No Bottle

Today I'll be doing my best impression of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. Apart from the horns. And hooves. And everything else reindeery except for the red nose, I suppose. I managed to get my proboscis in the way of a soccer ball during my game last night and it's now somewhat larger and redder than would normally be expected. Mrs Bison explained that on the positive side I could enjoy picking the dried blood out of it today.

I have a better idea - it's time to invest in a couple of new single malt whiskys on account of the last bottle being finished two nights ago. I am strongly inclined to the Islay malts - I like the flavor - but my last bottle was a Bruichladdich, which is on the milder end of the scale, being a less peaty Northern distillery. Maybe this time I'll swing over to the South and get an Ardbeg - something you could stand your spoon up in (if it didn't dissolve first). If I still have a red nose tomorrow it may have nothing to do with soccer.

For those of you not yet initiated, try one of these. About 12-15 years old should do it. More phenolic ones are to the left.

Ardbeg - Lagavulin - Laphroaig - Caol Ila - Bowmore - Bunnahabhain - Bruichladdich

The Practical Lardarse

Sometimes a healthy dinner isn't enough and I get the craving for sugar and fat, combined in some ice-cream based substance, and topped with chocolate. And possibly marshmallows. Tonight was just such a night, and you'd think that the little ice-cream parlour about five minutes down the road would be well-placed to capitalize on my lardy desires. However this is one of those issues where common sense dictates that I drive the five extra minutes to the grocery store.

Here's my reasoning: I go to restaurants not because of the ambience - if I got served the same food I get at home I'd start to wonder whether the napkins and lack of dishwasher loading was really worth the money. No, I go to places where I get food that I can't (or can't be bothered to) cook at home, and which I really like to eat. This is a short list on account of all the chain restaurants that serve generic crap, and the "emperor's new clothes" places with expensive menus and small portions where you wonder if you're the only person in there who knows that it's shit.

So why does anyone go to this ice-cream place? It's not the atmosphere (there are just a few small tables and it's a characterless hole) and I would need to pay $4 for a tiny ice cream when I can go down the road to the store and get a whole tub of Moose Tracks chocolate and peanut butter cup arse expander for the same price. A big tub - I wouldn't have been able to eat it all in five attempts without vomiting. In fact, for what it would cost me to take Mrs Bison and Bison Daughter for ice cream there I could have bought three tubs (which would have included the caramel one and another one with pecans in).

Of course Mrs Bison wouldn't let me buy all three to prove my point, so we just had the one. Which is probably good - no need to be a fat wanker just because it's cheap...

Boo Hoo

Let's await the outpourings of grief and sympathy at the news that Ted Kennedy may have a brain tumor. Poor old Senator Kennedy - let's all send goodwill messages and cards shall we?

Never mind that this is the same criminal scumbag who drove a woman off a bridge at Chappaquiddick and left her submerged in the car to die while he fucked off to his hotel and went to bed. Of course the incident was all smoothed over and he escaped with a slap on the wrist for leaving the scene of an accident. Poor old Larry Craig eh? All he did was try and get some butt-hole action in an airport mens room and he was prosecuted and hounded out of office. Little did he know that he could have killed someone and got away with it. Oh wait, maybe that only works if you're a Kennedy. "Sorry I drove off the bridge - I have a wide stance and my foot got stuck on the accelerator."

Let's get this straight - someone drowns in your car and you go to bed and forget about it? Bullshit. If you hit a deer while out at night the very first thing you'd think in the morning would be "Shit I've got to get my fucking car fixed". Might be a bit more "top of mind" if it was underwater and there was a dead chick in it, don't you think?

It's hard to believe that a turd like Kennedy can even be taken seriously as a politician, but just you wait - if he pegs it we'll be treated to many televised rose-tinted retrospectives on his life, all with Chappaquiddick conveniently airbrushed out. The Democratic establishment and their liberal media bumbuddies will see to that...

Just A Thought

Went to visit the local arboretum today, which was a lot better than it sounds. If I was back in the UK it would have been shit because any time you go anywhere you find hundreds of people trying to do the same thing, and dropping their litter all over the place while they do it. At least here we didn't have to see anyone all morning. Still, it did break my self-imposed rule against going for pointless family walks in the country, to which I plead guilty. Hopefully not a sign that I'm joining the Boring Old Farts club. I always swore that I'd cut off my own balls before putting on a waterproof and going for a stroll in the grounds of a local stately home.

Anyway, there was one bit where we followed a path through the woods and it seemed like it ought to have led to something magical, like maybe a gingerbread cottage. That got me thinking - if the witch lived in a gingerbread house she must have had a gingerbread toilet as well. I mean, it stands to reason doesn't it? Why did none of the books I had growing up show the witch with her robes round her ankles taking a shit on the gingerbread khazi? It's almost enough to make you wonder if they just made the whole story up...

