Adventures with Chinese food

So once or twice a month, I’ll stop at the local Chinese food place. It’s in a great location. I order my food, walk down to the bank, maybe stop in the drug store or supermarket, and then drop back in on the Chinese food place to pick up my hot, steaming order of Egg Foo Yung. For those poor souls, uneducated in the ways of truly disgusting Chinese dishes, Egg Foo Yung is three 3-egg omelettes, cooked in a wok, and served in a dense brown sauce. If I give you a hard time about your Big Mac consumption, feel free to parry with the Chinese omelette. Egg Foo Yung is like cigarettes: I know it is gonna kill me, it’s a disgusting habit, and if you don’t know why I do it, I can’t even talk to you about it. At least, I don’t throw the un-inhaled portion out into the road whilst driving.

Anyway, the greatest thing about stopping for Chinese is the little side shows. During the winter, as I crossed the parking lot, I noticed a strong odor of burnt wood. It was so strong that, as I entered the Chinese food place, I could smell the wafts of smoke emanating from my jacket. It attached to me that quickly. I commented on it, saying that I didn’t start the fire. Ha, ha. As my order was cooking, the staff in the restaurant was becoming visibly nervous over the smell, until we all saw fire trucks come streaming into the parking lot. Within minutes there were, and I am not exaggerating, a dozen fire trucks in the lot. But there was no fire to put out. The pizza place next door has a wood burning oven, and, apparently, they forgot how to open the flue. There had to be sixty firemen there, easily, all just told to go back home.

Last time I was ordering Chinese, a kid on a bike, probably about 16 or so, accosted me as I walked out of the supermarket, asking me to buy him some cigarettes. What a disgusting habit, I thought. No, that’s not what I really thought. What I really thought was, hey! how come he knows I’m old enough to buy cigarettes? And that got me thinking, as it always does, about being a kid and thinking that 30 year-olds were so adult, so mature, and had to have it all together by then. Yeah. But I never did ask one to buy me cigarettes or booze. The kid might have gotten lucky with me if he asked for beer, but only if he asked for the right beer.

I’m a beer-elitist. And this was proven to me on that very same excursion for my Chinese fix. There was an old, bummy looking guy, skinny, coupla teeth, pushing a cart on the sidewalk filled with things hidden by black, plastic bags. Now this strip mall does have a supermarket in it, so I wasn’t going by the cart alone to convince myself that the gentleman in question was a bum. He also carried with him a beer can in a paper bag. That was a topper. But, initially, I gave him kudos for his choice of beer. The can was very long, no 12 ouncer, and was black. In my naive elitism, I thought the guy was drinking a Guinness. It isn’t a very practical thing to do, since, I was thinking to myself, the Guinness can is meant to be poured into a glass. The new glass bottle Guinness, they say, can be drunk from the bottle, but I’d still pour it into a glass, being the beer elitist and all.

And then, I thought about the absurdity of my thoughts, very meta. He’s not drinking a Guinness, you dweeb. A Guinness is about $2.50 a can. It’s gotta be MGD or some such. Idiot, I sighed to myself.

We met up in the Chinese restaurant, my beer-swilling friend and me. He was talking to the cashier about his two daughters coming up from Florida, and that his mom was doing well in the nursing home. I still don’t know what to make of that, except that North Babylon has some chatty hobos.

Then, after I picked up my food and made my way back to my car, I got a message, a message from God’s messenger. You see, “The end is near. You, me, everyone you love, every star, every animal is going to die.” That’s it, folks. Wrap it up; nothing more to see here. The photocopied paper clung to my windshield, and all the rest of us who were just so lucky to park there at that time so we could be saved. Sneaky bastard. I was walking back and forth through that parking lot for the past 15 minutes, and I never even saw her.

I’m pretty sure it was a woman who wrote out the treatise on the second-coming of Christ, because of the handwriting, very curly. She didn’t necessarily hand them out, for sure, but I don’t think she’d want to do anything half-assed for the Lord. She seems to have the perennial problem of mixing up “your” and “you’re,” but she did pretty good otherwise. I don’t really want to make fun of this person, but I did get a kick out of this line, which was written lengthwise up the margin of the page: “God loves you, shouldn’t you love him? YES!” Oh, those pesky ambiguous negatives. Yes, I shouldn’t love him? No, I should not love him? No, I should love him? Oh, YES, I should love him. Okay. Got it. Now, I can see this “saving” a Christian who has gotten lost from the flock, and for that we all rejoice, but does it really work on someone who, let’s say, is a confirmed atheist who has written several pieces of Internet propaganda on the silliness of the Christian persecution complex? But, then again, how many of them did she expect to come across in a parking lot picking up Chinese food?

Posted by Jonathan at 01:51 AM, 27 June 2003 | Comments (1)

The dog ate my website

Excuses, excuses. What can explain the gaps in posting?

1. My hosting company went out of business.

I’ve been threatening to write about this for sometime now, but Nobody of Nowheresville does a better job of it, and, while our stories are not identical, his is much more interesting. It took a bit of time to get everything right again, in my case, and Optimum Online, despite other assurances, took nearly forever to propagate my new DNS info, and since I use Optimum Online for my Internet connection, I couldn’t see my own site for about two weeks.

2. My computer died.

And kept dying. I’ve got one of the most advanced operating systems ever, according to the marketing department, so I was a bit concerned that my computer would just constantly freeze, seemingly randomly, and would be very difficult to restart. It took me, a semi-decent tech guy, a week to diagnose the problem, which turned out to be the... mouse.

