I've been working really hard, and finally got it together enough to renew my reader's card at the Huntington. And to my embarrassment I was there about an hour when I ran into some colleagues from grad school. THEY were working. One of them is there working all the time, and of course I ought to have been doing this all along. Oh, well.

So of course I haven't been playing as much, and also asthma season has officially started, it seems. I've decided to play the Romans for a while and catch them up with all the other families in the neighborhood, and of course, in my neighborhood, Cassidy Vetinari is a "Roman." So there has been a lot of dating.

Like probably everybody else, I've been noticing all the Michael Jackson stuff going on. I really wasn't a fan of his later stuff. To me, Michael Jackson is the little kid I used to watch when I was an even littler kid. Or, more precisely, he is this:



To me, the Jackson Five was a cartoon family who lived in the TV, probably across the street from the Osmonds. Both of them had a Saturday morning cartoon show animated by Rankin-Bass. They were also on a lot of variety programs, like Sonny and Cher. My grandmother liked those. My parents were very much about Renaissance music and Frank Zappa, but actual pop music, like anything by Burt Bacharach, that was my grandma's kind of thing.

I read somewhere that Michael Jackson felt personally betrayed that everyone who liked him as a child star didn't like him later, but that's what happens sometimes. My childhood was ruined by disco. By the time Michael Jackson came along, I had taken refuge in opera and early jazz like Fats Waller and George Gershwin, and to this day, I'm just not in the habit of listening to popular music unless it is SO popular and maybe controversial that they play it on NPR. And my friends who hung around with me at Rocky Horror--we tended to like stuff like Blondie: Heart of Glass.

Anyhoo, because Michael Jackson is all connected to the Jackson Five in my mind, and since I can't think of the Jackson Five without thinking of the Osmonds, I got curious about what they're up to now. I see Marie flogging the Nutri-System Diet all the time. Jimmy is the closest to my age, and while he's put on a few pounds (hey, who hasn't), he's still got a career performing in England. In fact, he was just in a production of *Grease,* and . . . just watch the clip.

 (Ask me sometime about the lyrics about Australopithecus Africanus that I wrote to this tune. )

 
Then I got to wondering what Donny Osmond was up to, since he was always the big star. I remembered that he'd been doing about ninety seven million performances of *Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.* He's still performing, too, even though his clean-cut image hasn't helped him. A PR guy once begged him to PLEASE get arrested for drug possession. Just once. But I did not know he was in Weird Al Yankovic's music video for *White and Nerdy.* Because as Weird Al said, Donny Osmond is the whitest guy he could think of. You can see him dancing behind Weird Al in the original, here, but this is the greenscreen stuff they shot. It's kind of hilarious.

So now that I've established my geek credentials yet again, I'll admit two more things:

Yes, I have begun another writing project but I am not going to say more about it until there is more;

and yes, I have been tearing my way through the Dresden Files and really enjoying them a lot. A few things I was thinking as I read them:

( Dresden Files commentary and speculation. May contain spoilers up to *White Night*. )

So tomorrow I have research to do, and I hope my asthma clears up a bit, because this is nasty.

Also, to the dorks in Sacramento:  I am way out of patience with you.