Another reason to love P&M Orange Street Market

One of Miss Edith's small gripes in life is that in order to obtain Notarius's preferred coffee -- which isn't merely "preferred," but is in fact the only coffee he will drink in the morning without bitching about how the coffee tastes like ass -- I have to go to Willoughby's downtown, buy sacks of whole beans, and lug them home. I realize this doesn't sound like an arduous task but you must take my word for it that it has become one. There are times when I really just can't make it up the steps easily to the Grove Street Willoughby's, and when the York Street location is Too Far. I don't want to explain. Just accept what I tell you.

So yesterday I was at the P&M Orange Street Market hunting for cleaning supplies -- just a couple of sponges and a new mop head, no big deal -- when I noticed a new item on the shelf in the coffee section: BAGS of Willoughby's coffee. My jaw practically dropped. There were several types to choose from, and they had bags of whole beans and bags of ground coffee. The selection was not, of course, as wide and deep as the selection at the actual Willoughby's stores, but you know something? I did not care. I was thrilled. A small burden has been removed from my life, and that is a sweet, sweet thing, like mocha java with lots of cream and sugar in it.

Thank you, Pino.

Ground Beef: a posting of interest only to those in my immediate area, for which I apologize

Miss Edith is a carnivore -- not an omnivore, I'm sorry to admit, but definitely a carnivore -- and I've been known to make quite a meatloaf. Notarius would live almost solely on meat if he could, I'm sure. So meat -- including ground beef -- is definitely on our shopping list.

In the news recently there's been a lot of huffing and puffing about the safety levels of ground beef. Horrible things have been happening to people eating hamburgers because there are bacteria in the beef, and this is attributed to uncool practices at the beef processing and packing plants. Miss Edith was chatting with a friend about this (yes, on Facebook, ok, I admit it) and she said that she would no longer buy ground beef. It was just a food item that had ceased to exist for her, because she is scared for herself and her husband and her two young sons. I understood her fear.

Well, it didn't immediately occur to me, though it should have, but as it happens in my neighborhood -- and not far from where my friend lives -- there is an excellent little grocery store where the butchering is done in house. They grind their own beef, their own lamb, their own pork, everything. They make their own sausages. While nothing there is kosher, the quality of all the meat is excellent, in my experience, and I would urge people who live in New Haven and its environs to please consider giving the P&M Market their business, at least when it comes to buying meat. The owner of the store, Pino, and I have chatted about how they handle beef, and I have great confidence in the skill of the butchers (who've been doing this for a long, long time; if you need advice on how to cook a cut of meat, they'll talk to you about it) and in the quality of the things they sell.

Again, that's the P&M Orange Street Market, which is on Orange Street just at the intersection of Orange and Cottage Streets, around the corner from Lulu's and next door to that friendly little liquor store where you can always grab a bottle of something decent on the way home.

STELLA!

For some months, Miss Edith has been vaguely following the sad story of the Stella D'oro bakery in Brooklyn, which was having serious financial problems, and union problems, and today I read in the New York Times that it is finally closing.

To many readers of this blog (I use the term "many" loosely here), this will mean nothing; I grew up not thinking about this at all, but I gather that Stella D'oro cookies were a kind of regional thing. For me, they were an essential party of my childhood. My mother, a born and bred New Yorker, clearly felt that a life without Stella D'oro cookies was not worth living; she often ate their Breakfast Treat cookies all day long. Their Margherita cookies -- long, ridged, sort of shortbready cookies that came in packages showing the vanilla cookies alternating with the chocolate -- were always in our house. (Naturally, the kids preferred the chocolate, but it was fine, because my mother liked the vanilla ones. I think she always had them with coffee.)

But the real showpiece from Stella D'oro was the Swiss Fudge cookies. These were a rich, round vanilla cookie with elegant little ridges, that held in their center a perfectly smooth round blob of dark fudgy chocolate. If you refrigerated the cookies, the chocolate became as stiff as a chocolate bar, but in a warm room they had a slightly chewy feel; these cookies were our idea of heaven. Swiss Fudge cookies were a real treat. When my brother went away to college, my mother would mark his homecoming by buying a package of Swiss Fudge cookies and he was capable of eating an entire package on his own in one sitting. Whenever there was something special to celebrate, my mother bought these cookies. It wasn't that they were really so special; it was just that she knew how much we liked them.

