Housekeeping and Peanut Rage

I meant to update my template or something- I forget exactly what I intended to do- and then I got distracted and kinda forgot that I had a blog and that I'd left it languishing in virtual limbo for weeks.

So what's happened lately with me?


- WRIR 97.3 FM, the radio station that I've been engineering/DJing at since 2005, completed our bi-annual Fund Drive last week and we broke our all-time record, despite lousy economic conditions and the direct competition from our local NPR station's own fund-drive. (We are wholly independent of NPR).

My passion for live music engineering was re-ignited by five excellent sessions- in the course of the fund drive, I engineered a local Gamelan orchestra, a jazz quartet, salsa greats Bio Ritmo, a twangy rock band called Mag Bats and a fast-rising Belgian duo called The Black Box Revelation, two guys who really tore things up- in a good way:



I had my own two shows as well, but I'm not podcasting them as they are full of fund-raising chatter and I'm not into editing audio files at the moment. The show returns to normal tomorrow, never fear. As if...

Hmmm...what else?

Oh yeah...I had been using a couple of internet dating services and going on a lot of nowhere-nothing  dates this summer, but I finally gave up on the dating services altogether . I kinda had to give up, because I met a warm, beautiful, intelligent woman who has been very kind and very good to me and I'm more than just a little bit sweet on her. We've gotten to the point where we are planning a vacation together, so I imagine she'd be pretty pissed off if I went on dates with women who aren't her, not that I would do that.

I'm feeling a sense of real-life happiness that is entirely new and wonderful to me and I don't plan on fucking it up. The future looks good with her in it.

 I've also  been a repeat guest on a internet radio talk show streamed on New Dissident Radio called Breaking Taboo. The show is archived on their site, you can download and  listen to all the recordings, not just the ones with me on them. The show's host, the multi-talented Lakota Phillips, also has a new show called Rebel Goddess.

Oh, and the Peanut Butter Conspiracy is pissing me off. There's been considerable media hoopla about the soaring price of peanut butter- the day I first heard this news, I went to my local store and found the store brand of all-natural (ingredients: peanuts, salt) PB was on sale for $2.00 per 16 oz jar.  A 5-lb bag of potatoes, on the other hand, cost nine bucks! Both items were more expensive than the low-end ground beef ($1.69/lb in bulk), which says a lot more about ground beef than it does about the Peanut Famine.

Before I forget: Never buy peanut butter that contains any added oil. A peanut is 50% oil by weight and there is no reason to add oil to PB- what food processors do is remove the healthy peanut oil ( which is sold separately as a commodity) and replace it with much cheaper industrial-strength hydrogenated and partially hydrogenated vegetable oils. The kind of oils that shorten your lifespan.

Read the label of your average Name Brand PB and ask yourself this: what part of the peanut does hydrogenated cottonseed oil come from?

Furthermore, if you have some extra time and really want to save money, make your own damn peanut butter. Here's how you do it:

-Throw peanuts into a blender or food processor. Add some salt or a touch of honey if you wish.

- Turn the device on.

-Turn it off and stir up the nuts.

-Turn it on again.

Repeat until you have peanut butter, which isn't really 'butter' at all. (It's really peanut paste, for Godzilla's sake!)

- Make someone else clean the blender.

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See ya on the radio!

Eat Stuff, Stay Young

 This (above) is a picture of me, circa 1999. Years of heavy drinking and drug use had turned me into a withered, skinny, shaky derelict of an old man while I was still in my 30s.

Fortunately, I quit using hard drugs sometime around the year 2000 and that allowed my body to retain most of the calories in the alcohol I was consuming, minus a few calories here and there from vomiting and the occasional bleeding injury. In any case, by 2004 I had stopped being so withered and skinny and I became a fat, bloated blimp. I only shook when I wasn't drinking- which was never- so I was pretty steady most of the time.

 But the Fall of 2005 brought with it the Fall of Me. I survived, but just barely. Sometimes it seems like part of me died that year and perhaps it was a part of me that I'm better off without.

Or maybe it is still inside somewhere, lurking and waiting...but for what?

After all, you can't blow up the Hindenburg twice.

I did have a relapse of sorts recently. I found myself mixing a live band on-the-air for the first time in about a year- I'd had a years-long binge of live music starting back in 2005, and I thought I'd cured my mixing addiction by replacing it with the guitar-playing habit that I thought I had kicked back in my drinking days ( see how these cycles work?).

These days, I can't seem to go a day without at least a few minutes of guitarizing. I say this  not without a certain amount of lasting gratitude, a gratitude which circumstance does not allow me to convey directly, but which is there nonetheless. I hope you understand.

Anyway.

This is me now, doing something that I love to do: admiring myself...um...I mean, setting up a broadcast sound-stage at our local non-profit FM station:

If you have ever listened to my radio show or to one of my broadcast/podcasts, I would like to take a minute to personally thank you for doing so.  It is a truly a labor of love, but it is worth it knowing that there are people out there, friends and strangers alike,who actually enjoy what I do...I mean, wow. That is a great feeling.

Having my own radio show is an honest-to-Godzilla childhood dream of mine come true, it really is.

This is what it looks like when I'm playing records for you...we have two old-fashioned turntables and those records are the real deal, straight outta my personal collection, scratches and all.

