Les Bonnes Choses

A case of mistaken identity caused me to lose two cloth shopping bags this morning at the Howard St. Target. It must have happened some time in the dairy section, where I was getting yogurt. Now that I think of it, that's exactly when it happened. I had grabbed two 4-packs of Activia yogurt, put them in my basket, and then noticed that one of them had an expiry date of Saturday. So I went back to the dairy case to get yogurt that didn't expire until mid-November. And on I went with my shopping until I got to the checkout, where I found a couple of peculiar items in my basket, and my cloth bags were nowhere to be found. I kind of felt violated. I blame the other shopper because it's easy. Look, I just did it.

I didn't put much of my shopping away until I got home from work, which was late because I attended a talk and stayed after to (try to) speak to the speaker. I'm not very good at hijacking conversations. I can, but think I come off like an ass when I do, so I just wait politely for the perfect segue. Perfect segues almost never come, unless you can engineer them. Like the one I have just engineered to bridge to the next topic, where I talk about a conversation that I had with a grad student when walking back to my office following the talk.

We were talking about how academic job applications are quite a mish-mash. Some positions are at old-skools, and they want you to send a ream of paper in an oversized envelope plastered with postage stamps. Other schools use 3rd party or in-house websites to manage the submission of your application materials. And finally, some positions require you to email a bunch of pdfs to a department secretary. This might seem like a big leap from the surface mail application, as it is theoretically instantaneous, and costs nothing for postage and paper. It is not without its drawbacks however. I discovered that when a vigilant secretary emailed me to ask whether I had emailed any other materials beside the CV (an academic resume) I had updated and re-sent to reflect a recent upgrade of my awesomeness. I had.

The job ad requested the usual CV, research statement, and scholarly writing samples (i.e., journal articles). Together, these documents weigh in at maybe about 3.5 MB. Some IT departments have strict policies about what can and cannot be sent by emails. UWO, for example, won't let anything pass that has a .exe or .zip extension. I will note they also have an email help section on the IT department website describing how to circumvent this restriction by asking the sender to change the file extension, and causing me to facepalm.


Another common restriction is a filesize limit. Emails exceeding a certain size are just dropped. I suspect this is what happened in my case, and perhaps the case of other applicants to this job, because the secretary reported having a problem receiving emails lately. Now, as I related this story, this grad student and I began to wonder how hard it must be to get a job for a biochemistry student coming out of the lab that invented Viagra. I mean, wouldn't all of their resumes get flagged as junk mail?

Significant Academic Achievements:
Developed a method to INCREASE the LONGEVITY and POTENCY of the VIAGRA drug by INJECTING the non-medicinal substrate with a HARDENING agent.

This evening, I am having a rather spartan meal. Though I like to cook, I don't like having to decide what to cook, especially because I don't live in a grocery store, and am therefore constrained by what I happen to have on-hand and what needs to be used up (see also my recent entry on freezer-burned entrees). This evening, when I came home to face my kitchen dread, I noticed a couple of bags of pita chips on the table (presumably left by Jerome et al) from last weekend's homecoming tailgate party. The only correct thing to do with pita chips is to dip them in hummus.

I've got the ingredients for hummus covered several times over, probably as a result of some OCD grocery shopping. I first made it some number of years back for some small gathering of the usual suspects, following a random recipe off the internet. I still call up a random recipe, but that's mostly to get a rough idea of the proportions, so I don't end up making a thick salad dressing by adding too much oil, for example. The recipe to which I have linked is a good starting point, but you'll be quite happy with the results if you also add cumin and paprika (smoked paprika is especially tasty). Combined with pita chips, and some raw vegetables that will rot in my fridge if I don't use them when I remember them, that's a tasty meal.

Now, lest anyone be concerned about my welfare, I should note that I had a hearty breakfast and had 2 cups of chili for lunch. Arguably, people have their meals backwards when they have a piece of toast and coffee for breakfast to fuel the first half of their day, followed by medium lunch to get them through to a relatively large dinner, just a few hours before they go to bed. Unless you're a sleep-powerwalker, those dinner rolls are going right to your bum.

Plus, I still have a stash of jerky.

