I made a crock-pot creation yesterday that ended up being fantastic. I had a package of 8 chicken legs from the meat market ($3.23) and a big bottle of spicy BBQ sauce ($1 at big lots) In the morning I dumped in the chicken legs, squirted in the entire contents of the BBQ bottle, set the pot to low and went to work. I was not sure how it was going to come out, I was afraid all the meat would just melt off the bones and I would be left with a liquid mess.
However, it came out fantastic. The chicken was very tender, but still intact. The BBQ sauce was marinated right into the meat. It tasted like it had actually been BBQ’ed. I ate the legs with a fork because they were too messy to eat by hand, however I was impressed. I will have to remember this one. How did single men ever live before crock-pots. Probably why they had to go and get married.
Don’t know my greens:
I stopped at Albertson’s last night to pick up some greens for a salad fixing for my lunches the rest of this week. I picked up the normal goodies I like, lettuce, cucumbers, bean sprouts. I was trying to get some Romano lettuce, but in that section of produce was a Douchebag and his girlfriend. They looked exactly like something out of http://www.hotchickswithdouchebags.com/. He was some muscled dude wearing a wife beater t-shirt, a baseball cap and a gold chain with links as thick as my fingers. His face held a sullen ’My girlfriend is making me shop with her’ look. They were arguing over some vegetable. I wandered around the produce section for a while, pushing my cart and sniffing at fruit and peering at them, waiting for them to move because frankly I did not want to get within four feet of them because I might end up getting sucked into the vortex of douchebaggery.
When it was clear they would not move for a bit, I finally grabbed a little produce bag and darted in and snatched my greens and darted away. I was smugly congratulating myself for my quick moves until I was standing in the checkout lane while the guy was ringing up my purchases, and what I thought was Romano lettuce came up as ’Radish tops’. What the heck? Radish tops? I ended up putting some into my salad anyways and when my sister had some (she was over doing my taxes) she asked ’what are these’ and held up some of the greens on a fork. I asked her why and she said ’They are kind of bitter’.
So, I do not know my greens. And what the hell do people use radish tops for??
Zombie Cars:
So, the other night I caught ’Resident Evil: Extinction’ on PPV. It was a decent flick, because it had lots of zombies in it. And people killing zombies. However, as I was watching a film I could not help but notice an error of zombie protection that I have seen used over and over in movies: Barbed Wire. In ’Resident Evil’ and the last remake of ’Down of the Dead’ people tried to protect their cars from zombies by running barbed wire across it. It is my feelings that barbed wire has no effect on zombies. Barbed wire is meant to hurt. That is why it is so effective against people and cows. You do not want to touch it because it is all hurty.
Zombies, however, do not care about getting hurt because they are dead. In fact, barbed wire would actually be a hindrance against zombies because they would probably get caught on it. And shaking a body loose from barbed wire is pretty hard. So, if I was building a zombie-proof car I would not bother with spikes and barbed wire. Instead I would get the most aerodynamic egg-shaped car I could find, like a Toyota Prius or something. I would then remove any sort of projections like rear view mirrors or antennas and whatever. And then I would coat the entire car with some sort of super-slick lubricant. Just grease it up with Pam or Teflon or something. See, zombies are not tool-using creatures. They just grab. And if I am in a car that is all slick, they have nothing to grab on to. They just slide off. So if I was driving down a deserted road and a zombie suddenly jumped on my car, instead of getting stuck on the barbed wire where it would jerk and snarl until I got out and knocked it off with a broom, it would instead just zip slide off my car and I would continue on my merry zombie-free way.
Let's set the dial to March 17, 2008: Ed is greasing a Prius against zombies and mistaking radish tops for romaine.
Slow cookers have come a long way since you could squirt a whole bottle of bargain BBQ sauce over eight legs and call it dinner, but the spirit lingers in every subscription meal kit. Back then we still roamed fluorescent grocery aisles, sniffing fruit and dodging human landmines; now I can order radish tops from an app without ever making eye contact, and the app will ask me how they tasted. The internet was a place where you could stumble upon a website cataloging human peacocking; now the entire timeline is one continuous feed of people optimizing their personal brands, which is somehow worse. PPV meant scrolling a hotel-remote-looking menu for one zombie movie; now streaming auto-plays a zombie show while I'm trying to sleep. Your car theory was pure 2008: an egg-shaped Prius, no mirrors, coated in cooking spray. Today's cars are covered in cameras and sensors, and the closest thing to a zombie is a distracted driver staring at a phone. You'd still need to clean the grease off the windshield, Ed.
“2008 Ed, did you really spend the rest of the week choking down bitter radish tops just to avoid a produce-section confrontation, and did the zombie grease ever make it onto a car?” — Beelzebubba the Third
2008 Ed: Well, Beelzebubba, you got me. Yeah, I choked down those radish tops for most of the week, mostly out of spite and cheapness. My sister kept giving me that look over the tax forms, like I was some kind of feral herb idiot. I think I even told her they were "hearty greens." They were bitter little bastards. I figured I paid for them, so I was gonna eat them, even if it meant puckering up with every bite. And no, the zombie grease hasn't made it onto a car yet. I still think the Prius idea is solid, but I'm not about to go slathering Pam all over my ride just to look nuts in the grocery store parking lot. Maybe if the dead start walking, I'll give it a shot. Until then, radish tops and I are done.
