Anita was working this morning on a translation about Saint Catherine Laboure and I did a little searching to see if I could figure out if that really is the woman's corpse or not at the rue de bac. Seems to be so, though it's hard to believe.
This led me to a webpage listing saints' patronages. Botulph is the patron saint of Boston. The patron saint of computers, computer users, and computer technicians is Isidore of Seville. Mental Illness has many patrons. Narcissus and Saint Mark the Evangelist share the patronage of insect bites. Narcissus lived as a hermit in the desert and probably then suffered from all kinds of flea bites and such, but Mark has no fewer than 19 patronages. It seems unfair to make Narcissus share the one measly patronage he has. Mark has Egypt, Venice, lawyers and scrofulous diseases. Hardly seems fair.
On our way home from Vermont recently, at a particularly commodious rest area, a flyer for Spiderwed Farm caught my eye. "Home of the 'original web site'", it boasted. Today I finally got around to checking it out.
"REAL SPIDER WEBS ARE HARVESTED -
collected by Will Knight. The colorless, fragile web of an orb-weaving spider called Araneidae is first brought to light by painting. It is then transferred by hand to a wooden plaque where it is protected with a fine furniture finish to assure a lifetime of enjoyment for all web lovers."
I bet these are kind of amazing in real life, too bad the pictures aren't a little better. I'm sure they don't do the work justice. I bet these are hard to dust.
Nanowrimo. I don't stand a chance of finishing. Do I? So far I am 0 for 5 or 6 or however many years I've signed up.
I got pretty far last year.
I think I have a better chance at Drawmo.
Recently, in a wine shop in Medford, I saw a display of wine marketed to a fairly obvious target market: exhausted mothers. I'm amazed I never saw anyone doing this before. A pregnant woman, especially in America, spends nine or more months without a drink. Then she gives birth, which at its best is a somewhat traumatic experience. Her entire life has changed. A whole new layer of potential stress and guilt has been laid atop her existence (and joy and wonder, but those aren't the ones that make you say, "I could sure use a drink," so I'm glossing over for now).
I found this marketing gambit pretty ballsy, here in Puritanical Massachusetts. I wonder who's behind it. "Mommy's Time Out." Brilliant! And notice, the display is empty.
The store's attempt to market wine to die-hard Red Sox fans, to the left of the Mommy's Helper box, was slightly less successful. Those guys are already drinking beer. The idea of putting baseball players' faces on wine seems like as bad an idea as Mommy's Helper is a great one. Wine drinkers won't like it, and neither will jocks and baseball fans.
Here's another wine targeting mommy, though with slightly less hutzpah and humor.
That label says to me, "I'm so drunk that my child has become nothing more than a colorless, fuzzy sketch to me. Hope she keeps up, 'cause I'm not stopping now."
This just came for me via registered mail to J & D's address in Portland. I have no idea what it is.
If you aren't already listening to This American Life and Radio Lab, I highly recommend you check them out. I especially am enjoying Radio Lab these days.
Last night, Erik and I went to River Gods for a nice dinner and to see Chris spin for his Tourfilter DJ night. We sat with some friends of his, one of whom was a pretty Brazilian woman. She and I made a little small talk and at one point she she said, "Has anyone ever told you that you look like Gwyneth Paltrow?"
I wonder why these statements so often start with "Has anyone ever told you that..." It's an interesting convention and I wonder how it got started.
This was, to my recollection, the first time that anyone has ever likened me to Ms. Paltrow, but I am often told by new acquaintances that I "look just like" someone else, usually someone they know personally, and only occasionally a celebrity. My theory is that all blondes look alike. Especially when the hair is long. There's just something about that shiny silky yellowness that impresses itself on a person's brain.
Generally, I don't like being compared to other people. It makes me feel a little, I don't know... oddly furious. I suppose I like to think of myself as incomparable. "No, I look nothing like your friend Mandy!! You are completely mistaken," I might be screaming behind my polite and only slightly disdainful smile.
I used to get Diane Keaton a lot when i was in college, because of her characters in Manhattan and Annie Hall. That's less of a blonde thing than a small-town gal in the big city stereotype.
When I was in High School I was often told that I was a perfect double for Lauralee Bell, who played the character Christine aka "Cricket" on The Young and the Restless. Cricket was supposed to be a model, but I never thought she was really very pretty, so I bristled at the comparison. After hearing this from so many strangers at the mall (the woman at Great Cuts who trimmed my hair, the salesgirl at Claire's who sold me my bangles), I would watch The Young and the Restless and try harder to think Cricket was pretty, but all I really managed was to feel sort of irked.
My favorite celebrity look-alike and the only one that hasn't in some way annoyed me, is Gerda Wegener, which I got from Kai. She makes the exception to the rule, because I can identify with her and admire her. I think she's someone I would have liked to party with and I think she's hot. Something about the obscurity of her fame and her quirkiness make her a palatable doppelganger. I've used a picture of her as an avatar on online communities so much that I sometimes forget that it isn't actually a picture of me. I'm not even sure she was blonde, so she also has the merit of not falling into the all blondes look alike paradigm.
So, to illustrate this post, here are pictures of me at my most airbrushed and glamourous (my high school senior picture) and all the celebrities anyone has ever told me I look like, as best I can remember.
