What you need

I totally ripped this off from my friend Erika. Here's how it works. Go to Google and type in "(your name) needs" then post the five funniest ones.

Dinah needs a job. I don't think she's pulling her weight around here. ...Dinah needs a little bathtub, too. I really couldn't agree more, as I am clearly screwing around on my blog. And also I stink.

Dinah needs to define her relationship with Huntress. Ah yes, the Birds of Prey, featuring Dinah the Black Canary.

Dinah needs to be spayed, but that only takes one day. Ouch!! This is what happens when people name pets after tertiary characters in Alice in Wonderland.

Dinah needs to be arrested. Eek! Although I'm fairly certain this particular Dinah can be found on Guiding Light.

Dinah needs some pointers in pirranahdom. Who doesn't?

What do you need?

Judgemental, yes

By the way, did I tell you that I was featured in a Baltimore Sun article about online dating? Long story about how it came to be, but you can read it here. (If you don't want to register with the Sun to read the story, try bugmenot.com for a pseudo-login.)

If you don't feel like reading the whole thing, the highlight of my appearance in the article is an excerpt of this obnoxious, super-tart statement I made to the reporter about how my dear friend Loren and I used to sit in the tiny office we shared at the crappy movie promotion agency, and judge potential dates based on whether they "gave good email."

When I was single, one of my friends & I used to read boys' emails to each other, and decide whether or not they were dateable simply by their writing ability. Boys who wrote like they talked were dateable; boys who wrote boring/stiff/formal emails were sketchy; gross spelling or punctuation errors were not tolerated ever. If he wrote like he talked, and he was funny? He WON. Judgemental, yes, but it was a solid correlation every single time.

Of course, this all predated the whole IM-speak phenomenon, but I can't imagine either of us even considering a boy who was too lazy to spell out entire words.

(Incidentally, mAc used to write me AMAZING emails. Now, of course, they're more like, "If you're stopping by the store on the way home, we need trash sacks.")

Mix of the Month: August/September

If my lack of mixing over the summer isn't a testament to how busy we've been this summer, I don't know what is. I love getting my hands on new music, discovering new bands, mixing fabulous playlists to suit whatever flight of fancy might strike me at the particular moment. But it's been awhile, y'all. Is it possible to get musically horny after a dry spell of no new music? Because I feel like I am CLIMBING THE WALLS.

In the meantime, here's a theme-y mix I put together as part of my monthly CD swap project. This month I hosted, and since I've been so slammed with work at the office and the house, that was my theme: Show Me What You're Workin' With (Or, if you sing along to Mystikal like I do, "Show me widja widja widja".)

Originally, I'd planned on throwing together a mix of everything we listened to while working on the house, which upon closer examination was 95% 80's buttrock and 5% BEP and Madonna. (Because nothing gets your roller going like Def Leppard's greatest hits.) But then I mentioned the theme to mAc.

Me: The theme is Work. So it could be music you listen to at the office, music that gets you through a rough day, music to motivate, or songs for when you're just, like, workin' it.
Him: You could also do bands that are occupations! Like Men at Work and the Police and Firehouse.
Me: Dude. You just said Firehouse.

Naturally, I had to take the idea and run with it. The result is below.

MEN AND WOMEN AT WORK


Opportunities/Pet Shop Boys
We've Only Just Begun/The Carpenters
Life in the Factory/Drive By Truckers
Trying to Make a Living/Firehouse
The Laws Have Changed/The New Pornographers
Shrine/The Dambuilders
Every Little Thing She Does/The Police
Punk Rock Girl/The Dead Milkmen
Spitting Games/Snow Patrol
Narc/Interpol
Nothin’ but a G Thang/Dr. Dre
It’s Raining Men/Weather Girls
His N Hers/I Am The World Trade Center
Down Under/Men at Work
Nothing Better/The Postal Service
I Know What Boys Like/The Waitresses
I Just Died in Your Arms/Cutting Crew
6 Underground/Sneaker Pimps
All These Things That I've Done/The Killers

LAME

This is just a little memo to the five of you who read my blog:

I love it when I get comments on my blog. I think it's unfortunate that Blogger makes it hard for people to post them without having to go through a whole rigmarole of signing up & signing in and all that jazz, but I sure do love getting them from the people who have gone through the trouble. I love it when mAc comments, when my friends comment, when strangers with blogs of their own comment, and I love it when my mom comments. (Hi mom!)

