web-goddess

The Mathematics of Misery
1 – set of keys forgotten by me at home this morning
1 – mobile phone forgotten by the Snook at home this morning
10 – therefore useless phone calls placed by me to the Snook
2 – number of hours it took him to realize I hadn’t signed on to IM from home
25 – dollars spent on magazines and food at the shopping center to keep me busy
5 – daggy garments tried on at Kmart
2 – blinding calf and foot cramps in the middle of the Kmart bra section (brought on by last night’s crappy Pump class)
3.5 – number of hours it took Snook to finally reach home and let me in

Add it all together and it equals a NIGHT of SUCK. I’m goin’ to bed.

AskMetafilter tackles the important questions like… What is the origin of the slang term beeyotch? The responses are fairly enlightening. I’m pretty sure I picked it back in London in ’98 (courtesy of Hoey and Hipp, for those that know them). That thread also contains the following joke which made me snort with laughter:

Q. What does Snoop Dogg wash his clothes with?
A. Bleee-yatch.

I’m ranting about “low-carb diets” over at Glitter again…

Roger Ebert doesn’t think Andy Serkis should necessarily be nominated for an acting Oscar for his work on Return of the King. Hmm. I disagree. I can see what he means about all the extra work the technical guys did, but I think you could still nominate him on the basis of the vocal performance. As Ebert’s letter writer mentions, wasn’t there a lot of talk about Robin Williams being nominated for Aladdin a few years back? I think Serkis easily eclipsed that performance.

And by the way, I hope you all used your Christmas break to catch up on the Oscar contenders… because the Web-Goddess Second Annual Oscar Contest is coming soon!

A Pump class by any other name…
Ow. It’s been a while since I had a good gym rant, right? I’m in some serious pain here, people. I meant to go to Pump class last night (with the instructor that I like) but by the time I got there it was full. “No problem,” I thought. “I’ll just run tonight and tomorrow I’ll try out a new guy.” Bad idea. First, a little background for you non-gym-rats:

Body Pump is a class where a bunch of people do synchronized weight lifting to music. It’s pretty low-impact and it targets all the major muscle groups, so it’s a good workout for me. The thing is, it’s like franchised. The company that invented it makes gyms pay a license fee to use the name. My new gym must have had a falling out with them, because we don’t have “Pump” class anymore… We have “Flex” class. It’s the exact same workout though and that’s all that matters. I mean, the whole point of having this standardized routine is that you pretty much know the workout you’re going to get before you go, right?

Wrong. This guy tonight apparently decided to do a little innovating. My suspicions were raised when he had us each get some extra equipment (“Two extra bars??”), but everyone else in the class was either an old lady or a scrawny Asian, so I figured I’d be able to keep up. Right off the bat, he had us doing aerobics to warm up. Aerobics! I don’t have a good track record with that. Plus it was like eighty degrees in that gym. I was sweating like crazy. (It reminds me of that yoga crazy people do in a heated room.) As for the actual lifting, he went too fast and combined groups together and pushed me beyond where I could go. He had us doing weird things like using the extra bars as ski poles for doing calf raises. He made me do pushups on the floor without my towel and I got carpet burn on my knees. (Yeah, I do girly pushups. But at least I can do more now than I could six months ago!) Halfway through it I was literally trying to come up with a good enough excuse to leave. It was like yoga all over again. Every time I looked around I could see that everybody else was doing fine, while I just couldn’t get into it. I had no energy and I was flailing, and every time he’d exhort us to go a little deeper or hold something longer I could tell he was directing it right at ME. And he went so fast! I was trying so hard to keep up that I knew my form was suffering. Now I’m feeling it. My legs hurt and my neck feels seriously screwed up on one side. I’ve probably slipped a disc or something. Stupid man. I should raise a complaint or something… *grumble grumble*

Sydney is suffering a sniper crisis at the moment… from somebody with a BB gun.

I was excited to see this review (with accompanying photo gallery) for the stage production of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials books at the Royal National in London. It sounds interesting, to say the least. I can’t believe they cut the character of Mary Malone! Granted, you could trim a lot of her story out with the weird motorcycle-animals, but she fulfills a pretty crucial role in Lyra’s temptation. In terms of casting, wow, Will is pretty darn cute! I think Timothy Dalton would make a great Lord Asriel (though Terence Stamp, who did the voice on the BBC radio production, would be better). The daemons look pretty cool. But, my, Mrs. Coulter looks old! I thought of her as much younger and prettier. Isn’t that part of her charm and attraction? (Link courtesy of Max.)

