Spotted in front of the apartment complex between my house and my bus stop. Poor unwanted chair.

I did it. I finally gave in and tried a bacon chocolate bar. I was wandering around World Market the other day and saw that they have Vosges chocolate bars for $5.99 — they retail for $7.99 at every other place I’ve found them, online and in meatspace.

Now, I’ve been eating salt with chocolate for years, so bacon and chocolate is not such a bizarre combo for me at first blush as it might be for other people. A few sprinkles of sea salt with a bite of slightly bitter deep dark chocolate is a heavenly taste. The salt really brings out the sweet and makes the texture of the chocolate seem more velvety.

Sweet and salty together is actually pretty mainstream. Look at peanut brittle, it’s been around for decades and wouldn’t shock the staidest of midwestern grandmothers at this point. And a lot of the folks back in Louisiana love salt on their watermelon.

The addition of bacon makes this bar a trifecta of flavors: sweet (deep milk chocolate), salty (alderwood smoked salt), and smoky (applewood smoked bacon). The presence of bacon is actually a lot stronger than I thought it would be, in the form of slightly chewy pieces about the size of bacon bits generously scattered throughout the bar. There is definitely bacon (and salt) in every bite.

Verdict: I loved it. But a lot of bloggers reviewed it when Vosges first released it, and many of them thought it was the vilest thing they’d ever eaten; so don’t go by me, try it for yourself!

And lest you accuse me of selling out, may I say in my defense that bacon as a hipster trend was sooo 2008. They’ve all moved on. To what, I have no idea. Macaroni & cheese? Tuna-noodle casserole?

Anyone check out ABC’s reboot of V? I wouldn’t call it a remake, because it looks like they just took the basic premise and ran with it. The main protagonist appears to be an FBI agent played by Elizabeth Mitchell. (It’s her son that joins the Hitler Youth Friends of the Visitors, although they are called “Ambassadors for Peace” or some such in this version. I bet he doesn’t get eaten in this version, though.) And the reporter that becomes their mouthpiece is a man and the leader of the visitors a female, so they are definitely switching the gender roles around a bit.

I know a lot of my fellow Gen Xrs have been whining about the sacred cows of their childhood and whatnot ever since the remake was announced, but SciFi played a marathon of both the original miniseries and V: The Final Battle last Sunday, and honestly… it’s not as good as you probably remember it. It’s not just that effects (not to mention the Visitor costumes!) look cheesy as hell. It’s more than 25 years old, I can overlook that. Plus, television shows didn’t get nearly the budgets that they get now. Even adjusting for inflation, ABC probably spent more on the pilot than NBC spent on the entire miniseries.

But there’s a reason why almost all of the actors went on to do fuck-all with their careers: Most of them weren’t that good. Plus, the remake has already addressed something that drove me crazy about the original series: The odds of aliens evolving to look exactly like humans (and very attractive humans at that) are roughly diddly-squat : a 1 with 27 zeros following it.

But if Morena Baccarin doesn’t eat a guinea pig by the third episode, I am out. (Alan Tudyk is also in it, so yay for Firefly vets getting work.)

Fun fact: The original premise of V had nothing to do with aliens. It was supposed to be about the rise of a fascist government in America. But when they were developing it, The Empire Strikes Back had just come out, so NBC was like “Dude, make it about aliens”. That’s why there are so many heavy-handed WWII references in the original, down the Visitor insignia’s resemblance to a swastika and one of the secondary characters being a Holocaust survivor.

The socks are from — where else? — Sock Dreams, $10. Everything else I already had.

This has been hanging off my wardrobe door since last Monday evening. It was what I was planning to wear the next day, but then my lungs decided to explode instead.

I got the socks ($5.99) and the shawl ($12.99) weekend before last at Target, when I had the main goal of getting long-sleeved shirts. It’s funny, the shawl is the exact same pattern as the blue & green one that I bought months ago.

The shoes ($19.99) are also from Target, but I bought them online. They’re suede.

Oh, nowhere special. Just HALF DEAD WITH ACUTE BRONCHITIS.

I started to feel like something was wrong around noon on Monday. I had this weird hot feeling in my chest, like you get when you really exert yourself. Except I was just sitting at my desk.

Then Tuesday I woke up aching all over, with a low grade fever and a really painful cough. I thought it was the flu — not H1N1 OMG DEATH FLU, just regular flu — so I figured bed rest and liquids and I’ll be fine. And I did start to feel better in the late afternoon. But then in the evening my temperature started to go up again.

I should have known it wasn’t flu, because I never got a sore throat. I’ve had bronchitis before and the fact that my first symptom was a pain in my chest should have been a huge red flag.

Anyway, long story short, by Thursday night it finally sunk in that this was something that was going to need antibiotics, so Friday morning I dragged myself into the ER with a fever of 102.4 and left with prescriptions for azithromycin, hydrocodone, and cough syrup with codeine.

I still feel pretty lousy, but this morning my temperature was normal for the first time in a week, so the antibiotics are definitely doing their thing. A full course of azithromycin is only half a dozen pills, so they must be pretty intense. They’re the size of horse tranquilizers, too.

I went to Target on Saturday and added a few long-sleeved shirts to my wardrobe. (And one purple shirt that turned out to be short-sleeved. Curses! My “I don’t try things on, I know my sizes” policy backfires on me occasionally. Oh well, it’s a nice color, I’ll find something to do with it.) I’ve worn this outfit before, here I’m just adding a shirt under the dress (and tights under the socks) for warmth. Everything else I already had, the pin is my black lizard.

