Joe me the money

Last night at a commercial break during The Practice, I guiltily change channels to Joe Millionaire. A few seconds later, the phone rings. I think, this room is bugged, isn’t it. I look at the Caller ID. It’s Rajani. I pick up. “Oh, good lord, Rajani. This is becoming our thing now, isn’t it?” I chide. “Watching Joe Millionaire together?” (I like to pretend it’s mere coincidence that we find ourselves on the phone every Monday night at nine, eight Central.) And so it goes. We watch the remainder of the screeching, gold-digging train wreck.

I won’t bring myself to watch an entire episode of the series, but I usually tune in during the latter half to catch some of the crude mating rituals, and the ceremony with whatever precious gemstone pendant Evan is hawking this week. I laughed at Sarah’s comments to the effect of “he’s a little rough around the edges” and “he’s not really very intellectual.” And I loved when, as he tries to describe a kind of stuffed pastry at dinner, she says, “Gnocchi?” and then with a hint of self-satisfied and exasperated condescension, “Wait, you mean, ravioli?” Ha. She’s thinking, “ooh, project!” but I want to see her face when she finds out he’s more of a fixer-upper than a move-in special.

Speaking of TV, earlier tonight I caught the pilot of the unfortunately named A.U.S.A., a new sitcom starring the ever charming Scott Foley. Eh, it’s passable Tuesday night fare, but it’s definitely the star that holds the show together.

V. good. Yet again I undertook a bootless attempt to read Henry James’ The Ambassadors. I bought the book years ago, thinking, ah yes, Americans in Paris and so forth, but the dense, descriptive prose demands more attention than I can muster in my daily fifteen-minute stretches of reading on the metro. So it goes back to warming the bookshelf bench, for now. In its stead: Bridget Jones’s Diary. I know, how’s that for a 180?

Super-sized vending. Near the McDonald’s next to my office building, today I discovered an oddity: a huge outdoor vending machine, at the edge of the the parking lot. Huge. This thing is as large as one of those sidewalk delis. I walked up to it, mouth agape along with a couple of strangers, ogling the beast. Billed as a kind of automated convenience store, it sells not only food but other small, sundry items. I don’t know why, but the idea of a machine like this seems so foreign to me, literally, like European or Japanese, say.

And as if that wasn’t enough, attached to the side is a separate machine from which you can rent DVDs. (Another article here; and these pictures of the one in Adams Morgan give you an idea of what it looks like.) I’d take a picture of the one I saw today, but I’d probably get the some of the same strange looks directed at the machine itself.