November 30, 2006
Gloating
Last night I had dinner at Katie's hose. My job was to seed the pomegrantates.
Tp seed a pomegranteat, you pyt it in a bowl of water and break it oen gently with your thumbs, then scrape the seeds out. The seeds go to the bottom and the rest, thwe pomehrante body, gloats to the top.
...
I don';t know what's happening to my fingers here. I have eleected to leave inb all thes tupos which are no eing done on purpose and are sort of interesting. To me. I have not been drinking. Am I having a fit of some kind or what's going on?
My hands say on the keyboard while my fingers gloat to the top.
Posted by didofoot at 05:17 PM | Comments (0)
November 29, 2006
The numbers you've all been waiting for. I'm sure.
Harper's did it first...
Sean did it best...
But I'm doing it now...
Our Europe Trip rendered in the style of Harper's Index
Number of films watched in movie theaters: 14
Number which were V for Vendetta: 3
Revolutions worth having that did not include dancing: 0
Number of people who gave up their beds for us: 7
Percentage who are over the age of eighty: 16%
Approximate number of anti-American sentiments we heard expressed: 57
Percentage which were uttered by me: 100%
Number of couples prevented by our presence from hooking up: 3
Number of couples we pretty much caused to break up: 1
Number of days I mentally thanked Michele for convincing me to pack an extra pair of jeans: 70
Number of times we did laundry: 10
Number of times I do laundry at home in a 70-day period: 2
Number of books I packed: 2
Number of books I brought home: 12
Percentage of fights the Lad and I had which related to who would carry my traveling library: 100%
Number of fights the Lad and I had: 1
Percentage of our hosts who owned televisions: 37%
Percentage of our hosts who had high-speed internet access: 56%
Percentage of our hosts who were communists/anarchists: 12%
Posted by didofoot at 04:34 PM | Comments (2)
November 28, 2006
Didofoot Reads The News, Part 4
On Bush's upcoming meeting with the Iraqi Prime Minister
From Time.com
"National Security Adviser Steve Hadley told reporters on Air Force One on the way to Estonia that Bush will be a good listener at the meeting."
Hadley added that Bush also planned to use his inside voice during the proceedings, and had promised this time to request an adult to accompany him if he needed to make wee.
During the proceedings, Bush laid out a strategy for the U.S. involvement in Iraq by drawing a line in the sand and suggesting that "this is our side and that's your side." When the Iraqi Prime Minister later accidentally crossed the line on his way to the coffee cart, Bush burst into tears and had to be taken outside.
Posted by didofoot at 10:16 AM | Comments (2)
November 20, 2006
Lad Ball
After an excellent day spent touring the De Young and eating cake with the Woods, the Lad and I spent yesterday evening sitting near each other and reading things. Because the radiator schedule hasn't been amended to account for the chilly evenings, I had to wrap up in my XXL flannel pajamas covered with a print of dancing pigs.
"I am a pork ball," I said to myself, examining my giant, fuzzy knee bags, and insisted that the Lad address me as 'Pork Ball' for the remainder of the evening.
This is how things stand with us, me entering life as a 27 year old, him turning 28. We own all the arcade games, occasionally dine on carrot cake and half a bag of walnuts, and some of us blog about our hair. Would his life be more elegant if he lived with a grownup? Hopefully we'll never know.
Happy birthday, Lad.
Posted by didofoot at 05:37 PM | Comments (5)
November 16, 2006
How I learned to stop worrying and love my hair
A little while ago I decided to stop using shampoo, partly because I just read a random website swearing that it's unnecessary, but mostly because I'm too broke to keep buying these expensive products if I don't really need them. I thought I'd test it out and see whether my hair grossed itself up after a few days or if this no-wash business really works.
Here, therefore, is a small diary of my progress.
Day One
Sunday, November 12
Hair gets washed as normal. This will be the last day for some time that I use shampoo. I'm going to miss this chemical orange smell, especially after a few days when my hair starts to smell like old garbage.
Day Two
Monday, November 13
This is the first day of non-washing. I do use a little Herbal Essences conditioner, mostly on the ends, but fortuitously I use the last of it. After this I plan to get a lighter conditioner, ideally one not tested on animals this time. I can't really tell what condition my hair was in today, because I braided it right out of the shower and left it in braids until I went to bed.
