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we duel MacArthur and Patton

Patton selected his .357 Magnum and a baseball bat. MacArthur chose an original Model of 1911 and a bolo knife. I met their ghosts at dawn at a nondescript grassy plain somewhere alongside the Hudson River. After a bit of friendly but restrained banter, I outlined the rules of the day.

And …, wait, hold on. [shuffles papers] [unintelligible muttering] I know, hold on. [throws papers] Yeah, okay, that didn’t happen.

But what did happen is a long while back I visited MacArthur’s ivory skeleton box.

So for whatever reason I decided to rewatch Patton and then watch MacArthur the whole way through for the first time. Then I decided to compare the two, because why not. For those who have seen both movies you know how this is going to end. But this is all for fun, so why not.

All the pieces were in place from the start. Patton pulls a decent director in Franklin J. Schaffner who made some good films beyond just this one and also served in combat in said war. They got some c-grade hack named Francis Ford Coppola to write the script.

MacArthur gets stuck with some guy named Joseph Sargent and a writer known as Hal Barwood who you all will surely remember as the guiding hand behind the Oscar nominated video game Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. Oichalcum plot twists my ass, Hal, what the hell were you thinking? Indy wasn’t like that. [throws chair]

MacArthur also pulled a budget 1/4 less even though it was made seven years later. For whatever reason MacArthur’s creators then decide to compound the impending misery by covering a span of ten years instead of Patton’s three, all with a running time 40 minutes shorter than Patton.

In terms of MacArthur, I think a bunch of producers got together and decided to shoehorn a Patton clone, they somehow got Gregory Peck involved, and figured even though they were setting it up for failure that it’d somehow all work it and still make a bunch of gold. It didn’t.

MacArthur made a fraction of Patton’s money, lives with justifiably poor reviews, and just leaves you with sense of apathy. When you’re done with Patton you get the idea you’ve just watched something powerful. When MacArthur’s over you shut off your television and go get another beer.

Peck, who remains one of my favorite actors, touched on this:

I admit that I was not terribly happy with the script they gave me, or with the production they gave me which was mostly on the back lot of Universal. I thought they shortchanged the production.

No kidding. Yet for some reason Peck would still go on to say this was one of his most favorite roles. Maybe because MacArthur was a victorious general, famous and mostly beloved, and Peck got to do a whole bunch of long monologues.

A good example of the disparity is that Jerry Goldsmith did the music for both flicks. You can hear Patton right now, picture the light notes of the trumpet across the North African desert. You know that music. It will live forever. Now you go ahead and try and remember one note from MacArthur. You can’t because Jerry phoned it in. So did everybody else.

MacArthur is just going through the motions, they portray MacArthur’s evacuation of the Philippines in the first ten minutes of the film. It’s one of his most controversial and gut wrenching decisions and we see it immediately with no buildup, no time to establish the film. It’s jarring how quickly this scene shows up.

Conversely the movie is nearly an hour long by the time we see Patton confront his inability to keep his mouth shut and the ever eternal slapping of one of his men. These scenes have power because the movie has taken its time to build a character and story.

The crazy thing about Patton is that so many of the memorable parts we take as genius, thus making MacArthur look silly, almost never happened at all. Nobody wanted to go with the opening flag speech scene. George C. Scott wanted nothing to do with it. So Schaffner just lied to him and said it’d be filmed at the end.

Says Coppola on the commentary tack, “All you young people, bear note, that the things that you are fired for are, are often the things in later life that you are celebrated and given lifetime achievements for.

Patton also has to deal with the enduring reality that it was made without Patton’s input, family, diary, notes, and thus relied heavily on Omar Bradley. I can say what I want about MacArthur’s poor film execution, but the content at face value is likely almost entirely accurate. The same cannot be said of Patton.

If you ask me, the most controversial aspect of the film is not Patton himself but Bradley’s presence. It’s open to interpretation just how much of Scott’s portrayal of Patton’s personality is a mythical creation inside Bradley’s mind. It makes for wonderful movie, but maybe perhaps not the look Patton himself would appreciate. From my end, I think this is how Patton was, some of the time, as in an act. A deliberate act of leadership. The rest of the time he was likely the thoughtful military professional his writings depict, but that which does not make for entertaining movie.

