Mary Poppins Remix

Just turn up the sound, and enjoy.

Panda Thigh Casserole in Oatmeal Hollandaise Au Poivre

Ever sat behind a competitive eater in the Burger King drive-through line? Who has that kind of time? Not you, not me. We need to cook for ourselves in this busy, rockabilly world.

New recipe. Ever tried Panda? It’s cheap, and Aunt Ramie, she done said they a recession on.

Serves

4 humans, 1 Big Cat or 16 dozen piranha

Preparation time
90 minutes to 50 years, depending upon availability of Sequoia leaves in your area.

Ingredients

Salt
Black pepper
4 D-cell batteries
Garlic powder
Garlic salt
Onion powder
Parsley
Oregano
Basil
Cilantro
Chili powder
Cayenne pepper
Red pepper flakes
Cinnamon
Nutmeg
Cloves
Allspice
Paprika
Ginger
Cumin
Thyme
Rosemary
Dill
Sage
Celery salt
Curry powder
Ketchup
Mustard, yellow or brown
Salsa
Salad dressing
Mayonnaise or Miracle Whip
Butter or margarine
Barbecue sauce
Theater popcorn
Parmesan cheese
Pickle relish
Soy sauce
Steak sauce
Worcester sauce
Tabasco sauce or similar hot sauce
Vinegar
Sequoia leaves
Did I mention pickle relish?
Honey
Sour cream
Sweet and sour sauce
Chocolate syrup and other sundae toppings
Tartar sauce
Cocktail sauce
Creamy horseradish sauce
Oatmeal
Arugula
Panda. If it is alive, stun it with your wit and good looks.

Kitchen Equipment


This recipe calls for a slow cooker. Get your cousin Fred.
Also needed: large pot, bread machine, crockpot, socket set (metric).

Directions



1. Install granite countertops. Won’t improve panda, will impress neighbors.

2. If none is readily available, plant a Sequoia tree. Wait. Then, mash a quart of Sequoia leaves (dried) in a blender (stainless) with a half-cup of olive oil purchased from a virgin. (L.A. cooks – travel to Utah.)


3. Zest a lemon. Set aside. This recipe does not call for zest of lemon.

4. Using only your feet, knead two pounds of dough. Toss it out the window. Nobody wants that now.

5. Down three jager bombs and raise a glass in memory of Ed McMahon.

6. Add something yellow. Not lemon. Anything but lemon.

7. Slice panda thighs in three-quarter-inch thick strips. Get as far as you can without waking panda. For tracking purposes, stamp a UPC code on each slice – makes the line move faster at the post office.

8. Go see a movie. Bring back one cup of theater popcorn. Eat it. This recipe will take a while. I’m only thinking of you, here.

9. Pour in one cup of chicken stock. Dump all your other stocks – they’re worthless.

10. Dare to dream. No, on second thought, despair.

11. Give generously to the Jimmy Fund.

12. Add ten eggs. Subtract two.

13. Add one back. Say “culinary delight“ in James Earl Jones’ voice.

14. Trim your bangs. You’re overdue there, Ringo.

15. Douse panda limbs with olive oil and shake on all spices in an amount you consider indulgent to the point of onerousness. When wrists show symptoms of carpal-tunnel, stop shaking. Heat, turn, heat, turn, feel the burn.

15a. Look up “onerousness.”

16. Carefully drop limbs into a blender and press button marked “Maximum Scoot.” Note: you will hear the sounds “Thwap! Thwap! Ga-zhonga floop floop floop.” This is perfectly normal, unless the blender is not plugged in yet, in which case, see your orthopedist.

17. Get drunk on power, just to see how it sits with you. Sober up, it’s over now.

17a. Ever visited Nova Scotia? Me either. Hear it’s beautiful. And, oh, the people, so accommodating. But salmon. Bleah.

18. Chop and shred your unopened 401(K) statement. Shred your resume too. These are artifacts of days gone by, friend.

19. I said uncooked! Don’t touch that!

20. Reset your clocks. Get a receipt. Elevate your legs to reduce swelling. Place an aspirin under your tongue. Squaredance among standard poodles.

21. Start a cooking show in England. Should it succeed, amp it up for American audiences. Add swearing, yelling, angst, electric guitars and melodramatic gestures.

22. Drop a roasted chicken on the floor in loving memory of Julia Child.

23. Keep calm and carry on. Buy 2 and save $7.50 each. Return one. Profit.

24. Get out of jury duty. Lift your own mood. Wax your legs. Wax mine. Not the left; it’s solid wood. Or is it the right? I can never tell – prosthetics are so advanced these days.

25. Drive to the Slauson cutoff. Cut off your slauson.

26. Order a nice set of maintenance-free teak patio furniture. You’ve earned it. You get what you pay for. Send me a check for the difference.

