Recently in Mops, Socks, and Chardonnay Category

Well, I guess I should devote a few spare words to the laetsts food craze sweeping the Intratubes - Fried Beer.

Frankly, I'm disappointed.

Yes, I know that I have, in the past espoused the fervent belief, backed up by a lifetime of research, that all the best stuff is deep fried. Preferably, battered and deep fried. With cheese sauce on top. And a sprinkle of kosher salt.

But somehow, for some reason, I'm just not feeling the love here with regards to deep fried beer. I'm not sure what the problem is. Sure, there's the starchy outer shell, which after frying is sure to be crunchy and oily. But inside it's beer, man. And I just don't think that's right.

I'm not a strict constructionist in the American mode, believing that the only good beer is a light, almost transparent lager, which is cooled to a temperature that is exactly 0.7 degrees above freezing (and has negligible flavor, the better to prevent interference with efficient alcohol absorption). I have, at times, when living however temporarily among the natives of the English Isles, imbibed a beer that is neither transparent nor served at a temperature that is within spitting distance of the normal conditions above the Arctic Circle. The beer in question, which to be honest is actually best described as ale, might even be construed to be just cool, slightly below the ambient temperature in the barroom or 'pub' as the locals are wont to describe their drinking establishments.

So, compared to the average American, I think I can say that I have rather expanded horizons when it comes to imbibing beer, and I can also say with pretty perfect authority that consuming any beer, even Guinness, immediately after immersion in a vat of boiling oil is just not cricket. Now having a beer on the side of a mound of whatever deep fried snack food you care to clog your arteries with - I'm right there with you, buddy, and are you going to have that last fried Ding Dong? Flamingly hot beer squirting into your mouth after you bite down on these beer raviolis - I'm going to pass.

Now beer popsicles, that's something worth trying!

I have a confession. Yes, it is yet another confession. Yes, I have a lot of confessions. I'm a lapsed Catholic. It's our thing. We never get over that whole sit in a dark cubicle and tell a man who wears a robe your innermost secrets. Wow, when you write it down like that it sounds really, kind of, skeevy.

Anyway, this isn't really a confession, as a much as it is a cry for help. At least that's Mary's stance. Me, I think it's just thinking outside the box. If I wanted help I'd just say - 'help'. But in this case I'll just say - 'cheese'.

I want to buy a cheese wheel. A really big cheese wheel. Like one the size of a monster truck tire - that kind of cheese wheel. I think it would be awesome. I'd put it on top of the kitchen table, which providentially is round. And they say I don't think ahead. I'm not sure who 'they' are, but they're always around. Of course, since the size cheese wheel I have in mind is something like two feet thick we'll have to change out the kitchen chairs for bar stools. Mary doesn't like sitting on bar stools. I'm still not sure how I met her, since at the time I was a firm supporter of sitting on bar stools and did it every chance I could. So anyway, she'll probably have to go eat her meals in the dining room. Me, I'm going to sup on top of the cheese wheel.

As the primary meal purveyor in the Waring household, I occasionally find myself completely bereft of ideas for the evening meal. More to the point, I sometimes find myself rather wanting in motivational impetus to cook. This wouldn't be a problem in most parts of the country, but we live out in the sticks and when six o'clock rolls around I usually can't pop over to the nearest fast food place for a sumptuous repast served in paper bags, nor does anybody deliver pizza out here. Well, there was a local pizza joint that seemed promising at one point, but after we read in the local newsletter that the owners promised that they'd be back in business as soon as they cleared up that little misunderstanding with Board of Health, we decided against adding them to speed dial.

In a situation where your significant other will be sure to shortly begin to wonder where her next meal is coming from may I offer the following suggestion:

Movie Dinner Night!

Yes, you too can make your spouse happy and show him or her how inventive you are, while getting out of the arduous task of actually preparing a well balanced and healthy meal. If you're really good, you can serve what is essentially junk food with nary a complaint, indeed in many cases you be awarded with accolades.

