Doc and the Bimbo Posts

A while back I was watching the news about tropical storm Henri and hurricane Ida. Not that I want to dump on the news media, but what is it about the silly drama associated with anything involving the reporting of natural disasters.  Just give us the facts.  What is happening, where it is going, how big, how many people lost power, how dangerous is it. I don’t need to see some reporter being blown around by gusting winds, or wading in flood waters, or wearing a yellow fire shirt.  Do I gain any insight into the storm, fire or flood? Oh hell no. 

I live on the central Oregon Coast. We get gale force winds every winter.  I stay indoors! If I was stupid enough to go out in the wind and rain, I’d lose my hat, my glasses would mist over, and I would get wet and cold.  Somewhere around 50 miles an hour the wind can knock me down and tree limbs can break off and hit me in the boys.   It is much more fun to watch and listen to the storm inside my dry and warm house while sipping a single malt. So why during IDA is middle aged Ali Velshi and his chrome dome standing out in the rain and wind.  He is a lot richer and smarter than I am.  Or so I thought.  Ratings you say.  Surly MSNBC they can do a little better than that. Watching CNN with Al Roker getting drenched on Bourbon Street was not any better.  And someone has got to say it.   Roker looked a lot better fat. I supposed I could switch to FOX, but I might drown in my own vomit.

Every once in a while, I have a big idea, and this one is a butte.  If they really want to improve ratings, my eyes would be glued to the weather coverage if there were bikini girls getting drench.  Not family friendly you say.  Bull! Is the Olympics family friendly? Beach volleyball!  I rest my case.  And ESPN could even get in on this idea by hosting a wet t-shirt competition during a raging rainstorm. What could be more American than that? Remember lingerie football.  I never missed a game. 

Fires get the same ridiculous coverage.  Inevitably the media will have some reporter wearing a hard hat and yellow fire shirt telling us how hard the fire crews are working. In my youth I worked summers for the US Forest Service and had the unfortunate experience of having to fight one small (15 acre) fire in rough terrain.  We hiked down into the fire in the late afternoon and fought the bitch all night.  Lucky for me it was pretty much out the next morning so that we could hike back up the mountain and get home to a nice shower and a good night’s sleep between clean sheets.  What a dirty, dangerous, and exhausting job.  On the fire I was on, I got an hour of sleep, waking up at first light to see an exhausted smoke jumper, who was sleeping too close the fire line. The soles of his boots were starting to smoke. I managed to wake him just in time.  He muttered something and moved 6 inches before passing out again.  I have nothing but respect for the people who do this year after year.  At the ranger station where I was employed, there were several veteran fire fighters. One stood out. When I met him, he was in his mid-forties, short and wiry. A man of few words and not afraid of anything.  A real hero. He and a few others from the station had been on a nasty fire a few years previous.  Sometime in the middle of the night my hero needed to pee.  The fire boss noticed him doing this and said, “better make that count”.  So, he waddled over to a hollow log whose center was a glowing mass of embers and hosed it down with his own urine. Let’s see, hot coals…urine… steam explosion.  Needless to say, having to fill out the accident report where you circled the injured part was bad enough, but to embarrass him even more, the district ranger made him give the report verbally to the absolutely gorgeous district secretary.  As stated earlier, I have tremendous respect for forest fire fighters, but I vowed at that moment not to “make it count” if I ever found myself in a similar situation.  But I digress. Back to reporters on wildfires.

Let me be clear about this.  There is no way a reporter was going to be allowed near the fire that I was on. There is no way that they could get their equipment close and if they did, they would have to spent tons of money to clean up it up afterward.  So, if they are not close to the fire, why the hard hat and fire shirt? And why do they always report the size of a fire in acres? It’s a fire not a crop and the average American has no concept of the size of an acre. 

Floods get the same stupid media treatment.  There is always a reporter in waders standing in water up to his crotch.  As a marine biologist I have spent a lot of hours in waders.  They chafe your crotch and are usually uncomfortably hot even in Pacific Northwest cold water.  After 4 hours of working the mud flats, I have pulled mine off and poured out a cup of sweat from each leg.  So here is our intrepid reporter wading around in dangerously polluted flood waters in water moccasin infested Louisiana.  Did I mention that waders inevitably leak?  Mine always did but I didn’t mind that much as I was on a pristine mudflat.  Might smell a bit, but I didn’t have to worry about getting dick rot from some nasty bacteria being carried in sewage contaminate flood waters.  So where is the cameraman?  He is 10 feet away standing on dry land.  He is not going to risk getting his camera anywhere near where it might be ruined by dirty water.  Once again, the ratings could be improved by using bikini clad girls in the waders.  Come to think of it I once had a calendar of that ilk.  Girls in waders with a fly rod in one hand and wearing almost nothing else. Then Judy found it.  Not a good use of shop wall space.

On a different note, who names these storms?  As I noted above, where I live, we occasionally get a real monster windstorm.  Had three in the 40 years I’ve live here.  We don’t name these storms. Maybe we would get more national attention if we did.  However, we would never, ever name a storm Henri (on ree).  What the fuck, that’s French!  Storm names should be scarry, Bubba, Guido, Karen, Rocky, Tonya.  With Henri, I pictured a 5- and 1/2-foot skinny guy wearing a beret with a scarf artfully wrapped around his neck, who is walking home with Bree and a baguette.  Henri is not a name that would make me want to go to an evacuation center to sleep on a cot and listen to babies cry all night.  The French have not had a real scary guy since Napoleon who by the way was 5’6”, wore a funny hat, and probably had a belly button fetish.  And even he was not that scarry as they named a deliciously layered vanilla creamed filled puff pastry after him.  Not scary.  Would you buy that pastry if it was named Adolf or Judy.  Now those are scarry names.

