The Annual Orgy of Consumption

Black Friday... shit, the very notion of getting up at four in the morning in order to elbow, claw, and shove your way into stores in order to buy a whole lot of cheap, poorly made crap on credit is totally foreign to me. Of course, many stores are now opening on Thanksgiving night this year. Damn, if overeating and lying on the couch watching football aren't sacred anymore, nothing is. I have scorn for the people who would descend upon the stores on Thanksgiving night, but I have nothing but pity for the poor folks working in retail. Damn, as if dealing with the people weren't bad enough, they don't even have time to digest their dinners before being thrown into the grinder.

I'm not into the whole consumerism thing, and I think an "opt out" on Black Friday would send the message to our corporate overlords that we are citizens, not consumers. There's a Say No to Black Friday (and to Rebecca Black's Friday) movement, a movement I heartily endorse. Reject the consumption, because, as the Reverend Mojo Nixon observed, America has turned into a "mondo condo shopping mall hell". While I can't endorse arson as a remedy, I do think that, barring the burning, Mojo was onto something:





I hope to be back from Virginia this afternoon and, with any luck, will catch up with the comments on previous posts and resume my typical posting routine. I shall make posting my post lecture recap a priority.

Happy American Thanksgiving!

Yeah, the economy sucks, and our political system is proving a failure, but there are plenty of things for which to be thankful. If you're reading this, you're alive, and that's a start. I don't really have anything to write about Thanksgiving that would be appreciably different from last year's Thanksgiving post. I especially love having a reason to post Turkish Song of the Damned, a song which is breathtakingly amazing, both musically and lyrically. To think that it was inspired by a drunken misinterpretation of a request for a jokey novelty song boggles the mind. Here it is, in a video which highlights Shane MacGowan's alarming dentition in quite gruesome fashion:





Now, we had our "Turkish Song", now how about a touching love song to listen to after dinner, while sitting before the fireplace? The world can be divided into two broad categories of people- those who realize that Turkey Dinner by the Hoodoo Gurus is the most romantic song ever written, and those who are flirting with a lifetime ban. Once again, the video to Turkey Dinner cannot be embedded, which is something for which I am anything but thankful.

Happy Thanksgiving all, and thanks for reading. You can be assured that I am grateful to be able to interact with such an amazing bunch of people as yourselves.

Big Bad Bald Bastard's Best Boston Brown Bread

If you're going to steal, steal from the best, I say. Posting a recipe, I decided I'd crib Laura's "best ever" schtick, leaving out the "E" word for the sake of alliteration.

I have to confess that, although I am a born and bred New York boy, New England looms large in my background. My paternal grandfather was born and raised in Framingham, Massachusetts, and our family would always spend a couple of weeks camping in Maine every summer. One does not readily get New England out of one's blood. Oddly enough, my New England past caught up to me recently (perhaps it's because of the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday, when everybody in the U.S. gets a little New England-y), and I had a strange craving for Boston brown bread.

Boston brown bread is a throwback to the early days of the settlement of New England, before decent stoves were developed. The multi-grain bread (equal parts rye, corn, and wheat flour) is sweetened with molasses, and steamed in a mold (nowadays, using an empty coffee can is typical). It's not the typical sort of thing I crave, but I inexplicably had a jones for it, and the commercially canned stuff, like Moxie, is not readily available outside of New England. If I wanted it, I'd have to make it myself.

I want to note now that I am, culinarily, strictly a stove-top operator. I am not a baker, in fact, my ability to kill yeast surpasses that of Monistat. Of course, Boston brown bread's not really baked, so I figured I'd be okay. To start my brown bread experiment, I needed a mold. One comment on a Food Network site suggested using the can in which Pepperidge Farm "Pirouette" wafer are packaged. My beautiful co-worker **REDACTED** had one of these on her desk, so I have confess, I had my eyes on her can for quite some time (I was joking with another co-worker, and when I mentioned that I was eyeing **REDACTED**'s can, she asked, "The cookie can? What for?" See, I'm no Herman Cain, so I can get away with such things). Not being a "can shark" (FUTURE BLOG POST?), I decided that I had to buy a can of Pirouette wafers- they are tasty, but a little too sweet, I had them with coffee, to cut down the sweetness factor.

Now that I had the can, I had to assemble the ingredients and get to work. The recipe I used was from Epicurious:

Equipment:
Empty can (I used a "Pirouette" wafer can, because it has a convenient cover)
Saucepan
Oven safe pot

Dry ingredients:

1/2 cup rye flour
1/2 cup wheat flour
1/2 cup yellow corn meal
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt

Wet ingredients:
1/3 cup dark molasses
1 cup milk

Add in:
1/2 cup raisins

Additional:
Butter for greasing the can

Start off by liberally greasing the can (heh heh), make sure the entire can is well lubed before you continue. Set the oven to 325 degrees Fahrenheit. Set saucepan full of water on stove to boil.

Mix dry ingredients, mix wet ingredients, then mix wet ingredients into dry ingredients to form a batter. Add raisins and mix into batter. Pour batter into greased can to approximately 2/3 capacity. Cover can (if using coffee can, use aluminum foil, and tie foil into place) and place in oven safe pot. Fill pot with boiling water to the 2/3 of the can's height. Put pot into oven for two hours. After removing pot, let the whole shebang cool for an hour or so, and then "unmold" bread.

