ThanksChristmasGiving

This time of year always brings conflicting emotions for me.  On the one hand, I absolutely love the Christmas season.  I love the fact that I can enjoy a Christian holiday with quasi-pagan traditions and can be secretly more excited about the changing of seasons than I am about anything else.  I can enjoy family traditions and shoveling the driveway, we fluff the tree and hang lights on the bushes, it's all very festive and wonderfully cozy.  The problem, for me, is this little holiday called Thanksgiving, in which we completely overindulge on tons of food and try and act like we're thankful for things after throwing half the food away because we can. It's really just a thorn because Thanksgiving causes people to get uppity about when you are and are not allowed to put up your Christmas tree or listen to Christmas music.  People will flood Facebook with their righteous indignation upon seeing a Christmas display at the mall or Target because that's what Thanksgiving is for, getting pissed about Christmas being celebrated too early.

Basically all of this boils down to Thanksgiving being a terrible holiday.  For one, if we need a holiday to remind us to be thankful for things then we're already screwed.  For two, it's predicated on a ridiculous story about native people sharing with inept and intrusive Europeans who would later kill and steal form them all in the name of god and country.  This is a great holiday.  Let's remember to be thankful for all of that killing and stealing.  Besides, Thanksgiving comes courtesy of some of the worst culinary inventions in history.  What other time of the year is a dinner table graced with the presence of Green Been Casserole, Yams and Cranberries of which you are expected to mash all together and eat with something approximating pleasure.  I don't understand these things so mostly I just eat rolls and quietly sit through dinner.  I'm probably also shaking my head a lot and making rude comments, but that's beside the point.

The point is that Christmas is a far superior celebration than anything Thanksgiving can ever hope to muster out of it's sad revisionist history and apocryphal story telling.  Mind you, I'm not referring to Coca-Cola-commercialized-spend-to-your-absolute-limit-and-then-some-Christmas.  I'm talking about candle light midnight church service in which you sing carols and tell stories.  I'm talking about early morning breakfast that is both simple and wonderful all at once.  I'm talking about sharing gifts and lives and time and board games and general merriment involving good beer and conversation.  There's snow on the ground, it's pleasantly cold out, hot cocoa abounds and you can simply sit and be with people instead of feeling rushed by the next day's shopping extravaganza.  Life can take a break and you have a moment to breathe and relax and just be.  Why should I wait until after Thanksgiving to be excited about that?

Bottom line: Thanksgiving misses out on being the worst holiday only because Columbus Day is, inexplicably, still a real thing...yay European imperialism.

X-Mas 4 Life

Jacob's Hierarchy of Appropriately Fried Eggs

I'm a fan of eggs.  I like them many ways.  Scrambled eggs, fried eggs, even poached eggs.  So why the fuck can't restaurants make them the way I order? Seriously, I can make eggs like a bagillion different ways.  Why is it so goddamn hard for people, who are employed to do as much, make eggs to someone's order?  I get that there will always be a bit of room for variance (for a little artistic license if you will) but for the love of everything that is sacred can we please clearly define the differences in fried eggs?  This is consistently the most frustrating and annoying part of eating breakfast at any restaurant.  Let us begin:

Sunny side up is pretty straightforward.  You never flip the egg and baste the "uncooked" side.  It is generally accepted both with the white a bit runny or not. When you say sunny side up, you expect there to be a little bit of leeway with the consistency of your white.  Yolk is of course runny as hell.  This is the fried egg you want to order when you are looking forward to cardiac arrest.

Over easy is also not to difficult.  While it requires a delicate flip of the egg, over easy means your white is going to be runny as will your yolk.  It's pretty simple, though I have experienced the over easy as over medium in many places.  This revelation usually comes after over medium comes out over well and I have to send it back.  Actually that's not entirely true because sometimes I ask my partner to have it sent back since I'm really a giant wuss with microscopic testicles when it comes to asking the server to fix something.  I mean, it's honestly not their fault, they're innocent bystanders caught in the cross-fire.

Over medium.  I should probably stop saying these are not difficult as none of them are actually difficult but holy shit if this is not the bane of my existence. Apparently this one is difficult for everyone but me.  The appropriately made over medium fried egg has it's white cooked through and yolk still wet but a tad more solid than the runniness of the over easy.  This is your classic dipping egg.  The yolk is of excellent consistency for your toast and is usually held in it's bowl by the slightest layer of solid yolk.  You cannot actually order this in a restaurant.  They will give you an over easy egg or over well, but never over medium.  Why?  I have no fucking clue.

Over well is by far the simplest form of fried egg.  Just cook the fucking thing. Everything is solid, just don't burn it.  There is not a soul on Earth who can't cook this egg.

