Tag Archives: Nerdery

I invite you to go elsewhere

  By Eden M. Kennedy | March 23, 2012 - 11:26 am |
5 Comments

I have two posts up in other places this week, both of them exciting investigations into the deep, dark subject of celebrities that I think are cute. The one up at The Popcorn Whisperer is entitled, Movie Clips I’d Like to See at the 2013 Oscars. My main goal was to write something that would reveal myself to myself, but then I got lazy and stopped wondering why I have so much affection for a bunch of famous people I’ve never met. How adorable do I find Drew Barrymore? Very. Paul Rudd? Charming as pie. But it’s Laurence Fishburne I’ll always adore no matter how pouchy he gets, because I remember when he was just Larry, a gangly teenager grooving his way upriver in Apocalypse Now, and then the next thing I knew he was goofy Cowboy Curtis wooing Miss Yvonne with all his twangling heart, and then what? Super sexy in Deep Cover (with my other boyfriend, Jeff Goldblum), and then bam! Othello! Which you’d think would be the pinnacle of his career, but no, suddenly he’s wearing a long leather coat and unlocking the secret of time itself for an addled Keanu Reeves. He’s just two heartbeats away from becoming Darth Vader’s cranky grandfather in a chrome helmet, and I’m probably going to start a Tumblr called fuckyeahlaurencefishburne. I’ll let you know if that happens. I’m still kind of busy unpacking.

The other thing I wrote is 5 Ways to Meet Celebrities Without Looking Like a Stalker, which started as an off-the-cuff idea that a couple of editors really responded to, but writing it made me realize how sadly excited I’ve been to run into movie stars throughout my life. I’m not sure if it’s because I’m kind of repressed and these people get to be emotionally vulnerable for a living, and so they appear to be living out parts of my life that I don’t have the guts to inhabit, or what. I’m sure studies have been done. (Oh, look, here’s one: Celebrity Worship Syndrome. I’m going to go ahead and self-diagnose on the not-pathological end of the scale.)

In conclusion, thank you for reading, click on those links and read me elsewhere if it sounds like something you want to do, and let’s all have the nicest weekend possible!

What is this?

  By Eden M. Kennedy | January 30, 2012 - 6:56 pm | ,
43 Comments

Jack says it’s a “potato bug.”

I almost stepped on this little fellow last week when we were walking along the bluffs. Since it was still wiggling its feet a bit, Jack flipped it over so I could take a proper portrait. It was huge! Like, two inches long. My god, it looks like a dinosaur, doesn’t it.

This handsome dinosaur bug is most assuredly dead by now, and I say it like that because I’ve been reading Evelyn Waugh.

Growth is painful

  By Eden M. Kennedy | January 24, 2012 - 2:44 pm | ,
32 Comments

Yeah, I cut my hair again. (Did you really think I wouldn’t?) I may have to finally admit that long hair is for those who have long-hair lifestyles and long-hair self images. People who are able to ignore the pain and frustration of hair blowing into their face/eyes; who are not irritated as fuck when their hair gets tangled in their bag strap or zipped into a dress. These are the blessed, for whom being romantic and windswept looks natural, instead of laughable.

Unfortunately, my son is in the thick of his need for me to look “like other moms,” for which this hair cut does not qualify. The only other short-hair mom at his school moved back to the Netherlands (so now I’m the tallest mom, too! The obviousness of my sticking-outedness is mythological in scope. Grrr, Mrs. Kennedy SMASH!). Last night, after I came home from work and he saw what I’d done to myself, he stopped just short of begging me to wear a hat. But this is a child who also thinks I should drive a Mustang, wear knee-high boots, and take him to Disneyland for a week. I don’t really understand how any of that will help me blend in.

(Video made using Everyday.)

The widening gyre

  By Eden M. Kennedy | January 10, 2012 - 11:28 am | ,
38 Comments

STRANGE NOISE UPDATE: After I posted yesterday, I went outside to have a look around Jackson’s window to see if there was any evidence of foul play from the outside of the building. Here is what I found!

