Zombie Lapdance

I’ve talked about Mike Varley on this blog before. He’s a great guy and a great writer, and right now I would like to talk about his new CD, a series of spoken word pieces about the the ’08 election.

The ’08 election was an important moment in American history, and I don’t think any of us are quite over it yet. The material on Varley’s CD is still topical in a timeless sort of way — a post-ironic exploration of the split in America’s culture and the hope and change that we bought like a Prius Hybrid.

The CD is now available for sale on his website, along with samples of the work and this helpful cartesian coordinate grid that graphically illustrates the various literary qualities of each track.

My favorite piece is "On Sympathy Pay," a chilling look at American indifference toward the misery we’ve caused in our fiasco of a war.

But most of the CD is fun, I swear. For instance, this video

on Joe the Plumber.

I have a few extra copies of this CD (I’m keeping one for myself of course) that I’ll be giving out as prizes at the improvisational fiction contest at Armadillocon. Yes, we’re holding an official event on the dillocon site, so pass the word.

My curiosity about the creek system is rapidly turning into a shtick. It’s taking me a long time to get anywhere in town, because I’m constantly stopping at bridges and culverts and peeking over the side. And when I’m hanging out with friends, instead of going out and drinking like a normal person, I’m always suggesting that we go check out the nearest creek and look at the fishes.

Even this far into the summer, with most of the creek system as dry as a bone, there’s still pools here and there. In the case of Waller Creek, there’s a population of platies that live in what looks like the overflow from Shipe Pool. It means they only have an inch of water in most places, but they thrive nonetheless.

Here’s a typical scene on the UT campus. The streambed, which is cut into the limestone bedrock, is dammed up into discrete little pools by warty mats of cyprus roots.

Did you spot the yellow-crowned night heron? The heron was doing pretty much the same thing I was, patiently watching the little fishes, and it didn’t particularly mind that I was there.

Editor D was talking about how he had a mosquito larvae problem in his city-provided rainwater barrel (that’s one thing that they don’t mention about the rainbarrels, their ability to foster pests. They also don’t mention that it never really rains here) and how he could use some of those mosquito-eating fish. So I caught some for him.

Last I looked they were happy and thriving. When you think about it, a rainbarrel filled with scuzzy water and fallen leaves is pretty much their home environment.

I had a death in the simulated creek aquarium. For a few days the female platy was looking pregnant, with a huge swollen belly. And then I found her dead with a deflated belly and a hole.

Did her babies burst out of her? Was it just an infestation of worms?

We may never know.

First off, let me say, TWO MILLION VISITS!!! WOOOOHOOOOO!!!!!

Okay, back to the food frakking…

Toasterwaffel was talking earlier about making fresh sardine pasta. So I bought some sardines at the New Oriental Market (my new favorite food purveyor in the whole world). Unfortunately, you can’t really get fresh sardines in this country, or at least this far inland. The internet tells me that with the oils in sardines they don’t freeze well. So the ones I bought at the market were dried, salted, and then frozen.

But they had the head. Which is something you usually don’t see.

Note the gaping jaw. Sardines are krill feeders and they use their ‘yawn’ to feast on these tiny creatures in much the same way as a baleen whale, only on a much smaller scale.

So I thawed them out and cleaned them, butterfly style.

Ending up with surprisingly little flesh.

The spines pulled out like . . . um . . . damn, is there really a simile for that?

My cat refused to eat the heads, guts, and spines. She’ll eat al pastor scraps from my torta, but she won’t eat some fish heads like a normal cat.

Then I "fried" the sardines in homemade ranch dressing, added parmesan and tostada crumbs and I had a vaguely similar dish to the one Toasterwaffel described.

Actually it was really salty and fishy. I could only eat about half of it before being overwhelmed. I’ll get to the rest later.

There are certain stories that are close to the heart. For me, the stories that come closest to addressing who I am and where I come from are those penned by Helmut Finch.

Finch was my first introduction to the horror genre. Most people who’ve grown up in Wisconsin have had Finch touch their lives in some way. He did for Wisconsin what Tennessee Williams did for the South.

So I am pleased to announce that the review I wrote of the new Helmut Finch collections has come out on Pseudopod.

This is a dramatic reading in MP3 format so you don’t actually have to read it yourself. Elie Herschman does the narration and I have to say that it’s amazing.

If you love horror, or even literature in general, you should listen to this article. It’s an overview suitable for the Helmut Finch newbie.

I was cleaning off my desk and I found a couple of projects that have sat idle for so long that I’m going to shelve them indefinitely. They are two languages I was inventing to help make the world a better place.

The first language, and the one with the most practical real-world application, is called Mover’s Tongue. It’s a system of syntax and terminology to facilitate the precise communication between two people moving a heavy article of furniture.

I think about this every time I help people move, because there’s always some point in the process when you have to set the sofa on a diagonal and jimmy the arm up around the edge of a doorframe. Mover’s Tongue would describe that process in a short sentence.

