Seething rage at Sur La Table

Husband and I were shopping for pleasing kitchen goods at Sur La Table the other night. I was enjoying wandering through the teetering shelves of copper cookware, dog-shaped ceramic chopstick holders, clay pots shaped like pigs and cowboy cookie cutters, which I will use to make dessert at my next Brokeback Mountain party. I was having a good time. So much to see! So much to consider! So much to purchase!

Then.

Halfway through my browsing, near the cookbook section, right near the Boos cutting boards, there she was. Her perky mug, grinning at me from the cover of a hardback book, where she's posing behind a "dish" like "hamburgers" that she made from a "recipe" in only "30 minutes." OK, fine, I can deal with Rachael Ray's cookbooks. I can deal with her television success. What I cannot countenance, however, is what was displayed right next to the book: RACHAEL RAY'S OWN BRANDED EXTRA-VIRGIN OLIVE OIL, "EVOO."
Rachael makes me irate because she has become wildly successful doing what any self-respecting home cook can do in her sleep. I mean, "Italian Grilled Cheese-n-Tomato"? How is that even a recipe?! It's grilled cheese!! (Insert righteous indignation here.) Yet she has 17.4 shows on the Food Network, her own magazine, awful catchphrases, a talk show that's starting in the fall and, now, her own line of olive oil! That she named "EVOO"!

To demonstrate my jealous fury, I am going to pick up as many bottles of "EVOO" as I possibly can and carry them across the store in an homage to Ms. Ray's daring ingredient transportation methods. Only I won't feel bad when I drop them all, the shards of her olive oil empire dashed to pieces on the Sur La Table floor.

The Dicky: January 27, 2006

The sender is the "California Olive Committee." The subject line is:

They kind of look like little football helmets, after all...

Whatever it takes to get football fans into tapenade.

It's not like we're in a nuclear standoff with Iran or anything

From yesterday's Akron Beacon Journal:

If Tehran's deadly posturing gets to be too much for you, just sit back and think about how totally, like, normal it is to eat quesadillas these days.

Take that, Peyton Manning

Please don't ever accuse Sympathetic Weather of not caring about sports.

Most fall/winter Mondays (and some Sundays), I am indeed ready for the football. (If only because it involves several beers and a good meal, but whatever.) During the summer, I can appreciate and enjoy the beauty of nine innings. And I am somewhat grateful to haunt the same streets and/or Italian restaurants as LeBron.

Although it might earn me a growling-at from shirtless men with orange-painted chests in the Dawg Pound, I must say I was gratified to hear today that the NFL says the referee in Sunday's Pittsburgh-Indianapolis game should have upheld flowing-tressed Polamalu's interception. (My family is originally from the Pittsburgh area, and my football "loyalties" reside there. Cry me a river, Cleveland.)

So, whatever, sucky ref! You are just so totally jealous that you cannot have hair like Troy.


Oh and by the way, that referee is lucky he didn't contribute to some Pittsburgher's death. It was a different play, but still.

The Dicky: January 17, 2006

In honor of last night's Golden Globes ceremony -- and of Hollywood's awards season in general -- today's Dicky goes to:

condoleeza rice, lol

Pitt-Jolie baby will be attractive, Pope remains Catholic

This is just the sort of brilliant news analysis that I've come to expect from MSNBC:

Dr. Lawrence Reed, a New York City-based plastic surgeon, said the [Pitt-Jolie] child’s good genes will in all likelihood make his services unnecessary.

“You have a very beautiful mother with great bone structure,” said Reed. “You have a very handsome father with excellent bone structure and facial features. The genetic prediction would make this child have a greater chance by far of being what everyone would consider an attractive baby, an attractive person.”

Reed said he predicts Brangelina’s baby will be “much taller” than Pitt, who stands at 6 feet, and the 5 feet, 7 inches Jolie.

“The eyes will be incredible,” he said. “I can’t see this ever not working out.”

In other news, Dr. Reed seems to have a creepy hot-baby fetish.

You may pop the champagne

Martha Stewart's calendar is back!!

