The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
Frustrated by progress in the War on Terror? And looking to vent those frustrations through the use of combustible materials on this Fourth of July?
Well, it seems you can buy fireworks fashioned in the visages of the likes of Osama Bin Laden and Yasser Arafat:
“When lit, the bin Laden cone erupts in blood-red flames and screeches for 60 seconds. Two shots blow his head off.”
The problem with modern American society is that we just don’t burn enough effigies these days!
So says a commenter to this Kevin Drum post, in which Kevin sings the praises of bratwurst. As long as I’m offending my vegitarian readership this morning — such as it exists — I figure what the heck, I might as well discuss All Meats Ground and Stuffed Into Casings.
To my way of thinking, there are few food items more wondrous than sausages, and I love them in just about every variety in which they exist. I don’t get caught up in the “sausage arguments”, in which a German from Milwaukee and a Polish person from Buffalo will come to blows over which is better, bratwurst or kielbasa. They’re both great. And so are Italian sausages, the hotter the better; grill ’em and serve ’em in a hard roll with plenty of grilled onions and peppers and slather ’em with brown mustard. Oh, yeah. That’s good eating.
And it doesn’t stop there! Andouille is great stuff. Slice it and cook it in a gumbo with shrimp and crab meat, and you’re in heaven. I haven’t been able to have Chorizo all that often, but that’s great stuff, too. And while I don’t like sauerkraut by itself, you take a pot of that stuff and cook a nice, big kielbasa in it, and you’ve got yourself one fine meal.
The most infamous kind of casing-stuffed meat product is, of course, haggis, which I’ve never tried. I think I’d like to. Maybe.
Finally I come around to the good old American hot dog. Yeah, I’ve heard the horror stories about what goes into them, and I’ve heard the political joke about how there are two things in this world, laws and sausages, that you don’t ever want to know how they’re made. But I’ve got a strong stomach, and I love a grilled hot dog. The casing has to be blackened a bit and cracking open to reveal the pink meat within; and as for condiments, I swear by diced onions and yellow mustard. (The mustard rule is: Yellow for hot dogs, brown for any other sausage, except for kielbasa, which require no mustard at all.) Here in Buffalo, the best brand of hot dog available is Sahlen’s, and the best place to eat one is Ted’s (which, by the way, sports eight locations in the Buffalo area and one location in, of all places, Tempe, Arizona).
There are two acceptible ways of cooking hot dogs, in my opinion: grilling (either outside or stove-top), or pan-frying them in just a bit of oil. Boiling hot dogs in water is a horrid practice, and is only of use to those who insist on loading their hot dogs with so many condiments as to render the hot dog itself as little more than a condiment-delivery device.
(Warning: Vegitarians, vegans, and fans of E.B. White had best avoid this post.)
John Scalzi has some thoughts on the fine tradition of pig-roasting. This is exactly what it sounds like: when you roast an entire pig, head and all. John’s description of the event is eerily accurate, right down to the fact that in any rural county there are at most five guys who are known far-and-wide for their abilities to roast an entire piggy.
I’ve only been fortunate enough to attend one pig-roast in my life, and sadly, the roasting of the pig wasn’t even done on the premises. The event was hosted at a favorite restaurant (the proprietors of which provided the food at our wedding), but the pig was cooked someplace down the street and then brought in a pickup truck to the restaurant when done. Still, it was damned impressive, even if they covered the head in foil so as to not gross out the more indelicate in the bunch. (I, of course, requested a peek, and it was exactly as I expected: just a bigger version of the roasted pigs my wife and I saw in the windows of Chinatowns in Boston and Toronto.)
Anyhow, pig-roast weekend was a lot of fun for us, and it’s a pretty fond memory of our pre-daughter lives, and a bit infamous as well, because three out of four nights that weekend (starting Thursday), my parents drank my wife and I under the table. (I seem to recall crying out into the Cosmos at one point, “Evil, I have met thee, and thy name is ‘Draft Beer’!”) And you can have all the pork tenderloin and pork ribs and pork chops and pork steaks you want, but somehow there’s nothing quite like eating those same cuts of meat when they’ve been cut from the flesh of the entire animal once he’s done roasting.
Confirmation is not in yet as of this writing, but an Iraqi group is claiming to have beheaded US Marine Cpl. Wassef Ali Hassoun. There is no video as of yet, but I’m sure it will be the same thing: three or four of these gutless bastards wearing masks, shouting “Allahu Akbar!” while one of them does the deed.
