the blog quebecois

In the tradition of Vodkapundit, I have decided to treat my reader(s) with timely recipies, drink mixes, etc., when I can't think of a damned thing to blog about.

Now that summer's on the horizon, people often ask me (actually, they don't, but play along): "gnotalex, what is a refreshing refreshment that I might enjoy while sitting under the deceased elm tree in my backyard?"

An excellent query. I am partial to those non-alcoholic coolers. True, they too often have that nasty chemical aftertaste, but I think I've discovered the cure for it; or at least, after two or three, you won't notice anymore.

1) Open non-alcoholic cooler.

2) Pour half of it down the sink.

3) Fill remainder with gin (the cheaper, the better).

4) Serve over crushed ice (shaken, not stirred) or neat (swill directly from bottle).

Enjoy!

Mass cull ordered to halt bird flu in B.C.

CTV.ca News Staff

Up to 19 million chickens and turkeys in B.C.'s Fraser Valley are going to be culled in a bid to stamp out the continuing spread of avian flu, Agriculture Minister Bob Speller has announced.

Good. I hate chickens.

They sort of taste like . . .

Chicken.

and oh, my god, look,
you have just discovered
the way that one thing can lead to another

-- pet shop boys

Ain't that the truth. For instance, you could go here and milk the cows before they explode.

But that leads to a lot of milk. So you could make some ice cream with it. What flavor, though?

Maybe the Japanese have some ideas. They have some, uh . . . different concepts for ice cream flavors, such as lettuce and potato, red wine, and tulips.

Or this.

Which leads to nausea.

Nippon Meat Packers:

It can make the ウイニー of the カタチ of the lovely animal and clean flower in the can tongue. If it makes together with the parent and child, certainly also the children the joy!

A pity Google's Japanese translator doesn't recognize certain characters. Note that essential words are left out. Now I'll never know what it means.

Feel free to develop your own sausage jokes.

They look appetizing, but it's a fair bet that they exceed your maximum daily requirements for toothpicks and glue.

Regardless, eat up, or there'll be

no dessert for you.

given that Japanese "food eaters" tend to eat some, um, interesting "food." It's a banner ad that I spotted on this manga site.

I was home from school sick one day, and was getting hungry, so I started some ramen. I had a headache at the time, and came up with the bright idea of advil ramen. I figured, "I like ramen, and I could use some advil. How can this go wrong?" Needless to say, dissolving advil tablets let off terrible fumes which are not the least bit appetizing. This wasn't one of my brighter moments.

Something Awful readers recount their culinary misadventures.

Warning: I haven't read through all of these; be advised that the language in SA forums can be somewhat, um, rambunctious at times.

Via kerplonka!

6 kasane bashi: Eating just one dish continuously
7 mochi bashi: Grabbing a dish, glass, etc whilst holding chopsticks in the same hand
8 mayoi bashi: Hovering chopsticks over the dishes while humming and hawing about what to eat
9 uke bashi: Holding chopsticks when asking for more rice
10 kaki bashi: Holding a bowl to your mouth and shovelling food in
11 neburi bashi: Licking your chopsticks
12 hane bashi: Pushing away disliked food with chopsticks

I was thinking about going to Japan; but that's now off, for fear that I'd accidentally commit some ghastly faux pas that would require me to perform ritual seppuku in front of the Emperor or something.

So it's Hello, Disney World!

Dinner time, and time to search for a recipe:

WIENER WATER SOUP

1 pkg. wieners
3 c. water

Combine wieners and water in a two quart saucepan. Bring to a boil until wieners are cooked. Throw the wieners in the garbage. Serve soup. Serves 3.

And what do you know? I've got most of the ingredients!

Via kottke.org

This cake is so disturbing, I'm almost glad the picture doesn't include the whole thing. The plastic clone babies wearing naught but mohawks is bad enough, but then they're also riding carrots. What do you do with that? It looks like some kind of perverted vegetable rodeo, or maybe a bizarre clone military exercise, what with their little plastic fists raised high in identical salutes.

And by "somewhat short" I mean that you'll laugh until you cry, though that's more of a tribute to the blog's writer and commenters, who have a wonderfully-droll style.

For more conventional notions of cake pulchritude, see here.

Via Random Thoughts

Pixifood (PIKZ-ee-food), noun: Any food substance that is highly pleasant to the taste as a child and tastes shockingly unpleasant once you become an adult.

Joe Posnanski:

OK, beyond the obvious vegetables question, I have another one: What do they mean AT LEAST six essential vitamins and minerals. Might there be more? Have those just not been discovered yet? Are scientist working in the SpaghettiO labs non-stop and occasionally shouting out, “WAIT, I found one! Oh, no, sorry, that was some lint from my pocket. Damn. False alarm.” Or does it depend on what you consider to be essential? Like do these have Calcite in them, but many Moms don’t feel that’s essential?

I ran across this photo a few days ago and knew it could have come from only one place. I was right:

I love that someone - either the customer or the decorator - felt that "sexual harassment" needed to be illustrated. And I realize that the decorator can't be expected to be Picasso or anything, but check out how far the girl's feet are off the ground. Either that was the Spank Heard 'Round the World, or she's on an invisible step while Chuckles there digs for gold.

