Zoom, a deer

So you know how on CSI (if it’s even still on) seven perfectly suspicious suspects just happened to have met up with the murder victim in rapid but orderly succession — without ever accidentally running into each other, of course — right before the victim gets murdered by the last suspect the CSI team is able to find and interview? Well that’s actually not the reason I’m posting this photo; I just wanted to point out the coincidence.

So you know how on CSI (if it’s even still on) an entire crackerjack team of highly-trained-highly-experienced CSI scientists exhaustively combs through every microshred of evidence in a case and just when everyone’s about to give up and go home to get some well-deserved rest the CSI Chief (or whatever the position — and its attendant convivial nickname — is called) just happens to walk by, spot something fascinatingly suspicious in the background of a photo that’s up to that moment been too overlookably blurry to warrant any measurable attention from any of the highly-trained-highly-experienced CSI scientists, ask the lone highly-trained-highly-experienced-but-at-this-point-understandably-beleaguered token-minority CSI scientists to — and I quote — “zoom in and clean it up” — a strategy for which neither the concept nor the technology has existed until that very second (except for when variations on this revelatory plot twist have played out verbatim in every other episode ever) — which suddenly reveals a crystal-clear image of the murder itself, the murderer’s face, the murderer’s telephone number, the murderer’s license plate and the all-important position of the sun reflected in the moistly shimmering pupil of a random passer-by’s eye? Because that’s actually the reason I’m posting this photo; if you can get that token-minority CSI scientist to zoom in and clean it up, you’ll see the three gorgeous, almost regal deer I just tried to photograph in my sister’s yard:

And if you aren’t able to get that token-minority CSI scientist to zoom in and clean it up, please just enjoy this artfully darkened photograph of the dramatic uplighting on my sister’s neighbor’s tree.

Adventures in home improvement

Summer's over, so it's getting dark before I get home from work during the week—which lately has never been before 9:00 pm. Which leaves only the weekends for painting if I want to do it by daylight. And daylight is the secret for making your painting look like it wasn't done by a box full of chemically dependent kittens. We got the dining room walls painted last weekend, and this morning we got up bright and early so we could tape off and paint the first coat on the baseboards and windowsills. After watching two episodes of CSI from the snuggly comfort of our bed, of course.

Our dining room looks onto a gated courtyard that nobody uses except to walk from the sidewalk to their doors. But as I was painting the dining room windowsill this afternoon, four hopelessly straight guys hauled a couple coolers, two beanbag boards and a bunch of beanbags into the courtyard and started playing beanbags. And even though they were doing it while swigging cheapo longneck beers and wearing sports-team-logo-emblazoned clothing, they were playing beanbags. Which—I'm sorry—is just totally gay. And even though they were the ones being all gay in the courtyard, I got all paranoid they were going to see me painting in the window with my shirt off and suspect me of spying on them with my gay spying powers. Which I kind of was, because one of them was totally cute. But I was doing home improvements while they were playing beanbags, so who's gay now?

Speaking of, we're planning on making the dining room gayer than an Exodus Ministries intramural beanbag league, so we're installing moldings that look like giant frames on the walls. And we're going to paint them in a subtly contrasting color. So after we cleaned up from painting, we headed to our not-so-nearby Lowe's (because we always go to our nearby Home Depot and we wanted to shake things up a bit because we are nothing if not impulsive and exciting) to buy moldings, finishing nails, liquid adhesive and a miter box. We found the first three things right away, but we couldn't find the miter boxes. I was pretty sure Lowe's would stock miter boxes among the basic tools, but the tool department was pretty well hidden at this Lowe's. After wandering around for a bit I finally broke down and asked a friendly Lowe's employee where I could find the miter boxes. His response: "What's a miter box?" Seriously.

Now, I know the term miter box probably doesn't come up very often in day-to-day conversation, so there's a good chance most of the world doesn't even know what a miter box is. (It's something that helps you cut accurate 45° angles when you install things that need square corners, like gay wall moldings.) But for a home improvement superstore employee, miter box should rank right up there with hammer and shopping cart and dude as basic, rudimentary vocabulary. And I'm afraid my shock over his home-improvement-superstore-employee incompetence took over before my polite-customer instincts could kick in because my response to his question was a look of condescension and "Um … you seriously don't know what a miter box is?"

