Depending on the situation and circumstances, I can be for or against convenience. As an example, I buy nearly all of my bread from the supermarket, but when I decide to make homemade bread you'll never find me anywhere near a bread machine, or even an electric mixer for that matter. I do all of my mixing and stuff by hand, and the dough doesn't even come close to seeing electricity until I finally place it in the oven to bake. When it comes to computers, I may build my own computers instead of buying them off the shelves, but once I have them powered up, I want them to perform their tasks as quickly as possible, and 99% of the time I'll go for something that helps me save time when I'm on here. When Microsoft introduced its Autocomplete feature to Internet Explorer -- the thing that remembers what you typed in text boxes before, and pops it up below the text box after you type the first couple of letters -- I was in nerdvana. Not only does this feature save me time, but it also keeps important search strings in mind when I'm on Google, so I don't have to spend time remembering what combination of keywords got me good information on something I'm researching for a story, or an opinion Website that speaks to my political convictions, or details on any of the thirty-seven people I'm currently cyberstalking.
Lately, though, sometimes I have found this Autocomplete feature disabled by a new technology built into some Websites, a feature that compares what you're typing to the Website's own repository of search strings instead of strings you've used previously. I first noticed this technology in use at Wikipedia -- for some reason only on the sidebars of entry pages and not the homepage -- and the biggest Website I know of that uses it right now is YouTube. Strangely, though, this is not my first run-in with this kind of technology; the first time I can remember seeing this in use was in the Sega CD adaptation of Jeopardy! In previous games based off of Jeopardy!, your answers, er, questions had to be entered either by multiple choice, or you had to get the spelling exactly right in order for the computer to recognize your question as correct. That's probably the biggest advantage of this technology: it stops misspellings before they start. After all, it's not like there's a Website out there devoted to YouTube misspellings ... oh yeah, right.
Anyway, while I appreciate that value of this new autofill system, I strongly dislike that it removes my ability to recall previously-used search strings. Although my student days may be over (for now), I still conduct a lot of research online. The end results of these research runs may not be tidy twenty-page MLA-formatted papers, but I try to learn as much as I can about everything that crosses my path, and rare is the time when a simple one- or two-word Google search will give me the information I need. Next month will mark fourteen years since I first got real Internet access when I started going to Antioch, and a good part of those fourteen years has been spent developing trial-and-error algorithms to use with search engines to help me find the information I need in the shortest amount of time. Autocomplete lets me keep that search string ready to return to at a moment's notice if I decide more searching needs to be done at a later date; now, with this new site-based autofill, Internet Explorer's native Autocomple gets wiped out.
In and of itself, this is a minor inconvenience. What particularly bothers me, especially about YouTube's autofill, is that the autofill can be used as a kind of front-end passive-aggressive censor. For example, type "sex " into YouTube (with the extra space), and the autofill goes bye-bye. Oh, there are still lots of videos on YouTube having to do with sex, from religious denunciations of our sex-filled culture to instructional and informative videos on safe sex practices to, well, sex, but the YouTube autofill isn't going to help you narrow down your sex search any. Worse yet, these word filters are used indiscriminately; try doing a search on YouTube for the Red Hot Chili Peppers' seminal album Blood Sugar Sex Magik, and autofill disappears once it gets to sex. Ironically enough, "blood sugar sec magic" shows up in autofill, indicating that Internet end-users have once again returned to the same silly deliberate misspellings of words it used to get around this stuff, started back when Metallica got Napster to pull its tracks off of the music-sharing service. In fact, I'm listening to an MP3 of "Enter Snadman" as I'm typing this right now. No, not really.
I know that what Google is doing with YouTube's autofill doesn't count as censorship since the autofill doesn't actually remove content, but it's still silly, annoying, and altogether capricious. For example, you know how last week, after Barack Obama gave that speech to 200,000 people in Germany, everyone joked about a charismatic leader riling Germans up with a speech? Well, you would think that YouTube would be a good place to go to find actual videos of Adolf Hitler's old speeches to compare to Obama's, since I assume they must all be in the public domain by now. Funny thing, though. If you type "hitler" into YouTube, the autofill once again gives you the silent treatment and disappears before it can help you narrow down your search. Now, I hate neo-Nazis and racists as much as the next sane person, but trying to put even the slightest veil up to prevent people from accessing the words and thoughts of Hitler strikes me as being only a few degrees separated from outright Holocaust denial. The idea behind freedom of speech is that you allow free access to the dumbest and most insane ideas out there, for the implicit purpose of allowing people to see how stupid the people who hold those ideas are.
It's even more galling that this would happen on YouTube, a Google Website. Never mind the inconsistency of Google not using this same technology to block search results from Google.com; Google is supposed to be the shining beacon of the Internet megasites, the company that has kept the great evil Microsoft as a perennial second banana, the corporation with the short, easy-to-understand philosophy: Don't be evil. Then again, this is the same company that already agreed to content restrictions on its Chinese Website in order to placate the Chinese government, so maybe this is to be expected. Google is, after all, out to make money, and maybe they stand to make more money by using this word filter in their autofill than by not censoring the autofill and, perhaps, getting accused of abetting searches for hate, violence, and porn. Well, they'd probably only get in trouble for the porn stuff, but that's America for you.
Sometimes the words that get blocked out by the autofill don't make any sense at all. For example, one of the people I subscribe to on YouTube is Mark Crilley, who has produced a number of incredible manga-drawing tutorials, demonstrating illustration concepts and techniques in a way that I understand better than anyone has ever explained them to me before. Keep in mind, my Dad did illustration for a living, so he tried to teach me a lot throughout the years. However, type "manga" into YouTube, and the autofill's word filter shuts you out. What exactly about manga is so bad that Google feels a need to filter it out? Anime works, so why not manga? Does someone at YouTube think "manga" is some of bizarre sex act involving a multi-tentacled monster or something? Well, maybe not, because "tentacle" gets through the autofill filter okay. I'm getting a headache trying to figure all this out, and I just wish I could turn YouTube's autofill feature off so I could get back to my old search strings. I'd tell YouTube what it could do with its autofill, but once you type "stick it up your" in its search box, for some reason the autofill won't help you narrow it down any further. Go figure.
Labels: freespeech, internet
Thurston Moore turns fifty today. FIFTY. Seriously, did I just lose a decade in here somewhere or something? On that very depressing note, let's play the friday5.org Friday Five.
1. When you go to the beach, lake, or pool, are you more likely to lower yourself gradually into cold water or to take a determined plunge and get it over with?
I haven't been for a swim since 1993, but back in the day if the water was too cold, I usually wouldn't bother with it.
2. How is this like (or unlike) your approach to other tasks or ordeals?
I avoid uncomfortable things a lot when I should try to move past my lack of comfort and just do whatever needs to be done. Witness what happened with that party I was invited to last month as just one example.
3. When someone gives you flowers, are you more likely to let them turn completely brown and gross before throwing them out, or to discard them the moment they take on that sick-flower look?
I give them to Mom for display down in the living room (I have no space in my room for flowers), and trust her to throw them out when the time is right.
4. How is this like (or unlike) your approach to other gifts, purchases, or relationships?
Ducking responsibility and forcing other people to make the decisions for me? Yeah, that sounds like me.
5. Think of your favorite movie (or a movie you really like, if you can’t think of a favorite). Some people say that the reasons you love your favorite movie are related to what you value in romantic relationships. How is this true or untrue in your case?
I'm not sure that there is a particularly romantic relationship in Dancer in the Dark, but I do identify with Selma's strong devotion to her son and her willingness to do whatever was necessary to save his eyesight. I'm not sure I could ever kill someone over something like that, but that just may be one area where I differ from Selma.
Labels: fridayfive
Anyone who knows me will tell you that I am not a morning person. As much as I enjoy going out to the parks and botanical gardens this time of year and marveling at the trees and flowers and the way the sun pokes through all the leaves creating wonderful kaleidoscopes of light, there is only so much sun I can take. Back before I went back to college, it seemed as if I could only work on my creative pursuits in the darkest part of night. Then again, maybe that had less to do with light than it did the fact that my backyard abuts Toledo's busiest highway loop. Anyway, although that has changed -- I attribute this to the fact that Dad never bothered to put blinds or drapes on my bedroom window -- I still prefer to be a late riser, and there are still certain activities that I find I can do better at certain times of day.
