Overhead lighting

As far as I know, I may be the only one who gets worked up into a passion about overhead and/or florescent lighting. Yet, I feel it is my duty to work everyone else up about it too so that reader, the next time I show up at your apartment, I won’t feel like I’m going to a doctor’s office.

Overhead lighting is okay in the following places: professional spaces, schools, medical spaces, and parking garages.

Overhead lighting is NOT okay in restaurants, houses, and anywhere else where ambiance has significance. It should not exist in a place where you want to feel comfortable. It should not exist in a place where generally, you do not want to feel ugly and stressed out. (For the record, this how I feel under florescents)

Do yourselves a favor, and look into lamps. They make your room look bigger, they make you look nicer. They will make your house less like a prison. Thank you.

Janky Squared

A good friend just sent me this... janky within and about janky! Ice cube and young Jeezy! (who is that?) Are these men janky at promoting, or promoters of janky? Will this film be appropriately horrible? Hopefully, I will never find out!

Window Blinds

As window treatments go, I'm not totally against the aesthetic of blinds. In these modern times, you can get newer and better versions of them, they're good for privacy at the flick of a wrist, and I've seen plenty of blinds that I did not think were all that awful looking. However, a good 99% of the time they are a royal pain, and then I hate them. I suspect it has to do with the ancientness of my dwellings.

My number one complaint about blinds is that they absolutely never pull evenly. I am forever having it happen where one side pulls up more than the other, and then I have to figure out which string I'm supposed to pull more, and then the other side cinches faster, and then it gets stuck like that, and after 15 more minutes you just give up and pull them all the way up because it's the only way to even them out. So awkward.

Possibly worse than this is the daunting task of letting them back down again. You always have to pull the string out and make a giant arc with your arm and/or whole body to bring the string to the other side, where it's supposed to release the blinds. It doesn't at first try, so you have to do this six more times. At that point, they come crashing down and get all bungled, or they come down one side at a time, the way they went up. Or they don't come down at all, and you have to literally pull on the bottom of them and move them down at the same time you release the string.

The strings are always really way longer than they need to be. They dangle on the ground. They get in knots which are impossible to take out again. Animals and small children always play with them, and could choke and die. Or they collect dust and you don't want to touch them.

The blinds themselves collect dust and look awful after a while. Also, somehow a few of them get bent and look completely awful. Usually when you're twisting them open and shut, a few of them do not move in sync with the rest or them so you have to go through and set those ones like all the others.

One time it happened that I was pulling on the string, and the whole hoisting system, the whole thing keeping those blinds up, came flying out of the window and crashed to the ground. I avoid blinds whenever I can.

Store-Bought Fudgsicles

For good awhile, Fudgsicles seemed like the perfect solution to my daily chocolate fix. They're low in calories, contain negligible amounts of fat and, theoretically, can be a refreshing end to dinner at home or a guilt-free late-night snack. I bought them regularly (which is embarrassing). But I have terrible chocolate cravings. If I could, I'd live off of cake, cupcakes and candy bars. So in an effort to keep my cravings at bay, Fudgsicles, with their reassuring Nutrition Facts label, became a regular part of my diet. More strangely, I didn't even really care what they tasted like. It was chocolate (sort of). As long as I wasn't spooning M&M's into my mouth.

After a few weeks of this routine, however, I started to pay more attention to what I ate. Admittedly, it was a delayed reaction, but I wondered how these things only had 60 calories and 1.5 grams of fat. The answer, of course, is: water, sugar and a buttload of 20-letter chemicals.

Here's how a typical Fudgesicle experience progresses:

Once you remove the plastic wrapper, you get a noseful of that synthetic frosty mist -- it's like a high-school chem lab with a faint whiff of Hershey's Park.

The actual act of eating a Fudgsicle is fairly uneventful. It's just a numb, vaguely chocolate-foodstuff sensation, not worth paying much attention to. Fudgsicles aren't the kind of dessert that you sit and savor anyway. You're most likely watching TV, on the Internet or reading a magazine while eating one.

And then: the aftertaste. It begins seconds after you've deposited the wooden stick. Your mouth is sticky; your saliva, thick and phlegmy. No matter how much water you drink or how intensely you brush your teeth, your breath still smells like metal and watered-down Nesquick.

After this happened many, many times, I ultimately developed visceral physical and psychological reactions to Fudgsicles. Today the mere thought prompts my stomach to churn, my throat to tighten and my head to spin.

