Dear Rhett Miller,

You ruined my favorite song. RUINED IT. Singular Girl was my favorite song of 2001, a song I loved so much that I bought a tape player to play the mix tape I had it on(since you cruelly only released it on the Special Edition of Satellite Rides). Your solo version is LAME! Way too polished and LAME! I'll never forgive you for this. Not even the graciousness you displayed when I stalked you down State Street to QDoba the night you opened for Tori Amos is enough to make up for this.

It's like Syriana, but with your ex-boyfriend, and no explosions

There's nothing like a call from the State Department to liven up your life. More details(if they're allowed) after the meeting.

I feel compelled to speak briefly about this whole South Dakota fiasco. The link includes what I think my brilliant and rightly outraged friends keep overlooking-it's not about South Dakota. This may be an obvious point, and I am probably several miles behind everyone else, but the scariest part of this is candor the bill's supporters display. I quote:

Supporters are pushing the measure in hopes of drawing a legal challenge that will cause the US Supreme Court to reverse its 1973 decision legalizing abortion.

They were waiting for this. They're arguing internally about whether they should have waited for Stevens to retire to push the bill through. The national movement had a strategy session and decided that South Dakota was the easiest place to make this play and then got to work. It's not like they had much to dismantle either; the only abortion clinic is in Sioux Falls, and South Dakota's Planned Parenthood system is so non-existent it's lumped in with North Dakota and Minnesota(home to some truly inspiring abortion doctors).

The ACLU, NOW, NARAL, and all of us knew this was coming. We all knew it was coming. Why act so surprised? We probably could have stopped it if we'd been paying attention.

Cold Snap, Hot Findings

It's about 10 below zero at the moment, and the wind chill takes it down another 20 or 25 degrees, so I'm definitely not leaving the house. I have hit upon the way to make the time indoors bearable: Saved By the Bell is downloadable from iTunes. Amazing.

Why I Won't Let the Dream Die

I know he lost-big time-, and the resemblance isn't perfect(and the photos are blurry), but this is really why I find myself so enamored of Johnny Weir. I'm sure Johnny would enjoy riding Falcor in all of his soft, sparkling, undulating beauty.

Will the next release be "The Crimson Album?"

I spent all this time reading about men's figure skating and managed to miss this! How could I have been so blind?

Yay

Congratulations to my favorite science geek, Sara, who was just accepted into UC-Davis' Entomology PhD program. She's busy playing in Senegal at the moment, but it's nice to know that when she gets back she's headed someplace that deserves her brilliance.

The Ice Queen

Liliana can attest that I told her hours ago about my newfound love for men's figure skater and total diva extraordinaire Johnny Weir. However, I procrastinated on posting and now those bitches at Gawker have taken all the fun out of it.

I spent all morning loving this kid. They're right; who DOESN'T love a kid who would walk up to a reporter and shout, "It was a scarf, not a boa. CHINCHILLA, not feathers!"? And now it's practically ruined. Except that the video is great. That bit about Republicans? Yeah, they should be afraid. I hope he appeals to all the twinkletoes little boys in Mississippi.

He probably doesn't look like Kevin Bacon

There's a Level 3 Sex Offender in my neighborhood. If your Sex Offender classifications are rusty, that's the group most likely to re-offend. There's a Community Notification Meeting tomorrow night. I don't know if I should go or not-one the one hand, it could be fun to see people get riled up, but on the other, if he's a child molester then it's probably a waste of a good day's indignation.

Ethan tells me our neighborhood has the highest density of sex offenders in Minneapolis(and in the country, but I'm skeptical of that claim).

Happy Valentine's Day!

About Last Night

It seemed like a good idea to go out with a couple of girlfriends last night. Ethan had, on his own, asked a classmate of his to go drinking with him and enlisted another classmate to keep things from being, you know, too gay. Our separate, parallel drinking excursions led to being hit on by people not each other for the first time in many, many months. The haul was less than impressive, as I was hit on by a bad knockoff of last year's hipster. He said his band's influences were people like STEVIE RAY VAUGHAN. In the "Band Poses" section of the photo gallery here he's the dude on the far right in the top right photo. He was wearing that shirt too. And cowboy boots.

He tried to commiserate with me about how difficult it is to be an artist and sustain relationships, and that he had just broken up with his girlfriend because he was dedicating too much time to his music. He didn't even offer to buy a drink. That was what the kinesiology majors were for.

I'm still hung over. It's embarrassing, but lucky that I don't have to work.