Monthly Sidebar Update

What better way to celebrate this three-day weekend than by spending a lot of time making HTML changes to my blog's template? It's time for the coveted Sidebar Update!

The new Object of My Affection is the lovely and talented Kristen Bell, star of the fantastic and far-too-good-for-The CW Veronica Mars, which, naturally, The CW just cancelled. She's proven on Veronica that she's equally adept at carrying heavy emotional scenes as well as light comedy. Also: she's a little cutie. And she's a hell of a singer, too! I can't wait to see anything else she does next. Wait, not counting Gossip Girl. That looks like shit. Oh, also, no more of those crummy, wimpy, PG-13 horror movies, either. Those suck. But, like, anything else. Probably.

I've decided to start keeping track on the sidebar of progress in my 2007 Kurt Vonnegut project, in which I plan on reading (or rereading) by the end of the year every book Vonnegut ever published. I just finished Slaughterhouse-Five, which I first read almost twenty years ago. It's still brilliant, in case you were wondering. I'll probably have more to say about it soon. Now, I'm on to Galápagos, which I read about fifteen years ago, and which I'm loving. It also marks the third of his books I've read in a row to feature the phrase "take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut." I should probably read Slapstick next, to make it four in a row. (The phrase is repeated frequently enough it's practically a character in that book: "Why don't you take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut? Why don't you take a flying fuck at the mooooooooooooon?")

Under Watching is the complete collection of Firefly on DVD. I found it for $20 at Wal-Mart. How could I resist? (Wal-Mart is still evil, but DAMN they have good prices!) Joss Whedon's space Western holds up tremendously well on repeat viewing (and hey, no pop culture references, Dorian!), and the commentaries are entertaining as hell (primarily the ones by Whedon or star Nathan Fillion). Good stuff.

I haven't bought a new album since the last Update, so I'm just going to leave Ted Leo and the Pharmacists' Living With the Living up on the Sidebar. I've been listening to it a lot. An awful lot. It's just tremendous. I'd say it's right up there on my very short list of "Favorite Albums of the New Millennium" with Green Day's American Idiot. And I'm going to go ahead and once again use a Ted Leo song for Lyric of the Month, but I'll switch it up a little, and use a different song from the same album. "La Costa Brava" has swiftly become one of my favorite songs of the past... ever. In fact, if you asked me right now what my ten favorite songs are, I'd probably include two Ted Leo tunes, "La Costa Brava" and "Me and Mia" (about which song I will be writing a bit more tomorrow). "La Costa Brava," as Leo has said in interviews, is the emotional centerpiece of the album, and it's a powerful and lovely acknowledgment that after all the energy spent raging against the machine and fighting the power and whatnot, you've got to take a break. You've got to rejuvenate every once in a while, you've got to take some time to regain your humanity. It's truly uplifting and wonderful.

And under Hating... I was going to put Jerry Falwell. Because, well, I hate him. He was a monster cloaked in piety, and the world is better off without him. But Christopher Hitchens did it so much better in his amazing appearance on Fox News' Hannity and Colmes. Check the You Tube video of it here. There's just no topping Hitchens' final line: "If you gave Falwell an enema, he could've been buried in a matchbox." So instead, I'll just go with Paris Hilton, and her pathetic efforts to get out of her jail sentence. We can all agree we hate Paris, right?

Oh, hell, I can't choose. Let's go with both.