lots of luscious free time this week, but precious little to blog about. was on the verge of feeling guilty for not working hard enough till i ran into christian today coming home from the gym, who said that he's basically not done any work, like, all summer, and then the feeling went away.

other stuff:

1) for our inaugural movie night this week, the brother and i netflixed wilde, whereupon he finally understood why the dvd was not to be found in the police state (BANNED, for "promoting" the "homosexual lifestyle"). once again: why was stephen fry not cast as horace slughorn?

2) i'm all for eco-friendly/sustainable farming, but our locally-grown summer squash just isn't very good. it's not meaty, if that makes any sense at all, more reminiscent of those squishy brown cucumbers that i hate (what are those called?)

3) learned from the sunday nyt crossword: LATRIA, one of the three levels of worship, the other two being dulia and hyperdulia. why do they not teach us awesome things like that in catechism? also, if hyperdulia is for the virgin mary, and dulia is for the saints, what is it called when you pray for the intercession of deceased relatives? so many important questions!

4) oh, and when i'm back this week, remind me to tell everyone at home the story of the mother and a clockwork orange, which i've refrained from reporting here at her behest.

in what may well be anti-climax of the decade, the other housemate moved out, and the brother moved in on thursday this week. this is a cause for minor celebration, as i (probably) no longer have to contend with crumbs/spills/unwashed dishes/stolen beer/unbagged trash etc etc. also, if you happen to be sharing a house with someone, please don't steal their beer. it's very uncouth. i hope one day to make a List Of Things That Are Fair Game When Put Into a Common Refrigerator: yogurt, bananas, carrot/celery sticks, etc. but NOT BEER. never beer. and especially not dogfish head aprihop.

in other news, i submitted, this week, a crossword to the LA Times, and my meta-analysis to psych bulletin. guess which possibility of acceptance i'm more excited about. (this is not a rhetorical question).

not for grad students

got a piece of spam today with the heading "Your Data Is Lost", and nearly had a heart attack.

have been watching kings, a show that started out promising but very quickly devolved into nonsense. the conceit was cool: a modern-day retelling of the biblical stories of the kingdom of israel with ian mcshane as king saul/silas and christopher egan (who?) as david. the producers also started out on the right foot, i think, by selling the show to nbc, and investing a ton of energy in art direction: everything is starkly lit and carefully crafted without having the awful glossiness and glare that the particular style often falls prey to. there are also some quite lovely moments in the pilot -- for instance, a scene where david confesses to his dying brother that the act that made him a hero (standing up to a 'goliath' tank) was not what it seemed ("everyone thinks i'm brave, but i'm not..."), prompting his brother's last words to him: "be brave now".

unfortunately, the pilot is more or less where the loveliness ends. it very quickly becomes apparent in subsequent episodes that the show has a number of fatal flaws. first, chris egan can't really act, and you can almost picture the vets of the production (mcshane and susanna thompson especially) getting increasingly frustrated with that. i mean, look at alias. lena olin, victor garber and ron rifkin combined couldn't combat the awfulness that was jennifer garner's "acting". second, the writers resort very quickly to the preposterous situations that should be reserved as last-resort ratings grabs or season cliffhangers at worst, with members of the royal family exposing themselves to deadly viruses and generally running all over creation trying to get themselves killed. i mean, c'mon. little common sense goes a long way.

which brings us to the biggest problem with this show. it doesn't seem like the producers/creators spent any amount of time thinking through how an absolute monarchy in a modern technological society would work. (or if they did, they needed better consultants. were you really short of unemployed history phds?) that was the coolest part of the show for me when i started watching -- how does this system run? unfortunately, it doesn't seem like the writers intended to go anywhere with the idea, choosing instead to spend time on pretentious symbolism, ridiculous lessons in "theology", and the cringe-worthy love affair between david and the king's daughter.

sigh. on to the next heartbreak

in the LAT crossword today

"Composer" of "Fanfare for the Common Cold": (P.D.Q. BACH)

self-diagnosis

while downloading music last night, it occurred to me that i have a very bad case of e-hoarding. what i usually do when i discover a new band is download their most popular songs, listen to the first 30 seconds of each, and move the ones i like onto some sort of current playlist. the rest of the music goes into the big slushy mess of other songs on my ipod, quite often never to be played again. every time i go through this, it crosses my mind that i should just get rid of the songs i don't want. i never do, though, not because i'm too lazy to, but because -- well, you never know when you just might want to listen to that horrible kings of leon song just one more time. corroborating evidence: i still have every single journal article, syllabus, paper and electronic assignment that i used or wrote in college, sorted by class and semester. further corroborating evidence: i have archived e-mail dating back to 1995 (!) including correspondence with A01A people i haven't see for close to a decade now. i feel like this is quite close to being a diagnosable disorder, except that within the next 10 years people are probably going to have a video recording of their entire life from birth hanging in a tiny chip around their necks, so maybe i don't have it so bad after all.

4th

since i'd hosted the thanksgiving dinner last year, i figured i may as well go the whole hog and host a 4th of july bbq as well. (with apologies to the brother -- you'd said you had plans. i thought of you!) there was a lot of meat, and a lot of beer, and nothing caught on fire that wasn't supposed to, and we managed to get a decent spot afterwards out on the parkway to watch the fireworks with sheryl crow* singing her 2 hits over and over again, so i count that as a success. speaking of the brother, i actually was going to say something rather similar to what he did, which is that independence day here is a lot more fun than back home, although ironically i often am a lot more drunk in the police state because i'm usually sitting in front of the tv downing shots of whiskey every time the ndp commentator says something from a list of pre-determined shibboleths. this is likely to be the plan this year as well, btw, so if anyone would like to join me in drinking to the clusterfuck that is our celebration of mediocrity and the destruction of the human spirit, you are more than welcome. i have a preference for jameson, but am open to suggestions.

* seriously, start naming sheryl crow songs now. despite how famous she obviously is, i defy you to name more than 5**. please don't e-mail me if you can.

** no, that one was by shania twain.