Author: Heather Meadows

Via Miss Em.

Just read an article about how a Huddle House in Richmond County now has a no-smoking policy. Look at this:

“They were pretty good about it, we had only one made lady who was mad I don’t think she will be back,” said Ross.

This restaurant’s smoking section used to have seven tables but today out came the no smoking signs, the restaurant is totally smoke free, a breath of fresh air for some customers.

” When you find out about you’re health second hand smoke is just as bad as if you were smoking so I’m glad, said Gwen Coker of Augusta.

“I’m happy for the non-smokers because I can’t take smoke bit really just stifles me,” said her aunt Rogerlena Williams of Beech Island.

Other regular customers who smoke says the ban will hurt business in Georgia.

“Usually the tables here are fill a lot of Richmond County workers that are not here today went across the river to eat because they can’t smoke here,” says Rose Warner.

“But those here don’t expect a smoking ban to snuff out the breakfast business.

I think it’s going to pick up I really do,” said Ross.

I’m amazed by how terrible this article is. The quotations are horrendous. You could argue that they were transcribed as spoken, but that doesn’t account for the spelling errors and lack of punctuation. It also doesn’t account for the main text of the article, which is nearly as bad.

I mean it! Soooooooooooo funny. I laughed out loud many, many times.

However, the plot purpose of this episode seems to have been to confirm that Wolfram is actually falling for Yuuri.

(Not that that needed to be confirmed, I mean come on, we’ve all seen episode 34, right? Where he gives Yuuri his scabbard as he heads off into the duel? [The duel, by the way, in which he uses tsubame gaeshi…] And there was that one episode I can’t find right now where Yuuri asked Wolfram why he was putting his life on the line [or something to that effect], and Wolfram [echoing something ConradGwendal said to him earlier] says, essentially, “That’s something for you to figure out on your own.” In that episode, like this one, Wolfram is too proud to admit his feelings, even though they are blatantly obvious.

(And now I need to end this freaking huge parenthetical.)

Seeing Wolfram’s feelings confirmed once again is…well, sad. Because it doesn’t seem like Yuuri is going to fall for Wolfram anytime soon. While I’ve always enjoyed Wolfram as a character, I used to not like him very much–he’s just a little bratty. :> But he’s grown more and more sympathetic to me with each episode, and it’s going to suck to watch him get his heart broken.

In other news…what was up with Conrad knowing exactly what went on between Wolfram and Elizabeth, and yet not saying a word? His role lately seems to have been chopped down to “guy who stands around and smiles knowingly”.

Man who lived in Kenyan airport gets UK citizenship

A man who has lived for more than a year at Nairobi’s international airport to protest being denied entry to Britain has finally been granted U.K. citizenship and plans to fly there within days.

In a real-life African version of Tom Hanks’ 2004 Hollywood hit “The Terminal,” Sanjai Shah, 43, has been eating cafeteria food, sleeping on plastic transit lounge chairs, and showering in arrival hall toilets since May last year.

His morning alarm is the dawn announcement advising the safe landing of the first flight.

“It’s like a second home here. All the staff know me, they’re very friendly,” Shah told Reuters.

“But it hasn’t been easy. The chairs are uncomfortable to sleep on. And the food is bad.”

Crazy.

(By the way, when I originally watched The Terminal, I didn’t realize it was supposed to be a comedy. I took it at face value, and it was therefore unable to hold my suspension of disbelief. I simply could not believe in the antagonist; he was like a caricature, an embodiment of evil. Knowing that it was a comedy, I’d like to watch it again…maybe I’d enjoy it now. But at the time, all I could think was that it was an exaggerated, self-indulgent exhibition of the suffering of a man who had done nothing wrong. It was more upsetting than anything, even if it did have a happy ending. And because it was so unrealistic, I felt as if I was being preached at, like there was some sort of moral I was supposed to be gleaning from it. All in all, it was a very irritating experience.)

MSN Women/The Knot has an article about the most common newlywed mistakes. I noticed one glaring one that I’ve been making. Not going to point it out, but I am going to start working on it right now.

I’ve (obviously) had a lot on my mind in recent days. I’ve been thinking about my future, about how to get back to Japan someday, about possibly going back to school and how exactly that would even work (no good schools around here, no real prospect of moving), about where to start my business, about how I can get a freaking job so I can start saving to make at least some of the things I want a reality. Add to that the fact that something bad happened to one of my best friends recently, something I know next to nothing about other than it totally sucks, it’s not her fault (and is actually a serious invasion of her privacy), and it’s forced her to give up something she loved. All because some stupid people had to be assholes.

Also, I’m physically feeling like crap, all congested and headachey, and that never helps anything.

However, I do have things to do tomorrow (amazingly enough), so I think I’ll end this early-morning ramblefest here and slip into bed with the hubby.

Night all.

Yahoo! News: Government goes after smokers’ sex lives

LONDON (Reuters) – The government launched a series of tough anti-cigarette adverts on Friday with the message that smoking is bad for your sex life because it makes men impotent and women ugly.

Obviously, the British government hasn’t seen AJ and Faye!

It’s hard being married.

