A whale pitcher:

(amazon) (jonathanadler.com)

A whale butter dish:

(jonathanadler.com)

How much do I love that butter dish? SO MUCH! I want to keep ALL MY BUTTER in that dish.

There is also a candle holder, but it is somehow not as cool.

The first new blog I’ve picked up is Tiger Beatdown, a collective lead by Sady Doyle. I’ve heard it mentioned before, but never checked it out until recently. I started reading during Ladypalooza, more specifically, the post about Dude Music. (The rest of the Ladypalooza posts can be found on this archive page and can I just take a moment to tell you that it drives me to despair when people refuse to make it easy on me by tagging their posts in a useful fashion ;_; ) I appreciate that there are multiple posters who all seem to have reasonable things to say (unlike some other blogs with multiple posters :p) and I like the wide range of topics covered and the hipster-ish sense of humor there. That said, I can see why the hipster-ness of it all could be a turnoff for some people. And I would also like to express my appreciation for their NPR-style support of themselves. People should be paid for doing work. And all that is why they are my new jam. I just wish they’d update more often, but then they’d maybe suck more, so I guess I’ll just have to learn patience or something.

The other blog I’ve added to my regular rotation is Fugitivus, which I will delay in linking for a moment. I feel somewhat terribly awkward for reading it and liking it so much, because Harriet very frankly discusses her abuse and rape and how she deals with the long term repercussions of them, which is often extremely distressing. The wonderful parts about her blog are how well she writes and how thoughtfully she discusses coping. I feel like after every post I read I have an entire month’s worth of ideas to chew over and digest, and I really appreciate her very personal approach to Dealing With Problems and Being Better In The Future. It isn’t just identifying a problem, but then also thinking about how to solve it. An other aspect I really appreciate about her writing is how honest she is about how hard she is on herself, and the ways she is working to be kinder to herself and others, which is something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently. Being able to read someone else’s thoughts on the ways they are unkind to themselves and the ways they change to become kinder to themselves has really helped me thinking about how I treat myself and what I want to change. At any rate, you can find her writings at Fugitivus.net and be prepared for explicit discussion of distressing topics.

I’ve also dabbled in Fatshionista, but my engagement is somewhat uneven as I am not really the audience she is writing for, and I am okay with that. I just love that she also loves Lady Gaga and linked to this great performance of Lady Gaga singing Gershwin.

Specifically, I’ve been looking for a Roomba of my very own to help keep my apartment clean given my extreme unwillingness to clean on a regular basis.

At google.com/alerts. I entered the search term roomba site:CITY.craigslist.org and it gives me alerts any time someone posts a listing for a roomba in my city! I also did it for DealNews.com.

And lo, Dealnews.com told me about a roomba was being sold by Woot.com, and it was much cheaper than anywhere else, and I bought it! And I didn’t have to spent time checking all over the internet every day to find it!

To make this a slightly less worthless entry, I will also tell you that I am plugging away at my Anne Elliot Spencer. I recently finished the second half of the front, and I just cast on for the first sleeve! I’m … still not done!

But actually, the whole point of me posting is because I want to enter another Grosgrain giveaway.

The first thing is this lovely dress! I am in love with the buttons down the sleeves. Just-above-elbow-length sleeves are my favorite length for sleeves! And buttons! The other giveaway is for these rose earrings, right here! I don’t know if I would be able to do them justice, but I want them anyway! Either way, it’s an awesome idea, which I will have to remember for Christmas time. I bet my sister would love a set of ‘Rose’ earrings.

Grosgrain is doing another giveaway, for a dress from Shabby Apple, and while I don’t really want the dress they are giving away, I am really liking a few of their other dresses. I’m really sad that the first one doesn’t seem to come in colors besides fuchsia and black. The second one comes in black and houndstooth. I’m really tempted, but their sizing kind of freaks me out for some reason. I think I don’t usually buy such expensive clothing online.

