Missy | December 25, 2001

I guess I couldn’t stay away.

Of all the bizarre things in this world, I never thought I’d see professional financial advice put in the context of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. (Thanks to Allen at Unapologetic for sending the link.) And in other Buffy universe-related stuff, Kiba at Joss is a Hottie sent me the link for this page of Firefly-related updates.

I saw The Royal Tenenbaums on Saturday. First, let me note that Rushmore is in my Top 5 Of All Time list (if such a list exists; I’d have to think about it for awhile, I imagine.) Anyway, the two share similar methods of story-telling (though RT goes a little overboard with the narration and chapter headings) and almost other-worldly quirkiness of its characters, and both have that charmingly comedic foreground which thinly masks pervasive twinges of sadness. Because of these things, it is very difficult to not make comparisons between the two, and Rushmore clearly comes out on top. I think this is the trouble many critics have run into. The Royal Tenenbaums is wonderful, but because we all loved its predecessor so dearly, we have hyped-up expectations for Wes Anderson and company, and it’s almost as if RT doesn’t deliver. Oh, but it does, if you can judge it on its own merits.

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Missy | December 21, 2001

Reader Henry sent me this link from the Drudge Report regarding an A Beautiful Mind controversy. The rumor there is that John Nash’s homosexual tendencies were completely kept out of the movie so as not to deter moviegoers.

Last night after some of my coworkers downed a bunch of wine and food at Luigi’s, I hopped in a cab and was complaining about how cold it had suddenly gotten. The cab driver says, “It’s not cold.” Turns out he was from Alaska. (I’ve had a good run lately with interesting cab drivers, though nothing beats the cab driver/bounty hunter. Remember that one, Michele?) Anyway, from this guy I learned about “black snow” (wish I had a link for this, but I couldn’t find a photo anywhere) which sometimes occurs when one of Alaska’s many volcanoes erupts and the ash mixes with falling snow. I don’t think I ever considered the fact that there are volcanoes in Alaska. He also told me that in many areas, they’re getting about 4 hours of daylight right now. And did you know that in Fairbanks, they have been known to have some of the most extreme changes in climate, from -70 in the winter to as much as 100 in the summer? How about that.

My Friday Five:
1. What is the weirdest thing you’ve ever eaten? I’m a big fat chicken (hah!) when it comes to food experimentation. So, I’ll have to go with sand, which I tasted when I was about 6.
2. Name one (material) thing you can’t live without. Seriously, chapstick.
3. Name something you’ve always wanted to do but didn’t have time for. How about two things? Learn how to a) knit, and b) play the violin.
4. What outrageous thing do you wish you had the nerve to do? I went to an informational meeting in college for the Miami Parachuting Club. I didn’t follow through because I told myself that it cost too much money and that I’d have to pay for it myself because my parents would kill me if they found out. The truth is, I never would’ve jumped out of that plane even if I had the money.
5. How do you plan to spend your weekend? Tonight: holiday party. Tomorrow: haircut, Royal Tenenbaums. Sunday: fly into Columbus, where my best friend is having a dinner party in honor of my 30th birthday (which is on the 28th.)

I may not post much (if at all) in the next week. So, happy holidays to you all, happy birthday to me, and happy New Year (I’ll be in NYC). I should be periodically checking my email, however.

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Missy | December 20, 2001

Here’s an office holiday party story that is probably less interesting only because it didn’t happen to me personally, but it is interesting nonetheless. At the third bar hit after the “official” party, when folks began to scatter along their merry ways (read: being so drunk they simply disappeared one by one), I was amongst 5 other people, each of whom was having trouble remembering one’s own name. One woman, whom I’ll simply call T—-, disappeared into the night. Turns out, she left her bag (which, as we found out three days later, was recovered by one of our compatriots) containing her wallet/money/ID/keys/etc. She hopped into a cab whereupon she promptly passed out. Thankfully, she a) had found a very nice cab driver, and b) had her cell phone in her pocket. The cab driver went through her phone directory and called one of her friends asking to drop her off somewhere safe.

Pop Candy’s top 100 list of interesting people this year. (Link shamelessly taken from Freaklog.) Some of these people are actually truly interesting.

