Emily Saidel and I debated the usefulness of the short-lived iPhone Baby Shaker App. in this week’s Perpetual Post. Catch her side here.
Just when I thought the iPhone had come out with an application that would be useful to me in everyday life, it was cruelly rescinded!
Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy playing Snood and making my iPhone look like a frosty mug of beer as much as the next person, but when it comes to spending $3.99, I’d just as soon purchase an application which teaches me a lesson that will really enrich my life—and leave it filled with babies. Alive babies.
So, it turns out you’re not supposed to vigorously shake an infant. Who’s supposed to teach me that, now that my iPhone is no longer permitted to? From what source am I to glean the knowledge that a rapid back-and-forth jerky motion causes X’s to appear over the eyes of a newborn? Do I pick that kind of information up on a street corner? At the local library? In school—a daycare, perhaps?
Videogames have long educated me on the ways of the world. From them I have learned that jumping on a giant mushroom with eyes and squashing it will keep me safe. I have discovered that shooting a dragon in the face with a crossbow rewards me with extra life and energy points. And I was on my way to learning what happens when you briskly shake an infant—but that knowledge has been unfairly ripped away. I vaguely believe that the results were bad, but I’m not completely sure anymore. How is this my fault?
Apple, return the Baby Shaker App to its rightful place in my iPhone. Some of us really need it.
Stephon Johnson and I also took on David and Victoria Beckham in the latest issue of the Perpetual Post. Read our two sides here.
“They Like Us! They Really Like Us!”
When the Beckhams relocated from England to settle across the pond in Los Angeles, I, like many other Americans, wasn’t quite sure what to think. Should this news thrill me? Should it fill me with pride? Should I pretend I didn’t hear it, so that if I happened to run into Victoria Beckham buying bunion slings in a Hollywood CVS I could glance at her archly over my ten-pack of Almond Joys and sniff, “What are you doing here?”
Really, why was this even news? Was there a faint cosmic shift in the fabric of the universe when the jet carrying the Beckhams touched down at LAX? Did Americans pause and raise their heads like meerkats when David’s cleats hit the tarmac?
I for one was wary of this strange move. Particularly when I heard the news that Victoria was going to be filming a reality show about her arrival in the US. How could she not be mocking us with every brittle bone in her birdlike body? But if Posh and Becks were only in it for the scorn, why set up permanent residence here? Was it for the satisfaction of knowing that they were thinner, more athletic and less smiley than 102% of the US population? Were they trying to show Yankee celebrities how you really walk down Park Avenue in 9” heels? Were they missionaries on a pilgrimage to teach lowly Americans about the world-except-for-America-renowned game of Soccer? Or, as I believe non-Americans call it, Foot Game?
Right, the soccer thing. Apparently Becks got a job playing soccer in an American soccer team, because—who knew!—we actually have that here for people over the age of 8. That’s right—unless I’m wrong, David Beckham is currently playing soccer for a league that is not prefaced by the words “Pee Wee”. I’ll bet he’s pretty good. The man plays a mean Foot Game.
At this point it’s been two years since the Beckhams set up camp in a California mansion, and they show no signs of vanishing anytime soon, aside from the signs of vanishing which Victoria displays every time she is photographed in public. It seems they enjoy our charming, old-fashioned way of life. Then there is the fact that their eldest child is named Brooklyn. This signifies that a respect and a perhaps even a fondness for the United States, lurks somewhere within the polished and unsmiling personas of the Beckhams. Deep down, they know they love us.
Jillian Lovejoy Lowery and I take on the Swine Flu in this week’s Perpetual Post. Yeah, we know we’re going to hell. Read her delightful take here.
Smarten Up, Swine Flu!
Swine flu, you are all over the map here! Your public relations team is doing a terrible job. Your image needs some serious work—and you need a clear message. You’ve also got to stick to your talking points and stay on target. This isn’t rocket science, it’s influenza! Work with me here.
You started in Mexico, Swine Flu, and you really got going there, I’ll give you that. You built a strong groundwork and created the momentum to sustain quite a campaign. But your sloppiness began almost immediately thereafter—as evinced by a number of tiny, insignificant one-person outbreaks in far-flung places across the United States and eventually the globe. One confirmed infection in Hong Kong, one in Sweden, four in France—really? That’s the best you can do? You call yourself a pandemic? Not even close Swine Flu, and I’ll tell you your problem: You’re still thinking like an epidemic.
You got a foothold in New York, it’s true—your numbers are strong there, and they’re growing. I’m glad you understand the importance of getting your name out there in well-populated, panicky liberal areas. But you have to remember, those folks are also generally well-educated, and they learn quickly, which is not to your benefit. You should really start branching out to some more rural areas—places where a little suspicion and fear go a long way.
