Gastronomic Regurgitations

            I’ve had a stew of different topics slow cooking in my head for a while now, all of them dealing with food in some form or another. So for the sake of freeing up some space on my mental hard drive, I will serve up my paella of home cooked thoughts on the topic of gastronomy.    

I’m not sure if culinary students need to write thesis papers, but I’ve been mentally drafting mine for years. Chocolate and Bacon is my masterpiece, the culmination of a young lifetime of food experience and exploration. If you’re standing at your computer reading this, you should probably sit down so the sheer force of its genius and simplicity doesn’t knock you on your ass. I submit for your contemplation, my pièce de résistance, that there is no food that cannot be enhanced for its betterment by adding chocolate or bacon. When you stop hyperventilating and the room is no longer spinning, I’ll give you the thought equivalent of another swift kick in the nuts. The penultimate food, given the brute logic of the thesis, is simply chocolate covered bacon. Maybe if Ben and Jerry weren’t too busy fishing for each others trouser trout’s, they would have developed Chocolate Salty Balls by now…bacon bits covered in dark chocolate, swimming in chocolate ice cream. Good night sweet Haagen-Dazs.

Wherein Chocolate and Bacon is a study of the happy marriage of two foods I love, Paninis and Burritos is a sordid tale of two ethnic foods struggling for relevance. The panini had its 5 minutes of fame but alas, its time in the spotlight has faded. I’ll always think of it as the unfortunately un-aborted result of that grilled cheese sandwich machine they sold by the truckload at Costco in the 90’s. You know you had one, don’t try and deny it. “Holy shit, a sealed pocket of scalding hot cheese, coated in spray on butter, made with a machine that will be a huge pain in the ass to clean and put away, I’ll take it!” I’m pretty sure panini’s became popular so douche bags with spiky hair, wearing those ridiculous looking gold sperm necklaces that you ginzaloons love so much, could feel cool ordering Italian sounding food in delis everywhere. “Ciao, can I get a prosciutto and mozzarella panini on ciabatta bread?” Hey jackass, you’re in Newark not Tuscany and I’m pretty sure you’re Puerto Rican anyway. Counter to the decline of the panini; enter the utilitarian workhorse of foods, the burrito. Street food, restaurant food, breakfast, lunch and dinner; like the essence of the Mexican day laborer, burritos will do anything for meager pay. One need look no further than Steve Ellis, that thin-lipped, smarmy, smart-ass, Tim Gunn lookalike, founder of Chipotle, to understand the success and appeal of taking basically anything, wrapping it in a tortilla and calling it a meal. The appeal must be real, because unlike the trendy Italian inspired New Jersey culture that we’re idolizing right now, thank you very much yet again you assholes at MTV, nobody is ordering guacamole on their burrito because they want to sound like an authentic Mexican.

Lastly, I want to give a brief shout-out to Anthony Bourdain, just because I think he’s a wicked cool guy. Please excuse my absolute lack of content here except to proclaim my budding bromance with Tony B. The guy is a hell of a writer; his show, No Reservations, is top notch entertainment. I made room for him at my roundtable dinner with people I think it would be cool to hang out and drink with, assuming he doesn’t Bogart all the booze. I’m keen on asking him if there’s anything he won’t eat. Once you’ve seen a man enjoy eating a sheep’s asshole, petty things like mushrooms and split pea soup don’t seem so bad anymore. Counterpoint to Anthony Bourdain is Jamie Oliver. I really have nothing to say about him either, other than I don’t like him and I’m not sure why. I appreciate his message, which he spreads like a jack-knifed manure truck on the Santa Anna spreads stink, but the delivery is lacking for me. Filling a school bus with sugar and dumping chocolate milk on everything he can get his tiny little British fists of fury on, just makes my inner Willy Wonka cry. His stupid brand of sensationalism seems kind of wasteful. Obviously, he’s not championing the much less glamorous, Feed the Hungry campaign. He fancies himself as a “shit-stirrer”, his words not mine. Maybe he needs to take a page from Bourdain and start eating assholes, and stop being so much of one.

