Mike from Barely Legal has a new blog called In It But Not Of It.

Today, he writes a post that only a man could write. It's about the death of a dear piece of consumer electronics.

I say it's a Post Only a Man Could Write because, really, women don't anthropomorphize things the way us men do. If a woman's favorite hairdryer breaks, she might be sad about it, but you'll never hear her say something like "Oh, Doris! <sob!> You were so good to me!"

But when my 1980 Honda Accord died, I said "Goodbye, Hubert!" and gave a little sniff when the tow truck hauled him away.

 

R.I.P, Robert Anton Wilson.

You taught me to see the forest for the fnords. You helped me help the Widow's Son. You helped me realize that more laws only serve to make more criminals. You opened my eyes to the great truth that the greatest thing about masturbation is its availability.

You will be sorely missed.

 

William F. Buckley should get sick more often.

Today's column, which can be found on TownHall.com, contains the following gem:

...It is the responsibility of men and women who seek an audience for their writing beyond the family to instruct or entertain, or to die trying. The ratio is not definitively established, between skills disposed of and weight of literary production.

The grand meaning of this lesson being that eminent people can write eminently awful books and get away with it, and that medical science falls short of shielding us from bad books.

Buckley is writing about Henry James's novel The American, but this quote applies to the blogosphere more than it does to century-dead novelists. Every blogger who wants others to read his work -- and let's face it, that's all of us -- should "instruct or entertain...or die trying."

That is an insanely tough challenge to live up to, but I feel equal to it. How about you?

 

Now that I've got a little girl on the way, I find I spend a lot of time thinking about teaching.

I'm going to have this whole little person to mold and teach. I didn't even have to apply for a license or anything.

I want to make sure I get it right.

So I spend a lot of my free time just imagining interactions between Eliana and me. I try to imagine things I know she needs to know, but that school will never teach her. I thought about interactions in which I taught her about personal responsibility, self-reliance, the importance of private property, and so on.

Then I started thinking: what things have I learned in my life that absolutely shocked me? What things did I encounter that I was absolutely unprepared for? And how could I best prepare my daughter for those things?

And then I remembered The Light Bulb Incident. And it occurred to me that it will be impossible to prepare my daughter for all the bullshit that will come her way. Because new bullshit is being invented all the time, even while old bullshit never goes away.

The Light Bulb Incident involves labor unions.

When I left home, I was only peripherally aware of the concept of labor unions. I had seen Norma Rae, but all seeing that movie had done was give me the idea that labor unions are good and people who oppose them are bad. I had never actually interacted with one, or with the members of one.

But there came a time, when I was working for the University of Florida, when I happened upon a burned-out light bulb.

I went to my supervisor, and said "Dr. X, there is a burned-out light bulb in the other room. Please tell me the location of the spare light bulbs in order that I may replace it and bring illumination back to those of us who toil for you."

That's when Dr. X informed me that replacing light bulbs was a union job and that not only was I not allowed to change the light bulb, but I could actually be fired for changing it.

I was 18 years old at the time and, of course, thought that I knew everything. I began to argue with Dr. X about the absurdity of not being able to change the light bulb. I pointed out that it was inefficient, that it kept me from doing my job until such time as the bulb was changed, etc., etc. Dr. X, having worked for bureaucrats for many years, just smiled and told me that every young lab assistant that came through his doors had the same reaction whenever they encountered a sacred union job for the first time. He told me that it wasn't worth thinking about and that I should simply put in a request to get the bulb changed and forget about it.

Head hung low, I went to the office and filled out the form that requested a change of light bulb. Then I took Dr. X's advice and tried to forget about it.

Unfortunately, I had to work in the room with the burned-out light bulb, so I was reminded of the whole incident every time I walked in there.

Three days later, I got another harsh dose of reality when the crack light bulb changing team showed up to change the light bulb. I'm sure that, somewhere, there's a joke about "how many union members does it take to change a light bulb?" At the University of Florida, apparently, the answer is "3". One to climb up the ladder and perform the actual changing, one to hold the ladder, and a third to observe the whole process. It took the team 15 minutes to change the light bulb. First, they had to identify the bulb in question. Next, they had to test the bulb -- by flipping the switch on and off -- repeatedly until they were satisfied that it was, indeed, burned out. Finally, they had to set up the ladder properly and perform the changing procedure.

I count at least seven people involved in light bulb changing in this story: me, Dr. X, the girl in the office with whom I filed the light bulb change request form, whoever the form went to after that, and the three crack light bulb changing team members. And I'm probably missing 2 or 3 entire levels of bureaucracy in that count.

I hope one day I get a chance to tell this story to my daughter, but I can't really conceive of a situation in which it might be relevant. But I really hope I find one so that I can inoculate her to one more thing before she has to go out into the big bad world.

 

Tonight was Turducken night.

For those philistines who don't know, a turducken is a boneless chicken, stuffed inside a boneless duck, stuffed inside a boneless turkey. There's usually some stuffing between each bird.

I've been hearing about these things on Food Network and wanted to give one a try.

Obviously, putting one of these together requires some pretty tricky deboning work. I've attempted this procedure before. I was attempting to make a nifty recipe I found in one of my Jacques Pepin books. The recipe requires three deboned chickens. However, for that recipe, and for turducken, you need to leave the meat completely intact. This involves cutting between the bones and the meat and then gently pulling the bones out. This is pretty easy when removing the breast and back bones; removing the thighs and the leg bones is a massive pain in the ass. When I attempted the Jacques Pepin recipe, I bought 3 practice chickens. The results were so horrifying that I just threw all three into a stock pot and vowed that I would never again bring such torture to poultry.

