The Five Tacos

My son hit me up with a question yesterday morning that kinda threw me.

Halfway through his pancakes he looked up and said "Dad . . . what's for dinner?"

The reason it threw me is two-fold. One, he's never asked me about a meal ahead of time, though he is very quick to criticize the meal that is being served, and two, as my dad will remember, I used to ask that question of him almost every morning.

It's possible some of my genetic code is finally creeping in.

I don't know why I was so concerned about the evening menu before I'd finished my bagel.

I don't remember ever having much part in the final decision making. But I do remember asking the question.

Just about every day.

My answer was a lame one:

"I don't know . . . something with ground beef."

It had been grilled chicken the night before, and grilled salmon the night before that, so to even everything out, this night was either going to be pork roast . . . or ground beef. And I'd already gotten the meat out of the freezer.

He didn't respond . . . or I couldn't hear his quiet little murmur . . . but the silence hung for a while until it was finally broken by my wife's suggestion that we have tacos.

That was a pretty good suggestion. We hadn't had tacos in a long time.

We used to have tacos a lot. Almost once a week.

Like, my favorite step-son story is one night when we were having tacos I cut up a bunch of carrot sticks and put them in the center of the table.

His jaw dropped and he looked angry and confused.

"What're these?" he screamed.

"Vegetables." I said.

"What? THERE'S NO VEGETABLES ON TACO NIGHT!!!!!!!"

I never made vegetables on taco night again.

But the point being . . . we used to have a taco night.

We don't anymore.

I don't know why . . . everybody loves tacos . . . and they're easy make . . . and they're so good.

The problem with tacos, aside from always having two or three shells left over that get stale, is a problem of quantity.

Proportion is a big thing to me.

No one is allowed to go hungry . . . no one is allowed to throw away food.

It's a creation of my own sense of Zen.

There are two foods that I can never quite get proportions correct. The first, obviously, is pasta.

No one but my mother-in-law knows how to correctly distribute pasta. I'm okay with that now. There are great mysteries in life that are much better if they're not explained.

But I should be able to successfully negotiate the amount of tacos for three people.

Let us start with the basics: What makes a taco?

Meat: Of which I've already proportioned 1.25lbs. Which seems to be the perfect ratio for all ground beef dishes (hamburgers, meat-balls, burrito-bowls etc.) If there is any left over, it goes straight into the eggs the next morning.

Cheese: Extra sharp cheddar in block form. The pre-shredded stuff, well I know a lot of people who swear by it, but I think it tastes like nothing, and if it tastes like nothing, why put it on stuff.

Color I guess.

Lettuce: Romaine or Ice burg. No fancy schmancy substitutes as we will later learn.

Extras: Onions, tomatoes, salsa, guacamole, sour cream, hot sauce, for this particular night I quickly pickled up some jalapeños.

It's a recipe I made up myself: 3/4 cup water, 1/4 White Vinegar, tbsp salt, tbsp sugar, a clove of garlic, 2-3 large jalapeños sliced up. Boil the water, vinegar, salt, sugar, and garlic. Add the jalapeño slices, cooked until the bright green becomes a muted olive color.

Whammo.

You've got freshly pickled jalapeños in about ten minutes.

I call it: Quickled Jalapeños.

Patent pending.

And they're balls out ten times better than the stuff you get at the supermarket.

Okay . . . last but not least . . . the shells.

The purist will tell you to get corn tortillas, fry em with oil, add the bend in the last minute.

The super ultra-orthodox purists will also insist on making your own tortillas.

I haven't had a full time job in 18 months, and I still don't have that kinda time.

Pre-made shells are the way to go.

Each box comes in a pack of 12 shells. If there are three of you that means each of you gets four tacos. Or if one of you is nine, who will not be able to eat more than two, then he gets two and the rest of you split the other ten.

That's five tacos each.

But tacos aren't like hot dogs. There are no quantitative rules of consumption.

With hotdogs, one is never enough, and two is too much. This is why people get married. To have another person eat that extra half a hotdog.

It's in Leviticus.

But tacos change from night to night, day to day, year after year, drive thru to drive thru. Like, I could put ten Taco Bell tacos down in less than a quarter of an hour and still wish I'd ordered that extra thing of nachos.

That's not too gross. A taco bell taco is 156 calories, so ten of them doesn't even meet my 2,000 needs.

But at a fancy restaurant, I can usually gobble down three. There's rice and beans to think about.

Homemade tacos are another animal.

You can't precisely prep, but you can maintain a certain buffet style flexibility, and then you have to track your progress throughout the meal.

The First Taco:
This one you inhale. Two bites, all gone. You don't feel any different, in fact now that the salt has hit your lips, you're slightly more hungry than you were before.

The Second Taco:
This one you don't actually inhale, and this is where the cheese is starting to melt and the heat from the jalapeños are kicking in and you've kicked out your elbows and are ready to dig in.

