Month: February 2016

Food fussiness then and now

When I was a kid I was a fussy eater. I would have been content to live on pizza and chocolate if it had been permitted, but my parents were strangely not amenable to such a limited, if delicious diet. Instead I ate most of the food put before me. But not all of it. Here’s a few items I regularly passed on:

  • tomatoes
  • onions (unless they were onion rings, because deep frying makes everything better)
  • broccoli
  • mushrooms
  • cauliflower
  • peppers
  • Brussel sprouts
  • meat loaf (I actually ate this, but grudgingly)
  • bread crusts (I didn’t actually dislike bread crusts but somehow my mom thought I did. I eventually told her to leave them on.)
  • liver
  • turkey necks
  • mincemeat tarts
  • anchovies

As an adult I became much more open to eating just about anything, as long as it was edible and wasn’t still moving on my plate when served. That said, there are a few things from the above list that I still won’t touch:

  • Brussel sprouts are horrible anti-food. You will never convince me otherwise.
  • I still don’t care much for meat loaf. Something about the combination of textures and flavor puts me off.
  • liver is yuck, like chewing on sour shoe leather
  • eating turkey necks is just weird
  • mincemeat tarts are grossbuckets; if you also happen to have butter tarts, all is forgiven
  • anchovies on pizza is disgusting. Why not just roll a salmon over the pizza then cover it with a box of salt? The taste experience will be largely the same.

Not a political post

I can’t explain why I find this so funny, but I do.

In case the link goes down in our dystopian future, it’s a page that allows you to blow a horn at Donald Trump’s head, causing his hair to fly up. It may be the best thing related to Trump we will see this year.

I give you: http://trumpdonald.org/

Run with the noses

This most recent virus/hellcold has been especially annoying.

It first took hold a few weeks ago and I was suitably ill and knocked out of commission for a few days. Breathing became a chore rather than something that just kind of happens without a lot of thought needed. After a week or so I got better.

Then last weekend I started to feel the hellcold trying to get hold of me again. I firmly told it, “No, go and bother someone else, some jerk or something.” And it seemed to work, as the rest of the week I again returned to a state of normalcy.

Until today. It is now making attempt #3. The primary victim again is my nose, which ran like an Olympic marathoner on the commute home from work. This is not pretty when you have no tissue on your person. Tonight, anticipating another round of Nose Acts Like a Dam, I have taken a decongestant and am drinking some nice hot tea. I have approximately 50 hours of meetings tomorrow so I am hoping that my body will be generous and kick hellcold to the curb again. It has my blessing to do so for the remainder of the year, in fact.

Other than that, I was also tired and it rained. I will not be writing poetry about this day. Actually, I write terrible poetry, so it may be appropriate to do so. But I’m going to bed instead. I’ll dream of terrible poetry, where no one gets hurt by it.

Happy Leap Year! Plus random thoughts on the lack of futuristic things

We get an extra day this month, but February 29th lands on a Monday so it’s really just a bonus day of drudgery and work.

And we still don’t have practical flying cars yet. Or impractical flying cars. Do I even need to mention the lack of functional robot butlers, the promised life of leisure as machines handle all menial work, leaving us humans free to create, explore and invent ever-better chocolate chip cookie recipes? I think not.

All told, 2016 is merely okay so far. It could be worse (Yellowstone super volcano erupting without notice), but it could be better (being able to control the weather–and super volcanoes–would be handy).

Book review: Blackout

BlackoutBlackout by Tim Curran
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Note: Minor spoilers in the review.

Blackout uses the same broad theme as Stephen King’s novella “The Mist,” replacing the titular fog with an all-encompassing darkness than envelops a small town, all the better to unleash alien horrors on its citizenry. While the story moves swiftly, it never quite clicked for me. It’s a fast and easy read but I felt indifferent to the fates of the various characters.

The writing is for the most part solid, but unremarkable. Passages like the following, where the main character state the obvious, are not uncommon:

And being a science teacher, I knew that if the sun did not rise day after day after day, there would be no photosynthesis. The plants and trees would no longer process carbon dioxide and release breathable oxygen.

One of my pet peeves–characters doing dumb things to advance the plot–is also in play here, though to his credit, Curran at least has the main character own up to his behavior:

I don’t honestly think it was the cable’s doing, but some weird self-hypnotic thing that made me reach out and touch it. There’s no good explanation for any of it. None at all. The self-destructive urge we all feel from time to time just became so strong, and I was so weak, that I just went with it. I touched the cable.

(The cables are bad, as you may have guessed.)

If you feel the need for a bleak, hopeless tale–that’s not a spoiler, as the first line of the story admits as much–you could do worse than Blackout, but I found it curiously joyless.

View all my reviews