awkwardly

My Terrifying, Dry Warrior - Chapter 2: Kidding the Buddha

2008-07-10T23:39:00.000-05:00

"As I fell down the other side of the fence toward the slobbering jaws of the dog, I regretted that I had never tried Campari mixed with Capri Sun."

Even if Gus gets away from the dog, how will he escape from its owner, an ambiguously amiable dude who calls himself "Buddha" and threatens to call the truant officer unless Gus tells him a joke? Listen to Kidding the Buddha, Chapter Two of the five part cliffhanger series "My Terrifying, Dry Warrior" to find out!

[Run time: 17 minutes, 3 seconds. The link above points to VBR 16.4 MB mp3 file (hi-fi). Click here to see other file formats for downloading and streaming.]

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My Pa, the Prognosticator

2008-06-12T17:33:00.003-05:00

My dad did two or three years in the Navy, supposedly volunteering for a longer stint in order to remain in the States. I mean, I don't doubt his claim, just doubt that any branch of the U.S. military would honor that kind of commitment. See "stop-loss." Anyway, that's why I was born in San Diego, CA instead of somewhere on the path of white flight away from Detroit.

I know he worked as a clerk in the Navy, took a lot of heating and cooling and plumbing classes, and that he only had six weeks on a ship to Guantanamo and back. Pa passed along this nugget of wisdom based on his experience: the difference between being on a ship at sea and being in prison is that you're less likely to drown in prison.

The Bush administration is making this joke more true than ever before. From The Guardian:
US accused of holding terror suspects on prison ships. I was going to say Pa was wrong in terms of drowning, given the current policy on waterboarding U.S. prisoners anywhere on dry land, but it was true at the time he made that statement, back when the laws against torture were still ostensibly honored by the U.S.

Aunt Sadie's Greens

2008-06-11T08:24:00.004-05:00

Chapter Twelve of Brazen Hearts, Fresh, On Sticks.

"Lupo's on Cherry Street is your standard tavern. The ale's flat, but at least the serving wenches have thick heads of foam. If you hold still at the bar long enough, you'll get propositioned by some group of adventurers who just met each other for the first time. They'll invite you along to raid the Tombs of Atuan or the Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth. I turn 'em down politely. Then I send word by carrier pigeon to my old friend Sally who lives in the Lost Caverns. Let her know a fresh bunch of humanoids is on its way.

"Even though it's in the human settlement of Korndale, Lupo's is the kind of place where a legless, shrivelled goblin witch can pull herself through the doorway hand over fist, and not really stand out in the crowd. That would be me, the goblin witch, Sadie. . . ."

Aunt Sadie tells about confronting her ancient rival, an unspeakable force of bitchiness named Francine. Hilarity and hijinx and bloodloss are sure to follow in Aunt Sadie's Greens.

[Run time: 13 minutes, 41 seconds. Click here to see other file formats for downloading or streaming, plus detailed music and f/x credits. Special Guest Melinda as "Georgia Lupo."]

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Buckaroo Banzai vs. Team Zissou

2008-05-31T08:14:00.003-05:00

I don't always remember to post my videos here on Awkwardly, so here are some more mashups you might have missed if you aren't subscribed to or periodically visiting http://www.youtube.com/deidzoeb

Buckaroo Banzai vs. Team Zissou

Pirates vs. Ninjas vs. Zombies vs. Robots

Lysistrata and Stitch

2008-05-23T10:51:00.002-05:00

I got an article accepted in/on the Journal of Cartoon Over-Analyzations! I wrote it two or three years ago and submitted it to metaphilm.com. They had put out a call for papers about philms for a book they were planning to put together. I don't want to be too pushy about this kind of thing, so I touched base with the editor after some time passed ... a year later. He said they still hoped to do the book. Meanwhile, fewer feature articles have been posted on metaphilm, stretching to three months and six months in between features. When I learned of the existence of J. Cart. Over-Anal. from metafilter.com (no relation), it seemed like a serendipitous time to cut my losses and submit the article elsewhere.

So anyhow, forget all the backstory. You're chomping at the bit to actually read the thing, right? It starts out like this:

Lysistrata and Stitch
Contributed by Rob N., who blogs at evilbobdayjob.tripod.com.

In the eternal struggle of boys against girls, the only hope for survival of intelligent life is for girls to win.

