These things so absolutely nothing

 

The close button in every elevator in the world.  Half the time the open button doesn’t even work.  But the close button?  100% of the time non-functioning.  Doesn’t matter if the door is just taking a little longer to close, or if you see your douchebag colleague running across the lobby to catch the elevator you’re in and the little spot of joy in your dreary morning is to pretend like you’re reaching for the open button to keep it open but you’re really thumbing the shit out of that close button to slam the door on the him – that stupid close button is there just there to mock you which you stand in this cabled box.

 

The “aroma” button on my coffeemaker.  This was designed for the express purpose of filling you with false hope.  It’s a coffeemaker – it fucking makes coffee and coffee already makes everything smell like coffee.  What’s the fuck could this button possibly do?  Make a bigger coffee smell?  I have no idea how it’d do that.  This is such a stupid non-functioning button on my coffeemaker.

 

 

Bay leaves.  The charlatan of the herb and spice world.  The whole fucking bay leaf industry is a fucking sham.  We all throw these stupid razor-like leaves into our cooking and think that they’re magically going to make our food delicious.  Here’s a test – what the does a bay leaf even taste like?  That’s right, you have no fucking clue.  You can’t tell if your spaghetti sauce had a bay leaf in it or not.  That bay leaf is entirely inconsequential to your cooking.  Yet, we’re all schmucks to go fishing around our gravy to pull this stupid leaf out so that no one accidentally chokes on it.  Fuck bay leaves.

 

The “no tokens” sign in NYC subway turnstiles.  There hasn’t been a fucking token in use in about 10 years now.  Just who the hell are these signs targeted to?  The packrat crazy guy living under the Brooklyn Bridge who suddenly just came upon a token he’d hoarded back in 1999 and suddenly decided to take a train ride up to Central Park?  How about you put up some useful information at these subway stations.  “Next train in 3 minutes and there’s a douchebag who’s with a recumbent bike in the second car from the rear.”  That’s useful shit that could come in handy.

 

Check engine light.  The single-most pointless indicator ever invented.  It tells you NOTHING.  All it does is freak you the fuck out and make you sweat bullets as wonder if your engine’s gonna just suddenly drop out from under your car.  Or if your engine bay will turn into a big ball of fire while you’re gunning 90 on the highway.  Or absolutely nothing will happen at all.  It’s fucking stupid.

 

Paris and London: just the lowlights

Let me start by getting one thing out of the way.  That old adage about how Paris would be wonderful if it weren’t for all the French?  Bullfuckingshit.  Paris blows because it’s filled with Americans.  Everywhere you go, it’s Yanks all over the place.  What the fuck, I thought we were in some massive sinkhole of economic diarrhea – yet, Paris, one of the most expensive cities in the motherfucking universe, is filled to be brim with holidaying Yanks.  Fucking blows my mind.  Granted, I was there to do the same, so I’m not gonna begrudge someone else’s holidaying shenanigans, but goddamn there are a lot of Yanks in Paris.

Anyway, two weeks in Paris with a slight detour to pre-Olympic-bullshit London yielded some entirely pointless observations:

French countryside.  For all talk about the visual orgasm that is the French countryside, it’s remarkably dull.  You might as well be driving through the middle of New Jersey.

British graffiti sucks.  Banksy notwithstanding (which is technically is street art, not the sort of graffiti I’m talking about).  On the left is what was scrawled on the back of a loo in an average pub right off Greek Street in London’s Soho.  Compare that to the right, taken from the bathroom at Max Fish in New York’s Lower East Side.

When you make the mistake of going to see the Mona fucking Lisa, you usually have the misfortune of getting crammed with about 150 other boneheaded tourists all clamoring to see the same stupid painting.  Problem is, every single of one of them will be a complete imbecile.  Not only are they pushing and shoving, you get dipshits like this trying to take a picture of the painting from about 30 feet away.  Using an iPad.  Took every ounce of self-restraint not to swat that iPad out of his hands and send it hurtling towards the Mona Lisa itself to test out the painting’s perspex shielding.

