Hey, It's Whole Wheat.

Finding news items like this is reason enough to get up in the morning.

See you at Krispy Kreme, baby.

The Oscars Are Over and I Feel a Little Woozy.

Here are some thoughts from last night's extrava-organza.

From the "red carpet" pre-pre-show:

• That fashion "expert" is saying that Jessica Biel's boobs are too big to wear that halter dress. I would totally wear that dress if I had those boobs. Mine would be lost in that dress. Quit being so gay, fashion "expert."
• The red carpet vultures are getting no good interviews. People just keep passing them by, pretending not to hear their plaintive cries. "Mr. Eastwood! Mr. Eastwood! ...I guess he's busy..."
• I was about to make fun of Ryan Gosling and his movie that nobody has heard of (Half Nelson? You mean like the wrestling move? Is it like Ice Castles, only with wrestling?), but now I feel bad because he's all about saving child war victims in Uganda.
• Then he goes and says this: "My mom told me that if you're making a decision for the money, you're making the wrong decision." aah.
• Nicole Kidman: didn't she read my blog from last year's Oscars? You know, where I was horrified at the large black blob trying to eat Charlize Theron's shoulder? And here she is with a large red blob trying to bite her neck. Pay attention, gorgeous people! You can't keep flaunting your gorgeousness like that, expecting us to forgive such atrocities just because you're otherwise perfect!
• George Takei is wearing the best gown of the night.
• Meryl Streep is so sure she is not going to win that she's thrown some old Grand Canyon souvenir necklaces on over her jammies. Bravo.
• Whoever that blond hostess chick is seems surprised that a 10-year-old isn't wearing "too much make-up."
• I love it that they make the press vultures try to entice their victims to come over to talk to them from behind hedges. It's like fishing for stars!
• Penelope Cruz: Why does it take such high tech engineering to make a dress stay on her body? It looks like she's wearing a suspension bridge with feathers.
  
• Somebody sewed sleeves onto the sides of Naomi Watts' strapless bumblebee outfit. I'm glad she realized they were sleeves and not just odd tubes hanging off the side of her dress at underarm level. Because that would have just been silly.
• I like Anne Hathaway's dress. Classy.
• Okay. Red hair isn't supposed to actually be red. I believe when they say red, they really mean a shade of orange. Patricia Field? I'm talking to you. Your hair should not match your red dress. Unless its Halloween and you're dressed as a crayon.
  
• I like Cameron Diaz's dress, even if some people say it looks like a half-eaten burrito. Her hair, though, is a disaster. Ironically, the color of refried beans.
• Cate Blanchett is perfect. Don't we hate her?
• Kate Winslett looks wonderfully pale. No sunlamps or spray-ons. Thanks, Kate Winslett!

On to the Ceremony!

• I like Maggie Gyllenhall and I like her dress.
• Lose the witty dance/silhouette thingies. Less than entertaining.
• It was almost worth the 5 hours of viewing to watch Will Ferrell, Jack Black and John C. Reilly belt out a "show tune" about comedy not being taken seriously.
• Yay, West Bank Story won Short Live Subject. Too bad he has to talk so fast to say something important to him, and yet they let that Hollywood Film Corral Sound Effects Orchestra go on and on. At least I'm assuming it went on and on. I left to pop some corn.
• That guy wins something for Happy Feet, but he didn't win anything for Babe? Bizarre.
• Quote of the night from William Monahan (Best Adapted Screenplay winner) upon making his way to the non-podium to accept his award: "Valium doesn't work."
• And what's with the no-podium thing? People are having to juggle their statues, or worse yet, put them down, to get out their little speeches. Ridic.
• That horse race mock-up thing is stupid and ugly. Get out.
• Just try not to like Tom Hanks. You can't do it.
• Anne Hathaway has eschewed the spray-on-tan look too. Drew says pasty is the new tan.
• Hah! That person I don't know just said "Stanley Kubrick, my great master." You just don't hear people describing their mentors as their great master anymore. Shame, I guess.
• Sherry Lansing wins Best Dressed Recipient of an Honorary Award.
• Gwyneth Paltrow is also sporting the Suspension Bridge of Tomorrow look.
• I liked when Jerry Seinfeld called all the nominated documentaries "incredibly depressing."
• What? This guy (Michael Arndt) quits his job as an assistant to Matthew Broderick to write Little Miss Sunshine and subsequently wins an Oscar for Original Screenplay? That's an awesome story.
• This always happens. One nominee blows the top off the place with their performance of their nominated song, and some other lame song wins. I first witnessed this back in 1975. I was 12 going on 13 and very impressionable. Someone once told me I looked like Liza Minnelli with my short hair and long eyelashes, so when I saw Liza kick some major Oscar ass with a show-stopping jazz-hands-a-flying ka-powie rendition of "How Lucky Can You Get," I thought the song was a shoo-in. Until they announced the winner: some whiny-ass hippy song called "I'm Easy" by Keith Carradine. Man. This year it was a medley from the Dreamgirls girls kicking vocal ass and taking vocal names. Then they open the envelope and find Melissa Etheridge's "I Need To Wake Up" inside. Man. SHE was even making fun of that song before the ceremony, joking that she had been able to rhyme An Inconvenient Truth with "youth."
• On that note, I'm going to go lie down for a while. I'm all academied out.
  

