Notes on Fear

Fear, if you don't know, is how they sell you things.

Clorets are a good sample case for this. They're good partially because they're both absurd and very smart. The absurdity is that almost any minty chewing gum is sold, I would assume, to people who in part fear having un-minty breath. The genius is that they jumped into that fear of bad breath with both feet and created a product specifically targeted at that fear.

Now in Toilet Brush Flavor!!!

As mundane as this example is I think it proves a larger point that marketing, generally, is based on a modified incarnation of the Underpant Gnome Economy:

1) Provoke a particular fear or insecurity in the target demographic.

2) Offer the provoked subject a product that assuages or removes the fear, temporarily.

3) Profit.

If this scheme seems banal, boring and deterministic well, it is. Long ago the spotless air-conditioned rooms full computers replaced the thoughtful, gifted empaths like Don Draper.

Not only that... they replaced a lot of stuff.

What we know today as "Big Data" or any of the other adjectives that are pasted on the lifeless hulks of computational units, servers and routers that lurk in dark bunkers all over the world like Cthulhu, began not long after WW2.

The RAND corporation, originally a creation of the Air Force (that stood for Research ANd Development, by the by.) developed Rational Choice Theory based on the mathematical ideas of John Nash (Yes, the Beautiful Mind guy). These ideas turned the individual person, the communities that they live in and their larger societies into "Consumers" that chose between one thing or another based on what seemed "rational" for them to choose. Thusly the individual or the multitudes could be manipulated into "choosing" things based on what was known about the things that mattered to them.

While one could certainly go on for hundreds of thousands of pages detailing all of implications and technologies that haven fallen out of the above paragraph I'll offer my own short digestion.

1) You and I are considered consumers, not just by marketers, corporations and ad agencies but by think tanks that influence political strategies and campaigns on both side of the aisle as well as the military and intelligence services.

2) These so-called consumers can be manipulated to make choices based on provocations that produce fear in the target demographic(s). 

Handbook for 18 year-old virgins

 As an only child I was a shy early on, afraid of talking to people I did not know intimately. I preferred to hole up with a Golden Book about insects or loiter in the kitchen during holiday parties and other get-togethers. The orginal target market for the Well for Boys, as it were.

This, of course, very much rubbed my father (who, among many of other things, had once killed a Vietcong sapper with a drywall hatchet in an alley during the Tet Offensive) the wrong way.

He would go out of his way to make me interact with strangers, mostly by sending me to pay for stuff like the bill at a diner or gas at the gas station, as a way to confront my fears.

More importantly, it worked. I grew to become a confidant young man one knock-knee'd trip to the register at a time. A man who has kicked through an unending rain-forest of dicks to reach my present age of 40.

I relate this not simply out of my own desire to self-aggrandize but to relate to you a sort of "Fear is the Mind Killer" mantra my father would repeat to me each and every time he would send me to a register with a 20 dollar bill or the yard foreman to order four dozen bags of sheetrock mud: "They can't eat you."

"And three dollars and sixty-three cents is your change.."

 If this seems both a) an inaccurate representation of potential outcomes and b) vaguely humorous it's because it was meant that way. He, after all, was the man who told me about the man-eaters of Borneo and their penchant for "Long Pig". His point was that fear, like the idea of a 48 year-old waitress eating me at the worn Formica register counter, was patently silly.

Well, that and that he couldn't always trot out the melodramatic "A coward dies a thousand deaths. A brave man, only one." he saved for moments when I was like "Not only no, but FUCK NO I'm not giving that woman the money and WHY, exactly, are we in this Santeria shop in the first place?"

Anyway, pay the bill but let them know that you aren't buying. They can't eat you.

Salmon Cakes

Not reported to the nice young man at the Detroit customs house

It's best to begin at the beginning:
My Mom is Canadian.

Yes, your faithful scribe is, indeed, a partial creation of the great state of Kanuckistan.

More to that point, I was educated for a brief period of time by the educational directorate of the Province of British Colombia during the first grade and to that end, I can say a few useless words in French Canadian. None of these words have done me any good when visiting Montreal.

