Son of Rumaki
Wednesday night, we took my parents out to Nora’s Wine Bar and Osteria in the northwestern section of Las Vegas. We expected good-quality, upscale Italian, but we got a whole lot more for our money than that. Each of the entrees had a certain indescribable uniqueness, as if the chef had given more than a little thought to making the dish his own. Grilled Scampi, for example, had little in common with the shrimp-bathing-in-garlic-butter concept we all know too well. Imagine little lobsters split lengthwise, charcoal broiled, chest cavities filled with an herb-and-bread stuffing. (They weren’t lobsters. They just looked like ’em.) Freshest-tasting prawns we’ve had in a long, long while.
But I was even more impressed with their grilled chicken thighs, described in the menu as “mesquite-grilled” with “spicy Sicilian blood orange vinaigrette.” They might have grilled them over mesquite, but they finished them under the broiler, or perhaps in a deep fryer (although I didn’t detect the least hint of oiliness). The skin was that crispy. The vinaigrette was truly remarkable, a perfect balance of citrus flavors with a chicken reduction glaze.
Listed simply as “dates” on the appetizer menu: China Ranch dates stuffed with Parmigiano-Reggiano and wrapped in bacon. Wow. I tend to think “rumaki” whenever I encounter bacon wrapped around a soft center, but this had little in common with rumaki. I found a recipe over at Epicurious which looks about right. See what you think.
Definitely some great ideas for our next dinner party, whenever that may be . . .
D.
No Country for Little Kids
He’s not a little kid anymore. Good God, his voice is changing! But “No Country for Blooming Adolescents” didn’t have quite the same ring . . .
Las Vegas is not a kid-friendly town. Used to be, the only casino you could take a child and not get dirty looks (or worse) from omnipresent security guards was Circus Circus. Even at the Circus, if you happened to be standing in place for longer than a minute (say, for example, while waiting for a family member to get out of the bathroom), a guard would come over and escort you to the front lobby. Loitering ist verboten!
Even now, it’s easy to run out of things to do. We went to Red Rock Canyon on Tuesday; it’s a fine place to climb without gear since the grades are gentle and you really have to work overtime to get yourself into trouble. Nevertheless, Jake usually manages to find one precipice or another to climb out on, whereupon HIS life flashes before my eyes.
Yesterday we went to a place called Gamestop, and oy, what a hassle, since we had to park at the MGM and walk a fair distance to get there. And all totally unnecessary, since when I googled Gamestop just now, there are locations all over Vegas (including one just a few miles away from my parents’ house). The one we went to had the rattiest pool tables I have ever seen, and way too many out-of-order games. Still, we had a decent time shooting pool, playing air hockey, and killing zombies. Noisy place, but at least they don’t allow smoking.
He wants to go to Circus Circus today. Yes, it’s another arcade, but they do have circus acts, and the arcade games are different than the ones at Gamestop. As for me, I’ll be happy if I can make it to a bookstore. (I finished Earth Abides yesterday . . . and even if it doesn’t pack the punch of The Road, it still closes with a haunting quality. There’s a bit at the end where the protagonist, who has grown quite old, speculates that most of the people who died in the Great Disaster (a plague) would have been dead by now anyway, and the young people alive now have known no other world than this, and seemed contented with their lot. So was it such a Great Disaster after all?)
There’s a Go Kart track somewhere nearby, but we did that not long ago and Jake hated it. They used to have a water park in Vegas, but it’s the wrong time of year for that, too. I suppose we could catch a movie.
For Thanksgiving, we’re either going to a casino buffet (with all the trimmins!) or PF Chang’s. I’m hoping for PF Chang’s. Sort of like the ending to A Christmas Story, don’t you think? But we all need to celebrate the holiday in our own peculiar way.
Some more peculiar than others.
D.
the usual surreal experience
My parents believe in papering their walls with family photos. I can’t look up from the computer without being transported ten, twenty, forty years ago. Or more. My dad has an old war photo or two hanging about, and . . . sweet Jesus, where’s their old wedding photo, or painting, or whatever it is? I remember it hanging in the living room in the house of my toddlerhood. Oh, there it is in their bedroom.
I feel like Billy Pilgrim.
Some things never change. My mother still uses too much paprika on her roast chicken. My parents still communicate at 70 decibels — it’s worse now, since she won’t wear her hearing aid. They still have a neurotic dog. Every few years they exchange it at the Neurotic Dog Store. At least this one doesn’t get so excited by strangers that he ejaculates (which used to make bringing friends over to the house a real trial).
