Nothing Personal, But I Hate That Guy

NOT JUST in con-sideration of the fact that eggs have officially been put on the Clean List again-- they don't cause heart disease! DOCTORS do!-- but also the fact that they are now being made to contain a surfeit of omega 3 fatty acids, today's lunch was an omelet. A glorious, glorious omelet, with Mexican blend shredded cheese and a slice of American and a thumbful of chopped shallot and diced cracked black pepper turkey and, of course, two strips of thick sliced bacon slung in right before the fold. Hear me out, folks: strike while the iron's hot. Quick like, before they switch up the voodoo on us again. And God bless the people at Saranac. Just God bless 'em.

The movie of the day is something that is, simply put, far better than it had any right to be. I have not read, and will not ever read, the novel it's based on, for the same reason I don't read Cormac McCarthy or David Foster Wallace anymore. (I have had many, many people tell me they find the novel Infinite Jest to be a work of unspeakably funny genius. I found the first fourteen pages (estimated, whatever I got through the coupla times I tried reading it) to be fourteen pages of world class chain yanking.) (And, as I have said of Spielberg, at least he puts on a velvet glove before yanking your chain.) This one, I remember when it came out, was acclaimed as genius, based on the premise, which is a man suffering from Alzheimer's writes his memoirs, which is then corrected by the son who feels betrayed by him, and thus you have dueling unreliable narrators. Two! Two of 'em! Huh!? HUH!?! CLEVAHHHHH!!!

Which, my initial response to the use of the unreliable narrator is: quit screwing around and tell the @#$%ing story. My response to the use of two of them is: screw you, Jack. Who said you got to talk anyways?

So I have no idea how much of the little twists of humor, sweet chunks of dialogue, cruel twists of fate, or extremely well earned bouts of bathos belong to the source work, and never will, so I am probably being a bit mean and disingenuous in claiming the film has no right being as good as it was, but I am maintaining that viewpoint, if for no other reason than to justify my continued insistence that I just don't ever want to have to read the book. But what comes out is a work of lovely genius, the story of a man's life which, told by others, would easily make him out to be an unbelievable bastard, a selfish lout and cad who had every advantage and squandered them at every turn. But if you were to see it from Barney's point of view, you'd see that he really did mean well, and that it wasn't all his fault.

So do I recommend it? Yes, and pronto, folks. Next thing you know, they'll be telling us we ATE our way into that unfortunate case of leprosy. (Although, if you'd asked US . . . )

Making A Hash Of Things

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!

More Than Meets The Eye

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.

Egg Salad of the Damned

WHEN I WAS in college, the ladies at the sandwich grill in the RDH (Residents' Dining Hall) would make me this wonderfully strange thing on occasion, a grilled egg salad sandwich. To this day, I do not know how they did it, but they would take a couple of pieces of Wonder bread, slap a slice of plastic cheeze on each slice, lump a scoop of egg salad in the middle of one slice, mush the other slice down on top, and grill it with a generous splurge of "butter" (which they always called butter, but which had to be some kind of institutional-grade oil emulsion). What came out was a miracle, this perfectly grilled, somewhat floppy but perfectly self-contained sandwich that held together admirably unless you unconscionably abused it, which I occasionally did. What I ended up with, when I tried to make it at home, was superior in one way: the egg salad was akin to the concoction I refer to as bedeviled eggs. But, due to a slightly kerfuluffled flip, the structural integrity of the sandwich was comprimised. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.


This is the item immediately after the kerfluffled flip. It actually turned out fine, only I had to eat it with a fork rather than picking it up like a real sandwich. Just think of it as the equivalent of an omlette with toast and hash browns. Which it is nothing like and identical to. Maybe that's what I like so much about eggs. You can do so many things with them, many of which make no sense, but make perfect sense. In fact, the filling here can be construed as something one of my fellow bloggers objected to long ago: eggs with egg sauce.

I don't care. I just love it. Oh, and also, while I am in the neighborhood, recently eggs were removed from the bad food list: no evidence that eggs cause anything bad to happen to your body, after what? 40 years? 50 years of false accusations? (Mayonnaise-- that would be the egg sauce-- my wife points out, is not off the bad foods list yet. One old theory-- old, and probably pretty bad-- would suggest that the consumption of beer alongside mitigates whatever fatty evil the mayo might bring to the death party. Eh. What the hell. They can saw me open when I'm dead.)


