Showing posts with label cereal. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cereal. Show all posts
Saturday, September 8, 2012
Monday, April 23, 2012
"Somehow I get the feeling that when young Ann Althouse refused to eat the carrots on her dinner plate, her parents just sighed and got out the Cap'n Crunch."
Roy Edroso cuts and pastes some of my very best material onto his blog, but leaves me out of his Village Voice column "Dog Soldiers: Rightbloggers Meld with Mitt over Obama Mutt Meal Story." He just doesn't know how to "meld" my material with his "rightbloggers" shtick. It's too meta (and meat-a) for him to grind up into the usual sausages the folk at VV use to metaphorically masturbate.
But I must correct Mr. Edroso. There are 5 errors in the statement "when young Ann Althouse refused to eat the carrots on her dinner plate, her parents just sighed and got out the Cap'n Crunch."
1. "Cap'n Crunch is a product line of sweetened corn and oat breakfast cereals introduced in 1963," and I was already 12 in 1963. My sweetened corn cereal of choice was Corn Pops, born in 1951, like me. Here I am explaining my cereal preference to 2 guys including a guy who looks like my dad and has a name like some guy in my adopted home town, Guy Madison.
2. Since carrots were never cooked in my 1950s childhood home, but were served raw, I liked them. Now, if it were something like spinach, which my mother always served with slices of hard-boiled egg on top, I would have avoided it, perhaps, along with the other kids in the family, with some simple commentary like "ew, spinach."
3. My parents never sighed about anything like this. At most, they would inform us that we were saying something that wasn't good "dinner conversation" and they would continuing modeling what was to their ear good dinner conversation.
4. My parents wouldn't get up from the dining table and go back into the kitchen to get different food if we didn't want to eat what we were served. They might say something like "That's dinner" and then move on, in the usual fashion, to good dinner conversation.
5. I was left to my own devices at the dinner table, devices I pursued silently and without parental comment or intervention of any kind: I drank milk, I ate plenty of potatoes, and I sprinkled sugar — copiously — on the wedge of iceberg lettuce. Later, after I was excused from the table — we said "May I be excused?" — I ate all the ice cream I wanted.
IN THE COMMENTS: At Roy's, Halloween Jack says:
But I must correct Mr. Edroso. There are 5 errors in the statement "when young Ann Althouse refused to eat the carrots on her dinner plate, her parents just sighed and got out the Cap'n Crunch."
1. "Cap'n Crunch is a product line of sweetened corn and oat breakfast cereals introduced in 1963," and I was already 12 in 1963. My sweetened corn cereal of choice was Corn Pops, born in 1951, like me. Here I am explaining my cereal preference to 2 guys including a guy who looks like my dad and has a name like some guy in my adopted home town, Guy Madison.
2. Since carrots were never cooked in my 1950s childhood home, but were served raw, I liked them. Now, if it were something like spinach, which my mother always served with slices of hard-boiled egg on top, I would have avoided it, perhaps, along with the other kids in the family, with some simple commentary like "ew, spinach."
3. My parents never sighed about anything like this. At most, they would inform us that we were saying something that wasn't good "dinner conversation" and they would continuing modeling what was to their ear good dinner conversation.
4. My parents wouldn't get up from the dining table and go back into the kitchen to get different food if we didn't want to eat what we were served. They might say something like "That's dinner" and then move on, in the usual fashion, to good dinner conversation.
5. I was left to my own devices at the dinner table, devices I pursued silently and without parental comment or intervention of any kind: I drank milk, I ate plenty of potatoes, and I sprinkled sugar — copiously — on the wedge of iceberg lettuce. Later, after I was excused from the table — we said "May I be excused?" — I ate all the ice cream I wanted.
IN THE COMMENTS: At Roy's, Halloween Jack says:
Althouse probably thinks of her blogging self as a shorter, snappier Maureen Dowd, but she doesn't have the detached hollowness at the heart of MoDo's mean-girl act; she's usually petty, often smug, and when she gets like this, downright creepy.Enjoy the party!
