Dear Ubermaus,
I was just writing you to tell you about a new short film idea that I'm pretty psyched about. Let me ask you this: What was Reality Bites missing? If you said, "A robot," then you are correct.
I'm planning on doing a 20-30 minute film about three ( Read more... )

Walking down to the mailbox this afternoon, I paused to think about how great it is that I don't have to work on Fridays. This was a great feeling, until I remembered that I had spent the morning on the porch enjoying the sunshine (clearly not work), but also reading an essay I'll be teaching my class in a few weeks (obviously not not-work). ( Read more... )

One of the last worthwhile things I did before leaving Texas was to work out a taxonomy of drunkenness with a couple of friends. I'm sure the livejournal world will be much more linguistically precise now that we've provided such a useful terminology. In order of increasing toxicity:

1. Not Drunk
2. Fake Drunk
3. Happy Drunk
4. Chatty Drunk
5. Clumsy Drunk

Given that my first day of American Lit I was pretty much exactly what I expected Graduate School to be like, it's almost surprising that I'm here of my own volition. We would have been having a fairly worthwhile discussion about the poetry of Anne Bradstreet, except that the class discussion was dominated by:

1. A "non-traditional" student, the kind ( Read more... )

Being without television signals or cable in this valley I live in, I recently purchased a subscription to Netflix. So I guess I'm going to be seeing a lot of movies now, since I'll have to watch a lot to get my $20/month worth. To keep my brain from getting fried, I'm posting quickie reviews on mausnotes. Recently reviewed: Harry Potter and Blue Velvet.

Dear UberMaus,
You recently helped Torn in Taylor County, so maybe you can help me too.
The thing is, I can't stop writing letters to agony aunts (and uncles, natch). I write maybe ten, twelve a day. I can't help myself. It's taking over my life.
And what's more, I'm running out of ways to sign off. I live in London, and there just aren't ( Read more... )

Dear Ubermaus,
When I heard about your recent plan to increase the ( Read more... )

One of my new fantasy projects is to introduce into the American vernacular the first ever party nomenclature. If you think about it, the existing system is completely inadequate. "Party" is equally accurate to describe what happened in celebration of my grandmother's 80th birthday (I was supposed to be valet parking old ladies' Lincolns and ( Read more... )

Playing the google game instead of thinking out something new, I ran across what will certainly be my new LJ bio:

The UberMaus is an Olive Baboon who was raised in a loving home and played with humans until he reached about 3 years old. Then he got too big to handle. Not knowing what else to do with him, he was put in a short, wooden, "closet" ( Read more... )

I've noticed that The UberMaus' "friends" list is rapidly becoming an accumulation of people--strangers, often as not--with better journals than mine. I'm not sure how I feel about this.

And, since I'm noticing things at the moment, I just noticed that the New Shorter OED is recommended by both Harold Bloom (stuck-up old fart on the English ( Read more... )