Category Archives: food and drink

Florida Film Festival

The [tag]Florida Film Festival[/tag] in Orlando at the end of the month almost seems worth coming back for.

The theme is ostensibly food, but the real draws for me are:

[tag]Stuart Townshend[/tag]’s [tag]Battle in Seattle[/tag]

[tag]Chris Rodley[/tag]’s [tag]Factory: Manchester from Joy Division to Happy Mondays[/tag]

[tag]Shane King[/tag] and [tag]Arne Johnson[/tag]’s [tag]Girls Rock[/tag]

And possibly best of all: [tag]Jeffrey Schwarz[/tag]’s [tag]Spine Tingler: The William Castle Story[/tag]

There’s also this [tag]meatblog[/tag] worthy doublefeature: [tag]This is my Cheesesteak[/tag] and [tag]Hamburger America[/tag].

This is serious stuff, people!

Discovery News is reporting on the [tag]Climate Change and Wine Conference[/tag] taking place in Barcelona:

Climate change is threatening to redraw the world’s wine-producing map, and the effects are already being seen in earlier harvests and coarser wines, experts told an international conference Friday.

I still don’t feel very well, so I’m going to go back to obsessing over Devil Toad now.

girl scout cookies

Holy cats, I just had quite a scare. The girl scout cookie sale finder told me cookie season was winding down. Have no fear, it doesn’t start until february 29th, so you have plenty of time to drink all that vodka to make room in your freezer for that case of Thin Mints you know you’re going to buy..

I’m too tired today to rant about the politics of turning children into sugar whores, but here’s a post from the archives, to tide you over.

Salon's Julie Klausner on "Skinny Bitch"

I glanced at a copy of Skinny Bitch when it first came out and thought it was a parody. It wasn’t funny so I put it down and forgot about it. I must have been the only one – this “diet book” that proclaims you’re either thin or your a moron is a best-seller. Julie Klausner takes a closer look in Salon, “Hey, skinny bitch! It’s a vegan manifesto masquerading as a diet fad. But the only thing this weight-loss book will help you lose is self-esteem.”

Thanks to “Skinny Bitch,” women who hate their bodies no longer need rely on their own self-loathing to stoke the flames of what seems like motivation but is actually self-flagellation — penance for the sin of being too fat. Now dieters can have the convenience of a former model (Barnouin) and a former modeling agent (Freedman) putting their transgressions in the black-and-white terms of right and wrong. “If you eat crap,” they chirp, “you are crap.”

It’s a disturbing review, but I have to admit that Klausner also gave me a good laugh with this line: “Have you tried to hold a conversation with somebody on a diet? The first 10 pounds they lose are mostly brain.” I’ve already seen it showing up in email signatures.