My cat Saget has been very, very sick and as a result I have been very, very distressed about her health. I had an epiphany the other day and realized that I have become one of those people who think of their animals as their children. The kind of people I have made fun of in the past. And to those people I now say "I'm sorry - I feel you man."
Saget has a urinary tract infection and we have been treating him with a plethora of medications for the past two weeks. But instead of getting better, he just got sicker and sicker throughout the treatment. By Friday of last week he was urinating these huge crystals that had to be mad painful to expel through his tiny kitty penis. Anyway, he was due at the animal hospital the next morning, but I could hardly sleep Friday night because the poor thing was acting so strangely. He was lethargic and walking real low to the ground and wouldn't come when I called him. The doctor said not to worry, but I worried.
So Saturday
morning I set out at 9am with the kitty in the carrier to hail a cab and
get to the hospital. I am in tears. The stress is too much, I am certain
something AWFUL is going to happen before I get to that hospital and I
am just generally freaking out. So the two of us, Saget all cowering in
his cage and me all puffy eyed and blotchy faced get into this cab. I
tell the driver where we are going and he says yes, he knows the place
well, we'll be there in minutes. Then he turns around and tells me how
beautiful my cat is. Which is funny only because Saget did not look beautiful
at the moment, he looked like a dirty floor mop. So the cabbie starts
talking about his mom's cat in Egypt - "I call him Bobsie" -
and how his mom spoiled the cat and how Bobsie would only eat people food
and liked to perch on his mom's shoulder. He made me laugh and took my
mind off of the situation at hand. At that point Saget proceeded to let
out some sort of marking odor in his carrier because he was so nervous
and upset and sick. The cab driver didn't even flinch, just rolled down
all the windows and kept right on telling me kitty stories. That guy made
my day.
Oh, and I picked up a little celebrity cat gossip Saturday morning at
the vet. While I was helping them calm my cat on the examining table …well
he didn't really need calming as he was catatonic, but I stayed and pet
him for moral support anyway…the doctor's assistant mentioned that
some woman had called about her cat.
The doctor: Oh you don't mean that she's bringing that cat in here do
you?
The assistant: Nods
The doctor: Uh…(sighs)… that cat is just so difficult and aggressive.
Great. You know whose cat that is don't you?
The assistant: Shakes head
The doctor: It's Ben Affleck's mother's cat.
Ben Affleck's mother's cat is a bitch! You heard it here first.
Heather
Murphy sent me this
link last week...help the little animals get a good meal.
Heh...
He said tax....heh.
It was a Friday night about two weeks ago. After a night of cocktails at the Middle East I ended up at the Seven Eleven down the street from my house. It's 2am and the place is packed, with a line going down the length of the store. I was trying to hurry along the group I was with as I was very impatient and had people back at my house that I wanted to see. So Liz and I stood in the doorway at the front of the store and while she whispered the words to me I chanted/yelled/sang
I got my
daddy's razor blade
You go get the neighbors dog
He's a hairy laso apso
We can shave that fucker bald
Twice. Kinda like a bizarre spoken word performance. What was strange about this situation, besides of course the fact that I chose to do it, was that NOBODY responded. At all. I was staring at the bread aisle as I thought I would lose my nerve if I made eye contact with people in the line. So after I go "Liz! What were they all doing?" And she's just like, "Well they were staring at you. That's all." No booing, no applause, no derisive words...no response! Bizarre I tell you.
Oh yeah, that was one of Mr. California's songs that I sang.
Ok, so we all know the internet has forever changed the record business and that record labels have decided that online piracy is the sole factor responsible for the slump in their industry. So instead of looking to change the way they do business and dealing with the reality of situation, or actually putting out product that people want to buy, they would rather pursue litigation against people who they are trying to persuade to be their customers. This makes sense right? I actually have been following all the court cases and articles on the subject, but don't write about it because its all pretty much a big yawn. But yesterday I received a large marketing packet from BMI that starts out:
Dear Noreen,
Music is an excellent way to promote traffic to your web site, but the musical works you play belong to the person or persons who created them...you should know about BMI and the U.S. Copyright Law...you must obtain permission from the copyright holder or their representative to play music on your site.
