Giant Gobsmacking American Idol WTF???

Adam Lambert, American Idol first runner-up? Wha? There's never been a more talented contestant than Adam Lambert, and gimme a boy with eyeliner, nail polish and glitter any day. I think Kris Allen is adorable, or, as the French say, adorable, and talented, yada yada, but Lambert is in a league of his own.

Eh, he's already a supah star and will be just fine. But knock me ovah with a puff of smoke, yo.

Territories

We have tons of hummingbirds nesting in the pines and silk trees outside my bedroom, so I hied myself to OSH and bought a hummingbird feeder and boiled up some syrup (1 C. sugar in 1 C. water, my mother's tried and true bird recipe) and waited. What I didn't know about hummingbirds is that they're fiercely territorial, but all I had to do was watch to observe it.

If any other hummers come buzzing by to poke into the sugar, one fierce Ruby Throated tsk-tsking fellow who's roundly claimed this feeder as HIS comes darting out of the pine (also his) to bombard the intruder. He will not allow any other bird to partake of the ample supply I've put out for them.

I get it though. I so get it. When my son decided to start cooking I had a hard time letting him into my territory. I get a bit too enraged hunting down the pots and pans that have their own territories the past 30 years that I've lived here. Emptying the dishwasher is another issue, chez moi. I have the matching Oneida Michelangelo silverware, and the stuff I ripped off from the Blue Cross employees' cafeteria (industrial silverware that will outlast the sun) when I was a student nurse supporting myself as a claims examiner part-time. THEY GO IN SEPARATE DRAWERS. At least, they do when I put the dishes away, and being that emptying the dishwasher is one of my least favorite chores . . .

The BF moved in 4 years ago, and there's this thing called "compromise" that's been a little tough for me. You don't wash towels with sheets, for instance, or underwear. YOU WASH THE FUCKING TOWELS WITH TOWELS. So he washes HIS towels with whatever he wants. Compromise. We all do our own laundry.

Meanwhile, this bird's gonna drive himself nuts, and I'm trying to have that mean something to me. It's constant, the shooing away of the invaders. It's gotta be exhausting. I'm getting exhausted just watching him.

One stealthy little bugger just logged a quick suck at the feeder that the boss-man didn't catch. Methinks it must've tasted even sweeter.

Natasha Richardson

Truly tragic, and we all know about it because she was 1) a celebrity in her own right, 2) married to a celeb, Liam Neeson and, 3) comes from a celebrity family, the Redgraves. And I'm not going to digress about the word "celebrity" here, but it's an interesting word.

I'm inordinately fascinated by causes of death, and this one is no exception. She had an epidural bleed, a medical/surgical emergency, allegedly from a small fall on a bunny slope (and you do wonder how small that fall really was). Then a fatal comedy of errors, blowing off paramedics, a delay to get to a medical center, in hindsight, so many shoulda this, shoulda thats, with the result that a healthy, vibrant mother, wife, daughter, actress is now dead, no re-dos. That she's a celebrity brings it all into world focus, the uber fragility of life, the nothingness of our individual existences, and yet, the everything factor of them.

She was a perfect candidate to be an organ donor, but nothing was said about that. I would think the family was approached; it's kind of a hospital's mandate to approach a family in these circumstances to donate much needed organs, and maybe the hospital staff did and maybe Natasha's family agreed, understandably electing to not publicize this to avoid the media frenzy that would carry over to the recipient. I hope her organs were harvested because I know some non-celeb person somewhere is dying for her heart, her lungs, her liver, a kidney.

If you're an atheist, in my opinion, this kind of stuff makes life even more precious, cuz baby, this is it, one fast whirl on the planet, liable to go up in a puff of nowhere fast. I'm gonna take this tragedy and do something fun because of it, something rewarding, decadent, something life-affirming. I'm gonna take a moment or ten and think of how lucky I am at this moment in time to not have anything greater than a stinking economic crisis to worry about. I'm going to see the tax man today, get that out of the way, and then go see my best pals at the beach (with the BF at my side, natch), observe the earth (it might rain in L.A. today, woo hoo!), drink champagne and toast to life. Natasha, I promise a sad-but-somehow-merry libation to you.