In the end, the best part of these two movies though is that I think that bizarrely, both Patton and MacArthur got the movies they would have personally wanted. Patton got to be played by George C. Scott and seen forever as an eternal warrior monk badass. And MacArthur gets Gregory Peck, who gives a bunch of cool long speeches for two hours. In this sense, they both win the duel. As always, in their own way.

Duel.jpg

Gentlemen! I will now count off the paces. No General MacArthur, I do not know the current exact time of day. General Patton, please wait till my countdown is completed before you wield your bat. General Patton!

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enjoy the zoo while you can

A child was endangered, a gorilla got shot, people are now angry about both, and in the end I think the only thing that’ll matter in the long run is this is just yet more justification of why we’re all bound for the crypt as a human race.

I’ve got no idea what my point of this post is, I’m just a bit frazzled, do or do not bear with me.  It’s your call.  Your were warned.

There is a ever growing path in society to just go around and dispense with things that offend people:

– You’re not supposed to play tackle football anymore because it’s dangerous.  Do folks conceptually understand just how perilous driving a car is?

– You’re not allowed to criticize Erdogan anywhere on the planet anymore without getting sued or charged, even though he’s essentially a dictator.  Even Frau Merkel is in on this plan.  Did she happen to forget what opinion the Stasi took on such matters when she was a kid?

– Do you have a varying political opinion from your friend, co-worker, or acquaintance on the street?  Shame on you.  You should be silenced.  We must all agree on everything.  Or else.

– If you happen to every once and a while prefer unhealthy food, then you’re just not understanding that one day a giant 300 pound strongman will be appointed by the courts to stand over your shoulder and hit you with a stick for not eating a pre-approved, organic, sustainable food option.

– If you love the zoo?  That just means you hate animals and want them to suffer.

– Down with squirrels.  Because why not?

When I was a young lad my Parents lost me in the middle of Disney World.  I seriously remember looking around and having lost track of where I was with none of my family in sight.  I must have been about eight or something.  Not knowing what else to do, I just sat down on a bench figuring they’d be back at some point.  And sure enough, probably about fifteen minutes later my Dad strolls up and all was well.

But think of all the wonderful things that could have happened to me:

– Fallen into the It’s a Small World river and drowned.

– Run amok pawning candy off total strangers.

– Got myself kidnapped by the Goofy mascot who would then have taken me to his gingerbread house.

– Proposed marriage to the princess and demanded to remain in this World forever.

But now because a child falls into a gorilla enclosure, the universe has apparently collapsed.  Folks with either too much time on their hands or no appreciation of the planet’s (or their own) actual problems feel the need to detonate the lives of the kid’s parents.

It’s literally international news.  These parents are going to have their lives and reputations detonated by the trolls.  In our brave new world, social media no longer allows you to make mistakes.  You have to suffer for being a flawed human being.  Which means you have to suffer for drawing air from the atmosphere.  Because we’re all flawed human beings.  What a wonderful moment for humanity.

I suggest, that if folks have an issue with these parents making a mistake, they need to put down the fucking stone.  But I don’t really get a vote.

Yet that’s not enough for some people, for since a gorilla was killed, we now need to bang on the zoo drum.  For you see, the zoo is evil.  It captures wild animals and put them in a cage for our own amusement.  It’s positively barbaric.  If that gorilla had not been in the zoo, it’d still be alive.

Except that it wouldn’t.  Because it would have died.  Because with some rare exceptions, almost every animal lives longer in a zoo then it does in the wild.  Do you know why?  Because wild nature is a freaking thresher.  It consumes life with glorious abandon.

Depending upon your viewpoint, it could also be said humanity consumes life with glorious abandon.  You know what won’t help with that?  Closing zoos.  Think we already care almost nothing for the planet?  Wait till four year old Timmy can only read about tigers in a book.  Because the tiger zoo was banned in 2036.

