Horoscopes, Conspiracies, and “Udder” Stuff

Is this not the least useful horoscope you’ve ever read:

Sometimes you have to dry clean your dry cleaning and hand-wash your hand-washables.

Where’s the profound astrological meaning in that?  Is this some archaic saying homemakers used once upon a time?  i.e. Sometimes you have to pick your battles?  Sometimes you have pay extra to have someone else take care of the shit that you can’t do yourself because you would ruin it, and sometimes you have to buckle down, use some elbow grease and wash your fucking linens.  You made your bed and now you’re gonna lie in it–so long as you hand-washed the embroidered pillowcases and sent the down feather comforter to the dry cleaners first, young lady!

With a little tweaking that bit of wisdom courtesy of Yahoo! Horoscopes could sell a bunch of Dryel (the at-home dry cleaning product).  If I were a copywriter it would go a little something like this:

Sometimes you have to hand-wash your hand-washables, but who says you have to dry clean your dry cleaning?

Isn't this guy hilarious? I don't know what he has to do with Dryel, but he comes up when you do an image search for it. I'm going to name him Dreyfus. Dreyfus the Dryel guy.

 Also, bizarrely, Dryel’s website may, according to Google, harm your computer!  Get a load of this(!!!):

 What is the current listing status for dryel.com?

Site is listed as suspicious – visiting this web site may harm your computer.

Part of this site was listed for suspicious activity 10 time(s) over the past 90 days.

What happened when Google visited this site?

Of the 63 pages we tested on the site over the past 90 days, 16 page(s) resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user consent. The last time Google visited this site was on 2009-06-11, and the last time suspicious content was found on this site was on 2009-06-11.

I call foul on the dry cleaners of the world who are clearly conspiring to tarnish Dryel’s spotless reputation. Perhaps Dreyfus will put a stop to this.  Though I’m no homemaker, I posit that this is a battle worth choosing.

Glenn Beck: Phantom of the HDTV

Something terrifying just happened.  I was sitting alone in the living room in my parent’s house.  Typing out an article for an upcoming deadline.  Down the hall my dad was listening to the Phantom of the Opera soundtrack on repeat.  “The Deadliest Catch” was playing on the TV, but I wasn’t particularly watching it.  I was engrossed in writing.  And then, I looked up from my laptop, and all of a sudden, the station had changed inexplicably from Discovery to…Fox News.  From rough and tumble crab fishermen in the Bering Sea, to this decidedly different breed of man:

Turns out my dad records Beck, who he says "Has his act together," daily on the DVR. Resulting in his showing up unwelcome in my afternoon. Sigh.

Drinking malt beverages, pickin’ up hos–you know, just another Saturday night.

Do you ever take a moment to reflect upon what you’re doing at any given time and find yourself thinking things like, “Wow.  I never thought I’d find myself spending a year in Malawi with the Peace Corps!”  Or, “This is absolutely insane.  I’m about to sign my name on this release form at which point network executives will have full authority to edit everything I do and say for the next four months however they maliciously see fit in order to procure the highest ratings.”   

My moment came about ten minutes ago as I was readying my camera to take a photograph of the banana bread I’d just baked, a photograph that I would then e-mail to my mom along with a message saying something along the lines of, “Look what I did on my Saturday night!”  So, yeah.  I realized that I’m swiftly turning not into the extremely cool, edgy woman I assumed I’d be, and instead into…I don’t know.  A pathetic, bread-eating woman who listens to Rod Stewart at a reasonable volume so as not to disturb the neighbors she occasionally hears having sex next door.  I’m becoming that aunt who you see on the holidays.  She always has crumbs on her improperly buttoned shirt and she’s alarmingly out of touch with current events and popular culture. 

Okay, I don’t really think I’m that far gone, but there is still some cause for concern.  But, seriously–the bread turned out really good.  I’m not going to force you to look at it, because that would be a new low for me, but if you want to look at how awesome my banana bread turned out…

Hot Fun in the Summer

There’s something about the beginning of summer.  And there’s definitely something about the beginning of summer in New York.  Earlier tonight I headed over to Manhattan to catch a free film at MoMA, only it was “sold” out, so I resigned myself to the sculpture garden.  All the past times I’d been to MoMA it’d been winter.  I didn’t even realize they had a sculpture garden.  But they do!  And it ended up helping me reach an important revelation.  I’ll get to that in a second.

Have you ever seen 1938’s Holiday with Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn?!  I’m only about 30 minutes in, but Grant’s character, Johnny Case, just had this topical little line:

When I find myself in a position like this, I ask myself what would General Motors do? And then I do the opposite!

This was GM in '38. (No need to look at any GM photos of today.)

Okay, back to my sculpture garden revelation: people don’t care if you take their photograph when they think you’re photographing something else.  Because more than anything, I think people are fascinating.  And I want to capture them.  But it’s simply no fun dealing with someone in a tizzy because you’ve pointed and clicked them.  We’ve long debunked the idea that cameras capture your soul.  Therefore, I don’t think it’s a big deal if I shoot your face.   Anyway, here are some of my photographic stealths of the day:

If you can't be immature in the modern art museum, where can you be?

Also, I completely failed to get a digital converter box.  Screw the system.

My Neighborhood on a Grey Day

I was in a funk earlier, so I decided to walk and take photographs of the most depressing/poignant/thought-provoking things that struck me. Here are some of the results: 

Tireless

 

Men

The Chrysler Building

The Empire State Building

The Toilet

 

 

In case you couldn’t tell from the angsty tone…taking these ended up being incredibly therapeutic.  And I think I’ll undertake frequent photographic walks in the coming weeks.  It’ll be really good because…I don’t know if I’ll be in this neighborhood for much longer, so it’s sort of like spending quality time with an elderly aunt in the nursing home who’s on her last leg.  Only better.

Let this be a lesson to you all.

My toilet has taken to gurgling.  It’s kind of like the noise that people make when they are about to vomit.  As it is gurgling, the water in the bowl bubbles up in sizable air pockets.  Pockets the size of Big Macs.  Or RuPaul’s fists.  What causes this phenomenon? 

I can’t remember who it was, but someone warned my roommate and me that it was entirely possible for our toilet to overflow, thus flooding our already in a sorry state apartment.  Is it the rain?  Yeah, I think that’s what the person said–the rain paired with a ground floor apartment.  When the storm drains reach maximum capacity, the water has no choice but to displace itself into the surrounding dwellings.  Like a Myanmarian refugee.  Or Queen Latifah in the 2003 classic Bringing Down the House.  (Not to be mistaken with 1995’s semi-similarly premised Houseguest, starring Sinbad and a confusingly alive Phil Hartman.)

Only it’s too simple to say “hamburger-sized air pockets, end of story.”  Because the air pockets have become carriers.  They leave behind unidentifiable debris in the porcelain.  Some of it clings to the side of the bowl.  Some of it floats aimlessly.  So now, instead of “Look what the cat dragged in,” I will, while unzipping my fly, ask no one in particular, “What did the toilet bring in?”  It’s kind of beautiful, really: The toilet, tired of being resigned to always dispose of, has broken from its fetters, and is now a producer of. 

It’s a bit like that old Ben Franklin quote: “When you’re finished changing, you’re finished.”  I’m not finished.  And neither is my toilet.