A Curmudgeon Thanksgiving

I AM preparing a small Thanksgiving feast. I think I may have done so once before in my life. I am pretty sure I'll have nothing else to think about or write about for the rest of the week. Standard refund policy applies.

In our early years of marital bliss, the holidays found my Poor Wife and I trying to satisfy the moietical demands of our families, further complicated by the fact that my parents were divorced and still bickering at long-range, a situation which continued right up to my mom's funeral. Some years we drove 150 miles or more just to eat two nearly identical meals and beg off the left-overs of a third. My Aunt Margaret, my dad's older sister, was a pretty fair cook with a real touch in dumpling preparation. My mother was not quite as accomplished, but made up for it by working out strenuously. My wife's family's cooking raises the question of how the bloodline survived before the invention of canning.

But whatever the level of competence, these are not people who embrace culinary invention, nor bravely navigate the uncharted waters of exotic ingredients or ethnic ports of call. My last attempt came several decades ago, when I served what I imagined to be a modest suburbanite's plate of roast lamb, spanakopita, and green beans with tomato to a family which looked at me as though I had just expressed a preference for women's apparel or the perineums of young Negro males. I--we--resigned ourselves then and there to a future of letting someone else boil everything to unrecognizability, interspaced with visits to the sort of restaurant which performs the task for you, probably several hours before you arrived. I have occasionally taken some small pleasure, in the case of the latter, of ordering a steak blood rare, then feigning ignorance of the effect on my fellow diners.

My Aunt is now 95 and too feeble for most tasks, let alone a Thanksgiving feast; she became the recipe giver emeritus a few years ago. For a while hosting devolved to my eldest cousin, who is a delightful person, a serial monogamist, and no cook whatsoever; it has since been taken over by her eldest, who is enthusiastic and fairly modern in his culinary tastes, but whose agrarian sense of reproductive obligation renders his house too small for his own brood, let alone the rest of us, so we've decided to stay home.

My Poor Wife declared, however, that the price of her participation was "traditional Thanksgiving fare", not that I was planning on dim sum. So I worked out the menu last night: turkey, brined and roasted, with apple cider gravy; sage stuffing; cranberry sauce, on the grounds that she'll leave me unless there is some; sweet potato soup, unless she reads this and objects, in which case it'll be sweet potatoes, sweetened beyond recognition; couscous with spinach; and a pumpkin-praline roulade, unless I get tired and quit first.

Woman better learn to eat leftovers for once.

These, then, are their stories.

The plan for Day one (today) was Make Potato Bread for Stuffing, shop for ingredients and a new roaster rack during the first rising, grind pork shoulder for sausage which may or may not wind up in the stuffing, and reconsider the whole proposition several times. I jumped up, got the potatoes peeled and boiled by 7:15, then realized at that rate the dough would be risen before Macy's--where I hoped to find a quick roasting rack--was open, so I regrouped.

I was dressed and ready to go when the dough came off the hook and went into the oven to proof. That gave me an hour and a half, tops, for my errands.

So of course Macy's doesn't have any roaster racks without they come attached, for sales purposes, to a roaster. And I don't need a roaster. In fact I don't really need a rack, but I use a couple of metal trivets and they're a pain to clean, plus I was hoping for something that stands a little taller. On to Plan B, which is an early-season trip to the Snootville Mall Williams-Sonoma.

I've mentioned the Snootville Mall a couple times here; it's the one that blasts various perfumes at you at predetermined intervals to enhance the shopping process. It's a Simon Mall; a percentage of each purchase goes to keep Indiana's wealthiest family in bologna sandwiches and internecine squabbling. I always try to go there dressed like a bum, which doesn't take much planning on my part, and today meant the black Levi's shirt with the gray chest-hair accessories, carpenter jeans, and Merrill chameleon ventilated hikers with no socks. I always walk fast, and bump into over-dressed gawkers. I always try to go there and get out as rapidly as possible.

