My life has been on a good streak lately, so there’s no real reason to clog it up with negativity, but these things I’m about to tell you, well, they gnaw and pick away at the very fabric of my soul….

The Italian Market = Ethnic Cuisine Amateur Hour
Over the weekend, I went to every store that carried Italian products, inquiring about panelle and arancine. I’ve been itching to have these lately, but was shocked to discover that none of the big names — Claudio’s, DiBruno Bros., Tallutos and so on — carried them. Well, half-truth: apparently Pronto, the DiBruno Bros. to-go store, carries a meat-free, wussed-out version of arancine — excuse me, croquettes. As for the panelle, looks like I’m going to have to take a trip to Bay Ridge or figure out a way to make my own recipe stop sucking.

Blogs I Can’t Fucking Read
Deep down, underneath the mania of Web 2.0, we all desire to be special snowflakes. It’s the motivation behind the countless, endless tweaks of blogs. As you may notice, I’ve fallen prey to the siren’s call time and time again. And I know I’ve put you through some lousy blog templates, but the one thing I’ve never done is made the type so small that it defies the whole reading aspect of it. So I ask bloggers, both near and far to do this for me — make your type size bigger. Please. Em, pixel, pica, point, whatevs. I shouldn’t need to create a Greasemonkey script for cleaning up your design oversight. Just nothing smaller than 11px — I don’t have health insurance, and the eyestrain is really, really taking its toll.

New Slang: “Gettin’ Honused” / “Honus Bonus”
This comes straight from my pal MTV and his sister, coined by being frequently shortchanged on coffee fill-ups by a certain barista-cum-indie-darling. If the coffee cup has way less than you paid for, you “got honused”. Similarly speaking, if your cup had an ample amount of coffee in it, you were the recipient of a “honus bonus”. Seeing the words “honus”, “cum”, and “indie” in the same paragraph = not a bonus.

Tobacco Companies & Their Marketing Ploys Strike Again
Seems like the upcoming Dinosaur Jr. show in town is being sponsored by Camel Cigarettes. It’s not being marketed that way, but if you wanted to know who’s ponying up the cash for the gig, well, there you go. I have this strong feeling that Dinosaur Jr. can command a hefty sum on their own, so why they’d want to get tangled up with R.J. Reynolds is beyond me. Looks like RJR is lobbying against a tax increase on cigs right now, anyway. Aside from the whole issue of bands being stupid enough to take this money, I wonder if RJR feels middle class indie rock yuppie types have the political clout they desperately need to make legislation like this happen. I just can’t imagine West Philly basement punks organizing a show a la Books Through Bars. Funny, I feel like I’ve been down this road before…

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 26th, 2007 at 2:18 am and is filed under food, general, internet, music.