And So On

laser beams from city hall
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

There are a whole lot of lost tourists downtown. I'm thinking that next time, we need to dump giant boulders on both sides of I-40 instead of just the one. Like zombies mindlessly beating their way into the Wal Mart (as everyone knows, Wal-Mart is the best place to hole up for a zombie apocalypse) the tourists are still getting through and they cannot drive worth a good goddamn. Of course, we in Asheville refuse to mark our streets, so there is that. However, all that will change now that Gordon Smith is our newest benevolent overlord! All Hail! Bring us sidewalks or bring us death, dude.

Highland Brewing has released this year's version of Cold Mountain, their winter beer and I went and bought two bottles on Wednesday. It is so delicious that all other beer will forevermore and henceforth taste not as good. However, do not listen to me! You will hate it! Don't go buy any! It is all for meeeeeee! Or, so I wish. Fortunately for my liver and my waistline but causing me to weep bitter tears of rue, it is not all for me, no, it will sell out soon (so get yours now) and I will not be able to find any more until next year.

In other news, I have not a damn thing planned for the weekend except attending a metafilter dinner party on Saturday, which should be fun and, of course, cleaning the entire house, which should not be fun at all. My friend and handyman Adam has been back in town from Baltimore and he has done all kinds of work around the house over the last week - there is a door to teenage wasteland! The downstairs toilet is rebuilt! the hose no longer leaks! the gutters are clean! and etc. Home ownership is a fucking pain in the ass, let me add, but Adam makes it doable. Therefore, if you need any home repairs done, email me and I will give you his phone number. He is awesome at everything.

In other news, there is no other news, except that it is actually supposed to not rain this weekend. Whoooooo!

a murder of crows

a murder of crows
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

There were about eleventy million crows at Richmond Hill this morning around 7:15 or so. I like crows for the most part but I was also permanently scarred by watching The Birds on TV when I was 11 or thereabouts so the constant cawing and swooping and taking up of the entire top of the forest was a mixed blessing. I harbor no illusions that my dogs would be any good whatsoever in the face of a sustained crow attack; besides, they would probably set it off by chasing them out of the parking lot in the first place. Dogs, I have noticed, enjoy a lot of completely futile endeavors, like chasing crows and barking at squirrels. Hint to all dogs: it is way easier to catch a squirrel that you haven't barked at yet and running into a flock of birds is a damn good way to get yourself shat on. But who am I to talk? The dogs feel the same way about all the time I spend sitting in the big chair (the really comfy chair they want to sleep on, at that) constantly turning over pages of paper. And then I get upset, too, when they try to help by chewing up those pesky paper objects.

I have managed to walk the dogs every morning so far this week since I like colder weather - it chases off most of the joggers - and I like being able to see. It was particularly easy this morning, because the gas company minions arrived at 7:00 with large yellow machinery. The guy who seemed to be in charge had a white ponytail and intricate blue tattoos all the way down his neck. He was very friendly and I understood very little of what he said. "We're just putting in the dpiojerlsnjfi," he said cheerfully. "Then the other guys will aoijwrfekm with the soinfaieonffewion in about two weeks or maybe longer, depends on the weather and the poiajoiewrm."
"Great!" I said, smiling back and looking a little mournfully at what used to be my lawn. (Surprisingly enough, there was some damn good dirt down there.) "Do you need me to be here?"
"Oh no," he said, "We'll just fix the woirjerl to the wpoiremr and you'll be all set."
So I should have gas in a month. I think. Or maybe this was some kind of random yard digging up heavy equipment crew of performance artists: you just never can tell.

New Faux Fisheye Thingie AND bonus Edgar Allan Poe stuff!

In my continuous camera frenzy, I ordered this nifty thing. I thought it would give me groovy distorted circular images and be so unbeatably cool that I would finally, finally join the ranks of the cool kids. Or something - hell, I don't know, I figured it was thirty bucks and worth a shot. Now I have owned it for slightly less than 24 hours, I am not entirely sure if it was worth thirty bucks. Perhaps twenty four ninety five. Anyway, the picture on the left was taken without it while (you guessed it!) the one on the right was taken with it on. As we see, it definitely widens the angle but it would appear to lose some focus, which in some cases is fine, i.e., here, where it makes my house look super trippy and bizarroid, as befits it's sixties style. Further experimentation will be necessary but oh well, what the hell, new toy! And it makes my camera look intimidatingly professional, so there's that.

