Gower Gulch

As special as Sport Shots were, the place I bought them was more special still.

When I lived in Hollywood, there was this little shopping center called Gower Gulch, which looked like a leftover set for a C-grade western. This shopping center contained everything you'd expect--a locksmith, an Indonesian sushi/karaoke bar, a Japanese Mexican seafood restaurant, a Denny's, an optometrist's office that never opened, and a Baskin Robbins/Starbucks/Togo's.

But the whole thing was anchored by Gower Gulch Liquor, the greatest store in the history of the liquor/convenience/drugstore/deli genre.

Gower Gulch Liquor made great sandwiches. They stocked the largest selection of impossible-to-find sodas in the world, from the only Triple Cola west of New York City to the last 300 bottles or RC Draft in existence. They had weird candy from Australia (ever had a Jaffa?) and imitation Japanese junk food from Malaysia. They had 4 more flavors of Spam than normally exist outside of Guam. They even claimed they could get me a can of Pocari Sweat, but that never panned out. (I finally had some this year in Singapore--it's basically Gatorade with a silly name. Oh well.)

Of course, being a liquor store, the variety of alcohol was really the central point. From $60-a-bottle Canadian rye that was worth every penny to all flavors of Cisco in existence. But the crowning achievement was Sport Shots, which I never saw anywhere else.

As sad as it was when Sport Shots disappeared, it was even sadder a few months later when Gower Gulch Liquor disappeared. It was replaced by another Starbucks, two doors from the original one, but not saddled with a Baskin Robbins and a Togo's.

You'd think this would be the death of the hybrid Starbucks, but years later, both were still going strong. (Just like the Starbucks a mile down the road that failed to kill off the Burger King/Starbucks and the laundromat/Starbucks in the same 3-storefront building.)

Neither one, of course, had Sport Shots.

Salsa

I love salsa. Yeah, as George Castanza says, it's partly because it's fun to say.

Especially specific different salsas and hot sauces. I don't mean the trendy boutique salsas like "Jump Up And Kiss Me Hot Sauce," I mean the simple things, like habanero.

For a semi-Spanish-speaking Caucasian, this word gives you the delightful challenge of making it clear that you understand how much different the word sounds in Spanish without sounding like a TV anchor saying "Channel 4 reporter <brief pause to switch language modules> Rrrrrramon Marrrtinez <pause> is on the scene with more."

But my favorite is Pico de Gallo. Because it means, of course, a trillionth of a rooster. Sort of like homeopathic salsa, in case you need to be cured of roosterosis or something.

Plus, there's the fact that people from all Spanish-speaking countries, even the ones where "ll" isn't normally pronounced like a hard "y," have to say "Pico de Guy-yo," because it just sounds wrong any other way. Even the dumb gringos get this one pretty close.

Anyway, any tacqueria without a decent salsa bar is not worth eating at. They don't have to have 20 flavors of salsa--in fact, if you find southwestern mango chutney paste, leave before someone tries to charge you $10 for a "wrap"--but they should have at least two, one of which should be very hot and one of which should be an odd shade of green.

But the real key to the salsa bar is the pickled spicy carrots. There is no proper English term for these things, because it's really not proper to speak English in their presence. Many people cannot handle them, and Taco Bell exists for those people, but that just means more for me.

Speaking of Taco Bell, when I was young, they had two salsas: Mild and Hot. At some point they added Fire. Fire is not really much hotter than Hot, it's just redder. Both have no flavor whatsoever, but can be used to give spice to Mild, which actually has an interesting taste once you get over the fact that it tastes like nothing else in the world that has ever been called "salsa." Somehow, it makes Taco Bell chicken almost edible. But for the boil-in-the-bag beef, you really need Hot. Or maybe Fire, whose thicker color hides the meat from view. Maybe that's what it's for.

Anyway, carrots.

POP Snacks and Nazi Rice

I know, you expected this to be a paean to Pop Rocks, Magic Gum, and other hypercarbonated snacks of the 80s. But this is even better.

Someone I know recently got back from Korea, and brought a bunch of snacks, including something called 'POP' Snack. With the quotes and everything. Basically just rice cakes, except for the packaging.

Now, usually I don't go crazy over East Asians and their bizarre English. (It's certainly better than Americans and their bizarre Chinese, Japanese, and Korean--"bonsai" and "banzai" are not the same word, damnit!) But in this case....

Written on the package was the sentence: "Let's establish heatlh society by abolishing inferior food."

This is creepy.

At first it sounds sort of bad-spelling-hippie (which is better than the usual bad-smelling-hippie).

Then suddenly the Nazi overtones hit you.

Finally, you realize with relief that it's actually talking about the cleansing of inferior food, not people. Some Hitler of the rice fields is attempting to establish a master race of pure white rice.

