I can not. Stop. Eating. I just keep shoveling in the grub, packing on the pounds while I stuff my face. And it’s not even like the bad old days, where I felt compelled to eat even when I wasn’t hungry; my stomach has caught up with my brain, it seems, and is colluding by making me feel actual hunger almost all the time.

A lot of it is because I’m constantly bored, I know. But an even bigger part of it…well, it’s not something I can talk about in an open forum. And that need for caution, in fact, is part of what’s gnawing away at me, causing the hollowness that must be filled with PBJs and oatmeal cookies.

Somebody charge a sigil for me, will ya?

Fight Club as Nice Guy ™ cinema writ large.

OK, on this mailing list there’s been discussion of the number of points of failure in the whole interview/hiring process. One person had written about how a great-on-paper candidate for a reference position had blown her chances when she’d responded to a question about her ref experience by saying, “Well, I really don’t like doing reference.”

Take a moment to marvel at the sight someone applying for a job that they don’t have any relevant experience performing because they hate that kind of work. Marvel some more at the person would coming forward and admitting that fact during the interview.

Some people are immune to such awe and wonder, though. A list member actually responded by asking if the interview process was always so harsh, if it’s common for one measly bad answer to scuttle an applicant’s chances.

Perhaps giving the querent the benefit of the doubt, another member responded by saying, “That’s kind of an important question, for an applicant for a Reference Librarian position….”

This application of the Clue Bat was all for naught, though, as the querent replied, “I get what you’re saying, but: if I have 10 patrons, and I tell one to go left when he should go right, and give the other 9 the correct information, do you fire me?”

Wow. I had thought the object of the original story was in the running for the world land-speed record in Missing the Point, but I think our querent has surpassed her and opened up a brand new league of cluelessness.

So this afternoon I checked my Livejournal friends’ pages for the first time in a good six months.

Overloaded with missed posts, I decided to dip in randomly. A sad voyeur, I especially wanted to check out the page of a cute (straight, sigh) boy who had lived in my building in Tuscaloosa.

Turns out he’s spending the entire month of August abroad, and is currently in Paris.

Now, this kid finished his BA in May 2006 at a very traditional age. Since then, he has moved half way across the country and worked a string of restaurant and coffee shop jobs, occasionally picking up a day or two of substitute teaching.

Now, I seriously doubt this guy has been living frugally, as hipster blood courses through his veins. Even if he had been pinching every penny for the last year, though, I fail to see how he could have possibly socked enough away to be able to 1) take a month off work, and 2) spend that month in Europe.

Seriously, how do people do shit like that? I want to know.

Finally, I shall respond to comments.

(I know, about damned time.)

In response to this, Pete wrote:

Durable products discourage conspicuous consumption and are downright un-American.

True. Maybe I should only buy Canadian coffeemakers in the future.

Prompted by my realization that To the Manor Born is a satirical updating of Dracula, Zero reasonably asked

Er … really?

Care to elaborate?

And so I shall.

Dracula is perhaps the most durable exemplar of Immigrant Panic literature. It speaks of the Eastern European hordes overrunning good old Anglo Protestant England with their sexy ways and their ravenous hungers and their thoroughgoing disrespect for the Way Things Are Done. More specifically, it centers around a particularly villainous arriviste, Count Dracula, who uses his diabolical charms to win over a pure and virtuous daughter of the English gentry. This woman’s fall is prefigured by her best friend’s early submission to the invader.

To the Manor Born reprises the theme and some of the particulars while modernising and satirising the underlying attitudes. Here the intruder from Olde Europe is not a member of a dissolute aristocracy but instead a nouveau riche capitalist. Both are, of course, bloodsuckers in their own ways.

Audrey, like Mina, resists the swarthy foreigner’s charms but eventually succumbs. Like Lucy in the earlier work, friend Marjorie falls for the newcomer almost immediately. The key difference here is that the respect for tradition and status quo that drove the horror in the tale of Dracula is undermined by the nascent multiculturalism and globalism and turned to the source of comedy in the tale of Devere. Where Mina’s stalwart virtue was a prize to be protected, Audrey’s hidebound traditionalism was a bit of buffoonery to be overcome.

Contrasting the two works allows us to see the latter production as a (you’ll excuse the pun) biting satire: Where the earlier tale is a defense of privilege against the depredations of the Other, the latter tale is a defense of privilege qua privilege, acknowledging that the aristocrat and the plutocrat are both leeches but that it doesn’t matter, so long as there’s some sort of -crat in charge. Thus the dark horror becomes black comedy, hrm hrm hrm.

