This One's Eating My Popcorn

IN VERY strange news, the picture for the last entry should have been the one to the left here. Two cheese grilled cheese sandwich etcetera etcetera. The other pic is the Usual Suspect, which is a tuna melt with American and Mexican cheeses-- about which more in a mo-- with the first experiment with the curly fries. The tuna went well enough with the Tsing Tao, and having the zingy hot Ketchupo!(TM) along was a positive boon. The conclusion I finally reached, after a week of Tsing Tao for lunch, is that you really do need to be eating in the Chinese restaurant. I had a pretty good experience having the Tsing Tao with Chinese take out, and I did manage to psych myself out about two thirds of the time having Tsing Tao with lunch at home, but-- and this is wholly psychological-- it really doer taste better with the Chinese food in the Chinese restaurant.

The "Mexican Cheese" in this case is not in any way Mexican. It's some gringo interpretation of what mexican cheese is supposed to be. And, as such, I don't have a real problem with it. I've had people lecture me all my life about American Mexican food not being real, or being some homogenized version of some thirty-seven separate and distinct regional cuisines, and I'm sorry, but I don't think I buy it anymore. I feel fairly certain that there's someplace down in Mexico where they do cover everything with molten cheddar cheese (or maybe some version of Monterrey Jack, I've seen that done too) and red sauce. And I have a hard time wrapping my head around the notion that the only only cheese they use in the entire nation of Mexico is the white queso that tends to get called Farmer's Cheese around here. That just seems odd. So while this is in no way authentic, I still use it. In this application, it does present something of a challenge: the cheese is bagged/shredded, so one must first place the American cheeses (white and orange) on the slice of rye, then place the tuna salad concoction on top of that, then make a bed of the shredded cheese on the other slice of rye, and then flip the layerd assembly onto the bed of shredded cheese. Then all that get's lifted gently into the prepped pan (heated and buttered). By the time it's ready for the first flip, however, the bed of shred has melted, and the connstruction is sound. Easy.

The curly fries, actually, were a little more of a challenge. Cooked by the specifications on the package, I ended up with a frair proportion of burnt ends. What is on the plate (in the photo at the top of the previous entry) is about two thirds of what I loaded in the oven. What you see here is every bit of it, cooked for about five minutes less thant he manufacturer recommended.


This is in no way the movie of the day, not for the least reason that the Wifey is here. I would never subject her to this. I quite liked it, but, for whatever reason, I have the feeling that it would get to her pretty quickly. Because, I think, this film is nothing if not unrelentingly ugly. Not in appearance, but rather in attitude. I mean, there is a definite sweetness to it as well, but the way to it is very, very foul natured.

Which is to the film's credit. When I told some folk about having seen it-- which was about three months ago, actually-- I described it as being dogged in sticking to it's conceit. Which it is: what if clowns were a segment of our society, wherin there were castes, taboos, conventions of dress and speech, power structures, separate social clubs, and so on. The plot is actually fairly conventional, the good guy (Shakes) wins and gets the girl, the bad clown-- be right back there too!-- is exposed and humiliated and driven out of the society, shunned by the rest of the clowns as well as those outside the clown community. And the whole thing gets driven by the single fact that clowns are a dualistic device in our society: they can either be a happy diversion for children or a creepy evil threat. So it makes equal sense for some of these clown being sad sacks who are hoofing their way through life, drowning their sorrows in whiskey by night, substituting cocaine for originality when pressed, aspiring to be the next big attraction if only they could get their lucky break.

Oh, and Florence Henderson plays the desparate, middle-aged one-night-stand Shakes is frantically escaping from in the beginning of the flick.

In a way this kind of has the same allure as the mything Jerry Lewis movie, The Day The Clown Cried. Not to the same degree, no-- of the Jerry Lewis joint, it is rumored that there is one sole extant copy, locked away in Lewis' own private vault-- but same kind, in a way. Very few people have seen it, and you would have to have sought it out specifically, and the odds of you wanting to watch it, based on subject matter and face value, do seem pretty remote. But, by all accounts, this is definitely worth the viewing. Good to be able to say: I have seen Shakes The Clown. And, too, I got Goldthwait's point. He set out to do precisely what he did, and that, in a nutshell, is in fact the central gag behind the whole thing. And it's funny as hell.

So do I recommend it? Hell, no. Always post the right picture of your sandwich. Never put yourself in a position to have to go post some cockameme, overly-long, utterly pointless explanation as to why the picture of the sandwich in the previous post was not the item described, but rather the object herein described is that sandwich down there, and this one up here you just saw is the other thing. And, by the way, cultural trope no one cares about it.

Shakes The Clown? Hell yeah. So long as you're over 21 and don't have any serious clown issues? Go for it. See Shakes The Clown. You'll be a richer soul for it.