This town needs a food critic. Many Midwestern towns suffer from this same affliction of a lowered gastronomic bar. The first great step that all Midwesterners should take is to admit that we have a problem. Let’s face it, people from the East Coast, West Coast and even the South come to our towns and vocalize the limited quality of our food offerings. Sure we have plenty of restaurants but it’s the quality and freshness of the ingredients and the creativity on the menus that lacks in many Midwestern locals.
I would consider myself lucky. Athens offers a surprising diversity in cuisine for a Midwestern town of 20,000 inhabitants. We have the University to thank for that. Unfortunately many of our restaurants are lacking that extra something that turns a restaurant that just serves food, into an establishment that serves a superb experience.
Many of our eateries present a deceitful ambiance that leads eager customers in thinking they will be receiving a meal worthy of the inflated prices on the menu. They suffer from “white tablecloth blindness.” A sever hypnotic affliction that is spread by greedy and contemptible restaurant owners who revel in doing business where the bar is set low enough to allow a white tablecloth to define the market value of the meal. One of the most extreme examples of white tablecloth blindness or “ambiance blindness” is Spagio in Columbus, Ohio. They tried to get me. Alas, their “canned” red sauce broke any spell they had cast on me at the door. I suppose in the end they still got me. I had to pay for that crap.
One other such bad experience several months ago was a horrific dining event at a place called Toscanos in Athens. This is honestly the worst meal I have ever paid for. This place doesn’t even make an attempt at inducing “white tablecloth blindness.” They simply jack their prices up to make the public believe they are actually getting something worth the hefty price tag. My brie chicken pasta was first brought out cold by a pitiful waitress who didn’t know a knife from a fork. When if finally came out hot, it was essentially a horrific plate of overcooked pasta with melted white american cheese over the top. The real insult was its $18.00 price tag. That was $6.00 more than I paid for a dinner in New Orleans of a Crab Etoufé that I will never forget.
Culinary disasters like this are why every Midwestern town needs a food critic. Imagine if, on a monthly basis, someone publicly called these dog food vendors on their overpriced slop in the local newspaper. Better yet, a periodic food critique is a great way to push good restaurants into becoming great restaurants through constructive criticism. Design is an iterative process and that includes food design. An honest critique might persuade good chefs to try the next and far better iteration of their menu items.
Small and midsized Midwestern towns will never be food culture centers like New York and New Orleans. We won’t ever have professional waiters. We will never boast the boldness and richness in our local cuisine that has evolved into modern Southern fare. We can however up the bar by getting our communities talking about food and demanding experiences in our dining out as opposed to just fancy dish names on a white tablecloth. There are places out here in flyover country that have started to get it right. Madison Wisconsin boasts a bevy of good restaurants and my meal at L’etoile was world class. Best part of it, the ingredients were fresh and LOCAL. If all that we demanded was not-out-of-a-can ingredients and that “fresh” was a word that defined the ingredients and not how the chef talked to his waitresses, it would be a start.
As usual, I waited until the last possible moment to do my Christmas shopping. Regardless of the time of year, I would rather be spanked with a spiked steel glove than spend time in a store or shopping mall. This sentiment is amplified during the Christmas season, when the stores become as uncomfortable for me as a trip to the Bureau of Motor Vehicles. This year, an already uncomfortable experience is made even more agonizing by the added awkward moment that now happens at every checkout counter as clerks cautiously contemplate which holiday wish they will offer at the completion of the sale.
Being in a bi-racial and bi-national marriage gives me a unique perspective on sensitivities given to the culture and belief systems of others outside of our own. The most comprehensive understandings in my own marriage are reached out of brutally honest discussions. The greatest benefit in such discussions is not somehow enforcing my own cultural norms or beliefs on my wife but rather the discoveries of where each of our beliefs and norms are different. This is what allows for the subsequent bridge building that sustains a healthy relationship.
It’s hard work being honest, discovering real divergence in beliefs and harder yet, to find the means for both parties to retain their beliefs and live under the same roof. The holiday greeting ignominy that has spiraled out of control this year is a further step in the politically correct speech movement that began in the 1980s. The so-called cultural sensitivity shown in such speech is a farce. The individuals and groups that takes such petty pride in buffing individual identities and belief systems out of the way that we speak to one another are doing far more damage to the nation than any Walmart clerk that might happen to say Merry Christmas to a Jewish person.
Why such an uproar this season over our holiday greetings? I looked at some national demographic statistics comparing religious affiliations in the U.S. between 1990 and 2001. Between 1990 and 2001 the proportion of our population that could be classified as Christian has declined from 86% to 77%. This would support being more sensitive about greeting a non-Christian shopper with a Christmas greeting right? Not really. In the same time period the number of Americans purporting no religious affiliation has jumped from 8% to 14 %. Most of these non-Christian Americans still celebrate the secular elements of the Christmas holiday. Given these numbers there is really only a 3% increase in individuals with a non-Christian background, hardly an overwhelming flood of non-Christians.
