Dear Cocksuckers in the Tech Dept,
I already told you that I tried that. And also that other thing, and that other thing. And the reason I used fancy tech words when I told you so was so that you would believe me. And that other thing wasn’t what I asked you. And if you tell me to go to www.google.com ever again I will set your children on fire.
Suck on a clod of shit you lazy ignorant assholes,
Jessica
A bunch of the restaurants around here have lobster mac & cheese on the menu. I don’t know whether this is really an east coast thing, or if this is, like, a 2009 thing? But anyway, places I’ve been visiting recently have it, and it sounds GREAT, so I always order it. And it’s…good. But I always end up wishing it was better. So I figured…I have $79 I don’t need! I can MAKE it better!
Parmesan reggiano, fontina, white cheddar, gruyère – about $5 each
Three lobster tails – $15
Tub of crab – $15
Celery – $29
The fontina, incidentally, is splendid at lunch with ham.
The thing is, I’ve read Consider the Lobster. I’ve considered it. I can’t kill a live lobster. I know, I know, I’m a terrible hypocrite – I’m perfectly willing to snarf pre-killed lobster, not to mention pre-killed crab, pre-killed fontina, pre-killed cow, blah blah. But, though Ian has repeatedly professed his (disturbingly insistent) willingness to kill one for me, and has informed me that he’s done this before at someone else’s house, I don’t want anyone to kill a lobster in my house. I don’t want to buy a lobster that will be killed in my name. So it was either the lobster meat they had at the store ($36 A MOTHERFUCKING POUND!!!!) or frozen lobster tails. The frozen lobster tails seemed wildly cheap at $5 each, so I got a few of those. Out of wild and obviously totally unnecessary paranoia, I also got a tub of crab meat, just in case, and figured I’d have mega-awesome crab salad sandwiches for lunch for a couple of days instead.
Shocker, I know, but…this is $15 worth of frozen lobster tail meat:
No crab salad sandwiches for me! But actually, I think using half-crab was a good thing: maybe it’s because they were tails, or warm-water tails, or because they were frozen, or because the crab was local and fresher, or something, but…the crab was frankly more flavorful and sweet and tasty than the lobster. Next time, I’ll go full-crab. It was easier, at least, if not cheaper. The lobster you had to skewer, and steam, and open (the recipe directions for this segment read, in their entirety, “Steam the lobsters [15 minutes], cool, pick out the meat.” I don’t know whose delicate hands were about to “pick out the meat” from THEIR lobsters, but mine were soldered shut and had to be smashed in half between my meaty paws before stingily surrendering their two bites of meat each), before then cooking again via sauté in butter. The crab came pre-cooked and in a little plastic tub. It didn’t even have a shrink-wrap seal to pull off! One good thing about cooking lobster, though: they change color! That’s cute.
(Until, you know, you Consider it, and remember that it’s because they’re burning, like a sunburn, and if they had been alive at the time you STILL WOULD HAVE SKEWERED THEM FIRST and then you would have STEAMED THEM TO DEATH.)
So I kind of made the recipe up, combining a few different ones, but the main one I used was, as the cute story goes, from a lobster fisherman’s blog! The dirty little secret that Ian does not yet know, of course, is that he uses Martha Stewart’s mac & cheese recipe and just adds lobster. He should have guessed by now, frankly. It always comes back to Martha when I do the foodblogs.
So. Was it better than the restaurant versions? Yes. I totally think it was. Was it still kind of disappointing, though? Sigh. Yes. Good things about it? The celery, the selection of cheeses, definitely the crab. Bad things? It wasn’t creamy/ liquidy enough (though, ahem, perhaps that’s because I used an entire pound of pasta), and I would have added more cayenne, more black pepper, more salt, and maybe some like Old Bay or something? Ian was in charge of the cheese sauce and I don’t think he added enough STUFF. Then again, I had a monster cold, so I also just kind of couldn’t taste anything. The recipe also recommended nutmeg, which I don’t really generally like and also couldn’t find our bottle of anyway, so we skipped. But I think it needed SOMETHING that was lobster-specific, you know? I really think the Old Bay is a good idea, though I didn’t think of it at the time. Just a tiny bit so you can taste something, but not enough so you’re like, “wtf, is that Old Bay?” Also, more salt and less colds. And not less pasta but more sauce. And probably also a green. Asparagus or something? Or tomato or red pepper? Tomato, probably, rather than red pepper. Red pepper might overpower the fish, which is vaguely delicate and I guess the whole point. And seasoning or something in the panko, maybe? Also, fuck it – if you’re cooking every single separate component in butter, and spending $30 on sea-bug, why the fuck aren’t you using heavy cream in your cheese sauce?? Whole milk?? Psh. That shit’s for amateurs. Also, lobster mac & cheese is overrated – next time it’s crab mac & cheese all the way. I feel like I’m complaining a lot, and I don’t mean to. It was good. It was really good. But was it worth $94? Um. Yes? Because I have to say that or else I’ll feel really really terrible for not sending a bunch of money to Haitians?
