Today’s entry will be brief because I’m making lasagna from scratch tonight but I would be remiss if I neglected my Things That Do Not Suck Thursday duties.  Remiss.

I found this on the Internets this week and it delighted me.  Not because it’s pure art but because it’s interesting.  Franz Ferdinand, this one:

No caption necessary, I think.

Not this one:

I do kind of like that mustache, though.

recorded a cover of Britney Spears’ song “Womanizer” and I think it’s funny.  Not because they’re making fun of it but because of how now it sounds like one of their songs now.  The fact that I adore the band may have something to do with this, but maybe not.  Enjoy!

It’s really too bad this theme doesn’t display time stamps, because if it did you’d notice that this was posted much later than I normally make a habit of posting.  I came home today and could barely scrape myself off the couch long enough to make dinner and, once I got dinner in the oven, I had a choice to make: write a blog post or make peanut butter cookies.

True to form, my stomach handled all the complex thinking processes and I hied myself to the kitchen to throw stuff into a bowl and hope the result was cookie dough.  Sure I was so tired I could barely string a sentence together, but we had some fine cookies for dessert!  The added bonus with peanut butter cookies is that they’re vaguely healthy, what with the peanut butter and all.  One could almost imagine they’re what peanuts were supposed to taste like, back before they remembered they were healthy.

Today was a big day for me.  Not only did I make the aforementioned cookies, my guest post for a friend’s blog went up!  I wrote a post about the delegation of household tasks in marriage for my friend Rebecca, who runs the blog for a neat new company called Alice.  It was a fun project, maybe there’ll even be a follow-up post about the fine art of splitting desserts when there’s an uneven number of cookies left.  If you’re in the mood, and feel like jumping into the fray with your opinions, you’re cordially invited to hop over and have a read.

Before I get hoisted by my own petard, let me not forget what day it is.  Today is Thursday, the day we all know to be the day I share with you my Thing That Does Not Suck for the week.  The Thing for this week surprised me a bit, but that’s TTDNST’s for you, just full of surprises, those wily devils!

The Thing That Does Not Suck this week is Bones: Season 2.  Sounds odd, but hear me out.  I wrote a post back when Wes and I were in the middle of the first season, explaining why I wasn’t really sold on the show.  The characters held little interest for me and I feel like they put the cart before the ox or whatever in many respects.

Season 2 is an entirely different beast.  The characters all seem human for a change and the repartee is fun.  There are romantic entanglements, interesting cases, and enough variety to keep the format from getting stale.  In short, it’s an entirely different beast than season 1.  I highly recommend it.  It takes a lot to change my mind (Wes can confirm this) so for a show to go from something I have to force myself to sit through to something I’m excited to watch, it must really be extraordinary.  Well done, masterminds of Bones, well done indeed.

Thank goodness today was a better day for me than either yesterday or the day before!  Between telling my boss he was only allowed to converse with me exclusively using semaphore, and proactively critiquing one of the submissions for my writer’s group on Saurday (thus saving myself the indignity of trying to cram quality critiquing into the five minutes before the group starts), I’m feeling pretty good about everything that happened today.

Not the least of the things that happened today is that Wednesday ended, thus bringing us to Thursday!  Since declaring Thursdays the day for nothing but things that do not suck, they have quickly risen to become my favorite days of the week.  I sometimes feel like I blink and another Thursday is rolling back into view, bringing with it fresh impetus to search out and show off the most non-sucky thing I’ve come across that week.

This week’s Thing That Does Not Suck was chosen almost immediately.  It was actually in a tie-breaker with the amazing photography of Erik Johansson, whose work graced yesterday’s post, but I decided to go with the one that made me smile, as opposed to the one that left me gaping in awe.

I’m really excited to introduce you to Inkygirl, who draws the most adorable cartoons.  Her work is primarily geared to appeal to writers, but I think they’re all purpose cute.  This particular drawing brought me much happiness this week:

Tell me this didn't make you melt all over!

I know my sense of humor is lame, but I’m tickled by this and it’s my blog so there.  Now, if you’ll excuse me I’ll be on my roof frantically consulting a semaphore letter chart and communicating with my boss using large, brightly colored flags.

Before we go any further, I have one question to ask you: Have you seen Ghost Town?  I’m pretty sure critics panned it almost universally but I have an unabashed and irrevocable adoration for that movie that may never die.  I laughed so hard I cried a little, then I cried for real, then I smiled. 

It’s a perfect Friday night movie (I should know, because I saw it on a Friday) so if you don’t have any plans tomorrow night you might want to look into it.  Either that or begging my sister in law to make you a chocolate martini.  Either way, you can’t go wrong.  The movie’s that good and so are her chocolate martinis.

The main character of Ghost Town is played by British actor Ricky Gervais.  You may know him as the main star of the original Office show.  Or you may not, I don’t know.  All you really need to know is that he’s British, hilarious, and has impeccable dead-pan delivery skills that made me crave corticosteroids so that I could get my breathing back under control.

In this YouTube video, which just happens to be this week’s Thing That Does Not Suck, Ricky Gervais sits down for a chat with Elmo.  Apparently celebrities sit down for Sesame Street fireside chats all the time.  I guess it’s a bit of a thing. 

I was talking to a friend of mine on Monday and she said, “Kim Cattrall was on Sesame Street the other day…” and then we both laughed because apparently when you become a parent you start discussing Sesame Street in everyday conversation.  We used to discuss Sex and the City.  Now we chat about Sesame Street.  We’ve either gone far astray or not very far at all, depending on who you ask.

This video shows the outtakes from Ricky Gervais’ interview with Elmo.  I think it’s charming how the two of them interact and riff off one another, and I’m tickled when Elmo loses his temper with Ricky Gervais and says, “It’s called acting, Mr. Ger-vais.  ACTING!”

Even if you have no idea who Ricky Gervais (or Elmo) is, I hope this short video makes you smile too: