THE GURGLING COD

Happy New Year!

Police Segway outside Dunkin' Donuts, Michigan Avenue, Chicago Il, 28 December 2007.
Best from our'n to your'n for 2008.

I can't believe it's not Polish Sausage!

In Chicago, where the Cod will be to the many nice places to eat as Stephen Maturin is to the Galapagos &c. in the Patrick O'Brian books. That is to say, a job that puts me within tantalizing proximity of interesting things, but prevents me from enjoying them. As a silver lining, I do commend the annual convention of the Modern Language Association to anyone who wants evidence supporting Woody Allen's thesis that real life becomes more and more like high school.
So, busy in the lifeworld, queuing up for nasty coffee and such, but I can offer a tiny nugget of PHC: If any of your friends runs some smack about how Todd English is vain and self-infatuated, you can set them straight with this sound bite:

"Of the four flats creen monitors at Todd English's Bonfire, only two -- barely 50%! -- are dedicated to Todd English content."

That's right -- the man has videos of himself playing on video monitors at his eponymous airport outpost. Meatmen fans will recognize an affinity with Slammy from Miami. No word yet on when Eric Ripert's Jumbotron will be operational at Le Bernardin.

Kiss my black can

Hope Christmas brought whatever it was you desired, be it a yard-long Sabatier, or a chance encounter in the all-night grocery. We've talked a little bit about Chunky soups in the context of Sunday Night Soups over to Serious Eats, but there is more to say. At times, parody anticipates real life -- today, one can buy real razors with numbers of blades that existed only in the pages of The Onion a few short years ago. I don't know if there is an explicit parodic antecedent for  Campbell's Chunky: Fully Loaded, but it surely is the first canned soup informed by the Brawndo campaign.* It is, after all, the soup in the black can "packed, crammed and jammed with extreme amounts of meat!"** Curiously, the semioticians at Hormel sued Cambpell's, alleging that the stew did not meet the statutory definition of "stew" and thus harshes Dinty Moore's buzz. Where is Carl Weathers when you need him? In the meantime, new-to-me The Impulsive Buy comes through with an explication of the Chunky/NFL liason, and a withering review of the Fully Loaded Rigatoni:

Speaking of testicles, Campbell’s has finally accomplished what they have always strived to do — give soup some serious balls. While that statement is indeed a terrible joke, it’s also what I think this “soup” is really made of. The meatballs have an abnormally chewy texture that I could only assume mirror the texture of a certain questionable organ meat. Maybe this is to appeal to the people with giant Oakland Raiders vinyl decals and metallic ballsacks hanging from the back of their trucks, but nobody knows for sure. I understand that they can’t use the finest cuts available, but this is bordering on unappetizing and disturbing.

Word.

*For evidence of life imitating art, you can watch the Chunky spot here.
**If this sounds like something you'd see on a DVD box, don't blame the Cod.

Wassail, Wassail!

Not much in the way of PHC here -- lots of driving, that darn sleigh to fill, and whatnot. However, if you need a fortifying cocktail for the holidays, I wrote up a few over to Serious Eats:
A serious New Orleans Eggnog (seen before in these pages).
A Charleston punch for 300. (Junior Leaguers and their guests, not Spartans.)
A somewhat more subdued Tannenbaum Tipple from the Lee Bros.
And finally, I may have done this before, but a Christmas song from Big Star.
Jesus_christ.mp3
Let's hope that 08 brings a resurgence of cities bathed in light and love. From our internet presence to your home, happy whatever you are celebrating.

A Gurgling Cod Public Service announcement

Some not-awesome news has reached me from a trusted informant in the service industry. At this time of year, people go out and buy stuff. Then, ennervated from this experience, they pay other people to cook and serve food to them. So far, so good. However, sometimes, it appears, people feel queasy about these purchases, and fearful of a Mastercard bill hitting like September Vogue, they are a little bit near with the gratuity. This must stop. Your server does not benefit from the 79" HDTV in the back of your Escalade,  Mr. and Ms. Restaurant patron, so you better come with at least 20%, unless your server, like, flips you off or something. If I were as clever as this guy, I would, in fact, make a 3 dimensional tip table, with size of check in dollars, and size of tv in inches, and displacement of vehicles' engine in cubic inches all multiplying the base tip.
And while we are on the subject of the service industry, a gift suggestion-cum-another PSA. If you know someone who likes to drink coffee, consider getting them a French press. Or a Thermos. Or encourage them just to roll out of bed on Christmas morning and start hitting the sauce. Or something, but do whatever it takes to keep Starbuckses from opening on Christmas. What the hell, people?

While my guitar shaped like Thomas Paine gently weeps.

This post is a little late, and gets the dreaded Silica Gel label, but Stephen A. Smith's fulminations against bloggers represent some of the same stuff we've seen from Batali, et al in re food bloggers, cooked down to a rock you can smoke:

"And when you look at the internet business, what’s dangerous about it is that people who are clearly unqualified get to disseminate their piece to the masses. I respect the journalism industry, and the fact of the matter is ...someone with no training should not be allowed to have any kind of format whatsoever to disseminate to the masses to the level which they can. They are not trained."

