Girl Detective

I’ve seen a handful of cooking shows over the years but only America’s Test Kitchen has warranted my ongoing time. In the past, at least, the show has featured practical recipes that are reasonable to make at home. It also has good segments on product tastings and gadget testings.

A recent episode included pan-roasted lobster, though, and it left me rather disturbed. It was not a recipe I was interested in watching being made, or ever making myself, and I found the repeated twitching of the lobster, in spite of cook Julia Collin’s assertions that it was “perfectly normal,” perfectly awful.

I’m not a vegetarian, but I limit my consumption of fish and meat, and seek out organic and kosher meats and fish because the animals are raised and killed more humanely. Blogenheimer recently linked to David Foster Wallace’s article for Gourmet magazine, in which he queries �Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure?� After watching that episode of America’s Test Kitchen, I feel pretty certain the answer is no.

On a more positive note, I was surprised during the episode by an animated segment on flambe, and highly entertained by it. The old science segments from the show were quite dull. The new animated one was not only interesting, but clever and informative. The animation was by Odd Todd. I hope that the show moves away from obscure recipes and on-air lobster butchering, and includes more animated cooking techniques. Otherwise my tv roster may get just a little bit shorter.

I was mistaken the other day when I said that My So-Called Life was my favorite show, ever. It was certainly one of them, but head to head, I think I’d have to say that another great cancelled show trumps it in my memory. EZ Streets ran for fewer episodes than My So-Called Life, but it packed quite a punch. The shows great cast included Ken Olin, Debra Farentino and Joe Pantoliano, and featured a haunting soundtrack by Loreena McKennitt. It was complicated and dark, and it got cancelled way too early. In Neil Gaiman’s comic series Sandman, Morpheus’ library included books that had only been dreamt of by their creators. I sometimes fancy that a complete collection of EZ Streets episodes would be in the AV section of Dream’s library.

There are other shows that I mourn on occasion: Action, Freaks and Geeks, Undeclared, The Job. I’m just hoping that two of my current favorites–life as we know it and Veronica Mars–don’t join that list this season.

I read about the demise of Washington DC’s former alternative station WHFS last week on two different weblogs: Rage Diaries and 1st Lede Writethru. Lisa and Vince, like me, mourn what once was a very cool radio station. One of the comments at the Rage Diaries, though, made me feel somewhat better. My memory of ‘HFS as cool was from the past; over the years it apparently went mainstream, eventually even playing Britney.

I associate ‘HFS with my senior year in college. I had lived a very insular college life, sticking close to campus. Through my job I met kids from other schools, who listened to different music, read different books, and knew more about the city than I did. Prior to ‘HFS, I listened mostly to classic rock and my cd collection included things like AC/DC and Guns n Roses. After ‘HFS, my music horizons broadened to include Indigo Girls, Sinead O’Connor, They Might be Giants, World Party, John Hiatt, and others, many of which are still in my cd collection today. (I must admit that Lisa’s list at her entry on The Rage Diaries sounds much cooler than does mine, but I’m not tweaking mine to sound cooler. It is what it is.)

I’m more sad for the deterioration of WHFS than I am for the loss of whatever it had become, which doesn’t sound like that much of a loss. I’m hardly surprised though. Over the years I’ve listened to two other stations change and die, and I’ve almost stopped listening to radio.

The first was WDRE in Philadelphia. ‘DRE underwent a lot of changes, but in the mid ’90s it hit a really fun stride with good music and good staff. I especially liked the morning show with Sarah, Vinnie and Spike. DRE got sold, though. Some staff went to its main competitor, Y100. Sarah and Vinnie went to Radio Alice-KLLC in San Francisco.

Then I moved to Minnesota. I really liked 105, even though I came years after its most cool time as REV 105. The music was OK and I really liked the morning show with Brian Oke and Mary Lucia. Then, one morning I was driving to work and they were gone. I have hardly listened to radio since, though I do occasionally tune into Radio K.

