Category: Consuming

According to Threadless, handlebar mustaches are the new mullet.

I think it’s spelled mustache, and not moustache. Anyway, it’s the next mullet.

I’m gonna grow one.

I failed at my earlier beard attempt, because I bailed when it got stupid-looking. But not this time. The point, this time, is to grow something that looks like I’ve fallen asleep in front of a glue gun and then rolled over onto the cat.

Details: do I cut it even with the middle of my mouth, or do I grow it lower– like, down to my jawline? In a few weeks, I’ll need to find some mustache wax, too. But those are implementation concerns I can address later. For now, I need only wait.

Taiwan Cafe. Also, note the coolness of Google Local.

I’ve been patient about my cell phone for all too long. The battery life is under 24 hours standby. The text messages that arrive hours or days late. The voicemails that appear only when I call in. The inability to recover from going into the subway without an actual reboot.

But today tops it. I had a six PM (three pacific) job interview. At six fifteen, as I was sitting next to my cell phone, waiting for the call, it beeped. The interviewer had called twice and left voice messages. The phone had never rung.

Someone will feel my wrath. Heads will roll. I swear before heaven and earth, someone responsible will feel. my. wrath.

What bugs me is that I know that switching carriers is more or less futile, since they all have equally crap service.

It’s been well reviewed in a number of places already, but Rendezvous, the new restaurant by a former Blue Room chef is really just beginning to take off.

Some people concentrate on the gentrification it brings: from Burger King to high-end restaurant, even here at the far end of the square. But honestly, I was entirely focused on a diverse wine list (we had an organic red from Puglia called Il Pioniere, like nothing I’d ever had, tangy and musky at the same time) and excellent food. We had celery-root salad with pomegranate seeds, huge roasted sardines, steak with truffled parsnips, lamb tagine, and finally an almond panna cotta. It was like some kind of dream, but I know it was real: unable to finish the steak, we brought it home, and I ate it for breakfast the next day.

We went to Ikea on Saturday.

Going on Saturdays is a mistake. So crowded.

By the second floor, and the third hour, there were many, many cranky children. Including me.

We came home with an Expedit bookshelf and also some other stuff we hadn’t thought we needed, but which seemed like a good idea at the time. Curtains! Pillows! Lamps! A flask!

To compensate, I didn’t leave the house today.

The promise of internet-based commerce has long been that it allows buyers and sellers to come together in an efficient manner. Real estate is finally succumbing. I am so happy to see FSBO Madison come into existence and into play. It doesn’t just mean that when I am finally ready to buy a house, I will get a better deal. It also means that the internet really is helping people (well, not Realtors, but everybody else), and more importantly, it means that I was right. And I love being right.

As I’ve said, holidays in my family usually involve a lot of food preparation in a particularly foodie-obsessive way: a different variety of exotic nut goes into the stuffing each time, that kind of thing. Then there is drinking of slightly too much wine, and people begin to argue about politics, and then someone changes the subject, and then people get tired, and go to bed.

Other people have Christmas parties that begin with Jell-O shots, and proceed to gunplay and chainsaws. Their fancy cookbook involves Jell-O Shots. (Note that the cookbook does not use the word “Jell-O” because the Kraft is wholesome and has nothing to do with liquor.)

Also I have discovered Diary of a Food Whore, which is a restauranteur/caterer’s diary of the indignities and hilarities of her trade. Her customers seem pretty evenly divided between people who are too lazy to cook, and crazy brides. All of them have guests who misbehave in one way or another, prompted either by an open bar or by an open buffet table.

Last night I engaged in the great American holiday tradition of going out for Chinese food on Christmas eve. The streets were emtpy, all the students had gone home, and the restaurant was packed.

I knew this would happen sooner rather than later: someone’s figured out how to make Google Print cough up a whole book.

My estwhile Gallic colleague did me the favor of sending a recruiter my way a few weeks ago, and last week, the recruiter sent me an email saying she had a few product marketing opportunities available and could I send her the latest version of my resume, plus salary history/requirements. I did, and then I didn’t hear from her again.

Yesterday, I wrote to her and said “I take it I answered incorrectly on the compensation portion of the exam.” She said that I had: I had asked for $N, and the position she had in mind paid double that. If my last gig had so much responsibility, she wanted to know, how come I didn’t make more?

I explained to her that I was a product marketing manager for Novell, not the product marketing manager for Novell.

I don’t imagine that she’ll write back. I doubt she wants to touch anyone whose job prospects mean her ten percent will be less than ten grand. Besides, placing me would be more trouble than it would be worth: too specialized and too expensive as a writer, but suspiciously cheap for a marketing manager.

So it looks like I’m going to have to read Bait and Switch right after I finish that Gladwell book. Before anything else, though, I have to write an article proposal.