mimi smartypants
Seriously, though: what's with the penguins?

turn on the love oven and cook up a casserole with stove top stuffing

I'D LIKE TO FORCE THE WORLD TO SING (aka MUSIC-RELATED BLATHER)

My favorite Stephen Malkmus line: I had a crap gin and tonic at Wounded Knee. Although when I'm singing along I prefer my version of the line, which is: I had a crap gin and tonic, it wounded me. (Because I know the pain of lousy gin.)

Lots and lots of excellent photographs of Chicago local heroines, the puta-pons. Brava.

I got good mail this weekend: a reader sent me a whole bunch of homemade CDs. One of them was a whole CD of Gito Gito Hustler! I fell in love with the mp3s that Mister Pants linked a while back, and now I have lots more Japanese girl punk to listen to! And there's no way my Secret CD Mail Buddy could have known that, so it is even more lovely and magical than just getting surprise CDs in the mail. Which is pretty fucking lovely and magical in the first place. Thanks, Secret CD Mail Buddy.

YOU HUNT, I'LL GO GATHER

Vegetarian Ethics Question Part 1: If you were relaxing on the beach with dozens of friends, within walking distance of a friendly down-home butcher shop and a giant barbecue pit and a 24-hour condiment store, and a large tasty quadraped walked up to you and dropped down dead of natural causes (not from disease or anything dangerous to your health), and someone whisked away the quadraped corpse and returned with juicy steaks for all to grill and consume, would you partake? I wouldn't, because part of my non-meat-eating ethos is that I find chewing on some other animal's flesh to be kind of barbaric, disturbing, and unnecessary (not to mention not tasty…I was one of those kids who happily consumed broccoli but had to be cajoled to finish chicken*), but I wonder if there are vegetarians who would eat meat if it somehow didn't involve killing. If chickens swarmed on trees like insects, and every year at a certain time they shed their skins and fell to the ground dead in vast numbers, would you get a basket and some hot sauce and gather them up and set about on a wing-eating feast? I am just curious.

*However, when said childhood chicken was of the “fried” variety, I used to love eating the crispy skin but I scorned the chicken. LT finds that hilarious and says, “Oh, the chickens had scary stories about you that they'd tell around the campfire. Mimi Smartypants…SKIN EATER!”

Ethics Part 2: There is no way that I could plunge a lobster into boiling water knowing that it would take fifteen seconds for it to die. Fifteen seconds is a long time to be boiled. The “humane” alternative of freezing the lobster that is discussed here is slightly more attractive in terms of lobster suffering, but still: Could you sit in your house knowing that there was a lobster scrabbling around, ever more slowly, in your freezer? It's kind of ghoulish if you ask me. “How you doing in there? Dead yet?”

The freezer method is no good in my house because Freezer Bear would get all freaked out. It would be so traumatic for him to have his home invaded by a crustacean and then be forced to watch it lose consciousness and die. Besides, Freezer Bear is a mammal and they don't usually hang with lobsters. (Not that Freezer Bear is prejudiced or anything.)

(THE MORAL OF THE STORY IS NO LOBSTER FOR ME.)

PROSAIC WEATHER TALK

So what have I been up to? I shower a lot. It is very hot here (the Weather Word(s) on Sunday was BLAST FURNACE). Showering helps somewhat but with this level of humidity you just feel even more fecund and tropical within seconds after toweling off. It's enough to make you want to keep a dildo in the freezer. (I wonder if emergency rooms ever considered that as a possible remedy for heatstroke? For hypothermia they use warmed IV fluids, so it stands to reason that for the opposite problem you'd want icy enemas or a frozen dildo or some other internal cooling mechanism.)

NON-SHOWERING FUN

Friday I went to Empty Bottle for no-wave electronic post-punk etc. There was one really awful band but the rest were pretty good. I have always enjoyed the helpful graffiti in the women's bathroom stalls that tells you which way the stall door opens, because it is a bit unusual and confusing. After a few beers, even more so.

Saturday was errands in the horrible heat and some family stuff. The family stuff involved drinking and eating pasta. The restaurant was good, but the waiter frightened me a bit: he seemed incredibly nervous (seriously, we're talking an “on the run from relentless killer cyborgs from the future who have been programmed with instructions to kill me in the most painful way possible” level of nervousness). I came this close to telling him to just leave the wine on the table instead of pouring it, because his hands were shaking so bad that it was all wobbly and splashy and dangerous. Either he had a case of The Palsy or was just on way too high a dose of lithium.

Sunday was mostly just hot. As is today. Let's have a slumber party in my air-conditioned office instead of sleeping in our hot apartments. I can read you spooky stories from medical reference books all night.

—mimi smartypants places a cool hand on your forehead and says, “shhh, go back to sleep.”