Two spots of radio hope are on the horizon in Minnesota, though one of them has mixed elements. St. Olaf’s classical station 89.3 was bought by MPR and is launching as an alt-ish, younger skewing station. Staff members include Mary Lucia and Mark Wheat, the latter formerly of Radio K, and both of whom are great local talent. The bad news, though, is that many of my musical friends are mourning the loss of the St. Olaf station, which was the MPR classical station’s main competition. So MPR is going out and buying up the competition station and turning it to another format. Who do they think they are, Clear Channel?

Why no, in fact, in a strange reversal, the local Clear Channel station is offering financial assistance to the small public jazz station that is the main competition for the Clear Channel jazz station, and helping it to meet its financial goals and stay alive, says the Star Tribune. (You must register to view it.) Representatives of MPR, when asked why they hadn’t done the same for the struggling station, said they were too busy with the launch of 89.3.

So MPR is evil, and Clear Channel is good. Black is white and up is down. Things in radio, at least here in Minnesota, might be getting more interesting.

Claire Danes is the most likely reason for the demise of what perhaps was my favorite show ever, My So-Called Life. MSCL ran ten years ago for nineteen episodes, over every one of which cancellation loomed, until ABC finally pulled the plug. The scuttlebutt, then and still, is that Danes and her parents met with the folks from ABC and said that she wasn’t committed to the show any more and wanted to focus on movies.

Nowadays, Danes cries foul and says that she hardly thinks it’s fair that her fifteen-year-old self has to shoulder the blame for the show’s cancellation. It’s understandable that a young star getting rave reviews would want out of a show that was on such shaky ground when the movies beckoned. Ten years later, though, MSCL is still fondly remembered by many, and widely regarded as one of the best teen shows of all time, with strong writing and a stronger cast.

My So-Called Life got a bit precious at times; it wasn’t perfect. But I can’t help but wish that both ABC and Danes could have had to foresight to see what a gem it was and give it the support it deserved. Several shows since have mimiced it, almost always for the worse: Relativity, Cupid, Once and Again, Roswell. The latest homage is ABC’s life as we know it. It is also receiving bad ratings, though it has recovered from a shaky critical start to its present state, which I think gives MSCL the strongest run for the money yet. I think ABC is giving life as we know it a longer time to develop because they learned from the MSCL mistake.

It’s interesting to see how Claire Danes’ career has gone, and ironic that perhaps she should have stayed with a great TV show instead of going on to mediocre movies, the best of which were almost a decade ago–Little Women and Baz Lurhman’s Romeo + Juliet–and even they weren’t great films. More recently she’s done Stage Beauty, an art house film with boyfriend Billy Crudup, that met with mixed reviews. Both Danes and Crudup were voice talent on the quite good but financially unsuccessful Princess Mononoke. According to sources like US magazine, Danes and Crudup became a public item just as Crudup’s ex, Mary Louise Parker, gave birth to his child.

Ten years ago, I loved Danes’ show, thought she had great talent and hoped that she’d have a successful career. At about the same time, David Caruso was pulling the same kind of move over at NYPD Blue. He’s received phenomenal reviews for his first season. Instead of sticking with the show that made him a star, he left immediately for the movies. He tanked in duds like Jade and now growls his predictable schtick on one of the CSI spin offs. I don’t blame Danes and Caruso for wanting to move on, but I do wonder if their potential would have fizzled so spectacularly if they’d stayed put and given their respective shows the respect they both merited.

And I don’t just mean outside where we’re experiencing a relative heat wave; it’s almost 20 degrees Fahrenheit. Drake was up and down constantly last night between 11 p.m. and 2 a.m., finally sleeping in to the ripe old hour of 6:30 a.m. The last week has been one of escalating white-knucklehood, as he gets more fussy, more screamy, and more difficult to care for each day. I don’t know who I should thank that the onset of his increasing fussiness coincided exactly with me getting a set of stitches in my lower back, but someone, somewhere seems to have a nasty sense of humor.

I stupidly thought that having a baby would be hard at first, but would get easier over time as the baby slept longer and as we got the hang of being parents. There has been no linear progression, but rather ups and downs, forwards and backs. It feels like every time we slog through a rough patch–teeth, illness, travel, what have you–it’s followed by about four days of good times. These four days are heaven. Drake is in a good mood, he sleeps well, he eats well, he is fun to be around. Four days are just long enough to begin to shed the memory of whatever the last rough patch was, and to have a small germ of hope sprout that, hey, maybe this parenthood thing is pretty good after all.

