Iceland’s got a lot going for it: fresh, clean air, perfect water, jaw-dropping scenery and gorgeous, gorgeous inhabitants. They don’t go in for comically death-defying fattening foods like we do here in the States. It’s not their style. But generally speaking, you can find better food in a pet store than you can in Iceland.

I’m exaggerating for comic effect here, of course. Having once learned the hard way that Gravy Train does not secrete anything close in flavor to real gravy when you add water, I do know the difference.

It’s just that because Iceland is so far away from everything and everyone else, and a country made of Arctic tundra, there’s no such thing as fresh local produce. Whatever is grown locally is grown in geothermal greenhouses and everything else has to be flown in from Europe. This drives up prices for pretty much everything on the island. And it makes for some seriously strange sandwiches that cost at least ten bucks. Like this one, snapped at a gas station outside of Vik:

I emailed a few Icelandic acquaintances, just to make sure I was reading the label correctly. That last letter isn’t one we have in English, and I wanted to make sure it wasn’t a cognate game-changer. They all wrote back, saying essentially the same thing: “Yep, that is a Bacon Nacho Sandwich.”
Read the rest of this entry »

I didn’t used to understand why BoingBoing posted unicorn chasers and cute stuff after high controversy, but now I totally get it. There’s been far, far more outrage over this whole coffee incident than the incident merited. Sure, I behaved badly and stirred the pot, and for a little while I thought it was funny. Now that everyone involved’s completely embarassed themselves, it’s time to move on and just look at something cute before getting back to work:

The photo comes from Gwen Turner Juarez’s Flickr stream, and it’s far from the only good one on there.

I lay in bed in Brooklyn yesterday afternoon, staring up at the ceiling and watching the sunlight fade from the room. I couldn’t nap, couldn’t rest. A creature had taken up residence in my throat and chest. I imagined it to be black and very hairy, with large leathery wings. It wasn’t quite a bird and wasn’t quite a mammal, just this hairy winged thing, like a shaggy, greasy bat.

It moved around, pacing between my uvula and heart, shuffling and trying to stretch its wings. I imagined what it would feel like when the shaggy bat burst past my lips and lifted off, cutting ragged figure-8s around the paper lamps hanging from my ceiling.

Smithfield Ham is a meat like no other. A close cousin to Italian prosciutto, Smithfield ham is the meat of peanut-fed hogs, salt-cured and hickory smoked for a minimum of six months in the corporate limits of Smithfield, Virginia — home to my grandparents, aunt and uncle. Smithfield ham is drier and more thickly cut than supple, subtle prosciutto. Compared to Smithfield ham, prosciutto is the damp rag used to wipe a hog farmer’s work boots.

In a purely physical sense, Smithfield ham is terrible for you. The only way it could harm your heart more from a medical perspective would be if a surgeon were to slice your chest open and manually pack your arteries with wads of the stuff. From an emotional perspective, it is Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving, love and forgiveness and bedtime stories all in one salty, fat-filled bite. Draped over a handmade biscuit with butter, it is also Prozac, Lithium and THC.

The bat flapped tireless, frustrated laps up and down my throat all last night, all this morning, in the cab to La Guardia, on the plane and all the way through the airport. It wouldn’t come out, and it was getting hairier by the hour, so hairy it got heavy when it settled on my chest to tongue its wet wings clean.

I keep waiting for the real grief to happen, but I just feel numb. I feel like I’m made out of balsa wood or something — soft and flexible, but easily shattered. All I want to do is read. I am an Easy Reader of epic proportions on a normal day, but now I am positively EATING words. I finished “Bonfire of the Vanities” on the plane and started right in on Haruki Murakami’s “Dance Dance Dance.” I was able to take a break from reading and joke around with my dad and sister while we shopped for funeral suits this afternoon, but after reading Pop-Pop’s obituary in the local paper, I couldn’t stop. It was all I could do not to wad the newspaper up and stuff it in my mouth — knocked out the front page, local section, comics and started in on the classifieds by the time we pulled up to my aunt and uncle’s house.

Read the rest of this entry »

Everything’s unwrapped, the champagne’s gone flat, and even the hangovers are over. While my holidays were full of warmth and good cheer and that uniquely Simmermon brand of stressed-out love, I’m glad to be entering that great grey yawn of real winter. Running around outside SUCKS until mid-April and when I have my daily panic that my life is slipping past, I can look out the window and feel fine about having a laptop strapped to my face. In the factory-blended oatmeal that is an East Coast winter, every numbing day that ends like all the rest is at least one day closer to spring.

My New Years’ was spent having cocktails and a home-cooked meal with my girlfriend, best friend, his wife, and their new baby. My New Years’ celebrations in years past have also involved copious amounts of booze, screaming and vomiting, but this years’ was different.

While the first decade or so of David Allen Browne’s life is going to be happy and full of love, he’s going to have no choice but to become grim, selfish and willfully ignorant in order to rebel against his hilarious, brilliant and loving parents once he hits puberty. Hopefully he’ll snap out of it before it’s time to take the SATs.

