I’m off to see Austin Powers in Goldmember in a few hours. I really hope it doesn’t suck. Most likely it won’t, right? And the soundtrack will probably be good, right?

I wanted to add a sidenote to the MTV entry from the other day. How is it possible that the Basement Jaxx didn’t get nominated for “Where’s Your Head At?” the scariest, creepiest, weirdest video of all time? With the monkeys and the chasing and the making me cry at five in the morning because it’s so terrifiying? You can’t say the song isn’t mainstream enough, now that I have to watch a Pringles can sing the same song. As if it wasn’t scary enough having a lab monkey sing the song, now I’ve got to watch a dancing Pringles can sing it too. Why does the television want to make me cry so much?

And also, since Lenny Kravitz didn’t get nominated for anything… is it over? Is he done? How did that happen? I wonder if he fired everybody. Just woke up and went down his phone list and fired all of them. “Yeah, Mama? You’re fired.”

I helped a friend move into a new apartment yesterday. The apartment itself is very nice. His neighbors put mine to shame, though. We were jokingly calling it Mental Place. Nobody closes their front door and they are in various stages of undress. One just walked right into the apartment, her small dog yipping around the boxes, asking my friend where he plans on parking. Another went out and chalked all over the wall, “Don’t park here!” on each available parking space.

The best (scariest) thing is the tiny bust of a man his neighbor has in front of her house. His name is Benny the Bomber and apparently he died a few years ago… on the birthday of one of my friends helping with the move. It’s one thing to make a memorial for someone in your life, and another to place it outside your front door next to your window filled with stuffed animals trapped in mosquito netting, but it’s another thing entirely to then draw a tiny Hitler moustache in red Sharpie on Benny the Bomber’s face. Then at one point when I was laughing I leaned over clutching my side and saw a man staring at us through a window.

Do you see what Los Angeles forces us to do? If I told you all of the things we saw at once, you’d never sleep again. As we unloaded the U-Haul, I said to another friend. “Mark my words. He’s going to write an Oscar-winning screenplay out of this. If he doesn’t start a comedy troupe with his neighbors.” It’s good that my friend has a sense of humor about the entire thing. He’s already naming the neighbors (creepy staring guy is named “Slingblade,” I do believe), and his girlfriend is taking no shit at all from these people, ordering them to stay away like Shelly Duval with a baseball bat. It really is a nice apartment, though.

In any event, there’s nothing funnier than a Benny the Bomber joke these days. “I figured you didn’t turn off your refrigerator before you left today, so I went ahead and did it while you were gone. It was keeping Benny up.”