January 19, 2005
Area Woman Eats Entire Box of Cookies
This is a parody of the sort you see in The Onion, except that it all actually happened, pretty much as given. I was reminded of this at my lunch today at Legal Seafoods in Baltimore with friend Barbara Saffir, when we talked about all the items (potato chips, ice cream, sugary snacks) we can never keep in our homes because we would eat them nonstop.
Area Woman Eats Entire Box of Cookies
FELLS POINT -- Local writer Jeannette Belliveau was delighted to discover Wednesday morning that someone had left a box of Entemann's Soft-Baked Chocolate Chip Cookies on her breakfast bar.
"I can tell already, this is going to be great day," Belliveau smiled.
"These must be for everyone to share," she thought. Her housemates often left Twix bars, office party leftovers and chocolate-covered macadamia nuts in the communal area adjacent to the pet food containers.
At 10:45 a.m. she made her first visit to the cookie box, determinedly ripping open the perforated lines on its side, and took about nine of the scrumptious concoctions to help her focus while working.
Later she returned to the remaining three-quarters of the cookies. "These are probably 'stales' on sale at Sam's Club," Belliveau concluded. "It would be best to go through them. Then we can all check them off as not wasted due to excessive exposure to the air. And move on to the next consumables in order of expiration date."
By 7 p.m. the cookies were finished. They had darn good flavor for stales, Belliveau thought. She never bought Entemann's for herself, which enhanced the pleasure of rediscovering the delights of their chocolate chips on the palate. The free box seemed to have fallen from heaven like a granted wish.
The contented writer took great pride in having split up the cookies' consumption into four separate trips to the kitchen, showing unbelievable willpower for a Belliveau. Everyone had to know that a less self-controlled member of the clan would naturally plunge face first into a box of Entemann's and scarf it like a hyena at a fresh carcass.
She had definitely done the right thing, Belliveau concluded, given that her brother Jim had once said that chocolate was good to control obsessive-compulsive disorders. Her writing had proceeded most satisfactorily all day. This was good. Very very very good. Her mood became buoyant. Briefly she wondered about the anonymous benefactor but did not dwell excessively on the matter.
Later that evening, her housemate arrived in her office. "Do you know what happened to my boxes of cookies and doughnuts?" she demanded.
"Um, well ... the doughnuts are right here," she said gesturing beside her computer. In other example of self-discipline, she had only eaten four of the 12 cinnamon, confectioner's sugar and plain doughnuts, and those nicely spaced out. But she wondered if absconding with a whole box from the communal area looked bad.
Then, bewildered that the fate of the cookies wasn't readily apparent, she said, "I ate them."
"Those were for a party for Saturday night," Laura said.
"And you left them out in plain view on a Wednesday?" Belliveau responded, trying not to roll her eyes. "You know you can't do that to anyone with a disadvantaged Catholic childhood limited to one cinnamon twist a week after Sunday Mass."
An hour later, Belliveau related her day's odyssey from office to kitchen and back to her husband, Lamont, confident he would chuckle at to the humorous parallels between their impulsive pets, who would eat anything within reach, and herself.
After a lengthy pause, Lamont said, "What were you thinking?"
Belliveau shared her decision-making processes, smug about the clarity of her logic. Inner satisfaction suffused her as she analyzed and articulated each step with lawyerly precision.
Lamont raised his eyebrows in silence.
"OK, I wasn't thinking. I was eating," she said, feeling misunderstood, but confident her sisters would validate her actions.
- posted by jbelliveau at 6:53 PM in Parodies
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January 17, 2005
2005 Favorites: Books, Music, DVDs
Books
Freakonomics : A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
Steven D. Levitt
This one's getting a lot of attention, but I agree with National Review's Jonah Goldberg that 
The Armchair Economist by Steven Landsburg is much stronger!
The Secret Man:
The Story of Watergate's Deep Throat
Bob Woodward
My personal knowledge of Bob Woodward begins with seeing him in the lobby of my high school, Richard Montgomery, in Rockville circa 1971, as he wrote an expose of the county's high school principals for the Montgomery County Sentinel. It continues with seeing him more than two decades later in his office at the Washington Post, and having him buy ice cream in huge buckets for the newsroom during one busy Saturday, perhaps just prior to the invasion of Haiti.
