The Butcher and I are watching “Making Fiends,” which we both agree is the best cartoon we’ve seen all day. But watching it has made us suspicious that we are being lied to about the origins of Ziva on NCIS.
Please see the evidence:
Ziva.
And… Dexter.
You’re going to tell me that those three people are not from the same mysterious country full of La-bor-a-tories, fiends, and assassins?
Here’s the most interesting thing I witnessed this Thanksgiving break, if by “interesting” we can stretch the meaning to mean “crushingly depressing,”–a boy who gets the shit beat out of him by his step-father and who watches his mother get the shit beat out of her sitting around telling the most deeply misogynistic jokes and reporting that they’re funny because they’re true.
It occurs to me watching this that this is how this shit gets perpetuated. It doesn’t matter if you love your mother, if you see her being beat, even if you believe with all your heart that she’s a good woman, with the emphasis on “good,” it’s not enough to outweigh the belief that, because she’s a woman, her fundimental condition is as a person who deserves this.
You see what I’m seeing? In order to make sense of his life, of a woman he loves who can’t protect him or herself, he comes to believe that she really, really can’t because of some fundimental defect that is inherent in her being a woman; all women suck, she just sucks a little less.
And I thought, so this is how it works, how it gets perpetuated, generation after generation.
We had Chinese for dinner and, as we were eating the fortune cookies, we taught my parents the delight of following every fortune reading with “in bed.”
My dad’s fortune was something like “You will travel for pleasure and business… in bed.”
“Ha, you’re going to become a male prostitute during your retirement years!”
“That’s not funny.”
“Is there even much of a calling for an old retired minister male prostitute?”
“We could put it on the internet and see if anyone is searching for ‘old retired minister male prostitute’ and then we’d know if it was someone’s fetish.”
“It’s not a fetish. A lot of women want to have sex with ministers. That’s just normal.”
“You think there’s a big market for women who want to pay to have sex with retired Methodist ministers?”
“I’m just saying, it’s not a fetish. It’s not weird.”
“Mom, read yours!”
“You are open to great adventures… in bed.”
“Ha, well, that’s good, since you’ll be sharing it with Dad’s new customers.”
“Ooo. Kinky.”
“It’s not kinky to want to have sex with a minister! They even warn us about it in seminary!”
We had lunch with the other Reverend. It was so good to see him and his wife. I get a kick out of seeing my mom and dad let down their guard and be silly and naughty and just themselves.
The recalcitrant brother and the nephew left right before they got here.
My mom and I had a long talk because her doctor told her that she absolutely cannot be driving, except to work and back and even that, he’d rather she didn’t. And I reiterated my position that they should stay in Illinois for as long as they can, enjoy being so close to my grandma and my Aunt B. and her family and within easy driving of my Uncle B. and the folks in MIchigan, and then, at some point that only they can say, when they’re old enough to want to be close to their kids, but young enough that they can get used to living a new place, they need to NOT MOVE TO GEORGIA, but think about moving here.
I told Mom to consider how the recalcitrant brother cares for the people who are dependent on him and to ask herself and Dad whether they want to be dependent on him watching out for their well-being.
Things with both nephews are so bad I don’t know how to tell you about them–in one case because, if what’s threatened is accomplished, I want it to seem unpremeditated, so that the kid can have some kind of life later and in the other case, it’s hard to know how serious it is–no one has heard from my sister-in-law and nephew in weeks.
It’s disconcerting.
To hear this stuff and to sit there feeling like “We must act. What can we do?” only to look over at the person who you’d expect to be feeling this the most deeply, to be the most troubled by the state of things, and to see him…
I don’t know.
I about can’t stand it.
The important thing is that I’ve been as clear as I can that, if they want someone to take care of them, they need to move themselves near to the people who can take care of them, and not the people who can’t.
I love this song and Mom and I were laughing out asses off at the video, so I think it will count. The best part, of course, is imagining what people of the future will make of it. No one, I don’t think, will ever believe that Nashville was so homophobic.
My brother is attempting to fix our dripping tub. Avoiding a repeat of the last time he attempted to plumb for us, I insisted that Dad supervise. That, of course, erupted into a fight because the recalcitrant brother was all saying “I need silicone” and then Dad saying, “What kind?” and him saying “Ummm, whatever.”
Fight ensued.
