good for the heart

With all the cheese I’ve been serving up this week, I can imagine that some of you might be getting concerned about the cholesterol levels. Well, this should help. Might I suggest that you get yourself a helping of this month’s round of Just Posts? One again, they’ve been served up tastefully by the fabulous folks of One Plus Two and Under the Mad Hat. Just click on the button with the purple bird, and you’ll be presented with plenty of links to whole lot of posts that speak to the same thing: making the world a better place. The Just Posts are good reading, good for what ails us, and certified to be 100% cholesterol-free.

justpostapril

And just in case that’s not enough enticement, please consider the following:

Clicking on those links says you care. (Sorry if that sounds cheesy.)

There’s so much going on in the world that it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and overburdened. There are so many wrongs that need to be addressed. It’s all too much for any one person, and it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that you can’t do enough to help. You may not be able afford to give money, especially to every cause you think deserves it. You may not have time to volunteer, and there are so many groups anyhow. You may not have the energy or know-how to fight the system over the issues. But let me share a secret.

Clicking on those links actually helps.

Think about giving an impassioned speech to a nearly empty auditorium. Now think about how encouraging it is to be surrounded by people who care about what you have to say. Clicking on the links is like a virtual round of applause for the authors. Thouse clicks count.

Encouraging others to write about what they believe in, act on what they believe in, fight for what they believe in. That matters, my friend.

Read some of those words. Even if you don’t have time to read everything, you can still see what people have to say.

So click on some links.

Think of it as mouse-based activism.

extra cheese

You know what really cheeses me off? When I finish a list and realize I’ve forgotten something.

It’s like going to the grocery store to buy bread, eggs and milk, and then remembering I need cheese too as I’m driving on my way there, but I figure I’ll wait to add it to my list, since it would be hazardous to write while driving, even if it is only one word, and then when I get there, going into this trance as I wander the aisles with my shopping cart, and wondering what it means that supermarkets now play music that was actually popular when I was in high school, and feeling up the melons and squeezing the toilet paper, then browsing the cereal aisle and feeling nostalgic for the days of my youth when lucky charms were an exotic unattainable bowl of cereal at the end of the rainbow because my mother insisted on having us eat healthy cereals like wheat chex and when I finally tried them, they really weren’t that thrilling, and resisting the urge to buy cookies and redi-whip and donuts, and before you know it, I’ve filled up the cart and then I head home with my bags of groceries, and after I put away my bread and my milk and my pint of organic blackberry sorbet, which seemed like a healthier choice than the chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream, but screw it, I bought that too, and bananas and maple syrup and zucchini and oatmeal and frozen peas, and then find a crumpled up paper in my pocket, and it’s my grocery list with its three measly items (bread, eggs and milk) scribbled on it, and realize that I’ve forgotten the eggs, and (crap!) I also forgot to get more cheese.

You know what I’m saying?

Anyhow, I realized that I left off some key pieces of cheese from yesterday’s cheeseful bounty. Such as:

  1. Richard Cheese, a musician who, along with his band Lounge Against the Machine, provides cheesy lounge music reinterpretations of so many your favorite contemporary songs. Also in the music category is the band The String Cheese Incident. Then there’s the apparently sadly now-defunct Cheese Patrol, a

    yearly homage to all the songs that people vociferously hate but secretly know all the words to. These are the songs we grew up with; overorchestrated. overwrought, oversynthed, over the top.

  2. Somehow I also managed to leave off the appearance of the cheese guy in the Buffy episode “Restless“, as well as a few other cheesy references. And in my research I came across this brilliant essay “An Analysis of Cheese as Metaphor in Buffy the Vampire Slayer”. Apparently, the layers of cheese in the Buffy series run far deeper than I’d realized.
  3. For more on cheese philosophy, you can check out this essay “on the non-existence of cheese.” Is there proof of the existence of cheese in the universe? Perhaps not.
  4. Then there’s the Cheese Burglar. But I’m not really a big fan of the cult of which he is a member. So instead I offer this cartoon mouse classic, The Cheese Burglar (1946). (You can even see it on YouTube. Though I admit to not having watched anything close to the whole 7 minutes.)
  5. I actually like the animation of this (shorter) shortThe Cheese Trap better, which features a cg version of the board game Mouse Trap, one of my childhood favorites.
  6. Do you hanker for a hunka cheese? Do you remember this rather creepy cartoon psa from the 70s? You might also be interested in the hunk-hankerers guest appearance on the Family Guy.
  7. Yesterday’s cheese did not include much in the way of cheese activities for those of you with too much time and not enough cheese on your hands. Options include: a quiz to let you know what kind of cheese you are. (There’s also a similar-veined one-step cheese “comparator,” but the reviews are not stellar.)
  8. There’s even an experiment with cheese that you can perform at home on your own. (However, the author does recommend exercising caution if you are lactose tolerant.) (And no, my dear seester, this is not the same cheese experiment you tried with me that one time when we were little. I’ll write about that later.)
  9. Most thrillingly, you can actually watch cheese *live* online. That’s right, you can watch watch cheddar cheese aging. Not only is it just as exciting as it sounds, it is also apparently the cool thing to do. (If you don’t have the months to spare to see the change in progress, you can also check out this time-lapse video encapsulating 3 months of the cheese-aging process.)
  10. And even though I offered it up yesterday, no cheese list would be complete without The Cheese Shop sketch. This time, I serve it up in its youtubiful glory:

