"Puppet wrangler? There weren't any puppets in this movie!" – Crow T. Robot
This1 is cute, but a little boring after awhile. This and this are pretty neat2, as is this, which is something I’ve always, coincidentally, thought would be nice to implement locally or between friends.
1 found through Speckled Paint
2 as is Rebecca’s Pocket, where I found them
The other day, Maggie of Fluffy Battle Kitten wrote: “It would be so super good if every morning when you woke up you could genie-in-a-bottle yourself to whatever age you wanted to be that day. You could wake up and be like, ‘eeny, meenie, moogly woop today I want to be 44.3 years old’ and then shazaam you would be 44.3 years old for the day. Then you could try bunches of ages before deciding the age you’d stick with most days. You’d need to take a test when you turned 18 in order to get your genie in a bottle age changing ability though.”
If I had been given that choice when I woke up this morning (now, I guess, yesterday morning), I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have chosen to go with twenty-five. But as this birthday has dragged on — and man, has it dragged on — I think I’m learning to live with it. Give me a year and twenty-five will seem like second nature to me.
Here’s the thing: if you spend four and a half long hours glued to your television watching the Academy Awards — and I did last night, although I skipped most of the early speeches and spent the last half trading jokes about the ceremony with friends online — then I don’t think you’re really in a position to say that the awards ceremony is irrelevant and a complete waste of your time. Certainly you can critique the ceremony itself or find fault with some of its winners, some of its policies — most definitely its length — but to say that celebrities are inherently evil and then rant about how the Academy Awards are a meaningless exercise of self-congratulation that we as Americans should not be watching…well, maybe it’s just me, but isn’t that just a teensy bit hypocritical? If the show is such a waste of your time, why would you spend so much of your time watching it?
That is, I think, at least part of the problem with Cintra Wilson’s review of last night’s show in today’s Salon; she alternates almost schizophrenically between pointed (sometimes deserved) criticism and fanboy-esque prose that one would accept, maybe enjoy, but probably not admire in a weblog, much less in a professionally produced online magazine. She has interesting things to say, but just as often she’s embarrassingly angry or enthusiastic, declaring the Oscars “obscenely superfluous” while at the same time professing her love for elements of the show or individual presenters. Compare these two observations, for instance:
Ron Howard is a completely adequate and, I feel, aggressively non-genius director. His choices are deeply, unapologetically pedestrian. He possesses lots of clunky homegrown skill and absolutely no lightning bolts of wild inspiration, which is why that script was a brilliant choice for him…
I do not want to love Owen Wilson but I am enslaved. He’s a fuckin’ badass genius. I read the “Royal Tenenbaums” script, and I have to say, it ruled so hard it made my stomach hurt from spleen and jealousy. It was better than the film. I want to be Owen Wilson, either that or eat Owen Wilson, with fava beans and a nice chianti.
Again, maybe it’s just me, but do these even sound like they belong in the same article? And if the thrust of your argument is that the Oscars are “the gargantuan, ass-licking brainwash of the year,” why waste so much of your time anxiously discussing Tom Cruise’s teeth or Jennifer Lopez’s hair?