Creepy Cravings

I'm craving a big, hot bag of boiled peanuts and a tall, frothy root beer.

So, naturally, I'm almost certain that I'm possessed.

The She-Creature Shuffle

Thought I'd post this bulletin response here for the helluvit. Here was the challenge:

1. Open up the music player on your computer.
2. Set it to play your entire music collection.
3. Hit the shuffle command.
4. Tell us the title of the next ten songs that show up (with their musicians), no matter how embarrassing. That's right, no skipping that Carpenters tune that will totally destroy your hip credibility. It's time for total musical honesty. Write it up in your blog or journal and link back to at least a couple of the other sites where you saw this.
5. If you get the same artist twice, you may skip the second (or third, or etc.) occurrences. You don't have to, but since randomness could mean you end up with a list of ten songs with five artists, you can if you'd like.


So out of 15,000 songs that take up 70 gigabytes and could play for more than 40 days and 40 nights without repeating anything, this random selection is surprisingly better than any playlist that I could have put together myself (although it could do with a dash of Tom Waits)...

01 - The Smiths - Paysted Way
02 - The Impossible Shapes - Always the Way
03 - Portastatic - The Angeles of Sleep
04 - Damien Jurado - Intoxicated Hands
05 - Arnold Schoenberg - track 9 from "Pierrot Lunaire"
06 - Jo Ann Castle - Tico Tico
07 - The Cure - Boys Don't Cry
08 - Sun Kil Moon - Pancho Villa
09 - Warren Zevon - Model Citizen
10 - The Rolling Stones - She's a Rainbow

Hmm, I'm feeling a little WFMU-ish right now. I should have my own Podcast, shouldn't I? Does anyone want to know what the next 10 would be? Okay...

11 - Sloan - Everything You've Done Wrong
12 - The Wolfgang Press - Cut the Tree
13 - Okkervil River - Black Sheep Boy
14 - Great Lake Swimmers - Bodies and Minds
15 - The Wipers - Up in Flames
16 - Maserati - Ambassador of Cinema
17 - Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Loverman
18 - Gary Numan - Dream Police
19 - Steve Reich - Drumming (3)
20 - William Shatner - Spleen

And then I decided to keep going to the next ten... they were:

21 - Red House Painters - Long Distance Runaround
22 - Cursive - Art Is Hard
23 - God in 3 Persons - Service
24 - Thelonius Monk - North of the Sunset
25 - Rilo Kiley - Hail to Whatever You Found in the Sunlight that Surrounds You
26 - Sam Phillips - Standing Still
27 - Deerhoof - L'amour Stories
28 - The Misfits - Dr. Phibes Rises Again
29 - Danielson Famile - Sing to the Singer
30 - Tom Waits - Black Wings (Live at the Raven Theater)

And after that I realized it was 4:20 AM and I'd been listening to music for a couple hours. So that's a perfect place to end. Nite!

Urine Gone!

So tonight I'm minding my own business, cringing while watching tv as I often do when I realize I'm absorbed in yet another reality show. I have an excuse this time though: it was ABC's HOOKING UP about online dating, and as you all know from my previous posts, I can relate to the horror of it all.

So, right smack dab in the middle of the show about 11 single women in NYC is a commercial for a product called URINE GONE*, because... I guess there's... uh... a lot of urine involved with online dating? Or a lot of lonely, single people with too many cats and not enough litter boxes watching this show? I can vouch for both of those guesses.

If you haven't yet seen this beauty of a marketing campaign, I'm not sure that I can do it any real justice here. I tried to search for the commercial online, but only came up with stills for this product, like the ones that follow (photos by Greyhawk68):

See, I'm not kidding. This is for real.

But the commercial is so bad that it begins parodying itself almost immediately. It's shot in typical infomercial/as-seen-on-tv/hi-cheese lighting, with added "scientific" blacklight segments to show the unseen urine and various other organic stains. Remember those 20/20 specials where they go into hotels and show you with a blacklight all the places on the comforter/chair/wall/mirror/ceiling that bodily fluids have been squirted? Well this commercial is rife with that kind of gross-out factor!

