"The Silent Art"

Yesterday, the world of mime bid farewell to one if it's most shining (quietest?) stars. Marcel Marceau died on Saturday in Paris, at the age of 84. Which I figured was notable because surely he was the last mime in existence. I mean, it's not as if anybody likes mime, right? And even if they do, there's no way anyone could like it enough to actually learn how to do it, I assumed. But apparently, I assumed wrong. There are mime troops, mime performances, mime theaters, and (I'm serious here) mime ministries. The mind reels. But quietly.
More interesting to me was the fact, which many probably already know, that Marceau was a Holocaust survivor who worked with the French resistance to protect Jewish children. Now for me personally, that's a legacy slightly more worthy of celebration, but I suppose it all depends on which side of the imaginary mime fence you stand on.

Just Picture My Face on Michael Douglas's Head

The Scene That Plays Through My Head
Every Time It Takes 2 Hours To Get Home From Work

I Mean Seriously

I know I should stop blogging about the news I find online, because it seems as if a pattern is developing. But I felt I had to point out this headline from a link on CNN:

"Police Question Armless Man In Neighbor's Death."

From my perspective, a person who is killed by someone with no arms should be officially classified as not trying hard enough to stay alive.

P.S. On an unrelated note, (since everyone in it seems to have at least one, and mostly two arms) I cannot stop watching this video. It's kind of Torrance Community Dance Group-esque. I think the song is super-catchy:



The artist is Feist. Never heard of her before the new iPod commercial, which I blame for keeping the song running in m my head for something like eight hours straight on Sunday.

OMG. Gross.

Men are disgusting. And 33% of men are extra-disgusting (which is saying a lot) along with 12% of women.

"More American adults are leaving public restrooms without washing their hands, and the worst offenders are men, a new survey found. Researchers who staked out public potties found that one-third of men didn't bother to wash after using the bathroom, compared with 12% of women."

And people wonder why I'm (just a little teeny bit) obsessive compulsive. Is there really any reason not to be?

Little Debbie, That Cruel Temptress

The other day while perusing the headlines, I came across this one:
"Girl, 9, Threatens To Kill Classmate Over Zebra Cakes."
When I was eight or nine myself, during a weekend spent at my grandmother's, I consumed an entire box of Little Debbie Oatmeal Creme Snack Cakes. I snuck some, asked permission for others. But in the end, over a period of approximately 10 hours, I ate 'em all. (You didn't think I started working on this girlish figure just recently, did you?) I paid for it later of course. During the small hours of the morning, my grandmother found me in the bathroom, barfing up those Little Debbies. Nonetheless, I'm pretty sure I asked to go buy another box the next day. Which is all simply to say that I'm no stranger to Little Debbie's allure. The siren song of an individually-wrapped snack cake can bring even the strongest among us to our knees.
(In my case, in front of the toilet bowl.)
But even in the darkest moments of my enthusiasm, I'm not sure I would have killed for Little Debbie. Which is why I was surprised when I read the aforementioned headline. The girl who made the threat apparently wanted to have her (snack) cake and eat her chips too, as they say. (Actually, they don't say that, exactly, but the principle applies.) After offering to trade her chips for the zebra cakes, she decided, "eh, to hell with it, I'll keep both," obviously familiar with that whole "possession is 9/10ths of the law" maxim.
While I think one could probably discern something telling about American youth from this story, or the country's troubling eating habits in general, I think it says a lot more about Florida, where the alleged incident took place.
To wit, a sampling of recent headlines from a FL television station news site:

• "Man On Bike Killed In Drive By"
• "Stolen Car Smashes Into Retirement Home in Orlando, Driver Flees"
• "Clerk Shoots Would-Be Robber 14 Times"
• "Woman's Feet Hurt By Sandals Purchased @ Wal-Mart"
• "Man Shot After Robbers Take His Pants, Make Him Run"
• "More Than 100 Snakes Found In Del Ray Warehouse Fire"

And that's without even trying. You get the idea. There's very little reason, if any, to go to Florida. Ever.

Fatty Fatty Two by Four

Is Britney Spears seriously getting shit for how she looked in her bikini at the VMAs? Has our concept of an attractive and healthy physique really gotten so far off the mark that we all think Britney Spears looked fat?

I'm not saying that she's not a trainwreck. She's a trainwreck, all right. And I wouldn't claim that her performance was good, because "depressing" is probably a more accurate term. Furthermore, I'm not asserting that, given a nearly limitless selection, I would have opted for that particular outfit. But that girl did not look fat in her bikini. This girl looks fat in her bikini:

If I looked like this in a bikini:

I would make an argument in favor of it being classified as "business casual" and then wear it to work every day. To my office. In Northern Virginia.
And plus, at the end of the day, isn't it a whole lot better than seeing her vagina, all things considered?

Good Fences Keep Out the Little People

Where I'm from, the closest thing to a gated community that you might find is the local cemetery. Sprawling McMansions, tucked away behind gatehouses, manned by folks who can't afford to live in the McMansions they "guard" are all but nonexistent.

"How sad!" you may be thinking. "Why, if we didn't have developers down here to rape and pillage every square inch of undeveloped earth, plunk down gargantuan box after lookalike gargantuan box, and then erect a big giant fence around the whole thing, where would we live? And how would people know that we're better than them, or that we make more money?"

And if you're the kind of person who wants your neighbor's nose up your ass, who craves guidance on issues like when it's okay to have your garage door open, or who believes that anyone whose visitors would park on the street deserves a citation, then a gated community might be just the thing for you.

I can think of a few instances where I might find a gated community appealing. Iraq's Green Zone comes to mind. I might want a big gate and fence there. And it's a safe bet the neighbors would be less concerned about your garage door than about pesky issues like whether you've got explosives strapped to your chest.

But absent insurgents or zombies or something, I'm hard-pressed to figure out why you'd want to live in a gated community. Maybe you think polarizing our society is kind of neat. Perhaps you never really saw much of a problem with that whole "separate but equal" thing. Or maybe you just sort of always wanted to be an elitist pig. In which case, you know, it's good to have goals.

P.S. Darren informs me that Paris Hilton just sold her house, so that she could buy a new one in a gated community. Which should tell you a little something about the kind of people who live in gated communities. How Darren knows this is an issue for a whole separate blog post, however.