1001 Uses Around Home, Boat, or Office

“What’s for dinner, Auntie?”

“Cold slurry!”

“Yay! Our happiness is complete!”

Spinster HQ is pleased to share with you our recipe for summer nutrients. Is there anything this slurry can’t do?

• Pour it in a glass for the best homemade V-8 juice ever.
• Salad dressing.
• Add (quite a lot of) vodka and a lime squeeze for bloody Marys, or tequila and a lime squeeze for Sandanistas.
• Pico de gallo (salsa picada): instead of blending the vegetables, substitute cilantro for parsley, leave out the vinegar, and chop’em up rough.
• Gazpacho: instead of liquefying, coarsely chop everything in a food processor, add a swig of olive oil, and eat very cold with garlic croutons.
• Leave out the cuke and vinegar, warm the slurry gently, reduce it a bit, stir in a little heavy cream, saute a few shrimp or chunks of eggplant in olive oil, and pour over conchigliette.
• For tomato-basil “bisque” add fresh basil, let it whirl around in the VitaMix for several minutes until warm, ladle it out, and dollopize with crème fraîche.
• Or just serve it cold in chilled bowls, olive oil drizzle optional.

Before

After

Ingredients

2 racquetball-sized tomatoes (left whole if liquefying for “bisque” or smoothie, otherwise, seeded and diced)
1/2 cucumber, peeled & seeded
handful bell pepper (red and/or green), roughly chopped
chile (fresno, jalapeño, etc) to taste
orange slice, 1″ thick
small handful flat-leaf parsley
1 large ring of raw onion
1 clove garlic
1 tsp blood orange and/or red wine vinegar (omit if adding cream)
1/4 cup orange juice or water
salt
pepper

Instructions

Buy a blender. Put everything in this blender. Blend until solids become liquid. Refrigerate 2 hours. Flavor improves overnight. Makes about 1 1/2 – 2 cups.

Related posts:

1. Twisty’s Kondiment Korner
2. Me And My Clams
3. Because you can’t blame on an empty stomach

– Slouching in the lime green recliner, watching “Snapped!” and the Cooking Channel, eating sour cream and onion potato chips and stewing about how fucked up it is to have a bum knee: these activities will become the Useful Toil she’ll not let Ambition mock.

– She will read cookbooks, yearning for the day she can stand up long enough to cook something besides peanut butter toast.

– Out of desperate ennui, she’ll start adding plugins and widgets to the sidebar of her patriarchy-blaming blog.

A neurotic behavior, the plugin-uploading nearly always obtains an imperfect, or crappy, result. The veteran blamer will have lost count of the number of times my brilliant upgrades have broken the blog. But this time it’s a plugin that fixes it so that comment excerpts appear right there on the front page. How can this can fail to delight? What possible outcome except that it will spur commenters to begin their posts with zippy opening lines rather than with dilute drabbulations involving the first person singular? This improvement should not only entice the non-comment-reader to check out your shit, it will also elevate the human species as a whole.

You need not point out that, in order for comments — zippy in nature or otherwise — to get written, it is traditional for the blogger to first post a post. I’m way ahead of you.

I give you a recipe for French lentils that I stole from Food Channel personality Ina Garten’s book How Easy Is That. The book title is dumb, but the lentils are vegan and real effin delicious, and you can take that to the bank because I am an award-nominated lentiloisseur of the first water.

Unfortunately I don’t have a photo of the lentils, but here is a picture of the peanut butter toast I had for breakfast instead, which, I can say without fear of contradiction, is extremely riveting.

Anyway, for the lentils you need:

1 onion, whole
1 turnip, quartered
2 cloves
1 leek, chopped up (white part only)
2 carrots, chopped up (orange part only)
garlic
1 cup green French lentils
olive oil
red wine vinegar
Dijon mustard
Salt-N-Pepa
salt and pepper

You stick an onion with a couple of cloves (Ina says 6 cloves, but that’s just too damn many cloves) and throw it into a pot with your lentils and turnip chunks. Cover with filtered water. Simmer til done.

Meanwhile, jump the leeks, carrots, and garlic, in olive oil, in a different pan.