say cheese

swiss_cheese.jpgYou might think you need to go to the grocery store to find cheese, but I have found cheese in a variety of unexpected places: books, movies, music and more. (And yes, it can get messy. Let me tell you, camembert is not something you want to find in an unexpected place.) I’ve come across so much cheese that there’s far too much for just me. So, I offer up to you this delectable platter of assorted cheesy goodness. Get your crackers ready.

  1. “The Big Cheese”: an expression meaning “the top banana” or “the head honcho.” (Please note that the “head cheese” means something totally different.) Here’s something I did not now about the origins of the expression “big cheese“:

    This use of the word probably derived not from the word cheese, but from the Persian or Hindi word chiz, meaning a thing.

  2. Little Miss Muffet This nursery rhyme girl not only sits on her tuffet, but she eats her curds and whey. That’s cottage cheese, my friend.
  3. “The Cheese Alarm,” a song by Robyn Hitchcock. This is a song of many cheeses:

    Roquefort and grueyere and slippery Brie
    All of these cheeses they happen to me

  4. “the cheese stands alone“: a line from the song “The Farmer in the Dell”. The title of I am the Cheese, a young adult book by Robert Cormier, and also a movie based on the same, references this line of the song, and the loneliness of being cheese.
  5. Cheese has long been used as a bait in mousetraps, and is especially good for trying to catch cartoon mice. Recently, this cheesy bait concept has been extended to motivating office workers with the book Who Moved My Cheese. This irritating-looking parable appears to have spawned a slew of cheese parody books, at least three of which are entitled “Who Cut the Cheese?”
  6. The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales, by Jon Scieszka and illustrated by the illustrious Lane Smith. This picture book features, among other things less cheese-oriented, a cheesy reinterpration of the gingerbread man fairy tale. Catch it if you can.
  7. “Cheeses of the World Series“: Jefferson Mint’s series of hand-painted collector’s plates featuring the cheeses of the world. Available only as an extra on the Austin Powers DVD. This is funniest deleted scene I can remember. It’s part of the overview that Number Two (Robert Wagner) gives of the activities of Virtucon, the “legitmate face” of Dr. Evil’s evil empire.
  8. Wallace and Gromit, Grand Day Out. Wallace loves cheese. Enough to go to the moon for it. And as we all know, the moon is made of cheese. (The other W&G features also feature some cheese, at least I know that The Wrong Trousers, and A Close Shave do. I have yet to see The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, but I would be sorely disappointed if it was cheese-free.)
  9. You know, there just aren’t enough movies featuring cheese. Paul Davidson, whose blog I found while doing my takehome final, offers a solution to this perennial problem by suggesting “ten movies whose plotlines would change by simply adding the word cheese to their titles.” An excellent proposition. (cf. “A Touch of Evil Cheese” and “Stand by Me Cheese”)
  10. The Cheese Shop sketch. In the land of the cheese, this sketch reigns supreme. John Cheese, I mean, Cleese and Michael Palin perform this legendary Monty Python gem. Hey, I was just making a joke about the John Cheese thing, but check out this slice of trivia from the John Cleese Wikipedia entry:

    John Cleese was born in Weston-super-Mare, Somerset, England to Reginald Francis Cleese and Muriel Cross. His family’s surname was previously “Cheese”, but his father, an insurance salesman, changed his surname to “Cleese” upon joining the army in 1915.

