Why don't you know yourself any better than that?

A friend of mine once told me, early on in our friendship, "I love food. I'll eat anything." After I met him face to face and started dealing with him on a daily basis, it didn't take too long for me to realize ... he's one of the most finicky eaters I had ever met. There were hundreds of foods on his "I will never eat that shit" list, even more on his "I tried that and it makes me sick just to think of eating it" and still more on his "Don't even bother trying to get me to eat that" list.

His mother later told me that of her three finicky children, he was far and away the most finicky of them.

How in the world do you get so out of touch with yourself that you can't even understand that you don't tolerate new foods and will tell a new friend "I will eat anything"? That statement is about 165 degrees from the actual situation.

I know, self-image has a lot to do with it. He believes that it's cool and suave to be a univeralist eater, therefore he thinks of himself as a universalist eater. But so badly in contrast to the truth?

The same fellow told me, around the same early stage of our acquaintance, that he was interested in knowing everything. I thought that was cool. I'm curious about so much, that I love learning things, reading up on how to do physical things, and trying them. Or else I'm curious about history. I love European history, and if you stuck a book in my hand about almost any kind of history, and suggested it (especially if you tell me you read it too and loved it), I'd put it in the stack of eager reading. Mind you, there are twenty other books in that stack so I might not get to it right away. But I'd want to. And probably would at least read parts of the book.

But this friend arrived in my life "eager to learn about everything under the sun" and immediately started telling me he wasn't interested in this, that, another thing, something else, and millions of other things. No, he had no interest in old houses, no he had no interest in historical sites, no, he had no interest in visiting museums, no he had no interest in going to the zoo. As it turns out, he was only interested in the sorts of documentaries that show up on crappy documentary networks like The History Channel, NatGeo, or in "pop" shows like "Mythbusters" and, God help us, "Ghost Hunters". I have determined that to be interested in Ghost Hunters, you have to have performed a one-hour lobotomy on yourself, similar to the one received by people who give a crap about "Top Model" or who slavishly follow the latest "Twilight" release.

So he got interested in Facebook when he met a girl who is slavish about her Facebook page. He had had a page for a while and ignored it for the most part. Now he can't stay away from it. He has traded playing World of Warcraft for staring at FB pages day and night. This is not an improvement, whatever his mom may say. These are people he doesn't give a shit about, but because they're stupid and vacuous and shallow and have to spread tentacles of social networkiness to feed their own reason for existing, he feels "connected". Well, he's connected to empty people and empty lives, but it's what his mom has been praying for over the last fifteen years--that her son would turn into a "normal" little redneck and quit isolating himself. Trust me, he's not the slightest bit less isolated than he was a year ago.

So he started feeding his FB site. He fed it information that wasn't any more true than that assertion that he'd "eat anything" or that he was "interested in knowing everything."

Mind you, he has a very very commodious brain. He could have put all sorts of subjects in there and become an expert on any of them. It took him till the age of 25 to feel any curiosity over anything. But the truth is, once he absorbed that feeling of curiosity, and indulged himself in it JUST long enough to pat himself on the back for being such a well-informed fellow, then he dumped any attempt to actually learn any of those fascinating subjects. And over the months, he's been slapping me pretty hard in the jaw whenever any of these subjects come up. "Oh, look," I'll say, "beautiful pictures of the Bay of Naples!" He'll ignore me and not even look. "Ooo!" I ejaculate, "This is a movie that came out a dozen years ago, it's about this amazing medieval battle in France. Six thousand English faced off against at least sixty thousand French, and won." You'd think anyone who was interested in knowing "everything" would turn around and look, but Facebook won out.

The truth is, he met a girl. She's mean-sprited, bitches about her family all the time, bitches about everything around her all the time, threatens other women with bodily harm if they come too close to the puppet she's taken over. She orders him around like a caged dog. She went to Transylvania University for one semester and dropped out before finals, but she has "College: Transylvania University" in her credentials on her "Info" page. She claims to like walks in the rain. She actually refuses to walk where her hair might get wet. She has aspirations to speak in lines of great poetic images, but her great images are trite to the point of being risible. She claims to be a great reader, then the titles she puts under "favorite books" are trash genre literature. If they had been great genre lit (good mysteries, good syfy, good historicals) then fine, but it's "teenage girl" crap, every title ending with the word "series".