Anyhow, as I write this I am listening to Natalie Merchant solo albums which, somehow, seems like the Canadian thing to do even though I'm completely sure she is British. Somewhere in a Toronto suburb there is a coffee house playing Tigerlily unironically, no doubt.

So, when my Mom comes to visit our Godzilla toddler she, for reasons that are not clear to me, brings with her many cans of Premium Sockeye Salmon, or Saumon Sockeye if you speak the mother tongue of Jack Kerouac: Franglais. I should go on to point out that my mother's side of the family are a sort of self-hating Franch Canadiens. Her maiden name is Desjarden. French as a Parisian vegetable market. Yet they insist on pronouncing it "Dis-Jar-Den" and, wait for it, they hate the Quebecios in a way that is almost like the low level racism people in the Midwest have for drunken Indians. I digress. 

The point is that I am usually swimming in primo canned wild Salmon. The result is this recipe for an exquisite seafood sandwich much like a crab cake but, you know, one made mostly of crab or in this case salmon. Sub in crab meat and add Old Bay instead of dill and you're on your way to making a damned fine crab cake. 

Add caption

Recipe

Salmon Cakes

1 418g (or 14.5 oz.) can of wild red Salmon
1 cup finely crushed Ritz or Saltine crackers
1 small onion, finely minced
1 tiny shallot, finely minced
1 egg (good eggs only please)
2 teaspoons dried Dill
3-4 grinds of black pepper
2 big pinches of Kosher salt

Tartar Sauce

1/2 cup quality mayonnaise
1/4 cup copped dill pickles
3-4 dashes hot sauce

Molson Golden

Begin

Get out your largest mixing bowl, open the can of Salmon and drain most of the liquid then dump it into the bowl with the rest of the ingredients. Mix well making sure to smoosh up the Salmon bones. No, canned Salmon is not boneless or skinless. Taste it for seasoning (this is why I said Good Eggs not the Salmonella bomb cheap eggs in the 18 packs. Also, seriously, good eggs are cheap. Buy them.) and add salt, dill, etc. if lacking. Set aside in the fridge for an hour to allow the flavors to marry. 

Cook

The preferred instrument is a big cast iron pan with a lid that fits. Preheat the skillet on high for 5 minutes and then drop it to medium-ish and add oil to the pan and swish it around. Form the patties (sorry, "cakes") into 4 inch wide by 1 1/2 inch thick rounds and plop them into the pan and cover it for 4-5 minutes. Flip them gently and cook for another 4-5 minutes, covered, on the second side until both look like the photo to the left. 

While they cook mix up the Tartar sauce and fry your potato buns in butter. To serve place the cakes in the buns and top with aforementioned tartar sauce (bonus points for shredded Iceburg lettuce) and serve with potato chips.


A note on substitutions:

The crackers in this recipe can be replaced with an equal amount of crushed Salt and Vinegar potato chips (omit salt from recipe), seasoned bread crumbs, panko, Chicken in a Biscuit crackers or even Potato Buds.

 Secondary considerations:

These patties can be made smaller or into other shapes and cooked then beer battered and deep fried to arrive at any number of unknown temples of bliss or, alternatively, made into patties and then dredged in crushed Salt and Vinegar or regular potato chips or, perhaps, even Pringles. Do so at the risk of your own mortal soul because beyond this point, as they say: "There be Dragons".

"Yo Dawg, you got them Pringles in there?"

 

French Fry Omelette

No sane person loves cold soggy fries.

So I went to see John Wick 2 this weekend.

I don't want to get into the movie itself but I'll say that it was totally fine. If you were expecting the Godfather part 2 instead of a mechanistic, video game styled shoot 'em up with a liberal sprinkling of vaguely Masonic imagery than you might want to readjust your expectations.

What is really happening here is that we met our friends at the heinous dumphole known as the Hampshire Mall in Hadley, MA. Pre-cinema drinks were had at Arizona Pizza which is basically where you would eat if you died and woke up in Hell... and Hell was a mall in 1993. TGI Fridays meets a gross, big screen studded, self-reflexive parody of TGI Fridays staffed by UMass 19 year-olds.