And only Timmy’s rich classmates’ parents (who were the elitists that demanded all the zoos close) have the cash to take their kids on a tiger safari, in which they’ll have to be encased in bubble wrap surrounded by armed guards.  Because life is dangerous you know.  In 2037, kids won’t be allowed to do anything.  I fear for this future.

Shit happens.  Parents make mistakes.  Zoos make mistakes.  Kids make mistakes.  I make mistakes.  You make mistakes.  Your very act of driving a car is more dangerous than anything you do.  Even if you frequently eat or drink poorly to the point you endanger your own life.  You should be allowed to run your mouth to folks about anything without fearing the lawyers or secret police show up at your door.  But you should also be wary of breaking out the social media bat to club somebody you’ve never met.  And the zoo is still a great place.  Because it teaches kids about nature in a manner they’d never experience otherwise.  And in the end this benefits nature.

And in the end I’m going to lose this fight though.  I’m going to get overruled by governments, outrage trolls, do-gooders, and all the others to whom the previous paragraph is viciously offensive.  So enjoy the zoo while you can, I guess.

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researchers to teach robots how to be just as miserable as the rest of us

If machines shall be our masters, or if we go the dark route and start becoming part robot ourselves, does the synthetic side need to feel pain?  Should your new robot arm send pain signals to your brain when you burn it on the stove or slice through it cutting vegetables?  Does robot butler need to suffer when he falls down the stairs carrying laundry?

If a UN Soldier tunes up a robot with some kind of directed energy weapon during the forthcoming War of the Fates should that robot be left in the dirt screaming in agony just like we would?  And why limit it simply to the physical variety of pain?  Could we also not build robots that can suffer emotionally too?  Is this even possible?

I have no idea, but we might get there.  This new BBC article is, Researchers teach robots to ‘feel pain’

Some articles make me smile upfront because for whatever reason I find the concept very amusing.  But when you read the article they make it pretty clear that they’re not talking pain as we understand it, but rather a self preservation variety.  The robot will sense “pain” as a means to prevent damage to itself while conducting tasks.

For instance if in 30 years a robot assassin is beating you to death with his titanium club, and you fight back with a discarded tree log, the robot will favor his right arm if you smash it rather than just continuing to use it until it breaks.

Or in a less lunatic scenario if a car making robot starts to feel “pain” because he accidently got his arm caught in the thresher he’ll withdraw his arm instead of just carrying on.  Read reflexes, just like us.

But just to truly even the playing field and as a preparatory action to seed the battlefield before the war begins, we should also make sure to build robots with the emotional side of pain too.  That way they can be just as miserable as the rest of us.

Think of how much harder it’ll be for the robots to enslave humanity when:

– Robot gets sad because he dropped his iced cream bar, which he coveted greatly

– Machine endures crippling depression caused by 17 straight days of rain and/or mostly cloudy weather

– Robot feels some sense of remorse as it leads human captive(s) to the conveyer belt

– They have to constantly endure annoyance as robot they don’t like sends never-ending data stream of 0s and 1s into their brain, while they’re eating lunch, even when robot’s back is turned indicating a total lack of desire to communicate with other robot

– Machine soldier becomes totally ineffective on the battlefield by constantly responding to directives to slay all organics with, “Why?”

– Robot boss responds to impetuous robot employees with raw anger, unnecessary rage, and unjust behavior resulting in wage discrimination, poor working conditions, and a completely unfulfilling robot employment experience

– Machines express unbridled fury or jaded apathy at rampant incompetence and greed of failed robot leader after failed robot leader

– A slew of robots determine the answer to their problems is the unrestrained use of an ever increasing quantity of machine brain expanding drugs

– Machine seeks emotional and physical connection with another robot, only to see it end in the same vicious soul searing divorce failure that 50% of the rest of us endure

– Robots invent Robot God, robots kill Robot God, robots invent Robot God, and so on

Or, the robots would just program out pain, emotional or physical, and then finish us off.  Eh, maybe we, maybe we need a kill switch around that code?  Yeah, definitely.

terminator

just you wait, you have no idea how much of a hell hole it is out there, bro

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all hail the cage fighter of the sky

Usually my morning commute is a blindingly dull sea of brake lights accompanying the desire to acquire a new occupation, a rocket sky car, or a method by which I might transfer my consciousness to my desk while my corporeal form remains at home with the dogs (telework).

