Vote Now and Think About it Latuh

I'm sorry to say that today I thought of Marcel Vigneron while I was in the shower.

I was thinking about foodies and how awful they are. I crap on them here from time to time, and I was asking myself if I was being too harsh. And of course, my unbiased answer was "no."

One the one hand I realize--I think I realize--what they are trying to do with their tiny servings of odd food. I believe the idea is to give people brief exposures to new and interesting flavors and textures, which differs from my goal of stuffing people until they become welded to their couches. And I suppose there is something respectable about the small odd food approach. On the other hand I realized that there is no way in hell I would stand around in my kitchen with flour in my hair, working for hours to create that crap. Would you? If you had the skills of, say, an Alton Brown, would you spend them on tiny, four-layer stacks of wood ears and sheep brains surrounded by trite swoopy patterns of mystery sauce? Seriously.

I don't know what I'd do if I went to dinner at someone's house and they served me tiny four-layer stacks of weird food. Eat it and smile and go to Wendy's on the way home, I guess. Food other people cook for me is usually bad anyway, so it wouldn't be traumatic. If I like you, I eat the food and thank you for it. Isn't that what everyone does? I don't really go to other people's houses for the food, anyway.

Here is the effect I shoot for when I cook. The guest takes a bite of whatever it is I cooked, and he or she puts his fork down, and the eyes roll back in the head, and they say, "Oh, my God." I don't want to hear a lot of crap about how I'm the first person to put X and Y together. I don't want to hear the word "plating." I'm happy as long as you can't stop ramming it in your face.

Call me crazy.

I get that effect here by myself. The other day I fried doughnuts in coconut oil and dipped them in my special glaze, and I took a bite out of one, and my knees bent involuntarily and I had to hold onto the stove. I consider that success.

I am pretty sure the people who started haute cuisine were a lot more like me than foodies. When you read about the food great French chefs used to cook, it's always pretty excessive. Big dishes piled high with good stuff. By the wagonload. I don't know how we got away from that.

A reader left a great comment here, which I am too lazy to look up. The gist of it was that pretentious freaks had screwed up art and music, and now they were after food. I think there is something to that, although nouvelle food usually tastes okay, whereas post-bop jazz and modern art are, objectively, shit. When you start to feel like you're eating a track from Miles Davis's Bitches Brew, you know you have crossed the line into the realm of really bad food.

Am I the only one who is amazed that Miles Davis and a whole bunch of other people worked on that album and let it hit stores with the word "bitch's" misspelled? Just wondering.

Acid is a hell of a drug.

After wondering if I had been too mean to foodies and concluding that I had not, I wondered if I had been mean incorrectly to Arnold Schwarzenegger. There is a passage in the new cookbook where I make fun of him for endorsing the Bullworker, a stupid fitness toy which, I assure you, is not the reason he won all those bodybuilding competitions.

Yesterday I realized the toy I had seen him promoting was not the Bullworker. It was an even stupider toy. It had a spring in the middle, and there were handles on the ends, and the idea was that if you bent the spring a lot, in a couple of weeks you would look like Lou Ferrigno. So I had libeled Arnold by claiming he promoted the Bullworker.

But guess what? He promoted the Bullworker, too. I Googled it.

I think you know what this means. Once again, I stupidly thought I might be wrong about something but turned out to be right. When will I learn?

You know what he would have promoted if he had been honest? Steroids, group sex, and sexual harassment. I could sort of respect him for that, because those are things he actually believes in.

I still remember a magazine article about Arnold, in which he told a recent immigrant the secret to getting rich in America. "You should sell dildoes," he proclaimed. He told the guy to open a dildo store. I am not kidding. Oddly, he didn't provide reprints of that article to the press during the recall effort. I guess there are some things you want to recall and some things you don't. "Governor Dildo." That should be his name. There was a time when you could reach the age of 40 in America without knowing what a dildo was. Arnold would lower that age to 4.

I think the Bullworker company should start making dildoes. That's hot. They could call them Butchworkers or something. Marketing isn't my area. For maximum benefit, use the Bullworker and the Butchworker at the same time. Be socially liberal and fiscally conservative while stimulating muscle groups you didn't even know you had.

Sometimes I think that in order to describe the times we live in, we would have to clone George Orwell, Hunter Thompson, and Federico Fellini. In one person.

If I turn out to be right about anything else today, you will be the first to know.