Stylin’ with Beppe
Image via whyweprotest.net.
Given my recent spate of nonstandard fiction posts, you may have guessed that I am on vacation. This year, however, rather than booking our usual warm weather getaway, Mr. Slattern and I have debunked for Italy, which I am sorry to report is experiencing some truly Old Testament weather on the eve of the big papal party. Obviously we hadn’t anticipated either contingency back when we made our holiday plans, but here we are in soggy Florence with a relocation to even soggier Rome in the not too distant future, and so we must make the best of both the climate and the impending riot of pope-mad tourists. On a positive note, we have found a bottle of Chianti or two at lunch and a steady supply of Aperol spritzes in the evening really do take the sting out of being occupied. Or is that ossified? Either/or I guess.
Now, I don’t really get to the Continent all that often, but when I do, I am always interested to see what the locals are up to. If the fashion- and culture-cognoscenti are to be believed, just by breathing the rarefied air of Paris, Milan or Frankfurt, our EU cousins are innately more sophisticated than we mall-stomping, burger-munching sad sacks will ever dream of being.
Image via blog.iodonna.it. Gesture via Beppe.
Certainly one sees the hand of old world sophistication at work in the choice of Beppe Grillo and Silvio Berlusconi as presidential frontrunners. I mean Jesse “The Body” Ventura and Arnold Schwarzenegger only made it as far as governor and governator respectively. Imagine what heights the USA might have risen to if they’d been allowed to scramble to the top of the political dung heap.
Aesthethetically, we are also told, the Euros have it all over us, and having visited the Louvre, the Uffizzi and the occasional Paris pissoir, I can certainly attest to that.
Better art? Absolutely.
Superior architecture? Check.
Pre-eminent fashion? Not so fast…
Though the average European is certainly slimmer than her Yankee cousine, she is just as prone to fashion faux pas as Betty from Peoria, let me tell you.
The mini-sweat via cocosa.com.
In the past week I have been subjected to a steady stream of what I call the mini-sweat pantalon. For those of you who aren’t familiar with this hot fashion trend, let me explain. The mini-sweat is an extra cheap, shrunken, shortened version of all American grey sweatpants. Like American sweats they flatter no one; however, unlike the Walmart version that aims to camouflage, these little gems give unattractiveness a sophisticated new spin by virtue of being skin tight and made of some kind of lightweight synthetic material that shows every bump, bulge and pimple on the ass beneath. Sadly, I have seen these on both men and women, but in truth I can’t say which is worse.
I have also noted that the perennial Euro favorite of t-shirts with nonsensical English printed all over them is one trend that’s still going just as strong as it was 20 years ago. Such authentic slogans as “Super Texas! Throw some cheese!” and “Rockin’ good booty San Francisco style!” routinely adorn the upper halves of the continent’s golden youth.
When paired with the mini-sweat pantalon, these make some kind of statement. Like maybe Beppe for President.
Wednesday Fiction: Gaming the Gorgon
Exension! You need an extension? I don’t think so.
Gorgon via macrobusiness.com.au
As I sit across the desk from the Gorgon, I quickly become aware of, then alarmed by, the rising level of bile in my throat. It’s as if my gut is turning itself inside out to protest the gastric churning that accompanies this and every visit to my client (whose real name is Ann Marie) at the monstrously huge bank that charges me exorbitant fees for the privilege giving them my money to use. In the agency world, the bank is notorious for its vicious corporate culture of eating its young then shitting out the bones on unsuspecting vendors and agency peons, of which I was once one. Unsuspecting that is; unfortunately I’m still a peon.
Today’s pleasure cruise is going to be particularly toxic, as I have come to receive feedback on the copy for the closely-watched “Credit Pump” scam that encourages unsuspecting card holders to apply for the highest possible credit limit before infinity so that they will never, ever pay off their balances and in so doing sell their souls to the bank in return for a houseful of consumer goods they neither need nor use.
