I did not watch the entire American Idol finale. And for that I am glad.
I did, however, watch enough of it to hear the original song both contestants sang (I don’t know the title of it but one of the lyrics is something along the lines of, “I want to be inside your heaven,” which means exaclty what, I do not know) and, unfortunately for me, I heard Carrie Underwood sing it again on Entertainment Tonight last night.
Now, I’m not saying anything disparaging about your idol, America. Rather, I’m saying that the fucking song is now so stuck in my head that I have been hearing it in a nearly continuous loop (actually, I only hear that one lyric listed above) for the past two days. And when I am NOT hearing it, I’m hearing XTC’s equally annoying song, The Mayor of Simpleton, which I heard playing in a store the other day.
I’ve tried listening to other music but nothing will erase these two songs as they battle to become the American Idol of my soul.
Rain. It’s been raining steadily since last Saturday. This morning the sun was out briefly, but it’s gone now. The clouds have returned.
They say this may be one of the coldest months of May on record for this area.
Cold. Wet. Green.
The tree trunks are black with rain. The moss, bright green.
I am thinking of the desert. The hard ground, dusty. The wispy plants barely tethered to the ground. The sweat that dries and leaves a salt stain on your shirt. The water in the distance is a mirage.
Somewhere, in some desert, someone is dreaming of a place that is cool and damp and sodden with rain.
Today is also Raymond Carver’s birthday so the poem for 5.25.05 is one of his: Happiness
Happy birthday, Ralph Waldo Emerson:
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — ‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.
— from Self-Reliance
Here’s an interesting tidbit–Unpublished Jack Kerouac Play Discovered:
An unpublished, three-act play by Jack Kerouac, based on his drunken Beat adventures, has been discovered recently and will be excerpted next month in BestLife magazine.
“The part we’re excerpting will show Kerouac and Neal Cassady at a racetrack, and they’re partying and gambling,” Best Life editor-in-chief Stephen Perrine said Monday. “But they’re also talking about reincarnation and other obsessions. It’s more an exploration of their inner lives.”
Harper Lee made a rare public appearance to receive an award at the Los Angeles Public Library. To Kill a Mockingbird is one of my all time favorite books and movies. Many writers try to emulate Lee’s tender and convincing style, but few have that skill. Harper Lee is a marvel and I do not at all puzzle over why she has never published another book (she may well have written dozens more for all I know). She may well feel that with this book, she has said it all.
Horrific and yet joyful story–Fla. Girl, 8, Found Alive After Kidnapping:
Police Sgt. Mike Hall was scouring the landfill for the girl Sunday morning when he looked inside the trash bin and saw a yellow recycling container with a lid on it. When he opened the lid, he “saw a bunch of rocks, a foot and a hand,” Sgt. Dan Boland said.
Hall then yelled out to see if the child was alive, alerting other officers to the discovery. A police lieutenant saw the girl’s finger move and officers began pulling rocks off her, Boland said.
So wonderful that she was found alive but how absolutely chilling is the situation that ended with her buried in such a way. All I have to say is that The Amber Alert is a really good thing.
I’m slightly obsessed with the HGTV show House Hunters in which prospective buyers visit three (they obviously visit more but you only see three) properties with a real estate agent and then try to buy one of them. Sounds scintillating, right? Well, yeah, okay. It’s is sort of boring unless you’ve become house hunting obsessed (as I have).
All this is to say that we are in the preliminary stage of looking at new houses and thinking about selling ours. Last night, we went to see a house that I’d found just listed last weekend. It was, we figured, too small for us but it was quite cool in appearance and the location is a place we would love to be. So we went and were disappointed to find it smaller, dingy, more ramshackle than we had imagined. So two thumbs firmly down on that house. We will keep looking.
On the other side of the house buying coin, we have selling. Discussions at present are about whether or not we should try to sell the house ourselves and cut out that ugly 6% commission. We know someone who recently sold her house in a weekend–the weekend she listed it. Okay, so that’s the kind of fantasy we all hope to come true but what is the reality for us? I’m thinking it’s possibly a situation of biting off more than we can chew but I’m also thinking it might be a lot of funny (and cost effective).
Of course, with classic bad timing we are thinking about doing all of this just as Alan Greenspan is hinting at a bubble:
Some regions of the U.S. housing market show signs of unsustainable price speculation and “froth” from rapid sales, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said. The surge may ease as homes become less affordable, he said.
“It’s pretty clear that it’s an unsustainable underlying pattern,” Greenspan said in response to a question after a speech on energy to the Economic Club of New York. “People are reaching to be able to pay the prices to be able to move into a home.”
“There are a few things that suggest, at a minimum, there’s a little froth in this market,” Greenspan said. While “we don’t perceive that there is a national bubble,” he said that “it’s hard not to see that there are a lot of local bubbles.”
I’ll admit, I’m not much of a lover of baseball but for some odd reason I love watching sappy movies about it (Field of Dreams) and reading amazing books about it (The Natural). I also appreciate the dedication and passion that goes into being a baseball fan. So, this post is about a new site dedicated to the game–Baseball DIY. Go on and bookmark it then.
I’m going to go ahead and be judgmental and say that this–Letourneau, Fualaau to Wed Friday–grosses me out. Why is the media celebrating this news? Would we be printing cutesy photographs of a male child molester marrying one of his victims? Haven’t we had enough of this woman? I feel so sorry for her children–all of them.
If you read nothing else today, please read this–Moyers Addresses PBS Coup:
These “rules of the game” permit Washington officials to set the agenda for journalism, leaving the press all too often simply to recount what officials say instead of subjecting their words and deeds to critical scrutiny. Instead of acting as filters for readers and viewers, sifting the truth from the propaganda, reporters and anchors attentively transcribe both sides of the spin invariably failing to provide context, background or any sense of which claims hold up and which are misleading.
I decided long ago that this wasn’t healthy for democracy. I came to see that “news is what people want to keep hidden and everything else is publicity.” In my documentaries — whether on the Watergate scandals 30 years ago or the Iran-Contra conspiracy 20 years ago or Bill Clinton’s fundraising scandals 10 years ago or, five years ago, the chemical industry’s long and despicable cover-up of its cynical and unspeakable withholding of critical data about its toxic products from its workers, I realized that investigative journalism could not be a collaboration between the journalist and the subject. Objectivity is not satisfied by two opposing people offering competing opinions, leaving the viewer to split the difference.
This is always hard to do, but it has never been harder than today. Without a trace of irony, the powers-that-be have appropriated the newspeak vernacular of George Orwell’s 1984. They give us a program vowing “No Child Left Behind,” while cutting funds for educating disadvantaged kids. They give us legislation cheerily calling for “Clear Skies” and “Healthy Forests” that give us neither. And that’s just for starters.
myfanwy collins 