The Surest Way To Get Me To NOT Buy Something

Flipping through the channels yesterday I stumbled about Giada's latest show Giada at Home on Food Network, and she was in the midst of making what looked like an interesting meat loaf from ground turkey.
It looked pretty good, so I decided that I'd try it out, planning to stop somewhere on the way home from work today to pick up what I needed.
All I needed to get was the ground turkey, Feta cheese, sun-dried tomatoes, bread crumbs, and eggs.
I didn't realize that buying this handful of items would take almost an hour and involve going to two different grocery stores.
The road I used to take to get home is closed for some construction work until September. Driving on Route 7 in the afternoon is out of the question, and taking the Greenway to and from work is way too expensive, so I decided that what I would do is take 7 in to work in the morning when it's not quite as congested - though it's still pretty bad; objectively, it only adds about ten minutes to my commute, but subjectively it feels like an eternity - and take the Greenway home.
The exit I take off of the Greenway brings me past a grocery store, so, since it's on the way, I decided to stop there rather than going to Super Target or Shoppers.
I ended up spending nearly a half an hour in an only partially successful search for these items.
Eventually I had everything I needed except the sun-dried tomatoes. I looked all over for them, but couldn't find them in any of the places I thought them likely to be found.
Finally, I was about to ask an employee where they were, but before I could another customer came up to ask him where he could find...sun-dried tomatoes.
(See? It wasn't just me being incompetent; either they were well-hidden or the other customer was also incompetent.)
Eventually I found where they ought to have been, but apparently they had none in stock, so I ended up having to go to another store to get them (and upon finding them there had to wait for some obnoxious lady to get the hell out of my way).
I got home and set to work on mixing the ingredients when I heard someone at the door.
It turned out to be some kid doing door-to-door sales of some security system.
I listened to his pitch, but given that the surest way to get me to not buy something is to try to sell it to me, I ultimately opted to say no. It actually seemed like a pretty good deal, but there was something that just seemed hinky about the whole thing, and seriously, the fact that it was a door-to-door sales pitch threw up a big red flag.
Of course, now that the sales guy's had a chance to case the joint I'm sure I'll end up getting "coincidentally" robbed like the people in the anecdotes he told about people who passed up on the system.
Oh well.
What made it all seem so fishy was the disingenuous nature of the pitch. They weren't trying to sell me something, rather, they were offering me an opportunity. They just want to get their name out there, so in exchange for me displaying their sign prominently in my front yard they would "compensate" me by giving me all of this free equipment and a "reduced" monthly fee.
Again, maybe it really was a good deal, but the whole pantomime of him calling in to "qualify" me and being "amazed" upon being informed that I qualified for the "B" package, which hardly ever happens, and calling his manager to get me the alarm control key fob - a $100 value - for free...no. Just no.
Then there was the way he was hitting all of the points he was instructed to hit in his training, like constantly using my name, complimenting me on my house, and continually saying "you guys," even though I'd told him I was the sole occupant, since he was clearly trained to deal with couples and families, which just annoyed the hell out of me.
I've worked in customer service. I know all about using "power words" and trying to form a connection through constant repetition of the customer's name. I've done that crap, and I'm keenly aware when it's being done to me.
After he left I finally got back to making dinner. It actually turned out pretty well, despite the fact that I added too much salt and that it actually fell apart when I was trying to get it out of the pan.
In any case, that was the excitement for today.

Crazy Hot Italian Misspelling

Hmm, I just noticed that I've been misspelling Giada's last name all this time. It is De Laurentiis.
Not sure how I never noticed that second "i" before.
I'm not going to go back and correct all of my errors, but I will spell it correctly going forward.
Oh, and she has an official Web site which you can visit here.
Sadly, the FAQ page does not list her height (or bra size), but here's a page with pictures of her.

Crazy Hot Italian Mystery

Commenter Nhannie responded to my often asked question about why people think Giada De Laurentiis is a dwarf on one of my older posts:

i ended up here on a "giada dwarf" google search....and i'll tell you why so many people think she is one! she has an enormous head, and really short arms, for the size of her torso.

