magical t shirt

My friend Donna sent me a t-shirt this week, and I keep forgetting to say thank you.

I pulled it out of the envelope and put it on as soon as I got to my apartment:



Now I’m sad I don’t have a Pride Festival to go to this year, because that would be perfect.

huh?

I got a weird phone message from Mom today.

“Hi. It's not an emergency, but... well... you need to know what's going on. Bye!"

Vaguely alarmed, I called home and got Dad.

“What’s up?”

“I got a weird phone message from Mom. She said it’s not an emergency, but I need to know what’s going on?”

Dad repeated it to Mom, who said, “I thought he’d know what that means.”

I didn’t know we were speaking in code on our voicemail now. I look forward to the call informing me that the owls are not what they seem or that Freelancer needs an extraction.

Book Review - Mr. Confidential

I just finished Samuel Bernstein's Mr. Confidential, the story of the rise and fall of "Confidential" magazine.

Bernstein writes well, keeping the tone light and amusing, but this is also a drawback. Like when I had to read that stupidly lopsided Mountains Beyond Mountains book for my old job, this book offers an overwhelmingly positive portrait of Bob Harrison, the publisher of "Confidential", as if Bernstein didn't speak to a single person who didn't like him. The Amazon review says it's an "unflinching portrait", but it does flinch, coming right out several times to say that no one was ever hurt by an article in "Confidential", and that it was all in good fun.

I’m innately suspicious of any biography that offers a one sided portrait. Nobody is a saint all the time. Saint Francis probably kicked a dog once when no one was looking, and Joan of Arc probably snuck twelve items into the medieval equivalent of the Ten Items or Less line, but that doesn’t make them bad people. Writing about anyone as if they did no wrong (or, in the case of Martha, Inc., as if they did no right) dehumanizes them and prevents the reader from relating to them. They stop being a person and become a character or, worse, a caricature, and biographies should treat their subject matter with more respect.

Back to the book at hand, two Harrison detractors are mentioned, but the author goes out of his way to make sure they don’t seem credible. There’s an entire chapter on how one of them became an alcoholic and murdered his wife and then himself, and Bernstein accuses the other of lying about so many other things that the reader is left to conclude that she must be lying about Harrison, too. That’s fine for a puff piece, the kind of thing you might read in “US Weekly” or even, if it still existed, “Confidential”, it’s pretty biased for a book that claims to be objective.

My new glasses are from Versace, but they were on sale

I had an eye exam this morning, and ordered new contacts and two pairs of new glasses, because there was a sale.

Ordering glasses is usually a disappointment to me, because I’ve never really gotten a pair I liked since I got old enough to pick out and purchase my own, because it’s hard to pick out glasses when you can’t see them. To see the glasses clearly and in focus, I have to get so close to the mirror that my face loses all cohesion as a unit. The glasses are in focus, an eye, maybe an eyebrow, but that’s it.

That means I’m not picking out glasses based on how they look on my face. I’m picking them out based on how they look on what I think my face looks like, and, as the poor eyeglasses lady found out today, that’s not always a good thing.

“What about these? They’re kind of round.”

“These are tiny. My head is huge. Do I look like Archie’s principal in these? Be honest.”

“Uh… maybe these. They’re hip, and kind of funky.”

“They look like Buddy Holly glasses.”

“Do you… like Buddy Holly?”

“Of course. But if I wear these, I’m gonna look like the old fat Buddy Holly that nobody wants to put on a stamp. These glasses are totally going to Elvis me, but with Buddy Holly.”

“Uh… why don’t you look around, and see if there’s anything you like, instead of me making suggestions. Then you can try them on and I’ll tell you what they look like.”

“That should work.”

Except that it hasn’t for the last twenty years, so I have no faith that it will now, either. I give that girl credit for trying, though.

stuffed president

I’m home from work today because of an eye appointment which got moved to tomorrow. This morning I decided I would stop by the grocery store on what should have been a routine trip. Everything was going along normally until, on my way out, I passed the claw machine and saw this:



President Nixon?

A stuffed plush President Nixon?

For a second I was certain it couldn’t possibly be Richard Nixon. What child would want a toy of President Nixon?

Who would sit around a marketing meeting going, “We need a plush toy that people will be willing to throw insane amounts of money into the claw machine for. Something children will beg their parents for quarters to get. Something guys will try to win to impress their girlfriend. Our blue-headed mallard isn’t really doing it, and fake Shrek hasn’t moved in months. What can we get?”

“Sir? What about disgraced former president turned respected elder statesman Richard M. Nixon?”

“GENIUS!”

That couldn’t be right. I entertained the thought that it might actually be a bad Jay Leno (although the same thoughts come to mind; what child wants a toy of Jay Leno?) but the tag confirmed it:



It’s Nixon.

This leaves me with two questions. The first, obviously, is, “Why? Why does that exist?” and the second is, “How much will it cost to get that out of the claw machine?”

They're very American!

I was walking through Target when I spotted a wall of these, enough to cover an entire endcap in the Pantry section:



Good God, I thought. Is there nothing people won’t slap a flag on? And what kind of people buy these out of all the other cupcakes in boxes? Is there really someone who’s going to look at these and think, “I like Ho-Ho’s and all, but they’re not very, you know, AMERICAN. I better get these instead.”

On the other hand, perhaps they’re not so absurd after all. What could be more American than driving to a big box store in walking distance to buy 3000 calories, utterly devoid of a single vitamin and individually wrapped in non-biodegradable plastic, for a dollar and change?

I don’t know about the other nationalistic shoppers at Target, but that argument was enough to sway me. And there is something more American than buying them:



Eating them.

So many people have written over the years that America is a sham, an empty dream, all flash and no substance, an oddly tasteless snack cake with waxy frosting that looks interesting but leaves your mouth dry. Could it be that Little Debbie, far from being a jingoistic Americentric flag-waving baker is actually a subversive metaphorist? Is she making her own comment on the “Spirit of America” by embodying it in the form of empty calories in a pretty wrapper?

Probably not.

Sometimes a snack cake is just a snack cake.

letter to "Top Chef"

Dear “Top Chef” contestants:

Please refrain from ever again referring to food as “sexy”. I don’t like to think of my chicken as vaguely sweaty, a little bit sticky, or unwilling to sit in the wet spot on my plate. Likewise, unless my vegetables are curled on their sides in the fetal position the next morning practically falling off the edge of the plate they’re shamefully trying not to share with a meat whose name they can’t remember from the night before, they don’t have much in common with sex, either.

Also, Tre, this isn’t “Memento”. You don’t need to tattoo instructions on your arm.

In closing, please develop a challenge for this season that incorporates Twinkies.

Thank you.