Zombie Lapdance

I want to start off this article with some old man griping. Let’s take a look at these potato prices from the HEB:

5-lbs of potatoes is $1.77, yet 10-lbs is only twenty cents more. What is not pictured, is the price of a single potato, which is $1.20. So, this is all a lead up to how it is that I walked into the store, intending to buy a potato, but I walked out with ten pounds.

But you know what’s free? Pecans. It’s pecan picking season in Austin.

Every time I try walking anywhere I end up with a pocket full of these tasty morsels.

My food-frakking deputy Julia and I visited the Restaurant Depot last week. You can get great prices on meat in bulk there.

And yes, that bag says "lamb carcass." You can even see its little hoofies up at the top.

A glimpse of some southern-style cooking for you northerners, this is from Austin’s Hoovers restaurant.

The yellow things are "ho-cakes", essentially a pancake made with corn meal. The cup on the side is filled with chickens, dumpling, and gravy.

Taco Cabana, a Texas fast-food taco chain, has been making Mexican street-food tacos.

They’re not much different than the taco cart tacos, except that you only get one meat choice, a marinated beef not unlike suadero. Also, they’re served with a very American-style chips and velveeta-queso side.

I picked up this Mexican dulces sampler at that El Rancho supermarket that I mentioned earlier.

I’m not sure exactly what everything was, but it seemed to be candied pumpkin, fig, and various other squashes. How do they make a piece of vegetable so incredibly sweet? It was like biting into a strawberry jam that was actually a pumpkin.

The big development with my cooking repertoire is the purchase of a crock pot.

So the first thing I did was go down to the store and buy the neck pieces of three different types of animals.

The turkey necks made dam fine soup. It was meaty yet healthy and vegetable intensive.

And after the crock pot had simmered the flesh from the bones, I was left with a pile of turkey vertebrae. They looked like the pieces for some weird European educational toy.

I was tempted to keep them. But then I thought better of it. You have to ask yourself how many carcasses you really need to keep around the house.

Instead, I played with them once and then threw them away.

Because I’m a nerd, I’ve been excited all summer about the new Twin Oaks branch library. I’m sitting in it right now, in their quiet-room study carrels (although I wish the rest of the library was less stingy with the desk-next-to-power-outlet facilities that us addicted laptoppers need).

I thought I would share some glamour shots with you. Surprisingly, I’m not the only one taking pictures. I’ve caught glimpses of a couple other people doing it too.

Too futuristic for a library? Notice the outdoor performance space flanked by rain cisterns.

Because this is Austin, the drainage is one of the primary design features.


As is the photovoltaic roof.

The entrance way has this tower, apparently for the sole purpose of housing this crinkly sculpture thing.

A bit classy on the inside too. I like the steel-girded wooden beams on the ceiling.

Some intern at the architectural firm spent a week figuring out how to hang these fluorescent light fixtures.

Haven’t checked in at the porch light recently. Got a particularly weird moth and a rare sighting of a praying mantis.

I’m going to give you an idea of everything I’ve been writing in the past couple of days.

I wrote up an overview of a Czech version of Jules Verne and a travelogue of Winnipeg at No Fear of the Future.

At Austinpost I put together an article that’s a step-by-step guide for ordering food from an Austin taco cart. It’s got a nifty illustration. I’m kinda proud of it.

And at SpaceSquid.com I wrote a series of articles. There’s one about hiding the shards of clay tablet at an undisclosed location, and another couple about things that are space squid but not this Space Squid.

Caught my first largemouth bass in a long time the other day. It bit on the first cast, which lends support to my theory that the fish don’t bite once they figure out you’re there.

It bit on a regular old worm too. Nothing fancy. Sort of makes a mockery of the bass fishing industry.

I bet it would have tasted good. But because it was the first cast and it was really close to the slot limit, I tossed it back.

Hopefully there will be more bass in my future. But now that I’m freelancing, I don’t feel comfortable spending time fishing, no matter how much I feel I deserve it.

Today was my last day at the bakery. I went in for a couple hours to make sure that the website was updated as much as it needs to be, at least for now.

I decided that I’ve spent enough time in food service, and it’s time for me to try to make it as a writer. I figure I’ve got a good chance, considering that next month I’ll be paying rent with money I made doing freelance writing in my free time.

Since this was my last day, I cleaned out my locker. You can get an impression of how long I’ve been working there by what I found: backups of all my important documents on 3.5" diskette.

It’s been a while since I’ve had a computer that actually had a disk drive that could read those. I remember when those diskettes seemed like a lot of memory. Now, they’re not large enough to hold a single photo from my cheap eBay camera.

Since I last mentioned him, the author C. Deskin Rink has been making good progress in shopping around his Helmut Finch story "What They Consumed." The story is now out in the premier issue of Bete Noire. The blurb on the order form credits Helmut Finch, which is kinda funny.

In honor of the continued and deserved success of this story, I have put together a Helmut Finch Mythos page. Sure, there’s only two stories in the Helmut Finch Mythos, but that doesn’t mean that the mythos doesn’t deserve some online resources.

The Helmut Finch Mythos page has all the links, facts, and tidbits necessary to create another installment in this unique and vibrant example of Wisconsin culture.

Longtime followers of this blog have seen how inadvertent aquarium ownership devolved into an obsession with Austin creeks and finally left me with my current enthusiasm: fishing. I’ve had some fishing failures, but there have been triumphant fishing successes.

The most recent success, I caught a beautiful example of the only North American cichlid. The territory of the Rio Grande Cichlid doesn’t stretch much farther than Austin, but I caught one on Tuesday.

I’m going to call this a bull male. A beautiful trophy.

Let’s say this was eight inches, just an inch and a half beneath the lake record.

I was going to hold the cichlid by the lower jaw to remove the hook, like they say you’re supposed to, but then I noticed that it had some serious teeth, so I decided to leave the hook in there.

A fish like this would cost you twenty bucks at an aquarium shop.

Needless to say, it was quite delicious. The meat was not unlike a sunfish, but it was particularly dense and oily. The hump above the head had some of the tenderest and most flavorful fish flesh I’ve had to date.

Editor D Chang has performed a total revamp on the SpaceSquid.com site. There’s now a wordpress blog, where we will be posting Space Squid related news. Possibly our stories will go up here, as well as on the PDF.

What does this mean? It means that I have yet another blog to contribute to. There ought to be a way to organize all this, don’t you think?

The inestimable Lawrence Person blogged about his complete Space Squid collection and the clay tablet that he acquired at the Armadillocon art auction. As it turns out, he has the tablet on a place of honor on his mantelpiece. Right next to the talking Ann Coulter doll and the dinosaur bone.

Lawrence Person denies that Coulter has been calling Space Squid a bunch of liberal traitors.