THE GURGLING COD

Three least favorite beverages for fall

 Longtime readers of this blog will be able to divine what kind of a Monday it is when the second least compelling beverage for the fall is whiskey made from the urine of elderly diabetes patients. Number one and number three? Well, Cocktane beats grandma's piss whiskey by a nose, with Tiger Fuel to show.* Unfortunately, among the things keeping the Tigers (#23) and the 'Cocks (#52) out of the very upper echelon of public universities is not their very own energy drinks. As you might have guessed, it's shaping up to be the kind of Monday that only the man from Freeport, Illinois could love. 

*Combine 3 oz Tiger Fuel w/ 3 oz Cocktane and a jigger of Gilpin Family Whiskey for a late summer refresher we call the Palmetto Health Crisis!  

A young friend writes...

Peerless Photoshopper Penny Pascal is kitting out her NYC kitchen, and asks:

I need a good starter set of knives that will not empty out my bank account but will also not completely suck. Do you have any recommendations?

I thought this might be an interesting question to throw out to the peanut gallery, as I imagine it might be almost as contentious as tomatoes in Bolognese. Look forward to your thoughts in the comments below. 

Meat Turtle!

We interrupt our unfolding breastaurant coverage to return to the question of whimsical ground beef novelties. The below, via the good folks at EDSBS is from a certain Kevin @LSU 2.0; if you find recipes that are profanity-free to be dreary, you will love this one.  In the nicer hotels in Baton Rouge, they leave one of these on your pillow, in lieu of a mint. 

 

Add Breastaurants

Per yesterday's exploration of the breastaurant phenomenon, a humble request. If you are a nursing mother, and live within range of a Twin Peaks restaurant, please visit this restaurant, and attempt to breastfeed your child while there. The Cod wonders if brestaurants permit breastfeeding, and is betting his pdf of the Judy Butler fanzine that they do not. 

Via Whatevs, two reasons to eat at home...

The Cod had recently congratulated himself on honoring his pledge to Peerless Photoshopper Penny Pascal to stop threatening to join Al Quaeda whenever a particularly revolting restaurant concept popped up. But it is not going to be easy! Via Uncle:

Over the past five years Twin Peaks has established a leadership role in the burgeoning category of casual-dining sports bars with an all-female wait staff known wryly as 'breastaurants.' With its tongue-planted-firmly-in-cheek tagline of being a restaurant with 'Scenic Views,' Twin Peaks is following in the path well trodden by the shapely gams of niche pioneer Hooters."

 The 'Fesser in me is obliged to point out that "wryly" is not quite le mot juste here. For "wryly," the OED has "In a wry, oblique, or distorted manner," and "wry" is "Dryly or obliquely humorous; sardonic, ironic." It would be more accurate to write "the burgeoning category of restaurants referred to candidly as 'breastaurants.' Because the people who serve the food there are women. Who have breasts. And they make them wear outfits so that you can see part of them. The breasts, I mean." 

To judge from the restaurant's own website, they seem to be targeting Japanese businessmen visiting places like Tulsa and who have powerful Eddie Bauer fetishes. To clarify, the restaurant chain is called Twin Peaks, because it is a breastaurant, and breasts often come in pairs, and are convex. That is the sly part, because the point is actually that the food is served by women with breasts. However, the restaurant inexplicably chooses to honor the nominal source of the name, David Lynch's cult TV show, and lays a heavy PNW theme on the cheesecake. Thus, the promotional materials feature vignettes like the above, where one of the gals from the restaurant is enjoying her day off relaxing on her Flexible Flyer practically garbed in hoodie, black panties, sheer knee-highs and red patent stilettos. In general, if bosoms barely contained by buffalo plaid are critical to your enjoyment of a meal, Twin Peaks seems like the place for you. It  it sure won't be for the food. Sexy lumberjack theme or no, it's one of those where you can intuit every item on the menu from the typography on the front. There are only three folks in the world who can fix this, so please, Bob, Greg, & Grant: 

Everybody's working for the Weekender?

A bit on the non-food tip before the nose-to-tail adventure commences. You may have seen the fake NY Post response to those Times Weekender TV advertisements. Pretty funny, but living in a market where the Times Weekender ads don't run much, I took a look at the actual Times Weekender ad:

Separately and together, what the real and the fake advertisements suggest about the future of newspapers -- and the present of New York City -- is kind of alarming. In no particular order:

-As someone who spends time in his day job thinking about print culture, it appears that the shared presumption of the real and the fake ad is that the primary function of the print newspaper in 2010 is to help identify suitable mates. Back in the day, the Boston Globe was known as "The Maid's Paper," as distinct from the Boston Evening Transcript of T.S. Eliot fame, and it's nice to know that in multi newspaper towns, the paper still serves this function as a social filter. 

-More generally, do these ads share a presumption that the Times demo skews smarter and whiter, and the Post's skews dumber and browner? I say that despite/because of the spokesmodels in the Times ad -- by virtue of looking like somebody's idea of what architects look like, they suggest that they are more united by their designer eyewear than they are divided by the colors of their skin. Add in the white members of the lumpenproletariat in the fake Post ad, and maybe, instead the conclusion is that we are living in a world where class trumps race? In which case, yay? 

