i'm not actually a worthwhile person, i just play one on the internet.
stuff that's maybe better than the other stuff, autobio, words about words, music stuff, film ask me shit, tell me shit, whateverdo you ever have that horrifying dilemma where you have exactly one bite left of all the things on your plate and you must decide: what food do i eat last? what bite will be the most delicious?
it’s… it’s not just me!
it’s like the bachelor/ette; s’cool meeting all these different flavors—but which one do you want to hang around after you’re done the meal?
illuminated by my friend’s as-ever awe-inspiring ability to ferret out the tiniest nuances of flavor1, confirmed by picking at a slice in between-the-fingertips chunks and tongue-squinting at each, it has been deduced that the problem lies somewhere with the four cheese base. there’s this weird slight bitterness that creeps in a few bites in to a slice, my friend specifically thinks it’s the olives & romano in the four cheese. however; there’s a lot good about it too—the olives and the goat cheese indeed work very well, texturally especially, and the tabasco is probably actually the highlight of the whole thing—and i think with some work a great pizza can be made from this.
1. for example, a little while ago he picked up a flicker of toothpaste on the tail of a swig of grape soda.
who is this appealing to? who would want this? isn’t this kind of exactly why we don’t eat dogs?
today, for the first time—which is kinda weird! i mean i’ve been working there for nearly four weeks now, i’ve been meaning to since i started, soo—i designed and made myself a pizza. it was as follows:
normal dough / normal sauce (a little light on it, though) / four cheese blend base / goat cheese / kalamata olives / chicken / tabasco after the oven
i mashed the olives and goat cheese (generous portions of both) together (like, put them both in one hand and made a fist and squirm-clenched it a bit) for maximal interminglings.
it was good, but not as good as i expected, i’m not sure quite what’s off about it…there’s still like half of it left though, i’ll go back to it later and see if i can ferret it out.
just because
WHY DO THESE EXIST
ketchup chips are one of those things that taste nothing like the thing they’re ostensibly flavoured as. i don’t know what they do taste like, actually (my friend proposes “some kind of tomato salt”), but they’re not all that bad really. my mom always hated them because she thinks they taste like chemicals, which is also probably not too far off. i don’t mind them, i’ll eat them if they’re around, and i think there’s a few off-brands that almost scrape decent, but i don’t think i’d ever seek them out. however, the other day i had some of this new kind called spicy ketchup, and those were actually pretty good.
i should preface by saying that i don’t know samosas very well (haven’t had many, don’t know much about their origins/common methods of production/etc) but unicon(university convenience, the convenience store like 2min away from here)’s chicken samosas are seriously the best thing and i could probably eat them forever and never tire of them. where to start; the crust/shell is amazing, super crispy right on the verge of crunchy—especially good in the unstuffed edges around the corners—they’re really well stuffed, w/chicken, potatos, peas, some other stuff that i can’t quite distinguish, and all basking in this curry tone, that crawls up to the back of yr throat and nests there, like this big cozy nest of spicewarmth…oh my god it’s amazing. i’ve been eating them pretty regularly this last week or so and even though i should probably be watching my spending a little more until i start pulling in paychecks i really don’t regret it. i put them in the microwave for about 50sec—still gotta work that out because even at a minute it’s never quite right, the corners will be so hot you can barely hold it but the middle will be barely lukewarm. this is a very minor quibble, though.
my friend told me today about this guy who used to work at the subway at his university, who apparently both customers and management didn’t like, and eventually got fired, and how when he put the banana peppers on a sub, rather than grabbing a handful and scattering them as per usual, he would take the pepper rings out one by one and lay them in a line straight down the sub, and how he laid the cheese just a little crooked so that at a certain point in your sub you’d get a bite that was extra cheesy. my friend said his subs were amazing. my favorite specific fast food preparation experience was one time at the quinpool mcdonald’s—well, you know those ads where the people in business suits are eating big macs and talking about how they’re so messy but they love ‘em anyway? i had always thought—argued, even—that this was the case; that the sloppiness was essential to the big mac’s general character. but this one time, this guy named brandon—he was some kind of senior employee, i can’t remember what it was called exactly but he had a tag designating him as like an expert or something—i watched him make it, this perfectly neat big mac, and it was great! i have only encountered the neat big mac this once, but it was enough to make me second-guess my principles on the matter.
