Month: February 2011

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Saturday Centus

Hoo boy. I try not to complain…but wow, do I ever hate this week’s prompt! This one is well and truly evil. Oh well, must make do. Jenny Matlock describes the assignment thusly:

I’m not 100% certain, but I think a lot of you probably have dreamt, albeit briefly, of being a Hallmark Superstar. It’s OK to admit it. You’re among friends here. How can you not want to attain the absolute pinnacle of writing success…cheesy sentiments for greeting cards!

With that in mind I scoured the web searching for the perfect romantic picture for you to create a mushy Hallmark-ish masterpiece around.

Now, with all due respect, I have to make an admission here: I have never, not once, harbored any desire whatsoever to write blurbs for Hallmark cards. I have made my own greeting cards in the past, choosing my own artwork and text, but the text I create is usually a poem of some sort, either one I’ve written or a poem I’ve liked from someone else. A standard “picture plus blurb” card, though? Nope. (Not that I’m implying that I am “above” such things, mind you; I’ve just never once wanted to come up with my own Hallmark Card-type of thing. My favorite store-bought cards tend to feature either funny cartoons from The Far Side, or beautiful artwork with no blurb at all inside, maybe just a generic “Happy birthday” kind of thing, with lots of space to write my own long-form greeting. That’s just how I roll, greeting-card-wise.)

Anyway, we’re supposed to write a Hallmark card. OK, fine. And we’re given a picture to work from. Again, fine…except that this is the picture.

Oh, noes. What on Earth am I going to do with this? Now, if I was just going to caption this as a Wonder Woman reference, I’d do something like this:

“Uh, Steve? I’m not totally confident in this new plan of yours to capture the Cheetah.”

But that’s not a Hallmark card, unless it’s a card for Comic Book Guy. What to do…well, OK, I’m stalling. This prompt is, as I said, evil. Jenny Matlock must right now be sitting in the command chair of her mountain fortress, drumming her fingertips together and chortling at the thought of the turmoil she’s unleashing upon her Saturday Centus community.

OK, fine, enough stalling. Here’s what I came up with:

From the rejection pile at Websters Dictionary:

OneTrueLove (n): That person who instinctively understands that there are some things we’ve done that should never, ever, EVER, be spoken of or referred to in any way.

Thank you for being my almost dictionary-defined OneTrueLove!

Best I could do, folks. Harumph.

(Oh, and a note to all the Centus participants whom I’ve met since I’ve started doing this: Feel free to participate in my twice-yearly game, Ask Me Anything! I’m taking queries all month!)

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Ask Me Anything! (Reminder the third)

Ask Me Anything!!!

Remember, folks, I’m taking questions pretty much all month for Ask Me Anything! February 2011. Any question is welcome — serious questions, silly questions, things you’ve always wondered about but didn’t have the opportunity to ask, things you don’t care about but want to make me write about anyway, et cetera. Just post your questions in comments to this post. Or, if you prefer, e-mail is fine (addresses are in the sidebar, but best to use the Gmail one) or Facebook message, for those on FB. Bring it on! Ask Me Anything!!!

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X-Files Case Report: “The Jersey Devil”

“Unlike you, Mulder, I would like to have a life.”

As I wrote in the intro to this series, I didn’t become a regular viewer of The X-Files until the show was in its third season, so there are a lot of episodes from seasons 1, 2, and 3 that I have never seen. That’s one primary motivation for doing this series in the first place, now that we live in a time when watching old episodes of shows that we may have missed is one of the easiest things in the world to do. I remember how it wasn’t always thus; watching reruns of Star Trek as a kid, on an independent teevee station, meant that I could go quite some time without seeing a particular episode – and, in fact, there actually is one episode of Star Trek: The Original Series that I have not seen, to this very day. (It’s “Dagger of the Mind”.)

