If There's a God, He's Embarrassed And It's No Secret Why

For Halloween this year, I decided to be pop-culture savvy and abandon my traditional "walk of shame" costume (short shorts, oversized t-shirt, messy hair and smeared makeup -- it's easy and fun!) and go as Kate Gosselin. That's my dear friend Alex on the right, as Jon (complete with Ed Hardy shirt.)

It was a funny costume, mainly because anyone who has seen me and Alex interact for extended periods of time can draw parallels between us and the Gosselins. But there's something to be said for the fact that Jon and Kate have pervaded the public mindset so much that they've been reduced to Halloween costumes. Trying to pull this costume together, I Googled "Kate Gosselin wig" and got 6 million hits. When your hairstyle is a national inside joke, you know something's wrong.

The Gosselins and their probably deeply disturbed brood are part of a phenomenon that my COMM 411H class likes to call "humilitainment" -- entertainment based solely on someone else's embarrassment. Humilitainment is nothing new -- after all, laughing at other people's foibles and falls from grace is about as human as it gets -- but these days it's everywhere, from the horrible audition episodes of American Idol to the Numa Numa dance to Mark Sanford's delightfully batty press conference confessing his infidelity.

In a lot of ways, the media is to blame for the pervasiveness of humiliation-fueled entertainment -- they basically capitalize on one of our basest instincts by offering up a heaping platter of shows featuring people so depraved they make us feel better about ourselves. At least we're not overweight train wrecks with poor singing skills and failed marriages, we say to ourselves. At least we're not as stupid as Paris Hilton or as messed up as the addicts on "Intervention."

I'm not sure what the solution to humilitainment is. I'm not sure if there is one, if only because watching people make fools of themselves is a grand tradition that would require a collective worldwide effort to stop. I do think that shows that really capitalize on human failure -- like "Jackass" and dreck like "Charm School" -- are unnecessary. If reality television is what we need to prove to ourselves that we're better than the unwashed masses, maybe we're not so much better than them after all.

Thoughts? Questions? Comments? Solutions? Post 'em in the comment section, please.

Lisztomania

Africa: Where Chris Matthews went on vacation this summer; also where he served when he was in the Peace Corps. See YOUR BOSS'S PERSONAL LIFE, CREEPY KNOWLEDGE OF.

Alex: My partner in crime, fellow indie-rock obsessive, and, among other things, the other half of the esteemed Collegionnaire scavenger-hunt team. See RIDICULOUS NEW YORK ADVENTURES, ENABLERS OF.

Babies, fat: I can has one? See SCAVENGER HUNTS, ITEMS ON.

Banana chips: I ate a pack a week. See SCURVY, WAYS OF AVOIDING.

Blogging: I never do it. See FAILURES, MINOR.

Brighton Beach: Where a.) I was handed Shabbos candles by adorable Jewish men who beamed when I told them I was Catholic b.) everyone speaks Russian to the level where you feel like a foreigner c.) you can purchase an entire fish on a plate for lunch.

Bronx, the: So gritty! So oddly quiet! Granted, I only saw about four blocks.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: what I watch on rainy nights in and when I feel like ogling David Boreanaz. Which is to say, always.

Checking out: I don't want to talk about it. See ERAS, ENDS OF.

Cheri: The worst bad movie you will ever see. See FAILURES, MAJOR.

Cyclone, the: Wooden roller coaster in Coney Island. See DEATH MACHINES, TERRIFYING.

Dancy, Hugh: I engaged in some mild creeping at a movie screening; he is as charming as you would expect. See HUSBANDS, FUTURE.

Earth Room, the: the most pointless modern art installation ever, because it is a.) literally nothing more than a room full of dirt and b.) closed for the summer.

Gramercy Park: Being a scruffy undergraduate/resident of anywhere besides the park itself, I am not allowed in and have to content myself with skulking outside its gates with the other plebeians on the sidewalk. Damn and blast. See DREAMS, CRUSHED.

Governor's Island: Good for a.) pretending you go to a New England liberal arts school b.) pretending you live in a post-apocalyptic nightmare world. c.) riding bikes without having to worry about being run over by taxis and such.

Hannigan, Lisa: Adorable-to-the-point-of-absurdity Irish singer-songwriter who puts on shockingly soporific concerts. See DISAPPOINTMENTS.

Hardball with Chris Matthews: See INTERNSHIPS, BEST EVER.

High Line, the: Take a railroad trestle that runs straight through Manhattan, above the streets. Abandon the railroad trestle. Turn it into a giant park of awesome. Welcome to the High Line.

Kent Avenue: Desolate street by the river in Brooklyn, home to an obscure concert venue, mysterious graffiti, and the scariest building you will ever see.

Lower East Side Tenement Museum, the: Learn about Irish immigrants; feel horrible for complaining about your closet of a dorm room. See GEEKERY, HISTORY-STYLE.

Mahmoun's Falafel: Legendary falafel shop on McDougal Street that sells falafel sandwiches for $2.50; where I, invariably, eat on the weekends. See THE GODS, FOOD OF.

Mooshstock: Because sometimes you end up at random hipster parties on (where else?) Kent Avenue that are inexplicably raising money for dogs who need surgeries. See DECISIONS, QUESTIONABLE.

Nutini, Paolo: He's a Scottish singer-songwriter and he's on CRACK. His concerts are also entirely populated by tools who dance into you as you attempt to decipher his lyrics.

Our Lady of St. Carmel, Feast of: Cause of adorable street festivals in Brooklyn centered around, inexplicably, a giant rotating pillar with an entire Italian band on it, carried by a hundred men. See CATHOLICISM, WHY IT IS AWESOME.

Packing: I am really, really terrible at it. See FAILURES, UNMITIGATED.

PATH train: I hate it and it hates me, by being confusing and slow and taking me to Jersey City when I wanted to go to Manhattan.

Potter, Harry: Still as addictive as ever. Thanks, J.K. See OBSESSIONS, JUVENILE, UNABASHED.

Rain, preventing of: Theory: if I bring my umbrella everywhere, the weather will remain consistently gorgeous, without fail.

Roofs: Parties are better on top of them. Also, the rooftop view in Brooklyn is the best thing you'll ever see.

Room, the: The best bad movie you will ever see. Also, Cameron Diaz is a fan.

Scavenger hunts: When they include items such as "a baby in a hat," you know it's a good one.

Sea Isle City: Adorably touristy Jersey shore town; where I have spent two weeks of every summer since I was seven (with maybe two exceptions). See TRADITIONS.

Summer: This one's almost over. See GOOD TIMES, ALL AROUND.

Songs on Repeat: I'm Awake, At Last, Awake

It's weird writing a music post on a day like today, but since I don't actually listen to Michael Jackson on repeat (sorry, big guy), I don't feel too qualified to talk about his impact on my life, which is limited mainly to several disastrous attempts at moonwalking and being freaked out in general by his nose.

I will say one thing, however. The man could dance.

Moving on.

I was going to start off with something along the lines of "there are few songs that make me want to burst into spontaneous dancing," but this is not true. There are hundreds of songs that make me want to bust a move on subway platforms and such, but Bishop Allen's "Rain" is high at the top of that list.



Obviously, that lovely little bongo-drum-thing going on in the background has a lot to do with the whole dancing thing, but I am embarrassingly obsessed with Bishop Allen for a reason, and that's largely because all of their songs have a very carpe-diem kind of quality to them. It's why I play them when I'm trying to wake up in the morning and when I'm heading out to random indie shindigs and when I'm driving with the express purpose of getting lost. More than almost any other band I know, they manage to capture the sort of excited uncertainty that comes with being young and broke and in the middle of a massive city, which is more or less my summer right now. In short: well done, boys.

