Friends, I am not exaggerating when I tell you that I felt my heart start to beat a little faster and my mouth go dry when I rounded the turn at the top of the stairs on the Mezzanine floor of the Boston Public Library this morning at 11:30. I was like a hunter on the prowl, a girl who’s just seen her crush. They were having a book sale at the Copley Branch, and for several weeks now I have been obsessed with getting hold of books for my new classroom library. I already had about sixty volumes before I went, thanks to Goodwill, the sale shelves at the Brookline Booksmith, and the wonderful gifts I received from Susan, Kristin, and the Goffin/Schumacher family. I was so excited about their donations, by the way, that I made little stickers to put in all the books they gave me:

The sticker with Alec’s name on it appears in a copy of Where the Red Fern Grows, which judging from the scrawl on the inner left cover used to belong to him when he was little. Thanks, Alec!

After I got over my adrenaline rush it took me about half an hour to fill a shopping basket with forty-some books from the children’s section of the booksale (I didn’t even look at the adult books, because then I would undoubtedly have had to call Ross and make him come get me with the car), which it turned out were discounted a further fifty percent. So I spent a grand total of fourteen dollars for three lovely, lovely bags of books. A copy of Chuck Close, Up Close! Two copies of The Friends! It was quite the haul.

Currently, the collection of books that is going to take pride of place in my classroom and be devoured (I hope) by a bunch of 5th and 6th graders is sitting on my living room floor. It looks like this:

It’s enough to make me cry with happiness. Although I’m almost crying already, because NPR was just airing a program about what kind of musical note-combinations make people sad, and they played a very limpid Rachmaninov that is practically guaranteed to turn on the waterworks.

I also want to mention that next to the books, although you can’t see them, are the tremendously lovely rocking chair and lamps that we got at Elizabeth and Alec’s yardsale this morning. It’s good to be friends with people who have fabulous taste.

And, finally…. you wanted more AAM? You got it!

What a look of frowning concentration. A babe after my own heart.

I’m off to New Haven for the weekend, to go hang out with the cool kids. Back Sunday with more, by which time Ross will be in L.A. at the world’s biggest international computer graphics conference, where his poster will appear. Yay, Ross!

I thought we really had to see this movie, because:

1) Absurd Hongkong Movies are really, really awesome. They’re right up there with Hindi movies that involve twelve million random songs and lots of dancing around trees. (Within the Absurd Hongkong Movie genre, Meals on Wheels is one of the best. All you have to know about this movie is that Jackie Chan and his buddy the nerdy Yuen Biao run all over Spain with a drop-dead gorgeous thief, and kick lots of ass. Also, everyone in Spain speaks Cantonese. Please try to rent or (il)legally download it, if you can.)

2) It was playing at the Brattle (still is till Sunday), and we are proud members with many free passes still to use.

3) The Onion apparently called this film “ridiculously entertaining.” I did not think it would be right for me not to see a film that someone believed deserved the epithet “ridiculously entertaining.”

Now that I’ve seen Shaolin Soccer, I can report that while I do not know if I quite agree with the esteemed opinion of the Onion, this was one of an extremely small number of movies that has made me laugh out loud. Stephen Chow is surprisingly sexy as a bum who just happens to be a Shaolin Master (along with his five ne’er-do-well brothers) — but the family hasn’t been able to make any money just being incredibly good at kung fu, so they’ve all let go of the dream. When good old Stephen meets “Golden Leg,” an ex-soccer-star who really wants to get revenge on his old pal, the Chinese Dr. Evil (you think I’m kidding? His team is called “Team Evil”), the plot thickens. Why not use kung fu to play soccer, and win the championship?

Hee. Why not, indeed. It’s got lots of great special effects (you can see most of them in the trailer I linked to above), like footballs turning into lions and gaping maws of black dust. And soccer is a lot more exciting when people fly through the air and get all their clothes knocked off them. Oh, and there’s lots of Matrix-type stop-action slow-motion scenes, but then the Wachowski Brothers stole that stuff from Hongkong movies anyway.

