This may be one of my favorite headlines ever. From the NEW YORK TIMES
Haitian Rebels Enter Capital; Aristide Bitter
Well I suppose he would be, bless his heart.
Tonight was my first Monday night hip hop class along with my Friday class meaning I can now bore all 5 of you with ruminations about my dance class TWICE a week! Hey, it's good for me, scroll on past if you're bored.
"Look at your butt!" Boogie commanded as we stood in profile, looking at our reflections in the mirror. "It better be moving! It's at the top of your legs! We got all sorts of preconceptions, everybody be 'I'm a white girl I got no hope for my butt' get over that!"
It's getting so much better. I can do all the crazy ass stuff she asks, the lunges, the ab exercises, the dancy things that are hard, hard, hard. They still suck but now I'm actually doing them instead of watching them going "what the fuck was THAT?!?!" And I have some dance vocabulary now. Sort of like learning a foreign language (like I've done lots of that but bear with me). If you have to spend lots of time going "casa=house, casa=house" that slows you down. But if you just feel casa, you have more options.
There is a guy in my class tonight who is from Africa. He's, I dunno, nine feet tall and when Boogie asked how to pronounce his name he said "Doo Doo" so he's not as fully asimilated as perhaps might best serve him. After watching me dance (we dance in groups of 4 moving across the room) he walked over to shake my hand. Which made me so satisfied.
While I am a doughy, goofy looking white guy I can fucking dance.
And folks know it.
"Andrew Reynolds!" Boogie said, calling my name on the roll, "sweet, sweet Drew!"
That's me.
Nice point from an online diary here which points out that women become eligible for Oscar Consideration by making themselves ugly (Nicole Kidman with the nose, Theron with the weight, etc.) and isn't that kind of fucked up?
I have a side question, not Oscar related, just newsy which, thusfar, I am unable to answer. I understand we've sent "a few hundred" marines to Haiti. How many military personnel are available, anyway? How many are deployed in Afghanistan, Iraq, the ordinary places like Korea, Germany, Japan, how many people are left?
Businesses run on a "just in time" inventory basis. How much inventory do we have? If, say, El Salvador gets fucked up right away, do we have anybody to send? Can we handle, like, one major conflict and one skirmish? Or what exactly?
