I am currently using their satsuma shower gel and matching satsuma body lotion. First, the answer to the question on everyone's mind: satsuma is just a fancy name for clementine. In short, it smells orange-y and nice. Especially the lotion, which I now have to be conscious of when and how much of it I use, because my advisor told me in his office one day that he could smell me. In a professional environment, I'm really only comfortable having people experience me with two of the five senses (and even then, barely). Smell is not one of them. Idealy, I would interact solely through email and IM, thus removing any uncomfortable "seeing". But anyway, it smells nice and does its job.

I get a lot of scented toiletries as gifts. I'm not complaining, because although it sounds kind of impersonal, it's far and away better than some of the gifts I have had the pleasure of receiving. So my message here is this: Bath and Body Works out, The Body Shop IN. No more satsuma, though- I'm finally through my tangerine body spray, so it's time to branch out a bit.

//Oh! One thing I forgot to mention that I think is ingenious: instead of dyeing the lotion orange, the bottle is simply tinted orange. I am impressed by this idea.

It is now time to point out a trend I have noticed lately: "Can I walk you through the menu?" This means: can I read the menu to you, moron? Thank you no, I can actually read. Three languages, in fact. So I'll just let you know if I have trouble sounding out any of the words, but for now please leave me alone. I know this is standard fare for a just-opened restaurant, but there was someone hanging over our shoulders the whole time we were there. It made it very difficult to make fun of every aspect of this soulless eatery.

We ordered crab wontons to start, and I ordered the Mongolian Chicken. Dan went safety first: chicken fried rice. The crab wontons came out sitting in the hot and sour sauce, an automatic point deduction. They were certainly stuffed with crab meat, more than any crab wonton (or crab Rangoon) I had seen before. The sauce turned out to be fine as well.

Dan's bid for safety turned out to backfire, as his fried rice turned out to be "bland, yet unpleasant" and "overwhelmingly just rice." My food fared a little better. It definitely had enough chicken, and the flavors were not unpleasant. A healthier entree would have included more vegetables, but my body was fueled by the chicken, rice, mushrooms, and scallions; no question about that. Yes siree, that meal certainly contained protein, carbs, and fat, as well as (I assume) some other micronutrients my body would need to function. If you're detecting that the food was a tad underwhelming, you are quite correct. There's just nothing that I can think of to say about it. Which is exactly how some people like things.

OK, the good points: pretty much every entree can be ordered in a vegetarian version with vegetables and tofu. The drink fountain actually featured a diet soda other than Coke (Sprite Zero). It was certainly clean, and the prices are reasonable. I am not planning to boycott the place when inevitably someone I'm with has not tried it. There are even a few things on the menu (pdf) that I wouldn't mind trying. But the whole experience could be summed up with a big... *eh*.

* I see that Charlie Chiang is now referring to itself as "Asian", grr. Well, they're Chinese at heart, but some are putting in sushi bars. When the one here finishes putting in their sushi bar, I am moving in.

So why bamboo? Cotton comes out of the ground too, right? Besides being fast-growing, bamboo is easier on the land than intensive cotton farming, which can lead to erosion and takes a lot of the soil's nutrients. Also, remember the boll weevil? Cotton farming uses a lot of pesticides, and that's not even considering the chemical bath the average cotton garment will go through before it gets to the consumer. I'm not going to stop wearing or buying cotton, but it seems like a good idea to diversify the sources of our consumer products, and besides, wearing bamboo just seems so COOL.

The second plant is a bit more controversial and may raise some hackles out there in the Southland: kudzu. I started thinking about kudzu after watching an episode of Alton Brown's summer mini-series Feasting on Asphalt. While traveling through the South, Alton stops to talk about kudzu, the famous out-of-control vine. He then picks a few leaves and... eats them? It turns out that kudzu is almost entirely edible, which makes me stop to marvel: we Americans, on average, could probably out-eat any other people on Earth, and yet we have allowed the entire lower-right quadrant of our nation to be overgrown by salad greens?!

