Imagine being nearly 80 years old and typing “yummy skills.” // No birth control like high chairs at happy hour. // Friend IRL served squash blossoms, two ways for dinner the other night. I told her forced-birthers couldn’t eat ‘em: fetal zucchini. // If your app takes your flack two screens of text to explain, maybe pitch it into the trash? // Explosive flavor sounds like an Ex-Lax promise. // Agriculture secretary sez food stamps “should not be the whole enchilada” for recipients. Dog-whistle much? // GOP tax cuts are just golden showers all over again. Free salt for the peed-ons. // One more reason never, ever to elect a teetotaler. He doesn’t care about wine people. // I will never forgive him for depriving us of taco trucks on every corner . . .
Toss ’em some canned chicken
A senator the other day described the so-called president’s foreign policy as “a dirt soup of incompetence, amateurism, neglect and braggadocio.” I’d say it’s worse. It’s a bone broth.
Instagram duped and tripled
If your eggplant flesh is almost devoid of flavor, you’re buying from the wrong farmer. And shouldn’t it be “from Parma to Pittsburgh”?
Swamp water in Riedel glasses
The orange feces flies so fast these days you can’t keep up, but I do have to note how pathetic it was that he chose Le Cirque for his $250K-a-couple fundraiser (because of course Hillary is pure evil for raking in the bucks). I mean, really. Donors have that kind of cash and you feed ‘em bankrupt chicken? But the story got even sadder — as with everything he reverse-Midas touches, the resto is ruint. It’s closing after New Year’s Eve. And probably without even collecting what he owes. The whole sad debacle gives new meaning to the term “celebrity haunt.”
Down to the deer heart
The latest mass slaughter of humans has me remembering being outside Pittsburgh on a story for Al Jazeera a few years ago and coming to have grudging respect for hunters who use rifles to “ventilate fauna,” as the inimitable Charlie Pierce puts it, to put food on their families (and in soup kitchens). My dad kept guns to shoot deer and jackrabbits, back in the days when the NRA was for hunters, not lethal weapons manufacturers. So I’m not in favor of a total ban, although keeping assault weaponry out of the hands of angry white guys would be a healthy first step. But I also keep flashing back to the frigid morning when my consort went plunging into the icy woods with his camera and audio recorder while I stayed behind in the rental car to try to stay warm. At one point a truck pulled up and two big guys jumped out with huge guns, and I realized I had all the doors locked but was completely vulnerable if they wanted to rob-and-rape. They could shoot out the windows, do their evil and drive right off. Their penis substitutes gave them all the power. But I still don’t think I’d have been any safer with one of my own.
$500K gossip at “Tacos Mexican Style” trough
As much as I rant about risotto emails getting us into this mess, I have to remember the botulism goes much deeper. The puke funnel that slimed Hillary for the last 25-plus years was mainstreamed by the likes of MoDo, who had such a giddy old time at a $505 Beluga-and-Porterhouse-and-1990 Corton-Charlemagne dinner with the junkie who would go on to gull listeners into staying behind in a liberal-hoax hurricane while he decamped to LA. Hooker or reporter? You decide.
A chicken (part) in every wok
More and more, it’s becoming obvious that the guano is getting real with all the foxes in charge of the Orange Henhouse. A report in the unlinkable Murdoch Crier detailed how the chicken industry is carping the diem to demand rollback of yet another rule imposed by the successful black prez, the one that limited poultry factories to whacking up a mere 140 birds a minute. A minute would now have 175 carcasses flying by, sort of Lucy-on-the-chocolates-line pace but now with more salmonella. The LOL, however, may be last on the greedsters. Their racist hero and his brownshirts at ICE are guaranteeing there will be no one available to do the work. Unless, of course, he succeeds in doing away with disability and Social Security. Guys on oxygen tanks and grandmas in wheelchairs will surely flock to feather their mitts with that sweet, sweet unliving wage.
Blackwater butter backlash
With the ’21’ Club back in the news thanks to the cretin in chief, I do have to note that the toilets there have all been elevated for the comfort of old asses.
Cow laughing at gum di guar
I kept the end flap of a box like this on my desk for a full year, fully hoping to type about how scary fud like this can be (the flight attendant last July responded to my Italian seatmate’s rejection of the wake-up meal with a chortling “Oh, you’ve had it, have you?”) And here I am, home again. (In AA’s defense, though, the Italian dressing was made in Germany.)
Don’t the Amazon make the apron blue?
I’ve only been back in the home of the brave for less than 72 hours, so maybe I’m missing something on the latest outbreak of food hysteria over burrito bowls. Do Americans shun cruise lines when norovirus wipes out whole shiploads of passengers? Or does social media make it easier for squitter reactions to spread fast? I’m so cynical I always wonder about industrial sabotage — factory fud is not gonna give up the fight kindly. Even as chefs clamber onto the dying burger train while basketball stars see the future is round and cheese-y. And made to your order by human hands.
Ketchup, well-done
And I probably should be nervous that the DHS (that would be the agency with the Deutschesque middle name) is now sending me releases on an expansion of visas for ag and hospitality workers. Why me, who can’t even keep a cat employed, let alone myself? Couldn’t be that I have noted that a certain orange shitstain benefits most from waivers of immigration laws at “his” vineyard and sanitation-challenged private “club,” could it?
Like pigeons on chips
Apparently there is no T-free zone in the world. And there should not be. It would be like ignoring typhoid when Mary is your cook. Still, the trouble with traveling while wired is that it’s too easy to stay obsessed with the insane clowns and the posse after them back home while blissfully exploring a favorite city for the fourth time on your fifth* trip. Even away from the computer there is overlap. One day I picked up online outrage over the dismantling of regulatory agencies, then passed a marker in the Piazza delle Herbe, once Torino’s most important market square, where full centuries ago “city authorities had to guarantee supplies of foodstuffs and check weights and trading.” The free market can never be trusted to be free. Now every time I start to think this bogus regime is going medieval on America, I’ll realize that might be an improvement.
*The food here is so uniformly good I can even vouch for what they serve in hospitals.
Regina TP next to the Asso
And I have also realized the Italians know exactly what to do with an orange jackass. Make something that would intimidate Bobo Brooks.
Every day is take your dog to market day, though
One night I spotted a couple eating at the vegan cafe whose slogan is “eat with head” tossing scraps to their dogs. Who were gobbling. I didn’t know if I should alert the Italian version of the FDA. Or the Torino ASPCA.
RTs/MTs
You can always tell a city is changing in the best way when liveliest neighborhoods are not on the tourist map. // On my third walk through an open-air food market in Torino I thought: “They all have the same stuff.” Then: “Oh. Yeah. Cuz it’s all seasonal.” // Even Ray Bradbury never envisioned Cryovaced octopus. // Only travel writers can see the Po from a table at Porto di Savona on Piazza Vittorio Veneto. // An important distinction at a farmers’ market: You say “due” and they ask “chilo or numero?” // Chest of quail is a pretty great translation. // Why you run through cash so fast in a foreign country? Every time they announce the check, clueless you reaches for the biggest bill to avoid misunderstanding. // I also saw a produce vendor wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with “nice people make nice things.” So that’s my problem. . .