-The premise of the Weekender makes me kind of sad, on both the supply and demand side. The Times is saying "Hey, I know we can't ask you to make a real commitment, but maybe we can, like, hook up on the weekends?" The reader is saying "K! I'm too busy to keep up with, like, the Swat Valley and the collapse of the economy, but maybe three days worth of soft news will be kinda like the cultural equivalent of the Today Sponge, and keep me conversationally viable on the jitney." Not to mention that the notion of being "fluent" in a given section makes me want to run screaming in the direction of a big book of Sudoku. 

Balk's on his Bolognese pony.

Anchowerish here, what with the day job kicking my ass. (The same people who change tables in restaurants also have children they send to college, it turns out.) But, when the Awl is not outreporting the fishwraps on the Target H8s Gays story, Balk is dropping Bolognese science. Balk writing a recipe is kind of like Judy Davis after 5 shots of cheap mezcal -- still exacting, but also kind of abusive: 

Finally, the tomatoes. Figure out how thick you want your sauce. You want it ragu style? Get one can. You want it a little more liquidy? Two cans. Either way, you are REQUIRED BY ME to be using a 28 ounce can (or cans) of whole, peeled San Marzano tomatoes. In this matter there can be no dispute. If you find yourself unable or unwilling to use San Marzano tomatoes I refuse to allow you to make my Bolognese. Seriously. Get out of the kitchen and go take a good, hard look at yourself in the mirror. Ask yourself, "Why am I such a fuckhead that I refuse to use San Marzano tomatoes? Am I the sorriest son of a bitch God ever put upon His green earth?" Nod twice to confirm to yourself that you are. Then go to the Olive Garden, because you'll almost certainly love it, and after the realization that you are the sorriest son of a bitch God ever put upon His green earth you could probably use some cheering up.

 If you are a giant nerd, it's fun to imagine what it would be like if the Zuni cookbook were written in this voice: 

First get a chicken. NOT THAT ONE! Not a Perdue Oven Stuffer Roaster shot full of more hormones than RuPaul! Lisa Bonet would not fuck that chicken on her PPV comeback special! Get a free range, air chilled bird, 3-4 lbs. Jesus. 

Bow down before the one you serve

As it happens, the one you serve is a ground beef Mexican wrestler in a bacon diaper. 

And the Starbucks just takes it to a whole other level. Via.  

Puffin' and Huffin'

I sometimes have a hard time imagining that the Huffpo is really part of the solution, but:

1) A rad slideshow of Julia Child for her b-day, and vetted by Dr. Yinz and guaranteed to be free of the malevolent harpies who seek to feed off of her legacy. It is nice to be reminded of the real deal.

 On the other hand, some opposite of real dealness, a survey from Zagat that puts Five Guys ahead of In-N-Out Burger. Evidently, the survey is not weighted by number of outlets, which is a relief, b/c anyone who has ever eaten at a Five Guys knows that Five Guys makes you feel exactly like James Stuart in Vertigo, frantically attempting to transform the Five Guys' Judy Barton into In-N-Out's Madeline Elster.

Lit Prof stars in "Institutionalized" reboot.

Via FOC Lime Spider, news of a fellow fesser getting into trouble at Starbucks:

Starbucks' strange vernacular finally drove a customer nuts. Lynne Rosenthal, a college English professor from Manhattan, said three cops forcibly ejected her from an Upper West Side Starbucks yesterday morning after she got into a dispute with a counterperson -- make that barista -- for refusing to place her order by the coffee chain's rules. Rosenthal, who is in her early 60s, asked for a toasted multigrain bagel -- and became enraged when the barista at the franchise, on Columbus Avenue at 86th Street, followed up by inquiring, "Do you want butter or cheese?" "I just wanted a multigrain bagel," Rosenthal told The Post. "I refused to say 'without butter or cheese.' When you go to Burger King, you don't have to list the six things you don't want. "Linguistically, it's stupid, and I'm a stickler for correct English." Rosenthal admitted she had run into trouble before for refusing to employ the chain's stilted lexicon -- balking at ordering a "tall" or a "venti" from the menu or specifying "no whip."Instead, she insists on making a pest of herself by ordering a "small" or "large" cup of joe. Yesterday's breakfast-bagel tussle heated up when the barista told the prickly prof that he wouldn't serve her unless she specified whether she wanted a schmear of butter or cheese -- or neither. "I yelled, 'I want my multigrain bagel!' " Rosenthal said. "The barista said, 'You're not going to get anything unless you say butter or cheese!' " But Rosenthal, on principle, refused to back down. "I didn't even want the bagel anymore," she said.

I'll be a guild traitor here and throw my sympathies behind the baristae. The Cod has similarly refused to master the Venti, etc patois, but if you say "small, med, large," in my experience, they will translate that when they call out the order. If one is ordering a single bagel from a coffee place, butter or cream cheese is a reasonable question to ask, and a different matter entirely from the silly venti... business. It's like ordering a martini and refusing to answer questions regarding your olive/twist of lemon preference. 

FWIW, the Post has "'It was very humiliating to be thrown out, and all I did was ask for a bagel,' recalled Rosenthal, who said she holds a Ph.D. from Columbia." She does, in fact, titled "THE CHILD INFORMED: ATTITUDES TOWARDS THE SOCIALIZATION OF THE CHILD IN NINETEENTH CENTURY ENGLISH CHILDREN'S LITERATURE" 

She does not, however, show up in the MLA directory, and research idle googling does not indicate just where it is that she professes. More important, the "all I wanted was a ____" leading to repercussions, a) it's like Suicidal Tendencies came back in the person of a sixtysomething academic. And if you were wondering, it's further proof that August is not a concept Guiteau Monday can even comprehend.