BuggBlog

Recipes and rednecks

Nine o'clock in the morning and I've got my red velvet cake in the oven. fishbowlDC may have declared my dessert pretentious, but that'll never stop me from baking up some unnaturally colored chocolate treats. Although, they might have been referring to that strawberry-spinach salad, but it's from my sister in rural Kentucky, it can't be pretentious. And the whole shrimp scampi thing... well, that's Barefoot Contessa, so they've probably got me there.

Anyway, New Year's Eve party tonight so most of my day will be spent in the kitchen preparing. Nothing too awful fancy this year. Artichoke spinach dip with my secret ingredient, sausage-cheddar balls (which are nothing like chocolate salty balls, in case you're wondering), raspberry-almond shortbread cookies, various cheeses, crunchy vegetables, and fried ravioli. Are fried ravioli pretentious, or just upwardly-mobile white trash cuisine? If you have an opinion, be sure to let me know.

Speaking of white trash, I keep meaning to say something about the whole let's-get-rid-of-the-immigrants policy in Manassas, Va., other than just pointing out the obvious "that's why they call it Manasshole" thing. It's just such a stunning display of family values when a local government gets together to declare that nephews just ain't kin, especially if they're brown and speak English with an accent. About the only fun thing about this whole moronic situation is that I get to be both a liberal and a conservative in my opposition. I'm very liberal on immigration issues, and I'm appalled by the obvious racism underlying the Manassas family definition law. And I'm a conservative on property rights, and the idea of a government defining who is and is not my family and determining who is eligible to live in my home makes my inner redneck want to reach for the buckshot.

Maybe that will provide some common grounds for others in the state to come in and (not-so-gently) explain to Manassas that their policy will change. Now.

Anyway, on a more upbeat note, happy New Year to everyone -- except, perhaps the town fathers and mothers of Manassas.

Why can't we all just get along, you fag?

There are some things in life that are so truly awful that you know you shouldn't pay attention but you just can't help watching the ongoing train wreck -- it certainly explains the public profile of anyone with the surname Hilton. In my case, the public scab I can't help picking at these days is newly-minted "columnist" Jeff Gannon. I'm running a little behind thanks to the holidays, but I just couldn't pass up this howler.

Concluding his "column" about the need for gays and lesbians to discuss issues of gender conformity and stereotypical homosexuality -- or, more bluntly, nelly fags versus straight-acting men -- Gannon writes:

Some will be threatened by any discussion about how gays ought to be portrayed to the rest of society, but they do a great disservice by attacking those of us who raise the question. Gay people need to challenge the stereotypes that serve only to divide, and to keep gay people from gaining greater acceptance from society as a whole.

Aside from the fact that, as always, Gannon's premise is about five years past its shelf life (thanks to the Bears and jocks and others, "straight-acting" behavior is now as stereotypically gay as a limp wrist and mincing walk), what makes this such a hoot is that just days before his plea for understanding Gannon fired off this gem on his web site, under the headline "Nancy's nancy boy nixed" (I'd linked to this before as an aside, before seeing his "opinion column"):

Ron Reagan, Jr., the embarassment that bears the name of one of the greatest American presidents is out of a job after his daytime talk show was mercifully cancelled last week. MSNBC put Reagan in the host's chair as the result of his election year masquerade as a "journalist" (btw, Twinkle-toes, what's YOUR journalism background?) proved to be a "stick in the eye" to those who revere his father.

Because nothing says "Kumbaya!" like calling someone a fucking fairy. And the whole "journalism background" thing? Priceless.

Tick-tock, tick-tock

There's nothing I love more than being 38. Except maybe being 37. It's a rainy, dreary morning in D.C., perfect birthday weather. Not that I care about birthdays! They're just  arbitrarily set celebrations of an event about which I have no direct memory. I'm thinking my birthday should actually be tired to a memorable and important early event in my life -- my first day of school, perhaps, or the first time I saw a Jim Palmer underwear ad (if you held you finger just so he looked naked), which would make me about 33. Much better.

In the spirit of feeling older but not wiser, here's my list of New Year's resolutions that I have absolutely no intention of keeping -- and are there really any other kind? Actually, reading some of the more earnest contributors at the Malcontent makes me feel a little more sheepishly misanthropic than usual, meaning that I'm generally misanthropic, but not all that sheepish about it. Anyway, making actual resolutions for the New Year that you intend to keep seems to me to be a dreadful tempting of Fate, like if you were to say, "There's nothing you could ever do that would make me love you less," or "I'll never do anything to hurt you," or "I will never ever get that fucked up again," or "I will never get into the back of a limo with a porn director, a professional male dancer and a vacationing Israeli soldier."

Not that I've ever, you know, said something like that.

A bleary-eyed return

Five days and 1,800 miles of driving later, I'm back home to a bed large enough to hold both me and Cavin, a television tuned to the inane channel I want to watch, and a quasi-deserted urban area with low traffic and empty streets. Yahoo!

