February 2005 Archives

Two items from the Red Sox Nation:

This video from ifilm.com is fucking hilarious. A Master Card spoof where Red Sox fans are forced to pay up for all the things they said they'd give to see their team win the World Series. And Denis Leary gets what's coming to him.

And The Soxaholix. How I managed to not find out about this site til now, I'll never know. "This Modern World"-style snark in a Red Sox setting. Caustic and brilliant and funny as hell.

"We choose to go to the motherfucking moon not because it is easy, but because it is hahd!

I finally got a good weekend with lots of free time that wasn't consumed by work, tattoo pain, or family illness, and that means cooking something I've been wanting to try for a long time: crawfish-stuffed cannelloni.

I got this recipe from the New Orleans Menu Daily mailing list, which is a daily newsletter put out by Tom Fitzmorris, the legendary New Orleans food critic. If you're ever in New Orleans, tune in to his food show from 4-7pm every weekday on 1350 AM. This guy knows New Orleans and its food better than just about anybody, and he's great fun.

Now that I've got my Sitemeter problems sorted out, I finally get to see all the Google referrals that lead people to my blog.

For some reason my site is ranked higher by Google for "perry bible fellowship" than the actual comic's web site, so I am brokering legions of new fans. You're welcome.

Lots of hits for "italian soda". Lots and LOTS of hits from people looking for "austin mardi gras pictures", and you know they're gonna be bummed when all they see is me and the kids eating crawfish.

Several people are interested in "giving up masturbation for lent". Ha! As if. There are some things I won't do even for God.

My second favorite happened today: "weightlifter butt explodes".

And my all-time absolute favorite: "porn eateries". I have no idea what this person was looking for, but I'd like to meet him (or even better, her). We'd probably have lots to talk about.

If I have figured my time zones correctly, it just turned Quinn's birthday over in Tanzania. Everybody go over to her blog and give her kisses and/or spankings, depending on your, uh, proclivities.

Last month some time we were talking a lot about books, and I promised to run down a bunch of my recent reads in the non-fiction category, since up until recently I'd been reading a lot more non-fiction than fiction. So here ya go.

Dan Savage Skipping Towards Gomorrah
Dan is the weekly sex columnist who writes "Savage Love" but this book isn't sex advice, it's his take on American culture. In each chapter, Dan takes on one of the seven deadly sins and goes out and tries to live that sin in a uniquely American way. So he does Greed in Vegas, Lust at a heterosexual swingers club, Gluttony at a BBW-and-admirers convention, etc. Along the way he manages to skewer the hypocrisy of the moral crusaders of the right like William Bennett at every turn. It's a great read if you're one of those who loves the sin but hates the sinner...er, I mean loves the sin but hates the sin-hater...no, wait...how does it go again?

William L. Shirer The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
The classic reference on the subject of Nazi Germany. Shirer was a reporter in Germany during the rise of Hitler and so witnessed much of the early years of the Nazi party first-hand, but his book is not just a first-hand account, but authoritatively and meticulously researched. If you want to understand how it could happen again, you need to understand how it happened there. The German people were not insane and they were not evil, yet they were possessed by evil and insanity for almost twenty years, with horrific results. Think it couldn't happen here? You're naive.

Dr. A (Isaac Asimov), The Sensuous Dirty Old Man
The lovely and talented Sara bought this for me last summer. Supposedly a satirical instructional guide on how to be a leering, lecherous dirty old man and beat the talentless young studs at attracting cute young things, I have taken it to heart. I know Dr. A only pretended to be kidding, and that this really should be a manual for living. I try to incorporate it into my daily routine.

Dan Shaughnessy The Curse of the Bambino
Originally written in the late 80's but updated recently (before the 2004 Series though), this book has probably done more to propogate the Curse notion than anything. Yes, the Curse was supersitious nonsense, but when fate shits on you year after year after year, you can't help but be superstitious. So now the Sox are becoming like the Yankees...the fashionable hat for non-fans to wear just because it looks cool. It's like when the masses discovered punk rock...the poseurs are out in force, and just because somebody wears a B on their hat doesn't mean you'll be able to commiserate with them and have them understand you. Winning was great, but the legacy of winning is almost a disappointment. Like, "now what?" Still, a fun book. (Yeah, I read it before they won.)

Got a few more I'll write about when I get some time.

