LOLNews
LATER RUSSKIE
INSANITY SELLS
CANADA REDECORATED &
BONO LOSES PANTS,
SALVATION ARMY COMMANDER:
CG @ 7:43 PM | Permanent Link
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Tomorrow the new War of the Worlds movie directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Scientology go-to boy Tom Cruise opens all over the universe. I'm sure by now you've heard about Tom Cruise's appearance on the Today Show where he assured the country that he knows things.
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I apologize for not posting the last few days. A few things came together that kept me quite busy - an exam in my class & being under staffed at work. Also, jury-duty.
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This post has nothing to do with Scientology.Eighty-four billion years ago, there was a really important guy. He controlled 437 planets within the universe. He certainly was more popular than Paris Hilton and didn't worry about polling data. He ran Earth (which was then called Superloofahfoofah). His name was Com Truise.
Com was not a happy camper. All of the planet's subway systems were overloaded with tons of people - much like the DC Red Line on a weekday morning. It was time to fix this - but instead of just adding more rail cars, Com had a better idea.
Com sent out movie audition forms to each and every commuter on every single planet! When the happy soon-to-be starlets entered the audition halls they were grabbed by large numbers of clones - clones called Tohn Jravolta.
Then they were injected with a mixture created by Aristie Klley - which heated up everyone so much that they couldn't move (or turn down inferior TV deals from Showtime). Each person was loaded into huge airplanes that looked just like the Spruce Goose, except the engines had been replaced with bottle rockets.
All those Spruce Geese flew quickly to Superloofahfoofah. The hot people were dumped into icebergs around Antartica and West Hollywood (who doesn't hang out in West Hollywood?). Once that was done, Com Truise let Jennifer Lopez release a new movie on Superloofahfoofah - which, naturally, vaporized every person.
But, as we all know, each and every person has within them a part of them that will live on after death. You cannot kill it - it is the essence of you. I call it a fun-bag. Com Truise knew this - and he planned for it. Com set up big "Sale at Wal-Mart" signs all over the planet - this naturally attracted everything and trapped the fun-bags in space.
The "Fun-Bags" were all taken to a huge drive-in movie. Naturally, Lopez's movie had flopped, but all that was showing were really bad 3-D movies. These movies did more than drain your wallet and deposit corn kernels under your driver's seat that would never see the light again.
They also gave the fun-bags a new sense of the world and told the fun-bags to take control of the looboodoos. (looboodoos being the new species that was living on Superloofahfoofah, of course.) It worked kind of like hypnotism, but not like that at all. Fun-bags controlling the looboodoos would give Com Truise problems for the rest of his days - movie deals not withstanding.
EVERYTHING was implanted into the fun-bags, including ideas about a fun guy named Jesus and a hep-cat named Mohammad. All those ideas, simply false ideas learned at the drive-in. Just like learning during Body of Evidence that Madonna can't act without a proficient director.
When the fun-bags drove out of the drive-in they encountered a traffic jam, and there were many accidents. Cars were totally stuck together! Today, those traffic jams have somehow become the problem of the looboodoos. And they don't have insurance! The fun bags are causing all sorts of problems for the looboodoos!
There's only one way to get rid of that kind of problem. Pay off a judge, of course. Luckily, judges can be found in most major cities, and may, at some point, invite you to see a movie.
CG @ 10:04 AM | Permanent Link
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Ah, my friends, my blogging friends, you must admit how wonderful it is when you don't have a big idea for a post - and some google traffic drops one in your lap. Then it leaps up and licks your face. Good google. Good google. Now fetch my router.
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Unlike many Americans I've never been excited about Jury Duty.
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Blatantly stolen from Zulu's Subjectiveness - I'm just adding to the movement...
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I'm glad the L.A. posts are done, because I have to say something.
CG @ 10:13 PM | Permanent Link
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It's a good day to wrap up the wall-to-wall-to -shaking-wall coverage of my trip to L.A. I have a lot of pictures I'd still like to share, so I'll let them do most of the talking, and keep my comments to a minimum.
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There are some things that you simply assume about L.A. Some turn out to be very true, while others turn out wrong wrong wrong. Then some new things present themselves to you , and you have to deal with them if you want to or not.
