Beans, Beans, the Magical Fruit

Gloria Rumpcocke on Hallowe's Eve Sluttery

2009-10-31T12:04:00.001-07:00

For a while I have pottered with a book called Gloria Rumpcocke's Guide to Being a Goddam Lady, a filthy and imperious overeducated drunken old harridan's guide to being, well, a goddam lady. Although I keep Gloria's musings close to the chest, after a brief spaziergang through People.com's photos of the day, where celebrities' slutbag halloween costumes revealed almost as much waxed hallway as a public psych ward, I'm moved to leak Gloria's wise take on the holiday.

Enjoy her. She's a huffy, rude bag but she knows things.

Sophie Monk: Ladybug? Or Deranged Creole Whoreapillar?

Like a ping-pong paddle that’s fallen into a pile of dog poop, Halloween has two sides, one perfectly clean and the other quite filthy. For my European readers, perhaps I should explain: Halloween is I think originally the Devil’s birthday and it’s all about scaring people and lighting a lot of gourds on fire. American children are sent door to door to beg for candy, dressed like little witches originally, although these days you have the impression that all the characters from Nickelodeon, Disney and the Cartoon Network have leapt to life, ravenous for King Size Butterfingers. They ring your doorbell and then when you open it, they inquire whether you have in store for them a “Trick or Treat?” It’s quite rhetorical— they’re not wondering, “Well, what’ll it be, are you going to push a button and dump me through a trap door into a bin full of knives, or will it just be a Charleston Chew, and then I’m on to the next round of Russian roulette?”

The enterprise seems to have become quite professionalized, in fact— mothers screech up to the front door in minivans which burst open and shoot out a SWAT team of children with ergonomic plastic receptacles designed to accommodate as much booty as possible. Some children quite literally brandish the tiny guns and swords that accessorize their repugnant TV heroes (“The Adventures of the New Little Mermaid— She’s no pussy and she’s armed to the gills!” et cetera.) After you’ve dumped your Fun Size Assortment into their plastic buckets, you couldn’t get them to run any faster if you yanked up your skirts and waved your community garden in their pale little faces. They simply atomize, and leave nothing but a Chrysler Grand Caravan’s tracks-of-fire in your driveway. This is, of course, the suburban way. Who knows what the city-children do. I suppose they skip the nancing around and just rob people.

Well that’s the wholesome side of Halloween. Now for the filthy side. Let’s use the example of a college freshman. We’ll call her Tiffany. No slut, this Tiffany. No, she takes biology and she wants to be a nurse, you know a good, normal nurse who takes pulses and such, not the kind in the TV shows who might hand the doctor a scalpel every once in a while but whose main job seems to be emerging from janitorial closets ten seconds after the ravishing cardiologist with her paper hat cocked and half a yam out. No, Tiffany is the bedpan-changing sort. There is a gentleman living in Tiffany’s dorm, let’s call him Jim, and Tiffany always sees Jim and thinks that despite his bangs, gelled up vertically like the teeth of a bear trap, he’s attractive. And Tiffany knows she has a pert collegiate body that Jim would love to paw, but it's always hidden under this oppressive barrier foisted on us by civil society, a barrier called “clothing.” Along comes Halloween.

Well, I think you know what I’m getting at. Off comes the American Aereopostcrombie hoodie, and Tiffany dons a pair of heels, a teddy and a headband with devil horns or cat ears attached, and happily marches outside, confident that finally she will catch Jim’s eye. Countless women will do the same—teenagers, professionals, married, single, literate, disabled, Christian, Jew and – well, alright, maybe not Muslim. I suppose Islam’s got a pretty clear stance on Halloween sluts. But countless women, come October 31, see fit to dress like a 100% legitimate whore, in a whorehouse, full of customers who came to shop for a whore. And just because she puts a headband on her head ornamented with two little black triangles, she may say she is a “cat” for Halloween. But let us examine: what are the primary characteristics of a cat? Does a cat have a barely-covered human vagina? Nnnoooooo. Does a cat have a black lace bra full of human booby? Nnnnoooo. Cats are furry, mackerel-breathed quadripeds, last time I checked and if Tiffany wanted to be a cat, she should have glued fur to the length of her entire body and practiced kicking dirt backwards over her craps.

This— forgive me— diatribe comes from my concern, primarily, for women who lose all sense of their dignity on Halloween, even though on Oct 30 or Nov 1 they would certainly never trail the sidewalks looking like they’d run out in the middle of a diabolical dominatrix session to feed the meter. If concern for ladylike behavior is not enough to motivate a young woman to keep her clothes on come the Devil’s birthday this year, do remind her that she’s liable to catch cold in a child's crotchless wetsuit in late October, and nobody wants to bang a slut with a runny nose. Well, that’s not quite true. Stress the dignity part, I suppose.

Paris: A little catch-up

2008-08-21T09:42:00.001-07:00

Are you wondering why I've been in Paris for 3 months without blogging once? You wouldn't be alone. I've had some queries. Granted, no one "reads" this blog any more than one might "keep an eye on" Haley's comet or "track" bigfoot. Still. It seems, if you know me, like there's somethin' exciting happening and I'm not spilling to Beans.

So even though I don't believe in a correlation between life lived and life blogged about, here are some tidbits.

1. I live above a Subway. Not the means of transportation, the means of Fake Bread Waft. The Fake Bread Waft in France is identical to the one in America. It's sweet and nasty and comes at a very powerful waft, like a red-bell-pepper fart by a great dane.

2. Speaking of Danes, Amsterdam is my new favorite place (a 4 hour train from Paris) and NO, not because of the whores and drugs. But not despite them either.

The Dutch make a great, simple mint tea.

and a world-class stoned retard.

3. The Ferris wheel in Paris, in the jardin de Luxembourg, cycles slowly for 20 minutes, goes really high, and is, despite being jammed in a weird makeshift carnival, awesome. This is how I felt about it:

4. Paris hates people over 26. Everything is cheaper if you are "moins de 26 ans." Under 26. But if you, like me, have lacked the vigilance to keep yourself from creeping all the way into 27, well then, Missy, you are going to have to pay twice the price for that museum admission. This may seem like small beans, but at the SNCF, a train ticket that ran my 25 year old infant boyfriend 50 Euro ran me over 100. Keep the olds from traveling! Those creaky 27-year-olds will stink up the train with Jergens lotion and death!

Just waiting for a French bureaucrat to come riddle them with bullets.

Often, student IDs and student discounts will not be extended to us over-26s. "You may still be a student at 27," they seem to say, "but that's your fault." If you are still enrolled in some sort of graduate program at 27, attempting to chisel knowledge into the petrified sap of your mind, you deserve no more public support than a grown man who insists on diapers.

"I'm just really busy"

5. Olympic commentators on French TV say "Oooh la la" a lot. It's great when you're watching something like Judo or Weight Lifting, something really brutish and grunty where one 400-lb Ajerbijanian lifts something heavy and three French commentators trill out three OVERLAPPING, fugue-like "Ooh lalalallalal ooohlalalala OH LA, LALALALA."

Bobbe Costasse, in today for Franque Gifforde.

Get hungry for a food post at some point.

Terror in the Skies, Culinary Edition

2008-05-08T09:31:00.000-07:00

20,000 miles above the Atlantic a few days ago, I was asked "Beef and Potatoes or Lasagna?" A Sophie's Choice for some people, but not for me! I love airplane food. I love how compartmentalized it is. Unless they ever actually drop those yellow breathing cups from the ceiling, it is the only thing about air travel that really makes me feel like an astronaut. "I have to eat this glutamine-and-salt-ration, it's the only thing I'll get for hours." I also like limited choices. I hate the BLT-restaurant concept of choosing your own sauce and sides for a dish. Isn't that the expert's job? I don't go into the Mercedes factory and tell them where to put the aluminum. I'm ranting. This has nothing to do with the story.

"Lasagna, please," I said to the stewardess. I get my lasagna. It's awesome. It's so fake. Teddy Ruxbin could digest it. I enjoy picking at my plastic blanket of cheese for a few minutes-- a good 5 minutes-- and suddenly I begin to hear raised voices.

"Chicken!"
"Are you sure this is beef?"
"Funny kind of beef!"

The lady behind me is a real loudmouth, she's been yucking it up with the stewardess the whole flight, so when the stewardess realizes something is up with dinner, she goes to the yucker-upper behind me to check in. The yucker-upper, by virtue of being obnoxious and possibly drunk, has become the passengers' representative. She is our congresswoman.

"What's going on here?" the stewardness asks Congresswoman Vodka-Breakfast. The Congresswoman alerts her that the beef "seems a lot like" chicken.

At this point people have been eating for 5 minutes. I don't know who started it but someone cleared the whole thing up by shouting "It's chicken-beef!"

The stewardess picked up on this as a plausible solution. "Haven't you heard? It's a new thing invented by the French! CHICKEN-BEEF!"

The Congresswoman and her aides love this. This is a huge hit.

"Chicken-beef!"
"CHICKEN-BEEF!"
"BEEFY CHICKEN"
"BEEFEN"
"CHEEF"
"BEEFEN-CHEEF"

The stewardess then leans in to the Congresswoman and says, very loud, opening her body out slightly to the others across the aisle and around her to announce that this is a Shakespearean aside, "HEY MA'AM, HOW'S THE FISH??"

"THE FISH!"
"HOW'S THE FISH!"
"HAHAHAHAHAHA [deep smoker's hack] AAAAAAHAHAHAHA"
"FISH-CHICKEN-BEEF"
"BEEF-CHICKEN-FISH"
"FICHEEFEN"
"CHIFEEF"
"WAAAAAAAA HAHAHAHA [frontier-style whooping cough] HA! HA!"

At this point I was cowering in my seat. I wanted desperately to know what this slab of protein looked like, such that it might take 5 minutes of dining for a passenger to realize it was masquerading as a different meat. Maybe everyone realized right away but did not care. What would they do, send it back and demand the beef they'd so tantalizingly been promised? "You got me all worked up for a rib-eye. This is just really disappointing." I get the feeling that airplane food is all basically made out of old tennis shoes, that there is a side wing of the Nike factory where they stamp out American Airlines broccoli; that maybe there's not much difference between air beef, air chicken, and Air Jordan.

The fact that the meat was fake and undecipherable was not surprising, nor scary.

The scary part about this was the cabal, the camaraderie that immediately emerged around the chibeef. There was a hearty, mocking laugh at the French: "Haven't you heard? They invented a new meat!" There was the general, bonding insouciance over the fact that the meat was indistinct. "HAHA. CHICKEN-BEEF. WHO CARES. WE ARE LAUGHING. VODKA BREAKFAST. LAUGH LAUGH LAUGH. COVERS THE SADNESS. SADNESS OF MY LIFE THAT I AM RETURNING TO. HAHAHAHAHAHA BEEF-CHICKEN. WE ARE BEST FRIENDS, ALL OF US WHO LAUGH AT MEAT VAGUENESS TOGETHER. IF ONE OF US WERE FRENCH, WE WOULD KILL HIM NOW WITH OUR PLASTIC KNIVES. HAHA. WHO ORDERED THE FISH?? WHO ORDERED THE FISH?? THE STEWARDESS KNOWS US DEEPLY. NOTHING MATTERS EXCEPT THE DEEPNESS OF OUR INTIMACY OVER THE NOT CARING ABOUT MEAT SPECIFICITY!!!!!"

I huddled in my seat, covered in my blanket, pretending to sleep. I was not one of them. I did not want them to kill me because I was not of the beef-chicken crew. I watched a Nicholas Cage movie called National Treasure. I liked it. It was cheap and shitty and dumb, but I was scared to laugh out loud. I thought the Congresswoman might hear me, and want to bond.

And honorable mention goes to...

2008-04-20T10:47:00.000-07:00

Noony Woman Awards

2008-04-20T09:20:00.000-07:00

I was in Dominick's the other day-- you know, the big, cheap grocery store where you have a zero percent chance of finding kefta but Cap'n Crunch is $2.99 for 3 boxes roped together with film strip from the newest Pixar infant acid trip-- and I did a doubletake when passing this book, sitting on a shelf next to puppy stickers and greeting cards:

I emailed my friend Lang immediately. "The crimson velour shirt!" I pointed out. "The HUGE smile! The 75-lb basket of fruit atop her Eastern-European Female Member of Parliament hair!" Books that are simultaneously about COOKING, LIVING, and LOVING belong in any noony library, to say nothing of the woman's name: Crescent Dragonwagon. She's awesome. Go read her web page.

"Welcome to your future, Langbein," Lang wrote back. My point exactly. A woman comfortable with her extreme nooniness. Thumbs up. Let's go buy Nestle's Symphony bars and write some prose poetry outside in celebration.

But Lang continued. "This is my future," she wrote and linked to this video of model/actress Brenda Dickson giving some barbituates-addled fashion and beauty advice from her $2,200 Hollywood home:

So far we have a handful of amazing ladies here: Crescent Dragonwagon (enough said), my mind-reading bestie Lang, this frosted tart of a beauty queen; time to rent Prince of Tides and have a noony lady love-in.

But WAIT. THEN, I clicked on a sidebar YouTube link to a PARODY of Brenda Dickson, and I found my TRUE hero. Lady, whoever you are that narrated this parody, my Hanes Her Way cotton support bra salutes you.

This might be the best thing I've ever seen on YouTube. Do you need to watch it again? I do.

This concludes a very special apex in my life as a noonypants-in-training.

Announcement: My Trash Is On Your Dashboard

2008-03-17T10:58:00.000-07:00

Hey homies.

I've decided to start posting my idiotic notebook scrabbles for your enjoyment, and by your I mean almost nobody's. As of posting my first one 5 seconds ago, I realize that my handwriting makes words look like math problems and will try to rectify this in future, maybe with the aid of a fourth grader or a ruler or mood stabilizers.

Buon apetito, and keep your pants on,
Jules

Imaginary Friends: Meet Alessandro!

2008-03-17T10:53:00.000-07:00

Is There an Opening on the Nobel Committee?

2007-10-11T10:33:00.001-07:00

A few days ago in his blog, Diner's Journal, Frank Bruni wrote about restaurant names. Sometimes ridiculous, he says, but sometimes satisfyingly clever, as in the case of a newly opened New York restaurant specializing in small plates and bar food, called BARFRY. Or, to be fair, BarFry.

I agree that there are names that make zero sense or piss me off. To the Wicker Park restaurateurs who named their restaurant Ear Wax Cafe, I can only say, What, Diarrhea Central was taken? What are you thinking?

But of all the restaurants in New York, to come out and praise BarFry was amazing for the following reasons:

1) It literally contains the word "barf," and looks like "Barfy."

Thanks, Internet. I KNEW you'd find something creepy and disgusting!

2) It is a pun on the term "bar fly." Hence, it evokes both

an infectious pest, the fly

and the subject of the metaphorical term, a lazy dirty drunk

3) The specific way it puns on "bar fly" with "Bar Fry" makes it sound like someone making fun of a Japanese person speaking Engrish. As someone who has never EVER EVER answered her cell phone "Euuuuh-- HERRRROOOO???" I find this totally offensive. Just kidding! But I find it brazenly, cluelessly impolitic for Bruni to give it the Clever Name Award, especially when the place apparently does have a menu slant toward Japanese. What's next, Frank, Most Tasteful Placement of Shar-Pei Puppies Award to David Hasselhoff?

(I'm fairly certain this is not photoshopped, either. Just pure, glorious, well-lubricated documentary.)

In short, WELL PLAYED, Frank. The best-named restaurant in NY is Barfry, but only because Throw-Up Rat Chink hasn't opened yet.

One more time:

Ughhhhh

Don't worry, you don't need special training

2007-10-09T16:39:00.000-07:00

Bye, everyone.

I am leaving to go become a scientist. I know what you're thinking. "What kind of scientist, Jules? The cancer kind? The AIDS kind?"

No, friend. I am going to be the kind that gets in a pair of goggles and slowly makes friends with a baby rhesus monkey.

Forgive me

2007-08-16T03:52:00.000-07:00

I know I am really late on this tip. I made this joke in my head months ago. But this seems like as an appropriate moment as any.

DINING BRIEFS??? The New York Times decided to call its short reviews DINING BRIEFS??

A BRIEF, singular, is a letter, a short missive. But when you pluralize it, it means:

Tight man-panties.

I'm not sayin' there's anything wrong with manties. How else would one funnel one's kibbles into a tight pair of white denim shorts? But I am saying that the term "DINING BRIEFS" is one of the world's most hilarious accidents.

Right up there with the time Coco ate a milkshake and made a twosie on the sofa.

Give me a Fucking Break

2007-01-28T14:10:00.000-08:00

Imaginary conversation between a devil and an angel on each side of Iron Chef Cat Cora's head:

Angel (crunching into a raw broccoli floret): I just feel like we don't get the respect the other Iron Chefs do.

Devil (Spreading mayo on a deep-fried Charleston Chew): Word. I mean, Flay and Molto have these sick reputations and achievements and we just seem like the Equal Opportunity hire. We have to do something about it.

Angel (moving into Flowering Shinto Lotus yoga position): Maybe if we just hold our own in the challenges, behave with dignity, and do some really great food, we'll make our own reputation over time! At least we'll stand out behaviorally from Flay, who's manners are less than...

