I'm spending the holidays in LA this year, and it's been great.
Christmas day in particular was a lot of fun. And weird. Definitely a little weird.
I woke up in a bed. Not too weird so far.
A girl was lying next to me.
Was that weird because there was only one? Was it weird because she was hot? No. Because one of the things that makes her hot is that she's the only person I know (besides me) that uses the word “preternaturally”? No. Was it weird at all? No, sorry, actually this whole paragraph is a weirdness dead end.
It was a little weird that the house we woke up in was a famous person's house up in the hills north of LA, which were covered in fog on Christmas morning, and that the beautiful house was filled with crazy, crazy things, including me and this girl, and that we had chinese food and then went to Barney's Beanery and ate Irish nachos and chicken fingers and had martinis and a little kid beat me and my friend Jeff at air hockey again and again, which I guess is probably a pretty fun thing for a kid to do on Christmas.
A fun thing for adults to do is see Bad Santa on Christmas day, which we did. After the movie there was a brief interlude of cake and pie at Mel's Diner, just enough food to fortify us against the kinds of activities we engaged in immediately afterward at Coach and Horses. Jeff claims the bartender wrote her number on his arm, and I guess I want to believe that happened because it's a pretty cool way for one of my most favorite (and slightly weird) Christmases ever to have ended.
Posted by jjwiseman at December 30, 2003 11:55 AMHuh? Irish nachos? New thing every day and all that. How very strange (I'm Irish :-)), and [googling] the term is apparently in wide usage for a variety of similar potato crisp [US: chip] and potato chip [US: french fry] dishes with vaguely Irishy or Latiny toppings throughout the USA and beyond. Dunno how I never encountered the term before...
If you're actually in Ireland, if you ask for "nachos", you'll get "american nachos" :-). [irish-tourist-board-voice] Don't worry though, potato chips and crisps with a wide range of tasty sauces, toppings and dips are available in most pubs that serve food in Ireland. Just ask. [/irish-tourist-board-voice]
Posted by: David Golden on December 30, 2003 05:02 PMWhat I find more perplexing than Irish nachos are chicken fingers. Chicken don't have fingers, and the actual food is not finger-sized. Unless your fingers are like, six-inches long and shaped like South America. Yours truly found her chicken fingers to be disillusioningly unwieldy. Not unlike South America.
Gotta go. Jay-Z wants to upload some pictures of his cat. Bye.
Posted by: Beyoncé on December 30, 2003 07:05 PMChicken Fingers: Hmm... probably depends on the manufacturer. Here, chicken fingers would be like "fish-fingers" but with chicken i.e. finger-length rectangular prisms of extruded, probably "mechanically-recovered" meat coated in breadcrumbs or batter. Still not exactly finger-shaped, but vaguely closer (of course fish don't usually have fingers either...) Apparently Bird's Eye are now calling them Chicksticks. Bleurgh.
http://www.birdseye.co.uk/products/showRecipe.asp?category=meat&type=crispycoatedchicken&ref=66200371
American companies call them chicken fingers too:
http://www.freezerqueenfoods.com/products.php?ccode=tc&pcode=tc_brea
I've never seen South America shaped chicken fingers. Chicken "dippers" or goujons might well be roughly south america shaped:
http://www.birdseye.co.uk/products/showRecipe.asp?category=meat&type=crispycoatedchicken&ref=66200369
Well, it's pretty obvious I'm bored :-)
In the opening voice-over sequence to the film, The Royal Tenebaums, the term preternatural is used to describe one of the principle characters, age 14, grasp of international finance.
Posted by: richard schave on January 1, 2004 05:49 PM