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With the tireless help of Mrs. Ghidorah, we opened our own restaurant.

We failed, utterly and totally, and I’ve come to realize that Mrs. Ghidorah’s tireless help was not entirely something she was thrilled with being asked to give. I wallowed, for longer than I should have, in my failure.

After my wallowing, I’ve done my best to make amends with Mrs. Ghidorah, who I owe more than I can ever repay. I’ve worked hard at accepting the fact that… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 4:32 AM on December 30, 2019

On second thought, I realized that I’d utterly forgotten something that has settled back into feeling like not that big a deal, but I got paid to write during this decade, for the first time in my life. (Links are in my profile if you’d like to read about pitfalls of opening a restaurant in Japan, or about the history of craft beer in Japan) It’s not a full time gig (literally once a month, at best) but at a recent year end party for the Life/Food/Entertainment section, my editor introduced me… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 2:57 AM on December 31, 2019

I spent a lot of Christmases at my aunt and uncles house in Chicago, and every year on Christmas Eve, we’d go over to my aunts best friends family Christmas party, one of those things where there’s a big family, but my aunt and her friend were so close, we were all considered family, too. It could have been incredibly awkward, a long haired, left wing Jewish kid at a conservative polish super catholic family Christmas party, but they always welcomed me totally and completely. Every year, there… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 7:14 PM on December 24, 2019

Awesome news. Congratulations, and get out there and make people healthy!

Do you make house calls? To Japan?
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 4:41 PM on December 21, 2019

Sadly, I really only excel at making the mess, not cleaning it up. Luckily, not living alone (and knowing I need to pull my own weight) forces me to try a lot harder than I ever would on my own. Still not something I enjoy.
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 4:39 PM on December 21, 2019

I feel sad because none of you know the glory that is Japanese potato chip technology, yet pretty excited that I’ve got them all to myself. For one thing, there are few standard flavors, usually salt, nori/seaweed (yuck), and chicken consommé. The glorious part is the nigh on constant innovation, and non stop release of new flavors every couple of months. I mean, sure, sour cream and onion is wonderful, and I love it, but:

Sour Cream and Jalapeño… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 9:43 PM on December 13, 2019

Mister Moofoo, you are now the other person I know who's seen Until the End of the World. I hesitate to recommend it to people because the opening, to me, is pretty clunky. It starts off pretty cheesy, with some bits that just don't work to me, before getting into the absolute wonder of the second half. As far as things I treasure, that movie has at least three, the moment In the Blood of Eden comes on over the Outback, and Solveig Dommartin screaming "my heart, it is dead" as one of… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 1:45 AM on December 8, 2019

Greg_Ace, I’m with you on that. I love when I’ve done a long day of smoking bacon, or making pulled pork, or whatever, and there’s that random moment where my nose loses its gotten-used-to-it-ness towards the smell, and I realize that I smell of hickory or apple smoke.

That, and living in Japan makes this rare, but walking down the street and catching a whiff of wood smoke (almost always cherry) from a restaurant. Cities aren’t just overwhelming in a visual or auditory… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 7:49 PM on December 8, 2019

Ms. Moonlight, if you don’t want that plastic bag, the magic words are sono mama de (sono like sonogram, mama like a kid would say to mom, and de like “deh”), which just means “as is.” They’ll put a little sticker on it that shows that you bought it. Works at pretty much any store selling stuff in Japan when you don’t need/want a bag.
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 11:40 PM on December 10, 2019

This isn't a perfect day of any sort whatsoever, but it is a "the perfect day for _________" where the blank is showing my 1st year high school students All Summer in a Day. They struggled through the story (sort of a low intermediate EFL class) this term, and it's the last day before final exams. The perfect part is that the weather outside is utterly and totally miserable, just a constant downpour under gray skies, the sort of weather that makes you forget the sun even exists, even… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 10:00 PM on December 1, 2019

I’m a little saddened that no one else here understands the awesome power that is biscuits and gravy. Or even just the wonder that biscuits represent (seriously, they’re the only bread type thing I can make, but oh, I can make fantastic biscuits!*). But biscuits and gravy is my absolute breakfast of choice, followed by maybe corned beef hash.

Clearly, I’m someone who believes that breakfast exists to soak up the sins of the night before, and I don’t think that’s a bad… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 5:39 PM on October 26, 2019

Want something even easier than that? Try cream biscuits.