PS – Okay. So. I just turned to Ian and asked him if he had anything to add.
“Did you mention that we always fight over making cheese sauces?” he asked.
I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT HE IS TALKING ABOUT.
I’m sick!
Recipe for the saddest bowl of chicken noodle soup ever:
* Half a box of leftover chicken stock
* Half a box of alphabet pasta that’s been getting dusty on a shelf for a year
* Salt
* Pepper
* Cumin, I guess?
* More salt, since you can’t taste ANYTHING
* Garlic powder & onion flakes, since you’re too sad and lazy to use a knife right now
Heat. Add parm on top. Eat while wrapped in blanket, watching heavily-edited torture porn on Syfy. Enjoy!
Here are some things that probably would have been far better expressed via twitter, but my phone is basically always dead, and I don’t know how to post a photo to twitter except via phone, so. They are here instead.
My gummy army men look a little gay, right? Like, ballerina-esque? A tidge light in the loafers? A bit lavender?
THIS SOUNDS THREATENING!!! “Sir! The FHDU has malfunctioned! Backup in three…two…” “Wait! Can’t we step on the ‘foot pedal???’” “Sir, we cannot. Haffenmeyer and Hinkstdedtler are blocking the pathway with making out with each other!”
(See, get it? Get it?? It was a callback to an earlier joke, see??)
Dear Free Providence Weekly Paper: Thank you for finally settling this debate for us, forever.
Also:
That is all.
I saw The Crazies with Ian last weekend! I didn’t hate it? Also, this was previewed before the movie:
So far, I’m not hating it, either.
I like remakes, in general. I think it’s snotty or something when people get all upset and wonder why Hollywood keeps remaking perfectly good movies, blah blah. It’s like getting upset that the movie is never as good as the book was – it’s not necessarily that it wasn’t as good, it’s just not the one you liked the first time. It’s a trick of your imagination, maybe. Old people will think that the Sex Pistols version of “My Way” isn’t as good, but punks would disagree. Or something like that. Plus, I think I’m a lazy movie-watcher, so already knowing what a character’s, um, character is isn’t that bad a thing. It lets you skip it and get to the other stuff: the scares or the effects or the whatever. And I sometimes don’t hate spoilers. I like being able to say, “Aw, shit, that is some ironic-ass foreshadowing.” Which is something I say sometimes. And, I don’t know. Even when the remake isn’t as good, it’s neat to see it re-interpreted by pretty people wearing modern clothes and shot on cleaner film stock and with better cgi. The new Omen isn’t better, it’s just different. It’s not worse. (The mask was scary!) (Oh – and! Using Mia Farrow in it, with the reference to other older devil-baby movies, strikes me as clever, which is another reason I like remakes: I like easy meta and clever references and in-jokes and winks and nods and feeling like I know some imdb trivia.) There are very few movies I would claim should not be remade.
The Crazies, in particular, I think was very very ripe for remaking. I have been known to claim that it is “Romero’s second-most-underrated movie,” but that’s just me trying to get someone to ask me about Martin. Honestly, it’s a shitty movie, and therefore not actually underrated at all. But it’s a really good idea. That’s what made it perfect for remaking: it was a good idea done poorly; I couldn’t wait to see this good idea done well. The remake didn’t make it as awesome as it could have been. The ending was very Indiana-in-a-refrigerator, kind of literally, and it didn’t push either the zombie comparison or the random-acts-of-violence metaphor far enough. But it was spooky and tense and scary and nerve-jangly. It was effective enough.
I’m excited about the Nightmare on Elm Street thing because it’s not just a remake, but it appears to be a reboot. I’m excited that Freddy’s makeup looks so much more realistic: he actually looks like a burn victim. I’m excited that it looks like it’s dropping the goofy one-liners and the humor (which I don’t hate in the Nightmare movies – it’s what they are and it’s it’s own thing and that’s fine, but – ). Nightmare is ripe for a reboot the way The Crazies was ripe for a remake: this is actually useful and makes sense. Nightmare really does have an honestly scary premise: the dreams, the trying-not-to-fall-asleep-but-failing, the pedophile who is the product of 1,000 crazy men raping a nun, who was burned alive by parents of children for revenge! What a great back story for a villain. Making it actually scary, and not arch and goofy and silly is a good change and a good idea.
