mrpeenee's Cameo Appearance

Why is mrpeenee sort of AWOL these days? Because the web filter where I work blocks me from my own damn blog. The nerve!

Thanks to everyone's comments on my Design Star rant below, especially since you all had the good sense to agree and point out how insightful I am. I went looking for more pictures of the humpy Dan, but struck out (obviously his porn career steams along under an alias) but I did find a picture of his aunt, Vickie, from her blog. Honest.I adore her. I think I may have to adopt her. Even though she got the Crazy Eye.

So I've finally replied in the comment section of Tachika Must Go, since I can only access this when I'm not at work. It brings into clear light how a blog is like a time machine: you write your comments in your present, but I read them from the past and reply thinking that my comments are the future, which is the past by the time you see them and now I'm dizzy.

I've asked houseboy Saluterius Boniface to bring me a wet cloth for my forehead.

Tachika Must Go

My favorite line ever in Design Star? Candice Olsen asking the contestants “Have you ever seen Design Star? Nobody finishes tile.” Excellent point, on a number of levels, mostly that the contestants should be able to learn from the disasters of past seasons.
• Do not attempt tile back splashes when you don’t have time for it
• Do not bite off more carpentry than the skills of your team can handle
• Do not have your hunky eye candy keep his shirt on.
Duh.

This week was kitchens. I have to preface my remarks by saying I love to cook and I prefer galley kitchens. They work better. I understand moms might need that bigger space for their adorable tykes to be adorable in, but I say go smoke crack out on the patio and get out of my fucking kitchen. If you do need a big ass kitchen, why then do you stick an island in the middle so you constantly have a traffic block to navigate?

And when people are talking about decorating their kitchens, they now have only two phrases at their disposal: “Tuscan, Italian, Warm, blahblahblah” and “I want to entertain there” which apparently means you want your guests standing around in your way as you’re trying to defrost the shrimp rolls from Costco. Again, crack, patio, out of my fucking kitchen.

So the room that won:
Look, mahmah’s kitchen from the trailer park in Little Rock. This is what they FINISHED with? It looks like a before picture, and a mighty nasty one at that. Too cluttered, ugly colors, crappy finishes. A Buddha in the window, one of them Moroccan ones, no doubt. I now have doubts that tubby know-it-all is gay. No queer would go shopping for accessories and wind up this. Obviously straight trying to pass. So they are the first team in history to actually finish in the time allotted. Big deal. Isn’t it better to have an appealing design? Guess not.

The losers:Judging from the comments on HGTV’s site, I seem to be the only person in the universe who likes it. I know, I know, they didn’t finish the tile (gasp) the counter was fucked up (gasp), but it looks like what they owners asked for. It’s sleek, it’s modern, and I dig it. I agree, more dramatic color on the cabinets would have helped, but still, pretty cool. They couldn’t accessorize the room, but again, I’m ok with that. I don’t want knick-knacks and tchotckes on my counter; that’s where I’m working, bitches; get this fucking flower arrangement out of my way.

Also, my strongest disagreement with both was the cabinets. These kitchens are less than twenty years old, the cabinets are perfectly sturdy and fairly new, and yet both teams ripped them all out to replace them with new cabinets in exactly the same footprint. Have any of them heard about the environment? Yeah, baby, let’s stuff some more wasteful crap into the landfills, trash the resources and energy used to create the originals and wind up with no appreciable difference. Plus the winners, by using smaller cabinets flanking the sink so they could squeeze in some bibelot shelves actually decreased the amount of storage. Fabulous.

Lastly, Tachika (also universally known as the Fuck Up) didn’t do shit, contributed nothing and yet didn’t get booted. What’s with that? Her whole team condemns her and she gets to stay? Did you see the looks when she returned to the green room? A narrow range from stunned to pissed off. I would have been more sympathetic towards Amy getting shafted, but until the actual final line up, I didn’t even know who she was or that there were three blondes, I thought there was just two. That’s how much impact they’ve had on me.

One last thing. When are they going to show Dan with his shirt off? Isn’t that in the contract? I’m not looking for go-go dancing in a thong (although that would not be amiss,) just a couple of nipple shots. Is that asking too much?

Rub It In

What is truly one of the foods of the gods? Peanut butter sandwich with orange juice, of course, especially that rare alignment when all the components are at the freshest, most deliciousest.

I was in the mood for a little god snack (and please, without jelly tainting the peanut butter. Aren’t we all adults here?) after yet another fabulous massage at the Kabuki Springs Spa. I know combining my sluttish reputation and massage just leads to an inevitable oohlalala reaction, but, in fact, I don’t like sex with my massage, much like jelly with peanut butter. Too distracting, I think. I want to pay attention to having a thumb dig into my shoulder and not worry about if we’re both going to fit on that little bitty table. The only Happy Endings I’ve had have been neither good massage nor good booty. And twice, they came as a surprise. I was there for a massage and suddenly there was friskiness. Unfortunate friskiness.

So tonight’s round at Kabuki with the talented Eban was just what I wanted. NO misbehaving, just serious shiatsu. And then peanut butter. Heaven.

Our New Favorite Saying

Urban Street Pirate reports that the mother of a friend of his once answered the door and exclaimed:

"Don't look at my hair. It looks like a chicken slept in it."

Friends, in the future, before you leave the house,ask yourself "Does my hair look like a chicken slept in it?" You'll be glad you did.

I wanted to find a picture of a reasonably attractive naked man with a chicken (and when you google "naked guy with chicken" you come up with some pretty astonishing results, let me tell you) but all I could find was this naked man beating egg whites.An allusion, no doubt, to the famous quip "My pubes look like a an unbaked souffle slept in them."

