Writer, Professor, and Everything Else
“Turkey gobbled up in 12 minutes,” as reported at CNN.com. Here’s a quote:
Sonya Thomas, 37, who weighs just 105 pounds (47.5 kg), beat seven men in the annual Thanksgiving Invitational: a race to eat a 10-pound (4.5-kg) turkey.
The smallest in the field, Thomas put her victory down to “swallowing fast.”
Interestingly enough, tonight’s CSI apparently features a crime involving competitive eating. Coincidence? I think not.
 You’re cautious, a bit paranoid. You left the scene for the suburban married life, but somehow, touble seems to follow you and piss on your mornings. You are quick to share your point of view, but have no problems with giving in to the requests of wives and wolves. Take the What Pulp Fiction Character Are You? quiz. |
Tip o’ the hat to “Drunk Again!”
Will and Annette and I went to see Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire movie this afternoon. Here are some of my thoughts on the whole experience:
Now, let me point out that I didn’t hear any of this, but I could tell that there was some kind of commotion going on over there. Annette gave me the very brief version of what was going on and I knew immediately that this wasn’t going to work. I started gathering the coats hastily and said “Let’s move,” and we did.
As we walked by Mr. Talker and his “hearing-impaired” son (I’ll get to that later), I said, quite sarcastically of course, “Thank you.” You know, a “THANK you!” kind of thing. Mr. Talker’s loud and somewhat sincere response was “Asshole!” Whatever. We retreated to seats a few rows behind.
Like I said, other than some weirdness, a good movie. Worth checking out.
While at school the other day, a colleague of mine noticed the vinyl Spiderman lunch box I was carrying. And yes, that is my lunch box; Will’s has a Yu Gi Oh! theme to it. Anyway, this colleague of mine said “You know, a lot of these soft-sided lunch boxes contain lead.”
“What?!”
“Yeah, they passed around a notice at the EMU Children’s Institute,” where said colleague’s children attend pre-school.
To get to the point: according to studies done by the Center for Environmental Health, there are some soft-sided lunchboxes out there that contain way too much lead. Furthermore, according to Snopes.com, this is not a hoax.
Now, as even the Center for Environmental Health web site makes clear, it’s not like the lead-containing lunch boxes are as dangerous to kids as eating or inhaling paint particles or something. Still, Will and I like to stay on a low-lead diet, so we swung by Home Depot and bought one of the lead testing kits suggested by the CEH web site. Happily, we are carrying around lunch boxes free of lead and made of pure vinyl/petrochemical plastic-like products.
Annette and I stopped by the Food Whole on Thursday after a nice morning walk. I for one like to stop and get a cup of coffee, perhaps something for breakfast (depending on what I had eaten before the walk). This semester I teach on Thursday nights, so I also usually get a frozen dinner to heat up for a pre-class meal at school.
Anyway, whenever I go to Whole Foods, even if it is just for a cup of coffee, I always make the rounds of the store in order to enjoy the various samples. The way I figure it, if I’m going to be paying a premium on my groceries (and actually, the extent to which Whole Foods is “over priced” is debatable, I think), I might as well enjoy all the perks. I had made my way over to the coffee area after picking out a ginger scone (sorta like a breakfast but sorta like a dessert, I guess), and there was a sample station set up for some kind of coffee. “Hmm, I’ll try that,” I was thinking, and as I was fixing myself a tiny cup from the pump thermos, I read the description of what I was about to try and I began to second guess myself.
The product I had poured myself was “Teeccino®,” a caffeine-free herbal coffee. I picked up one of the brochures they had there about this stuff. Here’s a quote from it:
Teeccino® (tea-chee-no) is the first herbal coffee belnded from herbs, grains, fruits and nuts that are roasted, ground and brewed just like coffee. Dark, rich, and full-bodied, Teeccino® brings you all the satisfaction of a robust brew with no caffeine reaction. Teeccino® tastes mildely sweet from dates and figs, but only has 15 calories per cup! Teeccino® contains 65 mg of potassium to give your body a natural energy lift.
Worse yet, Teeccino® comes in a series of flavors, including “Java” (ah, coffee flavored caffeine-free herbal coffee?) and “original.” On sample that morning was Almond Amaretto. Now, to be fair to the Teeccino® people, I don’t like flavored “non-herbal” coffee, so my impressions of their product may be a bit skewed. Nonetheless, I came away thinking that Teeccino® tasted a) absolutely nothing like coffee and b) icky.
And I guess the problem I have is the basic premise of the product: why would you want to give up coffee? I mean, sure, maybe you want to cut down on caffine. But that’s what decaf is for. They’re trying to make a comparison between this stuff and “herbal tea,” but the basic difference seems to be that herbal tea tastes good while herbal coffee tastes bad.
BTW, after bitching about this crappy stuff to Annette, I picked up the brochure I am looking at right now. Annette sighed and said “You’re going to blog about that, aren’t you?”
From a blog I read once in a while in my “official” blogging/teaching role comes this entry about conservative Christian churches sponsoring “Hell Houses.” Basically, some conservative Christian churches in places like South Carolina (where else?!) have been setting up these elaborate haunted houses –er, “Hell Houses” that are a lot like haunted houses in their churches. With one big difference:
Welcome to the creepiest stop in the afterlife — complete with real fire, demonic characters, a heavy metal soundtrack and unfortunate souls bound by clanking chains. In the knick of time, visitors are whisked away to a heavenly realm of redemption.
