So. The Grammys:

I like No Doubt vaguely, and Gwen Stefani is adorable, but oh my god what the hell is going on? Has Cirque du Soleil taken over the world now?

The "velvet overground?" Eh?

I think it's about time Norah Jones released another fucking song.

Did Faith Hill accidentally put her pants on her arms instead of her legs?

It's "brunettes with pianos" night at the Grammys!

Aren't they supposed to give out awards or something like that every once in a while?

Considering how funny most of his songs are, it'd be nice if Eminem could crack a smile occasionally. Dude, lighten up.

Oh. Coldplay. I was prejudiced against them before I heard them, so I can't judge fairly. But they're certainly bland. Not bad, I guess, but they seem born to do songs on movie soundtracks. And is this song ever going to end? Christ. Oh, come on. You can't headbang and play a piano. Even Axl Rose didn't take things that far. You look like an idiot.

So is there something on Avril's shirt we aren't supposed to see? Oh. Apparently not. I know people hate her for being overexposed and, well, 18, but I think she's cute and her songs are catchy. If there's suddenly a coherence requirement for pop starts, she's not the only one in trouble. (Consider Norah Jones' later summary of the international situation as "really weird," for instance.)

Y'know, I love "All My Life," but what an awful video. It makes me feel guilty that I'm so bored by it. Which isn't relevant for the Grammys, but I wanted to mention it. Oh, and yay Dave Grohl. Now don't make boring videos like that again!

What?! Okay, when the announcer says "Grammy" does it sound like "crappy" to anyone else? Maybe it was just because I wasn't paying a lot of attention.

Oh, shut. UP! Robin Williams! And! Oh my god, stop stealing jokes from The Door. Especially ones you already used, what was it, two or three years ago? I hate you.

So the rousing chorus to Springsteen's inspirational song is "la la la la la la la la." Okay. I'm strangely unmoved by his poetic insight.

Make N'Sync stop pretending they're The Bobs.

Willem Defoe introducing Eminem? Huh. Oh, damn it, I hate "Lose Yourself." It's not funny. I like when he's funny. Zzzzz.

Hey! Adrian Pasdar! Eeeeeee!

I wonder if it's hard to sing Clash songs without affecting a British accent. And man, Bruce Springsteen is just hateful. Quit looking like just singing is some kind of physical torture, dude. This is making me sad, and it's in a nice way except for the sadness I feel about Springsteen's existence. Sorry, I've hated him since 8th grade; I can't really stop now.

Hi, guy who's excited about being on TV!

So it was a tribute to Joe Strummer that didn't actually mention him by name at any point? Not that I wanted another speech, but actually saying his name aloud would be nice.

So there was a lot of snow. And two days off! Paid! Whee! My company hardly ever has snow days, so that was a big deal. And then I had a third day off because of my car being in a giant mound of snow, and they kept plowing me in, and when they ran the snowblower over the sidewalk they'd bury the front tires in even deeper, and then just when I was going out to make another try at getting the car free, the lace on my boots broke, and I took that as a sign and gave up. Plus, if I had managed to get to work, at that point they wouldn't have wanted me around. But now I'm mobile again, hooray.

And while many people complained about going stir crazy while trapped in their homes, for me it was just a long weekend, because staying home is pretty much what I do anyway. Plus, driving to the store is a chore. Walking to the store for urgently needed supplies in the middle of a not-quite-technically-a-blizzard is an adventure! Even if the supplies aren't all that urgently needed. I just thought a pot pie sounded like good snowstorm food, really. Oh, and cocoa.

One snowstorm related story about driving karma: On the way home tonight, I come to a big intersection that has two left-turn lanes. I'm in the right-hand one, because after I'll turn left, I'll turn right at the end of the block. Two police cards come up, all sirens and lights, and since the other lane is empty next to me, I move over into it as much as I can. And then the people further back decide to take advantage of the fact that I (and other people) have moved. So they creep up and block us in the lane we moved into in order to get out of the way of a police car. I see this shit all the time, and it drives me nuts. People will follow in the wake of an ambulance, passing cars that pulled over to let the ambulance by. I just want to scream at them, "I'm glad that someone else's life-threatening emergency is balanced out by your speedier commute!"

