Dumbidity

Subway - Eat Neat or Else

I go to Subway for a sammich fairly regularly, not like Jared or Sherman and Herman, but mostly because it's close, a more sensible food choice than McChubby's and not terribly expensive.

Most of the time they overload it with the veggies, though occasionally I'll have to explain to the Sammich Construction Technician that they're not gonna hurt me by putting jalapeños on it. It's fun to see what all falls out and then enjoy a small dropout salad for afters - which entails getting one's fingers messy. I must say that the young lady who recently assumed the SCT duties at my regular spot is a bit tight with 'em, which brings me to my point:

Subway is the fast-food spot with, bar none, the STINGIEST napkin policy. They give you * a * napkin and shoot you the meanest look if you dare to ask for another - for any reason. They don't even have the little napkin dispensers that look like Coke machines with those worthless, tissue-thin generic napkins that most places have on the tables (where the idiots stuff 'em in backwards so they shred when you try to get 'em out).

The silly part is that these napkins are like a six-inch square hunk of ad space for Subway, with the logo and heart-healthy data on 'em. If they were sturdier, they could bulk mail 'em to "Occupant" and get a tax write-off.

It gets even sillier: you can have all the top-grade straws (each encased in its own logo-imprinted, hermetically sealed, protective cellophane wrapper) that you can stuff in your pockets, throw on the floor and pass out to various panhandlers you meet on the way back to work...

...but you can't wipe your greasy fingers on 'em.

Cookies for Days!

My Dear Sweet Wife, who has to work full-time in a high stress environment (but would much prefer that I win the lottery or quit trying to balance the checkbook so she could stay home all day and do wifey/mommy stuff) secured a temporary semi-industrial license for the production of consumable baked goods. Pounds of flour and sugar, dozens of eggs, butter, milk, spices and pinches of this and dribbles of that have been mixed, dolloped and heated to perfection.

The macadamia nut, chocolate chip and fat-gram cookies are currently under armed guard, with special emphasis on monitoring the cats. Just one of the cream-cheese pound cakes takes 3/4 of a pound of butter, and I haven't weighed one, but my guess is those suckers are every ounce of two pounds. Liberal quantities of the rum we obtained in the Caribbean last month have been used to make rum cakes - large and small. Then there are these little blobs of meringue with mini-chips in 'em - they're like a weak excuse to eat semi-liquid chocolate.

Little baskets and tins and tags and decorative froo-froo and festooneries have been used by the schmedlets for the distribution of this high-caloric output.

And we have washed every damn dish in the kitchen at least 3 times and I can't count how many times for mixing bowls, cookie sheets, spatulas and measuring devices. Wiped the counters down over and over and over and over... Had to run a load of dishtowels in the washer just to keep up. Both ovens have been on 350 or more all day, which wasn't too bad considering the temperature today was in the low 50's and dropping.

Dude Food

I'll keep this simple: Cold leftover pizza rules.

Dude food could easily be lots of other things, and according to a Google search on it, it's even applied to cookboogs and gift baskets. That's too complicated, like maybe chicks or metros got ahold of it.

I think the term "sings" - sort of like cat chow, chili pie and meat loaf, but I associate it with pizza.

And nachos.

Dos Vadanya, Ivan

After Hurricane Ivan dodged Louisiana and instead devastated the Gulf Coast of Alabama and the Florida panhandle, we sort of got back to normal (or that which passes for normal around here).

There were a number of things resulting from Ivan we didn't expect. One of 'em was that the Ivan-spawned Blustery Day had poor Suzette all but strung out on her last tree branch with all her honey pots waiting to catch Piglet as he floated by.

Another, believe it or not, is that the grass in my dadgum yard is getting crispy from lack of rain. It's like walking through cornflakes out there.

As far as the Hurricane provisions are concerned, the crunchy-munchies are being put to good use, as is the store-boughten ice - we're down to about two bags - and I was recently emailed a recipe to help deal with the 30,000 Pounds of Bananas cat food plus 10 pounds of litter:

Cat Litter Cake
(Billed as a sure-fire hit for the next family get together.)

Ingredienks:

1 box spice or German chocolate cake mix

1 box of white cake mix

1 package white sandwich cookies

1 large package vanilla instant pudding mix

A few drops green food coloring

12 small Tootsie Rolls or equivalent

Servink Dishes and Utenskles:

1 NEW cat-litter box

1 NEW cat-litter box liner

1 NEW pooper scooper

Destructions:

Prepare and bake cake mixes, according to directions, in any size pan.

Prepare pudding and chill.

Crumble cookies in small batches in blender or food processor.

Add a few drops of green food coloring to 1 cup of cookie crumbs.

