pizza personality pie

What Your Pizza Reveals

You have a hearty appetite. You are likely to complain if a restaurant has small portions. You aren't particularly picky about pizza. It's so good... how could you be? You fit in best in the Western part of the US. You like food that's traditional and well crafted. You aren't impressed with "gourmet" foods. You are eclectic, stylish, and totally random with your choices. You are deep and thoughtful. You should consider traveling to Paris. The stereotype that best fits you is hippie. You knew it was coming.

What Does Your Pizza Say About You?

My take:

1. I think I am picky about pizza.


2. Can't even imagine what that means about fitting in best in the Western US....


3. Traditional, well-crafted foods...yeah. Gourmet...only if it's actually good, not just trying to impress folks.


4. Me? Random?


5. Deep and thoughtful...I'll buy that. And I will consider travelling to Paris, thank you very much for the advice. Maybe in the summer?


6. Hippie...OK. Sure, in some ways, but lots of my friends are hippier than me, so they wouldn't buy that. But I'll accept it, considering a computer is telling me this based on which pizza toppings I want.

Thanks to Peevish for this.

pissed off

Does blogger allow you to use language like that on here? I can't remember if I've seen anyone else doing it. But the constant recalls of items for children due to excessive lead paint really pisses me off. Not that the items are being recalled, mind you. But what the hell is anyone doing using lead paint in children's stuff?

I'm on the CPSC's email list for child & infant product recalls. CPSC=US Consumer Product Safety Commission. Every so often, they send me an email with several items on it that have been recalled. And the vast majority of them are for lead paint. And all but one item so far that I've noticed has been made in China.

Granted, the vast majority of products being sold in the US are manufactured in China now. And whatever my/your stance on that for economic reasons is beside the point. My point here is that if you are the CEO of a US company, and you are trying to cut corners so that you can give your stockholders big earnings, so you ship all your manufacturing overseas because they use slave cheap labor there, you had better be paying attention to the quality of the products. Sure, all the plastic crap is meant to break so that you'll have to buy your kid another one. I don't even care about that right now.

WHO is deciding to use lead paint? Where is it coming from? Are the US companies like Mattel and FisherPrice (and they are far from being the only ones) calling for lead paint in their specs for the toys? My guess is probably not. So are the Chinese factory managers/owners substituting lead paint because it's cheaper, easier to come by, or some other reason? And if so, where the hell are the US companies' CEOs, managers, bazillions of people who are paid the big bucks, when it comes to checking on what's actually going on in the factories?

And God forbid that the government in general, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission in particular, try to protect children from businesses that just want to do their thing as cheaply as possible with no regard for the effect on children. Nancy Nord, who is head of CPSC, said that "a Democratic bill that would expand her agency 'could have the unintended consequence of hampering, rather than furthering, consumer product safety.'" See the original article in Newsweek here. And UPI reports that Nancy Nord and her predecessor took nearly 30 trips financed by industry groups. All of this makes me so mad, I feel my blood pressure rising.

This post has been working its way through my brain for a while now; I finally had to vent. I may add more in this vein another day, but for now, I'm putting it out there. If this is an issue that you care about, I encourage you to contact your reps and senators.

what I want for my birthday...

So, with the advent of the new Mac operating system, J and I have been discussing buying a laptop so that he can work while we go away during the week. He needs to have a PC to do his work from home (or away, in this case), and the new Macs have been capable of working as either Macs or PCs for a while now.

I did a comparison of how the new laptops stack up against my desktop iMac (do they even call them iMacs anymore?), which is, let's see, between three and a half and four years old. How time flies...it doesn't seem that long ago.

I'll try to get all the jargon down.

My current computer has 1.25 GHz processing speed. The new MacBook/MacBook Pro has a range of 2.0 GHz up to 2.4 GHz. So the slowest is quite a bit faster than mine, and the fastest is almost twice as fast.

My computer has 768 MB memory (and I added an extra memory card, as it only came with 512MB I think). The MacBooks all have 1GB memory; the MacBook Pros have 2GB.

My hard drive must have 80GB, as it says 74.41 GB, and that is an usual number, to be sure. The MacBooks have 80GB/120GB/160GB; the MacBook Pros have 120GB/160GB/160GB.

Not sure if I need another (bigger) external hard drive for the automatic backups that happen with Time Machine.

J has been asking what I want for my birthday (on Sunday Saturday), and what I want to do. His response was...something on your Amazon wishlist? I've been thinking, "Don't you know what I want, I mean, what else have I been talking about for the past month...?"

Specifically, the 15-inch, 2.4GHz, 2GB hard drive with 160GB memory (just in case he's checking this out for ideas...).

He's a little clueless about these kinds of things, I love him dearly, don't get me wrong, but birthday goings-on and presents and things--not his forte. It would be a big present, but it's a big birthday. You know, when the first number in your age changes, it seems to be a bigger deal. (I'm feeling a bit old.) So, we'll see....

Halloween, after-the-fact

I'm not a big fan of Halloween, especially so the older I get. We did buy a secondhand costume for the baby, but decided last minute that it was going to be too hot for him to wear. So the day before Halloween, I dressed him up as a little business-baby, and we went into J's work for their kids' Halloween party. Then on Halloween night, with our big bags of candy open, ready to hand out, we dressed him a shirt that said "I want my mummy." I'll try to get a picture up later, but tonight is going to be crazy, I know it already.