Meanwhile, make a mustard vinaigrette with pretty good olive oil and red wine vinegar. Drain the lentils, throw the clovey onion and turnip on the compost pile, add the leeks et al, and mix in the vinaigrette. Ina puts a pat of butter in there, too, but TV cooks are contractually obligated to put too much butter on stuff. Dazed by a romantic nostalgia for the Paris bistro where she wolfs down this dish with her beloved Nigel, Ina also lets the lentils cool to lukewarm before serving, but I was all like, “Phil! Are you mad? Stick these cold-ass lentils back in the microwave!”

It’s true that the flavors improve when the dish sits for a while, though. Ooo baybah baaay-bah, bah baybah baaay-bah.

Related posts:

1. Spaghetti Jilroy
2. Twisty Celebrates the Conclave!
3. Don’t Worry, Here’s The Curry

UPDATE: Thanks to everyone who sent in screen shots. They have all been most helpful, and you screen-shooters are A-Number 1 Blamers 4ever! You can stop sending them now. Thanks again.

Rootlesscosmo recently posted a recipe for butternut squash with a sweet’n’sour raisin-y, pine nutty wine/balsamic reduction (here), and I was all hot to make it, but dang! The squash in my crisper turned out to be a spaghetti instead of a butternut. Still, I soldiered on, and it was darn scrumptious. Not least because spaghetti squash is the most hilarious of all the edible squashes. As you know, hilarity is a dish best served with sweet & sour sauce.

Note: not wishing to imperil certain delicate balances in my stomach lining, I increased the wine in rootlesscosmo’s recipe, and decreased the vinegar, by half.

But this isn’t strictly a what-I-had-for-dinner post. As you may know, it’s Blog Software Upgrade Week here at I Blame the Patriarchy, and as usual, I’m in way over my head. Harken unto my desperate cry: take pity on me, O thou blamers who know how to do shit, and email me screen shots of 1) a post headline, and 2) a comments page in 1) Firefox 2) Safari 3) boutique browser of your choice. My eternagratitude will be yours.

Also, if you know from CSS, or whatever it is, how the hell to do I get the nested comments to indent more, or have boxes around them, or be numbered, or something?

I would ask my real-life friends to help me, but none of them reads the blog. I’m too much of a downer, apparently.

Speaking of real life and downers, one of my aged relatives just called to complain to me about this situation, displayed on the front page of this morning’s Dallas Morning News: Wrongfully convicted rapist gets exonerated after a 12-year hitch, and the Great State of Texas reimburses him $600,000. But along comes the IRS with jaws that bite and claws that catch, claiming non-rapist owes a third of the dough to the federal government.

Along with a sympathetic pang for the dude unjustly accused of rape, my relative harbors an abiding antipathy toward the IRS.

“Bastards!” says the aged relative, getting pretty fired up.

“Now see here,” I say, “you’d better give me the keys to the Cessna.”

No doubt the IRS are bastards, but one can’t help but note that there is no commensurate front-page public outpouring of outrage on behalf of the rape victims whose rapists are never convicted at all. Nobody’s payin’ them 50 grand a year for pain and suffering. No newspapers are running front-page articles spotlighting the government’s failure to render justice on their behalf. And for sure no relatives are callin’ me up to complain that the rape conviction rate in the UK is only 6%.

Wrongful conviction for rape strikes quite the chord of intense indignation. So melodious is this chord to the ears of patriarchy enthusiasts that there still rages, in 2010, a huge debate over whether a rape victim may be held responsible for her own rape.

!

Related posts:

1. Spaghetti Jilroy
2. Spinster aunt posts place-holder
3. Spinster aunt still AWOL

Meanwhile, the damnedest thing happened. After wacking out on my nutty health kick dealio for weeks and weeks, a sudden craving for canned baked beans besieged me. Behold my hideous dinner, which I ate even after reading the label: “brown sugar” was the first ingredient after “beans.” “Sugar” was the first ingredient after “brown sugar.” Ay yi yi!

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A couple of months ago I had a near-death experience.