We�re talking lasers, aliens, boogers, gobs of earwax flicked off in restaurants, dogfights in space ships, a monster designed as a weapon to destroy worlds, plus shapely dancing girls. Lilo and Stitch has all the elements to win back boys and manly men who would normally avoid everything Disney. Sure, Stitch is cute and fluffy, but he�s also equipped with fangs, claws, spines, nightvision, nicks in his ears from past battles, tongue able to reach inside his own nose. He�s bulletproof, fireproof, lifts objects 3000 times his size and survives getting run over by two trucks. He also knows alien language so vulgar, it causes a robot to puke bolts in the trial scene.

Enjoy it while it lasts, guys, because the rest of the movie is about violent men who fail and women who pick up the pieces.

[Click here to read more.]

Pirates vs. Ninjas vs. Zombies vs. Robots (1936)

2008-04-29T16:33:00.004-05:00

Another meme thought to have originated on the internets is revealed to have much older roots, thanks to the recent discovery of this trailer for the 1936 Republic Pictures feature Pirates vs. Ninjas vs. Zombies vs. Robots. WATCH bitter enemies battle without appearing on screen at the same time! SEE the forbidden love of a pirate for a zombie! DON'T MISS Boris Karloff as Col. Sanders!

. . . Or it could be a mashup I finished last night. Featuring Boris Karloff, Charles Laughton, John Carradine, Randolph Scott, Duane Jones, Fei Meng, Bela Lugosi.

I used clips from the following movies, all public domain as far as I know:

Captain Kidd (1945)
She hao dan xin zhen jiu zhou (1976), a.k.a. Snake Crane Secret
Night of the Living Dead (1968)
Revolt of the Zombies (1936)
La Muerte Viviente (1971), a.k.a. Snake People
La Guerra dei Robot (1978), a.k.a. War of the Robots
The Phantom Creeps (1939)
Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet (19??), lots of varied editions derived from some original Russian film.

These can probably all be found on archive.org.

With music clips from Captain Kidd, Captain Scarface, and The Iron Mask (1929). The Iron Mask was a silent movie starring Douglas Fairbanks Sr., filmed in 1929. It was reissued with a soundtrack, including narration and voiceover by Douglas Fairbanks Jr. in 1952, and that's the theme music used for most of this mashup.

Gilligan watchers vs. MMORPGamers, and Where's the mouse?

2008-04-27T07:20:00.003-05:00

This blog entry Gin, Television, and Social Surplus by Clay Shirky [via metafilter] has some nice observations:

I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she's going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn't what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, "What you doing?" And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, "Looking for the mouse."

Here's something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here's something four-year-olds know: Media that's targeted at you but doesn't include you may not be worth sitting still for. ...

[This next section comes from earlier in the speech/blog entry. Shirky told a tv producer about increased activity on the Wikipedia entry for "Pluto" when scientists demoted it from planet status. Regarding the Wikipedia activity, the producer] shook her head and said, "Where do people find the time?" That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, "No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you've been masking for 50 years."

... But beneath that question was another thought, this one not a question but an observation. In this same conversation with the TV producer I was talking about World of Warcraft guilds, and as I was talking, I could sort of see what she was thinking: "Losers. Grown men sitting in their basement pretending to be elves."

At least they're doing something.

Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan's Island where they almost get off the island and then Gilligan messes up and then they don't? I saw that one. I saw that one a lot when I was growing up. And every half-hour that I watched that was a half an hour I wasn't posting at my blog or editing Wikipedia or contributing to a mailing list. Now I had an ironclad excuse for not doing those things, which is none of those things existed then. I was forced into the channel of media the way it was because it was the only option. Now it's not, and that's the big surprise. However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it's worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter.

And I'm willing to raise that to a general principle. It's better to do something than to do nothing. Even lolcats, even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions, hold out an invitation to participation. When you see a lolcat, one of the things it says to the viewer is, "If you have some fancy sans-serif fonts on your computer, you can play this game, too." And that message--I can do that, too--is a big change.

Awkwardly back on Tripod, their mistake.

2008-04-14T20:14:00.003-05:00

The bad news is that I wasted several hours over the weekend migrating everything I could find from Awkwardly (mainly stuff cached on Google or the Wayback Machine) to other hosts. Awkwardly had been removed from Tripod for allegedly violating their terms of service. The good news is that it's back on Tripod, so all my links from other websites and blogs and search engines aren't lost. Tripod/Lycos customer support replied on Monday that my website had been "mistakenly locked by one of our automatic processes." Like the Creator of the Hitchhiker's Guide universe, they apologized for any inconvenience this may have caused.

