January 31, 2008
Pajama drama
Every now and then my wardrobe starts to lag behind itself. I look at the sea of clothes in my closet and realize, for example, that all my underwear is three years old or more. That my jeans are going to rip if I think about them too hard. That no matter how many times you try it, a brown belt cannot be made to substitute for a black belt.
I have addressed most of these issues over the last few days, but I still have a problem with sleepwear. I have an over-stuffed drawer full of pajamas, but all my warm stuff is three sizes too big. I've been looking for new flannel PJs but nothing looks right.
Is it not possible to find flannel pajamas that are cute, fit right, have a pattern that doesn't make you sick to look at, and cost under $50? All I want is something warm that doesn't make me look like a nauseous whale when I wear it. Why is this so hard?
Suggestions are welcome. They are solicited. Bring on the suggestions.
Posted by didofoot at 11:06 AM | Comments (9)
January 30, 2008
Good news for the crews
Luna, once believed to be closed forever, has re-opened. It was purchased by one of the long-term waiters and his boyfriend, and it is, if anything, better than ever. The service is excellent, the champagne glasses are filled to the brim, the furniture is new...in short, don't we need to eat a brunch there this weekend? For old times' sake?
If you live in the hood or are willing to come here, and you like things that are awesome, let me know and we'll hook up for a brunch on Saturday.
Man I haven't been to brunch in ages. A brunch without Luna is scarcely a brunch at all.
Posted by didofoot at 12:46 PM | Comments (4)
January 29, 2008
Some stuff I am glad about
In the style of Mindy Kaling, here are a few things I've bought (or someone's bought for me) that I love.
Cheap finds from Warehouse Deals
This is the online store where Amazon sells stuff that got slightly damaged in their warehouse. I got the complete set of The Thin Man movies for $11, and an MP3 player for $99 (marked down from $170). In both cases, the outside boxes were slightly scuffed from having been dropped, but nothing else was wrong with the merchandise.
Sandwiches from Ike's Place
Only one thing was lacking to make the Castro the perfect neighborhood, and that was a high-quality sandwich shop. Now we have Ike's merely two blocks from our house and I can't shut up about it. Gene and I also can't stop eating there; at this point Ike knows us by name. I have plugged Ike's on every website I write for and dragged all my friends and family there. We love his food so much that we've become too embarrassed to eat there anymore. If only we could have another, crappier sandwich place where we could eat without shame, THEN this neighborhood would be perfect.
If you have seen me recently, you've probably seen me wearing my shirt with a picture of the Coke polar bears on it. It is super soft, exactly the right length, a flattering shade of blue and drapes perfectly. Michele bought me this shirt as a joke after I confessed that the Coke polar bears are so cute they actually make me want to drink Coke (bleh, I hate when marketing succeeds on me). But it is no joke to me now. This shirt is deadly serious, and seriously comfortable.
My Hamilton Beach 43253 Ensemble 12-Cup Coffeemaker
The Cadillac of coffee makers, the HB 43253 EC can make enough coffee for an entire dinner party at one time, unlike my previous three-cupper. It can also be set on a timer so that the coffee gets made ten minutes before my alarm goes off, and doesn't take a half hour to heat up properly. Also, it is red. Pretty!
I would still be working in an office without a desk calendar. This is the only way I can keep track of my deadlines and portion out work in the days leading up to my deadlines, so I don't wind up doing everything five minutes before it's due. (Sometimes I do that anyway. But it's carefully planned.) I like the Get Fuzzy calendar because the days have a lot of space to write in. Also, of course, I am a sucker for sassy talking animals.
Posted by didofoot at 10:01 AM | Comments (15)
January 28, 2008
Unhappy ending
I think maybe the massage chair at the nail salon fucked up my back. This has never happened before. But I was sitting in the chair about ten minutes longer than I usually do, and by the time I got up I was feeling like I'd overdone it a little. (Also, the chair had managed to undo my bra, a feat dozens if not tens of high school boys never accomplished.)
I was fine all day Saturday, the nail day, but on Sunday morning after I got up my back got bad very quickly, until I could only lay in bed popping pain pills while Gene brought me crackers.
A full day of lying medicated in bed seemed to help; I can move around and take deep breaths now, although the deep breaths still hurt. I think this will just continue to go away on its own. Meanwhile, ow.
Anyone else ever have this problem with a massage chair?
Posted by didofoot at 08:06 AM | Comments (5)
January 25, 2008
Well, thank goodness
I've been internally debating over whether or not to "throw my vote away" (also known as "vote for the candidate I actually want in office") on Kucinich in the primary, but now he's dropped out of the race. Thank heavens, right? Now I just have to decide on the lesser of two evils, just like I do in the general election.
Suddenly wishing I'd followed Gene's lead and registered Republican when I had the chance...
Posted by didofoot at 01:44 PM | Comments (5)
January 23, 2008
Something I have hold of has no head
I've at last tracked down a copy of Thurber's The 13 Clocks and The Wonderful O, as illustrated by Ronald Searle, and my delight in having found it is only surpassed by the fact that it turned out to be well worth finding.
