Budae Jigae is a delicious if strange Korean soup that comes from a mid-20th century practice of combining surplus foods at army posts with traditional Korean foods to make a meal. There’s a good recipe for it here, which can be adjusted to make it vegetarian, halal, or whatever you want (although part of me wonders what it would taste like with spam). Anyway, I’m going to just create rudimentary posts on Wednesdays of things that don’t fit anywhere on there own and aren’t worth a full post. Thus is born the Wednesday Budae Jigae.
-I’m not offended by ‘Jesus and Mo’ because it insults Islam both directly and through representations of two Islamic messengers as gay lovers. I’m offended by it because it has the subtlety of a kick in the balls and it’s just not funny.
-Random memory- I was sitting at a McDonald’s in Rome, with my friends E and R. We were there because R is a wimp when it comes to food and cannot eat anything interesting whatsoever, so I was sipping a Soda waiting til later to hit up an Italian food stand or cafe. I didn’t come halfway across the fucking world to eat McDonald’s, but I’m an accommodating guy. For some bizarre reason there was a TV in there playing old Warner Bros cartoons from the 50s/60s, in English. One of them showed a cartoon where two animals were in court before Porky the pig, with a sign up that said “court of inhuman relations”. E suggested that this would be a great name for a metal band, so we started coming up with the details of starting such a band when we got back to the states. We were going to play power metal in black judicial robes and animal masks. Every show was going to open with us going onstage, banging a huge gavel against the stage, and announcing “The court of Inhuman Relations sentences you…to rock!” and opening with a cover of Immortal’s “Tyrants”. We all split up not too long after though, and ended up coming back to the US at different times, getting wrapped up in our own shit (me becoming a Muslim, E becoming a serious experimental musician and Bah’ai poet, and R just kinda being R), and the project never materialized. THANK GOD.
- As I understand it, Clinton and Obama are still undecided. If it’s Clinton v McCain this year, which looks highly possible, I have no idea who to go for. Both are abhorrent and, frankly, we’ll never have room to criticize any other country’s dynastic process again if we have Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton as the sequence in our history books. Lieberman standing behind the Republicans is no big shock; why Al Gore picked a guy more right wing than many GOPsters in 2000 for a running mate, I have no idea. Hey, look, now Al Gore cares about the environment, an issue he actively avoided when he could have been in a position to do something! Way to go Al. Gah, the demos suck.
-Leena hipped me to the Muslim Heretics Conference. Good? Bad? I don’t know, but it looks interesting. And I would be willing to bet that, all heretic-ness (is that a word? it is now) aside, that it will be less of a hook-up spot than ISNA’s annual shindig.
-You are probably already aware of G Willow Wilson, who is considerable better known and more prolific than me. What you may or may not be aware of is that her graphic novel, Cairo, is awesome and gets my full comic-nerd recommendation. If you’re going to buy one work of sequential story art this month, that’s where I’d put my money. If you’re buying two, then I’d also check out Brian K. Vaughn, either Ex Machina or Y: The Last Man, both brilliant multi-layered stories, but Cairo stands alone which means you won’t have to buy 10 books for the story.
-Attached to my hotmail account today, I saw an article on when a woman should and should not tell a man she loves him. Do we have to turn everything into one giant production these days or can we just agree that the best time to tell someone you love them was when you feel they should know?
-Oh, and happy year of the rat. Man, just when I was getting used to signing my checks “year of the pig”.
That’s it for today. Check y’all later.
