Squirrels

After a lovely Sunday drive, I have to report that there was one fatality.

But, for those who did not know, I'll note that squirrels are surprisingly crunchy.

The Religious Views of Mermaids

Although neither anthropologists nor philosophers have yet reported on the religious views of mermaids & mermen, we can only assume that they must of necessity be Baptists.

Religious conversion

The real problem with converting to Judaism is frankly, the food. Gefilte fish and all that. It's like wallpaper paste flavored with plaster. I suppose with Anglicanism, you get Wassail bowls, which is something. Lutheranism has good food, especially in the dessert menu. Catholicism has a lot of good food, though there is a world of spiritual difference between pierogies and manicotti. Even Islam can make a reasonable stand for itself with Shawarma. But the Hindus have everyone beat for food, how can anything compare to mango chutney, chicken vindaloo, or tikka makhani? Hail, Shri Ganesha!!

On intelligent design

It seems that the question is not so much the intelligence in the system, but whether that intelligence has a will.

Questions for the Editor

> I know your stance on Taco Bell (I think), but what is your
> take on KFC? Specifically, their wraps? The chicken can be
> a bit heavy, but I saw a commercial for some wraps that
> look delicious.


McDonald's now sells salads.

Someone recently said that going to McDonald's for a salad is like going to a crackhouse for vitamins.

Somehow, KFC selling wraps is the same thing. If you're not going there for the big bucket of greasy chicken, why are you going there? I just don't see the buying wraps idea as prudent. ---If you're going to some restaurant for the experience and you choose $10 wraps becuase you're at a restaurant with friends and it's the experience, fine. But driving to a place for a $5 wrap sandwich that you can make at home for, what, a buck? And you're getting the restaurant experience of a KFC?

I actually don't mind the big bucket of greasy chicken. I don't get it a lot because I spend the rest of the day sliding out of chairs and I spend the next three days all shiny. But it's something I can't make myself. And it's cheap. I remember hanging one summer with some Middletown kids at the little half-park down by Home and Ravine Avenue. One worked for KFC and would bring a huge hefty bag of the leftover end of the day chicken--like 20 pounds of it--and we would all eat
it. Yum.

And I also spent a lot of time in the company of a woman who had a deep and restless craving for it. It was part spiritual and part unreal, but she would gorge on KFC on a regular basis. It was a woman thing.

I don't mind the Taco Bell food, and get it regularly. Beef and Chicken grilled stuffed burritos. They're great. (Not deep fried, not baked in a huge wad of polyunsaturated synthetic polymer cheese-food product.) But I don't eat it there, cramped into an over air-conditioned plastic booth caked with refried beans someone has sneezed onto the wall. Zitty-faced zombie high school kids on both sides of the counter. Nope. The take-out window is absolutely necessary.

I found an excellent and cheap fish shop in Meriden. Now that's food.

Haddam

Killingworth Road, (Route 81); Haddam, Connecticut

Change

I think as I get older, I am less and less likely to advocate
changing institutions from within.

American Idol

Simon Cowell's number 1 complaint about Randy Jackson is that he keeps on hogging the donuts, and Simon's number 1 complaint about Paula Abdul is she keeps hogging all the boys.

Norfolk

Haystack & Bald Mountains; Norfolk, Connecticut.

Not Rude Anymore

When did it get to be fine to eat in front of other people? Wasn't that a thing?

You used to not be able to eat in front of other people because it was rude. Apparently it's no longer rude.

One reason why it used to be rude was that if you ate in front of someone else, and they were not eating, it was effectively denying them food. 'I'm not going to let you have any of this, I'm just going to eat it in front of you.' Remember old lady schoolteachers saying "Did you bring enough for everybody?" That could only have been because it would have been rude to eat food and not share. After all, we're all humans, we all need to eat. No matter how different our social rank, our backgrounds, or our waistlines, anyone with food, in front of someone without, was supposed to offer to share.

But another reason is that eating food is...indelicate. There's chomping and gurgling and wheezing and burbling. Even in the most refined person of manners, if you really listen to them eat, it sounds like a sewer backing up. Now, paradoxically, if both people eat, no one person can really hear the other over the noise, and it's a pleasant time for both.

But, now, all that's swept away. It's gone. It's no longer rude. Now people eat on their own in front of other people without the slightest embarassment at all. And they sound just as sewery and bildgey and bloppy as ever. Grunt and wheeze and salivary glands shooting gushing sprays of spit left and right. It's all good.

Apparently. I say 'apparently' because that's what I see all the time now. Maybe I just spend too much time on a college campus. A college campus particularly populated with self-absorbed, solipsistic, utterly indulged their entire lives, college students.

Who sound like sewers backing up.

Very pretty.

Winter

They say we're up for some snow this weekend. I don't care at all, because the sun has gotten warm enough that Spring is coming anyway. Somehow, this past week, the back of winter has been broken. The crows sense it, the squirrels sense it, the doves have even reappeared. I can sense it. Let Winter do what it wants now, it's lost the battle again.

Scratch that one Off the List

Beautiful woman sits two chairs away. Casual. Sassy. Long flowing hair.

Pops in some gum and starts clacking away at it like she was a platypus in the Galapagos islands.

Breasts & Comedy

I was considering the comedic value of women's breasts.

Well, I was.

Children certainly see it. They find them hilarious. Not that there's any sexual tension in that; they just do. I remember pieces of some ancient joke about a woman who has a dog named 'Titswiggle'; there's a punch line for the joke that you can figure out pretty simply, and then you can write the rest of the joke yourself.

Then it occurred to me, it's the wiggling that is so funny. Anything that wiggles is, by definition, funny.

Think about it, that's why Jell-o is always a hit with kids. I mean, it's gelatin, hardly appetizing, but what could possibly wiggle more? Jelly is funny, too, though to a lesser extent, (the extent to which it still wiggles). Jam is even funny, but just slightly.

So breasts are legitimately funny, in their own right. Wiggly, wobbly, jiggly;—they're naturally funny.

Le Cinéma

I have been a devoteé of French cinema lately. Just trying to catch up with what I've missed, retracing some old ground as well.

And it's striking; apparently in French cinema, the idea of a middle aged man's romantic involvement with a high school aged girl is apparently considered enough of a plot in itself to be the basis of a whole movie.

There need be no more than that.

Not only can that be a whole movie, it's one out of every two French movies.

That's it. Apparently the whole movie-going French public will watch endless permutations of the subject.

The Thrice Secret Order of Profound Ignorance

Can there possibly be anything more tedious than an old Freemason, prattling on about ancient secrets of unknown provenance which no one understands? I have wasted so much of my life dealing with these garralous old buffoons; Freemasons, Bonesmen, the whole tin-hatted lot. Don't they know it's the Girl Scouts with the universal ark of alchemical talmudic secrets, and that they practice ungodly ceremonies to their interplanetary God in Area 51? That's where the secret society action is.