The Many Faces of Giselle

Sometimes I have the sweetest, calmest, most adorable cat:


And then there's the possessed Mr. Hyde side she was showing this morning:

22 years is enough of a wait.

(photo from the Detroit Free Press)

GO TIGERS!!!!!!!!!!!

The Detroit Tigers haven't been to the World Series since I was six years old. I still remember watching the 1984 World Series in our family room, having pizza and drinking Coke out of my one of our Little Caesar's Tigers glasses and cheering wildly when they won. It's been a long wait since then, but what a beautiful way to win a series.

Last night, they raised my blood pressure a few too many times- leaving bases loaded, allowing the A's to load the bases after 3 straight walks, bringing it to the bottom of the 9th with the game tied and two outs. And then after singles by Monroe and Polanco, Magglio Ordonez steps up to the plate and with a 1-0 count, just smashes the most beautiful, perfect walk-off home run into the left field seats to win the game and bring my beloved Tigs to their first World Series in 22 years.

Now in Detroit, our championship hopes have long rested on the Red Wings and Pistons. We haven't had much luck with baseball or football in my lifetime. I don't think many people hold out hope that the Lions will ever be much good. But somehow the Tigers have managed to hold on to fans even through 12 straight losing seasons, including 2003, when they lost 119 games to set a new American League loss record. Nobody expected them to have a good season this time around, and they came out fighting for first. After tanking end-of-the-season games to my fiancee's adored Kansas City Royals, popular opinion was that the Yankees would make short work of the Tigers. And yet they turned a poor end-of-season record into 2 series wins, 7 post-season wins in a row, and now a trip to the World Series. I can't wait to cheer them on.

Live Nickel Creek footage!

Videos from Nickel Creek's Bonnaroo Music Festival appearance are at AT&T's Blue Room. Click on "Bonnaroo" on the left side of the page, then you can choose the band you'd like to see. There are also videos from Bela Fleck & The Flecktones (all hail Bela, the Don of the Banjo Mafia!), Ben Folds, and several other groups. Sadly, Nickel Creek's videos don't include Chris Thile's hilarious "Set Me Up With One Of Your Friends." But the three that are included are, of course, fabulous.

An open letter to Eugene Levy

Dear Mr. Levy,

We like you, we really do. You were fantastic in "A Mighty Wind," "Best in Show," and "Waiting for Guffman." You practically made us laugh until we cried with your writing, acting, and singing as part of Christopher Guest's wonderful crew of comedic actors. Your dry wit in these movies is worth more than a thousand stupid Farrelly brothers' gross-out jokes or Jim Carrey mugs. You've provided voices for 2 recent kids' movies that got good reviews from the munchkins I work with. IMDB even tells me that you were in an episode of "Road to Avonlea," a Kevin Sullivan series loosely based on the stories of Lucy Maud Montgomery, and that wins you huge points in this Anne of Green Gables fan's heart.

But then we started to get worried about your choices. An Olsen twins movie? The man who brought us the slow-motion, anti-depressant-addled Mitch in "A Mighty Wind" getting billing after the Olsen twins from "Full House"? And we didn't even have the stomach to see "The Man"- just the previews were enough to make us cringe. You even got a worst supporting actor nomination in the Razzies for it.

But possibly most troubling is your presence in the American Pie series, and it is this continued association which brings us to this letter today. Your participation in the first one is kind of understandable. One can imagine that reading the script made it clear that it was just the kind of sex-obsessed silliness that would bring horny teenagers to the theatres in droves. Still a little below your talents, but an understandable proportion of money to effort. Okay, we said, but surely he'll have the dignity to get out of this embarassing role before the sequel. But there you were, in the second and third installments too. Then, shortly after the direct-to-DVD release of the abysmal "American Pie: Band Camp," the unfathomable fourth entry in the series, in which you were the only returning cast member from the original movies, CNN brings us the depressing news of a fifth movie in the series. Why, Eugene, why?

To be fair, IMDB does list a new Christopher Guest movie, "For Your Consideration," in your resume. This is a good sign, although our hope is tempered by your track record of stinkers in the last few years.

So please, we beg you- stop taking these crappy jobs. Leave them to the Rob Schneiders and David Spades of this world, a Baldwin or Sheen/Estevez brother, or pretty much any member of the Girls' Bike Club. Stop this slide before you end up with top billing in one of the Sci-Fi channel's laughably awful movies!

Sincerely,
Your hopeful-despite-all-evidence audience

Just my opinion

In my mind, Britney Spears' 50-hour marriage and those 3-month Hollywood serial marriages are more damaging to the idea of the sanctity of marriage than the "damaging" effects of letting two homosexual adults make a consensual lifetime commitment. I wish the legislatures would stop wasting their time on issues like this and focus on more important things, like putting together systems which actually empower people to get out of poverty.

"The President confessed to having had limited experience with enraged rabbits."

Okay, so Dave wasn't making it up- Jimmy Carter did report that he saw a giant, angry swimming rabbit. The full story and photos are here. (Fantastic title quotation from Carter press secretary Jody Powell's book The Other Side of the Story.)

Ooh!!! Sparkly!!!!!