Phrase of the Moment:
¤ Phrase: "Your little hopes and dreams."
¤ Usage: "Poor fellow, his little hopes and dreams have all be smashed."
¤ Origin: Quipped by a whore, or pre-op transgender man, or a sociopath, or some other lowlife who was engaged in a vicious verbal battle with another lowlife guest on the Jerry Springer show
¤ Notes: While the Jerry Springer show is generally pretty lacking in opportunities for intellectual improvement, you do tend to hear some funny jokes, of the personal insult type.  This was one of the best.  One loser was arguing with another loser, and when one said something about how she'd loved her husband, whom the other lowlife had stolen away, lowlife #1 replied, "Bitch, I don't care about your little hopes and dreams!"

You'll find it applicable to almost every situation in life.  It's the "little" that really makes it work, since that just so perfectly and cruelly diminishes whatever claim to importance the other person might previously have had. -- February 20, 2004

alaya and I/me paid our 3rd visit to Claim Jumper restaurant on Thursday evening, and for the first time I left less than satisfied, and with no doggy bag. On my first two visits I got the BBQ chicken sandwich, and then the Honey brie chicken sandwich, and enjoyed them both.  Both also came on a bun the size of a personal pizza, and were so large that I was only able to eat half a sandwich once, and about 40% the other time. Hence the doggy bag, which is fine with me since I like leftovers for a later snack, and I like getting got two meals out of one dinner.

On this third visit I wanted to try something different, so I got the grilled portabella mushroom sandwich, with some reservations.  I like portabellas, especially grilled, though I generally cut them into strips if I'm cooking, and serve them Philly Cheesecake/fajita style. I wanted another gargantuan sandwich though, and didn't know if it was just one mushroom patty, or severla, or strips, or what.  So I asked the waiters.  Yes, "waiters."

This was a somewhat eerie innovation we were faced with on Thursday evening at Claim Jumper; they had waiters working in teams. We had a tall, large, unattractive woman, and a shorter, equally-unattractive man waiting on us, standing side by side, both writing down the order, and tag-teaming when they talked. I assumed one was the trainee and the other the trainer, and I guess that's an okay way to get a new employee up to speed; it's just not one I've ever before seen in a restaurant. I wouldn't have expected to see it first at Claim Jumper either; it's not like they're serving 6 daily specials with various exotic ingredients that most people need a dictionary and a search engine to research.

Anyway, as far as I could tell, the tall unattractive woman was the experienced waitress, since she seemed to take final say in most matters, and it was she who launched into a description of what my portabella burger was going to look like.  Perhaps she should have been trainee'ing under someone else though, since my question was partially "What's it like?" but mostly "Is it as huge as the other sandwiches?"

She said something about how they're very large to start off with but the cooking shrinks them up some, which while true was very far from a useful answer to my question.  I was too hungry to worry about it though, and talking to two of them at once creeped me out, so I just said, "Okay." and ordered that. I was also annoyed that they didn't have any soda I wanted. They charge $2.25 for a drink, and for that price I want something I like a lot, and that I can be sure to drink at least three refills of, or I feel ripped off. Even though Malaya was paying for dinner.

Unfortunately, Claim Jumper only stocks Coke, Diet Coke, Sprite, and Mr. Pibb.  I don't like Coke, I hate Diet Coke, Sprite isn't a real soda, and Mr. Pibb is the poor man's Dr. Pepper, and is basically undrinkable. So I settled for water, only to realize, fifteen minutes later after browsing through the entire paperback-thick drinks/desserts/appetizers menu, that they actually had Barq's root beer from the fountain, I.E. with free refills, rather than just the obscenely overpriced at $2.50 IBC root beer, in the small 12oz bottle.  I like root beer, and while it lacks caffeine, putting it on the border of "real soda", it at least has artificial coloration, which keeps it on the safe side, and separates it from water look-alike things such as Sprite.

Malaya ordered some sort of cheddar cheese potato soup in a sourdough bowl, and also some chicken strips as an appetizer.

