In lieu of a real update because I have the shortest attention span in the world

This isn't even really worth highlighting, except in that it's always nice when someone else (particularly a someone else who is a paid professional) validates your (often mocked) feelings. Why I love the movie Titanic:

[T]he drippy love story isn’t what the film is about at all. It’s merely the mechanism though which we see the film’s true subject — the boat.

Indeed.

Four Things

So Dweeze has tagged me for this "Four Things" meme, and it is a well-known fact that I do whatever Dweeze tells me to do. So. Four things.

Four jobs I've had:

1. Materials science lab gopher.
2. Office gopher.
3. Undergraduate research assistant.
4. Undergraduate teaching assistant.

Four movies I can watch over and over:

Not necessarily the greatest movies of all time, but that's a different category.

1. Lone Star. This is the movie Chris Cooper should have won an Academy Award for, not Adaptation.

2. Mulholland Dr.

3. Titanic. Sorry, I know there's no excuse for this one. Believe me, it's not the love story (that's the worst part), because I mostly hate sappy, sentimental movies. But the fact is, I love the meticulous period detail (especially the costumes), and, more importantly, it's a maybe-not-so-well-known fact that I'm a sucker for large-scale transportation disaster porn.

4. Full Frontal.

Four places I've lived:

(Sorry, this one's not for bloggish consumption.)

Four TV shows I love:

1. Alias.

2. The Amazing Race.

3. The Office.

4. Eh, can't really come up with a fourth one. There are a bunch of other shows I watch regularly, but I can't say I "love" any of them (and since I still don't have cable, I'm limited to the meager offerings of broadcast teevee).

Four highly-touted TV shows I detest:

1. American Idol. Seriously, there are no words adequate to express how much I loathe this show.

2. Desperate Housewives. Although I probably wouldn't hate it as much if it just lost the awful theme music and the irritating Sue-Ellen Mischke narration. (Even then, it would still be immensely boring, so I still woudn't watch it anyway.)

3. The Apprentice. I actually forced myself to watch the last few episodes of this show last season, because my Dad knows the guy who ended up winning, but man, it was difficult. What a stupid show.

4. CSI, in any and all incarnations.

Four books I'd recommend to anyone, anytime:

Ugh, I hate this question. Here's the thing about me - I don't really read a lot of books. Which I know makes me sound really pathetic and illiterate. I do own a lot of books - I have a bad habit of buying them and then...not reading them. I don't know why. I think it has to do with the fact that I have a really short attention span. Anyway, it makes this question hard to answer because anything I say is going to sound really lame. But whatever, here you go:

1. Fatherland, by Robert Harris.

2. The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood.

3. Nicholas and Alexandra, by Robert Massie.

4. Fatal Vision, by Joe McGinniss.

Four places I've vacationed:

1. France.

2. Disney World.

3. Park City, Utah.

4. Seattle.

Four of my favorite dishes:

Depends whether you're talking generally, or from a specific source. Because there's a Malaysian resaurant here that has amazing mango chicken, but I don't know that I'd call it my favorite except from that one place. But anyway, whatever.

1. Kimbap (Korean sushi rolls containing beef, egg, spinach, carrot, and pickled radish).

2. Chicken Pho (Vietnamese noodle soup).

3. My Mom's barley-beef soup.

4. Aloo Chole (Indian chickpea and potato curry).

Four sites I visit daily:

1. Deadspin.

2. Defamer.

3. Damn Hell Ass Kings.

4. And of course, Circle Of.

Four places I would rather be right now:

1. Dhoni Mighili (Maldives). It is my life's goal to marry a wealthy man solely so I can go on vacation there.

2. New York City.

3. L.A.

4. France.

Four bloggers I am tagging:

Well, I don't really like to do that, but anyone who wants to is free to take it (though I seriously doubt my blog is the first place you've seen this meme, so I assume anyone who's wanted to do it has already done so).

My cat has dreadlocks

No really, he does. Although that may be just a polite way of saying he has, um, a grooming problem. I really don't know what's brought this on. I know long-haired cats often have issues with their fur, but I've had him for over five years, and only once in that time can I ever remember noticing any mats. At first I thought maybe he'd somehow managed to knock something sticky on himself, but I can't find anything spilled anywhere, so I don't think that's it.

Brushing isn't helping, at least not after the fact. So I tried to cut the mats off with scissors, but I only managed to get a few of them before he decided he'd rather claw my face off instead. He quickly learned to disappear as soon as the scissors appeared. But seriously, what the fuck, cat? It's just fur, for god's sake. He reacted like I was trying to cut off his leg or something. This, from the same cat who allows me to regularly clip his claws without registering anything more than mild annoyance.

Whatever.

(See, Dweeze, when you demand that I write more, this is what you get. A story about my cat. Be careful what you wish for, is what they always say, right? And I don't know why Gothmog wants to live vicariously through me. Dood. My life is more boring than just about anything. I'm not joking.)

But anyway, not that this is much of an excuse for going as long as I did without posting, but I did at least spend a substantial part of that time devoting my creative energies to a written piece at...some other site that I decline to name because I have this stupid neurotic obsession with keeping my identities in different spheres of the world and the internet separate, even though everyone knows and no one really cares and it's not like it's a big state secret or anything. Yeah.

So. I've been watching some TV lately. That's exciting, right? Right? Actually, I've been watching less now that baseball is over. What's that you say, it's not over yet? Okay, fine, it's over for my team. But as I've mentioned many, many times before, I'm quite provincial, and I don't have much of an interest in watching once my team is out. Especially not if it means having to subject myself to more of the wretched Fox coverage and the rage-inducing play-by-play stylings of Buck and McCarver.

One thing I have been watching, among other things, is Lost. Apparently a lot of people really, really like Lost. And okay, it's a pretty good show, and I've watched it from the beginning, so I'm not saying it's bad or anything. But I have some complaints.

First of all, I feel like they pulled a bait-and-switch. The show was originally billed as a plane-crash-on-a-deserted-island-castaway-type show. And then they go and pull all this sci-fi shit on us. As I may have stated before, I hate science fiction. I can tolerate a little bit if the show is good enough and it doesn't overwhelm things (see: Alias), but as a general rule, I prefer my entertainment science fiction-free. I know that without all the supernatural stuff, there'd be no show, because there's only so much people stranded on an island can do, but still, I'm just saying.

I hate the fact that there's a character named Charlie and it's not Matthew Fox. It's confusing to me. He will always be Charlie Salinger to me (oh yes, I just admitted to watching Party of Five. Wanna make something of it?), so it bugs me when someone says "Charlie" and they're not talking about him.

They're on a flight from Australia to the U.S. But there's only one Australian person on the plane? (Or, if you want to quibble, only one Australian person among all the survivors?) Yeah, that makes sense.

And here is my biggest problem: haven't any of these people ever read the book Alive? And no, I'm not suggesting that Lost needs an infusion of cannibalism. While that might certainly be dramatic, I'm not sure ABC would go for it. What I am saying is why don't these people get off their asses and explore the fuck out of every inch of that island? If you remember the story in Alive, after many weeks (months? I can't remember), they finally realized no one was ever going to rescue them, and a few of them set off to find help, and they found civilization not very far away. The whole time they were eating their friends, they could have been rescued if they'd just gone looking sooner.

So why haven't the characters on Lost devoted any real energy towards looking for help or civilization or something, anything? Sure, there have been bits and pieces here and there, but nothing major. Obviously the island is worth exploring because they keep discovering things like hatches and crazy French women and boats full of dynamite and planes full of heroin. How do they really know what really is or isn't on the island, or if it's even really an island, if they don't go poking around in some sort of organized fashion?

Or at least, why don't the writers pay the idea some basic lip service, and at least have the characters sit around and discuss it, just so they can say why it's not possible, or at the very least, not desirable. (I am willing to grant that they may have done this at some point, because I don't tend to pay attention to things very closely, since I rarely watch TV without also doing something else at the same time, but even if they did, they still haven't taken the idea seriously at all.)

I just don't get it. If I'm stranded on an island, the first thing I'm doing is wandering around as much as is physically possible to see what I've got there. I can't tell you how much this irritates me.

Finally, does anyone else besides me think that the father from the Schroeder family on The Amazing Race looks just like Jim Mora, Jr.?