 
All things must pass ... (*sigh*) George Harrison died last night.
It's so true it can happen to you all; there,Thank you, George. Live Broadcast: Freddy Cole and Zim Ngqawana - TONIGHT! 6pm PST/8pm CST From WWOZ: Jazz Journey, sponsored by the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Foundation in conjunction with the University of New Orleans Department of Music/Jazz Studies and Department of Research and Sponsored Programs present "A South African Exchange" at 8 pm from UNO Performing Arts Recital Hall. The cast will be Freddy Cole leading on piano and vocals, Gerald Byrd on Guitar, Curtis Boyd on drums, Zackary Pride on bass, then a second set with Zim Ngqawana leading on sax, Hotep Idris Galeta on piano, Troy Davis on drums, and Roland Guerin on bass. To listen on the Internet: http://www.broadcast.com/radio/Jazz/WWOZ. Big, strong SUV, worth every penny. From the "Morning Fix": The Ford Explorer, the world's top-selling SUV, suffered extensive bumper damage in low-speed crash tests, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety said. The 2002 Explorer sustained $5,432 worth of damage in four tests conducted at a wimpy little 5 mph, earning the institute's lowest rating for bumper performance. In contrast, my 1999 Volkswagen New Beetle, in 5 mph crash tests with its front and rear bumpers ... bounced. There was no discernible damage other than possible paint scratches. Morford, of course, continues ... "In similar tests, nearly every SUV on the market was shown to be a gimmick-thick marketing ploy to give testosterone-impaired owners the false impression of rugged manliness when in fact they're wimpier than a Honda Civic and handle like tanks and roll incredibly easily and explode and kill people and are uglier than a Pacer and have less cargo room than your average station wagon and suck gas and pollute and damage roads and hog parking but aren't they all so cute with their little American flags on their antenna?" Lynne Cheney Sucks Souls Dry I've got the day off and I'm lazy this morning, but the "Morning Fix" continues to enlighten and entertain as ever, so I thought I'd share another one.
Noted homophobe and adorable ultra-right-wing dragon lady Lynne Cheney said that Americans know too little about their country and the ideals on which it was founded, even as they fight in Afghanistan to defend both from foreign threats.
Enough already! Chef Jean-Louis Palladin died yesterday of lung cancer at age 55. He was a heavy smoker. Unfortunately, it's been a while since anyone's been able to taste his cooking, as the Rio Hotel in Vegas were kind enough to close his restaurant Napa while he was sick, leaving a man with a terminal disease with no source of income. They damn well better have taken care of him. Wes and I had the pleasure and delight to dine in his fine restaurant last March, and it was a memorable meal. Here's a reprint of my tale of the meal as posted in a previous Looka! edition.
There are now top-quality restaurants everywhere in Vegas; unfortunately our budget only allowed us to visit one. This time it was Jean-Louis Palladin's restaurant Napa in the Rio Suites Hotel.Email of the day. I have a fan in Portugal!
From: Pedro Miguel Leitão <pleitao@gulbenkian.pt>(What's the Portuguese word for "straitjacket"?)
