Should auld acquaintance be forgot: The top 5 people/trends of 2008 worth forgetting

As a bookend to my Christmas Eve post, I thought it would be nice to write a little something before the close of December 31st, 2008. Since my television has been on Star! for most of the afternoon and my Special Double Issue of Entertainment Weekly arrived in the mail today (yeah, in Canada we have to wait a bit before it gets here...by which point I've usually already read over half of it online), I have 'best of' thoughts on my mind. As a result, I thought it would be nice to put together, not so much a 'worst of' list, but a list of 5 things I hope we can all forget about 2008. These are not legacies, folks. They are flashes in their respective pans.

5) Lady Gaga

"Just Dance" was a catchy enough club anthem and LG certainly established trends with her glam locks and wardrobe. Then she released "Poker Face" as a single and I quickly realized her career deserves to be about as short as the pants she wears onstage and in her music videos. (You may have noticed, she tends not to wear any at all.)

4) The Hills

I watched this show for a whole five minutes.

That was enough.

2008 saw me (shamelessly...or relatively shamelessly) watch every episode of Rich Kids: Cattle Drive, Pussycat Dolls Present: Girlicious and Gossip Girl, but I could not watch this crap long enough to reach a commercial break. May 2009 bring early cancellations of The City and Bromance.

3) War and violence and hunger and bigotry and racism and sexism...

In truth, I don't want us to forget about these things, but acknowledge and work past them. It just seemed absurd and downright embarrassing to compose such a list and not include at least one "serious" issue (or, in this case, a conglomerate of series issues).

Also, the placement of "war and violence and hunger and bigotry and racism and sexism..." before the subsequent chart toppers stresses my absolute frustration with #1 and #2.

2) Sarah Palin

Allow me to retract my previous comment. This is a serious issue. I hate this woman. Normally I'm fairly careful about throwing around such a potent word, but after months of consideration I have decided its use is warranted. On election night, as my friends and I gathered to hopefully watch Barack Obama take over for Jack Ass as President of the United States (yay for us!), I was met with a fair amount of disapproval regarding my application of the "h" word to Miss Palin. For some, it was too obvious. For others, too unnecessary. We all know she's an idiot (or something to that effect), they all said, but hate is a bit strong for someone so oblivious, someone so harmless.

Harmless my ass. If Sarah Palin was running to be VP of the PTA I think I could live with it; Madame Vice Girl Guide leader or Queen of the fucking hockey rink. And it's not even just the thought of someone so unaware, so unprepared and so ridiculous as backup-leader-of-the-free-world that gets me going, but the fact that a room full of the most powerful, politically minded Republicans figured that a person like me would vote for her just because we both have vaginas.

And I'm not even American!

Anyways, I could go on for days about her but the point of this post is I don't want to, and I don't want anyone else to either. Three cheers to Tina Fey and may the many accolades coming her way reach their recipient in the new year and in years to come, but let's not give Palin one more minute past her reluctantly allotted (at least on my part) fifteen.

It's not because she's a woman.
It's not because of her choice of party, or religion, or anything like that (though these topics certainly divide us).
It's because she's stupid, and as a brilliant professor of mine once told my fourth year undergraduate English class, "Of course you should be worried about stupid people! That's what your degree is. There are stupid people everywhere--how do I cope with this?"

May I add only that stupid people with nuclear codes justify the truth of this statement to perhaps its greatest degree.

(If you would like to get all of your Palin ranting out of your system before the clock hits '09, check out this gem from Matt Damon...if you haven't already...repeatedly:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6urw_PWHYk )

1) Stephenie Meyer and the Twilight series

One day I'll finally get around to my post-length rant on Meyer and the four books that have made her a millionaire (possibly billionaire) and proved that hegemony is real.

Today, however, is not that day.

To be brief: Meyer has created a world where girls have regressed at least 150 years in their ideas and goals, vampires are an uber-race of rich, white, talented, indestructible, godlike creatures while Native Americans are dogs and marriage and baby-making is a cult into which every little American mind should be hungry to be indoctrinated. Shame on you, Stephenie Meyer, for preying on adolescent sexuality and for leading your readers astray with regards to their understandings of just about everything. No, reading for reading's sake is not necessarily always a good thing.

That, for now, is all I have to say.

Of course, upon reflecting on my choices I realize I've come off as something of a fellow female loathing bitch.
Don't blame me, blame the media.

(And stay tuned for a follow-up post that catalogues a list of female antidotes to the poop outlined above.)

May your bubbly bubble and your streamers stream- all the best in 2009!!!

Linda was such a poacher

I wish I had a river I could skate away on...

The title of this very, merry blog posting is courtesy of my younger brother who, in listening to Linda Ronstadt's cover of Joni Mitchell's "River," remarked, "Linda was such a poacher."

Happy holidays!

'Tis the night before Christmas and on a break from my strict Christmas movie schedule (A Charlie Brown Christmas, A Colbert Christmas: The Greatest Gift of All!, The Muppet Christmas Carol, An American Christmas Carol...A Christmas Story, National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, The Nutcracker Prince to follow tomorrow) I've decided to compose this, my Christmas Eve blog.



Santa's comin' to town with sequins in his hair...

