Zombie Lapdance

Because my day job is in the food service, I have access to restaurant-grade food products that you miserable mortals can only dream of.

Case in point, this five pound bucket of sour cream and this five pound block of extra-melty super-processed cheese.

You civilians are probably scratching your heads right now thinking, so? What does that have to do with me?

Well, if you put those two ingredients together, and add some spices, you have the exact recipe of Austin queso.

This is the sort of thing you might get if you order Kerbey Queso or queso con carne or some other chips and queso dish at any of Austin’s finer psuedo-Mexican diners. It has a smooth, creamy, cheesy texture that you can only achieve through proper blending of highly processed and artificial food-like substances.

Of course you can only eat so much queso, and one feels obligated to use up one’s surplus eight pounds of processed dairy product.

So I made some cheese and macaroni with tomatoes and sardines.

Which I suppose is something you don’t see every day.

Then I also made some dip. This started out as spinach and sour cream. And then I thought, what the hell, I have this can of SPAM. What would happen if I threw it in the blender with the rest of the dip?

I think I imagined a meaty cloud of SPAM mousse dip. But the SPAM completely disappeared into the dip. There was no trace of SPAM color, and only the faintest echo of the SPAM taste.

Certainly worth more experimentation, but a disappointing result all the same.

And now to relate some of my recent adventures with the taco carts.

From this cart near my house, I decided to break down and be that white guy who orders the tripas . You know, tacos filled with beef tripe.

They were greasy and crisp, and tasted like organ tubules. But in a good way. Hell, in a great way.

This taco cart sits in the parking lot of a tejano club on the far east side.

My friend ordered the al pastor torta. The red meat of the marinated pork is reminiscent of both shawarma and chicken tabouli.

And you gotta love the green sauce in the unrefrigerated squeeze bottle. Don’t worry, nothing could live in there, not even microscopically.

I ordered the barbacoa, because finding out that barbacoa comes from heads only makes it twice as delicious.

My new favorite game is trying to get people who should know better to run around in creeks with me. Yesterday I got my co-workers to do it.

First we were rousted from the Hancock Golf Course for trying to steal minnows from the direct path of speeding balls (there were some good minnows there!). So we had to go to Shipe Park instead.

There were hordes of the standard mosquitofish, but I was able to find another platy hiding among the hoi polloi. This one I can only presume is a male and certainly more beautiful than the other one in my possession.

You can see this platy, and all my other local fish, in this video tour of my Austin creek aquarium.

I’m absolutely fascinated by the natural world in and around the Highland Mall. Yesterday, while passing by Kickbutt Coffee, which is adjacent to the mall, I saw a couple of killdeer babies running around in the parking lot.

They were quite cute. Like little fuzzy cottonballs with toothpick legs.

It’s not at all unusual to see the adult killdeer in that area. I see them late at night as I bike through the parking lots. They run along the asphalt as if there were no difference at all with the fields and meadows they normally inhabit.

When the mother killdeer saw me snapping pictures of her babies, she did the whole "look at me, my wing’s broken and I can’t get away" routine.

As if I were born freaking yesterday.

Ms. Deanna Toxopeus and myself did guest readings on the current Drabblecast Trifecta episode. You can listen to the media right here.

It’s a damn fine episode. The theme is underwater monsters.

For months I had this half-finished project cluttering up my desk. Then the other night I finished it up.

It’s an audio amp inside a coffeecan.

Now, even as I was making it, I was thinking, why am I putting several hours of work into this? I was making from scratch something that I could buy at Goodwill for a couple of bucks. And the Goodwill version would work far better.

At the very back you can see the pumpkinseed-sized audio amp IC chip that is the core of the project. Everything else is just a peripheral.

Then I found myself doing another totally ridiculous project. Making moss terrariums.

Even as I put them together, I thought to myself, there’s no way I’m keeping these.

This one has shells inside it.

Got them for a buck at the dollar store.

This one has a tiny forest of crystals.

Like an alien planet or something!

Yep. Sometimes I start something and I just can’t stop.

As you might have heard, it’s somewhat hot here in Austin. Today the temperature has dipped somewhat, it was only 101F, but basically there has been a daily broiling that is progressively leaching my body of its precious minerals. You know why Texans have skin that looks like leather? It’s because their bodies are constantly cured in a bath of self-produced saltwater.

So here are some of the things that I’ve been putting in my mouth for no other reason than they happen to be cold.

We’ll start with the Rich’s brand icecream treats. This lemon/lime swirl bar is everything that Sprite wishes it could be, but never will.

Rich’s ScrewBall is a cone of popsicle slush that I assume you eat by squeezing into your gaping maw like a toothpaste tube. And what makes it screwball? There’s a gumball on the very bottom! A soggy, partially dissolved gumball! Pretty screwy, huh?

Then there’s the patriot bar!

Sam Adams ate a frozen popsicle just like this during the Constitutional Convention.