Having staved off the inevitable confrontation as long as possible with a revolting discussion of the Gorgon’s current physical state – eight months pregnant with what appears to be a Holstein, and retaining water like crazy by the look of her ankles and feet, which are propped on the wastebasket immediately to my right with HER SHOES OFF – I am now forced to broach the subject of the copy I have come to finalize. I really need to get out of this office and away from the nauseating smell that is wafting up from her filthy trotters and the abandoned ballet flats. (Payless, Tiffany blue, extra wide with yellow insoles and gold metallic studs on the toes. Perfect with her muumuu.) But first I need the Gorgon’s sign-off, so in desperation I dive in.
“You have comments for me?” I give her a smile that I hope communicates that I can be accommodating, but am not a pushover.
“Yeahr I do, it’s gotta’ be heah somewheah” the Gorgon says fishing around the mess of tatty papers cluttering her water-ringed, sticky looking desk top. “Okay, yeah, heah we go.”
She takes her time looking over the copy just to make me squirm, so I sit back in my chair and cross my legs, just to rub it in that I still can. Finally, she sighs and says, “I showed it to the workin’ group and they said it stunk.”
Well that’s helpful, I am tempted to reply, but I of course don’t. I also resist the urge to correct her conjugation of the verb “stink.” For Christ’s sake, you half-wit toad, I think, can’t you even insult me properly? Instead, I take out my own copy of the text and ask her if she could be more a little more specific.
“I dunno, they just said it wasn’t right for the theme and it needed ALOTTA work. They also said it was too long.”
The Gorgon glares expectantly at me through her colorless reptile eyes, and when she blinks I notice she’s got a smear of bright blue eye shadow on each puffy lid, presumably to coordinate with her shoes. Somehow it’s worse than the dirty, unpainted toenails, the cracked heels or even the stench. I haven’t seen that color on a human face since my National Geographic subscription lapsed in ‘83, but here it is, decorating the squinty, pink-rimmed peepers of the power-tripping troll who holds my job in her chubby little fist.
“I see,” I reply in my Meryl Streep voice, the one that’s about half an octave lower than my regular one. I use it when I’m in danger of swearing at inappropriate moments, such as when I get unhelpful, dumbass comments from a fucking cretin like this.
“So, which of the features do we need to take out, then? We’ve already vetted this with Legal, so it’s going to be tricky to change much. If you remember, their edits added about 25 percent to the length of the original copy.”
“We can’t take anything out, you know that. It just needsta be shortah.” The Gorgon’s smile is a lipless slash. She’s a fat tomcat playing with a half dead mouse now — her favorite thing.
I look down at the copy in my lap and make a couple of notes while I pretend to be scanning it for inspiration. “OK, well off the top of my head, I’m not sure how we’ll accommodate that, but let me take this back to the office and we’ll work with it. Did they give you any suggestions on how it could be improved or what exactly it was about the copy that stank?”
Now I’ve done it. She’s too dim to catch the dig about the verb tense, but she’ll never miss the opportunity to light me up and piss me out.
“They said there was no point in even makin’ any changes.” She gives me a grin that’s really a slap and shrugs as if to say, “Whaddya gonna’ do, girlfriend?”
“There was one thing, though,” she says looking like the light dawning on Marble Head. “They said you put all the quotation mawks in the wrong place. They want ‘em before the periods.”
The unspoken “Stupid” that goes on the end of this sentence is un-subtly implied, and I am amazed she still tries shit like this with me. When we were on press for the “Rake in the Savings” underwater mortgage refinancing promotion, she made me stop the printing because she insisted the sentence that began, “The benefits of refinancing your mortgage are….” should have been “The benefits of refinancing your mortgage is…” I explained the subject/verb relationship, diagrammed the sentence and even Googled various grammar sites. We were on the verge of pulling the plug and printing it wrong when someone came up with a grammar book and the Gorgon had to give in. She’s never forgiven me.
“In American English,” I begin, going all Professor Bigbrain on her ass, “the quotation marks go outside the period. You may have seen them inside in British publications, but we do it the other way. If you have an AP Style Book, I can show you.” I am Little Mary Sunshine now. I’m baiting her, and she knows it. Last time we were waiting around on a press run, she was openly reading Fifty Shades of Grey, so I am quite certain her stubby, sausage fingers have never handled anything published in the UK, or even Canada.