You know what I don't love? Spam comments. As in, "You have a great blog, come check out my Britney Spears/Halloween/mortgage refinancing/penis enhancement web site!" Yeah, dude? I DON'T THINK SO.

I'm offended and frustrated by this kind of spam on so many levels. A person's email and blog are personal tools, and the community that these tools bring together is personal as well. Spamming someone's email or blog is basically the same as telemarketers calling during dinner. It's extremely intrusive. So you put your number on a "Do Not Call" list and send their lame-ass emails automatically into your junk mail folder (which, by the way, I still have to check, since the exclusive settings on Hotmail make it so that if a friend emails me with a new email address, it goes straight to my junk mail until I grant it access to my inbox).

Not only are they intrusive, but here's the thing that really kills me, the marketer: this approach can't possibly be working. I mean, come on now, there has to be a better way. Not that I'm going to use my own creativity and resources to figure out how to help some jackass who can't get a real job sell more units of some bogus vitamin that'll make you last longer in the sack. I'm just saying that it strikes me as a waste of time, money and resources for an extremely small return. Oh, and also it's STUPID.

In short, spam is LAME. This you knew, but there's more: from now on, if you want to post comments on my blog, you have to go through an extra word verification step that Blogger has set up to prevent unwanted comments from getting on my blog. Which sucks to the power of LAME, but if it keeps the spam off my blog, it works for me. If you know of a better way to keep my blog's comments open to the public and spam-free, I'm all ears.

Any comments?

How 'bout that?

I always wondered if I really was an actual Democrat and, if so, what exactly were the qualities that made that true? "If only there were a handy internet test I could take to explain it to me," I'd think. Well, my wish has come true. I now know, without a doubt, that I am a Strong Democrat, thanks to this not-at-all-overly-simplified, totally accurate Internet test. My dot on the celebrity version of this chart falls right on Hillary Clinton's head, actually. How 'bout that?

You are a Social Liberal (76% permissive) and an... Economic Liberal (23% permissive) You are best described as a: Strong Democrat Link: The Politics Test on Ok Cupid Also: The OkCupid Dating Persona Test

"My girl-crush thinks I'm gay."

Or, non-sequitur bullets for the blogger on the go.

1) My darling friend Loren, whose quote headlines this list, does not have a blog but she totally should.

2) Fall is the best season EVER. I love autumn the best because:

• The weather cools off enough for cute jackets and boots.
• New fall TV.
• The best films, usually for Academy consideration, are released in the fall. (Best year ever: 1999)
• I look hot in orange.
• When it starts to rain, I want to bake things and stay home and hunker down with a warm throw and a Twin Peaks marathon.
• The air smells better, like mountains and leaves and bonfires and homecoming football games.

And the absolute best thing about the fall:

• Halloween.

3) Speaking of Halloween, the new decorations at Illuminations are awesome.

4) Last night, I put away more things around the house, including a bunch of dishes and things in our new sideboard that mAc put together. Which means our new soup tureen has a home.

5) I can't believe that I have a SOUP TUREEN in my SIDEBOARD.

6) Do you even know what a sideboard is? It's a little buffet/dresser type thing that goes in the dining room. It's part of the dining set we just bought. A set, as in table, sideboard and matching chairs.

7) Note to self: more rock shows. Less Ikea.

8) Veronica Mars, aka the BEST TV SHOW EVER, starts its second season tonight. Do yourself a favor, and set up your TiVO. I know, I know, it's on UPN, but trust me. It rocks. If not me, then trust Joss Whedon, Kevin Smith and Damon Lindelof. They love it too.

9) I actually met Kristin Veitch (from the link above) when we were in Hawaii. She was super nice, and I'm bummed that we didn't get to chat more and geek out over favorite shows like Veronica Mars and Lost and Arrested Development. The woman's got taste.

10) I don't have ten things for this list. It just seemed like I should end on a nice round number.

11) No, wait! Yes I do--I've been meaning to say this for ages, but if you live in SoCal and are looking for a good stylist, go to Frenchy's in Burbank, ask for Petrina, tell her Dinah sent you. She is the best, and keeps my hair looking all kinds of pretty. (The stray hair in the bangs is totally my fault.)

12) How cute is our dog?

*mwah*

Oops! My bad!

The power's out all over LA and people are freaking out. The latest on the news is that some jackass in the LA DWP cut the wrong line. As in, they cut the wrong line and power disappeared all over this major metropolis. For example, I work in Korea Town, my husband's in Burbank--our power went out at the same time. His actually stayed out for quite awhile, whereas ours flickered back on almost immediately.