    Anyhow, the Cheese Shop Sketch features 43 kinds of cheeses. Well, the names of 43 kinds of cheeses. Whether you’re looking for Cheddar, Brie, Wensleydale or Venezuelan Beaver Cheese, you will find no better place not to buy it.

thought I’d share

Sometimes, I make myself laugh. This is what I just wrote:

Examples 17 through 22b were coded as “reconstructed dialog.” However, the dialog was obviously constructed rather than reconstructed as the interlocutors are styrofoam packing peanuts:

17. They’re all “Pauly, don’t you want to try just one of us?”

One of the questions on my takehome final is a brief study of the usage of the quotative be+all, a close relative of the quotative be+like. We’ve been given a small corpus of 50 examples of this quotative, including some from blogs. Such as this excerpt from this one:

People who eat pennies are stupid. I mean, it’s obvious what’s going to happen. Your body isn’t going to be able to digest a damn penny, okay? Same goes for shards of glass or thumbtacks or pieces of errant plastic or even little lego pieces. I’m past that. I’ve moved on. Matured. But when it comes to these damn packing peanuts they call out to me like they know what I’m thinking. They’re all “Pauly, don’t you want to try just one of us?”” and I’m all “No thanks Mr. Packing Peanut, I think you’ll just give me a stomach ache” and they’re all “Oh, c’mon — what’s the worst that could happen?” and I’m all “I could get sick” and they’re all “Sicker than when you got food poisoning from Pizza Hut?” and I’m all “How did you know about that?” and they’re all “We’re packing peanuts, Pauly — we know all.”

Let this be a warning to all of you. Anything you write and publish on the web could turn into data fodder for linguists, or even worse, linguistics students. Bwahahaha.

Oooh. There’s something I could research: the distribution of spellings of evil laughs on the web. There seems to be a bit of variation in the onset (bwahahaha vs muahahaha vs buahahaha vs mwahahaha) not to mention variability in the number of “ha”s. (We can get from two “ha”s, as in bwahaha, all the way up to…I’m not sure how many. I got as far as googling

“bwahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha”

and was amused to get 7180 hits, and this:

Did you mean: mwahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

Hey, remember how I said I like sleep, and should be in pretty good shape to get some tonight? Not if I keep screwing around like this. So I’m all “I totally need to get back to work.”

final countdown

Damn. I can’t even write that, even think that, without getting that song running through my head. (da da doo doo, da da doo doo doo, da da doo doo, da da doo doo doo…) (By the way, Wikipedia seems to let you play snippets of songs now. But I must warn you, this song is insidious. There is also no pause or stop button on the Wikipedia player.)

What was I saying? Oh yeah. My class is almost over. The takehome final is due tomorrow. I’m in decent shape timewise, I think. Also not in such bad shape gradewise, in spite of my previous stressings. (Have I ever mentioned that if there is extra credit available, I feel compelled to go for it? Even if I don’t need it? I’m trying to resist the urge to do the extra credit question on the final, since I’ll get more sleep if I don’t do it. And unless I seriously screwed up on the last assignment, I don’t need it.)

Ah, sleep. If only I could get some sort of credit for that. Screw the credit, if only I could just get more of it. Have I mentioned that I love sleep? Oh, right. I have.

I am not an “I am not a plastic bag”

Mind you, this is not to say that I am a plastic bag.

But I have to share some silliness that’s come to my attention regarding the whole shopping bag debate. Since posting a few times about my own battles against plastic shopping bags, my blog has gotten a surprising number of search engine hits for the phrase “I am not a plastic bag.” Seeing as I live under a rock, I’d missed all the public hooha on the topic, and so the phrase seemed more than a little bizarre to me. Were there individuals out there suffering from identity crises whereby they needed to affirm their own non-plastic-bag status? bag_100×110.jpg

As it turns out, a whole bunch of people, though they are not themselves plastic bags, think that they need to buy a high-fashion accessory in order to avoid using wasteful plastic bags.

Designer Anya Hindmarch has designed a bag, the “I am not a plastic bag” bag. This is a bag, which is not a plastic bag, that advertises its non-plastic bagness through the words “I am not a plastic bag,” which are emblazened across the bag, which, as it turns out, is not plastic. They are not only not plastic, but apparently they are all the rage. Check out this bit from the FAQ page:

How can I buy I’m Not A Plastic Bag?
We have been overwhelmed by the success of this project. The UK limited edition brown bags have now completely sold out in the UK.

Apparently, folks are even selling these bags on ebay for oodles of money. There have been scandalous exposés decrying that the bags, though not plastic, are not produced especially ethically, nor are they produced in a particularly environmentally friendly way.

What I find more disturbing is that this buying frenzy not only smacks of unneccessary consumerism, but also smacks of a fad.

I’m not alone in these worries. As supporting evidence that the frenzy is about a fashion fad rather than reflecting conservationist intentions, one commenter on this blog post wrote:

my daughter has one and she loves it she takes it everywhere with her but surprise surprise not one person has commented on it which has really upset her

Ugh. I mean, why avoid using plastic bags if no one is even going to compliment you on your high-fashion anti-plastic-bag accessories?

While I applaud celebrities and other influential figures (who are likely not plastic bags) attempting to spread conscience and consciousness about environmental and social issues, does it really have to boil down to just another product?

carnival fool

I’m running off to join the carnival. More than one carnival, actually.

First stop: The 3rd Carnival of Colors thought my blue people would make an attractive side show.