Eventually we found the miter boxes using our gay spying powers, and in our search we wandered through the lighting department, where we stumbled on some pretty fabulous lampshades. I have a favorite lamp that looks like it was stolen by a Republican senator from a Victorian bordello, but the cheap shade I've had on it 1) totally didn't go and 2) totally made the fiancé want to leave me for someone who at least had the common sense to put appropriately hideous lampshades on his hideous lamps. We'd been half-assedly looking for a new shade since we moved in together, and tonight—right there at the halfway point between the miter boxes and the home improvement superstore employee who didn't know what a miter box is—was the shade we've been looking for: blood-red satin with gold brocade and a rusty-pink lining and dangly glass beads. What could be more Victorian bordello? What could be more fabulously hideous? What could be more tacky than a table decorated for Halloween with a mommy ghost candle and her three baby ghost candles? What could finally pull all the holy-shit-are-you-gay attention away from Larry Craig? None other than the pole-dancing new star of our otherwise well-appointed living room:

Pix from Las Vegas!

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CSI Episode Requirements

CSIs may wear hazmat suits and other protective clothing while processing an area that’s potentially contaminated and/or lethal, but only if it looks sexy.

CSIs must never wear hairnets or any other garments that would look unflattering or help prevent the personal contamination of a crime scene.

The more gruesome the crime scene, the more light-colored cashmere the CSIs must be wearing to process it.

The uglier the victim, the more we have to see him or her naked.

Female victims of violent crimes must look as though they applied their own fake blood and bruises with rouge and eyeshadow so as not to undermine the beauty that got them cast in the first place.

In the moments before he is murdered, the victim must be visited by at least three separate people in rapid succession who don’t know each other but who coincidentally all have reason to kill him.

The murderer must either pass in front of the camera in the opening 10 minutes of an episode or be the last possible suspect the CSIs can think of.

Every suspect brought in for questioning must have watched enough cop shows on TV to know that he or she is free to walk out at any moment—but only after making a dramatic statement or sassy threat.

At least one potential suspect—preferably a close relative—must show cool indifference over the victim’s death.

If at all possible, murderers and suspects must be played by actors who will eventually appear on Desperate Housewives.

CSIs must know vast amounts of arcane information on entomology, satellite technology, obscure scientific disciplines and esoteric forms of popular entertainment, yet they are required to explain basic tenets of forensic science (“pooling blood always follows gravity”) to each other.

Lab results must first be given in highly scientific terms (“polyfartypoopoochloride”) so they may be helpfully translated into laymen’s terms (“typing paper”) by knowledgeable CSIs.

Every episode must contain at least two of the following words: exsanguination, petechial hemorrhaging, through and through, the vic, alleles, CODIS, Jake and Nick/Eric/Danny really make a cute couple.

CSI labs, morgues and gun vaults must have more indirect lighting and funky ambiance than a trendy nightclub.

CSIs must have beautiful bodies and fabulous hair and wear tight-fitting couture, yet they must never earn the salaries required to afford their wardrobes and they must never be given the personal time necessary to work out or shop.

If a CSI suffers some physical or emotional trauma on the job, he must stubbornly refuse to seek the required treatment until Something Bad Happens to make him reconsider his obstinance.

If the sister or girlfriend of a CSI is dying of cancer, it must be the kind of cancer that makes her more and more beautiful as it progresses.

There is a mole in the CSI: Miami lab. They’re gonna tell you about it in every episode, but they’re never gonna give you any useful hints beyond that. So stop trying to guess who it is.

Let's hear it for the Rainbow Tour!

Wow. OK, this post is gonna be long. But I was in Europe for TEN FREAKIN’ DAYS, so quit your whining and get reading I have a lot to tell you. I’ve peppered this post with links to fabulous pictures and other enriching supplemental click-throughs, so you should be entertained until the bitter end. And if you can’t wait to see all the dark, grainy pictures my cheap camera took, you can just go here and check them out all at once.

Otherwise, I humbly present you The Rainbow Tour (now in low-carb digestible chunks!):

We’ll start at the very beginning, with …

AIR FRANCE
Aside from our early problems with lost luggage (which were more than compensated for with prompt, free found-luggage delivery and a well-stocked lost luggage kit that even included a condom), I really have no complaints about Air Chance France. The food they served was pretty good, the crew was attentive, our flights arrived more or less on time—and even though our seats were a little on the cramped side, they included individual entertainment centers that offered movies, TV reruns (including old episodes of “MacGyver”), music (including “An American in Paris”—GET IT?) and that spellbinding display of GPS ingenuity that uses cartoon maps and a little cartoon plane to show you exactly where you are, how high you’re flying, what you’re about to crash into flying over and even when you should expect to arrive at your destination.

