Zombie Lapdance

I’ve blogged about Tam Deli on North Lamar before, mainly about the Vietnamese sandwiches, but as it happens, the Vietnamese also make a damn fine breakfast.

The ham slice and the fried egg are fairly mainstream, but the pate and the fresh grated vegetables give it that Vietnamese twist.

Julia, my food-frakking deputy, and I found ourselves in Lockhart and had breakfast at the Mr. Taco. I ordered the machacado plate, which is dried, shredded beef scrambled with eggs.

Quite the manly breakfast, I thought.

Another Mexican dried beef situation cropped up when Julia and I ate at one of the hip new food trailers, El Naranjo. The place has had a lot of buzz as being one of the best interior Mexican restaurants in town (as opposed to Tex-Mex which is exterior Mexican). The special of the day was a re-hydrated Oaxacan dried-beef taco, which I believe they called tasajo.

It was about twice as expensive as I would expect to pay for a taco cart taco, but it was pretty good nonetheless. The best part about the venue was the cat who hung around the patio, begging for scraps.

It ate everything we offered it, including lettuce and tortilla chips.

Awww!

Last week I had lunch at a diner attached to a Motel on the frontage road. The sign called it "Kettle", and there was no definite article, which should have been a portent of the food to come. The catfish fillet sandwich I ordered came on a ludicrously small bun. It wasn’t a sandwich so much as it was a scale model of a sandwich.

As I left, the only other patron in the restaurant asked if I had been in Austin for long, because she had memories of "Kettle" being a nice place and she wanted to know if anyone else was as shocked by the current lack of nice as she was.

The one positive aspect of "Kettle" was the love tester machine, which confirmed all my suspicions.

I had some weird fish in the back of my freezer for some time, so I figured I should probably eat it.

After a bit of googling, I decided that "River Bard Fish" was a typo and that this fish was actually a "River Barb" or a "Tinfoil Barb," Barbonymus schwanenfeldii. A lot of people keep tinfoil barbs in their cichlid tanks because they grow quite large and can co-exist with potentially aggressive aquarium fish like oscars (so yes, once again, I have eaten an animal that people consider a pet). The Clove Garden has an entry on it, and he talks about eating around the "spines." You see, I bought this fish before I did a lot of research into fishing, so I didn’t recognize at the time the slashing technique that scored the sides of these fish.

That’s the same way those crazy carp fisherman clean their catch. The river barb is somewhat related to carp, so it has the same proliferation of bones that make every mouthful a disgusting mass of so-called spines. The slashes, in theory, allow hot oil to seep into the fish-flesh and dissolve the boniness. So I took measures to cook these fish in plenty of hot oil.

And you know, it worked. I didn’t notice any bones that weren’t in the expected fish skeleton places.

The tinfoil barb tastes pretty good. The flesh strikes a nice balance between flavorful and fishy.

For Thanksgiving I baked a whole bunch of pies, because it’s much more fun if you don’t have to do it. I made a version of a Tex-Mex pie that I’ve been working on, that involves chili, cayenne, and lime.

People seemed to like it. I posted the recipe up at Austinpost.

From time to time I do a digital house-cleaning, where I blog about bits and pieces of things I did and pictures I took that by themselves don’t really deserve an entire blog entry, or they have totally stopped being topical, or I never really knew what I was going to say about it.

Here’s an example that fits all the criteria. A few months ago I won free tickets to see Yuen Woo-Ping’s new movie during Fantastic Fest. The fest gave him some sort of award just before the movie, which was presented from some dude from the Wu-Tang Clan (the RZA I think).

It was a kinda neat moment, but hardly historical or even particularly meaningful.

While visiting the Sci-Fi archives earlier this year, I took this picture.

It didn’t fit thematically with the rest of the blog post I did, yet I was very impressed that Texas A&M is the sort of place where people can just leave their bikes lying around.

Austin now has a beer co-op. Nobody is really sure what that means, but if I was the sort of person who hung around at a neighborhood bar, I might hang around there.

