Cooking and other observations

Hints from Hell

Today, I'm thankful for a new stupid premise that starts with if.

Heard this morning on NPR: "If you've got a family member who will kill you if you take away their dessert..." Enphasis by the host, not me. I'm imagining a Thanksgiving dinner at which everybody's packing some pretty serious heat. Don't touch my pie, bitch! Don't even look at my pie. Now pass me the whipped cream.

I think I collect odd premises that pop up in various media outlets, since I now have two. The first is the classic "If you're camping, and you've forgotten your eyelash curler..."

Anyway, Happy Thanksgiving to all. I'm about to head out to Robin and David's place to do some cooking. We're eating about four. No kids, it should be fairly low key. We did the same thing last year, and it was nice.

Oh, and hi Adam. I saw your driveby. I didn't realize iChat was open. Maybe a cat opened it without realizing it.

Floor show

My bedroom looks out over a wide alley. One of my neighbors is having some work done on the carriage house in the back. This results in annoyance sometimes, like when the workmen choose to listen to the local work-safe radio station at a high volume. Trust me, if you hate Celine Dion, you'll hate her even more when her dulcet tones are bouncing off buildings into your personal space. But somebody forgot the boom box today, so it has been fairly quiet, just the sounds of construction.

Until a few minutes ago.

One of the dogs that belongs to the house that's being worked on got out into the alley. The dog appears to be a Bichon Frise, so it's a little puffy white dog. So there are three burly construction guys chasing a fluffy white dog around the alley.

I have oten wished for a digital video camera to capture moments like this. There's a lot of hooting and hollering. And some mild swearing.

These construction guys, with their work-safe radio and their mild cursing, are hilarious. I think they just caught the dog, because they're walking back toward the yard. I hope the pooch doesn't bite one of them.

Butt. Ugly.

Several catalogs arrived in yesterday's mail, including one I had never seen before. Upon investigation, I discovered that it was "intimates" for "plus sizes." This is all fine and well if you yourself wear a larger-than-10 size, but nobody in my house does. However, I flipped through it. I was a little annoyed that the bras came in sizes 38C and larger, because a couple of them seemed to be both cute and not flimsy. If you've ever been inside a lingerie department, you know how rare that is.

Not that I would purchase a bra without first trying it on. Usually that's a recipe for unsightly back fat, and I'm opposed to back fat. (Please note that back fat is caused not by being overweight, but by wearing ill-fitting undergarments. A person with low body fat can have back fat if her bra doesn't fit properly. )

OK, so, I turned a few more pages and noticed the ugliest undergarments ever. I hesitate to call them panties, because these don't even qualify as granny panties. The "boxer pant(y)" is made out of "tricot nylon" and features elastic at the waist and leg. That would be fairly standard for nylon undergarments, except that when they say "leg" they mean "mid-thigh."  Considering that, I must conclude that even Granny wouldn't be caught dead in these drawers.

I had to look at the picture for a minute trying to figure out how and why one would wear the "boxer panties." I honestly can't imagine anybody finding it appealing, either to look at or to wear, and I really can't imagine creating a fetish around it.

The problem is that leg elastic. It's just so wrong. And the horrible shiny nylon. also wrong. Additionally problematic: in the catalog, the garment is depicted in "lilac," which seems to be a sick bluish hue that bears no resemblance to an actual lilac flower.That's more than one problem.

No way, no how should a grown-up human female wear this anywhere near her plus-sized thighs.

I urge my fellow females to Just Say No to the fugly underwear.

Something disturbing for your Thursday

OK, so these two 60+ women decided to have face lifts, then decided to write a book about it. (Excerpted in the WaPo.)

Uh. OK. The blurb mentions screws, so I'm guessing this was more than a tuck.

If they were going for the gross-me-out factor, they succeeded.  One of the women said something about how she was tired of having to put on so much makeup, but if you check out the picture,  they look pretty heavily made up. Don't they know that dark, heavy makeup ages you? I didn't see before pictures, but it seems like a few hours at the Stila counter might have ben almost as effective and a hell of a lot less traumatic.

Makeup for any age: cover up those circles, make sure your eyebrows are even, and a bit of lip gloss. That's pretty much all you need.  If you're pale, which I am, you need blush.  I don't think  that I'm going to feel a lot different when I'm 60.

They look hard. Hardened. Harsh.  Also, they don't look happy. So I have to wonder why they did this to themselves.  If the real justification is that they didn't want to be invisible, I can understand that. But I also know that if you wake up every morning and tell yourself that you look great, then other people will think you look great. I don't think that varies with age, since it comes from within.

That's also where beauty comes from, but I guess a confidence lift is harder.

You can't be both

While perusing the circulars for the local supermarkets, I came across a curious item, the Semi Boneless Lamb Roast.

A quick Google tells me that the people who package and sell meat do not actually find this term odd, and probably not oxymoronic.

What gives? Either a piece of meat has bones or it doesn't. Like questions of being pregnant or stoned,"Does this have bones?" is pretty firmly set up in the either-yes-or-no camp.

Now, I'm not putting semi boneless in the irony box, because today it's full up with White House flacks giving away Medals of Freedom to people who were critical in the war in Iraq, which is very much an ongoing matter and hasn't really gained freedom for anybody with the possible exception of George W. Bush. He's headed for a second term, which means he can do pretty much whatever he wants. This may or may not include making himself semi boneless. We'll all have to wait and see.

Poang goes to Tehran

I read a washingtonpost.com headline as "IKEA Passes Resolution on Iran."

It was a true WTF moment. What does semi-disposable Swedish furniture have to do with Iran?

A second glance told me that the answer to my question was "nothing at all, you goof." The real headline is "IAEA Passes..." and that makes a hell of a lot more sense.

Oh well. Cheap laugh.

Fair warning

From the Kinko's web site:

Like any driving directions/map you should always do a reality check and make sure the roads still exist.

All righty then.