Here’s some of the features of mover’s tongue:
-Two separate naming schemes for the direction of movement and orientation of an object. One that is subjective to the speakers or listener, and one that keeps a fixed frame on the object being moved.
-Words for arcane movements that can be linked into a sequential string of actions.
-A large vocabulary of safety-terms and contingencies.

At this point to do the language right, I would need to work for a summer as a professional mover and then compile the real-world testing into a handbook or a wiki.

The other language has few if any real-world applications. In fact it is almost entirely useless, and deliberately so. It is a graphical Inferno/Krusher dialect called Boomspeak.

Boomspeak works as a series of non-sequential, linked word balloons. The language has no nouns, just action verbs and adjectives (although the adjectives can be linked in word-balloon clusters to form specific object descriptors). I like the idea of a language that doesn’t have a linear written progression, just a two-dimensional array of symbolic relations. Of course doing it that way probably wouldn’t make any sense.

I can imagine someday doing a short comic that uses this language. It would work well once I convert all the vocabulary to Inkscape graphics. But at the moment the Inferno/Krusher sub-genre is on the wain, and I don’t have time for a lot of cartooning, so it’s all going into the files for a rainy day.

During my lifelong quest to see every sci-fi flick ever made, I somehow completely skipped over the French New Wave sci-fi. A little while ago I watched Godard’s Weekend, a rambling and vague collection of violence and surrealism. On the strength of that, I rented a sci-fi film that Godard made a couple years before called Alphaville. Alphaville was much the same as Weekend, but without much violence or surrealism. Here’s the most futuristic image from the whole movie:

Mostly, Alphaville is just the hero wandering around a city that looks exactly like a city from the 1960s, while people make apparently nonsensical pronouncements about the fate of man in an increasingly mechanized and technological society.

I have the feeling that Godard loved the spectacle and drama of sci-fi movies, but he always had too little budget and too much Frenchness to make one that was really fun.

A movie that Godard would have made if he had very little education and was a borderline pedophile is Yo-Yo Girl Cop.

While at the video store once I suggested to my girlfriend that we rent this. She responded with "why would you want to watch that?" in the tone of voice that one usually reserves for people who like to collect their urine in jars.

So I waited for her to leave town and then put it on my Netflix queue.

Now, honestly, having watched Machine Girl and Tokyo Gore Police, I was not particularly impressed with Yo-Yo Girl Cop. Those other movies were action movies the same way that grizzly bears with rabies and cybernetic arms are apex predators. Yo-Yo Girl Cop was just a movie about a schoolgirl with a yo-yo. The yo-yo wasn’t even particularly useful, even though everyone had one.

So I’m sad to say that this is just a fighting schoolgirl movie that’s just going through the motions.

A little while ago I reported on the vikings versus space dragon movie Outlander. So I thought I would complete the set and watch another Hollywood viking movie, Pathfinder, where the vikings fought skraelings (this is the only correct general term for aboriginal Americans as a whole).

In theory, a movie about the clashes and misunderstandings between these two cultures would be thrilling. As it turns out, the movie makes about as much sense as the movie poster:

I mean, seriously, the viking longship has spikes coming out of it?!?!? In the movie itself, the longship is about the size of a Navy missile cruiser, with four different levels. The people who made this movie spent about five minutes researching the historical background.

And to add insult to injury, they had a convoluted plot device to make the skraeling hero white. I think that we’ve all matured enough that we can watch a movie with a skraeling man saving the day. If nothing else the new Twilight movie will prove that.

It’s been a while since I’ve talked about the podcasts, but then there isn’t much new that I’ve been listening to. In fact there’s a little less on my Miro feed list.

For instance, I removed "College Humor Dot Com" because the motherfuckers weren’t funny and they were too smug about it to. Sort of like Jay Leno.

A video podcast that is funny, is Showbeast(RSS). This is a surreal kids show with puppets and greenscreens and a surprisingly innocent insight into the child psyche. At least considering that the people making this are clearly a bunch of Bay-area weirdos. I would recommend watching the Nose Raptor episode as a first glimpse of the Showbeast world.

Another kids video podcast I’ve been watching (for no good reason really) has been Komet Kameratene(RSS), which I’m guessing could be loosely translated as Comet Capers. It’s a Norwegian kids’ show about a bunch of muppet aliens who explore Earth and learn valuable lessons that involve talking to Norwegian children who are almost entirely non-white. There’s no subtitles, but the Norwegian is close enough to English, and the children’s humor so broad, that you almost don’t need them. Certainly the scenes with the Norwegian-speaking alien chef are virtually identical to scenes you may remember with the Swedish Chef.

The only new audio podcast is The Moth(RSS). If you listen to This American Life, you’re probably already familiar with some of this material. The Moth is a series of publicly performed stories, and we are assured before every episode that the stories are all told without notes and they are all true. Whether or not you believe that, they tend to be dramatic and amazing. This last week a guy told a story about how he used to earn his living with internet gambling. Oh, and he hated cockroaches. That’s the dramatic part.

