Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Monthly Archives: May 2010
Remake hell
Why does Hollywood do nothing but remakes? Or at least that’s how it seems sometimes. In the gym last weekend, I watched nearly all of Ben Stiller’s version of Heartbreak Kid. The original, starring Charles Grodin in the title role and Cybill Shepherd as the girl he meets and falls in love with while on his honeymoon, was an odd gem — I remember not being sure whether to laugh or cringe at Grodin’s sociopathic character. Been a long time since I saw that movie, but I recall it as an oddity: edgy, not a little disturbing. Certainly not rom-com.
The new one is pure rom-com, with only the slightest nod to the original working its way in with the ending “twist” (ZOMG, he’s gonna break another heart!) Other than that, the new version is pure formula, with new love interest Michelle Monaghan being oh-so-perfect (and beautiful, but who wouldn’t be beautiful compared to a baked lobster covered with Noxzema?), throwaway cameos by Carlos Mencia, Daily Show alum Rob Corddry, and Ben’s dad Jerry, and requisite grossness (which seems to be de rigeur ever since Something About Mary) supplied by a folk cure for jellyfish stings.
Broadway is even worse, stealing regularly from books, movies, and itself. Hairspray the musical surprised me, but I’m not holding my breath for Pink Flamingos the musical. But I do reserve dibs for the libretto for The Exorcist the musical. Imagine: possessed Regan in full makeup, head turned 180 degrees, cross brandished, lapsing into song! Oh, I love it already. It’ll be the best thing to hit Broadway since they recycled The Producers.
D.
A fatal attraction to science
I’ve been researching tellurium, a precious metal that is not terribly expensive since there aren’t many uses for it. Bismuth is also a rare metal, and also not pricey since you can’t do much with bismuth but make cool crystals with the stuff.
In browsing that site, I discovered something interesting. But let me back up a bit. Let’s say you have a little kid at home and you want to pique her interest in chemistry. What do you do? When Jake was little, I showed him the vinegar and baking soda reaction, I demonstrated electrolysis using copper wire and a dry cell battery, and I showed him how to do paper chromatography. Didn’t pique his interest in chemistry, but it wasn’t for want of me trying. Turns out you can find all kinds of sites on the web like this one, which features great experiments to do in your home.
Amazing Rust is not one of those sites. It’s Ask Mr. Wizard for the budding Timothy McVeigh crowd. It’s the one-stop school science fair idea-source for next year’s Darwin Awards winners. I mean, for the love of Hephaestus, they brag about staging large-scale thermite reactions.
But this is the project that really got my juices flowing:
You know what you do not want to hear around this apparatus? Whoops.
The object of this experiment is to liquefy chlorine gas. After a brief preamble about the brilliance of Michael Faraday in figuring out how to isolate liquid chlorine by cooling and pressurizing it, they include the necessary “kids, don’t do this at home” message, to wit,
Chlorine is toxic and can cause severe respiratory damage and, if inhaled in sufficient quantities, even death. Take great care to avoid breathing chlorine gas. In case of inhalation, retreat to an area with fresh air immediately. Consult the MSDS, and other reliable sources, to determine the appropriate medical attention required for various levels and paths of exposure to dangerous substances.
Chlorine gas, and liquid chlorine, are highly corrosive and may act as an oxidizing agent to many organic and metallic materials.
Dry ice and especially liquids cooled using dry ice pose a significant safety risk. Do not allow these substances to touch living tissue (for example, skin) for any significant period of time as they will quickly cool the tissue to dangerously low temperatures and can result in frostbite. Always handle with thermally-insulting, non-absorbent gloves.
A list of applicable MSDS pages are provided in the ‘external links’ section on the left.
Only experienced persons possessing the proper equipment and who are knowledgeable of the material’s properties and the recommended safety procedures should attempt this experiment. It is only advisable to perform this experiment inside a well-maintained fume hood or glove box in order to protect oneself from the corrosive and toxic effects of liquid and gaseous chlorine. The danger may be further minimized by only producing chlorine gas, and thus liquid chlorine, in small quantities. Proceed with Extreme Caution and at One’s Own risk.
Ah, but then on to the fun stuff. Here’s the basic idea: produce chlorine on the left, cool it in a dry ice bath on the right. How do you produce chlorine? The tried and true method known briefly to scores of hapless janitors and house-cleaners: mix a bleach with an acid. In this case, calcium hypochlorite and hydrochloric acid. Et voila, you’re producing gas! In a closed system! Such that the only thing standing between you and a massive chlorine gas spill is the integrity of your ground glass joints!
But it’s the little bubbler in the middle that really tickled me. It’s what the chemical engineers call a scrubber (if I remember correctly. Kira, you want to chime in?) The website explains that hydrochloric acid is laden with water, so the chlorine gas generated is also saturated with water. By bubbling the chlorine and water vapor through the scrubber, you remove the water, purifying your product.