Now Williams-Sonoma employs greeters, much like Wal*Mart, only theirs are ambulatory and reasonably aware. They generally appear to be women beginning to approach a middle-age they were not aware would be somewhat clouded by their having signed a pre-nup without adequate legal advice. Their style and manner says "I'm just doing this between planning Junior League luncheons", but their eyes--if you catch 'em when they ain't looking at you--say something else entirely.

Only this time the greeter wasn't a woman, but a Gay-American who took a quick glance at me as I entered and decided I'd been sent on a mission by someone smarter to buy some inexpensive gadget whose name was probably written on my palm. He might have muttered "Truck Nuts" under his breath. He immediately went back to talking to the geezer he'd been helping, the one who truly had no idea why he was there, without so much as an acknowledging nod. I cased the joint. No roasting racks that didn't come attached to roasters here, either, the main difference being that these roasters ran $250 and up.

And let me just state for the record that I am 100% behind the Gay Agenda to Corrupt America in a Better Organized Fashion than Her Current Corrupters Do, save for one area: retail sales. I do not want to be waited on by someone who introduces him or herself at the beginning of my dining experience. I do not want expert merchandise advice from someone who seems damned tickled to be almost shopping for a living. I am not here for the cheerfulness, whether or not it's free. It makes me think I'm shopping with Amway. No normal person can deal with the public for ten minutes and remain cheerful. Or even recover a previous level of cheerful. I hate the person who employs you, and who marks this shit up double what's justified just so he can afford to spray me with random perfumes. I want you to acknowledge that you do, too. Else I don't want you to make a commission on me.

What he acknowledged, instead, was that they had no roaster racks without roasters attached. I felt like pointing out that they have madeleine pans, cannel knives, three-headed timers, and grapefruit spoons, so maybe a simple fucking rack would not be out of the question, but I had bread rising.

Off as quickly as possible to the grocery, where there are no organic turkeys, but the steroided by minimally-invasive means ones are just over a buck a pound. Place is already a zoo. Grab eight items, head for the Express Check Out Line, aka Why Don't I Know Better By Now? Behind the woman with the screaming infant, who is actually a diversion from the elderly woman who apparently won a lifetime supply of rouge in a radio contest ("That, or she had some bad rug burns"--Kevin Nealon), and who, I swear, takes ten minutes to complete her six-item transaction. From its impatience I'm guessing the baby has dough rising too. Next up, finally, is a middle-aged woman with a dozen items which include two bottles of wine--actually, pink goop with alcohol in it--and who has no ID. So that's a five-minute argument with the clerk, followed by a quick cellphone call (of course) to her husband, who's apparently in the parking lot, waiting for someone to feed him, so he can come in and certify they're old enough to know better.

Good Christ, I hope you people don't fly. Or else I do. At least the bread turned out okay.

Moderate, n. A Guy Who Needs Only One House To Fall On Him Before He Notices.

ITEM: Schwarzenegger Withdraws Support for Offshore Drilling. Which, mind you, was "supposed to" fund Cali's state parks, a sort of West Coast version of Mitch Daniels™ Brand fiscal responsibility, where you sell off state assets you're only temporarily in charge of in order to provide something your base wants to have without paying for it. Though in Indiana's case it's pavement, not trees.

ITEM: Administration in PR "Panic" Over Oil Spill. First, if I woke up to Mike Allen every morning I'd give serious consideration to sleeping until noon, or Eternal Rest; hell, just the fact that I live in a country where administration officials won't eat breakfast without checking the US magazine of politics is enough to make me ponder the Big Sleep.

In fact, conversations at the time of the spill on April 20 show that West Wing aides were worried about the rig tragedy from the moment it was reported. Even before the scope of the disaster was clear, these aides knew that it would undermine, if not reverse, Obama’s support for increased offshore oil drilling.

Aw, gee, ya think?

Maybe it's just that I'm old, but I find myself more astonished, on an almost hourly basis, at the fact that "adulthood" is supposed to require balancing of Obvious Fucking Facts Staring You in the Face with some abiding metaphysical assurance that Profits are talismanic. This, despite the fact that it always winds up operating in reverse; once you deed control over the environment to someone whose sole concern is how much money can be wrung from it, the only question is how big the disaster is going to be.

