Rosemary for Remembrance

 If you've changed your name from Livejournal, drop me a note here (I'm screening entries) so I can recognize you.  Also, this is an immense favor, but if you changed your name *on* Livejournal at some point, tell me that, too?  I have completely forgotten who ironed_orchid , to pick on just one, used to be.

 It turns out that "No, no, I only held a knife to the throat of my girlfriend and attempted to assault my wife when I was addicted to steroids, and I'm sober now" doesn't strike most Illinoisans as a plausible defense.   In what was presumably an effort to bury the news, the ex- Lieutenant-Governor nominee announced this at a bar, during halftime of the Super Bowl.

I'm kind of tired of the redemption narrative as it applies to drug and alcohol use -- "I used to be an addict, and I'm managing it successfully" is one thing, but "I used to be an addict, and therefore I get a bye for everything I did while actively using" is another.   When I lived in Charlotte, NC,  the man responsible for buying voting machines for the county, who turned out to have been helping the manufacturer sell used machines as new to the town and pocketing a share of the profits, blamed it all on his out-of-control marijuana addiction.  Too many people have suddenly discovered (I don't know if this is true in Lee's case) active addictions only when the scandal of their behavior hits the newspapers.

Californians and liberals have probably seen this one already. For the rest of you, I offer a clear-cut choice:

Demon sheep.... or Carly Fiorina?



The good bits are the first minute, which features some Terry Gilliam-esque animation, and from 2:31, which features a guy crawling around in a sheep suit.

Carly Fiorina's team's previous Internet hit was their carefully-tuned slogan, "Carlyfornia!" [exclamation point original].

Since, as a person of geek, I am painfully aware of the way that Fiorina arrowed HP into the ground, I am glad to see she's incompetent at hiring marketing people as well.  

I wonder if we'll actually have a Democratic candidate for Governor this year?  Not that it will matter until/unless we have a Constitutional Convention.  Which we need, but which will require the universal disgust at the state of the state to be directed toward the root cause, an unmanageably amended Constitution, rather than toward individual politicians.  

 I own, and delight in, a Royal Winton Tiger Lily breakfast set.*   It comprises a tray, a teapot (lost  or broken before I got it), a cup, a wee milk-jug, and an even wee-er sugar bowl, all creamy yellow and with handles made of pink, green, and yellow tiger lilies.  I've bought another Royal Winton Tiger Lily teapot, in the green-and-white colorway, to replace the broken one.  The set  is -- well, "precious" is one word, but some would call it "twee"**.  

It also contains ... duh duh DUUUUH! ... a toast rack.    And here is where I realize that British, British-commonwealth, and all British-tinged cultures are INSANE AND WRONG WRONG WRONG.

This morning, my loving husband made me tea in bed, because he is just that nice, and at my request used the breakfast set.   For the hell of it, he also made use of the toast rack, which we generally leave on the shelf.  Two slices of hot buttered toast, lovingly sprinkled with Maldon salt, were rapidly becoming colder than Dick Cheney's heart.  I hastily removed them and put them on the plate with the other two slices, still comfortably warm.

As I understand it, the toast dilemma is between soggy toast (stacked on a plate) and cold toast (stacked in a rack).  I realize that tradeoffs must be made in this world, but it is completely obvious to me that everybody who isn't me has made the wrong decision.

* Mine is in the primrose-yellow colorway, not the green.

** People who say "twee" should go leave the room and talk about Zen teabowls now.

(Yes. I am one. Shut up, she explained.)

Again from the Times: In A Prius Preserve, Shaken Fans

Tim Ahern, a spokesman for the environmental group the Trust for the Public Land, said he had bought a Prius for his commute from Sacramento — about 80 miles east of here — for the same reason cited by many buyers: Mother Earth.

“I was driving,” Mr. Ahern said. “But I was also doing something good for the environment.”

But on Wednesday, he said he was stunned that the Prius might have problems and had called his Toyota dealer for more information. Unfortunately, he said, there was little information to be had.

“So,” he said, “looks like I’m riding the train for a while.”

There's been a horrible disaster in Haiti. People died. Survivors are homeless, hungry, and injured. What do you do?

Well, if you're the members of the Central Valley Baptist Church in Idaho, you:

1. Promise children's parents that you're taking them to get a good education, and that the parents can visit them.
2. Pile 33 "orphans" (see above) into a van and drive for the Dominican border, where you plan to
3. House them in an orphanage that currently does not exist and
4. Set up a Website promising that these children will be available for adoption in the U.S. and
5. When you are stopped at the Dominican border, lie about your intentions.
6. [edit] Blame Satan when people object.

One of the early actions the U.S. took in response to the Haiti crisis was to shut down all US-Haiti adoptions except those that were already in progress. People like Laura Silsby  are the reason why.