The name change, too—whose idea was that? Right in the middle of your launch into the realm of international recognition and fame—you swap the rock star moniker of “Swine Flu” for the deadly-dull and ultra-forgettable handle “H1N1”?! Really– what were you thinking? What was going through your mind when you decided to play the new-name game? You’re not Prince! You’re not even John Cougar Mellencamp! I’m telling you, switching up a classic, ominous name like Swine Flu for a letter/number combination—it’s crippled the rising careers of even bigger and deadlier viruses in their heydays. I would have fired my agent right then and there for even allowing me to consider the idea.
So here’s what we do, toots. We’ve got to get you back on track. I’m thinking a guest-star appearance or two. Strike down someone famous—but not too likeable; you want to keep public sympathy on your side. I’m thinking Kathy Griffin, or one of the Baldwin brothers. Keep working hard, keep your focus sharp, and you could be back on track in no time. Believe me, H1N1—you’re a real workhorse. And you’re going places.
I Look More Delicious In Person!
Internet, I love you for your cooking blogs.
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Seriously. For someone who likes to dabble in home cooking and try new recipes, the internet is a foodie’s fantasy-land. Everywhere you turn, you find artful, delicious cooking blogs like this one and this one.
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I like to cook so much that I’ve occasionally thought about trying to start a cooking blog, but I usually give up after remembering how many good ones have already been established. It’s like wondering if you should take up the piano at the tender age of 28, and then flipping through channels and seeing a 4 year old pianist headlining at Carnegie Hall. It kind of rains on your parade a little. Not that you would have expected to end up at Carnegie Hall yourself, but…it gives you an excuse to be lazy and not try.
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Plus, I don’t like to experiment a lot when I cook. I am a recipe-slave. All of the paper recipes I’ve printed out and tried at least once are flour-encrusted and water-stained; the recipes I use most in cookbooks are wrinkled and gritty. This is because I lean over a recipe twenty times every time I use it double-and triple checking the order in which I am supposed to add ingredients and the correct amounts to use. I prefer recipes that tell you exactly what the food should look like at each stage of the process. I am an anxious, hovery cook. And I don’t like to make up my own recipes, or experiment with other recipes, unless it’s to add more of an ingredient than it calls for if I like it– can you ever have TOO MANY green onions? No way.
In any event, yesterday I wanted to do something nice for Brian, who spent all day yesterday volunteering at the World Beer Festival in Raleigh (poor baby!), so I decided to make his favorite dessert: Key Lime Pie.
At the local grocery store, I started crestfallen at the pile of normal limes in produce. Supermarkets never seem to have those little mesh baggies of tiny round key limes when you need them. A woman stocking apples next to me asked if I needed something, and I told her what I wanted. “It looks like you may not have them,” I said.
“No,” she said, “but we have Ki-wis.”
She kept repeating that statement. She was not joking. I appreciated her trying to help, but when she started selecting limes from the normal lime pile and saying, ‘this one is smaller’, I wandered away. Eventually I found a bottle of Key Lime juice. Saved!
Pre-pie, after settling on this recipe from Gourmet by way of Epicurious; (I tend to like Epicurious.com’s offerings), I realized I was going to be left with 4 egg-whites. It seemed like a waste to throw out 4 whole egg whites, but I’d already had eggs for breakfast and was not in the mood for a 4-egg-white omelet. I just wasn’t.
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So after doing some searching around (all of the egg-white recipes I found were either for meringues, these weird sounding cookies you make and leave in a turned-off oven overnight, or angel-food cake, which calls for at least 8 egg whites), I found this recipe for Sweet Milk Three Egg-White Cake. I don’t always like the recipes I find on Cooks.com; there aren’t reviews that I can locate, and I tend to come across a lot of ‘buy a store-made pie crust, fill it with jello pudding, refrigerate’ recipes, but sometimes one comes through for me. You never know. Plus, it’s a good place to find general ideas and themes for recipes, due to the huge volume of recipes listed.
I’m not as big on pie, I’m more of a cake person (sorry Laura!), so I figured this Sweet Milk Cake (doesn’t that just SOUND good?) would work nicely. You will note that the original recipe is charmingly OCD; it has you greasing the cake pan, lining it with waxed paper, and then greasing the waxed paper. It also instructs you to sift the flour and other dry ingredients a total of 4 times. This seems a little excessive. Lacking the proper amount of sugar, throwing in an extra egg white because I had one, and baking in a bundt pan were all my little lazy touches. Oh, and also I started sifting the flour, and gave up about 1/4 cup into the first sift. So there was also that. (I have found that where cooking is concerned, I tend to overestimate my patience and attention to detail. My meals are always paved with good intentions; I may start out cutting up a chicken breast into small, uniform pieces so that my stir-fry is consistent, but I almost always get bored of that and end up with chicken pieces of a gradually increasing size. This never stops me from considering myself to be a patient and meticulous cook, even though that is just not really the case.)
