fever in, fever out

* the previous entry's mood was sponsored in part by an overdose of deadwood, the first season of which we just finished watching on DVD in a four-episode marathon friday night. i absolutely love it, in all its cocksucking glory. the characters/actors are amazing: calamity jane, the doc, wild bill hickok, the dangerously charismatic al swearengen, the mad preacher, trixie, dan, even the stick-up-his-butt eventual sheriff seth, plus so many others. we're going to borrow the season 2 set from a friend soon. cannot wait to see it. also, the writing, especially the dialogue, is so fab. i love the creative combination of thick-'n'-fast blue with the courtly, almost poetic vernacular. and the actual words themselves are combined in a singularly fetching fashion.

* i never finished with the hummingbird-baby report: it has a happy ending. after the whole mastering-gravity thing, the little critter had a steady development, with only one backsliding incident in which it ended up back on the driveway, rescued by 00soul. only a few days later it was gone from where we'd put it; we saw it later, perched on the side of the nest next to its sibling that was still in the nest. all seemed well, and now the nest is empty, so i assume the babies grew up and went on their merry way.

* i wrote about the world cup in my most recent column. watched the germany/portugal "losers" game yesterday -- boy, was germany happy to be no. 3! a lot effing happier than france looked at being no. 2 after today's championship game, which was pretty exciting despite going down to the dreaded penalty kicks. zinedine zidane, france's big star, the captain, head-butted an italian opponent in the chest (!), away from the ball, toward the end of regulation. throughout the match the announcers (who avoided actually calling the game as though someone held guns to their heads and threatened execution unless they offered up only the usual meaningless statistics or the most banal details involving the players/teams/countries) kept endlessly blathering on about how zidane was retiring after this game and yada yada. anyway, the head-butt came just after france had made its last substitution, and zidane was red-carded after much confusion, seemingly over whether a ref had seen it happen, or just seen the replay on the big screen that was of course projected immediately after this blatant foul was caught by a camera. i really wonder if an official actually saw it happen. but wtf, it most definitely happened. how bizarre. the guy was so played up, and needed, and with his legend to consider, and he effs up and gets thrown out. a bit anticlimactic for us observers. but france lost on penalty kicks -- of which zidane is reportedly a master -- so i can't imagine mr. z.z. is too happy a guy ce soir.