My Little Buddies Pt. Deux

So when I last wrote about my Little Buddies, those tasty little satsuma mandarins with joy filled hearts, they were at the mercy of some sick individual whose soul is as black as tar.

However I have good news, my surviving Little Buddies have managed to escape, in quite the most colourful manner I should mention. They even sent me a picture to commemorate their escape, and it's quite dramatic to say the least.  

Mr. C on Tolerance

Strange Obsession with Genitals

I came to a rather disturbing realization the other day. My people, Chinese people that is, love penis.

Yup those are penises. I don't know what else to say.

They eat it, they powder it then eat it, they powder it then put it in pills, and they probably drink it in their tea (unconfirmed, don't wanna confirm it).  They do all this because they believe that consuming penis will make them more virile, help with their circulation, or fulfill some other bogus claim that has its roots in a time when people still wiped their ass with leaves.

Granted traditional Asian medical practices have put us on to some pretty cool stuff, like ginseng for example which actually does have some proven beneficial properties. The successes of these traditions though don't make up for the mistakes or the silly superstitions that spring out of them.

One Giant Sausage Party

According to a recent study done by National Geographic they were able to determine that the most average person in the world is twenty eight years old, male, and is of Han Chinese descent. Now that is cool and slightly frightening but why exactly are there so many bloody Chinese males in their late twenties floating around?

What China may look like in the year 2020.

Well the reasons are many but one of the major contributing factors, and the focus of this part of the post, is probably sex-selective infanticide. The short and terrible of it is that a child may either be aborted as a fetus or killed as a infant simply because they weren't the sex that the parents preferred. The reasons why anyone would do this are many, and all are pretty god-damned dim witted, so going through them would be pretty pointless.

Anyway this barbaric practice may have led to the current ratio of 113 males to every 100 females in China. This would officially make China the biggest sausage party on Earth, and according to estimates by the year 2020 there could be 35 million surplus males in China.

As a side note, economists have predicted that the period onward from 2020 is going to see a lot of growth for Kleenex and Vaseline in the Asian market, if you don't already have money invested in those products I suggest getting in now.

SIDE NOTE: While Google image searching for a funny image that captured the spirit of the term sausage party I had failed to set my search filter to strict. Never ever search for the term sausage party without your filter set to strict, just don't do it.

I'm not Going to Take it Anymore

I love the parts of tradition that bring families together and helps them celebrate the positive aspects of their culture. I do my best to be open to what I could learn from another culture, and I've grown as a person because of it. But I'm not a tolerant or open person when it comes to traditions that do more harm than good.

There are species being pushed to the brink of extinction so that a bunch of people with more money than brains can put powdered dick in their morning tea.

There are countries around the world where innocent lives are extinguished so that a family can have a son to pass on a name.

These practices and many others like them are simply sick and barbaric, and one defense that is constantly brought up by supporters of such barbarism is that it's tradition. Well guess what, lynching black people used to be a tradition too, but that got thrown out when people realized that lynching anyone is a pretty dick move. We need to look at these traditions that we hold dear and ask, "Is this conducive to creating a functioning compassionate society, or is it leading to countless numbers of needless deaths?"  

If you end up going with the latter, then maybe it's time for a change.

My Little Buddies

I don't think that I can ever eat an orange again. I just couldn't bear it, my guilt would drive me over the deep end. 

The joy brings tears to mine eye.

Before you go and start believing that I may have come unhinged just hear me out. Today while working away whistling happily to myself I happened upon a bag of tangerines, whose brand name was Little Buddies and the bag was adorned with a picture of three very merry looking  little tangerines. They were so joyous and gay, one was dancing, while another laughed, and the third was just smiling at his friends. They were so full of life, of hopes and dreams. They looked like they were ready to conquer the world, with "friendship!" as their battle cry and mirthful laughter as their weapon. If someone were to create a contest in which contestants had to most accurately portray the joys of life and incredible mirth, our Little Buddies would beat the Dalai Lama like a red headed step child. No joke.

This is where my dilemma comes in, how could I devour something so cheerful? When I think about eating one of them I just imagine his little look of bliss turn into a twisted face of abject horror as he realizes that I've just consumed his frontal lobe. It leaves me feeling more than a bit guilty. 

