my dog can't poop in the rain. it's funny.

oh man i've found another pointless waste of my time.. oh but it's so good. there's this cartoon on BET called Hey Monie and it's hilaaaarious, it's so natural and perfect and within like 3 minutes i had complete love and affection for the characters. it appears to only exist monday nights at 11:30, so go watch it then and report back with your feelings. i was overcome. i think you can guess i don't often find fantastic entertainment on BET. well well.

good lord, ebert has given The Passion his full four stars... "Note: I said the film is the most violent I have ever seen. It will probably be the most violent you have ever seen. This is not a criticism but an observation; the film is unsuitable for younger viewers, but works powerfully for those who can endure it. The MPAA's R rating is definitive proof that the organization either will never give the NC-17 rating for violence alone, or was intimidated by the subject matter. If it had been anyone other than Jesus up on that cross, I have a feeling that NC-17 would have been automatic." for the rest, go here.

shit. frank is leaving in like a week and i can't for the life of me get together with him. things happen so fast. meanwhile i get an email from marianna today detailing all of her trip so far on semester at sea - cuba, brazil, and south africa so far - and my god, it's amazing just to read it, to think kids get to experience this stuff, and in such a wallop - she'll be all around the world by late april. she saw fidel castro give a speech! but apparently he's a loon. listen to this: "He likes to have a 'dialogue' with us, allowing us the opportunity to ask questions and him the opportunity to answer. In the entire four hour 'dialogue' there were (I'm not kidding) four questions asked, two of which he did not want to answer or could not answer. He speaks very much like a senile grandfather. He'll start to answer the question in some weird abstract way, and then get distracted by some other random thought, then, two hours later, come back round again and answer the question directly. So here were a few of the topics discussed: The population of Tanzania, Cashews and the spelling of cashew, how writing on a baseball is like putting your hand on the world, so don't put your hand on the world, China and how he went there a long time ago and liked it, the price of books for both Americans and Cubans, and how he imagines the price for Americans to reach up to Mars, and lastly, but most importantly he spoke 45 minutes on VCRs and how everyone in Cuba seems to own one. Oh Fidel. The funniest and most exciting part of the entire speech was when, in the middle of some other random thought, he announced at 4 p.m. that we had to return to our ship by 8 and walked off stage." what a world.

i had my field trip to the dali museum yesterday. it was a mixture of great and hot and kind of bad. unfortunately the whole thing wasn't scheduled correctly to where the gap between breakfast and lunch was about six hours and the time spent at the museum was around 5 hours. which is about 4 hours too long really. it wasn't all that big and it was crowded so you felt pressured to not linger on a single piece for too long or else you're blocking everyone's view, or smelling a stranger. the art was great really. i've never been a big fan because it feels too trendy and after reading orwell's critique of the autobiography i felt like people like dali are maybe just the scum of the earth, but upon seeing over 100 original works, everything from 9 x 12 foot extremely elaborate portrayals of chris columbus' discovery of america to tiny pencil drawings of naked women from his adolescence to the disappearing bust of voltaire to jewelry and bizarre eating utensils to a masturbating hitler.. it was really interesting. watercolor and pollack-style paint-spraying and cubism and surrealism and sketching, he just used all forms of visual art medium and it was really impressive to see all of this eclectic work done by one individual. i really enjoy the paintings where there's double imagery - like this one where you see in the foreground a boy sitting by a river with his head in his lap and behind him is the exact same shape only it's a hand holding an egg, and before long you can't look at the boy's head without thinking it's an egg.. after a while he didn't seem deviant at all, he just seemed funny and sexual and eccentric in a good way. the persistance of memory and all that stuff still seems a little dull to me, but here i am anyway, a dali convert.

it wasn't a nate and melody day of fun. some new things have happened since then, mainly gary has entered our group so now we're a fun little threesome in the back of class. gary was in my moses, jesus, and muhammad class last semester and for a while he seemed like he was a christian but then he revealed he wasn't so i was always a little confused about him. yesterday i learn that he is 30 years old. which is, wow i really didn't know that. and he also grew up right down the street from me on northern way by dyson.. so hm. he's very friendly and talkative and he makes good eye contact so of course i get this impression that he likes me. which makes me kind of like him. or at least think about it all the time. so nate and gary and i get the very back of the bus where the three of us can sit together. which is cute. and then we find that kristopher-with-a-k is on the trip and he comes and sits in front of us, which is nice at first because he's very good-looking. he and nate have a lot to talk about because they're kind of obsessed with beer, sports, and video games, so they start to pair off and me and gary start to pair off. gary and i are sitting close together so our legs and arms are always touching and when he talks to me he kept looking like he was looking at my eyes and then down to my lips so i was um, alert let's say. if girls could get erections i often wonder where and when that would happen to me.