Day Three
Tuesday, November 14
Morning
No product at all today because I haven't gotten around to buying my new conditioner. I do get it wet in the shower and then just finger-scrunch it. It feels drier than usual, probably because of the lack of conditioner. My scalp also feels dry, but normal-dry, and that's encouraging because I was worried it would be oily by now. My hair smells clean and is keeping its curl instead of hanging limply like it usually does. Observe:
Afternoon
My hair is both oily and dry now, if that's possible, and is doing the thing it always does when I leave it down, which is to gradually lose the nice shape of its curls and disintegrate into semi-frizz. Into a braid it goes. Who invented the braid? I need to send that lady a thank you pie.
Tomorrow I'm having lunch with my fashion friend, Tracy, who will surely notice if I show up looking slightly homeless. Should I give in and shampoo tomorrow or risk the conditioner treatment? I know you're just on the edge of your seat about this.
Day Four
Wednesday, November 15
I do a "conditioner rinse," which basically means washing with conditioner instead of shampoo, and leave the house with wet hair in order to meet Tracy in time. By the time I reach her office, it's clear that this plan was a disaster.
Me: I really have to apologize for my hair.
Her: You really did not just say that to me.
My hair at this point is oily, dry, limp and miserable, as am I.
Day Five
Thursday, November 16
I give in and wash my goddamn hair.
Clearly this no-shampoo idea is completely retarded. What's sadder is that this is not the first time that a random website has tricked me into making a bad life decision. Other internet punkings have included:
- Vegetarian lasagna recipes
- Clothes which look weird when you actually put them on
- My mail-order bride who ran off with my wallet and VCR a month after our marriage
- Urban legends in email forwards
Internet, never again do I trust you to provide me with untainted facts, goods or spouses!
Here endeth the lesson.
Posted by didofoot at 09:50 AM | Comments (6)
November 09, 2006
Escaping from Escape From L.A.
Warning: This entry is chock-full of spoilers, but they're spoilers about an old and ridiculous movie.
Last night the Lad and I rented Escape From L.A., the ill-conceived sequel to Escape From New York. Like New York in the original, L.A. is now designated a prison for undesirables after an earthquake turns the city into an island. Kurt Russell plays Snake Plisskin, a war hero-turned-criminal who is sent in to L.A. to rescue a boring Doomsday device. (This is a global EMP machine that can and does shut down all the electrical current in the world. "Everything we've accomplished for the past five hundred years will be gone!" one character cries in horror, and I cried in horror "Hello, books?")
The filmmakers don't fuck around: they let you know right at the start exactly what kind of movie this is going to be when Snake jumps the shark -- the shark from the Jaws ride at the now-underwater Universal Studios, that is, which he jumps over in his fancy-pants Submarine Of The Future.
In Escape From New York Snake is forced to overcome difficult challenges such as battling a great big enemy, but the sequel takes a lighter, sportier approach. Challenges Snake must overcome in L.A. include surfing a tsunami, playing really difficult basketball, escaping from a band of psychotic plastic surgeons determined to harvest his body parts, and -- my personal favorite -- walking slowly on a treadmill for about five minutes. You know the film was made in the '80s when a treadmill is used as a torture device.
There are two -- and I use the term loosely -- love interests, unusual for an action film. The first, who does nothing to further the plot or Snake's character development in any way, claims she was banished to L.A. for being Muslim, although obviously her real crime was her Elvira-ish wig. She offers to show Snake a good time, holds his gun for a minute, and is quickly shot to death (by someone else's gun) for no real reason. The second interest, the President's daughter, doesn't even get the half-second teary-eyed glance Snake bestowed on his first special lady-friend; Snake spends the movie ignoring her, as do the other characters and the audience.
My favorite part about the movie is that Snake eventually teams up with a crook he worked with in Cleveland. (Cleveland is referenced throughout the film as a place Snake spent some hairy hours; the implication is that Cleveland is worse than New York or L.A. all on its own, without being designated a city-wide federal prison. I've never been to Cleveland but that's sort of the impression I've always had about it.) The crook used to be a fellow known as Carjack Malone, but when Snake encounters him in this film he's now a drag queen called Hershey -- an interesting choice for an action hero's sidekick. Two scenes later, Hershey the drag-queen is hang-gliding into a nest of baddies with Snake to save the day. Hershey was my favorite character, but I have to wonder how a bad-ass drag queen went over with this film's demographic audience.