The movie of the day is NOT Wise Blood. It was Wednesday's movie, due to the fact that the Onion AV Club reviewed it, and I opened the file about ten minutes before the flick came on the Flix channel. I had been putting it off on a coule of different grounds, not the least of which is that Brad Dourif has been in some really insubstantially creepy stuff, and also that, in the improper mood, I am fully capable of accusing Flannery O'Connor of libeling and slandering the South on the least grounds.

AND the results were strange enough. The shooting took place in and around contemporary (1979) Macon, GA. Which was a strange time for Macon, but to be completely fair, the place has hardly changed since. Macon is a strange place. Dirt poor, pissed off, and proud of it. Then there's the costumes, which go a long way to forging the characters, so as anachronistic as the costumes are, so anachronistic are the characters. Which is admirable in it's strange, strange way, but . . . Well, in the final analysis, this jigsaw puzzle just don't fit together.

Although it did grow on me. Everyone is so completely commited to their part that the thing kind of flows along, and by about a third of the way in I was excusing the major flaws. Which, in addition to the anachronisms, there are flaws in the source material, up to and including the decades-long arguments as to whether Flannery O'Connor's 1952 novel cribbed from Faulkner, made hommage to Faulkner, updated Faulkner, or ripped Faulkner off, and THEN, if, like me, you beginning point, your opinion of Faulkner, is, well FUCK Faulkner, then after a certain point you are inclined not to care much. What I ended up seeing was an auteur (director John Huston) so enamoured of his vision that he was able to convince an entire ensemble of actors that all kinds of things that were absurd on their faces would contribute to the creation of a seamless and socially significant work of celuloid art.

So do I recommend it? Dunno. It left me bewitched, bothered, and bewildered, and not in the good way, as if I had had a sultry, sexy dance with a stranger under Autumn moonlight to the mumurrings of a nearby jazz ensemble, but more like I had just endured an IRS audit adminstered by a crew of clowns in full costume and white face. Like something very important, and not altogether pleasant had just happened, but there wasn't any real reason to take it seriously.

So I enjoyed it. But, then again, I'm a weirdo who like eggs in egg sauce.

PS: At one point I was moved to observe that Dourif was essentially playing the same character as he did in the film Ragtime, although I don't know how true that is or what, if anything, it would mean. So I didn't make that observation.

The Secret Lives Of Ommlettes*

AND SO I say again: Yes! Eggs and beer? Yes, I say! Yes!

It might not look like it, but this is one of the most successful ommlettes I have made in recent memory. For the record, the fillings are white American, orange American, 3 cheese Mexican blend, ham, finely chopped shallot, and a generous squirt of Plochman's yellow mustard. The toast slices, rather than being buttered, were slathered with a Grey Poupon. I do like my mustard.

The object did stick just a little and rupture a bit on delivery from skillet to plate, but the cookingprocess was in precisely the right state when this happened, so that the carry-over heat did the last touch of cooking to the eggs as I got the rest of the accoutrements together. Poifect!

The beers are the Saranac Black Forest and Pale Ale, which teamed up like Briscoe & Green.

The film of the day is not Let The Right One In, but more about that in a bit. The lunchtime diversion was supposed to be Tony Bourdain's most recent show on Viet Nam, in which he claimed to be planning to move there for a year to work on a novel (or so claimed the Time Warner Cable program guide description). The first time I watched it, I missed the last 20 minutes or so, as the fatigue of a most busy weekend filled with later-than-usual nights caught up with me, so I was curious to see if those missing 20 minutes contained anything more in the way of a conviction that Bourdain is really going native, and what, if anything, that might mean for the series.

Instead, the program being offered was the original Viet Nam show, from, I think, a year ago. As I was cooking while the first reel unspooled, I didn't immediately make the connection (later, while eating, I managed to put the pieces together), but as the thing went on I began to wonder: was there an outcry such that the Travel Channel-- The Travel Channel-- decided it was too risky to re-run the show? Were people so traumatized by the prospect of Tony completely and officially departing the States that watching it again might cause a rift in the social fabric? And if so, what kind of world are we living in?

