Category: Thoughts

Someone just bought a $10,000 motorcycle, barely rode it at all, and now wants to sell it. What went wrong? Abortive midlife crisis? Illness? Divorce? An ultimatum of divorce related to the motorcycle? Or did they win it in a raffle and decide not to keep it? Is it a shop trying to unload excess inventory without having to announce a sale?

Then there’s this guy who bought an $8000 bike, spent $10,000 on chrome, and needs to sell because he has a baby. Location? Lynn, Lynn, city of sin. It’s almost surprising the ad doesn’t begin with “Accidentally had a baby, now have to get married and sell bike.” I love that he says “Over $10,000 INVESTED!” Sorry, I think you should be using a different word. One like like “WASTED!”

Good: Jimmy Carter is a hero.

Bad: As the boat is sinking, President D-Bag says “Fuck the children!” Lou Pearlman asks, “Do we have time?”

Ugly: NSFW Anna Nicole Smith near-death OD photos.

The guy in white being murdered is a Japanese journalist.

I have earlier stated that Cat Power does the best cover version of “Satisfaction,” but Devo does a great one too:

(Note also their brilliant cover of Nine Inch Nails’ “Head Like A Hole.”)

(Via Ectomo, the weirdest blog I’ve found all week).

From co-worker Joel Brown’s review of Bionic Woman: “This is moody, broody stuff, and I don’t just mean because Isaiah Washington begins a multi-episode appearance next week. (We kid because we love! But not in a homosexual way!)”

From my Friday night TV recs: “Moonlight: Debut. This “Angel” knockoff just might be the best new broadcast-network drama on Friday nights. I’m pretty sure it’s the only new broadcast-network drama on Friday nights. Anyway, watch it if you have a thing for vampire detectives.”

Seriously, there’s nothing good on TV on Friday nights. Anyone with anything better to do is out doing it, so the Friday night audience is more or less captive.

Also I continued a crusade against replacing actors with robots, and insinuated that a number of famous people are totally gay.

You know, I try to make the world a little better every day, so I also explained to my readers how to spot a particularly fancy suit.

That’s me. Saving the world, one worst-dressed-list and near-libelous insinuation at a time.

I’ve been buying various meats at the farmer’s market this summer: local organic natural beef from River Rock, that kind of thing. The farmers invariably have a bunch of coolers filled with ice packs and frozen packages of various items, set up in the shade, and the quality is absolutely fantastic. Really delicious meat.

Of course, being farmers who have the whole animal to sell, they have some odd bits as well as the usual steaks and ground beef and pork chops and sausage. And of course, being me, I always want to add one of the odd cuts because it sounds like a culinary adventure. And of course, being human, we eat the normal stuff first and then look in the freezer and find it full of less-common or harder-to-cook cuts.

Start with the five or ten pounds of short ribs and brisket and so forth, which just need long, slow braising. They’re great for cold weather, so we’ll hold off til then, but at least I know how to cook those things.

Then I get some weird things that don’t make a lot of sense, but which I just had to have at that moment. Like the six pounds of beef marrow bones, which you can’t really use for stock (not enough meat on them). You can really only do two things with them: roast them and serve them with toast and a very small knife (scoop out the gooey insides), or feed them to a dog. On the plus side, they were very cheap. I have no idea how to cook them, but I’ll learn, I guess. At least I have enough to try several times.

Same with the hog jowls (aka “pork cheeks”) I got this weekend. I snapped them up mostly because I remember Mario Batali using them and calling them guanciale. Well, when I got home I found out the difference: to get guanciale you have to be willing to hang your raw, salted jowls in a basement for six weeks, because it’s cured hog jowls. Basically, guanciale is to jowls as bacon is to pork belly. And all the other pork-cheek and hog-jowl recipes I can find are basically variations on using the jowls as a kind of bacon, and on them already being cured and/or smoked.

And my basement is just too damp to cure meat.

And I’m scared.

Right now, I’m thinking confit, but I’m kind of scared of that, too.

Did I say I was looking for food adventure?

My favorite acronym of the moment is “tl;dr” which means “too long; didn’t read.”

I was going to post something really deep about what that acronym’s existence means to our society, but… tl;dw.

NYT reviews “Good Luck Chuck”: “… a must-see for young men with a subscription to Maxim but no access to the Internet….” “Chuck gets a lot of action, but then — after a long, split-screen montage of his priapic exertions — he starts to feel empty and used. Me too. But if the logic of “Good Luck Chuck” holds, the next movie I see should be a masterpiece.”

I admit to thinking this cartoon is funny. I admit to owning a t-shirt based on this cartoon.

toothpastefordinner.com

But I can’t really wear it any more: The Canadian Dollar is now trading at parity with the US Dollar.

It’s not strictly bad news: should be good for the US export sector. What’s left of it, anyway.

Kafkaesque really is the only way to describe it: “Hello and welcome to the United States. Your visa has been revoked. We cannot tell you why. Goodbye!” Or for that matter, Welcome to K-Mart. You may not leave. You have committed a crime. Unlawful detention anyone? I’d make fun of her for shopping at K-Mart, but seriously: what is the world coming to when everyone is nothing more than a suspect, guilty until proven innocent? Also, I read today that pirates are causing trouble. Not the joke kind and not the software kind, mind you. I mean real pirates with automatic weapons.

Oh hey, children do neat stuff: