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.”
  
• …
  

the one with the waggedy tail

UPDATE! I just bought the deer/unicorn stuffie. I couldn't help myself.
I really need to stop looking at things on Etsy, especially in a week that began with the first winter utilities bill and ends with a haircut, Belle & Sebastian tickets, and a possible drive to Dayton.
Because I keep finding stuff like these things, all of which I want:

by PerfectChildren


by knittydirtygirl (I've been stalking the Craftster spinning board lately, wanting to try to make my own yarn with weird stuff in it.)

Someone already bought this, but I still feel like I should pimp this guy's stuff, because I really like it:

by WalrusRider

Man, I keep looking at that deer/unicorn thing. I do get paid this week, and it's not like I've added to my weird stuffie collection lately...

until I’m ready to use it

“Hold My Life” is playing right now. Billboard January 7, 2006.

• There’s a pretty boy on the red cover wearing a shirt saying “Underage Thinking”, which may be the cheesiest thing I’ve seen so far this year.
  
• Wait, sorry, I forgot about the previews for that Sam Jackson/Eugene Levy thing they played twice before 40yrold Virgin.
  
• But does that count, since I saw it last year as well?
  
• ”The Who” will be touring again this summer. Sorry, Pete, but it’s not really The Who anymore.
  
• So, here’s an ad for Hard Rock Hotel San Diego condos, which, yuck, but it’s a topless vaguely ethnic woman, all sweaty, from the back. We’re invited to check out their website for “more eye candy and important ownership information”.
  
• I’m amused at how old the picture of Michael Jackson they chose to illustrate this story with is. I miss less-obviously crazy Michael, don’t you?
  
• I think Arctic Monkeys might be my new favorite horrible band name.
  
• Any idea what they sound like?
  
• OK, they “serve up hard rock with a Southern flavor,” but isn’t DecembeRadio the crappy emo-est band name you’ve heard in awhile?
  
• Oh, they’re a Christian band. I wonder if that can account for the name…
  
• ”Underage Thinking” is the name of that guy’s album.
  
• He kind of looks like Rory Gilmore would, if she were a boy.
  
• If I cared at all about the Grammies, I would read about their secrets, but—
  
• --O! I feel a Simpsons reference coming on!
  
• Where did George Harrison get that brownie from?
  
• I know Mariah Carey’s all about this butterfly thing and all, but her giant butterfly ring looks like something I got out of a gumball machine in 1987.
  
• Oh man, Gwen Stefani’s got these flowers coming out of her head. Like, it looks like her hair turned into giant fake blossoms and she doesn’t know what to do.
  
• Speaking of Mrs. Rossdale, did everyone read Meg Cabot’s blog (link if you scroll down a hell of a lot) the other day when she was talking about celebrities’ years-in-review? The fake Gwen one was very funny.
  
• I like plurals of words with hyphens like that. Mothers-in-law and such. I was listening to the radio the other day, and they referred to more than one person going past as “passerbies” (I can only assume that’s the correct spelling).
  
• That’s not cool. “Passers-by” is one of my favorite words, and not one I get to use very often.
  
• More about the new Strokes album.
  
• We should order Mary J Blige’s new album for the library.
  
• Man, it’s raining hard right now.

I'm really charmed by this.
Also, I like how, sometimes, if I'm loud enough when I tell kids to straighten up and fly right, their parents happen to hear and come discipline their kids.
Plus the fun hypocrisy of saying, "You can't be loud in the library," loudly. Being a grownup has its petty, childish perks.