You're Doing It Wrong

Another typical Thursday morning. I thought I had so much more time than this …

Here’s a list of the 100 Most Mispronounced Words. For example– Don’t Say: triathalon. Do Say: triathlon. Comment: We don’t like [th] and [l] together, so some of us insert a spare vowel. Pronounce it right, spell it right.

Today was a perfect sunny spring day in winter. My first day since sometime in October where I didn’t wear tights. I even wore my skinny pants today because I can fit into them fine without tights. I ate a banana, meusli and yogurt for breakfast. And a sliver of coffee cake. For lunch I had 1 1/2 pieces of pizza and some raw vegetables. And I ate the crust. In the afternoon I ate 2 chocolate chip cookies that I made last night in between The Sopranos (Tony’s back!) and The Simpsons (repeat). For dinner I had 3 tiny pieces of pizza and salad and after I had dried apricots and some It’s Soy Delicious “butter” pecan ice cream.

I was as thrilled as the next Elf-freak about Lord of the Rings’s success at the Oscars and I don’t know who all took the gamble on Peter Jackson but they deserve the grand prize for taking a risk on that guy. (And I think, considering the bazillions of dollars the movies have made, that the risk takers have done just fine.) What brings me to this topic is a film called The Frighteners made in 1996 and starring Michael J. Fox and directed by … Peter Jackson. This movies rates a 73% on Rotten Tomatoes and I’d heard it was good and defied genre etc. and since I’m studying scary movies right now and since I think Peter Jackson is so fantastic, I rented it recently. As Jar Jar Binks would say: PEEEEYOOOUSSA. Bob and I started watching it together and Bob left before the first act break. I finished it, and it did have a few elements to recommend but the dialogue was consistently painful and the special effects didn’t quite work. MJF saved the day and we are damn lucky that PJ has improved much since then.

After Christmas I bought some Saranwrap on sale. It was “festive” holiday wrap and there were pictures of snowflakes on the box and I thought that meant there were snowflakes on the wrap so I was all excited and bought Saranwrap even though I normally use Reynolds wrap. Holy Crap. Saranwarp is garbage! It’s worthless. Mr. Saran ought to be ashamed of himself. And there are no snowflakes. It’s just plain red and not even particularly festive. It’s a pain to tear off. It’s a pain to wrap your stuff in. It is just plain wrong. At the market tonight I bought Reynolds Wrap in festive green and put the Saranwrap in the back cupboard for emergencies.

Bob and I spent the night in Olympia so we could cruise around downtown this morning before heading home. We didn’t have a place in mind for breakfast and were sure if we wandered around something great would pop up. Of course it’s never that easy and we tromped around finding interesting places that were closed and alterna-cafes with colorful awnings and dogs wearing hemp collars tied up out front. We went to the outdoor outfitters sale tent to see if someone could point us to something good and the guy said, “I’m not much of a breakfast person.” We decided to walk up one more block and passed an old van with Yoda on the dashboard. I said, “Look Yoda, it’s a sign.” At the next block we saw a guy leaving a restaurant with a styrofoam container. Bob said, “It was so good he took his extras with him.” The place is called The Urban Onion and we got a great booth in the corner and they poured a delicious cup of coffee. I got huevos and Bob got an omlette with smoked salmon and cream cheese and substituted the potatoes and toast with two pancakes the size of bus tires. After breakfast we went to Orcas books where I bought a large pile of books to go into the stack I’m already too busy to read. A perfect day.

We went to Tacoma for Wintergrass yesterday. We ate dinner at Over the Moon Cafe a place we found by accident at Wintergrass 2 years ago and have been looking forward to returning to ever since. We rushed in to catch Sam Bush followed by Barbed Wire Cutters at the church and then went back to the Sheraton and went up and down the stairs between the convention center and the ballroom plus caught Jimmy Gaudreau & Moondi Klein at the bar. As per our usual luck, we ended up sitting near obnoxious talking people in the convention center. Why go to a kickass bluegrass festival and then stand in the corner with your friends talking and being squirrely? Also the hot accessory this year was a tiny baby. There were tiny babies everywhere. I have a theory that if you have only 1 tiny baby, other than the sleep deprivation and large satchel of baby-shit you have to haul around, you can pretend that your life still hasn’t changed all that much and you can get out and do the things you used to do. In the ballroom they were trying something new and had the chairs cleared out for dancing. It was only partly successful. There was the requisite hippie guy with dreads wearing a skirt dancing away, the hippie chick doing interpretive dance, 1 or 2 couples doing organized couple dancing and a bunch of grown ups dancing with their kids. No large scale hippie mob groove.

X Files

I’ve been in the mood to watch X Files lately. I found some moldy tapes in the video closet and watched both Tooms episodes (season 1) a couple of weeks ago (still creepy). This week I rented an Episode 3 disc from netflix because I wanted to see “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose,” the one with Peter Boyle, which was just as good as I remembered. The whole disc was classic. Remember the first three seasons when XFiles was unbeatable TV?

The first two episodes on the disc were season openers which completed a 3 episode story that had aliens in train cars and Indians and stolen files and Krycek. I convinced Bob to watch the fourth episode, D.P.O., last night. Giovanni Ribisi and Jack Black are in it — GR plays this nutty guy who fries people with lightning while loud rock music blasts. JB gets fried in a shower of quarters. Awesome.

From the San Francisco Chronicle — finally, someone’s said it: Too Much Positive Reinforcement

“… Like everyone from Paris Hilton, whose attorneys confidently announced in the middle of her sex-tape fiasco that “Hilton is a model and actress (and) is at the beginning of what she had hoped would be a long and prosperous career,” to President Bush, who wears his below-average credentials like a badge of honor, Rea was suffering from what one might call Too Much Positive Reinforcement: the belief, against all available evidence, that one is meant for special things.

“TMPR has now reached epidemic proportions. How else to explain the legions of the talent-free who wait in line for days for a chance to show their stuff [on American Idol] — then are stunned to be told they don’t make the grade? After decades of upper-middle-class parenting designed to shield Junior from all possible failure, and from any honest judgment of his talents, it’s no wonder we need television shows like “American Idol” and its fellow showcase for TMPR victims, “The Apprentice.” These shows are delivering the spanking — sorry, the time-out — that our culture of bloated self- evaluation is subconsciously craving. Their success signals that we may be reaching the end of a long national delusion. There is simply not room enough at the top these days for everyone raised to believe they belong there — and, deep down, we all know it. …”