Happy Pi Day!

As a man who has enjoyed a few sugary treats over my forty years of life, I have come to the conclusion that desserts fall into three categories:  cake, ice cream, and pie.  All desserts are just some subset of these three, with pudding being the superfamily over all of them.  See what I did there, Britain?  No angry messages left in the comments.

Bears...always funny.

Each one of these delicious treats has a certain aura and mystique surrounding them.  Cake, for instance, is celebratory.  Marking another successful circuit around the sun on an annual basis after springing forth from your mother's womb?  Have some cake!  Finally shuffling off that employment coil and heading into the sunset of retirement?  Have some cake!  Decided to stick your dick in one vagina for the rest of your life?  Cake me, baby!  Even at bachelor parties, the stripper jumps out of a cake.  Cake is for celebrating.  You're never having sex again?  Let's eat cake! 

Ice cream is fun.  Hot day?  Let's have some ice cream.  Celebrating a birthday?  Well, hell, let's have some ice cream along with that cake (see paragraph 2).  On a date?  Well, we're not quite to the marriage and wedding cake step, so let's have some ice cream!  Even the ice cream man drives around in a fun, festive cart with Pop Goes the Weasel or some other song from your childhood blaring over the loudspeakers while he patrols the neighborhood like some sort of angry, frozen dairy treat bearing predator of the sea.  Sure, he has his victims bound and gagged in the back of his festive refrigerated van, but, man, for a few moments while you're picking out the overpriced, frozen dairy treat from the menu on the side of the truck, the ice cream man sure seems fun!  Who wants a side of chloroform to go with this drumstick knock-off?  Me!!!!!!...zzzZZZzzz...

I went to a dark place again, didn't I?

Pie, however, isn't really celebratory (the stripper doesn't jump out of a giant pie, does she?), nor is it as fun as ice cream (man, this pie just doesn't fit into the sugar cone like I was hoping!).  No, pie is something completely different.

Pie is pure sex.

Pie is a lot of work.  Sex is a lot of work.  When you make pie, you have to make the crust, you have to fill the crust, and then you have to put another crust over the top of the filling.  And the crust?  Yeah, it's so flaky and delicious because it has lots of layers.  There's some sex pun in there, but it's late and I can't be bothered to connect the dots.  When you make cake, you just dump some stuff into a bowl, crack a few eggs, stir, bake, done.  You don't need to frost cake; cake is pretty damned delicious as is.  Frosting is just...well, the icing on the cake!

No, pie is something more, something that is in tune with the deepest seated needs and wants of our psyche.  Eating pie makes us feel good, sure, but it also makes us feel a little naughty after enjoying it.  There's something a little lascivious about enjoying a pie. 

Indeed.

Hell, pie is even used as a euphemism--and I use that term lightly--for sex.  A woman's vagina has been likened to a slice of pie for a long time running.  Maybe it's because the shapes of the two are somewhat similar in appearance.  Maybe it's because they're both delicious.  Maybe it's because your face is a mess when you eat either of them without using your hands.  I'm not sure, but I do know that it does sound a lot nicer to liken a vagina to a pie than it is to describe it as cakey in any way.  When Eugene Levy was encouraging Jason Biggs to shove his dick in a dessert, he didn't tell him to fuck a cake.  No sir.  It was pie!  American Pie!  Yum.  *pukes*

 And, do I really need to mention Warrant and their assault on our early 90's radio experiences?  I didn't think so.  But it tastes so sweet it makes a grown man cry...

I apologize for any and all earworms this spawns.

Even though there's no real relationship between the value pi, which is the ratio of the diameter of a circle to it's circumference, and pie the delicious, salacious treat, we've still come to associate the dessert pie with March 14th, which is 3.14...or the first three digits of pi the mathematical value.  At least in America.  Those silly Europeans write March 14th as 14.3...so they don't celebrate pi day until the 31st of April.

Oh.  Right.