Redstart, you can’t just drop that in the thread without explaining more, or perhaps, including the recipe. It’s just not cricket.
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 8:48 PM on October 26, 2019

Taz, as far as sausage goes, honestly, I make sausage, so that’s usually not a problem for me. That said, if you can get ahold of minced pork, you’re almost there, especially for making loose sausage or patties. There are a ton of basic sausage recipes out there, but a pretty simple rule is base a recipe off of a kilo of meat, and then adjust depending on how much meat you’ve got.

1kg minced pork

15-17g salt, depending on… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 11:19 PM on October 26, 2019

julen, thank you for all of the work that you've done. Quonsmas has been a wonderful thing, something that has never failed to pick me up (magically, my quonsing has always come at the end of a rotten day, but then I come home to find a little box full of someone's incredible thoughtfulness and wit). When I have communicated with you about my difficulties getting my ass in gear and living up to the Quonspirit, you've been unfailingly helpful. Whatever difficulty you have now, please, please… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 7:35 PM on October 20, 2019

Any form of mascot on mascot violence, or a mascot being beaten up as part of the joke, I can’t help it, it appeals to me on a deep, fundamental level. There’s something glorious about giant mascot costumes doing battle.
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 6:48 PM on October 19, 2019

An additional Hell Yeah of mine, is anytime I think of the terrible attempts at American accents in the (not great) movie Blackhawk Down. The best of all of them is Ewen McGregor as the company clerk, always complaining that he can never go into combat because he can type (like I said, not great), and when he’s suddenly given the chance/confronted by going to combat, he looks a little freaked out, and the guy that gave him the news says “this is what you wanted, isn’t it?” and Ewen McGregor… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 7:41 AM on October 20, 2019

I really, really like the Microaggressions page. To some extent, it reads like a cliffs notes version of the way this place has helped me to grow as a person, and I’m indebted to the people here and in real life that helped me to understand this stuff, either by example, through their posting and comments, or by directly challenging ideas I had and helping me to understand the impact of my words and actions.

I get that being the kind of person who needed the handholding… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 3:27 PM on October 14, 2019

Thanks for posting this. I honestly thought yesterday after making my post about Splinter that we haven’t had one in a while, and I think I’m starting to hit a limit on how much more terrible shit I can take.

Before splinter being shut down, it was the NBA knuckling under to China, setting a terrifying precedent that Apple and Blizzard have fallen all over themselves to reinforce.

Before that was HK reviving the anti mask law, which scares the… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 8:21 AM on October 11, 2019

The Final Destination series is one of those things that Mrs. Ghidorah and I unabashedly love and will watch together whenever it is on.

Strangely enough, the free cable movie channel ran a marathon recently, and I only caught the tail end of it, and watched the last one for about ten minutes until I realized they’d (bizarrely) edited out all the deaths. Like, just at the moment, they’d cut it out so you didn’t see the gore, and fast forward to the look of horror from… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 5:09 PM on October 4, 2019

As far as actual horror, I love The Ring (yes, the remake, because the original is horribly dated, oh no, Sadako is here, let’s turn the film negative!) and Juon. The original Juon has a scale that the remake doesn’t attempt, which is fantastic, but somehow I found the remake more viscerally frightening. Pulse (which was a remake) was largely terrible, but had some incredibly well done sequences of absolute terror, hidden inside a mediocre film.

The Descent was the… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 5:18 PM on October 4, 2019

I'll have to track down the original of Pulse then. And yes, the way the movie suddenly switches from "My friend has gone missing and things are weird" to "This is the end of the world, and everyone is dead" is pretty amazing, and does something that I love, that most movies don't which is to play out the idea to its logical conclusion. There's absolutely no reason that the phenomenon in the film would ever limit itself to one location, or one person, so it doesn't.… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 7:10 PM on October 6, 2019

Definitely owls, or specifically one, the only wild owl I’ve ever seen. In college, long enough ago that no one had cell phones, I was having just a really, really nice day in fall of my first year, and I didn’t want it to end, meaning I wanted to stay down on the main campus instead of go back to my dorm a far enough walk away that I knew I wouldn’t come back down afterwards. I tried calling everyone I knew, but no one was in their rooms. I came back out of the library, determined to at least… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 8:30 AM on October 5, 2019

MetaTalkSam Elliot: It would be nice if people the Dude tried to abide
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 10:35 PM on September 25, 2019

I finished high school in Lake Forest, where Ordinary People was filmed. Still never seen more than bits of it.

