The Saga of Bobo, the Wandering Pallbearer

If You Get Caught, Lie

2012-01-10T13:10:00.000-08:00

THIS WAS the default lunch, as today Speed TV re-ran the 2011 Grand Prix Espagna, from Catalunya, which is my second favorite course. Yeah. I think so. Spa, Catalunya, Monza. Then probably Singapore, because it's ridiculous. Imagine F1 racing in Pittsburgh. Or maybe in Jersey.*
But the traditional pastrami dish, which this time was going to be an omelet with pastrami inside, sort of like an omelet with hash filling, was out because the pastrami in the fridge had gone over, very likely because that's what happens when Christmastime comes around and everybody else in the known universe insists on feeding you. So at the last minute, I bolted out to the store and grabbed some bacon. So I had a turkey, bacon and cheese with both cheddar and American cheese and two kinds of mustard. (Oh, and the Ketchupo!(R) is made with a new Heinz product, ketchup with balsamic vinegar, which WOO-HOO!)
This is not the movie of the day, even if you hold a non-metaphoric gun to my head. It happened to be on when nothing else was, and SHEESH! What a dog. There are small flashes of what they meant to do, Russell Brand is intermittently amusing, Helen Mirren is appropriately icy and quirky by turns, but it has a heart as black and cold as Jennifer Garner's. It seems like they meant to do a fairly pure update to the original-- eventually Our Hero gives in, goes to AA, and accepts his small part in the charity wing of the soulless corporation whose teat he formerly gorged upon, and thus honorably wins the penniless girl who turned out to be a genius kiddie lit author, which is all bullshit, but at least bullshit authentic to our times-- but, as always happens with addicts, too many things must have seemed like good ideas. In a way, it was like going to a flea circus and finding ticks. You either get that metaphor or you don't. I'm not going to elaborate.

Not that the original was actually any better.

What was very clearly designed as a vehicle for Dudley Moore to show off his classic British stage sketch comedy sensibilities, not to mention Liza Minelli to pull the original J-Lo, trying to convince us that Liza with a Z was really just Linda from the Bronx, degenerated into a writer's group monstrosity. The sky was the limit. If they wanted to get Sir John Gielgud to act in their farce, so be it. If they wanted to kill his character off, so be that as well. They even included a speech in which one character justified a killing and then asserted that his being justified in protecting his family's house and food gave him reign and justification in killing for any reason he saw fit. (Oh, and that damned theme song? It took, like, six people to write that thing. Okay, four, but two of them were Burt Bacharach and Carol Bayer Sager, and if that didn't foreshadow the coming cocaine epidemic, I don't know what else would have.)

But the re-do? The final scene was a shot of Arthur driving his one true love down Fifth Avenue in the Batmobile with flames coming out of the turbine. And Fifth Avenue was so clearly glass painted (or whatever the computer photo-shop equivalent is) that when they disolved from that into a cartooned Fifth Avenue backdrop, it was actually, disappointingly, anti climactic.

So do I recommend it? The sandwich was good. But other than that, man, I just don't care.

*Never mind. That's only funny if you follow F1 way too closely. But this is. "Moon. New York City. What do I have to do, draw you a map!?"

Ain't That A Hole In The Boat?

2011-12-29T10:43:00.000-08:00

ONCE IN A LONG WHILE something comes together that makes perfect sense while making no sense at all. This time it's topping a beef stew with slices of brie. The stew comes about because it's freakin 3 degrees outside-- alright, as of now, it's 48, but it was 28 for the low, and 33 when I took the dog out to walk about ten this morning-- and the brie was just hanging around after being part of a ploughman's lunch a few weeks back. The result, after the brie was allowed to rest atop the steaming stew for a few minutes while the bread roll finished baking, was just tremendous, a subtle, under-the-chin punch that rings the bells like a hay maker, just a shadow of the brie's pungency co mingled with the spice of the stew. It's so crazy, it just might work!

This is not quite the movie of the day. Almost. Kinda sorta maybe. Mostly in that I am watching it on Comedy Central, so it's chock full of commercials and bleeped to h***, but also that I am only watching it for a sense of completion. I have seen the second half of it, in bits and pieces, probably one and a half times all told, just during stints of time when there wasn't anything else much on or while something else I was watching was in commercials. But I felt I needed to give it the full shot, at least once, since it has a real rotten rep as what the critics like to call "lazy comedy," despite having shown me some flashes of, if not brilliance, at least competence.

Allow me to backpedal here, just briefly, and suggest that I also feel guilty for not giving the flick a shout out for containing yet another brilliant Michael Shannon performance-- and whatever else goes on here, Shannon really does manage that stride between drama and comedy, playing a genuinely scary guy for laughs. Nah. That doesn't justify it either. And it doesn't really say much for Shannon, although I don't think it says anything against him either, to lump this in with the Shannon oeveur.

Because it's not that it's a bad movie. It's just not a better one. Its full of yank-out-the-rug humor that doesn't quite surprise. It's like that friend you had in junior high school who learned that if he popped his friends in the right spot in the back of the knee, they'd almost, but not quite, fall down. It's like watching a student pilot do a run-through for the instructor before doing a solo: they punch all the buttons and toggle all the switches, but it never gets off the ground.

This is the movie of the day. Lemme take a moment and try to figure out why.

Nah. I got nothin. It's a beautifully shot, wonderfully acted, gritty, overseas inter-war drama, full of conflicts and injustice and cruelty, and love and redemption, and, most of all, pathos for flawed but worthwhile characters. It's also based on a pretty badly written book about a bunch of stuff that never happened while the Chinese people were trying to decide which kind of fascism they wanted. Oh, and did I mention the stereotypes? Not just of the Chinese mind you. McKenna-- that's the author of the book, Richard McKenna-- thought it was important to show that peoples of all races are capable of being completely nasty, and that unless you fall in love with Candace Bergen, your soul is as redeemable as a tin can in Nevada.

I have no idea what I mean by that.

So do I recommend it? Not really. In the final analysis, you're as likely to combine brie and stew as, well, you're not likely to, I don't think. Let's Go To Prison really isn't bad, it's just misunderstood. No, wait, it's too well understood, and it takes the patience of a saint to sit through it for all the little good bits to add up, despite the fact that Will Arnett and Dax Shepard are adorable together. And even though The Sand Pebbles is a really good movie about really rotten things (and people! Don't forget the people!), the fact remains that it's about five hours long-- alright, three-- and given that it plays hell with a bunch of really very interesting history, mainly for the satisfaction and edification of it's author, it's really hard to argue for.

And The Horse You Rode In On

2011-12-18T08:15:00.000-08:00

Merry Christmas, y'all.

Entertainment--It's Contaigious!

2011-12-08T13:34:00.000-08:00

TODAY's lunch is in part inspired by the Wifey's compul-sive viewing of food related shows on the Travel Channel, specifically Adam Richman's show Man Vs. Food. On one of his bizzaro jaunts through some town's eateries lead him to a joint where they made grilled cheese sandwiches with basically whatever cheeses they could find-- or so it seemed to me-- and every once in awhile the memory of watching those sandwiches being made will inspire me to do something like this. This amounts to a seven cheese grilled cheese sandwich, American, two different levels of cheddar, and the four cheese Mexi blend, which, yeah, I know: that's cheating. But then it's on rye bread. With two kinds of mustard. And bacon and slices onion. He he he he he.

This is not particularly the movie of the day, but it was on while I was waiting to make, making, and then having lunch. I can watch this dumb tub of crap anytime. The science is not precisely junk, but it sure as hell ain't far from it. The whiteboard scene in particular, where they're trying to hone down a pool of victims to try and find Patient Zero, well, um, no, that's not precisely how that works. Besides which, having read the book from which they derive their source material . . . Ah, forget it. The list of bitchings is just too long. But if I am in precisely the right mood, then I can watch the performances and dig to the dialogue and only every once ion a while break out laughing out loud at the fact that I am watching fuckin' Outbreak.

This is also not the movie of the day, insofar as I did watch it, but more out of a sense of obligation than anything else. I heard, when it came out, that it was both brilliant and damned near impossible to watch, and figured that vsooner or later I would end up giving it a run. But then, having enjoyed Michael Shannon's wonderful, dark, increasingly unhinged performance on the HBO series Boardwalk Empire, the final tumbler fell and I stuck it in the Netflix queue. With the result that, dear God, what a superbly well acted, amazingly well written, meticulously constructed chunk of the willies! The best way I can sum this up is to say that, several times, I had to remind myself that yes, there are people out there that believe about 80% of the conspiracy theories being spewed throughout the film as justification for the characters' increasing mania, and to just calm down, all that blood is fake. (And no, that wasn't a bug on my leg just now.)

So do I recommend it? Hell, yeah. Have a grilled cheese on rye. Add bacon. Turn off the part of your brain that knows how the CDC and the Army actually function, along with whatever knowledge you have of virology or weaponizing bugs, and watch Cuba Gooding Jr. pretend to fly a chopper. And you'll probably never want to watch it ever again-- and make sure it's daytime, or else keep the lights on, and plan on getting up and walking around from time to time-- but Bug will keep you crawling. Hate them willies. They oughta call 'em the sams.

When I Say Hillshire, You Say @#$%!

2011-11-16T13:14:00.000-08:00

THIS IS NOT today's lunch. This is a picture of Sebastian Vettel, this year's winningest F1 pilot, behind the wheel of his wounded RBR7 after spinning out due to a tire puncture in the second turn of the Abu Dhabi Yas Marina course. Due to the fact that I cannot not watch the re-runs of the race any time they come on, I have now watched Seb spin off the track and dig in the dirt three times now. It hurts. Every time.
Today's lunch was a tuna quesadilla, which is a weird-ass thing I like to do now and then for the sheer hell of it. Yesterday's lunch was-- well, lemme get to that in a minute.
First, I want to apologize for having been gone a month. I could cite many things, but the fact of the matter is that my sister in law has absconded with my camera, and I have not been able to bring myself to blog here without a lunch pic. Yesterday, however, lunch was not something that I feel I ought to foist pictures of upon an unsuspecting public. For whatever reason, I thought I had an obligation to see what Hillshire Farms' laboratory workers thought this thing called "pastrami" was supposed to be like. After determining that the result was a peppery, vaguely beefy version of ham loaf, I decided I could better my odds by adding American cheese and grilling it on rye. I eventually concluded that, at the very least, I couldn't lose by adding anything to it. When I say Hillshire, you say @#$% those @#$%ing @#$%ers! Go Meat Like Substance!

This very much wasn't the film of the day. One of Hitchcock's last thrillers, made in the 70's, taken from a book which was very clearly set in the immediate post war London-- but still, set in the 70's!-- from source material that dates back to the 30's and 40's, including the notion that continental cuisine is insanely complicated and easily ruined by incompetent British housewives . . . Alright. That last part is probably true. Anyways. I have tried to get through this about a half dozen times over the years, to almost no avail. As Hitchcock flicks go, this is one of the most disturbing, not least because the psychology is so dated and dodgy, but more so because Hitch finally had leave to include nudity. So we get plenty of opportunity to ogle the breasts of women who are dead. Or about to be dead. Just plain creepy. This time I managed to cringe my way through about 75 or 80% of it, meanwhile washing dishes, checking the mail, and generally wandering about the house, with the result that I managed to sit through most of the long, talky portions and skip most of the murder scenes, before noticing that Dear God! Oh, dear God, NO!!!-- the thing still had forty five minutes of bad European fish stew jokes to go. (And that scene where the killer tries to retrieve his tie pin from the corpse of his latest kill while trapped in the back of a moving potato truck! HILARIOUS.)

So do I re-- oh, who the hell am I kidding? If you know what meat tastes like, you won't like anything Hillshire Farms makes. And I think Hitch was trying to be funny-- I HOPE Hitch thought he was being funny-- but the naked bodies of fetishistically murdered women just aren't all that amusing, no matter what kind of funny faces he got the actresses to make. Or maybe I'm just not getting the joke. Because there's eels in the soup. Those whacky French! Go Mush!

Meritocracy

2011-10-03T13:27:00.000-07:00

SO FALL has fell, and it's time to start indulging in things that make good sense in cold weather. After all, this is the Lower Piedmont region of North Carolina, so it very well might be back into the mid 80s by Thanksgiving. So this little cold snap, lows in the 50's, high of 70 today, calls boldly and definitively for beef stew. (Of course I added cheese. Who the hell do you think you're talking to here?) (Wow. That was meta.) The bread roll was slightly old, not quite stale but very crusty. Just perfect, actually. The selection of the beers didn't actually seem to make any difference. The IPA and the Pale Ale went along pretty well, but I seem to think that almost anything would have done.

This, on the other hand. I gotta say I think the beer made quite a huge difference here. This is a Sam Fuller joint that, having seen and mostly enjoyed The Ninth Configuration, I knew I was going to come around to sooner or later. Having read descriptions of the basic plot, I could see where there must have been influences of this on that, and Blatty's thing was so weird and weirdly satisfying-- and Fuller's reputation as both a crackpot and a genius filmmaker-- that eventually I had to see it.

And, well, wow. Just wow. What a heap of psychological misconceptions wrapped in shredded, twisted Freudian dogma. (Oh, and do peep that poster. It's the one that Wikipedia uses in their article on the click. There are NO TITS in this movie. No exposed ones anyways, at least not that I saw. Remember, I was making stew at the time as well.) At one point, the main character undergoes electroconvulsive shock, comes out clear and cogent with, as opposed to the expected memory loss, an enhanced memory of events, and the side effedt of losing his ability to consciously speak, getting trapped in an interior monologue that gets more maddening the longer it goes on. This is a side effect of electroconvulsive shock therapy that has NEVER BEEN REPORTED IN THE HISTORY OF MEDICINE.

That about says it all right there. Just got things wrong, all the way along. Every five minutes, almost like it was planned that way.

But I could not stop watching. As rotten as it was, as much as it got wrong, as silly as the faking a dominant incestual relationship with the stripper who is his girlfriend but is pretending to be his sister so that Our Hero will be involuntarily commited to an insane asylum so he can uncover who killed one of the inmates PLOTLINE is, it's still pretty mesmerizing in its own way. Definitely some striking images, commited (HAH!) perfomances, not least by James Best, most usually known as the genius who gave us the character of Idiot Sheriff Roscoe P. Coltrane, and some passages alogorizing insanity that were, despite the film's rampant silliness, pretty damned harrowing.

This turned out to be the morning movie, just by virtue of there not being a whole lot else on to watch. I first caught this in high school, fortunately in the company of a romantic schlub who really liked Woody Allen-- and had never seen any of the heavy slapsticks, like Bananas or Sleeper, which, doubtless, helps in appreciating the later work-- and who thus argued sucessfully for me to see the thing despite its faults, all of which he graciously pointed out, to the point where we walked out of the screening with me arguing for the film as a rich, slice of life portrait of a certain class of modern New Yorkers, and my freind arguing that he ought to get kicked in the head for ever suggesting anyone ought to see that slice of pretentious horse shit ever under any circumstances.

And, oddly, I think we were both right. This is a film I can enjoy, so long as I can nip in and out, enjoy the music and the beautiful cityscapes and the quaintly crappy interiors and the naturalistic acting, and not try to convince myself that, in 1970s Manhattan, sophisticated people had entire cocktail party conversations about orgasms in theory and practice.

So do I recommend it? Hell, yeah. Throw on a flannel and jeans, open up the doors and windows, make yourself a hot bowl of stew, and pretend you're ready to settle in for a long, cold winter. So far, in my expereicne, the films of Sam Fuller are to be approached with skepticism and a length of lead pipe. And if you can stomach Allen in what I like to refer to as his pre-offensive period, go for it. Also, scope that gorgeous little Porsche tootling up the West Side Highway! I'd damned near sit through the whole thing for that one scene alone.

Almost.

I Got Yer Dark Ages Right Here

2011-09-14T11:03:00.000-07:00

(Sorry. I am watching a show on the History Channel anout The Dark Ages, and they just went through the segment about whether the Dark Ages deserve to be called The Dark Ages, and they went through a brief explication of the fact that Petrarch coined the term, without bothering to note that Petrarch was a snob. Ahem.)
Back in 1989, when hurricane Hugo came through our fair city, I just happened to have a pot of chili in the fridge. For the next three days, cold chili was basically my diet, since there was no power and, being a college student, I didn't have anything else on hand. You might have thought that experience would have poisoned me on chili for the rest of my life, but no. A week later, after power was restored, the first thing I did was make a fresh pot of chili, and the following day lunch was the then ubiquitous chili cheese grilled sandwich. Far above being the best thing I ate that week-- my pal Dog Nagel staked me to a meal at the first joint we found open, which was Sonny's Barbeque, which sucks-- it was absolutely revelatory. It's not just food. It is love.

This was the result of, let us say one of the by-products of, the Wifey's coice to attend Dragon Con this year, and a damned good thing too. I think we had both heard bits and pieces about it over the last year, and I seem to think that the History channel screened it at some point, but getting it on DVD and sitting down and just chewing though the damned thing was the best way to do it. Even at that, there was a HELL of a lot of shorthand involved. James Marsters, who played Buzz Aldren-- oops! More shorthand required: this is a biopic detailing the Apollo 11 mission. So Marsters did a preso at the D*C and dished quite a bit of background, which the Wifey parsed out as we watched, and then I, with my own extensive knowledge of the moon landing, kicked in what I knew on background, and back and forth through the whole thing, to the point where we came to the conclusion that you might not have any real shot at enjoying this if you didn't have significant background to deal from. Whether that's true or not, eeeehhhhh, dunno. We managed to enjoy it, anyways, so that's enough for us.

This, on the other hand . . . We watched an unfinished version of it on a draft DVD about six months ago, with disjointed subtitles and about half the English commentary of the finished version, but I knew enough about the era of F1 involved and the driver himself-- Woops! This is a doc on the life and death of Ayreton Senna, possibly, no, probably, no, certainly the best Formula 1 race car driver of all time-- that we managed to digest and enjoy it with little effort. My Dad and I then went to watch the finished version, in it's limited release, at one of the local part-time art film theaters a week and a half ago. I enjoyed the hell out of it-- better subtitles, more racing footage than there had been in the scratch cut, more English speaking talking heads, and a lot more footage of Senna himself-- but my Dad seemed to think he would have enjoyed it more had there been mor subtext and explanation. And he's right. It'd be good to know that the first four seasons Senna competed in were not held solely at Susuka in Japan, just that that's where the final race of those seasons took place, so that's where the driver's championship was usually decided. Etcetera. I was going to keep going, but, honestly, it's F1. I find it largely the case that, on this subject, you either already know or just don't care.

This. Um. Well! This . . . This I tuned into periodically while I watched Tony Bourdain's show about Dubai, which is wack, and almost got sucked in several times. Ray Wolstone as an ethics professor! Tony Perkins as a star basketball player! Hanoi Jane as an embryo! And say what you will about her politics, she was, back in the day, and continues to be, and incredible piece of pulchritude. (And honestly, her politics don't bother me that much, largely because she really doesn't seem to have much in the way of politics, frankly.) But I just couldn't stick it out, in any way whatsoever, because it was just too ridiculous. Pop psychology and a bullet primer on the philosophical groundings of ethics drive a plot about a failing scholor who happens to be a hot shot on the court being offered a bribe to throw the big game against-- get this-- the Sputniks. I didn't stick around long enough to find out if they were supposed to be Russian or not. But I was there for the big punch line, wherein the hero is told to tell the ethics prof all he knew about Socrates. ("Socrates was a Greek. And they poisoned him.") Wherafter the Dean (or something) declares he passed the quiz because that's literally all he knew about Socrates. Now eat your spinach!

So do I recommend it? Hard to say. I think it takes a particular form of stalwart to even contemplate the notion of a chili cheese sandwich. It also violates at least five points of the Unified Sandwich Theory, not that you'd care per se. I suppose if you know enough about the moon shot you could enjoy Moon Shot, but I think being a big fan of either astronautics or James Martsters would help. You're only going to go see Senna if you're a fan of Senna or with one. But I can't see any reason in the world why you'd want to sit through Tall Story, unless your name was Alex and you were being reconditioned, in which case it might just make for a pleasant change of pace.

Because It Is Bitter, And Because It Is New York

2011-09-09T10:35:00.000-07:00

(If you get this title, based on the best line of a pretty bad poem, I can only say: I'm sorry.)

I often find myself defending fast food for entirely the wrong reasons. Mainly that fast food gets a far worse rap that it really deserves, because, come on, people, it's crap. McDonald's burgers are not made of worms, the corporation is not responsible for South American deforestation, and even if KFC is called KFC because what they are serving isn't legally chicken, you really don't need any vast conspiracy theory or grotesque inference of the origin of the meat to indict the product. It's crap. It's stuff that developed and thrived because people travelling to far flung places on the highways and byways of America had to eat something. And while I have my objections to, for instance, Patton Oswalt's critique of the failure pile in a sadness bowl-- come on, dude, you took it home? You tried this fucking thing to go? Of course it sucked. But it sucked more because you gave it a chance to cool down. That's the kind of crap that, if it's got any chance at all, you gotta treat is like adamantium: you gotta keep it hot.

On the other hand, all it takes for me to curse at the TV is some fococta spokesman proclaiming that KFC uses real chicken to make its-- wait for it-- popcorn chicken. Oh, come the fuck on! For fuck's sake! Who the fuck would ever know or care if those little greasy breading balls were made of anything besides breading and Styrofoam? In fact, given what they end up as, I'd be slightly comforted knowing that they weren't real chickens, after all.

Of course McDonald's is bad food. That's all ye know in this world, and all ye need to know. But the fact that McDonald's is bad food because it's processed does not make my pastrami, not to say my rye bread, unprocessed. (And don't get me started on the mustards! That's right: plural.) But the cheese curls were a really odd choice. Not to say that they don't dance along with the deli in their own odd way, but it's not something I would do on a regular basis, I don't think.

This is something I have been trying to get my head around for awhile. I've known of Louis CK as a comedian and as a comedic theorist for quite awhile, but I shied away from his show from the get go, for no reason I could put a pin in. I have been trying to catch up with it, but so far, it's been a little painful. As I noted to the Wifey, if nothing else, it's pretty good New York porn, getting in a fair amount of gritty, cheap, street-level shots-- just my kind of thing-- but the plotz are all self-induced cruelty humor, which is in keeping with CK's stand up material, comedic theory and life in general, but so far, it's a little hard to take. Not that I am giving up on it, or even worse, hoping he'll change. Just that I have to say, as a fan, watching it is more a labor of love that a joy to the heart. So it goes.

On the other hand, if one is to be a fan of New York, one has to admit it can be more than a bit of a miserabilist place. It's easy to be very happy in New York; it is also very easy to be pissed off and depressed and convinced that all the forces of the universe are aligned against you.

That's better.

Chili Cheese Fries Of The Damned

2011-08-30T13:12:00.000-07:00

EVERY ONCE in a while it dawns on me that my ususal summer practice of vowing to stick to cold sandwiches and potato chips is really pretty silly, and then I start giving in to the impulses and cravings that, for good or ill, frame my world. This time-- what I refer to as Cold War Chili Cheese Fries, because the flag, to my eye, vaguely resembles the flag of South Korea-- paid dividends in spades, not only in providing a damned hearty meal and a spicey delight, but also in providing the absolutely most perfect companion Sara's Black Forest ever had. The black lager-- I gotta stop doing that: the Saranac people describe it, on the label, as a Bavarian style black beer, and I have exactly zero reason for calling this a lager-- anyways, it has a slightly sweet undertone that the chili, spiked with chili garlic Cholula and green Tabasco, curled around like an affectionate cat. Prrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

The movie of the day-- well, lets' suffice to say that Jerry Lee has now seen Voyage of the Damned.*

This is something I have kind of been meaning to see for at least a couple of years, but had been instincively avoiding for no reason that I could really put a finger on. Plenty of stuff argues for the film-- great cast, compelling story, historical impetus, real human drama-- but I just always got the feeling, seeing the few small moments of it I had in the past, that I just didn't want to sit through it. This time it happened to be coming on with just the kind of perfect timing than made me think that this was an opportunity I ought not to ignore.

(The Wifey points out that this revierw completely omits what the movie itself is about. In 1939, the Nazi German government selected nearly a thousand Jews and gave them passage to Cuba. Accoding to some, they were never expected to be allowed off the boat, and, in fact, once they got to Cuba, they were denied passage, either as tourists or refugees. The captain spent the next months sailing about the Atlantic, trying to deliver safe passage to his cargo, failing in both the US and Canada, finally managing to scatter them between Britain, France and Belgium. Then, of course, the war broke out, and eventually two thirds of the passengers met their demise at the camps.) (Wow. That was cold.)

With the result that this is one helluva movie. Great cast. Great performances, Extraordinarally compelling source material, driving plot, great dramatic moments, great sets and costuming. But good LORD, does it go on and on and on. Of course, it was originally a TV movie, so it may have-- MUST have-- gone on over two nights, but it was still a helluva thing to sit through, regardless. On the one hand, I understand that the filmmakers felt compelled to include a fair amount of the on-boardschmoozing and politicing and interpersonal conflicts, but in a large way, this was just kind of like a chicken salad with far too much mayonaise. Still, I am glad I saw it.

I went to all the trouble of researching this, ordering it from Netflix, and setting myself upo to screen this, and then guess what shows up in rotation on Showtime? So I considered watching this earlier in the day, but noooo-ho-ho-ho-ho! You do fine fork, Lizzie, and please understand that I am a fan, but, really, genuinely, please, once was enough. Or at least that's how I feel right now. I'm a little scared that while the first time it was compelling and engrossing in a slightly painful way, a second time it just might come off like cruelty drama. Which, finally, I have the same visceral reaction to as cruelty humor. Not that humor can't be cruel, folks, just realize that all cruelty is not humorous.

