Please enjoy a photo of a Robo Hamster
My daughter thinks my blog should have more photos of Robo Hamsters and, because I haven’t been feeling very funny lately (possibly because I work at a funeral home and there are just so many dead people here), I have decided to heed her advice:
Robo Hamster!
Also, please know that if you would like to buy my affection, giving me a Robo Hamster (plus cage, bedding and food) would be a good place to start.
A second Robo Hamster!
P.S.
It’s actually short for “Roborovski,” not “Robot.”
Sorry.
Unicorn horns for all! Especially cats!
I want an inflatable unicorn horn for my cat.
Not so much because I love unicorns (but who doesn’t love unicorns, amiright?), but because my cat is a jerk.
I love that the ad declares “Cats love it!”, because, shyeah, like cats love anything.
Magical magnetic marvelous gloves!
So my boss got these new gloves that have magnets on the sides so they hook together and you don’t lose one when you take them off.
Which would be really cool, except I know that I’d end up stuck to a flagpole or something and then, after they have to call the fire department to come save me like Flick in A Christmas Story, they’d say: “Why didn’t you just take off your gloves?”
“Because my hands would get cold!”
“No, seriously, what’s WRONG with you?”
Please don’t ask me that
I want people to stop calling/coming in to the funeral home and greeting me with “How are you?”
Because it’s rude if I don’t respond in kind, but I hate to do it because if you’re coming into a funeral home, chances are you’re not doing so good.
And if you’re all like: “I’m great! Ding dong, the witch is dead!”, then I think I hate you.
The wicker chair conundrum
When I was young, my neighbors had a wicker chair. It was so cool. It was the best chair ever. I wanted that chair SO BAD. I couldn’t wait to become a grownup so I could buy my very own wicker chair.
Ta-da!
(For some reason, my parents didn’t want one.)
That wicker chair sat in my neighbors’ living room like some grand, magnificent creature. A veritable peacock among chairs! Their couch and recliner practically curdled up in envy.
I said: Ta-da!
Oh, how I wanted a wicker chair. In fact, ALL the wicker chairs!
Including you, preciousssssss.
“Can I sit on it?” I asked my neighbors, my greedy little eyes absorbing all the beauty of that wondrous seating apparatus.
“Oh, God, no,” they said.
My heart broke a little that day, but I burned with a new resolve: To save up all the moneys and buy my own wicker chair and then I would put it in our living room and maybe watch a little TV while sitting in it, but mostly just look cool and have my family envy me.
They’d be so jealous.
“Sure, honey,” said my mother in a voice that didn’t sound particularly envious, but probably she was just hiding it.
And the day finally came. I saved up ten whole dollars, and she agreed to take me to the import store. And there — lo and behold — was a wicker chair. Maybe not as awe-inspiring as my neighbors’, but still.
Ta-da a third time!
It was, indeed, out of my price range, but I figured I could talk my mother into spotting me the rest of the money. And so I decided to take a test sit.
Now, mind you, I was not a particularly pudgy child. In fact, most people would have described me as “underweight,” once they got tired of using the word “scrawny.”
So I sat in the chair of my dreams.
“Crunch,” it said.
“What was that sound, Mom? Was that the sound of my dreams dying?”
“Quick, let’s run,” my mother said.
And that’s the story of why I still don’t have a wicker chair.
Just like the bears!
I want to hibernate under my bed until winter is gone, but I’m afraid my family would start asking some awkward questions.
“Are you wallowing in your own filth under there?”
“…Maybe?”
Candied bacon, all the time
Ever since one of my coworkers got married and had the best wedding cake ever, I have been craving candied bacon. (She actually had a variety of wedding cakes, but the best one was the cupcakes with bacon on them, because bacon.)
And so, after some experimentation (a.k.a. “googling”), I found a wonderful recipe, care of Lords of Bacon (a.k.a. “my heroes”) for candied bacon.
Thank you, Lords of Bacon, for your service to our world.
Now, I know this isn’t a recipe blog, it’s a humor blog (supposedly. I mean, I laugh at it, but I’ve always thought I was rather clever), but I still think (most of) you guys deserve the recipe for candied bacon, so here it is:
- Take some bacon. Probably about a pound or so. In a large bowl, pour some brown sugar. Roll the bacon in the brown sugar — one at a time is probably best, because, while wads of bacon are yummy, wads of candied bacon make a considerable mess — and place it on the baking tin that you probably should have already prepared by covering with tin foil and then spraying the tin foil with cooking spray. (Lords of Bacon and other blogs recommend some sort of wire rack for cookies goes on top of this, but who the hell has one of those? You can always tell your guests that the pieces of tin foil you couldn’t manage to peel off the bacon is the prize or something.)
Yeah, look at this fancy-pants candied bacon on its highfalutin wire rack.
- After all the bacon has been rolled in the brown sugar and placed on the baking tin or cookie wire rack or whatever, toss them in the oven. I mean, keep them on the tin or wire rack, and put them carefully in the oven. Which should have been set at 350 degrees. (I’m sorry. This is why this isn’t a cooking blog.) If you’ve got any leftover brown sugar, you might as well sprinkle it over the top of the bacon well before it goes into the oven, or you’ll probably burn yourself.