We were late, as most people with bionic toddlers often are, so we missed out on ordering food but did have time to guzzle a few pints of murky craft-brew diabetes water. Long story short there were quite a few leftover French fries that one of our friends inexplicably took home and slid into the refrigerator, likely never to be thought of, let alone eaten, ever again.

Yes, this is a real picture of the Arizona Pizza hell place.

The next morning, nursing a "let's get drunk enough to discuss the semiotics of John Wick 2' type hangover, I awoke with a desperate need for weapons grade Brunch Garbage food. Eggs? Check. American Cheese? Check. What else... wait, what is in this wilted foam deli carton? AH HA! Half a chicken burger and a shit load of flaccid french fried potatoes. Valhalla.

To write this down as a formal recipe seems insulting to real food that needs a recipe to describe it's preparation so we won't do that.

I managed to find a serviceable sized small frying pan (non-stick) and some butter. As I waited for the pan to heat up (medium setting) I whisked an egg together with a pinch of salt and roughly chopped the aforementioned limp potato abortions.

A large knob of butter was added to the pan along with the fries which I then forgot about for several minutes while I hunted for a seltzer to quench my prodigious cotton mouth. There was none but the fries had gotten quite crispy. Revivified by the healing power of butter and heat to a delicious, soul greasingly golden brown. I added the egg, gave it a moment and then sloppily flipped the omelette and added a slice of white American cheese. After about a minute I folded the egg mess onto a plate and discovered one of the best shitty breakfasts since the ubiquitous New York City bodega bacon, egg and cheese sandwich.

I don't care if it sounds deeply sad, I will say it anyway: This great and terrible item is the best thing that has happened to me in the past 90 days. Except for my new pair of boots and a couple other things we'll discuss at a later date.

Update:

I found out after I wrote this post that the French Fry Omelette is the most popular street food in Tanzania where it is known as "Chips Mayai".

Tanzanians know what is up.

Check it out HERE

Video Games

 I"ll start here by saying that I really, really loved video games as a kid. Because I was a relatively poor kid I never had an Atari or Intellivision or a Colecovision or any of those early home gamer systems which only made me love them more. I sought them out, no matter how shitty, at the supermarket, the mall, friends houses... whenever I had a chance I would play them.

Now, in my high school years I came to, predictably after all the DARE program propaganda, enjoy certain mind-altering substances. As it turned out a friend of mine had just gotten the program Doom on his folks 386 computer if anyone remembers such things from the time when dinosaurs roamed the earth. We played it. A lot. My favorite weapon was the pump shotgun with which I dispatched all manner of ugly, alien hell-beasts. It was great.

Then one time we played it on Acid.

After about 15 minutes of playing it I had a moment that was a very deep and profound moment of "What the FUCK am I doing?!?!"

Here I was shooting horrible, misshapen alien demon things with their guts and blood splattering all over the walls of the strange megalithic dungeons when I was living in a miraculous universe of beauty, patterns and rhythms ever expanding into new and increasingly complex arrangements on a planet that is home to an infinitude of wonders and curiosities: Pyramids, giant squid, Sequoia trees, tardigrades. Not to mention mathematics, philosophy, art, literature, engineering, metaphor, symbolism and music. That was that.

 Funnily enough, I had a very similar moment at the same friend's house with industrial music. "Why am I listening to this mechanical, lifeless death soundtrack when I could go outside and lay in the sun?" Or something like that. Memory editorializes the past.


These are wholly unremarkable stoner thoughts, obviously. However, these realizations changed the path of my life. While I did, now and then, play video games and listen to industrial music but, mostly I didn't. I had gotten a bad taste in my mouth about these things that I just couldn't shake that saved me from wasting countless hours of my youth gunning down fictional bad guys and instead I wasted them hiking, reading books that were over my head and writing shitty poetry. Are those things better than playing video games? Maybe. But that isn't the point.

