Woman Finds Skinned Chipmunk Living In Her Couch

As the four regular readers of my blog know, I read CNN daily and often write here about it when I feel like it. Today I clicked on a story apparently about Bob Dylan's home being too smelly (what?) and it transferred me to KTLA.com which is, from what I can tell, where crazy news goes to die. It's full of stories that got caught between the fiction of The Weekly World News (RIP) and more respectable news outlets. Among the insane headlines I was met with when I visited KTLA:

• Martha Stewart's Dog Killed In Explosion
• Woman Hurt In Sex Mishap Involving Power Tool
• Chimp Plans, Executes Attack On Zoo Visitors
• Five Human Heads Found In Coolers
• SoCal Man's Body Mistakenly Delivered To Pet Store
• Woman Finds Hungry Cat Living In Her Sofa
• This photo gallery

I'm speechless.

As for my life, my dead squirrel may have been stolen, but after I sent my prayers for more corpses out into the universe Ham delivered by finding me a dead chipmunk. I was going to cut it open tonight but I just couldn't bring myself to do it when I was holding it in my hands and it's little eyes were staring straight into mine. I think I need Skippy there to hold my hand while I turn the little guy inside out. Either way, my skin fever is satisfied.
I thought I could keep the little guy in the Fels fridge for a couple of days without anybody noticing as long as I labeled the container this time. I left it in a Cheez-It box and then realized that people don't refrigerate Cheez-Its so I labeled it "Spinach and Lentils Pilaf - Do Not Touch" because I thought no one would want that. Then people got high and touched it and there was screaming and the chipmunk ended up in the microwave. Luckily I was there to save it. I miss my fridge.

Sitcom class is going well. We just wrote a scene for a never-going-to-happen Western sitcom which we ended up titling Full Jailhouse (my other suggestion: Fresh Prince of the Unincorporated Territories).

It sounds like my life is all skinning and classes, but I'm sure it be more than that. I'm trying to get used to being around people that I know all day long and having everybody know what I'm doing all the time. I'm also getting sick. Maybe that's a reason to miss Sue's class tomorrow. :-)
I've also been texting people a lot and it's led to me using emoticons more. :-(

Back to School Like Rodney Dangerfield

Prof. Whitehead may not want me here, but I'm back at Bennington to stay. All I have to do in order to graduate is pass one exam. With the help of zombie Kurt Vonnegut (Kurt Zombigut) I can do it, but I was up last night dancing at the Oingo Boingo show in the student center and performing perfectly executed Triple Lindy dives at the rec center. All for the love of my son...


Me

Stray notes:

• Today in class we read a piece by Martin Buber. I realised what loneliness is when I looked around and there was nobody to laugh with about the name "Buber."
• It's really cold outside. Whenever I walk out I find myself saying in my head "It's FA-FA-FA-FREEZING!" and wishing that I could say that to someone without them being irritated by it before remembering that that person doesn't exist.
• Emily made me a schedule, which is very nice of her. There is a man on it with my name on his shirt as D-Bow, with the "D" being a bow and the hyphen being an arrow. How have I never in the course of my life thought of that?
• There's someone on campus who looks like Adam Freed, someone who walks like Sean and someone who sounds like Brian Schultis (kind of). I wish people I didn't know would stop unintentionally imitating people I did.
• I had my first class with Margie-babe today. It was intense. I don't ever want a class to end again with out-loud readings from Holocaust survivors quickly followed by discussions of our majors ("Dance-Lit!").
• I told someone after watching the first episode of Friday Night Lights on Hulu that, though it is widely acclaimed, I don't think I could get into it because I'm not that nostalgic about high school and never really liked football. Then I watched two more episodes and proved myself wrong. Now I'm hooked! Go Panthers! I'm sad!
• I brought one of my dad's old pipes back from home after cleaning it out into my trashcan. When I was in the car to the airport I realized that the large piece of ash I had removed was the filter. Bummer. Now I need a new pipe. It will go well with my growing incense addiction; my room already smells like a head-shop, it might as well get some of the accouterments. Next: posters of aliens in a wintry forest of mushrooms peeing "4:20" into the snow.
  

Half-assed tv follow-up post

I'm finding it hard to keep up with real life here now that I have one. In lieu of that, here's some more comments about tv and junk:

My fears earlier this week were unfounded about The Office. Oh man was that a good episode; right back into the bittersweet funny.

My fears about Skins were very founded, though. (Spoilers if you care) Skins took a page out of Degrassi's book this week and sent its most interesting character to Africa (right after we got to know him!). There were some ok moments as stories and characters develop a little bit, though I sure wish it would stop trying to be edgy and crazy and just represent how real teenagers act. In my opinion, the inclusion of a mobster character who gets tangled up with teenagers for some reason (not to mention his comical henchmen) is like when The Flintstones added the Great Gazoo or Itchy and Scratchy added Poochy: it's just unnecessary and bizarre. If they went all the way and made him act like a human being (problems with that this season) they might get somewhere, but instead he drinks Cup o Noodles to show he's tough and challanges a 16-year-old to a fight that consists of eating raw peppers. What the fuck? What universe is this?

