OMG, I love her. She even tells a boring story.
Just when you think she’s more amused by this than you are, you get, “Put the cover on and let that boil until it cooks. We’ll have to wait awhile.”
I love everyone over 85. Her show should be called “The Watched Pot.” It’s that good. She even checks her rice for bugs. Television gold.
For today, I refuse to get worked up about cartoons in the New York Post where the punch line is apparently “Black people are monkeys” or how depressing it is for the Obama Administration to continue some egregiously malevolent Bush anti-terrorism policies or how Goldman Sachs executives are openly stealing bailout money or how Detroit will have a population of 500 by 2020.
Here are links to nice things.
First, the EPA may regulate carbon dioxide. Really, they just have to or we’re all fucked. This is technically a minor good thing that relates to a strongly terrible thing, but we’ll take it.
Second, NYU students have occupied a floor of the Kimmel “student center.” I got my entire secondary education at that school, and Kimmel is a hideous trainwreck whose real purpose as the student union at a university with no campus is to boot students out for donor luncheons and special events, because NYU is actually a vast real estate empire with auxiliary teaching duties it maintains to keep up appearances.
I was on the speech and debate team and my freshman year (’99-’00) we had a practice space and an office — the bad old days. By the time I was in grad school (’04-’05), I had to coach the kids in an open lounge where everyone was talking and moving around. The more buildings NYU erects or conquers, the less space there seems to be. They’re like Robert Moses, building highways to eradicate traffic.
The students’ demands are a greate combination of considerate, radical and achievable. Opening Bobst Library to the general public is especially progressive. As of now, it’s a hermetically sealed Borg cube perched at the corner of Bloomberg Square Park. (When you graduate, you’re permitted to return only once.)
Third, the inebriated fun of the Bay to Breakers race might not go the way of Halloween in the Castro. (I realize the possible laziness of linking to the NYT from SF about an SF event, but googling it and searching wordpress didn’t come up with anything better).
Finally, delicious things. I want to make this.
And I’ve been making chocolate chocolate chip cookies compulsively since finishing the lemonade cleanse, and I think I’ve achieved jouissance. I follow this recipe with some variations.
First: instead of 1/4 tsp of salt I add a heaping 1/2 tsp. I swear nothing comes out tasting salty and the ability of salt to intensify the taste of everything is particularly effective with the butter.
Second: double the vanilla, from 2 tsp to 4. This enables you to cut back on the sugar by maybe 1/8 – 1/4 cup.
Third, I also substitute some brown sugar for a bit of the white, so that the total amount of sugar is a little more than 1 1/4 cups, of which at least half a cup is brown.
Fourth, nuke the butter till half of it is liquified. You really need to watch the microwave; no multi-tasking during this part! I like to compare sticks of butter melting to the implosion of the Twin Towers. Once it’s clear that the FDNY are all dead, stop the microwave.
Fifth, mix it by hand. It’s not hard, you have fewer utensils to clean and I really believe that a heterogeneous mixture–i.e., with little lumps of butter–is the shit. If you can’t tell, I love butter.
Sixth, refrigerate the batter until it’s as cold as the fridge. Sure, it’s a pain in the ass waiting and having stiffer batter, but if you’re like me, you actually make cookies as an excuse to eat raw dough anyway.
Just ate the last cookie.
Awwww. I know they’re in on it because it’s a great store.
There’s something so romantic about defleshing big pieces of meat. Together, as a couple.
It’s not even cited in this list of desirable (or un-) US cities, but it’s totally in my top 4, along with NYC, SF and Seattle. I’m sure it’s humid as hell for 10 months out of the year and you’d never find a decent job anyplace, but I could totally live there, especially in my eccentric dotage.
All we did was eat. I was there with my boyfriend for his sister’s wedding, and coming less than a week after I resumed eating solid foods post-cleanse, I was probably devouring about 10,000 calories a day. This can be attributed to my own voracious appetite as well as to the fact that everything in New Orleans has a butter sauce and andouille sausage, even things like pralines or Vitamin Water.