Tuesday Newsday: Can't Keep It In

Twitter and I have sort of a love-hate relationship, mainly because my life is usually not interesting enough to lend itself to minute-by-minute microblogging (although this does not appear to deter almost everyone else on Twitter). However, I have to give it props today, because it's part of the reason Iranian protesters have managed to organize massive demonstrations over the country's disputed presidential election for the past two days.

Reading some of the posts from Iranians on Twitter makes me feel like the most vapid person in the world. My most recent Twitter entries are on spotting Rob Pattinson outside my dorm yesterday, while the latest missives from Tehran are on violence and arrests and protests. It's scary stuff, but it's also pretty cool to follow what might be a revolution in the making.

"Citizen journalism" is not one of my favorite concepts, mainly because over here, actual journalists do it better (and more ethically, Mayhill Fowler). But in a country where the press has been banned from reporting on the streets, where foreign journalists' press credentials have been revoked, where the government is reportedly starting to crack down on electronic media, citizen journalism might be Iran's last best hope.

One By One All Day

I think I've written about five of these sort of apologetic posts since I started this blog, but because I a.) live in New York (well, temporarily) and b.) have a job (albeit unpaid), I am chalking my failure at blogging and life up to sheer busyness (yes, that is a word) and the following factors:

30 Rock. I work here. Bam.

Beaton, Kate. The reason I want to go to Canada as soon as possible/the reason I feel better for obsessing over obscure historical personages. Stalkee at my comics convention this weekend.

Blogging. What I do while I wait for my laundry to dry.

Boats, rowing across gorgeous lakes in upstate New York of. See WHY LIFE IS WORTHWHILE.

Broadcast personalities, the spotting of. So far, six.

Brooklyn, New York. Sometimes shadesville, always classy.

Comic and Cartoon Art, Museum of. Facilitator of the dorkiest thing I have done this summer, which is attend an indie comics convention, stalk down all my favorite webcomics artists, and freak out accordingly. See GEEKERY.

Decemberists, the. Best hyper-literate prog-rock indie-pop folk quintet around and apparently now powerful enough to sell out Radio City Music Hall Wednesday night for a concert of epic proportions. See SPASMODIC DANCING, CAUSES OF.

Goddard Hall. We have an elevator made out of plywood. Seriously. See RESIDENCE, PLACES OF.

Lemon, Liz. I am still secretly hoping to run into her. See IMPOSSIBLE DREAMS.

Manhattan subway system, the. I told a tourist how to get to Times Square the other week. See PRETENDING TO BE A NEW YORKER.

Maps of New York. Mine has disappeared.

Matthews, Chris. Technically, my boss, although I see him about once every few weeks because he films out of Washington and my internship is with Hardball's production team in New York. Drinks black coffee. Knows my name now, which is sweet.

Meconis, Dylan. Indie webcomic goddess and author of the brilliant Family Man. I met her last weekend, and it was fabulous.

MGMT, music videos of. Getting me through the week. See WILLIAMSBURG, THE ENTIRE POPULATION OF.

Mohonk Labyrinth, the. The most frightening thing I have ever done. See MOUNTAINS, CLIMBING OF and TERRIFYING DEATH CREVICES, SQUEEZING ONESELF THROUGH.

Novels, the reading of. Makes you look cooler on the subway.

Philadelphia Phillies, the. Who destroyed the Mets this week? Oh, right. See BASEBALL, THE DOMINATION OF.

Rain, the abundance of. It's June, not April. Come on. See APOCALYPSE, WEATHER OF THE.

Topic banners, the writing of. My job last week at Hardball. I am responsible for such gems as "The Looming Confirmation Battle" and "What's Next for the GOP?"

Village, the. Best place in the world. Besides Brooklyn. And Philly.

These Brooklyn Stars Are Small And Strange

On my "things I enjoy about life" list, getting free crap is pretty high up there. This has generally resulted in my accumulation of a lot of useless items (I have more commemorative lanyards than I know what to do with) and a few good ones (I still wear t-shirts from random high-school volunteer projects).

This sort of thing tends to run in my family; my dad's favorite pastime at baseball games, besides keeping score with me, is to sign up for credit card offers that he immediately cancels, just to get the free t-shirts and tote bags they hand out once you sign up.

So when my friend Alex suggested going to a giant exchange of free stuff in Brooklyn today, the idea was just too good for me to pass up. So I took the F train out to Carroll Street, promptly got lost, wandered around the adorableness that is the Carroll Gardens neighborhood, concluded I will live there forever, and finally ended up where I was supposed to be, at BKLYN Yard's Score, said free crap extravaganza.

As an aspiring hipster, BKLYN Yard is pretty much my natural home. It's essentially a lot right on the Gowanus canal, with corrugated-tin garages and overgrown grass and that whole faded-industrial-glory vibe. Score featured everything from cheap tacos to piles and piles of retro clothing to ancient cassette tapes to broken record players. There was also a book section, which pretty much made my day.

People-watching is also pretty high on my aforementioned list, and BKLYN Yard pulled through on those counts, too. From the standard hipster boys in sweater vests and Chucks to the woman wearing a bumblebee costume (there is photographic evidence of this somewhere, I swear), it was a good day all around.

I made out pretty well in terms of actual free swag, too. I don't like shopping very much unless I have something specific in mind, but I can spend hours going through piles of random free stuff, which proved pretty successful at Score. I am now the proud owner of two new sweaters, some ironically ancient t-shirts, a pair of stripey shorts, a few artsy prints, a pile of books that should last me through the summer, and this piece of utter brilliance:

Yes we can.

Tuesday Newsday: The Start of Something

Remember that shot from the opening credits of 30 Rock, where they zoom up the front of the GE Building in Rockefeller Center while jaunty music plays in the background? At some point, that shot likely goes past my window on the fourth floor, which, predictably, excites me to no end.

I've been making a valiant effort over the last few days to not gush too much about where I'm working this summer, but I am giving up all pretenses now because there's just no point anymore. 30 Rock (yes, they actually call it that) is just too awesome. For starters, it's just nice to be back in a newsroom -- any newsroom -- and the Hardball offices are pretty sweet. I get to swipe into the office with my official MSNBC intern badge (my ID comes complete with the worst picture of me ever taken), I have a computer with two monitors that will never cease to amaze me, and I get to walk past various tourists on the way up pretending I am Very Busy And Important. Score.

I've been a print journalism devotee for as long as I can remember, so trying out broadcast is daunting but really, really interesting. The deadlines are earlier -- instead of going to print at 2 a.m., we're on the air at 5 p.m., which can get harrowing but is kind of exciting. Mostly, though, broadcast is about collaboration -- with producers, anchors, tech people, camerapeople, and so on. A newspaper story goes through a long chain of editors before it goes to print. Getting a broadcast story on the air is not so linear -- it's like a giant web of people, all contributing to the same product at the same time. As evidenced by my terrible attempts at metaphors, I don't understand a lot of it, but I'm getting there.

When I'm not geeking out over the journalism-y goodness of it all, I have been keeping my eyes peeled for the famous ever since I found out that Saturday Night Live films a few floors above us and Brian Williams' office is a floor below me. (Hardball's own Chris Matthews films, unfortunately, from Washington.)

When you spend most of the year in central Pennsylvania, just being in the vicinity of television royalty is pretty damn exciting. And since random awkward encounters with broadcast personalities are kind of my thing (it's how I got this internship, after all), it's about time I started initiating awkward water-cooler conversations with my more famous NBC brethren. Lorne Michaels, you have been warned.

Lost Review: Those You've Known

After this post, this blog will become something more than sporadic Lost rants, I promise (if only because season 5 finished Wednesday night). But the finale was on crack, so indulge me for a bit.

Disclaimer: Spoilers ahead. You know the drill.

In the interest of time and my general sanity, I'm going to break this up into various bullet points, because otherwise it'll be a thousand words of me sobbing about Juliet and Sawyer with a few crackpot theories thrown in. Thus, onward!

