• Summer Glau was born in the same year as I. This makes me feel pleasantly young.
• What metonymy means (yes, I may have known it before, but I didn’t remember.)
• Apparently if I were a rock star, I’d be either Siouxsie Sioux, Kate Bush, or Fernanda Takai, none of whose music I’d listened to until so informed. (Two down, Kate Bush to go.)
• Someone who’s never been a judge is ‘qualified’ for the Supreme Court.
• If a worker bee lays an egg, the other worker bees turn on her and devour her for her crimes.
• A pin can go really, really far into your foot and not produce a lot of blood.

I hope you are duly edified.

In Outlook 2003, when you sort by size of message, it gives little category headers. ‘Tiny’, ‘Small’, ‘Medium’, ‘Large’, ‘Huge’… Thanks to the wonders of the Intarweb, I don’t have to check my Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook…those are EXACTLY the progression of size classes which appear in D&D, between Diminutive and Gargantuan. Suddenly getting e-mail at work is way more fun. Messages with Word Docs attached are like goblins! And when I deal with someone’s gigantic, photo-laden PowerPoint presentation and delete the file when I’m done? I’m slayin’ giants.

Aww yeah.

I think everyone who doesn’t live in a painstakingly created 24-hour reality channel has probably noticed that women in Hollywood are skinny. Sammichless Star Syndrome, I like to call it. Those who are stars get skinnier; those who are rising become skinny. I doubt I even need to name examples.

There are many, many explanations for this. Probably the best is simply that fashion designers prefer to design clothing for skinny, skinny bodies. The fabric drapes better, and the body is a better stage for the clothes to do their own thing upon. That affects both models (and therefore the standards of beauty) and Hollywood stars, since they want to wear haute couture on the red carpet. You can’t get most couture in sizes above a 6, according to at least one disgruntled Victoria’s Secret model.

This obsession with thinness, everyone knows, is bad. It’s not healthy for most bodies to be that skinny, the unrealistic ideal contributes to the rampant bad self-esteem suffered by American teenagers, and its attendant demons anorexia and bulemia. But what’s interesting is that the skinny ideal doesn’t seem to have affected men that much.

Sure, many guys think individual stars (such as Cameron Diaz) are hot, but psychological studies show again and again that as a group, men find a curvy figure more attractive than a very thin one. Given that the majority of women are heterosexual (or, an even bigger majority, hetero or bi), you’d think that the male response would have a bigger influence on standards of beauty than that. So here we have one of three things: the best counterevidence for the claim that women only care about their appearance to catch men; evidence that gay male fashion designers* are plotting the downfall of female sexiness**; or a mystery.

So I came up with another theory. America has a very strange attitude towards sex. We all know it. Any nudity is sexual; sexual content in movies is controlled more than gore; so forth and so on. High fashion, both for the red carpet and the screen, tends to be low-cut, tight-fitted; it exposes the body. It suddenly occurred to me the other day that perhaps skinniness is the celebrity ideal partially because a more buxom figure is more primally attractive. We clothe celebrities in skin-tight pleather, expose huge swaths of their flesh; maybe in our weird Puritan-subconscious way, we don’t want them to be viscerally sexually attractive. We want to be able to see them as idols without being embarrassed by the prurience of desire. We want them to have gorgeous faces and alien, otherworldly bodies. We want them to be cyphers for beauty rather than objects of lust.

Or I could be crazy. It’s been known to happen.

*Not all fashion designers are gay men. However, I have been known to read Vogue, and I have been shocked to discover that a LOT of them are.

**This is a joke.

I got a particularly well-executed phishing e-mail last night. It looked just like a Paypal e-mail, said all the right things, had no spelling errors, and even had links which showed the proper URLs until you moused over them and discovered something skuzzy in Hungary. I sent it on to Paypal, pondering how they choose their targets (I had just used eBay and PayPal for the first time in months a few hours before), and admiring the craftsmanship.

Because besides avoiding the usual pitfalls of spelling errors and blatancy, they had executed a master stroke. In their phishing e-mail they had included a stern warning about phishing e-mails. Marvelous.

By the Fates! I have a website again! Now let’s see if I remember every blogseed I came up with while I was laboring without blog and without e-mail, trying to remember things without the notes I write to myself via e-mail, suffering withdrawal pangs for my braindump, Faerye Net.

I love the internet. I really do. It is a constant source of memes, monkeys, pie and keetooms, as well as a useful receptacle into which excess time can be thrown. But it seems to be the consensus that the internet is responsible for this ‘global economy’ thing, and I am officially unimpressed.

My inbox is full…full to the point of annoying ‘You can’t send e-mail messages, thus accomplishing tasks and shifting responsibility, until you sort through all this crap and delete some powerpoint presentations people have sent to you to print!’ messages from Outlook…and a significant portion of it is from Europe.

Now, the language barrier here is far less of a problem than it was the last time I worked on an Asian project, but for some reason the ‘getting anything bloody accomplished’ barrier is far, far higher. We send you form. You fill in form. You send me form and I slavishly type your information into spreadsheet. Is simple! But no.

We have Swedes who don’t fill in forms, or think that ‘credit card info’ means absolutely everything about your credit card, down to its color and where it goes in your wallet, that is NOT the number. We have Italians who write convoluted messages which sound like they’re asking for special steps to be taken, and turn out to mean that they don’t need anything, including a hotel room. We have Greeks who need hotel confirmation numbers for their embassy (really?) and people from Dubai who send back a carefully uncompleted form. I’m serious, people. Stop. The deadline was last week. You were late last week. And every time I write you an e-mail, it takes 24 hours to get a response through the haze of timezones. I can’t help you, and you’re not helping me.

