Submitted For Your Approval.

Point Of The Pie.

Author: November 24, 2021 6 Comments

Pumpkin pie Pop Tart. Don’t be fooled by the appearance.

Someone once told me “There is no difference between the best pumpkin pie you’ve ever had and the worst pumpkin you’ve ever had.” While not entirely true—I’ve had some genuinely terrible pumpkin pie—I get the point. There isn’t a single pumpkin pie I’ve tried that stood out as the best; all the good ones have merely been adequate. Pumpkin spice owes its popularity not to pumpkin but to its ability to elevate a tasteless, overcooked vegetable to something that’s moderately enjoyable enough that you want to eat it once a year, unlike, say, pecan pie. I will go through a brick wall for good pecan pie, but that’s another story.

So when I picked up pumpkin pie Pop Tarts I had pretty low expectations. And I had low expectations even though I like Pop Tarts. And some are definitely better than others. Chocolate Pop Tarts are better than plain ones, although I prefer the plain ones for breakfast because the chocolate ones seem too much like a dessert. I also felt compelled to defend Pop Tarts when a recent lawsuit came up alleging that the strawberry Pop Tarts don’t have enough strawberry in them. I’m impressed that they have any strawberry in them and I think the only reasonable grounds for a lawsuit would be if there was something in them that was truly unexpected, like catfish.

Also raspberry Pop Tarts are superior to strawberry Pop Tarts, regardless of the actual quantity of raspberry.

As I said I had low expectations for the pumpkin pie Pop Tarts and they failed to live up to them. Imagine taking a pumpkin pie, scraping out most of the filling, then folding over the leftover crust. Add some sugary Pop Tart icing (it’s not frosting) and that’s what you’d have.

They’re honestly the worst Pop Tarts I’ve ever had.

Submitted For Your Approval.

It’s That Time.

Author: October 31, 2021 4 Comments

So this card showed up in our mailbox announcing that for the first time in several years there will be trick-or-treating in our neighborhood. Or maybe there have been trick-or-treaters but they’ve just skipped our house and I had to eat all the Halloween candy I bought myself. It was a hardship but I managed somehow.

I talked to my neighbor about standing out in our driveways together. He’s very tall and I’m pretty short and I had this idea that we could be Cheech and Chong. Sometimes I pick up his mail for him if he’s away and when I take it over I’ll say, “It’s me, Dave, I’ve got the stuff,” and he’ll say, “DAVE’S NOT HERE, MAN!” The kids probably wouldn’t recognize us and I’m not sure how hip the parents would be. And he suggested he could be Jeffrey Dahmer and I could be John Wayne Gacy and I hope the kids wouldn’t recognize us and I know the parents wouldn’t appreciate it, and anyway if I’m going to go to all the trouble of putting on clown makeup I want to be a character who’s kid-friendly, like Pennywise, but that’s another story.

Source: giphy

The precise scheduling is funny to me because when I was a kid Halloween started as soon as kids started going out—usually just after sunset, because it would be gauche to show up at someone’s house demanding treats at noon, especially if Halloween fell on a school day. The anarchy of it was part of the fun. But I like having an idea of when kids will show up. It helps me gauge how much candy I might need, although I’d rather have too much than too little, and if I have any leftover, well, it’ll be a hardship but somehow I’ll manage to take care of disposing of it.

And that concludes this year’s Halloween parade although, as always, the final word goes to Lou Reed.

 

Submitted For Your Approval.

Bob’s Burgers Could Save Your Life.

Author: October 27, 2021 4 Comments

Source: eonline

So much has been written about Bob’s Burgers that I don’t know where to start, but then that’s part of what makes the show so great: you can start almost anywhere with it. Hey, I love Bojack Horseman, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and Schitt’s Creek, but those shows have long story arcs that extend over seasons, or the whole series, making it hard to pick out a single episode to watch on its own. Bob’s Burgers is an animated sitcom you can drop into almost anywhere and have a good grasp of things by the time the opening credits finish.

Just because the stories are small, though, doesn’t make the stakes any lower. The Belcher family deals with serious crises, even if it’s in a light and funny way. In the episode “All That Gene” Linda, the mother, worries she’s a bad parent, something every good parent thinks at some time or other (maybe bad parents do too, but they don’t care enough to do anything about it). And Bob says, “I mean, we both screw up. All the time. Sometimes we’re okay, I think. But a lot of times, we screw up.” It’s not eloquent or even reassuring, but he goes on to say, “I just think, as long as we’re trying our best, that’s as good as we can do.”

