Some Words

Looks like a little bit of data was lost from the DB, I’m reposting this one, but the post on the horrors of spoiled fish sauce will be consigned to oblivion, no one really needs that.

Why is it that Hot Chip is so much better live than on their albums. I mean, I expect people to be good live acts, but the mix is always better too. Maybe they’re a little more sloppy, but the album cuts are often just slightly… hollow sounding.

I mean, sure it makes me want to see the show, and I’m not nuts about the guitar solo, but come on… That’s a pretty big difference.

I went to a Punch Pizza tonight for dinner. As I never seem to decide before they take my order, I took one of their menus home, in the hope of not holding up the line next time. Looking over it a moment ago, I realized that on the front it says:

Less is More
Because More is Better

Now where have I heard that kind of reasoning before?

The girlfriend came home from Iowa today with two “grapples,” apples that have been bred to smell and taste like artificial grape flavor.

The wonders of modern technology.

Some school in the area of her home town signed on for a grant program that has their elementary school at the forefront of testing exotic fruit experiments. The remainders make it to the store.

Now, I have no idea if this was a GMO, or just a breeding accident that someone realized tasted like fakey grape. I don’t really care. All I know is that it made me uncomfortable. I felt old. Some things just shouldn’t be done. The fact that these two apples made the entire dining room reek of jolly rancher only exacerbated my fear.

But, remembering that all good technology is used to piss off old people, I decided to soldier in and taste the damn thing.

Really, I have to wonder about the thing. It doesn’t really taste like grapes, or even fake grapes, when you bite in. Mostly you get apple flavor, something close to a honeycrisp, maybe a braeburn. Hidden somewhere in the front of the flavor is grape jolly rancher flavor. I don’t know how they do it, but it’s like when you looked at crystal pepsi and it tasted different. I’m not sure I would have tasted anything, if I hadn’t been told this was a grapple.

So, really there is only one use for these things. Here’s how you get the most out of a grapple.

1) Find a grapple and some form of powerful hallucinogen.

2) Drug a friend.

3) When your friend is high, feed him the grapple. Don’t tell him that it’s been engineered to taste like that. Tell him that an army of tiny gnomes, carrying miniature grape jolly rancher candies, rubs the apple down before each bite. If he looks fast enough, tell him, he can see them rush in just before the apple reaches his mouth.

Science at work folks. We are at the forefront of a brave new world, where we take real food, and make it taste like fake food. The children at the school, I hear, were fans of this apple. Who can blame them? It tastes like what they know.

So, it has come to the time in my life where wedding DJs are a thing I must consider. Last weekend, I went to the wedding of my good friend Brad. At this wedding I saw many old friends who I don’t see enough. There was booze, two wonderful people got married, a good time was had by all. Only one thing marred it. I did not like the DJs. I gathered that the groom was not nuts about them either. Specifically there was one point, or rather set, which stood out.

The DJs were doing there thing, and the whole event was moving along smoothly, when what do I hear? Are those the dulcet tones of “Baby Got Back?” Now, this is a fun campy song for college parties, but I found it to be a little out of place at a wedding. Undeterred, I continued to talk to my friend Ben. “Baby Got Back” then segued into “Wild Thing.” The set was taking a turn for the worse. “Baby Got Back” had camp appeal, as did the Grease medley they had played before. While I don’t listen to it at home, it has broad appeal, and doesn’t generally offend me to the point of caring. A song about a run in with a prostitute seemed a little less fitting.

Now, it turns out that Brad stepped out sometime during “Wild Thing,” possibly around the time the hooker asks for “fifty dollars to make you holla.” He returned to hear the opening of Black Eyed Peas, “My Humps,” which rounded out the three song set. Lest you think these DJs were not about class, that song Won a Fucking Grammy. Not that that means much of anything. I thought about linking the song, but I listened to it again for about two seconds and closed the tab in fear.

Brad, it should be said, has been in Japan for most of the last couple of years. He was spared the whole “My Humps” thing. So, he comes into the room, and it turns out he thought that the lyrics has just been something Will Ferrell had made up for the Blades of Glory trailer. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that it probably wasn’t the highlight of the night for him. It is a testament to how fantastic Brad and Hana are that even Sound Productions, who DJed our high school mixers, could not get in the way of their night.