If you are not cooking your eggs according to this handy guide, you are doing it wrong.  And since I titled this "Jacob's Hierarchy of Appropriately Fried Eggs" let's place these types in their proper order:

Over medium - Superior in all aspects, the over medium fried egg contains the best of both worlds; cooked through white and nice liquid yolk.  It is, beyond a doubt, the best way to cook a fried egg.

Over well - This one is really a situational style but remains at the top of the list for the sole reason that you're not dealing with runny white.

Sunny side up (only if the white is thoroughly cooked) - Better than snotty ass over easy, the sunny side up with white cooked through makes a decent change of pace from the over medium and you can feel superior to other cooks by showing off your basting skills.  There is the psychological problem of knowing that one side of the egg hasn't touched your cooking surface and also the heart attack.

Over easy (as long as the runny white is minimal) - And I mean minimal.  If the white is barely noticeable in its runniness then this egg is serviceable for purposes of potatoes and eggs and skillets as the runny white gets hidden in the mixing of ingredients.

Over easy - Can be vomit inducing when the white is jiggling on your plate.

Sunny side up (non-cooked through white) - Fucking disgusting.

So there you are world.  I just dropped some knowledge on you and knowing is half the battle.  Go forth and prepare your fried eggs appropriately.  You're welcome.

Why Lawnmowers are Ruining the World

Ye Old Time Mower

Anyone who knows me knows I can be a bit of a complainer enjoy righting wrongs via the use of surprising semantics and clever rhetoric, hence this post.  My beloved lawnmower, whom we will call Chewy, decided to take a giant steamy dump in the middle of mowing the lawn last week. Apparently it was time for it's nearly 10 year old battery to say goodbye. Well fuck you battery, you had one job in life, to hold a charge, and you fucking blew it right in the middle of mowing the lawn.  I don't blame Chewy.  Chewy has been good to me, I just think he could do a better job of picking and choosing who lives inside his little lawnmower heart.  To be fair, 10 years is a prodigious life for a lawnmower battery, but that doesn't excuse it's decision to really stick it to me in the end. And, also to be fair, I had a back-up reel mower that gamely picked up the slack after hitting Chewy with a few wrenches.

I would show you a picture of my beloved Chewy if I could find one floating somewhere in the vast reaches of the internet but it turns out my mower is so old that there's a recall on it and they have to pretty much replace the entirety of the mower's outer body and some of the electrical components.  When next I see Chewy (probably two weeks) it will look nothing like my old mower.  I'm sure it will feel something like picking up your ridiculously rich husband/wife from the plastic surgeon's office (minus all of the gauze, blood, and highly addictive pain meds).

Chewy's new digs, I can hardly stand
to look at him.

This disgusting looking thing (left) is what I will be handed when I pick up Chewy.  I'm sure the orange is some sort of safety precaution (you know, so you can dodge the oncoming mower in time) as Chewy was black where the orange is and green where the black is. Come to think of it, Chewy's recall probably had something to do with him being a stealth ninja mower seeing as he blended in so well with the grass and sounded like a vacuum.  Who would ever guess that a vacuum could be so deadly, thus sneak up on you and maim you, thus ninja mower, thus recall.  Flawless logic.

I wasn't really angry about taking Chewy to the plastic surgeon's office repair shop because of the old trusty reel mower and the fact that these old model electric cordless mowers are leaps and bounds better than the new ones.  I would survive a few weeks of mowing the old-fashioned way and perhaps even enjoy a boost in physical exertion and general well-being.  This was not to be as I am prone to the universal law of Shit Hitting the Fan All At Once, which makes for messy situations.  The old reel-mower took a dump as well (though not the explosive kind that requires you to clean up the toilet bowl afterwards).  It decided that I did not require it's handle to be attached to it's base anymore.  Why, you might ask?  Good fucking question to which it had no legitimate answer.  It was time to play hardball.

Then this happened

Under no circumstance was I going to throw in the towel and since we just dropped Chewy at the repair shop it was between me and the reel-mower.  After about an hour staring at various items in the garage it occurred to me how much faster my partner would have been able to come up with a solution.  Another hour later I had finally zero'd in on some crappy looking rope to tie to the handle so I could drag the reel-mower through the grass.  A few seconds in to plan B I gained unanimous consent from myself to declare this plan an absolute failure.  Plan C required me to acquire a tig torch, some oxygen and acetylene, and a crash-course in welding; this was not feasible.  Which left me with plan D, wait until the neighbor gets home and ask to borrow their lawnmower. Fucking piece of shit lawnmowers.

Fucking useless...

So basically, lawnmower's can fuck themselves, and grass can too.  Because, if we get right down to it, the only reason we have lawnmowers is because someone at some point decided that seeding one's property with grass was a great idea.  Fuck that guy too because now I'm stuck in this web of conspiracies and lies in which my neighbors call the village office if my grass is "unkempt".

I miss Chewy...


Update: Turns out the internet is vast and unending, you just need to know how to use it.  Anyway, a picture of Chewy in his prime that might help explain paragraph three: