Hibachi!

Sometimes I get the feeling that when a Japanese chef has been very, very bad, they send him to America to work off his penance serving hibachi. 

"You will go to the United States and cook the same handful of dishes day in, day out, while making corny jokes and singing bits of old pop songs. You will watch the old people and small children laugh but the teenagers groan as if their soul is being removed with a crowbar. You will have to get a dozen orders to the right people or there will be trouble. Sometimes drunken fools will try to get into the act and you have to prevent them from falling onto the grill. Stunts with fire and knives are mandatory. When you have suffered enough to atone for your sins, you will be permitted to return and begin your career again at the bottom. So be it!"

Or maybe not. Maybe the men (not entirely but almost entirely men) enjoy the atmosphere of cooking with an audience. After all, in many restaurants you make the same dishes over and over, and in many comedy clubs the acts make the same jokes over and over. Why not combine them? Could be fun. 

The hibachi restaurants I've been to usually pack a minimum number of people around each table so that the dinner-and-a-show will have a party feel even if you're combining people from a romantic date, a small birthday party, and some dude who just showed up hungry. You can't cook like that for just one or two people. And I must say I've never had a bad meal from one of those places. But I’ve always wanted to wash everything I'm wearing and take a shower when I get home, because everything smells like the restaurant. 

So here's to you, hibachi chefs, and thanks for making great food in a fun atmosphere. And don't worry about the teenagers. It's not you. They're like that with everybody. 

We've got a Godzilla for sale.

Thinkin' about Godzilla. 

I don't believe I've ever seen a full Godzilla movie. By the time I came along they had gotten pretty silly. The original 1954 Toho movie was pretty damn dark -- Godzilla's ruin of Tokyo would have revived some horrible memories for audiences who had lived through the real thing, with Allied firebombing less than ten years earlier. The Operation Meetinghouse bombing of March 9 through 10, 1945, "is the single most destructive bombing raid in human history," according to Dr. Wikipedia. And yet people packed the theaters in Tokyo to see Godzilla (or, as he was known then, Gojira) destroy the city all over again. 

I've written before how seeing the destruction of midtown Manhattan in The Avengers in 2012 was hardly entertaining to me, having been in midtown on September 11 while my wife was downtown. I wondered about all the non-player characters in all the buildings who were getting obliterated or crippled for life. Previous superhero movies had been all about preventing horrific damage to innocents; this one felt like it was reveling in it, and less than 11 years after the terrorist attacks. 

But no one else seemed to be bothered, so I guess I'm just a little delicate little lotus flower, too good for this world. I haven't bothered with any other superhero movies since the first Guardians of the Galaxy. Don't even mention the word Transformers to me.  

For high-body-count entertainment, though, Godzilla is king of the destroyers. When the children of the original Japanese audiences got older, Toho found that they loved Godzilla, and so movies got geared to younger viewers and it showed. Sure, cities and irreplaceable landmarks and presumably thousands of people got killed, but it was fun! There was even a promotion to design a robot for 1973's Godzilla vs, Megalon. The winning entry was Jet Jaguar! And you can't blame the kid who won for the name, because Jet Jaguar was the name the studio gave the robot. 

Come on, people now, smile on your brother
Everybody get together
Try to love one another right now

I've never even seen the entire Mystery Science Theater episode that covered that picture. 

Some of my friends were big fans of the Godzilla and Godzilla-adjacent movies, which typically ran on ABC's famous 4:30 Movie, films for post-school kids cut in half and run over two days. ABC seemed to program for boys -- it would always be kaiju movies or the Planet of the Apes or low-budget horror films or the 1966 Batman movie or the like. I don't think I had the patience for movies in those days. I could sit through hours of TV, don't get me wrong, but in 30-minute segments, please. 

These days ol' Lizard Eye is back and bigger than ever. (A friend of mine in college always wanted to make a Godzilla movie where the Big G would go up against a bunch of hillbillies who called him "ol' Lizard Eye.") I'm told that in the new films from Legendary Pictures, the good humans want to find a way to coexist with all the giant monsters. Seems like a pretty tall order to me. Every time one of the damn things sneezes, a billion dollars of infrastructure goes up in flames. This is why we can't have nice things! 

