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Disks in Rotation: Books Lying
Open Soul-Devouring
Worry When I Grow Up:
Curse of the Day: |
Monday July 29, 2002 | |
| Quote
of the Day I personally feel the bible says all people are equal in the eyes of God. I personally feel that women should play an absolutely equal role in service of Christ in the church. -- Jimmy Carter, announcing that he is cutting ties with the Southern Baptist Convention over it's treatment of the "lesser gender", AKA women. (Which just goes to show people can read anything they want into the Bible, even ex-presidents, if they try hard enough. -- Flux) |
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Daily
Blog For my semi-usual restaurant report, I ate dinner with my dad Sunday night. I wanted a fish sammich. Damnit. So we debated as to where one might best be obtained, and compromised on the Anthony's Express in Mission Valley. There are two Anthony's in San Diego, and they are big seafood restaurants. Normal sit down places, medium-high prices, decent food, slightly better quality than Red Lobster, if that gives you some idea. They have recently opened up a few fast food versions of themselves in other locations, trying to get more business and compete for the quick diner market. These Express places have nearly identical menus, including wine lists, but less items, none of the elaborate/expensive meals, and much quicker service, with all the charming ambiance of a new Taco Bell. Most people get fish and chips or a simple grilled fillet of something at them, and you are in and out before you can get through a loaf of sourdough and your clam chowder at a normal seafood place. Anyway, I figured they'd have a decent fish sammich, and dad likes fish and chips, so off we went. I figured wrong. They had 5 sandwiches on the menu, and none sounded any good.
Objections:
I got the battered cod, while thinking "Isn't battered-cod a fish stick?" The other problem is that when searching for ingredients for a decent fish sammich I could make at home (as a break from my usual Boca Burgers, Garden Burgers, and Shiitake Burgers, all of which I have in the freezer now) I picked up a 3lbs bag of frozen fish (cod) fillets at Price Club last week. I've had one, and it wasn't very good. Too thin to fry up well, it sort of disintegrated. It was pretty tasty on a sandwich, but I was wanting more of a burger-shaped thing, I think. The sandwich arrived, and as I had feared, it was "fish". As in half of an order of "fish and chips". There were three of them on a long, sub-style bun, with tomatoes and some lettuce. Not awful, but that's basically a fish taco in bread. I was thinking more of a burger-like thing. I ate half there, enjoyed their pretty good FFs, and brought the other half home, where I took out the fish, scraped off residual mayo, threw the bread away, and heated them up in the oven on 350 for about 5 minutes, and ate them with some ketchup. The funny thing is that my sandwich was $5.95. The fish and chips there is about $6.50 for two piece, and $8 for three piece. It comes with fries and coleslaw. So I essentially got:
If I were wanting to eat there again, and really cheap, I would consider ordering the cod sandwich, and asking for the fish on the side of the bun/tomato/lettuce. The $2 less would pay for a drink and tip. (It's not a real tip, since there's no waiter service, other than them bringing your order to your table, and most people leave them nothing. So I'm being generous with $1.) I sort of like their fish and chips, but that's a lot of grease for one meal with nothing really to soak it up, and their FFs are mediocre at best. News stuff galore today. Remind me to write fiction tomorrow, or do more work on the photos section, and not surf, since I've got more than enough news items for tomorrow already typed up. Creepy story about four army guys who have recently killed their wives, two of them in murder/suicides. The weird part is that all four are at the same Army base, and three of them were just back from Afghanistan. I'm personally surprised at women who date/marry soldiers or cops, since there are such high rates of violence and divorce, but no one appears to think in advance that same tough macho image that attracts the women will likely turn to domestic abuse in years to come. I'm talking out of my ass, I don't know if there are actual statistics that military guys are more prone to beating and/or murdering their wives than other men, but it seems like an obvious extension. Guy spends all his time being trained to kill and use violence as an answer, you just expect him to extend that work experience to his home life. Plus you have to factor in the types of Rambo guys who are attracted to that sort of work in the first place; they'd probably be getting into drunken brawls even if they were plumbers. It seems like every other news article from Australia is about whores. Yes, I'm jealous. This one details the government paying to build and operate a six bedroom brothel. Rates are planned to be $13 an hour, and that's $13 Australian, which is like $10. Jesus that's cheap for a blowjob, isn't it? Of course there's no telling what the girls look like... I posted a week or so ago about the Vatican's plan to canonize an apparently-non-existent man. There's another article about him today, this one about how they are Michael Jackson'ing him.
