About fifteen years ago, Maxwell House came out with a bottled “iced cappuccino” here in the States called Cappio. It was available in several flavors, including cinnamon, vanilla, and mocha . . . and man, I loved that stuff. Especially the mocha, which tasted as if coffee and cocoa had made sweet, sweet love to produce a God-Child who had descended to Earth for the sole purpose of making my poor tired brain happy again. World without End, Ah-men. Ahhhh-mennn.

It was moderately kinda sorta expensive, but it sure was tasty. Smooth, sweet, and a kick like a mule wearing velvet horseshoes. Hoo boy.

Then one day it went on sale. Everywhere. So I bought up a bunch, never thinking that maybe it was on sale for a Reason.

The Reason, of course, turned out to be that it had sold like crap at a stable-shovelers convention. So less than two years after introducing it, General Foods stopped making it for the U.S. market. All the stores put their stock on sale so they could clear the shelves for whatever came next.

The result: Once I knocked back my little stash, that was it. No more Soup for me.

A decade and a half later, all of the bottled iced coffee drinks on the U.S. market taste as if they’ve been filtered through a stevedore’s shorts. And they apparently sell like crazy despite being more costly than heroin. (Okay, maybe not the best heroin. But still – two bucks for a six-and-a-half ounce Doubleshot? I’d ask how those rapacious bastards sleep at night, except I’m pretty sure they don’t.)

Read More »

The official Jumper website is currently running a Comic to Film contest that asks contestants to create an original video based on the comic pages found on the site. To get started, visit the official website and drill down.

Winners will receive a trip to Los Angeles for a meeting with Jumper director Doug Liman. They will also receive a 15 inch MacBook Pro with Final Cut Studio 2 Editing Suite. The submitted videos shouldn’t be longer than seven minutes in length.

From the sidebar at Making Light.

I’m not by nature a nostalgic person. I think of my childhood as primarily a time when other people told me what to do, where to go, what to eat, when to go to bed, what to wear, and when my options were limited by my lack of resources. Sure, someone took care of me, fed me, bought my clothes, loved me, but for example, I was on a rural bus route that took an hour and I get motion sick. The doctor prescribed medication so I wouldn’t throw up every morning, but no one ever offered me any options other than fly out the door at 6:15 every morning for a dull and mildly nauseating hour. That, as far as I am concerned, summed up a lot of childhood. You make the best of it.

Bob has been consumed by nostalgia lately. He’s reading about Ghoulardi, a kind of cult TV personality who was big in Cleveland when he was growing up. I’m painting a bedroom and I bought some photographs off Etsy to have framed and hung. Then I thought about how all those decorating shows tell you to frame your own photographs so I dug out my box of photos from China and started going through them. I discovered two things. I’m not a good photographer. And I am deeply nostalgic about the girl in those photographs.

I was 28 when I went to China. I had a sense of what my life could be that was very different (of course) from how it turned out. I like how it turned out, mostly because of Bob. But I…regret is too strong a word…I have some wistfulness about the other life, which involved a great deal more travel. The road not taken, so to speak. I wanted to speak another language, live in another country again.

Of course, what I forget about that girl is that she was unpublished and felt a tremendous weight of anxiety. When I was 28 I had a life of rented rooms. I had never owned a couch, which seemed to me at the time symbolic of some sort of rootlessness and lack of seriousness. I had spent several years chasing the dream of being a writer. For some of those years I didn’t have a job or health insurance or a car or a boyfriend or a television. No dog, of course. I felt as if I was falling farther and farther behind in life. I wasn’t sure that I would ever be a writer. Or that I would ever be anything other than marginal.

Of course, being marginal was what gave me the freedom to up and go to China. Now, painting and decorating a room in my very nice house, living as a writer, I know that I wasn’t in fact falling behind. I forget all that. I see that girl and I forget all the anxiety of being young and uncertain. I see China. I see a time when who I was seemed more malleable. It’s a middle-aged kind of nostalgia. One I have no patience for in other people, and swore I would never indulge.

Indulge me?

I have a supermarket loyalty card. It’s that card you swipe at the cashier’s station that gives you “members only” discounts on certain products. Like, clementines one week are $9.99 for a box; the next week, with a Safeway card, they cost $4.99 (I, for one, wonder how seriously they expect me to take that “discount.” If they’d price the clems at $7 a box all the time they’d probably make the same amount of money–but then the customer would miss that sense of getting a deal). Be that as it may, I have family to feed and I wield my Safeway card with brio.

