April 18, 2003
The truth behind Dr. Atkins' fatal fall
OK, here are my theories on the death of Dr. Atkins, creator of the all-meat, all-the-time Atkins Diet. He died from head injuries suffered when he slipped on an icy sidewalk last week in front of his home in New York. The physician had been ridiculed by the medical establishment for 20 years until just recently, when the docs went "Doh! (forehead smack) Bob (Atkins) was right and we look like idiots! Eat all the meat you can choke down!"
1. He became light-headed from lack of carbohydrates.
2. Vengeful members of the AMA hired a hitman to hose down the sidewalk of front of the Atkins house just before a hard freeze.
3. Nitrite poisoning impaired his balance.
4. Angry cows spiked Atkins' morning omelet with a growth hormone that took effect just as he reached the icy sidewalk.
Posted by Bob Benz at 4:06 PM | Comments (4)
Maybe we should have made our checks out to Dick Cheney instead of the IRS
The check I mailed to the Feds on Tuesday was enought to buy 1/518 of a Patriot missile. As I dropped my return into the mail slot, I imagined the stacks of Iraqi bodies I helped create, the financial opportunities for Dick Cheney and Haliburton I'd made possible, the oil company property safeguarded by my money. (Strains of Lee Greenwood's "I'm Proud to Be An American" swell, then fade.)
Posted by Bob Benz at 3:51 PM | Comments (0)
April 17, 2003
Another good guy has done gone on ...
I learned yesteday that a good friend died recently. Paul Pershing was an incredible, fascinating guy. He'd toured the country with a rock band. Didn't lack for journalistic chops. And he was a prototypical computer geek. He's the one who turned me on to HTML back in 1994, when it was completely incomprehensible to me. Paul was patient, and together we figured out how to write the code it would take to put the Rocky Mountain News on the Web.
When I heard yesterday that he'd died, I started searching google to see if I could find an obit or something. I didn't find one then, but I did find a slew of Usenet posts he made dating back to 1989. It's so strange to read these posts now, knowing he's dead but that his words live on in cyberspace.
I learned a lot from you, Paul, and I'll never forget you. Rest in peace, old buddy.
BTW: During the Google search, I also found a Rocky article about when we launched the site.
Posted by Bob Benz at 2:47 PM | Comments (2)
April 15, 2003
Onward Chistian soldiers ...
Looks like those wacky evangelical Christians are gearing up for a new crusade. This could be where it gets interesting ...
Posted by Bob Benz at 9:30 AM | Comments (2)
April 11, 2003
Saddam Hussein, Britney Spears fan
News reports say there was a poster of Britney Spears on the wall of one of Saddam Hussein's now-ruined palaces. Britney frickin' Spears! This, in a country where they require women to wrap themselves in head-to-toe chadors. Are these guys conflicted or what?
Posted by Bob Benz at 7:15 PM | Comments (3)
Farm sluts
No, it isn't porn. But it's damn funny and you should be able to watch it at work without putting your job in peril. Check out this video. You'll need Quicktime, sound and about 20 minutes to see it, but it's worthwhile.
Posted by Bob Benz at 5:19 PM | Comments (0)
Another Holy Cow: Killer Monkeys, Talking Dogs, and the Artichoke with a Heart of Gold
Having just turned 36, I've identified two serious differences between me and David Berkowitz, the infamous Son of Sam. One big difference is that I'm not a serial killer (of humans), and the second is that while I routinely have long, meaningful conversations with my dog (among others), she doesn't talk back. This arrangement suits me fine. The Gender-Neutral Transcendence of the Universe Which Binds All Living Things in Its All-Encompassing If Somewhat Impersonal Oneness [that would be "God" for you rubes]--er, God knows what kinds of shenanigans these mischievous critters might force me into if I gave them audience. Besides, I'd rather give orders than take them. Better to think for yourself.
When my vegetarian co-workers get on me for killing animals (fish, deer, turkey, the odd squirrel, rabbit, or duck over many years) and eating them, I usually issue my standard reminder that as I have too much respect for plant life to harm it in any way, much less consume it, my ethics and principles demand I avoid the consumption of helpless plant life. Who made a spine, movement, and vocal cords the line of demarcation, anyway?
