oh, baby

Ever since the universe was forced to stare in admiration and awe at the extraordinarily phenomenally kickass unicorn dress, I have been meaning to post more Drawings Of Awesome Things In My Life.

One such thing was given to me for my recent birthday by Mr. B. It is a dress. It does not have unicorns on it, but heck does it give the unicorn dress a run for its money. It's pink. It's from 1954. It has one of the most perfect silhouettes I have ever seen. It is sized for a 14-month-old.

I realize it's not, um, traditional for a dude to give his 26-year-old girlfriend baby clothes as a gift. Especially when, for the record, she is not in the family way. But when I saw this dress at this really surreal store called Ohio Knitting Mills (which buys department store deadstock from the 50s/60s/70s), I would not shut up about it for days. The silhouette! The pleating! The mock neck! The tie back! I was tempted to buy it in order to bring it to a seamstress and have it copied in grownup size. I was tempted to buy it to (creepily) keep in storage until I had a daughter. But I didn't, because it was absurdly expensive for what it is, which is an infant's dress from half a century ago. So Mr. B. snuck out and bought it and had it archivally mounted and framed in this painfully beautiful sleek shadowbox and oh my god, it makes me so happy. Here it is:


And here, for reference, is one of the (undoubtedly myriad) contemporary dresses that obviously show the stamp of its influence:


Yes, it's Britain's Barbie wearing an RM by Roland Mouret "Moon" dress. Which, at $2,150 (plus shipping!), is a leetle beet pricier than my dress. But significantly less awesome, all things considered.

spice up your life!

We are working on an Indian-food cookbook at work, and--having finished the photo shoot--a few of us are divvying up the foods and props to take home. So I have spent the past 20 minutes or so transferring from large ziploc bags into small ziploc bags marvelous spices like star anise, nigella, this weird dried fruit called kokum phool ... and dried fenugreek, which looks like this:


basically right now i feel like a drug dealer. This is my badass life: pretending that this baggie of fenugreek (the unique flavor found in Aunt Jemima maple syrup, and an herbaceous galactagogue*)is really a baggie containing a controlled substance, and swaggering badassedly around my cubicle.



*I cannot believe I haven't written about this word before. In fact, in my email archives, I found a message from me to Mr. B dated nearly a year ago in which I swore to post about the word. You would think, from the etymologies of demagogue (leader of people) and pedagogue (leader of children), that a galactagogue is a leader of the galaxy. Is that not a kickass concept? Except, no. Sadly, "galactagogue" means "a thing that stimulates lactation." Not really at all in the same ballpark, is it? Though it is some consolation that the word "galaxy" itself sort of has the wind knocked out of it when you realize it just means "milky place." Also kind of undermines megavillains, when you realize they are just saying "Soon I alone shall rule the Milky Place! Bwahahaha" etc.

UPDATE! I am a complete moron and I have, in fact, blogged about this word before.

deliciousness

I accidentally posted this post here. I meant to post it on the flophouse gazette, the house blog my roommates and I are sporadically maintaining. I guess now it's public.

Well as long as we're talking about dreams, last night I dreamed that I won a $600 roasting chicken in a swimming contest. To cook it, I decided to start it in a cold oven and let it get to 375, and then stay there for five more minutes. Then I took the chicken out of the pan, which was full of drippings, and added butter and heavy cream to make a sauce. But I kept the heat on too high, and the sauce dried out and began to scorch, and I shouted for my brother to get me some beef broth to reliquefy it but he was absorbed in a game of Wii Tennis.

So, yeah. That was my dream.

I'm having potato chips for lunch. Also soup, but hot damn the chips are the good part.

Also also, the Pope remains Catholic.

The New York Times, besides being my favoreenie newspaper and home of the only acceptable crossword puzzle outside the UK*, often writes these adorable articles that proceed kind of like this:

NYT: (pointing to the present and future) look! a trend!
New York residents: (peering in direction NYT is pointing) where? we totally don't see that.
NYT: [explanation of trend!]
New York residents: (pointing to the past) it's actually that way.

I totally love the pieces like this because they make me feel hip and jaded, which is my preferred state of being, but does not come to me terribly naturally, so any help is welcome.

Today's example is actually a pretty well-done piece on the intentional creation of an online identity, particularly as it relates to social networking and dating sites. Attentive readers will note that we have already covered that here, albeit at a slightly different angle. Anyway, the great part comes when bylinist (and new favorite person) Stephanie Rosenbloom just goes ahead and makes the joke for us:

The scholars found it common for online daters to fudge their age or weight, or to post photographs that were five years old. Also, the world is round and the chemical symbol for water is H2O.

For that, Stephanie, I salute you.


*Mini-vignette:
cousin: i mean, i didn't even realize people did it in pencil.
me: i don't even understand it. pencil is, like, the same color as newsprint.
cousin: sometimes when i'm feeling really cocky i do it in felt-tip marker.