Second stop: Ms. Mismanners has been dragged off to the 73rd Carnival of Satire to demonstrate clause contortionism, comma-juggling, epithet-throwing and her latest note-writing tips.

Third stop: I was going to put together a fun and exciting carnival list, but instead I’ll share with you some tidbits of Carnival Jargon that I snagged from the Wikipedia Carny page.

  • Mark

    A target for swindling, especially one whose gullibility has been demonstrated. Derived from the covert use of chalk to mark the backs of especially ripe targets. The term has entered the popular lexicon, usually as “easy mark.”

    So that’s why I kept getting chalk on my shirt. (Don’t worry, though. A nice young man said he’d go buy me a new shirt. I’m sure he’ll be back any minute now with my new shirt and the change from that large bill.)

  • Sharpie

    The opposite of a mark: an experienced player who is wise to traditional carny scams and is skilled at the games themselves.

    Is that what the marker folks had in mind?

  • Some money terms:

    Scratch – the revenue from a concession.

    Oats – stolen money from a concession.

    “The Nut” – The sum total (in cash) of a performance, or group of performances

    “The Kitty” – Budgeted amount of finance, regulated by the management of a carnival for purchasing food and supplies for its workers. (“We wanted a new tent, but there’s no more scratch in the kitty”)

    I had no idea kitty was a carny term…Though I’ve found possible other origins. (Wait, you mean Wikipedia might have inaccurate information? But it must be true. I read it on the internet.)

  • Then there’s “Sugar Shack”:

    a concession or food-stand that doubles as a front for drug commerce & trafficking.

    Wow. This makes me really suspicious of all those places that claim to sell things like maple syrup, candles and most suspiciously “quilt kits.” (Oh, fine, so the term has a legitimate maple-syrupy meaning, too. Or at least that’s what they want us to think. I bet their fingers are just sticky with illicit activities.)

  • Burn the lot

    To cheat players with little or no attempt to conceal the subterfuge, in the carny’s expectation that the same town will not be visited again.

    I try to take this attitude when visiting relatives. I mean, really, do I want to be invited back?

  • And ooooh. An infix:

    -iz- – inserted between the syllables of words to serve as a cipher or cryptolect.

    (This -iz- may or may not have a relationshizip to the –izz– infix.)

  • Here are some more assorted bits:

    Bally – A free performance intended to attract both tips and visitors to the nearby sideshow.

    Slough – Tear down your “joint”. Get it ready for the road.

    Spring – Open the carnival.

    “Rousty” or “Roustabout” – A temporary or full-time laborer who helps pitch concessions and assemble rides. In the 1930s, American Rousty’s would work for a meal and perhaps a tent to share with other workers.

    “Donniker” – Bathroom

    “Alibi” – A technique used where the player has apparently won the game, but is denied a prize when the jointee invents a further, unforeseeable, condition of the game. For example, a player may be disqualified on the grounds of having leaned over a previously undisclosed “foul line.”

    • Okay. There will be a quiz later. For your homework, please use one or more of these words in a sentence.

    blue trees

    Look, a picture:

    blue_trees.jpg

    This is a painting I did a few years back. (All of the paintings I’ve done were a few years back. It’s been a while since I’ve painted.) I was experimenting with cubism, and using a limited palette. I should probably get a better photo of it at some point. But there it is.

    Really, I’m just very tired today. In spite of the extremely rare occurrence of having gone to bed before midnight for the last two nights, I’m still just wiped out. I should nap, but have appointments today, plus more of that work-nuisance stuff to do. So I’m not feeling terribly writey today. So, instead I say: “Look, a picture.”

    just say no pants

    I’m afraid that I’ve been letting my pants fall down. It’s been weeks since my last pants post. For shame. But an important pants event has come to my attention. According to some folks, May 4, 2007 is:

    No Pants Day.

    That’s this Friday.

    No pants day is a holiday (not an official holiday, mind you) where people celebrate by not wearing pants. The holiday has an official website. Supporters have put together a public service announcement. There are promotional materials:

    no_pants_flyer.jpg

    The truth is, I’m not sure I can support No Pants Day. Get behind it, as it were. While No Pants Day does support the saying of “pants,” if not the wearing of pants, I’m not sure I’m comfortable with all this anti-pants propaganda. I mean, just look at this logo:

    no_pants.jpg

    I’m considering protesting No Pants Day with my own No No Pants Day materials:
    no_no_pants1.jpg

    Of course, there’s always the risk that others will protest my protest, which I’ll, of course, protest:

    no_no_no_pants1.jpg no_no_no_no_pants.jpg no_no_no_no_no_pants.jpg

    However, ultimately, I predict that pants will prevail. Power to the pants!

    big win for pants