Faces for Clothes

Some creepy mannequins I saw at Macy's to-day. I like how they're not gaunt, though I suppose they do look a bit like the baby masks from Brazil.

Their faces sort of looked like how mine felt, actually, as I'd just been at the dentist. It's interesting planning your day around a numb face--my appointment was at noon, so I figured I'd have a late breakfast, then after the appointment, I'd stop at the bank, drive downtown, and walk ten blocks to Pokez. After waiting for my food to get to my table, I figured the feeling would have come back enough to where I wouldn't bite the shit out of my cheek the way I'd done last week when I'd tried having a slice of pizza too soon. But I got sidetracked before leaving Horton Plaza mall by a chess game--first I watched two guys playing, one of them resigning I thought rather early, saying other the other guy was clearly winning and would torture him. The guy was winning, and did seem to be a better player, but both of them had been overlooking a lot. I had my impression of the winner's abilities confirmed when I played against him and won, using black. Here's what the board looked like at the end;



After the opening moves, I started laying traps which he avoided by making moves that put him in even worse positions--I was preparing to fork his King and Bishop with my Knight, which he avoided by moving his King over one space which allowed me to fork his King and Rook with a pawn. Things quickly devolved into a slaughter, but I can't say I was disappointed.



I decided to stay up a little late last night, to reward myself, I guess, for finishing the new chapter of Venia's Travels, so I finally started watching the episode of Boardwalk Empire from Sunday, but halfway through I was just too tired to stay up any longer. This was despite the fact that this episode featured the show's first really . . . I don't know how to put it, the first time the show really rolled up its sleeves and dived into itself. It was the scene where Agent Van Alden storms into a dentist's office and has the dentist inject with cocaine a man with his intestines falling out so Van Alden could interrogate him. It was all a great maelstrom of brutal weirdness around a frighteningly focused Fed, though I'm pretty sure the fact that the first thing the guy with his guts hanging out said when he woke up, "Go fuck your mother," in Yiddish, was inspired by the wonderful true story Shuli Egar told on The Howard Stern Show a couple months ago. Egar had been on a plane seated between an annoying Rabbi and the Rabbi's wife, neither of whom were willing to switch seats with Shuli in order to sit next to each other. When the Rabbi had tried to get Shuli to pass a baby to his wife, Shuli complained about the fact that the Rabbi and his wife had forced Shuli to sit between them. In Hebrew, the Rabbi said to his wife, "This is why I don't like them," not suspecting Shuli, who grew up in Israel, would understand and reply in Hebrew, "Why don't you go fuck your mother?" I suspect there are a lot of writers who listen to Howard Stern to help them come up with realistic sounding scenarios of regular ball busting guys.



I watched the rest of the episode with breakfast to-day. The show's still pretty good all together, though a lot of the time I'm just marvelling at how nicely shot a regular television series like this is now. I loved seeing Kelly Macdonald in her darling blue outfit, and she's great to watch, though the writers have some tricky ground to tread with her. The whole "innocent immigrant girl" shtick can't go in too many directions, especially since I don't sense there's much investment in her point of view. The show hasn't really connected with her yet beyond the type she's playing, though she's lovely to watch, and the scene where she's helping Lucy try on dresses was great. I'm so not sick of seeing Paz de la Huerta naked.



Twitter Sonnet #190

Long orange hair stifles bar top wasabi.
Thin roots choke the bland formica planter.
Solid vegetable cubes took a cabbie.
Carrot hosts offer canned morning banter.
Undead voices discuss zombie spinach.
Devil paper cups capture a clinic.
Suspiria lighting covets Greenwich.
Red and blue thought clouds betray a cynic.
Purple leaves preserve strange Eve's modesty.
Grains of edible sand stick to black sock.
Lettuce will grant turtles no amnesty.
Only one ship can belong to a dock.
X-ray guns spot a pink feather boa.
Remains of third flamingo of Noah.