Wednesday, January 20, 2016

Your Guide to Super Bowl Festivities in Downtown San Francisco

How many times have you thought "Hey, I wish my city was hosting activities tangentially related to a sporting event that will actually be played 50 miles away at enormous civic cost and virtually no return on investment, but with guaranteed headaches and inconveniences for vast swaths of the local population, all for the purpose of enriching a few billionaires and perpetuating a morally questionable sport that leaves some who play it with lifelong diminshed cognitive function?"

A lot, right? Well, FEEL THE EXCITEMENT!!!!!  SUPER BOWL 50 IS HERE!!!*

* Not actually "here."

Check out all the fun events and activities at SUPER BOWL CITY!!!


First you'll want to note the area in RICH OWNER RED.  That's fabulous SUPER BOWL CITY, where you'll be subjected to invasive, airport-style security just to get to the Subway, which you probably shouldn't be going to anyway.  Inside SUPER BOWL CITY you'll find fun activities like OH NO NOT THE PATRIOTS AGAIN, a 36-hour-long loop of Tom Brady throwing an 8-yard pass to a tight end, and BUILD ME A STADIUM YOU LITTLE FUCK, where you can pretend to be a megarich team owner and force a struggling municipality to go to a three-month school year to have enough money to build you a new stadium to replace the one you had them build you just 8 years ago!

Oh no!  What's that sound?  Has an NFL player gotten loose from the Containment Area and is threatening passerby?  Please quickly and quietly assemble at the ROID RAGE EVACUATION POINT for removal by ferry while our team of trained specialists restrains and calms Mr. Hardy.

Down Market Street a bit you'll find CONCUSSION JUNCTION.  Take a monster blow to the head in our Aeneaswilliamsizer and then compete to finish simple tasks like remembering to pick your kids up from school or successfully ordering bottles of Ace of Spades for your boys at XS!  Don't try taking Muni there, though.  We've removed all the busses so limos full of cocaine and champagne can get through!

[PLEASE NOTE: NFL Executives, you will need to check in at the Mayor's Reception/Quid Pro Quo Donation Station upon arrival.  Please remember to discard dirty money in the box marked "ILLEGAL CONTRIBUTIONS HERE." Thank you!]

Want to participate in the fun, but don't have thousands of dollars in disposable income?  You'll be welcomed warmly at the CITIZEN PEN, where you'll find a VCR with a grainy copy of one of the Cowboys-Bills Super Bowls and a box of Bagel Bites.

Also remember, we've partnered with Uber to bring you GUESS THE SURGE all week!  Trying to get home from work because Muni is completely shut down?  That'll be 2.4x normal!  Thanks for playing!
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Thursday, January 14, 2016

How to Make a Grilled Cheese Sandwich

Last night on Twitter a fierce battle broke out. It concerned what duty we owe to our fellow man and the nature of empathy. No, I'm shitting you, of course. What it actually had to do with was how to make a grilled cheese sandwich. If you thought ISIS was bad get a load of some of these psychopaths. We had people buttering the bread first, there was some kind of talk about cheese curds, and one freakshow kindly, albeit misinformed, citizen said to put olive oil in the pan.  I had no idea people were so fucked up.

It's cool, I can help.

Liv Tyler eating a grilled cheese.  From Mario Batali's Instagram, apparently.  I just Googled "Liv Tyler eating a grilled cheese" to find it.  
A GRILLED CHEESE SANDWICH, despite its name, is not prepared on a grill, but in a 10-12" saute pan.  There are three ingredients: bread, cheese, and butter.  Olive oil is not an ingredient.  Mayonnaise is not an ingredient. Chipotle aioli is not an ingredient.  Maybe those are ingredients in some kind of grilled sandwich, but not a grilled cheese.

BREAD.  You can use a wide variety of breads to make a grilled cheese.  The Classic GC is on white bread, and if that's your steeze, Orowheat Buttermilk White does a fine job.  Sourdough also makes an excellent GC.  Try Beckmann's California Sourdough, which is fantastic.

You can use other kinds of bread, too.  Dill rye makes a nice GC with aged swiss (as discussed below), although that is certainly a nontraditional GC.  Wheat is usually fine.  Sliced brioche is heavenly, since each slice of brioche is made with about a stick of butter anyway.

Type of bread you can't make a GC with: hot dog or hamburger buns, sandwich rolls, biscuits, croissants, those weird hard little dinner rolls, banana bread or any other fruit bread (which really aren't bread anyway but cakes but I'm wildly digressing now).

