Zombie Lapdance

Here’s a few sights from grocery stores around Austin.

Every once in a while I have to use the restroom at the HEB when it’s being cleaned, so I have to visit the second-floor employees’ facilities.

It’s a grackle’s eye view of the store.

The other day I did a walk-through of the El Rancho Supermercado up on Research. It was a sensory-overwhelming experience, crowded, colorful and filled with visually perplexing products. Take for instance what is clearly the most awesome birthday cake ever created.

There is a freaking T-Rex bursting out of a volcano! I repeat, a freaking T-Rex bursting out of a volcano!

These fish are striped bass. It’s an ocean-going species that the State of Texas frequently stocks in reservoirs, including Lady Bird Lake.

Consider this a wistful photo of an angler’s dream.

I bought a crockpot recently, and I’m going to be kicking myself for ages because I didn’t buy one large enough to fit una cabeza de borrega.

Maybe if I tamped it down?

I stopped by Sasona, my old co-op for a while last week. It’s been a long time since I’ve visited, and I was pleasantly surprised that some of the ridiculous ghetto hacks I had installed are still running, years later. For instance, I had rigged several doors to close using a rope, a pulley, and pieces of rebar I found lying out in the yard.

The rebar is the counterweight, visible to the left.

On the other side of this door I cobbled together a stop to muffle the sound of people slamming the door open. It’s made from scrap wood, some old socks, and a scrap piece of Dickies work pants.

And Sasona is still observing their bread man creation myth ceremony.

Definitely the best piece of social engineering I ever pulled off.

The story of my most recent fishing trip starts with crickets. Thousands and thousands of crickets.

Apparently this is a fairly common event this time of year. I think that Highland Mall has a particularly large swarm because they irrigate their tiny patches of grass and then keep the parking lot lights on all night long.

Did you know that crickets can fly? You would never believe it looking at them.

They certainly didn’t try to fly often enough as I caught them and put them in my bait bucket.

So armed with a bucket of crickets I set out to the lake. And for the first three hours there was nothing. At one point I cast my line into the center of a school of fish and I could actually see them staring disdainfully at the bait.

But a few hours later I tried again, and virtually every cast got a bite. Those fish love crickets.

By neglecting to include a frame of reference in this shot, you have no idea that the fish is only a few inches long.

I’ve adopted a system of keeping one of my bicycle buckets filled with ice. Then I can just toss in the fish, and they stay fresh until they meet Mr.Fillet knife.

The largest fish I caught that day was a redbreast sunfish. They’re easy to identify because they have a yellow breast and they have an elongated gill flap or "ear" that is much longer than the longear sunfish. Yes, virtually everything about the longear’s naming scheme is a lie.

It was nine inches long, and considering that the lake record for this species is only an inch longer, that’s not bad at all. When it hit the cricket it sunk the bobber completely out of sight and felt like a barbell at the end of the line.

Something that I had forgotten about fishing was the shear variety of life one encounters. In this case, leeches.

A message to all you nature-worshipping pagans out there: nature is freaking disgusting.

I’m reasonably certain that I got off all the leeches from my catch. And if I didn’t, some corn meal and hot oil took care of things.

I wanted to post a few photos from the recent Space Squid excursion to College Station. Because it was the official hand-over of the clay tablet issue to the Cushing science fiction archive, we had to make it a huge production with a bunch of Space Squid contributors tagging along to take a tour of the archive and witness the somber transition of ownership.

How do you know when you get to Texas A&M?

Hehehehehe.

The archive is held inside giant, mechanical sliding bookshelves.

A crew of science fiction writers perusing the many rare editions reminded me a little of kids in a toy shop.

Note, the third or fourth largest science fiction research archive in the world uses the term "sci-fi."

So all of you who want us to use "spec fic" or "skiffy" instead can just bite it.

Hey, Superdave, look! Utopia!

So that’s where you catalog the Necronomicon.

I think the paperback is slightly scarier than the human-skin edition.

A veritable tower of Dick.

The cuneiform cone was close to the size I imagined.

The tablet however was much smaller.

Here’s the historic handover of the Space Squid clay tablet issue.

And of course, any trip to College Station requires a stop at Snook for the chicken-fried bacon.

(photo by Nicky Drayden)

There’s an additional writeup at No Fear for the Future.

I am sitting here at my computer having just finished a particularly long and tedious shift at the bakery. Making pies and French bread from scratch is a pain to do at home, and doing it at a commercial scale is proportionately more painful.

And then I see the report of a news story that Julia mentioned to me last night: There’s a potentially habitable exo-planet right next door.

I can’t believe the banalities of work made me forget that. Hell, I can’t believe I’m not drunk and celebrating.

There’s so much to be excited about! Gliese 581g is a mere 20 light years away, which makes it about as close as an Earth-like planet could possibly be. "Gliese" is the prefix of a cataloging system for near-earth stars that are too dim to be seen with the eye (most of the galaxy is red dwarfs that are too small and dim to be seen by their nearest neighbors).