In any event, I made my version of Sweet Milk Three Egg White Cake, and I. LOVE. IT. Enough to share the recipe!
Sweet Milk Cake With Liberties Taken:
1/4 c. butter, 1/4 c. shortening
4 egg whites
1 c. sugar
1 c. milk
2 1/4 c. flour
2 1/2 tsp baking powder
3/4 tsp salt
2 tsp vanilla
You pretty much know how this goes: Oven to 375. Stir the flour up with the salt and baking powder. Cream the butter and the sugar. Add the vanilla. Add the flour and the milk alternately to this mixture. Grease a bundt pan. Bake for 40 min or so. The outside of the cake will be dark golden brown and just this side of crusty; the inside will be white and have a moist, tight crumb and be alllmost too sweet, but not quite (glad I skimped on the sugar!). Top with a ring of frosting (I used leftover creamcheese frosting from a can) when cake is still warm so that frosting will drip appealingly down sides of cake. I think any kind of frosting will work nicely.
Anyway, I really liked this cake, and it was really easy to make. I recommend it any time you have some leftover egg whites and a sweet tooth.
I think I will try posting an occasional recipe on here. This wasn’t so hard!
The following is from a 3-way discourse on the Susan Boyle Phenomenon over at the Perpetual Post:
Let’s face it: Pretty is the new pretty. And the old pretty. And next season’s pretty. Looks are about all we have the attention span for these days—words take too long to listen to; forget about ideas. Because we like pretty, we prefer to get much of our social and cultural stimulation from pretty faces, which is sometimes hard, because pretty mouths don’t always say pretty things. Or smart things, or things that make sense. This is not a tragedy, since at this point, nobody wants to know how you got your sharp wit or your theory of post-modern architecture—they want to know where you got your shoes.
Attractive celebrities, it is ever more commonly believed, are by virtue of their attractiveness able to excel at many different kinds of things. Models design clothing lines. Actors discuss globalization in tabloid interviews. Bono is an Op-Ed contributor for the New York Times. Jenny McCarthy speaks out against vaccinating your children. Tila Tequila wrote a book. Meanwhile, authors scowl, and schedule a professional photo shoot for their next dust jacket, because they have to do what they can to keep up appearances. Appearances are important, because they count, and they are what they seem. If you are attractive, you will likely receive the attention you deserve.
When these attractive people stumble or fail at something new that they’ve tried a hand at, we mock them, sure—but deep down, the very fact of their attractiveness tends to earn them our grudging respect. We are willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. Because they are attractive, they deserve to be treated as special.
In turn, these attractive celebrities do their best to remain attractive to us, their public. They get plastic surgery, they diet and exercise and attempt to make their bodies as appealing as possible. They get their hair and makeup done, they put extreme amounts of consideration into picking out their clothes.
Sure, ugly is still there, plodding around behind the scenes, rearing its turtle head into the spotlight occasionally, but we prefer not to think about it. We see enough ugly in our real lives; on the bus, at the gym, in the office. In the mirror. When we open a magazine or turn on the television, we’re ready to see some pretty, please.
When relatively unattractive people venture into these realms of television and magazines, therefore, they have the deck stacked against them from the beginning. This was demonstrated during Susan Boyle’s audition for Britain’s Got Talent. The audience took one look at this dowdy older woman and dismissed her. This is a common reaction to plainness. We lack patience for the unattractive; particularly the unattractive person who has the same hopes of achieving fame and fortune as attractive people do. Relatively unattractive people remind us that sometimes, we are vulnerable and human and unattractive ourselves. We too make mistakes, and we fear that no one will give us a chance either.
When Susan Boyle surprised everyone by being reasonably poised and talented, the most surprising thing about it was how much the audience disliked her before she gave her performance. When you don’t know someone, you can’t hate them—but you can hate the parts of them that remind you of what you hate about yourself. The loathing and disdain directed at Susan Boyle were not really meant for her.
I’m not sure how I feel about that new iPhone commercial. It’s kind of dark. You know the one I mean? Where there’s jangly guitar music, and they show a guy looking up ‘sushi’ on his iPhone, and it shows him a map to the closest sushi restaurant, and then he pauses, cancels the sushi map and types in ‘bridge’, and the iPhone shows him a map to the nearest bridge? And then the next shot is the guy standing on the bridge, and then he’s shown updating his facebook status to ‘single’ on his iPhone. And then he goes to Twitter and posts the update ‘I am on a bridge’. And then he puts the iPhone in his pocket and jumps off the bridge? And then the Apple logo comes up? I’m not sure how I feel about that ad.