The low point of the whole Alderson debacle was the disappearance of Martha from the pages of Living -- taking the beloved calendar feature with her. Living editors replaced Martha's monthly reminders to "go hiking in Maine with Barbra" and "invite Nobu to Lily Pond Lane to help me sand and seal garden tool handles" with a feature called "Gentle Reminders," which, as to be expected, never lived up to the out-of-touch bourgeois charm of the calendar.

But lo, yesterday on Martha Martha unveiled a giant new calendar that will be a fixture on her daytime show set. Her audience clapped and squealed as if the words "The calendar is back!" are on par with "You get a car! You get a car!! YOU get a car!!!" (Which, of course, they are.)

Thank you, Martha, for giving me a reason to live again. And what will you be doing on January 24? Why, sending flowers to David Letterman, of course. A friendly gesture, sure, but that can't possibly beat when you sailed to Tobago Cay with Mick Jagger and family on the 5th. And might I suggest starting your packing for Torino on the 30th? That's when I'm doing mine.

Frightening the veterans

My husband and I spent a good deal of time at the American Legion last night. When we arrived with a few friends (two brothers, one of which is gay), the place was relatively full of older vets and local firefighters. They were enjoying themselves, sitting at large round tables and drinking pitchers of beer on which they tipped the poor suffering bartender $1 a piece.

Gay friend Andrew hit the jukebox, doing all he could to restrain himself from playing "My Humps" -- thinking that it would not be a favorite among the bar's patrons. Interestingly, he contented himself with playing some Elton John, which is much less straight than Fergie's lovely lady lumps. Anyway. The vets and firemen didn't seem to mind, but a few did start trickling out of the establishment.

I had $5 in my wallet, which buys you 12 songs at the Legion. I figured that I might try to expand the musical horizons of the remaining veterans, but by the time we got to "Copacabana," we were the only people left in the place. The last departing gentleman told us he would've stayed longer if not for the awful music.

Which means, sadly, that when "My Humps" came on, the bartender was the only soul left to witness Andrew's strip tease under the poorly-drawn map of Saudi Arabia on the Operation Iraqi Freedom banner. If you were wondering why the terrorists hate us.

The Dicky: January 6, 2006

Allow me to introduce a new recurring feature on Sympathetic Weather: The "Your Dick Isn't Just for Pissing" Award for Excellence in Spam Subject Lines (the "Dicky," for short).

From time to time I will bestow this honor on those spam messages that end up in my in-box with particularly hilarious and/or obtuse subject lines. To earn this recognition, a piece of spam must go beyond the ordinary and think outside of the box. Promises of lower mortgage rates and larger breasts will not suffice. I'm talking random-ass crap.

I hereby proclaim the inaugural Dicky recipient:

That's one nice dildo, councilwoman

A race for the ages

If you watched The Biggest Loser: Special Edition last night, no doubt you were captivated by the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat that can only come when a childish and insecure man is compelled to give the smack-down to everything in his unfortunate path.

Witness the human drama that played out when Red Team contestant Otto Muha, apropos of nothing except perhaps to defend horsey Jillian's honor, bullied the Blue Team's Don Samuels into an impromptu foot race. Poor Don was just working out, hugging trainer Bob when Otto forced him outside:


You might have missed it -- the race came and went in the blink of an eye, and the stingy Biggest Loser editors and producers only replayed it 10 to 12 times throughout the remaining portion of the show. But if you were lucky enough to see it, you got to watch a laboring Don dig deep for a come-from-behind win over an excessively competitive Otto. Fence post to fence post, this clash of the overweight titans might have been the finest entertainment NBC has offered us in the past year.

I am curious to see how this works

l am blogging from the local library, using its wi-fi, via my fancy Palm Pilot that my husband got me for my birthday.

I think my technophobe head is going to explode.

Looks like I can't change fonts, etc. from here. So I guess what I sacrifice in style and formatting, I make up in "convenience." Although I could just walk 10 feet from where I'm sitting and use the free computer -- which totally would be easier.