Poop: A Public Service Announcement

Please wash your hands after using the bathroom.

This is something your mother should have taught you years ago, but just in case, I'll say it again:  Please wash your hands.

Why?

1.  Bathrooms contain toilets.
2.  Toilets contain poop.
3.  Therefore, bathrooms contain poop.
4.  You'd wash your hands quite thoroughly with a lot of hot water and soap if you touched poop, wouldn't you???

But I didn't touch any poop when I was in the bathroom, you might say.  WRONG!  Poop is everywhere in the bathroom!  It's invisible, but it's there.  Every time someone does a Number Two, vaporized microscopic poop fills the air and scatters forming a Poop Envelope.

Schematics of The Poop Envelope

The radius of the Poop Envelope can put a lot of things in danger.  For some, constant vigilance is necessary to prevent invasion:

Others have resigned themselves to their existentialist lot in life:

 And finally there are always those who just embrace their fate:

Regardless, these bathroom items all agree on one thing:  poop is everywhere.  The best thing you can do is take appropriate precautions.  So please wash your hands after using the bathroom.

Thank you.  Now we can be friends.

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You're Worth Crab!

This weekend, we long-suffering residents of Anchorage were finally rewarded with two beautiful sunny days. It was a great moment for being outside in the yard and enjoying the 58 degree weather (chilly by southern Californian standards but quite blissfully balmy for an Anchorage spring day).

Inspired by the decent-looking weather, my friends and I decided to hold a Crab Night. We've had a number of crab nights this year in response to somebody's realization this winter that everybody loves crab, yet nobody buys crab for himself. Somewhere deep inside all of us is a small little person who thinks he does not deserve crab unless he is inviting guests or putting on a fancy spread to celebrate a special occasion. It is a sad statement of low self-esteem... especially in a state where we have such delicious indigenous wild crab all around us.

You've probably seen these Alaskan beauties before -- long spindly crustaceans with legs which seem to go on forever, available in either the Red King or Golden King variety. I once tried to conduct a very scientific experiment to determine which is better but after they got mixed up on my plate, I had to abort my quest for knowledge. Generally speaking, the Golden King is more affordable -- whether it is due to an inferior flavor or due to its spiny shells which may cause injury (or at least certainly materially slow down crab-eating), I do not know. If I weren't so crazy about crab, I could remain level-headed enough to conduct another experiment.

I did have some apprehension about our first Crab Night; like others, I did not think I was worth crab. As a kid, the family ate crab to celebrate birthdays or when the supermarket was having an unbelievable sale. At no point would anybody in my family buy crab alone and go off into a dark corner by yourself to eat crab just for the sake of having it. So for our first crab night, it took a great deal of determination to buy a bag of these luscious crustaceans, just for me and no one else.

Despite my trepidation, the first Crab Night was a smashing success. It ended up being a ladies-only affair, a group of women huddled on the kitchen floor, with crab and happiness dripping from our chins.

Sucking the rich flesh out of the shells with reckless abandon, I felt a great sense of inner peace.

The success of Crab Night One spawned a series of other crab nights, the best of which occurred this year on Valentine's Day. In the past, Valentine's Day had been about little more than the unfortunate proliferation of pink junk, overpriced bouquets, and cheap and unwanted milk chocolates. This year, however, the ladies and I decided that We Were Worth Crab.

I realized then that my problem with V-Day past was not that I had been spending the "holiday" alone or with imperfect men, but rather, I had not been spending them with Crab.

You see, nothing says I LOVE YOU like the Gift Of Crab To Yourself.

From now on, rain, sleet, or shine, man or no man, I am having crab on Valentine's Day! You're worth it! You're worth crab!

(not to be confused with You're Worth Crabs... nobody is worth crabs.)

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Leave My Dude Alone.

Ah... there's nothing like an untimely movie review! Casino Royale was released in November of last year, with second run theatres playing it months ago, and no doubt the film has long since hit DVD, maybe no longer even crowding the queues of Netflix customers. It has been months even since I've seen the movie and first started chewing this cud of criticism.

But alas, opinions are timeless.

The press and fans had been all abuzz about the new James Bond, giving me high hopes that we were finally embarking on a new 007 era, finally free of that corny Pierce Brosnan who to my dismay, during his reign managed to woo many first-fans not even gametes when I saw my first Bond flick. No doubt all the talk had set within me high expectations for a great Renaissance, perhaps something worthy of the Cold War?

Not quite. While we've definitely left Remington Steel behind, this was not the return to the James Bond whom I fell in love with so many years ago.