OUR HOTELS
Our Madrid hotel was filled with fabulous basement catacombs (and free access to the Internets!), Barbie Dream Showers and curious, inescapable peek-a-boo displays of roommate toilet activities. Our Paris hotel was waaaaay less high-tech (and waaaaay less fastidiously clean), but it provided plenty of room for all my fabulous new shoes, and it could not have been more conveniently located for gay tourists who like easy access to shopping, pastries, charming little out-of-the-way restaurants, gay people, museums, walks along the Siene, piña coladas and walks in the rain.

AND SPEAKING OF PINA COLADAS …
You know how I never drink? Well, that kind of … um … changed in Madrid. You see, my friends ordered a pitcher of sangría at our first dinner … and I’d never had sangria … and I’m never opposed to just tasting alcohol (you know, just to see what I’m missing out on) … and it was kind of tasty … and before you could say Jake’s dancing around with his underwear on his head! I’d had a full glass of sangria every night with dinner—along with a shot of some syrupy apricot-and-cinnamon schnapps thing my last night (which I sipped like the dainty little princess I am)—for three nights in a row.

Go on. You know you want to. Just let it out. Let that giant YAWN out over my sangria story. “Woo-hoo,” I can hear you say. “Jake had a glass of alcohol with dinner. Alert the media!”

Well, I AM the media—at least as far as your eyeballs are concerned at the moment—and it IS news. I had more to drink during my three nights in Madrid than I’ve had collectively in the almost 37 years I’ve minced walked this earth. And while I’m not about to do anything crazy like order a beer or something the next time I walk into a bar (crazy!), I actually kind of liked my sangría. I didn’t feel like the alcohol did anything to make me slur my speech or tell my friends how much I loved—LOVED!—them, but it did apparently make my face quite red.

Some people drink and get laid. I drink and turn into an Oompa-Loompa. Sexy!

THE INTERNATIONAL MEDIA
The TVs in our hotel rooms—when they weren’t bringing us dubbed reruns of “Charlie’s Angels” and “CSI” (which in France is called “Les Experts”)—kept our brains fed with a steady diet of CNN and BBC world news. (Note to Not My President Bush: The international media report every word you say and everything you claim to think as though you know what you’re talking about. Please make sure that you do.) And to our horror, these otherwise rational, relatively reasonable news sources that brought us political and economic information from around the world focused their American coverage on … the Michael Jackson trial. In all seriousness.

I am SO embarrassed that we have a kid-diddling circus freak as the sole noseless face of America in the international media. Seriously. I could just die. (See the reference to red-faceness above.)

FRENCH MEN
Before I move on to touristy things, let me just get this out in the open: I have a new fetish. Move over, muscular blonds with meaty butts and thick, rubbery lips—I’m now in love with wiry little Frenchmen with their tiny waists and angular faces and dark complexions and deep brown eyes. But damn do French men jam my expertly calibrated gaydar. Every single man in that country looks queer, from his manicure to his fastidiously trendy wardrobe to his impossible-to-resist-grabbing ass.

Anyway, now that that’s out of the way, it’s on to the touristy stuff:

THE EIFFEL TOWER
What magic! What charm! The Eiffel Tower is just as fabulous as I’d imagined—though I’d actually pictured it being a little taller. We went up once during the day on Wednesday (apparently missing Rod Stewart’s third marriage proposal by mere hours) and then again on Thursday night, where we were treated to hookers! hookers! hookers! tacky kitten souvenirs gorgeous views of the city and the on-the-hour sparkling light effects that literally make everyone in the city gasp and applaud and reach for their cameras.

VERSAILLES
For some reason I’ve never been that interested in Versailles—though I’m a huge sucker for over-the-top architecture and vulgar displays of grandeur. Versailles delivers all of that and more—even managing to fuse my twin fascinations with rococo excess and wig-wearing human heads in a fabulous way I’d never even imagined. I was surprised to discover that large parts of Versailles (and, actually, there really are no small parts of Versailles) are in a state of formidable disrepair, though there is a lot of repair work underway. The famed Hall of Mirrors is currently undergoing a thorough rehab; we could see only about a third of it through the construction.

