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Welcome back to "Ask Alex", where I answer all of your stupid questions with even dumber answers. Have a question you need answered? Tweet it, email it or submit it here and I will get to it (maybe) next week.
-------------------------------- Before I get started, I have a major Misfits Announcement!!! Attention everyone, quiet in back, please!!! The Misfits Universe is growing. Stuff that we write circulates faster and wider than ever, we’re getting more and more submissions from guest posters, our Twitter feed keeps attracting more and more followers and every week, and we get more and more participants in the Wednesday Night Gif Challenge and the Friday Night #MisfitMischief (#MischiefAfterDark if you are lucky). The interaction from the ever-expanding crew of Misfits Friends is the best thing about Twitter, and we are trying to think of ways to encourage and recognize that. Earlier this week, @Patriot_Musket threw an idea out to the group: what if we formally begin recognizing those people who make us laugh or cry or think? What if, every week, we picked the single tweet (or more than one, there are no rules here that we can’t bend) from any non-Misfit that most encapsulated the entire week? And what if we gave that tweet a special shoutout in #MisfitMemo and officially named it as… The Misfittiest Tweet of the Week!!! Well, by golly, we are gonna do it! We share a on of hilarious things with each other all week long, and now we are going to start picking the best one every week. There is no objective criteria, it will just be a tweet that we think is awesome. Other than having to come from a non-Misfit, there are no rules, no guidelines and no means of submission. We are going to arbitrarily pick one, and you are all going to love it! So, look for the first winner in next week’s Memo, available sometime in the general vicinity of Monday. Now, on to #AskAlex...don’t make Alex’s Fantasy Football team angry!!! You won’t like us when we are angry. A week after suffering our first loss of the season, Mariota Kart exploded for a single-week league high of 165 points last week, burying poor @st55104716 before the games really even kicked off on Sunday afternoon. With a loss by @marcannem96, Alex is back in a three way tie for first place (@Jholmsted won her third straight to get to 6-1 as well). @RaymondWPS also won his third straight, climbing to 5-2 and into sole possession of the final provisional playoff slot. After that, it is kind of a cluster…@st55104716 is in fifth at 4-3 and @vixenrogue, @molratty, @martinishark and @cdpayne79 are all still alive at 3-4. The rest of you? Wait ‘til next year!!! Daryl has apparently confused me with a commercial sea captain again (pretty common mistake, really), which I can only respond to with the best Masshole insult I can think of. After that, Lady Catherine is due some answers on questions left from last week, two about food and one about cheesy realtors. Sicariothrax wants to know about my Halloween costume history, and then I get back to sexting! Enjoy:-) Submitted by: Daryl Have you ever sailed from Gloucester to the Flemish Cap? This could be the most ridiculous yet of your many ridiculous questions, Daryl. Since I am not, and have never been, a commercial fisherman, no, I have never sailed to the Flemish Cap. And since I saw The Perfect Storm, I think I know enough to never try, no matter how good the Swordfishing may look. I know I have been to Gloucester, because I have seen the statue memorializing the fisherman lost at sea, but for the life of me I have absolutely no idea why I was there, or when. I think maybe the girls went to a birthday party up that way a couple of years ago? Except for its fishing industry, there isn’t a whole lot going on in Gloucester, and it is quite a way past nicer North Shore towns like Beverly, Marblehead, Ipswich and Manchester-by-the-Sea (which, don’t let Casey Affleck fool you, is a really nice place.) Salem is near there, as well, but I don’t go there on account of the witchcraft. Gloucester (“Glaw-stir”) is notable mostly because it is in the pantheon of Places that Only Massholes and Englishmen Can Pronounce Because They Are Spelled Weird. Think of the ability to pronounce these places as like a secret handshake, only I’m not touching your filthy hand, you shiesty fucking chucklehead... Massachusetts’ second biggest city is the municipal urinal cake called Worcester, and pronounced by most Massholes as “Wuss (like calling someone a wuss)-stir” but by Central Mass people as “Whis-stir”. Also in Central Mass are the twin armpits of Leicester (“Lester”) and possibly the single most confusing one, Leominster (“Lemon-stir”, emphasis on the first syllable). Dorchester is pronounced exactly as it is spelled, which is also exactly how these other places are pronounced but not spelled. Quincy