The rest drifts slowly but perceptibly toward entropy. They’re not quite who they used to be, nor are we. Thank heavens for Jake; if it weren’t for children, older might be a wholly depressing concept.
D.
Still on my mind
You know how some books and movies linger? I still have The Road on my mind. That whole what does it mean to be human theme gets to me, I guess. McCarthy’s point (one of his points, anyway) is, we’re not solitary creatures, and even the family unit does not raise us to a much higher level. Altruism is key. And sometimes you have to take risks on people.
At least, I think that’s what this book is all about.
Somehow this seems appropriate:
And besides, Natalie’s a cutie.
D.
Post-apocalyptiana
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Earth Abides by George R. Stewart
Fallout 3 by Bethesda Software
As a kid, I read Mordecai Roshwald’s Level 7, a grim post-nuclear holocaust tale in which humanity ekes out a few final weeks of existence in underground bunkers. This stuff fascinated me. The time was the 70s and the Cold War was very much alive and frigid; we had regular duck-and-cover drills, and you could set your watch by the local Civil Defense siren’s weekly howl. I still dream of blinding flashes, of the anticipatory horror before the arrival of a flesh-vaporizing shockwave. Level 7 wasn’t great literature, but its uncompromising lack of sentiment gave it an enduring place in my memory.
I read Earth Abides back then, too, and I recall it as an almost romantic vision of post-apocalyptia. The holocaust is viral, not nuclear, and the humans are struggling but not doomed. Apathy is a far greater threat than man’s darker nature, which appears only in scattered incidents. A man uses a loose woman as bait for a trap. Another man carries a venereal disease and is disposed of by a community that would just as soon not deal with that particular vestige of the past.
It’s a fun book, in a way, because Stewart (who was a Berkeley English Professor) seemed to care less about the question, “What will a few survivors do with an empty Earth?” and more about the question, “What will the Earth do without Man?” It’s an ecologist’s fantasy, a rumination on the decay of society’s trappings and the response of the creatures who live because of or in spite of humanity.
I just finished a much different book, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Surprisingly, it has a happy ending, or as happy an ending as one could hope for from such a grim creation. A man and his (six-year-old?) son walk south over a burned-out wasteland of a continent. The son’s obsession that they remain “the good guys” in this world of roving cannibals provides all of the drive and much of the tension: how can they possibly remain the good guys? The father-and-son relationship provides the story’s heart. If you can get past McCarthy’s love of sentence fragments and hatred of quotation marks and apostrophes, the writing is beautiful, even though the subject matter couldn’t be more stark.
What horror overtook this world? McCarthy mentions “concussions” in a flashback, suggesting explosions; but if the apocalypse was nuclear, everyone would have long since died. As it stands, humans have done far better than plants and animals. McCarthy’s wasteland is almost too grim to be believable.
I suspect Fallout 3 got me in the mood for death and devastation on the grand scale. Fallout 3 takes place a couple hundred years after a nuclear war. Some fragments of society persist in a few dozen scattered Vaults, underground shelters with insular, vaguely autocratic societies. Above ground, which is where most of the action takes place, civilization lingers in scattered settlements (Auntie Entity would be proud). Out in the wild, you battle radscorpions, giant mole rats, and various and sundry other ghouls and super mutants. Oh, and this “wild”? It’s the Capital Wasteland, the ruins of Washington D.C., dotted with remnants of the Capital Building, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Washington Monument.
The charm of Fallout 3 derives from its premise: we’re not fighting for our lives in a post-nuclear Earth, but an alternate universe, one in which human culture froze circa Leave it to Beaver. A local radio station plays great hits from the 40s: The Ink Spots “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire,” Bob Crosby’s “Way Back Home,” Billie Holiday’s “Easy Living.” My favorite, perhaps: Danny Kaye and the Andrew Sisters singing oh-so-politically incorrect “Civilization”:
Each morning a missionary advertise with neon sign
He tells the native population that civilization is fine
And three educated savages holler from a bongo tree
That civilization is a thing for me to see
So bongo, bongo, bongo I don’t want to leave the congo
Oh no no no no no
Bingle, bangle, bungle I’m so happy in the jungle I refuse to go
Don’t want no bright lights, false teeth, doorbells, landlords
I make it clear
That no matter how they coax him
I’ll stay right here
Here’s a full review of Fallout 3 over at PC World.
What’s the appeal of these doomed worlds, I wonder? Do they appeal to the misanthropes among us, or the humanists who believe that human nobility is most manifest in the direst of worlds? They’re stories of survival, most of them (Level 7 being the notable exception) so perhaps we like to think that we, too, have what it takes to make it through to the other side. And what a Darwinian jackpot for the survivors! George R. Stewart certainly understood this; his survivors reproduce like rabbits in the aftermath of the plague.
