Controversy

(e:jason) mentioning the BBQ article (I forgot that I had forwarded it to him!) has triggered the motivation to go on an old-fashioned rant as you've seen me do in the past.

To wit: (and I do read this paper daily - their food section is the best in America).

"While summer quenchers like light beer and iced tea are refreshing if you're mowing the lawn or tending a hot grill, I want a more robust adult beverage when I sit down to juicy slices of grilled beef or smoky, finger-licking barbecue."

Really? This is war. Thank God that in this country, for now anyway, we still have the freedom of choice. Or if you're me, the freedom of antipathy and excoriation. Let me translate - "While beer and iced tea are okay for the bumpkins who cut their own grass, I prefer a more sophisticated beverage with my BBQ. You know, less rough around the edges and more palatable to my banal sensitivities."

Food writers are generally insufferable. When the article started talking about "interplays" with sauce, smoke, etc. affecting the beverage of choice I had enough.

The Truth

Here's the deal. The food comes first, not the accompanying drink. Anyone that says otherwise is fucking wrong, okay? The fact that the article is titled "Pairing wines with grilling favorites" rather than "Pairing grilling favorites with wines" says it all. Now you certainly may expect to see this kind of thing in an overwhelmingly yuppie city like SF, where more often than not your exposure to BBQ will be in a sit-down restaurant with silverware, a water course, horrifying conversations going on around you and an utter lack of wet-naps.

Drinking wine with your BBQ is best done at home alone, where no BBQ cognoscenti will actually witness what is going on; sort of like your alcoholic uncle nipping from a flask in his jacket when nobody is looking.

Of course this sort of shit goes on in California - there is no reputable BBQ tradition there and the state is full of transients, both legal and illegal. This scenario is going to create a melting pot of theories about food, and let's face it, there is no better region for foodies anywhere in America than the Bay Area. Pair this with the famous wine industry in the area, and you're bound to have experimentation.

This isn't to say that it works, or that it is appropriate, mind you. Pairing BBQ with wine is as crazy a concept as pairing a burrito with wine. Hey (e:jay), do you think that Gramma Mora's last night could have been enhanced with a splash of Beaujolais? The spiciness of the sauce would have really made everything pop!

Fuck me, I can't even handle that in jest - I blame Bartles and fucking James and those 4-packs.

This is what you drink with BBQ if you wish to avoid embarrassment; beer (go easy drinking, you'll enjoy nowt with a stout), iced tea, water, or juice. BBQ is not a high-class endeavor - it is meant to be done amongst friends in a casual manner, out in the backyard with some tunes, green grass, plastic cups, fire, sunsets and the sort of good times our grandparents had.

BBQ is more than food, it's a classic American activity with a tradition that demands respect. Wine belongs just about anywhere other than with BBQ, just like sushi belonging just about anywhere other than a baseball stadium.

Facebook Quizzes

I've noticed that a few of my people on FB are completing the "How well do you know X person?" quizzes. It made me realize a few things -

1) Only a few people could complete one of these about me because I'm a bit secretive and I'm a hard guy to get close to. (Grammar police - do not forsake me, for I know what I've done).

2) I'm not sure how well I would do if I completed one of these for my friends. I would be fine with my good friends, but for people such as my friends' wives? C'mon. A friend recently completed one of these for a friend's wife and he scored 42% - as far as I'm concerned that is the equivalent of an A.

3) Inevitably someone who is sending this quiz to their friends will be disappointed to discover that somebody close didn't know the person as well as he or she thought. This is when the dramatics flare up like a SoCal brush fire.

Sirius

Satellite radio is great - right now I'm listening to Wolfman Jack DJing a late night shift on the 60s on 6 channel. Ahh, the sixties - the absolute best time in American music history. The only problem is that Wolfman Jack has been dead since 1995 - a little strange. The story behind it - they unearthed some of the legendary DJ's previously lost shows and are broadcasting them.

I really do love the music - it makes me realize how cheated and manipulated music fans are these days. They can keep Kanye West - I'll keep Marvin Gaye. They can keep Fall Out Boy - I'll keep The Rolling Stones, The Byrds, Bob Dylan, The Beatles. Today's music generally sucks, and it's never made so starkly apparent as when you listen to things such as the 60's on 6. In those days, you were a "listener." These days you are a " music consumer."

It made me realize that we've lost something in American culture that I really, really love. That is the nationally known, influential, monolithic, trend setting radio DJ. There really isn't any more big guns in the radio world and I think its a sad side effect of our move towards iPods, digital media, etc. In other words I think it is a negative aspect of our cultural evolution.

In that sense I think its admirable, even appropriate, for satellite radio to tip their cap to the past and air these Wolfman Jack shows, as well as hire "Cousin Brucie" to host satellite radio shows, thus completing the circle. I might not have lived through that time, but I'm convinced that anybody who did would recognize what I have after listening to the channel for a while. I can't be the only person my age who recognizes these things, can I? Maybe I'm learning about what my buddy Jerry meant years ago when he told me I was an "old soul."

