Haines His Way

Back from errands, and also scored the new DVD of The Conformist - very exciting.  I now actually have ninety minutes to myself before leaving for LACC and rehearsal.

My goodness, is this a slow news day here at haineshisway.com?

I must say, our new cast member is short - five feet.  It's probably going to be amusing visually, since her beatnik boyfriend is about six feet tall.

I had quite the surprise late this morning. My friend Hal called with an offer to take me to lunch, his treat, at a local Italian restaurant I had never been to. We went there for lunch, and it was delicious. But the best things about it were that (1) it was free, and (2) it was such a surprise since Fridays are usually fried chicken day around here.

A welcome change.

Because lunch ran late, I only had a chance to watch two things from last night.

I began with CSI, an OK episode with idetical twins (who knew nothing about each other) murdered within two hours of each other.

Something happened to Gregg Sanders on last week's show (which I forgot to record) so that now he's being sued by some family due to some testimony he gave in court. It was briefly mentioned during the show but no backstory was offered, so I have no idea what that's about.

While I was watching SMALLVILLE, my friend Jeff was calling from his break at work wanting to talk (and rave) about last night's UGLY BETTY. Of course, I hadn't watched it yet, so we ended up talking GREY'S ANATOMY instead.

UGLY BETTY will be the first thing I watch when I go back down and prepare for the evening's viewing.

I've completed the first section of Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma, .  Who knew that so much of our processed food came from corn?  Even vegetarians aren't exempt, if they're eating anything that's been manufactured.  If you get a meal from McDonald's and eat it in your car, you're eating corn.  The burger?  Corn-fed beef (cows don't naturally eat corn, they eat grass).  The McNuggets?  Corn-fed chickens, which are then chopped up and processed, held together with corn products to make up the nuggets.  The soda you drink to wash it all down?  The second ingredient in the soda, after carbonated water, is High Fructose Corn Syrup, sweeter and cheaper than sugar... particularly after the tariffs imposed on the sugar industry by the corn lobby.  Opt for a salad?  The Newman's Own Salad Dressing contains still more HFCS, along with "corn syrup, corn starch, dextrin, caramel color, and xantham gum," all of which come from processed corn.  Even the fries, which you would think are mostly potatoes, get half their calories from corn oil.  Even the car you drive in, while eating all this McProcessed food, is run in part on corn, because of the federally mandated inclusion of ethanol - a mandate that was supported by the corn lobby, of course.  (And ethanol creates more pollution than ordinary gas, too!)

Scary stuff.  I try to avoid corn syrup & some of these other ingredients when possible-not an easy thing to do.

Every day should be fried chicken day....

....if only I thought my arteries could stand it.

I love corn.

And pecan pie cannot be made without corn syrup.

And I adore pecan pie.

BUT...I hate candies made with corn syrup in place of sugar.

It doesn't taste good to me.  Store-bought fudges ALL are made with corn syrup and taste nothing like good old homemade fudge made with pure cane sugar.

I love roasted corn and corn-on-the-cob.  I love creamed corn, corn chowder and fried corn.

I love corn bread, corn pones and corn flakes.

And I''ll even laugh at a corny joke every once in a while.

We felt MEDIUM was an hour too long & was too predictable.  We did appreciate the creativity of the youngest daughter’s dreams.  The remaining plots & story lines, while intriguing at times, just didn’t pan out for us & left us wondering “what was the point of that?”  

However, we found this week’s episode of BONES wonderful.

Tonight we might watch UGLY BETTY.  

Today is Friday. That is all I have to say today.

Re: Corn.

The corn that we humans eat is not the same as the corn that is raised for industrial food.  What we eat is either sweet corn, raise specifically for human consumption, or pop corn, again specifically raised.

The corn that is used for corn syrup, starch, and further modified into practically everything comes from hybreds that are specifically raised for a) high yeild and b) resistance to disease.  Apparently it tastes like... well, almost nothing.  It is to corn what a chicken nugget is to chicken, meaning that it tastes not like chicken but like a nugget.

Hmm. The Devil Is A Woman, or The Flame Of New Orleans?

Obviously, der B and I have returned from the Casino Royale screening.  We were both pleased with the film (although there were a couple of plot points I had to explain to der B, stuff that had flown by during the film and were easy to miss).

It is definitely a reboot of the franchise, much as Batman Begins rebooted the winged rodent.  And Craig makes a very good Bond, dangerous and in his own way sexy.  That Judi Dench is the only actor to continue from the earlier stuff to this film was a good decision, and she and Craig play well together.

My memories of the book are sketchy, but the film seemed to follow the original storyline very well.  It is raw, rough-edged.  There are a number of set pieces that, while fantastic, never seem set in a fantasy world.  Great cinematography, I thought.

End of report.  And I don't think I've included any spoilers.

Yes, the kitchen floor will be mopped in just a few minutes. I thought about doing it this morning the way I've done the other cleaning during the morning this week, but I put it off. Now, I have that awful job staring me in the face.

Ah well, I best get to it!

WBBL.

You got something against corn? Actually I've eaten what we call field corn, it tasted like corn to me. You wouldn't want to eat it when it's hard and dried and ready to be processed though.

We tried that from the corn field next to us in Pennsylvania-YUCK!!!