Pointy or Rounded Snout?

Former Honey and I made a bet over the type of animal embroidered on the Lacoste polo shirt. I instantly replied, "it's an alligator" and was so sure of myself that I made the bet sushi dinner. Former Honey thought it was a crocodile but was less sure of herself and countered with coffee. No, I insisted, dinner.

Back in the early 80s when these shirts were popular, as I guess they are once more, I remember calling them alligator shirts. There was also a book floating around at that time titled, Save an Alligator, Shoot a Preppy. Eager to cash in on my dinner, I googled Lacoste and discovered that Wiki believes it to be a crocodile. Impossible! I kept looking and found a site that said:

The Lacoste sports shirt, made of cotton pique and bearing a logo of an alligator, was named for its creator, tennis pro Rene "The Crocodile" Lacoste.

As much as I want to win this bet, Professional Critic pauses. This makes absolutely no sense. I'm a humanities gal through and through but even I know an alligator and a crocodile are not the same animal. (Don't ask me how they're different please. They just are, okay?)

Reading the Lacoste website, it is easy to see how we all became so confused. Says Rene Lacoste:

"I was nicknamed "the Alligator" by the American press, after I made a bet with the Captain of the French Davis Cup Team concerning a suitcase made from alligator skin. He promised to buy it for me if I won a very important match for our team.The public must have been fond of this nickname which conveyed the tenacity I displayed on the tennis courts, never letting go of my prey!"

"So my friend Robert GEORGE drew a 'crocodile' which I then had embroidered on the blazer I wore on the courts."

Lacoste himself, or maybe his friend Robert GEORGE, is the source of the confusion. Forgivable, I suppose. He's a tennis player and style icon, not a herpetologist. But what of the sushi dinner? Am I buying or being treated? Does the word crocodile in quotes really mean alligator?

I turn to science to help. Even after studying this damn corporate animal and using this handy guide I still can't tell.

Two more interesting tidbits. One from Lacoste again:

"To the best of our knowledge, this was the first time that a brand name appeared on the outside of an article of clothing - an idea which has since become extremely successful."

Thanks, for that great contribution to the world, Mr. Lacoste, as well as your incisive understanding of the crocodilian species.

And because urbandictionary.com was one of the sites that wanted to tell me about Lacoste, I finally (sort of) understand what hyphy means.

Suffer The Professional Critic

After avoiding it for weeks, I finally watched Babel. As with Amores Perros, this film is an unrelenting sufferfest. The sense of foreboding as the movie opens with two hormonally crazed unsupervised boys with a rifle just deteriorates into panicked chaos and desperation across the globe until you think things just can't get any worse ... then of course they do.

Alejandro González Iñárritu
I am so done with you.
If I wanted to feel this shitty
I would just read the newspaper.
At least then I could get my horoscope.

Follow the Money

That's what I learned from The Wire, whose fourth season I am not so patiently waiting for. But in the meantime I am really enjoying Deadwood. It's a lot like The Sopranos, but instead of poly blend shirts and fake French tips, there's suspenders and handlebar mustaches.

But why am I following the money? Today while I was trolling through Perez to find the full text of the blasting voicemail Alec "I sure am dumb" Baldwin left for his daughter Ireland, I happened to notice a picture of Tom and Katie as they entered a fundraiser for the New York Rescue Workers Detoxification Program. Interesting, I thought, this absolutely reeks of Scientology. Knowing that vitamins and exercise couldn't be too far behind, I did some digging.

Initially I felt torn. Sure, the Scientologists are crazy. How crazy? you might ask, if you didn't read my last post about these nutters.

"Scientologists believe that most human problems can be traced to lingering spirits of an extraterrestrial people massacred by their ruler, Xenu, over 75 million years ago. These spirits attach themselves by "clusters" to individuals in the contemporary world, causing spiritual harm and negatively influencing the lives of their hosts."

--US District Justice Judge Leonie Brinkema, 4 Oct 96 Memorandum Opinion, RTC vs. Lerma

Tres, tres crazy, no? On the other hand, no one else is championing the cause of 9/11 emergency workers' respiratory illnesses. If memory serves, I do believe the EPA, perhaps fearing a rash of lawsuits which came anyway, went to great pains to tell the public that the smoke and particle filled air around Ground Zero was perfectly safe!

Part of me thinks, oh, fine! Kooky rich Scientologists like Tom Cruise want to pony up some cash so that 9/11 emergency responders can get saunas, vitamins, massages and maybe get some relief from their very real and serious symptoms. What could possibly be the harm in that? Why must the Professional Critic get so bent out of shape about every little thing?!

As usual, it's the money honey, as in separation of church and state, or rather separation of cult and state. Alt-Religion-Scientology reports:

"The Post accused Lopez of, in return, 'steering' $630,000 in taxpayer funds to the New York Rescue Workers Detoxification Project, a formerly privately funded facility near the World Trade Center site. Co-founded by Scientologist superstar Tom Cruise, the center, on Fulton St., uses long saunas, vitamins and exercise to allegedly detox firefighters and others who worked at Ground Zero.

In June 2004, Lopez, who is chairperson of the City Council's Committee on Mental Health, allocated $30,000 in public funds for the detoxification center. The center later received two additional $300,000 allocations of city money."

A different story all together.

Rabbits in Dresses

Check out this newsbit from Salon today:

One can learn a lot from "fake" news: Daily Show viewers best informed on current events, Fox News viewers finish at the bottom - NYT:

"Americans may have more news outlets today than two decades ago, but they still don't know much more about current events than they did then, according to a new survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. But here's one big difference: the survey respondents who seemed to know the most about what's going on -- who were able to identify major public figures, for example -- were likely to be viewers of fake news programs like Jon Stewart's 'The Daily Show' and 'The Colbert Report'; those who knew the least watched network morning news programs, Fox News or local television news.