Design Star: It's Back.

We’re all watching HGTV’s Design Star are we not? As a showcase of these poor schlub’s design capabilities, it is to laugh, but as a game show, oh my. It falls only short of Hollywood Squares in terms of the queer amusement factor.

I mentioned last year that the contestants seem to regularly fall into immediately recognizable clichés, the easier for the audience to pick out who to root for without wasting precious time on getting to know the characters. There’s the vaguely artsy chick (this year with a kind of biker/punky thang going on,) the obnoxious, overconfident nell, the token black woman, the straight guy to prove not all decorators are poofs, the bleach blonde prom queen with good jewelry, and the humpy eye candy guy. The rest are just fodder thrown in there in order to be voted out. Nobody has cried about how they miss their family yet, and no obvious catfights, but it’s still early.

You may remember last year’s eye candy turned out to have a wee little porn star past. This year’s humpy boy, Dan, LOOKS like a porn star. And I don’t mean that in a generic way. Mrpeenee’s encyclopedic knowledge of porn points out that he bears an uncanny resemblance to Alex Wilcox, one of our faves from days gone by. Proof provided below:


The big change this year is that the judges are much better than in the past, particularly Candice Olson, who I think has the single best decorator show going. I bow before her.

So, episode 1. I love the big Hollywood house, who could go wrong with that? Turns out a couple of these guys could, and did. But overall, they all seem better than past years with no obvious losers. Yay for that.

Since I can’t remember any of their names (except for my new imaginary boyfriend Dan) I’ll just run through the rooms.

Bunk Bedroom . Eesh. I understand they wanted to be sassy, but it was all so random. And those fake animal heads. Honey, if something was ironic five years ago, chances are you should pass on it now.

The bedroom that wasn’t a hot mess. Dull, fussy and it sort of irritates me to agree with that Genevieve Whatshername judge, but she was right, why shove everything over on one wall? And all three bedrooms had those fabulous huge corner windows that they all ignored. Doofuses. Or Doofai. Whatever.

The bedroom that was a hot mess. I actually think the design and color and scale was the best of all three bedrooms. It could have been really pretty if it was finished. This is where the problem with the show being a game show and not being really about decorating ability comes in. So they couldn’t paint the floor? You think on a real show the talent is doing the grunt work? That’s what stage hands are for. Still, the Lady Who Cried got on my nerves, so ok, shove off.

The living room. Jeebus, what a stunning room to start with and then they wound up just sort of OK. Not bad. Ho hum. Thanks, here’s your cookie. Prom Queen lady announces that since it’s so big they need to break it up into conversational areas. Right on, girl. So what happened with that idea? Pissed away while she squabbles with tattoo biker boy about how to put up wallpaper. Look honey, if you want to do it, take the damn brush out his hands and go to it while he does something productive.

And the hot pink geese? Big deal.

The dining room. Yowzah. Everybody liked the big free-hand mural on the wall down onto the floor, including me. I assume the nerdy little queen who actually did it and designed the room while eye candy put together the table and shopped is the sleeper real talent of the show. I’m also pretty sure he volunteered for the dining room to further his lust for Dan. Who can blame him?

Next week: kitchens. Oh boy, because they’re the greatest potential for true disaster, the Poseidon Adventure of decorating shows. My money is on one of the blondes going, mostly because I can’t tell them apart.

Flkjdsahfy.

Did I have some little stroke over the weekend and just not notice it? My typing, which is shaky at the best of times has degenerated into seemingly random keystrokes. For instance, I just wrote “typoivn” instead of “typing.” And for that matter, I just inserted an accidental return and wrote “insteaqqd”. I cannot type three words in a row without a mistake. Spell check is wonderful and I thank the goddess for it, but when one is displaying the typing skills of a retarded monkey, I’m not sure if even that can save me.

So today I have to proofread a medium sized publication, catch up on all the emails I missed on Friday and untangle the mess that is the October through December training room schedule, all without the control over my fingers’ motor skills.

Maybe I will just stare at houseboy pictures instead. I just typed “housebouy.” Typo or wishful thinking?

Heat Wave

Before I even start, let me assure those readers sweating it out in New Orleans, Austin, Mobile, lesser Florida, O-myfuckinggod-man, and other hot-ass environs that I understand my complaint about the heat here will let loose a snark storm. I am prepared for that. To those of you who would belittle my suffering, I say bring it, bitch.

I had to go make an award presentation in San Jose yesterday. The farther away one gets from civilization and the Golden Gate, the hotter it gets. San Jose, 60 miles south of here, was in the high 80s. Omigod, I was dying. Cue snark storm. I know plenty of you will not see 80 degrees again until a cold snap blows through in the autumn; I was once one of you. As I was trudging along (in a sport coat, mind you,) I kept reminding myself of my Gulf Coast youth and how I would have laughed at the idea that this was even warm.

But my life here has softened me and by the time I got to the presentation, I was sweaty, sticky and probably smelly. You know how fair-skinned older men have a distinctive aroma? I keep wondering, Is that me? Don’t answer that.

Plus the award was one we were making mostly because we needed to present it, not because someone particularly deserved to receive it. Sometimes in a political world the existence of the award is much more important that who actually gets it. Thus, I wound up trying to make a speech that did not expose the fact the criteria for the honor was mostly that the recipient was breathing and frequently wore shoes.

Fortunately, I was able to flee back here where nature keeps the airconditioning blasting outside. A little fog, a little cool ocean breeze and I am once again a happy poof. It’s important to occasionally be reminded why life here is so expensive. We’re paying for the climate.