I take it they'll be using less than his full name also, given that it's "Juan Diego Cuauhtlahtoatzin". Really. Funny how that Indian part of it is left off in modern usage. Though since it's unpronounceable and utterly impossible to spell, we can't entirely blame racism for that. When you consider that entire history of Catholic settlement in the New World was more or less genocide and forced conversions for the native peoples, I'd think this has to be about the last straw. On the other hand, since the guy never actually existed, and was just invented in myths and legends years later (just like Jesus *cough*) they could make him purple with orange spots and be just as accurate, eh? The Who bassist who dropped dead last month before their big tour was set to start OD'ed on coke and had a heart attack, the coroner says. When you're nearly 60 and have a heart condition, it might be time to cut back on the blow, you think? There are bold junkies, and old junkies, but no bold old junkies. (The old ones being drunks or less-frequently heroin/LSD junkies.) Old heart = time for downers. Nice to see that even old rock stars can still go out like rock stars though. It's better to burn out than fade away, and all that. A heart attack isn't exactly a cool rock and roll death, unless you have it while on stage/a groupie, but since it was brought on by blow, I guess we can give him partial credit. I often see very ugly and poorly-decorated trucks and vans with logos for some painting service or car detailing service, and think it's funny in an ironic way. But I've never seen one quite this good. Another funny picture on Boners is this ad for the Steve Austin weeble-wobble punching bag. Now I don't want anyone to complain next time I say wrestling is homo-erotic, for they clearly bring it on themselves. The odd part is that it's homo-erotic, but not in a way that gay men actually like. A link to some boobies site from Fark led me to this shot. The girls are cute and all, but the guy in the red suit, sporting about 3" of wood, cracked me up. Funny article about VP Cheney having the Secret Service threaten to arrest a summons server, who was trying to serve Cheney. He's being indicted for his insider trading actions when running Halliburton Oil from 1995-2000. The article points out Bush's actions trying to pass legislation that would ban the sorts of things that 1) are already illegal, and 2) he, Cheney, and most other business/politicians used to get rich in the past. Now this is how you train young girls in the proper form of cheerleading. Gives them some ideas for working their way through college as well.
An amusing article about the utter clusterfuck voting in Florida has become. Screwed up election filing fees, errors in registration, plane crash that lost most of the forms to file for election, closed airport preventing candidates from flying in to register, etc. The funniest part is that the universally-reviled (other than by hardcore Republicans, I guess) Kathleen Harris, who made such an ass of herself trying to decide the president election last year that Florida screwed up so badly, wasn't there at the time.
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Frankly, you people disappoint me. I've gone most of my life thinking right-wing Christians were absurdly easy to get riled up, given the stupid stuff they tend to boycott (Howard Stern, Purple Teletubbies, slightly risquι TV shows on NBC at midnight, anyone insisting on the separation of church and state, etc), and figured that as soon as I made a few remarks about molesting priests (Father O'Fingers), or evolution, or ridiculed Noah's Ark searchers, I'd be rolling in angry "I'll pray for God to heal your sick mind." type emails; messages that would be simply dripping with unintentional comedy, and provide me with wonderful site content. Emails that I could post and have a poke at, prompting more such emails, and extending the cycle until I got national media coverage and then... well I dunno, someone would give me money or something. It's not like I thought it through all that well. (I was going to mention my semi-scandalously suggesting that Jesus never actually existed, until I realized that I wrote that yesterday, but hadn't posted it yet.) Anyway, here's the first mail that's sort of angry about something I said. ch farther north it is. I would have thought more of you than to just refer to a country so close to you as a solely parka-wearing nation. Ryan His line about "polar bears running amok" is just great, IMHO. Use of "amok" = bonus points. He's correct of course, there aren't (many) polar bears in Canada, that's Swe/Nor/Finland, and they call them "ice bears" there. Rather than ice bears, everyone knows that Canada is overrun with savage packs of rabid wolves, as well as baby seals which will take your legs off up to the knee if you aren't careful. Hence the clubbing. Actually none of that is true; and when I posted yesterday's sarcastic comments about the UN's listing of best places to live, I expected I might get some similar mail from someone in Sweden, Finland, and/or Norway, angry about me lumping them all in together, when clearly they are all as different as say Mozambique, Zaire, and Nigeria, as any idiot, even an American one, can see. That someone from Canada would mail me about the "parka" remark was a total surprise. Let's revisit my actual comments from yesterday's blog, shall we?
