Lo, Fat!

Oh goody!  Just checked my leftover spare ribs in the fridge, and it looks like they are cold.  You know what that means.... hardened saturated fat layer!!! 

I don't often come by isolated saturated fats.  An obvious but nevertheless unfortunate byproduct of my aversions to both texture and cooking smells is that I don't often cook meat at home.  But the other day I decided to make some braised spare ribs and headed to the grocery store to buy a good cut. 

Spare ribs, as luck would have it, turned out to be on sale.  My disproportionate satisfaction with the luck-of-the-draw savings, however, quickly turned into vastly more disproportionate horror at the following sign advertising the sale:

What jerk came up with the idea of adding to the sign a friendly cartoon rendering of an animal, smiling and totally oblivious to its grim future of slaughter, purchase and consumption?  The cute little cow had a little friend too, a piggy playing near the packaged pork ribs.  Waaaaah!!!! 

I know it's grossly hypocritical of me, but I don't like being reminded of the animal from whence my delicious meal came. Of course, if I were more committed to the cause I would become a vegan, which I fully intend to do as soon as I meet a vegan who is not kind of annoying and proselytizing.

As it stands, I like to pretend that meat grows in plant form.  I like to imagine that some fatherly farmer wearing stylish coveralls and a floppy sun hat with a fetching grosgrain ribbon tied 'round it goes out into his fields each day with a brightly colored watering can and lovingly irrigates his steak crop. Then takes some pruning shears to his burger bushes.  And sings lullabies to his baby bacon saplings.

The little white lie is enough to keep me relatively clean of conscience on the rare occasions when I eat meat.  And cooking with meat, though even more rare, is an occasion to celebrate, because of the glorious saturated fat that it generates.

Playing with fat is, without a doubt, the single greatest Joy of cooking. In the past, I've likened the act of chipping away the white, solidified centimeters-thick layer of fat that forms at the top of certain dishes to peeling off a Biore pore strip from a blackhead-laden nose. There's something very viscerally satisfying about seeing an accumulation of an unwanted byproduct. I think that's also why I really like that Ped-Egg scraper thingamajig for filing down the rough skin on my heels.

This time, while the spare ribs were slow-cooking, I had already jumped the gun on the fat-removal process by siphoning away some fat that had risen to the top with a spoon. I found the process of slowly skimming liquid fat, however, infinitely less satisfying than gouging off pieces of its solidified alter-ego.

It's far more delicate work -- surf too deeply and short rib flavor shrapnel gets caught on the spoon along with the waste -- and I've never been too skilled at any tasks requiring the finer motor skills.  Or patience, for that matter.  The process of collecting liquid fat resembles the meticulous and repeated dedication of plucking an unruly eyebrow, whereas solid fat offers the instant gratification of waxing multiple hairs into orderly submission in one fell swoop.

On the other hand, capturing fat in liquid form has its own set of merits.  As surely as Lindsay Lohan will wake up tomorrow afternoon hungover with cigarette butts and cocaine in her hair extensions, so will all saturated fat harden at room temperature.  For my short ribs, I collected the fat in a soup can and it solidified before my eyes.

I think next time I'll pool it into a clear receptacle.  Maybe a beer bottle or a shot glass so I can play a nice trick on someone when they get drunk.  Heh heh heh.

revengeful

It's amazing that, a mere decade removed from the consistent and interdisciplinary rigors of secondary education, somehow my "knowledge" of everything I learned in middle school through college has been totally reduced to simple summary captions that a monkey could have memorized.

Geometry:  Perpendicular = my mom can park.  Parallel = my mom can't park.

Anatomy/Biology: Liver = Processes alcohol and resultant munchies.  Fallopian tubes = Chicago Bulls.

Literature:  Dumas' Count of Monte Cristo = Good at revenge.  Dostoevsky's Invisible Man = Sucks at revenge.

Sigh.  I randomly thought of this last allusion yesterday as I found myself at the distributing end of some poorly executed revenge.  I was trying to park my car during the heart of rush hour;  legit spots were few and far between, so I spent a solid half hour circling within the six block radius in each direction of my apartment, searching in vain. 

I was in the middle of making a U-turn substitute (completing an otherwise illegal U-turn by utilizing an open-ended driveway) at my typical (i.e., "cautious breakneck") speed, when a short fat bald man ran up to the passenger side, slammed his chubby hand on the car's hood, and shouted:

"Hey, slow down!  Bitch ..."

How totally bizarre and uncalled for!  I hadn't come remotely close to hitting him or anything else.  After all, had I actually done so, his mangled body splattered across my tires would certainly not have been in any condition to shout at me.

Nevertheless, anyone who's ever met me knows I'm not one to stand idly by when someone, however stupid, picks a fight, however stupid.  So I did what any reasonable medium-to ill-tempered person would do in that situation. 

I screeched to a halt and shouted back: "Say that to my face, you ... [edited]."  The remainder was a filthy, classless and otherwise awesome outburst of epic, Tarantinian proportions, comprising:

• the f-word;
• the f-word as adjective;
• both c-words;
• all three p-words;
• the f-word several more times; and
• various conjugations of both "suck" and "lick."

Had there been any bad words that started with Greek letters or numbers, I would have used them too. 

Had there been a massive flock of birds standing nearby, they would have flown into sky cinematically as I shouted. 

Had a full orchestral ensemble been sitting in my back seat, they would have spontaneously burst into the cataclysmically combative strains of "O Fortuna" from Carmina Burana to accompany perfectly my dramatic insults.

Most unfortunately for me, the impact of my tirade was somewhat dampened because I hit a wrong button and rolled down my left rear, rather than right front, window. 

In other words, I don't think the guy was actually able to hear anything that I actually said.  I probably just looked like a cat lady who has misplaced her cats and resorted to talking to herself.

Once you've made an ass of yourself, what else is there to do? 

Had I not been in a car, and had he actually heard me, either he would have cowered in shock and backed down.... or else we would have come to blows.  But since I was in a vehicle, I couldn't very well elevate the fight further -- I would've had to actually nudge him with the car, which most would consider a crime, or else get out of the car and chase him on foot, which all would consider totally f-word-ing stupid. 

So anyway, I ended up just giving a weak stinkeye out of the still-closed passenger side window and driving off like the Invisible Man that I am.  Why even bother to learn bad words if my deployment of same is going to be so ineffectual? 

bloody hell

Yesterday I found my mind wandering to the last tattoo parlor I visited.  Of course, by "visited" I mean stared at from afar, half-wishing that I were still  in the age range where an impulsive tattoo would not be unanimously mocked by my peers.  And of course by "parlor" I mean the folding table and chairs set up at the top of the stairwell of Senor Frog's in Cancun, perfect for tempting drunken teens into capping off their evening's streak of poor judgment with permanent body art.

I remember thinking then how great it was that even the rare fastidious holidaymaker who had ridden neither a skanky one-night-stand nor a mechanical bull could still have one last chance to bring a bodily-fluid-borne disease home as a souvenir.

So yesterday I wondered: where do the artists who are insufficiently skilled with needles to work at makeshift nightclub tattoo setups go to seek employment?  Apparently, they work for my doctor.

Yesterday I suffered through what should have been a non-sensational annual physical.  Unfortunately, the nurse drawing my blood couldn't find a good vein.  For ten minutes she poked and prodded my arms, tied and retied a tourniquet, and still nothing.  If I were ever to consider smuggling some heavy duty contraband goods into the country on my person, I would want this chick heading up the body-search division at Customs.

She ended up pricking my right arm three times, including once into a vein that yielded nary half a vial of blood despite her fiddling in vain with the needle for another ten minutes while it was in my arm.  It was like watching a really stupid child play "pin the tail on the donkey," and even after they take off the blindfold he's still trying to stick the damn thing to the animal's eye. 

