Thin

via Daily Prompt: Thin

Thin

In anything else, thin is bad.  Thin walls, thin logic, thin resume.  All indications of insufficiency.  Thinly veiled threats don’t fool anyone.  Thinned paint shows the old color beneath.  “It’s a thin line between ___ and ___…”  Fill in the blanks.  Sanity and Madness, Love and Hate, Order and Chaos.  The thin line represents a precarious balance.  No one talks about the bold line, the thick line, the substantial line.

Thick, substantial walls protect.  Substantial logic has weight in arguments.  A thick resume indicates loads of education and experience.  All these things are considered good.  A bold character gets the leads in movies and plays.

So why do women want to fit into a size 0?  Why are ribs sexy?  Why don’t you want your thighs to touch?  It’s better to be rich and thin?  If I were rich, I would EAT BETTER!  I wouldn’t stay thin for very long–that’s for sure!  When so many are starving to death because they can’t get food, why do we emulate them in a rich country where people can walk into a grocery store and buy ANY food they want?  It makes no sense to me for anyone (male or female) would want to look like they haven’t had a good meal in months when they have access to anything they’d want to eat.

Skinny people exist.  They have high metabolism and cannot gain weight.  They are not half-starved because they eat a tiny piece of lettuce and spit it out.  They are healthy as far as their bodies are concerned.  Can you be healthy and not thin or skinny.  Of course!  Look at the athletes at any Olympics.  They have honed their bodies so that the demands of their sports are met.  They are flexible where they need to be flexible, they are powerful and fast.  Dancers should be the same way, but still some will starve themselves to look good on stage.

It is in my humble opinion that people want to be thin because of whom they think are watching.  If they weren’t on stage, on TV, in the movies, in the magazines, basically ON DISPLAY like a manikin in a store, they would not obsess on how much weight they appear to carry.   You should be comfortable in your skin, able to move and do the things you love without the side effects of too much or too little weight.  Your dance partner shouldn’t wonder if he’ll drop you because you’re too big.  He should also not worry about accidentally throwing you through the ceiling.

Not a big fan of “thin.”

Ren Faire!

Ren Fairs are interesting…

It’s where people may or may not dress up as they think people would have dressed up in the 1200-1700’s.  500 years of fashion stuffed unceremoniously into a market.  Oh and it may be Renaissance or Fantasy.  You’ll see people with horns and wings and feathers.  They’ll wear midriff baring outfits and nun’s robes.  They’ll wear faux pirate gear and costumes that include armor from 4 different countries and 3 different centuries of manufacture.  They’ll wear $400 boots with a “I made this myself” fairy costume.  They’re selling wooden swords, beer steins, and games.  You want a weapon?  There are plastic and aluminum copies of authentic arms, and light sabers.  Tacky jewelry to works of art can be 2 tents from each other.

Turkey legs–smoked and served in aluminum foil and a paper basket or fish ‘n’ chips seem to be the popular food.  Why is this funny?  No turkeys in Europe until 1550’s and then not to common people.

But…I love Ren Fairs!!!  The choreographed fights, the belly dancing, the fake English Accents (because all Renaissance fairs are English) the trolls and creatures and costumes, and those dam turkey legs.

I got to thinking.  Did the people in the Renaissance have 1C Fairs?  Did people dress up in Roman and Greek outfits?  Would the tourists dress up in their favorite apostle garb?  Everyone would have had to speak in a very bad Greek or Latin accent.  They’d have to lose the colorful outfits they wore and choose plain peasant robes.

(Yes, those are authentic outfits from the Renaissance.  These below were designed by Michelangelo…not the turtle, the guy that did David…)

Go to the 1C fair!  Wear a sheet!  Might have different pagan gods, fair folk, leprechauns, and other mythical creatures on display and wandering on the midway, and those that still worship those gods waiting for the lightning to strike.  Instead of jousts and such, they could feed the Christians to the Lions at 1:00 3:00 and 5:30 shows.  (No not REAL lions!  They wouldn’t get volunteers that way!)  They could serve Roman Pork and wine and some beer from Goth.  The Goths would wander around the fair and threaten the civilized people dressed as Romans.  It could be fun.