Of course, there's more to radio  than just spinning plates. You gotta know what the Fancy Knobs do, for one thing. And sometimes you get to meet really cool people. Or maybe instead of them, you'll meet my friend Kevin (below, middle), a.k.a, the redoubtable Mr. Atavist .
A year or three ago, I showed Kevin how the Fancy Knobs work and now he is conquering the world with his own show, one great unknown band at a time.

But enough about me and the people who are lucky enough to bask in my greatness. Let's talk about you.  Let's talk about us.

Nah...let's keep talking about me, 'cause I'm kinda bummed out that you can't come over for dinner tonight-  I made a nice summertime vegetarian treat for you and I kinda wanted to surprise you with it. There's a lot of ardor in my larder for you, you know. 

First I soaked my wheat, which you can see in the background, then I threw a bunch of chick peas and some tahini and other bits of things into my food processor...note that you should put most of the spices and small bits in first, but I had some extra parsley and roasted pepper, so it went in last.

Pressed buttons until the machine got loud and the food spun around like clothes in a washer.

After a few minutes, it looked like this. Not ready to eat, but much more colorful than my rather bland black-and-white laundry.

After much grinding and whirring, I eventually had a big bowl of the yummy, healthy goop known as hummus. Because you said you loved hummus.

Anyway, by now the wheat had finished soaking, so I added a bunch of stuff that I just happened to have lying around the kitchen to the wheat until it turned into tabbouleh. Which is pretty damned good, if I must say so myself. And I must say so myself, because no one else is here tonight  to say anything to me or for me. 

Sigh.  

 Not that I miss you or that I like having you around you or anything like that...I just hate having all this extra food. I knew you'd understand.

 The kicker is the cucumber dressing. It's easy as hell to make and it tastes great on top of hummus and tabbouleh.  Sliced cukes, added oil, vinegar, pepperoncini ,  a little sugar, some garlic and the leftover bits of mint, red peppers and parsley from the stuff I made earlier.

Put it all in the 'fridge and let it chill...

What's that? You can't come over?

Damn. No, it'll keep...yes, literally, haha. I'm glad you don't mind leftovers.

On the bright side, that means more dessert for me. I made these special just for you but I dunno how long they'll last...

Damn. My stomach hurts. Must've been all that hummus.


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Love it Or Loaf It

I am a compulsive reader of stuff and that includes food packaging. I scrutinize item after item, checking for hydrogenated fat,  high-fructose corn syrup, artificial sweeteners and the like. It slows down my shopping but I like the health benefits that come with a reasonable diet, so I take the time to read the labels.

But one  product slipped through. The bread.

I really had to wrestle with my core values over this damn bread before I even bought it- usually I buy the day-old unsliced  bread which is twice as flavorful as packaged bread and costs 50 cents as a sale item. But there wasn't any at the market so I went for the 2 for 1 sale on factory bread.


This bread isn't terrible and it has no bad fats or sugars, so I grabbed two loaves and checked out. It wasn't until I got home that my troubles began.

I popped a couple slices in the toaster and idly read the bread packaging while I waited. I encountered these words: "...baked the way nature intended".

What the hell does that mean? Like most feral children, I've spent a great amount of time living in the wilderness and scavenging for food and I have never, ever seen a loaf of nature-baked free-range bread. If there was such a thing as wild bread, I wouldn't have had to do all that goddamn dumpster diving when I was a kid and I bet I'd have a lot fewer possum scars.

So I got to thinking, which isn't always a good idea.


Nature never intended to bake loaves of bread. The circumstances required for nature to spontaneously create a loaf of sliced wheat bread would be pretty far-fetched indeed...I was picturing a wheat field in a valley , with giant millstones rolling downhill from the surrounding mountains and crushing the wheat, which is being partially devoured by insects that eat chaff and shit baking powder while it rains just enough to make dough but not enough to put out the fire in a nearby woods...then you need a small tornado to mix the ingredients and hurl the mass into the burning forest where it lands in a rectangular hole left by some sort of  appendage-less burrowing creature.

I haven't figured out a plausible scenario for the natural slicing yet. Nor have I worked out the damage caused by such a concentration of localized natural disasters but I''m guessing that it would be a lot of damage. Perhaps a loaf of nature-baked bread is what killed the dinosaurs.

My next thought was : I'd be a happy and well-adjusted person if it weren't for this goddamn bread.

So I thought about taking it back to the store and asking for a refund on account of the label having bothersome nonsense printed on it, but I decided not to because by that time my toast was ready and toast always calms me down.


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Skip The Part About Leaving A Beautiful Corpse

Meet Donna Simpson, a public suicide-in-progress. Simpson's stated life ambition is to become the world's fattest woman, hoping to reach the 1,000 pound mark within two years. At around 600 pounds, she is already unable to walk  distances of more than a few feet without using a cart.  At 1,000 pounds, she is likely to be completely immobile, permanently bed-ridden by her own choice.

Disgusting? You bet. But I can't help but be impressed by her ability to set a worse example than her cartoon namesake, Homer Simpson:

                                Not The World's Worst Role-Model

For those who would rather not eat ten large bags of potato chips at a single sitting, I offer a few nutritional short-cuts seen during a recent shopping trip.

