The Secret to Great Pizza Sauce (+, how to open a can of tomato paste)

Haven’t written about food for a bit.  There’s a local Greek pizza place near me that is a bit of an institution, this despite the fact that the original family long since decamped.  But much of the original menu remains intact, and fragments of the family have gone on to run other places.  Right now they run a takeout place with what must be surely the world’s most stunning prices.  I walked in there once, more or less with the idea of buying a pizza, but I didn’t realize I’d have to invest to do it.  Their flyers—Sophie’s in Calgary—are still delivered to my door routinely.  The prices go up routinely, and they try to add a crummy menu item or two each time to make it look as if there’s something new and interesting.  I was once even in an expansive mood when I had a friend over and I suggested we just go for it and order one of their pizzas, but my friend, himself so shocked by the prices, basically just said he would have found it immoral to order at such prices.

Anyway, sorry for the intro. In cases of extreme economies like the one I live in, sometimes you just have to make your own pies. And, of course, so doing is a very satisfying, if time-consuming, endeavour.  If you don’t like taking the time to cook, or you don’t have time, well, that’s too bad.  In terms of making time to eating time, pizza must surely be amongst the world’s most disproportionate meals.  A girl I knew who once worked at a place like Sophie’s, but not Sophie’s, told me that the secret to the sauce was cinnamon.  Who knew?  I haven’t checked the web, but I’m sure google lists 45 billion posts about the use of cinnamon in pizza sauce.  Ok, so I’ll add to them.  It is true.  Cinnamon will definitely enhance your sauce, particularly the zest.  But a tiny amount goes a very, very long way.  For your entire pie, you would never want to add more than you’d put in your coffee, another great place to put cinnamon, which I gather is good for you.  Go really really light.  Use it, but go light, light.  Just get the scent.  Mix it, even cook it, first.  Just a bit.  A bit will enhance your enjoyment alot.  Works well with basil, too, but again, use basil sparingly; go with the tried and true pepper flakes and oregano and Italian spice etc.

So anyway, if you do make pizza and you haven’t tried cinnamon in your sauce, try it—but only use a tiny bit to start, because, strangely, the cinnamon taste will really take over if you add more than a few sprinkles.  Treat it like cayenne or something even stronger than that.

More wisdom imparted to me by another girl: how to open a can of tomato paste.  It’s true that you probably would not use tomato paste in pizza sauce (although, then again, really to impart that dark tomatoey richness, you might—never tried it myself, but one day maybe).  I was using some earlier tonight in some spaghetti sauce I was making.  Many moons ago, though, I was making chilli, and a girl I knew was with me and she showed me how to open those narrow cans of tomato paste.  If you only open the top, of course, the thick paste is hard to get out and so on.  You always end up scrabbling around and not getting it all out and so on and the can has to be rinsed forever etc.  What this girl showed me was how one simply has to open one end with a can opener, all the way so the whole top is cut, and then just flip the can over and do the same to the bottom, or the other end.  There’s never any chance of leakage or mess or anything (especially if you open over the pot/pan you’re cooking in) because the paste is so thick and glutinous.  Once the can opener has clicked through both ends of the can, one simply pushes on the metal at one end and watches and the whole can extrudes itself out the other end. One merely scrapes the two can ends off on the can itself or whatever, or with a knife, and presto, the whole can has been perfectly emptied and is easy to clean for recycling.  When this girl did this in front of me, it was a revelation.  I have no idea how many cans of tomato paste I’d opened up until then.  What she did was sublime—almost illegal, I thought.  I wonder if even tomato paste manufacturers know about this.  Yes, yes, I haven’t googled it, so yes, maybe I am the 30 millionth person to write this on the internet.  Anyway, I’m 30 000 001.  But if you’ve never done it before, it sure is fun to open your first can of tomato paste with utter perfection of results.
zr 

Andy Barrie’s Secret? Gutless Americanism

Mind you, Rick Salutin has said, it was “Respect for listeners” (Globe and Mail, Feb. 25, 2010).  Here is a link to Rick Salutin’s column –

 http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/andy-barries-secret-respect-for-listeners/article1481621/  

(the Globe and Mail, not me, and of course not Rick Salutin, the person who actually worked on it and wrote it, will decide when it gets taken down).

Well, on looking back at Rick Salutin’s column, and on what’s gone on with Rick Salutin since, it’s pretty plain to see that he was grinding so many axes of his own that it was hard to find Andy’s shavings under the stone.  I support Rick Salutin, but I think he would find his proxy admiration column regrettable, in hindsight.

Let’s get a few things straight—draft-dodgin’ opportunist Andy was a guy who never left the U.S. behind, and never stopped trading on the fact that he was a big-time U.S. guy who awestruck Canadians were desperate to hire (compare at: the mystifyingly credentialless Margaret Wente, Texan Tommy Flanagan and his sidekick pal Ted Morton, aka Frederick Lee if he doesn't want his name known by the public he takes his paycheque from). 

Allow me to dilate.

Back in his non-old but fairly old CFRB days, Andy was the mellifluous lord of all that he surveyed.  He was a person with that most astonishing of qualities that you almost never, ever see in nature.  He was that one individual in . . . surely a million, who could actually listen to himself as he spoke.  If you’ve had any experience in journalism, or broadcasting, or TV, or reporting (and I’m in there for nigh on all of those), you know what a remarkable quality that is.  To hear Andy Barrie was to hear a man speaking to himself so profoundly that he essentially eliminated any presence other than his own.  There was no question, pace Rick Salutin, of listening, but rather only of hearing Andy. 

In his CFRB days (far from the start of his stateside broadcasting career), Andy basically had to bridge commercials as a morning man, speaking adoringly to himself for a few minutes at a time.  On one occasion, a woman who wrote for Eye wrote an article in which she said she loved bad boys in leather on motorbikes.  Stuff like that is meant to be attention-grabbing for the writers so that they can be catnip for AM radio, and CFRB sure wasn’t asleep at that switcheroo.  Andy, that big ol’ chucklin’ big ol’ big-time (deserter) American made a big thing of showin’ that he threw his big ol’ cowboy boots up on the table when he was interviewin’ this done gone feisty sensible chick (and he made a big-ol’ point of telling us just how did throw up his big ol’ boots up there).  