I will say this for Godzilla -- he inspired a pretty great song by Blue Öyster Cult. With a riff reminiscent of Godzilla's scream, a thumping drum footstep, and verse hammered out in iambic tetrameter, it's irresistible. 

I just don't find fun in death and destruction. But there will always be those who love the Big G, and good for them. Just don't get stepped on.   

Between hibachi and low tide.

Surely no art form has managed to combine cooking, comedy, prestidigitation, and danger as the hibachi. 

We were at a celebratory dinner the other day and got a table with its own little griddle. "Griddle" seems like an insultingly low-class term for the art of the hibachi chef, to be frank. It comes from the Middle English gredil, or gridiron, but the flat surface isn't a gridiron, which is a grate. Another area where English has let us down.

You have to admire the showmanship of the hibachi, even if you don't like the food, although I do. The chef generally has a repertoire of stunts and jokes, flinging raw eggs and flipping things in his hat and whacking things to pieces and making ingredients dance and sing. This is always accompanied by good cheer, no matter how many times they've had to do the act that day, no matter how grumpy the patrons may be. These guys are pros.

And they're not always guys! For the first time at this restaurant we saw a female hibachi chef. She wasn't feeding our little crew, but I could see her in action, and she was doing her own version of the act. I guess she has broken the glass shīringu.

I have heard that traditionally in Japan, as in many places, chefs of any rank are considered menials, barely worth noticing. It seems strange for a country that gave the world the goofy Iron Chef, but perhaps that's helped change things. The show was wacky but the contestants always serious. In the West the great Auguste Escoffier made cooking at high level a well-respected career. Personally, I have always shown respect to people who are giving me food, if for no other reason than eating it is an act of trust. 

Also, I like to think that in America, we always respect people who work hard. Hibachi chef is no lightweight career. We salute you, chefs! Flame on!

War is... HeLLO!!

 

A fistful of ice cream.

I know I am late to the game on this, but I finally tried a treat that the rest of the world has tried -- mochi ice cream. I'd heard it referenced in everything from books to video games, but never wanted to invest in a boxful of the stuff. Well, My/Mo has made it possible by sheer genius for everyone to have a taste, one frozen dollop at a time. 

"Chew Your Ice Cream Because, Whatever" is one of their slogans. and it seems to sum it up. I was hunting for pearl onions in a strange town halfway up the county when I saw a freezer full of these li'l cuties near the registers. For $1.50 I had to sample the mochi mojo.

For those as ignorant as I was, mochi ice cream is a dollop of ice cream within a sticky rice cake, invented in Japan. This gives it the chewiness mentioned above, but also the ability to be handheld, at least long enough to eat it, without significant melting. Genius!

As for the taste, the dollop shown above was as advertised, vanilla ice cream with a touch of blueberry in the middle, the perfect ice cream serving to ease a craving. 

Hurray for thinking of such a clever idea. Portable ice cream has been a dream from the beginning, when the ice cream cone was invented more than 120 years ago. Eskimo Pies (or whatever they are called now), ice cream sandwiches, Klondike bars, ice cream bars on sticks, all sorts of clever ideas have been tried to give us ice cream on the go. I can't say mochi is the best from my small sample, as the rice cake is kind of flavorless, but it achieves a kind of perfection -- one little ball of goodness that doesn't melt as you eat it. It's like the M&M of ice cream.

One of the curious things about this invention is that, while everyone loves ice cream, people of Asian heritage are among the most lactose intolerant in the world. Europeans and their descendants tend be 18% to 26% lactose intolerant, but Asian ethnicities run 75% to 95%, and some figures for Japanese run all the way up to about 100%. Now, not everyone suffers severely from the condition, and the mochi is so cute and small that it might bother only those who really get the heebie jeebies from milk the worst. I'm just impressed that a people who are that intolerant to lactose devoted the will to make this great ice cream treat. All the same, My/Mo is wise to make some vegan and nondairy flavors. 