I haven't bought a package of Stella D'oro cookies in a while, a long while. I remember eating a package of them with Notarius, who thought they were ok but no big whoop. That's ok. Things like this, I acknowledge it's all about sentiment and less than we would like about the true objective quality of the cherished thing. (The ice creams of our childhood are somehow infinitely wonderful -- but how many adults really want to eat a Hoodsie cup? Right.) But I am sorry that I won't be able to buy Stella D'oro cookies anymore.

Vera Ramone King's Piece of Shit Memoir

I cannot remember the last time I spent so much time reading such a piece of crap.

I recently re-read And I Don't Want to Live This Life, that classic shlock-bio that Deborah Spungen wrote about her daughter Nancy Spungen. You remember Nancy. Sid and Nancy. Right. Her.

Deborah Spungen's book has a few flaws, and you know it's basically biassed and that there's no way it's really telling the whole unvarnished (or un-Manic Panick'd) truth. But it's a completely readable book. It really is.

So Miss Edith's at the library the other day and notices that Vera Ramone King has published a book about her life with Dee Dee Ramone. It's called Poisoned Heart. Now, Miss Edith was really a Joey person, not a Dee Dee person. You know how everyone had their favorite Beatle? Their favorite Monkee? (John Lennon; Mike Nesmith -- thanks for asking.) Well, my Ramone was Joey and if that makes me a teenybopper poseur, so be it. But Dee Dee was an interesting enough character, I thought, "Well, hey, it's a short book, anyhow, how bad could it be?" So reader: I borrowed it.

Phoenix Books, an outfit based in Los Angeles, really needs to hire some goddamned editors.
As a matter of fact: Phoenix Books, if you're reading this, if you would like to hire me, I would be more than happy to -- for a small fee -- completely rewrite this book so that it's in English that doesn't screech in my ears like an old warped copy of Metal Machine Music. Ok? Call me. Because this book is a piece of crap. Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz, who I believe in my heart of hearts to be intelligent and literate people, wrote in their introduction to this thing that Vera Ramone is now a writer. You know something? I just lost some respect for Weymouth and Frantz, even though I'm sure they're just trying to be polite. This is a book that uses every cliche it can as many times as it can. Phil Spector is referred to as "the legendary Phil Spector" twice in one page, nearly in one paragraph, as I recall. Vera Ramone may be a lovely woman, but she is no writer.

Deborah Spungen had the wits to hire a ghostwriter who turned her story into something that was painful to read but not because the language was so mangled. Vera Ramone must have written this thing on her own, because otherwise there's no excuse. What I don't understand is why her editor at Phoenix let her down so badly. This embarrassment of a book shouldn't have seen the light of day, at least not in its current form. Vera Ramone uses the same stupid, hackneyed phrases over and over again. She's constantly telling us what a giving, loving, affectionate genius Dee Dee was. What a guy. He was a peach, when he wasn't ODing on something or beating the crap out of someone. If this book had been handled by Judith Regan, back when Judith Regan was handling this kind of thing, this would have been a trashily fun little book about the Ramones. As it is, it's just horrible, and I don't even know if trying to be charitable and looking at it in a campy way is going to save it.

I'm sorry to say this, but this is one case where I'm really glad I read a library copy and didn't spend actual money on a book. Good lord.

I seem to have a gift for these things...

So there I am, reading the New York Times, on my comfortable front porch, cup of coffee in hand, when I do it again. I transpose the letters in a headline in such a way as to completely alter the meaning of the headline with considerable comic effect (to me, anyhow).
Today's humdinger was:

STIMULUS LAW BOLSTERS FOOD BANK OFFERINGS

which I read as:

STIMULUS LAW: LOBSTERS FOOD BANK OFFERINGS

leaving me to think, "Man, that's some lucky food bank!"

Nicholas Rombes and his Magnum Opus: The Cultural Dictionary of Punk

Miss Edith likes her Peggy Lee, don't get me wrong, but there's times that call for something a little stronger, and when those times come, Miss Edith turns to her trusty pals from CBGB's. She streaks her hair blonde in her mind and plays "Atomic" (That's Blondie, for you fools who don't know) really fucking loudly. Oh, yes.

My close friends, and even some casual associates, know this well. Which is why I was surprised -- and then not surprised at all, really -- when a bookseller friend of mine, Kate H., appeared at my house the other day with a book for me. "We got this in," she said, "and I whipped out my wallet. Here!" Then she stood, waiting, waiting to see the expression on my face when I unwrapped the book (which she had, in excellent style, wrapped in old newsprint).