so we have a bunch of good conversation that's funny a lot because he's a little bit of a weirdo with an offbeat sense of humor and i keep making fun of him for being old so that's all nice. and we end up losing nate and kris at the museum so we walk around and around it together talking about the art and talk about dali vs. freud and dali vs. orwell with this hip professor that was on board with us and go outside and wander around looking for the mysterious "other museum" that was supposed to be next door but didn't actually exist and looked at the yachts docked next door to the museum. the whole day was kind of gary and melody's day of fun, with a little bit of eating and interaction with other kids, but by the time we were back on the bus and it was getting dark, still sitting close, more listening to his classic rock favorites than talking, i kept getting this impression that i was very much locked into this moment between us, i was experiencing this intimacy, but right when i expected him to say something to me about it he would laugh and comment on some conversation that the boys were having behind us. which makes me kind of fall into a pit of how i'm too desperate and maybe if i wasn't always looking i would find something or some self-deprecating crap like that. so we piled off the bus and my ride was already there so i just walked off and looked back and gary had looked back to see where i was and we waved and that was it. so i have no idea. i couldn't have put myself more out there without feeling like a complete idiot. i start thinking that's the problem, that i'm not giving enough signs that i'm into it, but dammit i smiled and laughed and made eye contact and asked all about him and touched him a little bit, anything more would be ridiculous and that's not who i am. i hate it how you never find out things are going nowhere until you get your hopes all up. but maybe i'm wrong. he's selling me a tv for my living room to replace the high-pitched-sound-emitting one that's maybe giving me a brain tumor, which is very good, and i'm picking that up tomorrow before class, so maybe some interesting thing will happen. whatever.

ok SAG time.

becca: the cooler was interesting but not fantastic. you kinda saw bill macy's package so that was weird. i want to see the jane goodall chimpanzee movie at the orlando science center. i've never seen a movie there so i don't really know how you do it but i'm sure we could figure it out. unless you're not a dork like me and don't want to pay $10 to see a 45 minute documentary about chimpanzees... roger moore gave it five stars! umm.. next week will be touching the void, a docusortamentary about an amazing mountain climbing expedition.. i know this sounds increasingly worse but really the guy was on letterman telling his story and my jaw was dropped the whole time. ebert gave it 4 stars! which is his 5! so yea, this is all i do, can you tell?

btw guys, my dali museum field trip is open to everyone, and we actually need more people so we can fill the bus and not have to pay more. so if any of you want to get on a bus with my humanities class and drive to st. pete and look at a cool dali exhibit this saturday from like 8am-8/9pm, pay $15 and come on. i think a lot of the kids are trying to bring friends so you won't look like pink elephants. $15 covers the bus and then we get some sort of group discount for the museum which should cost $5-8, and then we're just eating lunch and wandering around the beach for a little bit. jenn might drive up to meet us too. so hey.

i freaking love my astronomy class. i am so lucky to have gotten an astronomy professor who doesn't feel like doing math. we just get to learn all the cool stuff and go "wow" like 10 times every day and walk outta there feeling very small in the coolest way. the earth's diameter is 12,000km and jupiter's diameter is 142,000km!! it takes up 96% of the planetary mass in the solar system! saturn is so undense it would float on water! pluto is fuckin far away! so now i want to be an astronaut.

more than 2,600 same-sex weddings and counting, people... this is a good week to be alive.

GAVIN NEWSOM: MAN OF THE YEAR

from the san francisco chronicle: "It was only his 12th day as mayor of San Francisco, but Gavin Newsom decided that night -- the very night he attended President Bush's State of the Union address in Washington, D.C. -- that he was going to defy California law.
And turn the nation on its ear.
Attending the president's Jan. 20 speech as a guest of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Newsom listened closely as Bush voiced his strong support for outlawing same-sex marriage -- with a constitutional amendment, if necessary.
Not long after the speech, Newsom called his chief of staff, Steve Kawa, a gay man who was at home with his partner and their two children. "He told me that he wanted to do something,'' Kawa said.
Two weeks later, during a staff meeting, Newsom dropped the bombshell on his top aides: He wanted them to explore how the city could start issuing marriage licenses to gay and lesbian couples.
Kawa said the mayor asked staff to gather as many legal briefs, news articles and other background information as they could. Added his communications chief, Peter Ragone, "He also wanted it done quietly.''
Within 24 hours, Kawa was on the phone with Kate Kendell, executive director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, a San Francisco-based public interest legal organization.
Her reaction: "Oh, my God, you're kidding me,'' Kendell said in an interview Saturday. "It was a mixture of 'wow,' and 'oh s -- .' "
It was the first time, Kendell said, that a mayor of an American city wanted to take such an initiative. And Newsom, a straight Irish Catholic man married for two years, was the perfect politician to take on the fight, she said...."

