The 12 Foods You Must Not Eat

Rubber bands. Their ingestion leads to slingshotosis. So stop sprinkling them on your granola!

Dish soap. We all love it on our pancakes, but studies show that most brands contain magic imps that carry away all the grease they find -- this can have serious consequences for your grease glands.

Grapefruit. We have no idea what’s wrong with grapefruit, but it’s on every no-no list on the internet, so who are we to go against  the grain?

Kleenex. It’s made from ground glass, you know. Plus they never get the flavors right.

Rolex oyster watches. Only in the months that have an ‘R’ in them.

Duct tape. When it sticks to your ribs -- it sticks to your ribs!

French cooking. It’s nothing but wine, butter, and snails -- you’re better off chugging a can of Pennzoil.

Windex. We know the pretty blue color is tempting, but it’s made from the distilled blood of the endangered Windex bird of Madagascar. There are only a dozen left in the entire world. Be a tree hugger for once, okay?

Pickled wombat feet. Australians are inordinately fond of this delicacy, and you don’t want to turn out like THEM do you?

Grass clippings. Unless it’s going to rain and you like to sniff your own butt.

Dilithium crystals. These don’t really exist, so if you find yourself munching on a bag of them it’s time to go see Dr. Phil.

Bic pens. They give you constipation -- otherwise known as Writer’s Block.

The Short Tempered Chef Woks up Some Beef & Lettuce Stir Fry

I’ve been watching too many episodes of Samurai Gourmet on Netflix. I’ve become wok-obsessed. Those guys on the show cook everything from scrambled eggs to tuna fish sandwiches in their darn woks, and it all comes out looking scrumptious. Plus it only takes them twenty seconds or so to make a full course meal in one fell swoop. So I’ve turned my back on my faithful fry pan and gone whoring after asian ambiance with a big clunky wok I borrowed from my daughter Sarah about a year ago -- and if she thinks she’s ever getting it back, she can kiss my sashimi.

I wanted something simple but elegant -- messing around with half a dozen pots and pans to prepare my meals is not something I relish. It makes me REALLY short tempered, cuz of the clean up. I’m so lazy that my idea of housecleaning is to flush the toilet once a week.

I’m going to wok up some butter lettuce, red bell pepper, half a can of diced tomatoes I’ve got huddling in the fridge, and beef in a bottled Szechuan sauce -- the ingredients list red chili peppers second, so this stuff could be liquid dynamite. I’ll have to take it easy the first time so I don’t blow the roof of my mouth off. But I want to be able to TASTE the darn meal and break out into a minor sweat by the time I’m done. That, to me, is the only way to enjoy a meal -- with body tingling, short of breath, and exhausted by the end of it all. Kinda like sex used to be . . .

Well, kiddies, it turned out pretty darn good. A little soupy, because of the canned tomatoes, but that’s fine -- I’ll finish off the rest of it tonight as a soup with some toast. It was just spicy enough to tickle the back of my neck and bring a light sheen of sweat to my wrinkled brow. For dessert I had half a grapefruit and a stale donut that I microwaved for 15 seconds -- good as new. I washed it all down with a bottle of chocolate milk. How come they can't make a powdered mix that turns regular milk into the kind of chocolate milk you buy in the dairy case? Oh well. In the words of that famous sleuth/gourmand Nero Wolfe, the whole shebang was “Satisfactory.”

North Korea Hosts Bank Robbers

When hackers associated with North Korea tried to break into Polish banks late last year they left a trail of information about their apparent intentions to steal money from more than 100 organizations around the world, according to security researchers.
from the NYTimes.

In North Korea robbing banks

By internet is given thanks.

Their leaders say that overseas

Financial funds are a disease.

So hackers steeped in fresh kimchi

Are acting patriotically.

And when your debit card goes dark

You ought to blame some guy named Park.

"Tell Another Clown Story, Grandpa!"

