January 2, 2007
Noticably more is to be found here than there was when I jokingly gave this site its name, and there is much more
on the way. To be exact, there's a lot more already prepared, with the main hold-up being my primary ISP.
Way, way, way back when, I was going through the weirdness with chi.general, the story of that being worthy of a
page in its own right, but I'll give you a shortened form. Much of what the original main body of this site was
about was an account of my dealings with what some would call the digital underground or "the Cabal", in all of
its absurdity. One day, after a series of my own posts had been subjected to a series of forged cancels, in one
case the forger carelessly leaving his .sig on the cancellation message, and all parties involved (the ISPs
included) told me that I was on my own on this one and should deal with it myself, the cabal on the group my
messages had been disappearing from chuckling openly about this series of lawless actions, all of a sudden,
something happened that they didn't find so funny. After being told "you know what, guys, that can work both
ways, so what do you say you cut it out", and hooting it up some more, our boys all of a sudden found that their
posts were vanishing, and that was completely different!!!
Yeah, right, guys - and my allegedly deleting your posts would be different from your being
demonstrably guilty of forging cancels against mine would be different ... how? "Because we're
screaming more loudly" was their answer, more or less, and it was an answer that my previous primary ISP,
in its unprincipled cowardice, was eager to accept. The cabal on chi.general seemed to view this as being
some kind of victory or vindication, as such mobs often did during the 1990s, but if they could have seen
me sitting behind the other side of the screen that night, they would have seen me laughing my backside
off. It was like watching a group of whiny little kindergartners running, crying to teacher because they
picked a fight with the wrong kid. After all of the tough boy posturing about "taking care of your own
problems" and "not crying to the ISPs", the first thing they did was run crying to an ISP. At that point,
I had a small epiphany.
In the past, the rudeness of these little cabals had gotten my blood boiling, which is what trolls live for,
but now I was just laughing, and the more they swaggered over their imagined victory, the more amusing I found
the sitation. Why? Because on some gut level, I had respected people who the facts would never have let me
respect consciously, and when I saw the level of just sheer cowardice put on display, that gut level respect
was no longer a possibility. I had always had difficulty truly looking down my nose at people, even those who
clearly deserved it, but that magical combination of low character and personal weakness I had just witnessed
helped me past that problem. The scorn of those one scorns on every level becomes meaningless. Without even
meaning to, those twits had set me free. With a feeling of closure, I greeted the latest thoroughly unjustified
ISP contract cancellation with relative indifference, and had no desire to seek another account, anywhere.
Had events continued on the course they were taking that week, up until that very last day, none of my websites
would probably even exist, and I probably would never have visited ePlaya or travelled with the Green Tortoise,
two experiences I would have been vastly better off missing out on.
Not that I'm complaining, overall. The night my previous ISP rolled over on me, before I knew that my account
was about to be cut off, I spoke with a very beautiful woman who I had met a few times before, and she asked
for my e-mail address. I was not going to let her get away, so I replaced my wrongfully deleted account with
a new one at a new ISP in a great hurry, literally overnight, too much of a hurry for me to have researched
my choice very well. Looking back, even though I'm no longer dating her, yes, it was totally worth it, and
no, this is not about to turn into a Penthouse letter. Let's just say that she is greatly missed, and getting
the memory of her company more than justifies accepting a few hardships. But a rapid choice is seldom a good
one, and lately this one hasn't been.
I won't name names, but lately the connection speed on my own account has slowed to the point of near-unusability.
A pair of image uploads to ImageShack, through my own account, took six hours. Neither file was much larger than
300K, and at the six hour mark, I walked past my computer, thought "you have to be kidding me" and broke the
connection, the second image having not been successfully uploaded. I called tech support, reported the problem,
and found them very eager to play the "let's try to blame the customer" game. "You're using dialup?", the
representative asked. "Yes", I answered. "There's the problem", he responded, "With a 56K dialup, your connection
isn't fast enough to handle the flash graphics on sites like ImageShack". Just one tiny little problem with that
rationalization explanation; ImageShack's image upload page for its registered users has no flash graphics
or other bandwidth devouring gimmicks. It's a relatively tidy and simple interface that shows one some thumbnails
for a few of one's images, links to a few more pages, and not much else. It's a simple, rapidly loading page
that's easy and (usually) pleasant to use, and besides which, similar problems had made their appearance on other
sites, so this didn't seem to be something that one could really pin on ImageShack.
