Zombie Lapdance

If you know me, you know that I’m fascinated with grackles. For a while now, I’ve noticed that if you feed a piece of baked good to a grackle, they’ll take it to the nearest puddle and soak it until it’s soft and easy for them to break up with their beaks. If you give them something like a Gardettos rye chip, they’ll stand there patiently until the puddle does its work.

This seems like an ominous indication of both a learned culture and the ability to defer gratification, two things that elude many humans.

I caught the behavior on video, so you can see for yourself:

The creek aquarium isn’t doing so good. The water pump is having more technical issues than normal and I’m down to one fish, the baby sunny. I’m pretty sure that the sunfish is killing and eating the others, even though it is slightly smaller than they are. I found the male platy with most of his soft belly parts chewed away.

I haven’t figured out what I’m going to do with the tank yet. Maybe I’ll upgrade it, maybe I’ll wait for it to fade away.

I was biking through the Northcross neighborhood and explored the upper reaches of Shoal Creek.

There were still some spots with water.

Including this sinister brown snake that may or may not have been a cottonmouth.

I found a park with a little turtle pond.

And a couple of pedestrian bridges tucked into the neighborhood.


If I were still a little kid, I would be constantly searching them for trolls.

I haven’t been paying much attention to the "neat stuff" topic category. I think it’s because I spend too much time eating weird things that it overwhelms the merely non-edible weirdness in my life.

Down by Ladybird Lake, right in front of City Hall, the fence is covered in vintage Historical Society photos of catastrophic flooding in the Austin area. In the left photo you can see a house washing over a dam. In the right photo, rooftops of the stores lining South Congress Avenue barely peak above the flood waters.

Is it just me, or is it a bit morbid to put these right next to the lake?

Here’s a photo I found of Alice in Dairland 1951 buttering Miss Iowa’s cob.

Thank goodness this photo was taken before the invention of sexual innuendo.

They’ve put up the schedules for the trains we don’t have.

The trains we don’t have are only going to run for a couple hours during the morning rush hour, and a couple of hours in the evening rush hour.

Oh, and it takes 45 minutes to get to Leander by these imaginary Austin commuter trains.

And the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter took pictures of the original Apollo landing sites. (photo credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/Arizona State University)

You can see the shadows of the landers and tracks left in the lunar dust. Eat that, nutjobs!

If you’re a Space Squid contributor or illustrator, and I didn’t give you your payment and contributor’s copy at Armadillocon, your Squid is in the mail.

There’s a couple of donators and advertisers that I’ll mail on Monday, but in general, that’s taken care of, so if you don’t see what’s coming to you in a reasonable amount of time, let me know.

About a month ago I had the most brilliant stupid idea of my life. I figured that if you put an air mattress into the Colorado River just below the Longhorn Dam, you could then float the nine-mile bend of the Colorado that ends near the airport and take the bus back to where you started.

Two days later, a pal and I put the plan into action. To my knowledge, no one else has ever attempted this.

I only just developed the paper-analog pictures I took of the experience (didn’t want to get my digital camera wet), so this is the first public documentation of our Colorado River expedition.

Since we had no idea how long it would take to float nine miles, we got up pretty early and loaded the bikes with gear.

Of course no adventure can start before grabbing breakfast tacos.

We put in at the 183 bridge, which has a number of inexplicable bridge supports that have been empty for as long as I’ve been in Austin.

Originally I thought we could float the river on temporary rafts made of inflated garbage bags. And then I tried to inflate a garbage bag and found that they don’t like to stay inflated. So we ended up with some cheap air mattresses.

It didn’t take long to blow them up. And they had the added feature of a drink divot in the arm rest.

Here we are testing the beer cooler. Yes, it floated! Originally the beer cooler was a pair of styrofoam chests used to transport cat insulin.

I got the idea for the mattress expedition after spending an evening (with this same friend) chasing minnows and swimming in the river. At the time, the river was about thigh deep and very swift. As it turns out, the current is highly variable, dependent utterly on the whims of the Colorado River Authority. The day we chose to go mattressing there was hardly any current at all. It was indeed a lazy mattress day.

I have since found the Lower Colorado River Authority webpage that has a real time readout of the river height and current. On the mattressing day the Colorado River had a flow of 75 cubic feet per second. This is equivalent to 400 toilets flushing continuously. For a river though, this is barely a trickle. I watched the website for a few nights and found that they slowly open the floodgates around 5pm, bringing the river flow up to 1400cfs until morning.

The point being that we had to manually paddle our way downstream.

But with some splashing we made it down to an old sewage pipe that crossed the river, which made a perfect place to stop and rest.

And then we essentially walked back. So no grandiose circuit, just a pleasant day spent with the river and some beer. But we still have the air mattresses. It’s just a matter of waiting for the river to have water.

Too often hotdogs are relegated to the periphery of cuisine. They are found in dark corners of convenience stores and the children’s menus of fine dining establishments.