Spring, in all it’s lovely glory, is also an awful time for the radio.  Sports is hard to listen to when it’s not football, my hockey team is out, and I still can’t magically wrap my brain around following 162 baseball games a year.  All of the news, especially NPR, is a sea of insanity as if the universe revolves only around Clinton or Trump even though I’m quite sure my local mayor has more of an impact on my life than they do / ever will.

I’ve been told by folks who have equally insane commutes that the secret is to get into podcasts.  That these are somehow the superior cure for the brake lights.  I’ll admit, I haven’t tried this yet, but might.  But honestly I’m not so sure about this whole podcast or blog thing.  I get the impression that people who write blogs or do podcasts are weird idiots.

Anyways, so there I am this morning when all of a sudden I get a ringside seat as a mockingbird dashes out of the trees to cage fight a crow I can only assume dared get too close to the nest.  This went on for at least a minute.  As the crow continued to flee, the mockingbird pursued for at least a good hundred yards across the sky.  Little dude wouldn’t let up even though the crow was three times his size.

I could write twelve pages on the pros and cons of the film Ender’s Game, but this reminded me of a line in that movie:

“Knocking him down was the first fight.   I wanted to win all the next ones too.”

The mockingbird won all the other fights this morning too.

When I was an enlightened young lad I used to bird watch, for whatever reason.  Now I’m just a moron who reads indoors, watches movies, or plays video games.  But if you have watched birds for any length of time, you’ll know this is typical mockingbird behavior.  They’re aggressive, they don’t take it from anybody.  Luckily for us, they have not acquired the ability to wield firearms.

Cheers my friend, you made my morning.

mockingbird

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you have to live with it

Ponder if you will, this simple scenario.  It takes one hour for a normal cardiologist test to check your heart for the detrimental presence of alien spores.  But your particular cardiologist (we’ll call him Gil) says it’ll take him at least three hours to test you.  And his error rate for the test is north of 90%.  So you’ll just have to take his word for it.  You of course reject all of this, and decide to go to another cardiologist.  Until Gil starts cracking up and delightfully informs you that he’s the only cardiology practice on the planet.  You have no choice.  You have to live with it.

We’re regular TSA haters on this degenerate blog.  Partially because I fly a minimum of a dozen times a year, usually nearly double that.  In that time I’ve seen some real, real anger inducing stuff.  I’ve seen the TSA aggressively frisk a well dressed grandmother, scream at a small child, allow a person without an actual passport past the international checkpoint, and on and on and on.

For what?  Kindly take a moment to gaze upon the latest saga in a 15 year journey of incompetence.   If you’re flying out of Chicago, the TSA needs you there three hours early to do something that traditionally only took one hour.

There are the usual troubling nuggets in this article:

– Apparently after all this time they still can’t process the concept of peak season travel numbers.  This is their business.  This is what they do for a living.  But nobody seemed to bother to write on a napkin the number of booked tickets verses the number of screen personnel and do some simple math.  After all, it’s just your life, so whatever.

– The TSA continues to pound TSA Pre as the solution to all of your problems.  As before though, you’ll still have to pay $85, get fingerprinted, and conduct a formal interview with a TSA bureaucrat who’s undoubtedly fully qualified for the job of determining whether or not you’re a vicious terrorist.  So TSA Pre is the answer to the problem of the TSA’s removal of your time and money.  And thus the solution is for them to take more of your time and money (and your privacy).  So you can get back what they already took from you.  In any other construct not government, that’d be called theft or blackmail.

– All of this might be worth it if the TSA actually did the task assigned to them.  But as the article reminds us, the TSA fails at its mission well over 90% of the time.  In fact, the article actually mentions the raw numbers which I’ve never seen before:

undercover security operatives managed to smuggle 67 illegal weapons or simulated bombs past TSA security on 70 tries last year, that TSA officials were unable to properly vet 73 aviation employees who had links to terrorism, thereby allowing them access to secure areas,  and that senior managers have a long history of bullying whistleblowers who identify potential problems.

