Sunday, June 29, 2008

Hot sheets: Be on the lookout for ninjas and God’s got the best coke hook up!

You’ve got to love the Associated Press. They never fail to find the weirdest, most pointless news items from around the world (though mostly America, cause face it, we do the weirdest stuff) and make them available to the general population. This week is no different.

Have you ever walked through the woods and felt that you were being watched by ninjas? It happens to me constantly. Nary a day goes by that I don’t feel the steely gaze of a deadly ninja assassin boring into the back of my head. But as soon as I turn around I see nothing but the slight shaking of a tree limb, though there isn’t a breeze to be felt. Ninjas are, of course, famous for their vanishing skills.

Recently, in Barnegat, N.J. (Birthplace of the Toxic Avenger) a ninja was spotted running through the woods behind an elementary school, (what better place for a ninja to be hanging out than the backwoods of New Jersey. It’s a veritable hotbed of ninja activity!) thereby causing Barnegat public schools to be on lockdown from 9 to 9:30 A.M. That’s right, for 30 minutes, Barnegat was on high alert for ninjas! I’d like to hear that report.

Bob: Oh my god! What’s that running through the woods over there? Jesus Tapdancing Christ, it’s a ninja!

Deacon: Red alert! I want a one hundred percent lockdown of all schools, nurseries, pet shops, airports and bus stations within a 50-mile radius! This isn’t a joke people, it’s the real thing! The day we’ve all trained for!

It turns out that the ninja was really a camp counselor “dressed in black karate garb and carrying a plastic sword.”(Because there’s nothing scarier than a dude with a plastic sword. Am I right?) who was late to a costume-themed day at a nearby middle school.

And what’s the lesson learned here? Well, apparently kids in Jersey are so stupid that they need to keep the elementary and middle schools open year-round. Naturally, this is bound to lead to an increase in ninja sightings.

***

If you’re ever in Tampa Fla. and you feel like buying an eight ball of coke, may I suggest going to church? Because it’s only at church that you’ll find God, and I hear he’s got some ill shit at competitive prices. Not to mention he’s conveniently located within 1,000 feet of a school (the Tampa school of Tanning, I’m sure) and public housing.

God Lucky Howard, (his real name, it would seem) was arrested last Saturday trying to sell coke to an undercover cop. (Those dirty undercover cops, always trying to hassle decent, law-abiding omnipotent deities!) The cops had been watching God since April, but since they probably felt that they had a good gig in sunny Tampa, waited until June to get off their fat asses.

When the cops searched his house (the House of God!) they discovered 22 grams of coke and scales. (Interesting fact: God had been selling that same 22 grams for the last three months. Very similar to that loaves and fishes trick he taught his son.) He’s currently being held on a $86,500 bond, which shouldn’t be a problem for him. He ought to be able to create that money out of thin air, or at the very least, kill the first born sons of the cops who arrested him.

Word on the street is that since Phil Hartman is currently in heaven, God will retain Lionel Hutz as his personal attorney.

Everyday something really crazy, (and often stupid) happens somewhere across these fruited plains (that’s not politically correct though, I prefer homosexualled plains) of ours. It’s the job of Eighty-Four Glyde to bring this important news to you, so you can go out and impress chicks. You’re welcome!

Thursday, June 26, 2008

So easy, a caveman could do it!

Seeing how I’m out here in the honest-to-goodness cradle of civilization, (the delta area encompassing the Tiger and Euphrates Rivers,) and having so much free time on my hands, (what with last year’s surge having worked so well and democracy coming any day now) I decided to do some research into the history of mankind.
Being a born and bred American man, I decided to look into the early civilizations of my native country, and boy did I find some interesting things (thank goodness for Wikipedia, I say.) Hidden deep within the middle of an ancient book, (by Dr. Gooch of all people! That man is more prolific than DaVinci) on prehistoric man, I found something that will shock people more than the latest insanity to come out of David Lynch’s head. A conversation between two Neanderthals:

Hank: Yo, Grock, what day is this?

Grock: Ugg

Hank: Really? Already? Damn, seems like just yesterday we went on that woolly mammoth hunt.