So will mochi replace our scooped ice cream as the traditional Key family Thanksgiving dessert (for the last two years, by popular demand)? Nah. A big bowl of vanilla with cranberry sauce and whipped cream is what I want. But I still give a big hand to a little treat that represents another way to enjoy the world's greatest confection. 

Sunday recap.

So how was your Sunday?

Here's my story, in painless brevity:

1) Weather

Large Economy Size Dog Tralfaz was foiled again in his quest for snow. It was actually snowing when we went out at six, but it didn't mean it. All told, it wasn't even a dusting -- more like a film. It had melted by nine.

I think he's actually getting sore about it. Me, I still think Old Man Winter has something awful in the wings. I'm not putting away my Porta-Igloo, the Huge Lands' End Coat That Walks Like a Man, just yet. Or my thermal underpants.

What? Of course I have thermal underpants. Everyone in the Hudson Valley has thermal underpants. Even Paul Shaffer, I hear. Yeah, big ol' union suit, red as a stoplight.

2) Door

February is here! So my concerns about the blank door are over. Like many of my neighbors, I hung a big red Valentine's Day heart on the door. Stepped back; looked good. Then suddenly realized that the block now looks like a string of Japanese love hotels. Maybe this decorating for every holiday thing is a bad idea.

💖🏩💘🏩💓🏩

3) Sink

All right, all right, I didn't stop the stupid leak! Sheesh. I had the part but I couldn't get the hot water off. I needed to get a tool from the cellar, maybe some Liquid Wrench, and figure a way to do it without causing a boiling-hot geyser. I'm sure this will all be blogfodder at some future time.

4) Groundhog Day

Staten Island Chuck, the groundhog at the zoo on that much-abused borough, predicted an early spring this year, as did that Pennsylvania guy. Chuck has the higher accuracy rating, so Phil probably just fell in line. I'll remind readers that Chuck bit Mike Bloomberg and was maliciously treated by Bill "Warren Wilhelm Jr." de Blasio, so over the years he has also proven to be a good bellwether of human character.

5) Church

Our parish has two afternoon Masses, noon and six. We usually make the noon. It was jamming like Christmas Eve. The pastor welcomed everyone, including those who normally make the six p.m. but didn't because of...

6) The Super Bowl

As you may recall, I have not watched any NFL football since the commissioner decided that political correctness and football go together like mac & cheese, so the crazy people should be allowed to run the asylum. But to be accurate, I caught a little of the Bills/Texans playoff game when we were visiting friends last month, because they had it on. Prior to that the last game I saw any of was last year's Super Bowl, and yes, that was because I had just fallen in the driveway as gracefully as a piano in a Chuck Jones cartoon and gotten a concussion. So, dazed on the sofa, there was nothing I could do when my wife put it on. She's as bad a channel-flipper as any man you may know, and she likes football.

This year I distracted the family unit with Animal Planet's Puppy Bowl XVI for as long as I could (Team Fluff won in a squeaker!), but the unit insisted on seeing the game. And it was a pretty exciting finish. I hear that Hard Rock Stadium has a lot of gold confetti for sale cheap.

And that's another Sunday in the books! Who knows what thrills away today?

I do. Proofreading and physical therapy. Blecch.

Squish the Mets.

Not interested in the All-Star Game, as my beloved Mets are 10 games under .500 and going nowhere, saddled with injuries (as usual), stupid coaching, and criminal ownership. I was surprised to see that a Met (rookie Pete Alonso) won the Home Run Derby on Monday, but that will probably mean a season-ending muscle pull next week. Meanwhile, Real Baseball lost again to Fake Baseball, because the All-Star Game is played under the rules of Fake Baseball.

Never mind all that. I have a Mets mystery to solve. It concerns this:

What the heck?

Doesn't this Japanese soda made by beverage giant Kirin look a little like...

Why, yes it does.

I had never heard of Mets soda, but saw it in passing in a video about the strange Japanese (but I repeat myself) world of vending machines. I sat up. Wha...? The Mets have a soda brand? So I did some digging.