2. Everyone is skinny and beautiful. I did notice a frighteningly high number of really skinny women, of course, you don't need to go to L.A. for that, just watch the MTV Movie Awards. And for sure there are a lot of really attractive people there.
This simply is not the case. Everyone we talked to or met - from people on the street to people working in stores - couldn't have been nicer. I think it may stem from the fact that you never really know who you are talking to in L.A., or who they know. And since there is one industry that dominates employment in the city (psst: entertainment) you can't afford to piss anyone off.
4. The Hollywood Tower is haunted. OK, this isn't really the first thing that comes to mind when you think of L.A., but I couldn't help but mention it. Many Disney themeparks feature the Twilight Zone Tower Of Terror ride.
5. Sorting Clothes for the Lazy. There are some great used clothing stores in L.A. We visited one on Hollywood Boulevard and others on Melrose (Melrose, FYI, excellent shopping.).
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There are a few things that come to mind when you think about Los Angeles. Yes, the Hollywood sign, but I already talked that one to death. There are more. In my short time there I experienced all of them. In fact, I experienced the following L.A. Trifecta:
It was the woman with him that was mentionable - the one and only Juliette Lewis (of Natural Born Killers, The Other Sister and From Dusk 'Til Dawn fame).
Up went signs for the 1946 film noir "Black Angel" with June Vincent and Peter Lorre. During the day, we thought that maybe the Pantages was showing an old movie, little did we know it was all Hollywood deceit.
I thought it was Josh because I know his movies. My sister thought it was Aaron because she knows his. (Let the record show, I still think I was right. Maybe.)
Here's the view out the window - yes, that's the Capitol Records building. At first I didn't think anything had happened. I walked to the window and saw people still walking, driving and watering their lawns. Didn't these people know the EARTH HAD SHAKEN?!
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I'm back.
I stayed with my sister and her boyfriend in L.A. - in an apartment I wanted to take back with me it was so nice - and she lives a stone-throw from the sign. Literally, if you could throw a stone a few miles, it would hit the sign (you'd also have one hell of a pitching arm.) Driving on a street near her on the first day I asked - where is the sign? She turned the car 180 degrees and pointed out the windshield. There. Wow.
There are no roads that lead directly to the sign. You can't get that close to it. This story doesn't end with me climbing up on an "O" and taking pictures. Sorry.
Even without the prodding, I have to admit it is a spooky place. The roads - which must have been designed by Dali - curve randomly and alternate between steep inclines and crazy steep declines. A lot of them end like this. You'll be driving and BOOM - no more road. (Also, walk up past the end of the road for a bit and you fall off a ledge. BOOM - no more life.)
We didn't find the road that leads past the sign and into the valley that night. Let the record show that my sister was willing to keep looking. And that I had the heebie-jeebies and wanted to go home.
The next night, with the help of google maps - we had directions over the hill, past the gorgeous Hollywood Resevoir (more like a lake in the middle of the hill) and down into the valley. Heather Road is the key. Take Ledgewood to Heather - then keep going left.
Pictures of this evening didn't come out so well. Maybe if I had a flash a few hundred times stronger.
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I won't be able to blog for a few days, I'm going to see some stars.
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I think a Congressional Committee should immediately be formed to look into why only young, pretty blond girls like Natalee Holloway, Elizabeth Smart and Jonbenet Ramsey are being kidnapped and/or killed.
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It's come to the point where I'm considering avoiding television altogether. It's not worth the aggravation.
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Not really!The human head is of the same approximate size and weight as a roaster chicken. I have never before had occasion to make the comparison, for never before today have I seen a head in a roasting pan. But here are forty of them, one per pan, resting face-up on what looks to be a small pet-food bowl. The heads are for plastic surgeons, two per head, to practice on. I'm observing a facial anatomy and face-lift refresher course, sponsored by a southern university medical center and led by a half-dozen of America's most sought-after face-lifters.(see how easy it is to blog when you simply rip use the excellent work of someone else?)The heads have been put in roasting pans - which are of the disposable aluminum variety - for the same reason chickens are put in roasting pans: to catch the drippings. Surgery, even surgery upon the dead, is a tidy, orderly affair. Forty folding utility tables have been draped in lavender plastic cloths, and a roasting pan is centered on each. Skin hooks and retractors are set out with the pleasing precision of restaurant cutlery. The whole thing has the look of a catered reception. I mention to the young woman whose job it was to set up the seminar this morning that the lavender gives the room a cheery sort of Easter-party feeling. Her name is Theresa. She replies that lavender was chosen because it's a soothing color.
