Office romance

I keep wantin' to post about The Office but somehow, don't. I was one of those UK Office snobs there for a good long time, sucks to the US version, because really the original is so much more dour and sorry and cruel, as offices are known to be, and the sunny political correctness of US television could not possibly do the original justice, plus that hunky dude with the big teeth is an insult to Tim, my perfect imaginary TV dreamboat boyfriend. Why are men, generally, not more like Tim? Note to men: be more like Tim.

I guess it was The Dundies that won me over, which I just saw for the first time the other night. Now I am not the hugest Michael Scott fan, and Emmys aside, I think he is actually the weak spot of the Office. Imagine having to go toe to toe with David Brent, the most excruciating character in the history of TV. You're going to fail, I don't care if you are friends with Jon Stewart. And yet, Michael Scott kind of pulls it out with his version of O.P.P. I admit it, I laughed.

Update I guess I'll be reading this site since I am such a nerd. Also? O.P.P. was on the radio when I drove to work this morning. Awesome.

Hateoween

There are a number of topics on which I disagree with John Q. America, one of the main ones being, Halloween.

I hate it.

We Americans spend five billion dollars annually on this latex-scented schlock-fest. Right. Five billion dollars on Dum Dums, grease paint, and rubber Freddie Krueger masks. I have nothing to add to that, it is so criminally embarrassing.

And yet there I was today, at the mall of death, looking for some feeble skeleton decoration to pin to my front door, since I live in the suburbs, where Halloween is in no way an opt-out event unless you want lookalike teenage boys with retro Chris Makepeace hairstyles slashing your tires. Go on, I'll wait while those of you residing in the city congratulate yourselves for living in a neighborhood that scares parents of school-aged children.

***

Ok, where were we? Right, I'm lurking in the Halloween Hut, looking for some closeout sale cardboard skeleton with little metal brads for joints to inform the suburban tweens that yes, we will give them chocolate bars in exchange for not having to hose shattered pumpkin shards off our walkway in the morning.

The Hallo-hut stinks of cheap rubber, like a giant toy factory in Hsinchuang. Makeshift walls of spook-merch have been temporarily propped up inside of the gutted retail space (most recently a Gottschalks, possibly during the Nixon administration). Paint-gunned rubber face masks lie in quivering, picked-over piles. Lamely ghoulish life-sized monsters slump against mannequin stands, wearing paper signs that scold you break it, you buy it. A plastic butt lies abandoned in the middle of an aisle.

A plastic butt.

I drift down the aisle of adult-sized costumes, just to see what the well-dressed idiot is wearing this season. Women's costumes fill two entire aisles, many of them torn and falling out of plastic flat packs and wadded up in piles of black spandex on the floor.

I survey the choices. Dominatrix. French Maid. Bride of Frankenstein with really tight bikini underwear. Playboy bunny. Bimbo cheerleader. Half naked police officer. Basically, this stuff. These are the only choices. This is the entire scope of available women's Halloween costumes.

Allison Glock was so not kidding.

Yet another reason to hate Halloween.

Duck, duck... suck.

There are some things that just unequivocally suck, like Mark Morford of the San Francisco Chronicle, and the lyrics to A Little Bit of Life by Craig Morgan. But the one thing that sucks more than a line of Rhoombas that wraps all the way around the sun is the "comic strip" Mallard Fillmore, by Bruce Tinsley.

I was in fact all set to go on a tirade about it, except that Wikipedia as usual beat me to it, with its lightly contemptuous, tounge-in-cheek description: "Mallard yearns for the "good old days," and views himself as a victimized underdog in a world that is being overrun with political correctness, religious secularism, and hypocrisy." The article then goes on to list his common targets, like Barbra Streisand and 'Kids today, what with their rap music and video games.'

Even Jon Stewart preemptively covered what was going to be the essence of my tirade: that Bruce Tinsley is not in fact writing a comic strip, but rather uses the four panel format as a soap box for trite conservative viewpoints, because god forbid we would want a single corner of the media to fail to reflect trite conservative viewpoints.

