Requirements of the law

"European Union laws require you to give European Union visitors information about cookies used on your blog. In many cases, these laws also require you to obtain consent."

 This warning appears in the editing functions of this blog and I'll be honest, I never really paid any attention to it. This bit of legal argle-bargle, to quote the late Justice Scalia, was just another example of the usual boilerplate nonsense that you have to expect in an increasingly bureaucratic society, something that the mind dismisses without ever having processed the information in the first place.  Now that I have noticed it, however, it seems more than a little presumptuous, doesn’t it? First, there is the question of sovereignty: can the European Union, which by its very name is clearly located in Europe, order me, a citizen of this our Great Republic, to do anything?  Second, how do I know which of my visitors are from the European Union and which are not? I am not some international Internet traffic cop who has the time and the energy to keep up with the people who come here and then question them about who they are and where they come from. Strange as it may seem to the European Union and the, I assume, very well paid paper pushers who devised this rule, I have an actual life here in the United States of America and that this actual life requires the majority of my time and attention and does not require me to pay attention to the European Union or its strictures about cookies and visitors.  Third, as to the question of consent, I wish to point out to the Eurodrone bureaucrats in Brussels who are behind the aforementioned bit of legal argle-bargle that nobody is forcing anyone to read The Passing Parade—the management of this blog can barely get the writer who provides the content here to write for the damned blog—and so the question of consent is largely moot, unless, of course, said Eurodrones are demanding that I get the reader’s consent, in which my response is that you can go kiss my royal Irish ass, guys.

However, in the spirit of international amity, I will point out that The Passing Parade is not terribly fond of cookies, but that we do have a very nice pineapple upside down cake that my mother makes from scratch and that on occasion we will indulge in some freshly made gourmet doughnuts from the new place across the street from the egregious mold pit wherein I labor for my daily bread.  If you are ever up this way, I invite you to drop in and share a doughnut, unless you are intent on getting me to follow European Union law, in which case I will call the police and have you removed from the premises. Thank you for your time and attention.

Culinary news that you can use, yes you can

I don’t go to town very often—I am no one’s idea of a social butterfly—and so when I do go out I want to make sure than I am going to a good place with excellent food and nice ambiance. Once upon a time, finding such a place would involve going through newspaper after newspaper looking for reviews, but nowadays all I need do is check the Internet.  Almost all restaurants have their own websites now, complete with hours and links to reviews proclaiming how wonderful they are, and with menus listing the specialties of the house available for everyone to read.  I think this is a very good thing, although sometimes I wonder if the menus are too much of a good thing.

I bring all of this largely unnecessary detail because I have a bad habit of not getting to the point in the first paragraph, which I know many of you find annoying in the extreme and, to tell the truth, irritates me as well, but I fear that it is a stylistic tic that I am stuck with at this point.  In any case, I was reading the menu of a new Mexican restaurant here in our happy little burg—they had their soft opening a week ago and some of my friends recommended the place to me—when I noticed that amongst the fillings offered with their homemade tortilla tacos were children and Jamaican jerks. This took me aback; these are not the sort of things anyone would expect to see on a restaurant’s menu, especially a restaurant that hasn’t really opened yet.  The average taco connoisseur expects to see fish, pork, or beef as a filling, although in some places one can get kangaroo, cockatoo, or emu too; I should point out here that I would not actually eat a fish taco if one of my brothers’ lives depended on it—I hate fish with just about every fiber of my being. I hate liver, eggs, and asparagus as well, but I would eat them if one of my brothers’ lives depended on it…maybe. No, not maybe, definitely, sort of, and only if Mom made me. I suppose I should say something about the use of children as a taco filling, but an Irish clergyman of my acquaintance has modestly proposed something along these lines a while ago and so I recommend that you peruse his recommendations.  I agree with most of his major points and I see no reason to repeat those points here.

