Comma Dot Comma

It’s time to check in with our favorite Netflix movie reviewer. Here’s his comment on the movie National Treasure, which he gave three stars:

At first, when I am sit down and to prepare for the watching of this movie, I can’t expectations to imagine the stressfull I am early to experience by the ten minutes at beginning. And from there, it was like day spending in one of big American amusement parks. I experience ride of suspensful and colorful sceneries. Not to mentions the beautiful actress who plays female protagonist — wow my heart is so full of jumping!!! Great movie for to watch again and again!

Why write anything when you can get it generated for free? A collection of random text generators:

They fight crime! The perfect set-up for your latest noir novel or screenplay. Don’t like it? Just click “try again.”

Microfiction Assignments: Quick! Follow the directions to create a masterpiece… all the plot points are present. (Thanks to nate).

These five text generators were collected by the guy over at Communications from Elsewhere.

Brag Generator: Perfect for your pre-drag-race speech.

Teenage Poetry: The tears, the roses, the staring at cloudy horizons.

Postmodern English Criticism. This one generates a whole nonsense paper with footnotes. My coworker sent around an excerpt of this ,side-by-side with an excerpt from Stanley Fish, and most of us couldn’t tell which one was which.

Time Cube. Why read the rants on the real crazy-guy-time-cube page when you can randomly generate a similar excerpt here? You don’t get the big red letters, but the rest is there.

Band Names. It gives you a choice of several, but you can always refresh to get new options.

We are entering that pre-moving phase in which one tries to use up all the random bottles and cans of food and hygiene products, in order to avoid either wasting stuff or having to pack it. This strategy resulted in a surprisingly yummy soup the other night.

1 packet Taste of Thai coconut ginger soup mix
1 can coconut milk

1 can garbanzo beans, drained and rinsed
1 can spinach, drained
1 can chicken broth

cooked farfarelle pasta

(no, no hygiene products in this particular recipe. sorry)

Heat all ingredients together until hot and tasty.

I am struck by the wide variety of partially-empty pasta bags we have in this one kitchen cupboard. Rice noodles of various widths; spaghetti noodles of various widths and grains; elbow macaroni; penne; egg noodles; lasagne noodles; those big hollow noodles for manicotti; bowties/farfarelle; and some twisty kind I don’t know the name of.   Think of all the soups, sauces, and salads they represent, both those I have eaten in the past, and those I could potentially eat in the near future.  It’s going to be boil-a-feast central chez Dottie Comma.

In other news, I’ll be in sunny southern California until next week. They have well-paved roads and an established recycling infrastructure, but no internets.  At least, not in the Motel 6, and also not out in the woods, which will be the other place I’m staying.  So,  ta ta for now.

I’ve been wondering all day if I should blog about this, but since it’s already national news I guess it’s ok. In the midst of an extremely busy day my thoughts keep drifting back to my good friend Aaron (pictures of him, the tall dark-haired guy with goatee, are included in my Alaska blog post), who is undergoing surgery today after a 450-ft tumble down an icy face of Mt. Hood. He and his two climbing partners, as well as the two additional teams of climbers below them that they crashed through, all survived. The two other teams managed to keep their places on the icy slope, and one of Aaron’s friends was able to safely walk the rest of the way down the mountain. Rescuers were nearby and saw the fall, and they waited with Aaron and and Jeremy for seven hours on the mountainside until a helicopter could airlift them out. The two men have some serious broken bones and all three are battered and bruised and scraped, but it turns out that everyone is expected to fully recover. On the one hand I feel relief and gratefulness that it wasn’t more serious– that they fell away from the the deep crevasse nearby, that the other teams had all just fully secured themselves to the ice and that Aaron’s team was able to warn them that they were falling, that there were rescuers right there waiting to provide first aid, that the injuries are all of the sort that heal eventually– and on the other hand I feel some grief and fear. Aaron is an experienced and responsible climber, and his fall reminds me that if it can happen to him, it can happen to anyone. Frightening and painful things can occur among us at almost any time. Granted, this is an obvious truth, verging on the cliche, that I am reminded of again and again; granted, mountain climbing isn’t exactly a risk-free activity; granted, one can’t constantly think of these things and continue to live a sane life. Yet the reminders keep me sad, and humble. I also feel sad that, though their rescue was quickly put in motion and everyone worked as fast as they could, they had to lay injured in the snow for so many hours. I still wish God’s protection included our bodies and our fortunes as well as our souls.Thank God Aaron and his friends had helpers and comforters, and those who continue to watch over them. If you are a prayer, please pray for their speedy recoveries. If you are also a reader, here is the link to the newspaper story in the Oregonian.

