OF A GOLDEN AGE

As I flipped through my Google Reader this morning, an alarming trend stood out.

• XKCD gets us started, bringing to mind the Simpsons where Bart accidentally goes to smart kid school. When asked to give an example of a paradox, Bart says, “You’re damned if you do, and you’re damned if you don’t.”

• Goldblog cites an astonishing editorial from Garrison Keillor that wrecks my warm opinion of the man:

If you don’t believe Jesus was God, OK, go write your own damn “Silent Night” and leave ours alone. This is spiritual piracy and cultural elitism, and we Christians have stood for it long enough. And all those lousy holiday songs by Jewish guys that trash up the malls every year, Rudolph and the chestnuts and the rest of that dreck. Did one of our guys write “Grab your loafers, come along if you wanna, and we’ll blow that shofar for Rosh Hashanah”?

Really, Keillor? Pulling out the ol’ red herring of cultural elitism? Get bent.

• design mind took a different approach. Does Gordon Ramsay threaten to undo his small jerk empire by acting personable in a new show? I agree with the author that it might:

Gordon, stick with what you do best, before you set your brand back a decade. Go back to being an f-bomb dropping a-hole. Please.

Is this what the holidays are for? Abrupt nonsensical role reversal? Jerks run amok?

Five finds in our work fridge when I cleaned it out today:
1. 9 expired yogurts, 2 cream cheeses, 1 cottage cheese
2. 1 very black banana
3. 5 kinds of mustard
4. 5 kinds of salad dressing
5. 6 sodas, each a different kind, five of them Pepsi products

Five synonyms for cool, from a sixth grader:
1. Okay
2. Frigid
3. Good
4. Cold
5. Fine

Five games I didn’t love at first:
1. Mario RPG
2. Street Fighter
3. Super Smash Melee
4. Sonic the Hedgehog
5. Chrono Trigger

After several hours of too-slow plot play and several months of bored hiatus, I returned to Chrono Trigger and it finally won my sustained attention. I still don’t love that there’s no separate battle screen (stupid Final Fantasy games, ruining me for everything else) but I do love the music, the graphics, and the entire conceit of the game.

This weekend I watched a sixth grader play this insane-looking game Nazi Zombies (no, really) and the graphics were so real it kind of made me sick — I don’t want to see some real character’s head get blown off, or some real character without legs dragging around on his elbows. It reinforced that I am an eight-bit girl when it comes to my favorite games, and I will play Super Nintendo games indefinitely. Nathan thinks it has the best games of any console to date, and I agree.

Five games I ended up not loving:
1. Super Smash Brawl
2. Final Fantasy VIII
3. Super Mario Galaxy
4. Final Fantasy X
5. Super Mario Bros 2

Five games I loved immediately:
1. Final Fantasy VI, VII, IX
2. Paper Mario 1, 2, 3
3. Super Mario Bros 1, 3, and World
4. Mario Kart Double Dash
5. Katamari Damacy

Today a colleague gave me the onceover and said I was dressed “like Michael Jackson in the Matrix.” This is what happens when you wear black shirt, pants, shoes, and long coat, with white socks. Ha! At least my socks match today.

Let’s visit the more fashionable, shall we.

Critical Shopper has a review of the new Armani flagship (more like battleship for the size of it) in Manhattan. Check this out:

[Armani] has built a variation of [the Frank Lloyd Wright stairs at the Guggenheim] inside his store that quite possibly improves on the original. The Guggenheim resembles a collapsible camping cup; the Armani staircase looks like a Slinky made by unfurling a giant spiral-cut endive. It’s wild, organic and throbbing, a veritable turbine generating the store’s giddy atmosphere.

My goodness, a spiral-cut endive? And we wonder why people claim New York City is a symptom of the yuppocalypse.

A Suitable Wardrobe linked to Stowers Bespoke in a recent post, leading me to discover my new favorite woman’s ensemble, ever, seriously. If you’d ever told me I’d fall in love with a pink tweed three-piece suit, well, I wouldn’t have eaten my hat but you may have eaten my tomboy fist. But as I told Marty earlier, I’m loving the three-piece suit lately.

And for those of you who want to and can walk in stilettos: Watch out, they’re about to get even higher.