Yes, it is alarming that Mr. Smith seems shaky on the meaning of the word "format," but more alarming that a putative journalist who reaches millions of homes every day seems to be operating with a guild mentality. Imagine how different (and better!) the history of our species would be if only people had been properly trained had access to mass media.  Milton's just an old blind pain in the ass, and Tom Paine's that guy at your local who bumps into you, spills your beer,  and spends the whole night apologizing to you. Woodward and Bernstein are bumping rails in an Alexandria motel, etcetera, etcetera. Hell, in Stephen A. Smith's world, Martin Luther would have had to be thesis-nailing certified before he posted his stuff up.

The point, which is evidently bears repeating, is that access to the medium does not create an audience. An easy way to establish that is to click on the "next blog" link on a Blogspot blog. For every blog that people read, there are hundreds that are ignored by a number that asymptotically approaches everyone. A blog only has an audience if people find it and read it. There are ways to generate that audience, but they involve, primarily, having content that people want to read. If you are credible, you are credible, if you ain't, you ain't, and it does not matter what the medium is. Like Marshall McLuhan said, don't hate the player, hate the game.

And speaking of the title, in case you missed it, it's the 1988 NBA Eastern Finals, and Prince is Dominique Wilkins, and Larry Bird:

More gifts.

If shitting gold or a roast that weighs more than the last three best actress winners does not appeal, there are some more reasonable ideas.* I stand by what I said last year, but would add a bit of a caveat by way of suggestion. Individually selected knives make better gifts than sets, and one way to make a single knife seem giftier would be to pair it with the new Peter Hertzmann jawn, Knife Skills Illustrated. Hertzmann has one of the more fully realized, yet slept upon food things on the internet. This book is useful, but it does seem like a case where the publisher's eyes are bigger than its stomach. There is an article or two like he does's worth of material, and then a lot of other stuff that pads it out into a book.

The stuff about choosing, holding, and using knives is useful -- imagine a world where Chris Kimball took antidepressants -- but the next 210 pages are how to cut individual vegetables and meats. Seriously. Here on earth, if you are unable to apply what you learned from cutting celery to cutting fennel, you probably should not be trusted with a knife anyway. To make matters worse, each item, mushroom, chicken breast, etc, is repeated for righties and lefties. Let's just say that the Cod has been shopping at the Leftorium for some time, and has, to this point, managed to extraopolate from the illustration to real life. I still have a hard time swiping my card at the gas pump, but the idea that the locations of the tomato and the knife would be exchanged, I've been able to suss pretty consistently.

All that said, the same things that make this a not-great value at $29.95 make it a nice gift -- while it is tough to figure buying it for one's self, but not hard to imagine wanting it for the stuff in the beginning. Paired with a decent kinfe, either utilitarian or fancy, it would make a nice gift for someone who has started cooking, and wants to get serious.

Add gifts

Greeting to all the Gothamists enchanted by the dream of golden scat. More gift ideas forthcoming, but first, University of South Florida football coach Jim Leavitt on the Most Wonderful Time of the Year:

Q: The obligatory follow-up: Have you done any Christmas shopping?

A:"(Dec.) 24th. Every year. 24th. I get out there and dig in. That's a strong day for me, shopping.  A lot of nephews and nieces, and they all like the gift certificates from the mall. They know what they're going to get. I might do tickets to the game. It won't be anything real creative. I get real confused at the mall. So many things to look at and buy. To try to figure out what goes with what person, that's real tough. People that have the skill to do that are really special. You have to wrap things up, do the bow and the whole thing. A lot of stuff. It makes me nervous getting ready for it."

This pretty much captures where the Cod is, Christmaswise, but you can do better than this. Deets tk.

Gifts

A series of missives from Cod operative Addison reveals that it is a fine line between clever and stupid. On the one hand, now you can shit gold. Yes, actual  gold tablets that you eat, for the thrill of having sparkles in your poo. The person who would use this product and look forward to its denoument, has nothing to live for anyway, so why bother.

On the other hand, the twelve bird turducken has the genius of being willing to go further than the other guy.* This is a Christmas centerpiece that weighs more than a healthy third-grader, needs eight hours to cook, and could feed the active rosters and coaching staffs of the Broncos and Chargers after they get done playing on Christmas Eve.
*I'm thinking here of Kurtz' excursus on the Viet Cong towards the end of Apocalypse Now. What's more Christmasy than that?

Homegrown stars... they're just like us.

In light of recent conversations about changes at Food Network, some more fodder:

Food Network and Rachael Ray have agreed to a two-year deal for a new primetime series, Rachael’s Vacation launching in January 2008, as well as 60 new episodes per year of popular daytime series 30 Minute Meals, it was announced today by Brooke Johnson, President, Food Network. Additional terms of the arrangement were not disclosed...“Rachael is the quintessential example of the homegrown stars we create at Food Network,” said Johnson. “She has been with us since 2001 and we have built a strong partnership that will continue for years to come and bring more new and exciting projects.”