Burrowed Into My Brain, But in a Good Way

Can you get this song out of your head? I can't. It's from the the iPod Nano commercial.

Perez has been talking about Feist for weeks but assuming I had no idea who he was talking about because I am Uncool and Out of It, I ignored him. Turns out I actually do know who Feist is, because I knew this song, too:

All this time, I thought this song was by Madeline Peyroux. Even though I am so excited that I figured out how to post YouTube clips to my blog, I'm not going to post Madeline because she sounds absolutely nothing like Feist and I'm embarrassed.

Searching around You Tube to see if there were other Feist songs I knew, I found Inside and Out. Bestill my heart--she's covered the BeeGees. Their version is better but that she would even attempt to cover without a doubt one of my favorite bands ever (yeah, I said it) just endears me to her. Plus, she's a total dork with her spastic dance moves. And she's from Canada, which makes her extra cool.

Since I've been a bit light on content lately, I do want to mention this article about the changes DNA evidence has brought to the legal system, not because I think DNA evidence is at all controversial but that eight states do not give inmates access to DNA evidence: Alabama, Alaska, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota and Wyoming. Is this not something that can be mandated federally? Is this not the equivalent of refusing to consider fingerprint evidence? Not being a legal scholar but rather a Professional Critic, I'll go ahead and say that this is crap.

Well, Did You Evah!

Thank you, thank you to the good people at Jezebel for teaching me about this unusual new product. (Not safe for work.)

Then check out this for a different perspective on this new product.

Please bear with my vagueness. It's better to approach it unawares.

What a swell party it is.

In Your Mailbox Soon

The weather's getting cooler, holidays are just around the corner and the catalogs are pouring in. This pleases me greatly, as I love reading material of all kinds.

Pottery Barn, a staple in the catalog world, consistently provides tableaus of soft core interior design porn. Yet this most recent catalog was a bit of a departure from their usual fare, no longer predictably soothing but jarring ... disturbing. I've incuded some selections so you'll see what I mean.

Antler Objects

Antler Candleholders

Horror movie chandelier

Deer Head Object
Choose Whiskey or Espresso

Cougar Object
Choose Everyday Suede or Textured Basketweave

Wolf Object in Chunky Herringbone
Choose Walnut or Ivory
I hardly know what to expect next. The PB Weapons Line?

Buttery Meat Sandwiches

If I wasn't trying to avoid a stroke, I would make all the recipes from Pioneer Woman Cooks, especially this yummy meaty sandwich. I love reading this site since Ree unapologetically delights in the deliciously deadly trifecta of bacon, butter and brown sugar. I am a little worried about the cholesterol levels of her rancher husband, Marlboro Man, who she writes about a lot in her other blog, but I can't co the world.

But I can--no, must--share my guilty pleasures. You see the tried and true over there to the right (Go Fug Yourself is having a stellar week, btw), but a new one for me is FameCrawler, a blog devoted entirely to the reproductive live of celebrities. Highly recommended entertainment.

Finally, in addition to a housing market that can make millionaires feel like paupers, the Bay area can make another claim to fame: it ranked second in the nation in amount of time folks spend in their cars above normal driving time, a whopping 60 hours a year. We're only behind LA, at 72 hours per year. Funny, 60 hours seemed low to me; wasn't that how long I sat in traffic just today? Ever since my ass calloused over, it's so hard to tell.

Weekend Chores

I subscribe to the public health model of housecleaning: prevention of illness, disease and injury. This allows sufficiently wide berth for clutter, dust, dirty laundry, and funky leftovers. Because I have allergies, my threshhold for squalor has dropped a bit in the past year but generally speaking, I spend as little time cleaning as possible.

I grew up in a very tidy and clean house. There was a strict schedule of weekly chores that included dusting, vacuuming, laundering sheets and towels, and thorough bathroom and kitchen scrubbing. Except for getting to spray heart-shaped blobs of Pledge on the coffee table and making satisfying patterns in the carpet while vacuuming, it was torture. It felt rigid. The house didn't even seem dusty. The sheets often still smelled of laundry detergent, which in my book, meant they were still clean.

Fast forward to college, when I cleaned the house of a professional couple, no children. Their house was very beautiful and they appeared to spend no time in it. As a result, it was like a museum: still, untouched, and spotless. I had no idea why they hired me, but every week I dutifully wiped clean counters and scrubbed gleaming toilets. The only part of the job that I liked was cleaning the copper bathroom fixtures with Brasso. Talk about gratifying, wow. Also, they were from Europe and had a lot of interesting food in their pantry. Back in the early 90s in the midwest, pesto in a tube was provocative stuff.

Broadening of culinary horizons aside, these weekly visits seemed pointless, almost depressing. Not unlike how it felt to be forced to vacuum imaginary dirt when I would rather be reading, climbing a tree or simply staring off into space, doing absolutely nothing.