So, join me today in celebrating a unique number, pi, by treating yourself to a lascivious and tasty indulgence, pie the round circle dessert.  Oh, hey!  There's our connection!

Mind.  Blown.  Indeed.

Turkey Day Redux: Boobs, Birds, and Letting My Joy Out

As reported here on these electronic media Saturday, I safely traveled to and returned from the great state of Tennessee, and in case you didn't read it on Saturday, Tennessee truly is a great state. Minus Bruce Pearl. I kid, I kid. Sort of.

Anyway, I have much to tell, much to tell indeed! So, I've broken it up into compartmentalized story form. Because I'm lazy like that. And because otherwise the post would probably be really effing big if I didn't do that.

Diminished:
Let's start with the meal, shall we? Or, the rather spare offerings otherwise mistaken for "Thanksgiving Dinner." While my greatest hopes were achieved in that I could fall asleep in front of watch the Packers game Thursday at noon, I was getting hungry toward the end of the game. Fortunately, in the middle of the fourth quarter, when the game was pretty much finished, anyway, the dinner bell was rung.

I would have happily slept longer watched the rest of the game if it meant having more food.

Being the loving and caring father that I am, I stood up to get my kids their plates first. Knowing that they both love mashed potatoes (because, really, who doesn't love mashed potatoes?), I went straight for the potatoes, expecting to find some massive, heaping amount of deliciously boiled and creamily-whipped spuds. Instead, what I found was a meager pile of gunpowder spuds that had no pepper, no butter, no chives, no milk, no flavor and nothing really to make me think "mashed potatoes". And, considering there were 20 other people who would also want some potato flakes mashed potatoes, I served up a teaspoon of mashed potatoes for my child (I think I had Cookie's plate). Other "side" dishes suffered from a similar paucity. Again, small spoonfuls of everything was served up. With this, it was time to get to the meat of the meal--the meat! All morning, my wife's cousins and my brother-in-law had been manning the turkey fryer, so I was looking forward to some sumptuous turkey as well as the afore-promised Honey-Baked Ham.

Sadly, I got to the meat platters and found that the turkeys (well, the ones that were done, at least) had been carved with the delicacy and precision of an amphetamine-fueled axe-murderer. Picking through and getting some smaller portions that, you know, someone other than T. rex would eat, I turned to the ham.

Have I mentioned how much I love ham? This is a genetic thing, because my children both love ham, too. No, wait. There's no ham-loving gene. We love ham because it's so fucking delicious!!!

As I said to my wife later, when it was just the two of us: "Who the fuck serves a cold ham? We could have gone down the street to the grocer and gotten some cold cuts. Isn't the whole point of having a Honey-Baked Ham is that it is fucking baked???"

Mmmm...butchered bland turkey and cold ham. Two strikes and you're out, right?

I figured I could make up for the lack of everything else with rolls. Unfortunately, someone had planned ahead really well, and cooked 16 rolls. For 21 people. Like so many other aspects of the dinner, it could all be summed up fairly easily: Swing and a miss.

Fall on Me:
Around the "dinner" table, conversations were shared, but mostly about people I didn't know. Being that my wife and her siblings and her sister's husband all went to the same high school, they knew the same people. At one point, we were talking about running, and about how it's difficult for women to run (you know, 'cause they got boobs). Suddenly, the name Erin Hill was brought up (I think that's the name...I got distracted during the telling of the tale...as I will recount shortly).

Apparently, Ms. Erin literally hit herself in the face once during gym class. It was at this point that I took my wife's arm in my hands and said, "You have my attention. Do go on." Ms. Erin was not one to do things half-assed, from what I can gather, and when she went through puberty, she really went through puberty, erupting forth with lovely, heavy Double-E cup breasts on her somewhat slight frame.

My sister-in-law then informed everyone that Ms. Erin's large breasts caused her some troubles and really "screwed up her back". My mother-in-law then interjected that, no, her back got messed up when she was in a bus accident and they had to go in and do surgery.

