All Too Often,The Beat Does Not Go On

Sad story about the Empire Roller Skating Center in Brooklyn closing down in Sunday's NYT. The last indoor wood-floor skating rink in the five boroughs.

It will become...a storage facility.

Makes me want to strap on my skates, head over to Oaks Park & thank the heavens that I live about 3 miles away from the largest roller skating rink in the Pacific NW.

Fact: roller derby (at least for girls) is pretty darn popular around these parts. Portland's got its own league, the Rose City Rollers, comprised of four teams. (From the pics on their site, I guess they're trying to look tough, but I wish they would smile anyway. Football players smile. Of course, I'm generally recoiling from seeing them with their helmets off...but that's beside the point. Ladies, you can smile & still be badass.) I've not yet seen this in action & frankly have little idea what it is, but I do know it is a contact sport involving roller skates, fishnet stockings, & beer. Sounds like heaven on earth, if you ask me. Looks like they're having tryouts in June...hmm...

I Have Waited My Whole Life Minus 12 Years For This

"The [Food & Drug Administration] is expected to approve the first contraceptive pill that is designed to eliminate periods as long as a woman takes it."

Questionable sentence construction aside, all I can say is: Please. Yes. Thank you. What's the point of bleeding if you've no intention whatsoever of breeding?

Also: Hot Chip are coming round these parts again in June. Wonder Ballroom (still debating whether to go see Marianne Faithfull at same). Ticket prices have increased a bit, but have not yet reached the astronomical increases which Franz Ferdinand tickets did when their second album came out.

Also: Jarvis Cocker is in Seattle on Monday 30 April. I can't manage to go, which actually is all right with me, believe it or not, mostly since I never got around to listening to his solo album anyway, but it's a bit sad nonetheless. Somehow, knowing that he's only got 5 U.S. show dates (two of which are in NYC) makes it worse. Maybe I should have moved to Seattle...hmm...nah.

However, !!! on 2 May is definitely happening. I imagine I can make do with that.

Come Here, Sausage

The movie itself would have been infinitely better had it been 90 minutes of this. And indeed, the mid-film dance-tacular set to "Boogie Wonderland" was FANTASTIC. And better yet, came free of the queasiness I felt by the final dance-tacular.

Because sadly, the makers of Happy Feet put in this thing called "plot". Wherein the sheer ridiculous glory of dancing penguins is muted by a Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer-type protagonist + questionable ethnic stereotypes + thrown-in & hastily concluded globally conscious message + a lot of sex(ual innuendo). Really. All the penguins except hapless Mumble are pretty much just trying to get laid, whether via song or pebble. However natural penguin booty may be, I maintain that it is still somewhat disturbing when a movie opens with the main character's mother singing Prince's "Kiss" ("I just want your body baby/From dusk til dawn") & segueways into "Let's talk about eggs baby/Let's talk about you & me". Penguins!

Although I must admit it was way more adorable than it should have been to see a baby penguin getting down to the sound of "The Message". Actually, the soundtrack overall was commendably selected, given the film's magnitude.

In conclusion, I'm almost ashamed to say I was half-hoping that since they took it to the "bad humans" level, they were going to give us some hot penguin sweater action. Seriously, if this movie had been made in the 90s it would have been all oil spill badness rather than oh nos we's overfishing badness & then, maybe, we woulda got the sweaters. Although I understand that technically the sweaters are generally used for fairy penguins, not emperors, they could have gotten away with it.

Plus, the only possible competition for penguin-dancing cuteness is penguin-sweater cuteness. If they had combined the two I probably would have died of the cute.