blog alice

two weeks ago, i hosted the lafayette petfinders' get-together soiree. we were all finally able to meet each other and sit and chat (and laugh at me dropping my damn cheese wheel on the floor). despite buddy's urinary-hellos, all went well. the food was grand, the company was grand, and i was sad to see the night end!

welcoming the gang! donalee, alyson, luann, sandy, kim, neil, and dana!

wendy, jen, and a very happy as-of-this-weekend colts fan!

hi, mom!

oodles and oodles of food!

can WE have some?!?!

my guys getting tons of attention from kim and neil

next time i'll get more chairs, guys! sorry!

the whooooooole gang! (aka next year's christmas card)

luann and ming (who looooved the attention) and alyson and buddy

mom, pam, sandy, and donalee

conan, the portly voyeur (alyson's lap fell asleep)

so when do i get some of that cheese wheel???

i've been royally spammed, so if you'd like to create an account, jet me an email; i'm starting to get pissed at these russians. first, the cold war, now, spamming my site. knock it off!

anyway, i'm off to L.A. in three weeks for a veterinary school interview. anyone been to pomona? will i actually get real food there?

there is, unseen by most, an underworld; a place that is just as real, but NOT AS BRIGHTLY LIT. A DAAAARRKK SIDE.

sitting in my bed compiling my class website, i was lucky enough to stumble across a tales from the darkside mini-marathon on sci-fi (haven't touched it since i stumbled across that bad bad movie with ben stiller's wife and the chubby kid from stand by me). i used to basically hold my breath until 11:30p.m. on saturday nights so that i could wpix it for a half hour and get my tftds fix (i still can't say g-r-i-t-h-e-r, thanks to e.g. marshall). they had like three episodes on about mannequins yesterday. why are mannequins the focus of bad horror--tourist trap, um . . . tourist trap (hey, it was better than monsters and friday the thirteenth: the series combined). anyway. i remember one where the kid creates a vacuum cleaner that sucks the sound out of things (it sucks his babysitter dry), and as my own japanese-invented vacuum cleaner whapped me in the head for the twentieth time tonight (for the four-hundred and eightieth time this year), i started to get suspicious. it only happens when i'm using the utility tools, when i try to stretch the cord more than a few feet, and i always know it's going to happen, i just never known when. and then i see a dust salamander, i move to attack, and WHAP. and then i take the vacuum cleaner and throw it on the floor, usually with an expletive. the dogs often join in, barking and busting the plastic bumper. i haven't named it yet, but i'm thinking about something like jehovah. or kharma. or jeb.

the sky is falling! the sky is falling!

VIRGINIA BEACH, Virginia (AP) -- Evangelical broadcaster Pat Robertson said Tuesday that God has told him that a terrorist attack on the United States would cause a "mass killing" late in 2007.

"I'm not necessarily saying it's going to be nuclear," he said during his news-and-talk television show "The 700 Club" on the Christian Broadcasting Network.

"The Lord didn't say nuclear. But I do believe it will be something like that."

Robertson said God told him about the impending tragedy during a recent prayer retreat.

"I have a relatively good track record," he said. "Sometimes I miss."

umm....does that mean, sometimes god misses?

lessee here...we've moved through the straight whities; we've targeted lower-income minorities (on t.v. AND in walmart parking lots). they're almost used up! who oh who can the poor mr. bush turn to in these dire times, since he obviously doesn't want the pullout of troops in iraq to go down under his mostly already unsuccessful presidency in the short mention most whitey-white history books will pay him (right up there with andrew jackson and gerald 'god-rest-his-soul' ford).

who's left???

dah-dah-DAH-DAH!!

it's the gays!

yesiree bob! the gays have now been 'accepted'! (only by necessity, of course, say our country's military leaders.) 

"them there queers still can't murry, nope nope. but we'll for shure let them talk it up in basic training!" says john shalikashvili (say that five times fast).