Kerouac wrote in his preface to Visions of Cody - "this feeling may soon be obsolete as America enters its High Civilization period and no one will get sentimental or poetic any more about trains and dew on fences at dawn in Missouri." Maybe he was right, but at least that's not true in this house. I'm a sentimental guy with a long memory - oh, look - now your "How well do you know Josh?" score is now 1%. Ha!

Nice. The government will own this company (rather than say, the UAW having it given to them by Obama to sell off and eventually fund unsustainable retiree benefits).



The "healthy" bits will be quickly sold to The Government, while the "unhealthy" bits will be separated and presumably sold off.

Everybody was asking the following question about the billions in loans given to the auto industry. What will happen to the money? Well, here's your answer. Over $15 billion of your tax dollars are about to go up in smoke, erased as if you were never fleeced for it to begin with. In addition to buying up healthy GM and forgiving the loans, which we were told were imminently needed for the company's survival, this new company The Government will also fund a new line of credit to GM.

So, in other words - you are about to be on the hook for -

a) The purchase price of the "healthy" assets of GM, which has yet to be announced, nor does anybody know which parts of GM are "healthy" or not. (Seems to me the whole enterprise is "tits up")
b) $15 billion in forgiven loans to GM and its union, to merely keep the company afloat for a few months.
c) Billions of dollars in new credit lines.
d) Billions in other obligations to secured lenders.

Cheers -

Josh

Here she is, happily gnawing on a bone -

The Super Dog

Hi, let me introduce to you Ella, our newest office dog and the pride and joy of my co-worker.



She's a year old this month and is extremely energetic. She's a pure bred Sheltie, a supremely intelligent breed. She is always running around like a pup would and barks a lot at Angie, the other dog, who usually lays around and does nothing. Ella needs constant mental stimulation... she gets bored. I'll be sitting here, typing away and doing my work, and I'll hear a tennis ball bounce on the floor behind me... I know it's Ella asking me to play a little catch with her. She'll bark until I play with her a little bit. She also has this little tug toy that we play around with. She's a tad skittish (I'm told this is how the breed generally behaves) but she's warmed up and comfy now, and even the first week she and I were best pals. Ella is a bit of a spaz, but she's also a sweet dog who'll come around to me and give me kisses for no reason. Half the time, my hands have dog slobber on them and I didn't need H1N1 to come around before I washing my hands constantly here!

She's really good at catching balls on the bounce, and my co-worker puts her her in some sort of dog agility sports competitions. Her favorite snack is actually carrots - we always have them and she shreds through them. Actually, she likes them so much that you have to be careful feeding them to her. (One of these days, I'll get a video of her on here, however I can, so you can see her in action). Seeing how healthy she eats made me realize what my boss and his wife have done to the other dog - I've been privy to watching them feed her endless amounts of people food, including Tim Bits, bits of a bagel w/cream cheese, Chinese food, etc. WTF - do they want her to be a diabetic? She's already way overweight and is a prime candidate for doggie osteoarthritis and hip trouble. 5 years old.

Having dogs in the office has been a really great experience for me. Growing up, we didn't have pets. I had no idea about how to interpret what dogs were trying to tell you - I've learned a lot about dogs without actually owning one. It's been really great and a joy, not to mention a great stress reliever when the days go badly.

SPoT Suburbia

This morning I visited the newly opened SPoT Coffee on Main St. in Williamsville. It's an utterly sanitized version of what you find on Elmwood or Chippewa, and it is possibly just as hard to park nearby if you want to visit. It's in a plaza adjacent to the Mickey D's, across from the large plaza with the Tim Horton's, etc. - there is a parking area but it serves many businesses, and being familiar with that corner, I know with certainty that getting in and around that area is an absolute nightmare.

Anyway, what really caught my eye was the dessert cases. Here they were far better stocked and more presentable - it made the kids on Elmwood look really, really lazy by comparison. (I haven't gotten a thanks for a tip in a couple of years at Elmwood either, should I do it anymore?). Everything in the case looked great, but I tried one of the vegan muffins and it had a distinctly 'off' flavor going on. (One shouldn't taste fish when they bite into bran, cranberry, etc.). The coffee - reliable and consistent. I didn't order a bar drink and probably won't, for at least six months - almost every employee oozed "SPoT NEwBiE." You'd hope that they would shift some employees around to ensure that the quality wouldn't suffer. I'm not confident - someone else can try it.

Anyway, it's really clean and lounge style - like an updated Starbucks - and another bit of really big news at this place are the gourmet pizzas - yes, SPoT PiZzA! $10-$12, 6-8 varieties.