When I saw The Cultural Dictionary of Punk (recently published by Continuum, the folks who did those completely awesome 33 1/3 books), I think I smiled so big and so hard my cheeks hurt. Kate is a doll. I immediately began flipping through it and knew right away that this was gonna be one FUN book to read.

Miss Edith read it from cover to cover, though not in one sitting. (Life doesn't allow me that luxury anymore; I have, believe it or not, Things To Do.) Every chance I had, I was sitting down with that book: with my morning coffee; with a drink at the end of the day. I had my quibbles with it -- this is a highly subjective little book -- but in general I had to admire Rombes' work, which is passionate and filled with interesting details I didn't know.

I have two real issues with the book, one of which is that several entries are really these personal discourses on some obviously serious problems that have arisen in Rombes' life; I'm not trying at all to make light of them, but the texts relating to them did read sort of weirdly in relation to entries on the glories of the Ramones first three albums. I often thought that Rombes should have just written The Cultural Dictionary of Punk and then done a shorter, tighter memoir discussing what happened to his sister... ooo! Have I said too much?

My second issue (and this is, I realize, truly wishful thinking) is that the book does not come with a CD (or a list of links to recordings online) of many of the songs Rombes discusses. Over and over again he has long discussions of songs that he describes as, you know, bloodcurdlingly perfect examples of this that or the other, and Miss Edith said, "OH MAN I GOTTA HEAR THAT NOW!" and ran to the computer, only to discover that there was pretty much no way she was gonna hear those songs; they're not available on iTunes, and frankly, with stuff like this, it'd be easy to spend waaay too much time and money hunting down obscure 45s. I ardently wish that Rombes had found a way to make a companion CD (or, again, online, streaming -- not even necessarily downloadable) archive of these songs so that readers of the book could have understood more fully the glories of the music he was talking about.

It's not that every song should be included in this compilation; I mean, anyone can find the first Ramones album, or Marquee Moon (that's Television, people: Television). But there must have been at least a dozen really out there songs by, you know, punk bands from Cleveland that existed for about three minutes, that Rombes talks about so tantalizingly that I basically wanted to shoot myself when I wasn't able to listen to them RIGHT THEN.

Well, listen: don't let my griping deter you. If you've got any interest whatsoever in punk rock, punk culture, punk whatever, then this book deserves a half inch of space on your shelf. By all fucking means.
http://culturaldictionaryofpunk.blogspot.com/

I saw the garnish, I knew what it was, and I ate it.

Miss Edith is older than she used to be and to celebrate, Notarius took her out for a lush, rich meal at a lush, very High Design restaurant in town.

The appetizer? Mine was a little... weird; my beloved's was, he tells me, divine.
The entrees? Both wonderful.

The drinks we ordered were also very nice: I had a Pimm's Cup and he had a mint julep. My drink came with a little slice of cucumber stuck over the rim of the glass, as is traditional. Notarius's drink, on the other hand, was garnished with something that, in the dim light, I could not identify at all. I peered at it from across the table and wondered if it was, perhaps, a stalk of pickled parsnip; or, maybe a very long piece of raw ginger? The garnish was maybe three inches long and a quarter of an inch thick; it wasn't a small object by any means. (Well, as far as it goes with things you would find garnishing an alcoholic beverage.) I asked him, "What is that thing in your drink?"

Notarius confessed that he had no idea. I took it from the glass and carefully bit into the end that wasn't residing in the drink. It had a sweetness to it and a slight crunch, but could not be bitten through. It was incredibly fibrous. I spent five minutes putting the end of this thing into my mouth and lowering my teeth experimentally, and couldn't guess what the hell it was. "I thought maybe it was from the core of a pineapple," Notarius said, "But I don't think it is."

Finally I asked our waitress what the fuck it was sticking out of the glass, and she said, "It's sugar cane."

Sugar cane.

Talk about something I never would have guessed.

Mystery solved, I returned to my drink, with its comfortingly familiar cucumber garnish. I took a bite of the cucumber and then popped the rest of it into my mouth. "I saw the garnish, I knew what it was, and I ate it," I said happily.

Notarius Gives Me Gold

I know there are a zillion other jokes like this around, but...

The other day, out of nowhere -- long after Easter, please note -- Notarius turned to me and said, "Wouldn't it be great if they made marshmallow Peeps but instead of being little chicks they looked like Samuel Pepys?"

This is the man I married.

Just something I thought some of you might enjoy.

