Monday, April 16, 2007

A potpourri of truly indispensible knowledge

* Recently, The Bookseller trade magazine announced the winner of their annual Bookseller/Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title -- The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification by Julian Montague. While it's a good, solid quirky title, I'm a little miffed that Di Mascio's Delicious Ice Cream: Di Mascio of Coventry: an Ice Cream Company of Repute, With an Interesting and Varied Fleet of Ice Cream Vans, by Roger De Boer, Harvey Francis Pitcher and Alan Wilkinson lost out. Now that's a title.

* Speaking of publishing, I was shocked that Entertainment Tonight was AGAIN shut out of the Pulitzer Prize race this year, with judges deciding to instead give their Fiction Prize to some hack named Cormac McCarthy for his novel, The Road. Don't they know how hard Mary Hart works for her art?

* If you're feeling friendly on Thursday and have a hefty supply of antibacterial hand wash, then you might want to take part in National High Five Day. The name pretty much says it all: go high five like crazy. And if you can high five a professional athlete, preferably Peyton Manning, then all the better.

* You know how no one believes that politicians are motivated by good intentions any more? It's kinda true. They're all just vying for the mythical Golden Gavel. Here, I'll let The Washington Post explain:
Both Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) want to be the very first among their class of nine senators to win the Golden Gavel Award, which was created in the 1960s as an incentive to get wide-eyed new senators to learn the rules and procedures of the snootier chamber. The award goes to any senator who has presided over the Senate for 100 hours in any given year.

What with all the Facebook pages and the cafeterias and the cliques, I always figured Congress was like high school. I wonder if Barack will ask Hilary to prom? Bill's going to be sooooo jealous.

* If you want to learn more about the secret world of the annual Spamarama Festival in Austin, Texas, you've got to check out Mary Jo Pehl's intense, action-packed and awesomely funny account of her VIP Spamarama experience.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I love that Di Mascio's is an ice cream company of repute, but it makes me worry that somewhere out there is an ice cream company of ILL-repute, chaining consumptive orphans to industrial size whisks to whip up flavors like Absinthe Shot, Pick-Pocket, and Victorian Hooker.

Liz said...

That's great. That's the best laugh I've had all day. If there is an ice cream company of ill-repute, I sure hope someone writes a book about it -- maybe one with a really good title.

Anonymous said...

Thank you! I'm always glad to make people laugh. The (sad?) thing is now I can't help wondering what these would actually taste like: I'm thinking Victorian Hooker is old stale coffee with a fudge and syphilis swirl, and Pick-Pocket would have to have lots of soggy, pathetic not-even-half pieces of nuts, with gaps to show where the cashews and cookies bits have been snatched away from. Absinthe Shot is probably just ordinary, runny vanilla with green food coloring, but by this point you don't care 'cause your brain's gone soft from the syphilis swirl.

Liz said...

I can't believe Ben and Jerry's hasn't picked up on these yet. :-)