What’s needed now is a little wonder. So here’s Wonder Woman.
Grumble grumble grumble….
An open letter
A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter
A Perfect Storm of Stupid
It’s always weird when one comes into contact with the way a rabid right-winger views the world; they just don’t see things the way the rest of the world sees them. At all. It’s often breathtaking and creates cognitive dissonance as on the one hand, one tries to formulate arguments against their clearly ludicrous positions, but on the other, one realizes that none of it will work in the slightest.
Case in point: Ben Shapiro’s list of the ten most overrated directors in history. Ben Shapiro is one of those people who thinks that every single thing under the sun needs to be examined for its conservativeness (or lack thereof), often with laughable results. Like this article. Here are some of his more laughable assertions (and most of them are terribly laughable):
On Ridley Scott:
Ridley Scott has, for some odd reason, received accolades that far outpace his actual accomplishments. He’s made one entertaining film, Gladiator, and a host of second rate films masquerading as masterpieces. Blade Runner is a bizarre and massively overpraised mess. Thelma and Louise is liberal tripe, although it does provide the best imagistic summary of modern feminism: two irritating “independent” women driving themselves off a cliff…Then there’s Kingdom of Heaven, which is an homage to the “religion of peace” and a slap at Christianity through and through. Alien is slow. GI Jane is hysterically terrible. Plus, it’s got Orlando Bloom, who has about as much charisma and credibility as Al Gore.
Nice editing there; Orlando Bloom isn’t in GI Jane but Kingdom of Heaven, which Ben disses two films previously on grounds that make clear, if you’ve actually seen KoH, that the only way Ben would approve would be if it depicted Muslims as murderous without exception and Christians as holy without exception. And thank God we have the Al Gore reference! Hoo-boy!!
On Michael Mann:
All style, no substance.
That’s always a pretty useless complaint, but it certainly indicates something about Ben that he couldn’t find any substance in Heat.
On David Lean
Everything Lean made is too long by at least half an hour. I know it’s mortal sin to suggest that Laurence of Arabia, Dr. Zhivago, The Bridge on the River Kwai, and Ryan’s Daughter are anything less than masterpieces, but … they’re all less than masterpieces.
It’s not a mortal sin. It’s just stupid. Kind of like saying Hamlet is “less than a masterpiece”.
On Quentin Tarantino:
I recently watched Inglourious Basterds and marveled at Tarantino’s skill. But he is a gifted high school child given a camera for his birthday, and entranced with his knowledge of cinema. Which means, in simple terms, he doesn’t know how to tell a story.
Given Ben’s all-too-obvious inability to read or watch a story, it certainly seems odd that he would quibble with Tarantino’s ability to tell one. But Pulp Fiction is pure story, brilliantly told. Ben’s babblings about plot make clear what’s happened: he’s failed to understand the movies he’s watching.
On Martin Scorsese:
Goodfellas is similarly disgusting – you feel the need to take a shower after watching. Why anyone would want to spend several hours of his/her life with coke-snorting Ray Liotta and Co. is beyond me. The Last Temptation of Christ is baffling.
Umm…no, it’s really not baffling at all. Unless you’re stupid, that is. As for Ben’s take on Goodfellas, well, I suspect there aren’t enough trees in the world to yield sufficient paper to contain a list of items that make Ben want to take a shower afterwards.
But his Number One choice for Overrated Directors is an utter hoot:
On…
…wait for it…
…oh my…
ALFRED HITCHCOCK!!!
He never made a great film. He was the Stephen King of the silver screen: he made films with great premises, but he never knew where to go from there…North by Northwest relies on the tried-and-true random helpful coincidence to save our hero, time and again. It brings to mind one of Twain’s rules of writing, directed toward Fenimore Cooper: “the personages of a tale shall confine themselves to possibilities and let miracles alone; or, if they venture a miracle, the author must so plausibly set it forth as to make it look possible and reasonable.” Not so much for Hitchcock…Rear Window makes one reach for the fast-forward button.
So many assertions! Stephen King never knows where to go with his stories! North by Northwest relies too much on coincidence for an established fan of 24 like Ben Shapiro to follow! Rear Window taxes his ability to pay attention! Although, I suspect that last isn’t out of boredom; rather, I suspect that looking upon Grace Kelly gives Ben the urge to take one of those showers of his.
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On impolite thoughts and the posting thereof
Several readers have expressed dismay at the marked shift in tone that this post represents from the kind of thing I usually post here. I understand that concern, but in this case, I’d hope those offended would take into account the fact that it clearly takes a lot from the ilk of Mr. Limbaugh to get me to post something like this. Instead of “OMG, what an awful thing to say”, maybe the reaction should be, “OMG, what made him feel like saying that?”
Is this an apology? Well, no, not really. The complaint voiced in the several e-mails I received on this post was phrased almost identically in each case: “This isn’t what I come to Byzantium’s Shores for.” While I sympathize to a certain extent, it’s only to a certain extent, and I reserve the right, as always, to write this blog for reasons that may not match up at all times to the wishes of those who read it.
I write in this space to express thoughts that I feel like expressing. While I don’t express every thought in my head here, I can in no way guarantee that sometimes the thoughts I express here won’t be the uglier ones. If on very rare occasions I don’t live up to your expectations of me as a blogger, well, I think that’s more on you than it is on me. In the end, the only expectations that matter are that what I post here is a real and accurate depiction of something I think. If not, then the blog is a waste of everyone’s time — mine for writing it, and yours for reading it.
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Porky Goodness
I decided, kinda-sorta on a whim, to make some pulled pork the other day.
Now, in the past when I’ve had the taste for pulled pork, I’ve bought it already-made at The Store, either our own make of it or a brand like Lloyd’s, which comes in a tub and just needs to be heated up. But while I used to love Lloyd’s products, over time I’ve come to find them too saucy and too sweet, and I’ve further learned that pulled pork is basically a very cheap hunk of meat, cooked until it shreds, and then simmered a bit in sauce. More or less.
So I bought two items the other day. I bought a small roasting pan, with rack; this is to supplement our larger roasting pan, which is big enough to roast a nice-sized turkey, but is a bit cumbersome when one wants to roast a six-to-eight pound cut of meat or a chicken or a game hen or…you get the picture.
The other item I bought was, obviously, the meat. I bought an eight-pound shoulder butt pork roast, which I laid out on the rack of my new roasting pan and seasoned on both sides with a rub:
Then I covered the roast with foil and put it into the oven at 375 degrees, where it remained for the next four hours. It was about an hour into this process that I discovered a flaw in the Homemade Pulled Pork Plan: even though the cooking time is six hours, your home smells like wonderful pulled pork after just one. Talk about hunger being the best sauce, and smells stoking the hunger….
After four hours, I removed the foil and popped the roast right back into the oven, for another ninety minutes or so. At this point I was checking the roast’s temperature every twenty minutes or so, aiming for about 175 degrees; when I finally reached that point, I took the roast out of the oven and let it “rest” on top of the stove for ten or fifteen minutes. (Believe me, folks, allowing cooked meat to “rest” before doing anything else is so essential to good cooking that, well, it’s almost a deal-breaker; cutting meat just after removing from the heat will pretty much destroy any effect you have from your careful preparation. Trust me on this.)
Then it was time to shred and simmer a bit in sauce. I grabbed a couple of forks and shredded away, dropping the hunks of meat into my trusty crockpot. This took a lot longer than I had originally thought it would; even as tender as the meat was after that long in the oven, it still takes a while to physically shred eight pounds of the stuff by hand. Once I had it all shredded (except for a couple of large hunks of fat, which I removed), I poured in most of a bottle of barbecue sauce (a “Kansas City” style recipe sauce, although not the stuff that my good friend Mark likes to recommend because he knows the people who make it, but next time, that’s what I’m using because trust me folks, it’s good sauce), and then ran the crockpot on high for about half an hour, just to bring everything to a nice piping-hot temperature.
The final result? Utter sandwich heaven:
Of course, being that our household is just the three of us, this process yielded an enormous amount of pulled pork for us. We each ate two sandwiches that night; The Wife and The Daughter had some more for lunch the next day; I had it for lunch yesterday and will have more today; and yet, as of this writing, there is still a huge container of it in our fridge. So far we’ve got seven meals’ worth of meat out of that roast, and we’re not close to done yet. Total cost will be under a buck a meal for each serving we end up getting out of it. That rocks.
My process here wasn’t any kind of “official” method for making pulled pork, but I put it together from reading some recipes online and looking at the shredded pork recipe in Emeril Lagasse’s cookbook devoted to pot-luck dishes. It’s as easy a cooking process as I’ve encountered. If you’ve never made your own pulled pork, give it a shot. It’s easy!
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Sentential Links #194
Wow, we’re closing in on two hundred of these posts! Awesome!
(BTW, with comment moderation being the rule here now, I’m reopening comments on these posts, with certain rules that are known to the persons who have need to know them.)