But the tech support guy I was speaking with wouldn't let go and accept reality, and he certainly wasn't going
to acknowledge that there were any problems that needed fixing. He continued to insist that I needed broadband
to upload mid-sized .jpegs to a free image hosting service. How much more would that cost, I asked, only to be
told that his company had decided to not offer that to home customers. "So you're aggressively pushing a product
that you're refusing to sell?", I found myself thinking. Upshot - the problem did not get fixed, and now ftp has
broken down going through my primary ISP as well. That provider is clinging to the line that this isn't their
fault, but how could one explain the impossibility of FTPing anything through our connection, using their dodge
of choice? FTP presents a straight text interface for the user, utterly devoid of graphical content, and that
has been running as slowly as anything else for weeks, at this point, with no signs to be seen of any improvement
coming for the forseeable future. Friends and family have been kind enough to let me borrow their computers, but
my scanner and my images are back at my place, connected to and on my computer, and so, for the moment, I have
a backlog of material waiting to be uploaded and no way to upload it, courtesy of a primary ISP that has openly
stated that it does not value its home customers.
That's a little annoying. The day I signed up with these guys, they were a small mom-and-pop outfit, the home
customer being the mainstay of their business, but now they're a lot bigger, big enough that they feel comfortable
with the idea of spitting on those whose business helped get them off the ground. It's a shame that "loyal
customer" seems to be spelled "s-u-c-k-e-r" these days, but this is what reality has become, though I suppose
that things could be worse. We do have all of the time in the world to look for new primary ISPs, which is good
because I have material to transfer from my old diskspace to my new diskspace, wherever that may end up being,
and on a low budget, I'm just not sure of where I'm going to look. Progress is a funny kind of thing at the lower
end of the income scale; you worker longer and longer to get less and less, and you're expected to celebrate the
trimph of human ingenuity this change represents. Even so, some of us are not impressed.
One way or another, though, I will get those pictures posted.
What I have here, right now, are part of the Halls of Eternal Disbelief,
somewhat modified, along with some related material on the homepages for the
Killfile Dungeon Rebuttal Ring and Fred Cherry: A
Usenet Legend, The Untold Story. Not that griping is all I do, of course; there is the page of images of the north
side of Chicago, kind of a photographic walking tour.
I can't show you a lot of the things that I'd like to show you, because they've been torn down. In Chicago, many of
us hold a bizarre belief that the US constitution prohibits the protection of architecturally significant buildings
and districts. One might point out that the exact same federal constitution applies in San Francisco, where
architectural preservation has had great successes, but our locals just won't listen. At the current rate, almost
the entirety of the once considerable architectural heritage of this city will be gone relatively soon, fallen to
the wrecking ball and to the very large egos of some very small men. If you can imagine this, in at least one case
a landmarked building downtown was eminent domained after a developer decided that he wanted its location for part
of a shopping mall, and the owner refused to sell, wanting to keep the old beauty in place. Our local government
came in, took his building away from him, knocked it down, and then paid some tens of millions of dollars in subsidies
to the developer, who never did get the mall built. That was in the late 1980s; as of the time of the first writing
of this passage, back in 2005, several multimillion installments of good money tossed after bad, the location was still
a vacant lot, a huge gaping hole in the middle of the Loop, idling a large chunk of some of the highest priced real
estate for over fifteen years.