I was at a benefit tonight with my friend Kristi, and for some reason the subject of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" came up. She had just recently read it for the first time, so we talked a little about Thompson, Kerouac, Ginsberg.

Then later Gina and I saw a late show of Hotel Rwanda, and it's been Rwanda that's been on my mind the past few days anyway. Until now.

Something got me out of bed, I don't know why, and I came down, checked my email, then checked MSNBC.com.

Hunter S. Thompson has taken his own life. With a gun. Naturally.

How very very sad.

My net.buddy Quinn is spending the next few months as an intern at the UN's International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, taking place in Tanzania. Her most recent entry about her visit last week to some of the genocide sites in Rwanda is extremely harrowing, but I want you to make yourself read it anyway.

We in the West are still patting ourselves on the back for liberating the Nazi concentration camps 60 years ago. We are so proud of what our grandparents did. We know that it was the right thing, and we would have felt proud to have done the same if we had been alive then.

And yet we ignore the genocides of our generation. When we have the chance to live up to our high ideals, we fall so short. One million dead in Rwanda, while we did nothing. And to read what Quinn has written, the tribunals are not so much a closure for the victims as they are a continuation of the torture. Meanwhile, many of the Hutu perpetrators of the genocide are regrouping and rearming and ramping up for an encore performance in the eastern Congo, right under the noses of UN peacekeepers, who know where they are but have no "mandate" from the Security Council to round them up. And such a mandate is not even on the table from the US State Department's point of view. Because we're so preoccupied with the mess we're making in the Middle East, I guess.

But hey, we made a movie about it (PG-13, just like Son of the Mask). And it even got some Oscar nominations. We must be so proud. We clearly care about this issue a lot, in our usual style.

Meanwhile we have the Sudan. Our solution there is to argue about the finer gradations of the definition of "genocide". 200,000 dead may or may not qualify. Pity they didn't choose to have their genocide in the Middle East, which might have made it a sexier candidate for "nation building".

In 1971, Northern Ireland Home Secretary Reginal Maudling make his infamous comment about how it should be the goal of the British government to achieve "an acceptable level of violence" in the northern counties of Ireland. Not peace. Not justice. Not home rule. Just the odd car-bombing every once in a while. Enough to keep it off the front pages of the London papers.

We've come to believe that a certain level of genocide is "acceptable" in those places in the world where the people are too backwards, too unrefined by our Western standards, to conduct themselves in a civilized fashion.

We need to do better. And I'm frustrated because I don't know how I, Ray, can change things. Our track record since 1945 is poor.

I don't know Quinn in real life, although I've gotten to know her in IM pretty well the past few months. And I can say that I am proud as hell of the job she is trying to do, and my heart goes out to her.

P.S. Her birthday is this coming Friday.

This soda is unbelievably amazingly incredibly unbelievable. We need to start buying it by the case.

It's fruit soda, kind of like Orangina, only not as sweet, and they use real sugar instead of corn syrup. Comes in three flavors: lemon, ruby red grapefruit, and blood orange. With fruit pulp floating in it.

Un-frickin' believable stuff.

When I get snatches of time, I'm working on changing the layout of this site. If you see anything that looks broken, let me know (especially if you know how to fix it). I already know that the three columns are different lengths in Firefox; tell me how to fix it and I'll send you something nice.

As if I don't spend all week hacking Java and Spring and JR*les, now I've got a hobby that involves...more programming. Yeesh.

I first heard about the Soup Peddler last year some time, but we finally signed up for it last week and got our first soup today.

The Soup Peddler is David J. Ansel, soup chef and bike activist (plus employees now, since the business is growing). How it works is, every week the Soup Peddler emails out a list of this weeks soups, including a little paragraph about the recipe or the soup's history, and a complete list of ingredients. You sign up for one of the soups via email or their web site.

On your weekly delivery day, you leave out an ice chest containing your empy reusable half-gallon soup bucket and a check for the soup, and when you get home from work, you've got a full half-gallon bucket of soup on your porch. Delivered by bicycle all over South and Central Austin.

This is so eco-hippy Austin, and the soup is GOOD. We had mulligatawny stew tonight, and there isn't any left. I'm really looking forward to making Wednesday night our weekly soup night.

