Musings From The Naughty-Cupboard

Well, I'm still locked in this fucking cupboard.
He says he'll let me out when I show some sign of sanity.
Sheesh!
At least he left me the laptop and a stack of movies, though it's getting pretty unpleasant in here what with the constant fights with Stouffer over who gets to use the litter tray.

And talking of catshit, my comment box seems to be full of weiners.

Katie writes (rather scarily):
"I wish I were an Oscar Mayer Weiner
That is what I truly wish to be
cause if i were a Oscar Mayer Weiner
everyone would be in love
oh everyone would be in love
everyone would be in love with me"

And Maria:
"Oscar Meyer has a way with B O L O G N A."

I have spent fifty years blissfully unaware of the existence of Oscar Meyer weiners - or indeed any other brand - but now you've gone and spoiled that and introduced me to a new horror of US "cuisine" to add to the supersized burger, "freedom" fries, alleged pizza with macaroni cheese on top and greasy bits of deep-fried gristle served up in a bucket.
Now I have to add to that list of shame classic Italian dishes with the meat replaced by pink plastic hot-dog "sausages"?
Holy crap!

This from a country that - since 1492 - has to date signally failed to produce a single edible cheese.
Shit! The stuff comes in spray cans over there … or in thin, shitty-smelling sheets of sweaty rubber that look, feel and taste almost exactly unlike cheese of any description … except perhaps knob-cheese.

We had a flirtation with US "cuisine" over here when I was a kid in the sixties.
We poor urchins, dressed in rags and scratching for turnips amidst the bombed-out cities of post-war austerity Britain, assumed that as you Colonials all appeared to be filthy rich and to drive flying cars (or at least cars shaped like "weiners" as this lovely photo from Lulu shows) and live in Disney castles that you must have been doing something right and that maybe it was your diet …
Er …
Okay, so now we know that a diet based on saturated fat, sugar, salt and chemical additives produces a nation of grossly obese, hyper-aggressive morons (present company excepted, of course) with the attention span of a bored gnat, but back then we thought you were really on to something.

The result was truly dreadful, a "food" product the memory of which still produces creeping horrors in my scarred soul:
"Heinz Baked Beans With Pork Sausages".
A can of orange goo with some stale borlotti beans floating in it in amongst some weird, squishy, pink, poo-like tubes of mystery "meat" of a consistency to suggest that maybe you guys farmed earthworms.
"Weiners".

When I was a nipper these were the very pinnacle of "luxury international cuisine".
Together with SPAM®, of course.
Fortunately for us those things were indeed "luxury" items and for special occasions only, so the chemical damage to my child's body was limited.

So anyhoo: back to the weiners.

I checked on YouTube and it appears that I must now add the word "weiner" to "risotto" and "basil" and all the other words our errant Colonials have yet to learn how to pronounce correctly.
It's as if you guys look at a written word and take a wild, flying guess as to its pronunciation without bothering to consult an actual alphabet or indeed any form of language, let alone the language whence the word originated.
"Weiner" - for your information - has the soft German "V" at the start and is not pronounced "whiner" or even "weener", at least not in any civilised part of the world.

Of course, being an Englishman it is my natural genetic birthright to blame absolutely everything on the Irish and this case is no exception.

Back in the good old days of the potato famine, millions of starving, illiterate and uneducated Irish peasants washed up on the shores of Noo Yoik City, their brains addled with poteen.
Too dumb to realise they could choose anywhere on that enormous continent to live, they huddled together in Noo Yoik's seething tenements and quickly took over and monopolised those bastions of the establishment where spectacular, mule-headed stupidity was not an impediment but was indeed a guarantee of career advancement: politics, the police and the immigration authorities.

As the wars, pogroms and other horrors of late nineteenth century Europe and Russia raged, they produced the biggest human migration ever seen and countless millions of poor and uneducated Germans, Scandinavians, Poles, Czechs, Russians and folk from all points unpronounceable descended on the illiterate Irish immigration officials who now ran Ellis Island.

Here, they found that they would lose their ancient and beloved family names and be given instead a piece of official stamped paper with a new and usually very stupid word scrawled on it.
This was the inevitable result of some dumb Oirish schmuck-o asking the poor immigrant's name and then wrestling incompetently with the alphabet (and usually losing badly) in a deranged attempt at phonetic spelling.

The Irish - whom most people in the US assume are charming romantic poets - cannot even spell their OWN names, let alone anyone else's.
An Irishman at a spelling bee is a sight to behold.
They launch into spelling with more enthusiasm than is probably wise in a people for whom the alphabet is an alien concept, adding endless "g"s and "h"s and cramming consonants in where no consonant has any business being crammed.
They spell "Neve" "Naimh", for fuck's sake!
The current fad for giving kids Irish names makes junior school roll-call sound like a spectacularly phlegmy coughing fit.
Sweet cheeses of Nazareth (not, by the way, available in a spray can)!
These are the people who gave us the hilarious misnames that make the credits the funniest part of any US movie or TV show (my personal favourite being Lolita Fatjo from one of the Star Trek spin-offs … Lolita's bad enough but where the fuck did she get "Fatjo" from? Shamus in immigration; that's where).

Of course, I know that at least three of my very favourite blogpals are of Irish descent but being locked in a cupboard with a sweary blue rubber cat gives rise to odd thoughts and being soundly beaten by angry weemen becomes a strangely attractive notion.

Anyhoo … I shall conclude this stream-of-semi-consciousness drivel-fest with the observation that a similar admixture of enthusiasm and complete ignorance gave rise to what has become that most fearsome weapon of mass destruction: US "cuisine".

The confused, illiterate peasants from various parts of Europe found themselves hunkered down with their new, incomprehensible names, in little turf houses miles from anywhere in the howling snowstorms of the prairie.
Some tattered remnant of folk-memory still lingered in the names and vague notions of the noble cuisines of their home nations but with none of the correct ingredients to hand and struggling with the weird pronunciations of Noah Webster's twisted English they did the best they could.

Occasionally they came up with something wonderful, such as gumbo, chowder or indeed the original Boston baked beans; sometimes they almost produced something edible, like hominy grits; but mostly they came up with deep fried varieties of saturated fats, sugar, salt and gristle - usually coated liberally with maple syrup - and with increasing industrialisation unnatural chemicals were added to mask the appalling taste and texture.

And of course they came up with the "weiner".

If the Germans know nothing else they know how to invade a country and how to make a good sausage.
Just as the French and the English know how to make great cheese ("blessed are the cheesemakers").
A true weiner schnitzel is a joy to behold and delicious to eat.
The thing that passes for a "weiner" in the States deserves its very own circle of Hell.

Though I still want one of those weiner cars!

So that's all the news that's fit to print from the naughty-cupboard.
It's back to scrapping over the litter tray.
Hey ho.