1. A slight vertical shadow of dirt or something on the ledge below his window, and a smudge of something above it that could have been created by some sort of impact:

2. And in the bushes across the sidewalk, this:

I don’t know exactly what it’s composed of, of course, but it wasn’t like any other rock on the ground nearby. I took it in to work, just in case anyone knew anything about geology. My boss suggested putting it on the check-out counter with a little sign that said “Do you know what kind of rock this is?” but it got busy and I forgot. A Google image search for meteorites makes me think maybe I’m in the ballpark, but it’s still pure speculation. Thank you, everyone, for your interesting explanations for the many things that go bump in the night, I think we all need to catch up on our sleep.

SECOND THING UPDATE: Now that the holidays are over and everyone’s life sucks again, hardly anyone asked me “How are you?” at work yesterday, so when it did happen I was able to get closer to what exactly it is that bugs me about it. And then I did it to the guy checking my groceries at Vons! Oh my God, I was all, “HOW ARE YOU?” and he ducked his head and gave me this totally affectless “Fine, thanks” which clarified everything. My new theory is: “How are you?” is a totally bland, rote, inauthentic way of beginning an interaction with someone you don’t know, which is fine except that it throws up a barrier to any real further exchange between you. It can actually establish a polite distance between you, as opposed to the possible intimacy of a companionable (or even a purely functional) silence. So if I ask the check-out guy at Vons how he is, I could be doing it because I really don’t want to talk to him.

OR I might assume that he has hundreds of meaningless interactions during the day and (a) I think that must suck, or (b) I feel sympathy for my idea of a downtrodden, ignored check-out guy, even if that has nothing to do with who he is and is actually pretty patronizing, to assume he needs me to uplift his probably-fine existence, or (c) I don’t want to be another face in the mooing herd of people buying beer all day long, or (d) I don’t want to live through another thoughtless interaction with a stranger myself. And all this is going through my head, while the check-out guy at Vons is probably thinking, Organic produce is bullshit, or, I wonder if I’m going to get in trouble for coming back from my break ten minutes late? or This lady in front of me is smokin’ hot, I sure do like middle-aged white women with frizzy, graying hair.

LAST THING: It’s my birthday today, and if you’re feeling at all depressed about slowly becoming old and decrepit, you need to go here. It’s a long right-scrolling line of photos of white girls/ladies from the ages of 0 to 100. (The link for white boys/men is here.) If you start at 0 and watch as they all slowly fall apart, it can trigger some feelings of doom, BUT if you start at 100 and scroll left and watch everyone get younger, suddenly 70-year-olds look fucking fantastic. So being on the slippery slope to 50 feels A-OK today, folks.

Day Nineteen

  By Eden M. Kennedy | November 19, 2011 - 8:24 pm | , ,
14 Comments

I was at work today looking around for books to add to the Staff Picks shelf. There are a few books that I’m continually putting up there, like The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate and The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing, but when all my favorites are checked out I have to start grabbing stuff that you’d reasonably believe a middle-aged woman whose book club only keeps on their e-mail list out of pity would recommend to you.

I was wandering through fiction hoping for inspiration when I found an old Wodehouse novel called Jeeves and the Tie That Binds. The inside flap said rather effusively that P.G. Wodehouse published this book on his ninetieth birthday, and that this was his best novel yet, and also that it was clever, delightful, uproarious, entertaining, and fun. Skeptically, I flipped the book over to see if there was more hyperbole on the back:

Nope! But he could still touch his toes. Best author photo ever.

Day Fifteen

  By Eden M. Kennedy | November 15, 2011 - 6:30 pm | ,
6 Comments

Draw a squirrel choking a chipmunk.

Why does the chipmunk look like Hitler?

Put sunglasses on the squirrel!

Put a fedora on the squirrel.

Now give him a beard.

Let me do something to the chipmunk! *Adds little mustache*

Yes, Chuck Norris squirrel with platypus feet is killing swollen Hitler chipmunk.

You are welcome to suffer through me learning how to draw cartoon characters, but it’s not going to be pretty.

This is how I know my dog can read

  By Eden M. Kennedy | July 20, 2011 - 11:35 am |
36 Comments

Peewee had been eating the same canned food pretty happily for the last six months and then all of a sudden I couldn’t find it in the store. After digging around a little while I realized that they’d changed the label on the can. Nutrisca food was now Dogswell.