Knife work is not really my specialty.

Given my past experience, there was absolutely no way I was going to try to make a turducken from scratch. Fortunately Farker bboy steered me in the right direction. Specifically, he steered me to Poche's. Not only does Poche's sell fully assembled turduckens, they have some of the best andouille sausage I've ever tasted.

Poche's alleges that their turduckens feed "15-20 non-Cajuns". I had 7, but those 7 were very determined.

The turducken came out marvelous. I attribute this partly to Poche's expert assembly and partly to my mad roasting skillz. Poche's does the hard part. But their roasting instructions leave a little bit to be desired. The whole of the instructions are "roast at 375 degrees for 4 hours." That's just not going to cut it, especially when I've got an audience that expects great things from me.

I always use a thermometer to ensure that my roasted meats are perfect. But therein lies the problem: where the hell do you stick a thermometer in a turducken? I tried various places, but it was almost impossible to figure out if it was going into stuffing or into meat. Eventually, I just stuck the thermometer where the neck would be and shoved it in horizontally. I roasted the turducken until the thermometer read 175. It took a little less than 3.5 hours. So, if I had left it in for the full 4 hours, the turkey part (the outside layer) would probably have been very dry.

As it turns out, carving a turducken is easy. Just cut out cross section slices. If people are coming to your house to eat turducken, then they probably want the full turducken experience. So I made sure that everybody got some turkey, some duck, some chicken, and some of Poche's awesome cajun stuffing.

I wanted to use some of my Poche's andouille sausage in a side dish, so I made andouille spoonbread. This was an even bigger hit than the turducken. Everybody wanted more of it. Even the picky eaters were clamoring for more.

One unexpected thing was that I got some of the best drippings I've ever gotten from roasted poultry. They were beautiful: dark, fragrant, and full of flavor. Plus, there was a definite "cajunness" to the flavor of the drippings because some juices from the cajun stuffing made their way into the bottom of the pan. My friend Michele told me that there was no way we were not making gravy with those drippings, so I whisked up a roux and made some really awesome gravy in which we dunked many slices of French bread.

All in all, it was a great evening with a lot of great food. I followed the meal up with a Cusano 18 and all was well in the world. There were tons of leftovers, but I really don't mind. I'm looking forward to turducken sandwiches tomorrow!

 

So, the wife and I have been worrying about whether or not our as-of-yet-unborn daughter will get into the "right" pre-school.

Today we toured one, and it's the best we've found so far: it's close to us and the people there are clearly total pros. We observed an incidence of projectile vomiting. The ladies in the room sprang into action like...ladies dealing with vomit. They soaked it up with some sandy material (like an oil spill), swept it up, and in less than a minute, things were back to normal. As a rookie dad, I was very impressed.

Everything seemed to be going great...right up until the end of the tour. I noticed that there were whiteboards on each classroom door. These whiteboards are how the teachers communicate to the parents what the kids did that day. At the top of this whiteboard it said, "Today, we talked about Kwanzaa."

Dammit. <bang head on desk>

 

So, last night was just a little bit unexpected.

My wife and her co-workers got together for a sort-of Christmas party. Spouses were not included, so I told my wife that she should go out and enjoy herself and that I would be at Villa Antonio, our favorite restaurant, smoking cigars and drinking scotch until she was done.

When he's not crazy busy, I like to chat with Chris, the bartender. Chris was definitely crazy busy on Friday because he had a party of 80 "cocktailing" in the bar area when I showed up. But he got a few minutes to breath and tell me that Sammy Hagar was in the restaurant.

Woo hoo! I can't drive 55, baby! Half of Van Hagar inna house!

Now, I'm not one to fawn all over celebrities, but I do like to at least say "Hi" if I get a chance. I've met Congresswoman Sue Myrick and our esteemed mayor in this same restaurant.

Unfortunately, Sammy was cordoned off from the masses and was unreachable. But Chris told me they'd purchased a bottle of Sammy's tequila just for the evening and he suggested that if I wanted to meet Sammy, I should buy a round and have one of the waiters escort me to Sammy's room with it.

So, I had him pour out 5 glasses of Cabo Wabo with little lime wedges and off I went with Anthony -- the sommelier and son of the eponymous Antonio -- to meet Sammy.

Sammy was an extremely cool guy. He shook my hand and insisted that I sip, not shoot, his tequilia. So I sipped it, and I was glad I did. Cabo Wabo has a very mild but interesting flavor and it goes down very smooth. A little bit of lime right afterwards is the perfect complement. I usually only do a few obligatory shots of tequila on Cinco de Mayo when they send the hot chicks around to sell shots of Cuervo, but I could see myself drinking Cabo Wabo often and enjoying it. I'm almost certainly going to add a bottle to my liquor cabinet.

I chatted with Sammy and his entourage briefly, and then I got out of their way so they could enjoy their evening. No sense wearing out your welcome.

About an hour later, they disappeared out the door with a few cute chicks from the bar.

All in all, it was a very fun evening, although I paid dearly for mixing the tequila with the scotch. That's an experiment I will definitely not repeat.

 

My lovely bride and I saw Spamalot this past weekend. All I can say about it is: drop whatever it is you're doing when it's in your area and go see it.

It has old favorites like "Bring out your dead!"

And it has new stuff, like Brave Sir Robin serenading Arthur to tell him "we won't succeed on Broadway if we don't have any jews."

You can find out more about it here.

If you see just one musical [lovingly] ripped off from Monty Python and the Holy Grail this year, make it Spamalot!