FOOD ON DRUNK

Reda Deems Carnie Coffee "Good Shit"

2011-06-02T11:34:00.000-07:00

It's not one of my most exciting performances, but I am excited to be on The Berrics. Watch Part One, and Part Two.

Last Christmas we shared a cabin with friends in Big Sur. When I awoke and stumbled to the kitchen, I found one of our friends making coffee. To protect her identity, I’ll use my patented technique of disguising her name by spelling it backwards: Narahs.

“We need more coffee,” Narahs announced. She had poured the entire bag we brought with us into the filter.

I don’t drink coffee when I’m hungover, so I’m not sure why I even cared (or why I even brought coffee?), but I decided to argue with Narahs about the proper methods of making coffee. At the time, my opinion was she was using way too much. The argument didn’t last long, though, because Narahs ended it when she said, “You don’t even drink coffee! We make coffee all day, every day!”

This is why I changed Sharan’s name to Narahs because I don’t remember exactly what she said and I don't want to say mean things about my daughter. But she said something along the lines of, “You don’t know how to make coffee,” and it pissed me off. GRRR...

In hindsight it’s actually kind of funny because I do know how to make coffee and I make coffee almost every day. But the only time Narahs is at our house in the morning during coffee hours is after a night of drinking. And, as I mentioned, I don’t make coffee when I’m hungover. So it’s not my fault that Narahs is a stupid drunk slut and hasn’t experienced my magical coffee making ability.

Because I do know how to make coffee, and I make good coffee. Reda says so. And if there’s anyone who knows coffee, it’s Reda. In the latest episode of “Wednesday’s With Reda” on The Berrics, Reda and Joey Brezinski visit our house, molest my wiener, make fun of the art on the walls, and demand that I make them a cup of coffee. Reda enjoyed the cup of coffee I made him. In Part Two, you can clearly hear him say, “This is good shit right here.” If you know anything about Reda, that’s quite an achievement because he hates everything. But my coffee is good shit. Right here.

There was a lot of silly business that didn't make the cut on The Berrics and I can only assume it's because there was too much cock involved? Joey and Reda molested more than one wiener that evening. As you can see in the photo, my Whale Cock is on the floor in front of Reda, and Joey is holding my Portugese coffee mug that Nieratko got me. It's designed with holes around the rim so the only way you can drink out of it is to wrap your lips around the dick that protrudes from the side. And those are only two of the wieners we were playing with in that room.

To Narahs’ credit, however, she is correct: I am not a coffee fiend or a connoisseur of the beverage and don’t pretend to be. (So that just means she’s not “stupid,” but she’s still a drunk slut.) In fact I kind of hate coffee people. But I do enjoy a good cup of coffee and I learned long ago a proper technique for making one. Notice that it's singular: a proper technique. I know there are other methods, but I don't give a shit about how you make coffee. This way works. It’s so simple I don’t understand why people get so fucking crazy about it. Or why some people can’t make a good cup. I take a Melitta filter, put it in one of those plastic Melitta cones, wet it, and put it over a cup. Then I grind some beans (currently I’m using Trader Joe’s “Bay Blend,” which is what Reda had), put a couple big spoonfuls in the cone, and pour a little boiling water over them, just enough to wet them. I then wait a couple minutes before I pour the rest of the boiling water over the grounds, and, voila: good shit right here.

Witch Bath

2011-03-17T13:44:00.000-07:00

Witch Bath is our new favorite game that we learned in Belize.
And your new favorite black metal band.

“Oh look who finally showed up?” Wende (pronounced Wendy) said from the bar when Tania and I arrived.

“She even cleaned her house for you,” her sister Denise said scolding us.

“Ah shit,” I said. “Sorry. Fuck.”

I felt horrible. I hate flaky people. When I say I’m going to do something, I do it. It’s one of my better qualities, but I flaked out that day. We had made a date to play Wii with the sisters that afternoon, but Tania and I decided to take the long walk along the beach to the Coppola resort instead. Tania said she forgot about the Wii date. I didn’t forget about it, but I thought it was just drunk talk. “Ah, they won’t miss us,” I thought. Apparently they did miss us. And it wasn’t drunk talk. And they were pissed.

Wende and Denise are sisters, born in Canada, of Irish descent. They’ve owned the Pickled Parrot in Belize for over a decade. We wandered in our first night in Placencia and ended up staying til after closing. Not sure how or when the Wii came up, but we discovered that we all share a love of Wii bowling.

“Why would anyone go to a bowling alley ever again?”

“I know, right!”

“Real bowling is so stupid!”

So Tania and I were invited to their house the next day to enjoy a few frames of Wii bowling with them. “I’m going to kick your asses!” I boasted. But, as I said, we flaked. And we had to listen to their shit for the rest of the evening. Which we deserved.

We did, however, make two play dates with the sisters that first drunken night. The second one was the following day and involved, believe it or not, real bowling.

“There’s a bowling alley here?” I said. You have to remember that Belize is mostly jungle. “I gotta see this.”

Wende on the left, Denise on the right, at their bar, The Pickled Parrot.

“So are you actually going to come tomorrow?” Wende asked.

“Or are you going flake out again?” Denise asked.

They were really mad. I guess besides cleaning the house for our Wii play date, they even closed the bar down.

“Yeah,” I said emphatically. “Yeah. We’re coming. Shit, sorry.”

Pickled Parrot's Pink Pussy.

The next morning a small crew of Placencia locals gathered in front of the Pickled Parrot to take a bus eight miles north to the neighboring town of Maya Beach. The occasion was Brenda's birthday. Brenda is another Pickled Parrot local. Like Wende and Denise, she was cool. We had a fine time drinking rum punches with Brenda at the Pickled Parrot.

The idea of a bowling alley in Belize becomes even stranger when you take a bus to a bowling alley in Belize. A couple people in our group had, in fact, never been on a bus before. Probably because the bus, a very old school bus, only comes once a day. We got on in Placencia, which is the southern most tip of the peninsula and thus the beginning of the bus route, so the bus was empty at the start. That only lasted a few minutes. By the time we got to Maya Beach, eight miles and 30 minutes later, the thing was packed, standing room only. It seemed to stop every 20 feet and ten more people would get on. One girl that got on emerged from the jungle with a pizza. (Gratuitous grandpa joke: Must have been a pizza “hut” in the jungle somewhere?)

The first stop on Wende and Denise’s Maya Beach adventure was Mangos, a bar/restaurant that everyone said had the best food on the peninsula. They couldn’t stop talking about how good the chef was. It looked good. Tania and I weren’t really that hungry yet, so we just ordered a plate of nachos with grilled shrimp and enjoyed the view and our rum punch.

Tania enjoying the view at Mangos. Below, not yo shrimp.

The thing I will always remember about Mangos, though, was the ring game. Next to the bar, there was a silver ring on a fishing line attached to the ceiling. The ring was around a hook screwed into a post. Denise took the ring off the hook, took a few steps back, and began trying to swing the ring back onto the hook.

“WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS?” I yelled.

“It’s the ring game,” she said. “It’s a Belizean thing. You try and get the ring onto the hook.”

“LEMME TRY,” I yelled. I tend to yell when I get excited.

Get the ring on the hook. Looked simple enough. I swung the ring at the hook, and missed.

“What the fuck?” I said to the ring as I caught it on its return.

That was all it took, just one try. I was pissed, and I was hooked (no pun intended). I’ve been addicted to it ever since. I’ve been jonesing for a fix so bad since we’ve been home that I went down to the hardware store, bought the supplies, and built my own damn ring game in our backyard. We dubbed it “Belizean Horseshoes.” (Other names we considered were “Belizean Basketball,” you have to get the hoop around the “ball”; “Belizean Darts,” you have to hit the “dart” with the bulls eye; and “Belizean Wedding,” put the ring on the “finger.”) But, after a short search on the internet, I learned that it already has a name: it’s called either the Bimini Ring Game, or Ring The Bull.

Tania never fist pumps, but she jocked out when she got the ring on the hook at Mangos.

The ring game is popular at bars throughout the Bahamas, not just Belize, but nobody really knows where it came from. Some say it was introduced by pirates, but pirates (butt pirates?) seem to be the response to any question without an answer down there. Others like to say it was invented by Hemingway while he was fishing and drinking, drinking and fishing, sometimes just fishing, but most of the time just drinking. But it doesn’t matter what their story is because the game’s origins can purportedly be traced back to some ancient pub in England called “Ye Olde Trip To Jerusalem.”

“Legend has it the game was brought back to England by Crusaders from Jerusalem,” says the site ringthebull.com. “This story appears to have come about primarily from the game being played in the most famous and oldest pub in England ‘Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem’ situated in the cliffs underneath Nottingham Castle. This pub is an old crusaders tavern dating back to the year 1189 AD.”

It’s a nice story, and I hope it is true, but ringthebull.com is a site run by some dude in Cincinatti. (Since the internet says I invented the word “bromance,” I don’t really believe anything on it anymore.) And even if anybody was alive in 1189 AD, there doesn’t seem to be any explanation for the Jewish element in the story. “The Crusaders” makes the story sound very exciting and romantic (much like butt pirates), but—wait, they stole it from the Jews, what? Jews play games? I mean besides Dreidle?

In short, I don’t think it really has a name and you can call it whatever you want. So we’ve decided to call the ring game we learned in Belize “Witch Bath.”

This really has nothing to do with anything other than I thought this might be a nice place for you, the reader, to pause and enjoy a wonderful painting of a lobster wearing sunglasses and enjoying a Belikin.

The other night, we had a couple friends, Mark and Sharan, over for drinks, dinner, and to try out our new Belizean Horseshoe game (which was its name at the time). Mark also brought his two dogs, Randall and Collette, and a coworker from Connecticut named Carly. Dinner was delightful. Tania made braised beef short ribs with leek polenta and green beans (I would call them haricot verts, as is the fashion these days, but I’m not trying to sell them to you, and I’m not French). But Belizean Horseshoes was the highlight of the evening. As I had hoped, our guests were absolutely smitten with the stupid ring on a string.

“You’ll probably find me out here when the sun comes up, smoking cigarettes and still playing this thing,” Carly said.

It was in fact Carly who was the first person to get the ring on the hook in our backyard. I had performed fairly well on the one at Mangos bar, I had hooked the ring probably a dozen times, but after setting the one up in our backyard I couldn’t hook it once after a half hour of trying. Which made me wonder if I had miscalculated the distances. But then Carly arrived and made it on the hook in just a few minutes (a little too easily, I thought), and we were all shown that it wasn’t as impossible as it first seemed. Mark and Tania then both hooked it a couple times, and I went on to hook it a few more times. Sharan, on the other hand, has yet to experience the joy of landing the ring on the hook because she’s a total loser.

“I fucking hate this game,” Sharan said.

Amid the revelry of the evening, however, an unfortunate mishap soured our merriment. Mark’s dog, Collette, got hit by a skunk in our backyard.

“And Collette’s the smart one,” Mark said as he stood over Collette on our lawn wiping the froth from her lips and cleaning her bloody nose. She not only got the skunk’s vile spray straight in the face, but she got the skunk’s claws straight up her nose. “She has a problem with cats,” Mark explained.

Not to be outdone, Randall raced into the darkness of our backyard and found the wounded skunk himself and was similarly entertained by the animal’s noxious nether regions. While Collette was fine with her first misting, and sat quietly, albeit ashamed, on the patio for the rest of the night, Randall returned to the scene a half dozen more times and received the same result every time. He couldn’t get enough of it. We wondered if it was like heroin to him or something. “You throw up at first, and it burns your eyes, but after that the high is amazing!”

Beckett, as I’ve said before, hates squirrels. He calls them Devil Rats. And skunks, well, he refers to them as the Queens of the Devil Rats. I mentioned this in the backyard at some point, which might have been why Mark, using Randall’s voice, characterized the foul smelling weasel as a witch. “I thought it was a cat,” Randall whined, “but it turned into a FUCKING WITCH!”

Shortly thereafter the term “Witch Bath” was born. It’s what you get when you get hit by a skunk. As in, “Randall and Collette each took a witch bath the other night.”

“That’s a good name for a black metal band,” I said.

And thus the world famous “skunk metal” band Witch Bath was born.

“When do we start practicing?” Sharan asked excitedly.

“Practice?” I said. “Pfft! We don’t practice, we stink!” (That’s two grandpa jokes, if you’re keeping score.)

I further explained that the hard work was already done: we had a name, we had a logo, and we had a theme on which to hang our crappy metal music. Making the crappy metal music to go along with our logo is easy. Anybody can do that, even me and Mark. So all that is left to do is for Sharan and Tania to write some stupid lyrics about skunks, witches, baths, and witch baths. Of course costuming is a major issue for any metal band, but in our case that’s a no brainer also: we’ll all wear black witch’s habits that will be painted like a skunk. With bushy tails and pointy black hats, of course. At the moment I'm busy trying to figure out how to rig the tails so that we can lift them to expose an anus hose that will spray the audience—like Gwar—with skunk juice. Gwar skunk tails are far more important than practice.

The only thing we need to practice is this fucking shit right here!

A few days later, while pricing witch hats (they’re expensive!), I had a great idea, “We should just call the ring game, Witch Bath, too!” Mark has admitted having trouble pronouncing the “Belizean” part of Belizean Horseshoes, Bimini Ring Game just sounds stupid like Jenga, and Ring the Bull sounds either vaguely sexual or like a catchphrase on Sports Center. But if someone asked me if I wanted to learn how to play Witch Bath, I’d be like, “Fuck yeah!”

And thus Witch Bath, the ring game, was born. (You’d think we’re pro life with all the things being born in this story, but we’re not.)

The object of Witch Bath, then, is to get the noose (ring) around the witch’s neck (hook), so that you can drag her down to the river and drown her. The drowning, that’s the “bath” part. Or maybe the object is to get the wedding ring around the witch’s finger (the hook) so that you can marry her and sit in her Jacuzzi cauldron for all eternity? I don’t know. And I don’t care. Use your imagination. If Picasso can call this a guitar, I can call this game Witch Bath.

Red Rum Punch

2011-03-08T09:49:00.000-08:00

These juicy green leaves with bright red veins came from a bush, or a tree, that was all over the beaches of Belize. We stayed in a beach shack in Placencia.

“It’s gonna DUMP!”

I must have yelled that a dozen times our first day in Belize. The rain would fall hard at times, but not for long. There was always blue sky right behind the dark clouds that were born over the Caribbean Sea with its Bermuda Triangle and peculiar weather conditions that would make the rain fall sideways. Little flying water coffins.

“You’re going to dump,” Tania said.

It’s true. I am going to dump. No matter what. Even if I died right after she said that, I’d still dump. I’ve been give to understand that corpses void their bowels.

“You don’t tell me when I’m going to dump!” I yelled back at her. Perhaps too aggressively.

We were on vacation, after all, and there was no reason to be starting a fight. We had even taken the precaution of sleeping on our usually assigned sides of the bed: I am on the right, Tania is on the left. That is from the vantage point of a murderer standing at the foot of the bed with a knife in his hand, perhaps a large chef’s knife, and looking at us while adjusting his pantyhose, or ski mask, or whatever costume he had chosen to wear for the event of our deaths. Maybe he wore nothing and wished for us to see his crazy face before we die so we’d always “remember” him, that is of course if memory crosses the divide between this world and the next. I’m of the opinion it doesn’t. I said he was crazy, right? In which case, if he were sans mask, then he would probably be picking his nose as he surveyed us sleeping. I would flick a booger on my victims right before I set upon them. It’s completely unnecessary, but it’s a little added obnoxious touch to an already unpleasant event. I mean, if you’re going to be a jerk. I wouldn’t aim, I’d just flick it like a cigarette in that “Alright let’s do this!” manner that is so popular among action movie stars. And then I’d stab the fuck out of them. Out of us. I’m on the right, she’s on the left, if you’re a murderer at the foot of our bed.

This was the view from the front porch of our beach shack. See that black dot on the beach by the water to the right? It's a bag of trash. It was there our entire stay. We wrote a children's story about it called, "The Li'l Bag of Beach Trash." Which you will enjoy soon.

“You’re on my side,” Tania said as she emerged from the bathroom in our tiny little beach shack and found me on the left side of the bed. Again, from the murderer’s perspective. “You wanna fight again?” she asked. The Amelie soundtrack was coming out of her crappy, tinny iPod speakers.

“Where was that, that we fought because we slept on the wrong side of the bed?” I asked. The song that she walked down the aisle to, “La Valse D’Amelie,” was playing.

“I don’t remember,” she said, thinking about it. “London?”

“No,” I said. We definitely fought in London. That was a particularly bad fight. But I remember sleeping on my side, the right side, right as in opposite of left from the perspective of a murderer at the foot of our bed, but also right as in the correct side of the bed. Because I remember staring at the window all night long, which was on my side of the room, our horrible, tiny, harlequin themed room. There’s nothing like a clown-themed room to exaggerate and mock a domestic spat.

“Maybe Vegas?” she wondered.

“Maybe,” I agreed. “For some reason Vegas was the first place I thought of, too.” She didn’t think Vegas first, but I said “too” all the same. And Vegas seems like a place where you’re supposed to fight with women.

“I just remember that we were fighting,” she said, “and in hindsight, when it was all over, we decided it was because we were sleeping on the wrong sides of the bed.”

“Probably,” I said. Upon inspection, I’ve found that every one of our fights is over nothing and may as well have been caused by sleeping on the wrong side of the bed. It’s as good an explanation as any. “Oh wow! Look at the moon!” I said. It was still light out, but I could see the moon rising over the ocean.

When it would "dump," I'd take pictures of beach trash and whatnot in the room. This is a little piece of seaweed going up Bittman's nose.

“Oh,” she said, stepping out onto our porch, “it’s a full moon.”

Tania got her camera out of her purse and took a picture of the moon in the daylight sky. It was one of those digital pictures you feel the need to take, but will never do anything with. It’s a nice sentiment, but ultimately it’s just a stupid moon picture.

“Are you using the Caribbean Ocean Moon Rise setting?” I asked.

Tania’s camera has all these automatic settings that are oddly specific such as, “Pets,” “Food,” “Babies,” “Fireworks,” “Night Portraits,” “Starry Night Portraits,” “Self Portraits,” “Starry Night Self Portraits of Baby Food,” etc.. I prefer to keep it on the one that uses a martini glass as an icon, “Party,” it says. I hope that every picture I take in that mode will look like I’m at a party. “WOOOO! PARTY CAM!”

“Duh,” Tania said. “What? You think I’d make the mistake of using the Pacific Ocean Moon Rise setting?”

I poured two more rum drinks. Tania lay down on the bed and picked up her Patti Smith book. The Cocteau Twins babbled out of the tinny iPod speakers. Tania thinks the singer sounds like Nell. Jodie Foster Appalachian feral wild child jibber jabber. The surf splashed upon our beach. The faint yellow moon went behind the clouds.

Our first bartender preferred this rum because it was mellower, not so sweet and vanilla-y.

“Jesus,” she said as she took a sip of her rum punch.

“That’s how they did it at the bar,” I said. I watched. I made mental notes. They filled the glass with ice, then some rum, then a splash of punch. Tania found my interpretation a little strong.

“You like that Patti Smith book?” I asked.

Tania said Patti Smith is a good writer. Tania never says that. Even about good writers.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Why don’t you ask the murderer at the end of the bed. He’s been reading over my shoulder all night.”

I wondered if the camera had a setting for “Murder.”


Rum punch at Coppola's. Coppola has a resort in Placencia. We walked about three miles along the beach to get to the bar on the ocean and have a couple drinks and watch rich people have really weird forced romantic moments.

Found this sick Neil Blender ramp on the walk to Coppola's. Tania is watching wild chickens in the trees.

Chili's by The Long Beach Aquarium

2011-01-04T12:26:00.000-08:00

I'm making my own screen savers.

Tania’s BFF Christy was in town with her kid and they decided we would all take a field trip to the Long Beach Aquarium. I was a little worried because the general consensus in regards to the aquarium is that it sucks. I saw a lot of negative reviews on Yelp.

“Sucks.”
—Shaquand

“Worst 'quarm.”
—Jimarcus

“Very, very, very sucks.”
—Traycedes

“Smells.”
—Lashaunta

“That is so stupid.”
—Nene

The one problem with all of these bad reviews is that they were comparing the LBC aquarium to the world renowned Monterey Bay Aquarium just a couple hundred miles north. Unfortunately, not only does the LBC aquarium suck in comparison, but so does every other aquarium in the world. The Monterey Bay aquarium is beyond comparison, thus it is unfair to judge anything in relation to it. If you take Monterey out of the equation, however, the Long Beach Aquarium of the Pacific is a fine aquarium with lots of cool tanks. There are sharks, seals, jellyfish, and even playful otters. They also have small troughs filled with sea slugs, and starfish, and other disgusting things that they let you touch. It’s sort of like an underwater petting zoo, but instead of stinky goats, you stroke snot.

This thing tried to pull me in.

“What are their names?” I wondered to the slug wrangler when it was my turn to stick my hands in the water. She said they didn’t have names. “No names?” I said surprised. “Can I name them?” I asked. Best to ask permission before you go around naming animals that don’t belong to you. Their keepers might subscribe to a Montessori philosophy and are waiting for the animal to name itself.

“Sure, I guess,” the attendant said.

Tania is a black belt at naming seals and other sea creatures, and thus she usually handles this sort of thing, but she thought this would be a good opportunity for me to get my foot in the door and suggested I give it a go. And so here is a catalog of some of the names I came up with:

Slimon the Diamond, Boogers Snot Com, Wet Taffy The Elder, Dear Old Used Condom Carl, Suck On It Sylvester, Jean Luc the Sand Junky, Barry the Bewildering Baltic Blind Banana, Ole Slow Poke (“The Cheetah of the Sea”), Dimitry the Underwater Arms Dealer, Herman the Echinoderman, etc..

Bill and Ted were having an excellent adventure.


This is Christy's kid, Preston. "Hey, Preston, make a shark face," I said. "Huh?" Preston said.

"Make a—" "I know, I heard you. God. Hold on, I'm thinking of a good one… okay I got one."

"TAH DAAAH! SHARK FACE!"

But one of my favorite things about visiting the Long Beach Aquarium is getting to eat lunch on the marina. And in my opinion, there’s only one place to go. It’s a funky little joint with a real deal, south-of-the-border name and the cooking to back it up. This place is going old school and it’s called Chili’s.

