oh yeah, now everyone's all high on friendster.

we blogged it first! okay, that's totally not true.

i even got the poonster in on the friendster action. it turns out that the Star Wars Kid is in both our networks.

p.s. Mr. P only has two friends, so if you're a friend of his, you should add him so his network is not overshadowed by my massive 62528 people.

quickly! we have food, booze and various other vices assembled for this evening's activities, but no activity! what shall we do?!

UPDATE: activity consisted of listening to the radio while drinking. i guess it doesn't take much to make us happy.

Wednesday is the day I buy the New York Times. It's all about the Dining section. Amanda Hesser, William Grimes, Frank Prial, and Eric Asimov ... all know their craft and produce lively, precise descriptions.

Prial's got a diverting article on dessert wines today. He tries to coax us Americans out of our guilty relationship toward sweet vinousness:

"[W]e have taken enthusiastically to dry wines — so much so that, except for Sauternes and port, we tend to look down on sweet wines as gauche, embarrassing, the excesses of misspent youth."

This is all true, and I think outside of a few major cities the situation is even graver than Prial suggests. When I clerked in a mid-sized city, I found only a few colleagues who appreciated the joys of port and Sauternes. (So I proselytized.) And don't get me started on the slowness of Americans to appreciate the gossamer amber marvel that is fine Hungarian Tokay.

Prial goes on:

"But the truth is, in a guilty sort of way, we still love our sweet wines. Only now we call them dessert wines. We needn't feel guilty. The Romans liked their wines sweet. The British, during the 300 years they owned Bordeaux, shipped mostly sweet wines back home. And didn't they invent port? When the Dutch dominated the Bordeaux trade, the wines they sent off to Amsterdam were overwhelmingly sweet."

Well, yeah, but deep sweetness was very scarce, especially in chilly Northern Europe, in the days before the commercial processing of sugar cane. It was a big deal, a luxury. People craved as much sweetness as they could get.

Anyway, in addition to being a wine buff generally, I adore complex sweet wine, whether it be vintage port, late-harvest Alsatian Gewurztraminer (which Prial discusses), Tokay, or fine Sauternes, which is one of those rare phenomena that can exist for years in your sensory imagination as an ideal, producing a strange shock of recognition when you encounter them in real life.

"Wow, so you exist."

- P., purply

brought to you by mr. poon and the number 2022.

cubicle dweller!

in my hunt for random blogs, it occurs to me there is entirely too much garbage online nowadays. but look, cubicle dweller likes legos!

anyways, go and take a look around. it's nice and fuzzy there.

{Listening to: Another One Bites the Dust - Queen - Pure Funk, Vol. 2}

p.s. it should have occurred to you by now that my definition of random may be different than the conventional one.

i am connected to 57417 people in my personal network!

{Listening to: Disco Inferno - The Trammps - Saturday Night Fever}

or, what i learned from watching "queer eye for the straight guy."

men can be trained to do absolutely anything.

good boy! now, roll over!

{Listening to: Up for the Down Stroke - Parliament - Greatest Hits (The Bomb)}

i just finished a monopoly marathon. i won by $7,603 after bankrupting everyone else in the game. that means i had every single one of the $500 bills. it gave me some seriously perverse pleasure.

I offered Alice a bunch of music recommendations in the comments section to the "voting" post below.

She has responded with a no doubt judicious silence.

{this morning's listening: Schaufensterpuppen - Kraftwerk - Trans-Europa Express (original German)}

i freakin' just got spammed by a christian tour group operator. it's kind of weird, because it's probably the first piece of spam i've ever received from a (putatively) real company not trying to sell a) real estate b) weight loss items or c) penis enlargement products.

i can't be sure -- i'm no expert -- but i think spam is way unchristian. there's a special level of hell reserved just for spammers and con men. spam, being pure evil certainly is the work of the devil.

i normally wouldn't link to something like this (besides, my linking is clever and funny), but in case someone gets taken in by it, and is smart enough to search, they'll stumble across this post [keywords engaged]. i know for sure i didn't opt in - my particular piece of spam came through on a mailing list whose closest thing to a deity is elvis.

Lane wants to be Number Two.