but also ice ages and blackouts of rain

Billboard January 28, 2006.

• Great. Now I've got "Snowfall" stuck in my head on a sunny, unseasonably warm day.
  
• Could be worse.
  
• Could still be the storytime song.
  
• "Are you owed royalties? We are looking for you."
  
• Universal Music Group wants your address. So they can send you a big, fat check, presumably.
  
• Why does this remind me of the Simpsons where Wiggum tells people they've won a boat in order to get criminals to turn themselves in?
  
• Goodbye, student loan payments.
  
• This is a really boring issue.
  
• So I've been entertaining myself with the PotterPuffs.
  
• And moving things around the library, of course.
  
• Yay for new reference desks!
  
• I always forget that, technically, P.O.D. are Christian.
  
• I suppose I should order their new album for the library.
  
• New Bob Pollard, too.
  
• Though that one doesn't fall under my work-ordering jurisdiction so much.
  
• Ugh, that cabinet in the new desk stinks.
  
• Live are back?
  
• Why?
  
• oooo! Review of K-Fed's single! heh
  
• It's called "PopoZao".
  
• And there's a ~ thing over the a.
  
• I love when Billboard gets bitchy: "Britney's private dancer"
  
• "I wanna see ya kitty and a little bit of titty"
  
• That's a quote from the song, everybody.
  
• It's also a pickup line that will ABSOLUTELY work on me, 100% of the time.
  
• And maybe my new MySpace headline.
  
• OK, so normally all the pictures on the "Backbeat" page are of execs, people holding those gold record plaques, and random Billboard writers like that crosseyed lady I haven't been mean about in a long time.
  
• And then here's this TOTAL press picture of Jennifer Lopez (who I still not-so-secretly love--She paid her dues! "Waiting for Tonight"! Selena!!) and Marc Anthony looking ROUGH.
  
• Like, Mick Jagger lines around the mouth rough.
  
• jeez.

Oh, and I wanted to say something about my wrong Printz prediction. I was doing the Oscar cynical prediction thing, so I'm glad I got it wrong. (Stay tuned for my cynical 2006 predictions. I like to hear as much of the buzz as possible before I decide.) Plus, I really and truly loved Looking for Alaska, so I'm happy. Not as happy, however, as the author, as depicted in these highly entertaining (at least to me) photographs.

Why are there ants in the tub?

I took the yarn from that sweater I took apart and dyed it with Kool-Aid, generic Kool-Aid, and egg dye from an Easter egg kit I randomly had in my kitchen cabinet. I vaguely remember wanting to dye Easter eggs at some point, but don't remember what state I was living in at the time, so I've potentially moved a Paas kit 2-3 times, which is a scary thought.
I kept forgetting to buy batteries for my camera, so I don't have any procedural photos. I did have a great phone conversation with Tiff, though, during, which consisted mostly of me narrating squishing yarn, describing the awful smell of wet sheep + wet bunny + wet acrylic + vinegar, and the like.
Here are some pictures of yarn drying on my shower curtain rod:


Here's a picture with horribly off colors that I couldn't fix in my crappy photo-fixing program, but that show the curtain/yarn set-up well:

Also, who doesn't love my shower curtain? I love my shower curtain, and my hot pink bathroom!
I also love Melissa's hot pink bathroom. Hers is a bit more coral than mine, but kickass nonetheless.
Soundtrack for this project: Tinyfolk and a mix remarkably similar to this one.
***
Tiff finally got her holiday package, so I can show off this picture of knitted Calvin Johnson, hanging out with Humor in his Jayne Cobb hat.

Here's the front of his shirt.

feel sick and dirty / more dead than alive

If you thought the casting of Mrs. Jude Law was the worst thing about the forthcoming Factory Girl, you've got another think coming.

in your dad’s suits you hide

Billboard January 21, 2006

• I’m really hungry. After getting a message referencing Los Bravos, you kind of don’t want your lame granola bar anymore.
  
• Some rapper—ah, DMX—is on the cover with his dog. How is rappers with pitbulls any different from rich girls with purse dogs?
  
• I accidentally typed “god” there. Heh.
  
• Apparently, according to Billboard, it’s the “Year of the Dog” whatever that means.
  
• ”…RAMMSTEIN, Germany’s current most successful live music export.”
  
• That was all for you, Cara.
  
• So, this JT Leroy guy is a phony?
  
• All I know about him is that he edited this year’s DeCapo best music writing.
  
• Which was a disappointment. Except Greil Marcus’ Buddy Holly piece.
  
• And I was left wondering, Have I lost my taste for pretentious rock crit?
  
• But I guess I can just blame it on this Leroy mook, right?
  
• I mean, one of the things he chose was that piece Eggers had in Spin about Big Country.
  
• Which I liked, at least more than I usually like Dave Eggers (which basically means I didn’t want to punch him in the face halfway through reading it), but it was still a bit too precious and precocious for me.
  
• Like, “look! Even before I was supersmart verbose writer guy, my musical taste was SO innovative, SO amazing, that I loved this band no one else knew much of anything about! And I grasped what they were doing musically, when I was 13, and I’m going to make all these grandiose, rewriting-history type claims about both the band and myself.”
  
• But, you know, I wasn’t this irritated after reading it in the magazine originally, so I can blame all this ire on that Leroy mook, right?
  
• DMX’s real name is Earl.
  