 

This fucking guy at Versailles.

Café du Flore, Café Deux Magots, Brasserie Lipp – apparently this view affords you a tiny lukewarm cup of espresso that’ll set you back 10 euros.  We hit all three landmark restaurants in one sweep one lazy Tuesday afternoon.  Sure, they were lovely and boasted all sorts of literary history, but holy shit do they know how to work the whole tourist trap thing.  In fact, all the tourist traps are finetuned to perfection.  We hit a whole bunch of them – Au Pied du Cochon, Bofinger, Chartier, the three above.  You walk in and not a single Parisian is to be seen in any of these places.  Yet, somehow they make you feel OK sitting down and having an unspectacular yet unoffensive meal.  You know full well that you’re in a tourist trap, for some fucked up reason, you’re OK with it.  Which is heaps different from any given tourist trap in New York.  I think.  I haven’t been to New York tourist traps in a long while, so I’m just projecting here.

Andouillette.  Speaking of restaurants, my typically brave demeanor when it comes to food finally betrayed me.  On my final night in Paris, having already tried so many typical French foods, opted for one of the few remaining things I had yet to try: andouillette.   Sounds like an andouille, right?  And I fucking love andouille.  I had to try it.  Even if the description is nothing like andouille – andouillette is a sausage that’s constructed of chopped up tripe stuffed into an intestine.  Not just a natural gut casing, but the whole fucking intestine.  Filled with chopped up tripe.  How bad could it be?  Holy shit, never ask that question when it comes to andouillette.  Because the andouillette will punch you in the mouth with a definitive and declarative answer.  It tastes like you’ve just eaten the toilet from Trainspotting.  And you can’t swallow it because it’s all hard and crunchy and it tastes like shit and you start to gag and the combination of gag and a mouthful of shit causes you to asphyxiate, and your only solution is to wash it down as quickly as possible by guzzling wine right out of the bottle which causes you to instantly become the ape-like retarded tourist in the restaurant.  Everything is horrible and you want to die.  After coming to, I politely sent the plate of Satan’s pinched loaf back and ordered a steak tartar instead.  You have no idea how delicious a raw hamburger is after you’ve tried andouillette.

The subway music is much more interesting.  That’s not to say that any halfwit walking around with an accordion equals something good.  In New York, half these schmucks on the subway create some indiscernible racket and demand loose change from you.  Parisian minstrels, on the other hand, often sound like they might actually be good at weddings and bar mitzvahs.

Deodorant.  Europe is gonna be so awesome when they discover deodorant.

Zebras in the city

That’s right, because my choice to wear some shitty plastic watch is going to be heavily influenced by a herd of jerkoffs in animal-print full-body spandex as I wait for the 6 train. Brilliant.

Underground music

[Originally posted March 2011]

Shot this today in the Times Square subway station.  These guys have to play below the surface of the earth. Meanwhile, up top, I gotta hear debates about Biebermania or whether or not Lady Gaga’s Grammy egg show was any good.  WTF.

These guys might not be a great bluegrass band, but I’d rather be debating them than some shit about Glee.

Eat shit and die

[Originally posted October 2010]

Road food. Was there some gas station/rest stop coalition formed years ago where they all got together to form some unholy pact to sell and serve only the most heinous shit in the universe to unwitting and desperate drivers? Is this some retarded goof on the cross-country driving public, or something far more sinister? Because it’s as if these joint are actually going out of their way to serve the most gawdawful shit on earth. Inedible rancid shitfood. Maybe there is there some secret tournament amongst them to see who can come up with the worst shit that people will actually pay money to stuff down their big fat-coated throats. Like maybe there are local competitions, that ladder up to state championships, then regional playoffs that culminate in some national shit-off.And if some schmuck actually drops dead right there and then in the rest stop after one bite, that’s taken as a hole-in-one.Because somewhere out there has to be the single worst rest stop restaurant in the universe. Maybe you’ve found it. I don’t know if I have, but I’ve visited some strong playoff contenders. And that was just this past weekend.