They’ve made so many of these movies that they’ll probably run out of title ideas soon, so I thought I would help with suggestions. Please feel free to add your own! I’m sure the producers are reading.
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Fast & Furious 4: Fastestest and Most Furiousousous
Fast & Furious 5: Now The Cars Talk
Fast & Furious 6: Is This a School Zone?
Fast & Furious 7: Oh My Back
8 Fast 8 Furious: The Final Fasteer
“It’s very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present, you know what I mean?”
–Edith Bouvier Beale
I was first introduced to Grey Gardens by a friend of mine who had seen it dozens of times and quoted it often. He said I absolutely had to see it, that it would change my life. While it was difficult for me to watch all the way through the first time, and I still have trouble getting through the whole thing whenever I watch it again, Grey Gardens is unforgettable. I think everyone should see it.
When the musical came out, I was oh so excited. My parents got me tickets to it for my birthday, and I highly enjoyed it (although the first act, which is not based on the movie, I could take or leave). The flamboyant and yet painfully intimate documentary film was well suited for the adaptation to Broadway musical. The addition of musical numbers did not seem glaringly out of place, since the documentary itself was alive with music and dance. The portrayal of the Beales on the stage was thoughtful and nuanced; loving yet honest.
Given that the Broadway musical was such a smash hit, I should not be surprised that a film remake of the original documentary, as was recently shown on HBO, soon followed. Truthfully, I can almost understand the desire to remake Grey Gardens; a work of such brilliance is sure to inspire its share of devoted followers, and imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and all that.
While I have come out against film remakes in the past, I don’t doubt that at least some fraction of them are made not with profit in mind but out of love and devotion to the original. When you remake a fictional film, even if it’s based on true events, you are in effect re-telling a story that was originally told using actors and a set and a script. Your version of Bonnie & Clyde may underline different themes and play up ideas that were less obvious in the original, and that’s fine. Your take is different, but it is recreated under the same circumstances as the original film, and in that regard, your version is just as legitimate.
Remaking a documentary, on the other hand, is not only ludicrous, but also pointless. How can you play up ideas that weren’t sufficiently developed during the original documentary of Grey Gardens, when all of the ideas and themes that existed in the original were introduced by the actual people themselves? Edie Beale and her mother were not actresses. They were performers, certainly, but they were not playing roles. They were being themselves-their own glorious, crazy, tragic selves. Why on earth would I ever want to watch two actresses attempt to portray the Beales, when I can watch the actual Beales? What aspects of their incredible lives could ever be better illuminated by an actor’s mimicry?
Both Little Edie and Big Edie are dead now, and both died in poverty, having seen little financial reward for starring in an incredibly popular documentary that laid bare the trappings of their astonishing lives. In one sense, I understand that a remake of Grey Gardens is supposed to serve as an homage to the Beales. But in a more real sense, I see it as a ghastly exploitation; replicating a documentary that itself bordered on exploitation, no matter how iconic and successful it became in the end. Let these two fearless, haunting women have the last word; see the original Grey Gardens, and skip the remake. As a devoted fan of the original, I plan to.
I am convinced that if I were locked away in solitary with no contact with the outside world except for Twitter, it would STILL irritate me.
For this week’s Perpetual Post, Howard and I took on the Obamas new dog. Someone had to! Find his side up here on Tuesday:
Of the many grievous errors committed by the Obama family during its first several months in the White House, high on the list is their recent adoption of a purebred Portuguese Water Dog, an elitist breed if ever there was one; the sort of dog that’s born with a silver shoe in its mouth. They’ve named the little patrician “Bo”, which is likely short for ‘Boristocrat’, or ‘Bommunity Organizer’. Or perhaps, ‘ABotion.’
In any event, the Obamas claim that this newest addition was chosen because their youngest daughter, “Malia”, is “allergic to most breeds of dog”; a flimsy excuse for a politically-charged adoption which was undertaken mainly for the purposes of legally joining the Obama and Kennedy families at long last. The wishes of the dog itself, who suffered a callous name-change at the hands of his new owners, were not taken into account, nor were the feelings of the millions of dogs who remain in shelters, left homeless and un-adopted by the First Family.
Indeed, if Malia truly does suffer from allergies, it is President Obama’s duty to show that affliction no mercy. The United States has never negotiated with allergens, nor should it now. President Obama’s shameless devotion to the health and wellness requirements of his young children makes America look soft on terror.
Not only are average Americans up-in-arms at this favortism; Canine-Americans are also exceedingly insulted by the Obama’s devastating slight to their homeless and shelter-dwelling brethren. In his blundering adoption of a pedigreed puppy, Obama has in effect just told Canine-Americans to roll over and play dead. Dogs of mixed descent are left to feel unrepresented, wondering sadly how they are supposed to take pride in their species, and whether they are in fact good boys.
I Heard Tell 