And then, when my dad insisted that they look at what they were doing and make sure they see what all they need before they go to the store, another fight.
So, good times.
Then my nephew comes in here all “Why isn’t there any water? I have to wash my hands.” and just stares like it’s somehow my problem that he’s been oblivously playing video games while a fight ensued eight feet from him.
And no one is following my orders to not bitch about the Butcher behind his back, to me. Seriously, he’s in the other room. If you want to complain about him, walk in there and complain to him.
Everyone’s all upset because my nephew is flunking whatever grade he’s in. But no one seems to know why this is. My brother is all “His mom doesn’t tell me shit and I’m not going down to the school to find out.” and I was just like “Okay, I’m done hearing about this.” And they all stare at me like I’m crazy, but I’m like “Are you looking for advice? No. You’ve already decided you aren’t going to go yourself to find out what the problem is, so you know what you should do already. Are you pissing and moaning so that you can get it out of your system so that you can work up the courage to do what needs to be done? No, clearly not. So, why am I going to sit here listening to you talk like this is somehow all her fault for not involving you in your kid’s life. You had him in the car for five hours to get up here. What did you talk about? So, I don’t want to hear it. I don’t like her, but Christ.”
And now I’m the bad guy.
I swear, every once in a while I will catch a glimpse of something–like this is exactly why I went into English and History. I wanted to act out for a living the main dysfunction of my family–sitting around trying to make sense of things we have no intention of actually participating in.
Grrr.
All I can say is that the tub better not end up like the dishwasher, where it gets half done and then I have to nag the Butcher into figuring out how to finish it up.
Having my parents here while filling out the family tree turned out to be very helpful. I didn’t learn anything too exciting about my dad’s side of the family, thought we did get a great many of his aunts and uncles married off to the right people.
But on my mom’s side, I was able to really get some good information. First, I had been stuck on my grandpa’s mom–Marie Corcoran. Let me tell you, the amount of Marie Corcorans who were born in Illinois at the turn of the century or right before is pretty dang large. And they apparently all have mothers named Mary. But I was able to discover, while showing my mom the census records that listed her uncles as small children, that Marie’s dad was born in South Carolina and her mom was born in Illinois.
Well, the amount of Corcorans who were born in both South Carolina and Illinois and who had a daughter named Marie? One couple. William and, of course, Mary.
I even found William’s parents–James and Bridget–who came to South Carolina from Ireland.
So, that was fun, because before yesterday, Marie was basically just a big question mark.
But! More excitingly, having my mom here to help with her dad’s dad’s people–the Riches–was very helpful. We knew the basic outline of the story–that Grandpa Bob’s people had gone out to Colorado and then there was the Dust Bowl and so they returned to Chicago.
And because Grandpa Bob was born in Colorado, we were able to find his birth place–Arapahoe, Colorado.
Mom said that it wasn’t just Grandpa’s immediate family who went to Colorado, but the whole family. So, I looked in the census records for all the Riches in Arapahoe, Colorado, and read down the list until we hit a Beatrice and Mom shouted “I remember my dad talking about a Beatrice!”
So, I traced Beatrice’s family tree, found her dad–Leonard Rich, who had a brother Robert, and a brother Clayton and, Bingo!, that’s Grandpa Bob’s dad! (So, we’ve complicated the story that Grandpa Bob was named after Robert Louis Stevenson–since apparently he had an uncle Robert as well). Well, once we found Leonard’s branch of the family tree, we were able to discover his (and Clayton’s) dad–Frank–and Frank’s dad, also Leonard.
And we could follow the Riches on their westward trek–Leonard born in New York, Frank born in Michigan (where we were supposedly notorious socialists), Clayton born in Iowa, and Robert born in Colorado. Interestingly enough, it seems that it was Frank who hauled the whole extended family out to Colorado.
Then they mostly came to Chicago, which was, interestingly enough, not a “back” as they had never been there.
Thanksgiving proceedes pleasantly enough. Only one person managed to grab a hot casserole lid with her bare hands. I won’t mention any names, but she’s having a little trouble typing this right now.
We trimmed up a bunch of stuff in the yard and now we’re burning the world’s thickest log and arguing about whether it wll burn by itself or if we need to put another log on with it.
So, here’s the joke I heard the recalcitrant brother telling the Butcher as I fell to sleep last night.
