Disorderly Content

I have a weakness for odd combinations, like that Baptist church and RV park I encountered in Austin, Nevada. So imagine my delight when I finished ordering my Nikon D300 from Ritz Camera (no shipping and they pay the sales tax!) and was offered an add for Dave's Gourmet and his collection of Insanity Sauces. Especially when I clicked through and discovered this gem: Hot Sauce & Garden Spray. It's like using pepper spray to season your food, or a taser to jumpstart your car. Except it's real!

One of the disadvantages of letting my blogging slip is that so many whacked out stories become unstoried before I can write about them. Like a piece a couple of days ago about how the Guvmint was confiscating containers of vegemite to keep it away from our citizenry. Vegemite's kind of hard to describe, but think of a dark, salty and strong-tasting paste that's a byproduct of beermaking or something. Aussies spread it on toast in the morning, which I think is what makes 'em so mean. (Maybe if the French put vegemite on their croissants they'd be tougher. Or not.)

Anyway, turns out the whole story's a crock. No ban, no confiscation, and if I want to bring some vegemite back from my trip to Oz next year, I won't have to sneak it through Customs in dog-sniffing-proof containers. Because I happen to like the stuff, if only because I believe it'll make me tougher.

Growing up, I think I always saw nature as something that got in the way. I could never understand why we couldn't get some favorite foods whenever we wanted back in the days before grocery globalization. By the time I was doing my own shopping, it had ceased to be an issue. Well, unless you actually wanted good produce, stuff that tasted the way it was supposed to. But somehow I didn't notice; I just accepted increasing mediocrity at the market as one of the benefits of the modern age. Heck, I didn't even notice how bad most frozen foods taste. After all, they're a huge improvement over canned. Aren't they?

Anyway, that's all changed since I got hooked on our local farmer's markets. They've brought me a little closer to nature, with both the good and bad. The good of course is that I get food that looks and tastes a lot better than what's in the market, and often a lot cheaper too. The bad is that I can only get it when it's there to get got. Which is kind of fun, as each weekly visit brings in new things and means saying goodbye to old ones. Right now we're nearing the end of the cherry harvest, which is sad. But the blueberries are out in quantity, which makes me happy. And I got the first okra since last fall, which is exciting if you like that kind of thing. (I do.) I'm still waiting for the hot peppers to make their appearance. The first few varieties are showing up, but I expect all kinds of colors, shapes and degrees of pain to arrive over the next few weeks. Exciting, isn't it?

I'm generally now sure growing up is a good thing. Heck, I've held out against it as long as anybody. But sometimes it's a good thing. Maybe.

Today I got together with a friend from my SGI days for lunch. We met in downtown Mountain View, which is full of ethnic restaurants of all kinds. Used to be mostly Chinese, then suddenly it was lots of Indian places, then a handful of Thai. Now there's a little of everything, including a few more upscale spots among the fast & cheap lunch options.

Anyway, when I arrived at Castro and Villa I turned around and noticed a new Vietnamese place where an Indian restaurant used to be. So that's where we ended up. And it was quite a surprise, I must say. The food was very good, the presentation elegant. The service was a little bit slow, but nothing to get upset about. But I'll give them some leeway; turns out they've only been open a few weeks. Besides, neither one of us was in a particular rush to get back to work.

Okay, Xanh was more expensive than our usual lunch choices. But it made a nice change from the usual Mountain View quick lunch. I'm looking forward to going back.

Amazing the stuff that goes on in your neighborhood, if only somebody would tell you about it. I've lived in Mountain View for sixteen years. And I never knew about the Portuguese community here, or the amazing crab cioppino dinners they offer a few times a year. Fortunately, a friend and former coworker's wife has a distant cousin. And that cousin's husband is of Portuguese descent. And they get a group together for one or two of the cioppino events every year. To which I've been invited recently. As recently as last night, as a matter of fact.

Here's the scene: there's this huge meeting hall that's set up with long tables with paper on them. You sit down, tie on a plastic bib unless you're very careful or very brave (I am neither), have some wine, salad and garlic bread. And then they deliver these huge metal bowls of crab that's been cooking in this amazing aromatic sauce. And you dig in. And keep digging in as crab after crab is turned into a pile of broken shells. Oh, there's also cold crab, which makes a nice change every couple of hot ones. And after we've all had our fill, we all head off for more drinking and maybe some dancing. Gotta do something to work off all that food!

What fun! And too bad there isn't another one until December. Then again, the last thing I need is the temptation of all-you-can-eat crab in the neighborhood. Because I can resist just about anything but temptation.

From Boing Boing comes news of the latest takeoff on Russian Roulette. Last time it was electric shocks; but now it's capsaicin, the active ingredient in chile peppers. Read all about it at the appropriately named Firebox.com.

Just be sure to take pictures when you play. The expression on the loser's face just has to be preserved for posterity!

Thanks to my stock photography obsession fixation hobby, I'm constantly on the lookout for new subjects to capture. Every Sunday morning I'm at the local farmer's market, checking out the produce for both its gustatory and its visual characteristics. Sometimes I buy fruits and vegetables with neither the knowledge nor the inclination to do anything more than place them in my light tent for a few pictures. And sometimes I have no idea what it is I'm buying; it just looks cool.

Which is what happened today at my local supermarket, where I found the spiky creature at right in the organic produce section. It's called a Kiwano Melon, also known as an African Horned Melon, presumably because it's a melon from Africa that happens to have horns. It's also orange and spotted, although they decided not to acknowledge that part. Anyway, I had to make a voice memo on my phone to record the name, knowing there's no way I'd remember it by the time I got home. Which turned out to be fortunate; the guy at the register had no idea what it was either. And since they hadn't figured out how to breed them with bar codes, he needed some way to look it up. Then again, maybe I could have convinced him it was some kind of pepper. A cheap kind of pepper.

And yes, if you were wondering, I did try to eat it after I took its picture. Not bad, although dealing with all the seeds was more trouble than it was worth.

Twinkies sushi. It's sushi, but made from Twinkies. It's Twinkies, but made to look like sushi. What more is there to say?

(Well, how about "thank you, Backup Brain"?)

Which, one has to admit, is preferable to eating what the Brits think of as food. But that's neither here nor there. No, we're here to discuss the international sport of cheese racing. What's cheese racing? It's what happens when you put a plastic-wrapped slice of processed cheese food¹ on a barbecue grill. Turns out the plastic is fireproof, so the cheesy stuff inside bubbles and expands with gas. As we would do if we were to eat it. But I digress.

1. You have to wonder about any product that has to include the word food in its description, as if to assure you that you aren't the incipient victim of a grand practical joke. But I'm sure there's some government agency doing their part to look out for us. Like the folks who won't let California growers refer to prunes as dried plums. Dried plums sound less unappealing, the growers feel. And that's what prunes are. But the bureaucrats are unmoved. Maybe if they ate some prunes...

Is this a great country or what! Thanks to Boing Boing for the news that M&M's will do custom message printing on your own very special special mix of colors. As with most things in life, the fine print takes some of the fun out of it. And you're limited to two lines of eight characters each. But it just means you have to get creative.

Do you think their censors would have a problem with "Eat Me"?