Ok, first off I had like three MP3s on this site to begin with. I have no idea what would possess BMI to contact me about three random MP3s. But they sent me a letter, four different contracts, a brochure on licensing music and assorted other marketing materials - the packet probably costing $5 to $10 dollars to produce. So the record industry is in a slump, they have no money, everyone is stealing from them, yet they have the time to hire a person to track down everyone online using MP3s and then mail them a load of crap...hmm...makes sense to me. I would also like to point out that these songs DON'T actually belong to the artists, they belong to the RECORD COMPANIES AND DISTRIBUTORS.
So yeah, I removed the MP3s and have solemnly sworn to myself to not buy any product by an artist that is repped by BMI. Luckily they have a web site where you can look up artists by name to see if they are part of their "repertiore". So take that BMI.
Here's a good article on the subject.
Holla back.
April 25th, 2003
Liz
got all these makeup and beauty product samples from a friend of hers
and then Jersey and I went to her house and tried them all out. This is
Redken's Water Wax. Liz let me have it. I love it. All the clumpy goodness
of regular wax, but it doesn't make your hair greasy.
I don't have any celebrity drug gossip, but I can direct you to pictures of Winona Ryder kissing that kid from Bright Eyes.
Toast and toast and toast and toast...
I didn't know that Shrinkey Dinks makes computer paper. Very cool. The other crafty project that I dream of doing...Day of the Dead Sugar Skulls.
Protect your kitty from SARS.
April 24th, 2003
The naked, smoking and very pregnant Catherine Zeta-Jones link was yanked almost immediately after I posted it. God those people are quick on the cease-and-desist tip. Hope y'all got to see it.
Was Jack White channeling some kabuki theatre character on Conan last night? That was white face paint right? If not, I am very frightened. I'm all about not making fun of extra white skinned humans (myself being one) but that was not fashionbly pale, that was Night Of the Living Dead kinda pale.
Madonna's site got hacked the other day. Old news, I know. I just wanted an excuse to point out that the rap thing she did on American Life sucks.
"Vice cops raiding a Paris flat were amazed to find a photograph of Leonardo DiCaprio with two prostitutes..." Police say he didn't know the two were prostitutes and friends are worried "his naivety will one day land him in hot water." I too am worried about poor Leo. I know how easy it is to mistake prostitutes for very good looking, extremely friendly women. I have been known to make this mistake myself. And I thought the money they requested was a donation to PETA. My innocence sometimes even overwhelms me.
Speaking of PETA, there was an excellent profile of Ingrid Newkirk in last week's New Yorker. Can't say it made me want to go out and donate to the cause, but reading about the factory farms the author visited really did re-inforce my vegetarianism. As it happens, young girls are the group most likely to go veg, and so in response the meat industry has countered with:
Cool to be Real and the infinitely lame Pork 4 Kids
But the veggies come back with this.
Bart Simpson's best blackboard line: I was not touched 'there' by an angel
April 22nd, 2003
Ok, I'm not even freaking out about the x-tra large pendulous breasts, it's the fact that she's very, very pregnant and yet smoking a cigarette. Is this still ok in some circles?
The Dansko
Love girls will be hanging out at Healthworks in Cambridge this Saturday
(4/26) from 3pm to 6pm. The team will be giving out free advice to
anyone who asks - even to those who don't - basically they will be forcing
offering their unsolicited opinions to anyone who will listen. They can
tell you about women specific bike products, sports nutrition, and they
will tell you honestly if those shorts make your butt look big. There
will be mini clinics on bike repair, maps for local rides, fit specialists,
and FREE SAMPLES. If you got a double X chromosome, or something close
to it, get your ass down there and learn something.
Look at the nifty flyer Mr. Thom made up.