I do, however, wish to comment on the use of Jamaican jerks in Mexican cuisine. This seems to me an act of cultural appropriation on a truly monstrous scale, nothing less than the forced bastardization of two national cuisines that do not derive from the same cultural and culinary sources and share no common traditions. And to what purpose? Like Tex-Mex, chop suey, and Chicago style deep dish pizza, using Jamaican jerks as filling is less a celebration of culinary mestizaje than a surrender to the unyielding demands of Americanization and assimilation, a demand that all the world’s cuisines subsume their cultural autonomy into the black hole of the American melting pot and transform themselves into peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

As if this astonishing act of cultural imperialism were not enough, I heard on NPR the other day that, following many allegations from consumers that the Jamaican jerks they’d eaten could not be the real thing, the state Department of Consumer Affairs had investigated several restaurants with Jamaican jerks on the menu for false advertising and that the consumers’ allegations were true.  Approximately thirty-five percent of all restaurants advertising Jamaican jerks in their tacos or as a separate menu item were not using Jamaican jerks at all; these restaurants were using locally grown American dumbasses instead. One veteran department investigator told the NPR reporter covering the story that this was one of the most blatant cases of false advertising and consumer fraud that he had ever seen.

Nor is consumer fraud we are dealing with here. The use of American dumbasses in place of Jamaican jerks who should have gotten those jobs is an in your face example of nativist prejudice and racism at its worst. I understand, as does anyone who has to deal with the public everyday, that dealing with jerks of any race or nationality is always a bit trying—jerks wouldn’t be jerks if they weren’t trying—but to deny jerks work simply because they are jerks is un-American in principle and probably a civil rights violation in practice.  While it may be too early to demand that the Attorney General’s office open an investigation into this matter, I fell that the restaurants involved should pay the Jamaican jerks they deprived of a livelihood some restitution for their pain and suffering, and also for involving them in an act of cultural appropriation that I am sure these good people did not want to take part in.

I should, I guess, end this discussion with a brief review of the food.  The child-filled taco was very nice, I thought—the meat was tender, but a bit too spicy for my taste, and the pulled Jamaican jerk made with real Jamaican jerks was quite good. You can tell the difference; American dumbasses tend to be bland and the meat tends to be a bit fattier—and it surprises me that any restaurant would think that they could pass off such a clearly inferior product and that no consumer would notice the difference. I do recommend the Jamaican jerk taco, if you like that sort of thing, and also the steak fajita, which was very nice and a welcome change to the less conventional fare.  I also recommend that if you have a restaurant advertising Jamaican jerk in your area that you call your local consumer affairs department and ask if they know if the restaurant is selling the real thing.  You really do not want to waste your money on a cheap imitation.

Narrowing the way, or the shad run, whichever you think more important

The American shad is a pelagic fish, which I understand has nothing to do with the fourth century heresiarch Pelagius or his denial of the orthodox Christian doctrine of original sin, a belief that led St. Jerome to call Pelagius an ignorant liar stuffed with Irish porridge, amongst other negative things, and everything to do with the American shad’s preference for living in the open sea far from the sight of land, where calls from telemarketers, bill collectors, and mooching relatives need never trouble them.  Living in the open sea is a good thing; I’m sure the shad think so or they wouldn’t bother living there, given the property taxes out in that neck of the woods, but every year the American shad wearies of this near idyllic existence and gather together in great schools several hundred thousand strong and then head for the rivers and estuaries of North America’s eastern coast like so many Rotarians, Elks, Odd Fellows, or the fraternal organization of your choice going to their organization’s annual convention in Las Vegas.  The shad head for the East Coast of America for pretty much the same reason that our Rotarians et al go to Vegas—sex—although the shad make less of a song and dance about their reasons for heading for shore. The shad, after all, are not leaving the little lady behind to keep the home fires burning; nope, the old ball and chain is going with the guys and aims to have just as much fun whooping it up as they do.  There’ll be no sexual double standards here, thank you very much; this is a Democratic Party stronghold and don't you forget it, buster.

For those of us who live near a river on the eastern coast of the United States, and yes, this category includes me, the arrival of the shad is one of the great signs of spring, along with allergies, baseball season, gnats, and having to do your income taxes, and no sooner does the shad run commence than the highways and byways of our happy little burg become lined to the danger point with cars, vans, pickup trucks, SUVs, and such other conveyances that will hold truly prodigious amounts of fishing equipment.  This annual invasion of dedicated sportsmen is annoying in the extreme for those of us who live here, as our Izaak Walton wannabes seldom bother to look both ways when crossing the streets.  What’s worse, or at least I think so, is that these people apparently believe that carrying a fishing rod and a tackle box conveys upon them some form of immunity from the vehicle and traffic laws of the Vampire State as well as an exemption from the laws of physics.  So if any of you people, and you know who you are, are reading this, please be aware that waving your fishing rod at my thirteen year old Ford will not stop the car dead in its tracks; fishing rods are by no stretch of the imagination magic wands and this trick will no more work with my car than it will with a locomotive coming down the line.  Except, of course, if I run you down, you know the law says it’s my fault, no matter how stupid you were, whereas if the train hits you and smears your dumb carcass over a mile of railroad track scores of people, including me, will read your obituary and mock you for trying to stop a locomotive with a fishing rod, and we will be happy that you have chosen to remove yourself from the gene pool.  Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life to improve the species.  It’s a small victory, but they add up, you know, yes they do.