Golden Globe nominations have been announced. What, no Royal Tenebaums for best comedy picture? No In the Mood for Love for best foreign film? Memento is surprisingly absent, save for screenplay. The TV Drama category is interesting: no Buffy (we’ve come to expect this by now), and in addition to the usual suspects (West Wing, The Sopranos), we’ve got Six Feet Under (like it), C.S.I. (I’ve only seen one episode, thought it was decent), Alias (wtf??), and 24 (no arguments from me…I watch this.)

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Missy | December 19, 2001

The Onion weighs in on A Beautiful Mind:

“Inspired” by Sylvia Nasar’s biography of the same name, perhaps because “based” means the filmmakers couldn’t fudge as many of the facts, A Beautiful Mind operates under more stable economic formulae, buffing out the rough edges of Nash’s story into easy-to-swallow inspirational swill. It would probably take a cracked genius to elucidate the workings of Nash’s mind, but director Ron Howard (Apollo 13, Ransom) has always hugged the middle of the road; his method for suggesting his hero’s brilliance is circling the camera around his head. But as much as Howard’s commercial instincts prevent him from getting inside Nash’s faulty wiring, they also keep the film running smoothly and agreeably, driven by the force of Russell Crowe’s eccentric and inspired lead performance.

Just as I suspected. I’ll still see it.

The play Copenhagen is coming to the Kennedy Center at the end of February and tickets just recently went on sale. It, too, is “inspired” by actual events: a meeting between physicists Werner Heisenberg and Neils Bohr and his wife. The play won the Tony for Best Play last year. Apparently I am not the only one with a fascination with math and physics and geniuses and whatnot. The play Proof won the Tony for Best Play this year, and I had the good fortune of seeing it.

Speaking of movies, who knew that reviews (thus far) for Lord of the Rings would exhibit such acclaim? I may see this one after all.

Metacritic also has a round-up of the year’s best albums, based on their metascore as well as individual publications’ top tens.

And more Buffy-as-best-drama-on-tv opinions…a user in the ISCA BBS Television> forum had the following eloquent point to make:

Dec 18, 2001 13:02 from Steed
Buffy> Buffy is actually *better* than West Wing, a show with perfect characters who are about the same as they were when they were introduced (even its creator admits this), a show that owes a great deal of its success to the fact that you can just watch a show at random and get the gist of the characters and plots. Buffy meanwhile features characters who grow and change and very ambitious story arcs with a depth and humor that can’t be denied.

But, since it’s about vampires and demons, it gets ignored.

It looks like Buffy creator/writer/director Joss Whedon is working on a new series called “Firefly” for Fox. Maybe to replace the long-dead X-Files?

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Missy | December 18, 2001

One other thing–many thanks to one of my favorite daily reads, InstaPundit, for the link. My traffic all of a sudden picked up substantially. I guess that means I better be substantial in what I write.

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Missy | December 18, 2001

A reader (Hi Henry!) emailed me with the news that Buffy has been nominated for an AFI award as best drama. Being the American Film Institute, they also have award nominations for films. I see that A Beautiful Mind is all over the place. I’m trying to not get my hopes up too high for that movie. I think Russell Crowe is a gifted actor, but I have my doubts with Ron Howard, who, like Spielberg, tends to overly dramatize stories. I have an affinity for the subject matter (as I believe I’ve mentioned in this blog before) since I studied (was required to study) game theory (for which Nash wrote about–and essentially created–when he was in his early 20’s, and for which won him a Nobel prize in economics some 50 years later).

I don’t know what it is about mathematicians, especially the bizarre ones, that fascinates me. A couple of years ago I read a biography of another quirky math dude, Paul Erdos, a prolific (as in, he wrote nearly 1500 papers) number theorist. One of my favorite stories about him is that in later life, Erdos needed eye surgery done, during which he would be awake. He couldn’t understand why the doctors wouldn’t allow him to read math papers with his good eye during the procedure.

