Zombie Lapdance

The weather has returned to what most people would consider reasonable temperatures. No longer will I need to ingest large amounts of chilled food and beverage to normalize my core body temperature. So for the last time, I present to you, cold stuff.

We will start with the gelatin-in-a-cup category. This creme parfait tastes like cubes of jello suspended in whipped cream.

This rompope came from a late-night taco cart. The proprietors poured eggnog-flavored jello mix into a coffee cup and let it set.

On a whim, in order to beef out a credit card purchase at the corner convenience store, I bought a jug of strawberry flavored horchata mix.

I’m reasonably certain that the same jug had been sitting on that shelf when I moved into the neighborhood last year. It tastes like pink-tinted petroleum distillate.(and I’m drinking some right now as I write this)

Here’s another disgusting beverage. I had a bunch of leftover chocolate chip cookies, and I thought to myself, "If I blended this with icecubes, I would combine the cool refreshing texture of an iced smoothie with the chocolaty goodness of a chocolate chip cookie."

In practice it was simply a sickening sludge.

This rice-pudding popsicle had visible hunks of rice and raisins.

To complete the full flavor cycle of Mexican sack icecream, I present to you the strawberry bolis (or bolis fresa).

A buddy of mine discovered that he could make his own sparkling mineral water by pressurizing tap water with industrial-sized CO2 tanks.

It’s cool, refreshing, and far far cheaper than buying Topo Chico.

As promised, I returned to Pepe’s Fruit cup stand for more frozen treats. It’s a difficult place for a non-Spanish speaker to navigate because of all the slang terminology in the signs and on the menu. Here we see Julia eating something that was identified as "lala."

It seemed to be a strawberry malt with large hunks of fresh strawberries.

This is also from Pepe’s. It may be called "the Mona." It is a sundae, half of which is fruit.

The wafer cookies are also a nice touch.

I’ve become one of those people. I now own a set of juggling clubs.

I bought them because Julia owns a set and I was always using them when she had her backed turned.

You can only get good juggling clubs online. The set I have is mid-grade. They’re essentially just hollow pieces of plastic with a taped handle. Julia has the pro-grade, the juggling clubs that are multiple composite. I was shocked to discover that you can really feel the difference.

What I have will work fine for now. I am at a stage where my juggling skills are not likely to impress anyone other than myself.

I would like to point out at this juncture that my story "Beneath the Red City" is now available at Innsmouth Free Press. This is a story that I wrote a couple years ago when I was having a Lovecraft overdose and listening to Art Bell’s AM radio conspiracy show. The two elements fermented into a horror story about shadow people and submerged cities. I’m happy that the IFP people chose to publish this. I hope you enjoy it.

It’s not strictly accurate to say that Austin has a zoo. There is however a place in Austin with the name Austin Zoo. It’s located to the southwest of town, where the suburbs meet the rolling hills and cedar scrubland of the hill country.

It’s not a huge zoo, and it identifies itself as an animal rescue center, so most of the animals are recycled. Take for instance this capuchin which had previously endured the sorts of psychology experiments that are so inhumane they won’t even conduct them on undergrads.

Monkeys are so cute when they’re insane!

My boss hates the Austin Zoo because she thinks they’re too picky about what animals they rescue, limiting themselves to zoo-quality animals instead of filling up their enclosures with possums.

Yes, my boss is quite insane. You rescue possums by leaving them outside where the coyotes can get them.

The zoo hasn’t put a lot of money into the enclosures. Mostly the enclosures are just fences circling some animals and a patch of Texas dirt. Like this lion enclosure that is made from chain link fence.

I’m not comfortable being separated from a giant predator by an object that I myself can both climb over and cut through.

If you do go to the Austin Zoo, you should add a buck to the modest ticket price and buy the animal feed. The highlight of the zoo (other than the two bobcats in a hammock) was the petting enclosure. I fed the geese (which repeatedly bit me) and the ugliest goat I’ve ever seen.

There was also an alpaca, which had this amazing prehensile cleft upper lip.

It’s impossible to describe what it feels like to have an alpaca caress your hand with its warm, fuzzy mouth.

After going to the zoo, I recommend stopping by Mighty Fine Burgers and getting your hands washed in their powered handwashing machine.

Texas is generally a pretty ugly state. On any given day it will be beautiful for no more than ten minutes. Those days, when they happen, look like this:

I was saying when Julia and I did the solar system model that I needed to do more projects that I could take from conception to completion in the course of a single evening.

Here’s some more modest time commitment projects.

Last night, Julia and I conceived and completed a little stop motion animation about a character called Blobby.

I haven’t tried to use sync sound with animation in a while, but I think it turned out pretty good.

On a previous night I decided to turn some of my projection TV optics into an LED lighted viewer.

There’s a little battery pack and switch, and a bunch of LEDs and wiring, all tacked together by hot glue. That hot glue gun might be the best dollar forty-nine I ever spent.

Look! It glows!

And it can make important pictures look even bigger and more important.

And speaking of projection TV optics, the moon is out now, so I can show you some more interesting pictures from my homemade telescope.

I blogged earlier about my laser printer and how I had to order a new cartridge over ebay. When the cartridge arrived, it turns out that it didn’t quite fit in the printer. And that’s where the hacksaw comes into the story.

And now it fits fine! I’m going to have to solve more of my problems by cutting off bits until the problem goes away.

My creek aquarium is now fishless. The last surivor, a sunfish who I had thought was my friend, committed suicide by jumping out of the tank. I don’t want to think about his last few moments alive, hopping about the floor, collecting more and more hair to his sticky fish scales.