Let The Right One In I will be holding off on for awhile. We didn't get the chance to see it in a theater, and the Wife has proclaimed that she has nothing in the way of an interest in seeing it on DVD as of even date (just recently released). And while everything I have heard about it has suggested that it is a very well made and moving film, Iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii . . . I'm waiting until one day it's just on. I have this strange feeling that the suprise in store for me is that all those film critics didn't see this to be as transparent and manipulative as I did. Ihave even developed a very specific theory as to which scene this somewhat ubiquitous still from the film appears in. You don't want to know; it'd either be a spoiler of sorts, or your wouldn't give a flying rat's ass.

*For those of you who have not bothered to wonder why I keep misspelling "omlette," it's supposed to have been a meditation gag. The egg dish being such a calming force as to make one go "Ommmmmm . . . " No one got it, it's gotten more than old, and I now declare said old pale gag dead and buried.

Ommmmm-lette

This is your brain on drugs, with turkey, ham, bacon, minced onion, chopped basil, 4 cheese blend, with (inside) cracked green peppercorns and chili powder and (outside) black pepper and Celtic sea salt. (The potato side is a hash brown made from deconstructed tater tots, with white American cheese and a schmear of barbeque sauce.)

There has not been a movie of the day for-- what? Two weeks? Three?-- because we have been in the middle of watching a couple different series on DVD.

First, Dead Like Me. This is something I had caught a little of one night in a hotel room while out on a business trip, which is to say I didn't get the best glimpse of it. It seemed interesting, but turned out not to be something that we just didn't happen to catch when it was on. Typically, with HBO series, they are scheduled such that I catch them around the time the Wifey is headed to bed, which is what happened with John Adams and Generation Kill. I don't recall her saying why, but she stuck this in the queue, and so far we have quite enjoyed it. Some of the story arcs are less than gripping-- although never boring, truely-- but the performances are adorable, especially Ellen Muth as the sullenly blase teenager learning the lessons of life in death, and Mandy Patankin as the zen task master of the worldy purgatory.

Then, of course, there is the Boston Legal.

James Spader. Bill Shatner. Candice Bergen. And, this season (last season), John Laroquette, chewing most delicately on the meatiest role the man has had in recent memory. And don't get me started on the vets playing the judges. In our household, this is known as candy. Sweet, sweet candy.

I will probably get around to posting about movies-of-the-day in another couple of weeks, but before that, I will be on hiatus. Not just due to the Boston Legal-- caaaaaaaaaaaaaaannnndy, sweet, sweet caaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaannnndy-- but also due to the fact that I am wrestling with a temporary crown on the lower left rear molar, to be replaced by a permanent crown a week from tomorrow. So, in the mean time, most of what I have been having for lunch has been less than spectacular. On the other hand, thus the omlette. Speaking of which:

Really, this was more like three of your brains on drugs with etc etc. Which, of course, defies literal interepretation, but actually goes a long way towards explaining, by way of metaphor, the magic of the omlette.

Modernity!

The Wifey has always been nutty for cool new cars. The smaller, the cuter, the more fuel-miserly, the better. This is the latest discovery. It's electric, it'll tell you where the nearest coffee shop is, and the wheels pivot so you can drive it sideways into a parking spot. Of course, there have been prototypes with pivoting wheels for the last half century, and they never catch on, mainly because they're not cars. They don't feel like a car, drive like a car, they're just not cars.

This specimen lead to the following dialogue between 'imself and the Wifey:

The Wifey: hee hee

'imself: Cute!

'imself: But the problem is, it isn't a car.

TW: well, no

TW: it's a moped in bubble

'imself: With directional casters

TW: the sideways parking is cool, though

'imself: It's a La-Z-Boy-In-A-Bubble!

Which prompted TW to send me that little animated laughing emoticon that never fails to remind me of that scene in Independence Day when they fire off the nuclear warhead into the heart of the alien mothership.

All that prompts me to dig out and post a picture of what my pal Doc Nagel described as possibly the last, best use of a Truimph TR6.

Although I'm not at all sure this is (was) a Trimph. In fact, I'm not sure what the hell it is (was).