“Well, you’re the writah,” she says, clearly unconvinced. I consider the possibility that she’ll tell me the bank prefers British usage and make a mental note to get that in writing, but she doesn’t. Instead she says, “Aright, I got anothah meetin’ in five minutes and I gotta’ go pee before.” What a delightful image that is.
She seems to be preparing to heave herself out of the chair by shoving her belly up and forward. I think maybe I should offer her a hand, but the idea of touching her makes me squeamish and I’m afraid we’ll both end up in the chair with me on top of her, so I try to look busy with my papers. Rather than witness the grotesque spectacle of her stuffing her feet back into the blue shoes or worse, watching her waddle barefoot across the slimy carpet and hearing the ticky tacky sound I know it will make, I thank her for her time make for the door. I feel like I’m walking on my toenails all the way down to the lobby.
Four rounds, another no-decision, but I’ll be ready for you next time, bitch.
A little Valentine’s Day closet porn anyone?
C’mon down the rabbit hole.
Alert readers may have noticed that I have been rather conspicuous by my absence of late. The rest of you have probably been hanging out at the portable bar speculating on more pressing issues than why I can’t seem to get it together to post something pithy, and good on you.
As it turns out, I have been busy rather than slothful recently, though, let’s be honest here, there’s always at least a whiff of indolence mixed in with the miasma of eau de cologne, vodka processed through the skin and apple cider vinegar (trust me, you don’t even want to know) that surrounds me.
Image via bagsnob.com
So where have I been you ask? Down the rabbit hole of middle-aged porn, obsessively re-screening the homeowner’s peep show, hanging out at the housewife’s glory hole. That’s right, my friends, I’ve slipped on my trench coat and have been spending huge blocks of time, and outrageous sums of money, at The Container Store. If you’re over forty or female or both, you probably require no further explanation, but for those of you who fail to grasp the significance of my new predilection, let me explain.
As I may have mentioned, I have some shoes — considerably more than pictured above, though nowhere near Imelda scale. Let’s just say it’s a substantial collection, carefully curated, lovingly arranged and personally significant, at least to me. As we all know, you can gain fifty pounds, develop female pattern baldness and a goiter, but your shoes will still fit. They are the foundation of the adult woman’s wardrobe, her security blanket, her hedge against sartorial disaster. As such, they need to be properly organized and displayed; they need “breathing room,” if you will.
Oh Imelda, one never is enough, is it?
Image via pinoygigs.com.
Now, Mr. Slattern and I have shared a rather large, though inefficient, walk-in closet for several years, and in that time my need for space has increased. Unfortunately, this has impinged on his need to keep my off-season shoes out of the area designated for his shirts. Rather than accept marital discord as the inevitable result of this rather fraught arrangement, however, I came up with the clever idea of dividing the one large closet into two smaller ones. Well actually one smaller one and one really tiny one, but that’s more of a detail than a feature item. Let’s move along.
Anyhoo, it was during the closet renovation project that I began frequenting that den of organizational iniquity, The Container Store, to ogle its aisles of color coordinated hat boxes, ingenious rolling shelving units and mad clever “storage solutions.” I’d spend hours talking about retractable fixtures with the staff, stroking the finishes on cabinet facings and fantasizing about stackable accessory storage. I fetishized the perfect reach-in closet and lingered in front of the titillating array of colorful bins and coordinating hampers. I was hooked, an addict, a filthy closet junkie who could not get enough of that sweet organizational stuff.
See? There really were costumes.
Via Wikipedia.
Now, before this little adventure, I had never really understood the obsessive need for this kind of stimulation. It wasn’t until I was in college that I saw my first dirty movie, an X-rated version of Alice in Wonderland, complete with costumes, dancing, singing and more than a few acts of extreme lasciviousness. Given that Cosmo generally tucked the particulars of its centerfolds out of sight in those days, and that the interwebs wouldn’t be invented (and cluttered up with naked girlfriends, randy phone repairmen and bleating Kardashians) for decades yet, I had very little experience with this kind of thing, which is to say none at all. But my friends and I figured it was time we found out what all the fuss was about, so we located a fellow student with a car, offered to spring for gas and trundled off to the Stillwater monoplex for a double feature.
