Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Cheesy Creation Mongers

cheeseA recent human interest story about creative cheese descriptions inspired us to post some fun blurbs culled from our local cheese-mongers. Here is the crème de la cheese!

Cramulac Fontina is to supermarket Fontina as the patient scraping of a time-scalloped whetstone against a sturdy sword is to the intermittent application of a paper-backed emery board to a cracked Lee nail – a false nail applied to a hand which is surely to be hacked from its owner's limb by that battle-tested blade.  Gorgeous melting cheese.

Gazing upon the vegetable ash that covers this deceptively small lump of GoatLord chevre is to invite madness.  One's sanity follows one's gaze into the barren moonscape of greys and deep blues until one is immersed in an inky nothingness that consumes all consciousness.  Is it possible to be insane without anything that can be reasonably called a mind?  But "reasonably" has no place here – you are singing forth unknown colors in the mad chorus of Yog Sothoth – Ia!  Ia!

Due to its quick aging process and use of raw, unpasturized milk, Camembert de Normandie is illegal in the United States. This explains the rather extreme price of this smuggled dairy, and why it is served in glass vials. This cheese is buttery and spreadable, unless, as is the case here, it is served in dried out nugget forms. We recommend that you light this cheese in a glass pipe and smoke it, inhaling its rich, almost mushroomy goodness.

Joey was always a bastard to me.  I took his feet and strung them on a tree.  He crawled at me foaming curses until I pinned him to the dirt with my spear and let the dogs work his back down to the bone.  We built our campfire on his corpse and roasted his goats over his sooty skull.  We drank his mead and ate his trout all under the light of his flaming long-house.  As we rode off the burning thatch drifted into his fields of rye and set them alight.  His children cried out for us to take them with us, but we did not turn back.  Nor did I let the men have their way with them, though.  There is a code we must follow.  But enough of that – this is some tasty cheese!

For the love of God, don't eat this. It's rotten milk, curdled and laced with mold. Why would you even consider eating this? Cheese is the greatest hoax in the history of cuisine. That "sharpness" you're tasting? It's your auto-immune system spitting acid on a hostile poison. Sure, if it got you high, or drunk, it might be worth chewing down some of this nasty gunk, but all this refuse does is make you fat. Somewhere along the way the whole thing got out of hand, enough people got hoodwinked that now everyone's afraid to admit that the emperor has no clothes, and that the "food" you're smearing all over your crackers is nothing but decomposed garbage. Don't be fooled! Of course, if you won't listen to the obvious truth, you could do worse than this Taleggio from Lombardy.

--Steve Kilian

--Dan Kilian

What The *#@% Should I Make For Dinner?

The First Insomniac

Friday, January 25, 2013

Know the Cranhgul


ImageKnow the Cranhgul by their withered frames!  The lampreys that adorn their spines and clavicles drain sustenance from them while giving them the ability to see beyond the natural spectrum!  Their gums recede, their cheeks become hollows, they assume the classic skeletal visage of the mad wizard!  As the man shrivels the parasites grow fat and bulbous, but are kept hidden by the black cloaks that shroud this secretive race!  These robes cannot cover the stench of the Cranhgul, whose metabolisms are forever distorted by their sickening burden!  Their pores seep a clear fluid which reeks of the privy!
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The lampreys grant long life to these disciples of forbidden arcana, allowing them to pursue strange courses of study for centuries on end!  They move past mastery of a subject into realms of knowledge of which normal mortals cannot conceive!  This has fed a long tradition of tales and songs that celebrate the Cranhgul's greatness!  It was a Cranhgul who teased forth the rules of reanimating dead flesh!  It was a Cranhgul who unraveled time from matter, allowing the one to pass through the other unchanged!  It was a Cranhgul who first bound Will into iron, arming nations of warriors with weapons of terrible power!
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Some say that the parasites are the descendents of a great alien race!  If so their history is lost, as the parasites are no more than leeches when prised from the struggling forms of those Cranhgul that have been captured through treachery and luck!  Those slime-ensconced foulthings spew ichor when crushed underfoot!
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Know the Cranhgul by their withered frames!



--Steve Kilian
Waitstaff

The Most Brutal Route

Friday, January 18, 2013

The Numbers Letters Game

zScrabble is facing a challenge. A numbers cruncher, Joshua Lewis, is questioning some of the most important tiles! This analyst has crunched the numbers using some sort of algorithm that is no doubt mathematically unassailable but that no one believes anyway to determine that the Z and the X are overvalued! Evidently, in the seventy-five years since Scrabble was invented, enough small Z and X words have entered the English language that these quirky consonants are hardly so exotic.

Lewis says that Z should be demoted from 10 points to 8, and X from 8 to 5. He uses a software program named Valett to redistribute the values of these letters. I have three objections to this devaluing of scrabble letters.

One: You don’t change Scrabble values with a software program. If you’re going to change a Scrabble piece, you do it with a wood burner and a steady hand. If you can’t singe a new number onto that tile, it wasn’t meant to be changed.