is pronounced with a “z”. Needham and Dedham are “Need ‘um” and “Dead ‘um”, not Need Ham and Ded Ham, and Reading has a “Red” not a “read”. Well, I mean it is “read” if you are using that in the past tense, but not the present... Scituate has a silent “c” and a “t” that sounds like a “ch”, and I have only a vague Idea how I am supposed to pronounced Cochituate, except I think that two different sets of letters - “ch” and ‘t” - make the exact same sound. Barstable is pronounced with a “stubble” and Billerica has a silent “e” and an invisible “k” - “Bill-Rick-uh”. While we are talking place names...no one seems to know why the Flemish Cap is called the Flemish Cap. It is an area of relatively shallow water at the transition between the cold Labrador Current and the Warmer Gulf Stream which causes a clockwise circulation of the water. It is about 350 miles east of Newfoundland, which puts it, oh a little over 2,000 miles from Flanders. The only guess about the name is that it refers to Flemish fishermen who ventured that far in the 1800’s, but I’m calling bullshit on the idea that they routinely sailed 2,000 miles away to catch fish that exist in large numbers everywhere in the ocean they have to sail across to get there. But, that does get me to a subject that Daryl will probably love and the rest of your will find incredibly boring: whaling. In the early days of the whaling industry, whalers routinely sailed halfway around the world in search of Bowhead and Right whales (cuz they swim slowly and float when they are dead), but that just seems different...there was more money in whaling, the products were less perishable, and whalers kinda have to go where the whales are. How much money was there in whaling? So much, in fact that for a time in the 1800’s, New Bedford, MA, founded by Quakers who left the colony at Plymouth Bay and built a whaling industry that became the world’s largest, was the richest city on earth. I am going to assume that most of you have never been to New Bedford, so I will skip a lengthy description of current day New Bedford and simply note that it’s story arc is not dissimilar to another city that, about 50 years ago, was also the richest in the world: Detroit, MI. At least Detroit has nice suburbs… The U.S. (New Bedford) whaling industry was in slow decline throughout the 1800’s as overfishing drove the whales further and further away and whalers in parts of the world a lot closer to the whales began to benefit. But it came to a screeching halt in 1871 when a fleet of 40 ships passed through the Bering Strait before being trapped in a fast-spreading pack of sea ice brought on by a stationary high over northern Siberia. Only seven ships escaped and the rest, including 22 based in New Bedford, were destroyed. Miraculously, not a single person died during the 70 mile trek across sea ice and open ocean in lifeboats, but the New Bedford Whaling industry was effectively ruined. I am totally off track here, so I am not even going to tell you about Scrimshaw, which is pretty cool, but I will leave you with a semi-related book recommendation: In the Kingdom of Ice, the ill-fated voyage of a polar exploration ship in 1879. Submitted by: Lady Catherine (three questions left over from last week!) Why are spaghetti squash, cauliflower rice, and zucchini bread allowed to continue their reigns of terror? I don’t understand how we can have truth-in-advertising rules requiring at least a defensible backing to any claim made in an advertisement, but still allow a fucking squash to pretend that it is spaghetti. Spaghetti squash is only one of a large number of offenders, too! “Sweet breads” sounds like some kind of sticky roll lathered in fruity confections or a wonderfully iced cinnamon roll. No, it’s some kind of weird gland meat from cows and sheep or whatever else has a spare pancreas that can be served as food. Head cheese? Not cheese, and the name “head” doesn’t make any sense at all. I guess “meat jelly loaf” made it hard to move product. Mincemeat is not meat, and is also the biggest weapon in the war against Christmas. Bombay Duck is a) a fish, and b) from a city we haven’t called Bombay in decades. Colonial Goose is...lamb, obviously. And don’t even get me started on either Rocky Mountain Oysters or Lamb Fries… {Side note: Crab Rangoon is the best Chinese food, despite being named after a city that has never, at any time in its 1,000 year history, been in China. It’s also called Yangon, but whatevs. They haven’t started calling it Beijing Duck yet, either.