Speaking of Target, I’ve had my eye on these shoes, waiting for them to go on sale, and it looks like this is my week: they went from $24.99 to $19.99.

I also want these shoes, but I’m not going to pay full price for them. I just have to be patient, they’ll go on sale eventually.

This wool sweater dress I’ve had bookmarked for a few weeks is down to $37.99 from $49.99, but I bet it will go down more. However, if I wait too long they may run out of my size; plus it’s 100% wool so it’s probably not ever going to be as cheap as my cotton dresses. Unless I wait for final clearance, and then I’ll probably only have a couple weeks before it’s too warm to wear it. I have to ponder this.

Just don't look! Just don't look!

Yesterday the Twitterverse descended into some kind of violent civil war after professional coat tail rider Meghan McCain posted the above photo, presumably as some kind of proof that she’s not functionally illiterate. Whatever, Meg. We all know that’s probably just a picture book. Half the Twitterati wanted her stoned as a whore and the other half showered her with virtual Mardi Gras beads.

I don’t care if Meghan McCain wants to show a photo of her giant gazungas to every mouth-breathing social retard on Twitter. That is her right. The tree of liberty must occasionally be watered with online photos of some dumb blonde’s huge rack.

What makes me want to puke is her transparently coy narrative here: “Oh, look at how much of a LOSER I am, reading one of these words on paper sandwiched between stiff covers things while my cleavage erupts over the top of my skintight tank! Mercy, I hope this doesn’t upset anyone and give me enough material to fart out a dozen more posts on the Daily Beast! Heavens to Betsy, if you have an opinion click on this handy link to some shit blog post I wrote! I get paid by the view and Mama needs new hair extensions!”

This is actually pretty mild behavior from a McCain, considering her father basically once offered to make his icy wife sexually service a bunch of meth dealers in exchange for their votes.

Miserable failure.

Wow, there’s nothing like waking up to news that makes you feel like your forehead veins are going to explode. One of the first things I saw when I opened my eyes this morning was this line crawling by on the news ticker: Interracial couple denied marriage license in Louisiana. GEE, NOW I REALLY WANT TO MOVE THERE!

In the grand tradition of conservative backpedaling, the clerk in question, Keith Bardwell, is claiming he’s not racist. Right.

“I’m not a racist. I just don’t believe in mixing the races that way,” Bardwell told the Associated Press on Thursday. “I have piles and piles of black friends. They come to my home, I marry them, they use my bathroom. I treat them just like everyone else.”

He lets black people pee in his toilet? He’s a saint!

He did it for the cheeeldruuun:

“There is a problem with both groups accepting a child from such a marriage,” Bardwell said. “I think those children suffer and I won’t help put them through it.”

Yes, sometimes they suffer so much that they become President of the United States.

This is the kind of thing that I keep running up against when I consider moving to Louisiana. In some ways, it would be like moving to a developing nation, albeit one where I wouldn’t need a passport. My mother always says that racism exists everywhere, but that’s not the argument I’m trying to make. Yes, it exists everywhere in this country; but the fact is that it tends to be normalized only in certain areas.

I’m sure the couple eventually got or will get their license from another clerk (or possibly from the same clerk, because discrimination on the basis of race is illegal even in the Gret Stet of Loozy-Anna). But this racist asshole has already permanently pissed all over what should have been one of the happiest days of their lives. Whenever they think of their wedding, they’ll inevitably get an angry knot in their stomach.

Lastly, I would like to tell Keith Bardwell that he’s polishing the brass on the Titanic, as it were. (Except that analogy makes me sound like I think interracial couples are a disaster, and I don’t.) If you ever observe the black people you see in Louisiana, you’ll see a lot of blue and green eyes, light skin, and fair hair. Races been mixing in the state for a while now, you ignorant cracker.

ETA: Research has uncovered that Mr. Bardwell was a registered Democrat until last year. Gee, what could have possibly been a factor in the ‘08 elections that caused a lifelong Democrat to switch parties???

You can have him, Rethugs.

Tomorrow is the 20th anniversary of the Loma Prieta earthquake. Umm, yay?

I was born in the Bay Area and earthquakes have never fazed me. Even while it was going on, I didn’t panic, because it honestly wasn’t that bad in our house. I think some plates rattled and I remember the lamp hanging above the kitchen table, where I was sitting, swayed pretty crazily.

What I remember most about it was that it seemed to go on for a freakishly long amount of time. The earthquakes I’d been in before had always been a quick jolt or two, then over. Loma Prieta went on and on, and just when you thought it was over, it started up again. Of course it was only like 30 seconds, but in retrospect it seems like several minutes.

Earthquakes are what my Louisiana relatives always come back with whenever I express my reluctance to live in an area where your house can be devastated with hurricanes on a yearly basis. They’re always like “Yeah but California! Earthquakes! EARTHQUAKESEARTHQUAKESEARTHQUAKES!!!”

BULLSHIT. For one thing, earthquakes — at least potentially devastating ones — don’t happen several months of every year. They happen maybe once a generation. My parents had their house destroyed twice in the first three years they lived in Louisiana. In 40+ years of living in California, they were in a total of one big earthquake, that didn’t cause them any personal property damage. And okay, you get a warning with hurricanes, but all you can do with that is save yourself. It’s not like you can pick up your fucking house and evacuate with it.

But the main thing is that I consider Loma Prieta my earthquake insurance. I was in a major earthquake. Loma Prieta will be in American history books next to New Madrid and 1906. I have a better chance of winning the lottery while getting struck by lightning than I do of ever being in a quake of that magnitude a second time. The way I see it, I never have to worry about earthquakes again.