Appetizers
A 1 Deep Fried Baby Sock, Stuffed with Eraser Detritus $1.25
A 2 Boiled Packing Peanuts (6) $3.95
A 3 Fried Potpourri with Special Bright Red Sauce $1.75
Entrees
B 1 Spicy Mr. Clean Magic Eraser with Steamed Barbie Hair (Market Price)
B 2 General Tso's Seat Belt a l'Orange $15.45
B 3 Sweet and Sour Racquetballs with Brined Baby Pinecones $13.20
B 4 Deep Fried Loofah, Shanghai Style $14.90
Dessert
C 1 Homemade Radiator Coolant, Assorted Flavors $2.90
C 2 Fruit Delight on Princess Ming's Paradise Bed of Regret $9.95
Sorry for the wait...I just stepped out for a York Peppermint Patty, and I got the ssssensation of a brisk jog! through the piney woods! over the mossy hills! across the Joann's Fabrics parking lot! past the Lane Bryant! over the freaky karaoke club where it's always dark and everyone lacks a full set of teeth! through the parking lot kiosk that used to be a Fox Photo and now sells turkey on a stick! over the carpet store with the wacky wavy wiggly arm man!
...and then, the couch. Hi!
p.s. I know some of the archived links are broken...working on it. :)
Recently, the splendid P and I did some pop cultural spelunking by way of Waterbury, Connecticut. Waterbury is home to one of the last "real" Howard Johnson's restaurants, and by last, I mean, they're brushing off their HoJo affiliation next week. But the lunch counter is still there, replete with mirrored back wall, the Simple Simon & the Pieman graphic, HoJo's logo carved into the glass near the ceiling, milkshake mixers, and people who look like they've been there since opening day.
The entire experience was a peculiar patchwork of past and present, organic and synthetic, family-style and not-so-family style. Waiting-room mauves and greens were everywhere. The dining room seemed to be true to the original layout, as did the lunch counter. In the back of the dining room was an oddly placed salad bar, which glistened with beets and gelatins...this was across from a slightly off-balanced "Desserts" glass refrigerator which held saran-wrapped pies, mousses, and cakes. This was in the middle of the dining room, right next to a table of six.
The menus were laminated collages of inkjet printouts, old, copied HoJo's food photos, new items (wraps!), old items (fried clams!), and an earnest announcement on the cover promising their clientele that even though the HoJo's name was going away soon, they'd still get the same quality dining experience and service they'd come to expect over the years. And we have fried clams!
(We didn't get the clams - I couldn't muster up the stomach juice for it. I did, however, have a lovely cheeseburger.)
Adjacent to the dining room is the retro-phenomenal cocktail bar. It was a (karaoke on Saturday nights!) bar - filled with dark, heavy furniture and dark wooded walls. In the middle of the room, dividing the bar from the lounge area, were two gigantic fabric screens of a leopard and some other wild animal, presumably included to lend the lounge a more...exotic? exciting? urban? urban! feel, which I guess might give you some credibility if you were belting out "We Built This City" in front of the 1970's gas fireplace on karaoke night.
Supposedly, HoJo's is coming back (better than ever, etc.) as soon as they get their ice creams in order. Not the same as the "real" thing, but, awesome.
Dear Music Choice People,
As an occasional listener (when I need background music while I write) and distracted viewer of your cable channel "Light Classical," I must tell you a few things I've noticed. I hope you will indulge my suggestions here on improving your service.
- Your graphics make me feel like I'm watching TV in a room at the Paducah Holiday Inn, ca. 1983. I have watched a bowl of oatmeal that was more interesting. What's with the weird montages? The clunky graphics? The photos of jaundiced musicians that look like they were safety-scissored out of an airline magazine? Feh.
- Speaking of musicians, do not ever show the public what the flute/oboe/violin/piano player looks like. I say, better heard than seen. Enough said.
- Why is it that every time I look up, there's some tidbit on the screen about when the composer died? "Schubert died in 1828" or "Liszt died in 1886" or "Bizet died in 1875." Why not call this channel "Elevator Music by Dead White Guys?" It would be more descriptive, and it might bring you some more corporate subscriptions.
- This brings me to your little trivia tidbits. I'm not sure who writes these, but I suspect these are either auto-generated from some big dusty reference CD-ROM from 1989 or they are written by a Mr. Bo Ring McBoringson who works in a broom closet in the Music Choice HQ and has a tuna fish sandwich for lunch every day with a carton of milk and exactly 7 Milk Duds for dessert. If you don't have anything better to write than when Stravinsky died, why not tell a joke? I can think of a ton that you could write about Bach ("Bach wrote all his fugues Bach-to-Bach in the spring of 1748", etc.), Lizst ("Q. How do classical composers get fresh breath? A. They gargle with Lizsterine!"), etc. At the very least, bring in a writer or two from NTN. They manage to slide some real zingers in their little trivia game answers, and I suspect they make those writers work in broom closets too.
Thank you for your attention.
Sincerely,
A Concerned Music Choice Light Classical Listener
I have resisted, for several days now, the urge to sit down and write an entry about my renewed love affair with prunes. Because I feared that a passion for prunes would mean I'm just around the corner from early-onset senility, and before you know it, I've got 64 oz. jars of cold cream and the complete DVD set of Mama's Family. And soon I'll be waving my graham crackers and scowling at my neighbors who leave their mailbox flap open and my tinfoil hat tells me that's how all the aliens get into our city milk supply.
Unrelated:
Quote of the day, or at least this morning:
We do not see the world as it is. We see the world as we are.
This was lifted from a NYT piece, quoting someone who had lifted it from the Talmud.
Other thoughts:
- Can't someone improve upon the umbrella, for god's sake? I mean, this design has been around forever, it breaks, it sucks, and you'd think by now someone would have come up with a better solution. I don't have any bright ideas, other than using some new space-age material (that's my solution for everything...), hire some Italian designer, and uh, magic happens. I'm pretty sure that's how the process happens at Target. And I love Target. ...Forget designing "a better mousetrap": umbrellas suck the big one.
- Ditto internal combustion engine.
- Negroponte's laptop UI. Hmm. The jury is out. I must hold one in my grubby hands and mutter ignorant remarks.
I predict that this blog will get more attention in the coming months, as I invent and revisit ways to procrastinate from writing my thesis. I also predict that my house will never be cleaner. The effects of thesis research are already being felt: today I lint-rollered my cat. She didn't seem to mind. Also, I have rearranged my medicine cabinet twice after I ran out of laundry to do. And it's only January.
Question: Is blowing one's nose a modern custom, evolving from our fascination with hygiene, or is it a natural human response to having a drippy nose? Did cavemen with allergies run around looking for leaves to wipe their noses with? Or did it just run down their faces? Or did they wipe it off when it dripped with the back of their hands? These are the important questions.
- Rosie and Trump shut up.
- More money. Less fretting about it.
- Lots of giggling.
- More meatballs. Specifically: Five meatballs, arranged in a star formation around the perimeter of my plate, with a small blop of mustard in the middle.
- More civic accountability; fewer asshat city leaders.
- My master's degree (finally).
- My tire patched.
- Being where I want to be, with the person/people I want to be with.
Why do you keep selecting the same 3 pairs of socks and wash just those when you have a veritable plethora of other socks to choose from? Fine socks. Happy socks. Socks that need to be worn and have their $7.99 purchase price justified. And stop hiding things in here. I see you. I know. Have I said too much? That's right. I'm on to you.
Several times in the last month, I have approached the door of my home, pointed my car key fob at the doorknob, and pressed the "unlock" button. This is a sign of something, probably something not good. Maybe a vitamin B deficiency.
- Shout wipes are the best, because I am a foodtard, who can't seem (still) to be able to throw food into my gaping maw with efficiency or accuracy.
- Burritos. Mmm.
- I've noticed that college students these days NEED a healthy disrespect for authority. Baaaack in myyy day (insert gramma creak here), part of every class was deconstructing the authority of the author, his/her agenda, context, advisor/mentor/nationality history, etc. Now college classes (the ones I've had lately) are just...boring acquiescence. Feh. Somebody, please, throw a metaphorical tomato or something.
- Contemporary fiction/commentary, in that self-conscious Dave Eggers vein that uses lots of commas, like I do here, and creates a sense of camaraderie with the reader through sly references to under-the-radar pop consumer phenomena like Shout Wipes to set up these ironic self-aware meta-reflections, substituting feckless navelgazing for "content" - that's really getting on my nerves.
- Cingular sucks the big one.
- I am starting a new gaming craze called Sudon'tku, where the player looks at an empty grid, yawns, and decides whether to pick up their drycleaning today or tomorrow, and then takes a nap.
I know funny spam-quoting has been done to death, but I couldn't help but giggle at the gook in this spam I just got:
Air Conditioning has a lot to answer for. [...] My disclaimer: don't follow these instructions. Who on earth decided to invent this word?
I guess lately I've been of the opinion that Canada is too big. for god's sake there are just a few spoils in the fridges and some darkness. What can you see from up there in the dark I ask?
Mr. SpamBot brings up a good point about Canada. And how Canadians see in the dark. It's my opinion that they must be of hypervisual acuity in order to avoid the elk and Celine Dion and the fast-moving nocturnal glaciers.
Some days, I just want to put my snow globes, office toys, blankets, footies, lamps, cotton balls, Glad Press n' Seal, silverware, dryer sheets, knickknacks, books, floss, and George Foreman grill into a big box. And then do one or all of the following:
- Get in my car and drive to Vegas and be a docent at the Liberace Museum
- Quit my job and sell laminate flooring and/or pharmaceuticals
- Take my cat to Hollywood and get her booked on Fancy Feast commercials (and a regular gig as a judge on Project Runway)
- Why can you always find Mama's Family on some channel, at any time, day or night?
- Go to Rwanda and teach web development
