Pants Off Cook Off

I have to admit that I have been cheating on this blog with my new blog. It's actually a group blog--kinky, I know. It's called Pants Off Cook Off, and it's about cooking. Check it out.

Yet more health care woes

I decided to be all responsible and go get a physical since I haven't had one since the last millenium.

Serious mistake. First: my issues with needles have apparently not abated with time or with my new yogic breathing skills. I thought I was doing well--looking the other way, thinking about other things, breathing--only to wake up slumped over (that's why the chairs they use have a padded safety bar thing in front, it seems) with the whole staff of Quest Diagnostics looking at me worriedly and putting wet paper towels on my neck. It was a surprise pass-out, much more reminiscient of the Reading a Book In Which a Character Has an Uncontrollable Nosebleed incident in the laundromat in 1999 than the Attempting to Give Blood episodes of 1995 and 2000. So that's disturbing, because at least you want to have some forewarning of when you're going to pass out, you know?

Second: CIGNA will not pay for me to have a tetanus vaccine. This is very close to hilarious. Apparently vaccines are only covered under "medical" insurance and not "pharmacy" insurance, so when doctors do not stock the vaccine themselves (because they don't have the storage and it's more expensive to buy smaller quantities, apparently), but instead send you to a pharmacy to get it, the insurance company will not cover it. I spent 30 minutes on the phone with CIGNA and spoke to 4 different people, and they all said the only thing I can do is go to a different doctor who stocks vaccines.

Dealing with the medical system is enough to make me want to throw myself off a building in despair, and I'm totally healthy.

Gossip girl, mmmmmm

I only watched the premier of Gossip Girls last night because Kristen Bell (the erstwhile Veronica Mars, RIP) is the narrator. This is somewhat less than satisfying, because you don't get to look at her. And look how preposterously cute she is:

Ahhhh. But Gossip Girl was pretty awesome anyway. The premise is that Kristen, Gossip Girl, is an anonymous blogger who writes about the tomfoolery of the insanely good-looking, rich, jaded, ridiculously-named kids at a schmancy private Manhattan high school, as follows:

Serena van der Woodsen: Lovely, possibly sad, possibly bad blonde who would look like a Hitchcock heroine if she weren't falling over drunk a lot of the time (falling over gracefully, though); disappeared to boarding school in Connecticut last year under mysterious, possibly sad, possibly bad circumstances.

Blake Waldorf: The feisty brunette who used to be Serena's best friend, but resents her mysterious disappearance and re-appearance, and considers her a threat to the social power Blake has consolidated over the last year.

Nate Archibald: Blake's boring boyfriend who (SPOILER!) did it (yes, IT!) with Serena last year, unbeknownst to Blake until ~40 minutes into the premier.

Chuck Bass: Bad, date-rape-attempt-prone boy. You can tell he's evil because he combs his hair forward, wears ridiculous things like ascots, and uses the phrases "seal the deal" and "tap that ass" both in the same scene. That and the date-rape attempts (two in one hour!).

Dan & Jenny Humphrey: The Brandon and Brenda Walsh of this show--they're sweet, innocent, not rich, and from a frumpy, faraway land (Brooklyn). Dan's in love with Serena, and Jenny wants to be popular and is Chuck Date Rape Attempt # 2.

There are also an Asian girl and a black girl who I don't think got names yet. And some parental characters who, very much unlike the Walshes, are busy having illicit affairs and directing their children to sleep with their classmates so as to advance their business interests.

One could point out that Veronica Mars would hate these people and would spend her time finding out what crimes they're guilty of rather than writing "Gossip Girl loves parties" on a blog devoted to the minutiae of their lives, but who wants to be such a negative Nelly when you could just watch the teevee?

Status as home-improvement guru soon to be reinstated!

So we had the guy who previously built us new walls after we got air conditioning installed come over to look at the somewhat-destroyed-bathroom-walls situation. He said he'd come over and TEACH us how to fix it ourselves. He told us that he taught a guy (the son of Sen. Pryor of Arkansas, he said) to plaster his walls and he went on to become a professional plasterer. Mr. T&A would prefer that he just do it himself, but I am very psyched about learning how to do it, and perhaps becoming a professional plasterer myself. Yahh!

Wherein I use interior design principles in lieu of a lead dust test kit

DC seems to be entirely bereft of lead paint test kits,* so instead of using science, I put my powers of deduction to work. 