Finally, the hotdog has found its marquee standing as the culinary centerpiece it was meant to be.

I am talking about Frank, an Austin entertainment district destination. Only a few months old, you can find Frank in that weird little building next to where the Alamo used to be. It’s gimmick (and yes, every business in the warehouse district needs a gimmick) is to sell hotdogs and bacon-infused cocktails in a trendy atmosphere.

My food frakking deputy Julia and I ordered a couple of these high-class hotdogs on a recent visit. Julia had the Chicago dog, and I had the plain hotdog with the "pork-it" option, which means that they split it open, stuffed it with cheese, wrapped it in bacon and deep-fried it.

Let’s take another look at those. BTW, our server totally called me out on the photographing.

Julia’s Chicago dog was as authentic as I’ve ever seen. It had the Vienna Beef sausage, the slightly mooshy poppyseed bun, giant slices of vegetables, and the uranium-green relish that is the hallmark of an authentic Chicago dog. If it had cucumber slices it would be so close to perfect that it would bend space in a vortex of hotdoggy goodness.

My porked dog was honestly a little dry. But I blame that on my failure to drop an extra buck to have the dog drenched in chili and cheese. I expect you readers not to make the same mistake I did. Of course if there had been additional condiment options beyond the ketchup (!eww!) and mustard bottles on the table, that wouldn’t have been a problem.

The hotdog prices were about par with a sit-down establishment and certainly not as steep as you would expect for a trendy warehouse district menu. Frank has additional haute cuisine specialty sausages, like "jackalope" and currywurst, but that’s an exploration for another entry.

It’s not directly in line with this topic, but since it’s part of the general ambiance of Frank, I would like to talk about their specialty cocktails.

In the foreground is the "redheaded stranger" that I felt obligated to order. It has bacon-infused vodka, bloody mary mix, and garnished with a cube of cheddar and a strip of bacon. I could barely taste the bacon infusing, in fact I could have imagined it. Mainly I tasted the spicy hot mix and some sort of vegetable matter that kept slipping up the straw and popping in my mouth. I still have no idea what it was. The strip of bacon almost immediately went limp and got lost in the ice like a folded-up tapeworm. I can’t say I enjoyed the experience as much as you would expect for something described as "bacon infused," but it did its job. I didn’t taste any alcohol at all. And it certainly contained alcohol because I went goofy for a bit.

Julia’s "Daytripper" tasted like a watermelon aquafresca. Which, as you know, is awesome. Add Tito’s vodka to that and it’s doubly awesome.

Frank’s Chicago Dog – Grade A plus
Frank’s Pork-it Dog – Grade B plus

For some people, the highlight of their summer is a trip to Sea World or Six Flags. For me, it’s a trip to the MT Supermarket.

The MT Supermarket is the largest Asian grocery in Austin, and it’s in the running for the largest grocery of any sort in the area. If it weren’t located far up Lamar at the end of the world, I would shop no where else. As it is, trips to the MT are special affairs, necessitating a manic shopping spree.

The MT combines my love of exotic food with my love of looking at fish. Here’s some of the koi in a pair of ornamental ponds near the entrance.

Whenever I’m at the MT, I’m always tempted to buy some of the funeral money, which the Chinese burn as a form of ancestor worship.

But it seems like it would be particularly rude to do so, and although I am not in any way a superstitious person, it would really suck if I bought some hell money and then someone close to me died.

Although once I die, I could only hope that I have ten thousand ghost dollars to spend as I wish.

But there was plenty of other things to buy at MT. This is a $75 pile of hard-to-find food.

Most of the items were a couple of bucks or less. What bulked up the cost of the purchase was my case of Mr.Brown canned cappuccino drink and some papaya bubble-tea mix. Expect to see Food Frakker entries about this trip for weeks to come.

Even before getting the food home, we had to break into the snacks.

The squid crackers actually tasted more like MSG than squid. The snow pea snacks tasted like Cheetos, if Cheetos had the dominant flavor of processed pea instead of processed cheese.

The ostensible reason for the trip to MT was so that my Food Frakker deputy Julia and I could cook a nice meal together. So right away we started on the Golden Threadfin Bream.

We chose this because it came pre-cleaned and marinated in spices. I was a little wary of reckless fish purchases. Although I figured I could google for recipes, I didn’t want to be stuck with some fish at home and then not have the ingredients to cook it immediately.

As I searched the web for advice on how to prepare some of my other fish purchases, I found The Clove Garden, a resource for "adventure cuisine." That’s my kind of website! I will no doubt be returning there frequently.

Here’s a closeup of the naked bream flesh. With snow crab mushrooms to spice it up.

Here’s the lovely Julia with our lovely prepared meal of golden threadfin bream, rice, and Julia’s roasted baby bok choy.