The Third Taco:
This is the gourmet taco. This is the one you've prepped with all the trimmings. This is the one you take your time with. You chew around the edges to get all of the different combination of flavors, your hunger starts to feel satiated and you feel more like a delicate consumer rather than a trash compactor.

When you're finished with the third taco, it's time to take stock. How much of each of the ingredients are left? Do you need to shred more cheese? Do you need to cut more lettuce?

In this particular case, I . . . for whatever reason . . . thought that the purple leafed romaine would be just fine. After months of eating kale, everything else is so tasteless, but I was plainly informed that it tasted funny and my son was loathe to take another bite. Thank goodness the lettuce was on top and it was an easy fix.

So we don't need any more lettuce.

The Fourth Taco:
The question here is . . . will there be a Fifth Taco? If the answer is yes, then you have to restrain yourself from loading up everything into the shell. If the answer is no, it's time to squeeze that processed shell to near the breaking point. Do not let the shredded cheese or the Quickled Jalapeños go to waste.

Patent pending.

Also . . . do not ask your life partner which taco they are on.

The answer will only make you feel disgusted with them or disgusted with yourself.

The Fifth Taco:
There really shouldn't ever be a Fifth Taco. It's not healthy. It's probably not even all that sanitary since you've been eating with your hands. And you're not really hungry anymore.

I mean, you're kinda hungry, like after an entire bottle of wine you're kinda sober, but you really shouldn't be driving anywhere.

And because your gluttony has sorta grossed you out already, you're gonna feel some pressure to inhale the Fifth Taco like you inhaled the First one.

You know what . . . don't.

Chill out. Take a sip of beer and make eye contact with the rest of your family.

Chew.

You might not even feel all that obligated to finish it. And if you don't wanna . . . then don't . . . you won't be breaking any rules.

And if you do finish it . . . good for you . . . celebrate by taking a nice walk around the neighborhood.

Check the mail.

Do some deep knee bends.

Post Script: Last night I didn't go for the Fifth Taco. I hit a perfect equilibrium halfway through the Fourth and reminded myself that there is just enough meat, shell, and lettuce left for a nice taco salad which I will be eating for lunch today.

TBT: Water Water Everywhere

Today was the day of the first break-in at the Watergate Hotel.

It's also the day the McDougalls were convicted of fraud in the Whitewater scandal.

That's like a Throw Back Thursday Two-Fur.

I'm loving these little history lessons cause it makes me go back and relearn a pieces of a history that I'd either all but forgotten or never really understood in the first place. For instance, I know the word Watergate, and that it had something to do with Nixon doing bad stuff, lying or whatever, and that there were missing tapes, and a Deep Throat, and that the jig was up as soon as Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman got involved, but that's about it.

I also knew the word Whitewater, which had something to do with the Clintons being . . . well . . . the Clintons.

Like . . . you know something shady went down, but you really can't put your finger on it.

Don't feel bad. Kenneth Starr couldn't put his finger on it either.

That's all I'm gonna say about where Kenny puts his finger.

And whole thing was overshadowed by where Bill puts his cigars.

So on this day, 1972, a couple of guys break into a hotel room, which happens to be the headquarters of the Democratic National Campaign, take some blurry photos, and install some listening devices.

Okay . . . that's bad.

But the funny part, is those particular listening devices don't work and need to be reinstalled, confirming what my dad always says about "Never going cheap on three things: Alcohol, Electronics, and Women."

Tricky Dick and Slippery Bill should really take my dad's advice.

Anyway, its funny because they broke in again a few weeks later and got caught.

And, seriously, they got caught with cashier's checks from Nixon's reelection campaign fund.

Oops.

Word to the wise, if you're gonna do stuff like that, take your $25,000 check to the bank first.

It's just common sense.

And speaking of $25,000, that just happens to be Bill Clinton's yearly salary (as Attorney General of Arkansas) when he and his wife and their pals, John and Susan Mcdougall invest in a little creekside property called Whitewater.

It actually was a pretty good investment, seeing as how there were tons of white people migrating out of MotorCity Land, and heading south to NASCAR country.

How could you go wrong selling water front vacation homes to to displaced white people who don't want to pay high property taxes?

Deregulation is the answer to that question my friends, deregulation, and a whole lotta fraud.

Okay, so this is gonna get tricky, but stick with it, I promise I'll make this fun for everyone.

Lets start with my second favorite movie "It's A Wonderful Life."

Remember how Jimmy Stewart got stuck running the boring old Building and Loan?

That sucked.

Banking sucked.

But Building and Loans (which eventually became Saving and Loans) were pretty much the back bone of the post WWII America. The greatest economic expansion ever seen by any country that didn't have 'Empire' as it's last name.

But it was like super boring.