Me [as Snake hovers absurdly over four hundred machine-gun-toting extras]: Did this film basically end Kurt Russell's career?
Lad: I think so.
Character in Film: Snake, don't do anything stupid!
Lad: Whoa, too late.
Posted by didofoot at 09:29 AM | Comments (1)
November 04, 2006
"And the books she read, and the books that she said she read..."
"She herself was a victim of that lust for books which rages in the breast like a demon, and which cannot be stilled save by the frequent and plentiful acquisition of books. This passion is more common, and more powerful, than most people suppose. Book lovers are thought by unbookish people to be gentle and unworldly, and perhaps a few of them are so. But there are others who will lie and scheme and steal to get books as wildly and unconscionably as the dope-taker in pursuit of his drug. They may not want the books to read immediately, or at all; they want them to possess, to range on their shelves, to have at command. They want books as a Turk is thought to want concubines -- not to be hastily deflowered, but to be kept at their master's call, and enjoyed more often in thought than in reality."
- Robertson Davies, Tempest-Tost
"Hoarding books is unfair to everybody. In fairness to all Book Sale participants:
-No blankets, sheets or any other coverings are allowed.
-You cannot have more than one hundred books or five boxes of books under your control at any given time without purchasing them.
-Anyone caught stashing or hiding books will be expelled."
-SF Library Book Sale Instructions
"Books are trophies."
-Ellie
I've rearranged my books again. Reference books have their own shelf now, separate from the other non-fiction. In having a whole shelf and a half dedicated to non-novels, I've become a more serious, better-educated person in a way I wasn't when I had merely read these books.
In High Fidelity, the main character organizes his record collection autobiographically. ("If I want to find the song "Landslide" by Fleetwood Mac I have to remember that I bought it for someone in the fall of 1983 pile but I didn’t give it to them for personal reasons.") One day, when I'm old and cantankerous and my library takes up more space than my furniture or grandchildren, I will organize things this way, beginning with Little House on the Prairie and ending with my back copies of Octogenarian Today. When I die and my library is dismantled, probably no one will care why a spurt of Jonathan Carroll novels is followed by a Vienna guidebook, but at least as my life dissolves out onto other bookshelves it will disappear linearly -- childhood, adolescence, adulthood -- like the better sorts of plots.
Posted by didofoot at 10:21 AM | Comments (3)
November 01, 2006
"This is to make an ass of me..."
I was thinking about A Midsummer Night's Dream yesterday. As fairies, Titania and Oberon exist outside of human morality: they have extra-marital affairs, fuck around with nature when they're in a mood, and meddle in the lives of mortals whenever they like. Because they exist in an amoral paradigm, they are not punished for behaving in an amoral way. When Oberon, for example, puts love-juice in Titania's eyes and sends her off to fall unwittingly into bed with the first ass she meets, he is basically putting roofies in her beer and allowing her to be assaulted. However, what would be reprehensible in a human is allowable here, because Titania, being an amoral creature, cannot expect protection from anyone else's moral code. In effect, it's okay for Oberon to set his wife up to be date-raped by a donkey, because she's inhuman herself.
Some similar rule seems to be in effect at the Castro's Halloween street party. In a desperate, last-minute attempt at a costume, I went the out-and-out slutty route with a whorish schoolgirl outfit. Walking through the crowd with the Lad, my ass was grabbed by strangers no less than three times. This made me wonder: is Halloween a fancy-dress ball, or is it a giant role-playing game? If I'm only wearing my costume then I ought to be free from groping hands. If, however, I am expected to become my costume then I am in fact soliciting such contact by choosing to wear it. In short, am I putting myself outside the normal code of social conduct by becoming the character of a transgressing schoolgirl? Or am I still a moral human who ought to have some protection from stray hands to the rear?
To put it another way, when Cala Foods has a sale on giant bags of candy the day after Halloween, should I be expected to resist the urge to buy it because it's so bad for me? Or does the tempting cheapness of the candy, so clearly calculated to draw me in, make it essentially fat-free for the day?
Finally, would an extra layer of fat added to my ass from this year's post-Halloween candy protect me from unwanted ass grabbing next year?
Posted by didofoot at 07:20 PM | Comments (4)
