Julie, Julia, and the Twilight Zone

What blogger couldn't weigh in on the movie of the book of the blog, Julie & Julia, about the woman who was already an awesome cook and writer but was stuck working at the Freedom Hole hotline because no one can just do what they love and be happy without money, until one day Julia Child appears in her cupboard and possesses her, making her chop up all the haters, sparing the too-good-to-be-true husbands and amazingly well-trained cat?

ME! I saw the movie a while back, with Nan and Mum--who loved it, because they love food, and I can't critique the movie, because for a movie about women bonding over food it wasn't bad and I don't like picking apart other people's work because that's fucking lame, so I thought I'd fire off a list of things I learned about myself from the movie.

One, I am apparently a man. A man who hates food. An anorexic man, even, because after two hours of watching people have orgasms over food--and yeah, Julia Child made out with her husband, I just...you need to know that, not that I had a problem with that, or Adam Lambert's AMA performance for that matter--I was just feeling a bit like I'd had a really bad migraine.

Maybe that's because I had a migraine. See, I had just gotten into playing Café World on Facebook, not because I like food or anything, but...it's Facebook, you understand, and I use Facebook ironically, and I have migraines, and doing anything online for more than the minute it takes to play Bejeweled Blitz makes me start acting like all those people in The Happening just before they step in front of a combine harvester. I smell in algebra!

Anyway, I'd been doing fine serving bacon cheeseburgers--and I'm a vegetarian, remember (not many people do, because I don't shove it down everyone's throat)--but I'd staggered off to take Excedrin and my caramel apples went bad before I could serve them and my rating tanked and all the computer people weren't giving me coins anymore and after that maybe I didn't want to see two hours of a Nora Ephron film about food. Although the occasional up yours to Sen. McCarthy was beautiful. The killing of the lobster might have negated that, had I been in the room, but I walked out. I came back, I always do. I didn't walk out on Orphan, mind you. Orphan kicks ass. See it. You'll know when to look away.

Afterwards, The Trade-Ins episode of The Twilight Zone was on, and I couldn't stop staring at the old dude's powdered eyelashes, so maybe I was just being '80s-level picky that night.

This is not a reflection at all on the movie or the blog or the books or food in general, really. There was a meme on Facebook, again I don't know why I did it, and it told me I was a spork because I chose Julia Child as the person I'd most want to sit and listen to. Sinatra was on the list, loads of people were on the list, but I figured Julia Child would have good stories and not be all that dangerous and/or likely to make me want to hang myself afterward. I've since read Julie Powell's blog too and it's fabulous. So I guess I just get diabetes from Nora Ephron films, that's all. Sure. It's me. Me, me, me.

OH YEAH, speaking of me, blogs didn't have pop-up windows like, "YOU HAVE A COMMENT!" in 2002 and they still don't (thank god). Call me picky, but War Games prevented me from getting a modem until I was 16. I had a modem, in the house, when I was 12, and it had to go back to Games 'n' Gadgets, unopened, because of its untapped lethalness. So yes, I have an issue about movies misrepresenting the common everyday computer.

But you know what? That whole Julie/Julia story is an up yours to fear and that I can get behind 100%.

Even if I can't look directly at cream sauce without puking. Or aspic. Or raw poultry. Or fish. Or--okay, I'm physically incapable of puking in real life due to my hernia, so don't worry that I'm off puking somewhere. Anorexia's nothing to make fun of. But puke jokes always amused me, because as I've pointed out earlier in this post, I seem to be a very weird boy.

---

Nevermind that, Hey Pais has a much better take on Julie & Julia.

Julie, Julia, and the Twilight Zone

Cookies That Don't Cause Itching and More!

My cousin-in-law-in-law has started a blog about what inspires her, everything from design to her son and gluten-free cookie recipes. The cookies are very inspiring and I think that's why I'm featuring the blog.

FRESH beckett. Read and enjoy.

Cookies That Don't Cause Itching and More!

Bring The Pokémon!

A few movie nights ago Mum pulls out this bag of seemingly harmless popcorn. Yet halfway into the movie I began to get sleepy and hear music in my head. Never mind that I was wearing my radio and it was totally late.



I woke up with numbers scribbled on my face in a clockwise fashion with a magic marker. Judging by the way my nose threw a shadow on the four, I was facing entirely the wrong direction.

