Daily

On Saturday night I was getting ready to go to bed, around 12:30 am, and heard someone hollering outside like an escapee from the wacky shack.

“Where the hell have you been?!  Get in this house!!” the person roared, at the top of his lungs and very near our back door.  I walked into the family room and stood beside an open window, so I could eavesdrop while the tirade continued:

“I asked you where you’ve been!!  …What do you mean up the hill?  What are you even talking about, up the hill?!  …Who were you with?!  …Are they still there?  I feel like cracking some heads!!”

What the hell, man?  Cracking some heads??  Who is this nut?

Then I heard him say, “You’re fifteen years old, drunk off your ass, and trying to climb in a window in the middle of the night?!  What’s wrong with you??  WHY ARE YOU THE WAY YOU ARE?!”

Yep, it was Poppa Half-Shirt again, completely losing his shit.  The guy was screaming so loud and getting himself worked-up into such a frenzy, his voice was cutting in and out and going all reedy.  He sounded like a complete maniac.

And Sunday morning we heard him yelling again, apparently a continuation of the previous night’s “conversation.”  Among the pearls of fatherly wisdom imparted: “SOMETIMES I WISH YOU’D NEVER BEEN BORN!”  And this was followed by a godawful crash that sounded like a china cabinet going over.

Yeah, they have a good time over there…

Can you hear your neighbors where you live?  Have you ever overheard anything interesting?  If so, we need to know about it.  Tell us about it in the comments section below.

Also, were you ever the yellee in that situation?  The fifteen year old drunken hooligan trying to sneak into your parents’ house late at night?  Did you get away with it, or did someone go all Half-Shirt on ya?

And I’m going to try something new for a week:  updating a couple of times per day.  They’ll be shorter posts, but more focused.  And if it doesn’t work, we’ll just go back to the old way.

See ya in a few hours…

Now playing in the bunker.

When I saw a TV commercial for the new Long John Silver’s fish taco I thought it was a hard shell with nothing but a LJS breaded filet dropped inside.  And it made me laugh.

Does the existence of a shell instantly transform any food whatsoever into a taco?  Is that the way it works?  If so, maybe Cracker Barrel will start selling beef stew tacos?  And spaghetti tacos for the kiddies?

And if we’re in the mood for something a little more exotic, perhaps we can someday go down to China Palace for a platter of Moo Goo Gai Pan tacos?  And when we’re in West Virginia we can order up a mess o’ fried baloney sandwich tacos to tide us over until supper?

I mean, all you have to do is add a crunchy shell, right?  I think I’ll start carrying around a box of them, for those times when I want to kick off an impromptu Mexican fiesta. While at Waffle House or Dairy Queen, or wherever.

Unfortunately, the so-called fish taco wasn’t exactly as I originally understood it to be.  It’s actually half of a breaded fish filet, shredded lettuce, something semi-spicy called “Baja sauce,” and those little LJS crumbly things (deep-fried grease splatter), all wrapped in a soft tortilla shell.

Not quite as hilarious as I originally thought…  It’s more of a wrap than a taco, really.  How disappointing.

But it certainly is tasty.  In fact, I was taken aback by its tastiness.  The simple ingredients work well together, and there’s all sorts of textures going on, and temperatures, too.  I liked the way the lettuce was super-cold (for some reason), right up against the hot fish filet.

And they didn’t overdo it with the Baja sauce, which I appreciated.  I’m very skeptical of sauces, because they’re almost always overused to the extreme.  I might be in the minority, but I don’t view a sandwich as merely a surface on which to transport mayonnaise.  So, I often scrape 80% of the sauce off my fast food fare, usually with one of those mysterious dagger-like “hard fries.”

Baja sauce is mayonnaise-based, and a little spicy.  The inside of my mouth seemed to get hotter and hotter, for about five minutes after finishing my lunch.  I didn’t notice much heat while eating the things, but there was a delayed time-released reaction.  Nothing too extreme, though.  This is Long John Silver’s, remember.

The tacos weren’t greasy, either.  Eating at LJS usually leaves me feeling like my mouth and throat have been treated with some sort of industrial undercoating, perhaps something used on battleships to keep barnacles from sticking.  And that’s because of the cooking method they use:  real hot grease.  Everything there is prepared via a method known as “real hot grease.”

But my tacos were surprisingly light on the undercoating.  And they were easy to eat, as well.  The ingredients weren’t falling from the tortilla, and I didn’t have sauce dripping off my elbow, etc.