Of course it was cringeworthy, but it was just what CBC needed to hear.  Here they had a pompous blowhard American who actually thought he could tempt a hot young girl half his age talking about how she liked bikers by tossing them big-ol’ draft-dodgin’ boots up on the table in front of her. 

At CBC, Andy just never was a fit.  He tried and tried, lovingly, to listen to himself, but alas the constraints of national and provincial newscasts, public notices and the like, just hemmed him in and hamstrung him no end.  When he started, he would often miss posts, and then try to be jocular about it.  But when it’s a network and not ads, you just can’t get away with that kind of personal indulgence (and I don’t remember Andy formerly getting too many private sponsorship spots for furniture warehouses or car dealerships, anyway).  If you know *anything* about jobs or work or radio—or just being a human being in general--you would find Andy Barrie’s smug arrogance that makes other people have to run around trying to put out fires for you unbelievably reprehensible.

But no matter.  Andy was easy on himself.  Near the beginning of his CBC morning tenure, Andy “interviewed” political footnote, but very wealthily public-pensioned—every Canadian who might read this is paying for him--Tory minister David Tsubouchi.  Tsubouchi had been in the news, part of the Mike Harris “common-sense revolution,” for saying that consumers oughta just go into stores and say to proprietors, “hey, this can of tuna is dented; I’ll give you 69 cents for it.”   Tsubouchi said that poor people just had to “haggle” to get better deals.  I think Rick Salutin might remember moments such as this.  A few bold individuals, following Tsubouchi’s visionary and sensible lead, actually did go into stores and say, “well, look, it says here this ravioli is .99, but the label is ripped, and I’ll give you a quarter.”

Andy listened as David Tsubouchi told Andy that single welfare moms were putting their kids through university on the public teat.  Andy listened dreamily and impassively, presumably thinking up his next big Andy intervention.  Ah yes.  Single moms on welfare raking in so much cash that they can put their kids through university on it.  To big ‘ol American self-regarding Andy, it just made so much obvious sense, it sure didn’t require any comment of his. 

It’s hard to discern any legacy of Andy’s.  Hard indeed.  But all those single welfare moms out there who managed to just shoot their kids right on through university, well, they’ve got a soft spot for Andy Barrie and Rick Salutin, sure they do. 

zr

Withered momentarily by Jack Layton’s pragmatic enthusiastic urgency, Conservative Rex Murphy pauses, briefly.

Rex beat me to it, here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVWEk3UBhLk

I'd hold Rex up to further challenges, but I think he hasn't the humanity.  A couple more 12-pounders are going to have to stove him in before this happens.  That said, you can read what I wrote below, then see what Rex said a day before, above.  I wonder what Rex will have to say about things like, oh, health care, in the future.  They might touch him now, as they might have many, many years ago.  But he was smarter then.  Now he is smarter still, to be sure, to be sure.  Even knowing of Rex and his retirements, it was I who was too cynical.  If Rex would meet me now and take back all those years of hate and hatred towards people bereft, then I would meet him there.  You have the upper hand, now, while you live, and I live longer than you.  Now let's make a show of it, for common benefit.  Over to you, Rex.
-------------
Never one not to light upon a metaphor he could not mix, a gathering of words he could not foam into an incomprehensible ungrammatical self-regarding froth, a Texas-sized lie (Iraq was never about oil) he could not support, a news item he could not exploit (Toronto shopkeeper enacts vigilante justice—Rex thinks he’s George Armstrong),  Rex has fallen strangely silent. 

One would have thought Rex would have been the first to leap upon the Layton casket to accuse “le bon Jack” of pandering or “SOCIALISM” (!!!eeeaaaahhhh!!!) or worse (even Rex, famously self-tot, couldn’t think of a more imaginative or damning _noun_ than this!!!).  But Rex is curiously silent. 

Nevermind.  Rex’ll roar back, spewing uniambic vitriol with hand-shaking louring, overpowering us with his glassy-gazing sheer hatred of people who have regard for others than themselves.  More predictable than a squall at a Cornerbrook wedding, more obvious and inevitable than an open fly.

Rex’ll be back.  And when he is, he’ll shoorly (hands up) have some shehit (hands down) to show down with those socialists.  [Alright, I admit I haven’t got the accent (or Rex’s self-indulgent hatred) to pull it off.]  But.

Anyway. Welcome back, hatred man!  Cancer survivors await your next 12 pounder! 

zr

The Name – What is a Zorg Report?

No-one is wondering, so I’ll not tell you.  This name (Zorg Report) got chosen a hundred years ago in a dim galaxy far away.  It actually has nothing to do with sci-fi (sorry), and it isn’t even copied from such obvious names as “The Colbert Report” or “The Rick Mercer Report.”  Believe it or not, the name actually even predates those (hence perhaps the galaxy reference).  The name is just really a kind of buried joke that involves an old friend and a so-so west-coast quarterback and a New York jazz musician.  Cut out the friend and if you can (be the FIRST to) accurately name and accurately describe the last two people in that last sentence, then post as much and I’ll buy you a cd from Amazon.com or Amazon.ca or Amazon.uk or whatever.  I’ll pay up to 20 US or Cdn or pounds or even Euros, and yes, I’ll pay the postage, too.  You pick a cd you want from somewhere up to and under 20 US/Cdn/UK/Euro and that I can pay for, and I’ll order it and send it to you postage paid.

If you would like to suggest another name for this blog, then fire away on that.

And, as we know, so many blogs fall into a state of . . . .

Nevertheless, I will hold up my end of the bargain as long as I am around.

zr

Jerry Howarth and Gregg Zaun – A Winning Combination

Jerry Howarth and Gregg Zaun – A Winning Combination

Have got to say I have enjoyed Gregg Zaun’s turns with Jerry immensely.  I do like Alan Ashby, but he sure is serious and technical and humourless; he really does seem to be auditioning for a TV job, and not grasping at all the necessary familiarity of a radio role.  He probably could, but he clearly doesn’t want to; you can tell by his voice and incision that he sees himself on TV, not radio.

