Giving Banderas The Stink Eye

Leftover baby back ribs from Hudson's On The Bend

It's Oscar Night again. Time for Hudson's leftover ribs and Star Trek DVDs.

Star Trek DVDs are indicated when one eats ribs instead of watching the Oscars. Books require page turning, and TV requires constant channel flipping, and we don't want to get sauce on the remote, or on Andrea Dworkin.

I watch the episode where the brilliant but delusional Dr. Roger Korby makes an android replica of Captain Kirk by spinning him around on a giant lazy susan. A bonus: this episode also delivers Lurch in an incandescent star turn as a robot in a puffy pink leotard. The leftover ribs, while pretty good, cannot hold a candle to Lurch.

Neither can the Oscars. Every year I purposely avoid it; my frail constitution is no match for the gruesome spectacle of the world's biggest whores on parade. Yet every year, after Kirk has dispatched the evil androids, I take a quick peek.

Why, here's some generic hottie struggling under the weight of 4,598 cubic zirconia, the smallest of which can be seen from space. She is singing a forgettable, overwrought show tune, accompanied on piano by professional bore Andrew Lloyd Weber, who looks like he was separated at birth from that creepy homo Liza Minnelli married a couple of years ago. The hottie's thin voice is no match for the tedium of the Andrew Lloyd Weber ballad. I fall into a coma.

The sound of Chris Rock's voice revives me. But poor Chris Rock! He looks shell shocked. Possibly he's realized, too late, that he has officially become The Establishment's butt-boy. He laughs weakly at his own tepid Janet Jackson joke. I can't watch this anymore. It burns! It burns!

But wait! Here's rich, beautiful actress Natalie Portman, giving an award for Best Film About Autism!

For comic relief, I briefly tune in "Law & Order: SVU," the show about mutilated women. In this gripping, patriarchy-affirming episode, the nebbishy serial killer buries a woman alive because his mother, Anne Meara, locked him in the closet as a child. Women! They just don't listen!

Back at the Oscars, a corpse-like Jeremy Irons is presenting an award in the aisle, Monty Hall-style. This seems tacky, even for Hollywood, until I realize it's only one of the little awards, Best Low-Budget Documentary About Unaffected Third World Tribespeople, so it can go to a female British director who doesn't know any better. "This is the dog's bollocks!" she exclaims, cryptically.

As a female winner, she's an exception. Hollywood is Ground Zero for misogyny in the US. It's where we turn when we want to know what to think about who should clean toilets or how big someone's boobs should be. Never does Hollywood misogyny gleam with such radiant zeal as on Oscar night. Where else can you see so many hairy plug-uglies in tuxes being squeezed so adoringly by so many 22-year-old shiksas? The shiksas aren't up for any of the awards; they're just the bling. The male plug-uglies win everything, except for one or two awards specially reserved for the rich, beautiful actresses that all the plug-uglies want to bang.

Which is pretty gross, but there is nothing quite so repellent as celebrities high on celebrity, being themselves on national television. "Shucks, I'm just a little ole farm girl!" gushes rich, beautiful actress Hilary Swank.

Wait. There is something more repellent! Some merry prankster has told tone deaf Latin hottie Antonio Banderas that he can sing, and Banderas has bought it! He's slogging through a horrifying, overwrought show tune, in Spanish, in front of a brick wall, accompanied on guitar by professional bore Carlos Santana! Banderas is singing to a motorcycle! Oh the humanity!

Fortunately, I am a Trekkie. I know what to do. There's an episode from Season 1 where Charlie the alien adolescent can make unpleasant people disappear just by giving them the stink eye.

I aim my remote carefully. I may not get a second stink.

Cruel Shoes

photo: Footwear Of The Middle Ages

I blame the patriarchy for my persisting addiction to misogynist footwear. And god help me, I love the Manolo! Witness his greatness here, and here.

Smoked. Red. Exotic. Meat.

Fig. 15. Rattlesnake cakes on a slab of granite



Fig. 24-A Giant meat plate: 1) elk backstrap 2) wild game sausage 3) rabbit nuggets 4) quail 5) buffalo tenderloin

Thirty-five minutes northwest of North South Austin by car lies the swishily rustic Hudson's On The Bend, the most expensive barbecue joint I have ever loosened a belt in. Squeeze Hudson's and out will ooze thick, picturesque, lone-star-shaped globs of Texas Hill Country mystique. I would advise anybody in need of a giant meat plate there to hie at once.