The bread itself is very moist, virtually crustless, with a pronounced molasses flavor... it's kinda like a massive muffin. While it goes well with butter, I imagine it would go really well paired with a mild cheddar cheese, kinda like a Bostonian take on the Jamaican classic bun and cheese. I imagine the recipe could be tweaked, substituting buttermilk for the milk, and playing with the flour proportions and amount of molasses. I think my next batch may have less molasses, as I really don't have much of a sweet tooth.

There you have it, an interesting quick-bread recipe for those of us cack-handed types who can't bake worth a damn.

A Little Traveling Music Please

For me, the classic road-trip music will always be Roadrunner by Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers (the original lineup included Jerry Harrison, who was a founding member of Talking Heads, and David Robinson, who drummed for The Cars). Here's a live version that, I confess, I'd never heard before:





Of course, Roadrunner sounds suspiciously like Sister Ray, by the Velvet Underground:





Roadrunner has become somewhat of a standard. Joan Jett tackled it:





The song was also hilariously butchered by the Sex Pistols in a rehearsal, with a confused John Lydon ad-libbing in quite entertaining fashion:





Mojo Nixon & Skid Roper's Jesus at McDonald's was a tongue-in-cheek "tribute" to the song:





The song's got legs, which is pretty outstanding for a love song to Stop and Shop.

Gonna Be a Busy Week

This week will be pretty nutty- I am working a graveyard shift now (Monday morning) and will be traveling to Brooklyn for a Secret Science Club lecture (this one is really up my alley, so I am looking forward to it). I plan on driving down to Virginia to spend (American) Thanksgiving with my mom, and my sister, her husband, and my two eldest nephews. I plan on leaving the Old Dominion at the crack of dawn on Friday, and driving straight to work. Yeah, it'll be a hell of a week, but family is paramount.

I'll be putting up scheduled posts for the week. I have some quiet hours to do some writing. Unfortunately, my responses to any comments will be sporadic at best, but I'll take some time to respond to posts when things return to a semblance of normality. Now, gotta crank out some posts.

Follow Up on Yesterday's Post

I've been thinking about the Penn State scandal (who the hell in the States hasn't), and I'm still astounded and appalled that it could have gone on for so long, and to have victimized so many children. I don't know what sort of mindset would allow such a series of occurrences to take place, but I'd guess that it the corrupting influence of money takes center stage. The Penn State football program is a multimillion dollar enterprise, which may explain why nobody wanted to rock the boat skippered by Joe Paterno. "Hey, the kids who were victimized were disadvantaged, and Sandusky delivers the goods on the gridiron... why jeopardize Lions football?" Of course, this is merely a symptom of a whole culture poisoned by greed, authoritarianism, and unaccountability.

Another thing which has had me scratching my bald pate in puzzlement is the "Don't talk to strangers!" injunction. All too often, abusers are trusted individuals- clergymen, close friends or family members, authority figures all. Often, it takes an outsider's perspective to suss out that abuse is occurring. The abusers are able to cloak themselves in the mantle of respectability, so other members of the community are unable to call their actions or intentions into question. Hell, in the Penn State case, one has to wonder whether Jerry Sandusky founded his charity largely as a "spiderweb" to entrap vulnerable children. How does one educate one's children to be skeptical enough of authority to never kowtow to the predator's "classic" veiled threat: "Don't tell anybody! Who would believe you anyway?" How does one convince a kid not to be afraid to shine a spotlight on a "trusted" member of the community who is doing evil under the noses of the populace? I know the schools typically don't teach kids to question authority, but I'd tell any parent that it's crucial to do so.

Responding to the Penn State Horror

Last week, the horrific Penn State sexual abuse scandal dominated the U.S. news cycle. This week, a similar scandal broke on the Syracuse University campus. Who the hell knows what other scandals will come to light as additional victims, emboldened by these revelations, decide to come forward? Part of me fears that these scandals are not confined to these two institutions.

Shortly after graduating from college, I started volunteering as a coach for a children's athletic program. The program is a multi-sport endeavor, the kids participate in a variety of athletic activities. In all my years of involvement in the program, there hasn't been the faintest hint of any inappropriate behavior on the part of any of the coaches or administrators. That being said, the director of the program came around to all of the coaches and informed us that, because of the heinousness of the Penn State crimes, that we would be taking measures to minimize any chance that anything like it would happen with us. In a strictly CYA move, all of the coaches in the program would be subject to a background check. I've got no problem with this- hell, I had to submit to a background check last year, when I worked for the Census Bureau. Of course, a background check would only reveal a problem if an individual happened to be caught, but it's still something demanded in the interest of due diligence.

In all of my years coaching, I've always abided by the simple rule: "Don't be alone in a room with a kid, unless it's your kid." I'd add the corollary: "Don't allow anybody else to be in a room with a kid, unless it's their kid." In our particular system, the kids are grouped according to age, and each group is shepherded around by two or three counselors, high school kids- former participants who have come up "through the ranks" and garnered the job (the counselors are the only paid staff members) through good attendance and dedication over the years. Two of our current counselors have stayed with us while in college, and some of the counselors have passed into the ranks of the coaches over the years. If a kid needs to go to a locker room to get something, there's no need for an adult to accompany them- the counselors are there to act as chaperones. Kid needs to go to the bathroom? Have a counselor escort the kid to the pissoir. No need for an adult to be involved. Hell, I couldn't even begin to fathom why an adult with honorable intentions would seek to be alone with someone else's kid.

Nothing untoward has occurred in the course of our program, but we're still feeling ripples from the Penn State horror. We're going to take steps to minimize the chances of a similar occurrence occurring under our roof, but I'd be lying if I said that things haven't changed.