I was beginning to freak out that they'd have to draw the blood from my hand or foot like when I was a kid, when she finally switched to my left arm, and, on the second try, managed to collect her vials. 

So this morning I woke up to see that both crooks of my arms are covered with erratically spaced puncture spots and track marks.  It looks like the work of a vampire with a bad overbite.  Or a heroin addict with Parkinson's Disease.

I wonder if today will be a better day...

foul mood and odor

Drat.  Friday night and I'm home alone.  Looks like next door neighbor is an even bigger curmudgeon than I am, though;  I can tell he or she is home because of some cooking odors wafting down the hallway.

That's right, I have never met my neighbor.  He or she is generally an unintrusive, neutral presence.  No loud music or subwoofed bass shaking my walls, no raucous parties and constant stream of sloppy guests, no illegal prostitution enterprise operating under cover of some deliberately vague "import/export business."  As far as I can tell.

But tonight, I'm already in a bad mood, and now I've noticed there is a bad smell to go along with it.  I have no idea what my neighbor is cooking, but judging by the terrible odor I wouldn't be surprised it if turned out to be fecal matter.

I hate cooking smells with a passion, even when it is vegetables and not apparent human waste that are being cooked.  The kitchen in my house growing up was always swimming with curious odors -- odd combinations of animal parts, heavy oils and strange spices -- and I hated it.  Now I go through Febreze or other "odor-eliminating" sprays in my own kitchen the way Ryan Seacrest probably goes through lube. 

I hate emerging from a restaurant with my clothes saturated with food smells so that people I run into hours later can still guess my entree.  Curry?  Mongolian or, worse, Korean BBQ?  Bless.  And since I have really long hair that is damaged by aggressive coloring over the years, I'm convinced that my strands are more porous than the average person's, and therefore absorb and hold smells longer.

Curiously, even though I am very put off by odors, I have never been particularly sensitive to or discerning about pleasant scents.  I've worn the same perfume for the last nine years because I can't find a new one.  Whenever I test drive a brand that smells yummy on someone else, I somehow end up redolent with olives, latex, or other equally unappealing scents.

The last time I ventured into Sephora I enthusiastically coated all the available surface area on my wrists and forearms with different perfumes, then wandered aimlessly around the store for fifteen minutes waiting for the "top notes" to settle.  Unfortunately afterward I couldn't tell the differences among any of the scents.  Nor could I remember which perfume I had sprayed where on my appendages, rendering the whole experiment worthless on multiple levels.

So in an effort to look like less of a no-talent assclown I spent a further half hour fumbling with about two dozen tester paper strips coated in new scents, periodically heaving Kate Moss-grade sniffs at a pot of coffee beans to "reset my sense of smell."  Finally I left in shame with my hands totally covered in paper cuts and totally devoid of purchases.

I so wish my olfactory dullness would kick in right about now.  Think whatever my neighbor is cooking is starting to burn.  Serves him or her right.

Sweaty Beards

English idiomatic question: what is an antonym for oxymoron?

What I mean is, rather than a subject and modifier that contradict each other (e.g., "compassionate Conservative"), instead a turn of phrase where the subject's obvious traits render the modifier redundant and unnecessary (e.g., "greedy banker," "ankle-biting midget" or "virginal sci-fi fan").

Not-ymoron? I don't think such a word exists – although maybe "redundancy."

Anyway, my "attractive Swedish" friends (see where I was going with the not-ymoron query?) Isabella and Christian have recently informed me that their hotly-anticipated collaborative film Sweaty Beards may soon be opening in the US! 

Sweaty Beards is a movie about Vikings, by real Scandinavians, in English.  Moreover, it features an island death match.  Just when I thought one film could not have it all.  Check out the movie website: http://www.sweatybeards.com/

I'm incredibly excited at the prospect of this flick.  First of all, Vikings are obviously awesome.   In 2007 I spent 40 hours in Stockholm – about 38 of which were daylight, mind – and was disappointed to find that there were no actual Vikings roaming the streets, attempting to lure me aboard their ship to pillage my passport and what few krona I had not spent on aquavit.

Second, I despise subtitles because they're so distracting and oftentimes less than accurate – try watching Mr. and Mrs. Smith in Buenos Aires, where the whole theater starts laughing when Angelina taunts Brad with "Chickenshit!" and the subtitles helpfully flash "!COBARDE!"

So I know I have a notoriously short attention span and difficulty sitting through movies without ejecting to go wander around the lobby, or making up plots in my own head, or asking lots of questions and irritating fellow spectators.  I may or may not also have been roundly booed at the conclusion of Avatar when I shouted "finally!" and broke my 3-D glasses in frustration. 

But this looks like the first film ever that I might be able to endure in its entirety.  Let's all go to the movies [x3]. . . and get ourselves a treat!

threes

If deaths, humor and sneezes come in threes, so does the TOTALLY BATSHIT CRAZY.

I've always known that there were some crazy people in my apartment complex, but the majority of my days pass incident-free.  Sometimes I think God likes to store things up and then spring them on me collectively at opportune times to make unrelated events seem correlated and therefore more significant.

Like seventeen years and four days ago, when I was on a middle school field trip to Boston and in order to bypass the huge line to get into the famous "Cheers" bar I sidled up to the doorman and asked in a faux-Texas accent whether he could let me and my friends cut the queue, seeing as how we had escaped from those horrible Waco Branch Davidians they been showin' on the news.  And he let us.  And the next day the compound burned to the ground.  And I realized that even at age twelve I was a total dick and God already hated me.

Anyway, so today, I was thwarted in my simple attempt to do a small load of laundry by the collective crazy of my fellow apartment dwellers.  Three of them, in fact.


1) The Gnome

The gnome is back. I may have mentioned before that there is a gnome who lives in, or under a bridge near, my building.  I've only seen her once, and only in the building's basement laundry room, where I presume she can tunnel out from her underground lair in order to launder her soiled and frayed robes, harem pants, and pointy-toed cloth shoes.

The last time I spotted her she was lurking around the ground level dryer gathering the last of her tattered rags into a glorified bandana-adorned hobo stick before scurrying out of the side door.

Accordingly, I don't even remember so much what she looks like.  But I'm guessing a standard file photo of Hayden Panettiere can serve as sufficient visual demonstration of her gnome-ish qualities.

So if the last several months have been totally devoid of gnome sightings, how do I know she is back?

Because when I walked into the laundry room today, there was a small, rusty-looking stepstool leaning against the machine.  Who else but a gnome would be using a stepstool to assist in dropping clothes into a washing machine?

I was too terrified to stay in the room, even though there was still a free machine available.  Besides, I hate the recently installed "upgraded" machines anyway, because they don't have a cold/normal option, forcing me to choose between inferior cycles.

Better to save up all my laundry and quarters and hit that coin-op laundry near my parents' house that is really just a front for a Salvadoran smuggling ring of some kind, where at least I get to listen to the fellow patrons talk melodiously about me behind my back because they think I don't understand.


2) The Teen Music Fan

On the elevator ride up from the laundry room, a pale skinny hand clutched at the doors as they were closing.  I would have thought it was the gnome chasing after me were it not regular-sized.

It turned out to belong to a college-age kid, maybe 18 or 19 years old.  He had an iPod strapped around his neck, the earbuds buried in some floppy, appropriately unwashed looking hair.  He wore scuffed gray New Balances, a cool looking retro shirt, and shredded jeans.

So why was this relatively normal kid blaring from his iPod a song I recognized as by Miley Cyrus? I could hear a wasted hooker-with-emphysema voice screeching about the next STD she is planning to contract even with the headphones on!

Am I really getting that old, or are "the kids these days" totally beyond insane? Who is this Justin Bieber character, and who is the record executive responsible for slipping him prolific doses of Human Growth-stunting Hormone? Why is he singing a song about "Eenie meenie miney mo" on broadcast radio? Why is Justin Timberlake, never a scholar of lyrical sense to begin with, now singing about “Carryout”? Is Rihanna an epileptic?