I wasted no time in ordering Hudson's Famous Mixed Grill: two square feet of assorted exotic game accompanied by big, assertive, barbecue sauces (see fig. 24-A, above). With the exception of the rabbit chunks, which were hard as little stones and afflicted with a sugary sauce, the dish was superb. I never met a hunk of smoked red meat I didn't like, but the buffalo exuded a particular attraction. Exquisite! Somewhere under all the meat was a shovelful each of beer-flavored mashed potatoes and an excellent corn pudding. The entire affair was topped with a petunia. It cost 38 bucks.

Hudson's pecan-crusted rattlesnake cakes with chipotle sauce are storied. I cannot recommend them. Though the palate's first impression is one of fish tanks, this association is mercifully fleeting; the real problem is their textural similarity to instant mushroom burgers, or dirt. What gives? Why weren't there discernable chunks of rattlesnake? Is the meat so nasty that it must be pulverized and hidden? Or so scarce that it must be pulverized and stretched? Either way, the preparation raises doubts about the suitability of rattlesnakes to cakeal applications.

I must also question the wisdom of combining duck with scallops. Until further notice, my position is: two great tastes that don't taste great together.

On a technical note, the parking lot is hilarious. It was a dark and stormy night when I presented myself for my giant meat plate, and there was nowhere to shove the SUV but in an ancillary lot at the top of a muddy hill at the end of a very steep, very unlit succession of craters. Hudson's idea of pavement appears to involve chucking a few truckloads of river rock over an unexcavated armadillo colony, after which they probably smiled and went inside to skin a couple of wild hogs . Do not arrive in stylish footwear, is all I'm sayin'.

Death Looms For Prince of Patriarchy

Fusilli, leftover takeout chicken, sun-dried tomato, roasted garlic, mushroom essence

Meanwhile, self-inflicted castration falls out of fashion.

I got outside this dish while watching responsibly reported hard news on TV. "Peter Jennings Reporting: UFOs--Seeing Is Believing." There's nothing like watching a parade of yokels declaim "I know what I seen, and it warn't no aeroplane!" to take a girl's mind off the Pope's tracheotomy!

The Pope's doom impends. Big whoop. There's always another pope pupating in the Vatican's Pontiff Incubator. You probably already know this, but in the Pontiff Incubator they play mind-control tapes over and over. "Women are bloody, corrupt harlots," the tapes say. "They have fangs in their vaginas." Then, when the little popes pop out with their pointy little heads, they know what to do. They must fuck things up for the bloody corrupt harlots as much as possible. Preferably through domination and exploitation!

Both the papal mind-control tapes and the hatred of women in western civilization are the direct result of the greatest hits of Judeo-Christian mythology. Who could forget the Myth of The Fall? There's a jolly tale! “Of the woman came the beginning of sin, and through her we all die.” (Sirach 25:24).

This Sirach mutha isn't fucking around. As you probably already know, his is the last of the Sapiential writings in the Vulgate of the Old Testament.

The Old Testament. It's like a bible or something to these Catholics.

Early Christian doctrinaires--guys like Tertullian and Augustine--building on Sirach's penetrating insights, enjoyed an unparalleled horror of women. They demonstrated their horror by constantly castrating themselves and issuing dire warnings about the "uncleanliness of the womb."

Unfortunately, people today hardly ever express their horror of women by castrating themselves. What gives? It turns out that current thinking holds the practice to be lacking in machismo and therefore psychotic, or gay. Thus is self-castration the purview of nebbishy nutjob characters on "Law & Order: SVU," the TV show about mutilated women.

In real life, discrimination, marginalization, domestic drudgery, poverty and garden-variety rape and murder are the only acceptable manifestations of misogyny.

Go Shoot Motherfuckers

Grilled lamb chops with mustard and red currant glaze, flageolets with
spinach and tomaters, and a head of roasted garlic

"You know, when I joined the Army nine years ago people would always ask me why I joined. Did I do it for college money? Did I do it for women? People never understood. I wanted to join the Army because I wanted to go shoot motherfuckers."
--attributed to a Fort Benning drill sergeant in "AWOL In America"by Kathy Dobie, Harper's Magazine, March 2005

Much like I can't remember what life was like before the internet or the GPS-equipped automobile, it's hard to recall how I managed before the Lodge Outpost Cast Iron Grill and Matching Stand arrived at the Twisty Compound.