Nukes: I admit, I only warmed up to Jack's insane idea of exploding a hydrogen bomb at the Swan to neutralize the electromagnetic field that will eventually cause Flight 815 to crash on the Island because I just wanted him to shut up about it. We also find out that Jack the Selfless has a secret reason for wanting to change the future: he wants another chance with Kate, at which I seriously considered throwing things at my television.

Interestingly enough, Sawyer's admittedly very tiny torch for Kate is also what makes Juliet agree with Jack's plan, which also made me want to vomit. KATE IS NOT THAT SPECIAL, GUYS. SHE IS INDECISIVE AND ANNOYING AND SHE AND JACK DESERVE EACH OTHER. Kate is also not helping matters by throwing Sawyer various patented Soulful Glances every other second. Sigh.

Anyway, like almost every one of Jack's plans, the hydrogen-bomb thing fails pretty spectacularly. Sayid gets shot trying to get it to the Swan station, Jack goes on a muderous rampage through Dharmaville in revenge (fun times!) and then when he finally drops the bomb down the shaft, it doesn't explode. FAIL.

Also, Saywer beats Jack up. FINALLY.

Jacob: After years of waiting to find out who the mysterious Island-god-leader-person is, we were introduced to him in the finale's opening minutes, as he watches a ship on the horizon (the Black Rock?) while sitting on the beach. Jacob is more than a little creepy. In this episode's flashbacks, he manages to meet most of Lost's principal characters at seminal moments during their lives to offer a few cryptic asides and then wander off mysteriously. He is also apparently quasi-responsible for Nadia's death, which is unforgivable. Poor Sayid.

Jacob is also involved in a serious rivalry with another ancient Island creepster, whom Entertainment Weekly's Lost expert, Jeff Jensen, is calling "Loophole McNameless." I like it. Anyway, Loophole tells Jacob within the episode's first few minutes that he wants to kill him, and that he will find some "loophole" to achieve it.

"Good luck with that one, kid," Jacob says (more or less) with a smirk. Burn.

Zombies: I really tried to like Undead Locke for a little bit, especially after Undead Alex voiced her support for him a few episodes back. But, seriously. Undead Locke is a bum. He's smarmy, he's annoying, he baits Ben like it's his job (Ben, to his credit, is usually ready with some dry comeback), and he likes reminding everyone that The Island Tells Him Things. Incessantly.

So I was happy but not terribly surprised to discover that Undead Locke is not actually Locke, but probably Loophole McNameless posing as everyone's favorite emo tool with daddy issues (come to think of it, that's pretty much everyone on the island. Never mind). Real Locke is, interestingly, still a corpse. Well done, Ben.

Deaths, maybe: Sayid has survived the Gulf War, two plane crashes, Horace's grass clippers, and life as Ben's hit man/secret lover, only to be (maybe) killed by tiny Ben's drunk father? COME ON.

Moving on. My journalism ethics professor enjoyed reminding us all last semester that, above all, people need to be included. Clearly, Jacob never got this message, because Ben has some serious exclusion issues with him. In a surprisingly poignant sequence just after he and Undead Locke finally meet up with the erstwhile Island king, Ben asks Jacob why he's never bothered to talk to him despite his years of service to the Island.

In this situation, someone like Jack or Real Locke would have maybe thrown a weak punch and then cried. Instead, Ben stabs Jacob, because, like him or not, he always gets the job done.

Most importantly, let's have a moment of silence for the badassery that is Dr. Juliet Burke.

When the future hatch goes haywire after Jack's bomb plan fails miserably, Juliet gets dragged into the electromagnetic drilling tunnel, only to be grabbed at the last minute by a devastated, desperate Sawyer who lets out some Titanic-worthy "Don't you let go"s. Then: she falls down the shaft, Sawyer absolutely falls apart, I nearly cry, she lands at the bottom of the shaft, nearly dies, and then sees the unexploded hydrogen bomb.

Being the awesome person she is -- and, after all, there's really nothing left to lose at this point -- Juliet whams the thing (which is rigged to explode on impact) with a rock.

The entire screen goes white.

And that's it.

Here's to season six!

Songs on Repeat: Had A Lot of Things to Say

Like many children who grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia, I have spent most of my life relentlessly pretending that I actually live within the city limits, because trying to explain to people that you live in a town that is too small to possess a zip code is just too depressing.

With anyone who lives outside the Philly area, this usually works. But good luck trying to fake street cred in State College, where at least half the population is also trying to pretend they're from my gleaming metropolis.

Thus, the fact that I will actually be living in a city this summer -- I have an internship with MSNBC in New York -- makes me ridiculously, irrationally excited, to the point where I have accumulated a small playlist of songs that remind me of my impending summer adventures.

This includes:
- Pretty much every song ever written by Bishop Allen, for no apparent reason
- "Song for Myla Goldberg," by the Decemberists, which includes the admittedly blindingly obvious line "I know New York, I need New York, I know I need unique New York"
- "Gates of the Old City," by Looker, which reminds my former roommate Heather of Mary-Kate and Ashley and reminds me of Bishop Allen. Double win.
- "You Can't Hurry Love," by the Concretes, which readers of this blog will remember from a past Songs on Repeat post
- This song:



I have no idea why this particular song ("Wires," by Jason Schwartzman's solo effort Coconut Records) makes me think of dashing around New York, but it does. And yes, the band is another gimmicky project of an actor-turned-musician, which usually frightens me (see: Duff, Hilary), but Coconut Records has proven to be appropriately indie enough for me so far.

And there's no denying that "Wires" is catchy as hell, at least in my book. After all, it features punchy guitar chords and a xylophone, which is pretty much all I require of a song. There's also a great part that involves what I think is a Wurlitzer towards the end where everything just sort of soars upwards, and it's lovely. So: cheers for this song, and for New York, where I will be blogging from the Village in t-minus nine days. Score.

Quick blog note: Next up will likely be a LOST review, which I haven't posted yet because I am still attempting to wrap my head around the season finale, which was mindblowing and brilliant and almost made me cry. Stay tuned.

Tuesday Newsday: Taking In the Sights of Your Empire's Colony

Aaaaaand, we're back!

The blame for my complete and utter lack of blogging for the past month falls squarely on the shoulders of a finals schedule from hell, complete with an astronomy exam that literally gave me a headache and an eight-page research paper that had me trapped in front of a microform machine reading Nazi propaganda -- in French -- for seven straight hours one weekend. Whew.

Needless to say, it's good to be back in the land of the living.

And while emerging (mostly) unscathed from the Pollock Testing Center doesn't really match up to snagging an early release from an Iranian prison, I'm sure Roxana Saberi is feeling similar sentiments of relief today as well.

Saberi, an Iranian-American journalist living in Iran, was sentenced by an Iranian court in April to eight years in prison on charges of espionage. She was released Monday after an appeals court reduced her charges -- perhaps due to a letter from Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad encouraging the court to be fair in its decision.

Her release means a lot of things -- a new and hopefully promising development in the U.S.'s dealings with Iran, an insight into Iranian domestic politics, an indication of how the wind is blowing in a country where Ahmadinejad is seeking re-election next month. It's a testament to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's general badassery (she, along with President Obama, has been clamoring for Saberi's release since she was arrested). It's a signal that rational discourse between Tehran and Washington might not be impossible.

But at its core, it's a victory for the free press, especially in Iran, where a journalist can be arrested merely for working without press credentials. In the U.S., we're bemoaning dropping ad revenues and the perils of online reporting. But halfway across the world, Saberi's case shows that getting a byline can get you arrested. It's sobering stuff.

Analysts have cautioned that it's not prudent to read too much into Saberi's release, arguing that her sudden release illustrates the volatility of Iranian politics. And in a country where two other Americans are missing or detained and Iranian-Canadian blogger Hossein Derakhshan is still being held on espionage charges, the battle isn't over. But the case of Roxana Saberi is certainly a good start.

Lost Review: Better Late than Never

There are various legitimate reasons for why this review is so overdue, why I have skipped Sunday Nunday and Tuesday Newsday this week (sigh), and why my life is mildly ridiculous right now, mainly revolving around some torn ligaments in my ankle (don't ask) and far too much homework.

However, I figure that since Lost is tonight and I will not get to watch it, I might as well console myself by writing a heinously overdue review.

Spoiler alert: I highly doubt there are people who have yet to see last week's episode, but if you haven't, stop reading, for obvious reasons.

Our episode opens with Dharmaville in disarray. Horace, acting like the crochety old woman he is, is yelling at everyone; the flames are dying down from tiny Ben's hippie-van-on-fire diversion; and, of course, Hero Jack has Important Questions for Everyone.

"If he was locked up, how did he start the fire?" he asks, directing several piercing gazes at Horace and managing, miraculously, to come across as both mind-numbingly dull and in cahoots with the enemy. Nice one, Jack.

Horace just flips back his flowing locks, shoots off a condescending remark about how it must have been an inside job, and looks grumpy, as usual.

Meanwhile, Kate meets tiny Ben's loser dad -- who is one of those people you could feel bad for until you catch a glimpse of tiny Ben's taped glasses and bruises, and then you hate them again -- and Jin rolls in with a dying tiny Ben in his arms.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaand we're off.

Juliet tries to operate on tiny Ben, but her forte is babies, not tiny dying future megalomaniacs, and so, naturally, she sends Sawyer to ask Jack for help. As much as I hate Jack, there are several things he is useful for, and one of them is saving people from imminent death (sorry, Boone).

But we're dealing with New Jack now, the one who seems to have forgotten all about the seminal moment that was his "live together, die alone" speech in Season 1, the one who only recently shaved the Jeard, the one who, apparently, couldn't care less about DYING CHILDREN.

Dying children, Jack! You once pumped your own blood into a tool who ran a wedding business! For shame, sir.

Instead, Jack decides to make sandwiches while Hurley and Miles have one of the more amusing conversations in recent Lost memory, in which Miles tries to explain time travel to Hurley, who espouses the well-regarded "Back the Future" theory of time travel, which is basically that when you change the past, you cease to exist.

Miles, obviously an adherent to the Daniel Faraday school of time travel theory, tries to tell him that what's going on is All Part of the Plan, because you can't change time. There is really no point to this conversation except to allow the audience to feel better about themselves for asking the same frantic time-travel questions last week, but I adored it, mainly because Hurley worrying that he will disappear is just. too. cute.

Meanwhile, Kate yells at Jack about tiny Ben, Jack whines about how he already saved Ben once and how Kate still doesn't love him, Kate gives him a Look, and Jack returns to making sandwiches and whines that he can't fix things and that the Island will take care of everything. (Juliet also yells at Jack as he gets out of the shower and gives him a very critical once-over. Burn.)

Actually, Jack's moaning about how The Island Will Fix All is rather Lockian, come to think of it. Perhaps if Undead Locke ever gets back to 1977, they can build a smoke hut and drug people together.

In the face of Jack's crushing lack of any sort of common decency, Kate and Juliet decide to be awesome together and take tiny Ben to the Others in hopes of getting him fixed. As Kate prepares to cross the Hostiles' truce line, Sawyer shows up, hair blowing in the wind, and offers to help.

After some posturing by a group of Hostiles, Richard Alpert emerges, eyeliner gleaming, and agrees to take tiny Ben, but warns that he'll lose his "innocence" (?) and all memory of the event.

Which leads to this episode's shocking-but-kind-of-predictable conclusion, which is this:

a.) If Jack had agreed to operate on tiny Ben, tiny Ben would have lived without having to be magically cured by the smoke monster or whatever Richard Alpert is planning to do to him. Therefore,
b.) if Jack had cured tiny Ben, tiny Ben would not have "lost his innocence" and become the skeevy little creeper we all know and love. Ostensibly,
c.) if Ben was not so evil, he would not have given the Losties so much trouble. Ergo,
d.) everything that happened to the Losties at Ben's hands is entirely Jack's fault. (And maybe Sayid's. A little.)

To quote my fellow copy desker and Lost addict, one Brandon B. Taylor, I can't believe I once believed in Jack. Sigh.

Some other points:
- Horace continues his tradition of stating the obvious when he discovers keys left in the lock of Sayid's empty jail cell: ""He didn't break out, somebody let him out." O RLY?
- The flashback this episode is about Kate and Aaron, and what happened to Aaron before Kate left for the Island. It's sad and sweet and actually managed to win back a lot of my respect for Kate, which is nice, because I've been annoyed with her for a while.
- Sawyer tells Kate they would "never have worked out." HE CAN BE WITH JULIET FOREVER NOW, HOORAY.
- We also find out that Sawyer told Kate to find his daughter Clementine just before he jumped off the helicopter last season. My love for him knows no bounds.

We Are Stardust; We Are Golden

I was planning on writing a post tonight about studying for my imminent and massive astronomy test and how astro always sends me on a massive philosophical kick about what it all MEANS, which got me thinking about Dylan "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" Thomas, who in turn got me thinking about poetry in general, which usually always brings me back to my favorite poet of all time, the great John "No Man Is An Island" Donne.

I want to marry John Donne for many reasons. For one, he spent most of his life madly in life with his wife Anne and wrote gorgeous poems for her. Secondly, he was sort of a poetic Renaissance man -- his work ranges from intense theological musings like "Batter My Heart" to still-fairly-bawdy love poetry for Anne like "To His Mistress Going to Bed," which requires no explanation. Ernest Hemingway owes him big time for his "for whom the bell tolls" sermon. And just look at his picture. He's adorable.

He was also a sucker for ridiculous puns and metaphors, which makes a lot of people want to tear their hair out but which I absolutely love. This is especially evident in my all-time favorite John Donne poem, "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning," which I am posting in its entirety because it is awesome.

As virtuous men pass mildly away,

And whisper to their souls, to go,

Whilst some of their sad friends do say,

"The breath goes now," and some say, "No:"

So let us melt, and make no noise,

No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;

Twere profanation of our joys

To tell the laity our love.

Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears;

Men reckon what it did, and meant;

But trepidation of the spheres,

Though greater far, is innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers' love

(Whose soul is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove

Those things which elemented it.

But we by a love so much refin'd,
That ourselves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind,

Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.

Our two souls therefore, which are one,

Though I must go, endure not yet

A breach, but an expansion,

Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so

As stiff twin compasses are two;

Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show

To move, but doth, if the' other do.

And though it in the centre sit,

Yet when the other far doth roam,

It leans, and hearkens after it,

And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must

Like th' other foot, obliquely run;

Thy firmness makes my circle just,

And makes me end, where I begun.

I still get chills when I read this poem, usually because of the last line, which gets me every time. Donne wrote this for his wife just before he left on a trip to France, to make her feel better about him leaving, which is just. too. adorable. I can just imagine Anne making lunch or something and finding a little note from John Donne on the counter, and instead of getting some sort of generic "Love you, see you in a few weeks, take care of the kids," she gets the best poem ever.

Forget a red, red rose -- Donne compares his love to gold, to the planets, to geometric compasses (who even thinks of that?). In anyone else's hands, it might have been ridiculous, but John Donne makes it work. Working in some awkward puns ("And grows erect, as that comes home"?) could have gotten really awkward, but John Donne makes it work.

Also significant is the fact that he never published a poem during his lifetime, which means that this was meant pretty much solely for Anne. Writing a love poem for your wife is one thing. Writing a thorny, complex poem that employs one of the most famous metaphysical conceits of all time for your wife indicates a huge level of intellectual respect for her, which was kind of in short supply in the 16th century.