Thurber's prose, especially in his kid books, rattles and giggles and riots and shams, and generally poses with its head stuck round the corner and its tongue out. For example, "Light a light or strike a lantern! Something I have hold of has no head." (This is a sentence I first saw quoted in a Pamela Dean novel fifteen years ago and have been wondering about ever since. Like a giant game of Memory, I pick up quotations here and there and hang onto them in my brainspace until I find their origins, sometimes decades later. It's fun to make matches. When I've got all my what's-to-who's sorted out, I can probably die contented.)
This would be a wonderful book to read to a kid, because a lot of it rhymes, but it's not obvious until you hear it read. Plus, the dialog is so well-written that it's a delight to do the voices. I know because I've been reading it out loud to myself when Gene isn't home.
And also:
"Hagga weeps no more," he said. "Hagga has no tears. She did not even weep when she was told about the children locked up in my tower.""I hated that," said Hark.
"I liked it," said the Duke. "No child can sleep in my camellias."
Yes, and also:
A purple ball with gold stars on it came slowly bouncing down the iron stairs and winked and twinkled, like a naked child saluting priests.
Posted by didofoot at 06:33 PM | Comments (4)
January 18, 2008
The Human Database
I review a lot of different businesses for my various gigs, and I always find it absurd when a business doesn't have a website. This is true for my personal life too: I don't like going to a location blind anymore. I want to read the menu before I get there, I want to see pictures of the clothes they're selling, I want to know who the CEO is.
It struck me today that this should also be true for people. Everyone should have just one website that acts as a hub for their internet presence. It should include all pertinent information about them: contact info, history (social, romantic and professional), services they provide, groups they're in, other websites they're active on. It should have photos of them and lists of references.
This is sort of what sites like MySpace are trying to do (but the Myspace format is so crappy that I refuse to believe they're the final answer). Eventually, someone will succeed, and then everyone will have a page.
Imagine how our kids will think of dating. You wouldn't consider going out with someone who didn't have a webpage. How could you go blindly into a date without knowing basic stuff like who his friends are, where he went to school and what martial arts skills he has? No, you'll want to log onto the Human Database and pull up his site to check him out first.
Yes, I see all the problems with this (privacy violations, further regulation of the delightfully unregulated internet, identity theft issues, etc.), and I don't care. I want everyone to be instantly knowable from the comfort of my living room. And I want it now, so I don't have to spend another hour tracking down this guy for my article.
Posted by didofoot at 12:13 PM | Comments (1)
January 17, 2008
Best Books of 2007
Hoping I am not too late for a retrospective post, I present to you my best reads of 2007:
Classic Fiction: Tender is the Night
"Sometimes I think Gene and I are like Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald," I told my dad after reading this.
"Yes?" my dad said, choking on his burger in an effort to keep a straight face.
"Well, we have lots of socializing," I mused. "And...I mean, not the drinking to excess so much. Or the madness. Or the social butterfly thing, really. And we don't have the inevitable bleak dissolution that makes the whole thing so poignant and delicate and...I guess we're not that much like them, actually."
"Yes," my dad said, relaxing.
Contemporary Fiction: Run
Actually, my vote for best contemporary novel is wavering between Patchett's Run and Franzen's The Corrections, but, much like it will probably do in the primary, my vote swung towards Patchett because I wanted more girls on the list.
No, actually Run is a great book, a little sensational in its plot points but very understated in its language. Her best is still Bel Canto for my money, but this is also excellent.
Fantasy: Dragonhaven
This is being billed as a young adult novel, presumably because it's about a young adult, but like (almost) all McKinley stories this is full of three-dimensional people with fully-adult feelings and problems. She takes a hard-to-swallow situation (young boy forced to play nursemaid to young dragon) and makes it completely believable by adding a wealth of details: the wearying labor of cleaning up dragon droppings every day, the difficulty of masking dragon smell, plus the dragon evolves from needy, faceless infant to an individual personality as she gets older just like a real kid does.
Young Adult: Green Angel
This is about a girl whose family dies in a loosely-sketched apocalypse. Hoffman wisely avoids filling in the details of why civilization just crashed, focusing instead on the aftermath of guilt and grief. She also deals nicely with teen self-mutilation without getting preachy, judgmental or gross. And the language is knock-you-over gorgeous, as Hoffman's language always is.
Plays: Representative Plays
Yep, *that* J.M. Barrie, the one who wrote Peter Pan. I expected that these plays would just be an interesting curiosity for my shelf, but these are inventive, strange, funny and occasionally heartbreaking.
Travel: I See By My Outfit
Autobiography: The Enchanted Places
Christopher Milne, better known as Christopher Robin, tells a calm, chatty tale of growing up as the son of the man who created Winnie the Pooh. I enjoyed the half-pleased, half-frustrated tone of the book, which is about two pages long, the perfect size to stuff in your purse or coat pocket for subway rides.
