Usual mishmosh.

Okay, I'm sorry, I'm beating the deadest hiphop horse ever, but part of what I like about that Big Daddy Kane tribute is the sight of LL Cool J and Melle Mel singing along like total fanboys. TOTAL fanboys. Chairdancing, rapping along, comin in hard on the most famous bits. Hilarious and sweet. Okay, thank you. I could possibly be done talking about this (one year later), although I did watch it four more times at work today. Insane. Ah...what did I do before YooToob?!?!?!? Must go watch the sleeping kitten. AWWSLEEPINGKITTEN!

Can we (related) predict when the flat top/fade is gonna come back? Equation: 5-6 more years for distancing (long enough for Arsenio to acquire a new context), using the every-20-years model for recycling of styles + 2 more years for irony + a few more years to allow white folk to indulge in some similar hair-dos minus a few years for the increasing speed at which we re-embrace fashions of the past....say, December 15, 2014. Gonna be so cool.

How did somebody as fundamentally mediocre as Donald Trump become the icon for all that it is extreme (big rich ya!) in this country? He ain't actually the richest guy in the country, even in NY; he has a horrible speaking voice; no charisma; the worst cotton candy hair ever; an inabilty to look directly in the camera--just the most kindasorta blippity-blah enh heh yuck so-so yenh na-ja so-so comme ci-comme ca dude ever. His commercials for this big increase-the-wealth seminar he's part of are hilarious! He sounds like a used-car salesman. Which is what he sounds like to me when he's showing someone around Mar-A-Lago too, frankly. Just don't get it. Maybe I'm just tired of the enormous monument to his dick-or-lack-of that is constantly blocking traffic in my neighborhood. (WHY oh why do we need that thing here in Chicago??? I am appalled, as an archiChicachauvanist. Between that and the Macy's-ing of Marshall Field's I may never go near the south bend of the river or the Loop ever again. WRAWR!)

More littry nibbles: I was thinking...maybe next time I go to the UK I will get to go to a E.F. Benson event of some variety in Rye. And maybe Tom Holt will be there! Okay, I've never read any of his Lucia books--it's not fair, but I lump them in with other the-author's-dead-but-let's-keep-the-franchise-going books like Mrs. DeWinter (GAWD!) or Scarlett (BLASPHEMY!)--but I bet it would be interesting. And I could ask him all about his mother, who happened to be B. Pym's literary executor and biographer (and an author herself)--in fact, there's a very poignant journal entry toward the end of BPym's life describing when she gave a college-age Tom Holt an idea for a story to write (which he did). Then I could daisy-chain from author to author, compare the food the Janeites serve to the atmosphere at the D.L. Sayers confab to the accommodations at the Forster conference...

I MUST see the parade of the fairy penguins on Phillip Island, Australia before I get too much older. Must! Fairy penguins! Fairy penguins! Fairy penguins! Fairy penguins! Fairy penguins! Fairy penguins! Fairy penguins! Fairy penguins! Fairy penguins! Fairy penguins! Fairy penguins! Fairy penguins! Fairy penguins! Fairy penguins! Fairy penguins! Fairy penguins! Fairy penguins! Fairy penguins! Fairy penguins! Fairy penguins! Fairy penguins! Fairy penguins! Fairy penguins! Fairy penguins! Fairy penguins! Fairy penguins! Fairy penguins.

My endless fascination with ethnicities and the ways actors play with them came to a head today with: Sam Waterston! I had always thought of him as a superWASP, but then I heard more than a few people say he was Jewish. I was thinking...is he so WASPy he's a Jew? Like John Waters describes some women as being so straight they're drag queens? No, turns out he's a superWASP after all, one of God's frozen people (although his character in Killing Fields was Jewish?). Anyhow. I always find it kind of fascinating, what at its most contemporary extreme Vincent Canby called "ethnic makebelieve"--in that case about Alec Guiness' role in A Passage to India which was kinda the last of those artistically well-intentioned but almost 'black-face' roles...they've now been subsumed into a slightly different formula. Toned-down, but still about passing and not passing on some level. I guess I'm always fascinated at who admits to being something and who doesn't. Maybe *personal armchair psych* it's because I am 1/4 Jewish to 3/4 WASP, which I didn't really know about it until I was in my college years (resulting in a lifetime of fascination and celebrity nosiness?). My grandfather was in some ways the classic second-generation immigrant trying to Pass (converted, married a shiksa goddess, Naval Academy, full catastrophe). It's not that I fault him for it exactly--I just never got to really ask him about this enormous thing.

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Okay, Gilmore Girls was on tonight. A new one. I'M SORRY I GOTTA GET IT OUT, YO.

Well, it was done at the expense of the suspension of disbelief and with a major dip into gravity-free, soap opera-style willy-nilly time-telescoping plot/character/emphasis overhaul (among other breathtaking changes: Emily and Richard for now just jolly pills in the background), just to restart the engine, but the show finally got some juice going. Like...what's gonna happen next? I actually wanted to know. I also thought:

* Man, Lauren Graham and Scot Patterson look just thrilled to be released from having to pretend they like each other. He was SMILING. She was pretending to be ATTRACTED to somebody. Could that be the MAIN reason for the malaise of last season? Rather than just a contributing one?

* It took me 6 or 7 tries to actually watch this damn episode because of the opening riff on Snakes on a Plane. It added to the excruciating quality that this kinda GG chatter has that they took on a phenom with such a short lifespan...just couldn't bear to listen to it. Kept stopping the tape! (Related query: Do you think they showed Funny Face--without Audrey dancing in her peglegs--as a slap at the new dumb Audrey Hepburn commercials? Or just 'cause? And WHO STOPPED/STARTED the projector? Do they know it takes a person to do that? Not to mention I'd think that'd be at least a couple reels...somebody would have to change them. *NERDY FILM GAFFE HONK*)

* Er, what was Logan doin with his left hand while he was on the phone?

* Rory kinda boring as hell and blandums. Not sure about these new arty friends. But I liked that writers made Paris a campus-legend type--that was right. And at least they're *trying*.