A polar bear and a lizard are smoking a joint. Smoke, smoke, smoking, just the absolute best bud either of them had ever tasted. And finally the lizard is like, “Whew that’s good, but I have cotton mouth like you wouldn’t believe.”
“Well,” said the polar bear, “you should go down to the river and taste that water. It’s pretty amazing.”
“Okay, I’ll be right back.”
So the lizard goes down to the river, is drinking some water, when an alligator comes up and is all, “Hey, lizard, what are you up to?”
“Oh me and this polar bear are smoking the best pot you ever had.”
“What? A polar bear? Here? Are you fucking kidding me?”
“No, seriously, just go right up the trail. You know where the magnolia tree is? He’s right there.”
So, the alligator is all like, damn, I’ve just got to see this, and he heads up the trail to see this polar bear.
And there, under the magnolia, is indeed a polar bear smoking pot. The alligator stares at the polar bear. The polar bear stares at the alligator.
And finally, after a moment, the polar bear says to the alligator, “Damn, how much water did you drink anyway?!”
Well, the turkey is in the oven. Every thing else is ready to go in the oven in about an our. My brothers are over at the Butcher’s friends, watching the first half of the game on hi-def. My nephew is playing Grand Theft Auto. My mom is going through our kitchen looking for god knows what. Dad is eating Doritos and watching a special about Bozo and the dog is sleeping like a rock.
And now my dad is arguing with himself about which guy in Bozo’s band was my uncle’s uncle.
I’m just about to lay on him the knowledge that mammoths ate osage oranges.
Good times.
1. Is it true that Osage Oranges used to be eaten by mammoths? If so, does that mean that, since we saw a bunch of Osage Oranges at the park, there used to be mammoths there?
2. I’ve read the Wikipedia article and I still am unclear. Is a pony a small horse, the way a pug is a small dog, or is it more like pony is to horse as dog is to wolf?
3. Will crocuses spread in the yard?
Mary over at Libradio has awarded Bill Hobbs the First Annual Thanksgiving Jive Turkey Award. Well, that’s got to be the end of the Jive Turkey Awards.
Mary, you’ve peaked too soon!
It seems like I’m always about a year ahead of the rest of the world when it comes to Nashville’s parks. Mrs. Wigglebottom and I enjoyed Shelby Bottoms until it got too crowded for our tastes. We enjoyed Percy Warner until it got too crowded and full of unleashed dogs for our tastes. And this morning, we drove over to Bell’s Bend.
What can I tell you to convince you to stay away?
Um. It smells bad. It’s ugly. It’s hard to find. There’s no parking. There’s nothing to look at once you get there. No beautiful views a girl and her dog can enjoy, even if they’re just meandering around a small loop to stretch their legs and try out a new knee. There are not picnic tables where you could have lunch overlooking beautiful fields slowly turning all kinds of shades of faded colors.
It’s terrible. Terrible. Never go there.
Leave it to Mrs. Wigglebottom and me. We’re willing to sacrifice our own happiness to save yours.
The dog and I are about to get in the car and go for a long, meandering ride culminating in a very, very short walk.
For the record, I don’t normally take Exador’s advice, but I do think he’s right about taking the dog for a ride to lift her spirits. If she’s really good, maybe we’ll stop for a treat–warm tortillas this time of year are especially nice, I hear.
A lot in this that I want to talk about, but I’m dilly dallying here and I’ve got a home to get to. But I don’t want to forget.
Well, if you insist, nieces and nephews.
1. Creepy or cool? I can’t decide.
2. I have no words. None. I want a beer, a bar, and a man that smells like smoke and hard work, and a pickup truck, and this song playing while he convinces me to go for a ride. You have ten minutes, world, to make that happen.
First, Jeff Woods says:
“The sky’s the limit for how crazy they want to be,” says Rep. Henry Fincher, a Democrat from Cookeville, who helpfully offered advice to the Republicans in a Scene interview.
Fincher points out that Democrats lost the legislature—ironically enough for the first time since the Civil War—because white voters thronged to the polls to vote against the black guy running for president, and they happened to vote for all the Republicans on the ballot while they were at it.
Then Pesky Fly says:
Ironically, [Kurita’s] dramatic expulsion was meant to prevent a Republican from becoming Senate speaker. How’d that work out, guys?
