A Blog Named Sue

Wild Loose Commas

I'm not dead: My larger child went back to school this week, my little one just started daycare and my job is kicking my ass - in other words, my schedule is pretty thoroughly boinked. I'm working on some new stuff, though, and I hope to have it posted soon.

If you want me to go on arguing, you have to pay for another five minutes: So Craig is not guilty, not gay, not quitting but possibly not not quitting...I think it's safe to say that whatever he is, he's not.

Please excuse us while we kill ourselves: Saw my first, honest-to-goodness "jumper" the other day; the police had cordoned off the area around 28th Street and Sixth Avenue because there was a guy about forty stories up who was threatening to kill himself. I must say I was a bit surprised by the crowd that had gathered, a fair number of whom were shouting, "JUMP!" Call me naive, but I didn't think that stuff actually happened, I thought it was only a gag in the movies. One guy was classic:

"Yo! Let's go! I've been standing here for an hour! Fucking do it already!"

I don't know how it turned out. I had to get back to my office.

Arrivederci, Luciano.

Wild Loose Commas

Sorry about the unintentional radio silence over the past few days; a pre-holiday crunch at the office kept me offline and I've been treating myself to an extended sojourn in the real world for the past few days - a sojourn highlighted by The Worst Haircut Ever; I swear, I look like Steve Ditko's rendition of J. Jonah Jameson. Anyway, a few random bits of trivia that have been rattling around in my head (non-sci-fi geeks can tune out now, if they desire):

-I thought this Entertainment Weekly article about Transformers was pretty funny; I was around 14 when the cartoon debuted so I was never really a fan of it, but you've got to get a chuckle out of the cartoon's fans griping that the film adaptation of a toy franchise is overly commercial.

The story reminded me of when I did some promotional work for the Mattel/Cartoon Network re-launch of the He-Man & The Masters of the Universe line a few years ago. I was shocked to discover that Mattel keeps a full time PR person on staff whose sole job is to maintain good relations between Mattel and the He-Man fan base. Mind you, this was a franchise that had been dormant for nearly twenty years at that point in time. He-Man liason is a tough, unenviable job, by the way - there are literally thousands of He-Man fan sites and it seems that grown men who write He-Man fanfic are a surprisingly prickly and fickle bunch.

I have used this space to wax rhapsodic about the Christopher Eccleston Dr. Who episodes; I've finally had a chance to catch up with the first season of David Tennant's run as the Doctor.

Well.

Um, yeah, let's just say my reaction is a bit less rhapsodic...

Regular transmissions about stuff that actually matters to resume tomorrow.

Wild Loose Commas

A few random thoughts as we head into the weekend:

• I really thought they would brazen this one out. The White House is characterizing Secretary of State Rice's meetings with her Syrian counterpart as "informal," thus they are not hypocrites for bashing Speaker Pelosi for meeting with the Syrian government. Geez, they're off their game. Off the top of my head I came up with "Secretary Rice can meet with Syria because she speaks for the President, instead of undermining him," and "We had to meet with them to repair whatever damage Speaker Pelosi's irresponsible stunt might have done." Come on guys, you can do better than "informal."
• A-ha! A cunning plan. Apparently the GOP Presidential candidates are going to ward off the haircut and "earth tones" stories by the Maureen Dowds of the world by being bald and all wearing the exact same suit.

Images from AP Photo.

Wild Loose Commas

The next two or three days are jampacked with meatspace goodness for me, but a few items before I go:

-Kiss My Ahss: Newly converted eco-warrior Arnold Schwarzenegger on why he thinks it's taken people so long to "warm up" to environmentalists:

“They were like Prohibitionists at a fraternity party. But I believe this is about to switch over. It’s about to switch because it’s going to be powered not by guilt, but by something much more positive, by something much more dynamic, by something much more capable of bringing about real big change.”

Oh, so if we'd been a bit more fun you might have listened before the climate was stressed to the point of collapse? Piss off. A better analogy would have been, "We were like the people at a fraternity party desperately trying to get the keys away from some stupid drunk asshole before he got behind the wheels of the Lincoln Navigator his dad bought him and he went and killed somebody."

I mean, Arnold, it's great that you've converted your Hummers to run on hydrogen and biodiesel, but, piss off.

-At first, I got all fanboy giddy over this - but then I realized it's only application will be to kill people.

-Well, Max, I'd say it's for the same reason lions go after the sick and lame zebras of the herd. (Via The Sideshow.)

While I'm gone, enjoy this picture of the only woman in New York Rudy Giuliani hasn't divorced yet.

Wild Loose Commas

Meatspace has grown jealous of my absence and will demand much of my attention today, but there are a few things I wanted to opine on before I go:

• If you're going to commit plagiarism, don't plagiarize the Wall Street Journal. There are some people who actually read that, you know. I would plagiarize, oh, I dunno, an obscure fledgling blog, for example. I mean, the blogger will probably be so flattered that he or she wouldn't even sue over it to increase their name recognition and drive some hits to the site. At least, that's how I would feel about it. Honest.

• Hooray! In six short years, give or take, my morning commute might not suck! Maybe.

And in the course of preparing this post, I have discovered that Typepad's spell checker doesn't recognize the word "blogger." That's a bit odd, isn't it?