Grock: Oog

Hank: Yeah, you’re right. Time flies when you’ve been running for your life from a swarm of freakishly huge mosquitoes with razor-sharp noses big enough to pierce our broad, hairy cavemen chests.

Grock: Grg?

Hank: I dunno, what do you want to do today?

Grock: Kcrug!

Hank: But Grock, we already discovered fire last week when the sky gods sent water from the big empty place above our heads and there were loud sounds and light from the heavens hit that tree on the hill and brought forth hot stuff that we used to cook our various roots and tubers. Remember? You got wasted on fermented bee excrement.

Grock: Ouk. Bkrgu?

Hank: Naw man, we invented killing things with pointy sticks last month. And the month before that we tied rocks to sticks to hit things. You’ve got a terrible memory.

Grock: Og

Hank: That thing in the corner of the cave? Oh, that’s just a round rock I carved. I call it “the wheel.”

Grock: Oguh?

Hank: I’ll tell you what it’s for. Say you have guests over and you’re all enjoying a hunk of saber-toothed tiger and you want to sprinkle some salt on your food, but it’s just out of reach. What do you do? Well, “the wheel” sits in the middle of the table and you just spin it until you can reach the salt.

Grock: Rgh!

Hank: Yeah. It is pretty boss. Check this, an idea has managed to escape from my thick, over-sized, Neanderthal cranial area! Look, the big orange ball is highest in the sky right now and it’s kinda hot. Why don’t we go find a couple of bitches to hit over the heads with our clubs and drag back here to the cave? Then we can make some of that fire stuff and put some left over rat meat on sticks and put them over the fire until they’re cooked. Add a little fermented guano to that equation and I think we’ve got ourselves a pretty decent little get together. What do you think?

Grock: Ugg

Hank: Dude, you talk too much.

According to the book, this exchange took place two weeks after the summer solstice in the year 43,000 B.C. Meaning that those cavemen were most likely getting down with a party on the 4th of July.
History comes alive!

Sunday, June 22, 2008

Hot sheets: Watch where you sit and never send back food

Always striving to bring you the important news you need to know, Eighty-Four Glyde brings you this week’s hot sheets.

Today’s first story is an AP article from June 20. Involving an enterprising young stalker out of Newburgh, New York, with aspirations of being a piece of furniture or something.
David Joe Limones cut a hole in a woman’s couch (her name was withheld for no reason other than to spare her embarrassment, I guess) then hid in the cavity until she came home and sat on him. She must have been born with no nerve endings in her ass.
So she came home and sat on the couch (the article doesn’t say how long she was sitting there, though if she enjoys a good couch-sitting as much as I do, she could have been there for hours) until she felt a bump in the cushions move. Then she jumped up, (if my couch started moving, I’d jump the hell up too*.) and he popped out, like some kind of deranged birthday surprise and knocked the cell phone out of her hand.
She called the cops on him and he was charged with burglary and probably with being a twisted ass freak. Though, like me, they were probably just jealous that they didn’t think of it first.
Talk about a love seat!
***
Out of West Bend, Wisconsin, also on June 20th, comes a story that warns of the dangers of eating at the Texas Roadhouse restaurant. Especially if you think your steak is a little overdone.
Ryan Kropp, a line cook at that steakhouse decided to take matters into his own hands the other night. When he was asked by his boss to cook another steak, medium rare, for a patron to take home, Ryan decided to add his own special seasonings.
Cutting a slit into the steak, Ryan inserted something into the meat.
“These are my pubes,” he said to a coworker.
The customer noticed the short, curly treats the next day while eating the steak. He then called the manager and the police (!) to complain.
Listen, I’ve had bad food before, but I’ve never felt the desire to involve law enforcement just ‘cause I got pepperoni on my pizza when I asked for sausage. What kind of total gump does that?! I don’t know, because the customer is never identified in the story.
So anyway, Kropp was fired and charged with “placing foreign objects in edibles,” every parent’s worst Halloween nightmare, but a crime that couldn’t be so common as to deserve its own charge or sentence of up to 3 and a half years in prison. That’s nuts! Who hasn’t gone down on a partner and come back up with some pubes stuck in their teeth like some kind of nasty dental floss? (No? Just me?)
This guy shouldn’t get 3 and a half years for doing something that everybody who has ever worked in a kitchen has done! Well, not always involving pubes, but some pretty nasty shit. I worked in a steakhouse for a year and I’ve lost count of the amount of food I’ve messed with. That’s an Eighty-Four Glyde entry in itself. And I bet the comments left by other cooks would be just as gross as the blog.
I’m going to start a “Free Ryan Kropp” campaign!

