Not A Dollarshort

The Officer's Mess

Last week I spent some time in New York, followed by a conference in Chicago and finally Charlotte, North Carolina to visit my parents and grandparents (we are not from North Carolina -- they moved there three years ago because of a job my father got). Anyway, a lot of travel was followed by a relatively restful weekend with my family (sans Ben) in which my mother and I shopped and I got my first pedicure ever. Yeah, all nice and normal stuff.

On the last day of my trip, my mother and I went to a chain store called Steinmart, some sort of store that has clothes and furniture and is pretty different from any places I've been to California. Anyway, it was at Steinmart that I saw the most awesome painting ever.

I love Westies and I love whimsy. This seemed straight out of Disneyland. So, I called Ben and asked his opinion on the picture. Since I couldn't get GPRS working on my phone, I couldn't send the picture of the painting I took. Based on my description I could tell Ben probably would want me to pass. He was interested, yes, but unsure of how it would look in our home.

So we went home.

Later that night, as I showed my dad and grandparents (who responded that "that crap isn't going to hang in our house."), I finally got the picture uploaded to my blog for Ben to see. Pretty quickly we both decided the picture was too good to pass up. So, my parents and I jumped in the car and rushed to Steinmart which would be closing in about ten minutes.

When we got there, I rushed to the back of the store and asked a clerk if the painting was in stock. But instead of describing it, I showed a picture on my cell phone I took earlier that day.

Salesclerk: Wait. Are you the one who just called about this thing?
Me: Yeah, that was my dad.
Salesclerk: Oh, okay. I couldn’t believe there would be two people wanting that tonight.
Me: Yeah, well. I like Westies
Salesclerk: Okay...I’ll get it.

My parents then asked if there were any other prints of this caliber and she proceded to show them a beagle in miliitary attire along with The Officer’s Mess (my painting).

Salesclerk: We had to remove these from the sales floor because of complaints.
My parents: What kind of complaints?
Salesclerk: People were saying they were offensive.

Offensive? I’d give on tacky or weird, but offensive?

Anyway I got the painting, carried it back with me on the plane to California and propped it against a chair in our living room. Ben and I love the thing and the fact that it makes us smile every time we see it. People who have visited our house smile and laugh at it. It’s a conversation piece — it makes us feel good. If that’s offensive, I’m all for it.

When in North Carolina, I told my parents that it was my goal to get that painting in the background of an upcoming photo shoot Ben and I were going to do for a periodical. Luckily, when the photographer came over, she loved The Officer and it’s now predominantly in the photos (though there are some photos that we took in another room — we’ll see which one they choose).

Note: The reason I'm so dressed up in that picture from the shoot is because I'm wearing my prom dress from high school -- Ben and I started dating because I asked him to the prom.

By the way, the artist behind The Officer’s Mess is Thierry Poncelet.

Good stuff.

United Airlines Spam

I'm a United Mileage Plus member and I'm a pretty frequent flyer (I've amasedd about 50,000 miles these past three months) so I am a frequent visitor to the United site and happily receive the mailings. So, it gives me great pain to see that -- starting yesterday -- my inbox fill with spam with the unique email address I signed up with.

I'm not going to completely jump to conclusions and say that United sold the address (because I genuinely don't think they did) but I wonder how this email got discovered.

It's pretty easily solved. I'll just change the email address and direct mail to that one as junk.

I'm just saying...

Yelling 'Freebird!' In a Crowded Theater

Link: WSJ.com - Rock's Oldest Joke: Yelling 'Freebird!' In a Crowded Theater.

So good:

On a recent live album, Modest Mouse's Isaac Brock declares that "if this were the Make-a-Wish Foundation, and you were going to die in 20 minutes -- just long enough to play 'Freebird' -- we still wouldn't play it."

The article is accompanied by some great audio files.

Frito-Lay Munchies

We keep a junk food stocked kitchen here at Six Apart. We owe the food stocking to our office manager, Maile, who, as a mother, knows all the sort of foods that we should but orders the food she knows we will eat. That's why the grapes go sour and mold while the peanut butter cups are gone within a half of a day.

Sidenote: She did buy the most gorgeous box of fruit from The Fruit Guys and as of this moment only a moldy kumquat and two grapefruits remain.

Anyway, I wandered into the kitchen after a Costco delivery to find three huge cardboard boxes stacked on a table. The boxes didn't have any indication of their contents and were all still sealed -- I questioned whether I should even open them. As I thought about this, I pictured numerous Six Aparters looking at the boxes and not feeling at liberty to just open some box in the kitchen.

So, of course, I just found a knife and tore into the first box. To my dismay, inside the box were packages of some sort of cheese-like chip snack called "Munchies." I'm not a huge fan of cheese snacks (I absolutely detest Goldfish) so I tossed the box to the side and tried the next box.

More Munchies.

Disgusted, I gave up and went back to my desk.

Later that day, at Foo Bar, I kiddingly ripped into Maile for buying such a disgusting snack.

Since most of the people at Foo Bar hadn't even seen the chips, I ran to the kitchen to bring in the evidence. It was then that I opened a bag of Munchies to show everyone the horridness up close.

But then I realized that inside Munchies was a fucking treasure cove of junk food.

Munchies are basically pretzels, Cheetos, Doritos and Sun Chips. All in one bag.

The picture on the bag is so utterly disgusting and yellow. And to make matters worse, the branding of the "contents" looks like a "from the makers of..." sort of labeling.

It turns out that these things are so addictive and so good -- and so deceptive. Most everyone I talk to say that they thought they looked disgusting but now have to watch their intake. We bond about the goodness as relative to the packaging and how bad of a job Frito Lay did with the marketing/color scheme.

Yeah, so they are targeted to stoners. And, they are horribly bad to consume.

But, they make me so happy.

In doing some online research about Munchies, I found this great review:

Frito-Lay scores a big hit with this mix of snacks. I figured that they just mixed Cheetos, Rold Gold pretzels, miniaturized Doritos and Sun Chips into a bag without much of a real plan, so I wasn't expecting a whole lot. But this combination of flavors really worked. There's plenty of cheese on the Doritos and Cheetos, but it's very well balanced by the smoothness of the pretzels and the different taste of the Sun Chips. These were very popular around the chip bowl. Good stuff.

I love that there is a site that reviews chips.

By the way, I know I could have just found a picture of the Munchies package online, but I just had to scan it in manually. It just shows what effort I'd go through to evangelize this treat.