Leave Paula Deen Alone!

I'm so sick of everyone picking on Paula Deen.

I saw a headline the other day that said, Paula Deen photographed eating a cheeseburger.

Yes, she has diabetes.

So does my mom. My mom also has heart disease.

She's still here.

Granted Paula's recipes are not health conscious. They aren't supposed to be. Down home cooking is never healthy. And Paula isn't telling you to eat her cooking every day of your life.

Even a diabetic can splurge every now and then.

I am so sick of everyone butting into our lives.  If I want to eat a meal full of butter, fat and calories, that's my business. And it's Paula's too.

Leave her alone!

Her health is not our business.

RIP Video Stores

Lately I've been missing video rental stores. I think they're becoming extinct.

Back when I was a bachelorette, there was a really awesome store called Video Images that was directly under my awful studio apartment. It was mostly VHS but had a mind-boggling selection. There was a "cult/indie" aisle, a "musical/music doc" shelf, and a decent foreign film collection. Its 80s-riffic horror section was constant fodder for my friends' weekly Shitty Movie Night. If it wasn't for that store, I might not have seen Everything Is Illuminated, The Reflecting Skin, or the cinematic classic Rock N Roll Nightmare. A world without Jon Mikl Thor's mighty pecs is a sad one indeed.

Needless to say I was heartbroken when the owner retired. I bought some of my favorite tapes, but I felt like a vulture. At least then there was Blockbuster, which even if the hapless employees couldn't recommend me a movie, you could find something there. Now there isn't an honest-to-blog video store within a 45 minute radius, if that. All our Blockbusters went under, and now we have a few redbox kiosks scattered across the city.

So you might ask why a video store is even necessary in 2010. Hell, the word "video" is in the title - who the hell needs a dusty VHS when you've got Netflix? I guess I'll go with my old curmudgeonly battle cry "it's just not the same!" There's nothing that really replicates the feeling of going into a video store and grabbing a DVD or VHS based on the cover alone. Netflix is almost too good at pinpointing what I'd like; I kind of miss being underwhelmed by an awful B-movie.

Mostly, though, it just weirds me out that generations of kids are going to grow up and have never set foot in a video rental store, that some culture landmark of my childhood is going to be completely foreign to everyone after me. Millions of slumbers parties are going to be denied an older sibling renting Monkey Shines and the nightmares that follow.