Never Watch The View. NEVER!

So, I was watching a repeat of The View while I was making the bed last week and they were discussing gay marriage. The women represented about how you'd expect: Whoopi and Barbara in favor, Elizabeth representing the selectively moralistic and Sherri representing the fucking morons.

Poor Sherri, bless her heart, was just all twitterpated and conflicted about gay marriage. See, she's got these two gay friends and she even lets them around her son who refers to them as Uncles (see how forward thinking and progressive she is)! But she doesn't want her pastor to get sued if he refuses to marry some gay people. "America is litiguous, y'all!" she informs us.

Lookit: I was raised Catholic. One of the fundamental tenets of Catholic dogma is that women are not allowed into the highest positions of authority, solely because they are women. Women cannot be priests, bishops, archbishops, cardinals or the pope.

Odd, that: no one has sued the Catholic church over this. Imagine if G.E. had a similar policy; America, as Sherri told is, is litigious, y'all!

Ah, but hearken back to eighth grade social studies. Remember that thing about separation of church and state. Oddly, it goes both ways. This separation is not integral to the United States Constitution as part of some nefarious founding fathery plot to keep your kids from praying in school. It's there to keep the government out of churches; it's based in religious freedom.

But, Sherri sits there on The View throws out her "some of my best friends are gay" rationale, pretends she's open-minded, and blithely privileges the unthreatened rights of a few American religious leaders over the fundamental and absent civil liberties of millions of gay Americans.

I waited for Barbara or Whoopi to point this out. They did not.

Those women make me CRAZY. I probably saw about 30 minutes of The View in 2008, and all on days off when I was making the bed. And each of those 30 minutes resulted in making me CRAZY! I must remember: Comedy Central during bed making. Comedy Central. Never, NEVER, watch The View.

From Poetry to Pop Culture

What can I say, my interests are varied. I'm almost as partial to celebrity gossip as I am to poetry. If I stumble across a link about Jennifer Aniston, I am compelled to click on it. But in my trolling across pop culture sites, it seems like offputting fawning has been replaced by offputting vitriol. And, really, aren't they just two sides of the same coin?

A few days ago I clicked on one of those Jennifer Aniston links that I can't seem to pass over and in the course of the post they referred to "her withered up ovaries." That level of invective brought to mind the people weeping and rending garments in front of Princess Diana's palace after she died. In both circumstances, I want to change barstools while muttering, "sheesh, dude, get your own life" under my breath.

Thank heavens for the fug girls.

Poetry

I love poetry. I think I got this mostly from my father, although I suspect my mother would object. But Dad was the guy I boozily recited Houseman with. I want Laney to have poetry in her life, to love it like my Dad did and I do.

So after dinner I picked up my favorite poetry collection "Good Poems for Hard Times" compiled by Garrison Keillor (you should all have this collection... it's perfect and does exactly as the title suggests) and turned to a random page to read a poem to Laney. The poetry gods smiled and I landed on the following, which we had a good chat about. Laney and I decided that the poet was probably right about what the Whole Duty of Parents is.

(Listen to me: read it aloud. Poetry should ALWAYS be read aloud!)

Ode on the Whole Duty of Parents
by Frances Cornford

The spirits of children are remote and wise,
They must go free
Like fishes in the sea
Or starlings in the skies,
Whilst you remain
The shore where casually they come again.
But when there falls the stalking shade of fear,
You must be suddenly near,
You, the unstable, must become a tree
In whose unending heights of flowering green
Hangs every fruit that grows, with silver bells,
Where heart-distracting magic birds are seen
And all the things a fairy-story tells;
Though still you should possess
Roots that go deep in ordinary earth,
And strong consoling bark
To love and caress.

Och! I love that! How great is that: "stalking shade of fear"? Did you read it aloud? If you didn't, I bet you missed all the rhymes. Read it again. Aloud, dammit.

Alexander Pope described good poetry as "what oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed." I think that about sums it up.

Review (Pre-Post Mortem?)

I love Pushing Daisies. I've been parceling out the last few that I had on the DVR, making sure I was in exactly the right frame of mind to watch it. But, I've finished the recorded episodes and I think there are only three more episodes before its end.

It's no secret that I'm a fan of really good television. And this show so fits the bill. All the actors are wonderful; the leads are fantastic, but it's Chi McBride, Kristen Chenowith, Swoosie Kurtz, and Ellen Greene that can all, with just a look, knock your socks off. And sometimes Kristen Chenowith and Ellen Greene sing. I LOVE it when they sing. The writing is clever and cute without being cloying (some might disagree, but since this is my blog I get to tell them that they're wrong). The premise is wicked and intriguing. The costumes! But forget all that stuff. I'd tune every week just to look at it. Every set is a work of art.



