It's log, it's log, it's big, it's heavy, it's wood

I love Ren & Stimpy. Now if I can only get David to like it. Can you believe I married someone who doesn't think Ren and Stimpy is funny?!?

NKOTB 4EVA!

In the late 1980s I was completely obsessed with the New Kids on the Block. My entire room was plastered, wall-to-wall, with NKOTB posters. I had a life-sized cardboard cut-out of the group in the middle of my room, as well as a room divider covered with pictures and articles cut out of teeny bopper magazines. I even had posters on my ceiling so that the last thing I saw before I went to sleep was John, Jordan, Donnie, Danny, and Joey looking down on me. I finally removed all the New Kids paraphernalia in 1990 when my friend Erin and I were having two cute boys over to study for Geometry. Soon there after, the New Kids faded away into pop culture history.

So imagine my surprise when I hear that the New Kids might be reuniting. I guess with the recent "success" of the Spice Girls' tour, the fab five are thinking about jumping on the reunion bandwagon. While my musical taste have certainly progressed way beyond late 80s bubble-gum pop (even in 1989, I bought R.E.M.'s Green and The Cure's Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me along side the New Kids), I would be tempted to go see them again. Would it make me completely lame to go see the same show I was screaming and crying at 20 years ago?

Oh, and in case you're wondering, I was a Donnie fan. He was the "bad boy" of the group.

My Fantasy Modernist Life

Everyone has a secret fantasy career that they daydream about while sitting in their cubicle pretending to do their real job. (Or in my case sitting at home in front of my computer pretending to write their dissertation.) In Kara-fantasy-world, I travel the globe discovering and buying hip modern furniture and design products for an upscale modernist design store and wealthy clients. And on the side I also write freelance travel articles about all the "so cool it won't be cool by the time you read this" places I go to on said travels, since up-and-coming designers only hang out in the coolest local cafes, bars, and restaurants. Basically I want a *Wallpaper magazine life. (I don't think anyone actually lives this kind of jetsetter, uber-hipster, design-junkie life. The magazine just creates the image of this lifestyle and sells issues based on the idea that you can feel like you live a small part of it just by consuming their product. Brilliant.)

So with that in mind, I've been drooling over pictures from the annual Cologne International Furnishings Show posted on Mocoloco (one of my favorite modern design blogs). The most unique so far is the Bratespiel, a pop-style small appliance that can roast marshmallows (as well as sausages since. Come on, this is Germany). I would have absolutely no use for this, but it looks so cool (thus defeating the tenant of much modern design of form AND function).

In my fantasy work life, right now I'd be in the middle of a couple weeks of down-time in DC before jetting off to Palm Springs for their annual Modernism Show and Modernism Week. Now if I can only find someone to hire me . . .

Fred Phelps is now protesting Heath Ledger

You just got to love Topeka-based anti-gay hate group Fred Phelps and his cult. Now he's promised to protest memorials for Heath Ledger in the U.S. I guess travel to Australia is not in god's plan. Maybe Fred could pull an Oral Roberts and claim god will kill him unless he raises travel money to protest the funeral of a "fornicator." How did I grow up in the same town with this man?!? (Thanks to my brother-in-law for passing this article on to me.)

Why I Hate Political Science

This link is for those of your non-academics who wonder why I hate a discipline that I've been attached to since I started undergrad. In a nutshell, it's because of the hegemony of mathematical and formal research methods in political science and the associated emphasis of universal theories of politics, devoid of reference to specific context, history or culture. Now this is a vast over-generalization and simplification, but you get the basic idea. Fortunately, there has been a backlash movement for over 5 years called Perestroika. You can read about Perestroika here, here, and here. Even with the pendulum swinging away from the stuff I hate about political science, though, I still don't know if I can stomach teaching and researching in this discipline. I'll make that final decision, though, when my dissertation is done!

Addicted to decaf

Almost every morning, I walk with the dog to Starbucks and order a decaf Americano. Sometimes I get strange looks from the people around me since I'm ordering decaf. "What kind of idiot drinks decaf in the MORNING?" I'm sure they're thinking. I gave caffeine up about 3-4 years ago and I don't regret it. However, I still crave decaf coffee in the morning. I always thought it was psychological. Some kind of attachment to a warm, bitter, creamy (clearly I put creamer in my coffee) drink after I wake up. That is, until I found out that Starbucks decaf still has caffeine in it. Now all decaf has a little caffeine in it; usually around 5 milligrams. In a Consumer Reports study, the decaf coffee at about about half of the places they tested had 5 or less mg of caffeine. However, decaf at Starbucks, Seattle's Best and Dunkin' Dounuts all had over 20 mg of caffeine per cup! That's about 20% the caffeine in a normal cup of coffee.

No wonder I crave decaf in the morning. I'm hooked on the caffeine!

They just met on the way . . .

With the ongoing writers' strike, David and I (like many others I am sure) have started digging into our TV on DVD collection. This week we started watching Season 1 of Moonlighting. During the late 80s this was one of my absolute favorite TV shows, along with others in the sexual tension, witty banter, mystery-solving, will-they-or-won't-they genre of the time such as Remington Steele and Scarecrow & Mrs. King.

Like other TV on DVDs I've made David watch with me (Buffy, Angel, Roswell, Alias) I'm hoping to convert him to fandom. I also hope I can figure out why these kind of shows appealed to me when I was a "tween". Maybe it was because these women were a kind of nascent form of the strong and complex female characters I would later love (such as Buffy and Sydney Bristow). What role did Maddie Hays and Laura Holt play in the development of my personal brand of feminism? Maybe adult me can find this out.

There's also the pure comedy of Moonlighting that I always loved. I can't wait to watch the Taming of the Shrew parody, and the one where everyone dresses up like the client with the black veil over her disfigured face. The end involved lots of cream pies. Classic. I didn't realize this, but Moonlighting is often cited as one of the first modern dramadies (fusing aspects of comedy and drama), now a staple of the contemporary TV diet. The show also routinely broke the fourth wall, a practice which points to the artistic complxity of the show. As Leah R. Vande Berg's entry on Moonlighting at the Museum of Broadcast Communications argues:

"Additionally, in many episodes, protagonists Maddie and David break the theatrical "fourth wall" convention with self-reflexive references to themselves as actors in a television program or to the commercial nature of the television medium. Such metatextual practices are techniques of defamiliarization which, according to certain formalist critical theories, epitomize the experience and purpose of art; they jar viewers out of the complacent, narcotizing pleasure of familiar forms and invite them to question and appreciate the artistic possibilities and limitations of generic forms. Moonlighting's use of these metatextual practices signifies its recognition of the traditions that have shaped it and its self-conscious comments on its departure from those traditions -- characteristics typically attributed to works regarded as highly artistic."

Moonlighting as highly artistic, eh? And I just thought it was fun to watch.