Gulp Fiction

A day around the barbecue with a guy named Barge

If Barry Zito had control of his curveball like Boland has control of his sliders, he wouldn’t be 0-6, that’s for sure.
On Sunday, Boland whipped up a tasty batch of sliders. After that stellar performance, he’s not getting shipped to the bullpen anytime soon.
There is something about a burger smaller than a credit card that is saddening to a meat-loving American like myself, but, interestingly enough, any sadness quickly disappears when you realize that you have 36 of them.
Grilled onions, fresh beef and melted cheddar cheese on a Hawaiian roll, compact yet abundant, is the perfect way to assuage the sadness in the passing of another wild Saturday and compliment the lazy slowness of another dreary Sunday.
Even the fond and fresh memory of a bunch of guys sitting around on a Sunday watching sports, coming up with funny names, breaking wind and dreading Monday somehow makes Monday a little bit more bearable.
Making Tuesdays more bearable, however, is another task altogether. Matt Cain pitching a shutout through 5 1/3 against Colorado and getting the win helps. He deserves it.
Now if the Sharks can get a win tonight, Wednesday might not be that bad.

A sermon aboard the H.M.S. Beagle: A townie’s take on Picnic Day

Well, it’s springtime again and for those Frisbee-chucking, bicycle-riding quacks like myself who call The People’s Republic of Davis our home, that means another installation of everyone’s favorite drunken college free-for-all – Picnic Day.
Ah, yes, Picnic Day, where an educational and family-friendly holiday has throughout the years devolved in to a vomit and broken glass-filled riot that proves once and for all that both evolutionism and the Bible are wrong: we are not evolving, and we are not more than just animals. Animals with cell phones, but animals nonetheless.
For those of you who possess the ignorant luxury of not knowing what Picnic Day is, I will explain.
Picnic Day was started in the 1910s as a demonstration of Davis’ contributions to the world of agriculture. People would bring picnics, hence Picnic Day, and they would look at tractors and corn and wheat threshers and generally do a bunch of things that would bore a modern person to the point of putting Dr. Kevorkian on speed dial.
On campus, there are wiener dog races, a parade, cows with holes in their stomachs, genetically altered things, bugs that perform tricks; basically what state fairs would be if everyone who ran fairs had a Ph.D. and didn’t like rides, alcohol or fried foods.
Off campus, however, is a very different scene.
It is the largest student-run event in the United States and so, on reading the words “student-run,” it is easy to imagine what those moronic weight-lifting, charlatan frat boys and their equally idiotic sorority counterparts do with their time and the remnants of their student loans check.
The bars open at 6 a.m. and there are parties everywhere, all day long. All the drunk girls are screaming or crying, all the drunk guys are screaming or fighting, and the locals are generally hiding for their lives.
It’s kind of like spring break in Cancun without the beach and the roofies. Well, on second thought, let’s just say without the beach.
I hate Picnic Day.
My parents live right in the heart of it, ground zero – University Avenue. Two blocks from campus, two blocks from downtown, and surrounded by apartment complexes.
I usually spend Picnic Day sitting in a lawn chair in my front yard with a cooler of beer and a shotgun loaded with rock salt just inside the front door -- the beer to calm my murderous tendencies and the shotgun to deter any frat boy from “relieving” himself on my father’s Audi.
The ladies are much more polite. They at least ask if they can use my bathroom. To which I usually reply, “one dollar for number one, five dollars for number two.”
It’s quite a profitable little racket.
This year, I think I am going to play a little game of “Frat Boy Pitfall.” Basically, I dig tiger pits in the front yard and line the bottom of them with punji sticks. Then I place a 12-pack at my doorstep and wait in the bushes.
The winner gets the beers; the losers get a free ride to the emergency room.
Perhaps that is a little extreme . . . extreme and potentially criminal.
Maybe I should just go with the flow and put my energy toward more enjoyable labors. My mother is getting out of town. If my father is smart, he will too. Maybe I should just relax and have a good time.
I like to drink. I like drunk girls. I like to drink with drunk girls. I like watching frat guys knock each other out. I like music and barbecues. I like watching teary-eyed drunk girls with mascara streaming down their face bawling to their friend about what some guy did or didn’t do or said he would do but didn’t. I like watching idiots get arrested. I like to see the hood rat thug out-of-towners who heard about the events from a friend wander around aimlessly, obviously not students at UCD or any school for that matter, throwing their abrasive inner-city game at suburban white girls and failing miserably, wondering why the girls don’t respond to being yelled at on the street. I like seeing rookies fail. I like seeing veterans rep. I like the comforting allure of the new familiarity of it all: always different, but always the same, the only thing that changes are the faces. The same cheap beer, the same conversations, the same pairs of Uggs, the same damn Sublime song that they have been playing for the past 15 years.
I like it all.
I’m still young enough to let it all go and have a good time.
At least, I think I am still young enough. If not, there are always the punji sticks.

