What the hell do you mean, “It’s not Friday?” I’ve had enough week for one week, thanks. And judging by Fug Girl Heather’s take, the mustache of Robert Downey, Jr., has pushed her over into that territory too.

Robert Downey, Jr. Mustache. The man who single-handedly could have saved Ally McBeal (girl and show both) had he been able to stay out of the blow instead of leaving her to fishtail off into “long-lost daughter” and “Jon Bon Jovi” territory. Mustache. As Heather so impassionedly points out, you’re not Tom Selleck, dude.

Not that I needed any more.

2) If you intend the weapon to give you plausible deniability for secret laser blasts, you probably shouldn’t announce, “Hey, check this cool shit out! We have an invisible high-powered laser letting us melt a bitch with plausible deniability!”

–Ace

I know of no other blogger who can say “melt a bitch” with quite the same … gravitas.

And the new Padawan–sort of a Jedi intern–is a girl in hot pants and halter top and do-me boots whose dim one-liners put her right up there with Jar Jar and Ziro in the anti-pantheon.

–Kyle Smith on the new Star Wars: The Clone Wars animated movie.

I am beyond tears with this man.

Apparently, a person in my general metropolitan area is Monica Lewinsky.

I don’t even have anything to say. She’s gotta live somewhere.

Wow. Twelve thousand calories a day. And what calories! I think even Pippin would have turned his nose up at pizza.

Via Hot Air.

A plan for widespread certification rather than four-year degrees. It makes a lot of sense. I had a conversation not too long ago with an architect who went to a technical school rather than a university, and he talked about how the young college grads in his office struggle to keep their heads above water because their university courses hadn’t taught them about the building codes and laws they need to know to be licensed in their state.

No technical barriers stand in the way of evolving toward a system where certification tests would replace the BA. Hundreds of certification tests already exist, for everything from building code inspectors to advanced medical specialties. The problem is a shortage of tests that are nationally accepted, like the CPA exam.

It makes a lot of sense for editors. Though I doubt individual employers would stop testing individual candidates on their skills as they do now, at least they would know going in what skills those candidates are supposed to have, if they’re certified as having passed tests on the various style manuals, and could stop wasting their time testing everybody with a degree who thought editing looked easy enough for them to do.

Oh wait, except that’s how I got into editing myself. Well, no, not really–I focused on editing as what I really wanted to do, as opposed to what I studied in college, and I passed with flying colors the test my hiring manager gave me. But still, would my employer have looked twice at me under a certification system that I had not entered yet? A widespread system of certification would make it more difficult to change careers in that way, would make it much harder to apply for a new batch of jobs and see what shook out, but then editing is somewhat unique among professions in that it doesn’t necessarily require a specific degree or certification (like passing the bar, for example) but it does test you at the door. Perhaps it is one of very few professions that you can currently switch to relatively easily, as I did, and maybe for people wanting to switch to other professions, a certification system would actually make it easier, in potentially not having to go back to college before being able to switch.

At any rate, the point is well made about cutting through a lot of BS in the four-year system … and in life, as well, including BS like this:

Here’s the reality: Everyone in every occupation starts as an apprentice. Those who are good enough become journeymen. The best become master craftsmen. This is as true of business executives and history professors as of chefs and welders.

I wish that were true, but think back to college, think of that professor whose class you knew was bogus or lightweight. What’s he or she doing there? The dual-pronged BS of the college system: It confers degrees on people who might actually be ready for not much and promotes teachers who lead to the same result. A certification system would certainly require colleges to be more competitive outside the zone. That would be a good thing.

Via Hot Air headlines.

I love B-17s. I love Memphis Belle, I have a framed drawing of the Shoo Shoo Baby, I think the men who flew in them and their near mechanical relatives were a particular class of hero apart. I almost cried the other day describing the scene where John Lithgow tries to raise a cheer for the men of the Belle because they’re going to fly their 25th mission in the morning, only to be slapped down by the superstitious air crews who know it’s bad luck to count chickens before they’ve hatched. And I only got into the discussion in the first place in order to mention Harry Connick’s rendition of “Danny Boy.”

Anyway, there are still a few airworthy B-17s out there. Apparently if you’re in the right place at the right time, you can crawl up the hatch and get a feel for what it was like. Wow.

Scene: Playground, summer, a couple hours before sunset.

Son: “Mom, climb up here and slide with me.”

Me: “No, I’ll watch you slide.”

Son: “Noooo, climb up here, I want to slide together.”

Me: “No, I’m too big [fib, hoping he’ll just accept it]. I’ll just watch.”

Son: “You used to slide with me.”

Me: “When you were little. Now you’re big and you don’t need me to slide.”

Son: “Did you slide when you were 32?”

Me: “Probably.”

Son: …

Son: “Has your tush gotten wider?”

***

Later, inside the house, Mom returns into the kitchen to find son staring at the computer monitor.

Son, grinning the grin of the one who knows he won: “That’s what we said.”