It's taken 4 years, but my first fan mail came at the end of last week:


Normally, a high-profile celebrity like me would be wary of an unsolicited packaged in the mail. But I'm not like other celebrities. I'm a down-to-earth kind of guy. I put on my pants one leg at a time, except on those lazy weekend afternoons, where I just can't be bothered to wear pants. But I was wearing pants when I went out to the mailbox, in case you were wondering. I opened up the package to find one of the best foodstuffs ever:


Jerky. If ever there was an upside to survivalist living, it's living off salty, dessicated strips of animal flesh, not much different from the chicken nugget that fell beneath your driver's seat last April. For some reason, I like the stuff. So does my eldest son. The younger one doesn't yet have enough teeth for jerky, but I wager he'll like it too, especially since he shares my taste for black licorice, and that stuff smells like a tire fire.

As I was planning out this blog entry after work, I naturally decided it would be appropriate to eat a strip or two. And because my dinner was still on the stove, I started to snack on some mixed nuts. I'm pretty sure I've now exceeded my salt intake for the day. The first clue was that I am now exerting osmotic pressure on the groundwater beneath the house. I'm leaving puddles everywhere I step.

Okay, I have a confession to make. I embellished a bit. I am not actually leaving puddles on the floor. And the jerky that arrived in the mail came not from a crazy fan, but instead from Rebecca's cousin and her husband. But it was a very generous gesture on their part, and I have convinced myself that my blogging had something to do with it. So I shall go to the post office tomorrow and set up a PO Box, should anyone else out there want to send me jerky.

There's a division of labour in our house -- or, at least, there was when I had Rebecca with whom to divide the labour. Generally speaking, Rebecca handled the grocery shopping. In retrospect, somewhat odd, given that I was the one who generally turned the groceries into meals, but appropriate given my general disinterest in leaving the house to go shopping. Those grocery delivery services were invented for people like me: highly functional shut-ins. So it should be unsurprising that I have been rooting through the freezer like a pig hunting for truffles so I can delay the inevitable trip to the grocery store as long as possible. Unfortunately, I have picked all the low-hanging fruit (that is, the entree-qualifying items not hidden by bags of frozen berries), leaving me to find forgotten freezer bags of unidentified slightly freezer-burned meat.

So the other day I decided to wing what is probably my favourite dinner on the Cheesecake Factory menu: tuna tataki salad. An interesting side note: cilantro features prominently in this dish, as prepared at the Cheesecake Factory. I hate cilantro. The smell of it makes me slightly nauseous. It is to my great consternation that pretty much every dish served at Cheesecake Factory, with the possible exception of most of their cheesecakes, use cilantro. But the taste for cilantro is apparently genetically determined, so it's not like I'm just being difficult. In fact, in some of the reading I did for a paper I am working on, I learned that people's tastes differ because their chemical receptors for the flavour carrying molecules are physically different. As a fairly close analog, people generally take for granted that a red crayon out of the Crayola box looks the same to everyone, though that is not the case (for colour-blind people, for example). If you're a picky eater tired about getting flack about not eating your quiche (egg + cheese + spinach = gag), science is here to the rescue.

Um, yeah, so back to the story at hand. The tuna tataki salad at Cheesecake Factory is so good that, even with the cilantro (which I scrape off), it's probably my favourite thing on the menu. So naturally, when I found a freezer burned slab of formerly sushi-grade tuna at the back of the freezer, I figured I may as well trim off the dried out bits and give it a whirl. Half-way through preparing it, I decided to see if I could find a recipe to see if I was on the right track (I was, but I hadn't guessed that lime figured into it). And dammit, did it ever turn out good.

Now, tomorrow is the Northwestern Homecoming parade, which will include NU alum Stephanie Marsh -- an impossibly white actress who I kind of sort of recognized. I wouldn't normally care, as I don't watch TV much anymore. However of more interest is the fact that Ms. Marsh's husband, Iron Chef Bobby Flay will be in attendance. I'm holding out hope that his ulterior motive was to come here to challenge me to a throwdown after the parade. And if the challenge is to make a freezer-burned entree, he is totally going to get pwned.

Gill has me exclaiming "Brilliant" all the time, often with a disconnect between the subject of the statement (that which is purported to be brilliant) and the subject's objective characteristics. As I first noticed the rather liberal use of the word in the Harry Potter series (often with the modifier bloody), I must assume that it's a British Isles thing, so maybe I'm just getting back to my roots.