So the other day I heard an ad on the radio for a new service of Safeway’s and, in my ceaseless quest to go out and get the goods for my fellow Brains and Brain-eaters, I signed up at once for FoodFlex(tm).

What is FoodFlex, you ask? I always knew that Safeway was tracking what we bought–I mean, if their computer can keep track of how many cups of coffee I get at the Starbucks stand in the market (the 10th is free!) it’s certainly able to track everything else I pick up. But now they’re making a virtue of it: sign up for FoodFlex and Safeway’s computer will track all the food you buy and give you reports about your nutritional intake. Buy broccoli and tofu and you’ll get a gold star (well, I’m making up the gold star, but I imagine the report will shine upon you). But if you’re having a party and buy two bottles of wine, a bag of Tostitos, two boxes of Malomars, and a rack of lamb, what do you think the report is going to say?

It only takes a small jump to the point where your grocery cart (many of which are WiFi capable and can broadcast ads for products depending on your position in the store–stand near the Rice A Roni and **BAM** there’s an ad urging you to pick up some San Francisco Treats) notes that you’ve stopped in front of the potato chips and tssks at you.

Grocery Cart: Again with the chips? That’s not very healthy is it?

Me: We have people coming over. I won’t eat any, I promise.

Grocery Cart: Uh Huh. You know, you could at least get the baked chips. They’re not as bad for you. And for God’s sake, no onion dip! Salsa is much better for you. (the cart rolls along until we pause in front of the meat section). Pork chops? You didn’t buy that “other white meat” crap, did you? Please. You can serve nice white meat chicken.

Me: Great. You want to tell me what else I could serve?

Grocery Cart: (coyly) Oh, I wouldn’t presume. Two bottles of wine? Really? Don’t you think some sparkling cider and a nice fruit bowl would be a good way to end the evening? (Speaks loudly, to attract the attention of other shoppers). You don’t need all that alcohol, do you? I mean, it’s not a problem for you, is it?

Me: (head in hands) Grape Nuts and organic pomegranate juice okay with you?

Grocery Cart: Now you’re talking!

When I get my first report from Big Brother FlexFood I’ll report back.

It’s not very much snow at all but it came with wind that blew the relatively heavy metal chairs off my deck and iced up the streets. Anyway, they canceled school.

Twilight Ninja and Noble Girl are delighted.

Laura, whose office in the house doesn’t have a door, is less so.

Steve, whose office is a separate establishment far across the snowy plains of the backyard, is just fine.

I’ve been terse, of late.

I haven’t posted about global warming in a long time; so many well-informed writers are posting on the subject now that I don’t have much new to share (though significant progress continues to be made — at least on the scientific front). My posts on bird flu come from my background in public and environmental health, but I don’t have a lot more to say other than (in various ways) think about what you would do, if the worst becomes real. How will you survive it? How will you help your family and neighbors, your community?

(Come to think of it, there is plenty of overlap between bird flu and a zombie infestation. So, you know: stockpile food and weapons, keep away from infected individuals, and whatever you do, don’t eat brains.)

And I have some great posts queued up with regard to humans in space, but not a lot of time to devote to them (and to be worthwhile, they need time. rsn, I promise).

My fellow Brainiacs have been sharing some great stuff lately. I’ve been reading avidly. Hungrily. Zombiliciously. But the output has been minimal.

All this magma is moving around inside. There’s this tectonic plate activity under the surface of my thoughts. Quakes, geysers, upwellings. Subduction of old rock, old patterns of behavior and thought. Processes beyond my control are busily destroying the ruins of my old life, making space for new processes. I don’t even know what it all means. It’s hard for me to know yet how, or even what, to share.

But these images spoke to me.

(Via Group News Blog.)

Someday, in some far distant future, the ruins of Kolmanskop, Namibia will lie beneath a tropical rainforest. Or maybe an ocean. So will the skyscrapers of Singapore, London. New York. Where Everest is now, we’ll have a savannah. An unimaginably advanced city. The remains of a vast, nanite disaster. The site where a new savior is hatched and raised, whose writings will later transform the lives of uncounted posthumans.

