Moot Point

Who would guess that the world’s most expensive chocolates (several times over) are made in a tiny kitchen shoehorned between a pair of hair salons in a half-abandoned strip mall in Plano, Texas?

Okay, maybe it’s just because I am a bit of a dork about food and about sticking it to the man, but I was totally rapt reading this 10-part investigative series on overpriced chocolate. The dude sets out to see what the fuss is about Noka Chocolate, a.k.a. “the most expensive chocolate in the world.” It manages both to totally bust them (as it turns out they misrepresent their product, which is essentially just commercially available chocolate from a reputable supplier that they temper and repour for the squares and combine with cream to make truffles as opposed to actually making the it from the “rarest cacao sourced from exclusive plantations around the world”), and also teaches the discerning consumer a bunch of stuff about the chocolate industry at the same time. (via Mefi)

I can’t wait to stop essaying and start baking.

So, because I am a slacker, I watched what I assumed to be the great majority of Batman & Robin on TV this weekend. Alex then informed that I had, in fact, missed about 40 minutes of exposition, in which we learned the sad tale of Mr. Freeze’s frozen wife and also that Alicia Silverstone’s character was supposed to be a computer student at “Oxbridge.”

I don’t need to tell you that it was a terrible movie in every way, and that it ruined a couple of careers (Silverstone, O’Donnell) and was a huge setback in others (Clooney, Thurman*). What surprised me was how bizarre its politics are. The villains are both crazy scientists who privilege their selfish, cold (LITERALLY!) science over people. “People come first,” Bruce Wayne heavy-handedly tells Poison Ivy’s secret identity.

Plus there’s this weird plot line where Barbara (future Batgirl), who is Alfred’s niece in this version, is all “I want to save Alfred from his horrible life of servitude,” because you know, she is a flaky liberal and thinks rich people are bad and exploitive. But of course, Alfred isn’t like that. He’s like family and wouldn’t dream of doing anything other than living out his twilight years doing laundry for some rich superheroes. Saying that her elderly uncle who is in failing health might want to retire from his butling job instead of picking up after rich punsters forever obviously makes her a commie. It’s bizarre, in the way that any thing where the servants are members of the family is bizarre.

Also, though she is a badass motorcycle racing judo practitioning hot blonde computer geek**, Batgirl doesn’t have the wherewithal to just make herself a superhero, she kind of has to stumble onto the batcave. This is is stark contrast to the TV series Batgirl, who was a spunky librarian who had her own secret spinny-wall thing and her whole secret identity was separate from Batman and Robin. And a wicked theme song! She was a ’60s-style independent, DIY woman.

So, anti-science, pro-rich-people-having-servants, and…disappointing in its portrayal of women, having somehow moved backwards in 30 years?

Aren’t you so glad that you have me to cover pressing issues like how bad the George Clooney Batman is? Blogging is totally poised to replace conventional journalism any minute now. Whatever, it’s essay-writing season.

I’m pretty sure that when he is hanging out with Steven Soderbergh and Brad Pitt in his house in Italy, they throw on the DVD, skip to the part where Clooney says “The heat is on, Mr. Freeze,” and laugh and laugh and laugh.

Then George probably makes Brad watch all of Meet Joe Black.

*Granted, she also made the almost-as-brutal The Avengers and was married to Ethan Hawke, so I don’t think we can totally blame her stagey delivery of plant-based puns.

**How awesome are her hacking skillz? She cracks Alfred’s password by randomly guessing stuff like: “Alfred” and “Wayne.”

So I’ve gone from stressed out to depressed about how poor my time management skills are, to moderately determined. I still have an assload of work to do, but I think I can maybe actually get everything that needs to be done, done in time.

Today was pretty much a day. Tired, reading, campus, eggnog, Top Model (go not-Melrose! what a lame season), reading sections of this Christopher Hitchens article about how women aren’t funny out loud to Alex in an increasingly incredulous voice, movie for my paper, blog, bed.

Other blogs have really covered all the obvious bases. I mean, clearly he was writing this to piss people off; he’s a contrarian, it’s what he does. But, as Alex pointed out: does he really need to take down the female comedy establishment? Is that really blowing people’s mind? “Chicks aren’t funny. Because they have uteri,” is hardly an expose on Mother Theresa. Another sign that he’s lost his edge: quoting Kipling. Unquestioningly. As an authority. That people should take seriously. In the twenty-first century. The guy who’s best known for coining the phrase “white man’s burden” and writing The Jungle Book. That’s funny.