Arterialscerlosis is the order of the day on the Internet these days as well and I trust I didn’t hurt your neck with that segue to another subject, but I cannot help but notice the increasing narrowing of the information superhighway.  For example, whenever I go online I must face a plethora of ads that promise to teach men fifty years old and over, yet another category that includes me, unfortunately, Spanish, French, and/or Italian with one simple trick.  I know why this is happening; I have been going to my local public library and using the online French language program to teach myself a little bit of the language in preparation for a proposed expedition to the City of Light later this year.  I have not been studying the language assiduously—I do nothing assiduously, I fear, except whine about my fate to all and sundry—and I can categorically state that after two and a half hours of not very intensive study my French is somewhat less good than my Spanish, a language that I have not been studying assiduously since high school.  So I guess there’s hope for me yet. Also, I am not sure that this trip is even possible at this point, and to paraphrase Will Rogers, I am wasting no time on a prospect.

In any case, these cyberlinguistic Burma-Shave signs promising me deliverance from the drudgery of learning French irregular verb conjugations with one simple trick invariably come with a photo of an attractive young lady of uncertain national origin whose primary assets are her nice looks, her nice smile, and her overly impressive bosom, which I do not understand, since everything about this young lady is designed to make me forget the various conjugations of avoir (to have) faster than I learned them. I therefore suspect that she is not the one simple trick the advertisers promise I can use to unlock my inner Cyrano de Bergerac; if she were, then Hugh Hefner would, by definition, be able to speak all the living languages of the Earth and most of the dead ones, including Pictish and Akkadian, high school foreign language programs would require their students to read Playboy as homework from one end of this our Great Republic to the other, and Viagra would replace Ritalin and Prozac as the pedagogical drug of choice in the nation’s schools.  That Playboy is not required reading tells me that learning French and Spanish is more difficult than this one simple trick can handle and that the purpose of the young lady is to distract my attention while these jokers loot my checking account.  The thing, of course, is that I’m not fifteen anymore.  When I was fifteen this dodge would have worked in a New York minute; when most of your body weight is testosterone almost anything sounds sensible if presented in the right package; but a couple of generations have come and gone since high school, I fear, and most of my body weight is cholesterol now, a substance not nearly interesting as testosterone, as I am sure a good many people out there can verify.  Avoir, aurai, avais, ayant…I haven’t gotten the present tense yet, but I’m working on it.

Is no nudes good nudes?

Reuters reports that a Polish coffin company is now using nude and semi-nude models in their 2013 calendar in order to advertise their product. While babes in bikinis is a time-tested commercial strategy; when I was a young boy I often wondered about the wall calendar in my father's workshop-there did not seem to be any connection between attractive blondes and plumbing supplies that I could see, but then I was not an especially bright child; I do not believe that this method of advertising will stimulate coffin sales to any great extent. Nude women luxuriating in stylish coffins will not make the coffin's primary use any more popular than it already is and no amount of advertising can or will change that fact; like toilet paper, coffins are something you need when you need them and not before. Nude women in attitudes of erotic abandon may make what the French call the little death more interesting; indeed, you can argue that nude women and the little death were made for each other, that they go together like Burns and Allen, Abbott and Costello, or peanut butter and jelly; but no one is interested in dealing with the big death unless or until they absolutely have to. However, I do see a market for this sort of thing in Muslim countries, especially those countries infested with large numbers of jihadi suicide bombers. A stylish coffin could be the perfect recruiting tool in such places, especially if you can convince the customers that Miss November will be one of the 72 virgins he can expect to wait on him forever after he eliminates himself from the gene pool. Yes, I see a veritable fortune in the making there.