Then, WHAM, we’re right back into shrill screams, arching tantrums, and sleep hell for everybody. It’s happened several times lately that G. Grod will be holding Drake and I’ll move near for a hug and Drake will push me away, annoyed. It’s not enough that he’s not cuddly, but he actively rebuffs me.

I’m not sure, but isn’t “dribs of hope alternated with weeks of difficulty” a well-recognized torture pattern?

Conventional wisdom varies on how often one should replace a tube of mascara. Some generous sources say a year, but others recommend every six months, or even every four. Such frequent replacement can mean that mascara is an expensive part of a beauty regimen.

My previous favorite mascara was Bobbi Brown’s Thickening Formula, which was discontinued and replaced with a combined lengthening/thickening formula called Everything Mascara. I bought a tube last spring. I didn’t like it as much as its Thickening predecessor, but it had a good brush and a not very wet formula that didn’t clump much. It had two strikes against it, though. It was hard to remove, even with the normally very efficient MAC eye makeup remover, and it wasn’t cheap. At $19 a tube, I didn’t love it enough to replace it even twice a year, much less three times. And so I embarked on a search for a decent, reasonably priced drugstore formula.

Most magazines and makeup artists tout Maybelline’s Great Lash regular formula as the best (and one of the cheapest) drugstore mascaras. I tried it a few years ago and didn’t like the brush and got a lot of clumps. I didn’t see the need to test it again.

I did some online research and found some good reviews of products by Maybelline, L’Oreal and Almay. Picking out just one was daunting, though. Each formula comes in multiple colors and waterproof or not. Each brand had about a half dozen different formulas, so there were at least fifty different tubes among which I had to choose. After about ten minutes of deliberation, I chose Maybelline’s Lash Discovery in blackish brown, non-waterproof. It’s both a thickening and a lengthening formula and has a tiny brush. The brush is easy to maneuver, requiring fewer strokes, using less product and lessening clumps. It’s a very good basic mascara and I’ll buy it again. It cost about $6.50, so I could replace it every four months and pay just a bit more than I did for one tube of the Bobbi Brown.

I’d seen the Hanky Panky #4811 touted in several places as that most unlikely of products, an attractive lace thong that is not uncomfortable. I picked one up recently, and it doesn’t disappoint. The 4811 looks good and doesn’t feel bad. Sorry, but I’m not quite sure I can make the leap to the statement that it’s comfortable. For me, the best I can say is that I mostly forget that I’m wearing it.

Some of you may wonder why women put up with any discomfort at all from our undergarments. But for even moderately low-rise pants–which are pretty much all that is out there over the last few years–a low-rise undergarment is de-rigeur. Yes, one can go commando. I prefer to try to get a couple wears out of an item before laundering it, though, and I feel better about this when I’m wearing underpants. One can wear bikinis, but VPL (visible pantie line) makes everybody feel like a victim. Thongs eliminate VPL, don’t ride up over the waistline (unless encouraged to do so, and I think most of us were thankful to see the quick end to that tarty little trend), and allow me not to feel too skanky about wearing a pair of jeans more than once.

Stuff for babies is a fast-growing and profitable market. Note how Babiesrus is one of the few big-box retailers to have survived the Wal-Mart and Target growth-fest, while its parent company Toysrus bit the dust. There’s a lot of stuff out there, and it all costs a lot of money. Some of it is good, some of it is mostly harmless, and some of it can make a poor, sleep-deprived parent feel even stupider. Buying needless baby junk is a nasty bit of business. Not only are you wasting time to shop, but also scarce money and finally, once you get the thing, even scarcer space.

We’re recently retired an item, and I’m feeling pretty strongly that we probably could have gotten along without it just fine. It’s his high chair. We’ve had to retire it because the straps have gotten too tight and because he can detach the tray himself and send it and all the food on it flying. As I was readying it for retirement, though, I became very aware of how hard it was to clean, and how many features it had (multiple heights, recline) that we’d never bothered to use.

Instead, we’ve moved our toddler Drake to a booster seat, which attaches to any regular chair. It is small, portable and easy to clean. Best of all, Drake cannot detach the tray himself.

The high chair was big, unwieldy, hard to clean and able to be defeated by toddler tricksiness. It cost about $60 and we only got about ten months of use out of it.

The booster seat is small, adaptable, can be taken to restaurants, and is still immune to Drake’s machinations. It cost about $25.

If I had it to do over again, I’d skip the high chair completely. They’ve over-supplied it with features and upped its price past the point of utility. The booster seat is the way to go.

This morning when my husband G. Grod and I went in to get our toddler son Drake out of his crib, we were met by an unpleasant smell. Drake was sitting calmly in his crib, and had been awake for some time, babbling happily to himself while G. Grod and I had finished our coffees. Perhaps this morning wasn’t the best one to delay going to get him, though, because our attention was soon drawn to the wet stain on the sheet, and his lovies (loveys?) Duckie and Mouton. We’d been calmly finishing our coffee while Drake sat wallowing in his own filth.

I keep waiting for the authorities to show up at the door, shake their heads, grab Drake and hustle him into a waiting dark car, and say, “You know, they really should make people like you get tested in order to be parents.”

A flurry of excitement ensued. G. Grod hustled the bedding and lovies (loveys?) to the laundry room in the hope that we could get the latter washed and dried by naptime, while I got a bath running for a very confused Drake. In addition to routine-breaking morning bath, we let him have a post-bath naked time, for which he rewarded us by peeing several times. Sigh.

Drake’s screams have increased in frequency over the past week, and there is a new, shriller edge to them than before. His appetite, especially at night, is off. His naps are shorter and he wakes unhappy. He has been waking frequently at night and has been difficult to calm. In addition to this morning’s, he’s had several very messy, poopy diapers in the last few days. While it’s tough to get a good look in his mouth, I think his gums look to be bulging; his incisors may be on the way in.

I find teething, like so much of the rest of parenthood, to be maddeningly vague. It is not something that follows a linear, obvious progression. He hasn’t been drooling or biting things lately. He did those about a month or two ago, well after his last set of teeth came in. His recent messy diapers could be teething related, but they could be a virus. Often, he’s continued to act fussy and irritable even after the teeth have punched through the gums. And, since he continues not to talk, (oh, all right, he can occasionally say touchdown or moo, but those aren’t really helpful in a discussion of whether it hurts and where) we continue to have to follow the multiple-guess method of childcare.

This afternoon he barely ate anything for lunch (he even refused PUDDING!) and was twitchy and screamy. So before his nap and based on my best guess that he’s in pain, I gave him some ibuprofen. (I feel like I’m on the medical show House: “I don’t know what he’s got, but his symptoms point to this, so I’m going to give him meds as if he definitely has what I think he has.”) And voila, he went right to sleep after I calmed his screaming fit, and has been sleeping now for perhaps an hour and a half.

I feel very foolish because it was just last week that G. Grod and I were stupid enough to say aloud, Wow, he’s really been sleeping and napping well, hasn’t he?

Cue the ironic, hollow and bitter laughter.

I often gripe that TV shows shy away from the really dark stuff, as in my entry on House. I just watched the first two episodes of the new Battlestar Galactica series, though, and I found darkness in abundance. It is so dark, in fact, that it’s still rattling about in my head, demanding attention.

I watched the first episode as a kind gesture to my husband. Then I was the one who insisted that we watch the second as soon as possible. I am neither a groupie nor a detractor of science fiction television. I gave up on Firefly after two episodes. (I will grant, though, that the original pilot movie was quite good, and the cut-up version they ran was not, so there was unrealized potential there, in spite of the execrable space hooker with a heart of gold.) I did get hooked on Babylon 5, only to become disgusted with whatever season it was that Tracy Scoggins joined the crew. I think the Star Trek shows/movies have some good bits, as well as some terrible ones. I got bored watching Farscape. All in all, then, I wasn’t at all prepared to like Battlestar Galactica. Like everything else, I thought it would be just OK. I was wrong.

Battlestar Galactica is good television. Period. It happens to be good television that is also science fiction, and that is what is so surprising. There is no need to make allowances for its genre, or its campy origins. This is good stuff.

