Monday, October 31, 2016

Restaurant Review: Osaka Japanese Restaurant. Provo, Utah.

Everything was better when I was a kid. The wars were better. The diseases were better. Even the Presidents were better. And especially the Japanese restaurants were better. Much better.

I am referring, of course, to the one and only Little Tokyo in Dinkytown, near the campus of the University of Minnesota. My best friend Wayne Matsuura's parents were good friends with the owners of Little Tokyo, so Wayne and I would go there on Friday nights to stuff ourselves with tempura vegetables and pickled daikon radishes and rice balls soaked in sake and then wrapped up in layers of seaweed. In return we washed dishes and broke to saddle the larger cockroaches so we could ride 'em out of town after the place closed. I remember the food as light and crispy and filling and pungent.

But today,October 31, some sixty years later, I find myself in a Japanese place on Center Street in Provo, Utah, that does not live up to my memories at all.

 I started with a bowl of miso soup, which tasted exactly like chicken soup. Then I got a green salad, with, the waitress said, the 'house dressing'. The so-called house dressing was some kind of watery mayonnaise. So that didn't do anything to cheer me up. The decor was dark and severe, with simple Japanese calligraphy on the walls. I was happy to have a nice thick pillow on my chair -- but it was covered with crumbs. Next came the pot stickers:

They were okay; nothing to strew cherry blossoms over. As I stared at my plate of pot stickers I realized with embarrassment that I've never really known the proper way to eat them. Do you pick them up with your fingers to nibble on or cut them in pieces with a knife and fork? Me, I just stab 'em with my fork, dunk in the sauce, and then stuff the whole thing in my mouth. On reflections, that seems a rather barbaric way to eat them. So I've probably been offending Japanese culinarians for many years past. Perhaps if I had stopped there I would not now be glaring at my computer screen, with steam slowly rising out of my ears. But I went ahead and ordered vegetable tempura:

It came with the smallest bowl of rice I have ever been served in an Asian restaurant, so I couldn't even fill up on stodge. The veggies had not been dipped in batter at all; they were dipped in cement. I tried using the dipping sauce to soften them up, but they remained as impervious as granite. And flavorless as well; I ladled on the soy sauce like there was no tomorrow, but it hardly made a dent in the void. As I gnawed my way through the last piece I noticed that even though it was now high noon there was not a single solitary other customer in the restaurant -- and now I knew why; if you didn't bring your own jackhammer you probably couldn't digest anything on the menu.

I give the Osaka a one burp rating -- and they're only getting that because I liked the fish in their lobby:

My meal of pot stickers and vegetable tempura, which included the miso soup and green salad, cost $10.56.

I did not feel I had dined well after finishing this meal, so I stopped next door at Bianca's La Petite French Bakery for a Bavarian cream filled kro-nut, a leviathan pastry that set me back $4.99:

It's supposed to be a French donut sliced in half with cream filling in the middle. It succeeds in being nearly impossible to eat without dislocating your jaw and getting powdered sugar on everything within a radius of ten feet:  


But it's very good; soft and sweet without being at all gooey. As I sat back covered in powdered sugar, I decided that one lousy Japanese meal does not a tragedy make -- not when I can balance it out with a heavy sweet that will soon have me napping peacefully in my recliner until the hobgoblins start coming out tonight for their cheap candy treats. I should have gotten some gift certificates from the Osaka to hand out for Halloween . . . talk about trick or treat!  



Inside the Affordable Care Act’s Arizona Meltdown


Premiums for some plans will be more than double this year, some of the biggest increases in the nation. Only last-minute maneuvering prevented one Arizona county from becoming the first in the nation to have no exchange insurers at all.

from the Wall Street Journal  

Affordable Care is a jest,
as popular now as incest.
The premiums soar
like the hammer of Thor, 
and crushing the poor in the breast. 



When I'm good and famous

I've been reading all about Bob Dylan  being unreachable; the Nobel Prize Committee wants to get a hold of him to give him his medal and a bunch of money, but Dylan won't return their calls. Same thing with Bill Murray; he's notorious for not having an agent or manager or secretary and for never returning phone calls and not giving a hoot in hell about publicity.

What is it with these people? Are they crazy?

Crazy like a fox. Or like J.D. Salinger.

These people have gone beyond the hype of fame, to discover the Land of Fame Zen -- where privacy, if not modesty, reigns, and the media goblins have been expelled forever.

And that's how famous I want to be.

I'll go back and live in Thailand, where I spent two years as a missionary and five years as an English teacher. Pick up where I left off with my girlfriend Joom. Live on a durian plantation in a teak wood shack.  No cell phone. No internet. No indoor plumbing. Just unreliable mail delivery. Any darn reporter who wants an exclusive will have to tramp through thorny jungle trails, barely wide enough for a python, to reach my compound. And the chances will be very good that I won't be there, because I don't care enough about journalists or publicity to follow the rules of normal hospitality. They can talk to Joom, who barely speaks English.

