I Did Not Have Soviet Relations With That Evil Empire

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!

Tales From The Crapped

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

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

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


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



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

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

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