Okay, that, plus how much we're going to increase it by playing footsie with the profiteers beforehand. (See Joe Conason on Norway's offshore drilling.)

What changed, exactly, between the Drill Baby Drill Convention of '08 and last month? What changed between last month and today? Why does it take an environmental disaster (and far from the first one) to alert you to the potential for environmental disaster?

Would now be a good time to remind you that one reason we're having this "debate" is that we had this debate thirty years ago, when "conservation" and "energy independence" were synonymous with "Malaise"? When the President's PR "Panic" was that someone would catch him with Jimmy Carter's solar panels on his roof?

Incidentally, it's interesting that one of our two major political parties voted en mass against the notion that we can give every American health care, but apparently think we can afford unlimited risk to life and livelihood so long as it's in the name of private enrichment. The Indiana primaries are today, and thank god, as we might get a week's respite from political ads. All Republicans favor jobs and small children, so long as they're their own or their grandchildren, though in Dan Burton's case they could be Romanian stunt doubles. Todd Rokita, best known as the Indiana Secretary of State who figured his office was a grand excuse for putting his name on everything that wasn't nailed down, then buying teevee time to publicize it, bemoans the fact that his newborn son was born $40,000 in debt thanks to the Gubmint. Or some number he pulled from his ass. It's funny that this concern never extends to Young Rokita being born hostage to utility companies, landlords, currency speculators, multinational corporations, or all the people his father's beholden to for financing his million-dollar campaigns. Cute kid, though.

A Little Darker, Please.

Our present toaster, like so many gadgets, is more of a subscription to appliance world

R. Porrofatto

THESE two  articles in the Sunday Times caught my attention. In the former, the old Tiger Stadium in Detroit, the Briggs Stadium of my extreme youth, where Al Kaline and Norm Cash and Harvey Kuenn played a child's game instead of working summers, where for a while Rocky Bridges enjoyed watching ball games and kept a wad in one cheek that made him look like Dizzy Gillespie with Bell's palsy, is being fully or partially demolished (which being the point of the article) for free, in exchange for the salvage rights; in the latter, the rise of thoroughbred fatalities is linked to a Win the Glamorous Races At Age Three Or You're Cat Food mentality that may be weakening the breed.

[Waymon Guillebeaux, a vice president of the Detroit Economic Growth Corporation] also turned a measured eye to the present and said that remaining structural pieces are valuable. They are from the first half of the 20th century. “The steel is the highest of the high grades,” he said. “Steel was cheap then.”

Adding that all metal prices had “gone through the roof,” Rottach said the demolition would be a green project with about 85 percent of the materials recycled.

Now, the only thing I know about economics is that Milton Friedman won a Nobel for it by the simple expedient of using the word "freedom" at least twice per paragraph, thereby giving birth to both the Sisyphean School and a generation of David Brooks columns.  

See, I can't understand why 85%  of the materials in every project known to man wouldn't be recycled.  When did it ever make sense to just throw shit in a hole and put a match to it?  How is it that stewardship has never entered into the equation, except as the anti-capitalist agenda of Dirty Hippie, Inc. ?

Here, again, I'm not insisting common sense should necessarily trump statistical investigation, and I'm not saying the degradability of product quality over time, or increased scarcity, hence cost, is strictly attributable to unchecked avarice and its avatars and professional touts. I'm saying we ought to be able to make a fucking toaster that works as well as they did forty years ago, and the fact that we do not is enough evidence to grab these fuckers by the wrist before they turn over another card, search 'em for the gaff, and ride 'em out of town on a rail, suitably tarred and feathered.

It's more than possible, it's likely I'm an idiot, but, then, I'm pretty sure that when the Reagan administration simultaneously oversaw (if I may use the term) the mass consolidation of the meat-packing industry and simply upgraded every slice of cow in the country ("Everyone under sixteen years of age is now...sixteen years of age," and, after all, why quibble about Grades when you aren't really going to inspect anything anyway?) it was not in consideration of some new technology that turned gristle into filet, but one that turned the public's gold into its own. Freely, as they note in the econ biz.

