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!                                                

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. 

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.

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.