Mix with a fork or shake in a jar. Set aside.

More Destructions:

Cool cakes to room temperature, and crumble into a large bowl.

Toss with half of the remaining cookie crumbs and enough pudding to make the mixture moist but not soggy.

Place liner in litter box and pour in mixture.

Artistical and Imaginative Creativity Activity (may be habit forming):

Faux Clinkers:

Unwrap 3 Tootsie Rolls and heat in a microwave until soft and pliable.

Shape the blunt ends into slightly curved points (you know what those clinkers look like).

Repeat with three more rolls. Bury the rolls decoratively in the cake mixture.

Sprinkle remaining white cookie crumbs over the mixture, then scatter green crumbs lightly over top.

Faux Clumps:

Heat 5 more Tootsie Rolls until almost melted.

Scrape them on top of the cake and sprinkle with crumbs from the litter box.

Heat the remaining Tootsie Roll until pliable and hang it over the edge of the box.

Place box on a sheet of newspaper and serve with scooper.

The Arthurities indicate it should look like this pheauteaux:

My Dear Sweet Wife thought the whole concept was disgusting beyond redemption. I decided it would be a good idea if I just leave out how much fun she had making "Dirt Cake" out of pulverized Oreos, chocolate pudding and Gummy Worms. Yeah, she'd be liable to get downright irritated if I brought that up, or how big of a hit it was with the schmedlets, their relations and associates, so I'll just avoid mentioning it.

Überburger

He's not finished.

Sure he is, there's nothing left but fat and gristle.

Like I said, he's not finished.

Yesterday, I finally fell victim to the marketing scam of Cheeburger Cheeburger: The Pounder.

Having successfully conquered this arbitrarily designated obstabble to unquestioned manhood, I won't likely do it again. It's not that it's a bad burger, but it's not a great enough burger to justify the exercise. Besides, when I go for blortosis, I've reached the age where it has to be high-quality blortage like all-you-can-eat fried shrimp or boiled crawfish or my Dear Sweet Wife's (insert name of obscenely delishiss dish here).

It wasn't terribly formidable, but I'll admit to mentally comparing it to the "Old 96er" that John Candy's character polished off in The Great Outdoors. I finished it over 18 hours ago and I'm still not hungry. When I go back, I'll order a smaller burger so I can appreciate their shakes.

How did it rate? About a 9.6

I prefer flame-broiled burgers, so it started out with a point value of only 9.90 - similar to Matt Donald's, but higher than Windy's at 9.80

You can have it dressed any way you like for free (save certain premium toppings) so it scored well there.

The overall assembly is, shall we say, precarious, so eating it is not a pretty sight: deduct one-tenth.

Their attempt to spike it together with olive-tipped toothpicks was ineffective and the olives do not complement the burger a-tall: deduct five hundredths.

They don't put any seasoning on it (at all), and any disassembly to add salt/pepper has a negative effect on the already tenuous structural integrity of the construction (besides, once you pick it up, you better not touch anything): deduct one-tenth.

They shred the lettuce, and because it is applied directly to the bottom of the patty, its wilt-factor is too high: deduct five-hundredths.

They also didn't have their camera, so my photograph doesn't grace their wall of fame. After seeing the plethora of patrons' pictures (puffy and puny) pasted on the pink painted plaster, it doesn't seem like such an honor after all.

Microwave Blues

I was going to entitle this "What Time is it When Your Microwave Trips the Circuit-Breaker Three Times While the Bacon's Cooking?" but it was both too long and too obvious: time to get a new MICROWAVE!

This wouldn't be remotely noteworthy except that we've had this particular Amana® Radarange® since about 1986. It was nearly $500. It's as big as a 20" TV. It arrived before before Guido (in the old Mug), so all the sentimentalists around here are in flutter. Guido just wants a way to nuke chicken nooble soup and exploding mini-raviolis without covering 'em.

We got it as a sort of present from my Dear Sweet Wife's parents. They got two and couldn't use the second one. They still have the first one. My mother-in-law is famous for that sort of trick, stereotypically buying some huge hunk of "a really nice" ham, then stopping by on her way home (across town mind you) and realizing it was about 4 pounds more than she really needed and could we take some of it? Sure, anything I can do to help out.

This was back in the days when creeps used to actually steal microwaves when they burgled. "Yes officer, they took the TV, the video-cassette recorder and the Radarange®." All that stuff probably ran $1500.

Imagine some fool burgling the Giant Mug and making off with my 40 pound Radarange®...

Burgle: (grunting and oofing) GRUNT! OOOF! Man this microwave heavy.

(Later at Finster's Fencing and Hot Goods...)

