Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Booze Hound

My new lucky number is 04724338.

I'll admit it lacks a certain roll-off-the-tongue-ness when you're shooting craps at the casino, but there was this fundraising raffle at work and today, that very ticket number won me three cases of wine.

Ooooohhhhh yeaaaaahhhhhh.

I think you'd be surprised what three cases of wine can do for your social life. My Popularity Index reached an all-time high today! I mean, it's always pretty stratospheric, what with the baked goods and the glorious hair and all, but if I were publicly-traded, today would be the day you'd kick your own ass for not buying shares in me. I have drinking dates well into the foreseeable future! And not only does three cases of wine greatly improve one's social standing, but I also have a feeling it's going to go a long way toward taking the edge off, like, the rest of the year for me.

As soon as I got home, DH and I spread all the bottles out on the kitchen floor and developed a complex algorithm for sorting them involving country of origin, year, varietal, and label cuteness. It was like some kind of awesome grown-up Halloween where the people actually care enough about their loot to afford it an appropriate level of respect in their sorting decisions. No crappy "chocolate; not-chocolate" system for us! I felt so vindicated!

The kids quietly shared a bowl of popcorn for supper and watched us haggling over an appropriate sorting schematic. Every so often we'd shout, "Now THIS is how it's DONE, kids!" and laugh maniacally.

After a couple of hours of intensive sorting, re-sorting, revising the taxonomy, and calling each others' credentials and methodologies into question, we had created thirty-five individual piles based on our carefully selected criteria [patent pending]. (We would have had thirty-six, but we drank one.)

*aaaaaahhhhhhh* Best. Halloween. Ever.

Saturday, May 21, 2011

Late-Successional Salad

I hate diets. They're always trying to make you eat salad, which I hate even more than diets. It's not even that salad in itself is all that bad, it's just that - since I've spent more or less my entire adult life on a diet - I've grown to seriously resent having to eat the shit. It just doesn't rev my reward centres the way a hunk of good chocolate can, and - evolutionarily speaking - that's gotta say something.

Trouble is, if you think about it long enough you realize that damn near everything is actually salad. And let me tell you: with about fifteen years of adult (i.e., dieting) life on the clock, I've had a lot of time to think about it. Case in point:

Casseroles? Stir frys? Ain't nuthin' but hot salads.

Sandwiches? Wraps? You haven't mixed 'em well enough.

Soups? Smoothies? Uh, you mixed 'em too much.

In addition to being generally unpalatable, given the advanced civilization we live in, salad is actually something of an embarrassment - it's just a pile of ingredients! Half the time they haven't even been cooked! Dude, humans discovered fire about a zillion years ago - why the hell are we still serving up plates of uncooked foliage? If someone asked you for a masterpiece would you give them a can of paint?

Of course not.

Here at the top of the food chain, all I'm asking is for someone else to do the work of turning those ingredients into something more delectable and calorically-dense. Steak, for instance. Or cheesecake. Now there's the masterpiece I had in mind!

Thanks, Vincent van Cow - keep up the great work!

Friday, May 13, 2011

I Got a Nikon Camera...

Give someone a dollar and they eat for a day; give someone a grand or so and they drop it on lenses and stand around all day talking about how they're photographers.

This is a classic logic error: although all photographers are people with cameras, it does not necessarily follow that all people with cameras are photographers. Seems like everyone and their uncle fancies themselves a photographer these days. Hey, guess what? It's not that hard anymore. Point; click; repeat a zillion times because digital memory is cheap and essentially limitless. It's like those monkeys that wrote those plays: if you do anything often enough it's bound to come up Shakespeare sometimes.

The next time someone tells me they're a photographer, instead of just letting my eyes glaze over with extreme apathy I'm throwing down the ultimate photographic gauntlet: take a good picture of my toddler. After all, toddler photography is a lot like wildlife photography, except your subject is more recalcitrant than a grizzly bear in early spring, faster than a hummingbird on amphetamines, and dirtier than, like, a wombat or something rolled in dirt. And then maybe rolled a little more in more dirt, just for good measure.

Wait, what's that? You got a clear shot? Of my child? Holding still? And smiling?

Awww, too bad he has a giant boog dangling from his left nostril. You lose the challenge. Hey, maybe you should hire some monkeys to help you out for next time - I hear they're into photography.