It's Like A Faustian Bargain, But Without The Faust!

NEW YORK (Reuters) - General Electric Co unit NBC Universal has reached an agreement with TiVo Inc to become the first major broadcaster with the right to use the digital recorder company's research and interactive advertising products, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday in its online edition.

The agreement will give the TV concern's networks such as NBC, Telemundo and Bravo -- as well as its NBC owned-and-operated TV stations -- access to TiVo's ratings data, the Journal said.

The deal will be announced as early as Tuesday, the Journal added.

NBC Universal is also planning to use the deal to sell advertisers TiVo products such as interactive tags, which enable a company's name to be seen even if a viewer is zapping through an ad, the Journal said.

YOU probably won't believe this, but back in the Dark Days of Analog computers were sometimes viewed as potential instruments of evil (!), waiting to run Amok; even the poor unassuming bar code was thought of as a precursor to government-sponsored anal probing and mass extermination camps, and people laughed at Soylent Green. Well, I did, anyway, but then I was high, plus I was only there in the first place because some high school friend of my sister's had suggested that if I took her to see it at the drive-in in my (used) Audi LS she'd let me drive her (almost pristine) Volvo, if you know what I mean, and then she wouldn't.

In fairness, people took concepts like "dehumanization" and "invasion of privacy" and "Nazi death camp" a lot more seriously in those days, and almost no one had seen Star Trek and its window into our technotopian future. The idea of a personal computer wasn't even on the radar. Hell, radar hadn't actually been on the radar all that long, now that I think about it. We hadn't yet experienced the joys of efficient, hydroponically-grown tomatoes, let alone realizing how much greater genetically-engineered varieties would bounce. We fed our cattle grain, if you can imagine, and not, well, less-successful cattle.

I'm not sure when this all changed, but I do know that to the extent Bill Gates is responsible we need to re-think our position on schoolyard bullying. I imagine we can also blame Christmas, which introduced Pong and Atari into American living rooms like undetected carbon monoxide, leaving our citizenry too groggy to realize that in a few short years every meal, opera, family gathering, retail shopping trip, theatre opening, bris, or spectator sporting event would occur under a thick blanket of ringing telephones and the loud recitation of one end of the witless conversations they presage. (All of this leaves out my personal complaint about the sort mindless commercial nostalgia for this stuff which posits it as some simpler, purer time, the sort of thing which might cause a professional scribe to quote someone renting hall space to a bunch of chiptone enthusiasts to the effect that "this is their Woodstock". And don't get me wrong. I have the utmost respect for these or any other artists, and nothing worse than benign neglect for their audience; it's the sort of people who say, "This is their Woodstock," I'd like to see eliminated, or at least driven mad by one side of a telephone conversation while they wait in the checkout line.)

Where the hell was I? Oh, so as of January 1 your TIVO will be spying on you not just for its own amusement, but in the service of the General Electric Corporation (NYSE: GE), a move which is not only being applauded in certain circles but lauded as bold and innovative. Thanks to this sort of modern innovation you don't even need to read the teevee listings anymore. If you did anyway, you'd find that over on the actual NBC tonight you can watch The Bionic Woman as updated for the Late Naughts (she's still a crime-busting techno-feminist with nice hair, but now she's considering Opting Out). Or, if you'd rather catch what market research convinced NBC to do with Bravo ("The Arts Network"), tune in for six prime-time hours of Project Runway. Bodes well, huh? Compared to that a little non-consensual anal probing while someone taps out Freut euch des Lebens on a rejiggered Merlin doesn't sound so bad. Maybe NBC could save a little bold and innovative thinking for the Product.

Happy Birthday

Sputnik I
launched October 4, 1957

IN other news, I read ESPN too much. Gregg Easterbrook:

Although the great technical achievement of 1957 -- the artificial satellite -- and the main consumer-industrial product of that year -- the Edsel -- seem crude in retrospect, great artistic achievements of that same year, such as "West Side Story" and "Doctor Zhivago," seem magnificent in retrospect....