Despite these numbers, the real issue is that we are mopping our differences under a rug and pretending they don’t exist. It doesn’t take a psychiatric degree to know that, for an individual, bottling up feelings is unhealthy and ultimately can lead to an explosion of rage that does more damage than had the feelings been vented gradually. Why would a collection of individuals be any different? Rather than being “sensitive” to the under-represented, I would propose that our societal push for ever increasing political correctness in speech is a cop-out and a way to avoid uncomfortable situations. If we are not careful, the ultimate result of such avoidance could be social upheaval like that which was witnessed in France recently.
Until the time that people grow up, shed their fears for talking about cultural differences I am considering crafting a nametag that I can wear into stores to avoid the awkward instance when the clerk carefully considers their words. My badge will read: Chris Keesey: White, American, Christian with Black, Haitian wife and mixed race child. Hopefully this can help store clerks and any other individual worried about being sensitive to not offend me or my family.
During a newscast the other night featuring the “Merry Christmas” controversy, Ingrid noted, “I come from a country with 70% unemployment and a per capita GNP of $400, you people need to get a real problem”
Did she just say that Americans have no real problems? I’m offended.
Researchers at Northwestern University recently determined that a third of U.S. teens showed poor levels of cardiovascular health after being given and subsequently “flunking” a standard treadmill test. Their research is touted as truly highlighting the growing problem of inactivity and resulting poor fitness amongst our children. I applaud the researchers on their findings but could have saved them a great deal of time and come to similar results by simply spending a couple hours at a local shopping mall performing my own qualitative ethnographic study.
Let’s face it, there are a lot more fat-ass kids now then there were 20 years ago. Here is how I achieve my results. When I was in elementary school there was 1 morbidly obese kid in each class of 25 students and 2-3 chubby kids. A chubby kid, while not necessarily “a porker” in the true sense of the word, is one who has enough extra payload that he/she might still have the misfortune of having to get their pants in the “husky” section at Sears.
Now let’s put that data up against some more recently acquired data. I was recently at Easton Town Center in Columbus. Out of 15 elementary aged kids playing by the public fountains, 4 were morbidly obese and 4 others were “chubby.”
So let’s look at the results of my hearty data set. 20 years ago, in an elementary school class of 25 students, 4% of the students were morbidly obese. 8% of the students were “chubby.” More recently 26% of elementary aged students are morbidly obese with another 26% being defined as “chubby.” Fortunately for today’s greater numbers of chubby kids, Sears has done away with the “Husky” designation of pants.
Why such shocking increases in portly kids? Part of the reason for such shocking results in my own studies is the geography of the study itself. Easton Town Center is located in Columbus Ohio, a city that in its very construction is ideal for creating engorged waistlines and inactivity. Quality of life is deemed sub par if a resident is not able step directly from the kitchen, after downing their doughnuts, to their car in less than 10 paces. From here, their car will take them directly to the parking lot at work where any more than a 25 yard walk into the office building means that you are a mere plebian in terms of workplace status. Walking in Columbus Ohio is frowned upon.
More recent personal ethnographic studies at my current location in Appalachia have proven to be even more atrocious. While there is more activity in the Appalachian lifestyle, the average diet makes a daily doughnut for breakfast look like a fat-free granola bar. In a particularly appalling incident several days ago, I actually witnessed a first; two teenagers with their mother in the lobby of my workout facility eating McDonalds before beginning their workout. This is like soaking your firewood in water the day of your campout. Why not light up a cigarette while your at it ladies?
Just last night while discussing food with my daughter and nephew, they suddenly started singing “Mcdonald, McDonalalds, McDonalds makes you fat” While it warmed the cockles of my heart to hear the song, and I am glad that they have a rudimentary understanding of the correlation of fast food and obesity, I don’t believe Mcdonalds MAKES people fat. People make people fat by eating too much Mcdonalds. As adults, we all make conscious decisions about our diet and must live with the consequences. It’s true that it is much harder now to make the right decisions given the pervasiveness of fast food in our society. It’s even harder to fit in physical activity. The decision to lead a healthier lifestyle begins simply with small steps such as walking to the mailbox once a day instead of pulling up in your car on the way home. Better yet, to the ladies at my gym, how about eating a bagel before your workout instead of a foul, stinking bag of McDonalds.
Sears may have done us no favors in removing the “Husky” section. In removing such a badge of dishonor, they started us down the road of removing tangible consequences for poor diet and inactivity.
A strange thing happens as redheads age. Even before our hair turns white, the tint of our hair darkens. I thought it was just me however in reading several articles on redheads I see that it is a common phenomenon. As my hair has gone from an orange-red hue in my youth to a more auburn-brown natural color, I have become more interested in the science behind red-heads.