School Board Elections

This is one of the few topics where I'm an out and out nihilist. It isn't that I don't care - one would have to be psycho not to care about the education of America's kids. I just don't have any faith in the electorate here, nor do I have any faith in the people who ultimately serve the city or the schools. Buffalo is in the shitter and in bottomless decline for numerous reasons. The number of registered voters who got out last night probably wouldn't fill HSBC Arena - think about it. 5%? That's sad. I'd go more into it but there's no point - I'm pretty set in my belief that the school board election didn't matter, and that there isn't a whole lot that one (or nine) people can do to change what is a catastrophic scenario. Don't get me started about the internal politics of our school system...

Page 6 Returns

Go visit Look At That Fucking Hipster -

You'll see stuff like this - Paul has competition for facial hair experiments -




I've noted the hipster backlash that has escalated of the past few months. Let's be honest, they deserve it. Any grown person that would do things like the above deserve to be lampooned.

Today's victim - Nancy Pelosi. It's a sort of parody suggesting a new weight loss video - "Nancy Pelosi's Sweatin' to the Socialists" - based off of her manic clapping during the not-state-of-the-union but state-of-the-union speech earlier this year.

I think it's a fair question. Why should the other half of the country that didn't vote for Barack Obama treat him any differently than the way liberals treated George Bush for 8 years and counting?

In other news:

In the age of "unprecedented transparency" Obama's government is debating on how to give you bad news. You see, the bank stress tests aren't going very well, and Obama's government is concerned that the bad news is coming at the wrong time, which is why the both the timing and the nature of what will be said about the stress tests is being manipulated. The stress tests will contradict every falsely optimistic word spoken by Barry about the economy this past week. That's a fact - if the stress tests were going well, there would be no need for manipulation of information.

See, they think it is really important to tell you that JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, et. al. just profited in billions of dollars this past quarter, but you really shouldn't worry yourself with scary information on the horizon such a dozen banks potentially failing. which will make the economy collapse even further.

Among numerous laughable items attributable to the Obama administration, the promise of transparency is perhaps the most frequently broken promises.

I'm telling you this now, and heed this warning - this in particular isn't political and I'm saying this as a friend - with tax increases, several million jobs still to be lost, foreclosures ongoing now not just as a result in poor lending practices but job losses, steeply declining tax receipt projections (especially in NYS) despite punitive tax increases on "the rich," tens of TRILLIONS in future budget commitments with no rational way to pay for it, either with tax increases or future borrowing - I hate saying this to you but we're in deep, deep trouble and we aren't likely coming out of it anytime soon. Some think they will simply monetize the debt, meaning rampant inflation. Oops - that's another topic - our money supply has tripled only in 6 months, it's never been higher. Rampant inflation, maybe hyperinflation, is an inevitability based solely on the extra trillions already in reserve in the banking system. Cheers. :(

Next post - How can New Yorkers get a minimum 4% increase in their take home pay? Get the fuck out of New York State and move to Texas, Florida, or any other state that doesn't have income taxes whatsoever, not to mention a vastly superior quality of life, a vibrant private sector and a government with less of a predilection to treat you with contempt. Did you know that the state of Texas, by itself, accounted for 70% of the nation's private sector job growth last year? It is absolutely insane and a self-inflicted wound to stay in New York.

Here's a fluff piece, interesting nonetheless, from China Radio International regarding a young American who studied finance in the UC system, but ultimately left to open a bakery in Beijing. It's interesting seeing the Chinese exposed to American culture that has nothing to do with companies, but with real people. His customers love him. WTF - I'm blonde and I studied Finance and Economics. Maybe I should forego it all and open an American bakery in a foreign land as well?

You'll appreciate this - check it out.

UPDATE: I thought I'd show you all the progress being made on my "roll up the rim to win" collection thus far, and a piece of candy with a name I couldn't believe... I bet Ralph Lauren's daughter keeps this in stock at her store in Manhattan.

On February 17, the President signed into law the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Economic Stimulus Act). This law lowers the amount of federal income tax withholding from your paycheck through he "Making Work Pay" provision. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has released updated withholding tax tables and Advanced Earned Income Tax Credits and has recommended that these changes take place no later than April 1, 2009. XXXXXX, our payroll service provider, has already implemented these changes effective with the paycheck you have received today.

The reduced withholding amounts will be in effect for the remainder of 2009 and 2010. You will not be required to complete new Forms W-4 to take advantage of the reduced federal withholding percentage.

You will likely notice, based on your marital status and number of dependents claimed for bi-weekly payroll, anywhere from $20.00 to $40.00 MORE in your net pay this week (and it will continue for 2009 and 2010). If you wish to NOT have this extra amount as "take home" pay and wish to resume having more taxes paid in to get a larger refund at next year's tax filing (2010), then be sure to let me know and I can provide you with the proper form to complete.

There will be no change to New York State tax withholding, as far as we know now.

I think my boss may be incorrect on that last point - sadly state withholdings will be going up, not down.

Anyway, here is your "tax cut," which is actually a "tax credit."

After me it's your turn (thanks for the inspiration (e:gardenmama))

jasmine green tea bag
stern winds test icy window
it's only noontime