Basically, a Savings and Loan (S&L for short) would loan people money to buy houses, for which they would collect a modest interest rate, and then they would open savings accounts, for which they would pay even more modest interest rates and use the difference to pay for ZuZu's cough medicine.

(That was an It's A Wonderful Life reference . . . try to keep up.)

Anyway, it's literally the financial version of watching paint dry.

And it was really hard. There were so many rules. Like, they couldn't invest in commercial real estate, and they had to get all kinds of approvals for things, and there were actual people paid to make sure that the S&Ls weren't selling properties back and forth to jack up the prices and cash in on commissions.

But the 70's was like totally the "Hey man, let's chill out" decade.

Let's give small business owner Jimmy Stewart a leg up. Maybe give him chance for him to insulate that drafty old house of his.

So we chilled with the regulations a bit. Thanks Carter.

And okay, so yeah, there were a few bad apples. The kind of people that would sell properties back and forth jacking up the prices and cashing in on the commissions. But you know . . . things happen.

Now if you don't know what that last paragraph means, it's actually not that complicated:

Say I buy a house for $10,000.

Cool. I gotta house.

But instead of paying my first mortgage payment, I sell it to my brother for $15,000.

That's cool. I give my agent $1,000 and keep the remaining $4,000.

Except my brother is now paying $15,000 for a house that's really only worth $10,000.

And I feel bad about that cause I'm a good brother.

So the next month, before he makes his first payment, I buy it back from him for $20,000.

His agent is also my agent, so he gets another $1,000 and my brother gets $4,000 for all his trouble.

Now for a while I can use my $4,000 to pay the mortgage payments on a $20,000 dollar house that's really only worth $10,000, so in a year or two I run out of money and my brother agrees to buy the place for $25,000.

Now banking becomes exciting! My agent is making $1,000 a month and my brother and i are each making $4,000 every two months.

And so on and so on.

And, even better, if everybody does it, well, then all the values of all our houses go up.

Woo . . . freakin . . . hoo!

Unfortunately, we call that rapid inflation.

Which is bad.

So to slow that down, the Money People decide to increase interest rates.

The modest interest rates that the S&L's were charging go up, as do the more modest interest rates that they are paying out, and hopefully ZuZu's cough gets better.

Except, because people and corporations are cheap bastards, now everyone wants to save and nobody wants to buy, and the S&L's income is far less than it's payment obligations and after a few years . . . whammo!

Everything drops like a rock and the S&Ls fold. Costing the taxpayers billions.

Ooops.

Okay, so back to the creekside property called Whitewater (see, I told you this would be fun). The Clintons and the McDougall's buy the place assuming that property values are gonna rise and they can supplement Bill's meager $25,000 income by selling the land off bit by bit.

Unfortunately, they sorta missed that window between relaxation and increased rates, and ended up losing their investment.

Or did they?

See the McDougalls weren't quitters. And they happened to own a few S&Ls. But even though regulations were relaxed, it wasn't like the government totally repealed the entire Glass-Steagal Act.

That wouldn't happen for another fifteen years. Thanks Bill.

John McDougall couldn't actually borrow more than $600,000 from his own S&L, so he kinda sorta funneled money from his "friends" to make it all look legal as he traded properties back forth to himself.

It only gets sticky because the Clintons were "friends" and Hilary was the lawyer would handled those contracts.

Her part was essentially sorta kinda legal. But John's wasn't.

So he went to jail.

But don't worry . . . Bill pardoned him on his last day in office . . . so everybody wins.

Now the moral of the story might be that there are cheaters everywhere. But if that in anyway surprises you, I'm actually astonished you were able to read this far without visual aids.

Nope, the parallel between these stories is that the guilty parties weren't the perpetrators. The Clintons weren't actively defrauding the financial institutions any more than Nixon donned a ski mask and broke into a hotel.

But when the light shined down, they shredded papers and burned evidence, erased tapes, and back pedaled away from the truth for years, in the Clinton's case, decades.

Yet, if you follow the trajectory you'll notice that Watergate lead to Nixon's complete downfall, while Whitewater got smoothed over and essentially forgotten about.

See, we're getting much better at hiding our frauds and the people paid to pay attention are getting worse at finding them. And it doesn't mean the end of all civilization, though it's hard to ignore the Doomsayers, I just think it's important to go back and look once in a while. A reminder of the past so that we're not collectively doing the same stupid stuff all the time.

Throw Back Thursday shouldn't just be all about mullets and denim jackets.

It's your civic duty.

Sex and Cilantro

So I had a very serious post slated for today.

In light of the Duggar scandal, I was going to make some poor tasting jokes about sexual deviance in repressed cultures. I even had a note pad full of my scribblings on essays from Freud to Kinsey, the histories of the Babylonians to Fundamentalist Muslims, and I even found this wonderful post from the Center for Morality in Public Life making the case that society crumbles when people concern themselves with sex for pleasure instead of procreation.

