Anger Burger

The captain and I have been secretly working on a tabletop card-game OF OUR OWN INVENTION for the past few months. It is called “Bad Neighbors” and is thematically centered around murderating your neighbors before they do the same to you.* It’s fun to play and easy to learn- we designed it with the idea that you should be able to pick it up and play after already having consumed adult beverages. A game between two people takes about 10 minutes; up to 5 people can play at once.

Yesterday we got the first real print of it (beta version 1.o) in the mail and it looks boss (see above: photo by the CAPTAIN).

Having already tested it in the rough stage (with the help of some enthusiastic friends), we’re moving on to test phase 2, where we answer the question: can people figure this out without us coaching them, using only the included instructions?

In the meantime, we’ll be moving forward with cleaning up some errors and finalizing the art. Did I mention there are more than 69 unique pieces of art in the game, hand-drawn by SUNDAY and myself (MIKE the VIKING)? Pret-ty awe-some. The actual art is less blurry than the above photo.

Like so.

The game will be up for sale once we solve the instructions issue and decide exactly how to print it. We will either be using THE GAMECRAFTER (a kickass indie-game print-on-demand service; this is where we made the beta deck) or traditional printing (supported by a kickstarter, most likely). There are pluses and minuses to each.

We’re taking volunteers for beta testers (local is best). Drop a comment if interested. Or if you want to be on the “I will totally buy this thing as soon as you start taking moneys” list. Otherwise, stay tuned.

Until Ragnarok, I remain:

MIKE the VIKING

*using vampires, zombies, aliens, and demons. we like to keep our murderizing clean and classylike. 

I urgently need to show you something.  It is not related to anything at all, except inasmuch as we all care about the advancement of humanity: the internet has achieved, for me, the pinnacle of everything.  It is called Fashion It So.

It is difficult for me to be funny after reading this blog, because it sucks all the funny out of the any nearby consciousness in a predatory effort to use the funny for itself.  It is a vampire who bit me and drained me of all my wit, and I write this as the remainder of humor drains from my body, unable to sustain me.  But I don’t mind, because that vampire is so magnificent and sparkling that I want it to take my funny.

From a sheer copywriting standpoint, it’s genius.  Mike the Viking is paid to teach copywriting, and I suggested that he just instruct his students to read Fashion It So and try to emulate it.  But then he pointed out that he wouldn’t get paid anymore, and I sort of need that half of our finances, so that was that.

The best thing that happened on St. Patrick’s Day (other than my friend drunkenly watching Leprechaun 3 and pausing to tell me earnestly “This movie is much more informative than I thought it was going to be!”)  was someone hauling out a one pound sack of caffeine and offering me some.

One pound sack of caffeine.

Now, clearly it’s not hard to get caffeine — it’s hard to keep from consuming it, really.  But I drink several caffeinated beverages a day, and in anticipation of being even more poor than I am now, I’ve already resigned myself to not buying any more Red Bull.  It’s just too expensive, but it’s the only energy drink I like other than coffee.

And coffee, let’s talk about coffee.  I am good for one, maybe two cappuccinos in the morning before strange things happen to my Crohn’s butt.  Not good things.  I love coffee and refuse to give it up, but it’s taken years of self-brainwashing to be happy with merely a single cup in the mornings.  Happy in the same way that Oprah claims she’s happy with her body but still brings up dieting in every conversation ever.

But you guys, I’m tired.  I’m tired almost always.  Solution:

I ordered 250g of pure caffeine off eBay BECAUSE THAT SOUNDS TOTALLY SAFE and it arrived as two 100g packets and one 50g packet, which was not how the package was described or photographed, but it is actually better than a single 250g packet.  The 50g packet is going into my emergency/apocalypse bugout bag, the other two packets are going into the kitchen cupboard.

I did some research, and it turns out that bodybuilders¹ use caffeine in big doses and with some good science behind it, one point of which is that it increases blood flow, which is good for muscles.  Clearly I do not give a shit about muscles.  But the point is this: bulk caffeine is actually easy and safe to acquire, and I probably didn’t need to get it from the internet, I could have gone to a Super Supplements or a Vitamin Shoppe or something.  Still, these guys were selling it for a good deal, and were one of the few bulk ones that bragged about being USP, FCC Grade.

Anyway, caffeine!  It feels finer than wheat flour, more like talc to the touch.  And you mix it into whatever you want, which means of course that I’m putting it in my whiskey.

The order came with this hilarious micro-scoop, but it requires like 10 of these little scoops to equal a Red Bull.  I could have earned the $2 needed to buy that Red Bull in the time it took me to carefully measure out a dozen of these scoops.

The thing to do is to order a 1/16 teaspoon, which is the equivalent of about 125mg of caffeine, which is still maybe less than a cup of drip coffee.  Mixed with your beverage of choice, you’ve got yourself some frugal wakey-wakey time.  I’m trying to find the conversion I read earlier, but it appears that they consider a “dose” to be 250mg, which would mean there were 1,000 doses in this order.  And if we’re actually taking half that, then there are 2,000 doses.  Two thousand!  Wait, is that math right?  Who cares, it’s still like a penny a dose.  Heart attack party!

