It's like eating the sea
Spent the weekend at the Astoria/Warrenton Crab and Shrimp Festival.
I was reminded a lot of the bit in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, where Adams writes of the Vogons and how they spent an entire night getting drunk and smashing jewelled crabs with mallets.
Meanwhile, the natural forces on the planet Vogsphere had been working overtime to make up for their earlier blunder. They brought forth scintillating jewelled scuttling crabs, which the Vogons ate, smashing their shells with iron mallets; tall aspiring trees with breathtaking slenderness and colour which the Vogons cut down and burned the crab meat with; elegant gazelle-like creatures with silken coats and dewy eyes which the Vogons would catch and sit on. They were no use as transport because their backs would snap instantly, but the Vogons sat on them anyway.
Thus the planet Vogsphere whiled away the unhappy millennia until the Vogons suddenly discovered the principles of interstellar travel. Within a few short Vog years every last Vogon had migrated to the Megabrantis cluster, the political hub of the Galaxy and now formed the immensely powerful backbone of the Galactic Civil Service. They have attempted to acquire learning, they have attempted to acquire style and social grace, but in most respects the modern Vogon is little different from his primitive forebears. Every year they import twenty-seven thousand scintillating jewelled scuttling crabs from their native planet and while away a happy drunken night smashing them to bits with iron mallets.
This was a bit like that, only the festival gave you a plastic fork instead of a nice mallet with a bit of heft. I'll know better for next year.
The other part of this trip involved shopping for wine with a baker's dozen of my friends. We ended up snagging a couple cases, including a bunch from Melrose Vineyards. I liked their Riesling quite a bit, though I am not the kind of person who wanders around a wine tasting with my glass on a cord around my neck. (I saw a ton of people with those this weekend, and it never stopped looking goofy. My main impulse was to take my wineglass and shatter it, shivving everyone who wouldn't get out of my way—not gesticulate with both hands with a tasting of some vinegary juice dangling around my neck.)
Like Kevin, I watched the first episode of the new Doctor Who, which is quite good. The shitty BBC special effects never really bothered me all that much, though I can see how they would. The show reminds me a bit like reading—you have to use your imagination to get around the fact the show has mostly been filmed in an old quarry with a couple of cardboard props. Eccleston's decision to abandon the role after just one season is a bit maddening. He's just so believable as the Doctor. It's like that one bit in the Hitchhiker's TV series where you can see just how blue Ford Prefect's eyes are and it's amazing. Only All. The. Time.
