August 26, 2002

Jim finished his site this weekend and it looks awesome. Its at www.perpetualdesign.net. You can write Jim and tell him he is the best artist in the world...or you can just say hi.

Students were moving in and getting ready for college this past weekend. I hate this time of year. There were five moving vans at my apartment building last Saturday. The population must double in this city when school is in session, and it tends to make me feel claustrophobic. I walked to Harvard Square yesterday to get a magazine but became so annoyed by crowds of people meandering down the sidewalk, either lost or sightseeing, that I had to flee back to my place empty handed. Even rollerskating was no fun on Sunday, as there was so much traffic Jen and I had to move out of the way of a car every five minutes.

Sorority Life. What can I say? Is there anything more entertaining than drunken college girls? Of course not. Which is why I am glued to my television every Monday at 10...or is it 10:30? Regardless, tonight was another winner. One of the sisters said of the pledges (in a very grave voice) "I have a problem giving them the name Sigma Alpha Epsilon Pi!". Honey, I would have a problem giving anybody that name...I can hardly pronounce it. What happened to simple frat names like Delta Pi? Is this sorority so far down on the chain that they had to take this name?

Tonight a friend, who requested anonymity, called and said she saw on my site that I am obsessed with David Sedaris and his family. She told me that David Sedaris's sister has a job cleaning her friends house. Now all I have to do is wrangle my way into the house while she is there and observe. So exciting!

August 19, 2002

"On Wall Street After Dark, A New Bohemia Bekons" from Sunday's New York Times. I don't know what to say. Ground Zero is the new East Village according to MTV VJ Gideon Yago.

"For Mr. Yago and his friends, the area around ground zero seems to fit the gritty feel of much of the fashion and music that is brewing downtown right now from garage bands like the Liars, the Rapture and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs." Uck. I can't say how much this makes me want to puke...

Also in the article they quote two women "who seemed accustomed to having velvet ropes part for them", one saying to the other,"that's so punk rock", about the fact that they were not immediately let in. Why is that now a catchphrase? Why does it piss me off so much?! I read articles with people like Jewel and Britney Spears refering to something as "so punk rock" and I want to scream.

Ok back to the article.. are VJ's really arbiters of "cool" by anyone's standards? I think by definition, VJ's are not cool, therefore whatever they have to say about "coolness" should be summarily dismissed by the author. Many, many years ago I was at this club the Marquee that used to be on the West side, seeing the band Helmet I think, when we noticed a video crew following someone around. Before I could make out who it was, my friend Lisa, who was WASTED, started screaming "Duff! Duff! I'm gonna kick your ass Duff! Hey Duuufff! Duuufff! I'm gonna kick your ass!"which is funny enough by itself. But she had gotten her MTV VJ's confused and was actually threatening the VJ Alison Stewart.

This is Duff:	This is Alison Stewart:

Well, I can't tell the difference.

I watched Sex and the City last night. Samantha's horrifc chemical peel got me thinking about the whole plastic surgery thing. At the moment, I'm neither pro nor con just very, very curious. While theoretically I want to condemn the practice as a result of a youth obsessed, oversexualized culture, I fear that when my neck is hanging like a kangaroo pouch I'm gonna be looking for a referral.

The American Society for AestheticPlastic Surgery has a photo gallery of some before and after surgery shots.

The site www.siliconeholocaust.org has some" after" shots that will make your hair stand on end. That has got to be everyone's overwhelming fear as far as actually going through with the surgery...that you would volunteer for a vanity operation and end up scarring yourself for life. Or end up like Micheal Jackson.

A friend was saying recently that what we should be thinking about is prevention. No sun, no smoking, and taking daily antioxidants. That's the only plan I have at the moment and although it seems kind of lame, it makes a huge difference. Look at sets up twins where one spent her youth as a tan party girl and the other, I don't know, was boring and stayed in.

