There are so many layers to this one, it's hard to know where to start.

First off, in the Law of Unintended Consequences department, you can tell by this photo that this is a two-toned sammich. The two-tone-edness was unintentional as the frying pan was not as hot as I expected to begin with and hotter than I thought at the end; the picture was actually meant to show off the girth of the beast, which I don't think it does very well.

Next (next?), this is another example of what I have taken to calling the cheese-bomb: two slices of orange cheeze planted in the outside layers. The basic technique for making the fried bologna sandwich is to fry the bologna and apply the white American right around the time the second side is finishing, then layer the bologna slices on the bread as they come out of the pan; next (next?), after giving the pan a quick but thorough wash, grill as you would any other sandwich. The cheese-bombing makes . . . A difference. Not all the difference, but a difference.

And then there's the mustard: Plochman's on one side, Ka-me Chinese style on the other. This is a fairly complex beast for a fried bologna sandwich.

The movie of the day was almost this.

Almost. I mean, it's been fun enough, but there are large swaths of it I have kind of drifted through. It's good enough for a political/historio thriller, but there are aspects to it that make me wonder why anyone-- the writer of the novel, the adapter of the screenplay, the director, the actors, me-- bothered. Everything about it is impressive, especially for a TV movie (although, to be fair, it's a BBC TV movie, which in American terms is alot like being an HBO production, in terms of quality), but the plot has shifted like 5 times since they started, and I am starting to wonder if the grand plot twist that is headed my way is really going to be all that worth waiting for.

So I finally ditched it for the time being and switched over to an old Law & Order, as I want to finish the sandwich and read this article at the Onion AV Club without feeling like I am missing something. I may finish it up later, or I may wait and watch the rest of it later on with the Wifey. But I can recommend it. The cinematography is wonderfully stark, and, if nothing else, Danny Craig and Gabe Macht are clearly having a hell of a lot of fun.

BEHOLD GOSSAMER!

SO what separates this from the earlier iteration, dubbed Monstro?

Note the fried egg topper. I had been thinking about doing something along these lines for a week or so now, based largely on several items that popped up on shows we have been following on the Travel Channel. A fried egg on a sammich is a wonderful thing indeed. Any of you thinking of doing such a thing yourself, two bits of advice: cooking the egg hard is not the way to go. I would seem to forestall any messiness that might otherwise be involved, but it's just not the way to go. You have to trust me on that.

Also, it is absolutely crucial that you locate and monitor the yolk of the egg within the sandwich. This should be attacked in a single bite, and you should be prepared for a wildly varying degree of spurtage/seepage.

Insert your porn joke here. Hell, never mind; I just said "insert."

Last night's movie was this. It was fine. There were morality bits that were iffy, and it kind of bothered me that those iffy bits were really the basis on which the thing was built, but the acting was uniformy strong, and all the characters came off as essentially believable and mostly honorable, and all utterly human, so it was all pretty much watchable. And it moved well enough, but not so fast as to strain credulity.

So to recap: sausage sandwich with fried egg, recommended, but expect some acrobatics to be necessary.

Traitor: recommended, but be prepared to make the occasional ethical leap now and again. And watch out for that yolk!

I dub thee "Monstro."

(Pinocchio was recently released on DVD. "Monstro" was the name the animnators gave the giant fish that swallowed Pinocchio.)

I am not sure if you need the details here, but it's Hillshire Farms' smoked sausage with kraut and cheese on a kaiser roll with Grey Poupon. Why, you might ask? Nah. You're right; you'd never ask that. But it is because I am ill. Not mentally diseased, although I definitely have an element of that as well, but because I had a slight cold over the weekend, and then celebrated the break in the weather (and St. Pat's day) by dropping the top on the Miata and driving to the local for corned beef and cabbage, and thus caught hold of a relapse that has been kicking my ass around the block. The beers were the Black Forest and an IPA. Like Briscoe & Green.*

The film of the day was not Milk. I highly reccommend it; Smartly done, wonderfully acted, very good history, and here's something you don't hear every day: wonderfully lit. How many films can you say that about? How many films can you actually say, with a straight face, have authentic period lighting? (A few scenes may be overly murky, but in those cases the intent was pretty clear.) And pretty good San Francisco porn to boot, showing off in particular that quality of 'Frisco that is genuinely timeless.

Bored the crap out of me. I know the whole story. And I'm not saying that there were not moments that grabbed at me-- there were-- or that this is a film that didn't need to be made. It badly needed to be made, this is a story that needs to be told in the strongest possible terms, not just because Havey Milk managed to gain representation for an entire segment of the popluation that hade been not only unrepresented but actively persecuted. But, yeah yeah yeah. And then there were the scenes with Anita Bryant in them, which just creeped me out. Crazy bitch just creeps me out. Brrrrrrrrrrrr!

This was the film of the day.

*I know; that's what I called the Pale Ale & the Black Forest, but the analogy still applies.

Back In The Day, The Guys All Thought Of Me As "The Fifth Horseman"

I SEE SATAN IN MY SAMMICH! I SEE SATAN IN MY SAMMICH!!!

I see dead people?

I mean, if people can see the Virgin Mary in a grilled cheese . . . Well, then of COURSE I'd see Satan in this one. After all, it has ham in it . . .

Boy, that went WAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay farther than I had first imagined it would.

The side is Pringles, which I may be over for awhile. Not sure why. Fortunately, it doesn't take long to get through a can of Pringles. The beers are a Saranac Lager followed by an IPA. I know I have done this before, but this time, let me just say: Dude, that is how we do that.

This was going to be the movie of the day.

