More red flags than May Day in Moscow

The latest yahoo I have run into is the King of the Yahoos--you can't beat this story! He said he was an internal auditor for Shell Oil (and you know how I feel about oil companies--they're Satan's henchpeople, rapists of the environment, instigators of modern wars.) He was supposedly "in London" this week auditing the London office, and since London is 6 hours ahead of Chicago time, of course his e-mails and chats showed up at "odd hours." (Like, when his wife was asleep?) His photo showed a good-looking man with dark hair and a big smile. He said he was 6'2" and made over $150K (doesn't impress me, but I'm sure that was designed to impress a fair number of gullible women.) Oh, and tragically he lost his wife and three children in an auto accident in Arkansas two years ago! This is some guy with whom I e-mailed and chatted briefly, before I shut him down for the following reasons:

1. Couldn't write very well--certainly not at the level of someone who has a high-paying, sensitive job at a major corporation. His main form of communication was repeating "lol" or "yeah" over and over. That's a big red flag!
2. Said he also owned his own oil company which bought from wholesalers and sold to others, and he apparently bought from Shell--that's conflict of interest if you're an auditor, so I think that's bullshit.
3. Wanted to know when was the last time I had sex and how many men I'd been with but didn't seem to want to know anything else about me. That's just plain icky! So I decided to change the subject and asked him about his parents. See #4.
4. When I asked him if his parents were still around, said he grew up in an orphanage...
5. When I pointed out that he sounded like a character in a book and that I didn't believe him about #4, and what else has he done? Train elephants? Played on the 1980 Miracle hockey team? He shut down and I haven't heard from him since. Which is fine with me. I deleted him from my contact lists and from my search results.
6. Couldn't Google him because he had a really common name, but apparently doesn't show up in anything related to Shell Oil either. Hint: if you want to mess with a librarian, be prepared for the fact that we will thoroughly research you...
7. I think his photo is just some random male catalog model he scanned in, some good-looking dark haired guy in a black shirt. I won't be surprised to see "him" in the next Kohl's flyer I get in the mail. Still, whoever he is, he's a good-looking guy. ;-)
8. If you're supposedly conducting something as sensitive as an internal audit for Shell, how can you be e-mailing and chatting with strangers you've met online? Wouldn't you be concentrating on your work and unable to have access to anything that might be an outside influence? Hellooooo?

That's a lot of red flags and bullshit, doncha think?

Tapas, the little dishes of Spain

Last night my Entire Family, meaning not just me and my parents, but additionally my sister and her husband, went out for dinner. We went to Emilio's Tapas Bar in Hillside. My sister and brother-in-law are in town this week--they live in Texas in a small town named Seguin, home of the World's Second Largest Cement Depiction of a Pecan. Another town nearby built a bigger cement pecan, a huge blow to Seguin's civic pride.

But I digress...going out to dinner with my parents is usually an exercise in saintly patience, as I grit my teeth through all sorts of circular conversations with my mother while my dad sits and munches things he shouldn't have because of the Heart Attack Two Years Ago. Therefore, it was such a pleasant surprise to actually sit down with everyone and have a wonderful time at a restaurant! Unheard of!

Tapas are the little dishes of Spain, as the menu helpfully described. Back in the old days in the old country, one enjoyed a glass of manzanilla, Spain's famous sherry. But one wouldn't want flies in one's manzanilla (not italicized this time because you're familiar with the word now...) so a little plate would guard the sherry. Some brilliant Spaniard decided, "Why you put plate on glass to stop flies if plate could have little food on it?" And thus tapas was born!

We had the chickpea puree with breadstick slivers, hot goat cheese in tomato sauce, dates wrapped in bacon, a mini beef tenderloin with roasted veggies, salmon crepe, potato salad made with aioli (the famous Spanish garlic mayonnaise, and for which Spain should win some sort of Nobel Prize, something...) grilled portobello mushrooms with manchego cheese, and all sorts of other little delights. It was fun to pass the little plates around and sample everything, and everyone had a Good Time, even my mother, who didn't complain about a single food item as being Too Flavorful (though it was, ironically...Mom doesn't usually like Flavors in her food.) Dad, who didnt' say much as usual, enthusiastically declared at the end of the evening, "That was fun." The biggest honor was when Mom and Dad said they would go back again, an honor usually reserved for family restaurants. So a good time was had by all!

Remember Mold-O-Rama?

Remember those wacky waxy animals you could watch being made in a space-age machine with a bubble glass top at the Brookfield Zoo? Turns out those machines are still around! I was beside myself when I went to the zoo yesterday with a friend and her two little girls and discovered that Mold-O-Rama is still in existence! A link to my childhood is preserved, and as long as Mold-O-Rama is there, I am a child at heart.

The process that creates those animals is injection molding (which I remember doing in 7th grade Industrial Arts to a less-amazing effect, though my mom still pretends to this day that she adores the napkin holder I made.) You watch the machine's molds close, and then the mold splits, and you see your blue dolphin or orange lion or white polar bear appear, and then the best part: this spatula appears to slide your mold off of the machine and into the receptacle, where you lift the little door and CAUTION! WAX MAY BE HOT! which indeed it is, but you scoop out your animal while risking third-degree burns anyway, because you're so excited to get your little dolphin into your waiting hands!

Brookfield Zoo has changed since the last time I've been there, which has to be over 20 years now. It's all Pottery Barn decorated--the Australian wombat had a tasteful terra cotta pot tipped on its side in his habitat, for example. There's all sorts of interactive crap for kids, too. Heaven forbid you should look at a real Mexican Grey Wolf when you can scoot a little metal wolf on a grooved table which flashes digitized facts as the wolf goes by so you can learn all about its habits, or you know what, let's just scoot the little metal wolf around on the table and skip that pesky, time-wasting learning part! It's funny--nobody really wants to experience things through their little naked eyes; let's look through a giraffe-shaped periscope at the giraffes, or pull down a little flap to spot a leopard instead!

My favorite animals are the Big Cats, of course, distant cousins to my adored Oskee. It was eerie to see the Big Cats doing things my Little Cat does: a snow leopard was licking a paw, the lion was bobbing his head up and down as he napped, and the tiger was pawing at the walls, bored out of his mind. Oskee does all of those things.

It was a gorgeous day outside and I thoroughly enjoyed strolling around the zoo. The world is filled with amazing creatures, whether you look at them straight on or through a little digitized display unit that kids bang around on. ;-)