Above we have an 11.25 ounce box of pre-sliced Frozen Toast, sold for the  low price of $3.29, or about 41 cents per slice.  Look at the label. Amazingly, this pre-fab simulated toast product can be prepared in only 5 minutes! Wow. That's almost as fast as I can toast a bagel in my countertop toaster and about half as fast as I can toast bread.

The good folks at Pepperidge Farm are assuming that not only are you too lazy to toast your own bread, they are also banking that you are too lazy to butter it. To help, they have 'buttered' it for you by saturating it with margarine and vegetable oil. As a result, you'd be better off eating refried donuts than PF's overpriced grease-sponges.



The stuff of MREs:

Here we have  "Home Style" "Traditional"  turkey, gravy and stuffing packaged in unrefrigerated plastic tubs.  Why bother with the dangerous hassle of dropping a huge turkey into a vat of boiling grease?  Next Thanksgiving, just place one of these  containers in front of each dinner guest and be done with it.

Add some of these for good measure:

This is a 24-ounce package of prepared mashed potatoes. It sells for $4.00. In the produce section, you can buy 5 pounds of potatoes for $3.50 and it will produce about 7 pounds of mashed potatoes. Yeah, I know mashing potatoes is 'work' , but will a little exercise kill you? (Maybe, if your name is Donna Simpson.)

Size Two:

Pictured here is an 8-ounce box of frozen peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches. It contains four two-ounce sandwiches and costs $3.49,  about 85 cents per  tiny sandwich or $7.00 per pound. Apparently fixing a traditional PB&J is just too much work for today's youth, 27% of whom are too flabby for active military duty.

Curiously, the FDA is currently considering passing regulations restricting the amount of salt that is put into processed food. According to the the American Medical Association, 150,000 lives could be save each year simply by reducing sodium consumption.

""Nothing is off the table," said FDA spokeswoman Meghan Scott. 

The salt industry disagrees.

Morton Satin [his real name-ed.], director for technical and regulatory affairs at the Salt Institute, which represents salt producers, said regulation "would be a disaster for the public." 

"If you consume a lot of salt, you also get rid of a lot of salt -- it doesn't mean it's an excess," he said. "I want to make sure they're basing this on everything that is in the scientific literature, so we don't end up being guinea pigs* because someone thinks they're doing something good."  

I fail to see how reducing our salt consumption to healthy levels makes us "guinea pigs", but I can see some obvious harm that will arise: if salt consumption drops by one-half, so will the profits from the sale  of salt. The FDA estimates that we each eat 3 grams of salt every day- someone has to sell all that salt and the sellers aren't happy with the FDA's idea.

*(One third of all American adults suffer from high blood pressure, probably due to years of being treated like a salt-gobbling guinea pig by the food industry)

Donut Pass Go

I think that the donut production schedule at my local market is the most convincing argument for the existence of Divine Intelligent Design that I can make. This statement doesn't say much for my thoughts regarding the logical foundation of "Intelligent Design", but it sure speaks volumes about the humble reverence with which I view donuts.

Earthly manifestations of the Divine are often subject to zealous misinterpretation and the Sacred Donut is no exception; so before I continue with my sermon, I'd like to pause for a moment and debunk some commonly held beliefs about Donuts and God:

1: DONUTS ARE UNHEALTHY FOOD: FALSE!

In fact, donuts, taken as a group , are one of the best food values you can find. Think of it this way- your body needs to ingest roughly 2000-2500 calories per day in order to maintain it's normal functions- now imagine that you are trapped on an island with limited food supplies- what food are you going to want with you? Carrot sticks or donuts?

I was recently on a short airplane flight during which we were handed bags of baby carrots as our in-flight snack. The label on my two-ounce plastic pouch indicated that the entire contents of the bag consisted of a mere 15 calories! You would have to eat roughly 135 two-ounce bags of baby carrots in order to obtain enough calories for a single day's exertions- or you could eat two donuts. It would seem to be a no-brainer.

2: THERE IS NO GOD: FALSE!

If there's no God, then who invented churches and made Sunday morning such a popular day for attending them? And who decided that Saturday's baked goods would go on deep discount sale while almost everyone else is in church on Sunday morning, allowing me to get "first dibs"?

Why, God,of course!

On a typical Sunday, I can arrive just as the market opens and pick up an overstuffed box of donuts (12-20 crammed inside) for less than two dollars- there's enough calories in one of those packages to sustain me for a fortnight or longer and you can bet that I'm grateful for it because I know it's all part of of His plan to provide for me during my current hard times!
If you need more proof, consider this: have you ever taken a crusty, stale old donut and microwaved it for seven seconds? It transforms those hard little shit-cakes into steamy mouthfuls of heavenly miracles! It's about a million times better than loaves and fishes, I tell ya what!

And who invented the microwave? God did!

A Note Regarding Microwave Ovens And The Manifestation of Demons: Traditionally, Earthly visitations by Infernal Beasts have been marked with the over-powering smell of brimstone. In the "post 9-11" world, this has been replaced by the cloying stench of microwaved fish...the fish, of course is an ancient symbol of Christianity, so it's no accident that Satan chose fish as the ultimate office stink-bomb. Frequent lunchroom "sea-gas" may indicate that your co-workers are possessed by demons, but I'm guessing you already know that.

3 :God Hates Atheists But He Looks Out For Them Anyway: True!

