Open Letter

Dear White People*,

Stop making us all look like assholes.

Stop screaming lies at the top of your lungs just because our president is a black man. Stop doing the absolutely most belligerent things while staying just within the law. Stop making it look like we want everyone else to feel shitty because they're not white.

Thank you.

Yrs,

Bobo The Wandering Pallbearer




*You know who you are. Oh yes you do.

You're Not Druish, Are You?*

SO TODAY's lunch falls right in the middle of the pile-of-goo category: my mother-in-law's wonderful shepherd's pie, spiked with salt and pepper, augmented with a lattice of Plochman's yellow mustard, and capped with a bulkhead of cheese. The beers played a nice counter-balance to the whole affair, bringing out both the sweetness of the corn and the the bite of the mustard and black pepper.

It kind of made up for the cheeseburger I didn't have yesterday. The Local had pulled pork barbeque on the special. It was good.


I SO WISH this was the movie of the day. The big news today is that this has been released on Blue Ray. Now, I have not seen Blue Ray yet, so I cannot vouch for the boost in quality, but I am assuming that it is comparable to HD, in which case, watching The Towering Inferno in Blue Ray would be just fetching. Stunning. Basically, it would amp up the impact of watching the fakest fake fiery fire to a whole new level! And you could actually SMELL the flop sweat pouring off off Steve McQueen and Paul Newman's faces by the gallon! And you could watch Robert Wagner die in stunning detail! Seriously, folks, I have sat through this thing twice, once out of stunned disbelief and once out of pure, unadulterated nostalgia, but I imagine sitting though it once more, in ultra-vision, would be like a chance to see what losing your mind feels like, whilst being assured of returning to sanity after a reasonable sojourn.

This is also not the film of the day. Probably never will be.

On the one hand, I still can't decide whether Tarantine is a quirky prankster with a heart of gold or a privledged twerp who can't tell his head from the hole in his ass. On the other hand, now that this is on the cusp of delivery, and the cast is traipsing around doing the press junket thing, and they mostly seem to be touting what a weird moral-ethical dillema the whole thing presented, in that they portray gleefull killers, but on the other hand they're killing Nazis, but on the third hand they're being taught to operate their weapons by modern-day, clean-handed Germans who wouldn't harm a flea, and on the fourth mutant appendage, Tarantine took great pains not to tell them what they would be facing the next day, kept bits of the back story secret until the last second, and, apparently, kept fucking up those last two "tactical" bits by getting drunk and blurting out the secret the night before he meant to spring it on his loyal crew of thespian guinea pigs.

Here's the problem: I am wary, scared, terrified really, that this whole thing will emerge from the editing suite Tarantine-slick and Tarantine-sugary. A veritable Chris Farley Show of a parody of World War Two. ("Remember when we killed all those Nazis? That was AWESOME!")

Excuse me, but I don't want to play that fucking game. Remember the Nuremburg trials? Remember how much fun we had there?

That was AWESOME.

*The title here was going to be the penultimate punchline from Monty Python's Flying Circus' Mr. Neutron episode, but I was a little trepidatious that someone might read my blog. Could have lead to severe repurcussions, and easily offended anyone who might be way overly sensitive and obnoxiously knee-jerk reactive. Instead I settled for a three level pop reference gag that no one will ever understand. Clever of me, no?

Editorial Commentary

Doc Nagel is probably right, reagrding the UST. My earlier, libertine outburst should probably be viewed as what it most likely was: a barbeque fueled exortation of hedonism, worth little more than the rantings of a coked up film executive on a midnight bender, dialing numbers from his little black book at random and then blaming the recipient for all his failings and failures.

Wait a minute. What just happened there?

In point of fact, I think, the UST probably ought to be provised in some way to prevent things like this. The item is the currently ubiquitous grilled tuna salad sandwich. The whole process was going swimmingly, right up to the point when I went to flip the thing to grill the port side, and then tragedy struck. The sandwich actually turned out fine from a gustatory point of view; it's just aesthetically that it's a complete and utter failure.

Of course, the real culprit in the tragedy was the spatula I was using, which is a floppy, oversized number which looks like it would be perfect for flipping sandwiches but has been responsible for botched flips like this in the past. (Mind you, I am not letting the tool take all the blame; I chose it after all. And the old saying, "It's a poor carpenter who blames his tools," is wrong. It's a poor, stupid, fucking carpoenter who works with crappy tools.) But I am not sure the UST could be so crafted. Besides which, the tenent in mind would be more a general culinary standard anyways: don't use crappy tools.