I understand if it can't be exported from the region for fear of spreading it further, but if you find yourself east of the Mississippi and south of the Mason-Dixon line, isn't it your civic duty to get yourself a bottle of Hidden Valley Ranch and go to town? Two caveats courtesey of AB: first, make sure that what you've got headed toward your face-hole is kudzu and not poison ivy . Second, although it doesn't respond that well to herbicides, people sometimes spray it anyway (out of spite?) so it's also important to make sure your kudzu hasn't been dowsed. But if it's on your own property, why not start thinking of that entirely overgrown junked car on the front lawn as a salad bar?

Another good one for the bathtub. If only they laminated the pages or included washable soap crayons, it would have been perfect. Seriously, you can taste the Colbert in here, and it tastes good. See the Strangers with Candy movie, rent the series on DVD, and read this book for a Sedaris-Dinello-Colbert-iffic summer.

When I was a kid, we had, at various times:
1. A TRASH-80 that didn't have a hard drive or a disk drive (it had a busted cassette drive)
2. A dedicated Smith-Corona word processor (at a time when it was way too late to own a dedicated word processor, but at least it had a floppy drive and printed documents that looked pretty nice)
3. An Apple IIc+ (a decent system that few people bought)
4. A Packard Bell PC

This book also reminded me of my stepdad's love for also-ran office applications like Lotus 1-2-3, AmiPro, Quattro, 8-in-1, and the list goes on. A fun trip down memory lane, if your memory includes any of these things.

Buy the book, then read along with Rachel's Summer Reading podcast. I can't tell you if the book is any good without Rachel reading it, but I can tell you that her podcast totally rocks.

Somewhere around chapter 5, I stopped thinking that she was reading a book by Chuck Klosterman and started believing that she was reading her own book, or better yet, just making it up as she went along. A great reading voice, along with a ton of built-in heavy metal cred and good intro music choices make this better than some professional audiobooks I've had the misfortune to listen to.

I avoided this book for some time, although as I've mentioned before, I do like Chuck Klosterman, even when I totally disagree with him and think he's full of crap. I'm not particularly a heavy metal fan, but honestly, I mistakenly thought this was a novel, and it would have sucked as a novel. So rest assured, novel-haters and rock-music-haters: there's still a good chance you'll enjoy this.

I recently made the claim to my cousin that I read for pleasure for 30 minutes per day. Unless reading stupid web pages counts, this would be completely untrue, except for the fact that I do try to read something for pleasure (from an actual book) every day, although usually nowhere near 30 minutes' worth.

My favorite spot to read has to be the bathtub. This collection of very short stories works out perfectly for bathtub reading, as one story is just the right length for filling the tub and sitting for a minute or two before getting down to the business of lathering, rinsing, and repeating.

It is one of those random books on our shelves that I am sure was Dan's before we started dating, although he may be equally convinced that it came from my collection. Wherever it came from, the 38 short stories it contains are a quick tour of authors who might have remained unexplored otherwise.

--St. Augustine

And in case you were curious, I'm 5C.

Maybe if I was more into music, this would have meant more to me. But I'm not. You hear that? I'M NOT INTO MUSIC. There. I said it. It seems as though I have never met anyone who doesn't claim to be interested in "music". Look at your MySpace friends, your Friendster (if you're so 2003 like that), whatever, and everyone claims music as an interest. I won't say that I don't like music, that I don't listen to music, that music offends or means nothing to me, but at this point in my life, I have to admit that I don't know much about what the kids are listening to. I avoid Top 40 radio, and I'm increasingly embarrassed by "alternative" format radio. At the same time, I'm completely lost when it comes to hipster bands outside of the mainstream. I'm just not cool enough, or I have other things that are priorities for me.

So back to the subject at hand, which is Never Mind the Pollacks, Neal Pollack's take on the history of rock and roll. I read it with interest, but for me, it was no Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature. It was perhaps TOO Neal Pollack, if that is even a statement that could make logical sense. Neal Pollack is over the top; that is what Neal Pollack is, and that is what he does. I understand that, but yet... I can't put my finger on what didn't blow me away about this one.

I keep apologizing for not liking the book, because generally I really do appreciate Neal Pollack. I even broke my Celebrity Rule and got his autograph, not only in my copy of his aforementioned Anthology but also on my Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature World Tour T-Shirt. Because: that's what you do with Neal Pollack.