When you're studying astro at highly unreasonable hours, it's fun picking out Donne's little astro references, too -- "trepidation of the spheres" refers to planetary motion, and "dull sublunary lovers' love" has to be one of my favorite phrases ever. Overall, well done, Mr. Donne.

(And yes, I acknowledge that John "I Write Puns In My Sleep" Donne is probably rolling in his grave over that one.)

Songs on Repeat: Love Ain't Far

As much as I hate to admit it, I am a secret Motown junkie. I adore the Supremes, I am a sucker for the Temptations, and Martha Reeves is one of my personal heroes.

I attribute this mild obsession to something akin to Stockholm syndrome — back in the day, I rode an hour-and-a-half-long bus to high school every morning, and my bus driver, Socks (who is another story entirely), insisted on playing our local "oldies" station, Sunny 104.5, over the bus radio. At full volume. For the entire ride. After months of attempting to fight the powers that be (earmuffs, headphones, and various pleas to turn down the music proved futile), I gave in. I can pretty much sing the entire Sunny 104.5 repertoire from memory now, which is kind of pathetic.

Thus, when I found a song called "You Can't Hurry Love" by a Swedish band called the Concretes, I went in expecting some indie cover of the Supremes' hit. I couldn't have been farther from the truth.



There is no reason, really, why I should enjoy this song as much as I do. It has about three lyrics, it's over in two minutes, and it's mildly repetitive. But it's catchy as hell, man, and as far as my repeat songs go, that's usually all that matters.

Of course, now that I've spent several paragraphs waffling about my minor Motown obsession, I feel I should include a video of The Supremes' seminal "You Can't Hurry Love" as well.

Tuesday Newsday: Aspirations Wrapped Up In Books

As weeks go, this one hasn't been the best for the newspaper industry, and it's only Tuesday. The Chicago Sun-Times filed for bankruptcy today, and according to a Monday rumor, the venerable New York Times will soon be eliminating its City section and regional weeklies.

Newspapers need money, but more importantly, they need buyers -- people willing to invest time and energy in reenergizing and reinventing the business model that so many have failed at. So, in lieu of giving in to the man and accepting bailout funds, here's a solution: let's buy them ourselves.

At least that's Andrew Dunn's plan. Dunn, a journalism student at the University of North Carolina, runs the Web site Let's Buy A Newspaper, where, since January, journalists have been pledging money to -- you guessed it -- buy one of the country's various struggling papers. The now-defunct, almost universally beloved Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Rocky Mountain News were once first on the site's list of potential purchases. That list now includes papers like the Miami Herald and the San Diego Union-Tribune.

On the site's "About" page, Dunn admits that he started the site on a whim when the news broke about the Post-Intelligencer but would be open to following through on the experiment if enough pledges come through.

Yes, only $28,000 has been pledged to save newspapers that are asking for hundreds of millions of dollars. Yes, the site might be a little too idealistic for its own good. Yes, there's almost no chance that Dunn's endearingly bare-bones site will actually manage to buy a paper of its own.

But at the same time, click around the site and you'll find a bunch of concerned, intelligent journalists discussing new practices in newsroom management, laying out a business plan and outlining a payroll for 20 reporters and seven editors. It's kind of like playing house -- what would we do with a whole newspaper of our own? -- but already, contributors are putting forth ideas about investors, advertising and potential locations. Reporters and editors from publications as venerable as the New York Times and as small-scale as college newspapers are pledging $50 and $500 and $5,000 if the project gets off the ground.

Maybe it's wishful thinking; maybe it's a shot in the dark. But that's what new media is about: taking a crazy idea that just might work and seeing where it goes. At the very least, Let's Buy a Newspaper is bringing together print journalists across the country to talk about the future and share ideas in a time when ideas are all we have left.

And if the whole thing does work out, they can have my $50, any day.

Lost Review: Building It Up to Tear It Down

I have been heinously behind on blogging/homework/life, but this is no matter, as I have recently caught up on Lost and am subsequently shell-shocked by the insanity that was this past episode. Seriously -- it's turned one of the central tenets of the show upside down, and I have no idea where it's going next, but good god am I excited to see what happens.

Spoiler alert: anyone who hasn't seen last week's episode yet, stop reading now.

Our episode opens in Tikrit, Iraq, which is apparently the hometown of Sayid, who earned a place on my "generally awesome people" list very early on. A father is urging his pathetically obese son, ostensibly a young Sayid, to kill a chicken for dinner; pathetically obese kid refuses, tears spilling down his pudgy cheeks; I begin to worry that all of Sayid's credibility has been destroyed forever; and then ACTUAL YOUNG SAYID, who is much cuter, appears on screen and casually snaps a chicken's neck while his fat brother looks on, shocked.

My relief that Sayid was not the playground loser in his youth is boundless.

And we're back to the present (or, in this case, 1977), where a captured Sayid is lounging in his Dharma cell, refusing to eat or speak. Although I kind of understand (Dharma-brand beer has to be terrible), this will not last long, and it doesn't, because 12-year-old Ben Linus shows up with a sandwich and a book and a terrified-but-hopeful look in his eyes.

Tiny Ben is awesome and sad; he's just desperate for a friend, and it's pretty much the most adorable thing ever. If he'd been born in Britain, he might have grown up to be Harry Potter. Instead he just gets to be one of the best villains ever (Ben totally beats out Voldemort in my book).

Horace, the leader of the Others, shows up and tries to force Sayid to talk while waving a pair of grass clippers. Sayid shows no emotion, and rightfully so, because aging hippie men with dumb hair and lame grass clippers are quite possibly the least threatening things in the world.

Meanwhile, back in Dharmaville proper, Sawyer and Juliet share a sweet little moment in which Juliet laments the fact that Jack and company have returned to the island and pretty much ruined everything. Sawyer is adorable and reassures her and DAMN IT I WANT SAWYER AND JULIET TO BE TOGETHER FOREVER, the end.

In an effort to keep this life intact, Sawyer storms into the cell where Sayid's being held and tries to formulate a plan to get him to join the Dharmaites. Sayid refuses; Sawyer warns him that he could jeopardize everything he's worked for.

"I've built a life here, and a pretty good one," he says. I melt.

The flashback for this episode, by the way, is Sayid-centric, focusing mainly on what happened to Sayid after he stopped killing people for Ben. At one point, Ben finds Sayid in some third-world country, where he is building Habitat for Humanity-esque houses to atone for his various Ben-fueled sins or whatever, and tries to convince him to kill one more person for him.

There is only one significant line in this scene, and it's this:

Ben: "You're capable of things that most other men aren't." SAYID/BEN 4EVAAAAA

The rest of the episode (except for the end -- wait for it) does not require too much commentary, but there are a few choice moments, including:
- Everyone tells Sayid he's going to be tortured for information, but the Dharmaites' version of a torture man turns out to be an aging hippie (surprise!) who feeds Sayid some drug that makes him tell the truth. Coupled with tiny Ben's striking resemblance to a certain boy wizard, the truth serum has convinced me that Lost is pretty much Harry Potter in the South Pacific.
- Sayid slurs to everyone that he's from the future, and torture-man utters one of the best lines of the episode: "Maybe I should have used half a dropper? Oops?"
- Horace spends the entire episode trying to make scary faces but usually ends up looking like a grouchy old woman, which is what he is. I really, really hate him.
- Hurley has apparently been assigned to kitchen duty and, predictably, looks adorable in an apron.
- Tiny Ben gets slapped around by his loser dad and ends up with a giant bruise and taped glasses. I just want to give him a hug.

The rest of the episode is pretty uneventful, until the end, which is honestly one of the most shocking developments I've ever seen on Lost.