Many of you who have only known me in recent years are saying to yourself, “but you’re a blonde not a redhead.” Not true, the blonde is fake, added in at first because I was tired of being a redhead. When you endure a childhood of redhead jokes you tend to aspire to different hair colors. The taunts range from the simple “Ronald McDonald” references to more vicious insults like “red on the head like the dick on a dog”. More recently as my hair darkens, I turn it blonde because I don’t like having dark hair either but that’s more of an aesthetic choice.
So what is the science behind red hair. It’s very interesting and actually far more than just a hair coloring. There are actual genetic studies behind the origins of the redhead which appears first as a recessive gene only 20,000-40,000 years ago. In evolutionary terms, this is very recent. This MC1R variant gene is most prevalent in Celtic countries but is also noted in many other locals in far lower percentages. Some researchers have cited this regionalism of the occurrences of the recessive gene to propose that redheads are the product of cross breeding between Neanderthal man and Cro-Magnon Man. This theory, while rather funny, has been largely debunked. To think, I could be closer genetically to Neanderthals. I’m not sure how I feel about that.
Beyond just the color of our hair, redheads are generally also the proud possessors of freckles, fair skin and have also been scientifically documented as having different reactions to anesthesia than the rest of the general population. The latter might explain why I can drink so much Wild Turkey at a sitting without adverse reaction. ;-)
So why the fascination with red-heads? I guess it starts from childhood. Most redhead kids wish they were anything but a redheaded kid and I would assume the jackasses making fun of them are probably glad that they are not redheaded. Is it just kids though? Apparently not. Ancient Romans considered red-heads to be unlucky however it is documented that Romans could at the same time command a higher price for red-headed slaves than your stock brown-haired Slav that littered their slave markets. Judus Iscariot is sometimes documented as a redhead. The British to this day are especially cruel to redheads despite the fact that Queen Elizabeth 1 of England was a redhead.
I was discussing redheads the other day with a coworker. We were laughing about the notion of a bright red-headed president. I proclaimed that this country would see a female president long before ever seeing a red-head in office. After some research though it would appear that my proclamation was incorrect. Calvin Coolidge was a redhead. I think it is safe to state however that, much like myself, while he still was a redhead, age had either turned what which was once bright red to a darker shade or depending on his age, white even.
To the young redhead, take these words of inspiration with you as you wade through the endless redhead jokes thrown at you in your youth. Much like your hair color, the jokes will fade away into the distant past. Your hatred for clowns will not fade. You can become president, at least when you don’t show any outward evidence that you really are a redhead anymore. Oh and also, if your hair color does darken or lighten, always let your anesthesiologist know that you are a redhead beneath it all.
Ingrid and I participated recently in a “giving tree”. For those of you not familiar, a “giving tree” involves plucking a card off of a designated Christmas tree. The card contains the name of a needy person in the community and lists items that they might want or need for Christmas. In our case the individual needed some pants and shirts.
Now this is a really good idea and a great way to actually put some meaning back into a holiday that has become little more than a commercialized scramble to knock items off of the Christmas lists of everyone in your family. It was also a great way to teach Somnia the valor of giving to people less fortunate than ourselves.
Several days before dropping the gift off, Ingrid asked me where the gift was so that she could wrap it. I assured her that the gift did not need wrapped since the card clearly stated, “No time to wrap your gift? We will wrap it for you.” For 2 days I assured Ingrid that the giving tree organizers would wrap the gift and for 2 days Ingrid repeatedly asked to wrap the gift.
The day we were to drop the gift off, I had clearly prevailed. We would utilize the offered gift wrapping services. Much to my dismay and Ingrid’s far greater dismay, the event organizers greeted us with a look of surprise as we handed them our Elder Beermans bag full of booty that we proudly presented for such a good cause. “We are not wrapping gifts” said the organizers. The look on Ingrid’s face could have frozen boiling water as she directed her gaze on me. “But don’t dismay”, they said. “There is paper over there. You can wrap it here” Ingrid’s irritated stare loosened as she surveyed the wrapping materials. “No boxes?” she replied. “Sorry, no boxes”, the organizers answered back.
After a tense few seconds of the organizers waiting for Ingrid’s reaction, she broke the silence, turning to me and stated stridently, “I should have never listened to you.” Like a trooper though, Ingrid proceeded wrapping the gift, without a box, protesting the entire way with proclamations ranging from “This is half-ass” and “This just shows that we don’t care” She then set it atop a pile of “correctly” wrapped gifts in boxes and bows and we exited the scene with Ingrid uttering a final, “how embarrassing.”
