Celebrate Minnesota - Get on board the Lutheran Snowplow!

A fair while back now at work we got into a discussion* about what the most 'Minnesota' possible cocktail was.  Relevant background - Minnesota is the State we live and work in**.  For those foreign readers, it's one of the ones in the middle.  Not, not that one.  Yeah, you're thinking of Wisconsin. We're to the left of them.  It's cool. Common mistake.

Not Wisconsin.

*Yes, by 'got into a discussion', I do mean 'I rambled on about it at some length while everyone else politely tried to continue working.' 

**Although we are owned by Canadians now.  The company, that is.  Not Minnesota.  Well... actually, there's an argument to be made there...  Discussion for another time.  It's been good, but poutine has - thus far - been notably lacking. 

After some thought, I eventually came up with the following drink recipe:

    -2 oz. Vodka

    -2 oz. Cream of mushroom soup (prepared, not condensed)

    -Garnish with two tater tots and one pillow mint

    -Serve neat in a lowball glass rimmed with Hidden Valley Ranch ranch dressing powder.

For some inexplicable reason, this obvious triumph of a recipe was not immediately met with universal acclaim.  Although my boss, Larry, did - after a moment or two of thought - christen it 'The Lutheran Snowplow'.  So, he can't have been completely disinterested in the topic.  Or perhaps he just wanted to put a pin in things.  Who can say.

Now, one of the things that you're required by law to do as a citizen of the State of Minnesota is to make a Tater Tot Hotdish at regular intervals.  And that's not a state law, that's Federal.  Yeah, I don't know why they thought that was a good use of their time either, but there it is. A tater tot hot dish is what I'm assured the rest of the world knows as something called a 'casserole'. In its simplest form it's a layer of ground beef, topped by a layer of premixed cream of mushroom soup*** and your personal choice of can of vegetables.  I'm a corn purist myself, but a solid case can be made for mixed vegetables.  That's between you and your god.

***Pro hack - mix one can cream of mushroom soup and one can cream of celery.  You're welcome.

On top of that you dump a bag of frozen tater tots****, then bake the whole thing at 350 for about an hour.

**** If you don't know what tater tots are I don't even know how to help you.  

As I made the requisite run to the grocery store for the ingredients for the aforementioned hot dish, I realized something profound.  I was purchasing 2 of the 5 components for the greatest Minnesota themed alcoholic beverage ever conceived of in a green sand iron foundry.  Plus, I already had vodka at home, because I'm not an animal.  

The location of Hidden Valley Ranch ranch dressing powder packs is, by this point, a well-known thing and such was easily obtained.  That just left the elusive pillow mint.

I have to admit, my hopes were not high that I might find the elusive pillow mint at my local grocery store.  I briefly toyed with the thought of downloading some sort of dating app for women over 70 and looking for someone nearby, as such a woman would without question have a small dish of them sitting helpfully on a small living room table.  But fortune was with me (if not with our local septuagenarians looking for love) and the store actually carried them.  They're for some reason insisting on calling them 'cloud mints', but they are clearly the same thing.

It's happening.

All the pieces are in place.  We're doing this.

Now the question you're obviously thinking (other than 'Dear God, why?) is 'Is this a drink that's served chilled vodka cold, or hearty cream of mushroom soup warm?  And the answer to that is 'I honestly have no idea.' SO, we're going to prepare a split batch of soup and try it both ways, in the interest of scientific integrity.

As I write this, the tater tot hotdish has just been put in the oven.  All that's left now is to prep the second can of cream of mushroom soup, chill half of it, and then sit back and think about times in my life that I could have made better choices.

Will update later as we approach zero hour.

Cocktail with the red toothpick is warm. 
Cocktail with the blue toothpick is cold.

OK, the results are in and warm is 100% the way to go.  As you can see, getting tater tot garnish to balance on the rim proved to be beyond me, and the pillow mints dissolved almost immediately, which in hindsight I should have expected.

But fun fact - The pillow mint proved to provide a really fun finishing note to the overall flavor complexity.  I admit, I expected the pillow mint to be the albatross on this particular drink, but it turned out to be the MVP.

Also, powdered ranch dressing on the rim not only looks delightful but is also fucking delicious.  I would caution anyone from letting it dry on the glass though, because it appears to harden into a substance that could safely drive space shuttles through re-entry.

Also, if I tried this in the future, I would absolutely filter out the mushroom chunks, which were emotionally upsetting.

Also, and I feel obligated to mention this, it cannot help but be noted that the final product looks unmistakenly like a glass of what we might politely refer to as 'gentlemen fluid.'  I don't know what to do with that information.  Perhaps, as a courtesy, we can all just politely move on from that observation.

