I’ve been playing my new album while blogging. Just now I thought to myself, “I didn’t know Pearl Jam had a song on here!” But when I checked the list, it was Creed. *sigh* What clones. Reminds me of when the first Stone Temple Pilots album came out and my ex- called them “Stone Temple Vedder Pellets.” On a positive note, though, I’ve been rocking out to Wheatus’s “Teenage Dirtbag”. How did I miss this song? It rules.

    I’ve got two tickets to Iron Maiden, baby…

Toploader also had me dancin’ (in the moonlight). My image of them as a band straight out of the 70’s isn’t helped, though, by the fact that everytime I see them on telly I think to myself: “When did Hyde from ‘That Seventies Show’ get a rock band?”

New Poll: Ahh, there’s nothing better than a good weblog scandal. How were you affected when the truth about Kaycee came out?
 
Results from the old poll: R.E.M. won by a landslide! It was, like, 100 to 7. What, you don’t believe me? Too bad! My site, my call. Live with it.

I totally forgot that Crufts was this weekend! I just caught some of the final rounds while waiting for my stuffed pepper to finish roasting (yum). In case the name escapes you, Crufts is the “World’s Greatest Dog Show” (their words). If you’ve seen “Best in Show“, you know what I’m talking about. They take it so seriously! It’s awesome to watch, if only for the unintentional hilarity of it all. The best part, of course, are the names of the dogs. I jotted down a few from the “Pastoral Breed Final” I just saw. (Those are the dogs that originally herded animals, so it’s like German shepherds and border collies and stuff.) A selection:

  • “Penliath Shooting Star”
  • “Otterswish Bernadette”
  • “Zottel’s You Don’t Fool Me”
  • “Freelancer Frosty Moon Over Corydon”
  • “Tamarch Maggie May of Tolorock”

Seriously! You can’t make stuff like that up. Too insane.

Adventures in Shopping

I don’t even know where to begin. Okay, yes I do. This morning my plans for the day were: go shopping and buy some more shorts/t-shirts for our trip next week (for some reason I’ve got, like, NO summer clothes anymore), pick up this album I’ve been wanting, go to the gym, and pick up some food for dinner. Simple.

So on my way into Hammersmith, walking through the park, I was thinking about the possibility of my sister coming to live in London and all the BUNACers that I knew when I first came over. Most have gone home to the States, but there are a couple that might still be floating around. I suddenly thought of this Canadian guy Adam that I had last seen *literally* over a year ago. “I wonder what he’s up to,” I thought. “Too bad I don’t have his number or even his last name.”

So I do my shopping. Some observations:

  • Apparently nobody’s going to be wearing shorts this summer. Seriously, I had to search just to find some to try on, and they were all butt ugly. Apparently the fashion gods have decreed that it’s going to be a very sweaty summer.
  • Okay, men, I know you call them “3/4 length trousers”, but really, who are you kidding? They’re capri pants. Yeah, I wear ’em, but at least I call ’em by the right name.
  • I’m getting really, really tired of this Madonna-USA-glittery-acidwash-rodeo girl look that’s taken over all the shops.

Okay, ranting aside, I did manage to pick up some cool stuff. So I stopped off at one last shop, Primark, before heading to the gym. Primark is kinda like Filene’s Basement or something. Everything’s £4 and it looks like it was just taken off the delivery truck. I found this kickass pink T-shirt that says “goddess” on it that I had to have. When I went to pay for it, though, I suddenly realized that all my other shopping bags were gone. I ran all over the store, which was packed, frantically checking everywhere I had been. I finally went to the customer service desk, where (THANK GOD!) somebody had turned them in. I guess I left them in the changing room. Bless the honest English.

So I left Primark thinking that I should get to the gym before anything else weird happened. I started off down King Street, and immediately I noticed that a guy walking in the opposite direction looked an awful lot like my friend Adam I mentioned before. I literally did a bigtime double-take and then flagged him down. It was him! I know it sounds stupid, but the sheer coincidence of it completely blows me away. And not only did I randomly run into him, he lives clear on the other side of London and was only in Hammersmith to visit friends. So, yeah, it’s a city of, like, six million people or whatever, and I randomly run into someone I haven’t seen in a year five hours after thinking about them. And if I hadn’t lost my bags in Primark, I wouldn’t have passed him on the sidewalk. PSYCHIC, I TELL YOU! PSYCHIC!

Anyway, that’s my adventure. I just had to tell somebody.

U.K. Survivor Update: HOORAY! I hereby take back everything bad I said about ITV on Friday. In addition to showing Survivor two nights a week, they’re also showing a two-hour recap of the week’s episodes every Saturday night! (Well, I don’t know about every, but they sure did tonight.) So I got to watch the second episode and boy, was it good.

  • The bug eating was great. They were all so hungry by that point that a few of them really seemed to savor the big, meaty grubs. Snookums declared that he couldn’t eat them if they were wriggling, but I felt that I probably could, as long as I didn’t have to go first.
  • The immunity challenge was much harder than it sounded on paper. The teams had to build stretchers in 15 minutes, and then four from each team had to race through the jungle to find their missing teammate. On the way back, the path was narrow and as one of the Ular carrier’s went down, it looked like Helang would overtake. Eve, who was *on* the stretcher, however, threw her body in the path of Helang and managed to slow them down. It all came down to the final sprint, when one of the Helang guys collapsed three times. Weenie. I was especially heartened to see that Ular, the winning team, actually had a girl (Sarah, the model) as a carrier.
  • Lots more swearing this time. The best was when J.J. got mad that everything had washed away and the whole camp was untidy and they kept losing things. She let lose with a tirade that’d curl your hair. That was the nail in the coffin for her, I think.
  • When J.J. finally did get voted off, her final moment was pretty venomous. She turned to the group and spat out, “I know exactly who voted for me” before literally running off into the jungle. And during the closing interview, she ranted about Charlotte (even rolling her eyes at the very name, like I do at the fact that Charlotte brought no less than THREE bikinis with her) and called her the most useless person on the team. That woman has issues.
  • Funniest moment: watching schoolmarm-ish Jayne brutally whack a shark upside the head with a rock so she could eat it for supper.

And “Big Brother” started today too! I’m in a time-sucking vortex of reality television. I’d say I pity you American folks faced with nothing but re-runs… except I’m going to be back in the USA myself this time next week!

Score one for the Yankees! (No, not the baseball team.) A federal appeals court has overturned the injunction against “The Wind Done Gone”. I’ve already checked Amazon and it’s not up for pre-order yet. It’s supposed to be out by the end of June though. I’m definitely stoked to read it.

I know I don’t normally blog so much news, but there’s just tons of interesting stuff on the wires today. And some of it’s a matter of life and death! (Don’t hyperventilate, Ma. The Hammersmith Bridge is the only place they’d want put a bomb around here, and I’m far enough away from that.) Summertime excitement!

The old comments have all been added to the system! Yes, your deluded rants and ravings have now been preserved for Internet posterity.

Terms of endearment

What do you call your significant other? (Hypothetically, then, if you don’t have one.) I know Brigita likes “SigOth”. I generally just call mine “Snookums.” Or when I’m talking to others, he’s my “boy” or my “boyfriend” or my “honey bunny poopie pie.” (Just kidding about that last one.)