And if I decide to fly over to Hawaii to see my good bud Barack in his retirement, for some golf or body surfing, you can bet dollars to donuts I won't alert the media. Especially the social media. No Twitter or Facebook for me, kemosabe.

I'll have a beard-growing contest with Letterman, and the press won't know a dang thing about it until it's over -- and the only information they'll get about it is from Letterman, the blabbermouth.

I'll be so elusive and aloof that all the biographies written about me will have to use the word "Unauthorized" in the title.

I guess I'll have to get a penthouse in Manhattan as well, right next to Woody Allen's. We'll feud about his dog messing around in my garbage. But the public will never know about it, since Woody knows how to keep his mouth shut, and I'll be too busy with my New York bankers to care. And I'll do nothing to scotch the rumors about a possible Broadway production.

At some point the sneaky paparazzi will snap a photo of Tom Cruise giving me a Scientology book while I give him a Book of Mormon. This is the only photo of me extant for the next twenty years.

I won't be in Washington to receive my Mark Twain prize; I'll send Joom's daughter-in-law from her first marriage, who speaks passable English, to pick it up.

Let me tell you, it's a great feeling having complete validation of my talents without being bothered by any fans or questioned by the media. I get to have my kale and eat it, too.

Now the only question is just how exactly am I going to get that famous; it usually requires work and patience and genius. And I don't go in for that kind of strenuous stuff anymore. Bad for my blood pressure.

Maybe I'll just live obscurely without bothering to become famous at all. And then I'll become famous for that.

Christ is joy!

For Latter-day Saints, Jesus Christ is joy!    Russell M. Nelson


One name only fills the earth with joy and jubilee.
Jesus Christ, the Savior -- the mild Man from Galilee.
Believe in him and sorrow melts, along with cold despair.
Pray to him for rescue -- for it is His only care.
Never doubt his love for you; each sunrise will reveal
reasons to rejoice in Him with everlasting zeal!                                                

Sunday, October 30, 2016

My Neighbors

Let us be neighbors of whom it might be said: "He or she was the best neighbor I ever had."  Gordon B. Hinckley.

My neighbors are a friendly bunch
who keep me in their prayers.
They bring me casseroles for lunch
and shovel off my stairs.
When I need a ride to work
they volunteer with glee.
And when I borrow garden tools
they come and work with me.
I've never known a better group
of friends who've got my back --
even though I'm almost what
you might call Mormon Jack!

The tears of a (real) clown: All the insane clown hysteria is giving us a bad name

Clowns take us to a happy place;
that's why they wear a painted face.
Since Grimaldi they have striven
to be loved and then forgiven.
Lovable, or bold and loud,
clowns wring laughter from the crowd.
But today their very function
is subject to severe injunction.
When we make the clown a fiend,
our sense of humor we've demeaned. 

Saturday, October 29, 2016

Restaurant Review: Broke Eatery. Provo, Utah.

Across the street from Provo City Hall is a two story brick building that is undecided as to its purpose. It could be a bar, from the number of neon beer signs in the windows, or a ReMax office, or a modest bistro. Turns out it is all these things. The front of the ground floor is a new bistro, with only a half dozen items on offer.

Being a pleasantly dry day, after a night of cold rain, I was out ambling along, scuffling through the leaves with my Dr. Scholl's work shoes, enjoying what promised to be the last of a very sensual fall, when my eye fell on the Broke Eatery signboard. I was on my way to a Japanese restaurant, where I planned to do multiple gag photos of me struggling with chopsticks, but the signboard halted my progress with the announcement of a turkey pastrami sandwich and bowl of potato/sausage soup for a mere pittance. As I was contemplating a change in eating plans, the chef bounded out the door to give me a hearty greeting. I steadfastly kept my eyes on the signboard; unwilling to let his friendly demeanor sway my choice of cuisine. But I suddenly realized that sushi and tempura were not to be my fate today. An unpretentious combination of soup and sandwich sounded much better.

And it was much better. Partly because I dined al fresco on their sidewalk patio, where my waitress Nichelle smiled at me the way girls used to smile at me when I was a young shavetail full of wanton promise to the opposite sex:

Nowadays, alas, my creaky knees and billowing paunch mark me as a mere Pantaloon in some tawdry commedia dell'arte production -- a toothless and repulsive wreck of a man. But still, Nichelle smiled, the sun shined, and the food was good.


 In fact it was so good that as I was slurping up the last of the soup I realized I didn't want this brief idyll on the patio, with the Honda Civics whizzing by on the street and young couples with babies in strollers wandering past on the sidewalk, to end yet. So I asked for a half order of chicken jambalaya. The chef brought it out himself:

The chicken pieces were plump; the rice succulent; and the sauce of crushed tomatoes really didn't need the dash of Tabasco I carelessly flung on it.