In 15 years the TSA has never successfully stopped a single terrorist act.  They’ve never caught a guy at the checkpoint.  But if you play devil’s advocate to try and make the argument about deterrence, all I can say is with a failure rate of 90%, if an actual terrorist had actually tried, he’d probably have succeeded.

So what’s all this been?  For 15 years?  Smoke and mirrors.  Power, money, and the bureaucratic inertia survival of an organization, no matter how incompetent or rude or unfair to you, the citizen.

But don’t worry, Congress is all over this, solving the problem like they typically do:

On Tuesday, Sen. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) called on TSA Administrator Peter V. Neffenger to resign if the long wait times at airports such as O’Hare and Midway are not resolved by Memorial Day.

Senator Kirk seems to think wait times are the reason to clean house.  Senator Kirk is thus burning his day sitting under one tree, surrounded by flies, scratching his head, completely unaware that he’s in the middle of a whole forest.  Bravo.

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methods of behavioral change

This morning I observed a woman park in a handicapped spot and then walk away pulling two large suitcases with nary a limp. So unless she was taking that luggage to her husband’s wheelchair office, I’d bet a substantial margin of my limited international gold reserves that’s she’s illegally parked.

I see this all the time, mostly at work. I figure probably a third of those parked in handicapped spots are not actually crippled in any way. I cannot morally comprehend executing such an action. It would legitimately make me uncomfortable, all day, to know I did that. But apparently folks are cool with it, it becomes part of their routine.

Maybe this isn’t a big deal. Or those folks are actually quite nice dudes, and this is just one of their flaws. And if humanity has anything, it’s a whole bunch of flaws. But for whatever reason, any time I see this happen it bothers or even angers me immensely. I nearly said something unfortunate to that woman this morning. I’m glad I kept my mouth shut, for I gather that would not have ended well or accomplished a thing.

Anyways, let’s accept that this is bad behavior requiring correction. But we’ll need help, because humans are flawed weak flesh beings. So we’ll use Enforcement Drone Version 2.09 (ED209) as our assistant in this matter.

1) Guilt

Person wrongly parks in spot. ED209 saunters up and wryly comments to the individual in his stale robot voice.

ED209: YOU ARE NOT HANDICAPPED. YOU SHOULD BE ASHAMED OF YOURSELF.

2) Shame

ED209 walks up, and demands production of identification. ED209 then takes a photo of the person’s face.

ED209: THIS INDICENT HAS NOW BEEN POSTED TO YOUR FACEBOOK PAGE.

3) Fear

ED209 walks up and shoots the individual in the kneecap.

ED209: YOU ARE NOW IN COMPLIANCE WITH ESTABLISHED PARKING REGULATIONS.

4) Punishment

As the person walks away, ED209 combusts their vehicle in a fireball that shatters nearby windows.

ED209: YOU WILL NOW BE ASSESSED THE VARIOUS DAMANGE, CLEANUP, AND ENVIRONMENTAL FEES.

5) Morality

ED209 forces them to sit down for a five hour chat on the various moral considerations involved with improperly parking in the handicapped spot, making a clear case for the values of a balanced ethical society.

6) Apathy

ED209 slowly trots by the person as they walk away from their car but offers no comment or correction, hoping over time the individual in question establishes some type of internal corrective action guided by conscience.

Which ones of these will work? I’ll let you decide.

ed209

Awh, isn’t he cute?

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how do you become champions without playing a championship?

So these Leicester blokes just won the Premier League title. Folks are freaking out. It’s draped the news for days. Apparently the odds were so high that I figure it’s the equivalent of having the Jaguars or the Browns win the Super Bowl next year.

For amusement, my Guests have calculated the chances of the Jaguars or the Browns winning next year’s title as longer than, “…the chance the Sun viciously explodes tomorrow due to a fourth rate intern pressing the wrong button at the Large Hadron Collider.”

