No more meat

I haven't had meat in three days. For health and taste reasons only. I could care less about cattle and chickens. Meat is tasty and all, but so are chick peas. When I found a recipe for mock tuna salad that tasted better than any tuna salad I've tried, I figured I'd take the plunge.

Next came fake hamburgers. They taste nothing like hamburgers, but it doesn't matter. Again, they're mostly chick peas and tofu, and they're fried instead of grilled. They taste great.

I don't know how long this will last. I have eight promising recipes, but my downfall will probably be restaurant related. In Philly, I would have no problem staying veg. My favorite Chinese place and favorite sandwich place are both vegan and located in Philadelphia. I took my mom and brother to the Chinese place and they liked it.

Locally though, aside from the Chinese places, all we have are chains.

Sub shops aren't too hard. I order the veggie sub 90% of the time at Subway anyway. I just double the cheese and toast it. Quizno's has only one vegetarian option, and it's the same price as most of the food I normally get. I tried it today and it was tasty enough.

The taco places aren't hard either, though we only have a Taco Bell in York. No Qudoba or Chipotle, which actually have great vegetarian options.

I'll probably just stop going to the Wendy's-, Burger King- and Arby's-type places. Fries are about the only thing a vegetarian could get there. That's probably better for my health anyway.

I'm not going to cut out meat all together. I'll still make fish every few weeks, and I'll probably still eat beef at nice restaurants or weddings. But cutting it out of my everyday diet should be pretty healthy.

First song

Well, fourth song ... but the first are far from complete. On MRL'sMySpace.

It's an acoustic cover of Patent Pending's Old and Out of Tune. A great song from one of the bands that will play the Arrogant Sons of Bitches' reunion show in September.

Coming soon are another cover and two real songs... I hope. That should make a decent demo.

New York tomorrow

I'm heading up to New York City tomorrow with Niha to get her a Canadian visa. Apparently she can't just cross the border like the rest of us. It's crazy the amount of stuff she needs for a day/weekend trip to Canada. She needs seven different I-somethings, her current passport, her old passports, her travel parole and a bunch of other things.

I mean... it's Canada. Who'd want to do anything to them?

Bomb the Music Industry and Suburban Legends

It's been a good 24 hours for ska hybrids.

Bomb the Music Industry released Get Warmer, the one man band collective's fourth album of electro-ska-rock-core in two years. It's free off of Quote Unquote records website. I haven't listened to all of it yet, but what I've heard has been good. Warning: The vocals will take some time to get used to.

While on Quote Unquote, you can browse a bunch of other bands offering their music up for the cost of bandwidth. I recommend the Matt Kurtz One for some straight up rock 'n' roll. Live, he plays the bass and snare drum with one foot, a bass guitar with the other, keyboard or guitar with his hands, and sings. For someone who can barely play the guitar and sing at the same time, it's impressive.

The Suburban Legends new album also leaked. It's almost overproduced, but with them the more ridiculous the better. While Rump Shaker was a parody-ish boy band playing ska-punk, this trends more towards disco-ska revival. Ultra poppy, but with the talent to pull it off. There are probably a few of the new songs on their MySpace if, you know, you care.

Pilot season

Pilot season has become far cooler with the advent of torrents and crooked reviewers.

The Big Bang Theory is a sitcom about two socially awkward geniuses. It has a laugh track, which just feels wrong. I haven't watched a comedy with a laugh track since... I don't know. (How I Met Your Mother has laughter, but I don't know if it's a track or studio laughter.)

My guess is that they're just using the canned laughter for the pilot. It's an odd choice. Even real studio audience laughter is leaving network comedy. All of NBC's comedies have no audience-helping laughter. Generally people know when to laugh. A laugh track is for shows where the humor is easy to miss and people need help. Those shows shouldn't make it to air.

It's not surprising that this show is slated for CBS. It's the only network with good laugh-track comedies. Two-and-a-half Men isn't terrible, and How I Met Your Mother is one of my favorite shows. But as I said, the laughter just feels wrong.

This is because TV has become a more and more insular medium. The laugh track used to make the audience feel like there were other people in the room, because the TV was a scary object and watching it alone made people feel anti-social or perhaps like they might be sucked in. They liked to feel included. Laughter also made the watcher more keenly aware of the fact that the show was really live, which is why it's still important for stand-up comics and talk show hosts, both areas where the performer feeds off of the audience's energy. There's a danger in those live settings where the performer can succeed or fail, and the failures give the performer an opportunity to improvise.