Devil (scratching balls): Oh Flay's retarded. Yeah, he was raised by boxcar children. No doubt. But we'll never get by on performance alone. Even if we outclass these guys, we'll always get our jockstrap hiked up our ass in the locker-room after the battles by the chanting circle of big-guy chefs. No no. We've got to do something drastic.

Angel (drinking green tea): You mean like shave our vagina?

Devil (swilling Beam): Yes and no. I've got an idea...Who's the classiest person alive?

Angel: Nelson Mandella?

Devil: That asshole? Gimme a break. RACHEL RAY.

Angel: (visibly uncomfortable)

Devil: We'll follow in Ray's footsteps and make some skanky nudie photos. Plus, we got better jugs than Ray.

Angel: Well that's certain.

Devil: Done. Trust me on this. We'll have the respect of the Iron Chef locker room in NO TIME. Bite THIS pepper, Chairman!

Nothing says "I deserve respect" like jamming a can of spam in your canola-oiled cleavage!

Let's just hope Batali doesn't follow suit.

Laura Ingalls, but slightly Wilder

2007-01-25T11:45:00.000-08:00

When I go to the gorcery store, I deliberately avoid produce from California or South America and try to go for the stuff that comes from remotely nearby. This practice predated the whole e. coli business, and came more from my wanting to abide by the conditions of my idiotic, romantic conception of farm life that involves eating what you'd eat if you were Laura Ingalls Wilder and you called your Dad "Paw" and traded grain with Seminoles. Except sometimes you also have Luna Bars and Gatorade. It's a system, it works for me.

That's one reason I appreciate Whole Foods--even though an overwhelming majority of their produce is from California, they're very clear about where everything comes from and they've always got something or other from the vicinity. And by something or other, I mean cabbage.

That's right. I got through the fall pretty nicely-- lots of gourds, etc., but for the past few weeks I've been, like my distant Schwabian ancestors, subsisting pretty much on cabbage. Pickled, slawed, braised. Gnawed on raw over the evening's reading. If you looked in my purse right now, I'm sure you'd find a couple little purple threads of it, like the stray confetti of a 19th-century Russian serf celebrating the death of a locally menacing she-bear.

I see the stuff from California-- the big, plump, glossy green stuff. "Leeks?" I scowl. "Paw wouldn't have leeks in his root cellar in the middle of January." So it's a no. Whether Paw would have Colombian coffee, Camel Lights, Norwegian salmon and Pecorino is irrelevant. I'm sticking to my guns on the cabbage.

Grandmaw churning Diet Coke.

Remember the Needy

2006-12-07T07:41:00.000-08:00

No matter what I tell my therapist, there have been some effects of experiencing the Christmas season in a Jewish household, particularly in the decidedly Christian shire of Virginia.

My next door neighbors, the Antebellums.

In the absence of candy canes, Santa Claus myths and mounds of carefully wrapped presents under a fragrant evergreen tree, my heart gnarled around the only holiday the Torah threw at me: Hannukah. For those who haven't had the distinct pleasure of being gipped out of the clusterfuck of giving and receiving that is Christmas, Hannukah is not an important Jewish holiday. It ranks somewhere between Shavuot ("The holiday of corned beef and psychoanalysis") and Yom Ha-atzma-ut ("The holiday of ridiculing your child's clarinet skills") on our stupefying lunar calendar of religious festivals.

Don't get me started on Yom Sameach, with its ritual nerd costume.

Technically, there is no religious or cultural reason for giving presents on Hannukah, other than preventing bitter little present-less Jewish kids from growing up into bitter grownup converted Christian adults with holiday credit card debt and happy Jesus-loving children. My parents knew this, and also knew that they had future golf-themed Bar Mitzvahs to pay for.

So my brother and I were privy to increasingly sophisticated methods of justification for not getting real Hannukah presents. For instance, one Hannukah my parents planned a ski trip for after New Year's, and then wrapped all the gear they would have had to buy me anyway in 8 little gift packages placed next to the menorah. Day one: ski goggles. Day two: gloves. Day three: a key to their hotel room. I call bullshit! Presents are supposed to be unnecessary. I also distinctly remember my twentieth Hannukah, when my parents casually announced that my present that year would be "another year of college." That one really hurt, as I was stymied by the fact that 1) education truly is a gift to be cherished for all one's life, and 2) their fucking present cost $40,000. But I have a sneaking suspicion that they were already planning on completing the mission of putting me through the private university wringer; less clear is if they planned on having me graduate, drink $10 New York martinis for two years and move back home to apply for more expensive schooling.

90% of my daily caloric intake is olives.

My point is, everyone knows a Semite who feels the way I do. Maybe your Jew-friend shelters your assets from taxes, or keeps you from having to pay alimony. Maybe he or she sows that perfect cuff on your slacks or got you a 4-picture deal with Universal. Wherever you may find them, this Christmas take a moment to give them a real gift, not one made of hugs or with crayons, but a big fat fucking expensive electronic piece of shit from Brookstone that will break before President's day. After all, isn't that the Christian thing to do?

Somebody buy me this.

Speaking of Jerusalem artichokes...

2006-12-06T14:20:00.000-08:00

A woman lit a match on an airplane to conceal her farts and the plane made an emergency landing.

Great title: "Flatulence, not Turbulence..."

Dear Everyone Who Made Fun of Me For Buying Silk Long Underwear from LL Bean

2006-12-02T10:30:00.000-08:00

Bite me.

I am, in the words of Mrs. Doubtfire, "toooooastywarm."

Like these guys, minus the enormo-codpieces.

Sunchokes: What Saveur Is Too Polite to Mention

2006-12-01T15:48:00.000-08:00

Saveur just did a nice piece on one of my favorite rhizomes, the Jerusalem artichoke, aka the sunchoke. The author hinted that "the principle carbohydrate it contains...is inulin rather than starch, making [it] a lighter-tasting but less digestible alternative to an Idaho russet." (December 2006, p.32) Readers might gloss over this not knowing that the author is in fact referring to the nuclear fartpower these little nuggets possess. My mom told me that my grandparents grow them and have built up a "tolerance" but that they refuse to feed them to guests, considering it basically impolite to lace their dinner with gastrointestinal TNT. She warned that people have been known to "float away like a Zeppelin" after eating them. It's no joke. Or maybe it's the perfect joke.

Knock knock!
Who's there?
Sunchoke.
Sunchoke who?

Overheard in New York, Food Network Edition

2006-11-28T18:16:00.000-08:00

At Upper East Side bus stop.

Girl 1: I saw Batali and Giada di Laurentiis yesterday doing Italian Christmas on the Food Network.

Girl 2: How hard do you think Batali tried to bone her?

Girl 1: About as hard as you can try at anything that only takes one try.

Bobby: From Gordon Bombay to Boredom All Day

2006-11-27T18:57:00.000-08:00

The most kitchen-centric movie out right now is not "A Good Year", but "Bobby", Emilio Estevez' film about the Ambassador hotel on the night of Bobby Kennedy's assassination.

Makes ya wanna see it, right? WRONG. Read on.

Kennedy was shot in the kitchen, and among its 19,000 main characters are a kitchen boy, a grandiloquent chef played by Lawrence Fishburne basically reprising his role as cosmic know-it-all Morpheus in a white toque and chef's jacket, and Christian Slater, taking a break from feeling up strangers to play the dickheaded kitchen manager.

Notes on "Bobby":

- Like a really long, really bad episode of the West Wing; shot similarly, with that signature Sorkin nerd-who-does-heroin talkiness, and those long, ambulatory shots.

- Emilio Estevez should be kept very far away from FinalDraft Pro. For safety's sake, we should probably keep him away from typewriters, alphabet blocks, notepads and crayons. The dialogue was painful throughout.

- Elijah Woods is Madonna's illegitimate baby, and here's why. His eyes are that same insane fake blue, lit up from within like a Furby. He's got the same gap in his front teeth. Most convincingly, he speaks weird Madonna British English. Lohan looks like she's laughing at him through the whole movie.

- With the exception of Sharon Stone, who looks like she's been hosed down with tropical parrot poop, nobody looks remotely 1960's. Everyone-- notably Heather Graham and Joy Briant--looks like they just walked off the set of TRL, perfect contemporary style intact. This would not be a problem if Estevez didn't attempt to cut in with real documentary footage from that night at the hotel, footage of people that look so preposterously, bowl-headedly, mutton-choppingly 1968 that you can't possibly stitch the film and documentary together visually.

- Ashton Kutcher provided the only real fun as a douchebag hippie who induces two young campaign interns to take acid. It was like an episode of Punk'd within the movie. That devilish Ashton and his merry mischief makery!

If you really want to know about Bobby Kennedy's shooting, watch the PBS doc "The Kennedys". By the end of it, with both his brothers gone, it's impossible to begrudge Ted Kennedy his 11 a.m. Mai Tai. Or his 11:15, 11:22, 11:37 and 11:39 Mai Tais. Estevez, however, has no excuse for taking himself so seriously.

Even with the moustache of an abject pervert, he tries to take himself seriously.

Mayor Daly's Thanksgiving Salute

2006-11-27T18:53:00.000-08:00

Carson Daly, the Mayor of Doucheville, having nestled a cross-eyed plush turkey into the comfortable dent where his brain would have gone.

It's actually kind of sweet-- the khakis and the shitty studio are so humbling.

Stay Warm This Winter...Except Your Tits, They Can Freeze

2006-11-13T22:38:00.000-08:00

"You better watch out! I'm gonna throw this snowball at you! Tee hee! It's a perfect sphere. This is how I throw, I put my hand out palm-forward, like I'm turning a doorknob. It's not very practical, but then again, I'm at Base Camp 9 on the South face of Mount Kilamanjaro and I'm wearing a V-neck cut to the navel with my mams hanging out, so...wait, I forgot what I was saying..."

A Haiku About My Values

2006-11-11T22:32:00.000-08:00

Sixty-five dollar
Pasta machine: worth it. (A
Girl who won't buy soap.)

Burgess Meredith and Homemade Pasta

2006-11-03T22:14:00.000-08:00

I came home after one of the worst afternoons of my life and all I wanted was comfort food: a heaping bowl of pasta. I love the Italian restaurant on the bottom floor of my building, but the fun of it is the waiters that know you, the chalkboard specials and the $17 bottle of wine. Takeout is just overpriced Barilla in a lukewarm red sauce.

So I decided to make my own pasta. I found a recipe on Epicurious-- just 2 eggs, a cup white flour and a quarter cup of wheat flower, blended, kneaded, left to sit, and then rolled thin.

On my walk home earlier, I had decided that I needed to decompress, so I stopped by Walgreens to see if they had any movies, which they did. About 500 obscure kung fu titles, total anachronisms like "The Three Ninjas" (early nineties kids-grownup-ass flick) and blaxploitation favorites. Amazingly, between the crap, I found a double-feature: "Grumpy Old Men" and "Grumpier Old Men" on one DVD.

I don't have a pasta machine, but with a can of carnation evaporated milk, I rolled out my dough. "This is going to be a disaster," I thought, as I shot the can off the counter for the 5th time, my pasta looking like the gingerbread man's air mattress.

Somehow I pounded the dough out, with the full force of my body weight and nine or ten different implements-- forks and spoons, a pickle jar.

And "Grumpy Old Men" and the sequel both totally killed me, mainly the work of Burgess Meredith, who plays Jack Lemmon's crazy old 95-year old, chain-smoking, lecherous dad. They play outtakes during the credits, and it's worth buying the movie for the outtakes alone-- Meredith riffing all the filthiest lines is amazing, e.g.:

Lady: You've been to Hawaii? Which Island?
Meredith: Youwannalickapeepee.

And my pasta? Somehow, awesome. Although my wrists hurt.

Anyway, my own jagged idiot pasta and the best on-screen pervert of all time: I think I turned this crappy day around.

Congrats, Whitney! Remember when you were still on drugs and you made this?

2006-10-31T18:17:00.000-08:00

Whitney Houston announced her sobriety today. So Whitney, we celebrate your sobriety, just as once, you celebrated the fact that little children walk on balance beams and learn to swim. This video is like a stack of icing, sheets and sheets of icing, off of many cakes of footage.

Enjoy.

A tent of conscience over stakes of intellect...

2006-10-17T20:12:00.000-07:00

...over a wedding party of dizzying evidence, DJ'd by clarity.

May as many people read Michael Pollan's article in the Times as possible. And Mr. Pollan, I'm really sorry about the, uh, metaphor above. It's a compulsion.

The Mating Dance of the Celeb and the Starbuck

2006-10-12T14:28:00.000-07:00

There's something confusing going on. Or maybe something simple, and I've confused it. A picture is worth a thousand product placements (this genius montage via Jossip quite a while ago)

Celebrities are ALWAYS carrying Starbucks, and the WORST of them, the WORST, are Mary Kate/ Ashley Olsen. I weigh at least 300 lbs more than the both of 'em combined, and I don't need elephant-dumps of coffee in my hands at all times. I drink a small cup in the morning, made at home and carried in a geeky rubber thing, and then a refill around three. Even when I had money, I almost never got Starbucks because, c'mon, it's just BORING. That, to me, is a more compelling reason to avoid it, and shoot for a local brew, than the fact that it's burny and bitter and overpriced.

But back to the Olsens. I used to think that maybe the reason you always see celebs with Starbucks is because there are a lot of Starbucks AROUND-- it was statistical. But this photo (via People) of Ashley Olsen and her friend Chewbacca coming out a Paris Starbucks says to me that this shit is DELIBERATE.

WHY would you seek Starbucks out in Paris? Why is she always holding it? Does she have a "lifetime free coffee pass" from Starbucks, for all the valuable magazine placement? But why would Mary Kate Olsen care about free coffee? SHE'S A BILLIONAIRE. Even her 12 daily ventis don't make a dent (denti?) in her shaggy, oversized wallet. So why the Starbucks infatuation?

And obviously Mary Kate here is metonymic for the rest of the celebrities. But these stars make effortful, professionally-aided attempts to cultivate seemingly idiosyncratic style. (Again, Mary Kate swaddled in trash bags, accompanied by Hun) So why do they cling to a mid-brow, much-vilified corporate icon like Starbucks, more often seen in the hands of overweight mall waddlers? What do they get out of it? Is Starbucks the only coffee shop in LA?

Sites like this add to the confusion. Who engineers it? Is it not engineered? Do celebs just enjoy Starbucks?

And a related question: can Mary Kate's tiny heart, already working overtime to carry her enormous shawls, handle 800 fluid ounces of caffeine per day?

Best Situation Baked Ziti Has EVER Been In

2006-10-11T19:37:00.000-07:00

Beats sitting on the formica in Bensonhurst, don't it?

Like a cobra in a shopping bag

2006-10-11T19:28:00.000-07:00

Jesus, man, throw on a pair of Umbros or something.

I don't understand

2006-10-11T19:14:00.000-07:00

This summer, when I learned to make traditional Finnish pulla, I was dismayed. Even after baking delicious pulla five or six times, no local neighborhood Finns came with tarpaulin in hand to wrap me up and carry me home, plant me in front of a huge iron kettle, and call me "wife."

Now, I have begun to make my own rye bread regularly. This is not because I am some sort of obnoxious, esurient epicure: this is because I am scared of my neighborhood at night and I'd rather just bake the bread myself than wrestle a wigged-out hobo to get inside the grocery store. Plus, flour and water are much cheaper than bread.

But it's become more than defensive now; I'm emotionally attached to my rye bread. I don't come home to an empty house anymore, I come home to a ball of dough which has been rising expectantly, waiting for me to come home, punch it, and roll it around a little bit-- LIKE A WIFE OF MY OWN!!

But here's my question. Pulla was one thing. But rye bread? DAILY? I understand that I live on the 12th floor of a building with pretty tight security, again, surrounded by a moat of wigged-out hobos. But I'm a TEENSY bit incredulous that no woodsmen have come to club me in the head and lovingly drag me home by the hair to shave their backs and cure their moose. I think I deserve to get thrown across a threshold for this display of ur-Finn domesticity.

Well, until then, I'll just be here on this Laz-E-Boy, reading Soap Opera Digest.

Mommy's a scary mommy

2006-10-09T12:07:00.000-07:00

I know she's just been through something tragic, but has she also just been through a carwash of Vaseline??

Thanks, Big Guy

2006-10-05T14:21:00.000-07:00

Dear Julia,

I thought you would appreciate this hilarious insano.

Keep truckin'.

Love,

God

Starvin' Marvin

2006-10-03T16:35:00.000-07:00

People have been asking, "Now that you're in grad school, Jules, are you eating like an anorexic Cistercian monk?" (I paraphrase.) Away from my boyfriend/cook, away from the New York restaurants I loved, and most palpably, away from the professional life that afforded my indulgences, am I sitting on a rock by Lake Michigan, gnawing on my arm like a crazy cur?

The answer to that question brings me to about eighth grade, when my kitchen dabbling became a regular after-school workshop. Nevermind that I was obsessed with processed foods. (I loved the critical quest of adding water to Lipton packs and seeing what became of the various powders: Alfreddo? Garlic and Herb? They basically all tasted the same.)

Obviously, years of this shit has formed a chemical Lego palace somewhere in my colon. I shudder to think about it.