It’s like life: not everything is an extended ordeal. People do the best they can and move on, and not everything resolves neatly, but sometimes you just have to erase the chalkboard and move on because your daughter made up a joke Burger Of The Day.

Source: Eater.com

And the show does emphasize that the Belchers and their friends form a supportive community, which brings me to what I really want to talk about which is the season eleven finale “Vampire Disco Death Dance”. And that just happens to be the name of movie Bob wants to take his oldest daughter, Tina, to see.

This is how Bob describes Vampire Disco Death Dance: “It’s a dress-up-sing-along interactive experience. There’s an emcee, people talk back to the screen. At one point, people even throw confetti.”

Yeah, he’s really talking about The Rocky Horror Picture Show, but the world of Bob’s Burgers is a quirky alternative to ours so instead of Brad and Janet you have the son of a garlic farmer who goes to a nightclub and falls in love with a vampire.

Source: imdb.com

The other kids, Gene and Louise, are too young to see it—and if there were any callbacks to previous episodes someone would probably bring up the time they secretly screened the Jewish deli zombie movie Again With The Living Dead and terrorized all their friends—but Tina is thirteen, the same age Bob was when he first saw Vampire Disco Death Dance.

Source: AVClub

Every story has a conflict, of course, and Tina’s is that she wants to bond with a group of friends at school—and one of the show’s few ongoing elements is her on-off relationship with Jimmy Pesto Jr., the son of Bob’s rival who runs the Italian restaurant across the street—but she feels she doesn’t exactly fit in with them. They play a game called “drinking or not drinking” which she thinks is pretty stupid, but she’s a kind and generous soul, and the game is really, really stupid. It may also be a really obscure reference to a scene from Andy Warhol’s Blood For Dracula, although the writers of Bob’s Burgers don’t usually go for the obscure.

Bob is also trying to make Tina a part of his community too. He wants seeing Vampire Disco Death Dance to be just as meaningful to her as it was to him at thirteen, and that’s not going to work. They’re different people with different perspectives in spite of their shared lives. There’s a lot here about how communities are made of individuals and the give-and-take being part of a community requires, especially when Tina tries to get her friends to see the movie with her and they’d rather sit in the lobby and play “drinking or not drinking”.

There’s also a B-plot of Linda, Gene, and Louise setting up a miniature restaurant for the raccoons in the alley which goes as well as you’d expect. It’s not tied to the main plot but nicely mirrors it, giving Linda, Gene, and Louise their own parts: Linda cooks for the raccoons, Gene plays music, and Louise gets to play with fire. Or at least light candles. And it emphasizes that while you can’t artificially create a community we all still want to be part of one.

Source: Facebook.com

And that’s why I want to get back to The Rocky Horror Picture Show and the documentary in progress Rocky Horror Saved My Life. And, really, the documentary’s title says it all. Before the internet Rocky Horror was a place where a lot of us who didn’t fit in anywhere else did fit in. The audience participation gave us a feeling we belonged, even if—no, especially if we were among strangers.

Bob tells Tina that Vampire Disco Death Dance meant a lot to him when he was thirteen:

I remember sitting there, looking around the theater at all these people in costume, all of us singing together, and I thought, Wow, I’m–I’m not alone. I’m with people who, you know, kind of get me.They exist.

Yeah, he’s really talking about The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The moment is especially poignant if you know Bob’s mother died when he was young and he didn’t get along with his father and didn’t have many friends, but you don’t need to know that because at that moment Bob was really speaking for all of us.

Source: tumgir

American Graffiti., Submitted For Your Approval.

Fertilizer For Thought.

Author: October 20, 2021 2 Comments

Source: Botany One

So a new carnivorous plant has been identified, joining the ranks of the Venus flytrap, pitcher plants, sundews, butterworts, Audrey II, bladderworts, and bringing the total number up to who cares? Because carnivorous plants are cool. Mostly, anyway. The newest addition, Triantha occidentalis, isn’t a particularly showy plant, which is probably why it escaped notice for so long, and is one that would probably only be cultivated by specialists, so don’t look for it at the checkout line at your local garden center where you usually find Venus flytraps, pitcher plants, and the occasional sundew in plastic cases guaranteed to be dead by the time you get them home, but that’s another story.

What stands out for me about reports of this new plant is that carnivory is now so widely accepted and understood that even popular articles take it in stride and don’t rattle off names of other carnivorous plants, and they don’t show any signs of my personal plant peeve. Ever since Darwin reported that some plants really do consume insects back in 1875 up until, well, pretty close to now, every popular story about carnivorous plants contained some variation of the following:

Instead of being eaten these weird plants eat, reversing the natural order!

