The Peanut Butter Crisis

I think the salmonella peanut butter crisis may be one of the biggest tainted food scandals yet. Bigger than the spinach. Bigger than tomatoes. Way bigger than jalepenos. Because those are all vegetables. And nobody really likes vegetables. Vegetables are a delivery system for butter, sour cream, dressing and cheese sauce. And if your broccoli has cooties, that's just an excuse to eat cheese sauce straight out of the pan.

And speaking of things straight out of things, eating peanut butter straight out of the jar is high risk behavior. I mean if Eddie's Vegan Peanut Butter Cookies are on the list, can anything really be safe? And it's not like vegetables. Peanut butter has fans. Me being one. And specifically, a fan of peanut butter crackers. The toasty ones. Not the cheese and peanut butter. Those are weird. But the ones that are kind of like peanut butter on Ritz.

I've got two boxes of delicious Market Pantry peanut butter crackers that I've been circling like they might be attached to a trip wire. Market Pantry hasn't been on the FDA list, but that list just keeps on growing. But I won't throw them out. Because I like them. And I'm cheap. Of course, I won't eat them right now either. But I've got time to wait it out. Those crackers never go bad.

Just to know that it's out there

You may have heard of it already: The Bacon Explosion.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/28/dining/28bacon.html?no_interstitial

Basically, it's woven bacon, wrapped around sausage, filled with bacon, dipped in BBQ sauce and thrown on the grill or in a smoker. That's woven bacon. The calories are astronomical. The fat grams are enough to make your heart seize in your chest. There should be orange cones and crime scene tape around it.

There is no way on earth I would ever make this. No way I'd ever knowingly go where it would be available to me. No way I'd want to eat it.

But.

If someone handed it to me, already prepared on a plate, with an industrial strength napkin, and had Tums and a Lipitor drip on standby. . . I'd say "No. No. No. No, thank you, very much. You're too kind, but really. No. No. snarfle, snarfle, snort, mmm. mmmm. . . chomp. no, oh my godsomeonepleasetakethisawayfromme. . . mmmmmmm".

This recipe would be the food porn equivalent of Hustler. Dirty. Wrong. Appealing to the lowest common denominator. Which, in this case, would appear to be - me.

A frosty reception

Brrrr. At least for the next 2 or 3 hours (we'll have a high of 50 this afternoon, from a morning low of 25). We had freezing rain in Dallas yesterday morning, that really gunked up the traffic system, but by afternoon most of it had melted so the afternoon trip home was fairly uneventful.

But then something wonderous happened . . .

Okay, not wonderous. But kinda neat. All the ambient moisture from the evaporation re-froze overnight. Like frozen fog. And it coated all the vegetation in this frosty/sparkly glaze. Not the streets, thank the Traffic Gods. But the trees, grass and bushes all had this ghostly white cast. Some of the wispier native grasses in landscapes looked like they'd shatter at a touch, and I even saw yucca plants covered in frost. I couldn't find much that I could snap from the sidewalk, but here's a couple of pics to share a little frost with you:

Generally, I'm anti-Winter Wonderland. Cold? No, tanks. But even I have to admit it was real purty.

Whoopeee! One more hurdle passed!

I was dancing around the office, showing my friends. Generally acting like a nincompoop. But a charming nincompoop I'm sure. It takes so little to get me excited. Or at least that's the rumor.

I got my first Cafe Press test order. Cool, no? Everything looks pretty good. At least to my eyes. I'm hoping it's not a case of "everybody thinks their own baby is cute." Ya know? But, here's a pic of the first t-shirt and bumper sticker. I've ordered a few more products to test and/or give away.

Now I just need to get kickin' on more logos to add to other products. I need reverse images, transparencies, different sizes. And I need to figure out the whole meta-tag, key word and links issue. My, so much to keep a lazy girl busy.

Sore winners

http://highschool.rivals.com/content.asp?CID=904726

I've been watching this story since last week. Not least of which because it's from my hometown.

Honestly, I don't think it would have been necessary for the school to make a public apology. This is between 2 teams. Sometimes people get caught up in a game, forget why they're playing and do something jerky. But all it takes is one coach and his girls going to the other coach and his girls and saying "Sorry. We should have been better sports. Can we take you out for pizza?" And that would have done it. No fuss. No muss. Lesson learned. Frankly, I'm kind of shocked that anyone who'd make the choice to work with highschool kids would need to be told this.

Plus the fact the Covenant name is not misleading. It is indeed a Christian academy. Obviously everybody forgot to put on their WWJD bracelets that morning. Which of course makes it a jucier story. I actually feel kind of bad for the Covenant girls. The coach (and apparently other adults) who should have been making sure they're getting the really valuable lesson from school sports (and for the record, that's not how to make a 3-pointer), was asleep at the wheel. The Dallas Academy girls have a coach who made sure that even when they were getting their butts handed to them, they kept on playing their hardest, and would walk away rembering what it feels like to be on the receiving end of bad sportsmanship.

But seriously, it's time to turn the media spotlight off these young women and let them work it out themselves. And seriously, ladies, going out together for pizza would be a great idea. There are very few things that a crowd of females can't work out over and a few slices with extra cheese.

At the Movies - The Great Buck Howard

I went to see a preview of a "yet-to-be/may-never-be" released movie on Sunday. It was The Great Buck Howard, with John Malkovich and Colin Hanks, among many, many others. It was a fairly decent film, that might have been an even better film for me if it didn't have such a good pedigree. I was just constantly thrown out of the moment of the movie by who the actors were.

For instance, Colin Hanks. I've seen him in other stuff, and I'm not really distracted by the fact that he's the son of Tom. He's good now, with a lot of potential for very good later. But in this movie, his father was played by his father. Very well played, by the way. But unfortunately, once I saw them in the same frame together, I spent the rest of the movie analyzing Colin's face: oh, he gets that expression from his dad; when he turns that way, he doesn't look at all like his dad; when he smiles he looks like a cross between his dad and Zach Braff. Really not conducive to watching a story about a character who isn't Tom Hanks son.

Then there were people who showed up in bit parts who were actually too big for the role they were playing. I'm guessing it was because Tom Hanks was a producer and they either were doing him a favor, or hoping he would owe them a little quid-pro-quo somewhere down the line. So, Donnie Most shows up playing a producer for the Tonight Show. Not in a "cameo-Donnie-Most-playing-a-producer"/ironic kind of way. Just him playing that little throw-away part. I finally decided that actors have a specific gravity. And any time that gravity doesn't quite match up to the part they're playing, it throws things off. Like if he'd been playing that part in a bigger movie, it would have made sense. Or if he'd been playing a bigger part in this small movie, it would have made sense. But as it was, all I could think was "Hey, that's Donnie Most." And the same thing happened with Dave Atell. And Napoleon Dynamite's grandmother.

And lastly was John Malkovich. Who was, as per his usual, balls to the wall, totally committed, no vanity, no motivation unexplored. An artist and a pro. Working his ass off. And his best was just at an entirely different level than anyone else in the room. With the exception of Tom Hanks - and that scene was freaking poetry. Not that the other actors were bad. It was just like watching Derek Jeter play at the Little League World Series. They're good. He's better. And it shows.

In the end, it was a charming little movie that suffered from an over-abundance of gifts. If you see it for rental, it's got moments where it gets everything right. And for those, I'd say it's worth an hour and a half of your time.