read on!

so if you didn't hear, there was some sort of mass protest in san francisco over the weekend and a whole shit load of gay couples were legally married at city hall. : ) i'm off to discover more about what the hell happened cuz i don't really know but here are some things that made me cry: this, this, and this. HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY!

From: Protestants for the Common Good In Defense of Biblical Marriage

The Presidential Prayer Team is currently urging us to: "Pray for the President as he seeks wisdom on how to legally codify the definition of marriage. Pray that it will be according to Biblical principles. With any forces insisting on variant definitions of marriage, pray that God's Word
and His standards will be honored by our government." This is true.

Any good religious person believes prayer should be balanced by action. So here, in support of the Prayer Team's admirable goals, is a proposed Constitutional Amendment codifying marriage entirely on biblical principles:

A. Marriage in the United States shall consist of a union between one man and one or more women. (Gen 29:17-28; II Sam 3:2-5)

B. Marriage shall not impede a man's right to take concubines, in addition to his wife or wives. (II Sam 5:13; I Kings 11:3; II Chron 11:21)

C. A marriage shall be considered valid only if the wife is a virgin. If the wife is not a virgin, she shall be executed. (Deut 22:13-21)

D. Marriage of a believer and a non-believer shall be forbidden. (Gen 24:3; Num 25:1-9; Ezra 9:12; Neh 10:30)

E. Since marriage is for life, neither this Constitution nor the constitution of any State, nor any state or federal law, shall be construed to permit divorce. (Deut 22:19; Mark 10:9)

F. If a married man dies without children, his brother shall marry the widow. If he refuses to marry his brother's widow or deliberately does not give her children, he shall pay a fine of one shoe, and be otherwise punished in a manner to be determined by law. (Gen. 38:6-10; Deut
25:5-10)

G. In lieu of marriage, if there are no acceptable men in your town, it is required that you get your dad drunk and have sex with him (even if he had previously offered you up as a sex toy to men young and old), tag-teaming with any sisters you may have. Of course, this rule applies only if you are female. (Gen 19:31-36)

dammit frank. god i'm so conflicted here. this is great, this is amazing, i'm so happy for you, i have this image in my mind of where everyone will be in ten years and you're going to be in this incredible job doing all of this incredible stuff and making all this money and you will be IMPORTANT and SUCCESSFUL and i have no doubt about this and that's just phenomenal to me. it's what makes the separation worth it, because i know you deserve this more than probably anyone else and shit you're so damn good at what you do and this feels actually very much like a destiny thing, which you're so lucky to have lemee tell ya because the rest of us are often just floundering around to find some sort of voice and here you've not only found your's, you're using it. i love that. but oh i've just gone and screwed myself getting all close to you when i knew you would leave sometime soon, and this is exactly what i'd do too if i were you - florida is suffocating, literally, and as much as you love friends and family, there's this drive in us that we get maybe from watching movies that makes us want to just venture out and DO SOMETHING with our lives and i really hope i get on that train soon because it's one of those things that if you wait too long you just never do it i think, but here you're doing it, and that's wonderful, and maybe you'll get the ball rolling for the rest of us and we'll do it. because as much as we feel like we're still kids, we're not really. and i kind of hate that, but you can show me the better side of all this by going up there and kicking new york's ass. i just hope i don't lose touch with everyone again because sometimes i feel like you're the only one i can feel comfortable with and just talk to at these parties.. but maybe i'm wrong about that, i hope so. just, shit, it's going to be very uncomfortable for a while, but don't worry about that, just feel cool that you had that effect on someone. and i will most certainly be coming to new york in the next few months to visit. everyone will say it but i will do it. promise. not for your benefit, of course, but for mine. i miss that place and i really really mean it when i say i want you to show it to me. so work hard, and never fear because hopefully we'll get a steady flow of visitors up to you every couple of months or so. this is great, frank. your mother is incredibly proud of you.

so i guess the white house press have suddenly grown balls again... i'm listening to the press room exchange from yesterday i think as they berate mr. mcclellen about bush's national gaurd service. it's fuckin awesome. go here. yea i just figured out how to do that.. 2 1/2 years later... hey who was the former press secretary again? i wanna know the story behind that guy leaving, i have this feeling he just got fed up? that would be a fun book to read.

