Passunder

Seeing as how tonight was the first night of Passover, I was all set to title up my entry "Matzoh Do About Nothing," when I got this eerie feeling of déjà vu. So I looked back to around this time last year to see what I would have titled a Passover entry (because I knew I'd have a Passover entry) and bam, that was the title. Things to take away include: being original is difficult, and I probably haven't changed all that much in a year.

One thing I've long thought of but perhaps not mentioned in this specific blog is the mystery of matzoh. Now the story behind matzoh is that, in their haste to leave Egypt, the Jews could not wait for the bread to rise. The only flaw in this cute little tale is that, if you actually make bread dough and do not allow it to rise fully and put it in the oven, matzoh is not the result. From the wiki it states:

Matza dough is quickly mixed and rolled out without an autolyse step such as might be used in leavened breads. Most forms are docked with a fork or a similar tool to keep the finished product from puffing in the same manner as a tortilla or pita bread, and the resulting flat piece of dough is cooked at high heat until it develops dark spots, then set aside to cool (and, if sufficiently thin, to harden to crispness).

In there you will note the specific actions taken to create matzoh's distinctive "shitty cracker" consistency. I mean, honestly, eating some matzoh for a week is hardly a chore in comparison to the suffering and oppression of the tale of Passover, but it doesn't change the fact that the production of matzoh is oddly devised — contrived if you will — and commercialized.


This year matzoh is the object of my Passover cracks.

Anyway, I'm actually a bit out of steam and riding a low after discovering who Justin Bieber is. As usual I am only more of the problem by continuing to mention such individuals. Give the people what they want. And if the choice is matzoh or Bieber, I will take matzoh every time. But as always, don't forget the most important part of Passover: Borei Pre Hagafen. Pour some out for your homie Elijah.

Spring Into Action

When you live in a place like Chicago or any place that has Winter, but also other seasons, I really think an amendment needs to be created that allows people to take days off of work, let kids out of school, etc, on the first beautiful day of the year. That day was probably Wednesday here, but by golly Thursday was nice as well, and today ain't too shabby either. I've always considered Spring the time the trolls come out of their caves, sometimes wearing awesomely alluring things like white skirts. While it isn't quite warm enough for all that (although I could have gotten down with shorts today), it was still in the 60s and it's nice to want to venture out into the open and interact with a whole lot of humans. The sun will do that. I get why Sheryl wants to soak it up .

But it really does foster all sorts of pleasant behavior. Still, I made the original stipulations of places that have winter because you need that frame of reference right? Appreciate the Summer because of Winter. Or would we all be a Hell of a lot happier with the constant sun? Guess it depends. My excursions to very sunny places suggest that perhaps always sunny is not a bad thing.

Anyway, I took advantage of the nice weather to do something I have largely neglected to do not only in this city but in general: take some damn pictures. So I hit up Millenium Park for not the first time and basked in the reflections of the cloudgate aka the bean and took pictures of tourist groups. Actually for tourist groups. Pictures of tourist groups sounds creepy. The degree to which all of these people appreciated this — what I consider a rather simple act —was maybe not surprising, but certainly refreshing. Warms the damn cactus of my heart.

And since I feel like this needs an injection of humor I should mention how, a couple of weeks ago I was hurrying to the train and, stepping on a piece of ice to bypass an old lady, slipped and fell. I mean, I didn't step on the piece of ice on purpose, but there is certainly some correlation if not downright causation going on here. I thought only my ego was damaged, especially when this woman asked me if I was alright and she was like ninety-thousand years old, but I managed to rip the crotch of my pants in the whole ordeal. Not noticing this for the better part of two hours was awesome, but luckily I was wearing some slick boxer-briefs. And then I got drunk and largely forgot about my pants, but the pants, the pants never forgot...

Don't Feel Compelled to Drink That Second Cup

Maybe it's a mug of coffee, maybe it's a beer or something a little stronger. Moral: don't ever feel compelled to drink that next beverage. Caffeination, inebriation, make sure not to go past satiation. Caffeination, apparently not a word, so another to be added to my suggested word dictionary. Also, I would advise against nail clippers as a surgical tool.

So I was going through my sticky notes on my Mac Dashboard earlier today, which I have to do periodically because I write about a million inane notes to myself on there. They're never really organized by any sort of logical connection, and rarely is there reference to where some of the information comes from. This is an excellent sign of my organization skills. The thing is, I like having to sort through it in a lot of ways because it allows me to wonder what I might have been thinking. I will end up searching my email and google and microsoft word for these phrases and sometimes much lengthier bits to determine where exactly they came from. Almost always they are unique creations of my own mind that don't exist anywhere else that I can find. This is neither a good nor a bad thing, but that I often don't recognize the tone and the words in there is a pretty fascinating thing to me.

Sometimes these little notes are not completely inane and they will in fact be things like links to articles I want to get around to reading or mildly amusing and interesting other things on the internet. In my recent clean-up, I came upon this old list of the worst captchas of all time that someone sent to me godknowswhen. In case you are not familiar, the captcha is that little ditty that appears when you are leaving a note or logging into a webpage that appears distorted and is a random amalgam of letters and sometimes numbers, whose intention is to avoid having automatons leave notes that get filed under the spam category. This very thing will occur when you attempt to leave a note on this very blog (that's very very isn't it?), but I still manage to get notes with Asian characters (because I am not learned enough to determine if they are Chinese or Japanese) all the time that are absolute gibberish.

