Thought That Came Unbidden

Did you ever have one of those days where you just couldn’t get out of first gear? The kind of day when no matter what you tried to do you felt like you were running through jello and not in that debauched, Playboy mansion sort of way either? I’m having one of those days.

In a semi-vain effort to keep myself awake at work I did the following:

Took every test I possibly could stomach at blogthings.com. (They weren’t very accurate I hope.)

Read an article in The New York Times about why our social security numbers aren’t secure (Hint: Just like GMO seeds, once your SSN is “in the wild” it’s in a database somewhere forever.)

Played around with a nifty visual search engine from a link in a techie womens mailing list I subscribe to.  And randomly searched for things that interest me.

I ran across this lovely tidbit:

BUFFY SEASON 8
Joss Whedon sinks his teeth back into the Vampire Slayer, and you won’t believe who he has on tap to help him write it!

Sharpen your wooden stakes and practice your demon face-punching, because Joss Whedon’s packing all-new Buffy tales.

The “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” creator slays his way back into the monster mythos that made him a household name this March, when Dark Horse releases an all-new Buffy limited series. Set after Season Seven of the popular TV show, the new comic details where the monster-fighting characters have been since the show ended in 2003, and where they’re headed.

“I want people to understand that it is going to be canon in the Buffy-verse,” promises Whedon, “not little ancillary tales that aren’t allowed to add up to much.”

The folks at Wizard Universe go on to enthuse listing a lot of names that I’m sure will mean something to my pen & ink head friends but don’t mean much to me.

Yeah, the article is from December 2006; the good news is, the book comes out in less than two weeks. I’m having an uber-geek moment but hey, at least I don’t feel like I’m trapped in jello any more.

You know what the best thing about the 18th of February is? It means the damn month is more than half over.

The only thing that ever redeems February is when Mardi Gras falls within it. Pancakes and penitence, anyone?

I just can’t catch a break when it comes to food. I was listening to the news today when I heard a brief bit about ConAgra recalling certain jars of Peter Pan and Great Value peanut butter. You can find almost anything you want to know with Google. What I found was this from the FDA

FDA Warns Consumers Not to Eat Certain Jars of Peter Pan Peanut Butter and Great Value Peanut Butter Product May be Contaminated With Salmonella

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is warning consumers not to eat certain jars of Peter Pan peanut butter or Great Value peanut butter due to risk of contamination with Salmonella Tennessee (a bacterium that causes foodborne illness). The affected jars of Peter Pan and Great Value peanut butter have a product code located on the lid of the jar that begins with the number “2111.” Both the Peter Pan and Great Value brands are manufactured in a single facility in Georgia by ConAgra. Great Value peanut butter made by other manufacturers is not affected.

If consumers have any of this Peter Pan or Great Value brand peanut butter in their home that has been purchased since May 2006, they should discard it.

Read the full notice…

May 2006…just how many tens of thousands of jars of peanut butter is that, exactly?

So I hustled my butt downstairs to check the now two-thirds empty jar of Peter Pan crunchy (there is none but crunchy!) I bought last month. Sure enough…stamped right there on the top of the lid was a product code beginning with 2111.

It’s really too bad food is necessary to survive. If it wasn’t we could just skip it altogether and make do with the six other pleasures of life.

We don’t get snow here in DC. Something about where we are geographically, the combination of proximity to water and not quite south or north, gives us a perfect scenario for what meteorologists lately refer to as ice pellets or freezing rain.

It was sleeting at 4:39 this morning. How do I know? I was awake. More, though, I was lulled back to sleep by the quiet tink, tink, tink of ice against the housing of the window air conditioner. Shoveling wasn’t so much shoveling as chopping, pushing, and trying not to slip and fall.

By noon we still hadn’t seen a salt truck despite assurances from the Mayor’s Call Center that trucks were “out in the neighborhoods” but after two hours of 50lb loads of what was essentially crushed ice I sort of felt like I was trapped in a giant daiquiri machine.

Irony is a little understood concept in the post-modern world. The OED defines ironic as “1) using or characterized by irony. 2) happening in the opposite way to what is expected.”

Irony, then, is defined as “1) the expression of meaning through the use of language which normally signifies the opposite, typically for humorous effect. 2) a state of affairs that appears perversely contrary to what one expects.”

Literary irony “is a technique, originally used in Greek tragedy, by which the full significance of a character’s words or actions is clear to the audience or reader although unknown to the character.”

In no way, shape, or form is a 98 year-old man winning the lottery and then dying the next day ironic (we expect old men to die). Nor is rain on your wedding day, nor is “ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife.” Yes, I really want to slap Alanis Morissette silly. Or at the very least pummel her with a compact version of the OED (weighs about 40 pounds) for the crime she perpetrated through pop. I did, however, run across a perfect example of irony the other day in The New York Times.

The “adult” film industry is a set of early technology adopters, always looking for ways to cut costs and production time. Videotape permeated the market as fast as it did in the late-1970s/early-1980s because these film makers realized quickly that reusable tapes were significantly cheaper than film stock that could only be used once and couldn’t immediately be viewed to see if you got what you were trying to get.

As such early adopters, the “adult” film industry is currently pushing the edge of the technology envelope with High Definition equipment but they’re finding that what they’re getting isn’t what they expect.

Raise your hand if you’re the only person in the world who thinks that what is seen in mainstream, or even fetish, American “adult” films even vaguely resembles real people?

The “adult” film industry is built on dyed hair (of both sorts), hair removal, collagen, breast implants, liposuction, botox, and a whole lot of make-up and good lighting. In an industry where nothing is actually real – from the boobs to the orgasms – and an actress is forced to have her fake breasts “redone” because new technology is making minute scars from her first operation more visible the very definition of irony is this: “HD is great because people want to see how people really look,” Ms. Price said. “People just want to see what’s real.”

Reference:
“In Raw World of Sex Movies, High Definition Could Be a View Too Real”, by Matt Richtel, The New York Times, January 22, 2007