Tales From The Crapped

SO THE RESULT of multiple coin tosses is not a cheese-burger, not a ham sandwich, but grilled tuna salad on rye, something I had been meaning to get back to for various reasons, not least of which that I have fallen hopelessly behind on my scheduled mercury poisoning. This should get me back on track.

The Longboard Lager had been aquired earlier in the week to accompany dumplings and noodles from the local Chinese take out, where the counter chickie knows my order by heart and now has but to ask the Wifey which incarnation of broccoli in garlic sauce she prefers that afternoon. The result of combining it with the Sara IPA was almost like eating two completely different sandwiches. The lager emphasized the fishiness of the tuna, while the IPA punched up the spikey black pepper and the zing of the mustards. (For those of you just joining Our Hero, tuna salad is made with dill relish, mayo, Plochman's yellow mustard, Grey Poupon dijon mustard, Ka-Me Chinese mustard, Celtic sea salt and both black and green cracked peppercorn. This iteration also featured chopped shallot, which I love.)

Sorry I haven't been blogging for a bit, but my sister-in-law borrowed our camera for a week and a half, so I have not been able to take the ubiquitous lunch pics. This whole thing started witht he habit of taking pictures of the day's lunch to show the Wifey via IM, and for whatever reason I have become convinced that I absolutely cannot blog without a lunch pic.


Which is either a shame or a blessing, depending on how you look at it. We have watched a whole bunch of movies of late that were not worth watching. Not including the little beauty to the left here, which I watched all by my lonesome over lunch, with the result that, man, they just don't make propaganda like that anymore. Of course, this particular propaganda had one hell of a raison d'etre. This film happily points out that the Nazi impulse began with a simple trumpeting of the value of conformity, in the interests of national solidarity and the restoration or the German empire to its rightful place at the top of the historical heap. Mucho scary stuff. It also gives me a pair of new possible perspective on the tea baggers: either these guys are the new Nazis, or we have nothing to fear because these guys don't even have the wherewithall to be Nazis. I think either perspective is worthy of consideration.



The movie of the Chinese take out, which we indulged in Monday while recovering from an overnight trip to Roanoke, Virginia, by which I mean we had left at 1 in the afternoon Sunday and got home at 4 AM the next day, was this. The Wifey had put it in the Netflix queue because it had someone famous in it, which we eventually concluded was Eric McCormack, although it could have been almost anybody in the cast, which was one of those where-have-I-seen-him/her ensembles of actors who have been great in all kinds of minor things. (Had I put it in the queue, I would have done so because it had Dan Lauria in it, or Robert Patrick, also known as the Liquid Metal Terminator.) Once again, the Chinese take out was instrumental.

As Ebert said, this was obviously a labor of love, but why? There is certainly nothing like it, but just because something's never been done before isn't always a good idea to make it. The acting was universally superlative, with pretty much every actor having an opportunity to shift from melodramatic satire to pure dramatics somewhere along the way. (Lauria, in particular, did an ultra fine job, playing it like it was all a joke he alone was in on until one moment late in the film when he lets loose and just freakin burns.) And there were some hi-larious bits involving badly made fake monsters and using green screen to simulate in-car shots when they had just moments before been shooting on location. (The latter of which is really funnier in retrospect.) But when we got to the end of the film and discovered that the Special Features consisted of material designed to reinforce the flick's whole film-within-a-film central gag, well, goddamnit, enough was goddamn well enough.

So do I recommend it? Re-discover your old loves. Tuna salad, anti-Nazi propaganda, and far over the top rec reations of 1950's sci-fi fare are all worthy of your attentions and affections. And if it takes tossing in a couple of specialty beers or Chinese dumplings to keep the flames of passion burning, so be it. The heart wants what it wants!