* In fact, I did once. During a college acid trip, the couch I was sitting on tried to eat me. So I jumped up and ran down the hallway, only to discover that the walls were breathing in and out like lungs. Very disconcerting.

Sunday, June 15, 2008

Hot sheets: Nail gun fun and why the chicken crossed the road

First and foremost, Eighty-Four Glyde is here to inform (betcha didn’t know that!). To that end, I’m introducing a new feature, to educate the Great Unwashed, with those news stories you may not have noticed while you were celebrating R. Kelly’s acquittal or lamenting the rising gas prices.


Our first story comes from the June 10th, United Press International.

It seems that a guy from Kansas (the state where a woman sat on a toilet seat for so long that her ass fused to it. Unsavory) managed to shoot himself in the head with a nail gun while building a lattice with his friend.

I know what your first question is: What the hell is a lattice? That’s easy; a lattice is one of those things that people always used to escape from their second story bedroom windows in movies from the 80s.

I bet your second question is if they were drunk. My answer is probably, but the article doesn’t say.

So what had happened was that while George Chandler (“Could I be any more irresponsible?”) and friend were attempting to build this thing, the hose to the nail gun became entangled, (How? In what?) and caused the gun to fire a nail into Chandler’s head. It took the Bob Villa wannabes a while to find it though. Wanna know how Chandler thought it felt?

"It was just like a maybe like a sting, bite or something, you know," Chandler said.

Truly, a master of the English language.

So they wandered their way to the hospital, where Dr. Nick, apparently, took control of everything.

"'Does anybody have a hammer, a claw hammer.' I thought he was teasing at first, but then he says, 'No. It went in like that. We can pull it out like that,'"
Chandler said.

You should see what happens when he tries to build a birdhouse!

***

Why did the chicken cross the road?

Well, according to a June 10th article by the Associated Press, it’s because he declared a jihad on the people of Simsbury Connecticut.

People driving on some road in Conn., (the article doesn’t specify, so maybe there’s only one road in the state) saw a “raw roasting chicken” on the roadside. In some kind of twisted Wolfgang Puck move, the chicken was stuffed with a pipe bomb!

The cops still don’t know who stuffed a raw chicken with a pipe bomb, or why, (possibly they thought somebody from Perdue would drive by and take the chicken back to the company headquarters or something) but there’s one thing we do know: the road was then closed while the Hartford bomb squad came and blew up the chicken. Thereby spreading chicken pieces across the Nutmeg State.

Now, if they had blown up a basket of potatoes, carrots, herbs and spices, the woodland creatures would have had a complete and delicious meal!


Tune in next week for new and enlightening stories that the mainstream media (Motto: 7% news and 93% opinion, just the way we think you want it) didn’t think were important enough to share with you. But I know better.

Thursday, June 12, 2008

The use of traditional Caribbean herbs in unorthodox cooking

People are always asking me the best way to incorporate Caribbean herbs into their recipes. I hope this helps to answer those questions. Happy cooking everybody!

*** *** ***

One June, a few years ago, some friends and I were enjoying a lovely evening sailing around the islands of the Caribbean. It was a small party with just myself, my friends Loudin Obnoxious, DaftMonk, Juan, “bringing crystal pepsi back,” Beck, a keg of Killians, and a few chicks we had picked up from St. John’s. Out of nowhere a squall appeared that destroyed our boat and left us stranded on a small, deserted island.