Things like the Soup Peddler are what make me love Austin. People sometimes visit us and say "I heard Austin was a great food town, but the restaurants here aren't that special." But Austin is not supposed to be a great dining-out town like San Francisco or New York or even Houston. I mean, the restaurants aren't bad, but what Austin is is a great FOODIE town. For people who like to cook. We've got so many farmers markets and organic farms nearby, we've got the Whole Foods headquarters, the flagship Central Market, Wheatsville Co-op...this is a food geek town.

That's why I like the Soup Peddler. Bike geeks. Food geeks. South Austin weird.

And did I mention the soup is damn good?

From Looka comes this link to "How to Cut...", a fantastic illustrated guide to help you become as anal retentive about proper knife use as I am.

As usual, I didn't get my ass in gear early enough to get us dinner reservations for Valentine's, but Gina managed to get us an early table for two at 6:15 at Mars.

We like Mars a lot, and we've eaten many fine meals there. It's not the absolute best restaurant in Austin, but it's a good balance between "nice" and casual. It's reliable, it's got a quirky menu with lots of veggie selections for Gina and game dishes for me, and a decent wine list (at least I remember it did).

Now I know Valentine's Day is a crappy night to dine out, it's a terrible night to visit a place for the first time, and so that's why we tend to stick to tried-and-true places like Mars. But tonight takes the cake. Literally.

Don't get me wrong, the food ranged from good to awesome. But the portions were tiny. I mean microscopic.

She started with an appetizer with hearts of palm (two, to be exact, each about half the size of your pinky) with fava beans (about 10), and I got the littleneck clams. Five of them. Little. They were good, the beans were undercooked a little is all.

For soup, we each had the cauliflower creme, which was unbelievably good.

And then we each had the striped bass with something-something butter on a bed of chard. This looked like one of those "tiny portions stacked high" dishes where they forgot to add on past the first floor. About a 3 oz piece of fish on top of two pieces of chard. It was very tasty. It was also gone in two minutes.

And that was it. We thought the whole situation was kind of funny, actually, but we were both really hungry and were discussing where we were going to drive through on the way home to get some real food when the waiter pops by to give us our dessert options. He described some fancy chocolate brownie espresso kahlua thing that sounded fabulous, and which we guessed was the kind of giant chocolate death thing that they bring with two spoons. And then poached pears in a port wine reduction. We're both off chocolate right now, so we opted for the pears.

We're thinking "this is where they make up some volume, right?"

Wrong.

Five bites each. And only because it was pre-sliced into five bites. I could have done the whole thing in two without offending Ms. Manners. We saw the waiters carrying the chocolate thing to other tables, and it was equally meager.

3 course dinner + dessert (that left us starving). One cocktail, one glass of wine, two near-beers. Tip.

$190.

I'm sorry, but Mars is not that good.

Now look, I understand that Americans have become accustomed to massive food portions. I grok the whole "Supersize Me" thing. But dang it, you don't spend $100 per person on dinner and walk out of the place wanting to stop off for a burger on the way home. It ain't right.

On the way home we stopped at Central Market and picked up a carrot cake. It was damn good, and filling, too.

Here's the inside of my arm and my chest, which combined were the most painful things I've ever felt, apart from the time I broke my elbow.

At the bottom of my arm you can see one of the lilies. The coloring of the outline is different because that one will be partially underwater when it's done. You can also see the biggest lily up on my chest.

I finally had my first tattoo session last night with Chris Trevino. I can't say enough nice things about this guy.

We had only talked for a few minutes last summer about what I wanted, but he remembered everything, and had a really firm idea in his head of how he wanted it to look. He spent about 90 minutes drawing the design freehand on my arm with markers, then two hours inking it in. I got two short breaks at the 30 minute and 90 minute marks.

I had forgotten how much this hurts, and I had no idea how much the inside of the arm or the pectoral muscles could hurt. I'm a little nervous now because I have a four hour session booked Thursday to start on the shading, and I'm not really sure I'm up to it unless I can find some good drugs (anybody? anybody? Bueller?). Yeah, yeah, I know.

Anyway, it's beautiful, I love it. Two pictures here. This one shows the swan, wings furled like it's taking off, with that frothy Japanese-style water on the bottom. The pink and purple stuff is not my skin, it's mostly magic marker from his initial sketch that I haven't managed to wash off yet.