Anyway, why did I come home from school, drop my bag, and hit the pantry, selecting a robotic pre-pack of pasta powder and setting to work in my lab? Was it because I was a pig? Because I was so hungry from lacrosse practice? Taking over for my absentee parents? None of the above (except maybe the pig, obvie.)

No, the reason I cooked so furiously was because I WOULD ALWAYS RATHER COOK THAN DO MY HOMEWORK.

Which should explain why my fridge right now contains: spinach and turnip green soup, spaetzle, an apple tart, lentil stew, tzatziki sauce (WHY? I had dill, I had yogurt, and I'd rather roll in poison ivy naked than read more Foucault), and a chicken thigh with roasted apples. I've got a lot of reading to do tonight, which means a couple of squashes might get roasted, and I think we're in for an elaborate coffee drink or two. I can't help it. It's a compulsion. I think better when I know somethings bubbling or roasting or braising somewhere in the kitchen. I think it helps my brain braise.

Better than that BrainBraiser9000 I bought off QVC!

A Job for Mike!

2006-09-30T09:42:00.000-07:00

The other day I came accross this in one of my readings about 18th century Paris:

"Snippets from the most popular [pamphlets] would be compiled in semi-clandestine nouvelles a la main that supplied their elite subscribers with inside political news and gossip (these were a development from the earlier chasseurs de nouvelles, men employed by wealthy individuals to keep them up to date with the news....)"

CHASSEURS DE NOUVELLES??? Mike, as if your love of talc and irony hadn't spelled it out already, I think we can now safely confirm that you were born 250 years too late. You should be living in an era when you can be an aristocrat's hired mangossip.

As a poor substitute, you can just continue calling me when you see Haley Joel Osment at the Whole Foods, etc.

Head-over-wheels in love

2006-09-25T11:10:00.000-07:00

I never thought I'd be a biker. I'm not particularly locomotive. Uncomfortable at more than pedestrian speeds, utterly panicked by roller coasters and self-soiling on mopeds or motorbikes, I used to gasp at the sight of New York bikers. Part in awe and part in old-lady disgust ("the nerve!") I would watch them zip around delivery trucks, brave the West Side highway, cut around traffic like scissors clipping paper dolls. They were a different species of human, tougher and dumber.

But Chicago presents a different set of conditions for the cyclist. Streets are wider. Bike paths cover the city from North Side to South. The land is so flat that I found myself distractedly annoyed by having to walk along it, when I could be rolling on something. My apartment is a 13 minute walk from campus, but the idea of a 3 minute ride (= ten extra minutes of doing nothing at home!) bothered me like a pop-up ad whenever I left the house.

So I bought a bike. I purposefully concealed this from my family. They would no doubt have argued against it or given me long lectures on road prudence and basic Newtonian theory. But like the Egyptian chick finding moses in a picnic basket (Sorry, been a while since I read Mother Goose), I knew it had to be mine the second I saw it. I paid the previous owner of this red-brown Schwinn Cruiser a reasonable ransom and took off with the bike, which I rechristened Cherry Cola, to the surprising realization that I was positively FILLED with an unreasonable elation, a high. It would have been appropriate if Falcor's theme from the "Neverending Story" had blazed from the sky. I flew down the street, past the Museum of Science and Industry into the nature sanctuary behind it, around the big pond, and then over to the University campus and back home, feeling like a mythical combination of a grade-schooler and an eagle (a greaglooler.)

I'm still not going to be one of those sickos that slices around garbage trucks and zips down the highway. I clocked my ride to campus this morning at 8 min, which means I am only going SLIGHTLY faster than my walking speed. But who's counting? As Santa said in the Old Testament, "Texas is for lovers." I think Cherry Cola and I are in our own happy Texas.

Now maybe it's time to do some schoolwork, huh? Iron out my reference literature...

Oprah's nagging rasputin

2006-09-08T13:50:00.000-07:00

Who is this new slack-jawed sidekick of Oprah's? Dr. Robin Smith? I've seen her on a couple of times. This woman makes Dr.Phil look like a..well, a real doctor. Yo, where's that girl Nupur from Spellbound? 'Cause Dr. Robin Smith needs "logorrhea" spelled out for her, hard. Her sentences are 900 minutes long. Even Oprah's guest (abandoned by her husband) who is having her brain extracted and laid out before her in 5th grade psychobabble seems totally and completely bored.

I just caught her say "...the struggle of love that you surround yourself with..."

She reminds me of that type of friend that you go to when you just need to let it all out, but she reverses the flow and fills you with more empty pro-woman fist-pumping than Glorias Gaynor and Steinem combined. SHUT UP AND LISTEN.

"The 'Marriage' part refers to the inequal contract of hatred between man and woman. 'Lies' refers mostly to my doctorate degree."

The Last Grain of Fantasia

2006-09-08T10:24:00.000-07:00

Recognized world genius Sarah "Hundo" T. discovered the most amazing website I've ever seen. It was just hiding in the folds of the internet for so long, one little grain of sand at the extreme edge of a conceptual universe, waiting to be plumbed by an innocent, roving hand.

Jesus, I have to leave the house.

Nerd-Sun Courrier

2006-09-08T09:15:00.000-07:00

Dear The Economist,

Nobody likes a dork. OK? You need to give people a break. No, listen, I'm interested in synthetic biology, and I'm willing to have you catch me up on 40 years of DNA synthesis, computer technology, and the "mere pottering" that you call today's science of genetic engineering, but then you follow right up with the death of tolerance in the Netherlands, and this was all sheer moments after catching me up on the amoebal splits and mergers of the European baby food market. I'm just saying: can't we have a countdown or two? A Quick Tips box? A Hot/Not chart? You'd be surprised how one measley monthly feature called "Guy Without His Shirt" makes the serious business of Cosmopolitan (e.g. "How to Hose Down a Horn Dog") more palatable. I like the use of charts and graphs but come on, Economist, don't make me feel like I'm enduring the Quantitative portion of the SAT's. Boring grey and blue boxes stacked up like dry toast to express private equity investment as percent of GDP by country? Why not simply put a picture of a slutty woman shrugging, with the words "Private Equity Investment????" in block text over her crotch? Today's reader's need-- nay, expect-- visuals, not the black-and-white squiggly symbols back-to-back on every page of your dork report.

Don't be prideful, Economist. Listen to the wisdom. Time to tits up your journal a bit if you want to stay in the game. And THEN we'll all be willing to sit around a little more patiently and listen to why Felipe Calderon's Mexican presidential campaign is destabilized by blah blah blah percent acronym fact blah blah Other Country yamma yamma yamma peril.

RATE THIS BEEFCAKE!!! Then learn about whether the US Virgin Islands are sufficiently prepared for a terrorist attack. Bonus: 101 SEX TRICKS TO LEARN BEFORE YOU DIE!!!

Live Blogging the Food Network: Unwrapped

2006-09-07T16:36:00.000-07:00

Feh. Sometimes it's interesting. It's distracting knowing that Mark Summers is looking out over his fake diner set and wanting to right all the angles. The informational segments are so short, you don't really get into much. He just visited the NYC Barbecue block party and the consensus was that it was full of barbecue. Washinton's white horse, no?

I WISH THIS BOX WERE A PROTRACTOR, A PROTRACTOR I COULD APPLY TO LIFE

Live Blogging the Food Network: Alton Brown

2006-09-07T16:21:00.000-07:00

Alton is spazzing about vanilla. I don't think there's a better verb for what Alton does than spazz, except maybe 3-D spazz: he spazzes in every dimension. He attacks a thing with science, with sketch comedy, with fact, with lore. He's the fixed, terrier-like obsession of Jeffrey Steingarten with the incontrovertible knowledge of Harold McGee. Don't get distracted by the gimmickry-- we can all learn from Alton Brown, that spiky, gosling-haired goof. He takes nothing in a recipe for granted, seems to reexamine the basics of everything. He heated the cream for his creme brulee just now in a plug-in hot-kettle!

Right now he's doing a sketch where he's sitting in a limo between a fake movie executive and an oversize fake vanilla bean that looks like a black man's testicle.

Got to love this wacktard. Oh now he's using a power drill to core pears and screaming at the pear to die. Crazy bastard.

Live Blogging the Food Network: Rachel Ray

2006-09-07T15:34:00.000-07:00

Back to back episodes, right at mealtime.

(Dumping pre-shredded carrots into a salad) "I got these nice fresh veggies already prepped. It's one way of letting the supermarket do the work for ya!...Yum!" It makes me feel like she's going to make me line up in table groups and go to gym class. If she made noodle necklaces one day, I wouldn't be entirely surprised.

Her commercial food product use makes it less incongruous when the Network cuts to a commercial for Arbor Mist Orchard Fruits-flavored Chardonnay.

Live Blogging the Food Network: Rachel Ray

2006-09-07T15:13:00.000-07:00

OK, alright. It's easy to beat up on someone who's had a ton of success. The idea of a 30-minute meal? Doable. Easy. Digestible. Smart. So let's see this show through eyes that are not, at least initially, filled with scorn.

Pros: The concept. ... The kitche-- the kitchen's ok. In today's episode she's making Mac n' Cheese and sauteed chicken thighs. What's wrong with that? Mothers everywhere coud make that for their little ones, I guess.

Cons: I can't say exactly what it is that's so terrifying. Is it that she's so fucking perky it feels like she wants to stab you in the eyes? Is it the cutesy nicknames for everything (EVOO, GB, etc.)? Is it the apish giggle used to dull the afterpain of inane comments ("I love these li'l squirt bottles! [apish giggle]")? Is it the food itself, basically blameless but never very appealing? Hm.

I don't know what to say. She's just trying to be wholesome and helpful, right?

Sigh.

Live Blogging the Food Network: Sandra Lee

2006-09-07T15:05:00.000-07:00

I'm sorry, let's use the full title: "Semi-Homemade with Sandra Lee"

I'm not going to go nuts on this woman, because let's not beat a horse that clearly died halfway through the title of her show, but I will say this:

She's making spicy red braised short ribs in a HEAD TO TOE BRIGHT WHITE JUICY COUTURE SWEATSUIT with a Mommy camel toe that recalls the rippling white canvas of a regatta-bound sail.

"I pulled this out of a box!"

Live Blogging the Food Network: Ina Garten

2006-09-07T14:39:00.000-07:00

The Food Network is a lot like Holland: Mostly boring, self-consciously bourgois, but with some undeniably valuable cultural contributions. Actually, some of the Food Network celebrities are pretty odious-- that Flay, yikes, what an angry edge that man has, and let's not speak of Rachel Ray's one-woman crusade to retard American home cooks.

But Ina Garten is a goddess. If I could be any FN personality, it would be Ms. Garten-- always smirking a bit, entertaining the local gays, nipping at the sherry. If the world of "domestic doyennes" (cringe) were a highschool, Garten would be the effortlessly hot, pot-smoking writer and Martha Stewart would be the psycho valedictorian who secretly wants the school to blow up. Paula Deen would be everyone's learning-disabled best friend.

What a beauty.

Garten's food never cuts corners, or pretends to change the world. It's just classy and full of good stuff. She makes me want a certain type of classiness I thought I could live without, a wealthy Hamptonsiness that she makes benevolent, not snooty.

Case in point: her monikier as a cook/fine foods purveyor? The Barefoot Contessa.

WORK.

I will sit on your green felt limbs, and crush them

2006-09-06T13:10:00.000-07:00

You may recall a few posts ago, that I was "tagged" by Lang Fisher with a questionnaire. I wrote a new questionnaire of my own and sent it to a few people. Mike answered. One of the people I sent my silly questionnaire to was Justin Purnell, the Kermit to my Miss Piggy. I run around shouting blandishments from my throat and trying to sit on him, while he says very dry things and tries to survive the sheer power of my love.

Well, I tagged Justin, and then-- recinded! I was tired of having my pink, woolen Piggy heart crushed.

But I am retagging him now. Justin? Are ya home? Miss you!

P.S. This is the show he hosts at UCB. It's always free and funny. Why not go? I can't think of a reason. Unless you're DEAD.

Someone get this guy a Gatorade!

Paula Deen has Grandson/Snack

2006-08-25T10:05:00.000-07:00

"Inn't he just so cute? I'm 'onna just put a little buttah right on up on 'is forehead here and dip his diaper in som heavy cream and take a little bite o' that baby. Mmmmm idd'n that just a sinful li'l buttery ole baby up in theah? Mmmm thasss juss delicious!"

Market Theory of Too Much Time with Parents

2006-08-23T17:59:00.000-07:00

I was in Finland for TWO MONTHS with no one but my parents. It didn't seem like such a bad idea: we've always gotten along, and besides, I would be working a bit. All I have to say is, I have all this photographic and anecdotal evidence that at one point, I was a young, happenin' chick with night after night of parties and shows, dance cards and C-cups filled to the brim. Now I'm fairly certain I've aged about 20 years and have become a mustachioed, sweat-panted, shag-bobbed house-dwelling fatass spinster with no friends. I don't even know where my cellphone is.

But here's the most insulting part. You know how most parents treasure nothing more than the company of their coop-flown progeny? This is clearly a market-based phenomenon, in which children, by making themselves in such short supply, increase the demand for their company. I would say that the market here at home has become oversaturated with Yours Truly, and demand has plummeted. It's sort of shocking to be shrugged off by the selfsame people that were trying to feed you soup and hand you cash when you came home from college.

It's quite shocking actually. I'm rather shattered, not personally, but at the economic breakthrough I've discovered. To think that if we all returned home to the bosom of our parents forever (not that this was my intention) they would consequently wish us dead, and that it is simply because we leave that they seem to sit at home frothing with baleful affection.

Well, I'll be moving to the midwest soon and becoming quite scarce, so the market forecast looks good-- someone tell Suze Ormond I'll be worth my weight in diamonds come September!

Making Scott McClellan Look Even Fatter

2006-08-23T17:54:00.000-07:00

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said Iran's offer "falls short of the conditions set by the Security Council."

I say White House Spokeswoman Dana Perino "is way too hot for her job."

Leaving Finland

2006-08-21T02:46:00.000-07:00

Dear Diarrhee,

I am leaving Finland tomorrow morning. Hopefully no terrorists will want to fuck with us. If there's one group no body's gritting their teeth to take down in a glorious political blaze, it's probably the Finns.

Geez, I've learned so much here this vacay! Learned how to bring in a big fish, how to party like the natives, and how to handle 2 months alone in a pine box with one's parents. I feel like I'm at least 50% of how smart I was when I got here. Sigh.

Now we are packing up the house, not to be unblanketed and dedusted until next summer. The downside is, it's hard work. The upside is, we have like 25 beers to get rid of.

See you back home, homies!

PS Could someone please give me directions to the United American States? I believe it was founded by Amerigo Vespucci. I know I leave my house and turn LEFT, but then...I would appreciate directions if someone has them. My address is: My House, Finland, North Europe, Europe, World. Thanks, all!

Jules

Lexinton and/or Concord?

2006-08-20T04:08:00.000-07:00

If you sit outside our house in Finland for more than about ten minutes right now, you will hear the ferrous pop of bullets firing from big, long rifles all across the bay.

The duck hunting season began today at Noon. You know what that means: I'm no longer the worst-dressed person in town!

This guy is!

Balls-Out Perdition, Finland-Style

2006-08-20T01:51:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I went to my first Finnish house party. It started at 2 pm and ended at around 3 am, when I entered rigor mortis with a Cohiba cuban cigar smoldering in my lap.

I don't know what this picture illustrates, aside from "smoldering" and "terrible breath."

Anyway, I assumed, based on previous European field research, that young people everywhere party the same. Sure, the intoxicants may differ-- in Germany it's beer, in France it's the date-rape drug--but basically, the world over, young people stash the 'rents somewhere, get a couple of bottles of the local poison, put on some music, and peel back the confining layers of civil code until someone's, say, trying to pan-fry a Pop-Tart, pants down.

But in fact this assumption was wrong. This party's host was exceptionally thoughtful and detail-oriented (or, as I like to say during job interviews, "detail-orientated...fuck") but apparently, according to one Finn at the party, it's not exceptional for even "rough" parties to follow this pattern.

- Start by raising the national flag and giving short speech praising the weather and thanking the guests for coming, followed by public introduction of each person ("This is Paivi, Paivi is a traditional tanner from Oulu who enjoys chemical burns, sausage and Kanasta")

- Champagne toast. The American version of this would no doubt involve magnums of Freixenet hoisted in the air and drained directly into faces to the gargled shouts of revelrous intent("Pants-shitting time!" "Let's get hurt!" "Skippity fuck fuck!")
Here, glasses were filled halfway, and they lasted guests at least an hour, as discussion began to simmer on the sun-dappled terrace. SHOCKING, I realize. These people, p.s., were in their early 20's.

Americans in their early 20's

- Dinner. Table for 18. Grilled chicken, ribs, wine, pickled herring, potatoes, brown bread, vegetable skewers. A nice spread. Buffet-style.

- Drinking, dancing. Truthfully I left for about 4 hours to go to a family gathering, but when I came back, people were finishing off ice cream and it was time for sauna.

- Fresh pot of coffee.

