*pops door on storm cellar*
*pokes head out, looks around cautiously*
*scrambles up ladder and out of cellar*
*blinks and tries to shield eyes from the overly-bright sunlight*
I'm back now, and hopefully won't be gone for as long again, if I can help it--the past few months have been interesting, what with finding/starting a new job, looking after my friends during various crises (emotional and otherwise), and trying to keep my own head above water. I'm feeling a bit more chipper lately, though, thanks to a variety of factors, although I'm going to give the most credit to the cute little SAD light I got for less than $40 off Amazon.com, which sits on my desk at work and gets turned on for an hour every morning, and which really does seem to be perking me up lately, placebo effect be damned.
When you find yourself rediscovering reserves of piss and vinegar that you hadn't really unleashed in nearly 20 years, and had damn near forgotten that you ever possessed, to the extent that you (a) defend Scarlett Johansson from what IMNSHO was unfair and inappropriate slut-shaming on CDAN*; (b) deal with an obnoxious individual on a local news site who seems to feel that being wished "Happy Holidays" is an affront to his Christian white male privilege--no, asshole, it just means people are being polite and not automatically assuming anything about anyone's religious beliefs or lack thereof, while still trying to be friendly and wish someone whatever joys of the season they may wish to have; I phrased it far more graciously, but that's the gist of it--and (c) commented on a Joss Whedon Facebook posting by batting my eyelashes and offering to bribe him with mega-amounts of my semi-legendary brownies if he would only make a Hawkeye/Black Widow movie happen--because, damn it, Jeremy and Scarlett deserve their own movies, seeing as they're the only Avengers who don't have their own franchise entries, plus it would fill in a lot of interesting gaps in the characters' backstories when the Avengers sequel comes around in 2015, and make a whole lot of fangirls and boys very, very happy, thereby only increasingly the eventual box office for the above-referenced sequel--well...methinks things may start getting, um...interesting, and hopefully not in that "may you live in interesting times" Chinese curse way.
(I really don't recommend being some degree or another of being seriously depressed for nearly 20 years; it does tend to rather crimp one's style/social life/functioning/life in general. Ah, dysthymia, the chronic fatigue syndrome of mental issues...)
Having blithered all that, I'm definitely going to make more of an effort to post more regularly here, and probably not just about my misspent youth in the alt-music scene, either. Anyway, have to go now, because Jezebel is demanding her late-night snack, and if I don't want my good work pants shredded while I'm still wearing them, I'd best get on out to the kitchen and get her fed...
(Oh, and Joss? I'm totally serious about the brownies; I'll even throw in a batch of chocolate-chip oatmeal cookies to boot...I do have references, after all... ;-)
Monday, November 12, 2012
Friday, May 18, 2012
"That hi-pro glow..."
Remember what I said about posting every week? Um, well...when you get the news that you're being laid off from your job of eight years the day after you post your first real entry, you tend to have other things on your mind besides yammering about your misspent youth, as I'm sure way too many of you understand.
At any rate, here I am again, but I'm not here to talk about the alt-rock scene...oh, no. Today's inspiration comes courtesy of my friend C-ko, a compatriot from the old alt.music.nin days, who happened to mention in a Live Journal post that her daily tasks take her past a local whole foods chain store, the end result of which is that she's able to regularly purchase what she referred to as "hippie chow."
Oh, dear.
I now have this sudden mental image of a great big bag with the familiar checkerboard pattern and the words "Purina Hippie Chow" emblazoned across the front, complete with a commercial featuring long, frizzy-haired folk in overalls and Indian import embroidered blouses snarfing the snuff out of hand-thrown pottery bowls on the floor. *cue hysterical laughter*
So, while I'm being silly, what do you all think should go into Purina Hippie Chow? Granola, of course, but that's only part of a balanced diet...freeze-dried tofu? broken-up chunks of soy-based veggie burgers? dried fruit and nuts? brown rice and beans for proper protein complimentarity? aggressively-whole-grain bread? (I'm reminded of the Fran Leibowitz quote in Metropolitan Life that bread needing to be sliced with an ax is bread that's too nourishing; God help me, but I actually baked bread like that back in the late '70s and early '80s while still living with my parents, and topped it with soy spread straight out of the original edition of Laurel's Kitchen, the gastrointestinal results of which led to my mother's commenting "Damn, those people must have a four-hole shithouse!" Um, yeah...what she said.)