Pat Tabler, well.  Pat is a bit like Kelly Hrudey.  I cringed so much when I first heard and saw Pat that I felt bad for his family.  Pat’s gotten better, but I don’t imagine I’d be able to have a conversation with him in a lineup for free beer.

The flaccid, hopeless Buck.  How it is that Toronto keeps going to this fake-tan ‘man’ for every job going—what’s next, dogcatcher?  Fartcatcher?—poor Buck.  He’s so far out of his league in every league.  All he can think to do is hail the brilliance of terminators like Jon Rauch.  It’s too pathetic even to discuss.  I just feel bad for Buck.  He needs to reinvent himself.  Maybe he could try catching.

(Honestly, I am only being half ironic in typing that, really I am.  Buck has got to figure out who Buck is and be it, and quit being the hopeless genuflector he is.)

Sportsnet in Canada admittedly has limited penetration, so you can’t really get Blue Jays broadcasts in any kind of major centres, but even if Sportsnet did have a robust national profile, I’d still have to go with the paysite mlb.com I’ve got and get the radio with the superlative Jerry Howarth.

Jerry’s been making the Jays come alive almost since the Jays were born—for so many years, he had to work alongside the crude, rude, monosyllabic pill that was Tom Cheek.  Well, not to speak ill of those who are. . . but in the end I basically just tuned out Tom altogether and brought the volume back up when the descriptive and enthusiastic Jerry came on for his innings.

Jerry’s had a few partners since, and I think even Jerry doesn’t know what to do with Gregg Zaun.  I don’t know that Zaun is all that suited to the TV commercial-break role that sees him have to be stiff and spit out 8-word platitudes; he can’t use much of his spontaneous humour, or, more importantly, his rapidly felt and real and insightful thoughts and comments.  Zaun’s frank and real and humorous commentary probably isn’t so good for sterile tv.  He seems almost made for radio.  And if you think that’s a slight, when was the last time “made for TV” was a compliment?  Painting my garage, driving my mower, I’ve heard numerous nuggets and insights from Zaun; just out on the Oakland trip, Jerry called, “. . .and there’s a foul off now to the right, down the line, into those empty seats.  Only 12, 000 fans tonight!”  To which Zaun instantly riposted “Jer, Jer, didn you git the memo?  Iz green seat night tonight!”  Classic.  Zaun clearly has stuff he prepares, but he also can get in the spirit of things like a player and a fan, and no-one else with the Jays can do that, nobody.  Sure, Zaun brags a bit; sure, some of his self-effacing shtick is already old; sure, he’s so close to some buddies, like Travis Snider, that he makes errors in broadcast judgment—but he sure is a fresh gem in the Blue Jays’ history.  Even more, and crucially, he actually _brings out_  Jerry, something that has probably never really ever happened at all in Jerry’s generation-spanning career, certainly not with Tom, and not so far with Alan.  Jerry’s one straight Christian who’s never going to criticize so he’s never going to really let fans in much on the intricacies of the game, but still he does love the game and he’s been watching it and calling it long enough to remember some things.  Zaun asked him recently who Jerry thought was the most intimidating fastballer the Jays had ever had, and Jerry was actually so stunned that he never ever responded, not even in subsequent innings.  The Blue Jays have a resource in Jerry, and when you’ve got a guy who can bring just about everything to the table _and_ bring out Jerry, why, then you’ve got something just about any broadcasting executive would have to instantly kill because fans might enjoy it.

Anyway, Al’s back in the booth now, now that the Jays are home again, and Jerry has picked up his dour mood.  Last night Jerry was hectoring a fan who had apparently got onto the field or something—Jerry visiting his Christian outrage upon probably some over-exuberant fan.  That’s not Jerry, really.  He may be prim and pushin’ for the Lord above all, but Jerry does like the game and he has spent a long time around it, and a fellow lover of the game, with a sense of humour, like Zaun, is just what he needs.  If Zaun ever joins Jerry, that’s appointment listening for me.  Too bad Sportsnet has such tiny radio coverage in major centres in Canada, but I’ll pay mlb for that and the Ueck and Vin’s first 3 and so on.

Tune me in for sure when it’s Jerry and Gregg; tv or radio, Sportsnet’s loss is mlb’s gain.

zr

End the Folly of Benevolence – Help Neil Reynolds of the Globe and Mail Keep his Alarm System

In his August 14, 2011 column, Neil Reynolds, the latest clapped-out right-wing hack to be hired by the Glib and Stale to prop up its riddled right-wing standard now that the Blatch has gone, observes that government assistance (surprise) impoverishes everyone.  The immediate purpose of the column is to hail his new icon, Australian pseudo-academic David Stove.  Like a good high-school paper journalist, Reynolds cleverly hides the source of his “inspiration” until the very end of his column—‘lo, he saw a re-edition of a book by the dead and discredited Stove, and that really got Neil’s juices flowing.  Would that Reynolds would graduate to undergraduate.  Stove’s thesis is that, the more the government helps people, the poorer they get—and boy have Stove and Reynolds got some stats for you.  To wit, in England, by

1800, the number of poor, sick and elderly people who qualified for the dole had increased several fold, rising to one person in seven (which, coincidentally, matches the proportion of Americans who qualify for food stamps). (A13)

Ah yes, 1800.  Well do I recall it.  Cakes and ale all around.  Several fold!  But, still ‘tis true, I can’t get over the border now without taking part in those great spontaneous food-stamp feasts they have down there—scarcely one house out of seven not but offering a good fat goose to the weary traveller.  Such fare, and if only the GOVERNMENT wouldn’t stop us from such feasts!

It reflects very sadly on the Globe and Mail that it would publish words that even the cartoonish Tea Party would find hard to digest.  But such is the sway of ideology, and the money that ideologues can accrue and that distort their relationships to reality, not to say morality.

At a first level, the most regrettable aspects of Mr. Reynolds’s childish anti-tax, anti-government (the government is not people but corporations are) rants indicate that he demeans and debases himself to get money.  We all need money, but we can’t all of us go to such craven extents.