Oh no, an autobiographical interlude! If I were some science blogger I’d probably say, “Hey, get your own fucking blog for that crap!”

But you know how it is. Everythang I do gon be funky from now on, etc.

The near-death experience was a 24-hour interlude wherein lab tests performed by a local branch of the Cancer Industrial Complex made it seem likely that my cancer had returned. Well, lemme tell you, I had about 47 kittens. When the interlude was over, and it turned out I was still what they call “cured,” I spent an hour in the can doing what you do when you have just found out you’re not going to die after all (at least not right away).

When that was over, I said, “That’s it!”

And I meant it, by gum.

Whereupon I quit pussyfooting around. First to go were the three or four cigarettes I was letting myself smoke every day after fifteen years of botched attempts at quitting, which botched attempts included hypnosis, Wellbutrin, 637 boxes of Nicoderm, chemotherapy, and three complete rounds of Chantix, the pill that makes you sui/homicidal. Who was I kidding? I had fucking cancer. I can’t smoke.

So I went back on the patch for a month and just fucking did it. Blam. The end. It turns out it is not possible to quit smoking unless you have recently been under the impression that you’re about to croak of a hideous disease but somehow you oiled out of it at the last minute.

Next, I removed from my nightstand drawer the embarrassing 471-pound bag of peanut M&Ms. Not only are M&Ms fundamentally gross, they have those creepy TV commercials where the talking M&Ms are delighted to go to their deaths as cheap human snacks.

I also removed from my freezer the embarrassing 471-pound bag of tater tots. Processed frozen fried reconstituted potato nuggets! What am I, twelve?

I hauled out of storage my old elliptical machine, therabands, balance ball, heart monitor, yoga mat, and dumbbells, and began sweatin’ to the oldies.

Next, I invented Aunt Food. Aunt Food is an organic whole wheat tortilla smeared with avocado and topped with grated carrot, grated zucchini, diced red bell pepper, steamed corn, a few sunflower seeds, cilantro, and pico de gallo. It is washed down with an ice-cold half-gallon of Liquid Sanctimony.

The result? I am now a superfatted bore with huge guns and gas bloat!

Because of its beauty and whimsical health claims (it can make you invisible), everyone’s been begging me for the recipe for Liquid Sanctimony.

Liquid Sanctimony

2 giant kale leaves
2 giant chard leaves
handful dandelion greens
fistful spinach
handful parsley
handful wheatgrass
handful broccoli florets
1/16th of a red cabbage
2 celery stalks, with leaves
1/3 cucumber
1 carrot
1/2 avocado
1/4 lemon (with rind)
1 tomato
2 of those little tangerines that come in plastic net bags
1 banana
1 apple
1″ pineapple ring
1″ ginger
handful blueberries (fresh or frozen)
handful strawberries (fresh or frozen)
handful raw cacao nibs
handful dried goji berries (Navitas brand is somewhat edible)
handful sesame seeds
handful sunflower seeds
handful almonds
handful flax seeds
1 tablespoon coconut butter
1 tablespoon bee pollen
1 maraschino cherry (optional)
1 miniature paper umbrella

Put the greens in a VitaMix with 2 cups of water.
Don goggles and protective noise-blocking earmuffs.
Set VitaMix on “stun.”
Activate.
Whirl 17.4 seconds.
De-activate Vitamix.
Wipe off goggles, kitchen cabinets.
Add remaining ingredients (except cherry, umbrella).
Re-activate Vitamix.
Whirl 28 seconds.
De-activate VitaMix.
Inspect resultant sludge with critical eye.
Dilute with water or ice to desired viscosity and re-whirl.
Serve with cherry, umbrella

Makes about 2 quarts. Drink the whole thing. Repeat daily for 2 weeks. Prance around town glowing with vitality and smug superiority.

Note 1: For maximum sanctimony, use only organic fair trade ingredients grown by weathered-looking folk living simple lives.

Note 2: Do not attempt with a lesser blender. The machine should be capable of generating a wormhole, lest the beverage come out all gritty and lumpy and insufficiently liquefied, which would impair both digestibility and your sense of sanctimony.

