"Europe Relaxes Rules on Sale of Ugly Fruits and Vegetables"

Thank you, EU, for entertaining me this morning. They've eased up laws against oddly shaped produce, which lead to statements like this one:

“This marks a new dawn for the curvy cucumber and the knobbly carrot,” said Mariann Fischer Boel, European commissioner for agriculture, who argued that regulations were better left to market operators.

A new dawn, curvy cucumbers!

But curvy bananas still need to watch out:

The European Union is well known for its detailed regulations on agricultural items. Commission Regulation (EC) 2257/94, for example, states that bananas sold in Europe must be “free from malformation or abnormal curvature,” though Class 1 bananas can have “slight defects of shape,” and Class 2 bananas can have full “defects of shape.” Bananas were not covered in the ruling, so for now, these standards remain.

Haha funny

Two stories that amused me recently:

Make DC Weird by Designing, Buying a T-shirt (WCP City Desk blog)
An English Country Stylist, Unrepentant (NYT)

Favorite excerpts:

1. From Jule, former colleague:

[O]ther cities with weird campaigns, they are more committed to their towns’ weirdness. "They have street performers," she offers as an example.

"So what we need are mimes?," I ask. "Yes," she says. 'Mimes."

"And maybe those people who look like they’re made out of gold, but they’re really not.'

"Yes," she says, "or maybe pewter. Anything metallic."

2) from NYT:

a. Keith Irvine turned 80 last week and threw himself a garage sale to celebrate. "A very elegant garage sale," he said dryly, raising silvery eyebrows.

b. Mr. Irvine can be balky. In the 1980s, he said he suffered a midlife crisis, which he expressed by building an addition to his early 19th-century farmhouse. The addition included a very grand ballroom, and did not include any input from his wife.

"It was very irritating," she said in a phone interview last week. Mrs. Irvine, who has written 13 books on architecture and decorative arts, took her revenge by threatening to have an image of the new wing engraved on expensive stationery emblazoned with the words "Keith’s Erection."

Mad (Wo)men

I am not really sure why this article about women and online advertising exists, considering it's nothing groundbreaking to expose that women go online and, you know, also buy stuff. My favorite part, though, is the fact that one adman interviewed is named Mr. Draper. His lines might as well be coming from Don himself:

"I love women. Women are more than half the population, and they do most of the shopping," said Tim Draper, the venture firm's co-founder and managing director. "We are constantly looking for more sites that cater to women."

Name game

Today I've read two interesting articles about names and naming; the first in Slate (from last week) gives strange examples of people requesting legal changes and the latter in the NY Times visits the Ohio town of Knockemstiff (subject of an eponymous book). The former makes a Johnny Cash joke, and my favorite detail from the NYT story is that the online moniker for one of the interviewees is "Knockemstiffmom."

My favorite (English) professor was particularly into naming: here is his book. I got into it too, and continued writing papers about it, most appropriately for a Dickens class a few years later. Not that something like Hard Times is a very subtle book overall, but hello, school authorities named M'Choakumchild and Thomas Gradgrind. When applied to nonfiction, that is, actual people, good naming is a fine balance between creativity, snobbery, and absurdity. Forcing the name Talula Does the Hula From Hawaii on your kid is just unfair. Why not just Talula? Lulu? Cute! And then there are kids such as those in Robert Rodriguez's clan: Rocket, Racer, Rebel, and Rogue. I like your movies, RR, and love alliteration, but give me a break--like you did your daughter, Rhiannon. Or, for fairness's sake, why couldn't she be Rally or Roar or Relentless? To my 20-something, nonparent mind, it just reeks of forcing your own identity on your kid.

Place-naming doesn't seem to have to play by quite the same rules, because it's attached to something that doesn't have to go to school and get beat up after attendance is taken. At least, Americans have consistently given themselves more room to be literal. A quick Google search turned up Hot Coffee, Miss., Truth or Consequences, N.M, and Sugar Tit, S.C. The source of the first seems sort of obvious (some place with coffee), the New Mexico town renamed itself after a radio contest in 1950. As for Sugar Tit, apparently they want to give up the name (!). My hometown, Emmaus, Pa., has a straightforward Biblical origin, as do nearby Bethlehem, Nazareth, and Egypt. That does not, however, account for East Texas, Pa.

Actual cute overload

Cute is cute, and sweet is sweet. I like especially silly, often nonfunctional cute stuff such as this, this, and this. But the crap in this story about a lobster wedding motif just makes me gag. Especially because they were WRONG about lobsters mating for life. And because they inspired this sentence: "The painting has made the bridegroom as happy as a clam."

I hope for their honeymoon they bought each other matching khaki shorts with embroidered lobsters.