Cat's Eyes Match Chair

Ultimate Breakfast

These days I'm totally into the fresh green drinking coconut--it is the original ideal breakfast.

Phase One: Just got up, feeling sick and grouchy, last thing I want to think about is food. No problem! Grab a drinking coconut from the fridge, slice the top off, and pop in a straw.  It's subtle, nourishing, refreshing, like breast milk for grown-ups.

Phase Two: Feeling better, got my strength up, but still upset to be awake: ready to beat someone's head open with a hammer, which is exactly what comes next.  Take that, coconut!

Phase Three: What with all that smashing I've worked up a real appetite, and what could be more satisfying than a delicious fresh coconut?

See?  It's the perfect breakfast experience.

Dirty Dancing

So Christine's watching Dirty Dancing on TV.  Well, if you've always wondered what the deal is with all that "Nobody puts Baby in a corner" stuff but you've never actually watched the movie or bothered looking it up or anything, it turns out her name is Baby.

Not sure why it is nobody puts her in a corner, though.  It's not a very good movie.

*** UPDATE: 2 March 2012 ***
Okay, according to Christine, it's Patrick Swayze who's all like "Nobody puts Baby in a corner."  Apparently Baby and her family are sitting at a table in the corner, and Patrick Swayze comes over and he goes "Nobody puts Baby in a corner," and he pulls her out and they do their dance and that's it.  So actually, it's all a dispute over the seating arrangement.

See, I had always assumed that "putting Baby in a corner" was some kind of really filthy dance move and that it was Baby's father who was objecting to it.  Like, e.g.:

[Patrick Swayze and Baby are dancing together.  It's completely dirty, like, dirtier than you could possibly imagine.  Think of the dirtiest dancing you've ever seen and then multiply it by fifty.  It's that dirty.]

PATRICK SWAYZE: Baby, I totally sweat you, you're so burning up the dance floor right now.

BABY: Oh, Patrick Swayze, this dirty dance we're doing right now illustrates my undying love for you.

PATRICK SWAYZE: I...I think it's time now, Baby.  I've been waiting so long, but it's finally time for me to put you in a corner.

BABY: Yes!  Yes, Patrick Swayze.  Put me in a corner!  Do it now!

BABY'S FATHER: [coming in the door horrified] Hey, NOBODY puts Baby in a corner!

PATRICK SWAYZE: Wait, why are you calling me "Patrick Swayze"? Shouldn't you be using the name of my character?

BABY: Either I can't remember what your character's name is or I never heard it, not sure. Also, I don't know the name of the actress who played me, though I'm pretty sure she also played Ferris' sister in Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

PATRICK SWAYZE: Now that was a good movie.

BABY: I don't know. In retrospect it kind of reeks suburban white male privilege. I mean, why should kids like Ferris just cruise through life on charisma and affluence?  Should we really be celebrating that?

BABY'S FATHER:  I concede the force of your objection, Baby, but it was still a pretty sweet movie anyway, not like this piece of shit.

Almost Lucid Dreaming

So I've been hearing a lot about lucid dreaming recently, and I guess I've been thinking about it, though I certainly haven't been training or anything.

Well, last night I thought I was having a lucid dream. I was definitely aware that I was dreaming and I was even like, "Hey, this must be a lucid dream." But in the dream, the actual sleeper wasn't me; it was some guy in Buenos Aires. So I think it was just a regular dream about having a lucid dream.

Grown-Up Cakes

Haven't been making any children's party cakes recently.

This was a pretty sweet orange poppy seed tea-cake:

I used the lemon tea-cake recipe from Miette, then substituted oranges (actually, clementines) for the lemons, added poppy seeds to the batter, then sprinkled poppy seeds over the glaze. It was pretty well received.

Made this gingerbread cake (also from Miette) with dinner this evening:

It looks awful in the photo, but it was really great. I used more molasses and less sugar than the recipe called for, which gave it a darker, more sophisticated flavor.  We had it with vanilla ice-cream.  Yeah!

Beyond Lemon Tea-Cakes

Supposing that truth is a lemon tea-cake--what then?  Is there not ground for suspecting that all bakers, in so far as they have been dogmatists, have failed to understand lemon tea-cakes--that the terrible seriousness and clumsy importunity with which they have usually paid their addresses to truth, have been unskilled and unseemly methods for winning a lemon tea-cake?

The Cat

The cat used to sleep on top of my chest as I lay in bed at night.  I'd go to bed and within a minute or two she'd pat into the room, like clockwork, jump up onto the bed, climb onto my chest, circle a few times, and go to sleep.  It was our quality time together and I valued it.