This is the main reason why this semester has been so hard on me. I have a very small class this term, filled with incredibly brilliant writers who I barely even need to teach; I can just give them a bit of guidance and turn them loose, and shortly thereafter get back a lot of top-quality writing. Combined with the fact that I'm teaching on the satellite campus, and thus saving about $30 a week on gas from when I was teaching on the main campus, and you would think that this would be an absolutely wonderful time for me. Unfortunately this class I'm teaching is also meeting very early in the afternoon. I have no problem getting up before noon -- heck, I'm only getting up about forty-five minutes earlier than my usual wake-up time -- but I'm having to cram an awful lot of activities into a very short span of time every morning before I teach. Combine that with the fact that I still have to stay up late at night to take care of other responsibilities, and I've felt totally out of whack for the past month or so. I can't get as much sleep as I need, it's been impossible to stick to a diet because my energy levels just won't stay stable, and I seem to go from long periods of cramming a million activities in a few minutes to long periods with nothing to do.
I didn't come here to blog about my schedule, though. (Although I do think this explains why my blogging has been so sporadic lately.) No, I came to talk to you about BBC America.
See, my sister and her husband moved out of the house on the first of this year, into their own apartment northeast of here. Less than two months later Dad died, and were it not for the fact that Heather and Mark are tied in to a twelve-month lease at the apartment, they probably would have moved right back in me and Mom. Heather's been over here on weekdays while Mark's at work, though, to help with cleaning and just to keep Mom company. In the fifty or so days Heather was a stay-at-home housewife (er, apartmentwife), she spent a lot of time watching television, and one of the shows she got hooked on was the BBC show How Clean is Your House?, a show where two British ladies go around to the dirtiest homes in all the United Kingdom, document how dirty and filthy and germ-ridden the houses are, and then clean the houses up with the help of the owners and a team of cleaners. It's the kind of reality television you'd expect the British to come up with, and I can see the appeal of the show, although it's definitely not the kind of show I would make a point of watching. Unfortunately I don't have a choice in the matter, as Mom and Heather insist on watching the show every day.
Normally I could avoid this just like I avoid everything else I don't like in this house, by shutting myself up in my room and working on things here at my computer while I blast some tunes to drown out the audio from the downstairs television. Unfortunately, BBC America, sadists that they are, decided to put on How Clean is Your House? starting at noon. On a day when I don't teach (or I teach in the evening), that's about when I'm having breakfast downstairs; this term that's when I have to grab a quick lunch before I dash off to the satellite campus. Our kitchen opens full-on to our living room, and the television faces directly into the kitchen. It's impossible to open the refrigerator or plug in the toaster without getting an eyeful of a refrigerator with more culture in it than a PBS mini-series, or a bathroom so grimy that not even Jigsaw would be cruel enough to chain anyone up in it. Needless to say, catching an eyeful of these images while I'm trying to eat my Cheerios does not make me very cheery-o.
I would like to just blame my sister for this; after all, I think the only reason she watches this show is because it gives her an excuse not to clean our house as thoroughly as it should be because, hey, at least it's not as bad as the ones on television. However, I have to wonder exactly what cleaning fumes the programmers at BBC America had under their noses when they decided to put this show on at noon. Noon being the start of the lunch hour is part of our American DNA; even in this day and age, the plurality of full-time jobs are from eight in the morning to five in the afternoon, with a lunch hour break starting right at noon. I know that the British tend to take their lunches, er, dinners closer to one or two in the PM, but BBC America isn't just BBC programming on an American channel. If they're going to take the time to bleep out all of the curse words our tender American ears just can't stand to hear coming out of the telly, and if they're going to produce a dumbed-down newscast to compete with our American dumbed-down newscasts, you would think that they'd at least take the time to research our culinary habits and take a few minutes to think through the fact that we don't like to see cockroach nests and caked-on human waste when we're trying to eat our bloody lunches!
I'd really appreciate it if someone could present me some other reason why BBC America would schedule this show during lunchtime, other than that they're deliberately trying to make us nauseous. Until then, I may need How Clean is Your House? to come across the pond and come to my house, to clean up all the vomit in and around my toilet caused by watching their show.
