Twisted Spinster

Boy, can I whine with the best of them or what? I hope I at least do it in an entertaining manner. But it’s still the case that I am in dire need of funds, so any little bit you can contribute will get a huge thanks from me.That being said, I do hope someday to have a bit left over. And you know what I’m going to buy with it? A freaking connector for my car so I can play my portable cd player in it. I used to have one that used the cassette player in my car (there was this thing you put into the cassette player that you attached to the speaker connector of the cd player, and you could hear your cds), but it was in the glove compartment when that car got repossessed, and after that I didn’t have a car so there was no need to replace the connector. My ex-fiancé had this thing that used a signal from the radio to connect your cd player with the speakers in the car. That would work for me, as the old radio I have in my current jalopy does have a cassette player, but it stopped working. I don’t know if they make anything like that anymore — everything seems to have gone iPod nowadays. Well, I do have a Creative Zen MP3 player I bought a couple of years ago — that means 100 years ago in electronic toys terms.

I need something like this because the radio is driving me crazy. Radio sucks in Orlando. We have two rock stations — one “classic” rock (the same two ZZ Top and AC/DC songs they’ve been playing for over thirty years now), and one “modern” rock, which means endless repeats of Staind and that other band that sounds like Staind. If you’re lucky — most of the time it’s nothing but mindless pseudo-raunchy deejay patter, where the level of discourse is such as to make one long for the days when the high intellectual stylings of Howard Stern ruled the airwaves. And what is it with the death of the “radio voice”? Everyone on radio (and on tv — just try to listen to Chris Matthews or Greta Van Whatserface’s hideous voices without your ears starting to bleed) sounds not only like their favorite pastime is gargling broken glass, but they all seem to affect these reeely, reeely, like, yuh know, aged Valleygirl/guy speech patterns. No wonder Obama’s been able to sway millions with his disjointed clichés; the man does have a golden voice. It’s a conspiracy, or something.

PS: since I’m being paranoid, why do I get the feeling that come post-Election Day and the revelation that Obama’s hypnotic campaign didn’t work and we elected someone else to be president who had some sort of background in something other than nodding at his wife’s and pastor’s crazy rants — why do I get the feeling that there are going to be riots in the “inner cities”? This worries me just a tad, because I get to drive through a portion of that so-called “inner city” to get to work. There are an awful lot of Obama bumper stickers there. This isn’t racist, this is just an observance of the fact that the media have built this guy up to be the Second Coming on very flimsy evidence beyond the fact that he’s young, skinny (only the news media would make up something as off-the-wall as a supposed “fear of skinny people” on the part of the Hefty-American class; in other words, project much, news nuggets? It’s the news people that fear and hate fat people, which is why anyone running for president better have a workout regimen stricter than a Romanian gymnast’s, and why we’ll never elect anyone fatter than Bill Clinton (and he put most of the weight on in office) ever again), and of course of the approved “not white” color. His “ideas” are the usual ephemeral lite-beer foam, and would have been roundly mocked if they had come from any paleface candidate.

But the media do this all the time. They build things up out of nothing, and flog the story until they’ve made it seem like the most important event in world history, and then they are surprised when the shit hits the fan. For example, remember the O.J. trial? Of course you do — even if you avoided all televised and radioed mentions of it you had all your co-workers, who could talk of nothing else, driving you nuts. Or at least I did. But at base, was it really that important that a washed-up football player who had a few stints of lame acting under his belt may or may not have killed his wife? Well, one surprising, and even shocking thing I did learn was that lots of black people still remembered who he was.

And then there were the Rodney King riots… which I am convinced happened because the news media treated King like the Christ Child, just because his routine (for LA cops, anyway) beatdown got captured on videotape. And then there is something a little closer to my experience — the Miami Riots of 1980, which pushed back my high school graduation one week because the city was in lockdown. Not that I cared, but I did live just off 27th Avenue, which a few miles north of my neighborhood went straight through Liberty City. While all the “fun” was going on we would go stand on the street corner and look up the street (most Miami streets are very straight and long, and Miami is very flat) at the huge column of black smoke that were the remains of businesses and homes. This all blew up because the cops killed a guy they caught speeding on a motor cycle, and as he happened to be black and the cops happened to be white, the news media blew it up into a big racial thing. The media made sure to carefully note whenever they could that the jury was all white. Be that as it may, the cops should have gotten the book thrown at them — but guess who the prosecutor was? None other than Janet Reno, who as you well know went on to a brilliant career of convincing kids to accuse their parents of being Satanic child rapists, and then became Bill Clinton’s chief burner of weirdos (if you think Democrats will protect you for being a weirdo, the Waco affair should have been your first clue; leftists hate non-conformists way more than supposed rightwing fascists do — for one thing, rightwing fascists are often believing Christians, and one thing Christians are supposed to do is to recognize that they are no better than any other sinner; leftists have no such inhibitions).

