Meow House Theatre

I smell catnip!

And it makes me happy.

And naughty.

Yes after a long catnap, the felines have returned. Well I’m sorry but they were tired!

Hector enjoys sleeping in drawers

I just came back from lunch. While walking into my building, I held the door open for some dude not once but TWICE. And not once but TWICE did he neglect to say “thank you” or even give me a little nod. I might has well have been the Invisible Hand of the Door God.

In my efforts to be a kinder, gentler person, I’m not going to assume he was some rude jerk-off who probably thinks he’s entitled to having doors held open for him. I’m going to choose to believe he could not say thanks because he tragically lost his tongue in an unfortunate accident, probably involving a frozen fence post and Larry Craig. Poor thing.

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Oh FINE maybe he was just distracted and lost in his own thoughts. All right, I get it. I will cut him some slack. It’s okay. I guess it makes up for that time I hit my sister in the eye with a hot tea bag because I wasn’t paying attention to where I was flicking it. I felt really bad about that.

I finally broke down and signed up for Flickr.

I used to use Photobucket but it’s kind of a bargain-basement setup; then I went to a Picasa gallery, but they have this weird way of providing the links to your photos and albums, which required several steps of work in order to get an actual HTML or image link, and that annoyed the hell out of me. Google (which owns Picasa) is usually so user-friendly and easy and they madePicasa unnecessarily complicated. I know how the HTML tags are supposed to look and it still took me several tries to figure it out. I don’t understand why they had to make it difficult. I don’t want to keep everything here on my site because what if I change hosting companies–then I’ll have to reload everything. It’s a pain in the ass.

I was conflicted about Flickr because apparently they censor. If you post images they deem “inappropriate” they will just delete your entire account without warning. “Inappropriate” could be pictures of, for instance, art nudes. Or even nudes that are not actually showing anything that you’d not show on the street. As in, everything is covered. But Flickr will just delete you if they don’t “like” it. And this really annoys me and, frankly, scares me. However Flickr has the nicest interface (although even it is unnecessarily complicated and without features in their logical place) and they have the largest number of users and most opportunity to have your work be seen by others. So I signed up. Although I’m still practicing “Web 2.0″ just in case. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket, as the saying goes.

flickr.com/photos/meowhouse

… performed by bunnies.

That’s what goes on over at one of my favorite sites, Angry Alien, where artist Jennifer Shiman has created “Bun-O-Vision” using Flash animation and which she has turned into “The 30-Second Bunnies Theatre Library… in which a troupe of bunnies parodies a collection of movies by re-enacting them in 30 seconds, more or less.”

I’ve been watching the site for years and today someone reminded me of it, so here’s a post!

You’d be amazed at how much of the movie’s storyline and fine detail can be crammed into 30 seconds. My favorites include:

Resevoir Dogs (unbleeped), Titanic, and Jaws. But I think the funniest one is Brokeback Mountain.

Go visit! It’s a nice little place when you need a break during work.

I went downstairs to get my paper today and it wasn’t there. Hmmm, that’s unusual; it’s usually delivered about 6:00 AM or so. So I went back inside and found another copy and called the circulation department at The Boston Globe and this is what the recording said:

“In an effort to provide you the most complete New England Patriots playoff coverage, delivery of today’s paper will be delayed.”

I don’t give a rat’s ass about the New England Patriots or the playoffs or getting complete coverage of some stupid game. And more importantly, there’s a tiny thing I don’t understand: either that game was last night, which means the paper has had an eternity in the Newspaper Space-Time Continuum to write about it; or it’s today, which means we’re not going to get our papers until, what, midnight?

This is just baffling to me. I don’t recall the Globe ever delaying delivery so they could provide the most complete Iraq War coverage. Or the most complete anything coverage. Why don’t they just deliver the paper and let people who simply must get “complete coverage” turn on the TV? Or the radio, or the computer? I can’t replace the information I want to read in the paper by doing any of those things, but everyone else can get “complete coverage” about some dumb entirely-too-important-in-our-warped-society game by turning on their monster-truck-sized TV sets.

It was 60 degrees today in Boston and close to that or the same yesterday. And I LOVE IT. I am really hating cold weather more and more. In Charleston over Christmas it was somewhere between 55 and 75 the whole time and it was glorious. I had to go do errands outside the office and was wearing my winter coat and I was roasting. If it could be like this in New England from November through late April, I’d be so very happy.

I think this nice weather here is supposed to last a few more days at least. I do feel sorry for the bulbs though, because their little pea brains (heh heh) are going to be all confused by this and starting making their journeys to the air beyond the dirt. And then it will get cold again and they’ll turn downward again. This messes things up for the real blooming time.