Labels: personal, teaching, television, work
The presidential election cycle slowed down enough this past month or so to allow news organizations to trumpet the fact that Belgian beverage maker InBev is purchasing Anheuser-Busch, the makers of that most American of beers, Budweiser. A hue and cry came from trailer parks all over this country, not only because another American company was being snapped up by a foreign conglomerate, but because most people know next to nothing about Belgium. Seriously, could you find Belgium on a map of Europe? Did you even know Belgium was in Europe? Belgium doesn't really play into this whole "war on terror" thing, so for the past seven years or so Belgium has had even less of a place in the broad American conscious than Antarctica. At least Antarctica has a climate that lends itself to crappy basic cable reality shows.
When I first heard of InBev's attempts to buy Anheuser-Busch, I thought that it was just an attempt to boost their own profits by buying one of the most iconic of brands in the most powerful nation on the planet. When you think of American beer, you think of that stylized logo, the image of those great big Clydesdales thundering across the untamed American landscape, the string of incredibly annoying yet highly successful Super Bowl ads from Bud Bowl to the frogs to the "whassup" craze that made most sane people want to jab folded-up bottlecaps into their eardrums. It certainly couldn't have been for the beer, because in case you've had your head in a keg for the past hundred years, American beer is horrible. It looks and tastes like urine, and has so little alcohol in it that the only way you can get any appreciable buzz off of it is to drink until your bladder becomes more distended than a Halliburton no-bid contract.
In fact, American culture seems to be built around our pathetic, piss-water pilsners. It isn't enough for us to get stinking drunk whenever we want; no, we have to attach a "my dick-bladder is bigger than yours" contest to it all. From shotgunning to beer bongs to keg headstands, competitive beer drinking is not only a large part of our American culture, it's practically the only reason 30% of young adults go to college. If you're in college and you have a couple of hundred bucks to blow, try swapping out the American beer you use in your drinking games with real beer from Japan or Germany, and see how quickly everyone is on the floor writhing in pain. People will start vomiting up things they won't even remember eating.
Still, what American beer lacks in alcohol, it makes up for in patriotism, which is why it's still so popular across this country. Drinking a Bud is like drinking the American flag, minus any potential health benefits from the flag's fiber. The only way you could make Budweiser a more prototypical American beverage would be to add high fructose corn syrup to it. It'd probably sell better than Bud Light with Lime, to be sure. Americans love their American beers, which is why it only makes sense that a foreign company would want to buy Anheuser-Busch, to get their hands on all of those beer-stained profit sheets.
Imagine my surprise, then, when InBev said that they were going to start marketing Budweiser across the world, claiming that Budweiser is like "America in a bottle." While I agree with the sentiment of Budweiser being an American flavour, the idea of marketing American beer to the world struck me as uniquely insane. It would be the equivalent of Mercedes-Benz buying Ford's Edsel line and selling it in all corners of the earth. No one knows better than non-Americans that Americans have a predictably humourous (or is it humourously predictable) way of deluding themselves into thinking that their products and people have to be the best simply because they're American. The rest of the world knows that our beer works better as a varnish than a beverage, so why would InBev even think of trying to sell it in countries that produce real beer?
Finally, though, the realization came upon me that the only reason InBev would want to ship Budweiser to all corners of the earth is precisely because it is so bad. Just like we need those fantasies of slapping our bosses around to help us deal with the pain of being bullied by those bosses, the rest of the world needs a release valve to help it deal with the fact that we're the most dominant nation on the planet and we never let them forget about it. From our politicians to our music to our consumer culture, there are few places on this planet you can go without the heavy hand of America smothering everyone and everything. (We'll probably spread our influence to those places, too, once we find oil there.) By sending Budweiser to all corners of the globe, it provides some much-needed levity to places where they hate our red, white, and blue guts. People there will be able to say, "We may not have America's power or influence, and our government might get pushed around by theirs, and our culture may be becoming a poor imitation of theirs, but hey, at least we have decent beer."
I've never had a drop of alcohol in my entire life, but even I know how embarassing it will be to have Budweiser, and all that it represents, ridiculed on the international stage. That's something that even I am willing to raise a glass to.
Hitler published Mein Kampf. According to Godwin's Law, I've already lost this introduction. Let's just do the friday5.org Friday Five.