Let's start with the basics. Bond does NOT ever say, "I love you." Doing so will immediately result in DEATH (as older fans will recall was the fate of his wife Teresa Bond, whose matrimonial bliss and lifespan did not extend beyond the ending credits of On Her Majesty's Secret Service). Bond may have muttered some crap about "love" a couple of times in the Brosnan era, but that was reason to stop watching the movies. 007 also does not give the pink slip to God, Country, and the Queen, and again, certainly not for love. And he is not a robot. The Daniel Craig version is entirely binary without any nuances reflecting the spectrum in between extremes. As the more classic Bonds have shown us, it is in fact possible to:

• kill for the love of your country,



• "love" women for the moment,



• and be human at the same time.

And if God forbid, Bond finds himself mired in a moral struggle, he keeps it private - he certainly doesn't talk about it. Eww.

In Casino Royale, as soon as this Bond left the Her Majesty's Service in order to spend the rest of Forever with Random Bond Girl, predictably, I leaned over to my companion and whispered, "She's either EVIL or GOING TO DIE." Or both, I suppose.

And I guess I am the only one who thinks that the real James Bond can be clever and witty without being corny and sappy. It frustrates me when people think Bond is inherently corny. As one friend has described me, I belong to that "radical faction" of Bond fans that really likes Roger Moore. And no, I do not think Roger Moore is corny at all. (He has a good sense of humor, let's just say.) I tried recently to look up on the Internet statistics to verify whether I truly stand in the minority of the fan base, but the search was inconclusive. In my opinion, the truly unsufferably corny James Bond came with Pierce Brosnan, and I wish he took that Bond with him. (I'll note here that I was actually fond of Brosnan's Reminington Steel work, but Remington is no James.)

Puckery Daniel Craig did a good job with what he had, but I found the script generally lacking. Only the dialogue between Bond and Bond Girl on the train ride was mildly interesting. They even gave poor Oscar-winning Judi Dench lame lines. Over the years, whoever has been in charge has soured Bond movies into regular action flicks, a genre which has recently suffered from an over-proliferation of testosterone-indulgent, drawn-out, seemingly never-ending violence. (See giant-insect killing scene in King Kong; Orcs fighting in second Lord of the Rings movie. Yes, I know all of you men are still drooling over these cites.) That men enjoy watching minute after minute, scene after scene, of boring arbitrary repetitive boring action suitable for only fast-forwarding leads me to believe I will never ever be compatible with the opposite sex.

And to top it off, Casino Royale was a remarkably unsexy movie. Bond movies are supposed to be super sexy! What happened to the not-so-subtly-implied sexual escapades worthy of only indecent international spies? The slow, slinky unzip of a sequined gown that used to make my five-year-old heart turn all a-flutter???

In Daniel Craig's defense, he is undoubtedly the most athletic Bond ever and could beat Bambi in any contest of leaps and bounds. And certainly even the dear and eternally smooth Roger Moore would not want to compare pecs with Mr. Craig. Despite my opinion that the movie's plot was generally unsexy, the word HOTNESS did inexplicably and randomly HOTNESS cross my mind a number of HOTNESS times during the film. HOTNESS HOTNESS HOTNESS (Ladies, you know exactly when.)

In the end, I question the constant effort to reinvent 007, to bring him into "our time." If I want to think about "our time," I would not watch a movie about a man who probably packs a helicopter in his attaché on a daily basis. The point is that James Bond is classic and timeless. You want to do a movie about a spy who likes strange girlie concoctions with curly lemon peels, well, invent a new dude.

Hands his shaken martinis, and leave my dear 007 alone.

All in all, Casino Royale was certainly not a waste of the three dollars I spent at the second-run theatre. And there is the business of HOTNESS HOTNESS probably being worth a few extra nickels, too.

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Bring Back The Five-For-Five!!!!!

I may be skirting the fine line separating the Blogworthy from the Better Left Unsaid, but this is a one-woman-one-stomach campaign to bring back the Arby's FIVE-FOR-FIVE deal. For those of you who sadly missed the promotion, it permitted a hungry customer to buy five items of food (your choice of Arby's Melt, Curly Fries, Drink, Cherry or Apple turnover) for five dollars... and ninety-five cents. That's the annoying fine print. It's not really "five-for-five" but rather, "FIVE-FOR-FIVE-NINETY-FIVE." Arby's had the good sense to know that "five-for-five-ninety-five" would not be a good slogan, so they elected instead to defraud their customers with "five-for-five."

