I'm going to be keeping my public blog at WordPress from now on. I doubt I'll be updating here; here's the RSS feed if you're interested.

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bento #36

Kind of a slapdash lunch this week. This is what happens when I go to the grocery store without making a plan and a list first.

• Bite-size cucumber & cream cheese sandwiches on dark rye.
• Apricot.
• Trail mix.
• Vegetarian "chicken" nuggets--fast becoming a freezer staple. With catsup.
• Sliced lotus roots that have been brining in apple cider vinegar and kosher salt for about 10 days.
• Milk pudding cake. I don't know why it's called that, it doesn't have pudding inside. It's not too sweet, even the icing. More like pan dulce than cake.
  

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I can't articulate my feelings of "Huh?" any better than Jezebel did:

The spine of Allure reads "The Beauty Expert." That's the mag's claim to fame. Nowhere does it say that the publication is for the mentally handicapped, three year olds, those recovering from spinal cord injuries or Neanderthals. (Or Cro-Mags, heh.) So it is impossible to comprehend why the glossy felt the need to publish a step-by-step charticle on how to take a shower.

How to shower

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Preview of this weekend

Via Consumerist comes a feature in Business Week about vodka. The author theorizes that there is no discernible difference between different brands of vodka, because it's a "neutral" liquid--no aging or oak barrels, the goal of the end product to be as flavorless as possible. Preferences are based on marketing and snobbery.

He served a group of his friends--including one self-professed "vodka expert"--a variety of straight shots and mixed drinks, and no one could tell in a blind test the difference between Absolut, Popov, Ketel One, Smirnoff, Skyy, Belvedere, Grey Goose, and Vox.

Heh! I've been telling my friends who are Stolichnaya or Grey Goose snobs for years that they're suckers. It all tatstes like lighter fluid, anyway. My vodka of choice is Smirnoff, which retails for around $9.99 a bottle. Goes great with V-8 juice and a dash of Tabasco. Sometimes I get Skyy, because it's distilled locally and bottled in cobalt blue glass--I have a weird obsession with things that come in cobalt blue bottles. I gather it's considered rather high-end in other parts of the country, but it's pretty cheap around these parts.

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Summit fire 1

There's been a pretty nasty wildfire raging in the Santa Cruz mountains for the past couple of days. Usually wildfire season doesn't start until late summer/early autumn, but we had one of the driest Aprils on record, followed by intense wind for a lot of May.

Even here in Fremont you can tell there's a fire somewhere. The air quality is very poor--my eyes are burning. The sky is all hazy, and you can even smell it.

It looks like they're getting it under way though, and the weather's cooperating. It might even rain a little bit this weekend.

Spring in the Bay Area is a schizophrenic time of year. The weather flip-flops from one extreme to the other. In the space of one week, it went from triple-digit record heat, to cold and windy. The temperature dropped about 30 degrees over a 3-day period. It can make biking a trial, because you never know what to wear. I try to remember my mother's advice: Dress in layers!

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There's an interesting post on Big Fat Blog today about whether to congratulate people on weight loss or not. The author says he doesn't do it, that "Offering up a positive retort only serves to reinforce the idea, ultimately, that it is bad to be fat. The simple congratulations - even if stated in a meaningless fashion, even if you really don't care, even if it's awkward to say nothing - means that one supports the status quo."

I think this is a little simplistic. There are different kinds of weight loss. And I don't think it does the fat acceptance movement any good to deny that obesity can be bad for your health--it just makes us look simple-minded and self-deluded. If someone is tired of aching joints, or is at risk for a stroke from high blood pressure, or really needs to get their diabetes under control, who am I to tell them not to lose weight? My concern would be that they do it in a healthy way, not starving themselves or going on dangerous fad diets. If they did that, they would liikely just gain the weight back, possibly with extra.

Someone very close to me recently lost a lot of weight that was slowly (and not-so-slowly) killing him. I'm incredibly proud of him, and I'm glad he did it, so I will be able to enjoy his company for years to come. (Well, that's not to say he couldn't get hit by a train tomorrow. But still.) To me, that's like congratulating someone on their cancer going into remission. It's not like they're dieting to get closer to the stick-thin unrealistic ideal of beauty our society holds up, which is behavior that shouldn't be encouraged.

Where I don't congratulate is when people who are already healthy lose 20 pounds starving themselves on bullshit diets like Master Cleanse. If they fish for compliments, my stock answer is "I thought you looked fine already". And I absolutely refuse to take part in those bizarre, ritualistic self-loathing rounds that so many women indulge in. You know what I mean: someone says "Waaah, I need to lose X number of pounds! I really hate the size of my Y body part(s)!", someone else adds their bit of self-hatred to the pile, and everyone looks at you expectantly? I usually say "I'm perfectly healthy, and I think I look good, so I'm okay"

I've lost a noticable amount of weight in the past year, since selling my car and riding my bicycle/walking a lot more. It annoys me when people compliment me on my "weight loss". To me the more important aspect is how much better I feel--I'm still a size 18-20 and likely will never be smaller, nor do I have any burning desire to be so. However, the way I feel isn't really visible to others, so I try to take their remarks for the compliments they no doubt mean them to be.

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I have no idea in what kind of context this was done, nor do I care.

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Sadly, Jericho was canceled after its short-lived, fan-inspired resurrection of a 7-episode 2nd season. At least it allowed them to more or less wrap the show up and give it a fucking awesome send-off.