All three women were lost at sea and Loudin and suffered a compound fracture, half of his femur poking through the skin of his leg. Everybody else survived with little more than bruises and small cuts. Luckily, the keg also survived, along with a few other odds and ends from our sailing party.

With careful rationing of the keg, we were able to stay hydrated for a week, even though we didn’t have any food. We lost weight and soon our bodies started eating our own muscles to survive. Juan and Beck tried catching fish with their bare hands, but were more often than not unsuccessful.

By the time the beginning of July rolled around, everybody was three quarters dead. I decided then that I wouldn’t die on that island, so I took things into my own hands. That night I bludgeoned my weak friends with the mostly empty keg, in their sleep. They didn’t have the energy to fight back.

When the morning came around I decided to look around the island to see what I could find. Imagine my surprise when I discovered fresh clumps of local oregano, thyme, basil, nutmeg, some ginger roots, green onions and even some scotch bonnet peppers! I knew that if I could bring all these herbs and peppers together into some kind of meal I would be able to survive my ordeal on the island and even celebrate the Fourth of July the next morning!

Bringing everything back to our camp, I got to work. I was able to pull the visible portion of bone out of Loudin’s leg and sharpened it to a crude edge on a nearby rock. With a serviceable knife in hand, I was able to chop and grind the herbs and roots. When it came to the leaves, I simply crushed them to release their essential oils.

I was also able to use the bone knife to cut up my friends. The key there was to cut at the bone joints for ease in separation. This being my first time eating people, I wasn’t sure which would be the best parts to eat. So I cut a few filets of thigh, a few hunks of pectoral and glutes. Luckily, my friend Juan was a large guy, so there was a lot of meat on him. I also made sure to cut out a few livers for the vitamins and other healthy attributes of that organ.

I then gathered a lot of wood to create a fire and to make a spit on which to cook the meat. With my limited resources, I felt that spit roasting would be the best method of cooking.

I could have instead found large, flat rocks and thrown them into the fire until they were properly heated and then placed the meat on top to let the heat come through from the rock below, but it would have taken much longer to heat the rocks and I wanted the food to cook evenly. Plus, on the healthy side, cooking by spit allows the fat to fall off the meat. The bad thing is that the falling fat can cause fire flare-ups, so you have to keep an eye on that. Using a match I had hidden in my pocket, I started the fire and gave it time to develop a nice bed of coals for cooking.

By this time it was the early afternoon, a perfect time to prepare the meat for cooking!

I started by grinding a handful each of the thyme, basil, oregano (to give it a nice local island flavor) nutmeg and ginger together with a little beer to create a kind of rub/paste that I slathered all over the pectoral and thigh filets and let them sit in the shade under a tree for four hours, so that the meat would absorb all those delicious flavors.

With the hunks of glute, I stuffed them with a few scotch bonnet peppers and green onions and even a little beer to add moisture and texture to spread throughout the meat, from the inside out.

I decided to keep it simple with the livers. I rolled up them up with the wild onions and oregano inside and tied them into a roll with a shoestring. With all of my food prepared, it was time to cook!

To keep the meat from cooking unevenly I decided to use a double-spit. Much like that rotisserie that Ron Popeil talks about on TV. Because I had to insert to sticks into the meat it made more sense to try and keep the meat as flat as possible, so that I could flip it, instead of trying to rotate it. With the livers, I decided to tie them to the spit sticks instead of trying to insert the sticks through the meat.

Based on the type of meat, I decided to cook everything to about a medium level of doneness. This meant about 8 minutes of roasting for each pound of meat. This method worked well, leaving the filets crispy and done on the outside, but slightly pink and moist in the center. The livers were done to a uniform brownish/gray when I took them off, with pink spirals where the shoestrings and wrapped around. The hunks of glute were brown on the inside with a pink center that smelled deliciously of onion. With the food done cooking (after about two hours) I got to eating!

Since everything was an experiment I wasn’t sure how all my friends would taste. Some of my friends were white, some black. Some really thin and some had some muscle from going to the gym. I didn’t know if lifestyle and diet would play a large factor in the meat’s taste. I discovered that my friends who liked to go to the gym had tougher, more stringy meat, while my friends who liked to chill out in front of the TV and drink all day had more tender, fatty meat, kind of like those Kobe cows.

