Hi guys! Beet here. Just a little note to explain what shit’s gonna look like around here over the next couple of days. Zero flights got out of Seattle today. ZERO. So to that asshole who was posting in an earlier thread about how Seattlites need to stop bitching about the snow, FUCK YOU. Because everyone who was supposed to fly home for the holidays today is fucked. If your flight today got canceled, you can’t get on another out of Seattle until the 27th, maybe the 26th if you’re lucky. So everyone who was supposed to fly home for Christmas today is not going to be home for Christmas. So, once again, to that commenter, FUCK YOU.

The end result is that some of my friends are stranded here for the holidays and are super bummed about it. Since I’m a little Jew girl and I don’t really care whether or not I’m with my family on December 25 specifically, I decided to change my flight to the 27th (under the circumstances, US Airways waived any rescheduling fees), and I’m spending Christmas in Washington. This will be my anonymous Christmas gift to a random Seattlite, who will be shocked to hear that s/he can, in fact, catch a flight to Phoenix tomorrow and be home for Christmas. I feel warm and fuzzy about it already.

Plus: some of us stranded folks rented a cabin near Mt. Baker and we’re going snowboarding tomorrow. WOOT WOOT! So: Wendie will be covering for me on Tuesday (THANK YOU WENDIE!!!). It’s nice when I get to have a life every now and then.

The bad news is that I don’t think our little cabin has Internet. I’m also not going to ask Wendie to cover for me on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day. So I am going to try very hard to find places around Mt. Baker that are open AND have Internet access (if you live in or near the area, I’d love to hear your suggestions!), but posting will probably be pretty slow and/or non-existent on Dec 24 and 25. It will also likely take longer for your comments to get approved.

We should be back to normal by the night of the 26th at the latest.

If I don’t talk to you guys before Christmas, you are my Christmas presents and my Hannukah presents and my Martin Luther King Day presents and my Flag Day presents and my birthday presents and just generally the highlights of my life every single day of the year. So thank you, and happy holidays.

With absolutely nothing else going on right now, Hollywood is all abuzz with talk of the $2M in gaudy jewels stolen from Chez Hilton last week, and Paris Hilton is all too happy to warble on about it herself.

“I think whoever did this, definitely has been there before,” she told E! News on Monday, while perusing the racks at the L.A. boutique Intuition. “We have some suspects that I’m thinking of … I would tell them to please return my things, because I know that they’re probably watching E! News right now, to return everything and that’s it. They just have to anonymously have a taxi drop it off in my front gate in a box with my jewelry and everything they won’t get in trouble, but if all this goes on for much longer they’re going to get in more trouble.”

I’m sorry, but does anyone else think this sounds like the bitchy girl at summer camp trying to figure out who used her razor? Because she’s brunette and it had a black hair in it this morning and so she just knows someone used it? And she’s got like a fucking checklist of names and everyone’s huddled around her bottom bunk while she holds court and produces evidence and accuses everyone and makes people cry? And she’s like, “Look, if you just admit it now, I won’t turn you in,” like there’s a fucking summer camp jail and you will be incarcerated the fucking instant she tells the counselor that it’s your leg hair on her razor. And the whole time you’re just sitting there thinking to yourself that she probably started growing pubes this week and didn’t notice. Paris Hilton is totally the bitchy, pubescent summer camp girl who thinks you used her razor.

Um, so the Chinese people have chosen an earthquake-surviving pig as the most inspirational animal of 2008. (Ummmm … I thought the Chinese had their own calendar … )

A pig that became a nationwide celebrity after surviving for 36 days buried beneath rubble after this year’s Sichuan earthquake has been named China’s most inspirational animal of 2008.

“Zhu Jianqiang” or “Strong-Willed Pig”, won the award in an online vote, beating six dogs, a bird, a turtle and a cat to the coveted title.

The porker shot to fame after he was discovered alive in the debris of a house on June 17, more than five weeks after the 8.0 magnitude earthquake which killed about 90,000 people in the southwestern province. The owners of the house under which he was being raised had not bothered looking through the rubble because they assumed that no animal could have lived through the devastation.

The pig survived on just rainwater and a bag of charcoal although his weight had fallen from 150kg to just 50kg.

He was then sold to become the prime exhibit at a museum set up to commemorate the quake, where his new owners guaranteed him a life free from the worries of the slaughterhouse and traditional Sichuan pork dishes.

A sweet tale indeed, although a report in the China Daily newspaper injected a sour note: apparently the Strong-Willed Pig has become a bit of a greedy pig in his new life as the Jianchuan museum.