this, this kind of stuff, is a thing i feel strongly about! i mean, okay, the ingredients are mass-produced (and probably not in a careful or healthy way), and i’m sure that the corporate guys have worked out a platonic ideal of each menu item and that the staff are taught to conform to this as closely as possible, but in practice, from franchise to franchise and person to person, that simply doesn’t pan out. there are good burgers, there are just-okay burgers, there are occasionally terrible burgers, there are, rarely, amazing burgers; and technically they are all the same burger! have i ever had a perfect-as-per-policy burger? who knows! point is, there is some art to this shit, and i mean obviously fast food is kind of a shitty job and nobody owes it to me to make my order with model airplane t.l.c. and i don’t expect them to and i don’t hold it against them when they don’t, but on those blue moons when someone does, i love and appreciate it a ton, and yes obviously this is hugely trivial and obviously fast food is mass-produced junk but there is nuance even in mass-produced junk if you care about it and pay attention! i’m sorry, i know, this is dumb but i find this stuff really interesting, i talked about it once before (focusing on the differences btwn two local mcdonald’s locations), these little contingencies that humanize the “corporate grid” or whatever you want to call it. and also i just really like burgers and—okay, digression: in grade 6, i was in halifax for a few months because mom was taking a course there, and i went to this private school that she had heard good things about, and i found a kind of a…i dunno, this haughty air about a lot of people there (though there were also some really nice people), and one thing i specifically remember was (for context: this would’ve been a bit after super size me came out) a lot of kids making a show of how gross they found mcdonald’s (it always seemed to be just mcdonald’s). we ate out a lot when i was a kid because [long story], but fast food was always an occasional thing rather than a regular, and mom always made the point that if you otherwise kept a balance it was fine to go for junk occasionally, just to be aware and careful about what you eat, etc; all good lessons even though i don’t really heed them nowadays. and i remember thinking it was odd that these literal children had such strong opinions on this matter, and thinking that they seemed to be conflating a bunch of issues with fast food in general into mcdonald’s because it was, at the moment, a big popular target—which is to say that it seemed like they were parroting their parents’ (possibly also lazy, trendy) opinionatings, and that it was essentially about showing off how much more conscious/refined/whatthefuckever they were. and i really didn’t like that. again, i stress—i’m not trying to say by any stretch that fast food is not super unhealthy and that they’re not super shady about it, nothing like that, but i mean, shit, people can decide for themselves how they want to navigate those issues and fuck off w/yr smug judgements about it
but uhhh anyway, that was a bigger digression than i thought it was going to be, i also probably politicized this more than i meant to. i’m going to try to at least sketch out what this is all about to me. i’m grasping with vaguely/pseudo- theoretical terms, but i’m sure this would fall apart under any actual theoretical analysis; it’s ultimately totally personal. (i don’t know like, anything about marxism or anything like that. seriously, i’m probably just straight-up wrong, this probably doesn’t make any sense, if it seems like i’m trying to make a political/theoretical Statement it’s only because i’m not very smart and bad at expressing myself.) it’s a beaten-to-death satirical trope, the consumerist zombie; individual identity corroded by demographics, brand preferences standing in place of personality, etc. certainly there’s something to it—it may not do any injustice to corporate intentions—but i find it unfairly pessimistic toward us. i’ve always found that inevitably human idiosyncrasy will eat away at the grout of whatever consumerist grid is imposed on us, that we can carve out personal spaces within it. the (unfortunately dubbed) mcgangbang: it’s two official menu items, put together to make an unofficial new item. someone somewhere got the crazy idea to put a mcchicken in the middle of a double cheeseburger, and somehow it worked phenomenally, and the idea blew up! i don’t know, it just seems really great to me, that kind of creative navigation of the consumerscape. (i feel like there’s maybe an analogy to be drawn with urban exploration.) or, another aspect; i associate certain products with certain times, places and people in my life—sentimental connections. for example, i distinctly and fondly associate the beer battered chicken patties & potato wedges w/cheese sauce hungryman with skipping classes hanging out at my friend’s house in the last year of high school (this association is tinged with sadness, mind, because back then it came with a really great spicy sauce on the side that they stopped including like a year after that). my friend has a great thing about the memories each brand of root beer evokes for him. and i guess you could read this as consumerism branding even our inner lives or something, but it feels more to me like…like how sometimes a song feels like it’s written just for you, so can a convenience store snack—like that. i think there’s beauty to be made of this stuff, you know? (i’m not stoned, i swear.)
types of food i generally don’t fuck w/outside of specialty places:
most missed limited time only fast food menu items:
most missed discontinued/limited time only sodas:
least missed discontinued/limited time only soda:
chocolate bar variants that are better than the original:
worst individual burgers i’ve ever eaten:
mcdonald’s fries are wayyyy overrated. always oversalted, too crispy or too soft, minimal substance, almost always too hot. wendy’s every day.
some good points. too hot and too soft are definitely common-ish problems. minimal substance is really mcd’s in general: i find a solitary burger from most other places more filling than one of their full combos. as for the other two, i generally lean pretty salty anyway and i’ve thus far never met a fry i’d call too crispy (my favorites of any given mcd’s batch are those slivers of pure crisp clustered ‘round the bottom). another thing i just remembered: they take vinegar the best—maybe due to aforementioned unique flavor additive??
