Today is National Pie Day, huzzah!
Sadly, this is also the day that the Captain and Tennille announced that they are divorcing, which I find quite a bummer. But I can tie that into National Pie Day, too:
Happy National Pie Day, folks!
Negativity Begone!
I’m a little irritated by the negativity that transpired, however briefly, in this space. So, in the interests of at least pushing it down the page and thus starting its inevitable march toward mostly-forgotten enshrinement in the archives, here is a pieing in reverse.
Orange Photography Slow Motion Photo Booth Pie in your face edition π from Orange Photography on Vimeo.
(Although it’s not really a pieing, so much as a container of Cool-whip just tossed at the lovely victim…but the reverse effect is pretty nifty….)
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Rule of Acquisition #109
On Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, the Ferengi are established as having a culture so built around business and the pursuit of wealth that they are governed by a series of aphorisms called the “Rules of Acquisition”. I always like #109:
Dignity and an empty sack is worth the sack.
I agree. The hell with dignity. I’ll take the pie in the face every time.
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O tempora! O mores!
Dear baseball players of the world:
So some dope interrupted the Murdoch family’s stammering and mumbling today by “throwing a pie” at Rupert Murdoch, which actually meant waving a styrofoam plate in Murdoch’s direction as some sort of foam slid off it, till Mrs. Rupert Murdoch jumped up and clobbered the “pie” guy.
Back in 1998, when Bill Gates got hit by a pie, it was variously reported to have been a “cream pie” or a “custard pie,” and Gates said through a spokesperson that the pie “wasn’t that tasty” β suggesting that it was, at least, an actual, edible pie.
The decline from a real pie to a lazily produced plate of foam should be familiar to baseball fans. Over the past decade, the baseball “pie” has stopped resembling a pie at all, till players are content to celebrate victories by smacking the hero of the game in the face with a towel full of shaving cream.
Even a fan of the pie-in-the-face like myself has to admit a certain amount of befuddlement over your adoption in recent years of this lovely ritual. But it’s hard to find it a cool thing when what you’re doing is just using a towel slathered with shaving cream. First off, shaving cream…ewwww. Second off, a towel? Really?
So, if you baseball players want me to take your slapsticky victory celebrations more seriously, stop doing this:
Or stop calling it pie. This is a pie:
That’s what you’ve got to use. After all, a thing worth doing is a thing worth doing right. No compromise is possible on this point. A pie in the face is a wonderful thing! A shaving-cream towel in the face is…wildly not. Harumph!
Love,
-Me
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Sunday Burst of Weird and Awesome
Oddities and Awesome abound!
:: Oh Japan, never, ever change!
As LiveDoor News pointed out this week, a new trend is spreading among Japanese schoolgirls. It’s called “cream puff face” (“ganmen shuukuriimu” or ι‘ι’γ·γ₯γΌγ―γͺγΌγ ). And, you guessed it, it involves smushing a cream puff in someone’s face.
This isn’t exactly a new trend, as it’s possible to find examples of cream puff faces as early as 2007 and 2008. And, yes, this is a spin on the old fashioned pie in the face gag. But in Japan, the trend really started to take off with schoolgirls in 2011. The Japanese mainstream is just catching on now.
Huh….
(Well, stop the whaling. Other than that, never change!)
:: Check out these detailed floor plans of teevee households. I never realized that the Simpsons have two living rooms!
:: Want to make your own ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ posters? Of course you do!
More next week!!!
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Answers, the sixth!
As usual, I’m taking forever to get this done…but soldier on, we shall! Two questions up first from an anonymity-preferring soul, on a matter near and dear to my heart:
Since you seem to enjoy a pie in the face, did you do the wedding-cake-smashing thing when you got married?
No, we did not. And in all honesty, I’m glad, because — and this may come as a surprise — I hate that. I have never found it enjoyable to watch; it always strikes me as a very out-of-place and inappropriate chunk of mean-spiritedness shoehorned into a ceremony that is supposed to be a celebration of love and kindness. I had zero desire to do that, and The Wife agreed with me. At least, I assume she did. I don’t even recall bringing it up for discussion.
(Now, I don’t judge other couples who do this, and I’ve seen it at a bunch of weddings I’ve attended. I don’t think it implies anything for the marriage, one way or the other, and if it’s your wedding and you really think the cake-smashing thing is what you want to do, then by all means, have at it. I just won’t be one of the ones laughing.)
