I added a page explaining myself to any of the confused Portadown News readers who showed up expecting political satire or whatever. Evidentally you have been coming, as I checked my stats and I was getting hits from bbc.co.uk, qub.ac.uk, gsi.gov.uk, nics.gov.uk, and others, plus folks from Spain, Sweden, Australia, Ireland.... Cool. Welcome.

This is something of a shock to me, as I always figured I was just yelling out into the void. My first stats confirmed that -- I could pretty much guess every person who came to read the site. But, I don't know anyone at the BBC, or at MIT, or at Stanford, or anyone in Maine, or anyone who works at StateStreet.com. Hi. How ya doing? And what the hell are you doing here? Not that I mind, of course -- that's the point of the "world wide" part of the web -- but it's still a bit of a shock.

Introduce yourselves, ok?

Hey, I got an e-mail that Newton linked to me from the Portadown News site. Very cool. If you're just joining us, no, this isn't a political satire site. Sorry. But I have been known to be funny, honest! I'm preparing a "Welcome, PDN refugees" page, but until then, you can check out these greatest hits:

Feminine grooming rituals, or "Ow! What the hell are you doing to my public hair?" Scroll a little further down to see my frustration with AT&T Broadband reach fruition.

The perils of the word "should" (about halfway down the page)

Marmite, or still more evidence that Brits are insane

Patron saints (about halfway down the page)

We get robbed. A lot.

Anyway, hello to any PDN folks who are reading.

I wasn't going to write anything tonight, but I just got home from seeing a play (Death on a Pink Carpet at Live Bait -- it's great, go see it. Review tomorrow.) and I found the following on my answering machine.

Beep
Machine: Message one
Angie: (yelling) You are so obviously screening your calls right now, because you are so obviously watching men's figure skating. I just wanted to call you because I just saw Brian Boitano, and I wanted to sing you "What would Brian Boitana Do?" from South park, but you're screening your calls, and singing it on you answering machine isn't as much fun. But you a so obviously screening your calls! [Click]
Machine: Message two
Angie: (sounding chastened) Hi, it's me again. I just remembered you're out watching that show, so you're not screening your calls, so, um, yeah. Bye.

If it makes you feel any better, Ang, I taped the entire night's Olympic coverage so I could watch the Men's Figure Skating-- Long Program at my leisure. How sad is that?

So I'm supposed to see my therapist tonight -- what, you didn't know I was in therapy? For God's sake, I'm single, American, 31, smart, from the East Coast, a quasi-yuppie, live in a major metropolitan area, own cats... of course I'm in therapy. It's the law, isn't it?

Anyway, I'm supposed to go see my therapist tonight, but I'm not entirely sure she'll be there because she's pregnant. Heavily pregant. Due-last-week pregnant. If-she-doesn't-pop-today-they're-gonna-induce pregnant. That kind of pregnant. Which is somewhat daunting. I have trouble with the whole therapy thing because, this blog nonwithstanding, i don't like talking about myself to begin with. What the hell sort of gall do you have to have to continue rattling on about yourself when someone's liable to to start contracting right in front of you? Yeah, fine, it's supposed to be "my time," but who the hell cares -- she's about to give birth! To her first child! This is a bg deal -- much bigger than anything I have to say, I'd figure.

And how exactly do you deal with it?

Shrink: So how does that make you feel?
Me: Well, blah blah blah, sniffle, blah blah... hey. Why are you looking at me funny?
Shrink:: Oh, nothing, I just felt an unusual pain. Go on....
Me: Whatever. Blah blah me me me blah me blah...
Shrink: Ow. I hate to interrupt here, but I think my water may have broken.
Me: What are you talking about? You'll probably be in labor for hours, and we've got 20 minutes left in my session. So I was saying, me me blah blah blah.
Shrink: (Breathing heavily) No, no , I think I should really get going. The contractions are coming pretty quickly now...
Me: What. Ever. Cross your legs. Clench or something. This is all about me, and I've got issues!

Update: Saw shrink, no babies birthed. Whew.