i can't believe clark already dropped out.

also i've added a link to help people register to vote, just in case any passing body hasn't already. it's very important, people. unless of course you plan to vote for bush, in which case it's not really that important, i mean, look at the system, corporations run everything, you mean nothing to them, voting is a sham.. sucks man.

i saw american splendor, frank, and it was enjoyable and an interesting take on the wide array of lives one can lead, but i'm sorry it wasn't as satisfying or funny as lost in translation. i really like saying "pekar" tho. like "pecan pie" in when harry met sally.

say, i'm learning all new things all the time, and in changing the number of posts that are displayed on this page i happened upon an area to put in a blog template thing.. so maybe i can fix this face of mine.. but now i can't figure out how to get onto the site where i found a bunch of cool templates. does anyone have template website suggestions for me?

everytime i see dave chappelle doing tiger woods and saying "fer shizzell" on that commercial i laugh.

i wanna know everything.
i wanna be everywhere.
i wanna fuck everyone in the world.
i wanna do something that matters.

Go OUTKAST. album of the year baby. heyyll ya.

and congrats to coldplay, the only other song besides "hey ya" that deserved best record = "clocks", still not tired of it. chris is so sexy. and his kerry shoutout was classic. here's hoping, chris.

go see master and commander. no, really!

so i debate over whether this is good to tell you or not, because mass amounts of people could start doing it and then the company could figure out what's going on and then i wouldn't have my little advantage in the world.. but i realize that may be a little selfish so... if you go to ratetheradio.com and take a 10 second survey and put in a name, any name, every name, and your address, they will send you a coupon for up to $12 to use on a single movie ticket at most theatres, including regal. one coupon per survey. i tried this with several names and my single address and i've gotten five in the mail so far. about 20 more are coming. it takes about a month for them to get to you tho. but still. pretty huge loophole there. kinda great. try not to spread that around too much tho, huh?

so now i've finally seen The Last Samurai, which is much better than the review said, i cried a little and now have a huge crush on ken watanabe. and i want to be in that village and live the life of a samurai. and you would've sooner if you'd ever seen Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai... oh yes. forest whitaker shows us a mixture of mafia, gansta, and samurai culture. very interesting movie. got to see a trailer for The Day After Tomorrow too... jesus. chills at that scene of water rushing towards manhattan.. yknow jake gyllenhaal's in that flick.

also have now seen City of God (oscar surprise for best director) - a brazilian masterpiece about an insanely violent slums city where if you're older than 5 you have a gun and you've killed your first kid by 6 or so. insane. ly good. go see that.

so i listen to 102 jamz sometimes, and it's really quite good, i've come to love beyonce even tho i hate anyone changing up the national anthem, that's probably the one area in life where tradition is best, and you hear lots of nice jay-z and sean paul and sexy r&b like alicia keyes and this amazing song by floetry that i think is called "gettin late". ooo it's so good. check that out. music is great. i'm gonna watch thirteen today. lots of goodness out on video now: american splendor, which i need to see still, the secret lives of dentists, once upon a time in mexico, and of course, lost in translation.

The Darkness.. well here's the thing. If you'll refer to Buddyhead, who I get all of my musical opinions from? no not really, but they do have great influence over me surely even tho i read them probably once every six months anymore.. if you go here: http://buddyhead.com/music/bestof2003/ you'll find that The Darkness is on their "Worst of 2003" list, among many other bands you kids fancy, (but it's only because they don't like you as PEOPLE and nothing to do with the quality of the music so no need to seriously critically evaluate it or anything... you know sometimes snobbiness just erupts out of me) and here's what they have to say: "Can we cut the irony bullshit already? Enough with the whole, "I'm dressed like a total fucking clown, isn't it hip?" crap. There's nothing cool about velcro shoes, stupid haircuts, and wearing a pink Journey ringer tee three sizes too small. We're looking down the barrel of a very large gun pointed directly at you Brooklyn and Silverlake. Ten years into this, "I look like how my mommy dressed me in 1985" garbage, and you knew it was only a matter of time before the whole irony shtick was full blown. Yeah dudes, I get the joke... mullets, bad solos, falsetto, posturing... NOT FUCKING FUNNY. This glam cockrock pose was stupid 20 years ago, and it's worse now because we SHOULD know better."

so ok. how am i supposed to feel kindly toward them after that? i know that makes you mad. the music wasn't all that enjoyable in the first place, it was just kind of like.. "hm.. i don't know.. hmmm uh, eh, yeah..." so that's not a strong enough platform in the first place and buddyhead knocking it down is maybe just like shooting a dying animal or something.. it is a little catchy, and it's not nearly as murderous to my ears as, say, evanescence, but that doesn't mean we should praise it. our standards should be higher than that. btw, i'm revisiting my pumpkins greatest hits cd lately, thanks again for that. and billie holiday and old at the drive-in (in/CASINO/OUT, v.g. album).