But she sells herself well. Really well. And never stops selling herself to her new boyfriend. "I'm too kind" she says. Half an hour later, "I'm too good to people I know" and he believes her, no matter how badly her words vary from the truth. We've seen what she really is--bitchy, mean, complaining constantly, accusing, jealous, ready to fly into a rage at any moment. He's afraid of her temper. I told him once, "Good thing SHE didn't see you do that," and his eyes popped out and he nodded, "Yeah, no kidding." But he'll tell you, she's the sweetest girl on earth, and fully believe that. How can she be the sweetest girl on earth when you're that afraid of her?

"I'm a sweet moonbeam" she extolled herself. I strongly doubt it. If you're so sweet, why do you get on MSNMessenger for hours at a time complaining about what crap your parents and sisters are? When does your mouth stop bitching? Oh, wait, I'm forgetting the Y factor--the boy you trapped and enslaved. He thinks he's saving you from your evil family. That increases his importance, you know, so keep up the bullshit, honey, you're only fooling one person on this planet.

Meanwhile, back to his list of interests. He says he likes "running". He told me when he got dropped off the bus back when he was in high school (graduation date, seven and a half years ago), he ran home. Less than a quarter of a mile, mostly uphill. And that's the only time I've ever heard of him running anywhere. He likes parkour. What he means is, he likes looking at parkour videos and he likes going to the parkour page to have an excuse not to crack open an actual book and read it, or get himself down to the parkour place and do the jumps and handstands the other little boys are doing.

He likes travel. Excuse me while I cry. The guy who fought against going three miles from the house likes travel. Sigh.

When he grows up, he wants to major in business and start a company that will flourish on defense contracts. His company will develop weapons for peace and he will be a billionaire. And yet he can't talk to people, he hates any kind of confrontation, he won't delegate responsibility, he can't assert himself to save his soul. Every other person poses a threat to him. Even his mother, a control freak that knows no bounds, looks at her son and sees a namby-pamby person with no people skills. And he refuses to study up on the subject of communication.

He loves Iron Man 2. That's his hero, Tony Stark. He wants to be Tony Stark. And he saw his dombitch as Penny. He sent her a picture of Tony and Penny with their foreheads together, almost kissing, and asked her to put it up as her FB avatar. She did, then took it down the next day, because she couldn't live without a photo of her own ugly face up there. (Back near the beginning of their acquaintance, he showed me her photo album. Two hundred damn pictures, almost exclusively her own face and nothing but her own face. Yes, many of them were in the "fat broad" angle, shooting down from above so as to minimize the fat, since she had been fat in the recent past but had lost the weight. Needless to say she couldn't part with even one picture of herself. The rest of the lot had her posed with her head turned, chin angled toward her uplifted shoulder, glaring at the lens through her eyebrow; it's the "I'm too much woman for you to handle" pose. And seeing almost two hundred of those (often in series, she obviously held up the cell phone and took five pics in a row and was so enamored of all five poses she couldn't live without any of them), I wanted to vomit. The only FB photo album I've ever seen with that much conceit came from a professional model whose job it was to promote herself furiously. And even the model limits herself to about two hundred photos of herself.

This is why he picked a domineering bitch who would tell him what to do for the rest of his life. They had known each other less than a week when she was already telling him she didn't like his having another woman around him and gave him the silent treatment until he agreed to do her will. A week after that she demanded "in a relationship" as his FB status. By that time she was already cybering him and demanding his tongue be used on her body parts, his fingers placed in various orifices. Not good enough, she told him to bring condoms to their dates at the movie theatre, so that they could fuck if they ever got the theatre to themselves again. And after just two months, she demanded they get married, and ordered him to change his FB status to "engaged."

This poor, weak guy who hooked up with one of the nastier women in Laurel county is planning to be a CEO. I think he'd be smarter planning on being stuck in the mail room, and let the bitch be the CEO.

Ellen DeGeneres's new ad: "Some fashion models look so mad!"

I saw a new (new to me, of course, but that doesn't mean it hasn't been around a while, I don't watch the ads much) ad with Ellen Degeneres as the spokeswoman for Cover Girl and Olay makeups.