Mr. Reynolds, it is evident, has very little experience of the world.  Had he had some experience of the world, he would have travelled to many countries, and saw what obtained there.  He would have seen successful countries and troubled and destitute ones.  He could have (the ­Globe could have sent him there, on their vaunted private cash) visited countries such as the Scandinavian or Nordic democracies; he could have gone to Germany or Switzerland or any number of western European nations and revivifying Central and Eastern European nations.  The absolute hallmark of all of these societies and nations is that they agree to pay taxes and that they agree to work together towards common goals.  They do not childishly delude themselves that the simple evasion of taxes will somehow bring about paradisiacal heaven on earth. 

I’ve been to many countries on this earth, and I’ve spent time in those in which there is no or corrupt taxation.  Having done so, I can only conclude that Mr. Reynolds is stunningly ignorant, a liar, a desperate hack grasping for cash from his ideological paper, or just a gutless loser willing to write from Canada about chimera problems that have never touched him.  My frank suspicion is that he’s basically gutless.  But I’ll leave it there. One can girdle that earth, and go north and south, and up into Europe, and find all kinds of countries that subscribe eagerly to Mr. Reynolds’ theses.  Some of the things they lack are (eagerly for Mr. Reynolds) government, sanitation, health, infrastructure, an economy, education, law, --oh, government, again—and so on. Somehow, though, I just don’t think that Mr. Reynolds would have the guts to live there.  He’s a liar, and he knows it, and it makes him money, and he hopes he never, ever has to live in a place such as one he advocates.  It’s a poor, poor excuse for a man, that he has to live his life out arguing against his fellow human beings, but this is the one Neil Reynolds has chosen for himself to enrich himself.  His mother looks on, and may the good Lord give him his just reward.

zr

Tiger Woods – Man Without a Home

(But now with a goatee to hide his flubbery receding chin.)

There are a few things I’d like to get off my chest about Tiger Woods. 

--The extended overture:

1. Tiger Woods was never going to be a force for diversity in men’s golf.  He was allowed into the club because his dad had been in the services and Tiger was only half-black and he would have embarrassed whites otherwise.  And of course he did have ability. As the remarkable British television documentary showed, Tiger was steeped in notions of entitlement, misogyny, disloyalty, and hierarchy.  If Michael Jordan said “Republicans buy shoes, too,” Tiger would have said “Democrats ain’t got no shoes cause they don’t work.”    In his half-way, Tiger did inspire Asians, though, ironically many who may not have shared his gender or appetites.

2.  The guy is amazing for how he was able to separate himself mentally completely from anything at all outside of golf.  Golf was the playground he’d been bred up to; it was only when he got off the course that he really had to go to work, on his cellphone and with the girls and against his family and so on. 

3.  The media was totally complicit, failing their duties when we had the wildest cat in the jungle on our hands.  The extent to which other players were cowed is also surprising, but then, maybe they just weren’t in Tiger’s private playboy club.  So fearsome was his “club,” he invalidated even truth.

4.  His insane driving, that has now been, predictably, surpassed, by equipment and others, has cheapened the game, and turned golf into a game of driving and then pitch and putt.  No golf course will ever feature trees on its fairways anymore, and “deep rough” is called grass somebody let grow more than a couple days.  Everything about his game is amazing, and some of his putts are beyond memorable.  But his winning by 10 strokes and never playing on the fairway of the hole he was actually playing—that wasn’t/hasn’t been good for golf.  Golf will and is taking a long time to adjust to things like that, just like tennis made the ball bigger, and so on.  (Incidentally, has anyone noticed that Zina Garrison and Evonne Goolagong ploughed fields the Williams sisters haven’t even watered with their private perfumes?)

5.  Never did like Woods because he was such a petulant, privileged type.  It has been odd how people I’ve known have liked and then disliked Tiger.  I just never liked him, but I _do_ like bad guys sometimes.  I loved McEnroe.  He had a sense of humour.  People said he was trying to mess up opponents by getting mad, but I don’t really buy it.  I think he charged himself up by getting mad at himself and really believing he’d been hard done by.  Kenny Linesman; the Sutter brothers; Charles Barkley—you hate those guys, but in a way they are irrepressible.  Tiger was just a simpering wimp who couldn’t take camera shutters (camera shutters!!!!!) and acted like a wet cat after.  A privileged prince, who treats all those around him accordingly, that is what Tiger clearly was.

The long-winded coda, but/and without the symphony:

Remember all that feely-goody thing about more minorities in golf, after the golf world was basically shamed into letting people like him play on courses?  How the whole world would play golf after Tiger? I haven’t seen any African-Americans lately, and it is improbable that there are any on the horizon.  Historically speaking, Tiger may look like a fly in a pail of milk, but it may turn out to be more because of him than despite him, what with the example he’s set and the encouragement he’s given to those who don’t have names like Tag Heuer.   If you ever wanted anyone to pull off a stereotype, Tiger, like Obama, both of whom have only half the cred, have sure pulled it off.  This must say a good deal about everyone, somehow.  Anyway, the idea that Tiger would somehow open up golf beyond the white rich exclusive country clubs was one honky tune, and if any people are going to do that in the future, they are going to come from places such as Germany or Northern Ireland or England, etc., just as they used to come from Spain or Argentina or whatever.  You shouldn’t have had to take your 2-irony out of your bag for that one, anyway—but no-one, least of all golf journalists like Lorne Rubenstein, would venture there over the past decade or so, and are not likely to as long as they need a paycheque.

I remember—and I know I am not wrong—I wouldn’t write it if I could be sued--how Jack, with that kind of set chin and settled mouth and brow of his, sort of glanced off to his right in an interview, as he always did, and suggested how maybe once Tiger settled down, he’d become an even better golfer.  Jack *was* referring explicitly to marital settling down, not settling down on the course.  Jack’s eyes, like those of many mature men, were a little bit back in his head, and he was thinking of himself no doubt, but also others, and he was imagining that, once Tiger just got his whole life settled—wife, kids, spread, sponsorships—Tiger’d probably get it all in gear.  Jack said it kind of wistfully and with a detached look.  He had been asked a question about the rocketing Tiger, a question to which he was accustomed, but he was kind of thinking about himself, and about his passing from legend to myth.  He just said that Tiger was a young phenom who’d settle down and settle in (remember, now, the famous Sports Illustrated pictures of the Nicklaus family with their shirts pinned back) and Jack just kind of figured that Tiger’d settle down, like he did, and once he did, oh look out, Jack would be history.  It was just a very wistful interview Jack gave, as though he saw the future, and accepted it, despite the legend he still was.  Jack had once been a creation, too.  I also wonder, though, if at the back of Jack’s eyes and in his words there wasn’t a hint of something a lot of people knew but no-one could speak of because of the Tiger mafia and media complicity.