In a little over or less than six weeks, I'm not much good with dates, and I don't like to tie myself down with a schedule or anything, I will be attempting my first summiting of Pike's Peak. Summiting is what we he-man mountain climber types say when we hike to the top of a mountain. As opposed to saying we hiked to the top of the mountain. It's important to know all the jargon, you see. And, well, technically it's also not exactly my first summiting per se, since we've been up there at least five or six times, because everyone who comes to visit us here in the Rockies wants to ride the Cog Railway to the top of Pikes Peak, and we usually go with them. The donuts in the gift shop on top are to die for.

Anyway, this time will be slightly different because I'm going to walk to the top. It'll be a monumental feat comparable with Scott conquering the South Pole, though hopefully with a little less hypothermia, starvation, and death.

Unlike previous hiking expeditions I'm taking a completely different approach to this one. Back in the day, which means when I was young and the birds sang and the sun shone, I was wont to accept invitations to treks across the American West with studied insouciance and perhaps, though I will deny it vigorously, a bit of naïveté. For instance, my preparation for a hike deep into the Grand Canyon from the North Rim (which is the opposite and less salubrious side then the one tourists are familiar with) was a program of steady and mildly excessive beer drinking and cigarette smoking.

Deep from the depths of American product promotion ideas come a new and horrifying twist on that perennial breakfast icon - the Poptart. Now, to be honest the humble poptart really isn't the worst idea for a breakfast food that anyone has ever devised. That would be this - the Jimmy Dean Pancake and Sausage on a Stick. And not just any pancake, but chocolate chip pancake. I'd still go with Poptarts ranking in the top five bads though.

According to the New York Times, and they should know since the story is about Times Square, which is really named after the New York Times, a little factoid that I thought I'd just throw in there. And not just to pad out the entry any. Not much. At. All.

Returning to NYT articles and better writing than you'll see here in a month of Mondays, there will be a new Poptart food emporium in Times Square. For reasons that escape me, and any right thinking person in the country. It's Poptarts. They're frankly crap. Even after you've toasted them. And let them cool down for ten or fifteen minutes because let's face it, you'll only bite into a Poptart fresh out of the toaster once in your life, and the scarring that you'll experience as the molten fake fruit and sugar lava streams agonizingly across your taste buds will encourage you to dunk them in a bowl of ice water before consuming from that point on.

Marmite stocks have fallen. Marmite prices have risen. Disaster stalks outside your door. Is it locked? Are you prepared? Can you be prepared for a potential disaster of this magnitude? Can anyone? Are there any more mock terror questions I can ask? Are there? Doesn't that beer on the left look cold and refreshing?

So over the weekend there was a news report that a jar of Marmite is now more expensive than a gallon of gas. Since we're talking British gas, that means it's really expensive, though we don't know how expensive because British gas is sold by the liter, not the gallon. Actually the litre. So even the Brits don't know how expensive Marmite is, but it's a lot.

This is really quite interesting because Marmite is the next best thing to edible industrial waste. Certainly the taste won't fool you into believing it's made from flower petals, orange blossom honey, and a sprinkle of fairy dust. It tastes like it looks. Dark, dark brown. Almost black. Gunky. Acrid and acidic. Well, those last are actually tastes as opposed to appearances. But take my work for it, if you were cleaning the traps at a large scale commercial recycling facility - Marmite is exactly what the stuff plugging the traps would look like. Maybe a little worse.

In travel related plans, summer is drawing to a close. While the nation as a whole has sweltered, roasted, and boiled, we've been having a somewhat cooler season than usual up here in the High Rockies. John Denver country. Well, it could be Hunter Thompson country, but he was mucho loco and I'm getting a little long in the tooth to take up excessive and irresponsible drug abuse and reckless gunplay. On the other hand, if we're talking John Denver, well, less said the better, I'm thinking.

Since it has been a couple or three years since our last visit to the Disney EPCOT International Food and Wine Festival, and because Mary wants to avoid the traditional first snow of autumn which usually occurs on or around October 1st, we'll soon be off to Orlando. To share, with our fellow Americans, the underappreciated art of sluicing vast amounts of perspiration off our bodies because, although people here in the mountains will be bundling up as the first brisk zephyrs of winter approach, in Central Florida it'll still be the third circle of hell. With monstrously large mutant skeeters thrown in for good measure.

