But it’s the warmest night in ages.

Billboard 11-4-06

• You know, I'm not sure how many of these I have left to do. I don't know how much music collection development responsibility I'll have at my new job, and I don't know if they'd order this way anyway.
• I'm sure I'll find enough other things to mock, though.
• But nothing quite like "Ricky Martin: Undeniable" which is the ad cover of this issue.
• You know, I kind of thought I'd never have to deal with Ricky Martin ever again.
• And I really liked that thought.
• It's that stupid Ricky Martin Unplugged which, I'm sorry, is just a terrifying thought and I hate it.
• But now I'm envisioning Ricky covering "Mama Said Knock You Out" and that's kinda cool.
• In a frightening sort of way.
• Speaking of frightening, the real cover is Meat Loaf. A rough looking meat loaf.
• Tim Burton directed a Killers video!?
• Aw, Le Tigre.
• It's always weird when a band like Le Tigre shows up in this magazine.
• Li'l Steven is discussing SpongeBob.
• Apparently, SpongeBob has an album, Li'l Steven was introduced to it by Seymour Stein, it's a good time.
• I can't get "Seymour Stein" out of my head now.
• This Meat Loaf picture is awful. Once you reach a certain age, shirtless is a bad idea. Whether it's his actual body or not.
• Also, I reached my limit of beefcake-y romance novel-esque imagery earlier this week from Fabio's appearance on ANTM.
• You know, I always thought Meat Loaf was one word, not 2.
• So there's a Bat Out of Hell 3 now?
• Enough is enough.
• Wait--didn't he have a falling out with Jim Steinman? How can there be a Meat Loaf album without Jim Steinman!?
• Oh, no falling out. Steinman health issues. But he still wrote 7 of the songs. Phew.
• Wait! Steinman's manager says no to the health problems! I'm so confused! And torn! I need April to sort this all out for me!
• (Yeah, my friend April? Totally obsessed with Meat Loaf. It's a little weird, but makes sense if you know her.)
• Steinman didn't produce the album, though.
• Which I know everyone cares about, but, let's face it, no one reads these anyway. They just keep me entertained while I attempt to stay on top of various kinds of music I don't give a shit about.
• Wait, isn't "It's All Coming Back To Me Now" the Celine Dion video that looks almost exactly like the Meat Loaf video? Because Steinman wrote that song, too.
• OH SHIT. THIS MAGAZINE IS BACKING JOHN "THE ASSHOLE" HOSTETTLER.
• Fucking intellectual property bullshit.
• See? This is why Billboard is creepy and weird and I need to vent to the whole damn internet about it.
• Least they aren't backing goddam Santorum here.
• That's why their asses lost, anyway.
• Waaaay too much about Ricky Martin...
• Except I keep misreading the copy, like thinking an ad is calling him a misanthrope, or "Evolution Denied" instead of "Evolution Defined."
• All kinds of Doors crap...
• Lauryn Hill popped up and played another random private show.
• I wish she'd get her crazy shit together and just write another album.
• OK, there's something that feels very "end of an era" about hearing that Sonic Youth have one more album to go before their Geffen contract is fulfilled.
• Or maybe it's just that I loaned my copy of Experimental Jet Set, Trash, and No Star to one of my crew earlier today.
• Mike Mills and Corrin Tucker and performing together (I think) at some benefit. I bet that sounds amazing.

What's a little boy like you doing with big boy smut like this?

Everyone's got their favorites, and I'm no exception. I've got my regulars, my favorites, the ones I call "My Crew".
Like any crew, there are some I see every day, some I don't see often and I wonder what happened to them (or, I'll read something, think of one of them, and lie in wait for their next library appearance), and some I kind of forget about until they come in and then I remember how awesome they are.
Badger* is one of that last group. He's this babyfaced 11yrold I see once a month or so around the YA graphic novels. He used to worry me a bit, because he looks so very young and fresh-faced, and we all know the caliber of graphic novels I buy. See, I have a lot of kids of a certain age who are attracted to, for example, Hellboy Jr. And then I have to show them where their comic books are.
But then I started talking to this kid, and noticing what a repeat customer--and reader of things like Lenore--he was. And that, when he asks about movies, they tend to involve Monty Python. Earlier today, he was online and I happened to catch a glimpse while I was overriding the filter so a patron could use the Google Image Search. He was reading "Maakies".
So gradually, it becomes clear that we haven't got some child to protect from scary, scary stuff he isn't ready for. We've got an 11yrold whose sense of humor is already pretty sick and demented. And that's AWESOME.
C'mon, don't you wish you had had the Bunny Suicides in junior high?
Of course, my favorite Warner Brothers cartoons were always the "Duck Season Rabbit Season" ones, so maybe I'm not one to talk...

