Peperami Is Insane

Peperami, a UK Slim-Jim-analog, has probably the most astonishingly, deeply weird product website I have ever seen in my entire life.

The Peperami Meat Retreat (caution, plenty of sound) takes us into an Arkham-esque asylum for "twisted meat": salami products so insane that they have been committed for their (and presumably our) protection, all to a soundtrack of lunatic laughter and desperately pleading talking sausages with British accents. Various user prompts include such tempting descriptions as "Rendezvous with this psychotic salami and he will reward you dearly."

It is also one of the first times I have seen the phrase "freaky little sausage" and "if you can't handle the meat, you're asking for abuse" used in purely food-related contexts. Erm. As it were.

[via NotCot]

My Heroes

I don't know how many philosopher/foodies there are out there, but I was just typing up something about Galen Zamarra, chef at Mas in the West Village, and kept on referring to him as Galen Strawson.

Hee.

The Ears Have It

Let it never be said that my superficiality does not give me a real-world advantage!

For example: Sarah Palin wears earrings shaped like the state of Alaska. They look like little golden chiclets trailing fish poop:


Even if she were not the earthly incarnation of Shiva, Destroyer of Worlds, I would look at her Alaska-shaped earrings, worn to meet the president of freaking Afghanistan and be all LADY, YOU LACK THE SELF-AWARENESS TO ACCESSORIZE APPROPRIATELY, THEREFORE I DO NOT TRUST YOU TO RUN A COUNTRY.

That being said, I should point out that my t-shirt today has rainbow pom-poms sewn to the neckline. BUT THEY ARE AWESOME.

[via]

Global Swarming

I've been having kind of an episodic debate with someone about climate change. Episodic because every time we butt heads over it, we both get so cranky that we realize the subject is just not worth engaging in. And the engagement happens because, specifically, this individual is a self-defined "person who, while he acknowledges that global warming is happening, has not ruled out the possibility that it is just a natural part of earth's self-regulating process and we should probably stay the heck out of it until there is more conclusive evidence." Whereas I define his position as "a large pile of guano."

Surprise surprise, I am not the world's most levelheaded person when it comes to certain lines of argumentation. Especially on something like climate change, about which I admittedly know almost nothing except osmosed conventional wisdom from various outlets like the NY Times and The Internet, which tend to run along lines of THE PENGUINS ARE SO CUTE. So while I am rock-solid in my belief that, yeah, global warming is both real and our own damn fault and also bee tee dubs worth doing stuff to stop, I am not so hot at actually coming up with coherent arguments against this dear guy's beliefs except I CANNOT BELIEVE YOU BELIEVE THAT OMG OMG OMG. Which is not fair.

The one thing I can do, and this is maybe too deeply ingrained, thanks to years of philosophy and logic and debate, is dissect the structure of someone's arguments and take it apart on methodological grounds. Which rarely goes over well, let me tell you, but goes over just about as badly as possible when I shift gears from "I take your climate change denial personally! And am going to cry now!" to "Hey btw did you notice how your argumentation precisely mirrors the shit that is pulled by the creationists?" Because at those moments he gets very very very mad at me and then I wind up feeling deeply bad about myself for pulling this low blow of comparing this irrational belief held by someone I know and eat brunch with to an irrational belief held by mittelamerican crazy scheming insano-bots.

The point of all this is: I am not the only person in the world who sees the evolution/climate change denial parallels! And this article was on Digg so obvs it is a legitimate contribution to the human canon.

You Are His Cheeseburger

my friends had a cheeseburger-eating contest and I might have made a video of it, set to possibly the greatest song ever discovered searching for "cheeseburger" on the iTunes music store:

Why is it in fast-motion? Because it took them fourteen freaking minutes to eat six double cheeseburgers each, and that was deeply anticlimactic. Classic case of not needing to outrun the bear.

