2004-01-14 - 1:40 p.m.
Strange things going on, mostly disconnected due to lack of sleep and my own generally fragmented thinking.
I've been spending way too much time on James Lileks' website, especially the Gallery of Regrettable Food. Imagine my surprise when I saw the Better Homes and Gardens Meat Cook Book being extensively lampooned. Those old cookbooks from the '50s and '60s were instrumental in my early culinary development. It kinda makes me wince nowadays to see all the heavy sauces and fat usage, and what passed for ethnic cuisine. It's an interesting place; pokes fun at some of the cheesier aspects of design and commercial art from the '50s and '60s while still managing to be slightly nostalgic for it. I wonder if there will be retrospectives of cheesy ad art from the current epoch in 50 years?
One of our local radio stations has been undergoing a rather schizophrenic time. 104.1 WMLL started off as a hard-rock station, then switched to a retro-'80s format. (Impending sign of age here; when the music of your high school years gets its own radio station.) Around the middle of November, it switched to an all-Christmas format (my right eyelid is still twitching), which it maintained through the end of the year. Then for about eight days, it started calling itself "The Wheel of Music" and playing this incredibly wide range of songs. It was as if somebody had loaded all the CDs from the station's collection and hit "shuffle". All of a sudden you had Bananarama, Blur, Little Richard, The Beatles, and Johnny Cash all being played within minutes of each other. Darned interesting. Now they've revealed their new format: cocktail jazz. Sinatra, Johnny Mercer, Diana Krall, Tony Bennett, Louie Prima, you get the idea. There's even a few nods to the late-90s swingers. It's a rather adventurous decision, format-wise, since mostly you hear this stuff on AM radio. They're still playing pretty safe, though; no Martin Denny exotica or Esquivel freakouts. A little Combustible Edison or Sergio Mendes would really make things classy. (But that's just me.) Perfect station for those upcoming martini nights… KDHX still has 'em beat, even if all their cool shows are on during the day.
A question for all my loyal readers: am I thoroughly justified in freaking out when a complete stranger walks up and starts petting my daughter? We could be out shopping, or at a restaurant, or wherever, and some idiot comes up and starts poking at her. It's usually an older person, so I don't feel justified in getting all Beowulf on them, but in my book it shows a huge lack of manners. Any thoughts? Tactics? (It's weird; I know how to deliver a physical smackdown, but verbal ones are much harder for me.)
The weather's unseasonably warm, but I still crave cold-weather food. Soup, stews, Alsatian sauerkraut, heavy stuff like that. Gotta watch myself there.
I'm out; gonna take a little nap here…
