Yesterday I was chatting with my boss about how a halfway decent restaurant next to our office suddenly shut down with no fanfare or warning, and how it was a bit of a shame, and how it would have been nice if it had served fries, when she dropped this bombshell on me: it didn't serve fries because it wasn't part of the union. The fry union. The National Union of Friturists. I'm fucking serious, here's their website.
Frankly I'm still not wholly believing this isn't an elaborate joke being played on me by my boss. But it does stand to reason, because there is a particular technique of fry-making here which is ubiquitous, and ubiquitously good, but also more labor-intensive than the typical chop-dry-boil-serve of Anglo-Saxonia. And now I find myself doing something I rarely do, which is praise Belgium.
Belgian fries are fucking good, and make it almost utterly non-worthwhile to buy fries back home from the vast majority of places that serve them, except from a few places, sometimes dreadfully expensive pretentious type places and sometimes greasy spoons, that use what is the ubiquitous method here: chop-dry-boil-drain-boil-serve. Far more crispy, and perhaps counter-intuitively far less fatty, at least as far as taste and texture go.
Okay - once in awhile, when you've been roughing it in the bush for a bit in Northern Ontario and you've got a dreadful hunger on and there's some chip truck selling fries with fresh pickerel or something lovely like that, it's quite nice to have a big soggy mess of piping-fresh chop-dry-boil-serve potatoes to eat because they still taste like potatoes, in a way, and the dripping-fattiness isn't unwelcome. And as a convert to the joys of poutine, I believe, perhaps erroneously but blow me, motherfucker, that it wouldn't be nearly as good with chop-dry-boil-drain-boil-serve chips as it is with chop-dry-boil-serve, because with poutine I believe the whole point is to ensure maximum dripping fat uptake in an effort to soak up a drug and alcohol binge (thank you for helping me live with my vices, Quebec).
But I find I have to really be in the mood for those, or else dead drunk or coming off amphetamines, the second of which won't happen again until I have a mid-life crisis in twenty years, while chop-dry-boil-drain-boil-serve chips, while in the end rather less recognizably tasting of potatoes, are always really fucking good.
So anyways, good on you, National Union of Friturists. Solidarity! But I wonder what they do to non-unionized people who make chips, or union members who commit heresy and make chop-dry-boil-serve chips. I almost don't want to know how this particular delicious sausage is made. . .
giovedì, dicembre 10, 2009
Would we recognize ourselves 40 years ago
Reading more Hannah Arendt now, On Revolution, and starting to get the feeling - I'm only about 15 pages in so maybe it will be corrected soon - that the poor woman died at the right time. Never saw the 80's and never saw Western society's flawless, splashless dive into utter individuality and the consequent annhilation of the polis, of her ideas of freedom and equality, and indeed of ideology in an abstract sense though I don't know if she'd have minded the last.
I mean, what would she have made of a jerkoff of a blog like this one I'm writing right now, where I whine about my feelings and how I think World War II should have been fought and go on about my favourite kinds of trees, which I write in the morning before I head off to a career which exists in some sick nether-zone between work and action . . . oh I don't know. It's not as bad as all that. I'm just in a poopy mood.
And really my job isn't as bad as all that, in some ways it's smashing, and I've even started largely appreciating our Yankee overlords, though we'll see how long that lasts if they neglect to give me the Australian contract, that will propel me into the upper - count it - the upper middle class. And anytime in the past week or so that I've been feeling poopy about my job, I've looked at this blog, that was on one of the Friday mail-outs by the guy who runs Sickipedia, and I count my blessings.
I mean, what would she have made of a jerkoff of a blog like this one I'm writing right now, where I whine about my feelings and how I think World War II should have been fought and go on about my favourite kinds of trees, which I write in the morning before I head off to a career which exists in some sick nether-zone between work and action . . . oh I don't know. It's not as bad as all that. I'm just in a poopy mood.
And really my job isn't as bad as all that, in some ways it's smashing, and I've even started largely appreciating our Yankee overlords, though we'll see how long that lasts if they neglect to give me the Australian contract, that will propel me into the upper - count it - the upper middle class. And anytime in the past week or so that I've been feeling poopy about my job, I've looked at this blog, that was on one of the Friday mail-outs by the guy who runs Sickipedia, and I count my blessings.
martedì, dicembre 08, 2009
How not to end a war
Whilst going off to all and sundry here about how awesome Rotterdam is, how exciting the new architecture is, how beautifully arranged it all is, I have got reactions ranging from disbelief to curiousity to agreement to Miss C's - she couldn't find it, as a reconstruction, beautiful because of the suffering that had been involved in its flattening. Can't contradict that, of course, it's quite true. Rotterdam on the brain, combined with the fact that its flattening was used as a reason, to a certain extent, for the beginning of the RAF assault on German civilians, and Hilts' obsession, and certain inevitable thoughts at the moment about the suffering of the innocent, is making me sit around thinking about the second world war.
