(no subject)

On the subject of how much it costs to eat food... one of the things I need to track better for the 2005 year is how much my damn food costs, including bought food not from the grocery store. (I mean like food from restera... restarau... Fuck it. Places you eat out. With waiters.) Probably better tracking of what I spend on food is a good idea and we can see how I'm doing with the figures expected for my country. I'm supposed to spend something like $1427 in 1993 dollars, and using the handy chart that the internet hath delivered unto me via the endless reach of google, we can see that this works out to about 1886.49 in 2005 dollars.

( More on the food thing. Also some thoughts on parody and quite a bit of parenthetical rambling, not that this should surprise anyone.... )

(no subject)

Is it just me, or is this something that would be a LOT more fun if it were a DVD instead of a book? I feel like emailing the author and going "Great idea, wrong medium."

I mean, hell, it's a book about television commercials. How can you discuss things you can't see? It'd be fairly easy to make a DVD, instead. The format would be something like intro the material, show the commercial, plain. Provide some voiceover commentary on the commercial, showing it again, more slowly, with football circles-n-arrows to highlight interesting parts of the thing. Add more discussion, pausing the action if needed. Wrap up voiceover, lead in to the next one, hopefully one that is thematically similar or different or related in some way to the previous, sort of chained events (3-Chain!). That would be so damn cool. I would buy a DVD like that. Why did they make it a book?

(no subject)

I have some food in the cupboard that I should probably do something with. Now, I really hate how people post on cooking forums that they "just bought some xxxx" and need to know what to do with it RIGHT AWAY. I don't understand such cooking emergencies. Was there some bizarre shopping accident where they inexplicably wound up with two sheep's stomachs, a live goose, or a puffer fish when they THOUGHT they were getting four pork chops or a pound of ground turkey? They never say how it happened that they wound up with the weird ingredient, just that they have it. I dunno. I think that an examination of the mental processes that lead people to lay out good money for something they do not have any idea how to make into actual food would be enlightening, but I can't find a polite way to say that in said forums. Ah, well. Those innocent victims of bizarre shopping accidents have got to be shopping at a Trader Joe's or a Whole Foods or something similarly upscale. We don't have sheep stomachs, live geese, or puffer fish at the Weiss.

( Read the rest? )