Remember Chef Jamie soon by making this dish. Aside from the latest Commander's Palace cookbook, start your next special meal with this fabulous appetizer, which will remain on Commander's menu indefinitely as Jamie's signature dish:
Jamie Shannon's Tasso ShrimpiPod in hand. Well, I couldn't wait. I gathered up my birthday money from various relatives (which helped take the sting off the price), kicked in the rest and got one. It's grrrrrreat! So far the only complaint I have with it is its lack of a case or belt clip, but the third parties are already lining up to provide exactly that. I've been fine-tuning my playlist which will eventually include everything from Uncle Tupelo (their entire recorded output excluding boots) to Cordelia's Dad (all their albums too), plus a bunch of new stuff I want to listen to, all the way to a carefully selected cross-section of the best of New Orleans, Cajun and zydeco music. I'm up to about 875 songs so far, with room for maybe 250 more. I never quite got it when I saw the ads that featured the iPod at "actual size", or when people said it was the size of a deck of cards. "Tarot cards, maybe," I thought. Nope. It's tiny. It sounds great. It doesn't skip. I've never needed to use it to the point where the battery would even be half-drained. It's incredibly easy to use. It's beautiful. And once I'm finished filling it up I'll be able to carry about 75 hours of music ... just as they say, in my pocket. The guy at the Apple Store in Glendale said they were selling "briskly", and that they had no worries about running out of them. "We've got about ten thousand of them in the back," he said. "I'm not kidding. They're stacked floor to ceiling." If you balk at the price ($399), think about the fact that if you were to buy its tiny 5GB hard drive as a separate component for your machine, it'd cost you that much all by itself. Plus I suspect that Apple will gradually reveal that the iPod has far more capability than as "just" the best MP3 player out there. Remember that it's also usable as a portable FireWire drive, and runs on an OS that has full PDA capabilities (address/phone book, appointments, to do list, etc.). Could be interesting. Email of the day. From someone calling him- or herself "Tater":
Date: Tue, 27 Nov 2001 10:59:27 -0500Hee hee heeeeeeee. Thanks for making my morning, Tater. Quote of the day. Speaking of making someone's morning ... this happened yesterday. I had gotten into the elevator at work to head up to my office, but before it got to my floor it stopped and started heading back to the ground floor. I guess I hadn't pressed the button hard enough. I got off before it went all the way back to the lobby and caught the next up-bound elevator. One of my cow-orkers was inside.
Cow-orker: Chuck! What the hell are you doing on that floor?You're welcome, Jim. Any old time.
Thanks for some of the best meals I've ever had. Jamie Shannon, executive chef of Commander's Palace restaurant in New Orleans, died of cancer on Friday. He was only 40, and from what I'd heard everyone (including himself) thought he was getting better. Goddammmit.
Happy Thanksgiving! It's been a busy week, and it's going to be an even busier weekend for me ... lots of cooking and socializing, so I'm taking some time off. Make my signature Thanksgiving side dish for your meal tomorrow, Sweet Potatoes and Pears with Bourbon Cane Syrup Glaze, and have a great long weekend. See y'all next Monday! Yeah you rite ... have a mos' scocious boit-day, bra. Malcolm "Mac" Rebennack, Mr. Gris-Gris Gumbo Ya-Ya and one of the world's great fonkmeisters, better known to the world as Dr. John (The Night Tripper), celebrates his 61st boit-day today. His new CD "Creole Moon" is one of da best o' da year. Get him a nice present (and one for yourself too) by buying it. Finally! "2001" in 2001. Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece "2001: A Space Odyssey" is finally being rereleased ... in a meticulously restored 70mm Super Panavision version that will play in only three theatres in the country ... San Francisco's Castro, Washington D.C.'s Uptown, and Los Angeles' Egyptian (woohoo!), with a few later 70mm releases to theatres that can handle it, plus 35mmm releases elsewhere. Kubrick had been working on this restoration up until the time of his death. I've never seen this film in its original 70mm presentation. It's out December 20. CAN'T WAIT!! Bora! Bora! Bora! There's a delightfully snarky review of the wretched "Pearl Harbor" in DVDfile today. It gets off to a great start:
Alright, let's just get the obvious question out of the way ...is "Pearl Harbor" really as bad as they say it is?Heh. Yep.
What is it that makes "Pearl Harbor" so bad? Oh, let me count the ways. Shot like a perfume commercial and edited like a music video, the script is absolutely terrible, the acting embarrassing, and [director Michael] Bay utterly fails in creating a believable, emotionally resonant recreation of Hawaii circa 1941. An obvious attempt to replicate the success and structure of "Titanic" -- at least that James Cameron's mega-hit managed to successfully stage a historical tragedy that felt authentic -- "Pearl Harbor" is a mass of tiresome cliches that has become an instant camp classic. This was supposed to be Bay's Schindler's List, but instead it's his "Heaven's Gate".Ouch. (*snicker*)
Quote of the day.
Q: "Well, I know the guy over at gumbopages
has a lyric archive. Does it amuse you when you see some
misinterpretations of your lyrics?"
