In which chocolate, chocolate, caramel, chocolate and cookies are "good for you"

Being lactose intolerant, it makes all the sense in the world that one of the Twitter feeds I follow is that of Baskin-Robbins.

Perhaps it's to test my will power. For example, since starting to follow BR's tweets, I have successfully avoided going to my nearby BR31 despite my deep passion for BR Rocky Road ice cream. I even managed to stay away during last month's 31 cent scoop promotion (which, as I write this, is still being promoted on the company's home page despite the fact that it was held - in case you missed it earlier in this sentence - last month).

A few minutes ago, those crazy ice cream-making geniuses actually posted this* on Twitter: Try our new Brownie a la Mode w/ layers of chocolate brownie, chewy cookie, & caramel. Good for you & your friends!

Which seems accurate. Except maybe for the, uh, second sentence. So I retweeted part of the message with a quick commentary:

I'm not saying it was necessarily in response to my tweet, but 14 minutes later - I counted - BR had deleted the original tweet and posted this version, deleting the "good for you" and replacing it with "big enough for you":

My guess is that in order to keep the promo within Twitter's 140-character limit, the writer translated "enough servings for a party of five" to "good for you." Here's the nutrition info** - you can decide for yourself whether the two are synonymous.

SFTC: Looking out for your saturated fat intake, one post at a time.

* It's possible that I'm off by a character or two - they may have had "and" instead of "&" in order to stay within the 140 chracter limit, and I couldn't access the original message once they deleted it. But the "Good for you & your friends" language is precisely what was in the original tweet.

** Worth reading, if only because this confirms that - I am not making this up - the dessert does not contain crustaceans.

Extra pleasure formula

(I wonder what ads Google will pop up here when its magic scanner thingies read today's headline. And now, on with the show.)

My next blog post after this one will be Number 300, and I was thinking about using my 299th entry to announce some kind of big celebratory SFTC contest in which you, the reader, would have the chance to win fabulous gifts and prizes, but that's as far as it got.

Instead, I want to tell you about a new mathematical equation I'm working on. It's going to be a formula that will calculate the likely amount of enjoyment that can be derived from any given dining or entertainment activity.

I'm using variables such as amount of time waiting in line (let's call it Tw), amount of time enjoying the food or activity in question (Ta), impact of weather on the wait time (W)*, cost of the activity ($), and something that I'm calling the X factor (strangely, this will be represented in the formula as Z), which is really just going to be a way for me to fudge the equation if necessary in order to come up with the result I want.

Now, I haven't actually gotten around to plugging in various numbers to see if it will make any sense**, but in my head, the formula looks something like this:

(Tw - Ta) * W

__________ + (3.14 - Z) = ENJOYMENT FACTOR

$

What brings up this sudden dive into advanced mathematics, you ask? The answer: two activities from the past weekend that ranked at opposite ends of the enjoyment scale - and the realization that I waited in line for 35 minutes to do one of them and for no minutes to do the other.

The activity that was worth a wait of more than half an hour? Eating a pair of $2 tacos. You read me right, mamacita: Tacos.

But not just any $2 tacos. These were a Korean short rib taco and a spicy pork taco, hot off the grill from one of the Kogi barbecue trucks. If you live in L.A., you've probably heard about Kogi, which has two vehicles that stop all around town for three hours at a time (you can follow them on a twitter feed), serving up the aforementioned tacos, plus burritos and other specialities like Kobe beef hot dogs. Oh, and if you don't live in L.A., this actually might be a reason to move here.

Waits at the trucks' late-night stops outside of bars have been rumored to be an hour long or more, but based on what I ate Sunday, those line-waiting drunks are actually making very good decisions.

Unlike, say, the people behind Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, which I also, um, experienced this weekend. (Oh, just to tie this back to my Enjoyment formula - no waiting in the ticket line, but 115 minutes of waiting in my seat for it to be over.)

If you haven't heard, the film stars Matthew McConaughey, which I mention only because my favorite movie reviewer, The Regular Guy on WXRT, accurately described his performance this way: He's "the man who has the whitest teeth in the world - my god, they're blinding!"

It wasn't just that GGP is horrifically, abominably awful - which it is. It's how a movie that is nominally a chick flick could be so misogynistic. (All of the "comedy" comes from McConaughey's character learning to use women and his ensuing misadventures - oh and Lacey Chabert's bride-to-be character acting like an insane shrew.) It's like it's a film for women who love men who hate women.

There's something about that formula that doesn't work.

* A long wait could actually work as a positive factor, if it's sunny and 70, which it pretty much always is where I live. I swear I'm not rubbing it in.

** Of course it will make sense.

Sold! And why Tuesday is the new Monday

I'm just starting to read up on new Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, but if our old pal Mitt (Schlag) Romney is against her, I feel like my decision is probably made.

I'm sure thrilled that today is the beginning of a four-day work week, but Tuesday is still off to a sucky start because (listed in chronological order of when I read and/or tasted them, not in order of importance)...

1) I read that former Wilco member Jay Bennett died this weekend. Bennett was an influential part of the band when it recorded the albums that are by far my two favorite, Summerteeth and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. 

Although I think all of Wilco's music has been interesting since Bennett was fired, it's not nearly as much fun anymore - an assertion that I think is strongly supported by the band's latest, Wilco (the album), which is online now and being released soon. In an NPR music blog, one reader referred to Wilco's recent music as "dad rock," which, sadly, I had to agree with. But someone once told me never to speak ill of a recently deceased multi-instrumentalist's former bandmates, so I'll leave it there. Point is, Bennett helped create some of the songs that became my favorites during the past 10 years, and it's sad that he's gone. R.I.P., Jay Bennett.