Let’s get some of the tamer food items out of the way first, before I dip too far into my weekly recap of culinary depravity.

Here’s something that everyone can get behind, A&W deep-fried cheese curds!

Served hot and fresh, they were a little taste of home. But they had a lot of nerve calling the dipping sauce "marinara." It tasted more like ketchup mixed with barbecue sauce.

These unnamed crackers had the primary ingredient of rice flour and the primary taste of MSG.

These TAKO chips proudly declared themselves to be octopus-flavored.

If you look closely, the chips themselves have cute little tentacles!

I finally visited the lunch counter attached to my favorite Korean grocery. Most of the entrees were $5. But my food-frakking deputy Julia and I ordered the only things on the menu that topped off at $8. She got the stir-fried octopus and I got the bulgogi, barbecued beef.

I couldn’t identify all the little bowls of tasty things. There was some sort of pancakey thing, the usual kimchee, and some cubes of pickled vegetable of an entirely unrecognizable species. Maybe a gourd or tuber of some sort.

Here’s a close-up of the octopus.

When you ate the tentacles, the suction cups popped off and rolled around your mouth like rubbery ball bearings.

My pal and I visited that taco cart in front of the tejano club again. Just to add to this blog’s head-porn content, here’s a closeup of the inside of his barbacoa taco:

I ordered the tongue (lengua) taco.

This was prepared much different than the previous tongue taco I ate. This tongue came in delicous, tender cubes. You can even see the bumps!

While I’m on the subject of a cow’s mouth, I bought some chorizo the other day from one of the little neighborhood Mexican markets.

Take a closer look at the ingredients:

Now the funny thing is, just last week I woke up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat because I was terrified that nobody was making good use of all those salivary glands out there. I should have realized that those Mexicans would be on it already.

After frying up the chorizo I mixed it in with some refried beans and made tostadas. The tomatoes are courtesy of my housemate’s amazingly productive romano plants.

I should point out the San Luis hot sauce. You know a hot sauce is industrial grade when it comes in the same kind of bottle as bleach. This is a condiment designed to stay outside in the sun all day on a Mexico City taco cart. It cost me $1.59.

Finally, I want you to take a moment to read everything on this packaging.

I… I… I’m at a loss for words. It’s as if I wrote that packaging copy myself. Although what the package doesn’t mention is that a mouthful of southern satisfaction is so hard and crunchy that you’re liable to lose a filling.

I’ve mentioned before the food I’ve gleaned from the convenience store at 14th and Cedar, and this might be the last time I report on it, because circumstances have conspired to keep me away. Here’s a corndog I bought from them.

The corndog had languished all day under the heat lamps, which had baked its battered shell into a weird stale cocoon. But the meat tasted lightly aged and overall it had a fighting spirit that I couldn’t help but admire. This was one little corndog that never gave up.
14th and Cedar Convenience Corndog – Grade C plus

The backbone of the hotdog/industrial complex is the gas station. The Tetco at the corner of 29th and Guadalupe proudly bears this standard of hotdog excellence. They have a greasy, well-tempered roller rack of dogs that have reached their maturity at a biologically inhibitive temperature. The nacho cheese machine has a phlegmatically gloopy thing going on, and the chili dispenser extrudes overly runny meat-paste, but the hotdog itself is solid.

Plus, you can get a combo that includes a soda and chips for the unbelievably low price of $3. This is what makes hotdogs the crucial foodstuff that they are — the industrial economy of scale reflected in low, low prices.
Tetco Chili Dog Combo – Grade B

People in Texas are stunned when I tell them that the A&W in my home town closed for the winter. It was just a shack at the edge of the swamp, with waitresses coming out to the car (like at Sonic). But they only did it when water stayed in liquid form. You ever see a root beer stand waitress lose a toe to frostbite? There is nothing more tragic.

So it always feels like a little of the summer magic when I stop at A&W. And I would wager to say that their chili coney dog is pretty magical too.

Everything about this dog radiates luscious plumpness, to an almost sexually obscene degree. If I hadn’t eaten this hotdog, I probably would have spanked it over and over again until my A&W booth was a smear of greasy brown chili.

And the hotdog itself was delicious. The meat broke crisply between my incisors, revealing a dark and spicy substrate.

The bun itself was like a cloud. It soaked up some chii, and then disappeared down my gullet without touching teeth or tongue.

I wish there had been more of this hotdog, but I guess there’s only so much indulgence that one man can absorb in a single sitting.
A&W Chili Coney Dog – Grade A minus

This issue of Food Frakker, we’re going to have something a little different. I managed to catch on digital media the encounter between my co-worker Jeremiah, and a Korean snack treat of the sort that I would ordinarily only inflict on myself.

So allow me to present the sequential graphic narrative of Jeremiah and the Mixed Bean Crackers.