Where the Battle of Algiers rages on ...Rick's Cafe Americain

I wonder if Dawn cares about the Winter Olympics now?

Last December, after we had been dating for around 7 months, Carrie emailed me Quitting the Paint Factory: On the Virtues of Idleness, proving she already knew me quite well.

True to form, I printed out the article but it sat on my desk for the last 15 months, occassionally taunting me with its presence but usually buried under a pile of unread mail. I finally started reading the article last night.

Because I am moving on Sunday and was supposed to be packing. You sent me the article, Carrie, so you only have yourself to blame.

If you asked me if I would order women’s curling on pay-per-view I would probably ask if you hired a team of morons to write that question or came up with it all by your stupid self.

So why did I get to work at 10:30 this morning?

Everyone knows that TiVo is the greatest thing ever invented. That fire and the wheel were mere preludes to the day that I could spend a Sunday afternoon in Queens dragooned into helping my mother get her seasonal clothes into/out of the attic with the understanding that Sunday night I would be left alone to watch the prerecorded Saints game in a brisk 90 minutes. Still, every day I find that TiVo disappoints me.

For instance, I can no longer watch, on a TiVo enabled television, a commercial. I will press fast forward until blood starts to pool under the nail of my button pressing finger, so spoiled have I become. Also, if I change the channel and find myself in the middle of a show that I would have liked to have seen the beginning of I look to the heavens and bellow “TiVo, why have you forsaken me?”

In other words, I now blame a piece of home electronics precariously balanced atop my television for being unable to bend time to my whim. And I feel justified every time.

Just as a side note, the television show that inspired this was Lidia’s Family Table. I tuned in while she was making a shrimp and scallop gratinate and lobster brodetto. At the time, I was eating canned salmon. Directly from the can.

When I first saw this wasp that turns roaches into zombies and ultimately leaves the roach a dead shell of itself, I thought “How ingenious! Only evolution could have come up with such a thing!”

And then I remembered the law firm’s summer program.

(Via boingboing)

I didn’t have to enlist Rick or Carrie to redesign the blogroll!