The threadfin bream did not taste as good as the gourami, but I had prepared myself for that. The flesh was surprisingly firm and had a distinctively fresh-water flavor. Julia compared it to tilapia, but I thought it had a more catfishy pungency to it. It also had an amazing amount of bones. My first bite came off the gut end of the fish, and there were so many bones that they crackled like broken glass in my mouth. I nearly vomited. But with plenty of patience I orally sorted the bones away from the flesh. After some practice and an improved understanding of bream anatomy, I was able to nearly eliminate the bone content of every forkful. All in all it wasn’t a bad fish. As Julia said, "If I caught these fish myself I wouldn’t be disappointed at all."

The license plates on these two vehicles are only one digit off, and by only one number!

I’m incorporating this event into my all-encompassing theory of how Halliburton and Mikal Trimm are out to get me.

The summer is like a hot iron on the Texas soul. But luckily we have cold stuff to combat the sweaty dread.

Found this at the vending machine in front of Home Depot. Of course I took it as a personal challenge to my masculinity.


It came out of the machine so cold and hard it splintered the balsa-wood spoon that came with the cup, which was not cool. And then it wasn’t all that sour.

Here’s some of the hauls from various Korean markets. When I opened up this popsicle I thought that it might be chocolate! But my heart sank when I discovered it was red-bean flavored through and through. Yech.

This melon-flavored soda had that neat opening that uses a punch tab and a marble. It tasted nice, but it had roughly three tablespoons of soda inside, which is not nearly enough for a giant man like me.

Likewise with this soda, except it had some sort of Pokemon thing, which didn’t actually do anything. Personally, I didn’t feel all that comfortable paying two bucks for a plastic trinket and a dribble of sugar water.

The yogurt-flavored soda was not as disgusting or as interesting as you might think.

Pollapo must be Korean for purple-flavored ice.

Every time I drop in to the Korean market, there’s a new set of cold treats. Korea must be a tasty wonderland. There’s a lot of Lotte snacks, like this stick of strawberry-flavored ice.

Or this waffled sandwich of chocolate and icecream.

The frozen crepe stick was filled with icecream and chocolate chips.

I think this frozen novelty is the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen.

This thing I’m eating?

I don’t know, chocolate or something. It was already half-melted, and it didn’t take me more than fifteen seconds to devour the other half.

This convenience store Mega Missile also illustrates the difficulty of preventing premature popsicle loss.

And when we’re talking about cold things, who knows how to combat Texas heat better than Mexicans?

The guy pushing the icecream cart around the neighborhood warned me that the Lucas bar was chili. He didn’t think I could handle it.

I totally handled it.

From another gentleman with a pushcart and a big cowboy hat. A cup of cookies and cream icecream, eaten on the curb with a balsawood stick that the icecream man took out of a garbage bag hanging from the cart handles.

My associate got the watermelon popsicle because it was a long day in the sun, and he "wanted something with as much water as possible."

From the dude in the van with the familiar yet unrecognizable song blasting from the roof speaker, I acquired the most delicious vigilante in Gotham.

Justice is best served cold. And creamy. And sweet. And Batman’s eyeballs? They’re actually gumballs! They never mention that in comics.

I haven’t been spending enough time at Pepe’s Fruitcup stand. It’s because I thought it just had fruit, and I’m really more of a processed sugar and animal protein kinda guy. Well, the have that. This banana split was more like a small barge of softserve icecream, whipped cream and sprinkles. I rushed home to take it’s picture, but the two minutes in the sun did not do it good.

For a long time I had thought that raspas were just snowcones. How wrong I was. A raspa is like a snowcone the same way a Hello Kitty is like a Bengal tiger.

This was tamarind and cherry flavored, topped with sprinkles of chili and salt (they had a canister of chili-salt on the counter if you didn’t think you got enough). The salt melted into the ice slush, making it even colder. And that stuff on the straw? Chili-tamarind candy.

For almost twenty minutes I was virtually not-hot.

If ever you’re in one of the seedier convenience stores in Austin, you might see some odd little condiment packages sold up by the cash register. "Twang" is flavored beer salt. It comes in a variety of flavors, but this chili-lime flavor is probably the most gastronomically accessible.

It makes even the cheapest beer taste a little more like salt. And yes, after a few months of sweating, that’s a good thing.

Basically, all of these pictures are from the Space Squid party. If anything looks out of focus, it’s because everyone just happened to be a little fuzzy at that time of night.

I don’t mean to brag, but even without the burlesque dancers, this was the best party anyone has ever seen.

Here’s Chris Nakashima-Brown, aka The-Life-of the-Party.

Here’s slugtribe honcho Wendy Wheeler trying to get editor D to give up squid guy Ike’s phone number.

Liam, an improv fiction contestant, looking at the devilish timer that was the bane of the contestants.

I brought the cryobev3000 to the party, and it performed flawlessly. No one was electrocuted, there were no spills. Just constant beer-cooling.

This is Space Squid illustrator Chris Waltrip enjoying a preternaturally cooled beer.

And at the end of the night, all the party supplies went on the hotel trolley, and we rode off into the sunset.