NO THEY DON’T. Let’s get this straight: you can reverse a car, you can reverse thrust, you can reverse a jacket from the ‘70’s, you can reverse a photo, you can have role reversals, a court can reverse a ruling, you can even reverse the polarity of the neutron flow, and you can be kind, rewind.

Carnivorous plants don’t “reverse the natural order”. Everything that lives eventually dies, and the Earth is a giant recycling factory where everything that dies ideally becomes sustenance for something else. Animals that eat plants, or, for that matter, animals that eat other animals, will, in time, become food for the plants themselves. Sooner or later we’re all gonna be pushing up daisies, capisce?

Carnivorous plants don’t reverse the natural order. They just cut out a few of the intermediate steps.

And this is the point where I usually share a video from Little Shop Of Horrors because, you know, Day Of The Triffids doesn’t have any catchy songs, but Botanical Chaos has these fun short videos on the care and feeding of easy carnivorous plants, and here’s a good one for right now:

And also here’s a video from Little Shop Of Horrors for obvious reasons.

 

Submitted For Your Approval.

Lucky.

Author: September 24, 2021 8 Comments

Last day of chemotherapy.

Why is seven a lucky number? There are seven days in a week, and while that’s got a long history it’s also pretty arbitrary—if we were smart we’d always have December 31st on Thursday so we’d have the weekend to recover. There are seven continents although that’s also pretty arbitrary because Europe and Asia are connected and so are North and South America, and the central part is pretty important too. There are supposedly seven stars in the Pleiades but look through a telescope and you’ll see a lot more than that. Supposedly there are seven colors in the rainbow but when was the last time you looked at a rainbow and really saw indigo? There’s the old dad joke that six is afraid of seven because seven eight nine, but that’s the kind of joke that’s only lucky if people are still willing to talk to you after you tell it. Maybe it’s something in the number itself. Seven is the largest single digit prime number, and it’s an odd number so you can separate it into two even groups of three with one standing in the middle alone, and it’s there saying, “Hey, do you know why six is afraid of seven?”

In games with two six-sided dice there’s a special significance to seven because it’s the number that has the most combinations so it’s the number you’re most likely to roll.

It’s also been seven years since I finished chemotherapy, which has me thinking a lot about how much happened in those first seven days.

My first day I went in not knowing what chemotherapy even meant, which sounds stupid now, but all I’d heard about chemotherapy was the side-effects: hair loss, weight loss, sickness. What would the procedure be? And I was afraid to ask which may sound even more stupid but I figured I’d find out soon enough, and it’s not as though I could negotiate or improvise something other than what was in the script.

With that first day, a Monday, I learned that chemo mostly involved sitting around letting IV bags of fluid drip into my veins. I expected it to be like a root canal but it was more like study hall in school, although less painful because I didn’t have a test on economics afterward.

Later in the week I’d develop severe swelling in my right leg from all the extra fluid, I was so exhausted from stress I fell asleep during an MRI, I got lost going to the bathroom and a nurse had to show me the way back to my room.

I had bouts of nausea and wondered if that was as bad as it would get, then it got worse: a guy with a guitar came around and sang “Edelweiss” to me.

I think it was during that first week that I had the minor surgery to have a chest port installed so I wouldn’t end up with arms like a heroin addict’s. I fell asleep during that too and woke up singing “Comfortably Numb” which everyone in the operating room found hilarious.

I wondered if I’d see any other side effects and, in fact, the following Monday when I went in I leaned my head back on a pillow while a nurse gave me a single shot. When I lifted my head up there was a clump of my hair on the pillow. The rest of it would fall out later.

Those first seven days didn’t so much establish a routine as get the worst of what I’d go through out of the way with things gradually getting better from there.

Six times now I’ve celebrated successfully finishing chemotherapy. It wasn’t the end of my cancer treatment—there was still recovery and surgeries that followed, but, as the one who had cancer, I get to choose, and I’ve arbitrarily picked this date as the one to celebrate. And six times it’s not really been something I’ve celebrated; it hasn’t been fun reflecting on what cancer meant to me, what it did to me. I’m glad to be here but six times I thought I’d be happier to be here if my body hadn’t turned on me, if I hadn’t lost so much to a cluster of runaway cluster of cells.

This time feels different. It’s lighter. It’s better. This time I just feel glad. I don’t know what comes next, but I’m ready to roll the dice.

