Study says that chefs don’t count calories when you eat out – of course not! That’s not their job. As much as I don’t care for the big portions, the idea is that they give the big portions to convince you that you’re getting your money’s worth of food. Plus, they want you to feel full. The key, I guess, is that people shouldn’t eat out regularly; if you make your own food, you control your calories. Or, if you eat out, know what you’re getting.
Starbucks’ overtaking culture, as the arbiter of what movies, music, and books we read.
And, in the world of comic strips and the Internet: boy, are people really mourning the passing of Aldo of Mary Worth? Aldo was Mary Worth’s semi-stalker, to the point that Mary’s friends gave him an intervention (instead of, say, calling the cops), which frustrated Aldo’s intentions of dating Mary such that he went back to the bottle and then fatally drove drunk off a cliff (accidentally driving off; not like he intended to committ suicide – Aldo’s stupid, but not that stupid, apparently). Wow. Could it be that Mary and the soap opera comic strips are making a comeback? Or is it that Mary’s comic strip is the one where we get some strange characters for our (un)intended amusement? (Aldo, Smitty Smedlap – a serious grouch who had his own odd crush on Mary, plus “Woody” – who became psychotic after finishing his dissertation and failing to flirt with Mary’s neighbor Dawn).
October reading:
John Le Carre’s first novel: Call for the Dead. Great read – the weight of the emotional baggage of the characters – George Smiley, Elsa Fennan, and the weird office politics of British Intelligence (which felt a lot like anyone else’s insane workplace), and the feeling of being in another time – the Cold War at its height.