I even got in a bit of trouble at Versailles. See, there was this huge statue of Napoleon (who I’ve always thought was kind of hot) so I jumped in front of him and asked Matt to take my picture. But then I noticed that from where I was standing, you could pretend to look up his robe as though you were admiring his massive marble member. So I reached up and did just that. And just as Matt snapped a picture, The Angry French Lady of Death appeared in a cloud of smoke and started chewing me a new delicious chocolatey profiterole asshole. I wasn’t sure if I was in trouble for touching the statue, disrespecting the patron saint of French military might history or actually using soap in a European country, but I was definitely embarrassed for being caught doing tacky American tourist things.

NOTRE DAME
Again, not as big as I’d expected—but just oozing (literally!) with soaring Gothic charm. We climbed the claustrophobic little winding stone staircase to the top (I had to climb carefully because if I turn around and around too fast I might accidentally turn into Wonder Woman), where we were treated to spectacular views of the city and up-close-and-personal encounters with the church’s famed gargoyles. But since it was gray and overcast and COLD (it was pretty much like that the entire time we were in Europe) our rapidly shriveling nuts didn’t let us stay too long.

THE LOUVRE
I know this is sacrilege—and maybe it’s just because I was well beyond the stage of cultural overwhelmitude by the time I got there—but I found the Louvre to be kinda boring. (And this is coming from a man who habitually spends entire days in art museums in every major city he visits.) The building itself is GORGEOUS, but the sheer volume of art it contains is so overwhelming it’s almost nauseating. (Kinda like that time in fifth grade when I chewed five whole packs of grape Bubblicious in one afternoon—to this day I can’t even stand the smell of the stuff.)

I’m also not a huge fan of the genres that dominate the permanent collection. There’s an awful lot of dark Dutch paintings (Rembrandts are like Eros lube—a little bit goes a long way) and waaaaaay too much rah-rah Northern European stuff (there are acres of canvas dedicated to long-dead French royalty—who are similarly enshrined in virtually every other museum you visit in Paris—while there isn’t a single work by an American painter … at least not that I saw, and I traversed the entire museum last Friday). I do, however, have a fascination with heroic statuary and virtually anything Medieval, both of which are available by the ton (literally!) at the Louvre. Which was also part of the problem: While I stood in silent reverence in front of the first 400 marble statues that I saw of Greek gods clad in delicately veined muscles and draping robes, I found myself all but sprinting past the next 400 of them, trying desperately to spare them the fate of the doomed grape Bubblicious.

I also wasn’t a fan of I.M. Pei’s glass pyramid the first time I saw it—and I’m usually the first to jump on the grand-old-architecture-meets-funky-new-architecture juxtaposition bandwagon (wasn’t that a Beatles album?). But it grew on me immensely about the fourth time I walked through the courtyard. And once I entered the pyramid and discovered its role in making the museum so accessible I became a huge fan.

One of the reasons I was in the courtyard (and not in the building itself) so many times was because of …

THE STRIKE
I’m already not a fan of unions, and on Thursday when all the collective museum staffs of Paris staged a massive strike, my carefully planned vacation was torn asunder. I am the almighty tourist! You must bow to my whims and show me your national treasures and sell me overpriced trinkets on MY schedule, you selfish museum staffery! Actually, when we found out later that one of the reasons for the strike was to oppose a proposition to extend the grueling French workweek from 35 hours to 40, we did become arrogant, unsympathetic American tourists. But since there was nothing we could do, we turned to Plan B. And my personal Plan B was …

MONTMARTRE
There’s this obscure little tavern in the Monmartre district in northern Paris called the Lapin Agile where poets and writers and artists have met and exchanged ideas for over a century. There’s even a brilliant little play by Steve Martin about a hypothetical meeting between Picasso and Einstein at the Lapin Agile right before they burst into the worldwide consciousness. I’ve always wanted to visit this tavern, but it was pretty low on my priority list—until the museum strike moved it instantly to the top on Thursday.

The Lapin Agile kind of hard to find, and my wandering journey accidentally took me through Montmartre’s pretty revolting sex district, where trannie hookers—who had a preternatural ability to sniff out my Americanness as I walked by—literally HOUNDED me on the sidewalk. I quickly learned that if I pretended like I spoke only Spanish, they were pretty powerless to bug me with their pidgin English and their manly features and their tarty little outfits. Lo siento, Guapa. No te entiendo.