Rest in peace, nameless fish buddy.

But this tragedy is an opportunity in disguise. I’ve been thinking of doing a revamp of the whole creek project. I plan on making a completely new pump and filtration apparatus from scratch. I’ve even gone so far as make a diagram, instead of just jumping right in and making something.

Now I just have to find some parts that are vaguely like the picture.

During that last big trip to MT Asian Market, I had to buy a packet of spiny eels. They were just so cute, with their pointy little noses and spotted tails.

There’s very little on the web about how to prepare spiny eels, so once again I turned to the Clove Garden and their comprehensive list of exotic fish. The great thing about the Clove Garden’s fish page is that there are about a hundred pictures of exotic fish, each one carefully placed with the grain of one particular cutting board. This strongly suggests that the webmaster of clovegarden.com, Andrew Grygus, has in fact eaten all of these fish.

Andrew Grygus is my new personal hero. That’s right, I’m putting him up there with Sanjay Dutt, Al Leong, Frank Sodolak, and Buzz Aldrin’s gleaming fists of justice.

There’s nothing from the Clove Garden’s entry on spiny eels that is not fascinating. Grygus recommends frying and eating the eels ‘"head, guts and feathers"’. He also says, "Only a severe sissy would cut off the heads."

Coming from my new personal hero I could naught but rise to the challenge.

Step one was defrosting the spiny eels. Here you see my food frakking deputy Julia with a fistful of eel.

Next was the preparation assembly line. Julia had the excellent idea of giving them a Japanese style breading.

Once fried, you could hardly tell they were once squirming happily through rice paddies in Asia.

We rounded out our eel dinner with some pork/leek dumplings and broccoli.

The spiny eel tasted a little like smelt. There was a little trouble with the spines, which were like four-millimeter-long bones. Sometimes I swallowed the spines, and sometimes I found them tucked into hard-to-reach spots of my mouth. The pointy little skulls also had bits of bony material that were hard to chew.

We ate until we were stuffed and there were still about half the eels left. I don’t feel too bad about it, I think the whole thing cost about two-fifty. Maybe I’ll use the leftovers in a soup. With enough simmering the spines might dissolve.

Julia and I decided that the spiny eels were better than the bream, but not quite as flavorful as the gourami.

I put one of the leftover eels out on the back porch for the cats. The cats wouldn’t touch it, but a possum found it within minutes. But I’ve heard possum’s and eels are natural enemies.

The bad thing about the internet is that you can learn about something obscure and then buy it on impulse a couple minutes later. That’s what happened to me when I learned about Alternative 3, a British hoax documentary that spawned its own breed of conspiracy theory. Almost immediately I found that I had sent money to a conspiracy library in the UK which then sent me a burned copy of the documentary and a letter referring me to other websites that will tell me what’s really going on.

What’s interesting is that the suggested reading includes "conspiracyplanet.com", "infowars.com", and youtube.

The Alternative 3 crowd is at the exact opposite of the "Lunar landings were faked" crowd. They believe that the lunar landings actually happened, but only so we’ll never suspect that the global elites have had a moonbase since the 50s. You see, "Alternative 3" is the plan to blast all the rich people into space and leave the poor to die in Earth’s inevitable environmental collapse.

If I had to choose between believing one or the other conspiracy, I would definitely choose Alternative 3. At least it assumes that the conspiracy is fairly ambitious.

The exact process by which people came to believe the hoax is unclear. The documentary is clearly staged on many levels. For instance, there’s a character who is ostensibly an Apollo astronaut, yet even the barest of research will lead one to believe that there has never been an astronaut by that name and that the character in the movie is played by an actor.

In fact the movie ends with a credit sequence that lists the names of all the characters and the actors who played them, right after it displays the intended airdate: April Fool’s day.

An obfuscating factor is the book that came out with the same title. I think the book claims the movie is actually a re-enactment, although why they would try and make the re-enactment seem like a fake documentary is beyond me. There’s probably an explanation for it, but that would require reading a lot of words, which seems like too much trouble to me.

The "documentary" as a film is pretty good. Like Orson Welles’ "War of the Worlds" radio play which it is frequently compared to, it makes good use of the drama inherent to a non-fiction format.

There’s a slow buildup of plot, from the reports of missing scientists,

to the big reveal of the master plan.

It’s so convincing, that if I weren’t secretly employed by the world elites, I would believe it myself.

When I heard about chicken-fried bacon I thought, how could something so wonderful exist in this cold, cruel world? So of course my food-frakking deputy Julia and I had to make a pilgrimage to the holiest place in the chicken-fried bacon universe, Sodolak’s Original Country Inn in Snook, Texas.

I don’t think that four hours is too much to drive on a Sunday to get chicken-fried bacon, do you? There’s plenty of beautiful Texas scenery on the way.

There’s not a lot to Snook. There’s an intersection and a stoplight. There’s a post office. And there’s Sodolak’s.

The interesting thing about chicken-fried bacon is that not only is it a conceptually stunning concept, but it actually tastes really good. The bacon is surprisingly light without sacrificing its rich flavor. And the dipping gravy takes it over the top.

In this video, Sensei Sodolak says that people will purchase two orders of chicken-fried bacon and call that a meal. Personally, I think that Julia and I could have split that single order and it would have been perfectly filling.

The chicken-fry batter crumbed like the feathers of angels.

On the way back we stopped by Round Rock and visited the eponymous round rock.

Could any day be more perfect?