...I know, I totally would have expected pudding to do this, right?

Tags: February 2009, photos, food, humor

Bring The Pokémon!

The Bronx Diet

It's a well-known fact that The Bronx rose up out of the oceans of time as farmland. The ancient first Americans--Aquehung to the girls in the park--knew how to eat, as evidenced by their inability to die of cholesterol. Only the bullets of mad canoeists such as Jonas Bronck and cowboys were able to halt the immortality of early Bronxites.

So I was thinking, why hasn't the ancient knowledge of the fruits of the Earth been passed down to the humans milling about now? Why indeed. I must end this.

Food is all around: Due to its vast farming history, the soil of The Bronx is rife with the seeds of food. If it grows out of the ground it will make you feel good when you eat it. It is a fact. The magical mushrooms which sprout from the mercury-laden soil is rich in poisonous hallucinogens, perfect for those unable to buy both food AND drugs. Keeps the kids quiet and turns any long-time spouse into something fresh and interesting!

A river runs through it: There is no lack of interesting things to drink in The Bronx! The flavorful waters of the coincidentally-named Bronx River are just water to be drunk. But if water rats have bred in is not your thing, there are Snapple dispensers on every corner, full of tasty delights. Spicy Hobo Urine can be found bottled in the tall grasses on special days of the week. Check with your neighbor if they've found any, don't let them hoard it all!

Soup's on: Dandelions are just dandy! The entire entity known as the humble dandelion can be eaten, and you will not only lose forty pounds of fluids but you will be unwilling to taste anything but the fiery bitterness of the dandelion leaf. Waiting for the cottony phase of the dandelion yields delightful candy for junior!

Something On The Side: Drug stores are within crawling distance of every pavement for quick veggie side dishes known as chips. Here the humble potato has already cut itself into handy mouth-sized slices of crunchiness after mating with the local favorite onion and mineral sour cream.

Looks good on your face, too: Dollar stores are treasure troves of friendly garnish. Natural crystals formations known as lipstick are delicious when sliced over a salad of dandelion greens and raw morchella esculenta!

Not all things found in The Bronx are edible. Some things, such as automobiles, were dropped by wild birds and should not be ingested. If found, police should also be abstained from on account of their high doughnut and caffeine content. Rainbow water, commonly found in parking lots and along garages, will give you shiny hair but you will most likely be dead of indigestion before noticing.

I hope these handy eating tips make 2009 a healthier year and teach you self-reliance in case you ever get off the bus at the wrong stop and need to survive on wits alone until rescued. Soon even you will be giving a big cheer to the delectable cuisine of The Bronx!



Mangia.

Tags: February 2009, food, writing, humor

The Bronx Diet

The Streets Will Run With The Gravy Of The Non Pie-Eaters

Happy Thanksgiving, everybody! Having digestive disorders has taught me holidays aren't about food, they're about sappy warm fuzzy loving of your loved ones, so have a good time however you do it where you are, and as always thanks for reading my blog, it really keeps me going. Seriously.

Of course after you read my chilling tale of horror you may rethink encouraging me. *ahem*

On a chilly November morning, one shot rang out in warning
The ones who could fly took to the sky
Carrying the signal that justice was dawning.

From coast to coast many humans played host
To travellers hungry for flesh.
Restaurants and food banks all shared the same boast
That their turkeys had just arrived fresh.

From ovens and freezers, the vigilantes rose
Taking up weapons their slaughterers chose
"Pardon me!" the headless turkeys said
Pulling out muskets to shoot the chefs dead.

The sun set on houses engulfed in flames
Grinders ground down the meat-eaters' remains
A message was left in the ransacked malls
Smeared ten feet high in blood on the walls
A simple wish meant for you and I

EAT PIE OR DIE.

The Streets Will Run With The Gravy Of The Non Pie-Eaters

Nowhere Else On Earth That I Would Rather Be

Odds are that as this is being posted by the millions of little people who live in the tubes of the Internet, I'm off careening down some street swearing loudly at the maniacs who have someplace more important to be than the delightful back streets of Co-Op City. I can't blame them at all, I am most likely also looking to get as far from the road as I can, because it's like the Autobahn, but with traffic cameras.