But recently, she's stopped doing that.  Now she sleeps way down at the foot of the bed, on the left side.  Sometimes she still comes up to have a look at my chest, as if she's considering it, but then she always decides against it and goes to lie down at the foot of the bed.

If she could talk, she could explain what's going on, she could say, e.g., "It's been warmer recently, and I don't feel the need for your body heat," or "You've changed shampoos and I don't like the smell of the new one," or "I'm still angry about that time you nearly stepped on my tail," or whatever.  But she's just a cat and she can't speak, so the change remains inexplicable and traumatic.

Disaster Strikes!

So Tilo's been playing Monopoly Junior, off and on, for a few years now, and, whatever, it's a children's game, right?  It's not very good; I don't recommend it.

Right, so we decided to get him a copy of regular old grown-up Monopoly for Christmas.  It says "Ages 8+" on the box, but he's a highly intelligent, well-adjusted seven year old--or anyway, he knows to cry when he doesn't get his way, so that all seems fine.

BUT--and this was completely my fault--when I went to the store to pick the game up a few weeks ago, I just assumed that the box with Monopoly written on it would be, you know, Monopoly, and not something else.  So imagine the horror and disgust I felt when, upon opening it up a couple of days ago*, we found this: 

That's right: it's the UK version!  Now I think I'm a pretty cosmopolitan guy, but this rankles for several reasons.

1. This is Australia!  If they're going to play on a non-standard board, why not Sydney or Melbourne or something?  Bowing down before the imperial capital is very 1950s.
2. If they're going to do London, why aren't we using pounds?  The instructions still refer to the currency as "dollars," but they use this weird M symbol instead of $.  What the hell?
3. Come on!  Monopoly has got to be the quintessential American board game.  It's the apotheosis of unrestrained robber-baron style capitalism--and not some kind of namby-pamby-Smithian-hidden-hand-of-the-market-spontaneously-maximizes-the-public-good capitalism either--no no no!  Monopoly is a game of real estate speculation, literal rent seeking.  You're supposed to run your competition out of business, drive up prices as high as possible, and impoverish your fellow citizens.  You win when the other players lose everything!  This is a game inspired by Andrew Carnegie and J. P. Morgan.  It would have made Professor of Moral Philosophy Adam Smith physically ill.  It belongs in Atlantic City, not London.

* We were in Bali for Christmas, just got back a couple of days ago.  Santa filled Tilo's stocking in the hotel, but he had to wait to get home to open his presents.

Highbrow Allusions in Pynchon

Check this out:

        "Quickly, the field-glasses....Now, what in blazes have we here?" The [airship] in the distance was distinguished by an envelope with the onion-like shape--and nearly the dimensions too--of a dome of an Eastern Orthodox church, against whose brilliant red surface was represented, in black, the Romanoff crest, and above it, in gold Cyrillic lettering, the legend BOL'SHAIA IGRA, or "The Great Game." It was readily recognized by all as the flagship of Randolph's mysterious Russian counterpart--and, far too often, nemesis--Captain Igor Padzhitnoff, with whom previous "run-ins" (see particularly The Chums of Chance and the Ice Pirates, The Chums of Chance Nearly Crash into the Kremlin) evoked in the boys lively though anxious memories.
        "What's up with Padzhy, I wonder?"  murmured Randolph.  "They're sure closing awfully rapidly."
        The parallel organization at Saint Petersburg, known as the Tovarishchi Slutchainyi, was notorious for promoting wherever in the world they chose a program of mischief, much of its motivation opaque to the boys. Padzhitnoff's own specialty being to arrange for bricks and masonry, always in the four-block fragments which had become his "signature," to fall on and damage targets designated by his superiors. This lethal debris was generally harvested from the load-bearing walls of previous targets of opportunity.
                --Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day, 2006.  Pages 137-38 of Vinatge version.

Okay: Russian dude dropping "bricks and masonry" from airship in signature "four-block fragments."  That's a Tetris reference, right?  Right?

Signs in Bali

Merry Christmas To All!

My Joke about Heidegger

I'm pretty sure I thought this up on my own.  I don't think I heard it anywhere:

Q  Why is Martin Heidegger the Bill Clinton of Continental philosophy?
A  Because they both want to know what the meaning of "is" is.

Get it?  Get it?

(I did a couple of web searches and it turns out several people have already thought up variations on this joke.  Damn it!  Not fair!  I didn't even know who Heidegger was back when that whole Lewinsky thing was happening!)