Awesome foodstuffs corner: We picked these up last weekend:
Japanese green tea Oreos! These were tasty but a bit of a
cheat, since they weren’t in any way shaped like traditional Oreos. They were
very small—they came seven to that box, individually wrapped, and were shaped like tiny
squares. The base was a chocolate cookie layer topped with a layer of matcha-flavored Oreo
cream, with the whole thing coated in dark chocolate. Nothing to dislike about
that. The mint chocolate ice cream bars were from Taiwan and were… fine. The ingredients contained no cream (they used powdered milk instead) or chocolate (cocoa
powder mixed with coconut oil for the coating), which isn’t ideal, but they did have a
good astringent mint flavor.
Rest in peace, Jon Polito, who was a most welcome presence in so many of my favorite TV shows and movies over the past thirty years, from Miami Vice to Highlander and The Rocketeer and Miller’s Crossing and Barton Fink… I could go on. I'm going to have to do a Miller's Crossing viewing this weekend in his honor.
It’s September. Even though the weather isn’t quite autumnal yet, I’m drinking the first mug of Earl Grey of the season right now while celebrating the end of a long, sticky, stinky summer. I look forward to turning on the oven someday soon and actually, like, baking something. Until then, it’s still the same unending cavalcade of salads around here. No new recipes to report, in other words.
As I mentioned last week, all this month I’m doing a small,
low-pressure push to get people to read and review my book Wrong City at Amazon. Buy the Kindle ebook for $2.99 or download it
for free at Smashwords or multiple other places, read it, leave a review at Amazon, and
let me know with a link in the comments of last week’s post, and I’ll enter you
in a drawing to win a trade paperback copy of Demon City, plus some cool weird stuff. Wrong City is a short (probably around 65,000 words) contemporary
fantasy story about an unsuccessful screenwriter who has a life-changing chance
encounter with a charismatic stranger and ends up entrenched in a terrifying
supernatural power struggle between various malevolent forces working behind
the scenes in Los Angeles. It’s mostly autobiographical, obviously.
Two of my favorite guilty* addictions kicked off new seasons
last week: RuPaul’s Drag Race All-Stars and
Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders: Making the
Team. Watch them back to back for a marvelous double feature; they’re flip
sides of the same coin. I have a soft spot for hilarious, witty train wrecks,
so I’m crossing my fingers for either Katya or Alaska to take the crown on
RuPaul. On DCC: MTT, I’m never all that personally invested in the young women
trying to make the squad (they all seem very sweet and happy and enthusiastic
and, holy hell, I’m not sure I could carry on a conversation with any of them),
but I’m perpetually fascinated by Kelli McGonagill Finglass and Judy Trammell,
the squad’s director and choreographer, respectively.
Kelli and Judy! They’re both former DCCs from the squad’s
high-profile glory days in the eighties. They’re simultaneously terrifying and
sort of wonderful, and while I strongly suspect my political/social views are
not in any way compatible with theirs, I still think it might be fun to toss
back a few glasses of wine with them while listening to cheerleader horror
stories.
*That’s a lie. I’m too old to feel guilty about anything I
watch on TV. I like RuPaul and DCC: MTT, and I feel no shame about
either.
I watched Sing Street,
John Carney’s film about a band of schoolboys in Dublin who start a New Wave
band in 1985. It’s flawed but totally entertaining. Relevant to this site: Duran Duran’s Twitter feed
hyped the film fairly heavily when it was released in theaters earlier this year, and
it’s pretty obvious why. Apart from containing a jubilantly awful (deliberately awful, and absolutely wonderful in its awfulness) cover version of “Rio”,
Sing Street also contains a scene in which the whole movie pretty much stops down for a while so all the characters
can discuss the awesomeness of Duran Duran:
Yeah. I mean, it’s a good movie, obvs.
Music video to head into the weekend: Let’s go with Pat
Benetar’s “Invincible”
Be well, everyone. Enjoy September. Drink a pumpkin spice
latte, if that’s your thing.
Comments
With pumpkin spice coffee, natch.