Tuesday, August 31, 2021
Kitchen Korner
I used to buy Ian a celebrity cookbook for Christmas every year, until I ran out of ideas for celebrities who seemed even vaguely plausible in the kitchen. Thus, we will from time to time have Stanley Tucci's potato croquettes or Chrissy Teigen's mac and cheese interspersed with our regular menu of microwave cookery and Blue Apron meals we forgot to cancel. We even dipped into Paula Deen's offerings before she became controversial. But this past weekend we really outdid ourselves with a little bit of Gwyneth Paltrow, specifically her summer corn polenta recipe that looked really easy but ended up possessing my life for a spell.
You see, the recipe called for freshly prepared polenta, not the pre-cooked kind. And the first three grocery stores I checked only had the latter, or at least that was the only type I could find. It turns out there are lots of different places in groceries stores where polenta might be! The pre-cooked polenta was in the "international" aisle next to other Italian fare, but when I ultimately found the raw stuff it was with baking supplies. Maybe if I'd realized that it's also known as "corn grits" that would have made a difference? I don't think that Gwyneth would be comfortable with that terminology, though, and I'm never one to cross a vagina candle mogul.
Anyway, once I got the right supplies, the polenta was a pretty breezy 45 minutes in the kitchen, most of which was spent stirring. And it received rave reviews, though that may well have just been social politeness. Not sure whose cookbook I'll use next time. Does Rihanna have an entry?
Sunday, August 22, 2021
The Future is 1995
One of my very favorite things about Ian is that he, for a very long time, had a VHS copy of the Sandra Bullock thriller The Net that he had taped off television and moved with him multiple times. That VHS tape met a terrifying end last year when we used it as a guinea pig for our attempt to get our VHS player to work; there were bits of tape everywhere. Although we did ultimately get the player to work, we still ask to this day if it was really worth that very high cost.
And now I have to say that the answer is yes, because I have finally seen The Net, as we watched it on demand earlier this week. (Yes, we had a slow week, to the point that we also watched the 2005 Ryan Reynolds remake of The Amityville Horror. Horror, indeed.) I know a lot of people who remember it very fondly, but it doesn't really hold up in my view. The internet is presented as being a very powerful and very scary thing, and that's not wrong, but they keep it really vague about how exactly "hacking" works. Mainly people seem to just be selecting commands off of pop up windows. There are multiple diskettes involved, and the climax of the movie involves use of the "escape" key. Also, Dennis Miller as the love interest? Did Sandra cross the casting director somehow?
All in all, it made for a long evening. Not as long as the evening spent watching Ryan Reynolds somehow seem sarcastic while attempting to murder his family, but still.
Monday, August 16, 2021
Now What?
The Olympics are over and the pandemic remains. I'll admit that, by the point in the year, I'd sort of envisioned that I'd be running all over town naked and freely coughing on people, but I also thought that people would get vaccinated. Because, you know, dying is oftentimes viewed as a negative. But I'm wrong on all kinds of things, frankly. I mean, I really thought Kathrine Heigl was poised to have a nice romantic comedy career after 21 Dresses...
Anyway, we soldier on. I'm still going in to the office occasionally, primarily to avoid having to make multilingual small talk with my cleaning lady, and I've even added a few lunches with friends into the mix. It seems weirdly transgressive to sit in Chipotle and eat our burrito bowls with our masks down. We're still watching a lot of television, but we've also worked to bring reading more into the mix. I finished the complete short stories of John Cheever, which I'm not even sure that John Cheever can say. I still haven't read Ulysses, though. That one will probably be evergreen for me -- it seems too heavy to even carry, frankly.
Oh, and I got a CPAP, did I mention that? Yeah, I went in for a sleep study and had a bunch of wires attached all over my body by a very sassy lady such that even relaxing, much less sleeping, seemed like an impossibility. Then I found out I have sleep apnea and spent months trying to convince the major sleep health companies (because that's a thing) to actually sell me their products, before finally getting the opportunity to strap myself into a mask every night, much like Hannibal Lecter. So yeah, no big deal. I do think I'm sleeping better now, though it hasn't done anything at all to prevent that recurring dream where I've been electrocuted by Shelley Long.
Sunday, August 08, 2021
Commercial Break
As I have previously blogged, I love the Olympics. I do not love, however, seeing the same commercials over and over again. (And yes, I fast forward when I can, but I'm watching a lot of this live.) Here are some of my least favorites:
-- The Microsoft Teams ads where people are "exploring" Tokyo virtually via Teams. First of all, don't harass your Japanese friends by making them walk all over with their mobile devices showing you cat cafes and translating shit for you. They're not asking you to carry them all over Navy Pier or take them to a virtual tea at American Girl Place, are they? Also, everyone looks stupid reacting to things on Teams; showing the world how that looks is not exactly selling the product. And to the girl for whom the cat cafe was the "top of her list for Tokyo:" time for some self reflection.
-- The Facebook ads where a "Longboard family" learns to do skateboarding tricks together on Facebook. I mean, sure, Facebook allows hate speech to fester like nobody's business and didn't seem too concerned about actual calls for the overthrow of the government, but at least they make skateboarders feel good about themselves. Can't Facebook just accept that everyone hates them but feels kind of stuck with them because they used their account to join Candy Crush and they don't want to have to start over on level 1? That's a pretty catchy ad slogan right there.
-- The Uber Eats commercial where the delivery person is trying to make a delivery during synchronized swimming practice. What happened to contactless delivery? Couldn't he just leave it at the door and text Janine? And what happened to waiting half an hour after you eat before swimming?
-- All of the pharmaceutical ads where athletes talk about how they get migraines or have relatives with diabetes or whatever. Is there no aspect of these people's lives that we can leave off the record? I mean, we already had to go swamp boating in Florida with Caeleb Dressel.
-- The commercial where the paralympic athlete swims through images of her life story to the reenacted sounds of her mother getting the call about adopting her. Why does everything look like it's taking place in the 1950s? She's 29 years old. Also, swimming into your childhood kitchen seems likely to cause water damage.
I'm a positive, life affirming person. It's the only way I know how to be.