There's this story in this week's New York magazine about Bob Kerrey and my alma mater. Damn, I love this description of the New School. It makes us all sound like Soviet dissidents...who smoke and wear berets. Yeah.
Granted, the New School was a weird place for Kerrey to begin his new life. Take the most mercurial, diffident, talented, and irreverent Democratic superstar—a self-taught intellectual with a pharmacy degree from the University of Nebraska and no academic experience. Then put him in charge of revamping New York’s most radical left-wing academic institution, a place founded in 1919 by pacifist professors fired by Columbia, famous as a haven for Jewish scholars fleeing Hitler in the thirties and forties, and even now a hotbed of political ideology. The resulting furor was as inevitable as the class conflict in Karl Marx’s dialectics.
The other night I was watching Tough Crowd on Comedy Central. Sometimes the way the guests bicker and shout over each other on that show just annoys me and I have to change the channel. Other times someone says something funny and I laugh. Back to the other night - one of the other commedians dissed Collin Quinn's fashion sense as being "mummenschanz". Now thats funny.
April 20th, 2003
Happy Easter to all my peeps. Rock on.
Later
My beloved punk kittens have whored themselves out to VH1, performing Culture Club's Karma Chameleon no less...It had to happen sooner or later...
April 16, 2003
Vegan Soldier Keeps Asking Everyone If They Want Their Bread (This week's Onion)
Jen and I went to see Hot Hot Heat last week. I neglected to tell her that it was at 7:30 until the day of the show. The other detail I felt it was unnecessary to share until the moment we got there, was that it was an all-ages show. So we pull up in front of the club and Jen starts making fun of two 16 year old girls in matching "new wave" outfits and goes "Yeah, they're probably going to see Hot Hot Heat."
"Uh, they probably are. It's all ages you know?"
"What!?"
Man, she was not happy. Not that I was thrilled. But we had fun and we danced. So the band look like escapee hobbits from The Lord of the Rings. No kidding, they are all like an inch away from midgets. Not that hot hot...
Speaking of Hot Hot Heat, can I have this guy's job? Really, who is this guy's audience? I read his reviews constantly and try to figure out how old he is/where he is from/why he sounds like my dad reviewing bands.
Southpark signs until 2005! Norman Lear's still got it.
Kermy, how could you? Haven't you seen those commercials? Don't you know that pot smoking makes you shoot people? You will end up getting raped and pregnant and make your parents the youngest grandparents in the neighborhood. Then you will leave their house and mow some dude down on your way to give the drug pushers the money to support terrorism. Or at least this is what the Partnership for a Drug Free America says...their site kills me. We're cool! We're hip!
I'd actually be laughing if it weren't for the fact that we are all footing the bill for this lunacy. It cost $2.2 million to air the thirty second ad during the superbowl (not counting any production costs.) Want to know where else your taxes are going?
Did CNN turn up the boos during Michael Moore's speech? Click it.
I read this article and all I could think is...NOBODY has EVER sent me ANYTHING. Not even a bag of Rap Snacks.
I love you like a fat kid love cake.
Go Metric!
April 13, 2003
Don brought lots of crazy (and some cool) stuff to our house in a self induced fit of anti-materialism where he decided EVERYTHING MUST GO. It was like going to the fire sale of a hip lunatic.
Some examples of the booty found here.
My favorite:
You spin me right round baby, right round, like a record baby, right round round round.
This month's Bitch magazine is the Obsession issue. There is an article by Layla Cooper on female record collecting that made me happy. Since I sold off 95% of my vinyl in the mid nineties (under sorry and desperate circumstances..don't ask) I don't think I can really count myself as a collector. But I still dream.
A Limited History of Vinyl Collecting by Noreen
10 Years
Old(?)
On
our way home from church on Sundays my brother and I would listen to Casey
Kasem's top 40 Countdown. If we we were quiet and didn't misbehve
my dad bought us a candy bar after church. If we were especially well
behaved or my dad was just in a good mood, we got a 7" from the nearby
record store.