The table fell silent for a moment and I added, just loud enough for everyone to hear, "Well, hell, they probably saved her life!"

Comedy: it's all in the timing.

King of Comedy:
My brother-in-law (my wife's brother), is perhaps the one person in the family most like me in terms of sense of humor (though my mother-in-law does have a very twisted sense of humor...she just feels bad about laughing at poop jokes and Carny folks). Many of my brother-in-law's friends rely strictly on shock value for their jokes. During the "meal", my BIL got a text message from his friend Marcello that my BIL had to read to the family: "Ha, Marcello says that he just clogged up his in-laws' toilet!"

"What the hell," I added to the end. "Doesn't he realize that you have to break up the fleet before jumping to hyperspace?"

People laughed, but as the words were finally sinking into my mother-in-law, she laughed the loudest and the hardest. So, I successfully offered up the two best lines of the entire weekend.

Stand:
One of the major problems of the entire holiday was that there were 21 people in the house and two dogs. This, in and of itself, should not have been a problem. However, it was a problem when the only seating is a loveseat, a recliner, a rickety rocking chair, two barstools and two other straight-backed chairs.

As such, I spent most of the holiday downstairs, in the basement, on the couch. I sat there. I read there. I worked on the laptop down there. I slept there. Pretty much, by the time Friday afternoon rolled around, I had worked a pretty good ass-groove into the couch. Awesome.

Orange Crush:
I didn't think it was possible to ruin French toast. I mean, it's pretty simple: soak it in an egg-and-milk mixture, sprinkled heavily with cinnamon and nutmeg, cook. Serve with syrup.

My sister-in-law, who enjoys nothing more than making others feel bad, brought a bunch of breakfast casseroles for Thursday and Friday. Thursday was a bunch of quiches, which were tolerable. I'm not a big egg fan, for reasons that I won't broach here (think biochemistry lab, if you must have some form of explanation), but the food was free and I could have a couple of slabs of it to tide me over for the rather sparse offerings for Thursday afternoon.

Friday was this French Toast Casserole thing. And, while I like French Toast, I don't like it with orange zest. Nor do I like it without cinnamon and nutmeg flavorings. I like it even less with caramel sundae sauce spread on top of it. However, since I was trying to be polite, I choked down my initial two pieces. With it, I ate a single piece of bacon and a single sausage patty. Talk about being made a sad panda...

Imagine my distress when my father-in-law loaded two more slabs of French Toast Casserole onto my plate. I suppose his heart was in the right place, but... Since I was severely lacking in the whole breakfast meat department, I went ahead and ate them. They laid in my stomach like rocks. Bland, chewy rocks. Bland, chewy, there's orange flavoring in here where citrus overtones should not be rocks.

Fortunately, I was able to steal a single sausage patty off the plate headed toward the dog's bowl before it got there.

Shiny Happy People:
My sister-in-law is a very religious person.

When, you know, she's not making fun of Mexicans.

I digress. My sister-in-law is a very religious person.

She has foisted the great love of Jesus, Mary, Joseph, the Holy Spirit, Saint Wenceslas, the Holy Sepulcher and transubstantiation onto her oldest child. Well, it's both of her children, but her oldest seems to be the one who suffers has responded to it the most. Pretty much from the moment we got there until we left, it was one long, constant stream of things that are happening in her church. If it wasn't what was happening in the church, it was what her friend Lisa was doing...Lisa, whom she met at the church!

It came to the point where my wife and I are going to make a drinking game out of it the next time we're around her.

Possibly the most annoying thing (other than making her children say prayers when they are being punished...) was that, whenever one of the girls would be angry or frustrated or anything else that might be construed as negative in any way, my sister-in-law would command them to "Let your joy out."

Can't do a cartwheel? Let your joy out. Can't play with a toy because someone else is playing with it? Let your joy out. Not enough mashed potatoes on the buffet table? Joy, it's what's being let out.