Last Sunday, there was only one box of remaindered pastries still on the shelf when I arrived - tough economic times have generated a steep increase in the number of persons competing for day-old goods- so I snatched it up without a second glance and proceeded to check-out. I glanced through the carton's cellophane window as I scanned the package and saw movement. Tiny , swarming movements. Lots of them.

Tiny movements don't belong in donut boxes, so I peered through the transparent rectangle to see what was moving. The box was teeming with small winged insects, very much like fruit flies, only slightly larger. I gave the box a vigorous shake and a few flies loopily escaped from between the cardboard flaps.

I approached a nearby clerk in order to show her what I had found and a horrible thought occurred to me: All the years of drugs and booze are finally catching up to me...there are no bugs in this box, I'm simply starting to hallucinate. In five minutes, I'll be covered with spiders...and then abducted by aliens...Christ, I'm finally having my long-dreaded psychotic break with reality and it's being sparked by stale donuts. When -if- I 'wake up', it'll probably be in a padded cell, naked and covered with imaginary chocolate frosting.

I showed the clerk my donuts and she was strangely non-committal. She indicated that she needed to get the manager and ducked into the office, taking the package with her.

I'm being taken by Gypsy Bakers, I thought, they are in the back, pulling the old-switcheroo...or using a Port-A-Vac to suck the little flying bastards out of the box.

The manager appeared, clutching the box. He looked down at it, then at me. Was he assessing my sanity?

"Sir,", he began, "I apologize. These donuts appear to be contaminated. We'll be pulling the rest of the stock now. Thank you for bringing it to our attention."

The rest of the stock? But there are no more donuts!

So I drove to the next nearest market and approached the donut case. Empty.

I asked the clerk what was up with the donut shortage. I really wanted a donut but I didn't want to settle for a 'Hostess'-type brand.

"Oh", he told me," they are having some sort of problem at the other store and the donuts are late."

So I wound up buying two pounds of bananas instead of a box of donuts. They weren't nearly as much fun to eat as the donuts would have been, but I guess I should be thankful to God for taking extra-special care in helping me stick to such a healthy diet.

While My Guitar Gently Sleeps (Day of Rest)

I got up early on Sunday so I could do my shopping while most other consumers were at church, asleep or both. One of my first purchases was a new set of blood-red bedsheets. Before starting my chores, I placed my guitar out of harm's way on my newly- adorned mattress and after doing so I couldn't help but think that my B.C. Rico is one sexy instrument...sadly, the largest hole on my guitar is 1/8" across and 3/4" deep, otherwise I'd marry it. I think I'm hoplessly romantic.

Next, I set about preparing dinner. The previous night, I had taken a package of frozen chicken breasts out of the freezer and placed them in the refrigerator overnight. This left them in a half-frozen/half-thawed state that made it easy to dice them into cubes for better marinading.

ALLAN'S SPICY NAMELESS CHICKEN


- 1 package (1 1/2 lbs. to 2 lbs.) boneless, skinless chicken breast, partially frozen, trimmed and diced

- 2 smallish onions ,chopped

- A really big green bell pepper, chopped

- 2 habanero peppers, finely diced

- 2 red chile peppers, diced

- Fresh garlic, minced

- Enough Cheep-O Brand Italian Dressing to cover it all ( but not drown it).

Avoid using 'light' dressing, you'll need the oil in the 'hi-cal' stuff for cooking; the extra sugar/corn syrup in the 'lite' will burn and ruin everything...
Throw this stuff into something big enough to hold it all, add some thyme, rosemary, white pepper and cayenne pepper, stir, cover and refrigerate. It should look like this:




I can't do housework without music, so my next step was a bit of simple stereo maintenance- ever have a stereo/radio etc. that makes "crackling" sounds when you adjust the volume and other knobs? Perhaps one side of the stereo cuts on and off unless you jiggle it "just right"?

Dirt is likely to be the culprit.

I removed the top casing of my amplifier and set to cleaning...in my case, the volume fader was cracking and buzzing and generally annoying the hell out of me, so that's where I started. First, I used some canned air to blow out the dust from the front (below) .



That solved nothing. It was a total waste of time. The real dirt was on the inside.



That little grey rectangle to the left of the air nozzle is the backside of the volume button. It slides along a metal rail that regulates voltage (a potentiometer or 'pot' for short), so the next thing to do is to clean the pot. The slight electrical charge that runs through the pot tends to attract dirt and other particulate matter, such as smoke and cat dander, so it's a good idea to clean it at least once per decade.

First, blow canned air along the rail while sliding the fader back and forth. You can actually see the agitated dust specks clinging to the red nozzle- there was some serious grime inside!

Next, moisten a cotton swab with 100% anhydrous (without water) alcohol, which you can obtain from any electronics parts dealer- stick the wet end of the swab inside the pot's groove and gently slide it back and forth, in and out, slowly at first, then faster, repeating as needed...aaaahh. Now we are getting somewhere!

Important: Do not use rubbing alcohol on your electronics, ever. Look at a bottle of rubbing alcohol- it says 70% alcohol on the label. The other 30% consists of water and mineral oil, two things that will ruin your delicate electrical wotsits.

Do you remember VCR tape decks? If I had a DVD for every VCR that I have seen destroyed by the careless application of rubbing alcohol, my name would be Netflix.



The flash bleached this photo- in "real life" , this swab was filthy. All told, it took nearly half a dozen swabs before I was satisfied.



