Tag Archives: column

NYC: The city that never sleeps, or stops drinking tiny crustaceans with pincers on them

Crisp, bright flavors of honeysuckle with a slight oaky creaminess on the finish. (via Gothamist)

GateHouse — There are a great many reasons I don’t live in New York City: I’m easily terrified, I hate the cold, I got passed over for the J. Jonah Jameson role in the “Spider-Man” musical (thanks for nothing, The Edge), I learned the hard way not to do anything Huey Lewis tells me to do (that was an internship I’d like to forget) and when it comes right down to it I am a deeply domesticated, weight-gaining fancypants who enjoys owning both the parking spot adjacent to where I live and my very own washing machine. Also I’m partial to relaxed-fit jeans.

At least those were the reasons as of last week. The reason I don’t live in NYC this week, aside from the fact that no one has remotely offered me a job there, is that their tap water is filled with invisible living crustaceans, all of which have heads and many of which have pincers. Whenever possible, I try not to ingest pincers, which isn’t usually a problem as long as you can avoid Wendy’s.

Recently, the NYC blog Gothamist published a post confirming that New York tap water, while among the cleanest in the nation (choke on that, Iowa City), is filled with very small, very brown, very crunchy-looking crustaceans called copepods, which, loosely translated means “It Doesn’t Matter What It Translates Into Because The Suffix -Pods Is In It, Gross.”

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• Digital Underground – Underwater Rimes (Remix).mp3

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Gobo Fraggle ends child abuse, a nation rejoices

Hey, kids! Come over here and let Gobo tell you about the Whig Contract With America

GateHouse — Let me preface this by saying that despite what you might suspect in about four minutes, I oppose child abuse. Very much so, actually.

But because I’m also against this weird new Facebook-born style of quasi-activism-that’s-actually-just-neediness-and-nostalgia, I’m also declaring my opposition to witty image-oriented viral movements as well. You know, not as much, but still.

Still, having now been on Facebook through four solid years and one talky movie, I’m convinced it’s most effective at the following:

  1. Compelling people to smilingly hand over a profusion of personal data, ensuring that everyone from space satellites to John Boehner to the 12 clones of Mark Zuckerberg that have been hatched to date (LOOK IT UP) can accumulate Assange-loads of information about your shopping, income and drinking habits, mostly drinking. True fact, just this afternoon Facebook encouraged me to install a New Profile feature, one designed to paint a more complete picture of who I am, rank my friends like NCAA tournament seeds and tell you my work and travel habits, so you know exactly when to steal my TV.
  2. Delivering the news that you’re hoping, once again, for a win by the NFL franchise nearest your house.
  3. Identifying your neediest friends, who can be spotted by frequency of posts or liveliness of tax-oriented rants.
  4. ‪Making blatant, desperate calls for help through status updates, so that friends may be obliged to comment supportively. For this reason, the last time a friend did this, my comment read, “That sucks, I bet it’s infected, and you probably deserved it.”‬ People really like my friendship.

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Oh sure, I try to sink the boat ONE TIME and everybody gets all hypercritical

"Hello, I am an Adorable Dolphin. May I have some of your delicious snacks?" (Actual photo of actual needy dolphin)

GateHouse — Listen, I’m from Indiana. We don’t know a lot about saltwater sea-craft in Indiana, given our state’s disappointing proximity to most oceans. We are, as you know, a land-borne people who spend our time farming, jerking around with daylight savings time and being Colts fans when they’re winning. My childhood, it can be safely said, was not one that involved a lot of rigging up a jib sail to the topmast or whatever.

So it was with this sort of generations-old sailor’s background that I found myself last weekend on a boat for an afternoon of sailing around the waters of my little coastal town, a pretty unconditionally delightful way to spend an afternoon, save for the brief few moments in which I attempted to sink the boat and all aboard it, which included my six-year-old son, several lovely couples from whom I will no longer have to worry about responding to dinner invitations on time and three or four large coolers, all of whom are now totally ignoring me.

In my defense, though I did, admittedly, attempt to point a pontoon boat directly at the seafloor, I didn’t do so on purpose. By definition I couldn’t, since I didn’t do anything on this trip on purpose, since I didn’t (and still don’t) have the foggiest idea how to transport a boat through waters that have waves and sharks in them, mostly sharks. We received shockingly little guidance from the company that rented us the boat, mainly the helpful advisory to keep the red markers either to our left side or our right, and, if heading directly at another vessel, to turn the wheel a bit, or, failing that, whoop and jump up and down a lot.

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Coffee Makes You Immortal, or, Last Night A Decaf Saved My Life

This has nothing to do with anything, but is awesome.

