Happy Birthday

to my favorite.

Live-blogging the Oscars: a lude

8:31 - This may be a good time to mention that I'm not really a Jon Stewart fan.

8:31:30 - Mostly because he receives a disproportionately raucous reaction to every tepid joke he utters at full volume.

8:34 - A Hillary joke followed by a Jew joke in the first two minutes. WHO SAW THAT COMING?

8:35 - FOLLOWED BY A LAWYER JOKE. UNPRECEDENTED.

8:37 - Javier Bardem doesn't seem to enjoy veiled John McCain jabs.

8:42 - I've already switched from wine to beer.

8:43 - First Best Song performance. This is a good time to talk about the Friday night date night I had with my hubby this weekend. After failing to figure out the broken DVD player, we switched over to the On Demand free movie list, which seemed pretty lacking in promise.... to me. An excerpt of the evening's conversation:

Dan: "Hmmm, this doesn't look very go-- OH MY GOD HOWARD THE DUCK! I've been wanting to see that forever! Do you KNOW that you can't even get it on Netflix? And OH WAIT! OH MAN! LAST TANGO IN PARIS! Okay, we're fast-forwarding to the sex scenes, and then we're watching Howard the Duck. 'Bring me the butter...'"

Me: -----

A half-hour later

Dan: "I am in HOG heaven."

Me: ----

***

8:47 - "And now.... Oscar's most hateful moments."

8:38 - Does Spike Lee show up to this thing solely to be the requisite "Race joke! Quick! Cut to a recognizable black person! Where's Whoopi? Okay, where's the other one?" cut?

8:49 - My mother in law had a viscerally negative reaction to Ratatouille, owing entirely to the fact that it featured rats.

8:51 - NorBIT! NorBIT! NorBIT!

8:51:30 - Dammit.

8:52 - I absolutely adore Frenchmen who speak in fake French accents.

9:06 - Dan and I have been squabbling over who's rocking the Woolly Willy look better, The Rock or John Travolta.

9:10 - Not awarding a major award early on is such a mistake -- that's how you lose the husband vote.

9:10:30 - Dan has just suggested an antidote: have the Oscars co-hosted by Steve Carrell and Scarlett Johansson.

9:15 - Jennifer Hudson just had her Oscar revoked.

9:17 - First non-surprise of the evening (Best Supporting Actor Javier Bardem) just caused the dog to dramatically readjust his place on the couch.

9:23 - Second Best Song performance. This is a good time to try and explain why I hate Angelina Jolie so much. Okay, so first of all, she is not a friend of women. She doesn't seem to have any female friends, only male husbands and boyfriends she steals from women. One day I think Zahara will call her on this. Second of all, I think she's a wildly overrated actress and stunk in that dumb movie she won the Oscar for, and I say that not even caring that she tongued her brother. Mostly though, I hate her because I think she wildly overrates her own value as a humanitarian. When she travels to Iraq to raise awareness of the refugee situation over there, exactly who is she seeking to educate? The US Weekly readership? It just doesn't fly.

9:27 - I DARE Jon Stewart to make an Owen Wilson suicide joke.

9:33 - Jerry Seinfeld as an annoying animated bee totally works for me.

9:39 - One of the reasons I adore my husband is that he loves the oddly beautiful non-Americans: Rachel Griffths, Toni Collette and now, apparently, Tilda Swinton (who just gave an oddly beautifully awesome acceptance speech)

9:45 - Do you think the Technical Award nerds were pissed a hot PREGNANT actress hosted their awards this year?

9:49 - Dan likes the odd hotties, I like the Coen brothers.

9:51 - Peter "thirtysomething" Horton will play the lead in The Michael Bay Story.

9:53 - Third nominated song. Okay, I'll be honest, the superdelegate thing is making me nervous. I just don't trust the Clintons to seek any sort of truthful end result to this primary. Dignity just does not seem to be a coveted quality of their campaign (unless polled working-class Ohio voters suddenly put "dignity" atop their list of coveted qualities in their presidential candidate). And the whole bizarre Karl Rove-playbook accusation this weekend made my meta-blood boil.

10:01 - I have to pee.

10:02 - Peed.

10:10 - Okay, I'm just gonna say it: I don't like these foreigners comin' in and stealin' our Oscars. Where's Lou Dobbs when we need 'em?