Sunday dinner at my daughter’s house up in Orem was wonderful. There was a crisp kale and cabbage salad with citrus dressing; warm cornbread in a huge iron skillet baked by another one of my daughters; and all the slow cooker short ribs a man could ever want -- I went back so many times that the pile of bones I left behind reminded me of an elephant’s graveyard from a Tarzan movie. After the feast my special easy chair was pulled into the sunlight in the living room and the grandkids drifted over to stand or sit by me -- they wanted to hear another clown story. And I was glad, very glad, to oblige.

Because, you see, their parents, my children, didn’t get to hear very many clown stories when they were growing up. Things went badly for my wife and I, both financially and romantically, until the day that Amy packed the kids in the van and drove off to her sister’s farm -- never to return. I went back on the road, and then moved to Thailand, and the kids and I became strangers to each other for nearly twenty years before we started to reconcile. So all the tall tales and quirky anecdotes I had about Swede Johnson and Prince Paul and Irvin Feld festered inside of me like pathogens. There was no one to tell them to -- my Thai girlfriends, for the most part, didn’t want to hear about the circus. They just wanted to go to the karaoke bar or the beach. Thank god for a few good friends who tolerated my yarning from time to time -- without that release valve I would have spun out of control to some lunatic fringe until I was lost to the solar system.

But this fine Sabbath day as I sat in my comfortable chair, wiping barbeque sauce off my hands with a bandana, all I had to do was ask “Well, you twerps, what clown story do you want me to tell you today?” And the grandkids jumped in without pause, asking for their favorite adventures all at the same time:

“Tell us about the dynamite box!”

“The time you locked Michu in his trunk!”

“The washing machine where you came out as a devil!”

“The elephants, the elephants, the elephants -- tell me about the elephants!”

“That one where the old clown crashed the clown car into the big pole!”

I held up my hand to command their silence. They stopped hopping around like monkeys on pogo sticks and sprawled on the floor to hear the first story. Their parents looked on with indulgent smiles, and the little babies, too young to know that a good story was coming, crawled between them looking for neglected pieces of cake.

“Have I told you about the pygmy hippopotamus on the Carson and Barnes show?” I asked quietly.

“No!” they shouted back. “Whatsa pick-me hippomatapuss?” One of the babies crawls up to my leg and yanks on my trousers, indicating a desire to nestle on my lap. I pick her up, smooth her silky hair, and lay her across my ample spare tire.

“Well” I begin, “on Carson and Barnes they had this pygmy hippopotamus -- it was the size of a German shephard. Most hippos, y’know, get so big and blubbery that when they walk on the ground it trembles like there’s an earthquake. But not these tiny ones -- they come from deep inside the Congo and are so shy that when the natives sneak up on them and shout ‘Boo!’ the poor creatures fall over in a dead faint and are captured and sent off to a zoo or a circus . . . “

One of the boys interrupts: “What kinda sound does a hippopotamus make?”

This might stump a regular old grandpa, but not me -- I’ve seen too many National Geographic specials. I open my mouth as wide as I can and bring forth a deep bellow that leaves my larynx hors de combat. The boy nods his head in satisfaction -- that sounds reasonable to him.

“So anyway, on Carson and Barnes they have this tradition that when it’s your birthday they grab you and throw you in the pygmy hippo’s tank!”

Another interruption, this time from a grand daughter who demands to know didn’t I get any birthday cake first? I assure her that not only did I get cake on my birthday, but also cotton candy flavored ice cream and a frozen dill pickle on a stick. This last item produces groans and energetic gagging from all quarters. The infant on my lap senses that something disagreeable has been mentioned and decides to slide off before a fist fight breaks out.

At this point four-year-old Lance loudly proclaims that he wants some of that cotton-flavored ice cream and goes in search of his mother for a big bowl of it. His howls of frustration at being told there is none available are clearly audible in the next county.

I continue my tale. “Well sir, I was bound and determined that they’d never catch ME to throw in that dirty old tub with the pygmy hippo -- so I hid in one of the porta-potties until it was show time.”

Several hands are raised -- the grandkids are beginning to show me some proper respect at last.

“Yes, what is it?”