In the end, because I was starving, everything was delicious, though I preferred the pectoral filets the most, and I washed it all down with the left over beer. And while wearing a jaunty party hat, I declared that it was truly a Fourth of July to remember. Though next time I’ll be sure to bring salt.

*** *** ***

So, I’m thinking about sending this article into Cooks Illustrated, for their summer issue. What do you think?

Thursday, June 05, 2008

It's in the air

Summer’s back. I usually comes once a year and with it comes all the usual summer activities. My least favorite summer activity is lying in bed at night, wrapped in a sweaty sheet, struggling to sleep in the oppressive nighttime heat. It’s damn near impossible to get a good night’s sleep, but when I do, I have some strange dreams. Allow me to share the most recent:




The dream began with me sitting at my school desk, getting my learn on. Like many dreams, I happened to not be wearing pants, but that wasn’t much trouble because I didn’t really feel the need put on three pairs of pants over my six legs. That would have just impeded flying.


It was the middle of a hot summer day the Fourth of July (sense a theme here?) in fact, and friends and I were chilling out in school, avoiding the heat. You might find it odd that I’d be in school in the summer, especially on such a prestigious holiday, but with a pupal stage of around two days and a lifespan of a few months if I’m lucky, I don’t have the luxury of missing out on my education.


But the day was just too beautiful, I was itching to get outside and enjoy it. Beyond the teacher’s droning on about the dangers of diethyl-meta-toluamide and picaridin, I could hear sounds as if in a joyous celebration. And the delightful smell of carbon dioxide mixed with delicious foods wafted by my proboscis, enticing me and daring me fly outside as soon as the teacher’s thorax was turned.


As her lecture on citronella and nepetalactone continued, I saw my chance and made a break for the door.


When I flew outside my senses were immediately assaulted by smells, sounds and sights beyond my comprehension. People everywhere! Barbeque grills! Food! Condiments! Picnic tables that gave unsuspecting sitters inch-long splinters! Frisbees! Red, White and Blue streamers! It was truly a Fourth of July celebration for the ages, and I couldn’t wait to be a part of it!


With a weight of under 2 milligrams, all it takes is a breeze of around 1 mile an hour to send me flying off in the wrong direction, luckily, I was flying with the wind and had little trouble approaching the picnic unseen.


I alighted on a branch and saw a few friends of mine, Hana and Chrissy, hanging out and watching the people mill around. Since they were females, Hana and Chrissy were both about twice my size, with long, slender, sexy legs and big, juicy-looking, swollen abdomens. Gorgeous!


The ladies had also smelled the picnic and were making plans to get their feast on. So we got together and decided on a course of action. I’d go in first and be a source of distraction while the girls would go in and get as much food as they could before we were all discovered and chased away.


It was all going well until Hana was slapped by a big drunk redneck with a tattoo of the American flag on his forearm. She would have made it away, but his blood was so loaded with alcohol that she could barely fly in a straight line. She didn’t have a chance.


When Chrissy saw what happened she started to make her way over to her friend, but barely made it a foot before she was assaulted from behind by a generous spray of Off! She instantly became disoriented and dropped to the ground, where she was killed when a bunch of people stepped on her repeatedly, in a blood-thirsty rage.


With both females dead I knew that it was only a matter of time before I was attacked by these drunken 4th of July celebrants. And I was right. They suddenly sprang at me in a group, prepared to rend me limb from limb (from limb from limb from limb from limb!) for the simple crime of trespassing on their cook out. The horror!


I dodged and weaved as best I could, trying to stay out of their grasp, but it was no use, my small, scaled wings could only keep me aloft for so long and I had already been flying for two hours. I was tired and getting sloppy and they knew it.