Lot of Roman references.

Love them Romans.

Anyway it was all going to boil down to the fact that it's getting time to have "The Talk" with my own son. The Victorian in you is probably thinking he's way too young for "The Talk", but I'm sorry to tell you my friends, it's the internet age, and he's already being exposed to dirty words and naked girls by the kid down the street.

I can't tell you how much bad information comes from the kid down the street. He's the kind of kid that will be the first on the block to tell everyone the truth about Santa Clause, that there are worms in Big Macs, that you can catch Ebola from climbing trees, and that cops can shoot you whenever they want. He also knows all the bad words.

Thankfully, and I have no idea how I did this, but I raised a kid who is not only suspicious of the kid down the street, but he's also pretty fearless when it comes to asking me to clarify things.

He's already heard me utter most of the bad words anyway.

The Talk is going to go pretty easy.

I'm actually more worried about his mom.

(That's a joke. Her and I have The Talk all the time.)

Actually . . . not ALL the time . . . wait . . . why am I telling you this?

Anyway, it was going to be a good post. Funny, a little ruthless, some cringe worthy comments, and a few of those dirty quips that make you fell embarrassed because you laughed out loud in a public space and can't explain to the person sitting next to you.

But I was having a hard time getting going. Part of it was anger. Part of it was disgust. Part of it (and this is going to sound weird) but part of it was sheer disappointment.

Why do religious people have to be such a f$#@ing nightmare?

Seriously, can't we have one god fearing person, claiming to be a good role model, who isn't a total shit storm?

You got the Dali Lama and some might say the current Pope, but his pre-Pope stance on homosexuality keeps him out of the running.

Martin Luther King maybe. Unless you were married to him and weren't immune to the clap.

A case could be made for Jesus himself, but just imagine the scandal if Josh Duggar ran into a jewish temple screaming at everyone and overturning furniture.

No lie . . . it's in the bible.

The problem is what a psychologist would call "Cognitive Dissonance"

Holding two competing thoughts in your head at the same time.

"How to claim moral superiority when the Supreme Being is clearly a sociopath."

I may have just written the title of my next book.

It's that dissonance that leads to repression that leads to an explosion of deviance. Unless you're a writer for the Center for Morality in Public Life, to which my response would be: "Pick up a f@#$ing newspaper!"

Endquote.

Anyway, pissed and frustrated I did the only thing one can do when one is pissed and frustrated, I went into the kitchen and opened the fridge door and stood there for a while.

I wasn't hungry, I just needed some 'me' time and I'd already used the commode.

Inside the fridge is a bag of basil and cilantro that I got from my mom's herb garden.

Thanks Mom.

The basil, both green a purple varieties, I turned into the most amazing pesto sauce a few days ago.

Pesto is pretty easy. Basil, Garlic, Parmesan Cheese, Pine Nuts, Salt, Olive oil . . . puree. Although I adjust that recipe based on whim and the availability of Pine nuts.

This one, I substituted pine nuts with sesame seeds (you get the salt without that piney aftertaste) and I also used my handy dandy Garlic salt grinder from Trader Joes instead of the fresh garlic cloves.

When you use fresh garlic there's a spicy acidity that I personally love, but it can overpower the simple dish. I went with the dry stuff, which made my wife roll her eyes at me, but was later forgiven because the subtlety of the dish was off the hook.

She's not as enthusiastic about experimentation as I am . . . but she's just as hungry.

So now I've got this cilantro.

Cilantro is a whacky herb.

It's pretty easy to grow, although, speaking of sexual deviance, it doesn't live very long, and unlike Onan of the old testament, it has to drop it's seed on the ground quickly if it wants to survive.

Onan dropped his seed on the ground because he didn't want to impregnate his dead brother's widow.

Poor Onan.

And that is why you can't masterbate.

Poor you.

But the wackiness of cilantro doesn't end there.

In order to get all it's herbalicious goodness, you gotta clip it while it's still very young, which Freud says could be dangerous.

But once you've got it . . . what do you do with it?

Salsa.

Guacamole.

That's pretty much it.

And you can't really serve it up for parties because it turns out that a good portion of the population has certain receptors that make the fresh herb taste like soapy bitterness. It's actually genetic. The gene that inhibits the enjoyment of cilantro is OR6A2.

You could turn a homosexual straight easier than getting an OR6A2 carrier to go to Chipotle.

It's as if god intended some people to like it and some people to not.

But there's hope.

Because . . . internet.

All I had to do was to type in Cilantro and Recipes and I was flooded with hundreds of different options. All shapes. All sizes. Different types of meats. Different types of non-meats.

If you know what I'm saying.

Most of the recipes were for salsa or guacamole, and salsa-guacamole, and guacamole-salsa, and one might think that the definition of a cilantro dish is between one salsa and one guacamole, but there were lots of other ideas too.