Why can't getting my daily allotment of vitamin C be more easy and less guilt ridden?

UPDATE! June 11th, 2011

This morning some cruel and thoughtless, nay I should say monstrous, human being sent me this picture with the words, "Thought you might find this funny..." in the email.

OH GOD NO!

I am horrified and speechless as I stare at this image straight out of my worst nightmares. Now if you'll excuse me I need to go and cry while sitting in the fetal position.

Detestable Delectables

There are things out in the world that no one in their right mind would eat, like rail road spikes, live power lines, or my grandmother's terrible, terrible cooking. Then there are foods out there in the world  that are generally accepted as fantastic.

But then there are the foods out there that straddle the line. These foods might look absolutely god awful, like something crawled on your plate and died a slow agonizing death from eating something as equally ugly as it, but these foods can still be tasterific. And today's post ladies and gents is dedicated to two of my favourite foods (of many) which aptly fit the category of what I like to call Detestable Delectables. 

1. The Dim Sum Treat

BOCK!?

For those of you not in the know Dim Sum is essentially Chinese brunch, but instead of eating eggs Benedict and washing it down with a nice mimosa, we eat different kinds of proteins stuffed into dumplings and wash it down with cheap Chinese green tea. Which I'm pretty sure means that it has been cut with something toxic that will either render me blind or dead. 

Anyway, we don't just eat dumplings though, we also eat sticky rice, which is various proteins shoved into steamed rice, black bean steamed short ribs, and one of my favorite all time items, chicken feet.

So here is the skinny on these skinny little treats.

Pros:

- Fried or steamed, sometimes both, then simmered in black bean sauce. Pure awesome.

- They are all flavour, as you'll mainly just be eating chicken skin, and everyone knows that the skin is the best part.

- If you are full and you have two left you can always dance them across the table, or if you only have one you can always use it to traumatize a small child. Both of these things I have done, and they are fun, fun, fun!

Cons:

- It's kind of morbid eating something that is clearly and easily identified as having come from a chicken. 

- It's a guilt trip thinking that you are eating the feet of a now amputee chicken, less so when you realize that the rest of him probably went the same way, or more so I suppose. Crap now I feel like a jerk.

- Try not to think about where those feet may have been when they were still attached to the chicken... You thought about it didn't you?

- It's feet for fucks sake, who the hell would choose to eat feet? Besides me?

2. No it's Not.

Another one of my favourites from my childhood is a dish that is very close to my heart and the hearts of literally billions of people around the world, congee.

Hmmm that looks... Wait what the hell is that?

Now congee, which is actually known by many names in many languages, is at its most basic level nothing more than a small amount of rice that has had the ever living shit cooked out of it. If you ever over cooked rice you know that it tends to get a little mushy, and if you took that mushy rice and cooked it further then you eventually would get congee. Now either during or after the cooking you would add all sorts of lovely and not so lovely ingredients to the mix. Ingredients like salted fish, green onion, mushrooms, chicken, and just about anything else that you might have in the kitchen. Which makes sense because congee was eaten largely in the past as a famine dish because China doesn't have a real stellar history of taking great care of its people, shocking to say the least. 

So here is the low down on the this lowly dish.

Pros:

- It's tasty.

Cons:

- In some of the languages that have a name for congee, that name translates out to "rice gruel". There is a reason for this, it looks like gruel. It is seriously one of the most ugliest things you will ever eat, or won't eat given my enthusiastic endorsement of the dish.

- It has the consistency of warm, chunky snot. If that isn't appetizing I don't know what is.

- They will charge you five dollars for a bowl of the stuff, and it really only takes about fifteen dollars to make a huge pot of it yourself. It's easy to make too, a lobotomized monkey with one arm and severe radiation poisoning could prepare it. Not hard.

- People, if I was not raised eating the stuff, I would sure as hell not willing eat it today.

That concludes our little culinary adventure for today, I hope you enjoyed it and managed to keep your appetite. Stay tuned for the next installment of Detestable Delectables which is my "things that should never have been dunked in a deep fryer" segment. Until later.