That is, how is it that this guy could be the greatest golfer in the world and still have 50 girls of availability on speed dial (amply proven over and over) and sponsors and  media and (somewhere after the fact) a family, too?   How is it that he could rendez-vous, from Vegas to Miami, at a flophouse and his buddy’s house and her house and a pancake house and still win on Sunday?  This guy was Mickey Mantle X 25, Derek Sanderson X 50.  Clearly, Tiger has a dissociative sociopathic personality.  In interviews, he has talked about how he has to separate himself from the media so that he can have his own time, his own space—well, if he ain’t shedding, then Woods comes from another planet, because what he achieved amidst all the texting without t’s is truly amazing.  It is almost amazing to think just how Tiger could go out and win and maintain such superb poise, all the while having on the back burner no end of call girls and pay friends while his euro-model wife sat in a Florida mansion with his infant child.  Now that is concentration.  That guy had enough "space" for 18 3-putting dictators.

Jack maybe knew it; surely others on tour knew it, too.  But the media was silent.  And even after the fact, they are cowed.  Canada’s main golf journalist, the chummy Lorne Rubenstein, and sometime sidekick Bob (“bubbly”) Weeks, of course had nothing to say (see no evil. . . ).  Only recently has Rubenstein rather timidly disapproved of Tiger.  Lorne knows he’d never golf again on private links if he said anything revealing about Woods.  I sometimes wonder about journalists like Lorne; they do face tough decisions: you’re either too stupid to see it, or smart enough not to.  The result is that people like me, who don’t get to hang out near Tiger every day, and don’t get paid for “covering” golf, have to make it up for themselves after the fact, from public-access Florida police reports, for example.   Shame, shame on the game, and all the seedy wannabes who attach themselves to it, like Lorne and Bob.

Well, well.  Here’s some things we know now:

--Tiger’s dad (as the British documentary amply displayed) taught his son the worthlessness of women and that fidelity was no value for a man.

--Tiger’s mom, nevertheless, who probably does have some vestigial familial or ethnic pride of her own somewhere, was somewhat peeved.

--Tiger’s sponsors—those who hung with him—are creeping (key verb) away slowly as he fails to win or contend.

--Tiger’s wrecked-up knee, caused by the incredible torque of his swing, may prevent him from getting to Jack’s 18 majors.  You almost have to wonder if, if Tiger weren’t so untouchable, there could have been a coach out there somewhere who could have said to Tiger, “look, Tiger, we’ve got to change this follow-through, or else you’re not going to. . . .”    Can Tiger go from being a great starter to a premier reliever, like Dennis Eckersley?  Can Tiger take his diminished driving and physical deterioration and find new mental maturity and solidify other aspects of his game?

Well, we’ll see.  The man’s a nasty prig, born and bred up that way, all the way.  His talents, especially with putting (which is, as they say, where the dough comes in), have often seemed sublime.

But what of Tiger after?  Will Tiger ever be in the booth, jolly with a salty goatee, like Feherty?  Heh.  Tiger has only ever had one home, on the course.  He didn’t have it in Earl’s cheatin’ urb. He couldn’t have it with a coveted model, and if he did have it, it had to be an endless succession of hotel rooms and pancake houses.

Will Tiger get to 18, or the untouched 19?  It looks more and more doubtful, if just in reach.  He will probably disappear into a vast ersatz Jacksonian Florida estate, his belly growing, his chins tripling.  Girls coming, girls going, guys in sunglasses wearing all the baubles he once endorsed, coming and going, coming and going—little sign of “Tiger.”

He was—may be still—a great golfer.  But he was never a good man, and his beneficence, in the short term, is not apparent.  And it took him to reveal as much.

zr

Old Navy – Flare Jeans – Curse of All Women, and People

I sure do take on the big topics.  But anyone and I, too, naturally like to talk about advertising, and I imagine I’ll keep on doing so.  And I don’t think my focus here is so minor; it blends my tastes and attitudes with social and gender ones that are far from insignificant.

Old Navy has this new TV ad based on a Debbie Gibson song, featuring four young women bowling.  The song goes:

Old Navy Flares make my legs lean (long and lean),

Go out and take a second glance:
They fit so right, it can’t be wrong,

I’m never taking off these pants.

The ad features three young women coming into a bowling alley, followed by a tokenish pre-teen/tween Asianish girl.  The hot girls throw a few balls (comical stereotype Vinnies pratfall and look on—if you stereotype the guys, then it’s ok to stereotype the girls, is the advertising shorthand of our generation) and then the token gets to dance in front of them.

I guess this ad must have been planned to work on various levels—back to school, telling girls they look lean, junior Asian reps getting to style too, etc (they aren’t selling “junk in the trunk” jeans here, anyway, that’s for sure).

The regrettable thing about flare jeans is that they are essentially impossible to look good in.  If they’re tight and you’re over 6’0” and the flares aren’t so cyclonic as to leave you with a legfull of leaves, then maybe you’re good to go.  Otherwise, though, the comment that flares can make your legs look “long and lean” is just about the most ludicrous statement in recent advertising history.  That’s like saying smoking is good for you.  Flares make you look short and fat and stumpy, and are an egregious assault on aesthetic or fashion senses.

I remember being back in Paris a long time ago, long before my last visit, and down in the subways at night I saw girls wearing flare pants, and I though, “Oh my god, there it is, and here it comes, flare pants will be all over Canada next year.”  Strangely, and thankfully, it never happened.  Quelquefois, meme avec les francais, il y a des faux pas.