The point is that, as I tried and failed to point out in my Benign Sedition post, technology is something to be a little skeptical of, especially when it is being marketed at us in a way that makes us seemingly crazy not to just want, but to crave it. Or, for that matter, to feel ostracized from our culture simply by not immediately and mindlessly taking it on board. To state it another way: "Is this technology working for me and my enjoyment of my life or is it keeping me, acting as a layer of abstraction or mediation, from enjoying my life?

As I have said earlier, I'm not going to burn my phone or laptop and I'm not going to throw a brick through my TV. But I am using them much less and doing stuff like cooking, reading books, going to the library and taking baths. This experiment is rather recent but I have been less stressed out, slept better and, generally, enjoyed my life a lot more.

Ordering of the Passions

I've been trying to narrow down what the core causes of the general irrational madness I have seen grow and bloom in American culture during the past few years. This is a tree that has born the fruit of narcissist selfie culture, emotionally kinky oversharing on social media and, lately, the grotesque types of emotional overreactions leading up to and following our recent presidential election.

I swear that this will be the last post that has anything to do with politics for a while, and really I'm just using politics here as an extreme example of the larger issue, which is the fact that, as a society, we seem to be increasingly addicted to unchecked emotive responses to the world around us rather than engaging our minds to figure out what is at the root of our responses and understanding them.

What the fuck am I talking about?

Well, I'll have to start by saying that I have been reading a lot about the "Dark Ages" and its antecedents in West, East and Middle East. No, I'm not secretly gearing up to begin a Dan Carlin style Hardcore History podcast. I've been researching the transition from the Bronze to the Iron age in those cultures, particularly looking at the development, establishment and spread of advanced metallurgical technologies.

This research has yielded all manner of choice factids and surprising nuggets. For instance: the earliest "Iron" weapons in the East were daggers and swords with alloyed copper cores, bronze blades and GET THIS cutting edges made from ferric meteorites! Mandate of Heaven, indeed! This technology also came not from China but to China from the Steppe peoples who likely got it from the Vedic civilizations of the Indian sub-continent. It is known, for instance, that the Vikings were trading furs along the Silk Road for ingots of carbon steel produced in India that they, in turn, fashioned into the famous Ulfberht swords as early as 600 AD. I digress.

Chinese Alchemical Smelting Furnace

Anyway, aside from the aforementioned cocktail trivia, the real meat of getting into and understanding the evolution of metallurgy involves understanding that 1) these people were practicing science and 2) science of that time was not a highly specialized endevour as we know it today, where you can make a career from being an expert in a particular species of flatworm, but rather a broad and interdisciplinary science that encompassed astrology, "magic", philosophy, chemistry, psychology and a broad swath of interests we'll, for the sake of brevity, call the Occult. This scientific system is most commonly referred to today as Alchemy.

"BULLSHIT!!!!" I hear you say. "Those people were a bunch of superstitious old fools who thought they could turn lead into gold and were busy trying to get little men to fly out of their test tubes. That is not science! That is crazy people shit!" Point is taken. Yes, that is what the average person thinks about when they think of Alchemy, if they indeed think of it at all and I am not going to go into great detail here trying to show you that that view is a tad myopic. Instead I'll just note that quite a number of people that are revered by scientific history were, in complete fact, raging Alchemists.

Sir Isaac Newton: Fucking Alchemist

   Again, for the sake of brevity I'll name one: Sir Isaac fucking Newton. Yes, the guy that Newtonian Physics are named after. The Co-creator of Differential Calculus. Optics. Color Theory. Head of the Royal Society. That guy. Total Alchemist.

What does any of this have to do with people rage hating on Twitter, snapping selfies and all that "greater societal ill"?

I am getting there.

So, I had to (for the sake of research?) run down and try to understand Alchemy in an effort to figure out where all this pre-scientific science shit was coming from. Hold on tight now, it's going to get a LOT weirder before we end up landing softly on my point of this whole post. Now realize I am going to have to grossly simplify things and leave out a bunch of shit but, in the main, what I am about to say is truthful.