It’s hard to predict when complete and total kitsch will work, and when it will fall flat. I think in the case of Shaolin Soccer, it works — mostly because the movie looks really clean and slick, and the fact that someone spent so much money to pull off the most absurd visual jokes is almost funny enough in itself. And unlike dumb American movies, it doesn’t contain any fart jokes, poop jokes, or shadow silhouettes that suggest enormous penises. It does contain a few moments of uncomfortable raw-egg-eating (don’t ask) homophobic humour, but that’s over quickly. So bring the whole family, and enjoy!

(I wonder what they called this movie in the rest of the world. “Shaolin Football” just doesn’t have the same ring to it.)

Off to Beerworks for probably the last evening ever with all the remaining peeps from the Children’s Lit. Program. It’s going to be a sob-fest. Will report later. (I may have to walk out without paying, just for old times’ sake.)

Sorry, I lied — this entry is a day late and not about Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Instead, I present Meera Kicks Ross Out of the Car and Finally Learns to Parallel Park, a photo-essay.

Last night, on the way to what would otherwise have been a lovely Japanese dinner in Coolidge Corner, Ross and I stopped talking to each other over parallel parking. (Don’t worry. I’m mostly kidding. We did eventually start speaking again when the miso soup arrived.) In any event, I decided that since I wasn’t getting any better taking instructions from him about when and where to turn my wheel in order to achieve the elusive parallelity, the only way I was going to learn was if he let me do my thing and make mistakes until I finally figured out how to do it. Shortly after today’s lesson began, I further decided that it would be easier for him to let me do my thing if he was out of the car entirely, taking the following illuminating pictures (which are probably from about twelve different attempts and appear completely out of sequence in order to create the semblance of a smooth parking process):

Here I am working on the first task: parallelology with the car in front.

Got it.

Swinging back, suddenly so far away.

A nice shot of Erdos’s butt, where you can vaguely see not only the clever bumper sticker we acquired for him*, but the enormous amount of bird poop on his rear end. The birds, they love this car.

Things are looking up, although the last time Erdos was this close to the curb, he popped a tire.

Perfect Paralleliotics!

*It says “I’d rather be reading Bukowski.” (Which, I’m sorry to say, isn’t true. I like driving much more than reading Bukowski. Although Erdos would probably rather be reading Bukowski than being driven by me, so there you go.)

Ever since I joined Audible.com, I’ve been downloading episodes of NPR’s Morning Edition every day. I listen to the previous day’s program while I surf, while I pack books into boxes in preparation for my upcoming move, while I wander up and down the stairs getting juice from the kitchen. Most days it forms the aural backdrop to my morning, and I absorb the news through a slow process of osmosis. I half-listen to the political reports, tune out the sports segment, and sometimes hear something interesting about a movie or a play in the final minutes of the show, which is devoted to the arts.

Yesterday morning, an interview with a Ugandan activist broke through the fog of laundry folding and I want to share what I heard (and learned). I’m not sure how much you know about Uganda; I don’t know very much, and I knew even less before I heard this story. Bear with me while I offer a horribly simplistic summary of the situation in Northern Uganda, and I’ll point you towards some places when you can read more, if you’re interested. If you’re not interested, come back tomorrow when I promise to ramble about a much more lighthearted topic, like my recent acquisition of Season One of Buffy. Or something.

There exists in Uganda, a country troubled by disputes between (according to the CIA factbook) “Tutsi, Hutu, Lendu, Hema, and other ethnic groups, associated political rebels, armed gangs, militias, and various government forces,” a rebel insurgency group that calls itself the “Lord’s Resistance Army,” or LRA. It’s an organization that is shrouded in a certain amount of mystery, but among the few things that are known about it are these facts: It is headed by a self-styled mystic named Joseph Kony, who apparently wants to “overthrow President Yoweri Museveni’s government and replace it with one governed by the Biblical Ten Commandments.”