Back in my strategy concentration in Paris, we were taught that the role massive city bombing played in World War II was an emotive one, to a point. The Luftwaffe were doing too good a job knocking out British airfields in the first part of the war, so the RAF broke with accepted practice and started the massive bombing of German cities, beginning with Berlin. This produced the desired effect of nudging the Luftwaffe into retaliating with British city bombing, drawing their limited resources away from strategic bombing - sacrificing Britishproles pawns, so to speak, to keep the queeny-poo of ensuring air superiority. And after that the city bombing had its own twisted, retributive logic.
But did it hasten the end of the war? I don't think so. It's a sort of Law of Nature that gets drilled into you in strategy studies - Air Power Doesn't Win Wars. Maybe mutable or not, but one thing is sure in this case: Germany didn't surrender because German civilians were tired of getting bombed by the RAF, it surrendered because the Russians had arrived. And while the argument that Germany was easier to overrun because of all the important things that had been bombed is a persuasive one, I find it less persuasive than the argument that the German army and population went on fighting as long as they did because of their fury over how their cities had all been burnt down, or because of fear of what enemies who had shown so little mercy to civilians would do to them if they put down arms.
I honestly believe the Germans could have allowed fifty genocidal tyrants to come to power, and the English could have allowed their governors to go on murdering and enslaving darkies in the colonies for another 50 years, and neither group would have morally deserved to have their lives, happiness, and sanity abused by their leaders in such a disgusting and futile way. But who deserves anything anways.
Back in my strategy concentration in Paris, we were taught that the role massive city bombing played in World War II was an emotive one, to a point. The Luftwaffe were doing too good a job knocking out British airfields in the first part of the war, so the RAF broke with accepted practice and started the massive bombing of German cities, beginning with Berlin. This produced the desired effect of nudging the Luftwaffe into retaliating with British city bombing, drawing their limited resources away from strategic bombing - sacrificing British
But did it hasten the end of the war? I don't think so. It's a sort of Law of Nature that gets drilled into you in strategy studies - Air Power Doesn't Win Wars. Maybe mutable or not, but one thing is sure in this case: Germany didn't surrender because German civilians were tired of getting bombed by the RAF, it surrendered because the Russians had arrived. And while the argument that Germany was easier to overrun because of all the important things that had been bombed is a persuasive one, I find it less persuasive than the argument that the German army and population went on fighting as long as they did because of their fury over how their cities had all been burnt down, or because of fear of what enemies who had shown so little mercy to civilians would do to them if they put down arms.
I honestly believe the Germans could have allowed fifty genocidal tyrants to come to power, and the English could have allowed their governors to go on murdering and enslaving darkies in the colonies for another 50 years, and neither group would have morally deserved to have their lives, happiness, and sanity abused by their leaders in such a disgusting and futile way. But who deserves anything anways.
lunedì, dicembre 07, 2009
The joys of being middle class on a fast train to Paris
Had a smashing weekend in Paris. There's a sentence I never thought would come out of my brain but I guess eventually things just stop doing your head in, which is a good thing to know in the present context. La New Yorkaise is moving home definitively on Wednesday, and like a good former fellow inmate of the fucking madhouse that is Pars when you're underemployed, I swanned down on the Thalys and helped her pack. Which translated into about two actual hard slog hours - she's already shipped most of her stuff - and me getting some really great castoffs that wouldn't fit in her hold luggage, like a camping chair and an awesome sleeping bag and enough good quality acrylic paint to make the F-word's eyes light up. So the time spent with her was lovely and the time spent with Miss C, whose loft we stayed in once more, was even lovelier, in a way. She starts a year-long treatment programme for hepatitis today, and has no idea how it will go, so I suppose she drank her last few glasses of wine for a long while with us . . . both of those women are so dear to me in such different ways.
And discovered my theory about Paris is correct - if you have lots of money, it's actually a great place to be.
