Category: Life

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Will’s food rating system

We had lovely family dinner at Gratzi last night; it had been a long time since we had gone out to dinner, so we decided to go to someplace nice. A good meal was had by one and all.

Will’s dish of choice at Gratzi is penne pasta with an alfredo sauce (or is that alfrado sauce? I’ve seen both spellings), and he thought it was great. “How would you rate that on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the best thing ever?â€? Annette asked.

“I’d say… 9 and four-fifths,â€? Will said. And he then proceeded to give ratings to several other foods. Here’s a selection:

Asparagus: 0

Regular Milk: 2

Licorice flavored jelly beans: 2

Broccoli with ranch dressing: 4

Hot dog with bun: 5

Strawberries: 6

Chocolate milk: 7

Hot dog without bun: 7.5

Gratzi pasta: 9.5 (or 9 and four-fifths, though this morning, he said that was a 10 too)

Vanilla-flavored milk: 10

Most kinds of candy: 10

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“Waiter, I think there’s a drag queen in my pasta”

So, I’m killing a little time while eating this morning while watching this episode of Molto Mario on the Food Network. Mario’s show features three “guest” diners who ask Mario (what I presumed are usually scripted) questions about the food he’s cooking. Normally, the guests look like very well-heeled and well-goomed New Yorker yuppies, the sort that probably frequent his restaurants.

But this morning, one of the guests was a woman who looked kind of like Linda Richman, the Mike Myers character from Saturday Night Live way back when. Then she started talking, and she sounded like Mike Myers doing Linda. Okay….

Long story short: it became clear as the show went on that she was probably a he. Mario seemed unusually uneasy during the show, and at one point, he referred to his guests as “the fellas.” One of the other two men tried to gently correct him. “Ah, Mario,” he said, “you mean you two fellas.”

Mario’s response? “Well, let’s say two and a half fellas.”

As Jerry Seinfeld famously said “not that there’s anything wrong with that,” but not the sort of thing you’re expecting from a cooking show.

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Check out “Pound”(y), and don’t miss the Weight Watchers cards

In the course of surfing around yesterday while I should have been working on my textbook, I visited this post by John “A Writing Teacher” Lovas about blog writers who got book deals. I’m mostly interested in this for “official” (aka, English professor job) reasons, but I thought I’d post here because it was that post that took me to Wendy McClure’s web site “Pound,” which actually is http://www.poundy.com. Apparently, “www.pound.com” was taken. Anyway, on John’s web site, there’s a link to a San Francisco Chronicle article about how it was McClure’s blogging that lead to a book deal.

McClure has a memoir coming out called I’m Not the New Me, which I know nothing about other than it is a pretty good title. But personally, the part of her site that will keep me coming back is this collection of bizarre Weight Watcher recipe cards from the 70s. What ugly food they used to eat.