If it were a dinner party and she started in on this, people would probably laugh at first, mostly out of politeness, but a strained silence would ensue as she went on and was obviously getting into it. Then she realizes that not only is everyone else silent but almost everyone is averting their gaze; she clears her throat, murmurs "Well, anyway," and drains her wine glass. The guests can hand-wave it away as an odd tic (although one or two might reach for their list of handy excuses on the occasion of subsequent invitations), but on the blog it sits there, generating a veritable miasma like the stench of garbage left in a warm apartment for a week.
Fortunately from her perspective, unfortunately from anyone else's, she's got her regulars to reinforce her behavior, with Meade piping in with a HuffPo piece about the amount of lead in the White House lawn, and she'll have a virtual dinner party at which she's always the toast of the town.
Friday, October 21, 2011
"I felt that women betraying each other was something I was investigating at the time."
Said Tori Amos, explaining the origin of the song "Cornflake Girl":
Just Right cereal... female genital mutilation... it's hard to imagine a greater disparity in sources for a song. And yet... everything goes into the mix, doesn't it? You read books about all sorts of drastic and dramatic occurrences and your own life ticks on with its miniature but important-to-you events, it all swirls around in your poet-brain, and out pop a song (and, over the years, out pop stories about whether the song came from).
This isn't journalism. It's art, and the only test is: it's a great song.
The idea of that, and how quote-unquote friends can really hurt each other deeply, and the idea that the enemy is out there somewhere, but really, where we get hurt usually comes from people we are close to. So “Cornflake Girl” really was about two women, that one felt that the other had really betrayed her.The inspiration came from Alice Walker’s book "The Temple Of My Familiar":
In the book, they talked about how young girls would be taken to a place for female circumcision, whether it was out in the desert of Africa or what have you, usually by somebody they trusted. A mother, a grandmother, somebody they loved, and of course the person that was doing this to them, taking them to the whatever you want to call it, the hacker or the mutilator, thought that they were doing the right thing, or else the girl wouldn’t be able to get married. They justify their betrayal, and that was really what prompted the idea of “Cornflake Girl.”But wait, says Adam (at Throwing Things), what about that story about how "she beat out Sarah Jessica Parker to star in an ad for Kellogg's Just Right cereal?"
Just Right cereal... female genital mutilation... it's hard to imagine a greater disparity in sources for a song. And yet... everything goes into the mix, doesn't it? You read books about all sorts of drastic and dramatic occurrences and your own life ticks on with its miniature but important-to-you events, it all swirls around in your poet-brain, and out pop a song (and, over the years, out pop stories about whether the song came from).
This isn't journalism. It's art, and the only test is: it's a great song.
Saturday, October 30, 2010
I did something I hadn't done since the '70s.
I made granola!
(Enlarge.)
Have I gone crunchy? No. I just bought a big bag of oatmeal in the rolled oats form, I didn't like it anywhere near as much as I like the steel cut oats, and I didn't want to have to eat it or throw it away.
(Enlarge.)
Have I gone crunchy? No. I just bought a big bag of oatmeal in the rolled oats form, I didn't like it anywhere near as much as I like the steel cut oats, and I didn't want to have to eat it or throw it away.
Friday, June 5, 2009
Sunday, January 18, 2009
10 thoughts about "The Wrestler."
1. To be fair to Marisa Tomei, it should have been titled "Meat." But "The Wrestler" is apt, because Mickey Rourke's role, as a wrestler, is much larger. But the 2 actors have equivalent parts, as human meat, making a life out of a crude display of the body. And when Rourke's character, Randy the Ram Robinson, retires from wrestling, he works at a deli counter, making up orders of sliced meat, and there is, at one point, a literal depiction of the man as meat — which I won't spoil. (Don't you hate spoiled meat?)
