A Random Assortment

~ The china above is the most beautiful one I found and the only one that Francisco and I even remotely agreed on. (I'm a green-flowers-all-over-the-plate sort of girl and Francisco's a white-plate-with-a-silver-boarder sort of guy.) I was bemoaning the fact that it was far more than we could ever register for (the bread and butter plate alone is $120--and I think that the rest of it might be sold out). And then I said, "Oh well, I guess I'll have to just pin it as a consolation." Francisco: "You're such a cliche." Ha!

(I don't know if we can register for china: the less expensive stuff is boring and the expensive stuff is expensive! Thoughts?)

Oh: also--it's photographed with a carp! That's a bit much. Although those fish always do look hungry, so maybe it's appropriate..

~ For Diana: from Prince Philip's funniest gaffes:

"To Cayman Islanders: 'Aren’t most of you descended from pirates?'"

~ On granola, for Papa Leopard.

"Born in the better-eating movement of the late 19th century and revived a half-century ago as an earnest health food, granola is suddenly sowing its wild oats, in variations that are lavish, whimsical and sometimes unapologetically fattening."

 (When was granola ever not unapologetically fattening? I mean, it's good fat, but it's not like granola's made out of celery.)

On one variation on granola:

"It’s green and orange and yellow and blue. When Mr. Choi first went to his Sunny Spot team and suggested a fresh take on granola, he told them he wanted to see color. 'It’s always just so brown,' he said. 'Why can’t we make it really, really festive?'

He also told them to shake up expectations. 'I wanted it to be this bowl of twists and turns, instead of just one scoop after another,' he said. 'I don’t understand the process of eating things just to submit yourself to boredom.'"

Oh my. A little offensive. I like sometimes eating things with one taste and no "twists and turns"--like iceberg or crispix. Also: only one of the foods in the picture at the top of the article is recognizable to me as granola.

Also, funny:

 "Granola has traded in the bulky sweater for a little black dress."

~ The Post Office is launching a clothing line?!

~ Yesterday was Auden's birthday, so there was lots of good Auden stuff on the internet.

~ What if the languages and animals disappear? Things like this stress me out. How do we pick what survives, since there's a finite amount of resources? What do we lose when languages die? Somehow these two things are conflating in my mind.