If you’ve never seen a pornographic musical, it may be somewhat difficult to imagine. It is certainly a singular experience, what with all the dancing and singing interspersed with nudity, fellatio and random episodes of fornication. If memory serves, it was all very light-hearted in tone, what Patsy Stone would call, “a bit of cheeky fun.” In truth the particulars of the film are a bit hazy owing to the extended Blue-Nun-and-bong binge that preceded our attendance, though I do recall being somewhat taken aback by Alice’s escapades with the Red Queen. Let’s just leave it at that.
In any case, not since Alice dallied with the Mad Hatter (in his improbable size 9 1/2 hat) has one pleasure seeker found such fulfillment in a single location: aisle 5 of the Container Store to be precise. Enter at your peril and try to be discreet is my advice.
The Slattern gets with The Plan
Day 1: In which one desperate, overweight, middle-aged urbanite attempts to make and consume flax seed granola. Welcome to “The Plan.”
Regular visitors to my little literary lock-down unit will know that when it comes to dieting and weight loss, my “suffering is legendary even in Hell,” as the infamous Pinhead so aptly put it.
In recent months, my quest to reduce has become something of a forced-march, and my struggles to rein in my intake are now the stuff of legend. OK, maybe not Legend in the biblical or Arthurian sense, but I think it’s fair to say that this challenge looms large on my personal horizon. And by that I mean, it has begun to consume my every waking hour, haunt my dreams and even impinge on that most sacred of rituals, cocktail hour.
I have consulted with (and subsequently eighty-sixed) Dr. Feelbad, diet doctor to the stars, on the basis of his poor bedside manner, his obvious supplement scam and complete lack of interest in important details like stress levels, sleep patterns and whether I’m going to have a nervous breakdown in the next ten minutes. These, you see, have an enormous impact on weight, as any reputable doctor/nutritionist worth his salt Maine Coast Organic Kelp Granules (salt is fast becoming a war crime in my house) will attest.
Now, having tried the many small meals approach and failed in a spectacular fashion, I was becoming rather desperate. Always ravenous, constantly panic stricken from hunger and never within reach of an approved high-protein, low-carb, non-pizza food, I was haunted by the desire for a cookie, piece of fudge or entire cheesecake, pretty much night and day. When I say I was powerless in the face of these cravings, you can believe it. Picture an aggressively peckish Honey Boo Boo gazing upon a truckload of pork rinds or Bill Clinton peering through the window of a jello-wrestling marathon, and you get the idea.
My abundant future.
Courtesy cappywrites.com.
Sure I was down ten pounds, but that happened two months ago. I had, as we in the diet-as-second-career business say, plateaued. The problem: twenty more to go, no idea how to get up the mountain and not a crampon in sight.
Enter “The Lyn-Genet Plan.”
So yesterday I flicked on the tube and caught a few minutes of an interview with the oddly-monickered Lyn-Genet Recitas. She claims that the key to successful weight loss and abundant good health is not calorie counting or the banishment of wine, chocolate and cheese; rather it’s the elimination of specific foods that we cannot tolerate. So I was in — all over IT.
Straightaway I bought the book and headed out to provision. Unfortunately, all of New York City is apparently in with me, so finding the necessary food items was more like a scavenger hunt with the cast of Survivor than a zen-like shopping trip as prelude to radiant good health. The required dandelion tea was scarcer than hen’s teeth, while the mandatory flax seed granola was nowhere to be found. As such I have been forced to concoct my own flax seed granola from the vague recipe in the book. In fact, all of the recipes are quite vague. Luckily I do have a certain skill in the kitchen, and was able to create a semi-palatable iteration to keep body and soul together until the store-bought version arrives in the mail. And I will share; I’m a giver.
Flax Seed Granola
- To 1/2 cup of water, add 1 tablespoon ground cinnamon, 1 teaspoon ground nutmeg, 1/2 teaspoon ground cloves and a teaspoon of pure vanilla extract.