And then the chef sat down to talk for twenty minutes. Gradually the unhappy realization dawned on me that he thought I wanted an interview. I had told him I was doing a blog about where I was eating lunch. He must have thought I was a reporter. But I'm not. I'm a blogger. And to my way of thinking a blogger is on par with a pickpocket -- you can't trust  either one.

But once he had launched into his story I didn't have the heart to stop him. It's a humdinger of a story, full of love and violence and tragedy and triumph; but, as I say, I'm no reporter, thank god, and so I'm not going to repeat a word of what he said.

The food was good. The weather was great. And the tables all had cut flowers on them. What more do you want me to write? This isn't the New Yorker . . .

I give Broke Eatery 4 Burps. My soup and sandwich combo, with a half order of jambalaya, cost $14.40. And yes, I did leave a cash tip on the table just as I said I would start doing in an earlier blog. That got another smile from Nichelle. I think I may be in love, but I'm going to take a nap first before I do anything drastic.



Friday, October 28, 2016

Who's really the fool?

A child wore a clown mask to school.
Her teachers then started to drool.
While being expelled
she suddenly yelled:
"I wonder who's really the fool?" 


Restaurant Review: Joe Vera's. Provo, Utah.


I entered Joe Vera's place at exactly 11:37 p.m., and already there were 12 customers seated ahead of me. I could tell it was a classy joint, because of the sign:

This sign in a restaurant means you are in the presence of ladies and gentlemen, and you had better watch your P's and Q's or Bruno who washes dishes in the back is let off his leash and allowed to maul you before tossing you out on your ear.

The decor is muted, with embroidered black felt sombreros hanging on the walls. I was hoping for the absence of mariachi muzak, but no such luck. Why do restaurants play canned music? Is it to make people eat more? I hardly think so; who wants to gorge in an elevator? The staff can't enjoy it. It calls to mind the season I spent working at Circus World down in Haines City, Florida, which featured an old-timey carousel that played "Strawberry Blonde" and "In the Good Old Summertime" over and over and over again. It could be heard everywhere in the park, and after about a week of such a steady diet I nearly succumbed to a gibbering dementia.

However, my mind is a strong one, able to leap tall ant hills in a single bound, so I stoically endured that musical torture amidst the dwindling orange groves -- just as I endured the mariachi tunes at the restaurant today. But it marks a man -- I still occasionally squirt blood from my eyes like a horned toad.

My idea of a great restaurant is one that is located in a functioning library, where everything is done in whispers and you can take down a book to peruse while awaiting your order.

My chips and salsa were brought right away, before you could say "Bob's your uncle." And they don't stint on the salsa, either. You get a little carafe of the stuff to drown your sorrows:

Like every Mexican restaurant I have ever been to, most of the chips were already smashed into the size of cracker crumbs -- so I had to pinch together a dozen little pieces to scoop up some salsa. This always leads to an unfortunate accident on my shirt front. I wind up looking like Pancho Via has just rampaged through and shot me in the chest.

I ordered something called a Bandido. It contained flour tortillas, refried beans, salsa verde, a goodly portion of melted cheese, lots of shredded lettuce, and a dab of sour cream and a smidgen of guacamole:
The waiter warned me when he placed it on the table to take care, the plate was very hot. Again, this is something I've noticed at every Mexican place I have ever patronized -- the main dish is always served on a platter that is always near a molten state of heat. Why is that? Do they microwave the stuff until it sizzles? I once asked my old pantomime Maestro, Sigfrido, Aguilar, who still has his Estudio Busquela de Pantamimo in Patzcuaro, Michoacan, Mexico, why Mexican food is always served on heated plates in the States. He told me: "It's only as hot as you want it to be." (He was also into Zen at the time.)
I was pretty hungry, so I had finished the whole homogeneous concoction and was sipping my raspberry lemonade before I realized I had not really tasted much of anything as I filled my pie hole. Call me uncouth if you will, but my taste buds had not been stimulated by the dish -- only lulled into a near coma by all the melted cheese. I had eaten ballast, taken on cargo, but not really dinned.
Even the refried beans had not made an impression, and usually they stand out like sliced wieners in a bowl of clam chowder. The best refried beans I've ever had was at the Que Pasa restaurant, run by Alex Janney, in Bangkok, Thailand. He's from Texas and he knows how to make 'em sing on your tongue. I once asked him for the recipe, to which he politely responded "Go to hell."