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Missy | December 17, 2001

So. Mulholland Drive. When I was watching the movie, I felt myself become increasingly agitated once the lesbian thing was introduced, because at that point I was convinced the movie had derailed itself. And shortly thereafter the Lynchian weirdness and bizarre chronology kicked in. But I kept telling myself “Missy, don’t dwell on plot points. You’ll drive yourself mad.” And while I certainly don’t have an explanation (which may not even exist in a ‘correct’ sense) for many of the plot details, I think the movie, once seen in its entirety (and probably moreso after a second viewing) makes a great deal of sense. It’s amazing how truly horrific Lynch can make the ugly underbelly of Hollywood seem, though really, I think the larger message of the movie is the sheer sadness when our dreams (as in aspirations, though this movie also plays off the kind of dreams swirling through our heads when we sleep) are not only not realized, but in fact the opposite of what we’d hoped. Unlike, say, Lars Von Trier, who is bent on simply punishing his characters with contrived unfortunate situations, Lynch’s characters have a strange self-awareness, with many having dualistic dispositions rooted in a(n) evil/sadness/ugliness, etc from within. Anyway, before I go any further into some nonsensical dissertation on the movie, let me just say that Naomi Watts is fantastic, and Justin Theroux is hunkalicious.

One of my aunts selected Christmas gifts for me off of my wishlist (thanks MaryAnne!), which she had shipped directly to me since we live about 3 states away. Anyway, yesterday I received The Big Sleep (put on the list after I had read Motherless Brooklyn) and House of Leaves which I really knew nothing about but added it because it had been talked about/recommended in the Lit> forum on ISCA. I was unprepared for what people meant by the book being “difficult”…..the book switches between many different fonts, there’s footnotes all over the place, the type even changes direction on the page, some stuff is crossed out. Have you read it? Today I found this site, which features a discussion forum for the book. All in all, it looks wacky/interesting/difficult. I can’t wait to read it after I finish The Corrections.

So my gay friend Jeff is taking me to his office’s swank holiday party on Friday at the Georgetown Club. Here’s to hoping that once you put some nice clothes on me, I’m better-behaved (=less inclined to drink a lot) at holiday parties.

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Missy | December 17, 2001

The holiday party went as expected: I drank too much and was out too late.

I saw Mulholland Drive this weekend. More on it later, as I am still pondering it. But I will say this: what the fuck is it about Lynch movies (The Straight Story being an exception) that makes me feel like I’m about to have a heart attack?

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Missy | December 14, 2001

Friday Five:

1. What did you want to be when you grew up? First it was an astronaut, which morphed into an astronomer. Sometimes I still wish I was an astronomer.
2. Do you have any nicknames? Missy is a nickname for Melissa. I had no choice in the matter; my parents gave it to me and it stuck. When I was a kid I much preferred the name Lisa. I have no idea why.
3. If you could change something about yourself what would it be? That I could be completely free of debt.
4. Have you ever bought anything from an infomercial? Nope.
5. How do you plan to spend your weekend? Today is my office Christmas party, which will go until who knows when. (And for the record, yes I am on antibiotics, and yes, I may cheat with a couple of drinks. Alcohol weakens the effectiveness of antibiotics, but I figure a couple drinks won’t kill me. Of course, if I go through the entire $30 in my wallet, then I guess I deserve whatever infection decides to riddle my body.) In trying to round out my year-end movie list, I still need to see Mulholland Drive. (Others such The Royal Tenenbaums, In the Bedroom, and Ali will have to wait until later in the month.) I think that’s it. I finished my shopping. Maybe I should think about sending out cards.

Wednesday night at 8pm is a terrible hour for television. During my channel surfing, I came across one of the PBS stations re-airing an episode of Frontline, this one a part of a series on the roots of terrorism. This particular episode featured a lengthy exegesis of terrorism in the 1980’s. I was too young to really pay much attention when Tehran and Beirut were the hubs of terrorist activity, so this was sort of a history lesson for me. The PBS site is very thorough–there’s a timeline; interviews with the likes of Robert C. “Bud” McFarlane (Nat’l Security Advisor to Reagan), Caspar Weinberger (Reagan’s Sec. of Defense), journalists and other intelligence/counterterrorism officials from that time; plus the evolution of islamic terrorism from the 1960’s on, video clips, a discussion forum, suggested links/readings, and a round-up of lessons learned.

The cubicle generation: a journal entry written out of a reaction to an Atlantic Monthly article on the future elite. It’s unsettling, and quite real–my college days mirrored the characterizations drawn in the article. What does it mean to be “good kid”, and is that want we really want? (Found via riley dog.)