The Kentucky and Indiana family tour was great. The Bugg family is on the Kentucky leg, while my maternal family the Kintners are on the Hoosier tour, and visiting each of them has a different vibe (although they're both rural as all get out). Unlike the Bugg side, where my sister and I were the last of a passel of grandchildren, I'm the first grandchild on the Kintner side, which carries a certain cachet even unto adulthood. It's much easier for me to feel like one of the adults with that side of the family.

Now, if I could just figure out how to feel like an adult when I'm at home. But New Year's approaches and there's a magazine to put out, so more coherent thoughts will come later. Although I'm not promising much on the "coherent" front.

State of mind

I had this whole thing in my head this morning about why I love Kentucky, despite a whole host of reasons I shouldn't. Problem is, I can't see the actual proof for the way I feel, and I'm not sure if there is any reason for the way I feel beyond nostalgia.

The reasons I dislike my home state are many. Kentucky eagerly joined the group of states constitutionally banning its gay residents from marriage. Not only does it send a slate of senators and representatives to Washington that should make everyone itch (e.g. Mitch McConnell), the state government has devolved into an apparent crony system in which one of my blazingly homophobic and over-privileged college classmates can get nominated to the state supreme court. Remaining in Kentucky never seemed an option to me, if I were to lead anything near the type of life I wanted (at the time, a job at the Washington Post and some vague sense of wanting to live a "gay lifestyle," so you see where that got me). Outside of two cities -- Lexington and Louisville -- Kentucky really is a huge collection of rural lifestyles, from the backwoods coalminers in the eastern mountains to the farmers in west.

I should point out that I'm oversimplifying a bit, so don't think the state's all mules and square dancing. They do build Toyotas here, you know.

But. But, but, but. A part of me always thinks about what it would be like to come back. A part of me always misses the big fields around the house I grew up in: the creek out back with mud so thick it would suck off your shoe; the railroad trestle that dared you to risk an oncoming train to stare at the ground beneath between the far-spaced track ties; the hills and sinkholes that made for tumbling games in elementary school and motorcycle jumping not much later.

A part of me knows that Kentucky is a beautiful state, even with the trees denuded for winter. It's less pretentious than its snotty older brother, Virginia, which constantly boasts of its ancient pedigree, when the length of its history is simply the result of being a coastal plot of land that just about any idiot with a boat would have found sooner or later. People had to work to find Kentucky -- they couldn't even get in until they at last found the Cumberland Gap. And it's not hard to prefer Kentucky to its unfairly maligned neighbor, West Virginia, a state that is inarguably beautiful. Unfortunately, because everything in W. Va. is at the top of a mountain, there's never anywhere to go but down. I prefer my own state of mountains in the east, rolling fields of bluegrass in the center, and the short hills and shallow valleys of my own home town in the west.

I'm sure this all sounds horribly rose-tinted and nostalgic, and it is. That's kind of the point. Kentucky for me really is a state of mind -- it's the place where I can reconnect with my family (whom I've found I've grown closer to as I've grown older, a pleasant surprise of aging). It's a place where I can get away, at least for a while, from some of the more oppressively urban aspects of life at home (namely, too many people and too much traffic). It's a place where I feel comfortable just relaxing and thinking, which may lead to too many self-indulgent memory trips like this one, but hey, that's what the holidays are for.

But all those things are the province of vacations and getaways, not homesteads and houses. Which is why, love it as I might, I can't ever imagine making Kentucky home again.

Trunk junk

My review of the 2006 Volvo S40 is up over at Metro Weekly. I don't have a whole lot to add to the review itself -- it's a solid small sedan, and with the AWD and turbocharged 5-cylinder engine, is pretty fun to drive. The downside is that it's a bit on the expensive side for what you're buying, basically a Volvo badge. I still say if you want a small four door, take a gander at the Mazda 3 sedan, which shares the same platform as the Volvo but comes in as a better value.

Price aside, the only other thing that really bugs me about the Volvo is the lack of space -- it's really tight inside, without much room to put anything. The trunk is very shallow, and frustrating for something as regular as trips to the grocery store. I had the S40 the week following the Hyundai Sonata -- now there was a car with a trunk. The Volvo just doesn't pack it in like it should.

And I really, really want them to give me a red one next time. God, I hate silver cars.

It can only get better from here

So it turns out my boyfriend's big Christmas present for me was sharing his head cold, making this week's production schedule a particular joy. After wrapping up on Wednesday in an over-the-counter induced haze, I decided to head home early to rest and recuperate for the upcoming Kentucky road-trip. Then I had the idea to run by Tyson's Corner, given that I'd only bought about 10 percent of the gifts I'm expected to provide. "Run buy" being a relative term. Panic Christmas shopping with a head cold, fever and a few thousand of your fellow men and women is not a recipe for spreading joy to the world.