I simply cannot stomach the veritable pogrom of a Tossed Garden Salad. Don't get me started on casseroles. My wife's a little miffed at the state of our lawn (I'm no mass murderer), and I refuse to allow a garden on my property. I will not allow the vivisection of rosebushes on my land. MOST people might think of gardens as petting zoos. All I see is a concentration camp surrounded by concertina wire. Okay, chicken wire; same thing. I routinely wear my Save the Celery t-shirt to church. I am a charter member of the Friends of Radicchio. The only bumper sticker on my car reads SALSA IS MURDER.
So I've given up vegetables for good. I've been Veggie Free for several years now, and it's changed my life, not to mention my digestion. It happened suddenly, unexpectedly, just after my wife and I returned from our honeymoon. She cooked me a baked potato to go with a big slab of rare roast beef, and I simply could not look that tater in the eyes (all 47 of them) and cut into it with my knife. To do so would have, by then, felt like cutting myself open and slathering my innards with stick butter, hard and cold from the fridge. So I ate an extra helping of the sizzling meat that was still practically mooing, and went to sleep that night with a clear conscience.
I don't mean to imply it's been easy. I've had to give up my beloved beer (all that grain! The horror!) and am now forced to choke down lots of chocolate milk with every meal, but principles are meaningless without personal sacrifice. It's simply the life I've chosen.
Not eating meat would be like having a purely platonic relationship with my wife. Of course I love her, hold her in high esteem, respect her as a fellow sentient being. We have long conversations deep into the night about very, very meaningful things, and we fish, camp, hike, play cards, and do chores together. We play ball with our children and take turns bathing the dog. We go on long walks at dusk and marvel at our blessings. Sometimes I cook, sometimes she does. I have been known to fold socks, and she works (a little). She is truly my life partner and best friend. She's smarter than me. But if she's not really, really amorous on a regular basis, there's going to be trouble.
I once read an article where a bowhunter at a cocktail party was discussing his activites in the field with some guests. One woman recoiled in horror hearing him talk of his fellow bowhunters. "You hunt animals with sharpened sticks from trees?" she asked, mildly outraged. "What are you, killer monkeys?" The author says he considered this for a moment and finally agreed. "An apt description of homo sapiens," he decides, too late to say so, however. At least animals have a chance to evade or bite you. Plants can't even run (tumbleweeds don't count, smartass).
So when you're eating that spinach salad this evening at that trendy little bistro you flock to every payday, maybe you should think twice before drowning it in caustic VINEGAR and oil (what kind of monster ARE you, anyway?)...think before scooping guacamole with your dried, pounded, suffocated wheat corpses (go ahead, call em tortilla chips, we all know what they really are...aborted wheat germ suffocating in sealed plastic bags), chewing it all like the guiltless predator you are and washing it down with muy cervezas, remember that all those vegetables were once free, blowing in the wind, stretching toward the sun with vigor, trying to evolve into the first head of iceberg lettuce that could move about on its own, the first artichoke to compose a line of iambic pentamenter, the first tomato to transcend its crucifixion on those garden stakes and ask forgiveness for its tormentors. And ask yourself...what have I become?
We live in a fallen yet mysteriously beautiful world. Life is short. Eat more meat.
Posted by Bob Benz at 11:38 AM | Comments (2)
April 10, 2003
It's time for summer camp ...
Well, Chris, after long and sometimes heated discussions, your mother and I have decided to ship you off to a nice secular humanist summer camp in the Smokies. Maybe that will straighten you out. God knows, we haven't been able to.
Which gets me waxing nostalgic (I do that a lot, don't I?)
I remember my one brush with summer camp -- Camp Rosary. A nice Catholic retreat somewhere out in the woods of Pennsylvania. My brother Steve and I were loaded on a bus and whisked away from home for the first extended time in our young lives. I still have vivid memories of that place. Raiding other cabins. Sack races. The canteen where we bought snacks. The spiffy Jesus crafts. And these strange women who played folk tunes around the campfire each night. I remember them playing "Leaving on a Jetplane" over and over and over ...
It was only toward the end of camp that we found out these women were nuns. They sure didn't act like the sinister Sister Mary Lucille of St. Anselm Grade School fame. They seemed, well, normal. Even hippiefied, in a nice, safe Catholic kinda way. More Vatican II fallout, I guess.
