I’ve decided to start a new segment here at Melodic Insomniac: WTF Wednesday. Basically, I’m posting about one of the many, many things that I see during my week that make me think or say, “WTF?” I think I’ve got enough subjects to keep this going for quite a while. That’s pretty scary.
There’s a great toy store in my mall that sells mainly toys from my childhood. That means board games, Lincoln logs, those cool cardboard blocks painted to look like bricks, and more of the like. Electronics are at a minimum. The majority of the dolls are of the nameless teddy bear and baby doll variety, but there is a small selection of action figures. There are some Indiana Jones action figures, but they look nothing like Harrison Ford.
On the other side of the store, completely alone from the rest of the action figures, hangs a set of the following:
Crazy Cat Lady: The Action Figure. How many cats do you have?
I’m sorry, but who in their right mind needs an action figure of a crazy cat lady, complete with six cats (in addition to those that are already peeking out from beneath her hair and from her sweater pocket) to accessorize her?
What really cracks me up is that this toy seems to be completely independent from any TV show, movie or game. She is a stand alone crazy cat lady. Not to knock the cray cat lady, but I thought that most action figures that do not emulate movie stars or teeny bopper singers encourage children to pretend to be some worthy profession, like a firefighter or a policeman.
This recipe was adapted from the April 2007 issue of Everyday Food magazine. It is a complete meal for one, but can easily be adapted for more people. The recipe is simple, the food is healthy and the flavors are divine. It’s fun to assemble, fun to unwrap and fun to eat. I can safely say that this is one of my favorite meals.
Today we’re going to take a photographic journey through the process of making this flavor-fest. Click each photo to embiggen and see the salmon in all its yumminess.
1 small zucchini, halved lengthwise and thinly sliced
1 shallot, thinly sliced
1 tablespoon butter, cut into pieces
1/4 teaspoon dried dill weed (or a sprig of fresh)
1 lemon sliced, halved, plus 2 teaspoons fresh lemon juice
coarse salt and ground pepper
1 skinless salmon fillet, about 6-8 ounces
Preheat oven to 350°F. Fold a large piece of parchment paper in half to crease it; open it and lay it flat on a baking sheet.
On one side of the crease, mound zucchini. Top with shallot, butter, dill and lemon slices. Season with salt and pepper.
Place salmon on top. Drizzle with lemon juice and season with salt and pepper.
To close, fold parchment over the salmon. Make small overlapping pleats to seal the open sides and create a half-moon-shaped packet. Place on a rimmed baking sheet and bake until salmon is opaque throughout, about 15-17 minutes.
To serve, you can either place the packet on a plate and cut it open, or make a slit in the paper and use a large spatula to transfer the contents to a plate.
In about three weeks or so I will be packing all of my belongings into a truck and drive a few states to the left to set up house in a new town. To that I can only say, “Holy freaking crap, when did three months become three weeks? I have to pack!”
I’ve moved house a few times in my adult life and I would like to offer what I’ve learned in the past as advice for myself and others who will move in the near future:
Start packing early. It usually takes about five times longer to pack than you expect it will.
Make friends with boys. Big, strong, manly boys. They will often help you move heavy things if you offer them pizza and beer.
Make friends with your local liquor store. They are the best source of sturdy cardboard boxes, and most of the time they are more than happy to let you have them.
That said, some liquor stores are stingy about giving away boxes on weekends. Especially when there is a holiday approaching, they are sure that any minute they will have to accommodate massive orders of booze that can only be carried out in large boxes. In that case, look elsewhere.
Flying Fish Brewing Co. boxes are the best for packing sheet music. They are the perfect size to fit the music snugly, are just large enough to fit in a substantial amount of music, but not so big that you can’t lift them when they are full. I’ll have to try their beer one of these days.
LPs, when packed in boxes, weigh a ton and a half.
I’ve spent the better part of today squeezing as many empty boxes into my tiny little compact car as physically possible, and after bringing them home, filling them with all my worldly possessions. I am proud to say that I have packed each and every VHS, DVD, LP and CD in this apartment into twenty-one boxes, appropriately labelled and neatly stacked in front of the now empty bookcases. By doing so, I have effectively packed one half of my living room (with the obvious exception of the furniture itself). When I realized this, a feeling of elated accomplishment swept over me.
Then I turned around and faced the rest of the apartment.
Sure, it’s wonderful knowing you have emptied the shelves of three bookcases. But it is really quite crushing to know that in the grand scheme of things, I’ve barely made a dent. Today I only tackled the media section of my little home library. I’ve barely even touched the books or sheet music yet.
