mimi smartypants
Seriously, though: what's with the penguins?

yo quiero a giant deadly ray gun

For some reason the idea of slippery greasy non-stick-coating high school football players (Scroll down) is very funny to me. Butter-flavored jailbait, mmmm.

Although I am rarely online (which seems like an odd thing for someone who is at this moment updating a personal web page to say, although it is true), I am sometimes, and I've recently discovered this instant messaging phenomenon (in the Microsoft MSN Messenger sense) and it's kind of fun, even though in some ways it reminds me of the dark days of the Internet and the incredible dorkitude of a BBS that I belonged to once, so very, very long ago. So basically what I'm trying to say is, if you too are a devotee of the Instant Message and you see Mimi Smartypants online, feel free to send a shout my way. I mean, I can't guarantee I'll chat with you for hours or anything, but I certainly will send a friendly hello, the way I would if you were in the bed next to mine in the tuberculosis ward, which if you think about it isn't really a bad metaphor for the Internet.

I've ranted about this already to certain friends, but not here, so please bear with me if you've heard it all before. LT installed Windows XP on one of our home computers and I guess I've been living in a hole for not hearing this before now, but I was shocked at how bizarre and ugly it looks. It's all primary colors and softly rounded toolbars (no sharp edges with which to hurt yourself) and generally reminded me of Baby's First Computer or something, and I hate it. There is some button that lets you make it look more like a normal grown-up computer, thankfully. It probably has some other nuts-and-bolts technical things going for it, but since I'm clueless when it comes to that stuff I'll confine my Windows XP review solely to the aesthetic aspects, a la the reviews of Paul Lukas. (Scroll down again.)

I hate making generalizations about the differences between men and women. It's just so retro and stupid and it seems to be a favorite topic of bad stand-up comics, and if that's not a reason to hate something then I don't know what is. That said, I couldn't help observing something odd the other day: LT has been working from home a lot, and a while back when I came home he was quite proud of some things he had done around the house, one of which was to paint our metal kitchen garbage can. “Doesn't it look better now?” he asked me, and I had to admit it did. Painting the metal kitchen garbage can would never have occurred to me in a million years, however, and the female friends that I've asked seem to concur. If I was scouting about for domestic improvement projects, I probably would have picked something very prosaic like scrubbing the bathroom or cleaning out the cabinets. Does this point to a failure of imagination on my part? Or a lack of attention to the everyday details on his? Or should I stop reading Deep Meaning into every part of my life and just quit while I'm ahead? (I think I know the answer to this one.)

A funny urban moment: I'm walking across Michigan Avenue and some guy in a giant SUV (because Michigan Avenue is quite the rugged terrain, you know) is trying to make a right turn, and of course he's only paying attention to the traffic coming from his left and none whatsoever to the PEDESTRIAN DIRECTLY IN FRONT OF HIM. So he's inching up and inching up and coming close to running me over so I thumped on his giant SUV hood to warn him to watch it. Then he becomes irate, rolls down the window, and yells, “Fuck you!”

“No, fuck you!” I yell back. (Eloquent, aren't I? But hell, he started it.)

But he has to get the last word in. As he makes his turn, he leans out the window and shouts, “Go back to Mexico!”

Um…okay….but I think they'll be rather surprised to see me….

—mimi smartypants, legal citizen.