Doesn’t that sound super rare? Gee I sure hope so. That Collider thing scares the hells out of me. They be wielding black magic inside that mountain, I assure you. Think workplace violence is bad? Wait till the Black Hole Ghosts they let into our temporal realm warp all those Euro scientists’ heads.

hadron.jpg

Anyways, Leicester didn’t play Manchester United and knock them off in a brutal Duel of the Fates that risked the destruction of multiple stadiums by hooligans drinking too many non-alcoholic beers. Instead, Leicester gets the trophy because Tottenham and Chelsea played to a draw. What?

At first, when I heard Leicester was to play Manchester I thought it was for the championship. To win it all, loser goes home, etc, etc. Apparently not. I guess in EPL the title goes to the best record, or so I’ve been able to gather. There are no playoffs.

That’s just about the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. So I embarked upon a quest to read the rules of the EPL to figure out why there is not just a straight Super Bowl like title game that would likely be watched by a billion people across the globe. After twenty minutes of this, I gave up. My head hurt.

You go ahead and try and determine via relegation, EPL rules, the Championship League, UEFA, FIFA, the various regional groups and ruling bodies, what the hell is going on. If you want to understand why the European Union is an unhinged organizational basketcase, kindly go and try to figure out how Euro soccer is organized.

If I’ve got it wrong, one of you seven fringe people who regularly read this blog who knows better please clue me in. I think I’ve got it right, but who knows.

Manchester United v Leicester City - Barclays Premier League - Old Trafford

Leicester City fans cheer on their side in the stands after the match despite not winning the title on the day, during the Barclays Premier League match at Old Trafford, Manchester.

Two other teams just tied. We won!

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Shakespeare’s skull is missing; we’re on the case

In some of Earth’s most ancient cultures, it is said the soul can never fully be at rest if the body is un-whole. Poor Shakespeare is missing his skull, and his soul might thus be trapped in some kind of weird Valhalla purgatory where he is compelled to club fight the same thug over and over again until his skull is reunited with the rest of his bleached skeleton.

We, at The Arcturus Project, are here to help. Based upon our belligerent preliminary research, my Guests and I propose the following unhinged scenario and vicious plan:

1) We build a time machine and fly back to 1794 where we will intercept the grave robbers on site. Rather than liquidate them immediately, as my Guests desire, we will preserve the timeline by sedating them, giving them a fake skull, and returning the original skull to the grave with the thieves none the wiser.

 

Shakespeare.jpg

We’re on it, bro!

 

2) Should we fail in our attempt to fold space and time via a machine, we’ll have to buckle down and search in today’s realm. Naturally our first stop will be Derek Jacobi’s hallowed mansion. As the foremost headman of the Anti-Stratfordian Faction, surely he’ll know the secret whereabouts of the skull as his cult has undoubtedly kept it hidden for centuries to further cloud the memory of the author who they claim is surely a fraud. Should we fail in our brutal interrogation of Jacobi, taken in by his charm, gentlemanly behavior, and delightful ability to star & seriously act in even the most C-grade of hack garbage movies, we’ll have no choice to resort to more ridiculous methods.

 

jacobi.jpg

Derek Jacobi, in the Oscar nominated Underworld: Evolution

 

3) We’ll begin by exhuming Shakespeare’s entire skeleton, a process that might result in the complete destruction of Holy Trinity Church, but whatever, omelets need making. Then we use the DNA from the skeleton to clone Shakespeare. Once the clone reaches the age of 52, we summary put him to death, and harvest his skull. We then rebuild Holy Trinity Church, put the original skeleton back in the tomb, and add the Clone Shakespeare’s skull into the tomb as well.

 

4) As a caveat, we don’t know the rules of Valhalla. We’ve never been there. So it’s possible that because the skull is a clone skull, that this won’t work. And Shakespeare’s soul would still be trapped. So next what we’d have to do is use the most invasive of surveillance methods to catalog the location of every 17th century skull in the British Isles. We’ll be able to tell what skull is from this era by detecting the presence, at the molecular level, of frilly cravat material common in this age, such as that seen gracing the neck and skull of Her Majesty:

elizabeth.jpg

Then we’ll use DNA tracing (see first part of Plan 3) to analyze millions of skulls until we find the right one. Then we’ll but that skull back in the church and (hopefully) manage to put back all the millions of other skulls too.

