Hump(s) Like a Snow Hill

Listed on humor-blogs.com
No, I’m not writing about high-minded, wintry porn devoted to the literary works of Melville – but I should, of course. Instead, I’m writing about an event that has almost as much fake love; the pre, pre, pre-primary season of the 2008 American presidential election.

Although, like a lot of porn, the Democratic side has one woman surrounded by about eight men.

Ewww - sorry. Try not to think about that. Try really hard.

Currently, the process has reached both historic and foolishly epic levels. Both sides are crammed with an unprecedented level of political bio-mass all vying for the right to lose the next election.

The Democrats have a field that is genuinely notable for its historic diversity, and the degree to which I simply do not care. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are both serious contenders for the nomination, and neither of them are a white dude (Hillary, thanks to the medical wizardry of the Swiss). Additionally, they still have comic relief in the form of Dennis Kucinich who has a lot more free time since he fell into the lava at the end of The Lord of the Rings. (It occurs to me that I’ve used this joke before – I owe you all a coffee…).

Conversely, the Republicans have a collection of the whitest dudes most notably the blindingly white Mitt “Now with Bleach” Romney. However, the Republicans do have a range of political ideologies that (for them) is pretty broad. Rudolf “Frontrunner?” Giuliani is a New York moderate, Congressman Tom Tancredo is really angry about immigration, and Ron Paul is clearly the candidate who was doing the most talking when I changed the channel to watch Iron Chef.

Maybe the real meaning gets lost in translation but there’s something magical about that wisp of a Japanese actress tasting a dish and saying “These spices make me weep for my ancestors…”

I’m not talking about Iron Chef America either. While a fine show featuring a host of culinary talent (most notably the mountainous and brilliant Mario Batali) and the inimitable commentary of Alton Brown, that show has never – and I mean never – had a baseball manager state that the tempura he’d just eaten “Would inspire his team to victory among the memories of their honored dead”.

(NB – I originally mistyped Iron Chef America as “Iron Hef America” which could make for a lucrative , if nauseating, reality show about Hugh Heifner and the miracles of Viagra.)

As I’m writing this, I just finished listening to the pod cast for This Week with George Stephanopoulos and am moving on to Meet the Press. Either the networks have been implanting more cameras into my wife’s head, or I’m terribly unoriginal, because they are discussing (albeit, while presumably sober) the same topic as I’m clacking on to teh internets right now.

No, George Will is not talking about Iron Chef – although he’d be ideal as a judge;

“While I’m not ready to stand up and applaud, this spiny lobster is proof positive that the entrepreneurial spirit and the free market can make decent cuisine without anyone abusing the constitution, or inflating the welfare state…”

Presumably, he would then be killed by Chen Kenichi. But I digress.

The general wisdom being espoused is that neither party is on love with the current crop of candidates, and so the race is really wide open despite having been statistically unmoved since April. Sure, the Fundies don’t like Giuliani; presumably they’ll jump ship if given a viable alternative (The Angle of Pestilence in ’08!) and the far left has yet to find a candidate who has always been against the war and also has enough of a résumé. But that’s been the case since before everyone agreed that Spiderman 3 sucked hind teat.

In other words, in this super diverse field, neither side can pick a horse. Too many choices? Too many primary voters hesitant to go in such an unconventional direction? Not enough fat guys?

Bingo!

What the world needs now is another Howard Taft, a giant blimp-like political oracle to whom we can look (albeit not all at once). Sadly Taft is constitutionally barred from serving again because he is dead, and might still be serving on the Supreme Court. The Taft Court must have been a blast to serve on – every writ came with a basket of Buffalo wings!

Trivia – After the passage of the Certiorari Act in 1925, Chief Justice Taft celebrated by spending the weekend bathing in 500 gallons of sour cream.

Trivia #2 – That sour cream is still being served by TGI Friday’s.

Sadly, since Taft cannot run, both parties have selected alternative fat guys to get into the race to fill the Saturn-sized void left in Taft’s wake.

Republican Fat Guy; Former Senator, former actor and current potential candidate Fred Thompson. I’d endorse Fred, but only if he dresses up like the Admiral of the Enterprise that he played in The Hunt for Red October.