No surprise, huh? In order to appreciate a satirical news show, you have to know what the hell is being satirized, otherwise it just isn't funny. The grimaces, doofy grins and pauses are not inherently entertaining. Totally unlike Bugs Bunny, which is hilarious whether you get the references or not. I'm sure I had no idea that I was watching a spoof of The Barber of Seville when Bugs threw Elmer into a barber chair and cranked him up to the rafters, or that Bugs was playing Carmen when he donned the red dress and batted his fake lashes. I just thought a rabbit in drag was funny.

This is no commentary whatsoever on the intelligence and/or civic engagement levels of Fox News watchers.

Act Now! This Offer Won't Last!

I would like to offer my services to those in need of sensitivity training. You don't know who you are, and that's okay. Not knowing that you're an insensitive clod is sadly just part of being insensitive. It's a vicious circle! But not to worry-- Professional Critic is here to help with my exclusive Sensitivity Seminar.

Now, I know that because you don't know you need it, you may not realize that I'm talking to you. So I'm going to give you a sneak preview of the Seminar, with real-life examples of shocking insensitivity and the new skills you can expect to gain from the Seminar.

To the recommended house-call vet that I did not hire to euthanize Miss Kitty:

You said: "You'll want to put her to sleep rght away."

Ooof, that's oafish! I am not sure that any pet owner is very eager to kill their beloved animal. How about, "No one that loves their animal wants to see them suffer. You're doing the right thing."

To the dirty-looking, sloppily-dressed man employed by the pet cemetary and crematorium* who came out to collect my dead cat wearing elbow-length industrial work gloves:

Yowza! This is so egregiously insensitive, the Seminar will need to utilize a multimedia approach with video clips from Six Feet Under. Note the suits, the hands clasped behind the backs, the quiet respectful demeanor, the sincerity with which they apologize for the loss. Great models for how to interact with the bereaved.

To the pet cemetary/crematorium owners:

After you straighten out your employee (see above), turn your eye to your front desk. Consider occasionally filing the large stack of receipts documenting the various boxes of Fluffy, Kiki, Marmalade, Cocoa, Socks, Ned, etc that animal owners have picked up over the years. Don't forget! It's not a Harry and David fruit basket they're signing for--it's the ashes of their dead pet. Ditto on the garbage cans overflowing with the baskets and blankets of other dead animals. You may want to ask your now neatly-dressed and respectful employee to empty these a bit more frequently.

I hope this sneak preview helps you see how you can benefit from the Sensitivity Seminar. Don't delay! This offer won't last as my patience may run out. Instead of understanding how awkward and difficult it can be to talk to the grief-stricken, I might just tell you to go fuck yourself instead.



*Though this place offers a unique service for animals in the Bay Area, they were shockingly unprofesssional. Please take my words to heart and make some changes. Pet owners will be most appreciative. Please don't further inflame my ill-will by suing me. Thank you.

Distract Me, Amadeus

In the past four days I have watched the following in an attempt to distract myself from dementing grief over the loss of my most super girl, Miss Kitty:

Jackass: The Movie (1 and 2): Pretty funny, in the wow, these guys are insane--I really couldn't vomit this much way. In the best skit, one of the Jackasses inserts a Matchbox car up his butt then presents at the office of an elderly Latino doctor complaining of difficulty walking. The expressions of the dour assistant as she examines his X-ray and the ensuing conversation the doc has with a colleague (in Spanish) are truly priceless.

Wedding Crashers: Generally tedious and not so funny except for Isla Fisher, playing the koo koo love interest/stalker of Vince Vaughn

Team America: World Police: Pretty good satire of both the USA's chest thumping bull-in-the-global-china-shop ways and of the action movie genre. Best theme song: America, Fuck Yeah! Great sex scene, but the uncut version was better. Check out This Film is Not Yet Rated, to see the full version.

Part of Borat: Still good, but better in an audience of people howling than in my cat-deficient livingroom.

Fuck, A Documentary: Too long, but interesting as it features exactly who you think it would (George Carlin, clips of Lenny Bruce, various linguists and First Amendment scholars) but also folks from the other side bemoaning the degradation of language into coarseness and vulgarity (Pat Boone, who offers his last name as an equally satisfying alternative, Miss Mannners and a bunch of people from organizations whose very names make my ears turn off: Morality in Media for example.)

Video from the Vanity Fair photo shoot, featuring polar bear cub Knut being followed around by Annie Leibovitz. Not that interesting, but it sure is cute.

Movies sitting on my coffee table from Netflix that I may just need to return without watching because I just can't stand anything else sad or difficult:

Babel: Anything by Alejandro González Iñárritu, director of Amores Perros and 21 Grams, is out.

Sherrybaby: Woman sprung from prison tries to rebuild her life. Nope, nope, nope.

I'm noticing an abundance of the colon in this post. It seems to be working for me to write this way at the moment.

Disconsolate Wailing: Am I Waking the Neighbors?
Red, Chapped Nose: Decimation of the Virgin Forest
Necessary Objects: Drooled-Upon, Vet-Shaped Catnip Toy

Let the Cuteness Wash Over You

Rejected by his momma at birth, bottle-fed by his foster dad at the Berlin Zoo, green blankie in tow, it's Knut! My teeth hurt from looking at these pictures.