Let’s break up the global economy, people. It’s not working. We gave it a go and it just isn’t so. Until we all speak Esperanto and I go to work at 3 pm and stay til 9 (sorry, that’s 15.00 and 21.00 to you!) I think we should take a break. I’ll stay right here and you stay way over there, and if we have to use the internet, let’s use it for keetooms and pie.

I am informed that the main function of my blog is to let my sister know what new movies I have seen and what I thought of them. While this is a little distant from my vision statement, I am reasonably accustomed to being bossed by my older sister, so I am going to make an effort to post a rundown within a few days of exiting the cinema. This may mean compromising my usual habit of writing long, exhaustive reviews, but I think I’ll sur— hey, wait, why are you guys cheering?

Anyway, far overdue, here are a few notes on my most recent forays into shinyland.

The 40 Year Old Virgin
This movie is far less crass and unkind than some might guess from the general plot outline (slightly geeky guy has never had sex; his co-workers try to get him laid.) It’s actually rather sweet, and while it has too many raunchy jokes and too much toilet humor and swearing for me to take it home to Mom, it makes you smile, not just laugh. The joke is more on the deeply deluded co-workers than on Andy, the resigned virgin. Basically, it entertains and delights at every turn. It’s occasionally predictable, but that comes with the romantic comedy territory, and, well, I guarantee you won’t predict the closing credits sequence.
Very funny, with occasional groans or embarrassment, but a good heart.

Transporter 2
For once, a sequel surpasses the original. The first Transporter had great music, great driving, great fight scenes, and Jason Statham. I’ll admit, that’s more or less all it had (no, I tell a lie. EXPLOSIONS!), but it was enough for me. My sister informs me the plot and dialogue were forgettable. I don’t care; I didn’t mind forgetting them. The sequel, on the other hand, had unbelievable driving and fight scenes, same great theme music, same Jason Statham…and snappy dialogue with an entertaining plot. You don’t need to have seen the first one to enjoy this one. All you need is a love of action movies and a love of style. So much style.
Slick, entertaining action movie, beautifully executed. I laughed at it because it was funny, I laughed at it because it was so audacious. Enjoy.

The word for ‘submarine’ in French is [below|text|sous], but the word which bubbled into my mind this morning as I stumbled into the warmth of my shower was [you know this one!|text|sous][morning|text|matin], and I feel it is an appropriate creation.

I feel that morning is an alien element through which I make my way, surrounded by things which make, in the normal, surface world, no sense. Occasionally I surface, check my chronometer, shift my ballast, and dive again. Morning seems to have a higher resistance than other times of day, and simply moving through it, opening my eyes in it, takes immeasurably more effort than moving through simple air. Forget ‘under the weather’, from now on when I’m having trouble adjusting from the world of quilts and teddy bears and nonsensical dreams to that of harsh lights and tasks to do, I will be ‘sous-matin’. I will be operating ‘undermorning’.

I’m a GEEK! I snobbishly reject the mainstream! Why must you saddle me with these excellent shows that everyone likes! Curse you and your Alias and your Lost!

Alright, mainstream America. We have THAT much in common. But I bet YOU don’t like Moby Dick.

A little rant I wrote yesterday. I wasn’t going to post it, but since it isn’t going away, I’m biting the bullet and posting it. Please skip if you are not rant-inclined.

Rich people have it better than poor people. This is pretty much a universal phenomenon, short of sudden proletarian revolution. Money buys you comfort, security, health care, transportation…money buys you a lot of splendid things, which is why we, as a species, want it. When bad things happen, poor people, unshielded by big yielding cushions of money, often get the worst of it. They live in low-quality housing which collapses in an earthquake; or are packed closer together and are killed in fires; or live closer to the docks where the plague rats come in; or have bad sewer systems which facilitate the spread of disease. They have less power, so less attention is paid to them. They have more problems, and those in power have less reason to address those problems.

It’s always been like this. It’s squalid and horrible and unjust and heart-wrenching, and we as a society and as a species should try to change it. That doesn’t make it less true. When something goes wrong, the people who get forgotten, or underserved, or just generally the short end of the stick, are usually the poor. That doesn’t mean that any stupidity, poor planning, or negligence which hurts these people is deliberate.

The response to Hurricane Katrina is simply not a gigantic conspiracy by the nebulously defined bad old dudes in the government to ‘get rid of poor people in New Orleans’. The save-yourself evacuation plan favored those with cars, so more poor people were stuck. It doesn’t mean they deliberately left the poor to die in the hurricane. The makeshift shelter of the Superdome is ill-equipped for the purpose — so poor people are suffering. That doesn’t mean that “they weren’t expecting them to actually survive” (actual quote from message board) in the Superdome.

The internet seems to think it was a chap named Nick Diamos who said “Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.” He was right. Stop trying to understand the bad things that happen to innocent people by creating phantom conspiracies. Watch the <a href=”http://www.sho.com/site/ptbs/home.do” target=”links”>Penn & Teller: Bullshit! about <a href=”http://www.sho.com/site/ptbs/topics.do?topic=ct” target=”links”>conspiracy theories. By all means, give to the <a href=”http://www.redcross.org/” target=”links”>Red Cross or do something to help. Try to help the ongoing problem of poverty in America. But please, stop attributing the suffering of the poor to big nameless evil so that you can have someone to hate, someone to blame. It doesn’t help, because this isn’t evil; it’s careless, slapdash, selfish and frightened…and very, very human.