We've learned, during our first two visits, that one orders appetizers at Claim Jumper with caution.  They're expensive, as much as some of the entrees, but the money is well spent, since they're likely to be as large as your entire dinner entree.  In this case we got our chicken strips after a substantial wait (the restaurant was packed, with a 25 minute wait to be seated) and they were huge.  Seven strips, battered with BBQ sauce, and all of them were at least eight inches long.  They had to be breast meat, and damn near an entire breast each, they were so large.  Like small ears of corn on the cob.  Remember that later, when I get to the "when we got home" part of this tale.

We ate one each, split a third, and ended up nibbling a couple of bites each off of a fourth and fifth when our entrees were still not there.  Our thought immediately was to save some of the chickens for later snacking, like a sandwich the next day.  I'm now thinking about a chicken soft taco, with the chicken basically subbing for the usual chicken taquito I put into the super burritos.

When the food finally came, I had a decent-looking portabella sandwich, but one that wouldn't have looked out of place at Chili's, or Denny's, or a fast food restaurant. Oh it was pretty big, but I had no problem eating the whole thing and almost all of my fries, while as I said earlier, I couldn't manage even half of the two chicken sandwiches I'd tried previously.  My second mistake of the evening was the type of french fries I ordered, since I tried the string fries, rather than going with the much thicker steak-cut type I'd had the first two times.

Like Chili's (and other restaurants, as far as I know) Claim Jumper happened upon some sort of market research that said the main eater-reported problem with French fries is that they're not salty or peppery enough. They've taken bold steps to counter that failing, and you get about half a bottle of rock salt on a typical order of fries there, along with plenty of big chunks of pepper.  Since I never add salt to anything, and certainly not French fries when we wok fry some up here, I would be happy with plain potatoes, or perhaps ones that were very lightly salted.  Pepper would be fine also.

These were not lightly salted.  They weren't even heavily salted.  They were salt licks. We're talking hypertension au grautin.  I had to eat them with bites of my sandwich to keep my tongue from puckering up and shriveling away.

The other problem was the sandwich.  It wasn't gigantic, and it wasn't especially good.  The preparation looked fine; it had mixed salad greens with lots of the little purple things like arugula and such, a sour cream type of spread, purple onions, and more. The bread even looked nice; sort of yellowish and very rough and crunchy, like the sides of a grilled cheese sandwich on very hearty bread.  The problem was that they evidently accomplished that with about half a stick of butter, since it was just cloying in the mouth. The very buttery bread, combined with the thick cream cheese topping made the whole thing too pungent.  I never thought I'd complain about a sandwich that it had too much flavor, but here I am, and that's my complaint.  The sandwich combined with the super salty fries made the whole thing feel rather unhealthy, almost like extended dessert rather than dinner.

Malaya seemed to like her soup and bread, at least, and she ended up eating most of the sourdough bowl after the cleaned out the soup, so it must have been pretty okay. She also managed to save room for dessert, and we got a brownie to go, and were frightened by the weight of it when it arrived all wrapped up in a brown paper bag.  I opened it while Malaya was filling out the credit card receipt, wanting to see if they'd given us a brick by accident, and we took a look and giggled and saved it for home.

It came in a clear plastic box, a box that's easily large enough to hold a Big Mac. With some room to spare for fries.  Looking at it now, the brownie is about 5x5x3 inches.  2.54 it if you want the cm conversion.  It's ridiculously large, smeared with half inch of thick icing, studded with chocolate chips, and covered in sprinkled walnuts.  We sat on the couch at home, watching Survivor on tape, and ate about 1/6th of it, and Malaya did the last half of that herself after the thickness and richness of the chocolate satisfied my Y-chromosome-impaired sweet tooth in about 3 bites.

Overall it wasn't a bad dinner, but I can't recommend the portabella mushroom sandwich at Claim Jumper.

The other oddness of the dinner occurred in the car on the way there, when we found ourselves, as usual, singing that Fat Bastard catchy, "Chiiiiiii-leeesssss, baby back ribs! I want my Chiiiiiiiiii-leeeeeeesssssssss baby back ribs..." song, and I reflected how I've never seen any sort of advertising for Claim Jumper.  Not on the radio, in the paper or magazines, or on TV.  Malaya didn't recall seeing any either, and I speculated on what sort of catchy jingle they could possibly use to integrate themselves permanently into the collective catchy song unconscious of the American public.

