Friday, June 28, 2002
So like Clinton was pretty tacky, right? But check this dimfuck out.
posted by LauraB 1:08 PM
Wednesday, June 26, 2002
Everyone's a critic
Long, rambling blogs are boring. Give me pictures or give me linguisto-meth. Quizzes, factoids, cyrtopgrams, badinage, dancing jesii, enlightened editorialisms and commonplaces also accepted.
So feed my own petard: rate me, baby.
posted by LauraB 12:46 PM
Sunday, June 23, 2002
Piggybacking the Peas, Please
For the first recipe, Minted Pea Soup, you take
1 large chopped onion, chop it, and a big heavy saucepan you sautee it slowly w/ butter, salt and pepper. Add 1.5 pounds of frozen petit peas to the pot, 3 cups broth, and simmer. Look, they've really got to be petit or similarly very tender peas. Seriously. Stir in 2 cups chopped mint (a little Thai basil wouldn't hurt either, if you like more complex herb garnis) and another 2 cups of broth. Remove pan from heat - let the soup sweat with the lid on for 2-3 minutes. Now in small batches, use blender of a braun hand blender to puree the soup unti lvery smooth. Strain through a seive, and reserve the solids, which I will hereby christen "minty pea sludge" or perhaps, "greenwhip." Whisk in any combination of cream, milk, and/or yogurt your mouthfeel gauge desires. Add salt, pepper and garnish with mint leaves. Serve hot or cold.
So now you're ready for the second recipe, Super-Safe Guacamole. (Safe as in: really quite lowfat, compared to pretty much all other forms of guac)
Fluff up in a big bowl:
1 C. Booty's GreenWhip
1 large Florida avacado, roughly chopped
1 pkg soft tofu, drained
Big ole handful of cilantro
Maybe a few tablespoons of chiffonaded sages leaves
3-4 chopped scallions
and a finely diced serrano pepper, if you're that kind of person
and tuck in. I swear to god, if this shows up on Martha Stewart I will sue her within an inch her life. These recipes are so copyrighted by me.
posted by LauraB 2:50 PM
Friday, June 21, 2002
Not in my backyard . . . hey, where'd the backyard go? Or the apartment? Or the neighborhood?
OK, so we all know that Bangladesh and other places Americans don't care about will more or less disappear if we allow the melting/distintegration of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, but I was blissfully clueless about this:
"We know," said Dr. Oppenheimer, "that if the ice sheet were destroyed, sea levels would rise about five meters, which would be catastrophic for coastal regions. That would submerge much of Manhattan below Greenwich Village, for instance."
Yikes. (Part about Southern 1/3 of Florida disappearing left out cause I don't care. See, I'm a good American!)
Yeah, good name for the good Doc, too.
posted by Mike 12:26 PM
Thursday, June 20, 2002
If you really want security,
you'd make the new money scratch-n-sniff. Bills could come in flavors (That'll cost you a grape, lady!) Although it's disappointing that the government isn't doing the blind the courtesy of varying the sizes of the bills, let alone proposing a radical new graphic feel (let the stamp designers do it!), but pretty much anything is an improvement over our existing currency. Oh and please let it be wax- or plastic-coated paper, with really cool hip modern monuments of American architecture and nature.
Pushed, tho, we can all live with the typographic pap the Feds crank out. Only this horrifying thought looms as ominously as any terrorist act.
posted by LauraB 4:48 PM
Yesterday i was locked out
in a vigorous rain with no wallet. So I rambled on the banks of the east river, scouring for 35 cents in change to use a pay phone to call my roommate and say "come home from work early and bring the key!" I looked under vending machines, near laundromats, in change receptacles, wandering through grocery stores - diddley-nada. I the meantime, right, I pass by oh, like 100 people talking on their cell phones. What if, I think to myself, I just politely ask if I can make a local call because it's something of an emergency? Certainly I've helped out strangers in similar situations. Time to cash in on all this paying-it-forward.
Needless to say, my optimism was groundless. No one talked to me. It was as if I was an invisible alien who was attempting to violate their innermost secrets.
So that was all good, and by this time it wasn't raining so hard, so I submitted to the fates and began to enjoy my walk, content to wander for a few hours. Which is how i came to espy a curiously parked tugboat with a dumpster of what appeared to be eggs. It was tethered to a pier with two long flotational ropes about 200 feet long, and there were about 100 people standing in silence, looking at the boat. The dumpster was tipped at a 45 degree incline, poised to dump its load into the East River.
—Yo, whaddup?
—Those are ducks.
