DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Here’s an example of culinary craziness: invite two friends to dinner on short notice, and then when you learn that two other friends will be in town the same night, invite them too. And then make a fancy dinner comprised of recipes that you’ve never tried before, e.g., instead of making mashed potatoes, make mashed peas-mint-potatoes, which sounds unusual and certainly is if for no other reason than the bright green color. And instead of making fish, make three kinds of fish all wrapped up together like a turducken.

[Aaron recognized the recipe — Fish Roll with Compound Butter]

And then go with the two last-minute friends on an hour’s walk through Golden Gate Park, and then meet the other friends at a margarita place for an hour, and still manage to put on a 3-star, 4-course meal when you eventually arrive home.

Did I mention the three desserts? Or five, really: hazelnut shortbread, chocolate chip cookies, french vanilla ice cream with raspberries, and (for the guy who doesn’t eat dairy (i.e., me)) lemon sorbet. And here I was thinking my scale might be broken. Sigh.

In case I haven’t been clear: I wasn’t the host. I might have attempted this menu, but I would not have attempted to leave the house for two hours in the middle of the prep. I respect and admire the “dinner will be served if and when we finish preparing it” attitude, but I can’t muster it at my own parties.

I took off my sunglasses and reached out to shake my dentist’s hand. He reached out but froze halfway, aghast. “What happened?!” he said, his eyes wide above the paper nose-mask. “Your nose is all red — it looks like somebody hit you!”

“Oh,” I said, “my sunglasses leave red marks. It’s nothing.” I mentally dismissed the alarm that had started adrenaline boiling through my veins.

“No, really!” he continued, as he handed me a mirror, “see how you’re all blue under your eyes, and your nose is red.”

He was right. I looked ghoulish. I felt like a cartoon, looking in a mirror to see some grotesque monster-head peering back at me. I shook my head and felt reality snap back into place — it’s just my face, colors distorted by sun, wind, lack of sleep, and the green fluorescent light in the dentist’s office. If you stare at anything too closely it will begin to look bizarre, an unfamiliar collection of lines and textures. Still, he’d made me self-conscious and unsettled in my own skin, and I wasn’t happy about it.

A couple of minutes later, I bit him.

I haven’t seen Holes yet, but I will, even though (a) it’s a Disney film, and (b) I do not have teenaged children who could learn the value of a hard day’s work in the hot sun.

The book was really great. Read my review: Holes, by Louis Sachar

Of the movie, Mick LaSalle writes,

It was directed by Andrew Davis, who has made too many good movies for it to be a coincidence… He allows for outlandish characterizations but keeps the movie real, not permitting it to degenerate into silliness despite the inclusion of typical kid-movie jokes about smelly feet and flatulence.

What’s wrong with silly jokes about smelly feet and flatulence? If these are really just a kid-movie phenomenon, maybe I’ve been seeing all the wrong movies.

Apple’s Movie Trailers site hosts the Holes trailer in 3 stream sizes.

In an article about the transmission of SARS, Sudden Acute Respiratory Syndrome, Rob Stein of the Washington Post writes:

…although the primary route of SARS transmission is through droplets that infected people spray out when they sneeze or cough, scientists had detected evidence of the virus in feces and urine… That would provide an alternative explanation for how the disease spread rapidly through a Hong Kong apartment tower…

What sort of nasty plumbing problem allows for that leap of logic? Am I misreading something, or does the statement above imply that residents of the infected apartment building are exposed to neighbors’ toilet outflow on a regular basis?

The Voice of America confirms this disgusting hypothesis, in an article called Researchers Say Plumbing Helped Spread of SARS in Hong Kong:

Secretary for Health Yeoh Eng-kiong says most residents in the Amoy Gardens complex probably picked up the virus in their bathrooms, that large amounts of human waste carrying the virus went into the sewage system and leaked into apartments connected by toilet pipes.

I find this disturbing: camo paint on a jeep is bad enough, in terms of promoting violence and the sort of chest-thumping too-many-Y-chromosomes machismo that got us into Iraq to try to kill a bunch of people who we’ll now chase into Syria and any other neighboring country that had not-coincidentally already been targeted for American invasion by the Project for a New American Century memo back in 1998… but even worse, in my opinion, is painting mock bullet holes into the camouflage.

War is arguably necessary sometimes, but celebrating it like this seems demented to me.