In other news, Theo let me vacuum him last night. I think it is highly inefficient of collies to lose last year's winter coat mostly in the fall in preparation for the new one to come in but alas, in this universe of unintelligent design, that's how it works. If I had designed collies the whole thing would come off in one piece like a snakeskin instead of clumping off in awful chunks that clog up the vacuum cleaner and make Theo look motheaten and even more pathetic than usual. But as we know, they did not call on me to design the universe, more fools they.

In other other news, it's only the third day of November and I'm already like 2000 words behind in NaNoWriMo. This does not bode well but I keep thinking I will sit down momentarily and whip them out in short order. Ha! We shall see. Also, since it is the third day of November, that means that YOU (and I, I'm going after work, I promise) must exercise your right as a citizen and GO OUT AND VOTE! It only takes a minute, really, and they give you a free sticker. Free sticker! How can you possibly resist? Vote your pants off, Asheville. Vote like . . . like. . . like something or someone who votes extremely seriously and intensely. Like Edgar Allan Poe on a laudanum binge.

There is some rumor I read somewhere once that said the final consumption & pneumonia that killed Poe was due to his having been abducted by scurrilous vote getters in Baltimore while he was on a laudanum & whisky binge. These vote getters were hired thugs who went around grabbing derelicts and forcing them to vote. This tactic has fallen into disfavor, recently, although perhaps, Gordon, if you're reading this, you might want to give it a try! Not that I would ever advocate such a thing. I'll vote twice for laudanum, though.

Another Halloween Survived

spookyblogapaloozananny lich with straw
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

Phew. It's a good damn thing I don't have to worship the Dark Lord every weekend or I'd be undead by now. I seem to have been ridiculously busy these past few days and also I had a couple of minor mood meltdowns, attributable no doubt to the influence of a malign star or possibly dehydration. Or maybe it was that trip to Starbucks on Friday - if, by the way, it ever seems to you that a large bold roast with a shot of espresso is a good idea on a day that you're going to spend in a waiting room, think again! It doesn't even taste that tasty.

On Wednesday night we duly carved our semi stolen pumpkins; much fun was had; several awesome pumpkins were carved and painted (it turns out that warty pumpkins, which seem so awesome, are actually made of wood or steel or some other uncarveable substance.) On Thursday nothing much happened as far as I can remember, although I did my civic duty and went to the neighborhood association meeting. Helpful community note! There are going to be speed traps on my street beginning right away, so if you are illegal in any way, take another route. Also on Friday my good friend Jay had surgery on his knee and I accompanied him through that entire fun filled day at Knee Surgeries R' Us, which was much more enjoyable for me, Starbucks notwithstanding, than for him.

Friday evening, after delivering the aforesaid jack o'lanterns and stabbing myself in the hand (it is not advisable to try to saw frozen basil in oil out of a plastic container with a sharp knife in your right hand while you are holding said container in your left, let me tell you) and then ruining dinner (Sam's club ravioli sucks and falls apart when you boil it) I retired to my bed insisting that I was not going to the party and was in fact planning to sleep out the next several months or possibly years. However, I eventually came out of it and made it over to spookyblogapaloozathan, where I was impressed and abashed by the many, many wonderful costumes. Also, thanks for the votes: you are right now reading the Blog Most Likely To Make You Laugh Out Loud - for, I think, the third year in a row or something? Thank you! I will now say something funny! A ghost walks into a bar! But he goes right through it! Ba dum boom shish! Or, okay, not.

Friday ended up at the Admiral which was lovely as always and then Saturday, the actual Day, the Sacred Holiday, I did pretty much nothing except complain and wander about aimlessly in my slippers. Whining can also be a religious observance, hey. Then as evening fell I transformed myself into the Bad Hair Fairy, picked up Susan and Laura and headed on over through the rain to the Haen Gallery where my friends Katherine and Kate were having their engagement party. The costumes there were also spectacular and the zombie brides to be looked very happy and beautiful despite their deadness.

