The Weird and the Wonderful

I have a new favourite TV show. It's called Shut Up, with Stacy London. It's the new talk show starring the female host of What Not to Wear. She's pretty good on that show (witty, insightful), but this new one will be a lot less limiting. Instead of just making fun of one person who previously didn't care about fashion, she'll invite lots of different kinds of people on and tell them all to shut up. It's gonna be fantastic.

Speaking of fashion, Charles and I finally decided what to name the band. It will be called Poifectly Poiple, and we're debating whether to wear all purple whenever we play. Sounds like a great idea at first, I know, but on further reflection it could be a little misleading. It would look pretty cool, but it might make people think we're going to sound like Prince. I wish.

Hey, did anybody else hear about this big breakthrough in olfactory research? I guess they've finally discovered a funny smell. I always wondered if smells could be inherently funny, the way pictures or sounds can be (fat lady sitting on tack, boyoyoing). Sure, there are certain bodily odours associated with funny situations, but the smells taken by themselves are not really funny, as such. In fact, they're usually kind of gross. But I guess this smell will actually cause people to start laughing uncontrollably, without reference to any other sensations (and, no, it's not laughing gas — that doesn't have an odour). Apparently it's something like a combination of bananas, Silly Putty, and, oddly enough, Daniel Day Lewis's beard.

Maybe that's what Buster smelled today, because he's been acting very weird. This morning we found him hanging out on top of the television, for no apparent reason. We shooed him off, turned our backs on him, and five minutes later he was on top of the bookshelves. Getting him off there required a chair; I'm not sure how he even got up there. But then the really weird thing was about an hour and a half after that we couldn't find him anywhere, until we heard some plaintive meowing coming from the ceiling. On a hunch, I went out into the back yard and looked up on the roof, and there he was, about to climb down into the chimney! We don't even let him outside, so don't ask me how the hell that happened. And I REALLY don't know where he got the miniature diving helmet he was wearing.

But this is definitely the weirdest thing I've seen all week. Paris Hilton coming out of a record store with a copy of Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica. What is going on? I know that the entire universe is made up of particles which act like waves and can't be located or measured except in a statistically probablistic way, interacting in an unimaginable variety of systems that are unpredictable because they are totally chaotic, but come on; this just doesn't even make any sense.

No joke.

- Andrew