Voyage to the Bottom of the Cheese

SO I GUESS you could call this the logical extension of the plowman's lunch. Rather than just having the cold ingredients, I produced three planks of cheese bread-- one of gorgonzola, one of fontal, and one with a combination of fontal and white cheese-- and had them with a variety of olives and the last of the salami. The beer is Guinness, 'nuff said. As a mid-day repast, it was plenty satisfying, as is the notion of dubbing it the Ex-Plowman's Lunch.

Not that I would do such a thing again. Nor that I never would. I am simply unsure as to how soon I might again have gorgonzola, a cheese which, I quipped to the wife, is not actually named after the mythical monster, although it might as well have been. I love it, but it is some strong stuff. There are great lovers of heavy roqueforts, stiltons, and other pungent blues who consider gorgonzola not just strong, but, actually, crude. So I don't recommend it and I don't not recommend it. Try it some time if you like. You will either burst with joy or run screaming into the hills.

I can recommend today's movie, which was an Irwin Allen film, maybe even THE Irwin Allen film, although that's a hard thing to qualify. I remember seeing this for the first time when I was maybe fifteen or sixteen. When I turned it on, I first thought it was something else entirely, and I was watching chiefly in an effort to figure out whether it was what I thought it was or something else entirely. My Dad wandered through about the time the credits came up, and said "Oooooh! That's a good one!" I have no idea, to this day, if he was kidding or not.

Because it is a hell of a thing-- high concept stuff about the end of the world, conflicting personalities, and how their reactions can spur us to action or make us freeze in paranoia, and Barbara Eden's in it-- but, too, it's a hulluva thing-- flat characters, high concepts that are laid out like Scrabble tiles, and special effects that have all the exhilaration of playing with plastic boats in a bathtub, and Barbara Eden's in it. So I was able to get through it with a combination of nostalgia, fascination, disbelief, and beer. Other ways this might be recommended: after a head injury, while in traction, while feigning conversation with someone you find not at all interesting but to whom you are somehow honor bound to converse with, during oral surgery, or while teaching a film class.

But it was interesting to see, on this viewing, the second, some twenty-something (seven) years later, how many elements Tom Clancy lifted out, and I mean just plain stole, from this movie for use in both the book and the movie The Hunt For Red October.