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Wednesday, January 15, 2003
In case any of you NaNoWriMo winners were feeling cocky, the new Harry Potter book is going to be 255,000 words long. I find that just a little humbling.
BTW, the book will be released on June 21. I think the line is already forming.
BTW, the book will be released on June 21. I think the line is already forming.
Tuesday, January 14, 2003
I went to see the movie Nicholas Nickelby tonight. I liked it. I had a coarse and uncultured childhood and so have never read the book, and I thought the story was rather good. It's well acted, too. Christopher Plummer chews the scenery and seems to secrete evil from his pores. Nathan Lane, Jamie Bell, and Alan Cumming are all delightful as well. (Two words: "Highland Fling".)
As I was driving through the parking lot on the way to the movie I saw a white Audi TT with a license plate that read "PANGAEA". Do you suppose that's the name of this person's startup company, or are they just really big fans of the Mesozoic supercontinent?
Speaking of movies, yesterday I ran across the greatest one-sentence film review of all time. It's for the movie Bartleby, and it's in "Film Comment" magazine on page 57:
I love the idea of Melville patrolling the gates of Heaven with a billiard ball, waiting to exact vigilante justice upon all those who taint his legacy. (Note to Melville: I've got my own little surprise for you when I get up there. I was forced to read Billy Budd in 12th grade, and I've been sharpening my shiv ever since.)
As I was driving through the parking lot on the way to the movie I saw a white Audi TT with a license plate that read "PANGAEA". Do you suppose that's the name of this person's startup company, or are they just really big fans of the Mesozoic supercontinent?
Speaking of movies, yesterday I ran across the greatest one-sentence film review of all time. It's for the movie Bartleby, and it's in "Film Comment" magazine on page 57:
| At the pearly gates, director Jonathan Parker will find himself face to face with Mr. Melville, ready with brass knuckles and a pool ball in a sock. |
I love the idea of Melville patrolling the gates of Heaven with a billiard ball, waiting to exact vigilante justice upon all those who taint his legacy. (Note to Melville: I've got my own little surprise for you when I get up there. I was forced to read Billy Budd in 12th grade, and I've been sharpening my shiv ever since.)
Sunday, January 12, 2003
Indulge in the Bounty of America*†
You may say what you will about the United States, but the fact remains that we are far and away the world leader in snack chip- and snack chip-related technologies.
I went to the store tonight to buy some snacks for a meeting tomorrow. I was wandering down the chip aisle, looking vaguely at the nearly 873 gajillion products that are available for purchase, when I stopped in my tracks. I walked backward a few steps and gazed in amazement at what I saw.
There, on the top shelf, was a product bearing the nondescript name of "Munchies". "Munchies" is manufactured by Frito-Lay and is a mixture of - stay with me here - Cheetos, Doritos, Rold Gold pretzels and Sun Chips.
I know what you're thinking, because I asked myself the exact same question: How in the world did they do it? It was only through years of ceaseless effort that our scientists were able to harness the awesome power of these four fundamental elements and make them available for our snacking pleasure. And now, by some miracle of technology, they've managed to give us all four of them in a single bag! Such was my awe that I found myself too cowed to purchase this amazing snack, but the reviews I've read say that it's pretty good.
(NOTE TO READERS: After you finish reading this post, I highly recommend that you spend some time at www.taquitos.net. There are things on this site that are not to be believed, not the least of which is the Snacking Tour of the American Southwest. - Ed.)
After this revelation, I suddenly noticed the proliferation of space age technology all around me - three-dimensional Doritos, cylindrical Fritos, circular grid-shaped pretzels that look like miniature, buttered manhole covers. The Pringles section alone featured 12 different varieties of chips, including two which were described by their packages as "Pizza-Licious" and "Ranch-Rageous", names which no doubt belie the cutting-edge flavor advancements necessary to even contemplate such a creation. Science has even transformed the lowly potato stick from the plain, salty standby of my youth into something known as "Potato Sticks Pizza Party". They put a party in a can, for crying out loud!
I became dizzy with excitement. All of these magnificent inventions wheeled about me, spinning me into a veritable World of Tomorrow, just like that old General Electric ride at Disney World where 1965-model animatronic people demonstrated how much it sucked to live in the Olden Days and how technology has made things so much better now (i.e., 1965). We're living in a golden age of unrestrained junk food prosperity, and I for one salute the great men and women who have made it possible. These are true American heroes.
Despite this, I can't help but wonder why we have been so fortunate. Have our friends in the snack industry provided us with such revolutionary chips simply because we are a nation of fat-asses with lots of money and short attention spans? Or are we fat, lazy, and slow because we are exhausted from years of working overtime to provide the chip companies with the high-tech infrastructure necessary for this revolution, the end result of which is a snacking juggernaut with which we will vanquish our enemies from the Earth by turning them into giant tubs of lard like ourselves?
