More As I Think Of It
I have been humorously rebuked via email for always saying "see you tomorrow"
on this blog. Just so it's clear, when I say "see you tomorrow", I mean
"see you whenever I feel like writing another entry". So, that settles
that.
~~~
I was reading this very funny blog called
Stuff White People Like.
It's pretty much a send-up of white (mainly liberal) proclivities and habits.
And, inexplicably, the site has been bought by
Target. Some of my favorites among SWPL are:
- Restaurants that have menus with prices missing the decimal point ("I’m having the Lobster Pillows with Crab Demi-Glaze. It’s only 12")
- Grammar rules
- Paris
- Having gay friends
- The idea of soccer
- Wes Anderson movies
- Being the only white person in the room
- Kitchen gadgets
- Sarah Silverman
- Public Radio
- Gifted children
- Sushi
- Netflix
- Not having a TV
- David Sedaris
- Wine (except White Zin, wine in a box, or Arbor Mist, unless consumed in "an ironic fashion")
- Having two last names
That got me thinking about white people, and then just people and then about stereotypes and then about guys. How predictable are we? As an experiment, I arranged my DVDs. The left three piles are typical guy movies: Indy Jones, various Matrices and Lethal Weapons, just about anything Bruce Willis or Wesley Snipes has ever done, and so on. A few of them actually should probably be in the next pile, which is guy movies that have pretensions (Das Boot) or are considered classics (Blazing Saddles) or are cult films (Usual Suspects). That left a third pile of films I like but maybe anyone would because they're either funny, mushy or good for you: Chocolat, Beetlejuice, My Cousin Vinny, Ghost. Yikes, what's Atonement doing in there?
I do, of course, watch good films. You know, films by unknown directors that won everything at Cannes and have subtitles. But, I rent them.
~~~
The Chinese government has published a book of new translations for dishes that have traditionally had odd names, such as "Ants Climbing A Tree" and "Chicken Without Sexual Life".
Why no one actually knows how much oil there is.
Joey Chestnut (no, I'm not making this up) beat famed eating champ Takeru Kobayashi in the Nathan's Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest. After 10 minutes, they were tied at 59 hot dogs, and then went into sudden death.
~~~
I just finished painting the living room and archway from the Santa Fe Room. I will name the living room later, like they do at The Broadmoor, but I have to finish putting the baseboards on. Anyway, as I suspected my experiments with taping were a failure. No matter how close to the edge of the ceiling I got or how hard I pressed it on, the textured walls defeated me and I ended up with blue paint on the white ceiling everywhere. I stopped and had a cup of coffee and it dawned on me that I was approaching this problem All Wrong. It's like the Dining Philosophers or Faces/Vases. It takes a new point of view. At that point, I went back and painted like a bandit squishing blue into all the corners and slopping it along the crevice where the wall meets the ceiling. That's the first part of the algorithm. The second part is to hire painters for the ceiling and tell them that they'd better be damned good at taping.
~~~
More as I think of it.