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Posts published in March 2011

Salad: Fucking Your Mouth With A Knife Since The Beginning of Agriculture.

Over the last couple months, my friend Lindsey and I have been coming up with taglines for salad, a meal we both find wholly dissatisfying. It all began one afternoon when she was complaining about her lunch of salad and came up with “salad. never satisfying,” to which I countered, “Salad. Meh.” Some other favorites have included, “Salad. Tossing it is the only enjoyable part” (her), “Salad. Abandon all hope ye who enter here” (me), “Salad. It doesnt count if you put fried chicken, bacon and ranch on it and claim to have a satisfying salad” (her), “Salad: The food equivalent of a Ke$ha song” (me), and so on and so forth.

You get the idea. We must have at least a hundred million billion of them at this point.

During my internet travels, I stumbled across a posting on The Hairpin which was entirely women eating salad and laughing. What the fuck. Upon sending it to her, I started giving each photo a tagline and they made me laugh enough that I wanted to share with you.

1. Salad: Cucumbers Help Me Shit.
2. Salad: Makes My Period White Like My Clothes.
3. Salad: Only Water For Me Because I'm a Mean Drunk.
4. Salad: Only Fruit for Black People? Racist As Fuck.
5. Salad: I Hate Myself.
6. Salad: There Aren't Leaves Where I Come From In The Middle East.
7. Salad: What The Fuck Are These Red Things?
8. Salad: This Is The Face I Made When My Parents Were Killed.
9. Salad: I Lie To Myself That I Enjoy It.
10. Salad: Surprise! Your Lunch FUCKING SUCKS.
11. Salad: As Bland And Unfulfilling As The Rest Of My Miserable Life.
12. Salad: Fuck Me, This Shit Sucks.
13. Salad: Feels Like Broken Glass In My Guts.
14. Salad: You'll Never Actually Eat It By The Ocean.
15. Salad: Tastes Like The Bird Shit I'm Pretty Sure Just Dropped In It.
16. Salad: Iceberg? Are You Fucking Kidding Me? Could It Be Any Worse?

Fuck you, salad.

First Exit To Brooklyn

My friend Erik recently started a new music blog called First Exit to Brooklyn where he posts a song a day 5 days a week to share his love for music with friends and strangers alike. Here’s what he has to say about it.

i’ve loved music for as long as I can remember…so many memories associated with sitting in the back of my parents car, 70’s fm radio playing, my transistor radio, buying a new 45 rpm, watching mtv, going to shows, exchanging mix tapes, going out to bars or clubs, on to mix cds, and currently enjoyed with my mp3 player on random. there’s something about the single; be it popular with the masses, a college radio hit or a deep track. a lot of the appeal, to me, has to do with not knowing what’s coming next. don’t get me wrong, i love to listen to albums straight through as well, but i tend to do that when i am more focused in, and can give the experience more of my attention. it’s just simpler with a single, i can multi-task and still enjoy the music. it can be the hook, the beat, the riff, the baseline, or the chorus, in most cases it’s the combination of all of them coming together that reels me in. over the course of my life, i’ve come to love many songs in many different genres. some of them i’ve enjoyed since i was a child, some were around during my teen years, so many of my memories involve music and I still look forward to discovering music (new and old) every day. that is what I would like to share here…my love for these songs.

Go check it out and listen to some tunes and be inspired. If you’re a Tumblr user (and who isn’t these days?) follow the dude.

A Letter to Gravy Regarding its Deliciousness

Dearest Gravy,

Have I told you recently how much I love you? I would hate to think that you are walking through this world with no conception of how deeply I feel for you. You are the meat juice light of my life and I have yet to encounter a meal which could not be made better by your presence. For example, while eating chicken & waffles this morning with Tita Sue, I was delivered the requisite fried chicken and waffles but you were strangely absent. My heart nearly broke there this morning at Pies & Thighs as I consider you in combination with maple syrup to be an essential element of a satisfying chicken & waffles experience.

Fortunately, I know how to bring you into my life directly. After roasting my delightful little chicken in my cast iron skillet with a rub of salt, white pepper, garlic powder, onion powder, and black pepper, I was left with what people affectionately refer to as “drippings,” i.e., the cooked off fat and love. Sensible (read: stupid) people would just dispose of this wonderful collected juice, but those of us who understand the value of fat and cooked on bits of chicken know the best thing to do: make gravy. A bit of chicken stock and a smidge of flour and whisking the burnt on bits of wonder over heat results in life’s most magnificent liquid.