Aside from some foggy memories of sales transactions racking up on my credit card, my most distinct memory of the day was looking at a "Bratz Babyz" motorcycle and thinking "What perverted pedophile came up with that?" Really, if the parents of America are buying this kind of crap for their little girls, then there's really no room for anti-gay groups to be talking about queers getting married. I mean, come on, a pre-toddler cartoon girl leaning over a motorcycle presenting her bikini clad butt like a cat in heat? In the middle of the toy aisle?

Oh my god, I'm getting so old.

Anyway, the world makes little sense to me at moment due to the cold, which hasn't abated much during the 535-mile drive to my mother's. Luckily, I'm already sated with cookies and cake, so it's beginning to feel a lot like Christmas. One more night of sleep, and I might actually be normal. As long as I avoid nightmare visions of Bratz.

Yeah, yeah, happy frickin' birthday. Now where's Santa?

I am that bastard child of the holiday season, the (almost) Christmas baby. My actual birthday is Dec. 29, four days after the whole birth of Christ thing that during my childhood diverted so much attention from my own special day. You'd think that four days would be enough to refocus, but by the time my birthday rolls around, everyone's getting their livers ready for New Year's, so I lose out to the Baby New Year. Fucker.

A friend sent me this article by a fellow Christmas baby, which laments the greeting of "Merry Birthday" and other such conflations of the birth of God and the birth of ME-ME-ME! I don't recall ever being wished a "Merry Birthday," but I do remember that I never had a birthday party other than a cake at Granny's. My gifts were often items I got to choose for myself at an after-Christmas sale. Or, worse, swats on the ass equal in number to my new age, courtesy of my uncle, a gift that grew more terrible every year. I didn't even have the luxury of appeal to the favored treatment of a sibling with a better-timed birthday -- by a coincidence of cosmic timing (or the type of minus-nine-months math that everyone does even though they know it's going to give them an unpleasant mental image) my sister's birthday is symmetrically opposed to mine, four days before Christmas.

She really got the short end of the stick -- she got to open a Christmas present early.

The upside to all this: as adults, neither my sister nor I care all that much if you forget our birthday, unless you happen to be a family member or a husband in which case we care very much. Everyone else is off the hook, although cakes and cards are always appreciated. Anyway, it's not like I don't have enough to do in December: anniversary on the 19th, sister's birthday on the 21st, the family extravaganza of the 24th and 25th, my birthday on the 29th and a New Year's party on the 31st. Plus about 500 miles of driving on every day in between, and it's shaping up to be a fine, fine holiday season.

Randomized

Everything's finally back up and running after Typepad crashed for a full frickin' day. Not that it helps all that much, as I'm just about to embark on a full-scale Christmas panic in which I will try to buy all gifts, bake all cookies, address all cards and finalize all travel plans over the course of this weekend, in between playing league tennis and having Cavin's nieces over for spaghetti and Disney movies. The cards are the easy part, I think -- it's the shopping I most dread. So much for getting ahead this year.

Anyway, given the schedule, all I can do is skim over a few things:

--Watched A History of Violence on Thursday night. I generally like Cronenberg films -- I even liked Existenz -- and although Violence was part of the apparent trend away from his earlier works, the clinical detachment with which he approaches his subjects still creeps me out. And I love that. One observation: William Hurt is totally morphing into Dennis Hopper, and I don't really mean that in a good way.

--This is my favorite lede thus far in a story about Brokeback Mountain. Generally, I stay away from any gay movie that gives off the vibe that I have to see it in order to be a socially responsible gay man, but it is an Ang Lee film, so in that case I have no choice. I'm scheduled for Monday -- here's hoping my high hopes aren't dashed.

--Speaking of Brokeback, out of all the stupid posts and comments I've seen about the movie, this one from Jeff Gannon has to be the stupidest. Then check out his dismissal of Ron Reagan Jr. as a "nancy boy" and "Twinkle-toes." Project much? Yes, this is the guy that one paper claims needs to heard by the gay and lesbian community.

--Microsoft finally makes a product that I actually want to own (as opposed to being forced to use by monopolistic ubiquity), and they can't make/ship/supply enough of them for me to buy one. Nice work, Microsoft! I'm so glad they managed to have all those units available for a failed Japanese launch. Slate has an interesting take as well on the economics of the Xbox 360. But academic theories be damned -- I just want to play some frickin' Project Gotham Racing 3, dammit.

Pox on Plaxo

For all the drama in and around my life, I've found that there truly are few people whom I actively and agressively hate. And every last fucking one of them has my e-mail address ensnared in that damn Plaxo pyramid address book scheme. If I've called you a pusbag within the past five years or so, then I'm probably not  all that interested in catching up with a few e-mail pleasantries. I'll admit, I'm as bad as the next person when comes to removing the forgotten, the reolocated, the hated or the dead from my address book, but before you go clogging the e-mail boxes of every person you've ever known you might want to do a cursory cleaning.

And here I was saying Thursdays are all sunshine, bliss and ponies. Must be the icy rain.