THE OLYMPICS
Both Madrid and Paris are vying to host the 2012 Olympics, but Paris wins by a kilomegamelometer mile in the self-promotion event. There’s a massive Parisian campaign on subway walls, candy wrappers and even entire sides of beautiful old buildings to create buzz and influence location judges. The logo in this picture adorns the magnificent Hotel de Ville, which was just a few blocks from our hotel. It also appears on a couple other buildings we couldn’t identify and even the Eiffel Tower itself. And it’s totally freakin’ cool—Eurocool, even!

OUR FINAL NIGHT IN PARIS
The four of us had enjoyed dinners all week at a range of charming little restaurants within blocks of our hotel (including one called Pain Vin Fromage, which served a lot of bread, wine and cheese in a spectacular catacomb-like basement), and we decided to mourn celebrate our last night together with warm cups of chocolat at a neighborhood pub. And when the bill came and we were forced to spend vast sums of Euros for tiny little cups of melted chocolate, we knew it was time to head home.

The next morning, I arrived at the airport with exactly 11 Euros in my pocket. And I was able to cobble together a meal in one of the snack shops for exactly 10.95 Euros. Best of all, after I finished my snack, I found a Unicef donation bin to throw my last .05 Euro in. And, after curing the hunger in my tummy AND in the world at large, I boarded the plane satisfied that I’d used my powers only for good on this trip. Except for that little Napoleon incident. And all the trashy souvenirs I bought.

Anyway, I’m home. And this post is more than FIVE freakin’ pages in Microsoft Word. So I’ll stop typing and let you get back to work.

I’m sure I’ve forgotten some other vastly important stuff I wanted to include here. So stay tuned for the next chapter, which will NOT be this long. Promise.

CSI: Why I love you so much

Because if there’s a murder scene with 17 dismembered bodies and blood and guts dripping off the ceiling and running down the walls and knee-deep puddles of muck everywhere you look, Catherine will arrive to process the area in head-to-toe white cashmere.

Because your cases can turn on a flake of dry skin you find under a blowing leaf or on a single eyelash you find after sifting through thousands of pieces of debris vacuumed out of a shag carpet, but you still never wear those unflattering hairnets when you gather evidence.

Because you also never wear HazMat suits—unless they make you look sexy.

Because you will test the DNA of every drop of moisture you find at a murder scene UNLESS it will help you solve a case in under 48 minutes plus commercials.

Because your gun vault has more atmosphere and trendy backlighting than most high-end dance clubs.

Because when your investigations take you to high-end dance clubs, they always look as trendy and appealing as a homecoming dance on Saved by the Bell.

Because you get to say “bled out.” I wish I got to say “bled out” as often as you do. But the opportunity never comes up in advertising. At least not very often.

Because the blood at your crime scenes looks as gruesome as a bowl of warm cherry Jell-O. But you wouldn't know that because you investigate all your crime scenes in creepy darkness. And the creepier your crime scenes, the more you pile on the artfully lit darkness.

Because one of your victims died of a subdural hematoma soon after being served a tray of Shirley Temples. And now I'm on a tireless crusade to get the world to call that delicious concoction of 7-Up and grenadine a "subdural hematoma." (It's a far more apt name for a bubbly red beverage, don't you think?)

Because if you have the slightest inkling that there might be a body buried in a thousand-acre landfill, you’ll find that body before the next commercial.

Because your corpses, even after days of rotting in the sun or bloating under water, always look like napping supermodels. Unless their gross disfigurements figure prominently in your plotlines—but even then you still manage to make them look pretty fuckable.

Because your CSI people are practically exploding with detailed, working knowledge of a staggering array of arcane disciplines from scuba diving to bus mechanics to GPS technology, but they still have to explain the most basic elements of forensic science (“pooling blood always follows gravity”) to each other week after week.

Because your make-believe technology is so advanced, you can produce museum-quality images from the reflections in the eyes of people who happen to have their pictures taken as they’re witnessing crimes.

Because every schmo you pull in off the street to interrogate knows full well that he or she has the right to walk out at a moment's notice—but doesn't do so until there's been a Dramatic Revelation or a Misleading Clue or it's time for a commercial, whichever comes first.

Because your Web site treats your characters as real people, with no listings of the actors’ names, forcing us to do some
creative Googling.