Quote of the day. "Whew ... he didn't fuck it up." -- Wes, referring to Chris Columbus and his film of J. K. Rowling's book "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone". (We both enjoyed the film, actually.) Apparently UPN did, though. We couldn't bear to even put a tape in for the UPN remake of "Iron Chef" last Friday, and just went to see Harry Potter instead. I didn't even want to watch it. Looks like I made the right choice, from the reviews ...
Los Angeles Times:You get the idea. I don't think we missed anything. Long live Kaga-san! One would think he had no feet left. Jerry Falwell is apparently regrowing his feet at a rapid rate, only to gnaw them off and eat them again. Apparently everyone from left to right is getting tired of his bullshit.
TANJ? Is it just me, or does anybody else notice the similarity between the world of the new Bungie/Xbox game Halo and Larry Niven's Ringworld? Did Niven get any royalties? I sure hope so, 'cause as soon as I saw the comercial I thought, "Oh my God, someone's finally set a game on the Ringworld!" But of course ... no Louis Wu, no Chmeee, no Teela Brown, no Halrloprillalar, no Harkabeeparolyn ... Speaking of which, here are a couple of nifty sites, one describing the physics of the Ringworld, and the other some attempts at rendering some images of what it might look like. As always, the Ringworld is so incredibly huge that it's often difficult to wrap one's mind around its scale.
"We're Knights of the Round Table, we eat when e'er we're able..." No, it's not a Monty Python post, it's a how-many-people-at-the-table post. The other night for my birthday dinner at John O'Groats we had 10 people around the table, and if we hadn't had some people getting sick at the last minute and having to pick up a late-arriving family member at the airport, we'd have had 16. That would have been too many to have at one table, and in today's New Orleans Menu Daily, Tom Fitzmorris talks about the best way to deal with such a situation (in a nutshell, two tables of eight; the VIP/guest of honor can always wander and mingle). You could always have smaller celebratory dinners ... or do it over two nights! If your local public radio station sucks, here's why. Locally produced specialty music programming falls to the bean counters.
During the final days of October, as the public radio station WAMU-FM in Washington launched an on-air fund drive, one particular group of former listeners began calling in to donate only their complaints. They were fans of a bluegrass show that had been dropped without warning four months earlier from its coveted slot during drive-time on weekday afternoons. Refusing to contribute money, demanding refunds of previous gifts, the protesters meant to deny WAMU its goal of raising $1 million. And this was only their latest piece of political theater.It's the "NPRization" of public radio, homogenized news, information and syndicated programming that seems to rake in bigger bucks due to its being a lowest common denominator, while locally-produced specialty music programs are being axed, even if they have long-running popularity. It's all about dollars these days, and on many stations the programming suffers for it. Out with the bluegrass programs, in with the news and information and the same syndicated shit you hear everywhere. It's also the Outside Consultant Syndrome, summed up very succinctly by former Xeroc PARC guru Alan Kay, who said (and I'm paraphrasing), "A 'consultant' is a guy who knows 500 different ways to make love, but he doesn't have a girlfriend."
All these controversies, seemingly so disparate, traced back to a common source. His name is David Giovannoni. A brilliant analyst of public radio's audience who it is, how much it listens, when it listens, what it listens to, when and why it donates money he is quite possibly the most influential figure in shaping the sound of National Public Radio today, the sound heard by upward of 20 million Americans weekly.So they make money, but they're not worth listening to. Bleh. If you listen to public radio, if there are locally produced specialty shows you enjoy listening to, it is more important than ever to support your local public radio station with your membership. Only 1 out of 10 listeners actually coughs up money, and this has got to change. If it doesn't, and you didn't, and you lose your favorite shows to the Giovannoni forces ... don't bitch. Incidentally, KCSN doesn't sound like every other station. We don't have outside consultants, and our pledge drives take in more and more every year, slowly but steadily (and we have two bluegrass shows). For the most unique music mix in L.A. radio, tune to 88.5 FM or listen on the web. Shiny happy people. An airplane flight, 15 glasses of wine, misbehavior, an arrest ... the most memorably unpleasant image being Peter Buck covering himself in yogurt. (I wonder if there was fruit on the bottom.) Because the Guggenheim and the Getty simply aren't enough... there's the Museum of Condiment Packets.