I'm having trouble making the linking thingy work, for which I'm really sorry, so let me just say, Please, cut and paste this into your browser and read.

http://newhavenreview.com/index.php/2009/05/27/bostons-neat-graffitist-vs-new-havens-random-acts-of-text/

For fans of random artiness, fans of Eric Kraft, and members of the general populace seeking momentary distraction from the suckitude of your daily existence.

Shameless Plug for Laurie Colwin Tribute at the New Haven Review

Miss Edith has many obsessions, but very high on the list is the oeuvre of Laurie Colwin.
So she is very happy to be able to tell her readers that a small magazine, the New Haven Review, has decided to publish a collection of tribute essays in honor of Colwin. The contributors are all impressive in their own rights, and include: Deborah Eisenberg (who wrote one of my all-time favorite stories, Rafe's Coat), Anna Quindlen, Thisbe Nissen (author of the high-quality Colwin ripoff The Good People of New York), Colwin's daughter Rosa Jurjevics, and Willard Spiegelman.

The New Haven Review can be purchased for a few bucks -- visit www.newhavenreview.com for details.

Literary Marshmallows

I'm sorry that I didn't act on this while I had the issues of these magazines still in the house, but you'll have to bear with me because I can't get this strange factoid out of my head.

I think it was two weeks ago that I got in the mail the latest issue of the New Yorker and the Atlantic, one right after the other. Nothing unusual there. What is unusual, it seems to me, is that each magazine used the word "marshmallow" in a featured article. I know this doesn't sound particularly interesting but what are the odds of a word like that, which has, usually, no place in magazine writing (that is, non-foodie magazine writing), appearing in both the New Yorker and the Atlantic in the same week?

In one case (and determined readers can find the articles online, I'm sure, if they wish -- Miss Edith is too lazy to hunt, herself), there was a piece discussing a psychological test given to kids which involved self-restraint and eating marshmallows. And in the other case, a man was being described as looking like a marshmallow.

In the meantime, Miss Edith will start daydreaming about s'mores.

John Updike: A Very Special Sitcom

Miss Edith has spent time fantasizing about all sorts of odd things but never once did it occur to me that there was a sitcom based on a work by John Updike in the offing.

Saints preserve us.

Well, here it is, folks. Today's New York Times let me know that there's going to be a sitcom based on The Witches of Eastwick, entitled Eastwick. A more media-savvy person would have known this some months ago, but me, I rely on the Times for my television news (which is pathetic and sad, but there it is).

I had wondered if maybe this was all coming about only because Updike was finally dead and someone could get away with this, but apparently it's been in the works a long time, so, so much for that piece of cynicism.

But it's just so weird.

Eastwick. Starring a whole bunch of people I don't care about. Tune in, everybody...

An Unusual Subject for Miss Edith: Personal Hygiene -- One Woman's Rant Against Liquid Soap

I realize that this isn't the sort of thing I normally write about -- Miss Edith is a clean woman if not a good one, which means that while I do think about domestic and personal hygiene, I'm not prone to writing about it or even pontificating about it. Lord knows there are a lot of blogs out there that do just that -- and some of them are, actually, entertaining, informative, etc. etc., and that's just lovely.

But recently Miss Edith read an article -- I think it was in the New York Times, but I can't honestly remember; I would link to it if I could remember -- which was about handwashing. The article was inspired by the recent swine flu epidemic, and was really a sort of public service announcement reminding folks that handwashing is the best way to prevent getting sick.

Miss Edith has no problem with that.

The article reminded the reader that a person should always wash his or her hands after using the bathroom, and made the point that at the very least, even if one fancies oneself scrupulously clean, touching the latches on public bathroom stalls would be in and of itself reason to wash one's hands after using the bathroom. "How often," the article's author asked, if I remember correctly, "How often do you think someone washes those latches?"

Which is a fine point, and I take it, etc. etc.

But then, the author of the article said something that really stuck in my craw, which I've been pondering ever since. The article urged us all to use liquid soap from a pump rather than bar soap, because bar soap is, I guess, less hygienic in and of itself beacuse bacteria can, they say, linger on the soap.

This irked me.

Because here's the thing: you have to touch the soap pump in order to use liquid soap -- and things splash on those liquid soap containers, and, basically, the amount of crud that accumulates on liquid soap containers can be enough to make me wonder why anyone thinks they're actually neater or superior to bar soap. If you ask me, a liquid soap pump is just one more thing in the bathroom that needs to be washed. If no one's cleaning the bathroom latches or doorknobs, seriously, how many people do you think are cleaning the liquid soap dispenser?