Some of which didn't sound all that good to me, and some were just variations of mixing cilantro and butter, and some were . . . well . . . deviations I didn't necessarily want to participate in, but I don't think anyone was harmed. As long as it was consensual, everyone can have a good time.

There's no cognitive dissonance there. Especially if no one can see you click.

The internet can be a wacky place for choice and taste, but it's a godsend for the curious, and a much better place for information than the kid down the street.

Now the recipes I will be trying out this week include a Cilantro Pesto, a Cilantro Lemon Sauce, and for myself alone, a Cilantro Ginger Hummus.

Love my hummus like I love them Romans.

I will report back next week.

I'm not sure if my son is going to like any of these dishes. He may or may not be an OR6A2 carrier, which is fine by me.

And since it's food we're talking about and not repressed sexual urges, I would feel perfectly comfortable experimenting on my sister.

But I'll probably be experimenting on my wife first.

Not because I'm the moral majority.

I'm just a damn good role model. Even if I don't know how that happened.

HTT: How to Un-Insanity

There's that old adage that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

A quick web search will tell you that that was said by Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, Oscar Wilde, and Arthur Fonzarelli.

I made up that last one.

But still. Couldn't nail it down, but I'm guessing it was an Einstein quote, for no other reason than that was the first one Googled.

The first time I heard the quote was at a business conference in a speech delivered by a Regional Director that I was not, nor ever became, very fond of.

The kind of person that uses terms like Paradigm and Synergy.

You do have my permission to use those terms . . . but only if you know exactly what they mean . . . and only once per speech.

Anyway . . . what struck me the first time I heard the quote was that the Regional Director whom I was not, nor ever became, fond of, was talking about the company that was both growing and successful and I couldn't help mentioning to the person sitting next to me that maybe she had the wrong room.

Cause the quote swings the other way too.

A better definition of insanity is futzing with something when it already achieves perfectly wonderful results.

Sure you can focus on getting "Better" results, and for that . . . yeah, I guess . . . go ahead and change things, but if your current results are pretty good, you might wanna consider this idiom first:

"A sparrow in the hand is worth a thousand sparrows flying"

which is the 6th Century BC equivalent of:

"A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush"

Which is attributed to J. Capgrave in the 15th century AD, though I could've sworn that that was a Benjamin Franklin quote.

Poor Richard and his Almanac.

If you heard it, then you probably heard it there first.

Anyway, a third definition of insanity might just be chaos.

And by chaos . . . I mean clutter.

My garage is insane. The emails gathered up in my Yahoo account is insane. The amount of love, time, money, effort, sweat and actual blood that I've spent in trying to grow a tomato . . . off the hook.

So this summer I'm on an Un-Insanity mission.

Clear out the clutter and find Nirvana.

I don't mean the state of mind, I mean their '92 album: Nevermind.

It's here somewhere I just know it.

I started this morning with Unsubscribing from all the telemarketing emails that go to my Yahoo address.

There were 356 unopened ad campaigns from companies like Shutterfly, DIY, and of course my favorite, Atlantic E-Cigarettes:

Little do they know.

Turns out the 356 emails were the result of only eight highly aggressive groups, and it really took less than ten minutes to remove myself from their lists.

Yahoo!

Last week I tackled all the papers that were waiting to be shredded, and shredded them.

Now I can concentrate on my tomato plant.

I really don't know what it is about home grown tomatoes. I've hated tomatoes most of my life, and yet now I have this yearning to raise the perfect BLT.

It's true. People can change.

We had one good year for tomatoes. It was 2007, and ever since, we've failed.

We've failed by doing everything we were supposed to do. It's insane, but nothing we were supposed to do worked. So this year, I basically said "Screw the wild outdoors" and have begun growing a few plants in my kitchen.

Which is not something your supposed to do. Not enough light. Not enough humidity. It'll make your house smell like poo. Can't do it. It'll undermine thousands of years of agronomy knowledge. Your father in-law is disappointed in you.

But it's been a week. And the plants are looking pretty damn good. Buds are popping out all over.

It's working. I won't have the definitive answer until I bite into that sandwich, but I will keep you posted.

So here's the "How To Tuesday Lesson"

It's short, so pay attention.

Sometimes the best way to Un-Insanity, is to do something you're not supposed to do.

Maybe a little insanity is the quickest way to the sanest you.

Lindbergh's Moxie

Today is the day that Charles Lindbergh landed safely in France after being the first person to successfully cross the Atlantic Ocean in a plane all by himself.

That was 1927.

Nearly 90 years ago.

Mind blowing statistics being what they are and all.

It's much easier to cross the Atlantic now.

By jet plane of course.

I just watched a documentary about a woman who tried to cross the Atlantic in a rowboat.

Not the greatest of ideas, but she certainly had Moxie.