Jane made the mistake of classifying all sci-fi/fantasy as "brain candy." Nope. Wrong. Thirty lashes with a wet noodle. She later conceded that Philip Pullmans His Dark Materials Trilogy and Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow and Children of God are anything but brain candy. Sci-fi and fantasy -- or "speculative fiction," to give it the hoity-toity title -- let authors tackle issues that straight-out fiction writers can.t Don't believe me? Check out the books mentioned above, as well as Ursula LeGuin, Octavia Butler, Orson Scott Card, Madeleine L'Engle, and lots more.

Of course, there is a fair amount of brain candy and crap sci-fi out there: Check out Wendy's post on coming up with great lines that will catch an editor's eye. Apparently you can't go wrong with heaving bosums.

But anyway, before the lecture, Jane asked for suggestions for good books, brain candy and otherwise. Here's a list of recommended reading, from all sorts of different genres:

West With the Night, Beryl Markham
My parents went on a safari in Africa a while ago, and they got a reading list that included Hemingway's Green Hills of Africa. Well, ok, I said, but you really have to read this: The true(ish) stories of a woman growing up on a coffee plantation in British East Africa among the Masai. Where Hemingway is pretty much "Saw an animal. Shot it.", Markham is a part of Africa. But she didn't stop there: The raised and trained racehorses, learned to fly and became one of the first mail pilots on the continent, took folks like Blor Blixen on scouting missions for safaris, and became the first person to fly went across the Atlantic from Europe to North America. It's an amazing book. Not necessarily all true, apparently, and she became a scary old drunk woman, but who cares: read this book.

If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, Italo Calvino
Linear story? We don't need no stinkin' linear story... except there is one, sort of. You start reading a book, Italo Calvino's "If on a Winter's Night a Traveler." You get to the end of the first chapter, and realize there's a flaw in the book -- pages missing, a chapter repeated, aanother book entirely inserted in the middle. So you go back tot he bookstore, and they tell you "The book you were reading wasn't what you thought -- it was this." So you take that home, start reading it ... and it's an entirely different story. But it all makes sense, of a sort, in the end. This is the first book I ever read that just blew my mind: Who knew you could do this with words?

To Say Nothing of the Dog, Connie Willis
Time travel and the side effects thereof, the horror that was the Victorian aesthetic, what happened to the cats.... Joy. Funny as hell, and thought-provoking to boot.

e, Matt Beaumont
Yeah, this is brain candy -- what's wrong with that? I actually don't recommend you take this on vacation, as it reads so fast. Follow a London ad agency as it tries to land the Coke campaign, all through e-mail. With the added extra-special bonus of being able to identify who you are among the co-workers. (In temperment, I think I'm Melinda. In my current situation, I fear I'm Daniel.)

Iron and Silk, Mark Salzman
Not so long ago, China was an unknown country -- foreigners weren't particularly let in to wander around. Salzman came to China to teach English and study martial arts. A great account of his experiences.

Plus, I unreservedly recommend anything by Robertson Davies. Start with The Deptford Trilogy and go from there.

That's a start. Trust me, there's much, much more, and I can go on about this for hours.

Sigh. Books. I need to get a job where I read books all day. I am planning on putting up a book site any day now, but we'll see.

Continuing with my Tomato Nation love-fest, this made me laugh so hard, all the while desperatly trying to supress all laughter and not look or sound like I was laughing, that I was afraid I would burst a blood vessel in my eye and/or start seizing at my desk. I have got to stop reading this stuff in the office.

I sympathize with Sars (May I call you Sars? Or should it be Ms. Bunting?) and the whole cat-girth thing. While I've never had a Tubcat, Mongo was pretty damn hefty for a while (hence the name.) See, I got him from a shelter, and god only knows how long he'd been on the street, poor thing, so I think he basically was conditioned to eat whatever he found, whenever he found it, because who knows when he'd run across food again, right? This worked on the street, and even, to an extent, in the shelter, as he was competing for food with all the other kitties. But when we brought him home, we started free-feeding him and Bug. So there was this vat, basically, of dry food lying around, and he'd walk by it and think "Oh, look, food! Better eat it. Hey, more food! Better eat it. There's food there again! Better eat it...." and so on. So he hit almost 18 pounds, such that he was having trouble jumping up on the bed, before I switched to feeding them once a day and feeding them diet food.