The cousin of Australia’s Cardinal Pell has written an impassioned open letter asking him to recognize her individual rights as a lesbian. She and her partner are both former Catholic nuns who devoted over twenty years each to the church, including working in the slums of Chile during Pinochet’s regime. (More information in accompanying article.) She points out that the Vatican isn’t interested in the service they perform, the Christian principles they live by, or the loving relationship that they have. All they care about is how they have sex. How screwed up is that?

Related: I’m reminded of a scandal at ND a few years back in which a much beloved priest (Father David Garrick, for those that know him) “came out” in The Observer. He was, of course, celibate, but he identified as gay and sympathized with homosexual student activists on campus. His letter meant a lot to some of my gay friends. Unfortunately – despite the Church’s stance that it’s all right to be gay as long as you don’t act on it – he was soon bumped from the schedule for performing Mass and was basically silenced. The last I heard he’d left the Church and was scraping by as a doorman for The Tonight Show in LA. Just thinking about it makes me angry and sad.

Knitted Elvis Wig Pattern. And some people still think knitting isn’t cool…

Periodically the Snook and I – in an effort to better ourselves – take turns recommending books to each other that the recommendee is obligated to read. Most recently he handed me his old paperback copy of Clive Barker’s Imajica. I was less than enthusiastic about the prospect (as he was well aware). I had a dorky boyfriend in high school who read nothing but Barker and Piers Anthony and it pretty much soured those authors for me for life. The only Barker I’ve ever been able to get through before was The Thief of Always (which I enjoyed, to be honest). Anyway, I dived into Imajica trusting that the Snook wouldn’t steer me wrong only to pull up short at the first sentence:

“It was the pivotal teaching of Pluthero Quexos, the most celebrated dramatist of the Second Dominion, that in any fiction, no matter how ambitious its scope or profound its themes, there was only ever room for three players.”

My sister would’ve immediately sneered, “I don’t read books with people named Pluthero in them,” and kicked him in the bum. But I persevered…My biggest problem with the story is that it takes so long to get any plot action going. I mean, things are happening that you eventually figure out tie into the plot, but without a sense of dramatic tension to propel the story forward I found myself wanting to set it aside several times. Barker has a great imagination but I can’t stand to read 500 pages of fantastical landscape and character description. It reminds me a lot of China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station in that respect: The author is just in love with his own vision and spends so much time describing it that you’re sick of the whole world by the time the actual plot rolls around.

I was also worried that Barker was setting up a lot of enigmas that were never going to be solved. That always pisses me off. Luckily the Snook was there to assure me that all the loose ends would eventually be explained. They pretty much all were, with one niggling exception… (Skip the rest of this paragraph if you don’t want to be spoiled.) How in the world did Sartori – the one that set himself up as Autarch – meet up with Quaisoir? As I understand it, she was the “original” Judith and fell in love with Sartori, so he made the facsimile Judith to appease Roxborough (giving her eternal youth and bequeathing her to the family). Sartori also unwittingly made his own copy, who then messes up the Reconciliation and somehow makes his way out of the Fifth… with Quaisoir? Does she think he’s the real Sartori the whole time? Why did she change her name? (Or was that original name?) If the real “Gentle” Sartori was so in love with her, why didn’t he even mention her when he was asking Pie to wipe his memory? We didn’t even get a “Hey, look after that love of my life for me, will ya?” It’s really not a huge deal in terms of the plot but it’s pissing me off. Barker places all this huge universal importance on the idea of “lovers” but then completely drops the ball there.

Anyway, I finished the book last night and I’d give it a positive review overall. It starts slowly (and the ending isn’t quite as spectacular as I’d hoped), but there are some really great ideas and images in there that I’ll never forget. Oh, and a lot of really weird sex. I was reading it on the bus home from work yesterday and I think the person standing in the aisle next to me is scarred for life. It’s also really fun to try to guess where Barker is going with all the mixed metaphor and allegory and allusion. (Me: “So wait… If Gentle is Jesus, does that make Celestine Mary? And holy crap, are they going to have sex with each other?”) At least is generated some really fun discussions/arguments between the Snook and me. Now it’s my turn to choose… and it’s about time the Snook was introduced to Roland of Gilead, I think.