The Dharmaites, against Sawyer's advice, take a vote to kill Sayid because they think he's a Hostile; in response, tiny Ben pulls his first badass move of the episode and SETS A VAN ON FIRE, sending it careening through Dharmaville. While everyone is fighting the flames, he breaks Sayid out of jail and the two go running through the forest, trying to find Richard "Permanent Eyeliner" Alpert and the actual Hostiles. Jin finds them, tries to convince Sayid to come back, and a desperate Sayid knocks him out and takes his gun.

Adorable tiny Ben, impressed with Sayid's moves, says something adorable and chipper about how awesome Sayid is. Sayid looks up, agonized.

"You were right about me," he whispers. "I am a killer."

And he whips out Jin's gun and SHOOTS TINY BEN.

And that's it.

I can't even begin to imagine what this means for the show -- does Ben not exist anymore? Has Sayid changed history entirely? Has a hole been ripped in the space-time continuum?

I get where Sayid is coming from -- if you had the chance to kill random evil masterminds before they could actually become evil masterminds, wouldn't you? -- but it's still one of the show's most mind-blowing conclusions.

Actually, I think Ben will survive and grow up to be the skeevy little creeper we all know and love, and that his preternatural knowledge of the Losties likely stems from the fact that he knew them all when he was 12 and figured out who he was supposed to become. I have no idea if I'm right. But I can't wait to find out.

Sunday Nunday: This Is How I Am Repaid?

General life rule, whether you're Catholic or not: don't mess with nuns. If you do, they have various options for vengeance at their disposal. They can pull a John Paul II and just instantaneously forgive you, after which you will be so riddled with guilt that you will actually ask for punishment, or, failing that, they can always go old-school and whack you with rulers or make you stand in a trash can or something. (True story: that actually happened to a family friend of ours in the 60s.) Either way, it's not a good situation.

Scamming nuns is never a good idea, because not only will the nuns ultimately have their revenge, but the world will generally agree that you are a horrible human being. Rip off a nun and you've pretty much consigned yourself to a life of slapping orphans and scaring old ladies, because what else is left, really?

Thus, if this Chicago couple is indeed guilty of what the FBI says they are, I fear for their future. In 2004, according to an FBI affidavit, Angela Martin-Mulu and Edward Bosire turned up at a Carmelite monastery near Milwaukee and told the nuns there they were homeless Kenyan refugees who needed food and money, adding that they would be killed if they returned to Kenya. (The two immigrated from Kenya in 1999 and recieved political asylum in 2007.)

The nuns understandably took pity, because they are adorable, and gave them more than $800,000 over three years. Even worse, the money came straight from their personal health fund, according to a Sister Mary Agnes.

So if the couple are guilty (they were indicted by a federal grand jury recently and face up to 20 years in prison if convicted), they didn't just steal a fortune -- they stole it from a bunch of Carmelites who couldn't pay for health insurance. Low point, kids.

To top it all off, the FBI says most of the money was spent in casinos, which makes me want to bang my head against my desk. Gambling with nuns' money is practically asking to be struck down by lightning.

There's not really much I can say about this situation other than "well, that was dumb." And there's no word on what the nuns think about the whole thing, but personally, I'm hoping they break out the rulers.

Songs on Repeat: Sun Been Down for Days

At approximately 36 seconds into Wilco's inimitable "Hummingbird," there's this awesome little cello part that gets me every. single. time. It's only a few measures long, but it's absolutely gorgeous. Sometimes I just play the first minute or so over and again, because I am admittedly kind of pathetic.

Oren Lavie's "Her Morning Elegance" features a little cello riff early on, too. And maybe I'm just a sucker for what is arguably the best instrument ever (I haven't picked mine up in two years, but I'm not ready to say I used to play it just yet), because iTunes informs me that I have played this song 30 times since Sunday night, and that's not counting the play count on my iPod.

Usually my repeat songs of the week are sort of pleasant little things that I decide to start out my mornings with, but this one's different. It's minimal as anything -- those fantastic cello sections nearly drown out the muted organ and xylophone in the background -- but it's one of those songs that just works. I can't explain it.

Also, the music video is pretty much one of the most adorable things I've ever seen. It's probably one of the reasons I can't stop listening to the song.

Tuesday Newsday: Too Much History, Too Much Biography?

Note: The news industry is pretty insane right now -- but pretty fascinating, too. On Tuesdays, I'll be blogging about journalism -- how it's changing, who's shaping it, and what's next for the news. Thus, happy Tuesday Newsday, kids.



When the management of a major metropolitan daily newspaper decides to publish their Twitter accounts instead of their names on the masthead, you know something is changing.

This, if you couldn't tell, is the March 19 masthead of the venerable Chicago Tribune, one of my favorite papers and, coincidentally, one of the most troubled papers in the country right now.

So it's interesting that just a few months after its parent company declared bankruptcy, the Tribune printed a masthead devoted to one of the more pervasive aspects of new media journalism. Twitter is what you might call a "microblog," a vast aggregator of millions of people's 140-character status updates. At its worst, it's vapid, narcissistic, and completely pointless.

At its best, though, it's kind of the coolest thing ever. Wade through the masses of voyeuristic losers and you find really, really awesome journalists -- not just sitting there navel-gazing but delving in-depth into their reporting, taking you inside newsrooms across the country and around the world.

I follow way too many journalists on Twitter -- Daniel Victor from the Harrisburg Patriot-News, Chris Krewson from the Philadephia Inquirer, the adorable freelance blog queen Ana Marie Cox -- and while stalking my fellow newsies is admittedly a mildly pathetic way to spend my time, it's convinced me that Twitter isn't just for the self-absorbed yuppies that make up its majority. It's taught me that in the midst of layoffs left and right, of venerable papers collapsing like dominoes, there is a small subset of journalists who are embracing new media and making it work.

A few months ago, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill had a bomb scare on campus. Zach Tracer, a reporter for Duke's student paper, was on the scene and reporting -- but before filing a web update, he was posting everything he saw to Twitter. Watching updates come in instantly in real time was fascinating -- and yeah, it might speak to what my parents enjoy calling "the instant-gratification culture," but at the same time, it shows a remarkable willingness to adapt and innovate. Twittering the news is not going to make us any money in the short run, but maybe it's part of what will save us in the end.

Album Review: The Hazards of Love

I've listened to the Decemberists' latest album, The Hazards of Love, twice through so far and read countless reviews of it, and I'm still kind of torn about it, to the point where I've been sporadically bothering my friends all day to ask their opinion.

One minute I adore the lilting melody of "Won't Want for Love (Margaret in the Taiga)"; the next I want to tear my hair out over the overtly metal nonsense that is "The Queen's Rebuke/The Crossing." I've wavered between getting sucked into the album's overarching plot (more on that later) and dismissing the entire thing as too weird for words. It's hard for me, because I adore the Decemberists beyond all reason, to the point where I regularly yell "WE LOVE YOU COLIN!" at the stage at their concerts. I've spent years defending the band against its standard criticisms: their music is weird, their references obscure, their lyrics pretentious as all get-out.

But I'm going to say it: The Hazards of Love is weird, obscure and pretentious. It's a prog-rock opera in the grandest sense of the word, with dense, pulsing guitar riffs and crashing organs and a surprising amount of what metal would sound like if Led Zeppelin was planted in 1872. The whole album is a loosely connected story about a heroine named Margaret, her lover/baby daddy/son of the Forest Queen, William (who turns into a fawn during the day, randomly), said Forest Queen, and the Rake, who, sadly, is not a common garden tool, but a widower who murdered his children because he missed being a bachelor. Whew.

