Last night, Leonard & I looked at recent Hulu uploads to see if we want to watch anything. Promising selections:

• Drunken Master (only available till the end of 2009)
• Two People Under the Same Roof, which kinda reminds me of Ha Jin's Waiting
• A Fistful of Dollars
• The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant (Casey Kasem, but no Steve Martin, despite Leonard's vague recollection)
• The Republic of Love (Canada! Mira Nair!)
• Five episodes of MST3K

We also looked at recent New York City Craigslist posts for amusement, shock, sentiment, and "what does THAT acronym mean?" edification. A few (click soon, they'll disappear off the site in a few days):

• Almost a rap. Why is the age "99"?
• "Hot chocolate with milk, not water!" Is that a metaphor? Code? Or just a rant about bad hot chocolate?
• That sentence in the second paragraph just goes on and on, and not where I expected. Also, the photo and caption make teddy bears more ominous than Teddy Ruxpin did.
• Really rappish. Leonard cannot stop laughing at the acknowledgment-of-slant-rhyme couplet at the end.
• Actually platonic! (But why does the author specify a male partner? Larger probable appetite?)

  I want Chips and Guac. - w4m - 21 (Greenwich Village)
  Date: 2009-12-08, 5:45PM EST

  Hi,

  I am studying at Bobst right now (aka memorizing every detail of the jcrew website). I want some chips and guacamole but I don't want to eat a whole serving myself. I just want someone to eat them with me (and pay for half of them, obviously). I am awesome and you should be too.

  [photo of guacamole & tortilla chips]

• This is satire, right? NSFW. "PS I am a well known conceptual artist."

An N+1 article on online dating by Katherine Sharpe had some great Craigslist analysis:

Reading Craigslist, I feel as though I am dipping my cup straight into the swift-flowing stream of human need. Laid-back is the only thing these people aren't. When I step back onto the "regular" dating sites, I feel like someone coming out of bright sunshine into a darkened room; it takes a while for my eyes to re-adjust. Everything's so … subtle. On Craigslist, people say what they want; on Nerve or OK Cupid, they say who they are, and you infer the rest. Craigslist is scattershot, confessional, desperate, and sleazy. It's like a wholesale thrift store where nothing is hung up, no two items are alike, and the savviest shoppers wear rubber gloves. The other dating sites are for discerning petit-bouregois who like to read Consumer Reports and make informed decisions. Craigslist's the insane, open-all-night corner store where you go at 3 a.m. for unhealthy snacks, where a bony cat roams the aisles and there's a permanent card game going on in back. You go there for what you want right now and will most likely consume in private. Or you go there because you just can't sleep, and you need somebody else to know it.