But there is no failure in a sitcom with a laugh track. Everything is success, and all danger is gone. Comedy without a laugh track, like Scrubs or Arrested Development or 30 Rock, are sure of their humor. And because they have no laughter, they can deal with more serious topics. Not that 30 Rock or Arrested Development did, but Scrubs and Sports Night deal with a lot of serious topics.

Any show with a laugh track gives up that ability. If they try, they come off as preachy with their "A Very Special" episodes.

Good times

I am a much more real copy editor today than I was two weeks ago. Though I've worked on Define the Meaning since January, they only just put out an issue that included anything I've worked on. I just got the issue and it looks great. Whoever they have designing the pages has improved a lot since the previous issue.

So it was nice seeing Peter Rambo - Copy Editor on the masthead.

And I spent four days at am New York (or amNewYork or amNY). And they're going to pay me. Eventually, I assume. But that makes me a real, professional copy editor.

Though now I want to live in New York. Daniel Tosh played. Gogol Bordello played. They Might Be Giants played. I saw a Kwik-E Mart, a man talking to himself loudly (arms waving sans cell ear piece) and many pretty people. I was invited to a bar in "The Village," wherever that is, and I could walk everywhere.

Then I spent a week in North Carolina on an island. So I'm doing pretty well.

Tomorrow, AM New York

Or today, depending on how you look at time.

I start at AM New York filling in (I assume) for a vacationing copy editor. I'm going to stay with my brother in Philadelphia and ride a Greyhound bus to New York and every day from today till Thursday.

Following that, he and I are heading to North Carolina for a week of vacation.

Proof of imperfect greatness

I've been typing the AP Stylebook in order to both know it better and to have a searchable version on my computer.

I found my first mistake. On page viii, they misspell the Encyclopedia in the For religion questions: part of the Bibliography section.

That probably shouldn't make me happy, but it does.

Nothing quite like a form letter

I interviewed with The Motley Fool yesterday. Or, rather, I took an editing test at their primary colored offices. I did O.K., just not O.K. enough.

I was actually surprised to get a chance at all. In the past, I had applied to a number of places through their website's online submission forms and never received a response. Though it took the Fool two months, they did get back to me.

I'll probably apply again in six months if still not happily employed.

Cold water

My old and now, for the week, current roommate came back Thursday night mostly blacked out. In the process of trying to remove something particularly nasty from him mattress, he forgot to turn off the faucet. The hot water probably ran for the first hour or so, then stopped.

We figured this out today. Yesterday’s shower was a terrifying experience. The end result was a patchy cleaning, an accelerated heart rate, and a feeling of, if not actually being, dirtiness. I’ve taken cold showers before, but only cold in the sense of the absence of heat.

When I was in the Bahamas and Jamaica doing mission work, we had no heated water, but the result was more slightly under room temperature. This was almost painful, and not something I plan to try again.

Interview one

I had an interview with the Punxsutawney Spirit yesterday. I hope it went well; I have no ability to judge that sort of thing.

Afterwards, I drove to Penn State instead of home. I'll be here for a few days lounging and waiting for calls from my last two interviews.

Traffic court part one

I get to fight the man today!

So maybe it's just a traffic ticket. I'm pretty firm in my belief that no one should be pulled over for going 36 miles per hour. I think that's something most people can rally behind.

I'm going for a misjudgment of facts or failure to read a sign. You know, rather than the far-more-true-but-less-apt-to-work defense of bullshit 25 mph speed limits on straight, wide roads.

Though that did work for my dad once...

Revisiting high school cafs

It's really no wonder America's children are growing out faster than they're growing up. As a poor, lowly TA these past too many months, I spent quite a few meals reliving the high school lunch experience.

I usually got the main meal. It was a entree, fruit and vegetable and some kind of side. Sometimes they'd give me a bun. It was all edible, but not much more than that. Though I didn't eat with the students, I did go through the line with them. Very few went for the same thing I did.

I only went for the main meal because it was healthier than the alternatives. The alternatives to my mushy broccoli, hard bananas (seriously...) under-fried shrimp poppers and healthy whole wheat bun were soft pretzels, fries, pizza, cheese sticks, s'mores and all manner of convenience store sub-dollar snacks. All alternatives were far more popular despite their greater expense.

The food in our schools should probably be better. Not that I'd expect even meals made from better-than-army-surplus stock to fare much better against the junky alternatives, but it would be a start. The problem is that schools have to go with the lowest bidder. So, currently, the kids are stuffing themselves with shit regardless of what they buy from the school.

I don't see anything changing.

When I have kids, they're taking bagged lunches.