*Testing*

Yes, I did this on a cameraphone.

"Metin Kunt. Say it out loud. In the voice of a lady robot."

Hooray! The good folks at b3ta do what I've always wanted to do: tool around on Amazon and compile a compendium of unfortunately funny names.

My New Favorite Place

People, the Mary Pickford Theater at the Library of Congress rules. They show all types of crazy shit at 7PM every weeknight: film, TV, whatever. But this has to be the most insane bit on the current schedule, screening the Friday after Thanksgiving:

The Loneliest Runner (NBC, 1976) Dir Michael Landon. With Brian Keith, Melissa Sue Anderson. (75 min, 16mm)Writer-director-producer Landon shows us his dirty laundry in this painfully autobiographical teledrama. Lance Kerwin (James at 15) plays the young eneuretic track star whose mother's corrective regimen involves hanging stained sheets out his bedroom window. Shown with an encore presentation of How to Drownproof Your Child.

Billy Ray? As in "Special Attache to Mullet Affairs"?

*Tsk*:

I had arranged to meet Thomas Wheston in the campus coffee shop, who a few weeks ago retired from being the special envoy to Cyrus and had become a Georgetown teacher.

Oi, Humphrey Hawksley: you should have taken a stoll a bit beyond the lawn, where us folks could have started nattering on to you about how such a typo may speak volumes about you and your identity, your relation to your medium, etc., blah-blah-hey.

"Eighty-seven percent are intoxicated when they watch it. You didn't see that?"

Hah! These snippets of transcript rule:

STEWART: He wants to get what any politician does: access to a new constituency. He wants to get...
O'REILLY: The stoned slackers.
STEWART: ... that's exactly right, because the stoned slackers, this election is going to rely on the undecided. Who is more undecided than...
O'REILLY: Than the stoned slacker, right.
STEWART: ... the people who are high. Right now, they're thinking to themselves, ice cream or pretzels, ice cream or pretzels.

Prescient!

Oh, behold, for I am about to lay forth a grand example of pants-on-fire (testify!):

3rd Week of September 2003: Hurricanes that start with "I"! Texas! John Ritter (recently departed)! Choice of drink: Big Red and Vodka (a.k.a. Cloraseptic)

3rd Week of September 2004: Hurricanes that start with "I"! Texas! My grandmother (recently departed)! Choice of drink: Chilean red wine (a.k.a. much better than the Riesling at the overpriced steakhouse in Clear Lake)

Now, you may ask, did John Ritter smite my grandmother in retaliation for taking part in a drinking game bourne out of his Entertainment Tonight tribute broadcast? No, most likely not. But I would gander that John Ritter did run into my grandmother in the hip-happening nightclub that I usually construct Heaven to be, where everybody is fabulous in mind, body, and spirit: my grandmother would have most likely been meeting my grandfather at the bar for that long-overdue bottle of Barbados rum for their 50th anniversary when she was informed by a young man with a penchant for tight denim and polyester that yes, her granddaughter was right that the last hymn sung at the service was the same tune as "Go West" by the Village People and/or Pet Shop Boys.

Oh, and that it was blisteringly, broilingly, ridiculously hot in the Bayou City, so she picked a good time to check out.

Respect, and much love.

Listen Up, Kids:

My $0.02 shows up on page 209 of this-here book.

Day-um!

Even his own church's pastor didn't endorse him, and yet...

Rockstar of the Week / My New Favorite British Pop MC

Back in the day (okay, twist my arm, and I'll say 6/25/02, when I was hanging out in Ealing, West London, observing the kids at a shopping center near Ealing Common while I ate lunch cobbled together from the Safeway and listening to Kiss FM on the headphones while taking a break from trying to sniff out Kirsty MacColl's house [yeah! the one with the jukebox with Right Said Fred on it, and the recording studio where everybody was drinking champagne and strawberries while recording Kite! (I later learned in the early morning of 10/13/03 at a pub lock-in that the address is 48 Something-Something, and that there is usually a silver Saab parked outside it, but I was a bit sloshed and later ended up belting out the theme to Golden Girls in the middle of Lancaster Gate, so I don't remember the name or type of road, but I do recall thinking "Wow, how very... American-sounding")]), I was impressed by Miss Dynamite's "It Takes More". Then that fall, while I was tooling around trying to find a job, I heard her self-titled track "Miss Dynamite" ("I'm just Miss Dyna-mite-tee-hee") throughout many-a-day that September while I farted around on the computer and was like, "Okay."

But then! I quit that job I started 10/22/02 on 8/20/04, and I had in my head that Friday Estelle's "1980" ("1980 / Year that God made me"), and I thought, "I like this song much better than 'Miss Dynamite'." And now Estelle has completed the full-reversal with the infectous "Free," which is kind of like "It Takes More," except it's infinitely less preachy and pedantic. Ergo, Estelle is my new favorite British pop MC and, by association, the Rockstar of the Week.

"Don't think about being less than yourself!" Yeah!

"How Do You Kill a Giant Abraham Lincoln?"

The scene at Ford's Theatre is fast becoming the Christopher Guest movie that's yet to have been made. The Park Service tour guide is this unconfortably polyester-clad man whose dreams of board-treading seem to have been routinely discouraged ("John Wilkes Booth was like Brad Pitt, people! Riding on a horse in the night into Virginia!" [jumps on stage and points furiously at the stage door]), and there is this woman in the museum in the basement dressed up as Mary Todd Lincoln. Except she works neither for the Park Service nor any shape or form of the Department of the Interior. She just hangs out down there. Dressed as Mary Todd Lincoln.