Chili’s has been serving up homemade, down home cooking since 1975. And when you walk into the restaurant that is just a short walk from the Aquarium, you’re transported back in time. Your eyes are bludgeoned with a vast array of authentic memorabilia that makes you feel like you are in a cantina that straddles the border between Texas and Mexico.

“You put the knick knack in Knick Knack Paddy Whack Give a Dog a Bone!” I said to the hostess as she walked us to our bangin’ booth. “That’s how we roll, dog!” I said. Tania and Christy et al ordered a bevy of food from our waitress, but the most important item we ordered was the queso. Queso is Christy’s favorite food. She doesn’t eat anything else—actually she eats one other thing, spaghetti I think, but mostly queso. She’s the opposite of a foodie, she’s like a foo. Or maybe even just a fo.

Leggo my queso, Plato! Or I'll break-o your face-o!

As the waitress placed the bowl of queso on the table, I stood up, pushed my chair back, and made a very dramatic step away from the table. “Whoa!” I said. My body language showed that I didn’t want to get any queso on my money shirt. “I don’t think so,” I said with a hearty guffaw. That’s my lucky shirt that I wear to Vegas when I go out with the boys and we gamble and I yell things in the casino like, “THAT’S WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT!” and, “LET’S DO THIS!®©™” (LET’S DO THIS!®©™, incidentally, is my new catch phrase for 2011. I own it.)

Once the cheese was on the table I resumed my place and dug in. “Oh, that is money!” I said with my mouth full of the first bite. “You could wipe that on the inside of a urinal in a public restroom in Flavor Town and I’d lick it off!”

Next up was the chili. Hey, you can’t go to Chili’s without trying a bowl of their signature red. I rolled my sweatband up my forearm a little further and dug in for my first bite.

Actually, the Chili looks like the inside of a toilet bowl in a public restroom in Flavor Town. Mmmm.

“This rocks, brother!” I said with beans and sauce dangling from my confusing facial hair pattern like dingleberries off the butthole on a stray dog wandering the streets of Flavor Town. And then the heat started to mount on my tongue. “Wow, man, that chili’s got some kick! That’s the kind of kick you get when you get sent to the Flavor Town penitentiary and your cellmate punches you in the back of the head after he’s done buttfucking you! You should call this ‘Donkey Pun-Chili!’ LET’S DO THIS!®©™”

Finally, the star of the show, the famous Chili’s burger arrived. “Is that 80-20 mix?” I said to the waitress as she set it down before me. Almost all chefs use a mixture of ground beef that is 80% meat and 20% fat, but I always like to say it out loud because it makes me sound like a real chef and not some douchebag that wears his sunglasses on the back of his head and opened some cockamamie restaurant that serves up “collision food”—note that I am talking about food that is neither “fusion” nor “cuisine”—which is a head-on collision between Texas BBQ and sushi. I like to describe it as, “It’s what you get when you strap a rodeo bull and a sumo wrestler to two oncoming bullet trains: a total disaster! YEEHAW! ARIGATO!” Trust me, it rocks.

“Eighty twenty?” the waitress finally said. “Um, I don’t know? I can go check for you, though?”

“Wait a minute,” I said, and I pointed out the window. “Are those two sheep having sex on that yacht?” I asked.

“What?” she said looking where I pointed.

Which was totally in the opposite direction of my plate. While she was looking for my fantasy fucking flock, I stole a fistful of fries and stuffed them in my face.

“What?” she said turning back around.

But it was too late, my face was filled with fries. "Fistful of fantasy flock fucking face fries!" I’m a crazy guy sometimes. What can I say? “Wham bam thank you ma’am!”

My burger looks like what's in between the legs of my favorite Flavor Town hooker! Guess which one tastes like old fish!

Confused, the waitress left us alone to dig into our entrees. “Look at looky loo,” I said to my burger as I raised it to my stray dog butthole lips and took a big ole bite. “Oh man! I dig that. This rocks man. Get it goin’. That’s what I’m talking about. Winner winner hamburger dinner. You can taste the sweetness of the bun, and the crunchtastic pickle makes me tickle, and the tomato comes through like the national fruit of Flavor Town, and this thing just makes me get down, brother.”

In short, it tasted just like a hamburger, but I need to describe all the various components that make up a hamburger using colorful analogies, alliteration, rhymes, and all manner of blather for about ten minutes or so. When I was finished, I held up my jewel encrusted fist—I don’t wear any gay jewelry or anything, it’s like really cool dude jewelry that’s got skulls and shit on it, grrrrr—and offered it to anyone who happened to be nearby. Getting knuckles from me, after all, is the Quadruple-D equivalent of a Michelin Star.

Quadruple D? Did I not mention it earlier? The newsboys are on the street corners all over Flavor Town yelling the news: I’m starting my own TV show and it’s going to be called “Douchebags, Ding Dongs, and Dipshits.” It’s going to be off the hook.

BOOB: AVAILABLE NOW

2010-11-17T11:07:00.000-08:00

"Big Brother," the BOOB press release reads, "was the most infamous magazine in skateboard history and one of its loudest voices was Dave Carnie. BOOB (published by KING PUBLISHING with support from VANS) is a collection of Dave Carnie’s best work in his 14 years with Big Brother—a magazine that not only transformed skateboarding and brought us Jackass, but influenced everything in the publishing world from Vice to Martha Stewart’s Living. BOOB will go down in literary history as the greatest skateboard book, not about skateboarding, ever written."

Now for some quotes from famous people:

“Dave tells it like it is, or however he sees it through his perverted prism. Never compromising, sometimes offensive, always funny.”

—Tony Hawk

“On his best day Dave Carnie isn’t too pleasant. He is often drunk, fairly abusive, and a goddamn awful fighter. He can write like a son of a bitch and is one too. I’m a big fan.”

—Johnny Knoxville

“I met Carnie at Big Brother when the offices were at World in El Segundo and he was the biggest dick. It wasn’t till four years later when he was drunk at Jeff’s apartment that he was suddenly nice to me. I’m not sure how I won him over, but it took years of trying.”

—Spike Jonze

“Idiots often flaunt their idiocy unintentionally, geniuses often flaunt their genius over-intentionally, but it is the truly gifted ones who can deliver their genius through idiocy.”

—Mark Whitely, Slap Magazine

“When I think of Carnie, one word comes to mind: shitbag. Actually, that’s two words, but it looks way better written as one.”

—Jeff Tremaine

To order your copy, touch a BOOB anywhere on this page. While you're waiting for your book to arrive, enjoy a food related sample from the notorious "Kids Issue" that came out in January 1999:

How To Hurt Kids

Face it, kids suck. Who likes kids anyway? They're filthy little runts. We should be waging war against them, not for them. What's all this “they're our future” horseshit, anyway? What about the present? What about me? Has everyone forgotten that adults, back in the day, also had the misfortune of falling out of some lame cunt's cunt? It wasn't that hard. It was so easy that I don't even remember doing it. Yet every child who performs this pitiful stunt of bungee jumping out of a vagina is awarded Rock Star status.

“Isn't it cuuuute?” No, it looks like a fucking worm with arms. I hate kids. They've ruined everything: albums come with stupid warnings, car windows only go down halfway, drugs and liquor are heavily regulated, you need a ladder at the bookstore to get to the pornography, and TV and movies are boring. If it weren't for kids and their fragile little brains, you'd probably be looking at a nice pair of tits right now, but no, we can't show tits because of kids. Fuck kids! Let's kill ’em.

In an effort to rid the world of kids so that the rest of us can grow and prosper, I have created some deadly desserts that will, at the very least, injure the little fuckers. Kids love sweets. They fall for them every time. Just as men think with their dicks around women, so do children, in the company of candy, think with their tongues.

The ol’ razor blade in the apple—a classic!
Ingredients: Apple, razor blade, duct tape, glue, and a kid.
This one is a favorite around Halloween, but works during any season. Any ole apple will do, but if you can find one that fell in a pile of e. coli-infested shit you can inflict more damage. Cut the apple in half and then glue a razor blade to one of the halves. Align the halves as if nothing happened and then tape them together. Do this to a bunch of apples until you have an entire sack. Then, go to your local grammar school and hand them to the kids as they get on the bus.

The exploding candy bar
Ingredients: Candy, plastic canister of lighter fluid, a bottle rocket, sealing wax, a cigarette, a match, some tape, and a kid.
First, build the bomb. The diagram is self-explanatory, but remember, the more lighter fluid in the canister, the more the kid dies. Next, buy some candy and tape it all around the bomb. Make sure you choose popular candy. Then, when you find a kid that you want to blow up, light the cigarette (which acts as a time delay fuse for the bottle rocket on top) and give him/her the “candy.” Run away. Helpful hint: if you have time to stake out a location, build a foxhole nearby.

The cobra in the yogurt
Ingredients: One Yoplait Yogurt, one cobra, and one kid.
Kids love yogurt. Replace the yogurt in the container with a ferocious, hungry cobra. Go to your local park and offer any one of the young, rosy-cheeked whelps your “cobragurt.” When they go to open it, they'll think that they're about to enjoy a healthy snack, but—surprise! Cobra attack to the face! Works every time.

Poisoned candy—a classic!
Ingredients: Candy bar, Vanish toilet bowl cleaner, a turkey baster, and a kid.
An issue that I have yet to address in this article is the “don't–take–candy–from–strangers” dilemma. Don't worry about it. Kids are stupid sugar magnets. Their mother (the cunt) could be standing right beside them telling them, “Remember, don't take candy from a stranger,” and they'll still eagerly snatch whatever sweets you have to offer. I can imagine, however, some snot–nosed goody–goody actually refusing your gift. My first inclination would be to strike the little beast, but that wouldn't do either of us any good. So, I would explain that I was a friend and he can accept candy from a friend—works every time. But make sure you poison the candy. I fill a turkey baster with Vanish Toilet Bowl cleaner and ram it into the candy. Vanish does to kids just what the name implies.

Bear trap in the ice cream cake
Ingredients: An ice cream cake, a bear trap, a birthday, and a kid.
Order an ice cream cake at the cake store and request that they replace the ice cream with a bear trap. Most won't do that, so take the cake home and hollow out the bottom. Since you aren't going to be putting the hole back in, you can eat it. Yum! Spread the trap's jaws wide and secure the spring mechanism. It's a good idea to put the candles on the cake before you place it over the trap. Now, find a kid's birthday party, but be careful, because adults in attendance will like ice cream cake too. You don't want to mangle the hands of an accomplished adult, so warn the adults that there is a bear trap in the cake by spelling it out loud—don't worry, kids can't spell. Just say, “T-H-E-R-E-I-S-A-B-E-A-R-T-R-A-P-I-N-T-H-E-C-A-K-E,” then, anyone that is an adult will stay the fuck away from that cake. After birthday boy blows out the candles, say, “Okay, everyone dive in!” (Honorable mention: Mouse trap in the cupcake.)

GERMANY, CHAPTER 6: The Sandwich Thieves

2010-11-12T13:51:00.000-08:00

A typical German breakfast buffet.

Nothing got Tania more excited in Germany than stealing sandwiches from the hotel breakfast buffets every morning. Breakfast in Germany, incidentally, is more akin to an American lunch. It consists mostly of breads, meats, and cheeses. No matter how many cups of coffee or hard-boiled eggs I’d add to my breakfast plate, it always looked like lunch. I attribute this to the presence of all the pickled fare that is made available at the German breakfast. Pickles have no place at the breakfast table. That’s not just my opinion, that’s a fact. Lord knows I tried to get with the AM pickle program, but it simply doesn’t work. I found the European custom of drinking beer with ice cubes a little queer, but I’m okay with it, even if I refuse to participate in the practice. Pickled herrings with orange juice for breakfast, on the other hand, is a downright disgusting pairing. It's not natural. You’d have more success trying to mate a horse with a bullfrog. There’s got to be a “thou shalt not” in the Bible about eating pickled herrings with orange juice at breakfast, right? Because that is a marriage that will destroy the family as we know it.

"Meat, meat, meat! She can't afford a cannon. Meat, meat, meat! She can't afford no gun at all."
(That's some Anthony Bourdain/Henry Rollins shit right there, referencing old punk rock. Easy grandpa, easy. You're "Cool Meter" can't handle your obscure references and seething disdain for mainstream culture.)

We’d each grab enough meat, bread, and cheese at the buffet to make two sandwiches. At the table we’d assemble one sandwich and eat it while smiling at the other guests as if nothing at all were afoot. “Haha, no capers here.” (You actually could spoon some capers over your pickled herrings if you liked—oh! maybe even drop some capers in your orange juice to make a German bubble tea?) And then, very quietly, we’d put together our second sandwich. Next thing you know, POOF! It was gone!

A Sandwich Thief creation.

“I noticed you has had an entire sandwich on your plate not two seconds ago,” I always worried some suspicious fraulein would catch us. “There is no vay you could haff eaten zis sandwich zat fast. So I vonder, vhere did it go, hmm? Fatty?”

We fucking stole it, bitch!

I’d make sure the coast was clear, and Tania would get a gang of napkins, wrap up the sandwiches, and throw them in her purse. “HAHA! THE SANDWICH THIEVES HAVE STRUCK AGAIN!” We’d say that every time.

It should be noted that while ordinary napkins worked great for sandwich smuggling, I found that using vagina bags—wait, what? Oh, apparently they're not called "vagina bags," they're used for disposing of sanitary napkins. Whatever. The vagina bags were in dispensers on the wall in every toilet and they worked great for transporting stolen sandwiches.


While cruising down the Rhine, Tania looks for DEA (Dejeuner Enforcement Administration) agents before she tears into the contraband.

Stealing sandwiches in the morning is one of Tania’s finest ideas. Because the sandwiches would reemerge later in the day when we were on a boat or a train and hunger had just begun to descend upon us again. The stolen sandwich made for a perfect light—and FREE!—lunch that would tide us over until we got to a proper schnitzel palace.

“Nothing,” Tania likes to say, “tastes as good as a stolen sandwich.”

Here’s a travel tip from the sandwich thieves
This is not in a guidebook by Rick Steves
Steal a morning snack, stuff it up your sleeves
When hunger strikes, a stolen sandwich always relieves

This photo has nothing to do with stealing sandwiches, but it is about stealing. I'm not sure if Tania was suffering from a mild case of kleptomania, or if she just enjoyed making her "crime face," but emboldened by the success of her sandwich heists she started trying to steal all kinds of stuff. Here she's trying to steal an entire German castle one stone at a time. The only thing that prevented her from making off with the largest castle still standing on the Rhine and reconstructing it in our backyard was a thunderclap that echoed across the skies at the exact same moment she removed the stone between her fingers from the wall. "Put it back," I said nervously watching the clouds, "you've awoken the gods again." ("Again": as you may remember, when we got married, They (the gods) lit the hills around Big Sur on fire with lightning bolts.) "Fuck them!" she responded. She was obviously crazy and addicted to stealing. I conducted an impromptu intervention and was somehow able to convince her to not only put that particular stone back, but leave the rest of the castle behind. "Please accept this gift we are offering you…" We were not struck by lightning.

GERMANY, CHAPTER 5: The Ballhaus and The Roller Disco

2010-11-08T12:12:00.000-08:00

"Do you have anything gayer?" I asked the fraulein.

Before we left, I mentioned to Scott Bourne that we were going to Berlin.

“Let me know if you want a contact,” Scott wrote, “good friend lives there and would roll you around and take you out for a beer.

Do you get this? “You should meet my friend!” I don’t think I’ve ever taken anybody up on it. “New friends” is not on the list. A wheel of parmigiano reggiano is. But I always politely take the friend’s info, promise to look them up, and then promptly throw it out. For some reason I contacted Scott’s friend in Berlin. “Maybe he has cheese,” I must have thought.

The emails between Julian Dykmans and myself were normal enough, so when he suggested we meet at a strange place called “The Ballhaus” for beers and some of the “best schnitzel in town,” I said, sure.

“Hey! All right!” he wrote back. “Nine pm at the Clärchens Ballhaus. Reserved under the name Dykmans. This is funny, like a blind date… To recognize us, here is a pic...”

At the bottom of the email was a grainy picture of an attractive couple sharing a good laugh. They didn’t look like psychos, but then psychos never look like psychos. Which makes it hard for normal people to be normal because the most psychotic psycho always looks super normal. He said something else at the bottom that I didn’t pay much attention to at the time, “You feeling the be-bop evening? Better put on your dancing shoes!”

Julian may have been normal, but the Clarchens Ballhaus was anything but. “What a strange place,” I said as we entered the gates into a large, open courtyard where people were seated at tables, drinking, and eating. Some had spilled onto the street and were smoking cigarettes by the light of the bare bulbs hung from the trees. The courtyard garden had a wild character to it. Whoever cared for it, cared for it only occasionally, if at all. The five-story building didn’t necessarily stand out from its neighbors, it looked like an ordinary apartment building, but there was something strange about it. It felt as if it had suffered under the Nazis, then the communists, but now was the home of a vegetarian, nudist commune.

We stumbled into the dark, narrow, wood paneled foyer and were instantly transported back in time, into a world that I see in Kafka’s stories. Old men dressed in tuxedos with bushy white curlicue mustaches looked as if they had lived in the ancient cloakroom their entire lives. They took our coats and our money. It was very crowded. There was barely room for their bushy eyebrows. Even if I understood German I don’t think I would have been able to hear what they were saying, and they were upset at me for not understanding, so I just handed over some money and in return I received some tickets. I farted in the small, crowded foyer. Another old man in a tuxedo found the name “Dykmans” amongst the scribbles on a crumpled sheet of paper he kept close to his chest. He instructed us to follow him through a narrow pair of curtains.

German rockabilly for the senior crowd at the Ballhaus.

Inside it was dark and loud, the ceilings were high and the floor was packed with people of all ages dancing and drinking and shouting. Disco balls and tinsel curtains sent sparkles all over the ballroom. Another old ghost in a tuxedo led us to a table in a corner. I wanted to protest because we couldn’t see the action on the floor very well from there, but I later learned that all the good tables have been reserved for centuries by the elderly Germans who come every weekend to let their hair—what little they have left of it—down. My father would have protested, and spit on the floor, but we sat down and took in our surroundings.

I had to use the restroom, but was scared to cross the packed dance floor. I tried to get a piggyback ride at the edge of the dance floor to ensure safe passage to the bathrooms, but I didn’t know how to say “piggyback ride” in German. “Me? (I pointed to myself) I’ll get on your back? (I pointed to the old lady’s back and pantomimed mounting her) Ja? Piggy back ride? Ja?” I’m not sure if the fraulein was telling me to beat it, or if she was trying to tell me there was a saddle in a nearby cupboard, when I heard someone yelling my name in my ear, “DAVE!” It was Julian’s wife, Lou. She gave me a kiss on each cheek and I abandoned the migration. I showed her where Tania and I were sitting. Julian soon joined us. It was like a blind date. I had no idea who these people were.

Julian, I learned, is an old European pro skater. He’s been in the scene for a long time and everyone in Europe knows who he is. He now runs a company called Antiz. On top of being a dashing skateboarder, he’s an interesting fellow off the board. I’d liken him to something of a Euro Ed Templeton, both in age and hobbies. Although, to my knowledge, Julian does not paint nude boys.

Lou, Julian, pizza, schnitzel.

We ordered beers, schnitzels, and pizzas. We discussed the state of skateboarding, in particular the professional skateboarder’s responsibility to himself and to skateboarding. We agreed that some skaters take more than their fair share of stickers. The food was delicious, but the Ballhaus was so loud I think it was affecting my taste buds. Apparently the tongue is connected to the ears? I had to resist a strange urge to squirt lemon on Tania’s pizza. We soon realized conversation was impossible with all the dancing and the be-bop and so we were forced to abandon ourselves to enjoying the noise. Julian and Lou danced, while we watched.

Julian and Lou dancing in the center of the Elderly Sea. Below is the Easy Rider.

I have developed an interest in old people dancing, and I can say that some of the most wonderful elderly dancers in the world are to be found in Germany. We had one of Germany’s finest on the dance floor right in front of us. I’ll call him “Easy Rider” because his dancing style consisted of gripping an imaginary pair of “ape hangers” and steering his invisible motorcycle in tight circles around the floor. ER was not afraid to show his affection for younger women. ER touched/groped women in a casual manner not permitted to younger men. I made a mental note of his style for future use.

“A friend of ours is having a party at a roller disco,” Julian announced. “Would you and Tania like to join us?” We were still jetlagged and wanted nothing more than to go to bed, but the idea of visiting a German roller disco sounded like the worst possible thing we could do, so we said yes. Julian said something about a 200 meter track—I’m not sure what a meter is, but 200 of them sounded big. I pictured banked corners and the like. Perhaps even a loop. But in reality, the roller disco was a small room, about the size of a high school gym, with a stage and a bar flanking a wood floor that was filled with people on roller skates going in circles while listening to disco music. Roller skates were surely a form of torture or public humiliation during the Dark Ages, no? Yet we had to pay to strap a pair of those things on our feet. The disco, on the other hand, was free. I would have preferred Bach’s cello concertos.

“Do you have anything gayer than this?” I asked the fraulein behind the counter when she handed me my skates. They were bright, sparkly blue, but I thought I could do better. She didn’t seem to understand my English. “Maybe something white or pink? Weiss?” I know “white” in German because of all the wine. “Nien weiss? Okay. Well these will be fine. Danke.” In hindsight, I don’t think one could find a gayer pair of skates.

Tania drinks her beer at the bar where you're supposed. She got cool Converse roller skates.

“You’re really good!” Lou said to me after I took my first spin around the rink in my big gay skates. Tania agreed. I was impressing the ladies with my roller skating skills, just like in elementary school when I was well known for being the only boy able to skate backwards. I ordered a beer at the bar, put my arm around Tania, and began to explain the secrets of my roller skating skills. I compared myself to the American negroes that were in the videos projected on the walls. My what talent. I was inspired to take another spin when a great commotion occurred on the floor in front of us. It was Lou. She had snuck off while I was talking and caused a crash.

There was a great pile of Germans writhing on the floor. It’s hard to tell the difference between German men and women, but I think it was mostly men. It was quite a pileup*. All caused by a spilt beer. Lou spilled the beer. She was trying to bring it to Julian when she was grabbed by a falling German who pulled her, and her beer, to the floor. There’s a reason why beverages are not allowed on the roller disco floor: roller skates and beer don’t mix. Lou was given a tongue lashing by a German man she won’t soon forget.