For those interested in cat lore, I've discovered something very, very important: If you feed your cats only once a day, for the love of god, make sure you do it before you go to bed, not right after you get up in the morning. We made that mistake at first. Fortunately, I was living with a morning person at the time, so he was the one who was getting head-butted at 4:30 a.m. Mongo tried that with me a few times, but realized there was no way in hell he was waking me up. Tripp, on the other hand, was putty in his claws. Heh. Anyway, when Tripp moved out, I made sure to switch the feeding schedule.

Watched Buffy tonight, and Smallville. I got the Buffy Season 1 DVDs earlier this year, and it's amazing the contrast between the seasons. Buffy used to be a lot more... fun. Perky. Joyous. I still love the show, but I don't know if I'd tell someone to start watching it now. As my friend Joe said a little while ago, it's getting harder and harder to watch. It's all so dark, and everyone's so depressed and tormented. I mean, it has to be dark: Her mom died, she killed her one true love, she died and was ripped out of heaven, she's never going to be a normal girl... but damn, I feel almost guilty watching the show sometimes, because we, the fans, demanded she come back. We didn't want to let her go. We're the ones who dragged her out of heaven and forced her to perform for us. Well, actually, Joss Wheadon is, but we're not stopping him. We're enablers. The horror!

Um, yeah, I know. It's just a TV show. I still feel guilty.

Narcisisim is the bit where you're obsessed with yourself and if anything goes wrong, it's all someone else's fault, right? Apparently I'm a narcisist unclear onthe concept -- it's all about me, but it's all my fault, even the pain and suffering of fictional characters.

Note to self: Must get life.

But not yet, because men's figure skating is on! Huzzah! They're all so pretty, in their foofy shirts and spangly pants and all. And they kick serious ass, with the jumping and the spinning and such. I must admit, I don't know how they spin around so fast without throwing up. This is one of the many, many reasons I will never be a world-famous figure skater. The complete lack of coordination and the fact that I managed to break my arm walking on ice may play into it, too.

I'm finding more stuff to hate about U.S. Olympics coverage. Who woulda thunk it? They had the "poignant" piece on Todd Eldridge: about how he grew up on Cape Cod, son of a long line of fisherfolk, only to leave the life of his forefathers to pursue his skating dreams; how he's struggled through years of competition and only one award -- an olympic medal -- has eluded him; how he's come out of retirement, at the grand old age of 30 (as in, a year younger than me), to take one last shot at his goal.... All of which is true, but for god's sake, people, do you have to pile on the cheese? Look! It's poignant! Are you getting the poignancy? Well are you?!? Squeal like a pig!

The coverage of his actual program went something like this:

Announcer: Todd is facing a terrible choice -- will he do a quad, or will he play it safe to ensure a perfect program?
Me: Well, that's exciting. Poor guy. Lots of pressure, huh.
Announcer: He's only landed a quad twice in competition. The frst time he did that, he bought himself a new Ferrari.
Me: I officially no longer feel sorry for him.

He flubbed the quad, and bobbled a few other things. OK, I felt sorry for him again.

What I couldn't stand was the way NBC replayed his parents' reaction to the slip, and Kristi Yamaguchi crying for Todd. His parents aren't public figures -- they're just completely wrapped up in watching their son. Don't exploit them for the poignancy factor. Kristi is a public figure, but what did that add to the coverage? He messed up. He's not getting a medal. We know it. He knows it. Quit milking the moment. Let it stand on it's own. We. Get. It.

On a completely separate note, Wendy just brought up the most amusingly addressed peice of junk mail ever: My name is spelled as Sarahesild. One word. I guess they think it's like Brunhild, as in "Oh, Bwoonhilde, you're so wuuuuuvwie!"" "Yeahs Oi knooow it, Oi cayen't heeehlp it..."