¹ I originally mistyped this as ‘babybuilders’ which made me laugh and laugh.

I was writing a post about my mom’s birthday over the last few days when she told me that Chef, the unnamed woman who cooks on my favorite cooking show of all time, was in a very serious accident.  Needless to say, it derailed my writing thoughts entirely.

At the end of the above video is the following message:

First, I would like to say thank you to all of our viewers for supporting our show.  Today I am afraid I have some very sad news. On January 15th, Chef sustained serious injuries while riding her bicycle in the suburbs of Tokyo. She was rushed to the ICU by helicopter. I certainly understand your worries and concerns. She is now in stable condition, but unfortunately I am unable to give any further information at this time. I would like to apologize in advance for not being able to respond to your messages during this tragic turn of events.

Cooking with Dog is my primary source of Japanese cooking education, as well as being a bi-monthly treat I look forward to with great enthusiasm; to say I am upset about Chef’s accident is an understatement.  I love her.  She is my secret Japanese mom. The careful and economical movements of her hands, the tidy and proficient way she navigates her micro-kitchen, her soft speech, all of it is a great joy to me.  I wish her the speediest of recoveries, and I invite you to do the same.

About once every two or three years my friends Yuko and Sol invite a group over for family-style sushi dinner, and I basically didn’t even let Mike get off the phone when Sol invited us before I was backing out of the driveway and headed for Seattle.  If more people were prescribed sushi parties instead of Xanax the world would be a better place.

Perhaps the best part is that they encourage making hand rolls so that all of that frustrating sushi-rolling can be abandoned in favor of mashing food into your food-hole.  Honestly, it’s very clever: just fold sheets of seaweed into quarters and they break apart into perfect squares.  Smear some sushi rice on each square.  Fold/roll/taco into any shape you want and then eat.  They’re good for two or three bites, so by the time they start falling apart you’re already done and ready for the next one.

Also, each time Yuko’s dinnerware just slays me.  Everyone’s plates had different little Totoro images on them.

Eel.  Stop avoiding it.  It’s delicious and soft and not fishy.  And if you order it at a Japanese restaurant the chances are that it will be covered in a teriyaki-like sauce, which makes everything edible.

Sol’s famous spicy tuna is still a mystery to me, even though he’s told me how to make it half a dozen times.  Every time I make it, it just does not turn out the fucking same.  He’s lying to me, I’m sure of it.  The famous anecdote about the spicy tuna is that many years ago Mike the Viking and Sol ate an entire cereal bowl of this stuff with spoons because Sol “accidentally” made too much.  They just ate it like ice cream.

You poor bastards.  You wish you were at this table with us.

We discovered that everyone, including the two people who actually were raised in Japan, held their chopsticks a little differently.  I thought I held mine totally wrong for years, but it turned out that I was closer that some.

AND THIS STUFF.  I hesitate to tell you the ingredients because I fear you won’t believe me when I say: it was infuriatingly good.  So simple: coconut milk, soy milk, a little sugar, some soft baby tapioca pearls and some tiny cubes of soft sweet potato.  I KNOW HOW IT SOUNDS.  But it was like… something fairy royalty is served when they are in bed in their jim-jams and just want a little something sweet and comforting to eat.  It made me feel six years old and safe and happy.

Also:

It’s ribbon candy.

I’m serious, this is important.  Because for some reason ribbon candy is this impossible, mythological item, something that Baba Yaga gifts to the wayward traveler who has won her good graces.  And I know in my mind it should be thin and opalescent like glass, and each color should be a different flavor.  However, what I’d been finding in real life was thick, clumsy candy covered in flaws and breaks.  THIS DOES NOT FIT IN WITH MY SLAVIC FANTASY CHRISTMAS.

So, I was skipping through the frosty deep winter forest when I came across a box of Russell Stover ribbon candy for something like $2.  I clapped my hands and gnomes danced around me and little snowbirds burst across the sky like a whorl of ice crystals.

The best part is when you try to break a piece off it explodes into a thousand tiny shards, some of which fall to the floor and later stick to your socks.

They’re beautiful like edible Christmas ornaments and I keep looking at them with satisfaction, but I’m not sure there is anything practical about them at all.  I mean, that’s a dumb thing to say.  There’s clearly nothing practical about candy spun into fancifully antagonistic shapes, but what I mean is that I can’t think of a scenario where you won’t be picking slivers of sticky, half-melted candy out of the carpet, your clothes and the dog’s fur.  The upside is that they are tasty, and the white ribbon was vanilla flavored, which briefly broke my brain.

Hey, as long as you’re here, I want you to see something.  See, I knit.  I don’t talk about it here because then it’ll be a cooking and knitting website, and that path leads to kitten videos and talking about feelings and I think we’d all rather just drink an irresponsible amount of peppermint schnapps and argue about House Hunters.