2. We see a lot of Marisa Tomei's naked body. It's right in our face, lap-dance style. Unlike Kate Winslet, who is always getting naked for the movie cameras, Marisa Tomei has already won an Oscar. And she is not bathed in the kind of cinematic romantic light that makes us think — as we always think when we get to gawk Kate — how beautiful and how brave. You have to struggle — crawl across the floor — to get to a feeling of respect for the actress who submitted to this script. Like the sex dancer she portrays, you think does this woman need the money so desperately?
3. Tomei and Rourke display formidable bodies topped with aging, messed up faces. In one scene, Tomei — off from work — shows up with no makeup at all. Tomei is 45 and — in her face — she looks it. Randy tells her she looks clean. She didn't look that clean, but practically nothing is clean in this movie. It's an entire world of ramshackle filth.
4. Tomei is required to utter some of the most awkward lines I have ever heard in a movie. While giving Mickey Rourke a lap dance, she has to spontaneously utter some quotes from the movie "The Passion of the Christ" and then explain that she was quoting something from the movie "The Passion of the Christ." You get the point, early on, that Randy the Ram should be understood as a Christ figure and that the narrative should be seen as The Passion. Now, you may rightly wonder why. Movies often cue us to understand a character as a Christ figure, but what is The Ram suffering for?
5. Randy the Ram. Get it? Christ is the Lamb. And The Wrestler is the Ram. O, ram of God, who... who what? Redeems us of our last shred of dignity?
6. The Ram is scourged like mad. I haven't seen "The Passion of the Christ," so I can't tell you how close the various shots in that movie might be to the shots in Mel Gibson's magnum opus. But that cut to the forehead — crown of thorns, right? — even if it is self-inflicted. Getting staple-gunned all over his body? You just know that if the Romans had had staple guns, they would have staple-gunned Christ all over his body. (If that had happened, the staple would now be a holy symbol. Link to the script for "Lenny," wherein Lenny Bruce says "Good thing we nailed him when we did, because if we had done it within the last years, we'd have to contend with generations of parochial schoolkids with little electric chairs hanging around their necks." And here's the corresponding Bizarro cartoon.)
7. I've been noting a Hollywood trend of delivering pedophiliac titillation with artistic prettification. But "The Wrestler" does not fit the trend. The sex in the movie is completely adult — and it's also grubby and ugly. There are children in the movie too, though, and Randy the Ram actually plays with them. He wants to retain his self-esteem as a wrestling hero, so he play wrestles with them, gives one an action figure of himself, and lures another one into his shabby trailer to play an old Ninetendo game (in which he is a character). In real life, people seeing that evidence would suspect the man is a pedophile, but in the movie, he is absolutely not.
8. This movie belongs on a list titled "Movies With Scenes in a Supermarket Aisle." (I'd love some help compiling this list — and also a sub-list "Movies With Scenes in a Supermarket Cereal Aisle."
9. Of all the things that made me voice the syllable best transliterated as "ugh" — one of them was egg salad.
10. I know people want me to say, when I do one of these lists, whether I am recommending the movie.
ADDED: Re #9:
AND: Mickey Rourke talks about making the movie: Part 1, Part 2.
UPDATE: This post memorializes my first date with Meade, on January 17, 2009.
2. We see a lot of Marisa Tomei's naked body. It's right in our face, lap-dance style. Unlike Kate Winslet, who is always getting naked for the movie cameras, Marisa Tomei has already won an Oscar. And she is not bathed in the kind of cinematic romantic light that makes us think — as we always think when we get to gawk Kate — how beautiful and how brave. You have to struggle — crawl across the floor — to get to a feeling of respect for the actress who submitted to this script. Like the sex dancer she portrays, you think does this woman need the money so desperately?
3. Tomei and Rourke display formidable bodies topped with aging, messed up faces. In one scene, Tomei — off from work — shows up with no makeup at all. Tomei is 45 and — in her face — she looks it. Randy tells her she looks clean. She didn't look that clean, but practically nothing is clean in this movie. It's an entire world of ramshackle filth.
