The Best Show on Television

Ooh, between the end of last season and now I'd forgotten how much I loooooove The O.C.!

Musings on the Names of Atlantic Storms

The Great Benji Kelnardo writes:

Lately, with way too much time on my hands, and with the arrival of the apex of the Atlantic storm season, I have been thinking about the names given to these storms. For some quick background info, there is an actual council (seriously) that convenes every five years to name the Atlantic storms; sounds like a great job to me. There are four main rules. First, there must be a name for every letter of the alphabet through W, so that the first tropical depression of the year begins with the letter A and goes down the list. Second, the names must alternate between a male name and a female name. Thirdly, the names must reflect the languages of the countries that the storms hit, meaning, the names are equally English, French, and Spanish. Lastly, after a major Hurricane hits that name is permanently retired. Therefore, there will never be another Hurricane Andrew.

However, I have been baffled by many of the choices of these names. Hurricanes or Tropical Storms should have names that strike fear into the hearts of people. After all, last I heard Hurricanes are scary. Let's review the names of a few of the major Hurricanes that have hit the United States in the past twenty years. Four come to mind immediately: Hugo, Floyd, Gilbert, and the recent Charley. Are you kidding? I went to high school with a Hugo and a Gilbert and guess what--in gym class, when teams were being picked, at the end would be Hugo to my left and Gilbert to my right. Floyd? I know a puppy named Floyd. Charley? It may be a different spelling, but the most popular Charlie I know of is mocked by his own dog.

If this so-called council expects anyone to take these storms seriously maybe they should give them serious names. Can't you just see these jerks sitting there laughing about naming these storms? Is it any surprise that there is always a huge amount of people who refuse to evacuate? Oh no! Here comes Gilbert! What am I to do! Can you seriously imagine being frightened by anything named Wilfred? No joke, if we get to a W, the storm's name will be Wilfred. I concede that finding a W name that's scary is not easy, but why not Warren, for example? I'd rather be frightened by a storm named after a Hollywood cad than some old actor selling oatmeal.

There is hope on the horizon. Saturday, Tropical Storm Gaston hit South Carolina. Now that's a name. Say it--Gaston. Now close your eyes.............
Did you envision a thick-necked Frenchman with a bad attitude and cigarette? Well you should have. "Haw! Haw! Silly American! That will teach you to rename your snacks Freedom Fries!" You try to tell me that when you are in the path of something named Gaston that you wouldn't leave in a second.

This all brings me to a single conclusion. I know one thing to always be true--the one thing that brings Americans together like nothing else is xenophobia. So there is the answer: no English names at all, only foreign names. Think of the effectiveness! Everyone hates the French, even the French hate the French. Gaston--need I say more? More Spanish names. I don't know about you, but the first thing I think of when I hear the name Roberto is a switchblade (was that a line? did I cross it? I didn't really mean to offend). We could even expand it to other languages. Can you imagine how people would react to Hurricane Osama?

I am calling on the public to join me in this call to action. Maybe we, the humble citizens, can begin to demand more accountability of our Atlantic Storm Naming Council. Why are the Presidential Candidates not talking about this? Is Florida not a battleground state? An absolute outrage. The safety of our citizens now rests on our shoulders, and if we do not take it seriously the consequences could be devastating.

Alternative Sources of Energy

Suck on this, Green Party!

"I'd Rather Live in St. Paul."

Oh, Garrison, how I do love thee.

1-55652-552-4

Doug Crandell, author of Pig Boy's Wicked Bird for Chicago Review Press celebrates his literary debut in a poignant and permanent way. Publishers Weekly rewards him with an outstanding review (They say, "Richly anecdotal, the work leaves no detail unexamined, whether physical or ethereal" and "Crandell addresses everything…with poetry and imagination") as well as making him part of their Pictures of the Week feature.

Resource

Oh, fuck me, this is gorgeous!

I've been a fan and casual reader of Senses of Cinema for at least a couple of years, but now that they've redesigned the site, it's much easier to use. I was tooling around and discovered this amazing resource, which, I'm assuming has been there all along, but I'd never really noticed or appreciated since the links were kind of difficult to make heads or tails of. Go, read, enjoy, be enlightened.

Peekaboo

Main Entry: (1) peekaboo
Function: noun
Date: 1599

: a game for amusing a baby by repeatedly hiding one's face or body and popping back into view exclaiming Peekaboo!

Main Entry: (2) peekaboo
Function: adjective
Date: 1895

1 : trimmed with eyelet embroidery a peekaboo blouse
2 : made of a sheer or transparent fabric; also: revealing usually small areas of skin
3 : offering only limited display or disclosure especially of a teasing sort peekaboo publicity

Garden State

It was inevitable, wasn't it?