A German Roller Disco employee mops up Lou's mess. The angry German man who cussed her out is in the purple shirt in the center.

“ICH HAT BUMSEN MIT EIN HUHN!” the man yelled at Lou. I’m not sure what he was saying, but he was very angry. He sounded like Hitler. I’m glad I didn’t know what he was saying because if I had I would have given him a swift kick in the schnitzel. Lou, however, was very calm and apologetic, “Ja, ja, ja,” and calmly weathered his storm. She did, after all, deserve a short lecture on the dangers of roller skating under the influence, but the German fellow went a little too far.

“He said I was stupid,” Lou told us after he left, “and that I should be the one cleaning up the mess. He also called me a stupid American.” Lou is Swiss. So that makes him a stupid German. But it made me stupid mad.

“Why I oughtta!” I said through clinched teeth. I scanned the floor for the scoundrel, but he was nowhere to be found. “How dare he!” How can you call someone stupid while wearing roller skates? I’m glad I couldn’t find him because I can’t even fight when I’m not wearing roller skates.

But my beer was on a railing above the roller rink floor. German beer is delicious, but there are so many other ways to enjoy it. I gave my cup a little nudge. Oops. Such a stupid American. “Entschuldige!”

* I have co-written a play with my friend Caleb Plowman called, The Four Ball Pileup. It’s a rather long script, the action taking place over the course of five acts, but the gist of the story is that two nude men in a locker room collide as they turn the same corner and their penises and scrotums become ensnared. The scene in the roller disco, with all those men and women piled upon each other, has inspired me to begin writing the sequel, The Eleven Ball Pileup.

Roller skating to disco gets Julian amped.

GERMANY, CHAPTER 4: Huck a Schnitzel at a Whore

2010-10-19T08:32:00.000-07:00

Tania at Cafe Einstein.

“Is that one?” I asked.

“I think so,” Tania said.

“Wow, a real German whore,” I marveled. We never went and saw Checkpoint Charlie, but the German whores more than made up for that. “What the fuck is she wearing?”

She was a mess. She had cuts on her face, even a black eye (bitch doesn’t listen apparently), and her skin was yellow and green, black and blue. Her costume was very 80s-ish. There might have even been some leg warmers involved. Tania named her “Thriller” because not only did she bear a striking resemblance to one of the dancing zombies in the Michael Jackson video, but she looked so—erm—thrilling.

We had gotten a tip that Einstein’s café had some of the best, no-nonsense, old school German food in Berlin, including one of the best schnitzels around. What we weren’t told was that the restaurant was on Kurfürstenstrasse, which I now know means “Street of the Filthy Whores.” (Fürsten is German for “filthy,” and Kur translates literally to “farting dog,” but is also slang for “prostitute” in German. Kur, of course, is the origin of our term for a mongrel, cur.)

Roving gangs of Kurfürstenstrasse whores.

“Now, what exactly were you doing down here yesterday?” I asked Tania suspiciously when we emerged from the train station and ran smack dab into whore central. She already knew where the restaurant was, but had failed to explain that we had to navigate through a gauntlet of gash to get to it. She claimed she had come down to Kurfürstenstrasse earlier to scope out the restaurant and do some shopping while I was out skating. But I couldn’t help wondering if she hadn’t come down to Kurfürstenstrasse to try and drum up a little business of her own? She admitted that she had entertained a randy black man as a potential customer for a good portion of the afternoon, but she refused to accept him as a customer despite his proclamations of love. She rested her innocence on the fact that the Kurfürstenstrasse was fiercely guarded territory. “Even if I wanted to,” she said, “these bitches would have cut me.” I couldn’t argue with that. One of the filthy whores looked like she could have eaten Tania. And then Tania went on the offense and told me to just be glad our roles weren’t reversed because I would have a lot harder time explaining what I was doing by myself looking for a restaurant on the Street of the Filthy Whores. I should have smacked her.

Kurfürstenstrasse street art.

We kept our distance from the roving gangs of disease ridden harlots and slid along the sidewalk past the sketchy Russians (presumably the pimps) smoking cigarettes and drinking diesel fuel. After only a couple blocks, the street returned to “normal” and the elegantly sturdy, three-story building that houses the Einstein Café stood quietly in the middle of the block.

There is a lot of history to the Einstein that we didn’t know at the time. Hemingway, for instance, mentions it in A Moveable Feast. A German friend also told us, “It had been, among other things, a thriving underground Jewish casino which the Nazis frequented.” (I wondered if “thriving underground Jewish casino” was some sort of German slang for “concentration camp?”) It then turned into a Gestapo headquarters during the war. Probably most interestingly is that it stands next to what was once Joseph Goebbels’ offices. The eeriness of that relation wasn’t lost on the filmmakers of Inglorious Bastards as the Einstein Café is “Café Maurice” in the movie and the setting for the “iconic strudel scene.” (We’ve been meaning to watch this movie for some time, but now I’m really curious what a “strudel scene” is, and what’s so “iconic” about this particular one.) (And, while I question the truth of this story, I did read that Goebbels had, in a secret bunker/party room beneath the building, a sculpture of amputated arms (gifts from friend Josef Mengele) arranged in the shape of a swastika. Apparently it spun like a pinwheel.)

The simple reason the Einstein Cafe was chosen as a movie location is because the interior is absolutely stunning. It evokes the elegance of a hall in Versaille, yet exudes the calm of a comfortable café. The walls are painted a soft, lime sherbet and lined with long, tarnished mirrors framed by gilded moldings that reach to the golden, glowing ceiling high above the dining room. It’s quite a space. I’m not a designer, and I don’t have “a style,” but I could easily live with an interior like Café Einstein’s.

Tania with wiener schnitzel.

We were seated at a table against the wall. One of our dining strategies at restaurants is to always order different dishes. That way Tania and I maximize our dining potential and get to sample as much of the menu as possible. But we broke our little rule and treated Café Einstein’s menu in much the same way we’d treat Pat’s Steaks in Philly—I’m sure their menu has a wide array of delicious offerings, but there’s really only one thing to get: wiener schnitzel.

Our waiter glided away with our order, and we settled into a nice bottle of Reisling. Only moments later we could hear the unmistakable sound of someone pounding out our veal cutlets on a counter in the kitchen. “Wow,” I said, “they make it fresh to order.” Which was not how they did it at the small grill we sat at in the giant German department store KaDeWe (which is a story in itself). At that kitchen, they had a drawer filled with pre-breaded schnitzels that they would throw on the flat grill in a pond of butter. I’m kind of partial to “drawer schnitzel” (I might have one installed below the Jagermeister machine), but I think making it to order is the preferred method.

Tania got the chicken stuffed with cheese at KaDeWe.


At KaDeWe they also have giant, ceramic, Chinese babies that breathe fire.

While I prefer the interior at Cafe Einstein's, I'm kind of into this crazy scary monkey style room that was on display in KaDeWe.

I’ve never had a “death row meal” in mind. But I think a wiener schnitzel with a side of potatoes and a nice bottle of white wine is now a candidate for the last thing I will ever eat on earth. It is such a perfect little meal to me. There is something about a breaded piece of meat that is so satisfying and comforting. (WARNING: I’m about to play the cliché food writer mother card. Am I the only one that’s annoyed by this? Skateboard tour articles suffer from a similar malady: airport stories. Yes, we’re aware that in order to get to wherever you’re going you had to go through an airport and take a plane, but I don’t need to read about your stupid airport experience. You missed your flight? You forgot your ticket? They lost your luggage? Oh my god, how FUCKING INTERESTING! The food writer mother story isn’t nearly as bad, but when invoked the author always seems unable to recognize that they are not unique in this area. Everyone’s tastes are influenced by whoever fed them as a child. They taught you how to talk too, but rarely does a writer furnish his work with praise for the far more impressive miracle that comes out of the mouth.)

My mom did the breaded meat thing a lot. Mostly fish or chicken. I loved it. When it was my birthday and my mother was taking dinner requests, I’d put in for the breaded chicken breast. Sometimes she’d slap a slice of ham on top and melt some cheese over it. Tania’s chicken parmigiana is another one of my favorites. So it’s no wonder I’m absolutely smitten with schnitzel. And the one they serve at Café Einstein is one of the best I’ve ever had. It’s crispy, yet juicy and soft, salty, meaty, a little tang from the lemon—it is, in my opinion, one of the finest ways to deliver meat to your mouth. I decided in Germany that I could eat it every day, and I pretty much did. I will eat schnitzel until I die. If I had been in a concentration camp, I would have requested it as my last meal. As they were pushing me into the gas chamber with their rifle butts in the small of my back, I’d turn right around and say, “Ein minuten! Now you listen here buster: I want my last meal. Ein wiener schnitzel bitte!” I mean it wouldn’t hurt to ask. What’s the worst that could happen?

The Einstein wiener schnitzel barely fits on the plate. Tania thought it was a boomerang, but looking at it now, it kind of looks like an arm.

The schnitzel we ate at Einstein’s, though, that thing had the potential of saving us from death. It was huge, and shaped like a boomerang. Tania thought it was like a weapon. “If any of those whores attack us on the way back to the train station,” she said to me, “So help me God, I’ll huck this fuckin’ schnitzel at ‘em.” Tania ain't scared. She'll huck a schnitzel at a German whore.

Tania's grabbing a little statue cock in the park outside of KaDeWe. Just a little.

Schnitzel Recipe

A wiener schnitzel is a “schnitzel in the Viennese style,” and is always made with veal. But a schnitzel can also be made with chicken or pork. At home, we typically use pork. Either a thin, boneless pork chop, or you can cut slices off a loin. Whatever you use, pound it out thin.

Set up three dishes with flour, egg wash, and bread crumbs, and dredge the pounded cutlet in each. Then simply sautee the breaded cutlet in oil and butter for a couple minutes on each side until golden brown. Serve with a slice of lemon.

GERMANY, CHAPTER 3: Jagermeister Doppelgangers

2010-10-13T11:24:00.000-07:00

A dirty German hippie Chris Pontius doppelganger tries to make his acoustic guitar weep for Ronnie James Dio.

I’ve drank Guinness at the Guinness brewery in Dublin. It was delicious. And sipping a pint on the seventh floor’s “Gravity Bar,” with panoramic views of the city and Phoenix Park, certainly didn’t dampen the experience. Because Guinness does indeed taste better at the brewery. To be honest, it tasted better all over Ireland and England. It’s not a huge difference, but it is pleasantly notable. Since returning home, I’ve often entertained the idea of playing the smug snob and turning my nose up before an American pint. “An American pint of Guinness? Ugh. Disgusting. It doesn’t travel well, you know? I, for one, won’t drink it anywhere but Ireland! Maybe in England. Maybe.” I’m surprised I haven’t met that asshole at a bar yet.

So it was in kind of in the same vein that I constructed this blurry notion that in Germany the Jagermeister was “better.” Specifically in the sense that it wouldn’t cause the same suffering I endure the day after drinking it here. Because I was closer to the origin, I reasoned, it was therefore purer. All of the impurities and pollutants that cause the blackout drunk and then bludgeon the senses the following day are developed during transit. “It doesn’t travel well.” Jager germs? I don’t know. This, anyway, was my thinking when we ordered our first shots of Jagermeister in Berlin. That is if I was thinking at all. Which I probably wasn’t because it wasn’t long before the brain’s activity fluttered, ebbed, and finally subsided there in that dark bar on Wiener Street.

There were two bars near our apartment that we frequented while we were in Berlin. They were only about a block away from each other and, as I’ll say as many times as I can, they were both on Wiener Street. The first one was called Bar 11. We liked it because it was very dark (“none more black”), wasn’t crowded, and the bartender was a Mic-E Reyes doppelganger. He’s the one that gave us our first shot of Jagermeister… and our second, and third, and fourth, etc..

The other guy is "Cyclops German Salman," but he doesn't look as much like Salman Agah as "German Shaka Mic-E" looks like Mic-E Reyes.

We were in the country of the word's origin, so it's really no surprise that we saw a lot of doppelgangers while in Germany. Here's another, "German Rocky Dennis"—I mean, "German Shaun White."

At first I really did believe Jager was better in Germany. I love the taste of that cold, minty, syrup as it slides down the back of your throat. And all the herbs give it a vaguely medicinal quality, which, on the one hand, is sort of unpleasant, but at the same time I like to fool myself into thinking that it’s healthy. Like Guinness, “It makes you healthy and strong.” The shit was going down so easy at Bar 11 that I began to entertain the idea of getting one of those Jager machines for our house. “For the bedroom!” Tania said. (I married her for a reason.) Except those Jagermeister machines sound like a fucking lawnmower.

Setting: Living Room. Dave and Tania are on the couch watching TV.

DAVE (getting up): Good night.

TANIA: Good night? It’s only 4:30 in the afternoon.

DAVE: Yep. Pretty tired. Big day tomorrow.

Dave opens bedroom door, exits stage right.

TANIA (to herself): Weirdo.

Tania goes back to reading and watching TV. She is interrupted by a loud noise coming from the bedroom. WHIRRRRRRRRR! Tania jumps up and runs to the door.

TANIA: Hey! What’s going on in there? Are you drinking Jagermeister again?

DAVE (muffled): … uhhhh… no…

Silence for a moment. Then the loud noise again: WHIRRRRRRRRR!

TANIA: DAVID!

This is Charles Rivard. He's Canadian and he rides for Adidas. He also happens to look just like Charlie in the original Willie Wonka movie. After a long day of skating, the Canadians preferred the weed to the beer, so they didn't come out drinking with us very often. When they did, they tried to make up for the time missed.

This is George, the Adidas TM, and I getting our asses kicked at the other bar on Wiener Street. The full story will be up on the King Shit website soon.

One night while we were at Bar 11, Dio died. Dio didn’t die in Bar 11. He died earlier that day. Presumably somewhere else. We know because a dirty street minstrel came in to the bar and announced that his favorite musician of all time was dead and that he was going to totally harsh our mellow by playing Dio songs at us. Fucker. He totally looked like Chris Pontius, too. With a ponytail. And shorts. He might even have been topless? And when Chris has a guitar in his hands, he’s pretty fucking funny. So I’m not surprised, given the amount of Jagermeister I had drank, that I was deceived into thinking—even with the announcement—that this filthy German hippie with the acoustic guitar was going to entertain us with jolly songs about lesbians and such.

“Shave you wooly whores/ If I want to see Chewbacca I’ll watch Star Wars.” —from “Shave” by Chris Pontius

Nope, the Berlin balladeer was completely devastated by the death of Ronnie James Dio and he wondered if he could bum us out too and ruin our night with his horrible renditions of crappy Dio songs?

“NEIN!” I yelled at him. I actually know that word. “NEIN! NEIN! NEIN!”

Whatever shitty Dio song he tried to play, I didn’t recognize it. And then I suddenly realized, “I don’t know any Dio songs!” Which made me kind of happy. Like the Insane Clown Posse, there are some things I’m proud to be ignorant of.

“Water, fire, air, earth/ Fucking Dio, how does he work?” —“Miracles” ICP

(Star Wars, incidentally, is another pile of shit I’m proud to not know anything about.) Unfortunately there is one Dio song I do know.

“Holy Diver!” I blurted out after the first note came over the car radio one day.

“How do you know that?” Tania asked astounded. I’m not sure if she was pissed because it was the first time I had ever named a song before her (Tania can name any song in one note or fewer), or if I had just revealed some awful truth about myself.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s ‘Holy Diver?’” Who doesn’t know “Holy Diver?”

Tania, apparently. She claims she’s never heard it before. To me it’s one of the many unfortunate elements on the periodic table of classic rock. Like it or not, I’ve heard that song a million times. But apparently I’ve never really listened to it very closely because otherwise I might have wondered, as Tania did, “What the fuck is a holy diver?”

Very good question. I have no idea. And from what I can tell, nobody else does either. Have you ever read the lyrics?

Ride the tiger
You can see his stripes but you know he's clean
Oh don't you see what I mean?
Gotta get away. Holy Diver.

I didn’t think it was possible to hate that little metal midget any more than I already do, but it is. Do I see what you mean? No. No I do not. None of it makes any sense. There’s a lot of nonsense about a tiger, but then suddenly the Holy Diver goes to a costume party, “Holy Diver/ You're the star of the masquerade/ No need to look so afraid.” I’m interested in any interpretation of this song you may have, but in the meantime I’m just going to hate it. Because it’s okay to write dumb lyrics (Kiss), and it’s okay to write lyrics that don’t make any sense (Melvins), but there’s no excuse for dumb lyrics that don’t make sense. Dio fucking sucks.

Whatever the Teutonic troubadour was trying to play for us was not “Holy Diver.” But even if I knew Dio’s entire catalog note for note, I don’t think I would have recognized what this fellow was trying to play because the dude was a ham fisted drunk. I can’t imagine any Dio song being that difficult to play, but our wandering minstrel tried to start this particular song four times, and four times he had to stop and apologize for the behavior of his clumsy paws. At first it was annoying, because, you know, dude was being all serious and trying to pay tribute to his imaginary dead friend, shithead Ronnie James Dio, but by about the fourth attempt it was just hilarious. It was a fitting memorial to one of the worst “musicians” of all time: some drunk German gutter punk butchering a heavy metal ballad to a crowd of people who weren’t even listening.

“Nein,” I said when he came to our corner of the bar with his empty hat. “Nein danke.” I should have spit in it. Even if he had managed to play something we liked, we needed our Euros to pay for all the Jager shots that Mic-E just kept pouring for us. The Jagermeister was delicious, but it certainly wasn't any "better" than the Jagermeister we have here. The two worst hangovers we suffered in Germany came after nights of Jagermeister shots.

WHIRRRRRRRR!

I wonder if you could get a silencer for one of those Jager machines? Or an IV drip would probably work.

I was joking about getting one for the bedroom, but when you consider that they're only $300, it's not really that unrealistic. And, after using their website's "Tap Machine Profit Calculator," I learned it will "pay for itself" in just under three months. And it'll fit right where Tania's pillow goes!

GERMANY, CHAPTER 2: Max and Moritz

2010-09-30T08:16:00.000-07:00

One day, when I was out skating with the Adidas team at the museum spot in Berlin, I pushed off on my own little adventure. I was looking for beer, but ended up at a giant Sony mall complex. As I was skating around, I ran into a group of Americans.

“GUYS!” one of them yelled. He was a pudgy little redhead in his 30s. He looked like that cute little redhead with the beard on last season’s Top Chef, Kevin Gillespie. (Cmon, he was cute, that dude looked like a Hobbit that would live in your pocket and make you pulled pork sandwiches.)

“GUYS! GUYS! GUYS!” he kept yelling. This ginger boy wasn’t cute at all and he sounded like a fucking five year old. It was embarrassing to begin with, but it just got worse.

“GUYS! THERE’S A DUNKIN DONUTS RIGHT HEEEEEERE!” he yelled.

“Oh Jesus,” I thought.

Sure enough, we were all in Berlin standing in front of a Dunkin Donuts. His friends all rushed to his side and congratulated him. Presumably because they would have died of starvation without an injection of American food?

“Yep,” ginger boy said, “America to the rescue.”

I enjoy traveling and going other places because, well, they’re other places. Other places have different things to look at, to do, to hear, to smell, and to eat—do I even need to explain this? It’s absolutely baffling to me how some people travel. Why go to another place if you’re going to try and make it be like your home place? If you can’t be without the things and the foods that are at your home place, don’t leave your home place. This is the attitude, I imagine, held in Arizona towards Mexicans—surely created by the very same people who look for Dunkin Donuts while on a European vacation? “This is America! Leave your Mexico at home!” The difference, however, is that, first of all, Mexicans are Americans (as they’re part of the Americas), and, most importantly, they bring tacos with them. You’re welcome anywhere if you have tacos (except Arizona… they should change their state motto to, “Arizona: The Taco Hating State”). If you don’t have tacos, you shouldn’t bring anything with you to a foreign country. And that’s why Tania and I brought nothing to Germany except an appetite for all things German. We were on a mission for authentic German cuisine. And the first place we went to slake our thirst was a restaurant recommended by our drunk friend Renee called Max and Moritz.

Max and Moritz is an old school Berlin restaurant named after the two mischievous boys in the German cartoon of the same name. Max and Moritz are very naughty boys. They kill an old lady’s chickens, sabotage a bridge so an old man falls in the river, put gun powder in an old man’s pipe, and fill their uncle’s bed with may bugs, among other dirty deeds. They eventually find themselves ground to bits in a mill and fed to the geese. And no one in the village cares because they were such little assholes. “In the village not a word/ Not a sign of grief was heard.”

Max and Moritz nonsense behind the bar. The bartender looks awestruck because the ghost of Josef Mengele appeared in the ceiling.

We made reservations at Max and Moritz. Making reservations in a foreign language is fun. “Das reservations, por favor—I mean—shit, Tania? How do you say please?” Fortunately they speak English. Most people in Berlin do. Still, I enjoy trying to learn the native language. It’s kind of like my gift to the people of the country I’m visiting. Because to hear my tongue stumbling around a new language is like watching a newborn colt trying to stand. A newborn colt, cold, shaking, and glistening in afterbirth snot. It’s quite funny, apparently. Here is an excerpt from the King Shit article regarding my first attempt at speaking German in Germany:

I was standing on the deck of the quarter pipe when a dirty little gypsy boy approached me on a bicycle far too large for his tiny frame.

“MEINE MUTTER HAT BUMSEN MIT EIN PFERDE,” he said to me. Or something. I have no idea what he said. Sounded like Hitler. It was just a bunch of German words, but I’m pretty sure it was some variation on the theme of “give me free shit.” “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!” Which in German might look like this, “Geben! Geben! Geben!” I was prepared for this.

“Oh boy,” I thought, “my first chance to try out my limited German!” I had been listening to language tapes in LA traffic before the trip. I had learned very little, but one of the few things I made a point of committing to memory was, “I don’t understand German.”

“Ich verstehe kein Deutsch!” I proudly said to the little scamp.

“WHAT?” the little gypsy snapped at me. In English no less. His expression was twisted in complete disgust. I had either said something very offensive, or I’d completely butchered what I had intended to say.

“Uhhh, kein Deutsch?” I said again. I was embarrassed before this stupid child.

The soot covered little wretch just shook his head at me and hopped on his older sister’s twisted mountain bike and pedaled off to another part of the park where the rest of his gang was trying to make handlebars out of a broomstick.