We then moved on to another Halloween party with some extremely cool people who are actually neighbors of mine I have long wanted to meet, so that was excellent. They were off on other adventures which we graciously declined as being too damn rainy and cold (Wimps R Us) and instead trick or treated for beers at Zen & Helen's house - they were surprised and seemed even pleased. The weather, however, was unchanging so we gave up on the rain, the cold and the Halloween and hung out at Susan's drinking beer. I do that a lot so I kind of forgot it was Halloween for a bit until I looked down at my legs and thought momentarily "What the hell? Why am I wearing a satin miniskirt?" Words to live by!

SO that was Halloween and it was all in a all a great one. Yesterday I took down all the decorations in record time and breathed a sigh of relief right up until the point where I realized that the Other Holidays (insert sound of doom, like the drum scene in the Mines of Moria or perhaps the Carmina Burana, here) are coming up now. My plan to sleep for a few months sounds better every minute.

Pumpkins and More

plastic bones in shadow
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

I have been indulging in way too much retail therapy lately. Both the kids needed new clothes and so I worked out a deal whereby I would pay for half their clothes (the left half) and thus there was a flurry of ordering stuff online last week (my son, never having known life without the internets, is shocked and horrified at the thought of actually going to a, gasp, store and, oh god, trying things on.) This would be not particularly noteworthy except that of course I had to order myself stuff too - otherwise it's just no fun - and thus I ended up with a flame orange lace trimmed camisole and a pair of plaid ballet flats that would have brought my mother to tears of preppy joy. I'm returning the shoes - fortunately for my self respect they don't fit - and I have convinced myself that if perchance I am ever down to my lingerie in the woods again (a girl can dream) then at least I won't be shot by hunters.

However, buying all these things was simple and painless compared to the problem of purchasing pumpkins. You can't order pumpkins online unless you're way more organized than I am. The one pumpkin I grew turned to mush about ten days ago, alas, and I somehow managed to volunteer to bring jack o' lanterns to the unpronounceable blog party on Friday, therefore, I needed pumpkins. I have arranged for my friends to come over tonight to carve said pumpkins (you can come too, if you want, email me) and thus I really needed pumpkins and soon. So, I went to Sam's Club on Monday (and got a bunch of large size prints done from photos that turned out really well - cheap! Cheapcheap! Now my daughter's house has groovy art!) and discovered that they were out of pumpkins. Okay, no pumpkins; I left there and went to K-Mart to get frames for the aforementioned photos. The Patton Avenue K-Mart has reinvented itself as a downscale Target, by the way, and everything has been moved around, but somehow it's still depressing. They really need to burn that place to the ground; I think it's over a Native American burial site or maybe a portal to hell. Could be, though, that the faint screams of the damned that always echo through the air there are just employees or maybe it's a corporate provided soundtrack, who knows? Anyway, they didn't have pumpkins but then I didn't really expect them to so I left with my frames and as I sat in traffic on Louisiana Avenue I noticed people with signs on the corner.

I couldn't read the signs but I wondered what they were doing, muzzily assuming that perhaps it was a carwash, although 6 pm on an October Monday seems like a weird time for a charity carwash, but, you know, whatever. They looked like they were having fun, though, handing each other their signs and clowning around so I was predisposed to view them fondly until I actually drove into the intersection and realized that they were protesting Halloween on the grounds that it leads people to devil worship. I flipped them off. I have never flipped anyone off before in a car - seriously. Never before. - but I did it this time. Fuck you, insane Christians. I am tired of your stupid antics. You don't get to take my Halloween away or even try, lameasses. What would Jesus do? He sure as hell wouldn't be out there holding an anti Halloween sign.

Well that was Monday and then yesterday I went to Ingles because I have a teenage son and thus I must shop for junk food almost daily. Ingles too was out of pumpkins. This was getting serious. Also, it was raining.

The checkout clerk, my daughter via text message and my son via a phone call told me to go to the church across from the funeral home on Patton. I knew about this church, because I have bought pumpkins there many an October before. I got to the church in the rain and hopped out of the car in the rain and started wandering around in the mud looking at wet pumpkins.
"There's nobody here." said a young woman in black.
"You mean you aren't selling the pumpkins?" I asked,
"No, there's nobody here."
This proved to be true. There was a zipped up tent, but not a person around.
"Is there an honor system box?" I asked, "I really need pumpkins tonight."
"No," she reported dismally.
"Look," I said, "I'm going to steal some pumpkins. I know that's wrong and I'll come back by here in a couple days and pay them, whatever, but I'm having people over tomorrow to carve pumpkins and I have to get these pumpkins now."
'I'm having people over tonight," she said forlornly.
"Well then you have to steal pumpkins too." I said firmly. "It's a necessity; it's like stealing bread or something."