So I take back anything bad I said about Tripod in the meantime, and anything I might have admitted when speculating about why they might ban me. Really, the Pundit of Porn article wasn't that objectionable, was it?

If you read this through RSS or some kind of feed, don't change a thing. If you want to visit the whole mess directly, then visit http://evilbobdayjob.tripod.com as you always have. At least until further notice. I definitely need to back up my stuff in case Tripod goes belly up someday or has some malfunction that lasts longer than a weekend.

Awkwardly banned from tripod.com?

2008-04-13T10:37:00.002-05:00

Good on ya for finding your way to the new Awkwardly site at http://evilbobdayjob.blogspot.com, while it lasts. Tripod dropped me for some reason. Unfortunately, if they bothered to email me at all to let me know why they felt I had violated terms of service, it must have been to an old email address I don't use anymore. That might not be their fault.

I can't imagine that my latest blog posts were the culprits -- a link to my Dungeons and Dayjobs podcast, or "Pirates vs. Lighthouse Keeper" almost a month ago? Either they objected to ads posted on free tripod pages (ads by anyone other than them) or else someone objected to an article I wrote years ago, like F-Texas or "Pundit of Porn".

I'm gradually restoring and migrating stories and essays and content over to h2g2.com, sitemap and indexes over to angelfire. There will probably be a lot of broken links until I finish updating everything. Sorry.

Francis Gives Gus The Finger

2008-03-30T00:22:00.004-05:00

"I've been sober three weeks now. I'm pretty sure I've hit my lowest low and I don't want to go there ever again. It helped me re-focus my life. The event was I missed eleven out of eleven on the fractions quiz. You might get to the third or fourth degree in the Junior Order of the Free and Accepted Millwrights of Fowlerville with C's and D's, but you aren't gonna get to the thirty-third degree."

Will Gus complete his mission, transporting the psychic jewel to the drop point, or will cult assassins cut him down in the prime of his elementary school years? Listen to Francis Gives Gus the Finger, Chapter One of the five part cliffhanger series "My Terrifying, Dry Warrior" to find out!

[Run time: 15 minutes, 30 seconds. The first link above points to VBR 15 MB mp3 file (hi-fi). Click here to see other file formats for downloading and streaming.]

Remember that you can download the full text of this and all stories from the Dungeons and Dayjobs collection FREE from archive.org or you can buy the collection in paperback today!

Pirates vs. Lighthouse Keeper

2008-03-19T13:21:00.003-05:00

I picked up a good ol' VHS video at the thrift store, The Light at the End of the World. (That's the name of the movie, not the thrift store, which was a Salvation Army.) Initially I wasn't interested in the fact that it starred Kirk Douglas or Yul Brynner, nor by the cheesy cover illustration, a dude hanging from a rope by his foot below the ledge of a lighthouse. One of the bad guys pictured taunting the dangler carries a musket, and I realized they were supposed to be pirates attacking a lighthouse. Good enough for me.