Also: I love love love the scene in the trailer where they do the wet-sheet-as-wall trick, but then extend and extend and you realize that it’s actually really cgi. I claimed this was an homage or a clever reference to the original movie, but then Ian made fun of me and told me that putting Freddy in the remake was a very clever homage to the original or something. But I totally disagree: I think they’re referencing one of the all-time most famous homemade pre-cgi special effects ever (that’s right, I claimed that, eff you, Rick Baker) but making it cgi. I think that’s really funny and clever and kind of a “fuck you.” And I think maybe it’s also kind of the encapsulation of the whole process of a remake: you take the original, and you do something with it that they couldn’t or didn’t do the first time. You try to make it better. Maybe you make it worse. Maybe you make it worse through laziness – cgi is lazy.
Also, I do not want to work today. So, hello blog! Hello, talking about Nightmare on Elm Street for some reason! Hello, rambling about cgi.
I’m thinking about the tags I use on my blog (which are so stupid and useless – I do not fucking get tags; they’re so unnecessary) and i’m wondering if I’ve ever used the “movies” tag without also using the “horror” tag.
Okay. Work. Totally working now.
More claw heels. Just sayin.
Marc Jacobs:
Marc Jacobs even had claw-heeled flats, somehow:
dsquared:
Aw, shit, yo, dsquared close-up:
Luvvvvvv! Though, can I also point out, this model is notably thin:
Can you imagine trying to try on those cooter-length boots??
Though, again, can I also-also point out that these are so hot I just cried a little?
Maybe I need brown leather pants. (Yes. Yes, obviously, that is what I need. I will probably totally look just like this in brown leather pants. Brown leather pants are a good idea.)
Okay. No more pretty-clothes posts now.
PS – did you notice how I didn’t even mention the guy in the gold Speedo and the giant white trainers?? Because I didn’t.
So I was in the middle of making a very long and arch post about this, when Ian pointed out that it was not worth getting fired over. I don’t necessarily agree with that, but I will self-censor in the interest of maintaining a paycheck with which to buy my future tickets to the new-and-improved version of the Monster Ball once it comes back. Living Dress*, I’m doing this for you!
So the shortened version of this Very Furious Post? Someone (who is not in my department, is not my boss, and is not a graphic designer) sent me this note, on a flier I had created, via email:
all of the title fonts and names look too rickety – not very serious. I’m sure you know these are profound mature men, exemplary writers and scholars….I feel the current font looks to frivolous
**
(Incidentally, I would be remiss not to add: muthafuckin [sic,] yo.)
She went on, later, to ask me to re-space the vertical space between lines of text so that everything was completely equidistant (the “x presents…” equidistant from the title of the event equidistant from the word “with” equidistant from the names of the participants…).
(This does, though, at least make me feel like a real designer, which is a bonus.)
*Incidentally – did the Jim Henson company actually make this dress? Anybody know? I think she’s said it was “inspired” by Hussein Chalayan, but I haven’t heard who actually made it?
**PROFOUND AND MATURE MEN.
This isn’t even a Lady Gaga post!!!! It’s just a “very interesting observations” post!!! Because sometimes it is very interesting to observe this one person I’ve heard of who I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of before but I probably haven’t been talking about her very much and her name is Lady Something-Or-Other I Wouldn’t Know Because I Don’t Pay That Much Attention, Really.
Anyway.
The description of the plot for the program “Lady Gaga Takeover” is “Lady Gaga takes over.”
Even better?
All right, all right, I still have a blog, I swear. And it’s mostly humorless feminism and pretty shoes, aren’t we just a bundle of contradictions. And also I didn’t kill McQueen.
Speaking of (the first two parts)!
Re humorless feminism: ugh. These posters are both stooopid.
I found them near my building on campus. And the thing is, Teenage Jessica would have been all like, “HEEEHEEEBOOBIES” and also “BUT IT’S FOR A GOOD CAUSE BECAUSE I’M AN ACTIVIST AND/OR UM A SINGER I GUESS” and “HEY THERE’S A GUY THERE TOO SO IT’S FUNNY QUIT BEING SO HUMORLESS.” But grown-up Jessica is basically humorless. The one for the singers is the less-annoying of the two, I think, but the one about investment transparency just makes me roll my eyes so hard they’re about to fall out. At least put a fucking web address on there, yo. Otherwise you’re just showing us your tits. HA HA BUT THERE’S A GUY THERE TOO SO IT’S FUNNY. I don’t know. Humorlessness.