Problem solved! I put on CD #2 of the Peter Tosh boxed set, 'Honorary Citizen', made a quick trip to the laundry room and began cleaning and re-arranging my humble (read: humiliating) abode.

The first thing I did was carry my broken old futon frame out to the trash. My landlord is renovating one of the other units in the building and had piled up a load of cabinets, carpet and furnishings for a City pick-up, so my timing was perfect, I merely added my jetsam to the flotsam that was already there...I also dragged my dysfunctional 1975-ish Zenith console TV to the pile...I had entertained vague plans of converting it into an aquarium one day, but some things are just not meant to be... the TV belonged to my late grandparents and carried a lot of emotional weight, but holding onto a 150-pound, six-foot-wide TV cabinet for sentimental purposes is kinda crazy, even by my standards.

After ridding myself of these large, useless items, I pushed my remaining belongings to one side of the room and went looking for furballs and dust bunnies along the walls that had been covered by said useless objects. I found plenty.



The view from the other corner:



That painting is of me, back when I was fat, naked and had (some) hair on my head. I'm thin and bald now, but I still get naked on occasion, as necessity dictates.

Speaking of naked, when my male cousin died this spring, his sister gave me his surprisingly bizarre collection of pornographic DVDs. I didn't have the heart to tell her that bi-sexual midget porno is not exactly a boat-floater for me, so I graciously accepted them, but I need to get that shit out of my house- dying is natural and not to be feared, but I would rather not leave behind a collection of bi-curious dwarf porn- people might get the wrong impression- so I boxed it up and tossed it into my neighbor's trash can. My neighbor is a Born Again Christian midget who attends 12-Step meetings at Sexaholics Anonymous, so I doubt he'll mind, after all he's probably seen it all before...ick.

Strangely, by the time I took out the trash, the old Zenith was already gone, someone had carted it away...I wonder if there's a market for 30-year old broken televisions? Perhaps the heavy metals in the cathode-ray tube are worth something.

Speaking of paintings, I decided to "retire" the one pictured below. It was done by Ralph, one of my all-time least-favorite people; a drug-dealing, pedophile leader of a cult of teenage runaways and a "friend" of my parents...he once ripped my mom off by selling her a forgery of a Salvador Dali print. That's a whole other story...fiction, of course.



Thinking about kicking Ralph's ass made me hungry, so I placed my marinating foodlets into a sauce pan and sizzled them until the chicken was cooked through, then I added some water, flour and butter, whisked it until the sauce thickened and thenserved it over brown rice. Spicy yum! I made another laundry-related trip and then I sat down with a plate of my 'whatever' and some garlic bread...fantastic!




Speaking of "retire", today is my last day at my current temp job, so I snuck my camera in and took a snapshot of the chair I've been filling since June. People used to stick their heads into the doorway and ask me rhetorical questions such as: "How can you stand it in here?" and "Don't you feel claustrophobic?"




I am not going to miss those questions.

Spend Money, Gain Weight

Reading bad journalism can't make you fat or poor but following the examples given in said articles can. Let's look at this piece from MSN, via the Christian Science Monitor (red words mine):

By the time he's driven to the farmers market, bought the organic veggies and spent an hour cooking a meal for himself and his wife, Mark Chernesky figures he's spent $30.

What is he buying? $30 will buy more than enough veggies, organic or not, to feed two people. I can feed myself for an entire week for $30 using pasta, veggies and bread. Dude must be buying meat or seafood.

Dude has also factored driving and preparation time into his food cost.

That's why recently, after fighting rush hour, the Atlanta multimedia coordinator dashed in to Figo, a pasta place, for hand-stuffed ravioli slathered with puttanesca sauce. "I'll get out of here for $17 plus tip," he said.

First, an admission of prejudice. I hate anchovies. Second, dude has factored time and gas into his home-cooking expense; in the take-out example, these should apply as well- "rush hour traffic" and tip, plus $17 dollars, plus time...are we nearing $30 yet? Third, puttanesca is not especially expensive to make and the upscale-sounding phrase 'hand-stuffed' is just another way of saying that you are willing to pay someone else to stuff your ravioli for you. That's an indulgence.

Crunch the numbers, and across America the refrain is the same:is the same: Eating out is the new eating in. Even with wages stagnant, time-strapped workers are abandoning the family kitchen in droves.

The preceding paragraph adds absolutely nothing to the argument that eating out is cheaper than eating at home. It does, however, lend credence to my theory that people are lazier than ever before.

"When I add my hourly rate, the time to cook at home, I can instead take my family out to dinner, and it comes out pretty even," said Paul Howard, a manager-instructor at Café Laura, a restaurant run by college students at Pennsylvania State University in University Park, Pa.

Dude, how many people consider their family dinner as billable hours? By that logic, you'd have to factor your 'hourly rate' into every domestic activity. By extension, you could save hundreds of dollars a week just by canceling your cable TV. Does Dude think about his 'hourly rate ' during sex? There's a word for that. A dish as well: puttanesca sauce.

Sometimes I fantasize about what it would be like to have a family and my most pleasant images are of preparing and sharing meals together. According to this article, Americans are beginning to consider the nightly repast as a necessary evil to be dispensed with as quickly as possible in order to get back to doing whatever it is that is more important to them than spending time with their families. That is sad.

