Category: neck deep in the zeitgeist

One of the problems with exposing myself to reality TV is that I also expose myself to TV commericials, and I will buy anything anyone tells me to. As a result, I found myself on Wednesday driving about 20 minutes round trip to pick up a Hardee’s Low Carb Thickburger. “How did they make a fast-food hamburger with so few carbohydrates? I asked myself. I got it home and found the secret: no bun – it’s wrapped in lettuce. It’s not bad, really. It’s kind of like a giant ground beef spring roll. But I don’t think I’ll be making any more 20 minute round trips to get one. “Mike and Chris have promised that at their next brunch, in consideration of any low-carb dieters, they’re going to make meat waffles. I can hardly wait.”

While finishing off the No Bun Weirdburger, I remembered another time I went considerably out of my way to eat something ultimately disappointing. When I lived in Tokyo, my aunt and uncle came to visit and we went to Kyoto. My aunt went out for a walk one morning and returned to the hotel unable to talk about anything but the cinnamon rolls she had smelled from a small bakery. She went on about it all day long, and made me promise that I would go with her the next day to negotiate the purchase of these items, since I had been in Japan for several months by that point, honing my smiling and pointing skills.

We set out the next morning at roughly the crack of dawn “she really was like a kid on Christmas day” and found the “bakery in question, which looked more like a machine shop. But there was no denying the intense aroma of cinnamon baked goods. I found someone who worked there, who reacted the way many Japanese do when they encounter a foreigner, which is roughly the way they do when they encounter Godzilla. I finally managed to convince him that we weren’t there to step on cars, but wanted to buy what they were baking. The delight on my aunt’s face when I emerged holding a bag of goodies was almost spiritual. We each removed one item from the bag, and took a big bite of … something with the consistency of a building material. Perhaps a wood laminate, or polycarbonate. It was undeniably cinnamon, but to this day I’m not entirely certain it was food. Somewhere I have a picture of my aunt trying in vain to bite through hers, with a there-is-no-Santa look on her face.

I haven’t made a New Year’s resolution in probably five years, ever since the best one I’ve ever made: I resolved to be more superficial. I think most people assumed I was joking when I said it, but not entirely. It’s so easy to become righteously indignant about so much of modern American society, but you know what? It’s also very tiring. In its most noble interpretation my resolution meant I intended to save my indignation for topics that truly deserved it. But it really meant I was giving myself permission to watch reality TV.

I reaffirmed that resolution Monday night when I found myself unable to look away from Average Joe: Hawaii on NBC. It was touch and go for a while “and who knows, I could still escalate to Indignant Level Orange” but I finally decided not to get all bent out of shape about a show that is forcing a beauty queen to spend several weeks in a Hawaiian mansion keeping a smile glued to her face while surrounded by men who up to this point would have been invisible to her. I’m not going to bother finding all their names, but the group includes The Fat Guy, The Fatter Guy, The Even Fatter Guy and The Really Fat Guy, as well as The Guy Who Makes Carrot Top Look Like Cary Grant and The Guy with No Sweat Glands. “After watching the show for 20 minutes I realized I’d rather talk to any of them – even The Dull Guy with the Cold Sore – than the beauty queen.”

I’m once again ready to embrace my superficiality. I have set my Tivo-like device to record the entire series. It should put me in the right frame of mind for some of the other upcoming absurd reality show elimination contests, like Fear Factor, The Apprentice, and The 2004 Election.

For Christmas, <a href=”Jean gave me The Big Book of Being Rude, and to quote Bart when Homer gave him the machine that says “Go to hell at the push of a button, I promise you I will never get tired of this. It offers 7000 slang insults, and that should be just about enough to get me through a new year of job hunting and serving on my homeowners association board.

For instance, I recently found myself drawn into a heated email correspondence among my fellow board members which included the question, “How do we verify the number of squirrels to know if we are being fairly charged for this service? Rather than joining the debate on rodent enumeration technologies, I could have picked a rejoinder from the book and told them all to go and piss up a shutter, which the book indicates is an English expression from the 1910s. Of course, I would probably need to have that one approved by the architectural committee.

The book offers many opportunities to be rude in a modern context “it is not for the PC: no insulting term is left out”, but also gives us the chance to bring some historical insults back into use. Maybe the next time I get four steps into the interview process only to be told that the job is not going to be filled after all, I can seek my retaliatory inspiration from the 16th century and call the HR person a bel-shangle, clumperton, doddypoll or ninnyhammer. And why tell somebody merely to go to hell when you can tell him to go to hell and help his mother make bitch pies? “English, mid-18C: late 19C”.

“A former colleague of mine had a psychotherapist mother-in-law who was apparently far too nice a lady to swear effectively. After being cut off in traffic, she rolled down her window and screamed, “You can wipe your ass on my coat! After Ian and his wife stopped laughing, they explained to her that, not only would no one ever say that, it would in fact be far worse for her than for the other driver.”

The book takes a scholarly tone, giving time periods and etymologies for the words, but some of them seem a bit spurious. Are there really 23 euphemisms for crackhead? “Hubba pigeon” for instance? And how long did “Kuwaiti tanker survive as rhyming slang for “wanker? I for one was on US campuses for far too long in the 1980s and never heard anyone refer to an idiot as a “McFly “”a character in the Back to the Future films” or “dorkmunder “”dork + poss. Dortmunder Union Pils”. Right. So often our insults came from the names of obscure German beers.

