Never Trust The Gorton's Fisherman

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.

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

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.

Tuna Piano?

ONCE IN A great while, the fish sandwich enthusiast will run up against a specimen that is just damned perfect.

This is one of those times.

Your basic canned tuna salad sandwich probably doesn't sound like anything all that special, and, most of the time, it probably isn't. This just happened to turn into the prime specimen: the fish isn't anything special in and of itself, but after combining it with mayonaisse, Plochman's yellow mustard, about a tablespoon and a half of minced shallot, and about two tablespoons of dill relish, it turned into . . . Well, just magic. Slightly fishy, tangy, savory, just lovely.

The analog (and again, we're speaking of fish sandwiches here) would be the fried cod sandwich I had in New York a few years back. The Tale is on here somewhere, I am pretty sure, but the point would simply be that the thing was so gaddamned perfect that I have not had a completely satisfying fried fish sandwich since then. Here's hoping that this will not be the case here.

The first beer was the brown lager, and it snuggled up against the fish sandiwch like a suckling pig. The second, the Adirondack lager, was a shade too sparkly, at first almost shrill, but it went along well enough in the long run.

The film of the day was Leatherheads.

Not on purpose, mind you. Prior to lunch I had a couple of minor errands to run, and when I got back, turning on the TV in the office, this was on, about twenty minutes in, and a quick run through the guide verified that there wasn't anything else I wanted to watch on. So I watched it while I made and ate lunch, which is probably the best way to do it.

We saw this in the theater when it first came out, on the grounds that we like George Clooney, we like John Krasinski, and parts of it were filmed in Charlotte. Two hours later, as we emerged, blinking, into the light, I observed "Well, we've often said we would watch George Clooney paint a fence."

And then the wife and I concluded, in a single voice, "Aaaaaaaaaaand we just did."

Not that it's bad. It's a fine little movie. It's plenty of fun. It's closer than anything I can think of in recent times to what you might call a screwball comedy. As such things go, it makes for a simply fine tuna sandwich companion, which would be a great name for a rock band.

On the other hand, HBO 2 West (why 2? Dunno? Why West? I got nothin'.) followed it with Ocean's Thirteen, which is just plain wrong. When it comes down to ensemble fence painting, as Mr. Twain most ably demonstrated, is best kept to a single scene, and ought not to take up the entire narrative.