I rented Brigadoon last week. I’d never seen it and the name keeps coming up, so I thought I would give it a shot.

After watching so much Bollywood, it struck me that old Hollywood musicals are really quite slow. There’s whole scenes where they just shuffle around staring into space. Where’s the exposed midriffs? Where’s the item number? Where’s the part where Gene Kelly lip-syncs to rap?

And this Thanksgiving I missed a cultural event of massive proportions. Apparently the Macy’s parade had a couple of Superflat Murakami balloons.

There’s a great video, here, where we see the surreal balloons looming into view through the Manhattan canyons while a little girl starts to cry, "It’s creepy! It’s creepy!"

People seem to actually like the fishing pictures, so here’s a few more chronicles of my exploits.

A week ago I tried fishing along the Colorado River below the longhorn dam. I used to see people fishing there all the time, but I haven’t seen anybody there for a while. It was just me and a crazy guy throwing rocks at turtles. So I shouldn’t have been surprised that I caught the tiniest, most pathetic series of bluegills I’ve ever seen.

After I caught this one, I actually cast the line several times with the fish still on it, hoping to catch a much larger fish with the smaller as bait.

A little farther afield, I explored the fishing ponds in the Travis County park system. For instance, the Southeast Metropolitan Park, which is conveniently located near the airport, has several ponds. When you enter the park, it looks like a giant, empty field.

But if you hike back beyond the parking lots, there’s some beautiful wild terrain with ponds hidden between the hills.

I didn’t catch any fish, but a swarm of bluegills stole a series of worms. A park attendant, who gave me a ride back to the parking lot at thrilling speeds on his ATV vehicle, gave me pointers on catching bass and catfish. He even showed me a pond that I had no idea was there, where supposedly the best bass can be found.

I didn’t see any bass, but I did glimpse a fox, which is a rare sight. I couldn’t snap a picture before it disappeared into the brush, but I did find its brother, who held very still for the camera indeed.

To the north, another Travis County park has a "neighborhood fishing" pond called Bullfrog Pond. It belongs to a program where the state routinely stocks catfish in the summer, and trout in the winter. It’s supposed to make fishing fun and easy, the more so because the pond is barely larger than a swimming pool.

Several old timers had their catfish lines in the water, but they didn’t have so much as a nibble. I started fishing for panfish, so I would have some sort of success, even if it was an under-achieving success. So I changed up my techniques. Although the sunfish had been biting at my line, their mouths were too small to actually fit around the hook. So I switched to a smaller hook, and cut the nightcrawlers into smaller, bite-sized pieces. With some patience and work, I managed to catch several unimpressive redear sunfish.

The redear sunfish are a favorite of stock ponds because they tend to grow particularly large, up into the three-pound range. But these examples still had a long way to go.

Fishing for panfish (or "perch" as they are inexplicably called in Texas) is a bit low-class, and it’s even more low-class when you do what I started doing, dangling the hook off the edge of the fishing pier.

And that’s when I hooked it.

I was expecting to jerk up another finger-sized redear, but as I looked down at my line, this massive maw breached the water. It was a little like a scene from Jaws, or maybe Dune. A fair-sized largemouth bass had taken my little sunny bait, but because I was using such a small hook, it shook itself off before I could haul it out of the water.

I cursed a little, changed the tackle back to a man-sized hook and worm, and within a minute I had re-caught the bass.

I like this shot better because I’m wearing a very serious fisherman look.

I would have eaten this fish, but the keeper limit is 14 inches, and this fish was 13 and a half. And I just couldn’t get it to stretch.

I got an early Christmas present from my Grandfather this week. It’s an antique kukri knife that he bought during a visit to Nepal.

I won’t lie to you, when I was a kid, I had fantasies about owning this knife. Back during the Reagan administration, it seemed likely that civilization would collapse and I would ride through the wastelands carrying a manly knife like this on my belt.

The only thing I couldn’t decide was what color I would have my stallion, black, which is a totally awesome horse color, or palomino, like Roy Rogers’ horse.