The reason Fudgsicles made this list, more so than other chemical-laden snacky foods, is because it's a product that's meant to please but falls way, way short of succeeding. People have created tasty low-calorie, low-fat potato chips, crackers, doughnuts, ice cream sandwiches and cookies that don't leave you feeling like you've just mowed down the Periodic Table in one sitting. A better product is possible.

In fact, this afternoon, in preparation for this post, I forced myself to try the Fudgsicle-flavored sorbet at the Humphry Slocombe ice creamery in San Francisco. It was superb, cheap and they make huge bins of it each week.

Eat it, Popsicle brand!

Gazing Balls

Now that it's summer and I get outside more often, I have turned my hypercritical sights to the great outdoors. Lo and behold, there is great jankery in America's backyard! I must address it.

This is called a "gazing ball" or globe:

I can remember hating these at first sight, whenever that was.

I guess the point of a gazing ball is that the spherical and metallic surface reflects the garden for our viewing pleasure. I don't know about you, but I can see the garden from my vantage point at 5'8", I am not about to lean my ass down to peer at a metal ball for the purpose of seeing my garden warped and fisheyed. Plus, usually they are some kind of bright unnatural color, all the worse for reflective purposes.

There are all manner of stands and pedestals for the ball to sit on top of. Most of them are ugly. Here is a particularly puketastic fairy and mushroom one that M. White found:

Everyone has their own aesthetic when it comes to gardening. Since I am not a homeowner, mine is called: "ignore whatever is growing outside my apartment". However, if I did have a garden, my preference would not be to overload it with kitschy lawn ornaments. I would especially not throw in a few of these gazing balls. And why does it seem that every garden in which I have seen one or more these things is half-dead unkempt weedy mess on top of it all? More likely than not they will have added a few stone animals, fairies, and a bird bath or two... an unfair assault on our eyes!

"Kendra" Intro

Full disclosure: I watch lots of trashy television. And I have a pretty high tolerance for crappy editing, cheesy theme songs, low-budget sets -- you name it.

Perhaps a month or so ago, the E! Channel debuted one of its summer television shows, "Kendra." As a huge fan of "The Girls Next Door" -- the reality show that followed Hugh Hefner and his trio of girlfriends, Holly, Bridget and Kendra -- I immediately set my DVR. Though I was always a Bridget girl (she found time to balance elaborate party planning and extension school at UCLA for broadcast journalism!), I agree that the smart money is on Kendra for a spin-off. She's energetic, young and completely uninhibited.

The premise of the show is this: Kendra is now out of the mansion and living with her boyfriend, Philadelphia Eagles wide receiver Hank Baskett. I've only seen the first two episodes, but so far she: bought a lovely brick home in the Los Angeles area, installed a stripper pole in the living room, threw a raucous housewarming party, visited Baskett's family in New Mexico and participated in a charity basketball game. Pretty typical stuff, if you watched "The Girls Next Door."

Here's what the problem is: the intro. I know I've griped about the "American Idol" intro before, with its low-budg' graphics and synthed theme song (especially for a show that's all about singing and musical talent). But this may be worse. It's campy, but not good campy. You get the impression that Kendra and others at E! actually thought this would be a respectable intro. Sure, she hams it up, as usual, but there's something about it that takes itself more seriously than you'd think. When I was mulling this over with Sylvia the other day, she also made an excellent observation: whether E! and Kendra intended to, it's kind of like a crappy homage to the television intros of the late 80s and 90s.

Sylvia: It's just, like, such a person-points-at-the-boxed-picture-to-the-left intro. Like, "Look! We're interacting with the graphics!"

Or maybe it's the intro song, which couldn't have taken more than 18 seconds to compose but is performed with such enthusiasm and pomp that I feel kind of bad for poking fun. Sample lyrics:

It's just another chapter in life

Bought a new house

After tonight

No butlers and no maids

You gotta do you own thing your way

Go Kendra

Go Kendra

Go Kendra

Go Kendra

You on your own now

See for yourself:

Nail Polish Bottles

The nail polish bottle situation is mind-blowing to me. My complaint is simple: why doesn't the brush reach to the bottom of the bottle?

Why has no-one improved on this yet? Every so often, inevitably, I will have used up most of a color, and i am presented with the annoying situation where I can't just remove the brush and paint, I have to tip it nearly all the way over get my brush in there, and then save it from spilling out and making a mess all over the place.

How hard would it be to add another centimeter to the brush length?

Next up: Nail Polish Is Annoying When it Gets Gooey.