*Not his real name, obviously. It hit me earlier today that he reminds me a bit of the younger brother character in Better Off Dead. And you can't really get a better compliment than that, can you?

So...can I vote for Barack yet?

You'd think that a person with a master's degree in what is kind of basically finding and interpreting information would be able to figure out what she needs to vote.
You'd also think that the political party that kind of rose to power by simplifying as much as possible to a ridiculous degree would make voting easier in one of what they clearly consider one of "their" states.
And, thirdly, you'd think that when a poll worker tells you that you are "good to go", that the ballot you are about to submit is not provisional.
So, to make a long story short, I have to find a place to get an ID*--you'd also think that a state would not pass Voter ID laws and shut down a good deal of their DMV offices near-simultaneously--and take it to some office a few blocks from my apartment in the next 10 days.
I'm also pissed because of the school board part of the ballot. I remember hearing some woman on the local NPR (they profiled all the school board candidates) talk about bringing Christian prayer in schools and other unconstitutional, fairly disrespectful things, but I couldn't remember the bitch's name this morning when it came time to vote against her reactionary ass. For a second, I thought about just voting for all the male names, but then I realized that there's no guarantee that they didn't say the same prayer-related things, just on a morning I wasn't listening.
So anyway, go vote. It'll probably be less of an ordeal for you than it was and will continue to be for the rest of the week for me.
And if you need any more reason why you should try to vote conservatives out of office, my stupid internet filter is now blocking any site with "blogspot" in the url, flickr, youtube, and google image searches. When my crew ask me why, I like to go all Ms Sarcastic on 'em and tell them it's because they're all just little children who need to be protected from those bad, bad things. And then I tell them about DOPA and, because I don't librarian to morons, they all figure out pretty damn quick that "social networking sites" anymore, are just about anything worth going to online.

*Because why on earth would I spend money and take what is basically a learner's permit test when I'm leaving in less than a month for a state that doesn't make you do those things to get a license?

Hey, I like all that black shit.

More weeding excitement:

Nat wonders why we're getting rid of it. I wonder why we bought it in the first place.
Here are some more Breakfast Club quotes, if you're interested. I know I am.

Amongst the other people she thanks are Rebecca DeMornay and Eric Stoltz. (I wonder if he dressed up like a chicken at the book release party?) She also quotes the bit from Franny & Zooey where Zooey-as-Buddy reveals to Franny that Seymour's Fat Lady is Christ.
Which, if you know the book at all, is a hell of a pretentious thing for a teen actress to quote at the beginning of her second volume of poetry. Yes, second: the first was called She Was Nice To Mice. I am not making this up. It was published when she was twelve.

Hanging from inebriated ropes
he choked away my pride and hope
not woman enough
no angel, too rough
I failed
to save him

By breathing I have let him down
a garish painted circus clown
not goddess enough
too human to love
this whore

a portrait in a magazine
so pretty on a movie screen
I'm not tempting enough
clothed in flesh and blood
I failed
to transform it

Now falling
coming back to earth
do I even merit human birth?
Prove that you should be his wife
You are unfit for this life
I fall
undid my bodice and let out my breath
one wrong moment

Superheroes
I have known a few
but watched them fly away on cue
shortsighted
I didn't know
their envy I would come to owe
to him.

I've sinned

too close too much
won't admit human touch
again

I'll never be woman enough.
Women aren't enough.
Enough.

Yeesh--and I though High Art was hackneyed, melodramatic tripe.

Also, if someone could tell me how this picture looks, that'd be great. Guess who's filter decided to block flickr and blogger pictures today?

Prepare the wedding sack!

A short list of things I'm sure only Tiff and I think are funny:

1. The above plastic pickles in a plastic jar. I heart Target's dollar section. There's all kinds of fake food, but nothing else struck me as quite as hilarious. I kept doing that thing I do where I'm intensely amused and/or enchanted by something, so I shake it. Like a baby with a rattle. I know, it's weird.
2. Giant Sized Wolverine! Who is actually the height of a normal man!
3. Giant-Sized-Wolverine-Who-Is-Actually-the-Height-of-a-Normal-Man getting drunk with Jimmy Stewart.
4. (BORAT SPOILER) At one point in the Borat movie, they get a bear and small children are frightened away. And you know nothing makes me 'n' Tiff laugh quite so hard as bear humor.

The mixture is all of us and we're still mixing.