Two: Can’t some things stay overvalued? Do we really analyze Sean Connery’s range and acting skills and his indisputable good looks, or do we say he’s James Freakin’ Bond and he can play an Egyptian named Ramirez with a Scottish accent if he wants to (there is nothing overvalued about the first Highlander movie, by the way). Whenever some union goes on strike for better wages, retirement or health packages, someone always says “ I wish I could get all that,” like those are exorbitant things to fight for. They forget that some jobs are supposed to be nice, that we’re not all supposed to be working ourselves exhausted for crap. Maybe those jobs are overvalued. Good. If no one ever gets a sweet job, all jobs suck. Maybe X and Z held out for a better package.

Three: Maybe we shouldn’t take Scrabble so seriously.  Maybe it should be a rainy day time-killer game, as opposed to some tournament-driven, scientifically analyzed contest of gaming perfection. I don’t know a lot of Z and X words; maybe people who do should come up with a more sophisticated word game? Look, the big slide at the end of Chutes and Ladders destroys small children’s dreams of victory, erasing an entire game’s worth of uphill striving with one unfortunate descent. It’s overkill, but no one’s agitating for a smaller chute; that’s just the way the game goes. Coming from a family where Scrabble has been taken so seriously it’s nearly led to divorce (and I don’t care if it’s sexist or not, Dina, SEAWOMEN is NOT a word! You owe me a turn!), I can tell you we shouldn’t take Scrabble so seriously, and it’s all right to put down a lousy word, so go already!

Of course, if I’m not going to take Scrabble so seriously, then I guess I can’t get all up in arms if they decide to change it. Even if this story is just a plant by Parker Brothers to stir up controversy and sales for their product, maybe some tinkering would be acceptable. Everyone puts their own spin on Risk, and if I hadn’t augmented a board game I never would have been able to summon higher demons using a Ouija board. Think of the first guys who moved the pawns two spaces in chess. They must have been assailed for their heresy! Now everybody does it. Of course, innovation can have consequences. Consider capturing a pawn en passant. I’m not going to explain the move, but it came about because of the whole moving pawns two spaces thing, and it’s the biggest fudge rule in chess and involves time travel.

So watch out! Maybe the Z and the X are overvalued, but demotion could have ugly consequences. Remember, the Chinese are pegging their alphabet to ours, deliberately weakening their letters to enhance the language deficit. Why do you think everyone has to speak English when we should all be speaking Mandarin? If Z goes to 8, then 德 goes to 2. Also, don’t forget that Z and X are fun letters! We don’t want Scrabble to be any duller. I say overvalue the letters! Keep the zazz and the excess in the game!

--Dan Kilian

The New Drinking Games

The Siege

Monday, January 14, 2013

Friday, January 4, 2013

The Big Rain Check

boenerThe fiscal cliff has been avoided, for a couple months! Now that the New Year’s deal has been reached, let’s sweep away the confetti, rinse out our bottles, vomit, sleep, eat some Chinese food and try to figure out what just happened.


One question we could ask is “How does one avoid a cliff?” I would suggest that not jumping off a cliff is the way. Erosion aside, cliffs don’t move. It’s people who barrel off them who are suicidally lunging to their deaths, and they should avoid lunging. Someone should put up a sign saying “Stay away from the cliff. No lunging.”

No lunging, let’s plunge into the details of this deal.

$400,500 Is the New $250,000

Because Obama can’t sign anything without conceding some major principle he won an election campaigning on, that whole “anyone making $250K or more” principle had to go. Congratulations, people making $300,000: you’re now officially middle-class!

The Payroll Tax Expires

Republicans fought tooth and nail to keep this tax cut for the working class from expiring. I’m only kidding! Congratulations, people making below $110,000: you’re now officially rich!

A Stimulus Package to Create Jobs

Again, I’m only kidding!

A Digging Project

Using offsets found in Medicare, this bill authorizes a public project to dig up the corpse of John Maynard Keynes so that Republicans can kick it.

Sequester and You Shall Find

That was a poor pun using the word sequester. I think there was a show called SeaQuest in the 1990s, but I don’t remember anything about it. It might have had something to do with the sea. Maybe they were looking for the sea, because the earth had dried up? They were on a quest? Did anyone say, “Hey, we’ve got 7.7% unemployment and you’re off on another SeaQuest? You need to focus!” Someone must have made a Ryan Seacrest  joke about this by now, right? Regardless, all the spending cuts are due to expire in a couple months, so get ready for that.

Fixing the Debt Ceiling

At the same time as the sequestration, the debt ceiling comes back around. Remember the debt ceiling? That’s why we’re enduring all this drama in the first place. It’s much like the Christmas thank-yous I meant to write all last year, only now some of those people got me more presents. Now I’ve got to say thanks for the sweater and thanks for the other sweater. I think the debt ceiling is worse, because if I don’t thank Aunt Lou for the cookie platter I don’t think the U.S. economy sinks into the abyss. Oh, and also it wasn’t a Christmas present; I took the cookie platter and threatened to burn down Aunt Lou’s house if she didn’t pay for another one. Okay, I won’t, but I’ll be back in two months, Aunt Lou, so get ready for that.

Now those Pols in Washington have got me writing scary overstrained metaphors about my poor Aunt Lou. We’re supposed to be fixing global warming, not putting out fires we light ourselves. Obama better not negotiate with these clowns in two months, but my bet is he figures out a way to compromise, by negotiating just a little.

--Dan Kilian

God Smoked


Dear Western Beef