But I still recommend it, same as last time. Chili cheese fries are one of the world's most perfect experiences, and those white American cheese hashes, which are what makes me think of the South Korean flag, well, as Frost might say, those make all the difference. You could probably do as well to read the Wikipedia entry, but if you have a few hours to put into it, hearty provisions, and black beer, my advice is: go for it. And if you don't mind being punched in the gut repeatedly by a beautiful woman, so long as she gives you a peck on the cheek after each one, well then, my friend, this is for you!

*Know that story? You could look it up. It'll probably funnier that way, than if I explain it for you.

I Call The Big One "Bitey"

2011-08-25T11:05:00.000-07:00

SO NEW TECH-nologies and advance-ments in frozen pizza manufacturing techniques have finally lead us to a brave new world, one in which a person of discriminating tastes such as myself would contemplate having frozen pizza and beer for lunch as an actual treat. To be completely fair, this is the Palermo thin crust, which is a vastly superior bird in the field. I am not comparing it to true pizza. Tony's it ain't. Nor Villa Francesca, where they offer both New York style thin crust and Sicilians, and also the Grandma, a delightfull little cheese and garlic bomb I try to make room for even if I am full. But also, Totino's in ain't. Nor Red Baron, which, ew. Just ew. Anyways, this offers a nice, spicey sausage, which I don't even feel compelled to say is "good for frozen pizza," a bright, sharp pepperoni, and a nice undercurant of garlic. All of which is plenty to stand up next to the Harpoon offerings. If I did call one of them Bitey, it would be the Bohemian Pils, which like the IPA is hopped to the gills, but being very slightly lighter bodied, the hops are, in a word, bitey.

The movie of the day very nearly wasn't. The description we get of this on our TWC Guide makes it sound like a kind of pat exmination of the Holocaust through fictional characters, but it's way more than that, and very painful to watch. The basic premise is that a writer is conscipted by the Nazis to write a treatise justifying euthanasia-- what it says in the giude-- but at root it's really about a man whose circumstances keep him distracted enough to allow him to make what turn out to be terribly, tragically bad decisions during what turned out to be a terrible, tragic time. The worst part about it was that the character isn't blind to what's going on; it simply, by turns of the screw, becomes more and more impossible for him to resist, until finally he has become part of the most evil enterprise in history.

I don't want to say anymore, for fear of spoiling it. I'm not waiting to the end to say I recomend it. It's very, very hard to watch, but immensely well done, and imminently worth seeing.

This is also hard to watch, but for different reasons. This is not the film of the day, it's the film that was not the film of the day yesterday. I got it via Netflix, and popped it in at the end of what had turned out to be a fairly hard day while I snacked, blissfully and ravenously, on cheese and sausage and flatbread crisps and an IPA, but I hafta say I missed a fair amount of it. The basic plot was, I'm guessing, so thin that the first two thirds of it consists mainly of a shell game in which we are not supposed to be sure if the one guy is ripping everybody off, the other two guys are either blind or stupid, or they really are going to make a functioning jet pack. (Or rocket belt, in the chinois of the film.) The acting is commedable, especially from Paul Giamatti, who plays an arrogant, angry, genius schmuck like nobody's business. And David Hornsby, who's character may or may not have been gay (one of the parts I missed, if in fact there was a reveal there). But it moves like an unhurled brick, so when I happened to be away from the screen when the big plot twist came, and wasn't sure if the genius had hired mobsters to shake down the pitch meister, or just had gotten in some dirty money to finance the project, or had simply gone batshit with paranoia, I really didn't feel compelled to rewind and see what I had missed.

Sorry, Paul. I blame the editing room.

But I could recommend it. Like I said, not bad, as frozen pizza goes. Not Totino's, anyways.

Department of Settlements

2011-08-18T12:42:00.000-07:00

SO THIS was an experi-ment, much in the same way that my nephew Josh's pouring a glass of water down the back of a television when he was four was an experiment. (I kid you not, that was his explanation for it.) The Wifey has been on a Pad Thai kick for awhile, and so decided to take advantage of the offer in the local mega-mart to buy one Annie Chung product and get one free. The product she got was not Pad Thai, but the one I got was most certainly not hot and sour soup. The bits of it that were not offensively bland were downright nasty. The noodles tatsted like factory dust. The dumplings, which were of an entirely different brand, were better, but still not as good as I would have gotten had I called out to our local joint, which is excellent. The beer at least was good, Harpoon Summer Beer followed by their Bohemian Pilsner. A nice light lager followed by a ridiculously over-hopped pils, which went great with the chocolate cookies I had for dessert.

This was less and experiment than a requirement. I have been a big fan of Mary Elizabeth Ellis' work on It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia ever since I started watching the series in its third season, and I had heard good things about this movie in researching the cast of that show-- and that she was one of the writers. And it was pretty much precisely what I expected. A rich slice-of-life drama in which pretty much everyone gets their turns, good and bad. The script seemed to have been crafted on the basis that every one of us is a screw-up, given the proper motivations. There was only one plot point that I found somewhat implausible, but it was pretty well set up beforehand, such that it was not completely implausible, so I let that slide. And it had a drop-out-bottom ending that was just terrific, in that it both negated and amplified the entire plot in one fell swoop.

Took a damned long time getting there, though. Life is full of dull moments. Kudos to the writers for sticking 'em in.

This, on the other hand, was about 90% better than it had any right to be. That had largely to do with the New York & Long Island settings and the deeply commited performances, especially from Molly Ringwald and Ally Sheedy, who were both adorably commited to their roles, so much that I almost bought Sheedy as a cop. (Ally Seedy as a cop. Let that percolate a little.)
Watching Alan Alda and Joe Pesci duke it out was great fun, but it was even more fun watching Anthony LaPaglia stretch his New York Mobster cliche of a character all out of shape, and then Burt Young-- hell, what's there to say about Burt Young? Always good to see Burt workin' it. Every single element came out the Big Book of Hollywood Cliches, but damn if it didn't end up being a great deal of fun.

So do I recommend it? Hell no. Chinese, Thai and Mexican food should never be attempted at home. Maybe if you have a gourmet or industrial grade kitchen, but I'm not even sure about that. And Annie Chun can go to hell with an anchor around her neck. If your have an afternoon free, relax, stretch out, and don't expect any of the characters to behave perfectly-- and be prepared to be angry and dissapointed with each of them at some point. And stay 'til the end, that droput ending is a killer. And if you want and example of why the 80's ended early, you can't do much better than Betsy's Wedding. There were a few juctures where several of the actors clearly thought they were in a different kind of movie than the others thought they were in, and that made it as much fun as anything else.

Never Trust The Gorton's Fisherman

2011-08-01T12:38:00.000-07:00

SO THIS was an experi-ment. By and large I have always known the stuff they sell under the Gorton's banner is crap, and their recent re-purposing of the brand to suggest they are selling actual, recogniseably different kinds of fish, should hold no better promise. Still, I figured what the hell. I had recently put together a fish-and-chips lunch using a brand of frozen "pub battered" cod, and, I thought, it wouldn't take much of a difference in the Gorton's product to elevate it past the bland, unobjectionable, generic, frankly kind of insulting stuff I have experienced before.

And it was fine, really. A little disconcerting that the "fillets" are in almost geometrical form, and the breading still accounts for a dissapointing portion of the portion. But it tasted recognizably like fish, and actually enough like flounder that it might actually have been flounder. And, really, the only real reason I might have to dislike it is the standard reason, which is that this is the kind of food product that make it reasonable to claim all sorts of rotten things about Americans-- that we have no taste, that we value quantity over quality, that we voted for George W. Bush-- twice-- and that we will buy anything so long as it is packaged prettily and we're told it is special.

But really, the whole point here was the condiments. You see before you Vietnamese chili-garlic sauce, tartar sauce, Polish mustard, and ketchup spiked with Cholula and jalepeno Tabasco. Whee.

The weekend turned out to be movie weekend, mainly because we'd had a long week, the Wifey in fact had a long month, travelling for the majority of it for business, and it was easy enough to plop down and put something in the DVD/Birdy* player and just let 'er rip. This wasn't bad. The reviews I read of it played it pretty much right-- kind of heavy on the battle and light on the LA. Which is not to say there were no recognizeable locations or that it didn't feel like LA or SoCal for any reason. Just that . . . I dunno, it just kind of lacked personality. This bothered the Wifey more than it did me. Aaron Eckhardt was playing the lead as a character who doesn't have much of a personality outside being in the service, and having known a few of those types, I think he did a pretty good job, so I at least enjoyed that aspect of it. But the aliens only really appeared at great distance or as crafts flying overhead for the first two thirds, so the Wifey had great difficulty enjoying it as an alien invasion movie. It wasn't until I suggested that it was Black Hawk Down Vs. Aliens that she managed to find a level on which she could appreciate it. Still, in the final analysis, it was largely a great deal of smoke and noise. You could easily do as well playing a video game, and almost certainly better.

This, on the other hand. What is there to say? What's green and red and goes 200 miles an hour? They took a bit of Solaris here, some old Twilight Zone there, a dash of physics, a pinch of popular psych, a sprinkling of Dianetics, bleh bleh bleh, whiiiiiiiiiiiiiirrrrz, aaaaaaaaand garnish with Cillian Murphy.

So do I recommend it? Nah. I like my fish & chips with beer. The Battle: Los Angeles you could see once, but its' not going to change your life or anything. And if you happen to meet the Gorton's Fisherman, just punch 'im in the @#$%ing face for me.

*Birdy is what I call the Blue Ray Disc, both because I think it's cute, and because I think calling it a BD is stupid.

Va-va-va-va-variations!*

2011-06-20T13:56:00.000-07:00

SO RECENTLY, we had reason to contemplate an actual move to New York City. Not anytime soon, maybe in a year or two, depending on what develops here and what develops there. As anyone who knows me would imagine, I am more than intrigued by the concept, but also, as with anything else, I am wary of possible drawbacks. Then, over the course or the week, and over the course of one very good eating weekend for me, it became clear to me that there are things about Charlotte I would miss.

The Wifey and I were ensconced in our favorite Chinese buffet, where I was busily working my way through my second plate of meat and preparing to take on a plate of the chocolate cake with cappuchino flavoured mousse-- don't ask me HOW this end up on a Chinese buffet, but it does-- it came like a bolt from the blue. "If we left Charlotte for New York, I would miss this place."

The Wifey looked at me as if I had lost my mind, but then let it cook a little. "Of course, it's not like they don't have Chinese in New York . . ."

"Yeah," I said, "but they don't have this Chinese buffet."

Later in the weekend, I was relating this same story to my sister in law while I swam with her kids in the pool at her folks' place, expanding on it-- the local joint I hit once a week, the barbecue joint out south of town, and so forth-- when my nephew Thomas, the eight year old, asked "Which one is the restaurant where you like to get pastrami in New York?"

After an explosion of incredulousness, I started listing places-- the Stage, the Carnegie, Katz', The Second Ave-- and then broke down the fact that there is hardly a block on the island below Sixty Seventh where you can't find deli. In fact, two of my favorites, the joint on Bleeker and the one way down at the bottom of Greenwich Village, I don't remember the names of and haven't been able to find since. But man, the corned beef at the one! And the latkas at the other one! Yowza!

Today's lunch is just pastrami from the Harris Teeter, in fact their store brand, on rye with mustard. I know I would love living in New York, but I am pretty sure I would also miss having your basic deli in the back bedroom office of my house here in North Carolina.

The movie of the day is . . . Well, let me just start out by saying this flick gets a bad rap. I think critics expect too much of it. After all, everybody-- I mean, EVERYBODY-- is in it, it comes from a show of rich comedic legend, it should be a laugh riot from beginning to end, right? But the thing is, everybody played their bit straight, and since everybody was in it, nobody gets too much more than a bit. Besides this, it's every bit as much straight-up weirdness as anyone should expect from that notorious whack job Dan Aykroyd.

Which is also, I think, part of what makes it laudable. All things considered, this is precisely what one ought to expect from the Coneheads concept taken to its logical conclusion. Assume it is possible that three members of an alien race would prove themselves advantageous enough to a community that their physical differences and unusual mannerisms would simple be overlooked, and let 'er rip.

Which is not to say that it is not a deeply weird movie, which it is. Just to say, hell, we really ought to accept and embrace that the folks involved were dead set on making a deeply, deeply weird movie, and see if we can enjoy it for what it is. And my guess is that that set, those of us capable of bolting this particular formula down, is a pretty small one. It is not with any particular pride that I count myself amongst it.

So do I recommend it? Hell, what's weirder than eating deli in Charlotte, North Carolina? We're due for a visit to the Apple before too long. Maybe I'll find that place on Bleeker Street. Hell, maybe it wasn't actually ON Bleeker? And if you see Aykroyd, tell him I said: Dude, what the fuck?

*Which is how a parody of the Bowie number would go if Aykroyd had Beldar Conehead do his own special version of it-- which, for all I know, maybe he has!

Making A Hash Of Things

2011-05-18T11:24:00.001-07:00

SO THE WIFE sent word back from New York last Sunday that she had obtained a corned beef with Swiss on rye from the Stage deli, and this inspired me to get some of the locally sourced, grain fed corned beef offered by the Healthy Home Market, which is what used to be The Home Economist, which we now call the Happy Lucky Family Food Store, or, in the Wifey's distillation, the HLFFS. That same day, I elected to go to the local for a bacon cheese burger, and the following day I had my Dad buy me lunch after a little cooperative work on my car-- we both own 1995 Miatas, so the repair of an interior panel was an interesting and instructive venture for him to join in on. So when I got around to lunch today, I elected to chop up the corned beef with some cooked potato and raw onion, fry that up into a hash, and load all that into an omlette. Oy-yo!

This is the in progress shot. Wow. What more could there be to say besides "This is the in-progress shot?"

Except maybe to call this the inception shot, which it really isn't, and I would only write such a thing as a segue into saying I had meant to come back to this blog earlier, but if I had I would have meant to write about the movie Inception, which was the movie of the night something like a month and a half ago, but really, what the hell is there to say about Inception? Even to spoil it wouldn't be to spoil it; if they weren't just making shit up as they built setworks and engineered CGI bits, we never would have known the difference. This is not to say it didn't make any sense. It made plenty of sense. It just didn't make any difference whether it made sense or not.

This was the movie of yesterday. (Hey! Cute, huh! It's like a double-meaning thing that's not dirty!) In that Tony Bourdain referenced it in his most recent installment of No Reservations, exploring Boston, and I got to thinking about whether I had given the thing a fair viewing. I mainly had to wonder if I had seen the whole thing, as mainly I remember seeing bits and pieces of the thing here and there, and I could not remember having seen the whole thing end to end.

So yesterday morning I used the TWC start-over feature and watched it with my morning coffee, which, frankly, is every bit as good a way to do it as any. With the result that this is one gloriously, romantically, un-glorious and un-romantic film. It clings close to the conditions of the time and location, and just perceptibly improves upon them, just enough to make the ordinary worth watching. The bank robbers are smart and methodical, and wear masks that disguise their features just enough. The hero is an anti-hero who heroically struggles against all odds. The gun runner drives a Detriot muscle car that doesn't break down every other day, starts right up in cold weather, and never needs gas. Which is to say: I could nit-pick this thing to death, but, in the final analysis, it's better just to appreciate a gritty little fantasy about mob life outside Boston.

This was the film of the night last night. Why? Why. Good question. I think because the Wifey had decided it was a part of sci-fi filmography she wanted to experience. Again, a film you really can't spoil. The major percentage of the experience is just looking at giant sets, experiencing manufactured space, hearing twisted (not to say thwarted) ethics arguments, and appreciating just how important Joan Baez thought she was before the cocaine generation took over and kicked her out of the boat.

So do I recommend it? Kinda. The hash made for a dandy omlette filling, but, frankly, hash is like Chinese or Mexican: you can make it at home, but you're better off going out. Two or three of the best hashes I've ever had were at beat-down joints in Manhattan (one was at the Carnegie Deli Sunday brunch), and, well, there's a reason, beyond illiteration, that the phrase hash house persists. The Friends Of Eddie Coyle must be watched in it's entirety-- and, by the way, the conclusion I reached is that yeah, I have seen the whole thing before, either in chunks or from end to end, and I think you can just as easily watch it in chunks as see it straight through. Not that it's not sequential, but if you're smart enough, you'll be able to pick out which chunks belong where after awhile. (Not that you'd see it that way on purpose.)

And to hell with Silent Running. And the little drones, too!

The Bald Soprano

2011-03-17T10:58:00.000-07:00

SO FOR the last few days, I have been in a funk, a little off my feed, and yesterday morning I finally realized why. I had a gum-line infection which was manifesting as a deep toothache. A visit to the dentist confirmed this-- or at least proved nothing else evidently wrong-- so after a third dose of a VERY stout antibiotic, I decided I owed myself a very stout lunch. Thus, chili rice. This is something my parents introduced me too in my youth, originally meant to be an economical dish of about half chili and half rice, but I make it with about a 2 to 1 ratio of chili to rice, about three times the amount of cheese my Mom would put on it, and about twice as much sour cream as she would have allowed me to have.

Let me give you a cross section of that.

And beer is the proper beverage for this. I spiced up the chili with both chili garlic and regular Cholula, along with cracked green and black peppercorn. The cheese is something new in Kraft's line of shred mixes, what they call Classic Melt: American process cheese shreds with Wisconsin sharp cheddar, Vermont white cheddar and Monterey Jack. A well travelled cheese indeed? It's fine stuff, but, as the Wifey points out, it has about twice the sodium of the usual Mexican cheese blend, So I don't think I will be making it a regular in the rotation. My sodium intake is monumentally high as it is.

This is almost the movie of the day, in that it is almost a movie, and I almost watched it.

Not that it wasn't well done. The 80% or so I watched of it was quite nicely done, with some sharp, surprising dialogue, some fine character acting, especially from Ally Sheedy, who took what I thought was a fairly superfluous character and investing her with a very welcome sense of presence, and Casper Van Dien, who did a smashing job in what was all but a bit part as a tough, wise and pragmatic officer, coming in and taking control of a very bad situation. (Also, a couple of really great scenes: one where a character is interrupted berating another at gunpoint by the arrival of room service, and explains, "I wasn't sure how long this was gonna take, so I ordered us lunch." One where the conventions of made-for-TV movies were circumvented: instead of accusing the college-boy commissioned officer of "fucking with my men," he accuses him of "having a hard-on" for them, which turned into quite an affecting little scene.

Still, it was a TV movie, and it was a fake Vietnam story, and I really have very little patience when writers make up fake versions of the Mai Lai massacre in service of fake stories about post traumatic stress disorder and the number and state of our MIA's from the conflict. And as well done as it was, I don't know that I would give it a complete airing, just on those grounds. Although I don't know that I wouldn't. Like I said, it was mighty well done.

The first part I missed, when I nipped out to the store for the cheese mix, was a bit of exegesis I probably could have filled in pretty easily, maybe eight minutes or so, after which they went back into the thick of the Vietnam War part of the tale. The second part I missed while I was out assembling the dish, which, as you might have guessed, took more than a bit of attention and precision. I came back into the room with the assembled dish, and, boom. Closing credits.

So I almost watched it. I know how it goes, I know it has some excellent bits. But I have no idea how it ends.

So do I recommend it? No idea. For many years after leaving my parent's house, I held the opinion that chili was something to be taken straight: no beans, no veggies, no starch, meat, spice and sauce. (Although later I started adding onions, cheese, and sour cream, which, had you asked, I would have described as "the purist's cheat. Which would be a great title for a novel.)
Also, the real reason this crops up is that no one sells a chili that stands up to basic doctoring these days, so the rice, nice as it is, is actually something of a crutch. So while it may be a really, really well done chili, after all, it's still a made for TV chili.

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

2011-03-03T12:47:00.000-08:00

Ahhhhhhhhh.

Elements Of Repose

2011-03-01T13:44:00.000-08:00

SO THIS IS TODAY's lunch, just for the sheer hell of it. The weather has turned, highs in the sixties and blue skies up to the weekend, and around here that means-- or at least could mean-- the end of stew weather for the year. The sandwich is grilled cheddar on multi grain. Lemme amplify that: cheddar cheese and Plochman's Premium Stone-Ground Mustard on Arnold Healthy Multi-Grain bread, grilled to a brilliant crispy finish. Frankly, it was kinda weird, but it went really well with the stew, which I had while watching last years's Formula One race at Interlagos, the road course in Brazil.

And let's call THAT the movie of the day. The movie of the day is most certainly not the current foul, lousy, half-assed "debate" that's going on over whether our children are in imminent danger of being brainwashed by their incompetent, overpaid Marxist overlord teachers.

Now, I had more than my share of bad teachers during my school years-- including one who tried to teach me that a "sentence" is what you read, while a "sentance" is what a prisoner gets, "a lot" is a real estate while "alot" is an amount, and "Tuesday" is spelled "Teusday." And that was in just one year. The ultimate irony came about every third year when I, an eager student always hungry for knowledge, would butt up against a teacher who would declare me lazy, unintelligent, or borderline uneducable. I also have only a passing tolerance for teacher's unions, based solely on my brief interactions with North Carolina's specimen, who, when I knew them, maintained that a teacher's competence was never EVER to be a factor in his or her compensation. But, and I know this to be a fact, teachers in America are not only a soft and easy target for the ignorant and angry, they have been used as scapegoats for everything that might be wrong in our society since the early days of Lee Atwater's assendancy. (Typo. Keeping it.) (Actually, quite like it.) Also, I am lead to believe, by casual example and observation, that my experience was the anomoly, that most teachers are not just competent, but also energetic, intelligent, inspiring, and selfless. How true that is I know not, but really, for crying out loud, people, you gotta know that there are always, ALWAYS going to be more sensible ways of cutting budgets than getting rid of the teachers and/or crippling their unions. But the jack-wagons keep insisting that firing all the teachers is the only way to stop the world from sliding off the edge of the universe and plunging headlong into Hell, which is why the teachers desperately require the assistance of their trade unions.

Just thinking about the whole thing sickens me. It's like they're proud of being lazy, unitelligent, and borderline uneducable. So, instead, I bought new shoes.

These popped up from a tailored e-mail I get from time to time from Zappos.com, where I think I placed an order for shoes that turned out not to be in stock once. (I am fairly certain that this is the first time I have ever bought shoes from them.) I was actually looking for something with a blue body and bright trim, but the colourway (as they say in England) just jumped out at me and knocked me down. Also, oddly enough, it's virtually the same as the color scheme as a pair of Nike Elite Waffle Racers I found at a British shoe selling site, which I would have bought if they had been available in any size above men's 10. Yay shoes.

So the next step was to find someplace for them to live. Not a problem. (This cabinet, on the arrival of my new Onitsuka Tiger Ultimate 81's, will officially be full.)

I Did Not Have Soviet Relations With That Evil Empire

2011-02-21T10:59:00.000-08:00

ENJOY THIS IMAGE while you can. I am betting that I will very shortly put some of you off your lunch.

It is good to get back to the basics, so here's pastrami on rye with mustard and plain ol' Utz chips. The Adirondack Lager you see there is the first of two, which was just perfect for the situation. Good, basic deli. Although it could have been a shade better: the folk at the Happy Lucky Family Food Store seem to have taken to staffing the butcher shop/deli area with people who speak English as a second language, and have only a passing familiarity with deli goods. Not that I have a problem with either of those things, per se. it's just a combination which makes it difficult to convey the concepts of "shaved thin" without provoking embarrassment. (Also, this time, I feared that dusting off my basic Russian from college would have only complicated matters immeasurably.

This, for good or ill, was the movie of the day. (The HBO documentary Reagan; I couldn't find a good "poster" image for it.) I knew I was going to watch this from pretty much the first time I heard about it, and it was everything I had heard and imagined about it. It was even handed, fair, balanced, and maddening. Just damnably, damnably maddening.

Because Reagan, as a person, was just maddening to me. He was such a liar. He was probably the very least authentic person ever to walk the face of the earth. He willingly, knowingly did things and had things done which were not only wholly illegal but also morally wrong. Innocent people died due to operations he understood and put into motion.

When I was in junior high school, the day Reagan was shot, when they announced it over the intercom, all the poor, lower-class black kids in my class applauded. Years later I understood why: under this man's administration, a great number of very whacky and rather nasty things were done in the name of helping the poor. Like giving away processed foods made with rancid meat and terrible, terrible cheese. And making sure that all the folks living in subsidized public housing had basic cable. (Okay, so they didn't mind that so much, it just always bugged me that it happened under Reagan's HUD.)

On the other hand, he really did seem to think what he was doing was best for America. And he got us talking with the Russians, and he did more than any other president to help eradicate our national store of nuclear weapons-- mission incomplete, by the way, and we really ought to be still working on it. NO nation really needs nukes. They really don't. We don't need war, either. No, we don't.

The big criticism I heard about this early on was that it came off as a little too slick and facile. Which it was, which was all too much to the point. The guy himself was a little too slick and facile. In the name of smaller government he put us into deficit spending. In the name of prosperity he made things hard on the poor. In the name of industry he fired the air traffic controllers. Often what he did sounded right and felt wrong. Often what he did sounded momentous and did little to nothing. Often what he said sounded innocuous but was deeply poisonous.

And often it was flatly inspiring. I can't deny that. He was a master propagandizer. He also had great scriptwriters. Sorry-- speechwriters.

He was the prefect embodiment of the eighties: terrible ideas predicated on great truths executed with every ounce of aplomb money could buy. And, in the end, he doddered poignantly into the sunset. A better ending than any movie he had ever been in.

So I have seen it. It has been seen by me. And now, if I wanted to, I could watch it on HBO Latin. In Spanish!

Today's Lunch Is Brought To You By The Letter P

2011-01-17T13:08:00.000-08:00

SO FAIRLY recently I discovered that the store which used to be The Home Economist sells pastrami.

The Home Economist was-- and this is pure speculation on my part-- a health food store tricked out to draw in housewives who wanted to shop cheaper by way of shopping smarter. It was a chain with an agenda, offering bulk goods for cheap so that people would eventually buy their holistic medicines and herbal cures. Not that there's anything wrong with that, per se, it's just that the agenda had it's blind spots. I can't say for others, but I always went for the cheap bulk herbs, peppercorns, and sea salts, but most of the organical healthfood stuff was expensive enough that it never drew me it. Any given time I went in, the majority of the patroni were the kinds of granolas who believed buying the healthy stuff was both worth the money and ethically superior.

