idiot fish

My cousin sent this to me. He knows a lot about weird foods and World War II submarines. I love him.

Now, here are a few cool things I learned about Idiot Fish on the internets:
-it can survive for five months without eating
-it can live to 50 years old
-the species is at least 10 million years old!!

Unjustly named because of its bulbous eye, and endangered because of deliciousness, it seems idiot fish can't win.

jew can do it: a christmas cookie myth busted

My mom sent me this image in an email with the subject line "You can do it." My entire life she's told me that Jews can't make cutout cookies, that it's just not in our DNA. I explain this to my goy friends a couple times a year and it always provokes a bit of scoff and an eye roll. It's an understandable reaction for liberal arts post racial types. I only half-believed it myself. That's what I say. Except that in high school I had a friend who got to write in class essays on his computer because he had clinically bad handwriting, so a genetic predisposition to ugly cookies doesn't seem entirely impossible. Also, early tests of my cookie cutting prowess indicated that she was correct.

She made these cookies on Monday. Note the precision of the snowflake tips, the expressive bend in the necks of the cookie men--they're lovely. I don't know what to believe anymore.

speaking of gingerbread...

My latest post, "4 Local Gingerbread Structures of Note: How Southern California Builds Christmas," a fun little piece inspired by this little Jew's unlikely love of a little thing called Christmas, received considerable likeage on Facebook last week. I'm very flattered, but these achievements are seldom reached alone...

The lead photo was taken by my favorite almost 21 year old, Jewel Peeler. It doesn't nearly do her justice, because she is quite the budding photographer. You can find her work here and sometimes here.




Gingerbread boardwalk at the Ritz-Carlton Laguna Niguel.

we need these: ninjabread men

For Christmas last year we made gingerdads, gingerbread men in the various costumes of Joe's dad: Iron(bread) man, Breadhead man (he has a Grateful Dead shirt; it's a pun), etc. The dog ate all except one of them while we were out, before we were able to take photos.

Today I found these: ninjabread men, cookie cutters posed for holiday ninja action. We've already decided to make gingerbread moms this year, but next year these are so on.