Note 3: if you use Liquid Sanctimony to detox after coming off a hardcore tater tots/cigarettes/peanut M&Ms habit, steel yourself for interesting gastric events.

Related posts:

1. All-Purpose Vegetable Slurry Korner.
2. The Social Whirl
3. Halibut à la Chicken-Burger

I know a couple of turkeys personally. They bear no resemblance to the poor mutant albino carcasses commonly referred to as “turkey” by urban consumers. Why does everybody act like the world will come to a fucking end if they don’t roast one of those things? Who actually even likes eating that shit? This senseless clinging to violent tradition. I ask you.

Meanwhile, Franny got spayed two days ago, and is pitiful. She has already chewed through 2 e-collars. Against all odds, she hasn’t blown out any sutures yet.

In other news, it will amuse the Blametariat to hear that my debit card got hacked by some asshole perv who used it to open not one, not two, but three Internet porn accounts. As anyone who has endured this indignity knows, the aftermath is bloody. For the next three days — not counting the superfatted “Turkey Day,” since nobody answers Internet porn phones when there is excessive gorging to be done — I will be on perma-hold with endless automated customer “service” systems in a maddening attempt to rectify this way-bogus turn of events. I spoke to one human porn site guy who told me I was “paranoid” in thinking some total stranger had nicked my card number. He was positive that if I double-checked the house I would certainly find some pornsick husbands or sons slavering away in the dark.

I’d like to tie that asshole perv’s nuts in a bow.

Related posts:

1. Another Triumph For American Banality
2. Spinster Aunt Hiatus Diaries: I’m surrounded by invisible turkeys
3. Open Letter To People Who Make Sandwiches In Restaurants

Attic black figure wine stompers, ca. 600 BCE

My sidekick Stingray is a professional wino. She can tell you the names of about 87 different species of fungus that grow on grapes. She speaks reverently of the Moldavian terroir. She goes around telling people what wine to drink with their fire-roasted frisée frittatas.

Lately she’s been on this kick where she quits her job, shoves a few necessaries into a bumbag, and biffs off to some distant vineyard or other to toil in a cellar for months on end. I’m not sure what, exactly, this cellar work entails, but I get the impression that it more or less involves attaching lots of hoses to lots of tanks for about 12 hours a day in an ultra-misogynist environment for next to no pay. Stingray stresses that it absolutely does not involve picking or stomping grapes. Stomping grapes, she says, has fallen out of vogue. She thinks it maybe isn’t even legal in the U.S.

Anyway, Stingray is lately returned from one of these indentured servitude binges, this time in the Douro River Valley in Portugal. The winery was apparently picturesque in every respect. Rolling hills, winding river, ancient vineyards, and yes, human grape treaders.

I got pretty excited about this last feature. Grape stomping, as anyone who has watched I Love Lucy can tell you, is an iconic motif in the ancient European rustic narrative. It’s Bacchanalian. It’s bucolic. It’s barefooted. How soothing to know that, persisting through the mists of untold millennia, in some faraway Arcadian paradise, human feet yet aspire to this high moral purpose, squishing the crap out of grapes for the enbiggenment of all humankind.

Naturally I subjected Stingray to an extended debriefing on this foot treading theme.

“I can’t believe they still do that!” I said. “Did you stomp grapes?”

“Uh, no. Why does everybody ask me that?”

“What! How come?”

“Well,” said Stingray, adopting the weary tone of an evolutionary biologist addressing an audience of feeble-minded Intelligent Designers on the meaning of the word theory, “they asked me once if I wanted to, but I didn’t feel like taking off my –”

“Are you mad? How could you pass up a primo local color experience like that?”

“I don’t know, I was like up to my elbows in wine all day, and I just didn’t feel –”

“This is a travesty.” I was sorely disappointed by this bloodless disinterest in grape-stomping. “Who goes all the way to Portugal, works in an idyllic ancient vineyard where idyllic ancient rituals flourish, and suddenly declines to stomp grapes? Grape stomping’s a fucking archetypal theme!”

We went back and forth like this for a while. Eventually the facts emerged.

