I Like Tortles, Too

Just in case anyone out there in cyberspace hasn't seen it yet:



Me too, kid...me too.

C-O-2-Times the Pleasure

9/17/07

There are seemingly endless reasons to hate the Wal-Mart Corporation. I could probably do an entire series on the slew of evil practices in which the largest company in the world engages. Not since the roaring days of the African slave trade has the world seen such unfair and rampant distain for common workers, whether it’s the fact that managers illegally adjust overtime off of an employee’s timecard onto the next week, or the fact that Wal-Mart counted 28 hours per week as “full-time,” or the fact that, in an effort to squeeze every delicious drop of profit at the expense of human decency, Wal-Mart has installed a rolling work hours where employees are just sort of “on call” 24 hours a day with no set schedule. And don’t even get me started on the fact that Wal-Mart offered a health care plan so staggeringly expensive that they knew employees wouldn’t be able to afford it, and then encouraged them to go on welfare and Medicaid instead, effectively passing off responsibility to the US government. And, of course, there’s the fact that Wal-Mart gets huge subsidies from local government to come into a town and drive all small business to bankruptcy with lower prices that are immediately raised after all competition has been killed. No, forget all that. Today I want to talk about something near and dear to my heart: meat.

I enjoy cooking a great deal. Point of fact, other than booze pretty much all of my disposable income goes to food. Fortunately I’m a pretty good cook so my wife pretty much leaves me to my own devices where culinary decisions are involved. I think she would rather be blissfully unaware whenever I spend $6 on a single ounce of saffron, or $12.99 for a single, dry-aged steak. This information would just cause her mind to recoil in horror. But if you want quality, sometimes you just gotta pay for it. This is a principle with which Americans are terribly uncomfortable, which is why Wal-Mart is so popular. I will concede that it is terrifically convenient to get all your shopping done in one place, but at the end of the day all you’re left with is a little saved time and a cart-load of cheap crap. Shirts that dissolve immediately upon contact with water, lights that burn out if you’re so careless as to turn them on, pots and pans with the heat distribution properties of a moldy tangerine, and, well, moldy tangerines. This is not good stuff, dear readers. But the single most abominable sin against humanity Wal-Mart affects is what they have the unmitigated gall to call “meat.”

It looks pretty good, doesn’t it? Long rows of brilliantly red beef of all cuts merrily sitting inside large plastic containers; what could be better? Well, not all cuts, since Wal-Mart no longer employs butchers in favor of pre-packaged meat imported from gods know where except that it’s not from American farmers. So you can’t get anything cut to order; what you see is what you get. But that’s just peanuts, here’s the butter: The reason the meat looks so good is because it’s treated with chemicals to retain that ruby-red color pretty much forever. It could be as spoiled as Paris Hilton beneath that taught plastic wrap but it would still look like it was cut this morning. They way this is accomplished is by using low-oxygen atmospheres and treating the meat with carbon monoxide. I know, it sounds delicious. That’s why the packaging is so puffed and tight like that; it’s a specific atmosphere inside the packaging necessary to keep it looking good. So essentially that ribeye could have sat in an unrefridgerated truck in Death Valley for a week, then delivered its payload to the store and you would never be able to tell the difference.

Wal-Mart claims that it doesn’t use CO2-treated meat anymore, but independent tests have shown that, as of last year at least, they were still selling meat treated by carbon monoxide. All of that aside, if you’ve ever tasted Wal-Mart meat, the point is really moot. I won’t say it has all the flavor and texture of a coconut husk, but it’s close. Yes, it is a little cheaper, but only by a very slim margin more than overshadowed by its similarity to shoe leather.

According to the company’s facts page, “We made the decision to expand our case-ready meat program to better serve our customers.” If anyone out there believes that, I have a bridge in New York I’d like to sell you. They fired all their butchers (they were dangerously close to unionizing) and went to pre-packed, hermetically sealed foodstuffs because it’s fucking cheaper for them, period. They are also particularly terrified of letting you know where the meat comes from, heavily lobbying against country of origin labeling (COOL). Their reasoning here is that “COOL applies costs to the system and provides zero benefits to the consumer.” That’s according to an exec in an interview with Beef Magazine. Yeah, I don’t want to know where my meat comes from either. Are any of the cleaning crew mysteriously missing?

I’ve pretty much boycotted Wal-Mart for this and many, many other reasons. I’m not asking you to do the same, but in the interest of decent food, please consider a goddamn grocery store that at least has people who’ve touched the meat they’re selling. Good day, ladies and gentlemen.


Sources:
http://www.consumerfed.org/pdfs/CFA_Wal-Mart_CO_statement_5.16.06.pdf.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/12/14/122225/59
http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_4839.cfm
http://www.walmartfacts.com/articles/2462.aspx

The Pub Crawl

9/6/07

I should tell you that the Annual Billings Pub Crawl is in no way organized or sanctioned by the City of Billings. It apparently started when a few people decided it would be fun to go to all three of the town’s bars in one night. Last year I went with Hanni and there were about 30 people. This year, intermittently, I think the number may have been closer to 40 at the highest tide. The only thing that urks me about Hanni's crowd is that they all seem to operate in the “Matlock” time zone, meaning their functions start around 7 in the evening. Which, any sane person will tell you, is so early in the night as to be ridiculous. There is no call for falling into unconsciousness at the tender hour of only 1 a.m. on a weekend night, ladies and gentlemen. But I digress…

We started at the VFW, which is far and away my favorite of the three, if not high in the running for my favorite bar ever. Although, they did lose points because between last year and this year they removed the shuffleboard table.