Writing your own catchy song is damn near impossible, which is why it's always more economical to license an existing one, and mutilate the lyrics to your own purposes.  The three most catchy, quick songs I know of are all Weebl's Stuff ones, Kenya, Badgers, and Scampi.  So my thought was to use one or all of those for Claim Jumper, and just change the words. I shan't bore you with the full details, at least not until I have a microphone and so little self consciousness that I'd let my singing/chanting voice be heard online. But I think the best option is to go with the tune to Scampi, mostly since the lyrics can so easily be adapted to restaurant promotion.

"I've seen them, I've seen Claim Jumper fries.
I've been there, the food's a big surprise, like burgers, pasta, rum shots, pizza, daiquiris, brownies, _____, _____, _____, _____, Motherload cake, _____, _____, Motherload cake!

--- repeat ---

There are ten items before the "motherload cake" refrain, then two more before the repeat of it, and then the whole thing loops.  I'm not getting paid as an ad agency to pour over the menu and find 10 things that match the song's rhythm and have the correct number of syllables, but it shouldn't be at all difficult to do, given the amount of things on the Claim Jumper menu.

I'd do it now, but my legs are sore from the 6 mile jog I endured over very hilly terrain Thursday afternoon, and as is well known, a sore left hip impairs lyrical rhythm.

And speaking of Survivor... I had never seen an episode of the show (or of most TV shows since about 1987) until I moved up here last summer, and watched the last season with Malaya.  We're now watching Survivor All Stars, and like most viewers/fans of the show, we're pretty underwhelmed. The only real difference between this one and the usual show is how much more whining there is and how much lip service the basically clueless contestants pay to strategy. Everyone is forever going on about how it's every man/woman for him/herself, and how they can't really trust anyone, and how they need to worry about alliances and protecting their backs.

And then they proceed to make every stupid mistake that the noobs made last season, leaving the intelligent viewer screaming at the screen in annoyance or anger. Which I guess means it's good television.

The most annoying thing is that over the first six years of Survivor they never had anyone give up.  Osten, the notorious pussy gym-muscle young executive was the first last season, and now in All-Stars, which is supposedly the best of the best players, we've had two already, out of the first six eliminations.  The first one was the dopey swimsuit model a few weeks ago, and she at least had an excuse; that her mom was dying of cancer. Of course she knew mom was in a hospice before she accepted the trip to the show, and she knew she couldn't get any info on mom's condition while she was on the island, so you can criticize her for taking up a spot that way and then leaving early. But since her mom croaked like a week after she got home, and since she almost certainly would have still been in the game by then and would have returned to find mom dead, you can't fault her too much.

The second pussy to drop out was this week, and I saw something coming when they'd gone 30 minutes and hadn't even gotten to the bonus challenge yet; leaving them nowhere near enough time to do that challenge, footage from the camps afterwards, the elimination challenge, more footage after that with the usual scheming and horse trading about who is going to get voted off this time, and then the final elimination vote.  Clearly something was going to happen and someone was going to leave early, and since Sue was freaking out for the first 30 minutes, it seemed pretty clear it would be her.

So the first half of the show this week was death, with endless shots of Sue's whining about events last show, when Richard Hatch, the notoriously naked, gay, Machiavellian winner from the first Survivor ever, bumped into her on the balance beam obstacle course, and sort of rubbed his penis against her when she refused to make way for him to get past, then gave her another rub since he's a dick (pun optional) and she's a battle axe/troll.  At the time it was silly and stupid and mostly Sue's fault for not moving and Rich's for being foolish.  Rich then got voted off by his tribe in somewhat of an upset, and everyone had pretty much forgotten the little bumping on the balance beam. Everyone but Sue, who wouldn't let anyone forget it as she and sobbed and freaked out for a day, before crying and screaming and demanding to leave the show immediately when they got together the next day for the bonus challenge. Her screeching, hysterical, good bye speech was rather classic though, considering that her entire objection was to a naked gay man bumping into her with his floppy, undersized dingus, and she's shown nothing but contempt and derision and harpy-ness towards everyone else at every opportunity.