I guess some day, when my bitcoin investments pay off, I'll be able to afford to eat at a really ritzy joint where the chef personally prepares my dish with enough skill so I can taste each individual deftly utilized herb and spice, without resorting to an avalanche of melted cheese.
But until then, I give Joe Vera's a rating of 3 burps. Just because if you're hungry you'll get full, and if you bring kids they'll at least lick up all the melted cheese so you won't feel like you spent your money for nothing.
Total price of my Bandido (with a free drink) was $9.70.

The law is written by the airlines

“The law is written by the airlines,” Hassan said. “They have amazing discretion to treat people any way they see fit.”
from the Washington Post


When flying American skies
you're in for a nasty surprise
if you wear hijab
or Arabic blab -- 
or even have wrong-colored eyes.  

Pay up or else!

The U.S. has been struggling to combat an epidemic of scams targeting Americans online and by telephone. Authorities said that the fake call-center enterprise they cracked by tracing thousands of transactions is likely to be just the tip of the iceberg.
from the Wall Street Journal


This poem is a warning to you
that back taxes now have come due.
To avoid any clash
just pay me with cash -- 
the red tape I'm glad to cut through.


Thursday, October 27, 2016

Alaska Lawyer Accuses Justice Thomas of Groping Her at 1999 Dinner Event



If famous, you'll have to be coping
with numerous charges of groping.
You're not a heart throb;
it comes with the job.
You should have spent more time eloping.

The Mormon Mafia

We are the Mormon Mafia/We're ready to attack/those who think a stake center/is some place for a snack/We are ev'rywhere disguised/as neighbors, friends, and folks/who never cuss and rarely laugh/at any dirty jokes/We have our secret signals/and our ways to say 'hello'/involving hearty handshakes/and a ton of green jello/If you try to cross us/we will fill your life with woe/whether you're in Utah or the wilds of Idaho/We think alike and act alike/and march to just one drum/If you think that you can sway us/then you are really dumb/McMullin in the White House/is our deviant goal, all right/We plan to sneak him in real soon/in the middle of the night/Resisting us is futile/we're like clean-cut Borg, you see/Our masters in Salt Lake/ will lead us on to victory!  

Chicago is awash in rats

Chicago is awash in rats. A mild winter last year allowed broods of baby rats to survive, leading to an explosion of the critters, terrorizing residents as they run around their yards and dumpsters. By September, there had been 27,000 rat complaints, a 40% increase from 2015.
from the Wall Street Journal


Chicago is lousy with rats.
The citizens hit them with slats.
They tried the Pied Piper,
and even a viper,
but nothing says "Death" like wild cats. 

Golden Lee Smith

If you have an issue with cops
you'd better have powerful chops.
With taser or gun
they'll stop all your fun,
unless you're a triceratops. 

A bizness with no R & D

American businesses are building fewer buildings and buying fewer machines, but they have continued to spend on a key ingredient of future productivity and economic growth: research and development.
from the Wall Street Journal


A bizness with no R & D
is playing with calamity. 
Great profits accrue
from any debut.
(Well, New Coke was more a Dead Sea)

Grocers Feel Chill From Millennials

Baby boomers used to bring long grocery lists to supermarkets and club stores. Now shoppers in their 20s and 30s are visiting supermarkets less frequently than their parents, government records and survey data show. They are spreading purchases across new options, including online grocery services such as AmazonFresh, beefed-up convenience stores and stronger food offerings from omnibus retailers like Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Target Corp.
from the Wall Street Journal
A grocer exclaimed "Woe is me!"
"My shoppers depart gradually"
"My meat and my cukes
are treated like pukes"
"I'll now have to file bankruptcy!"

Eat your bugs!

Investigating the nutrients in insects, scientists at Kings College London and China’s Ningbo University discovered that minerals important to health including calcium, copper and zinc are more readily absorbed from bugs than from beef. They published their research in the current issue of the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.
from the Wall Street Journal 
If you want your meal to have zest
just put in some insectoid pest.
The essence of flea
sounds tasty to me.
Or how 'bout a nice beetle breast? 

Executives rarely lose out

Executives of EpiPen maker Mylan NV are unlikely to suffer a reduction in their pay from the company’s recent $465 million settlement of allegations that it improperly overcharged Medicaid for the lifesaving drug.
from the Wall Street Journal 

Executives rarely lose out
for acting like some kind of lout.
Their bonus secure,
they're seldom demure;
in fact honest dealing they flout!


Wednesday, October 26, 2016

Restaurant Review: Oregano Italian Kitchen. Provo, Utah

Should the local Carabinieri stop you for a pasta check while strolling on West Central in Provo, you can stick out your chin, Mussolini-style, and tell them you are headed to the Oregano Italian Kitchen. They will immediately cease hassling you, for there is good stuff to eat at Oregano, and the service is molto veloce.