We ate at Mother’s, on Tchopitoulas. Is that not the greatest name for a street, ever? It’s where the waitresses address a big party as “my babies” and where I had a “Ralph,” which is a po boy with debris (that is, the meat that falls into the gravy) and cheese. It was an appropriately-named sandwich because the theme of the weekend was that I ate and drank until I wanted to vomit, waited for the sensation to pass, and then resumed. I ate at least a dozen Hubig’s Pies, because Elliott’s sister married into the family that makes them. I had Gumbo Ya Ya and seafood gumbo, fried alligator, chicory cafe au lait and beignets from Cafe du Monde–you can’t really order anything else there; and Bananas Foster, which I didn’t even know was specifically Cajun. I don’t even like bananas, but it was amazing. And of course, dirty rice, crawfish etouffe and cheese grits. The rehearsal dinner was at Broussard’s; we never made it to Cochon, one of the best new restaurants in the US, according to Frank Bruni. Broussard’s was really good even if they directed us from cocktail hour into the dining room by ringing a bell. It’s the South; being totally passive-aggressive is just the way it is.
I had always assumed there were be endless mysteries to Cajun cooking, mostly unpronounceable things dervied from bastardized 18th century French which cannot be obtained anywhere else, but actually, it’s the same six things repurposed over and over until infinite deliciousness has been achieved. Although I’m sure there are amazing things from the bayou deemed too vulgar to be served at a fancy wedding.
There was no king cake. What’s better than the ritualized cannibalism of transubstantiation at a Catholic Mass? Answer: actually eating baby Jesus.
These little sewer caps were everywhere in the Quarter. I love the little things about a city that are irrelevant except in the aggregate, as facets of what makes it the city that it is, and which you might never know about unless you went there. Kind of like Sutro Tower in S.F. or coffee cups with that tacky “Greek” typeface in NYC bodegas.
Just because it’s not Mardi Gras yet doesn’t mean there can’t be ambient terrifying objects strewn about. It reminds me of the bizarre art direction for Fantasia in The Neverending Story II: Jonathan Brandis Loses His Marbles. These harlequins-on-a-pike were on St. Charles Ave. I took the streetcar that runs down it to the wedding. It had incandescent bulbs in it!
This was in the Warehouse District, upriver from the Quarter. I went through a brief moment, after visiting the Garden District, where I thought that maybe the Quarter was actually as gross as Cancun and nobody in their right mind would want to hang out there. Note: this was wrong.
The World’s Largest S. I love the windows. Against the palms, it’s just not Brutalism. It’s better. (This was on Canal St.)
This is the best misspellling ever, especially because the brain (or at least, my brain) reads the “-chic” as chic, as in “Le freak, c’est chic” after the first syllable. Who wants a Fuh-chic reading? You definitely want it read by the fattest, most toothless old Haitian woman you can find. Preferably one who cackles and disappears in a puff of smoke and metallic confetti. I didn’t go to Miss Cindy. I had mine done by Sharon and her ailing dog, Bagel. She didn’t get anything grossly wrong, but she was vague. Apparently ’09 is going to be a rough year for me.
I just enjoy this one. Faubourg Marigny, I think. Too blurry because I didn’t have a tripod, but fuck it, it gets the mood.
These are the backs of two chairs from the Carousel Bar in our hotel, the Monteleone. It revolves every fifteen minutes, which is fast enough to make some people a little ill. I loved it, though. I had two Pisco Sours. You can tell because the photo is totally not centered. This was the night of the wedding, when I ate more than I’d ever eaten, and had 4 Bullitts on the rocks, two gin-and-tonics, and three cups of coffee.
(We later had absinthe, but not here; it was absurdly expensive and not as amazing as elsewhere. Then we ate the worst pizza imaginable at a place that served watered-down alcoholic Slurpees. It was basically Ellio’s and had little evenly spaced holes in the bottom of the crust that revealed its origins in a maquiladora somewhere. Then we went in the hotel’s rooftop pool until a cleaning guy chased us out).
