Live-blogging the Academy Award miscues

8:31 -- Ellen calls Penelope Cruz Mexican

8:33 -- Ellen can't recall the name of the black guy from Blood Diamond

8:35 --Cameraman fails to locate Jew in the audience in response to Ellen's "blacks, gays and Jews" "joke"

8:37 -- Ellen dances

8:39 -- Nicole Kidman forgets to defrost her face prior to stage appearance

8:41 -- Academy decides the viewing audience can handle waiting an hour for first acting award

8:43 -- Dancing mimes??

8:47 -- Will Ferrell takes stage with dead poodle atop head

8:48 -- Dead poodle reawakens and springs atop John C. Reilly's head

8:59 -- Adorable little kid presenters inadvertedly underscore the falsity of all adults in Hollywood

9:05 -- Cameraman negates charming sentiment of short film director's "here's one for the little guy" speech by cutting to nepotism poster child Gwyneth Paltrow

9:08 -- Animal Planet fails to offer Puppy Awards counterprogramming

9:12 -- Academy fails to invite Michael Winslow of Police Academy fame to lead sound effect chorus

9:16 -- Sound effect guys don't make sound effects during acceptance speech

9:22 -- Meaghan loses $5 Supporting Actor bet due to Norbit factor

9:25 -- Ellen interviews Martin "Scuzzezzy"

9:26 -- Interpretive dance??

9:27 -- INTERPRETIVE PENGUINS??

9:30 -- Pizza and wing dings fail to arrive during James Taylor travesty

9:34 -- Al Gore forgoes pre-Oscar detox diet for pre-Oscar wing ding diet

9:48 -- Ben Affleck

9:50 -- Voters forgo one shot at hipster cred by failing to give Adapted Screenplay Oscar to Borat

10:12 -- Academy exceeds fat bearded guy Oscar winner quota with second Pan's Labyrinth win

10:15 -- Naomi Watts shows up in reasonable fascsimile of yellow Bebe dress I wore to 11th grade Thanksgiving assembly

10:30 -- Academy only sends interpretive snakes to eat Ellen

10:31 -- Writers pander to one-one billionth of home viewing audience still unaware of Ellen's lesbianism

10:59 -- Italian composer guy fails to shriek and climb all over the seats and declare his lusty Italian love for entire world upon Academy Award win

11:03 --Ditto Italian Babel guy

11:06 -- Ellen's new pantsuit fails to achieve desired "wowza!" effect

11:27 -- Three-hour Dreamgirls song and dance montage causes paroxysms of rage in Blog in Throat hubby

11:41 -- Eighteen-hour broadcast causes normally even-tempered Blog in Throat mother to send three-word email: "this show sucks."

11:49 -- Philip Seymour Hoffman pays follicle homage to Peter Jackson

12:13 -- Jack Nicholson pays follicle homage to Britney Spears

12:14 --Diane Keaton pays fruitcake homage to Britney Spears

12:17 -- Academy officially kicks off "Seinfeld in 2008" Oscars host campaign

My anxiety dream last night

Tom Cruise won the Best Actor Oscar for his role in the Battlefield Earth sequel -- and the world was okay with it.

I wonder if God's great chicken is of the food-court teriyaki variety?

Next to the Yuletide log, Puppy Bowl has to go down as the greatest piece of counterprogramming in television history. Although I always watch the big game, even when it's of the boring-as-an-egg-white-omelette variety such as last month's Christian Clash, I still find my way over to Puppy Bowl during second-half commercial breaks. Were it 1989, and were I not friends with the sort of folks who rip apart a totally innocuous catch phrase about two seconds after it finds its way into the popular vernacular (I usually wait about four seconds myself), I would happily give two snaps up to Animal Planet for its programming creativity.

But I'm equally appreciative of the stations that throw up their pukiest programs during big TV events, knowing they shouldn't waste quality programming on a 0.1 Nielsen rating kind of day. And so it was a few weeks ago that I found my way over to a movie called Amazing Grace during the halftime of the AFC Championship Game.

The movie starred Moms Mabley, the "octogenarian first lady of black comedy," according to a quick Google search. The word "inadvertant" should figure into that description, because what made the woman so hilarious was that she was mostly incomprehensible. Whole Moms monologues would go by without a single understandable utterance. I think she was trying to clean up a corrupt mayoral race or something, but the movie was clogged with too many soul cinema cliches to make much sense, and Moms' dialogue rendered impenetrable an already muddled plot.

Anyhow, all I know is that at one point, the inimitable Ms. Mabley stood up in front of a group of college activists, and, with tears in her eyes, managed to (sort of) say the following:

"Children, you are the breast, the thighs, and the dark meat of God's great chicken."

I've been holding onto this quote for quite a while now, because I frankly don't know what to do with it. It may be the most sublime sentence I've ever heard spoken aloud. Were it 1989, and were I not once a student at the kind of high school where students mocked you for carrying drugstore-bought school supplies, I would doodle that phrase all over my Trapper Keeper. As it is, I think I'll have to make it the new mantra of this blog. So from now on, there's a breast, a thigh, and a piece of dark meat in My great throat, and don't you forget it. Or in the words on Moms, dooonchoofuggetit.

