Daily Archives: September 25, 2011

Fooble the pleasure, fooble the fun!

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It’s Fooble-mint, Fooble-mint, Fooble-mint gum!

For those of you who are not of Generation X, that is what is known as a reference.

Look it up in some kind of book.

Heya hiya howdy, folks, and welcome to that brief respite from sanity known as the Sunday Fooble Hours, brought to you courtesy of Foobco, the Fun Folks to Know. Remember kids, when you think of asparagus used in suggestive ways, think Foobco!

Then call your doctor.

You know what I love? Random acts of wonder. Things that people do just to add a little sparkle and mystery and magic to the lives of others. Anonymous, selfless, completely sincere acts of public wonderfulness.

Like the odd and mysterious paper sculptures showing up around Edinburgh.

I could be wrong about the motive, of course. Perhaps it’s not an act of public wonder but the inevitable byproduct of a brilliant but tortured orgamist’s all-consuming obsession, and what were are seeing are not works of art donated to the public consciousness but symptoms of a mind slowly coming apart.

But I prefer to think that this person wanted to share their hobby with the world, but in a way that would give people something to talk about and wonder about and that would make their days just a little brighter and more interesting.

Nothing harmful or destructive. Just a something a little different, to make this day unlike all the others. A gift.

Then again, sometimes these sort of things are motivated by a simple need to be heard on a subject of local interest. Say, a local eyesore that desperately needs to go away, so desperately that you are willing to get together with a bunch of friends and perform a simply breathtaking act of public art as commentary.

I am gobstruck with awe for the people who did that. It’s not just a marvelously elegant commentary that anyone seeing it can understand. It is a highly daring and presumably quite dangerous stunt that I am thinking required at least three people to pull off. So it took planning and coordination as well.

All to say “this ugly old thing has got to go”.

I have crazy mad respect for people who are that passionate in their desire to make a statement, and who do it in such a powerful and peaceful way.

After all, it’s not like they destroyed anything of value, nor did they make the ugly old dam any uglier. They just added a very simple comment that hurt nobody but made their point clearly and even somewhat humorously.

Then again, some people don’t need to make statements in order to be heard, because they are the butchest human being alive and other people will do all the telling for them.

Like this guy here.

Quick, someone call Stephen Colbert!

Kind of makes Davey Crockett look like a big fat pussy, doesn’t it?

Sure, he “got him a bar when he was only three”, but did he do it by taking it on bare-handed and ripping out its throat with his teeth?

I didn’t think so.

Animal lover that I am, I have no problem with people defending themselves. I don’t feel bad for the bear. We human beings are top predator for a reason. We are really fucking dangerous. If the animals leave us alone, we can be civilized.

But cross the line and attack us, and suddenly it’s all about the law of the jungle.

Is it just me, or have I completely failed to keep a light and jocular tone this week?

Oh well. Here’s some intensely nerdy humour to lighten the mood.

You remember high school algebra, right?

You see, it’s funny because the square root of negative one is an imaginary number because there can be no number that when multiplied by itself results in a negative number. Square a positive number, you get a positive number. Square a negative number, a negative number times a negative number is always positive, ergo, still a positive number.

So you can see, it can be mathematically demonstrated, without the possibility of error, that the above joke is completely hilarious.

If you still don’t find it funny, you must just hate math.

That’s all the stuff I have for you this week, all you fun people out there. Time to clean up, turn out the lights, lock the doors, and play a little wistfully sad piano music to signal the network that we are done for now.

Seeya next week folks!

But then, there was this crap

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Blah blah blah, had something more clever in mind that just me whinging on about being super sleepy and the fucked up dreams I have been having, blah blah, there will be something better soon, and so on, etc., ad infinitum, ad nauseum.

It’s been a decent few days. Last night, Felicity, our friend Amos, and I went out for dinner. Joe, sadly, is still battling the head cold (now a chest cold… lets hope that’s its final destination before it departs for good) that has kept him home from work and out of commission for the whole week, so he was not able to join the Friday night dinner as would be his usual habit. Get well and godspeed, Joe.

Normally, Joe, Felicity, Julian, and I go out to Denny’s on a Friday night. A lot of people badmouth Denny, but from what I can tell, it’s a great place, very relaxed and unpretentious and with good food at a decent price. Honestly, I think all the criticisms are nothing but snobbery. Denny’s is informal and unpretentious and cheerful, and the worst part is, it’s a place where a poor person might feel completely comfortable and relaxes, and so there must be a million things wrong with it. The food must be terrible, the service must be terrible, there musts be the ill-mannered offspring of ugly grubby poor people running around and screaming all the time. There just must be. Otherwise the cognitive dissonance to a middle class mind would be just too intense to bear.

And so all those mean things they say about Denny’s must be true, even if they aren’t. Especially if they aren’t. Being able to get good food, service, and atmosphere at a place where poor people would feel comfortable? Impossible. It simply can’t happen. You must be wrong. We know more about Denny’s from never, ever going there (or even thinking about it, for we are normal middle class people!) then you do from going there all the time.

I have seriously had that exact conversation with people. It is amazing how strong cultural assumptions can be and how deep beliefs about seemingly trivial things like restaurant choice can reach into the very roots of cultural identity.

Why, I would not be caught dead in a Denny’s! What if someone I know saw me there! What would they think of me? They might thing I was less successful than they are and that I might even be… I can barely bare to think it let alone type it…. that I might be poor, and hence lower than them socially!

I would rather die.

Anyhow, so Felicity, Amos, and I headed to Denny’s, only to find the place absolutely packed. I have never seen the place that busy. It reminded me somewhat uncomfortably of the cafeteria at lunch time in high school.

One of our favorite waitresses, a bundle of energy and personality in a small package named Cathy, informed us that due to some kind of airline strike, the place was full of people getting a free meal from the airlines via some kind of meal ticket, and she couldn’t tell us whether we would get a table at all. “Might be two hours!” she said.

Poor dear, she was run off her feet. We ate elsewhere.

In fact, we ended up at Agitaro, a pretty decent sushi place. After 9:30, you can get all-you-can-eat for just $14, and the quality is quite decent. Not top shelf like the cuisine at Richmond Sushi, a half dozen blocks away, but excellent for the price.

And it scratched my sushi itch, which needs scratching every couple of months or so. I am not sure why. Perhaps I suffer from a mild wasabi deficiency.

I do really love those wasabi peas. Nom.

Ate too much, of course, and of the wrong things, of course. It’s sad that even when eating a potentially very healthy cuisine, I still end up eating tasty fried things like spring rolls and gyoza.

I am but a slave to my primate food fathering instincts that say “Salt is good and rare, eat the salty things! Fat is concentrated calories and rare, eat the fatty thing! And sweet means dietarily accessible calories, eat the sweet thing!”

I wonder if all sentient species have to o through a period where they must survive the effects of technology making all their cravings easily gratified?

“I swear, Gorbo, this is my sachet of flavored silica. I’m getting so fat!”

Talk at ya later people.