Five books that school ruined for me:
1. Jane Eyre
2. Wuthering Heights
3. A Tale of Two Cities
4. The Tempest
5. Julius Caesar

Five migraine triggers:
1. Soy
2. Avocados
3. Aged cheese
4. Onions
5. STRESS

Five things we did at our work party last night:
1. Grilled
2. Chain smoked
3. Made mojitos
4. Listened to a coworker’s former band’s record
5. Tried to remember any Eddie Money song by name OR tune

Five people I’ve talked to while out on the shipping dock:
1. The manager of the furniture store
2. A woman whose daughter is finishing veterinary school soon
3. A guy in a jumpsuit who works at 6:30 a.m.
4. A delivery guy who was not excited about several grosses of printer cartridges
5. This really uninteresting guy whose name began with M but was so dull I can’t remember

Five kinds of animals that woman’s daughter apparently had to learn about in veterinary school:
1. Large
2. Small
3. Water
4. Tropical
5. Fish

Five animals I no longer see regularly:
1. Cattle
2. Horses
3. Hawks and turkey vultures
4. Canada geese
5. Deer

Five magazines I read most of, if I have them:
1. GQ
2. Esquire
3. Real Simple
4. National Geographic
5. Vogue*

* I have no delusions of being even remotely vogue. Or . . . vaguely vogue? Either way, I’m not.

Five magazines I am repulsed by:
1. Seventeen (57 Ways to Tell If He’s Into You!)
2. Cosmo (57 Ways to Win Men With Sex!)
3. O (57 Ways to Lose 10 Pounds!)
4. Family Circle (57 Ways to Decorate with Snowmen!)
5. FHM (57 Ways to See Down Her Shirt!)

Nauru, my favorite tiny island nation, is long plagued by insane international corruption and has a terrible economy.

Recently I read a WSJ book review on somewhat obscure place-name changes which included a Nauru shoutout:

Take, for example, Pleasant Island, the South Pacific atoll that now calls itself the Republic of Nauru. It was once richly valued (and plundered) for its ­deposits of “super-phosphate,” a mixture of chemicals used in artificial fertilizers. [ . . . ] It has since tried to set itself up as a tax haven, started a smuggling operation for North Korean defectors, and even—you can’t make this up—invested its tax dollars in musical theater, all to no avail.

Yeah, to keep referring to it as Pleasant Island once it became a burned-out strip-mined shell would be, well, disingenuous. See also: The great Greenland/Iceland hoodwink.

In other island topics, this weekend I learned about Yerba Buena Island, a residential spot in the middle of San Francisco Bay. Yerba buena means “good herb,” similar to yerba mate, a popular variety of tea.

The island is accessible by bridge, which reminded me of Pigeon Key, a nature preserve-ish educational center off of the now-shut-down A1A Seven Mile Bridge in the Florida Keys. The new Seven Mile Bridge runs alongside the old, and in places the old bridge is preserved for pedestrians and fishing. On one side it runs long enough to allow access to Pigeon Key.

In honor of the mostly-dead, great website 5ives, here are some lists.

Five poets I truly love:
1. Charles Bukowski
2. Pablo Neruda
3. Edna St Vincent Millay
4. e e cummings
5. Stephen Dobyns

Five favorite rearrangements of my name:
1. Leronica
2. Cornelia
3. A Corn Lie (the title of my tell-all expose of farm lobbies — originally An Inconvenient Corn)
4. Ion Clear (my successful line of cleaning products, not yet invented)
5. Lo, carnie!

Five bands or performers that remind me of important males from my past:
1. Saves the Day
2. The Album Leaf
3. Blackalicious
4. Songs: Ohia
5. Nine Inch Nails

Five paperback authors I’ve read obsessively at some point:
1. Michael Crichton
2. Stephen King
3. Sue Grafton
4. Brian Jacques
5. John Grisham

Five pastimes I am very into:
1. Scrabble
2. Doodling
3. Knitting
4. Underlining in books
5. Xacto-knife crafting

Five foods that make me really sick:
1. Corn (regular or popped)
2. Milk, ice cream, cream sauce
3. Bananas
4. Onions
5. Citrus fruits

I am quite prone to tears, mostly because I am easily moved and connect with the world on a very visceral emotional level. Here is a quick roundup of the things I remember that made me tear up this week.

1. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (seen this at least one dozen times previously)

2. The episode of My So-Called Life where Angela says, “Sometimes someone says something really small . . . and it just fits into this empty place in your heart.” (seen this probably four times previously. Even thinking about it just now made me tear up again.)

3. Nearing the end of Bernard Malamud’s A New Life: Anxious, failing main character Seymour Levin uncomfortably reaches to stroke his beard, and remembers that he has shaved it off the week prior. He mentions wanting to let it grow back but it has gone gray under immense stress.

4. Many parts of (500) Days of Summer.

5. Remembering a story involving my school classmate Jacob Zuniga and then remembering that he is dead.

6. Seeing the second beautiful lady cardinal of the week and wondering if it was the same one. (Cardinals were my grandfather’s favorite bird and, since they’re not terribly common, I am thrilled every time I see one.)

7. When I peeled the price tag off the corner of a beautiful vintage silk scarf I’d just bought, and the silk underneath came right apart with the tag. (It is only a tiny corner, and I am now planning to frame the scarf, so I got over it.)

ADDENDUM: Also, this episode of M*A*S*H.

“You can’t beat Walmart’s unbeatable prices.”