For the uninitiated, the Food and Wine Festival is a wild bacchanalia where wine flows from fountains large and small, whole roasted oxen are carried through the streets by laughing youths to be deposited on vast tables groaning under the weight of the richly sauced provender that is supplied for free to the happy populace. Oh, according to Mary that's the VIP events. The little people have to be content to stand in line and pay for everything, including standing in line. Sorry.

Did you know there was a National Ice Cream Month? Neither did I. I suppose there's a National day, week, or month for pretty much everything nowadays. Especially, things or services that can be exchanged for cash. But as it is ice cream we're talking about here, wouldn't it actually make more sense for it to be a National Ice Cream Week, or even an Ice Cream Day, cause ice cream melts, but perhaps I'm applying a bit too much logic here.

Anyway, Consumerist links to an article from TheGloss, a site I haven't heard of before and based on articles like Gallery: Hot Dudes With Mustaches, I probably won't be spending a lot of time here in the future. Not that I have anything against hot dudes with mustaches, but since that horrible day back in ought-three when Mary declared the 'stache had to go, I've not felt right ever since looking over the hirsute offerings on other men's upper lips. It feels like I'm ogling their wives or something.

With regards to non-mustache news, in honor of the aforementioned overly long celebration of creamy, icy goodness, TheGloss has put together a list of the 10 most unusual flavors. Now, I thought I'd write a little on this particular subject because before she met me, ice cream was Mary's truest and deepest love. Nowadays, of course, ice cream is still number one, but my gumbo runs a not too distance second. Or is it my mojitos? Anyway, I'm pretty sure I'm in there too, certainly in the top twenty, at any rate.

Mary politely interrupted my perusal of the latest issue of Irradiated Foods Monthly to importune me to write something - anything. I declared that I had checked my larder of article ideas - and the cupboard was bare, my love! So she told me to get downstairs and get cracking on the Mac and write something, anything. Try food! You like food!

As a matter of fact, I do like food. And I like writing about food for maybe ten minutes or so and then I feel peckish and I remember that there's a very nice gorgonzola up in the fridge and some tasty crackers that it would go well with and maybe just a small glass or two of the Beaujolais, and then there goes the diet. But in those ten minutes I can crank up the turbocharged keyboard and dash out an article or three for you, dear reader.

Food, Ah, wonderful food. We were discussing food, right? Yes, well, we have travelled a bit in our time and have a few stories about some rather unusual meals we've sampled so I thought we might share one or five. Or more if I can't come up with anything else. So starts a series.

You know, part of the fun of this blog is searching for, and writing about, things that are strange, unusual, and sometimes beyond the pale. Occasionally, you find something that is not just beyond the pale, but beyond the ken of civilized man.

I bring you, The End of History Ale. It's not the Ale That Won For Yale. It's not Beer. Hooray Beer! It's not even Beer So Bad it's Good. It's the end. Period. Finis. Catch you on the flip side. Sayonara, slim.

I love this stuff. It's political incorrectness bottled and best served cold. So many things here are just wrong . Is it the fact that the alcohol content is so high that it makes whiskey seem like bottled water? Foreign bottled water, like Avian or something. Could it be the fact that it sells for roughly $750 a bottle depending on today's exchange rate? And with only a dozen bottles brewed, it's not exactly going to help out with Great Britain's balance of trade. Or could it be, just possibly, that they're selling the bottles incased in dead stuffed animals? Rodents actually. I think a stoat is a rodent. Well it's a type of weasel, which is close enough. I guess they ran out of squirrels and stoats and had to pack the last bottle in a rabbit. Oh, how the other buyers will laugh at the guy who ends up with the stuffed rabbit!

And the buyers, if indeed there are any, will all be guys. You just know they will. Because this is just the kind of thing to appeal to the type of guy who has too much money to fit in a bank vault, and foolish enough to think something like this is a) an investment and/or b) drinkable. Probably single guys too, because I'm pretty sure there's a relative paucity of wives that will agree willingly to allow their hubby to display this particular acquisition on the mantle.

And only a man could come up with a slogan like "eccentricity, artistry and rebellion; changing the general perception of beer, one stuffed animal at a time." Honestly, guys, doesn't it almost bring a tear to your eye? Guys?