I think there are two main reasons that this re-imagined series so impressed me. One, they learned from the key mistake of the original. The original Battlestar Galactica started as a two-hour movie that was aired audaciously against the Academy Awards. In the post-Star Wars sci-fi frenzy, it completely trounced the Oscars. Everyone was so excited about it that the studio pushed the creators to get a series together immediately. The series was thrown together in a rush. No surprise, it lasted less than two years. This series also started with a mini-series, but then took enough time to start the series off right. It’s run in England already, and has just come stateside. How long it will run depends on its reception here.

Its English roots are the second likely cause of its quality. As Warren Ellis noted in his review of House that I posted here, the English do a much better job of dark TV. It is quite a job that’s been done with Battlestar Galactica. Mary McDonnel and Edward James Olmos lend quietly impressive performances in their leads. I was surprised at how un-pretty most of the rest of the cast is, with the exception of the actor playing Lee “Apollo” Adama. The human race has been wiped out, the Cylons are hounding the survivors, and things are neither played up or down. They are definitely not, though, played for camp. That was what I had been expecting, and I’m sure I’m not the only person experiencing geekjoy that I was mistaken.

There are some linguistic lost causes that I mourn nonetheless. One is the chronic misuse of hopefully, which means full of hope. Another is the use of “whom”. Most people avoid the issue by avoiding the word. More and more I think this is what the end result will be. It saddens me, though. I like “whom” and wish it would be used more and used correctly.

I’m not necessarily one to talk, though. I knew that whom should be used an an indirect object after a preposition, e.g., Ask not for whom the bell tolls…. Who is to replace subjects and direct objects, e.g., Who’s on first? I was writing a letter recently, though, to someone whose intellect impresses me. I was trying to make a point, and didn’t want my point to be obscured by bad usage. I had a few sentences that were demanding that I choose between who and whom and I had to make my best guess because I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what part of speech they were. I was tired and I couldn’t lay hands on my copy of Chicago Manual of Style. It wasn’t near the other writing books like it should have been. Instead, after our move and in the absence of a formal filing system, I found it later wedged between The Mad Scientist’s Club and The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. (But of course. What was I thinking, not looking there?)

It wouldn’t have helped me, though. It has no entry on who/m. Instead I had to turn to little Strunk and White, (which, as I write this, I can no longer find. GRRRR.) Even if I could quote it, it wouldn’t help. It had a slight entry that did not illuminate. Instead it forced me to come up with my own rule. If you can substitute s/he then use who, if you would use her/him, use whom. Sometimes you need to flip the words around. For example, Who is the actor whom you despise?

Sadly, I think, it may be easier to leave out whom than to wrestle so with its use.

I find all the girl muppets on Sesame Street annoying. There’s Rosita, the aqua, Hispanic monster whose voice has a grating whine. Then there’s Zoe, the female counterpart to Elmo. Elmo annoys because he refers to himself only in third person, but in general he’s a pretty nice, friendly monster. Zoe, on the other hand, can exhibit quite a mean streak, especially when she’s defending her pet rock, Rocco. She also sometimes exhibits behavior that is so flaky that she seems almost stoned. There’s one other recurring female muppet, Prairie Dawn, who is bossy and impatient.

I don’t have the same problem with the female humans on the show: Susan, Maria, Gina, and Gabrielle. These are all fine characters who are kind and interesting. I find the boy monsters–Grover, Cookie Monster, Telly, Elmo, even grouchy Oscar–cute and engaging. All these monsters were there when I was a child, though.

Sesame Street is a show that I like and respect. I hope that it will inspire the same feelings one day in my son Drake. Is it me? Do I dislike the girl monsters because they’re new and different? I didn’t grow up knowing the characters of Gabrielle or Gina, though, and I still like them. Do I dislike the girl monsters for the same reason that teachers favor boy students over girls? Or have the creators of Sesame Street, in their efforts to round out their cast of monsters, created girl monsters who are less likeable than the boys?

In a comment on my dictionary entry, Zen Viking called me on my rant about free content and challenged me to elaborate.