Kalifornia

So. A friend of a friend of mine, an insufferable, reckless woman, or so I hear, decided to conduct a social experiment and investigate Medical Marijuana. California has approved the "medical" use of marijuana, a Compassionate Use Act, but the Feds still say pot's illegal, even though the state says it's fine, and we have the Kalifornia Konundrum.

Here's the deal:
To obtain medical marijuana you have to go to a health professional, usually an MD, who "recommends" your use of marijuana for Whatever Ails You. Whatever Ails You can be just about anything, and in my FOAF's case, what ailed her was arthritis. The doctor, a thirty-something, very serious, stocky man who explained he would never, ever recommend cannabis for recreational use, only for What Ails You, spent a long time with my FOAF, so I hear, explaining the many ways to manage pain, and just when she thought he was going to turn her down for not taking enough Aleve, he wrote the recommendation, an officially sealed document on good ecru colored stock, and valid for 1 year. For this, the reckless arthritic woman paid $150 cash. She told my friend that the clinic waiting room was teeming. She said it was a diverse group, from the elderly and the rickety to another MD (attired in a suit and tie) patiently awaiting his "recommendation", as well as the usual friendly-if-skanky types you might expect in such a "joint" (so to speak). She also said that the cult classic Reefer Madness was playing on a television set in the waiting room, providing ironic ambience.

So then, recommendation in arthritic hand, the plucky, reckless and enterprising woman sought out a "pharmacy", and this is where the story gets good. This FOAF went to one of the many "pharmacies" advertised in the clinic (the clinic is only to get recommendations). Outside at the given address, the signage indicated a nail shop, the windows covered and a security gate in place. She rang the buzzer, she told my friend, and was buzzed in to a clean, well-lighted place that reeked of slaughtered skunk. She signed in and sat to wait. When her turn came, she was ushered into another, private room filled with jars and jars of fine, perfumed sinsemilla, as well as cookies, brownies, and other products. "We just moved here," the cheerful clerk reportedly told her. "We'll be getting more stock soon: edibles, hashish and lollypops by next week.

LOLLYPOPS!

She bought a half ounce of OG Kush for $175, and my friend hasn't seen her since.

Saturday Night Fever

Last night the BF and I went out on a date. We hit Zono Sushi for dinner, and I had the Seafood Soba Salad, an artful presentation of freshly cooked-to-order buckwheat noodles and mixed greens in a pungent wasabi/soy/lemon dressing and studded with tide pool shit, dee-licious always. The BF ordered the weekend special with teriyaki salmon and sashimi, and we kept to green tea in interest of staying awake (our beloved Sapporo is super but soporific).

Then we hied on down through Hollywood, but first, we hit the drive-thru Baskin Robbins for sugar cones of Jamoca Almond Fudge. Happily slurping these in the BF's shiny new Prius, we got to the Farmer's Market and walked around, incorporating the adjacent The Grove in our evening promenade. If you're not familiar with The Grove, it's a mega mall, Disneyland's Main Street, USA meets Shopping America. It's all done up for Christmas, complete with hordes and hordes of holiday shoppers of the white, affluent persuasion, and we got some coffee and people watched, feeling festive and even a little gay. We bought tangerines and pears and bananas (pomegranates were $3.98 each, why, you could buy a gallon of gasoline for that. Unlike Persephone, we passed on the 'granates), and then:

We hied our asses to the Regency Theater on Beverly and Fairfax to see He Was a Quiet Man starring Christian Slater, who plays a sick nerd, the kind that goes beserk and goes on shooting rampages, and that's pretty much what happens. I'm a jerk for quirk, but this one, this one, no.

Then we went home. The BF was horny, I wasn't, that was the end of that.

Ode to the Pomegranate Martini

It's a thing of beauty, this drink, made with the beautifully perfumed Pama Pomegranate liqueur. Friday night the BF and I went out and I consumed not one, not two, but three of these beauties at Woktano, along with some miso soup and a sashimi salad. After, we wandered over to the dollar book store for drunken book-browsing. We capped off the night at Granville with beautiful glass of Five Rivers Pinot Noir, and a fresh berry shortcake.

Alas, I slept in my clothes that night, and woke up to a disturbing, whirling headache, but it was gone by noon.