When you live with someone, when you’re bound to them completely, they affect you and you affect them in ways that you can’t predict. Moods play off one another. Little things turn into big things, and big things into little things. Desires don’t always match up, and when they don’t it can make being in the same room awkward, and that’s kind of hard to deal with when you don’t have anywhere else to go.

Sleep is an escape from that, as is going on late night drives for no real reason.

Ultimately, you can’t really escape, though. And you shouldn’t.

Tomorrow we’re going to deal with this head-on, like we always do. And things will be good and happy again.

For now, though, I’m stuck in that awkward feeling.

All that talk of eating animals made me hungry, so I set out for McDonald’s in search of their late night menu (specifically, the evil, evil double quarter pounder with cheese). However, upon arriving I discovered that the system was down and they couldn’t take my order.

Some days, I take events like that as a sign that I shouldn’t eat a double quarter pounder, but not today.

The girl said the system would be back up in 10 minutes, so I drove up to the McDonald’s off Baston Road and Fury’s Ferry to see if it was open. It wasn’t, so I decided to check out the Fury’s Ferry Road construction and see how it’s coming along.

I drove out past Evans to Lock until I hit North Belair, where I turned left, thinking I would go to the Evans McDonald’s on Washington Road. I found myself passing the Columbia County Government Complex on Ronald Reagan, which perplexed me–I hadn’t realized that it was that close to North Belair. Of course, I was on the “other” side of North Belair, and this didn’t click until I turned onto Evans to Lock and ended up back at Fury’s Ferry.

Duh. I had driven in a big circle.

Oh, well. By this time surely McDonald’s system was back up, so I headed back over there. But another thought had occurred to me. The sign had said “Late Night – 11 pm to 4 am”, and now it was past 4. Would I have to eat breakfast?

Sure enough, I had to order from the breakfast menu. Sausage egg and cheese meal with orange juice it is, then.

Hey wait…there isn’t any cheese on this!

My previous post, in which I stated that I would try a meal of seal, made me think of something I saw on TV the last time I was in Kentucky. (I only watch US television when I’m in Kentucky, it seems.) I was at AJ’s, and they had that show on where you trade wives. This vegetarian woman was sent to live with a rural(?) family, somewhere in the South where they have gators. The scene we were watching involved the vegetarian convincing herself to try eating gator.

She freaked out about it for awhile, but then actually tried it and enjoyed it. During dinner, though, she had an interesting conversation with the family.

She stated that she didn’t think it was right to eat any animal, but that if she had to eat a dog to survive, she would.

The son of the family was totally shocked by this. He said something to the effect of, “You can eat other animals because they’re made for eating. But a dog is your friend.”

There are places in the world, of course, where dog and cat and other animals that are domesticated (and treated like family) elsewhere are eaten without a second thought. And there are places in the world where animals we eat regularly here are quite safe from becoming stir fry. The deciding factor in determining which animals are okay to eat is obviously cultural.

It makes me wonder. I’ve eaten a lot of strange things, including raw horse (in Yatsushiro–worth experiencing, not worth trying again) and cooked alligator (in Savannah–it was kinda tough, but not bad). But are there things that even I wouldn’t try? I’m not sure, for example, that I could knowingly eat a dog or cat (although strangely I don’t have a problem with the idea of eating bunnies). And the idea of eating buloot seriously grosses me out. But if someone prepared dog or cat or buloot and gave it to me–if it was right there in front of me, waiting for me to try–could I pass it up?

I’d actually like to think the answer is no.

JP over at Japundit unearths a new conspiracy in Japan’s seafood industry, one that is sickeningly familiar.

Run, Tama-chan, run!

(Of course, you realize that I will have to try seal the next time I’m in Hokkaido)

I can’t tell you how many times I have stopped reading something that may have actually been interesting because the design of the page was irritating to me. Maybe the font was too small. Maybe it was too big. Maybe the color was too close to the background. Maybe the colors were too stark in general.

Thanks to RSS, I now don’t have to visit people’s actual websites unless I want to make a comment, so you’d think I’d take a little longer before outright rejecting a blog because of its design. But no…I was reading something just now that was actually very interesting, but the font and the colors were so annoying that after a few seconds I gave up and closed the window.

The sad thing is, that site was using a standard Blogger template…

So Gen X are “apathetic slackers” (or were, “in their day”), and the younglings (Gen Y?) are the “Entitlement Generation”, according to this Yahoo! article linked by Miss Em.

Now, deserved or not, this latest generation is being pegged, too – as one with shockingly high expectations for salary, job flexibility and duties but little willingness to take on grunt work or remain loyal to a company.

“We’re seeing an epidemic of people who are having a hard time making the transition to work – kids who had too much success early in life and who’ve become accustomed to instant gratification,” says Dr. Mel Levine, a pediatrics professor at the University of North Carolina Medical School and author of a book on the topic called “Ready or Not, Here Life Comes.”

While Levine also notes that today’s twentysomethings are long on idealism and altruism, “many of the individuals we see are heavily committed to something we call ‘fun.'”

That does sound somewhat familiar…

Technically, I’m at the very tail end of Gen X, and I’ve always looked up to Gen Xers as my role models, but it does seem that I share qualities with this other arbitrary generation.