I went to the new city this weekend to look at apartments. Because I'm a huge fucking stereotype, I rock the NPR in any city. In fact, I've actually figured out vaguely what time I should drive through the middle of Ohio when I go home for holidays, so I can listen to This American Life and Le Show.
And yet, I always forget about Louisville's 2 goddam hours of What Do You Know., which Cara and I like to call "Wait Wait Don't Tell Me for people without a sense of humor".
There's also this show I hadn't heard of yet, called Weekend America. It annoyed me. A lot.
For starters, it's the weekend before a ginormous election (that I'm not going to be voting in, but that's a story for another day), so of course that's all anyone's talking about. They had a "blue stater, red stater, and a purpler stater" divvy up things, like an argument about whether the Hubble telescope is more blue or red state.
I hate that red/blue state crap. I mean, I live in a--wait, red, right? It's confusing when you think of yourself as a red diaper baby, but red means the opposite thing now, I guess? I don't fucking know--
In any event, I hate the idea that everyone in the state thinks that way. It's like all this "Hoosier values" bullshit. Technically, I'm a Hoosier. I also think 2 girls should be able to marry each other if they want. Is that a Hoosier value now?
So anyway, I'm driving, and it occurs to me--how much of this red/blue crap is a function of the electoral college?* If it was a popular vote, maybe we could stop pretending that everyone in New York City is in love with Hilary Clinton, and everyone in Indiana thinks she's the devil.
***
And it's not enough to offend the good little liberal in me; after this mess, Weekend America pulls out some new cds from the past week, including the produced-by-Ryan-Adams Willie Nelson album. The "Amazing Grace" cover was pretty interesting, but kind of reminded me of how after Jerry Garcia died all the hippies acted like Bob Dylan was their new messiah. But with Johnny Cash instead of Jerry Garcia. The worst, though (oh, I should probably also mention I'm not much of a Ryan Adams fan...), was the song that started with just Willie and a guitar, and I'm down, and it's good, and then the chorus starts and Ryan has all this "rockin'" start and he didn't adjust Willie's voice and it just gets smushed out.
Yuck.
***
Oh, and I did find a place.

*Yes, I'm perfectly aware that I'm the last blogger in the universe to bitch about the electoral college, and that it's totally 2000 to do so.

She's got tofu the size of Texas.

The thing about looking for a new place to live is, you open yourself up to meeting and talking with all sorts of strange people. I think I might have told you guys about the time I was accompanying a friend while she looked at apartments, including one whose tenants had clearly not been told about the visit, as they were in the middle of getting it on when we all trooped into the bedroom.
Like a lot of the weird occurences and people that flock to me when I'm least appreciative of them, there was more than a bit of the faux and/or washed-up hippie about those two crazy kids. I've also lived above washed-up hippie homeschoolers and been drawn into extremely revealing (for her) phone conversations with rabid Dave Matthews fans, for example.
Now, this isn't to say that I haven't had some hippie-ish friends that I've loved. In fact, until I moved here, I've pretty much always had a hippie girl buddy. Like my super-awesome junior year dorm floor-mate Liz, who was always a good person to visit if you wanted to make a huge dinner (we had a teeny little kitchen on our floor. In fact, most of my friends from that year were girls I hung out with in the kitchen while we waited for pasta water to boil or Jiffy corn muffins to bake.), bitch about a women's studies class, or concoct some insane reason to take two buses to Michael's. I've also had good luck with friends of the so-punk-they're-hippie variety, with the added bonus that so-punk-they're-hippies are usually too surly to have any of the above problems I've had with hippie-types.
But, of course, I was still surprised at the level of flakiness I got when I called a woman about an apartment last night. Granted, she wasn't as bad as the gentleman I spoke with before her, who felt that it was necessary to have the tv on at TOP volume while speaking with a potential tenant*. However, it doesn't really bode that well when the best thing someone can say about an apartment is how cute the windows are, over and over.
She was also surprised at my gas/electric stove question, and then kept saying how sure she was that it was gas. That's when she shifted gears and began to tell me how small the kitchen was. But cute.
Then she asked me if the jerks were declawed. Which, hell no. But I mentioned that they don't tend to scratch much, which isn't really a lie if you've completely forgotten about that old mattress, which I had. Then she starts describing the floors of the apartment, and trying to remember if there were "Berber rugs". At least I think that's what she said. I should also maybe mention here that everything I know about Berbers comes from an episode of Tony Bourdain's A Cook's Tour. They make tasty-looking bread, those Berbers. And roast sheep (or was it a goat?) in pits in the ground. Tasty-looking sheep.
I didn't remember any mention of rugs or cats from the episode, so I basically did the phone equivalent of nodding noncommitally while thinking, Get on with it, lady. But I'm really wondering, if she so didn't want her cute, tiny apartment scratched, why not just say no pets? I'm a librarian; I know how to limit searches to get the most valid results for my query. Had she, like another listing I found, said something like "one tiny quiet declawed cat which isn't a cat at all, but is actually a kitty robot like that creepy thing Cara has," I never would have called.
Some of the notes I made while on the phone with Berber rug lady:
"only declawed cats!? or not"
"kinda flaky?"
"deck"
"too flaky!"