As for what's happening in the Bow household, I'm surrounded by things that need homes. Since my mom and I are both moving, everything we own needs to be packed, given away or sold. A mountain of old t-shirts and baseball caps is going out the door to make room for weird inheritances like a machete and creepy masks. They're not interchangable when it comes to usefulness, but some things are more important than others.

All Things Geek

• Today I finished posting all of my dad's old board games on eBay. The geek money's piling up! Nobody wants Assassin, though, which shocks me. Going by the box lid alone, it's easily the coolest game.
  
  
  From what I can tell, the game is like Taxi Driver except instead of a mohawk Travis Bickle has a mullet and his target is John McCain.
  
  Assassin's only competition on the cool-o-meter is the dashing fellow on the cover of Rail Baron, the "game of building railroad empires" (which I'm keeping for myself). He's There Will Be Blood but drunk.
  
  



• In other media news, my literature burnout has moved me to comic books. I read Phoebe Gloeckner's A Child's Life, Debbie Dreschler's heartbreaking Daddy's Girl, a bunch of R. Crumb and now I'm halfway into Watchmen. I sure like them words when the come with lots of purdy pickshures. Reading the much hyped Watchmen, I totally understand why it's considered a classic. I didn't know how into it I was until I saw a preview for the movie the other day and had a nerdgasm. I hope it doesn't suck.
  



• As for music, I can't stop listening to Love's Forever Changes. Sometimes it sounds like someone going crazy, sometimes it teeters into hippie-dippy bullshit, but most of the time it's just an amazing beautiful album. I bought it for my dad but I don't think he ever really liked it. I'm not sure why. I can't embed anything from it, but check it out anyway.
  
• Today on TV there was a British movie from 1999 called Virtual Sexuality on. I remember passing it at Hollywood Video and always thinking that it was raunchy Cinemax-style porn. Little did I know that it was basically Just One Of The Guys but with shitty CGI. The amazing thing is how late-'90s everything about it is. There's bleached tips and Macy Gray everywhere. When my kids want to know what 1999 was like I'll hand them VHS copies of this, Can't Hardly Wait and Spice World.


• I'm afraid that all of my favorite TV shows are dying. I thought the last two episodes of The Office were pretty weak in comparison to what had been going on. What, so the Angela/Andy/Dwight triangle reaches a head and then the issue's dropped and everything's normal? No! I have a stake in these imaginary people's lives and I want resolution!
  
  Degrassi's long been put out to pasture, but that doesn't make its decline from pre-teen, Canadian guilty pleasure to pre-teen, Canadian guilty pain any more acceptable. Who are these new people that I'm supposed to care about? You can't just send characters to Africa and expect me to forget about them, Degrassi writers; not when you've left me with this:
  
  
  
  But what's really broken my heart is Skins. Oh Skins, I loved you so much! For those of you who aren't British and/or retrograding back to middle school, Skins' first two seasons were hella good. What started as a guilty pleasure (Matt warned me it was "Degrassi meets Rules of Attraction") turned into one of my favorite shows ever. But now? Let me list some of the offenses: extensive plots involving gangsters; penis-tattoos; drawn-out fart jokes; live goldfish-eating; characters nobody could give a shit about.
  
  These characters who seem to be drawn from imaginary TV-types rather than actual people - sensitive sk8r boi, walking pharmaceutical receptacle (Chris without the likability), Screech-like nerd who the former two are friends with for no discernible reason, xtreme maybe-lesbian (probably not) named Naomi Campbell (wtf??), twins (one's wild the other's not and probably is a lesbian). Oh, and Tony Stonem's little sister who the show keeps reminding us is totally attitude and anything-goes, yet somehow became way less interesting now that she talks. Skins - don't make me hate you. Please come back down to earth.
  

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Back to that irritating nerd and Darcy's froggy, Jesus-loving sister in Degrassi, let me put a question to you, world: is the nerd stereotype even relevant in 2009? Revenge of the Nerds? Fine. Saved By The Bell? Cool. The straight-laced programming geek in Virtual Sexuality? Ok. But now that the internet has taken over our lives and people camp out all night for Apple products is there still a cultural otherness to nerds? Look at tv - shows like The Office and motherfucking Chuck; movies like Rushmore and its imitators; the rise of Michael Cera and all indie quirkiness.

The outdatedness of the nerd stereotype really hit me when I was on the airplane from Belfast and they showed an episode of The Big Bang Theory. I guess it's a popular show, but it felt to me like something from another era. Haven't the nerds finally taken over? When the biggest movie franchises of the last decade have been The Lord of the Rings, comic book movies and Star Wars, I think we need to reevaluate things. Does this really represent a reality anyone thinks of as true anymore?



Of course, this is coming from someone who reads comic books, watches childrens' programming and then goes and writes about it in his blog, so what do I know?

Non-Post

So, while Bennington is letting it's current students out into the freezing Vermont tundra, I'm still here in Belfast. Only two more days after today, then it's on to Francia with mama mia (was that Italian? I don't know what I did there).
I've been spending my time here studying, drinking, saying goodbye and writing blog posts nobody reads.