So now I'm torn. I don't know what to do. If I'm ever told to "let my joy out", should I drop trou or just bust ass really loudly? I'm leaning toward the latter, and then sighing heavily and saying, "You're right, I do feel better." And then, if I can, to release a little trouser sneeze as a follow up and toss in "Oop, a little more joy for you all."

And then leave the room.

Sweetness Follows:
My fear about the pies was relieved a little bit when my mother-in-law showed up with four pies. That upped the pie:person ratio quite a bit. Unfortunately, there were now two pecan pies floating around the place.

This did not make me want to let my joy out.

However, there was enough pie for everyone. It was the, uh, getting of the pie that was most troublesome.

No one cut the pies.

Instead, I was handed a pie server and told to hack off a piece of whatever I wanted. I wish I was lying. It was so that you could sample all of the pies. Personally, I don't see why I couldn't just take a pie back to the corner that I was standing in (remember, seating was very limited) and just go to town.

My joy would have been released then.

Instead, there was a mad rush and a fight for the serving utensils. Pies were carved up in any manner which suited the last person at the pie pan. My OCD tendencies were not amused by this ignorance of proper pie protocol. Hysteria rocked the masses. The sun looked as though sackcloth had been drawn across it and the moon was the color of blood! A dragon with thirteen heads appeared! Lightning! Thunder! Office supplies! The Apocalypse!!!

I will say, though, that my wife's pie was the tastiest. So was the sweet potato/marshmallow cream pie that she made.

Pie

Chances are, as you're reading this (especially if you're reading this after 10:00 am), I'm on the road. That's right, my friends. As we speak (or whatever it is we do here), I am joining millions of other Americans by taking to the open road and driving to a far-off destination in order to eat myself into a stupor on Thursday afternoon. Hopefully, since I'm now in the land of the woebegone Panthers, Thanksgiving dinner won't cut into the Packers/Lions game too much. I would like to watch the one football team I pull for that has some semblance of a clue on the gridiron.

Anyway, I told you about how much I despise pumpkins. That big, evil fucker has scarred my childhood psyche beyond repair. Some of you assumed, then, that I dislike pumpkin pie. Really? Do I look like a guy who doesn't like pumpkin pie?

Of course I like pumpkin pie, you silly geese! Pumpkin pie is like the ultimate victory over those vile orange gourds! I mean, we've ripped them from their vines, cut them up, boiled them, mashed them into orange paste, sugared and spiced them, and then for good measure we baked their candied asses in a pastry shell. And if that wasn't enough injustice to crush their already fragile psyches, then we squirt whipped cream on top of the pie and devour it. And then, as one final insult, we turn them into poo. I'd say that we're the winners in that battle, my friends. Yes, I love pumpkin pie!

How do you eat your pie? Settle down, perverts. I know the answer to that already, which is why the Comely and Buxom Boudicca has that smile on her face all the time. Hmmm...perhaps I've said too much. Anyway, how do you eat your pie, perverts? I go crust first. The baked part of the crust is my least favorite part. It's dry and crumbly. I don't do dry and crumbly too well. Sorry, that's just me. So, I eat the crust first, usually cutting it off the slice of pie with my fork and sweeping it through either the pie filling or the whipped cream. After I've polished off that little appetizer, I go right for the wedge, eating from the smaller vertex of the wedge of pie first and working my way down the warm and delicious triangle. That's lip-licking good!

It's tough to pick a favorite kind of pie. Like I tell my kids, there's really only one flavor of pie: delicious! This isn't true, because some people frankly can't cook. Plus, I've only ever had mince meat pie once. I think I liked it but...*shrugs helplessly*

A few of my other favorite pies are blueberry, old-fashioned cream, and my wife makes this fabulous lemon chess pie. And, of course, there's the old stand-by and standard for delicious, apple pie. I love you, apple pie, and I love you, America.

