the gyrating women of sabado gigante

Went out to lunch the other day for Afghani food (no, not in celebration of the recent election in which the first person to vote was a nineteen year-old woman). I’d never had it before, and it sounded intriguing. That’s one of the things I like about California, it’s so much more diverse than Florida. Sharaun notices it more than I do though, she’s always amazed at how diverse her class makeups are. I know, it’s silly to call it “diverse” based on the cuisine choices – that’s just what kicked off the idea in my head. Well, I’m happy to say that the food at “Taste of Kabul” was yummy. Too bad my $10 lunch probably paid for some terrorist-camp recruit’s standard-issue pipe bomb, or maybe the poppy-seed startup costs for a budding opium venture. And that folks, is good sarcasm.

Anyway, I didn’t intend to write a paragraph about the restaurant and food, I wanted to write about the conversation. Had a really good conversation, covering the two most “taboo” topic you can think of: politics and religion. It’s awesome when you can have intelligent conversation with someone willing to be objective about things. I guess, to a psychologist, that’s probably the equivalent of saying “It’s nice when you can have a conversation with someone who has a similar opinion to yourself.” I mean, you’re naturally going to think of someone who more or less agrees with you on things as someone with their “head on straight,” or “in his right mind.” What’s intelligent and objective to one person could be ignorant and close-minded to the next, that’s the beauty of opinion I suppose. Anyway, it was a good conversation – and good spiced yogurt-covered dumplings too. Those Afghanis may be terrible at making peace, but they’re not too shabby at making lunch. Sarcasm, again, it’s good to close on a laugh.

Yeah, so, I did watch about half of the third debate the other night? it all seems like rehash now though. Kerry’s a liberal, Bush is bad, I get it. I wasn’t too impressed overall, I kind of just want it all to be over now. No more stupid misleading commercials, no more character-attacks, let’s just vote and be done with it. I was, however, disappointed in the way Kerry (and Edwards, for that matter) brought up Cheney’s lesbian daughter. I mean, how thin is that veil? Everyone knows you’re only mentioning his lesbian daughter because you want to make sure every knows he has a lesbian daughter, not for whatever false premise you’re supposedly talking about. “By the way America, and particularly you, Bible Belt: your incumbent republican VP has a Satan-loving lesbo of a daughter. Do you really want a vice-president who’s seed is so accursed by God that he can father such a moral abomination? I think not. Vote Kerry.” Stupid politics.

Ever since upgrading the TiVo to a ludicrous 140hrs of recording time, I decided to re-enable the “TiVo suggestions” feature. TiVo suggestions is a feature that lets the machine record shows it thinks you might like, presumably based on intelligence gathered from what you watch and what you already choose to record. I decided to enable it mostly as an experiment, y’know, to see how intelligent the thing really is. I thought it would be fun to see what kinda stuff it chose to record, perhaps it would even give me some insight into my own mind. But, alas, I think TiVo suggestions is mostly whack.

It’s been on a little over a week now, and man does it record some odd stuff. This morning I woke up and there were two episodes of some Spanish soap opera it had recorded off Univision. What? I mean, other than stopping on Univision for a minute or two while channel-surfing (gyrating women on Sabado Gigante pretty much stop you in your tracks), I’ve never watched a Spanish show in my life. It recorded two hours of infomercials – what in my viewing trends keyed in on that? It does, however, sometimes get it right – with things like I Love Lucy (it sees Andy Griffith and Leave it to Beaver), COPS (duh), Futurama and the Family Guy (probably based on the Simpsons and Aqua Teen “season passes” I have set). Of course, it’s skewed from purely “my” habits because Sharaun also watches TV. So the “suggested” list is rife with MTV “real life” shows and “making the video” and crap like that. Yup. Paragraph over.

Enough, Dave out.

Also written on this day...

• maybe i should invent a machine - 2010
• slightly more than usual - 2007
• q&a - 2006
• where the grass is greener - 2005