Dear Cultural Anthropologists of the Next Century:

Greetings! How're those hydrogen fuel cell vehicles treating you? What? Those never came about? But we were totally led to believe they'd be all over our roadways by 2020! Bizarre.

Anyhow... I know you guys are really busy, what with trying to figure out the meanings of strange 21st-century terms like "civil liberties" and "Greenland," so to save you a lot of time and expense that would otherwise go towards researching the cultural values, mores, and trends of American culture circa 2007, I offer you the February 18 lineup of CNN.com news stories:

• Confessed Web addict sues IBM for firing him
  
• Sack of baby skeletons found behind hospital
  
• Lead amount in lunchbags unsafe; feds didn't tell
  
• 'One size fights all' in NY's free condom plan
  
• Corpse sat in front of TV for a year | Read
  
• China's New Year about the pig, family | Gallery
  
• Offender kills self after child-rapist signs hung
  
• Stylist: I tried to halt Britney shaving head | Read

And just like that, you understand everything that we were once about. Wasn't that easy? Now go take your grant monies and blow them on a nice meal -- I hear Rumer Moore-Kutcher-Federline III's new restaurant is excellent. But before you do, be sure to watch the news video about the blind windower found mummified in front of his still-blaring television more than a year after he died. It's really funny.

Love,
Meaghan

Yeah, but he only did it for a role

From the Access Hollywood website this afternoon (emphasis added):

"As for her new do, Spears isn't the only star to go follicle free. Among the many celebs who have sported the lock-free look? Natalie Portman, Demi Moore, Sigourney Weaver, Sinead O'Conner, Samuel L. Jackson, Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan, British actor Patrick Stewart, Winston Churchill, Moby and REM's Michael Stipe."

Cue the sound of a "fucking football field of women" puking

I'm never one to trumpet the superiority of married life over singledom. I was happy and unhappy while single, and I've been happy and unhappy while married. Which is to say, sometimes I'm happy and sometimes I'm not, and I've tried to hold myself pretty much wholly responsible either way. Except when my husband gets a little too slap-happy discussing his latest poo-blog entry; at that point, all bets are off.

Then I read about this guy, and every day since I've thanked my lucky dumplings I'm no longer single. Although really I'm just thankful that every woman I know, single or no, has dodged this fucktard.

If there's a silver lining to the death of Anna Nicole Smith -- and no, I'm not in actual mourning, all of you "I was more upset when Chris Farley died than when Princess Di did!" (male) readers out there -- it's that she quartered this guy's 15 minutes of blog fame.

Reasons I haven't been blogging much

In no particular order:

-Football playoffs. Killed my social life, killed my post-holidays "no drinking" pledge, and eventually, killed my spirit. Almost killed my remote control, too, after I smashed it into the couch post-Patriots' loss to the Colts.

-My biannual realization that this is a pretty useless endeavor driven in large part by useless worries about what past acquaintances would think of me if they met me today ("Uh, no, sorry, dropped the Russian, the French, the math, the sociology, the flute, and the basketball. But hey, check out my blog!")

-Six-day workweeks plus two three-hour classes per week plus three mammouth freelance dealies plus looming 10-day international travel creating hardline deadline for all of it.

-My "life is too short to worry about weight" mantra has finally caused me to gain a lot of weight, necessitating some sort of attempt to get back in shape.

-Sick as a dog this last week, I've been.

-Sick dog this last week, I've been dealing with.

-Late in December, I tried something. I decided that I would go cold turkey on my downtime online activities for a little while. No more reading of blogs of past coworkers or past exes or past rivals. No more reading of Hollywood gossip sites. No more reading of anything but the most essential news sources. No more Friendstering or MySpacing. No more idle Googling of girlfriends of 10-year-ago romantic interests. Etc.

And surprise surprise, 'twas a raging success. Not just in terms of time gained, but in terms of mindframe adjustment. No longer was I fretting about other people's successes or wealth or wit or beauty or travel or blog-comment tallies and how it all compared to my lack of same. I just got online, did my business for a bit, got off and went back to living my all-around good life. Online ignorance truly is bliss. The only downside was that less time online meant less time for blogging.

But I'm drifting back towards my neurotic tendencies, so look for semi-regular blogging to resume shortly. If nothing else, it's high time I wrote a long-promised blog about my sister, a dragon, and an unconscious sex act. Look for it.

Overheard in Boston

Most teeth-gnashing exchange I overheard this weekend:

Polite counterwoman to oafish male customer: "Here you are. Have a nice day."
Oafish male customer: "Do you have North African blood in you?"


Most redemptive exchange I overheard this weekend:

One college-aged girl to another: "He had ALL the railroads, which meant I would have owed like TWO HUNDRED dollars every time I landed on one..."