delicious drink

so much more than a smoothie, so much healthier than a milkshake (but it'll still get you sloshed):

• ripe bananas, frozen
• milk or soymilk
• rum (or kahlua or creme de cacao)

blend milk and bananas, add rum to taste. the frozenness of the bananas gives the smoothie a whipped texture that approaches the icecreamlike. the rum gives your brain a whipped texture, too, which may approach the completely smashed. also, it can be vegan!

tonight, self-reflective new yorkers will venture to east 65th st and pay $10 to hear the talk East Side v. West Side, Downtown v. Brooklyn: Does your choice of neighborhood say something about you and your neighbors?

so after paying $1400 to live in the east village and feel edgy and slightly underground (but still pretty), we need to pay $10 more just to hear someone else tell us that? on the upper east side?

once again, sunday styles confirms my worst fears about america

last week, the nyt ran an amusing yet thoroughly disturbing story on plastic surgery for skinny people. check out "do my knees look fat?" for a well-proportioned serving of complaints by enviably attractive women who are bothered by things like chunky ankles and bra fat. an excerpt:

"'I had a little roll of fat hanging over the back of my jeans, like a spare bicycle tire in the back,' said Dana Conte, a bartender in Manhattan. It was so obvious that her mother constantly came up behind her and pulled her shirt down over it, Ms. Conte said. 'When your mother is doing that, it means there's a problem.'"

no, it means you should lay off the low-rise jeans, or at least buy longer shirts. since when does a mother's corrective measure translate in a daughter's mind to a call for surgery? it gets better:

"Dr. Lawrence S. Reed, the plastic surgeon who operated on Ms. Conte, the bartender, said some patients who choose micro liposuction want to reduce such negligible deposits that doctors can have trouble seeing the problem when the patients are undressed."

why can't these women accept that if they look good naked, they're doing well? why can't they just avoid certain styles of clothing? (maybe that hasn't occured to them since their biggers don't, but everyone's so distracted by an actual tummy or bum that offense by muffin top is completely ruled out.) and wait, right, this is the country that likes to throw fancy technological solutions at simple problems. commission an expensive and unreliable missile defense shield instead of building better international policies or, hey, cutting back on oil consumption. develop genetically modified strains of rice that will thrive off of global warming instead of working to offset the trend. have costly and painful surgery instead of buying better-fitting clothing. i woke up (yet again) believing in a logical world, but the nyt reminded me that this is how we operate around here.

i, too, can eradicate bra fat—and for a lot less money. with no medical training whatsoever, i am prepared to surgically remove spandex and lycra-blend tops from malls everywhere. and if you think your knees look chunky, try gaining some weight in the thighs. that should do the trick.

i have 0 friends; i've watched 666 videos

that's what youtube says when i arrive at their site. how alarming.

for my internship (where i mostly dig up not-yet-viral videos for a video blog), i spend all day numbing my brain with boring pet videos and keg stands gone wrong so that everyone with a real job can come to our site and waste time more efficiently.

here are two things i can't post because they're too old/they've already made the rounds.

a QVC demo blooper from 2003:



from last year's scripps howard national spelling bee:



so...if any good videos cross your inbox that haven't already graced boingboing or snopes, or if you or anyone you know makes funny sketches or animations and posts them online, i'll make you/them famous.

i've been skeptical of anyone who attempts the harper's notebook column after lewis lapham stepped down, but this month's essay by ben metcalf, on simple human decency, is both smart and playful. he lobbies for the right of anyone to say in print, "I would like to hunt down George W. Bush, the president of the United States, and kill him with my bare hands," toying all the while with the possibility that he really means it.

-istas

since school ended, my interest in shopping has returned to its museum-employment levels. i just got back from a trip up 5th ave (the bklyn one, not the mnh one, to speak in craigslist abbreviations), only to get sucked into the new anthropologie catalog as soon as i walked through the door. anyone know any interesting shopping blogs out there? i'm tempted to post pictures of my booty (the pirate-metaphor kind, not the anatomical kind), which includes some skirts and a dress made by german designers, acquired during our trip to bonn/cologne.

i find myself, though, miffed at this season's fashions, wondering why anyone in her right mind would want to wear stretchy cotton koolats and those boob doilies known as bolero sweaters and especially those hippie empire-waisted blouses. who wants to wear maternity clothes when they're not pregnant? it's great for women who are, because they can just shop at the regular stores without having to seek out fashionable maternity boutiques, but anyone who wants to show off her waistline must make do with whatever's already in her closet. why slim down for summer when you can fit a whole chocolate cake under the halter tops they're selling now?

maybe i'm looking at this the wrong way. maybe the fashion world has finally acknowledged women's tendency to, well, eat, and i should be celebrating my stomach's independence from scrutiny. oh, except wait—those stretchy koolats don't look good on anyone who isn't already so skinny they'd look hot in a garbage bag (ahem, D.) if they decided to put one on. designers might be applauded for cutting women some slack if it weren't for the unsightly koolat cameltoe they've inflicted on all of us by making the pants in sizes above 2.

i know that fashion cycles are as demanding as 24-hour news channels, that there's a recurring space that must be filled with something new to keep people hanging on. they sold us leggings in the 80s only to have us repudiate them in the 90s so that we'd nostalgically embrace them now. there's clearly strategy at work here, some manufactured consent involving long strands of beads and stretch-cotton koolats (which i'm told were very fashionable during a decade not disclosed to me because it would've revealed my interlocutor's age), but mustn't there be limits? are there no fixed standards of taste that accompany us into the stores each season?

the popularity of the koolat suggests not. we'll be encouraged to laugh at them in 2016, to feel shame when perusing old photographs of ourselves looking wide-hipped and wedgie-ridden, but i don't need hindsight to feel shame. why don't people who, when confronted with a Mapplethorpe or a dung-strewn Virgin Mary, argue for unchanging aesthetic standards in the nation's editorial pages carry those same standards with them to the mall? art may depart from habitual notions of beauty and still be successful because no one's asking us to wear the elephant dung. but the utilitarian nature of everyday clothes should guarantee a world in which we don't prance around in humiliating outfits. somehow, that's precisely the world we live in.

seasonal habits

two things that i was unaware of having acute needs for till this week:

• iced coffee. until i developed a craving for it while walking in the brooklyn heat up to a memorial day party last weekend, i had no idea that such a substance was even necessary. turns out it's the life force. which is not an invitation for starbucks to market the cappu"chi"no, which would probably be some unnatural form of espresso infused with green tea (this year's most promiscuous ingredient), topped with pistachio whipped cream. in fact, i can totally see that. i may have even received a coupon for it in valupak.

• the future bible heroes' 'real summer.' this song is really important.