Overheard in Downtown Cincinnati

So, I'm totally I'm totally ripping that title off from the DCist, but I admit it. Accept me.

But, I overhead the most amazing line today when walking to my car. I had to laugh, because it was so amazingly absurd.

Redneck man at bus stop to classy woman in nice sports car:

"Baby, you're the hottest thing since fire. Why don't you give me a ride?"

I have a feeling that guy is going to be at the bus stop for a long, long time.

When Monkeys Fight Back!

This story is so amazing that I had to post it in full. I've highlighted the important parts. A very special thanks to the BBC for reporting this story. The link to the original is here:

Monkeys attack Delhi politician

Delhi has long struggled to cope with marauding monkeys

The deputy mayor of the Indian capital Delhi has died a day after being attacked by a horde of wild monkeys.

SS Bajwa suffered serious head injuries when he fell from the first-floor terrace of his home on Saturday morning trying to fight off the monkeys.

The city has long struggled to counter its plague of monkeys, which invade government complexes and temples, snatch food and scare passers-by.

The High Court ordered the city to find an answer to the problem last year.

Solution elusive

One approach has been to train bands of larger, more ferocious langur monkeys to go after the smaller groups of Rhesus macaques.

The city has also employed monkey catchers to round them up so they can be moved to forests.

But the problem has persisted.

Culling is seen as unacceptable to devout Hindus, who revere the monkeys as a manifestation of the monkey god Hanuman, and often feed them bananas and peanuts.

Urban development around the city has also been blamed for destroying the monkeys' natural habitat.

Mr Bajwa, a member of the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), is survived by his wife and a son, according to the Press Trust of India news agency.

Snapped...

On recent lazy Sundays when I've actually been home, I've gotten sucked into marathons of the show Snapped on Oxygen. The premise, for the unitiated: profiles of cases where really crazy women murdered their husbands/boyfriends in incredibly violent (and often surprisingly innovative) ways.

Anyway, I'm really into true crime, but this show is extra creepy. I mean, there's a lot of crazy, murderous women out there. And they all seemed somewhat normal pre-murder. The show is in its sixth season, and after several marathon viewings, I've caught very few repeats. Apparently, there's plenty of material to mine for this show.

Also, as you might imagine, my husband is mildly perturbed by my interest in the subject matter. But it keeps sucking me in, and making me paranoid. And, I'm pretty sure it's not just me or my perception, but a large percentage of the bizarro murders seem to happen in Kentucky and Ohio. Which kind of ups the creepiness factor... like, is it in the water or something?

Exercises in the domestic arts

I recently acquired two new household items that may make me seem like I'm 27 going on 40 with 2.5 kids, a suburban pottery-barn inspired home, a giant SUV and a Martha Stewart obsession -- but I'm OK with that.

Item #1 -- not incredibly unusual, but I bought a crock pot. I'm terribly excited by the prospect of pot roast, 40-clove chicken and Cornish game hens in my future. Not to mention vats of chili cheese dip. My crock pot is red, and it's absolutely adorable. One day, when I get my Kitchen Aid mixer -- in red, of course -- my world will be complete.

Item #2 -- is something I've been secretly longing for -- a breadmaker. Thanks to my wonderful bf, who understands and appreciates my obsession with bread and soup, I got a deluxe-super-duper-does-everything-for-you-magnum-gorgeous breadmaker supreme! It will complement the vats of soup I make in my crock pot quite nicely. I'm looking forward to making everyone I know loaves of bread for Christmas... so brace yourselves.

See, I'm so domestic, it's great.... minus the fact that my house is a dirty mess and I really am not that motivated to fix the situation....

Now I must order kitchen curtains -- primarily to make sure the world doesn't see my mess!

Baby's Black Balloon Makes Her Fly

Editor's note: Totally taken from my MySpace blog. Because I can.

I love Cold Case on CBS. I like it for many of the same reasons that I dislike other shows—when it comes to showcasing the past, it's not particularly nuanced or complex, but that's what makes it totally awesome, at least in my opinion. If Det. Rush and company are looking into an early '80's case, for example, you can bet on big hair and Duran Duran. You totally know what you're getting into—the only surprise is the obligatory twist in the case 45 minutes into the episode.

Anyway, Cold Case is getting even more love than usual from me so far this season because in the first two episodes the team reopened cases from the '90s. Nineties music hasn't reached that level of nostalgia where it's cool to embrace it yet, but I'll totally cop to still loving those tunes from my middle- and high-school days. The first episode, Thrill Kill, highlighted a '94 case and featured flashbacks jam-packed with flannel shirts and—you guessed it!—an all-Nirvana soundtrack.

But last night's episode, That Woman, was truly awesome because it only went back to 1998, which means that all the songs featured in flashbacks were regularly played in my super-cool '92 Plymouth Acclaim as I cruised the streets of P-town my junior year of high school. Here's a few of the songs featured:

Black Balloon: The Goo Goo Dolls
Closing Time: Semisonic
Counting Blue Cars: Dishwalla
Sex and Candy: Marcy Playground
Torn: Natalie Imbruglia

It's kind of funny to hear those songs and then instantly what was going on in my head when I was 17. I loved some Natalie Imbruglia… I thought she was super-angsty—just like me!—even though I later found out she was a former soap star and didn't write her own songs, but whatevs. I also remember being pretty keen on Closing Time, despite never having stepped into a bar at the time.

