Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Tilted Kilt

Brittany is very excited that she has found a new job to supplement her Salvation Army internship income. She will be a bartender at a new bar about to be opened in Columbus, part of the Tilted Kilt chain. You really need to check out their website to know why I'm horrified.

Even worse, although she touts her bartending skills, she needs to start practising because she "sight poured" shots- i.e. knew what a shot looked like in a (particular) glass. She had never even heard of the variously named free/count/time pour that most professional bartenders use. Well, hopefully the outfit will look good on her.

Primary Colors

After her thinking that the presidential primary was in November, I believed that Brittany had been steered correctly in her understanding of American party politics. But, as is so often the case, I underestimated her ignorance.

On Monday I was discussing with Brittany the debate I had heard on NPR between two Democratic candidates for county commissioner (sadly they were both unable to put together a coherent sentence). I stated my belief that neither seemed worth voting for when Brittany replied that she hadn;t paid any attention to any of the races and so was just going to vote for "the Democrat" come Tuesday. When I said that since it's a primary we're voting between two Democrats she gave her patented blank stare.

Now primaries are odd things, the rules seem to be different wherever you are, as I am learning during this year's presidential campaign, but the basic idea is always the same: choosing who will represent a particular party in a general election. My vote has never really mattered before in a presidential election, but in the past I lived in areas so heavily partisan that only the primary mattered for local positions.

Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Jicama

Last night I went out to dinner with Brittany and we chatted about our weekends/days and she told me about a new fruit she had tried from the grocery store "JI-cam-a," which she accurately described as looking like a potato but tasting a little more like a bland apple. Now, I wouldn't expect someone to get the pronunciation correct as "Hee-kah-mah" if they've never heard of it before, but I did think it was pretty obvious that most of us don't describe it as a fruit. Even worse, when I said it was a little more like a potato in that it was a tuber, Brittany stared at me blankly, never having hear of tubers before.

I just mentioned this story to my officemate, let's call him B.J., and he too had never heard the word tuber before. Looking things up in wikipedia it does seem like the definition of tuber and root vegetable is a little more complicated than I previously thought, but it still looks to be an entirely pedestrian term that I thought most educated people would have heard.

Monday, February 11, 2008

The Grammy's

Watching the Grammy Awards Show with Brittany finally propelled me to update this blog. At some point soon I will add posts about the past month too, but now for the Sunday night drama:

Brittany walked in while Tina Turner and Beyonce (Knowles) were singing Proud Mary. Brittany said, "Wow, Diana Ross looks great!" And when I pointed out that it was really Tina Turner she explained that the camera shot was only showing the "INA" of the performer's name. "True," I said, "but Proud Mary is kinda a signature Tina Turner song."

Brittany stuck around for the montage of the music industry people that died in the past year, and it ended with Luciano Pavarotti. Brittany said, "It was nice that they ended those pictures with Pavarotti since he diad last year." I pointed out, "The montage was for all the people that died last year- that's why they did that."

Then Andrea Bocelli and Josh Groban sang a duet of "The Prayer" in honor of those that died, and while Bocelli was introducing the piece Brittany wondered, "Why won't he open his eyes and look up, that's not a very good presentation style." I replied, "Well, he's blind." And Brittany said, "I knew something was up with his eyes."

Finally, Brittany jumped on the bandwagon of people against Amy Winehouse being "rewarded" this year because of her personal problems. Though I don't think Winehouse is any sort of role model, when an award is given for achievement and someone has produced the best song for a given year, then the award should go to that person.