circulated a letter demanding that the three cafeterias in the House of Representatives' office buildings ban the word french from menus, said it was meant as a "light-hearted gesture".

But the name change, still in force, made headlines around the world, both for what it said about US-French relations and its pettiness.

Now Mr Jones appears to agree. Asked by a reporter for the North Carolina News and Observer about the name-change campaign - an idea Mr Jones said at the time came to him by a combination of God's hand and a constituent's request - he replied: "I wish it had never happened."

really? god's hand helped you decide on that clever name change? tell me more.

via julian sanchez, i see that the gamblin' types think that dumbledore will be the next character to bite it in the upcoming book harry potter and the half-blood prince. though the amount of bets on dumbledore supposedly stems from a leak in the town where the book's printing press is located, i still can't convince myself that it's true. isn't dumbledore too obvious of a choice to die?

in thinking about it since rowling confirmed a character would definitely be kicking the bucket, i've often thought that percy weasley, obnoxious older brother to ron and his clan, would be the goner. he's shown a tendency to get evil-er and evil-er as the books have gone on, and i can only imagine that he's going to pull an anakin at some point and will need to be killed off. or, or he's going to get a bit too drawn into the dark side, eventually have a crisis of conscience when ron or a member of his family is put at risk, and possibly sacrifice himself to save them.

either that or the owl. who the hell would miss it anyway?

As Catherine noted, Susan sent this book blog-game thingy our way. Sounds like fun -- I'm always glad to point out ways in which I'm a horrible hypocrite before anyone else has a chance to.

I'm a pretty bad reader. Not head-injury slow, but not fast, either, and very bad at making time for books. These things don't even take batteries -- how could they possibly entertain? Adding to the problem is my tendency to periodically become disgusted with my lack of book consumption and start on some ambitious nonfiction tome that takes me 4 months to get through. It's not pretty.

Plus there's the fact that while all you debauched liberal arts majors were reading Kundera and smoking hash with your TAs, I was toiling away in the computer science building and, uh, building a kegerator. Sure, I took more humanities courses than my nerd brothers-in-arms, but still -- by far the balance of my exposure to Great Literature happened in high school. Nowadays vacations are the only time I ever get meaningful amounts of reading done, and I rarely spend it improving my mind.

So there are lots of books I'm ashamed not to have read, and even more that I'm too dumb to know to be ashamed of not having read. But here are five that immediately come to mind:

Anything by Nietzsche

Okay, I might have read a an excerpted chapter of something in GOV101. But my main exposure to the man's work is from AP English discussions of Crime and Punishment and, yes, owning the Fight Club DVD. And yet I am still the kind of horrible ass who, after a beer or two, will unabashedly use the word "Nietzschean". Somebody stop me.

Any of Shakespeare's Histories

I took a course on the tragedies, and that was good. The comedies -- well, how much pretension can you really wring out of those? Plus I've seen a few of them staged. But when the histories occasionally come up in conversation (invariably conversation surrounding a trivia question), I'm lost. I mean, come on -- multiple Henrys? What the fuck?

Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

It's a classic of cognitive science, it's supposed to be readable, and it's high on many people's "it blew my mind, maan" list. But I haven't read it.

Moby Dick

I actually have very little interest in reading this book. I'm a little curious about what the hell scrimshaw is, but that's about it. But most of my friends went to a different high school than me, at which they all suffered through Moby Dick. It's a conversational touchstone. I enjoy pointing out that my class fulfilled our seafaring literature requirement with The Old Man and the Sea, which, subjective opinions aside, is indisputably shorter. But still: I feel left out.

Catch-22 / On The Road / Lots of Vonnegut

There are probably others that fit in this category -- you know, accessible books with a whiff of our parents' counterculture hanging over them. Some people start reading them in eighth or ninth grade to prove how goddamn precocious they are; others get to them a couple years later and eagerly devour them. But aside from a few Vonnegut short stories, I just haven't gotten around to them.

Well, there it is: the tip of my iceberg of ignorance. Like every other one of my personal failings, I blame my parents. Sure, I could have dragged myself downstairs to their bookcase. But I had a bookcase of my own -- one distractingly larded by my dad.

See, one of his biggest customers is John Olsson of Olsson's Books and Records, and frequently he'd bring back remaindered books -- booksellers can get refunds for unsold paperbacks by tearing off their covers and sending them to the publisher. From what I understand, the books would get dumped in a box in the breakroom prior to getting thrown out. And since my dad was friends with the employees, he could help himself to the books, enjoying the same status as the doctors of philosophy and failed guitarists who made up the staff proper.

Anyway, the upshot is that a lot of terrible, terrible scifi would appear on my bookcase and I would dutifully read it. So if you want to talk about The Great Gatsby, I will only be able to smile and nod. If, however, you'd prefer to discuss the possibility of humans encountering a spacefaring race of hyperreligious spidercreatures, and how that might work out for us -- well, then I'm your man.

oh, man. we've been tagged. tommy's busy at work today, and i just want to get this out of the way, so i'll go first. this was a meme i was absolutely praying would not get passed on to me because it would reveal the multiple ways in which i am a sham. graduated with honors as an english major at the university of virginia? check. minored in italian literature and therefore should be expert on dante, boccaccio, calvino, etc? check. been reading for over 20 years now? check.

but the really terrible thing of it all is this: i don't really like reading classic stuff. i didn't always used to be like this - i used to read voraciously - but somehow being an english major killed my love of literature. also, i realized recently that i have developed the attention spam of a gnat. a 25 year-old giant blonde gnat. i can barely stand to read a single blog post before i am running off to do something else, and when i do read something, i am inevitably looking for a limpid pool of crap in which my mind can relax, which might explain why i've read nearly all the works that dan brown has put out, but have apparently repressed the plot lines of everything from paradise lost to moby dick. the horror. i should really change this meme to "books i shouldn't have read but did anyways." or "books i have in fact read but for the life of me can't remember what happened in them, like jane eyre, there was that crazy attic lady, and crime & punishment...err...might have had something to do with an axe?"

but anyway. enough rambling. here goes!

The following quote from Helen Keller is posted in the elevator of the office building where I'm currently working:

I long to accomplish a great and noble tasks, but it is my chief duty to accomplish humble tasks as though they were great and noble. The world is moved along, not only by the mighty shoves of its heroes, but also by the aggregate of the tiny pushes of each honest worker.

mike and i went to catch snowden (of atlanta) and cartel (of d.c.) at the black cat backstage last night, and both were lovely. they both play the kind of pretty, guitar-driven rock music that i so enjoy. check out cartel's fleets here, and snowden's kill the power here.

in other music notes, i believe his ghostness may have said something to this effect a while back, but holy hell, spoon's "i turn my camera on" is one unbelievably sexy song. in fact, the whole new album is sexy. of course, i'm an idiot and didn't buy tickets before their 9:30 club show sold out, so if you want to help a girl out, shoot me an email.

i'm not sure what it says about my dad's frame of mind regarding my future when he keeps sending me articles like this one, but nevertheless - i'll say what i really think. you are an idiot if you are going to journalism grad school with the intention of being a reporter. from my experience, anyone who's intelligent and can write and wants to be a reporter can just GO BE A REPORTER. you are going to get hired at the same daily rag that you would get hired at if you didn't have that $30,000+ degree, and you are going to have to pay the same dues that everyone else who one day wants to work at the ny times will.

that said, i sleep at night because i tell myself i'm going to study new media, and don't want to be a reporter, and it will be totally different, and i will definitely get a job. and then i go down half a bottle of nyquil.