CHEESE.  God has given us many cheeses; use them.  The classics, of course, are cheddar and American, but like I said, swiss on rye is a great GC.  I think the Classic GC is American on white bread, but smoky sharp cheddar on sourdough is a [insert 100 emoji] sandwich.  Smoked gouda on almost any bread.  Don't use mozzarella.  It's too stringy and doesn't belong in a GC anyway.

BUTTER.  Use butter.  Not oil, butter.

METHOD.

Here's where shit went south online.  It appears, to my horror, that some people believe you should butter the bread, then put it in the pan.  This is an absurd waste of time that will just end up shredding the bread like wiping dog feces on onionskin.  Do people who do this just enjoy doing everything in the most difficult fashion possible?  Do you boil one penne at a time?  I guess you toast a bagel and then SMASH IT facedown into a pile of cream cheese and hope some cream cheese sticks.  Lunacy.

Let me make it easy for you.  Put a pan on a burner.  Adjust to medium-low heat.  Let it warm.  Place a pat of butter (about 1/2 tbsp) in the pan.  Enjoy it sizzling and melting.  Place your previously-assembled sandwich in the butter.  Slide it around a little for maximum coverage.  Cook for about a minute and hald, two minutes.  Lift up a corner with a spatula and look.  Is it golden brown, with a slight hint of darker crust forming around the edges?  If so, remove it from the pan.  Drop another 1/2 tbsp butter in.  When it melts (and it will be fast), put the sandwich back in, uncooked side down. Turn the heat down slightly.  Another 90 seconds to 2 minutes.  Voila.

There, was that so hard? 
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Thursday, January 7, 2016

The See's Candy Demystifier

Oh hey it's just post-holiday-season which means every work kitchen has an open box of See's candy leftover from some gift or sent back from some client that didn't leave a forwarding address.  What the fuck is in those, anyway?


1 - Oh good, just normal chocolate OH SHIT SOME KIND OF RASPBERRY GOO JUST SHOT OUT FUCK

2 - Literally a bar of peanuts

3 - Some kind of nougat/uinidentifiable nut thing

4 - Why is the center of this rock hard? Wait, it's pulling apart now but it's lodged in my teeth shit it's gonna pull a tooth out

5 - Dopey Clusters

6 - Just a couple of almonds with a thunk of chocolate loosely holding them together

7 - The only good one.  They move it around and put it in a different place in every box so you'll never find it again.

8 - Looks like the good one but actually has anchovy paste under a thin layer of chocolate.  GOTHA MOTHERFUCKER

9 - Hazelnut paste and broken promises

10 - What, just more chocolate inside chocolate? OK, this one is ok.

11 - They call this one El Diablo.  No one knows why.

12 - Actual maple tree sap, like with bits of bark and ants still in it and shit.

13 - You think it's another peanut bar but hidden inside is deadly fugu fish. You have 8 minutes to live, run don't walk to the nearest Japanese ER.

14 - Swirls of Hate

15 - Some kind of mint thing. It's OK.

16 - Walnuts 'N Roofing Tar

17 - Monkey foot

18 - Just some shit swept up off the factory floor and dropped into a paper sleeve

19 - Macadmia nuts on top, who the fuck knows underneath

20 - The Admiral Akbar

21 - It's a Snickers Fun Size, don't tell anyone

22 - This one's called Chocolate Suicide because Crystal killed herself the first day we made these oh God Crystal I miss you so much

23 - Chocolate so dark it makes Requiem for a Dream look like My Little Pony

24 - Now we're just fucking with you and seeing how many of these cheap-ass Payday knockoff peanut bars we can drop in here without you noticing

25 - I think this is the one made w/ hemp butter but I'm not 100% sure hang out for a while and see if Sheila in Accounting starts talking about the faces of the Buddha
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Thursday, December 31, 2015

My favorite tweets of 2015

Yes, it's back, for the third consecutive and fourth nonconsecutive time, TK's 2015 Tweets of the Year.  Everybody was very funny this year.  Good job, good effort.




Remember the llamas? I do, like it was yesterday, man. That was good times.




I think "here's a lanyard for some reason" is the killer. It's almost poignant.



MAKES U THINK



I did too! At least, at first.

How does this only have 29 likes? Maybe it was passed around on another account and got 7 million likes? It should have 7 million likes.

I actually went and found the real comment. It's real, or at least appears to be. Amazing.



I LOL every time I think about this tweet, to this day.



My life has been considerably better since discovering @desusnice's Twitter.

What the kids call "pwned."

And just in under the wire, one late but worthy entry:
Happy New Year, everyone!
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Tuesday, December 22, 2015

The 40 Going On 28 Christmas Special

EXTREMELY DON PARDO ANNOUNCER

Ladies and gentlemen....live from Clooney's Bar in the heart of the Mission District of San Francisco, it's the 40 Going On 28 Christmas Special! With your host, TK!  Please welcome.......TEEEEEE KAYYYYYYYYYY

(wild applause, cheers)

TK enters stage left, holding a mic, waving


ANNOUNCER

With special guests.....Internet commenters!!

A small group of ugly and malformed people wave grimly from stage right. They quickly return to vaping and forming terrible opinions.

ANNOUNCER

And the Garbage City Band!!!



The band plays a quick flourish of "Semi-Charmed Life"

TK

Thank you, thank you, thank you all for coming.  We've got a great show for you tonight, a lot of special guests are here.

LOUD CRASHING NOISE heard offstage

What...what's this?

GHOST OF SAN FRANCISCO CHRISTMAS PAST wanders onstage.

TK

Why it's...it's the Ghost of San Francisco Christmas Past! Welcome, Ghost!  How about a hand for the ghost, people?

(applause, cheers)

What's up with you tonight, Ghost?

GHOST OF SF CHRISTMAS PAST

Noooooothing, TK.  Just getting ready to head home to the Past...where everything was muuuuuuuuch betterrrrrrrrrr!

(Audience gasps)

TK

Hey, man, that's not entirely fair.  There are still a lot of good things about San Francisco!  The economy's great, there are a ton of cool restaurants, we're building a lot of new housing ....

GHOST OF SF CHRISTMAS PAST

Whatever, dude.

TK

Pot's basically legal.

GHOST OF SF CHRISTMAS PAST

Wait, what?

TK

Ghost of Christmas Past, everyone!  Big hand!

(appluase, cheering)

The Garbage City Band's piano begins to play

TK

How about a song, yeah?  Please welcome the Garbage City Singers!

The GARBAGE CITY SINGERS choral ensemble enter stage left.  

TK AND SINGERS

You know Geary and Sutro and Agnos and Jordan
Shelley and Feinstein, Moscone and Newsom
But do you recall
The techiest mayor of all
Ed Lee, the Mustache Mayor
Had some very greedy friends
And if you ever saw them
You would wonder where it ends
All of the other mayors
Used to care about their town
All old Ed Lee wanted
Was to not let Ron Conway down
Then one foggy taxmas eve
Twitter came to say
Our investors run this town
Won't you cut our taxes down?
Then how the VCs loved him
As they shouted out with glee
Ed Lee, the mayor hero
See you when we IPO!

(wild applause, cheers)

TK

Thank you, thank you.  We're just having some fun with you, Ed. You know we love you.  All in good fun.  Please don't let Airbnb have my house.  I'm still using it.

TK loosens his tie, sits on edge of stage with a drink

TK

Let's make sure we don't forget the real meaning of Christmas.  BUYING DRONES FOR PEOPLE AND GETTING BLACKOUT DRUNK.  No, no, I'm joking, of course.  I'm talking about being with your loved ones.  Like all you guys.  I couldn't do it without you.  Thanks for reading another year of my dumb commentary and ill-informed opinions.

TK raises his glass.

TK

To all of my readers.  I love you guys.

CLOONEY'S PATRON

(lifts head from bar) The fuck is going on here

TK

I see our time is running short.  Thanks again for tuning in!  See you on New Year's Eve for our Annual Best Tweets of the Year Post!  For the Garbage City Band, the Garbage City Singers, and Extremely Don Pardo Announcer, I'm TK!  Happy Holidays!

Garbage City Band plays as TK is roughly escorted out of the bar
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Thursday, December 17, 2015

Wait, I want to have an I'm Leaving San Francisco Letter too

Please post it on the Bold Italic.

 (I'm not actually leaving San Francisco. I'm just scared I'll miss out and won't be able to contribute to the I'm Leaving San Francisco Letter genre)

I can still remember the day I set foot in San Francisco.  The air was aglow and the fog tasted sweet, like simple syrup.  Every day I would walk to work from my huge apartment in North Beach that cost $124 a month to my very cool job doing something creative with a lot of cool people who were also cool and unusual.  Then we would go to underground dance fashion raves in SOMA before there were offices there or before people called it SOMA until 4 am and then be fine at work the next day because the very spirit of San Francisco would keep you invigorated.

It’s different now, of course; it’s not My San Francisco any more.  I guess it started when the Thorvites emerged from the sea and began eating large sections of the Sunset, their gaping, blood-soaked jaws full of pavement and stucco and hapless dog walkers.  Of course, incinerating Golden Gate Park with thermite and napalm temporarily halted their shrieking march across the city, but at what cost?  The new Golden Gate Parking Lot is convenient but I miss the trees.  Am I being selfish, though, I wonder.  What makes the old SF any better than the new one?