The second closest grocery store to where I live is a Mexican market. In a freezer tucked behind the güero treats, with a hand-labeled "Mexican Paletas" sign I found these frozen tasties:

The coconut bag of slush tasted exactly the way you would expect. The rompope bolis tasted less like eggnog and more like a butterscotch shake.

The closest grocery store to my home is a Korean market. And their freezer section is a veritable goldmine of icecream.

This one didn’t have any anglo lettering on it, but you could sort of describe it as a wafer-cone pocket filled with icecream, caramel, and nuts. I presume the characters on top are the Korean words for "brain freeze."

The other one was in the school of suckable icecream sack, complete with cryptic opening instructions.

I just used my teeth.

On a separate occasion I continued my Korean iced treat exploration, getting another of the polymer suck-sacks or "Squeez"(vanilla this time).

The coffee bar on the right cracks open in the middle. Which is fine unless the icecream inside is partially melted. The resulting spillage is unavoidable and upsetting. The bar on the left had all the tasty refinement of any premium icecream bar you might buy at a duller market.

And of course we can’t talk about cold things without talking about beer. Longtime followers of this blog might remember my Quixotic quest to achieve truly cold beer with the Cryobev3000 (I’m thinking of re-branding it the Beer Squid, but that’s a topic for another entry). Here are some ethnic alternatives to regular old beer.

Popular in Northern Germany is the alster, named after a lake in Hamburg.

It’s beer mixed half and half with lemonade. Think of it as a compromise between refreshing and intoxicating.

Another alternative is michelada.

This is a Mexican flavoring syrup that let’s you water down your beer with ice without looking weird. It’s for people who think that their beer lacks that zesty south-of-the-border taste.

Considering that there’s three months more of this heat, you can expect more Food Frakking on this topic.

I’ve been talking a little bit recently about the intersection of the natural world with the urban landscape of Austin. Specifically, the proliferation of nighthawks, my budding fascination with Austin creeks, and the purple martins at Highland Mall.

Continuing that theme, take a look at this cellphone tower:

On closer inspection, you can see that it’s almost buried under the messy piles of sticks that are the nests of feral parrots.

Nearly every cellphone tower in town has got a thriving colony of parrots. In this case it’s a matter of two invasive structures complimenting each other. Ten years ago there were hardly any cellphone towers, and the parrots were largely contained on the UT’s intramural field.

But there’s just something that the parrots love about these tall structures and their metal catwalks. They must be vaguely analogous to some natural habitat.

The same day that I took that picture, I talked a friend of mine into going creeking.

We explored Boggy Creek, an eastside creek that becomes a concrete aqueduct closer to the lake. We found plenty of mosquitofish and tadpoles, but little else of interest.

It had rained earlier in the day, so there was actual water flowing.

You can see the legacy bridge, the stone and mortar center arch, surrounded on either side by the modern extensions.

Maybe a man of my age shouldn’t be mucking around in a creek, walking barefoot through the tumbling waters.

Meh. It’s only inappropriately immature if I get caught.

At the last Space Squid release party, we conducted a scientifically calibrated zombie simulation using a scientifically calibrated pig head, axes, and samurai swords.

Well, I’m pleased to announce, for those of you who missed the original event, editor D of the Space Squid ruling editorial board, has completed editing the event into a handy online video format.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Space Squid Zombie Simulation Part One and Part Two.

At last you can live the full gory, gut-wrenching brutality that is zombie warfare in full-motion video. Think of it as much like reality TV, but with a scientific theme.

I goofed around a little more with that [url]Fresnel[/url] lens. First, I made half-assed welding goggles by putting the lenses of three different 3D glasses at cross-purposes to each other.

With nearly all light blocked, I can look directly at the intense focal point as I fry some bacon.

Although that was as far as I got. It was actually kind of painful to hold the giant floppy lens out that long.

So this particular project is going on the back burner. Eventually I’ll get around to making a frame and a focusing rig, or maybe I won’t.

Last year I discovered that a giant colony of purple martins roosted at Highland Mall every night at sunset.

They’ve returned once again. They’re roosting in a slightly different location, on the property of the Wells Fargo, just across the street from the North Side of the mall. It seems like there’s not as many as last year, but last year I saw them a month later into the summer, so they’re probably still finishing up fledging the chicks and the rest will join up later.

You can get a better idea of the size of the swarm from the video I took, which is much better than the video I made last year. The previous video got a link from an Audubon blog! But it nevertheless only racked up about a hundred views. *sigh*

From some of the reading I’ve done about this particular roost, the purple martins have been shifting the roost by a few hundred feet every summer, slowly working their way northward. The birding community initially located this swirling flock of swallows because it showed up on Doppler weather radar!

This is indeed one of the great unsung attractions of the Austin area. It even has an entry on Roadside America, although the entry is marred by a horrid slur from a Mister Robert Baumgardner who says that purple martins do not roost in trees, do not flock, and have already left for South America by June. Therefore, Robert Baumgardner claims, they are not purple martins, they are grackles.

Bob, that has got to be one of the most amazing series of wrong assertions I have ever heard. Just go and look at the stupid birds, Bob.