I am sure that given a lot of time, I could write a lengthy and well-reasoned treatise on this. I don’t want to spend time on this, though, which is part of why I think content should be free. If I have to pay, or enter a whole lot of personal information, or own a computer to access information, then information is slow to get, it’s unjust in distribution and makes doing what I’m doing (in this case, writing) more difficult.

Copyright laws were invented to encourage creators to create. Over the years, they have been warped by many, including Disney, to protect profit. I don’t believe that every book, magazine, movie, newspaper or DVD should be free. I do believe there should be a free form of it, though. I also believe that restrictive copyright laws do more harm than good.

If you are interested in delving into this issue more deeply, then my husband G. Grod recommends the work of Lawrence Lessig, a law professor at Stanford University, and author of Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity. Lessig was also tapped as an artist of the year by the Minneapolis City Pages, but so were Kevin Smith and Garrison Keillor, so there is some dubiety to the distinction.

I no longer subscribe to Warren Ellis’ mailing list Bad Signal. To use one of Ellis’ own favorite phrases, the list had a high signal to noise ratio. Ellis one of those strong personalities that inspire a lot of fans to think he’s a guru. He’s a smart, funny writer with a well-developed–perhaps TOO well-developed–dark side. My friend Blogenheimer, though, forwarded me Ellis’ review of the Dead Baby episode of House, which I will print below, because a lot of his commentary is spot on. If you’re interested in reading more by Ellis, go to warrenellis.com, but it’s not for the faint of heart. You have been warned.

I continue to have some lurking doubts about House, but I continue to watch it. House is definitely an Ellis-y protagonist. Smart, pissed and unafraid to let you know about it, but not without occasional glimmers of soul, conscience and humanity. What’s good about House is that there is some dark stuff, and they don’t usually drive home every point till you want to vomit. It’s also got fast, funny dialogue. What’s not good about House is that it’s yet another medical diagnostic show and sometimes requires the viewer to do some pretty strenuous sustaining of disbelief.

For example, in the Dead Baby episode, Dr. House was the first person to cry epidemic when babies started getting sick. As in most House episodes, they have no idea what the patient has, so they have to make a guess, treat it, see if it works, (it never does, and it’s often gruesome like a spinal injection, or claustrophobic like a long MRI), learn from their failure and still (in most cases) save the patient in time. As Ellis notes, the baby episode hinges on their best guesses being two types of bacteria, each of which requires a different treatment. So they treat the baby of the blond, American looking parents with one antibiotic, and the baby of the ethnic lesbian couple with another, and the lesbians’ baby dies. I was more than a little disturbed by the implication, and surprised that Ellis did not remark on this. The writers pulled their punches a bit by immediately making blond baby get sick anyway. The upshot was that it was a virus, not a bacteria, and they eventually figured out which one and were able to treat it, saving blond baby and the others.

The end of the episode aggravated me when it was revealed that the source of the virus was an elderly candy-striper handing out teddy bears to the new parents. Even if most people don’t know that nearly all stuffed animals contain choking hazards for infants (the ones on the show had button eyes AND a neck ribbon–double whammy) and are labelled “for children 3 and up”, ALL health care professionals know that stuffed animals are unsanitary breeding grounds for dust mites and other allergens. So even if a hospital would’ve had a person with a persistent cough doing the rounds of VULNERABLE NEWBORNS, she wouldn’t have been handing out stuffed animals, much less ones with ribbons and bite-off-able eyes. At the end of the episode, the only one so far in which one of the patients dies from the hypothesized treatment, I was left with fatigue from having to hold up my disbelief for so long, and annoyance that they’d killed the lesbians’ baby. The writers tried to show they were serious by killing a baby, and at least with this viewer, it backfired.