Only very lately, I noticed girls walking around, as usual, in tights and ankle-choking jeans, and I couldn’t say I disapproved.  Old Navy must be trying, through the force of marketing and advertising, to turn basic standards on their heads, and say that ugly is pretty and that bad is good, and so on, and make women look bad by wearing flares.  If Old Navy can start a trend and be at the front of it, then Old Navy makes money, no matter how awful it makes women look.

Perturbing things about this ad:

--shown in Canada, but features bowling, something that Canadians do as much as Americans curl—and 10-pin at that (Americans wouldn’t even know there’s another kind of bowling).  It shows Old Navy trying to Patton-ize the world with a steamroll marketing campaign that obliterates local culture (just being American), but of course, many if not most of the most successful advertising companies (b/c let’s face it, that’s what Old Navy is, a brand not clothing) penetrate local markets precisely by being aware of what’s going on and trying to cater to it, rather than trying to bludgeon people into thinking that they should all bowl and eat fries, like Americans who, alas, could never get into their jeans (hence the wish-fulfilment ads).  But then there is that blending of cool and uncool they’re striving for—definitely trying to cover all bases, like a good downmarket piece of advertising ought to.

--the sexless tween robot Asian girl—yes, she’s there b/c Asians represent $, and the girl represents youth who also represent $, but of course she also represents the kind of girl whose figure you’d have to have to fit into those jeans.  She’s a curious mascot who rather evidently doesn’t know what commercial marketing game she’s been induced into.  It’s a little creepy, especially with that Debbie Gibson thing.

Anyway, like I said, I cover the big topics.  Please, no-one, ever, wear flares.  Please. 

(I suppose that last line does cover the whole reason for the post, so please forgive and indulge my wearisome words otherwise.)

"I'm never taking off these pants." 

zr

Surfin’ USA – Rip that Curl wide open

Most of the time I’m not a fan of covers.  They almost never, ever work or surpass the originals.  The Clash were a bit unique in that regard—the way Joe Strummer basically destroyed Vince Taylor & the Playboys’ “Brand New Cadillac”—that was epic brutal nasty, and also a bit disrespectful.  Anyone who has only heard the Clash should also hear Vince, that very crazy man; his Cadillac was also new, and obviously Strummer did love it, and of course he wasn’t disrespectful, but the Clash’s version does kind of just steamroll that whole song.  That was a case of British on British.  Speaking of steamroll, when Strummer turned, earlier (it’s a blog), to Texan Bobby Fuller’s “I Fought the Law,” you would have said “how can you make a simple stripped-down pop song like that any better?”  Strummer did, just by amping it totally up and finding the soul in the very title, the idea of the person who fought the law.  Amazing.  In the “who would have ever thought of that” department, that cover just scores a triple AAA rating. 

[If you can think of a good--no incredible--cover, without having to open the fridge first, then kindly do respond to the "Greatest Covers" link under Music - General.]

The point of this post is to urge what I’ve always viscerally felt—that someone ought to just go in there and destroy “Surfin’ USA” by the Beach Boys.  I’m expecting—hoping—that someone will point out that this has been done, that a JFA, for example, did it in ’81 when I was too busy snorting derivatives, or something.  You let me know. 

The more you see footage of the Boys, the nerdier it becomes (that wonderful recent T.A.M.I. show film re-release comes to mind).  And oh yes, there is the Ramones doing “Surfin’ Safari.”  Even more incredible is _Blondie_ and the Ramones doing “Surfin’ Safari,” but bizarrely I didn’t even see that on youtube.  If you can’t hear Blondie and the Ramones doing the Beach Boys, then you just missed a 60s/70s/80s cultureknot that makes snakes look Como.

But I come back to my original premise.  If you took away the nerdy local lyrics, if you took away the softy softy bubblegum “ooooo”s, you’d find a repressed great song trying to get out.  Watch the 60s video of them in their striped shirts (and the pants!!) on youtube.  Listen to the buildup to the bridge, and hear the breakoff.  So much media ink has been spilt in recent decades to insist that the Beach Boys really were the rivals of the Beatles, that Pet Sounds was actually the world’s greatest rock n’ roll album—well, look at a vintage video of the Beach Boys, and be humblingly and despairingly disabused.  These guys were so McCarthy they made Pat Boone look like Casper. 

And it’s not that I’m a Beatles fan; I think they destroyed music.  However, I still do believe that someone, somewhere, has to just go in and tear apart “Surfin’ USA” and make it the tune it always had the potential to be.  Yes, maybe the lyrics may be changed; yes, maybe the locale may be changed; yes, maybe the language may be changed; but whatever!!: free this great song from its inane preppie bondage and make it a rock n’ roll anthem like it could be!!!

Again, I know many people, if they read this, will instantly think of great versions and so on that they know that I don’t—good, great—that’s the whole point.  Lay ‘em on—just make sure they’re good, and not Aunt Hanna in Cape Verde or something.

Let’s rip the curl right out of this great stupid song.

zr

Greatest Cover Songs Ever

I realize this is a very tired topic, but I’m a big hater of cover songs of virtually any kind, and I was just talking about them in relation to the Beach Boys’ “Surfin’ USA,”  so I just thought I’d put it out there to see if anyone wanted to note one or two great cover versions they know (I know, it's a tired--but true--topic).  I’m thinking of a couple now, but I don’t know if I can call them great.  They really, really, people, have to be *great*.  No joke great is what they have to be.  The greatest of the greatest by the people who didn’t even. . . .

zr

Postscript:

Ok, I'll go first.

Clash - I Fought the Law (Bobby Fuller)
Clash - Brand New Cadillac (Vince Taylor)

Weather Inflation

Fat Sweatin’ Guy is Right

I saw on TV the other night that Americans are beginning to become upset about “Heat Indexes.”  That’s ok by me, b/c I’ve long since been annoyed abt “wind chills.”

It really is very annoying when you just want to know what it’s like out and media keep insisting upon all kinds of terrifying new descriptions that in the end are meant only to draw more people back to them.

It does bug me.  And it bugs the fat man, too, Rush.  He says “the government” is telling him he’s so uncomfortable now.  Hell to be Rush, no doubt about it. 

