Glad I don't believe in interpreting dreams

A couple of nights ago I dreamt that I was tied up at the wrists by a girl I hardly know (a friend of a friend) and forced to sleep in a room filled with fibre glass despite telling her that I was not only afraid of it but also concerned for my health. I was really angry with her for reading a book I was writing in, and wanted to punch her.

The night before I dreamt that my engagement ring was falling apart and the stones were shattering so I couldn't even pick them up to have it repaired.

Last night I dreamt that the Boy Wonder and his friend were playing a monopoly game based on the world cup which I wasn't allowed to join in with. Instead of proper dice, they were using an apple with numbers drawn on it in a cup of water - you tried to roll the apple and when it came up with no number on top it was declared 'in the sea' and had to be rolled again. They were supposed to be headed off to a strip club afterwards, but none of them really wanted to go, and Eric was actually riding his bike around the village letting everyone know which televisions were working in all the pubs. He also had five TVs in his bedroom which was a bit weird, but I had to stay there while they all went off to the strip club so I had plenty to watch which was a bit of a relief.

Clearly these dreams are a sign of my slightly overstuffed brain, but for anyone who actually believed in interpreting dreams, I can imagine it would be pretty terrifying to guess what the hell it all meant.

Unfortunate juxtaposition in TV scheduling

For some reason, the folks at NOLA 38 have decided that an appropriate show to follow 'Reno 911' at 4.30 in the morning is 'Cops'. This means that if you kind of half watch the TV when drunk before bed, you get about half way through 'Cops' before thinking 'That's odd - this is hardly funny at all, and that one guy in the really short shorts has hardly even been in this episode. And it's a lot more gritty than normal, what's that all about?' before realising that the junky being cuffed is actually genuinely threatening the police with an attack with an infected needle, and you probably aren't going to see the sassy black one with all the junk in her trunk any time soon. I can only assume that somebody was actively encouraging this mindset when they came up with the idea of putting these two shows back to back, otherwise it's a desperately inappropriate oversight which, if we are anything to go by, has lead to a lot of late night confusion and disappointment.

Crazy TV land

Why is it that on television, the continuity people never seem to notice flaws in weather conditions? I frequently see loads of guys in suits, clearly quite comfortable as they have kept their jackets on, talking to women in skimpy vests or sleeveless tops who 'clearly' aren't as cold as you would think...

What is with these 'reality' shows

The first time I saw Run's House, the 'reality' TV show about Rev Run and the antics of his hilarious family, I was understandably intrigued to see how life would play out when you spend your whole time with a full sized clock around your neck. Then I watched it, and realised that it was scripted, and poorly at that, making the whole premise pointless and resulting in some of the most ridiculously poor television I've ever seen.

Since then, our nocturnal lifestyle has lead to us watching TV at odd hours of the day or night, which has limited our viewing to some extent and resulted in us watching 'The Hills', the most entertaining element of which is the anger it inspires in the Boy Wonder who without fail declares all those involved to be hateful and gets genuinely agitated about their continued existence. I think the fact that every turgid, over emotional scene is played out in this weird fake reality but with peculiar camera angles, inane whiny conversation and utterly vacuous situations engineered apparently to entertain people who have yet to become bored of the pathetic teenage antics of people with nothing better to worry about than how they look and whether they can steal their friend's boyfriend without looking like a bitch on television. I find it amusingly crap, but it is worth it for the rage that 'The Hills' inspires in the Boy Wonder - watching him fume in fury at the fact that these people continue to occupy space on the planet is hilarious.

I used to be stupid tribute

Having read some of the entries on IUsedToBeStupid.com I thought I should catalogue some of my own childhood misconceptions:

I used to think that a sign saying 'To Let' on the outside of a building meant that there was a toilet inside - weirdly, I knew how to spell 'toilet', but thought that the rules of spelling were more flexible than to limit the spelling to one version.

My Dad used to let me sit on his lap and drive the car, resulting in a belief which endured till I was a teenager than the steering wheel actually powered the car and was pretty much the only important factor in making it move.

Probably my most inappropriate misapprehension was that the word 'cunning' was short for 'cunnilingus' - I don't know where I had heard the word, but I figured they were close enough, so they must be related. It wasn't until I said it to my step-dad when I was about 10 that he asked where I had heard it and explained that it probably wasn't the kind of word I should use without knowing what it meant.

Eating at times which would make my mother faint

One of my Mum's rules about eating is the meals must take place within fairly narrowly time frames to be 'good for you' as in 'it's not good for you to eat this late'. Often, it doesn't even matter what you're eating, if it's not between 6 an 9pm, it's not good for you.

Since we've been here, we've lived a fairly irresponsible life, usually getting up between 2 or 3pm, staying up till around 5am and generally enjoying the fact that we aren't tied to any 'normal' timescales, but all this does mean that meal-times have become very much a theoretical thing, and despite the thousands of miles between us, I'm pretty sure that my Mum would have cross continental palpitations if she knew it was 2.49am and we've just finished dinner.

Crawfish boil fun

One of the awesome things about Louisiana is how friendly everyone is, and how keen they are to introduce us to traditional LA pastimes. As a result of this, on Monday, which was memorial day, we were invited by Shaggy, a friend of our new best friend to a crawfish boil at his house. A crawfish boil is a special kind of event, unlike anything we have in the UK, where food is served directly onto tables and enjoyed by all-comers.

Shaggy is a pro crawfish boiler, so somewhat of a master of the art of cooking up a vast (and I mean seriously vast) batch of crawfish in a huge pot with corn on the cob, mushrooms, potatoes and an incredible number of different spices. The food is fished out of the massive pot with a net and served directly onto the table where everyone tucks in with a gusto pretty much unseen in the UK. There is an art to eating crawfish which seems to yield a ridiculously small amount of crawfish meat - you pull the tail off the body and pretty much the whole body is discarded after sucking the 'juice' out of it, which is a delicate operation akin to trying to get the sherbert out of a flying saucer because if you suck too hard the spicy mix of crawfish innards and hot boil mixture shoots straight in to the back of your throat causing you to choke. The tail is then peeled leaving a piece of crawfish roughly the size of a small prawn, which is squeezed out of the hard tail shell and eaten.

I had eaten some pre-peeled crawfish while we've been here and tried to encourage the Boy Wonder to try some on the grounds that apart from his distaste at their appearance he would probably quite like the taste and wouldn't be put off by the texture, yet he had steadfastly refused to even countenance the idea. However, 20 minutes of badgering from Sam and a couple of demonstration runs, he was all over the mud bugs, eating not just one but several.

I think part of the appeal is the sociable element that comes with a crawfish boil - because you spend most of your time peeling the things, there's plenty of time to chat whilst you do it, and because you need to eat quite a lot (one tiny woman we met said she could easily eat five pounds), you end up sitting at the table together for quite a while, with people rotating in and out, mixing up the combinations and generally making for a very convivial atmosphere. You also get covered in crawfish boil mixture anywhere from the fingers to the elbows which breaks down some of the boundaries of what is normally considered proper eating etiquette and requires you to make friends with anyone who hasn't yet eaten or has washed their hands if you need anything passed or touched without wanting to get it covered, which is a handy conversation starter

All in all, the appeal of a crawfish boil goes well beyond the pleasure of actually eating the crawfish themselves, which even the locals admit is a high maintenance chore clearly originated by people with way more persistence than is currently necessary in procuring food - we're hoping that we will be able to find some kind of equivalent back home which will serve as a suitable substitute, but so far the only thing that I can come up with that even comes close is shelling peas, which I would enjoy, but I suspect would be a bit of a flop amongst our friends.