What's Wrong With This Picture?

OK, I've already marked it as to what's wrong. Click to embiggen.

Something Is Very, Very Wrong With Me
A couple of years ago, you would not have been able to get me to voluntarily buy or eat a tomato for any reason short of impending apocalypse. As my Brit friend and fellow English teacher in Japan used to say, there was a level of hungry that was 'tomato hungry" which was how famished he'd have to be before he'd eat a piece of tomato. I've long felt pretty much the same way. On my honeymoon as the waitress cleared our dishes one lunch, she observed that no tomatoes had been consumed on both my bride's and my salads. This resulted in the immortal phrase, "Neither one of yeez likes damadahs then." (This was in St. John, NB though you may want to place the accent more Joisey-like.)
The past, though, is always prologue. A couple of days ago, I sat at the kitchen table having a lively time with my visitor who had acquired a nice block of mozzarella for snacking purposes. I had also acquired a nice little Costco pack of Roma tomatoes (on the vine) for use in a dish I'll make in a day or so. I also had, in the kitchen, as I hadn't gotten to point of potting them, several young basil plants. You see where this is going, don't you? You'd be right.
I sliced the tomato to about mousepad thickness (probably should have done this on the bias but didn't think of it at the time), ground some smoked sea salt on the rounds, laid a hunk of the mozzarell' on each slice and a basil leaf atop that. Just amazingly delicious. Which is something you probably already know and is no surprise. But brother Lycurgus is reading this with his jaw dropped at least two notches. It's possible we may be in an alternate universe as what I described above would never have happened in the not-too-distant past on Normal Earth. Strange Earth has good tomatoes!

Once Again This Makes No Sense
Right now I would do serious harm to anyone who stood between me and a slice of lemon cake. I have no idea why but my tastebuds are just screaming "Lemon cake, you sunuvabitch! Lemon cake!"

Riddle Me This
If hydrocarbons are "made of dinosaurs" (to simplify the argument), how, then could those dinosaurs have gotten stuck in the tar pits where we find all those preserved skeletons?

This Is Dallas Ft. Worth Tower,
Yasmine Villasana You Are Now Cleared For Takeoff
A rare two line headline for this story:

Today's Moment Of WTF
Two posts about rectilinear fish products? What is on my mind?
For that matter, I'm getting together with a good friend of mine for dinner near the ides of the month and as it stands, the only place I'm really interested in going, mostly because I haven't been yet, is a restaurant called "Hooked" which (wait for it ...) specializes in fish. Personally, I want to see what their sushi is like.

And a brief note on mass storage. I continue to be amazed at how insanely affordable giant, mountain-sized hard drives have become. Today's wubbawubbawubba (shake your head like a bulldog when you say that) moment is a Fantom Green 2 TB USB 2.0 drive for $194 at Buy.com. Holy cow. You could store your whole life on that thing. Unless you were Obama in which case it would only hold an itty bitty part of your ego.
UPDATE: It was a good deal. Dealhack reports that it's sold out.

I Troll The 'Zon So You don't Have To
In "Today's Deals" you'll find the "Midwest Canine Camper Day Tripper Portable Soft-Sided Folding Tent Crate." Which is nice and all but the category of this offered deal is "Kitchen and Dining Deal."

"Here doggy doggy doggy! Dang. I forgot to preheat the oven!"

You Know How Much I Loves The Amazon
But I'm really conflicted about a possible order. Should I get one of these or not?
I seek your wise counsel.

Nuts!
By the Power of Greythumb!
Last night I was trying to peel a recalcitrant (by way of a slight desiccation) turnip and managed to skim a nice little bit off the left side of the tip of my left thumb (looking at it nail up). So after red-wetting a fair amount of gauze, I'm down to a reasonable sized bandage on my new flattop finger (well, half-fade is more like it) and I found that putting the hand into a nitrile glove and cutting away all but the thumb actually works much better at keeping the band-aid clean and the finger useful. The nitrile gloves are grey, thus the first line of the post, you see.
Grrrr. I took my revenge by eating the turnip. It was good.

Why Is This?
I would pay serious money for a fish taco right now. Watch it! I mean a fish taco at a place like Baja Fresh. I'd even settle for a really nice tuna sandwich. I think I'll make myself one tomorrow for lunch. My technique for using less mayo is to sub in a good shot of cottage cheese. It even helps with the texture.

