Zombie Lapdance

I ran across two interesting animals today.

This morning, while biking to work, I came across a giant snapping turtle who was in the process of crossing Airport Boulevard.

I considered helping it across the road so it wouldn’t get hit, but because it was a large turtle, finger-amputating size, and because I remembered all the stories my uncles would tell about how snapping turtles could reach around and bite you even if you were holding it by the back of the shell, I thought I would let it fend for itself. I can’t imagine its journey went well. It was heading in the exact opposite direction of water.

Then, while on break from work, I spotted a parakeet in the parking lot. It was a tiny little thing, wading through a chest-deep puddle. It couldn’t fly, and was way too small to amputate my fingers, so I caught it and put it in a box.

Either it was too injured to resist, or it was very tame, because it would perch on my finger and let me pet its belly with my thumb.

Nobody responded to the craigslist ad for a lost parakeet. I thought about keeping it, but it’s already found a home.

Maybe with proper training, the snapping turtle would perch on my finger.

There’s this little Korean grocery near my place that I’d never visited. It’s actually hard to find, it’s little more than a door in a strip mall. And for that matter it’s not really a grocery. It’s more like a kitchen that specializes in banchan, the Korean side dishes. It’s called "Mom’s Taste" presumably because when you think of side dishes you think of mom. I walked in the door, and there was one wall filled with little plastic tubs of pickled whatnot. On the other wall were a couple shelves of staples like instant noodles, bags of rice, and jugs of oil. The kid behind the counter came out and talked to me about the options. I should have bought a couple tubs of pickled whatnot, instead I got patties of bulgogi.

The fried up delicious, but I had so few sides to eat with it.

I’m low on groceries, so I had to eat some old impulse purchases. I got this can of stuffed eggplant a long time ago.

Every bite glistened.

The joy of food frakking is finding that queer cultural oddity before anyone else. Finally I have done that. These "papitas caseras," or fried potatoes, are absolutely brilliant. The trick is that the potatoes aren’t fried whole or in lumps, but in flat chips or something. I’m certain they will catch on in America as soon as people get over their initial surprise at the novelty.

I’m not so sure about the hot sauce packet though.

For months and months I’ve been going drinking with people down on East Sixth Street and the Liberty Bar with the hidden motive of eating at the Tacos Selene cart. This last week the little taqueria finally had the oreja in stock. You know, pig ear.

Each little square of oreja had a layer of skin on the top and bottom that was cooked to a gooey and sticky consistency. Sandwiched in between was a thin layer of white cartilagey material. The consistency of the middle layer is impossible to describe. It had the same sort of toothsome feel you get with tripe. Something midway between the texture of a wafer cookie and a toenail clipping.

Now that I’m an adult I figured it was time I owned a charcoal grill.

Julia, my food frakking deputy, and my friend Peter Gabriel came over to do some Memorial Day grilling. We had kielbasa sausages and asparagus.

I tried toasting buttered buns on the grill because that’s what the lady on that annoying NPR food show told me to do, but they ended up charred when I put them directly on the grill.

The sausages gave me the opportunity to use some of my Mang Thomas All Purpose Sauce.

You can use that stuff for anything. And don’t go thinking that’s just a brand name, the MT supermarket had several brands of all purpose sauce. It’s tangy and sweet and fruity, everything that ketchup wants to be but isn’t.

Just to be extra American, I rounded out the meal with some cole slaw and potato salad.

Not sure why I put some papitas caseras on the side. That foreign snack undermined the patriotic integrity of the meal.

One of the reasons why I’ve been posting less frequently on this blog is because I’ve been contributing to a not-for-profit community website called Austinpost.org. I’ve been given the job of luring people onto the site by writing about local politics in a way that is funny enough and infuriating enough to get them to come back and read more.

Most recently I’ve been writing about the KeyPoint report scandal as well as Capital Metro. The high point has been when the mayor’s chief of staff personally emailed me to protest my portrayal of a city resolution about agenda transparency.

