Netflix

It’s Possible I’m Going to Eat You When This Is Over

ME Overly simple thoughts , , ,

So I was bored the other day and started looking up recipes. Don’t get excited, I don’t plan to cook anything. I just like to look at the pictures and read the recipes and think to myself, “Wow, people who have time to make cornbread and shove it up a turkey’s ass really need to invest in Netflix.”

Even though I don’t plan to put any effort into cooking something, the thought of experimenting with recipes was intriguing so I started to take stock of my own culinary expertise. I eventually realized that the only really great recipe missing from my life is for a human marinade. Why would I need to marinate a human being, you ask? Please. It’s like you don’t even know me.

Let’s avoid violating the Fifth Amendment for a moment and assume that I need this awesome human rubbing spice concoction in case the apocalypse happens. Which apocalypse? Doesn’t matter. I’m just a girl who likes to be prepared to slow roast my fellow man in case of pending starvation…or in case I need to hide the body.

AllRecipes.com was shockingly low on marinade recipes that would fit the bill, so I had to do a little comparison shopping on my different cuts of meat and cross-reference the whole project with what I’d assume an actual person tasted like. We have to take into account things like the fact that adult humans should be fairly stringy and have used their meaty muscles a lot, in which case an alcohol-based marinade will help a lot with the gamey taste. We should also consider the fact that the apocalypse might end up being surprisingly low-carb once all the bread stuffs have molded, so I’ll want a sauce that pairs well with different natural sources of gluten and shrink-wrapped saltines. Sugary marinades are probably not a good idea because the last thing you want at the eat-your-neighbor end of the world is to be sluggish  since you’ll just end up marinating in someone else’s cook pot before nightfall.

Cooking methods were another conundrum. The obvious choice would be grilling over a low flame while the remainder of the meat smokes for later consumption, but the smell of succulentness will just bring on the hordes of hungry survivors and you’ll end up fighting for a pinkie toe before it’s over. Boiled meat is never good (sorry British readers), and we’re already eating a low-grade meat as it is. I think certain methods of cooking the meat in a pit of coals while covering it to trap the smoke might be the way to go.

Before anyone gets nervous or fidgety and thinks I’ve put way too much effort into my research, let me tell you that I drew the line at looking up good side dish recipe, for obvious reasons…I mean, what goes with human hamstring, right? Nothing! And besides, if I had a bunch of side dishes lying around, would I really be resorting to cannibalism? At least that’s the defense I plan to use with the judge.

Hollywood, You Lied to Me

ME Overly simple thoughts , , ,

There had better be a Starbucks there when I crash.

I am not ashamed to admit that every so often I get so wrapped up in a good TV show that it becomes nearly a medically diagnosed obsession. I have given up tickets to concerts, passed up camping trips, and even secretly skipped an obscure relative’s wedding (oh c’mon, we all know what a fruitcake she is, surely this won’t be her only wedding!), all because I was going to have to miss a new episode of my favorite show.

Netflix saved my sanity—and all future Christmas dinners with obscure relatives—by offering complete seasons of TV shows on disc. No wait, on streaming. No, back to discs. Nope, it’s streaming, I’m sure of it.

Even better, I’ve learned that I don’t have to actually watch shows on any given network time slot because I can just watch the entire series from start to finish without ever having to suffer a rerun or cliffhanger. So when I saw the show LOST being advertised on Netflix, I decided to never watch a single episode until they had pulled the entire series off the air, then I was going to watch all of the episodes at once while on vacation from work or the next time I’m laid up in bed recovering from hernia surgery. It made complete sense at the time.

Alas, it is not to be. I won’t be watching so much as the opening credits. Here’s why.

I’m currently typing this from somewhere over a stretch of land fairly close to Detroit. I’m in the smallest of passenger planes, wedged amongst a college guy who yells loudly while playing Angry Birds on his iPhone, an older woman who hasn’t stopped coughing since we left Atlanta, and a man who does not understand that the armrest marks the official border between the Land of His Seat and my own Seatopia.

