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Potentially cannibalistic vegetarian models, dangerous woohoodoh, and why S is the luckiest letter.
As you may have realized, I'm somewhat new to blogspace. It's not just that I've only just started this journal; I've also really only just started exploring other people's journals. And in these initial explorations, I've been struck by one thing: there are a lot of beautiful women writing well-written blogs.

And I'm not quite sure how I feel about that. Ordinarily, like most men, I'm deathly afraid of beautiful women. Out in the wild, of course, it's relatively easy to avoid beautiful women. Just stick to well lit bowling alleys and stay out of dodgy salad bars. Jillian Ann, who, as you'll recall, is a beautiful woman, has a list of New York eateries full of salads and other vegetarian fare, and I'll bet they're full of beautiful women, too. You should avoid these places at all costs. Even Green's on Montague Street, which isn't half bad for a vegetarian place. And shoe stores. Definitely stay out of shoe stores. And if you absolutely must exercise in a big public park, and you see the Inevitable Beautiful Jogging Woman, don't jog up alongside her and try to start up a conversation. Run the other way. Stay out of Crunch, too. Stick to gyms like Gold's, where sweaty men with enormous arms and enormously hairy backs can defend you if a beautiful woman sneaks in.

Somebody, probably a beautiful woman, planted a dangerous myth in popular culture a while back, claiming that men are afraid to approach beautiful women because they're afraid of rejection. And that's just ridiculous. It's like they're trying to goad men into approaching them. Like you're just a wimpy l'il fraidy-cat if you don't talk to the first beautiful girl you see. And you know, if you're dumb enough to fall for that propaganda, then you deserve what you're going to get.

Men aren't afraid of rejection. We're afraid of being eaten. That's right, eaten. Because that's what beautiful women do. They eat men. If you don't believe me, just ask yourself, have you ever seen a beautiful woman eat anything else? They might also eat other women, too, which is why non-beautiful women sometimes seem not to like beautiful ones.

Now, I'm not saying that all beautiful women always eat anybody who crosses their path. I mean, after all, they have to preserve their figures, right? But that's really the risk. In the post-Twiggy age, a modeling Moss gathers no fat. And it's just a matter of time before, somewhere between the alfalfa sprouts and the celery sticks, one of them snaps. You'll be walking along, minding your own business, when you pass a pack of models grazing at the local salad bar. And one of them will sniff you as you pass the window. And then another will notice the sniffing and say "What is it?", and the sniffer, like a superhot Uruk-hai, will go "Man flesh." And they'll leap right through the window at you, and you'll be so paralyzed by the sight of their rippling midriffs and low-cutting cleavage that you won't even be able to move. And then, right as you're about to compliment one of them on her nice mithril buttocks, they'll eat you. It'll be like that possessed-by-hyenas episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and you'll be Principal Flutie.

So, just to be safe, I recommend avoiding beautiful women until the modern definition of "beauty" changes. You'll know it's safe when critics see Monster and say "Finally, somebody let Charlize Theron eat something. See how much better you can act on a full stomach?" or when Neve Campbell begins to look more like she did in the first season of Party of Five. You know, when she was the pretty girl next door instead of the gorgeous-but-hungry dancer who might chomp on you like a pirouette if you open the door. Or when TV executives ask Margaret Cho to gain weight so she can play herself in a sitcom about her own life. Or when a guy can watch The L Word and go "Man, I had no idea John Goodman was a lesbian. I mean, I know there was all that controversy when he kissed Roseanne but -- oh, wait, that's Mia Kirshner?" Or when, instead of declaring war on the jelly donut, Joe Lieberman takes a more diplomatic Kennedy-style approach to sweets and tells the world "Ich bin ein Berliner."

Until then, if you absolutely can't avoid being around beautiful women, you should probably keep a pocket full of chocolates or beef jerky or something, just in case you need to distract them and run for it. Or try to be more like Carrot Top or Pauly Shore or Rob Schneider, as nobody, alas, will ever eat them. Not even if they were wearing a kosher t-shirt to an Israeli supermodel convention.