Other than that, I enjoyed the more-blatant-than usual use of Chicago as stand in for Gotham in Dark Knight, especially the ferries (like, do people in Gotham commute to and from Michigan?) the mention of the bridge and tunnel crowd (okay, uh, the Skyway and... tunnels? Like, does the workforce of Gotham have a large percentage of Morlocks?), and the use of a… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 9:24 PM on September 21, 2019

ActingTheGoat, those are where I pulled most of the examples from. Thanks again for everyone’s contributions. Just imagine, that frisson of disgust, that curling of the lip that some feel when they come across these, I managed to make a whole class of perfectly innocent school children feel that exact way!
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 10:20 PM on September 10, 2019

Oyéah, that’s awesome.
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 6:41 PM on September 11, 2019

Hi everyone, sorry for taking so long to get back to you with these. I got the poems back from the students today, and wow, some of them are absolutely wonderful, and I'm honestly a little at a loss for words at how happy their efforts have made me. I'm going to throw some of them down below, I hope you like them.


This is just to say
I have forgot
the fantastic poem
that was in my mind

and which you… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 5:51 AM on September 18, 2019

Tennis, you say? Just married? So would you say you’re starting out



(Sunglasses)


Love - Love?


yeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhh


I’m so sorry, but it was right there! Congrats!
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 10:50 PM on September 11, 2019

For my, uh, friends, this month’s meat set was

Jalapeño garlic bacon, cured with jalapeños from my garden, smoked with hickory

Buckboard bacon, which is bacon made from the shoulder instead of the belly, cured with brown sugar, black pepper, and a hint of molasses

Super garlicky kielbasa, with 3x the normal amount of garlic I normally use for kielbasa. You could kill a vampire with them

And bacon… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 10:48 PM on September 7, 2019

Years ago, and I don’t even really remember why, I emailed Bruce Sterling with a question (possibly about writing and research for the writing), not really expecting a reply. He did, in fact, reply, and we had a pleasant back and forth over it. That he replied at all was a surprise, and he was quite generous with his time.
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 2:42 PM on August 31, 2019

I’m also going to brag a little that Revolution Brewing retweeted the banner I made for a Chicago food/anti-hero series tap takeover I did, with the immortal phrase “look what our friends in Tokyo made for us, a unicorn pig ditka!”
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 4:00 AM on September 1, 2019

I’ll have to put my heads together and give this some thought.
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 5:44 PM on August 24, 2019

.
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 1:17 PM on August 16, 2019

I mentioned this is a similar Ask a while back. I don’t have, and am not planning to have kids, but I came up with possibly the most perfect dad advice I’ve ever heard, the sort of thing a dad tells their kids until they’re tired of hearing it, until one day, much later in life, they think, “wow, dad was right” and I turn they badger their kids with it. And, since I’m not planning to spawn, here you go, free to a good home:

If you don’t ask, the answer is always no.… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 4:25 PM on August 2, 2019

Just a stroll through that thread (I never knew about the cameras thing until now), and... wow. People litigating logical fallacies in a thread isn't something I miss.
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 2:30 AM on July 18, 2019

I came here as a lurker from a link from Memepool, a site that, name-wise at least was born just a bit too early. I struggled figuring out paypal, and when I finally got ready to sign up, I found out that the name I wanted was one of the many tragically lost to the signup process. That’s right, I should have been Torgo, as I was called throughout college by my close friends, but it was gone, and Ghidorah was the first thing I could think of.