I was prepared to dislike the new Long John Silver’s fish tacos, but was pleasantly surprised.  And at just 99 cents each…  Man, what a deal.  I might have to keep a sack on my car’s console at all times.

The official Surf Report rating:  A-

Further fast food shenanigans

Sunshine has a theory, you see…  She believes that Michael Jackson faked his death to jump-start his album sales again, and also get out of playing all those concerts in London.

I laughed when Toney reported this one to me, but it does seem a little more plausible than most of her crackpot ideas.  I mean, the guy used to dress up like a fundamentalist Muslim woman, and go out to Farmers Markets, and shit.  I think he’d be willing to attempt a fake-death stunt.

Of course, all big-time celebrity deaths have conspiracy theories associated with them.  Everybody’s skeptical of everything, and we’re all too smart to believe the official version of events.  We’re always convinced there’s more to the story, even when there isn’t.  Especially when there isn’t.

But still…  I think I could be talked into this one, without much effort.  What do you think?

Yesterday I was ready to install all five Soviet humbox window air conditioners.  It was more humid than the dark side of a scrotum in this place.

In fact, I told the oldest Secret he’d be helping me drag those bastards up from the basement.  Since he’s, like, six feet tall(!?) now, he can enable my laziness, dammit.  Set aside a couple of hours, I told him, for toting humboxes up several flights of stairs, as well as profanity-laced installation.

But it’s like autumn again.  We have all the windows open, a cool Canadian breeze is blowing through here, and it feels great.  So, to hell with it…  I’m not bringing ’em up until it’s absolutely necessary.

Toney believes we’re going to make it through the entire summer, but I think she might be engaging in a little hopeful estimating.  We’ll see how it goes.

I have five shirts that need to be mailed, and will be making a post office run tomorrow morning.  If you want one super-quick, place your order today and you should have yer swag early next week.

Unless, of course, you’re in Australia or Mississippi, or someplace remote.  I mean, seriously.

Remember a band called Angel City?  They were called the Angels everywhere except the U.S., I believe, and had several rockin’ and fun albums in the late ’70s/early ’80s.  They sounded a little like AC/DC, with an extra helping of punk attitude on the side.

Anyway, I’ve been eyeing this collection for a while.  It looked like a solid anthology, but the price was holding me back.  (What the crap’s a sourcing fee??)  I checked Amazon and eMusic, hoping they might have an affordable download available.  But I came up empty.

And this morning, on a whim, I checked iTunes, and they freaking had it — for $9.99!  I almost dropped a plate.  When it comes to ultra-obscure albums from my questionable past, I don’t usually have much luck with iTunes.

But today I scored, and vintage Angel City is blasting in the bunker as I type.  Oh yeah.

What’s the best way to clean the inside of a microwave?  I’ve heard people say you should cook a bowl of water in there, and it’ll loosen up the gunk.  What works for you?

‘Cause when I opened ours today, to heat up a Marvine Catheter frozen delight, it appeared someone had backed up to it, pulled down their pants, and power-blasted diarrhea straight inside.  What the hell, man??

Me (to the Secrets):  Who did this?!
Them:  Did what?
Me:  Left the microwave this way?
Them:  What’s wrong with it?
Me:  Take a look.  It looks like a hedgehog exploded in there.
Them:  Not us.
Me:  Right.
Them:  What do you mean?

And so it goes…

I posted a special announcement at Mockable today, about our new Twitter page.  I hope you’ll follow our ridiculous antics, and we promise to not get banned for life this time.  At least that’s the goal…

And if you’re not following the Surf Report at Twitter, then why not?  Sheesh.

Have you ever bought anything from those guys who hang out in parking lots, selling stuff from a white van?  It used to be stereo speakers all the time… “Hey man, we’re supposed to make a delivery to a store near here, and the idiots at the warehouse put twenty PAIRS of speakers in the van instead of twenty speakers!  We can let you have a pair for cheap…”

They all have approximately the same rap, which cracks me up.  But have you ever actually purchased anything from those guys?  How’d it turn out for you?  Tell us about it, won’t you?

And what’s the weirdest thing a stranger has offered to sell you on the street?

In Atlanta I was coming home from a bar at 1 am, and some guy emerged from the shadows and offered to sell me a pair of pants:  “C’mon man, they’re real nice.  Still gots the tags on ’em!”

The dude was holding a Macy’s bag, obviously stolen off someone’s back seat, containing an expensive pair of slacks.  I told him I wasn’t currently in the market for pants (pants!?), and he didn’t much care for my answer.  He walked away muttering a lot of words, one of which was “motherfucker.”