Posted by Bob Benz at 8:34 PM | Comments (1)
Another Holy Cow: Poet Zombie Cookoff at Talladega
"Life is too short," Jim Harrison writes in Just Before Dark, "for me to approach a meal with the mincing steps of a Japanese prostitute." Having read his collection of nonfiction three times now, I'm pretty sure he means it. I said I'm pretty sure, but then I'm a Christian Humanist Isolationist Redneck Swine living just outside the shadow of the Talladega Super Speedway, not a Poet Zombie Chef and self-confessed "Food Bully" traversing the republic in a red Land Cruiser. Unfortunately, this ranks me just below a "hanging chad" in importance as a book reviewer, but I never cared for Florida's Atlantic coast anyhow. Give me the mullet toss at the Flora-Bama any day of the week...
But the book. It's a collection of nonfiction essays written over a period of at least twenty years. Divided into three sections--the first on Food, the second on Travel and Sport (mostly hunting and fishing), and the third on Literary Matters--it makes for a good weekender. I typically breeze through the first two, but get bogged down in section three. For that I need Sunday. In short, I like them all but the section on food and cooking is by far his best. His descriptions of brook trout sizzling over hot coals had me reaching for the fly rod...no small feat considering I was sitting at home near the Coosa River at the time, swatting mosquitos the size of pteradons, hundreds of miles from the nearest trout stream, much less a brookie. Likewise his descriptions of woodcock, chicken thighs, rabbit, and duck. If you can get past the name-dropping, you'll smell them too, right off the page. But there is a lot of name-dropping, my one complaint.
Harrison's books, novels, poems, and screenplays/movies are possibly what Kurtz would have written had he made it back, put the past behind him, gave it the ol' college try, and settled down to a bourgeoise life as a haberdasher in partnership with Marlowe, who gives up the sea and becomes a simple cobbler, his livelihood tied to dry land and walking distances. No more adventures for him, thanks, and that goes for reading about it, too. Take your Ahab and shove it.
Such an extreme back and forth between the harshest objectivity in fiction and poetry and movie scripts, and most subjective, participatory journalism in his essays and articles, Harrison's twisted but just sane enough that he could either be Hunter S. Thompson's saner older brother, or one of George Romero's gruesome (but oddly loveable!) cannibals. And be honest...sitting there in the dark with the tv glowing, you're rooting for the walking dead. You root for Harrison, too, but you're also pretty sure you don't want to run into him in a dark galley...kitchen, that is.
Harrison in the kitchen or sitting at table does recall the Dead trilogy, or maybe NASCAR: you don't look for cooking or eating tips from Harrison for the same reason you don't emulate Dale Jr. on the interstate...it would kill you, or someone else. If you're looking at things properly (of course you are!) you would not be surprised to see him in a George Romero flick, trying to hoist a huge roasted leg of something dripping grease to his teeth with one hand while fending off the walking dead with the other. The tendency is to gawk, recoil, laugh, be amused, in that order. As a self-labeled "food bully," his tales of eating with Orson Welles or driving his daughter to tears by the sheer volume of labor intensive goodies he cooks up (and demands she consume) for a simple wedding party will shock and delight. I just dare you not to hear, "They're coming to get you, Barbara," in the back of your mind. How much "heavily truffled woodcock" is too much? Doesn't matter. With essays entitled, "A Plaster Trout in Worm Heaven" and "Log of the Earthtoy Drifthumper" beckoning, you'll turn the page anyway, if only in anticipation of witnessing him fighting his way through a zombie cook-off at Republican HQ with nothing but a cracked wooden spoon and some gazpacho. Reading Harrison changes you in annoying ways, and before long you find that you wouldn't think less of him, even if you saw him fighting with Jeff Gordon and hordes of flesh eating zombies over a bottle of barbecue sauce in the infield at Talladega.
Like true horror or auto racing, you know it ain't pretty, but you can't look away.
Posted by Bob Benz at 2:49 PM | Comments (2)
Clarification to previous entry
The headline on the previous entry should read "Fucking Southern Baptists." I tried to judiciously use asterisks to spell the f-word, but they were edited out by the program, apparently.