The layers we scraped off our bathroom were as follows:  top coat of off-white paint, almost certainly applied by Previous Owners in the 1999-2006 period. Then, wallpaper border, navy with teal and pinkish flowers in a kind of diamond pattern. Then, mauve/dusty pink paint which came off largely stuck to the wallpaper.  Underneath that was a kind of greige paint which stayed in place, and below that were bright pink and teal paint layers which we only saw fleeting glimpses of through the greige. 

I feel that the mauve paint must have gone up pretty much around the same time as the wallpaper border, both because they stuck together so much and because they coordinate.  And (drum roll), the mauve/navy/teal scheme MUST be from the '80s.  Yes?  And thus must not contain lead, because only paint from before 1978 has lead.  Yahhh!  All the vacuuming and 3-bucket stuff was thus hopefully just an unnecessary lark.

*The Home Depot on Rhode Island Ave. said they never have them although people ask for them all the time (which, then, why don't they order some?  but who am I to judge the wisdom of the Depot), and Logan Hardware says they usually have them but they don't now, or else they got some in on Monday but they can't find them, but they should get some more on Thursday.  They were very nice about it, though.

Plaster repair despair

Several weeks ago Mr. T&A and I embarked on the project of painting our bathroom. We were fresh off a smashing success in painting our office ("Plantain," a very nice yellowish green), and the bathroom is teensy, so it seemed like it should be relatively painless.

Ahh, the folly. We've spent eons chipping off layers of wallpaper and paint (the bastards who painted over a wallpaper border should be condemned to an eternity of trying to remove it). This has resulted in a disaster zone of cracked, holey plaster with random patches of paint. Tonight I attempted to patch some of it with spackle, but it was like trying to smooth out a 90-year-old's face with frosting.

To add to the problem, the other day, weeks after we started, we realized that our house is old so some of the paint we're chipping off probably contains lead. And we're having a baby shower here next weekend. (For somebody else, not me!) Pregnant ladies are not supposed to inhale lead dust. So now we need to clean the house using an EPA-approved method involving a HEPA vacuum cleaner and 3 separate buckets, and even so I feel like the worst baby shower hostess ever. (Plus maybe we've already lead-poisoned ourselves.)

Anyway, I have now officially hit bottom on the bathroom, and have acquiesced to Mr. T&A's plan to hire somebody else to do it. I now realize that I had been harboring visions of myself as a budding home-improvement guru, but now those dreams are dashed. Maybe I'll try gardening instead.

LinkedIn is freaking me out

I recently signed up for LinkedIn, the "career-networking" site that's like the tragic New Thing for those of us who were barely in the right demographic to have used Friendster in 2002 and are now too old for Facebook and MySpace. 

This thing HAS A TERRIFYING BRAIN.  It's like how the government is in movies--all-knowing and competent.  (Don't we wish!)  I signed up for it because 2 people from unconnected parts of my life--a childhood friend and Andrea of St. Scobie's Mock Whiskey--invited me to join, and I never turn down invitations unless I'm on death's door (afraid I might miss something, dontcha know).  So I get on there, and it suggests to me that I might know . . . 5 other people who I TOTALLY know, and who are (1) not connected to Childhood Friend or Andrea at all, (2) who I don't work with, (3) who I didn't go to school with, (4) who are not even all lawyers (so it's not like they're just asking if I know other 30-year-old lawyers, which would be a good guess), and (5) who don't all live in DC. 

How did it do that?  Normally I am either not surprised or not impressed by the mind-reading powers of the Internets.  Like, Netflix suggests you might want to to watch stuff that other people with similar rental histories have rented.  Or, why did Gmail put an ad for "Fat Bastard Talking Plush" (www.givemetoys.com) next to my email?  I don't know, but it was not a good guess, so whatever.  But the LinkedIn thing is both inexplicable and impressive.  Can we put it in charge of fighting terrorism?

Karl Rove implements Stage II: Jenna

Karl Rove resigns to "spend time with his family" (several years after his son has left for college), and then days later one of his former lackeys gets engaged to Jenna Bush. Coincidence? In the parlance of our time, LMAOROF. I predict that Operation KarlJennaMeld will be subtle at first: Jenna will start a whisper campaign about Hilary's affair with Rosie O'Donnell, maybe. Then the new Mrs. Henry Hager will take a job as a consultant to Fred Thompson's campaign, and her hair will start thinning. As Rove disappears from the scene--presumably into life as a private citizen, although few will ever see him--people will start calling Jenna "Boy Wonder" without knowing why.

Math takes on sex, kicks its ass

This article reminds me why I love math. 

Another haiku to my car

Hood flying open
On highway--pretty scary
This may be it, car

Metro grits teeth, smiles passive-aggressively at tourists

I love tourists in DC, especially the ones with fanny packs who look lost--they could be someone from my hometown! perhaps even my parents! I always ask them if they need directions, and smile so as to counteract the rudeness they have surely encountered in The Big City.

But I HATE HATE them on the metro. They don't know you're not supposed to stand on the left, so they block the whole escalator and inevitably make you miss your train. Not their fault, but enough to inspire medium-to-intense misanthropy (or perhaps touranthropy?)

Metro has instituted announcements ostensibly aimed at this problem, which are masterpieces of passive-aggression:
"Hi. Welcome to Metro. We have a lot of escalators in our system. You'll notice that most people stand on the right side. And while you're riding, hold the handrail for your safety. Enjoy your trip, and thank you for riding Metro."

It's all, "Hi, how was your day? Oh, that's great! Yeah, mine was good too. Hey, do you mind doing your dishes instead of leaving them in the sink because I just hate that when people live their dishes in the sink so the food dries on and it attracts mice it's really a pet peeve of mine like what do you think I'm your mother or something? OK, great talking to you! Have a nice night!"

I would like to think this is a mad genius attempt to communicate in terms Midwestern tourists understand, but some tourists are actually not Midwesterners, it turns out. Now the Metro will be populated by DC residents in ugly, sensible work shoes trying to shove their way up the left side past the Germans and Californians, on whom passive-aggressiveness is lost, while Midwesterners in sneakers and fanny packs cling to the right, terrified for their lives and worrying about what they did to make everybody mad at them. Tragic.

30!!!!

I'm 30 today. (!!!!!) I do not seem to have any new wrinkles or grey hairs, but I also do not feel a notably increased sense of inner calm. I guess there's still time for that, yes?

J. Scott Jennings had me hating him at "Odysseus"

I was prepared to almost feel sorry for J. Scott Jennings, the 29-year-old assistant to Karl Rove who got torn a new one by the Senate Judiciary Committee today when his boss refused to show up.  But then his prepared testimony said that the situation he was in "makes Odysseus's voyage between Scylla and Charybdis seem like a pleasure cruise."  Now I am back in my comfort zone of hating all things related to Karl Rove.  Ahhhhh. 

The 50 most relatively allegedly beautiful

The Hill has published its annual 50 Most Beautiful People on Capitol Hill article. As per usual, it's not very encouraging. See, e.g., :

(Charlie Hurt, one of the unranked bottom 40.) Perhaps realizing this drawback, this year the photographers employed the technique of standing very far away from their subjects, so many of the pictures convey only the fact that the alleged beauty in question has the standard number of limbs, and hair growing from the correct extremity:
(#3, Kathleen O'Neill, "The Jewel of the Hill.")

I find the 50 Most Beautiful very comforting because I can call the political party with 95% accuracy based on pictures alone. (Also because if I can't guiltlessly snark at these people, I might as well cancel my subscription to the internets and join an ashram right this second.) But a few of them evaded my Republicandar, which was highly unsettling. To wit:

Kathleen Taylor, DEMOCRAT! Why did this information not get through to her highlights, her eyeshadow, and her posture? It's like one of those neurological disorders where there's no connection between the left and right brain, so the person can see a key and use it to open the door, but can only call it a piano.

I am afraid of the Future Farmers of America

Today on my way back from buying lunch my path was blocked by a procession of kids in Future Farmers of America State Chapter President jackets. If you did not grow up in the Midwest, you may not be familiar with the Future Farmers of America (FFA) jacket. Here it is:

Cute and wholesome on one big-eared kid, but on 50 teenagers, blocking the sidewalk, all dressed alike, all with their jackets zipped all the way up despite the 90 degree weather--it sent a chill down the spine.

The internets have given me answers, but have not calmed my nerves. This power point presentation, courtesy (for some reason) of the Cleveland County, North Carolina school district website, explains the outfits. The FFA Official Dress involves an FFA jacket "zipped to the top." For women ("females,") it also consists of a "black skirt of appropriate length," a white collared blouse, an "official FFA scarf," and black shoes. (The State Chapter Presidents seemed to have added black hose to the mix.)

Also, the FFA crest consists of The Ear of Corn, The Eagle, The Rising Sun, The Plow, and The Owl. Who needs that many things in a crest? Suspicious.

Also, they were walking in the direction of the White House. Watch out, Illuminati.

The Preview is Sucking

Long before Harry Potter and His Dark Materials, I loved me some The Dark Is Rising. It's a five-book series that has everything you could want in a timeless fantasy story: British children with supernatural destinies, battles between good and evil, King Arthur mythology up the wazoo.

So my horror was very intense when, during the previews before the Harry Potter movie, I saw a preview for The. Worst. Possible. Movie. Version. Ever. I didn't even realize what it was for the first 30 seconds or so of the preview. It featured a pointy-faced blonde American kid who appeared to be liberally employing both lip color and cheek-contouring powder, and who looked like a 14-year-old Sebastian Bach,* except in a an upsetting rather than a sexy way. There was some clangy electric guitar music, and that guy who does the voiceovers of those slapsticky Christmas movies featuring Tim Allen saying, "Everything about Will Stanton's wife seemed pretty ordinary," and some other boy-actor calling Will "Bro." I thought to myself, "Why is this preview for one of those slapsticky Christmas movies showing in July, and where is Tim Allen?"

But after several scenes of boy-has-crush-on-girl, boy-goes-to-mall, all of a sudden the preview busted out the real actors and the portentous music, and it all became clear that it was The Dark Is Rising, except with an American instead of a Britsh kid, set in what looks like California but is apparently really Romania, and without any King Arthur mythology.

This is an easier casting do-over than All the King's Men:

Will Stanton: Modest British child who wakes up on his 11th birthday to find the rest of the world is in a magical sleep, and who finds out from a mysterious wizard-like figure that he is the last of the Old Ones, the Seeker who must collect Signs that will help the Light defeat the Dark. Does not have crushes on girls. Theirs: The aforementioned mini-Sebastian Bach, all with the iPod buds and the crushes on girls. Redo: Freddie Highmore! From Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Finding Neverland! Obviously!!

The Whole Point: Arthurian mythology, good vs. evil, British children. Theirs: The mall, American children with iPod buds. Redo: Read the books instead.

*I also love me some Sebastian Bach, both in his incarnations as the alluringly womanish front man for Skid Row and as the hilarious sandwich shop owner and guitar player on Gilmore Girls, but 14-year-old versions of him do very little for me or, I suspect, for anyone who is not a 12-year-old girl.

Harry Potter self-control

The f*^#king New York Times has POSTED A REVIEW OF THE HARRY POTTER BOOK. I'm not going to link to it lest I encourage their bastardishness. Apparently they bought it at some soon-to-be-smote-by-lightning bookstore that's ignoring the embargo.

Normally I do not avoid spoilers; I'll read reviews of anything, and will even go to spoiler sites for TV shows and such. I generally feel that if a movie/TV show/book is really good, then knowing how it ends won't ruin it for me. Also, I have an unusual ability to suspend disbelief and to be shocked by an ending even if I had already read about it.

But the end of the Harry Potter series, and all the anxiety about such matters as who dies, who's really a bad guy, and whether good or evil will eventually triumph in the world, is such a huge cultural phenomenon that I feel like knowing what happens ahead of time would totally screw it up. How could I go to Kramerbooks on Friday at midnight, and be near all those nerdy hyperactive children, if I'd read a review that alluded to the ending? What if my non-innocence infected all those little wizard-costumed chimps?

The problem is that I have absolutely no practice in avoiding spoilers. I wasn't tempted to go looking for the supposed photographs of the pages of the book, because it would take a long time to read them--but the NYT! It's right there, staring me in the face! Even the intro sentence, starting with: "J.K. Rowling's spell-binding epic ends . . ." BASTARDS!

Update: not so sicko

So I went to the opthamologist (sans referral) and she said I don't have pink eye. Logically this is a good thing, but now I am kind of embarassed (and want a refund on the 5 hours I spent calling doctors' offices and waiting in them).

Sicko

Warning--ranty:

I seem to have pink eye. Gross, yes? Trying to be a responsible human being by sparing others from bizarre infectious childhood ailments, I stayed home from work today with the intention of going to the doctor. I have a supposedly good health insurance plan (with Cigna).

I have spent THREE HOURS on the phone trying to get an appointment with a doctor. I finally found one who will try to squeeze me in this afternoon, but it is unclear whether my insurance will pay for it. My ostensible primary care physician (whom I have not met because I haven't been sick since I got this insurance policy) said she could not see me UNTIL AUGUST, infected eyeball or no. I called dozens of other doctors' offices from the Cigna list of primary care physicians accepting new patients, and they all either (1) never answered their phone, (2) were not actually accepting new patients, or (3) said they couldn't see me until at least next week. I finally called Cigna, who suggested I might try getting an appointment with an opthamologist instead; one at Howard University finally took pity on me. Then I had to call my PCP back to get them to fax a referral form to Cigna, but they said they wouldn't do it since I have not seen that doctor before. I explained my saga to them in non-calm tones, and said if the doctor wants to see me, that's great, I would come there right away, but if not she would just have to give me a referral, since I have to go to work before August and would rather not give all of my coworkers gross oozing eyes. We'll see what happens with that.

Having not been need-to-see-a-doctor sick in a long time, I really had no idea that this was how it worked. I thought that the reason people go to the emergency room for non-emergency treatments was that they were uninsured--but it would appear that, in fact, that may be the only way to see a doctor at all.

I feel like I could be a character in that new Michael Moore movie, and that makes me very unhappy because I hate Michael Moore. :(

Five random things

Ooh ooh, Andrea tagged me to tell 5 random things about myself! I don't really understand what this "tagging" is, but she said she was doing it, and since I am flattered to be included and like to talk about myself, I accept the tagging with gusto.

1. I am currently re-reading the extant Harry Potter books in anticipation of the last one coming out on July 21, and I am totally obsessed, to the point that I am doing things like reading while in the bathroom at work and while I walk to and from the bus, thus causing myself to trip a lot. The experience is making me feel like I'm back in elementary school, when I was always wandering around thinking about Narnia or Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory or Sweet Valley Junior High instead of, say, participating in elementary school. Now I wonder: was this really a mechanism to cope with the ennui of elementary school, as I always assumed, or was it just a natural reaction to reading really engrossing children's books?

2. Probably the reason I wanted to move to DC, both after college and after law school, was that I really liked DC as a kid. In particular, I liked the high ceilings in Union Station and the waterfront and cobblestone-street areas of Georgetown. Now I rarely go to those places. But I still like DC.

3. I am allergic to penecillin, cephlosporin, dairy, pollen, probably cats, and possibly alcohol, but not to poison ivy.

4. During a couple of summers, growing up, I did farm work--detasseling corn, to be precise. However, I feel like I am basically lying when I say that, because (1) I did it purely because I thought it was kind of cool, not out of any need for money, (2) I did it for probably less than a week each summer--it was the kind of thing where you just showed up at the park at 6 a.m. if you wanted to go, and I got tired of it quite rapidly and just quit going, and (3) I was very, very bad at detasseling corn; I definitely caused many, many corn plants to be pollinated by the wrong kind of corn (resulting in bad-seed bastard corn plants!) because I missed a tassel, or ripped it in half instead of pulling it out. So I was really engaged more in "walking through the rows of corn for minimum wage" than in "detasseling corn."

5. In 6th grade I got knocked out of the spelling bee on the first round, which crushed my fragile, obnoxious I'm-the-smartest-kid-in-the-room spirit, and the word I misspelled was "lawyer." (I spelled it "lawer.") Now I am a lawyer. I wonder if that is ironic, but I am not sure because I have been very unsure about the meaning of "irony" since seeing Reality Bites and realizing I could not define it, and thus being unsure whether I do, in fact, know it when I see it.

That was weirdly challenging. I tag Blonde Justice, Mr. 14 Empty Mountain Dew Cans, Laurie "Kitchen Cabinet" Barber, and Jake Mohan. (M, I'd tag you, but Andrea already did it, and I don't know what ill effects might result from double-tagging.)

My Dog Day

For one day last week we had a dog. I came home from work and there she was on the porch, a little hot dog with big eyes and floppy ears, hiding behind a chair. She had me at "I'm a tiny, furry, scared creature who doesn't bark or drool much, and look, I will climb right up into your lap."

The next day we found her owners. I know it was a good thing--the dog's decision to pee in our office while we were at work was a testament to how poorly equipped we are to handle an animal that doesn't go in a litter box, and also our cats would have killed themselves if we'd kept her--but still, as we sat there waiting for owners to come get her, I felt like a pitiful teenaged girl waiting to give up her baby for adoption, and wondering if it was too late to flee the hospital with the kid if the adoptive parents turned out to be meanies.

They were not meanies--in fact, the woman was British, which, what is more reassuring than that?, and they gave us a bottle of champagne which, for all I know, is fancy. I'm sure Maddy (that's her name, it turns out, short for Madison) is better off with them, but still, sigh. A haiku seems in order:

Daschund Madison
My favorite living hot dog
Vist any time!

Paris and the hoosgaw, and George Clooney and organic food

I am not yet sure what I think about the Paris Hilton kerfluffle, but there's no reason that should stop me from blogging about it, right? Here are my possibly internally inconsistent thoughts.

1. If Paris was let out of jail because of some serious medical condition, I am Monica Goodling. (Hint: I'm not.) Dudes get all kinds of hideous diseases and go entirely batshit crazy in jail all the time, and nobody lets them out.