True to form, frontman Colin Meloy warbles delightfully throughout the album, and the band brings on guest singers to voice Margaret and the Forest Queen. Becky Stark provides suitably waifish vocals for Margaret, but props to Colin for getting Shara Worden to sing as the Forest Queen. Even as the band descends into metal sludge halfway through the album, Worden's soulful growl slides above it all. She absolutely owns her half of "The Wanting Comes in Waves/Repaid," one of the best songs on the album.

The Hazards of Love is ambitious and grandiose and sometimes insane, and a lot of the time, this works. Maybe it's because I'm a sucker for the Decemberists' 2004 EP The Tain, which had a lot of the same epic elements, but I occasionally found myself drifting off in its dense melodies and climactic chords. It's not an album to pull a few catchy singles off, but as a cohesive musical whole, it works. It's easy to forgive the band for the distracting, stuttering distortion on "The Abduction of Margaret" when it's followed by the absolutely gorgeous folk tune "Annan Water." And some of the prog is, admittedly, pretty good -- "The Rake's Song" features some deeply disturbing lyrics but subversively catchy rock. For the most part, the album slides between thick prog rock and sweet, poignant love songs, each song bleeding seamlessly into the next.

That being said, part of the Decemberists' charm once lay in the fact that they could mesh epics like "The Crane Wife 1 & 2" with folk-pop goodness like "O Valencia!" on the same record. Hazards is all epic and no pop, which -- while it produces some crazy and interesting musical concepts -- kind of saddens me. Seasoned Decemberists fans know that Colin Meloy can make a song about a lost bicycle sound like the best thing you've heard in days. He doesn't need to sing about a shape-shifting fawn-man to convince us of his musical genius.

It's interesting to compare Hazards to the Decemberists' EP series, Always the Bridesmaid, released last fall. While Hazards represents what I think everyone's been fearing a little bit ever since The Tain -- the giant, inaccessible, "oh-god-what-were-they-thinking" concept album -- the EP series is almost a return to how the band began: sweet, melodic ditties about things as ordinary as a rainy day or a road trip through New England.

It's fun to rock out a little to The Hazards of Love, and the album definitely has its high points. And you have to give the band credit for taking on such an ambitious project, even if it falls a little flat at times. But for me, the Decemberists will always be about the mesh of the epic and the mundane, the pairing of wonderfully complex lyrics with choruses that will get stuck in your head for days. That's not Hazards, not by a long shot. But something tells me that Colin Meloy won't be sticking with Rakes and fawns for long.

Download: "Annan Water," "The Rake's Song," "The Wanting Comes in Waves/Repaid"

Sunday Nunday: A Very, Very, Very Fine House

Note: I spent nine years getting taught by Sisters of Saint Joseph, and I have generally found that nuns are pretty much the best people around. Thus, I introduce Sunday Nunday, in which I find interesting news about nuns and blog about it.

Nuns should get anything they want. (Within reason, of course. Renouncing your vows, for example, is probably not the best idea.)

But still. They give up everything they own, they get up early for Mass every morning (a feat indeed), and they can get serious stuff done when they want to (word, Mother Teresa). So when a FOX affiliate got all up in arms this weekend over a New Jersey parish that purchased an $800,000 McMansion to house its nuns, I was left wondering what all the fuss is about.

At first glance, this seems mildly excessive. After all, the nuns at my high school lived in a convent that was attached to the actual school. That's like working in an office all day and then walking down the hall to your bedroom. No one but nuns could do that without wanting to burn the place down within a week.

Anyway, nuns are generally expected to live in weird/terrible conditions and like it, and no one ever really makes an issue about it, including the nuns, because they know it's all part of the vows, yo.

Thus, when a parish in New Jersey bought a swanky new house for its five nuns, people were upset. The news report quotes some parishioners yelling about how nuns take a vow of poverty and that this is a waste of money for the parish and it's a terrible example to set, etc. etc. etc.

My favorite line is the lede in the article that accompanies the video: "Why are five New Jersey nuns living in a mansion that should be in Beverly Hills?"

BECAUSE THEY'RE AWESOME. OKAY? Okay.

The FOX affiliate also takes stalker helicopter photos of the house. Not cool.

The report goes on to mention, a little halfheartedly, that the nuns in question were living in a three-bedroom house and expected to welcome three more by the summer. Eight nuns and three bedrooms doesn't exactly work out. And building a new but more modest house for the nuns would have set the parish back by about $2 million, the archdiocese explains.

So we have eight nuns in a six-bedroom house, plus several acres of land, all bought at a discount price from a Catholic couple who were selling their house and wanted to help the parish out. Not only do the nuns get an awesome house, but the parish plans to use it for retreats, too. And you can totally throw giant church fairs on the new land.

I highly doubt that living in a huge new house will suddenly cause the nuns to adopt a high-flying nouveau riche lifestyle in which they ride around their new estate in personalized golf carts or something. And if they do, who cares? If I encountered a bunch of nuns driving a golf cart with their order's logo on it or something, I could die happy.

So: the parish saves money, the nuns finally get some decent housing, and the parishioners get a giant multi-acre party zone on which to throw fairs and raise more money for the church. Clearly, there is nothing wrong with this scenario. Catholicism for the win.

Lost Review: Ancient Commonsense

Note: As a Lost addict whose copy desking usually interferes with actually watching the show in real time, I will be posting sporadic episode reviews as I get to them. Disclaimer: I take no responsibility for confused readers who don't watch the show. It's far too late for you now.

I have been waiting for the big reunion episode for ages, ever since our six erstwhile castaways left the island at the end of Season 4, and we finally got the goods tonight. Sawyer was appropriately stunned, Hurley was big and cute and hug-ful, Jack did this whole awkward handshake thing, and our own Mistress of Meaningful and Poignant Looks delivered with various regretful grimaces and a desperate and sad hug. If Sawyer leaves Juliet for Kate, I will destroy my television.

And then comes Sawyer's big reveal: thanks to the island's time-hopping, he and Jin and Co. have been stuck in ... wait for it... 1977 ever since Locke left. In keeping with tradition, everyone drops what they're doing, makes scared faces, and the camera zooms meaningfully in on Hurley.

"Um... what?" he asks, staring around apprehensively. Somewhere in the great VH1 Has-Beens episode in the sky, Charlie "Guys... Where Are We?" Pace is smiling.

And we're off.

Sawyer, who is awesome, manages to get the returned castaways into the Dharma Initiative by passing them off as new recruits who've just arrived on the island via the initiative's sub. They all get flower leis and "Namastes" all around (the entire Dharma Initiative are secret hippies, for serious) and job assignments. Jack gets "Workman," which basically means "glorified janitor." Score one for Sawyer.

Sawyer also gets major points for a confrontation between him and Jack, when Jack, apparently dissatisfied with the fact that Sawyer has pretty much saved them all from death by Dharma, stops by his house to complain. "Where do we go from here?" he whines. Sawyer says he's thinking about it.

"It looked like you were just reading a book," Jack counters brilliantly.

Sawyer, who is pretty much my favorite person in life right now, puts down his book and straight-up OWNS Jack with a little-known fact about Winston Churchill (he read a book every night, even during the blitz, because he said it helped him think better) and a legitimate analysis of Jack's leadership style, which is that he has none.

"Back when you were calling the shots you pretty much just reacted. See, you didn't think, Jack. And as I recall, a lot of people ended up dead," Sawyer drawls. "So I'm going to go back to reading my book and I'm going to think. 'Cause that's how I saved your ass today." BAM.

Jack tries to fight back with some lame stuff about how he got everyone off the island, but Sawyer is a piece of ownage and Workman Jack leaves dejectedly. It's Sawyer time.

And then Kate and Sawyer exchange this little look, and Kate looks weirdly disappointed, and Sawyer looks weirdly guilty, and if she somehow destroys the competent awesomeness that Sawyer and Juliet have going on, I will break things.