} Cauliflower exists as a direct result of Adam eating the forbidden apple. It is no more than a means of God punishing us for our sins. I’ve had cauliflower that I found edible exactly twice in my life. Once it was pureed with butter and cheese, and once it was in larger chunks with bacon, cheddar cheese and ranch dressing. In other words, much like tree bark, cauliflower tastes fine if you bury it in enough stuff that tastes good. I’m going to disagree with you on zucchini bread, though, which is perfectly edible. It is especially edible if you include chocolate chips, but even without that, it is fine. It isn’t as good as pumpkin bread, which is probably of an equivalent nutritional profile, but it doesn’t offend me like those other things because it is not trying to hide itself as something good like rice or spaghetti. It’s one thing to be bland and flavorless, it is entirely another to actively mislead. Those other foods are living a lie...they are the Rock Hudson of foods! Alas, this is America, and I believe in freedom. Freedom of speech and religion and assembly and thought, and the freedom to make your own terrible choices and own your own consequences. If you use that freedom to eat a goddamn squash pretending to be spaghetti, then you deserve all of the misery you have brought upon yourself, and it is not my place to save you from your self-inflicted torture. What's with real estate agents getting glamour head shots for their promos? Would you let someone sell your house without perfect hair and sparkling teeth?!? Of course not! We hire attractive folks because their good looks mean that they are better people, that’s all. This is especially true of an industry that does so much of its marketing on the sides of buses and grocery store circulars. I assume those ads work, or else they wouldn’t continue, but I am having a hard time thinking of who would call someone to sell their house because they saw him on a park bench. Isn’t this really a word-of-mouth and personal relationships business? I would have guessed that most clients find agents either through a personal friendship or referral from someone who was a former client. I also think that the business of being a real estate agent is changing, although it is not nearly as endangered as some have hypothesized. Certainly, a lot of the traditional appeal of agents was that they had access to data that regular people didn’t. If you wanted a comprehensive listing of available properties, recent sales and comparable listings, you needed an agent whose firm had purchased expensive subscription data. That data, of course, is now available and searchable from a whole bunch of websites for free, or with just a free registration. But the industry has survived largely unchanged while others (think travel agents) have been utterly decimated. The reason, I would suspect, is that good realtors do a lot more than just list your house, point you at some open houses and then collect a couple of commission checks. More than sales and marketing skills, this is a hustle business and realtors succeed by being incredibly diligent with making and rearranging appointments, preparing buyers and sellers for the realities of the market they face and coordinating the process post-sale. It may be an industry that is easy for a shitty participant to make a living in, and it may also be due for some downward price pressure (suck it, flyover rubes, the commission rate on the coasts is generally 5%, not 6%), but I still think that good realtors do a lot to make the process better for buyers and sellers, and to get them fractionally better prices on either end. Speaking of Glamour shots...I am happy to see that Glamour Shots is still an operating business and hasn’t been killed by the prevalence of Instagram filters, which are a pretty good replacement for what has historically been pretty much 90% of the Glamour Shots product. Also, free tip for the Glamour Shots people: judging by the number of Twitter users who use grotesquely misleading pictures of themselves as avatars (I stalk your Facebook and LinkedIn pages...muah hah hah!!!) you have a business opportunity in making special Glamour Avis just for that purpose. In much bigger news, though, Glamour Shots is currently advertising a $49.95 boudoir photo package! For your $50, you get a makeover and a 2-2.5 hour photo shoot with 3 wardrobe changes and 40-50 poses. Rawr!!! I have to be honest...whether or not you ever decide to give the pictures to anyone, I feel like that is an awful lot of entertainment for fifty bucks. I would love every single second of that. I’m kinda bummed that the nearest Glamour Shots is in Staten Island, because I feel like this is tailor made for a drunk minute-by-minute diary. In fact, after perusing the store locator at their website, I am hereby issuing a challenge. The next time that @_cchayes is in town to visit @jholmsted, they need to grab a couple bottles of champagne, take their adorable selves down to the store located in her beloved hometown and write down every minute of the experience. Preferably they bring a third person to drive them and record their commentary so they can get just a little bit too drunk. Best city-specific food in America?
There is a big change in the list here, which explains why these are the top three. Before this, we saw a bunch of foods that are simply better in certain places, but we are now moving onto foods that are wholly identified with their city of origin. They are so good, and so much a part of the civic fabric that I don’t even have to tell you where they are from, or why they are good. You just know!!!
And don’t you dare @ me with your garbage thin crust pizza takes. I just smashed three Handshakes, and I will absolutely crack this half-empty Malort bottle over your head. You can take the girl out of Chicago… Submitted by: Sicariothrax Have you ever dressed up for Halloween? My feelings about Halloween have changed as I have gotten older. It’s never been my favorite holiday, but I appreciate it more than I did when I was younger. As I have written before, my mother was pretty non-functional for the first 12 years of my life. The lights and the heat always worked and I was never hungry, but that was about the limit of her attention to parenting detail, so there wasn’t a lot of time for Halloween preparation. The other complicating factor was that I didn’t really live in a place that was “Trick or Treating conducive”. You go knocking on doors after dark wearing scary clothes and you are likely to either get shot, or have someone call the cops on you. And crack addicts have trouble with times and dates, so it was unsafe to assume that people would know it was Halloween in the first place… So, I always had a costume for Halloween, but when I was little, that really only meant wearing it to school and then doing a limited amount of Trick or Treating before it was dark at houses of people I knew. At least twice, when Halloween was on a weekend, my best friend’s mother took us to a different neighborhood where we could go door to door, and I remember that seeming like pretty much the coolest thing ever. But, for the most part, Halloween in the ghetto isn’t really all that fun. By the end of High School, Halloween started to be more fun because there was more to do. I only remember one real bender of a Halloween party...my best friend and I both went as Brittany Spears (I was Baby One More Time Brittany and she was Oops I Did it Again Brittany), but I do remember it being more fun. And then Halloween in college was a blast. I had a couple of friends who were serious about their costumes, and I feel like their enthusiasm helped me greatly. I am also not going to lie, I am a big fan of slutty costumes...I mean, if you aren’t going to take advantage of your 20 year old body to dress like a complete whorebag one night a year, what is even the point of being 20?!? I tried to convince my pretend sister to go out in body paint with me one year! She is, um, “chestier” than I am, which probably would have made it a much bigger ordeal for her than me, but I feel like I had her more or less sold on the idea. I still think it would have been fantastic, but our plans changed and it wasn’t gonna work. Also, I feel like it turned out to be really cold that year, so maybe it was a fortunate choice...I’m not sure that paint provides a lot of warming… I *loved* taking my sister Trick or Treating. She and her friends would get so excited, and they always loved having me take them places because I was substantially cooler than having one of their parents;-). There is one street near here, where my pretend older sister conveniently now lives, that is something of a legendary Halloween haunt. There are thousand of kids, the houses get done up really fancy and the atmosphere is just super festive. And I love taking the kids around, too. I am going to be crushed when they finally tell me that they don’t want me along anymore! I probably have three or four more years, and I am going to enjoy them as much as I can! Submitted by: Karen Cobello (continued from last week) ... How do you feel about age differences? What's too much? ps: if you're not bothered by this, I'm going to need you to elaborate on that sexting talk from last week. Kids these days and all ... I’m still anxiously awaiting a follow-up on this, Karen! I’m assuming you took my advice and went out with this nice young lad, so I want to hear how it went. I really hope you made out with him. But you made reference here to my now-two-weeks-ago discussion of sexting, and I should let everyone know that you are not the only person to have asked. You are the only one to do so (sort of) publicly, but three other women (and, interestingly, no men) have raised the issue as well. So, since I am nothing if not a public service, I shall lend my assistance! I think that, when the word “sexting” is mentioned, we instinctively think about teenagers sending explicit pictures and messages that are both morally and legally problematic. When I talked about this two weeks ago, it was largely in the context of preparing your teenagers (mostly girls) to avoid making any mistakes that they would deeply regret. But there is no rule that says only teenagers are allowed to engage in digital foreplay, so today we are talking