August 16, 2002

My brother said he had put a personal ad up on nerve.com, at first as a joke, but then he started getting cute girl respondants and has been going out on dates. (You obviously did not hear this from me) Anyhow, I found this SCANDALOUS,yo. But then I started polling people I knew about on-line dating and a large segment of the population (ie. my friends and acquaintances) seem to have at least tried it out. As I have not dated in like 6 years, I was completely out of the loop. I'm freaking out that there is a whole new "advance" in dating that I will not be taking part of. Alright, so Kevin refused to tell me the name he uses, his "handle" , as you may, so in a mad rush of insomnia I stayed on nerve.com for like 4 hours just searching the 10 mile radius of the zip code 11211. I never found him. I did however see people that I knew or recognized, one I had "dated" before, and then my friend chris. This is him:

You can find him under "punkfool"

I was at my parents house the other night and we were looking at an old photo album which contained the Boston Globe's Arts and Entertainment Section from 1989. You see, my brother had joined some kids at our high school in putting out a zine- like thing called Samizdat (taken from the word for underground russian literature I'm told) and they made the cover of the Globe arts section. Brookline High School wanted to shut them down for being "sexist, racist" and a bunch of other "ist"s and the kids were telling Brookline High to go screw itself. Oh, I love teenagers. So I was looking at the article VERY closely because there is a picture of Kevin and like 5 others completely Robert Smith'd out and I was trying to memorize their outfits and hair so I could replicate them later at home. I also, for no particular reason, noticed that the name of the editor was "John Hodgman"...blah blah blah, long story longer...today while I was on the net wasting time I realized that John Hodgman writes for McSweeney's so I was reading some stuff he had up there including the Brookline-Brooklyn connection (funny). Later I decided to take a break and listen to an episolde of This American Life on Superpowers. While I was sitting there relaxing, I realized that it was again John Hodgman speaking to me through my computer speakers, reading a piece on "flight vs. being invisible" ...what does this all mean? What huge roll will John Hodgman play in my life? who is he?!

Also in the photo album I found these two pictures. When I was kid my mom consistantly dressed me like I was meeting the nuns for high tea instead of going out to play in mud - you will see that illustratedin these photos. One is me and Kev with Santy Claus (one of my personal favorites) and the other is us in a barn in Ireland with some baby pigs.

Shrinkey Dink Do! Or How Nicol Has Spent the Past Two Friday Nights I am so into this. I just need to find some people that are into having a shrinkey dink evening with me. This had to be one of my most beloved childhood past times and I am ready to get back on the horse. Any takers?

Adbusters in launching an online version of Adbusters TV with a contest. Where you can win money. See for yourself:

"ABTV is up, running, and ready for
your ideas and contributions. The next time you and your friends organize a
street party, liberate a billboard, shoot an indy documentary, or throw a
pie into the ugly face of authority, we want people worldwide to catch it
the next day at adbusters.
To get things cooking, we're also launching our first ABTV Contest. We're
looking for video, audio, and animation in three categories: Direct Action
(jams, spoofs, pranks, protests); Epiphanies (personal works); and
Mini-Documentaries.
We have $3,000 to divvy up to the winning entries, and the deadline couldn't
be easier: December 31, 2002." Guidelines?

August 11, 2002

I never had an opinion one way or the other on Elijah Wood. I actually have never given any consideration whatsoever to Mr. Wood and therefore have not pondered the question: Is Elijah Wood gay? The answer is a resounding YES: Elijah Wood is Very, Very Gay The photos alone convinced me.

I was at the doctor's office the other day and made off with one of their magazines - the May issue of Esquire. I took it really for no reason, since it was only after getting it home that I saw David Sedaris had written a piece in it. I was thrilled. The story was called "Repeat After Me" and it was about his sister Lisa, her big talking parrot Henry, and the fact that they are optioning his book (Me Talk Pretty One Day I'm assuming) and making it into a movie. What? How do I not know about this!?? I need more information.

Want to waste some time? Go to the unofficial David Sedaris page for articles, links and interviews

The Briefs are a punk rock band from Seattle Washington or at least that is what they claim. Lisa W. told me to look into them and since I do what she says, I went to their site and checked it out.

She also told me to rent Donnie Darko. Ok, I completely avoided that movie when it came out…as Jim said "I can't take one more deranged bunny reference." True that. Anyhoo, not being a David Lynch fan, not digging the bunny, scared by all previews I saw, I did not rent it until now and it was so good!!!! Creepy, Scary, Suspenseful …The official site is bizarre, I can't tell what it is supposed to do if anything. Interesting in some ways. I think it's a "concept" site- I didn't have time to keep going with it.

