my new platonic internet crush

She writes Victorian girl's school/gothic horror novels.
A Great and Terrible Beauty has one of the hottest scenes I've read in a long time--and in a YA novel, no less. (I've also been entertaining myself by using the word "steamy" to describe it.)
And, she's got one of the funniest, silliest, best blogs I've come across in awhile.
I heart Libba Bray.
---
Also, I need a Canadian to tape Alice, I Think for me, and you should all go read Susan Juby's blog, too, because I heart her as well. Hell, I almost went out in public in the world's most defective scarf, with "ART KNITTER" appliqued on it, simply because of Alice MacLeod, Realist at Last. That's the kind of love we're talking, people.
---
Speaking of love, I'm feeling a list of literary crushes post coming on. So stay tuned for that. Or something. Because who doesn't want to read about 26yrolds who are in love with Peter Pevensie, and I apologize now to whomever I wind up seeing the movie with.
Aw, who are we kidding? Melissa, I'm sorry.

I'm rapidly becoming the Blog of Listy Goodness (depending on your opinion of goodness, of course).

I like music.
I like lists.
I like public transportation.
Seems like it's about damn time to combine these loves, no?

1. Belle and Sebastian "The State That I Am In": "Riding city buses for a hobby is sad." I did a hankie of this one, but mispelled buses, which always looks to me like a plural for Gary Busey.
2. And, in "The Boy With the Arab Strap", Stuart sings a line about missing the bus. He is my soul mate, after all.
3. Wilco "Far Far Away": "Kiss and ride on the CTA." One of my favorite public transportation lines. Tiff and I are such nerds that, on the magestic Spring Break Road Trip, we both made sure to get pictures of CTA buses.
4. Kris Kross missed the bus, and that is something that they'll never do again. This one might be a school bus, though.
5. Replacements "Kiss Me On the Bus". 'Nother hankie: "your tongue your transfer your hand your answer"
6. Violent Femmes "Waiting for the Bus". This used to be my goto I'm Running Late song.
7. The Bangles "Manic Monday". I liked this one better when I thought the line was "blame it on the train but the bus is already there," probably because I used to try and rationalize lateness by blaming a particular route, when another got there ages ago. Example: I missed the 61A by 30 seconds. The 71D takes 10 minutes longer to get to the same place. Can I blame the 71D for being 10 minutes and 30 seconds late to work?
8. The Who "Magic Bus"
9. Screeching Weasel "Totally": "The Belmont bus takes me right by your house"

More to be added as I think of them/people bring them to my attention.

Am I allowed to be annoyed by this?

In the staff-side catalog at work, title searching Boy Meets Boy by David Levithan also gets you Meg Cabot's Boy Meets Girl.
However, the opposite isn't true. A title search for "boy meets girl" only gets the Cabot.
So, opinions? Can I get mildly riled up?
Oh, and more My So-Called Lifeness.

maybe she's in the Bahamas underneath the tropical sun

The would-be-fetus-lining is making this Billboard, for September 10, 2005, extra cranky.

• As a companion piece to my VMA ranting, might I direct your attention to Pamie, Stee, and Dan’s recap of the event? They’re much funnier than I could ever be, especially since we didn’t even watch the VMAs, instead going to Old Chicago for accidental ham.
  
• After spending all afternoon eating hummus and deviled eggs.
  
• ”Katrina’s devestation hits home for music biz.”
  
• Why? Because the people no one thought to help out are the same people that mainstream rap has spent the last few years convincing that the most important thing in the world is to look rich? No one’s gonna buy your clothes if they have no house, Diddy.
  
• Although, knowing this magazine, it’s probably that Napster is HQed in New Orleans or something.
  
• I’m sorry, I just don’t care that the music biz has been hit by this, in the same way that I don’t care whether or not McDonalds has taken a hit. It’s the people they’re constantly trying to sell their shitty merchandise to that are hardest hit, and that will continue to be hardest hit.
  
• Look, I haven’t even opened the damn magazine, and I’m already pissed. Can’t we go back to last week, when I just mocked Paul McCartney? Or am I supposed to be worried by the Paris hotel fires hitting home for him, or something?
  
• Oh, Elton John’s on the cover, with his songwriter guy. What’s his name, again?
  
• I’m actually pretty blasé about Elton John. It’s all one big MEH.
  
• OK, Kelly? Kelly Clarkson? Your dress is really pretty, that you wore to the VMAs, but, sweetie, do you not own a 3way mirror?
  
• Because your ass looks HUGE in it.
  
• Or does Kelly Clarkson just have old world bootie (I love you, Cara), and she’s the newest girl we’re all supposed to act like means that no tween and/or teen girls have body worries, b/c here’s one pop star who’s a bit curvy?
  
• I’m so out of touch.
  
• I could go on and on about the Katrina-ness, but I’m just going to say that, to me, it seems a bit callous to print things like, “Katrina disrupts all sectors of entertainment,” when its disrupted all sectors of everything.
  
• MySpace is launching a music label? See, Jackie, I was always like, no, MySpace is weird and corporate, but then you got me hooked and now I check all the time and my stupid clothing blog and I’M NOT MOVING TO A NEW NERDY CONNECTION WEBSITE.
  