And the biggest fucking joke is that the people who most need to stop at these little hells-on-earth are the ones we probably need some proper sustenance so that they don’t fall into some glycemic shock that’ll cause them to veer right into an oncoming eighteen-wheeler. But instead of getting the sustenance they need, they get the opposite. Some shit that’s just as likely to stop their hearts right there and then, as much as it’s likely to give them a fresh serving of crippling Hep C. “Hey, I’m pretty hungry right now, why don’t I pull into this rest stop here, and give that wart-ridden jackass behind the counter some of the rolled-up money I’ve got in my pocket to give me a swift punch to my heart and line my insides with liquefied possum fat. Yeah, that’s a great idea.Let’s go, kids! Maybe they’ll give you a lead-laden toy with your meal!”

Here’s the thing: why the fuck does everything need to be deep-fried? And covered in that super-durable polymer they tell you is “cheese”? Road food: made by, for, and with assholes.

“Just fry the shit out of everything, and I fucking mean EVERYTHING! Fry up that hot dog, fry up every piece of chicken there is in this joint, fry up those tomatoes. For dessert, fry up some ice-cream. These assholes love fried shit so much, I think we should actually take a piece of shit – literally – deep fry it some of that BP fuel we scooped up out of the Gulf, and give it a name. But call it something so they won’t know what the fuck it is they’re eating. I know: ‘chicken-fried steak’! Is it chicken? Is it steak? Fuck if I know, it’s got ‘fried’ in its name, it’s gonna be awesome!!!”

Instant food. Exercise a little patience, assholes. Just a little. By that, I mean a couple of minutes, that’s all. Just wait the extra couple of minutes to get something that’s properly made, rather than reheated, reconstituted from some partial biosynthetic extract that you know not from whence it came.

Take oatmeal, for example. Why the fuck are people willing to eat shit like instant oatmeal? Regular oatmeal takes about 10 minutes to make. Instant oatmeal takes about 5 minutes. Would it really fucking kill you to go the extra 5 minutes to get something that you know is actually made from oatmeal (because you can fucking see the oat grain), and not something that’s about three tablespoons’ (face it, those bags of instant oatmeal are tiny) worth of a cross between spackle and dog puke? How little do you give a shit about what you’re stuffing into your big fat pie hole that you’d settle for a bowl of processed assholes just because you can inhale it in 3 minutes instead of having to wait a couple more minutes for something to be made from scratch. Can’t waste a spare minute when it comes to eating crap!

Is it possible that you’re that retarded that you can do little more than to pour in some hot water or push a button on the microwave? Name one instant food that tastes better and is better for you? Just one. That’s alright, I’ll wait. How about you slow the fuck down, take your time to cook up something so that you know exactly what went into what you’re eating, and chill the fuck out. No one’s asking you to cook something super fancy, just stop with this instant bullshit.

New Yorkers who eat Subway. More than any group of people in the world, I want to bash together the heads of all these people. What the fuck is wrong with you? I don’t mean that rhetorically. I really want to know what the fuck is your defect that you live in the city with greatest delis in the world, and Hector or Jose eagerly standing behind the counter are only too happy to construct any concoction of a stacked sandwich to your heart’s delight… and you opt for motherfucking Subway. What the hell is wrong with you?! Each time you buy a five dollar footlong, you spit in the face of Hector. And Hector’s children. Stop with the Subway bullshit. How much do I fucking hate that chain. Bullshit sandwiches made of meats that look like sliced up tumors, and vegetables that look like they were pre-chewed by rabid mules. And they always look as good as they taste – like month-old roadkill.

Walk the ten extra paces to the corner deli and get yourself a proper sandwich, dipshit. Have some self-respect, for fuck’s sake.