Category: No Politics Friday

It's been too long since I have had taco-related content on here.

I'm not fond of Los Angeles. I believe I'm on record as saying it's essentially God's greatest mistake. Its people, by and large, are pretty neat though. It gets some of its local color in the form of mobile taco trucks that primarily serve the sizeable Latino population spread throughout the area. Under the guise of concerns for public safety and sanitation, the city is attempting to ban the trucks. This is considered such a slap in the face to long-time residents that even the New York Times is writing front-pagers about the controversy. And taco lovers from around the country are joining Angelenos in solidarity at SaveOurTacoTrucks.org.

Tacos are street food. They are Poor People Food. They are not something to be dressed up and served in fancy restaurants (although I hate most of the cast, I have unending respect for this guy from Top Chef for refusing, on principle, to make an "upscale taco"). Of course taco trucks, like most mobile food service, present some sanitation concerns. Let's be frank – you're not expecting hospital-quality cleanliness when ordering a taco from a converted school bus. We're adults and we understand what we're buying.

While the local government's actions are cloaked in a lot of language about litter or health and safety concerns, SOTT and many other observers have speculated that it has a lot more to do with large crowds of Latinos gathering in neighborhoods wherever the trucks stop. God forbid a bunch of people mill around a truck and talk in a parking lot or on a street corner. That would upset the delicate beauty of….Los Angeles? The smog-choked, traffic-strangled asshole of the world? Come on.

Much like when Chicago tried to ban Eloteros, I think that the local government involved in this controversy have forgotten a cardinal, 500 year old rule of politics: don't fuck with what people eat.

(Note: This week was subpar on account of finals, and I will be making it up next week. Promise.)

What's the quickest way to meet 500,000 Missourians?

Visit Brooklyn.

If you have a lot of friends between 21-30, tell me with a straight face that you do not know the person I am about to describe (or possibly a few dozen of them). It never fails to amaze me how many people consider moving to the latest 21-30 mecca (after they hung a "Sorry hipsters, we're full" sign on Brooklyn in 2003, there was a brief infatuation with San Diego.

It's currently Portland.) to be a complete plan virtually guaranteeing unending happiness. I can't say I blame anyone who wants to get the hell out of Indiana or whatever, but the illogic of moving wherever happens to be trendy escapes me. What could possibly work out better than moving somewhere "hot" (read: ass-breakingly expensive, as in $900/month for a closet sized apartment with three roommates) and sitting back to enjoy unadulterated happiness?

Some places are better to live than others.

But your life is your life, and you can't use a U-Haul to make yourself happy.

The "I'm so unhappy, but when I get to Brooklyn everything will be awesome" theory makes very little sense. No, when you get to Brooklyn your life is not going to be like Sarah Jessica Parker on that show I refuse to name. It's going to be expensive as shit, there will be three times as many identically-aged and -skilled people as there are jobs, and your neighbors will be a bunch of dipshits who just moved in from Dayton.

New York is cool. I like visiting. Portland, while wildly overrated, is nice too.
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But please, shut the fuck up about how great they are and how you're just about to move there and how great everything will be when you do.
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It does nothing but give me greater pleasure when you end up homeless, living under a tarp on someone's roof, and stealing wireless so you can blog about how great Brooklyn is (true story. seriously.) It ensures that I get a bigger kick out of it when you slink back into town because the best job you could find in Portland involved migrant farm labor (true story. seriously.)

When Chicago was "the" city in the late 19th Century, Mark Twain said "Chicagoans think they are the finest people on Earth when they are merely the most numerous." It applies broadly to any geography-based superiority complex. My life is imperfect and I'll probably be happy to leave southern Indiana, but not so I can become one of the sheep prattling on about how cool it is to live above a bodega that offers the privilege of paying $2.99 for an apple.

If you ever wanted to see a Finnish rockabilly band and the Red Army Choir team up to sing "Sweet Home Alabama" in English, this is probably your only chance. Don't blow it.

I guess I can cross this off my list. Now all I need is a video of a teenaged female Euro-pop duo singing "Insane in the Brain" backed by legenday Tuvan throat singers Huun Huur Tu.

Allow me to momentarily use the powerful bully pulpit of Gin and Tacos to self-promote on behalf of my other pursuits.

I'm in a band called Tremendous Fucking. We appeal mostly to people who like early Jesus Lizard, NoMeansNo, Light of the Sun-era Trenchmouth, and getting punched in the head. Probably doesn't describe you very well, does it? We are a letter-perfect response to a question no one asked. Nonetheless, we have a strange habit of making people experience enjoyment when they see us play or listen to our music. "This is not what I normally listen to, but I really enjoyed it anyway" is a common reaction.

Of course I'm leading up to the hard sell.
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Our new CD More Blood in the Monitors , recorded by Mike "Corn Dog" Bridavsky (the non-union Mexican equivalent of Steve Albini) and mastered by Bob Weston, hit the world last weekend. You should buy one (bottom of the page, item Step026). It is also on iTunes (or will be any minute now, according to Apple) if you prefer that route.