I wish I had something profound to say, particularly regarding The Road. My sister tells me they’re teaching it in high school these days — not bad for a book with a pub date of 2006. But I’m feeling bereft of profundity today, so I’m left with a piss-poor take-home message.
People who eat people are bad people.
D.
Cuteness overload
We need one of these.
And this is for you chemists and physicists.
And for Shaina and my other lantslaite, JewTube.
D.
For Shaina
From Jewz N The Hood.
Best exchange? When the Hasids say,
“What are they, gentiles?”
“No. RECONSTRUCTIONISTS!”
Read about reconstructionism here.
D.
A journey for the rest of us
From The Power of Myth with Bill Moyers:
Moyers: Why are there so many stories of the hero in mythology?
Campbell: Because that’s what’s worth writing about. Even in popular novels, the main character is a hero or heroine who has found or done something beyond the normal range of achievement and experience. A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.
I used to think, “We can’t all be heroes.” I also used to channel Dirty Harry Callahan to my med students and junior residents: “A man’s gotta know his limitations.” I still hold by those words.
Some folks have to see themselves as heroic. I don’t have to, but that’s just me. If I wanted to, I could work some internal magic and see myself as a hero; the trick lies in one’s definition of “something bigger than oneself.” My family is bigger than me. My practice is bigger than me. Hell, my blog is bigger than me, way bigger, thanks to you guys. And if I ever manage to get a book published, that too will be bigger than me.
I don’t need to rule a nation.
I don’t want a corporation.
Which is not to say that we don’t need rulers or empire builders. There’s a place in the world for true genius, and there may even be a place for boundless ambition. We humans are builders, after all. Makers. We shape the world into the image of our dreams, and sometimes we create wondrous things.
But other people should be our bricks, not our mortar, and we should be damn sure we’re building a good solid brownstone and not the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.
A man’s gotta know his limitations.
D.
Proof that I used to be funnier
Michelle Duggar ought to be popping out #18 any day now. High time we revisited this old favorite (old favorite of mine, anyway!) From May 9,
Michelle Duggar is pregnant with number 18, which means it’s time for me to unleash more Duggary goodness. If you read that article, you’ll note that Michelle decided to break the news to her kids on the Today Show.
Guess she could have been more tactless. Guess she could have announced on Maury Povich.
Media junkies. Since the Duggars wanna be the rock stars of extreme fecundity, I thought I would give them a few glamour poses . . . a chance, perhaps, to catch Hollywood’s eye.
See you below the cut.
Bodega Bay
I was feeling stir crazy yesterday and wanted to see ocean. Jake must have been bored with his usual computer games, so he took a rare break from the monitor (hey! I almost called it a CRT!) to come with me.
It’s a quick drive from here to the coat — 20 minutes, perhaps? And pretty, although when you’re used to a more northern coastline, this particular brand of “pretty” feels rather thin. Still, I had high hopes.
We were greeted by the bellow of bull sea lions before we even saw water. They had flocked to the shoreline by the dozens, and two huge bad boys duked it out over a young female with a very attractive set of flippers. She wore a bit of seaweed on her head like a tiara, and you know those fancy reusable shopping bags they sell for a couple bucks at Trader Joes? She must have found one in the surf, because she carried it on her right flipper just like the latest Louis Vuitton handbag, and she used it to slap one of the bulls upside the head if he showed any signs of cowardice.
Sea snakes of all colors had swarmed the tide pools. There were lime greens and emeralds, magenta with creamy stripes, teals and mauves and puces, and one lonely spumoni. Young boys clothed only in Speedos dove into the pools for nickles and dimes thrown by jeering tourists while street vendors loudly hawked sno-cones and churros. A good time was had by all.
We drove up the coast, looking for something less commercial, and found a colony of sea otters. Here, too, dozens of day-trippers had gathered, and there were vendors selling dripping wet muslin bags. We parked and got out to take a closer look. Fishmongers loaded the muslin bags with live mussels and oysters, and folks were tossing these to the otters. Seemed like a fun idea — how often do you get to feed sea otters? But it wasn’t like that at all. The otters had learned to macrame kelp into satchels and hanging baskets. We watched in amazement as a Marinite in black Vuarnets heaved a muslin bag out to sea; one otter made off with the loot while another swam to shore, tugging a kelp afghan behind him.
Yeah, Bodega Bay sucked ass. We stopped off at a gift shop, bought some salt water taffy, and came home.
Sometimes the fantasy is better than the reality.
D.