10:15 - Forth nominated song. So inspired by Howard the Duck, Dan and I have been engaged in some pretty punny humor all weekend. For the one or two of you who never saw the greatest duck comedy of all time, here's a primer: a midget in a duck suit from another planet suddenly gets sucked into our universe, lands in Cleveland, meets Lea Thompson and spends the next two hours saying things like "that really ruffles my tail feathers!" and "That does it -- no more Mister Nice Duck." So Dan and I started reimagining the five nominated films as dog movies -- Atonemutt, There Will Be Bloodhounds etc. -- and OH WAIT! It's JACK! JACK'S BACK! Whoo hoo!

10:28 - Dan and I just counted, and shockingly I've seen more Best Picture movies than him -- those 50s musicals come in handy.

10:29 - Renee Zellweger, I know you're not supposed to insult someone by saying they have a lesbian haircut. However....

10:34 - Lifetime Achievement Award. Okay, so Nicole Kidman isn't quite as creepy-looking now that she is with bun, but there's still something so freakingly waxen about her. And it bums me out because I thought she was hyper-cute when she had normal hair and skin and lips, and she was still totally my fashion icon until maybe three years ago, when she married that country Australian guy who flat-irons his hair (which clearly inspired Tom Petty ahead of his Super Bowl performance, and do you KNOW that I can't even still talk about the Super Bowl and oh my god it's clearly cursed other New England sports teams because the Celtics have lost three in a row since the All-Star break and the Bruins, well, who cares, and but now I'm afraid that David Ortiz is going to break his groin during spring training?) and isn't it kind of weird how she became all Stepfordian only AFTER she divorced Tom Cruise given what Kat(i)e Holmes has become and...

10:39 - oh, commercial.

10:45 - Fifth Best Song performance. So anyway, Patrick Dempsey. So here's a dirty little secret. When I lived in Santa Barbara 15 years ago, there was this video store called "The #*&@* Video Store." You actually called it "The Fucking Video Store," but it was spelled the way I first spelled it. Anyway, it was about a block and a half away from my apartment, which meant that we never returned our videos because it was just too easy a process. So the two movies we had out forever were Dances with Wolves and Can't Buy Me Love. And, well, I loved Can't Buy Me Love. LOVED. But I HATED Patrick Dempsey, mostly because he was just a little too damn skinny and a lot too whiny. And so I still hate him today even though he's genuinely hot.

10:57 - Okay, forget what I said about Jon Stewart. I think it's genuinely awesome that he brought back the woman from Once to give her acceptance speech.

10:58 - And as if on cue, my dog just let rip with one of the smelliest farts that ever was.

11:00 - Okay, I'm lame, but the dead people montage always makes me teary. And it was a total dud of a dead lineup this year ('cepting for Heath, of course).

11:11 - So has anyone actually seen Enchanted? It's getting a lot of disproportionate play this evening, and BOY is that making my hubby angry.

11:15 - "I've served three tours in Iraq and all I got was this lousy Short Documentary subject?"

11-something - I've been totally distracted by reorganizing this blog.

11-something-plus-one - I so extra-love my husband for loving Helen Mirren as much as he does.

11:37 - So if anyone wants to really understand the emptiness of knee-jerk heretical film criticism, go read Stephanie Zackarek's criticism of Daniel-Day Lewis's performance in There Will Be Blood. It made me honestly a little embarrassed for her.

11:45 - Might I just mention that I love the Coen brothers?

11:46 - Okay, Denzel Washington has to be the least-offensive, least-drunk presenter of Best Picture in a long time.

11:47 - Good final win. Otherwise? BOR-ing.

Live-blogging the Oscars: a prelude

I'm cranky. I'm cranky because we spent two hours today shopping for local produce, dairy and bread in a sincere but semi-cynical effort to begin the 100-mile diet. I'm cranky because after the shop we headed straight to our favorite pizza place, but it was closed. I'm cranky because this afternoon I listed a pair of expensive leather boots on eBay that the dog threw up on a half-hour later. I'm cranky because the dog then ate the loaf of our new locally sourced, locally baked multigrain bread. And I'm cranky because I'm now being forced to watch Regis Philbin.

Let's play.

February is National Pet Dental Health Month

Plan accordingly.