Now think what has happened in technical and artistic trends in the 50 years since 1957. Scientific endeavors have made fantastic strides in quality, complexity and significance. Consumer product quality has increased dramatically -- new cars are packed with features unknown in 1957 yet are far safer and more reliable, and the cell phone in your pocket and the computer you're reading this on, to say nothing of the Internet it's transmitted over, would have been viewed as supernatural by the engineers who built Explorer I. At the same time, the quality of art has plummeted. There hasn't been a musical of artistic merit to open on Broadway in many moons -- right now, it's all vapid dreck. (In fact, I think the show "Vapid Dreck," based on a remake of a remake, opens at the Brooks Atkinson soon.) And although good books are still written, what truly great novel has been produced in the past decade or two? Fifty years ago, technical stuff was buckets of bolts and art was splendid; now, the technical stuff is splendid and the art is in poor repair. This tells us something -- I just wish I knew what.

Well, for starters, that you shouldn't write about the Arts.

Easterbrook and I were born the same year, and if I may say so his point of view strikes me as something shy of inevitable. I sure don't look at cell phones or plasma screens and think what marvelous strides scientific endeavors have made "in significance", and I don't think that improved handling and crush zones are miraculous developments. In fact, I've watched them occur over the years with the same perspective as Mr. Easterbrook, and I think it's reasonable to state that the pace of technological advancement in the past fifty years should not really astonish someone who grew up under the tutelage of people who had experienced the previous fifty. I have the internets. I grew up with color teevee. My first-grade teacher watched the launch of the first American in space on a television brought into class for the purpose. She'd grown up riding a buggy to a schoolroom with no electricity or running water.

I don't mean to trivialize advancements in micro-miniaturization or industrial production, but it seems to me that many great scientific advancements of the last fifty years--the acceptance of plate tectonics, the rise of ecological science, improved notions of human health--are partly or wholly the result of shifting mindsets, (which were often opposed by earlier versions of Mr. Easterbrook's global-climate-change denial) and that much of the rest--in astronomy, genetics, communications--are the result of new tools developed at a not-unanticipated pace. The Sputnik team might be surprised to learn, fifty years on, that we've yet to harness nuclear fusion, but I suspect the two-way wrist telephone wouldn't lead to their establishing a cargo cult.

Which is to say they differ from today's glibertarian exaulters of consumer electronic gizmos. Computer technology did not march forward because consumers wanted it; it marched forward because business and governments did, and at some point some bright boys figured out how to convince ordinary citizens to need them. Weapons technology proceeds apace even though it doesn't make your Ford Escape any safer (though properly applied it could improve the aesthetics). As for the Arts, they're best left alone if we can't avoid playing a species of Fantasy Football with them, but if we must we might harken back to the green real grass fields of our youth and note that our fourth grade teacher said the exact same thing, except she added that her six-year-old niece could paint better than the Modernists. We will also note that in 2007 daubing the Next Natalie Wood with ochre and having her break into inexplicably impromptu song with a "Puerto Rican" "accent" is damned near aesthetically prohibited, an advancement we consider on par with automatic parallel parking, at the least.

Riley Labs Pick

The Novophone Retro handset.

Remember, Riley Labs accepts no advertising.

More Real-Life Captive-Cell-Phone-Audience Adventures, No. 273

Man in potato chip aisle at Marsh: "But I was a different individual back then."

The Kuleshov Effect

It snowed Saturday overnight, just enough that I had to go downstairs to retrieve my errand boots before I went to buy the Sunday paper. We're still feuding with the paperboy from ten years and two houses ago. It had turned what the teevee people were probably calling "bitterly" cold, although that sort of hyperventilation generally fades some by the end of the season, when it becomes harder and harder to scare up ratings by warning people who never go outside if they can help it that it's still winter. (Snow, of course, is another matter, since you have to drive in it; a good snow in the Rockies in June is worth another two ratings points.)

It was 7:15 when I went out the back door. There was a large woodpecker busy somewhere nearby, probably a yellow-shafted flicker, but we sometimes see red-breasteds and the occasional pileated. I couldn't see him but there's no mistaking the sound of their hammering for that of the smaller models, and I (still coffeeless) thought, "Hell of a way to make a living, bub, at thirteen degrees."

