You're a Honey Child, To a Swarm of Bees, Gonna Blow Right Through You, Like a Breeze, Give Me One Last Dance, We'll Slide Down the Surface of Butt

Tyra’s hair on ANTM tonight is ricockulous. I mean, you are in Thailand, not the People’s Republic of Horrible Flowers Sticking Out of Your Hair at Random Angles Along the Messed Up Braid Thing That Outlines Your Forehead. No real justification for that one.

Steven Colbert had this total wad on last night to talk about atheism. I could say, quite rightly, that this dude literally used the worst possible set of arguments to prove an entirely legitimate point or that he completely misunderstood the point of each of the issues he was talking about, but it might just sound like I am explaining how much smarter than I am than this total tool. And regardless of the obvious fact that I am way smarter than this tool, that would not be nearly as clear an explanation as this. The dude was so bad that Steven Colbert stopped just pretending to argue with the dude and actually argued with him. He sucked and anyone who buys his book should be legally barred from exchanging money for goods and services in the future. They can enter rehab or something so they can learn to be useful and productive members of capitalist society, evaluating whether or not a product is something that you should pay for, or reluctantly use only in desperation to make a papier-mâché club to beat yourself about the face and neck with.

If you were like a snail or a hermit crab and you know you were gonna switch shells soon, would it be like a really traumatic experience. Would you be thinking like “I know that in the end I will at least be able to find a shell around here somewhere that will at least be tolerable for a little while” but at the same time panicking every time you found a perfect shell that couldn’t wait until you were ready to occupy it. Maybe that’s not applicable.

Dunkin Donuts announced, on one of their commercials that was on my sports radio station today, that they were starting an “aggressive campaign” in the Buffalo area. It felt like they were firing a radio-shot over Tim Horton’s head. I can say for certain that it was the most mean spirited negative radio campaign I have ever heard regarding donuts. If I were not leaving this town in like a month, I would totally be in on Dunkin Donuts side. Plus they don’t screw around with sandwiches and stuff, at least not as much, pretending to be all normal restaurant with a donut instead of fries or something. I’m gonna remain Switzerland for the moment though.

Hippo has been trying to eat Katie’s flowers all day, and its really cute, cuz when you say “Hey Hippo, stop eating those flowers.” She either looks at you in her adorably grumpy fashion that clearly sez “Dude, chill, I’m just gonna take a nibble.” Or alternately, she looks back at you over her shoulder and pushes her nose against the flower and takes a little sniff in that “pay no attention to the Persian kitten sitting near the flowers” mode.

Peace,

MB-K

Pause, Take a Breath Go For Yours, On My Command Now Hit the Dance Floor, Gonna Make Ya Sweat till Ya Butt

We did some apartment shopping in Rochester today, which generally went pretty well. I mean, I am really sort of manic about the whole situation, since all the transitional aspects of money, location, happiness, Katie and Hippo comfort, jobs, dissertation, long term failure etc, but still it was ok. We saw a pretty cool townhouse which was a little too expensive and prolly too far away, a flat in a kinda crappy old house, and a cool apartment which was a little small but had a new hard wood floor, two bedrooms, and the right price tag. There is still some looking to do and I am incredibly excited about one potential place. The points of interest:

--the woman who showed us the first townhouse wanted to point something out specifically to Katie. She said, and I quote, “Katie, YOU may be interested to know there is a washer-dryer in the powder room.” I laughed openly.

--if you generally conceive of renters as inconveniences rather than clients or people, why do you buy a house for the purpose of renting it out? I mean, if you were a 1950s science fiction novel and you had to rent a room in your house, possibly unknowingly to an alien in disguise, I could get it. But if you buy a house that you don’t live in for the purpose of renting it, don’t be a total wad about it.

--I don’t really get the idea of “no pets” but I understand that they can cause damage, so whatever, exclude them if you want to exclude them. What makes even less sense, at least as a legitimate concept, is pet rent. You need to charge 20 extra dollars cuz Hippo might rip your walls to shreds? You should be more worried that she’s gonna hold you up at claw-point to make some of that pet rent back—Hippo is not excited about getting a job.

--Rochester has way way too many apartments that are not listed anywhere online. By “not listed anywhere” I mean not even in the newspaper. Is there enough random-physical-apartment-searching in the city to keep the market alive?

--why no one wants to rent me their totally awesome house for like 200 a month 2 blocks away from the university is beyond me. It’s a win win situation.

--how much would it rock to have a patio? Barbecues are awesome.