They want to know what a porty potty is. When I explain it’s design and function they are openly skeptical. Grandpa is obviously pulling their leg -- there is no such thing. I smugly let them appeal to their parents for support, only to be brought up short by the corroboration that yes, Virginia, there is a porta potty.

“Now, if you hooligans will let me finish my story . . .”

And I go on to detail the fiendish machinations practiced on my natal day to lure me close enough to the pygmy hippo’s cage to be given an unsavory bath -- and how I outwitted every stratagem until the evening show was over and tear down had begun. Then I described the elephants working under the glare of kerosene lamps to pull down the king poles and butt the rolled up canvas onto the tent truck. The best part, I tell them, is that the candy butchers give away all the extra hot dogs and unsold popcorn during tear down, and I could eat so much of it for free that it came out my ears. The grandkids are clearly envious of my culinary bonanza. They become restless and discontented until their parents wisely avoid a mutiny by handing out generous portions of cheddar Goldfish crackers with glasses of milk.

As the sun begins to set on this glorious day I regale them with stories of Tim Holst riding a camel into the ocean at Long Beach, where it tossed him into the briny deep and returned to the circus lot without him. And how I dressed up as a giant chicken to lay Styrofoam eggs around the track. And the time Larry Fine of the Three Stooges came to visit clown alley and shook all of our hands. He was in a wheelchair, on oxygen, but he gave us each a big smile and thumbs up.

Heads are drooping and the infants are whining for their mother’s breasts by the time I wind up the last tale. It’s time to go home.

“Pack up the dukey boxes and keep your grouch bag near!” I call as my children and their children depart. My oldest son Adam gives me a quizzical look at the front door and asks “How much of that was true, dad?”

I tell him what the old Ringling clown Swede Johnson used to tell me:  “It ain’t the truth, but it’s close enough.”

The Life and Times of Irvin Feld

I spent the summer of 1997 doing research on the life and times of Irvin Feld. My personal interactions with the man, as well as his great influence on the entire world of clowning due to his creation of the Ringling Clown College, left me intrigued -- curious to know much more about this myopic little entrepreneur who started out with his brother Izzy selling snake oil in the Appalachians during the Great Depression and wound up as owner and operator of The Greatest Show on Earth. As my research progressed, I determined to write his biography.

At the time I had already written several novels and the first volume of my own autobiography -- called Clown Notes -- and thought, in my obliviously smug way, that capturing another man’s life would be as easy as ordering a hamburger at McDonalds. Especially a man who basked in the publicity limelight as much as Feld had. There were reams of newspaper and magazine copy about him, all easily accessible.  

I recalled vividly my first prolonged encounter with Feld. After my graduation show at Ringling Clown College in 1971 I was convinced there would be no contract offer for me, so headed back to the Venice Villas to pack, lick my wounds, and figure out how to take the bus back home to Minneapolis. It was a rainy, humid, Florida night -- the peepers were croaking dismally along the canal; fireflies described lazy zigzags in the dark foliage; and the smell of wet vegetable decay left me depressed and resentful at my failed attempt to escape my stifling Scandinavian upbringing. My life’s trajectory pulled down by the force of failure’s gravitational pull.

But then Bill Ballantine, the Dean of Clown College, interrupted my listless packing by banging on my apartment door to demand I return immediately with him to Winter Quarters -- Mr. Feld was impatiently waiting to see me. Me? Numb with disbelief at this fairy tale turn of events I was ushered into Mr. Feld’s presence in Ballantine’s office. Wreathed in cigar smoke, Feld sat behind the desk and beamed at me.

“Ah, Torkildson!” he said brightly as Ballantine literally pushed me through the office door and left. “You’re a regular screwball of a clown, aren’t you?” He was referring, I believe, to my accidentally spraying him and his entourage with a fire extinguisher during the show. “We need that kind of craziness in clown alley.” He unscrewed the cap of his gold-tipped Montblanc, then pushed a paper contract towards me. “We’d like you to start rehearsals with the Blue Unit next month. How about it?”