Other activities:

• Sketching portraits based on people's Facebook photos, which is really just a big image library (if you're creepy).
• Reading my horoscope for 2009, as predicted by The Onion.
• Bulleted lists
• Trying to remember how to say "stabbed to death" in Old English for my test on Wednesday (it's "ofstingan")
• Listening to "Johnny Hit & Run Pauline" a gazillion times, by X, punk's cutest couple this side of Kim and Thurston:




• Discovering that dating is obsolete, courtesy of Mr. Charles Blow (...David Charles Blow??). That means if you haven't been going on dates much recently you're ahead of the curve. Go you! Go me!
  
• Spending all my UK pennies on a blank casette.
• Watching Top Gear and kind of understanding why it's the biggest show in the UK and not just a British Discovery Channel series. Kind of.
• Thinking about how I'm going to get to the airport but not actually planning anything.
  
• Procrastinating.
  

Multi-National Mediocrity (co-starring Robin Williams)

Now, when I talk about pop culture differences between Ireland and the US I usually find myself neatly picking out the worst, most glaring aspects of Irish pop culture (the ones most visible to me) and juxtaposing them with my favorite aspects of US culture (likewise). But that mindset overlooks perhaps the ugliest sides of both, which, to my mind, are products of seething banality. Both in the US and here I'm shocked by the terrible, terrible mediocrity that is embraced nationwide.
I hear myself getting on my high horse again, which is never fun to read. I don't mean to sound like some Chuck Klosterman-like arbiter of holier-than-thou taste.
But I do know what I like and what annoys me:

I've bitched before about how passable, Nashville blandoids The Kings of Leon are treated like rock gods here. Am I crazy? I mean I know it's not terrible, but it's not that amazing is it? Doesn't it sound like the Rock 'n' Roll Generator is set on "Default?"
That said, "Sex On Fire" is kind of fun.



I've been trying to find an analogous mediocre American band that also made it big here. I knew there must be sweet, sweet examples of middle-of-the-road history repeating itself. Imagine my happiness when someone told me that the Fun Lovin' Criminals were huge in Ireland for years and are even still touring. Don't remember them? Yeah you do:



Of course, when the Northern Irish aren't runnin' around robbin' banks all whacked off of Scooby Snacks they're watching X-Factor, which, like American Idol is complete shit. Unlike American Idol, though, everyone tunes in weekly, from old grandpas to 8-year-old girls. And Northern Ireland even has it's own horse in the race, the living Cupie Doll that is Eoghan Quigg:






Speaking of that awful Snow Patrol song, they played that at halftime during the Northern Ireland football match I went to. There's a lot of support for local artists.

But could anything drop my spirits and lift my ire like the fact that universal boil Jeff Dunham has wormed his way into the hearts of people in both the US and the UK? I turned away from the US, embarrassed that Jeff Dunham's Christmas special was the most-watched program in Comedy Central history, only to find that Northern Ireland has embraced his hacky, broadly-racial ventriloquist act, too. It's this kind of humor that makes me even miss the out-and-out, inarguable atrociousness of someone like Carlos Mencia. It's the type of thing I'm almost sure my dad's side of the family undoubtedly thinks is great (other things they like: the movie August Rush, Josh Grobin, church)
Why, world, why? Why do the freshmen I live with quote Achmed the Dead Terrorist to me?
I dare you to watch all 11 minutes of this clip - the most popular youtube clip in my hall at the moment - without clawing your eyes out so you can get to your brain to switch it off:



Oh, but it's not all question-setup/answer-punchline with a dead terrorist puppet; there are plenty of other too-bland-to-be-offensive stereotype puppets on display.
Like Sweet Daddy D! The lisping, jiving, black pimp!



Look at that lily-white crowd laugh! But Jeff didn't forget about them. What about hillbilly Bubba J? He likes - get this - watching Nascar and drinking beer! Haha! I relate to that!



And who could forget Jose Jalapeno. He's a sleepy Mexican pepper... on a steek! Watch purple abomination Peanut tell him what we're all thinking - your accent is funny! "What the hell is feeling "cchhhappy?" You fucking freak!



US and Ireland: this is your culture. You have the power to kill it; you have the power to make it stronger.


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Speaking of August Rush, I had to go imdb to remember it's name. While there I looked at the movies that Robin Williams currently has in production. Listen to these plot synopses and tell me that you can't already picture the movies in your head/ have maybe already seen them:

• The Krazees - "Unable to deal with his daughter reaching puberty, a psychologist (Williams) has to get a handle on his emotions, which have come to life as different characters."
• Old Dogs - "Two friends and business partners find their lives turned upside down when strange circumstances lead to them being placed in the care of 7-year-old twins."
• World's Greatest Dad - "A comedy about a man who learns that the things you want most may not be the things that make you happy, and that being lonely is not necessarily the same as being alone."

Hey, I have a script: unable to deal with the pressures of making a few good movies in the '90s, Robin Williams handles his emotions by becoming a giant self-parody.
That, or Hook 2.