I HATE CENSORSHIP. gaaahhhh bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit why do we let them push us around? fascist fucks. if i were janet i'd say "fuck you, i'm not sorry, it's a boob, get over it". and then i'd flash my vagina!! let them stew over that a while.

speaking of stewing, my humanities professor, Dr. Jaeger, doesn't know shit about grammar and she keeps taking points off of my papers because she thinks i screwed something up when i actually didn't. jesus! tell me if i'm right or if i'm right or if i'm right.. "there is still AN enormous amount of things.." she wants that changed.. wtf.. "But who, outside of cartoon madmen, GOES out looking.." she wants that changed.. wtf... "but it bears nearly only its title as a similarity with the novel" is that such "awkward sentence structure"? you'd think she was a moron, but she's not, so why does she act like one while grading papers? "Gods and Monsters, which beautifully portrays the imagined last days of James Whale's life, shows that he was an eccentric and openly gay man who had a bittersweet experience with first love on the battlegrounds of World War I" - she wants "shows that" changed to "showing how". that's not grammatically correct! what does one do in this situation?

i love astronomy. did you know that if we were to scale the universe down so that the sun was the size of a basketball sitting in a UCF classroom, the nearest star to it would be in Hawaii? that's fuckin incredible. i love astronomy.

so in preparation for our Dali museum trip we were handed this essay of George Orwell criticizing Dali as basically a great painter but a deplorable human being. did you know he kicked his sister in the head when he was young, threw a boy off a bridge when he was five, emotionally tormented a young girl who was in love with him when he was a teenager for five years and then left her? he was psychotic. and maybe a sociopath. and Orwell gives this great biting paragraph that i loved:

The point is that you have here a direct, unmistakable assault on sanity and decency; and even - since some of Dali's pictures would tend to poison the imagination like a pornographic postcard - on life itself. What Dali has done and what he has imagined is debatable, but in his outlook, his character, the bedrock decency of a human being does not exist. He is as antisocial as a flea. Clearly, such people are undesirable, and a society in which they can flourish has something wrong with it."

i wonder, how extensive is your knowledge of his work, all you kids with his paintings plastered on your walls? i've never seen the gruesome stuff he describes in this essay, but i will in a couple of weeks! this is a criticism of Dali's autobiography, so find that and read about his sordid life and look at his disturbing pictures and then tell me what you think.

jenn wants to take me to california to get married. i told her i'd think about it. wait a minute, it was actually for the coachella festival, featuring the cure and radiohead among others.. woo.. we are such silly people, country raised by puritans, freaking out over a boob. wow. janet is hot, get over yerself. i can't believe people are apologizing and saying words like "deplorable" and "$400,000 fine". jesus christ. i've almost completely forgotten all the superbowl commercials. there was the pepsi bears, which was kinda funny, and jimi hendrix which was good, and dog bites crotch which was funny (anheiser busch knows how to make a commercial eh?), and donkey wants to be clydesdale.. ummmmmm i miss the terry (?) tate office tackling commercial, and the zebra referee for the clydesdale football game and the cowboy going "that ref's a jackass" and the other cowboy going "no, i think he's a zebra". those two have got to be the greatest commercials of all time. and the herding cats. everything is art now, you notice? did everyone go and party here or in gainesville and not invite me? do you think i did something that i didn't actually do again? how can drama arise when i'm not even present? "i'm your gay pimp daddy!" i have to go watch that now but i'll leave you with laughter. i was watching the DVD (yes i got a player finally) of capturing the friedmanns the other day (oscar nominee for best documentary and so so so deserved) and in the extra stuff there's footage of these four birthday party clowns sitting around a new york restaurant table and they're complaining about bad excuses clients have given them in the past when they don't have the money and one is saying how this one lady said her husband had gotten like prostate cancer of the brain or something and then another guy goes "what a dickhead". LOL
and finally.. that little bearded fellow who briefly had a show on VH1 and does his comedy while softly playing the piano.. he said: "my sister was diagnosed with multiple personalities, and there's nothing funny about that... but she phoned me the other day....... and my caller id exploded."