Archives: April 01, 2005

The powder sugar on this donut puts a semi-protective barrier between your fingerprint and your nutrition

Monday, 18 April 2005 10:59 AM

Hearing rumors that a certain ad campaign is being retired, Jonah Bloom of AdAge bids farewell to Miller's High Life man:

In an era when much advertising feels fake, especially brewers’ ads, which tend to depict too-preened girlymen prancing around predictably beautiful women, the High Life man has been an honest, authentic campaign that regular beer drinkers could relate to. More young men than ever before are deserting beer for fancy liquors and silly spritzers -- on-premise spirit sales grew an estimated 10% last year, while beer sales declined -- and here was a campaign reminding us real men drink beer. It played perfectly into the cultural backlash against metrosexuality, it spoke to those of us who still aspire to our stoic fathers and grandfathers, who built stuff, who knew stuff.

The column includes several of the ads, which are pleasingly low-key and clever, and worth the free AdAge site registration to watch one final time.

He's a swell guy

Thursday, 14 April 2005 11:22 AM

There's a video flying around the interwideweb you might enjoy. It's of a University of Wisconsin a capella group singing Nintendo themes. For me, it brought back fond memories of those many, many, many, many hours spent with Metroid, Donkey Kong Country, and the Legend of Zelda.

I hope you'll pardon another MIT-based reverie, but it also reminded me of MIT's co-ed a capella group, the Chorallaries. Their most famous song is "The Engineer's Drinking Song," which has many verses and grows yearly.

The Chorus goes like this:

We are, we are, we are, we are, we are the Engineers
We can, we can, we can, we can, demolish forty beers
Drink rum, drink rum, drink rum all day, and come along with us
'Cause we don't give a damn
For any old man
Who don't give a damn for us!

The first few verses have to do with Lady Godiva and one or more engineers:

Godiva was a lady who through Coventry did ride
To show the royal villagers her fine and pure white hide
The most observant man of all, an engineer of course,
Was the only one who noticed that
Godiva rode a horse

It's not exactly staid. Much of it is beyond crude. But then, it is a drinking song. The rest of the song deals with drinking, studying, the heaven and hell of MIT, and the joys of engineering.

A maiden and an Engineer were sitting in the park
The Engineer was working on some research after dark
His scientific method was a marvel to observe
While his right hand held the figures,
His left hand traced the curves

And then there are a number of verses dedicated to Harvard and other schools:

A friend in ol' New Haven called me up the other day.
He said he was depressed because he hadn't got an A.
I said to him, “You idiot! Why did you go to Yale?
If you had come to MIT
You'd still be on Pass/Fail!''

Although the Engineer's Drinking Song is fun to sing, my heart belongs to "He's a Swell Guy," which is sung to the tune of "The Halleluiah Chorus" from Handel's "Messiah" and has the same basic theme. I can't find the lyrics online, but basically the idea is that you can replace "halleluiah" with "he's a swell guy." Try it!

Keep in a few "halleluiahs" for variety, and then when you get to the bridge, sing this: "And he shall live for a very long time." Then end with "The Lord's O-K."

Handel would love it.

Sincerity is not enough

Saturday, 09 April 2005 01:40 PM

I had an interesting discussion about religion last night over cocktails, and I was troubled to have no strong religion of my own to espouse. It's not very fun defending a lack of religion -- I felt so uncommitted. So I was delighted this morning to discover (via the lovely Anne) what might be my solution:

People of the United States! We are Unitarian Jihad! We can strike without warning. Pockets of reasonableness and harmony will appear as if from nowhere! Nice people will run the government again! There will be coffee and cookies in the Gandhi Room after the revolution.

So I signed up:

My Unitarian Jihad Name is: Sister Spikey Mace of Looking at All Sides of the Question.

Get yours.

And my assigned name is very right on! I've never felt so immediately understood by an automated program before. Clearly there's something special here.

Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated. In a very reasoned, reasonable way.

Brad Bird on NPR

Wednesday, 06 April 2005 04:11 PM

Terry Gross of Fresh Air talks to my hero Brad Bird of Iron Giant and The Incredibles. You can hear it online.