I found myself smirking just a bit when it first came on... then a bit more... then giggling... and before long, the giggles turned into guffaws, particularly when I saw this screen:

Not only was I laughing so hard that I nearly wet myself, which ironically would cause me to need this product (and thus had me seeing the genius behind the advertising campaign), but at this point I also became thoroughly confused.

I mean, you tell me: are we supposed to understand this as a substance that "works on" actually removing troublesome "wood, tile, concrete, linoleum," or is it a cleaner that gets that pesky urine out of your "blood, feces, organic matter"? Urine Gone, don't leave me hanging! Inquiring minds want to know!

Despite my confusion, I love this ad. It's true. I love you, Urine Gone commercial! With every ounce of "organic matter" in my body! Indoors & out!

(* Urine Gone is not to be confused with SEMENEX**.)

(** And Semenex should NEVER be confused with SEMENAX.)

Dear Abby:

I feel really, really ashamed of this... but I've just got to come clean. For the last year or so I've been avoiding someone... someone I've known forever and a day.

Now don't get me wrong. I've known her since we lived next door to each other in 7th grade and I love her to death. She's a sweet, caring, wonderful person... who just happens to have the creepiest taste in men. I mean it's worse than my taste in men often is, and that says a lot. (If you're on my friends list and think you're one of those men, you're not, okay!)

Anyway, T is on her second husband right now and I haven't known this guy all that long... only a handful of evenings spent hanging out at their house, just the three of us. What creeps me out about him isn't that he spouts off Rush Limbaugh diatribes or has really short arms, it's more than that... I don't really want to put my finger on it, but I guess I will.

Her husband completely creeps me out. He's a close-talker (likes to sit hip-to-hip when talking to me even though their couches are huge), he's always talking about which neighbors of theirs are swingers, and he's always suggesting that I should stay over at their house no matter how much/little I've had to drink and no matter that the drive home is only 40 minutes. I mean, he won't drop it... I'm on my way out the door, getting in my car even, and he's still saying: "We've got plenty of room here, really."

There's also the topic of his favorite party trick: the human heart beat.

Every time I'd hang out with them, he'd bring this up and how he loves to find some unsuspecting person at one of their neighborhood parties and surprise the poor bastard. Why is this creepy, you ask? Because this "trick" consists of him asking if you've ever seen "a human heart beat" and when the uninformed victim inevitably says "no," my friend's husband proceeds to drop trou and do something with his ballsack that makes it simulate a pulsing heart.

My first thought is: "Sweet Jesus, WHY?"

My second thought is: "What kind of delusional megalomaniac would think that anyone (much less a whole room of party goers) would want to see this dude's groceries?"

I've not witnessed this sight, thankfully. I was warned in advance by my friend that her husband liked to do this thing, then got all the gory details as he proceeded to recount the glory of his pulsing nuts.

After a couple of times of this coming up too eagerly in conversation, however, I became afraid that if I were to go back to their house that I might finally fall prey to this trap. Like he'd be hiding around every corner of their house, balls to the wind, waiting to pounce. And forget about me ever sleeping there! No way. I just know that I'd wake in the middle of the night to a pulsing sensation against my cheek.

The last time that I hung out with them, I requested a public place (a mall) and felt slightly more assured that he wouldn't risk it there. I even tried to get it to be a "girls day out" kind of thing, but the nut pusher came along anyhow. Apparently, he just doesn't let her leave his sight. And since then, my friend has emailed me several times, inviting me back to their place for various parties and festivities and I've always had an excuse. Recently, I've gotten so tired of giving excuses that I haven't even answered her last couple of emails at all. It's terrible, I know. But I haven't the energy to fend off the offers anymore.

The question that remains, given that I'm truly a shy and introverted person, is how do I tell my friend of 23 years that her hubby is too creepy for me to ever want to come around again? Do I just let her ask me why I won't come out and then reply, "Your husband's nuts," and let her figure out the double meaning or what?

Signed,
Allergic to Nuts

Girls simultaneously shout "DUH!"