Or you could go REALLY far back and have Ark-Fest!  They could have a large boat on display with all sorts of zoological exhibits.  They could have a rain dance!  They could throw fake rocks at each other!  They could close the Festival every night by having 1 guy at the top of the tower yelling through a megaphone, “Was that Thunder I heard?”

Why Can’t I Bitch About My Non-Flying Car Now?

Quite an insight!

Puppettron's Blog

The other day, my friend Qwill posted a little something to her blog about social networks and work, which got me thinking about a lot of issues with Freedom of Speech lately.  Her little piece on her own experience with social networking and the workplace reminded me that there was a lot of things we are now being restricted from doing for no real good reason anymore.

We’re all well aware of the restrictions to free speech that the vast majority of us were down with immediately after 9/11.  Sure, many of us are still incensed about the whole thing, and most of us thought that Freedom Fries was about the dumbest thing we’d ever seen, but for a good 3 months or so, all but the most hardcore rights activists were

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Democracy is Something We Believe in, for Some Reason

Egad! The boy was born in the wrong decade! Should have been here in the 60’s. The protests of the 60’s cannot happen now. Our voices are being shunted off to the corner of ambivalence and ineffectiveness so our representative government represents no one!

Puppettron's Blog

We spend a lot of our time talking about democracy here in the US, which is hilarious since we’ve never really had one. Sure, we’re a republic, which runs off representative democracy, but even then, we’ve done everything in our power to ensure that we don’t have a democracy and rationalizing our actions against it as necessary to preserve it. It’s like we’re building a house, but deliberately leaving out the foundation and load-bearing walls while insisting that the lean-to that we’ve ended up with is better than the house because the things we’re leaving out can be used to destroy the house we wanted.

For a democracy to work, you need the unfettered voice of the people. That’s something we’ve literally never had though. When the Great Experiment started, they restricted the vote to land owners, and the electoral college was put into place to actually do the voting…

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Offensive vs Offending

Deep stuff here! I love it!

Puppettron's Blog

One of the strange things to come out of the culture wars of the 10s is a weird argument over the sharing of opinions. I mean, other than ideological battles and literal nazis coming back into view. Man, this decade is completely fucked up, isn’t it?

So, a lot of what’s going around, particularly in the pictures-with-words memes is this idea from the ideological right that everyone’s problem with the things they say is that they’re personally offended by those things. It is, in fact, a big part of the culture there that they’re these brave folks who’re speaking their mind in the face of cultural marxism or whatever and that we need to get over our butt-hurt and be real men or whatever. It’s basically a big joke where the whiny liberal SJW can’t change the channel and ignore the things they don’t like, stemming from a real fear…

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Movie Bistro Madness

Come!  Enjoy your movie in the luxury of a recliner!  No sticky floors!  $7 for a ticket!  Unless you order it online to make sure you HAVE a seat when you get there, then it’s $13.  Unless you have our rewards card so you can order on line and get it for $7.  And that’s not all!  In every theater before the previews start, you get an advertisement for the Bistro Theater…4 theaters in the complex where they bring the food TO you!  You want to see an early movie, but you hesitate because you either have to have dinner at 4:00, buy dinner on the way in at 5:00 and hope they’re not so busy that you’re late and cannot get a ticket (unless, of course you already have your ticket…see above) or you wait until 10:00 when the movie gets out and have Taco Bell right before you go to bed.  Taco Bell at 10 pm can have unfortunate consequences.  The Bistro solves all those problems!  TaDAAAA!

“Be sure to get here and order from our chef-inspired menu and have the wait staff bring the food to you in the theater!  You want more to drink or another dessert?  Push the call button and have your payment ready.”  The food on the screen looks like something out of the gourmet chef shows on the food network.  It’s beautifully plated on square plates and artfully drizzled with just the right amount of sauce.  That’s a lot of effort for a chicken sandwich.

When you go to the ticket counter and pick out your seat, the cashier says, “Hey! and you’re in the Bistro so you can skip the concession lines and just order from your seat!  Enjoy your movie!”  Woohoo!  So you go to the theater, find your seat, get comfy and wait for the server to get to you.  Theater is nearly empty because you did arrive 30 min before the show as they suggest when going to a bistro movie.