Anyway, in contrast to the wild, the virtual pastures of cyberspace have, up until now, been a space where beautiful women have been relatively safe to gawk at. Even someone like me, salty and high in fat, can interact with beautiful women in relative safety, without worrying about being mistaken for a tasty potato chip instead of a hapless couch potato. Worst case scenario, a beautiful woman's webcam might eat your credit card, but, really, how tasty could plastic be? Plus, beautiful women's webcam sites always have cookies. (I don't usually like taking sweets from strangers, but I always feel comfortable accepting cookies from a beautiful woman's website, because I know it'll be low in calories.)

But the beautiful blogging woman is perhaps a more dangerous beast. Siren-like, her words entice you, until you feel almost like you actually know her, as if, if you actually met her on the street, it would be safe to just walk up and say hello. And then, silly snackman, she would eat you. Or would she? Is, say, Jillian Ann just weaving a virtual net to snare manly snacks? On the one hand, she's very thin, and she's celibate so there's not much reason for her to keep a tasty man around, and she's a vegan so she could snap at any minute. Her site even asks people to "feed the artist", so she might be very hungry. And she lives in New York, where it's often deemed socially appropriate to invite someone to bite you, so, you know, maybe she thinks gnawing on someone would be acceptable. But, on the other hand, as far as I can tell, there are still five fingers. She hasn't snacked on any of the photographers she's worked with. Yet.

Anyway, this is the sort of safety issue I think about when selecting a blog to blog about for shinyblogs. From time to time, I'm bound to come across a really good blog written by a really beautiful woman, and it's possible that she's hungry, and that her blog is only as good as it is because she's trying to lure some food over. It's like Lair of the White Worm or The Lost Boys or the opening scene of Buffy, but for blogs. So, really, read at your own peril, and keep a bag of chocolates handy. And if you don't see a new entry from me for more than a couple weeks, weep for me, for I have probably been digested by a supermodel. Hopefully Mmmilla Jovovich.

So, that important safety tip out of the way, it's time to talk about somebody's blog. And, surprise, it belongs to a beautiful woman. So read on at your own risk.

Now, so far, I've written about the blogs/journals/sites/whatnots of two people, Jillian Ann Durgin and Sir Ian McKellen, who are, by the way, both vegetarians who might snap and eat you in a moment of hunger. But they're also both well known in certain circles. Sir Ian is, obviously, well known in most circles now that his performance as Gandalf has lofted him to movie screens around the globe. Jillian Ann is a lesser star but still shines brightly in a constellation of model devotees, and, if you surf about a bit, you can find discussions of her in English, Italian and French, and probably a few other languages as well.

So I thought it'd be nice to find someone a bit less known. A bit less ripe. Someone who's just about to blossom. And, surfing about, I found someone eating a blossom:

Now, I know what you're thinking: "She's really cute. Is she safe, or will she eat me?" I thought it too. Well, intrepid reader, we must accept certain risks when reading blogs, but I think the risks here are worth it. For one thing, she's eating a rose, and that makes her a bit safer than other PEBP's (plant-eating beautiful people). As we all know, roses go straight to your hips, which is why most flower-laden salads use nasturtiums instead. So, perhaps she's less concerned about maintaining a Twiggy figure than the average PCVM (potentially cannibalistic vegetarian model). Also, she's not a vegetarian; she likes sushi. Also, she apparently has at least contemplated bathing in some form of strawberry pudding, so, if she really needs to up her caloric intake, she can just spend some quality feeding time with her rubber duckie. (Actually, I'm not sure if she has a rubber duckie, or if the strawberry gunk is edible, so remain cautious.) Lastly, she apparently lives with a fellow named "S", and hasn't eaten him yet. Of course, it's always possible that "S" stands for "sandwich" or "snack", but, you know, all in all, as long as he pops up on the page from time to time, I think we can assume she hasn't eaten him and, therefore, won't eat us either.

