Pic for a Sith.

The Dude sent a pic perfectly suited for the Sith.

A Sith BBQ thingy.

That is all.

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Prometheus Brought Pork from the Gods, not Fire.

We were at The Dude and Crazy Cat Lady’s Cat ranch for the Xth annual bonfire and Roman Food Orgy.

We ate more than was healthy, and then we ate more than was safe or reasonable.

I am STILL waddling.

Here is how my plate went down…

BBQ pork (shredded), bulkogi beef, corn chips, cheese-distillated (fractionated) product, synthetic onion-flavored sour-cream dip, spaghetti, horseradish, seconds on bulkogi beef, two chocolate-chip cookies, two slices of pumpkin bread, two halloween-style sugar cookies, and a bottle of tonic water.

Lots of kids were there and a number of friends, too. The Dude, ID10T-Killer, Black Lab on Crank, and Tenacious Bulldog.

Prometheus brought fire, too, I guess.

After test driving my iPad briefly (only three hours after I used it 10 minutes following the three hour setup), I heard Cruel Wife go “OOOOOOH” and at that point I knew we were going to go buy her one as well.

I can see how we’ll get our money’s worth already. They keep the kids quiet on car trips – using Angry Birds. I can see how Cut the Rope will be a useful tool as well.

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Pork Products.

I got a new Brinkmann smoker a few days ago.  Father-in-law (hereinafter known as TPBS – short for Twenty Pounds of BS in a ten pound bag) and I set it up Thursday night.

As soon as it was all put together I plugged it in for a few hours to bake off the bad paint stuff and crud from the inside of the smoker.

This morning Cruel Wife inserted an 8lb pork butt in the smoker (9AM) since I was having a hard time getting out of bed (honestly).  I got up a bit after that and did yard work and tended the smoker all day.  I smoked the dog shiat out of that pork butt until 5:47PM.

Spaced Diode (a very good MESSENGER/FIPS buddy of mine) and his wife and son came over this afternoon and joined the family and my in-laws for dinner.

Smoked pork, macaroni salad, baked potatoes, olives, marinated shrooms, garlic bread – we ate until we nearly barfed and then ate some more.

A few burps were heard (followed by the fluttering confetti of partially eaten napkins as they were propelled from people’s mouths) and chairs scraped across the patio as everyone sat back far enough to undo belts and pat tummies.

Then Spaced Diode’s wife says “EXCELLENT pork products, Lemur!”

I looked at her in horror.

Cruel Wife’s silverware clattered to her plate and she sucked in a breath between her teeth.

Somewhere in the distance a coyote howled and a low melody sounded from nowhere in particular.

“What did you say?  Did I hear you correctly?  Pork products?”

She looked at me with those innocent Yooper eyes and said “Yes, pork products.  It was excellent.”

I am convinced that children cried and kittens died at that moment.

Tears nearly welling up in my eyes I cast a glance around to make sure the children were out of earshot and said “Yooper Chick, pork products makes it sound like we just got done eating hog lips and assholes.  We ate pork butt, which is the shoulder of a pig.  Why do you not just stick a knife in my heart and twist until my soul screams into eternity?”

Enough to make a smokemaster want to weep.

You can’t call smoked pork butt pork products.  It’s a sin against nature.

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Movie festival weirdness.

Ok, so the plot goes like this:  Bad guy rapes good guy’s daughter.  Good guy’s daughter commits suicide.  Good guy captures bad guy and performs an involuntary sex change on him.  Good guy then transplants daughter’s face onto bad guy.  Then good guy has sex with bad guy making it impossible to tell who is really a good or bad guy.

Guests, among them a group of sweepstakes winners flown specially to Cannes by Stella Artois from the U.S. to enjoy a once in a lifetime movie premiere were horrified by the experience. That group of Americans left and did not come back to the theater following a partiularly violent rape scene in the middle of the film.

[snip]

The latest from the Spanish director is based on a French novel, “Tarantula,” and the hometown crowd for the most part (the ones who stayed in the theater) did give Almodovar a five minute standing ovation for the adaptation.

