Random thoughts on a hot day...

Still no news on the writing front; I'm noodling away at a few things everyday, just to keep my brain churning. And now, the news...

I'm taking a Pilates class this summer. If you're looking for something where you barely move but can still call it exercise, Pilates is for you! But be prepared to contort your body into strange positions. The instructor told us that a doctor developed Pilates post-WWI to help wounded soldiers strengthen their backs and abs. That's the party line, anyway. I think the real reason Mr. Pilates developed the exercises was because he got a chuckle out of seeing people hold their legs up at weird angles or roll themselves into a ball and rock back and forth like helpless turtles flopped on their backs. He must've laughed SO hard... But they say laughter's the best medicine.

In Pilates, there's a lot of "tightening your abdomen just behind the belly button." Easy for me; I've been sucking in my gut since I was seven. Even when I was pregnant I pulled it in!

Proving my assertion that Mother Nature is REALLY pissed at us (as stated in one of my earlier posts), hurricane season began with a bang and looks to be pretty awful for the duration. My heart goes out to the people affected by the storms--and inundated with clueless news reporters looking for some high wind action. Every time I see one of those reporters out there in the storm, their expensive raingear flapping madly in the 120-mph winds, their perfect hairdos ruined, I find myself hoping a tree will fall on them. I'm not a blood-thirsty woman (well, okay, maybe a little), but it drives me nuts to flip on the news and see yet ANOTHER update from the storm. Yeah, we know it's windy, it's gonna be like that for a few more hours. It's also dangerous! How much do they pay these reporters to do a stand up in the middle of a hurricane? It's not enough.

And how many times can we see the clips of the surfers who just had to brave the storm to catch one of those perfect 80-foot waves. Maybe a shark will get one of them while they're on LIVE fulfilling most news producers fantasies--shark meets hurricane. If the surfer is a white, blonde, 19-year-old honor student, then the producer would probably keel over dead. But with a mega-high-ratings smile!

And finally, I'm shocked, SHOCKED to discover it's Karl Rove who leaked the CIA agent's name to the press! Never would've seen that coming. I'm still waiting to find out who passed along that bogus memo about W's military service to Dan Rather--were his initials also KR? I thought Dan vowed to get to the bottom of it. Guess he got distracted by the hurricanes.

Janet -- No power in the 'verse can stop me!

Too Real Reality...

Hoping to have some time to write this week—came up with a nice plot twist for one of my WIP that might just inspire me to take it all the way to the end. We’ll see…

In the meantime, this interesting tidbit: ABC's new reality show, “Welcome to the Neighborhood,” was pulled before it could air due to complaints that it trivialized discrimination. Here’s the premise: 3 white, conservative families in Texas are given the chance to choose a new neighbor. Bigotry ensues when the choices are presented: minority families, a gay couple, a practicing witch, and what’s nastily known as ‘white trash’ (people with tattoos and a fondness for Velveeta and beer...you know, my relatives). According to the AP, ABC’s intention was to “promote a healthy and open debate about prejudice and people’s fear of differences.” Complaints centered on the fact that racist remarks and jokes were uncensored and unchallenged, leaving the impression that bigotry was sitcom-friendly. So ABC buckled and pulled the show.

Now, I’m not so sure the network’s intentions were really that altruistic—they wouldn’t have wanted to put ‘Neighborhood’ on at all unless they knew it would be controversial and get big ratings—and big $$$. Why else does a network present anything? But I guess the potential ratings bonanza wasn’t enough to overcome the inevitable bad press for doing what a show like that allegedly does—depict REALITY. We’re a racist nation… No I mean, species. It’s human nature to fear change and differences, but I guess it’s bad manners to actually shine a light on it. ABCs cheesy, button-pushing format was probably not the best avenue for the dialog we so desperately need, but I still think if we talk about it, we might learn something about our prejudices and fears.

In this vein, I saw that MTV is presenting “1970s House.” What a cop-out (to use the Linc-esque vernacular of the era)! Another vapid “house” reality show, tossing a bunch of mismatched but attractive people together and watching them argue over who left the toilet seat up. The gimmick this time is truly awful duds (trust me, I wore hip-huggers, body-suits, Earth shoes, and even a mood ring—they’re UGLY), even worse furniture (why was everything lime-green and plastic in the 70s?) and jokes about pot and post-pill, pre-AIDS sexual promiscuity.

If MTV really had balls, they’d do something ground-breaking, something that will actually force the youth of today to look at our history and THEMSELVES in a new way. How about 1950s house? Sexual repression, segregation, lethal racism, dead-end jobs for women, Communism, paranoia, Cinema-Scope, the whole shebang. Or how about Plantation House? The recent documentary on Slavery on PBS was really eye-opening, but the MTV crowd probably didn’t see it—too busy watching “Punk’d” or “Fear Factor.” How about a real reality show that depicts what slavery was like, for both blacks and whites? That would be courageous—and maybe the audience will actually learn something.

Whew! That was some rant, huh? I’ll close with a mini-review of the five movies I saw over the last week: “Batman Begins,” fun, Christian Bale’s Batman, strangely sexy; “Bewitched,” don’t bother, bewildering; “Herbie: Fully Loaded,” fully lousy; “Howl’s Moving Castle,” dazzling, wonderful, incomprehensible—see it!; and “War of the Worlds,” fun when in summer-action flick mode, but when Spielberg goes for literary—you should go for popcorn.

Janet – No power in the ‘verse can stop me!