"So how does it feel," my sister asked, "to go to bed in your thirties and wake up in your forties?" Um ... 'bout the same, I guess. My new favorite restaurant in Pasadena. Trattoria Tre Venezia, at 119 W. Green Street, kitty-corner across the street from Buca di Beppo. My friend Gregg had recommended this place, which I seem to have missed all the time I've been dining in Pasadena. Wes took me there for my birthday last night, and it's the best meal I've had outside of New Orleans all year (and it gave most N.O. restaurants a run for their money). It's got some of the best and most sophisticated food of any Italian restaurant I've been to in the whole L.A. -- of any restaurant, for that matter. It was stupendous, gorgeous, beautiful every moment and every bite. Next time we go there I'm going to eat an extremely light lunch (maybe two slices of white bread slatered with Jack Miller's Barbecue Sauce) so that I can have a more substantial antipasto (but the salads we had were still fantastic), plus a pasta for primo before the main course and dessert. We had had a fairly large lunch (bad idea) compounded by the problem of an early dinner, but I think we chose wisely from the menu and still managed to do the full Italian meal of antipasto, primo, secondo and dolci.
ANTIPASTOWe'd go back here in a second. There's the whole rest of that menu to try! The food, wine and grappa, combined with the small size, quiet atmosphere and impeccable service adds up to one of the best restaurant experiences I've had in the L.A. area in recent memory. I can't recommend this restaurant enough. Stick out your tongue and say "quack!" I love calf's tongue (as Marc Savoy once said, "It's so good I wish the whole damn cow was made out of tongue."), but I've never tried it from anything that flies. At 99 Ranch and other Asian markets I've gone to the meat counter and seen styrofoam meat trays filled with tiny duck's tongues, dozens of them, and thought it looked odd and kinda funny. I've never had the opportunity to order a duck's tongue dish, but I'm very curious. (Surely some place in Alhambra, San Gabriel or Monterey Park has them.) I finally got a chance to see what a finished dish looks like, though. Hmmmm ... yum yum yum! Hee hee hee. A great "Doonesbury" from two Sundays ago, in which Mark thanks his conservative partner Chase for the return of the flag.
You guys hijacked the flag years ago, during the Cold War, especially the Vietnam era, turning it into a symbol of unquestioning, jingoistic nationalism. Now it's back to being a symbol of patriotism and love of country, not a particular political agenda. So thanks for restoring it to all of us!Hee. A deeply religious people? An interesting recent post by Bill Lindemann in soc.motss reveals that both former presidents Jimmy Carter and had used the phrase "deeply religious people" in praising the Afghans in their fight against the Soviet Union. A web search revealed some truly priceless quotes, "in light of the unthinking admiration for all things religious spewed by our leaders in times past (and present), and the current popular sentiment that a little display of good 'ol American military force will quickly teach Those Evil People the error of their ways." [Comments in brackets are Bill's, from the post.]
Carter:From a followup post by Tigran Spaan of the Netherlands:
It is good to see that not everyone in the US has forgotten. Yes, the [mujahidin] contained many current Taliban leaders, as well as Mr bin Laden, and what is currently known as the "Northern Alliance". The latter group seized power in, I think, 1992, and quickly brought the country to a complete economic stand still, as well as making it a completely unsafe place to be (it was virtually impossible, apparently, to travel from one city to another without being killed, robbed or raped). Another "deeply religious" group, the Taliban, used this situation to gain support for their movement, which overthrew the [mujahidin] bit by bit from about 1996 on, driving them more and more to the North where they hid out until they became our new deeply religious freedom fighters of choice, the "Northern Alliance".Something to think about. Shave and a haircut, two bits. It is being reported that in the Afghan city of Mazar-e-Sharif, recently captured from the Taliban by the Northern Alliance, women are discarding their head-to-toe burqa garments, music has begun to blare from windows, and men are lining up at barbershops to have their Taliban-required beards shaved off. (Via NextDraft)
Quote of our new era.
"I will not fear. Fear is the
mind-killer."