I bought the Dogswell, and yesterday I was trying to figure out why he won’t eat it. We’d always mixed a few tablespoons of the canned food in with another brand of dry food and he’d always vacuumed it right up, but now he was walking away, leaving the whole mess untouched. Did they change the food inside the can along with the label? It looked the same. Was he just sick of it? He rejected all three different flavors. Was he feeling unwell? He was acting normal on all other counts. Was there something else going on?

More to the point: can my dog read?

I feel like they want us to read Dogswell in two ways: “dogs well” (Our dogs, they are well) or “dog swell” (My dog’s doing swell, thanks). The second way is kind of a stretch, as I know no one who uses the word “swell” as a descriptor in the year 2011 unless maybe, MAYBE, they’re over the age of 90. As a child of the 70s I’ve been known to say anachronistic things like “Right on,” and a friend of mine who’s slightly older says “Far out!” once in awhile, which reminds me of John Denver, who was once so earnest, singing about chickens down on the farm, and this friend of mine raises chickens.

But the third way I read Dogswell, and which had to have come up in a meeting or two, is “dog swell” as in Dear God, my dog is swelling, and if we don’t do something soon he’s going to burst.

I know nothing about creating brands beyond the fact that it must be terribly difficult. Even my non-swollen dog who can read knows that. (Not being a member of the Grammar Police, I’m not sure if you’re supposed to use “who” when referring to a dog, but writing “Even my swollen dog that can read” seems callous. My dog, apart from being 7/8 human, reads human gestures and body language at at least a middle school level. He’s no Albert Einstein (nor is he a swollen Albert Einstein) but I’d pit him head to head against any one of those mob wives on TV.)

My point is, if your brand name word play is successful in only two out of three interpretations, and the third one makes dogs who can read walk away from your food because all they can think about is puking or bursting, maybe you should dig a little deeper for a new name. Admittedly, this is coming from a woman who saddled herself with the name Fussy ten years ago, and half of whose search referrals come from people who are clearly misspelling the word pussy. So, yeah, measure twice, cut once.

I just went to their site and laughed out loud because they also have a “Catswell” line. Oh, God, I need to leave the house today.

I am tired

  By Eden M. Kennedy | June 29, 2011 - 12:27 pm | ,
16 Comments

I’ve decided to continue ignoring Flickr and keep posting MY random photographs here on MY site. I don’t care if it’s inconvenient for everyone to have to come over to MY SITE to see MY THINGS. I don’t care if no one misses me over in Flickrland. I’m happy that I have a bunch of old photos stored there, especially after my back-up hard drive ate the high-res versions (low-res is better than no-res at all), but fuck Flickr. Thank you, and fuck you. I frequently have both of those feelings at the same time, as I’m sure many people do. I love you but I fucking hate you. Equally.

It feels right.

Here’s the birthday cake I made for Jackson.

He wanted a bunch of Naruto stuff for his birthday, some of which he got. It turns out that the red cloud symbol is actually used by the Naruto bad-guy gangster types, the Akatsuki, but whatever. We can’t all worship Pat Boone. I had an unhealthy desire to be a Playboy Bunny when I was a girl, but I got through it.

Man, I am cranky. Week-night sleepovers are a bad idea.

MaxFunCon

  By Eden M. Kennedy | June 15, 2011 - 12:35 pm | ,
16 Comments

It costs me $70.00 to fill up my car at current prices. SEVENTY DOLLARS. And then I have to do it twice a month, sometimes more. What else can you get for $70? Ten movie tickets. Thirty-five medium-sized Fuji apples. Nine-tenths of a Snowball microphone. When I was a kid I drove a Volkswagen Bug with a ten-gallon tank and thus it cost me $10.00 to fill it up. One-dollar-a-gallon gas might be the only thing I remember miss about the Reagan years.

I only bring this up because I drove down to MaxFunCon last weekend and whenever I drive to a conference I tend to forget to save my gas receipts for tax purposes, and I would have forgotten this time, too, except that I’d been strangely compelled to print out my last two gas receipts, and then photograph them. Like you do.

The pump just happened to shut off and charge me these oddly symmetrical prices for gas, so naturally I printed them out so I could ponder their significance a little longer. And add them to my collection of tiny bits of paper that have nowhere else to go.