4. Tomei is required to utter some of the most awkward lines I have ever heard in a movie. While giving Mickey Rourke a lap dance, she has to spontaneously utter some quotes from the movie "The Passion of the Christ" and then explain that she was quoting something from the movie "The Passion of the Christ." You get the point, early on, that Randy the Ram should be understood as a Christ figure and that the narrative should be seen as The Passion. Now, you may rightly wonder why. Movies often cue us to understand a character as a Christ figure, but what is The Ram suffering for?
5. Randy the Ram. Get it? Christ is the Lamb. And The Wrestler is the Ram. O, ram of God, who... who what? Redeems us of our last shred of dignity?
6. The Ram is scourged like mad. I haven't seen "The Passion of the Christ," so I can't tell you how close the various shots in that movie might be to the shots in Mel Gibson's magnum opus. But that cut to the forehead — crown of thorns, right? — even if it is self-inflicted. Getting staple-gunned all over his body? You just know that if the Romans had had staple guns, they would have staple-gunned Christ all over his body. (If that had happened, the staple would now be a holy symbol. Link to the script for "Lenny," wherein Lenny Bruce says "Good thing we nailed him when we did, because if we had done it within the last years, we'd have to contend with generations of parochial schoolkids with little electric chairs hanging around their necks." And here's the corresponding Bizarro cartoon.)
7. I've been noting a Hollywood trend of delivering pedophiliac titillation with artistic prettification. But "The Wrestler" does not fit the trend. The sex in the movie is completely adult — and it's also grubby and ugly. There are children in the movie too, though, and Randy the Ram actually plays with them. He wants to retain his self-esteem as a wrestling hero, so he play wrestles with them, gives one an action figure of himself, and lures another one into his shabby trailer to play an old Ninetendo game (in which he is a character). In real life, people seeing that evidence would suspect the man is a pedophile, but in the movie, he is absolutely not.
8. This movie belongs on a list titled "Movies With Scenes in a Supermarket Aisle." (I'd love some help compiling this list — and also a sub-list "Movies With Scenes in a Supermarket Cereal Aisle."
9. Of all the things that made me voice the syllable best transliterated as "ugh" — one of them was egg salad.
10. I know people want me to say, when I do one of these lists, whether I am recommending the movie.
ADDED: Re #9:
AND: Mickey Rourke talks about making the movie: Part 1, Part 2.
UPDATE: This post memorializes my first date with Meade, on January 17, 2009.
Monday, January 5, 2009
I answer your questions.
Yesterday, I noted the questions each of which, according to SiteMeter, brought 1 person to this blog. I intended only to mock, but then I actually answered the questions. Why should I mock? I can answer the questions and do some small particle of good in this world.
In that spirit, let's answer today's questions:
who is msm?
A miserable left-wing fool.
what type of jobs will obama create?
According to Rush Limbaugh, today, these will be military jobs, and you won't need to apply for them. You will be drafted.
what to stockpile for an economic crisis?
Bottled water, peanut butter, toilet paper, powdered milk, granola, and V8 Juice — as much as you can fit in your house.
what happened in the movie doubt?
Meryl Streep pursed her lips and Philip Seymour Hoffman got red in the face.
what do men wear to sleep in?
Shorts.
In that spirit, let's answer today's questions:
who is msm?
A miserable left-wing fool.
what type of jobs will obama create?
According to Rush Limbaugh, today, these will be military jobs, and you won't need to apply for them. You will be drafted.
what to stockpile for an economic crisis?
Bottled water, peanut butter, toilet paper, powdered milk, granola, and V8 Juice — as much as you can fit in your house.
what happened in the movie doubt?
Meryl Streep pursed her lips and Philip Seymour Hoffman got red in the face.
what do men wear to sleep in?
Shorts.
Saturday, January 3, 2009
We were talking about khat, and Kev said...
"I thought khat-blogging had kind of gone out of style lately."
