A Slight Delay

This recipe was (nearly) written in blood, and underscores why it’s a good idea to keep bandaids and a good antiseptic in reach of your kitchen. But I digress. The following is a reasonably tasty potato soup. You’ll need:

5 lb. of Yukon Gold potatoes, peeled
1 32-ounce container of store-bought chicken broth*
1 package of bacon**
1 smallish bunch of green onions
3/4 cup or thereabouts of light cream or half and half
About 1/4 cup sour cream
Half a package (about one cup) of shredded sharp cheddar cheese***
Dash of black, white, and red pepper
Kosher salt, if needed

The procedure: (more…)

 So we’ve just returned from Puerto Rico. Armed with the knowledge of a week in the Commonwealth, I feel fully qualified to offer this travel guide for your time on the Island of Enchantment.  

We’d been warned 1,277 times (conservative estimate) about not drinking the water and told to avoid the streets of San Juan after dark, but this advice, however well-intentioned, only goes so far. The following article picks up where the usual advice leaves off, letting you know where you can find those little touches of home throughout the island, so that you can alleviate homesickness, and so you need not be exposed to the local arts and culture, much less the locals themselves. Fear not; you’ll find reminders of home nearly everywhere you go.

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The following is an honest-to-god email received from Amazon some days back. It’s too good not to share. I haven’t changed a word, since you don’t mess with perfection. Apologies for the sloppy formatting…

Dear Amazon.com Customer,We’ve noticed that customers who have purchased or rated Video Anthology, Vol. 1: 2000s have also purchased Eyes Wide Open on DVD. For this reason, you might like to know that Eyes Wide Open will be released on May 19, 2009.  You can pre-order yours by following the link below. Eyes Wide Open King Crimson List Price: $24.97 Price: $22.49 You Save: $2.48 (10%) Release Date: May 19, 2009 Eyes Wide Open is a fantastic eye cream that lifts and highlights the temples and is uniquely applied OVER your mineral makeup to give you that just jumped-out-of-the-shower fresh look! For breathtaking results, use in combination with ColoreScience’s Eye Serum, and ColoreScience’s My Favorite Eyes cream. The trio of eye products are available individually, or as a group (ColoreScience’s Eye Candy Kit). When used together, they rejuvinates the eye area and take the years off just by hydrating, highlighting and concealing problem eye areas.

Something that may be of use to you if the icebox at your job looks anything like it does at mine:

Please collect all of your items from the refrigerator by end of business Friday. It will be cleaned on Saturday morning.

If you want to keep your items in the freezer, please label them with your name and the date you put them in. If the items are not labeled, they will be thrown out. Any items that are questionable should also be removed and thrown out, including each of the following:

· The milk that’s turned to cheese
· The weapons-grade lasagna
· The maggot-infested tuna
· The hairy turkey
· The 22 containers of orange juice that contain half a sip, each
· Any Tupperware that’s suited only to a laboratory experiment
· The virulent fungus of unknown origin that even now threatens to choke the life out of us all

Thank you, in advance, for your cooperation.

Paging Mr. Tolkien: I have to admit that before the total collapse of Iceland’s banking industry–and with it, very nearly, the collapse of the country itself–I thought that their principle export was Björk. How wrong I turned out to be.

There’s another story that’s been playing itself out that’s only recently come to light in the media, involving Alcoa, some nutty environmentalists, and some stubborn holdouts from Lord of the Rings. File this one in “Stranger than Fiction.”

We take it more or less for granted that if you’re going to undertake a major construction project, certain preparations have to be made. Plans are drawn up, workers hired, materials gathered. Nobody bats an eyelash when the time comes for an environmental impact study, for instance. All well and good. Standard operating procedure. Nothing wrong with making sure that certain endangered species and mythical–wait a minute, what the hell? (more…)

A good book is a wonderful thing; you can lose yourself in someone else’s imagination, learn of things you would never otherwise have known, or just take pleasure in well-wrought sentences and memorable turns of phrase. English as She is Spoke isn’t one of those books. It’s an awful book, but a book whose sheer awfulness makes it nearly essential reading. From the first pages, it’s as though someone put Plan 9 From Outer Space between covers.