Anyway, it's all been said. So never mind.

An addendum to the lame list

For the love of all that is holy, why was this film made? Are you *&^% kidding me? America, what in the hell is wrong with you that you'd pay to see Tim "asinine 1980's sitcom dad" Allen in a fat suit electrocuting himself on Christmas lights THREE discreet times in a three year period? The very thought of this makes me want to hurl this laptop right at the next American that I encounter. I hate us! I hate this country! We are morons! Aughhh!!!

The lame list

People, I got nothin'. It's time to update and yet I haven't a single coherent thought about an irrelevant topic that would last longer than a sentence. Here is an example:

• Is it just me or is Jared eating his way out of a job? In the last Subway add I saw, he was looking a little bit like Jiminy Glick.
• Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip sucks because of Harriet Hayes, the unfunny collagen-lipped spokesChristian upon which every scene is focused with a garishly misplaced intensity. The second reason it sucks? Stung.

That's it. That is it, people.

Sad.

Wait it's the next day and I thought of something else bugging me.

• The Rolling f*&^ Stones on tour again. It's like, they won't rest until every last American has forgotten they were ever a relevant rock band. I went and saw the "Steel Wheels" tour bloody 17 years ago, I think they were calling it their "last tour," and there I was, still a teenager, thinking "man, it's sure painfully lame to see Mick Jagger in a neon sports jacket hopping on one foot in the late 80's to a song about Viet Nam."
• Also the other day yet another bad movie was on HBO, this time, called "Just Like Heaven." And it struck me for the ten millionth time that I don't know how people with so much money and so many resources can persist in making such boring and dumb films. Mark Ruffalo, why oh why are you playing shuffling, chemistry-free romantic leading men in tone deaf Hollywood comedies? I mean aside from the big paychecks? What's with the selling out? Let me guess, you have a pair of those $700 dollar tickets to the "Bigger Bang" tour at the Hollywood Bowl. Sigh.

Death by carrot

To hell with carrots; it turns out that Debbie Cakes may be your safest dining option these days. At the very least, you are unlikely to be paralyzed from the neck down after eating one.

Is anyone as completely unhinged as I am about this thing with the carrots? I mean e-coli spinach is one thing, not that I didn't totally panic about that in recent days, but for the love of all that is holy, PARALYZED BY CARROT JUICE? There you are, drinking some bland pureed vegetable, thinking you are doing something healthy for your eyesight or whatever the hell carrots are supposed to do, and then wham, you are twitching, seeing double, losing all connection to your large motor functions permanently, becoming the very vegetable you just consumed. Oops, sorry consumer, we may have dropped a little botulism in there with the spirulina and vitamin C. Side effects may include a total inability to independently move any portion of your body for the rest of your life. Thank you for trying our product.

Every night at 2 am I stare into the darkness, eyes wide and unblinking, deeply freaking out about things like this.

The Wichita Lineman

So the other day I found myself slumped in front of The Oprah Winfrey Show (do we still call it that? Or is it just Oprah now?), a program I try my best to avoid unless Oprah is being Serious Journalist Oprah (Oprahs I can't stand include God's Gift to Africa Oprah, Redecorating Rooms Oprah and Kissing Celebrity Ass Oprah, a.k.a Celebroprah). As it happened, the most annoying of all the Oprahs happened to be on the day I tuned in: Just One of the Girls Oprah, which meant that she was accompanied by her own personal Fallout Boy, Gayle King. On this episode, "the girls" decided to venture out among The American People in a conspicuously modest-looking sedan trailed by a helicopter and camera crew, there to document Oprah as she condescended to Midwestern Bingo players and proclaimed herself too clean for roadside motels.

At some point in the program, O & G crossed the state line into Kansas, and talked some Golden Oldies D.J. into playing The Wichita Lineman to honor their arrival. America was then treated to an Oprah-Gayle singalong duet, during which Gayle proclaimed, somewhat redundantly, "I love this!" approximately 47 times.

