Terrible Analogies

Hope everyone had a great father’s day.  

To celebrate I made up a special batch of my Budino desert.  This bad boy is composed of 12 egg yolks, three cups of heavy cream, two cups of sugar, 16oz. of chocolate, whole vanilla beans, and a generous dollop of whipped cream.  It’s a heart attack in a cup, but death never tasted so good…

Knowing my dad likes this desert, Karin and I surprised him by dropping by unexpectedly bearing gifts and budino.  There’s nothing like making your pops day with love and chocolate!

Of course we stowed away a couple Budinos for ourselves.  I managed to squeeze eight servings from this batch, and figured my dad wouldn’t know if this offering we delivered to him was two cups light

On the day I learned that David Carradine died of what’s looking more and more like a session of autoerotic asphyxiation gone horribly awry, I also learned that the burgers I’ve been enjoying since childhood contain less than 15% actual meat.  

According to this study, what you’re eating isn’t all that appetizing:

Meat content in the hamburgers ranged from 2.1% to 14.8% (median, 12.1%). The cost per gram of hamburger ranged from $0.02 to $0.16 (median, $0.03) and did not correlate with meat content. Electron microscopy showed relatively preserved skeletal muscle. A variety of tissue types besides skeletal muscle were observed including connective tissue (n = 8), blood vessels (n = 8), peripheral nerve (n = 8), adipose tissue (n = 7), plant material (n = 4), cartilage (n = 3), and bone (n = 2). In 2 hamburgers, intracellular parasites (Sarcocystis) were identified.  Approximately half of their weight is made up of water. 

Great.  Just great.  I’ll never be able to look at my burger with the same childlike, glassy-eyed, pseudo reverence again.  Now I know how these fast food joints can sell their food so cheaply and yet still manage to make a profit.  

And I fear that whenever I do sneak a burger it’ll forever remind me of David Carradine and Michael Hutchence.  I can see it now.  There I’ll be, sitting in a greasy booth with my fellow coworkers, the skin of my forearms fused to the sticky surface of the faux marble table top, eyeing my bone chip, arterial matter, and connective tissue burger when I not-so-subtlety blurt out, “So, did you know that some people get off by choking themselves?”

This day has irrevocably changed my life for the worse.  Thank goodness it’s Friday…

I’ve been to a few eateries in San Diego that aren’t quite fast food joints, but aren’t quite full fledged restaurants.  When you arrive you queue up in a line and order your food at a register, from which you’re given a number and you proceed to sit down at a table of your choosing where a server eventually delivers you your food on a plate along with silverware and napkins.

I’m not quite sure what proper tipping etiquette is for establishments such as these, but I tend to err on the side of caution and typically drop a couple of bucks on the table when I leave.  The way I figure it, some minimum wage employee is not only bringing your food out to you, but also cleaning up your dishes after you leave, and that deserves at least the smallest bit of recognition.

I don’t want you to think that I’m being guilted into leaving behind a tip.  I believe these types of establishments provide a somewhat niche service that allows for a more civil way to enjoy a meal that’s half a step above fast food.  It’s not first class, but it’s not coach either.

I try to pay attention to the people around me as they leave, and I notice that very few seem to leave behind any sort of a tip.  Now, I understand a waiter didn’t usher you in, describe in detail the chef’s special of the day, tuck a nappy into your shirt collar and coo over your wife’s appearance, but show some heart.  Some poor guy brings you your food and cleans up your mess after you leave.  In the end it’s only a buck or two.  Show them that you at least acknowledge their efforts.  ”But….they aren’t being forced to work there,” I can hear some of you say.  Yeah, I know, but think about this; how would you feel if the shoe was on the other hand and you were the one serving and cleaning up after total strangers all day long?  Wouldn’t finding a couple of bucks left behind for you every once in a while make you feel better about your current situation?

Ahhh…perhaps I’m just over thinking this whole thing.  If so, then so be it.  I’m no Mr. Pink.  I’ll continue to tip because I have a bit of empathy for my fellow human beings.

…What kind of toys are kids playing with nowadays?

In the span of a single afternoon I happened to stumble upon:

Disgusting Anatomy Heart:  Have you ever found yourself standing in your darkened kitchen late at night, with the only light coming from the single dim frosted bulb inside your open refrigerator?  There you are, slouching into the open box, your arm draped heavily over the door as you slowly scan its chilled contents.  Unsure what you want to eat you’re suddenly overcome with an overwhelming, insatiable desire to hold a slick, pulsing, quivering human heart in your bare hands.  

No?  Strange…I can’t believe I’m the only one ever to have that feeling.  

+1 for the bonus eyeball kit.

Gabby Girl: High creep factor with this toy.  I’m not sure where the manufacturer was going with this doll, but the posable mouth, flickering tongue, beady, vacant eyes, and 80′s inspired clothes propels this toy into the high stratosphere of the uncomfortably abnormal.  

Recently I’ve been having this reoccurring nightmare of waking up in a cold sweat and seeing that sometime, in the dead of night, this life-sized doll had silently pulled up a chair next to my bed and has been patiently sitting there, in the dark, inches from my face, watching me sleep.  The only sound I hear is a sticky, rubbery *smack* *smack* as it gums it’s lips together, her dead eyes staring straight into my shivering, cowering soul.

This doll eerily resembles a cousin of mine who lives in San Francisco, but with fewer facial piercings, no chronic cough, and absence of strict vegan diet for “religious reasons”.

Gummy Tapeworm: Knowing that by eating this it’ll soon be working its way through my colon is enough to make me want to wash my hands after handling the package.  I wonder, if I ever had an opportunity to eat a real honest-to-gosh tapeworm, would it taste like apple?  Who knows what a tapeworm tastes like?

Okay…that’s enough disturbing thoughts for one night…

I’m not sure when this practice started, but it has got to stop.  Right.  Now.

What I’m all up in arms about is the fact that cereal companies are getting into the habit of placing their prizes inside of the cereal boxes, but packaged and placed along side the interior cereal bag.  This, IMHO, completely strips away the thrill of digging into the cereal itself and hunting for the elusive toy.

We all had our own special ways of extracting the prize from inside a freshly opened box of cereal.  As a child I preferred the “hold the box at a 45° angle, push in against the box to create a hand space, then dig in from the bottom” method.  Others opted for the less refined “bum rush the box by slamming your arm up to the elbow and muscle the toy out” approach.  If you weren’t hip to either technique you could find a large bowl and dump the entire contents and simply pick out the prize.  This last approach was deemed the cowards way of obtaining the prize, and was considered bad form around our household

But I guess this is all becoming moot, with Kellogg’s now pre-separating the prize from the cereal itself, these and other self-taught prize extracting techniques might go the way of Pound Puppies, Speak & Spells, and “flesh” colored crayons.  We’re denying future generations of children by not allowing them the pleasure of digging deep into a box Froot Loops, bits and pieces of cereal oozing out of the box as they stare at the ceiling in total concentration, hoping to feel their way to the prize that looked so cool printed on the outside of the box.

*Sigh*  It’s an example of another small of piece of my childhood dying by carefully measured increments.