I believe I discovered why the drinks are so fantastically cheap; apparently the Billings VFW exists in a time-warp and we were paying 1986 prices (see picture below). Seriously, though, $2.50 for a 7&7? Bacchus be praised! Even at $1 tip each I still made out swimmingly, and the barmaid was quite generous with the liquor-to-Sprite ratio.

Hanni and I played some spectacularly bad pool. I think there was one game where our team didn’t sink a single ball. Except for maybe the cue ball. I am powerfully happy that I married someone as dangerously un-athletic as myself. Whenever we vacated the place all that was left were a bewildered bartender and one relieved-looking old fellow at the bar.

A scant few blocks away, “The Bank” is a quasi-tavern situated inside—what else—an old bank.

I have to say I do dig the outside façade. The inside is roomy and they have somewhere in the neighborhood of a thousand songs on the juke. The only negatives about The Bank are that it’s privately owned and keeps no set-in-stone hours, and they only serve beer and wine coolers. I had to make due with Corona, but the heroic amounts of spirits I had consumed at the VFW made sure I was in no danger of sobriety.

Come to think of it, none of the bars and precious few of the shops and restaurants in Billings keep rigid hours. They seem to operate more on a “whenever we feel like it” opening and closing time which is the sole dominion of mom-and-pop businesses.

Earlier in the evening I was promised that we would not be frequenting Billings’ third watering hole. I was lied to. I hate The Oasis. Hate it. I hate this bar with the fiery intensity of a matador afflicted with gonorrhea. Hanni’s brother Peter is a fire fighter, and was a first responder in Billings. He recalled with disgusted amusement that nary a weekend used to go by when they weren’t called out to Oasis because someone had gotten beaten with a crowbar or something.

Imagine, if you will, a dodgier, less-classy version of Patrick Swayze’s Roadhouse. Now add shit-kicking karaoke and a smattering of people who count the time they got a sloppy yawn* from a girl in a vomit-covered Skynyrd t-shirt their sophomore year in high school as the high point of their life, and you’ve just about got it.

This year for whatever reason The Oasis wasn’t as bad as last year. There was a smaller crowd and less republican sing-a-longs, so it was tolerable. All in all it was a good night. But goddamn…I hate that fucking bar.




*Sloppy Yawn: aka – a blowjob.

Fair Game

9/5/07

Long time readers of my blog will no doubt remember last year’s post concerning the 2nd Annual Billings Pub Crawl. Well last weekend it was that time again, and this year it coincided with the annual Billings Fair. All this and Labor Day weekend? Good gravy, however did I survive the revelry? In deference to our out-of-town and international readers, I should explain that Billings, Missouri is a tiny little town about 18 miles outside of Springfield, with a population of around 1,100 souls. It’s the type where you can see the “Thank You for Visiting” sign from the “Now Entering” sign, and it is from this sleepy little burg that my dear wife graduated high school. I can’t decide whether being there reminds me more of Children of the Corn, or Doc Hollywood, but there is something quaintly creepy about the place, not the least of which being the fact that my wife is related through some convoluted buggery to 9 out of 10 of its residents. It’s a nice place to visit, I should say.

Two years ago the village elders or whoever it is that makes decisions about these things decided that having rides at the Billings Fair was somewhat superfluous. Thusly, you get all the enjoyment of eating bad food and playing crooked, cheap games for even cheaper prizes while breathing exhaust fumes from the “tractor pull” without any of the distraction of actual fun that rides would bring. Oddly, it seems you don’t need carnival rides to attract carnies; they are just sort of drawn to the place like flies to a cow pie.

I’m pretty sure this guy is trying to shove a funnel cake into his mouth while shotgunning a giant Slurpee. I’m pretty sure he had pork cracklins in his pockets.

I was curious whether “Italian Charms” meant charms from Italy, or charms made by Italians, or perhaps charms to keep away Italians...

Turns out it means cheap crap with a nice dose of passive-aggressive racism:

And just what the fuck is going on here?

I shuddered each time a child crawled out of the Giant Smurf Vagina tunnel. It was like watching a log flume of alien births...being clitorally stimulated by a humping dolphin. Great balls of greasy fire.

Worst. Ring toss. Ever:

That day would have been a great time to be a thief in Billings, as the entire police force was at the fair. There must have been some vile terrorist plot to explode the bouncy castle, because they even had some guys in black t-shirts that said “Police,” complete with handcuffs and all, who claimed to be “police volunteers.” I didn’t even know that existed. I’m pretty sure “Police Volunteer” just means you like hitting people with sticks and wearing a mustache.

A dry burger, one jar of pickled watermelon rinds, and a fantastically delicious funnel cake later, we departed the fair en route to the first stop along the infamous Billings Pub Crawl. Tune in tomorrow for that tale, dear readers!