In defense of the Somewhat Indefensible Elisabeth Grant

At first blush, everything about Lana Del Rey screams "fake". A wannabe posuer. Psuedo-hipster Astroturf.

So of course right away I want to not like her.  After her performance on SNL last night - which I'll get to in a moment - I performed a cursory web search that yielded the following results.

• the fact she's the daughter of an internet millionaire
• in spite of the fact that her dad was a millionaire,  claims to have lived in a trailer home and was barely able to afford Cocoa Puffs, which is I guess a weird way of saying you're having trouble making ends meet?
  
• the fact that she admits that her stage name "came from a series of managers and lawyers over the last 5 years..." (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lana_Del_Rey )
  
•  her first album has mysteriously vanished (a la Alanis Morissette)
• and of course rumors of plastic surgery

First off, I cannot confirm the fact that her dad is indeed an incredibly wealthy man; judging from his website, he kind of seems like a guy who just did alright for himself in the shady field of domain name speculation and designing crappy-looking websites seemingly modeled off of his own crappy-looking website. And she does seem to have quite a bit of representation and management  for a girl who used to live IN A VAN DOWN BY THE RIVER!!!! but whatever.  I certainly don't see any smoking gun indicating her daddy bought all this for her.  To the contrary, it seems like she had a wild streak and her dad sort of disowned her for a bit. That would explain how she could live in a trailer park yet still have a penchant for top-dollar breakfast foodstuffs, right?

The disappearing of her first album is pretty weird, but Alanis Morissette did the same damn thing.  Now that I think of it, many of the issues people have with Lana have previously been mentioned in reference to Alanis.  OMG - if you rearrange the letters in 'Alanis', you get 'is Lana'...they're the same damn person, I bet!  I mean, who has heard from Ms. Morissette lately, hmmm?

As far as the plastic surgery goes, I just don't see it (disallowing, for the moment, the very real possibility that she is in fact Alanis - then she'd need to have had the surgery). Her lips don't look that different to me; they just appear to be painted differently. I will wager that she wears a wig, though.

Now, back to SNL.

Having not heard of her before last night, I was not subject to any buzz expectations, however I, like Juliette Lewis, was a little underwhelmed by her performance of 'Video Games'.  In an apparently since deleted tweet, she was heard to remark:

“Wow watching this ‘singer’ on SNL is like watching a 12 yearold in their bedroom when theyre pretending to sing and perform #signofourtimes.”

But Juliette is a Scientologist who supports Ron Paul for President and seems to post her every damn thought on the interwebs, so I take that with a grain of salt.  Plus she is a chicken shit and retracted it the next day. Have the courage of your convictions, girl! (Loved you in 'Natural Born Killers & 'Shit Grils Say', BTW) Let's move on.

Her next song (also, of course, her last, as you would know if you stayed in on Saturday nights like me often enough that you could basically be the show runner for SNL if you had to) was the one that got me.  And not just her singing, or the lyrics; no, was I really enjoyed was the musical sensibilities of Blue Jeans.



OK, I'll admit I have no idea WTF the deal is with her voice. Maybe she was just nervous.  But no one can accuse her of lip-synching like Ashlee Simpson, amirite? 

Now, of course, the lyrics are hardly original.  Hell, I'm sure you could probably pick every line in the chorus from another song. And the whole song reminds me a little of 'Wicked Game'.  But I don't care.  I just don't effing care.  Her key changes are interesting and exquisite. And she writes her own material, which is a huge plus in my book.

Here's a better version, just because I love you guys:

Oh my God.  That's the stuff - right when the music grinds to a halt after she says "end of time". Love it!

Two Gays Soldier Videos That Will Make You Cry

An interesting juxtaposition of videos, contrasting the bravery of US soldiers who lay their lives on the line for the rest of us...





...and of the people who cynically pander to the country using the troops as props to progress their own divisive, heartless agendas...



Not one of the GOP candidates chastised the people booing in the audience.  So I guess it's support our troops unless they're gay.  If they're gay, hopefully they'll go into a coma and die without insurance or Rick Perry will just execute them.  Don't look now, Rick, but Georgia is starting to catch up with your death toll!

SoFoBoMo Uh Oh!

Failure.

At least I can take some comfort that the failure was of a technical rather than artistic nature. I did get the SoFoBoMo picture book project done; unfortunately, the file size of my completed PDF was about 4 times the maximum file upload size. I'm by no means a Gimp expert, and the time and effort it would have taken to shrink all 35 pictures down enough to meet the file size requirements were imposing enough to convince me to bail.