(Which, I dunno. Maybe the world should change. I don't know that it will . . . )

The store has since been retooled as a neighborhood grocers with organic and health food options. This includes a full service butcher shop with house made sausage and grass fed beef. And pastrami. Amen.

But anyways, pastrami. Here on seeded Jewish rye with mustard, boom, like that, with the Utz salt & pepper chips and coupla Saras. I lead with the IPA and followed with the pale, although what difference that might make, I just don't know.

The movie of the day is not Piranha. This was the movie of last night, and, believe me Jesus, once was well more than enough. It's even hard to know where to start in describing it. First off-- why the hell not!?!-- first off, suffice it to say that it was obvious this was in 3D, despite the fact that we didn't have the glasses. Everything-- blood, breasts, boats, bastards, bug-eyed carnivorous fishes-- everything that started with B came flying at us off the screen. (Bullets! Yeah, bullets too!) Most of the acting by the principles was actaully on the subdued side, at least for this kind of flick. But the extras were off the charts, portraying what must have been the most annoying, irritating, headache-inducing display of hedonism and pulchritude ever seen on the face of this earth outside the gates of the sister cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. Oh, and then there was Jerry McConnell, playing a loud, rich asshole to the Nth degree, I mean absolutely chomping, devouring, destroying the scenery, above and beyond the call of duty. The CGI fish were magificent, detailed and vicious and relentless. Oh, and, of course, the two requisite moppets were . . . Well, frankly, they were generic, perhaps the one spot in the whole production that wasn't taken completely over the top. And, of course, the plot made no sense whatsoever. And the ending-- spoiler alert!-- there was no ending. The thing didn't end so much as fill 90 minutes that felt like three hours and then just kind of stop. There was a twist at the end-- The End! Or IS it?-- thaaaaaaaaaat I really just didn't fucking care about. In the final analysis, we were kind of glad we saw it, in the kind of way people who saw the Hindenburg might have been glad, just so if people might express a doubt that it actually happened, we might be around to say ooooooooooooooh yes, this definitely happened.

So do I recommend it? Hard to say. I know I like pasrtami. This was the third installment of pastrami from what the Wifey and I have come to call the Happy Lucky Family Food Store. The first was hot on rye with mustard. The second was hot on rye with turkey, mustard and white cheese. This one brought back memories of many lunches on the streets of New York. So you might not like pastrami, or you might not like New York, but I'd recommend it anyways.

The movie? Never before have so many bared breasts been so poorly used.

Happy Holidays

2010-12-26T12:51:00.000-08:00

Merry Christmas, y'all.

This is the big present this year. I bought myself a bunch of music and a few DVD's, but my parents in law got me this. So far, I'm one chapter in. Delicious. I'm gonna be nibbling away at this for at least a month.

In The Future, We Will All Be Heroes

2010-11-25T09:12:00.000-08:00

THIS IS NOT TODAY's lunch. Today is Thanks-giving, which means lunch will be variable and sporadic. It's also no longer my birthday, for which the Wifey and I went to Mac's Speed Shop, the best local barbeque joint, and I had a rack of ribs, half or which I brought home for precisely this reason.

Chinese dumplings and ribs. It doesn't get a whole hell of alot better than this.

The movie of the day isn't Iron Man 2. We watched this last weekend while the Wifey had Chinese food and I had chicken fried steak with eggs and home fries. Yeah. It made every bit as much coherent, cohesive sense as the movie. Of course, then, if you consider the source material, there's no end of ways this could have gone horribly, horribly wrong, so it's pretty much a mark of honor that they made it through two hours of story telling without the thing going completely off the rails-- which, dear readers, if, in your judgement, it did, I would not dispute you. But we leap-frogged over at least a half dozen glaring logical gaps easily enough to view the thing to completion without much tribulation. The three worst things about it were also the best: the acting, the plotting, and the CGI effects.

The acting: Sam Rockwell and Gary Shandling make for VERY convincing assholes. Excellent acting, guys. Please go the fuck away.

The plotting: Every single bit of the overstuffed plot was, in some way, reasonable. So nothing in this overstuffed bullshit burrito could be arguably cut wihtout damaging the overall plot arc. Translation: we're goddamned lucky it wasn't THREE hours long.

CGI: I have no clue where to start. Suffice it to say that, as a fan of F1 racing, within about two minutes of the Grand Prix sequence, I observed "F1 cars don't spin out their tires like that,*" --producing clouds of smoke like a NASCAR (boring) or IHRA drag racer (boring and nasty) would, for no goddamned good reason at all, and "Yep-- that's definitely Monaco they CGI'd all those cars into." It was so beautifully faked it was disgusting. And then there were thos damned electrical whips on Mickey Rourke's arms, which alternately sliced through steel and were grappled like lariats, both utterly believably. Great stupid effects.

Happy Thanksgiving, y'all.

*And the only car that spun out its tires was Tony Stark's. Weird.

The Battle Of Chili-Cheese Hill

2010-11-11T14:17:00.000-08:00

SO HOW THE HELL is it this is the only picture I have of chili cheese tots?

You may have already guessed that this is not the lunch of the day. This is the lunch of last January 10th, or so says the info log tag that popped up when I buzzed the image with my cursor. Today's lunch was alot like this, only slightly prettier. (The lunch of the day pics have been suspended temporarily, as my sister-in-law borrowed the camera to take Halloween pics of her kids, and we haven't got the thing back yet.) Today's lunch also included a selection from Saranac's winter variety pack, a vanilla stout. Based solely on that, I can say, wholeheartedly: if you get Sara in your area, do. I followed it with the Sara IPA, which was just ludicrous, but went down well enough anyways.

The not the movie of the day, well, I guess it wasn't a movie to begin with. I did see it the first time around, on HBO, one hour a week. Today, in honor of Veterans' Day, HBO is showing the entire series, back to back, all day long. And while I could-- was going to-- write about why the Band of Brothers series was better--a more compelling narrative structure, more coherent source work, a clearer through line of history-- and while I could-- and was going to-- explain why that was not a fault of the series-- the nature of the war in the Pacific Theater, for soldier and sailor alike, was more chaotic, less episodic, and more obscenely punishing-- and while I could-- and was going to-- write about how I had to start watching other things after about three and a half fairly solid hours of this, it dawned on me the HBO is airing this ten-part, ten-hour-long series, back to back, in its brutal entirety, as a run up to the premier of its new feature Wartorn: 1861-2010.

Which is about battle fatigue and post traumatic stress syndrome. On some level, that's just inappropriate.

And I don't know if it makes it worse or not, but following that: HBO First Look: 127 Hours.

The More Things Stray The Same

2010-10-26T13:46:00.000-07:00

ALRIGHT, I GUESS this may seem to be getting mono-tonous, but, well, firstly, I like cheeseburgers and beer. Secondly, once you have the ingredients assembled, it gets kind of hard to resist. Thirdly, there is an element of luck of the draw here. I mean, I don't JUST eat cheesburgers. Sometimes I eat chili dogs . . .

Over and above all that, I wish to report that following the UFO with the IPA is both really weird and very rewarding. My mouth had been so attuned to the practice of seeking out the hoppiness of the hefeweizen that the IPA cam across as slighlty sweet and salty, which brought out the pepper element in the ketchupo something terrific.

The movie of the day was Angels in the Outfield. The original. Don't ask me why. For some reason I just didn't turn the damned thing off.

The movie of the day is not Conan O'Brien's new show on TBS, and not for any of the reasons you might be thinking.

One might be that I don't watch late night TV, which by and large I don't. I don't watch Leno or Letterman because I learned many, many years ago, that there's never any guarantee that the show you'r about to see will be funny. Also, the guys are both arrogant jack-offs on occasion, and, well, @#$% them.

But Conan I have a soft spot for, about which more in a mo. So if I did watch late night TV, this might be a good candidate.

One might be that the promos for the new show have been kind of . . . Well, actually, I find most of them somewhat amusing, but the Wifey finds several of them . . . creepy. Particularly the ones set to that Missing You" song, where people are doing all kinds of whacko things because they miss Coco, including making him seventy five bar mitzvah cakes, which . . . You know, I'm going to take that back. For all I know, Conan O'Brien might actually be able to eat 75 bar mitzvah cakes.

I kind of like the one where he's dancing without the music. And the one where he's washing his desk, I think, is a lovely bit of satire. (Seriously, why is washing a car supposed to be sexy? Am I supposed to wanna screw the car as well?) (And seriously, folks, soap tastes nasty. I shouldn't want anyone to taste soap.)

And then of course there's the reasons I might be watching and I won't. One of which is that it means I am in increasingly less danger of accidentally watching the George Lopez show. George Lopez is only ever intermittently funny, he's a lousy interviewer, and whenever he gets on the subject of latinos I begin to suspect he secretly works for Fox News.

So thank you, Conan. If nothing else, thank you for that.*

Secondly, I do have a bit of a soft spot for him. He does seem to be one of the more genuinely funny guys in the business. He seems to have a fondness for running gags, which I appreciate. He's also responsible for one of the very few truly resonant "interviews" with Hunter Thompson in the years before his death.

Conan and crew were whisked to the Owl Farm, handed firearms, plied with whiskey, and told Hunter would be along shortly. (This was at like 7 o'clock in the morning. Quothe Conan: "I think I'm going to throw up.") So Hunter showed up, being Hunter, just doing that off-putting thing where he was very clearly hiding behind his persona, and proceeded to convince Conan and crew, in his rambling way, so commence firing upon the targets, which included stuffed animals for whatever reason. (Somebody thought shooting a teddy bear was funny, I guess.) The proceedings lurched along; Hunter urging them to use increasingly higher explosives in the guise of fulfilling some sort of membership ritual, Conan and crew getting an increasingly queasy vibe about the whole thing as Hunter handed them more and more powerful weapons. (I seem to recall Hunter saying "Here-- throw an grenade at it!" and Conan replying "Why?") At one point, Conan decided to try and placate Hunter by concentrating on the teddy bear, which, unfortunately, he wasn't able to hit with great accuracy. Then, at one point, the combination of the impact of the grenade and the carnage inflicted by a carbine suceeded in ctaching the bear in fire. "Ooh! Look! It's on fire!" To which Hunter said three or four utterly excited, thoroughly indecipherable things.

It was the first time I had seen anyone legitimately interact with Hunter S. Thompson in at least a decade. It was just kind of sweet.

So I have reasons I might watch Coco's new show, but I probably won't. He comes on at 11; so does Jon Stewart. Sorry, but if I have to choose between the two, I am probably watching the Daily Show. Until I find out what the next-day re-run situation is, that's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

*Also there's the whole network late night crappola aspect. I kind of like the way Conan handled his part in the shennanigans, and it was especially gratifying that people were lining up and buying airline tickets to appear on Conan's non-televised-live shows, while that craphound Leno, who insisted that America wanted him to molest the airwaves every night at ten, so all those poor folk who couldn't stay up past 11:30 could catch his action, crashed and burned. Leno has been funny, but that whole thing was just outrageously presumptious.

Raging Beer

2010-10-20T12:40:00.000-07:00

SO HERE WE HAVE, as I am so fond of saying, a beer fulla fridge. The local mega-mart had the last of Harpoon Brewery's summer stock-- HA!-- on sale for fifteen bucks, so this morning I broke down and shelled out. This despite the fact that, historically, I haven't liked wheat beers, and fully half the bottles in here are a hefewiezen of one sort or another. (Literally: three are one kind, three are another.) Given that today's lunch . . .

is the double cheese-burger I am so fond of, I figured it would be a good day to try out a wheat beer. The cheeseburger, which I am not calling the Double Whammy, and the tots, which are not Totlettes, would be capable of walking up to any substandard beer and staring it down into cowed submission. This turned out to be unnecessary. The UFO, often seen but never heard, was bold and hoppy, where most of the wheat beers I've experienced before tended to the sweet and thick. The summer brew was what about everybody does for a summer brew these days, which is a lighter bodied lager with brighter hops, which was just fine as well. The next question mark is the Harpoon crystal wheat brew, but fortuantely, between here and there, there will be the ubiquitous IPA, and there's a coupla Red Hook ESB's to be had there, too.

The movie of the day is not this ultra-violent love letter to a more embittered, embattled time when we all had the souls of wolves and the wits of sharks.

I did see this a number of years ago, largely on the grounds that it was something I ought to see one day. I think I had just recently seen one of Scorcese's other celebrated greatest hits and nipped out to Blockbuster to get this. I remember describing it, in an e-mail to Ol' Doc Nagel, as the most relentlessly violent movie I had ever seen. This was before I had seen Straw Dogs. I have now seen Straw Dogs, and this is still the most relentlessly violent movie I have ever seen. It's not just the fight scenes. It's everything. The dialogue, the mob scenes, the relentless jealousy and serial adultery and spousal conflicts and on and on and on. Where Scoresese's mob movies are cruel in the way that characters are tortured and killed, this one is cruel in that way in which characters are tortured and spared.

So I tried. I really did. But thanks, Marty, once was enough. My most fervent hope was that you meant this one to have a positive message-- See, kid? At least you're not them!!!"-- but it's just hard to watch that much brutality in one sitting.

At least the movie of the day is not this. I caught it on one of the vaunted on demand-- sorry-- On Demand chanels day before yesterday when there Was Nothing On. It was perfectly fine, the kind of indie tragicomedy where all the characters are defined by quirks, evil is comprised of conformaity, and heroism lies in not making very obviously bad choices when they are blatently presented to you, veritably shoved in your face. All the performances are commited, nuanced, and utterly false. Which is all to say that it killed ninety minutes that I could have otherwise spent reading David Crosby's 1988 autobiography, which I picked up at the Goodwill last weekend for a buck thirty nine.

So that's good at least.

But when it cropped up today, at three in the afternoon, right as I was done with one thing and not quite started on another, ehhhhhhhh-- no, thanks. Once was fine.

So do I recommend it? Sure. Don't read anything about it first, if you do, just kind of dive in and let the movie fill you in. It's got a little more suspense going for it that way. DeNiro gained and lost a total of four Marlon Brandos perparing for this role, which may just be his most commited and finest performance to date, and Marty Scorcese bankrolled at least a half dozen Columbian soccer teams in the making as well, so I think we all owe it to them, and the universe, to experience this film just once. Amen. So far the Harpoon products have yet to let me down, so yeah, unless they start producing lye-- and this would have to include the presence of skulls and crossbones and DO NOT INGEST warnings on the labels-- yeah, I'd go ahead and do it.

And sure, have the cheesburger. Like Warren said, before he went: enjoy every sandwich.

Amen.

The Sad Clown Wants You To Know His Pain

2010-10-05T12:07:00.000-07:00

SO YESTER-DAY I found the Magic Hat Brewery's new variety 12 pack on sale at the local for 13 bucks, so I snapped it up, with the result that I still had Saras for lunch (Two Saras For Quasimodo: black forest ham with cheese and mustard between slices of French toast).

(Actually, lemme go there first: had the Quasimodo with Polaner's blackberry fruit spread, which I keep wanting to call a compote, except I keep thinking that I probably don't have a firm grip on what a compote actually is, and the Saranac Black & Tan and Black Forest. The fruit spread was interesting, but the real revelation was finding a splash of the Black & Tan in the bottom of the bottle at the very end, and mixing that with the last of the Black Forest, which, well, damn! Turned it into an entirely new beer.)

(Anyways.)

This is a ham and cheese omlette with diced shallot and sliced black olives topped with chili and drizzled with mustard. The Magic Hat beers were phenomenally interesting. The first, their 2010 annual brew, called Odd Notion, was a bright, hoppy, light-hearted brew that rbought to mind Fisher's Bitter D'alsace (if memory serves, and I haven't had one of those in a long, long time). The second was an IPA, which brought to mind another craft brewed IPA whose name I can't remember, but it was quite nice as well: bright, stiff, hoppy. And there was an element of top-of-the-palate sweet spiceyness to both beers that is sticking with me, both literally and figuratively. The memory is lingering in my brain, and the sweet spiceyness is hanging on the top of my palate like a frightened rock climber.

Clinging to a . . . Nah. I got nothin.

In other news, Bobcat Goldthwait is a mean, mean man.

I caught his stand-up routines several times in the 80's, when he was featured in one-man shows by HBO, as well as a couple of festival appearances and whatnot on Comedy Central later on. I watched the entirety of Shakes The Clown (and blogged about it, by the way), and while I got the point, and appreciated the sheer intestinal fortitude it must have taken to stick with the premise so rigidly all the way through, I couldn't escape the conclusion that Shakes The Clown is a viciously, enormously painful enterprise.

So I figured I have given Mr. Goldthwait more than a fair, um, shake. I confess that I only got through about five minutes of Sleeping Dogs Lie, which is a movie about-- SPOILER ALERT!-- a woman who gave her dog a blow job in college and then spends the rest of her life not talking about it. (What the @#$ do I know, like I said, I didn't get through it.) This, on the other hand, I slogged through almost in spite of myself.

Who am I kidding? In spite of myself. This is a movie that seeks to take everyone who thinks they are even remotely inadequate and grind their faces into a muddy landfill, in January, and then convince them that their own desperately painful existences are deeply funny, the kind of epic farce that recognizes that like itself is a joke, and death is merely The Great Pratfall. It's the epitome of the Mel Brooks concept: this is the joke where YOU fall down the manhole and die, and it's funny because you weren't that great a person in the first place, really. Oh, and also? Anyone who has any interest in or appreciation of poetry is a self-involved wanker who's only in it to get laid.

Which, that last part is largely true, but anyways.

The concept here is that the kid was a useless, vile wanker-- literally and figuratively, and after he dies wanking, his dad uses him as a strawman to gain literary fame. Which is a wholly crass assessment, and totally unfair. As Onion AV Club head writer Nabin wrote in his review, there is a kind of sweetness in this, a sense of affection for all the screwed up characters in this Marquis De Sade morality play. A sense that the writer/director is really, really sorry to point it out, but these stupid, useless people really suck. Oh, and life's a bitch. Sorry about that. Sucks to be you.

So I get the joke, but I'm not sure it's really worth the effort. And the longer it goes on the less believable it gets, the harder it is to swallow, and the less funny it gets. So do I recommend it? Sure. Watch this movie, ya craphound. The makers of this film want you to know they're glad you enjoyed it, ya bunch of meat-sacks.

PS: And, as it turns out, the punchline of the movie is a pratfall, almost literally. Do not watch this film unless you are fully prepared to watch Robin Williams high-dive in the nude.

Eggs On The Horizon

2010-09-28T13:45:00.000-07:00

I DON'T REALLY have anything new to add here, but I really had to put this up. Yester-day's lunch was impressive enough-- ham and cheese on rye with mustard and, get this, sliced shallot and black olives-- but this was one for the ages. Making a left-turn from the previous manifestation, I went ahead and made what I am calling Quasimodo. It's a quasi-Monte Cristo. A classic Monte Cristo has both ham and turkey, but this has just Black Forest ham. The classic also has Swiss cheese on it, where this has American, as that's what I have on hand this week. The bread is French toast. The totlettes are totlettes. The small black cup is Ketchupo!(TM), and the red blob in the white dish is Polaner All Fruit strawberry spread. In the words of Mel Brooks: Woof.

There is no movie of the day. We've been watching this for awhile, the 2008 BBC series about a small handful of people left behind after an influenza epidemic wipes out almost the entire popluation of british actors. So far, my reaction has been just to kind of watch it and think "Well, alright, I guess that's one way you could approach it, writer-wise," whereas the Wifey's reactions have largely been along the lines of "What the @#$%!?! WHY would you (insert irrational action) when there are a BAZILLION (insert retail product/real estate concern)s just LYING ALL OVER THE PLACE, UNUSED!?!" Which, not that any single one of her observations have not been absolutely correct, 100% spot on. I just haven't been able to invest the necessary energy to picking out the nits.

So we watched this. It has been watched by us.

And next? Survivors, Series 2. Another six hour-long episodes. See you in October.

The Plotz Thickens

2010-09-09T11:15:00.000-07:00

SO I HAVE had lunch out (approx-imately) for the better part of the last week. Starting with a latish lunch of tuna salad croissant with Utz salt & pepper potato chips from the local grocery store deli and culminating with a visit to the nearby Asian bistro last Tuesday, I had not had lunch in at home for almost a week, and then I decided to go out to the local for a Reuben yesterday, given that the Terminix guy had just been over to poison the perimeter of the house, and, well, I just have a hard time making lunch in the kitchen on those days. It isn't that I am scared the pesticides will end up in my food, it's more that I am aware of the vague, subtlety evil aura of it surrounding the house. Just kinda unnerving, really, is all.

So today's lunch is a hot ham and cheese, and, as always, the things that make it special are the tings you cannot see. Garlic and peppercorn infused mayo on the bottom, two kinds of mustard, Plochman's yellow and the deli brown, on top. And you can't see it. Because I'm mean like that.

The movie of the day is not The Losers. Where normally I would have stuck up a copy of a movie poster, here I chose to tack up a still I stole from the Onion AV Club review,, partially because it better captures the essence of the film, and partly because I just hate all the goddamned posters they made for thing. Hate 'em. Every single one.

Or so it seems, anyways. As I began ramping up to this entry, I scanned all along the interwebs for info, things I could use to punch up my understanding of this irredeemably flat, unaccountably flabby post-cold-war-paranoid-schizophrenic hallucination, every poster I cam across looked like something based on what a thirteen year old had spent seven hours of study period etching in the back of his Trapper Keeper.

So I went with this. It should give you a pretty good sense of how the titular group is composed-- big guy up front, second in command at his left shoulder, wacky side-kicks in back, and the woman out to the side-- it could also give you a pretty good idea of what the plotz is. Er, sorry-- the member of the team who will plotz. Um. No, I mean the big plot twist, which is not-- SPOILER ALERT!!!-- that the chick is an Angelina Jolie clone from the planet Reptar in the Hulu nebula (I mean, facts are facts)-- but that the second in command will have dastardly turned on Our Hero about 95% of the way in, resulting in a set-piece shoot-out that would have happened either way, because that's how these things are plotted. Frankly, with this kind of flick, the only way to have anything resembling a twist is if it didn't result in an eleventh hour betrayal and resulting shoot-out. (But, again frankly, who the hell wants to see that.) (Besides Jim Jarmusch.) And while I don't precisely agree with the Onion AV's Scott Tobias' assessment of them as "a collection of black-ops douchebags" (and, he allows, "our ostensible heroes"), the tableau also helps establish another key aspect of the film: no one in it matters as much as . . .

Nah. let's leave it at that. Really. The shoot-outs seem to be clinging to the vegan motto "nothing with a face." Our heroes blast it out with an army of evil minions working for . . nah, I'm stumped there too. Anyways, the whole way along, nothing that went down seemed to have any human features aside from head, neck, torso and limbs. So this tableau shows that our ostensible heroes are ostensible characters who have ostensible personalities establishing an ostensible hierarchy in their ostensible group. Ostensibly. And then they fight a rich guy who has decided he wants the whole world to pick a fight with each other so that they can finally level out their differences. Or something. Jason "Butch" Patric, God bless 'im, plays it like a splice of Al Pachino's characters from The Devil's Advocate and Scent of a Woman. (I was gonna say Dog Day Afternoon, which would have been funnier, but false. Much like the way Patric plays his character!)

Anyways. We watched the whole damned thing, for no readily apparent reason, aside, perhaps, base laziness. Neither of us was willing to put forth the effort to get up and pluck the thing out of the DVD player. This is one ham sandwich I cannot recommend.

Conspiracy Fact

2010-08-31T11:56:00.000-07:00

THIS PAST weekend, one of my vegetarian pals advanced Answer A as to his mania, which is the undoubt-edly cruel and terrible ways animals are treated BEFORE they are cruelly slaughtered and unnaturally packaged to be sent to our local grocery chain. As he was holding his diet up as universal palliative-- if we refuse to eat the results of these sadomasochists' efforts to soil God's Eden, they will eventually relent and take to embracing all the furry creatures of the fertile green earth as their spiritual brothers-- I fell into one of my more basic defensive positions, which is that I cannot, intellectually, convince myself that the entire world will change as the result of my own actions or inactions. "It's a big world," I informed him. And then I had to back off, change the subject. It's just too soul-crushing.

For him. Not for me. The fact of the matter is that human beings have been slaughtering animals in some very bizarre and cruel ways going back to the beginning of history, and not always with the intent of eating them. And even if we were to collectively stop eating animal flesh in this country to the extent that all the feed lots and slaughterhouses were to be forced to declare bankruptcy and go out of business overnight, they'd still be hacking oxen apart in the Philippines in a manner so brutal an inefficient that the animals die a slow, agonizing death of blood loss shock before their bodies are discarded into the surf.

It's also a fact that animals are being treated with far more dignity in these modern times than they have been since the dawn of the industrial age, and we know this to be true because their treatment and processing is being monitored by armies of inspectors, and you have to dig really deep to find something demonstrably wrong with the system. I mean, really, it's fine to claim that the animals being treated with antibiotics have diseases because they are being treated with antibiotics, but pardon me if I find the argument less than convincing, given that you'd have to have been autopsying every animal in a brood for ten generations in order to prove that the evolutionary change had taken place wherein every animal were genetically predisposed to disease because their natural immunities had been wiped out by a dependence on antibiotics.

Might be they're being given the antibiotics because animals get sick. Naaaaaaah. Fuck that.

Which brings us to the film of the day. The film of the day is a ham and cheese with bacon on rye with mustard, along with totletts and Ketchupo! and a Saranac Pale Ale followed by a Harpoon IPA. Nah. I didn't buy it either.