It isn't a road I have to travel, it isn't a road I need to travel, it certainly isn't a road I want to travel. But I'm doing it because someone needs me to do it, which was the whole reason I got a driver's license in the first place.

If the lights are in my favor and give me a few seconds to think every now and then, I will lament not being home with my cats and dog, taking pictures and writing ridiculous stories. Even if the lights are not in my favor you can be sure that right now I'm wishing I was on any other road.

Nowhere Else On Earth That I Would Rather Be

This Rice Is Delicious, You Must Try Some!

Signing up for NaNoWriMo again this year, I ended up discovering a website that runs vocabulary-building multiple choice words by you, and for each correct match, the UN World Food Program somehow finds this out and sends 20 grains of rice to...they don't say. They donate rice. Seeing how I've clicked on The Animal Rescue Site for about ten years now, I'm guessing my vocabulary is about to get way better.

Which is good, because when I found FreeRice I was in the middle of my usual transformation into Nell and I could use, uh...that.

First I had no one to do the sign language with, then I had no one do speak Spanish to, then the brain mites came for my English.

This Rice Is Delicious, You Must Try Some!

The Week I Got Verbose Late At Night

Much of this week was taken up with repairing technology. I think it all went rather well, now I just need to find the cure for the kind of injuries incurred crawling around behind furniture with a FANTASTIC-SMELLING coaxial cable (I like the smell of new cables, lumber, eggcrate mattress pads and cat armpits) and playing with IDE ribbon cables (yes, I inhaled).

We saw The Forbidden Kingdom, the new Jackie Chan/Jet Li movie. I mean, come on, it's got Jackie Chan! And Jet Li! And...a white boy as the main character. He turns out okay, though. It was sort of like The Wizard of Oz meets The Katate Kid with some Lord of the Rings thrown in for good measure. And the ending was nearly better than Xanadu, but if I say more than that I'll spoil it.

Somehow I managed to not know anything about the Large Hadron Collider until the logo changed on Google on the day the potential black hole maker was turned on. Of course, once I knew about it I started to wonder if I should attribute the way my dog walks around looking spooked to some special canine knowledge that the planet is being sucked in on itself. Then she saw the neighbors and all was right with her world again. Hussy.

I had decided not to write anything about 9/11 this year, because I've told my story of that day so many times and all I wish now for everyone who died as a result of that day needs is peace. So I was out in the yard, taking pictures of the wildlife and cloud formations, and this bird, perfect little flying bird-shaped bird, got into one of the pictures. The angle reminded me of one of the last pictures I'd taken before that Tuesday in 2001, one that everyone went crazy over because wow, the colors! And a plane, not blurry at all, just PBBBT in the middle of the shot. It was the last time I deliberately took a picture of an airplane. I don't like airplanes, never did, much like I wouldn't like living in the path of oncoming trains or buses, so the picture caught "Ew," and I rarely thought about it over the years. It's sleep deprivation that makes me think a bird reclaiming the sky in my photographs is worthy of an entire post and 189 words the next day, but there it is.

If there's anything that stays consistent about 9/11, it's that we watch a lot of movies that day. No, really, that may seem harsh but there comes an hour when I need to stop experiencing things I can't fix. Generally this is about ten minutes after I wake up, but the women I live with are hardcore. TCM was playing a bunch of Kay Francis movies so I got to see Gloria Stuart (I make no apology for how many times I've seen Titanic) play pool and crash a car in Street Of Women and then we all started cracking up during Give Me Your Heart because Robert Osbourne had to tell the story about Kay Francis' problem with the letter R. I realize I've just made people who can't form Rs very angry, but remember, I can't walk around in sunlight without looking like a drunken maniac, so feel free to giggle at that and we'll be even.

I had the unfortunate experience of not only finding aphids checking out my forsythia, but a chunk of rot in one of the side supports of my swing--now entering its twentieth year of standing outside in sun, rain, snow...hell, I wouldn't have made it past that first summer. I busted out the horticultural oil for the aphids, but found that the tub of wood filler downstairs shares my tendency to crack and dry out over time. So I used Phenoseal. I caulked wood. The end is nigh but I'm holding on. I'll be damned if I don't go out swinging. As high as possible. By moonlight. Listening to '80s new wave. Surrounded by cats. You know, that swing has tried to kill me three other times, but I keep coming back for more. Sometimes I wonder if my love of swingsets is connected with my loathing of things like tags in clothing and being touched or my ability to blather on at length about the songs that were playing when I had a thought twenty-four years ago. Most of the time I don't wonder about it at all.

