If You Give a Mouse a Cookie is racist

If You Give A Mouse a Cookie was quite possibly one of the most offensive, anti-Mexican books I read when I was a kid. I mean, think about it. You have an overalls-clad mouse that looks suspiciously like Speedy Gonzales that just shows up one day. You welcome him with a proper all-American snack and then he starts demanding stuff. Hell, he even engages in some housecleaning. Oh, and then he's just gotta have a siesta. He wakes up and starts engaging in his own cultural activities and then demands that you recognize them at your expense. Finally, he demands more food and the cycle continues forever and forever.

24) It's time for another episode of dumb things I did in college!

I lived in a co-op and we were allowed to paint our rooms provided we used officially approved colors.  I had stopped painting my room for the day and cleaned up.   I thought I had tamped down the lid sufficiently.  I went to bed.  The next morning when I bolted up to turn off my alarm, I kicked a can of bright green paint that I had thoughtfully placed in the middle of the room.  Thud.  Gloop.

Naturally, I wasn't gonna tell anybody as it would be quite expensive to replace the carpet and if I could just clean it up sufficiently that it would fly under the checkout person's radar, I would be home free!  

Fortunately the carpet was that industrial blue stuff that hides all sorts of dodgy stains.

Renting a wet vac was right out.  "What's that for?"  "Uh..."  Fortunately, after a couple of days of pouring water on the floor, stomping it with a towel or dark-colored cloth, rinsing it out,  partially drying the towels, scraping the floor to see if there was any residual paint, blasting the fan and ironing the floor dry so it wouldn't start rotting (there was already a noticeable mildew smell),  I declared the carpet passable and let it be.

After it dried, there was a large faint crunchy stain in the middle of the carpet along with a faint mildewiness that lingered for a while.

I got my deposit back.  The new resident never made mention of it.  I vowed never to paint again anything that involved a deposit.

23) I can't believe I didn't take a picture!

Bitches, I basically made the whole dinner.  Seriously, the only thing I *didn't* do was cut up the animals.  Oh, and I didn't actually make the pies from scratch.  And the ham was pre-cooked  Plus I did most of the cleanup.

Oh, and we had a fourth person attend our dinner.  I expected this person to show up.

Devilled eggs:  Nothing special, tasty but nothing to write home about.  So far I'm the only one who's eaten them because I stuffed them in the fridge so nobody would get food poisoning and everyone else forgot about them.  Aiya.

Ro-Tel dip:  Come, now.  A pound of Velveeta to a can of Ro-Tel? You don't even have to cut it up beforehand.  I mean, if you screw this up, you shouldn't be allowed to make anything more complicated than a bowl of cereal.  It was good but also nothing special.

Vegetable tray:  It was a veggie tray.  Naturally, as the healthiest thing on the menu, it was virtually untouched.  I, however, quite enjoyed broccoli dipped in Ro-Tel.

Cranberry sauce: Oh shit, I left it in the cupboard.

Ham:  Purchased at the eleventh hour at Daddy's insistence.  A little on the dry side.  Probably got overcooked as it was hard to cut with a fork.  One of the dangers of buying something that just has to be heated up, I guess.

Turkey:  Ah, the piece de resistance.  The most important part of the meal.  Fuck this up, and you'll never be allowed to bring anything more involved than a store-bought pie to any family gathering for the next five years.  Now, this was my first time to be in charge of the turkey.  After I got the fucker thaaaaawed, I brined it for about 18 hours before cooking it.  Oh my god, brining is some kind of miracle technique.  I thought people were exaggerating about how the turkey would turn out, but it was tender, moist, perfectly seasoned, pretty.I riffed on Alton Brown's brine recipe.  Now, the Food Network website has a picture of the finished product and naturally, it's picture perfect.  I inherited the ugly food gene from my mom.  It's where you make delicious but weird-looking food.  Her turkey is the prime example of this.  It comes out of the oven as meat piled around a bird skeleton but since all of the meat has been sitting in the juices, you don't need a gallon of gravy to swallow it without choking.  In fact, you can skip the gravy.  Naturally, my turkey didn't look anything like Alton's turkey, right?  WRONG!  I'm serious, that turkey was fucking gorgeous.  I've never made food that pretty.  And by the time I thought to take a picture, Dad was already ripping up the turkey. "Oh, I thought you already took a picture of your turkey."