I got outside these exquisite chops while reading an article in Harper's about deserters from the U.S. military. The story is no longer available on the Harper's website, so I'll hit the highlights for you:

Being in the military sucks.

Especially if you happen to be somebody for whom shooting motherfuckers has not been the dream that's sustained you from the cradle.


photo Thomas Hoepker, Harper's, March 2005

The Art of the Taco

Los tacos de Tacodeli: fish (left) and the peerless Frontera Fundido

Tacodeli has perfected the taco with a little number they like to call Frontera Fundido. This sublime example of the taqueriador's art is chunks of toothsome pot roast with fried onions and crisp poblano peppers. The secret ingredient is the mysterious "mouth-watering cheese glaze." I can't explain what a "cheese glaze" is.

Tacodeli appears to adhere to the usual bullshit patriarchal class structure. White male models from the Urban Outfitters catalog run the place, while the exceptional Frontera Fundidos are assembled by small Mexican women hidden from public view by a dirty curtain.

Cleaning Out Your Meat Drawer?

Orrechiette with tasso ham and peas

If you're like me, you have a vacuum-pack of Savoie's tasso lying around. And if your tasso is like mine, it cries out to be combined with a sauce of peas and shallots and white wine and cream, thereafter to be applied to a bowl of orrechiette.

I pruned a bit of fat from it, but there's no denying I stole the concept for this recipe from one of my old St. Louis haunts, Riddle's Penultimate Cafe and Wine Bar. A non-fatal encounter with the Riddles' delicious Rigatoni Tassos requires extremely fit arteries.

It is common to use brutal, galooty wines to beat Cajun flavors into submission, but I am against the practice. I got outside of this dish with the help of a Trinitas 2002 Russian River Valley Petite Sirah, an extremely pretty drink that neither hid from my excellent sauce nor challenged it to a duel.

Cock Chop!

Poor Kim Tran: sick of the dick

Raging Feminist wonders how come a guy getting his dick chopped off is "so damn shocking" ("police said they were surprised by the nature of the crime") when the mass mutilation of gazillions of women is a daily occurence and causes not so much as a media burp.

Wonder no more, Raging Feminist. Do what I do. Blame the patriarchy.

Because how often do you think police are "surprised by the nature of the crime" when some douchebag beats his pregnant girlfriend to death with a tire iron?

We are not privy to the inner meditations that led Kim Tran to separate her boyfriend from his weener and flush it down the can, but it's a slim chance they were anything like "Oh, this lovely, caring man who has never abused me, I think I'll just hack off his dick without provocation!"

Incidentally, the other "top stories" from the NBC-affiliate website (which apparently doubles as the Randy Pedagogue Network) are:

Local Female Teacher Accused Of Sex With Boy
Female Texas Teacher Charged In Sex Case
Tennessee Gym Teacher Faces Sex Charges
Florida Teacher Using Insanity Plea In Sex Case

More Super-Fucking Sexist Bullshit

The best goddam hamburger ever grilled by anyone, honky or Negro

In Austin, where failure to own a grill is a felony, there are only six or seven hours per year when it's too cold for a cookout. The Twisty Test Kitchens have operated outside the law long enough! A few days ago we finally acquired our Lodge Outpost Cast Iron Grill and matching stand.

Thus did I eat this, the best goddam hamburger ever grilled over glowing coals by anybody in the history of the world and that's no joke, while looking for something to watch on TV. I saw that the Austin Music Network's "Women Who Rock" show was on.

The Austin Music Network is a joke. Every time I turn it on it's a video of drunk rawkboys live at Emo's or some other dump club. The production values of these videos reflect the sweeping artistic vision of the drunk girlfriends who shoot the footage with their HandyCams.

Yet I was curious about this Women Who Rock show. It's supposed to be "an hour packed with estrogen." I don't know what estrogen has to do with music.

The stubborn persistence of the Vagina-Ghetto ideology* in the super-fucking sexist music world has long chapped the Posey-Smith hide. In spite of this I clung to a tattered shred of hope that this show would have some redeeming content. Maybe not Eartha Kitt at the Village Vangard, but possibly the Bangles, or Sleater-Kinney.

So I clicked on Channel 15. It turns out that Austin Music Network's idea of women who rock is the Flashdance song (she's a maniac maniac on the floor) over a clip of the bouncing Flashdance buttocks, close-up, looped, and afflicted with cheesy psychedelic video effects applied in post by some stoner pig. The buttocks bounced relentlessly for the entire duration of the maniac maniac song.