When Liam was five, we were at this same restaurant and I asked him if he wanted to try a raw oyster. He thought about it and then said "OK". Got one in his mouth, made a face, and spat it back out on the shell. He rested a bit, then put it back in his mouth, thought about chewing it, then spat it back onto the shell.
It took him three more tries, but eventually he swallowed it. And the bunch of beer drinking guys at the next table who had been watching this show all cheered.
Now he can suck down three or four without a second thought.

Cassidy has been able to peel her own crawfish since she was in kindergarten. She doesn't need any help from me any more. (She's not as fast as me, yet, but nobody is as fast as me.)

I really don't get why so many people are squeamish about sucking crawfish heads. That's where the fat is, which is the really really good stuff! Have you ever had a mind-blowingly good etouffee or crawfish bisque? You know why it was that good? It was because somebody went to the trouble of scraping the yellow goo out from all the little crawfish bodies and adding it to the pot.

I'm trying out Flickr, so as promised here are a few photos from the Mardi Gras party at the Old Alligator Grill last week.

Mardi Gras outside New Orleans is by definition lame, but this party at least captures a little bit of the spirit of the thing, unlike the drunken frat boy titty-fest down on 6th Street which is exactly the kind of thing NOLA natives don't do at Mardi Gras.

We sucked down a few pounds of crawfish and a couple dozen oysters. Had fun. Left early since it was cold.

If I dig around in my archives, I can probably find some pictures of the family at the real Mardi Gras two years ago. If I find them, I'll post them.

I gave up meat and caffeine for Lent.

The latter includes chocolate.

And I just remembered that I promised the kids that we would make chocolate-covered strawberries this weekend for Valentine's Day.

Which leaves me with three choices:

1. Disappoint the kids.

2. Make the strawberries anyway, but don't eat any. Just watch.

3. Dial back a little on this whole "promise to God" malarkey. Didn't I really mean just "no coffee or energy drinks"?

Read it here at the Burnt Orange Report.

Since attempt to overturn ethics rules at the House level failed, the GOP are going after the investigations closer to home. This TX bill would make it illegal for any local DA to bring charges related to state election laws, sending all such investigations to the toothless state Ethics Commission.

In other words, Delay and his buddies would get off.

I honestly don't understand how anybody could be a Republican without getting a whuppin' from their mama. Shame shame shame...

Cass shadowed another kid at the "magnet" middle school today, part of the admissions process. This is a really big public school, on the east side of town and so you get a lot of disadvantaged kids there. AISD likes to embed their magnet programs inside lower-performing schools in the hopes that, I don't know, fairy dust will sprinkle over from the magnet kids onto the other kids and inspire them somehow. (I have opinions about that, but another time.)

Anyhow, the place has a great magnet cirruculum, Cass makes friends easily and she was really excited about seeing the place, so we couldn't wait to hear how her day went.

And she comes home in tears. Cried for half an hour. She said it was awful. It was crowded, the kids were all mean. At one point three boys were hassling her, with one begging her to go out with him, telling her he promised he'd be nice, wouldn't take no for an answer.

My girl is a black belt. Eventually she got sick of his shit and kicked him. He left her alone after that.

But fuck, man. I remember when we went to the open house at this place, there were posters all over the walls about sexual harrassment, but I didn't pay too much attention to them. I figured they were just part of the PC stuff kids today are supposed to be involved in, like anti-drug programs and the like. I didn't have any experience with sexual harrassment in middle school because whenever I got near a girl, I kind of froze up, maybe made a squeaky noise or something, and that was it.

So my daughter comes home and is miserable, and she won't say so but I think a lot of it has to to with how the boys treated her. She sounded scared. She begged us not to send us to this place, to just let her stay another year in private school.

So was it the boys? Or was it just that this school is really big and full of really different kinds of kids than the small private school she's used to?

We've got another application in at another public magnet school, which is smaller but which is down in South Austin, so we really won't know anybody there if she goes there.

Either way, I want to kill me some 7th grade boys right about now. This is my first experience with boys not treating my girl with the proper amount of respect and I can't say I like it too much. Not much at all.

I'm going to write a post about Mardi Gras, but I need some time to upload some pictures, so I'm going to cut right to the next topic: Lent.

I was raised Catholic, and even though I pretty much don't believe any of it any more, I still give up something for Lent every year. Several times in recent years I tried giving up booze, with predictable results. Meaning abject failure. I mean fuck, St. Patrick's Day is during Lent, what was I supposed to do?

