Episode 35: Narrow Stance

Reading From The Same Handbook
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad isn't the only authoritarian demagogue making really dumb pronouncements while solidifying his base. After his election as president of Bolivia, Evo Morales proclaimed that he was going to be Bush's worst nightmare, somehow leapfrogging himself in potential threat over Vladimir Putin, Osama bin Laden, Kim Jong-il, and the little nuclear loon from Iran. Never mind. His supporters plan to rewrite the constitution to allow him to seek re-election forever and ever.

No doubt he was following his best bud Hugo Chavez's lead, who has proposed an eternal presidency of Venezuela for himself. Hugo has lately put together a deal with Russia for the purchase of thousands of sniper rifles in anticipation of the U.S. invasion with which he keeps scaring his constituents.


And if anyone really thought Putin was going to go away peacefully in compliance with term limits, he squashed that notion when he floated the notion of becoming prime minister under the next hand-picked president, after one term as which he could run for president again. No doubt you can sense the schematic being drawn here.

President Mugabe of Zimbabwe, who has already secured what the others have proposed, gave a speech in which he expressed bafflement that prices in stores had increased, ignoring the fact that inflation in his impoverished country now exceeds 10,000 percent. He arrived for his speech in a Rolls-Royce convertible.
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Luck for us we have Dubya
"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."
- George W. Bush, August 5, 2004

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Talking The Talk
A father asked his ten-year-old son if he knew about the birds and bees.
"I don't want to know," said the boy, bursting into tears. "Promise you won't tell me!"
Confused, the father asked what was wrong.
"When I was six," the boy sobbed, "I got the 'No Easter Bunny' speech. At seven, I got the 'No Tooth Fairy' speech. When I was eight, you hit me with the 'There's no Santa' speech. If you're going to tell me now that grownups really don't get laid, I'll have nothing to live for."

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Would You Work For This Man?
Kent J. Thiry is the CEO of DaVita, a provider of dialysis services. He wears a Musketeer costume at company meetings, swinging a sword and leading employees in the "All For One" chant. He calls his headquarters a "village" and the sign on his door says "KT, Mayor". Aisles in the office have signs reading "Be Our Guest Lane" and "Aquisition Avenue". Thiry has painted motivational signs on office walls. Their meaning is intended to be inspirational, one assumes, along the lines of "Begin with the end in mind" and "Speak with your life, not just your words." He calls employees "teammates", who no doubt can be lopped off the payroll as readily and mercilessly as Wal Mart's "associates."
An hour in those alleys of health care commerce would make Geezer gag. He is comforted by the fact that DaVita is under FDA investigation about its excessive use of the drug Epogen.

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Secret Foods of Little Rhody
"Four all the way, extra sauce, and a coffee milk." Every Rhode Islander knows what that means, and can also rattle off a half-dozen other local treats ingested in quantity since birth. Those would be stuffies, jonnycakes, doughboys, clam cakes, cabinets, clear chowda, snail salad...and New York System hot weiners.
This "system" has nothing to do with the Big Apple. The murky explanation is that back around 1900, hot dogs were associated with New York and purveyors elsewhere wanted to gather in a little of that commercial stardust. Otherwise, these wieners, also called "gaggers", are but distant cousins to Coney Island franks, thinner and cut into four-inch lengths from a pork-and-veal sausage that can be thirty feet long. Inserted into soft steamed buns, they are layered with very specific condiments, including a meat sauce with a passing resemblance to chili.
Some restaurants diddle with the formula, dressing up the low-tech sauce with such highfalutin' ingredients as nutmeg and cinnamon. Heresy. For the real thing, step into Olneyville New York System (18 Plainfield St., 401-621-9500), a glaringly lit oasis in a dingy western precinct of Providence.

The staff is as jolly a bunch as might be hoped, joking with patrons and flinging zingers at each other. One night, the man holding position at the grill was a fellow slightly smaller than the right side of the Patriots offensive line. Fielding orders from the other countermen, he lined the requisite number of buns up his extended forearm, inserted the wieners, swiped on mustard, ladled the meat sauce, added a stripe of minced onion, and sprinkled celery salt over all.
It was a smooth, hypnotic performance, and he wasn't fazed by large numbers. Big as he was, he could assemble twenty or thirty wieners at once - "when I'm showing off" - and claimed his record is fifty, all the way up to his ear. Addicts long ago put aside any hygienic issues the process might suggest.
The result of this process isn't very fetching visually, but this isn't about presentation, it's about eating. Even for moderate appetites, four may not be enough.
The traditional beverage with wieners is coffee milk, which is also the official state drink. Think chocolate milk with sweet coffee syrup replacing the chocolate. More elaborate is the coffee cabinet, known to the rest of America as a milkshake.

Rhodies don't live on wieners alone. There are, for one delectable thing, clam cakes, fried little balls of dough in which an occasional morsel of the eponymous bivalve can be detected. But that's another story.
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