It Tries To Warn You Itself With Its Terrible Taste*

While I’ve been a lot more conscious about what I eat, I’ve still been pretty lazy about actually preparing my own food. During the week I opt to bring in a breakfast of a low-carb protein shake, peanut-granola bar, and yogurt. Being too lazy to cook, I end up buying lunch, trying to go with something reasonably healthy, or at least low in carbs. Then when I get home – remember, I’m too lazy to cook – I usually have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich (all-natural peanut butter, sugar free preserves), a bowl of high-fiber cereal, and maybe some yogurt or another peanut-granola bar.

Yesterday I decided to be slightly more ambitious, so for breakfast/lunch I made a dozen or so Fiber One pancakes, with the intent of having the leftover pancakes for breakfast throughout the week. In the evening I decided to actually cook something. I’ve been seeing a lot of references in places such as the healthy meals cookbook I got from my sister Kim for my birthday – by the way, thanks for the cookbook - to people making mashed cauliflower as a low-carb alternative to mashed potatoes, so I decided to make that along with some chicken breasts. I figured the leftovers would allow me to bring lunch at least a couple of times during the week.

It all turned out pretty well, but about an hour and a half after I ate, my stomach started churning, and for the next several hours there was a lot of bad stuff going on (and coming out of me). Upon reflection, I realized that, while it looked okay, I had no idea how long ago I’d bought the cauliflower in question. Given that I think I’d have been a lot sicker if it had been the chicken, I suspect that the cauliflower was the cause of my gastrointestinal distress.

Regardless, with the constant trips to the bathroom – and the fact that the sickness seemed to be wreaking havoc with my sugar – I didn’t get much sleep, and I woke up this morning feeling very tired and, well, drained. My stomach still felt pretty uneasy as well. I thought about calling in, but decided against it, though once I arrived at work I realized that I really should have just stayed home, so, after going to the one meeting I had for the day, I headed home around noon.

I managed to get a bit of sleep and started feeling better, and have managed to eat without having the food take the express train out of me.

Now I seem to be mostly back to normal. Of course, my plans for bringing in the leftover chicken and cauliflower – not knowing which is the culprit, I will be avoiding both – in for lunch have gone, er, down the drain.

All The Nudes That’s Fit To Print Department:

Years ago, when they held the licensing rights to the character, in addition to the regular color comics series Conan the Barbarian (monthly) and King Conan/Conan the King (bi-monthly), Marvel used to publish a black and white magazine called The Savage Sword of Conan the Barbarian, which I believe was on a quarterly schedule.

Not being a standard comic, Savage Sword was sold in a lot of places that didn’t normally carry comics, and, more significant to the point of this Department, did not fall under the guidelines of the Comics Code Authority.

I started picking up Savage Sword on a semi-regular basis sometime in the early 80s, shortly after the release of the movie, and I was sort of surprised at the somewhat more violent and risqué content compared to the regular comics. The differences weren’t extreme; there was a lot more blood, though being black and white it just looked like ink, the dialogue was just slightly more bawdy (I distinctly recall a scene in which two uncouth brigands are preparing to rape a woman they’ve found bathing in a stream and one of them says that they’re going to play a game called “Horsey in the Stable,” just before Conan swoops in and protects her virtue [which she later gives to him]), and there was usually a fair amount more exposed skin than was shown by even the most scantily-clad of the various wenches and maidens who appeared in the regular comics.

There was, however, very little in the way of full-on nudity. There’d be a fair amount of side-boob and the occasional bare bottom, but it was a rare thing indeed to see an actual depiction of a female nipple, and when that did happen, it was usually on one of the pin-up pages included in the book featuring action scenes depicted by various artists. At best, if a fully-exposed breast was shown, you got some semi-circles that indicated the outer edges of the areolas.

In recent years, Dark Horse Comics acquired the rights to Conan and in addition to publishing new books has been reprinting much of the old Marvel runs, including several volumes collecting Savage Sword.

I’ve picked up six of the Savage Sword reprints, and am currently making my way through Volume 6, which will bring me up to a point a couple of years before I started reading Savage Sword back in the day. In reading the reprints of these stories from the 70s, I’ve noticed something: naked breasts complete with nipples. Lots of them.

So this has led me to wonder something. Did Marvel editorial originally order an artistic cover-up of all the boobage when they were publishing Savage Sword, and now Dark Horse is simply reprinting the original, unedited art? Or did Savage Sword feature a lot of nudity up until the point at which I started reading it and then stop?

I suspect that it’s the former, and that Dark Horse is simply reprinting the art as it was originally submitted, but there’s another part of me that thinks that given how much The Universe likes to mess with me – and that it’s been doing so for my entire life – Savage Sword simply stopped featuring full-on nudity just as I started reading it.

If so, the joke’s on The Universe, because with the hormones raging through my system back then, even the almost-but-not-quite nudity that I found in Savage Sword every few months was more than enough for my purposes.

*The Simpsons reference in the title of the post is actually in reference to broccoli, not cauliflower, but it still works (even though I do actually like the taste of both).

New(?) Year

So the new year is well and truly upon us, a chance for new beginnings and fresh starts, a time to reflect upon the lessons of the previous year even as we look forward to the new lessons that lie ahead.
Or, you know, to just keep doing what we’ve been doing.
I’m not one for making resolutions, and, honestly, I’m more likely to just keep doing what I’ve been doing, so while there are some new beginnings and fresh starts ahead for me, I don’t foresee any astounding changes waiting for me in 2008.
There will be more money waiting for me, which is clearly a good thing, and what looks to be a more interesting and fulfilling job that will be providing said money, which is also a good thing.
But working five days a week? That I’m not looking forward to.
I suppose the inevitable question of “Jon, what did you do for New Years?” arises, or at least I’m saying, for rhetorical purposes, that it arises, and my answer to the question is, unsurprisingly, “Not much.”
I’d gone grocery shopping the morning of New Year’s Eve and had bought some sort of cheap steak that I wasn’t sure what to do with, so I opted to make Swiss Steak. It turned out okay, though the gravy was a bit bland. Apart from that, I parked my ass on the couch and watched HGTV for a few hours. The parking my ass on the couch part was the result of me not wanting to head back upstairs to the office to work on the Katherine Heigl picture. By that point I’d finished pretty much everything except the hair. Hair, as most regular readers know, is sort of my nemesis when it comes to drawing, and the hair in this particular image was especially challenging. I think the end result of my slapdash attempt at rendering the complex do turned out okay, but it’s got nothing on the real deal, but if I’d tried to render a perfect copy of the original, I’d probably have ended up working on it all through 2008, so, as I usually, I settled for what I could manage.
Working on the picture carried me through the end of 2007 and into the beginning of 2008.
Now I’m certain that there are worse ways to spend your New Year’s Eve than putting the finishing touches on a rendering of Katherine Heigl’s side boob, but I’m not certain that there are any ways that are sadder or more pathetic.
Still, “sad and pathetic” was an appropriate note on which to end one year and begin the next for me, so it all works out in the end, I guess.
Yesterday was even less active. I called my mom, and then later she called me so that I could talk to my nephew Todd, who’d been staying with her, before his mom picked him up.
In the evening I followed this chicken recipe I found online and learned, once again, that it doesn’t pay for me to try to fry breaded chicken, as in the process of removing it from the oil I always end up ripping the breading off.
And that was the exciting way in which I kicked off the new year.