Not a huge shock; the most abrasive people are usually the ones with the thinnest skin, but it was surprising how completely and totally she broke, and so quickly. I just wished Richard had still been in the game, since he was about the most interesting one out there, and it would have been fun to see Sue's reaction when they came face to face at the next challenge.  Instead she had to spend her fury howling at the show host, who was rather shocked by it all.  I would love to post a transcript of what she said, since it was classic in the "oh poor pitiful humiliated me"-ness of it all, but I can't find one online.  Yet.  I'll probably end up QotDing it at some point, it was just that good. 

I sort of feel bad for the woman, but obviously she has a ton of baggage of the sexual harassment type, or her husband dominates her, or something, since she was just out of her head over a relatively minor incident, incoherently worrying about her husband seeing what happened (Of course he'll see it; you're on TV, dear. Does he beat you for cheating or what?) screaming about being violated, and so on. Everyone else on the beach stared at her outburst in shock, wondering what screw was loose to have her so upset.

I suppose it was an interesting twist on things, and it created some excitement in an otherwise very boring show, but now we're up to two weak people quitting the show early, no one is left whose very interesting, and I'm only watching it now to see who loses, and to root against the smug idiots like Colby and Boston Rob and the typical gaggle of anonymous and useless FUTR (Flying Under The Radar) females who will inevitable band together like jackals and pull down the various lions one at a time.

And we had the single weakest show ever, with 30 minutes of moping, a big outburst, a crappy challenge, and then 20 minutes of "what the hell was she smoking?" after shocks. And no elimination challenge, and no final vote.  And on top of that, CSI after Survivor was a rerun, bumming Malaya out.

Various news up here, reader mails below.

¤ Interesting article from Australia, with a list of the silliest reasons people give for not voting.  These reasons are given to a government official, since surprise surprise, voting is mandatory in Oz.  If you don't make it to the polls, you get hit with a small ($37.50) fine.

A WOMAN claimed she was having group sex with 30 men in Nimbin, NSW, and could not get to a polling booth in Queensland on time to vote.

That is the all-time best excuse, according to electoral commissioner Bob Longland.

Hundreds of people have already contacted the Electoral Commission of Queensland offering reasons for their no-show as 2.2 million others voted in the February 7 state poll.

"You could have walked across Moreton Bay for all the broken-down fishing boats," Mr Longland said.

The most common excuse was illness, closely followed by cars, boats and planes with kaput engines.

So if she was busy with 30 men in a gangbang, does that mean the 30 guys also have a valid excuse?  Or does the electoral commissioner figure that while she was obviously busy all day, the men had about 23:55 out of the 24 hours in that day that they could have used to vote?

More seriously, I'm trying to imagine how the face of US politics would be changed overnight if voting were suddenly mandatory, and we had say, 90% turn out, rather than the 30-50% we get now, depending on the election.  I don't have the figures in front of me, but generally speaking, old people vote in disproportionately high numbers.  Imagine if all of the bored and disinterested college kids went out and voted as well?  They outnumber the old people; I'd think candidates who supported things like increased college scholarships, decriminalizing marijuana, and other such youth-appealing laws would get a lot more support.  And suddenly Medicare and social security wouldn't be so untouchable either, since hardly anyone under the age of 30 gives any serious thought to social security still existing in 35 or 40 years when they're old enough to qualify for it.  I certainly don't.  I don't expect I'll ever see a cent of the money I pay towards SS in my taxes back, since it's all going to pay for current and near-future benefits and future spending and Bush's deficits and such are going to soak it all up until they have to scrap the system or totally reorganize it in 10 or 20 years.

Other than SS and old-skewing issues though, the whole topic of how America would change if everyone, or nearly everyone, suddenly started voting is an interesting one.  I'm sure some authors have written about it, and it doesn't seem like it would be too hard to research; just check voting by age group, cross reference it with voter turn out by age group, and multiply.  Obviously that wouldn't tell the entire story, since poor people feel things are helpless and vote less than rich or middle class people, of all age groups, but you could factor in that sort of thing as well, using opinion polls and other research methods.