To get to Max and Moritz, we walked down Oriander Strasse through the ethnic neighborhoods that begin in Asia with Thai and Indian restaurants, and ends at a decidedly Turkish quarter of the city. We slid past the rows of hookah joints, with shifty eyed Turks smoking cigarettes in the doorways, and eventually found ourselves on Max and Moritz’s block. As we approached the restaurant with the small round sign protruding off the building, the sidewalk in front bathed in the orange glow of the windows, I rubbed my hands with glee. “Ah,” I said, “this is exactly what I wanted.”

Tania with her fassbeire, candle, and green penis tiles. Someone said they look like jelly fish, but all I see are penises.

Max and Moritz has been serving traditional German fare since 1902. (“No one was even alive then!” —Eddie Izzard.) The interior has a very warm, well worn feel to it, like an old baseball glove, with just a touch of the casual disorder that is so common to the European sensibility. We were seated at the bar and ordered a couple beers while we waited for a table. The beer wench brought us a couple drafts of a cloudy, golden beer. I was wary because I’m not a fan of hefeweizens. But she explained that this was their house beer, Kreuzberger Molle. As far as I could understand, it’s made for them by a nearby Berlin brewery. “It’s natural and unfiltered,” she said. It was fucking good is what it was. It’s so good that when, on our second visit, they served me something different, I almost had a tantrum. It was my fault for just ordering a beer, “Ein bier bitte!” I didn’t even know they had other beers. I would have sent the imposter back, but I don’t think there are even any German words for “wrong beer.” So I just slammed it, and made sure to specifically ask for the house beer on the next order.

"Very special sausages." Are they retarded? Extra retarded?

We were eventually seated at a small table with a candle in the corner against a wall of their ubiquitous green tiles with the penis head on them. I ordered sausages (“Very special Sausages from Westfalia with a sweet/sour green-bean and diced bacon sauce, with Parsley potatoes and mustard”), and Tania ordered the schnitzel (“Wiener Schnitzel: escalope of veal dressed in a fine crumb served with lyonaise potatoes and salad”). This was our first authentic German meal, and it was one of the best of the whole trip. So simple, yet so amazing. It was so good that this duo of sausage and schnitzel became our go-to meal all across Germany. I wish we had kept a running tally of how many sausages and schnitzels we had on the trip, but I’m pretty sure I had at least one, if not both, in my mouth every day of our trip. Ja, I had a lot of sausages in my mouth in Germany.

Ah, schnitzel. It was "spargel" (asparagus) season while we were there, so every restaurant had white asparagus with every meal. More on that in another post.

I’m glad I don’t live by Max and Moritz’s because I would be in there every other day ordering a fassbeire, schnitzel, and very special sausages. I’d get fat as fuck. But at least I’d finally have an answer to that old question, “Where should we go eat?” Because I can eat that shit all day every day. I think I’m turning Germanese, I think I’m turning Germanese, I really think so.

GERMANY, CHAPTER 1: Renee and the Big Gay Bar

2010-09-01T14:24:00.000-07:00

Renee on the left, Nicholas on the right.

“You are all flatheads,” Renee said laughing. “American flatheads!” Renee was wasted.

Tania and I were enjoying some wine at the bar below our Berlin apartment. It wasn’t our apartment. It was paid for by Adidas and we were sharing it with their Canadian team. But we did have our own room. Which we pretended was our own apartment. Plus it’s fun to say, “We were enjoying some wine at the cafe below our Berlin apartment.” It’s like we’re in U2.

“The Americans. You are all flatheads, you know?” he said still laughing. I had no idea what he was talking about.

The bar was actually in the restaurant below our apartment. We were disappointed that we never got around to eating there because the food looked very good, but we did spend a good deal of time drinking at the small bar. Mostly because Nicholas, the restaurant’s big gay waiter, was so entertaining. Nicholas was a flight attendant (sthuprizzzze!) and spoke very good English. Naturally, he was fascinated with San Francisco. In return for big gay SF information, he told us about Berlin.

“HAHAHAHA!” Renee was just laughing at my face. I was starting to get angry. For one, he was very ugly. He obviously hadn’t bathed in some time, his clothes were dirty and crumpled, his hands were gnarled, his hair was greasy and unkempt, and he was unshaven. In short, he was a typical German man.

Renee did not speak very good English, but I had no problem understanding that he did not like Americans. Mostly due to the imperialistic/military strategies of the Bush administration. “Flatheads,” I think, was a reference to military crewcuts. Renee was completely harmless and totally drunk, but he was getting under my skin. In that “don’t you dare talk about my mother” kind of way. I can talk shit about my country, but don’t you fucking dare.

Nicholas somehow calmed Renee down, and we soon settled into drinking and polite conversation. Renee even began cheering us. “KAAPLA!” he’d say and raise his glass. “KAAPLA!” I’d say back. He was doing it nearly every sip and I couldn’t understand what he was saying. It seemed worth knowing. “Is that German for cheers?” I asked.

“Klingon!” he said.

Klingon? This is when I began to suspect that Renee wasn’t quite right in the head. And he wasn’t. He even had papers to prove it. Not sure what brought that on, but he was very insistent on showing Tania his retard papers.

“They don’t care about that,” Nicholas told him and made him put them away.

Retarded or not, Tania and I wanted to know where to eat. We had been in Germany for almost a day and we wanted some authentic German cuisine. This question delighted Renee. He was very excited to tell us about a number of restaurants, but even with Nicholas’ help, Renee was difficult to understand. He asked for my pen a number of times, “PEN!” and then he’d scrawl some childish words in my book, but we could only pretend to understand what he was talking about. Renee eventually decided that the only way he could sufficiently tell us where we needed to go eat was if we returned to his apartment with him where he could give us a map. Tania and I looked nervously at each other, uhhh? Renee insisted.

“It is okay,” Nicholas assured us. “He is not crazy. I would never send you to the apartment of a crazy man. He is harmless.” I think Nicholas just wanted Renee out of the bar so he could close up and go to bed.

“Alright,” I said. “Let’s go to your apartment and get a map.” What’s the worst that could happen? If he tied us up and raped us, I could just write about it later.

Renee proudly poses before his media center.

Renee’s apartment was on the fourth floor of a cement, communist-bloc style building. He had one tiny room with a small kitchen and bathroom. His bed was a pile of clothes and a sheet on the floor in the corner. The room was dominated by a rather large TV/entertainment center.

“M*A*S*H?” I said looking at the shelves of VHS tapes. There were a lot of M*A*S*H tapes.

“Yes,” he said excitedly. “Every episode.” Renee hates the American military, but apparently enjoys the adventures of our hilarious mobile army surgical hospitals?

"PEN!" Renee feverishly showing Tania places of interest on zee map.

He spread a map of our Berlin neighborhood out on a laundry drying rack. It was a very nice map, kind of cartoonish. He began feverishly searching for places and making marks all over the place, babbling the whole time. He was very insistent we try a place that, I think, specialized in roast chicken. From what I could gather it was less of a restaurant and more of a home. I’m disappointed we never made it to that place because it sounded the weirdest. But some of his other recommendations we did try, most notably Max and Moritz. (Which I’ll write about in the next post. Followed by some of our other German dining adventures.)

This is the cute li'l map Renee gave us. This is a picture of the area in Berlin we stayed in, by the Gorlitzer Bahnhof. Which is right off of Wiener Strasse. HAHAHA WIENER STREET!

It was late and all the bars were closed when we left Renee’s apartment, but we all wanted more drinks. Renee kind of painted himself as a man about town and he assured us he could get us into any bar. I was over Renee, but we hadn’t been raped and I felt like I was still due some sort of an adventure. The first bar we came to was locked up for the night, but people were smoking cigarettes and drinking inside. Renee knocked on the window. The old bartender lady looked up. Renee made the universal sign for, “Hey! It’s me! Renee!” He pointed at his own face and smiled. The bartender didn’t even shake her head “no” at Renee, she just went back to wiping down the bar. “Hey!” Renee said knocking again.

I could tell we weren’t going to get raped or have any more adventures with Renee. The night was over. So we gathered up our maps with our German dining recommendations and retired to our Berlin apartment. That was the last we saw of Renee, but it was the beginning of our German dining adventures.

I made pee pee in Renee's toilet.

Devil Cheese

2010-03-15T17:59:00.000-07:00

If Wittgenstein can talk about the colors of vowels, than I can talk about the morality of cheese.

“Consider this case:” Wittgenstein writes in the Brown Book, “we have taught someone the use of the words ‘darker and ‘lighter.’ He could, e.g., carry out such an order as ‘Paint me a patch of colour darker than the one I am showing you.’ Suppose now I said to him: ‘Listen to the five vowels a, e, i, o, u and arrange them in order of their darkness.’ He may just look puzzled and do nothing, but he may (and some people will) now arrange the vowels in a certain order (mostly i, e, a, o, u). Now one might imagine that arranging the vowels in order of darkness presupposed that when a vowel was sounded a certain colour came before a man’s mind, that he then arranged these colours in their order of darkness and told you the corresponding arrangement of the vowels. But this actually need not happen. A person will comply with the order: ‘Arrange the vowels in their order of darkness,’ without seeing any colours before his mind’s eye.”

The technical term for this disease is synaesthesia. It’s “the tendency of experiences in one sense modality to trigger anomalous experiences in another sense of modality.” That must SUCK. And what sucks about it even more is I think I have it.

I have this weird sense of cheese. I feel like the Santa Claus of cheese because I can tell which ones are naughty and which ones are nice. I’ve had this sense since I was a young boy. When I see and smell a cheese, I know whether it is a good, benevolent cheese, or a bad, evil cheese. And I’m not talking about the taste. I’m talking about the cheese’s moral compass. I can “see” whether a cheese’s needle points north or south.

Of course the wedge of parmesan above caught my eye immediately: it has the mark of The Beast upon it, “$6.66.” It’s Satanic cheese. To you this is probably just a funny coincidence, “Ha ha, Satanic cheese!” but I’m being totally serious: parmesan is evil cheese. When I think of parmesan, I see images of Parmegeddon and the end of the world. I get migraines. And when the waiter asks, “Would you like some fresh cheese?” I am filled with dread. I hold in my farts. “Yes, please,” I always say, but I’m just being polite because mentally I’m being drawn and quartered while burned at the stake as I hang from a noose made of cobras! “AHHHHH!” I want to scream. It’s hard to hold in farts.

But, like most really bad things, parmesan is delicious. I have it all the time. I put it on pancakes. But it’s evil. It’s very, very, very bad cheese. Did you know that Hitler loved parmesan? He injected it. It’s also the cheese on the Aqua Teen Hunger Force “Broodwich.”

“A Sandwich forged in darkness from wheat harvested in Hell's half-acre. Baked by Beelzebub. Slathered with mayonnaise from the evil eggs of dark chicken forces beaten into sauce by the hands of a one-eyed madman. Cheese [parmesan] boiled from the rancid teat of a fanged cow. Layered with 666 separate meats from an animal which has maggots for blood.”

Don’t fuck with parmesan. Cheddar is better. While feta mo’ betta. Steer clear of Paneer, and watch out for Shanklish, it’s been known to stab from the front and the rear. Havarti’s a party, but it makes you farty. Cheese that is blue you must defer, it comes from a fellow named Bluecifer. The Father of Lies is the Father of Bries. Munster’s a monster, but Chevre is forevre. Limb from limb, Limburger on burgers is vile and vulgar. There’s nothing there that’s equal or fair in even an ounce of Camembert. There’s something amiss about the Swiss. Damme, Damme, Damme you to hell. Hell? Hella Mozzarella. Hella, just hella. If you’re home alone, beware of Provolone. Gorgonzola will turn you to stone, but there’s nothing worse than Mascarpone. God damn that mascarpone, that motherfucking mascarpone.

I hate cheese.

Vichyssoise and Anthony Bourdain

2010-03-04T15:38:00.000-08:00

I have an autographed copy of Bourdain’s first book, Kitchen Confidential. My friend Angela went to the book signing and asked if I wanted to come. I said no. “He’s no James Joyce,” I said. Angela repeated what I said to Bourdain and he paused for a second before saying, “True.” Still, he’s a good writer and I like that book. I also like his Les Halles cookbook and his television show, but the latter has begun to bore me.

I think No Reservations has run its course. The most disparaging element is this need to create a meaning and theme around every episode. At first it was kind of cute, but the crew has seemingly run out of different ways of saying the same thing: food doesn’t need to be fancy; good times equals good food, good friends, and family; and while the world and its people are all very different, we are all very much the same, etc.. I agree with this message. Who doesn’t? And I think any normal person would get it after sitting through an episode, yet at the end of every hour I have to get hit over the head with this fucking MESSAGE. You’d think Bourdain of all people would be smart enough to realize that a TV show doesn’t have to have a meaning or a message. If it does, the best way to get it across is to show it to me. Which, as I said, he does very well. But the other shit has gotten kind of pathetic, to the point where he even seems to be making fun of the situations the producers are forcing him into.

I’ve noticed the writing has suffered somewhat as well. Over the last couple of years his voiceovers have become stained by these really bizarre and awkward pop culture references in, I imagine, an attempt to appear hip, and cool, and intelligent, and relevant? It’s so bad that sometimes I wonder if he isn’t influenced by that Chuck Klosterman fellow. I don’t understand what’s so clever about mentioning Batman, Slayer, The Brady Bunch, and the Koran in the same sentence? One reviewer described Klosterman’s writing as an “amalgam of ostensibly unrelated material.” That same reviewer also reported finding a message and meaning in Klosterman’s work. I say if you stare at a pile of dog shit long enough, you’ll find something there as well.

Speaking of dog shit. Nothing suffers more than this douche pickle, Toby Young.

Bourdain, to his credit, had an interesting reference at the end of his recent Hudson River Valley episode in which he ended the piece talking about his family (!) and I think there was a Tolstoy reference in there? Something regarding the first line of Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” I don’t know. Seemed like he was trying to go there? Unnecessary if it was intentional, but it was, for once, well timed. At least it wasn’t another, “Check me out! I used to listen to punk rock in New York City!” I'm sure the mere mention of Lou Reed and The Ramones dislodges some “crazy” punk rock memories for all the geezers that watch the show, but they play that shit in my grocery store now. They don’t even disguise it as muzak, they just play The Ramones as is.

I was having this discussion about whether No Reservations is finished or not with my new friend and editor-in-chief of the recently created Swallow magazine, James Casey. We were having a debate of sorts, I suppose. And since we were also discussing content for upcoming Swallow issues and the new website, I said, “We should have some sort of a debate page.” People love arguing about food. Some sort of pro/con thing. And I thought “Anthony Bourdain” would make for a perfect subject. We tried to do something similar in The Skateboard Mag right after it started in a column called “Way/No Way.” Not sure what we were debating about because the skateboard media is allergic to controversy and avoids conflict like the plague. And, sure enough, the first “Way/No Way” I found when searching through the archives was in issue nine and was a self-reflexive debate about whether we should even keep the column or not. I, of course, was on the “way” side of the argument. Pun intended because the column really did go by the wayside right after that.

Way, Way/No Way

Way/No Way no mo’? No way. No fuckin’ way. I am so way into the way on this Way/No Way. They want to NO WAY this page of Way/No Way. They want to send it on its way. No way. There is absolutely no way I could be more way into way this way…today. I am WAY for Way/No Way. Way, way for Way/No Way. I say, “Hooray! For Way/No Way.” You say, “Hip-hip! Hooray! Hip-hip! Hooray! Hip-hip! Hooray! Way! Way! Way!”

C’est vrai, Way/No Way has been pretty gay nearly every play, but saying no way to Way/No Way is tres, tres gay-gay. If you say No Way to Way/No Way, that’s the last time you’ll ever get to say No Way today and that’s totally gay. And what’s that leave you with? No Way. If you send Way/No Way on its wayfaring ways, you’re way out of your mind and way, way, way out of line. Waaaaaay out of line. So I just pray you don’t say that you’re not way into Way/No Way. Okay?

Imagine the world as a tray, but upon that tray there is no way to say Way or No Way. Wouldn’t that make your day so terribly drab and gray? You’ll say to yourself, “No way, this day is so way too gray.” And all you’ll have to look forward to from day to day are long solitary walks in the rain along the quay. Everyday will be like Sunday, silent and gray.

When removed, the way is paved for what? Surely we’re making way for something way better than Way/No way, but what could be way better than Way/No Way? I mean, we’re already under way, why not go all the way? Who is pulling on the reins and crying, “Waaaaay!”? Who has the say? Imagine what you’ll say when you’re sitting in the café on St. John’s Day with your glass of cabernet and you make your way to this page and find no Way and no No Way.

“No way,” you’ll say. “No, freakin’ way,” you’ll say again, this time a little more dramatically. You’re in public after all. You’re an actor. A lonely actor, who’s never been in a play. “Where’s Way/No Way?”

“It has gone astray,” my voice will say, or perhaps it will be your voice, or maybe even a gentle woman’s voice, but regardless of the mouthpiece, there will be a voice, there always is after all. Perhaps his name is Jay? Or even Jean Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet?

“No way, you know Monet? I must say, he uses a lot of hair spray.”

There’s no way I’d try to lead your opinion of Monsieur Monet astray. He does use a lot of hair spray.

“Can you pass me the ashtray?”

I didn’t know you smoked. It’s my turn to act dismayed. I cross my legs. “No way?” I say.

“Way,” you say a bit too dramaticallay, “way, way too much.”

“There’s going to be hell to pay.”

“Oh I know, but that is already under way. So in which direction did this column stray?”

“It just kind of went away.”

“Did it disappear on a sleigh?”

“That I cannot say.”

“Was there any foul play?”

“Again, I cannot say.”

“Did someone fashion it a pair of cement boots and walk it into the bay?”

“Not that I have heard anyone say.”

“Is it hungover from last evening’s soiree?”

“No certainly not today.”

“Did it get too stoned listening to reggae?”

“That is indeed a possibilitay.”

“Est-ce que en Francais?”

“Je ne parle pas Francais. En anglais, en anglais.”

“Was it stung by a sting ray and drowned in the sea spray?”

“Oh, now you’re just being cliché.”

“Was it imprisoned by Augusto Pinochet?”

Before I can say anything about Pinochet, either way, the waiter arrives and asks what you’d like for your dejeuner.

“I daresay,” you say, “I’ll have the lumberjack’s souffle, the sauteed blue jay (it’s native to Norway they say), the Bombay fish fillet, the potter’s clay puree, a trough of curds and whey (hold the curds, extra whey), a pint of Perrier, another keg of chardonnay—excuse me, I’m a bit tipsay—another cask of cabernet and a yard of cloudberry sorbet.”

“Very good sir,” the waiter says, “it’s on its way.”

“You better watch out,” I say, “you’re going to get tooth decay.”

“No way, I brush every day,” you say. “So, hey, what’s up with this page anyway?”

“Well,” I say, inspecting my dossier, “me thinks it’s going away.”

“Going away? No way.”

“Way.”

“NO! WAAAAAY!”

“WAAAAAAY!” I bellow and bray.

“Wait…what’d you say?”

“Way.”

A bowl of our vichyssoise with croutons.

As I said above, I’m a fan of Bourdain’s Les Halles cookbook. I use it often. And one dish I’m quite fond of is the vichyssoise soup. Although Tania and I prefer it hot, as opposed to the cold in the recipe. So I’m not sure if it’s still “vichyssoise?” If “chilled” is an ingredient, I’m fine with calling it “leek and potato soup.” Kind of like how vegan chili isn’t chili. Once you take the meat out of chili it ceases to be chili. Vegan chili should be called a stew, at best. “Hot trash” is probably better. Vichyssoise is just so much more fun to say. But besides the taste, it doesn’t deserve the fancy French name because it’s incredibly easy to make.

Click on the page above to read the recipe. I found it online as well, but I noticed that the old fuddy duddies that posted it, edited out the fucking cusses.

Black Tacos

2010-02-02T11:14:00.000-08:00

There is nothing like coming home drunk, stuffing your face with black tacos, and guzzling white wine. "Ebony, and ivory..."

I fantasize about winning the lottery. I want to win the lottery, and then disappear. I don’t want to disappear entirely, though. I just don’t want to have to worry about social, economic, or political issues unless I’m bored. Especially economic. Debt, taxes, mortgage, they suck and they haunt me all my waking hours. I wish I could pay them in farts. Because I have a lot of gas. I don’t mind paying for any of those things—there’s no principles preventing it—the problem is I don’t have anything to pay them with, and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find the means to get that stuff. The means. That’s why I wish money was like farts. “How much do you need? Well here you go! PFFFT! Have a nice day—wait, what? Oh really, that’s not enough? Well sure, here’s some more: PFFFFFFFFFT! And buy your kid something nice: PFFFFFFT!” If I won the lottery, that’s how I’d be with money. Just farting it away.

A little white wine, a black taco, some Chinese hot sauce, some of Beckett's Glucosamine Chondroitin pills—at the time it didn't seem weird at all. Yum.

Tania and Sharan going down on a couple of black tacos… oh yeah…

I’ve taken this lottery fantasy far enough to actually invest in lottery tickets. Yes, I admit I am foolish enough to believe, on occasion, that I might win the lottery. And on those occasions I am simply in another world, a world where I am worth hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions. “We’ll replace the carpet in the living room first,” I’ll think as I’m handing the gas station lady my Mega Millions numbers. “I should probably look into, like, a dark wood flooring maybe. That might look cool? Actually we could do the whole house like that… yeah that would look nice.” It’s around that point that I realize that not only will I be able to outfit our entire home with dark wood flooring, but I can then cover the new floors with a layer of gasoline and light the whole fucking house on fire. “You won the lottery, Dave,” Tania says to me in my fantasy lottery dreamland, “we don’t need to live in a little shithole in Glendale anymore.” Oh yeah.

Oops! Looks like a black taco squirted some of its jack sauce all over Sharan's hands!

I shouldn’t be driving when I’m “on the lottery,” incidentally. I might as well be drunk. “No officer, I haven’t been drinking. But I did just play the lottery.” I really enjoy my visits to fantasy lottery dreamland. You should see our FLD house. Imagine if Hearst Castle were made out of chocolate and it had helicopter blades so it could fly…

As Sharan goes to wash all the jack sauce off her face, Tania goes down on another black taco! She's practically having a black taco gang bang!