Sorry. The flick of the day was something I knew I was going to come across before too long, although I actually had figured I would get it from Netflix and spend the better part of a day bracing myself before venturing into it. Instead it turned up on one of the movie channels deep into the line-up. We get forty-seven million movie channels, including at least six permutations each of HBO, Cinemax, Starz and so on. The channel this turned up on is so far up the tier that it makes me think it's programmed for people who would be asking for some particularly strange fare. (Not the same channel the movie Twilight has been showing up on, but not far from it.)

Initially I thought I was going to have problems with this based on what I know about military research into mind control and behavior modification, which is actually kind of astounding for a civilian. Most of what I know came from military sources, and all of it indicates what, to me, is a rather mundane and logical conclusion: methods of mind control and behavior modification, from a military standpoint, are unreliable at best and offer neither a tactical nor a strategic application in intelligence gathering or in actual warfare. In other words, the best way to control the mind of your adversary is to point a big, big gun at him.

Not that I am advocating that. I am fond of saying that I am against the bombing because someone has to be against the bombing, but the fact of the matter is, and this is a fact, war is stupid. As a famous idiot once said, war is about killing people and breaking their things. What part of that sounds appealing to you? Killing people and breaking their things has never won hearts and minds. Anyone who thinks otherwise is a liar.

Anyways.

So based on the first viewing, I am undecided about this. I kind of liked parts of it, and there were a good number of laugh-out-loud moments, at least for me. And the things that were patently untrue were very clear-- the US military has never had an ex-hippie guru who tried all paths to enlightenment for the sole purpose of discovering methods of psychic warfare. (I could be wrong, but I expect I'm not.) The things that were reasonable bore close enough resemblance to actual events. There were a few moments of ham-fisted morality and baconny exegesis, but nothing that really sank it. On the other hand, it wasn't, I don't think, the down-and-dirty military satire it meant to be, and the plot's redemption arcs were a tad on the broad side. Still, it wasn't bad.

So I dunno. I can't recommend having ham and bacon on Jewish rye, because, karmically, the stakes are just too high. Especially putting bacon on anything purporting to be even remotely kosher. I mean, bacon is the porkiest pork of all, so that's just kind of asking for it. If you do, though, follow the pale ale with an IPA. It's just common sense. Oh, and never research the military's attempts to research anything besides really big guns. It turns out they're really interested in doing really mean shit to people, and not only are they neither bright enough or weird enough to make any of it very interesting, they are perversely convinced that it's all for our own good.

And they're wrong.

The Eiger Configuration*

2010-08-24T12:26:00.000-07:00

THE LONG TERM effects of the ongoing chili dog experi-ment-- about which more shortly-- included another in a series of lifelong explorations into the possibilities of grilling things inside slices of white bread. This time, instead of JUST chili and cheese, I added sliced turkey. My initial thinking was that the addition of the deli meat would add a degree of stability to the tower, but I was also somewhat curious as to what, if any, effect it might have on the overall flavor of the device. Right now I don't have an answer or a slant or a take on that, something I am still getting my mouth-slash-head around-- and lunch was over the better part of an hour ago. I mean, it was terrific, a chili-cheesy-mustard-schmeared delight, and the totletts were awesome alonside, dunked in Ketchupo!(TM). But as to what the turkey added . . . Let me get back to you on that.

I had to add this pic though, just to give you an idea of the scope. Check out that cross-section . . .

The chili-dog experiment began as a result of something or other that reminded me how much I love a good chili dog. This was reinforced by a visit to a local bowling alley, where I did not bowl, but instead elected to sample their footlong, adorned with mustard, slaw and chili. About a month after that, I found myself foraging for lunch at the local Harris-Teeter, and tumbled to the chili dog conclusion. Which turned out to be that, four about ten bucks, I can pretty easily set myself up for four very solid lunches.

After this-- you can see a pic of one of the early configurations a coupla-three-four entries back-- I went through the variations, including using different chilis, various cheeses, different mustards, and the addition of chopped shallot-- not onion, shallot, which, trust me, is worth the difference, even though the only reason I tried it was that it was what I had on hand. One of my favorites was a particular lunch when I had two dogs, each with a different cheese, chili, and mustard. Awesome.

Eventually, I ended up with a chili that didn't really go well with the dogs, an Armour Star product that was more of a stew than a sauce. This cooked down far more than I intended it to, to the point that it was basically a paste. (It didn't help that I had mistakenly grabbed the chili WITH BEANS, which I would normally never do, and which is precisely the wrong thing to use as a chili dog sauce.) But the end result was that I added water, heated it up, doctored it with spices, let it cook down, and shortly, I had the perfect chili for the grilled chili cheese sandwich. Richard Drefuss could have made stalagmites with this stuff.

Still considering the turkey angle. I'll get back to you.

This was not the movie of the day. It was the movie of the day yesterday (during which I ate a grilled turkey and bacon on white, which was terrific). I didn't see this when it first came out, I think for reasons to do with the distribution-- I seem to think that our local theater chains interepreted it as the usual Woody Allen movie, which in this market back in those days meant it was supposed to hit the art house theater six or eight weeks late, rather than send it out as the first-week blockbuster it was supposed to be. Also, I guess, I was in college at the time, and I didn't go out to see a whole lot of movies while I was in college. But I had been a low-level Woody Allen fan, mainly enjoying his work in Sleeper and Bananas and especially Take the Money and Run ("It says 'I have a gub.' What's a 'gub?'"), as well as some of the brainier bits, especially Manhattan, which would eventually have nothing whatever to do with my own infatuaion with great, grand, grubby Gotham. And this got alot of awards, and ended up on averybody's year end best of list, and is often used as a perjorative in regard to Allen's later works, so I guess I always kinda figured I would eventually see it. Turns out yesterday was the day.

And just let me say this about Zelig. There was one line in there I still get a great deal of use out of-- "I love baseball; it doesn't have to mean anything, it's just beautiful"-- but other than that, I have no use for that long, hard slog through early psychoanalytic horseshit.

There.

Anyways. This was not a bad film. In addition to being superlative mid-eighties New York porn, just scene after scene of lucious streetscapes and excellent tracking shots and on and on, it features some really lovely performances, including a perfectly mid-tempo turn by Sam Waterson as an architect demonstrating precisely how right everything wrong about New York is. (That's not what his character is meant to do, but that, in my opinion, is what he ends up doing. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.) But by and large, it's the standard Allen template: nerotic New Yorkers have a grand old time screwing up their lives. Man dissillusioned by his ordinary life convinces himself that he is in love with his wife's sister! Near-incest infidelity leads to neurotic breakdown! Aging artist must face up to the young lover he can no longer keep! Flighty would-be female artiste flits from art form to art form, oblivious to the fact that she's not terribly good at any of them! And, as always, it's near impossible to say whether Allen is being misogynistic or sarcastic in the way he draws his female characters.

But oh! Those performances! Diane Weist! Michael Caine! Barbara Hershey! Allen himself, doing 'imself in that impeccably hilarious, neurotically charming way he hardly ever does anymore! New York! And, as near as I could tell, not a single blow job referrence.

Or maybe I missed it. There was a sandwich involved on my end at one point.

So do I recommend it? I dunno. Maybe next time I'll skip adding the turkey.

*So. Um. In a way, this film has big things in common with both The Eiger Sanction and The Eighth Configuration. It has both deep intrigue thrust against the backdrop of stunning location shots, and a bunch of whackos plunked down amidst astonishing and imposing architecture. Consider these elements cleverly written into the review. (Of the sandwich. Nothing like that could be said of what I wrote about the movie.)

The Goat Men Of The Greater Panhandle Ride Again!

2010-08-18T12:30:00.000-07:00

SO Some-where along the line, after a brief vacation with extended family, a pair of nights spent in close quarters with derby folk helping the skaters in our new league get through assessments, an evening of wall climbing, and then a weekend derby double header, most of which was spent screaming my lungs out and hugging all the old friends in our old derby league-- and I am not exaggerating when I describe these in dozens-- and finally a day off in celebration of the Wifey's birthday, I became the ONLY PERSON IN THE WHOLE ENTIRE EXTENDED GROUP to have come down with a head cold.

Normally, something would have been going around and someone or other would have just gotten over it, but nope-- not this time. This time I had a fitful time getting to sleep Monday night, during which I interpreted my intermittent coughing fits as the side effects of cheering myself stupid at the derby. It wasn't until my nose started stuffing up, somewhere around one thirty or two in the morning, that I realized I was legitimately sick.

So I spent the following day trying to convince myself that I was no longer sick, which almost worked, until shortly after lunch-- more chili dogs-- when my sinus passages took on a sudden and troubling resemblance to an LA freeway. Today I am feeling much better, but a lingering of the symptoms reminds me that I might not be entirely over the cold, so I decided to have an egg salad sandwich.

Hey, listen: it doesn't HAVE to make sense to you. It made enough sense for me to boil three brown eggs (cage free, I'll have you know), chop about a tablespoon's worth of shallot, throw in about an eighth of a cup of dill pickle relish, add mayo, three kinds of mustard (yellow, deli brown, dijon, & Chinese prepared), salt and pepper to taste (or, in my case, substantially beyond), slap the mixture between two slices of white bread (with both white and yellow American cheese) and grill the thing silly. This, as you might have guessed by the photo above, required the use of a knife and fork, but was totally worth the concession to etiquette in order to consume it.

The film of the day is not MST3K, in any of its permutations.

Not that I am against or dislike MST3K, or the Satellite of Love, Joel and the Bots, Mike and the Bots, the Doc or TV's Frank or any of the lot. Its' just that, well, I'm done.

The Wifey, for reasons passing understanding, decided not too long ago that she wanted to give this stuff a spin, having either missed out on it or rejected it out of hand back when it was originally on Comedy Central (originally The Comedy Channel, but I'm just not going there right now). Her research led her to the episode wherein they took on the notorious stinker Manos: Hands of Fate. This was, according to her findings, the episode consistently rated best by the powers that be.

This is largely because Manos is a terrible, horrible, stinking turd of a movie. It was made on a bet-- and the bad kind of bet, too, not "I bet YOU can't make a movie!" but "Hey, I bet you I can make a movie!"-- by a guy whose obsessions apparently included lingerie sand wrestling, unilateral polygamy, half-man half-goat creatures with chronic arthritis being forced to do menial labor, and the long term effects of low-level narcissistic megalomania in west Texas.

Wait a minute. I think I just described Dan Jenkins.*

Anyways. I think my favorite part of the movie was the five hundred thousandth time the evil meanie in the movie held his black cape out just so we could see the bright red hand prints emblazoned three feet across it on either side. These, we are left to conclude, must be the prints of the manos of the title, which, one may assume, are the purported hands of fate. It's my favorite moment because it's one of the few that doesn't make me want to scream out loud "WHY THE @#$% AM I WATCHING THIS!?!?" (Really, 'cause it's just a guy wearing a cape by that point.) When you look at it from a production standpoint, it's kind of incredible for a film shot outside of El Paso with a camera with no sound that only shot 32 seconds of film at a time with actors from the local theater group and a director who had ABSOLUTELY NO @#$%ING IDEA WHAT HE WAS DOING.

But when in considering it as a film viewing experience, one may only conclude OH MY GOD! WHAT KIND OF A SADISTIC, MEGALOMANIACAL CREEP WANTS ME TO WATCH THIS INTERMINABLE BULLSHIT!?!

Which brings me around to why I am kind of done with MST3K. It's not that I don't like the series-- like I said above, I have nothing but love for the guys aboard the SOL (think about that for a moment) and their alleged tormentors-- nor that I don't see the entertainment value in making smart over old sci-fi movies, industrial shorts, and old PSA bits. It's more that I am reminded, or rather was reminded, of the kind of mean-spirited bastards who insisted to me back in my college days that I HAD to see this stuff, describing it as "Like going to the movies with a bunch of assholes!" (Gleefully, like that was a good thing.) And where the central gag here is really, really funny and totally right in my wheel house as a running gag (repeating the flick's title over and over again as there is, for the better two thirds of the movie, ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to make any fun of whatsoever, and this culminating in two of the robot characters breaking down in tears over the impossibility of making anything useful out of this incredibly, impossibly stupidly vapid material), the fact remains that the reason this is continually held up as the paragon of MST3K virtue is the fact that the film itself is really, really awful.

Such things should not be judged, in my opinion, by degree of difficulty.

So I'm just kind of done. Not that I will never watch MST3K again. I've seen plenty, and I could well see some more. Just not the crappy one all the assholes tell me to.

*Just kidding. That would be EAST Texas.

Uncommonalities

2010-07-30T12:21:00.000-07:00

SO TO CONTINUE the trend of unrelent-ingly eating stuff people have warned us about for years, today's lunch eventually became chili dogs.

"You know how you feel when you've been out all weekend, drinking cheap whiskey and eating chili dogs?" one considerably ill character asks another in one of the more dire later episodes of the series M*A*S*H; "I wish I felt that good."

The weird thing about that statement always seemed, to me, that if you felt bad from drinking whiskey and eating chili dogs all weekend long, at least you could do so remembering how good you felt while you were drinking whiskey and eating chili dogs. It's the sort of thing a writer thinks up in the confines of the writers' room which, in that specific vacuum, sounds not only witty, but wise.

But I digress.

These were awesome.

The chili is plain, flat, out-of-a-can Patterson's Hot Dog Chili Sauce. I had never had it before, and I highly recommend it. It is a pretty basic down-the-middle chili sauce, mildly spicy and nice and sloppy, the way it has to be for the chili dog application. Beneath it, if you can't make out by the picture, is a layer of cole slaw. I don't get why people don't put cole slaw on hot dogs. Underneath that is a generous caulk of yellow mustard-- Plochman's, of course-- and under the dogs themselves is a layer of cheese, because, really, why not? The Saras are part of what's left from a mixed 12 pack, but chosen pretty deliberately, and they went along well. The lager came across as a natural companion to this kind of fare, while the brown ale brought out some extra spiciness and exotic notes in the chili and mustard. Excellent. (Also, I didn't really want to leap off the ledge and go to having chili dogs with an IPA, although that is something which, in retrospect, I am anxious to try. )

The film of the day is soemthing I completely stumbled onto right around lunch time. I had been out provisioning for the better part of the mid-morning, and when I got back and settled in, shortly after noon, this was playing on the station that I had been tuned into previously. I saw this on DVD shortly after it was released in that format, and I have been able to catch it once or twice a year on cable since then. American Splendor is like a chili dog . . .

No. I don't mean that at all.

American Splendor is a movie that I find both easily watchable and maddeningly frustrating by turns, depending on what kind of mood I am in. Today it was both. On the one hand, it's easy to watch Paul Giamatti dig into the role, which he does with vigor and, I think, pretty obvious glee. (It would be just as easy, if not more than a little crass and tasteless, to suggest that the character he is playing in this film is not a far cry from the one he played in John Adams, or to suggest that Pekar is the kind of guy Adams would have been had he been born and grown up in middle century Cleveland, but that is a muddle for another time.) Also, there's enough of Pekar himself (as well as other characters in the living drama) in the flick to lend it a strong air of authenticity.

On the other hand, speaking as one who has only once or twice surveyed (found, not bought) any volume of American Splendor, and didn't find it to be terribly enlightening. Or even very interesting. Indeed, I can only imagine that the world is filled with legions of people who watched this movie but were not strongly moved to seek out and read the works that supposedly inspired it. So does that make me a hypocrite? Should I, on some level, feel a little cowed, a little guilty about enjoying this depiction of a man whose works I have not given a fair hearing and judged as wanting anyways? (It is at this juncture that the Wifey would declare "He's got his money." To which I would probably add "He's dead." Pekar passed away just shy of three weeks ago. A cause of death still has not been announced, so far as I know.) Or can I just watch and enjoy this attempt to portray and, to some degree, sum up what was, apparently, a quirky, interesting, and, eventually, relatively satisfying life?

Do I recommend it? I think you should always question life. Interrogate it, challenge it, examine it from any and every angle you can catch. Ask yourself how much you know about it, wonder what you might be missing. When presented with the facts of someone else's life, why shouldn't you do the same? Try and figure what's the case and what's been made up, painted in, tacked on with epoxy, buffed clean, blended along the edges. As for the chili dogs,* just eat them. Never question a chili dog or a Chinese dumpling. It's better for your sanity.

*I am very tempted to change the title to "Ceci N'est Pas Un Chiene de Chile," for my pal Doc Nagel, who's a big fan of the Matisse gag, but this'll do just as well.

OOOOO, YA CRRRRRAAAAAZZZZY!

2010-07-12T11:32:00.000-07:00

AGAIN WITH THE Jamaican patty, again with the eggs and the tater tots, which, in case I have not pointd this out before, are actually Ore Ida Crispy Crowns, so they're like tot pellets, which I have come to prefer as my potato option. The Wifey is fond of saying that she prefers her potatoes in tot form. I guess this is yet another way in which I am a slightly more pronounced snob than most.

As it is with the beer, as well. Last time I got all chompy about getting to the movie review, and neglected to note that while the IPA seemed a bit on the dissapointing side in the context of the cheeseburger, the Kona Longbaord Lager was absolutely stunning, bringing out all kinds of nuances in the burger, very likely as a result of the contrast with the IPA. This time the IPA did just fine, standing right up against the spicy, creamy, tangy, salty combination, and the Kona seemed a little tired by comparison. Although it did more than fine with dessert, which was a Snicker's ice cream mini. Yum.

And I guess I'd be somewhat remiss if I didn't do this. The movie of the night this past Friday was Night of the Living Meh.

This is the kind of movie that reduces Rotten Tomatoes' otherwise reliable rating system to almost pure gibberish. As near as I can tell, and I didn't make a life's study of it, this didn't really get good reviews or bad reviews. So despite it's 71% fresh rating, pretty much all the reviews, whether dubbed good or bad by the fine folks at RT, amounted to "Eh, it's good enough for what it is, but nothing to write home about." A good many critics devoted a fair amount of column inch to dotting out the ways in which the remake and the original differ, but to be completely honest, all they really share is a premise: government something-or-other leaks into the ground water and drives people crazy. This doesn't really have anything near the level of paranoia, or, actually, crazy, the original had. In fact, one of the biggest deficits can be directly related to one of the ways they threw money at it: they came up with a special Crazies make-up scheme. Which had the effect that you stopped really caring who was going crazy and who wasn't. Where in the original, you couldn't tell who was being effected by the bio-weapon or who was just losing it under the strain or who was just a crazy asshole who figured any slight excuse to gun people down was good enough, in this one, the ones going crazy from the toxin would eventually be sporting a fancy new paintjob. If it had been a comedy sketch, they all would have been wearing hand-lettered signs reading "VILLAN."

Yeah. That's enough.

Discomfort Foods

2010-07-08T12:21:00.000-07:00

I DO NOT mean to suggest that today's lunch has caused me any kind of distress or discom-fort, which it has not, although God knows, I have been told all my life that this is precisely the kind of thing no one should ever eat. (Although everyone does.) This is the double cheeseburger, which this time, just out of chance, comes equipped with two extra thick slices of American cheese, and by design, two almost disparate seasonings: Celtic sea salt and cracked green pepercorn on one patty, and pre-packaged Lowry's Garlic Pepper on the other. The IPA is from the Bridgeport Brewing Co., and frankly I was expecting a great deal more from it. It was properly hoppy, but didn't really live up to the "Five Floral Hops!" hype on the bottleneck tag. Also, the body was a little thin for an IPA, which is to say that if this were coming from another microbrewery, it would probably have been touted as "Refreshing!" and "Perfect for the hot days of summer to come!" Not that it was in any way bad, or even inadequate, just not as extreme as I usually like my IPAs.

(I was tempted to say something along the lines of "If Budweiser made an IPA, this is what it would be like," and then take it back, but that's a hell of a thing to say, even if taken back, so I'd rather just not say it to begin with.)

The film of the day, well, I was nuts even to think about it.

This is something that I remember hearing about way back when, but never knew too much more about than what legend brought: famous film nobody's ever seen, which never ever shows up on TV, directed by the Great George Romero, whom many serious film critics considered then, and still consider today, a hack. It was also said to be a rip-off of the film based on the Michael Crichton novel The Andromeda Strain, which it both is and isn't. We almost went to see the remake last year when it was in theaters after they Democratized it-- "Hey, we know it's not a GREAT idea, but what if we thow alot of money at it?"-- but eventually didn't, I think mainly because we were busy with roller derby stuff. When news came out that it had been released to DVD, I sprinted to stick it in the Netflix queue, and then decided that, in order to really do it right, I needed to get the original and watch it, whether before the remeake or after. (Neither would matter too terribly, since I already know how it ends-- and if you are reading this site and need to be told that SPOILERS are coming, you're either new here, or simply not very ALERT.) So I did. With the result that the original 1973 film version of The Crazies is way, way better than it has any right to be.

First and foremost, it has that flat kind of 1970's directorial style that I never understood, which almost always has the effect of putting the characters at a remove. Now, I always thought, and to a degree still believe, that this was a way for directors making movies on the cheap with the understanding that the finished product would be delivered into the distribution pachinko machine with no guarantee that it would ever be judged for its quality to hide the fact that some of the actors were just no fucking good at all, and were hired as much for a great body, willing libido, or ready access to drugs as for whatever talent they might posess. In this case, the posit is almost uniformly disproven: all of the actors aquitted themselves marvelously, and absolutely shone through, despite the flat directorial style. (Or maybe that's just the nature of the cinematography of the era, I don't know.) The script was also marvelously done, with huge chunks of dialogue that go from "I SAID GET IT DONE NOW!" straight to "Look, I know you don't understand this, neither do I, but we're trying to save lives here." Basically, this ensures that pretty much every character gets a chance to come off as sympathetic. Up to an including the military types. With that, it's off to do a little plot synopsizing.

A plane carrying a military grade bio-weapon crashes in the hills near a remote rural town and the ground water gets contaminated with the agent, which is a virus designed to turn the enemy murderously insane, so that they would kill each other and, eventually, themselves. (This is something our government did, in fact, try to do; no dice.) (Make the weapon, not poison a town. Hold your horses there, conspiracy theorists.) The army shows up to try and contain the contamination and stem the infection using antibiotics-- and the containment crew is initially told what they are trying to stem is an accidental release of an inocculant, which totally is not the word I am looking for, and only learn that what they're fighting is a bio weapon about a third of the way in. The people go slowly insane, a handful try to escape the quarantine, the soldiers go around acting like soldiers, and eventually almost everybody is dead. Then the head military guy on the ground gets a peevish message that he's aaaaaa . . . needed in anoooother town . . . He he! You sure did a fine job there, but, well, there's a developing situation, and since you did ssssssoooooooooooooo well there, we, well, we'd like you to take over the next operation.

Antibody! THAT's the word!

Anyways, this was probably more gripping than the 1990 film Crazy People, which starred Dudley Moore as an ad exec who goes crazy Spring Break style and starts telling The Truth-- and, how crrrrrraaaaaaaaaaaaaaazzy is this? IT WORKS! And people start buying Metamucil so they won't get cancer and die! I remember watching it and hating it on HBO back in the day, and then about a week and a half ago stumbled across it as I was having the morning coffee and decided I would give it another try. The point is that no film will ever be more cynical, negative, caustic, or difficult to watch than Crazy People. I couldn't be bothered to dig up a copy of the poster.

And although The Crazies does crib some basic points from The Andromeda Strain, it's way scarier. The accident that leads to the infection releases something dastardly that was to be released on purpose. As the film goes on, it becomes increasingly difficult to tell who is going insane due to the infection, who is going insane from the stress, or who was just kind of a crazy asshole to begin with. And, in the end, it turns out that the big brains running the machine aren't really all that on top of things anyways. Heckuva job, Brownie.

This will not be the movie of the night, or tomorrow night, or this weekend. After I stuck it in the queue and it made its way to the number one slot, next to be mailed out, its status changed from AVAILABE NOW to LONG WAIT to VERY LONG WAIT. Usually when a disc gets there, it just never ever ever ever ever comes. Oh, well.

PS: Guess what just came in the mail? Crrraay-zeeee . . .

The Heroism Of The Embedded Pickle

2010-07-01T10:40:00.001-07:00

IF YOU HAVE BEEN PAYING ANY ATTEN-TION, you've seen this trick before. Or at least I think you must have. It's basically a take on what gets called a Cuban sandwich, which essentially boils down to some kind of pork on some kind of bread with pickles, grilled. (I know, I may be being disingenous, but if I could count the many different kinds of "Cuban" bread I've had over the years . . . Oh, and while I'm at it? While I'm disparaging trends? RYE BREAD IS NOT MULTI-GRAIN BREAD. And MULTI-GRAIN BREADS IS NOT RYE BREAD. And that GADDAMNED SANDWICH PRESS is NOT the solution to every sandwich question.) So I am calling this the Cuba Tarde, which I have just now decided means "The Cuban who missed the boat." For no good reason, but that's what I've decided. It's Black Forest ham with two kinds of mustard-- more on that in a bit-- with dill pickle slices grilled on rye bread, which is decidedly non-Cuban. The Saranac is what I picked up earlier in the week as a fall-back position, when the promised on-sale 12 pack of specialty beers-- $13.99!!-- failed to materialize at my Harris Teeter, as did my threat to go visit another nearby location.

The mustards are my beloved Plochman's yellow and a generic store brand brown "spicy" mustard, also known as "deli" mustard.

The film of the day is not Papilon, although it kind of could have been. Last Monday night I managed to get the Wifey to watch that one. To be fair, she was the one who put it in the queue, but I was the one who decisively put in in the player and made it go. She watched it while reading the second Stieg Larsson book, while I watched it while revisiting the previous two times I watched the whole thing end to end. In the final analysis, this is the movie equivalent of spicy brown deli mustard. It's good, but it's kind of generic.

Which brings us to this.