This week Mum made pancakes, and when Mum makes pancakes, I eat pancakes for days. Those pancakes frikkin' rule. Refrigeration and microwaves are also pretty neat.

Hurricanes aren't neat, though. Way to make me feel like a whiner about my rot, Ike. Stay safe, kids.

The Week I Got Verbose Late At Night

I Slip Further Into My Split Personality.

Last Saturday we were still not finding movies that were more interesting than Olympic tennis, but we tried anyway.

I Could Never Be Your Woman, and this is a first for all the movies we watched this year, we turned it off before Paul Rudd even showed up. One of the main draws was Tracey Ullman in the cast, and she was a pretty neat pissed off Mother Nature ranting about humanity but um...then there was a plastic surgery montage. A graphic plastic surgery montage. I guess it just wasn't the right night for it, we did give it another five minutes after Saoirse Ronan (fabulous actress nominated for an academy award for Atonement) was given a line describing what she found in her underpants at school that day, but when the period storyline seemed to be dragging on longer than most girl's first--I'M SORRY GUYS, I'LL STOP NOW.

We checked out another movie, Meet Bill. Once again, we went for it based on the cast (Aaron Eckhardt! Jessica Alba and Timothy Olyphant are in it too, and Craig Bierko's not credited but he is in it as well and so that was a nice surprise). I learned that night that I prefer guy awkwardness comedies to girl awkwardness comedies. Because the second movie was better.

Sunday morning I woke up in the middle of a midlife crisis. I hate that. It's been happening more often (again--last time was 2001), and I hope it stops (again--sooner than six months later) because it's bloody annoying and there's very little I can do about the state of my roof even if I was near it. After a while I went back to sleep, and luckily something in that sleep made me want to repair the couch when I saw it again. It's got these rods that go through the coils, you see, and one rod has slid sideways out of one coil ages ago. I couldn't get that to go back but by god I had scrap wood to make a BETTER support. Then again I was told it was a bit rigid, so maybe better isn't the right word.

Sunday also redeemed my faith in movies. Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day is crazy adorable if you happen to love Frances McDormand and Ciarán Hinds, which we do.

The Olympics continued to be on and I continued to get more interested in Beach Volleyball despite knowing Tibet and Burma are still having a bad time. Not in Beach Volleyball, just in general. I keep assuring myself watching something that's being broadcast anyway is not going to doom Tibet anymore than if I didn't watch it. It's the same reasoning people have used on me for why I should eat meatballs. It isn't really necessary, you know, Nan and Mum's meatballs are on the list of exceptions because really, fifty years down the line (and unfortunately it looks like I will have another fifty years) will it matter than I refused bits of dead cow or that I ate the family meatballs? Exactly.

Around Sunday I also started to question the amount of reviewing that I'm doing.

Like on Monday, while I was watching the two-hour Chinese beach volleyball match getting some writing done, I slowly noticed parts of my innards burning. I hadn't eaten anything to cause it unless the peanut butter finally decided to kill me--oh, that's right, I lifted a couch. You know, the first year I had a hiatal hernia, I totally thought I'd inherited exploding heart, and then weeks went by and I kept not being dead, and now some twelve years later, I no longer think I'm dying so much as I hope I would, quickly, because the burning, it burns. Alas, I will live, and next week I hope to report that all my parts have gone back down where they belong, quicker because of my tilted bed.

Other highlights of my week were rescuing a ninja ladybeetle (this was the bizarro black-with-a-red-dot variation) from a scaly euonymus branch I was pruning by letting it walk on me, and being asked by someone I don't know on Twitter if I wanted to do it. The Twitter post he replied to was a lament about not having a fan built into my brain, so perhaps he was just offering to help me install one. Still, I declined. I also rethought my original response of, "Pfft! In 140 letters?!" because maybe I'd be hitting a nerve. Wouldn't want to do that to someone who's been looking for a lady for sex since May (going by what came up when I Googled his username) and obviously has no idea who he was hitting on.