Why has the FCC not stepped in to ban this garbage from the nation's airwaves? I'd rather hear the continuous, logical beeping of the Emergency Broadcast System than try to decipher these lyrics.


3) The Wicked Witch of Northwest DC

So because I couldn't stop staring in disbelief at the kid in the elevator, or perhaps because I was beginning to move ever so slightly along to the audible beat (that Miley be a dirty festering skank but her Swedish pop impresario producers sure write a catchy tune), I decided to get off the elevator a floor early with my laundry bag.

Big mistake.

There is an widely-known crazy lady in my apartment, and she was there. For the sake of maintaining her privacy and dignity I'll just call her "Batshit Brenda the Septuagenarian Cackling Cat Lady who still wears miniskirts in A Concerted Effort to Kill Us All with her Rand McNally Atlas-worthy collection of spider veins." Brenda for short.

Doesn't every urban apartment complex have a Brenda? You know, a holdover from the 'Nam years who still dwells in her rent-controlled little hovel and emerges every once in a while to terrorize the other tenants with awkwardness?

I made the rookie mistake of talking to her once, and now she knows me. She never remembers my name, but she knows me. In fact, Brenda's probably given me an equally insightful nickname like "the Crazy Oriental Tall Girl who dresses like her welfare check got lost in the mail.”

Anyway, every time I see her in the halls or elevators, Brenda likes to complain about how expensive things are these days and what my rent is. She’s very consistent and persistent, like a one-woman Gallup Poll. Every time she asks, I give the same pat answer, that “I’m not in charge of finances in my household.” That seems to satisfy her.

But today, I was already in a little shock from my run-in with the music fan and the evidence of gnome activity. So today she started whining again about money. Went on and on and on. When she finally got to her customary question, I decided on a whim to break the cycle. I decided to answer her in Chinese. Just plain pretend I no longer speak the Engrish.

So I told her my rent in Chinese, then asked what hers was, and then looked at her politely as though nothing out of the ordinary had occurred.

What happened next was straight out of a Coen Brothers movie. Brenda didn’t skip a beat or change her expression at all.  She started speaking German!  Or at least what was definitely a Germanic sounding language. Too bad I don’t understand German, because I never did get the answer to what her rent is.

She hacked and hawed for about two more minutes, and then.

Literally.

Said, “Auf Wiedersehen.”

Like she was Heidi Klum and I was a Project Runway hopeful.  Or she was Arnold Schwarzenegger and well, just had never learned to speak English in the first place.

WHAT?

So there are two potential explanations for this social interaction. First, that she really is that crazy and didn’t notice that we had gone all “It’s a Small World” and had a multi-lingual conversation. Which would mean that I’m just as big a dick now as I was seventeen years ago.

Second, and more troubling? That I was just one-upped, and rather admirably so, by the apartment crazy lady.

Either way, I ran back up the stairwell, locked and bolted my door, and turned up my TV really really loud.  Help!  I'm afraid!

obviousness obviated

A friend of mine who just got married is on an unintentionally prolonged honeymoon in Paris right now.  Last I heard he was still stranded by ash-related flight groundings, and he was emailing me to seek suggestions for, and I quote, "non-obvious" things to do in France. 

I sent a reply email full of increasingly useless suggestions that all involved taking a train out of Paris.  My suggestions are useless for two reasons: first, because I'm not a huge fan of Paris and haven't been there for nine years; and second, because trains on the Continent right now look like prop vehicles from a Bollywood film because everyone is trying to secure a seat, or at least standing room, or at least hanging room from the outside of the carriage.

More to the point, I'm not quite sure what to make of the request for a "non-obvious" tip.  At least for a tip from me.  To me, French things are often very obviously French.  I've noted before that whenever I see an image of uber-French-looking David Guetta deejaying I fully expect to glance down at his turntables and find that he is spinning a wheel of brie.

I'm guessing that he was hoping for suggestions of activities that wouldn't be written about in guidebooks or other materials made available to hordes of tourists.  For that, I am pretty useless.  For the past few years my travel has been completely impulsive and comparatively unresearched. 

Usually I can be found a few hours before a flight's scheduled departure scrambling to pick up a guide book or some themed historical fiction so that I cram some knowledge about a region and orient myself. 

I like to land feetfirst in a city and figure it out as I go.  I'm transfixed by drugstores and convenience stores, and like to wander through them in different countries and draw semi-specious conclusions about the local citizens's preferences for toothpastes, hair care products, simple groceries and sugar-free drinks.  I like being courted and wooed by local beer ads before eventually sampling them all.  I like strolling around and looking at clothing stores, at other people walking on the streets, and searching for vendors selling authentic jerseys of the local soccer team that I can admire or, alternatively, obvious counterfeits for actual purchase. 

I am grateful, therefore, when friends give me tips for their hometowns.  I was in Verona last summer for opera, and a pal sent me a great email that I received my first day there, high-lighting several things of  mixed-obviousness that I shouldn't miss.  Seven scoops of gelato per day?  Obvious.  Gelato cheaper than water?  Non-obvious.  Pasta?  Obvious.  Pasta with donkey and horse meat?  Non-obvious. 

So I liked Verona.  Unfortunately I've been bombarded recently by commercials for a new movie set there called Letters to Juliet, starring the terrifyingly bug-eyed albino-with-thyroid-condition Amanda Seyfried.  Ugh.  I'm guessing it's going to be pretty heavy on the obvious.

tox tox tox

My bruxism has reached worrying levels.  Technically, I don't grind my teeth, but I do clench my jaws with the ferocity of a field soldier enduring a nonanesthetized foot amputation.  Anyway, the problem has escalated so that my molars are now dissolving into the jawbone from pressure.  My jaw hurts 24/7.

Because I am afraid of mouthguards and will not wear one with beneficial regularity, I'm told my only option is Botox injections in the jaw to loosen the muscles.

Yikes!  I'm not sure what my views on Botox at this point in my life should be -- I'm both depressed and intrigued at the prospect.  On one hand, it's obviously depressing that I now need toxins injected into my face to prevent it from crumpling.  But on the other, I have heard that Botox used as a preventative measure is more effective than waiting until after the collapse of one’s face and then attempting to put it back together using pulleys, wind-tunnels and staples or whatever they do.

After all, I don’t want to turn into “the Joker.” Shudder.  That’s the nickname I gave once to a super old cougar wannabe with whom I got into a scuffle at Miami airport last New Year’s... We were all trying to fly standby to get home, and obviously seats on flights out of a cruise-ship port city after the holiday break are few and far between.

Anyway, this lady was the most hideous person I’ve ever laid eyes on (and I've seen Donald Trump in passing). She was dressed in all black, and all spandex.  As a former volleyball player, my experience with spandex teaches that it was designed as a compression material – yet this woman’s garments somehow hung loosely from her deliberately emaciated frame.

She had dry peroxide blonde hair with visible brown roots styled into a bizarre feathered mullet.  Her face looked like it had been segmented off and handed to an army of ants or other small industrious creatures who then scattered in different directions, pulling her skin taut like a tent-covering for an outdoor wedding.

Her face was stretched so tightly that the corners of her mouth were forced into a wry half-smile, like the one painted on the face of Heath Ledger's Joker character.  I remember muttering under my breath, "Why so serious?" then laughing nastily to myself.

Most annoyingly, even though she was obviously not working a flight and was just trying to get home from a personal vacation like everyone else, she was wearing an “AA Crew" badge hanging from a jeweled lanyard around her bony, wrinkly, decrepit neck.

That neck! The telltale sign of aging that no amount of plastic surgery can hide. She looked like Nicole Richie from shoulders down, Madonna in the face, and the Lorax at the neck.

She was obviously trying to get the inside track on seats available for different flights by flirting with the gate agents, eating some Twizzler’s candy in what I’m sure she must have thought was a seductive manner. Watching her feed was like tuning in to a nature show on NatGeo. I remember watching her fumble with a twist of licorice in her clawed, leathery hands, then force it through her barely open, Restylane-filled lips in one swift motion.

So anyway, this brings me back to my original point of worrying that I will turn into the Joker whether or not I allow my Botox intervention to commence. It was pretty plain that the original Joker was only able to consume food sufficiently narrow and cylindrical such that she could slither it down her esophagus while moving nary a facial muscle.

If I don’t take care of my jaw problems soon, I’m no longer going to be able to chew, which might leave me potentially even worse off.  Eeek!  What should I do?

delayed reaction

Because I am not a nice person, and because people like to say stupid things around me, I usually never hesitate to draw a face or call someone out on their stupidity immediately upon discovering it.

Every once in a while, however, stupidity has an incubation period.  Like the time I met a blonde, blue-eyed could-be-gracing-Aryan-propaganda English girl in Greece and she said to me sincerely:

"Oh, you're Chinese?  I'm part Chinese too.  My grandfather lived in Hong Kong."

Perhaps because I was none-too-sober myself, I didn't realize the absurdity of her statement until the next day, at which time it was far too late to shoot her one of my trademark withering "wtf, white chick" stares.

So, two days ago I went to lunch at Founding Farmers with an old college friend in town for the day.

 I asked our waiter whether the "FF Blood Orange Soda" on the menu was premade.  As in, the type of pre-fab fruity soda of the type Boylan's or Dr. Brown's sells...

So garcon answered with a description of how the soda was made (pulp of blood orange mixed with a fruit syrup and seltzer water, in case anyone is interested), and concluded with:

"A blood orange is just a type of orange."

Maybe because all these drugs are making me a little slow, but, seriously, why did it take me two full days to realize just how riddled with stupidity that reassurance was?

Now I think on it, there's only one reasonable inference I can make about the motivation for his statement:

Did he really think I was worried that the Blood Orange Soda contained blood?

Is that really a plausible concern in this day and age?  A common question posed by restraunt patrons?

If so, I blame the irritating infiltration of vampire fascination into pop culture norms. 

I was over Twilight before it began, what with Stephenie "My books suck not so much because I'm Mormom but because I lack any semblance of gift for prose" Meyers at the helm of story-telling. 

Or its underwhelming movie franchise making undeserving stars out of: Kristen "No need to call an OB/GYN, my face always looks like I was just kicked in the twat by a cleated passerby" Stewart;  Robert "Blimey, my hair is dirty from having it up my own arse all day" Pattinson; and Taylor "I'm hot, but when I open my mouth please resist the urge to batter me with Thermoses full of milk" Lautner.

Even True Blood, with its hot hot undead, strains my nerves with its casting of Anna "I'm blonde and now openly bisexual but somehow still not remotely hot" Paquin as Sookie Stackhouse. 

Done with vampires.  Done with blood.  And somehow I never want to go back to Founding Farmers again.

mood lifters

Despite the mood of somber remembrance that gripped the nation today, I managed to scrape through the day without huddling in a Snuggie watching Glenn Beck and humming "American the Beautiful" at a dirge-like tempo. 

I will split the credit for my upbeatness between two potential causative factors: first, my recent discovery of and immediate fondness for Sweet Tea flavored vodka and the subsequent conversion of same to a routine morning caffeine source; and second, the following four specimens of hilarious media...

The first of these is obviously related to that giant infinite-syllabic volcano that everyone is talking about.  The same volcano that inspired a drunken Scotsman sporting a Hooters hoodie to interrupt a SkyNews broadcast with a tirade against Iceland. 

Because I am fascinated by all things Scots, I have obviously been fascinated by this douche and will openly admit to having searched YouTube to compare dueling remixes of "I Hate Iceland." 

So it was only natural that I would of course derive a good chuckle from the interview the "I Hate Iceland guy" conducts for Scottish radio host Paul Harper:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vb_oRKIle2Q

I'm so inundated with fascincation and hilarity that I can't even specify what my favorite part of the video is!  I think it might be a toss-up among:

1) the fact that the "I Hate Iceland guy" unexpectedly has a hot-person's name (Anton), and moreover

2) requires subtitles with greater urgency than Roberto Benigni; or

3) the host gently reminding Anton, "I don't think it was [Iceland's] fault that there was a volcano though."


On the subject of wacky news drifting over from across the pond against the current of volcanic ash, I also was uplifted by three great articles from The Daily Mail.  Though the headlines contained in the URLs give a sneak-peek at the insanity within, the articles themselves are in fact even better than one might suspect:

1.  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1267136/Father-banned-driving-getting-wheel-toy-Barbie-car-drunk.html

"The vehicle is not even capable of doing the speed of a mobility scooter and could be outrun by a pedestrian."

"Essex Police today said officers initially warned Mr Hutton not to drive the car but they arrested him when he ignored them and tried to make a very slow getaway."

2.  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1266496/Violent-donkey-terrorised-farm-animals-cost-owner-6-000.html

"Paco was also implicated in the death of a rival donkey called Pablo who was killed in a next door field, the court heard."

"...we got the donkey and it was a complete nightmare. I wish I never had the thing, it was a pain in the ass."

 3.  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1267208/Migraine-gives-English-woman-Chinese-accent.html

 "The first few weeks of the accent was quite funny but to think I am stuck with this Chinese accent is getting me down."

Amen.

a fit of fitness

Because astronaut, warlock, and more powerful astronaut are not feasible career tracks at this time, I've recently decided to apply for a job as an FBI Special Agent.  This seems an odd choice given my lack of propensity for stealth, but makes more sense in light of my extraordinary propensity for gathering information that with greater likelihood than not proves to be totally worthless.

I've reviewed the FBI website, which details the physical fitness standards by which it measures applicants.  To qualify as a Special Agent, a candidate must gather points from performance in four fitness tests:

1. Maximum number of sit-ups in one minute;
2. Timed 300-meter sprint;
3. Maximum number of push-ups (untimed); and
4. Timed 1.5 mile run.

However, in addition to ordinary Special Agent positions, the FBI also offers the opportunity for service on a Hostage Rescue Team (HRT).  The HRT entices recruits with the deliciously understated slogan: "Be Where Special Becomes Extraordinary." 

Those Carlsberg "Probably the Best Beer in the World" ad guys sure could stand to take a page from the HRT book.

To qualify for HRT, a candidate must pass an "enhanced" physical fitness test, which differs from the non-enhanced version by the addition of a pull-up component -- pull-ups obviously being the necessary and sufficient skill that qualifies a Special Agent to negotiate for the return of hostages.


The scoring system for pull-ups is fascinating.  As with the other four tests of fitness, men and women must perform the same task but receive points scored on different scales to account for physiological differences between the sexes. 

A woman who can perform no pull-ups scores zero, as does a man who can do fewer than two.  A man must perform twice as many pull-ups as a woman to achieve the same score.  To score five points, a woman must do five pull-ups; a man, 10-11.  A man need only perform 20 pull-ups in order to score the maximum 10 points.

As someone who has struggled mightily through many a pull-up and yet failed to produce a physical result resembling anything remotely close to an actual pull-up or even elementary pre-pull-up movements, I know it's pretty rich of me to use the word "only" to describe a pull-up sum total of 20. 

But I can't be alone in realizing that a man who can do only 20 pull-ups and a woman who can do 10 are not in the same realm of physical fitness.  If those two hypothetical people stood next to each other, between the two of them the man would no doubt have bigger boobs, no?

Douchella

Am I the only person this morning who doesn't need to change her awe-filled undergarments over the Jay-Z featuring Beyonce performance of Young Forever at Coachella?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIxV5zSrX48

I guess I'm still harboring bad feelings from visiting Indio last April only to discover that even in the middle of a desert I am still able to suffer an allergy attack. 

