Misplaced Childhood

This morning I woke up with Marillion's Misplaced Childhood CD running through my head. I've had this CD since 1990 - it's the first I ever owned. I bought it from a guy in my dorm in college, because he didn't want it. And no wonder, because it's melodramatic, OTT tripe.
So of course I can sing half of it by heart. When I wrote that it was running through my head, I meant it: "huddled in the safety of a pseudo silk kimono wearing bracelets of smoke", through "Kayleigh" and "j'entends ton coeur" and all the rest. I almost called my friend Amy, who was my roommate in 1990 and had to suffer through far more secondhand Marillion than anyone should, but I blogged this instead.

at the ballot

My title for today is a pun, har-dee-har, on the "at the ballet" song from Chorus Line. I just finished filling in my ballot for the national professional organization of which I am a member, and boy are my arms tired. Hee hee.
Here's the thing: these are professionals, asking other professionals in a professional organization to vote for them. But yet, some of them seem blithely unaware of that, so their personal statements contain elementary mistakes like these:
- failing to mention any knowledge of finance while running for treasurer
- using bad grammar and punctuation while running for secretary
- overusing exclamation points!!
- using this as a reason to get elected.
- mentioning their blog as evidence that they're up on technology*
Ugh. I tended to vote for people who were sensible.

*It's 2008, and you're an information professional. Don't pat yourself on the back because you've got a Livejournal account! I checked out a few blogs, and eliminated a few possibles because of how lame or egregiously twopointopian they were. I'll never use my blog as a selling point when I run for office, because it's just not that impressive to have a blog anymore.

Television Without Pity - without pity

There's not much point to building up a respected pop-culture website, if you're going to have it go horribly awry. I don't know whether the problems are because three of the site's creators and one of its more well-known recappers have all left in the last month, or whether they left because they saw where things were going, and couldn't stem the tide (possibly because of TWoP's decision to ally with Bravo?).
But yeah, I'm cranky that my favorite website is changing for the worse. The new layout (new as of yesterday, I think) is unnecessarily busy. And there are parts that don't go anywhere - don't advertise a wiki that doesn't exist yet. What's the difference between a wiki and the forums anyway? (I know the difference, btw, but for users there's no substantive difference, is all).
And for heaven's sake, I was reading a recap this morning by the increasingly unreadable Jacob, whose anger and blind prejudices aren't "without pity", but "without wit" and "without reason". Shut up, Jacob. And I took a poll on page 5, and was diverted back to page 1. Thanks, TWoP! Also - if a website tells someone they need a newer version of Flash, it's helpful (and by "helpful", I here mean "basic netiquette") to provide a link to an update.

E! and laundry

Today I had to fold laundry, and I found myself watching an E! True Hollywood Story while I did it. I didn't think I could be a bigger cliche - watching E! while folding laundry? Heavens.
In my defense (a weak one, I'll admit), I'd been flipping between The American President and Love and Basketball at first, but then those ended. So yeah - now I have neat piles of folded laundry put away, and I know a bunch of trivia about America's Next Top Model (the topic of the E! THS).