So, the fifth episode of The X-Files is the earliest in the series that I have never seen. “The Jersey Devil” is a pure “monster of the week” tale: there are no hints of government conspiracies or alien abductions here. Instead, we have some kind of wild thing on the loose in the woods outside Atlantic City, NJ. We first see this thing in the teaser sequence, set in the 1950s; a family is driving at night on a back road to Atlantic City, when they get a flat tire. The father is jacking up the car, says something to his wife, and while he’s in midsentence gets violently yanked into the woods where he is partially eaten. Cut to the present day, when something is preying on homeless people in the back streets of Atlantic City.

Mulder, of course, immediately connects the dots between the current murders and the case from 1950-something, and immediately postulates the existence of something called the Jersey Devil, which is apparently some kind of cannabalistic beastie living in the Jersey woods and preying on people. Eventually it turns out that the current Devil is a descendent of the one from the 1950s, and is actually a female.

Along the way, Mulder ends up annoying the local police, as he so often does. This leads to a typically X-Files-ish ending as the police are intent on doing one thing, Mulder is intent on doing another, and as often happens, Mulder ends up deeply disappointed.

There’s really not a whole lot to say about this episode. Part of the reason is that the show’s mystery is short-changed by quite a bit of screentime devoted to Mulder and Scully’s personal lives – that is, Scully’s desire for a normal personal life and Mulder’s lack of awareness that there even is such a thing. Scully goes to a friend’s kid’s birthday party; she goes on a date with some guy. The date is predictably interrupted by the waiter who comes over and says, “Agent Scully, you have a phone call.” Guess who it is. (This was the early 90s, when the only person on teevee who obsessively used a cell phone was Fox Mulder himself.) At this point in my rewatch, I’m wondering how soon the show will reach the point where we stop hearing so much about their personal lives.

This episode is basically OK – not great, not bad. It’s the first “meh” installment of the series. The next one up is “Shadows”.

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Super?

I have a hard time putting my finger on it, but the last few years, something just seems a bit smaller about the Super Bowl. Sure, they still hype the crap out of it, but it just doesn’t seem like as big an event as it once was. I was rooting for the Steelers, as they’re my second favorite team, but I’ve always liked the Packers too, so it didn’t bother me that they won. But it just seemed like…a football game, with a trophy at the end. Random thoughts follow:

:: I wonder a bit about Pittsburgh’s offensive game planning and play calling. In the second half, with Green Bay’s secondary as banged up as it was, I wonder why they didn’t try coming out in a spread formation and beat the Pack through the air. By that time, Ben Roethlisberger had his mojo back. The Pack came out terribly flat in the second half, and the Steelers just didn’t put the screws to them like I thought they should have.

:: Watching a steady stream of Green Bay players heading for the locker room at one point might be the best argument against an 18-game season that can be made. Football is so physical and violent that in an 18-game season, the team that wins the Super Bowl won’t necessarily be the best team, but the team that makes the playoffs with the most key players healthy.

:: Troy Aikman on scoring: “A field goal is big, but a touchdown here would be huge.” Thanks for spelling that out, Troy.

:: The commercials were crap, across the board. All of ’em. I’m really starting to hate how Super Bowl Sunday is now basically a national holiday for the advertising industry. That many people actually look forward to watching advertising strikes me as indicative of something deeply wrong.

:: Yes, the halftime show was total, utter crap. But the halftime shows are always total, utter crap.

:: Christina Aguilera muffed “The Star-spangled Banner”. You’d think that a professional singer could get the lyrics right, but I guess not.

:: So the powers-that-be at Cowboys Stadium screwed up the ticket sales, and ended up selling tickets to people they didn’t have seats for. Oops. Heckuva job, Jerry!

:: I read a lot of articles last week by sportswriters whining over the Super Bowl not being held in a warm-weather city. I’m not sure how warm Dallas is on a normal first weekend of February, but really, suck it, sports journalists. I think that what was really behind each and every one of those articles that I read was a guy who really likes getting an expenses-paid trip to someplace warm every February, and this year, it was a trip to someplace not quite as warm as usual. Too bad. I hope they have a Super Bowl at Lambeau Field.