Several more people showed up at this point to slop around in the mud and heavy rain for pumpkins and a quick council was held. "I'm leaving money on this table in the tent," said one man decisively. He didn't want to spend any more time in the rain than he had to. We all decided to do just that and by the time I left with my pumpkins there was a considerable sum on that table in the tent. More, I think, than there would have been if there were people actually collecting payment. The church may be doing it on purpose.

I'm glad we went with the table compromise. Even though I hate the kind of Christians who protest Halloween (and everything else fun in the universe, as well as basic human rights; those kind of Christians can go straight to their own invented hell as far as I'm concerned) I still didn't want to steal from the church. That's one of those setups for bad karma that I refuse to get entangled with. Besides, I'm already half convinced that I'll be struck by lightning if I ever walk into a church and that's just for sinful thoughts (mostly thoughts, okay) imagine what our Lord God Jehovah would do to a confirmed and unrepentant pumpkin thief?

I Am Martha Stewart

out for a stroll
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

This past weekend, I cleaned my entire house, mopped the kitchen floor, did laundry, pulled all the frost killed dead stuff out of the garden, mowed both the front and back yards, stayed cool when my neighbor dropped a tree on my fence and into my yard, half finished an extremely, um, funky outdoor candle holder, made pesto from the last of the basil and froze half of it, went shopping with my daughter, read two Juliet Marillier books, started Infinite Jest, watched several episodes of Legend of the Seeker, had an active and interesting dream life and still had time to drink beer with my friends and relatives and smoke too many cigarettes. I am telling you, I AM Martha Stewart and not only that, I have a Halloween costume. Okay, it's a lame as hell costume but it is a costume and I plan to wear it on Halloween, so, you know, all the criteria are met.

Now it is Monday and I am tired.

In a complete nonsequitur, my daughter needs a plastic Viking helmet; anybody have one they can part with or know of where one could be obtained for less than $20? We went to the Halloween superstore (featuring superslutz wear!: any, yes any, character in popular culture reimagined in a really short dress and fishnets! Even though that makes no sense!) and decided that $20 was a bit much for a plastic Viking helmet, cool and amazing though it might be. It's annoying because I could swear we used to own one - hell, possibly more than one - but it has vanished into the mists of time or maybe the garage.

Ham

We're eating ham. Ham is something eternal and everlasting; also, it's cheap. Last week, I bought a ham. Ham seems expensive when you buy it, because even the tiny hams that I buy run just a little below $10. These hams are tiny, you understand. They are so tiny that they probably came from Charlotte, as in Charlotte's Web, and no, I don't think the pig is named Charlotte. These hams are spider sized; they are arachnid and minuscule. They're the hams from a tiny spider legged pig - Spider-Pig, even. They're small and sliced and pink and will cost you just about $8.52 and when you buy them you think, ow, this is expensive.

They are not, however, expensive because you will be eating that ham for a couple of weeks and by the end, when the ham wins and you watch yourself throw the last ends away, you will swear to whatever gods you swear by that you will not buy ham again, no, nor eat it either. $8.50 for an entire week of trying hard not to eat what's in the refrigerator! It is cheap! And it will be three or four months before you try it again!

Ham has that ham taste. That odd ham texture that can't really be disguised in quiches or collards or omelettes; that ham thing. After about five ham sandwiches, even the ham devotee will admit defeat. The mustard, the melted cheese, the randomly chosen horseradish sauce, the half tomato - they're only staving off the inevitable moment when you look down at your half eaten sandwich and say, dude. Whoa. I can eat ham no more forever. I am hammed out.

And that is why, dearest reader, that after my lunch of two slices of ham and my rebellious tuna sandwich dinner, there is a ham quesadilla that I made for my son (about which he said, after a moment of silence, "Wow, Mom, hammy.") lingering half eaten on my kitchen counter, waiting to be wrapped in saran wrap and put in the fridge, where it will stay until I throw it away in two or so weeks, the American funerary rite for cold cuts observed.