NOLA in a nutshell. Preferably a praline. Notice how her face is slightly blurry because her tits are so gigantic, the camera focused on them. Jesus Christ, I love New Orleans.
So I’m over the hump, in terms of hunger and, hopefully, irritability. Days 3 and 4 are the hardest–I felt that way last year and this year reaffirmed it. Climbing hills is a struggle. No amazing sense of smell just yet. But I’ve eaten fewer lemons than I thought: three every day except for yesterday’s four.
The AM salt water flush is nasty if you don’t drink it quickly. The colder it gets, the more it’s like swallowing surf in the ocean. The laxative tea (I use Smooth Move) tastes better than most medicinal teas and this year I haven’t awoken at 5:30 with cramps; it’s more like 7:30 with simply an urgent need to poop.
And poop I do! The entire cleanse is basically a machine designed to get you to poop frequently and productively without introducing any new solids into your system–except lemon seeds, which I swallow because I’m convinced that seeds of all kinds are good for you.
I did think, both last year and this year, something along the lines of “Well, since I’m not eating or drinking, I won’t be spending any money!” But it adds up, a little. Two weeks of four lemons a day is 56. I got them four to a lb. at the farmer’s market, so that’s $14. The organic Grade B maple syrup is $17 $7.99 for twelve oz. at Trader Joe’s, and it looks like I might be able to stretch a jar out to a week (I halve the prescribed amount of syrup because I want to purge as much fat as possible–if only to replace it with new fat–and it’s not causing me any agony to do so). Unless you live in Vermont, where I just assume there is a state-subsidized program for free syrup, you’re going to shell out that much.
The tea was $5 and lasts the entire time, as was the jar of cayenne pepper. I already had sea salt and I honestly don’t know what that costs. $5? You need a bottle graded with amounts on the side so you can see how much you’re filling it up, and you need a Brita. I’m going to buy probiotics this year, so I don’t experience periodic, um, flatulence. They can be expensive, but I got sixty for $5 that were the second-highest of the four available grades (also at Trader Joe’s).
Ironically, the one thing I don’t currently have is a scale. It’s psychologically fulfilling to see your weight drop almost every day, sometimes by 2lbs. I was pretty erratic last year, though, and this year I just have to judge my by shrinking belly.
Assuming you have those things, the entire cleanse costs $55, plus the probiotics. Say $100 $75 max, and I’m doing it for $90 $60. That’s a nice meal, and less than what you would probably spend on food in a week anyway, unless you’re totally broke. So you are saving money in addition to expurgating the previous year’s toxins out of your system. You save lots more by not going out or doing anything social whatsoever because everything revolves around food and drink. I read a lot and I’ve already watched 14 movies in January.
It’s as amazing as it is gross to see your feces days after you last ate something. The salt water flush comes out of you as if your butt were forcibly spitting, and it’s yellow-brown with mucusy strands of poo. It’s like what I imagine cholera to be, only controlled. Nasty, but at least it’s not inside you anymore. Already I feel my breathing passages opening up in a weird way–not that they were stuffy to begin with–as the body expels mucus.
One of the last taboos is a frank discussion of defecation, when it’s actually the act of eating that’s pretty gross. Eliminating poison is far better than consuming it. Not that I’m not looking forward to In-N-Out…
At the farmer’s market down the block every Saturday, I always wonder why, in the land of $1.00/lb heirloom tomatoes and $3.50 10-lb bags of Valencia oranges, you can’t find avocadoes for less than $1 each. It’s California! Trader Joe’s in Manhattan has (or had) a “guacamole kit” for $2.99 that contained 2 avocadoes, a tomato, a jalapeno pepper, a lime and a shallot. Unreal.
Well, there’s this.
I want an avocado tree! They produce so much fruit you couldn’t eat it all. I want superabundance in my yard.
Grace Jones Releases New Album
Suck the Rainbow 