a black day in guttermoralityland

.
i'd always figured the spammers would pay no more attention to this little blog than has most everybody else; sadly, i was wrong.

apologies, commenters, for the new red tape.

the angry blogger, part 3

.
[part 2 to come--sorry, i'm feeling a little tarantino-ish.]

you know that old, hackneyed serenity prayer the alkies cling to--the one that importunes god for the ability to accept that which one can't change, the balls to change that which is in one's power to effect, and the smarts to know which is which?

well, if i were suddenly granted three wishes by the universe, that would damn sure be one of 'em.

from as far back as i can remember i have railed endlessly and impotently against all the idiots out there, since that's easier than facing down the idiot in here

[which self-awareness puts me at least a half-step ahead of all those other angry bloggers, right?].

gobble gobble

.


when i was a kid growing up in tyler, texas, it was a backwater place basically known for three things: roses, oil money and greenberg's smoked turkeys.

if we were lucky, one of our rich relations would favor us with a greenberg turkey at christmas, and when that happened i can't tell you how special it was because there are few things in this world my family loves as much, but in those lean days we would've never dreamed of splurging on such a luxury for ourselves.

in the ensuing years--especially since oprah named them one of her favorite things a few years back--greenberg's has gone from regional delicacy to coast-to-coast phenomenon, and deservedly so. i'm tellin ya, if you haven't had one, you haven't lived.

these last several years, i've always made sure one of these glorious birds preceded my arrival at my mom's house by a day or so, so as to be perfectly thawed in time for christmas dinner.

well, today it suddenly occurred to me that i'd forgotten to go online and order this year's turkey, so in a last-minute panic i called greenberg's from my car, prepared for the inevitable disappointment.

to my surprise, the phone was answered on the first ring by a live person [and no indian accent, either--that familiar east texas twang washed over me like warm bathwater].

i explained the problem, she pulled up my record immediately. "got it, hon--same order, same address?"

i said yeah, started fumbling for a credit card, asked if she could wait til i pulled over. she said, "aw, don't worry bout that--when the bill comes jest send us a check, and yew and your family have a merry christmas!"

i miss east texas sometimes.

quote of the effin' decade

.
last week, the president sat down with steve kroft for his third (i think) snow job appearance on 60 minutes since his election. among many extraordinary utterances, this is the one that most made me wanna throw shit at the tv:

"I did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of fat cat bankers on Wall Street."

oh, really, mr. president?

[believe it or not, there was a time when i might've actually bought that statement--last year before the election, as much as i thought [hell, knew] how wrong this guy was for the job, i at least held out the hope that if elected, his ultra-liberal ass would be compelled to throw the corrupt money-changers outta the temple.

ha--even i can be a pollyanna sometimes; i managed to forget for a minute that, no matter which side of the aisle a politician's on, it's first, last and always about the money.]

rather than the pretty words our president says, let's look instead at what he's done, shall we?

i could lay it out for you--hell, my jaw's been on the floor since he named tim geithner as his treasury secretary--but matt taibbi's done a far better job of documenting the whole ugly mess than i ever could, so read him instead. and i mean, every word.

i tell you, when disillusioned liberals start writing pieces like this, you know it's getting pretty bad.

another productive day at the office

. when i started here, there were sixteen people in my department. today we're down to three, we're the cream of what had already been a select crop, and we're a pretty tight bunch. three nights a week, our schedules coincide in such a way that allows us a long, leisurely dinner together. 

while we're all interesting people with creative backgrounds and our conversations tend to range over a wide variety of subjects, our perennial focus seems to be [and always has been] food, which we talk about incessantly. first, we cover what each person has brought to the table that night--where we got it, what's in it, what we paid for it and/or how we made it, if it's as good as it was last time. then we talk about what we've eaten since last we saw each other, and then, often as not, we talk about our favorite dishes past and present, with excruciating attention paid to every detail of how each is prepared. 

seriously, we never tire of this shit. 

well, one night not long ago i went off on velveeta/ro-tel queso, about how it had once been a staple of my texas youth and how much i missed it. to my amazement, neither of my colleagues had ever experienced the bliss that is this simple dish, nor could they understand how an ungodly combination of canned tomatoes and an engineered cheese product with a millenial shelf-life could even be edible, much less addictive--i said "don't knock it 'til you've tried it." 

next day sue walked in, dumped the following grocery-sack full of ingredients into my lap and said, "let's do it." and thus white-trash fridays were born. 

sadly, i was too busy gorging myself that particular friday to take pictures of the finished product, but it looked very much like this: it always does--seriously, microwave or stove-top, you can't fuck this stuff up, and i've never met anybody, no matter how high-brow, who didn't love it [this now includes my two colleagues]. 

next white-trash friday, we went with a favorite culinary ensemble from my college days: carl buddig lunch-meat sandwiches on pillowy white bread with cheddar-american cheese, mayo, iceberg lettuce and tomato, lipton california onion dip and ruffles potato chips, as lovingly pictured below: lemme tellya, just buying all this shit was an adventure--i found myself in aisles of the supermarket i hadn't walked in years, but it was totally worth it. and fuck the preservatives--it was a most excellent and gratifying meal. 

which brings us to tonight (yeah, it's only thursday, but it was john's birthday so we made an exception). john's menu was very specific, and straight from his childhood: oscar mayer turkey-bologna sandwiches on wonder bread [and only wonder bread would do--he was like a dog with a bone on the subject], best foods mayo, kraft macaroni-and-cheese with a can of hormel turkey chili thrown in, all accompanied by hawaiian punch. oh, and sara lee pound cake and reddi-whip for dessert. 

i ask you, does it get any more white-trash than this? 

sue volunteered to pick it all up, but called me on the way in and asked, "what about the card?"

i told her i'd take care of it. 

i googled, found the images i wanted, realized that since i was without my laptop i was gonna have to do this without the benefit of photoshop or illustrator, sighed and opened the infernal microsoft word on my office desktop, prepared myself for the inevitable struggle. the front was easy enough: but the inside? fuck--after struggling for an hour trying to get text and pictures to play nice together in word, i finally wised up and did it in powerpoint: turns out the biggest problem involved my dyslexic ass trying to figure out how to turn the paper for each pass through the color laser printer in order to get the sonofabitch to come out right--eventually i succeeded. 

 then a stop downstairs in the copy-room at the paper-cutter, swing by the mailroom for the appropriately-sized envelope, and we're done:

[and thank you, shitty iphone, for these quality photos]

 

oh, and the food: tomorrow i may take a serious shot at doing some actual work.

i couldn't have said it better (assuming i wasn't so internet-numbed that i still had the attention span necessary to form such thoughts, of course)

.
on may 7, 2006, harper lee wrote a letter to oprah winfrey (published in O in July 2006), in which she wrote about her love of books as a child and her dedication to the written word:

Now, 75 years later in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books.

if this headline doesn't say it all, then i don't know what ever will

.

do you get it yet, people?

when the overlords piously bloviate about how all the developed countries of the world must come together, surrender their autonomy to the united nations climate police and destroy what shreds of their economies and standards of living still remain for the sake of some half-assed, bogus science experiment gone wrong, they're only talking about you, the little people.

the architects of this massive fraud will, of course, be exempt from such strictures and be free to continue to rake in millions on their carbon-offset scams and public-speaking engagements, collect their awards and trot the globe in their gulfstreams preaching the virtue of sacrifice.

and yeah, i'm talkin about you, you fat fuck.