—Ducks? Or duck eggs?
—Like rubber ducks.
—Are they gonna throw 'em in the water?
—Yeah, you get money.
—Excuse me?
—If your duck goes under there (pointing under the pier) and crosses the finish line, you win a bunch of money. Or a car. They were gonna dump it at 5 but now they say 6:00.
Perhaps you had to be there, standing in the rain, watching vaguely sullen people watch a million rubber ducks just on the cusp of being spilled into New York Harbor, but it was just weird, man. Anyway, the whole thing was a charity stunt invented by these fine folks. The funny thing is, it was co-sponsered by a cell phone company who were offering one free phone call to anywhere in the USofA.
posted by LauraB 4:28 PM
Tuesday, June 18, 2002
Hallelujia!
Profound thanks to enetation for inventing a super-user-friendly commenting system. Changes will come, but for now, feel free to chat away.
posted by LauraB 5:37 PM
Monday, June 17, 2002
Justafiably furious.
When a fellow urban bicyclist causes me to fall in the middle of an intersection, cruelly shouting "welcome to my life, bitch— "
When my student loan repayment people send me a bill for $16,000 and make me spend an hour on the phone to find out the bill was erroneously mailed —
When all my students' work is destoryed via wonton IT negligence —
When minimalism is interpreted as aesthetic blandness and its ethical and metaphysical underpinings are abandoned by us artsy fartsy folk —
When the sum total of every vote I've ever cast results in a complete failure of my political representation —
Yeah, I do. I get angry.
posted by LauraB 3:59 PM
Friday, June 14, 2002
A friendly conversation
— Hey! How're you doing? It's been way too long.
— Well this is a nice surprise, hearing from you. Wazzup?
— I'm just feeling lots-of-robots-y and thought I'd see if you were too.
— Why, I am, thanks for noticing!
— Everything good?
— Marvellous, but I'm off to the Isle of Palms, and then I'm stopping by for a tattoo.
— Got it. Check and ciao!
posted by LauraB 3:44 PM
Wednesday, June 12, 2002
Bahut barra fun!
...Throw your hands in the air if you've got facial hair,
Not just for the guys, c'mon ladies be fair!...
Any song with references to my old friend carrom gets my eternal applause.
And to further express my American solidarity India in our mutal post-colonial status, I say "good day! to you, UK!"
posted by LauraB 1:29 PM
Eh! It's a thing
Please to note the new "equatorialize" link on your left. You may now tag our equatorialific ass. Off to garden in the City Hall Park now.
posted by LauraB 10:02 AM
Monday, June 10, 2002
Thanks, Houstons!
Good fun!
posted by LauraB 3:04 PM
Sunday, June 09, 2002
Hopeful aside, blogger-stylee:
An interesting dialogue from a perspective we here in the USA should get more often.
posted by LauraB 9:31 PM
Friday, June 07, 2002
High Time for a Snuggleblog
Five random things said by one spouse that turned the other spouse's knees into veggie aspic:
1. Call in sick!
2. Dude, make some music! It's easy.
3. I've got a credit card; let's go to London for a weekend.
4. Woman, I'm running for office!
5. Of course can pack it all into one backpack.
posted by LauraB 12:31 PM
Thursday, June 06, 2002
Flat-Haired Manifesto
To all the very-long-but-flat-haired people of the world out there, has this ever happened to you? You wake up and say to yourself "No! I simply cannot bear to hear the question `Didja iron your hair this morning?' one more time! Drastic measures for to wrest a millimeter of volume and life into my sagging coif are required!" And you haul your ass on down to the local beauty parlor, post-haste, without really stopping to think about the consequences of this caprice.
This roiling whim tends to happen at the beginning of summer, doesn't it? You wake up and think to yourself, "golly, whatever good are these silky waist-length tresses doing me now that it's 98 degrees and more humid outside than a Barbara Taylor Bradford novel?" Or perhaps you learn that hair is really nothing more than an ossification of all the toxic excretions your hair follicles can process. You begin to feel like you're wrapped up in strong, long, well-used sponges, ya know?
And perhaps you're like me, you contract the Must Change Urge with the Fear of the Chop. You maybe put yourself on a 10-year hair plan (short for ten years, grow it out for ten, repeat), or have made some kind of solemnical vow "I will never cut my hair until then Dalai Lama returns to Tibet." Perhaps the memory of a straight cut razor sailing across your scalp while your 5-rupee a shave barber scolds "you're very ugly now madam!" really instilled a physical distaste for sharp objects too close to your head.
