April 2010
You are browsing the archive for April 2010.
on “date night”
A.O. Scott, how I love you:
[T]he word vagina has no intrinsically humorous properties, but it’s uttered here as if believing that it did were sufficient to make it so.
I was just Googling the word “heartbreak” in search of ideas for a headline, and among the sites offering “Heartbroken Quotes, Emo Quotes, Sad Quotes,” “Quotes for Teens on Heartbreak and Breaking Up,” and advice on “How To Mend Your Broken Heart,” there was this little mistranslated gem at iloveindia.com: “How to Sustain Heartbreak.”
Those romantic, never-ending conversations on the phone have stopped abruptly. You seem to have lost a part of you. You just can’t seem to stop thinking about what went wrong between you and your beloved. You are blank and can’t seem to think of anything else, but how to sustain this heartbreak. It has never been easy sustaining heartbreaks especially after a long romantic relation.
The tips the article goes on to offer fall under the heading “Surviving a Heartbreak,” which is kind of a disappointment. I thought for a minute I’d found a online community for people who wanted to prolong their devastating sense of loss.
About halfway through, this Times article about people who take pictures of their food gets all serious:
That some people are keeping photographic food diaries and posting them online does not surprise psychotherapists. “In the unconscious mind, food equals love because food is our deepest and earliest connection with our caretaker,” said Kathryn Zerbe, a psychiatrist who specializes in eating disorders and food fixations at Oregon Health and Science University in Portland.
But beware:
Photographing meals becomes pathological…if it interferes with careers or relationships or there’s anxiety associated with not doing it.
I didn’t know before reading this that there are now cameras with special “food” or “cuisine” modes, though I’m not really surprised. Supposedly, they “enable close-up shots with enhanced sharpness and saturation so the food colors and textures really pop.” But it sorta sounds like one of those so-specific-it’s-useless buttons on a microwave. Do you really need a “chicken nuggets” button? Doesn’t it just end up cooking it for two minutes, anyway? And it bugs me when people need to be told exactly what a gadget can be used for, rather than finding an existing (and almost definitely cheaper) one that’s already up to the task. Why do you need a camera that claims to be tailored specifically for your food blogging needs? Just learn how to use your camera right, or if you must, buy a decent macro lens.
Which is not to say that I don’t like the idea of taking pictures of what you eat and drink. This pretty little cocktail (a specialty at Angel’s Share) is called a Tennessee Waltz: whisky, muddled strawberries and toasted thyme. Mmmmm.