With my last bit of energy, I resigned myself to the inevitable and went over to the picnic table in a last ditch effort to maybe have some kool aid before the end came. I walked up to the glistening, cool, pitcher of grape kool aid, ready for some of that sweet, sweet nectar, when a shadow descended upon me. The last thing I saw with my compound eyes was a giant hand blot out the sun as it rushed down to smack the table, with me caught in its path. I tensed my tiny mosquito body for the impact....




…Which is when I woke up. Weird, eh? I’m going to lay off that Iraqi cuisine before I go to bed from now on.

Sunday, June 01, 2008

American History 101: Mr. 4th of July Contest Entry

How do everybody? I have been nominated in a blog writing contest run by Just Jaynie, a Myspace personality. I am in competition to be Mr. 4th of July! I don’t really know what that means, but as long as it involves the word “mister” in the title, I’m in!


For the first round of the competition, I have to write why I think I should be crowned Mr. 4th of July. That’s an easy one. When I think 4th of July, I think American history, something I happen to be very keen on. So, I felt that to show my all-consuming desire to be Mr. 4th of July, it would be best appreciated with a history lesson on that very special day in our great nation’s past.


After a little research in Dr. Gooch’s Guide to American Pastification, (a well respected tome on United States history) I now present you, (the reader) with the history of the Fourth of July:



The Fourth of July, 1776
The Fourth of July will forever be known in American history as the day that the Continental Congress got together to have a have a light, but filling breakfast, between 6 and 9 am, of various fruits, muffins, bagels, assorted cereals, perhaps some bacon or sausage and their choice of orange juice, apple juice, milk or coffee. This breakfast became so popular that it was later named after them.


Following breakfast, the congress all got together in the VIP room in the back of Ben Franklin’s pub ( motto: Come for the 4 pm “Early to Bed” Happy Hour!) to sign the Declaration of Something or Other. One of the most important documents in American history, (right behind The Devil Wears Prada.)


But what many people don’t realize is that congress didn’t sign anything on that specific date. In fact, they had signed the declaration back in early May, but decided to hold off on announcing the event until the middle of summer when they could take a day off to have a nice BBQ and maybe play a little flag football.


The Declaration of Whozits was important because it was a statement by the fledgling American government to the British Monarchy that Americans would refuse to ever have some messed up looking teeth like the Brits. Here’s a quick rundown of other declarations made in the document. We the American people:


• Promise to never boil meats or give our food confusing and inappropriate names like “spotted dick,” “bubble and squeak,” “fitless cock,” “flummery,” “priddy oggies” and “toad-in-the-hole.”


• Think that driving on the left side of the street is really dumb, so we’re not gonna do it.


• Refuse to pay taxes to England anymore on lottery tickets or lap dances.
• Don’t want our lawyers to have to wear those ugly wigs while they’re in court, they look really itchy and uncomfortable.


• Reserve the right to call flats apartments, lorries trucks, loos bathrooms and not pronounce the h in herbs.


• Think British accents can be sexy.


• If we get around to it, want to have a president and a system of checks and balances, instead of a monarchy, or whatever. But, you know, it’s not that big of a deal.


England wasn’t too happy with this declaration, so they decided to go to war with America. A bunch of soldiers, (like a hundred or something) wearing the famous periwinkle-colored coats that marked them as professionals on the battlefield, hopped onto three ships, the Nina, Pinta and Apollo 13, and sailed their way to America, in the mistaken hope that they’d whoop some ass.


Unfortunately for them, they arrived on July 4th, 1778 and found all the military bases closed for the national holiday. Dejected, the soldiers went back home to their bland food and lousy weather, where they all got syphilis from Whitechapel hookers and died. Setting America free to invent three-storey buildings and do experiments with electricity and cable television.


So next time it’s the Fourth of July and you’re enjoying a hot dog made of leftover scraps from slaughterhouses while watching a drunk guy get his hand blown off from fireworks; take a moment to reflect on what those old, dead, white Americans had to endure to be able to provide a free country for you to grow, get plastic surgery before you hit your teens, be diagnosed with ADHD and medicated at the age of two, pay $8 for a gallon of gasoline, have IQ-destroying reality TV and write goofy and factually inaccurate blogs.


God Bless America!