Giles Coren, a restaurant critic for the London Times, has penned a hilarious article about the Calorie Restriction (CR) movement, written from a cyncial, satirical, typically British point of view, but it had me rolling.

Sample money quote:

Breakfast is more tinned tomatoes, garnished with “pizza herbs” and garlic powder. I eat just a mouthful and stop, but still my breath smells like a Frenchman’s pants well into the following week.

I got a kick out of reading it – you may, too.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/food_and_drink/eating_out/giles_coren/article7001699.ece

Hilarious – a must watch!

(h/t Alyssa Royse, via FB)

This was in my Facebook notifications pane just a minute ago:

A “designer rifle”?  WTF?  I didn’t even know there was such a thing.  I’m almost afraid to Google the phrase.

This has to be one of the most transparently gauche attempts to squeeze a buck from the bride and groom that I’ve ever seen.

http://www.unitysandceremony.net/

Using different colored sands, the bride and groom each take turns filling a Unity Vase as they recite their chosen vows. The sand colors can be coordinated with your home décor, chosen based on colors you love personally or for any other special reason that is meaningful to you. At the end of the ceremony, the vase is taken home and sits atop a shelf, a table or a mantle, beautifully symbolizing the start of your new life together.

I hereby declare that at the start of any consulting engagement, I will hire a certified Unity Sand Ceremony Style Consultant to come in and perform a Unity Sand Ceremony with the client. We will choose colors that coordinate with the client’s brand/logo.  The specially-consecrated sand will sit in a special glass receptacle on the build server for the duration of the project.  At the conclusion of the project, we will all walk out into the parking lot and sprinkle the (warm) sand in the CEO’s parking spot, signifying a task completed to the “highest levels of achievement.”  Should the project be a failure (never happens, btw!), we’ll flush the sand down the toilet.

Howard Schultz
c/o Starbucks Corporation
2401 Utah Ave S
Seattle, WA 98134

Dear Howard:

I’m writing to you with a problem.  I’m a huge fan of Starbucks and an even bigger fan of the “third place” community experience. I’m a regular customer at your Magnolia Relocation store.  I have spent – no joke here – thousands of dollars at that store in the ten years I’ve lived in Magnolia.

The problem is that I freeze my ass off every time I spend any time there.  It is, quite literally, as cold as sin, and I’ve been both a member of a fraternity and have worked at Microsoft, so I have some passing familiarity with the low temperatures traditionally associated therewith.  I would bet you one frozen buttock that it doesn’t reach more than 50 degrees Fahrenheit in that little back room where I like to work on my laptop, even when the temperatures outside are hot enough you could brew espresso directly in a shot glass.

No one likes to shiver, Howard, but yet I find myself shivering when all I’m trying to do is write code, or blog, or catch up with friends on Facebook, or any of the other million diversions one can do with a laptop and an AT&T Wi-Fi account.  My fingers get all discombobulated, and I find myself randomly hitting q’s and p’s and the little tilde thing way up in the top left, all due to the shivering.  My writing has suffered. The value of my “personal brand”, about which I have recently begun to obsess, is precipitously declining, all due to shiver-induced writing failures.

My bones complain.  No, not my bones, but rather the marrow inside my bones.  The marrow in my very bones freezes, like when one encounters a witch, or a vampire, or one mistakenly hits “Reply All” to an e-mail in which is included a crude joke about one’s boss at work.

I know several Magnolia residents of Icelandic descent and they refuse to go into the Magnolia Relocation store.  Remember, Icelanders are people who like to jump into glacial fjords for their health, yet they studiously avoid this store.  That, to me, seems an important indicator.

It’s so cold, I recently saw an elderly lady expire – I swear to god, that hot-breath-meets-cold-air misty phenomenon all of a sudden just stopped, and it was only when her son-in-law shook her that I suppose her heart restarted.  Her breath resumed making little icy clouds, and I heard her mutter “get me out of here, it’s too damned cold”.  She scuttled off, presumably to board a flight to Miami Beach, or Arizona, or some other place where they experience sensible temperatures.

There is good news.  There are very few bugs.  I suspect that have retreated across the street to Tully’s, where the temperatures are normal.  Also, the famously delicious icy consistency of your Frappuccino-brand beverages is probably prolonged and enhanced by the freezing temperatures.

Howard, I beg of you: ask the manager to turn the dial, and turn up the temperature, or turn down the A/C, or both.  I miss you and want to come back.

I laughed when I came across this passage in Lucky Jim in which Dixon ponders the sudden and unexpected sexual energy shown by Margaret:

“And why had she decided to seem so keen, after so many weeks of seeming not so keen? Most likely because of some novelist she’d been reading.”

You might think that Amis knew a bit or two about novelists exciting the passions of literate admirers. However, Lucky Jim was his first published novel. Maybe he was looking ahead and optimistically assessing the life?

I’ve never even heard of this movie – and now, probably never will again. Kyle Smith of the New York Post sums it up thusly:

The banality of evil has met its match in the banality of "Good," a Holocaust parable that barely registers a pulse.

What were the most annoying, most repetitive, most mind-numbingly banal phrases of 2008 that you hope die and stay dead before they can infect 2009?  Without further buildup, here are mine:

1. Ready on day one
2. Maverick
3. I can haz <anything>
4. You betcha
5. Commander-in-chief
6. Boots on the ground
7. Hockey mom
8. Look
9. Bailout
10. President Bush

What are yours?

You should check out Googlefight.  Here’s my favorite so far:

It’s not even close!

– from the Oregon Live website