I Slip Further Into My Split Personality.

I Have Said Fluffernutters And Movies Are Life.

I seem to have completely shifted this review of what I've actually accomplished in a week down to what movies we've watched. In the end, I have the feeling that will be more conversation-worthy.

For instance, if someone asks me what's new with me, and I say I almost drove into another car because the sunlight flickering off my windshield caused me to become what they call in medical terms, "weird," that's not going to end as well as me saying I saw a movie I thought was great. Unless of course I'm dealing with some of the people I know who don't watch movies, and then I'm left with mentioning that I bought Round-Up to burn the grass out of the driveway. Also not worth blogging about unless I was telling a story from the viewpoint of one of those blades of grass, who did nothing to deserve such a hideous fate except come into being in the wrong place and time. Much like me. Except I don't even need chemicals to wilt in the sun.

On that cheery note, 27 Dresses was actually way better than I expected it to be. I liked the cast, though, so that could have helped. Nan has loved Katherine Heigl from the time she saw her in Love Comes Softly, so that was a main reason we even sat down to watch this one. Luckily in this movie no one gets a horse dropped on them, and it either wasn't too sappy for me or I'm getting old. If you liked While You Were Sleeping, you will like this.

The next night we watched The Mist. We're Stephen King fiends, so of course we watched it, come on. Don't watch it right before you go to bed because it will shake you up. The final horror of it is not the scary monsters, either. Also, Lisa Gerrard, please stop cutting my heart out, you siren, you.

One of Nan's late night finds was Angel's Dance, it's one of those wacky dark comedies that I grew up on. Jim Belushi is teaching a guy to be a hitman, and Sheryl Lee from Twin Peaks starts out as the kookiest mortician and I won't say what she turns into, but just watching her set up the wall of photos of bodies she'd made up cracked me up. I need to watch Twin Peaks again.

Due to the asinine removal of our local grocery store, we have to get bread from a bodega that Mum swears doesn't carry rye bread because, "It's Jewish and the owners are Middle Eastern." I'm not sure about that, but while we wait for the replacement store across the street to open its doors, I switched from rye bread to Wonder Whole Wheat. It's a momentous occasion, you know. I've been eating rye bread and peanut butter first thing in the morning nearly every day for 12 years. Now I'm eating some sort of whole-wheat-made-out-of-white-bread, and I like it. What is wrong with me? I caved, I rolled over, I shifted loyalties. Meh, never was crazy about caraway seeds anyway. (I'm aware rye bread comes without seeds, but my aunt and I are the only ones who like it that way...so...we don't get that.)

This week I also shredded three bagloads of old invoices and statements, thereby falling behind in my goal to complete 24 comic strips in one month by a day, and I think I cut my hair. That might have been last week, however.

I Have Said Fluffernutters And Movies Are Life.

Things I Can't Believe Exist.

What a time to be alive. There is a grill--a small one, mind you--that has the ability to play MP3s.

MEAT AND MUSIC. Not entirely my thing, but wow. Gone are the days of having a radio sitting on the table taking up all that space that could be used for the potato salad, no, now there are 10-watt speakers inside of a George Foreman grill.

As a child, before my first boombox, Nan would pile her Barbra Streisand albums into the 6-foot long, 4-foot-high, 8-Track capable stereo upstairs in the living room and crank that baby up loud enough that we could hear it in not only the backyard, but Connecticut. To this day every time I smell a barbecue I can hear Guilty. (This was back before my intestines rebelled against 80% of the things I ate so that's one of my good memories. I know it may be hard to tell for some of you kids who don't get how fantastic an album Guilty really is. I'm not even playing with the title and saying I had nothing to be guilty of, eating a cheeseburger, really.)

As good an idea as this may seem, I don't understand how the wiring of the 10-watt speaker inside the MP3 grill doesn't get damaged by the searing heat of grillin'. Not only that, I mean, there's a plug for an MP3 player. Like, you have to plug your player into the barbecue. Think about this. Think about the ways this could go wrong. iPods aren't cheap, and I've heard rebuilding a library in one is like trying to reconstruct your ex out of Lego. To each their own.

The Tupperware boombox seems safer to me, somehow. Not that I'll be trying that any time soon as I wear my music on my head and since the time that I played my tape of Frank's Wild Years I tend not to try exposing my family to new music at dinner.