1. wtf is combo pizza? 2. what’s the #1 fries? (agreed that wendy’s and a&w are both good)
1. combination is pep&cheese with mushrooms and green peppers. maybe it’s a regional thing? what do you call it where you are?
2. mcdonald’s, always&4ever. the thin and crispy is what does it. (my mother mentioned the other day that she read once that they put in something, a beef flavor agent or some shit like that, which gives them that distinct (wonderful) smell—possibly also a factor.) they embody my general principle re:french fries; that they should be abstracted enough from their point of origin that they register directly as fries, never as potatoes.
a word i really like: languid. you know those summer days where it’s so mercilessly hot that everything drags and gets hazy and you just wanna sleep? that’s what languid always sounds like to me. when i say it slowly it feels like humidity as it rolls out of my mouth.
my uncle has been saying this for a while, and upon trying, i can confirm: a&w has stepped their fry game up majorly—damn near a tie with wendy’s for that number 2 spot. not very salty, which would usually be a dealbreaker, but like—think the way thick fries are good when they’re good, except they’re not actually that thick.
an argument i had last week: would combination fit within (a fairly strict model of) traditionalism/purism/basics w/r/t pizza in north america? i said yes, everybody else seemed to think that category only has room for pep&cheese. (i’m pretty sure it was agreed that any pizza with a meat other than pepperoni automatically falls outside.) (i used to really like spicy chicken but now i find it ehhh. i think i could live happily off only combo for the rest of my days.) (edit: i say north american but canada is really my only frame of reference, and even within that a limited range; from stuff i’ve read (i.e. arguments over which city has better pizza) it seems that america might just have a richer pizza culture than we do. my criterion was that if a pizza shop were to only have 2 kinds of pizza, i would expect them in most cases to be pep&cheese and combo. for example, when they put out 2-3 pizzas for fresh slices, usually it’s those 2.)
one night last week i wondered what it would be like to see a bird eating a flower and then the next day i saw it. it was awesomely coincidental enough to cover that the actual image didn’t really leave any impression.
a phrase that i heard somewhere (can’t remember where) recently that has stuck in my head: “cowboy action shooting”.
if there were a thing where people tried to spin porn title puns off the odyssey (rich latt trans) then i would contribute young dawn gets rosey fingered.
i was talking to my mother about burgers the other night, and she told this story: she used to have a friend who lived right next to a local burger joint—one of the old independent places, before the chains took over—and when they had money to spare, they used to get burgers then go back to said friend’s house to eat them. apparently this friend had super religious parents; the kind who, not unlike my grandmother, fill the house with religious pictures,statues,etc. in one room, they had a bunch of those big statues, the 1:3-ish scale ones like they have in churches, and this is where the kids would eat. “you’d be sitting there eating your burgers,” mom said, “watched over by the saints.”
tried for the first time yesterday—really good. i don’t know whether it’s a canadian thing or what, but here we have crispy onions as opposed to the sliced red onion shown in any of the pictures i’ve found online (much better, imo). the really cool part, though, is the sauce: it’s a light orangey color, looks like either big mac sauce or spicy mayo, but when you taste it it’s a straight up dark red bbq flavor!
when people call burgers sandwiches. like when you order a big mac and they say, “the combo or just the sandwich?” yes, i know it is a sandwich, but you do not call houses simply “buildings”, you do not call cars and trucks alike simply “vehicles”, you do not call a pickle a cucumber, etc.
this actually makes me angry
at nslc stores, all the bottles have little descriptive tags under them on the shelf. one white wine claims to finish on a note of wet slate. am i missing something here? how would one know what wet slate tastes like, short of, say, licking tombstones? why would this be at all desirable?
ikea factory mix-up shipped spiegelman’s Maus w/ my chair instead of assembly guide & buddy, its been hell dressing the animals with nothing to sit...
Today in Myopic White Critics Try To Write About Rap, Richard Roeper writes an incredibly awful, specious and intellectually lazy bit of criticism...
i want to be written and directed by quentin tarantino
this sounds like an absolute nightmare. nooooooooo thanks.
