I DON'T WANT YOUR HELP!!!

I AM AN addict. I can't stop. I don't want to stop. I need help, but I will not accept it, refuse to. I don't even run anymore, haven't run farther than a few hundred yards at a stretch in full on ten years, but I can't stop buying the shoes. This makes 17 pairs I now own.

Ain't they cool?

The lunch of the day is beef brisket and pulled pork barebeque from Mac's Speed Shop on a kaiser roll with cheese, backed with a modified barbeque sauce (boosted with Plochman's yellow mustard, Cholula hot sauce, and cracked black pepper), cole slaw (also from Mac's), and the chips, which are Utz's Crab Chips. (Works especially well since they are seasoned with Old Bay, and the kick in the cole slaw is provided by celery seed.) Conventional wisdom would tromp all over this: you either have pork or brisket, and either way you DO NOT put cheese on barbeque, except if the barbeque is especially bad. But the Unified Sandwich Theory would be easily met: two kinds of prepared meat with cheese on bread with condiment for dipping. This, finally, is what the UST was meant to do. The whole time, we have been thinking of the UST as a set of restrictive guidelines. But all ethics are descriptive. The UST is finally a permissive doctrine: anything that can be stably constructed between two pieces of bread is a sandwich. And it's good.

I hve been eating lunch for well over an hour. Partly because it's a chewy sandwich. Partly because . . . Well, it's like the joke about the three-legged pig. When a pig is that good, you just don't eat 'im all at once.



The film of the day, suprisingly, was this. Even after reading a couple of pretty good reviews of it, I was still a bit suspicious. I mean, how many Bill Pullman movies have you seen? And what has Ben Stiller been in that didn't suck? (Besides Tropic Thunder.) And Ryan O'Neal? Aren't we all supposed to think he's a douchbag these days?

I have honestly always thought O'Neal a fine actor, and a couple of his roles, to this day, to me, exemplify what a good movie ought to be (What's Up Doc and Paper Moon, to be specific). Also, I don't know that he's to be condemned so much. His kids, demonstrably, are spoiled, ill-mannered brats from what I have heard, except for Tatum, who has deliberately refused to keep in touch with him in order to avoid the rest of the brood, and death hurts. Especially, I think, the death of a beloved whacko. A little bizarre behavior on the part of the bereaved is, I think, both to be expected and forgiven.

Anyways. Good enough movie, if the sort of thing you can miss a half an hour of without missing anything much.


The same cannot be said of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, the movie so nice they named it for three and a half goddamned paragraphs. This one I deliberately put off, because . . . Alright, I put it off because I knew I would see it sooner or later, but I knew I would have to be in exactly the right mood. Same way I knew I was going to see Gerry. Beautiful acting, great story telling, broad, expressive silences, but llllooooooooooooooooooooooooong. And, what I knew going in but didn't confirm until I actually started watching it, the sourcework is bullshit. Iowa trained academic writer who, if his movie hadn't gotten optioned, woulda made his money teaching writing in order to give him time to write his books. At least twice in the movie I noticed harsh flaws in the story, and a couple of the ways they cast the character of the coward Robert Ford were just utter bullshit, especially in the endgame. But, in the end, well enough acted to make up for any flaws in the story. And the real star of the movie is the Canadian (Albertian) landscape standing in for the stark winter time climes of old Missouri. Beautifully shot.

Still. Jerry Lee has seen The Assassination of History by Some Schmuck Who Went To The Iowa Writer's Workshop to Convince Your Kid He/She IS Going To Be The Next Ernest Goddamned Hemingway, Which You Only Appreciate Because It Might Make Them Shut Up About American Freakin' Idol For Thirty Seconds, With The Rain And Sham-Ba-La.

But do I recommend it? Hell yeah. Make a lunch, get comfy, settle in, and DON'T PULL UP WIKIPEDIA. Zero Effect? Hell, no. I was probably just in a generous mood, and the crazy, mixed-up sammich certainly helped. Besides which, Lawrence Kasdan's kid is already rich, and Ben Stiller really ought not be encouraged (to do ANYTHING). The sandwich? Have some barbeque. Oh: And India Pale Ale goes great-- GREAT-- with this, so next time you do, have an IPA. And of course I recommend the shoes. Remember your Adams/Prefect: The value of good footgear is not to be underestimated.

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.