Cereal Monogamist

Websites of Note, 1st Edition

I have tons of websites that I’m obsessed with and visit regularly or more than regularly; I expect that, like “Why am I watching this?” from the other day, this topic will recur.

LOSING THE COW
This short blog I found in sort of a roundabout way; the blogger was a recapper at Television Without Pity (which I’ll cover on another day), then I followed her from there to her personal blog, on which she linked to this blog, which was devoted solely to her weight-loss efforts. Though she updated it a couple of times in 2008, the posts are largely from a few years earlier.

People who know me know that I am emphatically anti-diet, and, while I don’t discourage physical fitness for anybody, I find the obsessive pursuit of it a bit pointless. (It’s like this: I’ll walk the dog and do Pilates sometimes, but I won’t beat myself up if I skip a month or two. And I’m never giving up cheese.)

What does this site offer me, then, that I find so noteworthy? Philosophy, plain and simple. You have to start with the first post, in which the blogger (whose name is Linda Holmes, incidentally, and who now writes for yet another site that I like) explains how her approach, honed over 30 years of lifetime overweight-ness, differs from everyone else’s.

It’s like trying to win a tug-of-war, and you pull as goddamn hard as you can, and you don’t make any progress at all. And it seems like you should be able to do it, but you just don’t. And when you seek advice, you get the same piece most of the time: “Pull harder. You’re not pulling hard enough.” ... Here’s the advice you don’t get, that you should get:

1. Tie the rope to something secure.
2. Walk along the rope until you find the other end.
3. There will be a guy standing there. Kick the shit out of him.

...More after the jump.

I love the idea of the guy at the other end of the rope; the psychological aspect of failure, a personification of that thing that’s holding you back from achieving your goals. Because even beyond weight loss-specific philosophy, the site offers an amazing motivational tool in the form of “You’re doing it right now.” As someone who constantly pushes themselves to be more on task—do my reading on time! engage in outside study! keep the kitchen clean! make use of all the hours of the day!—and who often ends up on the couch, vegetating in front of some disappointing movie—“you’re doing it right now,” is kind of a revelation. When I choose to set aside my schoolwork to do jigsaw puzzles online for three hours, I can let that derail my whole day, or I can crawl back from it. Linda’s point with “You’re doing it right now,” is that we don’t make one choice in life (e.g., the choice to eat responsibly and lose weight); we make an endless series of choices and the only choice that matters is the most recent one you made.

What this means for weight loss—which, again, is the primary topic of the blog—is that eating one cookie is not the end of the struggle. Neither are the puzzles. The point is learning how to say, “Well, that was fun. Now back to the day job.”

RIFFTRAX
This site is where you go if you are still lamenting the passage of Mystery Science Theater 3000, a wacked-out TV show about robots and one slacker dude who are forced to watch horrible movies and comment hilariously on them. Mike Nelson, one of the creators of that show (which aired nationally from 1989 to 1999, first on Comedy Central and then on Sci Fi) has channeled his critical energy into Rifftrax, which is basically MST3K for a digital age.

The way it works is, he (and various colleagues) comment on regular-release movies. (See a genre-sorted Rifftrax catalog here.) The consumer downloads the commentary as an audio file; you obtain the film being commented on on DVD and sync up the two, creating a ready-made MST3K experience for a Hollywood film—which in itself is new. See, the original show was built around movies whose rights were easily (i.e. cheaply) obtained: B-movies, schlock-fests from the 50s, unreleased travesties. The price of obtaining the rights meant that the show could never work its magic on big movies. The system Rifftrax has set up—where they are only responsible for providing the commentary, and not the film—has effectively sidestepped that problem. Now we can watch Independence Day the way it’s meant to be watched: with full-force ridicule.

This new method has also given the MST3K gang the opportunity to comment on actual good movies, an opportunity they took. You can buy commentaries to Jaws, The Dark Knight, the original Star Wars series, etc. I’m not sure that I want to indulge in those; I like Jaws too much. I don’t want to make fun of Jaws, I want to enjoy its awesomeness. (But it’s nice to know that those commentaries are there, especially for people who don’t enjoy those movies.)

One of the great features of the site is that every track available for purchase also has a 1-2 minute clip available for free preview. I would warn anybody against visiting the site if you don’t have 2-3 hours handy for watching all the clips; you’ll want to.

SLING/SLING BLOG
A TV site I’ve just discovered, comparable to Hulu. The catalog of shows is extensive; not only does it have recent shows (for example, the complete first season of Damages, which I’ve been meaning to catch up, I guess as soon as I’m done catching up with Mad Men) but it has “oh my God, that show existed” shows. Full-length episodes of Sisters! Who’s the Boss?! Want to see the Very Special Episode of Family Ties where Uncle Tom Hanks faces his drinking problem? They’ve got it! (It won’t embed, but click here to see it.)

The site also has a blog, published collectively by about half a dozen writers, most of whom (with notable exceptions, CharlotteCowles) are funny. My favorite of the writers is TaraAriano—who, like Linda above, I tracked from Television Without Pity. The posts are relatively varied: some ‘weird news,’ some ‘did you see this thing on TV last night?’, all media-savvy. What’s really great about the blog is that the bloggers can pull from the catalog of clips to illustrate the points and themes of their posts. TaraAriano and WillEdmondson are especially good at this; see here how some of their posts utilize classic moments from The Simpsons.

AMERICAN RHETORIC
This site is an utterly amazing resource for anyone who studies literature, language, discourse, rhetoric, politics, sociology, etc. I’ll let those of you who don’t study (or particularly care about) any of those things determine how much interest this site holds for a layman.

Basically, it’s a database of speeches delivered by Americans, great and small. Speeches from the ancient past are reproduced in text; here, for example, is the text of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. If that’s too obvious for you (you can really find that text anywhere), how about Calvin Coolidge’s Inaugural Address, March 4, 1925? How about Susan B. Anthony, on the subject of women’s suffrage, 1873?

An even greater wealth of resources exist for speeches given in more modern eras. Want to see John F. Kennedy accidentally tell a mass of Germans that he’s a cruller? “Ich bin ein Berliner” has both text AND a video. Almost everything delivered by a political figure these days is online somewhere, and linked to by American Rhetoric; last semester, my students and I analyzed the use of language in Pres. Obama’s election night acceptance speech thanks to AR’s link. (I still get a little teary-eyed when he recounts the story of that 100-year-old woman who saw slavery in her lifetime but still got to see an African American man elected president of the United States.)

Not moved by 300 years of American political and social history? How about movies? You like movies? You like speeches from Gladiator? I present General Maximus Decimus Meridius: Opening Battle Address to the Roman Cavalry.

The site can be a bit difficult to navigate; the site design is sort of busy, and there are often paid advertisements gumming up the works. Also, if you decide to bypass themed searches and just hit the Speech Bank for an A-Z listing, note that the majority of the speeches are alphabetized under the speaker’s first name—A for Abraham Lincoln and so on. Still, the content more than makes up for the navigation problems.