Fig. 2b. Photo by Stingray, 2009.

Apparently, as a wine professional, Stingray is immune to the romantic lure of the grape stomping mythos. A further, even more shocking revelation: grape stomping is actually considered lowly. It turns out that the most popular insult around the cellar was “Why don’t you go stomp some grapes, you miserable grape stomper!” In Portuguese this colorful sentiment is expressed somewhat more poetically by the phrase peez ah pee. Or possibly pizza pie.*

Stingray produced some photos of the Douro Valley grape treaders. They didn’t look miserable to me. But the longer I contemplated the pictures, the less nostalgic I began to feel toward stomping. I began to formulate in my lobe a hypothesis I’d never considered before. You will observe in Fig. 2b that the treaders are not wearing sterile disposable latex long-johns.

They’re wearing Speedos.

“Sometimes,” noted Stingray, “these people are up to their crotches in grapes.”

Coincidentally, my fridge happened at that moment to be full of Portuguese wine, so my next question was exactly what you think it was.

Stingray delivered a detailed speech on the subject of filtering practices, albumin, the antibacterial properties of alcohol, and other hygiene-related crap. Unsoothed by this, I pressed her for more. She mentioned the alcohol thing again, and something about a sort of screen on a spigot somewhere. I remained dubious. Finally she admitted the truth: that although the odds are pretty well stacked against it, it’s not 100% impossible that a bottle of wine might contain a pube.

A bottle of wine could contain a pube! A bottle of wine could contain a pube!

____________________________

* Portuguese speakers are invited to improve my phonetic treatment of the phrase with actual spelling.

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1. Spinster aunt still AWOL
2. Anecdotal evidence of something
3. Buddha’s Contrite

In keeping with the recent commentary-on-a-comment motif into the self-referential depths of which this blog has recently plunged (if a blog may be said to have plunged into a motif, which contingency is, I admit, something of an uncertainty), today’s post is a blog comment upon which I comment.

First, the set-up:

Somebody saw an old post in which was featured a description of a dish I enjoyed at a trendy Austin foie gras shack a couple of years ago. Describing herself as “angered” by this, the reader wrote in to demand an explanation for my reprehensible foie gras-eatin’ behavior.

I was annoyed because

a) it blisters the spinster’s butt-barnacles whenever readers demand explanations for things. Particularly when the tone of the demand is sanctimonious, and the nature of the thing being demanded is personal;

b) I decline, cravenly and absolutely, to be seen as the head of some sort of cult who is expected to gleam with noble perfection and tow the party line barge on every little goddam thing, using my personal, real, 3D self as an example to all; and

c) I had, as it happened, already thrown myself on the mercy of the Savage Death Island Grand Tribunal regarding human carnivorosity in general and foie gras in particular, and, having adjusted my views — in a Very Special farewell-to-bacon episode — to align more locksteppedly with radical feminist food doctrine, felt unjustly accused.

I realize now, of course, that the angered reader was not in possession of all the facts, and that she was, in fact, merely asking for a clarification, and that a loudmouthed Internet feminist such as myself, who puts both her dinner and her crackpot ideology on public display using a medium that invites the commentary of total strangers, should expect to field these kinds of queries from time to time, even though there is an escape clause in the IBTP Terms of Use Agreement specifically designed to let me off the hook whenever I feel like it (the Cosmic Indifference Clause).

However, we spinster aunts are some of the most notorious fuck-ups in Cottonmouth County. So naturally I scrawled some asinine rejoinder, a scrawl I now regret. I meant it to convey a certain impatience with the habit of blog readers to hold blog authors to the same standards that they (the blog authors) daily espouse, and to suggest, dammit, that what I do on my own time is beeswax that ought not to be minded by the blametariat. What happens in Cottonmouth County stays in Cottonmouth County, by gum. Or something.

I must apologize to the angered reader. What she witnessed was not my finest hour, for the asinine rejoinder, it grieves me to reveal, alluded to my bowel movements.

Which brings us, finally and mercifully, to the comment upon which I am about to comment.