Moxie is the thing people had back in 1927 instead of courage. Lindbergh had moxie. A whole lotta moxie. And he was an interesting fella.

Fella is what dudes were back in 1927.

So he wins the Ortiz Prize by becoming the the first person to cross the Atlantic in a plane all by himself. Which made him a super super iconic rockstar matinee idol moral giant near-religious icon. We don't have those any more here in 2015. We prefer our idols to have flaws.

Flaws sell better than virtues.

Then he spent most of the Depression flying around the U.S. and Europe to drum up enthusiasm for air travel. Of course there was the whole bit of his son being kidnapped and murdered, revolting, and then Europe exploded into warfare and he was sent over to inspect German and Soviet Aircraft, and the Germans gave him a medal. The U.S. was not at war at the moment, so we were pretty cool about the whole thing.

That's pretty much where his narrative gets fuzzy.

We didn't know how to sell flaws back then, but we certainly knew how to (re)write history. We've been doing that ever since there was such a thing as writing. So Lindbergh gets honored by the Germans, he's clearly a Nazi.

He also said some stupid things about the Jews.

Nazi.

He was against the war, but biographers believe it was communism he was against, not fascism he was for.

Then there was the whole eugenics thing.

The belief in cultivating a superior human stock.

It had been suggested as early as Plato that maybe the human race might wanna consider breading themselves like race horses. It was popular among feudal aristocrats and it only took a few hundred years before realizing that marrying your sister was a terrible idea. The theory got picked up again after Darwin's evolution and Mendel's theory of inheritability became a thing. And then it got really going when the Nazi's decided that being tall, blonde haired, blue eyed, and conspicuously humorless was clearly the model for human perfection.

I had a friend who had been mountain climbing in Europe who marveled at his German counter parts. He told me stories about how they'd be climbing all day, and the Americans were tired and nearly broken, while these 6'4" machine-like German climbers would be smoking unfiltered cigarettes and didn't even look out of breath.

He actually said this:

"Damn dude, I hope we never have to go to war against these guys."

I squinted at him.

"We did dude.  . . . Like twice."

My friend wasn't a believer in Eugenics, he just had a temporary moment of awe.

Lindbergh was an isolationist and a believer in Eugenics. He didn't want the U.S. to get involved in the war, and he thought there was such a thing as human perfection.

We should all allow ourselves a few misfires.

But he did get caught saying some stupid things. And then because he just assumed he was right he never backed off. The history that was (re)written about him wasn't very flattering.

We like to raise our heroes with enthusiastic fervor.

We like to bring them down in the same manner.

We're weird.

What we didn't know then, but we do know now, is that there is more genetic variation in a handful of ants then there is in the entire human population.

Yup.

You look at anyone else in the world and you might as well be looking in a mirror, as far as genetics are concerned.

The only real differences between 5'10" me and my 6'4" German cousin is that he can climb a mountain, and I'm smart enough not to invade Russia.

Eugenics has a super modern push now too. Not that we are in the process of state sanctioned breeding (just yet), but we're getting remarkably close to a time when we can start picking traits at birth. We are also getting close to where we can turn certain things on and turn certain things off like an Englishman flipping a switch and waking up Brazilian.

We might see stuff like that in our life times.

And you gotta be a little curious as to what set of Nucleic Acids will make Billboard's Top 50.

Athletic or cerebral?

Left handed or right handed?

Do gentlemen prefer blondes?

Does size matter?

You know . . . the really important stuff. And the problem is is that we are so genetically un-diverse that such tinkering could theoretically wipe us out in a few generations.

We actually have to mingle more.

Funny how Lindbergh, the first man to cross the Atlantic in a plane, making transcontinental mingling possible, was just a little bit racist.

But he did have Moxie.

Which turns out not to be genetic.

Go figure.

HTT: How to Farmer's Market

I read a little bio of Alice Waters a day or to ago. If you don't know who she is, she's the gal who started the whole food movement in Berkeley in the 60's at her restaurant Chez Panisse.

Not to be confused with Alice Walker who wrote The Color Purple.

I always get those two confused. I'm sure there is some mnemonic that I could figure out, but who's got the time?

Anyway, Alice Waters started the whole food organic locally sourced thing.

Hooray for that.

I am not a champion or anything. My devout lust for double cheese burgers frozen and shipped from Brazil would make me a hypocrite, that and there are so many whole food concoctions that I think are just over priced and revolting.

I have certain food rules that don't fit within anyone else's ideology.

The things I prioritize: Price. Freshness. Taste. Whatever the hell I'm in the mood for.

The fourth one wins out most of the time.

The no no's: No Substitutions. No shopping at Walmart.

If I can't have gluten . . . I'm not eating bread. Simple as that.

If I can't have sugar . . . I'm not drinking a mocha.