"and who knows? maybe it'll be doin god's will anyway! my son said to me the other day, 'dad, if my buddy bob--i know you'd never let me join--is old enough to be in the army, then why can't he have a beer?' and i says, 'son, in a few years you won't need to argue 'bout that. we'll get them queers some pink fatigues and optional underwear in days of intense com-bat, and unless your little friend there takes it up the hershey highway--by the way i think yer hangin' out with that bobby boy too much, my whiskey buddies are startin' to talk--you won't need to worry about it. now go to yer room before i give ya a fistful of shut the hell up!"

the new "get-the-gays-inside" campaign will be led by none other than two of the movement's staunchest supporters:

the video game industry is already chomping at the bit, excited as "all get out" about the military funding of their latest project:

the u.s. military notes that simulation machines are due to hit college campuses this fall. they (and bush) are hoping these measures will attract a "new breed of soldier."

we'll see.

as i am compiling images to introduce my students to the mythological background they'll need to read the odyssey, i stumbled across this interp of the rape of persephone and was absolutely wowed (check out how the landscape curves, microfying the world, as if it's been caught in a ball of mirror):

i think i know that guy.

alice: hey, dana! wow. it's new year's eve, and after driving to (and getting scorned by) both hunter's pub and a bunch of irish brothers, we went to chumley's and played rummy and war, and now we're stuck once again in that universal vortex known as denny's. so, what do we do now? i know! let's eat bad eggs and try to scare the republican right sitting at the booth behind us!

alice: i don't think that they'll understand italian sign language, dana. in fact if they find out we're italian, we might get shot.

dana: what if i show them these?

dana: see, if i press them together, they talk!

alice: still that italian sign language, d.

ken: maybe i can run 'em off the road with my best rowan atkinson impersonation!

dana: no, ken. that's not italian. we use baseball bats and lubed police batons. no, you're talking about the illegal immigrant way (a.k.a. mexicans!). check out the jc online this week! hey, ken...isn't that your screenname on the good ole "j.c." (cough,cough)? sounds more like someone in the english department, though.

ken: hmph.

dana: how's about this, kenny-boy?

ken: no, no, no. you see, indianans aren't xenophobic, and definitely not racist! and i've heard that the republican right are rather well-endowed!

dana: poor, poor ken.

ken: d'oh! that's what pat robertson told me!

dana: awww. it's okay, ken. just look at these. it's the italians who are well-endowed. get your facts together.

which stereotype am i? hey. both my mom and grandmother were diner waitresses. well, actually my mom was a pancake house waitress, which is probably a step down from a diner waitress. my grandmother waitressed mickey's diner in berwick for thirty-seven years, flirting with coach curry and giving all her dough except for a small allowance for bingo on saturday nights to my grandfather. she used to bring me home banana creme pies.

Diner Waitress You Are What You Are

Ooh, we've made some bad choices in life, haven't we?

it's the curse of the notoriety...er...celebrity.

and i thought they couldn't ressurect nixon one more time....silly me.

my mom proudly attests that she doesn't know how to turn a computer on, that she "knows what happens to people who do." ken's dad doesn't exactly have a computer--it's webmail, which enables one to send email, but you're restricted from using a mouse (i personally think it's a torture device). i sent him an email this morning, and as i wrote it, i thought i should post it:

...Ken and I went to the Indianapolis Fashion Mall last night to use some of the many giftcards we received (Panera from Laura was great!!), and as we were driving home, Ken noticed a white minivan flying past us on the highway (Ken said he was doing close to 75, so the minivan had to be going 90). We got a mile up the road, and it was covered in this powdery substance, and we look across the highway (we were in the northbound lane), and there's the minivan beaten to a pulp on the other side of the southbound lane. I told Ken we should stop, but his cellphone was dead, and two cars in the northbound lane had stopped and several cars and a semi had stopped in the southbound lane. The emergency vehicles tore in, and within a few hours we read online that the person in the white minivan had died. I was all shaken up. It turns out the guy was trying to pass another vehicle up the road, lost control, flipped over the median, rolled into the southbound lane, was slammed by another car in the southbound lane (those two people were injured), and he died.  I know these things happen every day, but it's just awful to see it happen (and awful to be that close). Ken and I saw a deer hit on a highway in Indianapolis two years ago. You just feel helpless. Kind of like when you see a glass falling off the counter and it seems to fall for so long, but you can't possibly reach it. Ugh. So that was sobering.