Democratic Fat Guy; Al Gore. Also from Tennessee, I’d endorse him if he agrees to stop writing books and shuts the hell up.

More fat guy news as it develops…

The Sinister Summer

Given that it’s summer, I have an excuse to be lazy. As such, I’d been updating less as I went places to do things with my wife and broodlings…actually, I’d just been taking more naps, but that’s not important. My premise for The Reasonable Ego has always been that it’s less like a blog and more like a newspaper column (a bad, bad newspaper) so my updates are sparse by interweb standards already.

But just because I’d been posting less for the last few weeks, it doesn’t mean I love you less…no, wait, actually it does.

Sorry.

Listed on humor-blogs.com

Cooking with Government Cheese.

…the horrible reality of the liberal agenda…

Like many of you, I eat things. Things like soap, sunglasses, harmonicas and plumber’s putty (yum!). But in addition to these items, I also eat food.

Where food is concerned there’s obviously an entire spectrum of quality. It runs from classic dishes prepared by gifted professionals to anything cooked by the Irish, or by any French person not living in France (Acadians and Québécois, I’m looking at you…). Assuming that you don’t want to be a turnip and depend on others for all of your sustenance, you’ve probably learned to cook a few things for yourself.

This is not to say that you’re any good at it, of course. I have known at least six people whose definition of ‘cooking’ precisely matched my definition of ‘unwrapping’. Generally, they went no further than opening cans or finding the end of the freezer bag that had the zipper-lock on it. I could even relate the tale of an adventurous friend of mine who decided that she’d perfected her method for cooking chicken only when she didn’t vomiting explosively after eating it - it should also be noted that this woman now owns a restaurant and if she doesn’t pay up, I’ll tell you where it is.

The problem with cooking for the self-taught is that there is no reliable, external measure by which to measure your skill. Your friends are all idiots and will either lie to you or simply call anything crap if it’s not filled with aerosol “Cheez”. You can try comparing it to the culinary work of your dear mother but let’s face it, the old girl could have been feeding you guitar picks in rotten mustard for 18 years and you would have eventually grown to like it. Where food is concerned, the number of people who will lie to you again and again is truly staggering. I once tried my hand at Thai noodles to impress a girl I was dating and the result resembled a wok full of ear wax with a handful of elastics tossed in. Like a trooper (and something of a hog, honestly) she consumed the mess and then lied heroically about the quality of the dish as we rushed her to the ER.

PBS helped me out a little, but I could never make any sense of whatever the hell Julia Child was saying and The Frugal Gourmet was accused of being a pederast, so I felt uncomfortable having his cookbooks in the house. CBC tried to educate me as well, but being the CBC the best they could do was a show with an off-balance, British guy who substituted every ingredient other than salt for Spam and peach preserves. Inexplicably, they called this show The Urban Peasant rather than The Cook Who Won’t Go Shopping.

So I was adrift in a sea of some metaphor or another until I finally got a decent signal provider and started watching the Food Network – pardon me, Food Network Canada.

If you’re from a country that is not Canada, you may not be aware of the technology we have to mostly copy American cable channels. We’ve not perfected the process and as a result the gaps are filled with government-mandated Canadian shows and a lot of public service announcements. This may sound like a good thing until you realize that the absence of commercials is made easier since a slice of all the Canadian programming is (you guessed it) paid for by the government.

Before I go any further, let it be known unequivocally that Food Network Canada is a terrific source of entertainment and information. To be honest, next to my 24-hour news addiction Food is the channel I watch the most.

It’s especially good once you can stop flinching every time Emeril Lagasse screams at his food…delicious, chef – and now my daughter is crying!

If I weren’t so hideously under qualified, I’d like to have a show on Food Network Canada – I am Canadian after all and I can’t be worse than some of the single season runs that have come and gone over the years. It also goes without saying that it is even conceptually impossible that any show I might make would be worse than The Manic Organic.

It rhymes…get it? Not only do I get it, but I own a tiny piece of it. I don’t know what the parent network shows while our organics are being manic, but I’d like to be able to see the menu.

So while I learned to cook a lot better while watching Food Network Canada, I was both enthralled and unnerved that I was paying for a very small piece of Christine Cushing. I sure hope that it’s one of the good bits.

I am such an awful person – but I can cook.