Orgasms: a real ‘turn-off’ for women

17:54 20 June 2005
NewScientist.com news service
Michael Le Page, Copenhagen

For women, it seems, sex is a big turn-off, reveals a brain scanning study. It shows that many areas of the brain switch off during the female orgasm - including those involved with emotion.

“At the moment of orgasm, women do not have any emotional feelings,” says Gert Holstege of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.

His team recruited 13 healthy heterosexual women and their partners. The women were asked to lie with their heads in a PET scanner while the team compared their brain activity in four states: simply resting, faking an orgasm, having their clitoris stimulated by their partner’s fingers, and clitoral stimulation to the point of orgasm.

The results of the study are striking. As the women were stimulated, activity rose in one sensory part of the brain, called the primary somatosensory cortex, but fell in the amygdala and hippocampus, areas involved in alertness and anxiety. During orgasm, activity fell in many more areas of the brain, including the prefrontal cortex, compared with the resting state, Holstege told a meeting of the European Society for Human Reproduction and Development in Copenhagen on Monday.

In one sense the findings appear to confirm what is already known, that women cannot enjoy sex unless they are relaxed and free from worries and distractions. "Fear and anxiety levels have to go down for orgasm. Everyone knows this but we can see it happening in the brain," he explains.

Extraordinary behaviour

From an evolutionary point of view, it could be that the brain switches off the emotions during sex because at such times the chance to produce offspring becomes more important than the survival risk to the individual. Holstege points to the extraordinary behaviour seen in some animals during the breeding season, such as March hares, when the urge to mate seems to override the usual fear of predators.

But Holstege cannot explain why there is such extreme deactivation in so many areas of the brain during orgasm. Only one small part of the brain, in the cerebellum, was more active during female orgasm. The cerebellum is normally associated with coordinating movement, though there is also some evidence that it helps regulate emotions. “We don’t know what activation of the cerebellum corresponds to,” Holstege admits.

His study also revealed clear differences when women were faking an orgasm. Part of the brain involved controlling conscious movement lit up, and there was none of the extreme deactivation.

Next the team hope to look at what happens to the brain in the minutes after orgasm, as well as in patients with sexual problems. The team has already done a similar study involving 11 men, which revealed far less deactivation during orgasm than in women. However, Holstege says the results are probably unreliable and need to be repeated. The problem is that PET scanners measure activity over two minutes - and in men it is all over in a few seconds.

About My Thesis Film...

I fucking PASSED, motherfuckers! Woot!

At some point I'll have it up on the internet for all to see. Unfortunately, it isn't this form of genius that was asked me by my friend Tom:

"so how did the film go? you didn't make a film about a film masters student showing her work to a hostile thesis advisor that happened to display negative personality traits just like your own did you? i guess that much fun should never be had at ones own expense."

No, but unfortunately, too, I'll have to make a number of tweaks and (slightly major) changes to make my thesis committee happy. I should be done with that in... oh... six more weeks or so.

What's She Building?

Everyday, people will write me to check in with the same question: "Hey, She... what have you been up to?"

Well, I'll tell ya. I've been working on audio design for my film and getting almost no sleep because of it.



I have just 11 hours left and I am in crunch mode, so what do I do? That's right. I stop to blog about... well... what I should really be doing instead of blogging.

I've also been severely congested for the last several weeks and think that I'm now getting very attached to Afrin Nasal spray. I love you Afrin. Breathing is the second best thing to having sex... the first best thing being sex, of course.

I'm not complaining about any of this, because I decided after my last whiny blog entry that I would try to look on the bright side more often. I may not have time to get to the grocery store, but that's okay as long as I have some kind of sustenance in the house.

So to end things on a positive note, let me add that I've basically been living off of Diet Coke and fried eggs for a while now, and the resulting 3-days of diarrhea has been fucking awesome! As a matter of fact, I'd go as far as to say that I'd happily recommend this weight loss technique to anyone else too busy or lazy to get their ass into the local gym. Feel the burn, people. Feel.The.Burn. Awesome, I tell ya!

Okay, I'm done reporting in now.
More sound, less chatter.