A few tracks are available as a preview via MySpace.

I realize it is not our shared musical taste that brings you to this website, but the band and I have spent the better part of a year and several thousand dollars on this endeavor so I'd be derelict if I didn't try pushing it. It's also one of the few things I've ever done of which I am proud. Without qualification. If you're curious, I play the drums, sing a very little bit of backup, and concoct ridiculous song titles.
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This is a little aged but it's still one of my favorite things in the history of the internets: the folks at Improbable Research put the US Postal Service to the test by trying to mail 28 extremely odd items, in most cases simply by affixing the address and postage directly to the item. More than half (18) of the items were delivered, including an exposed bill, new Nikes strapped together with duct tape, a coconut, a street sign, and a fucking deer tibia.
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Neither the claw hammer nor the helium balloon made it. Damn bureaucrats.

I really like Anthony Bourdain. Anthony Bourdain loathes vegetarians. And don't even bring up vegans. Here's a famous, but by no means isolated, example of his philosophy, taken from Kitchen Confidential:

Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans, are a persistent irritant to any chef worth a damn. To me, life without veal stock, pork fat, sausage, organ meat, demi-glace, or even stinky cheese is a life not worth living. Vegetarians are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit, and an affront to all I stand for, the pure enjoyment of food.

A new blog, Hezbollah Tofu, apparently takes serious issue with Mr. Bourdain's claims, so much so that they are dissecting the recipes from his restaurant Les Halles and offering "vastly improved, veganized versions of your masturbatory, blood-oozing recipes." This is the Achille's Heel of vegan rhetoric. No. Stop. Drop the "vastly improved" tripe (see what I did there?) and I'll agree with your premise. Defend your decision to be vegan for all the valid reasons. There are many. But do not expect me to believe that mignon de porc made out of seitan, tofu and unicorn farts will taste better than one made out of pork. That, as the French say, is goddamn retarded.

I firmly subscribe to the "to each his own" philosophy of diet; if you don't want to eat pork, don't eat pork. If you want to be vegan, be vegan. Your pointless little exercise in self-denial does not, however, give you the power to change the facts. If you want to argue about how the agribusiness industry is morally corrupt and abusive to animals, fine. You are correct. You win the moral high ground. I yield the point. But don't expect me to pretend that your vegan "substitutions" in non-vegan cooking are improvements. It demeans us both.

Non-vegans will recognize the following scenario all too well. Vegan Friend tells us how f'n amazing he or she is at vegan baking. We express doubt. VF insists on making a vegan cornucopia to shatter our skepticism. VF hands us a piece of vegan "cake" which purports to destroy any suggestion that vegan baking is not orgasmically delicious. We take one bite, chew for 3 minutes on something that tastes like a fucking carpet sample, and silently pray for death.

You've only deluded yourself. Don't make the mistake of thinking we operate under a similar delusion.

Don't get me wrong, I can enjoy vegan food. My favorite selections are things that simply are vegan. No "adjustments" required. Lots of Indian recipes, for example, contain no animal products. Ditto many Cantonese, Mediterranean, and African dishes. But, like Icarus, your pride is your flaw. You start "fixing" our non-vegan fare. Note the website's "creme brulee" recipe. Whatever this is, whatever it tastes like, IT IS NOT CREME BRULEE. Do not call it that. Do not pretend like it is the same thing with different ingredients. It. Is. Not. Creme. Brulee. It is a blob of tofu with ersatz caramel sauce and a 6-hour aftertaste, and it sounds approximately as appetizing as fellating an incontinent bear. But if I'm wrong and it's delicious IT'S STILL NOT CREME BRULEE.

The world is not biased against your food. WE are not the ones with an agenda that excludes food based on principle. That's you. Most people have no politics in their diet. If vegan substitutes for non-vegan menu items tasted better, people would eat them. Alas, that is not the case. We don't dislike it because we're small-minded, as you like to assert smugly.
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We dislike it because it tastes like a sack of buttholes.

So here's 2 cents' advice to Hezbollah Tofu and the vegans: try to win me over on the politics and you might succeed. Try to win me over on the many cuisines around the world that omit animal products.
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That might work too. Don't try to win me over with fermented soy pinch-hitting for pork. Don't talk about how you've "fixed" cuisines heavily rooted in the use of blood, meat, and dairy. That just makes you look stupid. It makes you easy to tune out, and your message ends up confined to small communities of already-converted, true-believer vegans. And that is why websites like Hezbollah Tofu crack me up. Apparently you believe that if you constantly tell one another how delicious all of this unfortunate shit is, you might actually begin to believe it one day as you shovel another lump of Tofurkey at your joyless, long-suffering tastebuds.
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Sincerely,
Ed

PS: We all know that you eat cheese and yogurt when you're certain that your Fellow Travelers won't find out. The loose lips of our vegan friends have sunk that ship.