I live out in Western Canada where “wind chills” have remained somewhat, thank goodness, irrelevant.  And we do have winds out here.  But back east, where it is moist and not necessarily any more windy, you simply cannot tell the temperature, b/c competing media factions are so anxious to tell you how cold it is, that you never could tell how really cold it is. 

People--and there are millions of them--who would say, well, why don’t you just go outside and figure out what it’s like, miss the point.  Too many people have no clue what it’s like to be outside the weather.  Many people live in basements; they work in offices; they work in warehouses all night; they commute on various forms of public transit; they sit in cars, clueless as to what goes on around them; they care about their children who cannot be in cars, or houses. These people, who live outside the mainstream media feed, need to have a fairly accurate sense of just what the temperature actually is, not what it is to vamping sponsored media.  Media have got to develop a sense of social responsibility—media such as, well, Rush’s, can lead the way, by offering actual and accurate forecasts, rather than just trying to amp up fakecasts that they think will bring them more advertising.   It’s a serious issue.  You can’t just misrepresent what the weather is like for money when real lives depend on it.  Is this so hard to understand?

Rush? 

zr

The World is a Dangerous Place

Sunday, 7 August 2011

The World Is a Dangerous Place - Crime in Canada - Minister Rob Nicholson Stole My Faith

(Blogger, American in the first place, has made me post this _twice_, and will not let me retract.  Irony, anyone?)

Do most people lie awake at nights thinking of crime?

I was sitting here in the early morning hearing a news report on the radio about how in New Zealand they were deciding to criminalize all kinds of formerly legal substances.  My first thought was: you sure don’t hear much about New Zealand, and how is it that this story is a _story_?  Dog days of August, nothing for the media to do, maybe.

I remembered the words of a British statesman, or maybe politician, who noted that prison is a place where they put bad people to make them worse.  I thought about my own country, Canada, where our hard-right ideologically driven government is whipping up, hand in glove with the right-wing media that funds the government, fears about crime.

Whenever credible authorities point out that crime has been going down, reactionary governments say crime hasn’t been going down, and the media (here in Canada, CTV, both supports and engenders such governments).  I’m just one person, and I’m neither ancient nor juvenile, but I *would* have to say that, in my lifetime, crime has become something I have thought and worried less and less about.  My life does reflect the general trend.  When I think about my life as I’ve lived it in this country, with increasing multiculturalism and immigration and so on, it is as plain as the nose on my face that the instances of crimes of all types have, indeed, gone down.  Crimes still happen everywhere all the time, but crimes are nowhere near what used to be routine when I was growing up.  Tea party conservatives who want to base everything on their own private imaginations, take note: I've got a private notion, too, and it's practical, not made-up.

[Ok, it’s sad that I have to do this.  Yes, my family was victimized by crime twice, the last time in the early 80s.  In the early 2000s, I was a victim of some fairly serious vandalism.  So duh, I know what crime is and I know what it’s like to experience it.  No, I haven’t been shot or raped, but I’ve got a funny funny hunch that I do indeed know one hell of a lot more about being a victim of crime than those who are most ardent about getting bad guys they’ve only seen on tv.]

And I think most people understand this.  One might say, well, reactionary governments play to their bases by whipping up crime frenzy notions and so on.  But I actually don’t even believe that the base is there on this issue.  I actually think seniors, say, are much less worried about crime where I live than they used to be—and this despite constant media reports (my main newshour tv broadcast begins, significantly, with the sound of a police siren—that’s taking “if it bleeds it leads” to a new level of reification—the CTV newshour is basically saying “look, our intro. is a police siren—if there’s no cop crime stories, we haven’t got anything to talk about and you’ll get a test pattern for the next 60 minutes) that they ought to be. 

What I’m suggesting is that, in tandem with declining voter participation and so forth is an increasingly tight nexus between reactionary governments and concentrated global media—the people must be convinced that the world is a terrible and dangerous place, and reactionary governments and the media who fund them (and the governments who fund them in return through broadcasting regulations) must do the convincing.  You might say, “well, it’s the people who elect the governments, so if people are concerned about crime, then it must be a real issue.”  But of course, it isn’t.  Almost no-one votes anymore, and when the fraction who do vote do vote, they vote in response to brief emotional campaigns that essentially only enrich the representatives who get to sit around for the next number of years working not on voter issues, but on attack ads on how to get re-elected and ensure their pensions they get after a few years, unlike most people; fixed voting dates of course only exacerbate this situation (for concerned voters) and only assist the media (Fox, CTV, Sun) who benefit from government largesse in enabling them to turn elections into a kind of 1-2 year reality show.

In short (sorry, sorry), my point is simply this.  Crime is not getting worse, unless the government encourages it by encouraging a wild-wild west Alberta format in which anything goes and drug cartels from literally all over move in, as they have, to take advantage of the unchecked, unregulated, untaxed money-spinning regime.  You have to create a sense of crisis where none exists, so the government, along with the media (as Cameron and Murdoch have so amply shown, back entrances and front), creates one.

And the funny thing undeniably is that, in pretending to fight crime, reactionary governments of course increase it as much as they can—they create economic bubbles, regional hotspots, tax-free havens, gluts of non-citizen workers, and so on and so on.  They create the problems they pretend to combat, and thus sustain themselves.  Most people—anywhere—understand this, but they are drugged and swayed by the media that supports the government.  It’s like cheering for a soccer/football team full of bazillionaire coke-snorting media-baron owned stateless 1-yr foreign contract strikers; doing it is irresistible, and you know you shouldn’t, but just for the tiny glow it gives you on the few occasions a win provides you a faint vicarious sense of being loved in return, you do it. 

As night follows day.

The world is basically a safe place.  If any politician tries to tell you otherwise, ask yourself—have I been a victim of crime lately?  And if I have, what role has my government played in it?  Has it promised to lock up every toking 15-yr-old and throw away the key at a cost of hundreds of thousands of my own money?  Or has it said, “look, let’s teach these people some skills,” or has it said, “look, we’ve got to stop a situation by which anyone we give special access to can just come in here and make millions of dollars on a resource economy and then do what millions of untaxed dollars tend to do—end up in organized crime,” or has it said, “hey, guns have a funny way of killing people, and they keep doing it, so what about if we started trying to remove guns that inspire pretty well any violent crime you can think of?”