Austin Music Network's Vagina Ghetto accounts for 1/167th of their total dude-centric programming hours per week. I blame the patriarchy.

______________________________
* Vagina Ghetto/Vagina booking (thanks Kristeen Young) : a method of programming, whether for broadcast or live performances, wherein female entertainers are lumped together, usually under some bogus guise of "Grrrl Power!" or "Celebrating Women's Empowerment" or "Dueling Divas!" for the purpose of enbiggening the male audience. The audience for these programs is largely male owing to the male's legendary enthusiasm for confusing any woman on a stage with a stripper, and to the female's socially-conditioned fear and loathing of her own kind.

Insane Austin

Enchiladas Tres Marias at La Paloma, Austin

La Paloma, I am sorry to say, is in a strip mall on Bee Caves Road. The strip mall is an enormous, baking-hot asphalt parking lot. Around the edges is a single long, low, soul-sucking building, with a Taco Bell on one end and a UPS Store on the other. Few man-made structures are as ugly.

Austin inhabitants appear to readily accept the brutalization commerce has wrought on their picturesque hills. This behavior is insane. An Austinite has no use for a Taco Bell. There are 4231 places to get good tacos.

Further west on Bee Caves Road lie some of the prettiest rolling hills on Earth. Until recently, you couldn't swing a dead cat out there without hitting a magnificent vista view or a patch of wild flowers or a herd of white-tailed deer. Then developers got hold of it. The hills are now covered with water-guzzling golf courses and a plague of fake Tuscan villas starting at $500K. Few man-made structures are as ugly.

Open Letter To The Fucktards of Barton Hills

One of the gazillion untrained loose dogs in Barton Hills
whose ass can be kicked by Zippy

To the fucktard on Juliet St with the cell phone and the large white untrained loose dog, and also to the fucktard on Ashby Ave with the cell phone and the large black untrained loose dog, and to the fucktards on Melrose with the medium-sized red untrained loose dog, and to the fucktards across the street from the Melrose fucktards whose untrained loose fox hound yaps insultingly at passers-by, and to the fucktard hippie chick with the Peruvian beanie and the dirty baby and the untrained loose yellow lab, and to my fucktard neighbors in the cul-de-sac whose myriad untrained loose dogs poop in my yard:

Would it kill you to keep those untrained dogs on fucking leashes?

I ask because every single goddam day my trained, leashed dog Zippy and I go out sauntering along the public by-ways. Who do we see but you, infesting your yard with your untrained loose dog, lying on your cell phone to some soccer mom from your book club about how well your kid is doing in school. You observe our approach. Your untrained loose dog bolts toward us, often assuming an attack posture. You call your dog half-assedly, but naturally it ignores you since it knows even better than I do what a huge fucktard you are.

Thus, though I find it distasteful, I am forced to interact with you.

"Hey," I shout, "would it kill you to control your untrained animal?"

You look at me like I am something that crawled out of Monsanto's Experimental Bog, and reluctantly commence yelling your untrained loose dog's name. Flapping your arms, you chase it down with some difficulty. When you finally catch the dog, you give it a couple of good whacks. Good job! Dogs totally respect people who hit them!

Anyway, I wanted to let you know that it's just a matter of time until there is a dog fight. Your dog will lose this dog fight. Just an FYI.

Meatload

Tiny meatloaf, puffy potatoes with Boursin, edamame salad. From Central Market

Reader Steve H from the UK writes:

"Meatloaf? is this the National dish of America? what's in it? Can't think of anything in England even remotely similar."

Steve H is responding to photographic evidence from the Twisty Morsel Institute suggesting that I eat a lot of meatloaf. This idea appears to blow his mind.

What blows my mind is that Steve H has never heard of meatloaf.

Everyone--by which I mean, everyone whose family motto is "vive la difference!"-- is wringing their hands because the world is turning into one big strip mall. Snow White and Bambi live in Times Square and when you sail into Rio you see golden arches instead of Sugarloaf and they're razing McMurdo Station in Antarctica to put in a Wal-Mart. Well, Steve H is proof of how small the world really isn't. Here's a guy who lives only a couple thousand miles away, in a civilized country where a species of English is spoken, yet he has no connection of any kind with a dish over the delicious end piece of which any child of American Methodists, and probably Presbyterians too, has fought with her sister a hundred times.

