This is somebody's fault!

There's no point in describing it, you just have to play it. Katamari Damacy makes me squee! That is all.

Stupid labels.

It's a day for housework and, y'know, some of the labels I encounter in my day are just really, really stupid.

Tide would like you to know, in Really Big Letters, that it's 300oz product has "50% more than the 200oz product!" Well, yeah. Is this label for the benefit of people who can't do math? Is that the best selling point they've got?

Head & Shoulders would like to know that it is "Made of US and/or imported materials." In other words, it's made on Earth. And as I learned recently, "Earth is really full of things."

The Weekend

It has been a dull and quiet day here at the Villa. Other than a brief runaround so that Omaha could go to the office supply store for her duties as a Democrat, we sat around the house and did housy thngs. Lots of paperwork, that kind of stuff. I didn't get any writing done, but I did edit three stories for consistency.

One of the things I have been thinking about was an essay called "American's aren't fat because they lack willpower, they're fat because they're broke," which made the point that good food is treated as a luxury item and is correspondingly expensive. My reaction was this: part of the problem was that most of the cost of the food was the energy cost of acquisition and transportation. A box of Kraft doesn't give a hoot how roughly it is treated, but a pear or a hunk of meat requires care, refrigeration, timeliness, and probably a whole lot more room.

Today, I encountered a counter-response: good food is expensive because grocers believe it should be. I came to this conclusion after visiting the big Mexican ethnic grocery in town (which is next to the office supply store) and discovering that the grapefruit there was 50 cents. This is a contrast to the $1.99 at the Safeway a block away. Grapefruit is a tropical and commonplace in the Mexican diet, and even here in Washington the ethnic grocery prices it accordingly. Which doesn't explain why the head of red leaf lettuce was also half the price it is over at the Safeway.

I cooked dinner both nights: Last night was Moroccon Chicken with Lemon and Olives Tangine over cous-cous, with a side of naan, and tonight it was broiled salmon, steamed carrots, and rice pilaf prepared in clam juice (dammit, I'm all out of safron). No wine blogging recently; I haven't been drinking any recently. Sad.

Oh, and I finally got into my phone and put up a couple of ringtones: I hacked together two parts of Fiona Apple's Extraordinary Machine (I liked the first refrain, but the ending after the second made a better fadeout), A clip from They're Coming To Take Me Away, Ha Ha! and the 45-second high-adrenline version of Mission: Impossible that opened the last movie. I did have a clip from Everyone Else Has Had More Sex Than Me but couldn't figure out who it would be appropriate to assign. I really wanted to use clips from Inner Universe (the opening OST from Ghost In The Shell: Standalone Complex) but couldn't really find anything in it that would work; the same was true of Focus's Hocus Pocus (also known as "That Yodeling Rock Song from the 70s") and Burly Brawl by Donn Davis. I haven't pulled Video Killed the Radio Star or Valley Girl into Audacity yet to see if there's anything there I want to use.