Critics have also fallen in love with the upsetting film and are placing it in contention for the highest Cannes honor, the Palme d’or.

This is what I hate about “high art”.  It doesn’t matter if a story has merit or not, it’s just got to move someone emotionally, where the “someone” is a bunch of sick f*cks who have become so desensitized by their masturbation with great handfuls of sand and caustic soda that what should be repulsive suddenly gets standing ovations.  If you showed these folks “Pink Flamingos” today they’d go nuts.  Polyester was at least funny in a repulsive sort of way, and Waters’ movie PF was awful, but this latest one (not a Waters movie) with Antonio Banderas sounds like a steaming pile of excrement.

****

Give Squirrel a Whirl?  Hokay.

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BBQ… Not just for eating anymore.

On our vacation my dad and brother decided to roast pig in a pit.  They used these baking bags like you use in the oven.

See, they used this method last year and it worked.  Last year they asked me what I thought and I said then that I thought it would get way way too hot.  To my surprise and amazement last year’s turned out fantastically well.  I was confused.  I walked away and seriously doubted my skills, ability, and judgment.  I’ve been smoking pork for ten years now and I was stymied and felt inadequate.

Well, this year they asked me if I wanted to help.  I said “Nah.  You got it under control.  You’re pit masters.  You have mastered the pit.  You didn’t need me last year.  Have at.”

Well, this is how this year’s BBQ pit roasting turned out.

Note the charred ground around the pit.  This is indicative of a fire that is too hot.  Last year’s fire wasn’t as hot because they piled dirt around the edges and choked off the oxygen, and the fire burned much cooler.   This year they got cocky.

This year it just burned.  Here’s the results of 5 bags of briquettes used as a heat source.

See the well done chunks of meat?

This is what 700+ degrees for ten hours will get you.  I hate raw pork, don’t you?  I specifically asked for the piece on the lower left.

I laughed and laughed and laughed.

We had chicken that night.  At least the people who did not have the flu all had chicken.  I laid in bed wishing I was dead.  They laughed and laughed and laughed.

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My Own Porch.

Rarely does a sick dog go lie under the neighbor’s porch.

There’s a reason for that.

Being sick away from home is about as attractive as stripping buck-naked, dousing one’s self in cold turpentine, and crawling through red-hot broken glass.

We spent the first half of vacation with Cruel Wife’s family – her parents, Sister1 and her family, and Sister2 and her family.  For a total of… let’s see… 8 adults and ten children.  That was a story in and of itself.  Eight days’ worth of story.

But then a week ago today, we drove to see my family down in Orygun.

And got sick.

Driving from Seattle to Orygun, I had a bitch-kitty of a headache.  We stopped at Troglodyteville, Washington† for a pit stop.  Troglodyteville is sort of the armpit of the groin of Washington and the service road that we found ourselves on was basically the poop-chute of the armpit of the groin of Washington.  Now, if you’ve followed the tale of my life for the last two years you know that headaches related to my neck injury are nothing new, so I thought little of it.  What I did not know was that I had a viral passenger.

We arrived in Hometownville, Orygun four hours later and I started hanging out with my family, who were engaging in reunionizing in earnest anticipation of a pit roasting of many pounds of pig.

My father asked if I wanted to help out with the BBQ preparations.  I begged off, figuring that he and my brother could do it.  Last year they did it with my supervision – then I had said “Gee you’ve got it too hot, it will burn up” and it turned out wonderful to my great amazement.

Sunday morning rolled around – I got up feeling pretty cruddy.   I go to the kitchen were my sister says “How does well-done pork sound?”

I look at her warily and say “Mmmmph… huh?”

She says to go look at the pork.

Well, my dad and brother did the same thing they did last year – got it too hot except this year they did not fully seal the pit with dirt to choke off all oxygen.

This year, the environment inside the pit was the surface of the sun.  This year, the pork was in a pit that must have climbed upwards of 700 degrees for most of the night.  In fact, the pit got so hot that the sheet metal was blackened, the grass all around the pit was blackened, and smoke was billowing out of the pit.  This year, we had big chunks of charcoal where the pig once lay in the pit.

