A Dixie Carpetbagger

Oh, wait, what’s this?  A blog?  Hmm, I vaguely remember writing this drivel… ahh, well, let’s get back to it, eh?

Well, I seem to be falling down on that whole “regular posts” thing.  I’ve been… busy.

Feasting on the flesh of fallen giants

One thing I’ve been doing is raiding pillaging visiting all of the Movie Galleries that were going out of business.  I visited the one in my hometown the day after the liquidation sale started, and began hitting all of the others as I could get to them.  The prices were “okay” at first, but they got much, much better– gallery (older) movies at $1.49 each, or $7.50/10 and new movies for $1.99 each or $10/10.  As you can imagine, stuff began flying of the shelves then– at one store a guy bought two moving boxes full of movies, and he wasn’t the only one buying in bulk…  What was great was finding out from the employees where all the unsold movies were going to be shipped– that way I knew which store was next in line to close, and could hit it right as they put on the final sale.

I felt sad the entire time, though… Movie Gallery was founded in Dothan, which used to be an old haunt of mine– great places to eat, pretty good selection of stores… too bad they’ve turned into Chicago South.  (The local paper– the Dothan Eagle– is like a RFDTV version of the New York Times.)  And yes, I hit the Dothan store before it closed– not only was I able to see where it all started, all of the unsold movies from every other store were there.

As an example of why Movie Gallery became unprofitable, I can point to the fact that I bought a copy of The Package on DVD.  This was a new purchase– the disc was unscratched– of a twenty year old movie.  Last time I saw any numbers, it cost a movie rental house around 40 bucks to purchase a movie for rental use… and for a new release, you can double that.  At around a buck a night, that means it would take at least five weeks of constant renting to make the movie a profit item– which makes it obvious why Movie Gallery is kaput.   (Blockbuster has a different system (profit sharing) in place with the studios, but they aren’t going to hold out much longer.)

In short, I purchased 71 DVDs (no games, because console geeks are even faster than I am) for around $275, or about $4 a disc.  I did buy quite a few older movies (look, at $0.75 each, I’ll buy it, watch it, and then sell it if I don’t like it…), but I got quite a few newer ones– including both of the new(er) Stargate movies for $5 and The Core for less than $2 new, in the shinkwrap.  (Yes, the science is horrible.  Yes, the acting is bad.  But it’s a good B movie.)  I also picked up used copies of the Stargate movies… and Disc 2 of The Kill Point.  Not a single note that there’s two discs, and they ain’t in the same case…

Anyone want to trade Disc 1 of The Kill Point for used copies of The Ark of Truth and Continuum…

Findin’ the soul food

One thing I love about the South is the fact that we have good food right at hand.  One of the benefits of going to Dothan was that I went through Hartford, Slocomb and Melvern… and you can’t throw a rock in that area and not hit a produce stand.  The tomatoes don’t seem to be that good right now, and I wasn’t interested in any fruit… but they had I what I needed.  Which was a bushel of pinkeye purplehulls and a bushel of speckled butterbeans, both unshelled.

For those of you wondering what in the blazes I was looking for… pinkeye purplehulls are a variety of cowpea– like black-eyed peas– but with a purple hull.  Speckled butterbeans are a Southern name for a variety of lima bean… that’s speckled with darker colors.  Unshelled means I wanted them still in their shells (hulls), and a bushel is 8 gallons, 4 pecks, or two hampers– enough to produce 8 quarts of frozen produce.  Add in some okra to batter and fry, and you have a meal.  Okay, you also need some tea, cornbread, and some bacon to toss in the pot with the peas and butterbeans…

Is it hot in here to you?

Alabama summers are hot.  Which makes it a bad time for your car’s A/C to decide that it needs to lie down and rest.  Which is what my car’s A/C did while I was traipsing across lower Alabama.  Needless to say, I was doing my best impression of a steam locomotive– drinking water and blowing off steam every chance I could– the entire day.  Luckily, it was just a Freon problem, but I do appreciate what it took to travel by road before cars had all of these new gadgets… heck, the Buick doesn’t even get decent airflow into the cabin when you roll the windows down.  Maybe it’s time for the little moveable vent windows to make a comeback?

So, I’m not dead (yet), and you can expect your regularly scheduled snark to pick back up next week.

Eggs will no longer be sold by quantity in the EU– they’ll be sold by weight.  An official was quoted as saying “[t]his proposal would disallow selling by numbers. Retailers would not be allowed to put ‘Six eggs’ on the front of the box. If it was a bag of rolls, it would say ’500g’ instead of six rolls.”  So… the box will be square?  No bumps for the eggs to sit in?  Because otherwise, you’ll be able to tell from the package how many eggs are inside the container.

(H/T Dr. Lott)

Coffee shop run by girls in their underwear.  How did I not hear of this before?  Maybe I can convince them to open a branch in my area…

In American history, we have some truly famous last words: “they couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance,” “hey y’all, watch this,” and “maybe they only had one rocket.”  To this pantheon of terminal irony, we can add the phrase “Piece of cake.”

Let’s see… wall of flame, five pictures on it… hmm, time limit… owner tries to dissuade you…  Sure, it’s perfectly safe.  Until you take the first bite, that is: “I ate a piece. Hot… but not too bad.  Kind of like getting pepper sprayed.  Nothing I can’t handle.”

In my mind, the words “not too bad” and “like getting pepper sprayed” don’t belong that close to each other.  Of course, when somebody tries to pay me to eat something, alarms go off– “DANGER, DANGER CARPETBAGGER!”  But wait, it gets worse:

At this point I’m about five bites in.  Involuntary tears are coming out of my eyes. My hands are starting to shake.  Bite six, the hallucinations start. A submarine came out of the floor. The walrus that got out asked me for directions. Man, I’m tripping out. Bite seven… wait… that was my napkin.  Bite seven. My brain said “Screw this!” and shut down.

Well, at least Correia won’t have sinus problems for a while.  That is, if his sinuses weren’t burned out by the organic napalm.

I don’t even attempt stuff like this.  Me and capsaicin, we’re not exactly on friendly terms, so I’d probably end up a teary, runny-nose mess  if I even came into the same room.

Not only am I hungry, but I’m about to leave, and go find a restaurant to sit down in, so a post by Weer’d got me all watery-mouthed.

Seafood-

I’m not in flyover country… I live in an area with fish farms and the coast, so I can get fresh fish almost year round.  There are very few fish that I won’t eat (I’ve eaten shad before), but I do have favorites.  Catfish (oh, that’s a surprise, a Southerner liking catfish), including channel cats, bullhead, and flatheads.  Warmouth and bream are good eating, and a good catch, too… a small sub-pound warmouth can put up quite a fight, and I’ve seen both fish thrive in very shallow water.

Mullet is excellent eating, but you have to hunt for them… literally.  They’re herbivores, and are the whitetail deer of the fish world– ambush is the name of the game.  One guy in the back of the boat, oars out and gently changing direction as you drift, and one guy in the bow with the net.

Red Snapper– great when you can get it, but amberjack or grouper will do in a pinch (in Florida, grouper and snapper are almost totally commercial fish, due to our wildlife service).  Flounder are great, but tilapia are the best.  I’m not really a fan of crab or oysters, so, no info here.  (chuckle)