choral music, libraries, history, travel, pens, cats, books, marriage, (in)fertility, stillbirth, and a premature midlife crisis. So many projects, so little time...
You know what's great? Remembering the really bad hair that people had in the 80's. How were these guys considered hot and/or sexy?
Air Supply: "I'm all out of scissors, I'm so lost without them..."
Hall & Oates: "oooh here it comes, watch out girls it's my my badass mustache..."
Def Leppard: "Pour some hair gel on me..."
REO Speedwagon: "I'm getting more split ends then I ever thought I would... but
I can't fight the home perms anymore..."
It's not just a thing of always looking back on the past and thinking things looked silly. The whole big hair fad of the 80's was just terrible. Heartthrobs and singers in other eras were still hot. Exhibit A:
David Cassidy: dreamy vacant expression, hair that's long, but not too big...
Saturday Night Live is a highlight of my TV week anyway, but when Justin Timberlake hosts it, it becomes a highlight of my TV year (thank God the Rapture didn't happen on Saturday, so we didn't miss this!). So yesterday we watched SNL, and laughed our asses off to the Digital Short, featuring The Golden Rule, which we all know as, "it's not gay, when it's in a threeway." It postulates, of course, that whatever two guys do together doesn't count if there's a girl with them. Good to know.
Later on in the evening I was singing the song to myself, only I mis-sang, and the words came out, "it's not gay, if it's on a freeway." The implication then would be that anything two guys do together while stuck in rush hour traffic on the five north in, say, Whittier, wouldn't count. But as soon as you exit off on to surface streets, it becomes gay. Two things I just can't pass up with this line of thought: First, it's an additional justification for having a carpool: not only do you get to drive faster, but you also can indulge in random gay treats; and second, just make sure you check the timing on your GPS because as soon as you exit, the gay activities have to cease.
All night long we were having fun putting our own lyrical spin on the song. It's not gay if it's in a doorway, for example. Or a causeway, but I'm not really sure what a causeway is. Driveway also rhymes, which brings new meaning to National Public Radio's famous Driveway Moments...
You could substitute "runway", but that would be logistically difficult since most of the time spent on the runway involves wearing your seatbelt, making any gay activity strategically difficult. Also, it brings airports to mind. Let's have fun with word association: airport in the context of a gay song = a homophobic conservative senator in Minneapolis tapping his shoe in the men's room. I'd rather not go there in my mind, so scratch that and strike it from the record.
Jonathan just reminded me not to forget to use Runway as Catwalk, which makes a lot more sense. You see a lot of freaky stuff on high fashion runways, and I can imagine that it would take a lot to phase anyone on a fashion runway. That being said, models always look so serious, intimidating, and devoid of personality, so I'm not so sure that you'd even want to engage in much gay activity on a runway. But maybe that's just me.
Any day of the week rhymes, so if you're feeling a need to justify random gay activities you can remember the old axiom: "it's not gay, if it's monday (substitute your day of the week here)."
And finally, MMA, which fits on several levels. Two sweaty half naked muscled guys rolling around on a mat looks pretty gay in the first place, so it's a good reminder that "it's not gay, if it's MMA."
We have the best dinner table conversation, my hubby and I.
The quality of this video is bad since they taped their TV, but man, is it funny.
It's been a while since I trawled around Local News, and I forgot how hilarious it is!
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
More proof that people from Pennsylvania are awesome (it's the whole Quaker thing). Garfunkel and Oats, my new favorite girl duo, singing a song that I wish would have existed when I was in the dating world.
So last night hubs and I are turning in, and he's already laying down, with a pillow over his head. The lights are off, and I'm doing my little nightly moisturizing routine, sitting on the edge of the bed. I say to him, "you know, I've noticed a direct proportional relationship between the amount of time I spend moisturizing, and the care I take of myself in general..." and I proceed to tell him everything that I blogged about the other day.
He lifts the pillow off his head and says, "I've noticed a direct proportionate correlation between the amount of time you spend telling me 'interesting' stories when I'm laying in bed trying to go to sleep, with the amount that I love you."
Silly hubby.
One other thing to share. I've become completely obsessed with Rhys Bowen's mystery series, Her Royal Spyness. I've never been a big mystery fan, but this does it for me. It's set in 1932, Depression-Era England. The heroine, Lady Georgianna, is 34th in line for the throne, but her family is completely destitute. Her father, a Duke of some godforsaken place in Scotland, took his own life after he lost everything in the stock market crash, and left her brother peniless with death duties to pay. When the series opens, Georgie is still living in Scotland with her brother and sister-in-law Fig, but they're trying to marry her off to some Prince in Austria, and she doesn't want to be married off, so she high-tails it off to the family's house in London. For the first time in her life she's living without a maid, and she has no money, so she has to figure out how to make it in the big city. Things like learning to light a fire and dress herself are obstacles to be overcome. And then people start dying around her, and she has to solve mysteries and save the day even though she is continually underestimated. I inhale these books, and I'm bummed because I'm on the last one now. I highly recommend it.
