how does pop culture invade your vocabulary?

for example, i always say "doh!" when something goes wrong or i drop something and "yoink" when i take something from someone. this are totally stolen from the simpsons.

i also say "frak" all the time which is originally from Battlestar Galactica (it's their future curse word) but I picked it up from Veronica Mars and she picked it up after she went to a BG conference. So it's one big media loop.

Tontreal

I had a very weird dream last night. Spain and Canada formed an alliance to start some genetic testing. Basically, they were going to do experiments on babies. So Canada decided that the experimental babies would be marked by having "Tontreal" as their birth place on their birth certificate. ie, Montreal and Toronto. Tontreal was repeated over and over in this dream. Maybe about combining different places I feel I belong to?

Dreams are interesting, huh

Swatties are HIGH-larious

I was watching Last Comic Standing, a show I always thoroughly enjoy, when I started laughing really hard at these two beyond queer guys who were playing straight Jesus freaks. And then I realized they sounded familiar. I searched my gmail and realized that the duo was a group called God's Pottery and that they are Swatties. I had received a few emails earlier promoting them from the Swarthmore NYC digest. Anyway, they are by far one of the funniest groups on the show. Their schtick is to pretend to be positive, Jesus loving do gooders. So for the Yo-Momma jokes they did all good jokes, like "your momma is so terrific that she got elected mayor...by a landslide!" Please check out their website godspottery.com because they are simply hilarious.

Here's a bit from their website:

"Their first song was entitled, simply, "Jesus." After an overwhelmingly positive response, Jeremiah and Gideon returned the next Sunday with a follow-up tune, "Jesus Jesus." The next week, they played "Jesus Jesus Jesus." As the crowds swelled and word started to spread, it became clear to the boys that they were on to something big."

A foot in the door

Today was my first day at Channel 13. It was interesting, invigorating and quite exciting. I can't tell you how weird it is to wake up in the morning glad to go to work. A near year of instability has made me really treasure this three month opportunity to not think about making enough money. Plus I got a cute id card!

The hyper-Real World aka "Mexi-loco"

The Real World Hollywood went to Cancun and then they went to Playa del Carmen. Watching this episode was like revisiting all the tourist-infested Americanized and drunken bits of Mexico that my friends and I tried so desperately to stay away from. I was amazed how two different groups of friends could go the same places and have opposite experiences. At my end: the free beaches, historical day trips (tulum, etc), the 30 cent taco places and Playa Walmart (with a mole bar, mmm), the great cheap hostels with interesting peeps, the long public bus rides and inner city experiences. For the Hollywooders: four star hotels that look like the Marriot, private tourist only beaches, swimming with dolphins, cruise rides and fire dancing! All included a way of avoiding the Mexico in Mexico and going for (baja)California with an accent. Well some MTVs never change.

The Tudors: Sexy and Geeky

My newest obsession is Showtime's The Tudors, a drama focusing on the life and loves of Henry VIII. The show is sleekly stylized and richly historical. It's fun to watch the soap opera melodrama, the well groomed bodies (ie all the medieval guys sport razor cut, ruffled, and slightly gelled hair) in glorious costume and surprise, surprise...actual historical depth! The show delights in those little history in-jokes that one would only get if you had some knowledge of the time period. One of the jokes was King Henry telling Thomas More that he wasn't a saint with the "yet" winkingly implied. And of course the show plays upon the history we do know: all about how Henry divorced, annulled and beheaded his wives. So I watch poor Anne Boleyn do her thing all the while knowing she's going to the axe, but also give birth to one of the most famous and influential women in history (who also has her own television series, The Virgin Queen). I like my melodrama with a smart edge, so I'm enjoying the tudors.

PS Also a good show for both genders. Lots of fighting and political stuff (and boobies) for the boys, and emotional drama and setting for the girls (plus JRM's dreamy blues)

Big Love

More boutique HBO! Big Love is a show about Bill Henderson, a business man in Utah with three wives. The strength of the show lies in its negotiation of the main characters' polygamy. Or to be more precise, the reason I watch Big Love is for the compelling female line up. There's Jeanne Tripplehorn (Barb), Chloe Sevigny (Nicki), Ginnifer Goodwin (Margene), Amanda Seyfried (Sarah), Daveigh Chase (Rhonda), and Tina Marjorino (Heather). HBO, and cable in general, seems to be a space where women can have more complex and interesting roles (I'm thinking Sex and the City, The L Word, all for starters). And just more roles in general!

One thing I do that would probably drive the entire production team crazy is I fast forward through all the boring scenes with Bill and Roman, the two male head honchos. Hey, pissing contests are so over and done, trite trite. Big Love is interesting because of the way it treads between vulnerability and danger and focuses this through family relations (aka melodrama, yay!). Rhonda and Alby are perfect examples. These "compound" folks, or conservative Mormons, certainly have a scary tinge of fanaticism and power hunger. But they also come across as questioners, searching for a balance they sense is missing.

Why else would I watch a show where the characters pray and talk about following the faith? It sounds like an immediate turn off. But part of the attraction is hinted at in the title: Love. And its not surprising that the first show is about the sexual relationship between Bill and his wives. When you introduce characters who are flawed, lusty, vulnerable, and insecure- you create real people that are easy to care about. They have everyday problems just like the sitcom couples, except it happens to be tripled. The fact that they have to hide who they are also creates an instant tension that sucked me in. In a way, they appeal to the liberal ideal of "who the hell cares who you go to bed with" be it men, women, both or plural. Of course, the show carefully delineates the "good" polygamists from the "bad" ones- read the crazy, compound dwelling, marriage forcing and child marriage fanatics. But by the end of the first season these lines are already blurring.

Stuck in Ft. Lauderdale...

I read Madame Bovary in its entirety, from beginning to end, in Ft. Lauderdale's airport. That might give you a small sense of how long I waited in limbo hell. It was a real test of my non-existent patience. Here's the schedule:

10:45 am Arrive at Ft. Lauderdale Airport
12:15 Flight to JFK
12:45 Flight delayed
6:05 Next flight
6:22 Flight Delayed
6:30 Board Plane
8:30 Plane goes back to gate
9:30 Plane departs Ft. Lauderdale
11:00 Put in holding pattern over Atlantic City
11:30 Plane lands
1:30 am Roll into bed

So while Flordia was fun, airport hell not so much. I read OK, People, Star, Cosmopolitan, Entertainment Weekly, and assorted decorating and cooking magazines. I paced in circles. I watched CNN. The only saving grace was when my plane got canceled, (yes out of the blue canceled) Delta gave me a business class seat on the next plane which meant seat 1C, endless coke, a full meal and a brownie!