Here is some dinner music for your weekend by Barbra and Barry and Tom Waits, your results may vary.

Things I Can't Believe Exist.

Dear Guy Behind The Deli Counter,

Those plastic gloves you wear are meant to keep your germs off the food. So holding your cell phone to your head while wearing the gloves (I appreciate you switching the phone to your other gloved hand while you worked the slicer...I'm sure you noticed me gaping in horror staring) sort of defeats the purpose. What else do you do while wearing the gloves, I wonder?

Shake hands with the customers?

Oh my.

I'm...sorry I saw all that.

Dear Guy Behind The Deli Counter,

Recipes Of The Weird: Cereal Mash-Ups

The other night, we had cereal for dinner because Mum's been making these big meals like, a potato and some red beans, and dammit I was full. Nan too. In the house, we have three types of cereal: Rice Krispies, Special K with Red Berries, and the almond style Honey Bunches of Oats.

We put all three in our bowls. We created Honey Bunches of Special Krispies. And it was good.

Recipes Of The Weird: Cereal Mash-Ups

An Experiment of the Most Mute Kind

Looking around this Internet thing, there are a lot of hits on searches about losing one's voice. Mainly things like, "I have to sing tomorrow, OMG, what do I do?!" and invariably, there will be at least one reply that will invoke hot sauce.

I'm allergic to hot sauce, you know, once upon a time I ate a pretzel using the same hand that I'd used to rub Capzasin-P onto my arm. Doctors don't technically call what happens anaphylaxis, but for five years, among the symptoms of my exposure to hot sauce is the loss of my voice.

And so it was that I took out a packet of Yi Pin hot sauce that came with some Chinese food we got, and emptied the packet onto a slice of bread. Eating the bread did not kill me. It did not even burn...at first.

I got my voice back.

Ten minutes later, I'd lost my voice again.

The next day, I tried mustard. Mustard, Lowry's Seasoned Salt, and paprika. All together, because I felt like rushing the experiment. I got my voice back for a few minutes.

The next day, I took a spoon. Onto the spoon I put red pepper flakes, and coated that in honey. My thinking was that the honey would slow the pepper down as it went down my throat. It did! It's burning still...but not my throat.

Today, I just left myself alone. My findings are that the thing which could have killed me for five years now allows me to speak, if only momentarily, so I can only conclude that I have been replaced by a replica.

It boggles the mind.

An Experiment of the Most Mute Kind

Nestlé Pretzel Flipz.

You may recall me saying weight loss was taking place. Well, that may be, but remember I fall over in strong winds, so I can afford to eat five of these things:



They are, as you might imagine, of the devil. Pretzels, coated in white fudge. And they are delicious. I'm sure that the only reason there are any still in the house after two weeks is due to the design of the container, which is so tall it ended up on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator, and it keeps getting pushed behind the eggs and containers of spaghetti. Really. I'm not hiding them! I didn't even think they'd be there when I looked last night.

I never need to sleep again, thesethingsaresogreat...gah. *drool*

Looking for that picture, I found a petition to bring Nestlé Flipz back to the UK. They took their Flipz, man. They took their Flipz.

Not fair.

Yogurt-covered raisins are also really good, but I haven't seen those anywhere since the '80s, when I ate the entire bag by myself during an episode of 3-2-1 Contact. FOOD=FUEL!

Nestlé Pretzel Flipz.

Now is your chance to laugh at me.

Just like the gods do.

I would prefer to be a vegetarian, you may know this already. My reasons are not important, but taking my meat-eating mother to grocery stores where blood then starts dripping out of the wagon because there are freshly killed cow parts in there may very well be one of those reasons.

I'll leave that up to you to decide.

Now is your chance to laugh at me.

Trick or Treat?

If you watch TV for longer than three minutes, you might be familiar with the ads for the new 3 Musketeers Mint candy...thing. The ads show a woman eating a long candy bar that makes it snow or something because mint means snow! Very much like Peppermint Patties bring on hallucinations of ski lifts.

For a few weeks, we looked in our stores for these seemingly wondrous things, because if there's anything we need, it's candy. And possibly a blizzard. I finally found a bag of bite-size 3 Musketeers Mint candy things at the Rite-Aid Halloween sugar-fest. Me, buying candy? Something is wrong with the planets.

