The GirlAlive Blog

Asian Supermarket

There are two major Asian supermarkets in Edinburgh, and they’re both on Leith Walk, and one of them is okay and the other one is awesome. Last Saturday my husband and I went to the awesome one to do some shopping. I saw things and learned things and it was fun.

Oddly, the best place to get a lot of American food is the Asian market. The shop we were in was primarily Chinese, with all the other Asian countries tossed in. I was looking for interesting snack foods and some cooking ingredients. I’ve been hanging out at The Tasty Island blog a lot and drooling over all the awesome Hawaiian food, so I really wanted to make some Spam musubi.

As a small aside, when I got married, I spent part of my honeymoon at the Spam museum in Austin, MN. It’s totally awesome.

Anyway, I bought ingredients for musubi and snack foods. My cousin Erin recommended red bean mochi, so I located some and tried them when I got home. The flavor was okay, but the texture was a problem.

Then there was my favorite part of the store, the beverage case. They have root beer and pearl milk tea and aloe juice and all kinds of crazy Asian beverages. And did I mention root beer? I picked out a few interesting drinks to try at home.

I also got peanut butter crackers and saltines. They have saltines at the Asian store! And also chips that taste just like Fritos. I found out that the reason I can get my favorite American foods at the Asian market is because of the Philippines. Filipinos make saltines and peanut butter crackers and all kinds of great stuff.

It was a pretty good day, even though the bus ride sucked kind of a lot. Last night I made Spam musubi for dinner and it was one of the tastiest things ever. Husband doesn’t like nori much, so I’ll use less next time. But the flavor of rice, Spam and furikake all together is amazing. Hawaiians are geniuses.

I had a big argument with a family member this week because he thinks I never say anything about how I’m really feeling and I’m never honest about myself on this blog. I’m going to answer him directly and in more detail later, but let me just give the simple explanation of “Duh.” I don’t know half the people who read this blog, I once lost a job because I was too honest here, and I’m unemployed and don’t want the first impression that a potential employer has of me to be “neurotic depressive”. So no, I don’t pour out my guts here. If you want to see all of that, it’s on Facebook, but I won’t friend you if I don’t know you, and I won’t friend you if I work with you. Twitter is kind of my in-between where I’m a little more honest than here, but without as much detail as Facebook.

Oh, and also I totally love my new layout here. The old one was too classy and too pretty. It clashed with the lowbrow humor and always seemed a bit wrong. I hope you all like the new look too.

Alana

Excuse the mess…

I’m going to be messing with the design and theme and everything for this blog for the next few days. Please excuse the mess as I try to organize crap here. I think the current design is just too danged tidy and it annoys me.

Without Leno, Conan had good ratings

I’m just making a small aside here for a minute to apply some numbers and facts to the statement that Leno made about Conan having poor ratings back when he did his Oprah interview. I bring this up because some people actually believed him that Conan was failing. Let me show you an interesting chart.

Conan consistently beat Letterman in the ratings, and he was in fact gaining more of an audience in early September. Then The Jay Leno Show premiered on the 14th of September. Conan’s ratings continued upward for about a week, while people checked out Leno’s new show. Then the ratings plummetted downward when everyone stopped watching Leno. The truth is that Conan was on a trend of beating Letterman soundly until his lead-in changed and it was only after the Jay Leno Show started running at 10 that Letterman ever beat him in the ratings.

Don’t forget, the Jay Leno Show was cancelled because the affiliates complained that no one was watching the local news anymore. As Andy Richter pointed out on Regis and Kelly, the local news didn’t suddenly get bad. The primetime lead in was crap. Most people weren’t watching, and the few that were turned off their tvs and went to bed before the news. And yet Leno tried to say that Conan damaged the Tonight Show with poor ratings, even though it is fairly obvious that the poor ratings are directly due to Leno.

I still think that Leno is not entirely the bad guy in this. He’s selfish, and he’s a liar, and his word means nothing. But let’s not forget that the real villain behind this is Jeff Zucker. He has no background in scripted entertainment and he doesn’t belong at the head of NBC. He singlehandedly drove the former number 1 network down to number 4, where it has been since 2005. He is an incompetent moron. He should not be wearing a suit and giving orders from a big corner office. He should be wearing a paper hat and operating a deep fryer.

Argument

The following is the essence of an actual argument I actually had with a friend over the last few days.

So, yeah.

Actual Productivity

I have actually been fairly busy today. I manage to accomplish things when I haul my butt out of bed before 11:00.

First, I fished a piece of hay out of Spike’s eye that was so huge I have no clue how he managed to get it into his eye in the first place. His eye is still clouded over, but we’re going to see how he does over the next couple days now that the hay is out.

Then I applied for a bunch of jobs. I love that being unemployed has allowed me the time to read the entire Harry Potter series. Twice. But I’d really like to have less free time and more money now.

I downloaded 5 episodes of The Tonight Show With Conan O’Brien and watched 2. I deleted my Myspace account.

I’m on a bit of a roll with the productivity, so I might do something kooky like actually cooking food for dinner. Or baking bread or something.

Who struck out?

In a recent radio interview, Jay Leno addressed the issue of people boycotting his show in the wake of the Conan O’Brien fiasco. He said, “You don’t boo the next batter up just because the last batter struck out.” Really? Let’s look at a replay and see how that game really went.

(Sorry, dad, but Jay keeps digging himself deeper and acting like an ass.)