His thick glasses gave him an innocent, goggle-eyed appearance. I mumbled something in return, I don’t remember what, picked up the fountain pen, and signed.

“Fine, fine!” he said. “Anything you’d like to ask me about working for the show right now? I want this to be a profitable experience for both of us.”

I was still in shock at this sudden turn of events. My brain’s higher functions had shut down. I just shook my head and backed away towards the door.

“Okay, then. If you ever have any problems you can get ahold of me at any time. My door is always open to my clowns. And send Ballantine back in on your way out, will ya?”

Uncle Bill apparently had been listening at the door -- he rushed past me as I went out into the lobby and down the stairs.

And I found it to be true, at least for me, that Irvin Feld’s door was wide open. During that first season I wrote him several letters, complaining about AGVA dues and the unsanitary plumbing at Madison Square Garden. He always replied with a brief note, thanking me for my input and promising to look into the matter. His assistant, Arnie Bramow, hand-delivered his replies to me.

I took it for granted that he was like this with all the clowns on the show. But I got an inkling of his affection for me, and his possessiveness, several years later when I finally told him I was leaving the show for a two year voluntary proselyting mission for the LDS Church. That didn’t set well with him.

“I’m disappointed in you, Torkildson” he told me in his Washington DC office, after I had been startled half to death by the stuffed carcass of Gargantua, the famous killer gorilla, that he kept leering in his outer office. “I gave you your big chance and told Baumann to cut you plenty of slack. Now you go and leave me for some religious mumbo jumbo? I was grooming you for something better, y’know. Now your career will be over before it’s hardly started. Is that what you really want, kid?”

I affirmed my commitment, which only irritated him more. When I held out my hand to say goodbye he petulantly turned his back on me and let me leave in silence.

But Irvin Feld had trouble holding a grudge against his clowns. When I returned home in two year’s time, needing work, I called his office number and was immediately put through to him. He asked me how I had enjoyed myself in Taiwan, I told him it was Thailand, not Taiwan, where I had been serving, and he got right to the point by asking if I needed a job. I said I did, he told me to be in Cincinnati that weekend, and the deal was sealed.

So I had my own memories of him, as well as anecdotes from Swede Johnson and Bill Ballantine about the great man -- along with what I culled from the media. I wrote to Kenny Feld to tell him of my plans to write his father’s biography -- but never received any reply. Or help.

After three months of research and writing my money ran out and I had to go back on the road. I had no experience in finding grant money or any other way to fuel my work. I’d managed to write 170 pages and found it impossible to continue the story. The more I worked on his life, the less I felt I knew about Irvin Feld. In retrospect, I was too young and cocky to write a proper biography. So I desktop published my truncated “Life”, sold a few copies through ads in Circus Report Magazine (where I had a weekly column), donated a copy to the Circus World Museum in Baraboo, and forgot about my project in the hurly burly of keeping body and soul together while working on mud shows.

Recently I was surprised to find that Amazon.com is still offering my book, “The Life and Times of Irvin Feld” online. No copies have been sold in years, and it looks like Amazon is out of stock anyway. I may have the original manuscript tucked away somewhere in the musty old trunks I keep in my storage closet -- I recently discovered a discarded manuscript in one of them for a novel on LDS society called ‘The Further Adventures of Elder West -- but even if I did exhume my work on Irvin Feld I doubt I would have the energy and focus to expand it with further research and writing.

But I sure wish someone more competent and passionate than me would take a crack at it. It seems a shame that such a vibrant personality should be relegated to a short article on Wikipedia.

Irvin Feld. 1918 to 1984.

Thank You, Sonnie Cucinotti!

Tesekkur ederim to the many readers who liked my mini-memoir “The Clown Becomes an Entrepreneur.”   Your belief and support in my work keeps me going on rainy days:

Chris Twiford; Vivian Vance; Gabriel Romero Sr.; Elmo Gibbs; Matt Kaminsky; Thelma Todd; Mike Johnson; Mike Weakley; Rudolph Valentino; Sonnie Cucinotti; Francis X. Bushman; Scott Land; Henry Winkler; and the redoubtable Kenneth L Stallings.