My home media center, based around a Mac Mini, is objectively bloody brilliant, especially when paired with a free app downloaded from the iTunes store that lets me use my i-device as a remote controller for iTunes, effectively letting me fill my otherwise desolate house with whatever music strikes my fancy (I also overuse fancy, but that's the result of a linguistic feedback loop between myself and Jude, with John providing a repeater signal). This is exactly what I am doing now, as I tend to the household chores that I have been neglecting over the last three weeks. I'm not really sure what to do about the mess of leaves all over the property. I don't have a rake. Neither do most of my neighbours, I would wager, as I live in a neighbourhood where everyone and their dog has a small brigade of Mexican workers come once a week and tend to their properties. I'm just one white dude. How can I compete with that? At least I can vacuum like nobody's business -- or could, until I misplaced one of the attachments, which I suppose I should go find now, because I'm not giddinganythingdun as I sit here blogging.

This is brilliant. I'm on a bus¹. Just going into work now because I had to get some groceries in order to fulfill my lab treats duty tomorrow, and haven't shopped in weeks. At the checkout at Dominick's, the cashiers read your name off the receipt and wish you a good day. Nice sentiment but I sometimes wish they wouldn't bother. "Have a nice day, Mr. Mc...hmmmghhnmg" she said, her voice trailing off. I'd really like to be privy to how her mind dealt with that scenario.

He looks normal enough. Let's hope he's a Smith.
"Have a good day Mr..."

Let's see here ... Mc ... oh sh**. I can only do McDonalds and McGregors. Maybe if I mumble the last part he'll think he just didn't hear me properly.
"Mc hmmmghhnmg"

Okay, now finish strong. I can get past this!
"Would you like help with getting your bags to your car?"

Aw goddammit, this next guy has a turban. I'm going to need a drink on my lunch break.

¹I did a substantial amount of editing on my desktop computer once I got to work because, brilliant as it is, typing on an iPhone is really frickin' tedious.

That title works on so many levels. I've been up for 19 hours now, having woken up at 4:00(EDT) with a sinus headache brought on by my head cold readying to exit my body via my nose. For that reason, I'm kind of ambivalent about runny noses: on one hand, they're damn irritating; on the other hand, they invariably seem to signal the end of the plague of the day. Unfortunately, the runny nose hit full steam as I was driving through Gary, Indiana at around 9:30, and there was nary a Kleenex to be found. The truly observant reader will have done a double-take just then. "He woke up in the Eastern time zone. Isn't Gary, IN in the Central time zone?" Aye, there's the rub. As my aunt observed, I have become an extreme commuter, having woke up in London, ON and made it in to work in Chicago, IL before noon. Unfortunately, even at my right-brainiest, I cannot come up with a way to spin that sort of protestant work ethic on to my academic resume.

I do lots of inventing when I am engaged in monotony. I can't tell you how many lawn and gardening related inventions I have come up with while cutting the grass over the years. Look for a better bum cushion to hit the shelves in the next 18 months.

The hiccup that I was experiencing with the Facebook blog import appears to have resolved itself since last week. But you should still consider visiting the original site because the imported version strips out some of the formatting as well as some embedded content, like youtube videos.

Speaking of which, if you haven't seen this yet, this is the most wonderful piece of comedy ever:



See, unless you go to the original site, you have no idea what the heck I am on about.

A few years back, I wrote this blog entry (the previous incarnation of this blog).

Four years have passed, but some things have not changed: it's still the Canadian thanksgiving long weekend, so there's food. Even more than usual, because there will be multiple birthday celebrations and Make's wedding is tomorrow. They have cake at those, right? So, the 5 day forecast looks something like cake, cake, cake, cake and leftovers (probably including leftover cake).

I think I gained 5 pounds just writing that. That's alot of sugar, which we know to be bad for you. Like cigarettes, right? That reminds me of a funny thing I saw yesterday on the Chicago television station. There was a commercial where a woman is walking down the soft drink aisle of the grocery store, complaining that the government is proposing slapping a tax on soft drinks, sports drinks, et cetera -- basically the sorts of beverages that list high fructose corn syrup second only to water on the list of ingredients. And, according to the copy that the woman was reading, "government shouldn't be telling Americans what they should be putting in their grocery carts" (the commercial also implied it was just a money grab, so I'm getting mixed messages). Now, you can take it as a given that I disagree with their position. But what struck me as funny was that the very next commercial was for a website that moms can go to for parenting advice -- including, I would assume, advice about how to raise healthy children.

So, just to be clear, Americans have no problem with any random idiot telling them how to run their lives, so long as that idiot is not an elected official. So my question is, are Americans hypocrites, or is the electoral system set up to elect a sample of the population that is more idiotic than the national average?