Tell you what, vermin: take the damn masks off. Let me see you kill a foreign hostage while you’re looking him or her in the eyes, and while you’re showing your faces to all the world. No, it won’t make you any less the vile subhuman scum that you are, but at least you won’t be cowards about it.
I’m sure that when our troops find you and kill you, they’ll look you in the eyes before they pull the trigger. And they won’t profane their religions by invoking God when they do it.
UPDATE: Now the group responsible is saying that they haven’t yet killed Cpl. Hassoun. No other information is available as of this writing (9:30 am, 7-4-04).
UDDATE II (8 July): Now the missing Marine is confirmed safe, and an investigation is under way to determine if the whole thing was a hoax. This is why I try to not post in anger the first second I read a news story (as I did here), all you “Where’s the outrage!” people.
For the last couple of days, I’ve been having a very weird problem with Mozilla where pages won’t load when I click their links, unless I click them three or four times, after which Mozilla “gets the message” that yes, I actually do want to load the page at that link. Does anyone know what on Earth is going on here? I really really really really really don’t want to have to stop using Mozilla.
UPDATE: Upon further review, this bug-in-progress seems to really be afflicting Blogger and BlogSpot-related pages.
One of my favorite places on the Web to view art, ArtMagick, has shut down. The site was the original source of many of the images I’ve used as my masthead during the time I’ve been producing Byzantium’s Shores, and it will be keenly missed on far more than just that basis. So, if the ArtMagick creator happens to view this post, thank you for all the work you put into that site, and best wishes for now (if the “personal reasons” cited as the reason for closure are of the sad variety) and for the future.
You can see the punchline coming a mile away, but I still laughed. Maybe it’s the photo with perfect lip-curl that did it. Anyway, give the Dick Cheney Magic 8-Ball a whirl.
Mickey also reviews the latest blockbuster hit sci-fi film, but he’s less than impressed.
I watched Pulp Fiction the other night, and as always, I marvel at the film’s tight construction, but a couple of things struck me:
1. After Butch rescues Marcellus Wallace from the hillbilly pawn shop guys, Marcellus basically “cleans the slate” with Butch, albeit telling him he’s to leave LA and never return. But I want to know if Marcellus rethought that deal hours later, when he inevitably learned that Butch had already killed Vincent Vega. I’m thinking, probably not, but you never know. Surely Marcellus would be annoyed at losing two of his best “enforcers” in one week. (Remember, when that happens in the film, the events of the last scene — with Jules deciding to retire — have already occurred.)
2. I still love the “black humor” storyline, when Vincent inadvertently blows an associate’s head off, and then he and Jules have to get their blood-soaked car off the road. Ultimately, they end up at the home of a friend (“Jimmie”), but they have to then get cleaned up and get away from there before Jimmie’s wife gets home in ninety minutes and discovers “a bunch of gangsters doin’ a bunch of gangster shit”. They succeed and all, but I want to know how Jimmie later explains to his wife the disappearance of their best linens and the subsequent arrival of an oak bedroom set.
3. Really nice visual touch: the first time Jules recites his version of Ezekiel 25:17, we see a shot of doomed criminal wannabe Brett, with Vincent Vega in the background. Vincent pulls out his gun and holds it in both hands, barrel down, while shrugging his shoulders in that way that guys do when they stand for prayers in church services.
Thanks to Libertarian Jackass, I’m reminded of the existence of quintessential right-wing lunatic Adam Yoshida, who with a bit of artistic talent could be the right’s answer to Ted Rall (if I didn’t already suspect that Ted Rall was himself already the answer to something else). Anyway, I scrolled down Yoshida’s main page a bit until I found this helpful bit of policy advice:
The Congress should suspend the writ of Habeus Corpus in all terror-related cases.
Surely there must be something to be learned from a person who can pack so much nuttiness into just one fourteen-word sentence.
(EDIT: Now the first link actually links something. Oy.)
Mary points out a selection of Philosophy Games, a few of which (the ones I’ve tried so far) are kind of fun, even if they rely on the “Here’s a philosophical statement, do you agree or disagree?” type of thing, to which I can all to often reply, “Well, I agree in part, but not totally, so do I select ‘agree’ or ‘disagree’, since either way the game will later on tell me how internally contradictory my beliefs are?” Oh well, it’s still fun. Even if the one game proved the nonexistence of flightless waterfoul.
(BTW, Mary’s blog, The View from the Corner of the Room, is pretty much brand-new but shows all the signs of developing into a fascinating blog indeed.)