Okay, I found this via a comment from lishablog in singingnettle's LJ.

Entirely new to me, so I just assume I'm behind the curve.

No nudity, but still not safe for work. IMHO. ( We're All Going To Hell...here—> )

Hey, BTW... today is the first day after Old-Fashionedy TV got turned off. Does that mean my rabbit-ears tv icon is... is obsolete?

Here are the details about Sunday's concert down at the Lincoln Memorial. Except for the massive fups about censoring Gene Robinson's invocation and the non-free reality of the "free" broadcast (see link for the whole story on both), I liked the concert.

There was much talk about Martin Luther King's appearance at the venue, but I was all a-twitter about Marian Anderson, whom no one had mentioned until Queen Latifah got up to say her piece. I've always admired Anderson, and worked a reproductive rights rally on those same stairs fifty years to the day after she gave her concert there, invited by Eleanor Roosevelt after being refused the use of Constitution Hall by the Daughters of the American Revolution. Shame on the Daughters! I could be one, but I won't. For Anderson's sake. Obama is a lot more forgiving than I am. But yikes, I'd never actually heard Anderson's voice, and those few bars of My Country 'Tis of Thee make my ears hurt. Very, very, very operatic and very, very, very soprano. Eeeee!

Anyway, immediately following that, they had the same number performed by two soloists and a gay men's chorus, and I did tear up. I also cried a bit during This Land Is My Land but got the giggles when they sang the socialist verse. Pete Seeger sang it with the original "private property" and "relief office" verses, bwah-hah! It did my heart good to imagine, say, George Will's reaction to that.

Re tears of joy, I've been holding pretty steady so far, but I expect to weep like a fountain at some bar today at noon, where we are meeting Friend X and her husband and Arbor to watch the oath in a crowd. X is hosting a "ball" at her house which will be a very few people dressing up as much as we possibly can... to watch TV. Oh, well.

I went to Clinton's first Inaugural Ball - the one down at Union Station - and it was great. I was there as a worker, but they wouldn't let me work because of my mobility problems, so I sat there as the sole audience for Manhattan Transfer as they warmed up in the gloriously empty, gloriously acoustic marble hall for over an hour...and then tucked myself out of the way until the ball proper started.

Laugh, but what astonished me the most back in 2000 were the elderly men openly, even proudly, towing hookers behind them. Maybe they were trophy wives, I don't know, but the men (and there were at least a dozen) were clearly very rich and very old, and their escorts were semi-nude, super-tall in comparison, and had an average age of, say, 21. I'm a bit prudish about formalwear, but really, these women were seriously exposed. And no, they weren't daughters or granddaughters or nieces.

I remember Hillary and Bill dancing. She wore an eggplant gown with lace of the same overlaying the sleeves and bodice. He wore whatever it is that men wear, and played the saxophone. I wish I could have gone to at least the Power and Pride Disability Ball, though Obama will not be there; but most of all, I wish I could be down on the Mall today.

Before noon? LOOK!

For fans of David Boreanz of Buffy fame, a 2007 review of a film I haven't seen but which seems significantly different from his, uh, body of work:( Excerpt of review behind the cut... )

Okay, so, at 7 pm on WGN tonight, Old Spice ran their newest body commercial, which is of a centaur taking a shower.

Someone I know needs a YouTube of that really badly. (You know who you are.)

Apparently no one has put it up yet. It's not on the product's own site, either.

July Edit: Okay, here it is.

Okay, you saw yesterday's post about The Unseen, right? The dresses that didn't make it on to television? I wanted to do two colors today, but good news! I'm having company this weekend, YAY!!! Flist company!!! YAY!!! But the bad news is the house is a sty so I can only do one color today, and that's The Reds.

Red comes in many shades, but the most popular was lipstick red, a crimson that sets cameras on fire. (Crimson has more orange; scarlet has more blue; there's the mnemonic for you.) All of these women looked great in their red red gowns — not a loser in the batch.

The argument, if any, is ( back here behind the cut, with links and pretty pictures of these gloriously scarlet women! )

Okay, this is for my fashion peeps, and if you're not one of them, go read something political instead. I'm going to have to break my Academy Awards gown review into pieces, and so, saving the glorious reds for a later post, I'm leading off with... The Dresses No One Saw. That is, you didn't see them if you were watching the main broadcast or any of the "fashion police" shows. Of this lot, my favorites are the blue gown (pictured behind cut) and the silver charmeuse, bright as lightning, simple as rain.