It surprises me to hear that men and women who spend their days pruning eyelids and vacuuming fat would require anything in the way of soothing, but severed heads can be upsetting even to professionals. Especially fresh ones ("fresh" here meaning unembalmed). The forty heads are from people who have died in the past few days and, as such, still look very much the way they looked while those people were alive. (Embalming hardens tissues, making the structures less pliable and the surgery experience less reflective of an actual operation.)
For the moment, you can't see the faces. They've been draped with white cloths, pending the arrival of the surgeons. When you first enter the room, you see only the tops of the heads, which are shaved down to stubble. You could be looking at rows of old men reclining in barber chairs with hot towels on their faces. The situation only starts to become dire when you make your way down the rows. Now you see stumps, and the stumps are not covered. They are bloody and rough. I was picturing something cleanly sliced, like the edge of a deli ham. I look at the heads, and then I look at the lavender tablecloths. Horrify me, soothe me, horrify me.
They are also very short, these stumps. If it were my job to cut the heads off bodies, I would leave the neck and cap the gore somehow. These heads appear to have been lopped off just below the chin, as though the cadaver had been wearing a turtleneck and the decapitator hadn't wished to damage the fabric. I find myself wondering whose handiwork this is.
"Theresa?" She is distributing dissection guides to the tables, humming quietly as she works.
"Mm?"
"Who cuts off the heads?"
Theresa answers that the heads are sawed off in the room across the hall, by a woman named Yvonne. I wonder out loud whether this particular aspect of Yvonne's job bothers her. Likewise Theresa. It was Theresa who brought the heads in and set them up on their little stands. I ask her about this.
"What I do is, I think of them as wax."
Theresa is practicing a time-honored coping method: objectification. For those who must deal with human corpses regularly, it is easier (and, I suppose, more accurate) to think of them as objects, not people. For most physicians, objectification is mastered their first year of medical school, in the gross anatomy lab, or "gross lab," as it is casually and somewhat aptly known. To help depersonalize the human form that students will be expected to sink knives into and eviscerate, anatomy lab personnel often swathe the cadavers in gauze and encourage students to unwrap as they go, part by part.
The problem with cadavers is that they look so much like people. It's the reason most of us prefer a pork chop to a slice of whole suckling pig. It's the reason we say "pork" and "beef" instead of "pig" and "cow." Dissection and surgical instruction, like meat-eating, require a carefully maintained set of illusions and denial. Physicians and anatomy students must learn to think of cadavers as wholly unrelated to the people they once were. "Dissection," writes historian Ruth Richardson in Death, Dissection, and the Destitute, "requires in its practitioners the effective suspension or suppression of many normal physical and emotional responses to the wilful mutilation of the body of another human being."
Heads - or more to the point, faces - are especially unsettling. At the University of California, San Francisco, in whose medical school anatomy lab I would soon spend an afternoon, the head and hands are often left wrapped until their dissection comes up on the syllabus. "So it's not so intense," one student would later tell me. "Because that's what you see of a person."
The surgeons are beginning to gather in the hallway outside the lab, filling out paperwork and chatting volubly. I go out to watch them. Or to not watch the heads, I'm not sure which. No one pays much attention to me, except for a small, dark-haired woman, who stands off to the side, staring at me. She doesn't look as if she wants to be my friend. I decide to think of her as wax. I talk with the surgeons, most of whom seem to think I'm part of the setup staff. A man with a shrubbery of white chest hair in the V-neck of his surgical scrubs says to me: "Were y'in there injectin' 'em with water?" A Texas accent makes taffy of his syllables. "Plumpin' 'em up?" Many of today's heads have been around a few days and have, like any refrigerated meat, begun to dry out. Injections of saline, he explains, are used to freshen them.