(For the record: I have a liquid soap dispenser at my kitchen sink, and I do wash it pretty regularly; basically, every time I handle raw meat or poultry, I have to touch it to wash my hands, and then, yes, I wash the dispenser. It's annoying.)

So in the end, doesn't it make more sense to use bar soap, which doesn't have to be washed, because it is soap? Maybe in a public restroom a liquid soap dispenser makes more sense. But at home, I think I will make sure that all the sinks just have a simple bar of soap next to them. Screw liquid soap. Just screw it. A bar of soap, regularly used, has to be just as good, just as safe, if not better and safer (and let's not even get into the whole environmentally sound packaging mishegas) than an overpriced plastic bottle with a cruddy schmutzy pump dispenser on its top.

Peapod Grocery Delivery: is it pornography, or is my mind in the gutter?

Miss Edith enjoys having groceries delivered, and frequently avails herself of the Peapod service offered by Stop and Shop.

As a result, the email inbox is occasionally visited by promotional emails from Peapod. Which is fine. And they're mostly inocuous and sometimes even helpful.

This fine morning, however, I was greeted by a subject line that really did cause my jaw to drop, and I'm not sure if that's Peapod's fault or the result of my own filthy mind:

Hot Meat Specials For Mother's Day

Oh, my.

Hershey's Thingamajig: I'll Take It

Miss Edith is not above gorging herself on chocolate, preferably the kind you buy at drug stores. Some people insist on fancy dark chocolates, and some people will eat milk chocolate as long as it's Swiss or some such nonsense. Miss Edith, however, is happy to eat a Nestle Crunch, a tube of Rolos, or even a Charleston Chew.

Sure thing.

This week, browsing the candy aisle at Walgreen's, I noticed a candy bar I'd never seen before -- a new Hershey product called a Thingamajig. Figuring it was some variant form of a Whatchamacallit, which I enjoy, I glanced at the wrapper to make sure it didn't have anything truly disgusting in it (like some weird fruit flavor -- nothing ruins chocolate for me like the addition of fruit or alcohol) and upon reading that it was a chocolate bar with cocoa crisps and peanut butter, I thought, "All right, then!" and tossed it into my basket.

I've just consumed the Thingamajig and am heartily recommending it to my readers, all three point five of you. Go find this thing. It won't change your life or anything, but it certainly will increase your quality of life while you're eating it.

Thanks, Hershey. Now, would you please figure out how to make and market Chanukkah gelt that doesn't taste godawful?

How things suddenly come together completely inexplicably: Some Thoughts on Making Fried Rice at Home

For years Miss Edith has been a fan of fried rice of the sort you get at Chinese restaurants. Obviously some fried rice is better than others, but basically it's pretty much all good and I can't recall any fried rice that I refused to eat on the grounds of it being too disgusting.

However, I've never been able to make fried rice at home. I know, I know, you have to start with cold, cooked rice; done that. It didn't matter. I'd never made a pan of fried rice worth eating. After several years of trying a few times a year, I eventually gave up, figuring, "Ok, this Just Is Not Worth It."

I then read somewhere that it's nearly impossible for Americans to cook decent Chinese food on their home stoves because the burners don't get nearly as hot as the burners in professional kitchens. This, I can easily believe, and I thought, "Well, fine then; from now on, I will satisfy my jones for fried rice by just buying it from the Chinese takeout places in town, and stop feeling guilty about not making it at home."

Last week, though, I found myself incredibly hungry for lunch and staring into a refrigerator that held many fine comestibles but nothing that was immediately and obviously Lunch. My eye fell on a rather large quantity of cold leftover rice and I thought, "You know, I'll do fried rice. I'm so hungry, even if it sucks, I'll eat it."

So I got out a nice big frying pan (we do not own a wok; never saw the point in acquiring one), heated up some peanut oil, and chopped up the on-their-way-to-sadness scallions that were in the bottom of the vegetable bin. I also had a little onion and some garlic, so I tossed those into the peanut oil. When all the members of the allium family (did I get that right?) were smelling heavenly, I began to crumble the rice into the pan. I stirred efficiently and expertly, as if I'd done this a million times. I turned to beat an egg in a little bowl, and uncapped a bottle of soy sauce and opened my bottle of rooster sauce. Dousing the rice with soy and rooster sauce, I noticed that somehow, for the first time, the stuff in the pan looked like... fried rice. And it smelled incredibly good, like.... proper fried rice. I thought, "Huh." And kept stirring.