 Of course, like most modern Italian joints today, the inside is just this side of pitch dark. This seems to be the trend for stylish restaurants; they don't want you to be able to see what you are eating. Or maybe they are just being stingy on the lighting bill. Luckily, my owl-like vision allowed me to stroll suavely through the welter of tables and chairs with hardly a halt to violently bang my knee on some lurking piece of furniture. I not only see well in the dark, but some folk actually claim that I glow in the dark as well. All that strontium 90 in my pap as a child, no doubt.
My waiter seated me quickly and efficiently, then began jabbering at me in something resembling English but skewed with such a deep and impenetrable accent that I had to ask for a rerun several times before catching the drift of his monologue. Hopefully, he has only been in the United States for a few weeks -- because if he's been interacting with us down home folks for several years and can't shake that gosh dern accent, then by cracky he's in for a sockdolager of a time!

I just had water to drink with my meal. Since this is Utah, getting a license to serve beer and wine is like getting permission to wear a turban and ululate wildly in Arabic -- ain't gonna happen, chum. That's one reason why diners in Utah are a little bit more churlish and less inclined to tip than in other areas of the country -- there's nothing like a couple shots of hooch at lunch to brighten the rest of the day and loosen the purse strings.

I started things off with a calamari fritta -- squid rings. Piping hot, they were great -- but as they started to cool off they lost their will to fight back or exhibit any great flavor. So I had to gobble them fast and burn the roof of my mouth or let them cool and be denied their zest. It's things like this that make restaurant critics prematurely gray around the tonsils.

 Then came the spaghetti carbonara. With a sliver of toast, and I mean a sliver; I could have used it for a toothpick. Only franchises like Olive Garden shower you with bread nowadays; independent joints are more concerned about gluten, I guess. This place is also very chaste when it comes to garlic. The reek of it doesn't hang in the air like a miasma, as it used to in all the Italian places I ever haunted as a young man. But there was plenty of grated Parmesan on both my items. They must grow it in the basement. All in all, this pasta dish was just as rich as you'd want it to be. But I had to ask for red pepper flakes to wake it up a bit. And I am getting smarter as a food critic, folks; instead of gobbling the whole thing down and then lurching home to sit in my recliner for the next three hours feeling like a beached whale, I only ate about a third of it and brought the rest home with me. So if you happen to be in the neighborhood in the next 24 hours you can stop by and ask for the leftovers -- I doubt I'm going to get to them before they spoil. Another cross we cuisine queens have to bear.

One final note before I shut up. Since I liked the food and would gladly bring friends and family I decided to thaw my miserly ways just a bit and leave a big tip. I put it on my debit card and as I walked out of the place, giving it a four-burp rating, I began to wonder if there is any difference between tiping with my debit card and leaving cash on the table as a tip. So I called my daughter Sarah, who waitressed for a while, and asked her. She told me that wait staff always prefer a cash tip left on the table, because they can just pocket that and no questions asked; whereas if it's just added to the debit card it has to be taxed and divided between staff members, etc. 
So I'll be getting some cash out of the ATM before reviewing another one of Provo's hash houses. It'll impress my daughter Sarah and maybe I'll see more of her and the grand kids . . .  

My entire meal, the fritti and the spaghetti carbonara, came to $17.24.

Tuesday, October 25, 2016

Winter is hard to abide

Winter is hard to abide.
It causes my fears to collide.
The flue my lungs slice.
I slip on the ice.
I'm left all alone at Yuletide. 


Restaurant Review: Pupuseria El Salvador, in Provo, Utah.


Four doors down from the place I ate at yesterday is the Pupuseria El Salvador. The glass front door proclaims: "Authentic El Salvadoran Food!" So who am I to gainsay such assurances? I waltz in the joint, which is even smaller than the Peruvian greasy spoon I was in yesterday. And it's filling up fast for the noon hour.

Thankfully there are no Halloween decorations put up to mar the simple Grandma Moses-like paintings of rural life that hang on the walls. That leaves me with a good first impression, even though I have to sit in a folding chair. Me and folding chairs parted ways long years ago; they remind me of Amway conventions and pointless power points.
Once again there is only one overworked waitress on duty, who can't keep up with the modest crowd. And once again the menu seems to feature more items that they don't have than that they do have. My first four attempts at ordering something native to drink meet with failure. "We don't have any". I guess I had better learn how to say that in Spanish: "no tenemos ninguna".

For an appetizer I order one tamal de puerco -- a pork tamale. It comes with a bowl of shredded cabbage. In fact, all the meals in this place come with shredded cabbage. Which just seems wrong to me, like waffles and chicken. It may be popular; it may be a cultural thing; but damned if I'm going to let it go unremarked upon!
But the tamale is very good; moist and with a good amount of pork in it. It tastes so good I even eat some of the shredded cabbage with it. Just to be accommodating. 