We still pretty much adhere to the movie traditions described above around here even if, traditionally speaking, we adhere to little else. The silver tray of Christmas baking has been absent two years running and Christmas, at least as I remember it from a child/teenager/young adult's perspective, has certainly metamorphosed. There must be at least three dozen films about a protagonist struggling to understand a broken, altered Christmas and yet I was no less shocked to discover mine had changed in its turn just a few years ago (what's actually surprising is that it remained as consistent as long as it did!).

Of course, it wasn't really Christmas that changed but life that changed, while Christmas--as the culmination of a year in the life and the bonds therein forged and destroyed--merely came to reflect in some uber-concentrated way the life alterations of the recent past.

No, no one died or anything like that and I'm afraid such complexities of life and personal admissions will have to make their way gradually into the contents of this blog and will not be recounted and summarized conveniently here and now. (For all of you reading out there. The multitudes, the crowds...)

When Jesus Christ was nailed to his tree he said, 'O-daddy-o, I can see how it all soon will be. I came to shed a little light on this darkening scene. Instead I fear I've spilled the blood of my children all around.'

Suffice to say what I recognize is I'm certainly not the first to 1) encounter an alien Christmas and wonder where the time has gone, 2) look back on a year in conclusion and wonder where the time has gone and 3) feel lonely and sad at a time of year which promises, in its various forms, not one but all of the following things: a fat ass white man visiting and rewarding ALL the children of the world in a single night, a saviour borne of a single parent (if you don't count that omnipresent baby daddy) and a holiday that basically equates family and harmony (ha!).

So, indulge my Christmas whinings and letdowns, even if they are a mite predictable. After all, Linda was a poacher and I, as it turns out, am not much different.

Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night!

Perhaps I won't give it up entirely...

Dearest readers (of which, I am fairly certain, there are currently...none),

Since my inaugural post at least a dozen concepts for new blog postings have crossed right through my mind, dismissed as quickly as they were introduced. I am endlessly immersed in and consumed by randomish thoughts which, please recognize, are 1) in no way profound and 2) not really worth the time of the people in my life with whom I talk on a regular basis, so I really should make more use of this bloggerific creation to spew such nonsense into hyperspace.

(Note: I like pop culture so expect popcult posts to follow. A particularly scathing discussion of the craptastic and adolescent-hormone-sucking - ha! - Twilight has been stirring in my mind for weeks.)

You will also note I randomly posted some crap about having "purchased" "ownership" of a number on the web; a recent whim originating from a friend's facebook post. I am always impressed (and you should be too!) by my advanced ability to piss away my time, energy and focus on inane activities.

So why am I writing this now? There are several explanations up to the job of accounting for my reappearance. I have two weeks off work. I have two weeks off work and it's Christmas. I have two weeks off work, it's Christmas and I'm back home for 9 days. I have two weeks off work, it's Christmas and I'm back home for 9 days in my small Northern Ontario hometown. You see where this is going (...and a partridge in a pear tree!). This holiday season may prove a real lifesaver for my failing and flailing "blog;" the which you, gentle reader (Joss rip off), have the immense pleasure of enjoying (silent cheer for absent readership!).

All that being said, I don't really have anything to say at this point, at least not anything I would like to take the time to flesh out fully enough to publish it in blog form.

With that, adieu! until next time...

An example of something I accomplished instead of moving my apartment

I Own Number13431MillionNumbers.com

Things I have learned about blogging since becoming a "blogger" several hours ago

1) Knowing your witicisms exist for all to consume and worship in the great expanse of cyberspace, you tend to indulge re-reads of your own work in an attempt to capture the blog's faceless readership's first impressions.

2) After reviewing your blog several times, you wish you would have written everything differently than you did.

3) "I am obviously trying to living on the edge" is a blatant error.

Birthdays and blogs...

So, I've never blogged before and I don't really follow any blogs or read blogs all that extensively but here I am nevertheless.

Actually, the creation of this blog account probably has something to do with it being my birthday today, as I tend to do somewhat offbeat, out-of-character things like start a blog when I hear another year click into place.

Last year it was MySpace.

I've been on it maybe twice since.

Basically what I'm saying is that I don't anticipate my becoming a frequent or even infrequent blogger now that I have a page to endulge in the freakish public/private quality of the internet and ramble on about shit for strangers/friends to read. But who knows. Stranger things have happened.

Anyway, as you can tell, I worship at the altar of Joss Whedon (no, not really, I just like all of his work) and was an original Buffy fan, something original Buffy fans tend to stress to bandwagon Buffy fans in even the casualest of conversations. (I don't really know if casualest is a word and I'm even a little concerned I've used the wrong altar/alter for some reason. Normally I would look these things up before posting them anywhere. Today, because it is my birthday, I suspect, I am obviously trying to living on the edge.)

I like a lot of other things, too, which I'm sure I will speak about in blogs to come (those blogs I will probably never get around to writing). In fact, I have come to describe myself a fan of being a fan, caught in some mobius loop of fandom. Whatever that means. I've actually only described myself that way once before; twice, now, including the description contained in this blog. (How many times can I say blog in my first blog posting? This many times, it appears.)

That's all I really want to say right now. Are you supposed to sign off on these things? Probably.