The Legend of the Seeker

orchid light
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

My son and I share a mildly addictive personality and it has surfaced again with our sudden and shameful inability to stop watching episodes of Legend of the Seeker on Netflix Watch It Now or whatever they call that crack like ability they now have to pipe second rate shit directly onto your computer. Boy howdy, this is some second rate shit, too, or possibly even third or fourth rate shit but somehow, we just can't stop dialing new episodes up on the monitor.

Why is that? Partly it's the audience participation angle - we know exactly what's going to happen next! It's exciting! What with my many wasted years spent reading every half assed fantasy novel that comes down the pike and my son's long experience with fantasy based video games and way too much TV (acquired after he got too old for my careful parental strictures to work anymore, I'll have you know. His TV watching was rationed and monitored when he was little Well, sort of. He is the second child.) we can pretty much figure out precisely what each character is going to say next. If we're wrong, it's usually because our line was better. And the plots are so see through that they are laughable. Every single episode is 43 minutes of MST3King delight, plus, every single one features a ridiculous sword fight in slow motion. Bad sword fighting in slow motion is something that we both agree is just the purest of awesome. We shout Slow Motion Now! and then crack up as the hero and heroine dutifully polish off about 20 attacking minions of evil, very slowly with a lot of bonus jumping slowly into the air, the better for their clothes to flap around slowly and artistically. Yes, I highly recommend the Legend of the Seeker if you are into slow sword fights, utterly predictable and often quite funny plot lines and reekingly terrible dialogue. The gods know we're hooked.

Movies

crows
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

It has been a weird week and I think we should talk about something else, like movies! Even though I hardly ever see movies (I don't know why. Somehow I just don't watch a lot of movies. For years I had kids and was only allowed to watch G & PG movies and somehow I never got out of the habit of kind of not watching them) I still have strong, if wildly contradictory, opinions on the fine art of cinema. I have pretty much seen less movies than anyone else I know. If you ever ask me, did you see {insert movie name here} I would estimate that there is about a 70% chance that I will not have seen it. Unless it is a Japanese monster movie. Then, I've probably seen it. That is because Japanese monster movies fulfill my criteria for movies I want to see. And what is that criteria? Here, in handy list format, it is!

1. Swords. Movies which contain swords are better than movies which do not.

2. Explosions. Movies which contain explosions are better than movies which do not, unless (this is key) the movie is all explosions and nothing else. Like all good things, explosions too can become boring.

3. Magic and technology. Magic is good. Wizards in long robes are even better. Technology is good when it is essentially indistinguishable from magic and gets bonus points when it's ridiculous and absurd and clearly would never work.

4. (4 is the momentarily serious number) It doesn't fail the Bechdel test. Or, okay, it's going to fail the fucking Bechdel test, I know it's going to fail, they all fail, but either it's so over the top ridiculous that I can laugh at it anyway or there are enough swords, explosions, magic and NUMBER FIVES in it that I don't care.

NUMBER FIVE: GIANT LIZARDS. Giant lizards are vitally important to any cinematic success. Giant lizards can improve any and all movies, particularly the one that my mother dragged me to at the Fine Arts Theatre a couple of years ago. I cannot for the life of me remember the name of it, but it featured an amnesiac musician who washed up on the coast of Britain sometime in the 1930s and was rescued by two elderly ladies. It was beautifully filmed and extremely civilized and I wanted to gnaw my own arm off to escape. If only there had been a GIANT LIZARD! Then he could have eaten the entire cast and I would have been, personally, quite content. Particularly if then some guys in robes came in, fought him with swords and finished him off by blowing him up in a large explosion. While two women carried on a funny conversation.

The problem with this simple approach is that in actual fact, most of my favorite movies, when I do end up seeing movies, are not of this kind. My favorite movies (that I can think of right now, at this very moment, because I am terrible at remembering the names of things and have to memorize small lists of favorites to be trotted out whenever necessary, which is why for years I said my favorite movie was The Man Who Would Be King although I haven't seen it since 1975 when I was 11 years old and saw it at the movie theatre where it completely and totally absorbed me to a degree nothing ever has since) are Spirited Away, Scotland, PA, The Secret of Roan Inish and the Coca Cola Kid, none of which have giant lizards, swords, explosions or much magic or technology. That would be where the contradictions come in and extend even unto such movies as My Dinner With Andre, which I actually loved, despite its fearsome lack of all good things. So the formula is not without flaws. Still, feel free to borrow it! It certainly helps with Netflix and the movie machine at the grocery store, particularly if your viewing companions are tween or teen boys.