Finster: Fool! What I want with a 20 year-old mi-cro-wave? I ain't seen anybody try to fence a microwave in fifteen years. And look - it still got exploded mini ravioli all over inside. Get that junk out of here!

Burgle: Where I'm gon' get rid of this thing?

Good quextion. Me, I'm gonna simply place it on the curb tonight and see if BFI gets to it before the guy in the rusty brown van. Since the BFI guys have been hustling over here every garbage day by dusk, the odds are with Mr. Rusty Van Brown.

I'm taking the light bulb out of it though.

I'm Just Askin' - VII

Way back in the days of the oversized chrome grills, they were used to cover those huge metal radiators required by your typical straight 6 or V-8 Dee-troit motors. This was long before engineers figured out how to reduce the heat from the motors (often by removing 2-4 cylinders and shrinking the overworked pistons left behind), improve the efficiency of the circulation system and thereby justify making most of the parts of the radiator out of plastic as possible.

They even cover more of the radiator than they used to, I suppose it's a combination of ærodynamics and styling, and make up for lost airflow by gluing in those little plastic fans that come on after you shut off the engine.

The old radiators used to catch an awful lot of bugs during the warmer months, and you could peek inside and see 'em all mangled and crispy. If you caught too many of 'em, you had to carefully scrub those flimsy little foil thingys so as not to enjoy a boilover in traffic. Most vehicles had enough room to work your brush down between the grill and the fins.

But nowadays, most of your larger insects splute themselves against non-cooking surfaces, so you get more of a sun-dried effect. They still call it a grill though. I suppose that reduces the need to clean the radiator, which is a pretty good thing, because I don't know how you could get much more than a long-handled teethbrush in those t-niney spaces, and if you did, you'd void your warranty and bust a few tubes.

I remember sitting outside the Rexall Drug late one summer, whittling on a stick, drinking the warm half of a 6½ Co-cola (I don't recall what city was stamped on the bottom) and noticing all the grasshoppers, mosquito-hawks (one of which was still sizzling a bit, which is what attracted my notice) and other unfortunates in the big open grill of this Buick. Just about that time, a mockingbird lit on the front bumper of this car, gave me the once-over to verify my inert status, plucked one of those bugs out of the grill with his little beak and took off.

Is it possible that all the advances in car-engine cooling technology have robbed our avian friends of their opportunity to develop their epicurean senses?

I'm Just Askin' - V

I love Mexican food. I'm not talking about your nationalista drive-through chain, I mean real, sit-down Mexican restaurant-style dishes served on plates too hot to touch after I've eaten 2 baskets of chips as an excuse to snarf their refreshing salsas.

I like how they put the main dish on the oversize plate with all the side dishes arranged in some fashionable order, and then drazzle the whole enchilada (or tostada, burrito or soft taco) with all that cheese. Mmmmmmmm. Those little pots of sour cream, pico de gallo and guacamole just set the whole feast off.

It makes me think about the foldout of ZZ Top's Tres Hombres album, the one with the 24" picture of the aftermath of a heavy-duty Tex-Mex feast on the inside. A memorable sight to be sure.

I like the yellow rice and black beans places are big into recently - and they're mighty good, but there has always been a soft place in my head for frijoles. This may go back, way back into the time when the frozen enchilada TV dinner was a big treat because the folks were going out. Maybe it's only because of my fondness for that canned bean dip the Frito people do, I dunno.

But we were over at some friends for dinner Saturday - they made a mighty nice black bean soup - and refried beans came up as a subtopic of the conversation. This leads me to ask...

If refried beans are fried again, when were they ever fried the first time?

And why doesn't anybody sell them?

The Legend of Chunderpuss

It was a dark and stormy night...

Well, it was dark, and it could have been stormy but that's neither here nor there. One evening, early in the first week of October 1992 (shortly after 10 o'clock, Central), I was parked in The Red Chair (which might've been blue then) watching The Rush Limbaugh TV Show.

As typically happened King Crab, our Most Favored Cat, had been outside and was of the considered opinion that it was high time he gained entry to his house. He indicated this by yowling his desire to the Not-a-Cats thundering about inside. My Dear Sweet Wife was most sympathetic to his now miserable plight and was only too happy to invite him in with a "Prithee Sir Cat, do come in and comfort thyself as it please thee." This happens that way to this very day.

It just so happens that "as it pleases him" involves finding me wherever I am, pouncing up onto my lap, circling enough times to ensure a proper pulverizing of my vital parts, and curling up into a ball of fur that is not very tolerant of disturbances.