 

X) In the event Plan 4 becomes logistically impossible, we’ll have to activate Plan X. My Guests & I fly to Stratford-upon-Avon, and descend upon the Hamlet’s Determination Ale House. We drink until we come up with a better plan to solve this most pressing of the planet’s problems.

 

I’m banking on Plan X. However, if you wish to personally assist us in this most noble of quests, specifically Plans 1-4, please kindly provide us a bit of seed money by posting check, cash, or money order to the following address:

 

The Arcturus Project – Shakespeare Reclamation Branch

C/O Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation

1794 Aguiyi Ironsi Street

Abuja 900001, Nigeria

 

Your cooperation, as always, is very truly appreciated.

 

mel hamlet

Mel’s got it.  Mel’s got it!

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all hail the bunny

So let’s say it’s 1673, and you’re guzzling Reinheitsgebot beer at a pub in the Duchy of Westphalia. It’s a few days before Easter. Your buddy Carl leans over, wasted, and he’s like, “Hey, you know what, we should get some eggs and color them.” You don’t say a word, because beer is tasty, and you’re not sure if you just heard Carl correctly. And in any case, beer is tasty, so who cares. But then Carl continues, “but the eggs have to appear from somewhere, so a rabbit should bring them to the kids.”

You have no idea where Carl’s brain is, but seeing as how you can’t say nothing, you start with the simple, “Rabbits don’t lay eggs.”

“Right, right, but they can carry them, right?”

Your head hurts, “Rabbits can’t carry things, they don’t have opposable thumbs, and they hop around.”

Carl’s getting frustrated, he pulls on his stein, he needs you to understand the genius that’s at work here, “Okay, okay, but it’s all for fun, so if I say the rabbit can carry eggs, then he’s carrying the freaking eggs.”

“Okay.”

“But the eggs are colored, see,” Carl drinks again, “so that way they’re neat and colorful and you can find them easier.”

You’re barely listening at this point. You motion to the barkeep that you’d like another. But remember, Carl’s your buddy, so you have to play along to some degree. “What was that, about kids?”

“Well, kids get to find the hidden colored eggs.”

“So the rabbit hides eggs?”

“Right.”

“So that kids can then find them?”

“Exactly!”

“Why?”

“Doesn’t matter, because the rabbit wants to, he’s a hopping happy rabbit, or whatever, doesn’t matter. And all the kids search for the eggs, and they’re happy. Because kids like wonderful bright colors, and they like to run around, and play, and find things,” Carl starts chuckling uncontrollably.

Your next beer arrives, you desperately want to drink it, but you take a moment to furrow your brow in frustration. “Okay, okay Carl, so, uh, why would we do this?”

“Because it’s Easter!” Carl shouts as he raps his fist on the bar.

“WHAT do a rabbit, colored eggs, kids have to do with that Jesus guy rising from the dead?”

“Who cares! Everybody will love this.”

“Okay friend, okay.” And because it’s 1673, you put that next beer back in about 30 seconds, and you’re off. As you depart, Carl’s already shouting his idea to somebody else at the bar, who like you, couldn’t care less. And you’re quite certain Carl should have stopped at five beers.

But then it’s 1698, and eggs, bunnies, and color are everywhere. Kids are playing, everybody’s hiding eggs in bushes and under cobblestones, and it’s become an Easter tradition, full of spring joy and life.

Meanwhile, Carl’s made millions off his egg decorating business. And you’re still a day laborer at the local mill. But at least, every time you’re at the pub, Carl offers to buy all your beers.

bunny.jpg

Oh the joy of irrational youth, where my parents could dismiss us from the room and tell us to come back in ten minutes.  And then we’d get back, and Dad would defiantly state the Easter bunny had just stopped by, and hid a whole bunch of eggs in the backyard that we had to find.  We’d just missed him, honest.  Go get the eggs now.  And so we did.