UPDATE: see? this is what i mean: "The New York Times Company plans to reduce its staff by nearly 2 percent, including nearly 200 employees at the Times and the New England Media Group. The target date is August. Roughly two-thirds of the total will come from the Times, with "fewer than two dozen" coming from the newsroom through a "voluntary reduction program." More corporate speak: "Staff reductions will be carefully managed so that they do not adversely affect journalistic quality, the smooth functioning of the Company's daily operations and the ability to achieve its long-term strategic goals."
The company will take a charge but won't announce the amount until June. "

i can't decide which is the crazier tom cruise incident of the day - his insensitive, idiotic, slathered-in-scientology-goodness condemnation of brooke shields' use of drugs to help her postpartum depression, or his totally-fucking-insane performance on oprah (click through for pictures on defamer, where cruise acts like a goddamn monkey flinging his suspiciously hysterical love for katie holmes around like so many feces).

somebody, please, give him an oscar already, for anything, for a beer commercial, a belated award for the terrible last of the samauris, ANYTHING, so he can go into scientology hiding and leave us all in peace.

come early saturday AM, tommy and i, with an assortment of other bloggers and non, will head off to the wild reaches of the outer banks, land of the pickup truck and sonic. beer will be drank, boogie boards will be ridden, and dead dolphins will most likely be poked. in the spirit of making you all SO JEALOUS, here are the pictures from last year, including a totally awesome one of "young prodigy" matthew yglesias spraying a ginormous fountain of lighter fluid absolutely everywhere while puffing away on a cigarette.

aren't you jealous of us cavorting on the beach with other bloggers? aren't you? BE JEALOUS.

sigh.

like everybody else in the blogosphere, i lined up like the good nerd that i am to see star wars on thursday night. so, okay, whatever, it was pretty fucking awesome (at least the last 2/3). but something's been seriously bothering me since i left the movie theather. no, not lucas's depiction of how a man turns to evil; not how lucas made natalie portman look seriously ugly (a feat more amazing and impossible than the entire star wars franchise); not why did badass samuel jackson have to die?

nope. it's got to do with anakin's hair. i present to you a side-by-side comparsion.

now i know my comprehension of the star wars movies is seriously limited, but doesn't star wars 3 take place directly after star wars 2? perhaps i'm mistaken in my chronology there, but if not, that is a serious continuity issue. maybe hair grows at six million times its normal earth growth in the star wars series (that could explain the monstrosity that appeared on portman's head in about every scene); maybe a space badger attached itself at some point to anakin. i dunno.

NEVERMIND! i just asked tommy about this, and he reminds me the rather-awesome star wars cartoon takes place in between the two films, and thus we have the crazy hair. i still don't think it's a good look for anakin, but hey - at least he's not bald.

the new york times and washington post out-retard each other in simultaenous, lengthy articles about the new hotspot regions of italy (tuscany is soooo over). the new york times annoints le marche; the washington post annoints puglia. the post must be late to the game, because i was raving about puglia back in '03. i have never been to le marche, but jackie of the long trip home lives there and often blogs appealing entries about the town of macerata.

if there's one thing i can't stand, it's articles that a) try to discover the "new tuscany" and b) claim the best part about a region is that there are no tourists and it's undiscovered, then publish their articles in a newspaper that only gets about 2 billion readers a day. NOT TO MENTION the post also does a blurb on matera, which i also visited in 2003. you can read my account of the town here. you know what really gets my goat? back in my too-ambitious days of attempts at freelance writing, i queried the post with an article about matera. of course, nobody ever contacted me back. so they can go shove a a big ol' trulli up their butts.

well, charlottesville was wonderful, the graduation ceremonies were wonderful, and my brother is now officially an ensign of the U.S. navy, which is also wonderful. i have to warn you that my overwhelming pride and the fact that i was denied computer access for three days may result in this post being full of incredibly shitty prose, but anyways...

Yesterday, as part of our post-fire agreement with our landlord, we assisted in the partial demolition of our deck. So as you can see, we currently don't have much of a railing, and in fact have added a few rusty nails to the equation.

"But Tom," you're saying to yourself, "What does this have to do with me? Surely you don't think that I, a sophisticated, intelligent, lovely and/or virile young person, would be so foolish as to consume alcohol, go outside for a smoke, and tumble fifteen or so feet onto the bricks below?"

Well, yes. Certainly you wouldn't do it. We've talked about it, and everyone agrees that you're a promising young person with a bright future ahead of you, one filled with days of wine and not falling off of things. But I can't help remembering my friend Rob Zalkind, with whom I was sharing a chairlift when he leaned forward and, well, kept on leaning, falling thirty or forty feet^*, to the considerable surprise and dismay of his mother (motivated only partially by one of her skis getting knocked off in the process).

Anyway, Rob was fine. When we got down to him he was lying on his back, laughing and repeating "I'm so dumb" over and over. But in fact he went on to get a perfect score on the SATs (for which I will never, ever forgive him). So there you have it. Rob Zalkind: objectively non-dumb, yet still entirely capable of falling off of things. Maybe we'll put up some rope or something.

^* this is not an exaggeration

Wandering around the internet last night, desperate for something cheap and/or electronic on which to waste money, I came across this intriguing offer. Restaurant.com lets you buy certificates to a variety of eateries for less than their face value. Their DC list is mostly uninspiring... but wait! Ben's?!

Yup. I was amazed when Catherine pointed out that the place featured online ordering. But apparently the Chili Bowl's online strategy goes even further than that. You can get $10 certificates to Ben's for $3 per. The catch is that they're only good after 5pm and the minimum purchase for your order is $15. But that's not bad -- for just 8 bucks you get $15 worth of deliciously blistered sausage and transcendently bad chili (also available by the gallon, by the way). That makes these certificates worth ordering and keeping folded up in your wallet, I think.

the washington socialites, cleveland park mens club, and, indirectly, DCist and DC SOB hit the pages of the express. i'm a bit late on this as i was in charlottesville and didn't get a chance to see the article until today, but i'm not quite sure what to think. it's kind of awesome...right? it's also so insider it sort of makes me want to projectile vomit everywhere. i can't decide whether i'm excited or depressed that the popular kids have taken over the blogosphere. can't they just leave us inhaler using nerds our internets??

This is my friend Jon doing a handstand in the Grand Ole Opry. I'm not sure what else to say about that.