The blade shows the wear of decades of practical use, and right now I’m undecided whether I should take the time to polish it to a working edge.

As much as I would like a good zombie-hacker around the house, it seems a shame to ruin the patina on an antique.

While putting together my list of books for the holiday shopping podcast (I’ll get that to you in a sec, Ubal, I promise) I noticed that other people had an Amazon author page, yet I didn’t. So I made one.

Out of all the short stories I’ve published, only four have found their way into Amazon products. There’s "Deadtown Taxi" in Undead2:Flesh Feast, that made a mention in Ellen Datlow’s best of horror anthology that year. "The Secret of Pogopolis," published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, my first SFWA pro sale, is now available for the Kindle. Tales From the Secret City is still there of course, and that has one of the two published Patchwork Kingdom stories. And, through a stroke of luck, there’s a single copy of the Sam’s Dot best-of anthology, Wondrous Web Worlds 5, which has my infamous rednecks in orbit story, "Waldo in Space."

I wrote in the bio "Matthew Bey’s writing runs the gamut from absurdly comic to dark and terrifying," but after writing that, I realized that all the stories available through Amazon are pretty much just silly.

Since I presume you already have all of those books, you should feel free to leave comments on the page talking about how awesome I am.

I can’t believe I’ve never seen this before. I was in Eastwoods Park, fixing the wheel of my bike, when I sensed that someone was looking at me. And then I saw it, lurking at the edge of the forest.

It was a neat effect, the way that the sunlight, dappled by leaves, partially obscured this carving.

I may have to take back everything I said about Austin’s pathetic public art.

It reminded me of Toasterwaffel’s confession that walking through this park at night always gave her flashbacks to the Blair Witch Project.

Due to popular request, I’m going to post more pictures from fishing.

I went out fishing with a buddy of mine at McKinney Falls park, which has a creek running through it. Here he is:

It’s impressive that we could actually catch fish on a body of water this small. Of course the fish themselves were also very small. Here’s a baby largemouth bass that bit on a worm.



He’s pretty frisky. I imagine that if I caught larger bass it would be much more exciting. I think I need to fish in larger bodies of water and use larger bait.

Here are some sunfish I caught, a combination of redbreast and longear I believe, while fishing on a secret spot on Lady Bird Lake.

The lake record for sunfish is 10-inches, so 9.25-inches ain’t bad at all.

They love meal worms. Most of these fish bit within seconds of the hook hitting the water.

A hawk landed just above my head while I was fishing. I looked around for my camera, but couldn’t find it before the hawk flew off. And that’s when I noticed that my bobber had disappeared, dunked by another chunky sunny.

Not bad considering that I was fishing in the middle of downtown Austin.

I just got back from a weekend camping at Palmetto State Park with my food-frakking deputy Julia and a bunch of friends. We observed a fair amount of nature there, like this face-sized dragonfly.

The whole park was overrun by caterpillars, and there was some discussion if this blond one I found was an example of the deadly asp caterpillar.

Aaah! It’s bolting toward my face!

On the edge of the campsite there was a pile of mushrooms that was infested with maggots.

The maggots were in the process of evacuating the mushrooms, which meant that they were actually jumping free. You wouldn’t think that something so small, with no legs, could jump as far as they did. As much as a foot in some cases.

I spent a lot of time fishing. Palmetto State Park has an oxbow lake where most people were doing their fishing, and personally, I wasn’t too impressed. There were many little sunfish, but they all looked a bit anemic. After a bit of work, I caught this 7-incher. I think it may have been a longear sunfish.

It did not provide nearly as much meat as I would have expected.

I also worked the stretch of the San Marcos river that made a couple of bends through the park. The water moved at a pretty fast clip, and I had the best luck working bobbers and bait through the eddies and pillowing rapids. It was a surprisingly dynamic way to fish. A few small bass hiding along the rip-rap struck at worms.

But the best fishing came from the catfish.

I had no idea that catfish could be so clean looking and energetic. They were like bearded fish-puppies. And when you had them out of the water, they made an oinking sound that resembled the sound a fish would make while it was begging for its life.