I know, city politics doesn’t sound that exciting to most people, but I’m doing my best to make it entertaining and to raise the level of public discourse on the subject.

Now, should you desire to read some of my posts, just to see if I’m as funny as I think I am if for no other reason, you should vote with the "thumbs up" button at the bottom of the article. Right now the chairman of the local libertarian party has almost four times the number of votes as me, and it’s just not fair.

I was listening to a BBC science podcast, and I noticed that instead of referring to the ongoing disaster as the "BP oil spill" they called it the "Gulf of Mexico oil spill." In fact, throughout the whole program, where they talked about the various scientific efforts at mitigating the spill, not once did they mention the name "British Petroleum."

Although it is nice that they’re trying not to draw attention to the worst thing that Britain did to the US since they burned down the White House.

Every day I take comfort in knowing that the petroleum companies are technological wizzes, and that a deep-sea oil disaster could never have happened.

A few photos from here and there.

This weekend I went to a fundraiser out in the neighborhood of the Moose Lodge. They had a pinata of Ironman.

Kind of looks like he’s being hung in effigy, don’t it? Personally, I didn’t think the movie was necessarily that bad.

From the bakery. Nothing I could say about this cookie would add significantly to the image.

They’ve finally started on the extension to the Lamar pedestrian bridge.

The extension will stretch across Cesar Chavez, so you no longer have to wait at the light after biking over the river.

Remember those chalkboard chess games I was talking about? In the most recent game, Kevin forced me to a resignation in only 36 moves.

And no, I don’t want to talk about it.

The previous post about my trip to Waffle House reminded me to look into the possibility of buying a copy of the Waffle House music CD.

For people who don’t live below the Mason-Dixon Line, you should know that every Waffle House has a jukebox, and every Waffle House jukebox has about thirty songs about Waffle House products (most of the remaining songs are billboard country). Songs like "Waffle House Family" and "Good Food Fast".

I was on a road trip with some co-op buddies a few years ago, and we stopped at a Waffle House. Because that’s what you do on road trips, eat greasy food at roadside chains.

I slipped a fiver into the jukebox and, because I thought it was funny, selected all the Waffle House songs. By the time the third song started, I think it was "There Are Raisins In My Toast", a waitress who was not our waitress came over to our table to yell at me. The Waffle House songs were still playing when we left.

I think it is probably the most unintentionally destructive thing I’ve ever done.

So I was looking on Amazon for the Waffle House CD and I discovered that they do indeed have it. They are however asking $99. It should be noted that you can get the CD on the Waffle House website for $10.

I would like to further note that $10 is still too much to pay for this music.

The thermometer here in Austin has stuck firmly in its rut at the 90-degree mark. After this entry I’ll go back to blogging separately the "stuff that is cold."

An icecream truck passed by the softball game I was watching, so I bought this icecream-ized Spongebob Squarepants.

Each part of Spongebob’s anatomy had a distinct taste. From the watermelon grin to the cotton-candy eyeballs and the lemon face. And let us not under-sell the shear bliss of chewing Spongebob’s frozen gumball pupils.

A visit to Sandy’s hamburgers down by the lake prompted me to buy this hand-dipped cone.

The chocolate dip was not as good as I anticipated. It tasted more like wax than chocolate, and the soft serve melted and pooled beneath the chocolate where my tongue could not lick it before it leaked. The next time I eat one I will have to completely revamp my ice cream cone licking strategies.

Who am I fooling? I enjoyed the heck out of it.

Also, my friend insisted that I take a picture of her perfectly ordinary cheeseburger.

That’s not food-frakking at all!

When you read the words "purple glutinous rice pastries" what comes into your mind?

Once heated, they become exciting spheres of goo. I liked biting into them, the rice dough sticking against my teeth. When the purple glutinous rice pastries popped, they spilled warm sesame paste over my tongue.