Topics include the origins of The Incredibles, how their superpowers come from family archetypes, and his own most-desired superpower.

A harbinger of Spring

Monday, 04 April 2005 11:38 PM

This evening I enacted a yearly ritual: the Impulse Purchasing of Seeds to Rot in My Garage.

This year's enactment was typical of the ritual. I was at the local K-Mart in pursuit of something entirely other than seeds -- on this evening, contact lens solution, Q-Tips, and Scotch tape. On the way to the aisles of my planned purchases I was waylaid by sexy makeup displays. I'm addicted to makeup, especially eye shadow and nail polish, and I have no resistance to the standup displays that Revlon and L'Oreal use to push their latest formulations.

So two little nail polish bottles (B. Outrageous, which is a cheery yellow, and B. Rebellious, which is a sparkly black) found their way into my shopping basket and I commenced wandering the rest of the makeup aisle, searching for my personal Holy Grail: plum-colored mascara. Oh sure, I can get mascara in any color online (see: even red, which I can't imagine wearing but am tempted by anyway). The thing is, I want to be able to buy plum mascara locally, whenever I need it. But the only colors on the racks are variations of black, blacker black, brown, black, and so on, and so I am free to proceed with the rest of my shopping expedition.

I was by this point feeling mildly virtuous. Sure, I was sucked into buying two nail colors, but they were very small and I don't have anything like either of them. And I bought no eye makeup.

However, my resistance to further unnecessary purchases had been severely damaged by the makeup. Next I found myself wandering the stationery aisle, buying padded mailing envelopes in various sizes (on sale!) and searching for new types and sizes and colors of index cards. I located Scotch tape and saw that my shopping basket is overfull. Time to find an open cashier and end this farce.

I passed through the pet products aisle and averted my eyes from the cat toys. I could see the checkout -- I was on the home stretch!

And then I saw the rack of Martha Stewart brand seed packets. Prominent in front was a starter kit for alpine strawberries. Mom used to grow mini strawberries! I love mini strawberries! The kit includes a reusable mini terrarium and six tiny pots, plus starter dirt and seeds, and Martha's encouraging instructions. And right next to the strawberry kit was an herb kit, with all my favorite herbs, and a tomato kit. And look! a meadow flower seed shaker, which I could use to fill the nasty sunbaked corner near the garage with pretty, bird- and butterfly-attracting flowers.

So I spent ten minutes comparing options -- do I want the kit with lavender or the one with two kinds of basil? -- and mentally designing how my yard could look come mid-summer.

Although I do this every year -- I have bought the same collection of herb packets at least two years in a row -- only once have I managed to get any seeds into the required pots or into the ground. Instead, I have collected a stack of unopened seed packets, some dating to 2000. Seeds don't keep, but I hate throwing them away and acknowledging my failure. Year after year, I delude myself into thinking that I'll find the time to buy and prep pots, scrape the debris from my appointed garden area, etc.

The good news is that last year I did manage these gardening feats -- granted, it was early June by the time I got the garden started, but even so I enjoyed fresh cilantro in my salsa and made several batches of pesto to enjoy atop my home-grown, vine-ripened tomatos.

And thus hope springs eternal, like Spring itself.

The most famous fictional ballplayer since Mighty Casey

Friday, 01 April 2005 10:36 AM

The New York Times recalls "The Curious Case of Sidd Finch":

Sidd Finch was an aspiring monk who spent much of his orphaned youth in England, went to Harvard, dropped out after one semester and learned to pitch in the mountains of Tibet, flinging rocks and meditating. He was discovered by a Mets minor league manager who watched in awe as the gawky string bean would wind up - he looked like Goofy in the old Disney cartoons - and throw pitches so fast and accurate that they vaporized soda bottles standing 60 feet away. The radar guns read an unfathomable 168; Nolan Ryan's heater was just a changeup compared with this kid's.

The story was fiction for all but one person - Joe Berton, a gangly, 6-foot-4 Chicagoan who modeled for all the pictures, and to this day is recognized by dreamy fans as the actual Sidd Finch.

(Link via The Morning News.)

Copyright © 2004 – 2007 Cynthia Closkey