When A Plot Device Is Not A Plot Device

THE LUNCH of the day is yet another one of those fakey-ass burgers. (And no, I am not going to start calling them Assburgers, although if anyone asks, I do have a hell of a good story involving such verbiage.) More to the point, the beer of the day comes from Saranac's recently re-vamped Adirondack Trail Mix. I started with the Black Forest, and followed it with the Adirondack Lager, with the result that Hoooooo! BABY!

(The show in the background is Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations, Ireland installment, and you could assert that there is something fundamentally or morally wrong with watching such a show while earting a highly processed food product, but, lest we forget, there are alot of places in this world where "Eat Locally!!!" means "Starve.")

Last night's movie was, alas and alack, The Ruins. You can go straight to that link or wait. It might be funnier if you wait.

This is a film that got bad reviews, mostly complaining that it was not as good as the book it was based on. So I, at least, knew what I was getting into. But we didn't really understand how low the bar was going to be set. The cowbell here is that one of the characters is pre-med, so he can reasonably suggest some quasi-medical-sounding explanations and quasi-medical seeming procedures to fend off the killer vines. What he can't suggest, in fact, what no one can suggest, I suspect, is any explanation as to why the killer vines took an hour and a half to kill off these losers.* (Well, except that a half hour is spent building up ill will against said losers, so by the time the vines got around to killing them slowly with their fronds (hah!) (Did I jsut steal that from The Tick?), we basically didn't care, except in that we wished the gaddamned vines would just hurry the hell up and get it over with. Of course, these tourists-- these stupid, generic American tourists, whose shallowness is barely muted by the vast stupidity of the German tourist whose passing aquaintance got them to wander out into the middle of the jungle and climb down inside an ancient pyramid which, the German lad has claimed, no one has ever seen before-- come off as slightly more sympathetic than the locals, who have apparently taken up the habit of salting the soil around the pyramid so the vines won't spread and killing their own if ever there is even the slightest chance of contaigion. Not that you'll end up wanting to marry any of them. I didn't even want any of them to get married. The closest I came to having any real sympathy for any of them is thinking, at various time about a couple of different ones, "Could he/she die of his/her wounds now?"

Of course, after doing the preliminary research, I found that the schmuck who wrote the supposedly superior book is the same schmuck who wrote the book upon which the film A Simple Plan was based. I didn't read the book, but I did see the film, and it struck me as seriously lazy an excercise in misanthropy as one might ever hope for. If you need reasons to hate people, just look around. You really don't have to make shit up.

Knocking the author? Not really. He has his trade, he's free to ply it. This is America after all. And people are going to buy his dumbass bullshit, so it seems. So good for him.

Knocking myself. Shoulda done the research beforehand, and thus, have known better. When did Noah build the Ark? Before the flood.

*In point of fact, in the timeline of the movie, the vines kill off the losers over the course of three days, or a fortnight, or a week, or a fiscal quarter, or maybe it was over Labor Day weekend, or a week from Saint Swithen's day. I stopped caring before they even got off the @#$%ing beach.

The Potato Brush Is Dead; Long Live The Potato Brush

ABOUT six or eight years ago, I ran across this thing at the World Market-- I think, and I could be wrong-- and had to have it. It's a potato brush, see!?! It's a brush for potatoes that looks LIKE A POTATO!!! HAH!!!

And, since one of my prized possession is a refrigerator magnet shaped like-- yes, you guessed it-- a refrigerator, which was given to me by my brother way back when, I thought it might end up being a theme in our house.

Of course, the years have gone on, and now the thing looks like this. So the Wifey, in her infinite wisdom, has decided that it must go. As is the way in such matters in our household, she announced that it was going by remarking, several times, that it was all but worn out, and thus began the potato brush's long, inexorable journey to the refuse heap, by way of being placed six inches closer to the garbage can each time she sees it in the kitchen.

So it became up to me to make the potato brush's demise both as quick and as humane as I possibly can.

Farewell, potato brush. You served us well. You never scrubbed a potato in anger, and you scrubbed many things which you were never meant to scrub. You cleaned under fingernails. You loosened many strata of dried foods. You conquered many a Stain Of Unknown Origin. You took up space, and you did it magnificently.

You will be missed.