The Measure of my Superiority

Here's what I'm doing tonight:

6pm: Having dinner at The Olive Garden, where I have not been in years, home of the $8.95 endless pasta bowl, with free salad and breadsticks.

8pm: Seeing Harry Potter Daniel Radcliffe LIVE! NUDE! ONSTAGE! in Equus, from the front row of the balcony.

How on earth can your night in any way remotely compare?

Truth in Advertising

My problem with this commercial is not that it's sponsored by the Corn Refiner's Association and that it is promoting the non-horribleness (note: not benefits!) of High Fructose Corn Syrup, and that their method is "pre-scripted characters cannot think of a reason not to consume HFCS, therefore there is no reason not to consume it!"

Rather, my problem is that the boyfriend, at the end, asks about the girlfriend's red popsicle, "You only brought one?" And then the camera pulls out wide and shows that they are sitting in the middle of a really really large park.

YOU CANNOT BRING A POPSICLE TO A PARK. THE POPSICLE WOULD MELT. You can buy a popsicle at a park. But you cannot BRING a popsicle TO a park. GOD.

Dinner

I just had this long string of emails with Mr. B about where to have dinner tonight, and it started with him saying "want to go to that diner-y place?" and me saying "which one?" and we back-and-forthed trying to figure out what the heck this diner-y place was and it turns out that the restaurant, all along, was Diner. The restaurant called "Diner."

Not sure if this is a Who's On First moment, or a Thank God I Majored In Philosophy moment. Both?

Speaking of Internalized Notions

I vet user reviews. Here is one that I rejected:

Africans' don't have the same customer service expectations as Westerners, and they have not internalized the notion that "time is money", hence they are not as speedy and efficient. Those who dine out a lot are going to be disappointed if they expect the same level of service as they get elsewhere. You have to be very patient if you want to enjoy this place there is a big cultural divide to overcome. I think the staff has to be retrained, with new waiters and some better focus all around.

People. Why must people suck so much?

vignette: punctilious

p1: i am in the middle of a pregnancy scare!
p2: ?!
p2: did you miss your full stop
p1: not yet
p1: but there is a chance there will be a run-on sentence
p2: i am trying to figure out what "semicolon" would be a metaphor for in context
p2: perhaps one of the late, only-sorta periods for a menopausal woman
p1: partial-birth abortion?
p2: omg
p1: the chicago manual of style is no good at a time like this

Asexual Anorexics?

I would deeply like to bring out the mockery guns for this:

Vegans of Color, tagline: "Because we don't have the luxury of being single-issue," a blog whose every entry reads like my classroom experiences at Smith, and whose title reads like a photo that long-ago appeared in the Vice do's and don'ts of a lesbian clown in Toronto holding a sign reading "Lesbian Clowns of Toronto."

But I am going to hold off for the time being. Because I have a cold and my head is too fuzzy to concisely reiterate the same old "holy jesus hell, people" argumentation. Also I belong to a facebook group called "Heterosexual Meat-Eaters Club" and that is the actual literal diametric opposite of this blog, and so perhaps I have already engaged (and completed) the debate.

Personal Disaster

I have a cold.

This is not terribly special, and it is not the worst cold I've ever had. But it's a little after 10pm and I'm feeling fuzzy-headed and I want to go to bed, but there's that whole sneezing thing, and the drippy nose thing, and the post-nasal drip thing, and so I go into the bathroom to wash my hands (because as a doctor friend of mine just pointed out, hand hygiene is critical) and I think to myself "I will take some medicine!"

It is not until I open the door of my medicine cabinet that I realize that inside my medicine cabinet? There is no medicine. There is a lot (a lot a lot a lot) of makeup. There is a lot of ludicrously expensive skin care objects. There are enough pairs of tweezers to see my eyebrows through menopause. But there is no actual medicine in my medicine cabinet.

I am that girl. That girl? Is me. When did this happen? When did silver glitter eyeliner move in to the space where NyQuil is supposed to be? ARGH.

(via)