My least favorite pie? Hands down, pecan pie. I hate the shit. Growing up, when Thanksgiving rolled around, I thought there were only two kinds of pie to eat: pumpkin and pecan pie. The pumpkin would get slopped down first, and then there'd be this brown gooey mass sitting there, unappetizing and foul. I'd sigh and go without any more pie. Damn, I hate pecan pie. My brother loves the shit, though. He can have my share, and often he does. According to some reports, he ate 4/5 of a pecan pie last year at Thanksgiving.

I also hate peach pie, but that's more because I hate peaches. Even cobbler can't save their squishy, fuzzy asses when it comes to dessert time. Again, I'll opt for the apple when it comes to cobbler time.

Anyway, chances are, if you're reading this between 10 am and 6 pm, I'll be on the road. Pieless. And heading to a place where the pie to person ratio is going to be woefully unbalanced in the direction of the person. Seriously. It's like five pies to 19 people. That's nearly a 1:4 ratio. And one of those pies is pecan. Plus, my in-laws, they enjoy their pie, too.

I have a bad feeling that I'm going to go for pie and discover one tiny wedge of disgusting pecan pie.

Damn.

Anyone know if they make a pumpkin-pie flavored rum?

Sunday Free For All

Not a lot of people read this on the weekends, so I thought I'd just throw up a grab bag of shit that I've accumulated recently, thinking "Hey, that would make a fun little post." But then I didn't get around to it because, remember people, my lack of ambition at overcoming entropy sometimes outweighs my desire to tickle your fancies. If you need help plotting the relationship between my love of your comments versus my inherent laziness, I suggest the Arrhenius equation.

Anyway, remember that book thing I'm trying to work on and publish and all that shit? Well, for one, I'm waiting a bit for the economy to not be so dour before plunging headlong into the submission pool once anon. Hopefully, with the president telling everyone NOT to believe the media hype (for once), things will slowly begin to tick up. Now, if we could get more institutions to not take bailout money, the stock markets would begin to slide back up and then some enterprising agent would be like "awesome, let's print this thing!"

So, as you remember, I'm working on a big fantasy story. Since I've basically crafted an entire world for my characters, I decided to work in the whole element of realism that follows along with history, political structures and religion. For the religion aspect, I based my deities on Norse and Germanic mythology, with a healthy dose of Celtic, for good measure. When I did that, I busted open my guide to the gods and read, cover to cover, the section on Norse mythology. Imagine, then, my sheer giddy glee when I stumbled across a web comic centered on the dysfunction surrounding the Norse gods. I've been delighting in this for weeks now; here's the link to Brat-Halla. It might help to read it and keep open the Encyclopedia Mythica, in case you're not familiar with who Hod, Heimdall, Syf, Tyr, Frigg and Baldur are (I assume you know who Thor, Odin and Loki are...oh, and the Valkyries).

Brat-Halla's cast of characters
Jidai posted this the other day, but I have to steal it and leave it here, in case you missed out on it. There are some excellent nuggets of geeky reference in this.
Saturday Morning Watchmen Cartoon:


If you're a football fan and you're not reading Kissing Suzy Kolber, you're doing yourself a disservice. For instance, here's their recent Watchmen parody as played out by NFL players. I'm not sure which I like more, Silk Steeler or BoobsAssTits.

More Watchmen shit. Here's the PvP parody of Watchmen, using classic comic strip characters. It might not be as funny as the first two links, but it's still quite clever. Pfangirl originally had the links up for me.

Okay, last Watchmen thing. No matter how brilliant this is, this comic is disturbingly funny. It makes a lot more sense if you've read the comic or at least seen the movie. Thanks to Theory of Everything for making this possible.

And in case you missed the twin celebrations yesterday...or thought I was making it all up...here's the histories behind Pi Day (it's 3-14, in case you couldn't figure it out) and Steak and Blow Job Day (kind of NSFW link). Now, where's Nej to tell me that she learns something every time she reads my blog?

My New Best Friend

You ever have someone do something for you that was so nice, it brought a tear to your eye? Or it caused some other involuntary visceral response in your physiology (that's a lot of big words deftly arranged as a euphemism for "sprout wood")? No? You never have? Man, sucks to be you.