Too bad Jay couldn't have actually have inexplicably sexy ("inexplicsexy") Mr Hudson come out to perform.  I'm guessing the latter's translucent English skin would have instantly caught alight in the fierce California sun.  And those ridiculous slotted glasses he could surely have borrowed from his buddy Kanye would have proved totally useless in the sun protection factor department.

Probably the only good thing about Beyonce and Jay-Z appearing together is that the video technology that I require in order to add subtitles for whatever Jay-Z is saying to the crowd can also be used to speed up Beyonce's torturous draaawwwll.  Efficient.

whiteout

I feel like half the posts I make these days are about allergies.  But when I'm going through a box of tissues a day and even an emergency mission to the grocery store leaves me crippled for hours, it's the topic on the forefront of my mind. 

I woke up this morning with both eyes swollen nearly shut.  More troublingly, the epicanthic fold on my right eye has gone missing.  Normally, I have nice Asian almond-eyed monolids -- the epicanthic fold is “a vertical fold of skin from the upper eyelid that covers the inner corner of the eye” that causes the single, versus double eyelid.  My right eye now has a double lid!

I find it bizarre to look in the mirror and see one normal eye and one white-chick eye staring back at me.  I suffer from white-chick eye every once in a very rare while.  I call her Kelsie.  Kelsie likes to come out to play either when I'm extremely tired, or extremely hungover, or have sustained a blow to the general eye region.

Kelsie currently has me in a very bad mood.  I'm big on the monolid.  It's the monolid that allows me to call out non-Asians when they confuse me with Margaret Cho or Sandra Oh.  They like to backtrack, often with hilarious results ("oh, it's not so much you look like her, just that she plays a bitch, just like you"). 

So I really don't like that one side of my face doesn't fit the other any longer.  I feel as though I've had an ethnic stroke.  I'm worried the right side of my face is suddenly going to start paying full price for clothes and consumer goods.  What if it rains today and the right side of my hair starts smelling like golden retriever?  Suck it, Kelsie.

I'm going to put some tea bags on my face.  Heh.  Oh, and get something for my eyes, too.

dutch auction

Ping.  Received an email from theOutnet.com, the self-billed "most fashionable fashion outlet."  It's reminding me of their upcoming first anniversary sale, during which all items will be $1. 

I've never actually purchased anything from theOutnet.com, but being Chinese and frugal I do like to scope out their periodic flash sales.  One type of sale is the "Going, Going, Gone sale."  The site explains:

Going, Going, Gone sales are a type of reverse auction - once the sale clock starts counting the price drops - and will only run for a very short amount of time.  When you click 'Add to Bag' it locks the price. Shop too early and you could miss out on a super-low price.  Leave it too late and there may be no more stock left.

It all sounds very exciting. That sale description blurb should have lots of exclamation points!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


I like pricing games.  I used to love watching The Price is Right, with asshole contestants and their backhanded "previous contestant + $1" bids, or Bob Barker reminding us kindly to spay and neuter our pets right after we get another botched facelift and ultimately cede the hosting position to that charisma-less fat guy with big black square glasses.

To be a geek for a second, the type of auction that theOutnet.com describes is not merely "a type of reverse auction."  It is actually called a "Dutch auction." 

I also like anything to do with the Dutch, in part because adding "Dutch" as a modifier to any item makes it instantly more hilarious.  Is any other type of oven but Dutch hilarious?  Are fluffly IHOP pancakes as hilarious as gigantic thin floppy Dutch pannekoeken?  When the Dutch Royal Navy puts forth an entry into the annual Hong Kong Dragon Boat Race and its boat actually sinks in the harbor, would the disaster have been as hilarious had the entrant been the Somali Royal Navy? 

Anyway, a Dutch auction is how bids are taken and sales completed at Dutch flower markets.  The price on an item lowers until a bid is made.  First bidder is the winner and buyer.  The cost of premature ejaculation is overpriced tulips; the risk of excess thrift is floral blue balls.

Interestingly (or, rather, not interestingly, as the following anecdote concerns securities and is therefore a total snoozefest), the term Dutch auction also describes "a public offering auction structure in which the price of the offering is set after taking in all bids and determining the highest price at which the total offering can be sold.  In this type of auction, investors place a bid for the amount they are willing to buy in terms of quantity and price."  (def. courtesy Investopedia). 

I myself only learned of this alternate definition the hard way when I once worked on a case involving collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and my old white boss (OWB) wanted to quiz me to make sure I knew what a Dutch auction was.  When I answered: "Yes, how they sell tulips," he glared at me and told me to get out of his office.

Anyway, I'm a fan of the first variation of Dutch auctions, because unlike traditional auctions such as on eBay, the Dutch auction offers a real-time, immediate decision on whether the item up for bids has been won.  This feedback cycle more closely mirrors the process of placing bids in non-auction situations in real-life. 

The best illustration of social bidding I can think of might be from a real honest to God email that a perpetually single friend of mine once sent to me describing a typical night of trolling a bar for a hookup.  I just spent fifteen minutes digging it up, because it really needs to be quoted verbatim:

10pm- Searching for 9s or better, must be under 25 with own place. Prefer brunettes, but will settle for a stellar blonde.


11pm- Late 20s is o.k. if super hot, maybe go home with an 8, if she is funny and intelligent.


Midnight- Color doesn’t matter-skin, hair, eyes; if she’s a 7 or higher in her 20’s to early 30’s, I’m ready to go.


1am- Starting to round up on the numbers, a 5.5 is basically a 7, or almost an 8.  Starting to round down on the numbers, a 34 is barely out of her 20’s.


2am- Getting nervous, don’t care at this point, just hope nobody sees me leave with my 41 year old 3 I’m trying to pull.  Otherwise, that gay guy is cute and has been eyeing me all night.


3am- Waffle House waitress isn’t too bad, maybe a little rough around the edges, but that’s expected after working graveyard for years and living in a trailer at age 56.


4am- Maybe give you a call.

Humph. He can go Dutch himself.

simplify, simplify

I recently got a new computer.  Partly because it is new and partly because I am criminally lazy, my browser by default now opens to MSN.com.  This is obviously a tragedy because it forces me to read, even if for only a quick second, the moronic content that MSN.com publishes.

Yesterday I was treated to a terrible article about the Duggar family.  The Duggars are a fundamentalist Christian family from Arkansas boasting nineteen kids.  They have their own show on TLC even though as far as I can tell not one of them is a little person, hoarder or cakemaker.

I like watching their family on tv.  Each of the kids is home-schooled by their mom, herself a high school graduate who wed at age seventeen.  They selectively cite Scripture to justify their beliefs that girls can only wear skirts and never pants, or that not only sex but kissing should be saved for marriage.  In 2008 they campaigned for Mike Huckabee, who recently compared gay marriage to incest.  They believe that evolution is "totally unscientific" and that the Bible "proves" creationsim.  Oftentimes I find myself oddly jealous of the simplicity of their lives, wishing I could undergo some sort of targeted brain damage so that I could feel the same peace.

So what does MSN.com have to say about the Duggars?  The article was entitled "What the Duggars are Doing Wrong" and was written by a mom.  Yes, that was her actual credential:  mom.  Lately I've been noticing a lot of dubious credentials that people are for some reason not ashamed to tout.  Like this weekend when I contemplated ordering a NuWave oven after being nearly seduced by its tv informercial.

The commercial featured testimonials from people boasting the following actual qualifications and credentials:

- "certified clinical nutrionist"
- "certified sports nutrionist"
- "PhD, NC, MA (certified nutrionist and author)"
- "certified master chef/chef instructor"
- "TV cooking expert/ Long time NuWave user"; and
for one Michael Newman, "Former 'Baywatch' Star/Actor".  Sometimes a slash just says it all.