What’s in the scrubber? What would be one of the worst things to add to this toxic gas bomb waiting to happen? Oh, concentrated sulfuric acid, that’s all.
Okay, I’m off now to read about how to make thermite, because you know, holocaust by lung-eating gas is simply not as dramatic as death by raging inferno.
D.
Sex Ed, Catholic-style
Y’all know I’m not a prude. It’s not like I object to sex education in the schools; in fact, I think we need much more of it, delivered to much younger children. I’ve long thought of sex ed in the schools as a good thing. But I’m starting to rethink my position.
Perhaps the responsibility for sex education should remain with the parents.
The reason for my change of heart? I object to the manner in which my son is being educated. Do you want to know one of the first things they did with the kids? (A mixed class, by the way — whatever happened to separating the boys from the girls? Am I hopelessly square?) They showed them pictures of genitalia. Diseased genitalia.
Mind you, they did not first show them pictures of healthy genitalia.
Do you understand why I’m tweaked? Some of these kids — yeah, precious few, I know, since most kids find porn on the internet about 30 seconds after they first learn to google — but some of these kids have never seen opposite-sex genitalia before, or perhaps just artistically rendered nudity, not full-on wide-open or hanging-out-there packages. And what do they see? Warts. Ulcers. Purulent discharge.
And so for the few ninth graders left who are still mouldable, their first impression will be Ooooh! Grooooss!
I’m likely underestimating the power of sexuality to overcome the Catholic school’s ham-handed attempt to forever make sex = oh gross in the minds of these kids. But still, it bugs the crap at me that they’re trying to indoctrinate my son. Not that he succumbs easily to memes, but just the same, I’ve pointed out to him what’s going on here. Several times. Such that he’s sick of me mentioning it.
I haven’t tried to counter the propaganda with the “sex is beautiful” talk. I embarrass him enough as it is.
D.
This must be some kind of mitzvah. How do you say cockroach in Hebrew?
I got my patient in ASAP. You’d want to get in ASAP too if you had something crawling in your ear. I expected to find the usual cockroach, and indeed, my patient did not disappoint. But it was more than a cockroach.
It was Cockroach Plus.
Uh oh theca.
Cockroach plus ootheca, to be exact — an egg case. This was a female caught embarazada. Knocked up. Up the duff. On stork watch. Wearing the apron high. In the pudding club. Eating for 48.
And she was desperately trying to fulfill her Darwinian destiny in her last moments on Earth.
By the way, the egg case pictured above belongs to a Madagascar hissing cockroach, a beastie we used to breed in days of yore. And if you had one of them in your ears, you’d really have something to worry about.
Don’t know why Cockroach Plus should be so much more disturbing than Just Plain Roach, but it was. But hey, I’m a professional. I squirted some lidocaine down the ear canal (paralyzing and more or less killing the critter) and removed it piecemeal with suction and alligator forceps. End result, one happy patient who took the roach-bits home wrapped in gauze. So who knows, perhaps that egg case will find a happy home after all.
I told Karen all about it. She wanted to know, why didn’t it just back out?
“They can’t back out. Didn’t you know that? Don’t you remember the earwig episode on Night Gallery? They have to eat their way through to the other side.”
“Oh. Night Gallery. That’s your authority on this, huh?”
Yup, that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it. If it weren’t for me, the she-roach would have eaten it’s way through, laying eggs en route to the other side. Hey! I just remembered, there is a phrase for this in Hebrew — pikuach nefesh.
To save a life.
D.
A vision
As much as I love the nudes that Dean posts, something else nails me in the heart with far greater impact: a woman in a white cotton dress walking into the sun. Holding a bag of groceries, too, as it happens, but the groceries aren’t essential. Essential is the nudity that is not nudity, just enough information to let you dream. Still photos would not capture this beauty, because its intrinsic power derives from a body in motion.
Which is probably why I prefer to work out behind a woman exercising on a treadmill or elliptical trainer. Preferably one whose sweats are slipping down, revealing finely furred skin, a tattoo, or if I’m lucky, a pair of dimples or the hint of gluteal cleft. Yes, that’s medicalese for butt crack. I like butt crack. So sue me.
We all have to do what we can to stay motivated.
D.
Black nails Beck on Stewart
This is just so perfect. And to think, used to be I didn’t like Lewis Black. But the man is brilliant.
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Back in Black – Glenn Beck’s Nazi Tourette’s | ||||
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D.
Overheard at the gym
Is it a full moon? It must be a full moon.
Two white-haired guys in the locker room: one in his 70s, buck naked, drying himself off from the shower, the other in his sixties, neatly dressed, trying to make his escape.
Naked guy: The politics in this country, I just don’t know.
Escapee: It’s always been crazy.
Naked guy: No, you don’t understand. It’s just this century* people got greedy. Time past — what, for 19,000 years? — all people cared about was getting enough to eat. Now they care about cars.
Escapee: Well, no, it’s just the same. They’d fight about getting two hunks of meat instead of one, that’s all. People are the same.
Naked guy: It’s all different now.