The whole reason I am posting all this is that to enter the giveaway, you have to post a link back to her blog.  And also, to show you what a pretty dress I’d like to win!

Isn’t it beautiful?!  For more pictures, see her blog here.

It would be just the thing for a jaunt downtown or down to Barton Creek.

I… was not really impressed.
To backtrack for a moment, there is a trope, most often found in half-hour sitcoms, but can be seen in many other places.  It is the Hot Wife Married to Fugly Loser Dude.  In SitcomLand, all the women are HOTT, and they always marry fugly-ass losers who can’t wipe their own ass without help.  For (hopefully) obvious reasons, I hate this trope with the passion of a thousand burning suns.

Knocked Up has exactly this trope, and I just can’t get past it.  Katherine Heigle is gorgeous.  Her character is in the entertainment business, and is in front of the camera.  She is HOTT. Not only is she hot, but she is apparently (at least) moderately intelligent and has a career on the upswing. The dude who is played by one of those frat-boy comedy actors whose name I can’t be bothered to remember is not hot.  He isn’t completely fug, but he’s definitely not even in the same league as her.  Add on to that the fact that he is a skeezy-ass loser with no income, and no ambition beyond building a completely revolting website devoted to nudity in film, I completely FAIL to buy the premise that a) she would sleep  with him once, no matter how drunk, and b) that she would continue to associate with him once the pregnancy was discovered and she found out what a loser he was.

Add that COMPLETELY IRRITATING AND ENRAGING trope to the movie’s already repugnant handling pregnancy and the issues surrounding an accidental pregnancy, and Knocked Up is definitely not going in my list of classics any time soon.

According to the remains of this extra-old entry, there were some things that I thought the movie did well (perhaps the montage where Fugly Loser Dude halfway gets his act together), but I can’t remember what they were for the life of me, so I’m going to leave it at that.

That said, the first thing I watched that way was kind of a dud.

The sad thing is, this movie has all the hallmarks of a story I could really like. Ridiculous plot? Check. Angsty misunderstanding? Check. Lies, more lies, and selfish deceit? By the metric fuckton. So, I will completely admit, I was primed to love this stupid piece of shit movie. Except then it all went to hell in a sexist hand basket. (Are we actually surprised? No, but a girl can dream.)

I actually kind of liked the first half of the movie. Ridiculousness, silly scenes, overblown conniving – exactly my cup of tea. It was how everything was tied up at the end that completely ruined it for me.

1) Hypocrisy. Okay, so yes, everyone does it. But I expect a little more from my fictional characters. She is upset because he was doing it on a bet that will determine his career trajectory? When she was doing it all for an article? When all is said and done, those who live in glass houses shouldn’t be throwing stones around that casually. Both of them get a giant FAIL here.

2) Him. They did a pretty good job of showing what she saw in him, but what did he see in her? The entire movie, we’re shown him time after time gritting his teeth and trying to hang on to her, all for the sake of a bet that will bolster his career. We get a little bit of what he’s feeling during the visit home, but I’m not convinced enough for it to counteract everything that has come before. So his mad dash to get her back when he thinks she really did love him didn’t do it for me. Plus, it’d be cool to see him liking something else about her besides her love of basketball and ability to use his relatives to cheat at cards.

Which brings us to the last and most egregious sin committed by this movie.

3) The Taxi Scene. This is me wearing my radical feminist hat again, but this scene completely ruined the movie for me. Instead of “Don’t go to a job interview in DC because I am here and not there”, the correct answer was for him to kiss her sweetly, wish her luck, and with a lusty look in his eye, tell her to hurry back. Later, they could discuss her applying for jobs in the city, or a long distance relationship (now that he’s making the even bigger bucks with his ‘awesome’ new add campaign, he can probably afford it), or talk of him finding a job there. None of this shutting down her career bullshit. That completely pissed me off, and ultimately makes this movie a complete FAIL.