The scuttlebutt on the street is that the chance of life is 100%. But that’s just for those of us who subscribe to the panspermia hypothesis.

It was a little odd to hear NPR this morning mention both Portage, WI and "The town of Caledonia." I grew up in Caledonia, which is a township and not by any stretch of imagination an actual town. The nearest town was Portage, a low-lying piece of swamp between two major drainage systems.

So it’s not surprising that they’re having flooding issues over there.

Consider this entry a shout-out and a sympathy card to all my homies in the Caledonia area who built their homes a little too close to the dike.

Last Sunday the lovely Choo organized an outing to a dim sum restaurant in the North Lamar China Center. I’ve mentioned dim sum before, and if ever there were a proper way to eat it, it’s with a group of friends at a remote restaurant early on a Sunday morning.

The dim sum banquet hall was on the opulent side. It was suggested that at any moment there could be a John Woo style gunfight or possibly a Bar Mitzvah.

A small army of waiters rolled stainless steel carts from table to table, offering the diners their tasty wares. Each cart had three or four varieties of dish, held on a tiny plate or a steam basket. It was sort of like a Luby’s in reverse. The dishes went on the lazy susan (Susan?) at the center of the table, and the whole team sampled at their leisure.

There were plenty of tasty buns and steamed dumplings, but I’m going to focus on the outer envelope of the food experience here.

For instance, one of the dishes was a pile of spicy jellyfish strips.

Which tasted a little like fish tripe, if there were such a thing as an aquatic ruminant.

A standout in the taste department was the tendon.

It had a slightly gummy mouth feel and an almost bacony greasiness.

And finally I got a picture of chicken feet.

I’m particularly proud that I was able to convince people to eat this delicacy and to give them advice on the proper eating technique: "There is no good way to do it. Just suck between the toes."

So, apparently, no one really knows what would happen if you put your hand in the Large Hadron Collider proton beam. My tax money is paying for those protons. I demand some hand vaporizing.

A while ago I openly mused that I should get a fishing license. Julia (my food-frakking deputy) who we have determined does indeed pay attention, subsequently bought me a Texas fishing license and a pole.

My first fishing expedition was this week. I was crossing Lady Bird Lake anyways, so I threw the line in. Results were consistent with the fishing I did as a kid. Most fish ignore attempts to hook them, with the exception of bluegills, which strike the bait the moment it hits the water. And yet, nine times out of ten, the bluegill will strip the worm clean off the hook without a single notch on their lip. The tenth time, the fish you catch is so tiny as to make a fillet cut impossible.

Thankfully, my food frakking experience has lent me the skills to eat a fish in its entirety without stooping to cutting a boneless fillet. This food-frakker will show you how to clean, cook, and eat a very small bluegill fish.

This is the fish which had the misfortune to be the food frakker’s first experiment in wild-caught pan frying.

It’s curious that so many people tell me they would never eat fish out of Lady Bird Lake (the reservoir in the Colorado River that bisects Austin). I wonder if they know that the water coming out of their taps is the same water the fish lives in? Either way, I don’t see myself not eating fish I’ve caught. And the eating process begins with a 78-cent de-scaler.

I was at my friend Peter Gabriel’s house, and the only knife he had was a ludicrously dull and notched paring knife. But it was sufficient for gutting.

(A curious part of the Texas fishing code says that it is a violation to "fail to immediately remove the intestines from tilapia, grass carp, or any other fish listed as harmful". Which makes one wonder, why is it wrong to kill the fish some other way? You can’t just stab it, or cut off its head, you have to disembowel it?)

So the guts are all cleaned out, all the scales have been scraped off, and the fish has been rinsed. Then I cut slanted slashes in each side.

At this point I would rub spices into the slashes: sea salt, pepper, ginger, soy sauce, garlic. You know, tasty stuff.

The next step is breading. You can just toss it in rice flour, or you can do the whole three-step dip: flour, egg, then breadcrumbs or batter. Toss the breaded fish on a pre-heated pan with a coating of oil.

Notice how the slashes separate as it cooks.

Because it’s that kind of operation, we also threw in the one vegetable we had on hand.

When it’s cooked through you just pick the flesh off with a fork.

There’s not much doubt that fish just tastes better when you catch and kill it yourself.

So, yet another thing that I should mention. I was asked by Norm Sherman to step in as an associate editor at the Drabblecast. I’ve been a fan of the Drabblecast for as long as I’ve had an MP3 player. And as it happens, I’ve been published on Drabblecast three times, for the original story "Eggs," the 100-word drabble "Train Dreams," and an audio-production version of "The Elves Hate You." There’s an upcoming story too, "Snuggle the Dead," a zombie tale written in feature article prose format that will be on the Drabblecast B-sides feed.

When I told Julia (my food-frakking deputy) about my decision to join the Drabblecast editorial team she said, "Now who’s going to publish your stories?" Which was a little startling. I hadn’t known she was paying such close attention.

There’s a lovely introduction at the beginning of this week’s episode that welcomes me to the Drabblecast flock.