Sunday, August 22, 2004

good plop, bad plop

Bad plop:

It's Sunday, which has meant an exciting day of laundry. Three movies are out, and I have neither the money nor the energy to see them: "I, Robot," "The Bourne Supremacy," and "Hellboy." If I had to choose only one of the three, I'd choose "Bourne," simply because I'm in the mood for a meat-and-potatoes spy drama, and this one got good press when it came out in the States a while back. If it features moments that feed my inner fight scene junkie, I'll be happy-- even if the plot contains implausibilities on the order of "Bourne Identity" (notably, Damon's escape from the embassy early in that film: there were guards all over the embassy's interior, but not a single soul outside).

Good plop:

It's been interesting to watch Dr. Vallicella's slow descent into the lower circles of scatological hell. The man started off as civil and urbane, once even posting an entry on the nature of humor that made me wonder whether he had a sense of humor; but in recent weeks the good doctor's been creeping toward the cliffs of Buddhist mu-ae-haeng (Sino-Korean for "unconstrained conduct"). See his posts, "The Scatology of a Sceptic," "The Proctology of a Pessimist," and his shit-themed poem on meditation in the post "Ditch the Raft." It's true that Dr. Vallicella credits Dr. Horace Jeffery Hodges with the "proctology of a pessimist" phrase, but how does one explain this excerpt from a recent post on hummus-making? To wit:

I like my hummus smooth as a baby's ass and about the same color and consistency of what comes out of one.

Ooooh, how the mighty have fallen. But as a fellow hummus-lover (if not hummus-maker), I'm forced to agree that the best hummus is reminiscent of baby shit both in looks and texture.

The plop thickens.

_

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