Lost on the Lunatic Fringe

Since I mentioned Cyd Charisse, I thought it was appropriate to add some video of one of the best tap dancers…wait, she was a damned good dancer all around, but she was incredible. I can never get over how flexible and graceful she is doing tap. It’s much harder to pull off than it looks. Tap is not generally viewed as one of the more graceful forms of dance.

And just for the record, Robert Osborne could tell me to do anything, and I’d do it just to keep him talking. I love that man’s voice. I hear him talk, and I think he could be president if he ever wanted to be. He’s fairly articulate when he’s plastered too. (Oscar night, once you spotted it, you kept looking. Must have been one hell of a party.)

We watched The Band Wagon last night. I ended up getting to bed late because of it. It’s not because the plot was overly strong, but because Cyd Charisse and Fred Astaire were dancing in it. Cyd had legs that went up to her neck. She knew how to use them to the best advantage too. She was an incredible dancer, and versatile. She had chemistry with Fred Astaire too. Both of them were professionals who put their heart and soul into their dancing. Both of them had a very precise and lyrical style of dancing, and together they made poetry in motion.
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Mehdi and I are getting addicted to yet another Joss Whedon show. Dollhouse.We’re only torturing ourselves. Fox will smother this one in its cradle too, or otherwise fuck it up. I just know it. I’m praying that they don’t, though. It’s called hoping against hope. I am falling in love with the series. It’s just like Firefly. We fell in love with it, then it was over. So many paths it could have gone down, but it withered and died where Fox put it in the shadowy netherworld of Friday night.

I’ll keep my fingers crossed. I find it refreshing to see series with intelligent dialogue and a complex plot. I like subtext and innuendo, and good actors delivering convincing performances.

Obama repealed the “conscience rule”, which made it permissible for healthcare providers to deny treatment to people seeking birth control if it upset their religious sensibilities. Good for him. I think that if I liked Obama before, I really like him now.
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Some survey on Myspace made me remember again. I thought to myself, “fuck it. might as well blog that thought too.”. The thing that made me remember was a question about crawling through a window. Oddly, it did not make me remember crawling through a window.

When I lived in L.A., I used to walk a minimum of 12 miles a day. I’d walk three miles from home to work, then I’d go home for lunch. Then I’d walk back to work, the final three miles being the walk home at the end of the day. L.A. is an odd town for being bereft of a decent public-transit system and being reliant on cars. I could go into the reason for this, but I digress. Anyway, I didn’t have a car. I had never gotten my license. The foster and group-home system is not about to make it easy for anyone to have the freedom that a driver’s license or a car would give them. The twelve miles were standard. That was what I walked if I didn’t want to do anything in the evening or on the weekends. If I went out, I walked there too. I remember walking on La Brea and smelling the tar, splashing water from a bottle on my arms and face to cool down.
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There’s a discussion in a board I go to at the moment about libertarianism and revolution. What a frightening thought. I don’t think they really understand what it is they’re hoping for. Anyway, not only do they insist that libertarianism means far-right conservativism, but that it is our duty to rid ourselves of government control. So you get to live out your Mad Max fantasy and become a little king with your guns and food stockpile, but the rest of us are fucked? Yes, it’s everyone’s responsibility to provide for the eventuality and have a plan, but not everyone is paranoid enough to stockpile landmines and build a fallout shelter, let alone a compound of them. It reminds me of The Postman, (book, not movie) where the world is terrorized by bands of militia who take what they want because they have the guns. Maybe a better example is Hammer of God, in which even the people who stock up against a catastrophic meteor strike find that stockpiling food only guarantees that you make yourself a target for the people who didn’t.
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I got to thinking about what the internet means to me. When I was a kid, I read Kipling’s Just So Stories. One of the stories that stuck with me was The Elephant’s Child. It was meant to be a parable about the consequence of having too much curiosity. Maybe Kipling knew a child who wouldn’t stop asking questions, and he decided to fix the nosy little bastard in effigy by writing the story. Regardless, I am that elephant’s child. I am endowed with insatiable curiosity. When I was young, I spent a great deal of my time reading. I would read non-fiction, science fiction, fiction, literature, textbooks, manuals, children’s books….anything with words in a row. I was an indiscriminate reader. I would read while I ate, and I would suffer from lack of sleep because I would stay up nights reading. Sometimes I’d wake up in the morning with a book under me and the lights on. When my folks caught on, they’d come and check on me. I mastered the art of jumping up to get the lights and then back into a waterbed with hardly a ripple. All of this to continue doing what I loved.
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I was watching a program on the Science channel which happened to mention geodesic domes. I was intrigued as to the properties and possible advantages of such a house. One thing led to another, as they always do, and I ended up looking at a history of Buckminster Fuller. The man was incredible. I’d heard of “bucky-balls”, of course. I didn’t realize that they were named for him. He was an odd duck, but he was brilliant. He documented his life from 1915 to his death in 1983. Every fifteen minutes during this span, he would make an entry. It’s been speculated that he’s one of the most well-documented human beings ever. He designed houses that were sold as kits. They were called Dymaxion houses. They were designed to passively heat and cool, being roughly dome shaped. They had ergonomic bathtubs. Evidently they work the way they were designed to. The only shortcoming I can find is the tendency to have extremely good acoustics, so the smallest sounds carry throughout the house. If you want to live in one, you’d better not hope to have any secrets from your roommates. In a way, it’s a more successful version of the poured-concrete houses Edison tried to sell. Those crack and become drafty. You can’t move the furniture. Why? Because it’s made out of bloody concrete, that’s why.
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Especially when it’s the Melvins. The truth is, the first one is for the surrealism. The second one is part of my affinity for water, and the fact that I find women singing in Portuguese irresistibly sexy. The third one is just because it’s a work of art, and undeniably beautiful for that reason. It’s my blog, and I mean to do with it what I like. If you don’t like it, suck it.

I’ve been cleaning the living room today and thinking to myself that I need a shed. Seriously, who keeps their lawnmower, shovels, cans of paint and not one but two ladders in their living room? It’s not just those things, though. There’s a fairly large drift of bags containing crushed aluminum cans …four bags I believe, to be exact. There are boxes of envelopes and bills and correspondence to sort through, but it never gets sorted through. For what might be the first time in six months, I dusted. It’s always a revelation when I do it. It tells me that we are some filthy buggers who need to be “reeducated”.
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