Month: March 2004

OK, I have now watched all of one season of American Idol and about half of the next (yeah, yeah, sue me), and yet, to my memory, not one contestant has ever sung a song by Jim Croce. What’s up with that? The guy wrote some of the most singable songs, well, ever.

Here are some of Jim Croce’s lyrics. “Operator (That’s Not the Way It Feels)” is one of my favorite songs of all time, and so is “Time In a Bottle”. Even “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” is a lot better than I suspect most people remember it, although I admit it took me a long time to get over the bad Chinese karaoke version from the movie Sneakers.

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I can’t say as I’m too moved one way or the other by the fact that McDonald’s won’t be “Supersizing” anymore. First off, I rank McDonald’s third of the food chains — I prefer Burger King and Wendy’s, frankly, and if I’m in Iowa, Hardee’s trumps everything — and I don’t think their fries are very good. I like a crispy fry, and unless MickeyDee’s burns them, they’re never crispy. And I don’t like Big Macs.

So, nothing doing for me there.

Speaking of fast food, Mickey is annoyed that Wendy’s apparently discontinued its fish sandwich. You’d think they would at least bring it back as a season item for Lent, but who knows….since I live in Buffalo, home to a very large Catholic population and therefore an epicenter of some of the greatest fried-fish action on the planet, I never bother to get the fish sandwich at a fast food joint.

In my eyes, a fish sandwich should consist of a large bun — we’re talking the kind you have to go to a good bakery to get — topped with a piece of fish so long that it overhangs either side of the bun by at least three inches. Remember that scene in The Two Towers when Sam is trying to tell Gollum how wonderful potatoes are, especially when they’re plump and golden next to a piece of fried fish? That’s what we do in Buffalo, folks. You can use good tartar sauce on the fish — I like that — or you can go even better, and use liberal amounts of Frank’s Red Hot. (Not Tabasco, which is terribly overrated stuff.)

Our economy is a wreck, our city is stuck in 1981, our politics are a quagmire, but we know how to eat.

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Plush animals have certainly come a long way since I was a kid, when it was mostly bears and the occasional bird or something similar. Now, just about every member of the animal kingdom has a plush version; displays of same used to occupy honored places in stores like The Nature Company and Natural Wonders (before they were bought out or went belly-up).

But it never occurred to me that our microscopic friends on this planet might also want to be represented in the “soft, cuddly toy” realm. Hence, Think Geek’s plush microbes. Wouldn’t you love to cuddle with a plush version of the little beastie that causes Halitosis? Sure you would!

(via Paul Riddell)

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In one of the back rooms of The Store, there is an upper shelf on which sits a 55-gallon drum of Extra Virgin Olive Oil. This drum rests on its side, and the end facing out is tapped with a spigot. The spigot is kept closed by a combination lock, so that no one comes along and pilfers the oil.

Except, the lock only works as long as it hangs down, below the spigot handle. If it is flipped upward, end-over-end, so the dial points away from the person, the spigot can be opened normally by use of the human hand — or by the tall cart of crackers that has just been put there by some vendor guy. In the latter case, of course, the oil flows freely out of the drum, down the cart, and onto the smooth concrete floor.

Now, hopefully someone notices this before, say, ten gallons’ worth of olive oil spreads out in a giant pool in the middle of the receiving area (the most heavily-trafficked part of the back of The Store). Or, failing that, hopefully the person called to clean this titanic mess up is not me.

Today, unfortunately, was not a day for “hopefully”.

(BTW, any readers of mine in the Washington, DC area who are interested in seeing what my company is like can now visit a brand-spanking new location of The Store. Here‘s the map. Readers in the Washington area who are Western New York expatriates might be really interested. Or, they might not care one fig. Ya never know.)

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Darth Swank — who is blogging again — points out that February saw the anniversary of the Fender Stratocaster. This appears to be some kind of musical instrument, mainly employed by them hooligans to make that loud stuff they call “music”. I even hear tell that some young Turk used his teeth to play our National Anthem on one of these contraptions! These young ‘uns, I tell ya….

(BTW, I have no idea what kind of guitar Hendrix used. So don’t flame me if it wasn’t a Stratocaster, OK?)

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Here.

I’m not posting them here, because I think they work better in the context of the essay which they accompany. But check it out: it’s a description of life and things in the Chernobyl region these days, written by a young woman who loves to ride her motorcycle through that area because, well, there is no traffic at all. Some of these pictures are utterly haunting: barges that simply pile up in the river, because they can’t even be melted down for scrap (due to radioactivity); a child’s doll left on the table where its owner left it before evacuating; domesticated animals that rejoined the wild after being abandoned; a shot from a hill of an entire abandoned city.

(via Warren Ellis)

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It saddens me that Out Of Lascaux has sported no new posts in over a month, and only one since the new year. I enjoyed reading Alexandra’s essays about art, since I know embarrassingly little about how to look at a painting. I hope she’s doing OK and returns soon.

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My boss informed me today that next week should be the last week in which I have to get to work at 5:00 am on two of my five days. This is staggeringly good news. I should not look forward to the days when I have to be there at 7:30 on the basis that this constitutes “getting to sleep in”.

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In response to my post about Ravel’s Bolero the other day, a couple of people commented — in comments and in e-mail — that since I don’t like Bolero on the basis of its repetitive nature, I probably would hate Philip Glass’s music. In all honesty, aside from a couple of film scores (The Truman Show, and I’m assuming that I’ve heard at least one more of his), I have heard almost no Glass whatsoever. Now, what I have heard seems droning and repetitive, so I’ll have to concede that I probably would hate his music. But I don’t know.

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Sean points out this group of maps of subway systems from around the world, all apparently to the same scale (i.e., the actual routes covered by the trains, not those stylized maps you’ll see in the subway stations). Interesting. Somehow, I had figured that New York was riddled with subway lines.

I suppose they could include Buffalo’s subway, but it would basically be a single line bending very slightly from north to south. And it’s not even a subway the entire way; in downtown, starting from the Theater District and going all the way down to HSBC Arena, it’s an above-ground light-rail system.

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