In other news, if the girl and I hire a DJ and that happens, they will find the body in the river.

Against my better judgment, I just motored through the last Harry Potter book. Spoilers and stuff below.

Read the rest of this entry »

It seems that the police, forgetting that these are not the 60s, and that tragically few people give a shit about poetry, set out to bust some dangerous insurgents of the Chicago poetry scene. The vagrant criminals? Publishers, notoriously the move vicious of the lot. I hear those guys will cut you for a ream of paper.

Seen at the Lyndale exit of 94: One woman in full jogging gear, jogging slowly across the intersection. In one hand, a 12 oz can of iced tea, it looked like Lipton Brisk, but I was at a distance. In the other hand, a cigarette. As she crossed the street, she took a long drag, not breaking stride. Upon getting to the other side, she exhaled. She then stopped to breath heavily.

Minnesota ranks number one among the fifty states for health and health care outcomes. This is largely due to the high number of people who have insurance. It’s 18th and 20th in smoking and obesity rates respectively. Scenes like today’s remind me that it’s more of a “least stupid” that a “smart” sort of thing.

So, a little bit ago I saw a post by Ezra Klein. That linked back to this post by Brad DeLong.

The hilarious Laffer Curve graph that DeLong was ranting about got me thinking. I’m not really good with image editing programs, but I figured, “Hell, that graph is amazing. I could do my own Laffer Curve.” Here it is:

Now gimmie an op-ed someone.

I don’t check The Valve often enough. I know this because I almost missed their link to this brief rant, in which Le Guin borrows Cormac McCarthy’s fibrous cock to slap Ruth Franklin for the opening of her Slate review of The Yiddish Policeman’s Union.

As far as I am concerned, my friend Shea hits another one out of the park. The part where you can see the line on the field, like it’s a carpet, is fantastic. No one will know what that means. Watch the videos.

A little bit of verbal house cleaning before I head out today. I’m back from San Francisco now, after having managed to spend less than I feared. After the burn, my head swelled up like one of those aliens in 1950s Science Fiction films. That’s about when I realized it was a second degree burn. It’s a feeling like notching a bedpost, only the result is skin cancer, and not a reputation as a cad. The swelling has gone down now, but it sank into my eyes for some reason, though they weren’t burned. Right now I am only swollen between my eye brows and the upper eyelids. It’s actually bad enough to slightly obscure my vision. In other news, I have never felt this sexy.

I’m going to be changing the name of this blog soon. I’ve hated the name since… oh about post two, but I couldn’t come up with anything better. It’s just sat there, looking horrid and annoying, so I’m taking suggestions from friends. What should that line at the top that says ‘Artless’ now be replaced with. Mark, no. I don’t know what you’ll suggest yet, but just feel secure in knowing that it’s a ‘No.’

To dozens of friends I owe email to… soon. Sorry.

The SO and I have gone to San Francisco for the wedding of a college friend of mine. We decided we’d make a vacation out of it, and so we arrived a few days early, so that we could see some of the sites.

Now, some of my friends will see this coming. I am very pale. I also frequently forget to wear sunblock. In Minnesota, I know where everything is, and I bike there. Minneapolis is small enough that this menas I’m almost never in the sun more than half an hour, unless I’ve gone camping, which sadly I don’t do enough of. Half an hour of sun I can handle. So, now, at a lower latitude, with more direct sun, what did we do? We forgot the spf 45 in the hotel while we wandered the streets being good little tourists. Now, because I shave my head, the entire damn thing is a giant fucking burn.

I was getting up every few hours this past night to douse my head in aloe. When that no longer got the job done (because there was already a nasty later of aloe over the entirety of my skull, I got up, and have now been sitting in the bathroom with a wet towel on my head. For those of you keeping track at home, this is amazingly effective, until the water gets warm.

I’m not lobster red, it’s more that pink near the center of strawberries. I foresee myself catching shit at the wedding.