Alchemy, at least in the West and Middle East, is the product of the teachings of what have been called "the Hermetic Texts" written by Hermes the Thrice Great who, in turn got these texts or the core ideas for the texts from Egyptian who in turn likely got them from, wait for it, an ancient technologically advanced civilization that was destroyed by some sort of great disaster like a flood. Yes, we're getting into some weird spaces here but please note that these are not my beliefs, this is what the history of the Hermetic wisdoms are claiming: "All this Shit Came from Atlantis, man."

"Are you claiming that "Mr. Science", Sir Isaac fucking Newton, believed that science and a bunch of other shit came from the lost civilization of Atlantis? Are you out of your mind?" Yes, I am saying that and no, if anyone is crazy here, it's Isaac Newton.

I totally ordered the shit out of my passions when I chose to not put a Black Science Man meme here.

 So we now get closer to my elusive point.

Coming with all this science from Atlantis comes a lot of other stuff. The Hermetic traditions permeate Western thought in the Middle Ages and some ideas that look a lot like Hermetic stuff also end up in pre-millenial Chinese thought. One of these concepts is sometimes called "The Ordering of the Passions" which basically boils down to this: strive not to be a slave to your emotions and desires but rather their master, drawing energy from intensity and channeling it into thoughtful, well reasoned creative acts.

Let's all read that again and then contemplate all the examples we've seen lately of actual grown up adults (who should fucking know better) acting like spoiled children having a temper-tantrum:

"Strive not to be a slave to your emotions and desires but rather their master, drawing energy from intensity and channeling it into thoughtful, well reasoned creative acts." 

If you can argue with that, you can argue with anything.

Big Sexy on opening night of La Fama BBQ

Recipe

Mac and Cheese Sauce or the Alchemy of Cream

The origin of this recipe dates back to Hurricane Sandy when I and my crack team of culinary commandos boarded an Avianca 757 at JFK the day after the Hurricane and flew to Bogota, Colombia to open the very first American BBQ restaurant in South America. Steve "Big Sexy" Harit, who I had stolen from the restaurant of that bald Greek guy chef bro with much relish, was tasked with developing the recipes for the sides. I won't recount all the amazing things he pulled completely out of his ass in a strange country full of strange ingredients but one memorable recipe is this one here. It is simple, easy and WAY better than any Mac and Cheese I have had before or since.



Ingredients:

1 quart heavy cream
1 onion, halved
2-3 cups shredded cheddar cheese or cheese du jour
Salt
hot sauce

Begin

Take one half of the onion and coat it with oil and then set it, flat side down, in a cast iron or other pan over high heat. Disconnect smoke alarms. Cook the onion half until it is moderately blackened. This is called an Onion Broule'.

Now place onion is a sauce pan with the cream and simmer for 5-7 minutes to get the good oniony flavor crystals out. Remove onion. Season with salt and hot sauce to taste then add the cheese and whisk it into the sauce. Taste again for seasoning then toss with your undercooked (if the label says 7 minutes, do 4 minutes) pasta of choice, slide into a casserole and cover with breadcrumbs. Bake 10 minutes in a 450' oven or until crumbs are golden, NOT burnt.

Pairing

 Colombian Beer (Poker or Club Colombia in the can), cheap cocaine, Aqua Diente sin Azucar.

Benign Sedition

I had planned to write a piece this morning inspired by an article about the hope of Spring, subversive agriculture and non-violent resistance to authority. In the shower I meticulously crafted the narrative: weaving the concepts from James C. Scott's "The Art of Not Being Governed"and Toby Hemenway's "Liberation Permaculture" together in concert with the soft spots in the armor of technocracy. I'd throw in examples of COIN failures across the world and finish up by bringing both the strident activists of the Left and Right together by shredding ideologies and unify their primary motivations (loosely, to make the world a better place) in the values they share rather than separate them by how they differ.

It was not to be.