Moonlight was another one of those shows that were just terrible, yet I couldn't stop watching it. Mediocre writing, downright bad acting (Shannyn Sossamon making the bared vamp-teeth at a monkey will always be remembered), giggle-inducing vamp effects; it was like a little cookie of wonderful badness that sat atop Friday night like a cherry on top of a sundae. (Wow, mixed metaphors much?) So of course, it also got the hatchet. Sadface!

It's biggest fault was its obvious rip-off of homage to Angel: Not only the whole "Vampire with a soul solving crimes" (Although in the Moonlight-verse, vamps didn't lack souls. It was more like the Blade version of vampirism. The vamps were like humans: sometimes good and sometimes amoral jerks.) root story, but they even borrowed the "Vamp's crazy lover/sire, who he thought was dead, returns as a human" plotline. It was pretty blatant. I suppose if it had lasted another season, Shannyn Sossamon would have given birth to a son who eventually got sucked into a hell dimension. And there would have been a demon who could see your future when you did karaoke.

Speaking of Angel, my main bad teevee indulgence is now going to have to be Bones. I watched the pilot back when it started, snorted in disgust.... and several months later went back to it. Something about it sucked me in. And it's not all bad, it's got a pretty good cast and fairly decent writing; although they've kind of veered wildly off-character this season. Mostly I just like anyone with the last name "Deschanel" and David Boreanaz, who isn't my generation's James Dean or anything, but cute and seems to know what he's good at and sticks to it.

Check out this screencap from the season finale. Can you think of any non-verbal cue that would give you insight into a character more than this?

Why are you wearing a hat that dispenses beer?

He's taking a bath while wearing a beerhat, smoking a cigar, and reading a Green Lantern comic book. He was also listening to like, Cheap Trick or some similar band. Awesome.

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Kidding, kidding!

Alex Pareene makes some valid points, chief among them that this is more of the same old bashing bullshit that we lashed out against when it was directed at us by Boomers (which I acknowledged in my original post).

Also that the parents of many Millenials aren't Boomers, but early Xers. So the problem of Millenials being "silly, vain, shallow, and self-important after one too many 'you're just sooooo special!' notes in our collective lunchbox" (as a LJ friend of mine so brilliantly put it) can't be laid at the feet of the Boomers alone. Possibly we overcompensated, after an adolescenece and young adulthood spent feeling like the unwanted redheaded stepchildren of America.

Millennials are the first generation whose every dumb mistake is archived forever on computer networks.
I will totally give him that. I've often thanked the universe that most of my dumb youth was behind me by the time the internet became an everyday reality, and was long gone by the time social networking and YouTube became common.

But then he loses me when he slams grunge. Only someone who didn't have to grow up surrounded by talentless hair-metal bands like Poison and Ratt would fail to acknowledge the debt we all owe to grunge. As my brother David put it: I never cared for the music, but I'm glad the movement existed, because it single-handedly made hair-metal irrelevant. All those fuckers woke up unemployed the day after "Smells Like Teen Spirit" landed in the #1 Billboard slot. (Of course, they all eventually found a second life in reality teevee, which is another crime that Generation X will no doubt one day have to pay for. But my original point is still valid!)

Generation X invented the very concept of selling out.
Dude, come on. We did not. I bet artists have been arguing about "selling out" since cavemen painted on rocks. That shit is universal.

In 1997, the Times looked at Mentos and Hanson and called us "edgeless." They dragged out Generation X rep Douglas Coupland to call us all uncool for liking the Spice Girls. We were little kids! Sorry I wasn't an edgy 12-year-old, Doug!
True, and again: acknowledged. The youngest Millenial is only 6, I think it's a little early to pass a sweeping judgement on all 80 million of them.

During the elections you guys represented the "youth vote"; we got stiff old Baby Boomers.
Well, who were we going to vote into office, someone of our generation? Somone who would have been, max, 31 in 1992? Besides, I don't regret campaigning for Bill Clinton. That horny old skirt-chaser gave us 8 freakin' years of peace and prosperity. If I had it to do all over again, I would.

Plus, it's cute how he thinks today's politicians are any different. You can wrap Obama up in the glittery rainbow of "Change!"--and keep in mind I support him myself--but in the end, he's not going to be radically different. The more things change, the more they don't, Alex. You should read A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn.

People keep calling us the first generation that will do worse than its parents.
Are you fucking kidding me? Generation X has been hearing this since I graduated to a sippy cup.

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Stop her before she destroys us all!

Actual headline from BBC News: Obese blamed for the world's ills. With the requisite ugly, hairy, stretchmarked disembodied stomach.

The gist: Climate change, rising gas prices, and the increase in the cost of food are all the fault of fatties. Yes, the world really is that simple. Why not just round them up and gas them? Along with tall people, people who exercise a lot or have fast metabolisms, poor people who can't afford a healthy diet, and the wealthiest 5% who suck up most of the world's resources, whatever their weight.

Man, I had no idea us fat people were so powerful. Sorry about all the cancer and terrorism that we've apparently been causing.

Sadly, this is par for the course for British publications. You think America has fat bigotry? The UK is 10 times worse, it's why Chloe Marshall (the size 16 contender for Miss England) is such huge news. It would be like a woman with 2 heads vying to be Miss America.

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