And read two books on trains - well, finished one, read the other - Bad Medicine by David Wooton and Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh. Decline and Fall - well. Brideshead Revisited was such a nasty little downer (in a good way, though) that I was not expecting that surreal little romp. I enjoyed it a great deal though. Very talky, very visual. I've written before about how awful I think authors like Ian McEwan and that guy who wrote The Hours are, in that their shitty books read like script treatments instead of novels and it's an abuse of the medium. But besides me hating Ian McEwan et al, I think that also has something to do with the way I hate most movies. Because Decline and Fall reads a bit like a treatment for an exceptionally good stage show - very dialogue driven - and I still loved it. But then the narrative voice was still awfully good, so not completely. Anyways. It was ace.
Bad Medicine was alright too but sometimes the argumentation was a little laboured. Wooton keeps so busy reminding you that he has an argument that it can get quite distracting from the actual elements of the argument. He was fitting so much into such a small book that I have a feeling a few conjunctions ended up on the cutting room floor when a few too many protests from Wooton about why he should be allowed to write about progress as a historical fact stayed in when they shouldn't have.
I get it. Progress. You like it. It exists. You wrote about it in your fucking introduction. Please, write a history of medicine, and write a history of the history of medicine, but if you're going to splice them don't do it in a mere 320 pages (though I understand it fits nicely onto the bestseller list at that length, but that's no more excuse for writing an insufficiently readable book than the fact that 'novelists' like McEwan make the big bucks from actually selling their books as film treatments), not unless you've got Darrin fucking McMahon level expressive finesse. And I'll tell you - Bad Medicine isn't a bad book, but Wooton does not have Darrin Fucking McMahon-level finesse.
It's a valid comparison, even if I'm only making it because I got the F-word Happiness for Christmas. McMahon, when he wrote about happiness and the history of happiness, forswore historical accounts of people who didn't write much or who wrote outside of the 'canon' (ie everybody post-Bhagavad Gita in Asia) as it was called back in my undergrad days. Wooton restricted himself similarly. Obviously that still leaves you with rather a lot of material, so if you're going to spend 15% of your words explaining to the reader that you're picking a fight, and if you lack McMahon-type finesse - honestly it's a wonder the book is readable at all. But it is, almost despite him.
And discovered my theory about Paris is correct - if you have lots of money, it's actually a great place to be.
And read two books on trains - well, finished one, read the other - Bad Medicine by David Wooton and Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh. Decline and Fall - well. Brideshead Revisited was such a nasty little downer (in a good way, though) that I was not expecting that surreal little romp. I enjoyed it a great deal though. Very talky, very visual. I've written before about how awful I think authors like Ian McEwan and that guy who wrote The Hours are, in that their shitty books read like script treatments instead of novels and it's an abuse of the medium. But besides me hating Ian McEwan et al, I think that also has something to do with the way I hate most movies. Because Decline and Fall reads a bit like a treatment for an exceptionally good stage show - very dialogue driven - and I still loved it. But then the narrative voice was still awfully good, so not completely. Anyways. It was ace.
Bad Medicine was alright too but sometimes the argumentation was a little laboured. Wooton keeps so busy reminding you that he has an argument that it can get quite distracting from the actual elements of the argument. He was fitting so much into such a small book that I have a feeling a few conjunctions ended up on the cutting room floor when a few too many protests from Wooton about why he should be allowed to write about progress as a historical fact stayed in when they shouldn't have.
I get it. Progress. You like it. It exists. You wrote about it in your fucking introduction. Please, write a history of medicine, and write a history of the history of medicine, but if you're going to splice them don't do it in a mere 320 pages (though I understand it fits nicely onto the bestseller list at that length, but that's no more excuse for writing an insufficiently readable book than the fact that 'novelists' like McEwan make the big bucks from actually selling their books as film treatments), not unless you've got Darrin fucking McMahon level expressive finesse. And I'll tell you - Bad Medicine isn't a bad book, but Wooton does not have Darrin Fucking McMahon-level finesse.
It's a valid comparison, even if I'm only making it because I got the F-word Happiness for Christmas. McMahon, when he wrote about happiness and the history of happiness, forswore historical accounts of people who didn't write much or who wrote outside of the 'canon' (ie everybody post-Bhagavad Gita in Asia) as it was called back in my undergrad days. Wooton restricted himself similarly. Obviously that still leaves you with rather a lot of material, so if you're going to spend 15% of your words explaining to the reader that you're picking a fight, and if you lack McMahon-type finesse - honestly it's a wonder the book is readable at all. But it is, almost despite him.
Iscriviti a:
Post (Atom)