3 Musketeers Mint taste exactly like Peppermint Patties.

However, even the small Peppermint Patties are bigger than these 3 Musketeer Mint things. The name is bigger than the candy. The candy is a one-inch square. That's unfair, if you ask me. I just get into eating candy and it's gone.

I have eaten five 3 Musketeer Mint things in the past hour. It's not snowing yet, unless you take my perpetual seborrhea into account, and I wish you wouldn't, because it freaks me out. Now all I can think of is how many Peppermint Patties I used to eat as a kid, and I wonder what happened to the wrappers. I was going to use them as tiny book covers, man! Anyone who has seen B. Original must realize how ahead of my time I was to consider making books out of candy wrappers. Retro '70s candy wrappers at that, it would've been fabulous.

Happy Halloween, I hope your sugar buzz makes you as high as me!

Trick or Treat?

How I Almost Ruined Meringue.

I woke up slurring. But that was not it. I could hear just fine. What I heard were instructions to gradually add the sugar when the egg whites were "frothy."

"AH DA ESS NOW!" I believe I said, then realized it was the eggs bubbling, and said, "DE SUGR! AH DE SUGR! DEY SAH FROHY! SAR ADDIN IT!"

I actually enunciate a little better than this when my jaw's all locked up thanks to my ventriloquism fixation of 1986, but I have to give an idea of what I must sound like to people, and that's the one I'm going with today. Anyway, I heard the word frothy, saw bubbles, and commandeered the making of meringue.

Fifteen minutes later, meringue was just beginning to form. Why? Because "frothy" is not when you add the sugar. "Frothy" is like when you get rabies from drinking too much peroxide (don't do it, kids) and a quick look at "How to akme merigue" on Google told me that the egg whites had to be way past frothy to start getting some sugar.

Notice how I develop dyslexia when I'm slurring. I love Sunday. Not as much as I love pie.

(I am happy to report that two days later the pie was gone, but we were all still alive. Meringue can work if you add the sugar too soon, but only if you burn it to a crisp in the oven to avoid death by raw egg whites.)

How I Almost Ruined Meringue.

Heaven Must be Missing a Gas Line.

Philadelphia, the company responsible for the glorious thing known as cream cheese, has a new ad on TV. Maybe you've seen it.

Angels, for some reason, are the spokes...beings for Philly, and tragically, they show that even when you go to heaven, if you're a blonde, you're going to be stereotypically a few feathers short of a full wingspan. Silly in the halo-holder, I mean. Dumb as a brick.

I'm not sure why, but in Philadelphia's vision of heaven, there is a break room. Enter the blonde angel, who cannot get the oven to heat up. Maybe this isn't heaven after all.

The snarky darker-haired (but with highlights!) angel makes a comment about the oven being in shock because blondie never uses it. So basically we now have The Odd Couple afterlife-style...with cooking required.

That's where the great news comes in. Philadelphia now sells cheesecake in a tub! You don't have to make your own, you just buy this, scoop it out of the package, into a crust, refrigerate in the great heavenly fridge, and you can have desert without following a recipe!

Oh, the angels sing. Or eat. They're very skinny angels, perhaps that's where the heaven part comes in. Eat as much cheesecake as you want; continue to look the same. That was also the plot of The Golden Girls, wasn't it?

Heaven Must be Missing a Gas Line.

Recipes of the weird.

I have a pine tree in my front yard, and whenever I'm standing around (a common occurance), I stare at the tree and wonder what pine needles would taste like.

Keep in mind that I'm not hep to Korean recipes, and had no idea that Kim Jong Il told his people to go eat pine needles until today, when I looked up whether I would die from ingesting pine needles. Seeing they were food in some places made me feel a little better about what I'd done.

I picked some new pine needles off the tree and ate them. They tasted great! I mean, yeah, I drool when I smell freshly sawed wood, so...I probably have more in common with the termites than I care to accept, but...damn, they tasted really good. At first it tastes as you would expect a pine needle to taste, but then there's like....pine juice or something in them. No, it isn't squirrel urine, it tastes like pine.

I just got some vitamin C and may be flammable now. I was also pooped on by a bird, this is shaping up to be an exciting weekend.

Recipes of the weird.