Anyway, this is all just to say, beware: the media does this sort of thing all the time. Expect lots of post-riot pseudo-agony along the lines of “where has America gone wrong?” and so forth, but look for the note of glee under all the anguished expressions. It will be there.

Okay, I realize I’ve promised to write more — I mean what’s the use of having a website if you don’t write in it? — but I’ve been distracted by the necessity of keeping home and body together. Here’s the update: I still have this job, but I don’t know for how long. They’ve been interviewing a bunch of people, and even though I turned in my resume I don’t know if they’ll end up taking me on permanently just because they’ve been training me to do this for now. Also I’ve been burned so many times now that I just don’t trust my circumstances like I used to. I just get the feeling that I’m going to end up back on the street soon.

Also, as usual I am short of funds — meaning flat broke, and with a negative balance thanks to the ridiculous charges the bank is hitting me with, since my overdraft account is also empty. This temp salary isn’t much. It all makes me want to start keeping my money in a sock under my pillow. But I’m afraid my cats will eat it. The younger one is already mad at me because I won’t let her go outside to eat weeds so she can throw them up on my rug later.

I don’t complain about the price of gas because it’s pointless, but I’ve had to stop driving places for lunch in order to save gas. Well that saves me money too, and also keeps me from getting 1) fat on fast food, and 2) sick because no one washes their hands anymore. I try to look on the bright side.

I’m thinking more and more of investing in some potted vegetable plants. The only problem is the cost of the pots — the plants themselves aren’t that expensive, and a couple of bags of dirt aren’t that costly either. I don’t want to plant directly into the soil (the mulch bed on the patio just has sand under it anyway) in case I am unable to pay my rent and end up having to move. Anyway, it would be great having bell peppers in a color other than green. Red, orange, and yellow bell peppers tend to sell for $3.99 a pound here, which is ridiculous. They tell me there isn’t a difference in taste, but I can detect it, and the red and orange ones taste sweeter to me. And there are other vegetables I’d like to eat fresh but for some reason vegetables cost the Earth in Florida. I thought this was an agricultural state but maybe that’s from when I was a kid. If not, then where the heck do we send our vegetables? They can’t all go to the local farmers’ markets.

Anyway, I’m running a bleg, for gas money for this car as well as fuel that will allow me to gas on on this website (har har har). Isn’t that paycheck just burning a hole in your pocket? (Speaking of gas money, I saw one of those tiny “Smart” cars in a parking lot the other day. It was bright yellow. I looked it up, and it only gets about 36 miles to the gallon? Oh, but this is an automatic. Hey wait a minute, why is a car the size of my shoe being sold with automatic transmission? What’s the point? Also, I’ve heard them going down the street — the engine sounds like a coffee can full of angry metal bees. I swear. My car sounds like that, but it’s thirteen years old and in bad need of an oil change. And it gets just over 30 mpg just in the shape it’s in. So there.

Update: on the other hand, maybe soon I won’t have anything to worry about. And neither will anyone else…

Good God, I went to the grocery store to buy some trivial, unnecessary items (like, you know, food), and I cannot believe how much things cost. I’m trying to eat a healthier diet of lean meats and fresh vegetables, but it seems that just about everything is some ridiculous price like $5.99 a pound. And that’s not even going near the even more insanely overpriced organic stuff, which all the stores are promoting to the sheeplike shopping public. I’m pretty sure that’s one reason food costs are going up — they figure if idiots will buy spotty, smaller “green” produce for a third again the price of something grown in, I guess, fields that aren’t dirt, then they can jack up the prices of everything. And of course there is the ethanol scam and fuel costs in general. I am officially over this recession/non-recession whatever it is.