Sarahesild. I knew I could be a valkyrie. Oy-a-hoy-HO!

Ah, Olympics. I caught the end of the luge, the medal ceremony for men's halfpipe, and and the figure skater's pairs program. The luge was great, as someone totally unexpected -- an Italian, at that -- won the gold, beating a German and an Austrian. Despite, or maybe because of, the upset, the silver and bronze medalists boosted the gold medalist up on their shoulders after the medal presentation. That's so cool. That's the sort of Olympic picture I love -- athletes honestly revelling in the skill and thrill of the sport. Yay.

The men's halfpipe ceremony was cool -- I can understand the chants of "USA! USA!" when US snowboarders swept the event. I have to admit I choked up at the national anthem, and yes, I sang along (badly, as the anthem is difficult enough to sing without having to deal with trying not to cry). Yes, I am pathetic.

As for the figure skating... yeah, it's results like this that make me join the raft of people who object to sports that require subjective judging. I'm not a skater, so I can't tell what the judges saw that I didn't, but it sure as hell looked to me like the Canadian couple, which ended up with the silver, skated better than the gold-winning Russians.

Which leads me to my media rant. The part that made me cheer the loudest was when Scott Hamilton (I think) said, right before someone started to skate, "We're not going to say much during the program." Thank you! Yes! That's exactly what I wanted to hear. Mention something when it's relevant, but otherwise, shut up. Just let us watch the program.

So that part went pretty well. But then, then! after the scores were announced and it was clear the Candians had won silver, stop with the extreme closeups on the Canadian chick's face. We get that it's poignant. We get that they're incredibely disappointed and sad. We get that life sucks. We do not need to count the pores on her face. We don't need to be able to see exactly what the mucas trail looks like. Give her some privacy, for god's sake. She's just suffered a crushing loss --- she doesn't need your cameras up her nose.

Speaking of the medal ceremonies, my dad said that they had been doing a wacky Cirque de Soleil acrobatic bit before the medal presentation. Apparently Bob Costas was apologizing for the weirdness of it all. I didn't see that today -- is NBC just not covering it, or did the Salt Lake folks finally get it through their heads that the medal ceremony is quite dramatic and entertaining enough? Jeez.

As for my own (paltry) athletic endevours, I went swimming again after class at Old Town. So far, so good. We'll see how I feel tomorrow.

Wendy: You are coming perilously close to joining Tripp in the column of shame....

Note to the Laundry Hamper Manufacturers of the World: I'm sure I'm not the only person who has three weeks of underwear on hand for the sole purpose of being able to delay doing laundry as long as possible. Could you kindly take this into account and manufacture hampers that will hold an according amount of laundry? Thanks.

Went out to see Copenhagen with Angie, Brian and Christine. It was a really good show, but not of the "I laughed, I cried, it was better than Cats" variety. It's about the meeting, during World War II, between theoretical physicists Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr. Sounds like a laugh a mintue, right? It's actually incredibly engaging, as they debate the morality of The Bomb, the ramifications of a partnership, German treatment of Jewish scientists (one of the ironies of the war is that Hitler wanted the bomb, but his policies drove out the mostly Jewish German scientific community that could have produced it) and occupied territories, and much more. The staging is stark and stripped down, there's only three characters and only a few sound and light effects, so you're really forced to grapple with these ideas. Go see it, if you have the chance.

Unfortunatly, we were apparently sitting inthe TB ward, as I have never heard that many coughing fits in my life. Plus, I think the women bhind us were expecting something closer to Cats, as they were singularly unimpressed. Sigh.

I finally went shopping to replace my tools and such. There's a new Home Depot opened up near us -- ahhh, Home Depot -- but I found a surprising number of things at Target for less money. Go Target. I also got sucked into buying a rice cooker at CostCo. that may be returned, upon reflection. I have no idea when I will next be called upson to make 10 cups of rice.

On the upside, I also got a vegetable steamer, which is one of the coolest kitchen implements ever. It's like a collapable flying saucer thing. Dude.