Zesty swordfish with roasted asparagus

I love to experiment while cooking. You're not being judged on Master Chef on technical presentation, you're in your own private kitchen fulfilling the #1 Rule of Cooking which a Jamaican chef explained to me once and that is whatever pleases your palate. Cooking, dunno know why but it's alot like politics - My way of cooking is The way - when just give me something good to eat, something that sticks to my ribs. Anyway bought a swordfish steak last week and here's what I did:

Diced up a small tomato, 1/2 a white onion and a jalapeno, all small dice (on Master Chef they'd have to be perfect squares but I ain't into the ocd style of cooking). Put them in a small bowl and added some olive oil and mixed it up. Drizzled everything on top of the swordfish and then some bread crumbs and even some Parmesan (dunno if Joe Bastianich would approve but fuck him), the whole idea being to give it that toasted appearance. Got my oven preheated to 400 (don't tell anyone but it was actually a toaster oven) and then put the steak on a foil tray. OK oven ready and so on another tray just below that was my asparagus which was drizzled with some olive oil, salt & peppa and a freshly crushed garlic clove. I prefer freshly crushed garlic to the bottled kind but whatever. So I'm watching the thing for about, oh I don't know 10 or 15 minutes, even used a small flashlight to see what's going on in there and towards the end just cranked that baby up to 450. Total time about 20, 22 minutes and put the bad boy on my plate with the asparagus kind of on each side. I actually think Gordon Ramsay would have liked it and the guy in the middle but Joe would have just taken a bite and walked away. You know I do my own thing in the kitchen and it rocked!! The cat outside even smelled it from all the way out there and came in and jumped up on the table. The things you can do with such modest equipment and it's good for you too. I didn't do anything radical like you see in some cookbooks and put a pineapple on top, chefs must be getting bored or something these days. Bon appetit!

This cult of negative non-inspiration out there

What d'ya think of this sermon? This past Sunday the pastor got into a whole homily on narrow is the gate that leads to heaven and few there are who enter it. Now that's fine as it was the reading for the day but I never heard one like this one before. He said what he's about to say is gonna sound somewhat harsh and he proceeded to say not all our friends, relatives, not even everyone in this parish who has passed on are in heaven. So I felt maybe he's alluding to Purgatory but then he went on -- "and not all of them are going to heaven." I started gauging the audience, hard to read but I did hear a couple of positive reviews afterwards which surprised me but let's put the brakes on this theological locomotive before we careen off into the ravine. Since the sermon was so unrelievedly negative, bleak I had this thought that yeah maybe the gate that leads to heaven is indeed narrow in which case it just might take that much longer for everyone to enter through. A single-file deal but that's not what I thought he had in mind and I would have been shot down if I raised my hand and offered my heretical counterdeal.

Who winds up in heaven, who doesn't, how many, all these are theological mysteries and it is the height of theological arrogance for a pastor, any minister to opine such. He knows this? God told him this? and what about him, hmmmmm??? This was crossing a line but organized religion does cross lines every now and then. How is this different from the radical Muslim believing all non-Muslims are infidels headed for the pit? So there I was sitting in the back of the church getting uninspired, depressed even. I've suffered enough in this life, you mean there's more to come in eternity? It was a surreal moment and so I was going over my tinnitus-like condition, my irregular bowels down through the ages, all those nights of poor sleep, psycho bosses and all the other slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and the icing on this crap cake of Life, woes in the romance department but you mean to tell me that's only a warmup?

You're killing me!

There's something about Robert Gibbs' comments that have been bothering me

Just because President Obama has apparently managed to piss off the left-wing blogosphere doesn't make him a conservative or even a moderate (Shaw is a notable exception but then again Shaw is Shaw). Gibbs' remarks that they won't be satisfied until we have a Canadian style health care system and Dennis Kucinich as president, well if you deconstruct that that doesn't mean Obama wouldn't prefer to have the public option. Indeed he's on the record as supporting such but basically he saw the political handwriting on the wall and to borrow a page from Patrick M he went with practicality over principle. If I say or do something that pisses off the soapster let's say, I get Mal's knickers in a twist too, hell let's say I got under Beth's skin as well, I just got geeeeeZed and the Zep bloviated on me well that doesn't mean I'm no longer a part of their world. I'm beginning to think this is the whole point and maybe Obama actually welcomes criticism from the left-wing blogosphere as this will make him appear the pragmatic moderate, the realistic centrist by comparison. It's like with the gays, they like him and all but every once in a while they feel he doesn't go far enough. Obama himself likes them but there's always a little pragmatic distance in between, some political breathing room. He's not gonna put the jelly fist in himself or slip on the semen in the boomboom room during a campaign stop. Though he's gotten a 100% positive report card from NARAL on the topic of abortion he's barely spoken and the one time he did he acted the aloof intellectual above it all, maybe even vaguely pro-life in a misty morning sense. I think Gibbs believes his own comments but his boss knows the real deal.