I'm seriously upset that I didn't take a picture of the turkey.  I'm going to have to find a way to manipulate it so I make the Christmas turkey because I need proof that I can make pretty food.

Giblet gravy:  Good stuff.

Stuffing:  Bland.  Dry.  Our family has always used bagged or boxed stuffing and as such, I've never been thrilled enough with stuffing to go off and find a decent recipe.

Sweet potato casserole:  This was supposedly based off of the Boston Market recipe.  Alright but too sweet for my taste.  Everyone else loved it.  Weirdos.

Biscuits:  A little drier than they normally are.  I have got to get my hands on some proper biscuit dough.  Still much tastier than the rolls we would have had instead.  Plus, this means biscuits and gravy for breakfast.

Pumpkin pie:  Didn't eat it.  Hard to go wrong with a frozen pie, though.

Cherry pie:  Well, I don't think it would make a grown man cry, but it still tasted pretty damn good.  Especially for something that basically just had to be heated up.

Overall, a success.  Much less stressful than when there's fifty thousand relatives who you never talk to outside of family gatherings and you're dodging knives and hot casserole dishes.

Now, just to plow through a month's worth of leftovers...

22) Boom-dee-ah-da, boom-dee-ah-da, boom-dee-ah-da, boom-dee-ah-da.

Tomorrow I'm going to review the meal so tonight I will be sharing what I'm thankful for.

It's funny when you think about it, it's really difficult for someone like me to be thankful for food, clothes, shelter, relative safety, all the things that a person needs to thrive because I've never been deprived of those sorts of things. It's like being thankful for air. I know that there's people who have asphyxiated, who have drowned or nearly drowned, who have diseases where they can't get enough oxygen. But it's sort of distant, unrelated to me. So when a person such as a news anchor says they're thankful for all these things, it sort of rings hollow.

So, it goes without saying that I'm thankful for all of the things that I need in life and all of the things I was born into. But there are some things that fairly often I stop and think, “Damn. I'm lucky to have this.”

I'm thankful that I have two jobs and that they're both pretty stable.

I'm thankful that I have health insurance.

I'm thankful that I am allowed to be an atheist, even if my family doesn't know about it.

I'm thankful for my college degree.

I'm thankful for the internet and the wealth of knowledge it affords me.

21) Stoopid work

The one annoying thing about a publically-viewable blog is that you can't write about work frustrations if there's even a tiny bit of a risk of current or future employers stumbling across it.  That was the one good thing about LJ, I could write individual private entries.

You at least have to be very careful when posting about work.  I think I'm safe saying that my supervisor isn't giving me enough stuff to do which is ridiculous because I was hired for her to be able to push stuff off on to me.  I'm very paranoid about not being busy which for me is the same as not looking busy because my poker face is non-existent.  It's partly because my last job was in retail and in retail you don't get to stand around doing jack shit for more than two minutes without getting nommed on.  Obviously, it's also partly because of the economy.

You know that feeling when you're in a relationship and your partner starts being aloof and snippy?  You want to pretend that they're just in a funk and they don't want to talk about whatever it is.  But you know it's only a matter of time.  That's kinda how I feel right now.  Then again, I had the same feeling at my old job for a while.  Little did I know that I was pretty much guaranteed to not lose that job because I'm sooo funny n' weird.  Incidentally, I went to pick up my last check and one of the managers said she missed my quirkyness.  Please.  I'm so painfully normal it's not even funny.

20) Making the food for the day of the thanksgiving

Okay, tomorrow I need to start doin' shit for Tee Day.

We've got a huge guest list this year- three people.

I know.  I don't know how we're gonna fit everyone.

I know my dad and stepmom are thinking, "God.  Amber's here for Thanksgiving.  She probably wants to go to the farm and kill and pluck the bird herself."  That's silly, everyone knows that wild is the way to go.

Unfortunately, I've let my gun registration lapse* so we bought a frozen turkey yesterday.  I've already convinced the folks to let me brine it.  It's the first time I've brined anything so it should be interesting.  At least I'll have the kinks worked out for next year when god willing I'll be somewhere with lots o' people.  Though I doubt in that situation the turkey will be in my jurisdiction.

The menu so far:

Turkey

Stuffing

Giblet Gravy

Green Bean Casserole

Pumpkin Pie

Cherry Pie

Whey Biscuits

Vegetable Tray

Dad has lobbied for chess pie.  Since Tom Thumb didn't have one, I'll definitely think about making one.

I'm going to lobby for something with squash in it that doesn't have the word casserole.

