elstaffe > Recent Status Updates

"'Do flowers HAVE bones?'
'Pretty sure flowers are boneless.'
'Like chicken tenders. Or decent mozzarella sticks." (156)

"[Chris Schweizer] lives in Madisonville, KY with his wife and daughter. Every once in a while he gets nominated for Eisner Awards but always loses, and he often has a mustache." (206)

Hard not to love a story that ends with Bees Ex Machina (Demane and Demazana, adapted by Katie and Steven Shanahan)

"1 cup .. cold cereal*
1/3 cup of powdered milk
2 tsp of sugar or 1 packet artificial sweetener
1/2 cup cold water
1 resealable ... bag
1. Put all the ingredients in the bag.
2. When ready to eat, add water and reseal the bag.
3. Shake the bag to dissolve the milk and sugar.
4. Open the bag and eat immediately with a spoon.
5. Write a note to yourself to never do that again unless you become an astronaut." (35)

"BACON BARS
...
After sampling the bar—so that you could say that you tried it—give the rest to the family dog. One nibble, and Fido will prance about the house barking (Translation: 'It's BACON!')." (35)

"The 'secret' was the second freeze drying. Otherwise, it takes boiling water to rehydrate them, and boiling water is not available on NASA spacecraft." (33)

"NASA freeze dries the eggs, adds water back, and freeze dries them a second time. ... The basic scrambled egg formulation has been around since the Apollo days. Originally a commercial company made them for NASA. When it went out of business the company gave the 'secret of the eggs' to NASA to use for space shuttle flights." (33) THE SECRET OF THE EGGS

"In the recipes that follow, the SS stands for 'space shuttle/space station.'
SS SCRAMBLED EGGS" (33) VERY IMPORTANT CLARIFICATION

"The great lifting power of the shuttles engine permitted food scientists to leave some of the natural water in space shuttle foods, which made them taste better and easier to prepare" (5) classic parallelism error

"No matter which profession you pursue, someone will always warn you about the danger of being perceived as 'too gay.' Take this advice very seriously, nod, and reply, 'Darling, I hear you.'" (102) Paul Rudnick

"Anyone who says that they don't like the word gay, or that they hate labels, or that they're not gay, they're a person: That's someone who still hasn't come out to their parents." (102) maybe in the 1970s, Paul Rudnick. But I bet you people hated labels without being in the closet even then

"I know many gay people now who honed their caustic wit as a defense mechanism — this particular rapier was the best thing in their own arsenals, so they made sure it was sharp as possible, and sometimes they went in for the kill. Hell, sometimes they still do.

Don't fall into this trap. It doesn't make you safe. It only makes
you mean." (26) David Levithan

"He is the author of Replay: The History of Video Games and Fizz: How Soda Shook Up the World. That playing too many video games while drinking too much soda featured heavily in his childhood is just coincidence." (245)

"carjackings, 101-2" (235) i had to go back and check this index item as it seemed out of place in this book... but yes, it does refer to carjackings by non human animals

" ts adult victims are more variously poisoned. Some of them are victims of homespun credulity (folk medicine recommends a tea of Jimson-weed leaves for the relief of asthma, consti-pation, and certain other ills), and some are victims of a credulous. sophistication (the street-corner pharmacopoeia recommends Jimson-weed seeds for a liberating hallucinatory experience)." (173)

"Dr. Ugalde cautions against applying the concept transgender to modern enchaquirados or to Ecuadorian communities of the past.
'I prefer to leave the past more open; like, they had their own categories, which I don't know and will never know.
But they teach us that gender diversity or fluidity is not white, and it is not just an impulse of big cities.'" (17)

"One reason is surely that sons who stay with their mothers, sisters, and aunts would have nobody to mate with other than family—and inbreeding creates genetic disasters. (Human royalty who unwisely failed to avoid this problem produced offspring like Mad King Ludwig Il of Bavaria, Juana the Mad of Castile, Charles the Mad of France ... you get the idea.)" (46)

"And in a part of the country where the Native American presence is so palpable, I was very much aware of that people's profound sense of oneness with nature." (129) yes, that one singular group

"But as a general rule we can say: A jumper who does not move his arms is a person who does not like to communicate or is unable to. We call him an introvert." (25) ouch

"Johanna Stiebert, First-Degree Incest in the Hebrew Bible: Sex in the Family (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 158." (199) book titles that I wish couldn't exist, example 5000

"It's sort of like how cable companies make you pay for Syfy, even though no one you've ever met or heard of actually watches Syfy." (196) I think you must run with a very different crowd than I do, Luke T. Harrington

"Having the donkey speak here isn't an entirely random choice; animals gaining the gift of gab to suggest the presence of deities is a bit of a motif in Near Eastern literature (which also accounts for that talking snake in Genesis, in case that was also still bothering you, Mr. Dawkins)" (164) weird "gotcha" attempt--if the Bible were just lit, there'd be less scrutiny of this stuff. But it's claimed it isn't just.

"Ezekiel, who lived about two hundred years after Hosea, returns to that same well and then drinks it dry" (158) aqueous example of eats and leaves no crumbs

"I used to wonder why Jerusalem itself would be 'troubled' along with Herod, but when you're ruled by a despot, his problems tend to be yours, whether you want them to be or not." (88)

"In 2013, the journal Pediatrics published a study that found movies rated 'PG-13' were, on average, *more* violent than movies rated 'R.' ... it's easy to make violent acts seem less violent simply by neglecting to show their consequences. ... heroes mow down rows and rows of nameless bad guys who don't bleed, that's 'PG-13' ... character gets a hole blown in his chest and slowly bleeds to death, that's 'R'." (85)

"Horrific Violence, Some of It Involving Bears" (85) a good chapter subtitle

"In the normal order of things, first, there's a murder; second, the police or the private detective does their job; and then third, the murderer commits suicide upon being caught. This is the regular sequence of events." (159) is...is it?

"One should meditate
on the ancient one,
the poet and ruler,
smaller than the atom," (95; eighth discourse, verse 9) I beg your pardon?

"There, in the patch left vacant by her own departure only two (or at most three) hours earlier, sat a late-model German sedan of a make no sentient Jew should ever drive, but Eva—who controlled the car option—was not one to burden herself with excessive sentimentality." A+ BMW subteeet

"'You know what confuses me,' he said finally, 'is why you haven't asked what he did, to get fired. Don't you want to know?'
Grace considered this. The real answer was: No, she did not. She really, really did not want to know." (210) ostrich theory confirmed