2. At the same time, I did feel kind of sorry for Paris, what with all the crying and looking hideous--nobody wants pictures of that to be plastered all over the Internets.

3. On the other hand, maybe she DOES want pictures of herself bawling all over the internets. It would have been a lot less publicity-garnering to just serve her time rather than paying off the sheriff or whatever she did to try to get out. Also, presumably she could have suppressed the urge to scream and such. Unless she really is flipping out. Who can tell?

Those are my deep thoughts for today.

Other than: I really want to see Ocean's 13. I lurve me some George Clooney. Brad Pitt, I could kind of take or leave--if you look at hime closely, he has a weirdly huge head, and is not really aging well, whereas George is like a hotter Humphrey Bogart and will only get better with wrinkles.

I feel slightly guilty that I much more likely to go see huge blockbustery movies when they first open than I am to see small movies ever (i.e.: I saw Spider-Man 3 and Knocked Up on opening day, but still have not seen The Namesake, Waitress, or even Hot Fuzz). But what are you gonna do--I like the opening-day excitement. It's kind of like how I just read The Omnivoire's Dilemma and know that we should do more shopping at the farmer's market so as to not contribute to the doomedness of the world, but we're having a BBQ this weekend and will probably do most of our shopping at CostCo. Kind of like, I suppose, how I should be following the immigration bill or some such like today, but instead am updating Google News every 5 minutes for info about Paris. As my brother often used to say, quoting, I believe, Bart Simpson: You ask me, I blame society.

From the D.C. Office of Tax and Revenue's Lips to God's Ears

Realizing that here it is June and I have not yet received my "state"* tax refund from the D.C. Tax Man, I called said Man's Customer Service Number to ask where it is.  The Man's helpful Customer Service Agent told me I should get it in 5-7 days, and I asked why it had taken so long. 

He said:  "It looks like the computer just went crazy, ma'am." 

I love me some D.C. Tax Man. 


*The whole crappy "All The Taxes, None of the Congressional Representation" thing continues apace.

I Heart Leslie Mann

I saw Knocked Up on Friday, and as the reviews say, it's spectacular, nay, miraculous. In the course of telling the story of how Katherine Heigl got drunk, put on beer-goggles, did the deed with Seth Rogen, got preggers, decided to have the baby, made it work with said schlubby babydaddy, and gave birth in an extremely realistic, terrifying, and very touching scene, it will make you laugh, cry, wish you were a stoner geek, wish you were a beautiful Type-A television personality, plan to have a baby as soon as possible, swear off sex forever, decide Seth Rogen is the beautiful love child of Will Ferrell and Tina Fey, and respect Ryan Seacrest.

But mostly it gave me a new love: Leslie Mann. She plays Katherine Heigl's unhappily married sister, and she is a revelation. (The picture at left is from The 40 Year Old Virgin, wherein she also stole scenes as the drunk girl who puked on Steve Carrell). She's beautiful in that blond, small, delicate-featured, fake-looking way, like Holly Madison, Hugh Hefner's main girlfriend (who is also bizarrely fascinating in that she's fairly smart and the whole thing seems beneath her, but she seems to really believe she's in love with Hugh, not that I watch Girls Next Door or whatever, you know, I hear things), and has a teeny little high-pitched girl voice like Joey Lauren Adam's, but she's as funny as Julianne Moore in Big Lebowski and Sarah Silverman in whatever rolled into one. The hilarity is slaps you in the face even more pleasingly coming from such a Barbie-looking person.

Possibly the best scene in the movie is when Leslie and a very pregnant Katherine Heigl get shot down by the cute-girl-assessing bouncer at a club, and Leslie unleashes a long, profane tirade at him which she then winds down into "Doorman. DOORMAN!! Doorman. Doorman! DOORMAN! doorman." The bouncer takes her aside and tells her it's all true, that he can't stand the stress of judging people based on their looks, and that the reason he can't her in is because she's old as shit,* but even so she's totally fine and he would tap that ass if he could. As he pays her this thoroughly obscene compliment, her face relaxes into a look of pure, beatific joy, and I want to pee my pants.

The fact that Leslie is the wife of director Judd Apatow and that their two kids are also in the movie, and are also hilarious, is about enough to turn my actress crush into a full-blown stalkerfest for the whole family. (There they are, minus the littler girl, who they presumably left at home because they are also responsible like Mother Theresa and observe bedtimes.) Holy God, how can they muster the energy to dress themselves, given how much time they must spend rolling on the floor, quaking with laughter at each others' uproariousness, and/or gazing into a mirror and drooling over their unparalleled cuteness?