1. What was the last meal that caused you to be ill?
I can't remember exactly when, but it was probably something I ate out that I thought was vegetarian but really wasn't. This is why I don't eat out that often any longer.
2. Are there any places you never dine anymore because of a bad experience hours after the meal?
Well, I avoided Big Boy for a long time because of a case of food poisoning I got there in high school, but I recently went to a Big Boy in Monroe to talk to a couple of ex-students of mine.
3. What’s your prescription for dealing with a food-caused illness?
Rest in bed. That's what always helped me whenever I got food poisoning, anyway.
4. When friends tell you about coming down with food-caused illnesses, do you avoid the places they name, or do you figure it’s a dice-roll wherever you go?
I figure it's a dice-roll, but again, I don't go out to eat that much any longer.
5. After numerous citations, a very, very popular restaurant that you’re quite fond of is shut down by the health department until it can get everything up to code. When the health department gives the restaurant the o.k. to reopen, do you go?
Probably not, given that I know of a lot of scuzzy restaurants here in Toledo that haven't been shut down despite some of the most blatant health code violations you can imagine.
Labels: fridayfive
Just wanted to drop a quick note here to say that I am still here. A combination of a busier-than-usual schedule (even by post-Dad's death standards) and depression has left me not only with no time to blog, but barely any time to sleep, either. I've been operating under a serious sleep deficit for four straight days now, and I still have a lot of work to do here at the house tonight and tomorrow before I can finally get some rest. Normal blogging activities should resume tomorrow, I hope.
Labels: personal
... or, as it's known around here, my sister's birthday. No Friday Five this week because it's about dreams and I don't remember too many of mine. (The ones I do remember are mostly unfit for public consumption, anyway.)
Labels: personal
This past weekend I picked up a CD/DVD rack from Best Buy. Mind you, I haven't exactly been buying that many CDs or DVDs (or even video games) lately, but I have bought so many books that I needed to repurpose one of my DVD towers for books. I put the storage rack together over the weekend, and it was a huge hassle because the directions weren't all that clear; I had to put several of the supports on three different times before I got them assembled in the correct order. It was only after I got the storage rack put together that the real fun began, though, because I had to move my big heavy bookcase about six feet to make room for the new storage rack. This required unloading the whole bookcase first, moving all the books into my sister and brother-in-law's old bedroom, and then moving the bookcase and loading it right back up. After that, I was finally able to move the new rack in here and get it fully loaded up, something I didn't manage to finish until late this afternoon. I had some more rearranging to do after that, and I still have a large pile on unsorted papers and other items in front of my television, but for now I finally have all my media organized the way I want it, and I have room for it to grow once more.
My big bookcase, which had been behind me at my workstation here, is now just off to my right, and I literally had less than an inch of space to fit it in between the wall and the windowsill, but it's here now. The shelves, particularly the top ones, are starting to sag, and I know that I've probably got twice as much weight on those shelves than what they're rated for, but I still want to keep this bookcase if I possibly can. Not only is it a good fit, but it's made by Sauder, and Sauder is one of the few local companies that produces stuff that I like. (I don't know if Sauder products are marketed outside of the Toledo area, but they make good-quality, inexpensive furniture and storage solutions.) I'm starting to have so many "big" books, though, that I may eventually need to buy a second big bookcase to house them, and I don't have the space for a second bookcase in this room. I could always put an extra bookcase in the loft or the vacant bedroom, but I don't feel comfortable having my books and other stuff in another room like that.
The other big development that came from this most recent rearrangement of my stuff is that I've finally given up on finding spare plastic cases for my old Nintendo games, and I'm just shelving the cartridges by themselves. (I have a small "library" of manuals in the new storage unit.) I had tried forever to find those old clear plastic cases like they used to put the games in at video rental places, because I thought they looked good and did a better job of protecting games than the sleeves Nintendo packaged the games in. Let's face facts, though; what kind of luck was I going to have trying to find standard-issue plastic cases for NES games in 2008? Finding these empty cases was hardly my life's work for the past few years, but it was something I kept trying every so often for the past several years. Rather than continuing to fight that battle, I just took the games out of the plastic cases, and now they're by themselves on my new storage rack (and taking up a lot less space, too). I guess now I just need to find someone else desperate for these old plastic cases and see how much money I can get for them.