(What do you say when you're the one who cuts that line? "Oops! My bad!" Yeah, I don't think so.)

No one's really buying the "cut the wrong line" story, either. Many think that there is something more sinister afoot (see bottom of article). I think these people, newscasters included, are simply on edge the day after the 9/11 anniversary and just one week after Katrina. Or maybe they just don't want to believe that someone could be so stupid or otherwise incapacited as to make this kind of mistake. Or maybe, just maybe, they're just trying to make a more sensational story out of it than it actually is.

Personally, I think it's a heist. I think someone of the George Clooney/Mark Whalberg persuasion either has someone on the inside at the DWP to take out a generator, or they've hired a hacker to cut power for a second. (If you see a Seth Green-type dude dancing around a laptop in LA, arrest that man!) Laugh if you will, but when artifacts at the Tut exhibit or $10 million in gold boullion goes missing, don't say I didn't warn you.

No time for love, Dr. Jones

Well, there's always time for love. But there's no time for anything else.

Movers show up tomorrow. Our house is painted (yay!), but our apartment is in a slight state of, um, chaos. To make matters more interesting, I'm spending moving day at work (not helping move) giving 3 consecutive presentations to one of our top clients, because life is funny like that. Not funny "ha ha," per se. More funny, "I'm breaking out in hives and feel like my head could explode into pulpy bits any minute."

We're almost there, and we're hangin' in. But damn. Moving sucks.

(And the Understatement of the Year Award goes to...)

Get Lost

Last week, mAc and I were in Hawaii. Which was fun to begin with, but wait! It gets better. On Tuesday night, I got to tag along to the DVD release party for Lost.

First of all, if you're not watching Lost, you should change that. Start by getting the Season 1 DVD (drops September 6), take a day off work and marathon your way through them, enjoy all the easter eggs and special features, and you'll be all set for Season 2. Trust me, you won't regret it!

With that out of the way, let me tell you about this event. It was insane. It was set about 10 minutes away from this resort on the North Shore of Oahu... in the middle of the jungle. They drove us out there in long, hitched-together golf cart-like things that were all tricked out like Oceanica airlines, complete with cute flight attendants in suits who gave us pretzels and humorous spiels throughout our journey. When we "landed," we walked down a tiki-torch lit path while the show's mysterious mechanical-sounding monster haunted us from speakers set deep within the trees.

The party itself was just sensational, and I'd like to take this opportunity to give major props to the geniuses at Buena Vista Home Video and Paradigm Shift for really outdoing themselves with this event. For those of you who watch the show, you remember the scene with Walt and the polar bear, with the big-ass banyan trees? That's where we were. It was wicked cool. The decor included huge, oversized asian paper lanterns in the trees, hand-made cocktail tables, and even a replica of the busted fusilage, set behind a stage where local favorites SLUG rocked the jungle with classic rock covers. (Our flight attendants did double duty as go go dancers.) Open bar featured the "Lostini" and the "Driveshaft" and I stuffed myself with sushi and skewers to help absorb the alcohol. For dessert, we toasted s'mores on the beach. How dreamy is that?

Speaking of dreamy, the Lost cast? So much hotter in person. Oh mah damn, they are some pretty, pretty people. I saw almost everyone, and briefly met Evangeline (Kate) (I complimented her 60's-style mini-dress and white go-go boots), Matthew (Jack), Harold (Michael), and Josh (Sawyer).

Josh was waaaaaaaaaaaaaasted. I mean, the whole cast was a little, um, lubricated and/or stoned, but he was really having a fabulous time. Not obnoxiously so, just a happy, funny drunk. Our introduction went like this:
Me: "Hi, I'm Dinah."
Josh: "Diana?"
Me: "No, Dinah, like Dinah Shore?"
He flops his arm around my shoulder looks at my friend who's taking the picture and goes,
"I have no idea who that is."

After the photo I tried "Someone's in the kitchen with," which he not only knew, but enjoyed singing to me in that cute, sloppy way that a happy drunk person has. And then he got distracted by something shiny.

Overall, a brilliant, fabulous evening. According to the staff and press, everyone was really nice, accommodating and easy to work with. No drama queens, no bitches, no fits, no nothin'. It always makes me happy when I discover that my favorite actors/bands/whatever are actually nice and cool in person. They so often are not, you know?

p.s.
Much love to my new friends Laura, Deb, James and my fellow co-founder of the Buena Vista Wives Club and new BFF, Ryan. Kisses!

