Saturday, February 11, 2006


various musings

this is perhaps the only time i will agree with the whining nora ephron. when i was at said hairdressers -- always a comic experience, as my hair is so long i have to stand up on the chair so shifa can blow dry it -- i was paging thru the current new yorker when i spied ephron's strange cookbook confessions in the personal history section.

there she makes a sensible statement, that you need to lose all your food neuroses. that you need to stop overthinking your dishes, and stop ruining your life and those of your guests with overwrought concotions.

but naturally, being nora ephron, she then has to renege on this wisdom and demonstrate that she not only remains completely neurotic about food, but has a series of truly creepy and pathetic crushes on famous cookbook authors, men and women alike.

um, nora: it's embarrassing, not amusing. i was mortified for you.

(that you have imaginary conversations with your latest culinary love-projection while whipping up overthought, overwrought concoctions suggests to me you may need anti-anxiety and anti-delusional medication. just trying to be helpful!)

plus, ephron has to toss in the obligatory reference to her bitter divorce from carl bernstein. for how many decades are you going to dine out on this, nora?

how wronged, wronged, wronged you were by him, you poor pitiful hollywood millionaireness you. ah, but what else do i expect from reading the new yorker?

woog, i say, woog.

per my previous recent post on the whole diet thing, as well as m.b.'s rather sensible comment, all i can say is that foodies weird me out. when are they going to develop a healthy psychological state that doesn't involve food as a misplaced, over-invested space of sexual desire, personal control, moral purity, celebrity worship, and craven social status?

yes, i do intend to write about terry p's ruby blue espresso from the other day. i'm still working on dialing in the best grind for it, so stay tuned.

and naturally i must point all of you, dear readers, to this nice article on agro-tourism in colombia's coffee country. long-time bccy pal and scaa board member mary pettit of juan valdez must be quite pleased.

and it is here where the coffee co-incidence thing happens again: because in the new yorker issue mentioned above, there's also a juan valdez cartoon! in which conchita (lola, to those of you who don't know her) catches juan walking out of a mermaid and bitterly remarks, "et tu, juan? et tu?"

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