Because your head detective's name is Jim Brass. (Get it? He's a COP! And they call him BRASS!)

Because Catherine’s last name is Willows. And she used to be a stripper.

Because every time you show a closeup of Nick Stokes and his thick bull neck and his impossibly handsome mug, his eyes are clearly saying: Come freak me wild, Jake. You are the only man I will ever love. My body is your playground. I also make excellent blueberry muffins and I like to clean the kitchen.

Because every time you give your characters painful playful banter or disturbing little moments of plot intrigue (like when Grissom gives Sara cryptic compliments on her beauty) or force them to use the words “murder central” when they find a body in a hotel room near a staircase, your actors almost never look into the camera and mouth the words I took this job just to pay off my school loans.

Because you are the meth addiction in the circuit party of life. I'm hooked from the moment I see the sweeping overhead shots of Vegas that open every episode—and by the time Grissom utters his obligatory Painfully Clever Wry Observation three or four minutes later to signal that it's time to TiVo through the opening credits, your impossibly red blood and guts are entrenched deep within my more realistically colored blood and guts. And I wouldn't have it any other way.

January adventures

1) I cooked dinner for The Cuddler last night. And I didn’t burn it. (The funny thing is he actually watched me cook—with great intensity—as though I knew what I was doing and he might learn something. The joke’s on him, though; I can make exactly three things—all of which usually turn out dry and tasteless—and he’ll get nothing but disappointment if he’s looking to me for a culinary education.) After dinner, he indulged me in my newest obsession: an hour on the couch wrapped—BONUS!—in each other’s arms watching CSI. So you can tell right there he’s good people.

2) I’ve seen some amazing stuff on stage in the last few days. Last week Eric and I got comp tickets to see Dance Chicago, a festival of the best work by the best companies in the city. I am now madly in love with Melissa Thodos & Dancers, especially their works choreographed by Paul Christiano, who uses bodies both as props and as instruments of expression—all with a bold, breathtaking synergy of kinetic energy and poetry. The show also featured some kick-ass, bone-rattling, pound-the-floorboards tap by M.A.D.D. Rhythms. Tap rocks. Especially the way this group does it.

Then this week Matt and I saw All Shook Up, a cheesy musical working its way to Broadway next month. A blatant ripoff of the Mama Mia! format—a silly story written to string together a canon of unrelated songs by one artist (in this case, Elvis instead of ABBA)—the show is eminently predictable, sillier than most but a whole lot of fun. And it features some fabulous sets and powerhouse singing, especially from this handsome fella, whose golden voice is eclipsed only by the piercing beauty of his eyes.

3) I take off Wednesday morning for five days in Iowa with my family. On the docket for this visit: spending a day with my nephew’s kindergarten class, watching my niece’s hit-buckets-with-spoons music class, hours and hours of canasta with any available adult, quality lap time with either of two very friendly kittens, Mom’s home cooking (which, unlike mine, has actual flavor), and a stop at my favorite grocery store (what kind of freak has a favorite grocery store?) on the way home to stock up on milk that costs less than $4 a gallon.

4) The lipo is healing better than I’d expected. I’m happy with the results as they are now, and my doctor says there’s still two more months for the “considerable” swelling to go down. So my waist is only going to get smaller. (But I’m not breaking out the International Male catalogs until I know just what my new measurements will be.) I consider myself fully healed, save for a tiny bit of tightness and some residual numbness around my midsection, and I’m working out at about 90% intensity. The best part: My sad little butt looks almost … butt-like now that it’s not hidden under a gooey pile of love handles.

5) I’m choreographing some numbers for a drag show (January 29 around 8 pm at Hydrate, if you want to go) that’s a fund-raiser for the Chicago Spirit Brigade. My dancers are working their butts off and looking pretty fierce—and the go-go boys backing up one of the numbers are smokin’ hot. And I can make them do whatever touching-each-other-in-sexual-ways things touching-each-other-in-sexual-ways things I want because I am the all-powerful choreographer! Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha!

6) I just wrote my name in the snow.

My two new obsessions

OBSESSION ONE: CSI

Last week while I was confined to my couch in my lipo girdle like some drag queen on house arrest, I stumbled on this fabulous show that turns grisly murder investigations and lurid pre-murder backstories into a spectator sport that’s fun—and educational!—for the whole family. I loved it so much I put all three channel options (CBS and the two channels that show reruns) at the top (well, right under Queer Eye) of my TiVo Season Pass list. And now, every night when I get home, I race to the TV to cram in at least one episode before I go to bed. Which is such a productive use of my time.