(except that he has more pictures of his trip west here)

Earlier today Pygmalion in a Blanket introduced me to the latest internet smash hit: CryingWhileEating.com. But now I find that it's actually part of a contest! ContagiousMedia.org is sponsoring a competition to see who can create the most infectious meme. The competition will be ending June 9th, after which $5k in prizes will be awarded. Unsurprisingly, CWE is off to a big early lead.

no No NO NO NO! Look people, I can stand the self-congratulatory self-diagnoses in Slashdot comments. I can bear the interviewer's rampaging narcissism in this Q&A with the creator of BitTorrent. But I just can't take it when Tycho, co-author of one of my favorite webcomics, attributes his ability to enjoy a boring videogame to a mild case of Asperger's. Especially when he spells it "Asberger's".

For those unfamiliar with it, Asperger's Syndrome is like autism lite. Sufferers have trouble picking up on facial and other social cues, and often have a hard time relating to people. They're frequently quite bright but poorly adjusted. The disease is poorly defined, hard to diagnose, and frequently confused with egotistical self-pity.

See, now that the condition has made its way into the popular press, every IT helpdesk peon in the land is self-diagnosing his lack of success with women as proof for a biological propensity toward reclusivity and unheralded genius.

I don't mean to belittle those who genuinely suffer from Asperger's. But as for the rest of you -- well, look, I understand that you think girls are terrifying. They are terrifying. But until a doctor tells you it's so, kindly spare me the explanations about how your tragic genetic destiny is to spend every night playing D&D on IRC.

to paraphrase an email i just wrote to tommy:

just wanted to let you know that i got back from the doctor [i've had some breathing problems all week including what seemed like a minor, out of the blue asthma attack last friday night] and she thinks i have allergy-induced asthma. so i have to take claritin and GET AN INHALER WHICH I MUST USE FOUR TIMES A DAY. i saw star wars on its opening night and now i get to whip out the inhaler. all the time. it's like i'm regressing straight back to middle school.

let nerdom reign! i'm off to charlottesville for the weekend to watch my brother don the cap and gown and get commissioned into the navy. woot. have a great one!

We saw Star Wars, and it was good. No: very good. I came away impressed. All of the stupid, boring and/or whiney bullshit (trade embargos?) finally culminated in a surprisingly decent sprint of character development. My spoiler-free quibbles:

• General Grievous was decidedly less awesome than his cartoon incarnation. Also, he turned out to be yet another bad guy with a stupid pseudo-Asian accent (no offense, pseudo-Asian readers). In the cartoons he was mute, dispatched Jedi with ease, and kind of scary.


• The acting remained non-great. Christensen continued his anticipatory method technique of pretending to already be half-machine. McDiarmid's lines dripped with so much menace that it began to collect in puddles on the floor. And Natalie Portman committed the cardinal Star Wars starlet sin of not actually looking all that hot. On the upside, Ewan McGregor's Obi Wan finally had something to do other than act like a weenie, and he did it well.


• Yoda's charming speech mannerisms have been codified into a strict Yodelian Grammar, and it's really annoying. Object Subject Verb. Object Subject Verb. Every. Single. Time. Even puppets ought to change things up once in a while.


• The writing, although better than the last two, was still pretty bad. George, why must you call them "younglings"? Is "children" not sufficiently mythopoetic? Let's compromise: how about "space-children"? (I'm a longstanding supporter of adding the "space" prefix to every scifi noun.)

  On the other hand, I am looking forward to endless months of encouraging Catherine to remember "when there was only our love," and we weren't buffeted by the cruel winds of a galactic power struggle, or, say, the need to put away our Xbox controllers.

Finally, allow me to direct you (via Yglesias) to Tyler Cowen's excellent case against the Jedi. In short: everyone's a fascist. Well, except maybe the Ewoks. And we probably only think that because of our patronizingly primitivist worldview.

this might be the coolest thing i've seen all day.

i try to be half-assedly original in most of my posts here, but sometimes somebody else says something so well, something that you have been THINKING YOUR ENTIRE ALMOST-FIVE-YEAR RELATIONSHIP, something that has been coursing through your blood but did not yet have the means to escape through your fingers onto the keyboard, that you just gotta link it and leave it.

in short: what she said.

so, like, i guess i'll see you at the gallery place chinatown movie theater tonight, in line for that sith thing. i'll be the one surrounded by manboys in glasses, with a disgruntled look on my face.

reminder to self: do not contact Legionnaires' disease while hot tubbing it up in the outer banks next weekend. hot tub bacteria. yummy.

This year's E3 -- the Electronic Entertainment Expo -- is well underway, and the first details surrounding the next generation of videogame consoles have been revealed. Let's begin deciding how to waste our money, shall we? A review, preview, and pictures of the hardware are below the cut.

so: apparently ron livingston is going to be at the johnston & murphy clothing store tonight from 6-8 p.m. the store about two blocks from my office.

however. i have somehow gotten roped into standing in line for the opening of "revenge of the sith" with several other people and one other unwitting friend at approximately the same time.

huh.

what to do, what to do.

thank you for the email where you smoothly and kindly informed me that: "We thought you'd like to know that we shipped this portion of your order separately to give you quicker service. You won't be charged any extra shipping fees, and the remainder of your order will follow as soon as those items become available."

i thought that notice about the order was particularly thoughtful; you truly have the customer's best interests at heart.

except when the order is a TWO-PIECE BATHING SUIT AND YOU'RE JUST SHIPPING ME THE BOTTOM AND I'M GOING TO THE BEACH IN A WEEK, ASSHATS.

Sincere apologies to Michael of Articulatory Loop. Going through our archives today, I noticed the absence of a bunch of interesting comments he had left a while ago about homeopathic medicine and the experimental evidence surrounding it.

Unfortunately it looks like his site made its way onto our comment spam blacklist, and his comments got eaten. Argh! This happened with HeresAHint, too, although we caught it in comments. I apologize, guys. Sometimes when you're taking out a hundred-comment load of spam you don't notice that a real commenter has left a message with the word "mortgage" or "poker" in it, and they get added to the blacklist. Next go-round, every comment they leave is stripped. If this has happened to anyone else, email me, wouldja? My name @ this domain.