I'm not about to spend the time on it myself, but it would be a good project for someone to do a doctoral thesis on.

¤ It turns out that African Giant Pouched rats are able to sniff out tuberculosis in human saliva with a success rate of about 67%, compared to 60% for examination by a lab tech with a microscope. Plus the rats can do thousands of samples a day, compared to a couple of dozen by the lab tech.  No, I'm not making this up.

"The rats undergo up to four months of intensive training. The food reward system means that they are eager to learn and to find the right sample."

The clinical tests at Apopo suggest that rats are a highly effective diagnostic tool.

The success rate for diagnosing positive sputum samples from the lungs of TB patients is 67%, higher than the standard developing-world diagnostic approach using a microscope, which Apopo puts at just 60%.

Rats can identify them because of the distinct smell of the chemicals in infected sputum samples.

Well, you learn something new every day, don't you?

I just want to see the day they put this into practice and you see nurses in the ER with giant rats on leashes, checking all of the incoming patients with a cough.  It would certainly be one way to get patients out of the hospital in a hurry.

¤ Weirdly original virus email I got today.  Here's the text.

Dear user of "Blackchampagne.com" mailing system,

Our main mailing server will be temporary unavaible for next two days, to continue receiving mail in these days you have to configure our free auto-forwarding service.

Further details can be obtained from attached file.

For security purposes the attached file is password protected. Password is "53352".

Kind regards,

The Blackchampagne.com team
http://www.blackchampagne.com

The attachment was a readme.zip, with a single .exe file in it that Norton didn't recognize.  I didn't run it, of course, and I'm assuming it's not a virus, but a trojan horse with a keylogger, or something along those lines.  I don't mean this as a security tip, I just found it funny being as I am the Blackchampagne.com team.  And I don't have any recollection of sending this one out.

I assume it's done by some automated script, and they just harvest emails they find online.  If you were a bit of a noob and got this from what appeared to be your ISP, say it came from noreply@earthlink.net, you might fall for it and run it, especially after your anti virus (not that noobs have those) didn't detect it.

¤ Another email from yesterday, this one with less malicious intent. 

Hello again,

I'm not usually prone to commenting on your film views and reviews, but I feel that now, you leave me no choice.

"Trashy films like Conan the Barbarian..."

Steady on, old chap, from such innocuous sounding snippets do great injustices grow, in fairness, I completely agree that Raw Deal and Commando are utter bags of cack, but Conan? Conan the Barbarian is a beautiful, soulful and stirring epic that fully captures Robert E. Howard's swords and sorcery style; I doubt you'll see a better example of the genre being made again - ever.

Sure, Arnie can't act, but that's hardly the point; if that's a problem, then let's slate him and not this superb movie. And with lines like: "To crush your enemies, see them driven before you and to hear the lamentation of the women," then who needs acting ability?

I think a full retraction is in order.

My warmest regards,
Jeremy

It was somewhat creepy reading this one, or at least seeing the subject line, which read "Regarding Conan." I didn't remember discussing Conan in the blog on Tuesday, since mine was a rather passing mention.  What I did remember was sitting through the last 2/3 of the very low budget Conan sequel, Conan the Destroyer.  The one with Grace Jones and Wilt Chamberlain, and the big cheesy demon with the horn. It was like the emailer had a secret view into my living room!  But then I remembered mentioning Conan the Barbarian in the blog.

As for Conan the Destroyer, I hadn't seen it in years, but it was on AMC and Malaya happened upon it and once we started watching, it was impossible to stop, even with frequent commercial interruption. It's such a bad movie.  Impossibly useless and annoying sidekick, constant stupid plotting, fake fight scenes, dreadful special effects and monster costumes, a cast composed entirely of non-actors, and so on.  They even reuse all of the music from the superior first Conan movie, regardless of how inappropriate it is for the scenes in question.

