Posted 6/16/2003 12:06:00 PM by Sid link
Message Of The Day 6/16/2003

Today, via their handy web form for cowards and informers, I sent the Saudi Religious Police the following message:

From: Naif bin Abdul Aziz Al-Saud

City: Riyadh

Email: disapprove@hesbah.com

Sin: Immoral Observations

Greetings to you, revered imams. May the loins of your Filipino slaves glisten hairlessly through the night like the polished knobs in the mansion of Allah, or the gill slits of the Bluefin tuna, Venus of the Ocean. My name is Naif bin Abdul Aziz Al-Saud and I need assistance with my immoral observations. Thank you for providing this service, as heretofore I have been somewhat less than proficient in my practice of them. My romantic abnormality, one shared by all of my house yet hidden from the public, has forced me to share these thoughts only with the objects of my fancy, and they have spurned my questions most rudely. Having no wish to offend the prophet, peace be upon him, I despaired of my sanity until the Djinn known as Google led me to your site.

Tell me, how does one determine the sex of a fish? All I see drive my loins into a frenzy of lust, yet I have no wish to spend my seed in the anal ducts of a female, as that would be displeasing to Allah and disgusting to myself.

I have been to my uncle, King Fahd bin Abdul Aziz, who first taught me of the joys of making my own caviar after learning of this joy from renowned actor Troy McClure, but he has been of little help, as he has become addicted to the joys of the cadiru, and I as yet prefer the honor of insertion to the duties of reception, at least I think that I do. All of my attempts at creating the special love that exists between a man and his mackerel have foundered on the rocks of identification, for I cannot ascertain the difference between the male and the females of the species, Allah not having seen fit to cover the disgusting nakedness of the female mackerel with a piscine burkha.

Please aid me in this soonest, as the fishmonger in Riyadh has closed his shop to me, and I need a date for my families private showing of Finding Nemo.

Yours respectfully,

Prince Naif bin Abdul Aziz Al-Saud

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Posted 6/15/2003 02:48:00 PM by Sid link
Father's Day

My father's day started at quarter of five in the am, three hours after I went to bed, when an exhausted Sainted wife handed me Scotty M, announce that both the milk wells had run dry and stumbled off to sleep in the quest room.

I'm not sure why. It's not as if the bottle of breast milk stored in the refrigerator a story below was going to magically waft its way up the stairs, growing warmer with every foot of elevation gained until it appeared at hand, or ideally at mouth, ready for insertion in to the gaping, howling maw.

Were it possible it would have had no trouble finding us. Helen Keller could have echolocated our position from a mile away, so piercing were his cries. I staggered my way down the stairs to the kitchen, took the bottle out of the fridge, somehow found a nipple for it in the dark, put water in a pan and walked Scotty back and forth while the milk warmed. An age later, it was finally ready, so I betook myself to the Lazy Boy in the den along with the bottle, the baby, the boppy pillow, the pacifier, the extra pacifier, Ngnat's Barbie afghan and the TV remote, and arranged us all therein, having first taped the Spiderman's Wedding cover of an old Marvel Age comic book over the window beside the door where the streetlight shines in at night with the force of ten thousand suns unless it is blocked.

And, once everything was arranged, with baby in left arm on top of boppy pillow, beside TV remote, under the Barbie afghan, pacifiers on afghan and bottle in right hand I looked down to find him sound asleep.

So we dozed until six, when he awoke and received a much colder breast milk breakfast than I'm sure he was expecting. The milk coma after feeding was the same despite the frigidity of the lactose, and so I crept up the stairs to put him back down.

Which was no sooner done that Ngnat awoke, almost 2 hours earlier than is her wont. So down the stairs I went again, with a burden not only much heavier than the first, but one much more limpet like in the quality of its attachment to me.

New child, new nest. Out with the bottle, pacifiers and boppy, in with the apple juice, fruit snacks and sofa pillows. I slept through a Dora and an I Spy and a Childe Harold to the Purple Crayon Came, or something like that. I'm a little bleary on the details.

Eventually it was time for breakfast, which I made, as the lazy slug-a-bed I married was still asleep at the ridiculously late hour of eight in the morning. Nothing to cook with, so first I unloaded the dishwasher, the Dishwasher Fairy having been more or less absent since Scotty M's arrival. The noise keeps her away, I suspect.

It being Father's day, I made Pecan Pisang Goreng, seeing as how that was what I wanted and no one was going to make it for me. It's an Indonesian recipe for banana fritters that I added pecans to, as they had just been laying around taking up space since Christmas, and everything is better with pecans. Southern tradition states this, and I have yet to see it disproved. Possibly sushi might not be improved by the addition of pecans, but I am unconvinced of this.

Father's Day Pecan Pisang Goreng

1 cup all purpose flour
1/4 cup packed brown sugar
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp ground nutmeg
1/4 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp salt
2 eggs
1/2 cup buttermilk. I didn't have buttermilk, so I used half and half. I do this a lot.
2 coarsely mashed bananas
a handful of chopped pecans.

Mix everything up and drop serving spoonfuls into a quarter inch of hot vegetable or canola oil. Try not to get hot oil to splash up in your eyes. It's not blinding, but it saves worrying about whether it's blinding or not. Flip after two minutes, remove from the oil two minutes after that. Dust them with powdered sugar, top them with berries, eat them plain or treat them like pancakes. It's all good.

I eat mine plain. Ngnat eats hers with peanut butter, but only after she is assured that, yes, this is what Dora eats for breakfast every single day. The Sainted Wife partakes of hers with large dollops of resignation, much as she does most of the odd things I cook, in order to provide a good example to her daughter, or to at least avoid being a bad one.

Since it was Father's day, I left her the cleaning up and slept till noon.