Steve H probably grew up eating whelk pudding.

So it's not a McWorld after all. Not yet, anyway. Pockets of regional eccentricity survive. The proof is in the loaf!

I offered to send Steve H my Nana's recipe for meatloaf. He has remained silent on the matter.

Happy as a Clam

Clam stew

4 out of 5 spinster aunts agree: there are times when it is impossible to look on the bright side of life without a big bowl of clam stew at your side.

Pathos and The Original Queen of Feel Good

Porn: what patriarchy demands of 48-year-old actresses
in return for 15 more minutes. Farrah, airbrushed into
submission in 1995

From my new favorite guilty pleasure website, the Mainichi Evening Whirl, comes this story on poor Naoko Iijima (Japan's "Original Queen of Feel Good") and her tragic comeback bid. Now that she's 36, the calls have naturally slowed to a trickle, so Naoko's going to remind everyone that she still exists with a nude scene in a TV show called "Filthy Tongue."

You know a female celebrity is washed up when pornography is her idea of a comeback bid. Farrah. Tiffany. Debbie Gibson. Don't stop loving me! Use my sexy Playboy spread as a receptacle for your furtive ejaculate!

..........................................

TV is so engorged with T&A that this Tokyo TV flunky, holding forth on poor Naoko's casting couch career, confuses it with acting:

"'Iijima recently developed an aura of somebody who seems to have settled down," a TBS insider tells Asahi Geino. "But it's easy to forget that she got to the top only after serving terms as a motor racing grid girl and a swimsuit queen. She used her fabulous body to get her breaks. They're as rare as hen's teeth now, but the photo collections she brought out at that time have got some pretty horny shots in them. I'd say her decision to do these spicy sex scenes comes from wanting to show she's raised a level of her acting ability.' "

..........................................

On second thought, maybe Farrah's dementia is kind of understandable. I mean, she did shack up for 15 years with a more or less professional misogynist. And as one of the pioneers of the family-style porn movement of the 70's, she'd been doing nothing but titillation for the past 20 years. Even her "serious" work was chick-victimization porn: in The Burning Bed (1984), she portrays a domestic abuse victim seeking vengeance, and in Extremities (1986) she portrays a rape victim seeking vengeance. Were you trying to tell us something, Farrah? Something about vengeance, perhaps?

I'm just saying that, maybe, when at nearly 50 years of age she did that desperate "holiday pictorial" in Playboy, Farrah's judgement was a teensy bit clouded by a lifetime of exploitation. She wouldn't be the first woman in history to believe she would cease to exist if men stopped wanting to pimp her.

Tokyo's Perv Fansite

Suicidal pop idol Masako Mori

Top headlines in today's Mainichi Daily News:

• Kiddie porn offender 'glad' to be arrested
• Teacher pinched for distributing nude doctored photo of student
• Man molests elementary schoolgirl because she was 'type'
• Accused rapist slapped with fresh assault charges
• 4 soccer players handed suspended sentences for molesting girl
• Suicidal pop idol pops pills as ill pops practically pops off
• Chinese geisha give slanted view of Japan's oldest professionals
• Deserted daughter causes howls when she bolts from 'whipped dog' kennel
• Flogged Queen of Pop becomes damsel in distress
• Pervy professor's upskirt inspections expose cracks in pillar of society
• Mika swings to 'Wobbly Tits, Tiny Waist and Bouncy Hips, Let's Share Them All Around'

If It's Glueless, You're Clueless

Killing two birds with one magnet: Behold the Limited Edition
Pray For Our Troops Ribbon Magnet, $2.99 at bwild.com

I got my boxers in a bunch while contemplating what my internet friend Becker calls "war magnets"--those ribbon-shaped bumper accessories without several of which no slightly frayed Texan Ford dare roar through the suburbs.

Nothing in American culture, except footwear, shouts "This is a physical manifestation of the ideals of the cult to which I belong!" louder than the automobile. Of course this is no newsflash. Studies have shown that Subaru Foresters are inhabited exclusively by liberal arts academics, and one need look no further than middle-aged white male CFOs to see who's cruising for hookers in (weather permitting) the Porsche 911s. Also, one is required by law, within 6 minutes of moving to Central Texas, to purchase an F-150.

Bumper stickers, such as the popular "I Heart Carbs," refine the basic automotive message to specify the particular worldview of the driver-- in this case, someone who hearts carbs.

Thus is the bumper sticker no mere trifle. It is not for every idle whim or passing fancy. It requires a deep and abiding commitment to affix one's innermost slogans to one's vehicle with semi-permanent adhesive. This semi-permanence infuses the proclamation with particular gravitas. Who among us has not been moved to the core by a stickerized admonition to Visualize Whirled Peas?

But these magnets. They're a different species. Why, they're not even glued on! They require no reflection, no conviction, no commitment! They're a vulgar fad, the vehicular version of stirrup pants. They're emoticons for the car, devoid even of the Smiley Face's vapid sentimentalism, signifying nothing.

Becker says that people slap'em on sideways so they'll resemble Jesus fish. It is my contention that such advanced conceptualization is beyond the very limited scope of people who support war magnets. I back this hypothesis with the observation that the magnet orientation is never entirely horizontal, as a Jesus fish would be, but rather at a sort of awkward, unpleasant angle (see above). This puzzled me until I realized that the peculiar positioning allows the self-righteous, bossy-ass slogan itself to be parallel to the bumper. These folks aren't taking any chances that their special message will be obscured by a design flaw.

Of course, the ubiquity of war magnets ensures that the special message is never actually read anymore. The symbol itself is commonly interpreted as "We Are Sanctimonious Fucktards Who Hate Women, Negroes, And Liberal, Educated Fags."

Fortunately, there is an anti-war-magnet cult, and I am happy to say it has spawned its own school of bumper sticker thought, which runs more or less along these lines:



People love to belong.

Football Head Baby Chaps Hide

Jerked chicken on a bun with orange-chipotle mayo, arugula salad, grilled plantain

I was half-watching that show "Family Guy" while jerking this chicken last night. I know, I know. "Family Guy" is so crappy there's hardly any sport in mocking it. But sometimes I half-watch crappy shows I hate because I am too indolent to find the remote. This contingency leaves me no choice but to mock as best I can with inferior material.

Besides the patriarchy, there is no one to blame but myself.

Speaking of blaming the patriarchy (as you know, when I am not blaming it I am speaking of blaming it) I was totally repulsed by the episode's ending. The baby with the football head and the middle-aged male British voice--is there a more tiresome character on television?-- kidnaps a female cheerleader, binds and gags her with duct tape, and locks her in a stall in a men's restroom. Why not? It's the obvious plot twist for a cartoon comedy about American family life. But that's not even the most unsettlling part. No, that part occurs when a putative sexual assault provides the episode's punchline. Guy enters restroom, opens door of stall containing ducktaped cheerleader (depicted, I reiterate, writhing face down on public restroom floor). Guy observes aforementioned helpless nubile, leers, and delivers this line: "Dear Diary. Jackpot!" Cut.

The Beet Goes On

Corn chowder with squash, fennel, and bacon


Roasted beets in a shalloty vinaigrette with toasted sunflower seeds

It's too bad I don't run a restaurant, because if I did, and you came to it, you could order this for lunch, and a glass of Mer-Soleil chardonnay. You could turn to your rosy-cheeked companion (who is slightly underdressed), if you had one, and say, "this is the best fucking lunch I've had in several weeks." You would then, if you lived in Austin, decide to blow off the rest of the day, and go sit around on the pedestrian bridge over Town Lake to watch the swans and the city employess in motor boats digging up algae.

But I wouldn't open a restaurant for all the beets in China. It's just as well, because I would undoubtedly name it Zippy Restaurant, after my dog.

Succulence and Suckulence: A Dining Tragedy Involving American Idol

Giant sea scallops with apple bacon, tarragon cream, and fettucine

One of my internet friends was wondering recently how art can be justified while people are starving. But what I want to know is, how can "American Idol" be justified while people are eating?

This was the question I asked myself last night while getting outside these scallops. Ordinarily I bar reality--televised or otherwised--during dinner, but on this occasion the scallops weren't getting any hotter and the remote wasn't getting any closer, so I decided to risk it.

If, as the poet Cher once said, I could turn back time!

It turns out that watching desperate insane people--a distressing percentage of whom, I shudder to add, mistake crocheted ponchos for fashion accessories--go to pieces because a couple of retarded record producers let them slog through 4 bars of "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" on national television, this impedes the absorption of critical Twistessential flavoroids.