In past jobs, I have had the opportunity to be around dying people. I heard many regrets and wishes for what could have been, but none of them involved keeping a tidier house or finally cleaning under the refrigerator. I know that Martha Stewart has attempted to elevate domestic duties to an art form, but I can't imagine even her deathbed regret will have anything to do with the cleaning she never got around to.

Today, however, while I was opening a cupboard to put the sugar away, a giant roach fell out, bounced off my face, landed on the floor and scurried away. I have lived in roach infested places--the kind where flipping a light on in the bathroom launches a swarm across the toilet seat--so my tolerance is pretty high. But being facially assaulted by a creature generally considered to be the epitome of filth and disease? I had a disturbed moment.

Yet when I thought about actually taking everything out of the cupboard to find and remove whatever that roach was grooving on, I thought, no fucking way. Maybe there is a pile of spilled something somewhere in the depths of my canned food, but maybe it's the neighbors roach just popping over for a visit. I'm already doing laundry and just scrubbed the toilet and that is more than enough housecleaning for one day.

Friday Night Nitpicking

It's always a good day when the new issue of Vanity Fair arrives in the mail. VF is one of the more misjudged magazines out there, no doubt because the cover always features a celebrity, if male viriley posed with a throbbing piece of machinery, if female, largely naked with a glossy lipsticked pout. This month it's Nicole Kidman, shirt unbuttoned, bra exposed, red lips gleaming. But don't be fooled. Their coverage of the war and the Bush presidency is fantastic. Yet! There are many ads for luxury ridiculousness, photos of celebs and Dominick Dunne chronicling celeb trials and travails. And excellent horoscopes. It satisfies my desires both for trash and substance, which neither People nor The New Yorker can do.

How alarmed was I to see that Mikhail Gorbachev is hawking Louis Vuitton?


Absolutely bizarre.
Makes me wonder what W will do when the blessed day arrives that we no longer call him President. Maybe sell guns? Represent Sylvan Learning Centers as a cautionary tale for parents of dullard children? Really, what else can he do? I can't imagine he'll make much money on the lecture circuit. Could he? Paying George Bush to articulate and engage an audience verbally? Makes as much sense as hiring Porky Pig to be your speech therapist.

Back to Louis Vuitton. Gorbachev is part of an ad campaign called Journeys. I'm not even going to link to the LV site because it is too stupid and pretentious. The whole thing is in Flash so you have to wait for the "movies" to load. The "high concept" ad campaign as storytelling thing is annoying especially because Andre Agassi telling me that his ideal trunk would have a compartment big enough to hold his snowboard with the bindings is not a story. Please just stick with photos. That way, we won't know if you have nothing to say. It's okay, as long as you look good.

Speaking of photos, that Annie Leibovitz is starting to bother me. Is there no other photographer on the face of this earth who can shoot celebrities? It's like every ad featuring Giselle Bundchen or Kate Moss. Bring on the fresh faces already! I watch America's Top Model, I know they're out there--call Tyra! I think I am still mad at Annie for not just telling the world she is a big old dyke and the late Susan Sontag was her lover and partner instead of all the lame mealy mouth things she said about how the best word to describe their relationship was "friends."

More Serious Topics

Which I will not be posting about tonight include: the rapidly disappearing polar bear, death by popcorn, the gigantic closet that is the Republican Party, and SF Mayor Gavin Newsom asking all city department heads to resign.

Instead, Britney. Though I had doubts that she could pull it together for last night's VMAs, I was pulling for her to up and surprise us all. Sadly, she did not. Stiff, awkward, she hardly moved and her lip synching was off--as if she never writhed onstage with a python like a pro. Since having two kids her body is not what it was, but her stylist--if she has one, which is increasingly in doubt--put her in a bikini anyway. Gah. Check out her performance here, and if you feel so moved, Sarah Silverman who came on right after her, who had some choice naughty comments.


Sluggish, distracted and chunky, Britney disappoints. You can't really tell from this picture, but it's a bad weave. I sure do wish Brit had let her freak flag fly and just walked around with her mangled hair instead of sporting all those crazy wigs like a mentally unbalanced Orthodox Jew.

Professional Critic Digs Deeper

This morning while watching the news and drinking coffee before leaving for work, I learned that just two months after going on sale, Apple is dramatically lowering the price of its iPhone from $600 to $400. The segment featured several interviews of early adopters, all displaying various degrees of irritation and betrayal. As I watched the story unfold, along with the accompanying footage of the hundreds of people literally camping outside Apple stores to buy the phone this summer, I paused for a moment and felt ... nothing.

I'm not entirely lacking in empathy or sensitivity as a general rule, but even as I dug deeper, still nothing. Spending $600 on a phone because it's new and cool (and make no mistake, I do think it's cool), but that can be destroyed with just one drop into the toilet, slip down a sewer drain, or encounter with a car, is sort of crazy to begin with. It's a telephone that was relentlessly advertised to you, appealing to your need to be cutting edge and cool to your friends. And you went for it. A phone, not leukemia drugs that promised to save your life but killed you instead. And if you were spending $600 on a phone instead of buying leukemia drugs, you're far beyond the kind of help Apple can offer.