GateHouse — Because Science is difficult and includes many absurd words and phrases with which I am not familiar, such as “continuum” and “polyphenols” and “mice,” I have a new personal rule in which I only read studies in the news that pertain directly, indisputably to me.

I am not interested in studies about “global warming,” or “people who have scurvy,” or “ways I can personally improve the greater good by changing a few minor, convenient personal habits, such as not driving a Nissan Armada or setting the thermostat lower than 82.” I am a very, very busy person, and Science is a large field that also apparently covers rocks and outer space, and I don’t know who has the time to keep up with all this flip-flopping — eggs are good for you, no they’re bad, and you should drink eight cups of water a day except that you shouldn’t, and you’re not supposed to eat walrus meat when you’re pregnant, etc. etc.

So unless Science can magic me up a helper monkey or something to take care of all this “reading,” I’m gonna just choose which studies to subscribe to (Note to Science: I would also accept a helper walrus, because I am not a picky man, and tusks are neat).

Anyway, shortly after enacting this new set of personal bylaws, I came across a study in the Newspaper — which is the weird, papery thing that will print tomorrow news that you read on the Internet an hour ago — that said that people who drink coffee may, in fact, live longer than those who do not.

This news caused my hands to begin shaking uncontrollably, although I don’t know if that was due to the study or caffeine, because on any given morning I put down enough coffee to kill anyone over the age of 55; enough coffee to, if distilled properly, actually power an oscillating fan; enough coffee that I would basically save tremendous time and effort by just chawing on beans. (Note: I am kidding; chawing on beans tends to make teeth the color and consistency of a saloon barrel, not that I’ve tried or anything).

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Breaking: Everyone has suddenly realized what Crocs actually look like

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George W. Bush, donning black socks and Crocs on his way to Sunday morning post-church grocery shopping at the Sun City Food Lion

Island Packet — Full disclosure: I have never worn Crocs, except for that day with the unpleasant episode of the exploding garbage disposal, about which the less said, the better.

But otherwise, that’s not for any particular reason other than that Crocs don’t come up much. I’m inside all day, and regrettably, I work for a company that requires me to wear human shoes to work (they have a similar policy regarding pants, which I oppose) and what’s more, I am cursed with larger-than-average feet, so wearing Crocs has the unsubtle effect of making me appear to have a small aircraft carrier to each of my legs, which is a highly confidence-rattling way to go about your day.

But that’s OK with me, because very soon, Crocs will be known solely as the ridiculous rubber clown shoes that achieved immense popularity largely because Americans will buy anything if their neighbor has one, even if it makes you look like you’re wearing pickles on your feet.

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Burger King Utilizes Cheap Lettering, Lunch Meat To Deny Flame-Broiling Of Planet Earth

Burger-King-Calls-Global--001

"Also, our burgers are made of dogs!"

GateHouse — First, let me state right off the bat that I am not remotely comfortable poking good-hearted laughery at the vast and powerful Burger King empire, for the reason that it is single-handedly responsible for the Egg N’ Cheese Croissan’wich. This is possibly the most perfect breakfast food chunk ever birthed by human hands, if indeed it was birthed by human hands, which I do not believe for one minute, because its eggy, buttery succulence is of such a thick and wondrous magnitude that I am pretty sure it was bequeathed us by some divine creation, like fire was given Prometheus, or the girl who plays Thirteen was sent to “House.” And stop, you’re all thinking it.

Egg N’ Cheese Croissan’wiches, when coupled with Burger King’s equally splendid French Toast sticks, comprise what is possibly the finest American breakfast you can obtain for under $5 and just a little tasty smidgen of eventual heart problems. One time, drifting down the lonely highways of southern Florida on spring break, my friends and I came upon a rest area selling Croissan’wiches at like 3 in the morning. I am not kidding when I say it was like stumbling out of the cornfield into the Field of Dreams (especially when the ketchup machine told me to “GO THE DISTANCE,” which was weird). I would sell my own flesh to indentured servitude in the Burger King’s castle without so much as a second thought if I thought it would score me free croissan’ery, and I highly recommend you stop reading this column immediately to eat as absolutely many of them as you can before the circulation problems claim you.

Anyway, now that I’m reasonably assured that we all know I like Croissan’wiches, here are a few things about Burger King that I do not like: their Big Fish, which is big enough but would more accurately be termed a Big White-ish Loaf Of Something; the Whopper Jr., which is a pale imitation of its monsterish father; and the way that some franchises are delivering their flame-broiled goodness and gastrically opposed fries with the good solid message that global warming doesn’t really exist.

