Shower!, originally uploaded by brendan2026.

I like this is back

Great tune, pretty, and funny, and probably doesn't mean anything to any of you guys! Rob, Alan, and Bridget I think will get it. But it's kind of like my life these days, it's all Sadie Pepper and Street Fighter.

Well written.

Dont forget the Funnies

October 6 2009, originally uploaded by brendan2026.

Make sure to catch all the fun nearly every day at www.calendarfunnies.com!

Cute Times

"here, has a candy"



"now you has a candy"

Toastmasters Speech #3: Get to the Point

I am delivering this speech tomorrow at our Toastmasters International meeting at work. Now, I consider myself to be more a writer than a speaker, so I'm pretty sure it will come out bumbling and the jokes will fall flat. But, I think it looks nice in writing:

It’s: Pizza

Good afternoon, fellow Toastmasters. Today I’m going to discuss a subject that I’m sure each and every one of us, minus the lactose intolerant, is reasonably passionate about: PIZZA. Is there a more perfect food? Pizza can be the most delicious when at its simplest, but has the potential for more variation than any other dish in all of cuisine throughout history and time.

In an extremely informal and inaccurate poll I conducted this morning, pizza was named as the planet’s favorite food (95% margin of error).

I’d like to briefly discuss the history of pizza. We all know that pizza is of Italian origin, but it has roots in Greek and Roman culture. Well, I suppose Romans are basically just fancy Italians, but you know what I mean. The Greeks covered their breads in oil, herbs and cheese. The Romans made a dish called placenta (gross!) that was layers of dough mixed with honey and ricotta cheese. Modern pizza originated as the Neopolitan pie in Italy, which was dough and red sauce. On April 4, 1889, at 2:14 pm, a man named Fiorello added cheese to a Neopolitan pie, and the angels sang.

I encountered an anecdote while backpacking through the hills of Tuscany—it is said that King Ferdinand the First disguised himself as a commoner, and in clandestine fashion, visited a poor neighborhood in Naples. Among other adventures, he had a great desire to sink his teeth into a dish that the queen had banned at royal court—PIZZA!

Now, to modern times. Growing up during the height of the corporate pizza wars of the 1980s, I associated pizza with Pizza Hut, Dominos, and Little Caesar’s (which had the benefit of being TWO pizzas). To me, that stuff was just the best. Children all throughout the 80s clamored for Friday night pizza deliveries, pizza parties, pool parties with pizza, birthday parties with pizza, pizza day at school, etc. It wasn’t until much later that I discovered what heathen, inedible garbage all that consumerist swill was. I began eating pizza from small, non-chain pizzerias, like Margherita’s Pizza on Main St. in Newark DE. I vowed to never eat corporate pizza again, unless it was free.

I became a pizza enthusiast. What is cool about being a pizza enthusiast is that it doesn’t really have the connotations that say a wine or a cheese enthusiast have, which are, a snob. Pizza is the food of the common man, and we gladly eat it as we spit in the face of the bourgeoisie with their caviars and their truffles.

Now, I had it in my head that we do pizza the best in the U.S. Sure, Italy created pizza, but we popularized it, right? Therefore it is the best? Well, when I traveled to Italy in 2000, I had a bit of a revelation. Italians still make the best pizza. They have pizza laws, man! Codes and standards for pizza! It sounds funny, but it is not a joke. I’m sure there is an Italian concern lobbying for ASTM to publish its own pizza specifications, guides, and test methods. According to the Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana, specific tomatoes and cheese must be used: San Marzano tomatoes and cheese made from the milk of water buffalo raised in the marshlands of Campania and Lazio. To cook, I quote:

The genuine Neapolitan pizza dough consists of Italian wheat flour (type 0 or 00, or a mixture of both), natural Neapolitan yeast or brewer's yeast, salt and water. For proper results, strong flour with high protein content (as used for bread-making rather than cakes) must be used. The dough must be kneaded by hand or with a low-speed mixer. After the rising process, the dough must be formed by hand without the help of a rolling pin or other mechanical device, and may be no more than 3 mm (¹⁄₈ in) thick. The pizza must be baked for 60–90 seconds in a 485 °C (905 °F) stone oven with an oak-wood fire.

As you can see, they are real serious about their pizza. There are fewer rules when it comes to another popular pizza style, Lazio, in which the pizza is baked in large flat pans and sold by weight. This is called pizza rustica or pizza al taglio. Usually the vendors cut the pie with scissors. This is the stuff I ate non-stop when I was in Rome, and each time my pizza world was rocked.

I came back from this trip and got a college job at Iron Hill Brewery, where I eventually became a pizza cook. If I could make serious money making pizzas, I’d be out of this place (ASTM) in an instant. Making pizza was the most rewarding and fun job I’ve ever had. I did it all—morning shifts, I would make the dough for the next day and a half, prepare all the toppings, come up with pizza specials, and flip pies for the lunch crowd. The night shift consisted of flipping pies all night long.

Like any art form, pizza chefery has its true artists and its hacks. I was certainly the most talented pizzaman at the Newark Iron Hill, and I patented my own pizza style to distinguish myself from the other pizza cooks, who were all, with the exception of Donovan, hacks. The style is called Total Hotness, and it consists of just a few rules: pizza ALWAYS served hot; not too much cheese; pizza shape: always round; and not too much flour on the bottom crust. This style was mostly just a reaction to the awful techniques of some of my colleagues.

The nice thing about working at Iron Hill is that you can see the cooks, particularly at the pizza station. I felt like I was the center of everyone’s attention in the restaurant. Of course, I was not, not by a long shot. Usually people were looking at their food, or their dining partners.

But every once in a while, the magic of pizza would entice a pretty lady to approach me and chat as I was flipping pies. She’d say, "my, those pizzas look delicious," and I’d say, "I know, I made them," and in those moments, I knew that magic was real.

Also, lots of just average-looking ladies would approach me, too.

Bonus story: Pizza in Scotland (if there is time).

Baby video

Still got it

Hire me to write your claptrap:

Week 5 Film Log

Michael Taussig’s enigmatic essay “Mimesis and Alterity” deals with the causal relationship that exists between percept and subjective consciousness—the viewer and the viewed. This relationship that is so fundamental to our interaction with the world is rife with mystery, and hence contains fertile ground for both scientific and artistic exploration and interpretation. Julio Medem’s film Vacas is an excellent vehicle to explore these ideas.

Specifically I would like to discuss Taussig’s concept of the fetish quality, the “animism and spiritual glow of commodities,” as it relates to the film. Manuel Iriguíbel, who later becomes the grandfather, escapes naked from a cart of corpses as he flees war. As he looks up after plunging from the cart, he sees a cow staring down at him. In his heightened life-or-death emotional state, the image of the cow is seared into his mind, both conscious and unconscious. The cow becomes his fetish object, through which he sees and interprets the world. The grandfather’s paintings of cows are an example of how the optical unconscious works on him to relive the “profane illumination” that is a result of the mysterious relationship between him and cows, and the mimesis involved therein, the “visceral quality of the percept uniting viewer with the viewed.”

This visceral quality of vision, meaning the actual physical connections inside of our bodies and organs, is exemplified during times of transition in the film. The grandfather looks into a cow’s eye, which becomes a tunnel to a different time or place. The grandfather’s world is one in which he constantly relives the most significant moment of his life, escaping war and death, through his relationship with his fetish object, cows; more specifically, the act of seeing cows.