schplog

Did you hear that Barbra Streisand is ditching her singing career to become a stand-up comic? Apparently she’s going through a funny phase.

Word on the street has it (thnx huggy bear) that Folgers is introducing two new coffee varieties to the market, specifically targeting the hip, ironic and infirm youth of today.

The one for rebels is actually supposed to complement “that smoky flavor” of the early morning cigarette (whoah, can you hear the backlash?). The ads are supposed to be awesome. There’s this young, skinny hipster guy, wearing a  “Your Favorite Band Sucks” t-shirt, and he’s clearly just woken up. He’s got a cigarette in his mouth and is poking around the kitchen for his instant coffee. He finds it and is so thrilled that he almost hacks up a lung. And then the voiceover says, “Ever heard of Smoker’s Cough? How about Smoker’s Coffee?”
Ohmygod. Apparently the ad for the Party Hard Whooping Coffee is even better, but I haven’t seen it yet.

Okay, how much chin could a chin-chucker chuck if a chin-chucker could chuck chin?

Or, conversely, how much gin could a gin-chugger chug if a gin-chugger could chug gin?

Or: how much shin could a shin-hugger hug if a shin-hugger could hug shin?

The thing with the cavemen is that they resisted change. Or rather, they just weren’t into having it happen very quickly. Understandably. Who can blame a tired ancestor for just plodding along about his daily business, bumbling about in his mediocre way, hoping that things would somehow kind of turn out okay? That was, in a nutshell, the life of Meanderthal Man.

Why did the chicken cross the road?

To network with the chickens on the other side.

(She’s an eggstrovert)

My great-aunt makes this totally over-the-top egg salad with about a thousand ingredients. Pickles, bean sprouts, marshmallows, bread crumbs, bacon bits, cabbage, you name it. Some people think it’s too much, and they’re right. But she doesn’t care. So what, is what she thinks. Life is short. Live a little.

Who cares if it’s a little eggsessive?

The film version of the wonderful novel, A Confederacy of Dunces (a schplog favorite), has already been cast many a time. But all wrong wrong wrong! I know Jim Belushi died before he could embody Ignatius J. Reilly, but Will Ferrell in a fat suit? Good grief. This must not happen. As Ignatius himself would say, “Oh my god, what a lascivious abomination!”

And he would be right.
Here’s how Dunces *should* be cast:
Ignatius J. Reilly — Phillip Seymour Hoffman
Mrs. Reilly — Holly Hunter (or possibly Geena Davis)
Patrolman Mancuso — Steve Buscemi
Lana Lee — Jennifer Dale
Darlene — Lindsey Lohan

For more on the unfortunate attempts to bring Dunces to the big screen, as well as the odd fates of many possible Ignatii, you may peruse Peter Hyman’s lovely article in Slate.

I always think of ratatouille as a simple French country dish with a bit of hearty  Italian-ness thrown in. I’m always wondering how that happened. Actually, I don’t wonder about it at all, but to graduate from culinary school I had to write a paper for my course on Meta and Meme: Origins within Orange Peels and the Cross-Cultural Cultivation of Dish Discourse.

My advisor, Dr. Charles Fox, chastised me for using the phrase “lasagne-like”, but he pointed out that Italian and French may well have merged to form something utterly  new. Cultural mingling across national borders, and all that. When it comes down to it, people just end up meeting. One thing leads to another and pretty soon they’re  already exchanging peasantries.

I’m not generally crazy about going to visit my mother’s sister, even though she’s super nice and always gives us great presents. But she’s also old fashioned and eccentric and it’s a pain to get there because she lives way up in the mountains with a managerie of animals that she spoils rotten. Not to mention all the creepy things she hasn’t adopted.

Once on the way to visit her my brother was bitten by a rattlesnake. Course he got lucky because  it turns out that she was the only thing that could have saved him. Auntie Bertha took him in and made a special tea, tucked him into bed and baked him his favorite cookies.  Nothing cures a poison like the auntie dote.

Apres moi, delusions of grandeur!