Undoubtedly it has been observed by divers gourmands more peevish than I that "American Idol" blows chunks, and not just because it fails to complement giant sea scallops in tarragon cream. It denigrates the eccentric. It rewards the trite. It enfeebles, with little apparent effort, the mind to such an extent that one almost gives a crap whether a halfwitted girl with blue eyeshadow makes it to her audition in time, as if the world isn't already sufficiently burdened with hacks in hooker outfits croaking out Stevie Wonder songs. My own noodle's complex machinery was so contorted by the banal tableau that I was soon immersed in a serious excogitation on the relative merits of three longhaired wankers who all mutilated "The Letter" with great vim. This, when I should have been thinking up words other than "succulent" to describe the scallops, which were, incidentally, a triumph.

My nerves were shot by the end of the episode.

All I can say is, it's a good thing that all art is not parsed by American Idol, or Nina Simone would never have made it to Hollywood.

Death and Fossil Fuel

Pan-roasted mahi mahi with fruit salsa

In keeping with my unholy tradition of absently absorbing television or radio broadcasts along with these little repasts, I got outside of this excellent fillet while listening to a horrible story on NPR about a toddler who got crushed to death by a giant boulder. The boulder was knocked loose by a strip miner's bulldozer. It smashed through the wall and crushed the toddler in his bed.

It goes without saying that gruesome freak accidents involving coal mines and toddlers are bad. What I want to know is, why the hell is anybody still mining coal? I mean, are we living in a Zola novel? When was the last time you burned a lump in your fireplace, or laid eyes on a steam engine? Never? That's what I thought. Everybody knows fireplaces and engines are all powered by nuclear fission.

The best and shortest and most horrible story about coal is The Bucket Rider.

Screws With Bacon and Zucchini and Tomato

White wine and goat cheese sauce, with a little sundried tomato.

NPR Chick Chaps Hide

Whole wheat pita with hummus, avocado, carrots, grape tomatoes, Kalamata olives, and kohlrabi sprouts. And suflower seeds. And a few drips of scallion oil.

Little did I know when I made this delicious hippy-dippy lunch that it would turn to ashes in my mouth. Harvard astronomy professor, shell collector, and amateur theologian Owen Gingerich was on NPR (audio here), explaining his view that, without some belief in "intelligent design," his only alternative is to view the universe as a "macabre, mechanical joke." The geezer--possibly afflicted with the same sentimental tic that caused Aristotle to gaze upon the infinite reaches of the heavens and announce "Earth is the center of the universe, by gum!"--is convinced that the cosmos is benevolently curated by a deity who "cares deeply about human beings."

Although nothing can blow my gaskets quicker'n hearing the words "intelligent design," this fusty scholar's public profession of faith is not what desensitized the Posey-Smith palate to the pleasures of kohlrabi sprouts. To his credit, he tried to make a point of insisting that his is a philosophical view, and not a scientific one. He came right out and opined that Intelligent Design as a political movement is no substitute for Darwinian evolution. But the theme was clearly too much for the NPR chick. Chapping my hide, she insisted on intoning the official American Media Liturgy on Intelligent Design, which consists of reminding everyone that there are "gaps" in evolution theory, while conveniently omitting to point out that in science, a "theory" is not some vague, crackpot flight of fancy advanced by dope-baked halfwits, but a hypothesis that has been confirmed by observation and experiment such that it is held to be a statement of general law or principle and is propounded as accounting for known facts.

What is the fascination with trotting out these grey-haired Men of Science--it is against the law to trot out women of science for this solemn duty--to expound on their personal looney beliefs? Is God more real if some fossilized old academic believes it? What's with Christians always trying to demythologize their mythology? Do they really think that, one fine spring morn, science will vindicate them, legitimizing their quaint prejudices and atavistic fantasies by proving in a lab that God is an American?

Twisty's Food Blog

Leftover Chicken Curry

After several minutes of agonizing consideration, I have decided to merge the Twisty Morsel Institute's daily findings with this all-purpose patriarchy-blaming blog. These food segments may be thought of as Twisty's Food Blog. Some may opine, "Just start a separate blog, Twisty!" But unto them I say, no. For a surfeit of blogs is the result of a blogulent mind.

Thus, you will witness, above, the chicken curry with cashews and cauliflower and broccoli and jasmine rice of two nights ago. I ate it while listening to The Osmonds "Yo-Yo." I desperately wanted to cover "Yo-Yo" in my last band, but the ditty held no fascination with those white-belt-wearin' poseurs.

