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Jan. 11th, 2005 11:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickOn 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.
Today was the first going-to-the-grocery that I noticed in the new year. I'm not little miss observant, so I could well have grocery shopped already this year without paying attention. But today I went to the grocery store, damn it, and I bought food. Good for me. Grocery bill: 15.96, all of which was food. (Sometimes I buy stuff like cat litter and cat food and toilet paper and laundry soap and other not-human-food items. In the event that I buy that kind of stuff, I'll make a note of it and take it off the total.) Remaining food budget for the year: 1870.53 (Am I going to stop eating once I run out of food budget? Fuck no! Do I look stupid? That was a rhetorical question. Do not answer the rhetorical questions. Am I going to include stuff like fast food and Starbucks and so forth? Yes. Not doing so would be cheating.)
I'm not sure how to figure up the cost of pre-existing food, but tracking my weekly grocery bill is a start. Let's try that, it looks like fun.
Also, today, I ran into a really delightful comic parody and, as I've been thinking on parody for a couple of weeks, this is as good a time as any to go into it. (Yeah, I've been thinking about parody and yaoi bondage porn and the cost of food worldwide and the relative honesty of people as seen on YarnHarlot's page and also on What the Bagel Man Saw and on and on and on. Mind-expanding drugs would probably make my head explode at velocities exceeding the speed of light, so it's a good thing I've not done any. Pot, which doesn't count, makes me laugh at stupid shit and eat absolutely disgusting foods like pork rinds. I swear, there is a whole class of snack foods only sold to the stoned. What else could possibly explain Funyons?) Anyway. Parody. The comic I linked to is a parody of Monty Python's Cheese Shop sketch... while funny in and of itself, the comic is a lot funnier when you know what it's riffing on.
Similarly, MC Hawking's song Entropy was quite enjoyable when I took it at face value... but it gained a dimension when I (finally) learned that it was based on Naughty By Nature's song OPP. The fan parody This is Otakudom is funny enough if you know something of anime fandom, but it's a hell of a lot funnier if you've seen This is Spinal Tap.
Because parody banks on the audience linking up the parody to the source material, it's a bit of a risk. Because of that, good parody should be funny or witty on its own merits so that if the audience can't manage to link it up to the source, they can still enjoy it on some level. The three examples listed above are all pretty fun on their own, but they're ever-so-much-more-so (in taste, the quality given by msg, the flavor identified as umami, is ever-so-much-more-so. Also, there was a really dreadful children's book that I read back when I was a child that used the phrase ever-so-much-more-so as sort of an emperor's new clothes thing. It was an odd book, really, sort of absurd and off-balance, and I remember absolutely nothing about it save the fucking phrase ever-so-much-more-so, an earworm that's lived for nigh on twenty-five years in my fucking brain. I don't know what it eats. Also there was a science fiction story about a... well, I'd have to call it a meme, a repeating motif that people saw everywhere, that propagated virally. What the fuck was that story? Google helpeth me not on these things...) when you manage to link 'em up to the source material.
Parody is an intimate humor, one that of its own nature has an in-joke, elitist quality to it. I'm all for it.
Today was the first going-to-the-grocery that I noticed in the new year. I'm not little miss observant, so I could well have grocery shopped already this year without paying attention. But today I went to the grocery store, damn it, and I bought food. Good for me. Grocery bill: 15.96, all of which was food. (Sometimes I buy stuff like cat litter and cat food and toilet paper and laundry soap and other not-human-food items. In the event that I buy that kind of stuff, I'll make a note of it and take it off the total.) Remaining food budget for the year: 1870.53 (Am I going to stop eating once I run out of food budget? Fuck no! Do I look stupid? That was a rhetorical question. Do not answer the rhetorical questions. Am I going to include stuff like fast food and Starbucks and so forth? Yes. Not doing so would be cheating.)
I'm not sure how to figure up the cost of pre-existing food, but tracking my weekly grocery bill is a start. Let's try that, it looks like fun.
Also, today, I ran into a really delightful comic parody and, as I've been thinking on parody for a couple of weeks, this is as good a time as any to go into it. (Yeah, I've been thinking about parody and yaoi bondage porn and the cost of food worldwide and the relative honesty of people as seen on YarnHarlot's page and also on What the Bagel Man Saw and on and on and on. Mind-expanding drugs would probably make my head explode at velocities exceeding the speed of light, so it's a good thing I've not done any. Pot, which doesn't count, makes me laugh at stupid shit and eat absolutely disgusting foods like pork rinds. I swear, there is a whole class of snack foods only sold to the stoned. What else could possibly explain Funyons?) Anyway. Parody. The comic I linked to is a parody of Monty Python's Cheese Shop sketch... while funny in and of itself, the comic is a lot funnier when you know what it's riffing on.
Similarly, MC Hawking's song Entropy was quite enjoyable when I took it at face value... but it gained a dimension when I (finally) learned that it was based on Naughty By Nature's song OPP. The fan parody This is Otakudom is funny enough if you know something of anime fandom, but it's a hell of a lot funnier if you've seen This is Spinal Tap.
Because parody banks on the audience linking up the parody to the source material, it's a bit of a risk. Because of that, good parody should be funny or witty on its own merits so that if the audience can't manage to link it up to the source, they can still enjoy it on some level. The three examples listed above are all pretty fun on their own, but they're ever-so-much-more-so (in taste, the quality given by msg, the flavor identified as umami, is ever-so-much-more-so. Also, there was a really dreadful children's book that I read back when I was a child that used the phrase ever-so-much-more-so as sort of an emperor's new clothes thing. It was an odd book, really, sort of absurd and off-balance, and I remember absolutely nothing about it save the fucking phrase ever-so-much-more-so, an earworm that's lived for nigh on twenty-five years in my fucking brain. I don't know what it eats. Also there was a science fiction story about a... well, I'd have to call it a meme, a repeating motif that people saw everywhere, that propagated virally. What the fuck was that story? Google helpeth me not on these things...) when you manage to link 'em up to the source material.
Parody is an intimate humor, one that of its own nature has an in-joke, elitist quality to it. I'm all for it.
