Cuteness Overload

The San Diego Zoo's newest panda cub has finally emerged from her den. I watched Zhen Zhen as she rolled around the yard looking adorable for quite awhile this morning, despite the fact that whoever is controlling the PandaCam is hopped up on what seems to be a dangerous combination of caffeine, crack and a bad cinematography class in college.

Counting Isn't So Hard, Is It?

To add to the chorus that's talking about law prom... well, I'll sort of add to it. I drank and ate and actually made a bit of money at Texas Hold 'Em without surrendering to my massive competitive streak and losing my temper. Also, I talked to people who I don't always get to talk to and had a hot date that sat by me as I bored her with the rules of poker.

But alas, there was a taint to the evening (and I'm not talking about T&E grades) - we went to the massively crowded Texas Roadhouse before the party. I was the first to arrive and promptly signed the 6 of us up for the hour-long waiting list. The others arrived and we chatted for said hour. Said hour goes by and the crowd is thinning. People are going past us (in groups that are just as large or larger) that came in after us. We send one of the boys to check on the wait time.

Answer - "Um, I don't know. Let me check."

Cue the riffling through pages and pages of names, standing around looking confused and, let us not forget, the dismissal of unhappy customers in order to joke around and laugh behind the counter instead. Finally they tell us that we could be seated separately in 2 adjoining booths. Because, you know, it's become so difficult to push 2 tables together these days.

Whatever. We're cranky and our blood sugar is low. We'll take what we can get. But 10 minutes later, when they STILL haven't seated us, I'm shaking and about to let loose a tirade. They must have felt the evil, angry gale approach because they finally called us as I came up to the counter.

We ask if we could possibly get just one table (because it never hurts to ask, right? WRONG.) Now we're surrounded by the entire cadre of managers, asking us in a rather condescending tone if there's a problem.

After explaining EXACTLY what they've done to us (and receiving nothing but a "Well, it's an hour wait for a single table for 6", despite the fact that that was what we HAD BEEN WAITING FOR), we sit down to 2 booths anyway. Luckily for them, they placed bread right in front of us so that we could sate the savage beast of starvation that was gnawing at us.

On the plus side, our waitress was terrified of us and made sure we had everything we ever wanted, short of a winning lottery ticket. (No, we did not take out the hostesses' idiocy/managers' rudeness on her. It was just nice to get actual service.)

On the con side, I don't know if I can go there again, which whittles the number of decent restaurants in this town down to about 3. *Sigh*

But the rest of the evening was lovely. Gracias, SBA.

MP3 ESP

So Ike Turner croaked, which is weird because the JUST other day my iTunes decided to play Tina Turner's "I Can't Stand the Rain" from the fantastic Private Dancer album and I thought, "Wow, she's really talented. Ike kind of deserves to go to hell for what he did to her."

And now he has.

Oh, calm down. I'm just kidding (maybe). But you can surely tell how concerned I am about the effect his exit from the world will have. I have to say though, that I love that People.com notes Ike and Tina's relationship as "tempestuous", when I would have said something like, "He beat the crap out of her constantly." I know you're not supposed to speak ill of the dead but a) even my description is mild, b) "not speaking ill" doesn't mean lying and c) the whole point of that rule is because the dead can't defend themselves, and like Ike would have given a hoot what I think or say.

Anyway, I feel for his family, but that's about as far as my sympathy goes.

Free the Rice!... Oh, Free Rice

FreeRice is surprisingly fun, and apparently does in fact send free rice to countries that are so desperate for food. It donates no matter what level you're on, but you can always improve your vocabulary,right? I got up to level 42, but I usually hover around 39. I know some of you out there are smarter than me - so prove it!

Shopping Becomes Depressing

Even if you don't know me very well, you still probably know that I'm not the biggest fan of children. I have 3 younger cousins (no siblings) but we were all born within a few years of each other and so I had none of that "here, watch your cousin for the evening while I talk to your uncle for 4 hours" experience. (My mother did - she mutters that there wasn't a family gathering that she didn't get spit up on at least once. She wanted to start wearing a tarp but my grandmother wouldn't allow it.) I also worked in retail, which is as close to an effective abstinence education program as we have in this nation. Watching your children is not the fitting room attendant's job, people. (That said, I have great respect for parents who actually teach their children to be well-behaved and quiet - I guess I'm kind of old school with the "seen and not heard" bit, which has been lost on many parents these days.)

But even if they were raving little terrors (they're not), there are 4 children I love unconditionally and will even let them put their sticky fingers on my nice clothing - Caitlin, Matthew, Jessica and Olivia. They're my nieces and nephew and they're wonderful. I love being "Aunt Sarah". I know, it surprises me too.

But - getting to my point, finally - I also have to get them Christmas gifts and I'm starting to worry. As I wander through the children's section of the bookstore, dodging perilous sticky fingers and snotty noses all the way, I have to wonder where all the decent authors went. Is there some 15 year long luau in the South Pacific that I missed? Surely - surely! - we can do better than "Do Unto Otters: A Book About Manners", which was chosen as Amazon's best picture book for 2007! Or "Psst!", which aside from its questionable name has drawings that look like they came straight out of MAD magazine. I am completely freaked out.

