Quick grab bag o' thoughts

It's not that I haven't felt like posting. It's not that I haven't had anything to say. It's just that I haven't had time!

I made my Monday deadline (barely), did a tag-team recap of the Destilando Amor finale that night (I didn't get the best segment, but I still managed to make a joke about killing someone with a demitasse spoon), and finished up some more work stuff the next day.

Huh, that'd only be yesterday, right? This is turning out to be a really long week.

I've got more to do today, but it's less urgent, and frankly I'm burnt out - too burnt out to talk about this cake thing that's on my mind, and much too burnt out for my yearly rant about Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. But not too burnt out for these:

• My check engine light came on again. This time it definitely wasn't related to the gas cap. The guy at Autozone said it had something to do with some solenoid thingy related to my brakes, and I couldn't get a car appointment until Friday, so I'm staying out of Cambridge this week (don't want to drive the car out of town until I know what's going on). Most likely it's nothing serious, because the light went off after three more restarts, but this makes two times that the CEL has come on within a month, and I've only owned the car less than 18 months. I'd like to know wtf is going on.
  
  
• I heard Norm MacDonald in a TV commercial. He was the voice of a cartoon gingerbread man. It was sorta pitiful, but at least he didn't sound drunk, like he was the last few times I've seen him. I blame Frank Stallone.
  
  
• I had a birthday. We ended up not going to the Restaurant That Time Forgot after all; instead we went to Hong Kong City in Taunton. It's in the building that used to be the Roseland bowling alley and ballroom. (There's a dance school upstairs.) The food there was great; they had THE best sushi I've ever had; but I don't recommend their mixed drinks. Their rendition of the Navy Grog didn't sound tempting at all, and my mother said her Mai Tai was awful. Their Suffering Bastard wasn't very good either. And my BIL, with whom I was sharing the birthday celebration, missed out entirely because he was stuck in a traffic jam for a couple of hours. We took some food home for him and had cake (my mother made a killer red velvet), but still, he totally got ripped off.
  
  
• I chased that lousy Suffering Bastard (or as my aunt Carol used to tactfully call it, "Suffering Bee") with a shot of Patrón Silver. It was good, but not better than the cheaper Cazadores Blanco. In related news, a while back when I was feeling wealthy, I got a bottle of Milagro Reposado to replace my then-almost-finished Cazodores. I tried some when I got home and was revolted. It was very different from Cazadores, and I hated it.
  
  I used up some of this pricey stuff in cooking, in mixed drinks, etc. and eventually it was gone, after which I replaced it with more Cazadores. The punchline? I guess I got to sort of liking Milagro after all, because my first sip of Cazadores after the one-month break was even more jarring than my first sip of Milagro. Milagro is crisp and peppery, while Cazadores is much oakier, almost scotchy (as is Patrón).
  
  
• Back when I was a happy Cingular customer, I was able to get a new, better phone for free every year if I signed a two-year contract. This kept them competitive with other companies, which all offer free phones to new customers.
  
  Now that AT&T has taken over, that deal is gone. New customers still get a free phone (or a deeply discounted iPhone, or whatever), but existing customers do not. You have to wait 18 months, and even then I think you get only a discount, not a freebie (they don't explain this clearly on their website). I really want a new phone, because I don't like the one I have; but after 8 years of nothing but free phones, I refuse to pay ANYTHING for a new one. Or a used one, for that matter. My contract with them expires in September, I think, after which I suppose I will be up for grabs. Brilliant marketing strategy, AT&T!
  
  
• Back in September, Univision hosted a debate for the Democratic presidential candidates in Miami. Questions were asked in Spanish; candidates were required to give their answers in English (Richardson complained about this), which was translated and broadcast in Spanish only (no English on SAP - I checked - and no English captions on CC2). Everyone showed up for this debate except Joe Biden, who had to do some Pentagon thing the next day or something.
  
  The Republicans were also offered a chance to debate, but the only person who accepted at the time was John McCain. That guy will talk to anyone. I guess they all reconsidered, though, because they're going to have their debate this Sunday at 7 (or maybe it's 8). I doubt that I will make it through the whole thing, but I am looking forward to seeing how they answer questions about immigration, multilingual education, etc. right to the faces of a voting audience that will be something like 95% Latino.
  
  
• I made those other two soup mixes I got from Plimouth Plantation. The instructions for the pumpkin chowder said to add two cups of cream before serving; not having two cups of cream handy, I added a little milk to one bowlful. A LITTLE milk. It converted this delicious, peachy-colored soup into a bland bowlful of nothing. I ate the rest of the soup without any dairy ingredients, and it was great, even if not technically a chowder.
  
  The Indian Corn Pottage ended up more like a big pot of grits or cornmeal mush with spinach. (A pottage should have a sludgy consistency, but grits absorb so much liquid that the corn-to-liquid ratio was bound to make it very thick.) It wasn't bad, but it actually benefited from a little bit of cream, which improved the texture.
  
  
• I got Office Space on DVD for my birthday. The "extras" in this so-called "with flair" edition weren't very impressive, but it did include captions AND audio in French and Spanish. I wanted to hear how Lumberg and Milton would sound.
  
  Neither the French nor Spanish version really got the delivery quite right. Lumberg didn't have the slow-talking schtick, for example. Translating his lines literally ("I'm going to have to ask you to go ahead and...") made them too long to say slowly within the allotted time. It might have been smarter to give him a slightly less wordy version to say, so that he could say it the same way as Gary Cole. But maybe that's just me. (Anyway, there's no excuse not to say "síííííííííí" slowly when Lumberg is saying "yeaaaaaah" slowly.)
  
  Meanwhile, the Milton we know has a mousy little voice, but the guy who was doing Milton in French gave him sort of a Muppet-like voice (Fozzie Bear, maybe?), and the guy who did him in Spanish didn't even do that much.
  
  The audio Spanish translation did capture Lumberg's personality much better than the translated captions, though. When Lumberg said "greaaaat," the captions always said "muy bien" (a bland way of saying "very good"), but in the audio he said a few different things, like "estupendo" and "óptimo." It would have been nice if he'd just used one word again and again, for better quotability; but if he can't speak slowly, I'm glad he could at least speak pompously and colorfully.