- Sauna: women first, then mixed sauna, then men's sauna. The mixed sauna sounded like a trap to me, a trap for a whore to fall into. What woman declines the women's sauna and prefers to sauna with men? Alternately, what man refuses to sauna with the woman and wants only to sauna with other men? Why is there this option? Questions for a later date. No one opted for the mixed sauna at this now officially slut-free party: women went first, came back with a beer in hand, fresh-faced and ready to chit chat while the men went down to steam up. Where am I in all this?

I couldn't figure out whether I was a man or a woman, so I just abstained.

- So the men take 3 times as long as the women in the sauna. This is a well-known thing in Finland. They go in and out a thousand times and drink a lot of beer.

- Fresh pot of coffee for the women. Eventually the women went down to get the men out of the sauna because they were taking too long. The men are drunk and wearing tiny towels and sitting around.

- Everyone gets dressed (that step happens HOURS later at American parties) and we proceed to table again.

- Sauna gives you an appetite. Sausage and salad.

- More coffee. (It's about 1 am) Chocolate cake and cognac.

- Cigars, chocolates, more cognac.

This is where they lost me. I had to crash. Unlike them, I wasn't hopped up on wad-loads of caffeine. Who knows what they did after I left. But I bet it was 700% more civilized than Mike falling asleep in a papoose on my back as I vom in a gutter.

2006-08-19T09:02:00.000-07:00

Hot damn, I love surveys! These take me back to those first days of widespread internet use, when pizza-faced tweens would mine the web for purity tests to mass e-mail over their AOL accounts. As Big Daddy says, "There 'twaran't a domain name yeh couldn't nab for three bits and a digi-pic of your doodle!" Sigh. Here goes!

1. Historical disaster you'd like to have perished in (e.g. vesuvius)
Well, I suppose it would've been gnarly to be one of Pharoah's henchmen swallowed by the resurgent Red Sea, but that puts me on the wrong side of the good ol' Torah. Let's just go with The Perfect Storm, which satisfies my simultaneous loves of meteorology and swarthy, idiotic drunken fisherman.

2. Who is the celebrity that you secretly believe you would be besties with if you ever met?
Ashley Olsen! I've even dreamt that we knocked into each other on the street and became BFFs. PS I had a great sighting of her at the Cold Stone Creamery on Astor Place.

3. Complete this sentence: When I go to the bodega, I usually leave with __________.
A pint of Ben and Jerry's Vermonty Python, a liter of Coke Zero and the Sunday Times. Maybe I should just donate my manhood to charity.

4. Which Spice Girl are you?
Is there a Pensive Spice? JK! Baby Spice obvs.

5. Which Disney character are you?
I am to Disney movies as hair plugs are to Nic Cage's scalp, i.e., a terrible fit. But when pressed, I'm probably most like the Dick Van Dyke character in "Mary Poppins."

6. T/F: I would vote for Oprah for President
In a second. Can you imagine Stedman wearing that ubiquitous string of First Lady pearls? Priceless!

7. T/F: I would vote for Ben Affleck for President
Um, no.

8. T/F: I would vote for Hugh Grant for Prime Minister of England
Only if Rupert Everett were Council of the Exchequer!

9. How do you feel about clowns/mimes?
I think parents who hire clowns for their child's birthday are actively trying to scar their progeny. Mimes get a bum rap; that steez is hard! If there's a better name then Marcel Marceau [sp], I haven't heard it.

10. Word(s) you are uncomfortable saying (e.g. "peen")
I don't know if there are any. One time I screamed the c-word in a French bistro's sun-dappled backyard during brunch service. By the way, "one time"= 2 weeks ago. I guess I hate the word "fabulous" unless it's said with an affected accent or ironically.

11. When I want to feel special, I wear my ________
charcoal face mask to the Russian baths.

12. Trait you inherited from a crotchety grandparent?
Smoking, which my Grandma Beatrice took up whilst pregnant with my mother, on doctor's orders, to combat nausea. Having since quit, I suppose I've inherited Papa Bernie's penchant for turning the thermostat to 104 degrees in winter. He lived in L.A., for the record.

13. Which one of the people in each of the following pairs would you make out with?

a. Prince Harry v Prince William
Pre-St. Andrew's William, post-Eaton Harry.
b. Cisco Adler v Osama Bin Laden
Truthfully, Osama. Do check out the excerpt from his concubine's memoirs in the current issue of Harper's, where she describes his seduction techniques, which include belittling her ass and dancing to "Rock Lobster".
c. Ruben Studdard v Ronald Reagan (alive)
I loved "Flying Without Wings," but gotta go with Ronnie. What. a. head. of. HAIR.
d. Rachel Ray v Star Jones
Uch, Jules, you're making this hard. Probs Rachel Ray, who presumably has comparatively little scar tissue all over her body.
e. Star Jones v Osama Bin Laden
See above. Call me un-American, but Osama's not Quasimodo, and hell, I'm attracted to power. I'll do it with either of the Google guys right now.
14. If I were given a baby _______ (e.g. horse) , I would name it _______ (e.g. Heroin)
If I were given a baby spider, I would name it Daddy Langbeins.

Do it for me, because I can't

2006-08-18T13:26:00.000-07:00

Will someone who IS in America please go see Snakes on a Plane for me? WHAT WOULD I GIVE to be there, opening night, with my Kangol hat backwards on top of my weave.

The Fat, Pants-Down Chef

2006-08-17T04:27:00.000-07:00

Jaime Oliver, lookin' good. Apparently he's doing a show about how British schoolchildren are fat. Either that or he's wrestling Jiminy Glick in a puddle of corn oil.

Tagged!

2006-08-17T00:37:00.000-07:00

Wow, am I an idiot? I was checking the ol' Site Meter for the Bruni Digest, and I noticed that Lang had linked to me from her blog, Dirty Old Prom Queen. "Huh," I thought, "wonder what prompted that."

So I checked it out: Lang had "TAGGED" me! That's when you send someone a questionaire and they answer it on their blog and send it on. I'd always noticed other people answering tags on their blogs. Seemed so fun to have blogger friends! It's almost like its own little community. Sigh. [Cut to me alone in a cardboard box in a hay field with an etch-a-sketch, "blogging."]

Well anyway, then I looked at the date, and it seems Lang had posted this in JANUARY 06.

Clearly this questionnaire is now obsolete, and I will have to create my own.

Mike, Why don'tcha answer this one? And Lang, I'ma send this back to you. I'm also going to attempt to tag Becky Yamamoto. Let's hope it works.

NEW QUESTIONNAIRE

1. Historical disaster you'd like to have perished in (e.g. vesuvius)
2. Who is the celebrity that you secretly believe you would be besties with if you ever met?
3. Complete this sentence: When I go to the bodega, I usually leave with __________.
4. Which Spice Girl are you?
5. Which Disney character are you?
6. T/F: I would vote for Oprah for President
7. T/F: I would vote for Ben Affleck for President
8. T/F: I would vote for Hugh Grant for Prime Minister of England
9. How do you feel about clowns/mimes?
10. Word(s) you are uncomfortable saying (e.g. "peen")
11. When I want to feel special, I wear my ________
12. Trait you inherited from a crotchety grandparent?
13. Which one of the people in each of the following pairs would you make out with?

a. Prince Harry v Prince William
b. Cisco Adler v Osama Bin Laden
c. Ruben Studdard v Ronald Reagan (alive)
d. Rachel Ray v Star Jones
e. Star Jones v Osama Bin Laden

14. If I were given a baby _______ (e.g. horse) , I would name it _______ (e.g. Heroin)

Have fun!

Facing up to Facebook

2006-08-16T12:43:00.000-07:00

I loved Friendster, I'll say it right now.

I feared MySpace-- it lacked Friendster's rigid borders. You could make your own template, share music, network. Bands had profiles, comedians had profiles. People had 13,000 friends. It seemed instantly more commercial, less honest. Does a band call "The Amity" from somewhere in the South really want to be friends? To they want to go the Atlantic Center for an "I Gotta Have It" Birthday Cake Remix at Cold Stone Creamery? Do they want to come over and watch "Dude, Where's My Car?" dubbed into French ("Mec, Ou Est Ma Caisse?")? Do they want to sit in the same room and Gchat each other? Well then these are not friends. To them, I am but a digit in their Friend Number.

I resisted Facebook. A third online profile? What am I, some kind of pervert?

I was sick of trying to drum up a reasonable list of favorite movies and music (since when is it that the accepted way of defining ourselves is by what entertains us?), a list that says, "OK, I'll let you in on who I am, but I'm not aggressively trying to impress you." You know, a concise, not-overwhelming list: Airplane, Scent of a Woman, Splash! Along those lines. But when it came to a 3rd profile, I was suddenly sick of trying to reduce myself to a little package that sketched out my parameters sufficiently for the perusing pleasure of anyone from a stranger to an ex. And you know, with all these online things, you're not learning anything about people except how they see themselves. "I am cute and flirty" = I am sad and lonely, and so on.

But the internet is a seductress, so good at the casual wasting of time, and frankly, my sister lured me into Facebook with the promise of access to her online photo albums-- she takes great pictures and Facebook has unlimited photo hosting. So onboard I came.

Dare I say it? I love Facebook! I do! It's sort of, SORT OF, exclusive, in that you have to have a college affiliation to belong. But what that really means is that each online identity really has a person behind it (i.e. no "The Amity's"). And because the network is somewhat limited (compared to MySpace), it's harder to try to use it for self-promotion, so people generally don't.

Its design is clean and runs glitchlessly, unlike Friendster, which was made of Legos, and the photo sharing really is a valuable feature.

I contemplated committing Friendster Suicide-- deleting my account. But I just couldn't. Friendster getting wiped out by MySpace is like Phil Donahue getting mauled by Springer. Phil was creaky. His suits looked cheap. He had no grasp of slang. He looked like he ate canned ham. But I didn't want to see him go down. And I don't want to put a nail in Friendster's coffin, either.

Maybe I'll commit MySpace Suicide. I never even check the fucking thing. But then-- well sometimes it's good for spying on people.

I guess I'm stuck with three online profiles. And two blogs. Maybe I AM a pervert!

Michael Crichton Proves that I am a Communist

2006-08-16T02:13:00.000-07:00

Just got back from a short trip to Helsinki. The highlights were:

- Design District. Great clothing (think Taylor500's wardrobe / Brooklyn's Bird boutique, but better made, and shockingly affordable) and interior design stuff, although I have no appreciation for interior design.

My idea of "chic"

- Kiasma modern art museum. They had a new art survey, international. I opened the place and found myself basically alone in the museum (it's a little past prime tourist season at this point). This is good because usually I get 150% distracted by other people's behavior in museums. My pet peeve is men who lecture their wives. I remember once when I was at the Louvre and some older, cologne-soaked asshole was telling his younger female companion that the Raft of the Medusa was people sailing away from Paris on the eve of the French revolution. GOOD ONE. Are you sure it's not Puerto Ricans sailing to Disney World on the eve of the Oscars?

Pinocchio getting a manicure from Dorothy

- I saw a name plaque on an apartment door that said "SUCKSDORFF"!!! That is literally a Swedish family name. I spent 15 minutes yesterday laughing out loud while plugging in given names. Sven Sucksdorff. Bruni, if you need some fresh aliases for your credit cards/reservations, I highly recommend a research trip to Sweden.

But this wasn't what I was posting about (see title.) I want to talk about Michael Crichton.

I don't really read thrillers or anything. I've never read a book by Stephen King, Michael Crichton, or Mary Higgins Whatshertits. I'd rather not be on the edge of my seat, if I can avoid it. I'm sort of clumsy.

But I ran out of reading material and my cousin gave me a book called Timeline, by Michael Crichton.

Critchton! Of Jurassic Park, Sphere, and Congo. Ah, I was in good hands, sure to be entertained, titillated with science, crushed with humanity.

I settled into a comfy chair (a Toyota, in fact-- this was the drive to Helsinki) and got started.

Let me say right off the bat that Timeline is a book of such surpassing bullshit that I got red marks on my forehead from hitting it so much. The part of the brain that feels embarrassment got STRAINED. It's like Sweet Valley High meets the instruction booklet for a Cuisinart.

The plot is that a tech firm named ITC creates the technology to send people, through QUANTUM FOAM, back in time, not to some simplistic sense of time as progressing linearly, but to a parallel world in the "MULTIVERSE" that is identical to the past.

Far more imoressive to me than QUANTUM FOAM is a cat that can use the horn.

Mostly you are made to gloss over the science but to be awed by academic credentials. The evil genius who runs the whole tech company is described like this:

After graduating summa cum laude in physics from Stanford at the age of eighteen, Doniger had gone to Fermilab, near Chicago. He quit after six months, telling the director that "particle physics is for jerkoffs."

I mean come on. So what happens is ITC sends a Yale medieval history professor back in time to the middle ages (don't ask why) and then his sexy young Yale graduate students back in time to fetch the professor. There's a problem there: SEXY YALE GRADUATE STUDENTS???

"I'm in my fifteenth year studying Mongolian underpants from the 13th century."

Also, I have BEEN among grad students studying medieval history in central France, which is exactly where Doniger finds the Yale professor that he sends back in time. I'll tell ya exactly what we DIDN'T do:

The liquid crystal display showed an outline in bright green. Through the transparent display, they could see the ruins of the mill, with the green outline superimposed. This was the latest method for modeling archeological structures...

The computer was fed mapped coordinates from the ruin; using the GPS fixed tripod position, the image that came up on the screen was in exact perspective.

I mean come on. This is what grad students on medieval sites use:

Using a series of identically spaced numbers, the polymer strip allowed the nubile, bikini-clad graduate students to assess the numerical atomic space between two points in units called "inches."

We had some fancy cameras, but we certainly didn't use a fucking liquid crystal mammogram machine to imagine buildings for us.

So what makes it all believable? The throwing around of fancy names.

Edward Johnston, Regius Professor of History at Yale, squinted as the helicopter thumped overhead....

It was easy...to become enamored of Edward Johnston. Tanned, with dark eyes and a sardonic manner, he often seemed more like Mephistopheles than a history professor.

Honestly, I didn't even get us into the grad students yet. Chris "eventually graduated fifth in his class. But in the process [of having an affair with an older married professor] he became conservative. Now at twenty-four, he...was reckless only with women."

Barf, right? Maybe I just don't understand. BUT WAIT. Check this out.

Chris goes back in time, through quantum foam, as we know, and his life is saved by a young village boy. Ooops but wait, much like like old professors, Yale grad students, and psysics prodigies, medieval boys turn out to be sexy: The boy's

black hat was thrown away, and golden hair tumbled down over her shoulders. She gave a little bow that turned into a curtsy... "I am called Claire."

...With that, Claire walked boldly up to Chris, put her hand around his neck and looked into his eyes. "I shall count every moment you are gone, and miss you with all my heart," she said softly, her eyes liquid. [I know, you feel your brain slowly retarding. Just wait.]

She brushed her lips lightly across his mouth [keep in mind this is in the presence of a royal medieval court] and stepped back, releasing him reluctantly, fingers trailing away from his neck.

Clearly if he went back in time and met a medieval lady, the lady would probably have a handlebar moustache and 4 brown teeth. And to pick at the lady, well that's rearranging deck chairs on the punctured dingy of this story, whose main device is a smokescreen of complicated scientific jargon ("We compress [a human being] using a lossless fractal agorithm") and fancy academic credentials (Yale should sue).

Crichton, come on now. Timeline was a #1 Bestseller. America LOVED it. I don't understand. As if my love of foie gras and refusal to bathe hadn't already sealed the deal, I guess Michael Crichton finally proved me unamerican.

I think I'll change my name to Brigitta Sucksdorff.

Maybe this is why pandas hate to procreate?

2006-08-12T02:45:00.000-07:00

I'm no biologist, but can I propose something to the biologists out there?

Pandas are famously shy-- this is why, then do finally get busy, it makes international headlines. You see, scientists are always putting a male and a female panda together in a cage, cueing "Unchained Melody", and setting up candle-lit tables for two.

But the female panda nevertheless settles into her nest with the latest Dean Koontz thriller while the male panda tries to fashion a deck out of bamboo. They never want to get physical with each other. This is true of pandas in captivity as well as in the wild.

Maybe this is why:

THIS IS WHAT A BABY PANDA LOOKS LIKE!!!!!!!

HOLY SHIT. It looks like a UVULA dragged through lint. And LOOK AT THAT FACE! If that doesn't scare you off of procreation, what will?

"Babyface" Bruni

2006-08-11T11:24:00.000-07:00

Well this is hilarious:

A preparatory flyer, warning restaurant staff of Frank Bruni's various credit card aka's, as well as his tastes and demeanor.

Bruni must be thrilled that people whose livelihood depends on the accurate identification of him in their restaurants have said that he "looks very young." A toast to your La Mer anti-aging throat cream tonight, Frank!

I wonder what the eagle-eyed maitre d's would be prepared to look for if I were the NYT restaurant critic?

Reservation names:

Lisa B. Skidmark, Esq.
Penelope Danderpants
Ina Kindergarten
Leslie J. Titwhistle
Doctor Maureen O'Blunderfuss
Polly Schitzpackle

Looks like Stockard Channing, dresses like Bea Arthur.

Often accompanied by long train of kazoo-playing gays, as if she were the Pied Piper, and it had been Gay Night in Hamelin.