I DON'T WANT YOUR HELP!!!

I AM AN addict. I can't stop. I don't want to stop. I need help, but I will not accept it, refuse to. I don't even run anymore, haven't run farther than a few hundred yards at a stretch in full on ten years, but I can't stop buying the shoes. This makes 17 pairs I now own.

Ain't they cool?

The lunch of the day is beef brisket and pulled pork barebeque from Mac's Speed Shop on a kaiser roll with cheese, backed with a modified barbeque sauce (boosted with Plochman's yellow mustard, Cholula hot sauce, and cracked black pepper), cole slaw (also from Mac's), and the chips, which are Utz's Crab Chips. (Works especially well since they are seasoned with Old Bay, and the kick in the cole slaw is provided by celery seed.) Conventional wisdom would tromp all over this: you either have pork or brisket, and either way you DO NOT put cheese on barbeque, except if the barbeque is especially bad. But the Unified Sandwich Theory would be easily met: two kinds of prepared meat with cheese on bread with condiment for dipping. This, finally, is what the UST was meant to do. The whole time, we have been thinking of the UST as a set of restrictive guidelines. But all ethics are descriptive. The UST is finally a permissive doctrine: anything that can be stably constructed between two pieces of bread is a sandwich. And it's good.

I hve been eating lunch for well over an hour. Partly because it's a chewy sandwich. Partly because . . . Well, it's like the joke about the three-legged pig. When a pig is that good, you just don't eat 'im all at once.



The film of the day, suprisingly, was this. Even after reading a couple of pretty good reviews of it, I was still a bit suspicious. I mean, how many Bill Pullman movies have you seen? And what has Ben Stiller been in that didn't suck? (Besides Tropic Thunder.) And Ryan O'Neal? Aren't we all supposed to think he's a douchbag these days?

I have honestly always thought O'Neal a fine actor, and a couple of his roles, to this day, to me, exemplify what a good movie ought to be (What's Up Doc and Paper Moon, to be specific). Also, I don't know that he's to be condemned so much. His kids, demonstrably, are spoiled, ill-mannered brats from what I have heard, except for Tatum, who has deliberately refused to keep in touch with him in order to avoid the rest of the brood, and death hurts. Especially, I think, the death of a beloved whacko. A little bizarre behavior on the part of the bereaved is, I think, both to be expected and forgiven.

Anyways. Good enough movie, if the sort of thing you can miss a half an hour of without missing anything much.


The same cannot be said of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, the movie so nice they named it for three and a half goddamned paragraphs. This one I deliberately put off, because . . . Alright, I put it off because I knew I would see it sooner or later, but I knew I would have to be in exactly the right mood. Same way I knew I was going to see Gerry. Beautiful acting, great story telling, broad, expressive silences, but llllooooooooooooooooooooooooong. And, what I knew going in but didn't confirm until I actually started watching it, the sourcework is bullshit. Iowa trained academic writer who, if his movie hadn't gotten optioned, woulda made his money teaching writing in order to give him time to write his books. At least twice in the movie I noticed harsh flaws in the story, and a couple of the ways they cast the character of the coward Robert Ford were just utter bullshit, especially in the endgame. But, in the end, well enough acted to make up for any flaws in the story. And the real star of the movie is the Canadian (Albertian) landscape standing in for the stark winter time climes of old Missouri. Beautifully shot.

Still. Jerry Lee has seen The Assassination of History by Some Schmuck Who Went To The Iowa Writer's Workshop to Convince Your Kid He/She IS Going To Be The Next Ernest Goddamned Hemingway, Which You Only Appreciate Because It Might Make Them Shut Up About American Freakin' Idol For Thirty Seconds, With The Rain And Sham-Ba-La.

But do I recommend it? Hell yeah. Make a lunch, get comfy, settle in, and DON'T PULL UP WIKIPEDIA. Zero Effect? Hell, no. I was probably just in a generous mood, and the crazy, mixed-up sammich certainly helped. Besides which, Lawrence Kasdan's kid is already rich, and Ben Stiller really ought not be encouraged (to do ANYTHING). The sandwich? Have some barbeque. Oh: And India Pale Ale goes great-- GREAT-- with this, so next time you do, have an IPA. And of course I recommend the shoes. Remember your Adams/Prefect: The value of good footgear is not to be underestimated.