THE GURGLING COD

Cocktail Party, Cocktail Party.

Welcome EDSBS shoppers: here is the terrifying song.

South Carolina FTW!

The gubernatorial adulterous booty calls to Argentina on the state dime, the sex with horses, the racist and anti-Semitic slurs? The Palmetto State was just getting warmed up for the Assistant Attorney General toy*-and substance enhanced sex w/ teen prostitutes. In a graveyard. If this were a rap battle, this would be where South Carolina threw the mic on the ground, looked real hard at Louisiana, Illinois, and Jersey, and walked away.**

*Pretty please, make it be the Twilight dildo?

**Like so:

Oprah says tip 10%?

The Cod is swamped, or I guess beached, this week. This Oprah tells you to tip 10% thing seems to hover in a strange verge of Snopesland. Would welcome confirmation/debunking.

WTF, Typepad? Cods don't wear neckties.

The image at left is a screen grab from the new Typepad. 25 words + image manage utterly to baffle the Cod on so many levels that it's not even funny. Economic, aesthetic, logical, discursive right off the top of my head.* On a related note, a friend whom I would enjoy calling "Saturday Night Fish" were he not familiar on the internet under his real name opines interestingly on blogging for fame and fortune.

*This is not to say that the Cod is not way overdue for a facelift, link cleanup, etc.

Is Facebook the Future of Journalism?

  It looks like a solid collection of snacks, but the context of Sifton's potato skin reset on DJ is a little odd. He plugs the published skins receipt, then talks about inheriting a flat screen from (DI/DO contributor) Marian Burros. The only comment is from (DI/DO contributor) Kim Severson, lamenting " Marion gave you a flat screen? All I got was a leftover jar of honey and some of her old cookbooks." It's amusing, and humanizes the names you see in the paper, but it's a little bit odd to see two major contributors to the most influential food section in the United States using the blog extension of their section to produce what feels more like a status comment thread on Facebook than journalism.

It may be me, or too much time with Benedict Anderson and Michael Warner, but it did remind me that some of the time I used to spend reading about people I did not know in the newspaper, I spend reading about people I do know on FB, Bloglines, Twitter, etc. Makes the Cod wonder what impact social media has on what we think of as news. This question is related to the concerns about newspapers in a digital age, but the difference between the questions is worth considering.

Sam Sifton likes his restaurants a little on the classy side*

What's the difference between Sam Sifton's ricci rhapsody and Vice mag's Chick-Fil-A sammich soliloquy? About eleven dollars. Sifton:

The very first item on the menu at Marea is ricci, a piece of warm toast slathered with sea urchin roe, blanketed in a thin sheet of lardo, and dotted with sea salt. It offers exactly the sensation as kissing an extremely attractive person for the first time — a bolt of surprise and pleasure combined. The salt and fat give way to primal sweetness and combine in deeply agreeable ways. The feeling lingers on the tongue and vibrates through the body. Not bad at $14 a throw — and there are two on each plate.

Vice:

Despite valiant attempts by Culver’s in the upper Midwest and In-N-Out on the West Coast, Chick-fil-A is hands-down the greatest fast-food chain in America. Its standard-issue no-frills chicken sandwich—a fried boneless chicken breast, pickle, and smear of mayo on a bun—ranks somewhere between finding a crisp $100 bill in the pocket of a coat you rarely wear and getting your first blowjob. It’s that good. The waffle fries are no joke either.

Vice may be overstating the case, but Sifton's review is the kind of 3-star review that has an I want to go to thereness to it that many of Bruni's did not. Sifton is not in Biff terrain just yet, but the reviews are fun to read. *Play us off, Confederate Railroad:

Chang vs. Bay Area, or is Lockhart Steele the new Vince McMahon?

A little bit late to the party on this one, but  if the Chang vs. SF beef did not exist, it would certainly be necessary for the new national Eater to invent it. Basically, it's like this. Chang claims that all SF cooks do is put figs on plates, and huffy SF chefs manage to get an SF book signing canceled. Bourdain calls bullshit. Comments get real warm, feelers go out from Eater HQ about what it would take to get Judy Rogers to hit Eric Ripert* with a folding chair at the Beard Awards. More seriously, the lesson is that one should never ever say anything bad ever about anything to do with food in the Bay Area.** The skins are no thicker than a fig's. In any event, one imagines this is far from over, and as I await the spectacle of Bourdain nemesis Rachael Ray leading a pro-fig rally at the Ferry Terminal Market, the Cod will be Pounding the Plexiglas, and spilling my popcorn. And special thanks to Penny Pascal, who outdid herself in realizing the Chang/Alice as Biggie/Tupac vision.

*Dude can cook a fish, I hear, but spawning a Twitter impostor? Someone has a lot of spare time.

**With world enough and time, could find a link to a huffy Bauer column for each word, plus some book review blowback, etc, but you can manage fine without.

Matchless Wisdom

The article on the persistence of matches as a restaurant giveaway, even as smoking wanes seemed like a puzzling choice for the front of DI/DO. Smokers or not, who among us has not deliberated over which would be the most impressive matchbook to leave on the back of the toilet? Among other things, what better way to encourage your guests not to use the out of doors for a bathroom?*

*That said, one of the best kind of spousal spats to eavesdrop on is one where the spouses disagree on it is the kind of party where gents are expected to pee out of doors or not. Tends to encourage frank exchanges of views.

Ro-Revus and Earl Butz

Thanks (?) to the cinetrix for passing along Ro-Revus talking about worms:

Yes, this is truly brainfrying material, and yes, it's alarming this dropped in the Nixon, rather the Wilson administration. Sakerlina public health initiatives, holler! Beyond that, and why it's here,  is that it speaks to a radically different nutritional economy in America forty years ago. Among the many many woes besetting poor folks in South Carolina, one that gets a PSA are parastic worms. At about 5:00 is the kicker -- "you can't afford to share food with worms." Of the problems afflicting the poor rural South today, a shortage of calories is low on the list, seems like. And FWIW, the kids in the video are all pretty skinny. So what changed? The major agricultural innovation, detailed by the dangerous elitist Michael Pollan and others, is the big-ag, fencerow-to-fencerow policies of Earl Butz. The upside, I guesss, is a cornucopia of corn products that keep us from worrying about fighting for every last calorie with cartoon worms. The downside is we all got wicked fat.

Ro-Revus and Earl Butz

Thanks (?) to the cinetrix for passing along Ro-Revus talking about worms:

Yes, this is truly brainfrying material, and yes, it's alarming this dropped in the Nixon, rather the Wilson administration. Sakerlina public health initiatives, holler! Beyond that, and why it's here,  is that it speaks to a radically different nutritional economy in America forty years ago. Among the many many woes besetting poor folks in South Carolina, one that gets a PSA are parastic worms. At about 5:00 is the kicker -- "you can't afford to share food with worms." Of the problems afflicting the poor rural South today, a shortage of calories is low on the list, seems like. And FWIW, the kids in the video are all pretty skinny. So what changed? The major agricultural innovation, detailed by the dangerous elitist Michael Pollan and others, is the big-ag, fencerow-to-fencerow policies of Earl Butz. The upside, I guesss, is a cornucopia of corn products that keep us from worrying about fighting for every last calorie with cartoon worms. The downside is we all got wicked fat.