Tom Wilkinson brought his daughter, and I don't care how old she is, this dress is too low-cut to wear on a date with Daddy. However, my prudery in the realm of necklines is well-known. ( The too-young, the too-old, the just-right, the beautiful blues, the rare colors, and that awful woman from 'What Not To Wear' all lurk behind the cut... )

Okay. Poor cleverpunition couldn't smack yesterday's tinyurls around well enough to be able to see the videos, so I found this copy of Part 1 on YouTube for her. Here's hoping it works.

The advantage to the rest of you is that this version, copyright be damned, includes the audio. Yesterday's URLs did not, so y'all missed seeing the five-year-olds dancing to "Lady Marmalade," a song I just love but not one I'd teach to my nieces ever, or at least, not until they're old enough to join the Marines.

Oh, and mehitabel1 has inspired me to do research on "tinker's damn" versus "tinker's dam," a worthless bit of clay used by tinsmiths as a dam for solder. Hmm! Too busy today to work on it, but I'm intrigued. Conflation? Elision? My idea of a good time. Report later.

Possibly much later. I have books and correspondence stacking up, and now that Yard Guy has gone and the yard is nearly done (okay, about eight more hours from Savant and about as much from me, and about twenty from Neighbor's Handy Son who is building a fence, and then "done" in the sense of, maintenance only), I need to get going on a plumber. I'm dreading just getting the estimates, much less getting the work done and paid for. Argh.

What a day! Okay, everyone, go play Fortune Cookie with cleverpunition, a game of her own devising. Go! It's gooood!

Second, anyone who has had a wedding, planned a wedding, been in a wedding, or seen a wedding, you must see these URLs given me by elegaer, OMFG, from a British facsimile of the U.S. "Bridezilla" show. Yes, they're safe for work, but first, some explanation:

( Chavvy, gypsy, history, video, photo, oh, the horror, oh, the humanity... )

I was chatting with a dog I much admire (in the dog's LJ) and we got onto the topic of doggie disabilities, and I ranted there, and now I'm going to rant here.

For some insane reason, Celebrex, a human arthritis drug, is running a TV ad with live-action reduced to white cartoon outlines on blue. A man gets on his bike, and the dog runs along, while the man talks about how great it is for him, the human, to be pain-free and mobile on this new drug. Meanwhile, the morons who set this up chose a dog suffering from moderately severe hip dysplasia to run beside him, in a painful "bunny hop" propelling-not-galloping gait. Morons, morons, morons. With all that was spent on this ad, couldn't they have spared a hundred bucks to have a vet look at it? It presents a poor dog who is a terrible contrast to the happy-sappy pain-free human!

Here it is; it's two and a half minutes long!! (Okay, 2:28.) The injured dog shows up at 49 seconds into it, reappears at 1:56 or so:

Okay, it's a Friday, I'm jonesing for Battlestar Galactica and there won't be any until they get around to broadcasting new episodes next year.

But hey, doesn't this kid look a bit like Katee Sackoff, who plays Starbuck in the new Battlestar Galactica series? Sackoff is ten years older than Carly Schroeder, who is starring in a soccer movie called Gracie this summer.

You can see it in this photo too. The same wide mouth. She's only 17. Be nice to see them play sisters sometime.

Okay, everybody, sing it with me!

The Chivalrous Shark

Okay, last night, waiting for Digit to finish my new computer (thank you, Digit, thank you thank you), got into the "Jaws" episode of Mythbusters.

They were hosting "Shark Week" this year on the Discovery Channel, so you won't find the teaser on their own website. The teaser's boring, anyway. The good stuff was in the show:

----construction of a shark-pedo to see if a great white really could whack a hole in a boat the size of the Orca (yes, sort of)
----ordnance tests to see if shooting an air tank really will make an explosion (no, it just shoots around like a really dangerous balloon)
----two experiments to see if punching a shark will make her or him go away (yes, sort of)

and so on. ashark2th, you should have seen it. Sharks and peculiar inventions, what more would it take to make you the happiest sharkster ever?