Zombie Lapdance

when i was just a wee lad growing up in the boondocks of rural wisconsin, they would air battlestar galactica right about the time i got home from school. trouble was, my parents wouldn’t let me watch TV that wasn’t PBS (i blame this for my apparent english accent).

presuming that the bus didn’t slip off the icey road on the way back from school (which happened weekly) i had maybe 45minutes of BSG time between my father going off to eke out a living as a late-night banjo teacher and my mother coming back from a hard day of construction-site management. i would huddle in the basement, right up next to the TV, the sound turned down as low as possible, my hand on the off-knob, ready to turn off the TV and pretend i was reading the moment i heard the front door swing open.

those tiny morsels of space opera were like crack. my heart would beat harder just hearing the opening trumpets of the BSG theme.

then my mother would come home, stalk down to the basement and put her hand on the TV to see if it was still warm from the bootlegged boobtoobing. (note to biographer: this is pretty much my only claim to being an abused child)

now i’m an adult, i live four states away from my closest parent (BIG states even), and i can rent as many goddamn BSG DVDs as i want.

which i did last night. it’s been, oh, 17 years or so since i’ve seen the vintage BSG series. and man does it suck now.

remember when you could have a crewmember with a mullet on the bridge of a starship? remember when ‘turbo’ was a part of the english language? and it seemed to actually mean something? remember when dirk "face" benedict seemed really, REALLY cool?

i don’t understand how something with so many spacebattles can be so dull and silly. but i’m going to watch the entire thing.

just to spite my mother.

since i mentioned inkscape, here’s an illustration i did for the forthcoming space squid issue (due in just a couple weeks!). um, it’s a corporate snackcake logo.

i posted the ‘scaled vector graphic’ file if anybody actually wants to look at how it was put together.

as if to prove that netflix is for homebody losers, the local hipster video store has been offering free beer on tuesdays. and wandering around, being indecisive about movies was already one of my favorite pastimes…

because the new takeshi miike movie the great yokai war was checked out, i settled for renting the pang brothers’ re-cycle and another johnny motard recommendation shallow ground’.

"that has to be a bad translation" my girlfriend said of the title for re-cycle. after watching it for twenty minutes or so, it dawned on us that this horror movie was actually about recycling.

although horror might be an unfair category. i think the pang brothers have the same problem that stephen king does, where they can’t write a straight up fantasy in a mind-bending alternate world without it being marketed as ‘spine tingling terror.’ although admittedly there were a lot of zombies. and admittedly my girlfriend jumped up and slapped me for touching her during a particularly tense "what’s going to jump out now" sequence (don’t tell her, but i was actually trying to hug her to comfort myself in my girly terror).

maybe i’m getting old, but i’ve been actually scared by some horror movies recently. even an american super-low budget film like shallow ground. john assured me it wasn’t a slasher film, which i think are the most boring pieces of crap you can imagine. when they have to use gingerbread men and snowmen as their villians, you know that the genre is scraping the bottom of the creative barrel. john was right, it wasn’t a slasher film, although you could almost say it was a slasher film imbedded in a much better japanese horror film that just happened to have an american production. i was prepared for the naked, blood covered boy that walked out of the woods at the beginning of the film, but when the boy was handcuffed to the stove in the remote sheriff’s cabin, that’s when i got the sort of discomforted feeling one get’s when the horror movie is breaking the rules. there were times while watching this that i had to sit as far back from my laptop as the headphones would allow.

there are giants in hotdogs just as there are giants in sports. these are the ones who define the game, whose sheer heart and stamina carry a merely silly form of movement into an artform, into a way of life. these are the namoths, the refrigerator perrys, the favres.

these are the prontodogs.

the pronto mart sits on top of the intersection of 43rd st. and duval, deep in the heart of hyde park. pronto means ‘quick’ in spanish, although for the past three months or so it’s been the ‘ronto mart’ and the ‘p’ still doesn’t look like it’s going to hang on for long.

the hotdog facilities meet you as soon as you walk in the store. you might say they are the corner-stone of the pronto-mart institution. the hotdogs draw in the customers and then the customers buy the 36oz. cans of lone star.

one hotdog is a mere 99cents, and you can buy two for $1.79 which gives you a remarkable savings of, um, about a dime.

the condiment facilities are always fully stocked. a three-chambered bin contains chopped onions, shredded cheddar, and relish. in the rack above the hand-washing sink, are bottled condiments, and not just the usual ketchup and yellow mustard, but also soy and hotsauce. there are also mayo packets for those of us who like to kick our hotdogs up a notch.

the dogs themselves spin on a lurching carnival ride of a rotisserie. this is the secret of the prontodog experience. every hotdog has been stewing on the racks all day long (after 10pm they’re half off and they rarely have leftovers to throw away). the juices have had time to marry, to mingle. it is the heated ferriswheel of tastiness that gives a prontodog its subtle character.

but the final touch, the added bonus that sets this apart from all others, is the chili crockpot:

beneath the protective chili-crust, the pronto-chili is kept at a bacteria-discouraging 114degreesF. cracking that crust with the chili-spoon is a tactile pleasure akin to breaking the crust of a creme-brulee.

taken together, a pronto hotdog and a pronto chilidog are a hotdog man’s hotdog.