Not so scary, but still sort of disturbing. I was just about to become amazed at the Koreans' lack of sensitivity to racist fascism after their treatment by their neighbors during WWII, not the mention the previous millenia, when I remembered Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Netenyahu and it all makes sense.

Anyway, I'm not sure how much lebensraum a grain of rice needs--I'm sure any farmers out there can help me. But if I were the soy in the next field over, I'd watch out. Or at least make sure that I didn't form all my defenses into a big line that reaches almost all the way across the field.

Vegetarians

I have little respect for vegetarians. But I have even less respect for carnivores who are grossed out by the knowledge that animals are dying for their food.*

I've never stalked an elephant with a crude hand-ax and 20 cohorts in hopes of carting off enough raw meat before the hyenas arrived to feed my tribe for a week. But I have killed a turkey.

Once upon a time, for Thanksgiving, a group of us who lived too far from college and/or were too poor to fly home decided that we'd spend the long weekend and our friend's dad's farm in southern Jersey. We arrived around 3am Wednesday night** and were awakened at 6am Thanksgiving morning by the dogs barking at the roosters to shut the hell up.

Pops*** came into the room and asked who wanted to kill the turkey. My other city-boy friends freaked out (my city-girl friends were spared by Pops' gentle sexism), but once I realized that I'd lived 19 years as a meat-eater without ever taking responsibility for it, I volunteered.

At first, I wasn't sure I could do it.

That's because I'd never met a turkey before.

I assumed that, when you walk out into a field of free-range turkeys, the first thing you notice is the sound. Or maybe the smell. But really, the main thing you notice is the fact that dozens of turkeys are pecking at your legs hard enough to draw blood, as if they think there are seeds hidden somewhere in your veins. You shoo them away, and then walk around in circles for a couple minutes and come back to bury a beak in your flesh.

These are hideous, foul-natured fowl. It's hard to call anything so stupid evil (W's saving grace), but it's hard to find anything nice to say about them. By the time Pops handed me the axe and explained how to do the deed, the only hard part was lifting 25 pounds of vicious attack-bird up onto the stump.

Still, I didn't enjoy killing it.

But I did enjoy eating it.

Yeah, I know, just another way of putting the old joke, "Meat is murder... and murder tastes damn good with A-1 sauce." Still, having never actually killed a soy plant, I'm not entirely sure I can eat tofu in good conscience--but I have enough understanding of where my meat comes from before it's injected with water and covered in plastic wrap that I can make the choice. I wouldn't want to kill a cow, but if I were starving in a field of cattle, I could.

Anyone who can't say the same, maybe they should stick to fungus. And if you can't bring yourself to kill a mushroom, you deserve to starve.

Footnotes follow. I like blogs with footnotes; it's such a silly idea. So here:

* Of course I don't have much respect for hunters, or people who work in slaughterhouses--or animals. And definitely not plants. I guess I don't have much respect in general.

** I know, officially Thursday starts at midnight, but if 6am is good enough for TV Guide, it's good enough for me.

*** Pops was not his actual name, and his sons weren't named Speed and Rex, but it sounds like a good farmer-dad name.

Filet O'Fish

Nowadays it's called "Filet-O-Fish," like "Bass-o-matic," but when I was a kid it was "Filet O'Fish." Not "Filet o' Fish" like "Barrel o' Monkeys," but "Filet O'Fish," like "Feeney O'Flannery."

Considering that back then, nobody but the Irish ate these things,* did Ronald McDonald read Jonathan Swift's "Modest Proposal," get the sarcasm, but still think it was a cool idea?

Before you scoff, remember, this is the same Ronald McDonald (as Scottish Presbyterian as a man could be without being named Robert**) who dressed up in whiteface and a red frightwig and a red nose to signify drunkenness as a hideous parody of the Irish for the delight of the normal beef-eating children.

Of course they're still made today despite the Irish being able to eat hamburgers,*** but they spend their allotted hours under the heat lamp in vain hope that a Scotsman will wander in, lost on his way to H. Salt or Long John Silvers or Canada, and order a fish sandwich.****

Footnotes follow:

* For those who don't get what the Irish have to do with fried cod: Until the 60's, Catholics weren't allowed to eat meat on Fridays, so they ate fish. Even after they dropped that rule, there were a number of kids--for some reason mostly Irish--with alcoholic fathers and dead grandfathers who ended up being taken care of by crotchety old grandmothers who refused to listen to that blasted new Pope. Fortunately, the last 6 escaped into legal adulthood, the hobo underground, or the sweet embrace of death somewhere around 1986, and modern Irish kids eat double quarter-pounders and supersize fries and are, as a consequence, just as fat as the rest of us Americans.

** ... or Bruce, or Mel Gibson

*** You read * above, right?

**** Scotsmen are required to eat fried cod, of any quality, whenever offered, or the English will stop letting them call themselves British. It's sort of a hazing ritual for being the new crown in Great Britain. Lucky for Northern Ireland there's no adjective "United Kingdomish."