Dum de dum de dum…no wait staff IN the theater.  7 guys and 2 old ladies are sitting there playing the screen games and they already have their food.  Silly people.  They do not have chef-inspired cuisine to munch on before the movies starts.  Still no wait staff.  Hmmm.  Press the call button.  The theater darkens.  The two actions are not related, but seem ominous.  The server sure enough comes to your chair and pushes your call button so it goes off and asks for your order.  By this time, you’ve forgotten what you wanted to eat and it’s too dark to read the menu.  “I’ll have chef-inspired popcorn with buttery topping please…small, and a bottle of your Blue Mountain Dew.”  “What flavor is the blue mountain dew?”  “I don’t know, it’s blue.  I don’t buy it for the name.  Find the Mountain Dew in your cooler and if it’s blue, that’s it.”  “Do you have your rewards card?” “Yup and here’s my payment,” and I hand him my debit card.  Why debit card?  Because remember it’s dark and I cannot now see my money.  He processes my card, prints out the receipt for me to sign, hands me his pen and runs off, leaving me with the receipt and the pen.

He doesn’t come back.  “Yoo Hoo?”  I must be in an action/adventure movie because all the previews are super heroes and dystopian futures and incredible rescues from disasters.  Dum de dum de dum.  10 min into previews.  Still hasn’t picked up the receipt or his pen.  I hit the call button again.  2 servers walk by me and ignore me with food for other people.  Remember those 7 guys and the 2 little old ladies?  They are looking at me with pity and those eyes that say, “Silly person!  You could have had your chef-inspired popcorn and your drink when you came in and would have consumed most of the popcorn by now…and it would have been HOT popcorn…”  I’m so foolish.  I press the call button again.  He shows up and wants to know if I want to add to my order.  I say no but here’s your pen and the receipt…thought you might need it.

It occurs to me that maybe the servers are on some sort of reality show.  They have to get the orders from the patrons, go to the kitchen, prepare the chef-inspired delicious hamburgers, nachos, and fries to order (there are no substitutions) and get them out to the patrons Gordon Ramsey style.  “You ^(*&%*&( idiot!  You can’t plate that hamburger like that!  Redo that!” and then throws the food on the floor.  “But Gordon!  It’s dark!  They don’t even know if I got their orders right!”  “Oh right then.  Put the sloppy mess back on the plate and get it out of here…scrape off the dirt and such.”  Meanwhile, the previews are over, and it’s last call for orders.  One server in the whole theater, and call buttons lit up all over.  It gives an eerie blue glow about the room.  I have now been in the theater for 40 min.

Once again the screen lights up to tell us that next time we should arrive 30 min before the show so we can have our chef-inspired pizza and beer brought to us and I think, “It really doesn’t take that long to put popcorn in a bag and grab a bottle does it?”  The movie starts.  The ship is blown to smithereens, the bad guys are throwing debris about with a wave of their hands and monstrous mountains with vaguely human features are wielding building-sized weapons to threaten our heroes.  At least I think so.  In the first 15 min of the movie, there have been 8 servers walking between me and the screen delivering food to OTHER customers in the dark.  How can they see the seat numbers?  AHHHH!  Finally!  Here’s my chef-inspired popcorn and dew.  It’s the latest in movie cuisine–like iced coffee and cold soup (Vichyssoise).  Room temperature popcorn.

In a restaurant, 1 server can work with 12-16 customers.  Ideally then, this bistro should have about 5-7 servers.  They should stand near their sections and greet you when you find your seat.  All the orders should be taken while the lights are still on.  If you have a party of 4 with dinner-type orders and a person by himself with a small snack order, you put in the order to the kitchen for the dinners, and grab the snack and the drink on your way back to the theater and serve the single.  As your section fills up, you take orders from the newcomers.  Put in the dinner orders, check on previous orders and pick up the drinks and deliver those to the people who have ordered.  Return to kitchen and pick up any dinner orders that have been completed.  Take orders from recently seated people.  Put in new orders at kitchen, check to see if any orders are filled and ready to deliver.  If not, get the drinks out.  Go back to kitchen grab filled orders and deliver, repeat. And as always, if you have a drink/snack order, get it out immediately.  The only people you should be taking orders from after the lights go out are the latecomers.

If you are going to run 4 bistros in a theater, you’d DAM well better have a big kitchen and plenty of cooks.  You have to serve 240 customers in 30 min or less.

I’m going to order my chef-inspired popcorn and Blue Dew at the counter from now on.