Anyway, here’s how I feel now every time I go food shopping:

I’m seriously thinking of growing my own vegetables in pots. If only I didn’t have a black thumb…

I do think I’ve found a description of the Ultimate Weirdo, described in the comments on Tim Blair’s site:

Jeff Goldstein had yet another troll make really disturbing comments about his kid. Because of a unique handle he used, he guy was fairly easy to track down and it turns out he’s a real whacko: a Furry who’s also into “adult diapers”. One of the comments he left at a Furry forum was this:

I’m an incontinent sheep and proud of it!

Please, Universe, no more…

The torment continues, my pretties… As I warned you, I’m not done with Doctor Who yet. For one thing, I’ve been following the exploits of all ten Doctors via this web comic. Amuse yourselves while I do laundry. (Note: the author hasn’t finished his saga yet — the most recent panel was posted yesterday.

Up next: Silurians! And maybe a review of The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai if I ever get around to watching it today.

And boy aren’t you all relieved. Though there are all those classic episodes not to mention past unreviewed episodes from this season to blog about… Muahahahaha!

Anyway — well, that was a mishmosh of hurried scenes. And then there’s the Soundtrack From Hell, never shutting up, never letting the viewer figure out by his ownself what emotion to feel at a scene… I’m glad that the BBC is employing Welsh musicians and all, but can’t they pay them just as much for a subtle flute motif, or for some of that weird, spare electronic stuff the old show was famous for? I never thought I’d be nostalgic for Moog synth bloops and beeps, until I found myself having to struggle to hear dialog over shrieking trumpets and crashing cymbals.

More thoughts: the heck with plasticene monsters, if I were a kid the note of utter misery this season ended on would have me suffering months of nightmares, while the “terrifying” notion of the universe being destroyed by creatures in tin cans would have long been shuffled to the back of my memories. I am beginning to think that maybe I’m an alien — if not a Time Lord, then at least a member of a race that doesn’t forget what it’s like to think as a child once adulthood is attained. Children are a lot more immune to the supposed “horrors” of fictional death and destruction and a lot more sensitive to the “everyday” mental and emotional trauma caused by mere human relations than adults seem to grasp. This has been something I came to realize at an early age, but that’s another story.

Another thing: it occurred to me that especially in the hands of Russell T Davies that the Doctor’s character has been treated like a prick tease. And in this episode we finally get the bitter unboyfriend in the person of Davros, who acts out the dream of every gay boi who’s been in unrequited love with an unwitting glam straight, by trashing said straight in front of the straight’s fashionable friends. Davies’ handing over the reins of the show’s control to another can’t come too soon… but we still have the shortened 2009 season to deal with, and I think Davies is writing at least one if not most of those episodes. Also a horrid thought occurred to me: just because he won’t be executive producer anymore doesn’t mean he won’t get to write more episodes. The horror, the horror…

One final note: a lot of fans were in hysterics about it but I didn’t find the dispensing of Donna to amnesiac oblivion all that bad. Of course the “make the character forget all the wonderful things that they did so they can live a normal life” is a lame fictional contrivance, but what else could they do with her character? Clearly having her travel with the Doctor “forever” was impossible — for one thing, a nearly immortal being isn’t going to cart about a human after retirement age (the show has attempted to point that out on more than one occasion — this is one of the strengths of the new show) so the only other way to get rid of Donna would be to kill her outright. And in any case she turned out to be one big Deus Ex Machina, and you know what always happens to those. If you ask me she missed a bullet; Donna fans should be grateful she didn’t get the Adric treatment.

PS: by all accounts the new executive producer, Steven Moffett, is planning to dispense with such “classic” villains as the Daleks. Thank God say I — those tin-can Space Nazis passed their shelf life long ago. And speaking of Nazis, what was up with Martha encountering Frau Blücher in a mysterious castle in Germany? Do the writers of Doctor Who not realize that there haven’t been ominous, mad-neighing-of-horses-causing women in Germany since Katarina Witt was born? It would have been funnier — and scarier — if instead of the stock hefty humor-impaired Teutonic female they had had Martha encounter a black leotard-clad metrosexual whose response to the Doomsday weapon that was the Osterhagen Key was “Yes, Ve are doomed and I am filled with remorse, and it is most delicious.”

But you decided to ring my doorbell on Doctor Who night.

Herewith a further installment in the fascinating account of the contents of the Netflix envelopes in my mailbox.