Okay, I'll grant you the big head thing - though I personally think it's more a matter of having an extremely skinny neck - but I've never noticed the thing about her arms. Though honestly, I don't see how anyone can readily notice anything beyond the schnozz, the crazy eyes and too-wide smile, and, of course, the boobs.
Still, all one really needs to do is just watch the show and have it confirmed that she's not a dwarf.
She frequently interacts with people of "normal" proportions, and the expense of "Giada-sizing" a kitchen, cooking implements, and ingredients if she were a dwarf would hardly be worth it, I should think.
I just can't see looking at her and thinking "dwarf." My initial response was "psycho," based on those crazy eyes and that maniacal smile.
Besides, if you look at the success of Little People, Big World on TLC, it would seem foolish for Food Network to cover up the fact that one of its stars is a little person, as having a dwarf cooking show would likely mean big ratings (pun intended).
And for the record, once again I will state that I've seen her in person and she is not a dwarf.

Crazy Hot Italian Bikini

Here's a clip from Giada's new show in which she's seen in a blue bikini, is apparently not pregnant, and either rides around on a miniature jet ski or is proving once and for all that she's not a dwarf.
I found it via checking the search results of someone who came here looking for it.
So here it is.

Spit Or Swallow?

Following a link that turned up from a Threshold visitor's Giada De Laurentis search, I found this little piece of wonderfullness.
I hope you enjoy it more than Giada appears to be enjoying her sorbet. It honestly looks like she's doing a screen test for a video with a title like Down the Hatch: Crazy Hot Italian Editon or Crazy Hot Italian Swallows, vol. 34.

Monokini Cavegirl

Okay, in response to the hits I get from people searching on the movie Bikini Cavegirl (AKA Teenage Cavegirl), I've done a few cavegirl pictures, though none of them have actually been related to the movie.
However, a bit ago I found a picture of actress Jezebelle Bond, who played Tahra, the titular - in more ways than one - cavegirl (whether it be Teenage or Bikini), dressed up in (part of) her costume from the movie and so I did a picture (using the line art/vector shading style) for those Cavegirl purists out there who want to see Jezebelle as Tahra getting the artistic treatment.
Be advised that she is topless in the picture, so keep that in mind before clicking on the link to this NSFW picture.
So there you go. I'm sure if you search Usenet or the torrents you'll find all kinds of pictures and videos of Jezebelle in even greater state of undress and engaging in all sorts of naughty behavior, but, once again, you won't find that here.
Oh, and on the topic of weird search strings, I've gotten enough people coming here on this one that I really need to know what's up with the whole "is Giada a dwarf?" thing.
WTF are you people looking for? Are you talking about some other Giada besides the Crazy Hot Italian Chick? If so, wouldn't it be rather easy to tell? I mean, sure, there's some sort of distinction between the different kinds of little people, but what does it matter to you if this other Giada is suffering from dwarfism versus cretinism?
Is there some weird rumor that's going around that they're using special effects to make her look like she isn't one on her show?
If you are talking about Giada De Laurentis, I can tell you from personal experience that she is actually a fairly tall woman, well over five feet and by no stretch (or compression) of the imagination could she be considered a dwarf, unless she's actually from a race of giants or something. Is that what the rumor is?
But I want to know what this is about. Is it a WoW/Everquest thing? Midget porn? What is the deal?
Seriously, if you are a person who came here to find out if Giada - whoever she may be - is a dwarf, please leave a comment explaining why you're trying to find that out. You can leave it anonymously, but please explain it to me.
(Oh, and I still don't know if she's pregnant.)