Ninety-five cents and fraud aside, I am mostly upset that the five-for-five is gone. I am even more upset that it has been replaced by a disturbing TWO FOR FOUR FISH SANDWICHES. Not only has the price per item of food doubled overnight, but the previous array of diverse options has now dwindled to a single fried fish sandwich, not very promising from an establishment that specializes in roast beef (and even this specialty is suspect). The extent of your choice is to get two of these unappetizing sandwiches.

What Arby's doesn't know, and perhaps this is why they pulled the FIVE-FOR-FIVE, is the cessation of this promo is really cramping my style. The five-for-five used to be my default bet. "I bet you a five-for-five that you're wrong!" was a win-win situation. If I lost, I had to buy a friend a five-for-five, which said friend would usually graciously split with me. If I won, the friend footed the bill. But in all circumstances, everybody gets to eat five-for-five. Everybody wins!

"I bet you a two-for-four-fish-sandwich!" however, does not have the same ring. Nor is it likely to invite anyone to wager against me. With the departure of the five-for-five, I've ceased being a betting woman, rolling with Vegas odds. Life in the fast lane cannot be had with fish sandwiches in your convertible. Nobody wins!

So to anyone else similarly grieving the loss of the five-for-five, please contact your local Arby's and bring the five-for-five back. And at all costs, don't be suckered into the two-for-four fish.

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Sharing Is Caring

It has finally happened. I am joining the youthful masses, those who are clad in low-riding jeans with fingers poised on the dial of their iPods -- yes, I, too, am joining the blogging community! My anachronistic presence here reminds of a similar venture many unspeakable years ago when I started my first (and last) webpage. It was a pitiful thing, at first grey and bleak with default fonts and a some kind of message akin to that of an answering machine, until it later careened out of control - was it something like javascript that allowed it to slowly and painfully change bright colors while loading, to the dismay of my few visitors who no doubt never returned?

Who could blame them.

In great hopes that a similar mutation will not happen here, I will keep this personal archive private for now, if blogs can be private. If no one looks under this rock, who knows what species of moss might grow here!

I chose today to start this blog because I think one needs to vent something when one is blogging, and recently, I've been rather dormant in this department. But yesterday, a small minor twitch in the cosmos happened. I received a piece of mail addressed to Mr. ___________.

This would be of no significance if it were not for the fact that I am a MISS _________. While generally reasonable about most matters of the earth, for some reason, when people wrongly assume that my name is a man's name and then proceed to send me bills, junk mail, or the worse yet, attempts to hire me in the name of Mr. ____, I have a fit. Granted, I have a Chinese name that I've never encountered elsewhere, but why assume?

Any of us who have made it through grade school knows that it only makes an Ass out of U and Me.

I can handle mispronunciations; in fact some are endearing, but the error of gender is simply unforgivable. Some might ask, but how are anybody supposed to know by your weird Chinese name that you're a woman? Point taken, but this does not excuse the failure to use simply my full name when in doubt. You can't take anyone seriously if they can't even get your gender straight. And aren't prefixes supposed to be honorific and polite? "Mister" is not likely to be taken politely when you're talking to a woman.

So I HATE it when people call me mister, even if just on paper. There it is. That piece of Mister Mail provided me with the requisite critical mass of Outrage to start this blog. So everybody write to the San Francisco Bar Association and give them a piece of your mind.

And I share the Outrage because I care. I care that others know this about me so that I give the world a chance to cease offending me, and I care that others understand this reaction so that other ambiguously named individuals will similarly be free of this offense. And hence, the title of my first blog entry. My college friend BJ would often utter this phrase after listening to one of my rants and vents or a bit of useless but mild-mannered commentary. He also used to say it after making an unsolicited observation, like when he found me in the dining hall after a rough night -- "Gee, you don't look too good. Sharing is caring."

Since then, I've taken BJ's words to heart. "Sharing is caring" disseminates the good in life and better packages the bad. If a sentiment is not shared, how is it to proliferate? I guess this is how I'm justifying this blog.

It's certainly not a one-way street, though. I appreciated BJ's advice that I didn't look too good because maybe it made me go back to my dorm room and brush my hair. And I appreciated it when a friend told me that I had a giant pizza stain on my sweatshirt when I showed up to fifth period biology unknowingly wearing a slice. And I appreciated it when someone told me that there was something wrong with the peach cobbler I made when I accidentally used salt instead of sugar. This is all useful information, so keep it coming! The eternal work in progress can't get better without feedback.

So onward with sharing and caring....

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