Tag: Nazis

Melting pot

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 25 Comments
Mom’s chili, a staple of my childhood. It’s good … but I prefer Pierre Franey’s version.

I was idly cooking up a pot of Pierre Franey’s turkey chili yesterday when some doglike portion of my brain not focused on the task at hand hopped the wall and came back with a bone for me to gnaw.

It was the Fourth of July. I was preparing a meal of Mexican origin that Texas claims as its own (along with a sizable portion of Mexico) using a Frenchman’s recipe in a New Mexican kitchen.

Mom’s recipe. You can see it’s got a lot of miles on it.

This particular recipe was “fairly traditional,” according to Franey, and not so very different from my Iowa-born mother’s take on the dish, which dates back to the O’Grady family’s stint on Randolph AFB at San Antonio, circa 1962-67. But Franey’s version uses turkey instead of beef, with a particular season in mind — not the Fourth of July, but Thanksgiving, which is when his recipe was published in The New York Times in 1992.

Franey’s journey to a quick, simple, and delicious chili recipe certainly took the scenic route, if we use his biography as our map. As a young man he left France to join “an impressive team of cooks” at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. When World War II erupted a few years later, he took another job — with the U.S. Army.

Offered a cushy berth as personal chef to Gen. Douglas McArthur, Franey declined, saying he’d rather help his countrymen fight Nazis in France. Thus, after boot camp at Fort McClellan in Alabama, he shipped out to Europe as a machine gunner, rising to the rank of sergeant and collecting a Purple Heart for his troubles.

After the war, Franey went on to work with Craig Claiborne on recipes and restaurant reviews for the NYT, and in 1975 hung out his own shingle there as “The 60-Minute Gourmet.” A decade later he was cooking on public television, too.

Imagine that.

What might an 18-year-old Pierre Franey encounter upon his arrival in today’s America? An immigrant … and from France? Taking American jobs? Willing, even eager, to fight Nazis rather than serve his betters in the kitchen?

He’d be in a Salvadoran slammer before he could get his apron on. And without machine-gunning any Nazis, more’s the pity. If the kid could channel the Pierre Franey from that other timeline I expect his 1942 self would be astonished that 83 years later we’re fighting brownshirts in America as Lady Liberty hides her face in shame.

Me, I’d still be using Mom’s chili recipe. Which is fine. But it takes a lot more time, and runs light on peppers and long on tomatoes.

Walk it off

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments

If you can’t ride or run, you can always walk.

It’s gonna be one of those holiday seasons.

The minor plague working its way through El Rancho Pendejo is taking its sweet time about the project. Herself seems past the worst of it — a lingering cough, but otherwise feels fine — while Your Humble Narrator remains in the early stages, making noises like a plumber’s helper working a clogged toilet.

As problems go, this is strictly First World, which ain’t bad for a couple of gabachos who live in the Third. We know people who have real diseases and realer troubles and somehow never go all Gloomy Gus on us.

“Gee whillikers, pal, you say you don’t feel perky enough for a little bikey ridey in the late fall sunshine?  Hard knocks for sure. Our puppy just died and the basement’s flooded and the kid just got filmed having gay sex in a congressional hearing room, so we had to quit our jobs, change all our phone numbers, and cancel the Internet. Plus we have Nazis marching around the neighborhood at all hours roaring “Blood and soil!” But I feel ya, bruh. ’Scuse me, back in a jiff, I gotta put out the cat. One of the Nazis set her on fire.”

So, yeah. Instead of being a whiny little gobshite all the time (instead of most of the time) I make my little tee-hees on the Innertubes, drink lots of hot beverages, and take short walks around the foothills trails, all the while hawking and snorting and spitting and in general trying to encourage the boogers to abandon this crumbling temple of the soul and jump on someone else, preferably a cat-torching Nazi.

It even helps, for a little while. Haven’t seen any sniffling Nazis out there yet, but I remain hopeful, if not optimistic.

Speaking of optimistic, the Colorado Supremes whack an underhanded insurrectionist with the fat end of the bat. The real Supremes bat next.

First Loser

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 13 Comments

A scene from last night’s GOP debate.

Anybody remember who else was on Paul von Hindenburg’s shortlist to be named chancellor of Germany in January 1933?

Could’ve been Baron Hoodat von Votsizface for all we know.

In most competitions, political, sporting, or otherwise, the runner-up doesn’t get a lot of press, the main reason being that s/he is the First Loser.

The winner gets the trophy, a parade, the keys to the Republic; the First Loser gets a polite interview or two — “Them’s the breaks, hah?” — and then toddles on home to gnaw on his or her liver before hitting the rubber-chicken circuit.

And even this shabby treatment is predicated on there being an actual competition taking place.

So why is the goat rodeo the GOP is trying to pass off as a horse race to nominate its pestilential candidate still on the nation’s front pages?

“Hope is not a strategy,” Chris Christie, one of the aspirants for the First Loser’s tinfoil tiara with bottle-cap medallion, told Faux News on Monday. Especially when one has none. (He’s sticking around anyway.)

Exactly why remains a mystery. The Joisey Jagoff and his fellow aspirants for the glue factory are still whinnying at each other in the paddock while Multiple Felonies lumbers around turn three, farting and wheezing old Nazi marching arias.

Face it, Chris, Nikki, Ron, and Vivek. The only horse’s ass in this race that matters is the one you haven’t even seen since before the starter’s pistol fired. You’re racing for second against a fat Nazi.

Even Hindenburg beat Adolf Hitler, f’fucksake. Only once, and not for good. But still.

Scared strait

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 14 Comments

Hello, Comrade Yeti, me love you long time.
Zdravstvuĭte, tovarishch Yeti, me love you long time.

Ho, ho. The brownshirts who cuffed one journo’ and tried to intimidate a couple more during a Joe Miller tea party at an Alaskan public school are apparently active-duty soldiers moonlighting without approval from their chain of command.

You’ll notice in the video still that one of these Nazis is giving the sieg heil with the wrong hand. Thirty days close arrest, Heinrich. If you’re lucky. Dis-miss.

What is it with Alaska, anyway? These Arctic Circle assholes suck the public sugar tit drier than a popcorn fart, like Nosferaturu locked onto a fat artery after a few hits of killer bud, then complain that they don’t like the taste.

What say we hire a few of these out-of-work fellas I hear so much about lately in the lower 48 to saw this frozen shithole off the continent and shove it across the Bering Strait to to Siberia, see how these freedom-loving dingbats like it over there? Love it or leave it, beeeyotch. Preferably the latter.

That lame-ass beard surrounding Miller’s smirking yap ought to look like porn-star poontang to some horny Russian yeti. Probably be the first time that mouth of his has been put to good use since his mama whelped him in a Kansas trash can.