I thought I'd do a post with a LOLcat, saying something on this theme, so I went to Flickr to find a picture of a cat, and I got pleasantly distracted by this comment on the photograph that I blogged yesterday. Screen grab:
See? The commenter — jjmadison — has a cat face avatar and his comment — "wow, all that on two packs of Splenda??" — continues the drug theme. Ah! My drug of choice is synchronicity. I'm high on it now. I'm even singing: Oh! Oh! Oh!
Not really, but I do have to shout above the din of my Rice Krispies.
Now, somewhat giddy, I do still want to make that LOLcat, and I search my Flickr photographs for "cat." But I haven't been good about labels over there, and the collection of "cat"-labeled photos seems a bit absurd. There's a latte with a foam cat face. A picture of a poster that says "Don't Shoot the Cat." There's the very young me with a cat and my same-age son with a cat:
[ADDED: Yes, Chris is holding a "Hilter cat" and we were just talking about Facebook groups like "G-D BLESS HITLER," but stay away from the Nazi synchronicity. The brown-shirt acid that is circulating around us is not specifically too good.]
There are the pages from my Amsterdam sketchbook about the Cat Museum — the Katten Kabinet. There are some bat orts.
Most absurd, there is a set of LOLcats, made from photos taken of paused — pawsed — frames from the movie "La Dolce Vita."
What was that all about? Don't you remember back on August 11, 2007, when TRex said "Every time I look in over [at Althouse], something so weird is going on that I feel like I just bumbled on to the set of a Fellini film," and I was all:
I'd love to pass out some of the Althouse blog drugs: frontpaging and tags.
And I'm hoping TRex will bumble over here and see that something weird is going on. And also that something crawls from the slime at the bottom of a dark Scottish lake.
UPDATE: From Lem:
AND: From Zachary Paul Sire:
AND: From Palladian:
From Kev (who started all this):
I thought I'd do a post with a LOLcat, saying something on this theme, so I went to Flickr to find a picture of a cat, and I got pleasantly distracted by this comment on the photograph that I blogged yesterday. Screen grab:
See? The commenter — jjmadison — has a cat face avatar and his comment — "wow, all that on two packs of Splenda??" — continues the drug theme. Ah! My drug of choice is synchronicity. I'm high on it now. I'm even singing: Oh! Oh! Oh!
Not really, but I do have to shout above the din of my Rice Krispies.
Now, somewhat giddy, I do still want to make that LOLcat, and I search my Flickr photographs for "cat." But I haven't been good about labels over there, and the collection of "cat"-labeled photos seems a bit absurd. There's a latte with a foam cat face. A picture of a poster that says "Don't Shoot the Cat." There's the very young me with a cat and my same-age son with a cat:
[ADDED: Yes, Chris is holding a "Hilter cat" and we were just talking about Facebook groups like "G-D BLESS HITLER," but stay away from the Nazi synchronicity. The brown-shirt acid that is circulating around us is not specifically too good.]
There are the pages from my Amsterdam sketchbook about the Cat Museum — the Katten Kabinet. There are some bat orts.
Most absurd, there is a set of LOLcats, made from photos taken of paused — pawsed — frames from the movie "La Dolce Vita."
What was that all about? Don't you remember back on August 11, 2007, when TRex said "Every time I look in over [at Althouse], something so weird is going on that I feel like I just bumbled on to the set of a Fellini film," and I was all:
"Im in ur hair/Lickin ur i"But these Rice Krispies were enough, and I don't want an egg at this hour. So I look to you, dear readers, to pick up Kev's khat-blogging theme and make some LOLcats. You can make them here, and you can email them to me at annalthouse (at) gmail (dot) com.
"Im ur soul/gettin outta heer"
"Ur head/my roller coaster"
"Im ur/windsheeled wipurrz"
I'd love to pass out some of the Althouse blog drugs: frontpaging and tags.
And I'm hoping TRex will bumble over here and see that something weird is going on. And also that something crawls from the slime at the bottom of a dark Scottish lake.
UPDATE: From Lem:
AND: From Zachary Paul Sire:
AND: From Palladian:
From Kev (who started all this):
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
:.
