Last month I mentioned that the people on
Broken Picture Telephone
always seem to know which Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle is being drawn.
When Elizabeth read this, the following conversation ensued:
E.:
Can you not identify the Ninja
Turtles?
me:
No...
E.:
Raphael wears the red mask,
Michelangelo wears the orange one, Donatello wears the purple one and
fights with a long stick—
me:
<horrified look>
E.:
Is this not a turn-on?
For dinner one night I made a dish with garlicky greens that came out way
better than it usually does. I tried to figure out what the difference
might be, and to my horror, I realized: instead of using regular salt, I
had — purely because it was closer — used a fancy
volcanic salt. Now I have to start budgeting for fancy salt!
I may never stop being amused by the fact that, for some reason, sharp
cheddar cheese in Canada is not labeled as "sharp" but rather as "old."
You can even get "extra old" if you like. Note that I'm not translating
from French here — that's the English label. "Old." Not
"aged" — "old." Ha ha ha ha ha!
Elizabeth got a haircut at some fancy salon downtown. While I was
waiting for her I passed an old building with a very unassuming, recessed
door. Curious, I took a look up close to see what it was. In small letters,
a sign by the door proclaimed that it housed the anti-slavery division of the
Canadian government.
My friend Mandy and her five-year-old daughter Charlotte may have supplied
the epigraph to the Photopia book:
M.:
Well, girls... Christie is
coming to babysit tonight for a couple of hours while I go to Sunfest. Won't
that be fun?
C.:
A babysitter? That's not
loving.
Another Facebook exchange:
Paul O.: Is $1 still the right amount to tip the pizza delivery person,
or is that too low now?
Adrian H.: It depends on where they were delivering from. Say they were
delivering from the '80s, that would be about right.
oregonlive.com: Calakmul Mayan ruins surprise deep in the jungle.
I guess he didn't provide enough spoiler space.
Here's a fun fact for you: Karl Marx had four daughters and named all
of them Jenny.
Deep Thought: If there were a commercial that showed someone getting
splashed from off-camera with gallons of orange juice, and reacting with a
refreshed "Ahhh!", probably not too many people would find it all that
unusual. But if it happened to you in real life, maybe you'd be refreshed
at first, but then you'd be all sticky.
I got back into Kdice a little bit. It's
interesting to see the difference between the high-level games and the
beginners' games. Novices tend to fight the game out until the conclusion
is apparent to anyone. The experts sit there, not doing anything, debate
how the game would be most likely to turn out, and negotiate an order of
finish.
I saw a menu that had violets in one of the dishes, and I thought to
myself, "Hmm, I wonder whether violets really smell like my memory of them."
So for the next few minutes I kept thinking that I would pull up Firefox
and go to that site where you type things in and it returns a bunch of
results and you can smell them.
One thing about wrong numbers — and, in general, anyone who
winds up calling me probably has the wrong number — is that rarely
do they involve what I would consider actual communication. A wrong number
should go like this:
me:
Hello?
caller:
Hi, can I speak to $NAME,
please?
me:
I think you have the wrong
number.
caller:
Oh, I'm sorry. Bye.
click
Instead, it pretty much invariably goes like this:
me:
Hello?
caller:
Blurg?
me:
Uh, hello?
caller:
Bluhh??
me:
Sorry, I don't understand...
caller:
HELLO?
me:
Hello!
caller:
WRONG NUMBER! click
For some reason I found going through the fruit check at the California
border kind of cheering. I guess part of it is that I thought the fruit check
had been canceled years ago for budget reasons.
Grocery prices in California seem jaw-droppingly low to me after spending
two months in Canada. Pints of Haagen-Dazs were $6.99 or $7.99; at the local
Safeway they're $2.49. Calabrian peppers took weeks to track down on Vancouver
Island and went for around $15 for a jar; at Berkeley Bowl a large jar is
$3.29. Cilantro went for $1.25/bunch at the "dirt cheap" produce store in BC
and goes for $0.25 at the Food Maxx near my house. And I haven't even
mentioned Trader Joe's.
I wouldn't make a very good political strategist. I know the birther
conspiracy nuts are hurting the Republican Party, but I've still been
relieved to see the GOP power structure trying to shut them down. I would
rather see the GOP recover a little bit than have to listen to such abject
stupidity.