There were the little changes, things that seemed small but then started to add up.  The coffee place down the street, where the owner, Rose still made delicious lattes and served heavenly muffins straight from her own oven, closed suddenly and was replaced by a Physical Form Transmutation Center, another one of those places where you’d go to have your molecular matrix disassembled and transmitted to a pulsar of pure energy.  There’s probably one in your neighborhood too.  It’s like they’re taking over!  They're like the Chase banks of physical transmutation places.  And I knew the cobbler shop probably wouldn’t last, but I was more than a little taken aback when it closed and reopened as an Alien Assimilation Center.  I know our new overlords are mighty; I guess I didn’t expect them to be so pushy, too!

I sigh and try to remember that change is inevitable.  The Mission was an Irish neighborhood once, then Hispanic.  Now it’s Biomutant.  From “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” to “Oye Como Va” to “Feast on the Skulls of the Screaming Ones, For We Are the Damned of the Night.”  All good songs, just different voices.  Change.  In 30 years, the Biomutants will be the ones getting pushed out, and they’ll probably complain about how the Drillbots have ruined the neighborhood by drilling holes in everything and driving right over the intricate temples of human bones the Biomutants spent so long assembling.  “I remember when this was a cool neighborhood, before the Drillbots messed everything up,” they’ll whine, in between bites of a child’s forearm.  It’s inevitable.

The last straw was when Gozor and his Reptile Clan won the Battle of Potrero Hill and slaughtered the last of the Golden Cadre.  The streets had barely stopped running thick and red with clotted blood when I came home to find a 3-day Notice tacked to my door.  Gozor was Ellis Acting me out.  A quick look at Craigslist and I knew my time in San Francisco was over.  I’d had some pretty sketchy apartments here, but $3000 a month for a muddy Hellpit dug in the sandy soil and covered with a bamboo lattice seemed a little ridiculous.  Especially since I also had to share a cooking fire with Jaku the Forgotten One, who honestly did not look like he kept a clean kitchen.

So farewell, San Francisco!  I shall remember you as you were, that beautiful, charming, grey City of Wonder, and not like now, just another backwards province in the Borakkian Empire.  I hear Portland is still not overrun; maybe I’ll try there next.
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Friday, December 4, 2015

Coldplay is a gift

Fey British Mom-rockers Coldplay were announced as the halftme entertainment for Super Bowl L.  Predictably, everyone lost their goddam minds.




Chin up, footballers! It could be so, so, so much worse. Just check out this list of Super Bowl halftime performers.  It is truly a dark tome.

FOR THE FIRST FEW YEARS, it was mostly marching bands, which is fine because no one cares and you can go get more Jell-O with marshmallows in it and a Hershey bar or whateverTF they ate in the late 60's.  The producer of the Super Bowl IV halftime show, in 1970, no doubt had a headful of the cheap and plentiful blotter acid that flooded the market back then because he booked Carol Channing and the Southern University Marching Band, two entities that had almost certainly never been in the same room together.

Super Bowl V, 1971, featured the first appearance of Up With People, a "musical" sensation so bland and earnest it makes It's a Small World look like Cannibal Corpse.  Up With People would return to darken the Super Bowl stage again and again, in 1976, 1980, 1982, and 1986, before they were blessedly sent to a re-education camp in the North Dakota desert and never heard from again.

UPDATE: Commenter Stoney claims to have no memory of Up With People!  Let's fix that.


Shoulda kept your mouth shut, big man.

What we think of as the Event Halftime didn't really start until Michael Jackson did it in 1993.  (Don't even try to suggest it started in 1991, with "New Kids on the Block (NKOTB), Disney characters, Warren Moon, 2,000 [presumably terrified] local children, and audience card stunt")  Suddenly Carol Channing, the USC Trojans Marching Band, and UWP were shunted to the side to make way for more palatable artists like The Blues Brothers (1997) and Big Bad Voodoo Daddy (1999).

The path to Coldplay was paved by similarly self-important anthemizers U2 in 2002.  Somehow-younger-seeming-than-U2 Paul McCartney was in 2005 and the Stones in 2006 but surprisingly not Elton John or Paul Revere and the Raiders in 2007.

(I started looking into this because Olu texted me about Peter Hartlaub's suggestion that Huey Lewis play the SB and I was honestly shocked Huey has never played a SB.  Is there any more perfect SB artist?  He's as smooth and featureless as a beach pebble, and even has an album called "Sports."  It's amazing the NFL didn't invent him solely for the purpose of playing halftime shows.)

So in closing, stop bitching about Coldplay.  At least it's not Charo with the Southeastern Missouri Marching Beavers or whatever they have.
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