Trashy Gossip

VS.





Okay, I have gossip. Don't feign disbelief. It's unbecoming. Anyway, Meg Ryan is to be on Oprah tomorrow. Word on the street is that she (Ryan) was a complete bitch, and Oprah really disliked her. Oprah allegedly gets sassy with her at least once during the interview, subtley insulting the consummate girl next door's intelligence. You gotta love Oprah. Also, Ryan's lips look unnaturally large in the previews. This is entirely unrelated...just a catty observation.

Disclaimer: I heard this from a friend who has a friend who works on the show. Admittedly, it's not something I'd wager my life, love (oh wait, there's not one) or career on, but it could be interesting. Watch if you're able.

Update: Last night I spoke with the woman who works for Oprah. She reiterated that O didn't like Ryan. She said Ryan seemed really insincere and that her publicist was kind of pushing her back into the spotlight since she has been out of it for so long. She also suggested that Ryan's work for CARE (the organization that thinks women are the world's greatest untapped resource) is basically a publicity stunt.

Sorry South Dakota

I was in a bit of a tizzy about this little piece of legislation. Rage against the world, shake your fists and scream! But, when all else fails (which it has) do what I did. Taunt your mother. We have a deal, see. If the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, she'll vote for the Democrat in the next presidential election (It's on the blog, Mom. It's for real). A small consolation. I forwarded her the article about South Dakota's abortion ban. Her response made me laugh.

"Nobody lives in South Dakota but ranchers and drunks. Don't go to South Dakota."

Uphill Both Ways

I didn't write the following. In a former life, it was an e-mail forward sent to me by a dear friend, who is in the old-timer crowd with me at school. I thought it was cute.

When I was a kid, adults bored me to tears with tedious diatribes about how hard things were when they were growing up - walking twenty-five miles to school every day…barefoot...in the snow...uphill BOTH ways!

I swore I’d never lay a bunch of crap like that on kids, but now that I'm over the proverbial hill, I can’t help myself. I hate to say it, but you kids today don't know how good you've got it!

When I was a kid, we didn't have The Internet. If we wanted to know something, we had to go to the library and look it up ourselves. In the CARD CATALOG!!

There was no email, either. We had to actually write letters. With a PEN! Then we had to walk all the way across the street and put it in a mailbox. And it would take like a week to get there.

There were no MP3s. No Napster. You wanted to steal music, you had to hitchhike to the damn record store and shoplift it yourself! Or, you had to wait around all day to tape a song off the radio...and the DJ'd usually talk over the beginning and screw it all up.

Talk about hardship - You couldn't just download porn. You had to steal it from your brother, or bribe some homeless dude to buy you a copy of "Hustler" at the 7-11. Those were your options.

We didn't have fancy crap like Call Waiting. If you were on the phone and somebody else called, they got a busy signal. That's it. No Caller ID Boxes either. When the phone rang, you had no idea who it was. It could be your school, your mom, your boss, your bookie, your drug dealer, a collections agent... You just had to pick it up and take your chances.

We didn't have any Sony Playstation video games with high-resolution 3-D & nbsp graphics. We had the Atari 2600, with games like "Space Invaders" and "Asteroids". The graphics sucked ass. Your guy was a little square, and there were no multiple levels or screens. It was just one screen forever and you could never win. The game just kept getting HARDER and HARDER and FASTER and FASTER until you died...Just like LIFE.

When you went to the movie theater there was no such thing as stadium seating. All the seats were actually the same height. If a tall guy or some old broad with a hat sat in front of you and you couldn't see, you were just screwed.

Sure, we had cable television, but back then that was only like 15 channels and there was no onscreen menu. To find out what was on, you had to use a little book called a TV Guide.

There was no channel surfing, because you had to get off your ass and walk over to the TV to change the channel on the cable box. There was no Cartoon Network. You could only get cartoons on Saturday Morning.

Do you hear what I'm saying?! We had to wait ALL WEEK for cartoons, you spoiled little rat-bastards!

We didn't have microwaves, if we wanted to heat something up, we had to use the stove or go build a friggin’ fire! If we wanted popcorn, we had to use that stupid JiffyPop thing and shake it over the stove forever like an idiot.

You kids wouldn't have lasted five minutes back in 1980.

A Man in a Suit

I have a new crush on this 45-year-old workaholic. He is Patrick Fitzgerald, special prosecutor responsible for the indictment of Lewis "Scooter" (how a man known by a nickname like this was allowed to rise so high, I'll never understand) Libby. I'm not happy about this crush, I'll just be frank. I don't even know how it happened. One minute I was reading this article, and the next I was scheming: How I could accidentally bump into this guy in Chi-town? You may think I'm arbitrarily assigning guilt to someone I'm already pissed at, but I don't care. I blame Trey.

Beautiful Baby

Congratulations Jamie, Kristina and Collin. I love you, miss you, and wish I could be there.

Julia Marie

February 13, 2006

The New Big Brother, Mom, and baby.