Fuh ... fuh ... (Hmm, not quite ready to say it yet.) Sunday is the first anniversary of my 39th birthday. Maybe next week I'll be able to say the "F" word.
Happy birthday, Mike! Go eat something fabulous tonight. Baby! And a belated congratulations to my friends Lou and Charlotte on the birth of their first child, Ethan Francis, on October 24! The passing of The Greatest. Chef Warren Leruth, the man who singlehandedly sparked the renaissance of New Orleans cuisine and who food writer Tom Fitzmorris calls the greatest New Orleans chef of the 20th Century, died yesterday in a Mississippi hospice at age 72. The chef, food scientist and restauranteur gained fame as the owner/chef of LeRuth's Restaurant in Gretna, across the river from New Orleans. I grew up hearing my parents rave about this place, but unfortunately I never got a chance to dine there before it closed. Chef Leruth became a highly sought-after restaurant and food manufacturing consultant after his retirement from restaurant cooking in 1982. (I had no idea until I read his obit in the Times-Picayune that he had created Popeye's terrific red beans 'n rice.) From Tom Fitzmorris' obituary of Leruth in today's issue of the New Orleans Menu Daily (added links are mine):
Quite simply, no restaurant passed from the New Orleans scene is missed as much as LeRuth's. Opening in the 1960s, at a time when New Orleans restaurants had interchangeable menus, he showed that you could be innovative and distinctly Creole at the same time.One good way to help celebrate the legacy of Chef Leruth is to make a batch of oyster-artichoke soup sometime soon. It's truly fabulous. Our ultraconservative, religious fundamentalist Attorney General. When President Bush nominated the former Republican senator from Missouri for attorney general, critics warned that he would use his office to promote his personal beliefs. They were right.
Boucherie day. The tale below of our visit to our friends' old-fashioned Cajun-style backyard pig slaughter in Eunice, Louisiana was contributed by my friend Mary ('cause she was there and already wrote this up and it's good and I'm really busy and lazy this week); this is mostly her with a little interjection here and there by yours truly. Anyone with tender stomachs and/or feelings about the eating of animals should probably skip to the next section. We arrived at the Savoys at noon last Sunday, bearing covered dishes as requested:
Wes made his mom's famous Tang Fruit Salad -- like many an old-fashioned, regular-folks dish, it was overlyWe got there just in time for the pig to meet his maker. Before we left, Mary had led us on a little revivalist prayer circle, thanking the pig for his place on the food chain, wishing him good journey to Hog Heaven, where there will be lots of sows and slops -- and can we have a suuuuuu-WEE!? Afterward, the friends and neighbors-cum-butchers took a little time to clean it, and then the butchers transformed into cooks to take their respective pig parts and turn the critter into backbone stew, fresh boudin, cracklins, and absolutely delectable barbecued pork. While we were waiting for pork products, we all sampled some of BBQ-Meister Todd Ortego's magnificent barbecued chicken, plus rabbits and racks of pork ribs out of the smoker, and some of the 30-plus other covered dishes that other guests had brought -- cakes, yam dishes, shrimp mold, hogshead cheese, corn bread, pasta salad, mac and cheese, it went on and on. Joel Savoy's excellent girlfriend Tanya, (who's a nurse) gave Mary an anatomy lesson using leftover pig parts, carefully cutting into limbs to show off joints and tendons and how they attach and work, then the relation of the esophagus to the lungs and how the lungs vary in size from side to side, with us even blowing into them to see if we could make them inflate (we could). Mary said, "I know this sounds disgusting -- and perhaps it is -- but it is interesting, it is what people need to know to do medicine or even just to understand their own bodies and how they can fail. You can far better understand the pain of sports or other limb injuries once you see an actual tendon in place. I also felt that if I got squeamish over animal bits in the raw, I had no right to eat animal bits when cooked. This isn't to say I don't feel I have now proved my good sportsmanship and can return to meat that comes safely packaged in plastic." It was a lovely good time, with far too many interesting people, locals and Savoy out of town guests alike, to have enough time to properly visit with all, or hear the jam sessions that resulted (there were at least three on various parts of the property), or even sample everything there was to try. Marc ended the evening (he was tired and felt it was time for the party to end, NOW) in time for us to make it back to the Seale Guesthouse to see the Emmys (Ellen rocks!) and, at the insistence of a couple of our friends, the last inning of The Game (baseball, yawn). A candlelit room with good friends drinking Old Fashioneds, eating Zapp's Potato Chips, leftover Halloween candy and Moon Pies, was the absolute right way to end the day.