Music That Doesn't Suck

My hero, Detective Tutuola

On my new iPod, "Body Count" has racked up the most plays so far. You remember. Original Gangster Ice-T wonders conversationally what it would be like to live on the Cosby Show, where cops come to get your cat out of a tree and all your friends die of old age. Poor Ice-T. He actually lives in South Central L.A., where, he points out--perhaps losing his temper a bit--shit ain't like that.

In fact, it's REAL FUCKED UP. [neener neener neener neeeener]

Body Count freaked everybody out in 1992. Black dudes? Playin' metal? Get outta here! When I worked at Blueberry Hill (where all the black dudes were kept in the kitchen), Joe Edwards banned this song during the dinner hour, perhaps surmising that angry black dudes don't excite white suburban burger-lust as well as Elvis does.

This sprightly number, on which I play air bass, contains a drum solo and pompous rawk guitar wanking. Fortunately, it overcomes these obstacles and is a masterpiece. That's because when Ice tells Beatmaster V to take these muthafuckas--that's us!--to South Central, the drums sound like a rain of hellfire, and Ice gives them a sort of mirthless laugh. As for the guitar wanking, it's OK, too, because Ice is now mournful over the body count, going "No! No!" every so often, which is just what I do during guitar solos.

"Body Count" is political, it's got a swell groove, and you totally identify with the guy's anger and desperation even if you're white as the driven.

Fun Fact: Before Ice-T became a famous badass-turned-TV-detective, his name was Tracy Marrow.
Fun Fact: Because freedom of speech is a fantasy, it's pretty hard to find a copy of "Cop Killer."

CDs Now Have Red "No" Circle On Them

Two unrelated events have collided in my personal sphere. One: I broke my iPod. Two: while rootling in my attic-ful of old St. Louis stuff for a pair of wool pants because it's so god-danged nippy up in this mug, I stubbed the Posey-Smith toe on a box of CDs that has been packed away, awaiting removal to our eventual destination. I haven't played a CD in three years.

I know what you're thinking, but this is no squishy, anti-iPod-backlash-I-was-reunited-with-the-dear-old-technology-and-I've-never-been-happier tirade. The five hours that elapsed between my having unintentionally smashed the old iPod on the cold hard ground, and the illumination of the emergency replacement iPod's green "battery charged" light, shining like a welcoming lamp in a window on a snowy eve, these were five hours of unspeakable emptiness.

The iPod is so wonderful. CDs are so dumb.

I know this because I've been importing, importing, importing that rediscovered box of CDs since yesterday. My new iPod has 3 times the capacity of the old one, and as I sat massaging the stubbed toe, I found myself eyeing those forgotten CDs with a mixture of dread and fascination. Soon my Aeron CD-importing-chair and my fanny were as one.

I can't wait until I am rid of the fucking things forever.

Unlike LPs, for which a case involving sentiment and the aesthetic qualities of packaging can be made, CDs suck in every way. The jewel boxes that aren't missing altogether are always broken. They feel cheap and crappy in the hand. They collect dust. The liner notes are too small to read. The sound they make when opened or flipped through is unpleasant. Shelves designed to store them are ugly. Because the music business is all paranoid, they psychotically seal CDs in impermeable wrappers that are impossible to penetrate without plastic explosives. People who work in CD stores make you give them your backpack before they'll let you in, and then they pretend they're not scrutinizing you and your purchase with a dilettante's critical beady little eye. CDs suck.

But the iPod is magnificent. The iPod fits in the average human ankle holster. The iPod does not judge. Its elegant little clickwheel. Its shiny steel case. Its 60 endless gigabytes.

So I've been importing, importing, importing. And I have a few observations.

1. That Peaches has a mouth on her.

2. There appears to have been a time in my life when I favored music by the sort of band who declines to put their name on the actual disc, preferring instead a blurry black-and-white art photo of some lone figure in the night, or a creepy doll. Or, in the case of my own band, fake plastic vomit. There further appears to exist in the universe some law or principle governing the jewel boxes of such discs. This law, or principle, states that these jewel boxes cannot exist in the same locality as the discs, lest the identity of the discs be conveniently revealed.

3. I never, ever need to hear "Burning Down The House" again.

4. My new iPod has a color LCD. I can put the album art right on there! And pictures of my dog!

5. Attention Fred Friction! I have your copy of Small Ball Paul's "You In Flames"!

5. It turns out I like music after all. Thanks, iPod!