I for one would like to know how to contact some of these mysterious accrediting bodies so that I can throw an expert or certified qualification around with my name.  Certified Curmudgeon.  That would spruce up the old CV a bit.

Anyway, returning to the subject of the Duggar article, it was one of those typical MSN.com articles where the answer to the stupid rhetorical question posed in the title is so glaringly obvious that one wonders how the article itself can comprise more than one sentence. 

Example title: "10 Signs You Aced Your Job Interview"
Only necessary content:  "You got an offer." 

Example title: "I Did Not Love My Adopted Child" 
Only necessary content: "So I sent it back to the orphanage."

Because isn't it so patently obvious "what the Duggars are doing wrong?" 
The article simply should have read: "Allowing nineteen children to emerge from a single woman's vagina."

And maybe followed by a visual image:

 

Succint, concise.  To the point.  I didn't need a certified mom to tell me about the Duggars.  I could have arrived at the same conclusion scanning the insightful comments to another article the same day, about Reggie Bush's alleged new girlfriend.  My favorite of that bunch could easily apply to the Duggar matriarch:  

"she fine, but she been swam thru."

ID and ego

The day of reckoning is here.  Just got back from the liquor store.  After plopping down three bottles of vodka at the checkout counter, I realized that I had left my ID in a different purse.  I was just beginning to brace myself to receive a dirty glare from the clerk for having to reshelve all my attempted purchases, when he grunted the price at me and held out his hand lazily for payment.

I realized in horror that he had deemed it unnecessary to verify my age.  So I handed over my credit card, sloppily signed my receipt, grabbed my brown paper bag filled with bottles and sprinted out the door, leaving the hapless clerk to resume his furtive masturbating or whatever other task in which he was embroiled before our transaction.

No carding!  Have I really ushered in that era at age 29?  Just two days ago I was feeling cocky, having been asked by my ophthalmologist's ditzy receptionist if I was still covered my parents's insurance plan.  But today in the safety of my car I checked my reflection in the rear-view mirror.  Lank hair plastered to one side of my face from where I'd slept on it.  Dull, lifeless skin.  Frown lines!  My red and glazed-over eyes would have widened in terror if they weren't so swollen from allergies.

I've been spoiled in the youthfulness department for a good long time by my Asian-ness.  While my white-chick colleagues long ago succumbed to crows feet and cellulite, I had escaped relatively unscathed thanks to my protective cloak of thick minority collagen.  No junk in the trunk is a small price to pay for no Botox on the mug.

But today I was reminded that the Asian woman's collapse into old age is different, more dramatic.  It resembles less the gradual wear and tear to a building and more a scheduled implosion like the demolition of Texas Stadium.  One night late into middle age, we go to bed still passing for a teen, then wake up the next day as a decrepit dragon lady.

I'm terrified, because apparently that day is upon me.  The four wheelchairs of the apocalypse have been sighted, and I'm done for.  If only I hadn't forgotten to bring in that vodka from the backseat of the car.

never have eye ever

Mine eyes!  O, mine eyes.  What is the pollen count going to be tomorrow?  I don't think I can stand yet another day of waking up with my eyelids literally welded together from dried up tears and other yucky, yucky allergy-related secretions.  Sigh.

I went to visit my ophthalmologist today to see what she can do about it. I like my ophthalmologist.  She's one of those really happy peppy people types who has a middle school aged kid and now eats nothing but Diet Coke all day as part of her strict milfing regimen.  She talks really fast, like an auctioneer strung out on the crystal.

She also confided in me that her uncorrected vision is not actually so horrible that she needs glasses.  In fact, the left lens sitting in her spiffy Prada frames has as much myopia-correcting power as does my car windshield.  But she makes one hell of a walking advertisement for her onsite upscale eyewear boutique.  All that Diet Coke has made her very sly.  Maybe if I ever go back to being a lawyer I'll start sporting a neck brace to client meetings.

Anyway, she pried open my poor puffy eyelids, dripped some mystery drops on my bloodshot eyeballs and began examining me with a barrage of gadgetry.

"Wow," she said, looking at me through a scope of some kind.  "No wonder your eyes are so small... your conjunctiva are covered with papillae that's causing all the swelling."

Okay.  That's a lot of information passed down in just one sentence. 

First of all, conjuncti-whatever is not a word I ever want to hear mentioned to me in an exam room, least of all after a certain MTV show about mentally subnormal guidos taught me and the rest of the viewing public that conjuctivitis can be transmitted easily through everyday dancefloor ass-to-face contact.  Um, no thank you, doctor. 

Second, papillae is really just a fancy word for bumps, but it sounds so much scarier.  I've heard of Human Papilloma Virus -- a recent widespread public health campaign taught me that parents should take their teen girls to get vaccinated against it in case they carry the whore gene. 

Or a papillon?  Dog that looks just like sewer rat strung out on the crystal.  Woof to papillae.

Finally, I may just be crabby from the allergies, but did I catch a subtle racial slur in there?  I'm Chinese, so my eyes are "so small?"  Just thinking about it is giving me 'Nam flashbacks of the time I fainted in Cleveland Park and one of the cracker paramedics hauling me to the ambulance on a stretcher leaned over in concern and asked me if my skin was "always so yellowish." 

My eyes are always small!  But these unbearable allergies are making it worse.  The world is my classic film, and I am watching the whole thing in letterbox mode.

Well, my ophthalmologist obviously felt pity for my plight.  She picked up her prescription pad from under a can of Diet Coke and prescribed me some Pataday brand eye drops to alleviate the itchiness, redness, swelling and teariness. 

Unfortunately, when I stopped at the drugstore on the way home, I discovered after waiting in a Ukrainians-queueing-for-bread style line that the pharmacy had run out of Pataday.  I've been on an internet ordering streak of late, so I decided to check out the drops online.

It turns out the Pataday website features a Van Gogh self portrait as part of its advertising banner (slogan: "Once-a-day relief for itchy allergy eyes ... That's genius").  Of course I was instantly curious what connection, if any, Van Gogh has to the sale of eye drops.  I guess it's not a bad tagline -- though I daresay the same ad campaign would have been far less successful if Pataday were an antidepressant or an ear medicine. 

I hope those eye drops are really just that good.

crushin it

Normally I like to write about things I hate.  And given that I'm a miserable curmudgeon who will prematurely be sitting on her porch sipping her vodka/prune juice and zealously guarding her trashcans from theft by the neighborhood's young hooligans, I usually have a constant stream of targets for my crazy rants.

But sometimes I go crazy and forget that I'm a misanthropic wench.  Sometimes I remember there are things that soothe my hate.  One of those things is my favorite new girl crush of the last year, dancer-turned-actress Heather Morris. 

She plays dimbulb blonde-with-bangs cheerleader Brittany on Glee, a show whose return to tv tomorrow night I am ridiculously joyfully anticipating. 

Much as I don't want this blog to turn into a standard celebrity-fellating forum like Perez Hilton's, my love for Heather must be acknowledged.  She was cast after originally contracting with the show just to teach the other actors the Beyonce Single Ladies dance for an episode in the fall.  Prior to Glee she was a Beyonce backup dancer, so I have to give her due respect for having tolerated working so closely with the slooooooowww ttaaaalllking Sasha 'Short Bus' Fierce.

Heather is sort of difficult to stalk online, as WASPs with really common white-chick names (is there more archetypal a white-chick name than 'Heather?'  Maybe 'Amber?') and one tv show to their credit do tend to be.

But she does have a fair fansite, complete with amazing dance videos, at http://heather-morris.com/, which I can safely presume was set up by either a pimply pre-teen girl or a lonely obese middle-aged male virgin from his/her parents' basement.

high maintenance

I've just had an awkward visit from a maintenance guy at my apartment complex.  I had called in a work order because the garbage disposal suddenly stopped working yesterday.  Just emitted a short putt-putting sound and then gone quiet.