Labels: books, dvds, personal, toledo, videogames
Two of Dad's loves were architecture and cars. One of the ways he put himself through college was to buy old cars that were being sold for a pittance, then fix them up and sell them for a big profit. You don't want to know how many times I had to hear his speech about how the car companies are evil for making their cars impossible to fix on your own. (It's not that I don't agree with him, but after hearing the same speech umpteen times you get kind of sick of it, you know?) Although Dad's delineation work didn't require him to have strong knowledge of architecture, it surely helped, and Dad did redesign the house after the fire. His ability to identify makes and models of old cars was awe-inspiring, and his knowledge of architecture was expansive to say the least. (I wish I'd had the opportunity to take him on a drive to and from MCCC's main campus, because he would have gotten a huge kick out of all the old barns I pass along the way.)
These past couple of days I've had a couple of experiences that kind of tied in to those things. Yesterday I finally went out to see The Shops at Fallen Timbers, a new "Lifestyle Centre" development along the same lines of Levis Commons. Back when I first went to Levis Commons I thought it was a unique new development; it's only been in the past month or so when I've gotten into researching mall history (spurred on by the recent closing of Southwyck I blogged about earlier) that I've come to realize that these developments are more common than I believed them to be, and that they're being built at a fairly high rate these days. At first Fallen Timbers struck me as a larger version of Levis Commons (I wanted to check out the Barnes and Noble at Fallen Timbers since it's about three times the size of the one I normally go to), but the buildings at Fallen Timbers look, well, kind of bland. The main buildings at Levis Commons are built with Victorian architecture in mind -- something I just happened to pick up from Dad, who only went to Levis Commons once and declared it was "too good for Toledo" -- and I think that's one of the main reasons I go down there as often as I do, even though I don't care much for the shops there. Fallen Timbers has shops that are more useful for me, but it's not the kind of place where I could just walk around looking at the buildings for a while. I suppose I'll go back to Fallen Timbers once there's a good special at Barnes and Noble, and maybe then I'll look around a bit more.
On the car front, as I was driving home from teaching this afternoon, I noticed a very rundown car idling next to me at a stoplight. Rundown cars in this part of town are a fairly common sight, but then I noticed that the car in question was a Dodge Neon. It really struck me at that point that, even though I couldn't care less about cars (as long as mine get me to where I need to be and then back home), I was looking at a car that couldn't have been more than fourteen years old, and I thought to myself, "Wow, that car looks really old." (Keep in mind that I drove a 1985 Toyota Camry through college.) Honestly, I don't see how I could have known that the Neon was an old car -- perhaps the dings and dents on the side were throwing me off -- but it's hard for me to accept that a car made in 1994 was old because, damn it, that's the year I turned eighteen, and I can't be that old. Yes, I am that old, I know, but I still don't get how I could think of that car as being old. If you asked me to name the differences in design between a car that was made fifteen years ago and a car that was made last year, I wouldn't be able to come up with a single thing to say. (At least with my Camry it had that boxy first-cars-from-Japan look to it.) Still, I don't need more reminders of just how old I am, and I guess now I can't escape them even when I'm driving.
On this date in 1862, Alice Liddell asked her friend, Charles Dodgson, to tell her a story while they were being rowed in a boat. Dodgson proceeded to regale Alice with a tale of another girl, also named Alice, and a journey she went on. Why does any of this matter? You probably know Dodgson better by his pen name. Lewis Carroll. Three years to that fateful day, the fourth of July of 1865, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was published for the first time, and I'll gladly take that book over fireworks any day of the week. Or year. On that note, let's play the friday5.org Friday Five.
1. If a traveling food show were to visit your neighborhood, what are some unique, regional foods it would spotlight, and where would it go to get them?
For better or for worse, if Toledo is known for any cuisine, it's known for Hungarian cuisine thanks to Jamie Farr writing all his local references into his Corporal Klinger character on M*A*S*H. The show would probably go to the restaurant referenced by Klinger most often, Tony Packo's Café, which I have eaten at a total of one time my entire life. I was not impressed in the slightest.
2. On an American cable show, a celebrity chef surprises people by challenging them to a contest featuring their own specialties (he usually loses). If he challenged you to your specialty, what dish would you prepare? If he challenged someone you know, what would that dish be, and how might the competition turn out?