Have I mentioned I hate comment spam?

charles and his mother graced tommy and me with a pair of tickets to the nats-brewers game last night, and i have a revelation: i love baseball! the night couldn't have been nicer - the grays have great season ticket seats, the metro to the game was quick and easy, the weather was pleasant, beers were consumed, i had an excellent (albeit pricey, at $5.50(!)) hot dog, and best of all - i didn't have to pay a lick of attention to what was going on! whenever i've attended other sporting events (besides tennis matches, which i enjoy because i am a spoiled waspy girl), i've felt as if all my concentration needs to be honed in on what's happening on the floor/field/court or on the madass, crazy yelling fans around me who act as if their very life depended on the outcome of the game.

not so in baseball! most of the time i zoned out, staring at the pretty green field or people-watching around me. everyone was relaxed, and the slow pace of the game ensured plenty of time for chatting. only drawback: the awesome-sounding open bar that mrs. gray had previously told me about had been closed after a man fell from the top level of the stadium and severely injured himself. so: because some (presumably) drunk guy fell, hard liquor and wine are banned, but they're happy to shove as much beer as possible down our throats?

anyway, i imagine that on weekends and during more high-profile games (as charles said, the milkwaukee brewers are a team that you have to remind yourself once in a while actually exists) the atmosphere might not be so inviting, but for a spring weeknight, i haven't spent a nicer one in recent memory than at RFK.

tonight: becca and i venture into the horrifying Cloud, to be repulsed by its all-whiteness and drink crappy flavored martinis. seeing as it's basically in my office building, i had to give it a shot. and the rest of the week is packed; i am an effin social butterfly! tomorrow is matt's birthday at local 16, then i'm meeting the delightful elana of the medill at polly's on thursday, and friday i'm headed off for what will NO DOUBT be a super-debacherous weekend in charlottesville with my hard-livin' parents and grandparents to celebrate my lil brother's graduation and eventual transformation into Real Live Navy Submarine Dude. i'm so proud of him! no doubt later this week, after stumbling home from one of the above-mentioned outings, i will write a weepy and overwrought entry on how awesome he is, and how much of that awesomeness is due to moi. (hint: almost ALL OF IT.)

the nytimes is making its op-ed page subscription-only, to the tune of around $50 a year. i think the washington post op-ed page and authors just got an early christmas present.

Monday mornings are, I think, when we're supposed to regale the internet with stories of -- or at least vague allusions to -- the exciting things we did all weekend. But I'm happy to say that this weekend I did nothing. There was a total, perfect absence of excitement. I did some work; I went to the gym; I watched some Star Wars cartoons; I read a little(!). Mostly, though, I slowly recuperated from the stress-induced lobotomization that work had recently inflicted. I was in bed every night by 11.

So thank you to those who invited me to go out. I'll be more interesting in the future, I promise. But I was pretty well determined to consign this weekend to sweet, sweet oblivion.

Well, okay. Catherine and I did do something. But it was entirely by accident! Taste of Arlington stood between me and my Sunday agenda of haircut- and grocery-acquisition, so Catherine and I met up there with Julie, Brian and Scott.

TOA was okay. The minimum buy-in of $25 was a little disheartening, as were the occasionally meager portion sizes that the $3-or-so tickets got you. I'll cop to gluttony, but Hard Times Cafe should still serve more than a quarter-cup of chili. More irritating, though, was the just-okay restaurant selection. Arlington's probably got more and better food per dollar per capita than DC; so why did Molly Malone's, Guiness-vendor to the pop-collar set, have a booth? Why did Chipotle? Hell, why did Kaplan Test Prep? Restaurants ought to jump at the chance to sell large quantities of one appetizer at $3/pop -- aside from the goodwill it generates, it should be easy and profitable. Although there were several good restaurants represented and quality food to be had, it felt like the festival was struggling to fill the booths. Many well-known area restaurants chose not to participate, and those who did seemed primarily interested in getting suckers like myself signed up for their spam email lists.

The mostly tasty eats weren't enough to assuage the feeling that the event was an exercise in marketing first and food second. It's been a while, but Taste of Clarendon was cheaper, more pleasant, and considerably tastier.

Oh well. At least the haircut was pretty good.

tommy and i decided to go out for dinner last night at spezie, mostly because we hadn't seen too much of each other all week due to his crazy-ass work, and also because we apparently did not get enough italian food during the 375 meals we had while in italy. also my italian food experience in DC is limited to sette up in dupont (update: this is actually a lie. tommy just reminded me that i have been to, like, every italian restaurant in the city, including galileo, goldoni's and obelisk, which was my favorite. scusi the premature alzheimers), and while they have good pizza, the other stuff is just okay, i had heard amazing things about spezie and wanted to see if we could actually get great italian food outside of, you know, italy.

spezie is located down around 18th and L, and it's a cute spot with a nice interior and spacious seating. the service was excellent throughout the entire meal. things started off well with a bread basket + this olive paste that was delicious, and we ordered two glasses of a sicilian red that the waiter recommended. since neither of us were extremely hungry, we decided to forgo a secondi and just get antipasti and pasta dishes. tommy's antipasto was fabulous - it was roasted peppers in a sauce of truffle oil and gorgonzola. mmmm. only drawback was that he smelled like truffles well into the next morning. ewww. my antipasto was good as well but i thought the serving size was way too large; i had a huge pile of prosciutto di parma with mozzarella di bufala. i just felt like something about it was a bit off - it lacked a little bit of flavor and could have used an extra drizzle of olive oil.

the pasta, however - oi vey. well, actually tommy liked his pasta but didn't think it was the best thing ever eaten. he had the bucatini all’amatriciana, which is thick, long tubes of pasta with pancetta and tomato sauce. it was good but he said there was way too much pancetta in the sauce and so it was uber salty. i, on the other hand, had the ravioli porcini and pistacchio - ravioli stuffed with porcini mushrooms and served in a pistachio sauce. man, i love italian food - they use pistachios in everything from pasta sauces to gelato and it is DELICIOUS. that cream sauce, i could have eaten it with a spoon, and the ravioli was perfectly cooked. it was probably some of the best pasta i'd had since the pear pasta i had in florence that i raved about. i guess i'm a fan of slightly sweet pasta.

then it was on to dessert, and this is where i became SEVERELY disappointed. the menu advertisted gelati della casa, and i was like, wahey, gelato! but then i thought about it and every american italian restaurant i've been that's claimed to have gelato just turned out to serve ice cream and it is for crap. but i ordered it here anyway, and, guess what - it was just ice cream! don't get me wrong - it was EXCELLENT ice cream. but why can't real italian restaurants serve real gelato? why, actually, can't you get real gelato in the u.s. ANYWHERE?! this is something that always eludes me. everyone i've ever known who's been to italy comes back raving, justifiably, about the gelato. if anyone ever opened a real gelato store here they would make a shitload of money. so why don't they?! answer me that, bloggers.

anyway, overall i'd definitely recommend spezie, especially the pasta. i think it'd be a nice spot for lunch as the lunch menu is a bit cheaper than the dinner one and you can sit at the bar in the front and watch the crazy L street people go by.

from my favorite tv diva's latest column:

Though they're still dotting I's and crossing T's on the final documents, I'm told Fox network and 20th Century Fox studio are "99.9 percent of the way there" to reaching an agreement on the new season. According to these highly placed sources, it looks very likely that Arrested Development will be coming back not only for a full season of 22 episodes but actually two full seasons of 22 episodes. How freaking fantastic is that?

At press time, I can tell you this is precisely where the show's fate stands. So, barring any last-minute switch-a-roonies or bad acts by Satan or Rupert Murdoch, we will get glorious "twin" seasons of the best damn comedy on TV.