I pushed most of the rice toward the edges of the pan, and poured the beaten egg into the middle of the pan. I carefully drew the rice through the egg, and stirred gently for a few more minutes, and by the time the dish was done cooking I was practically floored by how decent the dish looked. Ladling some of the fried rice into a bowl, I thought, "I think I've finally made it." Somehow, after more than ten years of attempting fried rice, something had come together in my head, or in my technique, or something, and I'll never know what, but let me tell you:

It wasn't fancy; there were no shrimps; there wasn't even any chicken. But that was one really, really good bowl of fried rice.
Victory.

Let's see if I'm ever able to pull it off again...

Cadbury Creme Eggs

If you are not a fan of Cadbury Creme Eggs, feel free to utterly ignore this post.
Miss Edith has long been a fan of this creamy, chocolatey, sticky treat, and splurges on them when they become available every spring. (Notarius prefers those candy-coated Cadbury eggs, which I think are horrid, but buy for him anyway because I am slavishly devoted to him... so -- to each his or her own. As long as I can have my Cadbury Creme Eggs.)

This year I note with some sadness that the eggs seem to be smaller than they used to be. Am I just getting old? Are my eyes playing tricks on me? I don't think so. I think that the economy is tanking, and the cost of chocolate has gone up, and that Cadbury is tweaking their product so as to cut costs. And I understand it, but it still makes me very, very sad.

Note: I just went and Googled "Cadbury Creme Eggs Smaller" and discovered that the change was made some time ago... and they really ARE smaller, it's not a trick my eyes are playing on me... so clearly I skipped the eggs last year, and thus didn't really notice the reduction of egg size until this year. In other words, I'm running a couple years late on this one.

I am sad nonetheless.

Shovel Ready

Miss Edith doesn't know for sure where this term came from -- "shovel ready" -- but she's already sick of it.
I looked online and apparently someone's found a citation for it going back to 1995. So we're looking at ten years of shovel-readiness. Fine. But I don't like it, I don't want to hear it anymore, and as far as I'm concerned, when you hear the phrase "shovel ready" you should get ready to be shoveling some shit.

Pardon Miss Edith's French.

Don Martin is Writing for CNN.com

This morning, Miss Edith very much appreciated a headline on CNN.com:

Wife Twacks Intruder with Emeril Pan

Twacks?

"It's like "thwonk," said Notarius, nodding sagely.

The video clip shows a genteel woman in her lovely home telling her story of how she whacked some young thug upside the head, which he doubtless deserved. However, the pan I saw her grab looked like a piece of Calphalon, not Emerilware. (I may be mistaken but I usually have a good eye for this sort of thing.)

I wonder now if they really meant to write "thwacks." But really, who cares. "Twack." Hee hee hee.

Salmon Loaf

Untold years ago we were bequeathed -- and I use the word carefully -- a can of salmon. Just a can of Bumble Bee salmon. You'd've thought it was gold.

Two weeks ago I finally decided it was time to use the thing, but I frankly had no idea what one does with a can of salmon. After careful consideration and perusal of many cookbooks, I decided on salmon loaf. I figured if America lived on it in the 1930s and 1940s, it must have something going for it.

I was wrong. The stuff is vile. Our cat, however, adores it, and I've been using the leftovers (i.e., nearly all of the pan's worth; Notarius and I each ate one slice and that was that) to give our beloved cat his thyroid medication.

The cat looooooves his salmon loaf. I can't believe I'm even thinking this, but it may be that when he finishes this salmon loaf, I might have to buy another can of this shit just so he can have it. He's old. He deserves this godawful stuff, if it makes him happy.

The Criterion Collection

Miss Edith is not only a somewhat compulsive proofreader, she's also a fan of the Criterion Collection, which has put out really nice DVDs of so many wonderful movies. True, many of them are not to Miss Edith's taste -- let's face it, anything too arty is gonna just put her to sleep -- but she admires the outfit for its determination, its style, and its taste.

So I was rather distressed when I noticed, in yesterday's New York Times Magazine (actually, today's, now I think about it -- but we get it on Saturdays), an ad for the Criterion Collection's new release of classic 80s arty flick El Norte. Why?

Because they describe it as a "groundbreaking independant film."

Even as I type this into Blogger, the word "independant" gets the program's attention as a typo.

Couldn't some copyeditor, or just... some person have caught this? Because it really makes them look stupid. You'd think that every soul working at the Criterion Collection would know how to spell the word "independent."

One comment on the Obama inaguration

Aretha Franklin:

Great hat.

Perfect.