I saw the commercials for LOST when it first came on the air and I am here to tell you with full authority that there are never that many beautiful people on one airplane. They lied to me.

Am I the only one who thought it was kind of strange that the survivors washed up on the island already haggard and stubbly, like they hadn’t shaved that morning before heading to the airport just in case they were going to be marooned on an island and wanted to look the part? And as the season wore on, why were all of the gorgeously stubbly-faced hottie men STILL stubbly faced? Unless someone had snuck a communal razor in his carry-on bag and the bag magically washed ashore, how were these men not sporting ZZ Top beards?

And is no one else worried that by the middle of season three the lone fat guy was still supremely overweight? Was he eating the extra cast members? Shouldn’t more people have been disappearing off the island as he struggled to maintain his Rubenesque figure?

Nope, the reality of airline travel struck and I’m done with pretty people masquerading as actual TSA passengers. It does kind of explain the government’s rush-job to develop, “I can see you naked through your clothes technology,” but that’s a whole other channel you’re not going to get me to watch.

The Idiot Box, Recycled

ME Overly simple thoughts , , , ,

 

While all of America has had the best time laughing at Netflix over the “We’re-a-disc-service-now-we’re-a-streaming-service-no-wait!-now-we’re-either-one-SURPRISE!-it-was-all-a-dream-we’re-kidding,” debacle, the movie service has had one unwavering devotee…my child.

Once the magic of having programming instantly appear on your TV screen happened (you know, like TV has done for years now), she literally spent about two weeks simply scrolling through the viewing options on the Netflix streaming pages. Sadly, there are a lot of shows on Netflix that no one wants to watch.

Unless you’re the only eleven-year-old girl in the Northern Hemisphere who isn’t allowed to watch Twilight yet. Then there are TONS of shows on Netflix that you can enjoy.

I suffered in silence while my daughter watched every episode of Monk ever made, including the school holidays where she would stage a MONKathon, complete with snacks and a chalk outline of a body on the living room carpet. I even tolerated old episodes of The Golden Girls with very little right-eye-twitching, mostly because Betty White is enjoying a pop-culture comeback and her Twitter user name is @BettyFckinWhite. What’s not to love?

But then my daughter discovered The Cosby Show. You know, that completely believable television show about a family living in New York where the mom is a lawyer and the dad is a doctor and they have five kids but miraculously not a single one of them ever snuck out with the car and got pulled over for DUI with three ounces of weed and an unregistered gun under the seat. The worst thing about that show was not the completely fake family with the laugh track and adorable jumping-the-shark add-on characters (uh, hello? Raven-Symone, anyone?). The worst part of the show was Bill Cosby’s sweaters.

We tried really hard to help her over this obsession by trying to convince her that the actress who played Rudy is actually a Greyhound bus driver now, or that Theo’s character became a cross dresser in episode 165. We started to tell her that the actress who played Denise ended up in drug rehab, but that actually happened so that joke is off limits.

Towards the end of this non-stop Huxtable spree, a new character came along. Some convoluted storyline involving a streetwise smart-mouthed cousin appeared in order to breathe new life into the show. Or as my daughter put it, to “reach a different demographic than the show had already been working with.” Weird, I don’t remember sending her to private school.

At last, tonight we reached the final episode. The family gathered in the living room (Cosby’s family, not mine…I couldn’t pay my husband to watch it and I was only there to make sure we saw it through to its end of days) and reminisced before Theo graduated from college. The trip down memory lane took two episodes. I tried to convince my daughter that the whole series ended with a tragic house fire with all the cast members present (except Denise, who was still in drug rehab), but she didn’t believe me.

Now that the series has ended—AGAIN, I hesitate to point out—she has found a new show to love. Storage Wars. Yes, a reality show about people who root through the discarded contents of other people’s abandoned mini-storage units. Where’s a sparkly vampire movie when you need one?