On one such morning, with my dad parked in front of the record store, I raced out, grabbed a copy of Blondie's Rapture and jumped back in the car without missing a second of the countdown. We got back to our house, just as they were about to announce THE NUMBER ONE SONG IN THE COUNTRY. My brother and I are all, "Its gotta be!!!!" "Oh mygod!" and race into the living room to put the stereo on...***
"And the number one song in the country is....Rapture!"
I jumped up, arms held high over my head in triumph. And then, still screaming in joy, I slammed my fist down onto the Blondie 7" that was sitting precariously on the wood arm of the couch. My hand landed heavily on the record and proceeded to scrape the single down the arm of the sofa, filling all of the little record groves with wood chips. It was ruined and there was no way to fix it. I cried. My parents claimed I must have done it on purpose. DAMN THEM.
***I have no real explanation for our overwhelming over-identification with Casey Kasem's Top 40 Countdown. My own theory is that since we didn't watch or play sports The Countdown kinda filled the need to pick a team to cheer on... and that particular week Blondie was our team.
12 Years Old
My brother and I used to spend our summers in Ireland. We stayed on our Papa's farm where there was only one small television, no radio and no stereo. We were completely cut off from American pop culture- from any kind of pop culture really- and the result was to make us more imaginative, self sufficient whiney little bitches. Whenever Kev and I were in town we would go directly to the record shop and buy all of the top 10 singles. Didn't matter what they were, cos we had most likely never heard the songs anyway, plus we had no way of playing the records as there was no turntable on the farm. But it was like a pot luck Christmas when we got back to the states. Every record was a complete surprise. I remember being totally psyched over Roman Holiday's Don't Try to Stop it. But I still haven't figured out who Mike Oldfield is and how that Moonlight Shadow song got popular with anyone, anywhere.
13 Years Old
I also used to accompany my brother to Newbury Comics, back when they actually sold comics and were only located on Newbury Street. While Kevin flipped through the stacks I would stand up by the front next to a few boxes of 7"s. I would go through the one that said "Local" and the one that said "Punk". I never touched the one that said "Indie" because I thought that "Indie" meant "Indian Music". I felt better after confessing this to Liz and having her tell me she thought it meant "Indy 500"... like the race.
14 years old
My brother bought me the Japanse pressing of The Smiths Hatful of Hollow. It had a gatefold cover and the lyrics came in Japanse. I was stoked.
18 Years Old
There was this kid Umbar (RIP) and he owned two copies of Social Distortion's Mommy Little Monster, which was IMPOSSIBLE to find at the time. This was back in the day when something was out of print, it was really out of print. No internet, no CD burners, No Ebay...you were lucky if someone produced an audio tape that had beeen recorded down so many generations that there were areas where the music fell out or you could hear people talking or some other lame-ass shit. Back to Umbar...he had TWO copies, but refused to sell me one, because one was TO LISTEN TO and one was to KEEP. Oh, did he piss me off. But he also pointed me on my mission...to track down that damn album whatever it took. And I found it all right. Second Coming in the West Village. Perfect Condition, gatefold album, lyrics enclosed. I remember it like it was yesterday.
Girl record geeks unite.
For all the record store freaks out there.
I don't know if We Love the Iraqi Information Minister is back up yet, but if you can get on it is worth it. No matter what happens, how many bombs go off, how much of the city is destroyed he stands by his story that everything is fine.
"I triple guarantee you, there are no American soldiers in Baghdad."
Homes should be working for us. He has a long career in PR awaiting him when the dust settles.
"We're going to drag the drunken junkie nose of Bush through Iraq's desert, him and his follower dog Blair..."
Drunken junkie nose...I cannot believe this man's first language is not English.
April 9, 2003
What to watch tonight - Law and Order or the reality tv tag team of Sorority Life/Fraternity Life? Decisions, decisions...
Reality madness. Wait, the cat one is funnier. (via everlasting blort)
More celebrity gossip than anyone could possibly ever use.
Have I pointed out enough yet that it will be my birthday soon? More gift ideas:
Rap Snacks - any flavor will do.