In an open letter to iPhone owners Steve Jobs not unreasonably says:

... being in technology for 30+ years I can attest to the fact that the technology road is bumpy. There is always change and improvement, and there is always someone who bought a product before a particular cutoff date and misses the new price or the new operating system or the new whatever. This is life in the technology lane. If you always wait for the next price cut or to buy the new improved model, you'll never buy any technology product because there is always something better and less expensive on the horizon ...

Check out this blog for more iPhone whinging and whining. It's entertaining for about five minutes.

In totally unrelated news, Madeline L'Engle, author of A Wrinkle in Time died today. I really can't deal with science fiction, but I am to understand that she was actually a great writer.

Today's Word of the Day

Mannose. Say it with me: muh-noze. Actually, I have no idea how you pronounce it but I don't care. This stuff is freaking amazing. Let me give you the back story.

If you are like me and many women out there, you have had one or more urinary tract infections (UTI) in your life. You probably also know that a UTI is a hell you would hesitate to wish upon your worst enemy. And you also probably know that after inhaling the Uristat, stat, you'll beg, plead and grovel to get your doc to call in a prescription for you, even though the idea of going to Walgreens in your condition is nearly unbearable. Then in a few days when you are feeling better, you'll develop a whopping yeast infection, prompting another trip to Walgreens for Monistat, humming I Enjoy Being a Girl*.

Readers, I was stuck in such a rut: bad bad feeling, Cipro, yeast infection, finally better for about two weeks and then ... that bad bad feeling came back again. I hit some kind of critical mass. I turned to the trusty interweb knowing that relief couldn't be far and I stumbled upon mannose.

Based on my extensive perusal of interweb sources, here's what I learned: Most (90%) UTIs are caused by E coli. E coli hangs on to the walls of your bladder with evil little stickers that even gallons of water coursing through you won't dislodge. Mannose, a naturally occuring sugar, seems to attract E coli to it, so that as mannose passes through your bladder, e coli attaches itself to the mannose and voila, you pee it all out. Healthy flora left undisturbed, so no yeast infection, no intestinal distress or nausea, etc. Now is that smart or what?

You can order mannose online at evitamins. Since my need for relief could not wait for shipping, I found mine at Whole Foods, a mixture of mannose and other happy urinary tract ingredients called UT Vibrance.

If this is going to work, you should be feeling a lot better within 24 hours. If you're not, there could be some other nasty bugger causing your troubles so do the right thing and go pee in a cup.

*I haven't used Monistat in years since I discovered cheaper, non pharmaceutical ways to address this. My personal fave is boric acid, but many other options exist. Check out your local natural food store for more choices.

Thoughts Outside the (Pizza) Box

From day to day my thoughts cover a fairly narrow range of subjects: I hope the traffic isn't too bad. God, am I sick of that fog. When's the last time I had a glass of water? I wonder how (insert family or friend name here) is doing. I miss Miss Kitty. Shit, this traffic sucks. Don't forget to breathe. Think blood pressure lowering thoughts. Oh shit! I forgot to (some work thing here). Breathe! Relax! Maybe I should give compact fluorescent lightbulbs one more try. I wonder if Christina Aguilera will announce her pregnancy before her water breaks. Etc.

A great way to escape the tedium of everyday thoughts and experiences is to travel. But if like me, you have limited vacation time and spend most of that time visiting family, which while wonderful is not quite a vacation, rest easy as there is another way!

A few weeks ago while eating out with Teacher, I was excited to find Pizza Today, the official magazine of the National Association of Pizzeria Operators (NAPO). Immediately I was immersed into the world of the pizzeria owner, which is not quite the carefree toss-the-dough-in-the air-while-the sauce-simmers-fragrantly-on-the-stove lifestyle I thought it was. For example, not once had I given thought to something that bedevils pizzeria owners, the gum line: the unwanted soggy layer of dough, often accompanied by a tendency of the cheese to slide right off. Gum line and slidey cheese are caused by oversaucing, an easily remedied problem once you identify the culprit.

A second article was devoted to another topic new to my worldview: peel release agents. This is the substance, usually corn meal or flour, that helps the pizza dough slide off the peel, the long-handled wooden paddle, into the stove. After debating the merits of five different release agents in excruciating detail, the author recommends three parts fine ground corn meal and one part semolina flour.

So even though I live in the bay area and the pizza, like the bagels, is unworthy of much consideration of any kind, I ended feeling rather grateful that I never had to think about the best way to store fresh mozzarella, whether lazy staff were throwing my silverware out or how to improve the relationship with my distributor. And that was a nice change of thoughts. Next time you're feeling trapped by your own boring existence, and that vacation balance refuses to budge, reach for a trade magazine. You'll be amazed at all the things you don't have to think about.

Unrelated tidbit: new season of America's Top Model starts in two weeks! And on Design Star, Kim is in the final two!!!