The full movie isn't awesome, but it has a series of mitigating factor that make it fun if you like these kinds of things:
1. Based on a novel by Jules Verne.
2. Kirk Douglas.
3. Yul Brynner.
4. Kirk Douglas vs. Yul Brynner.
5. Pirates.
6. Lighthouse. Nothing inherently special about a lighthouse as far as I'm concerned, but it gives a false hit on your steampunk fan-bone if you have one of those. There's something about obsolete technologies that were widespread in their day, like lighthouses, airships and steampower. It makes you think about a culture where they had a stable system that wasn't growing faster than they could handle. (Maybe it was growing too quickly for some people, but we can look back on history with rose-colored glasses and stereotype it as stable.) If you had a steam-ipod, you'd have to learn all the damn little new controls, but at least you'd understand how the steam powered it. I think it's a yearning for stability and order. Who knows.
7. Pirates attacking a lighthouse!
8. Ambiguous period setting and ambiguous creation date. Obviously lighthouses were not staffed for very long into the Twentieth Century, but this could have been anywhere from 1800 to 1920 as far as I could tell. Unless I missed important dialogue at the start, they don't give enough clues or say the exact date until halfway through the movie. On top of that, you get mixed signals about what time period the movie was made in. It's in color so that narrows it down. On the other hand, Kirk Douglas doesn't look too old and it doesn't look very sharp or well done. The props and costumes look tacky. Could have been filmed in the Sixties or Seventies, but which? Those two mysteries kept me watching for clues, even when the action slowed to a crawl. Melinda asked what a star like Kirk Douglas was doing in such a low budget movie. When his name came up as Producer, I said there's your answer.
9. Pirates vs. Lighthouse Keeper vs. Animals. It's no big deal when humans stab and beat each other to death in a movie, but you really hate a villian when he offs somebody's pet. If you count a mountain goat shot for food, there are three animals other than humans that get flayed or eaten or euthanized in this movie.
10. Unexpected pathos. It's weird how much extra feeling they can wrench out of you by threatening pets in the movie, and also a minor character. Lots of innocents and pirates kill each other, but at one point the pirate captain's slave, a young black boy who hadn't attacked anyone in the movie, gets knocked down in a battle and dies. They make a big deal out of it, giving him a funeral pyre with close-ups of his face. None of the other pirates get this treatment. They didn't put much emphasis on his character earlier in the movie, but it gets drawn out after he dies and you feel a little sad for him.

Iraq: What If We Win?

2008-03-13T23:28:00.014-05:00

"Lessons in Humility" is the title of an essay by Francis Fukuyama.

***

This must be what professionals mean when they say that sometimes the jokes write themselves.

I couldn't find an explicitly conservative mission statement inside The American Interest magazine, but you can read between the lines. The fact that Fukuyama is chair of their executive committee is one tip-off. Presenting articles by people like Fukuyama, Robert Kaplan and Richard Perle also makes it clear. That magazine title shouldn't necessarily indicate a slant towards conservatives, but I imagine if you ask why the U.S. needed to support coups against democratically elected governments in Guatemala or Chile, the people who work at this magazine would say because it was in The American Interest to do so.

Anyhow, there's more comedy gold besides Fukuyama's humility in the March/April 2008 issue of the magazine. I hesitate to comment too much about these titles. A few of the entries appear to be in favor of withdrawal, but these supporters of the war are so out of touch. Their symposium titled "Iraq: What If We Win?" includes the following essays (all available online):

"Stay and Win" - Josef Joffe
"Leave or Lose" - Paul Schroeder
"Winning a Civil War?" - James Kurth
"Morale Matters" - Walter Russell Mead
"For the Long Haul" - Philip Zelikow
"Winning Will Resonate" - Robert D. Kaplan
"We Won Years Ago" - Richard Perle

Start collecting stamps

2008-03-12T16:58:00.003-05:00

We get a lot of international mail at work, journals from all over. Today I noticed a sticker indicating postage worth 305.00 BAHT. It's marked Thailand Post. White background, some writing in two colors along the bottom, but black letters and artwork above (One big elephant walking with two baby elephants). It looks like a sticker that they would print custom information on at the post office.

Dude, if they're making customized postage in Thailand, not to make it sound like they're totally backwoods, sorry, but if even Thailand prints custom postage, how much longer are governments around the world going to bother creating pre-printed postage stamps with intricate designs to deter counterfeiters? Even if they don't totally stop issuing the kind of postage stamps we're familiar with, this will lead to a reduction, which means the supply will go down and the demand will go up. Now is the time to start collecting exotic modern stamps from anywhere you can get them. They won't be valuable in five or ten years, but sock them away for twenty or more and I bet they will be antiques, a whole different level compared with the current value of stamps you have from 1988.

I wonder how much these custom printed stamps will go for? Feh.

Too Many Irons

2008-02-22T13:18:00.002-05:00

Projects I'm working on, knowing that some will eventually fade away and be forgotten.

* Writing a Modern d20 campaign.
* Learning and practicing some songs on guitar to play with a friend, hoping to play some open mike nights if we like what we hear.
* Writing new episodes of Brazen Hearts. (Plan to turn the first 13 scripts into a prose novel or novelette.)
* Video mashup of scenes from Algiers and Why We Fight (Capra series). I wrote a "script" of exactly which scenes and lines I wanted to use, but lost it and can't remember.
* Video mashup of public domain movie scenes with pirates, zombies, robots and ninjas. This idea is trying to crawl out front of the others, but it will take several hours of searching and editing for the two or three minute scene I'll end up with.