The Urinal and You (A Guide to Peeing)

            I should be embarrassed to write this, as a fellow bro and all, but dammit somebody has to break the vow of silence and address some major problems going on in men's bathrooms everywhere. I’m sure you ladies have a whole batch of your own dark secrets so don’t get too smug. Fortunately for you, the humble reader of this fine blog, I’m not afraid to go where I have to go (see what I did there) to set things right. So let’s throw back the veil of secrecy on that pinnacle of male engineering, the urinal.

            It should be a pretty basic operation. You feel the urge to pee, keeping in mind that your going problem might be a growing problem (prostate health is no joke for you older bros), so you saunter to the bathroom. It’s important to note that in an office environment, peeing out of boredom is an acceptable excuse to escape the gravitational pull of your desk. Once you arrive for prayers at the altar of the golden god, things should be pretty straight forward, but here’s where you might feel compelled to break with normalcy and succumb to some baser instincts.

            Offender number one, in our lineup of puzzling urinal behavior is spitting. Guys, what the fuck is going on? It’s gotten to the point where even Pavlov would be scratching his head in awe. If the potpourri of fragrances in the bathroom is causing your mouth to water so much that you need to spit, you’ve got some issues. Granted, sometimes I look at the urinal mint and wonder if it really does tastes like a giant mentos, but it’s never gotten me that wet in the mouth. The insult to injury on this one is you jack-offs can’t even muster the mouth-eye coordination to land your loogies on target. The top shelf of the urinal looks like a pigeon lives on it. Personally, the last place I want to be with my mouth agape is standing over a fucking porcelain piss backstop. The laws of liquid dynamics clearly state that, “urine; once forcefully propelled from your pee-hole onto a solid object, will project in an unpredictable fashion, until such time as gravity will draw all of the errant droplets into a downward trajectory, covering your shoes and the floor at your feet in  a strangely sticky pee-based solution”. In layman’s terms, you might just catch a little sprinkle of tinkle in your pie hole if your mouth is open while you pee. Comprende? Can we agree to stop spitting in the urinal? Jesus, do we really even need to spit at all?

            The second felon, in our lineup of bathroom bandits, is snots. Not Cousin Eddies loveable Rottweiler, I’m talking about the crusty green guys that live in your nose. I’m already taking some liberties calling them green, because from what I’ve seen in the office bathroom lately, they’re ranging from brown to yellow, with stops at red and green along the way. You might want to add a trip to the Otolaryngologists (look it up idiot) while you're scheduling a prostate exam. The walls near the urinal look like some kind of paint sample from the Home Depot in hell, with dried snots in a dizzying array of colors. I don’t think I need to expound on what’s wrong with that picture. Let’s see if we can kill two birds with one proverbial stone and keep our fingers out of our noses and off the walls of the bathroom. As a caveat to that, if you need to lean on the wall to brace yourself against one of those, giant-coffee-before-a-two-hour-meeting types of pisses, you can allow your hand to touch the wall in lieu of passing out from the sheer ecstasy of releasing such a torrent of pleasure.

            This last one is a twofer. I’m going to roll proper urinal spacing together with intra-urinal chit chat. Conversation in the bathroom is often the accomplice to the crime of improper urinal selection. I always thought using the bathroom was a pretty private enterprise. It’s not that I have a shy bladder per se; it’s just that I prefer to go it alone. So when someone decides to belly-up next to me in an otherwise empty bathroom, I start to get nervous. Proper spacing seems like it should be pretty well understood. When possible, it’s your responsibility to allow a buffer of at least one urinal. The same basic spacing rules apply to guys in the movie theater, on the train, sitting at the dinner table, etc. Unless you have no choice but to pee next to me, I’m going to go ahead and assume you’re either a peter hawk, or a bathroom conversationalist. “Finally feeling like spring outside eh?” “Mondays are so brutal right?” “Dude, I got so drunk last night.” If you’re the one saying that shit to me while I’m taking a leak, shut the fuck up right now or I swear to God I’m gonna piss on your leg. Unfortunately for me, there seems to be a correlation between workplace seniority and bathroom chatter. The higher your face is carved on my totem pole of corporate command, the more inclined you’ll be to attempt small talk with your manhood in your hand (poetic I know). I’m assuming it’s empowering looking down on me from the heights of Mount Porcelainius, whilst you pee, spit and make small talk effortlessly, like the immortal you are.