But I digress. So I'm seething at the people next to me, and I know you're thinking "Big deal, so you make the turn and then change lanes," but again: the drivers around here are psychos, and often don't just "let" you change lanes, so it's a whole stressful thing. And obviously the people right next to me aren't thinking "driver courtesy" or they wouldn't have pulled up and blocked me in. Grr. The light turns green, we go, I turn... and then the traffic backs up a little, because it turns out that on this street, the right-hand lane is still piled high with snow from the plows. Ha! When I got to the merge, I did let someone get in front of me, because I am a Good Person. But I made sure it wasn't the jerk who'd blocked me in, because I'm also a Petty Person.

Okay. So yeah, with all that time around the house, I got some important goofing-off taken care of. I finished Wodehouse's Young Men in Spats, which was a present from Monty. It was very funny, so I will have to seek out more Wodehouse. Luckily, he's not hard to find. I think "Archibald and the Masses" was my favorite, just because instead of being about how someone tried to get the girl, it was about someone almost losing the girl. Variety!

And then I started Max Beerbohm's Zuleika Dobson, which I'm enjoying. Zuleika pays a visit to Oxford, and men fall in love with her at first sight because they do that everywhere. "'My beauty! How I hate it!' sighed Zuleika. 'Still, here it is, and I must needs make the best of it.'" She insists that she can only love someone who doesn't worship her, and so far she hasn't run into anyone who can resist doing that. And now a Duke at Oxford is getting ready to kill himself because she rejected him. Which she's excited about, because although there have been rumors that men died for her, she's never been able to confirm it before. I expect that hilarity will ensue. And, based on the summary I saw, plenty more suicides. It was described as a satire, but I think it's more of a black comedy.

I watched O Brother Where Art Thou? while snowbound. I still think it meanders a bit too much, even if meandering is the point of the thing -- it shouldn't feel like meandering while it's happening, y'know? But I enjoy it a lot; it's pretty, and George Clooney is so funny. (And also pretty.) I love how he delivers some of those lines, and he also manages to be energetic enough to make up for the drifting nature of the story.

And I said he's pretty, right? Okay then. There was more... Oh! Hitchcock! I got Shadow of a Doubt and Rope on DVD. I watched the little "making of" thing on the Shadow of a Doubt DVD, which was fine. I've seen the movie many, many times, so I didn't watch it. At least in the documentary, the transfer looked a little bit, uh, not right, but it was cheap, and it's still better than the prints I've seen on TV. I love that movie. It's so strange. If you liked Twin Peaks for the "small town with something wrong" vibe, you might enjoy this. Thornton Wilder wrote the screenplay, with some polishing by other people, so there are a lot of faintly eccentric characters being odd but not-scary, and then there's Joseph Cotton, who's very cheerful and friendly and wonderful and maybe kills people. In the making-of piece, they mention that this was Hitchcock's favorite of his movies, although they say it's because of the themes. I'd read an article in Murder Ink that said he liked it because they filmed almost everything on location, so he had total control, and as a result it came the closest to looking like what he'd imagined. But I suppose both could be true. One neat point in the documentary is that it's probably got Hitchcock's most developed villain -- he's the focus of the movie from start to finish.

And Rope. This is when I got a little sleepy. So I started to watch the extras, and there was another little documentary, and then I fell asleep. And then when I woke up, I discovered that the movie will play automatically, because the gunshots near the end are what woke me. "Huh," I thought, and watched it for a minute, and then fell asleep again, and it replayed again, and I woke up again. And then I turned the TV off and did something else for a while. So I can't say much about it except that you won't sleep through the gunshots. I have seen it before, too, but it's been a long time, so I'll probably watch it soon. When I'm not so tired.

And today I ordered a bunch of DVDs. They were too cheap to resist! And I've wanted them for a while! And I'm not defensive! Maybe a little. And tomorrow I might go to the comic book store. Ooo.

So I watch Letterman for the first time in weeks, and they've got a bunch of bugs on. And can I stop watching? No. Why not? No idea. It's hypnotic. Gaaaaah. I'll be shuddering all night.

There's no need to have that many legs. It's just wrong.

Let's see if I can remember what's happened for these past few weeks...

In a development that should surprise no one who knows me, I gave into temptation and picked up The Prodigal Woman a day or two after my last entry here. I'd tried to save it for the weekend, when I could stay up all night reading without dying as a result. It is mildly surprising that I didn't stay up all night. I stopped at about 4:30 AM, when my eyes hurt and I felt the start of a headache coming on. And I didn't even finish it! There were about 100 pages left! Very discouraging. But it's long. I mean, it's about 550 pages, but it's small print because it was printed during WW2 and they were trying to save paper. Anyway.