This is also not the film of the day, but it was the film of the day after we watched Papilon. I watched this alone-- and on purpose!-- day before yesterday over lunch. The lunch that day was the double cheeseburger, which was oddly appropriate. The whole film I expected the three surfer dudes at the center of the story to have cheeseburgers, but I don't recall any of them actually doing so. In fact, one of the key scenes late in the film, meant to show how much Southern California had diverged from being the Great American Youth Paradise and Home For Wayward Squares, one of the principle characters is rebuked for ordering cheeseburgers, as the local joint where, he SWEARS, he was just there YESTERDAY, miraculously no longer serves dead animal flesh. (So informed by a hippie-dippy waiter embearded and just a decade and an orange skin away from shoting AN-I-MAL! AN-I-MAL!) (Muppet joke, anybody here not get muppet jokes?) And that was kind of the key tenor of the movie: the real stuff is kind of left out. No cheesburgers. All of the hijinks with only a kind of a nod to the truly assholish behavior demonstrated by the pioneer surfers of the mid-sixties. The local boys dodge the draft by pretending to be, by turns, deaf, dumb, blind, queer, and crazy-- all of this smiled upon by the local-boy-makes-good character, which I still maintain is preferrable to the local-boy-makes-on-carpet character, who enlists and serves and comes back an Officer And A Gentleman (although NOT, presumably, because he got no place else to gooooooo!!!!). Prior to this they trash the house (and lawn) of the local mother who tolerates their outrageous behavior because, oh well! Boys will be boys! The Local Hero Surfer God gets to spend a fair spread of time being the local drunk, and then later disparage the Local Hero Surf Board Shaper Entrepeneur for turning into the local drunk, but then redeem him by riding his custom longboard through The Big Swell Of 1974. (Tonight the role of the Big Swell will be played by Maui. We apologize, but Surfrider's Beach is unable to appear tonight, due to laryngitis.) The serial beat-downs, the "Get off this beach we don't actually own!" arrogance, the shit-behind-the-dunes nastiness of the era is all washed away by a sepia-toned wave. Take nothing but memories, leave nothing but footprints.

The surfing footage, of course, is gorgeous. But the central flaw there still remains: while sitting on your board outside the last set, waiting out the swell, it is not possible to look over the top of the last wave and admire the surfmanship of another surfer, dude. ("Alright, cue Gerry Lopez!* Aaaaaand SMILE!!!)

So what is a poor boy to do? This isn't a Po Boy, silly, it's a Cuba Tarde!! The secret to any fake Cuban sandwich is the embedded pickle. And while you might think the embedded pickle in Papilon is Dustin Hoffman, it's actually Steve McQueen. (I have no idea whether he'd agree with that assessment or not.) The embedded pickle in Big Wednesday is William Katt, who went on to play the Greatest American Hero after he played a fake Vietnam vet, whatever that says about Hollywood. Jan Michael Vincent, who you might have thought was the embedded pickle, was actually the embedded passive-agressive alcoholic former child genius, which either makes this a chillingly prescient performance or the dirtiest cruel joke in the universe. Enough to make you believe there is a God. A cruel, vicious God.

*Gerry Lopez is a genius surfer who got the semi-thankless job of playing the new-school hotshot usurping the former glory of the local hot-dog surfers-- huh. Come to think of it, there were no cheeseburgers AND no actual hot dogs in this movie. Don't seem right.

We Have Both Kinds-- Country AND Western

2010-06-18T13:17:00.000-07:00

TODAY's lunch I have decided, in my infinite wisdom, to call "The Swaze."

"The Swaze" is kind of an ironic hipster nick-name for Patric Swayze, one which, I have it on pretty good authority, he relished. When he finally succumbed to cancer earlier this year, having worked right up to the point where it was fuctionally impossible for him to continue working, the internet was full of earnest lamentations by adorably earnest hipsters (and, in some cases, hipster douchbags) mourning his passing. The man is well and truly missed.

The sandwich here is a culmination of several influences, not to say inspirations, not the least of which is the experience of having ordered a hot ham and cheese sandwich from a fast-food chain and realizing, in consumption, "Hey, this doesn't suck!" (And yeah: rare experience.) The least of which is watching Tony Bourdain eat some gaudy monstrosity down in Central America-- least because, first of all, the sandwich he was eating was mortadella, and, simply put, ham is not mortadella, and secondly, in the words of Mr. William H. Joel, there's a new band in town, but you can't get the sound from a story in a magazine.

The beers were a flukey choice at best, the second to last Tsing in a six pack and the remains of a Saranac Trail Mix. They didn't go, they didn't not go . . . Or, well, I guess they went along with the sadnwich and tots in their own unique ways. Not that it matters: that is a pile of ham right there.

Which brings us to this, which is most definitely NOT the movie of the day. I tuned in to this earlier, after taking the dog for a semi-abortive walk around the block (hey-- it's hot out there, and she's old). I remembered watching it and loathing it years ago on HBO, on the grounds that the critics had absolutely brutalized it but the public absolutely lapped it up, about which more later. This time there was ABSOLUTELY NOTHING ELSE ON (that I felt like watching). So, out of a perverse curiosity, related to the perverse fascination which lead to my perverse first viewing, I watched it.

It's really very bad.

The production values are patchy, and the plot is really bullshit, the issues are all cowbells-- MIA's who are really POW's! Our useless government! Those inscrutible Asians! Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is really alot like putting on a pantomime play!-- and, God bless 'em, only about three of the actors in the whole ensemble were able to ladel a decent performance out of the swirling, steamy soup.

Swayze isn't one of them.

The first time I watched I spent the whole time going "This is pretty bad . . . Hey! There's Gene Hackman! This is really very bad . . . Hey! There's Robert Stack!" (Who blusters with the best of them.) "This is actually horrible, borderline immoral . . . Hey! Who's that guy?" (Fred Ward, who even made the hammy, shadow-infested PTSD sequences semi-cogent.) This time I spent the majority of my attention reading artcles on the web, but I did manage to zero in on Swayze's performance. He was playing a guy who was going in despite his own self doubts and insecurities, but it came off as an actor who wasn't sure when to lean against the tree or chew its bark. It wasn't his fault, I don't think: it was a valid choice for the character, which could have been played way more straight up and macho, but the other guys hamming it up macho made it come off as just weak.

In 1983 there were tons of American who were desperate for reasons that our involvement in Vietnam was not futile and wrong, and believing that there were prisoner who had been deliberately listed as missing in action, either by the enemy or by our own government, so that they could be kept in prison and tortured beyond human understanding seemed like a good enough way to go about things. Which is a crying ass shame, because it's a lie, and an ugly, immoral motivation.

But I can recommend the sandwich.

Oh, and as to the name: part of the reason Swayze was, and remains, so vastly, widely loved, is that yeah, he gave us ham, but he also gave us cheese. When he was doing a role that ought to have a wink behind it, he held the wink in reserve, and then he stepped next door and did To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything, Julie Newmar. And was the baddest son of a bitch in drag you ever saw.

2010-06-02T13:27:00.000-07:00

SO THIS IS not the lunch of the day. This was yesterday's lunch, the ubiquitous double cheese-burger, which I am in no way tempted to start calling a Royale With Cheese. No way. Well, maybe a little.

The beer here is the real story. This was yet another accidental purchase, something that I thought was on sale for 14 bucks for the variety 12 pack but was actually 18. (Yes, I know this is becoming a familiar story around here, and no, I don't think it's psychological, at least not yet.) The brand in question here is Peak Organic, out of Portland, Maine. The products are exactly what they would seem to be, high-end, organic, micro-brewed beer, and precisely the high quality product you ought to get for the price. In fact, eighteen bucks is maybe even a little cheap, but I am not generally in the habit of buying stuff in this end of the spectrum. I am an unabashed beer snob, I confess it, but the same way I have a single malt Scotch every coupla three years . . . The specimens in evidence here are an Imperial IPA and their maple oak ale. The IPA is a dead solid perfect California IPA, firm-bodied and thoroughly hopped up, and slightly dangereous, ranking as they do at 7.1 ABV. The maple oak ale was a real smartass brew, a terrific oat ale with a child's breath of maple syrup hiding just underneath. It went even better with the Keebler Peanut Butter Fudge Sticks I had for dessert than it did with the burger, which is saying something.

This was not the film of the day, either. Well, because it's not a film. It's something Michael Nesmith did back in the 80's, apparently with his mother's White-Out money,* which largely anticipated and was subsequently sunk by the MTV phenomenon. A collection of mostly funny skits and bits sandwiched in between videos for Mikey's songs, at a shade over an hour's running time, it presented the ideal entertainment package for myriad networks and local stations and cable outlets who refused and/or neglected to play it. That's not entirely fair: it was really aimed more at the home entertainment/VCR market. to suit a demographic which, although it most certainly existed at the time, remained blissfully ignorant of Sir Michael's oblations.

Which is, again, unfair. This has been a cult hit for years, and that I really only just now got around to seeing it in it's entirety is entirely my own fault. I just put it off. However, I may soon buy a copy of my own. Good songs. Fun stuff.

Yesterday's movie was this, which I had seen many years previous. I had forgotten how gritty and funny and poignant and . . . What's the word I'm looking for? The sort of thing that happens when an ironic twist coincides with the satisfaction of a justified revenge in the final act. Like: "Is that . . . could be . . . yeah . . . yeah . . . yeah . . . YEAH!!!" Schadenfruede doesn't really do it.

When I saw it originally, Gary Busey was the guy who played Buddy Holly and Willie Nelson was the guy who sang "On The Road Again." It wasn't until years later that I found out they were drug-fueled perverts bent on discovering the Xanadu of the mind-body duality. The whole thing made way more sense after that.

This was the Weekend Movie. I almost wish I were kidding. The original was really very disturbing, dark and amoral and chaotic and anarchic. There are these caves and there are these people lost in them and then, suddenly, there are things that want to kill and eat them. There: deal with it for an hour and forty minutes. Afterwards, the Wifey declared that a) THAT's the way horror movies ought to be made, and b) she was NEVER EVER EVER EVER watching THAT again. This one, we spent the full hour and a half bitching about how flat the characters were and how stupid they were being and whether or not (about 50%) what they were required to do by the script was anything they would logically ever have done in real life. Basically, The Descent: Part 2 was indecent.

So do I recommend it? I could recommend a cheeseburger anytime, but that's largely a part of the mania that will most likely result in my hospitalization for either cardiac or mental disease. If you love beer like I do, then you ought to plunk down some cash~ for something as exotic as the Peak brews once in a while. Michael Nesmith's collected work is something of an aquired taste, but this is probably as suitable gateway as any. Oh, and it's nowhere near as hokey as the cover art might lead you to believe. You oughta watch Busey and Nelson egg each other on at least once; so far as I know, it never happened again, and if memory serves, this is the best acting job the Redheaded Stranger ever put in.

But The Descent: Part 2? Not just no, not just hell no, but Go To Hell No. To call it pandering would be to give everyone involved waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too much credit.

*Michael Nesmith's mom was an execituve assisant and she invented White-Out. True story.

~In point of fact, this was paid for with grocery money, which lead to me putting out a spot of cash for one thing or another over the past weekend. All's fair in love and beer.

Tales From The Crapped

2010-05-20T12:33:00.000-07:00

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!

Sometimes, You Just Want Pizza

2010-05-06T11:56:00.000-07:00

THIS IS Freshetta's Pizza Amore 10 topping deluxe pizza, something I never would have tried had it not been on sale one time last month when I was in a bit of a funk and didn't have any idea what I wanted for dinner. I think in part I was looking for something that would pretty much be guaranteed to dissapoint, and while most Freshetta products I have so far found satisfactory, this is touted as coming with it's own heating tray, and my experience has been that nine out of ten emerging frozen food technologies do what they claim and are wholly unimpressive. But this was good. The first one I burned a little, but the subsequent ones have been rather nice, garlicy and spicy and slightly sweet in the sauce and buttery in the crust. Also, half the pizza-- what you see here-- makes a fine meal, and the leftover reheats admirably, so that comes out to a pair of decent meals for two to two and a half bucks apiece, beer not included.

I don't recall whether I have followed the Sara B&T with the Black Forest, but they went along fine, both with the pizza and each other. The slight sweetness of the pizza brought out an earthiness in both beers that was pleasing.

This was all after spending a productive morning driving myself completely insane.

Apocalypse Now has long been one of my favorite movies, despite having watched Apocalypse Now Redux. Apocalypse Now Stupid, Stupid Gaddammed Redux. The version wherein they added scenes that just made it seem more like they were just wasting a bunch of time and money screwing around in the Philippines rather than going about the serious business of making a movie about a very serious and rather tragic war. Still, I have managed to go back to the original version with some satisfaction from time to time, and what I see is a tightly coiled, nicely paced meditation on duty and madness and the toll war can take on the souls of men. I knew pretty solidly that I would eventually come around to this, but given that no review I have ever read gave it a complete rave, I held off for quite a while, But this morning I gave in, and there were many facets of it. Long periods of Coppola meditating on how to be a film maker without being pretentious followed by footage of Coppola being a pretentious film maker. Huge swaths explaining how hard they tried to stay authentic followed by complaints that the Philippine government helicopters they had been loaned were suddenly called away to help quell an uprising in the South. ("Hey!? Where are our helicopters goin!?!") One big reveal in which we discover that, had they stuck to the original ending in the script, this thing would have sunk without a trace.

But also it revealed that all those scenes in the French Villa were scrapped before they were even done filming it. They didn't reference the stupid surfboard stealing scene, but I get the feeling the same thing happened there. The things didn't belong in the Goddamned film, which is why they were Goddamned cut to begin with. Redux, my pasty white ass.

And, again, something I was going to do sooner or later, no doubt about it. And I think I was probably in about as good a mood as I could have been. Still, an extraordinarily mixed bag. There were alot of amusing bits, but alot of them were repeated, not quite ad nauseum, but not far from it. The narration and the rules gimmick were overused, to the point that the former became tedious and the latter, when it's big moment came to be used as a punchline, had completely worn out its welcome. And while Woody Harrelson was defintely the man for the job, it seemed really, really, insultingly clear that the director really wanted Jessie Eisenburg to be Michael Cerna, and he's just not. (And shouldn't have been. Cerna's mush-mouthed sincerity isn't really what the film needed; it needed a bitter, self-loathing misanthrope who is completely aware that the only reason he's survived is because of his life-long practice of deliberately separating himself from the rest of humanity.) The girls were fine, although little Abby Breslin being a steely eyed con artist wasn't nearly as shocking as I imagine the people behind the product imagined she would be. ("But it's Little Miss Sunshine!?!") Oh, and when you select a media that completely allows you to make up the rules as you go along, you have to draw your own lines. If you don't, eventually, you just end up looking like an ass.

So: Freschetta. They do good work. It ain't Ray's on West Houston, but it'll work. Saranac is good for the soul, I'm convinced of it. You probably know everything you want to know about Francis Ford Coppola and his partners in crime as you'd ever want to, and if you don't, yyyyyyyyyou probably don't want to. There are better zombie movies to watch, so unless you are the kind of person who likes to sit around snickering about how much smarter you are than other people (and trust me, you're really not) . . . well, there are other zombie movies to watch.

Sara Smile

2010-05-05T12:41:00.000-07:00

I SHARE this happy sight in order to please my fellow beer drinkers, and to drive my good pal Doc Nagel insane with jealousy. Say what you will about the wonder of wonders in California, you can't get Saranac out there.

You can get Sierra Nevada, which made me very happy for a good while last month, when I had a fridge full of Saras and Sierras, which is a fun thing to wrap one's mouth around. This should be fun as well, finding Saras to go along with the Harpoons. At some point, I wanna try the brown ale with the Harpoon IPA, but I gotta figure out what sort of lunch that would go best with. Something grainy, perhaps.

Today's lunch was the cheeseburger at the local. Normally I do that on Tuesday, but the lady who now manages on Tuesdays, whom I thought to simply have a slightly bland personality, and then considered a bit of a weirdo, and thought might just have man issues, turned out to be a psycho hose beast. Evidence of this is forthcoming, but first: this conclusion was reached when I went in on Wednesday rather than Tuesday and found out my pal Jaimie, the hostess, actually went so far as to cancel her Tuesday shift so that she wouldn't have to deal with this nutzoid.

Quod Erod Demonstrandum. Thus it is proven.

The process actually started last week, when I was observing the last bit of foul weather the month had to provide, which was foul indeed: nasty, rainy, windy, cold, just rotten, this in the middle of some classically bodacious North Carolina Fall weather, with blue skies and temps in the 60's. SO I started in jotting down lines for a variation on the Eliot bit. I read a couple of them to Jaimie, who, despite not being what you'd call a big reader, has proven to be a valuable sounding board on such matters in the past. She liked the first few lines, so I went back up front and got her to kibitz as the first few improvements revealed themselves. As this went on, I started getting a weird vibe from the manager chick. Towards the end, when I was all but done eating my burger, I approached the front to share another couple of lines. Jamie said, and this is a direct quote, "Dude, if ****** sees you up here talking to me, she's gonna yell at you."

At this point, Jamie was madly doing the standard hostess-up-front-cleaning that is the fifth business of any restaurant hostess trying to avoid catching crap from a batshit manager. That put the writing on the wall. Manager decides she's gonna yell at a customer? Whacko. Manager giving Jamie grief? Batshit. Everybody likes Jamie.

So at that point, I decided, after another brief chat with Jaimie, that maybe my Tuesday tradition was at an end. Heck, I figured, I guess I could start coming in Fridays. On Fridays, the Red Oak (locally brewed lager, yum) is on sale. So, just as an experiment, last Friday I went in, and my pal Jaimie was not working. And who was manageing? ******. I don't know which God I pissed off, but I must have done so on a holy day.

So today was better, I got to see my pal Jaimie and have a cheeseburger and a couple of Sierra Nevadas, and the manager was someone who actually likes me.

So anyways. Here's the fuckin' poem:

MUTABILITY, RECONSIDERED

Far from being the cruelest month,
April is a moody bitch, lovely in her shapes and ways,
But coarse in her shifting manner.
Sun-coroneted days
Turn to steel-cold rains
As April gets her last licks in.

All things are opposable
From thumbs and spindles to reasons and rhymes,
Weather and seasons and lives and times,
Moods and musings mutable
Changing and inevitable
As day winding down to dusk.

As clouds break loose on the broad horizon,
Spreading rose-tint glow far and wide
As cool moist winds breeze and glide
Tousling the treetops along the hilltops,
Painted pink and green leafy lollipops.
April can be a pretty cool chick.

Shapes Of Things To Come

2010-04-26T11:28:00.000-07:00

SO I HAD burgers. I had cheese. I had bacon. Even-tually, this was going to happen. I think it probably happened as a result of having Chinese take-out last night. For some reason, having a bacon double cheeseburger strikes me as the polar opposite of having fried dumplings and mixed lo mein, and the Sierra Nevada Pale Ale is the spark in the firmament that connects them. Very Zen, very yen-yang.

Tomorrow will be the cheeseburger at the local, which doesn't necessarily follow as a consequent at all. It'll be Tuesday. Tuesday is the day I go to the local for the cheeseburger. This, too, is more or less inevitable.

I also thought this was inevitable, but I was wrong. We got through maybe ten minutes of it before the Wifey had had it. She had decided, after the fourth sequel came out, that maybe we needed to catch up with the series. Which meant watching this, 2 Fast 2 Furious, The Fast And The Furious: Toyko Drift, and Fast And Furious, the ingeniously titled fourth installment of this seemingly deathless series. I didn't make mention of the fact that I gave up watching the third installment after five minutes of hammy, cliche-ridden, shallow exigesis that went down worse than old crackers from a packet of C rations without water, an analogy almost as cryptic and stupid as the movie itself. Of course, it didn't help that I knew a little about the "sport" of drifting, which is a nasty, filthy, wasteful, awful activity, perpetrated by idiots who hate their cars.

But, after all, crisis averted. When Vin Diesel is the most convincing actor in the flick, time's come to give it the fuck up.

AND then we watched this. I forget precisely what fomented it, although it clearly had something to do with the derbying, but she decided awhile back that she wanted to give it a shot, in advance of seeing the 2002 remake. Whilst this was waiting in the queue, we watched about two minutes of the newer one, about 15 minutes in, before Rachelle decided that it was a stack of shit not worth measuring. Which was fine by me. Say what you will about the man, but when Jean Reno is your seasoned veteran brought in to give the youngsters some gravitas, well, you're fucked.

But the original played nicely. Rachelle's classic quote, after the elucidation that the world in 2018 will be run by corporations, was, "Well, they got a couple of things wrong." (Which is funny, see, 'cause we taxpayers supposedly own several large banks, General Motors, etc., although it has been argued by yours truly that the political parties in most countries in this day and age are basically corporations.) Her classic after-action report is even better: "Also, I would totally watch a game of Roller Ball live. Without the killing." Yeah, the homicide would kind of put a damper on the thing for me.

The larger part of the reason I like the film has to do with how awfully ironic it is. We're supposed to be enjoying it because of all the terrible things it says about humanity, because all us smart folk are misanthropes who abhor violence. But we're NASCAR fans at heart, most of us. We're going to see people get smacked in the head with spikey gloves and shiny metal balls.

And when I say we, I mean you. 'cause I'm that kind of schmuck.

After that, this. Just happened to be on the TCM channel, a tad over half the way through, which is a fine enough way to watch it. This is another example of how much it is possible to get wrong. The International Space Station is a glorified high school science lab, there is no base on the moon, you can't fly manned spacecraft any further than the moon, and even then it costs a fortune and wastes resources, and so far as we know, freezing kills. No such thing as suspended animation.

The rest, howeverm is all true. The bone that famous ape-man threw into space turned into a spaceship, and then that monolith caused that one guy wo spend etenity in a ninteenth century drawing room before hurtling across the high deserts of California wearing neon filter glasses. Don't you read the papers?

So: to the recommendations. Anything you add bacon to in your own home is your own business. Wow. Think about THAT for a minute. The possibilities! On the other hand, what went wrong with the Fast & Furious movies is essentially what went wrong with the remake of the Rollerball movie, which is, basically, they added bacon to it. I could be wrong about that. But I do think that it's part of why no one ever thought to remake Kubrik's movies. They already had bacon added to them. Little known fact: Kubrik added bacon to everything.

We Approach The Gates Of The City-- Alert The Spoilers

2010-04-19T13:34:00.000-07:00

SO THIS IS the final conse-quence of having bought a package of ersatz roast beef a couple of weeks back. It made me consantly regret having done so, because what I had actually wanted was Black Forest ham. So today this is what I have: Black Forest ham on rye with sliced shallot, white and yellow American cheese, faux-Mexican cheese, and Plochman's yellow mustard. And fries and Ketchupo!(TM). So excited was I, in fact, at the prospect of such a sandwich, I piled on about four more slices of ham than I rationally would have, which, along with all that cheese, made for an unfinishable sandwich. Which is a very good thing indeed.

The beer, both of them, were relatively recently procured for the purposes of consuming fried dumplings and mixed lo mein from our lovely local Chinese take out joint, but in this case proved instrumental. Mainly in that I have always claimed that Sierra Nevada Pale Ale's closest genetic sibling is Harpoon IPA, and this, at least to my satisfaction, proved the case. Harpoon's the one with the dimples.

This was the Weekend Movie, which we watched while eating our Chinese take-out. We speculated openly beforehand that, without the Chinese, we wouldn't make it all the way through. (This is what happened, you might recall, with The Informant!, about which more in a moment.) But shortly in, we started having an inkling that this flick might be worth more than originally anticipated. The acting was more than reasonable, the set-ups weren't overly hammy, and there was no attempt to make up some kind of absurdly over-arching explanation for the whacky plot device-- which was that some little kid in Massachusets back in 1959 predicted the date, death toll, and latitude-longitude location of every major disaster for the next 50 years, up to and including-- and if you didn't know this was going to be spoilered, go back and check your brain in with the manufacturer, it should still be under warranty-- the end of the fucking world. It was like a roller coaster, at least in that the only way to ride it was to strap in, hang on, and trust the machine.

That was before the aliens showed up.

Yes. The big plot twist was somehow aliens knew the world was ending, whispered to selected children for no adequately explained reason, and whisked them off to their own little Eden-planet (and I mean little, you could see the curvature of the planet at the horizon, or maybe that was because they ran out of CGI money by that point in the production and had to skimp) while Nick Cage went home and reconciled with his religioso father and bland sterotype mother and sister to await the end of the world.

Now, I knew beforehand that this flim had something of a troubled past, that it was in and out of production and turnaround and what-the-fuck-ever for the better part of a decade, and there was some Dim of the Yard (Consternation! Uproar!) when the selection of director Alex Proyas was announced, and, of course, when that guy announced his intentions (according to Wikipedia,
"to emulate The Exorcist in melding 'realism with a fantastical premise'"), I figured the whole damned house of cards was doomed. Then, after it came out, the majority of critics panned it, most of them taking the standard "this thing is fucking awful because everyone in it sucks for this specific reason that I alone seem to have divined. Only our beloved, beknighted Roger Ebert seemed to tilt at the true nature, insisting that the film itself was really pretty good and rather suspenseful with an unfortunate detour at the end that kind of ruins things.

With which I would mostly agree. But, really: aliens? For the lovea Claude, man, why?

I found myself hoping, actually kind of day dreaming, that part of what happened in the pre-production-stall-and-turnaround period, the thing could be sold because no one thought anyone would want to see a movie that has, as its ending, the predicted, yet utterly unstoppable, destruction of the earth (and that it wouldn't have been by way of solar flare that kills everything on the planet, which, any physicist will tell you, is both just stupid and something that wouldn't happen wihout centuries of warning signs) (and a realignment of the planets) (and living in another solar system orbiting another, far different, @#$%$#@ @#$%$##@$#%%$ sun) (or maybe that was different too). And eventually some producer type said "I know! Aliens!" And some half-witted, inbred, terminally stupid Hollywood execuitive type narrowed his milky eyes in sly agreement.

Or whatever.
Hey! How about another look at those Rockwaffles!

Snazzy!

