Whedon Quote of the Week

"Maybe I'm just a dumb softie -- or a subtly brilliant softie. So subtle, in fact, that it cannot be picked up by human beings or any machines."

-Joss Whedon

Good night, Angel

I want to thank all of the blessedly creative geniuses who have brought us the wonderful "Angel" these past five seasons. I'm very surprised and upset that The WB has decided to cancel "Angel" while it is obviously at its peak. The massive changes made this season, while disturbing to some fans, truly revitalized the show. I was very much looking forward to watching "Angel" for at least another couple of years, especially considering its relative success in the ratings (#2 show on The WB for 18-34 year olds, by The WB's own statement). I certainly hope that someone reconsiders and that "Angel" continues to grow and improve before our eyes. If it does not, all I can say is thank you very much, "Angel" cast & crew, for showing us the dark and sticky yet kinda funny and perversely lovely demonic underbelly of Hell A.

And heaven help you, Joss Whedon. You must've done something truly evil (like Big Bad evil) in a past life to suffer this crap these past couple of years. Sheesh. You poor bastard.

Quote of the Day

"There's no 'I' in 'TEAM.' There is an 'M' and an 'E,' though."

-Carson Kressley

P.S., Maggie...

Congrats on the new digs. Wish I could have come to the housewarming party. Please re-email me your new address so's I can send your housewarming gift to you. Cheers.

Now that's just really weird

ET, is it just me or does Lynndie England, the woman who took part in the torture of inmates in Abu Ghraib, look a bit like a thin version a certain smelly-footed female whose presence in NYC caused Manhattan Island to sink about six feet into the rivers?

My mom won't get this

...'cause she never read Dune, nor would she sit still for the movie. So, I had to share with you. 'Cause it had me running into the living room, laughing so hard I doubled over. But I could tell Mom 'cause she doesn't know about Spice. And now I suddenly miss my superdork dad, who has read every single book in the series and would laugh, too.

from Fafblog!: I been in the War thing coverin the War. Fafnir is an embedded reporter. ... Already three of the men have been eaten by Sandworms. But the General says we will not leave Iraq until we have siezed Saddam and the mysterious Spice, for he who controls the Spice controls the universe.

"Damned lies" and the lying liars who tell them

I have little to do, other than study and write final papers. This means I've been able to watch and listen to much of the Congressional hearings with Rumsfeld on C-SPAN and C-SPAN2. At times I've been so angry I've had to leave the room and wander to the computer or to a book or to the fridge and pretend I'm not hearing what I'm hearing. The expression on Rumsfeld's face when he's confronted by Senators and Representatives from both (both) sides of the aisle asking intelligent and reasonable questions is...sigh I wish to God someone would just smack that look off his face. Like my sister E-- used to say when she was little, "He needs a mommy." Or to go back to kindergarten. Something. He's missing primal training.

I can't address what happened to those prisoners. I can't address the photographs. I can't address the response from the executive branch. I just don't have the words. Other people have addressed them much better than I (check out Terry Karney's blog, for one). So, I'll just quote "pfarley"'s LJ:

Thus spake Rumsfeld

Dear Citizens of the Earth;

Please judge America by our ideals rather than our actions; and likewise, judge our enemies by their actions rather than their ideals.

Otherwise, we'll fuck your shit up.

cheers,
Donald Rumsfeld
Secretary of Defense
USA

"Lies, damned lies, and statistics"

Maggie's blog says only, "Coming soon." This is a lie. There is no soon. Not at all coming soon. Far away from soonness. Lies, all lies. Except for the name, which is true. And the orange and pink, which are very real and scary and true.

But at least ET posted again. Shiny!

Getting all quoty with the Fafblog again

I fear you are not reading Fafblog, which means you have not been reading entries such as the following, which I am quoting in its entirity 'cause I'm too lazy to edit:

prematurely airconditioned supermarket

So last night I was in this prematurely airconditioned supermarket and there were these aisles and aisles of bathing caps, an they had these sorta fourth of July plumes on em, and they were red, and blue, and yellow, and I wasnt tempted to buy them but they did remind me that I had been avoidin the beach.