I did, however, finish it the next night. And duh, I really liked it. I'm developing a theory that it's a response to Gone With the Wind in a lot of ways. It's set in the North, the main character is an extremely unpopular girl who sets her mind to becoming a social butterfly, she marries a dullard with a good position while secretly longing for a passionate artist who wants to defy convention. And at the end she's all alone, without even her child. But the difference is, she's pretty happy about it. Basically, instead of thinking, "I'll go home to Tara and figure out how to get him back," it's "I'll go home and figure out how to keep everyone away from me." Which makes the whole thing a lot more interesting. Over and over again there are women who would have wonderful, satisfying lives, and then they screw it all up because they fall in love. It's hilarious. Probably a good choice for around Valentine's Day, if you're feeling bitter. (Oh, if you do go looking for it, this is the novel by Nancy Hale. There's another book by the same title that's some kind of inspirational born-again story and which I suspect has very different themes. Just so you know.)

Leda also leaves the story for long periods -- most of what I read last Thursday was about a childhood friend of hers, who has her own mini-opera going on for about 200 pages. She has a fine time in New York City in the 20's -- I loved this: "It did not really matter much what place you said you came from, since the only point of bringing it up was to declare how divine it was to have gotten away from it. Everybody here seemed to come from somewhere else; there was hardly a living native New Yorker; all were loud in relief at being in New York." But then she falls in love with a psycho divorced Marxist Irish Catholic who alternates between worshipping her and punishing her for her "sordid" past. Which gets pretty horrific -- there were a couple of times I was shouting at the book because Betsy kept putting up with all kinds of abuse. But then it got so over-the-top that it became funny. And I assume that was intentional, because how could you write this without intending it to be funny (this is Betsy's husband yelling at her):

"I'm leaving. I'm quitting work tomorrow. I'm going somewhere where nobody ever heard of you and where I won't see your lovers everywhere I look. When I get there I'm going to work. If you come, you'll be second to that -- if you even get to be second. God, when I think of my marriage and how I used to want to be unfaithful and wasn't, and when I think of how you went about being married to that poor cuckold of yours -- I could vomit. I'll give you a chance to be a good wife, on my terms, my way, in a place I'll pick out. But God knows you don't have to take the chance."

"I'll go anywhere you go."

"Oh, don't be melodramatic."

He goes on to suspect her of plotting infidelity while she's in labor with their child. At which point even she starts laughing at him.

Anyway. The title comes from Leda's abandonment of the solitary life for, not excess necessarily, but society. The ending is a largely stream-of-consciousness sequence when she realizes her mistake: "When I strike out it is in sin; when I rejoin the others I commit sin. All sin lies in the life of people, all virtue for me alone."

And I've been reading Wodehouse. And Beerbohm. And I haven't been reading a bunch of other things that are in a pile by the bed. Don't judge me.

Meanwhile, in the distracting world of television... Johanna gave me tapes of Profit from its December run on Trio. I'd been wanting to see it for a while, because I think Greenwalt was responsible for a lot of the good things about Buffy and Angel, which made me curious about it. And then the more I heard it, the more fucked up it sounded, and that really intrigued me. Having now seen all of the episodes, I think I can say, yup, it sure is fucked up. And very funny.

It's probably just as well that Greenwalt never got to bring Profit into Wolfram & Hart on Angel, which he kept saying he wanted to do. Because Profit would have made Angelus look pretty lame by comparison. And not just because he had even sillier hair. Anyway, if you missed it like I did, Profit is a complete sociopath who works at a corporation that is almost entirely populated with slighly less effective sociopaths. And then he lies, blackmails, manipulates, and murders his way through life. Sometimes he's scheming against people in the company, and sometimes he's scheming against people outside the company so that he doesn't get fired. And since almost all of them are horrible people, you don't feel too bad for his victims. Mostly. It's sufficiently dark and cynical that I spent a lot of time thinking, "I can't believe this was on TV. Even Fox."

I am still confused by the fact that in the pilot, Profit kills his father, but that seems to happen off-screen. And then you see it in the previouslys for the next episode. I'm wondering if Trio cut that for time, but it seems like a murder scene would be the last thing you'd cut for time. And I've watched it twice now, so I'm pretty sure I didn't just miss it somehow. It's confusing.

I'll probably have more to say about that when I watch them again.