Zombie Lapdance

Over a year ago, we elected a man to be president and we were euphoric with hope and happiness.

That’s why I posted this list of predictions on the morning after. I wanted to make everybody miserable and cynical like me.

The post drew a lot of interesting commentary, and I hope that revisiting it will do the same.

Here are my 22 predictions, followed by analysis of how they’ve been coming along.

1.) The president will successfully tax the rich. That would just about balance the budget deficit, except-

*( Yeah, this would happen if Obama could get so much as a resolution condemning midget wrestling through congress.)

2.) -we will never really get out of Iraq. Expect major reductions of troops in Iraq, but they will stay on at some level, probably as a "stability force" or somesuch euphemism for occupiers. The troops that do leave will just trounce over to Afghanistan.

* (True, except for the "major reductions" part. Is anybody really surprised?)

3.) Prediction 1 leads to the conservatives hating Obama like nobody’s business. The invective increases steadily in hatred, until the language from the ministers of conservative churches borders on the treasonous. Bolstered by the hate speech, the extreme right wing mounts-

* (Conservatives don’t need an excuse to hate and say stupid things any more than midget wrestlers need an excuse to pile-drive little people.)

4.) -several serious assassination attempts. But luckily the right wingers with the guns are every bit the screwups as the ones in the Whitehouse these last eight years. Feeling increasingly disempowered, the conservatives turn to-

* (This hasn’t happened. Yet. That we know of.)

5.) – Sarah Palin as a role model and ideological figurehead. Becoming as divisive and polarizing as Newt Gingrich and Dick Cheney before her (but without the common sense to shut up and stay out of sight after the country gets sick of her), Palin skirts the accusation that she caused the downfall of the McCain campaign (see my previous post about the trap of identity politics for the right), and instead becomes a righteous martyr. Offensive comments from Palin will make the news every six months. At least once she will be caught saying something truly racist, but America won’t really notice because-

* (I’m giving myself nine points out of ten for this one, but with Palin regularly doing live TV on FOX, we can expect the shockingly racist comment within the next year.)

6.) -investment in the tech sector will skyrocket. Even though investors are politically conservative, they only feel comfortable putting their money in the future when there’s a forward-thinking Democrat in power. Because of Obama, the most stodgy moneybags will think that we can remake the shape of industry, and that people will buy books online if given the chance. With the previous administration, all the investors could think about was oil. Now’s the time to invest in the most goof-ball technologies you can find, but be sure to sell before the conservative backlash government.

* (I have no idea how this is coming along. I’m thinking that the economy is still too sucky for a lot of investment.)

7.) America will completely fail to get over its race problem. The cops in Austin will still use force on black people at a rate seven times that of whites. School funding will still be tied to the property values of the community, giving poor communities the shaft. The president will just be another celebrity, no more tied to the liberation of black people than the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, except that now when the middle class sees someone from the working class, they won’t think, "Let’s fix the disparity in the access to education," they’ll think, "That loser could have been president." And it won’t help that Obama thinks those Mexicans need to learn English (luckily, he will find a way to phrase that so it sounds perfectly reasonable).

* (This is just another way of saying that nothing has changed from last year.)

8.) The energy crisis will continue to be a crisis and too little will be done too late. Luckily the economy won’t hit the post-petroleum brick wall until the first term of the conservative backlash president of 2016, so no one will think to blame Obama.

* (The stagnant economy has given us a temporary reprieve from the energy crisis. Yay!)

9.) There will be no significant health care reform. Nobody in power wants that to happen. There’s too much money in the health racket. All that time that Obama and Hillary spent debating nuanced differences in their health-care packages? Total waste of freaking time.

* (Hahahahahahahahahahahahahah!!! Ten out of ten! Too bad my personal victory means that America is getting the shaft like a midget in a wrestling ring.)

10.) At some point I will find myself protesting a "limited bombing campaign" against a nation’s sovereign territory. There will be five other people there. They will all be incredibly ugly. At least one of the signs will be misspelled and that will be the only thing to make it to the nightly news.

* (Luckily we’re still entangled with limited bombing of the same two nations (or three, depending on who you ask) so I don’t need to make any new protest signs.)

11.) There will be no Great Society-style initiative. Do you remember Obama mentioning poor people? Wrack your brain all you want, he hasn’t brought it up and he never will.