It was ten minutes later, as I was leaving the grocery, that some thirty-something guy ravishing his cell-phone would collide with me, bounce off, and walk on into the store without ever looking up. Who th' fuck are you even talking to at that hour on a Sunday? I have survived some horrible contagions in my life--disco, Ronald Reagan, Friends--but cell phones are worse than any of 'em. Okay, except Reagan. I do not get it. I cannot say that enough. If the doctor was calling me Sunday at 7AM to tell me the tests were negative and I could keep my testicles I'd tell him to call back during business hours.

I came home figurin' that bird had a pretty sweet set-up, considering.

They're started doing roadwork on a section of I-70 downtown, and they closed a couple of exchanges Monday, giving the local news hairdos another chance to wail on the Doomsday whistle. The DOT, another government agency Mitch "Lolipop Guild" Daniels has freed from the concerns of government interference, has done what American entrepreneurship does best: it gave a crappy product a snappy name that test-marketed well. So fourteen times per half-hour segment one of the hairdos now spits out some already digested info, not about "the I-70 construction project" or "the massive snarl-up on the interstate", but about the Super 70 Project. Get it? It's Super! It's Super Absorbent! Super Size It! Justice League Seal of Approval! Swear to God, one of 'em used the phrase twice in one simple declarative sentence.

I've figured out why the modern newscast requires four regular anchors, four subanchors, eighteen weather dramatizers, and countless field reporters, just to relay the same eight-point-four minutes of news over the course of four hours daily: it's because everybody not on camera is on his or her cell phone.

And these are the same people (one of whom did a story toss two weeks ago that included the phrase "New Way Forward in Iraq") aping heartfelt concern over the vidclips of the Armed Services Committee Walter Reed hearings they had to introduce yesterday. One called the hearings "very intense". You know when they break out the adjectival intensifiers for their milky blandishments they're serious!

Very intense! The news as brought to you by Emilio Estavez in Repo Man. What she meant, of course, was, "You might want to look away, or else you'll catch a glimpse of men who lost 25% of their superior cranial surface area fighting a meaningless war half of you supported by putting out yard signs. And then were treated like shit when they got home, lest any of you be given pause by the amount of money we were spending so a drunken frat boy you, a once free and proud people, actually elected President, could work out his Daddy issues. In fact, you might want to run, far, far away, as if you can ever get away from yourself."

Is it even necessary to add that thousands more Americans are bound for the same war having had their training cut short so the same Idiot-in-Chief can score points with what's left of his constituency? That they're headed off with less than the nominal equipment, some of it less than optimal equipment, or that we've known about this for four years now? Or that this sort of thing has been reported for at least half that time? That the Bush administration fucking short-changed the American veteran right out in public, without even bothering with the distracting patter? And that includes every news hairdo now cluck-clucking over "deplorable" conditions? Or that those matters were too very intense for them to report on? New Way Forward. Fuck you. Very.

I had originally intended to work Holy Joe Lieberman's quote from Sunday's Face the Nation into yesterday's Brooks piece, but it's a better fit here. Lieberman bemoaned the fact that we'd "failed in our moral responsibility" to our service men and women. This would be the same Joe Lieberman who said of Abu Gharib that it was moderately deplorable but the Moslems asked for it. I guess we're supposed to believe it's never dawned on the man that some of those injured vets got that way thanks to the recruiting power of that hands-off attitude, just as it never dawned on Bob Schieffer to ask Holy Joe--the reliable bipartisan voice for the Blinders On strategy--how it is he missed the moral outrage before a ton of it fell on his head.

Never trust a public moralist, and never trust someone who will take money to call a public shame "very intense". When the people who have bought and sold the War on Terra are leading the charge to flush out the sewers, not cashier a few general officers and see if that appeases the crowd; when Joe Lieberman's moral outrage leads to his resignation, when the right wing noise machine apologizes to John Murtha, when the Mighty Wurlitzer blows a fuse--then they can cry real tears, and then we can believe 'em. You could have stopped this shit as it was happening. And wouldn't that have been Super!