My main dish is lengua guisada -- cow tongue stew. I have to wait a long time for it, almost a half hour. This normally would have me stewing more than my order, but I am on a writing assignment, so I maintain a Buddha-like sang-froid. Then I realize something about the American dinning landscape: Nobody cares how long it takes to get their order anymore, because everyone is busy on their smartphone or tablet, so they wouldn't know if ten minutes or an hour had passed between their order and its delivery.  This makes for a better and more pleasant dinning experience for everyone today -- except for me, since I don't have a mobile device and quickly grow tired of drawing on the napkins with crayons. 
When my stew finally comes I find it unpretentious but very good. The onion sauce is robust and the sides of beans and rice go well with the pieces of tongue, which are very rich and chew well. And I even get 2 plump pupusas, which I have to admit are not as welcome as some chips or tortillas would be. I know it's the national dish, but to me they're like dispirited pancakes that have given up half way through the process. Better to eat them than throw them out; but as National Dishes go, I think El Salvador needs an upgrade . . . 
For my single pork tamale and a plate of lengua guisada I paid a total of $10.46. 

William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe

Although the arguments about his authorship have raged for two centuries, Shakespeare's plays have been printed and reprinted and reprinted again, bearing his name. Now, for the first time and with a bit of help from computers and big data, the Oxford University Press will add Christopher Marlowe as a co-author in all three “Henry VI” plays (Parts 1, 2 and 3).
from the Washington Post


It's hard to believe that the Bard
used Marlowe as play writing pard.
It's like Santa Claus
used the Wizard of Oz
when driving the sleigh got too hard. 

Monday, October 24, 2016

Restaurant Review: Se Llama Peru, of Provo, Utah.


Should you be ambling down West Center Street in Provo, Utah, some day, and suddenly stop to slap your forehead and say "By gadfrey, I'm in the mood for some fried guinea pig!", you will undoubtedly start looking for a Peruvian restaurant where such delicacies are to be had. And, being on West Center Street, you will immediately spot Se Llama Peru, give a screech of joy, and dive into the place like gangbusters.


It is a homey little place, about the size of a suburban living room. The tables and chairs are mismatched, and there's a soccer game narrated in Spanish on the big screen TV in the back.

The name of the restaurant, Se Llama Peru, roughly translated, means "We don't have it". They didn't have the first three items I asked for on their menu. And needless to say there was no guinea pig on their menu at all -- kind-hearted Provovians would never allow the execution of such cute little rascals just to satisfy their baser appetites.

So I started with their Sopa del Dia: Aguadito Sopa -- which is a heavily salted chicken soup with rice and some frozen peas,carrots,greenbeans, poured straight from the bag into the soup. The chicken pieces had some life to them. No bread or chips or tortillas are served with the soup, or with any of the meals. Must be an old Peruvian custom.




As the lunch time crowd moved in, the one lone waitress had to scramble to keep up with the orders. But she just kept on smiling -- which was more than I could do when I asked for a glass of water to soak out some of my soup's saltiness and didn't get it until fifteen minutes later. 

I'm afraid I can't comment on the ambiance of the decor, since it was all covered up with Halloween cutouts of skeletons, witches, and vampires -- unless that's how the place looks all year round. Maybe Peruvians have a ghoulish streak, I don't know . . . 

But I digress. Next on the menu was a plate of  Lomo Saltado

This is steak strips fried with tomatoes, onions, and french fried potatoes. Rice on the side. It's basic and hearty; the kind of dish that sticks to your ribs like a lamprey eel. As an ensemble dish it was decent, except for the potatoes. I'm afraid they were soggy and bland and tended to make the whole concoction sullen. Left out and replaced with a few carrot slices, the dish would be well-received anywhere. But I'm afraid the potatoes make this dish demi monde.

Will I be recommending this place to my friends Jim, Larry, Rob, Robert, and Nathan?

No, I will not.

My bill for a glass of passion fruit juice, bowl of soup, and the Lomo Saltado, came to $22.00.


GoFundMe Fraud

“Less than one-tenth of one percent of all GoFundMe campaigns are fraudulent,” the company said. “With that said, there are unfortunate instances where people create campaigns with the intention to take advantage of others’ generosity.
from the Washington Post  


There may be a generous God,
but does He protect against fraud?
The cynic says no;
the suckers just grow
like tourists who visit Cape Cod. 

Iceland’s No. 1 Dating Rule: Make Sure You’re Not Cousins

In Iceland it's easy to spark
a kinsman or two in the dark.
But if you are buzzin'
a second cousin,
you might want to move to Denmark. 

The diamonds that I travel on

"We tread a path covered with diamonds, but we can scarcely distinguish them from ordinary pebbles."  Dieter F. Uchtdorf. 


