the virtues of that stupid Caitlin Flanagan article about Twilight

Except for "stupid," these are words that do not belong together.

Abandoned HBO Soundstage for "The Wire"

A whole bunch of cool photos....

The Best and Worst Jobs in America

Damn. I used to be #7.

It annoys me that my wife thinks I would like the Twilight books because "I'm into that vampire stuff". I've never really gotten across that I liked BtVS because I'm into that Joss stuff not the vampire stuff. I don't read any vampire related books. I don't watch vampire related movies. Yet, the idea sticks somehow.

Well, what's making me crazy is that it's a writer's loop and it's not so much that they're going on about Twilight, but they're going on about this one paragraph:

"The salient fact of an adolescent girl's existence is her need for asecret emotional life—one that she slips into during her sulks and silences, during her endless hours alone in her room, or even just when she's gazing out the classroom window while all of Modern European History, or the niceties of the passé composé, sluice past her. This means that she is a creature designed for reading in a way no boy or man, or even grown woman, could ever be so exactly designed, because she is a creature whose most elemental psychological needs—to be undisturbed while she works out the big questions of her life, to be hidden from view while still in plain sight, to enter profoundly into the emotional lives of others—are met precisely by the act of reading."

The utter generalization of this paragraph made my head explode the first time because I'm sorry, not all readers are built alike and certainly, not all adolescent female readers are built alike.

And yet here are all of these writers basically saying "Yes! So true! And that's exactly why we want to write YA!" which to me does such a tremendous disservice to the very audience they're hoping to reach.

Or, it could just be that I'm cranky.

Look what my boyfriend made for me!

[link]

I am back from the dentist. I *should* got in to work, except my stupid company requires I take a full day or nothing, and it being 3.5 hours into the day and my tooth is throbbing (abuse from getting the temp crown on) and I'm just going to say fuckit. Even though I have already missed 2 important meetings and will miss a 3rd.

Add to the cranky of my dental plan sucking so icky bill and I'm REALLY like fuckit.

I think I'll go make soup.

This is a great sentence: ""The poor little buggers have copped such a hiding," Mr Marsh said. "Oddy is really protective of the chooks, so to her the penguins were only chooks in dinner suits."

This is why the second article was so much more satisfactory than the first one.

Barb's quote just made my head explode. I read at least a book a day from age 7 to 17. Did I have a peculiarly long adolescence? How, exactly, did I enter the emotional lives of others while reading everything I could get my hands on about dinosaurs and Roman Britain?

Roman dinosaurs in Britain had very complex emotional lives.

Roman dinosaurs in Britain had very complex emotional lives.

That's why they built Stonehenge.

eta: Anyone else remember this? Steve Martin's Best Show Ever