I really do like cheeseburgers, but...

I do love a good cheeseburger…and despite what friends say about pizza I think a cheeseburger is the best self-indulgence in the food industry. I’ll confess to something else, I not only like good cheeseburgers I pretty much like bad cheeseburgers too and my culinary closet includes Big Macs and Whoppers. This canned product is real (although still only sold by European camping suppliers, so far…the words Trekking Mahlzeiten means “camping food” in German, right?) and might test my appreciation of this basically American popular concoction. Here’s the recipe: Boil water, throw the can in for two or three minutes, fish it out, pop the top, enjoy. A nice packet of powdered red wine mixed with cold Bavarian Alps glacier run-off is suggested as a complementary beverage.

We Three Queens

I was chatting with my friend Croix night-before-last, discussing his recent voyage on the Queen Elizabeth II, which had docked early that same morning in Manhattan. He mentioned a historic meeting-of-the-maids where three Cunard Line vessels were going to converge in New York harbor at 7:30 p.m. and subsequently go in convoy formation through the harbor, under the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge and out to sea. Even though Croix was exhausted and it was raining and cold as sin, there was nothing for it but to bundle up, saddle our horses, gallop over to the fishing pier off 65th Street in Brooklyn and watch this royal parade sail majestically by. And sail they did, and majestic it was, with the Queen Mary II leading the parade, the brand new Queen Victoria second and, tagging along, the highly venerated QE2 which, I’m told, is embarking on her final voyage. She is due to be decommissioned and put out to pasture as a hotel/tourist attraction in Dubai. So this gathering of the three ladies was truly historic, never to be repeated.

It was a dark and stormy night and we froze our butts off but the fireworks nonetheless lit up the sky as the ships passed the Statue of Liberty, accompanied by a mass of smaller vessels hooting and honking. All three ships are veritable small cities anyway and they were all exploiting every possible light source--three large birthday cakes on the move.

I’m glad we partook of this adventure even though I feared for our health, if not our sanity, as we stood staunchly braving the elements. Oh, yeah, that Queen Mary is one huge pleasure palace and Croix told me she only clears the Verrazano by six feet when the tide is out. Uh…I suppose that could be, she certainly seemed to be reaching for the sky--but six feet doesn’t seem quite enough to me.

Global warming or just another day at the beach?

January 7, 8 & 9’s temperatures this year were practically tropical and I had some friends in town from Connecticut and we thought, what better way to spend time in the noonday sun but at the beach?

Plumb Beach is the closest beach to my place in Brooklyn, a 15 minute drive at the most, and we were soon strolling the sand and, since the tide was at its lowest ebb, the mud, of this strange and exotic spot so close to the big city. It is a strip of beach less than a mile long with dunes and a tidal lagoon with a marsh at its eastern end. I had never actually been there, not only because I had heard about its pollution problems but its parking lot is tiny and, frankly, even from the Belt Parkway it looks unacceptably trashy.

On January 8, however, the parking lot was almost empty, as was the beach/dunes, so it was nicely private and merited the removal of various items of clothing. It was a great afternoon and, yes, I took off my shirt and let the warm breeze caress my bulging and/or sagging (choose one) muscles. In fact it was such a great day that I’m a little sorry that I’ve subsequently done some research on Plumb and its recent history (thank you Google). I am so sad to read that it’s pretty much an ecological nightmare right now.

Prior to the 1960’s Plumb Beach was a popular and relatively clean destination for beachgoers, pretty much serving the denizens of South Brooklyn, but it fell on hard times when development and pollutants started changing its seascape as a result of some pretty toxic street run-off. In the early 1990’s a series of nor’easters battered the beach, causing an erosion problem dangerously close to the Belt Parkway, which is a major traffic artery serving JFK airport and with connections to several highways that make a dash out to eastern Long Island. Consequently, something had to be done and an attempt to “reclaim” the beach was started by dumping thousands of tons of sand on it to create an artificial dune system. The problem is that along this stretch the Belt is only about 40 feet from the water side of the dunes and, thus, these dunes are a very important barrier between the marauding seas and the highway so the Belt is obviously threatened by any storm (at high tide), not just the major ones.

Anyway, what happened next was predictable, that is, over time the sand proceeded to drift eastward and covered over a good third of the natural marsh, lagoon and sanctuary, totally disrupting the habitat(s) of a large variety of creatures, both avian (some exotic) and more mundane, like the horseshoe crab. The horseshoe is that large, ugly-as-sin, helmet-shaped denizen of the deep, whose remains you see on a lot of beaches. Plumb, at one time, was an annual mating area for this crab but it has now pretty much been squeezed out. The really bad news is that, although this little peninsula has made a comeback over the last five or six years, the erosion continues where the original sand was dumped and to save the highway another procedure will probably have to be instigated to again restore the barrier dunes. And the whole screwed up process will repeat itself.

Despite all of this bad news, I’m still glad I was at Plumb Beach on January 8, 2008 with my shirt off…it made me feel good. And that’s what counts these days.

One side note: here and there on the beach and in the dunes there are remnants of past disasters. That is, there are some old boat hulls and various bits and piece of vessels that had been creamed sometime in the past by the wrath of Poseidon. This is not unusual except that some graffiti artist, which to me is usually an oxymoron, is using these derelicts as mural space for his/her spray cans. I must say they are most startling rising out of the reeds and dunes. As much as I want to sneer at this desecration of the natural order of things, they are cool and I like them a lot.

Smelling a Rat

Even though my nephew works at Pixar (I love saying “full disclosure”) I was unaware of the following controversy until we were opening presents on Christmas eve.

Some genius at Disney and/or Pixar had the bright idea of marketing a French wine to coincide with the opening of the animated feature Ratatouille last year. Starting in August, a limited edition of 500 cases was to have been sold through Costco, but the sale was shelved by Disney because of “a trickle of inquiries and complaints” by California winemakers and, ostensibly, opponents (unnamed) of underage drinking. According to a Disney spokesman, “The pressure to pull the Ratatouille wine had been particularly strong from The Wine Institute of California, a San Francisco-based trade group that represents 950 California wineries. Domestic vintners were upset that the film promoted a French product.”

Nancy Light, spokeswoman for the Wine Institute, said her group complained to Disney “because the Ratatouille label, with Remy holding a rat-sized glass of wine, appeared to violate the spirit of the code of advertising standards that all institute members must follow. The code bans the use of any advertising that might appeal to people below the legal drinking age by using photos of very young models or cartoon characters.”

“…appeared” to violate the spirit of the code? Well, hooey and phooey on behalf of Ratatouille.

Looking beyond the apparent motivation of protecting sales of California wine by invoking a righteous stand of shielding our young, I think what it comes down to is that the middle-to-older mindset in America, even those people entrenched at Disney, is that just because a character is animated (and therefore a cartoon) means it’s directed at children. Don’t they even look at their own product these days? If it’s Mickey Mouse, yes, if it’s Remy (the rat) in Ratatouille, definitely not. Is Disney trying to sell a plush Remy? I’m afraid to look. I don’t think putting a modern animated animal, even a cute one, on a bottle of wine promotes underage drinking; it’s just open-market P.R. and a promotional gimmick for the movie! If it works and makes us want to see the movie or buy the wine…well, so be it!

Whether it was behind-the-scenes chicanery or actual righteous indignation that scuttled the project, I still think it was a dumb reaction. But to put it in its proper perspective, it turned out to be to my advantage since I benefited from the debacle (due to some insider trading…see disclosure above) and got a bottle of it under my Christmas tree! Cheers!