The diamonds that I travel on are hard to comprehend;
they're not the kind you can pick up and easily go spend.
A royal road, a highway great, that I should proudly tread;
but all I've got are flat feet and a yearning for my bed.
Forgive my Sancho Panza stance, O Lord of Windmills, please,
and help me seek thy glory though the dust might make me sneeze!
I do not take for granted all thy wondrous high designs;
but couldn't I be sent to lead the cheers from the sidelines? 


Sunday, October 23, 2016

Deer hunting season officially underway in Utah

The hills are alive with red plaid,
but deer are not terribly glad.
Would you shout hooray
if bullets did spray
around you like Islamabad? 

Every Cinderella has her midnight



“The tenor of our times is permissiveness. Magazines and television shows portray the stars of the movie screen, the heroes of the athletic field—those whom many young people long to emulate—as disregarding the laws of God and flaunting sinful practices, seemingly with no ill effect. Don’t you believe it! There is a time of reckoning—even a balancing of the ledger. Every Cinderella has her midnight—if not in this life, then in the next. Judgment Day will come for all. … I plead with you to choose to obey.”
Thomas S. Monson 
When the hour struck her ball gown turned back into tatters
and she fled the palace while the mindless crowd still chatters.
And so may my fine surface crack, my bold front disappear,
if I do not mend my ways and live in Godly fear.
Obedience is glamorous, but only wise folk know it;
they never boast about it, but just go about and show it.

Saturday, October 22, 2016

I did not read the news today

I did not read the news today
I do not want it anyway.
Election stories that must fail
as anything but fairy tale.
Scary clowns that crowd reports
as if they were the evening sports.
Russia meddles, China shoves;
there's no place for gentle doves.
Hackers steal with dreadful ease;
the Pope no longer has his keys.
Oceans rising while there's drought;
God above, what's this about?
Tomorrow I'll ignore the news;
on Netflix I can watch Tom Cruise. 

Throw it out!

My mother was not a pack rat. In fact she was the Anti-Pack Rat. If it didn't have an immediate use or recurring purpose, out it went. She allowed one small cardboard box for Christmas decorations, about the size of a toaster. We kept nothing in the attic; it was a sterile facility for the storage of dust. The basement was bare as well. One lone card table leaned against a whitewashed wall in the unlikely event we had enough company over to require its use. Otherwise there was nothing but a dehumidifier and the washing machine and dryer. Not even a cabinet to store detergent, bleach, and Mrs. Stewart's Bluing. All that stuff was placed beneath the cast iron laundry sink, right out in plain sight.

"Spiders are formed around undisturbed materials" she told me darkly as a child. And I believed her. It made me nervous to think of that card table, which might be harboring a hoard of black widows or brown jumping spiders, ready to overrun the household. So every few weeks I went into the basement to nervously jiggle it. Just to be on the safe side.

The only place she did not enforce her iron rule was the garage. It was a rundown shanty, like something out of Tobacco Row. My dad never parked the car in it, preferring to leave his trusty Ford parked in front of the house on the street, snow removal days be damned. My older brother Billy tinkered with his hot rod jalopy in it, and kept strings of rusting fishing tackle strewed about. Ancient rakes and shovels leaned wearily against the unpainted wooden walls; the storm windows were shunted into it in May, the same time the green garden hose was removed from its hook for leaky summer service. The reel mower lurked in a sunken corner, where snow melt always formed a deep noisome pool during the grey winter months.

My mother was wise to leave that sad hovel alone. She knew how to pick her fights. It was the original garage, from when our house was built in the 1920's; by the time we moved in thirty years later the spiders were already lodged comfortably and an occasional bat roosted in the exposed rafters. All our neighbors gradually replaced their ramshackle garages with brand-spanking new double-wide edifices, but mom and dad refused to spend a dime on ours. Dad just didn't care, and I believe mom was hoping that a wind storm would blow it over some August day or that it would burn down somehow. Then she would be able to raze the ruins, salt the ground, and have it paved over. She would have a flat and barren patch of property to gloat over.

She was an unsentimental and pragmatic woman. Which caused some hard feelings as time went by.

My older brother Billy went to Dunwoody to learn the printing trade, but had to drive a truck for many years before he got a birth in the heavily-unionized printing field. His meager take home pay, on top of several rambustious marriages, kept him rather poor. But he began collecting first edition comic books at an early age -- the first I Love Lucy; the first Monsteroso; even the very first Dobie Gillis. All of them stayed in their original plastic wrapping.

"Those babies are gonna be worth something someday!" he would chortle to me, when he'd come over for a visit between long trucking voyages. He kept them under the basement steps in our house, carefully stacked and inventoried in a plastic tub. When he finally got a coveted union printing job the money began rolling in and he forgot about the comic books under the basement steps.  He bought a lakeside home on Green Lake near Princeton and a Chris-Craft boat and held huge roistering picnics at his place all summer long, under the shade of a grove of butternut trees.