• Because this is, after all, the Year I Don’t Move.
  
• or Pack.
  
• Kinda scary, and anyone want some corrugated cardboard/know of any good crafty things to do with it?
  
• iPod phone, eh?
  
• scratch, eh?
  
• It’s so easy to start doing that, and so hard to stop.
  
• Stupid sexy Flanders.
  
• Aw, Folkways is using Dylan’s book to advertise its back catalog. I heart cross-material advisory. Every so often you run across someone who’s made the mixtape Charlie talks about in Perks Of Being a Wallflower, and as soon as I get the capabilities, I want to make soundtracks for books like Brave New Girl, Fat Kid Rules the World, and…well, I was trying to think of a non-YA book, but let’s be honest here: how many of those do I actually read?
  
• I am listening to Citizen Girl, though, and it is really great. I keep laughing out loud in the car.
  
• I’m not crazy, fellow commuters. Really. I swear.
  
• Ten years of Ozzfest? Really? Wow.
  
• Some Christian band…Les Paul…reggaeton…meh.
  
• Well, not Les Paul. He’s cool. I just don’t feel like reading about him today.
  
• See the opening note about uterine lining.
  
• What the hell’s that stuff called again? Something with “endo”? I forget.
  
• ”Inte…integral…no…”
  
• Integrious!
  
• Man, that’s digging out some old injokes. Like I don’t have enough unfunny jokes in my recent past, I gotta go back to 2000 and shit.
  
• Was that 2000? When the hell did Brian leave Pittsburgh!?
  
• Oh, the arms are flapping! I’m excited! Bauhaus tour!
  
• Aw, I love when Li’l Goth Jessy makes an appearance. Hee.
  
• A Trip Down Memory Lane: My first bonding experience with Cara (when she stopped being The New ILL Girl and became My Friend Cara) was when she mentioned that she had made her boy drive from Fredonia to Pgh and then to NYC so she could see Bauhaus.
  
• I believe I called her a bitch, actually.
  
• ”New round of acts with teen appeal play their own instruments, write their own songs.”
  
• Being a Billboard writer must be so easy, since it clearly involves taking old articles and replacing Lennon or LeBon with the Click Five or Hanson.
  
• Yup, they just mentioned Hanson in this one. Very cutting edge of you, magazine.
  
• Didn’t one of them get married?
  
• 6 questions with Gavin Rossdale
  
• Man, is there a new t.a.T.u. single? I loved them! They were so blatant, and so calculated, and yet catchy as all get-out.
  
• I love videos that are like checklists:
  
• girl on girl: check
  
• school girl uniforms: check
  
• girls in the rain: check
  
• OK, we got us a video!
  
• Now if only pretty boys making out would be as universally recognized and sought after. Video directors could work from that list me ‘n’ Tiff made around the same time as the integrious joke.
  
• and the Ghostwriter drinking game
  
• and Richard’s stupid glam mullet
  
• My mother sent me an email today that included the idea that we should set Madonna on fire, somehow related to her picture book enterprises.
  
• See, once you meet my parents, I think I make a lot more sense.
  
• Anyone want to weigh in on that topic?

all my black mollies are dying off

August Wilson's got liver cancer.
Sad news.
If you don't know who August Wilson is, he's a Pittsburgh native playwright. His plays document, decade by decade, Pittsburgh, specifically the Hill District which, in its heyday, was up there with Harlem and the African American neighborhoods in towns like Chicago. Everybody stopped by.
Then Pittsburgh went eminent domain on its ass, built the Civic Arena (now the Mellon Arena--where the Penguins play and where I graduated and saw Tori Amos, but not at the same time), and things got slummy.
At least one of his plays (The Piano Lesson, and I also could have sword Fences) was turned into a TV movie.
Here's some more August Wilson info, from a more reliable source than my blog: The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

a small way to help

This was embedded in the last post, but I figure it deserves its own entry.
There's a shop over at Etsy.com (where I sell my hankies) where all proceeds go to Katrina victims. If you make stuff, you donate it for selling. Or, you can buy stuff and help out that way.
Also, I guess Coinstars are accepting donations, too. Which appeals to the bored kindergartener and the bleeding heart in me.
Here's where you go for the craftiness.

2, 2, 2 posts in one!