According to these insiders, even though the ratings weren't exactly American Idol numbers, Fox's new prez, Peter Liguori, bless his perceptive little heart, has faith that the show will do well in a different time slot. He also wants to bring AD up to the magical episode number required for syndication and feels the show will do very well in repeats and also in DVD. Can I get a "Hell, yeah!"?

thought i'd give a shoutout to two d.c. blogs i've recently started reading regularly but will probably never add to the blogroll because i am so incredibly lazy: rock creek rambler and cleveland park junior club (who of late have morphed into pygmalion in a blanket, starting things off swell with a lovely, funny post about concerts this summer, with which i 100% agree, especially the parts about the ted leo show and travis morrison's magical impregnating hips). go. read. discover that d.c. isn't full of embittered, lowly idiots. rejoice.

by the by, i came across this page about buffalo hunting in my random internet browsing (don't even ask me how i got there; i'm not sure myself) and for some reason it made me really angry. now i'm not really against gun-owning or hunting (though i'm not necessarily a fan of the culture and attitudes that seem to come along with it), but really - how can you be PROUD of having hunted and killed a buffalo in a planned, guided expedition?

Hunters can enjoy an authentic hunt, full of adventure. This is no "canned" hunt but a stalk and shoot adventure. Accompanied by your guide, you will work your way within rifle shot of the wary herds. Bow hunters can choose to stalk, or hunt from blinds. Either way, your South Dakota Buffalo Hunt will create a lifetime of memories.

sorry buddy, but this is not like being out in the wilds of africa and taking home a 2 ton lion. especially for the people who hunt bufffalos with guns. if you can kill a buffalo with a real bow and arrow then i might have a little more respect for you because i seen dances with wolves (like twelve times), and shit looks hard. but as you know, with a gun, you may as well be swinging a tennis racket around in 4x4 room full of frogs. that is to say that neither creature would stand a chance.

additionally: who PLANS a vacation to SOUTH DAKOTA to go hunt buffalos? let me tell you - i've both been to south dakota and hung out with a herd of buffalos, and the two combined - well, unless you throw in a shitload of tequila - you've got yourself a crappy, weirdo vacation. i mean, how the hell are you going to get that thing home on a plane?

HOLEE FUCK. this is not happening.

so, there's this problem that we're having in this apartment. and believe it or not, it has nothing to do with that bastard charles. nor does it have to do with tommy and his propensity to have me tivo programs about "xbox: the next generation TOTALLY REVEALED [hosted by elijah wood and with a special performance by the killers]". nor, surprisingly, does it have to do with me and the fact that i just drank a half a bottle of wine. (this is what i do when i'm alone. i drink wine, check my bloglines subscription like six times a minute [why don't you people update more?!] and watch either a) under the tuscan sun b) sense & sensibility c) hours 2-4 of pride & prejudice the a&e version. next year is gonna be GREAT.)

no, the problem is much larger, and, funnily, at the same time much smaller. it is the ants. the tiny, fucking ants.

we started getting them about a month ago - they marched under the door in a small and sparse line, making their way from our landing to the bar between the kitchen and living room. at first i thought they were kinda cute. little tiny bugs! i mean, there weren't too many of them, ants don't bite you (well, these little black ones) or gauge your eyeballs out or nest in your hair or anything. plus, i thought, a few ant hotels would take care of the issue. no problemo! off to the giant to buy a few ant hotels and set them up in strategic positions along the walls. of course i felt much remorse at poisoning god's creatures, but dude - these are fucking insects. they're just lucky i'm not stabbing them with toothpicks and laughing.

for a couple weeks nothing happened - the ants neither increased or decreased but just kept on their steady march along our blonde bamboo floors. just as i began to be frustrated, i whisked myself off to fabulous italy, where there is gelato and stone villas and creepy monks, but no ants. and thus i forgot.

but by the time we got back, the problem seemed to have gotten worse. charles had been cleaning a lot while we were gone, and even his super magical cleaning abilities couldn't get rid of the little suckers. worse, they started to have an inclination for our dishwasher and kitchen counters. if we so much left a crumb of food or swipe of oil anywhere, they were on it. even worse, i started, like...hallucinating. ants, suddenly, were everywhere. i'd feel a slight breeze on my arm and freak out, thinking ants were crawling on it. out of the corner of my eye i'd see a slight movement and whip around to whack my hand down on the offending ant, only to find out nothing was actually there. it's been a little worrying. and a little stressful. i'm running the dishwasher at least once a day; the kitchen is getting mopped and wiped down all the time; i yell at tommy if he so much as thinks about leaving out the cutting board.

WORST OF ALL, i am constantly thinking about, like, ant military strategy. i worry that i'm cleaning too much and killing too many ants so that the offending suckers can't get back to their terrible little nest and inform their wiggly brethren that the kitchen counters are being sponged six times a night by some crazy yelling lady. i think about letting them swarm around a while on clean surfaces so that they realize there ain't nothing there and leave me the hell alone. i mean, can it get any worse than thinking about reverse psychology on ants? i think not.

but oh (and you'll never believe this), it just got worse. a lot worse. here i am, with aforementioned wine and terrible diane lane movie, enjoying the night alone. also with me is unaforementioned piece of lemon pound cake, which i just baked my little ass off to make last night. yummy, thick, lemony lemon pound cake. so good. i'm over on the couch, SEVERAL FEET away from the kitchen, in an area where there has never been an ant sighting. and you'll never guess what. go on, guess. yeah. no. a FUCKING ANT CRAWLED OUT OF NOWHERE ON TO MY PRECIOUS LEMON CAKE.

blogosphere, i'm writing this bitter entry because i need help. i'm pretty sure it is not this healthy to feel so much anger towards, well, anything, but especially bugs. it is also not healthy to be cleaning the kitchen twice a day and imagining ants crawling all over you. i'm about to check myself into a mental health clinic in south africa. please help me. give me your awesome, your cheap, your ant-murdering techniques. because i just saw an ant crawl across my laptop, and i'm about to go postal.

AHH! must...avert...eyes...

flashbacks...to...terrible uva sororities...MY GOD. THE PLAID. MY GOD. GOING INTO BURBERRY-INDUCED SEIZURES.

(ps - can i propose a photoshop contest if anyone is feeling unoccupied and bitchy? that guy in the cowboy hat deserves some SERIOUS adobe treatment.)

Some of you may remember these two threads, in which, prompted by Cartoon Network's Adult Swim staff posing the question, we debated whether a flying crocodile or a flying shark would win in a fight. I consider them among among the greatest achievements of this blog (and blogging in general) to date. I won't bother to recount the decimation suffered by the pro-crocodile faction. Old wounds.

So with one eye toward the future, and another toward reclaiming former glory, let me confusedly present you with an article entitled "Lion Mutilates 42 Midgets in Cambodian Ring-Fight". As the page notes, it's fake -- the explanation of how it came about is here (EDIT: original explanation here).

Since it's a fake, the question remains: who would win in a fight, an African lion or 42 midgets? In fact, it was this debate that spurred the initial creation of the article. So, that one fabricated piece of evidence notwithstanding, I think I'm going to have to give this one to the midgets provided that they're sufficiently organized. But I will happily admit that it's not nearly as clear-cut as Shark v. Croc.

it's been a while since i blabbered on about my favorite show this season, "lost." and considering i'm still getting comment threads on the last post about it, i figured it was high time to start a new thread on "what the fuck is going on?" some people may not have seen the latest episode, so i'll put my thoughts behind the cut.