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So now let’s talk about me. I was accepted into a class I really wanted to get in to, “Writing for The Daily Show,” which will start in a few weeks in New York. It’s pretty hard to get in–the teacher, J.R. Havlan (who is one of the show’s writers), only gives it once or twice a year and he requires a writing sample, which consists of a “headlines” section based on some current event in the news (that’s the first third of the show: what Jon does when he’s sitting by himself at the desk at the beginning), in the style of the show and, most importantly, which sounds like Jon. And then he decides among all the samples who he’s going to accept into the class. And I got in! I was fairly surprised because I’m sure they get many great applications, and the waiting list was over a year long. I requested yesterday with my boss and other relevant people the time off and it’s all set so I’m starting it on Feb. 5. Plus, a good friend of mine also got in and I’m looking forward to being in there with her: it’s really helpful to have someone to bounce ideas off of when doing this kind of writing. She gave me some good suggestions on ways to make my sample pop; things that were obvious after she pointed them out but which I hadn’t thought of beforehand. So you see how it’s good to have someone else’s eye to review things.I wrote my piece on Mike Huckabee’s recent ads, one of which rather prominently displayed a cross in the background (they were actually the edges of bookshelves) and the other a large “Jesus fish” (it was the logo for the group to which he was speaking). People sort of accused him of trying to send “subliminal messages” that he’s the best Christian or the most Christian or the most religious. I’m still not sure what the controversy was: everyone knows he’s a minister. Seemed kind of weird to accuse him of being subliminal about the subject. And it’s on his Web site plain as day. Anyway I tried to come up with something funny and “Jon-like” and it must have at least not been the worst one they got.

Point of interest: the first and possibly still only woman writer on The Daily Show was hired directly as a result of taking this class. Of course many more people than her have taken it before and since she did, so it’s not like you’re gonna get a job out of it. But it’s fun and interesting and there’s bound to be lots of talented people in there.

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Couple of comments on the Jan. 7 issue of The New Yorker: first, what does this cover mean? (Sorry, not the best picture. Maybe you have seen it full-sized though.) I get that he’s drawing the building whose beam he’s sitting on, but what’s that thing sticking out of his mouth? His tongue? An eraser? I’ve been staring at it for an hour and I can’t figure it out. Second, there was a great commentary piece by Hendrik Hertzberg in Talk of the Town, entititled “Round One”–which talked about the effects the respective religious beliefs of Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney have had on their campaigns. Two paragraphs I found especially interesting were regarding Romney:

And the dogmas of Mitt Romney’s sect are breathtaking. They include these: that in 1827 a young man named Joseph Smith dug up a set of golden plates covered with indecipherable writing; that, with the help of a pair of magic spectacles, he “translated” the plates from an otherwise unknown language (Reformed Egyptian) into an Olde English that reads like an unfunny parody of the King James Bible; that the Garden of Eden is in Missouri; that American Indians descend from Hebrew immigrants; that Jesus reappeared in pre-Columbian America and converted so many people that the result was a series of archeologically unconfirmable wars in which millions died; that while polygamy had divine approval for most of the nineteenth century, God changed his mind in 1890, just in time for Utah to be allowed into the Union; and that God waited until 1978 to reveal that it was O.K. for blacks to be fully paid-up members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

And later on, with respect to disdainful comments Romney has made on “the religion of secularism”:

Secularism is not a religion. And it is not true that “freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom,” as Romney maintained. What freedom, including religious freedom, requires is, precisely, secularism—which is to say, state neutrality in matters of religion. (Nor does religion require freedom, as the European past and the Middle Eastern present demonstrate; religions, plural, do, however.) “Americans do not respect believers of convenience,” Romney thundered in his “faith” speech. “Americans tire of those who would jettison their beliefs, even to gain the world.” These were strange observations, coming as they did from a man whose campaign has consisted largely of jettisoning the beliefs he found convenient as a Massachusetts politician but finds highly inconvenient now that he stands to gain the Republican nomination for President. But then those were merely political beliefs.

Read the full article here.

My conclusions are: 1) Not wanting to really rag on someone’s personal beliefs but some Mormons really are worthy of being frightened of (and to be fair, so are some Catholics, Baptists, Jews, Hindus, Druids, etc.); and 2) Mitt Romney is a flip-flopper if there was ever a flip-flopper in the history of flip-floppery. I still can’t believe he got elected here in MA but we were in some kind of Bizarro Massachusetts for a number of years, when we kept getting Republicans in the governor’s chair here in the bluest state in the country. I still haven’t figured that one out. I think people were inhaling too many glue fumes from the Big Dig tunnel construction project. Notice how we swung back Democrat just about the time when they changed glues, after one of the ceiling panels using some kind of inferior adhesive dropped on that woman’s car and killed her? Coincidence? I think NOT.

Photo credit: New Yorker cover from this page.

Tonight is the first night back on air since the WGA strike started. Andrew Sullivan will be the guest on The Colbert Report; I don’t think the guest has been announced for The Daily Show–probably to guard against anyone protesting their appearance.