 

Fun With Cancer, Submitted For Your Approval., The Weekly Essay

All I Can Say…

Author: September 11, 2021 10 Comments

Source: Vanderbilt University

Twenty years ago on this day I was at work when I heard that a second plane had hit the World Trade Center. A group of us, some of my coworkers and some people from other offices, gathered around a TV to watch the news. A woman next to me, whom I’d never met, spent several minutes on her cell phone. Her daughter worked in the World Trade Center and, fortunately, got out safely.
I spent the rest of the day in a kind of haze, like most people, I think, who weren’t directly affected by the terrible tragedies unfolding but still feeling terrible about the lives lost and unsure of what was to come. That day seemed impossible to put into words; it doesn’t seem any easier now, really, but I took some time then to go and sit on the steps of Kirkland Hall on the Vanderbilt University Campus, under its tall clock tower, to contemplate time and the world we live in, and to read W.H. Auden’s September 1, 1939.
It’s just as relevant now, if not more so, especially line 88.

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.
Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.
Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism’s face
And the international wrong.
Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.
The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.
From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
“I will be true to the wife,
I’ll concentrate more on my work,”
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?
All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

American Graffiti., Hail & Farewell., Submitted For Your Approval., The Vault

Please Dream Responsibly.

Author: July 23, 2021 6 Comments

“Molson Coors Beverage Company announced an ad they’re calling the ‘Coors Big Game Dream’ that uses something called ‘Targeted Dream Incubation’ to play commercials in your dreams (assuming you get some). Under the consultation of psychologist Dr. Deirdre Barrett, the beer conglomerate designed a combination ‘stimulus film’ and eight-hour soundscape that aims to ‘shape and compel your subconscious’ into dreaming about two signature drinks.”

–The Daily Beast

 

 

To: All Clients

Subject: Increased Advertising Opportunities

Good morning everyone,

As you are aware one of the impediments our industry faces is that, in spite of the increasing use of product placements in media, utilizing every available space, and efforts to turn every single person who’s ever lived as well as some animals into influencers, there are times when consumers simply don’t think about the products we’re trying to sell them. In an effort to proactively seize previously missed opportunities we are looking for ways to monetize the approximately seven to nine hours a day when most consumers are asleep. The technique of “Targeted Dream Incubation” is key to this new endeavor.

While this technique has been tried before technological limitations made it too intrusive. Our previous methods included calling people in the middle of the night and playing commercials. We also tried sending trucks equipped with megaphones through neighborhoods at night blaring messages about various products in an attempt to infiltrate the dreams of sleeping residents. We also tried paying aspiring actors to stand outside darkened homes and yell through the windows. Both of these methods resulted in some unfortunate incidents and litigation which is still pending, as well as generally negative reactions from consumers.

Now smart speakers and similar devices mean we can offer such advertising more unobtrusively, even without consumers even knowing it. To this end we’re looking at several options:

Since our first endeavor was for alcoholic beverages we’re looking at ways to preface the experience with “You must be 21 or older to enter this dream” in the United States, adjusting the number to 18 for Canada, Britain, and Australia, and to “You must be able to walk” for various parts of Europe.

Potential crossover opportunities. Our research has found that not all dream experiences are positive and we’re looking at ways to exploit this. We’ve had several pitch meetings to discuss the idea of reviving the character of Freddy Krueger from the popular ‘80’s film franchise. He remains popular in the nightmares of Gen X consumers and many have passed this on to their children. Maybe we could also reboot the 1984 film Dreamscape.

Regarding that same demographic we’ve tried, so far unsuccessfully, to enlist the band R.E.M. but remain optimistic they’ll come around.

We hope you’ll join us in what our former vice president of marketing Catherine called a “brave new world” shortly before she resigned and moved to an undisclosed off-grid cabin in Montana. Her last company e-mail included the question, “How do you sleep at night?” and we are grateful for this excellent suggestion for a marketing slogan.

Good night, everyone!

Source: Giphy

Not Non-Fiction, Submitted For Your Approval., The Weekly Essay

Eine Kleine Knowledge.

Author: July 16, 2021 5 Comments

Source: SkyView App

Arcturus was directly overhead, so bright I thought it was a planet, and it didn’t have the twinkle that stars are supposed to have compared to the steady glow of planets since stars generate their own light while planets merely reflect it. Or maybe it was twinkling and I just couldn’t see it without my glasses, although you’d think a twinkle would be pretty obvious, especially since Arcturus is the fourth brightest star in the night sky and fifth overall if you include the sun although you probably shouldn’t because the sun is so bright it’s just not a fair comparison.