Stories way on the backburner that I'd like to polish/finish writing someday:
* Muskrat Treasure
* The Pangborn Stalemate
* Hardboiled Head

Why the hell do they use bleached flour in a chocolate cupcake?

2008-02-15T13:36:00.000-05:00

Michael Pollan on Democracy Now

2008-02-13T14:07:00.003-05:00

Two great tastes that taste great together! The author of "Omnivore's Dilemma" and "In Defense of Food" Michael Pollan interviewed by Amy Goodman.

No Country for Satisfying Endings

2008-02-11T12:47:00.000-05:00

[I keep discussing No Country For Old Men with a film fan friend of mine, trying to figure out if the movie was unsatisfying because they screwed up, or if the problem is that I am only satisfied by a Hollywood ending. I'm leaning towards thinking they screwed up, and it wasn't just a Hollywood ending that was missing. So here are my latest thoughts I emailed to my friend.]

I thought of another way to think of No Country for Old Men, or the problem with that movie. (I haven't read the book yet, so can't tell if the problem is copied over from the book, or if it originates with the movie). The last few Stephen King books I've read, ones written after his car accident, played up the fact that he was intentionally not going to solve some mystery. In The Cincinnati Kid, a pair of old hometown reporters tell a young reporter details about a corpse found on a beach, a murder mystery that was never solved and remains unsolved at the end of the book. From a Buick 8 is all about an old car locked in a police garage, with all kinds of mysterious supernatural events that happen around it over the years. People find mutant creatures that appear in the car, a couple people disappear after they mess with the car and leave the trunk open, as if it�s a gateway to another dimension. Lots of speculation about why the things happen, but no confirmation. In both cases, the narrators or some of the characters point out how real life mysteries don�t always have tidy endings.

So I get the point that Stephen King is trying to be more realistic by not wrapping up all the loose ends (or enough of the loose ends?).

My favorite wise old creative writing teacher Dr. Cross used to always say, "Fiction has to be better than real life." He said that students would bring a story, and he'd say it didn't sound real or didn't work very well, and they would protest that it was a true story, that it happened to them just that way in real life. He'd say that doesn't matter, because fiction still has to be better than real life.

If you think about it, the best true stories depicted in movies or in fiction or even newspaper articles or memoirs, have to focus on certain events and leave out other events. The ultimate in realism would be a lot of boring moments with a few exciting or relevant moments. Stories and movies have to balance being as realistic as possible vs. making the story satisfying. Stephen King and the Coen Bros are just sacrificing the usual requirements of a tight, satisfying story in favor of what they think is more realistic dangling loose ends, and the trade-off doesn't seem to have paid off. [There were enough interesting elements in the movie that I enjoyed it, and I'll probably watch it again. But the off-screen climax seems more like an error than an interesting storytelling technique.)

Cory the Doctorow has a Poesy

2008-02-05T23:45:00.000-05:00

beljium it skream kiwi too zomby howdy

2008-02-01T12:59:00.000-05:00

Democracy Now vs. Ralph Nader?

2008-01-31T15:26:00.000-05:00

Amy Goodman interviewed Ralph Nader today on Democracy Now, since he just announced formation of a presidential exploratory committee. They always play sly and relevant selections in the music breaks (where they pause for radio or tv station identification), like they'll have a story about Bush claiming Iraq has WMDs, and the music will be "You Lie To Me". In the music break during the Nader interview, they played a ska song by "Public Property" called "Power Trip." This can't be a coincidence. I can't find tons of relevant articles immediatly when I google "Ralph Nader Power Trip" (only 920 results) but it's not far off from the word liberals and progressives usually apply to him for not capitulating to the authority of the Democratic party: "ego" (keywords 'ego "Ralph Nader"' = 85,200 results).

I'm just surprised that Goodman and DN would try to zap him like that, and that Nader wouldn't mention it as soon as he heard her announce what song they had played on the break.

Theoretically, if he runs and threatens to attract progressives away from them unless one of them adopts some of his platform (at which point he could agree to endorse them), then his running is a fair and solid and maybe helpful thing. Unfortunately, it's not a strategy you can announce upfront. People won't actually vote for you, or won't tell pollsters that they're going to vote for you, if they think you're planning to drop out like that. So it's not a threat unless you pretend you're serious. By the time it got to the actual day of voting, that wouldn't actually justify voting for him when you knew he wasn't going to get majority or plurality. It's an idea that justifies him running as a threat, but not for actually going through with it to the end. (This is me saying I don't plan to vote for him.)

