Before
A chronicle of an American life
Archive for August, 2003
16 August 2003 at 11.31 am · Filed under Culture
I attended a really great party last night, with a lot of witty and engaging people. If you’re reading, you guys were fun!
But definitely, the highlight of the party had to be “Uh-Oh Oreos.” The bag helpfully explains (and I am paraphrasing here), “Oops! We put the chocolate flavor into the creme instead of the cookie!” Longstanding complaints about “creme” notwithstanding, this leaves a few questions.
- First of all, so they messed up about ten million Oreos, and instead of chucking them into the River Scioto, they decided to make up a cute little bag about them and sell them for money?
- Secondly, if the chocolate was left out of the cookie, what flavor is the cookie? The cookie looked to be vanilla, but if the bag were honest about it, the cookie should have been, like, tasteless… or clear… or pocked with holes where the missing chocolate flavor molecules should have been. The absence of flavor is not vanilla; vanilla is its own flavor, dammit.
- Finally, what does this inverse cookie do for race relations? What would Bill Cosby say?
12 August 2003 at 1.46 am · Filed under Culture, Funny stories
I guess all I have these days are small thoughts. But hey, it’s summertime, the reality shows dominate, and you just gotta have some reality web log entries. If you really want substance, America, go read my famous Michael Moore entry (still one of the most popular pages on my site). I’ll be back with serious commentary in September.
That out of the way, here are more small thoughts!
- Virginia’s new license plates advertise the state’s 400th anniversary — “1607-2007.” Couple of points for you, Virginia. 1) 2007 is four years away. There’s no guarantee you’ll even exist. Some guy from West Virginia might organize a recall election, and your whole state could be replaced by Arianna Huffington. 2) 400 years, huh? And it took you, what, 260 years to free all the slaves? 370 years to legalize interracial marriage? 400+ to spit that chaw out? My state is only 200 years old, and we’re way more sophisticated. Maybe you should catch up to the inland provinces before bragging about your proud history.
- E-mail I got recently: “Bill F Cash, It’s a world of wine and United [Airlines] can take you there!” God, if only it were that simple.
- News story about today’s California ballot lottery: “The letters H, B and S, were drawn as eighth, ninth and tenth, meaning that some high-profile candidates, commentator Arianna Huffington, Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante and actor Arnold Schwarzenegger will be relatively near each other on most ballots.” This is what passes for news? The order — not even the content — of the California ballot? Well, their state is only 150 years old. :) Still, pretty tragic.
- Finally, I’ve come up with a couple of new shows for Bravo to air:
Boy Meets Girl. Here’s the setup: a pretty gay boy shows up and has a shot at meeting fifteen potential fag hags. They line up the women, and they each claim to know so much about things near and dear to the gay boy’s heart, like eyebrows or dance music, while complimenting him on his “zaniness” and “totally sensitive side.” But what the gay boy doesn’t know is that some of the potential gal pals are actually scary dykes who’ve been recently shaven. The big finale of the show has the girl revealing the particular horrific personal insecurity — weight, height, breast size, awful middle name — that will come to dominate their fledgling best-friendship. Grand prize? Trip to a gay bar, of course, where the boy will ignore the girl and the girl will silently lust after hundreds of cute unavailables.
Queer Eye for the Straight Teenager. A lecherous group of hairy fortysomethings drive around in an Impala cruising for hotboys in backward ballcaps. When they find them (typically at auto battery stores or maybe NASCAR), they offer smart fashion and dating tips such as: wearing less fashion and dating older men.
5 August 2003 at 7.19 pm · Filed under City life, Culture
“With buildings by Peter Eisenman in Columbus and Cincinnati, and by Frank Gehry in Toledo, Cincinnati, and Cleveland, the state of Ohio is beginning to seem as hospitable to cutting-edge architecture as the Netherlands.”
- The New Yorker, 2 June 2003
Guess all my friends who moved to New York, Washington, and Seattle are gonna miss out!