"Chris" I says to Chris cause he's the one I talk to about the beach, "I wanna go to the beach."
"Blah blah blah," says Chris who is eatin chicken. "Talk talk talk."
"Chris you are so unhelpful," says me.
"Blah talk blah. Talk talk blah."

So I take the bus instead. The bus is big and old and smelly and ugly and the bus is all "Nggghhh the bus hates the beach, the bus doesnt go to the beach" and I go all "fooey to you the bus" and so I decide to walk to the beach as it is a pleasant sunny day and I see all kinds of interesting things on the way like several stop signs and Giblets and an old coke can.

"Hey Giblets I am goin to the beach!" says me.
"The beach is insolent," says Giblets. "Besides you hate the beach."
"That's not true," says me.
"Talk blah talk. Blah blah talk."

When I get to the beach there is a huge beach monster there with enormous sharp teeth comin out of the sand. "Hey beach monster," says me. "RGGNRAAAFFRRRR" says the beach monster and it jumps for me and about fifty other Fafnirs all running away from it. "Run Fafnir!" say the other Fafnirs. "Aaaa!" says me and I start runnin.

I stop to rest in this prematurely airconditioned supermarket and there are these aisles and aisles of bathing caps, an they have these sorta fourth of July plumes on em, and they are red, and blue, and yellow, and Im not tempted to buy them but they do remind me that I have been avoidin the beach.

Stupid bathing caps.

And then, once more, need I repeat, there are the comments, some of which go approximately thuswise, while this one in specific goes specifically thisway:

I live far far from any beaches, but my hometown is still awash with migratory beach monsters seeking work. They snarl and they hiss but they don't mean it in their hearts, the homesickness has sucked all the fierceness from them.

"Rar rar" says the beach monster.

"I know", says I, "I feel you pain"

See? You need to be reading this, even though the punctuation and spelling is occasionally of the crappy variety, which you can apparently tolerate, considering you're reading my blog right now, which is only of the sugarkat and not the fafnir variety and therefore not as forgivable in its crappy English (e.g., this run-on sentence).

Read! Read! Go! Read! Frrraaaaaagh!

I quote in fullness of quoting statements endquote

This is why I read Fafblog:

what do you do with a problem like Fallujah?

Well we are pulling out of Fallujah it looks like. Now I know a lot of gloomy guses out there are gonna talk about appeasement and the downfall of the occupation and encouraging insurgents but yknow what, I think this pullin-out-and-leavin-crazy-Iraqi-militia-alone-under-a-Baathist-general plan might be on just the right track.

Remember that old episode of The Cosby Show where Theo wants to move out of his house and go live in the real world so Dr Huxtable goes and sets up his house as "The Real World Hotel" where Theo is charged for rent and food and cant afford to eat or sleep and has to say "Aw dad man was I stupid in this episode!" and his dad says "Thassalright son have a Jello pudding pop!" Ha ha! That was a great episode.

Well the moral of that episode is "be careful what you wish for because sometimes you're actually stupid" which is a valuable lesson we all should learn. What the US should do is give full sovereignty to all of Fallujah and put crazy Sunni militias in charge. At first they will be like "Awwwwright! Party in the mosque all Friday long!" but pretty soon they will learn that with Great Power Comes Great Responsibility and people will start comin up to them sayin hey crazy Sunni militias where's my electricity? and Hey crazy Sunni militias where's my job? and Hey crazy Sunni militias what happened to that universal health care plan you promised us? and crazy Sunni militias will learn the perils of incumbency.

Meanwhile the US will be back in limited-sovereignty Iraq goin "Oh what's that crazy Sunni militias you don't want to run Fallujah anymore? Oh well" and they will apologize profusely and US ambassador to Iraq John Negroponte will put a fatherly hand around their shoulder, give them a Jello pudding pop and a summary execution. And everybody will have a big laugh it'll be fun!

Anyway.

CORRECTION: In the previous version of this post Fafblog referred to crazy Sunni militias as "Moqtada al Sadr," who is not holed up in Fallujah. Also Fafblog referred to Iraq as "Candyland," President Bush as "convicted child molester President Bush," and Supreme Court Justice David Souter as "the argument from supervenience." Fafblog regrets the error.

What makes it even better is you look in the comments and see posting like this:

If I were the prez I would put this plan into action and call it Operation Combustable Huxtable and it would work I tell you what.

Shiny pate

I figured out why Jeter's having such a rough time of it this season. It's not that he has to play with A-Rod and all that that entails. It's not that the clubhouse has more new faces than familiar. It's not that he's getting old or that he's injured or that last year's injuries are getting to him.

It's that Don Zimmer isn't on the bench anymore.

Before every at-bat, Jeter would take off Zim's hat and rub his round, bald head for good luck. He'd been doing this since, I believe, 1996, since pretty much the very beginning of his big league career. Now, all of a sudden, that shiny pate is no longer there. The routine is messed up. Jeter's whole vibe is now off-kilter before every at-bat. It's not like he can do the same with Willy Randolph: Randolph has too much hair (and dignity). No, Jeter's without lucky bald head to rub. It's now over on the Tampa Bay bench, of all places, where the kids are completely unaware of the awesome power of Zim's bald head.

Poor Jeter. I hope he really is getting his equilibrium back. He's now hit safely in three straight games, going 3 for 6 yesterday. We'll see in a week's time if he's truly gotten over this hitch in his routine and realized he can fly without the crow feather.

This site is for the poet in Sheep Boy

Sheep Poetry Generator.

I believe the name says it all. Clickety-click!

Hey, lookie here

I was surfing around, not really looking for anything, when I came across this piece of fanart. I kinda liked it, considering it's fanart, as it has Nightcrawler, who's one of my all-time favorite X-men, Brooklyn from Gargoyles, and Hellboy, of whom I've become quite fond since seeing the super-fun movie.

Yay! Gargoyles!

Can't help lovin' that short stop of mine

The New York Times > Sports > Baseball >:

Jeter, Anemic at 0 for 32, Is a Crusher at 1 for 33

"Yogi Berra has forgotten some details, but he knew the length of his worst hitless streak, the way he broke out of it and the opponent when he did. Decades later, Derek Jeter provided the historical symmetry to an epic slump.

"In his first at-bat against the Oakland Athletics' Barry Zito last night, Jeter crushed a first-pitch homer deep over the left-center field wall near Monument Park at Yankee Stadium. The blast emphatically ended a slide that had reached 0 for 32, a figure that was familiar to Berra, the Yankee Hall of Famer.

" 'It's funny,' Berra said before last night's game, a 7-5 Yankee victory. 'I went 0 for 32 once. I hit a home run the next time up.' The home run, he added, was against the Kansas City Athletics, a forerunner of the Oakland team."

cue creepy '50s sci-fi moog Ooo-oo-oo-oooo!

Jeter and Yogi. Please also note that the HR wound up in the netting over Monument Park. He's so future HOF. I'll never cheer for that Rodriguez fellow the way I cheer for Jeter.

Oh, this just craked me the hell up

Doctor Unheimlich has diagnosed me with Katosis not the real name...edited to protect my web anonymity
Cause:	too much sleep
Symptoms:	hovering, occasional déjà vu, liver pain, frequent diarrhoea
Cure:	electroshock therapy
Enter your name, for your own diagnosis:

For an even bigger laugh, type in Sugar Kat into the name spot above. Tra la. I kinda like this response better....

...and this was my first and family names:

Doctor Unheimlich has diagnosed me with -- --itis
Cause:	influence of the Devil
Symptoms:	groin swelling, extremely inability to pronounce letter 'c', steam whistling from ears, pimples
Cure:	fresh air
Enter your name, for your own diagnosis:

Wah! This makes me happy for some strange reason

You are a GRAMMAR GOD!


If your mission in life is not already to
preserve the English tongue, it should be.
Congratulations and thank you!


How grammatically sound are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

Yay!

I saw Hellboy this Saturday! So happy! Yay my mom!

Liked it muchly, but that might be because I wasn't expecting much of it and came at it in terms of it being a movie, not in terms of how it interpreted the comic book. It was fun and funny and a little creepy, but mostly funny and fun. I suspect comic book fans might have been screaming, "Aw, fuck! Fuck! No! Shit! No! That's not--! Auugh! Bastards!" or some such, but I laughed and enjoyed myself immensely (the dialogue was occasionally stilted, but in a comic-book-y kind of way, so I accepted it for what it was).

Whee! Comic book movies!

I kinda want to see it again, mostly for Ron Perlman's performance, which I loved. My mom really liked the movie, too. She said now she has to get some huge-ass widescreen television so she can watch the Hellboy DVD appropriately. She adored Hellboy the character. Called him a "unique and very human superhero." (She collected Superman comics when she was a kid in the 1940s and '50s and feels herself to be an expert on the genre for some reason.) She now REALLY wants to go see Van Helsing. My crazy mom.

So, that's two thumbs up from the women of the Sugar Kat household for Hellboy.

From Salon: Hand wash, drip dry, insult president

By Melanthia Mitchell

April 23, 2004 | SEATTLE (AP) -- Clothes can make a statement. Urban-bag designer Tom Bihn has discovered that labels can, too. Bihn's sales have doubled since a French-language presidential insult mysteriously made its way onto the bilingual washing instructions for hundreds of his laptop bags and backpacks.

The labels read: "Nous sommes desoles que notre president soit un idiot. Nous n'avons pas vote pour lui."

Translated into English: "We are sorry that our president is an idiot. We didn't vote for him."

Bihn's self-titled company has drawn national media attention and sparked Internet chatter since a Seattle customer spotted the insult and posted a photo of his bag's label on his Web log.

Bihn is careful to note that the tag doesn't specify who "our president" refers to.

"I'm going with the idea that it's a joke about me, the president of the company," Bihn said Thursday, but "clearly when you use the word 'idiot' and 'president' in the same sentence people jump to other conclusions."

Bihn, 43, said he knew nothing of the tag until calls and e-mails started coming in from people around the country asking for "the bag with the label."

Bihn figures about 2,000 labels were printed and hundreds had been sewn into his bags in the past five to six months.

About 500 labels remain, and Bihn continues to use them. He also has given them to customers who want just the label.

The company also has rolled out a line of "French Label" T-shirts with the enlarged label silkscreened onto the front. The company says all profits from the shirts are donated to the Seattle Vet Center.

Bihn, who has a Seattle store and a Port Angeles factory outlet, said he has gotten some complaints, but most people who call him say the labels are funny.

None of Bihn's 10 employees has taken responsibility for the tags.

"We're not really looking real hard because it's been really good for business," Bihn said. "If somebody admits to doing it we'll give 'em a raise."

Russians say fuck you to plastic-fantastic glamour-pusses

Found on die puny humans:

An unglamorous schoolgirl has become a feminist icon in Russia after she was entered for an online beauty pageant by a friend as a prank.

Alyona Pisklova - not her real surname - got at least 40,000 votes, making her the runaway favourite to represent Russia in June's Miss Universe contest.

But Alyona, 15, was disqualified ahead of the finals because of her age.

In a blow to convention, her supporters hit back with a website called "Say No To Barbie Dolls".

She collected at least twice the votes of her nearest competitor.

Quote of the Day

"FOX! Where the shit hits the fans."

-Tim Minear not too long after having to tell folks his brand-new show got the boot after four eps.