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So for some strang reason i felt compelled to cook a 'main dish' this week. I browsed allrecipes.com and chose a recipe. It was a potential disaster from the start when I found it necessary to call home to mom to make sure that whipping cream is the same thing as whipped cream (it isn't! who knew?!), but thankfully I hadn't even bought the ingredients yet. Then, as I was mixing stuff, it occurred to me that I might want to find out what pans were going to be needed. It turns out you're supposed to put a big pan in a bigger pan with some water in it. It called for an inch of water. It got about 1/8th of that (cookie sheets ftw!). I figured that things were doomed, but when the time came, it looked a delicious golden brown on top and smelled hawsome (hawt+awesome=hawesome for those who haven't been following my trendsetting vocabulary modifications). Unfortunately, when I bit into it, it was WAY saltier than I expected. This both subdued the taste of the broccoli and sharpened the taste of the cheddar making for a really rich plate of bleh. Upon further investigation, I find that while talking to mom on the phone about my awesomeness in cooking, I put 2 tablespoons of salt and 1 tablespoon of pepper when it should have been 2 teaspoons and 1 teaspoon. Fail.
(In my defense, I think the recipe may have been fail anyway because it was very very moist for a casserole (12 eggs!).) I'm sad to say that all but one serving of the casserole is getting thrown out. |
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1 cup Peanut Butter
1 cup vanilla ice cream
1 cup milk
maybe a dash of ice
blended until smooth
=
Perfection |
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A very long but very interesting read...John McCain's account of his time as a POW (written in 1973 soon after he was released). |
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I signed up for Twitter. No idea what I'm doing, but whatever. My user name is RobertOgden because I'm original like that.
*SPOILER ALERT* Below is my review of Wall-E. If you haven't seen the movie already, you've been warned.
Wall-E is the story of a lonely robot's quest for love and the places that quest takes him. This story arc is full of subtleties. For instance, when Wall-E's world is literally rocked by the arrival of the Eve, a fresher, sleeker, more powerful robot compared to the lonely, antiquated, and resigned Wall-E, she is desperately searching for something. Wall-E can't figure out what she's looking for, but it is soon made abundantly clear that he's not it. It's only after Eve has spent a considerable amount of time searching that she is forced in frustration and desperation to turn to Wall-E who, it turns out, has exactly what she's been looking for. Even after this scene, Eve is aloof, only discovering Wall-E's love for her by accident in a much later scene by which time Wall-E has followed her to a far away galaxy to protect her. I think its a wonderful story and I appreciate the subtle way in which it is told.
Unfortunately, the Wall-E story arc is in danger of being overwhelmed by the BnL arc. The very first thing you see is an Earth in the not-so-distant future which is uninhabited, covered in trash, and ravished by dust storms. This is quickly explained to be the result of rampant materialism embodied in the big-box conglomerate BnL (read: Wal-Mart). What Eve is literally looking for is any sign of life which she must then bring back and show to her human masters as evidence that Earth is once again habitable. One of the main characters it turns out is nothing but a drone sent by what remains of humanity, a ship full of obese, hedonistic, almost brainwashed people who we find out are being controlled by their robot "servants" more than they realize. Perhaps this pessimistic, almost disgusting depiction of humanity wouldn't be so bad if it didn't overwhelm the main story so badly. By the end of the movie, when Wall-E's very existence is in question, it feels as though his story has been relegated to the status of "subplot" as the story of humanity returning to earth to plant crops and get a fresh start has taken over the helm. The conclusion of the Wall-E/Eve arc seems almost an afterthought, and that's truly a shame. It unsettled me a little to see what is presumably meant as a children's movie have such a blatantly pessimistic background with so subtle a main story. It strikes of propaganda to me. (Did I mention the swipe at President Bush? Was that really necessary in a movie for children who will no more remember Bush's presidency that I remember Reagan's?)
All in all, I think it is a good movie. I enjoyed the Wall-E/Eve story arc immensely (and will be keeping a weed planted in a boot in case any of you fresh, sleek, athletic girls are wondering where to find what you're looking for), and I will probably go see it again sometime before it leaves theaters, but I will do so armed with the knowledge that to truly enjoy the movie I must separate the masterpiece of subtle storytelling from the oft recycled canvas of environmental doomsaying on which it is painted. |
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