27. Sing a chorus of “Stand by Me” while seated. Stir.

28. Heat the mixture at 400 degrees for 90 minutes or 900 degrees for 4 minutes, until golden around the edges. Serve with passion. And rice.

Chef’s addendum: If you have no panda, condiments, or spices, it is considered perfectly alright to substitute sliced turkey on rye with mustard.

© 2009 Jeff Sawyer

Tom Waits sings “Waltzing Matilda”

I saw Tom in Ithaca, New York around this time, in an old Vaudeville Theatre.

The marquis read, “Tom Waits, $4.” Unforgettable.

5 Little-known Ologies

Phrenology is the study of the shape and size of the cranium. (My own has been categorized by a panel of university scientists as “anvil.”)

Here are 5 studies you may not be as familiar with.

5. Lollobrigidology – the study of the shape of Italian actress Gina Lollabrigida. (She turned 82 today; proceed at your own risk.)

4. Rushlimbology – the study of melodramatic mispersuasion for profit

3. Ologyologyology – the study of the study of the study

2. Apolology – the study of David Letterman’s correspondence with Sarah Palin

1. Ollieollieinfreeology – the study of kids hiding behind trees in backyards on summer nights
(interesting etymology at wikipedia)

The Sycophant and the Elephant

One day a greasy little man named Silas walked through a Sequoia forest, wearing a faded t-shirt and his least-favorite cargo shorts because the good ones were in the wash. He hobbled along a dirt path, his limp caused not by some tragic birth defect, a bout of fibromyalgia or those ill-fitting cargos but by a tiny toad that had hopped into one of the moccasins beside his bed while he slept the night before. Having fallen asleep, it awoke in the morning finding itself under attack by five stinky piggies.

This man, this character of ours about which both of you now read, was neither miscreant nor delinquent, neither malfeasant nor malefactor nor culprit nor any of the other synonyms for “thug” you might care to look up. He was just a man alone in the woods.

Or so he believed.

Left with the only two character options present in the writer’s cerebellum at this moment – hero or sycophant – Silas was a sycophant. And he paused.

He paused to inhale the perfume of the fresh, verdant forest, some of it just plywood scenery painted Vermont green but as much of it real foliage as the prop budget would permit without getting another chastising call from the tightfisted producers back in Hollywood, those Peter-principled accountants sitting in their big leather wingback chairs inside the bungalow marked “Finance Dept.” on the studio lot, sipping Chai and contributing nothing but angst to the creative process.

A deep breath filled Silas’ remaining lung, the other lung having been spontaneously donated to the YMCA years earlier, where it arrived uninvited in a plain, unrefrigerated cardboard box that was immediately thrown in the dumpster out back with some empty chlorine bottles and a pair of skidmarked swim trunks a kid in the “Advanced Sardine” class had abandoned in his pungent locker.

Silas bent down to examine his left moccasin and sort out why it might have chosen to become a nuisance on this otherwise faultless morning. As he did so, he heard a soughing in the meadow just ahead, where the forest parted and the sun dappled the forest floor like some would-be Renoir on the first day of Introduction to Oil Painting class when the teacher said, “Now daub, everybody daub, daub!”

Soughing, to save us both some time, is a rushing or rustling sound. This particular soughing was of the extra-extra-large variety, or XXL as we say around the haberdashery, as it was caused by an elephant browsing about the clearing, just now pulling a ripe apple off a craggy old tree.

Silas approached cautiously, like you do with elephants if you know what’s good for you.

“Who are you and what might you be doing here?” inquired the elephant, eyeing Silas warily, but not really too warily because he could actually smite the fellow in an instant if he so chose, just FYI.

“I mean you no harm,” said Silas, sensing that, as it had all his life, his slippery countenance was once again belying the fact that he really did mean no harm.

“Appreciated,” said the elephant, “but not an answer to the question.” As it chewed, the beast shifted its weight back and forth between left and right legs like a retail security guard with varicose veins might on the seventh hour of his shift only with a different number of legs. Occasionally its trunk batted at a swarm of black flies hovering above its head, something you hardly ever see a security guard do.

“I am Silas,” Silas replied, “and, by profession, I am a sycophant.”

“Now we’re getting somewhere,” said the elephant. “And that is…?”

“Many make their way in life by overdoing something. Competitive eaters. Reality show producers. Evangelists. I make mine by overpraising others. It is a way of endearing myself to those in power. Some call it fawning. I call it a living.”

“You are a toady, then?”

“I have been called that,” Silas sighed, “but not so flat a toady as the one I just found in my shoe.” He shook out the squashed amphibian and replaced the moc. “I may have a two-digit I.Q., but I have a six-figure income.”

