What I Used to Believe

A couple weeks ago I came across this site that asks people to name some of the beliefs they held as children (and presumably have since abandoned). I only spent a couple minutes looking at it, but it’s prompted me to think about some of the false beliefs I had as a kid. Here’s a few:

1. All dogs are male and all cats are female.
2. The first time I went to the skating rink, I heard the music coming out of the giant speaker set suspended from the ceiling, and I instantly concluded they had a woman trapped in there doing the singing.
3. Preachers could literally hear God telling them what to say as they gave their sermons.
4. When you turn 10 years old, the devil comes into your room at night and grabs you.
5. Luke Skywalker was cool. It gets worse: I thought he was cooler than Han Solo.
6. I thought people had to go to the doctor’s office to have sex.
7. On occasion, I could predict the immediate future.
8. I caused CBS to move its Spider-Man show from Wednesday to Tuesday nights by wishing on a star (we were always at church on Wednesday nights so I couldn’t see it—why didn’t I try that with Battlestar Galactica?).
9. I had the potential to become one of the world’s greatest vocalists because I could sing in a normal range and (what I later learned was) falsetto.
10. This one isn’t a belief, but it was a suspicion. When I was about six years old, I was riding in the car next to my sister, Karen, in the back seat. I looked over at her, and had the following thought, “Is it possible that my sister is actually an automaton that’s been designed to interact with me by simulating a human personality, but when I leave her presence she shuts down like a machine?” I didn’t express it like that, but that was exactly what I was thinking. I’ve mostly laid that suspicion to rest, now.
11. My hometown of Huntsville, Alabama was a hotbed of Satanic activity. They especially favored Green Mountain, where we eventually moved.
12. On your first day of high school, when you walk through the door, everyone in the hallways turns and looks at you menacingly, muttering “Freshmaaaaaaan!”
13. My dad could literally detach his thumb and reattach it at will.
14. My friend Buffy’s dad would, per her request, stab me with his giant sword that he kept over their fireplace and that filled me with mortal terror. While enraged at her for defying my will, I had told her that I’d ask my dad to stab her with his pocketknife. She called my bluff and raised me. Big-time. I went screaming into my bedroom until Mom came in and consoled me. I HAVEN’T FORGOTTEN, BUFFY!
15. If you are falling from a great height, and you have a piece of wood, you can just jump off the piece of wood before you hit the ground and you’ll be fine.
16. If we got everybody on one side of the earth to jump and fall back to the ground simultaneously, we might just be able to knock the earth out of its orbit. Thank God we never tried it.
17. Our cat, Cloudy, was probably the smartest cat in the world. My proof? When I would feed her, I could hold two packets of Tender-Vittles before her, one full and one half-full, and she’d always pick the full one, even when they looked the same.
18. I thought the alphabet song went, “H I J K M&M O P.” Mmmmm….M&M’s!
19. It was possible that the Earth and the Sun were, respectively, just an electron and nucleus of an atom in an unfathomably huge piece of matter.

Of course, this list is confined to things I believed as a kid. There’s all kinds of stupid stuff I’ve believed since coming of age. I could mention them, too, but really it’s just too embarrassing.

The Not-so-great Society

From today’s assigned reading for my Political Philosophy class:

Social institutions must, at the very least, be designed to enable ordinary human beings, who are neither saints nor geniuses, to do each other a minimum of serious harm.

Surely that can’t be right!

Meat Musings

I recently came across this page that features a set of photographs of famous barbecue joints. To answer your first question: yes, there are pictures of Dreamland. But most are of places in Texas and a couple in Kansas City. There is one North Carolina restaurant—Lexington’s, which I’ve not heard of before (the site that directed me to these pictures says it’s overrated).

Why the Texas bias, you ask? Good question. Maybe the journalist lives in Texas, but still it’s a poor representation of the state of the cuisine. I lived in Texas for two years, and I had some decent meat on occasion. At a friend’s house in Houston, I tried brisket for the first time, and it was fantastic. Also, Waco had a place called Vitek’s, which was respectable but nothing worth making a special trip for. When I went in the first time, I talked to the owner about BBQ and asked if he’d had Dreamland. “Yeah, their stuff is all right,” he said casually. I started to call him a lowdown, filthy liar and ask him to fight it out, but I had to get to class.

Other than that, I couldn’t tell you a thing about Texas barbecue. But even if, for the sake of argument, the Lone Star State does barbecue the best, why no shots of Mississippi’s offerings (Jones, as I recall, swears by Leatha’s)? Why nothing more from Carolina, or the hickory pit stuff you find in Alabama or Tennessee? Rendezvous? Corky’s?

Kansas City, I’ll grant, has a great barbecue reputation, which may seem odd to my fellow Southerners. I tried it the one time I was in KC, but I can’t tell you a single thing about the meal—not the sauce base, the meat, the sides, or even the restaurant’s name. We were on our way to Lawrence, KS to see some friends, and I had just returned from visiting London for the first time, so my interest in Kansas City and the cuisine to be found right off I-70 was understandably dampened. I wish I’d been able to get some authentic stuff.

