sunday best-of blogging

best song to silently and tranquilly embrace the inevitable to, even while inwardly mourning and resenting the world for forcing you to do so: "casimir pulaski day," sufjan stevens.

best communication breakdown: one of our cardiologists submitted a request for chest x-rays to data entry, and in the patient's history he scribbled a picture of a heart, instead of writing out the word. when the sad, skinny boy in data entry processed the request, the slip that printed out in radiology read, "persistent cough x several days, weak; evidence of love failure." single doctors throughout the building hung photocopies on their office doors.

best item extracted from a dog's intestinal tract: an entire pair of girls' panties, with "sweet" penned in sparkly silver calligraphy across the back above a picture of what i believe is a tightly wrapped piece of saltwater taffy.

best airline meal:


i am totally getting this.

my thanks to ken brown, who also designed the fabulous wrapping paper i mentioned in a previous best-of post. toadie and i are quasi-poor fans, as we haven't actually ordered anything from mr. brown (his minimum postcard order is 12 dozen or something, and while we would find ways to use them, we aren't made of money orders); we are promoting him every chance we get, though, mainly by sporting stolen, photoshopped morsels of his artwork on t-shirts. does that count? we think that counts.

best tortilla chips: the flour tortilla chips available in the prepared-foods section of whole foods. (insert homer simpson drooly noise here.) oh, they're so flaky and greasy and delicious, they dissolve into liquid glee on your tongue. the second best, though, for those who can't always make the trek to mecca, are the tostitos gold chips, which i can sometimes find one lonesome bag of on the bottom shelf of my local supermarket's nacho-fixins end cap, like the gods have stashed their irresistible hydrogenated yumminess away just for me. death by chocolate is a fine idea, but i'll take my final bow salty and oily.

best tradition: from john seabrook's article on the renaissance-era fruits of umbria, published in the september 5 issue of the new yorker, which i am just now finishing:

the dalla ragiones keep many of the traditional umbrian festivals, and at the end of the year they burn la vecchia, the effigy of an old woman made of rags and straw, and livio curses—"vaffanculo, anno vecchio!" ("up your ass, old year!")—and spits into the fire.

i am, as ever, bothered by the new yorker's decision to italicize the closing quotation marks around the italicized text, but not the opening ones. i'm putting it right out of my head, though, because i'm so enchanted with the saying. this family lives pretty close to where we're staying in umbria, so i'll have to make sure our friend and soon-to-be hostess remembers the curse and shouts it drunkenly at the top of her lungs at someone who has no idea what the hell she's saying this new year's eve. she'll be absolutely tickled pink. i'll probably do the same, but i think it'll be funnier for her, since there's a chance that the person she shouts at will think he or she should know what she's saying. unless she comes home and we wind up at the same party, and then we'll just shout it at each other, which i'm sure will be, at the time, the funniest thing yet.

best guilty pleasure: i, um, i love the bee gees. love them. unfortunately, i do not feel better having gotten that off my chest, and i'm still only going to listen to them when no one else is home.

best dream: one of the emergency/critical care doctors at the hospital came running through and ordered everyone to evacuate radiology, because she, for some reason, had to treat a dangerous tiger, and she didn't want any unnecessary personnel to be injured by it. toadie and i stuck around in case she needed help with the x-ray equipment, but we climbed up on top of the processor to be out of the way. the doctor shouldered her dart gun and marched out of sight, and the roaring and bellowing that had been emanating from around the corner suddenly ceased. we assumed she'd successfully sedated the tiger and crept over to check things out, and when we peeked around we saw the doctor attempting to stick a man dressed up like a character from cats in the butt with a giant syringe as he backed up against the wall, hissing, and swatted ineffectually at her with his fuzzy hands. she triumphed in the end, but we just left him passed out next to the door and ate some bagels.