about sexting only in the hands of responsible adults! So, with all of that said, I don’t think adults send enough dirty texts to their partners. A relationship that has lasted for 15 or 20 years or more is most likely built on deep and sincere love and trust and a shared sense of purpose. It often includes houses and children and so much intertwining that it is really hard to imagine one person without thinking of the other. It can also, I think we all agree, be kinda boring. The emotional excitement that comes from a new relationship and the physical thrill of being with that person may not count for a whole lot in the sense of “building a life together”, but it sure is fun. As we get older, busier and more comfortable with each other, though, we lose the spontaneity and excitement that makes new relationships so thrilling. We have neither the time nor the motivation to spend four hours primping for a date to ensure that every single inch of us looks our absolute best (you know, while also making it look like that didn’t require that much effort.) It is replaced by better things, but that doesn’t mean we don’t want to maybe try and get it back;-). And there are a lot of ways to get it back, some more involved than others. Vacation, obviously, because it means carving out time for each other and automatically mixes up your routine. Why is hotel sex so universally good? Because it’s a different environment that adds a new energy to the dynamic. Heck, I already told you that you can get a boudoir photo shoot done for $50!!! That will certainly lead him (or her) to see you in a new light! But this is about explicit text messages, which is honestly just about the easiest and least expensive way to start to get some of that excitement back (messaging rates may apply). There isn’t much that is more effective at winding up your other half than to let your him know that you are thinking about him all of the time. And in a way that says “I still can’t get enough of you.” It is also a lot easier for some people that trying to say things in person or initiate sex in a way that doesn’t make you feel terribly self-conscious. Now, you are free to take pictures and videos of yourself that would make Larry Flynt blush, but that isn’t really necessary. And my instinct is that very, very few women would feel even remotely comfortable doing that. But I would encourage you to at least be a little saucy, ladies. A little bit of thigh, or stomach or cleavage or anything that he considers to be a favorite body part can be really suggestive without making you feel at all awkward of icky. Or laying in bed and appearing to be naked (which you may or may not actually be...doesn’t matter), or in your underwear if you are a little bit more adventurous. The point being: you can get the message across that you have some very dirty thoughts on your mind without saying so explicitly or creating any pictures that are going to come back and haunt you in the divorce... You don’t even have to appear in the picture!!! Just show your bed, with some note about wishing he was there. Or your sexiest undies in a pile on the floor. Are you one of the surprisingly large number of people (it’s true...ask your friends!) that have, on occasion, turned on the TV and given your little kids M&M’s to distract them for 20 minutes? Well, guess what kind of reaction you are going to get it you send a totally non-captioned picture of a grocery cart with a bottle of wine and a bag of M&M’s. Heck, you don’t even need to include a picture! I once talked a particularly demure friend into sending her boyfriend “You can do anything you want to me as long as it starts with a 20 minute backrub.” Those kinds of things are easy...are your a runner? Or just start working out? I can promise you, if you drop a mid-day “OMG, I am in so much pain...you’re going to need to do a LOT of rubbing tonight…”, he’ll get the message. I don’t want to suggest that sex is the most important part of a long-lasting relationship, but it is definitely an important part. And however strong your marriage or relationship is, if the physical part of that relationship is tired and unfulfilling, it will benefit from a little bit of variety. You can accomplish that without venturing into Eyes Wide Shut territory (although, if that is your bag, by all means…) Just remember, nobody's personal happiness was ever reduced by having more orgasms. I’m going to wrap up with another new feature: Alex’s random old song of the week. There may or may not be a reason for these but I am going to note an old (definitions vary) song that is super awesome and may or may not have been popular at one point. This week’s? Cheap Trick is not a particularly noteworthy band and they are most known for “Want You to Want Me”, but they made one truly underappreciated song: Surrender.
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MisfitsJust a gaggle of people from all over who have similar interests and loud opinions mixed with a dose of humor. We met on Twitter. Archives
January 2024
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