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Random Thing Number One:
Nazi Bunnies
In my entry from June 4, 2002 I wrote about angry people throughout history, and I posted a picture of Adolph Hitler as a bunny (I copied the picture
from another site and just drew all the Nazi stuff on it).
Then someone sent me an email on October 9, 2006 where they had copied the picture from me, printed it, colored it with crayons, scanned it and emailed
it to me, which was kind of funny but also a little sad. My response to them was this:
Thank you for the picture. I hadn't envisioned someone actually coloring it with crayons. I also hadn't considered
that Hitler might be a brown bunny, as a Nazi rabbit would probably have considered them genetically inferior to the white
rabbits. I mean the white rabbits are the ones who are more civilized and live in homes and everyone thinks they're so cute,
and the brown ones are the wild buck rabbits that scratch in the dirt eating garbage and causing trouble and using up valuable
resources that could be better used for the more genetically desirable white rabbits. Or anyway that's what a Nazi rabbit
would think.
I'm guessing.
Really.
Here is an excerpt from a book I'm reading called Seduced By Hitler (Adam Lebor and Roger Boyes, Barnes &
Noble, 2000):
Such stories presented a stark contrast to the lot of the ordinary German who was becoming
increasingly dependent on "balcony pig". This was a somewhat inflated term for a rabbit which had become the main secure source
of meat. The Reich's Association of German Rabbit Breeders became an influential body, the key to making Germany independent
of meat imports. Naturally, the rabbits were bred according to the principles of racial selection.
OK, so it's not exactly a stretch to think that Nazis would breed rabbits the same way they did everything else, but
still. I thought it was funny.
Shut up.
Random Thing Number 2:
Danish Christmas Traditions
And Vending Machines
I have a friend who is spending Christmas with her family, and she sent me this email which she said I could post here
on the condition that I change her name. So let's call her Elektra, just because. Anyway here it is:
Just for kicks, I'm going to bore you now with a bit of an image of what my family holidays are like up here.
My mother is Danish and Christmas is the one time of the year she insists on being totally ethnic. Now that would
be perfectly fine except for the fact that my ancestors come from a part of the world that practically sees no daylight at
all this time of year; so the "traditonal" Christmas foods have a lot more to do with basic survival than say; taste.
I keep telling her that people didn't eat this stuff because they liked it, but because the alternative was starvation.
I'm sure if my forefathers had the option, they would have picked turkey, ham or even spagetti over this stuff any day of
the week.
Its all very bland, and dried fish is a key ingredient. Somewhere along the way,
someone (probably a Danish minister desperate for some new material for a winter time sermon) - made the analogy that all
this "winter food" was colorless or white, and therefore at Christmas time represents the purity of Christ. So
an essential theme to this type of Danish cooking, beyond being tasteless and disgusting, is that everything be white.
I call it the white food meal (remember in home ec class when they taught us that a balanced meal was colorful?).
Last year we had this dried fish, preserved in lard that had to be boiled in the gargage for 3 days to soften it up (smell
is horendous, that's why you make it in the garage) before you can even think about feeding it to somone. This is supplemented
with such wonderous delicaclies as fish pudding; herring casserole; potatoes with the skins peeled off them and if we
are really living on t he edge, cucumbers with the peels removed. Hungry yet? I am not a picky eater at all but
Christmas dinners like this over the years have permanently warped me. No one likes this stuff, and so we all push it
around the plate on Christmas eve, and then have to face it as left overs for days on end.
This family
tradition is going to die with my mother - my brother and I have sworn an oath to ensure that future generations never, ever
have to endure this kind of ethnic holiday torture. So think of me Sunday night, and if you have any creative suggestions
on how to get rid of "white food" without actually having to eat it - I'm all ears.
Seriously, I love my family
dearly, and love the fact that they honor traditions, just wish it didn't happen to include this particular one.
I can go on and on about midless quirky Danish details...but I'll try to restrain myself. Ok, just one more
- then I stop; last summer I was in Denmark for a family reunion. My cousin Thora and I spent more time roaming
the country sans family, and stayed in a colorful assortment of low cost (i.e. cheap) European lodging along the way.