:: I’m really getting sick of “narrative-based” journalism. Last year, the whole thing was “Will Peyton Manning stake his claim to being the best ever!” This year, it was “Will Aaron Rodgers make Green Bay forget about Favre once and for all!” This stuff is stupid.

:: That trumpet-fanfare thing they do when the Vince Lombardi trophy is being unveiled is laughable. Forget it, NFL; your trophy is nice, but the trophy itself will never have the cachet of the Stanley Cup.

:: Speaking of which, a local sports radio personality posed the question to Buffalonians: Would you rather win the Super Bowl or the Stanley Cup? True, Buffalo is hockey-crazed, and the Cup would be a sweet, sweet thing. But the NHL is a fairly small thing in the sporting life of the US nowadays. The Super Bowl, on the other hand? If the Bills won that thing, then Buffalo would be able to finally, once and for all, be able to offer an extended middle finger to every single person in the country for whom Buffalo is a punchline. No, I don’t think that a Super Bowl win would have any real effect on Buffalo’s economy or anything like that. But being able to say, “Hey, we won the Super Bowl, so F*** you” would be pretty sweet.

:: Next up: the draft, hopefully. If there’s not a lockout first.

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A tale of two meals

It was a moderately healthy meal…

Na'an bread pizza

…and it was a freakishly unhealthy meal.

Monte Cristo sandwich

The first up there is a pizza I made using a crust of Na’an bread. I spread it with a bit of extra-virgin olive oil, onto which I put some minced garlic. Then I topped the thing with a bit of cheese (an Italian blend from a bag — I got lazy), followed by sliced plum tomatoes, onions, and banana peppers. I sprinkled a bit of basil and oregano on the whole thing, and it was just so good!

And then there’s the Monte Cristo sandwich. Hoo boy.

I haven’t had Monte Cristos very often over the years, as they’re not the most common menu item in restaurants, and…well, they’re not terribly healthy. It’s probably been seven or eight years since I had one. But I got to thinking about the Monte Cristo after I watched an old episode of Good Eats on YouTube. I’ve been watching a bunch of these lately, and one of them had Alton Brown holding forth on a food item that is very dear to my heart: waffles.

At the end of the episode, after he’d made his perfect waffles, he said that you could top it with butter and maple syrup, but that’s not his favorite waffle topping. I figured he was going to put some kind of fruit topping or something like that on there…but instead, he plunked a piece of fried chicken right down on top of the waffle! He said that he tosses the chicken with a bit of hot sauce, puts it on the waffle, and then pours maple syrup over the whole thing. This struck me as very odd.

But when I did a bit of online research as well as talked to a guy at work who knows a lot about food, it turns out that fried chicken and waffles is actually a very common food pairing down south! I love southern food, but I’d never ever heard of this. And as I thought about it some more, I realized that the fried chicken and waffles bit isn’t that far off, conceptually, from the Monte Cristo sandwich.

And what is the Monte Cristo? It’s a meat and cheese sandwich — I used ham, turkey, and Swiss — which you then dip in an egg batter on both sides and then cook in a frying pan. You then serve the sandwich with a sweet sauce to dip it in. You can use fruit preserves, if you like, or you can do what I did here: maple syrup. Of course maple syrup goes well with this; I’ve often had maple-cured ham or maple-cured turkey from the deli, and basically this is a sandwich made from French toast. And wow, was it awesome. As of this writing, I ate that sandwich four hours ago, and I haven’t touched any food since.

(The egg batter I used was just two eggs beaten with a bit of half-and-half. I’ve seen recipes online for thicker batters that you smother the sandwich in before deep-frying the whole thing, but that seems like overkill to me. Most recipes also suggest dusting the sandwich with powdered sugar, but I didn’t bother with that.)

So there you have it. It was a meal of moderation, it was a meal of excess; it was a meal of healthful vegetables, it was a meal of fattening meats and egg-batters and bread. But both were far, far better meals than I have eaten recently!

(If you’re wondering why I’m talking like this, well, I’ll hold forth in a future post about it, but this may explain things:

A Tale of Two Cities

Ach! I’m becoming Dickensian!)

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