I tried. Dear GOD, I tried. Couldn't do it. Both the book and the movie-- yeah yeah, I didn't watch the movie, and didn't even TRY to read the book, but trust me, I know these things-- distill the most common, antecdotally supportable cliches about modern Americans leading modern American lives and mine them for the lousiest, most sleazy-minded, disgusting, impotent, irresponsible representatives of humanity one could ever imagine. And THEN they cripple them with conventional morality. It's like watching quadraplegics . . . Forget I was going to say anything here and just use your imaginations.

Anyways, not a fan. Seriously. It's like John Cheever writing intallment fiction for the National Enquirer. Screw it. If I wanta be that negative, I'd just go to the grocery store. (Wow. If that's not an obscure reference, I don't know what is.)

On the upside, my father-in-law has been catching up on Season 2 of Boston Legal, so I just happened to have a disc of the stuff lying nearby.

THAT's better.

(Better to mine the cliches for humor? Is that what I'm saying? Gotta go check on my horse . . . )

The Secret Lives Of Ommlettes*

AND SO I say again: Yes! Eggs and beer? Yes, I say! Yes!

It might not look like it, but this is one of the most successful ommlettes I have made in recent memory. For the record, the fillings are white American, orange American, 3 cheese Mexican blend, ham, finely chopped shallot, and a generous squirt of Plochman's yellow mustard. The toast slices, rather than being buttered, were slathered with a Grey Poupon. I do like my mustard.

The object did stick just a little and rupture a bit on delivery from skillet to plate, but the cookingprocess was in precisely the right state when this happened, so that the carry-over heat did the last touch of cooking to the eggs as I got the rest of the accoutrements together. Poifect!

The beers are the Saranac Black Forest and Pale Ale, which teamed up like Briscoe & Green.

The film of the day is not Let The Right One In, but more about that in a bit. The lunchtime diversion was supposed to be Tony Bourdain's most recent show on Viet Nam, in which he claimed to be planning to move there for a year to work on a novel (or so claimed the Time Warner Cable program guide description). The first time I watched it, I missed the last 20 minutes or so, as the fatigue of a most busy weekend filled with later-than-usual nights caught up with me, so I was curious to see if those missing 20 minutes contained anything more in the way of a conviction that Bourdain is really going native, and what, if anything, that might mean for the series.

Instead, the program being offered was the original Viet Nam show, from, I think, a year ago. As I was cooking while the first reel unspooled, I didn't immediately make the connection (later, while eating, I managed to put the pieces together), but as the thing went on I began to wonder: was there an outcry such that the Travel Channel-- The Travel Channel-- decided it was too risky to re-run the show? Were people so traumatized by the prospect of Tony completely and officially departing the States that watching it again might cause a rift in the social fabric? And if so, what kind of world are we living in?

Let The Right One In I will be holding off on for awhile. We didn't get the chance to see it in a theater, and the Wife has proclaimed that she has nothing in the way of an interest in seeing it on DVD as of even date (just recently released). And while everything I have heard about it has suggested that it is a very well made and moving film, Iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii . . . I'm waiting until one day it's just on. I have this strange feeling that the suprise in store for me is that all those film critics didn't see this to be as transparent and manipulative as I did. Ihave even developed a very specific theory as to which scene this somewhat ubiquitous still from the film appears in. You don't want to know; it'd either be a spoiler of sorts, or your wouldn't give a flying rat's ass.

*For those of you who have not bothered to wonder why I keep misspelling "omlette," it's supposed to have been a meditation gag. The egg dish being such a calming force as to make one go "Ommmmmm . . . " No one got it, it's gotten more than old, and I now declare said old pale gag dead and buried.

Woozle Wuzzel?

I couldn't agree more.

What's Going On

SO here we go again. Chili cheese fries can be addictive.

This was actually just a perparation, a prelude, to this:

This is the chili-cheese grilled sandwich, something that I
stumbled into during my last year of college, in the name of stretching the utility of a can of chili as far as possible. (Actually, this is just a picture of a grilled ham and cheese, but I could not find the pic I took of the chili-cheese monster.) Anywho, the iteration is basically a grilled cheese sandwich with a layer of chili in the middle. It is insanely good, especially with beer and fries. (And the beer was, in fact, the Red Hook Longhammer IPA, which went along like a dream.) (The beer with the chili cheese fries was a Saranac pale ale folowed by the brown ale, which was beautiful; the pale started out strong against the spicy smack of the chili, and then the brown ale cozzied right up with its slight, sweet undernote. Utterly gorgeous.

But, in fact, this is what's going on today.

Reports of accumulation varied wildly; predictions of traffic stoppages and the catalogues of closings did as well, but there were people on the road as early as eight this morning (as far as I know, since that's about the time I got up). Normally this much snow would cripple my town for a week, but thus far the melt-off has been rapid and comprehensive. Of course, there will be the ubiquitous talk of "re-freezing" overnight, something that has never actually happened as far as I know.

But it's been enough of an excuse to ground myself for the day, sit in and read junk on the internet and have chili cheese fries and beer. The Wifey got off to work about a quarter past eleven, and since then it's just been me and the dog, staying in and watching the snow melt.

The closest thing we have had to a Film of the Day was when we put in Babylon AD about a week ago, which was a huge mistake. We watched the whole damned thing, and it never once stopped to make sense. The whole damned thing just rolled along without explanation. Not only do I not recommend it, I still, to this day, feel insulted that it was ever made,* insulted that it was ever distributed, insulted that it was ever transferred to DVD format, insulted that it was stocked at Blockbuster Online, insulted that it was ever mailed to my house, insulted that it was ever brought inside, insulted that it was put into the DVD player, and insulted that I sat there during the whole goddamned thing and expected it to make, at some point, at least once, some kind of goddamned sense. Although that last part is realistically my own stupid fault.

*I suspect that editing may have been a part of the problem, but it would seem an odd thing for all of expositive scenes/speeches to have been left on the cutting room floor.