I'm No Boomer.

The Man keeps telling me I'm part of the Baby Boomer generation. I beg to differ.

Someone in The Man's Matrix of Knowledge has deemed that the generations break down like this: Seniors (born before 1946) Boomers (1946-1964) Generation X (1965-1981) Generation Y (1982-1999) and Generation Z (2000 - present). (Tom Bodett wonders whether we are in trouble, existentially speaking, since we seem to have run out of letters.)

My point is this:

• I don't remember JFK or MLK;
• I was 7 years old during the Summer of Love;
• I never screamed at the Beatles; in fact,
• I didn't curl up every Thursday or whatever to watch the Ed Sullivan show; and
• My favorite cartoon was Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner, not Howdy Doody, whatever that thing was.

I'm going to have to start my own tweener generation reference for myself and other 60 - 65 babies. I'm going to call it the Acme Generation. Because our generation keeps buying stuff and trying new stuff just try to get some dinner (let's face it, Wile E. is hungry - he just wants a Roadrunner sandwich), and the stuff just keeps failing on us. We got the Commodore 64 computers. We might have been able to play Pong on them, but once we touched the F1 button, the screen went blank, and there went $595 on 64K of deep fried RAM. We were told that when we grew up, we were going to get jet packs. All we got were VCRs and big hair. And my computer still doesn't work.
A more apt name would be the Disco Generation, but disco got a bad rap (again, the Acme curse). Thanks, Hooked on the Classics. If you don't get that reference, then you don't belong in my new generation. I suppose you could blame the demise of disco on all the coke, but every generation has their drug of choice. The Boomers had their pot. By the time I was in high school, the coke and qualuude references were flying so fast on Saturday Night Live, the censors could not keep up.
Saturday Night Live: another Acme Generation high point (note brilliant triple entendre). Get off of my SNL, Boomers!
More on this later. I'm just warming up.

My Own Duck

Since I stole that last duck picture, I took this picture at the zoo.

He's so fancy, he makes fancy ripples in the pond.

Field Trip!

My zoo membership has been burning a hole in my pocket this winter as it rained and snowed and rained with special guest wind. Today the sun was out, so I TOOK OFF. Actually I worried for an hour about the drive and my gas guage, left the garage, got about six blocks and wondered how I was going to manage to eat expensive and awful zoo food for lunch, turned around, ate a sandwich, changed my coat (because the first one seemed too, non-zoo-like), and then TOOK OFF.

This is what I saw: The meerkats in Portland are a little, um, rounder than the ones in Africa. But they are still good at keeping a sentry posted. Just in case.
This peacock was trying to impress some farm hens. It wasn't working. He tried everything. Even a cool shimmy move.
The polar bears were playing with this barrel. This barrel is made of sturdy stuff. They could make a commercial with these guys.
Die, barrel, die!
The tiger looking more fabulous than you.

This Blog Needs Some Eye Candy

So here's a delicious duck. Stolen fair and square from someone off the web. This duck has something to say. Too bad you don't speak duck.

Got One of those Sweet "Support Our Troops" Stickers?

Then you should read this.

Where We Celebrate a Sneak Peak of the Sun By Acting Like Overworked Peasants of Yore

The sun came out yesterday. The one sunny day in February we all wait for and absolutely drink. The sun gets so mobbed by all the sun-starved Pacific Northwesterners, it doesn't come back for four months.

Instead of playing in the sun, we needed to go out back and repair all the damage the PNW winter and two doofy dogs have done to the yard. I am talking chainsaw-size repair. The rot rotting away at our locust bean tree finally went too far this winter and the old fellow had to come down. Wonderful opportunity for chopping firewood and making a UPS truck-sized pile of brush into kindling and a smaller sized pile of brush at another location.

When we took a break for lunch and a trip to the yard & garden store, I managed to leave my purse, with about a hundred bucks, credit cards, gum, and a cool phone with a flower sticker at the local Baja Fresh.