Gizmodo belittles it, but I could actually really use one of these. The rubber bands aren't cutting it anymore.

I'm planning to write a lengthy cross-post for here and BTD about the Awesome Display Technologies of the Future, since I've been reading up on it recently. But since I'm still working evenings, I have no idea when I'll get a chance to write it. So for now: wonder at the mystery of electronic paper!

It's being used by Bridgestone as part of an automated pricing system -- you can read a little about it here.

None of the various competing electronic paper technologies are going to be in your next TV -- the response time is generally way too slow for effectively conveying motion. But the benefit to this tech is that you don't have to apply power to preserve the image, so if it can be made cheap enough you could build dynamic displays without worrying about where to plug them in.

It's fun to imagine the possible applications. Advertisements are an obvious one -- but so are, say, restaurant menus that automatically display the day's specials and the market price for fish. Or labels on keyboards that remap themselves to whatever application you're using. Or (if it gets good enough) electronic picture frames that actually make sense to own.

sometimes i do love amanda of pandagon. how can you not love a person out of whom comes this line:

Ms. jared reports that legislators in Ohio are trying to ban abortion altogether, even if a woman's life is in danger or she is raped. Because if you didn't want to get yourself killed or bear a rapist's child, you shouldn't have gone and been born be-cunted.

be-cunted! yeah. i think i have had too much wine.

wherein i get a bit of the frances mayes disease. really - it's full blown later on. oh dear.

so, i started typing up my 4 or 5 entries on our trip to italy. this one is staggeringly boring; the only thing remotely italian about it is that i was flying on alitalia. mostly it's me bitching about the flight, the wine, the [fake] forgetting of the camera battery...so be warned.

are you still not using an RSS reader? seriously? is there anyone who reads this blog who doesn't? then you, my friend, are an idiot. tim yang lists 15 great things you can do with RSS feeds. make sure to check out the comments for suggestions as well. i have seen the future, and its name is RSS!

additionally, none of you suckers gave me suggestions about my thunderbird problems. you bite. what good is the collective blog hivemind if i can't bend it to my will and make it answer every little query i have? anyway, luckily a while back i had added this handy patch to my thunderbird 1.0 which allows you to export all your feeds into an OPML file, so i just stuck that in bloglines. and voila. i have saved all my feeds, but i fucking hate bloglines...after using thunderbird forever, anyway. thunderbird 2.0, are you out there? (wait, it's not out there and i'm actually an idiot, is it?)

what tommy and i act like 75% of the time.

(taken at malpensa airport in milan by naomi. a few more italy videos here!)

I think I'm finally on the mend, but this whole saga has been pretty discouraging. I can now easily imagine a chain of events wherein I start out trying to buy a pack of gum and end up losing most of my blood.

today's scoop might be the best i've read in months. first off we have craaaazy has-been tara reid, who's apparently decided a walk down the paula abdul path would serve her well:

The “American Pie’ star showed up at the famed Barnstable Brown party Friday night and tried to get in, even though she wasn’t invited. “A security guard kept her out, and she did the whole, ‘Don’t you know who I am’ thing, and then a whole crowd outside started chanting, ‘Let Tara In! Let Tara In!’” reports an eyewitness. “So they went ahead and let her in.”

Once inside, reports the source, Reid was an aggressive partier and was downing Grey Goose martinis. “She was going up to male celebrities and trying to cozy up to them, with little success,” says the insider. “She kept trying to talk to Usher, but he pretty much ignored her.”

The next day, at the Derby itself, a source says Reid showed up in a dirty dress “that looked like she’d been rolling around on the ground.” She went into a VIP room and knocked a woman over and — apparently not realizing her mistake — walked on. When she was informed what happened, she offered to give the woman an autograph.

then we have this d.c.-specific tidbit at the end:

Jenna Bush was spotted Saturday night at Cafe Saint-Ex in the Logan Circle area of Washington, DC.. “She was chain-smoking and dressed all in white,” says the source.

i wonder what the hipsters bitching about saint-ex being taken over will have to say about this? and can it be long before she hits wonderland?

update: wonkette's gossip roundup spells saint-ex as satin-ex.

i'm having an annoying problem with thunderbird, if anyone can help. i've been using it for months now and i love it (and the email part still works fine), but the past few days upon start up, when i check all my RSS feeds, it downloads EVERY SINGLE BLOG POST OF EVERY SINGLE BLOG that has been published in, like, the last two months. instead of just the posts that are new since the last time i checked. for example, susan, who posts just a couple of times a week normally, has 20 NEW POSTS that date back to mid-april, none of which are new since the last time i started up thunderbird. needless to say, this is a huge pain in the ass, as i have to go through and delete/check as read all of my feeds, which number in the, um, 90s (i read a lot of blogs). i'm assuming this must be a problem in my server settings and/or the way thunderbird is checking the feeds, but unless it somehow got screwed up while i was in italy, i don't know why. can anybody help?! i'll send you some chocolate. if i can't figure this out, i will have to revert to using bloglines and checking webmail, which is not an appealing option.

...like the birth of a black hole.

A moment ago NPR's The World featured an interview with an editor of Restaurant Magazine, which has just published their annual list of the 50 best restaurants in the world.

Obviously I can't offer much genuinely informed comment -- none of the restaurants are in DC, and the closest I've come to eating in any of them is walking by Chez Panisse. But, I do have to say that the rationale provided for listing Britain's The Fat Duck as the best in the world seems a bit lame. Making ill-advised ice creams and sorbets out of savory ingredients -- wasn't that whimsical and innovative when we saw it on Iron Chef, say, five years ago? Sigh. Despite their staggeringly high output of good rock & roll per capita, I guess there's no avoiding the occasional British tendency to be wildly impressed with essentially stupid ideas.

Of course, there's nothing wrong with falling for superficial novelty. I do it all the time, after all, so it must be okay. But aren't foams supposed to be the dumb food fad of the moment? Get with the times, guys. Sardine ice cream is so over.

Pitchfork's assessment of the new Weezer album is up, and it's pretty rough. Don't take their word for it, though -- you can stream the album here.

Catherine played a lot of the album from her laptop yesterday. I was pretty busy capitalizing on my recent investment in new Halo maps at the time, but what little impression it left wasn't particularly good.

For some reason I'll still hold out hope for Weezer to eventually return to form -- although it was criminally short, I didn't think the Green album was bad. But I imagine that for a lot of folks, Make Believe will count as strike 3.

For me, at least, live rock music should be cathartic. A catchy melody and a few neat turns of phrase are good, but a show won't be great unless I know the people on stage are confessing, lamenting or raging at something. Until I feel an emotional connection, the songs are just ditties, the performance a play with extremely poor blocking.

That emotive challenge is more acute for the Decemberists than for most bands. A quick listen to any of their albums will reveal that Colin Meloy can write a melody, and pens lyrics that are too clever by at least several halves. But four minutes isn't enough time to connect with any of the chimney sweeps or seafarers' widows from the Herman-Melville-via-Wes-Anderson tableau filling Meloy's fevered English Major brain. The Decemberists have extra ground to make up if they want an audience to relate to their songs in any meaningful way.