So I'm parked, as I said, in the classic American Barcalounger Supine position with the Most Favored Cat, having already mangled my marbles, snoozing away. Rush was holding forth about something, and MFC began acting a bit agitated - moving about like maybe my lap wasn't its customary comfortable self. Rush comes back from a commercial and sets up a segment about Shinehead O'Connor's recent appearance on Saturday Night Live. MFC has now recommenced the testes trampling ritual.

Limbaugh rolls the video clip of Shinehead on SNL. MFC stops his turning and is now standing in my lap giving me a very odd look. In her unending quest for attention, Shinehead concludes her musical (their words, not mine) number by holding up and tearing apart a picture of Pope John Paul II. MFC, obviously revulsed by such an arrogant display of disrespect for the Pope, morphs immediately into...

dun dun dun DAAAAAH!

CHUNDERPUSS!

...and begins to vomit on me.

Me: (realizing I'm pinned under this barfing cat) HONEYQUICKOPENTHEDOOR!

DSW: (falling helpfully on the floor) WAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Me: (realizing my Dear Sweet Wife has lapsed into paroxysms of loving laughter and is not capable of helping me in the Least Bit) GETTHISCATOFFAME!

Chunderpuss: URP! URP! URP!

DSW: (still laughing as helpfully as humanly possible) WAHAHAHAHAHA! GROSS! WAHAHAHA!

schmedlets: (grateful for any excuse to make noise after the GO TO SLEEP edict has been pronounced) What's going on?

Me: (realizing now I REALLY can't get up or I'll dump cat puke all over everything) NOTHING! BE QUIET! HONEY GET ME A TOWEL!

Chunderpuss: (launching these darkish-bluish blobs) UUUUURRRRRP!

Me: (realizing these darkish-bluish blobs look like...) RAT FŒTUSES! THIS DAMN CAT'S PUKING RAT FŒTUSES ON MEEEEEEE!

DSW: (now laughing harder than may be humanly possible) GROOOOOOOOSSSSSSSS! WAHAHAHAHAHA!

Shinehead: (still on TV) Blah blah blah blah (Look at how Edgy I am! Don't you all wish you were as Edgy as I?)

Chunderpuss: (empty) Meow! (I'm outta here!)

FINALLY, my DSW staggers to her feet and allows Chunderpuss to bound off into the night to fight the forces of evil. Then she finds a towel and LEAVES ME to soothe the anxieties of the schmedlets as only a mother can. The mess was confined to me. The chair and carpet (and especially the fur of Chunderpuss) was unsoiled thanks to my heroic sacrifice.

I don't know what it is about rat fœtuses that don't agree with MFC's digestive system, but he didn't acknowledge the link between wolfing down pregnant rats (nearly whole, apparently) and the emetic results. For several years after that, we'd find these revolting regurgitated rodent remnants on the patio (or in a newly brown patch in the lawn). Now that he's living only on Social Security and has lost much of his vip, vim and vigor (not to mention a few teeth), he doesn't seem to fool with rats much.

I just hope he hasn't passed the Sacred Cowl of Chunderpuss to Thunderfoot or Curious Georgette.

Too Many Choices for Your Beverage Pleasure

I look into the little basket in which are stored the complimentary packets of beverage sweeteners and came to the distinct conclusion that things have gotten completely out of hand.

There are four (4, IV, ٤, //// ) different complimentary packets of beverage sweetener vying for my attention.

The White Packet: Hello there you handsome devil you! (I said they were complimentary), I am sugar - and I'm sure you're familiar with me. Yep, been around forever y'know - sweetener of choice for centuries (whispers) these other guys can't say that! Still only 16 calories per teaspoon without that funny aftertaste...

The Pink Packet: Thut UP! You're thuch a bully! I do NOT leave an aftertathte, it'th jutht an enhanthed flavor reminithenth. I'm Thodium Thaccarine, tho pleathed to meat you. Thee how light I am? (twirls) You know I'll ditholve much more quickly in your ithed tea than Thugar! And I'm approved Thafe by the FDA and even have the paperth around here thomewhere...

The Blue Packet: Dude, while you're hangin' around waiting for pinkie here, lemme just bottom line this for ya: I'm NutraSweet, do the dissolve thing real fast and twice the work on a packet-for-packet basis. All that stuff about causin' memory loss is history if I remember correctly and...

The Yellow Packet: Monsieur! Don't-ah lissen to a-heem! I yam Splenda - c'est manifique, no? Put me in your cafe au lait and don't-ah be having-ah all zee calorees and chemeecals-ah, for I yam made from shu-gar!

schmed: Bad news guys. I take my coffee black and just lemon in my tea, so all y'all just hop back in the basket with the non-dairy creamer packet who's been so polite all by his lonesome.

Geez.
I guess I should be grateful they haven't figured out how to powderize cyclamates.