Quoth Pinko Punko:

I know Jill must use the most decadent and wasteful of toilet paper. Dried centipede husks are even a luxury for some people’s bits. Flagellate thyself!

Pinko Punko is absolutely clairvoyant! I buy only 100% silk toilet tissue. It’s made in Mongolia by blind orphans, from silkworms who are fed nothing but foie gras.

Speaking of centipedes, I’ve got an anecdote.

Yesterday afternoon I was lounging with a pitcher of margs watching that psuedo-documentary TV show about women who suddenly turn into homicidal maniacs, when there came a faint scratching sound from behind the lime green recliner. Fran, my yella Lab puppy, began yelping like a hellhound. Absently I hoisted the spinster keister and shuffled over to the hub of the hubbub. I was thinking it was probably just another case of Fran attempting to menace, like she does about 587 times a day, some random household object, such as a coffee bean, an errant dung beetle, or my foot.

Well, when I saw what it was I shot up about eight feet in the air and let out a yip, which wasn’t so much a yip, really, as it was a scream, and of the specific nature of that scream let me just say that the traitors trapped in the jaws of the Ninth Circle of Hell’s three-headed Satan could have done worse.

As you have no doubt surmised, what I observed was one of those giant Scolopendra heros. You haven’t really been yanked out of a pleasant afternoon torpor until a venomous, 7-inch, yellow-legged, needle-footed, red-headed, carnivorous invertebrate aggressively strolls across your livingroom floor, headed, in its belligerent, gazillion-legged way, straight for a flip-flop containing your personal foot. Picture an anaconda crossed with an armadillo crossed with the alien in Alien, with a chip on each of its 23 pairs of shoulders, and you’ll have it about half right.

Listen. I do my damnedest not to be an anti-Scolopendrite. I’m the first to admit that in the wild, as it biffs hither and yon with its hypnotically undulating legs and gaudy color scheme, gracefully rearing up to envenomate its prey (furry woodland creatures such as mice, bunnies, and wildebeests), S. heros is Truth and Beauty itself. But holy shit! Stick one in the Twisty Bunkhouse and watch a spinster aunt devolve into a sniveling (albeit in what I like to think is a slightly butch way) glob of eek-a-mouseterism.

I had to get rid of it, and fast, before it scuttled off into the woodwork. I didn’t want it popping out later, in the dank subumbra of night, to challenge one of the dogs to a death match, or — the thought paralyzes me even now — to crawl into my bed and up my nose into my brain, winding itself around my obstreperal cortex and turning me into a centipede-woman! A ticking time-bomb, if an arthropod may be said to tick, which (though an arthropod may be a tick) it probably can’t.

It was the aforementioned embarrassingly convolute and panic-stricken B-movie thought process that led me to my first gambit; I ill-consideredly threw on a nearby pair of heavy boots with the idea of smushing the enormous bug. We circled each other for what seemed like hours — me clomping, the centipede undulating — but in the end I couldn’t commit centipedicide. This is not because I entertain any sentimentality on the subject of centipedical right-to-life. It is because I possess a weakness of character; I am literally nauseated by the sensation of stepping on any entity that crunches. I can’t smush beetles, scorpions, roly-polys, or Rice Krispies treats, either, if I expect to keep dinner down.

Next I had the bright idea that I would put a piece of glue-board down and herd the thing onto it with a broom, thereby immobilizing it and allowing me to remove it via barbecue tongs to its original habitat. But the great beast wasn’t down with herding.

So I tried to nudge the glue-board into its path with my toe, with the comical result — wait for it! — that both the Scolopendra and my boot got stuck!

In accordance with my instinctual antipathy toward footal proximity to venomous arthropods, my amygdala jerked the affected limb away in a panic, but, because my life had suddenly become a Charlie Chaplin film in which “glue-board” was a metaphor for “poetic justice,” this knee-jerk merely strengthened the glue-board’s affinity for my boot. So what did I do? That’s right; I tried to hold the glue-board down with my other foot to facilitate the extrication of the first.

I bet you didn’t see that coming!