I might also lobby for Ro-Tel cheese dip.

Nicole mentioned a ham.  We shall see if there actually is one.

We're gonna have a fuck of a lot of leftovers.  Oh well, guess I won't be cooking for a while.

Tuesday:

8:00

Check turkey for defrostedness, do cold water defrost if necessary.  Make stock with giblets.

9:00

Steam green beans

9:30

Mix dry ingredients for brine together plus 1/8 of water needed

Wednesday:

4:00

Put turkey in brine

6:00

Make gravy

8:00

Chop up veggies for veggie tray

9:00

Mix together all ingredients for green bean casserole except for beans and fried onions

9:30

Measure whey, mix together dry ingredients for biscuits

10:00

Clean up kitchen

11:00

Bedtime, full stop.

Thursday:

9:00

Clean up kitchen

10:00

Prep turkey for cooking, put in oven at 300 degrees

11:00

Make cheese dip, if applicable

11:30

Set out veggie tray

Fill sink with hot soapy water

12:00

Prepare stuffing, stuff turkey, increase oven temp to 350

12:30

Cleanup tiiiiime!

2:00

Put ham in oven

2:30

Heat up gravy

Cook green bean casserole

3:00

Make biscuits, bottom rack 425 degree oven

Put pies in oven, top rack

3:30

Move pies to bottom rack, reduce heat to 350 if making chess pie

4:00

Make chess pie if applicable, top rack

*Yes, I know that Texas doesn't require you to register to own a rifle.  Or any gun for that matter.

19) Originally posted as a reply on Facebook

Go ahead, call it a cop-out.  But I wrote this really long reply to someone's note about how the 2005 movie Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was better than the 1971 version.  I begged to differ.

I read the book once, saw the 1971 version several times, saw the 2005 version once.

I think both movies have their merits, but ultimately I liked the 1971 version better.  I saw the 2005 version not long after it came out.  My stepmom asked me if I liked it because she wanted to take the grandkids. "Well, it's definitely a Tim Burton film," I said.  And that's not a bad thing in and of itself.  Nobody's gonna argue that Tim hasn't made some damn fine movies.  But I felt that Tim was trying to be really, really faithful to the book and ended up just copy-pasting dialogue, songs, and whole scenes into his movie and then just went ahead and made a Tim Burton film anyway.  Plus, I preferred Wilder's malicious negligence to Depp's cloud cuckoolander negligence.

The 2005 movie was faithful in lots of places where it shouldn't have been and threw in a load of back story where none was needed, and it really bogged down the movie.  Prince Pondicherry's chocolate palace- unnecessary and just mildly racist enough to be squirmy.  Jungle scene- too long, probably also unnecessary and please, you expect me to believe that Jacko actually did the dirty work of hacking through the jungle?  I mean, if they at least lampshaded it, I could have accepted it.  Telling Charlie he has to abandon his family for the factory- felt like a plot contrivance to add some conflict for Charlie and Wonka.  Father backstory- good for showing where Wonka gets his fanaticism from and for explaining why he wants Charlie to abandon his family and for, well, Christopher Lee, bad for making Wonka less of a mysterious character and for also feeling like a plot contrivance to add conflict for Wonka.

I would hardly call the 1971 version a feel-good movie.  Just re-watch the boat scene.  Contrast it with the 2005 boat scene which if I had not seen the previous movie or read the book would have assumed was an ad for a theme park ride, although it does involve a bit of bovine S&M which is always awesome.

Yes, the 1971 version is flawed.  The whole fizzy lifting drinks bit did destroy the point of Wonka looking for a child that wouldn't disobey, and did make Charlie and Grandpa Joe look like morons for not remembering the grisly fate of the last two children.  The story probably wouldn't have worked in film without Wonka at first telling Charlie that he didn't win the factory after all and Charlie giving up his Gobstopper but neither the fizzy lifting drinks nor the family abandonment routes were the way to go.  Maybe if Charlie and Grandpa had honestly gotten lost?  But there was a good reason for substituting the geese for the squirrels.  Imagine trying to accomplish the squirrel scene pre-CGI.  At best it would be reminiscent of a bunch of Muppets dragging Verruca off, at worst it would be reminiscent of the BBC Zaphod.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaphod_Beeblebrox

Does the 1971 movie do the book justice?  Probably not, but I don't think that was the point of the filmmakers.  But the 2005 movie doesn't do it justice either.