Pronto Dog, Overall Score: A

[  Currently: Eating extending my lunch break ]
a co-worker of mine (mr.hall) recently went to third shift, which made it essentially impossible for us to continue our after-work chess games. these were epic battles, typically lasting three hours or more.

so i gave my co-worker a little surprise by setting up a chess game on a disused blackboard in one corner of the bakery.

of course he couldn’t resist the challenge.

when i went in to work early to schedule around turkey city, i met mr.hall at the end of his shift. after he clocked out he set up the game on a cheap plastic board. he sat there at a bakery bench and stared at the game for FORTY-FIVE MINUTES!!!

at first i scoffed. this was only the third turn. i had just moved 3.Bb2…, which is the last official move of the orangutang opening. the object of the orangutang is to pin down black’s B-knight, while using the bishop on the diagonal as a continuing threat against black’s H-rook. and, of course, like all the hyper-modernist openings, the orangutang is meant to jumble up the game, getting away from the traditional, stodgy efforts to control the center by opening with the king or queen pawns, rather controlling the board by keeping the center as clear of pawns as possible and setting up longer-range pieces on the side. it’s intended as board randomizer.

meanwhile, mr.hall, after his forty-five minutes of contemplation, completed his english defense by moving 3….e6, the same move HE ALWAYS MAKES IN EVERY GAME WE’VE PLAYED!!!

after all this, the moves were 4.e3…Nf6; 5.Bd3.

mr.hall refused to accept my last move, developing my bishop. i came in this morning to find written on the board: "you sure you want to do this? you’ll lose the g pawn and the next move the rook too."

geez. i’m no longer scoffing.

i attended the infamous turkey city writing workshop over the weekend. i had pulled an all-nighter in order to put in my shift at work before i began workshopping at 9:00am. so i’m sure that i was much more candid and befuddled than i ought to have been.

there were seven of us, two of whom had seen my selection before.

the workshop started with no fanfare. people just showed up at bruce’s house (and i’m always surprised at how many people know exactly what that means and where it is) picked up the selections arrayed on bruce’s dining room table and started reading.

i got to read the first chapter or so of the next bruce sterling novel, which demonstrated that if you want to imagine the future and you don’t want to look like an amature, you have to research full-time for years. which is so depressing.

after i went home and slept for 14hrs, i was name-dropping and it turns out that my housemate has been running the bruce sterling online index. he said that it made more sense in the terrifyingly info-fractured pre-google period of the late nineties, and that he hasn’t been keeping up with the miriad of bruce-related articles and lectures of recent years.

one of the advantages of co-editing a zine called "space squid" is that people send you a lot of squid links. and people on the internet love squid.

checkout the "compare yourself to a squid quiz" and "how to insult a squid".

links courtesy of ms.hill.

as some of you might know, there are few joys in this world greater than a gasstation hotdog. they are the ultimate convenience food, encapsulating all your vital nutritional needs (meat, grease, and condiments) in a single object that you can eat with your hands.

my most recent hotdog purchase was at the "north loop food store", you know, up near the parlor and monkeywrench books.

it was close to closing time, and the dudes inside were emptying the icemelt from their tubs of miller highlife. i walked around the store, but i couldn’t find a single hotdog rotisserie. just before i started to panic, i found it, the hotdog that i knew was there. it was in the far corner of the refrigerator cabinet, the least accessible point in the entire "convenience" store: a pair of pre-packaged chilidogs which had been stewing in their own chili for who knew how long.

after paying for my latenight snack, i was further appalled to discover that the store had no visible condiment facilities. i couldn’t find a single packet of catsup, let alone relish or mayo (i like putting a thin line of mayo on my chilidogs just to kick them up a notch). i made do with the store microwave and then retired to the comfortable and spatious curbside dining area.

although one would normally hesitate to place any bread-product in a microwave, the nuking actually seemed to improve this bun, enhancing its bunlike nature, giving it a simultaneously soggy and chewy texture, hot, wet, and limp. The reddish brown juices of the chili had absorbed into the spongy bun, leaving the pebbly meat chunks high and dry. The chili meat had a texture and a taste halfway between gristle and sausage. The "cheese" shreds which garnished my meal retained the plasticky consistency of a petroleum distillate despite the heat and the radiation of the microwave.

but certainly the high-point of the offering was the dog-meat itself. this flavorful and substantial tube of processed muscle-tissue rescued an otherwise abysmal hotdog experience. this was no spongy pork-meat or dull mechanically-separated chicken dog. this hotdog parted crisply between my teeth. it felt as if whatever animal donated this meat had been clenching all his muscles tight — and kept clenching them even after processing, shipping, and refrigeration.

North Loop Food Store, Chilidog. Overall score: B Minus.

[  Mood: Embarrased ]
i was searching the internet for any evidence that radiation actually causes bizarre mutations, you know, along the lines of killer squid the size of seattle, or even just really big earthworms. and i found no such thing.

but i did find:

the story behind this is actually pretty sad. basically you can’t have a tragic stillbirth in nepal without all the neighbors coming out and parading the corpse through the streets like it’s nepalese freakbaby new years.

even sadder, the content-sensitive advertising on the webpage is all about baby products and maternity services.