As I said, I won’t completely disappear because food is an area that will require me to keep one foot in the real world. Maybe I’ll try my hand at some farming and raising crops and livestock and whatnot, but in kind of a George Bush/Martha Stewart way. “You know, I have my own bee hives,” I heard Martha say recently to a guest who was showing her how to use bees wax for something or another. “I could use my own bees wax for this couldn’t I?” If I won the lottery, I’m sure I would also have my own bee hives, but unlike Martha I wouldn’t pretend that I’m the one out there physically harvesting the honey and the wax. That would be a job for the little man that I specifically hired to tend to the bees: the beekeeper. He has the beehives. I just pay him to harvest their fruits. “Bring me some bees wax, please,” I will say to him when I want some. (I wanted to write, “NOW!” but I think I’d be a gentle multi-billionaire and treat the help like family. Unless of course there’s some program (scam) in which I can pay someone else to be polite to offset all my rude behavior?) I would try not to delude myself into believing that I had anything to do with harvesting the honey, or smoking the artisanal bacon from our farm’s exotic pigs, or that I collected the eggs from our chicken coop, or grew the marijuana in our giant nursery, etc.. Or maybe I will? Because it seems like that’s what rich people do? They’re delusional. I’m sure there will be a lot to learn, and unlearn, after I win the lottery.

A sub category of the food area that I would be addressing almost immediately with my windfall of cash would be that of “late night, drunk people food” (LNDPF). While it’s not that big of an issue these days because we can’t afford to find ourselves out in public, drunk, in the wee hours of the morning spending copious amounts of money on greasy food, it will surely be an issue after we win the lottery. Because, for one, I imagine the first month or so will be spent stumbling around a variety of international metropolises in a drunken stupor. And I’m not going to know where to get a good taco. Even if I did, I’m not going to want to wait in line with all the other stupid drunk people. I may be drunk and stupid, but people who own their own beehives don’t wait in taco lines. So I would hire a bunch of late night, drunk people food cooks to make me my late night, drunk people food. I’d have a stable of chefs specializing in a variety of LNDPF. I’d have a Philly cheese steak dude, for instance. The steak, the buns, the griddle the steak is cooked on, everything would be flown in directly from Philly—oh wait a minute, I could just fly to Philly, huh? Oh yeah, I guess I could do this Elvis style, huh? Yeah, I guess after I win the lottery, I’ll buy a jet. And whenever I want a Philly cheese steak, or a slice of New York pizza, or Mexico City taco, I’ll just say, “Fire up the jet!” VROOOM! And then we’ll fly to Portugal to wash it all down with a nice bottle of Port. Yeah, I’ll get a jet. I don’t want those fuckers hanging around my property—my manor—all day long when they’re not making cheese steaks, or whatever they were hired to make for me.

I buried my face in some black taco that night, too, although you wouldn't know it because whoever was manning the camera was DRUNK!

I’ve been thinking of this because the last time we were out late and needed some LNDPF the only thing we could find were these dumb ass, black tacos from Taco Bell. BLEH! While LNDPF doesn’t necessarily have to be “good,” that doesn’t mean it should be bad. Or sound like the title of a dirty porn magazine. I really need to win the lottery so I don't have to bury my face in a black taco ever again.

[Epilogue: After I wrote the above post, I decided to see if there was indeed a magazine called Black Taco Magazine. There is not. And since Black Taco Magazine doesn’t seem to exist, now or ever, I took it upon myself to mock up some BTM cover ideas. It seemed like an idea worth exploring. It would be a niche market, but I think there’s an audience out there for a magazine dedicated to, you know, black tacos. Unfortunately, the covers I mocked up are so completely horrible that I won’t even allow myself to post them here. They are in really, really, REALLY bad taste. They shock even me. And now I’m ashamed of myself. And so I’ve abandoned the idea of launching a magazine dedicated to black tacos. For the time being, BTM will remain a part of my imagination… just like winning the lottery.]

Bobbibollis with Beckett

2010-01-26T15:40:00.000-08:00

This might have been the greatest moment in Beckett's life.

I talk for Beckett. I think I’ve mentioned this before? Some people would describe it as “anthropomorphic” (that’s a mouthful) (HA! Pun intended!) behavior, but I just call it “crazy.” Beckett and I have full on conversations. We even argue with each other. He tattles on me sometimes to Tania. It’s just plain weird, but I can’t help it. It’s due in part to the fact that Beckett is just such a peculiar little fellow that I can’t imagine him not thinking the strange things I make him say. And that comes mostly from his brows, which reveal a pair of eyes that are unmistakably human in their expression. Except that they are mistakably human because he’s a dog. Still I persist in imagining that he thinks with a human voice that speaks English. The other reason Beckett is the victim of my anthropomorphic jibber jabber is purely out of loneliness and boredom. I dislike telephones, but I enjoy conversing with people. And if there’s no one around, I tend to converse with myself. Since Tania started her new job last year and is working 10-hour days, and I work from home, I frequently find myself talking out loud. For some reason it seems less pathetic to have a conversation with an imaginary talking wiener, than it does to have a conversation with myself. I’m not sure what kind of logic or math I used to arrive at that conclusion, but I can assure you that there was some sort of work performed to arrive at, "Talking wiener crazy ≤ talking to myself crazy."

His voice is kind of a mixture of upper crust English (because he’s a very polite, Christian “gentleman”), and baby talk (because he’s a stupid little wiener dog.) For the most part he’s a very positive and upbeat little fellow. Imagine Ned Flanders as a wiener dog. Beckett doesn’t cuss, he prays to the little baby Jesus, and he hates rock and roll (“devil music”). In short, he’s the complete opposite of Tania and I.

On Beckett's fictional list of favorite foods, pancakes are very near the top. I've included some photos of his first and only pancake. Here he gingerly transfers it from humanity to the animal kingdom.

His favorite thing to talk about is, of course, food. This is also the only subject I am practically 100% certain his little brain is actually thinking about the majority of the time. I might be projecting the kinds of foods he wants to eat onto him, but there is little doubt that the strange little creature that lives with us is almost always thinking “FOOD.”

In this photo the pancake is officially owned by Beckett and he is not pleased with how close my camera and I are am coming to his pancake property.

As Tania reaches in to "clear the table," Beckett let's us know that he's straight up PISSED that we're even looking at his pancake, let alone coming near it. My you should have heard the growling.

“Uhhhh, excuse me? Plaze?” he often says as we sit down to eat dinner. “Uhhh, I’ve noticed that there are only two plates of dinner? I believe there might be some sort of mixup in the kitchen? Tanny, [he refers to Tania as Tanny, and/or Mammy, and I’m Davy~! q111111111111111111—excuse me, Gary just stomped across the keyboard—I’m either Davy, David (with an English accent), or, Pappy], yes, uh, I think you might have intercepted my order. In fact I’m quite certain that is my plate of food you are eating right now. Perhaps you could alert the chef to the predicament we find ourselves in, yes, plaze? If it’s not too much of a trouble, would you be a good Mammy and surrender my dinner to me and order yourself your own meal if you don’t mind? Seriously.”

One of Beckett’s favorite foods is raviolis. He calls them “bobbibollis.” This is kind of where the baby talk comes in. He speaks better English than I do (?), and enunciates everything perfectly, except for the occasional big word which he makes a complete mess of. Like ravioli. And one day we got raviolis in the mail. “BOBBIBOLLIS! SERIOUSLY?” Beckett was very excited. “My goodness, plaze!” That FoodBuzz thing over there on the right sent them to us. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but I haven’t given a Tinker’s fart about it since. Although there is the occasional free food giveaway. And, in one case, they gave away a bunch of raviolis. I don’t even remember what brand they were. I’m obviously not the blogger they were looking to get their raviolis to. In my defense, however, there was nothing memorable about them. They weren't bad, but they weren't good either. They were off-the-rack raviolis. Beckett, on the other hand, absolutely adored them.

“I beg to differ, David,” he said. “These are some of the most delightful bobbibollis I have ever had the pleasure of eating. Plaze.”

The free, mail order raviolis with Tania's red sauce. (The photo at the top of the post is Beckett's bobbibolli experience.)

And that’s probably because those were the first, and the last, bobbibollis that Beckett has ever eaten.

As an extra bonus track on this post, I’ve included here one of the scripts that is a part of a series of performances, starring Beckett and I, titled, David, Plaze. I don’t think the Pantages Theater in Hollywood has ever put on a performance of any of Samuel Beckett’s plays, but maybe our Beckett play, David, Plaze, will someday grace its stage? This particular chapter is titled “Poop.”

POOP

[David gets up to leave.]
BECKETT: David, where are you going? David, do you need to go to the bathroom? Plaze, allow me David. I know of a wonderful patch of dirt in the backyard where you can relieve yourself.
DAVID: Thank you Beckett, but I just went.
BECKETT: I haven’t seen you go outside yet today, David.
DAVID: That’s probably because I haven’t gone outside.
BECKETT: DAVID! YOU POOPED IN THE HOUSE!?
DAVID: Yup, in the house.
BECKETT: David. Surely you jest? Do you not know what happens to he who pees, poops, and/or poops and pees in the house?
DAVID: No. I do it all the time, Beckett.
BECKETT: ALL THE TIME! DAVID! THIS IS PREPOSTOROUS! YOU WILL BE PUNISHED, DAVID! SEVERELY!
DAVID: Oh really? How am I going to be punished?
BECKETT: By Tania, David. She is a most cruel and evil torturess.
DAVID: Tania isn’t—“torturess” isn’t even a word Beckett.
BECKETT: Dungeness! She is a Dungeness Crab David!
DAVID: Why, what does she do to you Beckett?
BECKETT: Oh the most horrible tortures you can imagine, David.
DAVID: Wait a minute. Why have you been tortured? Have you been pooping in the house?
BECKETT: David. Plaze.
DAVID: Well have you?
BECKETT (ashamed): …Yes, David.
DAVID: Beckett!
BECKETT: David. Plaze. It was in my youth. I didn’t know any better. I didn’t even know it [his anus] was back there.
DAVID: How could you not know it was back there?
BECKETT: It’s so very far away, David.
DAVID: Okay, so you used to poop in the house?
BECKETT: Yes David. On the floor. And Tania would torture me after I pooped in the house on the floor.
DAVID: Well you’re not supposed to poop in the house on the floor. How did Tania torture you?
BECKETT: She…she would say, “NO!” David.
DAVID: “No?” That’s it?
BECKETT: Yes David. It was horrible.
DAVID: Beckett. Come on.
BECKETT: She would say it very loud, David. And sometimes with lots of Os.
DAVID: Beckett, Jesus Christ.
BECKETT: Go ahead David. You’ll see. You just pooped in the house? Well you will suffer the wrath of Tania the Dungeness!
DAVID: No, I won’t. I’m fine Beckett.
BECKETT: David. Plaze. You should go back and eat it.
DAVID: I’m not going to go eat my poop, Beckett.
BECKETT: Where is it David? What room is it in? I’ll go eat it for you. Tania the Dungeness will surely still know someone pooped because the room might still smell a little like poop, but at least the poop itself will be gone—
DAVID: It’s already gone Beckett.
BECKETT: Gone? So you did eat it? Good boy David!
DAVID: No Beckett.
BECKETT: You didn’t eat it, David? Did Gebby eat it? David is that why you keep that dirty old curmudgeon around ? He’s your personal poop eater isn’t he, David?
DAVID: No, Gary didn’t eat it, Beckett.
BECKETT: Because I would be happy to eat your poop and anything else you happen to drop on the floor.
DAVID: I didn’t poop on the floor Beckett.
BECKETT: David I’m hungry.
DAVID: The poop is gone, Beckett.
BECKETT: David. Plaze. Are you trying to tell me that you squatted down on your haunches, pinched out a hot one and it just disappeared?
DAVID: Basically, yes.
BECKETT: Where David?
DAVID: In the bathroom Beckett. In the toilet.
BECKETT: David. Plaze.

Vans Xmas Party

2010-01-05T13:37:00.000-08:00

If you don't mind, just ignore the Xmas part and treat this as a slide show of any old Vans party at an open bar with free entertainment. I realize there's no food here, but we were definitely on drunk. (Turn sound on for narration.) (Originally posted at KingShitMag.com)

Black Metal Thanksgiving

2009-12-01T13:20:00.000-08:00

Skornicopia (aka Tania) serving up some salad to the evil convent. Fingerbang The Goosikus (aka Ray, center, end of table) is already eating because he's totally evil.

Thanksgiving was last week and we went and had dinner with my parents up north in Cupertino, and then visited with friends in Petaluma. It was a delightful holiday. But there was something missing? It wasn't until I got home and received a video from Chris Reed that I realized what it was: BLACK METAL! HAIL SATAN!

I mean, Thanksgiving is cool and all, but Black Metal Thanksgiving is pure evil. It's just awesome, but unfortunately we haven't had one in awhile. After our fourth BMTG, everyone started having babies. Which you would think would be fine, we could just sacrifice them to Satan, but apparently our friends actually want to keep their babies and watch them grow up so they can see if they look like themselves, or something. And I've been given to understand that Satan and babies don't really go together? Why do babies have to ruin everything that's fun?

Anyway, based on the response to the video that Chris sent (a montage of the second BMTG), it looks like we might be resurrecting the event next year. As Ray said after watching the video, "What made us so weird? I'm totally not that weird anymore. How do I be weird again?" By putting on makeup, listening to crappy Satanic music, and getting wasted at Thanksgiving dinner, that's how.

Second Annual Black Metal Thanksgiving

[This article originally appeared in Big Brother issue #82, March 2002]

Okay, so my plane, on the way home from this second annual Black Metal Thanksgiving in Portland, got grounded in Oakland. My plane landed in L.A. five hours later than scheduled because of a fucking security breach in fucking Seattle because some fucker forgot to turn on a fucking metal detector. So they decided to evacuate a few airports across the nation. I had to sit in that damn airplane on the ground, with no beer and a severe hangover, for three hours while some ham yabbered into his cell phone to the delight of the rest of the plane. I think they’re taking this security shit a little too far. Then, when I finally got home, near death, and I got out of the cab and walked through the rain to my front door, never lifting my head even as I unlocked the door and walked into my house—I was still looking at where a doorknob would be—I heard the unmistakably bruising pitter patter of water falling on a silent floor. “Uh oh,” I thought. I flicked on the lights. It was raining in my house. Flooded. I said, “Oh no!” out loud and ran to my new bed, that which I had been dreaming of all day, only to find it covered with great pools of water, each rising and falling as great droplets fell from the ceiling landing in them. My bed was a bog. I half expected to see frogs hopping around. Needless to say, I was a little upset when I got home.

Dark Meatiis (aka Kali) prepares her Szechuantanic green beans.

The next day, because I couldn’t turn on the heater and I had to sleep on the couch with a thin little blanket in a wet house, I awoke sick. Add that to five days of beer, cigarettes, and coke in rainy Portland and you got a sick li’l baby on your hands.

Wolfin and Dark Meatiis being evil in the kitchen. If my mom had looked like that when I was a kid, I probably wouldn't have bugged her so much while she was making dinner.

I’ve had some bad luck lately, this whole year in fact, and I think it’s because Satan is mad at me. I don’t think I’m worshipping him properly, or something. Like, I wrote this Satanic grace for the Thanksgiving dinner we had (which was vegan by the way, since our hosts are vegan… because you’re traditionally supposed to gorge yourself on meats of all sorts, it kind of adds to the evilness of the whole affair, don’t you think?) and I think his infernal majesty might have been unsatisfied with it. I mean, it was intended to be light and funny. Evil, but evil lite. We were at the table, it’s a time of mirth. But I guess he didn’t like it. Here it is. (Oh and by the way, we all had evil black metal names with Thanksgiving themes embedded in them. Mine was Pilgrimokon):

"This is the year Fran [Tiptaphantom] took a hit a E and left the party," Ray wrote. "I found her at home talking to the fireplace."

[THE ACTOR’S NAMES]

PILGRIMOKON, a dead pilgrim with a ghostly face, an ashen death mask.

A Convent of corpses, ghouls, demons and other unsavories:
TURK LORD (Chris Reed)
DARK MEATIIS (Kali Blomstrom)
STUFFIKUS (Dominic Orlando)
POKEANDHAUNTUS (Jennifer Brandon)
WISHBONARGGUS (Whitey McConnaughy)
FINGERBANGTHEGOOSICUS (Ray Gordon)
TRIPTAPHANTOM (Fran O’Connor)

Black Metal Thanksgiving II
ACT FIRST
Scene First
[A long Thanksgiving table covered with vegan fare in a castle dining room. Candlelight.]

Pilgrimokon stands ominously at the head of the table preparing to say grace. The convent sits round, some already eating (so evil that they are without manners.)

Pilgrimokon. HAIL! Dear Father Satan, black-winged Fallen Angel, Lord of Hell, Master of Evil. We gather here today, this Congregation of Damned Souls, to Praise You and your Wickedness, pray for Eternal Winter, embrace the Darkness, and stuff our Fucking Faces with this Vegan Fare which was prepared by the Hounds of Hell (who did not wash their claws) and broiled in Demon’s Assholes. [Fire springs from his hands and hair and the spectres of Hell circle his head.]

Convent. [cheers and cackles.]

Pil. Make note that some Vegetables fell on the floor and were unwashed before being returned to the serving Plates. [Evil Laugh.]

Con. [Evil Laughter, hooting, orgies].

Pil. Anyhooo…After this sumptuous Food passes through our Bodies we will aim our Brown Anuses toward Heaven and rain stinking Black Shit upon His Kingdom and blot out the Sun so that we may forever fornicate with Wolves upon the black velvet carpet of the Graveyard. [Points fiery finger at the earth and screams]. This congress of Devil Spawn gather here to give you Lucifer, you fucking Asshole, Asshole of Assholes, Praise, and to ask you to spit your fiery Venom upon our plates [spits on own plate] and to ignite the flames of Evil in our Gullets and receive us as we FALL HORRIBLY FROM GRACE! HAIL SATAN! [Raises fists to heaven and, like a wolf, howls at the Heavens above, almost as if he is threatening to go up there and kick somebody’s ass].

Con. [Raises their glasses, toasts Satan, saturnalia].

The Convent.

I really don’t see what the problem is. I mean, I gave him praise, I threw the devil horns, I painted him in an evil light, etc.. The only thing I can think is that he didn’t like the cutesy shit like the “unwashed claws” and the part about the veggies falling on the floor and that little “Anyhoo.” I mean, that’s just mocking the whole concept of Satan and his whole evil image and stuff. Anyhoo? I still think it’s funny. I wonder if those guys over at South Park have this problem because their Satan is gay? My worship of Lord Satan was just a little too light for his taste, but the Satan they created is a little light in the loafers and that seems like a way heavier offense to me. I wonder if he turns their beds into bogs every night?

I have to admit, though, it was kind of funny how Satan flooded my house. I mean a flood? That’s such a total God thing to do. What did he think I was going to do, build an ark? He’s so evil, man. Like, he knew I was coming home from Black Metal Thanksgiving, totally hungover and tired, and what does he do? He floods my bed. That’s so evil, like, I’m so sure.

He must have liked some of the shit Chris and Kali set up for the whole Black Metal Thanksgiving extra’ganza, though. We all wore corpse paint, and had black metal names, and only talked in creepy, sneaky-monster voices, for instance. And he must have loved our game of “Pin The Upside Down Cross On The Burning Church.” That was hot, but next year we got to make some rules ‘cause everyone would put the blindfold on and just walk up to the wall and feel around until they found the burning church. There they would pin their upside-down cross to all the other upside crosses that were right smack dab in the middle of the burning church where they were supposed to be. It was hard to pick a winner out of a contest that looked like a 15-way tie for first. On the bright side, everyone cheated! Which is very evil. We also had a corpse painting contest on… DEAD BABY FACES! Boo-ha-ha-ha! And then Chris and Kali’s band, Gobble, played a black metal rendition of The Smith’s “Half a Person.” You know, “Sixteen clumsy and shy, that’s the story of my life.” More like, “Sixteen clumsy and fall down the fuckin’ stairs and die, bitch!” It was tight.

So, I mean, we were hella evil. So all I can figure is it was my grace. Not evil enough. Sorry about that Satan. My bad.

Feast (aka Kevin) sums it up. (Tania and I's BMTG portrait, shot by Fingerbang The Goosikus, can be seen in the "about us" in the right margin.)

At the fourth Black Metal Thanksgiving one of the many after dinner games was "Evil Twister." "Left hand: Swastika. Right foot: Upside Down Cross."

Skornicopia and Feast twistin' up some evil.

Skater Turns Winemaker, Ryan Zepaltas

2009-11-04T19:31:00.000-08:00

This article originally appeared in the first issue of King Shit Magazine in a recurring (hopefully) column entitled, "When I Grow Up." Photos by the illustrious Brian Gaberman.

FOD has a small following and I’ve had the fortune of meeting some new people, most notably skater and winemaker, Ryan Zepaltas. Ryan wrote me shortly after he read a post about our visit to the French Laundry in Napa. “Just writing to say I like your food blog,” he wrote. “The [French] Laundry shit is hilarious. I have been lucky enough to eat there before. It is cool to see it from your perspectives. It is refreshing to see someone from the skateboard world be into food and shit.”

Ryan, it turns out, is a washed up skater who got into the winemaking business. He owns a small winery in Santa Rosa, Ca (Tony Trujillo’s home town) called Zepalta Wines. A couple emails later, and I had a box of four bottles of Zepalta wine on my porch. “The food blog has finally paid off,” I told Tania.

Ryan sent me two bottles of his chardonnay and two bottles of his pinot noir. They had cool labels. I admitted before I even tasted them that I probably wasn’t going to like the chardonnay, but I’d like the pinot. And I was right. Tania liked the chardonnay, but to me it had a little too much of that characteristic oaky, buttery flavor. I almost exclusively drink white wines, but I like white wines that don’t taste like anything. Funny, I was able to kill the taste of Ryan’s chardonnay with a couple of cigarettes and it was fine. I was rather embarrassed to admit, “Yeah, your wine is great… after a couple of smokes!”

“You have a very European palate,” he said. “Lots of French people smoke cigs. So maybe that’s how the French intended it to be: good after a couple smokes. Your more sophisticated than you thought.”

On the subject of palates, Ryan and I began talking about why skateboarders have such shitty palates. As I wrote in my article “Ron vs. The Oyster" “Skateboarders don’t eat shit. The skateboarder’s palate is retarded. Literally. They eat like little kids.”

