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Monthly Archives: November 2011

Note: This is not the post I was originally going to put up on Monday until the dogs ruined everything with their antics.  This is entirely different and gets to go up now because it contains such important information.  Also, I’m just going to count Monday’s post as this week’s crafty entry.  So you get some deep (read: ridiculous) thoughts instead.

I was recently pondering the relationship between finishing all your soup and Captain Planet when it dawned on me the cause of our ailing environment.  You may wonder how soup and the environment are related.  Allow me to explain.

First off, I will say that heart is overarching factor in all of this.  Keep this in mind.  It’s important.

Ok, about soup.  The other day, my friend was at our house eating hotpot.  She decided to end her meal with some soup.  Unfortunately, she misjudged the amount of room left in her stomach for soup and finished about half her soup before realizing that she was really full.  Well, like a good friend, I encouraged her to finish her soup.  You should finish what you have, after all.  I’m sure most everyone has been guilt tripped into finishing their food because of the starving children in Africa (there really are starving children there), that I thought perhaps she’d have been desensitized to it.  So I used a different method.  I told her that good soups are made by mothers and grandmothers with a lot if heart (machines do not make soup with heart, so it’s ok if you don’t finish or even buy those.  Male chefs can make good soups but they have to first go through a course on heart and not all of them can pass because they are at a disadvantage of being male and thus being neither a mother nor grandmother).  If you don’t finish it, you personally are causing some kind of ruin to the environment because the extra heart that went into making the soup has prevented Captain Planet from being summoned to right some environmental ills as everyone knows that a key component of Captain Planet is heart.  It’s like you’re willfully trying to destroy the environment.  Anyway, she finished her soup.

Afterwards, I was thinking at how sickly the environment has become what with global warming and the hole in the ozone layer and the poor air quality in a lot of places and the North Atlantic and Great Pacific garbage patches, etc.  This is more damage than can be attributed to just people not finishing their soup.  I was also thinking about how prevalent hearts are in today’s popular culture (e.g. I <3 NY, girls of all ages using “heart” instead of “love” or “totes like”).  That’s when it dawned upon me that Captain Planet can NEVER BE SUMMONED because popular culture has stolen all the heart!  Popular culture is what is ruining our environment because Captain Planet can never be summoned to battle things like global warming and pollution and the hole in the ozone layer!  If there were ever a reason to stop using “heart” instead of “love” or whatever other word implying a strong affection toward something, this is it.  Think of the environment!  It’s but a small change that has a big impact!  Finishing your soup is only the beginning.

By the way, this has nothing to do with how I find people replacing another word with “heart” to be really annoying.  Not at all.

I recently read a novel.  It’s the first new one I’ve read in a long time.  And…I liked a lot.  A LOT (but not alot).

Anyway, the book is The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde.  It takes place in alternate reality England, but not Fake England, in the mid 80s, and follows the adventures of Thursday Next, a literary detective.  You may wonder what  kind of job a literary detective would have.  For the most part, it seems like a pretty mundane job.  You defend the great literary works from conspiracy theorists.  You crack down on people trying to sell counterfeit poetry and verse.  And now and then, you are called upon to solve a crime in which literary characters are being pulled out from their original manuscripts and being murdered in reality thus changing literature forever.

Ok, so it’s the first time this has actually happened.  And it can only occur because Thursday’s mad scientist uncle invented a portal into the literary world.  Then, said portal was stolen by the Big Bad.  There is some muddying of the waters by Benevolent(?) Corporation.  During all of this, the ending for Jane Eyre ends up changing.

All in all, this was a very entertaining read.  It’s humorous and includes a very refined ridiculous.  I highly recommend it.

(I also found out that Thursday Next is in a few other adventures.  I will be reading those as well.)