Carolino’s magnum opus is supposed to aid Portuguese speakers to learn English. A noble aim, to be sure, but… well, let’s just say it loses something in translation. If you’ve ever seen Monty Python’s “Hungarian Phrasebook” sketch, you’ve got a pretty good idea what comes next. We can only thank our lucky stars that there were no major diplomatic incidents between the United States and Portugal in the 1880’s, precipitated by senhor Carolino’s little masterpiece. (more…)

I hate commercials where all they give you is a scene with a bunch of happy people and a voiceover with the brand of the medication. “Ask your doctor about Sinthrax… a medicine so powerful we can’t even tell you what it does.” I saw a Claritin commercial once with all these people dancing. The guy said, “Ask your doctor about Claritin.” I’m thinking, “That looks like fun.” Went out and scored some Claritin, and I didn’t dance. Not even once. Just got fatigue and dry mouth. I felt cheated.

Then there was the commercial with those women at the South Pole. One woman tells us her doctor prescribed Celebrex for her arthritis. Oh really? What’d she do to get it filled? Is there a CVS at the South Pole? Is it staffed by penguins? Does Santa make a pit stop there on Christmas Eve for Slim Jims, Diet Coke, and Depends? I’m sure there’s a uniformed polar bear at the entrance to stop him when the sensor thingy in the box of Depends sets off the alarm…

Lately I find myself watching a lot of nature shows. I’m not sure why. I like nature in many of its forms (except the many-legged forms that crawl up the back of your neck, or the particularly slimy forms), but I like it in its… well, natural setting. Not mediated by a cathode ray tube. But nature shows are a bit of a guilty pleasure, especially since the same guy has been doing all the narration for every nature show that’s been done since 1968.

And with 238 channels, there’s a lot more nature shows than there used to be. I’d love to see the NRA do one. Can’t you just picture the voiceover? “Here we see a majestic flock of cranes. Every year, the crane, following a deep biological imperative, comes in large numbers to this marsh to nest and to mate. And if you think they look noble now, you ought to see them with a belly full of twelve-gauge shot.”

Even Lifetime could get in on the act. They could send a pack of women into the middle of Macy’s, accompanied by a camera crew. And hounds. They’d have to have a narrator, too. “Sparky has just flushed two microsuede blazers out of a clearance rack.”

Then again, maybe the reason we have so much nature on television is because there seems to be so little of it everywhere else. Our towns and cities, to say nothing of the exurbs, have very little left by way of open space or nature. That makes it difficult to “get back to nature,” unless your idea of nature is watching the migration of the taxis, or the stockbrokers swimming upstreet to spawn. (more…)

You wouldn’t think that the passing of a tabloid would have inspired so much press. But when the Weekly World News folded (pardon the pun) in 2007, sources as diverse as Wired and Reuters took notice.

For 28 years, the WWN was something of a high-camp version of the New York Daily News, or the National Enquirer crossed with The Onion.  The closing of the world’s most bizzare fishwrap left a void on newsstands, and in readers’ hearts, ever since. (more…)

Every language has its expressions that don’t quite translate into English. Saudade, weltschmerz, and other lacunae bedevil translators since there’s no easy one-to-one translation for them. So you can imagine the problem posed by Yiddish.

Yiddish is the Marx Brothers to Hebrew’s Maimonedes, Lenny Bruce to its Ben Gurion, klezmer to its kaddash. It doesn’t pretend, or aspire, to be scholarly. Its cadences and meaning carry a different set of cultural baggage than Hebrew.*

Assimilation goes both ways; the speakers and their language, both of which came here in steerage ages ago, didn’t only assimilate into America; as so often happens, America assimilated some of the habits and language of the new arrivals, too. And what an assimilation. (more…)