I know I don’t have the patriotic drive or the 9/11 romanticism involved in enjoying this movie, but wtf is the deal with United 93? Not only does it have all the surprise ending magic of films like Titanic or Gettysburg, but there is no way to honor the passengers of this flight like having them portrayed by the Hollywood mega-stars who made Curiosity, Tree Shade, and Size Matters. I think the title is a poor choice when you can quickly and easily think of a cooler movie that would be described with the same title. In this instance, something about A.J.’s epic rise to power at United Airlines, circa 1993.

Hippo is excited cuz Sam Seaborne has returned to The West Wing, it’s every persian’s dream come true.

Peace,

MB-K

When I Feel Heavy Metal (Woo Hoo),And I'm Pins and I'm Needles (Woo Hoo), Well I Lie and I'm Easy, All of the Time, But I'm Never Sure Why I Need Butt

I had to go to the stupid dentist today. I refuse to get off on a crazy "I hate the dentist" rant, though believe me I have plenty of negative things to say about the psuedo-medical industry. I am not even gonna complain about my jaw jurting or the fact that my dentist is the dentist verion of Wanda Sykes if she was really severe and serious and never ever funny. Those qualities are actually as bad for a dentist as they are for a Wanda Sykes impersonator, believe it or not.

What I am going to talk about is this: hot dental workers. The dental hygenist-type woman who did the cleaning portion of my evil dentist visit was pretty cute and fairly young (I mean, there is Katie up at the top, followed by all the other women I actually know, so she wasn't cute on the scale of seriously hawt women, but insofar as ordinary folk go). Maybe this is only in comparison, cuz every dental hygenist I have ever had has been approximately middle aged and nothing to write home about, in terms of attractiveness.

The contrast that came to my mind, for some reason, as I was having my stupid teeth cleaned, was to getting one's hair cut. I have no proof of this fact, but I am willing to say that for all or nearly all heterosexual men, when you show up at the haircutting place, you are hoping to get a cute woman to cut your hair. Thats not to say its a condition of getting your hair cut, or that non-cute people don't cut hair as well, or even that it really matters in any way, but simply that: all things considered, if it had no negative effects at all, you would prefer the cute girl. If this gets anyone mad at their respective partners, I'm sure that s/he is the exception, one of those people who does not like attractive people running their hands through their hair for 20 minutes.

Everything that is good about having an attractive person cut your hair is absent in dental work. Haircutting feels good, dentistry hurts. Hair is an attractive part of one's body, the wide open mouth is not. You leave a haircutting place looking better than when you arrive, you leave the dentist drooling with a numb face. The similarities just become painful, you're working in the same proximity in both cases, there is the weird adjustable chair thing, the sterile individual work stations and the pokey metal instruments. Anyway, I am trying to find a way to explain all this without coming down to something that makes me seem even more shallow than I actually am. So I will stop.

To finish I will describe the plated dessert that Katie and I shared at Butterwoods Dessert Restaurant last night: the Chocolate Trio. On the fringes were two candied orange slices, one was topped with a tangerine sorbet (meh, fruit, I'm sure it was good, but there was zero chocolate to be found and tangerine is like sour orange times butt) the other had a chocolate orange ice cream, which clearly the way fruit was supposed to be used in this situation, it was good. There was a chocolate beignet, which made it sound to me like the batter would be chocolate, but in fact it was regular beignet batter with chocolate inside, yum. There was a flourless chocolate torte which was delightful, as you might expect from the words flourless chocolate torte. Katie will not agree with this in her account, but the best part of the whole thing was the chocolate bread pudding. Wow, it was awesome, perfect density and an explosive chocolatosity. I could not discern at all what it was really made out of, bread or dry cake or what, but it pwnd. Topped with a creme fraiche ice cream, it was among the best individual dessert items I have ever experienced. It was a great great dessert, the exact thing I was in the mood for when I showed up there.

Alright, Hippo says I need to refill her catnip toy so she can spend her evening in style. That seems legit to me.

Peace,

MB-K

A Modern Day Warrior, Mean Mean Stride, Today's Tom Sawyer, Mean Mean Butt

Happy Easter to everyone. It was a great weekend in this household, gourmet and everyday chocolates were abound, as was red meat in all its luxurious forms. I had a Double Quarter Pounder on my way home from mass, we had summer sausage as a mid-afternoon snack, and a pretty tasty porterhouse for dinner. That was accompanied by a green bean salad with pearl onions and bacon, cheese-scalloped potatoes, and Katie’s delightful homemade rolls. We maintained the whole springy motif during dessert time, when Katie whipped up one of the most delightful fruit-ilicious cakes I have ever had.