Pizza and the American family: A tale of culinary conversion

My little brother has come around. Finally.
For years, with stubborn and downright heretical defiance, he denied joining me in the embrace of my one true pizza love.
He ridiculed it, slandered it and stuck his tongue out in disgust at it for as long as it had been holy to me.
I tried to tell him, “It is not that weird. These toppings are on every pizza place menu in the entire country for a reason.” Still, he would never hear of it.
Yet, last Friday, after all the professions otherwise, after the torments and arguments and tooth pulling, he finally tried it. And as I knew he would, he saw The Light and finally came around.
He now he has welcomed pepperoni and pineapple pizza into his heart.
I never could understand why he was so dead-set against it.
His argument was that pineapple on pizza was disgusting. I suppose I couldn’t blame him. After all, he had only tasted Hawaiian, which, I to have to admit, isn’t that good.
Even I didn’t really care for pineapple on pizza before I found pep and pine.
Hawaiian just doesn’t have the kick to it. Canadian bacon is OK, if you are a softie who wants to eat pork but won’t risk the subsequent heart attack to do it. But true pork lovers like myself want to actually taste the goodness and we’ll clog every artery in our bodies to get it.
Besides, French-speaking socialists aren’t to be trusted anyway, so I say leave their “bacon” be. Eat too much of that stuff and soon you’ll find yourself saying “aboot,” and thinking that universal health care and responsible government are good ideas. Rubbish.
Canadian bacon is the culinary equivalent of going to a wine and cheese party with a tub of cottage cheese and a bottle of grape juice – it’s the sad pussyfooting of those too afraid of death to seek pleasure, those too preoccupied with trying to keep the Grim Reaper at a constant arm’s length to let go of it all and just live.
Let them have Hawaiian.
But pepperoni and pineapple . . . now there is a food fit for a king; a king aware of his own mortality.
The contrast of flavors is the best – the saltiness and spiciness of the pepperoni mixes so well with the sweetness of the pineapple, counterbalancing so that no one flavor dominates the palate. When mixed with the bitterness of a good beer, there are few pleasures that don’t involve dangerous chemical substances or the opposite sex that match up.
Hawaiian pizza tastes like pineapple. Pepperoni and pineapple tastes like Picasso’s paintings look or Beethoven’s music sounds or gasoline smells; that is, if you are like me and think gasoline is God’s cologne . . . Him, and Brian Fantana.
When made well, pep and pine is so good. In my opinion, that is. I do like to think I am a pretty good judge though.
But then again, I am a guy who believes that Kylie Minogue is a musical genius and that Perfect Strangers was a great show, so maybe it’s a good idea to take anything that I have to say with a grain of salt.
Nonetheless, in every person’s calendar of pizza life, the system is B.P.P and A.P.P – Before Pepperoni and Pineapple, and After Pepperoni and Pineapple.
In my life, the year 2008 is actually 5 A.P.P. Andrew’s is 0 A.P.P. Izza’s, if I have anything to say about it, is 0 B.P.P. But I’m not holding my breath on that one.

Take me down to Davis Noodle City

“OK, what you have?”
“Curry chicken,” Izza said.
“Noodle or rice?”
“Noodles, please.”
“OK, and you?”
“Hot garlic chicken,” I said.
“Noodle or rice?”
“Noodles, please.”
“OK, anything else?”
“A Coke, please,” I said.
“OK,” she said and walked away.
“Cute place. Curt staff, but cute,” I said to Izza as I looked around the restaurant, getting a feel of the environment.
There is something refreshing about the to-the-point attitude of an Asian waitresses in a hole-in-the-wall Asian restaurant for someone who feels as alienated from much of the overcooked-with-a-side-of-forced-smiles American dining experience as I do.
There is no chitchat. No rehearsed, fake smile, bubble gum-smacking, nauseating “Hi, my name is Candy and I’ll be your waitress” bit.
In many Asian restaurants with Asian immigrant waitresses (I’m talking culture here, not race) taking orders, they don’t even smile, which, interestingly, I actually like. There is nothing false about them.
It is about the food, and for the most part, really good food. Not the ambience, not the attitude, not a perky waitress with only the comfort of her Southern-fried charm to appease, trying to coerce me with ill-practiced flirting into buying four mocha ice cream sundaes at $8.50 a pop.
There is no trying to sedate me with specials and desserts and drinks in a desperate but clever ruse to cover-up the utter ineptitude of the staff.
The waitresses in these Asian places are fast, competent, they know the menu and they realize the Pax Americanus of the food industry that we who have served honorably already know -- if you don’t bother me, I won’t bother you. And if you do bother me, you will have diarrhea tomorrow.
So many places have lost their way, replacing fresh ingredients for flair, slow cooked for flash frozen. Fresh and seasonal in this world of the cowardly American eater just has no place anymore. That is why fast food and chain restaurants do so well – they taste the exact same, every time, no matter what time, no matter where you are.
The Shenanigans and Flingers of this country and places of that sort are more like casinos than restaurants: Everything is bright and flashing, if there is a clock, it doesn’t work; there are obnoxious people and alcoholics everywhere (usually the help), and the crew is trained to do everything in its power to keep you in the building for as long as possible so you will keep spending.
That is not to say that I am completely cheap, I don’t mind dropping the family farm on quality meal once in a while, but not on a syrupy milkshake to wash down my dry cheeseburger on a Tuesday.
The waitresses in these places don’t care about the bottom line. Rather, they care about their tip, which, again, I can’t fault.
But what they need to learn is how to do it professionally, rather than like a drunk girl on prom night.
An overly intrusive waitress seeking a larger tip need not bother and pester me throughout my meal, asking me every ten seconds how everything is. If anything, that will hurt her tip.
If a waitress wants a decent tip from me all she need to do is follow five simple rules: 1) Get my order right the first time, 2) get me my food as promptly as is possible, 3) be pleasurable but not phony or overbearing, 4) if you see that my water cup is empty, then fill it, 5) and don’t let the cook hock a loog in my blue plate special.
That is it.