Product placement

Oh fuck. Seems like I'm falling for all the practical jokes this week. Transpires this is a joke. The real site, as Richard notes, is mypyramid.gov. Still pretty funny though. I am a moron.

This is not a joke. The following is a real quote from mypyramid.org, the new American healthy-eating website. Remember everyone, keep eating those greens, and gas prices will go down …

Individually packaged vegetable items from exotic places around the globe are cleaner, more convenient, and keep our friends in the petroleum and petrochemical industries chugging along.

(I knew they were dodgy when I saw this: "Liver and other organ meats are high in cholesterol. Just so you know. But who eats those creepy parts anyways, right?")

further duncan

Parody my arse

Outpost Gallifrey brings news that BBC-sponsored "parody" sites related to Dr Who are springing up. Parody was not, however, the first word that came into my head when I saw them. The words I thought of were cirrus, socrates, particle, decibel (and on and on).

The official site's parody site Who Is Doctor Who? (glimpsed in the first episode, "Rose"), now has at least two companions. The BBC has opened the unit.org.uk UNIT website and has registered the site badwolf.co.uk. Keen-eyed viewers may start recognizing clues as to what that last site will entail...

I'm drifting

You know what's great? Whole Foods Market. Oh yes. One of our professors has, weirdly, given her car indefinitely to my friend Dave for no good reason, which means we are free to leave what I would jokingly describe as the ghetto that is Hyde Park (were it not true) and travel to good grocery stores on the North Side of the city.

I have long been aware that the availability of all manner of lovely offal in the Hyde Park Co-op is really an expression of the fact that it is a store for poor people, and the flipside of this is that it has no nice "straight" meat at all. No, nor nice produce neither. But in glorious Whole Foods Market a whole leg of organic lamb was mine for a mere $20, which I proceeded to cook as Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall intended with a tray of lovely organic root veg. I may never eat calf's heart again -- no, wait, that's a lie.

In other news I too am moving house. I will be living with the aforementioned Dave in an excellent apartment whose sole defect is that it smells of cat urine. This can probably be remedied by opening the windows which have apparently been closed for several months. Our landlord will be called Bob, and Bob tells us (with reference to me) that he is "pro-tenant and pro-foreigner" -- so that's all right then. Or maybe he was telling me that he was pro-Foreigner -- now that would be good. We could stay up all night discussing Lou Gramm...

More Duncans still

A summary of the brief email flurry.

Germany may have the new Pope, but Chicago has a concrete virgin…

My city makes the news for the best reasons. I present this without comment.

Being (dressed by) John Malkovich

Went to see a play starring John Malkovich last night, at which these flyers were handed out. Poor man must be getting a bit short of cash...

Updates at the Duncan site

In light of world events, a controversy rages.

One more thing…

… and then I'm done blogging for the day. Yes, the complete first season of Columbo has just arrived on DVD. 5 discs. 5 DVDs of Columbo. But there's still something bothering me …

Knights in White Sox

If you know anything about Chicago (and there's no reason why you should) you're likely to know about the Chicago Cubs, a baseball team wrapped even more than most in American mythology, and who play in the famous Wrigley Field, one of the only proper old-time baseball stadiums left in the US. Going to Wrigley Field, bang in the middle of a really nice neighborhood where people go and sit on the roofs of their houses to watch the game, is one of those experiences everyone who comes to Chicago should have.

Consequently when I came to go to my first baseball game last night, I of course decided to go and see Chicago's other baseball team, the White Sox, who are mainly famous for having thrown the World Series for money in 1919 and for not having won anything since 1917. Their stadium, US Cellular Field, looks like a parking lot and stands in the middle of a great big parking lot.

Nevertheless, baseball remains an excellent game. Between some of the innings Chevy advertised two trucks which they drove out onto the field, while a blonde woman shot T-shirts into the crowd with a special gun. Also, all of the players have a theme tune that plays when they come in to bat, like WWF wrestlers. The White Sox's closing pitcher is a Japanese guy who goes by the name Mr. Zero, and who comes out to the sound of a gong overlaid onto a dance beat, with a little animation of zeroes that plays on the big screen. Cricket was never like this. Anyhow, we won (we beat the Minnesota Twins 5–4), and I had a beer and a hot dog from those guys who walk through the crowd, so I'll be going back.

"Is it because I'm my own man? Is it because I eat nothing but plain boiled potatoes?"

Having just bought my fourth pair in a row of Converse Jack Purcell shoes, it is with not a little disquiet that I acknowledge that the phrase "set in his ways" now applies pretty accurately to me. Converse themselves, however, put a different spin on the affair. The owner of the Jack Purcell shoe is not boring, oh no, for the Jack Purcell shoe is, according to the little tag that came with them, a "Maverick of Simplicity." I'm sorry? Even leaving aside the question of how a shoe can be a maverick of any kind, this is meaningless. Sorry Jack. You're off the case. You're just too damn uncomplicated.

Choices, choices

At Walgreens I can buy a badge that says "Too Blessed to be Stressed." But then in the grocery store next door I could get some M&Ms that promise "Hugs, not Drugs." Which rhyming product to choose? Salivation or salvation? Candy treat or paraclete? God incarnate or peanut in chocolate?

Yes, it's been almost a week

Richard, who will no doubt be too busy swanning down the Champs Elysées to notice this post, points out that I, among others, have been a little preoccupied of late. It's true, I had a lot of work until Tuesday, then I finished said work. Having lived on nothing but rice for two weeks, I determined to go and do a bunch of my favourite stuff. So I went out to dinner at Goose Island, Chicago's finest micro-brewery, where I had my first pint of lovely real (real as in cask-conditioned real) ale since Christmas, plus a plate of "fish and chips," which, despite the fish coming in nugget form (though fresh, not processed) and the chips being small and thin, was still extremely nice. One thing about these brewpubs is they're always great, even though they are so thin on the ground. Continuing this hedonistic lifestyle I then went and purchased a big pack of kidneys and ate them (this was yesterday, not immediately following the fish and chips). I feel like myself again. Ah. I'm becoming such a kitsch expatriot freak. Now off to order some more Marmite from Myers of Keswick...

Dear God! I just discovered that October will see the release of the album-length collaboration of Will Oldham (Bonnie Prince Billy) and Tortoise, and that it will include covers of Springsteen's "Thunder Road" and Thompson's "Calvary Cross"! It's like birthday and Christmas all at once.

Portsmouth want Perrin, according to the Telegraph. They sure do. But I'm staying right here.

More Dan.

Sorry, I'm just full of blog posts today. However, I thought y'all would like this one. It seems that when Steely Dan played Chicago last year, Donald Fagen presented all his backing singers with a copy of the Chicago Manual of Style on stage. Ho ho. My employers at the press (and publishers of said volume) are rather taken with this and have put a copy of the original news story up on the notice board in our canteen. Here it is if you're interested. Please note that the Dan are currently employing a saxophonist by the name of Cornelius Bumpus.

Sauntering

Several parts of Locke's Thoughts on Education made me giggle, not least the part where he advises parents to buy their children leaky shoes so that they might be exposed to water. But I liked the following best:

Contrary to this busy inquisitive temper there is sometimes observable in children a listless carelessness, a want of regard to anything, and a sort of trifling even at their business. This sauntering humour I look on as one of the worst qualities can appear in a child, as well as one of the hardest to be cured, where it is natural. But being liable to be mistaken in some cases, care must be taken to to make a right judgment concerning that trifling at their books or business which may sometimes be complained of in a child. Upon the first suspicion a father has that his son is of a sauntering temper, he must carefully observe him, whether he be listless and indifferent in all his actions, or whether in some things alone he be slow and sluggish but in others vigorous and eager.

Ramble On

It struck me that I might make a list of all the songs I could think of with parts of the verb "to ramble" in their titles or in the names of the artists. However, when I got to "Ramble On" by Led Zeppelin, I had to stop when I came upon this amusing website.

Lawyers, Guns and Money

My encounter with Hyde Park's gun-toting mugging contingent a couple of weeks ago led to some adventures with the police this week. It began when I was roused from my bed at 6.30 on Tuesday morning by a detective who appeared to have no clue that it might have been unusual to ring people at such a time.
      "We've got a couple of guys in custody," he said. "There's going to be a line-up. Come down at six this evening." I had to come down to 51st and Wentworth, a lovely part of town a couple of blocks north of Inglewood, the worst neighbourhood in Chicago.
      "Should I come at exactly 6?" I asked.
      "Oh, yeah," he said. "There are a few people coming down. We'll just get it going real quick. Everyone in and out. Bam, bam, bam."
      By 9pm only a few of the little gaggle of muggees, liberal white guys to a man (plus one poor woman who had witnessed the muggers being arrested but, it turned out after she had waited four hours to be interviewed, had only seen the policeman running after the muggers) had been in to do the line-up, and the State's Attorney to whom we all had to talk had still not arrived.
      When he did turn up, the State's Attorney seemed unsure that with only the testimony of, what, ten of us, they would be able to build a case against the muggers. He argued with the police for a while. Pizzas arrived for the cops to eat (US cops are, it seems, just how you would imagine). The guys in the line-up took a half hour off for a cigarette break. Eventually, by just before eleven, we got it all done, leaving me to get a ride home with a fellow victim who had been considerably more traumatized than I. He told me about his pain all the way home, and how he had trouble going out these days, and was scared of his black neighbour. I fled when he suggested we have dinner.
      I'm glad they caught the bad guys and all, but somehow this bit was more traumatic than the crime.

Occasional political rant

Apologies for joining such a tawdry debate, but one thing has been bugging me since this whole Terri Schiavo business. That is -- the pro-life hordes at her hospice -- how many do you think there were at the height of the protests? A thousand? Two thousand? The answer is, round about a hundred. Yes, this issue that brought President Bush back from his holidays and launched a thousand newspaper columns about my favourite subject (moral values and the religious-right-as-bogeyman), subject of a major nationwide appeal for protestors by the evangelical church -- managed to get a hundred people to go to Florida. That's rubbish -- about as rubbish as their attempt to get Arlen Specter blocked from the Senate Judiciary Committee after the election.

My point, as it has been before, is that the Christian right get a lot of space in the news because their freaky views make good stories and because the president courts their votes (with more light than heat, it has to be said) -- but they are not representative of the Republican party at large, nor indeed (in another favourite media fantasy) representative of all Americans living outside New York, Boston and Chicago. If the left (and the left media) carries on fighting the right by caricaturing them all as stupid fundamentalist freaks, the Democrats will lose another election. And then I will be sad.

They got the Steely Dan T-Shirts

Now here's a garment I've just got to own. A snip at only $189, I think.

Old joke

If you're not doing anything this week, why not ring up George Bush claiming to be the Pope's next-of-kin, and asserting that the Pope assured you that, in the event of his being in a permanent vegetative state, he would want to have his feeding tube removed.