Under 15,000 feet of black plastic sheeting, the church has been transformed into a dark, twisting maze where visitors can witness scenes of death and destruction — from the living room of a Hurricane Katrina victim to the beheading of an American civilian in Iraq. Then, there’s the judgment scene where Christ invites Christians into heaven and banishes others to hell.
Personally, I think this is the kind of thing that is likely to backfire on these folks. Anyone who has ever read things like Pardise Lost or The Divine Comedy know that hell and the devil are the most interesting parts of the story.
Anyway, we’re all getting ready for the old-fashioned candy ‘n costumes sort of Halloween celebration around here tonight. This year’s celebration has been quite similar to last year’s: we went to a “Day of the Dead” party this past weekend, Will is wearing his knight costume again (check out the picture from last year to see what I mean), and I will be wearing my “This is my costume” T-shirt while passing out candy.
I want to be rid of all of this candy, too. Basically, when it comes to sneaking and eating candy, even though it really is pretty crappy candy all in all, I seemingly have no self-control. I feel like I’ve gained 20 pounds in the last two weeks just from tootsie rolls. Well, it needs to be outta here tonight, and Will will need to guard his candy haul carefully from me.
And I need to get back to the gym, too.
Annette and Will and I went to see Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were Rabbit on Friday for a late afternoon matinee. First off, it was a great movie– far from a “kiddie flick,” and anyone who has ever seen any of the other Wallace & Gromit shorts will love it. A lot of fun and worth seeing in the theater.
However, I am increasingly irritated about seeing movies in the theater. The expense and such is part of it, but I guess most of it is the people around me who seem to have no ideas about the basic rules of how to watch a movie in a public place. Like I said, we were there in the late afternoon. Among a few others, there was a large group of people behind us, and as far as we could tell, all of them had brought fistfulls of candy wrappers with them to the show. We heard a steady krinkle-krinkle-krinkle-krinkle, sort of like a grass fire.
And then, to make matters worse, there was a couple in their late 40s/early fifties sitting to my right who seemed to be in the theater not so much to see the movie but because they were looking for a place to sit to carry on other business. I mean, this woman was on her cell phone off and on, they were talking and talking about God knows what, and then, when they did notice that there actually was this movie going on, they would make loud and stupid proclaimations like “hey, LOOK at THAT!”
Idiots. And for the three of us, we paid around $30 for the pleasure of dealing with these kinds of people. This is why a really good big-screen TV/home theater seems like not only a good idea but ultimately cost-effective.
There’s a nice little write-up about Bombadill’s Coffee House in Ypsilanti in EMU’s student paper, the Eastern Echo.
I’m actually in Bombadill’s right now, certainly the best coffee shop in all of Ypsilanti and my choice of a coffee shop destination when:
But I still don’t have Ypsi in my veins the same way that Pete does.
Anyway, c’mon down and check the place out.
Via Johndan’s blog datacloud, I came across this preview for “Shining.” (It’s a .mov file, btw). Familiarity with the original movie helpful to get the comedy here….
Annette and Will and I went to see The Adventures of Robin Hood tonight, part of the Michigan Theater summer movie program. We had seen the original (and silent) Peter Pan earlier this summer in the same series.
Robin Hood was the definition of “a hoot” in all kinds of fun and funny ways, but I had very much a “seen this before” sorta feeling. Only the 1938 film was the original, of course. While watching this, I just couldn’t stop thinking of Monty Python and The Holy Grail and the Food Network’s Iron Chef. Here’s why:
The connections between Robin Hood and Holy Grail are prehaps pretty obvious. There are all the fight scenes, including the ones where Robin takes out 100 guys with one arrow; the whole bit with people just getting shot with an arrow right out of the blue; fights where someone picks up a heavy-looking table clearly made out of cardboard and throws it at a group that instantly collapses under it. But then there’s other stuff too. For example, the outfits: all of the knights and other “bad guys” hanging around Prince John are all dressed like the knights in Holy Grail— or vice-versa, suppose. And then for some bizarre reason, Robin Hood has a minstrel (Will Scarlet– and hey, guess what? he dresses in red!) during the fight scene with Little John, not unlike Sir Robin in Holy Grail.
So, what’s the Iron Chef connection? First off, there is a lot of food in the movie. I mean, when these people aren’t fighting, they are eating and they are generally eating some animal hoof or whole bird just off of the fire. Second, Prince John (the chief bad buy played by Claude Rains) is dressed exactly like “the chairman” from the original Iron Chef, totally over the top with crazy colors and sequins and everything else. I can’t find any pictures on the web to prove my point, but believe me, if you’ve seen either either of these shows, you know what I’m talking about.
Slight photographic update:
Annette did a better job of researching pictures of Claude Rains than I did. Here are a couple of images from this web site:
Everyone has to have a cape in this movie….
That’s Claude as Prince John in the middle. This picture really doesn’t do this outfit justice because it includes black pants and shoes with weird silver accents everywhere. Very Iron Chef, IMO.