Before I jump off into what might be taken as an anti-technological rant, let's clear things up. Firstly, I am not opposed to technology. However, I am also not a true believer of the technological quasi-religion that seems to have taken hold of American culture during my lifetime. I understand why it has become what it is. If you put yourself into the shoes of the 19th century everyman things like tractors, phone lines, train travel, electricity and the democratization of the internal combustion engine would be extremely useful and very seductive because of their eminent practicality in day to day life. The mid-century was quite dazzling. Supersonic jets, atomic energy, rockets to the moon, computers, etc. Were these things really useful to the average person? Certainly not, but they we're sexy. They told us a story of the "FUTURE!!!"  Whether or not you really wanted to colonize other planets or have a laser gun you be a fool not to be wrapped up in the ecstatic fever sweeping through the masses, fueled by the scientific manipulation of the human mind otherwise known as marketing. We weren't sure how it worked or how it was going to benefit us in any sort of practical way but, by God, we were for it.

Fast forward to the early 1980's of my early childhood. Flying cars? No. Colonies on Mars? Nope. Free Energy, world peace, the end of poverty, teleportation... did we even have a better train network than we did in the late 1940's? Fuck no. We had Space Camp, video games and all sorts of other consumer goods that were dressed up in the trappings of Futureness, but nothing tangible other than, arguably, jet travel being within reach of the man on the street. Luckily the marketing machine was still going stronger than ever:

If you were 7 years old, as I was, in 1984 when the above Grumman X-29 flew for the first time you were, like, convinced you were living in the future. Between this, the Space Shuttle and the SR-71 Blackbird the fact that we were not living in floating houses like the Jetson's apparently did not matter. What I now find hilarious about the X-29 is that forward swept wing jet fighters were being developed by the Nazi's in 1944 and the SR-71 took it's first flight in the mid-1960's. In other words, they were the past but we were still willing to buy that "most glorious future place of the Fatherland" was still coming, apparently.

I have a very particular memory of the late 1980's(or was in the very early 1990's?) which was watching Future porn TV shows reminiscent of "That's Incredible!" where goofy houses of the future, flying boats and all sorts of James Bond type novelty vehicles were trotted out to amaze the plebs while they watched it on television sets that were little different than those of the 1970's.

Accelerating in the background was the Information Revolution, which had begun during the Nixon administration to allow global financial stuff to happen 24/7, and by the late 1990's the internet was the new Futurism. Sure, web 1.0 was mostly populated by badly html'd Pearl Jam fan sites and message boards full of neck beards but that didn't mean that we couldn't speculate wildly on it and crater the US economy.

All the way along: What was the utility of most of the future hype bullshit that was marketed at us? The space movies, zippy looking jet planes and other assorted stories we were told about technology? Peer into the lives of the average American and you'll find that they are still living in a crappy house/apartment/trailer but now there is a large flat screen squatting in the middle of the living room where the 19" Zenith used to be and that everyone has a computer phone. Oh and their cars get 10 miles a gallon better mileage but if they break they can't work on them.

What would the guy at the beginning of this narrative of the age of technology have to say about this state of affairs? Not much positive I would bet.

You seeing what I'm getting at here? Maybe not, but I will proceed nonetheless.

Now, in the year 2017, the X-29 loving 7 year-old me would have thought we would for sure be living in the future promised by 2001: A Space Odyssey and yet, here we are.

 And this is why I will, likely, never write the article I intended. Because, on the way to my office to write I decided to pop in my headphones, listen to a podcast and dick around on my phonecomputer. My tight nest of thoughts scattered. My ambition sublimated. My will soothed by the false perception of doing something important.

This brings me to my real point: appropriate use of technology and the slippery area between work and play.

15 years ago you knew if you were relaxing/wasting time because you were plopped in front of a TV or reading People magazine. Nowadays you can check your work email on the bus and the next thing you know you have wasted the better part of an hour yelling at dumb people on Facebook. You will not get this time back. This is not an improvement.