As for things such as rape and child porn, well, you just have to ask your politicians, do you want to create a society of gun-toting ex-cons ripe n’ ready through reactionary policies to do their very worst, or do you want just to sentence those people toughly and with tough conditions—why hand them guns when they get out?  Let them live in unrepressive, egalitarian, family-valued (that is, families of any kind--if you really value families, and their values, you will value families, pure stop) societies that don’t find violence acceptable, and maybe there will be a few fewer of such individuals.

zr

Gamza - Silver Goat

Just wanting to hear from others who may have been able to access this good Bulgarian red.  I realize it's regarded as cheap and so on, but frankly I liked it and many central Europan Moravian and Romanian and so forth wines like it.  Anyone seen Gamza/Silver Goat lately?  Where?

I like the mild and degustible central european wines.  If I want wine, I want wine; I don't want motor oil after 30 000 clicks.  I want red wine, not black wine.  I want a lovely red wine with a reddish-coppery meniscus. Many people across the world are, I think, quite untutored about wine.  They read wine experts, but they don't grasp that wine has been drunk across the ages, and it was often a drink intended not to enrich wine journalists, but rather to join meals.   Any comments on drinkable wines from central/east/southern (non-western) Europe welcomed. . . .
zr

Breivik - he had to do it

I agree that Breivik ought not to receive any more coverage than he's already gotten, but why is it that nothing I've read, anyway, has pointed out that he probably felt he had to do what he did precisely because his brand of anti-Islamism was being obviated?  He had spent a decade of his life working on this, building up and steeping his hatred, but then, every day, on his tv and on his computer, he found, lo', Moslems wanting what he had--Audis, TVs, iPods, etc. etc.  No wonder he had to act.  Actions by Moslems across the Middle East were showing that they want his polo shirts, white weddings, photo technology, and so on.

It was now or never for that guy, b/c everything he had invested himself in was being disassembled by people infinitely more desperate and braver and more engaged and hopeful and determined than him, in Tunisia and Bahrain and Libya and Syria and Yemen and so on and so on.  In his cartoon web getup, he could methodically shoot people he thought had something to do with Islamism; actual Moslems have been dying in the streets to get Breivik's polo shirts.  It's up to the Arabs to decide what Arabs want, and it probably isn't just Coca-Cola and Budweiser, but if Arabs want to let women drive and participate in the modernization of their societies, and so forth, then so much the good.  

Anyway, no-one has been making the point I'm making, that Breivik and his ilk had to act now, b/c otherwise they would have missed their chances.  You can tell me what you think, if there's a you.
zr

coasttocoast.com George Noory advocates stopping foreign aid

Well, that's what he did just the other night, good ol' George.  George, of Arab descent himself but hosting a tea-party wacko show in the U.S., has to portray himself as a kind of avuncular "I'm on your side" kind of fatherly presence.  Putting on his best fake-plaintive voice, he wondered why the U.S. was spending so much to help out other countries when the U.S. itself faced such dire fiscal circumstances (never would've occurred to George that the corrupt U.S. banking system had led the charge towards kneecapping the world economy--maybe George was just pissed off that *he* didn't get the bankers' deal).  Of course, the U.S., in terms of western "democracies" (a club the U.S. joined quite a while after MLK was gunned down, making it just about the most recent "democracy" on the planet), is one of the tiniest givers of foreign aid in the developed world.  Most European and Scandinavian countries dwarf the U.S. in terms of humanitarian aid completely.  Hilariously, George's guest, an _astrologer_, either just didn't take the bait or was utterly clued out as she hastily scanned her computer (when you listen to this show, you can almost hear the clicking as the hosts and guests feverishly click through their computers trying to find defensive answers to calls that have been, nevertheless, pre-screened, the call delay times--but you can only pre-screen so much). The slow gaps, the references to breaks--anyone who has worked in radio can see the seams gaping on shows such as this. George's guest actually responded about how much the U.S. was spending on Afghanistan, say, and how much it was costing the poor U.S. to try to help those stupid Afghans.  Erp.  You can't even pre-screen your guests these days, even in a democracy!

zr

Peppers; foods you don't like but still eat

I seem to eat alot of peppers now.  It used to be that the only pepper you could get, or that I saw, anyway, was green.  In some European places, the pale yellow more elongated ones seem to be the norm mostly still.

[I haven't branched out alot into the smaller and hotter peppers used in places such as Asia and Mexico and the Caribbean, but I do certainly try them when they show up around me, for sure.  I'll keep experimenting with anything new that comes along.  I used scotch bonnets and jalapenos when pickling, for example.]

Peppers were always costly.  Now these stoplight peppers, red, orange, and yellow, often seem fairly cheap.  Now I never get/buy/use the hated green peppers of my youth, though I'd like to.  I guess hydroponic growing, or whatever, has made peppers really cheap to create.  But somehow not the greens, which now must be very downmarket according to consumer trends.

I only eat peppers b/c I think they are good for you (the darker the vegetable. . .); I do not actually like them.  There is no food about which I am more totally neutral than peppers (capsicum), and I would never consume them voluntarily.  But I just cook with them and eat them b/c I know they are supposed to be good for you, and I imagine they must be.  Better than fries, for example.

My wonderings would be, have you any comments on peppers--at all, and do you yourself have any other foods that you eat regularly, but really don't like very much.  I'm not talking something like oatmeal here.  We all have eaten that, and it's totally bland.  I'm just wondering if there are any foods out there that you regularly consume despite the fact that, on the whole, you just don't really like them that much?  I eat alot of peppers.  They're cheaper now than in my youth, and widespread, and you do have to love the colour, but to say I like them?  --no.

I don't know what other foods I eat but don't necessarily like to eat--mangoes, maybe, but that would have to be a fruit blog.  The slithery texture is odd and the piney scent is too much, but the colour and fruity sweetness is there, and just to hold them in your hand says: "I'm healthy!"  So I do buy them, and eat them, but I don't love them.

Ok then,
zr