What choice is left, really, then, but a perm? A wave, a body infuser? And you succumb to it: YES, yes I will.. Long and flouncy, gossamer ringlets, & afros are in, right? Yes, yes, YES PLEASE? Now! Give me a perm now! Give me twisty hair or give me, well, a manicure!” And maybe say you’re having a numerically neat birthday, one of those stop-&make-you-take-stock numbers.
'Cause that's what happened to me, and that is how I found myself in a Chinese beauty parlor at Elizabeth and Bayard Streets this spring. It was bustling with Sunday afternoon life, but they found space for me.
— So, what can we do ya for today, lady?
— I would liek a trim and perm, please.
— Oh, perm, very good! How wonderful. Just like Meg Ryan.
This is the first clue that I should perhaps just sloooow down a bit here, bootsy, (after all, isn't Meg Ryan pretty much flat-haired?) but naturally it is roundly ignored by my own juiced-for-chemical-coil self.
— $70, please. Here's some books for styles.
— Thanks. I'd like hair like that please, I say, pointing to a soft body wave.
— That's no good. You get perm like this, says the cosmetologist, pointing to a very tightly wound crown of super-hopped-shirly-temple ringlets.
— Um, no thanks, the first way, please.
— It's all arranged then.
Then she yells across the beauty parlor: Perm on one! Perm on one! Chen, come here!
A resplendent 45-year old Chinese man, with a Pokémon t-shirt, beery paunch, and single strand of blue artfully wrapped around his pompador like a gift ribbon, approached with a cackling glee, gunning straight for my hair. I cast my eyes away from his glorious entrance to a poster of Madonna in her Desperately Seeking Professional Hairhelp phase.
By now, the cavalcade of clues is starting to form a feeling, if not a thought. I close my eyes and wonder whether my permly model, Farah Fawcett, ever entrusted her physical manifestation to a Pokémon man with a cell phone dangling from a sparkly belt buckle, looking for all the world like a codpiece.
Chen grabs my hair, brandishes a chunk of it about, and proclaims "All this is no good, too flat. Like Chinese! You get perm? Great. Let's go!"
Vigorous shampoo, etc. On the return from the shampoo station to the perm station, it occurs to me that shampooing before a perm is supposed to be one of the numero-uno damaging chemical mistakes you can make. Chen is, at this point, chatting animatedly with his neighbor about my perm, although he speaks in Cantonese which I do not speak.
At the very least, I'll a trim, I think to myself. We'll see how it goes.
It goes badly (it was a rounded trim, not a straight one like I asked for), but not terribly (reasonably efficient): just enough to break the bodywave fever. I act:
— Okay, so Chen? I've changed my mind. No perm, just a trim, please.
Absolute, dead silence across the beauty shop. The shampoo lady looks up from her tap. The customer to the left of me, the one getting the perm, cocks an eyebrow. Chen's hands are poised in the air with a tiny little curler and some paper wrappers, and he looks up startled:
— No perm?
— Yep, no perm. Just the trim.
— …
— NO PERM?
— Yes, that's right.
— And why not?!
— Well, I like my flat hair.
— WHAT?!
— …
Another beauty shop attendant chimes in.
— You like straight hair?
(You must admire the weirdness of this reverse psychology customer management, no?) I pluck up and offer:
— Yes! Yes, I do like straight hair! My hair looks great! What am I, nuts? It’s so elegant! So smooth!
Someone chuckles, but Chen’s not smiling.
— ...
— But I already mixed the lotions, lady.
— I'm sorry. I'll be happy to pay for the lotions. But no perm, thank you.
Again with the beauty shop silence.
Mr. Chen lays down his curler and his bottle onto the wheeled perm cart, which he pushes away with a soft kick. He sits down, peels off his latex glove, and strokes his cell phone. With a heaving sigh he lifts his blow drier wearily, prepares to give me the longest, most painful blow-dry in the history of cosmetology, pushes out his lower lip, clenches his jaw, curls his long-nailed fingers as if to pinch my scalp, and with quite of bit of haughty ice, replies:
—Fine. Flat.
And that is quite enough of that. No more beauty parlor stories for another ten years. (Unless you want a leg-wax chronicle, but let’s save that for another day...)
posted by LauraB 4:57 PM
Monday, June 03, 2002
Da Other Bomb
Not to be a bummer on such a beautiful sunny day, but in the spirit of ultimate temperance could you please go and fill out this very brief petition to prevent Kashmir, the most beautiful place anywhere, from getting nuked to smithereens? Thanks.
posted by LauraB 3:06 PM