Anyway I didn’t automatically recognize Arcturus. I know a few constellations—Ursas Major and Minor, Cassiopeia, Orion, but Arcturus is in the constellation Boötes. Actually it’s in the foot of Boötes and I guess no one’s made a joke about it being in Boötes boot because no one’s really sure how to pronounce Boötes and also no one’s sure who Boötes was. It’s always seemed strange to me that even modern constellations named for figures from Greek mythology don’t get named after A-listers or even B, C, or D-listers. Sure, Aquarius, Castor and Pollux, and, my personal favorite, Sagittarius, get to be part of the Zodiac, but as far as the Olympian crowd is concerned they’re third cousins twice removed who only showed up that one time at their great aunt Gaia’s nephew’s friend’s marriage to Monoceros. If that’s the case Boötes was probably the guy who swept up the amphitheater while everyone else was enjoying a wild wrap party at Aristophanes’s house and someone felt bad for him and thought he deserved a constellation prize. And then there’s Arcturus which is also a proper name and the origin there is just as fuzzy although the star is sometimes also known as Alpha Boo which sounds like something astronomers write in Valentine’s Day cards to each other, but that’s another story.

As I said I didn’t automatically recognize Arcturus and I probably wouldn’t have taken a ride on this runaway train of thought had I not been able to use an app on my phone to identify it—although speaking of fuzzy terminology I’m not sure it’s fair to call something a “phone” anymore when making calls is lowest on the list of things I do with it. And then I used my phone to look up information about Arcturus because, hey, what else was I supposed to do with it, call somebody?

Arcturus is approximately 36.7 light years away, which partly explains why it’s so bright. In celestial terms that’s, while not exactly next door, at least on the same block. I did some calculating and figured that the light from Arcturus that’s now reaching us started on its way in late February, 1984, a little over a month after Apple aired its legendary Superbowl commercial for the Macintosh.

Back then being able to recognize Arcturus, and knowing it was in Boötes, would have been impressive. It would have made someone seem smart if, perhaps sitting under the stars with their Alpha Boo, they’d been able to rattle off those facts. Now it’s information that’s easily accessible, and while I don’t think there’s such a thing as too much information I don’t think it’s making us any smarter. Sometimes I worry it may even be the reverse.

 

Keep Looking Up, Submitted For Your Approval., The Weekly Essay

Nashville Pride.

Author: June 26, 2021 7 Comments

Source: Out Voices Nashville

The people we choose to celebrate and remember don’t just tell us who we are as a society but who we hope to be. That was my first thought when I read that Nashville is naming a street after Bianca Paige, the drag queen name of Mark Middleton, a Nashville AIDS activist who passed away in 2010. And my second thought was to write something about the art and history of drag. Thanks to RuPaul drag queens have gone mainstream but drag has a long and colorful history which some sources trace back to William Dorsey Swann, a former slave who organized balls in Washington, D.C. in the 1880s and 1890s. Wikipedia also traces the term “drag” to the 1870s, but history is complicated, especially the history of people who had to hide who they were for so long.

Anyway I kept coming back to Bianca Paige’s work to raise awareness and money for research on AIDS because, having grown up in the ‘80’s, I remember how terrible the AIDS crisis was. I remember that the worst part of it wasn’t the disease itself, which was horrible, but the irrational fear it created. It wasn’t just a disease that affected gay men but, because they were the main victims, the AIDS crisis brought out the worst in some people. In high school a girl named Kay sat behind me in some of my classes and we’d talk. One week Kay was out for a few days. When she came back she told me her best friend, whom she’d left behind when her parents moved from Atlanta to Nashville the summer before, had died. He was gay and he’d learned he was HIV-positive. It was difficult for Kay to talk about it because of how he died. He got on his motorcycle late at night and drove straight into an oncoming car.

If you’re inclined to judge him negatively for that consider what having AIDS meant at the time. For too many, even those who could afford treatment, it meant a slow, agonizing death as their body’s ability to fight off infections broke down, and for too many it meant more than that. Too many lost their families and so-called friends. Even those who had families who loved and supported them were treated cruelly by strangers.

Kay wrote an essay about her friend and what his loss meant to her. A teacher wrote, in red ink, at the top of her paper, “He got what he deserved.” That attitude was far too common. There wasn’t a principal or counselor in the school Kay could turn to. There were very few teachers who would have sympathized and the ones who did would have been afraid to say anything.

Things haven’t entirely changed either. Tennessee is one of several states passing laws that specifically target transgender people. Those like Kay’s teacher may be fewer now but they haven’t gone away; they’ve simply found new targets.

Still progress has been made and it’s because of Bianca Paige and others like her. It seems almost too on the nose that there’s now a street named for Bianca Paige because she provided a place for people to go and showed us a way forward.

Source: Nashville Scene

American Graffiti., Hail & Farewell., Ramble With Me., Submitted For Your Approval.

%d bloggers like this: