More on Facebooking

Posted by Shoshana

Yes, the wonderful world of Facebook has tapped me in to long lost nemesi (is that plural?) and friends from past lives. It’s a little trippy to be communicating, albeit limited communication, with people I have not talked to in decades.

Aleza mentioned a sort of voyeuristic quality to Facebook and other social networking sites, and this is something that I think draws people in. I’ll tell you a story about this one time when I posted pictures of my husband getting a tattoo. For the entire week following the posting, people at his medical school he didn’t even know came up to him to tell him they saw his tattoo pictures on Facebook. He was a little terrified of Facebook before this incident, but afterwards he wondered who else could see things he wasn’t necessarily interested in sharing with people. Because I had posted the photos on my profile, they were visible to all my “friends” and all of my friends’ friends. The network spiraled out of control.

My husband is still rejecting the idea of Facebook. He refuses to join. He is a revolutionary, of course. And we will all learn our lessons in the end.

On a fictional wall in cyber space

Posted by A.

I enjoyed Shoshana’s post on Stories from the Heartland about “Christmas Card” friends (you know, the ones who you only correspond with via holiday cards). It’s strange and a bit sad to admit how many people in my life have become relegated to an annual address label and postage stamp.

I suppose sending a card takes at least a little more effort than merely approving a Facebook friend request and posting some random, whimiscal and/or witty nonsense on a fictional wall in cyber space. On Facebook, I am friends with my first childhood crush, my high school nemesis and my college roommate. I am also friends with three hotels, a slew of Las Vegas-based PR folk whom I only know by name, an Indian restaurant and The Simpsons (as in the animated FOX series).  Is it just me, or has the definition of “friend” becoming watered down in this age of social networking?

In reality, I only count a handful of people among my closest friends, (that’s not including family). Sometimes I make the hasty mistake of counting the fingers on my second hand, but it usually doesn’t take long before those fingers fold back down into a hypothetical fist.

Facebook is a non-commital — a.k.a. lazy — way to keep in touch with people, not to be confused with actual face-to-face relationships. It is really not that different from the concept of selling yourself during real-life networking or at a high school reunion. On Facebook, as in life, we only show other people what we want them to see (and in some cases, that’s TMI). But on Facebook, you have the convenience of a “delete” button and the option not to post – a filter we don’t always have on a day to day basis. Don’t even get me started on the voyeuristic side of Facebook …

Not to say that it isn’t worthwhile, fun and occasionally a good way to pass time. I’ve certainly had my share of good Scrabble challenges and some enjoyable conversations. Also, having skipped my 10 year high school reunion,  Facebook has happily helped me to reunite, reconnect and reconcile with certain ghosts from the past I never thought I’d hear from again.

I think of it sort of like therapy, only much cheaper.

Avoidcado?

Posted by A.

My friend’s friend has never eaten an avocado.

No avocados. No guacomole. He probably hasn’t ever even grown a housplant from a toothpick-embedded avocado seed.

What an avocadope.

Speaking of Cake

Posted by Shoshana

I’ve got a friend up here in Iowa who has an awesome blog called Roasting Rambler. He is an unassuming chef, in that he absolutely thrives on creating masterpiece food but would never become a professional chef. He is constantly exploring the far reaches of food, creating and tweaking recipes and finding interesting combinations of ingredients. Not only that, but he is tapped into this amateur chef online community and shared a recipe for chocolate cake with Reese’s all over it. I mean all over.

He thinks this idea is disgusting. But I, on the other hand, think it is divine. I can’t wait to experiment with this cake for my husband’s birthday.

On another note, he is taking a statistics class right now. Summer school statistics is torture. I tried it once and nearly failed. I have more hope for him, though. He’s a smart cookie.

My brother thinks that we have all gotten too old to be able to grasp the language of statistics. It really requires an additional brain hemisphere to comprehend the depths of statistics. I hope once I am done with grad school I will not have to try to train my brain to understand the basis and fundamentals of a one-way ANOVA or a chi-square test. But I will always remember what a p-value is!

Piece of cake

Posted by A.

It’s funny how you can sit next to someone at work 40 hours a week and still know so little about them. In the two years I worked at the Home News copy desk with Craig, we became close friends. But I had no idea I was sitting next to a regular Betty Crocker.

While I knew Craig had decorated cakes in the past — a talent he learned from his mother — it honestly never occured to me how amazingly elaborate these cakes were until my last day at the newspaper in October 2006, when he made me this haunted house cake:

It’s like something out of Ace of Cakes! Here are some more examples of his amazing talent. You can also read his recipes and cooking tips on his blog Ketchup and Butter Sandwiches:

Craig’s comment: “This is ultimately a very basic chocolate cake, decorated with ribbons and ribbons of fondant. In the center is a chocolate orange. I really wish I could remember where I saw the pattern for it.”

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Craig’s comment: “This cake is on the cover of Rose Levy Berenbaum’s ‘Cake Bible.’ The leaves are very time-consuming, but a lot of fun. Melted chocolate is painted on rose leaves. After peeling away the leaves, their imprint is left behind.”