Once I noticed it missing and sweated through every traffic light (all red - thanks, magic Drew!) back to the restaurant, I was sure it was a goner. But there it was on the counter. Someone had turned it in with every single dollar and stick of gum intact.

Thanks, good human, whoever you are!

Today I did more yard work. But it is all good, because my pants are loose.

So Angry Right Now.

So mad.

I must have mucked up something with all this ISP changing. Can't fix the toolbar. Can't re-install the toolbar. Can't download anything. Can't restore former settings. Comcast "Computer Doctor" program still doesn't think I have any internet communication at all, despite the fact that I'm talking to you right now.

So mad.

The dogs are hiding.

Tubes Untied: My Fruitless Search for Justice

So Comcast cost too much.

So we call Qwest and say, "Hey, Qwest, remember us? Come back and hook us up with some cheap DSL and a plain old MSN account, just like in the old days."

Two weeks later, still no plain old MSN account. Seems like MSN put an 0 where there should have been a 1, or vice versa. MSN, the leader of all things computer, could not figure out how to restore our service.

We called them back (okay, Drew called them back) and told them to kiss our asses and cancel our non-service.

Luckily, we had held on to our Comcast modem and account until we were sure we were squared away with Qwest/MSN.

So my job last night was to un-connect the Qwest DSL system of jiggers and pulleys, and re-install the cable one.

But something happened to the modem while it was biding its time on the bench. It could no longer talk. Talk, modem, talk! Say something!

Plug. Unplug. Screw. Unscrew. Restart. Restart. Restart.

It turns out that the "series of tubes" was just not full of internet goo yet, and I just had to be patient. This morning we're back in business.

And paying way too much. My nose hurts, we are paying so much. (Paying through the nose, get it?)

For Those of You Glued to the TV Coverage of Anna Nichole

Here are two stories about two Jennifers that you should pay attention to. Instead.

Citizen Power Isn't What It's Cracked Up To Be

Hey, remember when I got all mad at Comcast and their robber-like prices and headed over to Qwest for a DSL connection and even a dish if they behaved?

Man, was I naive.

Turns out that Qwest wants us to pay for DSL and some excellent MSN products, but doesn't really consider it important that we be able to use them.

After 10 days, one 1 1/2 hour-long "chat session," one hour-long telephone help-desk-from-the-basement-of-a-Mumbai-brothel session and two trips to our house by actual "technicians," I still do not have the use of this miracle of technology.

I hate them.

Sorry About the Hearing Loss.

Turns out that the reason our fax has been spewing "no fax" reports for the past several days when we have been out, is that it has been beating our answering machine to the phone and consequently screaming in everyone's ears.

Sorry about that.

I didn't pay much attention to it until today when I came home to a rather profane answering machine message that sounded exactly like someone receiving some unexpected hearing damage.

Oops. My bad.

I would blame it on Drew, as he was here when the fax was re-plugged-in, but we can't really expect him to configure electronics.

That's like asking an ape to crochet you an afghan.

You know he'll use that scratchy bargain yarn, and you'll just have to do it all over again yourself.

I Am Weak From Your Cuteness

Cute Overload, you have slain me once again with your onslaught of cuteness from naughty, naughty poodles. I'll be in the living room recuperating.

If You Loved Me You Would Buy Me a Chef

I could use a prep chef. You know, the one that stands in the kitchen and chops food for all the other chefs? All day? (Dream job? I think not.)

I know you're supposed to keep your fingers safely tucked under your knuckles, but I forget. And I get in a hurry, because who likes chopping vegetables? (Notice my hand is not shooting up, although I have lots of practice from my years as Teacher's Pet.)

I have cut myself while chopping vegetables so many times, I keep a stock of colorful bandaids on hand at all times. Winnie-the-Pooh ones are okay, but its hard to beat Hello Kittys. They breathe.

I cut myself so many times that when I lopped the top of my thumb off a year or so ago, I just put it back in place and bandaged it up tight. I wasn't sure whether it would work or not, but I figured, if it doesn't, who needs the last quarter-inch of your left-hand thumb anyway? I don't play the flute much anymore.

Turns out, it stayed pink and healthy, although a bit bulgy, and it's still there. A little bubble on the tip of my thumb.

There is currently a Pooh bandaid on my left pointy finger.

Yep. Chopping vegetables again. In case you were wondering.

Scrubs is the new M*A*S*H

TV stations love it. They often run long blocks of it. And on Saturday, when you should be doing so many other constructive things, it's so easy just to sit down, get comfy, turn it on, and watch the clock hands doing a jig around the dial.

While you veg. Although, I wish I could spell that "vedge." I think I'll start. It could catch on.