Easy Listening For Sad Bastards

All that talk about digital watches yesterday got me a bit nostalgic for the days of my youth, when life was all unrealized potential, so tonight I decided to take a trip back through the music I used to listen to years ago. It's not like I had much choice - Mrs Bison was watching Dancing With The Stars and I had to flee the room, especially since Jaggy has made it clear that I'd be a giant homo if I stayed and watched it - so I looked on YouTube for old songs. The trick is to find stuff that you never liked enough to buy but would listen to if it came on the radio, and in my case that seems to cover a multitude of sins. Here's a small selection:

Sparks - This Town Ain't Big Enough
The Buggles - Clean Clean
Split Enz - I Got You
Gerry Rafferty - Baker Street
The Korgis - Everybody's Got To Learn Sometime
Diamond Head - Am I Evil (I actually had this on tape but I can't find the CD)
Aha - Take On Me
Proclaimers - 500 Miles
John Foxx - Underpass (early synth stuff)
Genesis - Turn It On Again
Twisted Sister - I Am (I'm Me) (I own it but I'd forgotten how good it was)
Dire Straits - Two Young Lovers
Fastway - Heft

This is the point where bloggers typically call this a meme and tag someone else to provide their top ten nostalgic music pleasures. Well sorry but I think memes are bollocks, so no tagging today, but feel free to reply with your own (s)hit list.

Caution: Man In Slippers

I was just back from a business trip this evening and having consumed a large sandwich and a cup of tea was settling in front of the computer with the express intent of unleashing my full wit and intellect on the world when Mrs Bison suddenly jumped up. There were people cutting through our garden at the back and this is one of the top ways of getting her pissed off. (I believe it may actually be number one, which is saying something when you consider all the other things I do.) She's been telling kids to get out of our garden for about a decade, on and off, and it never seems to happen when I'm around.

Tonight, however, I was here and therefore honor bound to follow my good lady wife out into the yard to remonstrate with them. She had a quick shout at them, and when they replied that they were just cutting through I felt it was time for a proper shout, reinforced with 230lb of physical presence. Turns out that they were only teenagers so a bit of shoutyness was all that was required, but I realised as I approached them that I was a forty year-old man in a pair of slippers. Oh fucking hell, I'm my dad. Slippers! I know there's no excuse for it, and I honestly don't own a pipe, but I have to hope that a 230lb man in slippers coming at you in the darkness is one of life's more bizzarely frightening experiences. I guess we'll see if they come back.

Off The Ranch

Now that summer is beginning to rear its head in St.Louis we're embarking on the salad season. This is characterized by many healthy green leaves suddenly showing up on my plate, possibly with bits of tomato, cucumber and other fibrous materials. The time-honored reaction of any right-thinking man is as follows:

1. Add large amounts of protein (i.e. meat)
   
2. Cover whole thing in high-fat dressing, to add flavor
   

Mrs Bison thoughtfully purchased this onion-flavored dressing which is so good that if you spread it on a turd you could probably pass it off as a savory tubular appetizer. Salads hold no fear for me now.

What I don't understand is the widespread fascination with Ranch dressing. Given all the wonderful sweet, spicy, mustardy, oniony flavors that could be bottled and spread on lettuce, why would you choose an insipid creamy emission that resembles noting so much as concentrated jizz? It's sperm donation in condiment form. Call me old-fashioned but you have to go a long way to beat Heinz salad cream, and the fact that they don't sell it here is no excuse for substituting a bottle of man-mess.

Cider Woman

An ancient evil has been reawoken. A horror that everyone thought was gone from the world is back. Cider Woman has returned.

I was in the liquor store a week ago with Mrs Bison because she suddenly and unaccountably developed a craving for cider. By this I mean real alcoholic cider, not the pansy non-alcoholic apple juice that some Americans refer to as "cider". So I got her a bottle, which took some finding. This place is a huge warehouse-like shrine to all things beer/wine/spirit, with a whole wall of scotch, but cider isn't much known or appreciated over here and we only found two varieties. Nevertheless Mrs Bison has rediscovered the taste for it and is at this moment on her way back to the store to buy a few bottles. Or a case. Or maybe she'll just have it delivered in a bulk tanker, I don't know.

Cider is what a lot of us Brits started out drinking. It's what first made us happy/stupid/violently sick, and getting back into cider is like turning back the clock to the good old days, when hangovers didn't happen and the most complicated decision we faced was "Chop Suey or Curry?" after the pub. The next step will be to recreate snakebite and black, or Purple Nasty, as we used to call it. (Strong cider plus Pils lager, with a dash of blackcurrant cordial, for any non-Brits out there.) I never drank that as a rule, because it made anything you puked on turn purple, but sometimes it just had to be done. Watch this space...