Oh so cute! I'm partial to hearts and stars and pink.
This page claims to be the original Facts on Farts. It seems there are several "unauthorized, plagerized versions out there" Get the straight dope from the original. Don't trust the imitators - or the playa haters.
Peace out.
Later April 8, 2003
My sweet, sweet husband on his 29th birthday. Aaawwwwwww.
I heart Jim Crosley.
April 8, 2003
Alright, who needs a job? I got one right here for you.
The other day I was "surfing the net" as they say, trying to figure out why Bob Saget (my cat - not the comedian) had suddenly become bulimic. Saget wouldn't stop gorging himself on food and then immediately puking it back up. The food wasn't even digested. It was still in its original cat food form. Anyway, in my search for answers I ran into this page on cat declawing. While I always knew you shouldn't have your cat declawed, I never knew why. Oh my god, that shit's wack!
West Hollywood just banned cat declawing. Check here for more info on stopping the practice.
Play whack a jack.
Ladies and gentlemen...it's Hammer Time...again?
Oh yeah. This article in the NY Times points to a new guerilla marketing tactic. Paying bloggers to mention stuff as being "cool" and then paying them for it. Although I am appalled by such underhanded marketing ploys, please be aware that I am open to any offers. And that I like almost anything that is free.
The most boring weblog in the world. No its not mine, silly. (via metafilter)
This is where I start a new feature called Guess Who's On Drugs Now? This will be fun right? Everyone can send me the names of newly outed drug addicts and links to stories of their wacky hi-jinks. Here are this week's casualties:
Jason Mewes (Silent Bob's partner in crime)
Salon's feature story on The Daily Show.
I bid you adieu.
April 2, 2003
Please do
not send me another email petition from the UN. The UN does not send or
collect petitions.
They don't want your list of 500 names. Nope, they don't want 'em. As
a matter of fact, they are probably really pissed that you are clogging
up their email system with these stupid petitions. So stop. Now.
Also, just out of curiosity, has anyone ever ever known a petition to work? I sure haven't and I feel like I've signed a million. Right at this very moment the rain forest is being chopped down, the dolphins are stuck in nets, and those baby seals have all been clubbed to death. What, you mean signing my name on a piece of paper didn't put an end to this?!
I totally need this. The legs are great even if the face is a bit freaky. More like Howard Stern crossed with Melissa Rivers than Joey Ramone.
My irony meter has been on the blink since the mid-90's, so I have a hard time differentiating humor from earnestness. Here's an example. Lets all make the A.L. Handsign!
Infectious killer disease running rampant in your city? Pick up one of these fashionable face masks to take your mind off of it.
I don't really like System of a Down. When the singer starts doing that operatic-metal thing it makes my ears bleed. But that doesn't mean that MTV should not play their video for "Boom!" That video along with others that portray "obviously sensitive material" are not in rotation at MTV. Billy Idol's "Hot in the City" made the list of the banned, although god knows why, since I don't think they've "rotated" that one since 1986.
Anyhoo, you can view the video on Micheal Moore's site (he directed it).
Kelly Osbourne claims MTV won't play her video either. Because it sucks.
I was looking at this site and it brought me back to the time when I judged an alcoholic beverage, not by taste, but on its packaging, price and alcohol content. I drank all sorts of nasty stuff like Cossak Vodka, Red White and Blue, Olde English (or Olde Polish as we called it for reasons I cannot remember) and Black Label. For gods sake, I even tried drinking ZIMA. My brother was the same way. At the time his drink of choice was Cisco. Then it was Old Crow. He used to lean towards the ghetto, now he's all "kettle one with a twist". I never tried Cisco 'cos it scared me, but I did try Power Master while it was on the market...for all of a month? Then the government had to get involved... something about the alcohol content being too high...whatever... It tasted like paint thinner smells. Sigh. I really miss that stuff. Jay and I once split a bottle of Old Crow. We do not speak of that night. Except that Jay occasionally lets out a "ca- caw!" and it makes me laugh.
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