“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”

― Henry David Thoreau

Alex Jones Apologizes for Promoting ‘Pizzagate’ Hoax

A radio host, name of Jones,

Ate crow to the very last bones.

It seems Pizzagate

Was mere bombinate --

So now he might lose his headphones.

The Short Tempered Chef Makes Breakfast with Leftovers

A leftover by any other name is still food. Something to eat. Sustenance. Grub. And since I don’t like shopping on Sundays, I’ll just rummage through the fridge and pantry to see what I can come up with. I have no prejudices when it comes to breakfast food. Cereal, eggs, meats, fish, turnips, cheese, olives, piccalilli, curry; it’s all the same to me. To misquote Will Rogers: I never met a breakfast I didn’t like.

So lemme see . . . I put some canned tomatoes, frozen country fries, half a white onion, some leftover Thai curry paste, two eggs, a splash of soy sauce mixed with brown sugar and a splash of juice from a jar of pickled herring, some diced ham and a bit of leftover candied salmon in the wok with sesame seed oil. Blasted the whole mess on high heat for a few minutes; now It looks kinda goopy. I’ll serve it over rice with some pickled beets I’ve had in a tupperware container in the fridge for the past two weeks -- they should still be good; I don’t think pickled beets ever go bad.

My breakfast goop turned out okay. Not spectacular, but not offensive either. I think my tastebuds must be more senile than I am -- it’s getting harder to taste things that please my palate, even when I put plenty of spicy stuff in. This meal would have benefited greatly with some hot spicy pickles on the side instead of the pickled beets. Kimchi? Kimchi! That was the missing ingredient. Also, I didn’t have anything to drink in the fridge except Shasta club soda. I should have had orange juice or pineapple juice. Or even squeezed a couple of grapefruit myself for the juice.

I’ve still got a wok full of the stuff -- what to do with it? Can’t impose on the neighbors or the kids. Truth to tell, it looks disgusting. If I freeze it I’ll forget about it and throw it out the next time my daughter Sarah helps me with my housecleaning. Okay, here’s a plan: I’ll put it in tupperware and keep it in the fridge for a few days, in case I wake up real early with hunger and have time to eat before going to the Rec Center to swim.

It’s times like these when I wish I had a dog.  

The Clown Becomes an Entrepreneur

By 1999 my osteoarthritis made it hard for me to do physical comedy anymore. And I didn’t really want to go the Birthday Clown route. So I decided on a radical move -- both in career and location. I took a publicity job with Tahitian Noni Juice in Bangkok, Thailand. I also taught English on the side. Since I had spent two years in Thailand back in the 70’s as an LDS missionary, I already knew the language -- and I had many old companions who were living as expats all around the country. I soon found myself running a clown jewelry business with a Texas expat partner . . .

Alex Janney is a Texas expat who missed the kind of Tex Mex cooking he got back home, so he decided to open his own Tex Mex place on the outskirts of Bangkok, called Que Pasa. The place is still up and running, and serving huge portions of stick-to-your-ribs chili and burritos. I made Janney’s place my unofficial headquarters when I wasn’t at work, because he let me tinker in the kitchen with his Thai staff. Alex had been using canned black beans for his frijoles refritos, which didn’t taste quite right to me -- there was a certain zest lacking. So the cooks and I fiddled around with the native red beans that the Thais use for dessert -- they mix the beans with lotus buds and coconut sap sugar. I had the Thai staff cook up a mess of plain red beans, and almost had to forcibly restrain them from dumping in the sugar and lotus buds, and then had them mash the beans up with some chili powder, sesame seed oil, and green scallions. The result, while probably not to be found south of the Rio Grande, was delicious. Alex immediately put it on his menu as “Thai Refried Beans.”