*IMDB says she's five years older than me, so if she's old as shit, I'm at least old as a fart. But if that means I can be more like Leslie Mann, I'm OK with it.

Curse you, Sprint M1, iTunes, and all consumer electronics

My old cell phone got rained on and died, the poor delicate flower, so I decided it was time to upgrade to a fancy one with a camera and a music player. I got this phone, the Sprint M1, which I think is kind of retro-cute like something out of the movie Tron, and which has the aforementioned camera and music player.

All good, except I WANT TO KILL THE DESIGNERS OF THIS PHONE, AND WHOEVER IS IN CHARGE OF ITUNES WHILE I'M AT IT. In the last 23 hours, I have discovered the following things:

1. The only way to put music purchased from iTunes onto a non-Apple device, like my fancy new phone, is to burn the music to a CD in mp3 format and then re-load it onto iTunes, or else download some kind of illegal-seeming software (note to The Man: I did not download any such software). This is because the files you buy from iTunes are in m4p format, or something, rather than mp3, ostensibly to prevent piracy or improve sound quality, but really so that you can only listen to them on an iPod or other Apple product.

2. You can load music you bought on CD onto the phone, but if you put it in the Music folder, which seems the logical place for it, you don't access it by going to "Music" or "Media Player," but through Tools --> File Manager --> Music. Then you can't play a whole album, just one song at a time, and you can't use the cute little "Play" button that's on the outside of the phone, you have to go in through these menus to pick a new song after each song is done playing.

IT SHOULD NOT BE THIS COMPLICATED TO USE A PHONE. I refuse to accept any blame for my problems using this thing, because I know I'm not an idiot. The problem is that somewhere along the line our society decided that Computers Are Hard And Complicated, and thus we have come to accept that you may need to spend hours reading a 300-page manual in order to use a phone, and also that there is any rational reason why you cannot play music you have purchased on a music-playing device manufactured by another company.

It's as if you bought a shirt, but it had 47 holes in it, so before you could put it on you'd have to read a treatise on which one is for your head and which ones are for your arms, and then also the shirt would self-destruct if you tried to wear it with pants you bought from a different store.

The problem is, what am I going to do about it? Do I return the phone to Sprint out of spite, which would hurt Sprint hardly at all but leave me, again, music-less and phone-less? And which might possibly just lead me to buy an iPhone when they come out because I know it will work with iTunes, thus perpetuating the iTunes copyright monopoly? Or should I just grit my teeth and figure out how to use it?

Monica Goodling is in da House. Of Representatives.

First impressions: Monica seems to have gotten a makeover from Ann Coulter before her testimony. She's bleached the crap out of her previously dishwater-blonde hair, but she hasn't cut off the unprofessional lenghth. She's curled the ends under in a girlish-tendrilly kind of look that I recall sporting circa 1992. Altogether, she looks fairly attractive in a mundane and unchallenging way, and older than her 33 years (bad skin); in other words, very Republican.

My genie has not granted my wish today--she has not cried--but other than that, the testimony is pretty riveting. Her voice sounds like a little chipmunk's, or a 15-year-old's. She starts off by reading a prepared statement which says: Deputy AG Paul McNulty misled Congress about the US Attorney firings (snap!), she may have asked excessively political questions of non-political career job applicants (way to take the sting out! somebody prepared her for this testimony), and she is a sweet little girl who went to public school (puke! not the going to public school, but the need to point it out) and then to Christian universities because she liked their emphasis on service (whatever), and she's really a quiet person who doesn't like to speak ill of anyone, but she will if she has to.

Whew, she really packed a lot in there.

Among the other highlights of her testimony so far: when she was asked about whether it was true that she blocked the promotion of an experienced criminal prosecutor because Monica thought the woman was a Democrat who couldn't be trusted, Monica said that she had had tension with the prosecutor, but attributed it to "two Type A women" working together. Oh. My. God. Monica: Throwing one Deputy AG under the bus wasn't enough, you had to drag all women down with you, too? Attributing your mistakes to the problems that are bound to arise when women (those catty, irrational creatures) are allowed to work outside the home does not do you any favors in the long run. And also, to whichever Representative let her get away with that: How was that an answer? Did you get nervous she might mention her period, and decide it was time to move on to other subjects?

Monica totally cops to blocking the hiring of a man who she assumed was a liberal because he went to Howard. Girlfriend just handed him a Title VII suit wrapped up in a nice shiny bow.