Any other ideas for what we ought to put into this? (And yes, anyone wanting to Photoshop a Purina Hippie Chow bag and post the results here is more than welcome...)
At any rate, here I am again, but I'm not here to talk about the alt-rock scene...oh, no. Today's inspiration comes courtesy of my friend C-ko, a compatriot from the old alt.music.nin days, who happened to mention in a Live Journal post that her daily tasks take her past a local whole foods chain store, the end result of which is that she's able to regularly purchase what she referred to as "hippie chow."
Oh, dear.
I now have this sudden mental image of a great big bag with the familiar checkerboard pattern and the words "Purina Hippie Chow" emblazoned across the front, complete with a commercial featuring long, frizzy-haired folk in overalls and Indian import embroidered blouses snarfing the snuff out of hand-thrown pottery bowls on the floor. *cue hysterical laughter*
So, while I'm being silly, what do you all think should go into Purina Hippie Chow? Granola, of course, but that's only part of a balanced diet...freeze-dried tofu? broken-up chunks of soy-based veggie burgers? dried fruit and nuts? brown rice and beans for proper protein complimentarity? aggressively-whole-grain bread? (I'm reminded of the Fran Leibowitz quote in Metropolitan Life that bread needing to be sliced with an ax is bread that's too nourishing; God help me, but I actually baked bread like that back in the late '70s and early '80s while still living with my parents, and topped it with soy spread straight out of the original edition of Laurel's Kitchen, the gastrointestinal results of which led to my mother's commenting "Damn, those people must have a four-hole shithouse!" Um, yeah...what she said.)
Any other ideas for what we ought to put into this? (And yes, anyone wanting to Photoshop a Purina Hippie Chow bag and post the results here is more than welcome...)
Wednesday, April 4, 2012
And away we go...
I've been saying for years that I ought to write a book about my various sillyassed adventures as an amateur photographer/provider of fresh baked goods on the fringes of the alternative rock scene in the '80s-'00s, and even started a different blog a number of years ago with the idea that writing for it might get me started...alas, such was not the case. Part of it was due to sheer laziness on my part, or simply being too busy with life in general to wibble on about my fangirl adventures, but in retrospect, I think a lot of it came down to Just Not Being Ready--ready, that is, in the sense of having just enough time and distance, and being old enough, to develop some perspective; even a couple of years ago, I would have cringed about certain stories, but now I can laugh at them as well.
(OK, some of them are probably cringe-worthy for life, but I knew I'd crossed a certain barrier when I found myself telling the tale of just how I came to end up on Michael Stipe's shit list in 1989 to a highly amused crowd of elder scenesters on the E train back to Park Street after seeing Kristin Hersh's multimedia performance of Paradoxical Undressing at the MFA--which, by the way, was wonderful; you should definitely check it out if she ever does it in your neck of the woods--and realized that, if you can all but shout a tale of your youthful naivete and foolishness over the noise of the wheels and the other passengers, and can do so with a big grin on your face, highly amused at the absurdity of it all after 23 years, you just might be up for blogging about it in front of God and everybody. And no, I'm not telling that one right away; you'll have to wait for it...it'll keep you coming back here, you know. ;-)
Now, that was all well and good, but I still hadn't actually started doing anything (as opposed to merely pondering the notion); what finally prompted me to get rolling was spending way too much time on my favorite gossip blog, Crazy Days and Nights, being highly entertained (and occasionally enraged) by the comments and stories of a poster we know only as Himmmm.