I caught a bunch of small catfish, and then, using chartreuse nightcrawlers (they cost a dollar extra with the chartreuse dye), I started catching much larger catfish. There were two 14-inch catfish and one 17-inch. The biggest one bit on a very large grasshopper.

There is truly nothing like the feeling of a heavy catfish fighting at the end of the line.

The catch would look much bigger, but it’s in comparison to me, a quite burly fellow.

I’ve never cleaned catfish of this size before, so it was an educational process.

The skin and the fins have to be pulled off with pliers. I exerted a surprising amount of force breaking these catfish into edible bits. But when I was done, there was three frying pans worth of fish meat, enough to give a serving to ten people.

Also, there was a big pile of fish guts and heads.

Man, that’s gross. Why would I even take a picture of that?

Once again, to give you some idea of the great things I’ve been up to when I haven’t been posting here:

Someone re-posted the article I did on ordering from an Austin taco cart. Which is the first repost that Austinpost has had in a while.

I followed up the taco article this morning with another food article about picking pecans in Austin. Which almost immediately got a comment calling it timely and informative. Which is kinda funny considering that there’s virtually no information in the article, just snark. But it is timely.

I also put up an article about the new Nature’s Treasures location, which has garnered virtually no page hits. It includes a picture of me taken by Chris Nakashima-Brown, who I just happened to meet there. He also took this picture:

The Austinpost article I did about the Libertarian election night party was perilously close to actual journalism. Replete with interviews. But no real research. I’m not that professional.

Over at SpaceSquid.com, I have kept people informed about the slushpile, the state of the photocopier and hardcopy distribution (if you want some hardcopies of Space Squid, let me know), and an awesome Dr.Who scene where Amy Pond uses the phrase "Space Squid." Which I presume was referring to me, personally.

Totally unrelated to anything, apparently there actually is a double-bladed whip sword called the urumi, much like the one that Shahrukh Khan used in Asoka.

Super awesome, dude.

And the first of the "How To" articles that I wrote for PCWorld.com is now up. Feel free to visit the article and click the "Helpful" button.

When we think of the Moose Lodge, we think of men in cream-colored blazers drinking beer elbow to elbow with scruffy gen-x rockers. Well, on top of having very affordable beer and a friendly staff of bartenders, the Moose Lodge also serves hotdogs. It’s part of their charity fundraising work.

The lady who puts this delicious, soupy concoction together follows a three-step process. First, she microwaves the hotdog and the bun together. Then she goes to the stove where a pot of chili waits, and ladles some greasy meat into the paper tray. Then comes the cheese, which has been sitting on the counter in a bubbling crockpot. I won’t tell you how unbelievably cheap the whole thing was, which seems counter-productive to the whole fund-raiser concept. All in all, the hotdog was the perfect thematic compliment to the Moose Lodge.
Moose Lodge Chili Cheese Dog – Grade B

Further away geographically, but only a hop and skip in the Austin party scene, is the Hot Dog King on Red River. After catching a show at the Beauty Bar as we are wont to do on a Saturday night, my food frakking deputy Julia and I decided to wait in line at one of the most popular food trucks in the "Entertainment District" (I can never type that phrase without sarcasm quotes). I’ve reviewed the Hot Dog King before, but I’d never had the venison dog.

Yep. Tasted like a hotdog.
Hot Dog King Venison Dog – Grade B

A block further down we get to Bar-B-Q Heaven, a food stand where there’s one guy inside the trailer and another guy leaning against the window who kibitzes and takes the customer’s money. I ordered the sausage wrap because it was truly astonishingly cheap, but I was pleased to find that it was pleasantly rib-sticking food.

Technically of course this is not a hotdog. But the sausage wrap occupies a parallel ecological niche. It’s like going fishing for sharks and catching a grizzly instead. This is tubular meat in bread, designed for speed, portability, and the power to please a man-sized hunger.
Bar-B-Q Heaven Sausage Wrap – Grade B