Wednesday, May 28, 2014

A typical WWPD assortment

-Alexa Chung shares her beauty routine. Read it, enjoy it. The thing to remember, though, going in, is that she looks like Alexa Chung and you don't. Remember this (, Phoebe,) when you're tempted to buy whatever it is she recommends.

-The Onion explains anti-Semitism in a brilliant but hard-to-read article. It's what I've been saying since forever - because we so associate "anti-Semitism" with "Nazism," Jews who call out relatively minor anti-Jewish acts are deemed hysterical. "Anti-Semitism" ends up seeming like a misnomer or overreaction unless genocide is involved.

-First-world-problems-sounding, but hear me out: the eggs from the farmers market (different stands) have a tendency to be sort of... broken. The eggs you can pay more for with the implied assurance that the chickens weren't too miserable end up costing more still, once you realize you can't actually use several of them. The explanation's simple enough - the way the farmers market works, it's all about conviviality and, more than that, trusting, honoring, the farmer. Or at any rate the person selling the farm-goods, who's standing in for the farmer. It wouldn't be done to check the eggs for cracks as one would at a supermarket. The dynamic is such that you feel you should shoulder the cost of any eggs that "nature" happened to crack of its own accord. Why should the small-scale farmer, so burdened already, bear that burden as well? Granted, I suspect the answer is just for me to be a bit more assertive at the moment of sale, and that the farmer/farmer-stand-in would be fine with it.

6 comments:

caryatis said...

This is not so much a First World problem as a Phoebe-specific problem. Check the eggs! I would.

caryatis said...

And if I would do it, you know it must be right.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy said...

Haha, yes, checking the eggs is the way to go.

kei said...

I always forget Alexa Chung is part Chinese, and I'm always surprised I relearn this fact because I can't tell at all. Usually the eyes give it away for me, and I can often even tell when someone is a quarter Asian. Good to know I can be surprised! Because arrogantly guessing people's ethnic makeup is not a good thing to be doing anyway!

Phoebe Maltz Bovy said...

Re: Alexa Chung, Wikipedia explains that she's 3/4 Chinese on her dad's side - maybe that 1/4 ancestor was really, really, white, whatever that means?

To me, she doesn't look Chinese or white, or any other particular ethnicity, just like some beautiful creature unto herself, who looks amazing in clothes, and who's built about as differently from me as humanly possible.

Britta said...

If her dad is 3/4ths Chinese, then she is less than half Chinese. I agree she doesn't look very Chinese, but genetics are funny. The quarter Asian people I know look about as Asian or possibly even less Asian than she does though. She's a person I've never found all that attractive, not even in a "I can see how she's beautiful but not my type" sort of way. To me there's something a bit off about how she looks, even if I couldn't pinpoint what exactly it is.