In addition to the time spent together, when you fix your own meals you can reduce and/or eliminate fats, sugars, salt, even meat if you choose ...whatever you don't want, you don't get. When you eat out, you have no idea what you are getting and how many calories it contains.

Here's a good two-step method for estimating take-out calories:

1)Look at whatever it is that you are getting ready to eat. Make a guess at it's caloric content using your worst nightmares as a guideline.

2)Double that estimate.

I know that there are some readers who will make arguments for eating out. I'm not against eating out. I'm disputing the argument that it is cheaper than eating at home.

I'll bet you dinner that I'm right.

Break The Jinx

I awoke to the sound of jackhammers and profanity. Outside my window there were five men sitting, watching another man as he used a powered hammer to pound a hole into the asphalt. The sitting men sounded like they were playing a game of ' Who Shit?', but were having difficulty hearing each other over the din of the jackhammer. Their shouted conversation went much like this :

"Fuck you!"

"What?"

"I said FUCK YOU!"

"Fuck who?"

"FUCK YOU!"

"What?"

"Fuck you!"

"Fuck who?"

"Fuck YOU!"

"Hhahaha!"

The shouting men were white. The working guy was black. They were all contractors, working for a local company with a name that sounds like 'cocks'. I wonder how much the City is paying Cocks Co. for this pneumatic morning serenade ?

Anyway, on to the good news:

My car runs wonderfully! Here's a quick recap of my automotive woes, starting early springtime:

- Car begins running erratically, producing massive clouds of smoke, stalling out, not starting etc, then running OK for a while, then sputtering again...'Check Engine' is on...during a search for the problem, it is discovered that my engine still has the original timing belt (162,000 miles) and it is frayed, almost ready to break.

- Spend $400 having timing belt replaced. Problems with engine continue.

-Engine problems become moot when I collide with a deer at 55 mph. I dig into my vacation money and spend $1200 on body repair. Eventually, another $600 is spent on replacing and re-aligning the tires.

-I get laid off. No more income. Begin DIY mechanic approach.

- Many failures later, I relent and take car to Volvo shop, where I am told it will cost $2500 to replace wiring harness. Intensify DIY approach.

- Info found on internet suggests mechanic may be wrong. Take car to different mechanic: It is a pair of faulty sensors- total cost, including labor, is under $200! Car runs great!

-The next day I told a friend :" Ya know, I'm afraid to say this, but I think I finally got my car fixed..."
Jinxed!
Within hours of making this statement my car started running badly again- no smoke, but it shook and shuddered when idling, had absolutely no power, was getting 10 miles per gallon...with some help, the problem was traced to a cylinder that wasn't firing properly. My friend said he thought it was a fuel injector problem- some online research supported his theory. But I had tried fuel injector cleaner when my car started fucking up...it didn't do anything.

That's because I followed the directions on the FI cleaner bottle.
Try again, I was urged. Ignore the instructions this time. Do it like this.

So I waited until my tank was almost empty and then I added two bottles of Old Engine Gumout. Then I pumped in four gallons of gas and started driving...by the time my tank was nearly empty again, it was running smooth and quiet- I had driven just over 100 miles, so my MPG was a little over 25, which is normal for my vehicle.

Yesterday, I shared this news with a group of friends -and my car didn't break down.

This morning I called my grandmother and told her I was going to drive up and visit her- and my car didn't break down.

I even started this post about my car not breaking down- and it didn't break down.

I went to market and back- and my car didn't break down...you get the picture.

Oatmeal, rice, bananas, beans...Godzilla, but I'm sick of the poverty diet.I was craving meat.
I don't eat very much meat- it is usually too expensive- but $1.59 a lb. for skinless , hormone-free chicken breast? Stock up!


Clockwise , from L to R : Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner.

The way my luck has been lately, I half-expected to manifest symptoms of salmonella , but it's been 24 hours and I'm OK. The leftovers are even better...

After my repast, I took a short stroll. I hadn't gotten far when I saw this:

Two unopened cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon sitting atop the trash cans behind a nearby building.

There was once a time when I would have wiped these off with my dirty shirt and slugged 'em straight down; instead, I dashed home for my camera before Scotty, our local hobo, found them.

These cans, to me, are a sign that one of my fondest wishes may yet be granted.
Somebody that I care about lives in the building where I saw this -I think these may be their cans...I would say more, but this time it's not me that I'm worried about jinxing.

Fingers crossed!

Mythic Kitchen #23 (of 17)

"It's the best thing since sliced bread."

This expression is commonly used to express approval of some new-fangled gadget or gee-gaw, but I think it overlooks an important truth.

Unsliced bread is usually better than it's sliced kin.

For example, my local supermarket offers pretty decent store-baked breads. They are available in sliced and unsliced loaves and the unsliced loaves are almost always available at 'day-old' half-price.
They clearly don't sell as well as the sliced loaves.
We, as consumers, actually expect our bread to be sliced for us. We are lazy consumers. It wouldn't surprise me if pre-sliced cheese appears on our shelves soon.

Shopping tip: Yesterday's loaf of unsliced bread is just as fresh as today's sliced loaf. As soon as you slice it, it is exposed to air and begins to go stale.
Most commercial brands use preservatives to retard spoilage, but I like to avoid those if possible...of course, with my luck it'll probably turn out that a cocktail of sodium benzoate, disodium guanylate and THBQ cures everything.