Do you find it funny when protesters hit politicians with pies?
Again, this may be a surprise, but no, not really. The fact is, when you get hit with a pie, you’re getting hit with something. If you don’t know it’s coming, then it seems to me it very well could be taken as assault. Plus the fact that the human response to having something shoved toward their face is to flinch, turn away, duck, all that. It’s certainly not to just stand there, close your eyes, and take it. When that happens in movies or teevee shows, it’s because it’s in the script.
So basically, I don’t think a pie should ever be dispatched toward the face of someone who isn’t expecting it and likely doesn’t want it. (I think both of those questions may have come up in a previous AskMeAnything, but I didn’t go back and check. I treat each question as new, anyway.)
Chris asked several questions, one of which is:
Which imaginary planet would you most like to live on?
Oooooh! Tough one. Very tough one, actually. Maybe one of those Star Trek desert planets? The ones that all look like Vazquez Rocks? Nah, probably not. I wouldn’t want to live on Coruscant, either. Or Trantor, or any of the other city-planets. Those might be cool places to visit, but to live there? Knowing that all you’ll ever see are buildings? Nah.
We only saw it very briefly, but I very much like the look of Alderaan. Well, you know, before the Imperial genocide of its people. Soaring cities in high mountain ranges? Sign me up!
But in reality…and I hate to say this, because none of you (aside from those who beat-read the book) know about it yet, but the main planet of Princesses In SPACE!!! (not the actual title) strikes me as a nice place. And it’s got lots of mysteries, the cool part of that being that I get to be the first one to see how they turn out!
More answers to come.
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Sunday Burst of Weird and Awesome
Oddities and Awesome abound!
:: Here’s a fantastic Wonder Woman illustration (via):
There’s a lot of magnificent Wonder Woman are out there, but one thing I wish is that the costume wasn’t always involving shorts that are so short that Diana might be tempted to don a pair of Daisy Dukes in a moment of modesty.
:: Lynn pointed out a Flickr pool devoted to rural decay. There are a lot of beautiful photos here, some of which are even haunting.
:: According to this video made by a Christian youth ministry group, ‘By the year 2017, 1 in 3 teens will grow up without having experienced the love of God through a cream pie to the face.’ Wow…makes me wonder if I’m doing it wrong!
More next week! Unless, of course, the Internet decides to go an entire week without calling my attention to something either weird or awesome. Hey, it could happen.
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Mabel
Joining the Instacrowd
Yup, everybody loves to complain about Instagram, the photo app that has turned everyone with a camera phone into a snooty nitwit who thinks that taking a quick snapshot and applying a filter makes them into photographic geniuses. Yeah, I thought that, too. But the thing is…Instagram makes taking photos and getting them onto Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and many other places ridiculously easy. I think that’s the real attraction here: not the facile photos, but just how easy it makes it to get them out there.
So yeah…I’ve jumped on the Instagram bandwagon.
I’m not going to be using it exclusively, because my heart of hearts still belongs to Flickr, even though it’s…well, it’s right out of the Web of 2006. But it’s still more tailored to nicer photos, and I’ve got too many years invested in using it to just stop. Flickr isn’t as easy to use as Instagram, but so what? It’s not like it was ever hard to use. Viva la Flickr, says I! But also, given my 7-inch Samsung Galaxy tablet, I just can’t turn down Instagram.
Below the fold are some of my first efforts using Instagram.
(Note to self: blog about my new Carhartt overalls one of these days.)
It turns out that ramen noodles with a fried egg is really pretty delicious:
I’ve seen photos of ramen with an egg for years, right on the package, but never tried it. Yum!
We went to Pumpkinville the other day, and The Daughter took a nice photo of The Wife and I, which I Instagram’d:
And of course, stuff on the Internet must have cats:
Finally, my very first experimentations with what Instagram-filtered photos looked like involved photos of my recent pieing.
Yup, Instagram is pretty cool!
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Something for Thursday
Whoops…I’m all off right now, folks. Thanks to my scheduling my vacation over parts of two work weeks, I’ve lost my ‘feel’ for what day it is. Which is why I forgot to do this post until just now. Whoops!
Anyway, apropos of activities in this space earlier this week, here is Henry Mancini’s “Pie in the Face Polka”.
It’s got to be impressive that I’ve never used that music before, right?