• Stuart Copeland’s about to release a documentary that’s mostly old super8 Police footage. I’m not the world’s biggest Police fan, but I am ALL about super8.
  

what I want my poetry to mean

Freakishly warm days in the middle of January always make me think of this song. Makes me miss Pittsburgh in May, once everyone has left town and you don't have to wait as long for Dave & Andy's.
I think I want ice cream tonight.
I'm reading Better than Running at Night by Hilary Frank. Ira Glass gave it a back-cover blurb.
Some other teen library program got on This American Life before me, so there's another plan down the drain.
Recent events have led me to wonder if the universe is finally getting back at me for that summer I spent sending people letters saying they weren't crazy enough for the people I was temping for to pay for their care.
I can't keep a red pen in my office TO SAVE MY LIFE. They always migrate to the reference desk.
Pop Rocks are really fucking expensive. I thought they'd make a great summer reading program sign-up prize, but it's like $15 for 36 packets, and I had 200 kids sign up last year.
My deer/unicorn thing arrived in the mail the other day. I had it sent to me at work, and it was fun seeing my officemates' reactions. Then I took her home to meet Tree and figure out a name.
Has anyone read Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell? I tried, in only the most cursory way, and I think I might need to pick it up again. Oh, and I still haven't read the non-Thursday Next Jasper Fforde book.
Booklist is one of the worst things to read for YA book selection. They always try to help out in their adult review section with pointers like this: "For teens contemplating a zoo career." Yeah, I've got ever so many of them.
4 days 'til they announce the Printz, and I'm starting to (maybe) second guess my Ball Don't Lie prediction. Maybe Elsewhere? Would kinda fit with the (in my opinion) total RANdomness of Kira Kira getting the Newbery last year. I also just read part of Claiming Georgia Tate, and that kinda seems like award-bait, too. Like, what's up with that book taking place in the 1970s? Now, that's a setting that has nothing to do with and brings nothing to the story. It actually took me out of it. Everytime Georgia talked about the bicentennial or Jimmy Carter or whatever, I got really jarred. But that's the book all those stupid journalists were mentioning as trash alongside Gossip Girls and Rainbow Party this summer, and that might push it ahead a bit.
I need better speakers for this computer.

so you say you like my shirt

This might be my new favorite YA book quote:

My heart was doing a happy leap, prancing around in a meadow of flowers, tra la la, without my permission. His dog's name was Rocket. I liked astronomy. It was that thing you do when you first fall in love. Where you think you must be soul mates because you each get hungry at lunch time and both blink when a large object is thrown your way.

It's from Wild Roses by Deb Caletti.

When I first read the book, I meant to mark that quote, but of course I didn't. I always wind up searching through books, desperate to find a quote, a fact, a line. I used to do this all the damn time in school. Writing a paper, there was always The Perfect Line/Point/Fact. I used to call up Meleah, or Tiff at the radio station (I seemed to pull a lot of all-nighters when she was doing her late-night show) with questions like, "What's the name of the Russian guy who made the movie where he showed film of a guy with the exact same expression on his face, but with different things after the cut, like he was reacting to them, in order to talk about the language of editing?"

While I was looking for the above crush-quote, I found this great moment, too. Seasonally, I'm a bit late on this one, but maybe we'll all remember to use it come next December.

...and our old Nativity scene. Mom and I still liked to have fun with it by moving the figures around in what you could politely call "nontraditional positions." Mom's not very religious in any regular way. She called the Nativity "Christmas Town," as in What's happening in Christmas Town today? I'd wake up to find the camel in the manger, say, with Joseph chipping in with parenting duties out front, and then I'd move them around to surprise her the next day with everyone standing in a circle around the donkey. Several years ago, the scene acquired a large plastic dinosaur, and later, a miniature replica of the Statue of Liberty that Mom got when she played a festival in New York. The poor folks of Christmas Town ran from Godzilla one day, and the Statue of Liberty got to be a fourth wise man.

So, yeah, Wild Roses is a good, if wordy for YA, book. So is Honey, Baby, Sweetheart, another of Caletti's novels. Here's what the cover looks like:

clangbangCRASH

Billboard January 14, 2006.

• It’s really been 10 whole years of Destiny’s Child? I guess that’s why they get to be all nekkid on the fake cover advertisement thing.
  
• blah blah piracy blah
  
• If only it were the fun kind of piracy, with ham and lime Starburst.
  
• ”Madonna has entered a licensing del with West Coast-based Celebrity Cellars to create and distribute a commemorative, limited-edition collection of wines.”
  
• Booze is the new picture book?
  
• This is the all-Destiny’s Child issue. Not that they don’t have their moments, but I just kinda don’t care.
  
• Although, this article here says one of their original names was “Cliché”. Heh.
  
• This bullet point is me laughing about that some more.
  
• There are a lot of these weird, digitally colored looking photographs (it’s almost like a topographical map-looking effect, and I don’t know what it’s called) that the girls all look awful in.
  
• And it seems like, if someone wanted all of Destiny’s Child to look bad, that’s the sort of thing they’d have to put a lot of work into.
  
• Couldn’t that work have been better done somewhere else?
  
• The library handyman is putting up the teenhole’s new tall shelving (yay) and I keep hearing all these bangs and clangs.
  
• Normal for putting up metal shelving, I know, but it’s distracting.
  
• It’s all warm today, and the itchy bugs have hatched and started biting me. I hate itchy bugs.
  
• I still can’t decide if I like Keane or not.
  
• ”Latin Notas” column this issue titled, “Hot, and Not”.
  
• Here’s a sample of NOT: “Raggaeton songs that depend on dated computer programming and even more dated references to booty, dancing and prowess in bed. These are valid topics…”
  
• There goes my hit single about…crap, I can’t think of any nerdy old programming jokes. Little help?
  
• Goddam! My shoulder’s itchy. Stupid bugs.
  
• Mr. and Mrs. Barry Gibb bought Johnny and June Carter Cash’s house.
  
• They “intend to use it as an inspirational place to write songs.”
  
• …