They're not entirely successful in the effort. Everyone in the band is a good musician, and they faithfully perform the songs as they appear on the album. A little too faithfully, in fact. What few differences in arrangement there are consist mostly of strange and somewhat arbitrary pauses.

But the overall live sound is their biggest hindrance: it's bright and crisp, with nothing ever vying with Meloy's vocal's for control of the melody. The string noise from an consistent overdeployment of acoustic guitars doesn't help matters. The result is all trebly texture with no substance; the organ, accordion and bass provide decoration rather than an enveloping core.

Maybe the Decemberists just aren't a wall-of-sound kind of band -- but in the cacophonous breakdowns of songs like The Bagman's Gambit and The Mariner's Revenge Song, it seems like they aspire to be. But even these examples are ultimately underwhelming. In those moments, when the band is furiously hammering at their instruments, Meloy ought to be straining to be heard over a noise you can feel in every part of your body. Sadly, they never quite get there.

So the live renditions of the songs provide little more than what's on the album, and I'm left trying to figure out what these weird narratives about alien times and places mean to me, if anything. As much as I like tracks like The Legionnaire's Lament, it's hard to convince myself that they're anything more than catchy curios. And if that's the case, I might as well just grab a thesaurus, put on the Wiggles and dream about pirate ships.

I'm not saying that every song has to be about the girl you'd like to have but can't. But if you're going to write a track about a legionnaire pining for home, convince me that you're interested in the pining, not just looking an excuse to rhyme "fecund" with "laudanum".

I guess what I'm trying to say boils down to this: Colin, go buy some louder guitars.

I was two years old the last time Washington won a playoff series. But now the Wiz are headed to Miami! Needless to say, discussing the likely outcome of that series would be in extremely poor taste right now, so I'll just say that really big guys are much more likely to spontaneously have heart attacks, and consequently the Wizards' chances really aren't all that bad.

And to answer your question: yes, so far the ride on the bandwagon has been quite pleasant and smooth. Wooo! Go Zards!

read this entry at gofugyourself.com. then read this bit on eonline.com (dated later than the fug one). is the mainstream media (well, if E! can be considered MSM) plagiarizing from blogs?!

UPDATE: tommy has informed me dismissively that he does not consider this plagiarism. bah. but i still think it's highly suspect.

was a success, as far as i'm concerned. i'd been wanting to write a lengthy recap all day, but work got the better of me. suffice to say that it was very fun, tons of people were out, i met many cool people, and i about cried tears of happiness when ms. seeking irony busted out "like a prayer" and "since u been gone," two of the only songs guaranteed to get me on the dance floor.

i met many-a-blogger and was surprised at how lovely they all were. no, scratch that - i'm not really surprised anymore when i met bloggers and end up liking them. maybe it's just cause i'm always drinking when i meet online people, but whatever the reason is, bloggers are the shizznit. excuse me if i'm forgetting anybody, but i had the pleasure of meeting and talking with shesbitter, skunkeye, seeing kelly ann and luke again, several DCist readers and commenters, plus all the regular DCist and bluestate folk.

the only thing i'm sorry about: not staying late enough to see the fight where some dude BIT A GIRL and the drunk girl who knocked over a toilet. man, i've been drunk many a time in my day...but how the fuck do you knock over a toilet? the mind boggles. any bets on what she could have been doing? and do we really want to know?

i'm gonna be on some sorta panel!

Virtual Voices: Bringing Women’s Voices to the Online Community (PS)
“Blogs” are a hot trend right now and although more than 50 percent of blogs are registered to women, the most noted and influential bloggers are men. What is the impact of blogs? How do women use blogs and how can they harness this new medium to strengthen their voice? Learn about blogging, and explore women’s voices in the blogosphere.

i apologize in advance to the innocent college women student leaders who will be subjected to my ramblings.

(and thanks to becca for asking me. i'll try not to fuck things up too badly!)

as first reported by the grammar police, there's some exciting news in our little sphere o' blogs: susan received a fulbright to study nationalism in georgia! (or something along those lines - she explained her proposal to me during our infamous chicago bender, and while i can't remember exactly what she said, i know it was AWESOME). so drop on by and give her a high five!

pretty funny, tho. link.

Stephen Colbert's getting his own show (link via Atrios). Awesome. It'll air after the Daily Show, and the plans is for it to go after the pundit half of the cable news establishment. I'm expecting an absurdist O'Reilly Factor with the egomania somehow ratcheted up.

I don't know if there are four nights' worth of material available per week to power that concept -- but as a fan of the impossibly funny Strangers With Candy, I'm eager to find out. The scene from season 2 where Colbert mimes a clown committing suicide reduces me to drooling, hysterical, drowning laughter pretty reliably.

i've only spent a couple of days browsing around its site and options, but backpackit seems like a pretty amazing thing. i wish i'd known about it when i was planning for the trip to italy - as it was i used del.ici.ous as an organizational tool then to keep track of stuff, and that worked okay, but not as coherent and easy-to-use as i would have liked.

anyway backpack is kind of hard to explain, but basically it's a personal organizer that lets you organize projects by yourself or with a group, that sends you reminders, and...well, lifehacker explains it better:

Backpack’s a fun combination wiki, weblog, to-do list and calendar that’s featureful but not overwhelming. Make a page that contains check-offable lists, images, dated notes, and files about a project or idea. Link pages and share them with others for collaborative editing. Set up reminders that get sent to your email or mobile device about project deliverables - or to water the plants or pay the rent. Subscribe to page changes in your newsreader, and reminders in your calendar applicaton.

Created by 37 Signals, the same folks who built Basecamp, Backpack sports the Signals’ signature simple, good-looking, pleasure-to-use design sense. In short, Backpack’s a perfect online replacement (or supplement) to that fancy notebook you’ve been scribbling in.

i'll be using it to plan for the move to chicago!

had to take the quiz:

You are the Consummate Hipster. Newbies bow to
you, everyone else just stares, as you swagger
down the street with "Little Green
Bag" stuck in your head.


What Kind of Hipster Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

though i believe the quiz might be a bit suspect, as i had to look up what exactly "little green bag" was.

hardest question to answer: Smite one of the following: it took a good 15 seconds before i chose freddie prinze jr over evangelical christians and george bush.

if i've got my addresses right, this giant snow penis was only blocks from my dear grandparents' house in laramie, wy. grandpa, i hope you weren't too traumatized!
(and that is the first and last time i ever intend to use "giant snow penis" and "grandparents" together in the same sentence.)

(via wonkette)

for those who missed the earlier post:

naomi's italy photos are here.
sara's are here.
and now, teresa's are here.

sorry for the lack of blogging. i really do want to write about the villa and creepy cortona and creepier etruscans. but a week sans catherine, and work is falling apart! well, minorly. well, not at all. but there is stuff to be done. see you at the DCist happy hour!

