Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Monthly Archives: April 2009
Brilliant
What would I do without my son to turn me on to strokes of genius like Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog? From Joss Whedon (you know — Buffy, Firefly). It starts here.
D.
Young men have lost their appeal
Bad enough my flight was 2 hours late flying out of Ontario. (Ontario CALIFORNIA, Rella!) No, they had to seat me in front of some 400 pounds of male twenty-somethings, two exemplars of Jocko testosterosus. They reeked of alcohol and blood and bluster. I remembered a dozen or more of the drunks I sewed up during my residency, tough guys who weren’t so tough when you came at ’em with wimpy little 25 gauge needles. Big men.
I wish I could have slept, but their mouths never stopped. Remember Paul Rudd and Seth Rogen’s you know how I know you’re gay? routine in 40-Year Old Virgin? Imagine that, without the humor. Imagine Beavis and Butthead grown up. Heh heh heh. Shut the F$%# up! No, you shut the F$%# up! You F$%#’in shut up or I’m gonna kick your ass so high it’ll be like, high. No, you shut the F$%# up or so help me I’ll break your nose. It’ll be so fun to watch you waah like a baby.
I figure they had to be at least 21, right? Because the stewardess served them booze. Like they needed more. Fortunately, our prop jet was noisy enough I couldn’t hear most of their conversation. Only when their laughter descended into argument (about once every five minutes) could I pick out the words. You’re so ugly you’re like, uggg-leee. You’re so ugly my butt gets better dates.
I predicted that when the plane stopped, they’d be the first out of their seats, and they would charge to the front of the plane. And I was right.
D.
Old Grandfather
After a productive (and certainly thought-provoking) interview in Bakersfield today, I drove to Ontario. This is a 2.5 hour drive, more or less: 99 to the 5, 5 to the 210, 210 to the 57, 57 to the 10. In Southern California we name our freeways, but most of these are unnamed. 210 is the Foothill Freeway, and 10 is the San Bernardino, unless you’re heading west, and then it’s the Santa Monica. 57 is the Orange. Makes for interesting directions.
210 through Pasadena and Arcadia qualifies as Old Stomping Grounds, methinks, but you wouldn’t expect a freeway to provoke memories. (Not unless you count the 110, AKA Pasadena Freeway, which every car-lover MUST drive at least once in his life. Wikipedia says it “is now known as a dangerous, narrow, outdated roadway” — primarily because the curves were engineered for a max speed of 45 MPH, and some of the on ramps are so short as to be merging death traps. But driving the 110 is an experience no one ever forgets. You’ll need to have this on tape, though, for background music.)
So what’s so evocative about the 210? This mountain range, the San Gabriels (here’s the big version):
Mt. Wilson is the old man of the mountain, who unfortunately has his head in the clouds in this photo. I had forgotten how much this range had reminded me of a sleeping giant. These are childhood memories, largely tossed aside even by age 10 or 11; but yeah, as a kid I could see shoulders, gangling arms and legs, a bald head bristling with antennae (there are lots of radio towers up there — also hidden by clouds). As I inched along the 210 in 6:15 PM rush hour traffic, I kept sneaking peaks to the north. Mountain ranges are not constellations, after all. They change appearance by the mile, and I wanted to catch the profile I knew so well from the 60s.
And suddenly, there he was, Old Grandfather, silent and slate-blue, just as I had remembered him.
You can go home again, but what waits for you exists only in geologic time.
D.
Ephemera
I followed Dean’s friend Graham back to Graham’s blog and discovered that I had missed International Talk Like William Shatner Day. The guy in the video, Maurice LaMarche, claims to be the third best Kirk impersonator. Naturally, I had to find out about the two “best” Kirk impersonators.
Kevin Pollak does an uncanny Kirk:
Sadly, I couldn’t find a clip of Kevin Michael Richards doing Kirk, but I did find one of Kevin Pollak doing an awfully good Christopher Walken.
D.
When did that happen?
We only use one TV, Karen’s big flat screen TV which we keep in the master bedroom; and the only time Jake ever watches TV is either (A) when Mythbusters is on, (B) there’s some educational program Karen wants him to watch, or (C) there’s something on MSNBC or Comedy Central appealing enough to pull him away from the internet.
Last night, Countdown had footage of four lion cubs, so we hollered out for Jake to come see (since he’s a feline fanatic). Karen was brushing her teeth or some such and when she came out, she and Jake were briefly standing side by side. And good lord, he’s almost as tall as she is!
You always hear people say, “Enjoy them when they’re young, it’s over faster than you think,” but it’s stuff like this which drives it home.
Off topic, but: I asked him if he would mind if we sold the downstairs TV. It weighs a ton and we rarely use it. Correction: I’m the only one who uses it, and I think I’ve watched it three times in the last six months. It’s ridiculous to keep shlepping it around with every move.
It used to be Jake’s playroom TV, but if I remember correctly he stopped watching videotapes about the time we bought it. He’d watch his old Battlebots tapes, and that’s about it. He doesn’t even do that anymore.
So I think I have a name for his generation: it should be called the post-TV generation. I guess you might call it the internet generation, but so many of us are internet-fixated, the label is too general. But my generation grew up with TV-as-babysitter, and TV as primary source of entertainment all through my childhood and teenage years. I suspect many of today’s kids are weaned from TV and hooked on the net by the time they reach their 7th or 8th birthdays. Maybe sooner.
I think this is a good thing. The net is far more interactive, and, I would argue, challenging. If you don’t believe me, check out Closure, an odd black-and-white game which requires a great deal of outside-the-box thinking. I bogged down on level four; Jake finished it. (Oh, and yesterday he played a net game in which the goal was to psychoanalyze and cure various neurotic animals. He cured the sheep straight away, but the turtle was very troubled indeed.)
D.
Eating jellyfish
Watching people eat jellyfish, you would think it wasn’t a delicacy. What is the matter with these folks? This stuff is good eats.
How do I describe it, though? That’s not easy, but I’ll try. First thing you have to realize is that jellyfish has little or no flavor of its own; it acquires flavor from its marinade. Typically, this is a mild sweet/sour liquid accented with sesame oil and green or red chili peppers. The jellyfish I had tonight at Tin’s Tea House Lounge (cuz I was too lazy to walk the extra block to P.F. Chang’s) was nicely salted, too, and they served it on a bed of sweet beans. Mung beans? Azuki? I have no idea. I liked them, though.
So yeah, the flavor isn’t difficult to imagine, but the texture is more of a challenge. Closest thing I can compare it to is fresh cucumber pickles — it has that same vegetable crispy-crunchiness (but NOT the crunchiness of a carrot, for example). Watching those YouTube videos, you might think jellyfish is slimy or chewy. It’s certainly not slimy, but chewy? Well, YEAH, you need to use your teeth on this one, but it’s not chewy the way geoduck, abalone, or calamari are sometimes chewy.
I don’t understand why folks have a problem with this. If people are able to stomach durian, they ought to have no problem at all with jellyfish.
I’ve only ever had to spit out one food in my life. My high school girlfriend’s mom said it was fish stomach and I believed her. It had the texture of phlegm. She called it jook, but I have since learned that jook is a rice porridge and does not have the texture of phlegm (or at least it shouldn’t). I think her “fish stomach” comment predetermined my response.
How about you — what did you have to spit out?
Keep it PG-13, please 🙂
D.