Yeah, once I disconnected my mouse and popped on my old Apple one-button, the machine worked fine. Oh, well, goodbye, Kensington; hello, Logitech.

3. My S finger is broken.

S finger? Yes, my left ring finger that types the S and the W and the X while I touch type. But it isn’t really broken, just the nail. In a two day period of self-immolation, I ripped half the fingernail off and electrocuted my left hand. Dammit! I’m just so tired of that left hand!

No. Not really. I’m just extraordinarily clumsy. But the short of it is that I had a wad of bandages on my left ring finger that made me type dsort odf likwe thias as I mashed the enormous digit into the keys. The bandage is off right now, so I can no longer use that as an excuse, but maybe if I pretend the electrocution did nerve damage to my hand I can still claim that I can’t type correctly, because,

4. I’m really lazy.

Posted by Jonathan at 11:25 PM, 18 June 2003 | Comments (0)

Sultaana Freeman and the Veil of Obfuscation

As a bleeding-heart, knee-jerk liberal, most people would expect me, I think, to take the side of the poor Muslim woman who lost her driver’s license because she would not remove her veil, in the name of Islam and modesty. The signs point to underdog, and I’m all about boosting the underdog. The ACLU, an organization I support and admire, has filed a lawsuit on behalf of Sultaana Freeman. There is currently an email missive, which incorrectly states that Florida gave in and is allowing Freeman to wear the veil on her license photo, that goes on and on about immigrants not playing by the rules, and this is God’s country, and love it or leave it, and all that crap. In other words, I should be decrying the heavy-hand of the government, and freedom of religion, and all that crap. But I’m not.

It turns out that that the stupid email missive mentioned above, which claims falsely to be an editorial in a Tampa-area newspaper, is wrong on many counts. One of the main ones is the immigration status of Sultaana Freeman. She’s an American, who once went by the name of Sandra Kellar. A short while after she converted to Islam, she was arrested in Illinois on battery charges after beating a 3 year-old child in her care. In that case, she also tried to refuse the lifting of the veil on the child in the name of modesty and Islam. Underneath the veil of the child, police found bruises on her face. Her arm was also broken. The mug-shot of Sultaana was taken without the veil.

Suddenly, I see no reason to side with this woman.

Moreover, the sticking point in the Florida driver’s license issue is that Freeman already had her photo taken with the veil, and only, she and the ACLU claim, after 9-11 did the state have interest in persecuting Muslims. But there are two problems with this argument.

The first is that the state has always said that driving is a privilege, and its rules are now that the whole face must be shown in the license. If Freeman doesn’t want to take off the veil, she is welcome not to. And she will not be granted a license. Simple. It is not religious persecution.

The second point: It is not religious persecution. In Islamic countries where women can travel or drive, they do not wear their veils in their passport or driver’s license. Their whole face must be visible. There is no Islamic law that makes it immoral, or immodest, to remove the veil when identification is needed.

I wanted, in my liberal, knee-jerk reaction, to think that Florida was needlessly troubling this woman. But now, my spider-sense is tingling with the possibility that Sultaana Freeman, nee Sandra Kellar, former Pentecostal preacher and child-abuser, may just be hiding something besides her modesty behind that veil.

Posted by Jonathan at 01:39 AM, 15 June 2003 | Comments (5)

Blame Me!

Okay, I admit it. I am only putting this in my blog so it will get noticed by the search engines quicker. But, I’ll at least put the keywords into a relatively readable paragraph:

I voted for Ralph Nader in the 2000 election. Many people blame Ralph Nader for throwing the election from Albert Gore to George W. Bush. And yet, as an unabashed Green, I think that Al Gore did win the election of 2000, and with the 2 million plus votes for a progressive Green candidate, Ralph Nader, a majority of voting Americans would have rather seen anyone else in office besides George W. Bush. But since Democrats would rather blame people like me, rather than try to get us back into the Democratic fold (Go Dean in ’04!), we’re held as the scapegoats for the loss of Albert Gore in the 2000 elections.

Phew! That was redundant, wasn’t it?

Anyway, the above bumper sticker is really for sale at CafePress. If you voted for Ralph Nader in 2000, and want to thumb your nose at everyone else in the country, (and who wouldn’t right now?) then buy this, and put it on your rear. Um, rear bumper.

Posted by Jonathan at 01:54 AM, 13 June 2003 | Comments (2)

June Reminder

Radiohead’s Hail to the Thief comes out today (10 June 03). So does Steely Dan’s Everything Must Go. Something very negative about those two titles. Bet the albums will be great. (I already know the Radiohead album is great, since I listened to most of it already—although, I was very drunk at the time. I almost wrote a very incoherent blog entry about it, but passed out before I could click the save button.)

In other entertainment news, Mr. Show’s third season will be out in August, along with The Simpsons’ season three. Looks like I know what I’m getting for my birthday. Ah, thank the gods for the high arts.

Lessee, what else? Gosh, it’s been a while since I’ve been here. So I guess some entries this week will deal with my previous hosting company’s demise. I’d like to comment on some comments made in various places on the ’Net. And I’d like to return to blogging in general. Well, we’ll see, won’t we? The proof will be in the blog pudding.

Posted by Jonathan at 11:38 PM, 09 June 2003 | Comments (0)