altrok main 1/7/2004

for January 7, 2004

Gift From The Gods
by Your Diva, Robin Pastorio-Newman

Congratulations! We survived the holidays again with few injuries, and almost no one married Britney Spears for fifty-five hours.

It's January, when we deftly avoid tiresome awards shows and even more tiresome reruns and turn to pondering the mysteries of the universe, like why so many people shout at us to get ready, like we could be continually underdressed without a cheering section. If the subject is a new, fabulous topic of discussion, honestly we were ready ages ago.

Unless you've been living under a moon rock, you know that over the weekend, NASA landed Spirit on Mars and immediately started beaming back pictures of the craggy landscape. Like a zany fangirl, Your Darling, Your Diva, Your One True Love watched PBS's Nova, utterly transfixed. Look! Another planet to adore at close range! Scant weeks earlier, the European Space Agency's Beagle II had landed on the Martian surface and failed to broadcast its homing signal - nine notes of a Blur song, one guess which! - and a Japanese mission to Mars failed.

Wily NASA, meanwhile, has another trick up the lab coat sleeve: a second lander, Opportunity, a mere three weeks behind Spirit, is well on its way to a second landing site. What more could a girl ask of her nation's favorite drastically underfunded geniuses? Happy Three Kings Day, America! And your present? MARS!

Back on Earth, it's apparent that you are no fool. Though you feel for Howard Dean's loss, you don't believe for a nanosecond a sane 24-year-old American fellow backpacked through Laos in 1974. You are bouncy and brainy, and despite that terrifying thirty year mortgage, you still love to dance.

"My Sweet," you ask, "how can you be so sure I'm as interesting as - well - you?" Vintage Vinyl, Fords' wickedly cool music and collectibles emporium, cannot keep DEVO's new DVD The Complete Truth About De-Evolution on the shelves. Since you've already bought it and seen it, there's no need to tell you how unbelievably cool the hilarious videos, raw footage and spicy commentary are. You just couldn't be cooler sporting a jaunty polar ice cap.