* (Thanks to Obama, the poor people who couldn’t afford health insurance may now have to pay for it or get a fine! But only if he actually gets a Health Care Bill through both houses.)

12.) Obama will continue to look great on television, and people will continue to feel all warm inside when he sounds reassuring and presidential.

* (I haven’t had a television in over a year, so I can’t speak on this. He sounds about the same on NPR at any rate. But I suspect that the charm is wearing off.)

13.) Exciting revelations about the horrible things done by the Bush administration will pop up continually throughout the Obama administration, even if Obama gets two terms.

* (I was expecting more of this. Obama needs to learn that you can only leave the sins of the past behind and have forward-thinking if you actually have some forward momentum.)

14.) The environment will continue to degrade, and people will continue to make token and ineffectual gestures to ameliorate the problem.

* (The raccoons seem to be doing fine in the urban environment. So we will have at least one North American animal for a while.)

15.) The liberalization of international trade will continue in the form of the WTO, World Bank, IMF, NAFTA, etc., without slowing down.

* (You know, I haven’t heard anyone even mention these things in the past year. I guess they won.)

16.) The world will suddenly think America is awesome. Except for Venezuela, which will still hate us.

* (Right after the election the world thought we were awesome. Now they think we’re "meh.")

17.) Conservatives in Congress will do everything possible to dig their feet into the ground. There will be no unity and no consensus building. If Obama asks Congress to breath air, they will hold their breath until they die. There will be lawsuits, special investigators, filibustered appointees, and the minute they get a majority (which will happen mid-term elections second term), they will attempt an impeachment. Lieberman will continue to be a putz.

* (Wow. This gives me shivers. Am I really this psychic? Or is Obama really that dumb to think that there will be bi-partisan cooperation just because he says it will be great?)

18.) Something as weird and improbable as a black guy with a funny name becoming president will happen, but none of us will get close to predicting what that will be.

* (Balloon boy? The underwear bomber? Dinosaurs with stripes? I’m still waiting for something truly weird to happen.)

19.) Nobody from the Bush administration will be held accountable for their crimes.

* (Not only have they not received the slightest slap on the wrist, they’re getting book deals and tenure at Berkeley. Yeah, I’m talking to you, John Yoo, you motherfucking sadistic yes-man scuzzbag.)

20.) George Bush will write his memoirs. In crayon.

* (Apparently he wrote the first couple chapters with a white crayon and couldn’t remember which pages were blank.)

21.) President Obama will repeatedly remind us that the Democratic party is also the party of big business.

* (Corporations are now people. They will flood the Democratic party with yet more bribes-slash-donations. Kiss your democracy goodbye.)

22.) The next version of Firefox will have a spellchecker that includes both "Obama" and "Barack" in its dictionary.

* (Um, Firefox? You’ve had three updates. You read the newspaper? You have Steve, Barclay, Fillmore, Roosevelt, Lincoln, Clinton, and Chavez. I think you’re forgetting someone.)

The take home lesson here, is that when you feel like being cynical, you should ask yourself if you’re really being cynical enough. With the exception of the assassination prediction, it all turned out as bad or far worse than I feared.

Of course no-one tried to assassinate Clinton or Carter, so I guess the conservatives learned from the JFK assassination (and the following Great Society) that it’s easier and more effective to character assassinate.

I feel a little blind-sided by the Obama administration’s failure to conduct the "War on Terror" in a humane method. We still have extraordinary rendition. We still have Gitmo, and there are now prisons in Afghanistan that are likely as bad or worse. I guess our people in uniform have more or less stopped torturing people outright, but that’s up for debate.

I wouldn’t have thought that the Obama administration would be so incompetent at passing legislation and such a failure at establishing ethical foreign policy.

To quote my food-frakking deputy Julia from six-months ago, "I thought it would be at least a year before I would be disappointed with the Obama administration."

Now that it’s been a year, I can’t believe I was so hopeful to begin with.

I’m going to make myself feel better by punching a midget.

Here’s how things stand right now: The slush pile is getting consistently cleared, thanks to Elle’s hard work.

And the editorial board has even approved a few more of thes stories for publication, but we’re still far short of a full roster for the next issue.