I can’t imagine how many more boxes I will need to finish just the books. Sure, when I lived by myself packing my own books was a manageable task. But there’s another monstrosity of a bookcase looming in the den with the remnants of Mike’s doctoral studies. For crying out loud, the man was a literature major! The bookcase spans the entire length of the wall and stretches from floor to ceiling. On its shelves sit hundreds, maybe thousands of books piled several high and two or three deep.
Since I’ve discovered a couple liquor stores in my area that seem to be willing to provide me with supplies for my quest (both liquid and cardboard), I’m not quite as worried as I was a week ago. At least I know that I will have containers in which to place my belongings.
What does worry me is knowing how much space packed boxes take up. The contents of my media collection are now taking up a substantial portion of my living room floor, rather than the six inches of space along the edge of the wall. I have a feeling that I will be living in a fort of boxes of books before the week is over.
My experiments into stop motion animation are evolving. Specifically, they are evolving into dinosaurs.
As with the last video, which utilized modeling clay, this was shot entirely with the built-in camera on my MacBook. I’ve upgraded from monochromatic clay to bright and vibrant Play-Doh.
Incidentally, I found out last week that one can purchase twenty four rather large containers of Play-Doh for less than $10. That’s a good deal if I ever saw one.
Once upon a time, I regularly checked in on a blog that was maintained by the wife of a friend of my main squeeze. Her posts were witty and hilarious, covering everything from the mundane and ordinary to the spiritual and all that is Josh Groban. Over the course of some months I developed a feeling of oneness with this woman who, despite being friends on Facebook, I have never actually met.
Then one day the posts stopped. There was some lame excuse for not blogging. Something about a doctoral dissertation and birthing a small human being. Every once in a while (read: every four or five months) a new post would show up in my RSS reader, letting the world know that she had not in fact fallen off a cliff and perished a horrible, bloody death, and that someday soon the posts would return with their previous frequency.
It seems that someday soon has arrived. Theology Girl has been updating with alarming regularity over the past week. (You hear that, Adrienne? Now everyone on my blog knows about it, so you have to keep updating. How’s that for peer pressure?)
Although I had planned to take a short break from the internet, I hadn’t expected it to go on for quite as long as it has. I wish I could present a cute baby from my loins as proof that I’ve been busy with other things, but that would be a vicious lie. The truth is, I’m just plain lazy.
The good news is that almost two weeks away has given me plenty of blogging fodder. Here’s hoping I can maintain my resolve and follow through with posting the weird shit I saw last week.
I’m sure that my return to blogging after my brief hiatus, though, will be completely overshadowed by the big news that has just overloaded all the airwaves: the death of Michael Jackson.
I have to admit, I’m a little annoyed. Not that Michael Jackson died, but that the minute he was taken to the hospital, NPR stopped reporting Farrah Fawcett’s death entirely. The poor woman died seven hours ago; to me, it doesn’t seem like enough time has passed before letting the story slide to the back burner. Twenty-four hours should be the minimum reporting time, no matter who else has died. Heck, they reported Ed McMahon’s death for two whole days before giving it a rest. The point is, now that Michael Jackson has died, it seems like everyone has completely forgotten about her.
I wish I could say that I had fond memories of Farrah Fawcett. Unfortunately, Charlie’s Angels was before my time, so I can’t talk about my favorite episodes or the kind of actress she was. All I can say is that cancer is one of the worst things ever to curse this planet, and I know all too well what it is like to lose someone dear to me because of it. I truly feel for her family. But that doesn’t change the fact that I’ve never actually seen her act in anything except her short appearance in Logan’s Run.
Michael Jackson, on the other hand, has provided me with plenty of strange childhood memories. Although I was too young to know him with a ‘fro, before he had the Thriller-era nose job, I do remember when he was still black, before he got creepy. If you don’t believe the photographic evidence, check this out:
When I was in elementary school, one of my favorite recess activities with my friends was sitting on the grass beneath the big oak tree on the playground, playing clapping games. (Athletics were not my forte. But that’s another story for another time.) We would sing songs to keep the rhythm, like “Miss Mary Mack” and “Down Down Baby.” We also sang the song about Miss Susie. You know the one. The lyrics dovetail into one another, making the supervising adults gasp each time we almost said a curse word.
“Miss Susie had a steamboat, the steamboat had a bell. Miss Susie went to heaven, the steamboat went to HELLo operator, please give me number nine…”
Naturally, we had to emphasize the word that might have gotten us in trouble.
I bet you’re wondering what this has to do with Michael Jackson. Well, gentle readers, it has EVERYTHING to do with him. Once upon a time, long ago in my youth, we ended that song with the following words:
“Miss Susie and her boyfriend are kissing in the D-A-R-K, D-A-R-K, D-A-R-K, dark, dark, Darker than the ocean, darker than the sea. Darker than Michael Jackson chasing after me.”
You heard it right, gentle readers. A quarter century ago, we included Michael Jackson’s name in a song because he was black. I think kids today (if they even sing that song anymore (damn kids and their cell phones)) have probably changed the words to better convey the meaning, because heaven knows the man in recent years would not have held the same standard of chromatic comparison.
Let’s shift gears for a moment. I’d like to talk now about Thriller. This album is definitely in my top ten list of best albums of all time. There were so many great songs, and one totally awesome music video.
A whopping thirteen (almost fourteen) minutes long, the music video for the title track was the first I had ever seen. (We didn’t have cable, so MTV was a foreign concept, much like it is today. Ba-zing!) The video was an epic feat of such magnitude, with two stories in one that required not one, but two superhuman transformations on the part of the man, and a voiceover by the master of horror himself, that only a major Hollywood director was up to the challenge of handling it. It was completely unprecedented, and in my opinion, although many have come close, none have topped it in sheer awesomeness.
When the video came out, my family came into possession of a videotape with a hour-long television special that detailed the process of making Thriller: The Epic Music Video. It may have been taped off the TV, but I can’t be certain. Either way, the origins of the tape have no relevance to this story at all. What is relevant is that my brother and I watched this tape ad nauseam.
There are two great things about having a music video on tape in the 1980s. First of all, being before the age of YouTube, owning the VHS was the only way to watch something on demand. And believe you me, we demanded to watch it all the freaking time. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, was the fact that music videos from the 1980s made some semblance of sense and incorporated fantastically choreographed dance sequences.
Since we watched the video so much, we not only quickly learned all the words to the song, and all the nuances of the dialogue before and after the song, as well as Vincent Price’s monologue and delightful cackle at the end of the song, we also became quite well rehearsed in the art of Thriller: The Dance.
The pause button on the VCR remote became our friend, and with its help we were able to analyze each move made by the undead dancers. With such iconic moves as the nervous ear-to-shoulder twitch and hunched hand-on-knee shuffle and hands-in-the-air-pelvic-shake, my brother and I made a two-person dance troupe. We tried to don the rattiest clothes we could find, and twinkled our toes à la Michael Jackson all the live long day. Never had we so badly wanted to be dead.
The best part of this story comes a couple months after our acquisition of the aforementioned VHS, on one fateful afternoon when my grandmother was babysitting us. My brother, dressed in all his undead glory stood before her and began to dance the Thriller dance, hoping for a gushing of “My goodness, you’re so talented!”
What he got instead was a trip to the doctor’s office. My grandmother had never heard of Thriller: The Song, much less seen Thriller: The Music Video, so my brother’s introductory dance movements (the ear-to-shoulder twitch) were mistaken for the start of a seizure. Eventually my mother returned home and, after doubling over in a fit of hysterics, explained that my brother was only trying to dance for her.
To be honest, I’m having trouble wrapping my head around the fact that Michael Jackson is dead. All the weirdness of the last decade aside, the man was a genius. He shaped a whole generation of musicians in a profound way, and I do think he was very lucky to have been recognized for that in his lifetime. Music would not be what it is today had he not been a part of it all. One of my friends said it so well: “I’m starting to understand what the death of Beethoven must have been like.”
Some people, especially the young’uns who only knew a scary, child-molesting white man with a magical decomposing nose, may remember Michael Jackson as the sad, frail, eccentric grown-up child star. I, on the other hand, choose to remember Michael Jackson the way I knew and loved him best: as a healthy, curly-haired, dark-skinned zombie with some seriously awesome moves.
Every once in a while I get the feeling that my life is being sucked away by all the time I spend puttering around on the internet. This is especially true after a couple of weeks of dreary weather and friends who have left to go on vacation. The only logical course of action in a situation like that is to spend all one’s time playing flash games, reading blogs and stalking people on Facebook. However, like most repetitive activities done whilst bored, after a time that routine gets really old.
I can’t help but wonder if I’m slightly addicted to the internet. While it’s not quite the same taboo as being addicted to internet porn, there’s something unsettling about realizing I can’t get through my day without checking the weather channel more times than I brush my teeth.
This week, however, promises to be different. For one thing, the weather is supposed to be lovely. For another, I only have a couple students to teach, so my days are relatively free. For yet another, my long-lost fiance, who I have not seen in a couple of months, is riding into town in his noble Subaru. Tonight. And staying for a whole week.
In an effort to wean myself back into the real world, I’ve decided to try an experiment this week: internet abstinence. Email will be checked once per day, since that is my primary method of communication with the outside world, but the internet browser will remain unopened. Blogs will remain unread. Free flash games will remain unplayed. This blog will remain unupdated. (Admittedly, the change won’t be seen much here, since my blogging seems to have deteriorated into a once-a-week phenomenon, but you get the picture.)
So, gentle readers, I will return in a week, hopefully with tales of wonder from the real world, and hopefully without too many symptoms of withdrawal. You can expect an onslaught of comments on your own blogs when I get myself caught up. Later, alligators!
My internal clock seems a little off these days. I’ve found myself waking up later and later each day. Under normal circumstances this wouldn’t bother me, because it’s always nice to sleep in. But this morning I woke up at 11:30. In the morning.
I’ve never been a morning person. I’m more of a night owl. I do my best work in the afternoon, so I’m quite sure I chose the right profession of teaching kids piano lessons after school. I’ve had a couple jobs that required me to be at work at an ungodly hour, like 8:30 in the morning, and they were the worst jobs I ever had. Certainly, they were not my most productive.
While I don’t like waking up before the sun rises, I also don’t like sleeping the better part of the day away. I do believe it’s possible to get too much sleep. Too little sleep and too much sleep have the same effect on me: grogginess for my waking hours that even coffee won’t relieve.
It’s not as if I go to bed incredibly late. Usually I’m in bed by 11:30, asleep by 12:30. Last night was no different. It’s also not as if I’ve been starved for sleep lately. A good seven hours will usually do for me, and, with the exception of a sleepless night here or there, I’ve been getting that. So, I’m a little confused about the eleven hours of sleep I got last night.
I think my internal clock is resetting itself for Tokyo time.
I’m curious, gentle readers, what is your sleep schedule like? What is the latest you’ve ever slept in?
One of my favorite shows when I was a child was Gumby Adventures, the 1980s revival of the original The Gumby Show from the late 1950s. I’ll save my lament of today’s kids for not having the foggiest idea who Gumby is for another time. What I will talk about is the totally tubular claymation that made the show what it is.
I won’t lie: I was honestly scared of the blockheads. They seemed so real! But that is part of what made this show so neat. What fascinated me was that the animation was not just drawings on a page, but animated clay. To me this seemed to make Gumby and Pokey come alive more than ink and paper would have.
Let’s fast-forward to this past year, when a new song from a new artist emerged. The music video for Oren Lavie’s Her Morning Elegance was shot entirely in stop motion and took the internet by storm.
Personally, I think the video is tremendously clever. It must have taken forever to shoot.
My first real education in stop motion came shortly after my exposure to Gumby, on an episode of Muppet Babies, when Nanny gave the kids an old video camera. Before recreating an abridged version of Star Wars, Skeeter showed the others how to animate clay by making a sculpture, pushing a button on the camera, moving the sculpture a tiny bit, pushing the button again, and so on.
This weekend I decided to try a little stop motion of my own, just to see if I could actually make the theory work. My first experiment, subtitled Sock Porn, was shot with my regular, everyday point-and-shoot Canon PowerShot SD1100 IS. There were 118 photos total, it took about a half hour to shoot and was edited together in iMovie HD.
In general, I’m pleased with the end result, especially since I had never done this before. There are a couple obvious errors, like my leg showing up in the last few frames, but that’s the sort of thing from which we learn. The most blatant issue, though, was the fact that the camera, despite being set up on a tripod, would move ever so slightly whenever I pushed the shutter button. The result is a shaky, nausea-inducing film that I am thankful lasts only 22 seconds.
My second experiment was a return to my Gumby roots: I used clay. I also changed the camera. Because I don’t have a remote control on my PowerShot, I had to find a camera that wouldn’t move when the photo was taken. That’s where my laptop came in. Using the built-in camera atop the monitor of my laptop, I shot all the photos for this experiment using Photo Booth.
I want to make it very clear that I am not an artist. My days of playing with Play-Doh are long gone, so I am sorely out of practice. But the goal of this experiment was not to create a masterpiece worthy of the Louvre. I’d say this experiment turned out quite well, indeed. The neutral tone of the clay showed up (all I had lying around), the camera was steady, and I even like the grainy quality of Photo Booth’s photos.
I’m totally into this stop motion filming. Eventually, I’d like to get a camera that works well in the capacity for which I would like to use it. Meanwhile, I think I’ll stop by the store and pick up some Play-Doh this afternoon and practice for next time.
My internal clock seems a little off these days. I’ve found myself waking up later and later each day. Under normal circumstances this wouldn’t bother me, because it’s always nice to sleep in. But this morning I woke up at 11:30. In the morning.
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