Italian sausage bread.

The other afternoon I was having coffee and studying at an undergrad-run coffee shop on campus, and I was a little hungry, so I went up to the counter to go buy a pastry or something, and I noticed that they had this thing called "Italian sausage bread" for sale, and when I asked what it was, this girl who was sitting on a barstool right near the register explained to me that it was a new product from the bakery, and was like a big scone, only with pieces of sausage in it, and it was quite good, if I liked savory things, so I decided to buy it.

As I found out, the sausage was more of the "ground beef"-type sausage you get on pizza rather than chopped up bits of the "Polish sausage"-type sausage (I love the latter, hate the former), and not only that, but I felt queasy all afternoon from eating the damn scone thing. It was really big, too, about the size of three packs of playing cards.

Lady Gaga concert like last Saturday.

So, I'm glad I went to the Lady Gaga concert, but I don't think I'm sold on her as a performer.

First off, the show had all these little things that were wrong with it. Like, the opening act was 7:30pm, then it was 45 minutes till the 2nd act began after the 1st act ended, and then a full hour after that till Lady Gaga came on - it made like just no sense. And, when she was at the piano, the piano should have been angled differently so she wasn't turned away from like 1/2 of the audience...

(There was some other stuff like that as well, but I can't remember exactly what now.)

Second, the show was very visual and she needed a deep stage, but I bet it was planned for theaters that were narrow and deep, rather than the one the show was moved to, which was not that deep, but broad; so much of the choreography and everything would have been better if you were sitting directly in front of the stage, and it should have used the stage more so people didn't feel gypped if they were sitting towards the wings of the theater.

Third, her biggest strength was her singing. Usually it doesn't come out on her up-tempo songs that have a lot of bass beat and shit like that, but during the middle part of the concert it was her on the grand piano singing some slow stuff, and she held the audience in the palm of her hand - you could have heard a pin drop. This is unlike Madonna, who dies whenever her voice has to hold the audience.

Fourthly, she gave multiple (genuine) shout-outs to her fans for supporting her through hard times, but a few times she or her act also started to schill herself. "This is a movement, and the fans write their own history," an announcer intoned between changes of set. She also made explicit that everyone should call themselves "monsters" and do this little claw thing with their hand during concerts, which I found very lame.

Fifthly, Lady Gaga is *not* a performance artist, however much she and her fans tell everyone that she is. She does one thing well -- she mixes colors, designs, textures, and different types of light in unexpected ways, and the only new thing she ever does is put out a new combination. The costumes and set pieces got very repetitive and blurred together, and were not memorable overall; there were no memorable moments due to that stuff...

Perhaps the only one was when she was singing "Paparazzi" and these dancers came out holding a large-pole between them like a trussed-up woman would be carried on by cannibals, only Lady Gaga had this crazy hairdo that was tied to the middle of it, and they kind of threw her around the stage while she sang.

But, it was a nice image that went nowhere. I feel many of her set pieces were more tableaus than concert acts - that is, they would have looked nice as photos, but didn't work holistically with the music.

So, unless she starts singing a lot more slow stuff or gets her shit together and does something better with her act, I'm probably not going to go to another concert of hers.

Addendum.

My one (white) friend from Mississippi pointed out that "krunk" probably is like the past tense of "crank", so krunk karaoke is like "cranked up karaoke".

Krunk and the Dutch.

A Dutch guy from my program and his wife (no, they are not my one Dutch friend, or the one friend of my Dutch friend, who is also Dutch, or my one Dutch prof) were asking my one (white) friend from Mississippi about krunk karaoke and want to come.

This Dutch guy is also the one who I was telling that his country was backwards with race when I came back from my one Dutch friend's wedding.

So, I told my one (white) friend from Mississippi that they could come, only as long as they didn't try to oppress any minorities, since they are in America and that is not okay here, and then I texted the same to the Dutch dude (no response yet).

My friend texted me back we should have a sit-down with them to clear up anything before we expose them to that much blackness.

I texted him that I just hope they don't call everyone Rufus and Erma.

He texted me we should make a list, so, all day I sent up sit-down points as I thought them up:

#1 - No pointing and laughing if you see black people eating chicken wings.

