Eccentric Flower:199905/deliberate drift
From Eccentric Flower
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may seventeenth deliberate drift Marge: Homer, you'll like Japan. You liked that Rashomon movie .... - - - I don't hurry. I just happen to move fast. Since I don't ever feel like I'm in a hurry, I sometimes forget the velocity. This morning I was waiting to get coffee behind two little old women who were clearly taking the universe at their own pace. Everything must be considered carefully, even if the decision is as mundane as which coffee urn to choose and does the one with the orange handle really have decaffeinated? Once I got over my annoyance at being forced to slow down to their speed, I was able to enjoy the sensation, as if I was drifting through time. After this weekend's postcards, perhaps we should drift for a bit. - - - They've unveiled the new Fenway Park plan, and the debate has begun. It's not a horrid plan, actually; it could be much worse. I like the design, and anything that takes Stephen Mindich's property away by eminent domain can't be all bad. Actually, since I have never been to a baseball game in my life and don't intend to start now, I don't know why I care. Actually I do know why I care. I like watching arguments. Now that's my idea of a spectator sport. - - - The Globe changed its comic strips this morning. Now, I happen to think there are few things more pathetic than being one of these people who writes indignant letters to complain about their comic being dropped, but I admit I'm sorely tempted. The Globe's comics page has always been something of a case of wasted potential. They can't get all these old strips that are no longer funny - such as Beetle Bailey and Hi and Lois and Hagar the Horrible and Peanuts (sorry, folks, Peanuts hasn't been good in a very long time) - because the Herald has those. This should give them a chance to have lots of newer, funnier comics, right? Well, it's true that they have Fox Trot and Zits and Rose is Rose - my three favorites of the new regime. And they have the stalwart standbys of the fringe, Zippy, Sylvia, and Doonesbury - the latter of which, I admit, has all but lost its way. And they have For Better or Worse, which is in a class completely by itself, the way Calvin and Hobbes was - it almost transcends its form. But they ran Over the Hedge and dumped it. They ran Stone Soup and dumped it (today). They tried out four new strips to replace the godforsaken Spider-Man strip that they only kept for so long because John Updike wrote in and said he liked it, and of those four, they picked the wrong one - Rhymes With Orange by Hillary Price (which I admit is at least beginning to grow on me). They have a one-panel cartoon on these pages called Top Secret by Paul Szep, who's an editorial cartoonist here. This cartoon is so unfunny - in fact, it's a little like Andy Kaufman funny, you're not even sure if the joke is that there's no joke at all. I wish they wouldn't humor him this way. If he didn't draw for the op-ed page this cartoon would have been dropped months ago. They just added two new unfunny one-panels, including Pluggers which they had dropped for a while and which didn't need the comeback. In the space used by these two new one-panels they could have run two strips and kept Stone Soup. Actually, I'm biased against one-panels - there is only one funny one-panel in the world today and it's Bizarro and the Herald has it. Isn't it a good thing I don't have anything more pressing to rant about? When I am queen of the world, my taste in comics will be the official standard. Then I can kill Dilbert and Garfield and Robotman - none of which are funny, but all of which have zealous followers - and no one will dare oppose my will. - - - When Nonelvis went to Toronto, she brought me back this odd candy bar. It's from Cadbury and it's called a Crunchie bar. She watched my expression as I ate it. "That's exactly the face I made when I had mine," she said, laughing. It's not that it's bad. It's just ... really odd. What it tastes like is a Heath bar that's been aerated. Instead of a solid lump of toffee under the chocolate, the toffee has all these little air bubbles in it, giving it the same taste as toffee but the texture of some kind of porous glassy volcanic rock. Our grocery store has a lot of import candy bars from England/Ireland, because there's a big Irish immigrant community in the area. Yesterday I looked, and sure enough they had the Crunchie bar. But the labelling was different. The one from Canada described the center as "sponge toffee." The one in the store said it had a "golden honeycombed center." What's interesting is that neither of those phrases gives you an inkling of what to expect. Then again, I'd be hard-pressed to find a phrase that would. - - - Thus endeth our light-hearted interlude of drift. Next up: displacement of ideas.
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