Forgive me blog readers, I have sinned. It's been more than a month since my last confession, er, blog entry.

Since my last blog entry, I've had about 30 days of the winter blahs. I slave for Scripps Networks Interactive all day, doing my part to make the shelter category online a better place for you and me. At night I lay in bed and watch "Law and Order" reruns. My TiVo spends the day recording them for me while I'm at work, because L&O airs on some cable channel, somewhere, every day. I try to guess the cast members before the opening credits. I only watch the ones with Jerry Orbach in them. Or young Chris Noth.  I delete the ones with Paul Sorvino. And I don't even record the L&O: Criminal Intents with Vincent d'Onofrio in them.

Yeah, it's a rut.

But I've been blogging somewhere for 7 years now. I'm due a break.

O.M.G. Sephora is opening a store in Knoxville this week!!!

For those of you with penises, Sephora is the most fab cosmetic store on the planet. They have brands like LORAC, Bobbie Brown, Urban Decay, Philosophy and Nars. Best of all, they encourage you to play in the makeup. It's all out in the customer's reach, with makeup applicators nearby.

Now if we can just get a Trader Joe's in Knoxville, the place will be officially part of the first world.

The Albuquerque Tribune published its last edition today. Here's a video piece from abqtrib.com about the paper's closing, featuring long time staffers (most of them my former coworkers and forever friends) talking about the Trib. I can't tell you how sad I am about the Trib's death. I worked at the PM newspaper from 1994 to 2000, and the place made me a better journalist and better person. The world is a dimmer place without it.

Well I changed my mind on Super Tuesday. The swing happened when I got into the voting booth in a failed patio store in deepest West Knoxville. The place had been a barn once --- Cows, horses, hay, animal manure. After barn came retail, and now it was empty except for the voting booth and the folding tables. The brick silo still stood just outside, across the parking lot from the Pizza Kitchen and the sushi joint. The pasture was now a parking lot filled with $40,000 cars and SUVs

Yes, I was about to cast my primary vote in a barn. Insert Tennessee joke here.

The strip mall surrounding the barn reminded me just how fast things change in this country. A few generations ago our ancestors were scratching substinence crops out of a craggy Tennessee field. Now I'm at the same spot sipping a $5 latte, trying to decide whether to vote for an African-American man or a woman for president.

It's a brave new world. The changes never stop, and most days I'm glad for it.

Change is a chance things might get better.

On that thought, I pulled the Obama lever.  Bring it, Barack.

 

Jake and Heath in a scene from
"Brokeback Mountain."

I'm stunned, stunned, I tell you, that Heath Ledger offed himself before Britney Spears.  No one with a bet in the Troubled Young Stars Death Pool saw this one coming. Is there still enough mirth remaining in the nation's withering newsrooms to run death pools? They were such wicked fun. I won the whole pot in the summer of 1999 for putting JFK Jr. at the top of my list of famous people most likely to die soon.

The autopsy results for Heath aren't back, but all the ingredients for suicide or accidental OD are there: naked on the bed, surrounded by sleeping pills. Discovered by the housekeeper. He never got the massage he'd ordered in, so he died with tension in his shoulders.  The same old sad Hollywood story, youthful talent and promise cut short by mood altering substances.  It'll take a few days to find out what mood-altering substances felled handsome Heath. What a waste. Heath had an Oscar ahead of him and a 2-year-old daughter to raise.

I keep thinking of that Lucinda Williams song "See What You Lost When You Left This World," the one where she gently chides a friend who has taken his own life, reminding him of all the little moments he'll never have again. 

          
 
Renfro in the 1992                        Renfro in a 2003 police mug shot
film "The Client."

You gottta feel bad for Brad Renfro, another, lesser known actor who died last week in Los Angeles of what appears to be an overdose. He was 25. He'll be completely eclipsed by the coverage of Heath Ledger's death. Heath was taller, blonder, better looking and had been nominated for an Oscar. Renfro became a child star at the age of 10 when he starred alongside Susan Sarandon and Tommy Lee Jones in "The Client", one of those John Grisham legal thrillers in the early 1990s. He did the child star thing and adolesced into a mood disordered man with a receding hairline, a drug problem and a propensity for making bad script choices. Renfro was buried this week in his hometown of Knoxville, Tenn., in a misty rain.

A pair of toxocology reports will tell the tale in coming weeks of Hollywood dreams gone bad.

Forget Led Zep's reunion. Let's talk about Robert Plant's hair. Holy Hairclub for Men! The guy is 59 years old and he still has a head of a hair a 28-year-old would envy. Yeah, I know he's bleaching his thick halo of ringlets to hide the gray, but he still has the thick halo of ringlets. Look at the photos. Below left, Bob Plant in 1972. Below right, Bob Plant last month.

              

Bob's hair hasn't thinned or crept back his forehead a single centimeter. It's still bouncy. Wow.

I'm not the only person to notice his eternally young mop. New York magazine asked some hair stylists to weigh in on Bob's locks. "Robert Plant definitely has a perm," stylist Rodolfo Valentin tells the magazine. "I call this the mucho-mousse-and-gel look."

All the stylists agree Bob isn't wearing extensions. It's his hair, and it's a little overprocessed. Stylist Carlos Vega says, "If only he used a curling iron—it would have been a lot prettier."

Well guys, after an eight month hiatus, I'm back online with a new blog for the new year. It's a Go Daddy prefab design, no custom work here. I'd rather write words than write code.

So why was I offline? My other website was swallowed by a failed web hosting company. They also let my domain registration lapse, so I lost leannepotts.net to a squatter. I was evicted from my own damn site. To make a long story short, I got leannepotts.net back, along with leannepotts.com, and got tired of arguing with ipower, the web hosting service you should avoid like the plague (or Mike Huckabee) about getting my content off their servers. So fuck them. I'm on Go Daddy now. And who needs all my old published clips from newspapers, books and magazines? 

I am reborn online.

Let's get rantin.' We've got to make some sense out of this president-electing, Iraq-War-losing, sliding-into-a-recession country of ours.