If I use mashed cauliflower instead of mashed potatoes it's only because my mashed cauliflower recipe is f%$#ing delicious. Same thing with refried beans, lentils, split peas, and chickpeas instead of rice, corn and tater tots.

Yes to delicious alternatives, no to wheat free crackers.

And if I want tater tots, I'm eating tater tots. That's all there is to it.

As for the Walmart rule, that was a really hard on to swallow, cause their freshness and prices are unbeatable. But in order to do so, they have to actively screw everyone involved in production, distribution, and retail.

If you ever want to lose sleep, watch a documentary about Walmart. Anyone will do.

Even Ayn Rand would be mildly disgusted. She  . . . like 45% of all Walmart employees, was also on Food Stamps.

No joke.

And I'm sure she hated every socialist second of it.

But we all gotta eat.

Anyway . . . back to food . . . one of the things that meets (sometimes exceeds) my criteria is the Farmer's Market.

Thanks in part to Alice Waters (the one who didn't write The Color Purple) Farmer's Markets are just about everywhere.

And I gotta say . . . once you get over the smell of snobs, they're pretty amazing, and I thought for today's How To Tuesday I'd give you a few tips on how to make your Farmer's Market Experience a good one.

First: If you can, walk to it.
That seems a little above and beyond, but you'll be surprised how brisk you feel on a perfect Tuesday morning, with the sun shining and a cool breeze a-blowing. Treat it like your daily exercise and it's a two-fur. Plus, it'll keep your purchasing to a minimum.

Second: Bring you own bag.
You're gonna have to get in the habit here in California anyway, might as well flex that muscle now so you can brag about how much of a model citizen you are. Your friends will envy you. Everyone wants to be a model citizen.

Third: Bring cash.
You don't have to. They all take Visa now. Hell . . . even I take Visa. But you're at an open air market in the middle of an industrialized nation, it's nice to feel provincial once in a while.

Fourth: Do not buy a damn thing until you've walked the entire market.
I know . . . the strawberries at that first booth look delightful . . . but can you really be sure those are your best bet? I promise there are going to be raspberries and cherries and all kinds of wonderful fruity delights all over the place. You've made the time already. Don't make a single commitment until you seen all the fish in the sea.

Case in point: Today I found a booth selling fresh Kale. $2.00 a bundle. That's a little less than double what I usually pay, but the stuff was greener and crispier than I'd ever seen so I was tempted to jump the gun. Had I done so I would've missed the third booth that had even fresher greener kale  for $3.00 for two bundles.

We eat a lot of the stuff, so yeah.

So take a long loop, see what's there and for what price. Make a list and then go shopping.

Lastly, let yourself be tempted by the farmers.

Ask them what's good.

They literally can't wait to tell you, and their suggestions are always out of this world. I picked up a pound of sugar peas that you can eat raw with the skin. Amazing. I will be sautéing them with a little olive oil, salt, garlic and serving them with some barbecued salmon tonight.

It's not hard to win at life.

No substitutions.

How'd That Get in There?

I've never gotten the hang of absentmindedly listening to music.

We had a barbecue last weekend over at the house and the first suggestion (a good one) was that we put on some music.

I was confused.

I never put on music.

Cause if I put on music, I'm spiritually obligated to listen to it.

I could spend all morning on a single note.

And not to do anything else.

I can drive and listen to music. My radio has six channels and of the six, three are Pop stations, One is classic rock (by which I mean 80's and 90's), one is Indie, and the last one is National Public Radio.

So my scanning basically goes like this: Pop, Pop, Pop, Nirvana, Bootleg Nirvana, Terri Gross.

I have an FM2 setting, but I don't go there very often. That setting I leave for one Classical Music Station for when I 'm in the mood.

You gotta be in the mood.

There's also an AM set of settings. Thanks to my brother, I am now interested in sports talk. Good god how the world changes.

But getting back to the listening of music, what happens, for me anyway, is overtime a song comes one, I have to listen to it.

Have to.

And because it's more an intellectual pursuit than an emotional one, I get just as must pleasure from a shitty song as I do out of a well crafted one.

(Not really, but you know, sorta)

And since getting air play is sort of the pinnacle of a songwriters career (and me being a songwriter) I have a certain amount of stock invested on what gets played and why.

Now I know it doesn't work like this, but I always invasion this perfect ladder of steps before a song gets played on the radio.

First the band's gotta know how to play.

Then they've gotta know how to write.

Then they gotta know how to record. The track has to have polish, sizzle, that 'certain something'

Then someone who knows what to do with that sort of track gets it on a major label, then the marketing department (who love the song BTW) gets rolling and ships the song out to hundreds of radio station whose DJ's they been intimate with, and then the DJ's put the song on heavy rotation and stars are born.

Doesn't that make perfect sense?

None of that is true though. You could skip through it all if your brother is a DJ. You could claw your way up each rung of that ladder and find you're nowhere but where you started.