And re pretty shoes:
I don’t really have anything re pretty shoes, actually. Um. Here’s this. I ain’t got no shame in saying I want those boots.
Okay, I promise, this is the last post about Pretty Clothes until I get my awesome new pattern sewn up, okay? But I have a few random things that are sort of vaguely related and I want to babble about them, so there.
So, in the past year or two, I’ve kind of gotten into the whole designer thing? I blame, mostly, two friends – one of whom introduced me to the fact that SAKS HAS A CLEARANCE SECTION and the other who convinced me I could totally probably sew that Lanvin dress (and let me try on her Louboutins). Getting more into sewing was a big part of it, too, obv. And Tavi and Gaga didn’t help matters much – neither, frankly, did ceasing to work inside the Conde Nast building. So blah blah point is I am, at the age of 28, coming to the realization that you don’t have to wear a black tshirt and a cardigan every single day. (I own, I swear to god, this is not an exaggeration, at least seven identical black tshirts. I could wear one every single day of the week. Twelve if you count non-identical ones – one with a ruffle, one with a v-neck, one with an empire waist, one with long sleeves, etc.) I was looking at photos from – I don’t even remember what – the Grammys, I think? But it was this long, long, long list of photos of ladies in dresses. And they were all very expensive and very beautiful and SO FUCKING BORING. The only interesting ones were Gaga and Rhianna and whoever else decided to wear dinosaur-shaped shoulderpads and a bird strapped to their bellybutton and two coffee machines as a hat or whatever. I guess this goes back to the stroke of genius when I saw the McQueen alien-lizard show and I realized that I should be learning how to sew THAT, not pretty skirts for work. (Oh, that’s right, I forgot to mention – this whole post is really just a big excuse to post photos of the McQueen armadillo shoes again.
TAKE THAT!!!)
Speaking of – the armadillos, everyone says, will never actually go into production and be sold in real life. They’ll be museum pieces. But I love that their idea and flavor are already sort of coming to be in very small ways: mostly that curved claw heel. Check out the curved heel behind Tim Gunn on the Bluefly Macy’s Wall To Be Used Thoughfully by Tresemee:
Also the curved heel in this Christian Sirano show:
Though, interestingly, again, the trickle-down: check out the uber-boring version of those that made it into his Payless line:
Much smaller platform, less architectural jutting action going on, and no claw heel. Pfff. Also, the fabric looks super-cheap and they’re weirdly expensive. Sirano’s Payless line has been wildly ugly. Alice + Olivia do it okay. He could if he wanted to.
So speaking of Alice + Olivia for Payless, this is the only way I can actually come anywhere near close to affording any of this stuff: the “for Target” phenomenon. I have this REALLY excellent pair of nice, solid, quality (non-leather) boots that are Mizrahi for Target. And I have this AWESOME good, thick cotton, fully-lined, well-detailed, well-constructed, well-designed dress that’s also Mizrahi for Target. It’s totally possible to make cute, quality stuff for these cheaper lines.
Rodarte, unfortunately, had no idea.
Damnit, 13 year old from whom I get 99% of my fashion advice, how could you have possibly failed me? THIS SHIT IS ASTOUNDINGLY UGLY, not to mention CHEAP, CHEAP, CHEAP.
I made Ian rent a car and drive me to Target the day after Christmas in order to try this shit on. I called Target ahead of time to make sure they still had some left. (The lady laughed at me.) I EVEN WORE MY TAVI HAIRBOW THAT I HAD SPECIALLY SEWN FOR THE OCCASION. (Cough-cough also: “Tavi bow” is probably another trickle-down from “Gaga bow,” right?)
And that’s what I get for it. Cheap-ass ill-fitting rough plastic ahem “tulle.”
This jacket was so thin and so cheap – there was no styling, no detail at all. (Nice black tshirt, though.) It was three rectangles of gross-to-the-touch carpeting samples sewn together. In fact – maybe this should be my new challenge. To do this horrible jacket better than they did, because it will be so. Easy. To do.
This stitching was huge and ugly and obvious, the fabric was either thin and cheap or rough and cheap, the design work was vaguely Hot Topic-level.
Also, there was this shirt:
Ooof. Maybe someone ELSE can make this shit work.
OH RIGHT NO ONE CAN BECAUSE IT’S HIDEOUS.
Sigh.
Fine.
One person can.
PS:
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