In other news, we find out that Sun, undead Locke, and Ben are stuck in 2007, which poses some problems. And Jack's undead father has shown up again, which should be interesting.

Other notes:

- Sun proves her awesomeness once again and knocks Ben out with an oar. Sweet.
- Sayid is also in 1977 with the Dharma kids, but he had the misfortune of getting picked up by some legit Dharmaites before Sawyer could find him, so he's in Other jail right now for being a suspected hostile. Sad face.
- At the risk of sounding ridiculous, I'm kind of mad Jack and Co. are back on the island, because Sawyer and Juliet are ADORABLE, and everyone seems to have made a little home for themselves where they are. Seriously, all they have to do is avoid Ben's giant Dharma extermination in, say, 1990-ish, and they'll be fine.
- Juliet and Kate's first exchange in the Dharma processing station was crazy tension-filled. If Kate tries to come back to Sawyer, I am fairly confident we'll see another Kate/Juliet mud-wrestling showdown.
- Tiny Ben shows up! He is still appropriately creepy. I am so glad he's back.

And, lastly, your Sawyer one-liner of the evening:

After a Dharma Initiative member suggests that they kill Sayid: "Well, I appreciate your input there, Quick Draw, but I wanna talk to him first."

Songs on Repeat: America Can't Say No

Note: Every week or so, I find a song that I listen to nonstop, on loop, for at least a day. It is pathetic, but it's my repeat song of the week, and I'll be writing about it each Thursday. Cheers.

I've been gearing myself up for the Decemberists' latest album, The Hazards of Love, by listening to old Decemberists songs pretty much nonstop. On the off chance that the album is absolutely terrible (the reviews are starting to worry me), I figure that I can still comfort myself with the orphans, chimney sweeps and starcrossed lovers that are standard Decemberists fare.

"16 Military Wives" was playing on loop on my iPod today, and it's a little different from the rest of the band's sea-shanty-packed catalogue -- it's a protest song, and probably the most upbeat of its kind that I've ever heard. It's snarky, timely, and it features a lot of indie-rock god and Decemberists frontman Colin Meloy warbling, which pretty much seals the deal for me:

Fifteen celebrity minds
Leading their fifteen sordid, wretched, checkered lives
Will they find the solution in time,
Using their fifteen, pristine, moderate liberal minds?

Golden.

When I went to see the Decemberists at the Electric Factory in Philly this past November (by far my favorite venue in the world), they played this -- and then led the crowd in a chant of "Yes We Can!" It was a week after the election, and it was brilliant.

Also, it has the best music video in the history of ever:

They Are Night Zombies!! They Are Neighbors!!

I planned to write a post tonight about a fantastic article in the New York Times today on the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's last issue (absolutely heartbreaking, by the way), and I probably will by the end of the week.

But after abandoning about fifty halfhearted attempts at a staggeringly brilliant and insightful piece on the state of print journalism, I turned to my latest means of procrastination: watching old episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on Hulu.

I confess: Buffy is kind of my favorite thing ever. The first six episodes of the first season are pretty standard fare: mildly silly serial episodes featuring an incredibly young Sarah Michelle Gellar fighting off laughably ugly vampires, witches and their ilk. The music, clothing and hair are wonderfully 90s-tastic, the one-liners are appropriately witty, and the characters are surprisingly endearing.

Otherwise, though, Buffy was kind of a guilty pleasure of mine. Until tonight.

I just finished watching episode 7 -- where Buffy, the Chosen One, uber-vampire slayer and all that, realizes that she's in love with mysterious bad boy Angel, who just happens to be a vampire. But! Angel has a soul! And a conscience! And he doesn't eat people! (And he is really, really hot.) The whole episode adds a huge new level of depth and danger and conflict to the show, while staying true to its quirky, likeable roots. There's a reason why Buffy is a cult classic, after all, and that really comes through in this episode.

Joss Whedon, the show's creator, said that the first season of Buffy is "high school as a horror film." In the Buffy world, a controlling mother isn't just an annoying helicopter parent; she's a witch who possesses her daughter in order to relieve her glory days. The quiet girl everyone ignores literally becomes invisible. The meanest kids in school might actually be demons. It's campy and ridiculous a lot of the time, but at its core, Buffy is really about issues that everyone who's ever been a teenager has faced: figuring out who you are, taking on frightening responsibilities and trying to stay sane through it all.

And have I mentioned how attractive Angel is? Because, seriously. Dayum, grrl.

Right Proudly High over Dublin Town

Every year, Philly holds a Saint Patrick's Day parade. And while we don't pull a Chicago and dye the Schuylkill green (it's pretty gross anyway), it's usually a nice little affair.

Two years ago I was actually in the city on March 17 to film a video for a group project, and though my Irish half will never forgive me for it, I'd completely forgotten that it was St. Patty's Day.

It was absolutely miserable outside. It had been raining since early that morning, I had forgotten an umbrella, and I had no idea where I was supposed to meet my group. Frustrated and soaked to the skin, I was fuming in a doorway by City Hall, waiting for the rain to let up, when I heard bagpipes.

Bedraggled, soaking wet and somehow still smiling, what looked like half the archdiocese's priest contingent rounded the corner, led by our then-newly-appointed Cardinal Rigali. The streets were absolutely empty, but there they were, flanked by bagpipe players and the city police department, marching on. Everyone waved at me. It was adorable.

If there's one thing the Irish are good at, it's tradition, and it's good to know that no matter what, on March 17, come rain, snow or ridiculous hangovers, there will always be a parade somewhere.
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(And for your listening pleasure, some Chieftans, for obvious reasons.)

A Turn for the Worst

I will likely never see Wendy and Lucy again, and I'm okay with that. It's difficult and sad and depressing and tragic, and it's rough to to sit through.

That being said, it's important and necessary and should most definitely be seen.

It's a simple plot -- Wendy, a young woman with a car, a dog and $525 to her name, gets sidetracked in Oregon en route to a job at a cannery in Alaska when her car breaks down and her dog, Lucy, runs away. The film follows her over the course of a few days, detailing her increasingly desperate attempts to get out of her situation in unflinching detail.

Wendy -- played by the spectacular Michelle Williams -- just can't get a break, and the real tragedy is that no one really cares. Clutching a dirty pillow and carrying everything she owns in a duffel bag, she moves through the tiny Oregon town in a daze. Every now and then she lets out a plaintive "Lucy!" It is, in a word, heartbreaking.

Wendy and Lucy is a sparse little film, with no soundtrack and only a few characters. Wendy herself is largely an enigma -- we know that she has a married sister in Indiana who can't be bothered with her plight, that she keeps a careful record of her finances and that, for whatever reason, the most important thing in her life is Lucy. Wendy's a blank slate -- but I think that's why I found myself worrying about her literally five seconds into the movie.

We care about her not because she's a standard indie-film goddess with a quirky backstory and a distinctly optimistic outlook on life, but because she is a sad little everywoman without a plan or a future. We care because under the right circumstances, she could be any of us.

A Smattering of Distant Applause

I wanted this introductory post to be all huge and epic, but I'm drawing a blank, so I'm settling with just being obvious. 

I'm Aubrey, I'm a journalism student at Penn State (on my better days, a "student journalist"), and I'm trying out this blogging thing mainly because it's the only thing I haven't tried on the list of self-indulgent social networking devices. I fought joining Twitter for a year, only to become addicted within a week, so I might as well get a head start on the blog. 

I'm a copy editor at our student newspaper here, the Daily Collegian, which consumes my life in a frightening but kind of comforting way. I'm from one of Philadelphia's various interchangeable suburbs, but, like everyone who lives outside the city, I just tell people I'm from Philly. I have a mildly pathetic addiction to twee indie pop, I've read Pride and Prejudice cover to cover at least five times and I own a finicky MacBook named Sev.

I also promise that I don't usually start all of my sentences with "I."