By the way, for all you kids out there, you should know that I had to surf all over her blog to find that sort of information, before I could know that it was safe. And that's risky stuff that you shouldn't try at home. Like those stunts you see on TV. So, if you stumble across a beautiful woman's blog, don't just explore it on your own to see if it's safe. Send the link to me and I'll explore it for you, and I'll get back to you if it's safe.

Anyway, back to Vivienne's blog. Oh, right, her name is Vivienne. If you already knew that because you've started surfing about her site, shame on you. That was very reckless.

Anyway, I stumbled across her site a little over a week ago, and meant to write about it, but wound up writing about Sir Ian's blog instead. And then I had work. And then I felt like eating. And then there were things I felt like watching on TV. And, well, you get the point. But I'm writing about it now, so stop your badgering.

The first thing that struck me about Vivienne's blog was the image of Vivienne herself. She seemed sort of like a red-haired version of Janel Moloney--Donnatella "Donna" Moss on The West Wing--but with deeper eyes. I'm a big fan of Donna Moss, as, even though I suspect she'll someday eat somebody, she's just a wonderfully warm and adorably quirky character, with great dialogue and--since she's brought to us by Janel Moloney--great delivery. So, naturally, finding the blog of someone who vaguely resembled Janel, I promptly set about reviewing the blog to see if there was any skin to be seen. Oops, I mean, to see if the site was safe for edible readers like myself. And, I also wondered if I'd find a warm quirkiness like that of Donnatella Moss.

And the answers are no, yes (as long as S doesn't stand for "supper"), and emphatically yes.

What really strikes me about Vivienne's blog is its warmth. I mentioned a few posts back that Jillian Ann's site is sort of like a late-night conversation you'd have at a youth hostel, when you're sleepy and unfiltered and a little grungy from a long day's walkabout, and talk about everything from what you've seen to who you've been to who you want to be down the road. It's about high points and low points and all the poetry in between. Sir Ian's journals and other writings are more like a cross between postcards to friends and memoirs, with the occasional editorial essay in between.

Vivienne's blog is a different experience entirely. Some of it is about her life, but most of it is just about cool things she's finding. It has some of the fellow-traveller feeling of Jillian Ann's video clips, but it's more of an "Isn't this the neatest thing ever?" than a "This is what I did today, feel free to take a look." From time to time I like to throw gatherings where everybody brings a bottle of wine or some cheese and we all just kick off our shoes, lounge about and chat while we get tipsy, without the usual see-and-be-seen, wanna-hook-up, or here's-my-business-card bullshit that tends to bog down other kinds of parties. Because, you know, even though they're often French, brie and chevre taste better without pretension. (They also taste better without shoes, because good brie smells like my socks but you'd rather not have to believe that that smell is coming from the cheese while you're eating it. But I digress.)

Anyway, Vivienne's blog is a one-girl virtual version of that. She wanders about visiting websites and books and various whatnots, and brings them all home to her blog, where she discusses them with a sense of sharing instead of pretension. And her site, generally, is like a really well hosted party, where everything is cozy and comfortable and upbeat (although she did have a pretty unhappy entry about the flu recently--Vivienne, if you're reading this, I hope you're feeling better). Overall, her blog conveys a sort of virtual gemutlichkeit.

"Gemutlichkeit", if you're wondering, is German for "a comfy coziness or cozy comfyness, like the way you feel when you're sitting around the fire with a bunch of close friends drinking warm alcoholic beverages and eating apple pie with vanilla ice cream while it snows outside, the kind of comfort that can only be truly understood in a language of the Old World." There's a similar word in Dutch, "gezellig," but you'd have to add "smoking a well rolled blunt and" between "friends" and "drinking" and, you know, that's not legal in the United States yet. There's actually an umlaut in "gemutlichkeit," two dots perched atop the U like happy feet on a leather ottoman, but I don't know how to add an umlaut in HTML.