Your move, beverage makers of Wisconsin.

Requiescat In Pace, eh?

 

Well, October is here and for the first time in simply ages I'm not spending it as a Canadian.  Which is too bad, because access to socialized healthcare would be great just at the moment, wouldn't it?

To explain:

A few years back an old friend of mine got in touch with me regarding a job.  She was coordinating haunted bus tours in Saint Paul, MN, and needed tour guides.  That is to say, it was a tour of sites that were haunted on a bus which - to the best of my knowledge - was not.

A few fun facts about Saint Paul, MN:

1: It's actually the State Capitol of Minnesota, although nine people out of ten think Minneapolis is.  There's another interesting story nested inside that involving Pigs, the University of Minnesota, and Laura Ingalls Wilder, but we're already in a digression inside a digression inside a digression, so let's just leave that for now.*

2: There's a statistically significant number of sites in the City of Saint Paul that can make a reasonable claim to  being haunted.  

(A lot of this can be traced back to one small modernist hotel being built in the heart of the super rich area on Summit Avenue** back in the mid 1900s, which everyone got SUPER pissy about.  This led to a whole series of by-laws regarding how no one was ever allowed to change anything about any of the buildings in that neighborhood ever again without a personal note from God, and even that was likely to be appealed by the HOA.  The net result is that that stretch of Summit Avenue has the longest continuous run of unaltered Victorian mansions in the nation.  And Victorian Mansions accumulate ghost stories like R. Kelly does urine-porn. Allegedly.)

So, at the risk of getting back to the point, I was invited to come and be one of those guides who stands at the front of a bus-full of people for two hours at a stride relating ghoulish tales of spectral phenomena that occurred right outside your drivers' side windows or your door side windows.

But there was a complication.  The guides needed to be spooky costumed characters, because - you know - haunted bus tour.  And while I, like all right minded people, recognize Halloween as the only good holiday, I only had one Halloween costume on hand.

A Canadian Mountie.

Not the most terrifying figure looming over our All Hallow's Eve iconography. 

How, you might ask, did I end up with a Canadian Mountie costume.  Years earlier, after years of making fuzzy animal costumes for Halloween and somehow not ending up as an object of sexualized desire, I decided that maybe cute fuzzy animals did not immediately lead to thoughts of sex***, and that I should, perhaps, try something with a little more intrinsic sex appeal.  

The obvious answer was a uniform of some kind, but I wanted to also make sure to also be something a little more unique so that I would stand out.  At this point I happened across an airing of the 1980s film 'Revenge of the Nerds' in which one of the mean frat guys is at a costume party dressed as a Mountie and I thought 'Yes.  That is my answer.'  And then I thought, 'WOW does this movie not hold up in any way.  Yikes.  Just yikes.'

But still, the frat guy looked pretty good in it, so I made myself a Mountie costume, took it on a trip to Halloween in Key West, and absolutely, comprehensively, proved that the fuzzy animal costumes had NOT been the problem.

 

But back to the story.  So there I was with a tour guide job whose existence relied on my making a reasonable claim that the Canadian Mountie counted as 'spooky'.

Then, in the early waking moments one fine September morning, it came to me.  It would work.  And - more importantly - it was amusing to me.  SO I went to the home base of the tours and presented their new guide - 

Deadly Do-Right.

 Spirit of Canadian Vengeance.

Pictured, hopefully with permission, in background - Nurse Hatchet.  Who got me the gig.

And so a legend was born.  And for many years afterward my October nights were spent in an orgy of gratuitously drawn out long 'O's and attempts to work the words 'Zed' and 'Alluminium' into the stories as often as I possibly could.  Eventually I became aware of Letterkenny, and the next couple of seasons became an extended game of forcing fans of the show to identify themselves through the simple expedient of beginning each ghost story with the words, 'How're ya now?'

Good times.

All done now, alas.  Thanks to COVID, this season Deadly Do-Right rides no more, and the organization that does the tours is closing permanently in November.  It was a good ride, and I'm proud to say that more than twenty years after I bought them, I could still fit into my jodhpurs. Although they were, admittedly, sometimes tighter than others...

And so, I give you all one last time my introductory spiel from the start of every single tour.  Sing along if you know the correct pronunciation of 'house' and 'about'.

"Hello.  How're ya now?  My name is Deadly Do-Right, late of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.  I was betrayed by my partner for the cost of a Tim Horton's Doughnut****, and ever since am cursed to roam the world as the Canadian Spirit of Vengeance. Which is the politest form of vengeance currently available.  And if you are not pure of heart, I will break into your house in the dead of night... znd leave a sternly worded note."