I could not stop laughing.  Yes, it was horrible of me.  I rubbed it in.   I laughed, I cried, I hooted, and I chortled.

And then I got horribly horribly ill.   Little did I know that my viral passenger held an open-house and opened the doors for an infection.  For four days I ran a fever of 102-103F.  I was wracked with coughs, chills, shakes, sweats.  By the time I finally got ahold of a doctor I had coughed so much that it felt like daggers in my chest and my ribs screamed with the strain.  I was hacking up flecks of blood.   Everything was coming up browns, yellows, and greens.

The doc prescribed amoxicillin, 2/day, 875mg each.  I crept around like warmed-over death, with my guts torn out by the antibiotic, coughing, not sleeping, not eating.  Even as of today I’ve had perhaps five light meals in the last six days.  Great way to lose 15 pounds.

My grandfather used to say that he knew he was sick when Graveyard Stew sounded good.  Graveyard Stew is essentially lightly toasted toast floating in warm milk (milktoast) and only is supposed to sound good when you’re in the graveyard with one foot actually in the grave.  Well, I was feeling so rotten even Milquetoast didn’t sound appealing.  I spent the lion’s share of the week wishing I could be here at home where I could at least feel like I was dying in my own bed.

Yesterday as we drove north to Seattle we got as far as Albany, Orygun when I said “Cruel Wife, we need to go to the hospital.”   I had the shakes, my fingers were tingling/numb, and I couldn’t breathe without a huge effort and even then only half in and half out.  So in the ER they determined that I did not have pneumonia (whew) but did have bad bad bronchitis (ok) and needed a nebulizer treatment to get my lungs to relax.  Did the trick.  I was able to draw a complete breath in and out and actually move some crap out of my lungs.

Our flight today was a tough ordeal.  Can’t move fast without getting winded and I have no energy to speak of.  The good news is that this is the best I’ve felt since a week ago and I think I’m going to live.  Living actually sounds like a reward, not a punishment.

Cruel Wife got the cough/sick thing but no fever.  My boy (Hellboy) had the fever and cough, too.

Why was he on antibiotics if we only figured out later what was wrong with him?  Good question.

Because in the FIRST week of our vacation, he nearly succeeded in getting crushed by a 300lb fountain which collapsed on him and gashed his little forehead open to the bone, for a total of 16 stitches.  From hairline to eyebrow went the laceration, from head to toe went the blood, and from the rental place to the hospital went the ambulance.

But that’s another story.  We thought the fever was an infection from his head wound.

We’re back, and we’re happy to be back.

I miss my Zoe-pup.  We pick her up tomorrow from the sitters.  She’ll probably pee her little dog britches and I’ll probably pee my big Lemur King shorts when we see each other.

† Troglodyteville is not the town’s real name.  A false name has been used to protect myself from the knuckle-dragging troglodytes that live there on the off chance that one of them knows how to read and comes across this blog.

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Cockroaches, Why Did There Have To Be Cockroaches…?

Update: My buddy EW1(SG) just gave me hell for grossing him out with cockroaches. Oh, this will really strain a friendship, but what the hell, no guts no glory. I can’t claim credit on this one but I can give it where it is due. Go to this site and look at the T-SHIRT.

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Sometimes, to cheer a friend up, you gotta gross ’em out.

Said friend related a story explaining his hatred of roaches. In his small room they had a habit of getting inside the TV, then doing a good job at self-immolation on a HV connection.

My version of blowing sunshine up someone’s butt required this response.

Look at the bright side:

1) You have a bugzapper

2) You have incense

3) Both were for no more price than that of watching TV

My post for tonight is the tool I used for the gross-out. It is something I cooked up – the cutting diagram for the American Cockroach, Periplaneta americana. I assume it is called the American Cockroach because they are so well suited for the BBQ.

It was buried in the UN-Bug Eating Post, but here is the TerraLobster™ (AKA “CockTails”) concept along the same lines.

cocktails-brochure (PDF FILE)

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