:: The most depressing thing is that if Fineman absolutely had to try to make some sort of convoluted connection between President Obama and President Bush, there was a natural analogy that sort of fit- the tsunami in 2004. (The “Katrina and the Haiti earthquake are the same thing” meme is pretty obnoxious, isn’t it?)
:: Only on page 17ish and already seeking out “an incomplete concordance to Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco.” (Ah, I read that book when I was in college. I loved it…but I’m pretty sure I actually understood less than half of it.)
:: Cats make excellent jurors. (Oh no they don’t! They’ll decide someone’s guilt based on whether the box is clean or the food dish is full. A cat would acquit Ted Bundy if he filled the dish and petted him or her.)
What I miss is the society.
:: No matter what I do, it seems like I always will wonder about the road not taken. (Lynda’s blogging is always best when she’s being all existential! But she’s working her way through what potentially could be, for her, a huge decision.)
More next week!
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Get the crash cart!
Well, it’s not a crash cart, obviously, but it’s my tool cart at work. If Batman had to push around his best weapons in a Rubbermaid cart, maybe it would look like this. Or something like that. OK, the Batman thing’s a bad metaphor, but this is the cart I use at The Store as I roam around, fixing stuff. Most of the tools I tend to use on a daily basis are here, plus some I use a bit less frequently.
On the top shelf, there are three main items. First, and most obviously, is the case for my DeWalt 18-volt cordless drill. That’s the only power tool I tend to wheel about as a matter of course; I do have others at my disposal, but I use none of them frequently enough to elevate to “Cart” status. Beneath the drill case, not really visible, is a flat box that is separated into a bunch of small compartments. This box contains screws and fasteners of different sizes and types.
In front of the drill case is my main tool bag. It’s an electrician’s bag by Husky, and this one contains the hand tools that I use most frequently. Here are all of my screwdrivers, nut drivers, lineman’s pliers, diagonal pliers (sometimes called “dikes” for short), tongue-and-groove pliers, locking pliers, hammer, combination square, torpedo level, probes, inspection mirror, Allen wrenches, digital multimeter, and so on. The tape measure you can see there is my backup; my main tape is always on my belt.
On the bottom shelf of the cart I keep things I use less frequently. Way at the front, tucked near the corner, is a box of electrical repair supplies: wire, wire connectors and nuts, cable ties, fuses, and the like. Behind that is a second tool bag in which I keep things like crescent wrenches, a socket set, chisels and files, a flashlight on a folding tripod, Torx drivers, and most of my drill bits.
Behind that tool bag is a plastic tote that contains my kneepads, an extension cord, two kinds of Velcro, WD-40, air duster, wipes, and fishing line. (This is for hanging signs at work, which is a big part of what I do.) There’s also a canvas pouch teetering there which contains my safety glasses, earplugs (essential for me when I’m using the table saw), a knit hat, and two pairs of work gloves.
Up top, by the handle where I push the cart, are several small compartments where all manner of stuff tends to accumulate: screws of odd sizes for which I have no assigned space in my fastener box, note pads, pens, and various other little things that pile up in the course of the job. Throw in a cup holder, and there you have it: my Cart of Infinite Repair. All I’m lacking are missiles with which I might target and destroy my foes!
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Might want to check the whole screen, guys….
Here’s a screengrab of what is, as of this writing, on the NFL section of the FOX Sports website:
The main headline there refers to Chargers tight end Antonio Gates, who may have a big day in today’s playoff game against the Jets. Hence the pun in the headline, “Pearly Gates”.
Except, over there in the sidebar on the left, the lead item is about a Chicago Bears player who died this morning. Seems a bit odd to have the giant headline “Pearly Gates” juxtaposed with the news of a guy who’s just died, doesn’t it?
It reminds me of a time in high school, when during a football game, a player on the opposing team was injured sufficiently for the ambulance to be driven out onto the field. (No idea what came of that, but we never heard that it was truly awful, so I’m guessing he broke something.) During the delay, the fellows running the PA system decided to put on whatever music was on the radio. The song that came on, right on the chorus, was “Don’t Cry Out Loud” by Melissa Manchester. Oops.
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Sunday Burst of Weirdness
Oddities abound!
:: The Battle of Hoth from The Empire Strikes Back, in Legos. This is amazing.
:: Who doesn’t like a good food fight in a movie? Here’s a top ten list of such food fights. I’d personally put The Great Race ahead of Animal House, but that’s just me.
:: Not weird, but extremely cool: the USS Independence:
I read about the ship over on Toolmonger, and they’re right: that is just an impressive-looking vessel.
More next week!