Biography: Anais Nin: A Biography
The woman who wrote the biographies of Simone de Beauvoir and Samuel Beckett turns her attention to Anais Nin, who Bair calls one of the "major minor writers" of our times. Bair is pretty unforgiving of Nin's lies, rewrites and selfishness, but if you want to know the real skinny on Nin's life this book can't be beat. It is exhaustively researched.
Essays: Consider the Lobster
I loved a few of the essays in this book so much that the whole book glows in my memory, though when I go back I remember there are more than a few rambling, kind of dull chapters that I skipped entirely. Still, it's worth buying just for the porn essay and, of course, the essay on lobster eating.
Non-Fiction: Somebody is Going to Die if Lilly Beth Doesn't Catch That Bouquet: The Official Southern Ladies' Guide to Hosting the Perfect Wedding
I have no idea where or why I picked this up, but I really kind of loved it, as I love all glimpses of how the Southern half lives. This is written by a couple of gleefully drunken, high class Southern ladies, and it's peppered with hilariously viscious gossip and hilariously gluten-heavy recipes.
Comics: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 8
Granted, Y: The Last Man is one of the best comic series out there, and I did read that this year. But nothing makes me happier than seeing Buffy continued. I am the kind of nerd that even the other nerds scorn to associate with.
And a call for papers:
I'm currently looking for something new to read. If you made it to the end of this long, boring post, you're either a rabid book fan or you like me a lot. Either way, I trust you to recommend something, so if you've got favorite books you read in 07, leave 'em in the comments please.
Posted by didofoot at 08:16 AM | Comments (0)
January 09, 2008
The Notebook
While shopping for stocking stuffers before Christmas, I found a tiny -- I mean TINY -- notebook with a hot pink metallic cover (not unlike Dianna's notebook, but so much pinker). I briefly considered buying this for Sean. Sean is a stand-up comic and humor writer who carries around a notebook which is about three times the size of this one and in no way pink. He uses this to jot down ideas for jokes in his own peculiar shorthand.
Many times I have yelled at Michele for curiously peering into Sean's notebook without being asked. He always assures me that it's fine. Only recently did I realize this is because there's nothing coherent in there at all. I was at dinner with Sean and some folks when he started reading us some notes which even he couldn't remember how to translate.
"Alligator, Bruins, Linda McCartney," he said.* "Pumpkins, the thing with teeth, rock-paper-scissors." Sometimes he was able to reconstruct the intended joke for us, and sometimes not.
I've known Sean since middle school, and over the years I've developed an automatic laugh reflex whenever he speaks. I think this is maybe why he and I don't have a lot of serious conversations. After that time he told me about his pancreatic cancer and his crush on his own grandfather and I laughed and laughed, he kind of stopped trying to confide in me.**
Anyway, even though I find everything he says funny, for some reason I find the joke shorthand especially funny. Part of the reason to get him this much tinier notebook is that it would make the shorthand jokes even shorter and even more inexplicably funny. For me.
"Blue," he would read from one tiny page. The rest of the table would stare blankly but I would laugh and laugh.
At that dinner, Sean also discussed the possibility of someday creating a joke about his joke notebook. As far as I know, he hasn't done this yet. I think when he comes up with the idea, he thinks "I don't have to write this one down: the very existence of my notebook will remind me." Obviously that's not working, but I feel if he had a hilariously pink notebook he would easily remember how funny it is.
Yes, all of these would have been great reasons to buy the notebook for Sean. But it was like five dollars and I found some Great Brain books I wanted more.
*Note: incomprehensible joke shorthand has been changed to avoid copyright infringement. Also because I'm curious to see if Sean will actually come up with jokes based on my made-up notes.
**Note: Secrets have been completely made up. Sean has never actually confided in me. Or if he has, I thought he was kidding.
Posted by didofoot at 08:49 AM | Comments (1)
January 08, 2008
The Datevine
Mostly I don't want any of you reading my professional writing, but every now and then I get proud of something and want to pimp it out.
Today it is The Datevine. I was recently hired to edit the SF page. Similar to Yelp and City Search, The Datevine SF is a database of user-generated content about the best places to eat, play, artify, etc. in the Bay Area. Except we're better than those other services, and here are just a few reasons why:
1. Most of the tips were written by me, your pal. That won't always be true, but I've generated a ton of content to get us started. If you just can't get enough of me (and who can?) you can spend an entire afternoon browsing around there and not run out of stuff to read.
2. If you happen to have an elderly laptop (as some of us do) then the maps on Yelp and City Search might sort of cause it to overheat. The Datevine, though still visually appealing and containing lots of map data, doesn't do that.
3. Everyone uses those other services, they're so mainstream. How many people went to the Yelp holiday party, like a million? But be the first one at your dive bar of choice to casually reference The Datevine and watch the attractive hipsters line up to make out with you.
So here's what you can do:
1. You can check out the site here, or
2. You can add your own ideas for stuff to do in the Bay Area here, or
3. You can leave suggestions for improvements in the comments on this post. We're just getting started, so all feedback is helpful. Or
4. You can totally ignore this. But I thought we were friends, dude.
Posted by didofoot at 11:07 AM | Comments (1)