Perhaps my mother and all of my family and family friends were just fortuitous or educated shoppers in my youth, but I had huge amounts of fantastic picture books. Usually they had gorgeous artwork and if they didn't, they always had a great story. And while I'm aware that some of them - "Goodnight Moon" and "Where the Wild Things Are", for example - are much older than I am and were culled from the sea of mediocrity, I would have thought some talent remained. But it seems that the greats of my youth are fading away, either into retirement or into tedium. 1986's "The Stranger" was the last good book that Chris Van Allsburg did, for example. It was so fantastic, maybe he just didn't have any more left in him.

*Sigh* Perhaps I'm being too cynical. Perhaps I should just lower myself to get Dora the Explorer books and even venture into movies and toys - although Lord knows they don't need any more of that. Perhaps I'm still not over the questionable quality of the 7th Harry Potter book. I don't know. I do know that I'm glad that my parents kept my old picture books and that I've already given copies of all those classics to my nieces and nephew - it's old genius, but it still works for now.

Avert Your Eyes

I awoke this morning and did my usual routine while listening to the painters outside spray-painting the side of my building. They've been at this for a couple weeks and frankly, I'm quite sick of them. I know I'm being unfair, but when I'm going to my dryer to get a clean t-shirt after my shower, I don't like to turn around and see the painters looking at me over my 7 foot tall privacy fence. Did I mention it was right after my shower? It was like I had stepped into a Ben Stiller movie and that's not a very fun place to be.

Anyway, they're painting what was normal, neutral-colored brick with this weird tri-color scheme in an attempt (I'm guessing) to look fresh and "with it". Most of the buildings have a cream top, a white stripe in the middle and green bottom. And yet I walked outside this morning to find my own building's walls a delightful shade of vomit.

VOMIT. Seriously, it looks like what my dog regularly throws up when he's eaten too many bits of disgusting trash off of the sidewalk. I'm hoping that this is just the base coat, but it cannot be gone soon enough. (Although even as I type this, they're hovering outside my window, painting more vomit on the walls. I'm dressed this time though.)

I know they're trying to update the place with the new owners and all, but it's like my apartment complex is having a mid-life crisis. And I'm the kid, embarrassed at the things that it's doing to itself in order to look cool and young again. Couldn't it just have bought a red sports car and gotten a 19 year old secretary to prance around in a miniskirt and do other, non-family-oriented things?

Escapism

Ah, the days after Thanksgiving - when everyone pretends they didn't know Christmas was coming for the last 11 months and they freak out, flocking to the malls. Mass consumerism is the essence of this time of year. That and something about the birth of some child or other?

But most importantly, holiday movies. It's hard to wade through the dreck that comes out each year, so I'll tell you what this humble blogger wants to see (i.e. what I believe will be worth the time).

1. The Golden Compass

I've wanted to see this movie since before I knew there was a movie being made. The Golden Compass is the first of a trilogy of books by Phillip Pullman and, precious few novels aside, is one of the most deeply complex and compelling books I've ever read along with its sequels. Seriously. If you haven't read the trilogy (dubbed altogether as the "His Dark Materials" trilogy), you are missing out on genius. It's like Harry Potter, only more engrossing, better written and has a touch of reality that you can feel, despite witches and talking bears and souls that live outside the body. It's more like the Chronicles of Narnia than anything else, now that I think about it. It's so fantastic that I won't ruin any of it for you.

Anyway, the point is that if they mess this movie up, I will literally cry. And I don't cry.

2. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

Not one for the kids, folks, if the title hadn't already tipped you off. Yes, it's a musical (it might be worth the price just to see Johnny Depp singing), but when did that stop Sweet Charity from being depressing as hell? Or Les Miserables? Or lots of others that I can't think of at the moment? Well, take all that depressing stuff from those musicals altogether and go about twenty yards farther and then down into a big black hole of murder and despair. Most full-blown operas don't have this much death and destruction.

But it has Johnny Depp and Alan Rickman (as the bad guy... err, the badder bad guy) and it's directed by Tim Burton. And it's about a demon barber with an old-time straight edge razor. What more could you ask for at Christmas?

3. I Am Legend

Unlike the above two movies, I don't know more than what they've told me in trailers about this one. But apparently there are zombies. And not the zombies that turn what was a horror flick into pure gore (surely you can see the difference?) but more like Shaun of the Dead zombies - tasteful. (Perhaps that's the wrong word...)

Also, Will Smith is in it and I'm just not tired of his one character - the charming, grimly funny hero - yet. I'm not tired of Harrison Ford's rugged smart-ass character either, so this shouldn't be surprising.

Three movies is actually quite low for my typical holiday movie season. It seems the writers' strike is working retroactively (Alien v. Predator: Requiem??? Are you kidding me?) but I can struggle through. For now the time being though, it's back to the grind.