Facebook

Okay, I think I'm done. I gathered 83 friends in about a week's time, using the following standard: people with whom I've had at least one memorable conversation (i.e. a conversation I can remember). So that seemed a decent standard and a decent number (although I'm sort of maxed out until I start having more meaningful conversations with near-strangers).

Then I started scrolling through all my other friends and got really annoyed. Journalists, publicists and LA denizens -- who make up a good chunk of my roster -- ruin the curve, since they know, or at least "know," about a bazillion* people at any one point. The more I clicked over to friends' profiles boasting three-digit friend tallies, the less popular I felt. And if there's one friend I'm not looking to reacquaint myself with anytime soon, it's good ol' Miss Unpopularity.

Then I got defriended. By who I couldn't even tell, but my number went down to 82 for a while, and I was crushed.

Also, because I hate having my photo taken, the only digital shot I had available is a four-year-old picture of me with my sister's dogs. And it's finally starting to dawn on me that pretty much all of my public-domain photos feature at least one dog. Which is just lame.

Meantime, I can't figure out how the hell NOT to send all these TV and movie quizzes to all of my other friends. Which is probably most annoying of all to my "friends," who were probably only looking to up their own tallies to begin with. So sorry, "friends" -- you shouldn't have accepted my "friendship" to begin with.


*the term "bazillion" got reintroduced into my lexicon this weekend by my adorable hubby. I like it. Somehow it seems greater and yet less-threatening an amount than "gazillion."

Steno notebooks

There are seven, half-used, on my desk right now.

2008's beauty resolution, unraveled

Eat better, take vitamins, do more yoga, blah blah blah.... my big beauty resolution this year was hair-related. I do get my hair cut and, uh, color-enhanced on a fairly regular basis, but it still looks like crapola half the time, because all the magazines tell you not to wash it every day, but if I don't my hair gets all gross and oily, but I believe the magazines, so I put my hair back in a ponytail, but I don't have any nice barrettes anymore (dog-chewing bait, those are), so I put it back with an elastic, but that makes me look like some sad-sack "Extreme Makeover" Before, but mostly I don't care. (Exhale.)

Except my resolution is to start caring. So. So this year I bought into a new trend: dry shampoo. My understanding is that this was a 1970s dud of a idea that has since made a successful comeback. At least, that's what the magazines say, and in case it's not already clear, I fearfully believe them. So a few weeks back I bought a bottle of spray-on dry powder shampoo and started playing with it. At first the can sprayed nothing but air on my head (the nozzle was clogged), and so I figured the powder was invisible and, suffering from the placebo effect, spent a few days admiring the volume and fluffiness that the "powder" had bestowed.

Eventually though, the can started dispensing a thin white mist all over my head, and suddenly I got it. My hair was huge, sexy and dry. I fluffed it out and I trotted off to work with Farrah Fawcett-like exuberance, convinced I'd finally solved the gross hair dilemma.

Except two hours later I looked in the mirror and saw that the white powder hadn't dissolved but instead was glaringly scattered throughout my hair and scalp. I looked like some eighth-grade thespian basking in the post-performance glow of her winning turn as the grandmother in "Into the Woods."

Except my actual secondary school acting roles were limited to parts like "Strawberry Vendor" and "Rabbit #8." But still.

My To Do list

... is cracking me up today:

Police
Hockey item
Yamada
1 pm bag
Gym
Platelets
Story ideas
Blog

Last night's indecipherable dream

Barack Obama won the Democratic nomination and Eli Manning died, possibly of a flesh-eating disease.

What does it all mean? I'm stumped.

A tale of two duties

The best part of my day: going to vote with the hubby and bumping into my sister at our polling place. I love that my sister and I vote in the same district -- even if we did split our vote.

The worst part of my day: spending seven-eighths of it ghostwriting a plea for money from a much-higher-up. Actually, it's not even a plea, it's a pre-plea: I'm supposed to get them all greased up for the money demand coming their way in the next month. All I know is that it's an arduous task asking for money when you know you'll never see a dime of it.

What can you say?

The Giants played better. And, I feel like it's unfair to be granted a World Series Red Sox win, a Patriots Super Bowl win, AND a Democratic presidential win in the same 13-month period. I'll take the first and third wins and humbly carry on into that great goodnight.

Overheard from a bride-to-be (or, Why I Eloped)

"and basically, the whole room will be a shrine ... to us!"