Anyway, Vivienne's blog is so nice and lovely that part of me wonders whether she keeps a separate blog for when she's not being nice and lovely, like a secret Blog of Dorien Gray, a blog where she lays waste to our democratic institutions and advocates destroying the ozone layer. But I haven't found it yet. I'll keep looking, though, just in case there's nudity there.

But for now, I'm content to enjoy the intellectual contentment of the Vivienne blog we know about. And there's a remarkable breadth of intellectual contentment there. In her most recent post, at the time of this writing, Vivienne ranges from surrealist art from Dominic Rouse, the recent cold snap in New York, her addiction to vegetarian burritos, her flu, an upcoming modeling shoot (Yeah, yeah, so I'm writing about a model/musician/artist again. Bite me, unless you're a model, musician, or artist.), and deep-fried cow brain sandwiches. Vivienne's blog is often a great place to find really cool things, like books on "How to be a Villain: Evil Laughs, Secret Lairs, Master Plans, and More!!!" or a pop-up book on cookies that has nothing to do with your web browser, or pencil sketches or paintings or lots and lots of photographs, or deep-sea critters exhibited in New York museums, or Polish delicacies (Vivienne, if you're reading this, go check out Teresa's on Montague Street in Brooklyn Heights), or KGB spy gadgets, or freakish Q-tip accidents, or tasty teas, or opera, or film, or jelly baths, or astronomy websites, or brain-hemisphere-usage diagnostics, or slideshows of New York "cupcake porn", or retro tampon cases, or The Master and Margarita or, well, just go read it. It's a wonderful collection of wonderful things, and you just have to giggle at the thought that there's a girl out there who says "I started reading Master and Margarita the other night and it is everything and nothing I was expecting from Bulgakov."

Well, ok, you don't have to giggle, but I did. The Master and Margarita is a masterpiece of 20th century Russian literature written by Mikhail Bulgakov, a seriously talented satirist generally unknown to us capitalist pigs. During his life, Bulgakov was best known as a playwright but his works were banned by Stalin's oppressive regime. Ironically, he attempted to regain favor by writing a favorable treatment of Stalin's youth, but Stalin banned it. Bulgakov started writing The Master and Margarita in 1928, uniquely blending a critique of Soviet repression into interwoven re-tellings of the stories of Faust and Pontius Pilate. In fear and despair, he burned his manuscript in 1930, but returned to it by 1933, working in secret and ultimately dictating revisions to his wife until a few weeks before his early death, in 1940, from a kidney ailment. The manuscript remained hidden until late 1966, when the first half slipped through a momentary lapse in literary repression and spilled across the pages of Moskva, a monthly magazine. Within hours, 150,000 copies had sold out and it was, as Vivienne has now echoed almost 40 years later, nothing anybody was expecting from Bulgakov. (Don't you just want to giggle now? Go ahead, let it out.) For one thing, it was a full-blown novel, a masterpiece really, and not some leftover snippet of a play. For another, it burst out just a year or two after the trials of Joseph Brodsky, Andrei Sinyavsky, and Yuli Daniel, giving an ironically timely satire of censorship and proclaiming (self-referentially) that "Manuscripts don't burn." It's a wonderful, funny, touching, complicated read, and you can find it in Russian or a couple versions of English at this Russian site or buy a nice paperback translation at Amazon (which is probably a more copyright-friendly way of going about it). The chair of Middlebury College's Russian department has an online multimedia reading companion for the book, which you might as well check out.

Anyway, back to Vivienne's blog. While you're waiting for your order of The Master and Margarita to arrive, you should go click about there. I'm pretty sure she won't eat you. I should warn you, however, that her blog may not be safe for practitioners of woohoodoh.