When Alex married his Thai cook he became very ambitious about raising a family in good style. The local schools in Thailand, to put it charitably, are adequate. Expats normally send their children to one of the expensive International Schools that resemble a country club rather than an educational institution. But it cost an arm and a leg. Last time I checked, tuition was 70- thousand dollars (US) per year. Alex was bound and determined to put his future offspring in one of these schools, so he became an uber-entrepreneur. Since his Thai was minimal, I often went with him on shopping expeditions as interpreter to help him haggle for items he could buy cheap and sell dear.

We prowled around the Chatuchak Weekend Market looking for bargains. An amazing place straight out of the Thousand and One Arabian Nights, this bazaar offers everything from pet Madagascar hissing cockroaches to pigeon milk to shingle froes to freshly minted ‘antiques.’ We found a stall that sold samurai swords for ten dollars each. They were beautifully made, and cheap enough for Alex to buy a dozen on the spot. Alex told me that back home in Texas everyone is crazy for weaponry of any kind -- the more exotic the better. He’d sell each one for two hundred bucks. But his plans to become the Samurai Sword King of the Pecos foundered when he ran afoul of US regulations regarding the shipping of weapons from overseas. The paperwork and the fees involved left him with a piddling profit margin. You can still see some of these swords on display at Que Pasa -- and they’re still available to anyone with two hundred smackers to spare.

By now I had caught the entrepreneur fever from Janney. I, too, would invest in a sure fire product that would give me a Croesus lifestyle.

My first venture was postcards. The market had dozens of artisans who produced hand-printed one-of-a-kind picture postcards that were inlaid with gold foil and frescoed with dried tropical blossoms. I figured if I bought them for ten cents each and sold them for a dollar each I’d be well on my way to a bonanza. But I was about ten years too late -- email was by then ubiquitous and tourists were not so eager to use snail mail anymore. My inventory sat and rotted in cardboard boxes in my un-airconditioned apartment.

Nothing daunted, I continued to accompany Alex to Chatuchak on weekends with my eye peeled for the main chance.

We found it one sweltering Saturday down a dim alleyway where the goldsmiths held sway. Clown jewelry! Petite little funny men made of hammered gold and bits of rubies and emeralds that could be used as brooches or earrings or attached to necklaces and wrist bracelets. They made cloisonne Chaplins and lacquered rings featuring the likenesses of Laurel and Hardy. These humble artisans sold their wares for something like fifty baht a piece -- which translates into roughly three dollars. Since my own funds were at ebb tide at the moment, Alex put up the cash until I could pay him back and we were in the clown jewelry business!

The stuff sold well on the internet, and Alex even put up a small display case in his restaurant. But just as the money started to roll in, the Thai government sent a representative from the Tax Department to talk to us about our lack of payment of the export tax.

“Don’t worry, Tim” Alex assured me. “It’s just a shakedown. They do it all the time with the restaurant. I’ll handle it.”

He handled it alright -- and we were served with a whopping bill for eighty thousand baht. After paying it off with all our profits, and then some, I lost my taste for being an entrepreneur. I sold my half of the business to Alex for some free meals at his place. But we did continue as partners in another venture closer to my true skill set. About once a month I showed up at his restaurant to do a birthday party clown gig for some expat family. What the heck -- it helped put som tum on the table . . .   

Thank You, Conrad Thiart!

To all the gentilshommes who liked my mini-memoir ‘The Clown Fries an Egg’ I want to wish a very happy “F. Scott Fitzgerald’s First Novel Published” Day. On this date in 1920 Fitzgerald’s “This Side of Paradise” was published to wide acclaim. My readers make me feel just as famous:

Mike Weakley; Gabriel Romero Sr.; Chris Twiford; Leo Acton; Alberto Ramirez; Mike Johnson; Andrew Jackson; Ron Butler; Conrad Thiart; Bruce Rechtsteiner; Kenneth L Stallings; Bruce Veldhuisen; Alex Janney; Anna Lima; Mary Pat Cooney; Jim Aakhus; Jane Caligiuri; Linda Bamonte; Patti Jo Estes Williams; and the indispensable David Orr.

“Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish.”

― Hermann Hesse