Then one day he waltzed in the door to tell mom he had just come from Shinders Books. They were offering a pretty penny for his first edition comic books.

"You won't find them down there. I threw them out" mom said quietly as he began to trundle down the basement stairs. There followed the longest, most painful silence I have ever experienced while living at home.

"Why?" he finally managed to ask.

"Spiders" mom replied, her eyes mere slits.

Billy turned and walked silently back out the way he came. We didn't see him again until Easter. But by then he was his old jolly self again, having apparently swallowed his resentment in favor of swallowing many slices of my mother's famous Easter ham.

I, too, was a victim of her mania.

To save money while completing the paperwork to go on my LDS mission to Thailand I stayed with my parents for several months after quitting the circus. I brought with me my clown trunk. It was a battered steamer trunk that I picked up at a St. Vincent de Paul up in Canada for a few dollars. I painted it robin's egg blue, and it contained all my clowning paraphernalia. When the official calling at last come from Salt Lake City I took along some of my jester's equipment, including rubber chickens, goo-goo glasses, my makeup kit, my complete wardrobe, and my musical saw. The powers that be in Salt Lake wanted me to do a little busking in Thailand for PR purposes. I left a few irreplaceable items in my clown trunk, which I put in a corner of the basement and covered with a fresh new piece of canvas I bought at the Army Surplus store.

I assumed it would be safe there, since it was such an integral part of my clowning career when I returned in two years. I said as much to mom.

I was wrong. It was gone when, as brown as a nut from the tropical sun and only slightly shaky from several bouts of breakbone fever, I returned to the old manse.

My trunk was nowhere to be found in the basement.

"Spiders?" I asked my mother wearily.

"Spiders" she confirmed.

But there is a cosmic justice in play for mothers who jettison their children's belongings. Many years later she came across a cache of old license plates out in the garage while looking for some bone meal for her roses. I was there helping with the yard work and told her they might be worth something to somebody, but her disgust knew no bounds, and she immediately tossed them into the trash. A few weeks later at a family gathering my brother-in-law Tom said to her:
"Evelyn, I want to talk to you about those old license plates in your garage. I can probably get you fifteen hundred dollars for them from a collector I know."

"I threw them out" she said calmly to Tom. Without a tremor in her voice or glint of moisture in her eye. Game to the last, she was. But for a woman raised in the depths of the Great Depression, who religiously gathered Green Stamps, I knew that the blow had told. And to be honest about the whole thing, I didn't feel bad for her at all.


Thousands of California soldiers forced to repay enlistment bonuses a decade after going to war

Short of troops to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan a decade ago, the California National Guard enticed thousands of soldiers with bonuses of $15,000 or more to reenlist and go to war.
Now the Pentagon is demanding the money back.
from the Los Angeles Times

When Uncle Sam calls you to duty
he's generous with extra booty.
But when you come back,
a limb or two lack,
he sucks it back like an old cootie. 

Lend Your Energy with Horses

A horse is a huge enterprise;
go into with wide open eyes.
The feeding, the cleaning;
it's all full of meaning.
(I'd rather raise tiny fruit flies)

Clowns in Germany

Creepy clowns have been reportedly menacing residents in Germany with weapons that include chainsaws and a baseball bat, authorities said.
from Time Magazine


In Germany clowns on the loose
have broken the ages-old truce.
They're creeping about
with chainsaws so stout
that herrenvolk yell "What the deuce!"


The Russians want to watch us vote

Election officials in Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Texas say they have denied requests from the Russian consulate to send observers to polling places next month. The Russians, it seems, wanted to study the "US experience in organization of voting process."

from Slate 


The Russians apparently dote
over how we are using the vote.
They'd like to detect
the smallest defect;
we've told 'em to go kiss a goat. 

The Magpie

There have been more than 440 reports of swooping magpie attacks in South Australia on the Magpie Alert website this year, compared with 339 in 2015 and 56 in 2014.
from The Adelaide Advertiser

The magpie does not have an ounce
of pity, but just likes to pounce
on biker and jogger,
and so this here blogger
these Corvidae stoutly denounce! 

Friday, October 21, 2016

The Chicago Cubs

A rabbi who is a columnist for the Jerusalem Post recently hailed the Cubs as “the Jews of the sports world,” an idea seconded by the Israeli ambassador to the U.S., Ron Dermer, who made a stop at Wrigley Field on a swing through Chicago this month.

from the Wall Street Journal

Consider the sneers and the snubs
endured by the suffering Cubs.
Their hope perseveres
though nobody cheers,
through famine and phonies and flubs!

How ‘Special Sauce’ Moved From Big Macs to Everywhere

When searching for something that's boss
at dinner, forget not the sauce!
Some mayo, some salt,
a pinch of asphalt;
it even perks up Spanish moss!