#2 - No saying "I can dig that" in an attempt to be "with it".

#3 - No complimenting singers by telling them that they're naturally musical and have the drums of Africa in their blood.

I am still thinking of more advice. The faux pas's they could make are endless. The Dutch don't realize how racist they are, they're on so much drugs all the time.

2 black women.

1) The other night on the bus the bus driver was going like 30-35 mph on the expressway (it's an express bus to my neighborhood from downtown). I was standing in the aisle, and this bigger-built (black) lady in a black winter coat and red cap pulled down over her ears looked up from the book she was reading to glance quizically at the highway, and when I saw that, I was like, "The bus driver's going like thirty-five miles an hour."

"Oh," she was like, nodding. "And I was wondering if it was just me."

"Yeah," I know, "Can you believe that?", and I pointed out how he was drifiting in the lane some too, and was probably tired.

"Well," she was like, "We should go pray on him."

At that, I laughed really loud, and was like, "Here I am getting pissy, but you're going to do something about it! I should pick up your strategy", and at that, she laughed, too.

When she got up to leave the bus, I didn't notice (I was tired and zoning a bit), but she caught my attention and was like, "Have a good evening," and I was like, "You have a good evening, too," and then I added, "And a good new year, and a good new decade at well!", and she laughed and was like, "I'll take all those," and got off the bus.

2) At the grocery store, there was a younger (black) cashier, and when she opened up a line, I was the first one there.

"Thanks!", I was like.

"I opened it for you," she was like, affably. "How was your weekend?"

"Great," I was like, "But I got that Keri Hilson song 'Knock You Down' stuck in my head."

"That can happen," she was like, and then she added, "And she pretty, I'd get wit her if I could."

Vegetarians.

So, I saw my one British / half-African / all-vegan friend at a reception on Friday, and when he asked me what I was up to that weekend, I told him that actually that night I was going to an African restaurant with friends, though the restaurant wasn't vegan-friendly at all.

"Oh, I'm used to that," he was like.

Then, I asked him my new question for vegans/vegetarians: "If a cow broke its leg and it couldn't be fixed and the veteranarian had to amputate it, would it be okay to eat the beef from that leg, since the meat didn't cause the animal any intended pain?"

He said no, because his reasons were more complicated than that, but his friend who he was there with said he knew this vegetarian from Montana who would eat roadkill. She was kind of from a hippy-dippy family that tried to live off of the land, and if they were able to get a freshly-hit deer from the highway near her house, she would eat venison from that.

"Wow," I was like, "That's the coolest thing I've ever heard. It's so morally consistent!"

"I know," the guy was like.

My one British friend, however, was still a little pissed about my question, and said that his question to me was whether I'd eat my dead grandmother, since the same logic applied there too.

Birthday...

So, for my birthday I met a couple friends at the local student bar. It was a pleasant few hours of leisurely conversation, but my favorite part was running into the Belgian student I know, who was out with other Classics students, who tend to be clique-y and odd and unvulgar, except the international ones.

Anyhow, after chatting a bit, the one German student at the table said that over Christmas he had seen a student from my department who was studying in Germany for the year, and that he was enjoying himself.

So, since this guy from my department is very young - he looks kind of like Harry Potter, and likes candy, and comes off more of a pre-adolescent boy than an adult - I was like, "You bet he is, he must be watching shit porn every night."

At that, the German guy laughed politely, and also a little knowingly, and so I was like, "Yeah, it's part of the citizenship curriculum in Germany - in elementary school, the kids all get together and watch shit porn that the teacher puts on a television. Train them from a young age, is what they do."

At that, all the Classics people looked at me askance, but then my Belgian friend was like, "Yes, that, and then they study Goethe. The shit porn is a propaideutic."

Scientists!!!

I was talking with a fellow TA from the course I'm on about different types of students he's had in class, and he was mentioning how he had some problems with scientists in an Old Testament class.

One, for example, couldn't understand her bad grades, since writing a humanities paper is just like writing a lab report, since both have hypotheses.

The other one couldn't understand why you needed to read creation myths from the Ancient Near East in order to understand the Old Testament.

"Why do I need to read that if I want to understand the Old Testament?", he was like. "It's all made up anyways."