- The bacon should cook for about 30 minutes. Around the halfway mark, you’re supposed to take some tongs and flip the bacon over, but that’s really hard to do so I usually skip that step. If you’ve left the bacon in long strips, 30 minutes should be about right. If you’ve cut them in half, say, on your mother’s recommendation, then 30 minutes will probably be too long and you shouldn’t get complacent just because it was right the first time you tried it and let the bacon burn. So for bacon cut in half, it’s probably more like 25 minutes.
- Of course, this all depends on your oven, so I actually recommend just checking the bacon every few minutes at the end, because you want it crispy, but not burnt. The reason you want it crispy is because it is covered in brown sugar, which makes it a bit soggy, so if the bacon doesn’t get crispy, it will be like trying to eat sugar/bacon-flavored glue.
- Anyway, once the bacon reaches that state of perfection, remove it from the oven and let it cool for a while. Remember those tongs you should’ve used halfway through but probably didn’t? Go ahead and use them now to transfer the bacon to a plate with wax paper on it, peeling off as much tin foil as possible and giving the tin-foily bacon to your least favorite people.
And there you go! You have now achieved nirvana.
Yeah, sorry about that, vegans.
My kingdom for a tropical fruit
I want a coconut.
Here’s one now!
Actually, I want two dried-out halves of a coconut and a manservant.
It will make traveling by pretend horse so much more entertaining.
The best instrument of all, ever?
I want a boomwhacker.
These colorful tubes are actually instruments that you play by repeatedly smashing them against the ground.
It’s no boomstick, but it’ll do.
Wait, is that thing even an instrument?
Why am I ambivalent about Awake?
I want to like Awake. I want to like it a lot more than I do.
I mean, I was really looking forward to this show. Really looking forward to it. Back when they showed the 2011-2012 season previews, Awake was the only thing I was excited about.
“Ooooh,” I said. “A man gets in a car crash and, in one version of his life, his wife is killed, and in the other, it’s his teenaged son instead? And he’s living out both versions of his life, and one of them is possibly a dream? How interesting!”
I see what they're going for with this poster, but I don't like it one bit.
(I often recap things when exclaiming in wonder to myself.)
So, with bated breath and all, I awaited the pilot episode, which finally aired, like, 27 months after the trailer. Or only five or something, I don’t know. And the pilot was awesome. The main character (a detective played by the very excellent Jason Isaacs) explains his predicament to two different psychiatrists, both of whom are convinced the other psychiatrist is the dream, deals with losing his wife, or his son, except actually not at all.
In the world where his wife is alive, he wears a red rubber band on his wrist, and it’s all shot in shades of gold and red, and Fez from That ’70s Show is the rookie partner who’s been assigned to spy on him. In the world where his son is the survivor, he wears a green rubber band, and everything is shot in shades of blues and green, and his partner is Steven Harris, who is just as scary as ever and also, I think, doesn’t age.
I mean, look at him! He looks exactly the same as he did when he first showed up on Homicide back in the last millennium! I mean, FEZ looks older than him! (And, yes, I'm calling him Fez because I can't spell Wilder Valderrama's last name. Double letters are my Kryptonite.)
My favorite bits in the pilot episode come near the end.
The first is that the main character’s wife is aware he’s been dreaming (?) about their son, and in his dreams (?), their son is alive and well, and moving on with his life. And she doesn’t want to hear about her husband’s dreams (?), because, to her, their son is dead. But at the end, as they get into bed for the night, she turns to her husband and asks him to tell their son she loves him. It’s a really beautiful moment.
I'm also very fond of the robe they keep putting her in. It looks so soft!
And the other is when the psychiatrists are trying to “cure” Michael of his split realities, and he’s like: “Um, look, I don’t want to be cured, because if this is some sort of mental illness, it’s one where I still have a wife and a son, so, you know — I’m good.” (Only he says it more moving than that.)
So, yeah, the pilot was supra-great!
And then it gets all kind of mediocre-y after that. Like, not living up to the promise of its premise, and other slant rhymes, I’m sure. And I keep waiting for it to be as awesome as it could be, instead of a kind of boring procedural with some rather obvious plot points (like the son beats up his friend after the friend accidentally breaks the son’s tennis racquet and no one can figure out why he would do such a thing, and I’m all like, “Duh, characters on television, it was obviously his mom’s tennis racquet!”) and a few places here and there where the different worlds seem to leak into one another. (And this leaking doesn’t have as dire of consequences as on, say, Fringe. It’s more like the main character sees something in one world and it helps him solve crimes in the other world! And then everyone’s like, “How did you think of that?” And he’s like, “Uh, I’m Batman?”)
"You know, because that sounds less crazy than 'I saw it in a dream.'"
So, yeah, I want to like Awake as much as I was hoping to like it, but it’s really got to work a lot harder to earn my love.
Like, B.D. Wong and Cherry Jones could meet in one of the worlds and totally fist-fight over who's a better psychiatrist.
Yeah, I'd watch that show.