Except now you're broke.

Anyway, because of the very unstable relationship between what I would like the world to look like, and what it actually does look like, whenever I hear a song on the radio that is just terrible, to cheer myself up I play a little game.

A little game called "How'd That Get In There?"

I heard one such song this morning. I won't name names . . . because I didn't bother to get any . . . and though the song was terrible (and mildly insulting on an artistic level) . . . who knows . . . it could be the next big thing.

I hate looking stupid in retrospect.

The song failed the first two of my criteria. The band didn't know how to play (and the singer probably shouldn't be let near a microphone) and they certainly didn't know how to write.

Short, non-dynamic, melodic phrases, and the kind of lyrics written by boys who have only yet begun dreaming about sex.

Not pointing any fingers.

I too was such a boy.

Once.

But, the song, albeit lame, was recorded seriously. There's a major sonic difference between a recording that is made for $25,000 and one that is made for $250. This song was recorded in the upper regions, produced, balanced, compressed, sizzled, radio ready.

How'd that happen?

No idea. The song had to have been performed in front of people with money. Like real money, not like daddy or mommy money . . . big time producer money. Someone had to really love this song.

Or maybe they loved this band. But to play the game . . . I've got to answer this question.

How'd that get in there?

And by 'in there' I mean on the radio.

And the answer I think, is that this band is killer live. You don't have to really know your instrument to deliver an exciting experience and maybe these guy just light up the house. They probably have lots of Likes on Facebook and have proven reliable on tour. They get picked up by a major label because of that energy and are sent straight to the studio to capture some of that magic.

Only trouble is is you can't hide from a tape recorder.

What sizzles in a 2,000 seat house is really tough to catch and time is uh ticking.

Marketing has already gone full swing and the group needs a song for the airwaves.

They decide that their regular act is too edgy for Pop Stations and try out the ballad written by the bass player back when he was fourteen or so because it doesn't have any Eff-Words.

Worked for the Goo-Goo Dolls. Why not us?

They've got the money, they've go the producer, they've got the studio, they've got the song, now all they got to do is make it playable.

And they tried really really hard.

Good for them.

Nobody listens to the lyrics anyway. Why would they? You don't have to sing it . . . you only have to sell it. There's a good lad. Now finish your diet Dr. Pepper and get back into the booth.

The producer gets all he can from the band and then sends them out to pick up some KFC.

Any trip to KFC will take about three hours.

Why they always run out of chicken is the third greatest mystery known to man.

But three hours is enough time to apply some studio magic (sizzle) to an otherwise unremarkable track.

Cut. Print. Package. Ship.

Did you get extra crispy? No? Well go back. Let the adults get some work done.

Promote.

Okay . . . so first question answered.

But then the song takes one of those metal punk ballad turns . . . where the vocalist pushes it up an octave and really gives the song some raspy meat.

He really should not have done that.

He doesn't have those notes.

He especially should not have done that four times.

The question here, is why would anyone let him do that? There had to be four or five guys in the band, anyone of them could've said something.

Did he not hear himself?

Possible, but I find that odd because when I track my own voice, every quivering quasar is amplified.

I know when I don't have a note. Mostly.

So the only explanation is that the vocalist either didn't know, or he just didn't care. I think he didn't know.

But the producer should've known . . . right? I mean this is a guy who makes several thousands of dollars an hour. People bank on this dude.

Or gal.

Could be a gal.

And there are three reasons she/he might have for letting it slide.

I'm not gonna do the whole he/she thing anymore. It's silly.

Okay, reasons for letting it slide:

One: She didn't hear it. Which sounds crazy, but it happens. Happens all the time. I once got into an argument with this producer (who had literally won a grammy the night before) and was trying to point out a popping noise where they had tried to punch in a vocal line.

It was really sloppy work and it took me ten minutes of playing the passage over and over before either the producer, the engineer, or even the vocalist heard it. None of them heard it, yet to me it was like listening to a leaf blower fire up on a Sunday morning.

It got fixed, but badly, and I can still hear it on the recording to this day.

Two: The producer didn't care.

Check was already cashed.

Three: (Most likely) Maybe they assumed an epically failed note displayed passion.

That happens sometimes too. Sometimes a particular take is just so immediate and present that the few mistakes within it are left in.

Can't argue with that logic.

But, well, with the rest of the vocal track inebriated on compression and auto-tune, they gotta know that whatever nuance they were challenging themselves with wasn't happening.

Or not.

I think that's what they think they did though. They left the terrible sour notes hang because it said "Edgy" or whatever.

Now I don't think the song is going to be a hit. And not because it's not good, which it isn't, but because it doesn't have a memorable hook. I've been writing about it for over an hour now, and I can't remember a single thing about it.

I will probably never hear it again.

And now you know why I can't listen to music blithely.

I could spend all of Monday morning on a single note.

And now I have.