"The swine is mine!" I'm still full, I think. I ate more pig and chicken and rabbit this weekend than I really care to think about. All I will think about is that it was some of the best food I'd had in recent memory. (Thanks to Bob Merlis for the above quote.) Needless to say, my quick weekend trip back home was tons of fun. After a fabulous dinner at Café des Amis in Breaux Bridge and a fun visit with my sister and bro-in-law, we headed further into Acadiana for the day's festivities. We kicked it off with yet another brilliant Cajun jam session at the Savoy Music Center in Eunice from 9am to noon, headed back to Lafayette for lunch and more family visiting, then the pièce de resistance of the evening -- our visit to the Swine Festival in Basile. The madness continues... No no ... please, don't get up. Ladies and gentleman, may I introduce myself? I am the 2001 Basile (Louisiana) Swine Festival Hog Squealing Contest Champion. You may line up to touch the hem of my garment. At the jam session on Saturday we had been chatting with Todd Ortego, one of Earth's finest and funniest human beings as well as "disc jockey/party starter" and owner/manager of Eunice's Music Machine, who told us that among the festivities at the Swine Festival that evening would be a hog squealing contest. This isn't hog calling ("Soooo-EEEEE!"), hog grunting or hog snorting ... this is the squealing, the sounds you hear, as Todd put it, "when you take the young male pigs and, uh, do that lil' thing to 'em that makes 'em grow up all nice and fat". (You get the idea.) I had actually learned how to make such horrible noises from my friend Dan Comeaux, who was a USDA Meat Inspector and who worked in meat processing plants. He got to hear lots of pigs who weren't terribly pleased about becoming pork chops, and taught me how to do it once. I have a bit of an affinity for impressions and such ... ranging from my cinematography teacher in grad school to, apparently, a squealing pig. Todd was mighty impressed, and said that I absolutely had to enter the contest that night. "First prize," he said, "is a case of beer!" Ooo, that sounded good! Uh ... wait a minute. What kind of beer? "Bud Light!" (Oh dear.) Well, I could always bring it to the boucherie on Sunday for use when the Abita ran out. The Swine Fest was tons o' fun ... absolutely amazing barbecued pork sandwiches (a pork steak literally six inches wide by a foot long, with both ends dangling out from in between two slices of white bread, and slathered with warm Jack Miller's Barbecue Sauce, the best in Acadiana and perhaps anywhere), garlic smoked sausage grilled and served on a stick (beats the hell out of khlav kalash) and more that I'll describe later. The center of the event was the stage and dance floor, that evening hosted by DJ Todd (who played a great mix of rock, Cajun, zydeco, blues, swamp pop and country). We were getting a little tired and knew we had to get up early the next day to prepare the dishes we were making for the boucherie, but we stayed past the boudin eating contest and made sure we were there for the hog squealing contest, which, to my surprise and resignation, I actually entered. ("Of course you're entering," my friend Mary said. "IT'S THE REASON WE'RE STAYING THIS LATE.") There were eight contestants -- mostly from Basile, one from Mamou, one from Opelousas ... and me. I made sure not to go first, which was a good move, as the first four contestants were pathetic. The key to a good hog squeal is to inhale as you're doing it; if it's an exhalation rather than an inhalation when you make the noise, it doesn't sound authentic. Todd leaned over to me and winked, saying "Man, none of 'em are inhaling! If you can do it like you did it earlier, you got it." Finally, it was my turn. I stepped up and was asked to introduce myself, along with where I was from. I said that I was from New Orleans, but that I lived in California now. There were boos, catcalls and hoots from the crowd, and dismissive gestures like "Get outta here!". Obviously, a New Orleans boy from the city couldn't know a damn thing about a down home thing like hog squealing, which only folks from a little rural small town are gonna know. I stepped up, cracked my knuckles, took a deep breath, lifted the microphone