Also in Atlanta, a man offered to sell me a box spring outside a movie theater.  No mattress, just the box spring.  WTF?

What about you?  What’s the strangest thing someone has tried to sell you on the street?  Use the comments section below.

And I think I’m going to stop right there.  This one’s all over the map, written in quick bursts over many hours.  But hopefully it’s not too painful.

I might post a special report (very special) over the weekend, but it all depends on whether or not I can get my shit together.  Stay tuned, but don’t get your hopes up.

I’ll see you guys next time.

Have a great weekend!

Now playing in the bunker.

About two weeks ago Toney bought a weird pizza from a weird pizza shop.  It’s not even a real shop, in fact.  As I understand it, it’s actually a high-falutin’ catering service that sells “gourmet” pies to the general public three or four evenings per month.

It’s one of those word-of-mouth “greatest pizza ever” but only for people in the know kinds of situations…

So she bought something called a shrimp scampi pizza (for roughly a million dollars), and it was just about the stankiest thing I’ve ever encountered.  She and the Secrets went to town on that thing, but I couldn’t even be in the same room with it.

Blecch.  It smelled like a panhandler who used to hang around the parking lot of Tortilla’s in Atlanta:  “Give me a dollar and I’ll take my bustling, living crotch and pits all the way over there…”

They gobbled-down most of Satan’s pizza pie, then stuck the remaining third of it in the fridge.  And every time I opened the door on that thing, I was slugged in the gut by the funk again.  My jaw fully-retracted three or four times per day for upwards of a week, which is, I believe, a new non-flu record.

Thankfully the pizza is long-gone by now, but I swear I can still smell it.  Not full-strength, but just a hint, way off in the background.  Ya know?  Toney tells me I’m crazy, but I know what I know.

When we moved to Pennsylvania we must’ve looked at a hundred different houses for sale, and one of them was really nice, but smelled like the owners were boiling a groundhog, or something.

The stank in that place was strange and gamy, and clung to my nose hairs for a week.  And even though we liked the house, it was immediately off our list.  The smell poisoned everything for us.  Even today, almost ten years later, one of us always says, “Remember how that house smelled?” whenever we drive past it.

One of my grandmothers used to live in a house that always smelled musty and old, sorta like gardening mulch.  It was something to do with the house, because when she moved the stink didn’t go with her.  Probably some kind of ancient moisture problem…

And when I was a kid there was a Cuban family in our neighborhood whose house always smelled like food, but not the kind of food I was accustomed to.  Everybody else’s place smelled like pork chops, fried potatoes, and pinto beans.  But at the Cuban house it was something wildly exotic, at least for 1972 West Virginia.  Yeah, who the hell knows?

Do you know anyone who lives in a house or apartment with a distinctive smell?  It doesn’t necessarily have to be a stink (although those are the best stories), just any kind of odor you associate with the place…

Use the comments section to tell us about it, won’t you?

And I’ll be back tomorrow, with a full-length Topic Dump to close out the category.

See ya then!

Now playing in the bunker.

A few days ago I was out running some errands, and Toney called and asked me to pick up some salad makin’s.  So I stopped at a nearby grocery store on my way home, and could barely get into the place because of all the grills and patio furniture out front.

Do people really buy stuff like that at a grocery store?  I’m not talking about a Super Wal-Mart, or a Mega Target, or whatever.  This is just a regular grocery store, that sells regular grocery store stuff — for the most part.

But right now they have three or four different propane grills to choose from, and several large pieces of furniture, etc.  And I just can’t imagine myself ever making the following statement:  “Let’s see, I need to pick up a dozen eggs, some milk, …and heck, since I’m here I might as well buy a dining room table and hutch!”

Ya know?

Our baffroom contractor (the newest member of our family) told me he recently bought a GPS unit from Price Cutter, a grocery store in a neighboring town.  A GPS unit!  He also has an “expensive Garmin,” and guess which one he likes better?  That’s right, the no-name (Sany?) model he purchased alongside carrots, and whatnot.

It’s not something I’ve ever done, or probably will ever do.  The prices can’t be very good, can they?  I mean, seriously.

But what about you?  What’s the most unusual thing you’ve ever purchased from a regular grocery store?  Tell us about it in the comments.

And this one’s incredibly short, for a host of reasons.  Including this.  But I’ll get back to it tomorrow, full-tilt.

See ya then!

Now playing in the bunker.