St. Louis claimed to have its particular style of BBQ. It’s easy to replicate at home. Take some Log Cabin brand “Maple” syrup, and heat it up in a pan. Now add a little Tabasco, but not so much as to overpower the saccharine flavor of the syrup! That’s pretty much it. We tried it once, and then we vowed never to make that mistake again. Even now I speak of it only in hushed tones. There was a lot of wonderful food to be had in the Bigass Metal Arch City, but that wasn’t one of them.

Surprisingly, we had access to pretty good barbecue in Grand Rapids. Our neighborhood had a pretty large African-American population, and they set up two rib joints within spittin’ distance of each other. I tried one of them: The Rib Crib. The owners were originally from Memphis, and they knew what they were doing. It added to the strangeness of GR, which in many ways was a colder version of a Southern City. Ask me sometime if you want me to draw all the parallels. The other thing I liked about the Rib Crib was the sign explaining all the rules for the juvenile clientele: no swearing, no drinking or drug use, no wearing pants that continually fall down around your knees thus showing your underwear, etc.

Surprised as I was to get good barbecue in Michigan, it was nothing compared to my disbelief at hearing that there was a distinctive BBQ style here on California’s Central Coast. And yet, it’s true. It’s called “Santa Maria style.” It starts with a cut of beef called tri-tip, which I’d not heard of before moving out here but have quickly come to love. The meat is rubbed down with spices, grilled, and usually served with salsa. I know, salsa should disqualify it from consideration. But trust me—it’s good stuff.

The best tri-tip I’ve had out here comes from Los Olivos Grocery. It lies just off Hwy 154 in the Santa Ynez Valley. We stop there every time we go to wine country. The store itself is a wonder: a first class gourmet grocery in such a rural area. They have a fantastic selection of local wines, plenty of great cheese, and a small bakery that serves Lavazza espresso (none of your Starbucks swill for me, thank you). And they make one of the best sandwiches I’ve ever had anywhere.

It’s quite simple. You can see them grilling the tri-tip in the parking lot, and the smell alone gets your salivary glands working. They slice the meat into thin strips, and serve it on a French loaf, with a side of salsa. I prefer it with barbecue sauce. I don’t know if they make their own or pour it out of a giant restaurant supply vat, and I don’t care. It’s a divine meal. And the bread they use is absolutely perfect—a hint of crustiness on the outside, but plenty soft on the inside. I’ve long realized that a great sandwich starts with great bread (even though so many places skimp on that part of the equation). And the Los Olivos Grocery gets it right.

The first time I tried it, I was really just looking for something to fill my stomach so I wouldn’t get completely soused at the first winery we went to, so I wasn’t expecting a culinary epiphany. But by the time I finished it, I seriously thought about getting another one. I could go for one right now, come to think of it.

The Best Sentence I've Read this Morning

"The Ultimate Gift is a Hallmark card adapted by Mitch Albom into a song that’s belted out by Celine Dion right after she watches a puppy get flattened by an ice cream truck."

You can find it here.

Links of Note

1. No doubt bent on forcing their fondue-swilling ways, Switzerland invaded Lichtenstein on March 1. Class acts to the end, the Lichtensteiners shrugged it off. Of course, they have no army, so what else would they do?

2. The United States Mint accidentally introduced some $1 coins into circulation that didn’t have the phrase “In God We Trust.” Since taking God out of schools is clearly the sole reason America's educational system is so crummy, what do you think this will do to the value of the dollar? If you want to beat the rush and unload your greenbacks, you can trade them for Euros, but only for the 2€ coin.

3. Have you bought anything from Bono’s Red campaign? Then brace yourself. According to Advertising Age, the ratio of dollars spent on advertising for the campaign to the dollars spent on actually helping Africans is possibly as bad as 100:18. Ouch! Red refutes the claim by citing this article. Bono's been taking some undeserved heat for this, it seems. I think he's genuinely trying to find innovative ways to help

4. From the People’s Republic of Seattle comes this story about teaching children values of democracy and justice (read: socialist indoctrination) by taking away their Legos. The kids had built a huge Legotown, which embodied (and I quote) “assumptions of a class-based, capitalist society—a society that we teachers find unjust and oppressive.” I find it rather chilling, although the original source, which can be found here, claims that it occurred in an after-school program, rather than a public school classroom.

Get Lost, Lost

Last week I indicated I may be getting close to giving up on Lost. It’s now official—I am fed up. The writers seem like they’re mortified of developing the story arc any further. Last night’s episode was supposed to be earth-shattering, but it was just boring. And so were all the other episodes this season.

It’s a shame, since the show started out with so much promise. It was different from anything that had ever been done before. That alone made it a welcome addition to TV land, but especially since it was in the height of (shudder) the reality show craze, from which we have yet to emerge completely. But the creative team has apparently decided there is nowhere to go.

I think Lost might actually turn out to be worse than The X Files. The latter show lost control of its own mythos by inventing subplot after subplot. That resulted in a kind of dramatic inflation. With each new twist in the plot and each new mystery introduced, you knew there was no way they’d be able to make good on their promises. Just like currency loses its value when (by increasing the supply) it’s increasingly unable to be traded for items of actual value, I began caring less and less what was happening. I still don’t know how the show ended.

But Lost seems to be trying to avoid that problem by embracing its opposite: rather than revealing anything at all about the island or the Others, it just asks the viewers to please stand by until the season (or series) finale. And I frankly don’t see how they can explain everything they need to explain in a way that is not hokey or contrived.