I almost wish I'd watched it on on DVD like I did the other Brian Fuller shows (Dead Like Me and Wonderfalls) since then the cancellation would have occurred prior to having fallen in love with it. But now I'll have to be there when the ax falls.

And this is where good television fails you. A brilliant movie may be poorly received by the public, may only be available in limited release, but at least there's opportunity to get to see its start, middle and end. Same with a book. It's only television that yanks a great show off the air in its prime at the same time it leaves another show to linger on life support long after the plug should have been pulled (I'm looking at you, Scrubs).

Sigh, I guess Pushing Daisies (like Firefly, like Arrested Development, like Freaks and Geeks) just won't chance to tell its story.

Just a Quick Question

Is it just me, or is there anything more eye roll inducing than men who wear shorts in 15 degree weather? I hate that I get so irked by that. I mean, it's not MY legs that exposed to the elements in a Chicago January. It's really no skin off my nose. But, it's just so.... stupid!

I get it when it's 50. Shoot, even 40 and I can relate. But when it's a seasonable January, I just want to walk up to the dude and slap him.

* Edited to add: I just discussed this with Don and it hits me: this is labored, affected insouciance, which IS, ipso facto, irritating. That is all.

Blogging for Posterity: My Borderline Marxist Revisioning of Snow White. Part Two

Catch up with the previous chapter here.

Part the Second: In Which Snow White Meets Socialist Dwarves*

And wasn't the woman he brought home dreadful? She was beautiful to look at, but vain and absent and, to top it off, an evil sorceress. She brought with her a magic mirror which she gazed in nightly and said:

Mirror, Mirror, on the wall, who's the fairest one of all?

And the mirror responded:

The fairest woman to be seen is, in fact, you, my queen

And as the queen stared into the mirror and went about her evil sorcery business, Snow White carried on hanging out with household staff and worrying about the state of the kingdom. Until one day, the queen asked her mirror:

Mirror, Mirror, on the wall, who's the fairest one of all?

And the mirror responded:

Woe this day and woe this night, the fairest one is now Snow White

The queen flew into a rage, she grabbed a box from her dressing table and ran out of the room. The first person she ran into was Freddie. She ordered him to take Snow White into the forest and kill her. He was to cut out her heart and return it to her in the box.

Freddie, of course, did NOT want to do this. So he took Snow White out into the forest and directed her to RUN RUN RUN. Then he killed a passing stag and put its heart into the box. The queen, having failed to pay adequate attention during her high school biology classes, was fooled.

Snow White ran and ran until she came upon a ramshackle old house in the woods. She knocked on the slightly ajar door and when she received no answer, swallowed her qualms and went in.

What a mess! There were seven unmade beds and seven unwashed dishes. Snow White was feeling nervous and worried and so she decided to clean up in order to distract herself. So she did. And when the little house was spick and span, she was still alone in the house and freaking out. So, she decided to distract herself a little more and made some nice soup.

When the dwarves came home, they were greeted by wholesome smells and a tidy house. At first they were irritated by Snow White's presumption, but then they decided to sit down to dinner. Over good soup and fresh bread, they reached an equitable agreement: Snow White would keep house for the dwarves in exchange for room and board and a modest stipend.

An equitable arrangement indeed!

And so they passed several weeks quite happily. Until one day the dwarves were away and a knock came at the door...

Coming tomorrow, Part the Third: In Which the Evil Queen Presents Poisonous Mark Kay Products

*The dwarves aren't really socialist, except in that way that a fair exchange for goods and services are socialist. You know, Obama-style socialism

The Blog in 2009

I went on blogging hiatus over the holidays, mostly due to the effects of alcohol. This is not to say that I've been drinking the holidays away (although, it being the holidaze, maybe a little bit), this is to say that I have become increasingly aware that youth serves to attenuate the effects of drinking. And, I ain't no youth no more.

I have been thinking about this blog through the holidays and what I want to do with it. I started it about six months ago and I slipped and slid throughout a myriad of ideas about what it was supposed to be. I'm especially embarrassed by my failure to limit posts to 100 words of fewer. By this age, I should have known that I am just NOT pithy. And then I sort of figured out what I wanted to do here.

But I do have some bloggy resolutions for 2009, and in the interest of organizing my thoughts, I'm putting them down here:

1) No more self-indulgent whiny posts. Those are just embarrassing.
2) Slightly more review-y: I've always wanted to keep track of what I read throughout the year and this is a perfect place for it. I'd also like to keep track of plays I see, movies I love, even particular TV shows that I watch. So, review-i-er
3) Proofread!
4) Finish what I start. To that end, I exit this post to finish Snow White.