Someday the ruins of Komanskop will be crushed, along with the bones of their occupants. They’ll be obliterated. Sucked into the mantle, dragged down to the dense iron core of the earth, super-heated, pressurized, and spewed out again to make new rock, new minerals that plants and animals will take up. Someday, they’ll be taken up by new stars, and made into new starstuff.*

There is a link between death and birth. Between destruction and renewal. Tossing out the old — old habits, ways of thinking, crap you don’t need anymore — makes room for the new. Hurts like hell. Burns the shit out of you. You can’t survive that process. You’re nothing but atoms, you know, in the final analysis. The universe makes use of those atoms, but you don’t get to decide whether you get to stay in one piece. Maybe you’ll be one of the lucky ones who survives and passes on your code, your DNA, your ideas. Maybe not. Maybe you won’t even be a bump on somebody else’s tarmac. It’s not in your control.

But fuck. What a fucking amazing dance it all is.

____________________
*I’ve definitely been spending too much time trolling in the dusty hinterlands of my brain.

PS Btw, did you guys hear? Somebody is postulating that the reason the universe appears to be expanding at increasingly fast rates is because time is sl-o-o-o-owing down!

I love cosmologists. It’s like they are getting paid to create code for an acid trip. (Ask me for a link in comments, if you really must read more. I’m too lazy to hunt it up gratuitously.)

PPS How many other people read about Bush’s SOTU Address and your brain changes it to STFU Address? Let’s have a show of hands.

The video explains it all so reasonably.

Me and She Who Is Awesome have some startlingly free-form conversations on occasion.

I don’t remember how we arrived there, but she suggested the first four lines of this song.

It got stuck in my head, and I had to write the rest.

It’s all pretty much one take, just vocal and guitar. I might revisit it at some point, but I’m pretty pleased with how it came out tonight.

And no pitch-tuning. Go me!

:

At The Lesbian Bar

:

Uh, I really doubt that this one is safe for work…

:

I’m on the mood for something light and bouncy today. This one isn’t all that obscure, I assume. It’s a duet sung by two women at the height of their powers, with voices that drip liquid feminist sex.

…Well, as a Guy, that’s how I interpret it, anyhow…

It’s Annie Lennox and Aretha Franklin working out on ‘Sisters Are Doin’ It For Themselves’. It rings on my bells, too.

:

Annie divas out on a bluesy version of the song at the the 2002 Queen’s Golden Jubilee.

I recognized a few faces in her back-up band, including Phil Collins, Eric Clapton’s long-time percussionist, and Eric himself.

At the same event, Eric and Paul McCartney did a pretty good rendition of ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps‘. This was one of my favorite Beatles songs long before I even knew that Eric had played guitar on the original. The story goes that the Beatles were cutting the White Album, and George Harrison had offered up this song. The others were dismissive, and not putting much effort into doing it. One day, he walked in with old friend Clapton, who told them that he was interested in playing on it. They took it more seriously after that.

I wish there was a Weekly Roundup today, but I’m afraid that the house remodeling adventures of the last two weeks have left me drained of my sanity, energy, and what little I have that passes for wit.

Remodeling, even the “easy” kind we’re doing (replacing our old, animal-ravaged carpets with new hardwood floors and painting), is a nightmare. It’s particularly tough at Casa Spector because The Dude and I are packrats.  The only difference between the two of us is that I tend to collect small stuff like vintage jewelry and The Dude has kept every piece of paper, toy, game, and hang tag that has ever touched his fingers.  This can add up.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but trying to move the, hrummmm, stuff out of The Dude’s room was a week-long trial.  It involved much dust, whining, and several threats.

Dante had Nine Levels in Hell. 

He had obviously never remodeled.

Read More »

This is a headcrab. They give me the willies.

If you already know about headcrabs you don’t need to go here to read about them. But they do something appropriate to our little corner of the blogoverse. They jump on your head and Eat Your Brains.

[Morgan’s squick warning: don’t click if you have a weak stomach…]

Read More »

Via Pacific Views, a great, short post from blogger Wandering Ink entitled “How to Prevent Another Leonardo da Vinci” that plays off Michael Gelb’s book How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci. The post describes how to squelch students’ creativity, drive, and critical thinking. Here’s a sampling:

This is how we kill each trait that may yield another Da Vinci:

1. Curiosita (from “How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci”)
What? Intense and insatiable curiosity; constantly learning due to a desire to ask and answer questions
The Murder: In schools, for the most part, students learn only what the teacher decides they will learn. Student questions will often go unanswered if they lead away from the material (go off-topic), or if there are time constraints on what must be learned that leave no time for these questions in class.

Snap! It’s almost like somebody took the how-to-prevent-a-da-vinci list from Wandering Ink’s blog and used it as the design specs for our educational system. The post was nominated for the 2007 EduBlog post of the year.

RTWT.

Three graphics designers, some costumes, and four days of shooting.