The people that you meet each day

We're still getting to know the neighbors on our new street. There's the older guy two doors down who's shaped a bit like Tweedle Dee, has fat, cigar-like fingers, often wears the same overalls/plaid-shirt/straw hat combo when he putters in his garden, and can tell you great stories about the Valley in the 50's.

There's the Car Family across the street who, at any given point in time, have at least 6 different cars parked in their garage, driveway and on the street in front of their house. Hot rod projects, a Porsche, some low-key sedans. Nothing on blocks or anything, all pretty nice. It makes me wonder, are they really popular, do they really like cars, is it a family of mechanics? It's easy to assume they're up to something more nefarious than that, like drug dealing, but I don't get that vibe at all. I mean, except for all the cars.

My favorite so far is the Armenian family next door. The patriarch was the first person to welcome us to the neighborhood, and he stops by often to check on us and give us advice. It's not unusual to see him wandering outside of his house late at night, in his shorts and white tank top, smoking really long, skinny Virginia Slims 120s. He has a daughter in his teens who was appropriately embarrassed when he made her come over and say hello. And he has a very large, extended family that comes over frequently for parties in the backyard.

These neighbors have an entire kitchen on their back patio, including extra fridge and an oven/stove. This past Saturday, they had the whole clan over for swimming, music and food. You could hear the matriarch of the family lecturing all the other women who were cooking, "It has to be fresh. It's so much better when it's fresh! You could get from store, but it's better when fresh. Here! Peel this!" As the night went on, the music got louder an louder. (Not that we minded--it just means that when we want to party in the backyard with music? No problem!) At one point I was just listening to their tunes and suddenly turned to mAc and said,

"Are we listening to Armenian country music?"

Yup. We sure were. Awesome.

Later that night, our buddy stopped by to share some of their feast with us. Specifically, he just kind of walked in, yelling for mAc, and proceeded to shove some kind of delicious tortilla-wrapped pork roast down his throat before giving either of us a chance to say, "Why, that would be lovely, thanks!" As soon as he saw me, he went back to bring me food as well, again giving me barely the chance to say thank you before I was chewing. Generous, but a little intense. As far as neighbors go though, it could be worse.

When we last saw our hero...

He was ripping out linoleum and tearing the over-sized antenna off of our roof and making cheeseburgers with a spackle spatula. In other words, mAc has better updates on the progress of our house than I, so check out his blog.

I can tell you, however, that we have color on the walls! It needs a second coat, so I don't have photos yet, but I will later.

*waves* Hi Mom!

over under

My inbox at work currently has 11 emails in it. By the time I get back in the office next Thursday, will there be over or under 300 emails in it? Ladies and gentlemen, place your bets.

Edited at 11:27 p.m.
For those of you playing the at-home game of Just How Crazy IS Your Inbox?, I have been out of the office for 12 hours. I have 54 emails. That's just 43 emails in less than one day, since I left the office around 11 for my conference. That is a light day, but I'm in meetings all day with people who usually send me emails. Five more business days to go, 2 in meetings, 1 at a field office and 2 on vacation. Keep in mind, I was at the office last night until around 10:30 taking my inbox down to 11... from 400. How bad will it get? Any takers?

Edited on 8/18: The grand total
Well, no one took a guess, so no one wins. As it turns out, I have the best grasp on how many emails I can expect in a certain amount of time. The number of emails in my inbox this morning? 293. Not bad. Not bad at all.

bullets

If I find the time to breathe, then there will certainly be more detail to follow, but for now, here are the bullets, in no particular order:

• I went to Chicago for work, and got to spend less than 24 hours with a woman I was best friends with growing up, but haven't seen for over 10 years. It was trippy, cool, overwhelming, intimidating, amazing, and fun. Kind of like my friend herself, actually.

• Work has officially gone ALL ASS UP. On the patented, 1 - 5 Dinah Scale of How Work is Going (tm):

1 = groovy

2 = fine-but-I-spent-too-much-time-online-today

3 = kinda wonky, yo

4 = Suck-tastic

5 = ALL ASS UP

• House is coming along but I haven't spent enough time there working on it. There's primer on some of the walls, including the really really gross room. The floors are done, we have AC, we bought tile and the new windows are on order. I'm fairly certain we've run out of money, but we continue to just Go For It!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1111one.

• We're adopting a rescued puppy. His name is Captain Awesome. He is, in fact, awesome.