But it's something to think about. Don't take it for granted from pundits and pajamahuddin who are wholly owned subsidiaries of the Democratic Party, that Nader should be the enemy of progressives. From what we've seen of the Dems over the last many years, the Republicans and the Democrats are both enemies of progressives.

Ask Not For Whom This Joke Works

2008-01-26T23:39:00.000-05:00

There were these friends. Their names were Patti LaBelle, Tyne Daly and Lars Ulrich. Patti and Tyne and Lars met at some awards show or Hollywood party in the 80s, and they bonded because of how much they loved computers and bulletin board systems. When the world wide web became popular, they were already seasoned veterans. Hundreds of spectacular discussions and flamewars from the earliest days of Usenet can be traced back to these three.

When Metallica hit it really big and developed their first website, it would naturally need a forum. Patti and Tyne liked posting there too, not because they were really interested in the band or their music. Just because they love any kind of internet message board or forum.

Unfortunately Patti gets kicks out of provoking people. Tyne Daly is usually serious and doesn't trade insults with people. But when someone insults her friend Patti LaBelle, Tyne Daly will take her response into real life, track down the insulter and step on their face. She doesn't play, even in cases when Patti LaBelle was messing around and provoked a nasty response.

Lars wrote a disclaimer which you'll see when you first register on that website. He meant to warn forum users not to insult Patti, but the wording is a little awkward because, you know, English isn't Lars's first language.

The disclaimer reads:
"For whom LaBelle trolls...
TYNE MARCHES ON!"

Songs to learn for Gramma

2008-01-17T13:34:00.001-05:00

St. Louis Blues - Bessie Smith version
Sentimental Journey - Doris Day version
Why Don't You Do Right? - Benny Goodman and Peggy Lee
Long Black Veil - Johnny Cash & Joni Mitchell version.
Dave Matthews and Emmylou Harris version

Also need to look up if any companies do reel-to-reel audio transfer service. She has some old audio tapes she'd like to play but doesn't have a working reel-to-reel tape player. Tapes of her singing, my great grandparents singing, great aunts and uncles, etc.

Adventures in Pickling

2008-01-12T21:13:00.000-05:00

A year or two ago I picked up The Joy of Pickling at a book store clearance sale. I don't salivate at the thought of pickles, but I'm down with the cheapness. I'm looking for recipes that allow me to preserve food cheaply, with methods that are presumably more healthy and less damaging to the environment than store-bought processed foods. Fantasies of survivalism also motivate me, as they have since I was twelve and imagined what kind of bunker/home our family should build. If the economy tanks, or if Gamma World was a prediction instead of a game, or if oil production peaks and demand for oil skyrockets, or if for some mundane reason I just can't maintain my current level of income, then it may become not only healthy and green and cheap to preserve foods at home, but necessary.

My mom used to preserve strawberry-rhubarb jam, apple sauce, veggies, way back around 1982, probably before she started working, although I can't remember precisely. And there's a family legend about my father around age five or six threatening to run away from home and take all the green beans with him. He might have been talking about home-canned beans. (For my next trick I'll try to pencil a little tiny Mason Jar on my family crest.)

So I started off slowly and I've been picking up steam lately. (Pickling up steam?) I made a quart of sauerkraut about a year ago, but the process scared me so much that I never ate any of it. Do you realize how they make it? If you dump the right amount of salt on some sliced cabbage and let it sit in the right conditions, the cabbage will release some juice and begin to ferment. That's the "sauer" part. It's literally going sour, but the fermentation process somehow kills the bacteria that would give you food poisoning. As long as you know what point to stop the fermenting process, then you'll end up with something edible that will last a lot longer than fresh cabbage, while retaining a lot of vitamins. (You actually get higher levels of vitamin B from cabbage kimchi than from unfermented Chinese cabbage, according to The Joy of Pickling.)

The other weird thing is that you don't keep it tightly sealed in a container while it's fermenting. It produces bubbles which need to escape. So you keep some kind of weight on top of the cabbage. As long as it is submerged in the "brine" (the salty water), it will ferment properly. If some of it is sticking out of the brine and exposed to air, that part will rot within a few days. And sauerkraut takes up to four weeks before it's finished.