Now, The Wichita Lineman is one of those songs you probably haven't heard since you were a kid riding sans seat belt in a big American car with your grandma while she tamped out her cigarette in a bean bag ash tray on the dashboard, and if you hear it again, it will bring you right back. The lyrics apparently concern the internal musings of a Midwestern telephone line repairman, something I might be able to ask my dad about, since this is what he used to do for a living.

Apparently Gayle King is not the only fan of The Wichita Lineman, as iTunes lists approximately 62 versions of the song available for download, including covers by Johnny Cash and R.E.M. I guess Glen Campbell's version is the one that takes me back to my days in grandma's Ford Falcon, but I can't be too sure.

Lemon Pie: Redux

I was sittin here thinking "why is it that the most interesting people you know don't write blogs?" and then I realized: they are busy being interesting.

On that note I thought it was high time to re-run a tiny-dog classic, Lemon Pie, by Uncle Dave.

Awake

As anyone who has been tortured can attest, that personality of yours, the one you think of as the fingerprint of your humanity, is in fact only a superficial Magic Shell coating over a nougaty center of dull desperation that is exactly the same across all humans who find themselves in bleak circumstances.

How do I know this? Possibly it is due to being screamed awake by a small, twinkly infant several times a night for the past 150 days, an infant who requires a magical and elusive confluence of events to occur before she will return to sleep, which includes the nearly impossible feat of keeping a pacifier balanced in her half-open mouth while she rolls around the crib like an 18-wheeler.

If you do not have a child, imagine this: your dog will only sleep if you balance a dime on his nose while he is still awake and pacing nervously up and down your hallway. It is best if the dog doesn't see you place the dime on his nose, and also that, when the dime falls, you replace it as immediately as possible, perhaps so the dog himself doesn't realize it has fallen. If you screw up any part of the dime ritual, the dog will howl to wake the dead. Note: It will not help to say atheistic prayers at the foot of his dog bed, not that I have spent countless nights crouched by a crib with my fingers crossed, muttering sleep incantations to the tune of the white noise machine and off-key, battery-drained Brahms lullaby mobile in hope of influencing possibly non-existent holy forces to keep my child from screaming.

I assume that I used to have personality attributes like the rest of well-rested humanity before I became a blinking, desperate mole-like creature with blood-shot eyes and a deep obsession with the logistics of napping, but those quirks and preferences are long gone and only the squinting mole remains. Thus this post has no point or purpose, and is careering off the track like Danica Patrick on Ambien.

P.S.: This is not a mom blog.

Good night.

Man shags

I realize this is a totally shallow post but tiny dog is a shallow blog, people. Let's face it.

I hate Owen Wilson's hair. This all came together for me in recent days when a certain spousal unit watched his 500th random 20-minute segment of "Wedding Crashers" on HBO, and there was "The Butterscotch Stallion," flipping his man-shag in dozens of unfortunate close-ups on his spectacularly unattractive old-Robert-Redford-meets-Ellen-DeGeneres mug, and I realized that right then and there, I'd had enough.

Enough!

Man shags have got to stop. Now. Note to David Spade, Jim Carrey, and Jon Bon "Cheesy West Wing Cameo" Jovi, get those damned female news anchor styles off your oversized actor-heads immediately or I'll arm the paparazzi with some Flowbees set to kill. Well on second thought maybe David Spade can keep his, it's all he's got going for him.

But back to Owen Wilson, did Kate Hudson really end her marriage just so she could run her fingers through this? Ok, I possibly believe it, since she apparently doesn't believe in haircuts for men.

What is my point, or do I have one? I do, and it is this: Men, take a good look at yourselves in the mirror today. How's that hair doing? Is it possibly a little longer than is appropriate for a man of your age and station in life? No? Are you sure? Could you fit a rubber band around the hair on any part of your head, other than perhaps the very front? If so, you have attractiveness-compromising issues that need correction, stat.

Disclaimer: this post in no way relates to a certain husband's haircut strike.