So there we were, adrenaline-crazed spinster aunt and incensed homicidal centipede, each with several feet mired in the same 6-inch piece of glue-board. And great Scott, this centipede had the strength of ten centipedes! It was breaking loose! No wait, it wasn’t just breaking loose, it was breaking loose and crawling up my boot! Already it was a quarter of the way to my obstreperal cortex! Scratching hideously with its gazillion needle-feet, its blood-red eyes burning with the icy purgatorial fires of impending doom as I pogoed impotently around the room, shrieking. What a tableau.

In all fairness, the centipede did have the physical advantage in this contest. If I’d had 44 more legs, and microscopic needles for feet, instead of 2 large glue-lovin’ boots, I might have been the one to get loose first.

Fortunately I’ve seen about a million movies where the action hero extricates himself from a tight spot by slipping out of his activewear, so, once I stopped screaming, for me it was but the work of a moment to yank off the boots, one of which was by now completely colonized by the glue-board and all but the last two sections of centipede, and heave the whole affair outside through a handy door. Finally, my neurotic obsession with antifeminist classic films paid off! As did my rigid insistence, against the advice of the baffled architects who designed the bunkhouse, on having 7 or 8 exterior doors installed in every room.

As has been noted by more poetical heartwarming nature crappists than I, centipedes “seem to exert a weird fascination on the morbid appetites of the hysterical and insane.” I know this is true, because I have written at least 3 posts [1, 2, and 3] on this species alone, and even made a movie. Inexplicably, the movie failed to beguile audiences, and went straight to video, where it awaits cult classicdom.

Related posts:

1. Spinster aunt attempts to assuage guilt re: centipede
2. The Foie Gras Chronicles: Part the First
3. Super cute fawn sprints across Savage Death Island

What’s an ag well? It’s a long, skinny hole in the ground reaching to a subterranean pond that, when you attach a windmill to it, pumps out water for your agricultural needs. Watering sunflowers, bathing snakes, etc. Only my ag well doesn’t have a windmill. It has a stupid electrical pump that always blows out whenever a cow breathes on it or lightning strikes it or it’s Tuesday.

But before I go, allow me to set off your gag reflex with this: Che Guevara’s granddaughter posing “semi-nude” for a PETA ad.

PETA has long been on my shit list for its freewheelin’ exploitation of our culture’s obsession with women’s oppression even as it supposedly advocates for animal liberation. Want some attention? Just pornulate some female celebrity!

Like all antifeminist activist groups — pretty much any activist or political group that isn’t specifically feminist — PETA takes particular pleasure in throwing women under the bus for The Cause. Marxist revolutionaries, the Black Panthers, the free love movement, Hamid Karzai, white liberal dudes trying to get other liberal dudes elected to public office: these guys have always counted among their most prized principles an endless capacity to endure the suffering of women.

In the ad, Lydia Guevara wears camouflage pants, a red beret, and bandoliers of baby carrots while standing with one fist on her hip and the other outstretched.

That Guevara is described titillatingly as “semi-nude” even though she is fully clothed pushes my lobe to the semi-boiling point. The ad positions PETA as edgy and with-it, but it degrades Guevara, women, revolution, carrots, vegetarianism, and the entire human species. Ditwuss!

Non-windmill-equipped ag wells are this week’s runners-up.

This more or less explains the Ditwuss Award.

[Thanks, Stellatex]

Related posts:

1. Ditwuss Award de la semaine: PETA
2. Hugs, Twisty: the continuing binary genderfication of America, and the introduction of the Ditwuss Awards
3. Stanley: now with even more invective

Homphobia. Is there anything it can’t explain? Such as the dumbest wine label I’ve seen in a while: Vinum Cellars “It’s OK” Rose. Apparently when people are reassured by hipster marketing that it won’t turn them into pansies, even mediocre rosé flies off the shelves. Vinum is sold out of the 2007 vintage.

It is always wise, Stingray says, to avoid wines with stupid, pronounceable names such as “It’s OK,” “Zen,” or “Kung Fu Girl.”

I say, let the rubes skip the rosé if they want to. Especially if it’s this rosé. Leaves more for me.

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2. Cleaning Out Your Meat Drawer?
3. Blamer brain trust alert 2