I’ll just put them . . . here.

Because I knew I had a three-hour-plus drive ahead of me, I checked out a few audio books from the library for the ride, one of which was by Antonia’s father, called Sharpe’s Trafalgar. It’s one of a series of books with the main character of Richard Sharpe, a battle-scarred professional soldier who will kill a man as efficiently and horribly as possible while in the midst of an affair with a deceitful yet golden-hearted married woman, and then you will also learn a lot about nineteenth-century shipbuilding. The story could not have been more disconnected with the reality of driving through Encino on my way to a convention full of nice people I only knew because they sound real on the Internet.

I feel as though the maxim Be bold and mighty forces will come to your aid had particular resonance on this occasion, for I had boldly signed up to go to a place where I knew basically no one, and a mighty force indeed came to my aid. Maggie decided to go to the conference just a few days before it happened and also got to the Lake Arrowhead venue first, got us registered for the same room, and instantly cut down my social anxiety by half. Maggie also happened to know 500% more people there than I did so she was able to introduce me to several handsome, self-deprecating, well-dressed, friendly people I might not otherwise have spoken to, and once again I was reminded how lucky and grateful I am for her generosity and friendship. Too bad I don’t have any pictures of her. I have one of Greg and Matt though, which also includes Jon’s hand and shoulder:

In looking up a link for Greg just now I realized that he’s the author of Rainy Day Fun and Games for Toddler and Total Bastard and I am really mad that I didn’t know that when I met him because I totally followed the blog tour for that book and got flamed by some guy named Anonymous as a result. Remind me to tell him that story next time we meet.

I really blew it on the picture-taking end of things, but I’ll show you what I’ve got anyway.

Here’s a picture of John Hodgman‘s benediction at the opening of the conference. He passed around several bottles of what tasted like liquor made out of brussels sprouts and then played a ukelele and sang La Vie En Rose with John Roderick. This simple presentation, along with the fact of the conference organizer, Jesse Thorn, being so kind and funny and such a gentleman, set the tone for the whole weekend. Jesse created this event with the underlying notion that creative people in general (and comedy nerds in specific) will come together to be awesome in a beautiful setting; that everyone will be open to meeting you; and that we’re all potentially best friends. It is in this spirit that people were encouraged to leave their bullshit at home. As far as I can tell, setting that intention worked. Jesse Thorn is a smart man.

And he is married to a smart, beautiful, pregnant woman named Theresa who claimed to have a copy of Let’s Panic! on her nightstand. She didn’t have to say that, but she did and I want so much to believe her.

What else? I went to a session on podcasting presented by Adam Lisagor. I’d been thinking about doing some podcasting myself and now I feel far more capable of doing what it takes to make that happen. Adam activated my dormant editing genes merely by teasing apart a couple of episodes of You Look Nice Today, and the clarity and delight that he brought to the process helped my brain-heart start to blossom.

I also took a “Yoga for Comedy Nerds” class with Neal Pollack, which we did on a high platform overlooking the top of a mountain and which I did without benefit of sunscreen. I can’t complain, though, because it gave me a hour to appreciate the beauty of our natural surroundings before heading right back into a series of darkened spaces to hear more hardworking people talk about what they do.

Hodgman interviewed Lee Unkrich, the director of Toy Story 3. Naturally I took a picture of the event before they even walked onstage. That’s just how I operate. Maximum listening efficiency was MINE.

However, the next morning I did happen to end up having breakfast at Mr. Unkrich’s table. I told him how my Barbie and my Malibu Ken used to sleep naked in a shoe box under my bed, which didn’t appear to shock (or interest) him in the slightest. I forgot to tell him how I’d just been to Dreamworks and that based on what I learned from that New Yorker article, purely on the basis of workplace mindblowingness, Pixar wins. Even though I thought Kung Fu Panda 2 killed. We’ll see if with Cars 2 Pixar can clear the bar Dreamworks has set.

On a final note, the whole weekend earned me my podcasting supporter badge! Now I just need to decide what to sew it onto. A sash of some sort, perhaps. Or a jaunty beret.

More stuff happened and more people were met but that’s enough for now, I think. Go see Maggie’s post for better pictures and another take on the whole weekend.