Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Huge links of sausage with cayenne juices flowing from them like a river

it is unclear why I found this passage from a food blog so utterly amusing-

I stringently disagree with your motion to discontinue boiling sausage with our seafood! The notion that grilled sausage may be better than seafood-boiled sausage is absurd! For my people anyway. Every time I boil seafood, I include sausage. Without exception, the sausage is the first thing to go. Some guests do not even start on the seafood until all the sausage is gone. You and I’s guests must have pallets from different planets because my people LOVE it!I recently had friends and family in from Florida on vacation. As usual I included a whole box of Manda’s Hot Smoked Sausage cut into 6” long links and boiled in the seasoning mix for about 15 minutes before dumping the crawfish in. Using this method, the ordinary 1” diameter links swell to almost 2” diameter. When bitten into or broken, the red cayenne pepper juice runs out like a river! Absolutely incredible! One of my personal favorites. My guests from Florida were overwhelmed with the flavor. In fact, the rest of their trip, all they did was talk about the sausage...and the sight of the juices running from those super inflated links...No-one could stop talking about the sausage!...the topic of all the conversations all gravitated back to sausage, sausage, sausage. They can not stop talking about the sausage! Huge links of sausage with cayenne juices flowing from them like a river.
You do as you wish on your stove top; my sausage will be the talk of the town...for many years to come!

Monday, July 20, 2009

The Monkey and the Snake

Solid NPR bit on the meat puppets yesterday which includes great clips of a choked-up Mike Watt. Worth the eight minutes. makes me wanna listen to Sewn Together again:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106734015

Saturday, July 18, 2009

Music and SQL

Saw and interesting bit over at the Reverse Cowgirl:

Interesting post you wrote about writing and money. I made my living as a writer during those wonderful late 1990 and early 2000 days you mentioned in your first post. 45 cents a word for practically anything I wanted to do. Great time to be doing that, free money and easy work. I also made my rent money as a guitar player for a few years of my life. Obviously I didn't get rich, but I know what it's like to get paid for one's 'art' and to compromise it. It got depressing after a while, but the lifestyle was great and there were still the cool, great gigs I could enjoy. Call it turning tricks or whatever, I just used the phrase, 'You take the king's shilling, you play the king's tune.'

I spent the weekend in NYC doing a two day music workshop where I got to meet one of my musical heroes, and not just meet him but play with him. It was amazing, and reminded me of why I started music in the first place. There were probably 75 other people there, all or nearly all of them many years younger than I. They were almost universally talented, optimistic, and hell bent as making it in music on their own terms. They were the antithesis of the stereotype of the lazy musician, they already had indie labels they started, they were gigging anywhere they could get, and they were sure it was just a matter of time until it was their turn to get on the ride. I wanted to tell them, 'Just so ya know, it ain't gonna happen. That doesn't mean you shouldn't try, because you'll hate yourself if you don't, but just because you think you're choosing failure or death doesn't mean you won't wind up with both.' I wanted to tell them about my most accomplished guitar teacher, a guy I took lessons from when I was about twenty. He was a legitimately well-known jazz player who had seen so much failure, including losing two wives mostly because he refused to give up music as his living, that he actually had come to hate music. Not hate drummers who are late and singers who can't come in on cue and staying in awful motels to make $150 at 2 AM. We all hated that shit, but he hated music itself, for what it had done to him and what it had refused to do for him. I vowed that whenever I got close to that I'd find something else to do so I at least would still love music.

And I did. After washing out of both the music and writing rackets I program databases now. I still make my own music, people still seem to like it on the rare occasion it's heard, and I still write. In fact, I write for a blog run by some of my favorite writers in the world and I do it for free, because I know they're broke and need the money and I don't. So by scything my 'art' off from my money I've kept my art pure, and it's still fun when I do it.

On the other hand, my money is what's impure now. It comes from prostituting my brain to do something 8-12 hours per day that I don't care about. Financial reporting does not speak to my heart, I do not pine for more hours in which I can write SQL code. I use a mind capable of producing decent music and better than decent prose for digital greasemonkey work. So, I guess the moral of the story is that you're fucked either way, there just isn't a lot of purity to go around.

Wednesday, July 15, 2009

In the Wrong Lane

Saturday, July 11, 2009

The Happy Rock

"If now and again we encounter pages that explode, pages that wound and sear,
that wring groans and tears and curses, know that they come from a man with his
back up, a man whose only defenses left are his words and his words are always
stronger than the lying, crushing weight of the world, stronger than all the racks
and wheels which the cowardly invent to crush out the miracle of personality."

- H. Valentine Miller

Saturday, July 4, 2009

Happy 4th