Now, I was not embarrassed and after several days of digesting the event I am left with perhaps an even greater sour taste in my mouth for gift wrapping than before the giving tree, gift wrapping train wreck. You see, I have never understood gift wrapping and quite frankly see it as perhaps one of the most outlandish wastes of resources that we as a culture hold dear. Making something pretty to simply rip it to shreds and heave it into a glad bag with the rest of the squandered colored paper just isn’t something I can get behind. I believe that I would be a terrible Mexican child as I would lobby to not thrash the pińata that someone spent so much time and effort creating.
What I believe really caps the whole giftwrapping issue for me is that once again, the sentiments that make Christmas such a wonderful event are lost; buried beneath layers of shiny, dyed paper that have somehow themselves become more important than the sentiments expressed by the gift itself. Perhaps I am such a killjoy that I am completely incapable of seeing the importance of gift-wrap in the Christmas tradition. Perhaps I’m simply trying to cover my ass for not wrapping the gift in the first place.
I have found a great way to ensure that I update my blog often...create bugs in the page design and the archival settings that screw up the index page almost daily :-)
By skinning the blog myself I somehow created a bug in the index page template that messes up the page layout by knocking the calendar to the bottom of the page if there are more than 1 entry on the index. Real nice huh? Vanity over funtionality. Well, I am still trying to figure it out.
Worse yet, today I find that the index page entry is gone completely. I must have messed with the archiving settings somewhere. The happy cloud, blue sky feeling that I felt as I skinned up a MovableType blog is slipping away as I now start to deal with these random problems.
On a somewhat non-connected note, I just finished hanging my last piece of drywall in the "media room" today. What a relief. Hanging drywall alone is no picnic. Now, allow me to make the following proclamation: Today, I like drywall better than blogs. When the drywall is up and painted I can look at it and enjoy my room on a daily basis without having to then continually deal with items such as archival settings and CSS and browser compatability.
"Bugs" could however still be an issue ;-). We were assailed by ladybugs this fall and I still periodically find them crawling across the ceilings heading for sources of light and heat. I read an article that stated how ladybugs are attracted to tall, white structures. We are fortunate to have a white, 2-story house perched atop a hill.
I wrote up this "drummers creed" for fun a couple weeks ago. It sums my current personal beliefs on being a drummer. Eric Miranda of "Ming Dynasty" must be credited for inspiring several of the points to the creed.
DRUMMER'S CREED
I believe the failure of most musicians, including myself, can be directly blamed on the fact that they did not learn the lessons that Charlie Watts and Phil Rudd learned at a young age.
I believe that if you don’t learn and know many songs, it’s hard to be good at writing or playing them.
I believe Dave W(a)ckle should be a mathematician not a musician
I believe the use of odd numbered time signatures, while it can be perfected, and I did perfect it, flys in the face of nature.
I believe I was a loser when I was perfecting odd numbered time signatures.
I believe Dave Brubeck and Radiohead provide excellent examples refuting the odd-numbered time signatures part of this creed.
I believe that it will be difficult to impossible to push Punk beyond the limits set by Gigi Allen.
I believe that Gigi Allen is not dead. (I saw him on the Green Line in Boston in ’99)
I believe that Ryan Adams, Jack White, Jeff Buckley, Dave Grohl and Theo Eastwind(NYC Subway) are great modern songwriters.
I believe Johnny Cash is a great all time songwriter.
I believe that I like Nirvana more than Pearl Jam today
I believe that I liked Pearl Jam more than Nirvana in ‘91
I believe I was a loser in ‘91
I believe that you CAN think that BOTH Jimmy Page and Johnny Thunders define what rock guitar is all about.
I believe and admit that I bought a farm to try and channel the energy of John Bonham
I believe that jazz peaked in the 1950s with the Miles Davis “With” series of albums (Relaxin, Steamin, Workin) and Kinda Blue.
I believe that conscious Reggae is cool but Konpa(Haiti) is cooler.
I believe that I would join a Steely Dan cover band if I could.
I believe that their will never be a Steely Dan cover band in Athens
I believe NYC is the epitome of what a city should be.
I believe LA is the epitome of what a city should not be.
I believe that Detroit just shouldn’t be
I believe that I wish I had not joined a “jam band” in the early 90s.
I believe that I would join a “jam band” again if it was like Gov’t Mule.
I believe that Tosca - Suzuki is great music to work to
I believe that the Vines could go from really good to great if their singer can keep his marbles about him.
I believe that the Vines wouldn’t be as good if their singer had his marbles about him.
I believe that I wish I were a fly on the wall when Keith Richards first heard Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da on the radio.
I believe John Lennon’s name should come first.
I believe it pisses me off when guitarists ask the sound man to pull the kick drum down in the mix.
I believe that 99.9% of aspiring musicians will fail
I believe that I failed
I believe I had a lot of fun trying
I believe that great bands are made by intangible factors and hard as you try to find just the right people, it’s like love. It just can’t be forced.