Yeah, the Joaquin Murieta essay is a square peg in a round hole.
However, this is a CFP I can sink my teeth into, so long as I get a copy of the completed volume.
Finally, I’ll get to write my dream paper on “The Home Economics Story.”
This is awesome. I don’t care what you think about Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” the Muppets do it best.
Muppets, Muppets, Muppets (holds up lighter).
Yesterday, Miss Baby and I were playing with socks — she likes to put them on her hands and do puppet shows, so she’s always digging through laundry for colorful socks. She will use white ones in a pinch, but prefers colors and patterns. She grabbed a little plastic elephant — there are always small plastic animals lying within arm’s reach at our house– and held him at arm’s length, saying, “Ayubame! Ayubame!” (That would be cute baby-talk for “Ayudame,” which is “help me!” in Spanish). This is, of course, what the lost animals always say in “Go Diego, Go,” or “Teevee-aygo,” as Miss Baby puts it. So the sock puppets conferred, sang the chorus of the little song, thus, “Go Diego, Go! A rescate, amigos, come rescue my friends!”
She does enjoy Diego, preferring him to Dora. It’s not about gender, though; it’s about animals. Diego has them; Dora has Boots and the musical bugs, but that’s it. Baby Jaguar is far more exciting a sidekick than Boots.
I’ve been busy and distracted, so I didn’t get to write about this when it happened. For our anniversary, my DH and I went to Raleigh to see Plan 9 From Outer Space. Ordinarily, we wouldn’t drive 50+ miles to see one of the worst movies ever made, but this was special — it had Mike and not-quite-bots. Since the end of MST3K, the principals have had a number of projects;the latest is Rifftrax; they comment on all kinds of movies. You can download the commentary and run it with your movies, or get shorts with commentary. This was a big “live riff” — the guys were in a theatre in Nashville, commenting on the film, and it was broadcast to theatres all across the country. So we were in a theatre full of Misties — geeky types, arguing about whose grad advisor is worse.
The show was absolutely hilarious; there was a great short about airline stewardesses, a musical interlude with some guy names Jonathan Coulton, a very funny geek folk musician. My DH and I have been MST3K fans since before we were married, so naturally we enjoyed ourselves. But it was even more fun to be in a theatre full of MST3K fans — everybody had a good time. Not what most people would think of as romantic, but it was good for us.
I came across a nice op-ed piece in the LAT today, a sort of “Dear John” letter to the state of California.
She’s right, you know.
Oh yeah, we’re geeky and getting geekier. My DH was talking about the new Tron movie (sorry, I don’t remember any of the details, except there’s a new Tron movie, and apparently Jeff Bridges is still involved), and we got to talking about the old one. I actually saw it in the movie theatre, but all I remember is Jeff Bridges and red and blue motorcycles. My DH has much more vivid recall of the original, and the conversation intrigued the Little Guy, who has been watching it for the last few evenings. He seems intrigued, and likes the whole idea of the guys inside the computer, that are bits of computers, using computers themselves. The whole movie does get rather “meta” from time to time.
Plus, if you skip the first half, you haven’t really missed that much.
Last night we watched Orfeu Negro, which sets the old myth of Orpheus and Euridyce in Brazil, during Carneval. It was quite nice, with gorgeous colors, and music by Antonio Carlos Jobim, whose Aguas do Marco is one of my favorite songs ever (and the fact that he wrote slightly different lyrics for the Portuguese and English versions only makes it cooler). Of course, the story isn’t particularly cheerful, but it has an interesting ending which is both sweet and sad. Plus, you get to listen to Portuguese for a while.
I’m one of those freaks who can’t imagine why people believe they need guns; I’m further confused by those who need to have them at every moment, no matter what. Sometimes, maybe, I can almost understand why one might believe one needs one gun; multiple guns, I just don’t get. Tom Toles puts it nicely:
OK, so, I’ve been following the whole story about Henry Louis Gates being arrested for being inside his own home. It reminds me of the time, back in CA, when a neighbor called the police because my DH and another neighbor were trying to break the padlock on our garage (we’d lost the key). The cops showed up pretty quickly — we lived in a neighborhood where a daring daytime garage robbery wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility — and my DH explained the situation, and the cops said, well, OK, and went on their way. Oh, yeah — and they did NOT arrest either of them. The joys of white privilege made manifest.
But what really surprises and disturbs me? Henry Louis Gates’ nickname is “Skip.”
Really. “Skip.” Go ahead, call him Skip. There’s no way I’m going to.