International gambling organizations! Mysterious Russian extortionists! A lone wunderkind facing overwhelming odds, and a tale stretching from Phoenix to Costa Rica, with occasional stops in Scotland Yard. It's all right here.

Of course, the locales in said places are all climate-controlled server rooms, and to the layman victory or defeat in this battle would have most easily been detected by how quickly various LEDs were blinking. But even if you only find it half as interesting as I do, it's still a pretty good read.

Alright, it's time to admit it: I'm fixated on Ratatat's Seventeen Years. Catherine got it on a CD sampler; I subsequently downloaded it from iTunes when I was frantically larding my iPod for the plane flight.

Yes, it's the song from those Hummer H2 commercials. But I can't help that. Don't blame Ratatat for creating music that's so perfectly congruous with a hated artifact. The song sounds like the soundtrack to Optimus Prime having sex, then falling asleep. Clearly, this is an artistic statement that deserved to be made, and one that's necessarily compatible with the promotion of monstrous SUVs. Blame the Hummer people who don't understand that the appropriate outlet for machine fetishism is Bjork videos (and trips to Microcenter). You don't have to commit a goddamn truck out of it.

Anyway, Seventeen Years is great, but has anyone heard the rest of the album? Pitchfork seems to have liked it, but the review's awfully written, and not in the usual Pitchfork way. So what's the verdict?

The Wizards have drawn even in the series -- this seems like as good a time as any to remind everyone to go visit your friends the WizzNutzz, who're having a banner year themselves: they just got a piece in McSweeney's! Funnier than Fafblog? Aubernica says: yes!

On an unrelated note, we missed out on game 6 tickets. They previously weren't on sale -- that seemed logical, since the game wasn't guaranteed to happen. But apparently that wasn't the actual reason, because they went on sale sometime this weekend, while game 6 was still but a fevered dream. And now the cheap seats are gone. Nuts.

DON'T FORGET! you won't be able to, because i will be harassing you from now till thursday at 7 p.m.:

DCist Cinco De Mayo Happy Hour
Tunes Spun by bluestate
Chance To Complain To Our Faces in Person, Jerkwad

if you're a reader of DCist and this site, please don't hesitate to come up and introduce yourselves. despite what you may think, i am a LOVELY person.

when i'm sober i look like this ('cept usually not riding a duck. usually).
when i'm drunk i look like this, or this, or this, and will be slurring, "heyyyyy i'm shhooo glad you could come! you're beautiful!"

God damn it Flickr! The stupid photoblog service is reposting items that didn't originally go through. I can't figure it out -- I thought I had their elaborate unspoken rules charted: one word titles, something in the message body, a single photo per post. But now that I'm back in the states it seems that anything goes, and a backlog of unposted items is rushing forward. Argh.

In other news, nobody at my office did any work at all, apparently, while I was gone. Meticulously crafted instructions about how to complete urgent task A were ignored; I finished urgent task A around 10pm last night. Worse, a longstanding project is going badly. I was assigned to it, then pulled off for other duties, with a junior programmer put in my place. He seems to have accomplished -- generously -- one and a half days of work over a 3-4 week period. Now he has been pulled off of the project as well. And -- surprise! -- we're supposed to have something to show the client on Friday. "I'm sure Tom can get it done in a day or two," my boss has assured my fellow worker bees. Aside from not being true, this ignores the fact that I'm still working at a client site full time. My joy overflows.

Anyway, besides being somewhat cathartic, this is all meant to point out that I might not be able to get as much posted here as I'd like -- if I want to be able to get properly debauched at the DCist happy hour on Thursday, I'd better put in some moonlit hours now. But don't worry -- I'm sure Catherine has pent-up blogging energies to spare.

the first of the photos have started to trickle in - naomi's 184 are posted here. enjoy!

PS - it seems a couple of flickr posts have decided to republish themselves. i'm not sure why, but take a second to reread the english translation at the agip gas station in cortona. if it hadn't cost me 30 extra euro, i'd find it HYSTERICAL. select the wanted bomb!

PSII - deleted the repeated flickr posts.

PSIII - the lovely sara, one of the three ladies on our trip who drove stick for hours on end without complaining, has posted her photos here.

speaking of christopher walken, alitalia showed "around the bend," a film he stars in, on the flight back home. i seriously question their judgment on this, because i don't think this movie ever even MADE IT TO THE THEATERS. has anyone ever even heard of it? in fact i question their judgment on most of the films they showed; the second movie on the flight there involved roberto benigni and a pal traveling back to the middle ages. needless to say, it was seriously disturbed, and appeared to have been made in the mid-80s. besides getting lost in the middle ages, the movie also includes benigni's plot to prevent christopher columbus from discovering america, because nothing good ever came out of there, and also he wants to stop slavery or something. it's called "non ci resta che piangere," which is interestingly a very appropriate title for the film, because it translates to "nothing left to do but cry" which is exactly how i happened to feel after watching it.

i already posted about several of my meals, but i'm going to go into a more extensive description here. prepare yourself for a post that ruminates on the philosophical beauty of italian pizza or the truth revealed by a perfect plate of pasta!

UPDATE: i just finished writing the post, and rereading it, it's terribly boring and more of me saying, "this restaurant was good, and so was this one. and THAT restaurant - OHMIGOD, so good!" so forgive the repetitive nature. i guess i intend it to serve as a guide for anyone searching around the internets for italian restaurant advice, especially of the cortona variety.

coming later: my impressions of cortona and our villa, next to a monastery built in 1211 and owned by a couple who delivered us fresh eggs every day. i HATED it!

since i didn't take pictures while in italy, i figure the next best thing is to take pictures of all the stuff i bought afterwards! and believe me, this pile could have been MUCH LARGER. but i used my famous self-restraint and only spent euros on things i really needed.

the purchases pictured in this photo, starting more or less clockwise from the big white box at top:

Anybody else listening to Howard Zinn on the Diane Rehm Show right now? Dude sounds a lot like Christopher Walken.

or drink with DCist this thursday to celebrate cinco de mayo. either way, it's guaranteed to be a fantastic, drunken party! come out to fawn over/berate your favorite/most hated d.c. bloggers! the fantabulous bluestate will be spinning some wonderful tunes. and i promise to get ridiculously drunk and make a fool out of myself. what more could you want?

UPDATE: drink specials for the night:
All Night Happy Hour
$3 Corona & Pacifico bottles
$5 Cuervo & Sauza tequila
$5 margueritas (rail)
$3 domestic bottles (Bud/Budlight/Miller Lite)
$4 rail drinks

you realize you've reached the heights of idiocy when: that camera battery and charger you left at home on your perfect tuscan vacation? the one you were sure you left plugged into the bedroom outlet? has actually been in some super secret pocket of your suitcase the whole time, the one you checked like 33 times, and you find it the night before you leave. BAH.

anyway, everybody else took billions of photos, so i shall pick and choose and violate copyright stuff to post theirs later. we are officially back home, and i have officially not gotten sleep in near 40 hours, and i am officially going to bed now. everything was lovely, but i'm glad to be back in the city.