#32 - boobs.

tonight was a night of chillin' at home & catching up on a few of my fave tv shows--true blood, mad men, dexter and the life & times of tim. these shows occupy various pleasure zones in my brain for varied reasons--crazy twists, social commentaries, crude humor--and all of them share one dominant trait, a favorite of heterosexual males worldwide...boobs.

i've been pleasantly surprised by true blood. other than the unarguably awesometacular film that was lost boys, i've never been the biggest fan of stories about the undead. i never watched buffy, read anne rice or cared for bram stoker, but i enjoy true blood so far. one of the reasons is anna paquin's boobs & her sun dresses/louisiana wardrobe (apparently designed by a friend of a friend!). she's just amazingly cute is all...and as both last sunday & this sunday's episodes clearly show, she is comfortable with nudity. boobs...oh & lizzy caplan (of cloverfield fame) joined the cast during this week's episode & is apparently also comfortable with, well...boobs.

i've also started watching hbo's new show the life & times of tim, brought to you by the same guy who brought you the budweiser lizards. remember how much we all loved those lizards & their hilariously dry wit? after a while, we didn't even remember the budweiser frogs. well, the life & times of tim is soaking in the same hilariously dry wit as those commercials. how witty is it? let's just say that last sunday's episode featured a scenario where tim ends up squeezing his girlfriend's grandmother's boobs...boobs.

mad men features many conical 1960s boobs & perhaps the largest boobs in television today, owned by actress christina hendricks, who is quite the sassy badass as the character of joan holloway, the ad agency's office manager...boobs.

i hate all the female characters on dexter. boobs unimportant. the end.

#32 - boobs.

snack: ghirardelli dark chocolate with raspberry
drink: canada dry sparkling green tea ginger ale

as i watched these shows & thoughts of boobs floated through my head, i snacked on a few pieces of ghirardelli dark chocolate with raspberry. after living through a childhood that included the wonders of tidal wave gum & gushers & and adulthood that has brought both jalapeno poppers & salmon roe to my pallette, i've always been a sucker for foods that squirt junk when you bite into them. the ghirardelli don't exactly squirt junk, but they have an inner mushiness that is accented by what i hope are raspberry seeds.

at the atlantic center target earlier today, i was determined to find a good sized bottle of some unique beverage to enjoy over the next few days. for those who know this place, it often resembles a soviet-era grocery store, with its long lines & empty shelves. today, the soda aisle was stripped fairly bare on one side, but when i looked up, the top shelf featured a bottle of pepsi & some relatively clear foreign soda whose label was facing away from me. i reached for it & to my surprise, discovered a new soda invention...canada dry sparkling green tea ginger ale. this soda has antioxidants & is yummy. the green tea flavor goes well with the ginger ale & they both work nicely with the chocolate & raspberry. well done, canada...for once.

in conclusion...boobs.

#29 - fluffycreamycreepysmooth.

tonight i'm watching the second vice presidential debate, featuring questions from myspace. take that facebook. the debate also features rules, which are to be wantonly flaunted in tom brokaw's face. he just keeps bringing them rules up & the candidates just keep giving him the ol' "don't make us oust you again, tom."

when obama speaks, he's always composed. he answers questions intelligently. this is probably a plus. i mean, it worked out really well for both gore & kerry. wait a second. mccain just replied to something obama said with something about nailing jello to the wall? did he just accuse senator obama of wasting dessert? oh, never mind. budget metaphor. obama not evil. jello safe. he's still not getting my vote though.

john mccain wants to sit down & reach across the table. bad table manners, senator. i really wish he would stop calling me his friend & chopping at me. i attended a taping of the daily show a year or so back & he was the guest, promoting a book or something. he was definitely charming then. now he just creeps me out. tonight, he keeps shuffling forward toward the audience like a mummy as he answers their questions. i bet you he's breathing his pharaohvian breath on the people in the front row. maybe he could throw silver dollars at the good people of america from high atop a building. i'm pretty sure he'd get the lenny vote.

here is the question i would have asked:

as a male in his mid-thirties who is so spectacularly disenchanted with the political system that i am considering going back to the green party & voting for cynthia mckinney just to say that i participated in the process, why should anything either of you say not sound like it is coming from the mouth of an adult in a peanuts cartoon?

i would reserve the right to fully emphasize the words "spectacularly disenchanted" and sing these words loudly whilst making hammering or baseball bat-swinging motions to emphasize my point.

the last question was from amherst, nh:

q: what don't you know & how would you learn it?
a: well, what i do know is that at the end of this question, you still won't know what i don't know.