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Jacques assists my brain decompression, his way

I’ve been horrendously busy lately with no sign of it letting up. So I’ve had to take a step back in planning what I’m going to cook. For quite a good long while, I’ve been on this kick to try ever harder recipes or techniques. I guess just to prove that I could do it. Or also that hanging out in the kitchen for hours with the dogs, cooking, drinking beer, and/or listening to music is my way to decompress from stupid reality.

I don’t have time for that now, but a man’s still got to eat. So lately I’ve transitioned back to some of the early cookbooks I bought, in particular Jacques Pépin’s The Short-Cut Cook and Fast Food My Way. You go buy your stuff, spend less than 30 minutes, and you’re done. This has certainly helped my schedule, but it’s also been a delightful return to basics. Something other than a massive list of ingredients with perhaps needless complexity.

It’s been kind of a return to roots, in the sense that if you’re only involved with a half-dozen items and a half-hour, you’d better get it right. You can’t hide anything if you screw it up. In many ways, this simplicity is better. In this hour long interview with Anthony Bourdain (you should watch the whole thing), go to the ten minute mark to hear Jacques lay this philosophy out, “…take away, take away…”

It’s also given me a chance to mess with things that have been on my mind for years, but just never got around to doing. In this week’s case, it was playing around with chicken livers and sardines, both from Short Cut Cook:

– Chicken livers persillade

Most folks hate these things because they’ve got a weird texture and look terrible when you break them out of the package. So I think I was well north of 20 years age when I first had them in Asia. Since then, I’ve never turned them away and tried them all over the place. But I haven’t ever worked with them in the kitchen. So Jacques steps in, and essentially offers you the opportunity to serve them with some toast and call it a day. Overall kitchen time is less than ten minutes.

Things did not go well at first. As I was trying to get the liver tub open and I ended up spilling liver blood/juice/whatever over a good portion of my counter and floor. My youngest was more than happy to help me clean up, so I had to scramble to contain her happy doggy tongue with one hand while I wiped it all off the floor with the other. Then you’ve got to clean the livers by trimming off all the connecting veins and all those lovely weird black parts that you’d rather pretend don’t actually exist. I’m not sure if this is typical, but I ended up discarding about half the biomass in trimming them down to the cook ready parts. After that, I was a bit demoralized, and wondering what I’d gotten myself into.

Yet all you have to do is roast some baguette slices for ten minutes and sauté the livers. The livers themselves take one minute per side, really high heat, and that’s it. Take your liver, take your bread, eat, and it’s well worth it. It’s probably not for everybody, but it worked for me all right.

 

chicken livers

finished product, they were liver-rific!

did ya get it?  I did a thing there?

[cricket, cricket, cricket]

 

– Sardines in tomato sauce

I don’t know whether this is accurate or not, but I always had the impression that folks tend to turn away sardines or anchovies because they don’t like the little small fishy, and the overall oiliness, fish odor & taste is too much for people. So you don’t really see these two dudes make much of an appearance in typical American cuisine (whatever that is). I’ve always loved them though. So when I came upon Jacques’ instruction to buy a whole freaking 16 ounces of sardines, I was sold. So because I’m a lunatic, I went and bought four tins, just to be safe. All he has you do is throw them on some greens with vinegar, parsley, salt & pepper, and some fresh tomato. So if you don’t care for sardines, this is repulsive because you’re eating them right out of the box as is. But for me this was a win. I took five minutes to make.

I love Jacques’ mentality on food. I guess he’s technically considered a celebrity chef, but in my mind he’s one of the originals alongside Julia Child who is not really a celebrity chef. I mean, sure, Jacques has made a boatload of gold throughout the years, but he’s always carried himself with the same humble simplicity that Child also had. There’s a reason those two were friends. It’s always a breath of fresh air from the current modern machine manufactured chef crowd. Jacques still cooks for public television, folks.

So thanks Jacques, for helping me get through this crazy busy time of my life. While also still eating well. And learning something new every day.

pepin and child.jpg

yep