I am not qualified to answer these questions, so I will leave them for those who will come after we are gone - most likely a race of robots, since our planet will soon be cloaked in an atmosphere of pure nacho cheese that will be deadly to all living things. But when they sift through the delicious, salty rubble and piece together the story of our great civilization, they will see that we were a nation of dreamers; a nation bold enough and bright enough to take a basket of corn meal, a handful of maltodextrin, and a pinch of corn oil, cottonseed oil, and/or sunflower oil, and turn them into ambrosia: a stack of pressed, curved, artificially-flavored corn laminate sheets which, if arranged properly, could be made to look like a Daffy Duck mouth.
This Fourth of July will find many Americans displaying the Stars and Stripes, but I won't be among them. As I sing "America the Beautiful", I'll be waving a much more potent symbol of our great country: a SuperSize bag of Salsa!-flavored Doritos® brand corn chips. God bless America, and all who snack there.
* The title of this piece comes from an official Frito-Lay slogan, which I swear I am not making up.
† Full disclosure: I was eating Pringles the entire time I was writing this. They were the Reduced Fat kind, though, and I swear I didn't enjoy them, except when I was making them into a Daffy Duck mouth.
You may say what you will about the United States, but the fact remains that we are far and away the world leader in snack chip- and snack chip-related technologies.
I went to the store tonight to buy some snacks for a meeting tomorrow. I was wandering down the chip aisle, looking vaguely at the nearly 873 gajillion products that are available for purchase, when I stopped in my tracks. I walked backward a few steps and gazed in amazement at what I saw.
There, on the top shelf, was a product bearing the nondescript name of "Munchies". "Munchies" is manufactured by Frito-Lay and is a mixture of - stay with me here - Cheetos, Doritos, Rold Gold pretzels and Sun Chips.
I know what you're thinking, because I asked myself the exact same question: How in the world did they do it? It was only through years of ceaseless effort that our scientists were able to harness the awesome power of these four fundamental elements and make them available for our snacking pleasure. And now, by some miracle of technology, they've managed to give us all four of them in a single bag! Such was my awe that I found myself too cowed to purchase this amazing snack, but the reviews I've read say that it's pretty good.
(NOTE TO READERS: After you finish reading this post, I highly recommend that you spend some time at www.taquitos.net. There are things on this site that are not to be believed, not the least of which is the Snacking Tour of the American Southwest. - Ed.)
After this revelation, I suddenly noticed the proliferation of space age technology all around me - three-dimensional Doritos, cylindrical Fritos, circular grid-shaped pretzels that look like miniature, buttered manhole covers. The Pringles section alone featured 12 different varieties of chips, including two which were described by their packages as "Pizza-Licious" and "Ranch-Rageous", names which no doubt belie the cutting-edge flavor advancements necessary to even contemplate such a creation. Science has even transformed the lowly potato stick from the plain, salty standby of my youth into something known as "Potato Sticks Pizza Party". They put a party in a can, for crying out loud!
I became dizzy with excitement. All of these magnificent inventions wheeled about me, spinning me into a veritable World of Tomorrow, just like that old General Electric ride at Disney World where 1965-model animatronic people demonstrated how much it sucked to live in the Olden Days and how technology has made things so much better now (i.e., 1965). We're living in a golden age of unrestrained junk food prosperity, and I for one salute the great men and women who have made it possible. These are true American heroes.
Despite this, I can't help but wonder why we have been so fortunate. Have our friends in the snack industry provided us with such revolutionary chips simply because we are a nation of fat-asses with lots of money and short attention spans? Or are we fat, lazy, and slow because we are exhausted from years of working overtime to provide the chip companies with the high-tech infrastructure necessary for this revolution, the end result of which is a snacking juggernaut with which we will vanquish our enemies from the Earth by turning them into giant tubs of lard like ourselves?
I am not qualified to answer these questions, so I will leave them for those who will come after we are gone - most likely a race of robots, since our planet will soon be cloaked in an atmosphere of pure nacho cheese that will be deadly to all living things. But when they sift through the delicious, salty rubble and piece together the story of our great civilization, they will see that we were a nation of dreamers; a nation bold enough and bright enough to take a basket of corn meal, a handful of maltodextrin, and a pinch of corn oil, cottonseed oil, and/or sunflower oil, and turn them into ambrosia: a stack of pressed, curved, artificially-flavored corn laminate sheets which, if arranged properly, could be made to look like a Daffy Duck mouth.
This Fourth of July will find many Americans displaying the Stars and Stripes, but I won't be among them. As I sing "America the Beautiful", I'll be waving a much more potent symbol of our great country: a SuperSize bag of Salsa!-flavored Doritos® brand corn chips. God bless America, and all who snack there.
* The title of this piece comes from an official Frito-Lay slogan, which I swear I am not making up.
† Full disclosure: I was eating Pringles the entire time I was writing this. They were the Reduced Fat kind, though, and I swear I didn't enjoy them, except when I was making them into a Daffy Duck mouth.