Good night, Deadly.  It's been fun being you.  Hopefully we'll meet again.

 

*In 1858, when Minnesota became a state, there were two big cities and so the compromise was that one of them would be the home of the State University, and the other would get to be the State Capitol.  Minneapolis got the University.  Unfortunately, the other City was named Pig's Eye, and had to go through some enthusiastic rebranding as 'Saint Paul' in order to make everyone not feel foolish.  Pigs Eye gets mentioned a startling number of times in the Little House on the Prairie books, which might raise some eyebrows as its primary industries were meat packing and prostitution.  Or, to put it another way, meat packing.

**When Tom Waits mentions in the song 'I Don't Want to Grow Up' that he doesn't want to live in a 'big old tomb on Grand Street', this is literally the neighborhood he's talking about.  He lived here briefly in his teens.

*** One inadvertent outcome of all this was when, after a decade of wondering where I'd put it, my old Squirrel costume showed up as the official 'Rally Squirrel' of the Saint Paul Saints baseball team.  I only have the vaguest of theories as to how it ended up there, but it's nice to see that it's aged well.

**** For a beautiful, short lived period Timmy's expanded internationally and we actually had them here, so people knew what I was talking about.

It's exactly like Go Ask Alice, but with Diedrich Bader instead of Peyote

So, the most amazing thing happened this morning, I...

I'm sorry... what?

2 and a half years...?

Really...?

Oh. Yeah.  About that...

It's fairly obvious to the casual observer that I'm not a bold user of social media.  This is for the fairly obvious reason.  I'm old and change frightens me.  Also, those kids keep walking across my lawn.

So, in addition to things like, say, forgetting about having a blog since the US had a functioning President*, I'm also not heavy into social media.  I have accounts with Twitter and Instagram, and was signed up on Tumblr until a few weeks ago when they stopped allowing pornogr a free exchange of ideas. But I rarely, if ever, look at or post on any of them.

*Seriously, who would have imagined that we'd be looking back at 2016 with longing regret?  We'd just lost Prince, Bowie, and Alan freaking Rickman** and I still think of Summer 2016 as that last moment before hope died.

** In hindsight, I wonder if the universe wasn't just politely sidling up to sufficiently cool and deserving people at the time, having a quiet word in their ear about upcoming events, and then discretely asking if they'd like to consider settling their check and making an early evening of it.

 So, there I was, pleasantly settled into curmudgeonly ludditolitry - if I might coin a phrase - when for some reason this last week a bizarre and unexpected transformation began taking place.

I started actually looking at my Twitter feed.

It's actually down to the fact that for the last couple of years I've been writing reviews for Douxreviews.com, and they're very on top of their twitter game.  Every time I post a review of something a tweet goes out notifying the world (and me) that said review exists, and provides a helpful link to read same.

So, because I'm drawn irresistibly to things with my name on them, I've gotten into the habit of  looking at other, non-me-related things on Twitter while I'm there.  It's a slippery slope, people. 

So, having gone from a person who has signed up for Twitter and resolutely ignored it, I'd become one of those people that reads things on Twitter.  And actively checks Twitter for said things to read.

At some point Twitter suggested that I follow Diedrich Bader.  I'm not sure exactly why, but I totally recommend it.  He's got a nice line in a kind of charming 'just another guy hanging out in the garage' vibe that leads me to believe that if you were hanging out with him and he suggested stealing a fire engine to drive to Mexico, then you'd totally do it because it sounded like such a reasonable suggestion at the time.*

*If you and Mr. Bader do attempt to steal a fire truck, be aware that they generally start with an ignition switch instead of a key, and you have to engage the battery first.  Also, they can be kind of a pig on gas, so expect to have to fill up again by the time you hit Rochester.**

**If you're starting in Minneapolis or surrounding suburbs.

Diedrich Bader, if the name doesn't immediately ring a bell, is currently playing Greg on the sitcom American Housewife, but if you Google him with your image search on you're pretty much guaranteed to go, 'Oh, him.  He was <that guy> in <that thing I liked>.'  Seriously, dude's been in a lot of cool stuff.

So, this morning he tweeted (see, I'm adopting the vernacular now) about a very amusing dream he had involving Allison Janney and Idris Elba, and something came over me.

I responded to his tweet, which I know is different from retweeting, and I don't think has a separate name for it other than 'responded', but it might and I don't care, because a few minutes later Diedrich Bader freaking 'liked' my tweet and responded (possibly another word) right back to it!.