Anyway, the bread is half-priced, but you'll need to spend an extra ten to twenty seconds per sandwich on slicing it. If you don't know how to slice bread, stop reading this.
I'm not going to be held liable for the damages resulting from anyone's fumbled attempts to slice bread with chainsaws, explosives, mallets, sabers, two-handed saws or anything else that isn't specifically designed to slice bread.

Hell, I've been slicing bread for decades and I still wear protective eyewear and chain-mesh gauntlets when I perform wetwork on dry goods...just last night, I let my guard down- I was making toast without exercising proper caution - when a sudden draft through my kitchen caused a fine mist of powdered cinnamon to waft across the tiny room.
If a small child with a life-threatening cinnamon allergy had been standing downwind from me at that precise moment...well ,who knows what might have happened?

Thank Godzilla, no such child was present- but they might have been. I didn't check. I was lucky this time, but I will endeavor to be more careful in the future.

Moral : Look both ways before you slice it or spice it.

Continental Breakfast of Champions

I got my car back today. The bill was $30 less than I was told- the shop told me the tires cost less than they first thought. They have come in under estimates on some of my former vehicles too... At times I suspect the garage of honesty-at other times I wonder what they are really up to.

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It has been exactly two years since my last drink!
Funny line my fellow recovering pal 'Lisa' told me yesterday:
"If I wasn't an alcoholic, I'd be drunk every night."
Hahah! Ya gotta laugh...
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Yesterday I was stuck at home with almost nothing to eat and no easy way to get groceries, so I made a salsa with what I did have. It turned out very well and is very cheap:

Two cans black beans- drain and rinse
One can corn- drain
One can diced tomato
A leftover carrot, diced (use whatever veggie bits ya got)
A few cloves of chopped garlic
A small handful of chopped cilantro
A few spoons of chopped jalepenos
Some cumin
Tiny bit oregano, black pepper , hot sauce, whatever you like

Total prep time: Under 10 minutes
Total cost: About four bucks. (Yields about 3- 3 1/2 pounds)
Note on fiber content:Fidel Castro eats a version of this to which he adds 2 parts oatmeal. He refers to it as Tsunami Salsa. You will feel better afterwards!

Cover it and let chill for a couple hours, stir every once in a while...mmmm!
(Store in plastic container)

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Yesterday I had a job interview that went well, but it's only part-time. Details if I get it- I am very wary of jinxing myself!

Today I sold my first package of radio advertising! My commission will bring an extra $100 a month in thru December. I'm starting to think I might be able to do pretty well selling ads part-time. Obviously, I love the station, so it's easy to be enthusiastic during my pitch. In general, I'd rather chew glass than sell products... however, I could get into selling vintage guitars...ahhh, jinxed!

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Pins and needles, grandma up and down the last couple days. I feel a lot better with my car back- I might go up there tomorrow.

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Hope everyone's well. I hope to see you soon. The heat and the vehicle-less days of walking through it have worn me out.

See America on Twenty Dollars a Week

(Like many headlines, the one above is misleading. It doesn't factor in expenses such as rent, utility bills, insurance premiums etc. ; and by "See America" I mean: "see my office, the inside of the bus , my apartment and various sidewalks")

Sunday night I withdrew twenty bucks from an ATM. This, I told myself, is all the money I can afford to spend this week. I really thought I could pull it off, but I failed. It was close.


My largest unavoidable expenditure was getting to and from work. A round-trip is $2.50, over five days that's $12.50, which only left $7.50 to live on for seven days. Transportation wiped out over half of my budget before my week even began.
It's important to note that I started with the following already in my larder:

-A half-dozen or so cans of food- tuna, beans, tomato sauce etc.

- 2 lbs dry rice

- an onion

- Fresh garlic and fresh cilantro

- Too much oatmeal

- Spices, spices and more spices

- Assorted condiments, some in jars, some in packets.

- A pound of coffee

- Cat food

I purchased a loaf of whole-grain bread- a luxury at $2- a half-gallon of grape juice ($2) and three pounds of bananas ($1) . That left $2.50.

With that, I bought a 20 lb bag of generic cat litter ($2) and a box of store-brand baking soda, ($.50). (I mix the baking soda into the litter-it greatly reduces the smell- and it's much, much cheaper than buying the 'deodorant' brands.)

That left me with zero cash for seven days. What to do?

First, I made rations, starting with my version of Fidel's Tsunami Salsa:

- 2 cans black beans, drained
- 2 cans corn, drained
- 1 can diced tomatoes
- a few cloves of garlic, chopped
- a 1/2 cup or so of cilantro, chopped
- a 1/4 jar of jalapeno slices and the last bit of a jar of pepper relish
- 1 diced onion
- some cumin

This yields approx. 4 lbs of tasty, healthy salsa that will keep for over a week in the fridge. Total cost is about three bucks, perhaps less.
I ate the last of it for dinner Thursday night, self-served with a side of curried rice, a piece of dry toast and followed with a dessert of oatmeal flavored with cinnamon, nutmeg, honey and bananas.

This meal was nearly identical to my lunch and dinner of the previous three days, with the exception of a tuna sandwich for lunch on Tuesday and some grapes I mooched from a pal last night.

I'm not complaining- even in the abundance of cash, this is pretty much what I eat- it's not because I can't cook , it's just that I'm lazy and unless I'm sharing a meal with others I consider eating to be considerably less exciting than cooking. This apathetic approach to diet has caused me to go from 195 lbs to 145 lbs in under two years, as well as lowering my cholesterol, triglycerides and blood pressure from the 'critical' (Tri-G was 650!) range to the 'exceptional'
( TG now 110) range ; my doctor uses me as a model to hold up to his other patients who have high cholesterol etc...he recommends diet and exercise as alternatives to prescription drugs...in other words, he says a healthy lifestyle is better for you than magical pills.
What a quack, eh?

In any case, my cupboard is Hubbardesque and the catboxes need changing, but I made it for five days, which is pretty good, I think. Four dollars a day, $2.50 of which was busfare= $1.50 a day for food. Healthy food that tastes good @ fifty cents a meal. Easy.

This is how I plan on replenishing my savings, because today is the day I get my car out of the body shop, which means that my money will all be gone at 5 pm this evening.

I'll be too busy to spend money this weekend: tonight I'm guest- hosting our Friday funk show, Zendo Soundsystem; tomorrow I'm hosting our weekly 1980's show and engineering some band that I've never heard of; Sunday I have my morning show and after that I'm going to attempt to visit my grandmother again. I will be watching the woods for deer on this trip. Carefully.

I know my grannie is gonna ask me if I need any money.
I do.
I need twenty-five dollars. I bet that I can live for a week on twenty-five bucks...oh, and hey, could you throw in an extra hundred for gasoline?

Computer, I'd Like Some Biscotti

Last week I got a "spam" from UPS, telling me that my delivery had been confirmed...I hadn't ordered anything from anywhere, so I didn't give it much thought; I assumed it was junk mail and deleted it after a cursory glance.

A day or two later, I came home from work and found a UPS parcel on my porch.

That UPS email wasn't spam at all- it was biscotti! Lotsa biscotti, the homemade kind! Chocolate, nuts... chunky goodness throughout!

I'd like to say "thank you" to my pal B and her bakerman C, but I can't talk right now. My mouth is full of baked yumminess.

So I say "MMMPKOOOMM" instead.

Improv Cuisine For Single Men

My favorite style of cooking is improvisational. It suits both my budget and my general inability to follow simple instructions such as those found in recipes.

This is almost all the food I had in my kitchen on Sunday. I was hungry as hell, but a long, sleepless night of playing records and tying cables had left me a little too shaky to drive- and the tranquilizers and sedatives I took 24 hours ago were finally starting to kick in, so I was pretty much stuck with:

A) Some prefab curry paste. Never stay home without it.
B) A can of beans.
C) Garlic. Fresh is better, but I was pretty wasted so this was all I had.
D) Hot Pepper Relish. Never run out. Life sucks without this.
E) Rice.
F) Frozen ground turkey, thawed.
G&H) Onion and Carrots.

In the background are two cans of gluten-free cat food. These are optional and not used in this example.

Chop up a few carrots and put some rice on the stove:

To cook rice: Put some rice in a pot. Put twice as much water as rice into the same pot, bring to a boil, set heat to low, cover with a snug lid and cook until fluffy. If it turns brown/black and smells scorched, you have overcooked it. Steam is to be expected, smoke is not.

Put the carrots in a skillet and saute them for a few minutes. While they simmer, dice the onion. Onions cook faster than carrots, so we are adding them later:


Once the carrots are a bit tender and the onions have started to become translucent, it's time to add the turkey and spices. If you are using ground beef, cook the beef first and drain off some of the fat before adding any spices, otherwise just add the bird, a few small spoons of curry, a few more of hot peppers and some garlic.
Mix it all together and let simmer until the turkey is cooked through.



The rice is done now. Take it and dump it into a larger pot. Add the skillet's contents and the (drained) can of beans. Cover and simmer for an hour or so.


What you will have resembles a scattering of rabbit droppings on a bed of poached maggots, but it tastes pretty good, is reasonably healthy -omitting the meat and adding more beans and veggies is an option- and best of all, it's under five bucks to prepare and it will feed one person for two days.

Cooking for guests is an entirely different affair. Perhaps we'll cover that in a later post .

Being Awesome is Hard Work

Remember Rube Goldberg? Rube would like my style. This is my desk at home - this morning, I waited until the last possible second to convert music from a vinyl record to a computer file .
On the right, there is a turntable- music leaves the turntable, goes into the 1970's console below it- (which actually has 'PHONO' I/O), is routed through the smaller mixer into my computer, which displays it as a wave form and converts and saves it as digital- then it goes from PC into the smaller mixer (center) and finally into my cheap-ass desk stereo and $20 speakers.

There are easier and better ways to to do this, but my way is more fun.

Anyway, I got the album recorded just in time to rush down to the station for a quick lunch. It's our Spring Fund Raiser :


Sushi!

Then I headed out to the West End for a Focus Group. That will be getting a post of it's own.

Then back to the station, where I sat in on our Local Show with DJ Jeff and MC Wendy:

I am Co-Director of Local Music and this is my section. Being Co-Director means that my colleague Mike Rutz does all the work and I get half the credit. He's pretty amazing- keeping up with all the local stuff is hard.

Anyway, I gotta get ready for tomorrow morning's show.
Tune in at 7am EST on the web.


My program is called The New Breakfast Snob- vote for it !

Full story after the dust settles....