- Add 1 cup of whole flax seeds to the water and spices and mix it up.
- Refrigerate the mixture COVERED overnight.
- The next morning scoop it out and spread it in a baking dish (metal, not pyrex) or cookie sheet. Not too thick, just enough to cover the surface with no gaps. As pictured:
- Use a spoon to press it down (this is important because it holds together better when you do) and bake it at 300 degrees for 45-55 minutes or so. About half way through, you may need to flip it over so that it crisps up. Just break it into big hunks.
- You can add dried fruits and nuts when you’re ready to eat it.
Is it delicious? No, but it’s BULKY, and if you cover it in blueberries and coconut milk, it’s not half bad.
Now, since the three-day cleanse portion of The Plan includes the dreaded kale, I’ll need a strong stomach, but I am resolved to go forward, and will let you know how it all shakes out.
Kitchen Slattern 
Kissing off the corporate payday
Feb 15
Posted by WSW
Image via immacommunity.wikia.com
Having, rather unfortunately, burned most of my bridges in the world of corporate communications several years ago, I am finding it more than a little challenging to get my foot back in the boardroom door now that our domestic financial situation could use a boost. After all, someone has to pay the liquor store delivery boy, address the Bloomingdale’s balance and cover my legal fees. Sadly, highly-compensated writing gigs are no longer rolling in the way they did before I recommended my last client take his suggestions on my syntax and…well let’s just say it was unlikely he’d have followed my instructions, primarily because it would have been physically impossible for all but the most advanced yogi, which he was not.
Don’t get me wrong. Blogging is fun, but it doesn’t exactly command the big bucks, or any bucks for that matter, and Mr. Slattern can only be expected to shoulder the family financial burden for so long. As such, I’ve recently started mining fresh sources of new clients, and let me tell you, the freelance world has changed significantly in the past few years, and not for the better. Here’s an example of a project description that was recently included on an RFP list I received.
This genius potential employer is Australian and requires that his
slave laborhired pen reside in the Philippines. Professor Bruce here offers to compensate the lucky bid winner at the princely rate of $3.00 an hour despite the fact that he is shopping for a very specialized, high-level skill set. Now it may well be that three bucks an hour constitutes a living wage for well-educated, bilingual academic writer/researchers in the greater Manila area, but I wouldn’t bet the Outback on it. Still, I decided to throw out a hook and see what I might reel in. Here is my proposal.Dear Bruce, apparently you’re an academic, so presumably you have at least one advanced degree, though that’s hardly evident from the sheep dip-esque writing style you display here. Didn’t anyone ever warn you about cheating? Was it never even mentioned out there at the University of Woolloomooloo? It has been some time since I left academia, but I am quite certain professors, instructors, researchers and the like are still expected to do their own research and write their own articles. Which makes you a big, fat cheater.
“3 bucks an hour, huh? Tempting…”
Image via businessinsider.com
Being a cheap cheater is even worse. Who do you think is going to become your uncredited scrivener for three bucks an hour anyway, you miserly turd? I assume Stephen Hawking is busy and I’m pretty sure Malcolm Gladwell charges at least $500 an hour for this kind of thing. Hell, I wouldn’t do it for less than a hundred.
Now, from the text of your job description, it is apparent to even the most gin-soaked intelligence — mine — that you could use some editorial support. This is not, however, what you appear to be in the market for. Correct me if I’m wrong, but what you seem to be proposing is for some poor, starving student in some stinking-hot hell hole to research and write a series of articles and reports for which you will pay a pittance and claim to have authored yourself. That can be called purchasing or stealing, but not authoring.
In closing, I would just like to say, “Oi Bruce, you SUCK.”
Although I sent this along, I don’t expect he’ll seriously entertain my proposal to do this work for the going rate. I would, however, like to know whether or not he was able to manage the storage option I suggested for his three dollar offer.
And now for something truly entertaining.
.
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Posted in Commentary, Rants
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Tags: Australia, Bruce, Business, Business Services, Communications, Humor, Malcolm Gladwell, Monty Python, Philippines, Stephen Hawking, United States, University of Woolloomooloo