Maybe I’ve got a kangaroo loose in the top paddock, but I think some of the insults are just plain dumb. I find it hard to believe that Australians in the 1930s couldn’t come up with anything cleverer than “as silly as a bag” Luckily, they put their best minds to work and a decade later issued the new, improved “silly as a hatful of arseholes”

While amusing, many are not very useful for the average 21st century American. However, should you find the need to insult someone from New South Wales, you might try “cornstalk or “crow-eater” “North Carolinians, by the way, are goober-grubbers.”

I don’t care what the Chinese zodiac says, so far for me 2004 has been the Year of the Potato. Don’t worry, I’m not going to write about mashing again, but I have done a fair amount of spud handling – along with champagne drinking – in the last two days. Perhaps that explains my general fuzzy-mindedness today. I have a potato hangover.

I admit I feel a little pressure here in this, the first entry of 2004. Does the first post of the year set the tone for the next 364 days? Is it like what they say about who you’re kissing at midnight being the person you’re going to kiss for the rest of the year? Can I work another potato joke in here? Maybe I just need to get this one under my belt and move on.

The dawn of 2004 brought a flood of messages to my inbox, so allow me to join with some of my correspondents in wishing you all a Happy New Year.

Signed,

David B. Thomas
Yourselves S. Institutionalized
Oceanographer B. Grumbling
Ritually H. Chastised
Antihistamines U. Depression
Miscuing J. Noncommittally

okay, I might have arranged this just a little

You know how you’ll go for a month with nothing going on, and then three good bands all play on the same night? It’s the same thing with end-of-the-year parties. We need to spread them out a bit more, people. I’m going to have my holiday party in April.

Saturday night I went to Joe and Andrea’s in Hillsborough. The crowd was roughly divided between librarians and musicians. Half the people I’ve met in the last year are librarians, so it did not surprise me that they were the ones getting jiggy while the rock ‘n’ rollers stood around quietly admiring Joe’s home studio.

My friend Kelly celebrated her birthday last night, and she got a pretty good turnout, considering it was a Monday in the middle of the recovery zone between Christmas and New Year’s. “Photos from Kelly’s birthday and Joe and Andrea’s party are in the holiday gallery.”

We met at the West End Wine Bar in Chapel Hill “voted by CitySearch the best spot in the Triangle to bring a date, and I can’t argue with that”. I suppose I’m more used to sitting around a smoky bar drinking draft beer than I am to sitting on a velvet sofa discussing the connection between syrah and shiraz. Hey, don’t get me wrong, I like it, and I love it when the bar snack is a cheese platter rather than a bag of pretzels. “In addition to two blue cheeses and one ass cheese, the platter included a chunk of manchego. As Ryan cut a piece he proclaimed, “Manchego is everywhere these days” and didn’t miss a beat when it slipped off the knife: “On Dave’s shoe, for instance””

And guess who else had her birthday yesterday?

When I bought my house five years ago I was overcome with a wave of domesticity that manifested itself in the purchase of design magazines and painting the rooms a variety of colors with silly names “Spring Sprout and Madder Carmine”, most of which I do not regret. One issue of House & Garden had a recipe for smoked salmon scrambled eggs in popovers, which sounded like just the thing for my housewarming brunch and inspired me to try my hand at the culinary arts.

I soon became hooked, realizing that cooking combined two of my greatest passions: magazines and gadgets. “For instance, I own a potato ricer, which I have used exactly once.” Then Mom gave me a copy of The Joy of Cooking for Christmas, which can only be described as Essential. “In the peculiar ways of our family, this book is referred to as “Mrs. Rombauer’s.”” I taught myself to cook by picking a different recipe every day, shopping for it, and cooking it.

I’ve tried a lot of different things in the last five years with varying degrees of success and have attained a modest degree of proficiency which at the very least keeps me from being too nervous about cooking for guests “although I do reach a level of tension while I’m preparing a big meal which sometimes means I’m less than hospitable to people who want to hang around in the kitchen and talk to me while I’m cooking. But I’m working on it.”

My mother is an excellent cook, and my interest has given us something enjoyable to share. I often call her to ask cooking questions, usually while I’m wearing hot mitts and worrying that I’ve destroyed something or created something toxic. “At least I’m past the “is this mayonnaise too old to eat” stage.” Our mutual interest is especially fun around the holidays, when we bond furiously in the kitchen.

I pride myself on two things: green beans and mashed potatoes. I’ve perfected my green bean technique after many years of trial and error, along with a ridiculous level of persnicketiness reached after reading too many books about the Culinary Institute of America. I won’t reveal all my tricks, but just to give you an idea, a sinkful of ice water is involved.

As for the mash, I’ve learned the secret: tremendous—nay, deadly—amounts of butter and cream and salt. With this you cannot go wrong. Today, however, it all went pear-shaped. I peeled half a bag of Yukon Gold potatoes and boiled them for twenty minutes. I melted two sticks of butter with some cream and salt and pepper, ready to add to the potatoes. I remember thinking to myself, “I need to add this a little bit at a time.” Any cook will understand my mindset when everything suddenly became ready all at once: the lamb, the green beans and the potatoes. So instead of adding the butter/cream mixture a little bit at a time, I panicked and dumped it all in at once. The result was potato cream butter soup.

In an effort to help me salvage this glutinous mess, Mom suggested adding some potato flakes, which seemed like a perfectly reasonable idea. I grabbed the box and dumped about a cup into the bowl. “That’s rice,” Mom calmly explained. No amount of tasting and retasting and self-denial were able to convince us that Dave’s Potato Rice Casserole was a discovery as opposed to a catastrophe. Three pounds of potatoes and half a pound of butter went down the drain, and I started over. Luckily Dad was napping and never knew what transpired.

All things considered, it could have been much worse. Like, say, for instance, my first Christmas dinner when my family each consumed roughly a half-ounce of melted plastic. But let’s not dwell on that. We all survived.