I don't care how many generations of Germans and others have survived on this stuff, leaving any food out for fourteen days sounds like something your mother warned you about. I ended up sealing it in a big quart jar and sticking it in the back of the fridge, where I never touched the stuff. I may have tasted just a tiny bit when it was "finished," but I can't remember. The idea of this stuff was even scarier than the 14 year old jar of peach preserves I opened and tasted (and survived).

I finally dumped out that untouched jar of sauerkraut last week, so I could try some other pickles in it. And I don't mean cucumbers. The word "pickle" in modern usage has come to mean a cucumber preserved in vinegar, but it originally applied to lots of different vegetables either soaked in vinegar or fermented through some process.

Why do so many people hate sauerkraut? I've noticed a few dishes that are hated almost universally, and this isn't just a matter of regionalism. I'm guessing that people started making sauerkraut because they could preserve the stuff longer, in times before refrigerators existed, or before refrigerators were common. Some people grew up on the stuff and developed a taste for it. The same goes for "lutefisk". Listen to Prairie Home Companion or any given Norwegian descendant for a while. Lutefisk is fish preserved in lye. Once it's preserved that way, you can stack them up on your porch like cordwood. No living creature or microscopic organism will bother them until you boil it for a few days, discarding the nasty water and adding fresh water occasionally. I hear it'll make your kitchen and your whole house stink in the process.

It made good sense back in the day when the only way to keep cabbage or fish or fresh vegetables from rotting was to soak it in vinegar or lye or let it ferment. But it's not a taste that anyone usually seeks, and nobody today with refrigeration and freezers and War-Malt on every corner needs to preserve foods in that way. So the only people who continue it are people who associate the taste with good old days, or kids who had the misfortune of growing up with those people who wanted to taste the good old days.

A few months ago, I learned about some audio files on the web of Vincent Price reading recipes, one of which was Pickled Mushrooms, and had to try it. After that, I dug out the pickling book for some other variations, and now's when you have to read my list of other recipes I've tried so far:

* Polish Pickled Mushrooms
* Pickled Mushrooms with Red Wine and Ginger
* Sweet Pickled Pumpkin
* Spicy Pickled Broccoli
* Russian Soured Cabbage
* Kimchi
* Zydeco Beans
* Kimuchi

The last two are recipes I've started but haven't tasted because they need to ferment or age a little longer. I canned three pints of Zydeco green beans. They're sealed fine and I trust that they won't spoil, but the recipe says not to open them for a month, so the hot peppers and peppercorns and garlic and mustard seed flavors will mingle adequately.

I've made some kimchi that turned out okay, although I think it was bok choy that I used instead of Napa cabbage (a.k.a. Chinese cabbage). The package I grabbed was wrapped in plastic on a cart of reduced price vegetables on the verge of going bad. Thirty cents for a pound of the stuff, but the label just said "Misc. Produce." I'm trying it again with Napa cabbage, which is currently soaking in saltwater. I have to take it out at midnight, mix in the other ingredients, and then let it ferment for three to six days.

Also at midnight, I have two pounds of salted cabbage that I'll try turning into Kimuchi, which is a Japanese variation on Kimchi.

The first fermented cabbage recipe I survived with enough confidence to try more was Russian Soured Cabbage. I chose that because it only has to sit out for three or four days, instead of six or twenty-eight. It's not a flavor I can imagine anyone wanting to make. I can be excused because I didn't know any better. Maybe leaving out the caraway seeds was a mistake.

But if I'm shivering in front of a jury-rigged fireplace next winter, after electricity and well-stocked grocery stores are nothing but fond memories, I'll gladly eat tons of Russian Soured Cabbage while my neighbors get scurvy from lack of fresh or preserved veggies. No, I'm not that heartless. I'll be selling them my home-preserved stuff. Maybe dandelion wine too. I suspect alcoholics will create plenty of demand for cheap homebrew if we have that kind of Long Emergency or deep depression.

Did you hear about the Iranian speedboats tonkin our warships?

2008-01-08T14:55:00.000-05:00

Did I say "tonkin"? I meant "tauntin'."

Evil - Howlin Wolf

2008-01-04T14:33:00.001-05:00