I had no idea that his work in the Navy brought him to the White House prior to his employment as a journalist, and it was in a corridor there that he first met Mark Felt, who was to become Deep Throat.
If you read this book, you will learn that Woodward lied to Richard Cohen, a Post columnist, who was prepared to write an article stating that Felt had to be Deep Throat; that Felt's motives will now never be known, as he is 91 and suffers from dementia; but that most likely, Felt believed (based on his service to J. Edgar Hoover) the FBI had an almost above-the-law duty to protect the country, that is, leaking information if need be to expose the corruption at the Nixon White House, or using extralegal means to capture the Weather Underground radicals.
Even though Vanity Fair scooped the Washington Post.
Garlic and Sapphires:
The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise
Ruth Reichl
Really enjoyed Reichl's opening on the bizarreness of her hiring experience a the New York Times -- no one she is visiting seems to have any clear idea of how to conduct a professional interview, and she is astonished at how filthy the newsroom is.
She shakes up the New York restaurant world by visiting hoity-toity spots in disguise and reporting frankly on shabby treatment. Whle this does not endear her to Times management, readers applaud.
One Nation Under Therapy:
How the Helping Culture Is Eroding Self-Reliance
Christina Hoff Sommers
Sally Satel
Thought-provoking look at the therapy industry and how little-trained vultures descend onto Columbine, the World Trade Center and insist that all in sight emote as if they are Sally Jesse Raphael.
Sommers writes with less pizzazz here than her earlier landmark,
Who Stole Feminism?, yet her targets are well chosen, especially Abraham Maslow, the guru who decided we all have a pyramid of needs, with self-actualization at the top. How many families have been broken up since as one parent or another decides they are more important than their kids?
Fascinating account of a pilot's 13-day hike out of the California Sierras following a crash in November 1994. Few could have survived the starvation and brutal conditions Peter DeLeo faced. He finds heavily padlocked cabins on the way, in contrast to the one-time tradition in Alaska to leave cabins stocked and open to a traveler facing an emergency. (The custom, according to John McPhee's excellent
Coming into the Country, is for the traveler to eventually restock what he takes on a return trip).
Reviews at Amazon.com note that the NTSB cited pilot error as the cause of DeLeo's crash -- that he took an ill-advised swing into a box canyon. Further, his emergency signaling device appears to not have had an antenna set up correctly, and he did not file a flight plan.
It seems the same person can be a crummy pilot and a determined survivor.
Useful Idiots: How Liberals Got It Wrong in the Cold War and Still Blame America First
Mona Charen
You probably know the outlines of how liberals have been sympathetic to Soviet Russia, Cuba and other totalitarian regimes, but Charen connects the dots to show similar patterns toward Nicaragua and even Cambodia as it descended into genocide.
American Taboo : A Murder in the Peace Corps
Philip Weiss
Fantastic story of a young American Peace Corps volunteer murdered in Tonga by another PCV -- who essentially got off scot-free. The tale is an engrossing one, especially fine are the observations of Tongans who watch the Peace Corps bureaucracy fall in line to protect the murderer (!) and conclude that whereas a Tongan would simply confess and be hung, Americans don't mind murder so very much. I agree with the reviewers on Amazon.com that take issue with the writer's failings to explain the reappearance of characters, but still, the narrative has its own momemtum, and the writer is clearly quite good at reporting what happened.
What is perhaps more lacking is a look at why the heck we let barely formed adults in their early 20s, most hopelessly unprepared for live overseas, go around getting themselves into trouble and ultimately being "whack-evaced" home when their minds crumble. My new book, Romance on the Road, will look briefly at the issue of young female Peace Corps volunteers, who, if French speaking, are sent to West Africa, where they are likely to encounter strong, seductive men, often HIV positive. Up to five PCVs a year sero-convert to HIV.
Parents and young folks alike should think twice before deciding they are suited for the Peace Corps!
Do-Gooders: How Liberals Hurt Those They Claim to Help (and the Rest of Us)
Mona Charen
Excellent chapters including "How Liberalism Created the Crime Wave" and "How Liberalism Created Homelessness." Charen's book blasts out of the gate with this opening sentence:
If you were inclined to assault your neighbor and steal his car in 1958, you would have to consider that neither the police nor the courts would cut you any clack because you had a deprived childhood.
How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must): The World According to Ann Coulter
Ann Coulter
Was expecting some sort of social guide to conversing with liberals, including a decent run-through of social issues high on the conservative agenda. This is actually a collection of Coulter's weekly columns. I was pleasantly surprised to find Coulter's book full of witty asides, amusing observations ("at least Saddam wasn't at Tailhook!) and with an endearing humility about her failures to crack the magazine market (many freelance writers will enjoy chapter 16, "What you Have Read If You Lived in a Free Country," a compendium of flaky rejections).
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
Lynne Truss
Great idea for a book -- a lively look at punctuation -- yet despite interesting passages on the history of the comma, this effort will confuse the reader rather than clarify. Does Truss even understand punctuation? As a former copy editor, I find the Associated Press stylebook infinitely clearer. Part of the problem is that the UK has something close to punctuation anarchy, an almost Chaucerian disregard for correct use of commas and apostrophes. And alas, this is a UK book written by a UK author primarily for a UK audience. Again, where were the editors? The rules for comma use are not so difficult, but Truss makes it appear otherwise.
On Paradise Drive : How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense
David Brooks
An editor should have sat down with Brooks to figure out what he was really trying to say about life in the American suburbs and exurbs. This reads like a description of a drive from Washington's Georgetown out to Frederick, Maryland, with bits of clever prose but no overarching point.
Things Worth Fighting for: Collected Writings
Michael Kelly
Nicer long pieces that contrast with his newspaper columns, including a profile of Jesse Jackson.
The Pythons
by the members of Monty Python,
A gold mine for someone like myself who is a big fan of the show but knows little about the background of the group.
According to the Rolling Stones
An obviously incomplete history of the band but packed with great photos.
DVDs
In Living Color
Hilarious and far more consistent than SNL.
Eight Mile
Reasonably interesting but there will be some holes in the narrative to casual viewers who are not huge Eminem fans. We are left to wonder in the early going, as Marshall flounders and chokes at rapping competitions, why his friends see such promise in him (the film gives us no clue). And my husband Lamont makes an interesting point:
I thought it was a little strange in 8-mile that Rabbit seems to have no relationship at all with black women. All his buddies except the guy who shoots himself are black, but black women play only the most peripheral role in the movie. It may be that they don't like him or he doesn't like them. It wouldn't be important except that he has completely "dysfunctional" relationships with the only three white women who show up in the movie, his mom and two girlfriends.There is an interesting twist in a sub-culture like this where there simply aren't that many potential mates within your ethnic group, so you end up either grabbing the first person like you even though you may be completely uncompatible or dating outside of your race. Years ago if you were a black professional you had this issue, so many people had to do a match-maker thing, never worked for me... Well this is never remotely explained in the movie. I kept wondering why he's getting wrapped up in these slags when there were so many sistas around.
The other thing is his outrage at the betrayal of the producer having an affair with the girl he's after. Seeing as Rabbit's only claim on her was a quickie behind the press, I wasn't sure he had any right to beat up the brother for doing the exact same thing. It almost came across as old-fashioned outrage at a black man and white woman being involved rather than outrage at a cheating girlfriend.
Whatever, not of this was made clear. It feels like M&M was either hostile to interracial relationships or he had it written in and cut it out because he was timid about what the public (his fans) or censors would think -- which seems unlikely considering the amount of profanity being thrown about and the topics of the raps.
Its inconsistent when you consider he's trying to make inroads into what has become the modern day black folk music, more reason for me to slag him off as a pretender.
- posted by jbelliveau at 2:58 PM in Books, Music, DVDs
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January 1, 2005
Bravo: Lonely Planet donates to tsunami relief
To know the wildly exotic coast around the greater Indian Ocean is to love it.
Tony Wheeler, a Briton who spent his high school years near Baltimore, Md., followed the backpacker trail in the early 1970s from London through Asia and on to Australia and indeed fell in love with what he saw.