Ryan agreed. “My skate friends are a pain in the ass to go eat with since to them a taqueria is getting fancy compared to the Taco Bell that they usually eat.”

I confronted Tony Hawk years ago because I took exception to his sponsor, McDonalds. I argued that McDonalds was evil and regardless of his opinion of the franchise, he’s a role model to a lot of kids and should be more keenly aware of what he’s endorsing. And, as an athlete, endorsing McDonalds is like endorsing Marlboro. It’s just trash. But Tony stands behind his McDonalds sponsorship. “I like McDonalds,” he said to me. “I eat there and I take my kids there. In fact, when I’m in Europe, my favorite food is McDonalds.” GASP! I was shocked. WHAT? Maybe in England, but what about in France, Italy, or Spain? You’d take a Big Mac over the greatest cuisine on the planet? Unfortunately, this is true of a lot of skaters.

Whoa, dude actually has some skills, too? When we were discussing doing this interview and talking about getting skate photos, I wasn't expecting anything more than a kickturn at the Santa Rosa park, or something. But a f/s noseslide? Very impressive. And the vineyard in the background is a nice touch.

“When I went on a skate trip to Spain a couple years back,” Ryan said, “all the dudes were eating Subway, and shit like that. I’m like, ‘There are all these cool-ass bistros, markets, and tapas bars everywhere, and you want fucking Subway?’ The good food wasn’t even that expensive. Mike Rusczyk was down, though. After skating all day, we would go feast like kings at these tapas bars eating fresh shrimps, foie gras, Jamon, good cheese, etc. while the others ate crap. The everyday wines there are cheap, too, so we would get multiple bottles at every meal.”

Ryan, like myself, is a relative newcomer to the foodie scene. He’s from Wisconsin. “Wisconsin was all about beer and hard liquor,” he said. “Fancy food in my hometown was Olive Garden.” After he finished school in Wisconsin in 1999, he moved into a room in his aunt and uncle’s house in Santa Rosa. Ryan spent the summer skating, filming, “trying to come up,” and being a general scumbag, but he was also introduced to some of the finer things in life. “They were the type of aunt and uncle that were total partiers, and they introduced me to lots of things,” he said. “They also were really into food, wine, and entertaining folks. They always took me along when they went to dinner parties and fancy wine events. I quickly got used to fancy food and wine. I mean you got to be a total tool if you can’t appreciate the local food and restaurants in Northern California. Jack in the Box vs. foie gras? The transition to being a food and wine snob wasn’t hard.”

Towards the end of that first summer, as his money was running out, Ryan met a guy who ran a cellar at a winery. He was hiring. “I ended up working for this winery named La Crema for a couple harvests,” he said, “and totally became stoked on the whole process. I decided to take it to the next level and go do an internship in New Zealand for winemaking. I went down to New Zealand to skate for a couple months and work for three. That was sort of the turning point where I decided that I wanted to take winemaking seriously.”

It became very serious when he started Zepaltas Wines in 2005. He’s gotten into making chardonnay, syrah, and also some Rose wines, but Zepalta focuses primarily on the excellent pinot noir grape that is grown in the cool climate of the Sonoma Coast. Which, I failed to mention earlier, is excellent. Even the wine snobs like it. “There’s brightness to this wine’s color and spicy aroma, more vinous than directly fruity,” said Wine & Spirits Magazine. “Its acidity captures the wind off the Pacific and infuses the wine with cool tones of red berries and forest floor along with earthy minerality.” Forest floor? What the hell? I didn’t taste no dead leaves or squirrel shit. It just tasted like good wine.

I asked Ryan how he did it? Making wine seems like something reserved for the Francis Ford Coppola’s of the world, not exactly something you’d expect from some dirty skater.

“Since I am not a trust fund kid, and I didn’t get rich off software, or something like that, I didn’t have a lot of money to build a winery,” he said. “I rent space at the winery [Siduri Wines] where I work by day. It’s an easier way to get into the business without spending millions on equipment and land. We have use of the facility, and equipment, and store our barrels there for aging.”

The grapes come from different sections of other vineyards that he leases/contracts. They’re custom farmed for him and he buys the fruit from the farmer. The grapes are then brought to the winery and processed. “The fall is the annual harvest time when the wines are made,” he said. “It is a grueling time of the year. I usually put in 18-hour days managing my wines, my consulting clients, and of course my main job at Siduri Wines.”

And he still manages to find time to skate. I wondered if he’d ever drank wine during a session? He didn’t think so, but he did say, “Wine at the session would be an interesting contrast at the Santa Rosa skatepark to the tweakers drinking 40s in the bushes and all the homies drinking Natural Ice and PBR.”

Which reminded me about the time I wanted to get sponsored by Coors. I never understood why everyone wanted to be sponsored by skateboard companies and shoe companies. I mean, sure, you need those things, but I wanted to be sponsored by something I really needed: beer. I’ve since transitioned to wine and I’m currently making a sponsor-me tape that I’m going to be sending around. I’m definitely sending a copy to Zepaltas Wines because Ryan totally gets it. “It’s funny that Tony Hawk has Bagel Bites as a sponsor,” he said. “If I were he, I would be hitting up a charcuterie, or a cheese company for a sponsor.”

Exactly.

To learn more about Ryan’s wines, click on this word here… wait, hold on, not that one, this one: zepaltas.

Tony Hawk Poops in Mid-Air

2009-11-04T11:18:00.000-08:00

Mike Jacki, who’s on the board of USA skateboarding and all that Olympic business, was recently at some sports conference in Switzerland and he sent me a photo of Tony Hawk (above). Apparently it was “on the wall outside the offices.”

I told him to get out a Sharpie and make some adjustments. I sent him my suggestion:

I sent it to Tony and Miki Vukovich. I figured they like pooping, and probably would enjoy seeing Tony pooping in midair. Miki responded first.

“It's from the lobby of Sport Accord in Lausanne, Switzerland,” Miki said. “Some big international sports governing body. He made the point that all the other athletes shown on the walls there are Olympians. But I don't think pooping is a medal event yet. I think it's just an exhibition sport at this point.”

Tony wrote next. “I'm good at it,” he said, “but not an Olympian pooper by any stretch.”

Coincidentally, during this email exchange, I had to run to the toilet to take my third shit of the morning. Tania makes the best shrimp scampi, but last night’s offering must have a bad shrimp in it, thus turning my dish into shrimp sketchy. What followed can only be described as Olympic shitting. I'll keep you posted on my petition to the IOC. It's more of a sport than fucking golf.

Buh-Bye-eeee Skateboard Journalism

2009-10-15T11:52:00.000-07:00

The skateboard world is kind of quiet at the moment, and it made me realize that I miss Jereme Rogers. Which made me think of this article I wrote for the second issue of King Shit Magazine. Because King Shit is a Canadian magazine, I imagine a lot of people might not have seen this? (Click on the image above for a better look at Tania's amazing tattoo and photo skills.) And for those reading this outside of skateboarding and unfamiliar with Jereme Rogers and his retirement, go here.

When I was a kid, I played hockey. I was on the California All Star Team. I was totally awesome. I learned French in about a week because I felt it would help me communicate better with the French Canadian teammates I would surely be sharing the ice with when I made it to the NHL. I’m still fluent in French, but I retired from hockey when I was in my early teens to pursue a career in ballet. I was even better at ballet than I was at hockey. I was probably the best ballet boy in the world at the time. I could spin and dance and do flips and jump really high in the air. I was a marvel to behold. I won every ballet contest I entered. But at the peak of my career I discovered the art of writing about skateboarding, and I retired from ballet. My ballet coach thought I was crazy. I pray for him.

But look what happened: I became the best skateboard writer in the world, ever. Everyone knew from the first word I wrote in a skateboard magazine that I was the God of skateboard journalism. I was awarded a plaque by the Academy of Skateboard Journalists for the first sentence I wrote. I’d print that golden sentence again, here, but it’s been reprinted so many times, and I’m sure you know it by heart—oh what the heck, everyone loves it so much, why not, right?

“I am so awesome.”

I stand back and just stare at it for hours sometimes. It’s so eloquent. And so true. That’s the beauty of my skateboard writing. I tell it how it is and I do it with style and grace. From the moment I penned that remarkable sentence, I continued to amaze the skateboard community around the world with every word I wrote. I’ve written about skateboarding in so many places around the world, I don’t even remember where I’ve been. All I remember is that people were flying me all over the place just to read the words that I wrote about skateboarding. Every article I wrote was better than the last. “This is the best article that Carnie has ever written,” people would say. But then I’d write another article, and people would be forced to say, “Well, I thought that last article Carnie wrote was his best work, but this is certainly the best article about skateboarding ever written, yes sir.” And so on. I was, to quote myself, “so awesome.”

Then a year and a half ago, cooking hit me like a ton of bricks. I was penning, once again, the most amazing skateboard article ever written when I was suddenly overcome with hunger. So I made myself lunch. And OH MY GOD, the food I made that afternoon was the most amazing meal I had ever eaten. Manna from Heaven! That night I decided to try my hand at dinner and, guess what? it was the best dinner I had ever eaten. It was so good I didn’t poop for three days. I wanted to hold onto it. I finally pooped into a plastic bag and I had the turd bronzed. I had to move some trophies around in my enormous trophy room to make space for the bronze turd, but now it sits front and center. It’s a constant reminder of what a remarkable chef I am.

All the while, I continued to churn out my award winning skateboard journalism, but secretly food had taken over my heart and mind. And stomach! (HAHA! I still got it. Damn I’m good at everything.)

At first, I just cooked for myself and a few friends. Mostly just snacks. I knew that the skateboard industry wouldn’t be happy losing the only person who could write about it, so I kept cooking on the DL. But I had discovered a new passion and I’ve never been one to deny my heart. I know the skateboard journalism industry is going to be very sad to see me leave, but I can’t do both. Who on earth could possibly find the time to write about skateboarding, AND cook food? That’s like standing in the middle of a road with cars going in both directions. And that’s dangerous. If the cars don’t hit you, a herd of sheep might run you over. And if the sheep run you over, they’ll poop on your face. I do not like sheep poop on my face. If a sheep pooped on my face, I would catch that sheep and I would make the best rack of lamb you’ve ever tasted. You will pray to God for the recipe. Which is where I got it. If God gives it to you, I suggest you tattoo the recipe onto your neck so that you never forget it. God likes a good dead lamb. And my dead lamb is so succulent, you might just want to go up on a rooftop in your underwear and yell about it. Seriously, it’s really good.

I trust that God will guide me and protect me on my new adventure. It’s a weird adventure because it’s just like the time I quit hockey to play ballet. And then right after that, I quit ballet to become a skateboard journalist. It’s trippy to me because it’s, like, totally the same thing, but it’s different, you know what I mean? I just want to make sure everyone has got it straight. Because even I get confused by all the dreams and journeys and careers and retirement parties that are going on in my life all the time. It’s hard to keep track! (The amount of pot God makes me smoke doesn’t help either.) So I just wanted to make sure that we’re all on the same page here, and that’s why I’m shooting out this memo to let everybody know that I’m retiring from yet another successful career, skateboard journalism, to become the world’s best chef.

Skateboard journalism: no.

World’s best chef: BAM!

These are the last words I will ever write in a skateboard magazine. I hope you cherish them forever. Because I totally loved skateboard journalism for, like, the couple of years I did it, so I’m asking you to totally love me back. I will pray for you even if you don’t pray for me, but it would really help me out a lot if you prayed for me. And, frankly, you’d be a total dick for not praying for me after I just got done praying for you. I’ll always remember you skateboard journalism. Goodbye.

God bless skateboarding, and God bless Jereme Rogers.

PS. I don't usually add any kind of reality to my writing, or bother explaining anything, but there was a lot of hate directed at Jereme when he retired—most of which was completely retarded—and I don't want my silly little satire on the situation to be construed as mean-spirited or similarly hateful. I sincerely wish the best for Jereme, and I hope he succeeds at rapping. And who knows, maybe I really will retire from writing to cook? MAYBE I'll become Jereme's road chef when he tours? HA!

BEIJING: Noodle Alley

2009-10-06T21:48:00.000-07:00

The noodle rainbow.

Food TV has been a successful fad for a number of years now, yet it still feels very much in its infancy based on the amount of overlap and redundancies across the spectrum of shows. They all seem to be going to the same places and saying the same shit over and over again. The audience is still a big unknown, apparently, because it’s obvious they’re not sure what skill level the viewers are yet. There’s an inordinate amount of time wasted, for instance, on some of the simplest kitchen tasks and most obvious food related information. I have yet to make the list that I’ve been wanting to for all of these “islands of knowledge,” but an example that would be near the top of the list would be The Avocado. Any time anyone on any show is making a recipe that calls for an avocado, they all have to pause and talk to me like I’m a child and reveal the secret to disassembling the fruit. “OH! So THAT’S how you get that pesky pit out?”

Food TV gold: a peasant sleeping in a rickshaw in an alley strewn with trash!

Another one of my favorite recurring themes in food television is the, “eat where the locals eat/street food is the best” mantra which is always delivered in this nauseatingly condescending tone that has a peculiar way of destroying the intended message. “Look at how cool I am slummin’ it with the locals!”

He'll make a delightful meal someday, but when we were there he was the cutest resident of Noodle Alley. (Oh, Gary wanted to say something, "asssssqXXXXXXXXXXXXXXD." Not sure what that is, "Ass Quixote?" He's a strange cat.)

Despite the influence of nearly every TV food celebrity’s insistence on seeking out “bizarre foods,” Tania and I have always kind of been like that anyway. We don’t like the tourist shit, and we tend to avoid anything “popular.” When we were in Beijing, for instance, we avoided any kind of tour or group activity, preferring to explore on our own. I think the only time we participated in a tour was to get to the Forbidden City. We had planned on visiting it on our own, but when we found out we could get a free ride there plus admission, we decided to plug our noses and board the tour bus. As soon as we were in, ZOOM! We ditched the group. I hate groups. I don’t even like going out to eat with more than four or five people. Aside from the Forbidden City visit, we had no itinerary in China and our only agenda was to get lost. In so doing, we found this fucked up market and street food alley less than a mile from our hotel. It was food TV heaven.

We probably should have chosen this noodle guy because he's clean, and handsome, and, most importantly, not drunk.

The market is an entire post in itself, but across the street from it was this weird food alley. And then off the food alley was another smaller alley which we named, “Noodle Alley.” And I don’t doubt that’s what the Chinese call it as well. One side is a cinder block wall lined with tables and other junk. The other side is a row of stalls and small shop fronts that all seemed to be selling the same thing: noodles. Each one had a cook in front throwing dough and making noodles, all with great fanfare. The cook would take a ball of dough, throw it around in the air, beat it on the bench, yell at us through the rainbows of flour, and next thing you’d know, he’d have a beautiful pile of silky noodles on the table in front of them.

Instead, we chose this guy, Ole Wi Can Chugalot.

We finally settled on the shop that seemed to have the craziest noodle technician out front. We couldn’t understand a word he was saying, but he just seemed funnier than any of the others. Turns out he was drunk. After we sat down to eat, we noticed that he was sucking on a 40 ouncer of Chinese beer that he had hidden beneath his noodle bench. I liked him even more. We nodded, Yes, we would like some noodles. They ushered us into dingy little room where we took a seat at a tiny table with mismatching chairs. We pointed at a beer on another table and raised two fingers, “Two?”

Here's the youngest Chugalot. He gave us cigarettes when we were done eating.

After he made the dough make shapes in the air, he’d toss together a pile of noodles and hand them off to, presumably, another family member, who would then throw the noodles into what was essentially a garbage can with boiling liquid in it. After just a couple minutes, noodles and broth were tossed into a bowl, garnished with pork flakes (I think?) and cilantro, and served with a beer and chili sauce.

Tania slurping on a bowl of awesome.

If I was a douchey food writer, I’d get all romantic about how exquisite a simple bowl of noodles served in a back alley in the middle of Beijing was, but I won’t. Nor will I reserve an effluent description of the dish for any upcoming interviews I may be doing where I might possibly be asked something like, “What was the best meal you ever had while traveling?” “Well, there was this one time when I was traveling through China…” Suffice it to say that it was a really good bowl of noodles. And while I’ve grown mind numbingly tired of hearing the traveling TV food personalities praising peasant food, I have to admit that sometimes they’re sort of right. Especially if a noodle show is involved.

Frankly, you don't have much choice in China but to eat what the locals eat because even the American fast food imports are completely unrecognizable. Not sure what this offering from KFC is, but I'm pretty sure the stateside franchise doesn't offer a Poop Taco Falafel?

ISLA MUJERES: Whale Sharks

2009-09-23T18:44:00.000-07:00

"Hello, and welcome to our underwater paradise... " That's what I imagine dolphins say when you jump in the ocean.

“Do you want to do it again?” our guide asked us. We had already been in the water twice. I was kind of tired, but I wanted to do it again. I looked at Tania. Tania shook her head, no. She was seasick. I’ve never had the pleasure of being seasick. And neither had Tania before this. But she was definitely sick. I had watched her puking overboard earlier. I wanted to take pictures of her puking, but I didn’t. One reason was because Tania is very vain and I wasn’t sure how she’d feel about being photographed in that position, but mostly because I was worried what I might look like to the other passengers. “What kind of a man takes pictures of his wife getting sick off the side of a boat? Disgusting!” And now both Tania and I are bummed I didn’t.

“No,” I said to the guide, “we’ll pass.”

Our guide looked at me, shrugged his shoulders and offered it to the next couple. They looked at me and asked, “Really?” I explained that Tania was sick and that I was going to stay with her.

Ole Pukedelic Patty. Blehhhhh...

A few minutes later while I was consoling Tania, I had a great big, “What the fuck is wrong with me?” We were on a little boat out in the middle of the ocean surrounded by whale sharks, the largest fish in the world. When the hell am I going to get the opportunity to swim with these giant motherfuckers ever again? We’d be crazy not to.

“No, no, no, we’ll go,” I told our guide, “we’ll go, we’ll go.”

We convinced Tania that she’d feel better OFF the boat and in the water, and she agreed. I don’t think that was actually the case, but it’s probably better to be sick and doing something cool, like swimming with whale sharks, than it is to be sick and sitting on a stupid little boat.

We wanted to swim with the sharks while we were in Belize. They were migrating at that time as well. But it sounded sketchy to me, for instance you might not see them, which would mean a big waste of time and money, and I was having a fine time without the whale sharks. “Fuck a whale shark,” I said. But Tania insisted that we do it on this trip. I’m glad she did because while it was a total tourist experience, it’s an experience I won’t forget for the rest of my life. Absolutely amazing.

We were going to buy our whale shark tour online, but thankfully we waited ‘til we got to the island and ended up booking a cheaper one at our hotel. At first we didn’t want to make a mistake and choose The Crappy One, but in hindsight, they’re all more or less exactly the same. Well, they all go to the same place anyway. Because when they all take off from the docks in the morning, they’re all using the same GPS to find the schools of feeding sharks. And all the boats are on the radio to each other. Once one boat finds the sharks, that’s where all the boats go. After sailing about an hour due east into the Gulf of Mexico, sure enough, we came upon a small armada of whale shark tour boats exactly like ours all filled with the sleepy eyed tourists we’d seen scattered about the deserted city at dawn.

Aircraft carrier? Oh, no, it's a whale shark.

We pulled in alongside all the boats and everyone’s jaws dropped. The whale sharks were everywhere. There were dozens of the giant creatures, some as long as the boat, slowly swimming just below the surface, with their tail and dorsal fins sticking out of the water, and their giant mouths open wide, trying to capture as much plankton as they could. It was bizarre and slightly eerie, and it was one of those instances where I ask myself, “I wonder, who was the first person that thought this was a good idea?” I think that when I eat raw oysters, too.

"Cage goes in the water. You go in the water. Shark's in the water… our shark."

By law, only two people (plus a guide) per boat are allowed in the water at a time. So that everyone can enjoy it, you only get about five or ten minutes in the water with the sharks. Unfortunately, our first dive with the sharks was just retarded. You could say I “biffed it.” I know how to snorkel, but I only get to do it like twice a year at best. So this wasn’t the most ideal time to reacquaint myself with the sport. It was kind of like not skating for six months, and then the first time back on the board I have to roll in on the mega ramp. “Okay, GO!”

“Okay. Shit. Flippers—flippers don’t fit, oh well fuck it—mask, snorkel, don’t forget to breathe, oh and you have to swim too, kick your feet, why can’t I see out of my mask? Oh it’s filled with water? Why is it filled with water? Don’t forget to breathe—NO! Not through your nose you idiot, through your mouth, through the snorkel! Watch out for the sharks. Wait, where is everybody? Where’s the boat?” Etc.

Yeah, I guess that could be a good screen saver, but that's what my first dive looked like.

On top of all that, I hit the wrong fucking button on the stupid camera. While I’ve been using the Canon Elph for years, and I know it inside and out, it was on the inside of a waterproof camera bag/case thing (these things are kind of ghetto and janky, but they work, and for $30, why not?) that makes operation a little clumsy. So while Tania and our guide were having a fine time swimming around dodging sharks, I was not only trying to stay afloat, but also trying to get out of “stitch assistant mode.” First run = no bueno.

Back on the boat, I fixed the camera and got ready for dive number two. Dive number two, as it turned out, was a complete success. Confident that the camera was working, I was able to take pictures without aiming and instead enjoy my time with Tania and the sharks. On that second dive we really were swimming with the whale sharks. They don’t move very fast when they’re feeding. They just kind of cruise along, so you can swim right alongside of them. Close enough to touch them. Which is illegal, but I did it anyway. It was hard to get close enough because, while you’re right next to the beasts, they seem to have this weird sixth sense and they know exactly where you are and my hand was always inches away from their skin. I finally reached out really hard and grabbed one. Upon feeling my hand upon him, the beast gave a flutter and he was off in a flash, not before whacking me in the knee with his tail.

Woooo! Got some tail in Mexico! Spring breeeeeeak!

Tania's fixin' to get some. I was trying to get her to puke on a shark, but she said, "I can't." "You say you can't," I said, "but you really mean you won't."

They were all over the place and visibility wasn’t that great, so we shouldn’t really have been surprised when we found ourselves right in the path of a shark with its mouth wide open and coming straight for us. Tania screamed into her snorkel under water. I pointed the camera in the direction of the monster and feverishly pressed the shutter button like I was playing a video game while kicking as hard as I could to get out of its way. At the time, we felt we were lucky to have not ended up in the belly of the whale like Jonas, but in hindsight, I wish I had played chicken with the leviathan.

"AAAGGHHHH!" Shooting whale sharks is a lot like shooting skate photos. Some tricks deserve sequences. Like this drive-by by… actually I don't remember who this is? I think this is either PANCHO BUBBLES, or PETER PANCAKES. Some of our other underwater friends were RUSTY (he had a rusty tag in his fin), PICKLES, PINTO BEANS, and TORRALBA. The last of which is a sheperdess in Don Quixote that Sancho describes as, "A buxom, rollicking wench, a bit mannish, for she had a slight mustache."

I haven’t felt that thrilled in a long time. And that’s why I convinced ole Pukey to get back in the water for a third outing. Plus I had forgotten to get some video of us swimming with the animals. This task I left to Tania, and as you can see below, she got a fine shot.

When it was all over and we were heading back to shore, they handed out some ham sandwiches. I hadn’t realized how hungry I was until they busted out that lunch. It was basically a prison baloney sandwich, but it was one of the finest sandwiches I have ever eaten.

I don't really remember the sandwich thing from the Dagwood cartoons. I just remember he always left the house without his pants on. I'm not sure why that was so funny... over and over again? Anyway, this is what that baloney sandwich looked like to me. Nom, nom, nom.

After the whale shark swim, they took us back to the island where we were given the opportunity to swim around this janky old reef with a bunch of stupid little fish. Pfft. I just swam with a 20 fucking foot long shark!

But the reef expedition was more of a stalling tactic so that the captain could whip up a proper ceviche lunch. Like the baloney sandwich before it, this was probably nothing more than a styrofoam cup filled with some fish and pico de gallo, but at the time, it was the best ceviche EVER.

At one point I wondered, "Does anybody eat whale shark?" After a quick internet search for "whale shark recipes," nothing really came up. The only evidence I found came from—where else?—the Chinese. I would love to see what Rachel Ray could do with that in 30 minutes. Yummo!

That fat white thing swimming next to the shark is not a Beluga. Although the "Carnluga" is a related species.

ISLA MUJERES: The Ballyhoo

2009-09-09T19:37:00.000-07:00

The beach on the west side of the island is protected from the rough Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean seas. The water is calm, clear, and warm as bathwater. Because it's so calm, the beach extends out into the shallow water for almost a mile. This is a pretty apt depiction of what we did every day.

At the risk of ruining one of our favorite vacation destinations, I’d like to say, “Isla Mujeres, Mexico, is one of our favorite places on earth.” (Although I’m pretty sure even if the entire FOD audience were to all visit at once, no one would notice the difference?) We’ve been there twice now, and plan on returning again and again. The first time we went was a couple years ago in December for my birthday. This time we went in the summer for Tania’s 30th birthday. Both trips are a couple of the best vacations we’ve ever taken. The best way to describe it is it looks like those Corona commercials: paradise. And the best thing is, it doesn’t cost shit. We’re broke, but we were able to scrape together $1500 that paid for our flights, a room on the beach, food, drinks, everything, and even a whale shark expedition (more on that later). I don’t often use the word “hella,” but that’s hella cheap for a six day vay-kay. And, yes, I said “vay-kay.” I just said “hella.” If you’re gonna say stupid shit, you might as well go all the way, you know?

Food on Isla Mujeres worth writing about is sadly lacking. Because it’s a tourist destination, nearly every restaurant offers tourist food. The island is in Mexico, granted the furthest eastern tip of the country, but you may as well be in Ireland as far as Mexican food is concerned. Instead, the hype men on the street try to lure you in with pizzas, pastas, steaks, and hamburguesas. I kind of regret not trying a Mexican hamburger, but I did make a bunch of them on this last visit. “Hamburguesa” is my new word for “poop.” “Tania? Honey? You’re going to have to excuse me for a moment,” I’d say, “I have to go make some HAMBURGUESAS!” And then I’d go make little Mexican hamburger patties in the toilet. Plop! Plop! Yes, we cooked them “sous vide.” There is, however, as we discovered on this trip, good Mexican food all over the island. We found a bunch of new places we didn’t know about last time. But one of our favorites is still a place we found our first time there, The Ballyhoo.

The Ballyhoo is a little hut, with no walls, sitting over the ocean, in the middle of a dock, behind a gas station. It’s not a hundred feet from the main tourist street, but there’s hardly anyone ever there. I’m sure the gas station has something to do with that, and there’s always a bunch of dirty old fisherman milling about—the dock actually goes through the restaurant—and I think everyone knows what dirty old fisherman are like, right? Drunks. Not the type of people “Bill and Kathy” from Wisconsin want to mingle with on their vay-kay, right? But, if they just took a couple steps inside, they’d realize that The Ballyhoo is the place they want to go on their vay-kay because there couldn’t be a more beautiful location for a restaurant. They make the best margaritas (nothing special, they’re just normal and strong), and you can see the clear blue ocean undulating between the floorboards beneath your feet while you watch the fishing boats tied to the docks gently bumping into each other and the fishermen’s children frolic in the shallows with their tshirts on occasionally squealing at the site of a shark shaped piece of seaweed, and, best of all, you have a front row seat for one of the best sunsets on the planet.

Fish tacos at The Ballyhoo.

And the fish. I made the mistake of once mentioning to my mom that, “Tania doesn’t like fish.” And so now when we visit, or dine with family and friends, we hear, “So we heard Tania doesn’t like fish, so we made…” Tania does like fish, it’s just not her first choice on the menu. But you wouldn’t know it at The Ballyhoo: Tania eats the shit out of their fish tacos. They’re so good. And they’re simple. It’s just fresh grouper, deep fried, and covered with slaw in a tortilla. It’s yet another instance in which simple, fresh ingredients are all you need to make an amazing dish.

This is their hot sauce. The lady let me know immediately, "It's very hot. I tell everybody now." Apparently she gave it to some big dumb white dude who was too tough for any hot sauce and it knocked him on his ass. Pussy. This stuff is very hot, but it's really good. I immediately tasted the habaneros. "And olive oil," she said. Which is a weird one to me because, as you can see, it kind of separates. Still, it was really good.

We’ve watched fisherman come in from sea, tie up, and gut their fish on the dock. They bring the fish into The Ballyhoo and the little Mexican lady behind the bar cooks it up right there. One time, one of the old fisherman saw us sitting at the bar and offered us some of his fish. “Try some!” he said. We did and it was awesome. There’s just a really cool vibe there as well. Although it was at The Ballyhoo that we met one of the island’s shittiest residents.

Tania enjoying the view. Or scheming how she can steal a boat.

She wasn’t that bad, but she was Canadian and she thought of herself as a local. She had been living on the island for a couple years and had shacked up with a snorkel tour guide. I remember her as a white, pasty, ugly little blonde gal, but for some reason the image I have of her boyfriend is that of a handsome, bronze, Mayan warrior, ala Fabio. Huh? I don’t think we even met the dude? Anyway, she sucked. She was one of those annoying people that like to consider themselves “travelers” as opposed to the softer, less experienced, and uglier, “tourists.” In short, she was a braggart. For one, she was constantly letting us know how much better the island was when she first “discovered” it. Apparently it was a jungle paradise, completely absent of white people, just two years before? Because now, according to her, it was all crowded, and built up, and everything was going to shit. It’s been two years since then, even, and I can assure you it’s still a quiet little Corona commercial.

"She lived in the Colonias [the poor part of the island]," Tania said, "and tried to make it sound like she lived in a god damn tree in the jungle studying the habitats of primates. The reality is she was trying to romanticize the shack she lived in with her loser bf. She also kept talking about how she would mix up her own, weird, organic potions. Like organic face creams and cleansers, and perfumes. I kind of went in and out of her conversations because, like most Canadians, she was incredibly boring and one-dimensional."

She also made a point of speaking to us in English, but whenever she spoke to the bartender or the help, she did so in Mexican. In shitty Canadian Mexican. And I suppose that’s the way you practice learning a language, and it’s a nice gesture to the local people, but the bartender spoke perfectly fine English, and she was doing it just to show off. And not very well. She was making a mess of the language. Which is what Canadians do with everything Mexican: food, language, they just need to put their pudgy little hands in their pockets and ne touchez pas. But I’ll never forget that stupid little lady because she was one of the first people to provide me with an example of the snobby world Traveler. She was something else. I mean, I'm bad, but I’m just a snobby world Tourist.

More Isla Mujeres adventures coming up.

Some people don’t know this, but Tania is an International Underwater Handstand Champion. She’s good. And most people don’t know that I’m the Tiger Woods of "Sunset Golf." In "Sunset Golf" you use a camera instead of a fucked up li'l club. But the object of the game is the same: get the ball in the hole.

Salsa Verde

2009-09-06T09:27:00.000-07:00

One of the questions on the Newlywed Game was, “What habit do you have that your spouse hates the most?” I’m not sure which one I’d choose, because I’ve got a lot of them, but one near the top of the list would surely be, “Making salsa.” I’m a salsa tinker. Tania hates it. I’m always messing with salsa and hot sauce recipes. The operative word being “mess.” I’m a messy cook. To imitate me cooking, Tania waves her arms around. “You cook like this!” Waves arms around. Which isn’t so bad when something good comes out of it, but in the case of salsa, she’s indifferent to the results. She’s not a salsa head. So it’s a big mess with no payoff. And everything is covered in hot peppers. It's not cool. Still, I continue to tinker.

We just got back from mexico and learned our old friend heather roach was in town, so we arranged a last minute bbq. Just some steaks and my “famous” white beans. Robin and Brandi are fans of the beans, thus they’re famous. In fact, the promise of white beans is the only way to get Robin to visit. While at the grocery store picking up supplies, I felt the menu needed a little something else, so I decided to whip up a little salsa verde for the steaks. It’s cheap, it’s easy, I’ve done it before, and the results have always been good. Even if Tania doesn’t like it. “Tastes like pennies,” she always says.

That night there were some compliments on the salsa verde, and apparently Corbett has been asking for this recipe for some time now, so I thought I should put the latest version of this recipe down on paper.

Salsa Verde II

2 medium-large tomatillos, halved
½ white onion
a few garlic cloves
1 jalapeno
3 serranos
½ of a lime’s juice
¼-½ cup of white vinegar
cilantro
salt

Set oven to 350. Lightly oil a baking sheet and place the first five ingredients on it. Roast in the oven for about 20 minutes or until lightly charred. Place the roasted peppers, onion, and garlic in a blender. Pour in the lime, salt, and the vinegar and coarsely blend. Add the tomatillos and the cilantro to the mix and blend until just mixed. Add more vinegar or water depending on the consistency and taste you like.

Of course the recipe is up for interpretation. The amounts vary depending on the ingredients. Eyeball it and use your cooking sense. For instance, some members of our party found the above a little too hot for their tastes. I consider it in the “medium” department and would even add a habanero next time for more heat. I’ve also learned it takes very little to make a lot. A couple of tomatillos never seemed like enough, so I’d get half a dozen, and then I’d end up with a giant tub of salsa that would last over a month. And the salsa tinker can’t tinker with new recipes until the old one is finished. That’s one of our rules: I can’t buy or make any new hot sauces until I finish what’s in the fridge. The other rule is: clean up.

I can’t believe that I considered the first salsa verde recipe a competition salsa. I was going to have a salsa verde throwdown with our friend Josh in Colorado. It’s much better now. But I was apparently already considering naming and bottling that first batch because I just found a list of possible salsa verde names we created. This batch might be deserving of one of these fine names? Nah, probably the next one. I gots to tinker with the recipe some more.

Swamp Fire
The Algae Business
Goat Piss
Thomas Jefferson’s Bile Collection
The Eighth Ocean
Ancient Pond Scum
Thunder Snot
Yeti Urine
Swamp Wax
Monster Polish
Mexican Rain
Mean Green Wet Dream
Liquid Pollution
Verde Venom
Verde Vomit
Green Darkness
Cthulhu Blood
LA River Sludge
Sludgezilla
Camel Spit
Wharf Water
The Dreaded
It Came From The Cave
Spawn Juice
Death Drool
Monster Piss
Cobra Tears
Cobra Juice
Verderrhea
Space Scum
Very Viscous Verde (VVV = 15)
Veni Vidi Verde
Poison Pepper Piss
Snake Piss
Chunky Green Poison
Super Scum
Filthy Hot Sludge
Hot Green Snot
Lagoon Gone Bad

Boston: Durgin Park

2009-08-27T14:32:00.000-07:00

This is a giant floor to ceiling picture of the staff back during the Civil War. "You know the big picture in the lobby?" my father asked me on this trip. "Well I think the blonde gal was still a waitress when we went there when you were kids." The blonde gal?

We went to Boston recently for a Dew Tour contest and some top secret International Skateboard Federation nonsense. Those stories will appear in the various skateboard publications I write for. The part that concerns us here, however, is the rest of the trip.

My father is from Boston, so we used to visit almost ever summer when I was a kid. Specifically we’d go to Martha’s Vineyard where my grandfather built a couple of houses in the 1930s. But since I turned into a punk rock, “I’m not going to clean my room,” snot nosed skateboarder, I haven’t been back there in almost 30 years. So this was kind of an exciting trip down memory lane.

One of my earliest memories, and a recurring story that tends to come up during Thanksgiving dinner, is the first time we ate at Durgin Park. Durgin Park is an old restaurant next to Quincy Market that specializes in Yankee cuisine. “Established before you were born,” it says outside of it. My brother and I were probably around ten years old so we don’t really remember this, but my parents remember the day vividly. They each remember it completely differently, of course. I think my mother’s version is closer to the truth.

Me at table. Me eat food.

It was a very hot and muggy day in Boston and the family was shopping in Quincy market. I have always hated shopping, so I can only imagine that my brother and I were miserable, horrible little shitheads. While my mother was trying to shop, my father raced ahead through the crowded market, heedless of what his wife was doing. (I have inherited the “walk as fast as you can without regard to the rest of your party” gene from my old man.) My brother and I kept up with dad, but my mom got stuck somewhere looking at a purse or something and ultimately was separated from the family. I’m not sure why we didn’t turn around and go look for her, but I wasn’t at an age to be making executive decisions, so I remain something of an innocent bystander in this case. My father, on the other hand, made the rather baffling decision to go get lunch. “Come on! Let’s go to Durgin Park!” I’m sure he said. Again, I’m not sure what was going through the man’s head because we were obviously missing a very important part of the family, his wife. Apparently it didn’t matter, or it never occurred to him that she would probably enjoy joining us for lunch, because we went upstairs and got a table in the communal dining room and enjoyed a nice, long meal. I remember the Boston baked beans and the Indian pudding, probably because my dad made such a big deal about them, but I remember it was a fine meal. We really enjoyed it.

Tania likes to make plates of the weirdest combinations of food she can. At a buffet she's not afraid to pile some Jello on spaghetti with a side of shrimp cocktail and a blueberry muffin. But our order at Durgin Park was even a little too weird for her. We started with a pitcher of beer and a plate of raw clams. I guess you can order them steamed, but I didn't know that. This is our first meal of the day, incidentally. I thought they were delicious, but Tania wasn't feeling it so early in the day. Note how she can barely keep her hands off the clams.

Meanwhile, my mother realized she had been ditched. My mother is a very sensible lady. She does everything very neatly and in order. So her logic told her, “Well, I don’t know where they are. So I should probably remain in the last place we were together.” She was hoping, of course, that her husband would retrace his steps. (This is before cell phones.) I don’t really remember the exact place she posted up, but basically it was a spot in the hot sun in the middle of the crowded market. There were some street performers near by and she said she saw them do their entire act at least three times.

Next up, we had a bowl of clam chowder. It was good chowder, but again, Tania wasn't feeling it. Something about Durgin Park makes the Carnie men insensitive to the needs of their women.

After what must have seemed like an eternity to her, my father, with my brother and I in tow, finally returned to the scene. My mother was furious. She hadn’t eaten, she couldn’t go get any water, and she was practically having a heat stroke. My dad, on the other hand, was oblivious to her suffering. I think he even bragged about how good the meal at Durgin Park was. “You should have come,” he said. Just then the street performers were starting up again. “Oh!” my dad said surprised, “let’s watch these guys!”

GRRRRRR! My mom pretty much lost it.

Somehow my father saw the glimmer of the problem and he dimly realized that he may be the source of what was upsetting our mother. So he did what any sensible man would do and offered her an olive branch in the form of a blank check to shop with. To spite him, my mother took the offer and bought the most expensive fur coat she could find. In the middle of the summer.

And we ended the meal with a bowl of Boston baked beans. Mmmm, a pitcher of beer with raw clams, chowder, and beans. Breakfast of champions. Below is Durgin Park's recipe for Boston Baked Beans. I don't plan on making them any time soon, but the story below is kind of funny.

Boston Baked Beans
2-quart bean pot
2/3cup molasses
2 pounds beans- California pea beans preferred of York State beans
4 teaspoons salt
1 pound salt pork
½ teaspoon pepper
8 tablespoons sugar
1 medium-sized onion

Soak beans overnight. In the morning parboil them for ten minutes with a teaspoon of baking soda. Then run cold water through the beans in a colander or strainer. Dice rind of salt pork in inch squares, cut in half. Put half on bottom of bean pot with whole onion. Put beans in pot. Put the rest of the pork on top. Mix other ingredients with hot water. Pour over beans. Put in 300-degree oven for six hours. This will make ten full portions. You can’t let the pot just set in the oven” explains Edward. “You’ve got to add water as necessary to keep the beans moist. And you can’t be impatient and add too much water at a time and flood the beans.” Edward produces his Boston baked beans under the watchful eye of Albert Savage who has been the head chef at Durgin-Park for the past 35 years. Albert is probably the world’s leading specialist in Yankee cookery. He himself is an old Yankee who was born in Lithuania. He has one assistant who is a Bulgarian Yankee and another who is a Polish Yankee. “The chief difference between Yankee cooking and most other kinds of cooking is that we make our food taste like what it’s supposed to be,” says Albert. In other kinds of cooking chefs seem determined to make the food taste like something else.” Albert prepares vast quantities of the traditional baked Indian pudding. In the course of a year, if you’re found of statistics, he makes enough to float the Queen Mary, the Queen Elizabeth and one small rowboat. The following recipe is sufficient to make one-half gallon.

The Great Wall Toboggan Ride

2009-08-25T13:47:00.000-07:00

The Demon Sled at the top of the Slidway.

I once picked up a GQ magazine to check out what kind of an audience they were writing to. I had heard that GQ paid like $5/word or some shit. At those rates, all you have to do is write, “Beer,” and you got enough money for a six-pack. So I was flipping through the mag and the first article that caught my attention featured a picture of an alcoholic beverage of some sort.

“Booze!” I thought. “I can write for these guys.” But then I started reading the article.

“Next time you’re in Italy,” the author began, “you gotta try this drink I found at a little dive bar on a side street near the Colosseum.”

Next time I’m in Italy? Who the fuck reads this shit? Everything about the author’s tone presumed that the reader saw a short jaunt over to Italy for a cocktail as completely normal. I quickly realized I would not be writing for GQ. There is nothing I could possibly say to the readers of GQ. (It’s like, what do you get Bill Gates for his birthday?)

Until now. I have some information the GQ man might be interested in. Because this is how the first sentence of this article should have begun:

“Next time you’re in China…”

Yes, next time you’re in China. What a douche bag.

Next time you're in China, steal a hunk of the Great Wall.

Anyway, next time you’re in China, and you’re going to go visit the Great Wall, you should visit the Matianyu section of the Wall. Most people visit the Bada Bing section of the Wall when they visit (I think it’s actually called “Ba Da Ling,” but I prefer Bada Bing) because it’s closest to Beijing. Thus it’s more touristy, really crowded, and, from what I understand, it’s not even the real Wall. Fake Wall! Fuck that shit. Matianyu, on the other hand, is only slightly farther from Beijing than Bada Bing, but it offers an entirely more pleasurable experience. For one, it’s out in the middle of nowhere, so there are few tourists. It’s also a real section of the Great Wall. And, best of all, there is a toboggan ride at Matianyu.

While there were less tourists at Matianyu, these four douche bags somehow managed to make up for the throngs of tourists we were avoiding back at Bada Bing. Since I'm obviously unqualified to write for Vice, I'm not even going to try a Dos and Don'ts here, but I will say that taking off your Ed Hardy t-shirt at the Great Wall of China and sticking it up your butt in the back of a pair of matching Ed Hardy shorts is definitely a DO!

The strangest thing about the toboggan run is that no one, locals included, seemed to know what we were talking about. A friend of ours had told us about it before we left, and we even confirmed its existence with internet video. We eventually convinced a small group of fellow travelers, including pro skaters Matt Milligan and Chad Bartie, to visit the Matianyu section of the Wall with us.

After a few wrong turns, we eventually made it to Matianyu, and it does indeed have a toboggan ride. Or, as it was called on some of the Engrish signs, “The Slidway.” We took a gondola up to guard tower 14 on the Wall. Then we hiked down—mostly down, but there were some steep ascents in a couple places—to guard tower 6, which is where the Slidway starts.

Walking the Great Wall is very nice. It is exactly as you would imagine it. The views are breathtaking, the architecture is stunning, and the sheer brute force required to build the damn thing is absolutely astounding. (Naturally I stole a little hunk of the Wall as a souvenir.) No less astounding are the little Chinese merchants hanging out in the shade of every guard tower imploring you to buy something, anything, from them.

Milligan is trying to barter a beer from the Mule Lady. She didn't want his measly 5 Yuan until he started walking away with his measly 5 Yuan.

They sold snacks, and beverages, even beer. Which, of course, meant they had to lug all that crap up to the Wall, and then carry it all back down again at the end of the day. It’s hard enough to hike that thing without a few cases of beer on your back. But we showed our appreciation for their mule-like strength by buying a beer every few hundred yards or so. We could have gotten a good buzz going up there, but we had read a warning on a sign earlier that said “drunkard and people who are insane” are not allowed to ride the Slidway.

Hannah, Chad Bartie, and Matt Milligan say goodbye before they descend.

At guard tower 6, you descend to the start of the Slidway. The track itself looks like a bunch of oil drums cut in half and stacked end to end. A bored Chinese lady stood at the top of the run with a train of sleds. Milligan, Bartie, and his wife, Hannah, decided to go first. Hannah got cold feet, but after some prodding, we got her into a sled. She lifted the brake and slowly rolled down to the first turn. We could still hear her cursing the Slidway in her Australian accent even after she had disappeared into the forest. “SHEET! SHEET! SHEET!” she kept yelling.

