Since it's been a while as the technical problems at home continue, I'll go back to the dots...

• Not that I want this to be the all Buffy and Survivor blog, but last Thursday was downright strange. For those of you who don't watch Survivor, the basic format is that the second half hour, in addition to the immunity challenge, tends to set you up for two possible voting scenarios by showing you who's thinking of voting for whom, and by showing the logic of those votes. For the first time in five seasons (I didn't watch the original), last week the editors were completely stumped by the vote. They pieced together a little bit of footage showing that there was talk of Christy going, but they weren't able to explain why that happened. Jenna and Heidi hate Rob, don't trust him at all, yet they end up voting with him again? Huh?! And two trends continue:
  1. Butch says nothing interesting, is on the wrong side of the voting, yet doesn't attract enough attention to go, and
  2. Someone proclaims that they are the pivotal vote/person in control and they promptly get ambushed.
  I had a long talk with the New Hampshire correspondent (still mourning this), and I like Rob's chances better than he does, but the game is about as wide open as it has ever been at this stage.
  
• It's tragic and painful when the fantasy girls of our youth pass on. Besides Mikhail Gorbachev, did anyone ever do more to bring Super Powers together than Miss Elizabeth? But you don't have to be former Elizabeth brother-in-law The Genius to realize that living with a 40-something down-on-his-luck former professional wrestler with drug and domestic abuse problems is FRAUGHT, with a capital FRAUGHT.
  
• I saw X-Men 2 on Saturday. If big flashy summer movies are your thing, you should enjoy it. I did to a point, but I have two quibbles. One is that knowledge of the X-Men mythology is more important this time around, and I have none. Two is that I felt as if plot lines were left dangling for way too long, and the editing didn't keep each of the separate plotlines moving forward very well. And if I notice problems with editing and direction, they're probably especially bad because I'm notoriously slow on the uptake when it comes to those things.
  
• If you had 49 guesses as to which state would put a socialist on its state quarter, you might still not come up with the right answer: Alabama.
  
• My latest read was Clancy Sigal's Going Away, recommended to me by my college mentor when I went to visit him last fall. It's the Communist On The Road. Written in the late fifties, it's about a former labor organizer and blacklisted Hollywood worker who takes a cross-country trip to try to find America's conscience, and his own. There aren't many answers, only questions, but it's quite a document of the collapse of America's extreme left wing, and also something of an indictment of those who left "The Cause" for a bourgeois life. It's not a great novel, but it's probably of more interest to historians than novel-readers anyway. It also has some appeal to drifters of all stripes who move around a lot and never quite seem to find a fitting place to settle down.
  
• I listened to the Bill-suggested "Ebony Eyes", and while it's still not on my Final Four of Dead Teenager songs, I might put it in the Final Four of a theoretical Barker-style tournament of oldies with talking parts, along with "Little Darlin'" by the Diamonds, "Chantilly Lace" by the Big Bopper, and my champion, Elvis's "Are You Lonesome Tonight?"
  
• I swear at some point I'll tell the million work stories I'm saving up...