And I have no idea what's happening to me now, but I swear to freaking God it was like I just unwrapped the Barbie I'd been hoping for all freaking year and I totally want to be a social media icon now!!  I want to tweet clever things now!  I want to please a clamoring pool of followers!!  I want to learn how to check and see if I have any followers!!  What exactly is a Youtube deal, and how do I get one??  Instagram - that's the one for pictures of food, right??  How does Tumblr's financial model not fall apart once they factor in the drop in usage that inevitably goes hand in hand with banning pictures of... you know what, we're not talking about Tumblr right now.

I get it, social media.  I have taken my first hit of interactive messaging, and the rush is heady and sweet, and I want me more.

I'm through the looking glass here, people.

For more 42nd Vizsla, follow me on... one of those...  app... things.  Just as soon as I figure out what my name is on them...

The business plan took a grim turn there...

So here's a conversation I had today over the work messaging system...

Me
Would you go eat at a restaurant called Two Bunny Brunch?
Assume that the waitresses are drag queens
 
Not Me
10:54 AM
I would eat there everyday
Is this an option?
 
Me
10:55 AM
A Facebook friend mentioned this morning in a comment that he'd interrupted a hawk's two bunny brunch while out running, and now I'm compelled to open a restaurant to use the name
There will be burlesque shows during your meal
 
Not Me
10:57 AM
as long as no bunnies are hurt, I'm totally in.
Pasties with my pastries!*
 
Me
10:57 AM
Oh... we will be starting each meal with a ritual bunny sacrifice at your table.
A bunny, killed by a drag queen while you watch
it's a lot of our overhead expense to be honest
plus PETA is SUPER pissed
 
Not Me
11:00 AM
well, im honestly kinda into a drag queen crushing a bunny's neck
 
Me
11:00 AM
the really weird thing about it is that it's a totally vegan restaurant
 
Not Me
11:01 AM
Dude, for real, lets go into the restaurant business together
 
Me
11:05 AM
"And now, while I get your drinks order, Mis Toulittah Pepsee will strangle a rabbit"

Yes.  This is exactly what they installed the messaging system for.

*Pasties and Pastries is still available as a name for that stripper operated bakery you've always dreamed of opening.  You're welcome.

Once Again, the Forensic Sciences Ruin Musical Theater

For reasons that aren't completely explained, I completely missed the show Bob's Burgers for the first five years of its run.*

It's still running now, for the record**

**Unless you're reading this in the far future and this is all just an historic record of some kind***

***Btw - just out of curiosity - Jetpacks? Did that ever happen? 

If you, like me, were living in a yurt and are unfamiliar with Bob and his burgers, here's the basic upshot- Bob's Burgers is a cartoon aimed for adults* that airs on the Fox network. It follows Bob Belcher and his family, who own and operate a hamburger restaurant and get into what can loosely be described as 'wacky hi-jinx'.

*In the sense that it features simultaneously more intelligent and occasionally cruder humor, not in the sense that there are boobs everywhere. Although it does score major points by showing Bob's older daughter, Tina - a girl just beginning puberty - taking her fear of zombies and overcoming it by making a conscious decision to objectify them sexually, which is - if nothing else - not the sort of thing you're going to see on just any show. So... you know... Suck it, Walking Dead.**

**Not literally.

One particular wacky hi-jinc (Is that the singular for hi-jinx, or is hi-jinx both singular and plural?  You know... like Sheep or Moose.) involved a school project about Thomas Edison and an elephant named Topsy

Now, it should be acknowledged that this episode, upon further research, contained more than a bit of slander (or possibly libel.  The courts are split in an interesting way as to whether broadcast television counts as written word or spoken.) Specifically, a big chunk of the plot is based on an apparently long standing belief that Thomas Edison was involved in the electrocution of an elephant named Topsy as part of his campaign to prove that the new Alternating Current was more dangerous than his own Direct Current*

*It turns out that this isn't actually true.  Yes, there was an elephant named Topsy that was electrocuted for being 'Bad', whatever that means to an elephant at the turn of the twentieth century, but Edison himself had nothing to do with it.  The confusion probably stems from the fact that the electrocution was recorded on a camera that Edison had patented. Seriously, the footage is still out there and VERY findable on the web, but you're probably happier not having seen it.

So in the plot of the show, Louise, the younger daughter and amusingly borderline psychotic*, is assigned to do a project about Thomas Edison.  Because the teach in question super LOVES Thomas Edison, she of course frames the whole thing as both a hit piece and (less expectedly) a musical.

*From the wrong side of the border...

Except of course that things get a bit carried away and instead of a musical about Edison electrocuting an elephant we end up with a musical about Edison and an elephant falling in love with one another.  To quote the show itself on this subject - 'If it's not man on elephant love, it ain't worth singing about.'

