Even A Little Mustard & Bread'd Be Nice

I MAY BE misquoting the line from Jimmy Buffett's "Cheeseburger in Paradise,"but I am not entirely sure it matters. First of all, Buffett was singing about the kind of incongruity one very typically encounters in the islands of the end of South Florida, despite all the rhetoric describing starving modern sailors at sea. I never researched it, and I am not entirely sure Mr. Buffett has ever espoused the back story himself, but I feel pretty confident he heard someone ironically remarking that, here so-and-so was in Paradise, and what does he order? A CHEESEBURGER. I am, in fact, having the  last mango in Paris. Again, I don't know if Monsieur Buffett ever had a mango in Paris, but I fell pretty sure he'd understand the reference. This year's mango crop has been fantastic. I have butchered and eaten easily a half dozen over the course of the last month, almost always in the service of a ploughman's lunch. (The avocado crop was tremendous this year as well, which I firmly believe is the Universe's way of apologizing for not letting me make a trip to California this year.)

So this is most definitely today's lunch. In many ways, it's nothing special: the black olives are just black olives, the brie is from St. Louis, the turkey is the same stuff I put on the Cobb salad sandwich, and the bread rolls are very generic dinner rolls. (Of course, the mango is mango, and the mustards, well, one is from the Stage deli in New York, one is Plochman's Kosciusko, but the third is just basic coarse mustard from a local grocery chain.) Still, woof! Quite the spread, and filling me up.

SPEAKING of filling one up! This was last night's movie. The Wifey suggested putting it on because the other one we currently have from Netflix is John Carter, and, she said, she wanted to see that one. (And she was in the process of making a sausage and cabbage soup, so not sure she would be able to keep up with the details.) Talk about filling! And I'm not talking about the movie!

Yes, the sausage and cabbage soup was wonderful and filling. It's good to have basic peasant food not and then. The Real Steel flick was alright, too, but it wasn't anything that would ever stick to your ribs. Just about everything about it was generic and calculatingly crowd- pleasing (even the crowds, which were drawn to be despised as bloodthirsty red-state louts and lauded as noble, root-for-the-underdog, red-blooded Americans). Still, for all that, it was way better than it had any right to be. For crying out loud, even the tag line-- Courage is stronger than steel!-- is calculated bullshit. Courage is not stronger than steel. Ask anyone who's ever been run over by a tank. Oh, wait! You CAN'T! They're DEAD!

But still, by the time of the final, ridiculous, David-and-Goliath fight between giant steel robots, both of whom succumb to punch drunkenness at various points in the bout, the Wifey and I were both on the edge of our seats. Metaphorically speaking, of course-- our couch has no edges. Our couch is so comfy, it has horizons.

This is the move the History Channel has been playing in memory of Neil Armstrong. Which is fine, as far as it goes, except it's not really about Neil Armstrong. It's about Buzz Aldren being a prickly character whose father needled him endlessly-- get it? Prickly? 'cause he was Needled? HA! Of course, it is a kind of fascinating piece, for various reasons, not the least of which is it mixes lots of live-action recreation of events with documentary footage from the events in their own times, and even a swath of the music Pink Floyd played for the BB C's coverage of the lunar landing. But, along the same lines, it's kind of a mixed bag. It feels at various times like it was rushed through production, that James Marsten's wonderfully nuanced performance as Aldren was cut with water, and that voice-over narration was added after the face to turn what was intended to be a nuanced character study into a capsule period piece. GET IT! CAPSU-- Oh skip it.

But I can't recommend it. This sort of thing takes years of experience, and you make one mistake with any of the componentry anywhere along the line, then there is a pretty good chance you ain't coming back down from that cold, cold rock in the sky. Although so long as you start with a good cheese, you'll be fine. Wow. That describes all three, the meal and both movies, in one grand slash. And yet I feel nothing.

If You Get Caught, Lie

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!?"