34

Taking a cue from an email from Banana, I've added translation links to the top of the page (right below my clever blog-motto [blotto]). I've been told that 34 is just as witty in Japanese, if not more so.

Have you ever seen a russian crossword puzzle? Probably not, unless you regularly ride public transportation in Brooklyn (or, say, Moscow). They're different from regular (read: english) crossword puzzles in that the grid is almost entirely open for words, the only blank space occupied with adverisements for cigarettes or something else suitably Russian. My initial thought was that russian crosswords must be a bitch and half to design, without the blank spaces to provide some buffer between incongrous (or at least incongrously spelled) words. But on further reflection, I guess that when you're dealing with an alphabet consisting almost entirely of made-up characters, spelling things correctly is a moot point.

Have you ever watched the Fox News Channel? It's really, really funny, in my limited experience.

And, yeah, there's the other half of that matchup. Lovely. At least I get to root for the Marlins, and I can pretend that because they have Pudge they're really the Rangers.

Well, we're halfway to the matchup that absolutely no one with any sense wants to see. Kerry Wood fucked my fantasy team over with his walks this season and he apparently doesn't take the postseason seriously either. His wife should be ashamed.

Remember how you were looking for a good store in NYC to buy curry or a place that would let you order curry via the Internet? Try Kalustyan's .

- 1 bowl Kix breakfast cereal - 1 cup chocolate soy milk Do what comes naturally. Enjoy.

This is really good: - 3 or 4 or 34 beets. Err on the conservative side - 5 or so carrots - an onion - a can of chick peas Preheat your oven to a lot. Like 475F or so. The hotter the better. Cut the stems and roots off the beets, and peel/cut off the skin. Sprinkle them with a little salt. Wrap them tightly in aluminium foil and put them in the oven. Peel and trim the carrots, and give them the same aluminium treatment. Into the oven with them. Do the same for the onion. Now, let all that roast in the oven for an hour. In the meantime, open up the can of chick peas, rinse them off, and put them in a large serving bowl. After the vegetables are done roasting, dice the carrots, beets, and onion. Take them out of the oven and unwrap them first. Now add them to the bowl with the chick peas. Season that all with some salt, pepper, and dill, if you have. Put it in your fridge for 15 minutes or so to let everything cool down. Fin.

Both this month's The Believer and this weekend's Times magazine have pieces on Big Food and obesity in America. I think the synchronic publication has less to do with editorial espionage than with Greg Critser's new book Fat Land , about which I really know nothing other than that there's a baby with a sundae on its head eating a slice of pizza on the cover. So the point of both of the articles, and I'm assuming of the book as well, is that we're a bunch of fat-asses because the government ridiculously subsidizes agri-business, leading to so much extra food being produced in this country that new ways to consume this food have to be invented. Witness the Super Sized Extra Combo Value Meals, thousands of different kinds of snack foods, and high-fructose corn syrup, which is incredibly pervasive in prefab food and a completely empty source of calories. Corn syrup is singled out by both articles as a leading contributor to obesity and a prime example of a produ...

(Scott asked me to post this on my blog. I don't have any idea either. I made sure to remove all the double-spaces after sentences, though.) Dear Jeff, Please post the entire contents of this email's body in the Complaints Department of your blog, with the subject header as the header of the blog entry. I am writing to complain about certain stylistic risks that have been taken, perhaps on Anna's recommendation, in emails written to me by certain individuals whom I consider close friends, and who are relatively high up in the managerial hierarchy of this blog. These individuals, following a second tip, offered by Yahoo and relayed at this fine Internet establishment by the establishment's fine patron, have been sending me email messages whose bodies are vacuous and whose entire(ly un)informative content is to be found within the messages' subject lines, which I find to be extremely irritating. I request that you make my annoyance well known so that I will not have ...

This article is apt. My favourite mis-contented signage is the "Javitz Center" you encounter after exiting Central Park heading west on 96th street. It points straight ahead down 96th, which might work if the Upper West Side were non-Euclidean. (Which it's not.)

Kill Bill , which I couldn't care less about, has resulted in the cutest Times headline: Blood Bath & Beyond .

New York Times (I think that's the standard italicization) story of the day: From a Cub to a Menace, and Now a Mystery . Also in honour of the Cubs. Also in honour of the Columbia Lions beating the Princeton Tigers this past Saturday. My favourite quote: "'He was straight up,' he [some dude] added. 'He raised a healthy tiger. They should find him a job with animals.'"

Anna, being the lovely and talented friend that she is, wrote the following film review especially for blogification. In my particular blog. At her request, I've attempted to honour all the original italics; because she's my favouritest banana, I've also left in all the double spaces after punctuation, which I normally find repulsive. I’m going to tell you about Brian Helgeland’s movie The Order in just a moment, but first I am going to tell you about My Great Aunt Lil. Aunt Lil was a bit strange. One of the ways you could tell that she was strange was that she believed she should not eat chicken because her stomach had the shape of a boot, like Italy. Another is the fact that on that fateful November day in 1963, it wasn’t until her son came home from school and set her to rights that Lil realized it was Jack Kennedy who had been shot and not Jack Lemmon. I mention to you Great Aunt, whom I have deemed a bit strange, to give you a scale that will help you to understan...