The People's Blog

The Internet Gods have smiled on me and I've been able to read Lileks for the past few weeks again. For some reason, whenever I tried to pop over to his site I would get that error code. You know the one.

Anyway, I copy for you this excerpt:

Tonight we had chicken. Free-range, antibiotic free, low-stress, non GMO-grain-fed chicken. It was horrible. It was like eating chicken-flavored Silly Putty. I blame the marinade. But of course I always do; that's my easy out. What, Iran has nukes? J'accuse le marinade! Gnat ate all her chicken, and inquired: "what's for dessert, father?"; (I love that. Sometimes she calls me "Papa,"; which makes me feel like Kindly Gepetto; when she calls me "Father"; I feel like a Victorian patriarch.)

"Kosher Ice Cream,"; I said.

"Kosha izescheme?";

"Yes."; It was left over from the quasi-kosher meal I made for Medved et al a few weeks ago. I completely forgot about dessert. Since you don't mix milk and meat, and since I was serving meat, I got some kosher frozen dessert. Chocolate fudge / vanilla. Not bad at all. It was soy-based, of course. Just like the soy-based vodka I had the other day: different, and not entirely bad at all. But I have an image of this conveyor belt heaped with soybeans heading into an Archer-Daniels Midland plant; on the other side of the building are various nozzles marked VODKA and ICE CREAM and ERSATZ BURGER PATTIES, and the goop plops out into trucks that take the stuff away to the post-production facilities. At this point they could market the stuff with the people suffix - People'sCream. People'sVokda. People'sBurgers. And the ads could have a Heston impersonator complete with kerchief: People's Cream is made out of Soy!

My junior year in high school I had a group of friends that liked to joke about being part of the "People's Party". Each of my friends had titles that they came up with on a camping trip. Ben, who was the only one who brought a razor to shave with, was the People's Purveyor of Shaving Goods. Ryan, I believe, was the People's Purveyor of Pharmaceutical Goods for bringing a different kind of tobacco. Emma, Ryan's lady at the time, was called the People's Mattress. On the other hand, maybe it was Nicole. The gist was that people liked to lay on her if you know what I mean. I was given the name the People's Woman. My job was to "sit and be pretty. "Pretty chauvinistic, but it was all in good fun.