But look at these ladies:

Her sweater says “Hello” but her eyes say “I’m going to land a hatchet between your fucking eyes, peasant.”

Hay now!  Some of us are happy to be wearing a mint green acrylic sweater!

I forgot how much having a day job rearranges your entire life.  I know, I’m punching me in the ear, too.  Nevertheless: bringing lunch to work!  Right now it’s fun, in a few days it’ll be getting old and by this time next month I’ll be eating nothing but pizza-by-the-slice and street meat.

In the meantime, I’m desperately addicted to this:

The short version is: it’s spicy juice.  The longer version is that they are sweetened, lightly flavored beverages with a smidgen of capsaicin in them, so they have a little bit of a burn.  The weirdest part is that my Crohn’s disease is not bothered in the least by it, and in fact the opposite.  I’ve been feeling pretty good lately, and the niacin-like rush of the capsaicin is no joke.

My only grief about the product is that I feel it could do with a little less sugar – while they don’t taste overly sugary, 40g per bottle is pretty much the upper limit of what I am comfortable consuming in a beverage and are what’s keeping me to one or two a week as a treat.  I guess I’m that nutbag asking them to make a sugar-free version, but there it is: some of us can’t digest sugar well and have to divvy up our sugar intake between the things we really can’t live without, like marshmallow milkshakes and bowls of Franken Berry for dinner.

My family started “birthday week” many years ago after the umpteenth disappointing attempt at a perfect birthday.  That makes us sound like real assholes, but it’s true: my sister and I both have mid-summer birthdays and often had no way to inform school friends that we were having parties, and in later years attempting to arrange one event each with divorced parents resulted in the genius realization that a single day was just too much pressure.  Though, I have to admit that we are now into “birthday month” which might be stretching things a bit.

Still, birthday cupcakes a full ten days after my birthday means I finally got some cake:

Though my birthday flowers retired rather dramatically:

My dad and The Thing That Lurks are getting along like Sean Connery and a lightly drunken woman, which is to say spectacularly:

While walking around Venice beach, I came across these hand-carved wooden spoons and immediately fell in great lust:

They had a Japanese sticker on them and I otherwise know no way to tell you how to get one, other than to say I got it at The Tortoise General Store and if you telephone them they might be able to tell you where to get one – they aren’t on the website.

It is, I believe, intended to be a rice spatula, but the overall construction is just too perfect to be limited to rice.  It’s very difficult to find short-handled spoons and spatulas in the US, though that doesn’t justify why I was rubbing it all over my face while waiting for my dad to pay for it.  What can I say, it’s very satiny.

Well, I’ve finally done it.  I’ve grown a goddamn passion fruit.

I’ve been eyeing them with increasing impatience over the last few weeks, since they ostensibly turn dark before falling off the vine and then have an additional ripening period after that.  I mean, I don’t want to tell them how to do it or anything, but I’m pretty sure they’re taking too long.

And then!  This morning!  This one was totally green about three or four days ago and slowly started to turn ruddy.

This morning it was laying on the ground, which is apparently normal: they fall, you pick them up.  Another reason to love passion fruit.  Laziest harvest ever.  Bitchin!  Now it sits in a windowsill and waits to turn wrinkled, at which point it is done and we will fall upon it with the torpid bloodlust of a morally obstinate vampire finally allowed to marry a teenage girl.

Speaking of predatory!

He’s really slow and we named him Time Warner!

I’ll make this short, because you’ve heard me grouse about this before:

• Christopher’s Big Cherry
• Twin Bing
• Chase’s Cherry Mash
• Cherry Blossom

So, a few weeks ago commenter David Farris Creations mentioned on Anger Burger’s Facebook profile that he saw this cherry-peanut confection and offered to buy me one.  I demurred and then regretted it but that is what it is like to be me.

So, near Cannon Beach is the psychotronic terror-zone of Seaside.  In Seaside are several massive candy stores that specialize in regional,  “vintage” and strange candies, where I looked for a Owyhee Cherry Cocktail and immediately found one.  I had my doubts since it’s made by the Idaho Candy Company, makers of the Idaho Spud a.k.a., what would it taste like if we chocolate-coated a latex camping pad?

The Cherry Cocktail falls into the category of “Obviously Formed with an Ice Cream Scoop” candy, which also doesn’t inspire confidence.

But guess what?  I think this is my dream candy.

The Cherry Cocktail is packed with peanuts and ONCE AGAIN I’m sure I taste coconut but it isn’t listed on the ingredients.  The center is actually maraschino-flavored instead of just being a glacé cherry, and the whole thing is in perfect proportion to itself.  My sister and mother both had a bite of the Cherry Cocktail and each agreed: not too sweet, decent chocolate and good fresh roasted peanut flavor.  There really was little to be improved about it, save making an actual homemade gourmet version with premium chocolate.

Now I can rest easy.  Minus the part where I can’t find them back in Los Angeles.