Amy very politely caught me out in an error of fact:

Do you mean the character played by J. August Richards (I think his first name is Charles), or the screenwriter? If you are talking about the former– hell, yes!

Sorry to hear about the teef.

Damn. You have no idea how long I’ve been making that mistake. I’ve been doing it for at least a year. Wow.

Glad to know I was at least right about his hotness!

And the teeth are much better now, thanks. Must be a cycle-of-the-moon thing.

Regarding drag queens in Southern small-town shows, Pete asked:

So who are the signifiers now?

It’s really a mixed bag, in my experience, enough so that I’m hard-pressed to name names. (I’m especially hard-pressed since I’m not too terribly hep to today’s pop music.) I know Shania Twain seems to be one of the few constants, though. Liza and Barbra and even Donna Summers are hardly heard from at all, and Cher isn’t a performer you can count on.

I think the important thing to note in this regard, and something that I think drove my original post without my realizing it, is that televisual portrayals of drag shows make the mistake of confusing drag queens with celebrity impersonators. Even a drag queen doing a Liza Minelli number would most likely not be dressed as Liza, but instead would be done up as herself whilst incidentally lip-synching a Minelli number. But, again, you’re highly unlikely to find anyone doing a Liza Minelli number at a small-town Southern drag show today, as the pieces performed are practically guaranteed to be songs by Top 40 artists recorded within the last 10-15 years.

We’re teetering on a linguistic brink here, actually, as the notion of “drag” is kind of collapsing into the notion of “female impersonation”. The form I once saw described as “travesty drag” (think Divine) appears to be dying, alas, while the goal of most younger performers seems to be to “pass” as genuine women instead of performing as outsized caricatures of stereotypical femininity or womanness. To put it another way, the performance among contemporary drag artists is increasingly seated in the illusion rather than the action.

And OK, that’s enough catching up for now.

Had a rerun of King of the Hill I DVRed last night running in the background. Commercials were on, but I wasn’t paying enough attention to warrant fast-forwarding. The cheesy haze of low-budget video in the corner of my eye combined with the fuzzy Latino-inflected voiceover and I started paying attention.

At first, I assumed I must have misinterpreted something. Thought I must have misheard what the muffled narration was saying, thought I must have just missed the clips of scantily clad women among the shots of tank-topped men. But it drew me in, I declare.

And then the closing narration, and the titles on screen, and I realized I hadn’t missed anything at all: Airing in a late-night commercial spot on a St. Louis TV station was an advertisement for a gay dating service.

Wow.

Low-end name-brand coffee makers, running around $25, don’t last any longer than cheap store-brand machines that go for $10. The mid-range offerings ($40-$50) appear to be the same basic mechanism with unnecessary bells and whistles added, so I don’t think they’d last any longer. I suspect the models starting around $100 might be more durable, but I doubt they’d last ten times as long as the cheapies.

To the Manor Born was a satirical then-contemporary updating of Dracula.

At this rate of picking up habits, I may finally be able to accept that I’ll never be able to afford taking up heroin.

So I’ve started watching History Detectives on PBS. Like, a lot. Like five-six episodes a week a lot. It’s kind of like Antiques Roadshow with research-oriented field trips mixed in. The hosts/detectives are charming, the objects researched are varied and usually of some interest, and the production values are…well, pretty much what you’d expect of a contemporary PBS production. Slick but cheesy, you know.

It’s fun, I occasionally learn something, but at the same time I am constantly frustrated. Your typical segment shows the detective visiting at least one major archives and two or three far-flung geographic locations. There are interviews with relevant experts, visits with authors, literally thousands of dollars and days spent in pursuit of an artifact’s provenance. It’s fun, like I said, but pretty damned annoying when at least half of their puzzles could be solved, and a significant amount of legwork in the other half could be dispensed with, by a reference librarian with access to a decent mid-sized U’s collection.

Note that I’m frustrated here, not annoyed. It’s obvious that they have to do it as they do, for it is television and the sight of a librarian tapping away at a keyboard for five minutes, perhaps stumbling into the stacks for a book or two, is not exactly thrilling. But still, it does grate a little when you see somebody flying halfway across the country to dig up a fact they could have pulled up in eight seconds in America: History and Life.

The really frustrating thing, I guess, is that the situations can’t be completely staged by the production company. The people with items surrounded by historical mystery, after all, have to have made contact with the show on their own. This suggests that there are people out there, hundreds of ‘em, with known enigmas that could be resolved by a spunky librarian who would just love to dig, at no charge, into the problem. There’s this great resource just sitting there, wanted but unknown. Le sigh.

Is James Gunn the epitome of sexy, or what?

Also: I really need to get to a dentist soon. Grr.