As for Conan the Barbarian, I refuse to back off an inch from calling it "trashy." It's ubertrashy, with low production values, very little dialogue, cheesy special effects and giant fake snakes, anachronistic costumes, an annoying love interest with no acting ability whatsoever, an ethnically-inaccurate sidekick, and an archetypally cliche plot. That being said, it's 100x better than Conan the Destroyer, and it's one of my favorite movies of all time.  I've seen it at least 50 times over the years, from watching a VHS tape I made of it off of HBO at least 30 or 40 times to the DVD version Malaya and I have watched half a dozen times since we got it back in August of last year, as described here (scroll down a bit).

I wouldn't say it's a great movie, or even a good movie, but I love most of the combat scenes, I love Conan's miserable and painful childhood and how he overcomes it, and there are some great scenes of quiet in the film, as well as tons of really good music. My two favorites:

2) When the hammer bad guy gets skewered by the spike and Conan stares at him while he dies and all you hear is the wind whistling and him groaning and the hollow bang his arm makes when it whacks spasmodically into Conan's shield.

1) The grand finale, when Thulsa Doom is talking to Conan on the balcony, and hypnotizes him, and Conan only snaps out when his gaze falls upon his father's sword, which he then uses to messily decapitate Thulsa.  The shot that does it for me is when you see him from behind, methodically chopping down at the sides of Thulsa's neck while holding him by the hair, and the crowd screams in chorus with the chopping impact, then fall into a horrified silence when Conan chucks the head down and it rolls, with hollow clopping noises, down the stairs.

Whoever said trashy movies couldn't be great fun to view?  After all, it's pretty clear that The Punisher is trashy, but that was my whole point in the update, that I want to see it just for that reason.  I don't hold out hope that it'll be as much fun as Conan the Barbarian

¤ Here's one from Kim that came in a few days ago.

Don't know if you've seen this before, and frankly I can't be bothered hunting through past blogs to see if you mentioned it already.......but this site had this Garfield critique that includes a simple parody of 'every Garfield strip' - which for some reason I found hiliarous.

The site itself is kinda funny in small doses, at least if you like "I hate everything/everything sucks but I rule" sarcasm.

http://maddox.xmission.com/c.cgi?u=garfield_sucks

I happen to love the original Garfield, from years ago, but agree that it's sucked for a long time now. Heh.

This is in relation to the Garfield movie trailer discussion/filleting I engaged in a couple of weeks ago.  The odd part is that I happened to see the rant/comic Kim links to here, and meant to put it into my Garfield rant, but never quite got around to it. Well, that's not odd. The odd part is how I found the link.  I was on a Calvin and Hobbes fansite, the one that archived the great speech by Bill Watterson that I quoted from in the Garfield movie blog, and clicked over to the forum just to see what on earth Calvin and Hobbes fans could still be discussing at this point, over a decade since the comic ceased to be.

The answer?  Mostly other comics, and how much they suck or don't suck.  One of the first threads was about Garfield, one of the first posts in it pointed to that Maddox rant, and off I went with a click of the mouse.  It's a damn good comic, for the purposes of exploiting Garfield's lameness, and I suggest you read it.

As for the Maddox site in general, it sort of confuses me. It's painfully ugly, for one thing.  He says his design theory is to be simple, which I think is fine; I tried to keep a simple design here, one that was suitable for long periods of reading.  Of course that was with the theory that my stories would be the long reading, since I'd never considered doing any blog as long as the average one has become.  But let's not go there. So plain is fine, but ugly plain is ugly, and the point size of his text is just ridiculous.  He also doesn't write very well, though he does get in some good jokes from time to time, in the cruel and snarky fashion.  I certainly can't complain about that tendency.

What confuses me is that he rants indiscriminately, seldom makes much sense, updates about every 3 weeks, has an instantly-forgettable URL, and yet is one of the top 5000 most popular sites on the internet.  He constantly talks about his high traffic, and as far as I know, unless he's found a way to cheat the ratings, he really does get that many visitors. You can check it on alexa.com, and while that rating is somewhat suspect (I have never used or heard from anyone who uses the browser bar that they count the hits based on.)

Meanwhile, BlackChampagne chugs along at #287,000 or so.  Just goes to show that writing quality online has about as much to do with site popularity as it does with best sellerdom, or that singing talent does with album sales, or whatever other "crap = popularity" comparison I need to bandy about in order to soothe my abraded ego.

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