Woohoodoh, if you're not familiar with the term, is not a martial art. It's the series of Simpsonic sounds that erupt from people who make the mistake of falling for people they read about online or in the papers or on TV, but probably won't ever meet in person. Woohoodorks go "woohoo!" when they discover that the target of their online affection is single, and "d'oh!" when they discover that they're not. There's also an occasional "ooh" or "mrow" when the male woohoodork discovers that the female target of his online affection is or has ever been a member of the lesbian party, and a "dammit!" if she gets engaged to another man. I saw this one blog a couple days ago that would have resulted in something like "woohoo! d'oh! woohoo! d'oh! woohoo! d'oh! dammit! woohoo! d'oh! d'oh! mrow! d'oh!" in the space of 15 or so entries. Just thinking about woohoodoh gave me almost as much emotional whiplash as that poor blogger must have. (I suspect she needs a good hug and a protective posse of gay male friends. Beautiful women are surprisingly fragile when they're not eating people, you know. Especially when they haven't figured out they're beautiful yet and are looking at other people's opinions instead of a mirror.)

Anyway, boys, I'm sorry to report that Vivienne is firmly set on "d'oh!". It's very clear that she'll be with "S" either forever or until she eats him. And S appears to be both a conscientious boyfriend and a good-looking guy based on what little we see of him in the blog and--and this is just a brilliant defense mechanism--he has long hair, so Vivienne probably won't eat his head. And it's not like you really need all your toes when you're with a beautiful woman who bathes in strawberry jelly and likes Russian novels. So, all in all, S will likely last a long, long time with Vivienne, which makes S the luckiest letter around. Dammit. ;)

Oh, yeah, that was either a preemptive "dammit" or a non-woohoodork one, as far as I know.

That warning for the woohoodorks having been given, let's get back to the blossoming part. One of the interesting things about reading blogs is that they're arranged in reverse chronological order, so, by default, you wind up reading about who somebody is before learning who they were before. Sort of like Memento, but without all the tattoos. (Well, usually without all the tattoos.) And so I discovered Vivienne, and then read back to the beginning of her blog, and, by the time I finished, a new entry had appeared giving a bit more detail, for the first time really, about where she had come from and where she thought she might go. Turns out she was a musician (which I had already learned) who had gotten into Juilliard (which I hadn't learned) but wound up at the Fashion Institute of Technology and then Queens College instead, dabbling in all sorts of artistic things while basically creating herself on her own for lack of parental support. Pretty impressive. But now she's thinking about going back and getting a masters in museum studies.

And I just think that's awesome. Because this is just so obviously somebody with a great eye for great things and a marvelous capacity for sharing them. Her blog, itself, is like a Metropolitan Museum of Quirk, so I can't even imagine what she'd do with a physical museum.

Which is a bit annoying, actually. One of the bothersome things about blogs is that they're generally either realtime or retroactive. But it's possible, in calendar mode on livejournal at least, to glimpse future dates. So, I kept hitting "next day" until around 2005, looking for news.

But heaven forbid Vivienne could tell us how her masters program's going to be going. No, dear readers, it's just suspense for us.

I began to suspect that, one night around July of 2004, she's going to get hungry and, lacking the energy to go out and buy cupcakes, is going to just roll over and eat S, leaving a terrible gap in the alphabet of her life. And then, after a period of generally unsatisfactory experimentation with assorted Seussian letters of the post-Z variety, and possibly a mrow or two, she'll give up on letters altogether, leaving us entirely without written words, unhappily blogless and unjournaled.

But hopefully I'm wrong, and Vivienne's just being a conservative, traditional girl blogging about what is and has been, instead of what is to be. In which case, my guess is, some day we'll read about her work as a conservator of really interesting tidbits and then, in the early 20-teens, we'll read about some cute little Metropolitan Gallery of Quirk she's opened and stocked with cupcakes. Then, at some point in 2035 or so, you'll bump into her on her first day as the curator of one of the world's better museums.

And, on that day, do me a favor and ask her if she's eaten S. Inquiring woohoodorks will probably want to know.