“I find most wallpaper patterns quite busy. Yet I could never compliment someone’s choice of wallpaper,” said the elephant. “I would have to come clean.”

“That is a luxury I do not enjoy. Good thinking on your part though. Smart to be sociable.”

“Was that –?”

“…Yes, I’m afraid it was. I am so sorry.”

“Nah, hit me again,” the creature said.

“Your eyelashes – are they real? Because such magnificent strands as those, I have never seen outside of a Las Vegas showroom. Surely they cannot be original equipment.”

The elephant laughed, giving out a soft, vague trumpet like a retired jazzman attempting a comeback despite emphysema. It did indeed possess fine eyelashes, half a yard in length and black as night. When it blinked, their flutter caused the leaves of nearby maples to dance in the breeze. Though as a male it was unconcerned with such affectations.

“I imagine you also have lightning-fast computation skills,” Silas added.

“Okay. You got me. Stop,” the elephant responded. “You’re promoted. I could use some company. Climb up on my back and we’ll explore the forest together. Let’s get out of this hot sun.”

Silas clambored up the old apple tree, the elephant moved in close, and the little man was aboard. Together, sycophant and elephant left the clearing on a new forest path, which took them into deep woods beneath a towering canopy of Sequoias.

“This is splendid! And you – you are magnificent, and hardly even smell!” Silas exclaimed with a wide smile.

“I am thirsty,” the elephant replied, skeptically weighing the compliment given the profession of the man who had delivered it. He lumbered on with his new passenger, past crumbling stone boundary markers of long-extinct farmsteads, acres of low ferns and charred campfire sites.

“I can see a river ahead,” Silas said after a time, “if you would care to stop for a drink. I imagine such a majestic trunk could drink it dry.”

Before long they arrived above the the river’s edge, resting atop a steep bank that dropped precipitously to the water. The river was wide, as wide as any mother-in-law, and swifter. Raising its voice to be heard above the rushing current, the elephant suggested to Silas that they look for a safer spot further down the path, where the entry might be less treacherous.

“No river on earth could imperil such a great creature as you, I am sure,” Silas said, “no ocean, no tidal wave, no tsunami, no –”

“Alright! But it was your idea” the elephant interrupted. Gingerly, it stepped off the edge of the bank with one front foot, then the other, and down the slope it went, gaining speed until it could not stop and hit the water with such force that it created a splash even greater than that of the first iPhone.

The elephant looked back to find that the little man had been thrown off him into the current, which now carried him downstream, out of reach, his arms flailing. Silas was swept around the bend in the river, faded out of sight and was ever seen nor heard from again, not even on Nick at Nite.

The elephant, being of formidable strength and great mass, was able to cross the river and walk up the bank on the other side, where he found a bounty of sweet grasses and flowers to munch, and lives quietly to this day.

The Top 10 morals of this story are these:

10. Sycophants who praise should leave elephants to graze

9. Compliment the big guy long enough and eventually you may go along for the ride

8. Ignore the elephant in the room, it will lead to no good

7. Change your car’s oil every 5,000 miles as described in the owner’s manual

6. Never fall asleep inside a moccasin

5. Should you ever find yourself in a fable, listen to the elephant

4. Visit Nantucket after Labor day when the crowds are gone and the rates are lower

3. Don’t sweat gay marriage when global warming is cooking the planet

2. Sycophant and elephant end may both in phant, but that’s no reason to unite them in a story

1. Tis better to be thirsty and alive than drowning in compliments 


© 2009 Jeff Sawyer

Izzy Eats

Izzy contemplates spring

My name is Izzy,
I’m the world’s largest cat
I called the Guinness folks and said,
“Can you prove that?”

They said,
“There’s one bigger,
We know ’cause we weighed him”

So I went right over
that day
And I ate him.

Life, Death and the Infomercial

First, we need to consider the self-described “big guy.” What he is saying is that he has put so much food into himself, he can no longer scrape all of it out. Herman, there are times in life when God sends you a sign, and this is one of those times.

Have a salad. And another. Have a thousand salads. You’ll be able to reach yourself again. Weebles wobble, and they do fall down.

Alert viewers will notice that at the line “Maintain your dignity,” the until-then-only-moderately annoying older woman suddenly affects the accent of Mrs. Thurston Howell the IIIrd had she been raised in Trenton.

Whatever dignity this actress had hoped for in life and career has certainly evacuated with her last bowel movement – which, from the looks of her expression, was back when GM shares were selling at over a hundred.

As for “the first improvement in toilet paper as we know it since the 1880s” itself, here’s how I see this little adult toilet training episode playing out.

After a long day at work, you arrive home to find a brown package on the front porch. You vaguely recall ordering something. Hmm, smells clean enough.

Growing excited, you open it, praying that the small prize within can somehow stir your soul sufficiently to give you the strength to endure another workday of abuse and despair.

An hour later, you’re deploying the Comfort Wipe for the first time down in Area 51.

But you’re an amateur. And it slips. And now, you can only see half of it – while, as physicians would describe it, you suddenly experience an “uncomfortable, full feeling.”

Darn the luck: you had the Salsa Grandé appetizer at TGI Friday’s for lunch, with optional jalapeno accessories. You’re now packing a load with the approximate viscosity of 10W-30.

Withdrawing the errant wand requires two hands, and you hear a great sucking sound, and sure enough, you splatter a Jackson Pollock that’s going to give the Clorox the fight of its life.

No delicate way to say it: you got some on you.

Desperate for an exit, you reach for the bonus “Get a Grip” you mounted nearby on the bathtub. But your hand is muddy now, and just as you pull your full weight up onto the thing, you slip on some Pollock, hit your head, and lose consciousness on the tile floor.

And that is where they find you three weeks later, when police break in after neighbors report newspapers piling up on the front porch.

They do not notice the small brown box sitting off to the side of the porch. It arrived just the other day, carrying an As Seen On TV miracle solution created to improve your life in ways you never even dreamed of.

Too bad. This one might have done it.

© 2009 Jeff Sawyer

Thanks to Mark in MA for sending along the most startling infomercial we have ever seen.

Sandra Bernhard Lapse May Create Celebrity Vacancy

Better Times

Hollywood, CA – The continued absence of comedian Sandra Bernhard from the public eye may soon create an opening for a new celebrity.

Entertainment officials explained today the American public is able to hold precisely 9,542 celebrities in its collective consciousness, including models, actors, musicians, politicians, authors, athletes, competitive eaters and Ross Perot.

Beyond that number, there is no recollective capacity with which to bestow fame upon any other individuals. Thus a celebrity must pass away or fade back into obscurity before a new individual can become famous.

Bernhard, once in great demand on the talk-show and nightclub circuits, has not been seen in national media for some time, and is rapidly fading from the American zeitgeist.

The candidate most likely to replace her appears to be Jimmy Fretzy, an aspiring, 22-year old actor in Turners Falls, Massachusetts, who has been looking for a break for some time.

Top 10 Questions that have Never Been Asked

10. “So, what brings you to our maximum security prison?”

9. “And is there a Mr. Butterworth?”

8. “May I please see your passport, your Uncle Terence and your liver?”

7. “Was there ever a better-built car than the Chrysler LeBaron?“

6. “Was that really a love tap, dearest, because to me it felt more like a punch in the head?”

5. “Doesn’t Joan Rivers’ face look natural?”

4. “Shouldn’t there be paid subscriptions for SawyerSpeaks?”

3. “When are they coming out with ‘Heaven’s Gate II’?”

2. “Can you believe I completely forgot my parachute?”

1. “Can someone please explain number 3 to me, the Heaven’s Gate thing?”

Executive Suite: where the Elite Tweets Meet

Mgmt: Welcome to the new Twitter home of International Sock Brands. Our mission is to pre-expect the sock fashions of tomorrow, today!

AbbeyM: I need some socks

Mgmt: The balloon over our head says a fabulous new hosiery fashion moment is about to bubble up!

AbbeyM: Where are the damn socks. “About Us” my butt

Mgmt: We’ve undertaken this journey to dialog with brand friends everywhere.

MarciaW: I can’t find one sock in my size. How can you not have medium?

AbbeyM: Brown. Socks.

Mgmt: We see renewed synergy here, and look forward to this opportunity to interact with you as part of our social commerce initiative!

AbbeyM: Women’s.

AbbeyM: Large.

FredC: Do you sell sweaters?

Mgmt: Feel free to get in touch any time with a “tweet.” We promise to –

AbbeyM: Do you accept Amex?

FredC: Golf sweaters? Beige? Where do I click eh? My kid just made first clarinet in the school band.

AbbeyM: Alright, FredC! You got to be proud there.

Mgmt: – waterfall your comments from top to bottom here at corporate headquarters in Binghamton, and get your thoughts into the right hands. Because we –

JimmyTunesComingAtYa: Why do socks have to match? Anybody?

AbbyM: Need 100% cotton. That equals pure cotton, if you don’t know.

BeBe: I played clarinet for a while in my high school band. I sucked. But you need stuff like that to get into college.

JimmyTunesComingAtYa: We could wear complimentary sock colors, like blue and green, or black and white.

AbbeyM: You’re onto somethin there

PharamSava: Get Viagrra, Levitra, Cialas, $$$s less here – no doctor needed!!!!!

Mgmt: – care.