i m N s h o

Ok, we've been pretty freaking busy moving this month so there's really been no time to post, but I saw this in my email this morning from The Word Spy and really HAD to say something… furkid n. A pet treated as though it were one's child. Also: fur-kid, fur kid. Example Citation: My name is Brenda Mejia and I'm owned by two Australian cattle dogs. I don't have kids, so I call my dogs my 'furkids.' They keep me as busy as a soccer mom. —Brenda Mejia, "Pet stories," The Desert Sun (Palm Springs, CA), April 30, 2004 All I have to say is that if ANYONE ever catches me referring to our cats as "furkids" you have my express permission to smack me in the face and tell me to snap out of it. "Furkids". Give me a break.

Ok, so I got on the Entertainment Weekly email list for their weekly box-office survey. They send out an email on Sunday or Monday, asking for your opinion on any of the week's recent releases. I, of course, got on this list just in time for me to stop going to movies nearly as often as I usually do (we've been KINDA BUSY, you know!?). SO I haven't had many chances to respond to their surveys. Well, I got one this week asking if I'd seen Troy or any of the other releases and I realized I hadn't gotten their email in a couple of weeks. Which meant that I'd missed my chance to weigh in on the utter wreck that was Van Helsing (a friend of mine described it as "craptastic". I can't think of a better word for it.) The biggest problem with this disaster is the simple fact that it tries too hard to be a videogame. No big surprise, Sommers & Co. worked hand-in-hand with the development team at Vivendi to make sure the game accurately reflected...

I've been bored with the templates Blogger offered in their last round of updates almost from day one, but I've just been too lazy (or too challenged by the thought of actually getting in and coding HTML) to do anything about it. So I'm really enjoying digging through all the new templates they're offering in this latest update to the service. There's also some cool stuff like a new "comments" option (I'm boing to be brave and enable those now… Quentin's going to have a field day with that one!) and profiles and such. I've got way too much fun stuff to play around with now. Now, if I can just get back to posting! (We're in the middle of buying a house and moving. I'm going to milk that excuse for all it's worth. I'll be posting again next month. No, really. I've got way too much to mouth off about to not be posting!)

The thing about movie channels like HBO and Showtime is that, when they buy the rights to show a movie, they buy the rights to show it A LOT. So, unless it's "prime time", you're apt to run into the same selection of movies pretty regularly. Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Mr. Deeds (yes, they even show the bad ones a lot!). And this isn't necessarily a bad thing. If I'm just looking for something to have on in the background while I'm doing something else, a movie I've seen dozens of times is an easy choice, since I don't have to pay attention to follow it (and the movie channels are well aware of this behavior among their subscribers). So this morning I was killing a little time and looking for something on TV to do the killing and I switched on Attack of the Clones . And what strikes me watching one of the early scenes isn't how bad the movie is (we all know that, while it's marginally better than Phantom Menace, it still...

Ok, I know I've bitched about this before and I'm aware that most of the country doesn't seem to either care or notice, but isn't ANYBODY else tired of our "no fault" President? From embarrasing international misstep to gigantic cluster-fuck, whenever anything blows up in the Bush Administration's collective face, there's always someone stepping forward to take the blame and say they left the President out of the loop, forgot to mention it to him, didn't make it clear to him… whatever they need to say to make sure we all understand it wasn't George W. Bush's fault that we all look like gigantic a-holes to the rest of the world. This time it's Rumsfeld's turn , since he apparently didn't think it important enough to mention to the President that they were investigating reports of American soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners. Which really begs the question of what the hell ARE they telling GW about these days? Pardon me for as...

Ok, I KNOW Brad Pitt, Orlando Bloom and Eric Bana (how the hell did he get on this list, anyway?) are the real draw in Troy, but how much of a freaking unknown/nonentity of an actress must you be to play Helen of Troy (you know, "the face that launched a thousand ships") and not even get a MENTION on any of the billboards? Of course, I just looked at her "resume" on the Troy site and see that she's a former photo model from Paris who had her first role sometime last year. She's gotten a Ceasar nomination for one of the films she's done and she's got a few more coming this year. So maybe it's just that the marketing guys figure no one in the US would know or care who she is till they've seen the film. But still… not even a mention on the billboards. That's gotta hurt!