Anyway, jet on over to Homebrew and Chemistry for a recap of Chemgeek's Thanksgiving Holiday (as a side note, prepare the empathy and sympathy train). Also, click the link for "euphoria". Awesome, isn't it?

When there was the chance that Brett Favre was going to play in Minnesota, I had pondered becoming BFFs with Chemgeek. However, his little buried shoutout and linky-loo with my name behind it cemented it.

So, new best friend, what's in the fridge? Mmmm...beer and pie. God bless America.

A Vote for Pie

Because I'm a nosy fuck, I read this article about what the Obamas will do to the menu at the White House. Here's a short excerpt about what President Obama likes:

Obama has said in interviews that his favorite food is chili, though [Walter] Schieb cautioned about disclosing the president's most beloved dish.

"He'll be fed it everywhere he goes for the rest of his life," he quipped.

The president-elect has also been known to favor fish and pistachios -- as well as pumpkin pie.

Chili? Seriously. That gets a thumbs up from me. I'm all about the chili. Also, I'm big on the pumpkin pies (you can read that two different ways). Now, if he'd just knock off this wine bullshit and pick up a taste for some American Pale Ales, I'd begin to believe that the country is headed in the right direction.

Funny story about the pumpkin pie. While in grad school, during those last few months when I was writing experimentals and wondering why God hates me smashing NMR tubes of my compounds on the floor, my buddy and I suddenly found ourselves in the midst of one hellacious pumpkin pie jones. One Friday afternoon, we hopped in the Bobby Boyle Memorial War Wagon and, after stopping off at 7-11 for giant slurpees, we headed out onto the town seeking a pumpkin pie. We hit the farmers market, bakeries, grocery stores, and this big box retailer common in the midwest called Meijer (pronounced "Meyer", not "Me Eye Jer"), all for naught. Seriously, it would have been easier and less time-consuming to just go and get the stuff to make our own pumpkin pies, but being men, we didn't cook much, unless it involved deep frying something and/or "cooking" a frozen pizza. Finally, in an act of not-so-quiet desperation, we hit Wal-Mart. There, in the bakery corner of the megalomart, we found a stack of pies that looked suspiciously like pumpkin pies, but they weren't. While the label said "pumpkin pie", it also had the words "diet" and "sugar free" written on the white sticker. This would not do.

In a moment reminiscent of Bluto Blutarsky going apeshit on the singing hippy's guitar in the stairwell, I dove into the stack of pies, tossing them back and forth looking for something that wasn't this communist version of an American staple. There, at the bottom of the stack, I was rewarded with an actual, honest-to-motherfucking-God pumpkin pie. None of the diet. All of the sugar. It was like some savage had hidden the pie at the bottom of the stack, knowing that he'd come back later to take it home and enjoy the delicacy on his own, probably with the lights turned out and the curtains drawn. My money's on Sean Astin.

We quickly spirited away with the pie, so that the aforementioned pie hider wouldn't see us raiding his hidden cache of non-diet, fully sugarinated pumpkin pie. For good measure, we went and bought cans of Redi-Whip whipped cream...each. We ran through the line, tossed some cash at the one-eyed woman working the check-out, and made for the apartment...with a stop off at the liquor store. What good is revelry if it isn't drunken, right?

We each ate half the pie, shooting whipped cream into our mouths with each bite. Later, we laid in the living room, something on ESPN flickering on the television screen in front of us, he in his chair and me on the couch, both supine, holding our stomachs and groaning. It had been a successful foray into satisfying our need for pumpkin pie. With our stomachs churning and our bodies emanating gas from various orifices, we celebrated in our own not so quiet way: by snoring so loudly it woke up the old woman who lived downstairs.


God bless you, pumpkin pie. You are a force of ultimate good. I'm sure, had He had some on hand, Jesus would have broken you at the last supper instead. Or perhaps that was served at the last dessert.