Deutschsproch

2006-08-08T13:16:00.000-07:00

Why Jules, I certainly do have some compound word-structs waiting for some Germanic intervention!

Crunchcoif: The condition in which many 19-year-old female interns in the city find their highlighted, consistently blow-dried, often tequila-soaked locks. Characterized by dry coarseness with a healthy dose of flyaways that look like tree branches in winter. Expl: "Mandy's crunchcoif could use a day at the beach with a still life's worth of lemons, or else she's gonna start looking like a bronze medal."

Weatherboner: When someone needs the weather to be a certain way, and the forecast calls for it, the anticipatory emotional outpouring can only be described thusly. Most often seen in bridezillas with outdoor ceremonies, learning-disabled schoolchildren who haven't finished their book report on "The Boxcar Children" and need a snow day, and, well, me. Expl: "During the great blizzard of '96, Mike's weatherboner pointed directly upward toward the snow-choked sky."

Shoredouche: This one is in reference to a product I wish some chemical corporation would produce, but hasn't yet. As avid beachcombers, Jules and I have noticed a certain unfortunate hygienic consequence of sea frolicking and sun worshipping: our B.O. resembles neither our everyday end o' workday smell nor the collective stenches that the coast can sometimes exhibit. A proper shoredouche is needed to clear out the fumes and return us to our natural musky equilibrium. No expl. needed, right Jules?

The Japanese Have Way Too Much Time, and Fish

2006-08-08T12:01:00.000-07:00

Goddam! I caught another pike tonight, and a big one, too. What to do with all this fish?

Maybe I will do like the Japanese and have a TV show where I see if cats can carry fish bodies of increasing weight. The slow dramatic build in this video is phenomenal. Thanks for the tip, Paul.

Just hearing the announcer guffaw every time a cat trepidatiously paws its way out of the woods toward a 200 lb tuna gets me every time.

Germanspeak

2006-08-08T05:11:00.000-07:00

You know how the German language has a way of making compounds that express an idea the way nothing else possibly could? E.g. the underused weltschmerz ("world hurt," i.e. when you're sick of everything) or the overused schadenfreude ("damage joy," i.e. the joy you take in others' pain), or the underappreciated hosenauspuff ("pants exhaust," i.e. the hot air that develops inside pants). Fine, I made that up, but I think it's important to note that "exhaust," in German, is literally auspuff.

"His Dockers, replete with that special mid-August hosenauspuff, swelled like the chest of a proud peacock."

Although somehow a lifetime of lager drinking has not given me the ability to speak German, I am going to propose some new, very needed compounds.

Mindspace: I know this sounds like a hippie psychobabble term, but it's logical to me. Like as in, "I've got to get all these Nick Lachey songs out of my mindspace to make room for my address."

Grainpoop: self explanatory. Alt., "ryepoop." Expl: "I'll be about 3 hours, Klaus, I'm in labor with a ryepoop."

Alcofuror: That particular sort of hangover energy, where you wake up on 2 hours of terrible sleep, shaking like Charlton Heston, go for a 10 K and repaint your apartment. Expl: "'Hey Inga, I noticed your Borzoi has cornrows.' -- 'Ah, yes, I braided them in an alcofuror this morning, that is why they are so uneven and smell like barf."

Glamsheister: People that are far, far richer than you but who somehow always foist the cab bill into your ratty lap. You know the type. expl: "I met Greta for drinks yesterday, and she made us split the bill even though she had the Kobe beef testicle caviar and I had a side salad. Total glamsheister."

Spearsnose: My sister claims this is a specific type of nose, where the bridge departs straight from the brow line without dipping concavely inward at all. You'll have to ask her about it. Apparently I have it. expl: "My perfect spearsnose was shattered by a whiffle ball. At least my spearsgut is intact."

Actually, the above compound is pretty mutable. Mandymouth? Aikencockeye? Stallonedrool? Madgearm (after all, "opraharm" was coined long ago.)

"I rode in a jet plane with the top down and ended up with total noltehair!"

Mike, any good ones?

Forwith Melady, 'til a Bad Hair Day!

2006-08-06T08:39:00.000-07:00

YIKES!!! I found the worst, nooniest noon fest EVER. (I have no idea how we overlooked this before, Lang.)

Introducing WUTHERING HEIGHTS. Some facts:

- Starring Ralph Feinnes and Juliette Binoche, 1992 (pre-English Patient), as two DEPRESSING ASSHOLES who can't requite their fucking love.

- Juliette Binoche, who is 800% French, plays a born-and-raised Brit, even though she speaks English like there's a Swiffer in her mouth.

- EVERYONE has terrible hair days, every day for 3 generations.

You can sort of get a glimpse here. Ralph Feinnes' banged mullet is soaked in motor oil, and stiff. It sort of looks like someone taped a smoked flounder to his head. It's actually worth queuing the film on your Netflix right after "Ernest Takes a Dump" just to see his nasty hair.

OK, bye, I have to go put on my stovepipe hat and contest a mysterious will at the Old Bailey. Farty tuppence to ya!

I think I need to rename this blog

2006-08-04T04:21:00.000-07:00

The collective message of recent posting activity on this blog amounts to "Jules is rugged, Mike's a dandy, and Steve Guttenberg's career slashed-and-burned a path of sheer retardedness through the cultural forest of the 1980s."

As such, you NEED to see this. Inspired by the Rollerdancing video, I trolled YouTube for some more Guttengoods, and found this trailer: Steve Guttenberg gets transformed into Shelley Long's concept of the perfect man, i.e. a homo rat-tail biker Aussi named Lobo. Pay special attention to the douchebaggy monologue and the twinkly synth soundtrack.

Yes, Hello Sweatpants Vendor. I'd Like the Royal Blue Tapers with the Drawstring.

2006-08-04T02:01:00.000-07:00

I swear this is the last fish photo (see prior post). But I really wanted to post this, so that everyone could see the NEW BLUE SWEATPANTS I bought from the SWEAT PANT VENDOR at the open market yesterday morning (fact.)

Yes, that is elastic at the ankle. And yes, I bought the matching top.

P.S. This is not a phase. I challenge ANYONE to present me with a SINGLE reason not to wear exclusively sweatsuits throughout grad school.

Am I an Appalachian Dirtbag?

2006-08-04T00:55:00.000-07:00

While Mike hunts for salad in his house (He lives at the Atlantic Center Pathmark, a.k.a. "Doodie Aisles"), fish continue stupidly biting the metal lures I tug across the water. I've simply never seen a summer so successful in Pike fishing. I caughta beauty two days ago, and last night again, right after a huge rain fall, when the sea was covered in mist and moonlight.

BUT I'M NOT POSTING ANY PICTURES. Why? Because I've realized that people who take and display trophy photos of their kill are psychos, trashy psychos.

Honestly. How many dead deer does one mustachiod molester really need?

HAHA! These deer killed us! Just kidding, we killed them and then posed their dead bodies hilariously!

I'm done hunting for today. Can I go watch Mulan now, if I wash the blood off my arms first?

Well I said "honey, we did a Loire Valley wine tour last year just the two of us, let's do something with the whole family this year," so Shawn and Jerome Junior both jumped at this whole Cote D'Iviore safari thing, and we just had a blast. Little Trebor still wakes up in the middle of the night screaming and of course Jeff is still peeing blood, but it was a blast!! It was so neat!

My Dinner of Late

2006-08-03T18:35:00.000-07:00

I've been making salads for dinner on almost every night I eat at home throughout the summer. These aren't darling summer salads the likes of which are dusted onto restaurant plates as frothy warm weather appetizers, and they aren't the ranch dressing-soaked salami-fests scooped into plastic containers at every ubiquitous lunch deli Third Avenue can endure; they are just mine, and just right. I perfected my ideas about the dinner salad this week, and had my friend sarah over to taste the results. Here it is:

Spinach. I've mixed arugula in, but I like the impression, false or true, that uncooked nutrient-rich greenery will counteract the pint of Puerto Rican rum that I'm drinking with dinner.

Red onion, perpetually the most flavorful ingredient that I shed a tear over. Ask Mother Barry about her ingenius dicing trick. Hint: IT'S DICED BEFORE IT'S SLICED.

Grape tomatoes, a summer treat that bursts with flavor and resists the mealiness that its giganto brethren acquire so easily.

The only things I don't put a lemon in are hot dogs and my homemade Ben-Gay.

Cheese, piave in this case. I don't know from cheese, but if it can be grated, cubed, tumbled, folded or otherwise included in a salad without it all dropping to the bottom, it's all good for this recipe.

Shrimp! It's a meat in a salad, but it's not greasy or heavy! If you think crustaceans feel pain, you can sub in some hard-boiled eggs. It's all protein, y'all!

I don't have a big salad bowl, so I throw it into a pot, drizzle some vineagrette and a bit of olive oil over the mess, put the pot cover on and dance for the length of a Harry Belafonte song. Sure, it's not rocket science, but in one pot I make a cool and rejuvenative dinner salad that puts a delectable cap on another workday spent surreptitiously browsing for tail on CraigsList while the boss tries to the nail the Davidston account. Minus the unflattering blocky hips and frizzy chemical-treated hairdo, I'm Rachel Ray with chest hair.

Guttenberg Followup: There is a God

2006-08-03T05:48:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Taylor500 for this treasure, which Gawker unearthed with this intro: "This clip right here should be ample proof to any New Yorker that there really is no God."

I have to disagree. To the extent that any ontological debate can pivot on a video of Steve Guttenberg dancing in rollerskates and babyshorts, I have to say that it convinced me of just the opposite: now, I know there's a God.

I.e., This is the best thing I've ever seen.

Definitely Deaf, Certainly Dumb, but TASTELESS?

2006-08-03T05:02:00.000-07:00

I was, as per usual, shirking my responsibilities ("Julia, get the fish guts off Papa's dock!") by drifting through some internet rabbit holes, and one of them let to this article about taste sensitivity.

Long story short, about 25% of people are "supertasters," a phrase coined by Yale scientist Dr. Linda Bartoshuk, while 50% make up regular tasters and 25% make up "nontasters" which must be an exaggerated term for subtasters. "Fungiform papillae," which sound like they belong halfway between a mushroom and a vagina, are actually the tiny taste receptors on your tongue, and supertasters have more of them, and they're smaller. Makes sense.

Well, here's the thing. How I have not been put in a mental institution is beyond me, and why I do not listen to everyone by holding a huge horn up to my ear like a Gold Rush grandfather is a matter of pure pride, because there's no doubt that I am both crazy and totally deaf.

But add this to the heap: I think I'm hard of tasting. Or else just stupid.

Today in the car, my mom said "Pheeew! Smells like trash." I hadn't noticed. Then I turned around and noticed the back seat was full of trash. (Nevermind why.)

This happens all the time. She's all "Holy smokes, the Jasmine is overpowering!" and I have no idea what she's referring to. Then she points to a Jasmine bush on the other side of a fjord. She's always sniffing here or there like a fox hound, and she will find the PINCH of cinnamon in a 10-ton vat of dough. There is no doubt that it is a gift, a distinct gift.

Another distinct gift: The Boob Chair!

I think my sister Anne inherited this ability. She is always tasting things more strongly than I. Hors d'oevres that included a potato cake with truffle oil were passed at a party once, and before they left the kitchen, she was nauseated by the truffle waft in the air. "I'm gonna be sick, I can't handle all this truffle," she said. Meanwhile, I, sitting indian-style on a cylinder of pan-seared tuna, perked up: "Oh, sweet! There's food at this party?"

I know that palates develop and can be deliberately trained. I guess there's an upside to being tongue-retarded. When you're frenching a dirty old sailor, it doesn't taste so much like pipe smoke and herring poop.

No gum? NO PROBLEM!

And Leite points out in his article that supertasters often don't eat enough greens because the bitterness tastes so strong to them. Meanwhile, anyone who knows me well knows that I almost exclusively eat bitter greens. I have always loved them; now I know that it's because they don't aggravate the block of driftwood which is my tongue.

They may be made of dimestore felt, while I am made of many layers of Neutrogena, but inside our faces, I am ANATOMICALLY IDENTICLE to a muppet.

This explains why we always order the same when we eat out!

Sloshed in Slurpeeville

2006-08-02T11:24:00.000-07:00

I feel proud to associate myself with a cadre of first-class imbibers, the sorts of people who will commiserate with you on the exceptional butteriness of a Cote du Rhone at 9 pm, gaily toast the first Ketel martini of the evening at 11 pm, and eventually suck the last droplets of Captain Morgan's from the proverbial clear plastic teet of the jug whilst tucking themselves into bed at 6 am. In short, being of the particular ilk who sip pastis like we are shtupped with dough but usually need to mainline a tall glass of everclear to settle into the blackout district of Krunkland, we feel comfortable on the roof deck of 230 Fifth Ave., or crashing an NYU party upon hearing that they have 40's of Steel Reserve stacked to the rafters. Expanding, then, upon Ms. Langbein's lovely-if-wallet-shredding list of great places to eat when blacked out, here are some places I've found are lovely when you're 9 sheets to the wind AND you've spent nearly all your money on drinks for that slut at the end of the bar who let you buy her drinks all night and then left with her main gay 5 minutes after last call.

Koronet's: I must first mention this Upper West Side stalwart, as it impressed itself upon the nostalgia nodes of my cortex slice by slice through 4 years of college. Fat wedges of searing hot pizza with a purposefully chewy crust slide down your throat and sop up the 17 gimlets you presumably drank on that Tuesday night. California Pizza Kitchen may have made chichi toppings de regeur, but a plain slice here drips with seductively monotonous pure pizza flavor. $3 and out.

Gowanus Yacht Club: Black out and eat out at the same time? Yes please. Tall cans of our nation's shittiest brews (think 16 oz. Milwaukee's Best cans, Ballantine, etc.) can be enjoyed with bratwurst, kielbasa, and bitty cheeseburgers. Nothing's over $5.

Joe's Shanghai: Tucked into the bowels of a tiny Chinatown street like so much MSG in a moo shi pork pancake, this big room full of fish tanks and communal dining tables is a mecca for soup dumpling lovers. If you can remember where it is even as you forget your address, you've done yourself a service, as 8 plump wads of dough filled with intensely-flavored pork broth and bits of scallion and meat await for $5. Their entrees are also some of the better Chinese food I've sampled in this city chock full of mediocre Szechuan and Hunan take-out.

Remember: As some of us who've worn a nice ass groove into the comfortable recliner that is their long-term relationship might forget (AHEM), enjoying such niceties as delicious and cheap grub at the end of a long lushy New York evening is no substitute for canning the pizza breath and hauling that special someone you locked eyes with at The Cock home for some light downers and a snog. Happy munching, you fat coupled jerks! Happy hunting, you jittery starving singles.

Blacked out at Blue Hill

2006-08-02T02:42:00.000-07:00

Frank Bruni visited the Manhattan Blue Hill for this week's review, which was about as fun as reading tax law in a church basement.

I had two of the best meals of my life chez Dan Barber, one at the Blue Hill in Manhattan and one at Stone Barns. This past Father's Day, my sister's godparents took us to Stone Barns, on a blazing hot morning, where I literally had a show-stopping GREEN SALAD. It was called "Everything in the Greenhouse" I think, and I dream about it sometimes-- minty, peppery, lemony, imperceptibly dressed, glossy gorgeous greens. I've never had anything like it.

A little more than a year ago, one of Matt's best friends, also a cook, took us out to dinner at Blue Hill Manhattan as a belated celebration of Matt's graduation from culinary school. Needless to say, we got ripped at the Dove first (one of those amazing nights when the Dove is empty, and you feel like you're in the sateen-lined salon of your own Whartonian manse.)

Our meal at Blue Hill was fun, but kind of shamefully profligate, a little like the time I took a drool-swathed 6-hour nap in a $285 seat at Tristan and Isolde at the Met. I stumbled through the tasting menu at Blue Hill in the blackest of blackouts, as if I were underwater, gurgling air bubbles when I opened my mouth and lugubriously reaching for but never quite successfully tasting these perfect, subtle, sober compositions.

That's the thing: if you're going to be blacked out, you should really eat somewhere with a sharp punch. You need food that can ice-pic its way to you through the wet mattress of your toxic fog, not someplace where you have to hush so you can hear the cricket playing a tiny organic violin on top of your butterbeans. You've also got to keep behavior in mind-- Blue Hill is an intimate, quiet space, not one in which the lifting of a skirt or the hollering of a slur can really glide under the radar.

Best places to eat in a blackout:

Bar Jamon: Spicy, hammy ham is just what Dr. Jekyll ordered for a nightmare drunk, and you can holler all you want-- you could light your tits on fire and you wouldn't turn heads on a busy night at this packed Spanish ham-hut/bar.

Gilt: I know it sounds crazy in such a rarefied room (the old Le Cirque space at the Palace Hotel) but the crowd drawn to Gilt is wacky-- Japanese brides, corporate groups, Jacob Marlowe socialites (the ones that look like they died years ago and are dragging huge gold chains around), and breasty tarts with older men. The staff is so impeccably tactful, they'll know exactly how to make you feel like you're not being an asshole when you shatter your Nth martini. The courses in the tasting menu are short, bordering on perfunctory, perfect for the fluttering attentions of a dilapidated drunk.