Cake Wrecks:

"Now look, I need you to go back to the bakery - are you listening to me? - I need you to go back to the bakery, and get another cake. And remember: We are preparing for a new life. Happy, cheerful, life. We are avoiding death, mmkay? Got that? Good. Now hurry up; the party starts in an hour."

Also see Roadkill.

It also revealed 28 per cent had choked on crumbs while one in 10 had broken a tooth or filling biting a biscuit.

More unusually, three per cent had poked themselves in the eye with a biscuit and seven per cent bitten by a pet or "other wild animal" trying to get their biscuit.

The English, on the other hand -- we're not so sure.

"Another piece of tarte au sol, Madame?"

Reuters:

British consumers have a nasty habit of serving their dinner guests food that has been dropped on the floor or past the recommended date for its sale and consumption, a new survey showed on Friday.

The poll of 2,000 British consumers, commissioned by Italian pasta brand Giovanni Rana, found 15 percent of respondents admitted to serving "floor pie," food that had fallen on the floor, and 10 percent knowingly made a feast for guests using off-food or goods well past their sell-by date.

And 13 percent said they had accidentally poisoned themselves and their guests with their cooking.

Some of the accidental poisoning could be attributed to the five percent of people who admitted defrosting food using alternative heating appliances, including an iron, hairdryer and sun bed.

The study also found men to be marginally more experimental in the kitchen than [wo]men, 26 percent versus 24 percent. But the male experimentation comes at a cost, with 27 percent managing to set their kitchen or house on fire while on cooking duty and a further 21 percent admitting to having singed their eyebrows or burnt off some hair in the process.

And "J'ai brûlé mes sourcils" has a certain "je ne sais quoi," no?

Nevertheless, the Management requests that you settle your bill before the cleavers start flying.

An economist explores the hidden semiotics of dining out:

I also start to worry if many women in a restaurant are beautiful in a trendy or stylish way. The point is not that beautiful women have bad taste in food. Instead, the problem is that they will attract a lot of men to the restaurant, whether or not the place serves excellent food. And that allows the restaurant to cut back on the quality of the food.

[. . .]

When you enter a restaurant, you don’t want to see expressions of disgust on the diners’ faces, but you do want to see a certain seriousness of purpose. Pull out a mirror and try eating some really good food. How much are you smiling? Not as much as you might think. A small aside: in many restaurants, it is a propitious omen when the diners are screaming at each other. It’s a sign they are regular customers and feel at home. Many Chinese restaurants are full of screaming Chinese patrons. Don’t ask me if they’re fighting, I have no idea—but it is a sign that I want to be there too.

Warning: Yakety Sax

One of the problems with electric-powered vehicles is their near-silent operation, which could pose hazards to pedestrians. Various solutions have been proposed, mainly by adding engine or bell sounds. Domino's Pizza in the Netherlands takes it one step farther, with a recorded voice praising its fare.

I could see where this could become extremely annoying after awhile -- judging by the reaction of passers-by, though, at this point it seems to be trying to murder them with laughter.

Via Dave Barry

David Thompson:

Today’s Observer’s editorial is concerned, very concerned…

"Only radical action will begin to win the challenge of obesity. "

…and swollen with the usual urges:

"If the answers, whatever they are, involve challenging corporate power and practices, legislating to improve the content of food or even limiting individuals’ freedom to consume junk, then so be it."

Found via Julia, whose commenter, Katabasis, adds,

"One to show people who think 'progressive' is synonymous with 'freedom.'”

We’ve been here before, of course. Readers may recall the Guardian’s unveiling of “passive overeating” and its sympathy with Professor Boyd Swinburn, who wants the state to “intervene more directly” in what and where other people may eat. Apparently, individuals cannot be trusted and the public must be corrected by its betters. Making food more expensive is, we’re told, “a benefit.” As I wrote at the time,

"There’s something vaguely unpleasant about a group of richer people – say, left-leaning doctors, columnists and academics - demanding constraints and punitive taxes on proletarian food. Taxes and constraints that would leave themselves largely unaffected. It seems Professor Swinburn believes the population is too stupid to live unsupervised by the state and by extension people much like himself. Our food choices must therefore be taxed or denied and we must be prodded firmly by our betters: '

'Soft policies such as education programmes… [are] not going to cut the mustard anymore.'”

And again, it’s all because they care so very, very much.

This is corn. No, it's not photoshopped. Yes, it's real. It's a corn variety called Glass Gem Corn and though it may look like jelly beans or beads, it's real, actual, edible corn. What in the world?

Seeds Trust, a family seed company, got the seeds for glass gem corn from Greg Schoen who got his seeds from his "corn-teacher", Carl Barnes, an 80ish year old part-Cherokee man, in Oklahoma. When they planted the seeds, out came the colorful wizardry that looks more like something that Willy Wonka would invent than our boring yellow corn. I want to eat you glass gem corn. Then I want to poop you.

Not my usual beat, but I stole it off Ace Of Spades, so its conservative bona fides must be impeccable. Besides, he's probably knocked most of the HuffPo cooties off it.

The recipe makes the cake from scratch, but if you are in a hurry or not sure of your skills in that regard, I see no reason (keep in mind that IANAC*) why you couldn't substitute an angelfood or other premix for it.

(* I Am Not A Chef. Also, it calls for a grape jelly, but I would think that raspberry or blueberry, etc. would work equally well.)