He knocked on my door timidly, shyly -- less Jehovah's Witness, more Girl Scout cookies salesperson.

The name tag sewn on the front of his coveralls read "Jorge."

"Hello, Hor-hay," I said brightly.

"It's 'George,' but hello," he responded.

My cultural sensitivity thus rebuffed, I led him into the kitchen and demonstrated the silent disposal switch.  George then immediately realized my worst nightmare by sticking his hand down the drain with the switch still in the 'on' position. 

Who does that?! 

Has he never woken drenched in terrified sweat from a hideous nightmare of fishing around down an apparently dormant garbage disposal only to have some bucktoothed little brat somewhere else in the building plug in his PS3, a seemingly innocent move that somehow trips a signal for the disposal to start up and turn the unwitting hand down the drain into a tendon smoothie?

Whatever this guy's first name was, his middle name was obviously "Dumb Fuck."  Or, maybe "Ill-Fitting Pants," which I considered as he bent down and opened the cabinets below the sink to tinker with the disposal chassis. 

My horror at his insufficient belt strength, however, quickly turned to embarrassment at my own stupidity.  George suddenly stood up, adjusted himself, then stuck his hand down the sink drain once more.  He made a quick scooping movement and then his thankfully unmangled hand emerged, clutching a gigantic white wad of what looked like paper towels.

"Plastic bag!" he shouted in triumph.  He then turned and looked at me with both eyebrows raised, brandishing the wet bag clump in my direction. "WHA' HAPPEN HERE?!"

He didn't really wait for my answer; just shook his head slightly, deposited the blockage into the trash can near the sink and then turned to fill out his work order receipts. 

He handed me my copy with a knowing grin on his face, the kind of grin you get when you spy an old Asian lady behind the wheel of a car and she fulfills all your racist but totally true expectations by leaving the left blinker on for three miles and then knocking over the mailbox as she careens into her driveway.  You would have thought he was a triumphant emergency room resident who'd extracted a gerbil from a body cavity or something, based on how damn smug he was.

So I thanked him for his help and showed him the door.  After he left, I stared intently at the soaked, slightly shredded white plastic bag sitting forlornly in the trash.  The sad little bag looked like a prop reject from that stupid scene in American Beauty where the unibrow kid creams himself over wind patterns' effects on litter. 

Finally I realized what had happened through a series of forensic reenactments and the sheer power of my own deductive reasoning.

The plastic bag must have been one of the many layers of odor-prophylactic coverings in which my frozen mahi mahis from the other night's fish taco dinner had been wrapped...

I had been attempting to speed up the defrosting process by running a continuous stream of hot water from the tap over the fish block in the sink...

Unfortunately, the fish block and its wrappings had formed a water-tight seal over the drain...

which had caused the water to back up in the sink and ultimately overflow onto the counters and floor... 

The resultant flood in the kitchen had taken a good quarter hour to mop up, during which time I must not have noticed that one of the fish bags must have come loose from the fish itself and been sucked down into the depths of the drain!

Just the sort of non-unusual everyday occurence that could happen to anyone.  Don't know why Hor-hay had to make such a big stink about it.

ninja elitism

Through absolutely no fault of my own I spent some time learning about gypsies today. What a cool bunch they are. If I could pick and choose my own cultural group to join, I’d definitely consider gypsy. Or maybe Trappist monk. Or Pennsylvania Dutch (what’s not to love? flat-iron: out. Homemade apple butter: IN).


But in a different life, had I been born with all sorts of skills and proclivities that I currently don’t have, it sure would have been nice to be a Ninja. Not an actual Japanese ninja, mind, because… well, I think I wouldn’t want to be Japanese period because I’ve got enough problems without taking on more (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1264812/Ki-o-razy-Young-men-prove-bravery-riding-giant-logs-steep-hills-bizarre-Japanese-Ki-otoshi-ceremony.html)

What I mean is simply to have ninja [whisper it] “skills.” Obviously I love the program Ninja Warrior because of the insane commentating. If and when a contestant’s slippers unhinge from the walls during the Spider Jump and he plummets into the water beneath the obstacle, those guys are right there to capture the magnitude of the shame the contestant has brought upon not only himself but also his family, his ancestors, his dentist and the entire division of the fish-gutting factory in which he labors by day.

Even when G4 ruined the show by injecting American Ninja Warrior wannabe competitors, I managed to find a silver lining to the whole fiasco in the form of super hot freerunner and sometime Madonna backup dancer Levi Meeuwenberg, winner of the American Ninja contest’s second incarnation. Mmmmm, Levi. In the course of my healthy idolatry I developed a fascination with freerunning and vicious envy of people who can actually do this shit:

http://www.youtube.com/user/ColoradoParkour#p/u/4/smLhCygDWi8

I actually went to a freerunning exhibition in Trafalgar Square last summer. It was a really solid showing and even featured a surprise intermission performance from Diversity, the dance crew that bested Susan Boyle in the finals of Britain’s Got Talent, though I don’t know if those guys made the highlight reel:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2hdaPaIJQg


How amazing would it be actually to do that stuff for real? Very inspirational. But here’s the thing: I am a surprisingly bad athlete. Bad bad. Failblog bad. Stephen Hawking bad (too much?).

I’m a geek. Geeks don’t climb up rocky cliff walls with our bare hands like Tom Cruise[’s stunt double] in Mission Impossible. We whine about being dragged out to the Torrey Pines cliffs, accidently blink out contact lenses in the gravelly sand never to find them again, lose our footing and slide downhill feetfirst badly scraping our midriffs and shins against the jagged rocks, and finally contract a raging case of ringworm from foreign fungi in the soil that won’t heal for four months afterwards. For example.

My athletic ineptitude cross-trains too. My brother is doing the p90x program – I got through p1x and then quit.

I’m having dinner tonight with a friend from North Carolina who in the time since I’ve last seen her has apparently gotten really into CrossFit. We’re going to a Korean BBQ joint, and I’m afraid she'll be so fit that she's going to out-grill me handily.

For those of you who don’t know what CrossFit is, it’s an exercise phenomenon that brands itself “elite fitness”:

CrossFit is the principal strength and conditioning program for many police academies and tactical operations teams, military special operations units, champion martial artists, and hundreds of other elite and professional athletes worldwide.

Yikes! Elite! I’m not sure what to make of the word. The last time I was in a rec beer league to play some volleyball, they set up three divisions – Beginner, Intermediate, Elite. Everyone signed up for the Elite division. Including the elite athletes who couldn’t even serve a bran muffin across the net, nor walk from their cars to the gym door without gulping down a restorative sip of Gatorade. Anyway, the commissioners ended up creating three new divisions – Elite, Super Elite and Ultimate Elite. I love America.

Anyway, CrossFit has been spreading like herpes in a freshman dorm, because….well, I’m not sure why because. What I do know is that anyone who does CrossFit becomes instantly obsessed with CrossFit and can talk of nothing but CrossFit and post nothing but cryptic CrossFit-related quotes on facebook. They don’t carry wallets, just gallons of milk. They count grams of protein and reps like Oprah counts her money.

It’s scary and intimidating. As an astute friend of mine once noted, “CrossFit is sort of like a fight club, except the first rule is ‘Always talk about CrossFit.’”  Or, as an astute friend of hers noted, “CrossFit is a cult.” I continued, “It’s like the Scientology of exercise.”

I do think that they are able to poke fun at their elite selves though, which is cool, because this is pretty hilarious:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgH_ZoMOht8&feature=player_embedded

Unless they weren’t actually being sarcastic and I just didn’t get it because I’m not Ultimate Elite material. Man, I hope that BBQ tonight is paleo.

dog lard and ghost vomit

It's day five of my latest cold, and I'm still feeling pretty miserable. The combo of cold and allergy symptoms has left me stuffed up and hoarse and my voice lowered by two octaves. Now I know how that Mary Carillo NBC Olympics commentator "lady" must feel when "she" dials "her" credit card company to complain about charges and a call center rep somewhere in Bangalore answers "May I have your good name, sir?"