Gilt: secretly great place to show your nancy to a stranger.

Sweetwater/Robin des Bois: If you're not going to remember it, you might as well keep it affordable. And who are we kidding, stay within cab distance of Boat.

Hm, there are lots of other good ones that I'm blanking on. I've been out of the city now for over a month-- I can't remember these places anymore!

I guess the brain damage is permanent! [insert slide whistle and clown honk.]

I look like Charlize Theron... in "Monster"

2006-08-01T08:51:00.000-07:00

While Mike sweats through his designer shirts in New York, I am happy to report that our 75-degree heat wave has broken here in Finland! Yes, today was in the 60's, and cloudy-- perfect for fishing.

My uncle finally taught me the correct method for bringing fish ashore or into your boat (thanks for teaching me this TEN YEARS AGO when I started fishing, Dad). It involves looping your rod around just above the water so that while the rod, which is flexible, absorbs the tension from the fish, the fish is simulteneously becoming fatigued from its struggle. Eventually it gets tired, and then you drag it next to the boat and lunge at it with your bare, and in my case, tiny and feeble, hands.

Anyway, the results:

Fresh from the Blue Collar And Also Lesbian Comedy Tour.

Scaling the pike so it can go in the oven.

Thank goodness my uncle is so smart and crafty. Otherwise it would have been another night of diving into the rocks and coming home empty-handed, being forced to eat hot dogs and not deserving a cocktail. I much prefer coming home with fish, because that means you get fish for dinner, and that you are promptly handed a Victory Martini.

One slight mar on this pretty picture: one of the fish had been mauled by a seal. Still edible, no worries there, but-- we caught the fish right here in our bay. I.e. THERE ARE SEALS IN OUR BAY.

Sort of takes the fun out of skinny dipping at midnight.

The Sizzler: Not just a buffet, a way of life

2006-08-01T07:06:00.000-07:00

Americans, visiting foreigners, illegal immigrants, sing it with me! And-a-one, and-a-two:

LAWD, IT BE SO HOT UP IN HERE!

That's right Jules, your ultra-futuristic Ikea-adorned Finnish glass box may be sparkling in the reflected light of the Baltic, and various flora and fauna may be practically craning their necks to be seen by your benevolent gaze, but is it 90 DEGREES AT 10 AM THERE? DO YOU HAVE HEAT BLISTERS FROM STANDING ON THE SUBWAY PLATFORM 600 FEET BELOW GROUND? DOES YOUR HOME THERMOSTAT NO LONGER SHOW A PARTICULAR NUMBER FOR THE TEMPERATURE, BUT JUST AN ELONGATED "BLEARRGGGH" NEXT TO A TINY PICTURE OF A STICK FIGURE WITH X-OUTS FOR EYES? No? Oh.

Today's weather map. Reds through yellows indicate "hot enough to fry ice cream" and greens indicate "so hot that going commando in metal button fly jeans will ruin your sex life."

How are average Americans to cope with this nationwide "heat attack"? Sure, the homeless and hungry can go to air-conditioned shelters, and the elderly are practically fending off free fans and lemonade with their wheely-baskets full of cherished possessions and loose change. But what about the rest of us poor schwitzing slobs? Here in the city, it requires a bit of good old fashioned ingenuity. How so? Let's go through a typical day on this sweltering granite prison known as Manhattan:

7 am: The alarm chimes. Another blissful night's rest, accomplished through the use of a room air-conditioner. Each morning I wake up and marvel at this little box's ability to keep me sane. I do not share this luxury with my roommate, a "man's man" who sweats tuna melt and 7 up into his sheets every night due to his stubborn refusal to "spend money on unnecessary things." I chuckle softly as I saunter to the shower. "WTF dingus, where's the ingenuity in that?" you ask? Ah ha! In order to afford the energy bill, I deftly forget to sign my rent check, buying precious time until I get paid and can juggle my debts and assets like so many spinning plates on the end of long thin rods made of poverty.

7:45 am: The subway. This one's a doozy. In many ways, this is a "grin and bear it" situation, but can be eased with some forethought. Need a backpack? Heck no, not with all the back sweat that's sure to follow! Ditch the workout gear, iPod, newspaper, water bottle and ditch the heat-trapping nylon! What do I do for fun on the subway? Stare at others, and brazenly examine their flaws while laughing sadistically.

8:15 am: Breakfast time! I go for hot foods on hot days. Why? Because the theory of relativity isn't just about quarks and googolplexes, it's about temperature. If my breakfast is 20 degrees hotter than the atmosphere, then ingesting said hot food will make it seem 20 degrees colder! Barry, you intelligent prick.

Work Time: Heavy lifting isn't just for muscled Latino men, drenched in their own musk and heaving through their tattered wife-beater anymore, no sir. Apparently, tiny little homos are supposed to do heavy lifting at their low-rank jobs now too. Thanks for that stunningly expensive degree, Mom and Dad, b-t-dubs. Anyway, while technically in my job description, the energy required to do such tasks would render my designer shirt, still being paid for Sakajawea coin by Sakajawea coin at the local Barney's, drenched. So instead, I slip the freight elevator man a couple quarters, a wink, and point him in the direction of the piles of astonishingly heavy stone I need him to move ASAP, DAMMIT. After all, it's his job too! He seems appreciative, even playfully jabbing me with the butt end of his switchblade in a mock threat to my life.

5 pm: Gotta hit the gym. Again, sweaty see, sweaty do, but is there any way to temper the stream of sweat on this deliriously hot day? How do I work out with out stinking out? Easy enough, when you stop drinking fluids. What liquid are your pores going to expel if you don't ingest any?! Geen. A delightful byproduct is how well your clothes fit without all that water bloat.

Din-din: Say goodbye to the heavy rib roast, the sodden casserole, the steamy stew, and say hello to popsicles. Who wants to be full during a heat wave? Who wants to grow groggy with red wine reductions as they sit in their vinyl recliner while the anemic overhead fan washes their body with a 4 mph breeze? Fuck it! Keep it simple (water-based), sugary (energy without the weightiness of real nutrition), and frigid.

Bedtime ritual: After an invigorating face wash (hot water, natch! Relativity again!), I pray to my God for a reprieve from the heat. Since I'm of the chosen people, I imagine that if nothing else, he'll knock a couple bucks off the air-con bill, get that train into the station quicker, and throw a couple of popcorn thundershowers along my way to keep me solvent and cool. Not Jewish? Good luck, loser!

Gordon Ramsay, I...I earnestly admire you

2006-08-01T02:29:00.000-07:00

I am not much of a fan. Of anything, really. There were admittedly a few years where I insisted we play the Indigo Girls on the cassette player in pottery class, but certainly not in the last fifteen years have I belonged to a fan club, followed a television program religiously, or "wanted to meet" (a la Friendster/My Space line item) anyone that actually exists. I mean, there are tons of people that do great work, and I think they're great. But in this world, there are two types of people: those that will go up to F. Murray Abraham at a party, hand him a champagne flute, yank his ponytail and tell him he's terrific, and those that will carefully study the jet stream of the passed hors d'oevres in order to discern the most propitious location to stand and have all the baby lamb racks and mini blinis pass right under your nose. I am clearly the latter.

But in my primpy, empire-busted, night-capped Eleanor Dashwood way, I do have one sort of small, glowing ember of a fan feeling in my heart. Here in Finland, on Finnish Television (which has the good taste of Joy Behar in a Frederick's of Hollywood), we get this program called Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares.

In this show, he goes into flailing death's door nightmare restaurants and tries to save them-- shaking up the menu, reinspiring the chef, retraining the line, repainting the damn room. He goes into these places with the MF'ing smartest suggestions, and so earnestly tries to pump their chests, administer his famously potty-mouthed mouth-to-mouth, get them to burp up that seawater and breathe again. It's kind of phenomenal what he does to these sad joints, and you can't argue with the sharpness of his insight or the passion behind his effort.

I think what I mean here is, well, I... I won't say I'm a fan, but... well, I kind of think Ramsay's amazing. I enjoy him a great deal.

I may not be his biggest cheerleader but...

I am the TINY mascot BEHIND his biggest cheerleader.

More Gutten Fever

2006-07-31T08:43:00.000-07:00

Mike:

Thank you for returning to the subject of Steve Guttenberg's bio, which it was irresponsible of me to gloss over in such a manner.

There are two important facts that you forgot to share, however, in returning to this brain-boggling quarry of hilarity.

1) "Fiercely dedicated to improving opportunities for the homeless and for young people, Guttenberg has created Guttenhouse, an apartment complex he has funded to accommodate young people after their graduation from foster child status..."

and

2) " [Steve Guttenberg] Spent a week volunteering at the Houston Astrodome after Hurricane Katrina hit."

Respectfully,

Jules

PS I am currently writing a stage adaptation about Steve Guttenberg, aka Sargent Carey Mahoney of Police Academies 1-4 administering Parmalat in the 9th Ward.

Gutten Night and Gutten Luck

2006-07-31T06:42:00.000-07:00

Jules is so far away, and yet our minds are still melded together like Johnny Tremain's deformed hand. Case in point: her post on Police Academy 4 led me to Steve Guttenberg's IMDB page, which is rich enough to deserve its own feature.

Lost in the ensuing decades of well-deserved mockery of Mr. Guttenberg is the fact that in his "Police Academy" and "Cocoon" heyday, he was quite the looker. Behold!

DAAAMMMMNN!!!! Not an ounce of body fat. It's entirely possible that he has a bracket installed just below his belly button to keep his bermuda shorts hung so precariously high, but let's not get picky. The guy was a stud. But any self-respecting celebro-holic with a lifetime subscription to Soap Opera Digest and a Tivo hard drive chock full of back "Access Hollywood" episodes can tell you the awful truth: for every ripped, vaguely-Jewish looking everyman actor who makes it, there are 175 of the same type waiting to spike his on-set iced tea pitcher with strictnine. And so, with the passage of time and the cooling of Mr. Guttenberg's red hot career, his flanks softened, his jowls lengthened, and his curly black mop went all Billy Crystal on us:

Now he looks like part of a Madame Tussaud's diorama of a Bar Mitzvah. Nevertheless, between his hot-ass youth and his normal-ass middle age, Steve Guttenburg has continued to work, dammit! For instance, he was:

Barry in "Mojave Phone Booth"
Nick in "Single Santa Seeks Mrs. Claus" and its sequel, "Meet the Santas"
Jimmy Zoole in "P.S. Your Cat is Dead"

and, my personal favorite, culled just as it's written on IMDB:

Winter Break (2003) (unconfirmed) .... Ted Harper
... aka Snow Job (USA)

Well, it's technically not magical

2006-07-31T06:01:00.000-07:00

I was checking the ol' Site Meter for this blog today, and I noticed that someone had found it by Googling "Beans, the Magical Fruit."

Did someone hear a gigglepuss little kid chanting the bean chants?

SITUATION THAT LED TO SOMEONE GOOGLING "Beans, the magical fruit."

Snot Nosed Kid: Beans, beans, good for the heart!

Snot Nosed Kid's Best Friend: The more you eat...

Both: THE MORE YOU--

Concerned Dying Grown Up: Excuse me!

Snot Nosed Kids (eating Push Pops/Lick'em Stix): What, mister?

Concerned Dying Grown Up: I have acute aortal angina failure.

Snot Nosed Kid: ANGINA!!! ANGINA HAHAHAHAHA

Snot Nosed Kid's Best Friend: VAGINA FAILURE!

Snot Nosed Kid: Your BAGINA failed!

Concerned Dying Grownup: No, children, I'm dying. My heart is crumpling like a paper bag.

Snot Nosed Kid burps, Best Friend drools blue sugar.

Concerned Grownup: I heard you just now incanting about a magical fruit, a special bean that is good for the heart? I should like to know more about its ameliorative properties, in the case that it may help me to extend the frail twine of my lifeline another day.

Snot Nosed Kid: YEAH, IT MAKES YOU FART!!! HAHAHAHAHA

Best Friend: HAHAHAHAHA FARTS ARE FUNNY, AIR THAT SMELLS LIKE POOP!

Snot Nosed Kid: POOP AIR LOL!!

Concerned Grown Up: I'm all too happy to suffer the side effects. The occasional toot is of no concern! HA! (Clutches chest.) Ouch! So where can I get these magical beans that are good for the heart?

Snot Nosed Kid kicks Dying Grownup in shin, Best Friend rifles his leveled body for change, Kids run off, the end.

Concerned Grown Up (struggling) : Thank You! Have a Good Day!

Kids (offstage): Bite my weenus, deadie!

It's like a film festival curated by hateful apes

2006-07-30T10:13:00.000-07:00

Last night, we watched Air Force One, because it was the only movie on Finnish television. It was...

Great. Harrison Ford makes a great president. The special effects, hand drawn in crayon on toilet paper by a one-eyed Rhesus monkey, were dazzling. The dialogue gave me cerebral palsy.

Tonight, amazingly, Finnish television, in all of its 4-channeled glory, has managed to drum up yet another shimmering capolavoro from the exhausting seabed of English-language cinema.

Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol (1987) (I assure you the IMDB link is worth your while.)

The presence of Steve Gutenberg, whose existence is now a punchline, in Police Academy 4 (FOUR), actually makes my heart heavy with sadness, like a bindle full of dog poop.

Oh wait! Glancing at the TV Guide (or rather, TV-Maailman Arviot), I see that there's a movie on at 21:00. THE PRINCE OF TIDES. A movie in which the most disgusting thing is not the family that gets raped. The most disgusting thing is Barbara Streisand in frosted lipstick adjusting her 1991 shelf bangs while referring to "our lovemaking."

I'm going to go swimming with a piece of ham roped to my head, in the hopes that it will lure a hungry sea lion.

I'm almost curious, when I've been eaten by a sea lion, and they've pall-born a dummy to my cenotaph, what will you continue to broadcast, Finnish Television? Batman Forever? Too obvious. Home Fries? The Burbs? Drop Dead Fred? Perhaps Judge Dredd. It's actually sort of retardedly admirable.

Almost exactly like a chimp cowboy with his pants off.

Dear People.com

2006-07-30T01:27:00.000-07:00

Dear People.com,

The Lord created the world in 6 days, if I remember correctly, and then on the 7th, which was a Sunday, he rested.

However, celebrities are not the Lord, and they almost never rest. They do not, come Sunday, say to themselves, "It's time to take a break from driving drunk, divorcing my peg-legged spouse, showing up to a premiere with my vagina below my dress hem, naming my baby something retarded, and resting Andre the Giant's sunglasses on the bony carapace where my face should be." And if celebrities do not rest on Sunday, People.com, neither should you.

Update Star Tracks, I'm begging here.

Love,
Beans

Ugh, disgusting. I need more.

Not on My Watch, Not This Time!

2006-07-27T11:39:00.000-07:00

So I think we all remember the TRAVESTY that occurred earlier this week, when I let the biggest fish of all time slip through my fingers, or rather, off my rocky shoal.

Anyway, Anne caught a pike yesterday (3 in one evening in fact, and the last two pretty substantial) and as I went to pin it down and get the lure out of its mouth, it slipped from my hands and went back into the water.

At this point, a normal person would have kicked themselves, sure, maybe lathered up into some real anger. But a person who only a few days hence suffered a physchological meltdown from the loss of a fish is not a normal person. So without so much as a twitch of hesitation, I threw myself fully clothed into the water and the tidal rocks, slapping after the pike like a bar of soap in the bath.

Long story humiliating, after I gave up on the fish and found myself on hands and bloodied knees, covered in mold and moss and dripping wet, I did the mature thing and banged my head against the rock, wailing about how I can't hold on to a fish, I'm cursed, etc. Then my sister pointed to a tidal pool at my thigh, in which the fish was quietly sitting like a loyal hound. I picked it up, whacked it on the head, and decided I don't have what it takes to be a fisherman.

Unlike these sociopaths.

Not to be a University of Southern Florida freshman or anything

2006-07-25T12:02:00.000-07:00

But I am kind of proud of our trash right now, considering it's just me and some old people in a log hut in Finland.

Explanation of my Heartbreak

2006-07-24T02:52:00.000-07:00

I know. I know it seems silly.

But last night, my heart cracked in half, audibly.

It began as a pleasant enough night-- I thought I'd grab my casting rod and head out to Karinokka, the rock far out at the end of the property. I've been fishing every night, mostly catching pike. Over the past week or so, I've been catching small ones-- probably legal to keep, but nothing to be proud of, so I'd been putting them back in the sea.

The sun was shining straight down on me at 6 pm. I cast from 6 or 7 different spots but I've been pretty loyal to this one rock almost all summer. I just have a good feeling about it, and most nights I end up there, saying to myself "just one more cast, one more cast," until I give up and go home.

So I cast out to the left, and the second the lure hits the water, it's a bite. A mighty bite. "Whoa," -- out loud, reeling in, I'm saying "Sweet Mary, Holy Shit," frantically. I see the fish take the end of my line 10 yards right, ten yards left. This thing is not fucking around. I reel harder and harder-- with a normal size fish, at this point, it would be thrashing at the surface and I'd be dragging it onto the rock, but this is no normal size fish. It pulls itself deep under. Finally I get it to the rock.