Consistency, the hobgoblin of small minds

Ah sweet consistency! Dave Miller searches for it, the soapster is probably more consistent than most, most hold it up as a virtue but there's just a little something I've discovered quite on my own. In fact it's rather disturbing, unsettling even and it's something we'd rather not face. It's

the Quirk,

oooooohhhhhh!!!!!! and many times it leads to Icky Things. Basically I've come to the realization over time that quite a few of our positions if logically applied to their stretching points have quirks, in fact they're built-in and it doesn't really matter where these positions fall on the political spectrum. If you're a bona-fide libertarian then you readily accept the premise that there's something wrong with our civil rights laws at least the parts that forbid private companies from discriminating against African-Americans (Rand Paul kind of acknowledged the quirk and then ran away from it). If you're a federalist then you have to accept miscegenation laws should they unhappily make a return. If you're for the gay marriage then you have to welcome the brother and sister team, even polygamy. While we're on the subject of Sex if you're a Catholic and don't accept artificial birth control as morally licit then you have to accept the notion that you should only have sex when you want a kid. Natural Family Planning (NFP) is a loophole and I once received a newsletter in the mail from some ultra-traditionalist Catholic sect that had a problem with even Pope John Paul 2 pushing NFP as basically it's just what I said: you should only have sex when you want a kid which is not the Z-man position of course but we are discussing quirks here. Terri Schiavo was a vegetable and not even human, a common enough position at the time except that you'd also have to accept the scenario then of somebody walking into her hospice room and then stabbing her to death and not having to face prosecution. Chris Rock talks about niggers, I should be able to as well. Now it's not the Z-man position that Chris Rock should talk about niggers but once you accept the Premise......I could go on. Pro-choice would mean you'd have to accept a world without abortion if let's say pro-lifers won in the marketplace of ideas and then every doctor on the planet for reasons of conscience refused to perform the procedure. I left Pro-life out you say? I leave that to Miss Saty. Quirks are political particles shooting around the political universe but we refuse to even acknowledge their existence and people (like me) who bring them up are accused of slippery-sloping. It's why a Protestant minister I once worked with said to me he doesn't believe in logic, he seemed to know. This list is very incomplete, quirks are EVERYWHERE but just to get things started let's go with gay marriage and a brother and sister wanting to marry each other, hell let's throw in some happy polygamists too for good measure. What some people call slippery-sloping is simply the acknowledgement that quirks exist and we'd better start addressing them. The slippery slope, you're skiiing towards the Quirk anyway. Doesn't matter either if the theoretical scenario under discussion is absurd (for the time being) or otherwise not realistic, quirks exist at the very end of many positions on the political spectrum these days. It truly is a funkadelic world.

Even mass murder has to be racially politicized

No sooner were the bodies cold then the CEO of Budweiser there in Manchester, CT had to address reporters at a press conference saying no, the Hartford Distributors of Bud aren't a bunch of racists. What's wrong with this picture? Thirty-four year old Omar Thornton who was black, on the job for two years and caught on video surveillance stealing beer and fired that very morning shot eight co-workers to death and then offed himself. His motive? they were all racists and his only regret was that he couldn't get more as he said to that 911 dispatcher. He claims to have seen racist scribblings on the walls of the men's room and complained to his long-time girlfriend that he was subject to constant racial harassment on the job and claimed to have logged a complaint with the union and they failed to followup. Here's two theories: either he was a delusional paranoid/schizophrenic or on some psychedelic like LSD or PCP or both. You know I'd do an autopsy just for the hell of it. A constant obsession with race is unhealthy and it'd be easy enough to blame liberalism for the tragic events but while I won't make that connection let's discuss liberalism anyway as it pertains to race. You know the disturbing part though? in the last two days I've talked to people who seemed rather sympathetic to the shooter not in the sense that they condoned what he did of course but the racial stuff ya know and unions we all know how they are. This is how far liberalism has corrupted our national psyche and in liberal calculus people like Don Imus and Andrew Breitbart are somehow more evil than mass murderers who somehow slipped through the system and didn't get the help they deserved and had a right to (recall liberal commentary on the Cho and VA Tech matter). Strong shades of the LI Railroad Massacre and Colin Ferguson's black rage, an exculpatory term coined by the late radical lawyer William Kunstler. I wasn't even gonna do a blog on this until Race entered the picture. I have no words, I am so SICK of this!!! If anything I would have thought the usual liberal push for stronger gun control measures in the wake of these type tragic events but seems we have to discuss race first. Talk about it all you want, these folks didn't deserve to lose their lives:)

