Rebel Prince

I decided to end the lease on the digital piano I’ve been renting for about a year now. It’s just that the quality time I spend playing it has been dwindling to nothing, such that it became nothing more than a pretty table with a monthly fee. The movers came early this morning to take it away, and though I was a bit sad to see it go, I’m excited at the interior-design prospects.

Now that I have all that free space, I’m in the market for storage solutions. I have more clothes than I would ever really need in any given season, and they need to go somewhere. (A donation bin is one place, and yes, it’s on my to-do list.) My dilemma in furniture buying has always been how to transport the items, since I don’t have a car. After learning my lesson lugging a few pieces home last year, including an especially heavy bathroom shelf unit—which reminds me of that Seinfeld episode with Elaine’s armoire—I’m now resigned to the less-hassle, easier-on-the-back-and-shoulders option: having things delivered.

I undertook a quick web jaunt through the usual suspects (from Crate & Barrel, and Levenger—which has a cool, sliding-top desk I like—on down to Linens N Things), and then remembered that good ol’ Target is online as well. For now I have my eye on the QBits modular furniture (though I think I’ll eventually purchase them at BestBuy.com, which has free shipping). I’m totally diggin’ it. I’ve seen similar, but more expensive pieces at Hold Everything, where the quality is better, so there’s a trade-off either way.

By the way, while I was waiting for the piano movers, I watched TV and, skipping all the war news, happened upon a home-improvement show called HandyMa’am. Ha, I thought I knew all the do-it-yourself shows (New Yankee Workshop, anyone?), but apparently not. I can’t say that the HandyMa’am herself, Beverly DeJulio, is as hip or exciting as the other hosts out there (think a safety-goggle-wearing, power-drill-wielding Carol Brady), but she and her daughters did renovate an entire kitchen. Groovy.

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The referrals from web searches for Adrien Brody’s speech keep pouring in to Rebel Prince. Not just from Google.com, mind you. I’m also getting hits from foreign websurfers using Google Canada, Japan, Korea, Poland, Netherlands, and Switzerland. At best, in the list of search results, Rebel Prince ranks second only to an old article link in the Guardian, which gets me thinking, “Hey, I can take on a major British news-media conglomerate, right?” Well, sooner or later, perhaps even as I type, the Google robot will wake up and do another sweep, during which my site will be bumped down a few pages in favor of more likely websites.

All the searches for Mr. Brody’s fine words brought on a surge of post-Oscar web traffic, the likes of which my little site hasn’t seen before. What does that look like? Here’s a chart, counting visits from 4 March (the date I started using Site Meter), leading up to the day after the Oscars. Okay, I’m probably pushing up the search relevance the more I talk about it, so I’ll stop here. For now.

Off-the-rack remarks. A leftover fashion observation from Sunday: as much as I appreciate Daniel Day-Lewis’ flair for the extraordinary, his slightly shimmering gray tuxedo just looked out of place amidst the sea of black jackets.

Oh, and I forgot to write about this earlier: last weekend’s most egregious fashion faux pas was not committed at the Oscars, but at the Pentagon press briefing on Saturday by Deputy Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, Victoria Clarke. What is this? (Feel free to make up your own “shock and awe”-variant remarks. I’ll start: more like, shock and awful? Thanks, I’ll be here all week.) Girlfriend, you’re representing the American military, in wartime no less… a little restraint, please? Let’s just say we’d never see Madeleine Albright or Condi Rice in something like that.

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