For anyone who's feeling the all-at-sea aftereffects of celebratory intemperance, and find their orbital re-entry into this new year a heat-shield-melting experience, we promise to go slowly. Apply the forehead ice. The soggy, greasy scudding along of a serious bout of intestinal crapulence today is instantly understood.
Everyone who wishes those darn butterflies would quit making all that rustling and flapping-around racket outside have our pity, not scorn. We'll simply wrap our feet in couch cushions -- like enormous Bullwinkle slippers -- and promise to not increase your agony with tuba practice or making you read in all caps.
While you're re-hydrating and giving wet, cautious, cotton-brained consideration to the possibility a bacon sandwich and some hair of the dog will be of more help than hindrance, we pledge to make no sudden moves and keep things on an even keel while you regain your sea legs.
Short and sweet is the rule today -- although we might mess with your head a tad, en route to providing you a crinkled grin or two.
Photographer Christopher Boffoli is up first. He takes pictures of a miniature world, using food. This usually takes some explanation. Here we go: Imagine a family camping in a sugar cone forest or skiers on the slopes of an ice cream sundae, for example.
(Brief aside: The bruised side of your stomach and psyche may find the cool and creamy conditions of ice cream worth exploring later today. This is especially true if you've previously taken the radical route of reawakening earlier on, applying multiple, rocket-fueled espressos to your body and mind.)
To the photos: There's a very small person and mower, working on the surface of an orange, making an elongated eel from the peel as she goes. In another image, on a sloped lemon bar, sledders and tobogganers swoosh down a hillside of fresh powder.
In another, a tiny snowplow works its way around small wafers, pushing its path through the powdered sugar, inevitably plowing-in again a hapless shoveler on a sidewalk who'd just been making some walkway progress.
And, there's an odd and familiar tingling sensation in another photo: Standing there in your spacesuit, on the Moon, in star-struck awe, in the presence of the ice cream sandwich monolith: My God, it's full of... vanilla ice cream.
(More ice cream. See how it goes when an idea is really right?)
The photography is wonderful, and the captions equally up to the challenge of amusing you, and smoothing out any jangled or jagged edges.
That is, unless you have no need of a couple's hug on the half shell, or a team of policemen trying to gain control of someone's oversized, escaped crawdad pet. It goes on and on, each one better than the last: Scuba divers, suited and geared up, ready to slip into a can of Coke, or plumb the depths of a cup of Earl Grey tea.
There is a certain magical fascination with a caption that reads, "It was the first cookie climb with neither sherpas nor supplemental oxygen," showing mountaineers tackling a stack of cookies. Another reads "Butter Business Bureau," and involves suited men with briefcases, surfing a pat of butter on an ear of corn.
There will probably be some moments of light-headedness or variable gravity during your recovery today, and as you adjust your own self-awareness and persona, imagining yourself immersed in these tiny new worlds.
To which I can only add: Go with it. (Did I already mention the ice cream?)
Then, there's the work of Jean-Joseph Renucci who also constructs micro-worlds sure to delight. Miniature horses graze on the green turf of the scrubber side of a dish sponge. A team of fishermen tackles the job of raising the lid on a sardine can. A traffic gendarme assures a snail he was going too slow...
And, making up the threesome, is the artist Slinkachu: A man sits on a package of cigarettes that is as big as yacht, trying to smoke the stub of a filtered butt as big around as a steamship's smokestack.
In another, an elaborate aquaslide shoots swimmers down past a sidewalk grating. How about the bachelor encountering a bevy of babes in a bottlecap hot tub, or the rotund superhero, perched on the rim of a soda can on its side?
All these glimpses of alternate worlds are available, and more, from a trio of very creative, witty souls -- a fine way to slip back into, and feel almost comfortable with, your own skin once again, following your out-of-body experiences last night.
For future reference, many partygoers rely on a ballast of bread and butter to help slow the rocketing ride of champagne to the stars. Meanwhile: Rehydrate. Maybe a little cereal, hot or cold. Bacon -- the original meat candy -- is often a good choice, especially paired with scrambled eggs, if you can muffle the deafening, gong-sounding clatter that's involved scrambling them.
For your mourning-after desert, there's always fruit. Or sherbert and gelato or spumoni, along with that oversold ice cream.)
* * * * *
Sometimes, another culture really nails it on a definition of some kind. The French have a couple of very apropos descriptions for hangovers. One translates into I have a wooden mouth. The other literally means I have bad hair, but really means My hair hurts.
There's also a Spanish expression for having a good time. It means We're throwing the house out the window.
And here I am, completely unaware that Defenestration Days were already upon us.
* * * * *
With all this talk of holiday food and drink, here are a couple of today's bonuses, for when you're feeling stronger -- after cleaning up the sills, sashes, and shutters for the next Defenestration Day:
There's a nice tale of a rediscovered family recipe for molasses cookies -- a recipe that needed a little help and guidance from a cookie detective, and got it.
More random speculation -- or is it more than that? -- is here, too, regarding the magic of asparagus to carry one safely through a bit of imbibing. (Asparagus? What will they think of next -- duct-taping pennies to your forehead? Beet root and parsnip soda pop? A dab or two of fish sauce behind each ear?)
Plus, there is also a chance here to fall down the champagne (or beer) rabbit hole again -- only this time, with a scientific understanding on some of the basics of bubbly and beers.
Meanwhile, it may help a bit to know that we really feel for you in your hour of Throbbing Payment to the Universe for Having Had Too Much Fun with Adult Entertainment Beverages.
We encourage thorough, but responsible, reasonable research here at World Recovery and Rehydration Headquarters. We drink to your success. And, as Red Green always said on his teevee show: We're pulling for you.
(If needed for back-up, there's also the Possum Lodge "Men's Prayer" from Red's show: I'm a man, but I can change, if I have to, I guess.)
Cheers.
Bullwinkle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullwinkle_J._Moose
Boffoli's site: http://bigappetites.net/
Renucci's Little People: http://www.npr.org/blogs/pictureshow/2012/08/17/158985361/odd-hobby-little-people-pictures-whats-your-pet-project
Slinkachu's world: http://slinkachu.com/little-people
Gelato: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gelato
Spumoni: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spumoni
Cookie detective: http://www.npr.org/2012/12/06/166671696/in-a-familys-lost-cookie-lots-of-love-and-molasses
Asparagus? http://inhabitat.com/move-over-bloody-maries-asparagus-is-the-new-hangover-cure/
NPR's Bubbly primer: http://www.npr.org/2012/12/28/168203189/get-the-most-bang-from-your-bubbly
Idioms: http://www.waywordradio.org/discussion/topics/your-favorite-idioms-please-1/
Red Green: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Red_Green_Show
and: http://www.redgreen.com/watch.html
One More Bonus -- The Artist Who Uses Sidewalk Chewing Gum as a Painter's Canvas: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-11677462