While sitting at my kitchen table enjoying my dinner, the glass of you sat next to my plate and I considered taking a great big swig of it directly, but I reconsidered for two reasons. First, I would have felt very bad about myself on an emotional, if not physical, level. There’s something slightly disheartening about drinking a glass of reduced fat and chicken bits. As a sauce, I love you; as a beverage I am not so sure. Second, I would have been left with no leftover gravy to enjoy as I consume the remainder of the chicken over the next week. If there is any leftover when the chicken is gone, I will dump it into the soup I intend to make with the carcass. Waste not, want not, gravy. That’s what I always (never) say.

Growing up in an essentially gravy-less childhood was a hardship, gravy. You are gravy, so you can never understand what it’s like to grow up without you. Imagine, for my sake, what your Thanksgiving turkey would be like without the luscious brown magic you provide. Imagine, if you will, what roast beef would be like if you never kissed it with your salty grace. Imagine, for the love of God and all that is holy, what my sausage smoothie would have been like if you were not there to provide such savory redemption from the depths of bland banality. Gravy, I love you. Thank you for being so versatile and easy to prepare. You are my life.

Sincerely,

The Black Laser.

PS – I am not referring to your poor relations that come in a can. They will need to stay outside. Thanks for understanding that we just can’t allow their kind in here.

The very first piece of The Black Laser fan art.

Holy fucking shit ass. Is this not the awesomest thing ever? The answer is, “Yes, indeed, Space Pope, this is the awesomest thing ever until you tell me about the next awesomest thing ever.” Goddamned right, subject. Don’t be jelly just because I have fan art and you don’t.

The piece was done (with only minor suggestion by yours truly) by Oz Haver. Click his name to see more of his work.

This guy is tougher than you are.

Do you feel tough? Do you feel awesome? Guess what. You’re not. Aleksander Doba, in the photo above, is tougher than you could ever hope to be. Why? Let me quote.

Aleksander Doba, a 64-year-old native of Poland, took off from Dakar, capital of the west African nation of Senegal, back on Oct. 26. After 98 days, 23 hours, 42 minutes at sea, Doba and his custom 23-foot-long, 39-inch-wide human-powered kayak landed at Acaraú, a city on Brazil’s northeast coast. The trip covered some 3,320 miles in all, and Doba became only the fourth known person to accomplish such a feat, and the very first to do it nonstop.

Are you an American and utterly ignorant of geography? Let me provide a map for you.

Holy shit. This guy is so bad ass you are probably hiding under your covers right now worrying that he’s going to come after you if you drink all the vodka. Be careful. This man exists.

Read more about it here: 64-Year-Old Kayaker Completes Trans-Atlantic Voyage

Creative Projects-February: JosephDillingham.com

February was a slow and not-productive-enough month, but I did manage to finish the one thing I absolutely needed to do: get JosephDillingham.com up and running. Getting the site finished has been looming over my head for a long, long time and I am glad to have it done. I even built it so that it is easy to update and add to. Extensibility built right in! People pay for that shit. I don’t have much else to say about the site that I haven’t already, so I leave it at this.

Now that March is here and I am not limited to 28 pitiful days, I hope to have more than just one thing done this month. I’ve also put myself on hiatus for the month which allows for seemingly endless free time unhindered by juice. More stuff to come. Keep your eyes here.

Iä! Iä! Cthulhu Fhtagn!

This morning I was reading through my Twitter stream and saw a tweet by BoingBoing called Eldritch Effulgence: HP Lovecraft’s favorite words. Being a Lovecraft fan, I clicked through to discover that “Abnormal” was Lovecraft’s favorite word. I also read that the originator of the list, one Cthulhu Chick, was working on an eBook of the complete works of H.P. Lovecraft. I then became keenly aware of a problem I had not realized I had yesterday: I had absolutely NO Lovecraft on my Kindle. I have Tolstoy and Melville and Poe and all sorts of other books in the public domain, but not a single work by the master of weird fiction. Lame!

I clicked through to the original article from BoingBoing to see if I could find some information on the forthcoming eBook. Right there at the top of the post was even more than I could have hoped for. And I quote,

Update: The free eBook of Lovecraft’s Complete Works is done and can be downloaded here.

Victory! Not only was the book finished, but it was free–exactly as much as I ever want to pay for an eBook that I cannot trade, give away, or resell!

If there are any of you out there who have never read Lovecraft and have no idea just how much of an influence he has been on modern horror, science fiction, and heavy metal, then you owe it to yourself to download the eBook and get reading. The price for admittance is just a little time and your curiosity. Jump in. Those of you who know Lovecraft probably haven’t even read this far before downloading the eBook.

It’s available for Nook (epub) and Kindle (mobi), meaning you can read it on just about any device that has a screen. Get it here: Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft

Thank me later.