Since 1986, the LRA has worked to achieve that goal via one major tactic: It kidnaps young children from their families and gets them to do its dirty work. The boys become soldiers in their bloody uprisings along the Northern border of Uganda, and the girls mostly become sex-slaves. They are as young as seven years old, and they are snatched from schools, churches, and villages. Because of this last threat, thousands of children apparently troop into the nearest cities from their villages each evening, gathering in hospitals and even crowding on the streets, in order to avoid abduction. Most estimates suggest that the LRA has kidnapped between 20,000 and 30,000 children in the last eighteen years. Thousands are still missing or dead.

It’s very confusing to me why, exactly, the LRA does the things it does. At one point it was supported by the Sudanese government, in exchange for its help in attacking the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army; when that support was (apparently) withdrawn, the LRA turned against the Sudanese military. No one seems to understand Kony’s real motives (the LRA resembles a cult more than anything else; like so many cult leaders, Kony is supposed to have dozens of children) and the group has no political allies within Uganda.

The mother I heard on Morning Edition yesterday morning is named Angelina Atyam, and her daughter Charlotte was abducted eight years ago, when she was fourteen. They were recently reunited, and Angelina was being interviewd about her work with other parents of kidnapped children to try to get these kids back home, and to petition the United Nations to send peacekeeping forces to Uganda. As far as I know (although I could be wrong), UN observers have been sent to monitor the situation, but no forces have yet been deployed there. Also, the International Criminal Court recently began an investigation into human rights abuses in Northern Uganda.

One of the things Angelina Atyam said in her interview — the last thing she said, actually — was a response to the question “Is it true that the LRA once promised you your daughter back, if you would just keep quiet?” She paused for a moment. Yes, she said, it was true. But the return of her daughter under those conditions would have been just a drop of water in the ocean. And I am very thirsty, she said — I am very thirsty for the return of those children.

Here is one of the best overviews of the situation I’ve managed to find; here’s Amnesty International’s Action Alert on the issue, so you can at least send an email to your representatives reminding them that it exists.

It’s not much. A drop of water in the ocean.

So, Burger King apparently has a new item on its menu of meat, the Angus Steak Burger. Can I take a poll? When you hear “Angus Steak Burger,” do you think what I think, which is that there is a probably a breed of cattle that goes by the name Angus, after some undoubtedly very wealthy Scottish farmer? This is the logical conclusion one comes to, yes?*

Ok. While waiting in line for the bathroom at the Burger King near Boston Common (where, I hasten to add, I did not have dinner — for reasons that will become clear), I heard the following exchange between the woman behind me and her companion:

Woman Waiting to Pee (looking at the signs for the new BK “Angus Steak Burger”): What’s an Angus?

Exhausted Companion In Need of a Cigarette: What?

Pee: “Angus Steak.” What’s an Angus?

Cigarette: Um. I don’t know.

Pee: I mean, is it some other kind of red meat, or what?

While I was in the bathroom I had visions of little Anguses running around a pasture; in my mind they were kind of a cross between sheep and pigs. For an interesting cultural cross-reference, ladies and gentlemen, I refer you to the following anecdote about singer Jessica Simpson. It is there that you will find the source of this entry’s intruiging title.

Truth is, though, the biggest reason Burger King’s juicy new offering failed to entice me is that a couple of weeks ago I read on another journalist’s website that he had seen the following sign after driving his wife to work:

TRY OUR NEW PREMIUM
ANUS STEAK BURGER
NOW HIRING

It makes me very, very sad that this person was not carrying their digital camera. It makes me somewhat less sad, and significantly more amused, to imagine my reaction should I ever have the pleasure of meeting a gentleman named Angus.

Oh, yeah. I almost forgot to mention that I was at Boston Common because I was about to watch the final performance of this year’s free Shakespeare on the Common production, Much Ado About Nothing. It was an excellent show — lots of fun — but the director probably owes Kenneth Branagh a substantial amount in royalties, since he appeared to have perfectly transposed the wonderful movie adaptation of the play onto the stage.

*Yup. Cows. Called Angus.