A bit of background here: For those of you not already familiar with CDAN (as it's known), it's put out by a blogger who nomme de net is Entertainment Lawyer, aka Enty for short; according to the site mythology, he's a 400-lb. bacon-loving showbiz lawyer in LA who's been married multiple times and, as a result of being brokeass from paying so much alimony, has been forced to move into his parents' basement, from whence come his postings. (That's his story, and he's sticking to it, irregardless of anything the NY Post, or any number of other media sites, might want you to think.) One of Enty's trademarks is the "blind item," aka a piece of gossip sufficiently juicy that the item in question is phrased in such a way as to leave plenty of clues for readers to guess the identity of the subject. Unlike most gossip writers, though, Enty periodically outs the blinds' subjects, usually on New Year's Day and July 4th, with a long, long list of reveals for the past 6 months' worth of posts, starting at 9 a.m. PST and popping up every 15 minutes until he either runs out of blinds or passes out from exhaustion, whichever happens first. (Not all blind items are revealed, however; we're all still debating the real identities of MV, the famous "singer" whose albums were originally sung by a studio performer, and Coke Mom, the actress so addled by her drug habit that her child/ren, her marriage, and her career are all in serious danger...some of the guesses are pretty damn good, though... ;-)
At any rate, CDAN has a lot of regular commenters, and one who first popped up a couple of years ago went by the name of Himmmm. At first, he appeared only sporadically, telling tales of being a guest at Chris Cornell's wedding and other amusing insider dish; it wasn't until his lengthy and heartfelt defense of Mel Gibson as a basically decent human being who was there for him when he needed it most, and who'd quite literally saved his life, that people started paying attention to what he had to say, as well as speculating on who he might be. Over the past year or so, he started posting more and more regularly, always entertainingly and always at considerable length--I like to joke that he's the only other commenter longer-winded than I am, and it's true--and always keeping us guessing at his real identity, while scattering hints hither and yon like starlets' panties along Hollywood Boulevard, and chatting with the rest of us regulars, offering sympathy and support to those who needed it and a wicked sense of humor to everyone else.
(Himmmm, if you're reading this, I still want to know how the hell you knew about my adventures as the alt-rock Betty Crocker and the infamous brownies, because odds are you don't know me from Adam's housecat...)
Anyway, it all got crazier and crazier until, after telling some mind-bogglingly sordid tales, he went out in a blaze of Internet glory, promising to come back at some point, and dropping his final round of hints as to his true identity. (I won't spoil all the fun; hop over to CDAN, do a search on "Himmmm," and see what you think once you pick your jaw back up off the floor after reading some of what he had to say.) It was a great ride while it lasted, and we all sincerely hope he does reappear down the line, because whomever he may be, he's one funny bastard with a truly righteous sense of rage where victims and victimizers--of whom there are far too many--are concerned; more to the point, though, the combination of reading his comments and firing off my own in response wound me up enough to make me think that hey, maybe it is time to Nike my ass and Just Do It...and so I made a mighty vow, right there in the CDAN comments, that I was by God going to start up my very own damn blog, and was even going to launch it on this very day, April 4th...
...and you're looking at it now.
You might be wondering "why this particular day?" Two good reasons: (1) astrologically speaking, today is the day that Mercury went direct after being retrograde since March 12, and therefore it's a good time to start a new project; and (2) just in case our friend Himmmm really is who an awful lot of us suspected he might be/who he wanted us to think he is, what better tribute to his helping to light the fire under my butt that actually got this blog off the ground than having it go live on his birthday?
(Consider yourself the patron saint/guardian angel of the site, bubela--it's the least I can do for someone who just might possibly be one of my all-time favorite actors, right? :-)
*************************************************************
So much for the backstory...as for the present, I'll do my damndest (work, etc. allowing) to post here at least once a week; it might be tales of my misspent youth, or my not-quite-so-misspent middle age, or natterings about some bit of weirdness, or whatever the hell strikes me as a good idea at any given moment. In the meantime, though, I need to go tend to my cat Jezebel, an almost-16-year-old tortie who has "tortietude" out the wazoo (torties--the redheads of the cat world...), and who keeps me under the strictest possible feline supervision, because she's tapping on my arm and wants me to get off the stupid computer and pay attention to her...
(OK, some of them are probably cringe-worthy for life, but I knew I'd crossed a certain barrier when I found myself telling the tale of just how I came to end up on Michael Stipe's shit list in 1989 to a highly amused crowd of elder scenesters on the E train back to Park Street after seeing Kristin Hersh's multimedia performance of Paradoxical Undressing at the MFA--which, by the way, was wonderful; you should definitely check it out if she ever does it in your neck of the woods--and realized that, if you can all but shout a tale of your youthful naivete and foolishness over the noise of the wheels and the other passengers, and can do so with a big grin on your face, highly amused at the absurdity of it all after 23 years, you just might be up for blogging about it in front of God and everybody. And no, I'm not telling that one right away; you'll have to wait for it...it'll keep you coming back here, you know. ;-)
Now, that was all well and good, but I still hadn't actually started doing anything (as opposed to merely pondering the notion); what finally prompted me to get rolling was spending way too much time on my favorite gossip blog, Crazy Days and Nights, being highly entertained (and occasionally enraged) by the comments and stories of a poster we know only as Himmmm.