Now, an important part of goal-setting is to leave yourself open to the possibility of public ridicule, and so I once again declare: failure. Hoist the failure sails. Worse yet, in the interest of public humiliation, a link to my completed photo book.
 

I'm actually fairly happy with many of the pictures.

But oh, the words. The stupid little words. The hardest part of this whole picture book experience was the words. That what I spent the most time on, and it's the part I'm least happy with.  Please, just don't read them...you'll just embarrass us both.

SoFoBoMo like a MoFo

You know what's great about the internet besides cat videos and illegal Cat Power downloads and hipster kitty? Oh, you've never heard of hipster kitty? Yeah, I figured you probably wouldn't have. But I digress, where was I?



Ah yes, the greatest (non-cat related) thing about the internet is that there's always some organization hosting an activity that you can participate in. And it almost always has a stupid cutesy name. It's like a singles mixer for shut-ins - so it's sad, but at least you can be alone in your sorrow, which is way less awkward.

Like right now; it's SoFoBoMo time! You get 31 days from July through August to produce a pdf proof of a photo book. Yes, I realize that July through August is actually 62 days, but they have some silly rules I didn't really bother reading, and the point isn't to count days, it's to get off your ass and do something. That something is take pictures. Then you get right back on your ass and get those pics into your computer. So it's like shit you would do anyway, only this time instead of taking pictures of everyone drunk at your class reunion, you take pictures of clouds or fields or shorelines or something. Is it really to much for the internet to ask that you stop behaving like a complete Philistine for a month or so out of your life?

On the SoFoBoMo site, there are links to projects that past and current participants have completed and uploaded. Some are so good that they make you want to just give up before you even get started. Many, however, have an more encouraging "Hey, I could do that!" quality to them.




So why not give it a shot? At least it'll give you something to do while waiting for this video to load.




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Listening to: 7 Year Bitch - Whoopie Cat
via FoxyTunes

What I did on my summer vacation

Dear internets,

Wow, has it really been a whole year? No? Oh well, absence makes the heart grow cankles and so forth.

Anyway, things have been super nuts this year, some douchebag in Wisconsin decided it would be a super great idea to take money from teachers and give it to yacht makers, beer barons, and I don't know, probably monocle sweatshop industrialists. This upset folks for some reason.

Let's see, what else. Ah, I know! I've been messing around with twitter a little bit, so now when I'm composing email and posting stupid blog posts and whatnot, I only hit the space bar once after a period instead of twice. I've heard that whenever you hit the space bar twice, your old English teacher has an orgasm. So, thank you, Twitter, for that.

And OMG, did you hear about this Casey Anthony lady? What a bitch, the people on TV tell me.

So anyway, back to me; I put this Rage Comic together, which took not really all that long. Geez, I've really wasted my summer hiding from the angry sun all summer.



Ha, I'm not so much a bad cook as a lazy one.

I suppose I've also been doing some writing, well, more to the tedious point, editing. I'll be posting the least bad versions of a few things shortly. And who knows, maybe some classy jokes, too. I'd like to tell you a Casey Anthony joke, but my mom would kill me.


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Listening to: Lenny Kravitz - Always On The Run
via FoxyTunes

Best thing ever (so far today)

Is there, deep in your heart, a desire to hear the great scenes in cinema history dubbed with the voices from SpongeBob Squarepants?

You're welcome!

OMG! RLHS? WTF?!?

OMG...do you guys like superheroes? Like in real life?

How about the movie Kick-Ass? Did you leave the theater, striding up the carpeted incline to the uplifting music thinking, "Yeah, I am so going to have to finally do that!" And if not, what the fsck is wrong with you?!?

Did you wear a cape as a child? (I did - I think it was a beach towel fastened with a safety pin) Well, why not pull it out of the back of the closet and come out as a Real Life Super Hero?

This site is awesome! You could spend hours, or at least halves-of-hours, just repeatedly hitting the 'Random Page' button.



These guys just dress up and go out and foil crimes. Yeah, that's all. How do you spend your Thursday nights? Watching Community? OK, I can see that; it's an excellent show. But are you still on the couch when Trump's ugly mug is on? Not these guys.

One of them says he goes around spray painting over graffiti:

“I use a cell phone, flashlight and a can of gray spray paint all the time. The spray paint is to paint a neutral color over gang graffiti, thus reclaiming the neighborhood for the people and not the gangs. It's supposed to be a lethal insult to the gang (meaning they have the ‘right’ to kill you for doing it.).”

Myself, I hold my keyring in my fist when walking after dark, making sure that the individual keys stick out between my clenched fingers. Kick ass!

You know what else is a good movie? Undercover Brother.





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Listening to: Best Friends Forever - BFF Theme Song
via FoxyTunes