sobering, indeed.

eh. anybody got a cart? my blog has crashed.

after a week of travel (and almost $200 in gas), to eastern pa, a jet up to upstate new york, a pause at niagara falls sans a working camera, off to a funeral in chicago and then back down to sweet home ala-republica, i'm finally catching up on sleep and healing from a semester of neuroscience, epidemiology and histology, not to mention that old prospectus thing and teaching two classes and taking dr.b.'s 300-page-o'-theory-a-week ballbuster (thanks, dr.b.). I squeaked out with a 3.73, somehow, and if they don't take me into the vet school this year...(insert lewd italian hand gestures here).

i've been working on this. and that. (if you've got any good images of hell, forward them)

losing count of the cats. trying not to lose it. realizing that friends come and go. as do cats. and debt.

and now i have to plan my next-weeend party for the petfinders group. my first welcoming of guests into my two-vacuum-bag-o-hair-a-week house. and i need to read homer. and pray ivy tech will give me a class or two so that i can get out of the debt amassed by my three years of traversing the globe (or i'll never get back to france or to another suzanne vega show).

and for the first year in eons, i have nothing to do on new years (a compulsion since my mom made me skip a bunch of mine in junior high school to babysit). no divine pesto in milwaukee this year. so i will spend the night twitching. ken's already got plans for mad dog. i suppose i'll watch.

there's always the dar williams show in february. in milwaukee.

barbie in the twelve princesses gameboy advance - logoed "dance your way into saving the kingdom"

ads where "little people" are crushed by cheeseburgers or casted as "bacteria" and "mold"

not being able to get the book i need to write my dissertation

vincent d'onofrio turned orson welles in the matter of a season

remembering that jimmy stewart is dead and decent scriptwriting is dead

STUPID victoria's secrets commercials (that's gonna hurt, sweetie)

finding myself glued to that mos def/alan rickman flick, but finding myself still pissed because it promoted the same racist stereotypes of "shut-up-and-be-pious-you'll-be-recognized-if-you're-quiet-and-don't-stir-it-up" (there's even a g.d. typo on the movie page)

and

not being able to spend christmas with my grandfather

i've just been offered a section of engl 230 great narrative works for the spring sem at purdue, and i am ecstatic. i'm just wrapping up teaching engl 250 great american books, and although the students showed MUCH healthy resistance along the way (from day one, they demanded orwell, despite my repeated explanations that orwell never took the handy-dandy citizenship test), their projects showed that they consumed the books and processed them enough to invoke some beautiful satires. if i had a clue as to how creative they could be, i would have molded another project around it. my very, very bad.

and now as i move to editing my prospectus (thanks prof. hughes for being so patient with me), hopefully, i'll be able to experiment further with pushing the students into new (and for some uncomfortable) realms of thinking about lit. YAY! now, time to order books and pray they'll be here in four weeks.

zee books (i think) in said order (i think):

(hunks o') The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Joseph Campbell.

The Odyssey. Homer.

Jude the Obscure. Thomas Hardy.

(chunks o') The Aeneid. Virgil. (needed to understand what can be understood of Dante, imho)

Inferno. (Dante)

Under the Volcano. Malcolm Lowry. ($#^&*$&# I can't WAIT to teach this)

Heart of Darkness. Joseph Conrad.

Jane Eyre. Charlotte Bronte.

Wide Sargasso Sea. Jean Rhys.