No Love in the Kitchen This Christmas

Oh, No! I'm about the be chopped!

Forget the violence of video games, the viciousness of cyber comments, or just good old-fashioned war, oppression and mass murder. For real mayhem, tune into a television cooking show sometime. Now that’s brutality!



Cupcake Wars, Kitchen Crashers, Chopped, Cutthroat Kitchen and Hell’s Kitchen, these are cooking competitions to rival a cage fight. Chefs brawl, trash-talk, and vow to crush their cooking opponents.

Now that they’ve added Dinner Party Wars (no joke!), I feel compelled to speak out against such hostility during this, the most peace-filled, time of year and post the following homage to the holiday classic.

‘Twas the night before Food Wars,

And all through the house,

Not a Top Chef was pleasant, acting more like a louse.

The sharp blades were hung by the braised hens a-sneer,

In hopes that Miss Julia* soon would strike fear.

The rivals stood seething all sure they’d smack dread,

While visions of beat-downs danced in their head.

And Rachael’s just-folks, and Guy won’t shut up,
They all settled in for a shreddin’. Whassup!

More angry than Ramsey his minions they came,

And he spewed, and he shouted, and called them vile names:

“Now Dumb Shit, Now Dill Whip, Now Clueless, and Screw Up!

“On Loathsome, On Weakling, On Dim Wit, and Spew Up!

“Win the judge’s top score, win the judge’s top haul,

“Now, clean away, mop away, wipe away, all!”

And giving a nod, downed a bottle of wine.

They sprung to their stove, to their foes gave a finger,

And away they all cooked, staged like Jerry Springer.

But I heard them exclaim, ‘fore they put down their pans.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all tainted spam.

*In order of appearance:

• Julia Childs, renowned and beloved French chef.

• Rachael Ray, super bubbly television cook and kitchenware hustler.

• Guy Fieri, spiky-haired loudmouth of Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives.

• Ramsey Gordon, television cook who verbally and emotionally abuses contestants.

• Jerry Springer, instigator of girl fights and revealer of paternity tests who is the definition of lowbrow television.

 

 

 

All I Can Remember Are the Rats



Three-and-a-half foot pit.

Yeah, sure I’d spent a week in California’s quiet high desert, only a stone’s throw from Mt. Lassen. I’d helped to painstakingly excavate three-and-a-half feet of dirt from an archaeology pit. I’d held in my hand gem-precious artifacts –smooth, cool obsidian points and perfect grinding stones. Awesome to behold.

I’d watched the sky immediately turn from playful white puffs to fearsome kingdom-come storm clouds. I’d listened to birds and bugs zip and buzz across the summer-yellow meadow. I’d discovered that a sage flower is really the sum of its zillion tiny blossoms. The stuff of poetry.

 Yes, I’d heard and seen all of these rare and beautiful things.



There's a rat incisor in my screen!

But now all I can remember are the rats –



common, pervasive, repulsive rats. Carriers of disease. Destroyers of car wiring. Rats skulked around the edges of my life during the week I spent last summer on an archaeology dig in Mapes Cow Camp near Susanville.

Unit #1, where I worked, was a beast, the energizer bunny of archaeology pits. All week it produced fine obsidian pieces, grinding rocks, and nice ranch-era metal, buttons and buckles.

Then weird things happened. Way down in the pit, beyond the turn of the last century, bits of plastic showed up. After some head-scratching, we determined that the plastic had been dragged down there by rats who’d created a little rodent love nest, which was confirmed when we found a yellowed rat tooth. Yuck.

And then, on my final day in Mapes, hot, tired, filthy, ready to head home, my car wouldn’t start, the victim of a rat invasion. Yeah, nice. They’d chewed at the insulation around hoses and wires, and even left behind their mobile nest on a ledge beneath my battery.

Hey, rats, way to ruin my romantic-high-desert-wind-swept-bigger-than-life notion of archaeology.

It's not all glamour out there.

What struck me about that week is that rats have always been among us. They refuse to live quiet, secluded life, but choose to skulk near human populations, making our lives a misery. And we’ve always battled them. We poison them, trap them, chop them in half with shovels, sic dogs on them, and puncture their eardrums with sound waves, but they live on and on and on nerve-damaged and deaf.

Why don’t more pleasant species, like butterflies or the polar bear, have the survival skills of these vermin? Why indeed. Read on.

 Rat facts that will make your lip curl in disgust:

·         They’re, of course, responsible for the plague and a number of deadly fevers.

·        They’ll eat grain, macaroni, pizza, scrambled eggs and their own feces for nutrition. Yes, their own feces!

·        They can survive a flush down the toilet and three days treading water.

·        They reproduce like the Brady Bunch and can pop out 2,000 rats each year.

Why, as a society, we’ve tried to make peace with rats by making them loveable is beyond me.

·         Mickey Mouse will slap you with a lawsuit if you as much as appliqué his image on a kitchen hand towel.

·         3 Blind Mice just play on our sympathy.

·         Tom and Jerry’s chases, poisonings, and head slams are adorable.

There’s really not a moral in here somewhere. Being sneaky and destructive pays, just look at Wall Street. Eeekk!