Abruptly, the hard-eyed wax woman is at my side, demanding to know who I am. I explain that the surgeon in charge of the symposium invited me to observe. This is not an entirely truthful rendering of the events. An entirely rendering of the events would employ words such as "wheedle," "plead," and "attempted bribe."
"Does publications know you're here? If you're not cleared through the publications office, you'll have to leave." She strides into her office and dials the phone, staring at me while she talks, like security guards in bad action movies just before Steven Seagal clubs them on the head from behind.
One of the seminar organizers joins me. "Is Yvonne giving you a hard time?"
Yvonne! My nemisis is none other than the cadaver beheader. As it turns out, she is also the lab manager, the person responsible when things go wrong, such as writers fainting and/or getting sick to their stomach and then going home and writing books that refer to anatomy lab managers as beheaders. Yvonne is off the phone now. She has come over to outline her misgivings. The seminar organizer reassures her. My end of the conversation takes places entirely in my head and consists of a single repeated line. You cut off heads. You cut off heads. you cut off heads.
CG @ 4:54 PM | Permanent Link
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I've been tagged... TAGGED!It was also my violent heart that broke,D. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
falling down the front hall stairs.
It was also a message I never spoke,
calling, riser after riser, who cares
about you, who cares, splintering up
the hip that was merely made of crystal,
the post of it and also the cup.
I exploded in the hallway like a pistol.
So I fell apart. So I came all undone.
Yes. I was like a box of dog bones.
But now they've wrapped me in like a nun.
Burst like firecrackers! Held like stones!
What a feat sailing queerly like Icarus
until the tempest undid me and I broke.
The ambulance drivers made such a fuss.
But when I cried, "Wait for my courage!" they smoked
and then they placed me, tied me up on their plate,
and wheeled me out to their coffin, my nest.
Slowly the siren slowly the hearse, sedate
as a dowager. At the E. W. they cut off my dress.
I cried, "Oh Jesus, help me! Oh Jesus Christ!"
and the nurse replied, "Wrong name. My name
is Barbara," and hung me in an odd device,
a buck's extension and a Balkan overhead frame.
The orthopedic man declared,
"You'll be down for a year." His scoop. His news.
He opened the skin. He scraped. He pared
and drilled through bone for his four-inch screws.
That takes brute strength like pushing a cow
up hill. I tell you, it takes skill
and bedside charm and all that know how.
The body is a damn hard thing to kill.
But please don't touch or jiggle my bed.
I'm Ethan Frome's wife. I'll move when I'm able.
The T. V. hangs from the wall like a moose head.
I hide a pint of bourbon in my bedside table.
A bird full of bones, now I'm held by a sand bag.
The fracture was twice. The fracture was double.
The days are horizontal. The days are a drag.
All of the skeleton in me is in trouble.
Across the hall is the bedpan station.
The urine and stools pass hourly by my head
in silver bowls. They flush in unison
in the autoclave. My one dozen roses are dead.
The have ceased to menstruate. They hang
there like little dried up blood clots.
And the heart too, that cripple, how it sang
once. How it thought it could call the shots!
Understand what happened the day I fell.
My heart had stammered and hungered at
a marriage feast until the angel of hell
turned me into the punisher, the acrobat.
My bones are loose as clothespins,
as abandoned as dolls in a toy shop
and my heart, old hunger motor, with its sins
revved up like an engine that would not stop.
And now I spend all day taking care
of my body, that baby. Its cargo is scarred.
I anoint the bedpan. I brush my hair,
waiting in the pain machine for my bones to get hard,
for the soft, soft bones that were laid apart
and were screwed together. They will knit.
And the other corpse, the fractured heart,
I feed it piecemeal, little chalice. I'm good to it.
Yet lie a fire alarm it waits to be known.
It is wired. In it many colors are stored.
While my body's in prison, heart cells alone
have multiplied. My bones are merely bored
with all this waiting around. But the heart,
this child of myself that resides in the flesh,
this ultimate signature of the me, the start
of my blindness and sleep, builds a death crèche.
The figures are placed at the grave of my bones.
All figures knowing it is the other death
they came for. Each figure standing alone.
The heart burst with love and lost its breath.
This little town, this little country is real
and thus it is so of the post and the cup
and thus of the violent heart. The zeal
of my house doth eat me up.
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