I Am Leslie Lange

Groggy Doggy Haiku Schmaiku

Pinkle & Pinkle
strike a pose without trying.
Synchronized sleeping.

Democrats, I beg of you! Moratorium on Palin!

This week, my e-mail account was flooded with Sarah Palin SPAM, also known as SPAL-AM. Sarah Palin in a red-white-and-blue bikini, wielding an assault rifle, a grotesque configuration of hydrogen molecules post-exposure to Sarah Palin's vice presidential nomination speech, Sarah Palin the Wolf Killer, Sarah Palin the Book-Banner, etc... etc... DNC anti-Palin SPAM. SPAM from various outreach groups: Concerned Mothers Against Sarah Palin (CMASP), People Having Nightmares About Sarah Palin (PHNASP), Sarah Palin Ate My Aborted Baby (SPAMAB), and so on.

I say ENOUGH! I do not want to hear any more about this crazy bee-yatch. She's everyone's new negative obsession.

This message was recently left on my answering machine: "Call me. I've just got to vent about Sarah Palin."

A slice of burnt toast flies out of my toaster with BURN IN HELL, S.P. carved on it.

OK, OK, I carved that toast myself with the little doohickey tool in my fingernail clippers, but still. If this response isn't like sending a shipment of free cotton candy to every bile-spewing Limbaugh Republican, I don't know what is.

It's time Oprah stood up and gave a public service announcement to democrats. Hello! Remember THE SECRET??? Stop focusing on what you hate, and start focusing on what you want. (What do I want, anyway?)

Send me a link about a planet full of unicorns. A U-tube video of Obama practicing free throws or of that kitten and its cute mechanical mouse. How about a nice benevolent chain letter? A schmaltzy feel-good anecdote, even one that rhymes, would even be OK at this point. But please, no more SPAM about her.

Nothing Is Ever Just 99 Cents

The other day, my housekeeper, asked me to buy myself some hangers. "It will be easier, you know, to hang up your clothes."
So, as I was roaming Desperate Hot Springs, running to the bank, avoiding off-leash pit bulls with my car, etc... I happened to see a sign for a new local 99-cent store. Juana is going to be so proud of me, I thought. I didn't waste money on expensive hangers from Walgreen's.

It takes courage to enter any 99-cent store, because, you know, there's no such thing as a free lunch, freedom isn't free, and nothing is ever just 99 cents. The last time I went, there was a fight at the cashier's station--a fight that lasted a long long time. Hence, the discount was offset by the time wasted, and by that I mean the years taken off my life at the stress of being exposed to a large blotchy-faced white guy (the customer) yelling at a petite, clear-complexioned black woman (the cashier) who told him, "Get out my face you dumb m$#%&." (She was clearly worried about catching his blotchiness.) There was also the time the price of cheap goods was a wait behind this guy whose elbow had a tennis ball-sized open sore, complete with stench and small insects. Would I have paid a few cents more not to have had my face all up in that? Actually, I'd have paid a hell of a lot more--and I work in a hospital.

But all these things were forgotten as I plunged into this new 99-cent establishment. This was going to be different because I was in D-Town. Everything is so crappy in D-Town, I figured the 99-cent store would be actually upscale. So I went in and it was true. The aisles were clean, organized, the shoppers respectful and free of sores. The cashier spoke naught but Spanish, but, hey, that's OK. I'm a proud multilingual (can offend in any tongue). I was so happy to get my three sets of 5 maroon hangers for $2.97 plus the tiny bit of tax.

Then I exited the store.
And there she was.
There she was, pushing what looked to be a baby stroller from K-mart.

She was grubby and there may have been a baby in the stroller, but the stroller was draped in blankets. What kind of blankets? Grubby blankets. There may have been nothing underneath those blankets but a grubby stuffed baboon. Still, the implication was: a baby out in 100-degree weather. She asked me for some change, mumbling something about being out of gas. I gave her several dollars, enough dollars to buy 15 hangers from Bed, Bath & Beyond.

Then I got in the car. Did I think, Gee, I'm glad I was able to help another human being? No, instead, I thought this: Once again, I have not saved money at the 99-cent store. In fact, I spent more money and received lesser quality items.

Once home, I complained about this to Juana. She said, "Oh, but you didn't lose that money because God was watching, and you will be rewarded for this, you know, because He sees everything." This made me feel better, not because I think God is watching me and keeping records, but because Juana is watching..and now maybe she'll forgive me for that big dildo I left in the dishwasher last week. Or maybe she was reminding me, in her own subtle way, that God saw the dildo too.

How to Waste a Perfectly Good Morning

1. Get up early. You’ve got a lot you don’t want to accomplish.

2. Go online and check your e-mail. Read, but don’t answer any of the personal ones. For now, they are merely measures of how well-liked you are.

3. Police your spam. If you are getting a lot of it, use this to heighten your sense of “life spinning out of control.”

4. Check your other e-mail account, the one that hooks you up with MySpace and Facebook. Find out who wants to be your friend. On MySpace, take a time-consuming personality quiz. On Facebook, get sucked into some word game or whatever. Your scores will determine if you’re a genius or a moron (there is no in-between). Play against a friend. If you win, feel superior. If you lose, look for some excuse, and fight back your tears.

5. Check your weight six times: before and after exercising, before and after eating, and before and after pooping. Use these statistics to determine an overall sense of self-worth.

6. Check your book’s Amazon rank. Compare this rank to rankings of your imaginary friends and rivals. Next, check the rank of a literary masterpiece no longer widely read, and if it is lower than your own, think, Yes! I am greater than Henry James!