And Vibinc says:
This is, perhaps, the single greatest failing of the TNDP in the last election cycle. More than anything else, the TNDP did a crappy job of communicating a plan. I don’t put this responsibility on Communications Director Wade Munday as it was his job to communicate the message, not craft it from the bottom up. I put it on the entire governing apparatus of the TNDP, and the general belief in old school “Trickle Down” politicking.
“Trickle Down” or “Top Down” politicking is just like it sounds; people at the top make decisions, those decisions “trickle down” through the ranks to the people. Just like “Trickle Down Economics”, few at the bottom of the information stream ever get wet. At some point, the information gets soaked up closer to the top and never makes it to the rest of the people.
Elected officials and political parties have used this method for years, and to a certain degree it’s worked. It can work, as long as people never age, have any personal crisis, or organized opposition. The problem with “top down” is that you never build any bench players to step in should the starter have to step out. The people at the top hold all the cards. When that person leaves, he/she leaves a vacuum in their wake, a prime target to be exploited by the opposition, which is exactly what happened.
(The whole post is so brilliant it about brings me to my knees, but that part is especially important to me.)
I think it’s just the day, which has, for reasons completely unassociated with the Democratic party, turned into a little clusterfuck, but I’m feeling a little despondant about the state of the Party and the potential for the Party to pull its head out of its butt.
I have a lot of thoughts. I keep floundering as I try to pull them together into something meaningful. But I feel like smart people are giving the Democrats a roadmap for how to turn things around and I feel certain that they aren’t going to listen.
We are going to have to do this without them.
My internet boyfriend* is talking about it and pointing you to homemade videos incorporating True Blood clips. Worth it just to revisit Bill’s amazing tub and Eric in it.
Mmmm. When we have naked man day, can we devote an hour of it to “naked men taking baths?”
*Like a tv boyfriend, not someone I actually know, just someone who’s work I feel great affection for.
It started yesterday. My alarm went off at 5:30 like it normally does and Mrs. Wigglebottom got up out of the bed in the other room and came in to see if I was going to get up. I was not. I hit “snooze.” She wandered aimlessly around the house for a few minutes. I could hear the click of her toenails on the hardwood.
When it went off again at 6, same thing.
Will today, she asks, finally be the day that we get up and walk?
I, too, miss our morning walks and it is so beautiful here at dawn, I feel like we’re missing out. And yet, we still have four more weeks where we’re supposed to be keeping her crated all the time.
We, of course, did not crate her, because she hasn’t been crated since she was a puppy and I couldn’t see the wisdom in paying that much money to fix the dog’s leg only to turn around and slowly drive her crazy by keeping her confined.
America, she’s so bored and I’m at my wits’ end about what to do about it. Clearly, she feels okay and any discomfort she feels is outweighed by her desire to get back to moving around and being a dog.
To switch gears, they still haven’t decided if they’re going to operate on my grandma. Yesterday, it was a definite yes. Then late last night, her heart doctor got wind of their plans and was basically, “You’re going to risk killing her over a broken bone? That seems stupid.” and so he’s going to look at the CAT scan himself and give his verdict on whether the severity of the break warrents the risk of putting her through surgery. It may be that they just immobalize it for a couple of months and then it doesn’t work great ever again.
I just hope that they’re doing a good job of letting my grandma decide. Yes, she’s old as dirt, but her mind’s good, and, in the end, she’s the only one who can really know what’s right for her.
I was thinking last night about my grandma, who was not a feminist. I think so often we hear about how feminism ruined it, how everyone was happy and everything was fine until those feminists came along and ruined it.
But my grandma’s life was not fine. She wanted to be a history teacher and she went down to Illinois State (which, at the time, was the Normal college) to do so and when she got there, they tried to steer her into Home Ec because History was for men. She tried to argue that there were no men, there being a World War on and all, but it didn’t matter.
So, she gave it a try, hated it, and came home.
Just because she didn’t have words to describe what was happening doesn’t mean that, when I was in college, she didn’t sit at the dining room table one Thanksgiving, crying as she told me about it. She knew what happened to her was bullshit, but there wasn’t anything she felt like she could do about it.
On another tangent, I’m on this email list and I feel like I made such a complete doofus of myself on it last week, talking about how I was excited to learn that Muddy Waters played in a band in Mississippi that contained a guitar player, a fiddle player, and a mandolin player and how I wanted to hear what that would sound like, blues on a fiddle and a mandolin. And everyone came back with, basically, “Oh, god you n00b” and I about wanted to die of embarrassment.
But yesterday, over at Boogie Woogie Flu, Ted Barron put up a song with a blues violin! I could listen to it! And it is cool. And so I can return to being a dork in private.
According to WordPress, the two most recent posts linking to Tiny Cat Pants are “Wake then bake” and “Buds, but a lot of stems.” Neither of these posts actually link to Tiny Cat Pants, but they both have a certain theme in common.
I don’t quite know what to make of that, but it made me laugh.
In regards to True Blood, the Shill asks
Also, have we discussed the completely stupid way Bill says Sookie’s name?
We have not. But now we are about to. In full disclosure, I feel a personal stake in this matter because my dad’s sister’s nickname, given to her by Grandpa Hick, is Sookie.
On True Blood, the main female character’s name is Sookie and this is pronounced by everyone as either rhyming with cookie or sounding like Sue-key. Her undead Confederate Boyfriend pronounces it “Suck-ay.”
I went to the experts.
Dwight Yoakum:
(see about 2:55)
King Floyd:
and Don Covay
All three of them seem to agree with everyone else’s pronunciation and contradict Bill’s choice.
But, because I am a giant nerd, I look up “Sookie” in the OED and what do I learn?
“Sook,” “Sook cow,” and “Sookie” are Scottish cow calls. Like you call to any pig, regardless of its name, with “Sooey!,” you, if you are Scottish and live in the past, call cows “Sookie” to get them to come.
Now, on the one hand, Bill is right that “Sook” probably comes from “suck,” so maybe Suck-eh isn’t such a weird way to say it, but let’s just think about this word pragmatically. We’re standing out in a field. You are, for some reason, standing in a pile of cow poop. You should remember, when standing in a cow pasture, to watch your step. Where were we?
Yes, we are standing in a field. The cows we want are way on the other side of the pasture. We want to call to them and get their attention. If we should “Suck-eehhhh,” only the last syllable carries and barely. But, if we yell “Suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuueeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee-keeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee,” now we have those cows’ attention.
And now we’re back to talking about my biggest problem with Bill. If I think about him too hard, I do not believe he’s a real Confederate Southerner. First there was the bullshit about him not owning slaves. Who, who in Louisiana with a house that big did not own slaves? I’m not buying it. Second, him talking about his dad owning slaves and how he knew the name of one of the field slaves, but not the house slave? No way. You don’t know the name of the person who works in your Dad’s house all the time? Then how do you ask for tea? “Oh, um, hey, you, could I have some sweet tea?”
And now, I’m supposed to believe that Bill, who did not own slaves, but who lived in his big farm house, which would have made him responsible for the livestock on that farm, called his cows with “Suck-ah”?
Again, I’m not buying it.
The Scots-Irish, who, I would assume, brought the term with them, seemed, as evidence by the music we can hear the term in now, to have spread it pretty far in the South and across various Southern cultures. If Bill were just hearing the name for the first time, one would assume that he would say it the way that everyone else around Sookie says it. That he says it differently indicates, I believe, that he’s heard the name before.
If he’s heard the name before, the most obvious instance in which he’s heard it is either as it is frequently used even now, as a pet name, or as it was originally used, a call name.
Either way, “Suuuuuuuuuue-key” is much more likely to get you nuzzled than “Suck-ah.” And so, I cannot believe that Bill would call her “Suck-ah.”
Here’s what we need. We need someone with a college-educated white Southern grandpa. And not one of those 60 year old Pa-paws. I’m talking someone pushing 80, who speaks with that “Ah went to Suh-waneeh” accent that you just don’t hear any more and who you call “Grandfather” or your mom shoots holes in your skull with her eyes. If that’s your grandpa, we need you to call him this evening and ask him how he would pronounce Sookie and report back.
On the phones, people! On the phones.
1. We have not even touched on the main problem with T-Pain and Ludacris on SNL, which is that T-Pain is the Pale Rider on the Pale Horse signalling the death of hip-hop. Just like that moment when I was sitting in McDonalds and heard the elevator music rendition of “Patience” and knew heavy metal was dead, listening to T-Pain make what amounts to hip hop Musak, tells me the genre is a zombie.
This has got to be about the most inane song produced in the last one million years, and might I remind you that the past one million years have contained such inane songs as “Sugar Sugar” by the Archies and “Mammoth Mammoth” by Ogg and his Groggs (I trust I don’t have to translate that into English for you for you to get the gist of how stupid it was. Those Neanderthals with their puns. Yes, it was a big hairy elephant. We get it. God, shut up already. And yet, one summer in 14973 b.c.e., that was all you heard around the fire).
2. Speaking of Guns and Roses, I can’t bring myself to even listen to samples of this album.
3. You say “tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt” like there’s something wrong with that.
4. To me, this post is the epitome of everything that’s wrong with Salon.com. Inspiring quote by a Catholic priest trying to do right; damn depressing comments beneath it. Listen, for the record, separate but equal is bullshit when it comes to race and it’s bullshit when it comes to gender. Tell yourself whatever little story you have to in order to disbelieve me, but I speak the truth.
5. This depresses me more than I can tell you. The only thing that’s going to save the Tennessee Democrats at this point is a full-scale revolution.
6. I love this post so much I ate up Barry Mazor. Sorry if you were counting on him for Thanksgiving. I’m just going to make one larger point: country music deserves to be written about thoughtfully and critically. It is an art form. It can stand up under the pressure of scrutiny. The sheltering that the industry and, more embarrassingly, many “country music journalists” do is insulting to the genre and I’m tired of it.
7. It was all I could do to not call Mack and say “Houston, We haz a Pomeranian.” The only thing stopping me is that, if he hasn’t see this, it won’t be funny. Though, truthfully, many things that make me laugh hysterically, he doesn’t find funny. And things I don’t find funny, like his Pomeranian getting right in my ear and making these noises like a cat with a particularly ugly hairball, seem to amuse him.
8. You know what’s really stupid? That I can’t go to either Amazon.com or iTunes, type in “True Blood” and get every song played on the show. Do they not tag songs that way? Apparently not, but isn’t it the most obvious use of an electronic catalog the size of the iTunes or Amazon catalogs? That they can put together playlists that aren’t real albums and sell them to us?
They break my heart. My grandma was going out to dinner with my mom, dad, Aunt B. and her family and my grandma fell in the parking lot of the restaurant and busted up her arm. The whole family spent the night at the hospital and they thought she was going to get to come home yesterday, but the CAT scan showed that the bone was pretty much shattered up near the shoulder and so they’re going to have to go in and fix it.
She’s almost 90, so, you know, no one’s very excited about putting her back under anasthetic.
I like to pray, you know, sometimes. It brings me comfort, just to articulate things outloud and put them out there in the Universe. But I never know in cases like this what the best thing to ask for is. I guess just the best resolution and leave it to the Universe to sort out that.
Anyway, so it means the folks might not come down for Thanksgiving, which is fine. But my dad’s best friend is coming through and I called him to ask him if we should plan on having them for Thanksgiving dinner and he was all evasive on me.
Not the kind of evasive you can take too personally. I’ve known him as long as I’ve known my dad and I see how they both have no idea what would make them happy. Their whole adult lives as ministers have been spent opening themselves up wholly to the needs of others and both of them have been terrible, in their own ways, about making a safe space for them and their families where that work doesn’t intrude.
And I’ve noticed that asking them to think about what they’d like to do–do you want to have Thanksgiving here?–is almost paralyzing to them. They do not know if they want to have Thanksgiving here. They do not know what they want.
I don’t know. I guess this isn’t making any sense. My point is that I will not be upset one way or another if they do or don’t show up here on Thanksgiving. I am upset and my heart is broken that my dad’s best friend has devoted his whole life to serving others and it’s come at such a cost to him that his whole soul is bent under the weight of it.
I love these men with my whole heart, but seeing the price they’ve paid as ministers to do their god’s work is about the worst advertisement for Christianity ever.
This?
Is just not as good as this.
And I’m not sure why. I think that, in James’s voice, I hear that her life has been heartache before this, that all that waiting has been difficult for her and so, while she’s relieved to find someone, she isn’t coming to him without having walked a hard road to get there. And I just don’t hear that in Beyonce’s voice, as lovely as it is.