"Some fashion models look so mad!" she began. I'm so glad someone besides me noticed. They slump down the runway and they're supposed to show this angry attitude. "I dare you!" it says. I'm not sure what nitwit decided this chip-on-my-shoulder attitude made the dresses more appealing, but it's been the style for over twenty years. But then, so has a lot of other crap.

Ms Degeneres, you earned a Good Point in my book.

Track Lighting is trash

I hate track lighting.

Yes, I know it's popular and in big demand, but then so have a lot of things been in demand in spite of the fact that the design stank. Take for instance the flat roof. The people who were busy building them knew perfectly well that they trapped water, began to sag from the weight of the trapped water, and began to leak within just a few years of completing the house. BUT the flat roof said "Hey, I'm new, modern, exciting, the latest fashion! YOU WANT ME!!!!" and that's how a stupid damned fashion gets disseminated and perpetrated.

Take for example the Euro sink. An ugly basin with a raised collar edge, dropped into a hole in a counter and sitting there above the surface. You spill water, you PICK IT UP, rather than just wiping it into the sink with your hand and then drying it with a towel. There is no other way to get water and other bathroom debris into that damned thing. Toothpaste spatter? Wipe it UP, not wipe it in. Well, perhaps there was a benefit in that your diamond engagement ring was less likely to get accidentally knocked in. What about wet spills in the kitchen? Pick them up, presumably with a dry-ish dish cloth. A few peelings from the cucumbers flipped over thataway? Pick them up, you can't just push them sideways into the garbage disposal. Yes, there was a minor advantage in that the new euro sink you installed could add an inch of basin depth without your having to lower the plumbing under the sink instead. And then there's that precious advantage of being in fashion. Mustn't ignore that, because to the weak-minded, that's all that matters.

Granite countertops are another example. Hideously expensive, sickeningly impractical, capable of being deliciously pretty or hideously ugly, the granite countertop is never questioned as the height of what every homeowner should want in their kitchen. Never mind that they chip your best china, break glasses just because you were inattentive for a moment when you set the glass down, are flat as a pancake and allow any and all of your spills to flow onto the floor or worse, onto your belly. You're forced to use a cutting board for even the most minor of jobs or you'll dull your knives. The granite chips, forcing you to get it repaired. most people can't afford both the countertop and the backsplash so they have a tile backsplash installed (it looks so much better anyway) and they may as well have had an entire tile countertop (with the front edge raised as in days of yore) installed in the first place. But no, that offends the fashionable eye. It's dated.

So, back to the track lighting. Remember the kitchen with a huge lighting area that spread from one side of the ceiling to the other? Garish, unsubtle, bright, greenish-white, usually from an ugly home-made aluminum frame and cheap plastic "suspended ceiling" panels. But fluorescent light had its advantages. Almost no dark areas in the kitchen was probably the best one. Because the bulbs used so little electricity, the lighting could cover the whole room. Shadows were never an issue except around the stove where your range hood had an extra light for you to see better.

Whose brilliant idea was it to put spotlights over some of the counters in your kitchen? I'm sure it works, mostly, but any area that doesn't have a spotlight on it, you have to move your work into a brighter area. Of course, if they're incandescent lights, the lighted area is a more pleasant color than that glaring fluorescent green-white yutz we used to have back in the Seventies. On the other hand, a kitchen with some good areas and some weaker areas isn't a good kitchen, sorry. But that's what's POPULAR and impracticality be damned. So over the last three decades, we've gotten used to it, and anything brighter is "ugly". Find me a better option, please. Maybe a strip of light (quasi-fluorescent) with a nice golden candlelight color (NOT AMBER!) and not as glaringly strong as it used to be?

Fads. You can take 'em and stuff 'em. But that's another post altogether.

Decibels

It's not pronounced "decibles" (deh sih buls).

This unit of measurement of the volume of the sound you're listening to was coined (or invented, if you will) by a fellow named "Bel", pronounced "bell". His name deserves not to be turned into a schwa.

DESSIH BELL mkay?

If you can't accept my (very solid) authority on this, here is the dictionary.com link for the word, which includes the pronunciation, which just happens to be correct: