Parries → Fat and Foecal 

Oh dear. It’s not really Friday. It’s the following Monday. I cheated. Well, it has sat on me and plagued on me and I must not do this ever again. Did Lileks ever fail? Did Lileks ever once in ten years post Friday’s Bleat the following Monday? I doubt it. Even if you can’t write that day, you can take ten minutes out of the alloted thousand four hundred and forty to write in a hopefully amusing way that you cannot write that day.

The days matter. I’m going to bump up the significance of the day visually here on the design. Friday has a feel, as does Monday. Friday is weary perhaps, but accomplished. Monday is excited but a little nervous. Wednesday is the apex of life, civilization, activity, industry, hum.

We don’t go to the movies here in Brighton. The first culprit is the obvious one: ticket prices. At £8 each that means £16, which is 24e, or $48, or to make it sound even more crazy, a whopping NIS170, which is about five times what my sister and brother-in-law pay in Israel with their Diners Card. Also, the only cinema here within reasonable walking distance is the Odeon, which is an ugly place in an ugly building. Why are there no cinemas in the Churchill Square Mall? And considering this is a town that fancies itself all cultural ‘n that, why are there no little arthouses? Single-screen cinemas with a nice cafe inside? I reckon this town could support at least three. [I forget the Duke of Yorks]

Britons are now officially the fattest people in Europe, overtaking for the first time those beer and ham lovers, the Germans. I wonder if obesity is connected to flush toilets. These days a person can spend their entire adult life without having to see their own stool. We defaecate into convenient porcelein pools of water, and with a pull of a chain the mess is gone. If it were not gone so quickly and easily, might we be a bit more aware of what we eat?

Germans and I think some of their neighbors have a little shelf in their toilets (see ‘German Toilets’ by Scott Anderson), so that the pile sits there outside of water before being flushed away. Perhaps they’re retaining or importing a bit of Chinese wisdom, in which the diagnosis of health is best done by examination of the stool. But if I am correct, this should help them stay at normal weight out of sheer disgust for their own emissions. Okay, maybe if we want the Germans to become the fattest Europeans again, we need to get them to give up their shelf toilets.

You may remember a few parries back I mentioned just how much I love flying. I love having the food brought to me. And yet, I don’t like delivery service and I detest hotel room service. Why is that? I try to work this out. I don’t mind room service to a hotel so much if we’re clearly and obviously sitting out on the balcony and the food is brought out there. Similarly, I don’t mind having takeaway delivered to an office. I don’t mind room service to a hotel if you’re in the middle of a marathon session of work, or even of leisure, such as watching an entire season of 24 in one overnight hotel stay. It’s the idea of opening up your bedroom to commercial service that I find unnerving. It’s a slippery slope. Why get out of bed for anything?

Plus, in a hotel, is it not bad manners to eschew the dining room? There they are, standing at attention, the chef with his hat all ready to scramble your eggs, and you’d rather not see any of it. You’d rather some hotel person see you.

My mother always admonished us not to order drinks at restaurants as it was a waste of money. Perhaps this explains my damage?