CSotD: Monday Recipes

I’m mostly sharing this week’s Mo because if Ann Telnaes is going to stick me with this earworm, I’m gonna pass it along like mumps.

I’m sympathetic to vegetarians, but I’m unconvinced by the faux hamburger everyone’s going on about.

It’s not a luxury, but it’s not cheap. I suppose if we all bought it, the price would come down, but so far as I can tell, the advantage is purely ecological. It’s not all that much better for you, except in terms of cholesterol, and while it tastes like hamburger, it doesn’t taste like good hamburger.

It tastes like that extruded crap at the grocery store, which is ground in mass quantities at the meat factories (with whatever low-value trim they are allowed to toss in), frozen, shipped in giant tubes to stores, then run through a second grinder so they can label it “fresh ground.”

I’m not a snob, and I’m only a localvore to the extent I can afford it, but I buy my burger at the co-op, where fresh beef – often local – is ground once, giving it a texture and flavor that neither the meat factories nor the faux-meat chemists can match.

And I’m willing to go by the health experts’ advice that you confine your meat to a piece the size of a deck of cards, though it seems any hamburger I didn’t make myself is not only oversized but then topped with bacon and cheese and enough extra fixin’s that you’d have to be able to unhinge your jaw like a python to bite into it.

Which doesn’t matter because the first bit of pressure on the front side makes it all slop out the back.

And, by the way, even before Frances Moore Lappe explained the whole grain-vs-grazing land use conundrum, we had the goddam sense not to eat bacon, which is just nitrates and nitrites and salt and fat.

Goldarn it.

What the hell’s wrong with you people?

 

And another thing

Pearls points out a truly bizarre language shift in sports.

I remember waiting to see who the Sporting News had declared the “Hero” and the “Goat” for each World Series game, and when people started calling Tom Brady “the Goat,” I was more than perplexed.

It’s not just the Sporting News usage; it’s thousands of years of scapegoats. “Goat” has meaning.

And now it has a new meaning.

Well, bad means good and, besides, we’re talking sports, which has its own verb tense, the Speculative Past Present, mostly used during replays: “If he catches that ball, they’d have been back in the lead!”

Still, Thursday Night Football managed to get through an entire Jacksonville game last week without referring to them as “the Jag-Wires.”

Small victories.

 

And eccentric usage is not just for jocks. Over in Candorville, Lemont fancies himself a language maven, but “when you think of it” you’ll realize that “up” has a lot more meaning than simply the direction. (Don’t believe me? Look it up!)

I’d round up some examples, but the point is, Lemont is clearly wedded to making up his own eccentric, senseless language rules.

But we can leave it up to him to figure out that he messed up this time.

Let’s wrap it up and move on.

 

I’m not sure whether Tom Gauld‘s shelf full of writer’s supplies should tie into the above ruminations about language and usage or, perhaps, the further-up discussion of twice-ground extruded beef.

I bought a book back in the 80s, one of those really good magazine articles that got turned into a too-long book in which the author eviscerated best sellers and some critics’ favorites for being examples of what is praised rather than examples of good writing.

His contention was that, between Writer’s Workshops and MFA programs, a sort of cookie cutter pattern has emerged that everyone agrees is “good writing,” a kind of self-parody, but one carried out by different writers working to the same template.

Granted, a little Donald Barthelme or Myles na Gopaleen goes a long way and I don’t think many people really want to wade through “Finnegan’s Wake” or Thomas Pynchon.

But extruded prose lacks both playfulness and life. As Sheridan (Richard, not Phil) put it, “You write with ease to shew your breeding, but easy writing’s vile hard reading.”

We can enjoy the formulaic prose of Mickey Spillane or Ian Fleming the way we enjoy a basket of french fries: Familiar and comfortable, but not gourmet fare nor intended as such.

Ditto with those equally predictable, formulaic best sellers: Like the Colonel’s lady and Judy O’Grady, they’re sisters under the skin.

 

Speaking of storytelling, Judge Parker appears to have been through a bit of an exorcism, with a couple of weird, distracting storylines being tied up. I’m going to assume that the squirrel found its way out of the RV and we can start anew.

There aren’t a lot of continuing-story strips around and this is potentially one of the better ones.

But it’s a place where a nice basket of french fries ought not to be presented as pommes frites.

 

Finally, I’m going to have to ponder today’s Lio for a bit.

It’s not a matter of not getting it. It’s a matter of never having thought of it like that.

What with everyone absolutely convinced that everything that could happen is happening somewhere in an infinite number of universes, and that time is only a way to keep it all from happening at once, it’s a little stunning to find such a dissenting concept.

Stunning isn’t necessarily bad, though being “taken aback” can either mean a temporary, unexpected pause or a complete, disastrous dismasting.

As it happens, I was somewhat prepared. Last night, someone was speculating online about objects with only two dimensions, which reminded me of Flatland, an 1884 novella I stumbled across when I was about 11, which was old enough to understand it but not old enough to comprehend it.

I remember being quite taken aback.

 

And it sure as hell didn’t come out of some writer’s workshop.