I don’t cook, I consume.  This used to be my mantra.  When forced to cook due to Judy’s absence or illness, I resorted to my go to favorite, Banquet Chicken and deep-fried tater tots. All I had to do was open the box, put it in the oven, and then just before the time on the box was up, I would heat up some cooking oil in a cast iron skillet and toss in the tots. I was really proud of my tater tots.  So was my grand daughter who bragged to my eldest son Wes, who is a world class chef, about them.  Not only can I out fish my son, with tater tots, I can out cook him as well.  At least at one time I could.  Then Banquet Chicken changed something.  Don’t know when or why but they lost something over the decades.  Kind of like what happen to Twinkies, as they no longer taste the same either.  I doubt that my palate has matured as I still like Velveeta.  More likely Banquet and Hostess could make an extra penny per box by substituting some GMO shit for the real ingredients.  It’s called capitalism and even though Republicans will laud its virtues, in the Banquet Chicken and Twinkie examples, it just sucked.

I could say that I miss those frozen, processed chicken days, but I really don’t.  After the kids left the nest and I had a little more discretionary income, I discovered take out.  Now when Judy does not want to cook, I quickly volunteer to go get broasted chicken from our local tavern which comes with the best beer battered fries on the planet, possibly the galaxy. I also BBQ.  Like most men I have no real talent at this. Judy preps the meat, beans, and potato salad.  She then brings the marinated and tenderized steak out to me on the deck where all I have to do is put it on the grille and try not to burn it.  If I succeed in cooking a passible steak, I get credit for the BBQ, even though Judy did all the work. You can debate about white privilege, but BBQ privilege is definitely real.

I have never mastered the “poke your forearm” technique to tell well done from raw even though Wes has tried to teach me this on several occasions.  Others have tried to convince me that a meat thermometer will also work for this important steak doneness measurement, but I manage to fuck this one up as well.  Much to my son’s disapproval, I pull out a knife and slice into the meat to check for the proper degree of redness. 

“Dad, I just showed you again how to do this!  Are you that dense?”

“Wes, I tried, really tried. I think my forearms are not as fat as yours.”

That shuts the bastard up for a while.

For years I was fully content in my role as an open the precooked box, take out and occasional BBQ chef.  Then Judy decided that I was not eating healthy, and I need to go on a Mediterranean diet. You know, zucchini, tomatoes, eggplant, died beans, chicken and sea food, none of which is deep fried.  She even cooks all of this stuff at one time in an Instantpot or worse yet in a tagine, which is a Moroccan cooking pot where the food steams in its own juice.  I am not sure, but the Moroccans may have scaled this down from a device that they used to use to torture infidels.  Is she trying to kill me for the insurance? Okay, I have lost weight so I might live a bit longer, but now I will have to suffer through the drooling years.  Occasionally, so I don’t starve to death, I get her to cook “deep fried goodness’, but that rarely happens.  (I made the mistake of letting Judy read this as I was writing.  I am getting Mediterranean for dinner tonight. Fuck me.  Next time I am writing my blog on the shitter.)  Then I discovered Jet Tila.

Jet Tila is an Asian American who is an expert in Chinese, Korean, and Thai cooking.  It all started when we visited Judy’s bother John in Northern Washington.  You might remember him from a previous blog of mine.  He is the one who hybridizes iris, bakes artisan breads, and lives in turn of the century Victorian house, known locally as the Pink Lady.  Although, in that previous blog I intimated that he might be batting left-handed, but that was in spite for him exposing my not so manly fondness of an iris I inadvertently named “delicate”. Yet again he spent 20+ years in the Navy, so I can not be sure.  

But I digress.  We were sitting around his kitchen island drinking wine, eating gourmet cheese from Slough Foods in Edison, WA.  Judy and John are elbow deep in old cookbooks.  John feeling sorry for me for being left out, handed me a more modern book by Jet Tila, “101 Asian Dishes You Should Cook Before Your Die”.  Was John really feeling sorry for me, or just pointing out how inept I am?  Regardless of his intent, the first recipe I found was for General Taos Chicken.  I love that dish.  We have a Chinese restaurant in Newport, OR which we have frequented for decades.  It is owned by a family where we have watched the kids grow up and become employees.  It is also the place where we fell in love with chow fun noodles.  I wrote a previous blog about our failed hunt in San Francisco’s China Town for chow fun noodles. Jet Tela had a recipe on how to make your own. Fuck me. I was going to be a cook.

Wes was so excited about this he gave me an expensive chef knife, showing me how to safely use it to avoid cutting my fingers off.  First time, yes, the first time I used that fucking thing, right though the thumb nail.  If he knew about this, I would never hear the end of it, but as he only reads cook books and fishing shit I am safe.

Judy and I can now have cooking discussions.  She once told me to use sesame oil to fry up some chicken for the Lo Main.  But Jet says that oil is only used for aroma and does not good for cooking as it has too low of a burn temperature.  Wow am I good at this or what?  Then I watched one of Jet’s u-tube videos.  In it he gave further instructions not in the book.  Sneaky Asian bastards, now I have the watch the fucking cooking channel!

So far, I have make Lo Main, Chow Fun, Orange Chicken, and General Tso, and our favorite Bulgogi, which I consistently and inadvertently mispronounce as bukkake. The latter is a sexual practice in which several men ejaculate on the face of woman.  Well at least I am not a gay cook.