Matt takes the first turn before disappearing into the forest on the hillside below the wall.

Next Tania and I slid into a sled, which is nothing more than a plastic seat atop some large rollerblade wheels, and a hand brake. The lady instructed us to push forward on the lever to go fast, pull back to brake. She also said we should “rean” into the turns. I pushed off first, and after testing the brake, I pushed down on the lever all the way. I’d been on a toboggan run in Vail when I was a kid with my uncle. He told me I was a pussy if I used the brake. I could hear his voice in my head as I began my descent and I promised him I wouldn’t touch the brake. For a minute, anyway. Because that thing hauled ass. In hindsight, I think it can be done without touching the brake. I refrained from using it as best I could, but not knowing what was around the turns forced me to employ it a couple of times. Plus there were crazy Chinamen all along the track waving their hands in my face and yelling, “SLOW DOWN!”

“NI HAO!” (“Hello!”) I’d yell back.

They were also the cause of some unnecessary brakeage. “Maybe they know something about this turn I don’t know?” I’d think. I swear I got a little too high on one turn and caught a grind.
One of the best things about the ride is it’s super long. You know how a rollercoaster ride is about a minute long in reality, but it feels like forever? This thing felt like it just went on and on and on.

I opted not to video and concentrate on just hauling ass... mostly because the youtube video (below) gives you a pretty good idea of what I saw... just imagine Vans at the front of the sled... but Tania decided to try and film a little (above). I'm not sure how because as you can see, she's hauling ass.

“It felt like it lasted ten minutes,” Chad Bartie said at the bottom. I think in reality it’s somewhere between three and four minutes. ZOOM! For three minutes? So fun. It was seriously one of the best parts of the trip to China. And I want one in my backyard. Although it’ll never compare to the one we rode through the forests on the hillsides below the Great Wall of China.

And now I want to end this article—which is supposed to be about food—in the same douchey manner it began:

So next time you’re in China and you ride the Slidway down from your hike along the Great Wall at Matianyu, make sure to stop into the little noodle shop in between the souvenir stalls. The lady in there makes the best plate of chicken fried rice, and it really hits the spot after a gnarly Slidway session.

CHINA: Lungs 'N Tongues

2009-07-08T19:30:00.001-07:00

A typical Chinese lunch: a beer, a cigarette, and a plate of cattle lungs.

When we were kids, we used to play a game called “Pro Skater.” You pick your favorite pro skater and imitate him. Steve Caballero, for instance, was easy: you just tilt your head to one side when you drop in. Now that I’m dabbling in food writing, I’ve taken to playing “Pro Cheffer.” One of my favorite celebrity chefs to imitate is the roly-poly host of the Travel Channel’s Bizarre Foods, Andrew Zimmern. To play Zimmern, you just go to a foreign country, find the most fucked up food they have, and then put it in your mouth. It takes less talent than Pro Skater, but it’s no less dangerous, as I was to find out on a recent trip to Beijing with my wife, Tania. It happens to be one of Zimmern’s favorite haunts.

Tania out front of the Old Beijing Noodle House.

After a long day of strolling around the Forbidden City, we decided to visit a popular Beijing restaurant called “The Old Beijing Noodle King.” On the front page of the menu, besides the specialty “Zhajiang” (basically a bowl of noodles), there were pictures of two other curious dishes: a bowl of eggs and honey, and a plate of “cattle lungs.”

At this point we were fine. The beer was delicious. Which was a good thing, because I needed three more of those tall ones to wash that shit down.

“EWWW!” we squealed, pointing and laughing, and making disgusting faces. We’re Americans, after all. Got to play the part.

I was so bummed because I was starving and exhausted. I wanted a beer and something comforting to eat, but we both knew that we had to order the cow lungs. It was time to play Pro Cheffer.

The lungs arrived at the table just like they were pictured: no garnish, nothing, just a big plate of black lungs. The color made us wonder if the cows weren’t ardent smokers like their owners, or if it was simply the result of being raised in the smog laden air that seems to hang all over Beijing? I extracted a hunk of lung from the pile and held it up for a closer look. It looked like dog lips and squid tentacles. I didn’t really want to put it in my mouth, but to play Zimmern, you have to smile, shrug, and take a big ole bite. So I did.

"DAVID! Stop playing with your cattle lungs!"

Tania got busy on the lungs.

It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t good either. “It tastes like what it looks like,” Tania said, “grey.” The problem was the texture. It was like chewing on a condom and it took every last effort to get it down. On my next bite, I took a cue from the locals around us and dunked it in a bowl of sesame sauce. The sauce did little more than change the flavor from a chewy grey condom to a chewy sesame condom. It was marvelously horrible, and so we considered it a “win” in the game of Pro Cheffer.

These are the waiters clearing a table. They were snickering at us the whole time. We were, after all, the only lound eyes in there. I was like, "What? Did you guys spit in our cattle lungs? Like that makes it any grosser?"

Still hungry, we decided to explore the neighborhood around our hotel. We stumbled into a restaurant that looked tourist friendly. It wasn’t. Besides the eyeballs, the only other thing I recognized on the menu was something that looked kind of like Kung Pao Chicken. “I think you just ordered organs,” Tania said. She was close. Turns out it was “Tongue Pao Chicken” (hold the chicken). Mutton tongue to be exact. (I think it was mutton, there were a lot of cartoon sheep on the walls.) It was good, it was tender and tasty, but I had a hard time eclipsing the image of sheep licking each other’s dirty buttholes and French kissing each other.

This is what it looked like on the menu. "Oh yeah, a little Kung Pao..." Yum...

…but on closer inspection... "HEY! WHOA! SHIT! THAT'S NOT CHICKEN!"

As we walked back to our hotel after the tongue meal, I farted. I couldn’t help imagining a little sheep sticking his tongue out of my butthole and going, PFFFFFT! Tania laughed and imagined that the lung was right behind it and it took in a big gulp of air (Le Petomane!). Then it blew it out again. Which again made the tongue go PFFFT! Then the lung gulped more air. The tongue goes PFFFFT! And so on. It kept me entertained all night. It was funny all the way up until I took a shit the next morning, when a tongue and a lung came flying out of my bung.

Hawk's Box

2009-07-01T13:14:00.000-07:00

I know it's a "food" blog. There's food in the fucking picture. It's cat food, but it's still food.

While writing an article for an upcoming issue of King Shit about my visit with Colin McKay’s pets and Tony Hawk’s pets, I came across this photo I shot of Tony Hawk’s cat litter box. (Don’t worry, the joke about the Birdman having a cat in his aviary is in the article.) At the time I felt a little queer for shooting the photo, but now that I look at it, I think I have the beginnings of a very nice coffee table book about famous people’s litter boxes. There is surely a large number of famous people with cats, no? And people love to peer into celebrity’s lives. Not to mention the enormous crazy cat lady community that, alone, assures the book will be a complete success.

So there, I’ve started it. I’m making a cat litter book. One down: Tony Hawk. I’m sure it won’t be hard to convince the rest of the cat owning celebrity community to let me into their feline’s toilet. The only problem I can foresee is what to call it?

“Litter Boxes of the Rich and Famous”?

“Sands of the Stars”?

“A Richer Litter”?

“Litter Glitter”?

“The Scoop on Celebrity Cat Poop”?

“Poop With Loot”?

“Urine the Money”?

“Litterazzi”?

“Celebrity Cat Crap”?

“Famous Feline Feces”?

CHINA: UPDOWNLEFTRIGHT SUPER MEGA STORE

2009-06-25T16:59:00.000-07:00

The slightly different tone here is due to the fact that this piece is appearing at viceland.com. And they don't know who we are.

My wife, Tania, and I were recently invited to Beijing to do a story on the Chinese government’s recent interest in making skateboarding part of their Olympic program. An interesting story to be sure, but what we were most excited about was sampling some fucked up Chinese food.

As we expected, we didn’t have to look far. Directly across the street from our hotel was a large, two story supermarket. The name of it was in Chinese, but because of the four-arrow logo, Tania dubbed it THE UPDOWNLEFTRIGHT SUPER MEGA STORE. It was the first place we went after we checked into our hotel. We were jetlagged and confused—we just wanted a few bottles of water and some simple provisions for the room—so we weren’t expecting the sensory overload we got upon entering the UPDOWNLEFTRIGHT SUPER MEGA STORE.

“Turtles?” I said as we entered. On the linoleum floor near the entrance and beside the baskets was a large Tupperware container filled with water and little turtles. Live turtles. They were about the size of a book of matches.

“They’re so cute,” Tania said. Indeed. I later considered trying to bring one home. It would have been much easier than my original plan of smuggling a panda on to the plane.

After marveling at the meat department, which is totally open, nothing is packaged—I have no problem with this, I think the American practice of shrink-wrapping everything is wasteful and does nothing more than provide a false sense of sanitary safety—we ventured over to the packaged goods. (I mean, we wanted to buy a black skin duck and some pig eyeballs, but where would we cook it?) Just about anything you want comes in a package in China… and a lot of things you don’t want come in packages in China as well.

We wandered around laughing at all the “Engrish,” such as the “Chicken Ham Sausage!” and the “Hamburger choiceness raw material taste tempting!” and eventually gathered up a few items to make a small meal back in our room: the appetizer was a four-pack of thousand year old duck eggs. For the main course, we selected a hamburger in a bag, which would be accompanied by a side of blueberry Pringles. We paired our meal with a delightful bottle of rice wine.

The thousand year old duck eggs came first, and they were easily the worst part of the meal. I found it funny that there was an expiration date on the package. Apparently, someone in the year 1009 (during the Liao Dynasty!) decided the eggs we bought would go bad on Wednesday, June 13, 2009? Well they were right about them being bad on June 13, because they were bad on June 10 when we cracked into one.

It was like cracking open a stone. I’m not sure why anyone tries to get inside one in the first place because the second the insides were outside, our hotel room was filled with the most noxious, sulphuric egg smell. It smelled like ass. And horse piss. Legend has it that the eggs were once prepared by soaking them in horse urine. I don’t doubt it.

But, if I wasn’t about to put the damn thing in my mouth, I’d say the egg was actually kind of cool looking. Once unshelled, the shiny inside was a translucent dark green, almost black. And floating within the congealed egg “whites” were golden snowflakes which are formed by some sort of chemical reaction that occurs when duck embryos meet horse piss. (You have to wonder what the first person to combine those two things was thinking.) It would have looked cool as a paintjob on a car or motorcycle, or something, but on food, black/green is decidedly not cool.

We sliced into it and the creamy black yolk oozed out onto the table. “Ewwww!” we squealed. It looked like vampire blood. The smell, the color, the texture, it was all so gross that if I thought about a second longer, I was never going to eat it. So I took a big ole bite. Ugh. I have to admit that it wasn’t that bad—it just tasted like a very, very strong, hard boiled egg—but the smell, and the color, and the horse cock that I imagined was peeing in my mouth, made me gag. I got some of it down, but most of it went into the trashcan.

My eyes were watering and I needed something to wash the taste out of my mouth. The only thing near at hand was the rice wine. At least I think it was rice wine. There was no Engrish on the bottle. All I know is that it cost just over one yuan, which is about 14 US cents. Chinese MD 20/20!

I ripped the top off and took a big ole swig. Whoa! The shit was like lighter fluid. Maybe it was? I’ll never know. It was strong. I coughed, I gagged, my eyes teared up even more, and I shot snot out of my nose. My insides were on fire. But, I have to admit, it paired perfectly with the bold flavors of the 1000 year old egg. The wine’s acidity captured the winds off the polluted Yangtze River and infused the wine with the cool tones of battery acid and old fish bait rotting in the sun at the end of a pier. It acted as a perfect compliment to the egg’s farty, horse piss flavor.

The rest of the meal was just as weird, but not as difficult to get down. The hamburger in the bag was more or less harmless, except for the fact that it was a hamburger in a bag. I’m not even sure what it really was? It definitely wasn’t beef. It might have been chicken? It was probably lawn clippings and dead leaves. It didn’t really taste like anything, which was a welcome change from the appetizers. The only flavor came from the “mayo” which tasted like vanilla cake frosting.

The burger in a bag was served with a side of chips. They actually weren’t “Pringles,” they were a Lays product, but they looked like Pringles. And while there were a number of flavors not usually associated with chips to choose from in the UPDOWNLEFTRIGHT SUPER MEGA STORE, such as shrimp, ox, tomato, panda, we decided that blueberry was the most retarded. Although they promised to be “Natural and Cool” (and I actually believed that they would), they turned out to be fake and disgusting. I expected them to taste like Pringles with a hint of blueberry flavoring, but they turned out to be completely the opposite: it was a mouthful of chemical blueberry candy dust, in the shape of a Pringle. It was horrible. So naturally I turned to my old friend the 14 cent rice wine and took another slug. And that was it. My body had had enough of the UPDOWNLEFTRIGHT SUPER MEGA STORE, and I was promptly directed to the toilet where I barfed up, down, left, and even right. It was all definitely wrong.

BEIJING, Li Qun's Motherduckin' Roast Duck

2009-05-21T13:11:00.001-07:00

We were invited on a trip to Beijing, China last month. I went over to do a story on the Chinese government's interest in skateboarding. It's a strange story and you'll likely read about it in THE SKATEBOARD MAG soon enough. But the other reason I went was for the food. And if you saw Andrew Zimmern's entire episode dedicated to Beijing, you'll know it's one of the most fucked up culinary destinations on the planet. On our first day, however, we decided to play it "normal" and go for the roast duck. They say you haven't visited if you don't go see the Great Wall and have roast duck. Here's the duck story. OK? OK.

Tania was slightly irked/confused by my insistence on going to this place. I’ll admit, it was kind of a knee jerk reaction/choice, but once I read about Li Qun’s Roast Duck (pronounced LEE CHOON) in our copy of Fodor’s, there was no other place to get Roast Duck in Beijing. “Every other place that says they have the best duck is bullshit,” I said to myself. “Li Qun’s is the best, period.”

This is a quality I’ve seen in not only my father, but in most middle aged men: we settle on something for absolutely no reason and with little evidence, except because someone told us about it or we read about it somewhere, and then we adopt the information as our own and the impression becomes firsthand experience. Nothing could dissuade me. We were going to Li Qun and I wouldn’t hear of anything less. “O-kaaay,” Tania said.

It was good. But in hindsight, I have no idea how good it was because I’ve never had Peking duck before and thus had nothing to compare it to. But I enjoyed it. And, given the language barrier, which is extremely thick—even those Chinese who “speak” English sound like they have a mouth full of marbles and they got their voice running through a distortion pedal—I’m surprised we were able to hire a taxi and get to the restaurant and back as easily as we did. The accomplishment of actually finding the place (the first of many independent outings into the city) was as delicious as the meal. For one thing, they made it out to be in the middle of a ghetto maze. But that, of course, was one of the attractions of this hard to find gem.

Derrr, where's the duck restaurant?

The truth of the matter is it’s one block from a major intersection, and about ten yards off the main street. And there’s a big sign. As well as a bunch of crudely drawn ducks on the wall at the entrance of the alley all marching to the restaurant. The guidebooks made it sound like it was a quest to the top of Everest. I read another account online by a fellow who was duped into paying a guide to take him through the “hutong” (their version of a Brazilian little flavella) because he’d never find it on his own. We not only had no trouble finding it, but there was a man in the alley who seemed to be waiting for us. “Right here,” he beckoned, and ushered us into the restaurant.

The charmingly crappy alley way front door at Li Qun's.

"Hell and fire were sworn to be the least!" The duck oven.

The first thing you see when you walk into the dark and smoky foyer is the wood-burning oven with the ducks hanging inside. I was like a moth drawn to the light and went into the fire room. “No, no, no,” I was told, that was the wrong way, “In here, in here,” he pointed. So we made a left through the meat locker curtains and into a hallway with the dining room off to the side.

The dining room at Li Qun's.

It’s someone’s house converted into a restaurant. A skylight lit a small, cluttered dining room that was dominated by the color red. To our left, a small group of waiters and cooks hovered over a table with a large pile of shredded duck in front of them. They all turned and looked at us, something was said, and they all laughed. “I wish I knew what the joke was when they were laughing at us,” Tania said later. It might have had something to do with the fact that we were quite early for dinner and we were their first customers of the evening. We had had nothing to eat since breakfast. We were starving and I, at least, had hit the wall. Not the Great Wall, just “the wall.”

An older gentleman with an open shirt exposing a dirty wife beater beneath, beckoned us to come in. “Welcome, welcome,” he said. The owner perhaps? A waitress in a traditional red top tagged in and led us into a small room off to the side. The room was yellow, with three tables. A window with bottles of wine separated us from the main dining room. We sat down, and the waitress plopped two menus in front of us, and then she got out her pen and paper. It was time to order. This is something we found very common in China. I’m not sure if they’re being polite and attentive, or you’re just supposed to know what you want already? But they don’t walk away after you’re handed a menu. “Uhhhh…?” We stumbled through the pages of the menu as quick as we could. She saved us the trouble by intervening and, in a manner that displayed her history of dealing with foreign diners in the past, she quickly went over the menu.

We had three choices: traditional roast duck for two, popular roast duck for two, or vegetarian roast duck for two. Not sure what a vegetarian roast duck is, and we hate everything that has the word vegetarian attached to it, so we were left with two options: traditional or popular. “Popular” meant “white people order this.” So that left us with one choice: traditional. We added two beers. The waitress grabbed the menus and was off. We both were sad to see the menus taken so quickly, we wanted to peruse the other pages, but it’s probably a good thing we didn’t because we definitely didn’t need any more.

The beers came first. The label made it appear to be a nice bottle of ginseng tea. It was a normal. Next came the appetizers, and this was the part of the meal that separated the “popular” from the “traditional” meal. In fact, I think it was only one of the appetizers that separated the two orders: duck liver. The livers were sliced sideways and the sections produced looked like flower petals. And that’s how they were arranged on the plate, like a duck liver flower. “Very elegant cat food plating,” I thought.

The appetizers. Roasted duck wing salad is in the center, surrounded by broccoli, some cucumber, egg rolls, and the liver flower.

I didn’t much care for the first bite, but I later attributed that to my tongue’s forced isolation and lack of exercise throughout the day. It looked, and tasted like cat food. But by the fourth bite, I had begun to acquire a taste for the stuff.

“You can acquire a taste for anything, but who wants to?”

—Harry Dean Stanton to Crispin Glover, after he samples the latter’s tomato soup in the movie Twister.

The other three appetizers were pretty much normal: an eggroll cut into slices, a plate of broccoli in sauce, and a shredded duck wing salad. It must have been duck, but it looked like chicken in the egg roll, and it tasted a little gamey. Other than that, it was all really good.

It wasn’t long before they arrived at the table with an entire dead duck on a plate. “This the duck we killed for you,” they seemed to say. “She she!” I said. That’s “thank you” in Chinese. It’s pretty much all I said the whole trip.

After they show you your dead duck, they take it over to this little table and carve it up.

And then it looks like this. Little petals of duck flesh. Mmmm.

They took the duck to a table behind us, carved it up, and returned with a plate of meat. The proper way to eat roast duck—again, I read that this is the “proper” way to eat duck, but I really have no idea—is to take some meat, put it between one of the little pancake things, smear some sauce on it, and add some cucumber and scallion. I must say, it was delicious. The duck was juicy and smoky, and the dark, slightly sweet sauce accented the flavor perfectly. The crisp sharpness of the vegetables complimented the richness of the meat. My only complaint would be I would have seasoned the duck with a touch of salt. Otherwise, it was the best duck I’ve ever had. Which, admittedly, isn’t saying much.

"Just a one more bite, it is a waffer theen!"

As we ate, the restaurant began to fill up. The couple next to us were very chatty with the staff. At one point, the man got into a small argument with a waiter over their duck’s carcass. We later learned they were haggling over the price of deep frying it. “It’s the best part,” the man said to me. It looked like it had been crucified when it came back.

We learned they were Chinese, but living in Vancouver. They were ultimately very disappointed in Li Qun’s roasted duck. For one, he explained that he preferred the Americanized version of Peking duck—he regretted admitting it because of his Chinese heritage, but he insisted the duck you get in America and in Canada is better. But most of all, they were upset by the prices. Apparently Li Qun’s had been much cheaper in the past, but they’ve recently raised their prices. “Because—well, because of you guys,” he said.

I was done, but I needed to use the bathroom. This simple task became a chore throughout the trip and I dreaded asking where it was. I never found the right word. “Bathroom? Restroom? Toilet?” None of these words worked and I refused to point at my dick and pantomime taking a piss. I’m classy like that. Someone would always eventually figure out what I needed, but we never learned the word for toilet. Might have been more useful than the other two words I did learned. But that’s another post.

You don't have to tell me twice, "No shit? No problem!"

After visiting the toilet at Li Qun, I like to imagine the English word they use for “toilet” is much cruder. “Shit hole?” “Shit place?” “Piss fuck shit?” "Hell Place for Make the Poops?" I don’t know, but I loved the “NO SHIT” signs. You can’t see it in the photo, but it’s all over the tiny bathroom. It’s written no less than a half dozen times. I’m guessing the first couple were written kind of high up and then the artist realized, “Oh, children will be using the bathroom and so I better put the warning down at their height. ‘NO SHIT!’ you little shits.”

Peeing was allowed. And that's my Chinese beer. Delicious.

After we relieved ourselves, we got a cab back to our hotel and died. We had gone from starving to stuffed and we were still being ravaged by the jet lag. We passed out early.

After we were done eating, we had a smoke outside. When we were done, we threw our butts into the "ashtary."

During the night, I was once again able to find an ingenious way to blame my farts on something other than my own butt. It’s getting more and more difficult these days. Tania is on to me. I don’t think she believes me when I point at Beckett or Gary anymore. And when they’re not around, there are very few excuses I can muster. But over there in China, providence shined upon me.

PFFFFT! I farted. “Oh my,” I said, waving the sheets about to let the stink out, “somebody must have stepped on a duck!” Tania smacked me. But not long after, I farted again. PFFFFT! “Wow, it really sounds AND SMELLS like there’s a duck in this bed!” Smack! And then another, PFFFFT! “Oh it sounds like someone is lighting off FIRE QUACKERS outside! Maybe it’s Chinese New Year?”