Today marks the one-week anniversary of a 14-hour visit to New York City.  Super Sarah had invited me to hang out with her there after she got done with a work conference, so I booked my $35 Chinatown Bus ticket and scurried on up there for a one-night tour.  Scurrying in this case involved standing hopefully in front of a Chinese restaurant in Baltimore, then boarding a van, then boarding a bus, then standing hopefully in front of a Chinese supermarket in NYC waiting for Sarah, who arrived at almost the exact same moment, bearing in tow a tall handsome guy who had flown across the country to surprise her.  Yes, Sarah is a woman that inspires certain men to cross continents, and I don’t blame them.
I had two main goals for this trip, apart from some Q. T. with Sarah:  one, to look cool like a real New Yorker, and two, to get quoted on Overheard In New York.   Goal number one involved changing in bathroom of the dim sum restaurant we’d stumbled across in our search for food! glorious food! at 10 pm.  None of us had ever done dim sum thing, and I understand it’s more of a lunch activity, what with all the dainty parcels, which I ate in a manner that can be described more as alarmingly voracious than dainty.

We really liked the pink things and the pork buns and our brothy soups.   And that shirt looks boring, but it is actually a lace minidress worn over jeans.  I had a little wooden-bead purse to go with it that a some guy told me looked like garbanzo beans, what did I have it for, in case I got hungry?  I count it as scoring a point a stranger comments on my fashion choice, even if it is a slightly insulting comment.

Filled up with tiny wraps and rolls and buns, we asked, what next? We decided to make our way to the Village on foot, people-watching and peering into bars and clubs in the hopes of finding some interesting live music.  We didn’t find any live music (what? midnight on a Friday night? Where we, Topeka?).  Whenever we wandered among large crowds of people I would loudly insert non-sequiturs into the conversation in the hopes of achieving goal #2, confusing my two compatriots.  What did tame armadillos have to do with cheesecake?  I waggled my eyebrows significantly at them until they remembered.  That particular strategy I don’t recommend for those with similar goals, because the non-sequitur thing tends to kill a conversation right quick.  I also don’t know if I achieved my goal, since I forgot to check the website afterwards.  Seems unlikely.  No one caught their friend’s eye knowingly as I passed.  Nor did I overhear anything worth reporting.  I do have some advice for the fashion-forward skinny-legged men among you:  apparently the up-and-coming thing is very pointy multicolored boots and extremely tight pants.
We were tired of fruitless walking and decided to take a spin around the top of the world instead. We taxied to this hotel with a rotating rooftop bar, where I ordered a drink that looked more like a fresh fruit salad than a cocktail and then tried unsuccesfully to line up my cocktail napkin with the city skyline.  The napkin had silhouettes of all the buildings we were slowly passing.  Sarah and I teased her tall handsome fellow about being a lightweight until we tasted his martini ourselves, which was apparently straight bourbon with a cherry in the bottom.  hooo–eee.   We didn’t get drunk but it seems like a bad idea to drink too much in a bar that is actually rotating beneath you.  Talk about unsettling.  Once I was finally satisfied that no blueberry or melon chunk had gone uneaten from my drink, we headed out into the night once again, this time in search of cheesecake.

The deli where we ate cheescake, I forget the name of it though it is something so obvious I might as well just wear a sign that says “culturally unaware”, had a lot of pictures of famous people who had also eaten cheescake there.  We sat below pictures of Barry Manilow, a young chipmunk-cheeked Corey Feldman, and some house remodeling guy that had “You can do it!” printed across the photo.  Cheesecake seemed like a reasonable 2 am food choice until the pieces actually arrived.  They were each the size of a size 10 men’s shoe.  Here’s a picture Sarah took of our cheescake bites:

Then it was off to sleep for a few hours.  The next day we wandered around some more near and in Central Park.  Note to future park visitors:  if you are walking aroud the reservoir (pronunciation: rez-eh- VWAH), and you want to get off the one-way track, plan your exit well in advance as it seems to be quite fenced in.

I ate a bagel with tofu vegetable cream cheese, and a nasty soggy hotdog, and then it was time to wait uncertainly in front of the Macy’s side door for a bus home.  Good times were had by all.

Slate has a new blog– “blogging the Bible” by a guy who hasn’t read much of it. The inaugural post is interesting, haven’t got into the rest yet.

She tells everyone she has carpal tunnel though her wrists are fine.  “Squeeze right here,” she says, proffering her tendons.  “Feel that?  You can sense the damage.” You squeeze, sensing nothing in particular, some fat, some bone and cartilage, and then both of you watch pale finger-marks disappear from her wrist.

After church she extends her arms to you from across the foyer.  “Sweetie! So good to see you!” Her hands, advancing half a meter ahead of the rest of her, seem to wish they could detach from the whole slow unit and rush forward to grasp you.  The only way to fend them off is to clasp them between both your own hands at the first opportunity; all four swing between you as you chit and chat.