I Tend To Do Things That Don't Make Sense
Especially when it comes to ordering online. I really don't like to pay for shipping. I'll go through contortions to avoid shipping charges. Case in point is my first purchase from drugstore.com. I prefer one particular brand of cheap bar soap. Which is not carried at Costco and is no longer carried by my local grocery store. So I checked the 'Zon. They have it but the "prime eligible" "free" shipping soap cluster was about three times the price of a similar cluster from drugstore.com and, my first order, if I bumped it up to $25 gets shipped free.
You know what that meant. I then spent about half an hour trying to track something, anything to add to a couple of soaps. Men's scents? Nothing I like (dang! no Cool Water? no Fahrenheit?) Well, I do need some lip balm. I now have a free-shipping package consisting of nothing but soap and lip balm headed my way. At least I'll have enough Blistex to put in every room in the house and in the car. Saves wear and tear on the pocket. Yeah. Like that's the reason why.

Shameful Admission
For a real logophile, I find that I bump into certain words like roadblocks and, even when I can wrap my mind around the definition, my thought process grinds to a halt until I can process that particular word. An example is the word stochastic. I twig to the idea that it means "random" but what is it that necessitates its use instead of the word 'random?' This comes from a dyed-in-the-wool sesquipedalian as well.
"Quondam" is another one of those words. I should come up with a name for this phenomenon.

Let's Remember, Shall We?
Ah, those days of yester, the yoredays of our yute. I remember watching the televsioning machine with it's grainy black and white picture. I remember the Herb Alpert music that was used as the "Teaberry Shuffle" in ads to promote Clark's Teaberry gum.
I just ordered some of the Teaberry gum from Amazon.

I delight in the very idea that all the things that filled the nooks and interstices of our past have not gone away. Videos of ads on uToob, the gum itself. I suppose I could get some of those wax "cola bottles" things, the red wax lips that tasted like ... well, nothing natural to be sure. And what aging child can't forget the dusty snort of flavored sugar drained from a "pixie stick" directly down the throat? I imagine I could get those too. If they weren't just revolting to the taste.
There might be a catalog of disgusting sweeties from the past. And things that are so far beyond the pale that today's children would run crying to their school counselors if they were confronted with them. Candy cigarettes. Gum cigars. Now it's all red vines and dentally hygienic gums. Pfeh!

Is It Extortion?
I haven't bothered to drag out my legal dictionary but I was thinking about Roman PoLetterman's situation.

Let's say that I have information about a married man who has maintained a series of inappropriate sexual relationships with women who work under for him. It is information that the person does not want revealed. So I go to said person and say, "I'd like to pitch you a screenplay idea." Whereupon I lay out the situation of which I have proof.
And I go on, "But I need money to produce this movie. Let's say, oh, $2,000,000. If you're willing to invest that amount of money, you can have full script approval. In fact, it will even give you unlimited access to my files for any editing you'd like to do. Of course, you risk losing your entire investment should things go wrong but I think it'd be a great investment for you."

Now, on a very basic level, the blackmail is obvious. But if it's presented in such a way, can it legally avoid the definition of extortion? If so, there's no crime. I need to dig out the law books and double check.

I Figured It Out
I think I finally cracked Victoria's Secret: She's kind of a slut.

Today's Poll Question
Which would you rather have - henchmen or minions?
Additional credit for explaining your choice.

I Wonder...
With new brands of skwerls popping up, I wonder if the frog I found in the backyard this morning might be the harbinger of something.

New species of squirrel spotted in attic.
We’re going to need a bigger Havahart trap.
Animalia-Chordata-Mammalia-Carnivora-Felidae-Panthera-pardus-sciurus carolinensis

Ow! Ow! Bloody Buggering Ow!
Gouty right great toe today. Not the worst I've had but it makes walking painful and I'm peeved as I'm not eating a gout inducing diet right now. Unless metabolizing my own fat would be gout-inducing. Now that would suck like a black hole: lose weight and hurt like a smashed Smurf while doing so.
Oh bother.

I'm Just Sayin' Is All
I bought some applewood smoked bacon at Trader Joe's the other day. My house is now perfumed with bacon aroma. The Airwick people are missing a bet here.

And I have a plan for the rendered bacon fat: I'm going to get some steaks at Costco, grind them into burger form and add bacon fat to the grinding. My friend the Enigmatic Misanthrope suggested adding lardons to the grinding for additional flavor and I admit that I hadn't thought of that. And I may be mis-remembering our conversation - he may have already done that rather than just suggested it to me. In any event, I think the idea of getting "bacon burger" flavor into the very meat itself has got to be a good thing. A better thing that anything Martha Stewart has ever called a 'good thing.'