All in all, she comes off as much less of an incompetent idiot than Gonzales did--for instance, she can remember some events that occurred last year. Of course, this just means she refrained from getting lobotomized before her testimony, and also that she has immunity from prosecution, so she can admit mistakes 'til the cows come home.

They're supposed to be reconvening at 2, and I will be all over the live feeds.

Rehab needs to go to rehab

If I were Rehab, I think I'd be really pissed that I was getting a reputation as the go-to solution for people whose problems are mostly that they're an asshole . 

MonicaGate II

I am very psyched about the prospect that Monica Goodling, the former Alberto Gonzales aide who has so far refused to testify to Congress about the firings of the U.S. Attorneys, has been granted immunity and will probably be forced to testify. I will totally watch with glee as a 31-year-old with no qualifications other than a degree from Regent University Law School (founded: 1986, Pat Robertson; accredited: 1996; motto: "Christian leadership to Change the World"; alums hired by the Bush Administration since 2001: over 150) squirms uncomfortably about what role she played in firing 8+ U.S. Attorneys for not prosecuting Democrats.

I also hope they also ask her if she was really the one who suggested to Ashcroft that he cover up the ta-tas of statues the Justice Department.

I also kind of want to see evidence that, as rumored, she's a crier. Is that evil of me? Mwahh hahahahaha!

However, I was perturbed by a recent NYT article about how Monica was also in charge of refusing to hire career attorneys if she thought they might be Democrats. Not just by the anecdote that she decided someone was a "liberal Democrat" because he "graduated from Howard University Law School, and then worked at the Environmental Protection Agency" (translation: "because he was black.")

The surprising thing is that the NYT portrayed all of this as Monica's own devious plan, which shocked! Shocked! all those who found out about it. They refer to the hire-only-rabid-Republicans plan as "Ms. Goodling’s strategy," and say she "insisted" she be given final approval in hiring assistant United States attorneys when there was an interim U.S. Attorney.

Dudes. One. The fact that the Justice Department weeds out lefties in hiring for career positions is as much breaking news as is Britney's loss of her virginity. And, Two. How does it sound vaguely plausible that this 31-year-old was coming up with a hiring strategy for the entire DOJ on her own?

If this is a sign that Monica is going to let herself get thrown to the wolves in order to protect the people who were really making the decisions, that is going to totally blow my schadenfreude about her testimony.

Book Smart, Common-Sense Dumb

So, I fracked something up at work. I didn't commingle funds, or run off with a Senator's wife, or kill a man, so that's good, but I did fail to research somthing thoroughly enough, so I gave some bad advice.

This has sent me into a major spiral, like a Britney Spears visiting a barber shop, Rosie O'Donnell doing anything-level spiral.* I am worried that this is the confirmation I have long been awaiting that I am Book Smart, Common-Sense Dumb.

I started to worry about possibly being BS/CSD (sounds like an STD, dosen't it?) in high school, in part because people would often say to me, "T&A, you're book smart, common-sense dumb." My dumbness largely manifested itself in my wee driving problem. Between the ages of 16 and 18 I got into somewhere between 5 and 10 car accidents. With only one arguable exception, they were all the result of my failing to pay attention, and hence doing things like backing up in a driveway even though another car was parked behind me, or hitting the side of the garage while pulling the car out of it. Whoopsie.

I harbor no illusions that BS/CSD is a charming attribute. It was maybe funny when Reese Witherspoon did it in Legally Blonde, but by Legally Blonde 2 it had gotten quite old. And darlings, life is one long sequel.

Plus, really you could say that my Work Whoopsie is not so much common-sense dumb as it is book dumb, being as how it did involve looking (or not looking so much) at books. Which, then where does that leave me? Dumb/Dumb. Wahhh.

I can still congratulate myself that I'm not as dumb as Brooke on the Real World. In case you missed it, in the most recent episode she thought a jellyfish stung her foot, and she remembered that you should pee on it (which I guess is at least pamphlet-smart), but then she MADE HER ROOMMATES PEE ON HER FOOT. Which, dude, you can pee on YOUR OWN FOOT without trying AT ALL. But being less dumb than that is what they call cold comfort.

*Not really. Don't worry, Mom.

Overheard in the Gap* (Pentagon City)

First Girl:  I think the last time I bought anything at the Gap was, like, 5 years ago when I bought a sweatsuit for my grandma.  She only wears white, it's really weird.

Second Girl:  White's not flattering.

First Girl:  Well, my grandma weighs, like, 80 pounds.

Second Girl:  Sarah, your grandma's dead.


*Yes, I was in the Gap.  And I bought stuff, too.  I will not be ashamed!