A motto I saw:
A conversation I’m surprised I haven’t had:
A snippet of my own writing that I rather like:
A sunset:
A cat in my chair:
A kick-off to my current vacation:
And on it goes!
Nothin’ good comes from a can…. (An experiment involving whipped cream)
Pie-in-the-face weirdness below the break….
OK. So it’s been my experience that the most common form of whipped cream in the US, the stuff in the aeresol can, is great for topping your pumpkin pie or for dipping strawberries or for giving to cats as a treat (yes, this is a thing), but lousy for pies in faces. The stuff is very highly aerated so as to come out of the can better, but once it’s dispensed it breaks down very quickly. You really have to use the stuff fast, lest the effect be less of getting hit with a pie and more of getting hit with a plate of thick milky-cream stuff. Yuck.
But, I saw a can of whipped cream the other day marked “Extra Creamy!” and that it was made with real cream. So…I tested it, because that’s what you do.
I dispensed the contents of the can into a pie crust. It started breaking down almost immediately, which was not an encouraging sign….
But hey…in for a penny, in for a pound as they say.
These results weren’t awful, I must admit. Not great, but not nearly as disappointing as previous attempts with this stuff. In fact, these particular results weren’t really disappointing at all.
I don’t expect this stuff will replace my usual preferred products for this sort of goofery (you can’t beat a nice coconut cream pie for splatting purposes), but for a “quick hit”, there are worse options out there.
So the whipped cream in the spray can gets a partial reprieve. I will not be embracing shaving cream, though. Because ewwwww!
Tips for success: Use a lot of the stuff, and dispense it as close to the splatting as possible. The spray-can stuff will melt quickly. And have fun, because as always, a pie in the face is a wonderful thing!
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From the “I Can’t Even” files….
The conversations I have….
Lazy Linkage!
It’s been a while since I did this, hasn’t it? I am, once again, going to try to be better about regularly updating this blog. Of course, we’ve heard that before, haven’t we?
:: Apparently the person who runs the social media for San Francisco’s mass transit system, BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit), finally decided to take a different approach in his/her responses to negative comment on social media. The result is some breathtakingly blunt honesty, and it really points up, in my mind, the odd American insistence on creating government services that are just good enough to be disappointing, and then complaining about them without actually committing, as a public, to do better. The money quote here is when this poor soul points out that the BART system was designed to move 100,000 people in a week, and it now moves over 400,000 people each day.
:: Moby Dick, read aloud, by the likes of Stephen Fry, Neil Tennant, Fiona Shaw, Will Self, Benedict Cumberbatch, China Miéville, Tony Kushner, John Waters, Simon Callow, Sir David Attenborough, and Tilda Swinton. Wow! I don’t really like listening to audiobooks — my mind wanders too much and I miss important stuff — but this might bear investigation!
:: CGI recreation of the destruction of Pompeii. Wow, those people had a bad day.
:: The filmmakers of Airplane! reflect on that brilliant movie’s making. Such a classic…although I got in trouble when we watched it as a family years ago, because The Daughter was six or so, and I figured, it’s rated PG. I’d forgotten the gratuitous shot of waggling breasts during one of the air-turbulence scenes.
:: Finally, I didn’t get around to properly observing Pi Day this year, but I did repurpose some older pie video footage of mine into a possible commercial for a new topical treatment for Resting Bitch Face, of which I am a sufferer….
I’m not promising more next week!
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National Whipped Cream Day
I know, the day is almost over, but I didn’t want to let the day go by without a recognition of National Whipped Cream Day! I’ve no idea why a day honoring such a wonderful substance would be January 5, but hey, who cares. I love the stuff (The Wife, sadly, hates it), and for a lot more than just a thick upper layer for pies to be forcefully applied to my face. Whipped cream has long had an honored place in my family as a cat treat, for example. Anyway:
Here are five things to know about whipped cream.
Here is Alton Brown’s recipe for whipped cream.
Finally, want to play that weird Pieface game that’s all the rage right now, but you can’t find it? Allow me to demonstrate an alternative!
Whipped cream is great stuff!
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It may be my year….
A new Star Wars movie and a new James Bond movie. I’m releasing my second book. Overalls appear to be coming back into fashion. and now this appears in the New York Times.
Ah, the thrown pie. Among the sweetest delights in life is the sight of an airborne cream-and-crust concoction finding purchase. It is the great leveler, a puncturing of pretension, and those who find pie throwing beneath their refined comic sensibility deserve nothing more than a lemon meringue treat, smack in the kisser.
Setting aside the fact that lemon meringue is, in fact, a terrible choice for facial dispatching, this is still quite a thing to read in the Gray Lady.
2015 may well be my year!!!
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Dispatches
Some stuff from recent days!
:: A kinetic sculpture featuring eleven thousand marbles. This kind of thing delights me to ridiculous degrees.
:: This blog is most certainly NOT SAFE FOR WORK, but it’s kind of interesting, if you’ve ever wondered what life is like for a working stripper.
:: JAWS is 40 years old!
What a great movie. I need to watch it again soon…but meantime, here’s a neat interview with the guy who, as a kid, got to be the killer shark’s second victim in the movie. Poor Alex Kintner!
:: Speaking of Speilberg blockbusters, I saw this on the road the other day. I assume it’s a promotional thing. Note the license plate.
:: Speaking of movies, some nifty news from the week past: the rest of Battle of the Century has been found. This silent Laurel&Hardy movie features one of the finest of the old-style pie fights in movie history, but the film itself has been mostly lost to time, until now, when the entire missing reel turned up. Details here and here.
As for the deeply sad story that’s been dominating the news this week…I’m not addressing it here. I’m simply worn out by such things. My thoughts tend to mirror Jason Bennion‘s, though, for what it’s worth.
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That is NOT a pie!
Getting hit in the face with a pie will always be funny
But then they show this video of a kid playing a game called “Pie Face” with his grandfather. It’s a game of chance where, if you lose, a dollop of whipped cream about two inches in diameter gets plopped onto your nose.
That is about as much getting hit in the face with a pie as those post-game baseball celebrations where the “pie” is a towel shmeared with shaving cream.
This is a pie. Get it right, America!
Thank you.
In other news, it’s entirely possible that I have issues, and all the writing I’ve been doing is getting to my brain….