            In summation, let’s think of the bathroom like its Fukushima Daiichi reactor number 1. Let’s get in and out of that mothefucker as soon as our work is done. Hey, if you need to chat, I’m happy to wait for you out in the hall near the spittoon cowboy.

Why Is Everything I Like Getting Ruined

             I figure I can use this “blog” as an outlet for my random thoughts, rants, problems and ideas. For my inaugural blog, I decided I would write about something that has been bothering me for a few years now; wizards, vampires and pirates. The working title is, “Why is everything I like getting ruined?”

 First it was Harry Potter and his prepubescent cronies fucking up wizardry and medieval fantasy in general. By the way, I’m reading historical fiction nowadays so I can stay on a level slightly above 8 year old girls and soccer moms. I don’t think I need to get into great detail about this shit because unless you live under a rock, you’ve been exposed to this literary butchery. How do you manage to take something as badass as this:

 “And next again she bore the unspeakable, unmanageable Kerberos, the savage, the bronze-barking dog of Haides, fifty-headed, and powerful, and without pity.” Hesiod, Theogony 310 ff (trans. Evelyn-White) (Greek epic C8th or C7th B.C.)

And emasculate it into this:

“After Fluffy's duties were done, and the Stone was destroyed, Hagrid set Fluffy free in the Forbidden Forest. Presumably, he is still there.” http://harrypotter.wikia.com/wiki/Fluffy

Jesus Christ, the Forbidden Forest? Really? Did he drink from the soda pop river and shit gum drops too? Oh and one parting thought before I move on…fuck Dumbledore.

            Not content to let J.K. Rowling solely degrade the genre, Stephenie Meyers stepped up to the plate and tore the other testicle out. Vampires and werewolves were probably our most badass, iconic creatures. Literary and movie giants throughout the ages have created masterpieces about these terrors of the night. We’ve always granted a certain amount of deviation with how they’ve been depicted and frankly, I always looked forward to new interpretations. Could vampires turn into bats? Do you need a silver bullet to kill a werewolf? Those seemed like reasonable topics for some creative imaginings. Now we’re asking ourselves if vampires do crunches to get six pack abs and if werewolves looks better in Abercrombie or Hollister shirts? The worst part of Twilight might echo the worst part of Harry Potter in that it opened the flood gates to the continued pussification and metrosexualization of things I once held sacred. It’s like the bastard child of Teen Wolf and the Real World. What happens when werewolves stop being full-moon-transforming, vampire killing, beasts…and start being polite…Twilight? Fuck Edward Cullen.

            So who fucked up pirates? I know what you’re thinking, “clench your butt checks Johnny Depp”. Alas, as much as I hate those movies, I can’t hang the blame for ruining pirates on Johnny Depp. This time the answer is pirates. That’s right, pirates ruined pirates for me. Before your head explodes, let me explain. Today’s news headline might shed some light, “World Sea attacks surge with more violent pirates”. Do we have to call them that? Can’t we start calling them nautical terrorists or aquatic extremists? I can’t figure out what the media is trying to do with this one. Are they intentionally trying to soften the image of these lawless shitbags? Do they have to ruin pirates for me now too? Can’t I envision pirates as peg-legged, blue-bearded, rum swilling swashbucklers, sticking it to the snooty Brits and cowardly French? Do I have to now think about RPG wielding, Marlboro smoking, hyena-on-a-chain Somali’s beheading Americans with machetes? Oh yeah and fuck Jack Sparrow too.

Nah, just kidding, fuck this guy instead.