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Missy | December 11, 2001

So about a year ago I had a cavity that I thought would need a root canal, but turned out to just need a filling. That cavity was fillied with the caveat that someday (and I thought that someday would be, like, years from now) I would eventually need a root canal. Saturday I woke up with pain in my cheek, and Sunday I woke up with the whole left side of my face swollen. Yesterday, I went into my dentist’s office, whereupon he sent me to a specialist, and come 10 am I was having said roots dug out and the infection (hence all the swelling) drained. Yummy! I hope never to repeat this experience again. Oh, and because I went to a specialist, it’s costing me a small fortune. Missy=unhappy.

I saw Ocean’s Eleven this weekend, as did most of America it seems. It was good fun, and a nice return to Soderbergh’s lighter fare than his agenda-y films from last year. So there were some plotholes, and it was difficult managing that many actors and their respective character development. I don’t really give a crap. It was funny and witty and the dialogue was well written, and the acting from the likes of Brad Pitt, and Don Cheadle, and Elliott Gould were top notch. And Soderbergh’s touch with his actors is amazing–he is notorious for getting career-topping performances out of actors, but the directions he allowed them each to take with respect to their characters’ quirks is just genius.

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Missy | December 7, 2001

My Friday Five:

1. If you were to go to a movie this weekend, which one would you pick? As mentioned yesterday, I already have my ticket for Ocean’s Eleven.
2. What movie would you like to rent this weekend? I want to see In the Mood for Love again.
3. What one TV show do you always try to watch? Duh, Buffy.
4. If you (and your S.O.) were cool with it, what five celebrities (at the most) would it be ‘ok’ for you to have a fling with? Well, I no longer have a significant other. That said, my list would still be the same: Steven Soderbergh (for the baldness, the nerdy glasses, and the intelligence), John Cusack (though I don’t think he’s that great of an actor), Joseph Feinnes (if only because I recently rewatched Shakespeare in Love and was lusting over his intensity and smoldering good looks, and that neck!), hmmmm…..this is harder than I thought-I may be revising this list later today……Guy Ritchie is pretty hot (and talented, of course)…..I’m going to think some more about the fifth person.
5. How do you plan to spend your weekend? Aside from seeing the aforementioned movie, somhow I want/need to accomplish all of the following: get my hair cut, go to dance class(es), finish Christmas shopping

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Missy | December 6, 2001

MathWorld is back! Yes!

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Missy | December 6, 2001

I had a dream about Steven Soderbergh last night. And I’ve already bought my ticket for tomorrow’s opening of Ocean’s Eleven. Because I am obsessed, I went a’ searching for more Soderbergh info, and I came across this fan site. Pretty thorough. I shall be wasting much time there.

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Missy | December 5, 2001

A quote from today’s Washington Post regarding time spent in airports:

“What else are you going to do when you’re stuck at an airport?” asks Smith, who’s based in Cincinnati but travels as many as 20 days a month. “Nowadays, I’d say nine-tenths of the people who get on a plane are drunk.”

I can say with absolute certainty that I was drunk when I got on my flight back here after Thanksgiving. Of course, with new FAA restrictions regarding staying in your seats for the first and last 30 minutes of each flight, with a one-hour flight, being drunk (read: having to pee) is not a good thing.

Next week’s Buffy is a repeat of the episode “Hush”. Here’s Mighty Big TV’s recap.

I’m working on my top ten lists for the year. I’m thinking I should reconsider a music top ten, though. I’ve hardly bought anything in the past couple of months. Maybe I’ll do a top five. My movie list is shaping up nicely, and I still have yet to see Ocean’s 11 and The Royal Tenenbaums. It’s been a great year for film.

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Missy | December 3, 2001

I opted out of Macbeth. Silly me. I was sick, though. I DID go to the zoo on Saturday, as the balmy summer-like weather was hard to resist. I walked over to Georgetown amongst the gajillion dollar homes to meet my friend Jeff who was babysitting his boss’s 5 year old. Like the dysfunctional yuppie family we appeared to be (Jeff is gay) we drove the boss’ Land Rover to the zoo like every other yuppie family in the DC area did on Saturday. The line for the baby elephant was frighteningly long, so we skipped it. Saw the baby gorilla, still firmly attached to his (or her, we don’t know yet) mama’s breast.

I saw Am