A Whole New Meaning for the Word 'Embed'

I have an instructor who was talking last week about double entendres. As an example, he used a comment by New York Times executive editor Bill Keller about Judith Miller. My instructor once worked for the Times and said that Judy had a reputation of being very "friendly" (the exact word he used) with sources and politicians before she was married. He said Miller was furious about the following statement from Keller:"If I had known the details of Judy's entanglement with Libby, I'd have been more careful in how the paper articulated its defense..." The italics are mine. It is an interesting choice of words, and I don't know quite what to think about it. I thought this was great insider gossip, but I'm not sure how insider it actually is.

Last night I was reading an article in the January 2006 Vanity Fair about the Miller imbroglio. Writer Seth Mnookin also mentions Miller's history of mixing business with pleasure. He writes, "She had a reputation for sleeping with her sources (in the 1980s, she both lived with then congressman Les Aspin and quoted him in her dispatches)..."

So what are they saying? Reporters shouldn't sleep with sources? Shit.

Home Sweet Home

I watched Elizabethtown last night, despite all the bad reviews, mostly because I'm stressed out and a smidge homesick. It was really pretty terrible - script, acting, plot, everything. I have to admit that I enjoyed Orlando Bloom's disorienting drive from the Louisville airport (that isn't the Louisville airport) to Elizabethtown. As he is leaving the airport he is acutally driving on I64 toward the airport into downtown. He passes several Louisville landmarks, goes through the tunnel between Louisville and Lexington, gets lost in Versailles and then miraculously finds that he is just outside of Elizabethtown. Eureka, indeed!

Prior to this excursion, Kirsten Dunst's character made a huge deal about her directions to E-town, warning Bloom repeatedly not to miss 60B. I'm still not sure what this is about. The only thing I can come up with is that the movie is trying to suggest that Kentucky connects its towns by gravel roads rather than interstates. This is also the first of several times Dunst tells Bloom an exit number. Who knows exit numbers?! Okay. I can think of one person. English is not his native language, though, and I suspect it was initially easier to learn the numbers rather than the street names. I have long considered this an eccentric talent. A parlor trick. "Hey, what exit number is Bardstown Road?"

I don't know the answer, but no doubt my friend and Kirsten Dunst would.

Also, Bloom stays at the Brown Hotel in downtown Louisville, even though the bulk of the action takes place in E-town. This is more than a little ridiculous. Not, however, as ridiculous as being told that Nashville is only 45 minutes from Louisville. What were these people thinking?

All of that said. I liked seeing Kentucky in its summertime green. The horse farms and beautiful stone fences in Versailles, the view of treetops and mist above the Kentucky River, the Ale81 shirt Orlando sports at the end of the film, it was all so familiar and so beloved, and I wonder if the bluegrass will always be the only place I truly call home.

War on Terror

From Bush's State of the Union address Tuesday night:

BUSH: Democracies in the Middle East will not look like our own, because they will reflect the traditions of their own citizens. Yet liberty is the future of every nation in the Middle East, because liberty is the right and hope of all humanity.

(APPLAUSE)

The same is true of Iran, a nation now held hostage by a small clerical elite that is isolating and repressing its people. The regime in that country sponsors terrorists in the Palestinian territories and in Lebanon, and that must come to an end.

(APPLAUSE)

The Iranian government is defying the world with its nuclear ambitions, and the nations of the world must not permit the Iranian regime to gain nuclear weapons.

(APPLAUSE)

BUSH: America will continue to rally the world to confront these threats. And, tonight, let me speak directly to the citizens of Iran: America respects you and we respect your country. We respect your right to choose your own future and win your own freedom. And our nation hopes one day to be the closest of friends with a free and democratic Iran.

Today My Yahoo page says, "Iran is world's top sponsor of terrorism: Rumsfeld." Three guesses where this is headed.

Read Stephen Kinzer's All the Shah's Men to find out how and when the U.S. and Britain sponsored terror in Iran.

Tricks of the Trade

I'm the world's best procrastinator. If it were a sport, I'd be a professional athlete. Instead, there's no market whatsoever for such a skill. Why is it that I'm only good at things that keep me poor? At any rate, my friend Lauren suggested that I educate the masses. So here goes. A list of ways to procrastinate. To be updated as ideas come to me.

1. update your blog.
2. watch several hours of Buffy.
3. check your e-mail.
4. call a friend and bitch about how you have no e-mail.
5. eat. you have to, or you'll die.
6. nap. again, necessary.
7. read the paper.
8. wash the dishes that have littered your sink for a week.
9. make your bed.
10. take a shower.
11. call your parents.
12. check your e-mail.
13. check friends' blogs.
14. paint your toenails.
15. do laundry.
16. go to intelligentsia to "study" and drink overpriced coffee
17. look at pictures of trashy celebrities at people.com
18. check your e-mail.
19. take out the trash.
20. go to the bookstore.
21. watch The Bachelor in Paris.
22. call several friends after to discuss the crazy woman with rotting eggs.
23. extract a pledge from each of them that they will never let you become that woman.
24. bake.
25. write an honest-to-God letter to your grandparents. nobody writes letters anymore.
26. that reminds me, check your e-mail.
25. Go to bed....which is where I'm headed now...Sweet dreams all.