So I definetely recommend buying the right thing. If what you're craving is not available, buy something like it, and then when you finally get that thing your were craving, it's really twice as good. Nick Cage movies are always a challenge-- and a crap shoot-- and, to my mind, there are two kinds of Nick Cage fan: the ones who roll the dice and watch his stuff when it comes out, and the ones who wait slavering for their chance to finally get to see Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans. If you're the second kind, I don't really need to recommend this film, because you're gonna see it anyways. If you're the first kind, then sure: load up on goodies, and make sure you're not watching with someone who will be constantly annoyed by your exclamations of "Really!?!" And "What the FUCK!?!" And you'll be just fine, really. It'll only hurt for a bit.

Who Are You Gonna Believe, Me Or Your Lyin' ADM?

2010-04-14T14:16:00.000-07:00

THIS IS NOT today's lunch. It is (was) also not yesterdays' lunch, which was a cheese-burger with my friends at the local pub-- and, note to beer drinkers in my area, a copper altbeir from the Olde Mecklenburg Brewery, which I had not even heard of before yesterday-- and, note to beer drinkers anywhere, the Sam Adams Noble Pils, which I had been meaning to try for a coupla months or so. No, this is/was Monday's lunch. I show it to you now because I wish to brag. I made a simple, pure double cheeseburger in my own home. And it was delicious. (The alternate line here was "This is my cheeseburger; there are many like it, but this one is MINE.") The Sweetwater IPA went along with the Sierra Nevada Pale Ale rather precisely, and both went more than decently well with the burger and fries. (And yeah, there are two different kinds of fries there. Cleaning up, if you can dig that.) The conclusion of the Sweetwater Experiment, by the way: IPA yum, EPA not bad but not great, the Blue(berry) beer stands just this side of the line of yuck, and the Imperial Stout simply tastes like they were trying too hard. 'nuff said.

The real reason I bring you this image today is that I wanted to take the oppor-tunity to show off my brand new, way-funky, technically-not-running shoes. These are the Nike Rockwaffles: the foreportion of the sole, about three-fifths of the length of the shoe, is a soft rubber compound built to stick to hard surfaces; the heel itself is standard Nike waffle sole material. I got them mostly because they're waaaaaaaay cool, and available in eleven and a half, and partly because the Wifey and I will soo be taking up indoor climbing as a sport, or at least giving it a shot or two. The reasons for this are twofold: the Wifey recently decided to take a break from roller derby and try reffing for awhile, and so needs to find an activity to fill in for all the skating, and our pal Paige, who, along with her husband, owns the indoor climbing joint, recently quit derby because she simply didn't have the time to invest in it. So we are climbing both for excercise and for the chance to hang out with our former derby pal.

Speaking of heavy lifting, this is not the seque of the day, but it'll do until one comes along. We got this thing in the Netflix envelope last week, preferring to watch Star Trek IV: The Quest For Late 80's Sterotypes first, but finally succumbed and watched it over Chinese take out Sunday evening.

They tried, folks. They really did.

But in the final analysis, this was just an intensely interesting but fundamentally unsalvageable story. In the end-- SPOILER ALERT-- Mark Witacre was just a kind of a bland weirdo who stole a bunch of money and then tried to white-wash it by pointing out that ADM and the rest of the know agribusiness world were fixing prices on obscure compounds which would appear to be everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Finely acted, beautifully filmed, and annoying as hell. I sat through it without too much wear and tear, but I thought the Wifey was going to take her fork out of her pork fried rice and stab herself in the eye with it. Instead, she grabbed her handy-dandy laptop computer and let her indulgence in the series of tubes keep her blissfully distracted. This, I submit, is what the internet is really for.

That, and buy really cool shoes. How 'bout we take another look at those funky, funky shoes?

I feel better already.

SO while I heartily recommend making your own cheeseburger, as well as having one out, not to say having one on, I can't either recommend or condemn the Sweetwater Breweries products. I didn't like like three out of the four I tried, but that doesn't mean anything. Except that, aside from the IPA, they didn't quite suit my tastes. Oh, and the Sam Adams Noble Pils I heartily recommend, very nice, light bodied but intensely hopped. And the Olde Mecklenburg Brewery Copper Altbier, too. Very nice. The Informant!? The Informant?!? I felt like I had to, but there's no reason you have to. Then again, you might quite like it. Don't take my word on anything but the shoes. The shoes you should most definitely not try.

Because they're mine.

A Partial List Of The Damned

2010-04-05T10:46:00.001-07:00

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.

Doc, It Hurts When I Go SHUT THE @#$% UP!

2010-03-24T12:39:00.000-07:00

SO THE LUNCH of the day is another take on poutine and curd, this time fries with cheese and gravy topped with chicken bits and a fried egg. To quote the Bard: Dude.

Adding a fried egg changes everything. This is one of the reasons I just don't get people who don't eat eggs. Being absent the ability to marvel at what a huge difference adding an egg to this already stupendous creation simply does not compute. Then again, I don't know if fries with gravy is something the good Doc would eat. We do have some other things in common.

For instance, a grasp of logical argumentation. I was very nearly put off my lunch when a kid selling something in a spray bottle door to door showed up. Being that we do not take door to door solicitations, I very politely informed him, before wasting any more of his valuable time, "Sorry, we don't take door-to-door solicitations."

He objected: "But, you don't have any signs!"

I rejoined: "Well, we still don't."

He argued: "Well, maybe you should get some signs!" And then stalked off as if I had offended him.

This is not a public place. This is our house, private property, ours, bought and being diligently paid for. There is no statute requiring me to display any kind of device explaining "HEY, @#$%-HEAD, YOU DON'T LIVE HERE," so that people don't mistakenly wander by and aquit themselves of the facility. Nor does the law require that I implace plaquards explaining that any random shithead that wanders by is not necessarily welcome to come up and knock on my door and insult me just because he's an idiot who took a crappy job because he's a loser and his life sucks. The law is simply not that specific. The law will support the notion that if you do come to my door and I tell you to go away, you should just go away.

But I effed at the kid for a coupla minutes to let off steam (with the door closed, is how polite I am), and finished making the meal. Final analysis: Poutine 10, Shithead 0.

The movie of the day is not The African Queen, which has just been released on DVD and Blue Ray. The review from one of the good flk at the Onion AV Club missed (or simply neglected) what I think is a key component of the film, which is a rising tide of bloodlust in the character being played by Ms. Hepburn. Which is something I could easily be mis-reading, or being overly cynical about, but the mission lady seems so blithe, so sweet, even tender in her increasingly rapt attempts to convince her counterpart ship's pilot that what they raaally ought to do, raaaaally, is rig the boat up so they can go blow those gaddamned German sons-a-bitches straight to hell! Raaaalllly!

So I'm watching this instead. I mean, it's not like this is a matter of choice, The African Queen is neither on right now or available for me to peruse on DVD right now. And it's not like this film isn't guilty of the occasional bloody-minded gesture. Hell, it opens with footage of Steve McQueen driving a gorgeous little black Porsche through the French countryside (and a small village) before stopping to re-visit the site of a fatal crash that claimed the life of a friend and colleague in the previous year's contest. But beyond all that, to me, it's just an hour and a half* of guys racing these gorgeous race cars around one of the most famous and demanding courses in the world. And I just think it's beautiful.

Raaaaaaaaally I do.

*I ususally claim this as two hours of guys racing beautiful cars, but after the opening fifth business, and granted some cruchy-chewy business in the upper third, it's really more like 90 minutes. Raaaaaaally it is.

Goodnight, Moon

2010-03-17T12:54:00.000-07:00

THE UPSHOT of having had a plough-man's lunch is that there is no way to do it without having a highly un-predictable amount of leftovers.
In the most recent case, mostly what I have left is brie and pepperoni. The bread, being a La Brea brand bread, was useless by the next day. I had the other half of the mango just a coupla days ago-- it was utterly beautiful, ripe and sweet and slightly mushy and cold, just gorgeous. And I have two calmatta olives left. Two. No good for anything, really.

But having brie around can lead to some wonderful things, like today's lunch. Which is tuna salad on rye with brie, grilled. Just say that out loud: tuna salad on rye with brie. If the mere words alone don't give you a chill up the spine then, well, I guess you don't like brie. Or tuna. Or me. Go to hell!

Pairing the Saranac Pale Ale with the last Mighty Arrow was indeed illuminating. My Spidey Sense told me to start with the Sara and finish up with the New Belgium, and that was indeed inspired. After the Sara (and with the brie and the highly spicy tuna salad) the Mighty Arrow was light and almost sweet, flowery and kind of . . . bottomless. Except I'm not sure how to describe what I mean by that. All this is by way of saying that I have become a kind of a left-handed fan of the New Belgium and its products. They have been suprising and delighting me in ways that I find terrifyingly unpredictable. It's like living with a gorgeous schizophrenic.

Oh: speaking of which, tomorrow's lunch will probably involve smoked turkey and pepperoni. Which is more like living with a passive-aggressive physicist. I have no idea what I mean by that.

The film of the day is something I have been anticipating for some time. When it came out, the reviews were mostly positive but oddly non-commital, and now I know why. The big plot twist-- if you can call it that-- comes early on, and while there is a small period of homina-homina-homina, where several possible conclusions are up in the air, they commited to the foregone conclusion relatively quickly. After that, the revelations came hard and fast and with stunning regularity, and had way more to do with the truth of the situation rather than the mysteries of it. Which is not to say there were no mysteries: in many ways, this is a very straightforward thriller. Which is why I hesitate to call the plot twist a twist. It's really more of a plot point.

See how coy I'm having to be? This is why the thing was so maddening for reviewers. It would have been so much easier if they could just let on that *** *** ** * ***** and get on with the review.

See? What's so wrong with that?

So do I recommend it? So many things can be done with brie. Never be afraid to experiment with your tuna. Moon is way more than the satisfying sci-fi thriller so many reviewers made it out to be-- mainly, I think, in hopes of enticing potential viewers without actually disclosing that *** *** ** * @#$%ing *****! Anybody want an olive?

Tonight, The Role Of Yukio Mishima Will Be Played By Carl Perkins

2010-03-15T12:03:00.000-07:00

SO THIS is what the Canadians apparently call "poutine and curd:" fries with cheese and gravy. The Wifey maintains that "curd" must mean something more specifically Canadian, some kind of raw milk cheese of some sort, but I have known enough Canadians to know they're just like Americans. They think that by calling it something different and cool sounding, it's not just gravy and cheese. Me, I'm a realist. Cheese? Yes, please. Gravy? Thank you! I plunked chicken nuggets on top to, because, well, why the hell not? And, since this bears a passing resemblance to the KFC abomination which Patton Oswalt dubbed "a failure pile in a sadness bowl" (before traipsing off to do the painful mass that is the movie Big Fan), I have decided to call this a Strategery Stockpile. I know: it's big and stoopid, and it cannot possibly be good for me, but I did it all entirely on purpose, and I put a good amount of thought into it, too.

As opposed to this, which was lunch last Wednesday. On the grounds of wanting something different, I went and bought the ingredients for a ploughman's lunch, which is midlands-British for "what's left in the cupboard." This started out as something my Dad and I would drag along for lunch on hiking trips, evolving into something more elaborate during my college years, and occasionally ramping into the kind of madness you see before you. Particularly: brie, olive-herb bread, pepperoni, mango, and calmatta olives. The beer, both last week and today, is New Belgium's "seasonal" brew Mighty Arrow Pale Ale. While in the past I had mocked New Belgium and their Fat Tire Ale, I have now concluded: New Belgium can do no wrong. Or at least they haven't yet, so far as I know.

The movie of the day is last Sunday's F1 racing from Bahrain, Dubai, Saudi Arabia, re-run today on the Speed Channel. Prepare yourself for alot of "Blah, blah, blah, Ginger!*"

I started watching this stuff last year, a few races into the season, and ended up catching up with the first few races of last year this year as they re-ran them on the Speed Channel. This is real racing. These are state-of-the-art cars piloted by extraordinarily talented drivers; the tracks are specifically designed to demand the absolute utmost performance from car and driver. This year the cars are all limited to a single fuel load, which is an extension of the F1 ethos: the goal is not just speed and agility, but also efficiency. I have found, so far, no reference, but based on what data I have seen, I am under the impression that these cars are operating in the neighborhood of fifty miles per gallon. (I so could be totally wrong about that.) It's also an enormous waste of time and energy and money, which is why it suprises me that more Americans don't watch it. I mean, NASCAR is a huge waste of time and money and resources, but the cars and the tracks are, by comparison, dead cheap.

Which just goes to show ya: Americans are dickheads. F1 isn't cheap or dirty or tacky enough for us. We'd rather watch crappy cars run around in circles while their drivers plot to make one another crash into the wall, and then have some bogus parlimentary body sanction them with toothless penalties afterwards.

It's the American way.

*The picture here is that of Spaniard Fernando Alonso in his winning Ferrari. Felipe Massa, also driving a Ferrari, came in second. This footnote was originally going to explain that "Blah Blah Blah Ginger" referred to an old Far Side cartoon, but I decided to fill it with something else you couldn't possibly care about.

Seriously, He's Wearing Han's Clothes

2010-03-04T13:12:00.000-08:00

THE MEAL is nothing new, my favorite empanada etc. The real story here is that I do not like Spanish Peaks Brewery's Black Dog Ale. It describes itself as an English style amber ale, but it's . . . I don't know. It's over-worted and under-hopped, so to me it tastes mealy, almost skunky. And it's way waaaaaaaaaaay too bouncy. Which is to say I over-poured this stuff twice, the first time actually over-flowing the glass and flooding the counter-top. That never happens to me. All that that adds up to: I do not like Black Dog Ale. I am sure it is fine for others, but I do not like it. I think this is the third time I have come to the realization that, for me, no good will ever emerge from Bozeman, Montana.

The movie of the day is he he he he hoooo hoooooooo HAAAAAH!!!

I think I stuck this in the Netflix queue because of the title. I cannot call myself a fan of Family Guy. I watch it when there is nothing else on and the Wifey is not around. I find it amusing enough, and the average episode will get me to laugh out loud a coupla times, but, as many major mainstram critics have observed, it's a show whose rhythms can get to be a bit repetitive.

But this was great. I laughed out loud a dozen times or more over the course of the hour. The reproduction of the movie, beat by beat, was perfect, and they left suprisingly little of the substance of the film out over the course of the 48 minute running time.

And then I watched it again. With the commentary, which was really cool, since everyone in the room was just having a damned blast. Especially Seth Green, who was very funny indeed.

And now I feel like I hafta watch this.

Dunno. We'll see.

I really have nothing against Bozeman, Montana. Never been there. But really, based on my experience with their beer, I can only imagine that it is a damned, cursed place. The people at New Belgium now have my whole-hearted endorsement. The Ranger blew the Black Dog away--- Ooo. That doesn't sound good. But it's true. If you're only going to see one Star Wars parody this year, well, I don't even know why you'd make such an arbitrary limitation, but who am I to judge? Is Star Wars all that sacred to you? Who the hell are you, George Freakin' Lucas?

Treasure of the Sierra Meh.

2010-02-24T11:42:00.000-08:00

SO THIS is today's lunch. Today's useless, useless lunch. It's a grilled turkey and bacon sandwich with white American cheese; in fact it's a grilled turkey and bacon sandwich with twice the amount of bacon it would normally have and mustard on both sides, and the Ketchupo! is heavy on the Cholupa. But I can't taste any of it. The Saranac Pale Ale tastes like a porter.

I have a cold.

It started last night; the first sign was when I woke up in the wee hours with one sinus cavity full of muck. I felt a bit rocky after getting up, a bit better after having coffee and a long, hot shower, but then the final sign popped up: about every five minutes I would pop up a reason to be intensely, bitterly anrgy at myself. This stems from my mother having assumed that every single cold I had as a kid was faked.

And enough about that. Today's movie is an old favorite that just happens to be on TCM. I was going to yap all about why I like it, but right now I feel like just saying I like it and to hell with you if you don't know why.

Don't talk to me. I am a bad person.

Williams, out.

In Medias Res

2010-02-17T11:17:00.000-08:00

A FEW YEARS ago I came back from a trip to glorious Cali with a huge and abiding craving for the terrific Mexican food I had had on the trip, and I went an entire year eating virtually nothing but Mexican style food. I don't see that happening again, but today's lunch is an example of the sort of thing I might have done during that era. The emapanadalettes here are a species of Don Miguel product, the likes of which we have not seen in these parts in many a year, and as such are agreeably mediocre: the factory floor interpretation of what kind of food you might get in a Mexican restaurant. I have often made the case that the reason "Mexican" food is so popular in America is that it's the sort of thing which, when done badly, is still pretty good. (See: Taco Bell.) This layout has the advantage of including hand-made guacamole, doctored black refritos, and sour cream. (EVERYTHING is better with sour cream.)

The beer of the day is a longer story. New Belgium's Fat Tire Ale has been enormously popular around these parts for the last year or so. My initial take on the stuff was that it's gourmet beer for non-gourmet-beer drinkers, which was clearly snobby and wrong. Still, there does seem to be a low note, a body note, that seems to be missing from it, giving it a slightly sweet undertone. Meanwhile, I had heard that they make an IPA, but I had yet to get my hands on it. This I got from a specialty store earlier this week. I opened one prior to sitting down at the spread, and the initial response was the same: missing that low body note, and seemed, perplexingly for an IPA, almost sweet.

Let's have a closer look at that label, shall we? IPA's are supposed to be over-hopped, and thus bitter, although many American versions (often called California style) are hopped in such a way as to produce a high, flowery top note (which I quite like, by the way). This seemed to be reaching for such a high note, but without the heaviness to the body notes, didn't seem to be sustaining it. Then I coupled it with the lunch, which I have decided to call Almuerzo del Arador, which is what my utterly unreliable Spanish-English dictionary suggests would the the analog for Ploughman's Lunch,+ and all kinds of whacky low notes came out-- chocolate, caramel, coffee, toffee, and on and on-- making that flowery top note sparkle like the last blast in a Maynard Ferguson trumpet solo.

Ahem. Gee, Jim. Obscure much?

The film of the day most certainly is not this. It most certainly wasn't last night. I don't recall specifically whether it was myself or the Wifey who put this in the queue,* but the other day it arrived in the mail, and last night we tried to watch it. It's baaaaaaaaaaaaad. Bad bad bad bad bad. Stoooopid bad. Mr. Yuck bad. We watched fully half of it, waiting for it to stop being stooopid, but the point at which Amelia Erhart referred to Our Hero's eyes as "cheaters . . . " Well, I corrected her: "Cheaters are glasses." The Wifey turned to me and said "Nearly forty minutes into this, and that's what you have to complain about?" That was it. Back it goes.

Baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaad.

The film of the day also is not this. I saw my Woody Allen flicks in entirely the wrong order, staring with Sleeper, continuing years later with Manhattan, later catching Zelig, and then finally catching up with Take The Money And Run, and then this. People went gaga for it at the time, thinking it's combination of social and political satire was smart and savvy, but the fact is it's wildly uneven, only sporadically funny, and actually pretty damned mean spirited. Years on, watching this, it's easier to believe that the man would turn out to be a self-important pederast with a fellatio fixation.

This is the film of the day. As any long time reader would know~ I am a fan of HBO productions, especially thier historical dramas. They tend to get most things right, and better still, they tend to capture the feeling of certain times and events right, or at least they seem to. In this, Brendan Gleeson does a fantastic job of capturing Churchill as a man, and the writer (writers? not sure) lifted about 60% of his dialogue from established historical quotes. And lemme just say this: Len Cariou as Roosevelt! Yee-owza, man! Not only is it good to see the old geezer get work, it feels good just to say it. Len Cariou as Roosevelt. Why didn't someone think of that sooner?

So do I recommend it? I've said it before: even if it's not "authentic" Mexican food, if you like it, eat it. This took an awful lot of work to make it worthwhile, but in the end, it was worth it. Your results may vary. It's important to see a bad movie, or at least part of a bad movie, now and then, if for nothing else than just to remind you of what a bad movie feels like. Never, EVER trust Woody Allen or listen to anything he says. (Except the bit in Zelig about baseball, that was genius.) You can watch HBO films or not. For me they are valuable as interpretations of history, except for that Rome garbage, but if you've read your history properly, and in this day and age, nothing says you have, no offense intended, you're not really missing much.

But, damn, man. Len Cariou as Roosevelt. Worth the entire damned trip.

*The Wifey put it in the queue, but I'm not admitting it, because I love her that much.

+And the little empanada bites I am calling "res," as said useless dictionary insists that "res de arador" means "ploughshares." Thus, at long last, the reason for the cockameme title to this piece.

~As if there were such a beast.

But This One's Eating My Popcorn Part II: The Spawning

2010-02-11T11:04:00.000-08:00

I USUALLY don't blog two times in a row, for no real good reason. It's what I commonly call Voodoo: something I do because it makes me feel like it iomproves my chances of a favorable outcome. You know, just like practicioners of Voodoo have no @#$%ing idea what they're doing or why, and only have the most esoteric explanation as to why what they're doing might work.

The lunch of the day is the empanada etc. etc. I felt like posting the picture because it looks like it has a face. Like the face of a metal monster, maybe? Either way, it was lovely. And the Sierra Nevada Pale Ale was a great compliment. This displays the wisdom of providing variety. I'm sure the Carlsburgs would have been as great a compliment, but still. Good to have a choice.

One more thing, then off to the other half of the entry. As I have said before, @#$% is my basic euphemism for "fuck," which I started using in work environs years ago, and kept because I think it's funny in it's consistency. This consitency (which some people seems to have missed) amuses me because the whole point of using those symbols to represent profanity is that the audience can insert whatever their dirty minds desire, so the profanity can be as light or as dark as they wish. Whereas I have put it in code? I dunno. Maybe it's kind of a purile thing on my part. He he he he. I just made you say FUCK!

The movie of the day may be The World According to Garp. It's early yet. I generally like this movie, but sometimes it is hard to take. Additionally, a few years back, I tried to read the book. Now, when the thing first came out, one matter in which the critics were in ubiqutous agreement was that people who like the movie wouldn't like the book, and that people who like the book would hate the movie. Which stands to some reason. In the book, Garp is a mean spirited prick who hates his mother; in the movie, Garp is Mork from Ork, New England. Small example: at one point in the book, the adult Garp is given some good news about the success of a rival author, and he thanks the messenger by lifting him up and placing his ass in the sink on the other side of the New York bar in which they happened to be standing at the time. (I think I knew this bar: it was a dive in that part of the city where the rich and successful went to act boorish and crude, just north of the Bowery. It's long gone now; in the words or Radar O'Reilly, I was only there the once, but I really liked it.)

George Roy Hill was picked to direct, which seemed like a very odd idea at the time (to those who knew the work), but in retrospect makes perfect sense. Hill was capable of making every dark theme, every perverse turn, play for light comedy or slapstick or caricature. Which is why, in the end, four or five of the plotlines ring a little false for me. A few things seem too quickly forgotten or overcome. A couple of the darkest aspects of the book, having to do mainly with the way one may choose to see the world, come off as quirky when they're meant to highlight a particularly disturbing (as Irving saw it) fact of human nature. All of which would have seemed less puzzling to me had I read the book at the time, but I didn't get around to it.

While I was reading it (later on), I had an intermittent co-worker who was a trained librarian, and a heavy reader as well, who had read this, and many other Irvings (the only one I have successfully read is A Prayer For Owen Meany, which probably says more about my personality than I want it to). So I asked him; "Is there any reason to finish reading this?"

After thinking it over briefly, he answered: "Well, no one does that particular brand of cruetly humor as well as Irving." So I quit reading it. I had made it about a quarter of the way through.

So this is one of those day when I will be watching the movie in order to appreciate the contrasts. Every confection-light scene, I will appreciate for the dark, drear, dire counterpart in the book that it ever so mockingly represents.

Wow. Just think what Hill coulda done with Deliverence!

Oh, and the conclusion of yesterday's review: Nah. Seeing Nickelodeon every coupla years is fine. I don't think I would stick it in on general occasion, just for something to watch. It's a little too much work-- although I appreciate why: each of the films three acts represents a different era in moviemaking, metaphorically, from the silent era through the seventies.

Yeah. Just writing that makes me wonder why I even like the thing. But I do, and I will watch it when it is available.

This is a Godiva chocolate covered pretzel, which the Wifey procured for me from a spread they had in her office the other day. It is diabolically delicious, sweet and creamy and crunchy and salty, and I had four of them with the last of my Sierra Nevada Pale Ale after lunch. It is, I think, crucially important to appreciate contrasts.

Cheers.

What Did You Want For A Nickle?

2010-02-10T13:09:00.000-08:00

TODAY's lunch is only partly a nostalgia trip. Mainly I wanted a little change of pace after a week's worth of Sierra Nevada Pale Ales for lunch. I stopped short of picking up a half pound of pastrami for lunch on the earlier errands. Still, I will gladly admit to having a wave of sweet memories rush over me after I got the sandwich back here, even though I live in a single story house, sit facing the woods, and the sandwich is (was) full of ham instead of pastrami.

A note on that: the ham is Black Forest ham. I don't see why anyone buys anything else, at least as far as the Oscar Meyer deli varieties go. The rest of them just taste like generic ham to me. This stuff atstes like HAM. I know I pick on people who claim that gras fed beef or organic free-range chicken are what beef/chicken OUGHT to taste like, but, to me . . . Also, you'll note that this has sliced onion and black olives within-- escapees at nine o'clock and twelve o'clock, respectively. Yes, my friends. Play with your food.

The film of the day is something I had been meaning to get to for a coupla months now. With one thing or another, I only just got around to moving it to the top of the queue last week. Today, on preparing to watch it, I came to a decision: this is an experiment to see if this is something I want to own.

The first time I caught it was totally by mistake. It was on HBO, back in the wild and wooly days of pay TV, and I think I basically went "Burt Reynolds? Ryan O'Neal? How can it lose?" Aaaaaaaaand then spent the next eight minutes wondering how/if I was going to make it out of this. Really. It was boring me to tears. Oh, and Bryan Keith was utterly unrecognizeable under his character, totally, brilliantly immersed, and I was ready to plunge a stalk of celery through my chest. (Meaning: I'da killed myself to get out of it, if only I had so much as a stalk of celery.)