True to the television rule that franchising a popular show is better than coming up with new ones, there are currently three CSI siblings on the air right now: CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (the original, which takes place in Las Vegas), CSI: Miami (which features the perpetually weird-talking David Caruso) and CSI: New York. The best by far is the Las Vegas version, mostly because it features the boy-next-door hunky George Eads as wholesome, earnest CSI rookie Nick Stokes. I have yet to see Nick take his shirt off on the show, but a quick visit to Google found me exactly what I was looking for. Google also produced a second helpful site that contains a number of visual “reasons of why” George is such a hottie.

As an added bonus, CSI seems to be a veritable breeding ground for actors who are about to make it big. In one night alone this week, I saw two separate reruns that featured none other than Bree Van De Camp and her philandering husband (as the killers, no less)—only months before they met each other (in prison?) and moved to Wisteria Lane.

But for all its severed-hand-in-a-microwave fun, CSI does have some bad habits. One is an addiction to painfully lengthy montages where we see lab technicians suspending candy wrappers in smoke-filled fishbowls to check for fingerprints or dicing up cadaver livers, putting them in a blender and pipetting the resulting goo into test tubes that go into a mysterious machine that spits out a sheet of paper with a Magical Piece of Missing Information (I was eating chili the night they showed that montage). The show could clearly use this airtime better by showing Nick Stokes going to the bathroom.

The second bad habit is the following scene, which plays out at least 10 different ways in each episode:

Lab technician (who used to be on that one sitcom with that one girl who had really big boobs): I’ve identified the mysterious substance you found on the body/at the murder scene. It’s polyfartypoopoochloride.

CSI person (who just came from the morgue and is dressed in body-hugging couture): Aha—sugar-free hair spray! That means the killer likes puppies.

Lab technician: I know. So I cross-referenced the handy wallet card I carry that lists the names and addresses of everyone in Budapest who drives a Volvo with our computer database of everyone who shopped at Sears the night that I played an extra in the coffee shop on “Friends” and look who I found:

(shows CSI person the computer monitor)

CSI person: Thomas Jefferson!

(cut to interrogation room)

Thomas Jefferson (who clearly has hair and looks unmistakably diabetic): I didn’t tell you I have a puppy the first time you questioned me because you didn’t ask. That doesn’t make me a killer.


OBSESSION TWO: SITEMETER.COM

When I tinkered with the design of this site last week, I had to go to Sitemeter to change the colors of my hit counter (you know, because if the colors didn’t all match, people would laugh). I had originally added the hit counter out of sheer vanity to see if anyone was actually reading my blog, and one of the interesting little Sitemeter bonuses has been a weekly email giving me hour-by-hour breakdowns of the number of hits I get.

But that was NOTHING compared to what I discovered when I poked around the Sitemeter site trying to figure out how to change the colors: Sitemeter keeps track of—and can show me with the click of a mouse—how many people are reading my blog in real time, tells me how much time people spend on certain posts, and—best of all—shows me how they found me, taking me directly to other blogs that have links to mine and directly to search results pages on Google, Yahoo, MSN and a handful of other search engines I’ve never even heard of.

So of course I visit Sitemeter CONSTANTLY, gaping with open-mouthed fascination at the ways people have stumbled on my blog.

And people have found me in some of the weirdest ways—with some of the last search parameters that I would ever guess would put NoFo on the first page of results.

For instance, in the last 24 hours, people have clicked on my site after searching for the following things:

virtual anesthesia maching (sic)
Julie Andrews marriage
porno aubergine rectum
Oprah’s interior designer
jake nofo (I’m blushing!)
picture of Rush Limbaugh house
condom picture jokes
MUFF
best exercise love handles (Jokes’ on you—it’s LIPO!)
short Internet cartoons
photos of naked gay men
women girdle pictures
pizza real estate
Paris Hilton naked (Really!)
red mold pictures
chemical face peels what about them
funny picture with bad breath
and, just moments before I wrote this post: fat boobs

All of which just means I’ll be peppering all my (midget fucking) posts with all kinds of random (sundress! rotisserie chicken!) stuff just so Google will point innocent (nun-slapping) Internet users to my twisted, subversive (moist and delicious) blog. Let the games begin. (Burma shave!)