Christmas was different, too. I brought my girlfriend home, for one thing. It’s a big deal for me to bring somebody home for a number of reasons:

• My sister and I have pretty well inoculated our parents against cultural/racial hangups, accidental profanity, body art and punk-influenced fashion choices … all known causes of heart failure to conservative parents. My mom can even say “fuck” without making a face now. But my family can smell a bullshit heart from a running mile, and the false politeness that ensues is deeply embarrassing. Nobody makes it across the threshold of the Simmermon unless they’re top shelf for real.
• Also, my grandmother kind of hates anyone that me and my uncle have ever dated. She comes around eventually, but I can take no responsibility for any eye-rolling, interrupting, or ignoring until she does. Folks that can’t handle it don’t make the cut.
• The relationship must be about much more than the physical. As I mentioned before, my family can sniff out a bullshit heart. In a small house with two parents, a sister, two lively and curious dogs and a “no ring, no shared bedroom” policy, that physical side is going to have to take a little holiday of its own.

Read the rest of this entry »

Behind that adorable black face, behind those sweet mournful eyes lies the soul of an unapologetic shit-eater.

For real.

That is not a metaphor. She’s gone from stealing fruitcake and puking it under the tree last Christmas to full-blown coprophagia, gobbling it right up from between dead leaves on the ground at night. Cold and hard or piping hot and still steaming, she doesn’t care and she does it quick, too, too quick to catch sometimes. She just can’t help herself.

Layla’s my sister Jess’s dog, half-beagle and half lab with incurable separation anxiety. She was taken from her mother too young, and consequently has massive incurable anxiety. Jess has tried training camps, reading dog books, everything. Nothing works. Every time Jess is gone for a little while, Layla overindulges in something she shouldn’t: fruitcake, shoes, a purse, now fecal matter.

All training methods exhausted, my sister now just spoils the dog completely rotten, talking to her in a high, squealing voice, carrying her in her arms like a large infant and allowing the dog to “kiss” her directly on the lips.

A few weeks ago, Layla vomited a five-inch turd onto my parents’ living room carpet. My mom called Jess up immediately to report the news, saying only

“Your dog has vomited a massive turd onto the carpet. Yes, a turd. Go ahead and let her lick your lips again. As a concerned mother, I hope you’ve got good health insurance,”

and hung up.

Such was the climate of the household this Thanksgiving. Everyone was exhausted and frustrated with this new habit, this repugnant fetish for a newly repulsive creature that’s far too cute to kick.

Jess and I spent Thanksgiving day over at my aunt and uncle’s taking care of my grandparents. They moved in sometime last summer for a few weeks while my grandpa recuperated from an operation, and it’s become clear that they’re in no shape to live independently. My grandpa’s 88 years old with congestive heart failure, kidney failure and diabetes. He needs a walker to get around now and can’t lift his legs by himself.

Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t make a single dime off this blog, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t pay off big-time. I don’t have ads or a large readership, but apparently my influence is enough that people are imitating things they see on here … something that might get them hurt or killed slowly through sheer fat absorption.

Take Bret Wallin, for example. He and literally hundreds of thousands of other people saw the post a little whole back about that ridiculous Franken-fast food pizza. And while some folks thought “yeah, I’d taste that,” Bret said “who’s got a Boboli crust” and MADE one. Actually, he made several:

My friends and I definitely tried our hand at making a couple McDonald’s pizzas. The first was exactly like the pictures you posted - each fast food kept to it’s own kind. The second, though, we chopped up the fries, nuggets, and burgers to spread out the toppings more traditionally.

A really fun time, for sure. We felt that the pickle was surprisingly one of the emergent tastes (as well as the ketchup and mustard to some degree). I first saw a link to your post (I think) on the site Kissing Suzy Kolber. I was visiting some old college friends and I knew right then - “we have to make that… we have to make it TONIGHT!”

And we did. Like I said, a great time. Most everybody felt fine except a couple guys had three slices. That sort of knocked them out for a little bit.

Understandably.

So wait. They made one of these things, ate it, then turned right around and made ANOTHER one. You know, to get it right.

This is why I use my fingers and eyes to make love to the Internet all day long.

You may have noticed this site loading slowly and crashing a lot this afternoon. That’s because at some point today, my post about the nastiest pizza in the world hit the main page of Fark.com. It had already been a busy week, as apparently a LOT of people wanted to have a look at this thing. It’s been linked all over the Web for the last few days, and the traffic has been staggering, at least for me.

Have a look:

It blows my mind, really. I revamped this thing to try and get some traffic, slap some ads on here and maybe get a little cash for my obsessions. But man, overnight? I know this is all going to die down in a few days, but right now, it boggles the mind.

I’ve done so much writing on here, so much original photography, etc. And it just amazes me that these photos (which are admittedly pretty cool and nasty) would have this much appeal. But man, you never know what you’re going to get when you get what you think you want — and you never know where you’re gonna be when the lightning strikes.

So yeah, in a nutshell:

1) Sorry about the slow page
2) but it was for a really good, exciting reason
2) one you look past the fact that it was just about some junk food.

I’m sure things’ll be back to normal next week.

I was visiting some old friends in Richmond last weekend when I found one of my paintings from college prominently displayed in their entryway:

There’s a detail with easier-to-read text after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

This girl, this beautiful young girl, just eats a LIVE praying mantis in this video. Even though I totally eat factory-farmed meat every chance I get: this is just WRONG.

If the scale were reversed, the mantis would have done the same thing to her. Even if the scale weren’t, it would have tried anyway. Mantids are fearless — they’ll go after anything that moves, including hummingbirds and human beings.

But in the beginning there, where the excited young man says “Two guys are coming to church because she’s eating this” … something about that just gives me the willies. That, and the tag line below the video on its Myspace page that says

My roommate eating a praying mantis. She’ll do pretty much anything for Jesus. Love it!

Although I probably would go check out their church if I thought they sat around eating live insects in worship service every Sunday morning. I’d probably bail on coffee hour, though.