I’ve taken on quite a devotion to cooking in the last couple years. I love my cast-iron pans, I love broiling steaks in them, making pasta sauces in them, making everything I possibly can in them, and next weekend I’m going to try a giant apple pancake in one of them. I’ve always suspected, though, that I would be looked down upon by serious enthusiastic cooks and food lovers, because there are so many different foods I don’t like. These fall into a few categories: Foods I like okay but probably wouldn’t choose if given options (shrimp, for example); foods I don’t like but will endure if I have to (citrus fruit, cilantro, others); foods I don’t like on their own but will accept in other things (blueberries in pancakes or muffins, avocado in guacamole); foods I simply cannot stand and will not eat under any circumstances (beets, mushrooms, artichokes, any of the weirder types of fruits like mango, nuts other than peanuts, tea, coconut, etc.).

Recently I’ve become completely enamored of the Smitten Kitchen, so it was with glee that I came upon her entry of some of her food weirdnesses and discovered that even serious cooks have a lot of stuff they don’t like.

2. As the above should suggest I’m really quite the curmudgeon about food; cooking allows me to hide this: I hate beets, green peppers on anything but pizza and even then not really, find cilantro (the green, not the powdered spice or seed) distasteful, as well as most teas, broccoli rabe and kale,all chais, cardamom, caviar, cheese-stuffed or coated items, dolma, minestrone, coconut curries, mustard that looks like yellow paint, the vast majority of fruit juices, nectars and smoothies and the vast majority of California cabernets and chardonnays I have tried.

Awesome. I don’t like smoothies myself because of a very limited relationship with fruit in general (strawberries, apples, grapes, and bananas, essentially, make the cut, and sparingly). She hates beets and dislikes cilantro! Just like me! Woo! But best of all was this bit:

1. After being a vegetarian for more than 15 years, the thing I took most quickly to was bacon, followed by any sort of pork, mussels and then beefy stews in butter-enriched sauces. Perhaps I wasn’t so much a “vegetarian” all those years but “rebelling against Jewish food.” Meanwhile, I have no love for typically easy-to-love non-vegetarian items such as chicken, turkey and shrimp. I’d pretty much rather eat a beet than a grilled chicken cutlet, which I will insist to my dying day tastes closer to cardboard than something edible.

Hallelujah. I have only recently come to the conclusion that the main reason I haven’t worked with raw chicken in my kitchen for a year or more, other than to roast a whole bird now and then, is because I really don’t enjoy eating the results. I made a heavy-duty chicken stir-fry the other night because of a sneaking suspicion that I’d been going too heavy on the beef lately, and it just. is. not. worth. it. The slimy, raw chicken that you have to pull strings of bloody tendon out of, and what do you get? Little chunks of white, dry, tasteless protein only marginally rescued by the glory of veggies around it. Yuck. I’m with Deb: Bacon, pork, beef. (I’ve never tried mussels.) Give me a steak to slap into the cast iron, any time, or chopped bacon on my spinach salad, or pancetta in my mashed potatoes, or pork tenderloin … did I mention the steak broiled in cast iron? Yum.

“The franchise [of Indiana Jones] really depends on me coming up with a good idea.”

—

… wait for it …

—George Lucas

You know, I’m kind of sure that was sort of true. In about 1986.

Maybe if he got Lawrence Kasdan, or even Frank Darabont, to write everything else once he’d come up with “a good idea,” it would actually stay good. Hell, I’d like to get a peek at Tom Stoppard’s efforts, too.

More head-scratchers in the piece:

The filmmaker scoffed at the possibility of passing the famed fedora from Ford to Shia LaBeouf, the 22-year-old actor played Indy’s son Mutt Williams in this summer’s “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.”

“He is Indiana Jones,” Lucas said of Ford. “If Indiana Jones wasn’t in it, you’d have to call it ‘Mutt Williams and the search for Elvis.’ … “Yeah, it’s ‘Mutt Williams and the Search for Elvis.”

So … smoking something, then, were we?

“I have an idea to make Shia [LaBeouf] the lead character next time and have Harrison [Ford] come back like Sean Connery did in the last movie.”

I get that “lead character” is not the same as saying Shia Labeouf will be Indiana Jones, but it sure sounds the same as “New Lead Character and the Search for Elvis.” And even if he does call it Indiana Jones and the [Whatever], I stand by my statement that we don’t want it and that I, at least, won’t watch it if he’s not the primary lead. Says the girl who didn’t even watch the last one.

Not the only howler in the piece, either:

Lucas plans a live-action “Star Wars” TV series as well, and he’s also looking into re-releasing the six “Star Wars” films using new 3-D technology.

God have mercy on Anakin Skywalker’s soul. I don’t even own the original three on DVD. How sad is that, for a girl who was in love with Han Solo from age five? Fie on thee, Lucas.

And lastly and bizarrely unrelated, this charmer:

“Like Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, I’ll go out and adopt twins if they’ll pay me $14 million to do it.”

Jerk.

I hope he doesn’t regret it.

Zabaduba again, to be specific. And I remember the lining up. For the morass of digital images that was Episode I. So I know that his commenter has a point too. Sadly.

Except painted faces at a Cubs game, or any baseball game, are far rarer than at a football game. FYI. Baseball fans don’t want that paint all up in their beer.