So last night in between watching the Ginger Lynn True Hollywood Story and Sex and the City, Liz and I saw Captain Kirk hosting a VH1 show on one hit wonders. And as part of his introduction for some song he makes this reference to a movie he did in Esperanto. I am thrilled to hear anyone refer to Esperanto in any context. For those not in the know, Esperanto is the universal language- the language of planet earth. It was created by some UN linguists like a million years ago and at the moment there are probably like 20 people who go around using it. Ok, maybe more, but I have never met any. More people probably speak Klingon than speak Esperanto…I feel like there was some big hubbub about Esperanto when I was a kid like they were trying to push it again or something. That and the metric system…But back to Kirk and my surprise at finding that this film ACTUALLY EXISTS. Its called Incubus and it was made in 1965 and its all in Esperanto with English subtitles and that's all I know. What kind of hole have I been living in that I am not aware of what is obviously a cult classic?

Punk Fashion tips from The Casualties...Rolling Stone Magazine. I just had to leave this up.

August 8, 2002

The premiere episode of The Anna Nicole Show last Sunday registered a 4.1 national Nielsen rating (4.125 million homes). That not only makes it E's highest rated premiere, it also makes it the most-watched "reality" show debut in cable history. What?!

The show, staring Anna Nicole, her dog Sugar Pie, her purple haired potential-stalker-material assistant Kim (she has a huge, very poorly executed tatoo of her boss on her arm...that's all you need to know), her lawyer who, incredibly, is named Howard Stern, and her son (missed his name, but feel very, very, bad for the boy), is very very hard to watch yet at the same time mesmerizing.

To sum up: Anna looks for a house, humps a bunch of inatimate objects (a bed, a floor, whatever), slurs a lot of words, eats, goes to a Guess? party and gets stuck under a desk trying to retrieve her dog. That sounds a lot funnier than the show actually was. The E! Channel, usually such a bastion of quality programming, decided it would be a great show idea to follow around a woman who has acheived has-been status in her early thirties,who's life is on a pretty accelerated downward spira and who seems to have a very serious chemical dependency problem. I am dying to know on what...really. Valium? Alcohol, Percocet? All of the above? I must have whatever she's on.

Courtney Love on a really bad morning without a stylist and glamour lighting.

August 4, 2002 For Gods sake...FLOSS! If you want to keep any of your teeth, floss them. I cannot stress this enough. The BEST floss in the world is Johnson & Johnson's REACH Gentle Gum Care....its not your grandparent's floss. They describe it as their "patented min-flavored web-like floss", I just call it "heaven".

My brother and sister-in-law, Tom and Lisa live in Sperryville, Virginia. Thats up in the Shennadoah Mountains. They live right by the state park and it is absolutely beautiful up there. So in Sperryville there is a post office, a general store, a few antique stores and that's about it. You can't just run out and get a pack of smokes whenever you want them. There's one other thing in Sperryville, and that is Cooter's Place. Cooter, of the Dukes of Hazzard fame, has a "place" there that is a kind of museum/general store/pit stop on the main thoroughfare in town. The General Lee (or a close facsimile) sits out front and Cooter himself hangs out all day every day mixing it up with the tourists. You can purchase some of his cool merch at http://www.cootersplace.com like a shirt that says "Crazy Cooter Comin' At Ya". Ok, speaking of the Dukes I always thought that the guy's name was Roscoe Pico Train. It was only a few years ago when I was at Cooter's Place that my husband told me it was Roscoe P. Coltrane...

Tom used to work on Ralph Nader's campaign. Now he's working on Cooter's. Cooter is running for congress under his real name Ben Jones (Ben Jones? What kind of name is that?)

Take it sleazy!

August 1 , 2002

I just finished this great article in this month's New Yorker (Aug. 5th, 2002) called "The Naked Face" by Malcolm Gladwell.
Its about the ability to identify and decode facial movements. Some people have the ability to do this innately with amazing accuracy but most of us can't. These two scientists, Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen, put together a system to teach this skill to others called the Facial Action Coding System ( FACS). There's lots of cool stuff in this article, its definitely worth reading.The entire time I was reading it, I found myself trying to contort my face into the positions they described. But most of the time I have no idea what they are talking about. So I found a visual chart of the different facial positions at this site. You can actually buy the whole FACS training system...but at $260 it seems a bit pricey if you are only going to use it to figure out when your friends are lying to you.They say on their site that people without any scientific training can learn FACS in about 100 hours, taking five weeks if 3-4 hours is spent per day.

So the article got me thinking about Asperger's Syndrome. Asperger's is a neurobiological disorder in the autism family. Basically it is a condition that affects people with normal to high intelligence who exhibit some autism like behaviors and have very obvious deficiencies in social and communications skills.They may also have difficulties with transitions or changes, have obsessive routines or be preoccupied with one particular subject. These people are super bright but because their interpretation of language is so literal and they don't pick up on body language they come off as very strange.