Now point out to me where I said anything about Canada? Of the top 10, Norway, Sweden and Finland are thought of as cold, and of course so is Iceland. It's called fricking "Iceland", FFS. Australia and Belgium and The Netherlands and the US and Japan are not thought of as cold. Canada is borderline. Actually I tend to think of Japan as a cold country also, but looking at a map the whole country is further south than any part of Canada, so I'll write that off as Anime-induced confusion. I was also surprised to see this list providing further evidence that "Belgium" and "The Netherlands" aren't really the same country. I tend to think one is a synonym for the other, and think of them interchangeably when I think "Dutch", which isn't a country at all, it turns out. Damn those foreigners are crafty! As for Canada, if you look at a map you'll see that Canada is North of the US, and extends nearly all the way to the North Pole. Therefore it's not unreasonable to think it's colder there than in the US. You'll also note that virtually every Canadian city of note is damn near on the border with the US: Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Winnipeg, Ottawa, Montreal, Toronto, etc. All to the south. You'll also note that quite a few of them are further south than some US states (Maine), and the whole country is further south than Alaska, which is a US state, but only technically. Using Alaska as evidence that the US is cold is like using Hawaii as evidence the US is overrun with volcanoes and tropical rain forests. No one is denying that Alaska is cold, or at least it used to be, before the Global Warming that the Bush Administration has proven doesn't exist, began. But it's way the hell up North, near Canada somewhere, I think, and run by Eskimos, or something, so ineligible for inclusion in this discussion. Anyway, I'd venture to suggest that Ryan, despite his excellent taste in weblogs, is projecting a bit by taking an anti-Canadian slant from my "parkas" comment, which was much more applicable to the various semi-arctic "Ice/Swe/Finland" type countries on the list. All of which I'm sure have their nice summer months, as well as lots of really hot aryan-looking women. Speaking of hot women, I went for a week's snowboarding to Blackcomb, which is a great ski resort near Vancouver, some years ago, and was amazed at how many gorgeous women were there, especially on the staff. I'd go into a postcard shop and want to take pictures of the two girls working there for a Cosmo cover. Every other ski lift operator was like a model, and they were all about 20. Tons of guys also, hunky and all that, I'm sure. It must have been an enormous dating mob every night in the local hang outs. I didn't get to investigate myself, since the weather was so utterly freezing the entire week that I had to spend two hours in a warm bath after boarding all day before I could feel my toes to be sure none of them had broken off on the hard landing after I pulled that 360 around lunch time. Spending all evening shivering beneath great down comforters sort of cut down on my outgoing social activities. Everyone there kept assuring us this was the coldest week they'd had in years, and that it was very unusual for not a flake of snow to fall the whole time, and that the lack of clouds was responsible for the sub-zero (literally) weather. But they knew we were Americans, so of course they would say that. Despite that evidence, I know that Canada, and even Alaska, can be hot in the summer. I flew up to Anchorage for a summer vacation with my grandparents when I was in my early teens. They were traveling extensively in their trailer, as old people are wont, and had voyaged from their Missouri base up to Alaska, mostly for golf and fishing. We drove from there down through Canada to the World's Exposition, which was in Vancouver in 1986, if my memory is serving me correctly. It was lovely weather, 80's and cool and night, and I loved the forests that pressed up around every Thousand Trails we stopped at. Aside from the badly-scratched Airstream we huddled silently in every night, praying the great, slavering, red-eyed devil wolves wouldn't smash their way into, it was a nice time. The problem for Canadians is that somehow it's become great sport for Americans on the Internet to make stupid jokes about things like dog sleds, polar bears, wolves, baby seal clubbing, etc, despite that fact that none of those things are at all funny, and certainly not anything I would make jokes about here. The only thing that deserves rude comments about in Canada are the belligerent French in Quebec, and they bring it on themselves. Unfortunately they aren't way the hell up North in the Inuit area, so you can't work in cold jokes about them as well. Where was I? Oh yeah, Internet jokes. Canadians get used to seeing stupid jokes about them all the time, and then expect them, and even read them into humorous blogs that are actually too busy making inaccurate and insulting remarks about various Norwegian countries to spare any time for Canada. As always on this site, one should expect sarcasm, occasionally in the Dave Barry vein of expressing utter ignorance about every other country on earth, and not take it personally, even if it makes your sled dogs and moose angry. |
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