That was largely because Bogdanovich had a helluva lot of establishing to do, and he was doing it all at once. As the tapestry began to take shape, things got better, and better, but it actually wasn't until about a half hour in that it started to really make sense-- and get funny. Very, very funny. And pick up momentum and reeeeally move. And from there on out, it was a pure joy. The the last half hour it just kind of died-- which, also forgiveable, was a function of the plot. It picks up again right at the end, and so boom, overall, satisfying movie experience.

So I will get to the recommendation bit before getting to the real reason I'm writing all this. I am sure you all know how I feel about ham sandwiches. But remember: Mama Cass. Hendrix. Jayne-Ann Phillips-Sousa. The ham can be your friend, or the ham can be your worst enemy. Proceed with caution. Nickelodeon is a fine romp, but you have some doldrums to contend with, so you kind of have to either be prepared to tread water or convince yourself, as Bogdanovich did, that the task at hand, the aping and celebration of a long gone time in the making of movies, is not just important, but sacred.

So I popped in the disc and clicked the menu to play and go two options: original theatrical release or directors' cut. And, of course, I thought to myself "I like herring sandwiches!"* So I watched approximately four minutes of the directors' cut. As I did I seemed to recall reading that the chief difference between the two is that the director's cut is in black & white and about four minutes longer. Indeed, a quick check with Wikipedia yeilded the existence of this entry on alternate versions of Nickelodeon:

"The 2009 DVD release includes a 125 minute 'Director's Cut' in black and white."

The Director's Cut is proof positive that not every auteur always knows what's best. Black and white was a horrible idea. This reeeeeeeeeally needs to be in color. It just does.

So am I buying a copy? Dunno. Maybe I will watch it again tomorrow. With a herring sandwich . . .

*From one of Douglas Adams' books; there was created a contraption whose function depended on getting a robot convinced that it liked herring sandwiches; this, the narrator notes, turned out to be the real trick.

Dumpling Central

2010-02-07T07:47:00.000-08:00

LAST NIGHT I got the Wifey to finally concede that we had not had Hop Feng in a longish time, although technically, if we had a once-a-month rule, we would only just qualify for a new installment. This isn't it; this is a pic from, lessee, I wanna say last summer, but some point in the decent-recent past, anyways. I have no idea what the beer here is. I could look it up on the blog-roll, probably, but it's not like it makes a difference. Last night it was Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, which was lovely and sharp and accentuated the peanut-oil glissando of the lo mein and the sweet-tartness of the dumpling-dipping sauce pendulously. Tremendously.

Last night's film was District 9, which was . . . meh. It tried to traffic in concepts of prejudice and racism and bureaucracy, but it was all really pretty dumb. The parts it did well, the story of refugee aliens trapped on our planet and the failed attempts of the humans to understand them and help them adapt to our planet and our societies, kinda got buried under a rather ham-handed attempt at social commentary. You just don't undestand us skaters, man! We ain't gonna get put down by The Man, man!

But I could recommend it. Good enough sci fi, I think, as such things go.

I don't recommend FOX NEWS! Recently the NC oard of Education floated a plan to change the way history is taught in our schools, by sort of shmearing it aross the grades from fifth to eleventh instead of trying to pack it all in to the eleventh grade course. And, of course, FOX NEWS! reported that the state was going to stop teaching our kids about Abraham Lincoln the Boston Teabaggers and the heroes of the Civil War. Asshats.

So I was going to blog about that, but now I'm not. @#$% the @#$%ing @#$%ers.

Peace, y'all.

Simpler Things

2010-02-03T11:21:00.000-08:00

IT'S BEEN a helluva a week. Helluva week, and it's only Wednesday. One of those weeks when all the small stuff just kinda piles up together, more or less all at once, so that dealing with the everyday details while juggling with unexpected minor emergencies makes it nigh on impossible to get anything done, or, more importantly, to feel like you're getting anything done, which is a feeling so dispiriting, so demoralizing, as to make it impossible to get anything done. So today I decided lunch would be something painfully simple. Just Ramen. No eggs, no onions, no soy or hot sauce. Just a bowl of noodles and broth. Amen.

(The water in the bottle isn't even genuine Crackwater(TM). Just a leftover bottle used for consumption. As I realized years ago, the reason I like bottled water is really that I like drinking water from a bottle. It appeals to my Roman nature: I like things in large quantities. When I drink water, I like to take it in deep swallows, large, wet gulps. I can't seem to do that as well with a glass as I can from the apperture of a bottle. Which, oddly, reminds me:

"Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth;
No mother suckled him, no sweet land gave
Large-mannered motions to his mythy mind."

Wallace Stevens. He's been coming up alot of late.

Which brings us to the film of the day.

I tried this thing a couple of times before, having caught it a half hour or better into the running time, and immediately getting ham-strung by one silly detail or another. Today, though, the stars were aligned: this started right after something else I had been watching was over, so I clicked in right at the opening shot. Now, I am on record as not having alot of tolerance for things that play ducks and drakes with history, but from the get-go, it was pretty clear that this film-- and, I am guessing, the Italian novel it's based on-- takes five and a half pieces of well-known facts about the Roman empire, slings them into an envelope of time between the fall of the empire and the beginning of the dark ages, name-checks Constantinople, assumes a can-opener, and, with that, is off and running. The Wikipedia article on it opens up with three-- three!!!-- of their oh-so-adorable "Wait! This article might not accurately reflect the actual historic record!" warnings. Ya gonna watch this thing? Huh? Ya Gonna? Ever? Then stop reading now.

The middle warning-- nah, wait. Let's start with the other two, which are actually more adorable. The top one suggests this article could use more sources. Sources on what? Sources on the validity of fictitious bullshit? Who, Umberto Ecco?* The third one actually suggests that the article might benefit from the attentions of those schooled deeply in military history, which is mind-boggling ridiculous. This thing is less militarily reflective that Braveheart. (Which sucks. Yes, it really does. None of that bullshit happened. NONE. AT ALL.)

But the middle one actually has the temerity to suggest that the article might benefit from the scrutiny of those scholars engaged in Wikipedia's ongoing King Arthur project.

You got that? Roman legions? King Arthur? Wait for it. It's totally worth it.

So the flick opens up with a big exegesis explaining that the empire is in troubled times and this legion and its legionairres have been called back to Rome for the coronation of Romulus Augustus. (Don't bother. Ain't worth it.) We then cut to Colin Firth and his warriors tidying up after their return from the vast regions where they have been battling to safeguard the empire's boundries. My early temptation was to start this by referring to Firth as the working man's Liam Neeson, which might or might not be fair, depending largely on how Colin feels about Liam. (I happen to think he's a ham who got lucky, but that's just me.) We then get young Thomas Sangster-- The Sangster!-- as the young Emperor Romulus, first seen mistaken as a common street urchin-- delicious with nori, by the way-- accused to attempting to steal Aurealius's sword-- that's Firth's characters name, Aurelius-- Aurelius!!!-- at which point Aurelius catches him and bounces him off a guy I almost thought was Robert Sean Leonard. It wasn't, but for a moment there is was reeeeeeeeeeealy cute to think that Robert Sean Leonard (AKA that kid from Dead Poet's Society, e.g. that guy from House) could score this kind of role, y'know, 2nd Roman Warrior. Before Bad Black Leroy Roman gets a chance to chop the kid's hand off for stealing (which, Aurelius-- Aurelius!!!-- takes pains to make clear they don't do in civilized Rome), he's saved by Ben Kinglsey.

(Typo: Ken Kingsley. I was damned tempted to assert right then and there that Ben Kingsley has an evil twin who does things like secure roles in movies like this and/or Sneakers. Too easy. Too obvious.)

So Ben Kingsley shows up wearing rumpled Jesus robes and doing magic tricks with a mysterious pentagram-shaped scar on his chest. In his opening reveal, he almost moves to hid this under his robes, which are just PRECISELY cut to show off the scar, which seemed a very weird choice indeed. Anyways, the second he showed up, before he even did the magic trick, I went "This guy's Merlin. Guy's fuckin' Merlin."

And I was right.

The next thing we know, Romulus is made emperor, the barbarians are at the gate, Rome is under seiege, the main Barbarian baddie kills both the father and the mother of the new emperor, and Aurelius, Not Robert Sean Leonard, Leroy Roman and the rest are trying to stop the seige while protecting the emperor-boy-king, whom they have sworn to protect "To the last breath." Theirs, not the emperors, one assumes.

Maxwell house boy-king! Delicious to the last breath!

After that there'a bunch or traipsing about, being captured, escaping, awaiting word from Constantinople, and then a masked warrior FROM Constantinople who had been volunteered to act as decoy/secret weapon in one of the rescue schemes turns out to be a hot chick.

You had me at Constantinople!

Meanwhile, Noble Friend, played by Edie's brother from The Mummy-- sorry. Played by John Hannah, a fine Scottish actor whose talents are put to fine use here. Anyways, Nobel Friend, who procured the Constantine warrior who turns out to be a hot chick, and is also the one through whom they are negotiating for sanctuary in Constantinople, turns out to have betrayed the Rome Steady crew, and is killed about halfway through the flick by Aurelius. And, dammit, in the scene where Colin Firth runs him though, the fine Scottish actor John Hannah seemed greatful.

Now THAT's what I call breaking the fourth wall.

"They lose me right after the bunker scene."

Alright. Time for some real synopsizing. They make their way to Britain where they follow Hadrian's Wall to the last vestige of Roman empirization where they try to convince the last members of the last legion to join them in turning back the hoardes. A few volunteer, the hoardes show up, the rest of the legionizers joins in, Not Robert Sean Leonard cradles Big Black Leroy Roman while he SLLLOOOOOOOOOOOOOWLY dies of a chest trauma the size of his forearm (and then, apparently, decides to not die), the hordes are defeated, Rumulus refuses Aurelius the right to die, so HE lives. Then Romulus throws the sword of Caesar-- oh, did I not mention that? Ben Kingsley is, among other things, the guardian of the Sword of Caesar, which is vaguely magical and was forged in Brittain for narrative reasons-- Romulus throws the Sword of Caesar so high in the air that when it falls to earth, tip-down, it embeds itself two-thirds of the way to its hilt in a stone outcropping.

Revealing only the last part of its Latin inscription: EX CALIBUR.

No, I am not kidding. And then Colin Firth marries Hot Chick, they change their name to Pendragon, Romulus becomes their son Luther, and then it turns out that Merlin is telling this whole story to his son-- do I even have to say it?-- his son Arthur.

That's right. Arthur Dent is the son of Romulus, last emperor of Rome.

I kid. They don't go that far, but I thought it was a funny thing to say.

So the conclusion is: sometimes, riding something like this out can be utterly rewarding. There is not an iota of worth to this film, but it's well worth the watching. No historical figures were harmed in the making of this film. And if you ever wanted to watch Mr. Darcy swing a sword and kick some ass, well, here's your chance.

Do I recommend it? Have some gaddammed noodles.

*And if you got that reference and know who the guy is, congratulations. I got nothin' more to say about that.

One Of These Things Is Not Like The Other

2010-01-28T11:08:00.000-08:00

SO THIS PICTURE was originally meant to represent my ingenious attempt to drain the last of a jar of Mount Olive dill relish in the absence of an actual sieve. I used the fine end of our lousy dollar-store cheese grater (that we got, in fact, I don't know where, I don't know when, probably as part of a set of something). But I have decided, in retrospect, that is looks like I was making my own relish, or customizing the Mount Olive stuff by applying a finer grain. So, fine; whatever you want to think. I am draining, making, or grating relish. It would please me if you decided I am doing whatever you think is the more impressive, nigh-on impossible, task.

You may have noticed the can of sliced black olives. Those I did modify, giving them a light chop before adding them to the tuna salad. The result, I regret to concede, is something that anyone else would probably call Mediterranean Tuna Salad, and so I suppose I have little choice but to call it that myself. But I will not relent. I have decided I am going to call this a Ground Elmo Sandwich.

(Of course it isn't red. You hafta skin and bleed the little son-of-a-bitch first.)

Up to this week, I had never had a Harp Lager. I have been aware of it for years-- same company that owns Guinness, after all, and I'm a HUGE fan of Guiness-- and I have heard people claim that the only way to make a Black and Tan is with this stuff. But to me, it's just beer. Not bad, not very good, just beer. Next.

The film of the day is The Taking Of Pelham One Two Three. As I said to the Wifey: the original, not that Travolta bullshit.* This is cheifly a matter of it being what is on right now, although I am enjoying it. At least, I am enjoying it waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay more than I did the first (and last) time I saw it. But I have a couple or three other stories I want to tell before I get to that. The first two are Steven Knight stories.

Steve Knight was a college mate of mine, a white-skinned, red-headed lilly-white from Piedmont North Carolina. College was a bit of a shock for him in a number of ways, not least of which, I think, was the sheer size of the population. I don't think there were more than two thousand living in the town he came from.

Steve was an architecture major who didn't buy all the crazy architecture theory he was being fed, and a mild-mannered Southern boy in the midst of a gang of rampant hedonists. As such, he was usually the brightest of us pennies come the morn. Often one of us would end up waking up on the floor, and occasionally find ourselves grasping two disparate things-- a shoe and a spatula, for instance. At a moment like this, Steve would softly start singing "One of these things is not like the others . . ." The rest of us started doing it, but it was always funnist when Steve did it.

The other story comes up because it's about Steve. At the time, "That's what SHE said!" was a most popular one-off gag, and we were all using it at every occasion. One morning after a raging party at Steve's suite, someone had to get to someone's car in order to get something incredibly important, and four or five of us tagged along, largely in the hopes that, after the very important item had been procurred, there might be some coffee to be had. At one point, one of us suggested we mgith gain some time and lose some territory by cutting through a parking lot. The others doubted it, and looked to me for confirmation. I said yeah, sure, that'll work, even though I didn't actually have any idea whether it would or not. A couple of hedgerows later, we emerged into the parking lot where the vaunted car had been parked, and someone said "Hey, that didn't take long at all!"

And Steve said "THAT's what she . . . said . . . "

These stories come to mind as I reminisce about the RDH (Resident's Dining Hall) at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and especially of the Omlette Lady. She was a large, pleasant, young-ish black lady, a solid thrid or fourth generation West Sider who had worked at the cafeteria at my high school and remembered me fondly, for whatever reason, and would therefore make the the most outrageous omlettes, one of which I had almost every morning before classes, egg behemoths filled with absolutely anything I asked for. One day at lunch, when she happened to be behind the grill, I had her make me a chicken salad sandwich, to which I had her add cheese, which I then had her grill. I thought I had invented something. (The Omlette Lady, whose actual name I did in fact know, acted like it was the greatest thing anyone ever thought of, but she acted that way about just about anything she made for her kids, as she called us.) I took the thing to a table and ate it, thinking to myself "Now, this is just wrong." (Or, actually, thinking this must be the kind of thing that the rest of the world would consider wrong. I loved it.)

Later that year, on a trip to New York, my Dad and I wandered into a deli on Fifth Ave, one of those places that's now famous because it's one of the last of its kind, where I ordered and was served a chicken salad sandwich, grilled, with cheese. At which point I reasoned, well, if they grill it here, then you can grill it anywhere.

(Its' Up To You, New York, Nooo-ooooo YOOOOOOOOOORK!)

The first time I saw this movie, it was sold to me as a great plot-twist flick, so I watched it with a fair amount of anticipation, not to say impatience, and when the big plot twist came in, I felt a little gypped. Then, after they made that stoopid remake, I decided I ought to give this another shot. I am not judging it as harshly as I did the first time. Like all heist movies, it's not as smart as it wants to think it is (and, I swear to God, whoever wrote this learned all about the New York subway system by reading a book), and it causes some of its characters to do some fairly far-fetched stuff-- not going into details, that'd take all day-- but by and large, it was a fair enough choice for the afternoon's entertainment. It clearly has to be better than that piece of crap those Scientologists made. I haven't seen it, but just judging by the trailers, it sucks.

And, the Wifey has informed me, it's in our Netflix queue.

So do I recommend it? Absolutely. Just like anything you can boil down and smear on a shaved rat's ass will produce cancer, anything you can put on rye bread and grill with butter will produce lunch. And it's good to watch an old New York movie now and then. And hey, it's got Matthau. You gotta bet on that.

*There is one way the modern version might redeem itself: if the music for the closing credits were "Rollercoaster (Of Love)." Nah. Too much to ask for.

Cold Comforts

2010-01-21T11:32:00.000-08:00

TODAY THE WEATHER turned on us, yet again, and the two days of glorious sunshine turned into a grim, gray, dour, rainy winter day. The ground is swollen shut, still cold from the deep freeze of the last two months, so the rain is coursing off it in streams. The kind of slow, soaking rain that always seems on the verge of ending, yet seems as if it will never end. So the lunch of the day is soup and sandwich. The soup is Campbell's Soups Natural Selections Tuscan Chicken, and the sandwich is ham on rye, grilled. The face on the television screen is Thandie Newton in the fine film Run, Fat Boy, Run, which is not a bad film because David Schwimmer directed it, but rather because of the huge holes in the plot at the 1, 3 and 5 marks. Which is to say it's a fine enough thing to watch, so long as you are distracted by the bad weather, the good food, and the lovely Red Hook Winter Ale. (Which I also had with Ghiardelli's Christmas special peppermint bark, which was both a one-hundred-and-eighty degree skid around and dead solid perfect.)

The film of the day is not Requiem. One of the crew at the Onion AV club recently added it to their thier new cult canon series, which I can appreciate on several levels, but, I, just . . . Nope. No can do. The barrel is way too full of fish. And one of the plot threads is yanked straight out of a Rolling Stones song. It's that school of film that's supposed to reward us all for appreciating how rotten the human spirit is, malfunctioning aspiration machines strapped to dying animals. Oh, and by the way, fuck yer mom, too. (Love the soundtrack, though.)

The film of the day is the fifth season of News Radio. Actually, it started earlier in the week. No, it started last week. Or was it the week before? Whatever. I grabbed a link to Hulu, which I had never bothered with before, and ended up watching the entirety of Season 4, which was the season before Phil Hartman's wife went insane and killed him before turning the gun on herself. It was also the season wherein the writing went from very good sitcom to straight out, up-and-up abstract comedy, culminating in an episode wherein they reinacted the movie Titanic, to great and magnificent effect. In point of fact, I started with the Titanic episode, and then went back to the beginning of the season, the first episode of which featured Jon Lovitz as a man perched on a ledge, preparing to commit suicide.

There's what you know, and then there's what you can prove. For instance, it's well documented that the fifth season was pulled together in spite of the fact of Hartman's absence, in fact because it was felt that Hartman would have wanted the show to go on. Lovitz joined up in his friend's absence, but knew he wasn't taking his place, because no one could take Phil Hartman's place. The fifth season has a kind of rhythm to it, one, two, one, two, with a fairly conventional plot followed by a more surreal and absurd episode. (More or less; this is a matter of appreciating intentions as much as anything else.) It's also indisputable that every single member of the cast found themselves channelling Lovits at one time or another. But I know . . .

Lemme back this up a step. I am on record as having a very vague and thoroughly unexplainable understanding of some kind of afterlife. No idea why, not attached to any kind of belief system or religious upbringing, just some vague notion that there is something left over, some other kind of existence out there somewhere. And somehow I know, I just know, that from somewhere, out there, Hartman was looking out at the show as they filmed it, thinking that there's no way the season would have played out that way if he had still been in it.

And he smiled.

This One's Eating My Popcorn

2010-01-18T14:08:00.000-08:00

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.

Who You Gonna Believe, Me Or Your Own Eyes?

2010-01-14T10:55:00.000-08:00

A COUPLE OF weeks ago, a friend of mine confessed-- scratch that-- iterated a love for pepper jack cheese. Which is not precisely the inspiration for today's lunch, more of a catalyst, I guess. The purchase of the pepper jack was in advance of several options, not the least might have been a tuna melt on rye with pepper jack cheese, and beyond that, perhaps the Jamaican jerk chicken patty with etc etc. A series of coin tosses lead here: a two-cheese grilled sandwich with curly fries and Ketchupo! Which is working out smashingly.

I like hot stuff. I didn't think I did as a kid, but that was based on a bad experience at the wrong Tex-Mex restaurant in Dallas, back in the 70's, in the days when the movement was all macho-macho, and the goal seemed to be, as near as I could tell, to hurt oneself so badly as to erase any other feelings, emotional or physical, from the psyche. But, after all, I do like hot stuff, and this is a great example. The Ketchupo!(TM) has three different distinct hot sauces (The 3 Cholupa's, and my regular readers will know what those are), and the sandwich is made of premium American cheese and pepper jack, with Plochman's yellow mustard on one side of the bread and mayo on the other. (The mayo makes a suprising amount of difference.) This is one of those combinations where the heat builds, slowly and gently, as the meal goes on, and the creaminess of the grilled cheese mitigates it just slightly, giving the whole thing a funky factor that is out of this world. This is the fourth instance where the Tsing Tao is working perfectly. Think of it this way: it's not entirely dissimilar from a decent Mexican lager, say a Carta Blanca or Modelo Especial. Nice nice.

This is definitley not the movie of the day. It's in heavy rotation on the movie channels right now, and I almost almost got sucked in the other day on the strength of the fact that Damian Lewis aned Jason Lee are in it, but we watched it once before. When it first came out on DVD. The whole goddamned mother-humpin' thing. Here's how bad it was: we watched it thinking it couldn't be that bad, it's Stephen King. And the Wifey had read the book, said it wasn't the BEST Stephen King, but far from the worst. And clearly, it was Stephen King: had alot of regretable psycic powers, childhood alliances brought fast forward to adulthood, malevolent spirits which exist for no particular reason, and bodily functions. In that last matter, it's alot like The Passion Of The Christ with shit and retard jokes.

Couldn't be that bad, but oh, it was. It was so bad, in fact, that we watched the "alternate ending" on the grounds that the ending in the movie was not the same as the ending in the book, and profoundly hoping that it would be better than the ending we just saw. And it was worse. Oh, my GOD, it was sooooooooooo much worse.

So never again. Never, ever, ever, ever again. I liked Damian Lewis in Band of Brothers, but I don't know why in the hell he did this. And I don't watch that damned cop show he's in either. And I will watch Jason Lee in any number of things, up to and including Dogma and My Name Is Earl, but this? Forget it.

The movie of the day was almost Leverage, since TNT was doing a Leverage-a-thon. But that was yesterday, and I couldn't find the proper poster image for it on the web. So the movie of the day is Sneakers.

When I first saw this flick, back in the early 90's, I thought of it as a great, big, what-if of a movie. This, after all, was at the dawn of the internet, when half of the people who knew about it thought it was going to lead to transparent corporate government and an end to global strife, and the other half thought it was going to lead to the governmental equivalent of date rape. But the fact is it's just pretty. It's just terribly, terribly pretty. It's alright that it isn't all that smart. Someone will look out for it. Just because it's just so god-damned pretty. (And never mind that Ben Kingsley can't maintain a Brooklyn accent for any real length of time. We all owe him time off for Ghandi behavior. Right?) As it turns out, they had about five decent ideas about the state of modern espionage (at the time) and they rubbed them together enough to make a reasonable amount of static. Also, they packed it with actors-- Redford, Poitier, Straighthairn, Akroyd-- whom I would pay to watch play tiddly winks. And River Phoenix, who would have to be playing with a ping-pong paddles just to make it interesting, and Mary McDonnell, whom we always refer to as The President, because whenever we see her in anything, we can never remember her name right off, and the only thing we have seen her in together is Battlestar Galactica. (The good one. Or the gooder one, anyways.)

Which brings us to this.

Some of my skater pals have been trying to get me to watch this show for awhile now. The first episode I caught a little of during one of this month's alotment of white nights, so I was not exactly in the best mood. Also, it was the Bilderbung Group episode (which the Wifey, appropriately enough, calls the Build-A-Bear Group). I saw about fifteen minutes of it, during which the schmucks following these heads of state around and trying to pry into their private meetings act suprised when they start getting followed by their highly trained, highly paid security details. (Said schmucks then claimed that the Build-A-Bear Group's big meetings concern thinning out the population by infection and innoculation, which what the fuck!?! WHY. WHY WOULD THEY WANT TO DO THAT? It would mean, chiefly, fewer people to consume the resources they largely control. Idiots.)

Actually, let me just stop there: idiots. The next episode I caught, almost in it's entirety, concerned the search for the Manchurian Candidate. Unfortunately, I know way to much about that shit. The Government cannot modify someone's behavior to the point that they can turn the individual into an unknowing assassin who would forget that they were programmed to kill after completeing the mission. They spent millions, actually more like billions, proving that they couldn't do it. About ten of the CIA's major famous fuck-ups involved them spectacularly failing to control people's behaviors. This includes the guy who was unwittingly does with LSD and, a week later jumped through the glass out of the window of a fourteenth floor hotel room in New York City, to his death, apparently under the impression that he was about to be tortured for the details of a secret mission he wasn't on. And the mentally ill inmates they gave acid and heroin to, in order to see how far they'd go to get more drugs if they stopped handing them out. Much much worse shit than Governor Ventura and his crack squad of exotic dingbats ever dreamed about digging up.

Want more? Alright: the next episode purported to be about how and why the 2012 bullshit might be true. I didn't watch much of it, but the bits I did watch centered around doomsday scenarios propped up by NASA research. NASA has been spewing junk science faster and harder than any other institution on earth since the early seventies. See, after they proved that the farthest away any manned mission could ever go is the moon, they had to start churning out lots and lots of justification for why the government ought to continue to spend the billions upon billions of dollars on them. Per year.

Now THAT's "conspiracy fact."