This One I Can Answer

Okay, I've seen a lot of weird search strings that have brought people here.
One of the main searches that brings people here is asking whether or not Giada De Laurentis is pregnant, which I don't know.
However, I recently got a hit from someone wondering whether or not Giada is a dwarf.
That was a "Wha-huh?" moment for me.
It is, however, a question that, unlike the pregnancy one, I can actually answer, as I've seen her in person.
No, she is not a dwarf.
I can't even imagine why anyone might think that she possibly could be, but even so, the answer remains no, she isn't.
To get back to the pregnancy, thing, though, I will share everything - as little as that is - that I know about it.
Several months ago I saw some new episodes of Everyday Italian. In one of them Giada appeared to be wearing a maternity outfit.
The episodes that are airing now seem to be reruns of those episodes that were new several months ago, by the way.
Bear in mind that this was several months ago, and as I learned while listening to her speak at the National Book Festival, production of the show is done in blocks twice a year.
So the new episodes I saw months ago were probably filmed a few months before that, so if she was pregnant at that time, odds are she's had the baby by now.
Further, when she appeared on Iron Chef America recently - which was filmed much more recently than the episode in which I thought she might be wearing a maternity top - she appeared as slender as usual. So again, if she was pregnant, she probably isn't now.
And that's all I can tell you.

Slow News Day

I didn't do much of anything today beyond cooking a pot roast in the crock pot.
Oh, and undoing all of the recovery I'd achieved on the whole carpal tunnel front by not doing any drawing for the past few days by working on a drawing today.
(It was an Heroic Portrait request for Kathleen)
Beyond that I watched a marathon of Flip That House on TLC, and of course tuned in to A&E to see Tanya Memme on Sell This House and Move This House.
Like I do every Sunday, I got a few hits from people searching for Tanya. Basically, I'm guessing, they see the show, think, "She's hot; I need to find nude pictures of her," do a search, end up here becuase I've mentioned her a few times, say, "This guy sucks and his blog is retarded!" when they see an utter lack of nude pictures of her here, then go off to wherever it is people go when leaving a boring-ass blog that doesn't have nude pictures of semi-celebrities in disgust.
During the week I get a few hits from people searching for her. Most of the searches during the week seem to come from her fellow Canadians.
(Since I mentioned her in this post, I'll say, "Hello, Canadians!" as it's boutnd to attract a few of you.)
Speaking of traffic hits, the seekers of knowledge about any sort of Crazy Hot Italian Pregnancies have been totally wailing on me today. I still don't know if she is now or has ever been knocked up, people, and I'm not terribly interested in finding out for you, so even if I knew, I wouldn't say.
So maybe I do know and I'm just lying and saying that I don't. So think about that.
Tomorrow I'm off to the dentist, then Tuesday it's the chiropractor, and Thursday....*Sigh*...it's back to work.
Okay, obviously it's not like I've been having the time of my life while off from work because, honestly, I'm pretty sure that the time of my life happened already, and probably wasn't really all that great anyway, but let's be honest, I'd rather not be working than be working. It's really that simple.
Sadly that doesn't bring in the kind of money that working does, so I'll be up hours before the sun on Thursday morning making my way through altogether more traffic than there reasonably ought to be that early in the morning.
Anyway, I saw that I was getting a lot more hits than usual today, so I figured I should post something.
Consider something posted.