Food and Clothing and More Sex

raclette 3
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

That in the picture right there is a nifty thing called a raclette. My friends Jen and Kyle discovered them in Europe and promptly bought one when they got back to Asheville. Then they threw a raclette party to which I was happily invited. The raclette, of which I had never previously heard, is wonderful. The stone piece heats up on both sides; what you cannot really see in this picture are the little slots for little pans under the stone. You put bread and cheese in the pans and then top them with the grilled veggies, or, well, go wild with pickles and potatos and all manner of other lovely bits and pieces of good things to eat. It was extremely fun and very delicious and if I ever need to buy another wedding present, this is going to be it.

That's the food part; for the clothing part, I must report that I think I want my entire wardrobe to be made of corduroy. I have somehow acquired several pairs of corduroy pants and a couple corduroy skirts as well as the screamingly eighties giant corduroy shirt I have had for many years and I think I need more, like, full on corduroy! Corduroy dress! Corduroy underwear! It's comfortable and great looking and if you're really really bored you can run your hands surreptitiously over your corduroy clad legs and space out on the strange serrated texture. Conversely, you can pick small threads out of it ad nauseam while the teacher drones on and on about Latin verbs or something. Yes, the last time I wore this much corduroy was seventh grade; how did you guess? I have also long been partial to men in corduroy sport coats. I know they're supposed to be some kind of fashion faux pas but I think they are awesome if just for the aforementioned strokability factor. So, corduroy: yes.

Sex! I've been thinking about my post from yesterday and the whole nature of celebrity in our culture and crushes on celebrities and just how it is that everyone, even my ex-husband, who was so tuned out of popular culture that I referred to him more than once as the Iceman, has at least one celebrity crush. (Chrissie Hynde.) Often these begin in adolescence and never quite go away (my love for Nicolas Cage began with Valley Girl and has somehow managed to survive Ghost Rider (eeeeyaaargh!) and those unbelievably terrible National Treasure movies.) I theorize that the whole idea of the crush began with the romantics - didn't everyone in 1830 have a tremendous crush on Byron? - but I wonder idly if maybe they are even older and then I wonder what need it is that they fulfill.

And then I think it must be awkward to be the recipient of a crush - I have actually myself been this and it is kind of awkward. Flattering, but awkward, because you just sort of never know what to do. Does Johnny Depp feel weird about all the women in the world - me included - who dream about him? I remember once running into Richard Butler from the Psychedelic Furs at a bar in NYC with my old boyfriend. He was beside himself with one of those heterosexual man crushes: he really liked the Furs. "I just want to say one thing to him," he said to me, "Do you know how many times I've had sex to the sound of your voice?"

It's kind of a strange commentary on our brains, I think, that we create these perfect people in our heads, based on how they look in (heavily edited) photos and on our TV screens and then fix on them as if they were really our friends or lovers. They're just people but somehow, in our celebrity obsessed culture, they seem like more. Maybe we are god deprived and need Olympians to gawk at. Maybe we just like to gawk. Gods know I do and I know and care less about celebrities than anyone I know - except my ex-husband.

Kurt Vonnegut wrote in some book or another - I am heavily paraphrasing from memory, here, being too lazy to look any of it up - that the problem with the world was that people had moved beyond living in small villages. People need storytellers, he said, and painters and poets and musicians and, I will add, photographers and film makers and, oh I don't know, theremin players. Enough of each of these people are born to fulfill the needs of a village, but unfortunately, we all want the same ones, and, like the Highlander, only one can survive and make it to the top. Well, by one I mean thousands, given the population of the planet, but it's still far less than the one to twenty or so ratio that Kurt was suggesting. He felt that this made the village artist types who never got to the top exactly unhappy and I think he's right. We look beyond the local for our fantasies when instead perhaps we should look around the neighborhood and to reality. Or not. I have no idea where I'm going with this, by the way, is that apparent yet?

Therefore, I leave you with this summing up: Raclettes, yes! Corduroy, yes! Johnny Depp, yes! Recent Nic Cage movies, no!