According to these people, they were on a mission from God.   If I weren't a Universalist, I would hope that these people do some time in Hell.

I am going to kick my 15-year-old secondhand Elna serger to the curb and buy a Babylock with air threading and automatic tension adjustment. The teacher was very nice and she knew her stuff. It's just that adjusting sergers is fiddly and maddening as hell and clearly takes a great deal of time each time you want to sew.

... or just usually?

Two snippets from today's Times:

Dear Jan Hoffman:  Adolescence is hell for everybody.  You could look it up.

Dear Neil Genzlinger: When you use the offerings of a cable network to describe women's and men's tastes, it would be sensible to check the ratings first. Spike and Lifetime, far from reflecting the pulse of a throbbing nation, are cratering.  One might even say deflated.

Dear Times: Stereotypes are not edgy exaggeration. They are clichés, things people already say, all over the country. Knock it off.

So, as is widely reported, Amazon has pulled all Macmillan books from their shelves as part of a dispute with Macmillan over e-book pricing.

I am ambivalent. On the one hand, real-world bookstores curate their stock: they decide what will sell -- and what they approve of -- and carry only that. This is why I dislike many real-world bookstores and why, ten years ago and more, I shifted most of my buying to Amazon, where I could pretty much buy anything in print. Amazon has as much right to curate their stock as any other bookstore; it's just that lack of curation is what makes Amazon appealing to me.

This decision is in no way morally different from Comcast's deciding not to carry Fox (was it?) until the two companies could agree on pricing. There is a significant practical difference -- Comcast genuinely is a monopoly in most areas, while an Amazon customer can blithely switch to Powells or B&N, or, if lucky, a local bookstore. Furthermore, Amazon has not made Macmillan books invisible -- you simply can't buy them from Amazon. It's just that I have an emotional attachment to All The Books I Want All The Time, while the availability or otherwise of Fox leaves me cold.

I am cranky, therefore, but not shocked.

I love the book. For those who don't know it, it's a pre-WWI epistolary novel by Jean Webster about a girl from a foundling home attending an [implied] Seven Sisters college through the generosity of an unknown benefactor. The benefactor, seeing an essay of hers and admiring her writing, makes the condition of the gift that she write a letter a month to him, to which he will not reply. The book is entirely in the form of her letters, with a few -- very few -- responses from the benefactor.

This makes it a challenging text to turn into a play. You could simply break the frame and play out the plot onstage, but then you'd lose Jerusha's wonderful narrative voice. It doesn't lend itself to the "Love Letters" treatment of having two people stand up and read their letters -- one of them would be just standing there and nodding for two hours. Something like "Dangerous Liaisons" (minus the sex; this is a girl's novel, dammit) would seem to work better, bringing the subsidiary characters the two main characters discuss on to the stage and having them act the scenes the leads describe. Daddy Long-Legs has some delightful and engaging subsidiary characters -- the heroine, Jerusha Abbott's, two roommates in college, her best friend, Sallie MacBride, and her eternal enemy, the stuck-up Julia Pendleton.

The adapter chose the first treatment. Jerusha speaks or, often, sings, her letters; Daddy Long-Legs -- whose real name is Jervis Pendleton -- mimes his reactions, sings harmony with her letters, and occasionally gets a number singing about how *he* feels. The original version of the play was a song cycle, later turned into a song cycle with interpretive dance, and the transition shows. DDL, the book, is all about Jerusha, about how she becomes an independent person -- very much like Jane Eyre, a person who is strong enough to refuse the masterful male's love until she's his equal. Jervis Pendleton is hardly present, except as a handsome young man flirting with a college student and trying to order her around.

Here's the problem. The lyrics are simply dreadful. I tried to remember some examples, but I can't. (Edit: This clip says it all.) Take it from me, if you heard lines A and B in an ABAB stanza, you immediately knew what A' and B' had to be, and you were always right. The rhymes were on-the-nose. The sentiments were on-the-nose. The songs themselves had almost no variety -- they were all pop songs at roughly the level of "There's Got To Be A Morning After". There was one memorable song with some tricky rhythms, about New York City, called "The Girl In The Window". My heart began to sink whenever Jerusha segued from one of the sharp, witty letters written by Jean Webster into the sludgy tosh written by the composer. Son, you're no Sondheim.

I had a very happy evening out with a friend, movingfinger, who also loves the original novel; I'm afraid we spent it dissecting the flaws. I will say that the lead, Megan McGinness, is lovely, engaging, has a fine voice, and holds the stage for the entire period; indeed, I found myself watching her all the time, even when she was sitting quietly in the shadows while the male lead sang.

A paragraph in the program had the author announcing that he didn't care if the show went to Broadway, he'd be happy if it was seen in community theater productions all over the country. Just as well.