2) I cracked open my Trader Joe's Essential Greens Veggie smoothie? juice? residue-in-a-bottle? for some healthy, mid-morning refreshment and - I probably should have figured this out from the photos of cucumber, kale, spinach, parsley and probably fungus on the packaging, but - blecccccchhhhhhhhh. Maybe it's considered healthy because it's crushing my will to eat or drink anything else today. 

I think it's ironic that where the expiration date is printed on the bottle, instead of "Use by" or "Drink by," this item has "Enjoy by May 29." I don't think so. I don't think there's a date by which I will enjoy this.

3) The California Supreme Court missed a really big chance to do the right thing when the justices voted not to overturn the unfair state law created by Prop 8. Other states have figured out this issue. Can not figure out why it's so tricky in this state, which was once considered to be progressive. On the plus side, more protest marches coming up, I'm sure.

Still, I'm determined to finish this veggie drink. Maybe if I add some sugar, things will start to turn around.

Mouse memorial

The Internet sure does let people get news out quickly.

Which is why you have to be impressed that the L.A. Times was able to report today that Wayne Allwine, the actor who was the most recent voice of Mickey Mouse died ... three days ago. I'm not saying I really needed to know about this on Monday, the day Mr. Allwine left us, but it does seem kind of strange that the paper of record in Los Angeles took so long to bring us the story, considering he lived, worked, and died here, and that the Mouse is sort of an institution.

I'm going to guess that most of the newspaper's remaining entertainment "reporters" have been tied up making sure they had up-to-the-nanosecond blog coverage of more important stuff like Idol (OMG! What an upset!) and DWTS (OMG! That's all I can think of!).

Anyway, if you're into this kind of thing, one interesting note about Allwine was that he had been married since 1991 to Russi Taylor, the woman who voiced Minnie Mouse. How sweet, right? And, if you're really into this kind of thing, here's video of the couple being interviewed about how they got the gigs.

Unfortunately, I really don't have any interesting Mickey-related stories for you. But - hey, here's an idea - feel free to share your own in the comments space below. Or add yourself as a follower over there in the right sidebar. Mickey would want you to.

Hard-ship

I'm not really sure why it's necessary, but boating has a language all its own.

So, as I'm sure you all know, the sides of a vessel are not front, back, left and right, but bow, stern, port and starboard. As if there's a need to use some super-secret code for the highly sensitive information that denotes which part of the boat you're talking about. Call me crazy, but maybe if sailors used plain English, they'd have an easier time warding off those pirate attacks.

I mention this because this weekend on the 405, we drove by a small truck that was towing a fishing boat. And, you know how every boat has its names painted on the back ... er, sorry ... stern? Seems like boaters usually pick women's names (Andrea Gail, anyone?), weather phenomena (Hurricane, maybe) or cliches that were probably lifted from Jimmy Buffet songs (say, Life's a Beach).

Well, this boat on the 405 had a name that didn't quite fit into any of those categories, and frankly, I couldn't figure out why someone would paint this on the rear of their ship. Unless it was one of those nautical code words I just don't understand. But there it was in big, black, bold script: Priapism.

Shaken, not stirred

I'm writing this because there's a good chance* my East Coast peeps will be awake before me tomorrow and there's also a good chance that while I'm still asleep with my cell phone off, one or more of those peeps will see news reports about an earthquake in Los Angeles. And they will wonder whether it did enough damage to prevent me from - at long last - adding something interesting or amusing to this blog.

On the contrary, mon frere: After a long blogging dry spell, the damn thing might have been just the tonic I needed to get me to swing back into action. (To the extent that typing messages that 10 people will ever read qualifies as "action.")

So, just to get the Q&A out of the way: Yep, I felt the quake. The floor shook for what felt like three or four seconds - enough time for me to remember that I should probably get underneath the desk I'm sitting in front of, but not enough time for me to actually do it. It was strong enough to freak me out a little bit, but not serious enough to rattle dishes or knock stuff off of walls. As of right now, it's being reported as a 5.0, which makes it the second biggest one I've felt so far.

Oh, also the U.S. Geological Survey web site says it took place about five miles from where I'm sitting.

Which I really don't like that much.

Anyway, how about a map? Here's how it looked on the USGS site shortly after the shaking was done:

I think the red makes it look a little more dramatic than it actually was - the colors just correspond to how recently the quake took place, though. It's the (huge!) size of the box that shows the relative strength of the quake compared with other recent ones in our area.

And now that I look at the map: Good lord, there have been a lot of earthquakes around here lately.

This is also a good excuse to tell you a short but touching** story about my family. When I first told my parents that I was planning to move to California and how happy I was about it, I knew they would share my excitement. Indeed, the first words out of my mother's mouth were these: "They have earthquakes there."

* a 100 percent chance, to be exact
** or whatever the opposite of touching is

Free-dumb

I don't think I'm breaking SFTC Blog Rule No. 1, which dictates that I will not write about the office - or maybe I am, but it's a slow week, I need material, and also, who follows those dumb rules anyway? - to share with you one of my personal workplace pet peeves:

I have to meet with a colleague about some super-exciting project, so I email to ask her what time she's free. Colleague writes that any time between 11:30 and 12:30 would be good. "OK," I respond. "Call me at 11:30." Colleague writes back: "OK. I'm going to be running back to the office from a 10:30 meeting so I might be a few minutes late."

Right. If you're going to be a few minutes late, then 11:30 actually isn't a good time for the meeting, smarty.

Pick another time - one when you are actually available. Because it's not my job to sit and wait while you walk back to your office. But thanks for playing.

Aaargh.