Anyway, one positive side effect about me battling it out with this cold is that I learned something interesting today about gypsies. Yes, really. In my world, any straightforward task can become a needlessly circuitous path to random cultural insights.

It all started when I realized I was out of decongestant. Which is sort of a big deal, because these days without my daily patented drug cocktail of pseudoephedrine, two antihistamines, a nasal steroid, my NetiPot, an inhaler and a yummy gummy vitamin chew, I sort of can’t breathe, and some might say that breathing is sort of important for not dying.

So anyway, I sat anxiously for a couple of minutes, paralyzed with fear because in order to restock my decongestant supply I would have to go outside, but I can’t go outside because the crazy pollen will exacerbate my allergy symptoms so that I’m worse off than if I simply stayed inside without more medicine.

This happens to me a lot -- like when I lost my cell phone a while back and then couldn’t call Verizon to get a new phone because I didn’t have a phone. Or when I used to wear coke-bottle glasses and would never be able to find them in the mornings because I didn’t have glasses on. Or when I drove my car out to a bar one night and then forgot where it was the next morning because I wasn’t trashed anymore.

I decided that I would fashion myself a rudimentary shroud to cover my face and hair like Michael Jackson’s kids back in the day or a vision of the Virgin Mary about to appear in a tortilla in Guatemala. Thusly covered, I might be able to survive the quick dash to the CVS around the block and be able to get my medicine.

Anyway, I figured while I was out I might pick up some more illness-related supplies. I’m tired of having to take meds all the time because it really dries out my mouth.  I always feel like I’ve been sucking on some sponges.

Then I remembered that over the summer in some granola organic-type store I had seen an herbal remedy called Gypsy’s Cure or something…something similar to those Fisherman’s Friend throat lozenges – it had struck me as a strange branding choice at the time because just earlier that day I’d learned from one of my more politically-correct friends that I should describe my lifestyle to others who I meet on my travels as “nomadic,” “wanderlusty” or “upscale hobo” rather than as “gypsy.”


I really wanted to find out the name of that remedy and to pick it up on my next venture outdoors. So I typed in “Gypsy’s Cure” into Google.

“Did you mean Gypsy’s Curse?” Google enquired politely.

Well, that was definitely enough to get me sidetracked. Best. Unintended search results. Ever. Here’s a representative sample of the actual links to which I was directed:

1.  Query: How to break a gypsy’s curse? Preface of question: “I accidentally ran over a gypsy's cat a week ago, and she cursed me....”

2.  Synopsis of Gypsy's Curse on Yahoo! Movies: Four physically abnormal men befriend each other in a gym and one man, a deaf mute without legs, becomes involved in a tragic love affair.

3.  Definition on urbandictionary.com: Male impotence; failure to achieve an erection. Classically blamed on a failure to buy pegs or lucky heather many years ago. Usage: “Sorry love, I've got the gypsy's curse. It's like trying to get toothpaste back in the tube."


Informative and enjoyable, but not helpful links. I went back to my original search results and scanned them hopefully.

Gypsy Magic: An Old Gypsy Cure for Nervousness. Valerian Wine. 2 handful valerian roots. 1 clove. 1 orange rind. 1 rosemary twig. 1 liter of dry white wine ...

Nope.

Dog lard is a old gypsy cure for a variety of ailments and is commonly sold by gypsies in Europe: "...If you smear it on your chest, it will cure asthma, ...

Hrmmm. Well at least now we're talking about upper respiratory, rather than psychosomatic, symptoms.

The most powerful Gypsy cure is a substance called coxai, or ghost vomit.  According to Gypsy legends, Mamorio or "little grandmother" is a dirty, ...


Wait, grandmother is a dirty what?! I couldn’t resist and clicked.

Turns out there was no need for parental controls on the site at all. Rather, it was a very, very, very dry article on Gypsy Americans and their culture, including history, immigration waves and settlement patterns. Dry, dry, dry. The whole article had been sucking on some sponges.

But I did learn something very interesting. Something so interesting, in fact, that I’m not even going to bother to verify by primary or even secondary source, and just store it in my brain in with my other “if it’s on the internet it must be true” factoids:

Gypsy taboos separate Gypsies—each group of Gypsies—from non-Gypsies, and separate the contamination of the lower half of the adult Gypsy's body (especially the genitals and feet) from the purity of its upper half (especially the head and mouth). The waist divides an adult's body; in fact, the Romani word for waist, maskar, also means the spatial middle of anything. Since a Gypsy who becomes polluted can be expelled from the community, to avoid pollution, Gypsies try to avoid unpurified things that have touched a body's lower half. Accordingly, a Gypsy who touches his or her lower body should then wash his or her hands to purify them. Similarly, an object that feet have touched, such as shoes and floors, are impure and, by extension, things that touch the floor when someone drops them are impure as well. Gypsies mark the bottom end of bedcovers with a button or ribbon, to avoid accidentally putting the feet-end on their face.

This new knowledge about gypsies opens up a whole new world of germophobia and compulsive disorders for me to explore. I’ve always been weird about feet, but only to the extent that I’m insanely terrified of other people’s feet and hypocritically cavalier about my own (you can’t be a toenail biter and not be a hypocrite of some sort).

In Thailand, for example, it was so annoying when I entered any store or house and I’d always be asked in a singsong voice to remove shoes, please. And if I was in a bad mood I would scowl and mutter in some undertone to myself that my feet are probably cleaner than your floor, lady, and then stubbornly refuse to remove them, instead preferring to stand outside in protest while I missed out on an amazing meal, or life-changing cultural immersion, or at least a chance to use a toilet before my kidneys exploded from all the coconut water I’d been drinking.


But back to the subject of gypsies, at least I’ve learned something interesting and will add “ribbons for marking all my bedcovers” to my shopping list of things I need to get next time I go outside.

As for that damn herbal remedy, I ended up finding it on drugstore.com. Typed in “gypsy” to the search bar and up it came under “Traditional Medicinals”: “Gypsy Cold Care Herbal Tea.”

Better yet, it’s on sale for 20% off and I’ve got some drugstore.com coupons on top of that.

Viral Idol

I know everyone not living under a rock has been inundated with people buzzing about this bowl-cut sporting, genre-bending Taiwanese kid who sounds enough like Whitney Houston to leave even Whitney Houston groping for her crack pipe in an attempt to figure out what the hell is going on.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aA-tOsM6F4Y

Would it be more or less weird to know that he's 23?  I had just assumed we were all just watching for the other ball to drop.

Anyway, I'm sort of over him already, which is a short fascination even by my standards.  He's being called the "Taiwanese Susan Boyle," which means that pretty soon we're going to hear about him too selling a bunch of albums that Simon Cowell will inevitably have a manicured hand in producing, and then having a breakdown that no one will care about because we're all too busy fawning over the next reality talent show audition.

I'm far more fascinated by his rival Asian singing sensation making the rounds, the amazing Filipina shemale Reggie Ramirez, who I'm going to call the "Singing Khloe Kardashian."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTa_UHf2Yoo&feature=player_embedded

I love how s/he thanks the judges using both personas.  I wonder if when s/he goes out his left hand puts a roofie in the drink before the right hand takes a sip.  Or if when s/he's having a bad day one side bitches the other out for giving her incurable gonorrhea.

Anyway, in the middle of all this craziness over the new overnight youtube sensations, I do have to show my love for the original "Penised Susan Boyle," timid Brit mobile phone salesman turned overnight recording sensation Paul Potts.  Not sure what he's up to these days but I'm a huge fan of this guy, and I'm not ashamed.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxOytYLlhiQ