Spring Is Here!

My New Most Prized Possession

I am the proud new owner of this number 9 (of 400 made) Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Donatello comiquette from Sideshow Collectibles.

I have been a fan of the turtles for over 25 years. In that time, never has anything of this magnitude or quality borne the semblance of my favorite characters. Nothing so glorious has ever graced my shelf. I can't wait for the other 3!

Figures of Action

Clouds

Here's a picture I took this weekend of some clouds. They reminded me of stepping stones across a stream, seen from below the water's surface.

I'd like to find something to complain about here as per usual, but I can't think of anything just yet.

Macau Cookie

This is a cookie that was brought back from Macau and given to me.

Its lovely mellow sweetness is unfortunately strangled by its salty seaweed cummerbund. This seeming afterthought would have been best left off the naked gateau if you ask me, as I feel it destroys rather than enhances. To me, there is really only one culinary wrapper that ever amounts to an upgrade: bacon.

I came to find out later that perhaps "cookie" had been a misnomer.

It turns out it is more of an egg roll (made from real phoenix eggs!) with, apparently, pork jerky hiding inside. That must have been the bit I'd identified as freeze-dried brine shrimp betta fish food. My mistake.

Is Bathing Just Once a Week Healthy?

A chunk from Dr. Jennifer Shu's expert answer, posted at CNN:

"I often hear complaints that bathing too often dries out a person's skin. Furthermore, physical limitations and pain from ailments such as arthritis may discourage them from wanting to bathe. ... Older individuals may also become confused or fearful of water or the bathtub or shower stall itself. Memory loss can be a factor, and they may not realize how long it has been since their last bath. Finally, being depressed can make people stop caring about their hygiene and other aspects of their lives."

So those particular smelly lab mates of mine are depressed? None of the other reasons seem to apply. Yeah, I guess I would be, too. But mainly because I smelled so bad. Aye, it's a vicious cycle.

Thanks to whoever (Pro) for sending me the link to the article.

My Treatise on Facebook

So my dad of all people says he’s thinking of starting a Facebook page and asked me to tell him what it’s about. I explained the basics of what it is and what it does, and he wanted the pros and cons of having a profile. This is what I told him. Let me know if I missed anything…

Pro: It’s got a large user base, so you can find a lot of old friends or schoolmates you may not otherwise have contact information for. You can search for them by name, where they went to school and so forth. Or, if a friend of yours is already friends with another mutual friend, they can link you two up.
Pro: You can very casually keep in touch with people you may not necessarily want to have long phone or email conversations with—check their wall, make sure they’re alive and kicking, see what they’re up to and move on.
Con: You can waste vast amounts of time peering in on people you don’t really need to have ties with. And people like Ned Ryerson will find you and ask to be your friend, and you’ll only be able to dodge them for so long before you have to let them back into your life.
Con: You may find out your friends are not really who you thought they were. Most people seem to think they really matter, and unfortunately Facebook nurtures this narcissism. Facebook will let you know whenever one of your friends joins the “Citizens Against Jim Jenkins” cult or feels precious enough to opine about worldly affairs by posting snide comments beneath a video clip showing evidence proving once and for all that you and those like you are responsible for everything bad that has ever happened in the world, ever. You may find that you preferred to “don’t go there” and naively assume your friends were level-headed pragmatists like you.
Con: You may already have contact information for everyone you know that is not subject to change. This is just another place to log into to send a message—what’s wrong with email? O the inconvenience of convenience.
Pro: A decent way to share pictures without having to email them to people individually.
Pro: As I mentioned, the only people you talk to there are people that are already really your friends.
Con: The only people you talk to there are people that are already really your friends.
Pro: When you die, your Facebook page will live on as a virtual headstone, and on the anniversary of your death every year your friends can post pictures of real flowers on your fake wall and say what they miss the most about you.
Con: People are lazy. If you give them this window into your day-to-day, they’re not likely to be genuinely interested in or concerned about you. “Oh there’s Jim, he’s fine, no need to call.” They may feel that Facebooking is sufficient, so they won’t write or come over to the house. You’ll get Facebook birthday cards instead of paper ones. Worthless icons of Christmas gifts instead of tangible ones. No one will visit your actual headstone.

In Which I Post Old Ravings...

For my first trick, some stuff I thought of a couple years ago:

I’m going to go on record here. Pink Berry is awful. It’s watery. It’s sour. Yes I’ve had those halfling’s thimble-sized peach-ish colored yogurt drinks with the foil lids, of which Pink Berry is supposed to recall the taste, so settle down. They have them at 99 Ranch. Those are good! And they’re yogurt. Pink Berry is not, and it’s not. I will not complain about the exorbitant price or the lack of flavor choice because of what I’m going to say next:

Red Mango is wonderful. It’s everything I thought Pink Berry was going to be during the period of time between hearing the endless hype, seeing the crowded stores, and actually trying it. True, Red Mango too is expensive and only really offers the one yogurt flavor, that being simply “yogurt” (Advantage: Golden Spoon. They’ve had dozens of flavors since their inception in 1982 with multiples of them being available at any given time and are the purveyors of my favorite to date - birthday cake. Yogurt crazes are cyclical - Hansel, so hot right now. This has all happened before. So although the Asian establishments are duking it out this round, go to the rope-a-dope, Golden Spoon, for your time may yet come again.) but Red Mango’s version is thick, tastes good, and definitely contains yogurt (I guess the jury is still out on Pink Berry, with some claiming it’s just flavor powder containing no active cultures whatsoever). Come to find out Red Mango predates Pink Berry in the motherland; Pink Berry, like many others, is a stateside-only upstart, scrambling for a piece of the pie, that was blessed with a hip location and was subsequently lucky enough to have its product placed in the hands of a couple of celebrities and immortalized on film by the paparazzi.

When I went to Pink Berry, they were playing one song over and over. It had one lyric, and that was “Pink Berry Pink Berry!” repeated. I don’t even have to explain how lame, narcissistic and therefore unprecedented it is for a store to hit you over the head with the advertisement for itself after you’re already inside. “Starbucks Starbucks!” “Jamba Juice Jamba Juice!” “Dashers Dashers!” The green and yellow, semitransparent plastic-y decor and pebbled flooring is perfectly reminiscent of the inside of a shower stall. Red Mango’s interior color scheme is consistent and less manic; refined, even.

Finally, as if I have not already convinced me, the iconoclast of the 21st century frozen yogurt industry, Pink Berry, has deemed that the words in its name be concatenated into one, which I refuse to do. Red Mango remains humbly, respectably “red” and “mango.” Proper English, proper yogurt.

All I wanna do is zoom-a-zoom zoom zoom and a boom boom.