“It’s gotten fatter and lazier by the day,” the paper quoted one of its keepers as saying. “We used to take it out for a walk every morning and afternoon, but now it’s too lazy – and too fat – to do it. So we’re feeding it only twice a day.”

Listen up, Westerners! We can’t let those Chinese beat us! We have to elect an inspirational animal, too! Is it one of the Puppy Cam Shiba Inus? The soon-to-be-elected Obama puppy? Brandon Davis??? LEO???

Who is America’s most inspirational animal of the year???

I wrote awhile back about how ridiculous and desperate I felt it was that Valkyrie was opening on Christmas Day. A friend emailed me later that night to point out that Schindler’s List also opened on Christmas Day. “Somehow,” I told her, “I don’t think this is going to be comparable.”

Here are some excerpts from an early review of this feel-good Hitler-assassinating holiday flick (emphasis mine).

Turns out Cruise is both the central figure in “Valkyrie” and its weakest link. He’s distractingly bad in this, the iconography of his celebrity so strongly overshadowing his performance. He’s just too powerfully contemporary. With his hard, flat American accent, he stands out in every single scene. And he’s not a good enough actor to immerse himself in this kind of period piece, or allow us to do the same. (Then again, if he had affected a German accent – or a British one to blend in among his co-stars – he would have invited derision for that, too. Maybe the guy just can’t win.) … Cruise undermines the potential of “Valkyrie” at every turn. He’s outclassed and outmatched by every member of the strong supporting cast, any of whom would have been more believable as Stauffenberg …

But we never get a sense of inner conflict, of the doubt he may have felt in betraying his duties, of the fear he may have faced in putting himself and his family in danger by going through with the plan. When Stauffenberg states with clenched-jawed, hushed certitude, “We have to kill Hitler,” we’ll just have to take his word for it that he feels strongly about the task he’s about to lead … The whole effort feels rather smoothly detached. The actual bomb-orchestration sequence is well-staged and has a few breathless moments, but a scene that’s supposed to be pivotal and poignant – when Stauffenberg reluctantly thrusts his partially amputated arm in the air and declares “Heil Hitler!” – instead comes off as laughable.

Ouch, ouch, ouch. BIG ouchies there.

I expect my headline here is going to be one of many, many, many jokes made in the next week or two where you basically pair the concept of a failed Hitler assassination with the concept of a failed movie. Collect ‘em all!

Let me see if I can explain this to y’all, because I’m not so sure I get it myself.

Jamie Spears was getting $2500/week to manage his daughter’s life. This payment system has been in place since January. But, for some reason, he decided to go back to the courts this month and be all like, “I’ve actually been doing way more work than I feel I was being paid for” and the courts were all like “Yeah, you’re right,” and now he’s getting $16K a month in back-payments for the past 11 months.

“He has been working extra hours related to various activities related to her music and her tour and activities necessary to the conservatorship,” L.A. Superior Court Commissioner Reva Goetz said during Monday’s hearing.

HOLY SHIT.

I DIDN’T KNOW THE COURT SYSTEM WORKED LIKE THAT!

Okay, now I get why America is so exciting! All this time I was like, “Wait, why’s everyone so pumped on America? What’s the big deal? Mostly we race cars and get into wars and then in our free time we make a A-list celebs out of receptionists at Sony BMG with funny eyeballs.” I didn’t get it.

But it turns out that you can just go to court and be all like “Dude, I am sooooo not getting paid enough” and then the court’s all like, “Dude, you are soooo not getting paid enough,” and then you’re all like, “Fuck no I’m not” and then the court’s all like, “I’m totally going to tell your boss to pay you like way more money, and the money has to start, like, last year, yo,” and then you make like $175K more for the year just for going to court and bitching about your income.

FUCK. YES.

I don’t know what you guys are doing tomorrow, but I am going to court, baby!

This is not a Christmas joke. Mischa Barton designed a line of headbands for Stacy Lapidus, and they’re retailing for $90-$200. WHAT PLANET ARE THESE PEOPLE LIVING ON?

Anyway, you may have heard of this little snowstorm thing we’re having up here in Seattle. It’s kind of a little nutty around here right now. We’re not really a snowstorm city. The airport’s closed down for the day. They ran out of de-icer. I may or may not be able to get on my flight out tomorrow. My fucking truck’s still in the shop but might be done this evening, and now I have to take my neighbor to the hospital after this shit happened yesterday. Apparently she can’t walk anymore.

The moral?

Not gonna be a whole lot of posting this afternoon, kids.

Really? How far do we have to push the leggings trend? I’m just kind of afraid that we’re one CW starlet away from using them as condoms. (The leggings, that is, not the CW starlets. Although they’re equally plausible in this context.)