Last year, since I couldn't give up booze again (since I didn't drink any more), I gave up meat. Worked fine. Lots of seafood and salads and cheese sandwiches, so I didn't feel too deprived.

This year, I upped the ante. Gave up meat again. And I added caffeine.

Yes. Caffeine.

(I see Karl has fainted dead away.)

No coffee, espresso, cokes, chocolate, oreos, Java chip ice cream, Snicker's bars, energy drinks, frappucinos...

Until Easter.

The lack of morning coffee is already taking its toll. I don't know where my energy is supposed to come from. "Try some fresh fruit, Ray." Uh-huh. That's like taking away my Triumph and giving me a bicycle. Sure, I'll still be able to function, and it's obviously a lot healthier, but I don't think you really grasp the velocity that I'm accustomed to.

This is really hot:

Sex scandal in Wonka land.

Don't believe them, don't believe them
Don't get bitten twice
You gotta suss suss suss suss suss out sus-suspect device"

Today Condi said that an invasion of Iran was "not on the agenda".

Which sounds eerily similar to Dubya's favorite phrase throughout late 2002, that "there are no plans on my desk" to invade Iraq. We now know, thanks to people like Richard Clarke, that this was a lie.

The lyrics above, by the way, are by the legendary Irish punk band Stiff Little Fingers. They played in Austin a few weeks before the election, and when they sang this song, everybody in the audience shouted along to every single word, and everybody got the significance. It was a powerful moment. Yes, the song is more than 25 years old, and yes, it was written about the Troubles in Northern Ireland, but isn't it spooky how much it sounds like it could have been written here, today, about us?

Heading out to the car this morning, through the back yard, I noticed a dripping sound all around the brick patio, as if it had recently rained and the trees were still dripping water. A drop landed on my shoulder.

And all over the patio were lots of black splat marks that looked kind of like somebody had dropped thousands of blueberries from a great height. I hadn't had any coffee yet, so while I'm standing there sleepily thinking "that's weird, pecan trees don't have berries", another splat lands in my hair. And I look up.

Shit.

Birds.

Shit, literally.

Hundreds of them. Very quiet, as if they were sleeping. Do birds shit in their sleep? Apparently so.

You know when people up north talk about birds flying south for the winter? You know where those birds go? They go to fucking Texas.

I would like to think that these are blue state birds who have decided to come down and bathe the mother of all red states in crap. But don't they know this is Austin? That we are Democrats here? Don't they know that my house was built by Democrats, that everybody who has lived here since 1926 has been a Democrat, that the ancient pecan and the elderly oaks they are shitting on were all planted by Democrats?

There are some lovely Republican trees up in Williamson County. Baptist trees, too, I bet.

Fly away, birdies. Deliver your crapload to the GOP.

Good birdies.

Since the last election, I've been reading lots of political blogs, and in the past week or so I've found a few good ones that have a Texas slant.

The Burnt Orange Report is one I've been reading since last year, ever since it broke the whole Gov. Perry Is A Big Old Queen scandal. It's as fine a bunch of reading as the Daily Kos, and published right here in Austin.

Pink Dome is a sassy Lege-oriented rumor sheet.

The Red State and Off the Kuff I just started reading today.

And View From the Left has a lot of liberal-oriented coverage, including local Austin politics.

Being a leftie in the belly of the Red State beast is fertile ground for commentary. Who knew?

My humble blog is the first hit returned by Google if you search for "privamatupilous".

Or "splendiferacy".

Or "privamatupilous splendiferacy".

Are you so proud?

The New York Times has a funny article today about websites and blogs devoted to the rantings of restaurant wait staff. Think Fucked Company for foodies, or Kitchen Confidential for the floor staff.

These two sites in particular are worth checking out: The Bitter Waitress ("Revenge is a dish best served in a black pleather Amex folder.") and the Waiter Rant blog.

Both sites are kind of slow today, probably getting slammed from the NYT coverage, but they're worth the wait.

And for the record, Gina and I tip embarrassingly well, almost to sucker levels. Has something to do with our college having been paid for in part by waiting tables (for her) and bartending (for me), so we know how shitty that life can be when you don't make your tips, but it's also just common sense. As one worker puts it in the NYT article, "I can never understand why anyone would be even the slightest bit rude to someone who is about to touch your food."