Letters to Holly

Wednesday, January 9

Going to a Show

Maybe, like a lot of high school kids, you watched a TV miniseries of The Scarlet Letter. It was produced by the Boston PBS station back in 1979, and many English teachers rely on it to help kids dig the Hawthorne book. I saw it in 10th grade. Your Sister saw it around the same time and fell madly in filthy, pagan lust with the guy playing the preacher.

Well, guess who's coming to Asheville in a touring play? When I heard the radio ad for the show Wednesday morning, I left her a message asking if she wanted tickets. Five hours later, through spooky willpower, I heard her reply even before my phone rang. We're going next weekend. I may be asked to walk around the theatre so she can be alone with him. And the other 300 audience members, of course. She's fully aware that he'll be thirty years older now. Don't think it matters.

Picture of the Day
Timing.




In the News
New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson is allegedly leaving the campaign later today. This is surprising; he said earlier this week that he had high hopes for winning western primaries. I thought he'd stick around a while to bolster his case for a cabinet position. Presumably, he simply doesn't have the money to continue. Three states have issued delegates: Iowa, Wyoming (GOP only), and New Hampshire. In five contests, there have been five different winners. Richardson can be seen as a solid second-place candidate. But I suspect his Hispanic heritage works against him. Too many yokels will fret he'll be kind to illegals.

Romney expects/hopes/needs to win Michigan next Tuesday because his dad was governor there. The Democrats are boycotting the state because the local party chiefs broke ranks to move the primary up the calendar. FOX is hosting a GOP debate tonight. It's seen as a last-gasp measure for Thompson and Guilani, who is gambling on winning the Florida primary later this month to jumpstart his campaign.

NY Mayor Bloomberg is still rumored to debate a presidential bid, but he has to hop in quick to get onto ballots of states for next month's multiple-primary Tuesday or he'll dig himself a delegate hole.

+ + +

Radiohead's In Rainbows was last week's best-selling CD even though the entire album was released digitally a few months back. I bought my copy after downloading the album without paying. The CD only sold 120,000 copies, but still came out on top.

Watching New Hampshire

After watching the Monday Daily Show and Colbert Report, we expected to call it a night until I flipped to CNN to check on the primaries. Then we watched it for about two hours.

Obviously, the Democrat vote turnout was huge. But the discrepancy between party votes and placement is stunning. Check these out:
  1. Clinton beat McCain by almost 30,000 votes.
  2. McCain got almost 20,000 fewer votes than Obama, the second-place Democrat.
  3. Edwards, the third-place Democrat, beat Huckabee, the third-place Republican, by almost twice as many votes.
  4. Fred Thompson, the drafted candidate meant to save the party from mediocrity, not only came in seventh (and two spots behind write-ins), but he had 1,000 votes fewer than Kucinich, a marginal Democrat candidate.
I found the honeymoon photos you left at Your Parents'. I think Sausage Kitty ate the other cat.

Picture of the Day
Vampire Kermit.

Tuesday, January 8

Let's Hear It For Drugs

I applied the synthetic tears (milked from the ducts of android children forced to watch Iron Giant for hours on end) throughout the day, and, while the eye felt better, the real test was how my eye would behave overnight. I have no idea about this because I popped OxyCotin before going to bed and slept like a mummy/log/driveway. I only use the stash if I have some torturous sleep deprivation, but I can certainly see the appeal of continued use. I feel fantastic. But I did dream about going deaf, like Limbaugh actually did during his Oxy days.

I decided not to audition for the Schoolhouse Rock musical after reading the audition requirements and realizing I didn't know what the musical terms meant. My pie-in-the-sky notion of waltzing in for my first musical and winning a singing role can't stand firm against my sheer ignorance of the lingo. The weekday matinees might not have gone over well with work either. Still, yeah, I would like to have tried it. There is the Mayberry theatre offer still standing, but I'd like to read the script and see the performance space before signing on to that show. I'm also making real progress on my comic script.

Your Parents' house is also still standing. The larger cat devoured the food before the other one could emerge from the shadows. The bathroom sink pipes have lit light bulbs over them to keep them from freezing. While I was given no note about them, I'm tempted to turn them off during this freakish warm spell.

Picture of the Day
Fire up the grannies.

Monday, January 7

Eye eye eye.

We took advantage of freakishly warm weather to work in the yard Saturday. She pruned while I went under the house for the first time. I expected to find a slim crawlspace leading to a bog, but found a manageable area that was bone dry. So our house foundation is secure. The previous owners wrapped the pipes in a plastic tubing I had never even heard of before, but it looks very sturdy. I also used my lawnmower to slice and bag the yard leaves. It worked great, proving again the boon of technology to those of us with mysteriously achy backs.

Unfortunately, a chunk of yard drifted inside my eyelids, laid eggs and died, and those eggs hatched, unleashing their young around 5 in the morning. I thought I had cleared out my eye, but the same problem developed this morning around 3. I went to the eye doctor this morning, and he found nothing, saying the foliage had left me eyes, but the scratched cornea is achy. he gave me synthetic tears to help my eyes heal. This happened to me in my childhood too. I mowed a neighbor's yard and spent the entirety of Back to the Future (in the theatre, so this was like 1935) dabbing my eye before I was taken to the emergency room. If I have trouble sleeping tonight from the lingering pain, I'm digging into my wisdom tooth medicine which I could have sold at the high school for a eleventy thousand dollars.

We named the Matrix this weekend. I had noodled with references to its football shape, and then I realized the paint is the same shade of silver as the New England Patriots helmets and out sprang "Brady." Your Sis approved. It only took us eight months.

We hosted Kathy and Travis last night for a pizza dinner, and we caught up on holiday events. Hard to believe it's only been a week since Tim and Orange Peel and the Krewe.

Picture of the Day
Madness.




News of the Day
Between playoff football games, I watched a lot of C-Span's coverage of New Hampshire.
a) Obama looks as confident and solid as a front-runner can.
b) Hillary's new tactic of accusing Obama of being hollow looks like she herself has no substance to hawk.
c) Bill Clinton spoke without notes, answering questions for an hour and utterly eclipsing every current candidate. The man is a machine.
d) Obama's wife spoke mostly to youngsters, and she has a casual air away from the podium.
e) Huckabee talks a good game. Too bad he denies evolution.
f) Rudy looks tired. I say he drops out within a month.