In a completely different time period in British history, I'm also obsessed with Bernard Cornwell's The Saxon Stories, about life in England when it was just a collection of individual kingdoms like Wessex and Mercia. The leader of Wessex, Alfred the Great, built the first "English" navy to combat the Viking invaders, and foresaw a time when the entire island would be united in one kingdom. I know next to nothing about this time period, though I want to get some non-fiction about it now that I'm getting into it through these books. When you say Mercia to me, the first thing I think of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Arthur riding since the snows of winter covered this land, through the kingdom of Mercia, where you can't find coconuts, given that it's a temperate zone. But I'm completely into this period now, and that's one of the reasons I love historical fiction.
I've started watching Millionaire Matchmaker pretty regularly lately. I stopped buying US Weekly, so this has become my indulgence. I have a kind of warm-fuzzy memory of it. I watched it in the hospital on the day after I lost Baby T, during the 90 minutes or so when J went home to get me new clothes and feed the cats. During that time I took a shower, and changed the channel from the Ax-Men marathon that J and I had been watching all morning on the history channel (or, as he likes to call it, the Redneck Channel - all those shows about swamp people, ice road truckers, and ax-men...where's the history???). I wanted something completely mindless, and on came this loud, annoying matchmaker chick on Bravo, setting up people on dates in between yelling at them and telling them that they were crap. It made me laugh when I really needed to.
While watching my new favorite show tonight, I saw what has to be, without a doubt, the stupidest commercial for an online college website I have ever, ever, ever seen. J and I were staring at the TV, openmouthed, barely able to make a sound until the very end when we just started snorting.
So, instead of Funny Local News, this week I'm going to give you Funny Stupid Commercials. I feel so bad for that actress. She probably was late for rent, and this was the first job her agent could get for her. Poor thing. She's probably been waiting tables in some west hollywood place for three years, and she finally gets a break, and this is what it is. Well, it is what it is.
I realize I didn't do a Funny Local News this week (Monday was a holiday for me, and I spent the day in therapy and running errands) so here you go. 41 seconds of pure juicy funniness from Isiah Carey of Houston (but when he was in Arkansas).
I'm going to start a weekly (or maybe more) posting on Funny Local News. Because there ain't nothing funnier than Local News. This inaugural posting will feature the inestimable Donald Robinson, reporting on Black Friday Sales at WFRV in beautiful (I'm sure) Fox Valley, Wisconsin. The funniest part of this story isn't the listing of mall stores (stores like The Gap, and American Eagle, complete with shots of their logos), or the mall manager talking seriously about a "soft opening" at midnight (oh, the significance!). The funniest part is when Stephanie from Maurice's talks about the fleece's being on sale. Oh man, I gotta get me down to Maurice's to get some cheep fleece!
Side note: I feel bad for poor Dee Thetford's husband. What short straw did he pick so that he gets to go out at 5am on Black Friday in the Wisconsin cold, and she gets to stay home and warm?
Gale Lemke is right: it is all just too crazy. Stay in Chilton, my friend.
Oh hooray, it's supposed to snow this weekend in my mountains! And my best friends from London are coming for Thanksgiving, so we'll be snowed in together, painting and watching holiday movies, and sitting by the fire. They were supposed to come see me with a big belly, but I guess that will have to be another trip. Sigh...
But we will still have a good time, baking cookies and making our Thanksgiving Day dinner (and we all have a lot to be thankful for) and painting light-catchers that Anna Louisa bought for Baby T. And I might get my nose pierced. Woohooo!
Hubs and I discovered failblog.org yesterday. It's really quite mean, but they post videos of people failing epically. Like this person who epically failed to get out of the way.
Other things I am enjoying these days include:
-Showers (I've always been a bath person, but I'm digging the time-saving factor with showers)
-My new espresso machine (I know I said this yesterday, but it really is worth two mentions)
-The tv show Community - Sadly, I've given up Glee because it's on Tuesday nights, and I have all the episodes since October 12 - my miscarriage - tivo'd and I can't bring myself to watch that october 12 episode because it makes me think about what I was going through at the same time, and I just can't bear it. But Community is good.
-Redbox machines
-The ten minutes I spent playing with Wrigley today as she was chasing the reflection of my computer screen on the wall. It was a good time, and I need to do that every day.
I'll be buying bread and milk and doing a snow dance tomorrow.