> bad signal
> WARREN ELLIS
>
> So Adi Tantimedh says to me, you
> should see this new series on US TV
> called HOUSE, because the
> protagonist could be one of yours.
> So I downloaded the fourth episode
> the other night, and watched it
> before bed last night.
>
> Two surprises: the lead is played
> by British comedian Hugh Laurie,
> and the credit sequence uses the
> excellent “Tear Drop” by Massive
> Attack with Liz Fraser.
>
> Hugh Laurie’s only done a little
> straight acting that I’m aware of –
> some light stuff in a Ken Branagh
> fillum and a quick thing in SPOOKS.
> Here, he wears a near-beard, an
> American accent — not perfect, I
> suspect — a limp, a cane, and a voice dropped an
> octave into an earthy croak as
> Gregory House, a nasty medical
> consultant in a nice hospital.
>
> House is a cranky genius with the
> social skills of a wild boar. He is the
> Unpleasant Doctor we’ve all met.
> I like stories about clever people,
> but I like some intimation of method,
> and House appears to be psychic
> in his apprehension of an epidemic
> in the hospital based on two babies
> getting sick. It’s a bit, you know,
> this man arrived at the morgue with
> two sticks of dynamite covered in
> his own prints lodged in his lungs, but
> it was Moider and I Resign and Dr
> Quincy You’re Amazing.
>
> Naturally enough, a bunch of babies
> get sick. And the hook of the episode
> is that they have two possibilities
> as to the disease, with two different

> treatments. Which means that
> some babies will be given one treatment,
> and some the other, and obviously
> one method or the other will lead
> to dead babies.
>
> Which, for US TV, is kind of
> interesting. I mean, it’s squeezed
> dry of emotional milk, and naturally
> enough one of the young and
> pretty supporting cast (including
> a wasted Omar Epps) has a dead
> child in her past and blah blah —
> but for soft American entertainment,
> that’s actually kind of hard stuff.
>
> House isn’t jagged enough to be a
> complete bastard, although one of
> his troops names him such, but
> that’s less Laurie’s fault than the
> script’s. Long and crooked, Laurie
> stumps around the place like a
> wounded spider, a murky fog of
> Hate trailing behind him. Standing
> in the maternity ward, another
> doctor comments that it’s unusual
> to see him willingly be in the presence
> of patients.
>
> “Patients don’t bug me until they
> get teeth.”
>
> The actress — I’ve blanked on her
> name — who did that turn as Sam’s
> Prostitute Friend in WEST WING
> appears here as the hospital
> administrator, a thankless role in
> this kind of show (the person who
> has to tell Quincy it’s not Moider
> and therefore be Wrong every
> week), and pulls it off with some
> charm.
>
> Clever Scumbag shows tend not to
> have a great lifespan in American
> television. VENGEAANCE UNLIMITED
> and PROFIT come to mind. They
> do better over here in Britain, where
> it’s something of a tradition. HOUSE
> isn’t a great Clever Scumbag, but
> it’s nice to see US TV trying it again.
>
> — W
>
> —
> Sent from mobile device
> probably from the pub

The first few episodes of The O.C. that featured Alex, Seth’s new girlfriend, had her straight blond hair with its purple streak up in an elaborate ‘do. The artifically stiff, round curl on the side of her head reminded me fondly of one of my favorite childhood dolls, Quick-Curl Barbie. QCB had strands of wire intermixed with the normal platinum strands so that you could use the plastic curling wand to style her hair into a curled coif with staying power. Alas, the wires became brittle after much manipulation and broke off, leaving QCB with rough bits of wire sticking out of her head, looking much more like a science project gone horribly awry than a beauty maven.

I didn’t have much luck with doll hair during childhood. Another favorite doll, Velvet, had blond hair with a ponytail fountain that sprung from a hole in her head and could be pulled out or retracted back. One day the obnoxious neighbor boy yanked on the ponytail for the last time, and Velvet’s crowning glory got pulled clean out, leaving her forever with a short bob and a gaping hole in her head. Her big sister doll, Crissy, had no such problem, but I was unconsoled; Velvet had been my favorite. Like Barbara Eden on I Dream of Jeanie, Velvet’s ponytail was a source of power and wonder. Its loss was a hard one.

The writers of last night’s episode of Lost, in which we got the back story for siblings Boone and Shannon, were back in the saddle again. It moved quickly, was interesting and gave us a few more things to puzzle over even while some questions were answered. I think the writers chickened out a bit by making Boone and Shannon step-siblings. I don’t think they were willing to get as dark and twisted as it would have to be to make them half- or full-blood siblings. In any case, I was relieved that last week’s bad episode was just that–an episode. The series continues to be mostly fun. And I loved that little bit where they showed Sawyer being escorted, shouting, through the police station. They never have explained what he was doing in Sydney, and why he was going to LA.