Like an idiot (I've NEVER EXERIENCED a big catch before!!! HOW WAS I TO KNOW???)I back up, the logic being that I will keep the angle of the line consistent to how it was dragged in, thereby not allowing the hook to get loose. Logic-- there was no logic at that moment, only pure joy. I was looking the single hugest pike I'd ever seen dead in the eyes-- pike are ancient fish, they look like crocodile, with their muddy green scales and their flat-billed razor-filled jaws. Its body was probably between three and four feet long, one huge muscle, its head like a bowling ball. What a beauty. What an ancient, lucky athlete, to have gotten so big, to be so ferocious.

And he was mine. The champagne we would pop! The photos we would snap! It would be a legendary catch.

And just as I pulled him onto the rock, his body halfway on land, the line snapped. Just like that. The beast flopped his head up, stalled a second, and dipped back down into the dark Baltic sea, with my lure in its gullet, to go bleed its way to some nearby shore and have the gulls and the muskrats pick at its ribs.

I threw my body on the rock and banged with my fists, like the babiest baby, and cried. Then I ran home, crying. Of course, the satellite guy was there working on the cables, and half the family was present to cut down all the trees behind our house so that my mom can watch tennis on BBC.

The workmen all stopped in their tracks, as I, purple faced, wailed obscenities and spouted tears. I don't think they'd ever seen a 25 year old woman act like that. I've never seen myself act like that. Not over a man, not over a movie, not over a botched assignment or a social gaffe. Never in my life have I been so totally and completely saddened, in my blood, in my whole being.

"She lost a fish," seemed to be the explanation. But words don't capture it. It wasn't a fish. It was a beast, a once-in-a-lifetime catch, the kind of animal that nets and hawks and other fish mostly keep from even happening.

Everyone's at tea. I have to look them in the eye. I haven't cried myself to sleep since I was eleven probably. I can't remember the last time the insides of my ears felt cold and tickly from catching tears for hours as I lay on my back in bed, stifling my snotty gasps out of embarrassment.

I'm a grown woman, dammit.

The night my heart broke

2006-07-23T10:49:00.000-07:00

I am too emotional even to discuss it. I have spent hours crying. The worst of worst heartbreaks.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH NO NO NO NO NO NO NO!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The Government Hearts Squirrels

2006-07-21T07:58:00.000-07:00

Well, someone looked into having the squirrels rubbed out (it wasn't me--I love 'em), and it turns out, they're a PROTECTED SPECIES.

Fancy little assholes.

A Rite of Passage for any Maiden

2006-07-18T12:56:00.000-07:00

Today I made my first loaf of traditional Finnish bread: Pulla. It was hard work. I had to pop cardamum seeds and grind them, knead the dough twice, and take my kneading board down to the sea to wash it between risings. That was noon today-- I can't BELIEVE I haven't had any suitors yet!! Don't they know? Haven't they HEARD? Why haven't they flooded onto the stoop from the forest, scooped me up, and parked me hearthside to bake my days away? I MADE MY FIRST PULLA!

Oh I know why. Silly me. I forgot my lucky fertility shinguards.

There we go. It'll be any minute now...

You know your pike is female when...

2006-07-16T02:12:00.000-07:00

...you're cleaning it and you rip out the ovaries! HAHA! Am I wrong? Am I wrong, guys? C'mon, ladies, you hear me, right?

That's right, pike #2. This time we're going to Papa's garden for some fresh horseradish to make a horseradish cream sauce. She's a beaut.

When did I become a Bass Channel-watching, sweatpant wearing, bloodthirsty woodsman?

Why can't I unzip this damn fatty suit???! Oh, because it's my body.

2006-07-15T10:12:00.000-07:00

I'm doing a lot of research on both countryside food culture and the restaurant world. But MAN is it taking its toll! I feel like someone rolled me in glue, and then in a mattress. Made of fat.

Hey, at least I'm not researching testosterone replacement therapy.

Now I have to go watch "Fletch," because it's the only movie on Finnish TV.

Score one for Jules

2006-07-11T10:49:00.000-07:00

7:00 pm-- I decide to stretch my legs
7:02 pm-- I've assembled my fishing gear; I head to the dock
7:11 pm-- BAM!

I NEVER fish without my Beethoven wig.
7:20 pm-- Dinner

"This white wine sauce is delicious! Oh--Oh I see. I'm dead and you're eating me. Well played, guys! See you never."

And then there were two

2006-07-11T07:19:00.000-07:00

Well.

Finally the squirrel that I found sitting on his haunches in the dining room this morning...

...sort of skidaddled out.

Then, he came back and BANGED AT THE DOOR, like an orphan at a baker's window, with a literal fist. I couldn't get a good picture of that, but it was hilarious, the TINIEST, most PASSIONATE gesture!

Then I was out on the FRONT patio, just yammering on the phone, when I notice a squirrel approaching me. Mind you, I had been chasing this little nugget around the house all morning, and he would run at 300 mph AWAY from me when I tried to shoo him out. Now he's all, "...hi there."

So he literally follows me around the for 20 minutes outside, in his little hoppy steps, like I'm his mother (which get my clock ticking, next thing you know I'm lactating all over, IT WAS A MESS!)

Well, now that it's become this dork, sitting outside pining for our company, even Little Miss Rat Poison kind of thinks it's sweet. "It likes my feet" she says.

The only thing now is...

There are two.

I swear, no more squirrel stories. I'm done. This is it. I just want you to know, we've accepted defeat and are living happily with our wild pets. White flag.

Open letter to the baby squirrel I've been chasing around my house for 35 minutes

2006-07-11T00:41:00.000-07:00

Baby, [NB please read in Barry White voice with background of synthetic strings]

I don't wanna do this no more. I don't want to play this game. Every time I try to talk to you, you run into the bathroom or hide under the fishing poles, some deep dark place you know I can't reach you.

But Baby you and I, we're not the same species, we're not meant to be together, and you gotta stop runnin' an' hidin' from that, you gotta get out my house for good, into a worrrl where you belong, storin' nuts, jumpin' offa trees.

Girl I ain't sayin' it ain't been fun. First time I saw you, bitch I wanted you to live on my shoulder! I thought you were so cute! But now I'm tired of these games. I want to go swimming, but I'm afraid to leave the house cause I know you'll come out of hiding and poop all over it, or chew up something I need, like cheese or underwear.

Girl, just go. I left the door open. I ain't gonna chase you no more. Go home to yo' mama, I know that crazy fucker misses you. She probably secreting panic oil out her ass all over the forest 'cause she can't find her baby!

Baby we had some good times and I ain't never gonna forget your furry ears or your huge ratty bear paws, that's fo' sho'. And please, girl, don't try to sneak on back when you drunk on cloudberries and needin' some comfort, 'cause my mama will literally step on yo' head. She's HAD it.

Please leave.

Love,
Jules

I'm not counting days anymore, it's annoying: Squirrels in the kitchen

2006-07-09T11:53:00.000-07:00

But seriously. I know it's like "enough already with the squirrels" but I came home from tea today (tea everyday at Mummu's at 1 pm, obvie) and the mother squirrel was in our kitchen, looking for the baby (who, if you've been following, we spotted today alive and well). It's like the velocoraptors in Jurassic park: THEY OPEN DOORS!! When they start barfing fatal acid in my face, then I will worry. For now, screaming out of shock seems to drive them back into the wilderness.

Tomorrow I'm going into Turku to check out a handful of restaurants, including a brewery that used to be a boat-sail manufacturer, where my great grandmother worked as a seamstress. Next up: we visit the Virginia site of my American relatives' penal colony!

It's like great grandpa always said, "The glass is only half empty when you're welded into a ball-and-chain with two idiots, hammering a road to nowhere."

Day 4: Where's National Geographic when you Need them?

2006-07-08T11:57:00.000-07:00

So last night, as Mom was clearing dinner and I was farting around on Gchat with Lang, she said,"OK, Julia, you wanna see the cutest li'l baby squirrel you evah gonna see?"

Answer: No thanks! I've got puppies to batter!

JK! I obviously jumped out of my seat and ran to the window, where I saw this:

This is where I wish some nature photographer had been on hand to make my cuteoverload.com contribution dream come drue.

All huge eyes, huge tail, little furry ears, and enormo bear paws. This thing was bred to see in the dark, jump trees, and play piano.

We knew, from the squirrel footsteps above our heads at night, that they had nested in the roof, but this li'l baby FELL OUT of the nest!

This is when he had backed himself into a corner and started shivering, because he was lost and couldn't find his mommy.

So naturally, I decide I'm going to feed it. But meanwhile, Mommy has called the neighborhood over to look at it, so I get bashful about putting out milk. What if it's considered retarded to feed squirrels, as if I had left meat out for a bear? I didn't want my grandparents coming over to see that I'd made Belgian waffles for a rat! Plus I knew my mom was against feeding it. (Me: "I want to feed it!" Mom: "No you're not! I'm gonna drown it in a bucket of water!")

The water-drowning seemed like an idle threat at the time, but later, my mom relayed the story to the relatives.

Mom: "We found a lost baby squirrel on our porch!"
My Aunt: "Oh, did you kill it?"

Later I admitted I had thrown it a vanilla cookie. Mom barely believed it. "Not my good Paussi cookies?" (that's the brand, Paussi-- they're like 'Nilla wafers with oat on top, nothing delicious enough to be wrested from a dying babe.)

We kept checking on the baby that night. He would climb up the wall but fall down before reaching the roof, his beautiful, new, dark brown tail flailing. (Everyone admitted it had a gorgeous coat) He tried so many times, but he couldn't make it and he just got exhausted. His tail was so cute and silky!

Sweet bush!

So Mom and I went to bed knowing the baby was still out there, in a dark world full of foxes and hawks (Mom: "A fox or a hawk probably come take it at night")and that it would probably die. Please note, my clever entreaties to ADOPT the squirrel, including "It could live on my shoulder, like a pirate's macaw!" "Let this death be on YOUR shoulders, then!" and "Would you leave ME out in the cold to be eaten by a fox?" did not work. Although I did learn that given the choice, Mom would indeed leave me in the cold to be eaten by a fox ("it's nature's way!")

Next morning, it was still there, and alive! But then it disappeared. We haven't seen it since. But now we have a new friend.

Mama squirrel thinks we killed her baby, and she's off-the-charts, Angela Basset-style FURIOUS.

And she's on our porch

Day 3: Adventures in Pheasant Sitting

2006-07-07T05:13:00.000-07:00

Further wildlife issues.

This is our domestic scene right now:

A poisonous snake patrols the front yard. A muskrat barfs sea chum onto our dock. A horny male pheasant announces his availability outside our house (he makes "an extended chicken shriek" says Mom) and there is a brown squirrel, possibly two doing suicide sprints on our roof, which, incidentally, is made of posterboard. The squirrel goes back and forth. It sounds like Fred Flintsone revving up his stone car by pattering his callused feet on paleolithic malachite. I said we should kill the pheasant. But what, are we going to become some kind of wilderness Branch Davidians, waving our rifles outside our compound and shooting everything that moves? We're surrounded. Frankly, the pheasant is probably terrified of mommy's Wimbledon-watching shrieks ("Ope! Ope! AAAAAAH! Come on, you've GOT to GET those!") and I know that snake doesn't enjoy seeing me in a bikini. We're basically living in a sort of lovingly annoyed Balky-Larry harmony.

With the squirrels in the role of the manky stewardesses, obviously.

Day 2: the Sound of Silence, and Possibly Judgment

2006-07-06T08:36:00.000-07:00

First, re the poisonous diamondback snake that lives under the patio: now it's become a whole thing. My mom says we should just go tell Papa when we see it and he'll come with his snake-killing stick (he has a scalp-count in the hundreds.) But I really want to kill it myself. Even though she is pathologically phobic about snakes, my mom remembers her first snake killing as s kid. She and her sister killed a baby diamondback with a stick (babies = as poisonous as the adults, if not more), and put a stone on its head because they wanted everyone to come see it and pay homage. Every day they ran to gleefully check on the progress of its deterioriation. Shall I be deprived of this joyous bat mitzvah, simply because I am a pasty city dweller with bad hand-eye coordination? I will not relegate the killing to my grandpa! In the battle between me and the snake, I have two things going for me: hands. And a shovel. Finally that BODYWEIGHT's gonna come in handy. So now, when I go down to the water, which is about 25 times a day, I take a 30-lb garden shovel, in case I cross you-know-who. I plan to hit the snake on the head with said shovel. I insist I will have it taxidermied. Mom's against this.
"You drive yourself to town with your snake in your pocket!"
"You'll drive me and I'll put it in a ziploc in the trunk!"
I will have my snake, and the villagers will come pay respects.

Quite literally what we are dealing with here.

Meanwhile, the issue of silence.

Finns are not talkers, apparently with the exception of far Eastern Finns, and expatriots in America. I think it is not an accident that talky Finns emigrate--I have no doubt they are cheerfully put out to sea on a raft to die by the entire laconic town into which they were ruefully born.

One reason that I would be a good hospice worker, in addition to the fact that I already have the orthopedic platform nurse shoes, is that I've been trained over the years to maintain conversation with a backboard. It's not my relatives in particular, who are all wonderfully kind people, it's the whole country. It seems blatanly hostile if you've never been around it before. Like they're MAD at you.

So what happens is, no one talks. And then instinctively, you feel that a terrible, unnatural void must be filled. So you throw something out there-- "I can't believe this wind!" Everyone looks PAINED. On their faces. But it's like gambling. You can't give up! You're just about to win! You throw your hat in again: "I feel like I've never seen it this windy, it's like WEIRD, right?" This is when they will finally talk. By making you seem like an idiot.
"This wind is not unusual." Reminding you that you have been forced into foolish ingenuine grandstanding by your sheer obnoxious need to fill the air with your own voice.

In America, being friends with a bunch of wiseasses, I can't say ANYTHING without a split-second response. But sometimes, the cuntiest thing is really just to let people's own words stew in silent air. Nothing sounds more judgmental than silence. Today, some natives took me along for errand-running in town. We drove into a parking garage and I found myself saying, "Ooooooooh, underground parking, eh?"
Nothing. My idiocy seemed to multiply into the space, to amplify and fill the car to the bursting point. "Underground parking, eh?" And then dead air, as if it was suddenly obvious to all present that I should be institutionalized. And it wasn't even a subtle, Canadian "eh?" It was the kind of thing that should have been accompanied by an elbow into a fellow toothless carnie's rib-cage. It started below middle C and ended at a high A sharp. If someone had replied "No, this is an underground clinic. We're finally going to get you de-farted so we can keep you inside!" Or something like that, well that's conversation. Now we're having fun! But dead silence? Man, it hurts.

Good thing that the 8.5% beer I hid last year is just where I left it! Good work, Jules!

Someone around here knows how to treat me right!

Finland Journal, Day 1

2006-07-05T06:10:00.000-07:00

I made a promise to myself that I would, in addition to getting this article done (can't wait-- it's going to be phenom) that I would start to update Beans a lot because I think that while it's all good and fun to piss away the day sitting on the dock and scribbling the most glorious prose that ever Athena lactated from her beknowledged tit, you really have to keep in mind the burden of entertaining someone else, some imagined public, or else you get all turdy and sappy.

(I have GOT to clean up my language, dammit!)

As soon as I'm done posting this picture of a farting tabby.

So even though there are about 17 people that read this with any regularity, I'm going to post all the time! YAAAAY!

So I got to Finland yesterday.

Nothing exciting happened today except for the POISONOUS SNAKE that lives under our patio finally reared its head. Now Mommy's afraid to garden. Lord knows what will become of our shrubbery! Seriously, she keeps shuddering these elaborate shudders every time she passes the patio ("Pheeeweeough yeeeee guck!")

But other than that, it's about 80 degrees, sunny, no wind-- when we drove in, I asked if it had been raining (it hadn't for days), because it looked like a tropical rainforest, big shaggy moss hanging off everything, forests I would have no trouble believing could easily furnish a couple gorillas. Alas, no gorillas in the mists, just cousins and grandparents. Really I'm really the gorilla, being congratulated and rewarded for simplistic communication. (Me: "Good Morning." Them: "What did you do today?" Me: "Fine, thank you." Them: "Good girl! Someone give her a bundle of rye.")

Mommy made me wade into the water with huge shears and cut the seagrass. I kicked up all the clay at the shore and it smelled like poop (plus it was low tide), and I got all Troop Beverly Hills about how this was so fucking nasty and it smelled like poop and I didn't want to do it. PS I was dressed like this:

Like full head to toe crazy gardening clothes (Mom: "these underwater gardening pants are so good! I have no idea where I got them!" Me: "Waterworld, starring Kevin Costner?") And I hacked at reeds. Now I have a lima-bean sized blister on my finger, but at least I earned my supper (perch fillets, salad from Mummu's garden) and maybe a doublewide G&T (after all, it's not for nothing that I was made to cross the Atlantic with a suitcase full of limes. I was terrified that airport security would check my bags-- not because I'd be in trouble, but because they would think I was totally retarded. Like I look like a normal traveller but you open my suitcase and it's just hydrangeas or something and I'm like "I'm going to a business meeting in a volcano! See you in 2050!") OK, more tomorrow.

A Voce - The Night I Almost Ate Myself Dead

2006-06-20T10:31:00.000-07:00

Q: Why no posting recently, Jules??

A: Because I've been busy nursing.

No, silly! Nursing my pathological need to eat delicious food!

That's me, far right.

Anyway, what with Matty leaving town-- he's headed to Maine this summer to cook at the Islesford Dock Restaurant in the Cranberry Islands-- and me moving of course, we had a lot of last minute eating to do. Plus, it was my birthday and all.

Yay for me! Oops, that's Jessica Alba.

That's more like it.

The point is, with limited time and resources, we hit the places we'd been most wanting to go, starting with A Voce.

And I have to say, of all the places we've ever eaten, A Voce was among the very best. I know "schmancy" plus "Italian" seems uncalled for sometimes, but this wasn't needlessly fancy, it was just absurdly fresh and perfectly cooked Italian. My favorites were the crudo, the octopus (poached first, then grilled-- it melted in your mouth), and the pastas (primavera and a lamb ragu). And of course April's desserts (she knew Matty from Cafe Gray, and sent out one of everything), which I ate most of, especially the dense sorbets and ice creams. That night, I was so uncomfortably full, even after hours of trying to walk it off, that I actually had to take one of the AmBien that my mom gives me for transatlantic flights. I think I'm still working that meal off. But well worth it. We counted, and literally, we had plowed through 20 courses. TWENTY. PIGS! and when you think about all the little starving children out there...

well, you just want to eat them, too.

I said I was pathological.

As promised, France photos

2006-05-13T16:27:00.000-07:00

Remember how I was all, "You can't get a sense, from words, how insanely cute a lippy little runt goat is unless you see the photo"? So, 2 months after my trip to the south of France, some real winners.

I mean, come on. A thousand words, no? Or maybe just three words, repeated 333 times each: so effing cute.

Mamma Mom with Mamma Goats.

Me, drunk, 10 a.m. We did the vineyard early because they say your palette is best in the morning. Probably should have spat. Whatever.

The wine was awesome-- Domaine d'Eole. Small organic winery (almost all the wines in the region are "biologique," or organic according to some standard.) White, red and rose, tried 'em all. I black out just before the rose.

Atelier de Joel Durand, in St. Remy. The guy's blowing up (this is one of his assistants.) There was a reporter from Le Figaro there, and someone from a French home and garden magazine. Keep your eyes peeled for him or you can order his stuff online. His signature is this chocolate "alphabet" where each chocolate is imprinted with little golden letters indicating the flavor on the inside: J stands for chocolate with Jasmin tea, etc. He also uses lots of provencale flavors like thyme, rosemary and olive. Since we were there just before eEaster, the whole place had become a warren of chocolate rabbits, but they make a wide range of stuff, from compotes to cookies. His website's gorgeous, if you're in the mood to salivate all over your keyboard. The guy himself was explosively charismatic, 7 feet of hyperactive limbs, wild hair, and the fastest ream of spoken French I've ever heard.

I don't know if this picture gives you a sense of the intensity...

Fish market in Aix-en-Provence.

More fish in Aix...

More fish...

Ah, the ubiquitous sea urchin, or oursin. Stands along the shore in Cassis cracked 'em by the dozen for you to slurp outside.

Me awkwardly standing alone in Cassis, the innocent, pretty port town just down the coast from Marseille. It's like, if you think of Marseille as a throbbing steam-powered ocean liner, Cassis is like a white wooden sailboat with a doily for a sail and a little white lamb in a hat as the skipper. In other words, adorable.

Marseille: lots more fish at the daily market on the port.

Saddest little squids.

Eels and Octopi.

Check out the creepy eye!

Alrighty. Enough outta me.

The Great Pastrami Showdown

2006-05-13T12:41:00.000-07:00

My eating is not very directed, and not usually educational. I don't get takeout from three local Thai places and sit around taking tiny bites and ascribing lots of adjectives until I have a winner. There's usually just one winner, and that's me, after I've eaten 150% of whatever my stupid whims dictate.

But recently I've been craving pastrami. Maybe the fact that I'm leaving the city soon has started to sink in and now I'll be streaking, panic-riddled, through every cultural treasure I've neglected in the past 7 years. I start my mornings at the Guggenhiem, hi-five a bum as I swing around a lamp-post and shoot off to catch the Circle Line. And Katz's.

You think pastrami and you think Katz's. It's been around quite literally since the end of the 19th century, but in that time the restaurant is perhaps proudest to have hosted the orgasm scene from "When Harry Met Sally." But I'd heard grumbling about the pastrami there recently (Among complaints, Chowhound.com dissensters pointed out that the meat's no longer smoked in-house, but sent out to Jersey.) And when it came to the city's best pastrami, there seemed to be one name on everyone's lips: Sarge's Delicatessen, on 35th and 3rd, a relative upstart at around 40 years old.

The Pastrami Showdown, a.k.a. Superfatty Fat Fat Matty and Jules Fatass Day: Katz's v. Sarge's.

Matty and I started at Katz's. When Matty was a cook at Prune, which is basically across the street, he used to eat at Katz's a lot, and scoffed at rumors of a downhill slide. We went at 3 in the afternoon and the place was basically empty, a rarity. Pastrami sandwich, $13.45, on rye with mustard, and huge-cut fries and a beer for Matty, celery soda for me. The walk to the table from the counter was almost painful, so badly I wanted to tear into that tower of thick, salty slabs of pastrami. It was awesome. It really was. So pickly and falling apart, ribbons of fat running all through it. Although in fact, the meat was surpisingly lean. With some bites you actually had to break down a kind of stringiness.

Apparently it's somewhat common knowledge that if you throw the cutters some extra cash, they'll give you the fattier slices. (Thanks to Chef Dave for the tip.) Maybe the leaner meat is meant to please a changing demographic: our friend Eli said that "new Jews" like the meat lean and "old Jews" like it fatty. I don't know what that means.

Old Jew?

New Jew?

Old Jew?

New Jew?

No Jew? I try so hard to be Jewish, but then Easter comes around, you know?

As we plowed through our halves of the sandwich, I threw Matty the question of what makes a good pastrami. He said something about nitrates or something, that they're in the meat and you shouldn't be able to taste them. And that you needed the right spice in the brine. And I guess there's the all important question of freshness. As for Katz's production being relocated to New Jersey, who cares? Of course they have to farm out, they're moving a ridiculous quantity of the stuff every day. It tasted utterly fresh. I guess, much like Whitney Houston, Ice T, Jerry Lewis and Norman Mailer, pastrami does not get fatally tainted by spending its formative stages in New Jersey.

Sarge's

We didn't even walk. Cab up to Sarge's, which is more of a restaurant, with a full diner menu. Big leather booths, nice waitresses, $1.25 for a BOWL of kickass coffee. We got a pastrami sandwich on rye with mustard ($9.95) and a tongue and corned beef sandwich on rye with cole slaw ($12.95), a house special. Holy shit. The cut was different from Katz's-- this was thinner, more ribbony. Where you had to chip in with some chewing at Katz's, this was pure and total butter in your mouth. And, like Katz's, this was a very generous portion, one sandwich easily enough for two people. It was delicious, definitely up there with Katz's. I think I have a personal preference for the slab-stack thicker cut style sandwich, but there's no doubt that you're dealing with the same quality product at both places.

THE OFFICIAL PASTRAMI SHOWDOWN VERDICT: I am fat and I like salty meat. That's the verdict. I think we call all agree on it. Further verdicts:

- New York is lucky to have so much awesome briny beef.

- If you live in Murray Hill and you're not spending every Sunday morning in one of those leather booths at Sarge's with a bowl of coffee and a pile of pastrami, check your insurance statements, because you've been recently lobotomized. Oh, I forgot to mention: the tongue and corned beef with cole slaw was technically my favorite thing we ate during the whole day. Perfect.

- Katz's has not gone downhill, it is not a tourist trap, it's selling the real deal. And tip your cutter! (Insert crude circumcision joke here.)

That's it for pseudoscience and instructive eating. Back to blindly putting anything in my face.

The Best Seat in the House

2006-04-10T13:00:00.000-07:00

There are many downsides to having a professional cook for a boyfriend. He comes home at 3 in the morning every night, leaving you ample time to cuddle alone and imagine him being mugged at the Utica station when he falls asleep in the C train. He is paid like a suburban babysitter. Sometimes his knives fall out of his bag in the rare taxi rides on which you collectively can manage to afford, slicing you across the hip. He touches you with fingers that have recently been slipping the seeds out of hot chilis, and you get hives. But there are a few perks, and one of them is that you get to know, through him, other cooks, and these other cooks go to other restaurants, and through a series of small-scale professional diasporas, there are now a handfull of restaurants where you can go and feel like family.

The perk aspect here has nothing to do with swag, with free drinks or dishes, but has everything to do with the singular experience of being friends with a cook in his own restaurant. Of course, there is the pride you feel at seeing your boyfriend's peers, now your friends, take on a new place, or even take the helm of a place. But more than that, it's admission into his side of the fray: on the stormy seas of clattering pans, sundry staff, loss and profit, bar and bathroom, you and he are in one industry-forged little boat, together. For him, years of long nights, of falling asleep on the train and getting mugged, of having his knives slip out of his bag or of burning his girlfriend's skin, have earned him the ability to make these gestures of generosity to whomever he chooses, and you sit on the receiving end, a concentrated extraction of pure gratitude.

Beans' Brush with Death

2006-03-31T09:28:00.000-08:00

Man, oh man. There's actually no way to post this business without the photos-- I can TELL you that I held a day-old runt goat in my arms at a cheese farm, but you really need to SEE his lippy little goat grin on film to appreciate it.

I ate so much on this trip, I can't believe I'm alive. One night I actually woke up in terrible, terrible shooting stomach pain. As I moaned and rolled like a beached whale, my mom suggested I might be having a "gaul bladder attack." WHATEVER THAT MEANS. I associate gaul bladder problems, like gout, with men like Captain Ahab or Martin Van Buren. How could a beautiful young maiden like me get a gaul bladder attack? Would I officially have to start smoking snuff and reading sequential volumes about British naval history??

It turned out that as I did every night in France, I had simply overeaten. But really really bad. The pain went away after a day or so, but not before my mom had to contemplate driving me to a French hospital to get "de la morphine, s'il vous plait." In 1998 I had my one encounter with a French hospital. I sprained my ankle dancing to Rusted Root at a house party. It was a light sprain, but the doctor put me in a full, hard, bright green leg-foot cast, and gave me a pair of polio crutches with elbow braces. Eventually I realized how ridiculous this was, sawed my own cast off with a butter knife and healed the sprain with a bandage.

I have no idea what they would have done for my "gaul bladder attack"...(in reading the following, please ascribe a ridiculous accent to all French parties.)

Mom: HELP! [dragging me in by one arm to emergency room, where everyone is chain smoking]
French Doctor: What's the matter??
Mom: I think my daughter's having a gaul bladder attack!
French Doctor: She was attacked by one of my countrymen? Have you called the police?
Mom: No, her gaul bladder, it needs to be removed!
French Doctor: Are you a trained medical professional, madame?
Mom: No.
French Doctor [looking concerned]: Then you had better not remove her gaul bladder.
Nurse: DOCTEUR! DOCTEUR!
French Doctor: Oui, Nurse?
Nurse: There is a woman who is fresh out of Cotes du Rhone over there!
French Doctor: WELL REFILL HER GLASS, FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY! Nurse! [whispering] Are you a trained medical professional?
Nurse: [whispering] Non, I am a waitress.
French Doctor: MMmmbut of course.
Julia: OUCH OUCH OUCH, my stomach still hurts!
French Doctor: Good point. Are YOU a trained medical professional?
Julia: No.
French Doctor: DAMMIT! DAMMIT! DAMMIT!
Mom: What seems to be the problem, doctor?
French Doctor: ...nothing... The problem is, she's having a gaul bladder attack!
Mom: I knew it!
Julia: Really? A gaul bladder attack? But you didn't even examine me.
French Doctor: But I barely know you! You want to get in a little gown and play princess, you do it on your own time. YOU are having a GAUL BLADDER ATTACK!
Julia: But I thought that was an old man's disease.
French Doctor: Well, now you are the man. TO THE MAN!
[Emergency room raises their glasses, doctor puts 12 cigarettes in JULIA's mouth and lights them.]
French Doctor: And now, we will put your leg in a cast. Do you concur?
Mom: Absolutely!
All: HOORAY!

SCENE.

"Don't worry about me! My gaul bladder's on the mend!"

Beans in the South of France

2006-02-27T13:50:00.000-08:00

Luckily, I'm going to the south of France with my mom for 2 weeks to take cooking classes. What this will entail, I have no clue. I don't think it's going to be technically-oriented. I predict a lot of wine-nipping and herb-sniffing and very little hard labor. Either way, no complaints here. The last time I was in the south of France, I was 16 doing an exchange program through my highschool. I lived with an awesome family-- at the time I regarded their refusal to refrigerate milk, cheese, and eggs as a reflection of their laissez-faire awesomeness. Later I realized that no one in France refrigerates perishables. It is considered highly uncouth I believe. Nevertheless, they were cool, helmed by a tiny artist father, who, had he rolled his paintbrushes up in his beret, lit them on fire and smoked them through his ass while riding a unicycle, could NOT have been more stereotypically French.

My point here is-- and watch out because there was no indication that the point was going to be anywhere in this vicinity-- we'll be staying in Arles but venturing out to Nimes, Avignon, and anyplace else with something worth seeing and/or eating. So if anyone has any suggestions, please feel free to pass them along via email or comments below. That's right. I said something genuine, something not intended to make ribaldry, nor mirth. Suck it.

R.I.P. Buttercream: A Life Without Matrimony

2006-02-26T13:07:00.001-08:00

I went to my first wedding relatively late in life, as a sophomore in college. It was a Scandinavian wedding. Scandinavian events are either marked by painful austerity, or by an alcohol-fueled break from that austerity, and thankfully this affair was the latter. I danced up a storm. I drank up a typhoon. I didn’t think I wanted to catch the bouquet—- the elders had to aggressively usher me into the line-up of ladies—- but the second those roses left the bride’s palm, something primeval swelled in me and I ended up diving like a Steelers linebacker making a last-minute completion at the Superbowl. (Sorry about the stitches, Gertrude!!) Somewhere between the traditional pickled herring and smoked salmon and the tiered white cake, I threw up my arms. “Who knew weddings were so fun?” I thought, ankle deep in fish bones and butter cream frosting, a blonde maiden icing her head wound at the next table over.

I returned to the states with a greedy eye towards the near future: after all, in only a few years I could look forward to all the post-college hitchings that you hear about mostly in the form of complaints. Apparently, people start to rethink the value of certain friendships when all of a sudden they involve airfare to Tuscon, a $400 frock the color of nauseated seafarer, and a gift-wrapped Cuisinart. But I was ready and willing! And here I am, years later, woefully uncaked and underchampagned, a gift-wrapped Cuisinart pouting like an unadopted puppy in a corner of my closet. I haven’t been invited to a single wedding since that first blissful event so many years ago. Why?

Is there a possibility that I am widely hated by a group of cunning friend-imposters that are playing an elaborate ruse by “inviting me to brunch” and “confiding in me”? I am fairly certain that these people do, in fact, like me. No, I have a better answer: My male friends are all gay and my female friends are all comedians. And most of the gays are comedians, too, so really there's an overlapping Venn web of weddinglessness. And let me say, they are all lovely, beautiful people, witty, sparkling, special. But there is a type of person that specifically wants to settle down, a type of person that will chew through her nails with anxiety until the princess-cut diamond that she researched is safely past her knuckle. I do not have any of these diamond-researching hausfraus for friends.

If the Ghost of Friendmaking Past could chaperone me back to my freshman year of high scool, I would watch in horror as a fat, frizzy-haired version of myself in a Les Miserables sweatshirt blissfully signed up for the high school Drama Club—signing away that butter cream frosting, slice by slice, with every semester’s new musical revival! For every hour we spent in oversized suitjackets singing “Luck be a Lady” in the cafeteria, a future amuse-bouche was hurtled into a dark grave. When I burst onstage in hooker digs at age 13 for A Gershwin musical about Havana, somewhere in the distant future a bouquet of roses burst into flames. We didn’t know it at the time, but in those years we cemented ourselves as the Unmarryables, some of us legally, all of us undeniably. A furious yen for a career in lights eroded the part of the brain that holds fantasies of potholders and PTAs. Synaptic channels were fused such that from then on, when a man makes a joke, we automatically search to ruthlessly one-up him rather than simply laugh.

Knowing what I know now, I would sign myself up for the volleyball team, maybe the knitting club, a bosomous coven of utterly appealing future brides. I wouldn’t listen to their stupid conversation, I wouldn’t set or spike, knit or pearl. I would just sit there like Bernie in "Weekend at Bernie’s" racking up the required amount of time for me to be definitively included in the guest lists for their wedding circuit. Then I would get blacked out at all their weddings (cut to me passed out spread-eagle in a miniskirt on the hood of a white limo), ruthlessly one-up all the singles I meet, dump the sluts as friends, and go back to the cynical, man-eating faggotry that I have come to know and love as my talented group of friends.

But first: where's that fucking bouquet? BRING IT. BRING IT!!!!