Here’s the WTF?!?!?!!!! moment of the day. Actual spam received over the weekend:
Sell Your Organs Online!
Reply to this message if your interested in selling your organs!
Seriously, what the hell?
Forget the fact that selling organs is illegal in the US. And I’m sure mailing them across state lines would be a felony. And you sure as heck can’t list them on eBay. Or Amazon—can you imagine? “15 new and used livers available.” “Customers who purchased kidneys also bought…”
I stopped in a Starbucks after lunch last Wednesday. I confused the barista by ordering a frappucino—he said something about how I was going to freeze my kidneys or something, and when I remarked that I was going to be in the office, he said he was joking with everyone who ordered anything cold. (Local readers may recall that last week was not particularly warm by SoCal standards.)
I also noticed a stack of boxes by the wall, all of them like this:
(For the record, this was November 9.) I assumed they were full of Starbucks’ Christmas and holiday-themed merchandise, but it was the phrasing that got me. The holidays start November 10? That’s kind of early, isn’t it?
I suppose it depends on which holidays we’re talking about. Usually, “The Holidays” refers to the Thanksgiving–Christmas period that also manages to encompass Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, and Boxing Day. (Wait, no one actually observes Boxing Day? Well, never mind, then.) They could be including Veterans’ Day, but there’s not much in the way of decorations, and the merchandising possibilities don’t tend to overlap much with coffee paraphernalia.
Hmm, here’s an odd thought. In America, we always associate snow with Christmas. Hence the snowflakes printed on the box. But in the southern hemisphere, December is the beginning of summer. I suspect Christmas songs like “Winter Wonderland” don’t get much play in Australia.
Mark Evanier’s review of Penn and Teller: Off the Deep End reminded me of two things: First, I forgot to watch the show. Secondly, on Thursday evening I caught an interesting commentary on the radio: Alien Encounters: Dolphins and a Magician. And no, it’s not Penn sounding off—it’s Teller. Yes, the guy who (almost) never talks on camera. While preparing for the underwater magic show, he turned around and came face to face with a dolphin, and… well, it’s probably best if you let him tell the story.
Saw this at Target today. I suppose I shouldn’t be much of a wine purist, since I don’t drink much myself (I think we have one bottle in the apartment, and we haven’t opened it in the year+ we’ve had it)—but somehow I can’t bring myself to buy wine-in-a-box.
I mean, think about it. “You, me and a box of wine.” How appealing does that sound?
Then of course there’s the fact that the boxes are roughly the size of the Macintosh G4 Cube. And of course, that brings up thoughts of the WINE project (which allows many Windows applications to run on Linux), but of course that won’t run on a PowerPC chip…
You know, somehow I wasn’t convinced we’d actually run out of hurricane names this year, even though it looked possible. But the National Hurricane Center has just named tropical storm depression Alpha, marking the first time more than 21 tropical storms have been recorded in the Atlantic in one year.
Just got an email from Disney on Broadway (I assume I must have given them my email address when I bought Lion King tickets several years ago) offering me advance tickets to their new Broadway show, Tarzan.
WTF?
Admittedly, I thought The Lion King was an odd choice for a stage musical, and it turned out to be quite good. But Tarzan? I mean, it’s a weird enough choice for a musical in the first place, but Disney’s cartoon wasn’t even really a musical—it was a movie with a Phil Collins soundtrack.
I wish I could remember exactly what Aimee Mann said last week when she introduced “Save Me.” It was something like “Yes, this is the song that lost the Oscar to Phil Collins and his cartoon monkeys monkey love song.” (Katie remembered it.) Apparently she says this regularly.
Bleah. I’d rather they put together a new tour of Beauty and the Beast. With any luck it’ll still be playing when we finally get around to visiting New York. (I honestly didn’t know it was still playing now until I went to look at the Tarzan info.)
Last night we went out to see Evita at the Orange County Performing Arts Center. It was a good production, but it was a slightly odd experience for me because it was based on the original staging by Hal Prince. Back in college, I was in a production of the show at school…and our director also based it on the original staging. Visually, the show was almost exactly what we would have done if we’d had the budget. (And a full orchestra, and more experienced actors, and so on.) They did make different choices in characterization at points—Eva was harder, Che was more comedic, etc.—but there was a definite deja vu element. (Katie will get her turn at deja vu next week when we see Carmina Burana.)
It also got me thinking about the structure of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s shows . His early works, like Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita and Cats and tend to be much more presentational. There’s lots of breaking the fourth wall, large chunks of Evita are symbolic (and the second half of act 2 is very disjointed), and many of them actually have narrators (Judas, Che, or just “The Narrator” in Joseph). But by the time you get to The Phantom of the Opera, the structure is entirely narrative. I’m not sure how much of that is Lloyd Webber changing his style and how much of it is moving to a new lyricist (Tim Rice worked on Joseph, Superstar and Evita). I don’t know Starlight Express very well, but what I’ve heard seems to fit more with Phantom, Sunset Boulevard, and Whistle Down the Wind.
Looking over at that site, I’ve discovered three more ALW shows I didn’t even know about. It’s not surprising when I think about it, though. I have been out of the musical theater loop for a few years. I mean, the big exciting musical event for me this year? The film adaptation of Rent that opens next month. I’m really looking forward to that, and the show is almost 10 years old!