My favorite was a place called the Zleep Inn (I liked saying the word Zleep - part of the reason we made the reservation there)
- which was more of a youth hostel than a formal hotel. In the lobby they had the most amazing assortment of vending
machinces I've ever seen. But my absolute favorite was the pasta vending machine (see photo). It has pasta at
the top (if you look closely you can see it), and a place to put a plate at the bottom. Somewhere in the middle
there was a vat of boiling water that the pasta seemed to dump into and cook when you put money in. On
the side you could push buttons to choose your sauce options - kinda like a coffe machine where you can make selections for
cream and/or sugar. I was never brave enough to try it - but the whole contraption just cracked me up. We were
in the middle of this medieval city filled with just about every kind of dining option you could imagine, but people were
buying spaghetti from a machine in the hotel lobby. Go figure
Please note that I also changed the name of her cousin, but everything else is directly from her email. Actually it was
two emails. But whatever. Elektra also thinks my idea for a moose farm is unworkable, which I find ironic, coming from
a woman who's actually seen a working pasta vending machine.
Also, I will never stay at a hostel, particularly one in Europe, because I saw that movie Hostel where in Europe
they torture you with electric drills and band saws and then kill you, which I'm pretty sure doesn't really happen but it's
one more reason to never go to Europe.
Random Thing Number Three:
Why I Hate Christmas
In the first Die Hard movie, there's this one scene where John McClane takes all this plastique that he stole
from the terrorists and he ties it to a chair, but before he drops the chair down the elevator shaft he takes the detonators
and sticks a couple of them in it, then he's like "F*** it!" and he sticks them all in there and drops it down the shaft and
says "Take this under advisement, jerkweed!" and it blows up and all the windows shatter. It's totally awesome.
When this movie first came out, I thought he was using all the detonators because he wanted to make sure that the terrorists
couldn't use them, but this dude that my friend Tom used to hang out with said that he did it because he was just a regular
cop and he didn't know how many detonators to use, so he just used them all. Since I had that conversation back in 1988, I've
seen the movie like 150 times and I still don't know which one is true.
The only reason I'm thinking about it is because it's getting close to Christmas and Die Hard is almost my favorite
Christmas movie. I love it when he kills the first terrorist and then puts a Santa hat on him and leaves him in the elevator
with the words "Now I have a machine gun Ho-Ho-Ho" written on his shirt. It's awesome. And they keep playing Beehoven's 9th in the background, which is so totally awesome, especially when the vault opens and the lights come on, or when the terrorists
set off the explosives and John McClane ties a firehose around his waist and jumps off the roof of the building and the helicopter
with the FBI guys crashes, I think it's exactly what Beehtoven had in mind when he wrote that symphony. And then in the end,
John and Holly learn the true meaning of family and giving and all that stuff. If they didn't say "fuck" so much in that movie,
I would make it a family tradition to watch it every year.
Other than Die Hard and the first Lethal Weapon, I can't stand Christmas.
I was having lunch yesterday with some of the ladies at work and I mentioned to them that I hate Christmas. And I thought
that pretty much everyone at work knew that I am a Christian but this one woman goes "That's because you don't know the real
reason for Christmas" and went on and on about Jesus and the true meaning of Christmas and giving and blah blah blah.
What I wanted to say was that the true meaning of Christmas is that when Constantine "converted" to Christianity, all
he really did was take all the pagan stuff that they already had in place and just slap Christian labels on them, so that
the day of the dead became all saint's day, and the winter festival became Christmas, and the fertility rituals became easter,
and pagan gods became patron saints. And whether all of that is good or bad and whatever judgements we can make about the
Crusades and Inquisitions that came later, I'm just saying that that's what happened. That's where Christmas came from.
I'm not stupid and I know that Christmas is part of our culture, and I still do the whole Santa thing for my kids, but
there's just something odd about seeing all the jerkweeds and buttwipes that piss me off the rest of the year, walk around
for a week talking about brotherhood and charity. And I have a hard time believing that there's any special place or time
that means anything more to God than any other, that He's more pleased with my life on certain days and not on others. It
doesn't make sense.
Anyway that's not what I said. What I said was "Whatever."
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