There's no way that the actual, full-length version of Zach Braff's Garden State was ever going to live up to the beauty of the preview. And, that's not necessarily a bad thing. I mean, if nothing else, that means Braff was able to come up with about three minutes, total, of extremely evocative images during his first time out as a director. Which is more than I can say of Van Helsing or King Arthur. That preview is its own work of art, visual poetry as pure and stunning as anything we're likely to see in 2004.

Within the last year, the sensitive filmgoer has been treated to Lost in Translation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Before Sunset, three extraordinarily powerful and devastatingly romantic films dealing with similar themes of rootlessness, memory, and longing, so Braff had a hell of a lot to live up to if he hoped to make an impact on the kind of audience that's likely to see such films. But, what a compliment in and of itself that Garden State can even be mentioned in the same breath as those contemporary masterworks. (I'll spare you the pain of additional comparisons to The Graduate and Harold and Maude since, outside of acting as inspiration for the lonely-boy protagonist and the general quirky aesthetic, those films shouldn't automatically be classed with Garden State. And, as with Igby Goes Down and its Salinger nods, Garden State's relative merits shouldn't be confused with the merits of its referents and it shouldn't be blindly praised just because the filmmaker has the same good taste in movies and books that you do.)

Perhaps I'm being too hard on Garden State. It was certainly lovely. I laughed out loud several times, was genuinely touched by the moment when Large hugs Sam's mother, and have decided that no one's doing barely contained anger on camera these days like Peter Sarsgaard. If I'd happened upon it randomly, divorced from the unique brand of indie-hype that it's spawned, I probably would have wholly embraced it as one of "my" movies. (If you've seen the DVD shelf at my apartment, you know what I mean.) But. (But.) There is (however adorable) a bit of baby fat clinging to the writing, and the general sense that, for all Braff's talent and resources, my friends and I, if we were working at the top of our collective games, probably could have come up with something comparable.

Atkins in the Workplace

So, my managing editor is currently completely obsessed with her Atkins diet, and today during a project meeting when we were discussing the fact that the author of one of our books was sending us a bunch of crappy scans on disk, she said, "yeah, more than half of the images were, like, 72 dpi, totally low-carb, um, I mean, low-res."

Sex and Dating in the 21st Century

Screw volunteering to register voters in swing states; the good people of Alabama need vibrators! Who's with me?

This makes my standard carbon monoxide detector excuse seem pale by comparison.

Open Letter

Dear Shaggy-Haired Hipster Boy Who Made Eye Contact Twice, No, Three Times with Me on the Bus This Morning:

It's amazing how we can sniff each other out, isn't it? How we're able to locate another person in a crowd that we know we'd probably be friends with if we had the chance? I'm sure you were listening to something interesting on your iPod; should I hazard a guess? Death Cab? Iron + Wine? Or something vintage, like The Clash or Iggy and the Stooges? I admire your boldness for going with that neon orange messenger bag. It was just like Kate Winslet's hoodie in Eternal Sunshine. Did you glance my way on accident? Were you just looking back behind you to see if there was an empty seat available or a better place to stand? Or did you notice something in me that you thought was interesting? My spiky hair with the fading purple streak, perhaps? My black plastic frame glasses? Were you wondering what I was listening to? (Alas, I can't afford to plunk down for an iPod right now, but it was Kurt Elling's Man in the Air in my trusty CD player. Are you surprised? Were you expecting Guided by Voices? The Mountain Goats? Gang of Four?)

Hipster Boy, I know I looked stressed out, and that's because I am. Aside from the fact that I'm not, and never have been, a morning person, and that my schedule was thrown off kilter because one of my roommates decided to take a shower at an unpredictable time while I was still in the midst of going through my prework routine, I've got a lot going on in my life right now. My poor little family is falling apart and I'm wondering what's going to happen to all of us. I had trouble falling asleep last night (a combination of the loud, beautiful thunderstorm and just too much on my mind), and I was feeling vaguely nauseated this morning, which is fairly typical of how my body processes undue amounts of stress. That's why I was scowling on the bus. I would have smiled at you, I wanted to smile at you, but I just didn't have one in me today.

I'm pretty assiduous about keeping to a regular schedule, so, if you are as well, there's a good chance we'll be seeing each other on the #66 again between 8:15 and 8:30 on weekday mornings. I hope things won't be awkward between us now that I've opened up to you like this. You probably just thought I looked like a girl you went to high school with, and I've gone and blown things all out of proportion. But I just wanted to say hi, and that I appreciated that you paid a little bit of attention to me. These days, it's the little things like that that make all the difference.

allison

Inspired Casting

Will someone finally PLEASE cast Owen Wilson and Renee Zellweger in a movie together as brother and sister? The blonde hair, squinty eyes, lemon-pucker lips, raspy Texas drawl? It's bound to happen eventually, and it will be beautiful.