I was just in a little voodoo shop in the French Quarter of New Orleans and received the long awaited phone call from Denise of Grace Films (aka The Simpsons). My class may get a guest speaker!

In other news, it takes way too long to go anywhere or do anything with five people!

Well, classes start on Monday and I’m finally ready for them, but I didn’t have a day off this week (and I won’t this weekend, either). Oh, well.

I’m almost over my frakking disappointment about the end of BSG. Almost. Maybe I just need to decide that I shouldn’t worry about it. The writer made it all weird–because he’s an angel and god wanted it to suck for some reason.

Things to look forward to: Margaret Atwood is writing a short story for the Canadian libraries. Should be able to access it online next month. A new Monty Python documentary will be available in October.

In other news, The Simpsons won me back with their latest episode. They go to Ireland and the jokes are funny and there are references to Bloomsday and the couple from Once is in it–perfection!

I was rather caught off guard by what was probably the last ever episode of Flight of the Conchords. It didn’t feel like an ending until the last couple of minutes, when everything wrapped up really nicely. Whatever angel wrote that show managed to do a good job.

Oh, wait–maybe god’s plan was to make the end of BSG suck so that I would appreciate the finale of Conchords!

Anyway, as much as I love Conchords, I’m not that upset if it’s indeed over. Season one was great; this season has had great moments, but the songs haven’t been as good (on average). I’m just going to have to get the DVDs and celebrate with them quietly every once in a while.

Flash forward to me doing so in a few decades–and then one of the songs activates the cylon part of me. And then I do some math. And then I ascend, embarrassed that I ever doubted.

Ok, I’m apparently not over it at all.

is here: http://www.matchflick.com/column/1906 Just getting my Doris Day on.

In other news, it’s supposedly Spring Break, yet I’m working about twelve hours a day anyway. I’m going to try really hard not to take any non-conference related work to the conference I have in a couple of weeks, at any rate.

Denise had the audacity to say in a recent blog that a conservative pundit shouldn’t bash McCain’s daughter on her weight (basically–you want to talk about issues, right?). Well, now some “John Doe” is calling my BFF a “fat dyke” and threatening to bitchslap her.

I know there are rude, thoughtless people on all sides of politics, but I have to say that I don’t know how Republicans think they’re going to recruit with attitudes like that. (I know–his overt position wasn’t to recruit, but what’s the point in refusing to dialogue? Isn’t the whole point to put yourself in a position where the opponent might see it your way?) (And yes, it does bother me when people from my side of issues make asses of themselves, as people then judge me by their behavior.)

You can read it all here:

http://deniseduvernay.wordpress.com/2009/03/17/laura-ingraham-quit-talking-about-our-bodies/

http://deniseduvernay.wordpress.com/2009/03/19/what-feminism-the-world-need-now-positivity/#comment-62

Denise–wear it proudly! We are what feminists look like!

One of my friends had an op-ed come out today about the government’s relationship with the Taliban. Check it out here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/17/opinion/17rouse.html?ref=opinion

That’s right–it’s Saint Urho’s Day!  Now, some of you may notice that Finland is a traditionally Lutheran country and that there is no Saint Urho in the Church, anyway.  Saint Urho’s day is indeed made up–Finnish immigrants wanted their own day to get drunk at the start of Spring (this was back when only Irish people celebrated St. Patrick).

So they made up their own holiday.  And why not?  All holidays are basically made up and/or have changed incredibly over the centuries.  Why not celebrate that which is fake?

Reasons why St. Urho’s Day is superior to Saint Patrick’s day:  it’s the day before.  St. Patrick was a dick.  It wasn’t “snakes” he drove out of Ireland–it was Norwegians.  St. Patrick is famous for being anti-immigrant.

If Patrick drove out the snakes, the Finns decided that Urho drove out the grasshoppers and saved the wine crop.  So put on some green and purple and drink some wine.  And when people try to hand you a green beer tomorrow, tell them you’ve already celebrated (unless you’d still like to drink–in which case, you should have some decent beer or another bottle of wine).

With the advent of Twitter, I don’t see how “twitterpated” won’t make it back into the regular lexicon. Denise and I are fairly twitterpated this week. A certain director of The Simpsons movie twittered us after Denise said she was working on the Linguistics section of the book.

Since, he’s asked to see my syllabus! It’s the best thing that’s happened in a relatively lousy week. I won’t go into the lousy stuff.

Instead, I’ll go back to linguistics–why do we call a twitter response a “tweet” and not a “twit”? Then we could say, “This twit says she’s eating egg salad for lunch.” And, as a friend suggested this week, is the past tense of “tweet” “twat”?

http://www.matchflick.com/column/1893

Woohoo!