7. Check your blog to see how many hits it got since your last post.

8. Pet and baby talk your dogs. Tell them the things you really want to hear. Things like, “How could you be so pretty? Huh? Just how could you be so pretty?”

Things You Might Read On a Bulletin Board at the Laundromat in Hollywood

A business card:

GET THE POWER
get a massage or workout
Call Franco Massimo
the "human touch"
323-850-8580
P.S. Free acting lessons free italian lessons

A printed flyer:

CASTING FILM/TV CREW "SUNSET AT DAWN"

Roma films is casting "Sunset at Dawn," a mafia thriller starring Franco Massimo about a hit man who came from Sicily to work for "la cosa nostra." This film has already been shot as a short and is being expanded into a feature. Rik Martino, exec producer. Shoot starts august 13

A handwritten flyer:

ROOM FOR RENT
- call Rik at Roma Films 323-850-8580

*In solidarity with the Italian-American community, and as a service to Franco, who offers free Italian and acting lessons, I am publishing these ads for free.

*What I really want to know is, if I take Italian and acting, will they put me in the movie? I do a great mafia wife.

PMS Movie Review: Wanted

WARNING: chockfull of spoilers

Some friends and I went to see an amazingly bad movie last night: WANTED with ANGELINA JOLIE. Poor Angelina. Didn't she go into the hospital right around its release? No wonder. I wanted to shoot myself when they had Morgan Freeman say "kill this mothafocka." (even though the nice black man wears a suit and talks pretty, he's just an evil gangsta underneath--ohmygod, was that an anti-Obama message?) Exploding rats? Paraffin wax spa soaks? A self-pitying navel-gazing hero transforms into a self-centered navel-gazing prick?

What really bugged me was the callousness. Innocent people die. A train full of passengers falls off a bridge. But the only thing that seems important is the dude's need to kill his target. The tone reminds me of my former roommate Freddy, a young cubicle-dweller who spent much of his spare time playing Street Fighter II. When 9/11 happened, he looked at the TV, laughed and said, "Cool." Same demographic.

It's all tongue-in-cheek fun when the hero lays down a trail of peanut butter to lure scads of sickly-looking rats into a garbage truck, then straps thousands of tiny bombs to their backs (a chore which would realistically take how long?), then looses them into the textile mill where his foes are staked out (bad special effect: no rats seem to wear bombs when they are first released). But it seems like the rats don't even do anything because the hero comes in next and starts shooting right and left. So my question is: why spend hours strapping tiny bombs onto rat backs when it doesn't do squat? Is it fun to watch rats get blown up? Didn't anyone see Ratatouille? Ahem. Anyone? Well, let me tell you, that was a movie. Rats are people too! They cook like nobody's ferking business. Oh, but maybe there was a deeper message, like about the "rat race" and how those who slog away in cubicles are all little hairy mini-suicide bomber terrorists. Hm. Or maybe somebody just hates rats.

The suspension of disbelief premise: dude is trying to kill his own dad because he thinks his dad killed his dad, but his dad actually killed the dude they told him was his dad. So then, when he kills his dad (hanging out of a falling train) his dad says, essentially, All this time, I was your dad and now you've killed me. And Wesley, the hero, is all Oops.

OK, but if you were his dad, couldn't you have sent him an e-mail? A message taped to a flaming arrow?

In the end, Wesley, all full of himself now that he's such a bad ass, says, I used to be ordinary, I used to be like you, or some such thing. What he should have said was, I used to be a halfway sympathetic character, now I just suck. And the final line: What have you done lately? Argh! Once again. Great message. If you work in a cubicle, your life is expendable, but if you pick up a gun and start killing people, you become a god.

Yes, I know it's all about the special effects and Angelina's hotness and dude's torso and stuff.

But sheesh.

Celebrate Your Anniversary by Doing Something Special

Try a delicious all-you-can-eat pea soup meal at Andersen's in Santa Nella, California. We did it, and we're still peeing green!

Pontifica's Birthday Haiku

Tonight: the party
Please, let there be enough food=
predominant thought.

Shared Brain Detail

So, today I see this headline on yahoo: Gay men, straight women share brain detail: report and I can't help clicking on it. Then I read on....

Mon Jun 16, 1:50 PM ET

LONDON (Reuters) - Gay men and straight women share some characteristics in the area of the brain responsible for emotion, mood and anxiety, researchers said on Monday in a study highlighting the potential biological underpinning of sexuality.

Brain scans also showed the same symmetry among lesbians and straight men, the researchers wrote in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

and all I can think is...why do gay men and straight women warrant a headline, while lesbians and straight men are an afterthought?

Is there a global conspiracy to link straight women and gay men? I think, mayhaps, it is so. And I think, mayhaps, that this is because a hyped up link between straight women and gay men SELLS PRODUCTS, LOTS AND LOTS AND LOTS OF PRODUCTS, while a hyped-up link between straight men and lesbians would only sell lots and lots of HOT LEZZIE PORN. And while hot lezzie porn is an important subset of our economy, it doesn't really need to keep up with the latest fashion trends.

Simply rove my hallowed archives for all those "weird search of the week" entries to see the sole link between straight men and lesbians. That's right. We are all girl-crazy, and we are all pervs. We also don't like to throw out our underwear.

By the way, I love the concept of shared brain detail. It sounds like a companionable military chore-duty, like shared kitchen detail or latrine detail--only brain detail is smart. "Wish I could go to the MENSA event with you guys tonight, but my fag-hag and I are sharing brain detail." (says Willy, the grown-up gay wunderkind)

Doggie Haiku: guest subject = OTIS

Trying to look cute
so the nasty cat won't claw
my little eyes out