#29 - fluffycreamycreepysmooth.
snack: smart ones chocolate eclair
drink: silk 11 fl oz chocolate soymilk

in honor of tonight's debate, i'm having myself a smart ones chocolate eclair. it is a perfect metaphor for the debate, except for the "smart ones" part. it is fluffy. it is creamy. it won't make me feel guilty about eating it. it needs to be taken out of the freezer & thawed out for an hour before consuming. it goes really good with silk soy milk, especially when it is the chocolate kind drank out of a wasteful american single serving sized bottle. perfect. metaphor. oh & they're both not very good.

#27 - my spicy home state.

at the age of four my father & i took a trip from my parents' chelsea, ma apartment up route 93 to windham, nh, where my parents (then aged 25 & 27) were in the process of building their first & only house. as i remember it, he & i walked around on dirt through the shell of the house as men hammered around us. you could still see through the stairs to the second floor, where the bedrooms would eventually be. a house had become more of a priority for my parents, as my now-28-year-old brother was on the way, upping the kid total to three. we would move in soon after & that's where i lived from then until i moved 45 minutes back down route 93 to boston for college. new hampshire sweeping upbringing assessment...good education, boring surroundings. a few nh facts fo yo mind:

- new hampshire has no sales tax, so people from massachusetts come over the border to shop, particularly at our state liquor stores, located both close to the border & directly off the highway, they're like rest areas with no place to pee but a wealth of "the cure for what ails ya"...very convenient for mass area fraternities looking to purchase grain alcohol for tubs of punch...i'm jus' saying is all.

- we host the first state primary, which i think makes us a skew corollary to the color red. bonus political fact...if it wasn't for arizona, we would have been the last state to declare mlk day a holiday.

- we've begat one president...franklin pierce...yes, his actions did result in the creation of the republican party & he is the only elected president to seek the nomination for a 2nd term but not get it & is often referred to as one of the worst presidents ever. thanks for noticing.

#27 - my spicy home state.
snack: lindt excellence chili dark chocolate bar
drink: v-8

turns out that lindt & sprungli (lindt usa) is based out of my home state. stratham, to be exact. just southwest of portsmouth. i'm snacking on one of their lindt excellence chili dark chocolate bars. i've been all about the fancy gourmet chocolates these days. in my book, i figure if i'm gonna need to consume chocolate to remain sane, a fancy imported chocolate bar beats a lame-o possibly-been-melted-in-the-bodega hershey bar any day of the week. gourmet chocolate (& specifically dark chocolate) is the future, people. if you've invested in clean technologies, i'm sorry to have to break that news to you.

omg. so i had been feeling guilty about drinking so much soda & thinking of what i could replace it with & thought about drinkable chili chocolate complements & went for the "tomato/vegetable goodness" of v-8. tomato...chili...sounded right to me...big mistake. i couldn't even get past the half way point of a 12oz glass. v-8 is nasty. i mean, on one level, it is only one letter & 32 numbers away from being a toxic lubricant. at first, i told myself the reason why i couldn't drink it was because i was in the middle of watching true blood (specifically something that happens in the 2nd episode) but it goes deeper than that. i will say it once...tomato juice is good for nothing but creating bloody marys. you can try to tell me that it's good for me. you can try to tell me it'll make me straighter (as if that's possible!). you can call it "splash" and pair it with berries. you can lock me in a room with nothing but v-8 & yoo hoo and i will choose yoo hoo every time.

that is how awful v-8 is. it almost ruined this blog entry...i originally wrote 95% of this on sunday night, but my life was thrown into such a whirlwind by the awfulness of the v-8, that i just couldn't finish it until now, three days later...new slogan = v-8...tastes like puke, but without the vodka & tabasco.

#24 - beantown.

seriously, boston. sometimes i just don't give you the love you deserve, especially when it comes to your music scene. i was born in 74', which means that i was in high/school college when the notable boston/mass bands included the pixies, sebadoh, belly, morphine, the lemonheads, juliana hatfield, buffalo tom, the mighty mighty bosstones.

until much later, i didn't listen to any of them, save a buffalo tom song on the no alternative compilation. a recent girlfriend was shocked dumbfounded surprised that i had never listened to the pixies. luckily this was a few years prior to their reunion tour, so i was hip to that when it came round.

during my high school/college years, i was giving compton & seattle & york, pa a lot of my love, but my boston area bands were letters to cleo & dinosaur jr, a testament to my preference for pigtails & guitar soloing weirdos.

& then i moved to nyc (save five months in 06') and to me, the boston music scene became as familiar to me as the akron, oh music scene.

#24 - beantown.

snack: ghirardelli intense dark citrus sunset 60% cacao
drink: blueberry cobbler flavor new england coffee

seriously, that's how you spell that company's name? ghirardelli? c'mon? really? the letter combos make me afraid to even run that one through the spell check.

so tonight i was walking to pathmark to pick up a few things, including a snack for the evening and on my walk there, was listening to the new amanda palmer album (the videos are the best part!)...boston music...a boston artist who has been around since the beginning of the decade as half of the dresden dolls but who has flown under my radar until recently. it is officially my favorite album right now, with that okkervil river album coming in at second. alphabetically, it is the first album on my ipod, which means that if i just keep pressing the play button on my ipod all monkeylike, without really even paying attention, it goes to that album by default. the first note is loud & hurts my ears sometimes when i do that though. anyhow, maybe you should give it a quick listen or maybe you shouldn't.

...so i walked to the store listening to amanda palmer & anticipating a boston creme pie to snack on in celebration of boston. when i got to the store & went to the freezer section, i thought differently. boston creme pies are friggin' $8. f that. ain't nobody's birthday up in my apartment tonight.

so instead, i went the gourmet chocolate route with the ghirardelli (thank you cut & paste function) citrus sunset...cacao beans for beantown.

i needed to re-up on the coffee as well & to my delight, the bags of fresh ground new england coffee were on sale for as much as the run-of-the-mill pathmark brand, so i went for the blueberry cobbler flavor. new england represent. fruit represent.

the results...the chocolate is really good. it's dark chocolate with bits of orange and caramel crunch, all things i love. the coffee is also really good. so good that the two cups i've consumed should have me up into the morning with caffeinated bloodstreams. usually the caffeine doesn't have extreme effects, but right now, i'm amp'd, folks. oh, wait...

AMP'D.

...and a side beantown note...this is blog entry #24...the number worn by my favorite baseball player growing up & the owner of the one of the top moustaches in red sox history.

#12 - good, clean fun.

up until i left high school, the tape was still pretty much the dominant way that i listened to music. my two high school cars came equipped with tape players. i had a receiver with two tape decks, which was absolutely necessary for making mix tapes. growing up, my first tapes were born in the u.s.a., the joshua tree and colour by numbers, although it would be years before i could even grasp what the deal was with boy george...come to think of it, i still have trouble grasping what the deal is with boy george.

a lot of the tapes i listened to came from my parents' collections. around the time i was 10, my father came back from a stint in the air force reserves in texas & brought a walkman & a bunch of tapes back with him, including albums from hall & oates, styx & men at work.

somebody in the house had this lionel richie tape...

...and my brother took a sticker of a smiling popsicle & stuck it above his hand, since it is sitting in that weird position like that, perfect for popsicle holding. seriously, picture a happy popsicle in lionel richie's hand & see if you don't smile back. i still get enjoyment out of that cover until this day.

my dad had a sweet stereo setup for its time, with big wooden boxed speakers that ran from the "playroom" into the living room & sat on either side of the fireplace. two feet from the left speaker was a recliner, where my grandfather always sat when he visited. one day in 83', this put him in a perfect position to experience my new thriller tape when i surprised him from the other room by turning it on somewhere in the 6-7 range of the stereo.

one of the tapes my siblings & i listened to over & over again was bill cosby: himself, which featured the favorite comedic piece of most of my childhood years, one that probably reigned up until i discovered monty python...track 5..."chocolate cake for breakfast," where bill cosby tells of his kids convincing him to let them eat chocolate cake for breakfast because cake has eggs & milk in it.

this was my childhood--obliviousness to cross-dressing, sticker fun and bill cosby. good, clean fun.

#12 - good, clean fun.
snack: betty crocker warm delights minis chocolate raspberry decadence cake
drink: 1% milk with bosco chocolate syrup

at the pathmark last night, i was loitering in the baking section when i came across betty crocker's line of single serving baking products for the lazy. as a snack-eating swinging bachelor type, there was no mistaking that these were made with me in mind. as a snack-eating swinging bachelor type who loves chocolate, raspberry & decadence, the type to get was also quite clear.

to sum up these treats, for two & change, you get two individually-wrapped bowls, each containing a tiny bag of cake mix & a pouch of raspberry drizzle. all you have to do is add 1 tbsp & 1 tsp of water to the cake mix, stir it up a bunch, drizzle the raspberry jelly stuff on top of the batter, pop it in the microwave for 30 seconds & let it cool for a few minutes...piece of cake.

to go along with my cake, i could have just drank milk & that would have been yummy, but i was feeling chocolatey, so i decided to pick up a bottle of bosco chocolate syrup to add to it, figuring that in the long run, it'd get me, at age 33, to drink more milk. this plan would work out perfectly if bosco chocolate syrup did not taste ABSOLUTELY HORRID. it is beyond me how you can mess up chocolate, but this company has done it. i drank the whole glass because i felt bad about wasting the milk. i haven't figured out what i'm going to do with the rest of the bottle yet, but i'm thinking i might sprinkle it on the souls of my enemies or salt the earth with it...you know, good clean fun.