The idiots who run the faux fansite Colbert Nation still haven’t updated the site to say they’re coming back. (It’s a “faux” fansite because Comedy Central owns and runs it and has created a persona of a “fan” to be the Webmaster, but tries to make it appear that it’s just some random dude lovin’ up the Colbert. It’s absurd. The last character they had playing the WM was an idiotic high-school student living in his mother’s basement, who frequently described how he enjoyed spending time in his mom’s bed watching TV or eating–what the hell is that all about?–and then he “tragically” went into a coma. Now the faux Webmaster is some guy who supposedly “won” a “contest” to see who the best guest Webmaster would be, and with approximately 5 votes compared to the next person’s thousands, he “won.” It’s all quite ridiculous. Comedy Central must think all people who both watch the show and have computers are very, very stupid.) Anyway, the site hasn’t been updated since November 5, so don’t bother getting any information there.

Anyhoo, this is pretty much an historic event as far as late-night TV goes. They’re coming back without writers, and cannot perform any material that was previously in the habit of being written by writers, or as any character that was written by writers. So Stephen’s entire act pretty is off-limits; Jon has a little more leeway in that he’s basically himself–he’s not playing a character–during the show, but it’s not like he writes the show himself. When I saw Stephen a few weeks ago at that fund-raiser he said he didn’t really know what he was going to do and the plan at that point was to get a general idea of what he wanted to say and then wing it. He can’t write for himself either, and neither can Jon, both being members of the Writers Guild. They can’t even take notes as that would constitute “writing” under WGA guidelines.

Well I do plan to watch. At least for tonight. And if I don’t watch future episodes I’ll still acquire them for my collection. Although I absolutely agree the writers have gotten a bad deal and find it incomprehensible that the AMPTP and the networks can claim they can’t agree to pay a certain percentage of future monies because they don’t know how much money “new media” (aka streaming Internet) will make. Yep, that’s why Viacom sued Google/YouTube for $1 billion for playing their content without compensation: because there’s no money in Internet video. Right.

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When commenting, be sure to do the simple math question or your post won’t show up.

Kind of a surreal article on the cover of Parade Magazine today:

Is Benazir Bhutto America’s best hope against al-Qaeda?

‘I Am What The Terrorists Most Fear’

An interview from Pakistan by Gail Sheehy

I saw it and thought I must have accidentally gotten an old edition of the paper. But no, it’s dated Jan. 6.

There’s no mention in the article or anywhere else that Bhutto was assassinated. And it happened “a long time ago” in the media cycle.

The online edition does say “Editor’s note: The assassination of Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto on Dec. 27 occurred after PARADE’s Jan. 6 issue went to press.”

Geez, how long in advance does Parade print?! I’m pretty shocked by their enormous lead time. I know they’re a magazine and not a newspaper (which often make changes only a few hours before delivery) but sheesh, Time Magazine seems to be able to print breaking news every week with only a few days’ notice. It’s just kind of disconcerting to see a front-page article on someone, written in the present tense and in which the subject talks about her future political plans, when she’s been dead for 10 days.

Parade, maybe you want to get some updated technology over there in your layout and pre-press.

UPDATE: hundreds of comments have been posted re the publication of the article at Parade’s Web site.

Dr. Phil–last name McGraw although few people know or care–who I thought could not possibly be any more of a sanctimonious windbag than he already is, says that Britney Spears “is in dire need of both medical and psychological intervention.” And he will reveal all the details on his show next week.

My god that repulsive blob of pus just got more disgusting. I didn’t think it could happen. He actually issued a press release about it!

LOS ANGELES, California (AP) — Television’s “Dr. Phil” McGraw said Britney Spears was released from a hospital Saturday but still needs psychological help, the syndicated programs “Entertainment Tonight” and “The Insider” reported in a press release.

“My meeting with Britney and some family members this morning in her room at Cedars leaves me convinced more than ever that she is in dire need of both medical and psychological intervention,” McGraw told the programs.

“She was released moments before my arrival and was packing when I entered the room. We visited for about an hour before I walked with her to her car. I am very concerned for her,” he said.

Responding to an e-mail request for further comment from McGraw, a “Dr. Phil” publicist referred The Associated Press to his statement posted on the etonline.com Web site.

I saw the snippet on CNN Headline News and read the full story here.

Sometimes Oprah really fucks up. She should have let this leech stay in Podunk, Ohio, or wherever he was drawling his “compassionate advice” with his highly annoying 45-on-33-rpm voice before she came across him. I hope she’s embarrassed at her part in making him represent everything that is disgusting about opportunistic nobodies attaining so-called celebrity status. He visited a sick woman (I wonder if he was even invited?) and tells trash TV show Entertainment Tonight all about it. He’s supposed to be a DOCTOR.

I thought his show of non-help (he never actually helps people: he tells them what’s wrong with them, which any brain-dead audience member without an M.D. can see quite easily) was the lowest he could go, but he has topped himself. I’d rather rot in the Bridgewater State Hospital than ever demean myself by listening to any “advice” given by that conceited git.

Whatchoo lookin’ at?

I am sleeping and that light is disturbing my eyes. Please to turn it off. Thanx.