And did they cast Jeffrey Wright as Muddy Waters? I reserve my judgment on that shit. Don’t get me wrong. I like Wright, but Morganfield? There just aren’t a lot of men like Morganfield in the world, who have that… something…
Look here
That’s an old man. But look at the way he gets that twinkle in his eye, that little grin on his lips… It’s a different kind of manliness than we’re normally shown–a man who takes great pleasure in being a man because he enjoys women. I don’t know, it’s hard to talk about. But there are straight men who enjoy fucking women–and lord knows there are eight thousand songs about that. And there are straight men who enjoy being men. But the kind of straight man so sure in himself…
Don’t get me wrong. In his personal life, Morganfield seemed to be much like all the men I knew his age, which was too damn fucked up by what they went through to get the success they had to be very pleasant company 75% of the time.
But Morganfield sings like he’s going to enjoy every second he’s with you, from the slight hint of your perfume he smells when he takes your coat to the way his fingers are going to play with the lace on your slip, just beause it feels good.
How many men can pull that shit off? And also bear a passing resemblance to him?
I don’t know. I’ll give Wright the benefit of the doubt, but I’m just not sure he can do it.
Why, yes, a girl can make it from Mack’s couch to my couch in 27 minutes, just to liveblog True Blood, in case you need to know for next season.
Oh, Rene, why do you have to be so fucking creepy now after a whole season of sweetness? Oh, and so creepy are you!
Is Tara naked? Oh, okay, no.
But where did she get pajamas? I should not overthink this should I? But is the mute guy perhaps some kind of man slave?
Oh, creepy white woman, you are so creepy.
And now there are more creepy white people! It’s like creepy white people quarter hour!
Ugh, no, never wear someone else’s bathing suit. That’s like sharing underpants!
A black guy, Eggs, who doesn’t seem to be related to Tara, who has a beautiful voice! “Collecting stray black people, is that some kind of hobby of hers?” Good question, Tara, good question.
But, is it just me, or does Eggs not seem to be looking directly at her? I mean, he’s handsome and all, but I am not trusting him, either.
Man, those are some kinds of shakes that white woman has.
But, god, could they stop with the creepy music when it comes to Rene? It’s hard to concentrate when the music is all “skreek, skreek, skreek.”
And I like that Terry has become the show’s Cassandra, just making true statements no one listens to.
How did Rene get all those tapes? And are there really tapes that help you perfect a Cajun accent, because, in general, I think most actors just watch The Big Easy and copy that.
Okay, so everyone knows now that Rene is the killer. Argh!!!!
Hurry Sam!! Hurry.
I’m sure he took out the … yes bullets.
Yes, because in the whole history of the world, screaming the name of the person you’re chasing to kill always convinces them to stop running. But I do thnk it’s interesting that Rene says he can feel Sookie in his head. Have we ever had any recognition before that it works like that?
Oh, Bill.
Oh, Sookie, you are so stupid.
And Sam is naked again.
And Bill is melting.
Oh, Sookie, I’ve had to do that to some baby rabbits before. It stays with you.
And Bill looks like an overcooked marshmallow. Put him in the ground!
God, do not count on Sookie to save you. Apparently, it’s naked Sam to Bill’s rescue. Good god.
Aw, Andy, I’m sad that the whole county had good reason to think you’re an idiot.
Does Sam know Mary Ann? He does! He does!
Oh, god, is Jason going to become a religious freak? Oh, no no no.
Oh no! Did Bill kill Lafayette?!
TWO WEEKS LATER?! Oh, so cheesy.
No, no, no. I just don’t want to see Jason get scary Jesus.
Holy shit! Do all bar owners keep that much cash around? That seems unsafe.
Next summer?!
But this terrible show has sucked me in! I can’t wait for next summer. Can we at least get a soundtrack before then?
Sometimes, when we’re watching Saturday Night Live, we play a game–“What drugs would you have to be on for this skit to be funny.” I felt that way watching Tim McGraw dressed like a turkey. By the time we got to the skit with Ludacris, T-Pain, and some Vanilla-Ice wanna be, it was clear that the problem is less than that you need to be on drugs. It’s not that Ludacris and T-Pain were sorry.
It’s that the skit wasn’t, even in concept, funny. If there’s going to be something weird going on, everyone in the skit needs to be in on it (except, if you don’t trust the audience, you could have one person in the skit who doesn’t get it, to cue the audience that it is indeed ludicrous) and you let the absurdity ensue.
But I thought that Tim McGraw did a fine job. Not great, but fine. And I thought his opening was nice.
The overly-nice prank phone call skit was middlingly funny, but it made me realize just how much I kind of miss Hee Haw.
Tiny Cat Pants 