Yes, there are infinite ways of being productive on a smartphone, but ask yourself the question I asked myself this morning: "How much time do I spend fulfilling the promise of the internet as the New Library of Alexandria versus how much time to I spend distracting myself, punding on the latest news, hate reading social media and looking for stuff I don't need on eBay?" Not just this but also: "What could I have done with the time that has just slipped away from me today?"

Now let's ask the larger question "How much human productivity was lost today by these means?" comScore says 198 million people own smart phones in the US as of 2016. Let's say that 2/3rds of those smartphone owners spend on average 1 hour a day dicking around. Both of those numbers seem fairly conservative but what the heck. 130 million hours of human production have been lost. Today. Considering that a human has 120,000 hours of dedicated work in their lifetime according to how we do things in the Western world that is 1000 lives worth of lost production in one day.

I would like to put this out there for you to consider: If technology does not improve your life and the lives of others, it is making them worse.

Wasting 1000 lives worth of work in one day does not seem like it is making things better. 

Stop dicking around. 

Start doing something meaningful.

Like making your own Hot Sauce?

Eggs, rice and beans, quesadillas and so many more things are just made better with a little bit of hot sauce sprinkled on top. Hot sauce is great because it is cheap and it doesn't really go bad, but is it as good as it should be? That depends. I use plain old cheap store brand hot sauce to adjust the seasoning on things like soups, stews and beans. This because I want acid and heat, not chile flavor. However, sometimes you do want the flavor. Sometimes you want to give a meaningful gift to your uncle or your dad. Sometimes you need to make your own hot sauce.

Recipe

1 cup White Vinegar
4 Habanero chiles, minced very fine
Salt

Optional

Garlic
Fish Sauce
Fermented Shrimp

Do

Combine minced chiles, vinegar and salt (and garlic or fish sauce or fermented shrimp or whatever) to taste in a glass jar. shake and refrigerate for 2-3 weeks, shaking when you think about it. Once the flavors have married bottle it up in recycled beer bottle or whatever and top with a cork. Old hot sauce bottle work surprisingly no well for this sort of thing because of their narrow necks.

Telling History with Dragons

No, this is not me getting lazy three posts into my new blog. This a template for what I want to celebrate here. To quote myself from my last post:

"Today I read an essay that examined the Gilmour Girls reboot, JJ Abrams reboots, nostalgia, Twitter, the left, the right, election fallout, Camille Paglia and what the definition of conservative actually means. It was written by a gay, Australian, former BBC documentary producer who writes books about magic.

Now that is the kind of diversity of thought I am talking about. Rich, weird, delicious diversity."

Well, guess what? This is the guy I was talking about giving you a short tour of human history using Dragons. Literally. 

If you like this presentation click the Rune Soup link to the right and sign up for his site. Yes. I know!  This is EXACTLY the kind of bullshit I hate but signing up is the only way you can watch his presentation The Campfires Edge which is like this video but 11,000 times better and this video is very weird and very good. Please yourself, either way.

How to Eat a Dragon

I've never personally met anyone who has seen, let alone cooked or eaten a dragon but I have met a few who've eaten snakes and one guy who seemed to cook them fairly often.

The gentleman in question was a standard west coast bohonk type that worked for the Water Department. I met him at the scene of an extremely large "Arizona Red" rattlesnake crossing the narrow two lane blacktop headed towards Silverado Canyon. How large is large? 8 1/2 feet long and about as big around as a coffee can in the middle. As a person who has seen my fair share of rattlesnakes, I assure you that this was the biggest I had seen by twice. 

Anyway, frater bohonk pulled over to look on the large sandstone colored serpent just ahead of us and sprung from his Water Dept. utility truck to retain a shovel from the bed and unceremoniously lopped the head of the snake off and shoveled the carcass into the back of his truck. 

When I asked what he was going to do with the snake he responded that they were "Good eats" (a full decade before anyone would hear from Alton Brown). 

Recipe

His preferred preparation was to skin and bone the snake and then marinate the loin segments in salad dressing for a few hours before grilling and serving over a Caesar salad.  Taste? Predictably: "Like chicken!"

Pairing
 

A sprightly Picpoul de Pinet