A bit of background here: For those of you not already familiar with CDAN (as it's known), it's put out by a blogger who nomme de net is Entertainment Lawyer, aka Enty for short; according to the site mythology, he's a 400-lb. bacon-loving showbiz lawyer in LA who's been married multiple times and, as a result of being brokeass from paying so much alimony, has been forced to move into his parents' basement, from whence come his postings. (That's his story, and he's sticking to it, irregardless of anything the NY Post, or any number of other media sites, might want you to think.) One of Enty's trademarks is the "blind item," aka a piece of gossip sufficiently juicy that the item in question is phrased in such a way as to leave plenty of clues for readers to guess the identity of the subject. Unlike most gossip writers, though, Enty periodically outs the blinds' subjects, usually on New Year's Day and July 4th, with a long, long list of reveals for the past 6 months' worth of posts, starting at 9 a.m. PST and popping up every 15 minutes until he either runs out of blinds or passes out from exhaustion, whichever happens first. (Not all blind items are revealed, however; we're all still debating the real identities of MV, the famous "singer" whose albums were originally sung by a studio performer, and Coke Mom, the actress so addled by her drug habit that her child/ren, her marriage, and her career are all in serious danger...some of the guesses are pretty damn good, though... ;-)
At any rate, CDAN has a lot of regular commenters, and one who first popped up a couple of years ago went by the name of Himmmm. At first, he appeared only sporadically, telling tales of being a guest at Chris Cornell's wedding and other amusing insider dish; it wasn't until his lengthy and heartfelt defense of Mel Gibson as a basically decent human being who was there for him when he needed it most, and who'd quite literally saved his life, that people started paying attention to what he had to say, as well as speculating on who he might be. Over the past year or so, he started posting more and more regularly, always entertainingly and always at considerable length--I like to joke that he's the only other commenter longer-winded than I am, and it's true--and always keeping us guessing at his real identity, while scattering hints hither and yon like starlets' panties along Hollywood Boulevard, and chatting with the rest of us regulars, offering sympathy and support to those who needed it and a wicked sense of humor to everyone else.
(Himmmm, if you're reading this, I still want to know how the hell you knew about my adventures as the alt-rock Betty Crocker and the infamous brownies, because odds are you don't know me from Adam's housecat...)
Anyway, it all got crazier and crazier until, after telling some mind-bogglingly sordid tales, he went out in a blaze of Internet glory, promising to come back at some point, and dropping his final round of hints as to his true identity. (I won't spoil all the fun; hop over to CDAN, do a search on "Himmmm," and see what you think once you pick your jaw back up off the floor after reading some of what he had to say.) It was a great ride while it lasted, and we all sincerely hope he does reappear down the line, because whomever he may be, he's one funny bastard with a truly righteous sense of rage where victims and victimizers--of whom there are far too many--are concerned; more to the point, though, the combination of reading his comments and firing off my own in response wound me up enough to make me think that hey, maybe it is time to Nike my ass and Just Do It...and so I made a mighty vow, right there in the CDAN comments, that I was by God going to start up my very own damn blog, and was even going to launch it on this very day, April 4th...
...and you're looking at it now.
You might be wondering "why this particular day?" Two good reasons: (1) astrologically speaking, today is the day that Mercury went direct after being retrograde since March 12, and therefore it's a good time to start a new project; and (2) just in case our friend Himmmm really is who an awful lot of us suspected he might be/who he wanted us to think he is, what better tribute to his helping to light the fire under my butt that actually got this blog off the ground than having it go live on his birthday?
(Consider yourself the patron saint/guardian angel of the site, bubela--it's the least I can do for someone who just might possibly be one of my all-time favorite actors, right? :-)
*************************************************************
So much for the backstory...as for the present, I'll do my damndest (work, etc. allowing) to post here at least once a week; it might be tales of my misspent youth, or my not-quite-so-misspent middle age, or natterings about some bit of weirdness, or whatever the hell strikes me as a good idea at any given moment. In the meantime, though, I need to go tend to my cat Jezebel, an almost-16-year-old tortie who has "tortietude" out the wazoo (torties--the redheads of the cat world...), and who keeps me under the strictest possible feline supervision, because she's tapping on my arm and wants me to get off the stupid computer and pay attention to her...
Thursday, March 15, 2012
Coming soon...
We'll be going live (well, as live as anything that has to be typed in advance before being posted gets...) on April 4, so come back then!
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