Subjekt Zwei

2010-01-08T08:06:00.000-08:00

SO THIS is not today's lunch. This was yesterday's lunch: chili cheese fries. Bush's stopped makign their chili, so I was compelled, after several months of chili-cheese-fry-less-ness, to once again go back and try the Armour chili as a component. Initially, I was far less than optimistic. Despite having added all 3 varieties of Cholula-- chili garlic, chili lime, and original-- two kinds of chili powder, a dash of sea salt and a double dose of gracked green peppercorn, nothing seemed likely to defeat the chili's overall consistency, which was that of something thickened with far too much corn starch, or perhaps epoxy resin. At one point in the process, I turned the burner to low for a long simmer, but apaprently the sauce didn't have the residual heat to make the simmer happen. Next I checked on it, the contents of the pan were calm as the Sargasso Sea. I bumped the heat up to a low setting, which after a few minutes resulted in a low, rolling boil, which translated into a simmer. Now, any chef wil tell you that's the wrong thing to do, but in this case, the wrong thing turned out to be the right thing. The sauce broke! which translates out into no more sticky-gumminess. Which also meant that my additives sang out like robins of the spring! Which means this was some damned fine chili cheese fries. (Screw grammar. I was happy.) I had this (these?) with a couple of Saranac Pale Ales, which has been the beer of the week. It will also be the beer of the day today, with either a Jamaican patty etc. or a double cheeseburger. Or maybe yet another tuna melt. Time will tell.

I'd just like to cut in here and assert that I am the worst Facebooker ever. The Wifey got me hooked up there three days ago-- yes, I couldn't even bring myself to make the physical effort of typing in my freakin' information, someone else had to do it for me-- and I have like 34 friends and I've made a total of three comments, one of them on my own wall. Hell, at least I'm trying.

The film of the night before last was this. The Wifey was off at derby paractice-- yes, the Wifey is a Derby Girl-- and, as often happens, I stumbled across something I thought she wouldn't watch in a million years. With the resul that, I think, we're considering putting this in the Netflix queue.

It was good. It was nothing particularly groundbreaking-- I mean, this is alot like a Stephen King joint, everything is stolen form somewhere else, except where it's hung out like's it some kind of homage or something-- but it's mighty finely acted, and done in such damned earnest that it's just goddamned adorable, and the scenery was so beautifully filmed that I feel warmly reassured, once again, that I don't have to go back to Colorado again yet. (Went there twice as a kid. Yeah, it's beatutiful, but it's also alot of trouble getting up to the beautiful. Especially not worth it if you hafta go through Denver.) And also-- and I don't think this is giving anything away-- the one guy looks sooooooooooooooo much like a very young Jack Nicolson, of course they dressed him up as some kind of genius-doppelganger McMurphy! (Our Hero from One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest.) And yeah, I saw the big damned plot twist coming a mile and a half away, but the thing was just such a numb pleasure to watch, by the time it came along, I had actually forgotten it. (Goodrich doesn't have a blimp!)

The one thing that bothered me came during the credits, which I watched because the cinematography is just so goddamned lovely. Can one say "nepotism?" There were an awfully small group involved here, and some of them seemed like, maybe they were, um, flogging a product. Like maybe craft cabin kits. Like you might be watching this mad scientist/genius doctor/fake kill his med school grad student sycophant/assistant (you'll have to watch the film to get all that, I'm not gonna try to lay it out here) over and over again so that he can use his blood-replacement nanobots to revive him, and the whole time be thinking to yourself, "Hey, if I had that craft cabin kit, all's I'd need is a little plot of land with a long driveway, and I'd have my very own Rocky Mountain resort!!!" Which was, actually, the creepiest part of the whole thing, really.

So do I reccomend it? Hard to say. If you make your own chili and have some left over, that's probably the safest thing, so long as you made real chili and not chili-soup. There is not a single brand of chili on the market these days I can vouch for, for any application other than as hot dog topping. I got lucky; that doesn't mean you can count on the sauce breaking. SubjectTwo? Sure. Drink heavily, wear helmets, face forward, and a canoe is not just as good.

Plate o' Ding Dongs

2009-12-27T14:43:00.001-08:00

It's A Yule-Tide!

2009-12-22T13:06:00.000-08:00

THIS IS NOT today's lunch. This was lunch sometime last week, when I decided that the Pyramid's Thunderhead IPA was not actually heavy enough to trounce the famous Jamaican patty with eggs and cheese etcetera etcetera, and it was, in fact, a pretty even match. For those interested in such things, the Thunderhead, which I have just now decided will be known, in our household, as the Dunderhead, is a fairly serious IPA, not only in the spicyness of the hop (the hops here are spicy, almost hot really, where the recent trend in American IPA's is currently towards a flowery high note), but also in the ABV, which is a respectable 6.1. Not enough to ruin your afternoon, by any means, but respectable.

The lunch of the day was a club sandwich and a crock of steak stew, which my bartender suggested qualified under the soup and sandwich option on the menu, only to be informed, upon preparing to serve me, that it didn't. (Bless the lad, he didn't say a word about this to me until after I had started eating, so I was not in danger of doing anything about it.) A picture would have in no way done it justice.

And I also mean to say: sorry for not blogging sooner. Been busy. Christmas, etc.

The movie of the day is my Christmas present to myself, speaking of which.

Well, one of them. The Wifey and I have basically gotten to the stage where Christmas is each of us going online and ordering whatever we want. Which, frankly, is as good a way of doing it as any. (Also, there always end up being a suprise gift or two we give each other, which is fine.) This is one of those movies I often find myself justifying, but I'm not going to bother this time. I love it. That is all ye know and all ye need to know. I have found myself thinking, a coupla time recently, that it might be a good thing to have on hand. What I have especially been thinking is that I wish the movie channels still had it in rotation, and gee, if I had my own copy, I could be watching it right now.

So now I do and I am. And I am also taking the oportunity to listen to the audio commentary by Peter Bogdanovich. Which is fine, but, as commentaries sometimes do, has the effect of obscuring a fair amount of the dialogue. So I will watch it this way this afternoon, and then I may watch it straight up tomorrow.

Soon rather soon, this will be the movie of the evening. Complete with halter top and hump-me-pumps!

The Wifey stuck it in the queue, and Netflix will send it dutifully along. I know, I know. I said never, ever, not in a million years, but in the interim, I have decided that enough critics whose opinion I trust (read: The Onion AV Guys) have found reason to like it that I might as well give it a chance. There's supposed to be some superb acting, and what one of the reviewers has refered to as a "plot twist" may actually, I anticipate, be the punchline to an elaborate set-piece gag. Which, if this is the case, could be well worth the seeing. So we'll see.

The Law of Unintended Consequences

2009-11-16T11:23:00.001-08:00

SO THIS TIME I was on the verge of trying to re-create one of the New York lunches, when, suddenly, I went insane. This is a chopped pastrami sandwich. Once upon a time in New York, in some deli off some avenue in the middle of the island, I ordered a patrami on rye, and the guy behind the counter grabbed a double handful of pastrami (in one hand, mind you), slabbed it on the countertop, and proceeded to whack at it with a cleaver. Then he took the resultant heap and plunked it down atop the slices of rye he had previously plastered with spicy brown mustard, wrapped the thing up in white deli paper, sliced it in half, and handed it over. So today, while tempted to try and recreate one of the recent New York lunches, I decided to try this chopped pastrami trick insetad. I also reasoned that grilling it with cheese would be a reasonable strategy, even though the only reasonable cheese I had for such an adventure was white American.

Clearly there is a kind of alchemy to the chopped pastrami, and clearly it is an alchemy of which I am unposessed. But while the thing did kind of fall apart on me, and the grilling was one helluva trick which I only barely pulled off*, it was still a really nice contraption. Chopping the meat brought out a level of savory spiciness I doubt would have otherwise been present, the American cheese went along rather nicely after all, and, to top it all off, the stuff in the container you see upscreen is the last of the blue cheese cole slaw, which, in the presence of the pastrami (and the ketchupo!) really popped. Which is all by way of saying: insanity, too, sometimes has it's benefits.

The film of the day is Ghostbusters, not in that it is on and I am watching it, but more that I feel compelled to write a little something about it. Recently, one of the Onion AV people wrote a little something about it for thier Better Late Than Never feature, in which (saving you from reading the whole thing) she missed a couple of key points to enjoying Ghostbusters. The first thing, and the most important thing, is not to expect it to mean anything. Part of the charm of the thing is that it isn't really any one thing. It tries to be a half dozen different things, and only partially suceeds at being a few of them. It is a cacahonous, schrizophrenic affair: Bill Murray is in his movie, Sigourney Weaver is in her movie, and Danny Akroyd has created his own alternate universe in which the 3 Stooges are serious scientists and ghosts are both real and animated. (Ernie Hudson and Harold Ramis are in that movie, although both are inexplicably straight men.) It was the 80's. People were trying to reinvent cinema without having any very clear idea of how to do it or why. (And there was alot of coke going around. Alooooooooooooooooooot of coke.) But this thing still hold together, for whatever reason. There is a very definite sense of harmless cool to it. This is why so many people dress up as Ghostbusters for ComiCon and DragonCon and what not. Call it the law of unintended consequences. Nothing about this movie says it should work, but somehow, the silly goddamned thing still holds together.

So do I recommend it? Never chop your pastrami. Let someone who really knows what they're doing do it. (And this applies doubly if "chop your pastrami" is slang for a particularly deviant sexual activity.) If Ghostbusters is one of those movies you can watch pretty much any time it comes on, good for you. But don't expect anyone who doesn't get it to be persuaded by any argument you might craft as to why the thing is some kind of cerulean genius. It's not. It's a pure fluke.+ Remember: for every Ghostbusters, in the 1980's, there were 34.7 Howard The Duck's.

*This was actually a rather impressive flip, in that I only lost perhaps 4% of the pastrami into the frying pan in the process, which I was later able to incorporate into the finished sandwich.

+And we should all be glad they didn't stick to Akroyd's original, whacky-ass script, which had him and Belushi as time-traveling spirit cops out to bust Einstein for ethereal fraudulence, or some such crap.

Happy Birthday To Me

2009-11-13T14:10:00.000-08:00

SO FOR MY birthday, since I just got back from New York, and after that, Bluefield, West Virginia, I decided that I would buy some new shoes. These are the Nike Air Pegasus model, which I have taken to calling the Air Pegs, because it's easier to say, sounds cooler, and, y'know, that Steely Dan song. They are kind of the un-Nikes of my collection. All my other Nikes are super light and super squishy, while these weigh in at an apalling seven ounces (GASP!?!) and have a more substantial EVA sole platform. They are still WAY comfy, and very handsome as well.

And then, in honor of my birthday shoes, I had a beautifully poured Black & Tan.

(That's a lie. The shoes arrived after I had started in on the B&T, along with a pulled pork barbeque sandwich on a kaiser roll with blue cheese cole slaw, and French fires with kethcupo! There was no movie of the day. I have been plenty entertained as it is.)

Boulevard of Broken Streets

2009-11-05T10:30:00.000-08:00

SO WE WENT to New York. Yes we did. This is a corned beef on rye from the Stage Deli, the Wifey's favorite. We went there the first night, showing up about five thirty. By the time we left, a little after six, the joint was packed.

What you do not see in this shot is the first of two beers I had with this meal. The sandwich-- this is half, by the way-- was fifteen bucks. The beers came to sixteen bucks.

This is me just a shade below Times Square. I include this mainly to counter the Wifey's assertion that I didn't take any pictures outside of the hotel room. This is actually one of the many pedestrian plazas recently created along Broadway, in the name of alieviating traffic. The first couple of them kind of baffled me, but the further we went Uptown, they more they grew on me. And, strangely enough, they seemed actually to be working. Broadway used to have some of the most egregious traffic jams, all the time, and in the 25 blocks we walked up and back, we didn't see a one.

(But I actually didn't take any pictures outside the hotel, for the rest of the trip. I didn't want the camera to slow me down. Union Square, Madison Square Park, Washington Square Park, Chealsea, Greenwich Village, the Hudson, Chealsea Pier Park-- I think that's what it's called-- East side, West side, all around the town.)

And here's the Wifey setting up her Command Center. (Laptop.) She was so entirely into it that she didn't even notice me taking the picture.

And this was lunch. A coupla of Carlsburgs from a bodega a coupla blocks up and a pastrami on rye from the, literally, corner deli. (Actually named the Corner Cafe.) This was the third day, by which point I had tweaked my left knee, shocked the sinews of my shinbones, and beat my feet all to hell. My reasoning was that I had better take it easy for the rest of the day. (I didn't. That was the day I stepped out the door of the Hampton Inn on 24th Street at Sixth Avenue and walked straight out west all the way to the Hudson, and Chealsea Pier Park.)

Speaking of the Chealsea Hamp, this was our view, or really as much as I could get of it through the window. (I got what I thought was a better shot, but the Wifey suggested, correctly as it turns out, that the bar in the middle of the window ruined it. It really did.

And here's where they lived. (Monty Python reference.) This is the bitchin' high rise apartment builing across the road. I didn't actually see any of the tenants during the stay. But I did toast them with my Carlsburgs.

And here's the view colored by the sun setting over the Hudson river. On this day, I believed in God.

And this is the view at night. Good night, New York.

And this is my plane home. I thought it was a kind of pretty view, for an airport. An album cover maybe. Anyways, the plane got me home, which is good. And sad. The shuttle van took us across the Queensboro bridge, across Rooseveldt Island, with a great view from Midtown all the way down the island. The plane banked high and hard getting out, giving mostly a view of the sky and the sun, but as I looked back I got a shot of the middle of the island, clear from river to river, with the Empire State Building right smack dab in the middle. Good bye, New York. I love you.

More Than Meets The Eye

2009-10-26T11:03:00.000-07:00

SO UNDER- NEATH the eggs and ketchup and mustard is a Quirch brand Jamaican patty with jerk chicken filling. The grocers around the corner recently started carrying them, along with about seven dozen varieties of "tamale" a month and a half or so ago, with the result that all those schmucks screaming their heads off about the deliterious effects of Mexican and/or Sudamericano immigrants to our country and healthcare system can get frickin' bent.

End message.

The tater tots-- in this case, actually, Ore Ida Tater Crowns, tee em, arrrrrrrrrrrrrr, were inspired by a visit to Denny's. Long story short, we were narrowing down early dining options in the face of a trip out to the countryside for a family event, and after ditching a local on finding it crowded up with churchgoers of the first water of arrogance, we ended up at Denny's for perhaps the last time in living history. I used to like Denny's alot. My kind of place. Reliable, bacon & eggs, a few outlandish offerings, such as the Moons Over My Hammy, which is a ham, egg and cheese monstrosity that is dear to my heart in both the best and worse sense of the phrase, decent coffee, and, something which seems to often go overlooked, reliable entry level employment for a decent wage. (Or so I had word of it years ago; no idea if things within the corporation have changed in the interim.)

About five or six years ago, though, they raised the prices and started on the practice I enjoy refering to as Binge Denial: putting some things on sale to draw in those consumers who have become aware that nine bucks is too much to pay for a middling omlette. We didn't stop going there on that score alone, but it was enough to help us strike that off the menu (he he) on a regular basis. This time, though, I reasoned that I have not been out for eggs in quite a while, and the Grand Slam Breakfast is currently priced at $5.99.

To say I got had would be too much, but I was a little cheesed off by the deception the fine people at Denny's Corporate Drone Warehouse seem to think they have accomplished. The Grand Slam used to be two eggs, two sausage links, two strips of bacon, hash browns, toast, and two pancakes. I seem to think it used to include coffee as well, but that's as may be. The Grand Slam is now four items of your choice from a list of nine or ten, including "better-for-you" items like turkey bacon and egg whites. The result was not bad-- I had eggs, sausage, bacon and pancakes, which was not great for six bucks, but not a complete rip-off either-- but the dumb bastards missed one crucial step. They didn't change the shape of the plates. The pancakes come on their own properly proportioned plate, but the eggs and co came on the same oval plate designed to accomodate the full compliment, with the result that without the hash browns and toast, the rest of the lads looked positively sad and lonely.

But, hey. Now I got my eggs and potatoes. These are not proper hash browns, but they will most certainly do-- most certainly have done, rather, as I have now finished this portion of the meal. And there is yet another side of the experiment: last night we had Chinese take-out for dinner, dumplings and lo mein for me, scallion chicken for the Wifey, and for that meal I started out with the Saranac Black Forest, switching to the Brown Ale when it turned out that the Black Forest really didn't go all that well with the Chinese food. The Black Forest went pretty nicely with the spicy empanada and egg and potatoes, but the Brown Ale-- Shazam! Or, in the words of Dizzy Gillespie, Shoe-Bop-She-Bam, O-Bloog-Y-Mont!

The movie of the weekend, or, more precisely, the Saturday Night Weekend Movie was NOT Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen. We made it through maybe twenty minutes of it, the first ten or twelve of which was CGI'd robots doing stuff, before we got to the going-off-to-college subplot, and then the uptight Mom eats pot brownies sub-subplot, before the Wifey began to feel her brain imploding. I was happy enough to turn the damned thing off at that point. While it might have been easy enough to appreciate Julie White's shrill schene chewery for a minute or two, after three or four, it just felt insulting.

No wonder Shia LeBouf drinks.

I can't say I recommend the Jamaican patty. I love it, but it is a very . . . singular sort of thing, I guess is what I mean to say. I came to it from several angles, initially, and I don't know that it is the sort of thing that could be leaped upon without truamatic results. But the strategic placement of a few blobs of ketchup for swabbing the tots in did bring to mind one of my favorite Kids In The Hall sketches, so I brought it up just so I could link to that. The Transformers franchise can go to hell. We watched the first one in the theater, which was fun enough just for being able to shoot "What the HELL are we thinking?" grins back and forth with the other patrons in the packed house. But after that, frankly, I'd just as soon get kicked in the shins.

Whattsa Schmatta U

2009-10-22T11:18:00.000-07:00

NOW LOOK. I love New York as much as anybody. Which is to say I probably love it more than I ought to. I do, in fact, know a coupla people who don't love New York. One because he grew up there and spent a substantial amount of his adult life there, and I guess that can make you see the negatives in starker relief than is strictly healthy for holding romantic notions of the place. The other because, as near as I can tell, he's an idiot. But that's kind of beside the point.

The point, if I have one, and I am not entirely sure I do, is I love New York. The City. Manhattan. The clear inspiration for today's lunch, an Italian sausage sandwich with peppers and onions. (Back to construction in a moment.) The first one of these I had at the North Carolina State Fair, Road Company, when they were encamped at the local fairgrounds right outside Charlotte when I was seven or eight. They called it a Coney Island. It was good. The second one I had off a cart in New York, down in the Battery if memory serves. It was way better. Not just because it was in New York. The Metrolina Fairgrounds tends to cheapen any experience, especially food experiences, since the whole place smells like garbage. (Yeah, I know. But this was in the Battery, or at least someplace at the South end of the island, and far enough from the Fulton Fish Market-- still open in those days-- that the breeze off the harbor was all you really smelled.) The sausage was better, the peppers and onions were better, the bun was better, and the whole combination was just better.

The third one I had was in Philadelphia. It was just wrong.

For this one, the sausage is an Italian flavored with green peppers and onions the local Harris Teeter features. The onion is white, the pepper is yellow, and yes, of course, there's a drizzel of my beloved Plochman's yellow mustard. On top is a mixed layer of cheddar and provalone, which worked out even better than I imagined: buttery and sharp and velvety, providing a wonderful counterpoint to the rest of the sandwich. Part of the magic of this, I think, is that it si a bundle of near contradictions: the peppers and onion are sweet and squishy, the sausage is savory and chewy, the bun is starchy and slightly crisp (and chewy in precisely the way the sausage is not). Balanced against all that, the cheese layer makes perfect sense.

The movie of the day is this.

I had been meaning to watch this a coupla different times, but both times I came in late enough that I felt like waiting for the next opportunity. (And hey, let's face it: it's an HBO doc project, it's gonna play until their mathematical model shows every man, woman and child in America has had a chance to see it.) Today was that day. It happened to come on right about the time I had completed the day's early tasks and was ready to start lunch. And it proved to be just about exactly what I was hoping for: a healthy mix of New York porn and worker's rights history. A bit pendantic in spots, but not so bad as you'd notice if you were not looking for it-- and clearly I was.

I did have a hard time watching the transitional bits going into the fourth quarter, where the elephant in the room no one wanted to mention by name is fact that you cannot make a profit manufacturing clothes unless your workers are making, and eating, dirt. This was also the point where the filmmakers seemed to assume their audience would either appreciate the snarky contrast in the sweatshop conditions under which the clothes of celebrity-whore designers are produced, or else simply not care. I am probably reading that wrong, but I did get kind of a squirmy feeling at that point. In the end, they did seem to be awfully on the side of the textile set: pay for your clothes, people! Screw Wal-Mart!

So do I recommend it? Hard to say. I started out wearing my black Gotham Girls Roller Derby tee shirt, which no doubt helped jump start my New York nostalgia, but I do think that the sausage monster was more than satisfactory, just short of illuminating, in fact. Saranac Lager was probably the perfect match for it too. The HBO joint is probably not much you don't already know if you know anything about the history and current state of the designer textile industry-- or if you have any affinity for New York immigrant clans, for that matter. And there were some bitchin' streetscape shots too. Which might not matter. I mean, if, say, you grew up there. Or if you're an idiot.

Smart Dog

2009-10-19T09:31:00.000-07:00

That was going to be the entire post, but as the hours ticked by I found I had more to say.

Fall is here, which in my part of North Carolina typically happens in a stuttered gathering of days, alternately unseasonably warm and gray and cold and wet and thoroughly unpredictable. The weather reports have an almost Kafkaesque, nay, Beckettian sense of irony to them. This year I let myself go and cheerfully bemoan our meteorologists' missed guesses as out and out cruelty, evil dissembling to no end save my individual suffering. One result of Fall's arrival is the annual decanting of the bed covering known in our house as The Chocolate Mousse (or Chocolate Moose, depending on mood and inflection), a synthetic down comforter I bought my wife for Christmas one year. It is so known for it's color and texture, which are respectively deep brown and marvelously, to use my wife's terminology for lack of a more wonderful descriptive, "squishy." The Dog has used her innate genius to find the best place in the house to spend the earlier portions of a cold Fall morning: my side of the bed, beneath the Chocolate Moose, shortly after my own willing evacuation from the spot.

Smart dog.

Fall also means I have brought out my beloved leather bomber jacket. I bought it many years ago, on sale, when I found it, and I have yet to see it's equal since. Everything about it-- color, texture, utility-- I love, to the extent that I usually put it away long after the season has called for it and pull it out much before it's required use. This season the mixture of rain and cold snap upon cold snap has proven my jacket's utility to a great degree, and so far it has only spent a small part of a single day in the trunk of a car, the day's warmth having robbed it of it's usefulness.

The leather jacket does not have a name, which is a bit odd for my household. It's The Leather Jacket. What else would there be to say?

Today the weather is bright and crisp and cold and clear, the low temperature for the morning setting a record at two degrees below freezing, predicted high of sixty-four, and we're nearly there already. Shortly I will be lunching, and then heading out to have my eyes examined, which, with any luck, means I will have a new pair of glasses for the trip we have planned for New York City next month. (Or if not, that will be just fine too.) My point is: my world is beautiful today, and I am grateful for it.

Put 'em In A Room Together And Let 'em Fight It Out

2009-10-14T11:46:00.000-07:00

SO TODAY's lunch is grilled turkey and bacon on rye with mustard and three cheeses-- white American, provalone and cheddar-- largely because I wanted to use the last of the package of provalone before it went bad, and because I wanted to get closer to opening a new package of white American. It was going to be a turkey and bacon on rye with dill havarti, but the local Harris Teeter had but a single brand of the stuff, which I tought to be both over-priced and inferior in texture. So I settled on some sharp cheddar, which I have recently discovered-- referrence the previous incarnations of the grilled tuna salad on rye-- go remarkably well with grilled rye bread. Or say re-discovered, I suppose. It should come to no revelation to anyone who has previously dined on the American oddity know and the patty melt.

The revalatory element here is the ketchup sans hot sauce. No. The revalatory element here is the combination of beers. Never mind how I came about aquiring the Longhammer IPA; following it with the Saranac IPA was just astounding. The Longhammer has, as I have previously noted, a lovely, elegant, flowery high hop note, and the Saranac after was absolutely bold by comparison. The combination was just grand, stunning.

The film of the day was Appaloosa.

Eh.

It was recommended to me by the friendly neighborhood mailman, if memory serves; I had seen a good five minute stretch or so awhile back, concluding that this was something I ought to see in whole. So today I happened to stumble on it right before it kicked off, two o'clock, smack dab in the middle of lunch, so I tuned it in.

Eh. It's a morality play. Bob Parker plays ducks 'n' drakes with the mythology of the old West to answer the immortal question: just what makes a hero not an asshole? And if she's "purty," is any woman ever really an asshole, really? HAH!? In this sense it is also very much an Ed Harris flim*: all heroes are ultimately flawed. See!?! Pollack? Flawed. Beethoven? Flawed. Old West Justice? Flawed. Nicely written though; Vigo gets some really choice lines especially. And everyone in it acquits him/herself nicely. Still, pretty much seen what it has to offer, and, as near as I can tell, anything it has to offer that I have not seen already is pretty much all bullshit. Damn those Indians! They are so noble and so savage!!!**

PS: The title of this post comes from a Stephen Wright gag: "For Christmas I got both a humidifier AND a dE-humidifier. So I put 'em both in the same room together and let 'em fight it out."

PPS: and then about 3/4 of the way through, the HBO service cut out. Since the Wifey works for the cable monster, we get a gabazillion channels, so I often feel I have no real right to complain on those rainy days when the cable service goes all futzy and half to 80% of the movie channels are not available or just plain go blank. It came back after a few minutes. I didn't seem to have missed much of anything.

*Intentional. Partially based on a series of typo-derived gags Doc Nagel and I have developed over the years, same way a work in progress, rather than being a poem, is a pram. Both of these actually derive from Monty Python gags.

**SARCASM!!! You can either waste two hours watching the thing to see what I mean by that or take my word that it's funny. Taking my word may be the less painful way to go, paradoxical as that might sound.