Why not just say Throwup with Bobby Flay and be done? If he goes after anything of mine it'll be my brownies, although the irony here is that my brownie recipe is just a slight tweak of one of Emeril's. If he goes after Mom -- the only other serious cook I still know -- it would probably be for one of her mother's recipes, either macaroni and cheese or oatmeal raisin cookies.
3. What are your feelings about cooking shows on television?
The only one I still watch is Simply Ming. I grew up on Saturday afternoon cooking shows on PBS -- I still have a strong emotional attachment to Jeff Smith even after the scandals surrounding him -- and I loved Food Network when I first got it in the mid-90s. These days it seems like Food Network shows everything but actual cooking shows, and you don't see that many cooking shows on PBS because they aren't big money-makers.
4. What kitchen gadgets have you purchased because you saw someone using them on television?
I'm not a big believer in kitchen gadgets; I like working with my hands whenever possible. That being said, my sister spends a very large chunk of her husband's money purchasing everything Alton Brown ever uses. "A few simple tools" my ass.
5. You get to (or have to, depending on how you feel about it) host your own food show on television. What will it be called and what’s it about?
The show would be called Alton Brown Sucks (I've mentioned this before), and I'd dissect an episode of his show on every episode, pointing out all the problems with it. (In addition to just being a smug jackass who thinks he knows everything there is to know about cooking, he gets a lot of things wrong, and his recipes betray a strong southern US bias that's anathema to a lot of us. I mean, mustard and onions in macaroni and cheese? What the Toot?)
Labels: fridayfive
I joke, here and with my students and elsewhere, that I'm not the kind of person who gets invited to parties. Some days it's a joke, and some days it hurts. Tonight is one of those nights when it hurts, and hurts bad.
I actually got invited to a party tonight. Without going into too many details, it would have been a good place to meet some new friends who shared a common interest. Unfortunately, my efforts to find someone to go with were met with failure, and even after I'd resigned myself to not going earlier this week, my efforts to give my ticket to the party to a friend resulted in said friend freaking out before I could even broach the subject. I must be one of the few people on this planet whose insecurity and nervousness comes through loud and clear even on her instant messages. I hemmed and hawed all day about going by myself, but in the end I just couldn't bring myself to do it. I made some of the necessary preparations if I was going to go -- I took my second shower of the day a couple of hours ago and had my clothes picked out if I went -- but as usual I overthought things, and when I found Jeff teaching Mom how to play Texas Hold 'Em downstairs I kind of let that distract me until it became too late to go to the party.
I can give you a lot of very valid reasons why I didn't feel comfortable going to this party. For one thing, there was going to be wine there, and I just do not get along with people who get drunk. The neighbourhood where the party is being held is also not exactly a neighbourhood I felt comfortable walking in, and I would have had to walk a long distance between the party and the closest spot I could park my car at. (I must say that the neighbourhood isn't all that bad; a combination of being a child of the 'burbs and going to that private school for so long has really warped my perceptions.) I wouldn't have known that many of the people there, and because this was the first party of its kind held at this place, I didn't know if things could arise later with drugs or the police coming because we were making too much noise or anything like that. All of these were red flags that signaled to me that I shouldn't go, and taken all together, I think it made sense for me not to go.
That being said, I can't help but feel that what really happened here was that I chickened out. Unless we're talking about quilting parties or Scrabble parties or things like that, the alcohol and the drugs and all of that are always going to be concerns. Granted, the fact that there wasn't a previous "baseline" party to judge things off of was a cause for concern -- I know people who went to the party and I can always ask them how things went later -- but it wasn't like I would have been forced to stay there all night if I started getting uncomfortable. Then again, tomorrow being a holiday and all, I would assume that the risk of drunk drivers being out there tonight is greater than it would be on a normal night. There are times when my compulsion to think things through to the nth degree results in some keen insights, but this is one instance where I think it's just caused me to become even more neurotic than I usually am.
I have things I can do at the house tonight. I'm finally finding the time to read and write that has eluded me so well since Dad died, and although progress in those areas is slow, it's coming. I also need to move some bookshelves around here and make some space for my growing collections of books and video games and DVDs. I have the feeling, though, that all night tonight I won't be able to help but think about what I might be doing if I was at that party.
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