Moving on to pop culture, I am a pretty good student of it, maybe like a B+, but I don't actually watch that much TV, I just have a high retention and extrapolation rate. So there is this show Glee that you have probably heard of and maybe seen. I have done the former but not the latter, but I know the gist and that is there is a lot of singing involved. I think of it as a 30 to 60 TV minute (21-42 actual minutes) version of the wildly successful High School Musical, another thing I've never seen. Hell I haven't seen Avatar or even Titanic for that matter. My point is, as always, that many media-related bastards play off the successes of others and incorporate them into their own matrices. One of the few shows I watch religiously, How I Met Your Mother, has recently had not one, but two song scenes, the most recent featuring Ted singing about the concept of the superdate and, earlier, Barney extolling the virtues of suits, or at least saying how much he loves them. This is pretty closely related to my last post, where I might have blamed Glee as well for Neil Patrick Harris's opening number at the Oscars. I'm sad that I have noticed this, and perhaps a little more that I am pointing it out, but insomnia can do that to a man.

Another thing that fascinates me is the suggestions of the most popular searches google will give you just from typing simple prompts, in this instance "how can i." This list is dated, but I had it pasted down on one of the aforementioned stickies and it looks as such:

how can i make my hair grow faster
how can i keep from singing lyrics
how can i get pregnant
how can i lose weight fast
how can i keep from singing
how can i lose 10 pounds in a week
how can i get taller
how can i tell if i am pregnant
how can i watch free movies online
how can i make money

People are, or were, apparently very concerned with losing weight, keeping from singing, and pregnancy. I think there is a correlation here involving pregnancy hormones causing one to sing and we all know a good way to lose weight is to give birth, for some definition of birth.

Finally, I was discussing shoes with a chum and he showed me a link to a Vans shoe called the prison issue. Why in the world would you ever name anything as such? Prison is often on the minds of folks though, clearly, as it is a very popular improv audience suggestion. And because I don't ever want that link to die, here is an uploaded image of said Vans shoe.


Note the velcro, which I can only conclude is for easy fastening to avoid excessive time bent over tying laces.

I am behind pace to fulfill my weekly post quota, so I'll aim to play catch-up shortly. New song parody and short story forthcoming as I do not want to recycle material, but I am somewhat busy with editing a longer bit of stuff and life and stuff. More pictures perhaps in the future, since they're worth like a thousand words and people don't really like reading as much anymore these days or something.

Mmm, mmm, mmm, mmm

Once there was this kid who got into an accident and couldn't go to school. That really was me, even if the Crash Test Dummies happened to reference it years before. Maybe they were just prognosticating my life because clearly I'm the only person who those vague circumstances befell. But then my hair didn't turn from black into bright white. My voice did manage to deepen in those six plus weeks though.

Moving on, in my last post I alluded to launching a couple of new blogs. I knew this was ambitious since I don't (mercifully) write in this one all that much even, but they have been launched. You can read my song parodies over at The Parody Pariah. Remember how Pop-Tarts were so cool they were hot?(I didn't embed that because I don't know, I didn't, and that was back before they frosted the Pop-Tarts; the dark ages if you will, of only traditional diabetes). You'll also note that I put a parenthetical after punctuation, and then punctuated it. This is grammatically incorrect but man, it looked weird without that period. The point was that that blog right there will shoot to be so bad it's good. I didn't place time constraints on my production to cover my ass either. If left longer to compose those things they'd only be worse. I basically just get a feeling and ride it out, hence the gross inconsistency in consistency of my posting here.

The short story blog has been named and vaguely described as well, titled Fetor Hepaticus. I just thought it had a nice sound to it there. I've yet to actually produce a short story for it. I might put up a rejected submission to a website or something, but I'd rather spontaneously concoct something. So stay tuned for posting at an indeterminate or, to be determined, time.

The only other thing I'll give some brief face time because I've got some other pressing matters to get to is the Academy Awards. I never really used to watch, but since 2007, I have seen at least fifty-percent of them. So with not a ton of frame of reference, major props to Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin. As far as I'm concerned, best hosting ever, well-played on the heels of a horrendous opening number from Neil Patrick Harris. I love the shit out of that guy, and I am far from alone in this, hence his choice for the opening number, but man was it bad. As someone who can't sing I can say we can smell our own, so having him sing was rough. See also the gaudy tuxedo jacket (was that what it was?) and lyrically the song was trite, not tight. Again, as a lyrical non-genius, I can smell out crap lyrics as well.

The other difficulty in critiquing anything about the oscars is that I hadn't seen most of the films. This is generally a problem as I am not the moviegoer I once was and, in fact, halfway through I watched Inglourious Basterds for the first time. On the strength of not seeing any of the other movies, I still am tempted to say it deserved more than just the best supporting actor nod. No matter, awards ceremonies are inherently contentious, so my only real gripe was Sandra Bullock. I know, I didn't see the movie, but I did read the book. On the strength of that and having seen The Net, Speed, parts of While You Were Sleeping, and parts of Miss Congeniality, not to mention the clips they show at the oscars, I can safely say that I have no idea how she won. Not having seen any of the other movies that featured nominated actresses, Helen Mirren or that girl from Precious probably should have won. I'd say who cares, but I just wrote a paragraph about it so I guess at the least I must care a little bit. No need for sour grapes, makes for bad w[h]ine. I will never be on the academy.

I'd say that's more than enough for the time being. Anyone else getting tired of Morgan Freeman? I never thought I would say that. Ted Robbins anecdotal intro was awesome though. Yup.