This place has made me a… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 9:09 AM on July 15, 2019

I do feel that one of our biggest problems right now is that overtly political perspectives are driving too much of the current culture

I apologize for dragging this back out, I’m in a different time zone, and just woke up, and because I really, really do care about this place, read through the 140 or so comments that came up overnight. And this was sticking around pretty heavily, and yeah, it was discussed, and seems to have been dropped, so… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 5:07 PM on July 14, 2019

My aunt died yesterday. She was old, in poor health, and she fell, breaking an arm and a leg, and had been transferred to a rehabilitation center. From a lifetime of smoking, she’d been on oxygen, and had developed anxiety issues on top of that, and finally it looks like her heart just couldn’t handle it all anymore. My cousin was with her most of the day, and left, with her blessing, only to hear she’d had a heart attack a couple hours later, and now he’s beating himself up for not having been… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 5:06 PM on July 11, 2019

I never buy them, but one thing I kind of love about living in Japan is that fireworks are not constrained to a single day. You can buy bags of fireworks at any convenience store all summer long. It’s not like back home where fireworks suddenly disappear on July 5th. And from about mid-July through the end of August, various municipalities will have massive fireworks displays along riversides. By massive, I mean lasting easily an hour or more.

Every year, it’s pretty… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 9:28 PM on July 5, 2019

Aside from personal venting, more of a societal thing: last night I was home early enough to catch the NHK (think sort of BBC/PBS) 7 o'clock news, and they had a little segment on Uber Eats, which is taking off in Tokyo, and it was all very "you might have seen these around town, here's what they are sort of thing" complete with a young guy talking about he can choose when he wants to work, and a manager saying that it's great that, during a labor shortage* it's a big help for his… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 8:44 PM on June 12, 2019

Gotanda, I'm right there with you on the pretty terrible bedside manner/understanding of pain management by doctors in Japan. I'm working through a kidney stone, and my regular doctor said "just wait until it really starts to hurt, then go to this other doctor you've never been to and know nothing about!" without really telling me what "really starting to hurt" means, so I'm playing some sort of weird game of chicken, hoping I can get through the next two weeks without the… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 10:34 PM on June 25, 2019

One of the less pleasant realizations of this past year for me was that, at this point in my life, at this age (which yeah, I get it, isn’t all that old yet), but these finances (which are crap), there are a lot of places that were in my “someday” list that I need to realize are going into the “oh well, it would’ve been nice” file. One of those is Tierra Del Fuego, which I’d always wanted to see because there’s something about the end of land that’s always meant something to me, that little… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 7:10 AM on June 23, 2019

Gather round, Mefites, and hear the tale of the ultimate coffee, a tale of woe, of parents divorced at young Ghidorah’s early years, and of half assed friend of the court rulings, decreeing every other weekends with a dad that had no concrete idea of what kids needed, or how they should be raised, and furthermore, a disastrous sweet tooth he passed on to his children! Hear the tale of COFFEE COCOA a Sunday morning treat with more sugar than any one should ingest at one go, let alone feed to a… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 9:58 AM on June 21, 2019

Well, by definition, the C.H.U.D.s, right? I mean, as long as we’re lucky and they stay down there...
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 5:30 PM on June 15, 2019

(Shudder) I know, but I hope no one else finds out.
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 12:58 AM on June 16, 2019

Probably just a bunch of stairs.
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 4:04 AM on June 16, 2019

I’m having a bbq this Sunday, and on the 29th, doing another event at a bar that’s invited me to come in and take over their kitchen a couple times a year, so today (my day off, he sobbed), I’ll be smoking 10kg of chipotle paprika bacon (for, uh, some friends), doing five pork shoulders for pulled pork, and making probably 7 kilos of kielbasa, while also cleaning the house and hopefully watching the Deadwood movie. Mrs Ghidorah is working tonight, so I have a feeling that my dinner will consist… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 5:04 PM on June 6, 2019

Among other things, I think it’s a good time to stop and realize that terms like Outragefilter were coined a long damn time ago, at a very different time in the site’s lifespan. As demonstrated in this conversation where someone asked what buttoning means, in jokes have their own way of ending as exclusionary/gatekeeping jargon that newer members don’t get, and might not understand as things that are well intentioned or good humored.

Something I would like to see,… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 9:15 PM on June 4, 2019

I'm a sucker for apples so crisp they crack apart when you take a bite. Currently, that means I wait around for Fuji apples to become less than crazy expensive in Japan. In China, I have no idea what the variety was but I could find giant apples that were incredibly crispy and tasted of honey. Pretty much the perfect apple.

As far as pineapple, though... We can do recipes, right?

Skin, and quarter a whole pineapple, slicing off the hard inner… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 6:32 PM on May 30, 2019

highgarden?

I’m pretty sure Bronn is on his way to kill me just for the suggestion. Geez, thanks.
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 7:09 PM on May 20, 2019