This Entry Has No Title

My mom has gotten word that the tissue received from my dad has helped a total of 115 people.
Most notably, there are two women who are now able to see thanks to my dad’s eyes.
So that’s all pretty cool, and my dad would have been glad to know that he managed to help so many people.
I’m glad that so many people could be helped, and it’s good to know that in this way my dad lives on, but I’m selfish enough to wish that my dad were just alive instead.
Ah well.
As was mentioned, I didn’t do much yesterday. Mostly I waited for A&E to finish with the back-to-back episodes of 24 and their airing of Philadelphia and get on with airing episodes of Sell This House so that I could get my Tanya Memme fix.
Once it finally got started, though, I found myself torn between watching Tanya, watching this cheesy but still kind of cool mockumentary on Animal Planet called Prehistoric Park in which the basic idea was that time-travel technology was being used to capture live specimens of extinct animals using Walking With Dinosaurs style CGI, and an episode of Iron Chef America on Food Network that featured Iron Chefs Bobby Flay and Mario Batali squaring off with help from special guests Rachael Ray and Giada De Laurentis.
For the Iron Chef thing I wasn’t paying much attention to Flay vs. Batali, as I was most interested in seeing Giada vs. Rachael Ray.
Giada was paired with Flay, Rachael was with Batali.
Of course, because I was flipping back and forth between three shows I missed out on seeing who actually won.
Still, the most interesting moment came when the Flay/De Laurentis team was being judged.
Among the judges was former Daily Show correspondent Mo Rocca, who made some amusing comments, most notably when he warned one of the other judges who was being especially critical of one of her dishes about the fact that Giada is Italian, at which point Giada agreed, made a crazy face and began making a stabbing motion.
It was a Crazy Hot Italian Moment!
Mo also earned himself some love by making a joke about whether or not Italian cops eat the Italian donuts that Giada had made. This got her to laugh – which made her look just as crazy as she did when “pretending” to be psycho – and to give him a hug.
Anyway, the show was noteworthy inasmuch as it’s about as close as I’m likely to get to seeing Giada and Rachael clad in bikinis and locked in combat in a kid’s pool full of oil (EVOO, of course).
And for the record, my money would be on Giada, as you can never underestimate the power of crazy.
Once that was over I turned my full attention back on Tanya and the house staging. I like the home improvement related shows, but I really don’t think Sell This House would be as interesting if it weren’t for Tanya and her various outfits.
Still, I am amazed at the wide-range of asking prices for hones across the country. Some seem amazingly low compared to NoVA, while others just make you wonder how anyone can possibly afford them.
I mean, there was this townhouse in Brooklyn that was selling for $825,000. It was a house that would probably sell for half as much around here. It wasn’t in a “ritzy” neighborhood, and apart from just being relatively spacious it didn’t have much going for it to justify a price like that.
It was basically just a standard house in the suburbs, a nice middle-class house.
So given that it wasn’t like it would appeal to the upper-class, who is the homebuyer that can afford to buy a place like that? Is the average income in that area really high enough to support a mortgage like that?
I don’t get it. I mean, there has to come a point when prices are just too high for even upper middle class people to afford, yet are not nice enough for the truly wealthy to bother with.
But whatever.
Somewhere along the line yesterday I realized that I wasn’t going to cook anything and that I didn’t want pizza, so I was going to have to venture out into the world.
This meant venturing only so far as my car and then taking that through a McDonald’s drive-through, but it’s a lot more venturing that I was in the mood for.
It made me kind of miss living in Ashburn where everything was a lot closer than it is where I’m living now. I mean, I had a grocery store and several restaurants just across the street, and the McDonald’s was a much closer drive.
Oh well.
This morning I ventured out again and did some grocery shopping. That was about as exciting as it always is.
Afterwards I watched the movie Jesus Camp, which I had downloaded the other night.
It was pretty disturbing to watch these kids being subjected to standard brainwashing techniques employed by groups that would be classified as cults by Christians – and to see the people doing the brainwashing be totally unapologetic for that fact. That they’re using the same tactics as “the enemy” doesn’t concern them in the slightest. They’ll do whatever it takes to accomplish their goals.
(Like Jack T. Chick, who by his own admission was inspired to create comic tracts based on the success that the Communist party had in China by using tracts. Some Chick tracts actually had cameo appearances in the movie.)
Of course, despite being genuinely terrifying, the movie did have some moments of pure comedy, such as the assembly in Christian Rap was being performed. There was just something so funny about hearing some white kids who would make Pat Boone look like Tupac engaging in some hardcore rapping.
After all, JC is the OG.
We all kickin’ it for Christ, indeed.
(Jack wouldn’t have approved of the use of Christian Rock and Rap music, by the way. Christian popular music is just one of the Devil’s tricks.)
And that was pretty much my day.