# 31 Dec 2006, 10:04AM: MC Masala on Sister-Sister Talk:
MC Masala this week is something I actually like. My dad used to say that the private or inexplicable conversations between me and my sister were "sister-sister talk." This column has some of that flavor.
On Saturdays in Stockton, we waited half an hour after our parents left for prayer rituals, then sneaked off to the S-Mart for videos, licorice ropes (me) and cookie dough (her). We picked one film each, and like Grade Point Averages, our Video Point Averages went up or down as our choices turned out great ("Clueless") or horrible ("Article 99"). And then there was the time I rented "Glengarry Glen Ross" and our parents came home and heard the cussing and never let me finish. Maybe I'd actually understand that movie now.
I rode the subway with my sister the day after Christmas, delivering her to her bus back to D.C., marveling that she can make me laugh as no one else can. We've been hanging out for 20-odd years, watching movies good and bad, entertaining ourselves on long car rides and making up play universes for those long afternoons when we were too young to sneak off to S-Mart.
# (1) 31 Dec 2006, 09:33PM: Jonathan Coulton Song Reminds Me Of Leonard Blog Entries:
"The Future Soon" reminds me of "Oh but it's not the future yet Giblets" you say, "You just need to wait til the video of the present becomes the kitchen of the future." Maybe it was the present this afternoon but now it's the future and still no kitchen!
Coulton is sort of an uncredited coauthor of John Hodgman's career. Leonard just bought and read Hodgman's The Areas of My Expertise while I was finishing Asimov's Foundation and Empire and starting on Second Foundation. I ended up taking a New Year's Eve nap.
I used to lurve Asimov. I used to be a twelve-year-old girl. Susan Calvin is, after all, cranky and brilliant and awesome, sort of Housian. It's only after growing up and trying to read stuff written between 1942 and 1953 that I feel the datedness. People untold centuries from now talk and act like middle-class white US men from the 1950s, as though the most revolutionary technology only inserted the word "space" into our sentences and grew tobacco on Vega instead of in Virginia. I know, it's supposed to be a retelling of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, but still. At least Battlestar Galactica is nearly self-parodying in its present-referentiality, without as much self-indulgent wish-fulfillment.
Cause it's gonna be the future soon
And I won't always be this way
When the things that make me weak and strange get engineered away
It's gonna be the future soon
I've never seen it quite so clear
And when my heart is breaking I can close my eyes and it's already here
Nonetheless: Happy New Year!
# 31 Dec 2006, 11:50PM: Phrases With The Same Rhythm As "Blister In The Sun":
- serpent in the grass
- raisin in the sun
- speaker of the house
- novel is a book
- Wizards of the Coast
- leader of the pack
- faces of the dead
