Pork Sliders

Gordon Ramsay has told me (via Kitchen Nightmares) that there are always trends in restaurants that need to be avoided as you probably aren't the git with the best ones out there. The trend in Portland is Pulled Pork sandwiches. These little messy love cakes are awful first-date food, but they seem to have captured the hearts of the NW. Unfortunately, there can only be one King. It is not 50 Plates in the Pearl District, or that brewery near 35th and Hawthorne, but rather, Standford's down by the waterfront. Go there, get a plate of these squishy little sandwiches with slaw and munch to your heart's content. I command you.

Local Produce and the Women Who Love Them

These blackberries may be stunted and fast on the way to being rotting corpses, but they remind me of fall. This will be of some comfort when the yellow leaves have turned to dust and bitter wind strikes fear into those who must scrape frost from their cars.

I seem to be in a fatalist sensibility at the moment.

I love me some hollywood men...

Shhh... Don't tell anyone, but Pixar had a screening to test two animated films on Monday in Vancouver, WA. Guess they figure this suburban wasteland mimics middle america without having to stray too far from a trusty metropolis.

It was also my virgin temp assignment. If all temping is this good for people watching, I am signing up for life. The whole thing was so James Bond meets State and Main it made my mouth water. We were overlorded by two men who resembled, respectively, Seymour Hoffman as truman capote with a malaise issue, and a weird Micheal Flatley standing in the wind upswept hair guy. They muttered, they adjusted their designer jeans, spoke of level 5 special watchgroups, pissed off the overpuffed security guards, and by the end of the evening were heavy into infighting over the power struggles inherent in a group of travel weary narcissists.

Meanwhile, I was forced to hand out 800 bags of popcorn to equally narcissistic target demographs who felt perfectly in the right bitching about getting their free popcorn too early or whining that they might have to see a movie for free that they wouldn't have picked themselves. Seriously, if you can't handle the ramifications of beggars can't be choosers, you probably shouldn't beg. Plus, there was this awful scene that I foretold coming once I realized I had to ask people to give me their white ticket in exchange for the bag of popcorn:

Me: Can I have your white ticket please?

Idiot: Just the white one?

Me: It's the popcorn ticket.

Idiot: Isn't that kind of (pause, furrow brow) ticket-ist? (laugh, readjust pants, significant look at harrassed popcorn worker that says 'you want to sleep with me, don't you?')

I feel sorry for the people that actually do sleep with them. Can you imagine their pillow talk?

{in.sert} some insightful zen quote

Does anyone really read zen shit past the first few words?

We are the grass that grows along the freeways...in ways that are free.

I think it's time to start adding pix...

I photoshopped the horns off my sister's evil cat. Here she is. Proof the devil exists...and is surprisingly cute.

5K Beetches.

There was a run today, one that required you run like hell. And, oh yes I did. I kitted myself up like a cop-impersonating stripper, snuck out of my front door at the ungodly hour of 0730AM past the apartment filled with impressionable little white trash children and headed for Portland.

Honestly, it felt two parts "walk of shame" one part "wtf am I back in high school?", shaken, not stirred.

So, then god tries thwarting me with fog, but my car triumphs. And the whole way down the 5, I'm having these extended metaphor daydreams where I am arresting during a routine traffic violation for impersonating an officer in a uniform with the name "sargeant sexy" stitched on the lapel. Freudian analysis reveals a deep fear that I am, in fact impersonating my life and will be found out at any moment.

So I finally get to Portland after getting lost for the 700th time since I've gotten here. For those of you who don't know, Portland is designed to resemble an MC Esher drawing with bridges where the stairs should be. And it's frickin' 39 degrees out (I know, Mischa, my scion told me) and I am running around downtown portland in spandex. 5K later and several mysterious pains throughout all of my leg tissues and we're handed beer and hot wings at 930 in the morning. Really, who planned that?

Point is: I finished. I kick ass.

Okay, that's two points.

I have conquered egg drop soup...

As I get older and closer to senility, my opinion on soup has become much more pronounced. I assume this in in preparation for when my teeth fall out and I am forced to call 5PM a "late" dinner. The one thing that pisses me off mightily about soup is the frickin' salt content. You'd think human beings required salt licks for the crap I have eaten that is supposed to be french onion or egg drop soup. So I made my own. And it was so much better. No salt added. I wish I possessed a servile nature, then I could go into chef-itude and open my own restaurant. However, my forays into the food industry have generally resulted in me be asked to leave or suffer being fired.

Fear not, dear readers, I just burnt those places to the ground.