Yesterday I didn’t go outside until after Alex got home from work at like, 5 PM. I was trying to write up this presentation I did ages ago, so that I’d have one less thing to worry about, but it was going incredibly slowly. “Let’s go somewhere,” I said.

We wound up at Capers. We didn’t need any food besides bread, but that’s never stopped us. We came out with bread, two kinds of olives (oh, it’s suddenly olives for me; I still hate green olives, but it turns out that actual good black olives are magically delicious), baba ganoush, Island Farms eggnog, Bitch magazine, and some Kettle Chips. Also, I was looking at tea, pondering my options for essay writing aids, when this lovely Capers employee started talking about how much she liked Four O’Clock teas, did I like rooibos? They have a rooibos chai, it’s really great, she has some sample packets she can give me? Do I like green tea? Does my boyfriend? She’ll give us a few of each so we can try them out and see if we like them.

She must have sensed that I’m stressed out about writing papers; free tea has been one of the main comforts throughout my university career, though it used to be bringing bags home from the meal hall. (I kind of miss Burwash at times like this. The food was just okay at the best of times, but there’s something that no amount of fancy food stores can replace in the ability to roll out of bed at 9, walk down the hall in pajamas (and maybe a sweatshirt) and enjoy some average breakfast, juice from a machine, marginally-acceptable coffee and a bowl of pineapple, melon and grape fruit salad). Those were the days.

Oh, and shut up, Richard Dawkins.

Do you consider parents forcing children to accept their religion a form of child abuse? JAMES MACDONALD, Bronte, New South Wales Yes. What would you think of parents who forced their children to accept their politics, or their taste in architecture? Have you ever heard anyone speak of a “Leninist child” or a “Postmodernist child”? Of course not. Why, then, do we all go along with “Christian child” and “Muslim child”? Such labelling of children with their parents’ religion is child abuse.

What? I mean, for one, he’s conflating teaching your children beliefs that you strongly hold, and socially labelling children as such. For another, how is calling a child “Leninist” abuse in any real sense of the word? Way to belittle the sufferings of actual victims of child abuse to come up with the most shocking way of saying that you, an atheist, don’t think kids should be taught religion.

How did a science geek like you get such an attractive wife? GARY HAMMOND, London I suggest you go to ” The Sexiest Man Living” at salon.com and eat your words. But seriously (of course you knew there had to be a “but seriously”), science has an image problem with young people, and phrases like ” science geek” don’t help. Isn’t it a bit like “kraut” or ” dago”?

No, “kraut” and “dago” are ethnic slurs. “Science geek” is…not.

I realize he basically says shit like this because it makes people mad and then they write blog entries about him. He’s like the Paris Hilton of Darwinism.

So I’m starting to be really glad I’ve stuck with Heroes: the pacing’s been getting better and they seem to finally be done explaining who everyone is. I like that they saved the reveal about Eden’s power until a couple of weeks ago. (Oh, and I was so psyched that I finally figured out who the actress, that I’d been calling “Rachel Bilson II,” is: Nora Zehetner, the femme fatale from Brick! How I figured it out: we watched Heroes and then we were watching something old on TCM, and this girl had a feathery hat, just like Nora Zehetner had at the end of Brick! I am a genius.) Anyway, it’s really been getting good. The six-months-ago story about Hiro and the waitress was totally heartbreaking, but not as much so as this week, when Claire realized that Zach’s memory had been erased, and her dad might be evil. Zach taping Claire jumping off that height was one of the things that started the series and it was used pretty constantly in the promotion. As an iconic moment, I think it’s up there — it’s like their entire arc just…disappeared. It’s really sad, but awesome from a storytelling perspective. The Claire and Hiro stories have been the interesting ones from the get-go though. (I also think the Greg Grunberg-Clea Duvall arc remains interesting, probably because I like Greg Grunberg and Clea Duvall.) The others? There are things that could improve.

1) Daddy Issues + Science = Boring! Look, I think Mohinder’s really hot, but that doesn’t mean I don’t usually get up to get food during his scenes. I get that the show is drawing on comic books, and you need to explain why all these people have mysterious powers, but so far we’ve pretty much established the evolution thing and Mohinder’s been not adding much else to the story for a long time now. I think probably something will come of this whole list, but did we need the young Indian spirit guide boy with the soccer ball from a few weeks back?

2) There’s something wrong with the Niki story. Mainly, I can’t make myself care about it. I don’t think it’s the acting, Ali Larter’s done a pretty credible job of making it clear when Niki’s Niki and when she’s Jessica, and I even like the kid okay. Maybe it’s just because Niki’s so damned depressing: she always looks worn-down and apologetic, all the time. She never gets to have any other emotions. Also, I’m not totally clear how having a split personality (stemming from Daddy Issues) is a “special power” in line with reading people’s minds, bending the space-time continuum, flying, painting the future, being able to heal instantly from any wound, or similar.

3) Shut up, Peter. (And get a haircut while you’re at it). I know Peter’s supposed to be one of our key “everyman” characters, who we’re following as he slowly puts together what his special powers mean, but mostly his character comes out as a (really annoying) self-pitying martyr. This is partly the writing and (I think) partly that Milo Ventimiglia just isn’t as naturaly charming a performer as a Hayden Panetierre or a Masi Oka. Maybe this will change now that he’s learned that he’s the thing what explodes, or maybe this will make him even more of a self-important martyr. With Daddy Issues.

In conclusion: I think maybe Tim Kring has Daddy Issues.

When Alex and I were walking out of Stranger Than Fiction earlier this afternoon, he confessed: “I was tired this morning and I somehow thought you meant Strangers With Candy, even though it hasn’t been out in a long time.” Heh.

The latter would have been one of a handful of less appropriate movies to take a couple of under-12-year-old kids to. I mean, it’s rated G — there’s like, one cuss-word and one scene with some decidedly non-sexual old guy butts in a locker room — but there’s nothing that would scar a child for life. But: it’s a movie about an IRS agent who finds his life being narrated by a literary novelist, and seeks help from a crusty university professor. I’m not saying this because children need to be protected, I’m saying this because paying movie theatre patrons need to be protected. From children. The heads of whom the entire film is going over.* You know you’re in trouble when, five minutes in, one whispers, from a seat away “Is this commercial going to be over soon?” and the other whispers back, “No, this is the movie.”

That said, the reason that kids wouldn’t like it was: it was smart. Alex and I both walked out raving about the art direction. The sets were all ordinary places: university professor’s office, IRS cubicle farm, hipster bakery, nerd’s apartment. But the set dressing was so carefully chosen and richly detailed: the book with a yellow “Used” sticker on the professor’s shelf near his TV, the Food Not Bombs poster on the cluttered bulletin board at the bakery, the nerdily tasteful ’60s-futuristic-modernist furniture in Tony Hale’s apartment. It made the fact that Will Ferrell’s apartment looked like a bad hotel, in 1980, even more telling. (Because he is a literary character.) The IRS file room had that big white endless thing, like in The Apartment.

Also, it was one of the best-shot movies I’ve seen all year. There’s this fantastic scene, where Will Ferrell’s sitting in the “joint seat” on a double-length bus, and he runs into Maggie Gyllenhaal on the bus, and they’re kind of flirting, and it’s basically just a shot-reverse shot set up, but it’s on a weave-y bus, so it looks really cool.

Furthermore, the acting was great. I always love to see Ms. Gyllenhaal, and Emma Thompson and Dustin Hoffman are always both great, but Will Ferrell really surprised me: I knew he was funny, but I didn’t know he could create a character this…quietly. I don’t want to give anything away, but he manages to convey a lot with toothbrushing, though he doesn’t say anything. (Granted, the narrator does say stuff, but because of how the whole narrator device works in the film, it works.)

Anyway, since I’ve been raving about every aspect of it for a good three paragraphs, I think you’ve gotten my point. I really loved this movie. More evidence in its favour: there were cookies in it, and also, Tony Hale! It’s nice to see high-concept done right.

When we got home, I made my classic back-of-the-chocolate-chip-bag cookies. Alex needed something to bring for a work potluck, and I needed an excuse to make chocolate chip cookies, which have to be the most relaxing thing to bake. You can stir a lot without worrying, the dough tastes good, and they make the whole house smell good. I was adding my dry ingredients to my creamed butter and sugar mixture while Alex sat at his computer, Danielson playing on iTunes, uploading pictures from his camera phone.

“…Did you take pictures of your [clothed] boobs?”

“Hah! Oh yeah. You were sleeping, I thought I’d surprise you.”

“That’s very nice, dear.”

Life is good. I only have a few more papers to grade, a presentation to write up, and two term papers to write. In the next two weeks. Oy.

*Most awkward sentence ever.