I have read, on a Web site that has just gone defunct so I can't link to it (I blame Trump) (organize and resist!), that the name of Mets soda does come from a baseball team, but not the New York one, or in fact a real one; it comes from the fictional Tokyo Mets, who appeared in a manga that ran from 1972 to 1976. It was called Yakyuukyou no Uta, and this is the summary: "Against her insistence, Yuuki is drafted by the Tokyo Mets as the first woman player in the baseball league."

Maybe the New York Mets should try it. What the hell, we're mired in fourth place.

Anyway, it's not too surprising that the manga creators should have named the team after the Mets, since they would have started work on this title soon after the New York Mets shocked the baseball world by winning the 1969 Series, the first expansion team to do so. And using a team name that way might be considered a non-violation, fair use of a trademark -- which then transferred to the soda.

Okay, so let's say the Mets name is up for grabs; what about that logo?

Generally, the United States and Japan respect each other's trademarks, both being signatories to the Madrid Protocol. (I know, China is too, but I expect better out of Japan.) For all I know, the Mets get a quarter every time the Japanese buy a case of Mets soda. Apparently the Mets soda has been around for a while, so I can't quite believe that the New York organization, greedy as it is, has never heard about it.

Mets cola, also by Kirin, made the headlines seven years ago by claiming to help people lose weight. I guess Mets losing can be a good thing, but I still dislike it.

Meanwhile, closer to home, we have a propane distributor in the northeast that goes by this name:

Hmm... Doesn't that remind you a little of...?

Good thing for the propane guys that the New York Yankees have such a reputation for being kind and generous.

Godzilla vs. Colonel Sanders.

A relative of mine who is old enough to know better cannot wait until Friday, when the new Godzilla movie opens. She is obsessed with Japan's not-so-jolly green (or gray) atomic-ray-breathing giant. I'm certain she's had her tickets for weeks. Well, I would suggest she stop into KFC for a bucket of chicken first. That will make the night complete.

Why? Well, Colonel Sanders and Godzilla go together like peanut butter and jelly.

Waaaay back in November 2001, when I was still working in Manhattan and the NY Press was a weekly delight (free, from boxes all over town, run by editor and impresario Russ Smith), one of the columns by writer Jim "Slackjaw" Knipfel astonished me with news about these two cultural titans. I'm glad to say that column is available online now, but let me quote:

Morgan remembered -- bless her again -- that there were a couple places here in town that specialized exclusively in Japanese pop cultural doo-daddery. As it turns out, that very evening, after spending a few hours at a local tavern, we found ourselves strolling past just such a place, on 3rd Ave.
   We went through the doors and up the stairs and through another door, where we found ourselves cast ashore on a very strange island. A kitschy heaven for collector geek and hipster alike. (And me -- though of course I was there on a very serious and limited mission. A hit-and-run sort of thing.)
   The walls and shelves were packed with toys, yes -- but an odd selection of toys. The oddest selection of toys, you might say. From your basic Star Wars and comic book heroes, to a Snoopy aisle, a Hello Kitty collection, action figures from The Fly, Scooby Doo, Futurama and Wallace and Gromit to ... Col. Sanders.
   For some reason, every section of the store contained some sort of Col. Sanders figure. In the far back corner, there was even a Col. Sanders section. Big figures, tiny glass figures, nodders, wind-ups, dolls. Col. Sanders, it seems, had become a huge pop cultural icon in Japan without any of us knowing about it! Was the news of his devastating attack on Tokyo suppressed in the Western news media?

This was the first I've ever heard of the Japanese love for the late Colonel Harland Sanders, but it makes sense to me. As a figure of history and myth, Colonel Sanders hits all the "great man" notes that one sees in Japanese pop culture from old anime to Iron Chef. He's gray-haired, old, wise, kind to children, demanding (but fair) to those who serve him, wealthy, and best of all, he dresses differently from all the people around him.

Kindly he may be, but don't mess with him. The Wikipedia page tells us, "The Japanese Nippon Professional Baseball league has developed an urban legend of the 'Curse of the Colonel'. A statue of Colonel Sanders was thrown into a river and lost during a 1985 fan celebration, and (according to the legend) the 'curse' has caused Japan's Hanshin Tigers to perform poorly since the incident."

I don't know anything about the new Godzilla movie. I know there's at least one other monster. If I thought Colonel Sanders would team up with Godzilla to destroy the real bad guys in the movie, I might want to go see it. 

Good cop, bad cop buddy movie!

Meanwhile, I am exceptionally sorry that KFC does not appear to be doing any cross-promotions with the film, even in Japan. I call that cultural tone-deafness, KFC. And don't try to make it up by putting "Lizard Legs" on the menu -- that will just make it worse. 

And how was your day?

Did you have a lousy Monday? I hope not. Mine was just okay. I was busier than a cramped-up blogger at a metaphor-writin' contest, but the Sisyphean tasks I'm on at the moment didn't show any significant progress. I wish I worked in Hollywood, where you don't have to work to get paid. In fact, they seem to pay you more.

But I shall complain no longer, for a story from 2017 was brought to my attention recently, about an officer in Minnesota who had a bad night on the beat. It seems that Brad Browning and another officer got into a scuffle with a knucklehead named Hietala who had outstanding warrants. Browning's fellow officer pulled out the ol' Taser, aimed... and shot Browning by mistake.

It got worse:

Hietala immediately fled, running through the neighborhood with Browning in pursuit. By the time Hietala hid between two garages in an alley, a Clay County sheriff’s deputy had arrived with a police dog. The dog was cut loose, but instead of biting Hietala, it bit Browning, the police report said.

It's not a good thing when your life turns into a Looney Tune. I wonder if they call him Brad E. Coyote now. Good thing for him that the Piano & Anvil Squad didn't show up to help with the collar.

My other new hero is Tsutomu Yamaguchi, an engineer for Mitsubishi. Perhaps you've heard of him. He accomplished an amazing feat -- by showing up for work twice.

The first time he was on a business trip, just about to leave the city and head home. It was August 6, 1945. He was in Hiroshima.

Yamaguchi was thrown through the air by the shock wave by the freaking atom bomb that fell on the city, and got burned and pretty roughed up, but all things considered, and compared to most of his countrymen in the city, he was in good shape. He spent the night in a shelter and managed to get to the train station the next day, having heard that some trains were running.

This guy, who'd just had the first atomic bomb used in war dropped on him, was going back to his home office to go to work. So remember that next time you call in with the sniffles.

Oh, and the home office? In Nagasaki.

Yes, Tsutomu Yamaguchi was the only human being confirmed by the Japanese government to have survived both atomic bombs dropped on Japan. Not only that, he lived to the age of 93. Hell, if two A-bombs can't stop you, you deserve to live a long time. I'm almost surprised anything could kill him.

So remind me of these guys the next time I complain about work. I'm on velvet here. No one seems to want to drop a nuke on me at the moment, nor sic the K-9s on me, nor friendly-fire a Taser at my behind.

But I'm watching out for the Piano & Anvil Squad. Don't trust those guys a bit.

Raw death fish, anyone?

When I was a kid, if you offered to feed someone raw fish, they might offer to punch you in the nose. There'd probably be loud discussions about trichinosis and liver flukes or some other such things as well. The was no raw food movement. Civilized people knew how to make fire. Raw was for wild animals and wild people; the last decent person to survive on raw food on purpose was John the Baptist.

But by the time I was in college everyone was sucking down sushi as fast as they could get it. It was the 80's, when Japan was about to take over the world, and I guess we were preemptively surrendering the culture, starting with karaoke and sushi. That was before we knew about Japanese game shows, hikikomori, adult adoption, capsule hotels, and anime schoolgirls with the oversize chestal endowments of fully grown Vegas showgirls, and got to wondering whether atomic bomb fallout made people insane decades after the fact.

Anyway, despite the omnipresence of sushi in New York, I've managed to get this far in life without eating any. I'm not a big fish lover---many Americans aren't; there's probably more fish animosity here per capita than in any other country---but I will go for unchallenging fish like cod or tuna if it's cooked.

My wife, sushi fan that she is, thought she ought to break me in.

Yep, knitted me a sushi. Seaweed-wrapped, she said. Sprayed it with a ginger air freshener to make it more authentic.Very cute.

Well, I can't say for sure if I'd like the real thing yet, but this one tasted pretty good.