I think this may trigger some mid-to-late-'90s iTunes downloading over the next few days. I think my first download might be Banditos by The Refreshments…

Close Encounters of the #2 Kind

Sorry for being so MIA lately... work, travel and teaching have taken me away from this most worthy past time. But, I found it very important to relay one of the most amazing things that's ever happened to me.

I stepped in human feces while wearing open toed shoes.

Yes, that's no joke.

Let me tell you how it happened:

It was an unseasonably warm Wednesday morning in downtown Cincinnati. Being the industrious person I am, I tried to get in to work earlier to start my day off right. As I turned the corner from the busy rush hour street into my office's doorway, key card in hand, I smelled the most amazing smell....

You know that saying "What crawled up your ass and died?" Well, I think that's the best way to describe the rancid odor in the doorway. Unfortunately, the complete shock of the nauseating aroma caught me so off guard that I didn't notice as my foot landed in the ginormous pile of shit.

Immediately I thought: Oh shit! It's shit! Dear God! Open toed shoes...tetanus... AAAAACCCCCCKKKKKK!

I immediately pulled my foot out of my shoe, pulled the shoe (did I mention it's one of my favorite pairs?) from the steaming pile of poo, and hopped to the curb where I fruitlessly scraped my shoe against it, hoping it would easily come off.

That was not the case, since apparently the person in question had a very loose bowel movement, creating a concoction similar in consistency to cement with similar adhesive ability. I hopped into the office and into the restroom, where I went through a lengthy process of scrub. gag. scrub. gag. exit bathroom for air. scrub. gag. Is that corn? sweet god. scrub. gag. scrub.

20 minutes later the shit was gone, yet the pungent odor still remained. Luckily for me, I once had to write an article on removing bodily fluids and odors for a janitorial trade publication. (Who knew THAT would come in handy some day?) So, I filled a bucket with Lysol and laid my shoe in it to kill the odor causing bacteria responsible for the rancid odor. It worked. No more odor.

But sadly for me, I still have not recovered, and I'm not convinced that I ever will be able to wear those shoes again. Just thinking about them makes me smell shit. It's quite unfortunate.

So that's the story of me stepping in human shit. I didn't even go into detail about the overall havoc it wrought upon the office, as I was not the only victim of the foulness.... I just had the most severely foul interaction.

Ah the joys of working downtown!

Fall TV Is Back!

Longtime blog readers by now know that I have nothing going for me in life that doesn’t involve TV. I live for it. I make plans (like sleeping and eating) around it. To me, new episodes of my favorite TV shows are like smack, or what I imagine smack to be like since I grew up in Paducah, KY, and the most hardcore tale from my youth involves stealing a pen from K-Mart when I was seven. My mother made me return it later. So I guess what I’m saying is that, to me, new TV episodes of my fave shows are like the high a seven-year-old gets from stealing a pen.

Anyway, since Fall TV is back, I’ve been gearing up for the return of old favorites— such as The Office, How I Met Your Mother, Friday Night Lights, Heroes (yay for bringing in Kristen Bell!) and even Grey’s Anatomy, even though it was all sad and weird the second half of last season with the ferries crashing and the dying and coming back to life and the Derek hitting on Meredith’s sister and the Addison leaving Seattle Grace to chat with an elevator. I’ll give it another chance. The music was still good, anyway.

There’s also new shows, and the ones I’m most excited about are Pushing Daisies, Bionic Woman (although stunt casting Isaiah Washington for an arc isn’t doing it any favors in my book), and Gossip Girl. I actually saw the pilot of Gossip Girl last night, and it was pretty good in that guilty pleasure kind of way. It stars Blake Lively (the blond girl from Sisterhood of The Traveling Pants, which you know I loved), and it’s pretty much The O.C. set in New York City. Let’s just hope it’s The O.C., seasons one and two, and not three and four when it got terrible.

Other shows I’m planning on tuning into (and have reasonably high hopes for) are: Private Practice (despite the terrible pseudo-pilot, I’ll watch anything that includes Tim Daly); Cane, and Women’s Murder Club.

Anyway, so today I totally mapped out my fall viewing schedule. Once everything premieres, here’s what it’ll look like with some nifty DVR maneuvering (assuming I like the new shows I want to see and stick with my favorites from last season.)

Sunday

9 p.m.
Cold Case
Desperate Housewives

10 p.m.
Brothers & Sisters

Monday

8 p.m.
How I Met Your Mother

9 p.m.
Heroes
The Hills

Tuesday

10 p.m.
Boston Legal
Cane
Law & Order: SVU

Wednesday

8 p.m.
Pushing Daisies

9 p.m.
Bionic Woman
Gossip Girl
Private Practice

10 p.m.
Lost

Thursday

8 p.m.
Ugly Betty

8:30
30 Rock

9 p.m.
Grey’s Anatomy
The Office

9:30
Scrubs

10 p.m.
Mad Men
Without A Trace

Friday

9 p.m.
Women’s Murder Club

10 p.m.
Friday Night Lights
Numb3rs


I'll bet you wish I knew how to link to a blog page because this post is taking over the whole homepage! I don't!