I need to find a new Laundromat.
Microsoft Word just auto-capped “Laundromat” for me—twice! Weird. I wonder…launderette. Nope.
Anyway, so here’s the deal. Let’s set the Flux Capacitor back to Sunday afternoon…
Sunday afternoon I had a picnic. Most of you jerks didn’t come (don’t worry, I still love you), but two people did (I love you guys more). So it’s me, Melissa, Justin, munching on hummus, crackers, pasta salad, and deviled eggs. There’s some small talk: tits ‘n’ barges, I trotted out the temping trading cards tale, the usual Melissa/Jessy Running of the Unfunny Jokes into the Ground, that kind of thing.
And I won a free Coke, but the assholes at Walgreen’s don’t take bottle caps anymore. Don’t tell a sick girl this, by the way; she’ll just stare at you uncomprehendingly.
We’re there, minding our own business, really, being quite the modern-day Seurat subjects (that was Seurat, right?), when Guy comes up to us. He asks, de you folks want to hear a song? Melissa says yes. In my head, I start crying. I know where this is going. No one comes up to you, on a Sunday afternoon in a relatively urban area, to just sing because it’s a nice day.
Or maybe I’m a cynical bitch that just needs a hug, because I immediately go into “I have no money” mode. True to form, we get hit up. And then I get hit on.
I just want to know, you tell someone you need to sing to get together money for toilet paper. Then you make some comment about how great the boy present is b/c there are 2 girls also present. Then you specifically ask each person for money, and, after you ask me, you tell me I’m beautiful.
Here’s the thing, because I know I’m about to get some comment about how I can’t take a compliment. This isn’t a compliment. It’s a reminder that, as girls and women, We are constantly on display. Any moron, from any walk of life, thinks it’s perfectly okay to comment on my appearance. And I’m sick of it.
There’s a character in an August Wilson play, the 1960s one I believe, who is a gorgeous girl with scars all up and down her legs. Towards the end of the play, it’s revealed that she scarred herself to deflect some of that attention.
Don’t get me wrong. Sometimes, the display is fun. There’s nothing quite like noticing a girl with kickass shoes, and then realizing she’s fixated on your coat. We do that for each other. And boy display isn’t always a bad thing, either. I just wish it worked like a library catalog search, and I could put limiters on. Or turn it off sometimes.
So, guess who uses my Laundromat? Thankfully, he didn’t remember/recognize me. Although this just proves my point more: these random comments are acceptable. Grr
Oh, and I taught myself how to knit while sick. Yay me!

Yeah. Here’s the 2nd part: Billboard Magazine 9-3-05

• Paul McCartney is an insufferable ass. And you just know Ringo’s gonna die first, leaving Paul the only Beatle left, and in a position to rewrite all sorts of history. And that shirt Stella wore? I hate them all, and I hate the cute clothes that Stella designs even more.
  
• aw, Kanye West.
  
• If there’s anything I truly love, it’s little pixely things. The Yahoo music ad has little pixely punks, and little pixely boy band, and a little pixely man with what looks like a little pixely sitar. Adorable!
  
• Ricky Martin’s working some serious George Michael scruff on the table of contents page.
  
• I’m so sad that Bob Moog is dead.
  
• And I totally love that Nick Rhodes is quoted in the article about him.
  
• Oh, random and off-topic, but remember those Etsy people I told you about, where you can buy my hankies? A group has set up a shop where you can buy stuff and proceeds go to Katrina victims. If you make stuff, you can donate to be sold. There’s info at the Craftster blog, as well.
  
• Slipknot thinks that the band in the Burger King chicken fries (which? Ew.) commercial looks too much like them, and sent a cease-and-desist letter.
  
• I just blew my nose, and now my ears are all stopped up and ringy.
  
• The dress Eva Longoria is wearing on page 25 looks like something that would have been my Barbie’s favorite outfit. But can she do the Barbie and the Rockers dance?
  
• New Nada Surf album on September 20.
  
• Melissa and I, it must be said, make an excellent getting-to-know-you tag team. She asks the basics I always forget about/don’t care about, and I find out the important shit, like if he hates Coldplay.
  
• Apple.
  
• My Chemical Romance have terrible hair.
  
• What song did Was (Not Was) do again? Was that the “everybody do the dinosaur” song?
  
• I heart Don Was: “Greed is the biggest problem facing the music business. People are tending to make shitty records and charging way too much for them and are not running the business in accordance with established principles of good management. We should take our energies a little bit away from chasing down teenagers who are file-sharing and go after the real problem and deal with those issues: Make better records and run the business better.”
  
• Man, I totally wish I hadn’t made all the Simpsons Wings references awhile back, ‘cause they would really come in handy right about now.
  
• Instead, I can just complain about how, when I opened up my vegetarian frozen dinner, there was a big chunk of pork in it.
  
• Yup, that’s definitely ham.
  
• What’s the song that, if you play it backwards, there’s a cracking lentil soup recipe? Or smashing? I’m sickly and not remembering things.
  
• And here’s a full-page ad that’s nothing more than a hand-written note from Phil Collins to Paul.
  
• Do I need to even go into how annoying Phil Collins is?
  
• Of course McCartney says he listens to Coldplay. Ass.
  
• And here’s the fucking PETA ad. There’s reason enough to hate anyone: an association with PETA.
  
• Oh, and he’s got a goddam picture book, too. Christ.
  
• To the Sendakmobile!
  
• Wow, could you imagine if there really was a Sendakmobile? That’d be AWESOME! Max would sit shotgun and ask if you were there yet, and you know Rosie is quite the backseat driver.
  
• Michel Gondry plays drums on Kanye West’s new album.
  
• Stupid fucking Billboard just told me about the final fucking end to “Six Feet Under”. Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck.
  
• Assholes.
  
• Like everyone who reads their stupid magazine has HBO or something.
  
• Fuck.