He and his wife, Belfast-born Maureen, began with a simple, home-produced guide called Across Asia on the Cheap. He gradually built the Lonely Planet publishing empire, with guides for most places around the globe, but a focus on the amazing world stretching from South Africa to Asia and the edge of Oceania. (See their history here.)
I interviewed Tony in 1987 for an article in the Baltimore Sun travel section, noting that his guides quite simply opened up vast parts of the world to the average traveler. I would never have gotten anywhere during my 1985 trip to China without the LP guide. The Wheelers made being an independent traveler a great deal easier. What an influence they have had on my generation. Lonely Planet arguably spawned the culture that led to the book and film The Beach (see my review here (scroll down a few screens).
No big phenomenon -- such as the popularizing of Thailand's beaches for young disaffected -- could be without its negative aspects. More than anything, The Beach demonstrated the scope of the Lonely Planet phenomenon, and the dark side of what is by and large a positive, socially responsible approach to travel.
Today I received the following e-mail from Lonely Planet's Comet, a monthly e-newsletter:
Lonely Planet has committed AUS$500,000 (approximately US$400,000) to the disaster relief effort. Of that money, AUS$225,000 will be donated immediately to the Red Cross, Care, Oxfam, Save the Children and Foundation for the People of Burma. The remainder will be donated to specific community initiatives over the next six months. In addition, Lonely Planet is offering each of its employees a day away from the office to volunteer in the relief effort, and is facilitating employee contributions.
Folks, this is a staggering amount of money for an independent publisher, or any publisher for that matter.
Bravo, Tony and Maureen.
More than that, note how Lonely Planet is getting involved: the careful selection of charities to support, the pledge to examine individual community initiatives after the immediate aftermath (and this company knows the areas affected well enough to help in a concrete way individual communities), and the offer to employees allowing them to volunteer.
Before receiving the Comet, I had already visited Lonely Planet's Thorn Tree bulletin board, earlier this week, knowing it truly was the backpackers' world grapevine. Lo and behold, the Thorn Tree had a valuable missing person's board for those seeking disaster victims, which I mentioned in my most recent blog.
$400,000 from one publisher. Good thing the United States upped its contribution from $35 million, because a great and generous nation of nearly 300 million should be able to give more than a dime a person, if a married couple can give nearly a half-million dollars.
Lonely Planet's donation is my own response, as a traveler, writer and publisher, to this disaster writ large, large, large. I didn't realize until this disaster that my first book, 
An Amateur's Guide to the Planet, had such a focus on the Indian Ocean, but it does. I write about seven gorgeous places (Indonesia, Thailand, Burma, Malaysia, Kenya, Tanzania and Madagascar) of the 11 countries later affected by the tsunami.
I've helped raise $450 so far with an offer of a free copy of An Amateur's Guide to fellow Farkers at the humor, news and Photoshop contest site Drew Curtis' Fark.com.
I want to do more, much more. I believe I'll approach other alumni of my high school, Richard Montgomery, in Rockville, Maryland, offering them an autographed copy of An Amateur's Guide as a reward for donating. With so many people having already given, my motivation is to stimulate a last little push among people who just need a tiny nudge or who are confused by the plethora of agencies available -- those who find it appealing, also, to read more about the area affected in a book that attempts to reveal these areas in happier times.
These Indian Ocean fishing and tourism communities were once paradises on Earth, and it is the least we can do to try to relieve their suffering.
Maybe I can also approach those areas -- Seattle, San Francisco, the Colorado Front Range -- that loved An Amateur's Guide when it first came out, perhaps via an offer on Craigslist. I am nervous about falling flat on my face with this effort, but I feel I have to try.
It was absolutely great to receive this news from Lonely Planet. Tony and Maureen Wheeler no doubt feel like James Firmage of Marin County in Northern California, whose family outran the wave on Phi Phi Don.
Over and over on CNN, he thanked Thai people who comforted his family and brought rice despite their own devastation.
Anyone who has traveled in South and Southeast Asia is likely to feel the same empathy for the people affected.
- posted by jbelliveau at 11:04 PM in Love, Sex, Romance and Travel
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