The biggest disappointment, though, was the small number of kids that came by.

Whoa, do we ever have too much candy!

bumperstickers, etc.

So I found this cute bumpersticker:

and on the same site, I found some others that I thought were interesting. I liked this theme, but I couldn't decide which one I liked best:

although the t-shirt had another slogan on the back, and I doubt that I would actually wear it.
I also liked

and

crush meme

I saw this on motherbumper, and a wave of nostalgia swept over me. Here goes:

Micky Dolenz from The Monkees. I am NOT old enough to have seen these the first go-around. But I adored them when I was about eleven. I would watch them in reruns all summer long. I loved them so much I actually recorded them on audiotape. Yes, you read that right, AUDIOtape. This was in the days before VCRs. Well, at least before we had a VCR, and while we weren't one of the first to get one, we're still talking early technology. I would listen to them at night with an earphone and my huge radio/tape player. I had seen them so many times that I knew what kinds of visual hijinks they were up to just by hearing the sound effects. In fact, I had quite a fantasy life which revolved around being part of the Monkees' "family."

Shaun Cassidy. I may have had a crush on him just because every other girl in my class did. I'm kind of embarrassed to say that I was a follower on this one. But I think I had a poster of him up on my closet door.

Timothy Hutton. This one started when I was in eighth grade (?). I *had* to see a movie for something in school, and my mother took me to see "Ordinary People." I loved the brooding, sad character he played. Sad story. Really hard to take in Mary Tyler Moore as the bad guy, but I still feel nostalgic whenever I see him, which is pretty rare. The crush even extended a bit to his father, Jim Hutton, who I would occasionally see in old movies on TV, like "Walk, Don't Run." I don't remember anything about this, only that he was in it. Whatever happened to Timothy Hutton anyway? I'm glad I outgrew the crushing on the brooding intellectual type.

Johnny Depp. This one is ongoing. I have loved the quirky characters he portrays in films since I first saw him. I'm sure I can't name all his movies, but definitely goes back to Edward Scissorhands and Benny & Joon days.

The Mac Guy. I have no idea what his name is or the name of that movie that he was in not too long ago about the kids who make up their own college. But I have to see him in whatever he's in. OK, I'll be the first to admit it, I am totally a Mac person. Love Macs. Hate PCs. Love the Mac commercials. Think the Mac guy is really cute. And sweet. Come on, would YOU be so nice to that PC guy? And I just found out that Mac is ditching the Mac guy because ... people end up sympathizing with the PC guy. Really? Does anybody really sympathize with him? OK, maybe sympathize with him because he's such a loser-nerd (don't give me a hard time about this, I don't think all nerds are losers, but this one is), but I for one, leave the commercials feeling like the Mac guy is nice and really knows his stuff, but he doesn't shove it down PC guy's throat. Let's face it, you can do much cooler stuff with a Mac right out of the box. Intuitive is the key word here.

Hey, does anybody know where this word "meme" comes from and what it actually means? I think I looked it up the other day, and the only meaning I could find was a linguistic one about morpheme or somesuch.

I love Apple

The clever folks at Apple have come up with a new version of their operating system. Go watch the guided tour of Leopard and tell me that you're not convinced. I am completely amazed by their uncanny ability to come up with ideas that are so amazing. I wish I could come up with ideas like this. I am astounded. How do they do this? Go ahead and watch it. I can wait. Then we can discuss.



Seriously, using Cover Flow (like on your iPod) to be able to preview all your documents??!! How cool is that!

And Time Machine, to back up everything automatically on an external drive every hour, so you can go back and find anything you've lost, thrown away accidentally, etc. Love it.

Spaces and Stacks are kind of cool, too. I like how they're trying to keep me organized. Because I really need some help here.

The built-in stationery in Mail is pretty cool, too. (I was snookered in by the birth announcements, which we haven't sent out yet. We did send emails to people to let them know, to everyone whose email addresses we have. But my mother-in-law kind of took me to task for not having sent out real ones. When do people have the time/energy to DO that? Seriously.... I guess I could have done it rather than starting a blog, but...should I feel guilty? I DO feel guilty about not having started the thank-you-cards yet. But I will. Really. At least I have them, as well as a list of what & who to send them to.) Oh, and they have a very cool way to easily send out e-postcards. You can just drag & drop your own photos into the template, then position and re-size them in the postcard!

Back to Leopard:
The only thing I don't like (and this is admittedly small) is that they name the operating systems after big cats. Not that I dislike big cats. I understand why they do it, they're powerful, fast animals, sleek, cool. Fine. But I can never remember which one I currently have. I think I have Tiger. But that's only because I can't think of the other animals' names: was there a Jaguar maybe? I don't think there was a Lion. There was a Panther, I'm pretty sure.

In any case, now it's Leopard, which must be 10.5. And I HAVE to have this. Really, I was convinced the first time I saw the guided tour. Yes, I actually watched it more than once. The first time, I got distracted. Maybe the baby needed something. Or the phone rang. Or my attention wandered. But I went back when I got the second email from Apple. Then I watched a second time when I made J sit down and watch it.