Ok that’s the part that relates to this article. People with Asperger's often freak other people out because they don't respond "correctly" to a given situation. Since they don't react to body language and facial expressions automatically, if someone were obviously upset and says "nothing's wrong" they believe that indeed nothing is wrong and act accordingly. One way of teaching people who suffer from asperger's how to get along more easily with others is to study charts of facial expressions and learn to attach meaning to them. Just like the ones they use in the FACS system.

You ask why I even know about AS? Well this woman I know, her son was diagnosed with Asperger's. At the time I didn't know what the condition was about so I looked it up and it completely freaked me out because the description could have been about this woman herself (the mother) When I wasn't feeling completely annoyed with her I would sit around and think "what in god's name could be this chick's motivation for acting like such an asshole all the time?" She consistantly pisses people off, ignoring all signs that they are becoming SERIOUSLY irritated with her and continues whatever she is doing/saying until the other person either storms off or loses their shit on her. She then acts SHOCKED by their actions.She's beyond awkward to be around and obviously not the most popular woman in the world.

A quote from a recent wired article:
"Over and over again, researchers have concluded that the DNA scripts for autism are probably passed down not only by relatives who are classically autistic, but by those who display only a few typically autistic behaviors. (Geneticists call those who don't fit into the diagnostic pigeonholes "broad autistic phenotypes.")"

So it makes sense that she is indeed a "broad autistic phenotype". Either that or she's just an asshole.
View the article: The Geek Syndrome: Autism - and its milder cousin Asperger's syndrome - is surging among the children of Silicon Valley. Are math-and-tech genes to blame?

The guy who wrote the New Yorker piece, Malcolm Gladwell, also appeared on Frontline last year. "The Merchants of Cool" was the episode and it rocked...Read his article on cool-hunting. He also has a book out "The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference on the creation of trends. I don't really know, but this person I know who will remain nameless was reading it and was talking about "mavens"...again, I don't know what this means...but she said the book was good. It's on the current list of things I must read.
Check out www.groupiecentral.com!

July 25, 2002

Tonight I was at the bookstore and I picked up "Found Magazine". The entire thing is made up of found items; notes, letters, pictures, flyers, etc. Some are strange, some sad and a lot of them are funny. Here's a sample from one of the found notes:

"look, u need to drop it, vanessa is making you do this, if she want's to box, wont she bring it on, in front of the school, that spooked ass bitch. look alex u were nice and now this one girl made u change, I suggest u leave her, cause she is going to make something happen to one of yo family, cause my cousin does witch craft and she said that vanessa just wants u to be hurt. if u don't change I'm never speaking to u."

Another was signed "rave on raver". Perfect. They have a website too.

I just finished "We Got the Neutron Bomb: The Untold Story of L.A. Punk". Your basic oral history of punk book. It was a fast read but not consistantly entertaining. Definitely not in the same league as "Please Kill Me" (an oral history of NY punk). Just starting "Up and Down With the Rolling Stones" which was written by the Stones ex-drug dealer Tony Sanchez. This one should be good.

July 23, 2002

Reality t.v .- I'm all about it. One of my more recent favorites is Trading Spaces. (Whatever happened to Bands on the Run!? It was genius. Someone needs to start a petition.) Anyway, I know I am late getting to this whole Trading Spaces deal but I am making up for it in my pure enthusiasm for the show.

July 22, 2002

Lovely and Amazing...both lovely and amazing. Go see it. I'm slightly obsessed with Catherine Keener (Being John Malkovich, Living in Oblivion, Johnny Suede, blah blah whatever). So I was trying to figure out when the movie was opening and I stumbled upon this site www.smokingsides.com (its actually a really boring site) but they have these, I don't know, reviews of women smoking in movies? Like this review of Catherine Keener in Being John Malkovich:

"Several scenes, mostly holding but with a couple of barely visible exhales. Does have one close-up with a drag and deliciously long exhale at the camera, not particularly well lit but pretty visible. Also rolls a joint and puts the ends in her mouth to seal them, but doesn't light it."

How much time on your hands do you need to take notes on who is smoking what in what movie? Maybe as much time as you need to comment on someone who is taking notes on women smoking in movies.

Look at Meat Hats!

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