Thoughts on mortality

At 45 when you have the pleasure of getting your first prostate exam you can kind of feel the crooked bony finger of the old Grim Reaper caressing your behind. Death and food - we're nervous, let's eat. We've developed weird cultural formalae for dealing with the inevitable. You'll be driving along with your friend and pass San Giannini's Restaurant and he goes "we ate there." "Oh, what was the occasion?" "My sister got hit by a Budweiser truck." Dunno man, I'm in mourning right now and don't need to go to some fancy Italian restaurant but that's just me. Went to a wake once with my Mom and we're sitting there and she whispers to me "this is macabre" and it is. Worked in a library many years back, the interlibrary loan department and one of the more popular books was, I kid you not, Mortuary Science. I've been meaning to do a blog for some time now on Weird Careers like you're some guy who works at the local animal shelter and part of your job is euthanizing perfectly healthy dogs and cats. Now I can't judge but how do you go home at night and like yourself? You work in a slaughterhouse and day in and day out the cows are hung upside down and you slit their throats. Later on you have sex with your girl but it's existential sex, some bleak black and white passionless thing and there's some angst eating away at your soul and she can sense it. You're a fuckin' monster but there are lesser careers you could have chosen like cleaning up in the porno booths after a long hard day of a bunch of lonely men jacking off to bad porno loops. Ya got your bleach, your spackle bucket and you drop the quarters in and stir everything up with that big pole they give you. At least you didn't kill anybody though.

Judge in California just killed Prop 8, you know the ban on gay marriage there. I don't lobby for it, I don't lobby against it. It's not my thing but I do think we reserve the right as a society to be tolerant but mildly anti-gay. A week ago my NYC government station, Ch. 25 here ran a whole evening's worth of gay programming and you can take this stuff in small doses but my overall reaction was why don't they just put on some cooking show instead? Ever since I can remember my bowels down through the years have been, shall we say irregular? (Dannon - Activia). God bless 'em but I don't know how they do this stuff day in and day out. The occasion when I'm even ready for a butt plug roughly coincides with the whole lunar eclipse cycle. Friend and I hiked up Mt. Spitzenberg in Peekskill last winter and somebody told him "that's a notorious gay hangout" like you go up there and expect to see a bunch of Mad Max biker dudes with spiked collars and nipple hooks brutalizing each other. Probably more and more states are gonna go with the gay marriage with friendly activist judges enabling the whole process and I don't see that we can do a whole lot about it. Things are just too gay lately but hey they're citizens right? ain't sneaking over The Fence like some others but it's like when you're out with your buddies at the Palisades Mall, you all don't have girlfriends and you begin to feel like a roving fag pack so why don't you just go to the rest area on 684 and get it over with?

The colonoscopy is old Mr. Death getting gay with you, he's sexually harassing you now and it's a topic I look forward to blogging about in a few years or so. There are other things to be concerned about like I'm just worried about the next workplace psycho getting ready to rock. There really is no game plan in place, no self-defense scenarios to work with (when was the last time you even had a meeting about this stuff?), it's just Ortiz comes to work a little upset today and Katie Couric is talking about you at 6:30 in the evening.

Sex, Food, Death -- whatever you want to talk about today.

Thoughts on unions

Since I blog about work alot, not the most popular threads since most folks seem to prefer straight politics, I've always had a running concern about how specific to get so I'm usually fairly vague for obvious reasons. Now I've had two jobs in my life that had major unions behind them, the dues always go up of course and there is the endless politicking for Democratic politicians (I'm beginning to think my union is socialist) and so I've come to two conclusions. Unions are corrupt and they don't help you. Now as the story goes back in the day one union for food workers was having trouble with the funds, going under and the very food company they were always at odds with at the negotiation table bailed them out instead of letting them go under......hmmmmmm......Now if you ask most workers do you work in a better workplace environment with good morale because of your union they always hesitate and pretty much the only thing they can come up with are those automatic raises you get even the slackers (and that's ANOTHER problem). Now I've seen folks whom the manager didn't like, he or she is on the firing line for whatever reason (manager ain't getting laid, whatever) and there has to be a union meeting set up of course before they can fire you and the union instead of fighting for the worker practically rubber-stamps the decision of management. As my friend says about unions, priests and lawyers you go to them with a problem or issue and they have this retarded clown look on their face - "I can't help you" - and though I've been pro-union my whole life I'm beginning to think we'd be better off without them. Went to a shop steward once with a legitimate issue and he warned me against pursuing it - "Joe's gonna cut your hours if you do" - but I was only discussing it, hashing it out because, well you're the shop steward buddy. Sure you will always have injustice and unfairness in the workplace but when the union doesn't care or backs up the management side instead of hearing out and fighting for the lowly worker you know something's up, something ain't right and it's a sage piece of advice I proffer to others before pursuing something know what you're dealing with. Hell they might all be having sex with each other and the rightness or wrongness of an issue may be as plain as day to YOU but cha'know. Oh doesn't matter if you're black either, not in the world of thuganomics. You simply want more bang for the buck and you can do without that socialist newsletter you get every month.

What are your thoughts on unions? (soapie must have a few)