Five days ago I took my sister's adorable kids (ages 4 and 6) to see Horton Hears a Who. What I am about to say may already be patently obvious to some of you, but I do not watch many (read: any) movies aimed at children so it is new to me.

While I can't say I enjoyed the film – and let's be honest, I'm not the target audience – I was amazed at how much of the humor was over the heads of children and aimed squarely at parents.
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I know this has been a trend since the mid-90s (approximately beginning with Toy Story) as a simple matter of economics: if the parents don't want to kill themselves for the duration of the film they will be more likely to bring the kids to see it. Fair enough. Parents everywhere are thankful.

This really started me thinking about how bad it must have been for parents when we (anyone born before 1980) were really young.

Horton was full of actors I like doing things like talking in a Henry Kissinger accent…and I still found the experience much less than enthralling to sit through. But I have no illusions – it could have been so much worse.

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I shudder to think back to some of the horseshit my dad took my sister and I to see when I was 4 (Care Bears the Movie and so on). In hindsight it's a certifiable miracle that our parents were not shooting heroin in the parking lot to survive it. While I am in no way willing to rent the movies in order to empirically verify this, I don't suspect there was much that would entertain parents in films like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2.

This is a fairly strange request, but I don't listen to a lot of popular music and I need your help.

Many months ago I did a little post comparing some particularly embarrassing rap performances by white girls. For reasons I won't bother explaining (yet) I need to come up with another handful of examples along these lines. So fire off in the comments – the topic is Horrible Rapping by White People. Discuss.

Please note that actual but laughably shitty rappers (Vanilla Ice, Snow, etc) are far too obvious, and therefore they are excluded.
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What I am looking for are instances of white artists who are not necessarily rappers deciding that they will give it a try to show that they are down with the black folks. Or something. Sort of like when Pat Boone made that "metal" album. Yeah, that happened.

I polled my band and they suggested Justin Timberlake.

And right now I'm horrified by the idea of having to listen to his music in order to verify this claim. If I don't post on Monday, rest assured that I have shot myself and it is all Justin's fault.
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There is absolutely no doubt about it. No competition. No debate. The New York Post is the worst newspaper in America. It's funnier than The Onion. I read it semi-regularly for kicks, but this…this one broke me. Even by Post standards, with their stated goal of maintaining a 7th-grade reading level and their editorial policy against compound sentences, this is excruciatingly bad. It crystallizes their stupidity, their no-fancy-book-learnin' populism, and their very twisted idea of "reporting."

Don't worry, in honor of NPF this is from the sports page. At a reputable newspaper, the journalistic standards are the same for sportswriters. As the Post has none it is not an issue here. Even if you don't care about baseball you should take a look at this trainwreck. As my buddies at FJM put it, this is what we're up against. "We" of course being the literate world.

If you can't plow through it, here's the premise. UPenn researchers/baseball nuts conducted a side project in which they created a quantitative method for measuring a player's fielding skills.
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They determine that former Mariah Carey fucktoy/Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter is the worst fielder in baseball. They video analyzed every single ball hit into play between 2002 and 2005. Think about that. The Post is incredulous, as he has won three Gold Gloves (an absolutely meaningless sportswriter-voted popularity contest masquerading as an award). What can those eggheads at Penn be smoking?
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(actual quote, sadly) Look at Jeter's Gold Gloves! This is roughly equivalent to arguing that Titanic is a great film because it won an Oscar or that Jethro Tull's Grammy makes them a top metal band.

So the basic point of the article – "SCIENCE IS FOR STUPID HOMOS. TYPICAL EGGHEAD BULLSHIT BY A BUNCH OF FAGS, PROBABLY BOSTON FANS, WHO DON'T REALIZE HOW FUCKIN' AWESOME JETER IS." – is typical Post fare. Now let's move on to the journalism and see how they defend their position. Bring on the experts!

"That's preposterous. I completely disagree. Jeter's a clutch player." said Yankees fan Mike Birch, 32.

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"It's ridiculous," said fan Jay Ricker, 22. "Jeter is all-around awesome."

"He has intangible qualities that can't be measured with statistics," said East Village bar owner Kevin Hooshangi, 28.

Ladies and gentlemen, these are the Post's sources. So let's summarize the debaters.

Team Science: a group of PhDs with a large research project which included quantitative analysis of every single ball hit in play for three years (!!!)

Team Post: Three semi-literate Yankees fans who watch about ten games per year, at which they are blind drunk, slurring, bellowing nonsense, probably shirtless, and irritating the living shit out of everyone in earshot by the bottom of the third inning.

I know that baseball is not important.

But let's not pretend that the rest of the Post is any different or better than this article. Just remember that this is what we're up against: facts are for stupids, science is fuckin' gay, and everything you hear that doesn't confirm your existing beliefs is biased and wrong.