Whose Cuisine...?

Thursday, August 15, 2002

We meet again, my old nemesis

I went down to the soda machine this afternoon to get a Diet Pepsi, and noticed that our snack machine now stocks Andy Capp's Hot Fries. Hot Fries, for those of you who have never encountered them, are a potato-chip like snack with some sort of chili-powder concoction sprayed onto them. They are essentially Dr. Atkins' worst nightmare: carbs and fat, rolled into little salty sticks of death with addictively tasty spices coating the outside. (Although, with Dr. Atkins' recent heart problems a lot of people are re-thinking the whole "bacon shrinks your ass" concept.)

Andy Capp and I spent a summer together when I was working concessions at Ebster Pool. The little blue bags of hot fries seemed like merely pleasant diversions at the time. Looking back on it, I realize now that Andy Capp was my sworn enemy, posing as a friend. He was taking my money and handing me back empty calories and burning lips. Damn you, Andy Capp! Just look at these things: "corn and potato snacks." They don't even have the decency to be one kind of starch or the other! They are the bastard children of Barbecue Fritos and French Fries, and they must be stopped.

Do you think I should nail my 95 snack theses to the front of the machine, or just scrawl "EVIL" in magic marker across its plexiglass window?

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Tuesday, August 13, 2002

A somewhat belated (hey, I still have a few minutes left) happy birthday to Amy, who moseys stylishly into the age of 30 a mere month before I do. She wrote a contemplative blog entry for the occasion, which you would be able to read if she were able to post it to her blog. But she can't, because her iMac is currently on the blink, and I have yet to send her the discs to fix it. (Soon!)

I am unprepared to comment on her thoughts, mostly because I'm not in that retrospective I'm-turning-30 headspace yet. I'm in the "I have 900 books in a warehouse that must be sold" mode, and most everything else has taken a back seat. Certainly, I had an occasion to think about it in the doctor's office as I waited for the gastroenterologist (I think I got that right) to come tell me about the endoscopy I'm going to have (I have had GERD for a couple of years now, and my doctor wants to have a look to see that the medication is doing its job), but the most I could focus on was the need to drop these extra pounds. Changing my life in that respect is a bigger challenge than publishing a book, and a lot less fun, but I think I can do it. Any feelings I might have had about getting old were quickly put into reverse by Dr. G, a sedate (Indian? Pakistani? he wore a turban) fellow who told me that I was "a young guy, and things [by which he meant my medical condition] can't be that serious."

Christina made her famous "never the same recipe twice" meatloaf tonight, which was excellent. It's not something we have often because of the large amounts of red meat involved, but it's pretty amazing when we do have it. Christina likes it best the next day in a sandwich, so I think I'll leave the leftovers to her. She also enjoys the fact that, when she cooks, I do the dishes that night.

Book news: Word came over the wires today that we're definitely going to be emceeing an event at the Tampa Theater, most likely a showing of Zardoz. That will be in October. We threw wide the gates of Internet commerce yesterday and announced that we're officially filling orders for Reel Shame (Amazon is doing it, so why shouldn't we?). Our first "open market" copy sold today to a gent in Colorado. Just 899 more to go. (Actually, that's not strictly true, since we sent 3 copies to Amazon for their inventory, and I suspect they've sold one or two already.)

That's it for tonight.

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