Posted by Bob Benz at 1:16 PM | Comments (2)
Jesus, deliver us from your followers
F*ing Southern Baptists:
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0314/mondo3.php
Posted by Bob Benz at 1:14 PM | Comments (0)
April 9, 2003
Another Holy Cow: Monuments and Progress
Watching various stone and bronze Saddams fall on television today got me to thinking about which monuments and statues I'd like to see decomissioned here at home...not to represent the end of an era, regime, or anything like that, but just because I don't particularly care for them.
At the top of the list is Mount Rushmore, the political equivalent of the world's largest ball of dryer lint. It's also a marvelous technical feat, but when I'm playing Trivial Pursuit I can't ever remember all four names at once. However, it IS oddly appropriate when you remind yourself that P.T. Barnum is as much a Founding Father as Washington, Jefferson, and what's-his-name, even if he did arrive late on the scene. While we occasionally succumb to the cult of personality (how can you not root for "Roooo-ben" from Birmingham?), we also try hard to resist it, so turning former leaders, however great or not, into big stone idols gives me a bad case of the totalitarian heebie-jeebies and makes me feel like I'm in Red Square in the sixties, or Easter Island in the days of the Druids (?) with all of their semi-cannibalistic merrymaking and human sacrifice, which definitley ain't good. At the very least it's hard on the digestion and bad for morale.
Next on the list would have to be the Lincoln Memorial. Lincoln gets too much credit, in my opinion, for being treated as a sort of Cro-Magnon father of the civil rights movement who was ahead of his time. Really dig into it. He wasn't. I look at the Lincoln Memorial and think of Leningrad.
There are more but you get the idea. On the other hand, I love the Statue of Liberty, the Washington Monument, and the Statue of Vulcan atop Red Mountain here in good old Birmingham, USA. Please note that these are all abstract art or personifications of ideas, not the immortalizing of mortal men in stone and bronze that borders on some hyper-nationalistic deification of our political errand boys. I love Lady Liberty for the ideals and history she represents...the Washington Monument because as an unrepentant sports fan I like to pretend it's either a big index finger that says, "We're No. 1," or a long, well-manicured middle finger raised in permanent vicarious high salute to all the bozos on Capitol Hill from all of us in the hinterlands. I routinely give them the finger from my home in the rural south, but they choose to ignore me.
To me Vulcan, in Birmingham, is supreme. While he's mostly fully clothed on the front, his hindquarters jut out all exposed and gleaming for all the suburbs south of the city. This continually reminds me, at the very least, that there's always more to the story. Ironically, the Roman god of the forge and metallurgy has been removed from his pedestal in pieces and taken down Highway 280 on huge flatbed semis to Alexander City for "cleaning and repairs." Since I live out that way, I've passed his pelvis in the fast lane on my way home from work.
It's somewhat disconcerting, but change always is.
Posted by Bob Benz at 4:18 PM | Comments (5)
Newcomers ...
I thought it might be fun to mix things up a bit. I've given frequent commenters Leanne and Chris (a k a Christian Humanist Redneck Isolationist Swine in Bama) the ability to create and edit their own posts here so they can speak out without just responding to the bunk I post.
If you'd like access, let me know and I'll give you a username/login.
Posted by Bob Benz at 1:18 PM | Comments (11)
April 8, 2003
13 ways of looking at my job ...
Who needs blackbirds when you have a degenerate secular humanist running around loose in the Deep South. Click here and look for the "13 ways of looking at my job" post. Hilarious.
Posted by Bob Benz at 8:31 AM | Comments (0)
April 7, 2003
A Maggot
I just finished John Fowles novel "A Maggot." It's an incredible work, set in 18th century England. It begins with objective narration, giving the impression of a movie camera tracking "a forlorn little group of travellers" riding across the landscape. The narration shifts, taking the form of legal testimony, periodical clippings, omniscient narration. The 20th century author occasionally inserts himself but mostly reserves his thoughts to frame the beginning and end of the book.
A maggot, of course, is the larval form of a fly. But in the 18th century it also meant a dance tune without title and tracking a theme. The novel is the latter. And, perhaps, the former, in some senses. Fowles riffs off his beginning image. This is one of those stories that stayed with me when I put the book down. The characters and story were vivid.
I came to Fowles through John Gardner, another of my favorite writers ("Grendel" is an incredible telling of Beowulf from the monster's perspective). It didn't take me long to get hooked.
Posted by Bob Benz at 9:40 PM | Comments (0)