A Partial List Of The Damned

SO THIS is today's lunch, nothing hugely creative: smoked turkey with two kinds of American cheese and Plochman's mustard (SING! "And into Plochman's, beat their swords; and into Plochman's, be-at their swords . . . " Sorry-- that occurs to me once in awhile), grilled, with bacon.

Lemme say that last part again: with bacon.

Now, while I do love bacon, I am not in the "anything can be improved by adding bacon" school, for the sole fact that there is one thing in the world that I do not think is improved by the addition of bacon, and that would be a cheeseburger. You add bacon to a cheeseburger, it becomes a completely different beast. This is one truth that I do hold to be self evident: a bacon cheeseburger is not a cheeseburger. Not that I don't reeeeeeeally dig a bacon cheeseburger now and again. Just that when I want a cheeseburger, I want a cheeseburger.

All that said, part of the inspiration for today's sandwich is this: Subway Restaraunts, Inc., is dead to me. DEAD. D-E-A-D dead. Some time back, literally years ago, I signed up for their internet newsletter thingy in order to take advantage of some deal or such that I never took advantage of. At this point, I was going to the local store for a sandwich about once a week, and it was fine; I trusted the people who worked there, the kitchen was visibly clean, and, heck, when you got right down to it, the sandwiches were just fine. I mean, nothing spectacular, but you could get a good, solid sub and a bag of chips for a little over five bucks, and it was fine. Then, once, I got a bad sandwich. It didn't make me sick, it wasn't horrible, it was just a shade off. Like something in it was just a leeeeetle past its prime. And that was all she worte for the local. I just didn't want to go there anymore. Not like an aversion, really. Just didn't want to. Part of it had to do with the fact that I had made friends with a couple of the people who worked there, and I really didn't want to have to tell them that they had poisoned me. (If, y'know, in the future they gave me a really bad sandwich, and, y'know, POISONED ME.)

The second blow was visiting the Subway at the Bluefield, West Virginia, mall, which was the ONLY place within gunshot to eat when we went there for a roller derby event last november. This was right after the avunted New York trip, so in addition to being served a really rather bad sandwich-- verifiably old, Pops, to the point that I had to decide within the first couple of bites whether I was putting my fate in jeopardy-- it was up against the memory of pastrami and corned beef on rye from the Stage and the deli on the corner and need I go on from there?

Then I opened one of their cockememe e-mail blasts to read their declaration "PEPPERONI-- IT'S THE NEW BACON!"

Never mind my general aversion to the whole "X is the new Y" bullshit. Pepperoni is not bacon. What kind of a @#$%ing idiot could . . . I mean, no one who has ever had . . . You see, unless you are a G*D-DAMNED @#$%ING ROBOT . . . Pepperoni is not bacon. Bacon is bacon.

Dead. Dead dead dead. @#$% the @#$%ing @#$%ers.


Saturday night's movie was this, which El Wiferino put in the Netflix queue when she concluded that we were not going to go see it in the theater, and I very nearly struck when the DVD reviews came out. Where the theaticals had damned it with faint praise, the DVD reviews spelled it out: not only is there nothing special here, the whole thing is one great, big re-tread, and nothing particularly funny at that. And while I think I did laugh once, and Rachelle got a couple of good lauhgs out of a couple of different bits, the fact the reviewers seemed to either miss or omit is that this thing is stupid. STOO-PID. I mean, really really dumb. The part that bothered me most was they peppered the whole thing early on with sight gags that could have figured into an over-arching explanation of the plot, and they squandered it all, just refused to connect the dots. In the end, it didn't feel so much like we had been ill-used (as viewers) as that a great deal of money and potential had simply been squandered. It was like watching a top of the line Mercedes getting detailed by a pack of chimps bearing brillo pads.

THAT's better.

This is one of several movie the Wifey refuses to watch on the grounds that it's dumb. STOO-PID. Which, I can see her point, but to me it's one of those films that is very smart about how it goes about being stupid, and on top of that, Billy Murray is very, very good in it, as are Peter Gallagher and Alfred Molina, a couple of guys whom I would watch wash windows, and Joanne Whalley, whom I would watch watching them wash windows. Also, it has a coulple of amusing things to say about the nature of spying and cold war politics, and, on top of that, I'm a sucker for anything that says crude things about the whole art of drama, the world of acting and actors, especially if it does it in a tongue-in-cheek, meta kind of way. Filled the time. Went with my sammich pretty well.

Oh, speaking of which, the beer: I had meant to do this up there, but this'll do just as well. I had been meaning to try the SweetWater Brewery beers for awhile, and hadn't done so mainly on the grounds that I don't like Atlanta (which is where they're located), which is about as stupid a reason not to try their beer as you could probably find. Week before last, their variety 12 pack was on sale, and the marketing on the box was cute (We boxed up whatever we didn't drink! HA! he he. Alright, not funny, but at least cute.), so I got a little closer. That weekend I decided to bite the bullet and plunk down for the 12. When I got it to the register and scanned it, it turned out it was no longer on sale: instead of fourteen bucks for the 12, they wanted 18 and change. Which, I figured, I already had it rung up (and, Rachelle pointed out, they had already stripped the sale price off the shelf lip), so I ponied up the cash and bought it. The next day, for lunch, I had the Extra Pale Ale followed by a blueberry ale that tasted like medicine. I later had one of the blueberries as part of a midnight snack, but it still tasted like medicine. I didn't finish it. Today the IPA (yellow label) and the EPA (green label) went alright with the turkey-bacon sammich. But the IPA had kind of a fruity high note, actually kind of mangoey, where the EPA kind of tastes like an overly chunky ale. Not bad but, like their company slogan-- Don't Float In The Main Stream!-- just kind of reeks of effort. Like they were trying too hard. Or maybe it's just that I don't like Atlanta. Either way, I don't think I'll be doing this again anytime soon. As it is, I have a few more to face up to, including three Imperial Stouts, which weigh in at a whopping 9% ABV. NINE. Which is alright, I suppose, just kinda gotta plan on not doing a whole lot the rest of the afternoon if I have a coupla THOSE for lunch.

So I don't recommend Planet 51, The Man Who Knew Too Little, Subway Restaurants, Sweet Water Brewery's variety 12 pack, or substituting pepperoni for bacon. Good thing no one's reading this.