And what damage does it do, really, to grasp and be grasped? None in particular.  So you do it.

Everytime I go anywhere in Baltimore these days I wonder: Is this the last time I will see this, do this, wonder about that? In honor of the end times (relatively speaking), a list of conversations and overheards gathered in the last year:

Hapless teenage guy on cell phone outside my apartment:

What I want to know is, why your girlfriend stole all my mother’s make-up! I gotta get that shit back! No, I didn’t threaten her with a gun, I ain’t even GOT a gun. Jealous? Jealous of what, she sleeps with anybody, there’s nothing to be jealous — oh, hello, Miss Annie. I’m trying to get my mother’s makeup back. And the forty dollars owed me, I almost got jumped over it– Miss Annie. Miss Annie. Miss Annie! Listen! Well tell your DAUGHTER to get out of the drug life too, all she does is eat oxies!

Mechanic hanging out in front of the shop, as I walked by:

Mechanic: What do you think of the name Edwin?

Me: Uh. It’s a fine name!

Mechanic to his fellow mechanics: SEE! I told you!

Guy getting on morning bus, shirt unbuttoned to the navel, gold crosses dangling, arms spread wide:

“Good morning, everyone! It is a blessed, blessed day!”

Everyone on the bus, nodding and grinning: Good morning!

Lady clerk at the Rite Aid counter, lodging her final counterpoint in our impromptu argument on whether the world is mostly good or mostly evil:

You get the wrong idea from T.V.!

Dr. G, to his newly arrived parents:

Welcome to Baltimore, also known as Charm City!

As he finishes the sentence, a guy jaywalks against the light, causing three lanes of cars to slam on their brakes. He treats us all to a flamboyant double flip-off, the two middle fingers held high and waved around in all directions lest anyone should miss them.

Dr G again:

What kind of world is it when we make our senior citizens stand on the street corner with signs that say HOT AND READY?

spoken upon seeing an old guy standing out in the winter weather with a Little Caesar’s Pizza placard.

Young Mohawk-and-chains guy, explaining to me why he is asking directions to his wife’s workplace, gesturing at his silent cell phone:

I just found out she cheated on me! Yeah it does suck. She lies and lies! We’ve only been married two months and this is the third time!

Technician taking my blood on mother’s day:

Are you a mother? No? I am. Yes, I have one child. Well, two actually. The girl is six and the other one is two months along. Thank you! I haven’t told anybody yet. I’m getting married next week and I want it to be a surprise. Yes, I’m excited too.

From the friend-of-a-friend files: Nate emailed me this true blue exchange between the makers of Brownie Bites and a happenstance consumer of said product (his friend).

Dear SugarBowl Bakery,

A co-worker recently brought a plastic tin of your bite sized brownies into work. Truthfully, the brownies did not look appetizing to me. I stayed away from them for most of my shift. However, being hungry, and needing energy for the trip home, I decided to try one shortly before end of shift. Wow. They are good. I mean really good. I was extremely glad I had not tried one earlier. I would have eaten the whole tray of them. They were so good, in fact, I even bothered to read the package that they came in. Then I became frightened. The package encouraged me to “enjoy these treats every day all day long”. Although initially sounding like a good idea, I decided to check the nutritional information. Each brownie is a nifty 140 calories. After some quick figuring of one brownie every fifteen minutes and allowing 8 hours a day to sleep, I realized you are trying to sell me a roughly 9000 calorie a day diet, half of that consisting of fat. Are you people trying to kill me?

Sincerely,

Chris B.

Dear Mr. B:

Thank you for your feedback on our petite brownie bites recently.

We appreciate hearing from our customers when there is an issue with our products and also when they tell us that “they are really good”!

Of course we are not trying to hurt anyone and like any food or drink products, everything should be consumed in moderation. A balanced diet as recommended by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration should lead to good health.

We are a very proud and long standing family run wholesale bakery in San Francisco.

We understand that in using the finest ingredients available to produce our products, that they can be quite habit forming. These brownie bites sell very well all over the world. We do have a Trans Fat Free line that will be produced before the end of the year.

Thank you again for your note and please keep eating those brownie bites…in moderation!

S.M.

Marketing Manager

Sugar Bowl Bakery

Interesting things I’ve happened upon in the last few weeks.
Some people really love their flashlight collections.

What ninjas think about the fighting scenes in Matrix (“It’s like a brick, trying to be Jupiter”). askaninja.com.

What do you get when you cross 200 liters of Diet Coke with a bunch of Mentos? Some pretty good choreography. (Link via nerdygirl).

I’ve often been the victim of mood oglers (warning: lotsa cussing), but I never had the term for it before now. In a moment of obsession I read cancerbaby’s whole blog a few weeks ago. She died last month. Here’s another really good, but sad, post by her, about marriage and stuff.