cleolinda | OUT, OUT DAMNED SPOT(s)!

Ohhhhhhhh no. No no no no no. My mother put a load of my sister's laundry in to wash this morning and asked me to put it in the dryer for a little bit and then hang it all up to dry. (For those of you asking where my sister was that she couldn't do her own laundry, her shift started at five this morning and she had a class last night. She's been a lazy cuss in the past, yes, but for the last six months, her schedule's been insane.) So I throw the clothes in the dryer, don't really look at them, and come back a couple of hours later to hang them up. They're covered in spots. Clutches of small, random, oily spots. Most of the load was polo shirts for work, but also in there? The outfit she was going to wear on her date tonight. Ohhhhhhhh no. And Sister Girl has, let us say, an Irish temper. I thought I had an Irish temper, but I realized it isn't really--with me, the amount of bluster is inversely proportionate to the actual amount of mad I am. I read something ridiculous in the paper, and it's like, "OH, WHATEVER, I CANNOT BELIEVE THIS GUY, DID YOU SEEEEEEE THIS?!"; someone does something shitty directly to me and I turn into my mother with the "I'm sorry, this is NOT ACCEPTABLE BEHAVIOR" Terrifying Calm thing. With Sister Girl, on the other hand, the dial's pretty much on eleven all the time. We're all going to die, is what I'm saying.

So the first thing I do is call my mother to see if the spots were there when the clothes went in that morning, and if we can establish any kind of timeline wherein none of this is our fault. (There's a "What would the Bush administration do?" joke I was tempted to make, but it was kind of a cheap shot.) She actually does know what I'm talking about, but we're still not sure that Sister Girl was aware of them--if Sister Girl knew when she handed the clothes over, she won't be mad; she'll just have been hoping we could get the stains out. But we can't ask her, "Hey, were you aware that your favorite outfit is covered in oily spots?," because if she wasn't aware, we're all going to die. So, to recap: it's not my fault, because the spots were there before I got there. We're still not sure where they came from, though.

So then my mother comes home for lunch and we go into panic mode. I've washed the clothes again, and they look fine wet; but when I take them out of the dryer again, the spots are back. My sister's coming home sometime after one and it's already noon. We are so screwed. We saturate them with stain remover in glue-stick form and spray-bottle form (I have never been so happy to see a 60-ounce refill of Spray n' Wash under the sink in my life); we use cold water, we use hot water, we use Biz, we use three different kinds of detergent, the stains are not budging.

While they're in the spin cycle (again) we get all Laundry Forensics and try to figure out what happened. The spots are very small but somewhat elongated; they don't look like someone stood over, say, a pile of clothes on the floor and sprinkled them with something. And the spots seem to be arranged in extremely random arrays--one shirt had spots up and down the sides, but not the front or back; another one had them only on the front and then the hem of the back. We eventually decide that whatever it was wound up in the washing machine somehow, and because the water was cold, it didn't immediately melt and make large spots, or dissolve completely; it probably didn't start streaking until the spin cycle, due to the elongated shape of the stains. The stains seem to be oily but very light in consistency--i.e., not heavy grease, fat, oil, or melted wax. No color, either. Baby oil, maybe--and my sister does use that to take her makeup off--but I can't figure out how baby oil would have randomly gotten in the washing machine, and why it wouldn't have been washed away during the... waaaait. What if she spilled baby oil on something while she was taking off her makeup? I saw one stain that was a lot larger than the others. Maybe the oil started coming out in the wash, but because it couldn't dissolve, it just stained all the other clothes in microscopic droplets?And the way the clothes were bunched up determined which parts got stained? Seriously, this is just now occurring to me. All I know for sure is, they've been through five wash cycles and still nothing is coming out. So... it was nice knowing you guys. I'd like pink and yellow roses on my casket, thanks.

Movies this weekend: The Wicker Man at 17% fresh: snap. Crank seems to have amazingly good reviews at the moment, though.

Munch's "The Scream" found by police after two years.

Meanwhile: apparently by the time y'all got to the gelfling porn Wikipedia entry, it had been sanitized, making me look insane. Well, nothing ever disappears entirely from the internet, baby. (I like how a note on the history page says, "Classified everything below the first paragraph as 'Gelflings in Fan Fiction' since that is all the contents really are at best.")

Maybe the Russian Wtf, as y'all call it, was an ambulocetus? Yeah, I don't feel better.

("Russian Wtf" reminds me of the old joke--a reporter at a garden show or a greenhouse or something (look, I forget the context) asks the gardener what the big purple flower is, and he says, "Damn if I know." Next day in the paper, a picture of it with the caption: The rare purple damifino.)

Brian De Palma talks about The Black Dahlia a bit. "De Palma was juggling simultaneous plot lines 'that overlap in ways you don't realize until later,' he says. 'Some things I changed were too complex for audiences to absorb unless they were able to pick up the book. I had to pare down a lot of the eccentricities of the storytelling. If four things were going on simultaneously, we didn't need five.'" This is the kind of thing I find fascinating, if only for my own writerly purposes.

Cate Blanchett as Bob Dylan in I'm Not There. Okay, I howled at this one. Maybe it works in action, but it's just hilarious out of context in stills. I forget which other actors are playing Dylan--seven total, I believe--but more of the cast in general is here. Definitely Heath Ledger, apparently.

Queen Fights for Right to Party, Blog. Brian May is ready to go over to MySpace and "apply a fist or two." I support this motion one hundred percent, sir.