to my lips ... and squealed. The crowd went wild. Apparently Comeaux was a pretty good teacher. I got a standing ovation, and my friend Nettie said that a local guy turned around and said to her, "That boy knows what he's doing." There were three more, including one local boy from Basile named Guidry who was really good -- he was raised on a hog farm. The big lady from Basile (whose name I never got, unfortunately) who was judging narrowed it down to four. We were invited to squeal again for the semifinals. This time I decided to give a little bit more nuance to my performance, and the crowd went even wilder. The judge lady gave me a big hug and kiss and said, "Baby, you sure you not fram Basile?" Guidry did very well himself, and it was narrowed down to the two of us for the final. I thought we were going to have to squeal again, but Guidry said, "Man, I can't do that again. My throat's raw!" Mine was too -- hog squealing is hard on the vocal cords. The judge lady wanted to pick me, but knew that it might be a bad political move to pick an out-of-towner over a local boy -- small town politics are like that, particularly in Acadiana. Finally, it was decided that it would be decided by audience vote. It was so close that they had to do it twice. Because Guidry had his own cheering section, the audience noise level was incrementally louder for him, so they started to give it to him ... then Todd interevened and declared it a tie, and we were both given the Royal Order of the Pig Snout (a pig snout tied to a leather necklace that one may wear with pride and, um, dignity). Guidry got a Swine Festival t-shirt, I got a Coushatta Casino t-shirt and two cans of Bud Light (which I actually needed to soothe my raw throat, nasty or not). I got thumps on the back and congratulations from Basile locals for the rest of the night, with several folks saying "you'd'a won if not for the politics" and "I voted for you!". Never have I had a prouder moment! :-)
Sooo-EEEEEE! Pig! Pig! Pig! I'm off for a very porcine weekend. This Friday through Sunday in Basile, Louisiana is the 35th Annual Louisiana Swine Festival! It's kicked off Friday night with a swamp pop concert by the legendary Johnnie Allan from 9 to midnight. Here's a peek at the weekend's events:
Saturday, November 3 - Fair Grounds, BasileAdmission is a whopping two bucks a person. Can you beat that? Call (337) 432-5383 for more information. We'll probably miss most of this, as the main reasons to head to Acadiana this weekend are to visit my sister and brother-in-law, to attend the weekly "Rendez-vous des Cajuns" at the Liberty Theatre in Eunice (this week, Rodney Fontenot, an 87-year-old fiddler and contemporary of Dennis McGee, with Tina Pilione and Ann Savoy), plus Grande Marais, with Vorance Berzas, with storytelling and more, all in French) and finally to visit some other friends in Eunice for their annual boucherie. It's an ancient Cajun tradition in which a hog is the guest of honor (and of which there'll be nothing but bones left by 6pm). There'll be lots of fine folk, family and friends, live Cajun music (ya never know who'll show up ... last time it was Aldus Roger) and the best barbecued pork, boudin sausage, cracklins and backbone stew you ever had in your life. See y'all Tuesday!
Kyo no tema ... KORE DESU! (*unveil with flourish*) Some guy has "reverse-engineered" a bunch of recipes from "Iron Chef" and created a web site. This is either very interesting or very scary, I haven't decided which. The guy says he's made them, but doesn't mention whether or not they're any good. I must confess that I've been terribly curious about that Caramelized Sirloin with Cocoa from Battle Mishima Beef. (Thanks to Greg for sending this in!) October Looka! entries have been permanently archived.
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(Just what do you think you're doing, Chuck?)
| Several of my friends and loved ones (and a few kind strangers) contribute regularly to this weblog. Thanks to Wesly Moore, Mike Luquet, Andy Senasac, Michael Yasui, Steve Gardner, Michael Pemberton, Steve Kelley, Barry Kelley, Eric Labow, Tom Krueger, Greg Beron and Barry Enderwick. |
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chuck taggart | email chuck (at) gumbopages (dot) com