And so, in a very catchy and singable riff, we begin with a thoughtful Topsy the elephant musing about her own mortality with the line, 'They'll say Awww, Topsy... at my Autopsy...'

Which is very touching and whistful... until you remember that it's only called an autopsy when performed on human beings.  On an animal it's called a Necropsy.

It still rhymes, but it's not as fun and clever. Sure, there's some wiggle room to argue that the capacity for self awareness and love (not to mention being able to sing a soulful musical number) might justify bumping Topsy up to a human-like standard in order to justify using the term autopsy, but still...

Stupid science.

Here's the closing number.  Yes, that is Kevin Kline as the voice of Thomas Edison.

Hakuna Matata, Asshole

I doubt that I'm alone in indulging in the occasional bit of freeway Schadenfreude*.

*On the off chance - it means 'The delight you take in witnessing something bad happen to someone else.  The fact that the German people felt the need to coin a term for this specific emotion probably says a lot about them, culturally.**

** I kid, Germany. You know I love you

Case in point, the other day I was merging onto one freeway from a different freeway when I witnessed a driver ahead of me stage an act of open defiance against the Zipper Merge*

*A curiously heated point of contention in American Freeway etiquette. The basic premise is that when merging onto a freeway there is usually a special lane of traffic on the side from which you're entering** which goes for half a mile or so before it tapers off and ceases existing, at which point you're expected to have become part of existing traffic. The question that really gets people worked up is - at what point during that half mile should you get your act together and actually merge into the existing traffic lane. One school of thought is that you should immediately merge into the permanent lane as soon as physically possible, as waiting until the last minute means that you're rude and inconsiderate. 

That school of thought is, of course, completely 100% wrong.

The correct school of thought is that you're intended to go all the way up the half mile of side road and then take turns with the existing traffic, alternating from either lane - exactly the way a zipper closes. You can tell that this is the correct school of thought, because THE FREEWAY DEPARTMENT FREAKING FLAT OUT SAID SO.  REPEATEDLY.  The point being that they made the entire half mile stretch of road because they actually wanted you to use the entire half mile stretch. If they wanted you to only use 50 feet they would only have made that much.

Regardless of that clear and obvious truth however, almost without fail you'll encounter some asshat who feels like it's his personal mission in life to deliberately block other cars from merging into traffic, zipper-style, and the principle that they know best.

**It's called an acceleration lane.  This might be considered a clue as to why stopping in the middle of it is just bone-headedly wrong.

So the other day I witnessed a pickup truck go out of his way to run someone off the road rather than let them merge into existing traffic, only to have the exact same thing happen to him when he had to merge into the next lane of traffic a mile or so later.

I immediately thought to myself, 'Hakuna Matata, Asshole', because at some point the details of the Lion King became vague enough in my head that Hakuna Matata sort of means 'Circle of Life' to me, regardless of the fact that it's a totally unrelated song and means nothing of the sort*

*You totally just hummed, 'It means No Worries', didn't you.

Fast forward to the following day, when I observed in the parking ramp a smaller car parked completely centered between two parking spots.*

*More on this vehicle another time, because the story doesn't end there

Upon my return to the parking ramp, I was somewhat pleased to see that the ramp management had left a stern note on their windshield castigating them for parking over the lines and threatening to have them towed if it happened again.  No sooner had I begun to bask in my righteous pleasure at seeing them justly struck down than I got to Lucille (My truck) and discovered that I had received the exact same note. On inspection it turned out that I was, indeed, about half a foot over the line on the passenger side (Lucille's a big girl).

Stupid Circle of Life.

Please Stop Hacking

There's an unfortunate tendency on the internet lately.*

*To be fair, there's an argument to be made that the internet is made up entirely of unfortunate tendencies, but this one stands out at the moment.

I refer of course to the unfortunate groundswell of vaguely interesting ideas being described as 'Life Hacks'

At this point any even moderately interesting new use of... let's say a dust pan for examples' sake... is getting tossed out in some endless parade of clickbait articles titled something along the lines of 'Genius Life Hacks That Will CHANGE YOUR WORLD!'

At first this was moderately amusing turn of phrase, but at this point one thing needs to be made abundantly clear to the earnest young bloggers out there...

YOU ARE NOT 'HACKING'. YOU HAVE NOT MAGICALLY UNRAVELED THE BASE CODE OF THE UNIVERSE IN ORDER TO RE-WRITE IT  YOUR WHIM. YOU STUMBLED ON A WAY TO HELP LADIES PEE STANDING UP.  
YOU ARE NOT MAGIC NOW.

 
That needed to be said.