Schuyler's Chicken

S

Originally uploaded by Citizen Rob

Some people like Bellesouth are already thinking about Halloween costumes but I say that no matter what you wear, your Halloween costume will not be as awesome as this man in a chicken suit right here.

fear

S

o I took Sadie for a walk, right past the house where the pit bull lives. What else was I going to do — get her a treadmill? No, she’s a tracker. She lives to walk along sniffing things. And, anyway, you just can’t stay holed up. You’ve only got this one mongrel life, and you don’t want to spend it hiding indoors; pretty soon the menace is everywhere and you’re left worrying about what’s going to rise up out of the basement. You have to wear down the fear. You can’t kite yourself up over the places you wish did not exist. You have to suit up, show up, move on through. The good news is that the joy is on the other side of the dark stretch of sidewalk. Also, you can ask someone to walk along with you, someone or something you trust. So I decided to be that person for Sadie and help her take back her joy in the street. —- Annie Lamont

The Thomas Reed affair

Like everybody else and their Mama who has any access to the internet whatsoever, I have a facebook account.

It’s here. Melissa Sawyer

Create Your Badge

Anyway, it’s not a big secret and there you go.

It has a hodge podge of lawschool classmates, college classmates, high school classmates, and friends and colleagues I have amassed over the years. And the occasional person who wants to up their Mafia Wars mafia.

So a couple of days ago, this guy named Thomas Reed put in a friend request. He looked familiar to me. I glanced and noticed several Hendrix people as mutual friends, assumed he was a classmate who ran around in different social circles, and accepted him.

Well I get a message from a college classmate.

Who is Thomas Reed? I added him because several other Hendrix friends had him as a friend, but I do not remember him at all. I could not find him in our yearbooks. (Not a perfect search, mind you, but I looked at all four yearbooks). Do you remember him? Can you jog my memory? I’ve forgotten a lot, but I was a little traumatized at having absolutely no recollection of a person . . .

It is at this point that I realize that I can’t definitely point him out anywhere. My undergrad only has about a thousand people on campus at any given time and my graduating class was in the area of 125 people. It’s not a large school by any means. I usually recognize people from college unless they’ve changed a lot in appearance and can usually tell you some random trivia about them like the dorm they lived in or some other such nonsense but this Thomas Reed. I can’t remember anything.

So I send an email to one of the more gregarious social butterfly types that I know. He also worked in the cafeteria which means he pretty much talked to everybody at some point.

I truly don’t! He is not in any of our old yearbooks. His profile says he graduated with us, but I just don’t remember him!

I sent a message to Mr. Reed himself and asked him to jog my memory about how he is, including asking what dorm he lived in. The place requires you live on campus unless you are married or provide some other type of excuse so everybody at some point has a dorm to name.

I send messages to some other people and it’s the same thing: He looked familiar. I noticed he had other people from college on his friends list and assumed I was daft for not remembering him.

Now. That’s strange.

How could someone go to a school so small and manage to fall under the radar?

OR

Why would a person fake being a 1995 graduate of Hendrix College?

OR

Is this some social psychology experiment to see how peer pressures affects facebook friending? The “Oooh everybody else from my school is his friend, I’ll friend him too” phenomenon.

OR is it someone trying to investigate a classmate who doesn’t know that courts don’t necessarily allow the info you obtain under false pretenses into evidence.

Hrmmmm……

Quote of the day

“

Nelson Mandela

Julie and Julia

Julie and Julia is based on two true stories: Julie Powell writing a blog, which later became the book Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously
, chronicling her year long quest to cook every single recipe in Child’s The Art of French Cooking and the story of how Julia Child discovered cooking and came to write Mastering The Art of French Cooking
in the book My Life in France This movie is directed by Nora Ephron.

I have to wonder if Ephron either wanted to just do a movie of “My Life in France” or met Julie Powell and hated her because she managed to make New York and Amy Adams ugly and downright boring. Now I know that Amy Adams and New York city aren’t boring and ugly so I have to come to the conclusion that Ms. Ephron did this on purpose.

In contrast, Julia Child’s France is a beautiful adventure land where everything is absolutely beautiful.

This might be used to reflect Julie Powell’s lost attitude but really? did you have to bore us.

Somehow they made Meryl Streep look six foot two. Julia Child was really six foot two. I have no idea. They must have found every petite actor and actress in Hollywood but they did it. Streep herself acted the hell out of this part and managed to pull of the very public and well known Child in a way that was realistic and not ridiculing. Given Child’s high pitched voice and mannerisms, she would be very easy to caricature. Instead, she turned out to be charming and fun. I had to find the book to discover that the postcards made in the film were actual postcards made by Julia and Paul (Sorry you have to see the film).

The food itself was featured but not in a food porn way such as Big Night or Eat, Drink, Man, Woman. I did, however, become fascinated with the first fish dish in the film and will eventually find the recipe and make it myself. Foodies will like that the author (via an actress playing her) of Joy of Cooking makes an appearance and makes a references to the changes made to the book over time.