I won’t go on in too much detail regarding how well the white cake, strawberry, whipped cream combo works, nor will I fully explain exactly how much of this cake I ate during last night’s foodstravaganza. What I will explain to you is the oddness of this fact: I realized, while eating this cake of dreams, that it reminded me of a specific delight. That delight: The Twinkie.

For some reason Katie took this as an insult, I suppose it has more than a little to do with the fact that she was viciously deprived of Twinkies as a child and hence cannot appreciate their gloriousness. Mitch Hedberg accurately observed that “Fettuccine alfredo is like macaroni and cheese for adults.” That doesn’t mean it is not of high quality, simply that it is a more complicated and “gourmet” version of the same basic structure: in this case, noodles and cheese sauce. Switch out the yellow processed American-ness of the cheese in the Kraft Mac and Chee and substitute some delicate parmesan. In this case you take the gooey yellow spongeyness and switch in an almost biscuit-like sweet density, switch in some actual whipped cream, and throw some fruit on the bastard. Still, a vanilla flavored cake with a generous amount of whipped topping: you get the gist.

I wonder two things about this situation: 1) Is there something about yellowness specifically that is always removed when “gourmet-izing” a classic. Would classy Cheetos have to be made with blue corn or something? 2) Why would you so thoroughly enjoy one version and not another? I mean, I guess there are circumstances where the specific changes may throw something off enough. If you are allergic to or just hate the additions, sure. If you added blueberries to my chocolate chocolate muffin from SuperMom’s I wouldn’t even bother to wash it down with SuperRich Choco-milk, but if you made it with imported Dutch chocolate and frosted it with a rich ganache, I would be in.

You know who does not get anywhere near enough props: Jim Varney. That guy was a talent and a hardcore one too. I was thinking about him the other day when I was asking myself a hypothetical “Who Would You Rather Bwn?” question: Going for an extended period of time without any video entertainment at all or watching only the film version of The Beverly Hillbillies on repeat at least 4 times a day? I realized that probably wasn’t a very hard one, but wondered if it would be a better question if you limited your video entertainment to only Jim Varney movies. Then I remembered: Ernest movies rule. I saw Ernest Goes to Camp at least 100 times. Ernest Saves Christmas was another gem. I loved Ernest Goes to Jail all except for the electric chair thing, since I had a hard time laughing at capital punishment, even at 12 odd years old. I remember when Ernest died and I was sad. But I didn’t remember the sad times, the Beverley Hillbillies for instance, or Slam Dunk Ernest. I remembered Ernest, playing an old woman, in a fisheye lens.
Hippo is too young to have seen Jim Varney in his prime, but I will have to sit her down and take a look at the early Ernest that so influenced our lives. A good dose of catnip and it will be as funny to my Persian friend as it was at so many elementary school sleepovers.

Peace,

MB-K

Run To The Hills, Run For Your Butt

I live in the state of New York and have for approaching 4 years now. I have never been to New York City. When I mention this fact around people in this area they are routinely amazed. Before I even get into the legitimacy/illegitimacy questions in this arena, let me just say that even people generally from the Northeast, not even NYC residents, are ridiculously arrogant about visiting NYC, to an extent that no one in any other area has ever been in my opinion.

First, let’s note that New York is about 400 miles from Buffalo. That’s the outskirts of NYC by the way, not Times Square. You gotta figure that to be at least 7 hours, if you make amazing time, more likely its 9 to really get into the city. That doesn’t make me particularly close, just because I’m in the arbitrary boundaries of the state of New York doesn’t make visiting the city any more likely. We’re far closer to Philly and Pittsburgh, and no one is surprised that we haven’t made those journeys. Montreal is prolly right in the same range and infinitely more likely to get my, admittedly limited, tourist dollars. Are you in Minneapolis? Have you been to Chicago, Madison, Milwaukee, Green Bay, Iowa City, Kansas City, Omaha, Lincoln, and St. Louis? All within about that same distance and I really can’t imagine being harassed if I hadn’t been to the University of Nebraska campus.

My guess is that the answer to this would be: yeah, but those places aren’t New York. Well, my guess is that some of them are way better places to spend one’s time than New York. The thing that solves back for all these reasons, of course, is money. If you are rich like a bastard, I’m sure New York is awesome. If you are rich like a bastard my guess is that anywhere is awesome. In fact, places that are awesome when you are not rich are probably way more awesome when you are rich, versus places like New York, which would swallow llamas if you aren’t wealthy.