In an unsupervised moment, my toddler Drake managed to break all twelve of a new carton of eggs. In a frenzy of home economy, I stored the unshelled eggs and determined to find a recipe that would use them all as quickly as possible. I decided on a cheesecake, calling for 6 eggs plus 2 yolks.

I started at noon and was not able to slice it till 9:45 p.m. And slice it I did, rather than leaving it for the next day. Because there was no way I was not getting at least a little piece of what had taken up nearly all of the day and caused no small amount of trouble.

First, I had to bake the cookie crumb crust. I did; it looked great; I removed it to cool. Then, when I was heating the oven to 500 so the cheesecake could get a glossy top, smoke started pouring from the oven and the smoke alarm went off. Butter from the crust must’ve leaked out of the pan and onto the oven bottom. At 500, it had been burned to a black, smoking mess that could not be dislodged even with a scraper. What to do? Abandon the cheesecake, with its 2 and a half pounds of cream cheese and 8 eggs? Ask the neighbors if we could use their oven? Instead, I checked to see if the pan would fit in our toaster oven. It did, so I put the cheesecake in, burned the top because of how close the fit was, but then lowered the temperature. While the cheesecake baked for 90 minutes, I started the cleaning cycle on my regular oven. Once the cheesecake finally was done it had to cool for 3 hours, then chill for 3 hours, then sit at room temperature for 30 minutes. And at that point, I finally got cheesecake.

Was it worth it? I’m not sure. It was good, and I’ve eaten quite a lot of it this week. (In my defense, I haven’t been out much, so haven’t had the opportunity to share it. And cheesecake really isn’t toddler food.) I used a gingersnap cookie crust and put chopped bittersweet chocolate in it, so it’s got a bit of sass to it. But I’m not sure any dessert is worth all that trouble and time.

I got some more tips on handling dry skin from the dermatologist’s office this week.

Don’t soap up everything when you bathe, just the nooks and crannies.

Pat dry, don’t rub or scrub with a towel.

Use a mild soap, like my favorite, Dove Sensitive Skin.

Use fragrance free moisturizer and laundry soap.

I’ve got stitches in my back right now, and they itch like crazy. I had a dermatologist appointment earlier this week, and she removed a suspicous-looking mole for biopsy. It looked suspicious to her, that is. I had a hard time finding it in the mirror, and it looked little different to me than the dozens of other moles around it. That’s why I’d sought the opinion of a professional.

The chunk of skin she cut out is in a difficult place that makes reaching and lifting difficult, both of which are frequent as I care for my toddler Drake. I also get the joy of waiting two weeks to find out whether anything is wrong.

For the past fifteen years, I’ve been a fairly conscientious user of sunscreen and protective clothing and general sun avoidance. And in spite of fifteen years of good behavior, I still had a chunk of my skin removed this week.

I write this for all of you that still go out in the sun without sunscreen, that go to tanning salons or who actually lay out in sun trying to get tan.

Stop fooling yourself. At best, you’re just aging and drying your skin. At worst, you’re courting cancer. Unless you have the green light from your dermatologist to go out in the sun with abandon, and I’m betting you don’t, then you know it’s bad and you do it anyway. Cut it out.

Or you’ll be like me, and your dermatologist will cut it out for you, and you’ll have stitches that hurt and itch and if you’re lucky, that will be all.

Last week, our toddler Drake woke up from his nap fussy; things just escalated from there. Soon he was in a full-on raging tantrum, and nothing we tried would calm him. We sang, we rocked, we walked, we offered him toys, we took him out into the fresh cold air, I even broke down and offered him both the regular phones and my cell phone, but nothing stemmed the screaming. After twenty minutes, I remembered that this had happened to me once before, only I’d been alone and the tantrum had gone on for forty minutes. I’d put Drake in the car, figuring that he’d be safe in the car seat, and the driving calmed him quickly. Again, putting him in the car calmed him. His screams subsided to quiet hiccuping sobs and sniffles and finally disappeared altogether. Then the rest of the night he was fun, happy and charming. It was a freaky, upsetting little interlude.