Well, that may not be fair. Instead, the signs outside a number of Burger Kings in the Southern region of America known as “Tennessee,” the hand-changed ones that usually read something like DOUBLE CHEESEBURGER DOLLAR DAY or (GARISH PROMOTION INVOLVING POPULAR CHILDREN’S MOVIE) or something hilariously misspelled, said, and I’m quoting here, “GLOBAL WARMING IS BALONEY.”

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Whiting, Ind. loses pierogi competition, and I go nuts

The greatest travesty of justice in the history of everything.

GateHouse – RECOUNT!

I DEMAND A RECOUNT!

I CONTINUE TO DEMAND A RECOUNT!

I HAVE NOT WAVERED FROM MY ORIGINAL POSITION OF RECOUNT-DEMANDING!

Unbelievable. Regular readers of this column — and hello again to my mom and whoever keeps coming to my Web site looking for pictures of the Insane Clown Posse — will remember that a few weeks back, I wrote about Whiting, Ind.’s chances of being crowned the Mrs. T’s Capital of the Pierogy Pocket of America, via what I believed to be a legitimate online competition, but what was obviously an audacious swindle being perpetrated on regular, dumpling-loving Americans by the nefarious lobbying cabal Big Potato. Because there is no way on God’s green and increasingly toasty Earth that Whiting, Ind., would lose to the alleged town of Binghamton, N.Y., wherever that is — especially not with the vast, crushing power of the full-on media blitz I personally launched in late October (and by “vast, crushing power” I mean “me, my cousin and this guy Jim voted like twice a day,” but I mean, come on, it’s working for Ron Paul).

Still, we Whitingians are nothing if not gracious in defeat, because many of us are fans of Chicago baseball, and I would like to react to our loss by doing a few things, the first of which is pout like a 4-year-old girl. Then, I plan to dream up a wildly irrational conspiracy theory involving Mrs. T’s executives and the Falun Gong (it will have a chart, which will rule), then sob quietly into my pillow for about two days, then don a black cape and sit in a barn listening to Bruce Springsteen’s “Nebraska” for the better part of an icy and sleepless night. I do not deal well with loss, people, and frankly given my history as a Cubs fan it’s a minor miracle that I ever get out of bed.

Second, I demand a recount, and I can do that because this is America, and recounts are available in any and all instances, such as when somebody doesn’t like the outcome of anything, or when a result is statistically close, or when you know your governor brother and his minions will help you rig an entire carnival-show state. So someone get Katherine Harris and her implants off of that photo-op horse and have her rig up something, and let’s not pretend like she has anything else to do.

Listen, I’m sure the people of Binghamton, all 12 of them, are extremely capable lumberjacks or whatever, but you cannot tell me that their pierogies can hold a drippy Slovak candle to those of my ancestors in Whiting, Ind., where there is an annual Pierogi Fest that features a grown man dressed as “Mr. Pierogi” although his costume could also theoretically make him “Mr. Salt Shaker” or “Mr. Deflated Zeppelin” or “The Swedish Chef from ‘The Muppets’” and where 75% of the town’s electricity comes from the fumes produced by recycled dumplings.

But buried within the press release announcing Binghamton’s controversial and contested victory lies what I believe to be the nefarious secret behind it all: A quote from Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y. Mostly), which says the Democratic front-runner is “happy to hear that St. Michael’s Church has persevered in its pursuit of pierogi perfection.” Ah HA! See what happened here, it was the HIPPIE WOODSTOCK LIBERALS and their VOTE TAMPERING, while on THE MARIJUANA. So for all those who voted for Binghamton, you voted for a WEAK AMERICA and a GIANT GAY GOVERNMENT and a land where writers USE CAPS ALL THE TIME WHEN THEY CAN’T THINK OF OTHER JOKES. Anyway, enjoy learning French, freedom-haters.

Indeed, as I suspect a recount will not work out in Whiting’s favor and the Supreme Court is apparently off making decisions on free speech or whatever, I propose that we, the people of Whiting — and all those other adjacent towns that look and smell like Whiting — waste no more time in invading Binghamton, as soon as someone can locate it on Google Earth. We will take their land, discover their secrets and then, only then, will we, um, invite them to Pierogi Fest next year, because we are a kind and giving people, and because we hear they have a fantastic secret recipe involving bacon.

* Binghamton, N.Y., was awarded $10,000 to St. Michael’s Greek Catholic Church, which entered the competition on behalf of the city and which will donate the prize to the Community Hunger Outreach Warehouse, which distributes about 2 million pounds of food a year to local charities.


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