As much as I love the current Doctor Who series (which I have already expounded upon ad nauseum), even I occasionally get tired of the bishonen-boy sweetness and light. Well, I’ve found an antidote of sorts in a role that the actor who plays the current doctor, or more likely his management, doesn’t seem all too interested in recalling to the public eye. That would be David Tennant’s over-the-top portrayal of Your Psycho Ex–Boyfriend in a sharp little thriller called Secret Smile, which is basically a Lifetime Movie of the Week on steroids.

Never mind the kids hiding behind the couch — Tennant goes at the part of Brendan Block with such relish that the parents will be hiding behind the couch. Brendan is on the surface a rather rootless ne’er-do-well who seems to exist solely to make the supposed protagonist, a rather ordinary girl-woman of the modern type (snazzily careered up — she’s an architect with a half-done flat and an Apple notebook — who isn’t averse to taking a strange man home for some hot anonymous sex) miserable. Her name is Miranda Cotton (all the character names are these oddly Hobbity things), and the actress who plays her is either more subtle than I was able to catch on to or has had one too many botox injections. (To indicate intense emotions she purses her lips a bit harder.) Miranda picks Brendan up at a skating rink and he’s the stranger he takes home for a sex scene guaranteed to make teenage girls who write Tenth Doctor/Rose fan-fiction squeal in glee. (This is neatly bookended by a rape scene near the end that seems to have been inserted solely to traumatize those same fans for life.) Unfortunately, Brendan turns out to be a sort of male version of the character Jessica Walter played in Play Misty For Me. Only instead of getting crazy, he gets even.

As written and acted, Brendan’s character is despicable, yet I found it impossible to not become a fan. Here’s Brendan smacking a hysterical woman who has been so far the sort of insecure, needy pill that even the nicest of us has itched to slap once in our lives; there he is barging in upon our heroine, who by the way never seems to think of changing the locks on her doors despite her initial upset that Brendan had lifted her spare keys, to bellow menacingly at her (in this scene Tennant is wearing the Master’s coat and leather gloves, rrrowrr! Tell me John Simms didn’t watch this movie for pointers); here he is gloating over Miranda’s accusation that he married her best friend (dumping her sister on their wedding day to do it too!) for her money and house: “Isn’t it wonderful?” Okay, maybe this makes me a bit of a psycho, but if you don’t half want to push the heroine’s annoying whiny “depressive” brother off the ledge he finally jumps off of, after Brendan’s “helpful” coaching, then you are a better person than I am. In the end, the only way to get rid of Brendan for once and for all was a bit of subterfuge and the apparent fact that in the UK you can be put away for murder for life on no more evidence than a set of bloody keys — no body needed. Brit readers, if I have any, can this actually be true? If so, then as much as I am an Anglophile, here’s one more reason to be glad we Americans broke free of the Empire.

(Secret Smile is not recommended for family viewing unless said family consists of adults with an astringent and unforgiving view of human nature, and a very black sense of humor.)

Today I woke up in the Bearded Spock Universe! I can think of no other explanation for the fact that Our Betters in Congress have made the extraordinary assertion that slavery in America was the worsest, most awful slavery in history — not only that, it was uniquely bad, utterly unlike the institution of slavery as it was known throughout the history of the human race. Never mind that Western nations were the first to realize that maybe the ownership of human beings by other human beings was wrong and not a basic and necessary underpinning to human society as it was regarded throughout history in just about every country in the world. And still is, in many non-Western countries.

Yep, that’s what we’ve got to look forward to under Great Lord President Obama: four to eight years of this sort of contest to see who can come up with the most complete display of self-abasement. Fun!

No, I’m not quitting blogging, like some other people, I’ve just been too exhausted when I get home to do anything but watch half a CSI episode (any CSI, I’m not picky when I’m tired) and drop into bed. Also, just about every day it’s been raining, which in this part of the world also means thunder and lightning, and after the great nic card fritzing event of 2006 I refuse to leave the computer plugged into the modem when it’s like that outside, so that puts a crimp in things. Also I haven’t found much worth blogging about — not even the upcoming presidential election. I will say this — Obama does have a great voice; I saw one of his I’m-gonna-save-the-world campaign ads on tv last night. He’d make a great tv news anchor. Unfortunately he is running for president, and I can’t think of any reason to vote for him other than 1) he’s half-not-white, so you can vote for him and tell all your friends that you’re not a racist, you voted for an Official Black Man; and 2) he sounds so good and you are one of those craven souls that needs to be led by someone with an impressive voice unlike that potato-mouthed Dubya chimp. The sad thing is there seem to be a lot of people like that out there.