Top Notch up on Burnet is a quite traditional burger and chicken place. You can tell because they fry their pies.

Is there no baked good that cannot be improved by deep-frying?

As a Midwesterner, there will always be something exotic about Waffle House. The chili omelet benefited from their proprietary milkshake mixer egg foaming, which made the omelet light, fluffy and just greasy enough.

I bought this stick of tamarind paste at the cash register of a Tex-Mex restaurant. It was a last minute sort of thing.

You know how dried tamarind has all these inedible hulls and seeds? This stick was exactly like that, but with a lot of goo. I don’t think I was able to swallow even a tenth of a teaspoon. Are these things really edible? Seriously?

From one of the zillion Tex-Mex patio places on South First, a plate of tilapia ceviche.

I’ve never had this before to my recollection. It’s raw fish that’s been cooked in lime juice. Sort of a Mexican version of sushi. Although I honestly couldn’t taste the fish. The lime juice and cilantro drowned out any other tastes there might have been. Although you can barely taste tilapia at the best of times. It’s the fish version of white bread.

Julia, my food-frakking deputy, and I stopped at a marisco place down on Cesar Chavez and Pleasant Valley called Catedral del Marisco. Julia started out with a Coctel de Camaron. I ate a little of the cocktail sauce that didn’t actually have large shrimp parts in it, and it was quite good. Gotta love the saltines, the only way to eat sea food in dime-sized chunks.

Then Julia got the tostada del pulpo. I don’t think I’ve ever tasted octopus that has been seasoned and cooked so well.

Myself, I ordered the biggest thing on the menu, the whole-fried catfish.

I particularly liked the bits of belly that were fried to crispy, thin flaps like catfish potato chips.

My, Mr. Catfish, what tiny bristly teeth you have.

The online science fiction publication Beneath Ceaseless Skies has just posted my new weird epic, The Secret of Pogopolis. This is a story about urban myopia and ballistic trajectories.

This is my first SFWA-credited professional sale, so I expect you to enjoy this story extra hard.

I’d heard about Pontypool for a while now, but it wasn’t showing up on Netflix, but it finally appeared at my local slacker-hipster video store.

This is a story about an early-morning shockjock, who finds himself at the end of his career and stuck in a church-basement radio station in the rural Ontario community of Pontypool.

Oh, and the end of the world happens while he’s on air.

The writing and the acting and set design (there’s one set) couldn’t be tighter. It’s quirky, charismatic and original.

The DVD also includes three short movies in the extras section. One of the shorts features the lead of Pontypool as Chet Baker. The other two shorts have no apparent connection to the feature, but that’s okay, they’re surreal and weird, and that’s the sort of DVD bonus feature that’s actually worth watching.

The DVD also has the hour-long CBC radio play that preceded the movie.

Julia (my food-frakking deputy) observed that the movie seemed to be symbolic of the war in Afghanistan (I don’t think the Canadians are in Iraq). If it is, then we can add that to all the other tricky subtexts of zombie movies.

I’ve been doing a series of Simpson-family busts, and since I last did Bart Simpson, the next in the line was Lisa.

None of the Simpson characters translate well into 3-D, but Lisa Simpson was the worst. You may not have ever thought of this, but Lisa Simpson always has exactly seven points on her hair. What’s more, the triangle of each point aims at the foreground eyeball, with the exception of the topmost point which aims equidistant between the eyeballs. Map that onto 3-D and you immediately lose all the geometric perfection which makes Lisa Simpson who she is.

This had me blocked for quite some time.

And then I checked google to see how other people had solved the same problem, and seeing how horribly even professional industrial designers did, I felt like I had permission to do it however I wanted.

Things get even more vague in the rearview.

But still, she’s a sassy young lady that Lisa.

She’s contemplative.

She’s knowing.

She’s a little regal.

But most of all, Lisa Simpson is good-natured.