And to emphasize his point, I shit you not, he grabbed his package and gestured with it. Whereupon the escapee made good on his escape.
At the treadmills, two women, friends I guess (but you should have heard the one bitch out the other for being late to the gym), no descriptions tendered because when people are living caricatures, accurate description would seem cartoonish. Call them woman one and woman two.
One: Do you know what my Message from God** was today?
Two: Your huh?
One: My Message from God. Check out my MySpace. My Message from God was, “Change comes [and here she paused for dramatic effect. Or maybe to catch her breath] whether you want it or not.” I tell ya, it’s amazing. Almost every day, my Message from God speaks to me. It’s where I’m at nearly every time.
Two: Well why shouldn’t God use MySpace to talk to you? God can use anything.
(Personally, I would opt for the burning bush or wrestler-angel. Much less ambiguity than a social networking app, don’t you think?)
One: Sometimes He uses people to talk to me.
Two: Oh, yeah! All the time!
People these days, I just don’t know. In my day we read horoscopes. (I grab my crotch for emphasis.)
D.
*He seemed oblivious to the fact that our century is a scant ten years old.
** She really did talk in hyperlinks. You could have knocked me over.
I knew it had to happen eventually.
My coins have gained in value, and some have beat the inflation rate. That’s assuming I would ever sell the damned things, or could get a competitive price for them. I never intended them as an investment, except perhaps one of those “let’s leave some cool things for the grandkiddies when we die” kind of investment. But, still, it’s nice to know my purchases weren’t entirely foolhardy.
Coins are beautiful.
My fascination began at around age 8, when my dad’s mother gave me some old coins (some American, some international) she’d been saving in her safe deposit box. The coolest of the cool were the large cents my dad had acquired while cleaning out the basement of some museum in Boston. Acquired, not stole, since he was told he could keep anything interesting he found in the basement.
Or at least that’s his story, and he’s sticking to it.
He found a whole jar of Indian Head pennies, which somehow disappeared. Perhaps his brother took them? No one knows. (Not quite as heartbreaking as the mysterious disappearance of my father-in-law’s centuries-old samurai sword, but still . . . And besides, that sword would have ended up with Karen’s brother, so it’s not like she, the youngest daughter, would ever have had a shot at it.)
Those large cents are nearly worthless, since I think the best of the lot is in Very Good or perhaps Fine condition. But it sparked an interest. For a long time when I was little, I would get rolls of pennies, nickels, and sometimes dimes from the bank, and pore over them looking for “finds.” In those days it was common to find wheat ear pennies (but never an Indian Head cent), and you could even occasionally find a buffalo nickel or Mercury dime in circulation. Rare, like once-a-year kind of rare, but always exciting.
The first thing we did when we got married was, we bought a pet snake. And one of the first things we did when I started earning a real paycheck (paltry though it was), was to buy a few coins. I didn’t have much money to put into coins, so it’s not like I shelled out a lot of cash.
Jake does not share my fascination. I showed him the coins when he was very young and impressionable, except I don’t think he was ever impressionable. He didn’t care for them. I showed him the coins tonight, and he looked at them for all of about two minutes. Or less.
I’m not sure why I fell out of the hobby. I think it’s because I got swindled by a couple of dealers and sold coins for much more than they were worth. As hobbies go, this one punishes the ignorant most severely. If I do get back into it, this time I’m going to do my research, and not simply buy coins ‘cuz they’re pretty.
D.
Either they love him or they hate him
We were TP’d last night. Not a bad job, but hardly professional. No toilet paper on the roof . . . no mostly dried-up egg yolk on the driveway or windows. The tree is well festooned, as are some of our bulb plants, but that seems to be the limit of our TP’ers creativity.
What follows is pure guesswork and supposition. For all I know, my partner and his wife had a few too many and decided to flashback to their youth. But given that most TP attacks are directed at the school-age child of the household, I wondered who would target my son.
I didn’t have to wonder long, since only a few of his classmates know where he lives. Specifically, his co-stars in this creation. The better question is this: should we take this as sign of affection, or act of revenge?
See, they didn’t get a great grade on the project. I know, I know, it’s hard to believe. They made a video, for the love of all things unholy. But the terms of the assignment specified that certain information regarding drug use had to be in the song’s lyrics, and my son and his fellow filmmakers included the info in a number of captions. The teacher judged this sinful enough to warrant a B rather than an A.
Why blame Jake? Because he insisted that if they make him (and me) do the bulk of the filming and editing, they would need to do the writing. And when he didn’t answer his text-message on the day they wanted his help with the writing (because, tech savvy though he may be, he’s never mastered the art of IM), perhaps they figured he was being good to his word.
In other words (as Karen put it this morning), your basic fight between the writer and the cinematographer.
Or, on the other hand, perhaps one of ’em has a mean crush on my boy.
D.
Jon Stewart on racial profiling.
Okay, so I was wrong.
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Explosive and the City 2 | ||||
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D.