Meanwhile, Sanjay2, the official Space Squid photocopier continues to give me trouble. I can only print off thirty copies at a time before it makes copies with ugly dark streaks. We’ve decided that this is the last time we print off an issue in my closet like a bunch of hoodlums. Two thousand copies? That takes a long time to run off.

It works well enough that the issue is getting out on the street. The current issue is now available at a number of drop points in the Austin area, including Quack’s Bakery, Monkeywrench Books, and Domy. More drop points will have issues as I get around to biking past them.

Here’s something I made this morning. It’s called a girdle scone, or if you’re speaking to someone non-Scottish and you wish to avoid confusion, just call it a griddle scone.

I ate this fresh off the pan, but I always thought it tasted better split down the middle and re-toasted with butter and jelly.

Girdle scones were one of four things I cooked while going to college (the other ones being spaghetti carbonara, stir-fried rice with tofu and habaneros, and crepes). I would grill up several pounds of scones, and my roommates and I would eat it with butter while watching Chow Yun-Fat movies and talking about how much we admired the ethereal beauty of Blossom’s friend Six.

They’re pretty simple to make, possibly the fastest and easiest way to consume flour. Most of the recipes online are from Scottish tourism sites, but they’re pretty much identical to the recipes I used.

2 cups flour
1/2 t soda
1/2 t of cream of tartar (what does the cream of tartar do? nobody knows)
1/2 t baking powder
2 cups Buttermilk (I almost never have buttermilk on hand, so I usually just add vinegar to regular milk to curdle it)
2 T butter (preferably melted)
1 T sugar or honey (although the Scots use "golden syrup" which just sounds naughty)

You mix it all up in that order and it should form a slightly sticky dough. Then you form it into thin patties and cook it on a griddle. You can either slightly grease or lightly flour the pan. I prefer the latter.

I spent my entire college career trying to find the perfect combination of scone thickness, griddle temperature, and cooking time, and it’s always eluded me. I think that if I had let the scones cool a little before slicing them open it would have turned out a lot better.

Sometimes a man just wants to sit in the sun and enjoy a bag of cheese rings, a can of macadamia-flavored canned coffee, and a Vietnamese desert cup.

The desert cup was a bit of a trip. The white fungus gave it a crunchy tripe-like texture, while the longan and Chinese apple gave it the taste of elementary school style canned fruit. And the seaweed, while vaguely resembling boiled apple peels, infused the concoction with a vaguely fishy scent.

And did I mention the gelatinous cubes of agar on the bottom?

Later in the day, unable to contain myself, I broke into the Chiz Curls.

It’s always good to see that Cheetos have a thousand cultural permutations.

Another desert cup thing that I found sitting out unrefrigerated at the MT Supermarket. It contained tapioca pudding, fruit and the obligatory seaweed.

Sweetened seaweed. Why isn’t that in more deserts?

La Mexicana, good for some breakfast tacos, followed by breakfast pastries.

Once you resign yourself to the fact that Mexican pastries will never be as sweet as their Northern counterparts, you appreciate them for being flaky and buttery.

I’m also resigning myself to beans as a desert food. Here’s some frozen bean mochi.

The tender and gooey rice dough hid a pocket of sweet beans, while the sesame seeds gave it a nutty crunch.

On impulse I bought a bag of brightly colored tapioca chips, only to find that they were completely inedible. The tapioca created a waxy, transparent film that was as hard and as unyielding as a plastic model of a P-51 Mustang. After some googling research, I tried dropping the tapioca chips in hot oil, and a magnificent transformation occurred.

What was once impervious, crackled, puffed, and swelled to become chips that were as crunchy as they were greasy.

I’ve been eating the tapioca chips with a small stash of ready-to-eat Indian meals. I’ve blogged about these before, they’re a complete traditional dish in a foil pack.

If I had a pantry full of these (which is actually within my financial means, they’re that cheap), civilization could collapse and I would be living in luxury while the zombies ate the rest of you fools.

That would give me the time to work on my budding betel nut addiction. I found a Bangladeshi market that sells pan leaves, the alchemical missing ingredient that turns betel-nut supari from menthol-tasting breath freshener into an exotic and unregulated stimulant.

The first time I chewed a pan and betel nut wad, my mouth filled with a gush of flavorful saliva, and then I worked for four hours straight and crashed into a dreamless sleep.