What’s so awesome about New York? The food? Yeah, I bet the food is really good. Notably though, every decent size city has great food. Even Buffalo and Rochester have good food. I suppose there is some stuff you can only get in NYC, but that stuff tends to be outlandishly expensive. Again, if you’re rich, cool. I’m not.

The people? This is a disad btw, not a good thing. I don’t like throngs, for the most part. I like a spattering of people well dispersed over a large area. I don’t like it when the mall is crowded. One of the few good things about watching Twins games at the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome is that you never feel packed in. Don’t get me wrong, I go to crowded places and it pretty much never bothers me. Sometimes it’s even productive, Lambeau Field comes to mind. But for your everyday going to work--getting milk--coming home routine, crowds are annoying, end of story. I’m sure the people are all very cool and everything, but I’m not real worried about finding cool people. I only need like 20 friends, who cares if there are a million or 12 million left over.

I realize that the things I have the best arguments for are actually reasons not to live in New York City. In fact, I have the argument “living in New York City good” pretty much destroyed. I’m sure there are plenty of cool things about visiting, lots of stuff to see, at least once, and I’m sure I will do that at some point. But to do it well takes cash. I haven’t been to NYC yet cuz I can’t imagine I will be able to handle it many times, and when I get there I want to do it right.

I don’t want to be in a city where I can’t drive around reasonably, where everything costs three times as much as it should, and I have to fight with a billion residents and another billion tourists just to get a hot dog.

I think I got off on this question, btw, because one of the blogs I read mentioned that on her most recent visit, she was amazed by the literal bags of garbage along the streets. I’m not a clean freak, but that admittedly sounds annoying and nasty. I wouldn’t have thought anything of it, but this makes two Minnesota bloggers who have mentioned this fact in the past 6 months or so.

Hippo sez that all the negativity on this blog sux. She is always right.

Peace,

MB-K

You're Always Asking What It's All About But Don't Listen to My Replies, You Say To Me I Don't Talk Enough, But When I do I'm a Butt

Tonight was Queen on Idol. It’s pretty hard to sing Freddy Mercury, even the epic and legendary Jordis Unga bombed it. There were a couple really poor attempts to do Queen songs, including Ace—who was disgusting—and Kelly Pickler—who looked exactly like a less attractive Ashlee as a blonde while pumping out a hideous country-muzak (Katie says Branson-like, those may be the same) version of Bohemian Rhapsody. Wayne and Garth called during the performance, they want their schwing back.’

I should note that the only reason Ace got the specific link I included above is because ruppdogg’s xanga is the only result that comes up when you google “ace young is a tool.” If anyone wants to ensure that my blog surpasses ruppdogg’s xanga as the number one result for googling “ace young is a tool” I would appreciate it. Though, at the same time…

What if it ignited some sort of epic battle between me and ruppdog. If I were ruppdogg and someone started a war with me regarding my dominance of the “ace young is a tool” google search market I would do two things:

1. I would strike against reut dawg, who must be the Southern TC Burbs equivalent of ruppdogg, sort of like Bizzaro Jerry. Watch your back reuter, cuz this d00d plays SOCCER in INDIANA. Its essentially like knowing what is gonna take you down. It’s a given, its like hearing “I know it was you Fredo. You broke my heart.” It even sounds the same “He plays Soccer in Indiana.”


2. I would buy the domain name http://www.aceyoungisatool.com/ and buy a week’s worth of ads on Rocketboom. Then, when Ace Young was eventually booted from Idol, I would change the website so that it taunted the person who tried to challenge my “ace young is a tool” supremacy. I figure it would cost me about 100,000 dollars to get to the level I am thinking of, but it would be so worth it. Like “peek-a-poms.” Sorry, bout that picture. All the photos of peekapoms on the internet suck. This is especially ridiculous cuz peekapoms are cute. We saw one in Dallas named Daisy. Adorable. We whipped a u-turn in the Expedition just to say hello to it.

So let me just, in advance, offer a truce to ruppdogg, please ruppdogg, don’t hurt ‘em. Do it for reut dawg, cuz no one wants to see him hurt. Do it for the peekapoms.

I made fajitas tonight. I did not make coconut ice cream and sticky rice. One of those decisions was brilliant, the other sub-par. They are not like US-China-Russian relations, all zero-sum and shit.

Hippo has had an incredible combination of dashing spastic kittenish energy and adorable napping poses today. She crashed after Taylor Hicks’ high flying performance of “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” It was, in fact, EMF style unbelievameow.

Peace,

MB-K