From a Korean market, some un-seasoned bacon.

There was no salt and no smoke flavor. Which is to say it tasted just like pork, but it looked like bacon.

I finally figured out how to make gorditas (which is Spanish for "little fatty").

You fry up some masa in patties that are two or three times as thick as a normal corn tortilla. You can add some oil to the masa and to the pan itself to give the gorditas a bit of a crunch.

Then you just slice open a pocket and add your favorite breakfast taco fillings. It’s the perfect blending of a sandwich, pita pocket, and taco!

I’ve just started exploring the possibilities of encasing LEDs in plastic resin. The downside is that the resin, until it sets, smells like the Houston suburb of hell. Plus it’s incredibly expensive, especially after you add in the costs of the necessary safety equipment.

But it’s pretty neat looking. This week I built a lighting base for a beam tree I happen to have around the house.

I said earlier that I could only find one really good folly house in the Austin area, but there’s also this one, down south near South First.

It used to be a church, but now it’s a castle-themed bed and breakfast or something along those lines. It even has a "moat" for swimming laps.

…if you recall my campaign to set myself up as the king of Innsmouth Free Press #2, I’ve been on the IFP listserve for a while, the upshot of which is that I was able to snag a promotional CD of Lovecraftian-inspired music.

Filled with scary Lovecraftian arcana.

The album is "Eldritch Musicks" by The Contrarians. All the descriptions of the band make reference to Blue Oyster Cult, which means that they play some reasonably trancy acoustic guitar while singing about the dweller on the threshold and the haunter in the dark.

I really like the first part of the opening track, a dissonant and eerie cacaphony.

Maybe you read my story, "Beneath the Red City," on Innsmouth Free Press a couple months ago. Maybe you didn’t. That’s not important.

What’s important is you want to vote for me, by going to the site and saying that it was your favorite story of the issue. They don’t even ask for your email, you just have to click on the survey form.

Showing your feelings for me has never been easier.

These pictures have been collecting in my harddrive. None is really worth a blog entry in of themselves, and they don’t really fit any particular themes. But I’m too cheap with my data to just file them away without doing anything with them, so I saved them for a rainy blog day like today.

I took this photo at one of the apartment complexes on Manor Rd. The building is a series of efficiencies inhabited almost exclusively by 20-something hipsters.

It’s interesting because every door has ten pounds of plastic-wrapped phonebook leaning against it, phonebooks that had already been sitting there for several days by the time I took the pictue. No one in complex has any particular use for the things. It’s been years since I’ve used a phonebook myself (or owned a phone serviced by a local phone company). I suspect we won’t be seeing sights like this for much longer.

Here’s Julia at the Larry Craig bathroom in the Minneapolis airport.

I used the stall immediately next to the one where Senator Larry Craig was arrested (which was occupied). I would have hung around for a while to see if the guy next door poked my feet, but I got cold feet (so to speak).

It was over a year that FEMA was renting out the old JC Penny at the Highland Mall, doing continued relief work or something related to hurricane Ike. They’re gone now, leaving an empty department store and a failing mall.

This is a backyard addition on the East Side.

When I lived out there I saw it go from an incongruous tower of cinder blocks to this somewhat neat pink thing. I was thinking of featuring it in an article about Austin folly houses, but I couldn’t find many other examples of preposterous architecture.

Walnut Creek is about twice as long as any other creek in the Austin area. It seems to have water flowing even in the peak of summer. And when it rains, the flood waters leave all the litter and crap of the East Side on trees next to the creek.

The Aquadome is a concrete hemisphere stuffed with tropical and marine fish.

In their back lot there’s a series of overgrown water features, filled with turtles, goldfish, and aquatic plants.

The Round Rock Outlet Mall. A place that I would never visit voluntarily. At night, its concrete avenues echo eerily with muzak and the distant screaming of children.

This donut shop sits in the shadow of an elevated highway.

Under a picnic table umbrella, men gather to play Chinese chess. At the counter inside you can see the regulars, four or more men sitting nursing their coffee and a fifty-cent donut. Each is of a different ethnicity and cultural background. At any one time there isn’t a single shared language across the group. But they are happy and converse together as equals. The one thing they have in common is they are all retired. This is why they lived. To spend their last days at the corner donut shop with their neighbors.

I often wish I was a regular there.