In some cities the population might have learned something from the fiasco, but G-d bless the Chicagoans, they just
never will. Conservative in truly the worst possible sense of the word, and you're hearing this from somebody who
used to call himself a card carrying Republican, before George Bush the younger made that label into something to
be ashamed of. What you already see in the new section (and will see more of in the future) could be taken as a
travel guide, but not for very long. It will be the best circumstances allow me to do, as I pay tribute to something
that is being lost forever for absolutely no good reason, because of the failures of a people who've come to confuse
passivity with maturity. I hope you'll enjoy seeing it more than I'll enjoy the need to create it, and that you'll
find it an interesting alternative to those cliched panoramas of the skyline, which always seem to be shot from
somewhere near the North Avenue beach house, and always in clear weather. Already, I have a few dozen images in
place, all of which will be polished, and at least a thousand more will be added in the next year. But yes, that's
being held up by a bad connection. Anything else?
Why yes, even in the area of photography. I've acquired a digital camera, and while that won't get my Pentax images
online, it will allow me to start a stock photography page, just as soon as I get through this owner's manual. Much
sooner than that, though, I should have a Midwestern recipe page to offer you. I'm surprised that there is a demand
for this, but judging from the amount of fakery I've seen on the subject on a variety of sites, there seems to be.
The real thing tends to be simple, humble stuff. To take as an example something that became a recent source of
contrarian flamethrowing on another site, let's consider the so-called "Italian Beef" one will see recipes for on
a variety of pages. One, published by a "traveller in the know", has roast beef being fried with peppers and topped
with cheese, and dished up with "Chicago style giardiniera". While what he's reporting might be a reasonable
description of what one gets from a few fast food places on the Near North side, it is not the authentic item,
and would never have been assumed to be such had Political Correctness not done such a superb job of scrambling
people's brains during the 1990s. Common sense should point to at least one obvious problem with drawing such a
conclusion, the moment one sees who is working the grill.
Or, for the matter, the moment one notices that he is working a "grill", one of those flat, heated metal counters
one finds in fast food establishments; how many people do you suppose have those in their own homes?
"Italian Beef", which by the way isn't even remotely Italian, is old style home cooking from Chicago's south side,
from what was once known as "the Back of the Yards" down near Garfield and Ashland, something so extremely regional
that until the gang war driven diaspora of the late 1960s and early 1970s, wasn't something that families on the
Northwest side had even heard of. Take a look at the short order cooks behind the counter, and then listen to them
talk. They're from Mexico. Their boss, at one place that comes to mind, is from India, and at another came from
the East Coast. Not a native Chicagoan to be found in the bunch, and so how would they even know how to make the
authentic local article? The fact is, they don't. What you're getting at these tourist trap locales is a cross
between a Mexican Oaxaquena and a Philadelphia Cheese Steak. It's not bad, as fast food goes, but it's not the
real thing. It doesn't even resemble the real thing.
Nor does it resemble anything else that very many native Midwesterners grew up eating. Frying, either in a deep
fat fryer or in a skillet, is not a very big part of Midwestern cookery, which overwhelmingly tends to fall into
the category of "comfort food". It's never all that spicy, or only rarely is it all that rich or heavy. Think of
it this way - if you had just slogged through a few miles of wet snow, amazed that subzero temperatures had not
turned that to ice (and maybe a little relieved), a little short of breath from having breathed through your
scarf the whole way and various body parts feeling ready to break off at any moment all the same - what would
you feel like eating? Something that would make you sweat? You're about to go back out into that blizzard to
clear your driveway, so no thanks on that. Something to get your gastric juices flowing? If they were flowing
any more, you'd puke your guts out, gastric juices and all. No, you're probably looking for something gentle.
The "Chicago style giardiniera" myth can be debunked by walking to the nearest Jewel food store, going into
the Italian food aisle, and picking up a bottle of Dell Alpe giardiniera. Dell Alpe is a national brand. All
these nonlocal people did was go down to the grocery store, grab something off the shelf, and empty it into
a plastic bin back at their place. Nothing local about it; quite the contrary, nobody in our area, as heavily
resettled from the South Side as it was, had even heard of this alleged local speciality until the 1980s. To
this day, I know of not a single local who makes the stuff, and more than a few who look at me most strangely
because I'll admit to liking it, a little. Even I wouldn't dream of putting it on Italian Beef, though; who
puts something soaking in vinegar brine on a dish whose character is defined by its long simmering in broth?
It would be like pouring Italian dressing over a bowl of beef soup, especially because there is no such thing
as using a little giardiniera; those chunks of cauliflower are a lot bigger than those little peppers one
picks up in the same aisle, which are about as authentically Chicagoan, and why not? They're sold by the same
company.
Other versions I could find were even more absurd, one of them calling for a mixture of Chili and Worcestershire
Sauce, believe it or not. The part that I loved the most, lurking during one of these discussions, was watching
the same people insist that Italian beef HAD to be Italian, but insisting on the authenticity of that recipe,
apparently blissfully unaware of the fact that Worcestershire Sauce is English, not Italian, and Chili Sauce
is TexMex. No, what one witnesses is some kind of Postmodern fixation that holds that Italian Beef has to be
Italian, because calling something Italian makes it Italian, even though the very people who've called it that
for years (us) were never under the impression that we were eating any kind of exotic foreign delicacy.  But then, if one finds oneself in a fast food establishment in somebody else's hometown,
so unshakeably absolutely convinced one is getting authentic local home cooking that one is prepared to tell
the local folk that they don't know what they grew up eating, one probably isn't firing on all cylinders.
Now that I've told you what's fake ... what's real? The actual, real item, in the case of Italian Beef, is
something so simple as to keep fashionability at bay. It's nothing more than a mix of chewy, strong flavored
cuts of beef like chuck simmered in beef stock along with green bell peppers and thinly sliced yellow onions,
seasoned with nothing more than salt and black pepper. One then puts it on a small, cut open loaf of crusty,
chewy bread if one wishes, the bread picking up the flavor of the juice that it ends up being saturated with.
That's all, nothing more elaborate than that. Some might dress it up with a few more herbs, but that's about it.
Pleasant eating, but nothing fancy, which is precisely the problem. Nobody is going to look at that description
and be wowed by it. Could you really put something like that in a cookbook, without the buyer of the cookbook
feeling a little cheated?
A lot of Midwestern food is like that, and a lot more is ethnically specific. Nativism never really caught on
in our region, in part, I suppose, because the would-be Anglo-Saxon "natives" were never very numerous in our
area. There is a recognizable Indiana version of "Sauerbraten" (which actually is a lot closer to an Eastern
French Beef daube, but don't let a Hoosier hear you say that) and a sweet and sour version one is likelier to
find at a church dinner to the West of Chicago, lightened with sour cream. Both are thought of as being "German"
by the respective locals, but after a few hundred years of local residence, the dish has mutated into - what?
In Louisiana, these overseas branches of old world peoples that one finds have fully developed their own
identities; one is Cajun, one is Creole, and these identities are recognized regional versions of Americanness.
No ethnic subculture in the Midwest has found its own identity in such a solid form; it is difficult to even
speak of any sort of Wisconsin French cooking style without making reference to France, and where the New World
version has diverged from the old, there scarcely seems to be any kind of uniformity, even within a town. The
innovation has been happening on an individual and family level, not on a community level, largely because there
is little in the way of community remaining; even in a small town, one's neighbor gets little more than a polite
and friendly nod, and there's nothing natural about cultural diffusion taking place between those barely aware
of each other's existence. Is there, then, any kind of common Midwestern cooking style to speak of? Could there
be?
Sort of, and you've probably seen the roots of it. Think of some of the "American" cookbooks that describe mild
flavored food that you've never seen an American eat. If you had grown up in Illinois or Missouri instead of in
California or New York, on the other hand, odds are that a lot of that stuff would look very, very familiar to
you. "Sort of", you say? Yes, only "sort of", because these things get individualized. Somebody's addition of
tomato (just a hint), molasses and caraway to a pot roast is most certainly not universal, but it doesn't really
blow minds, either. Underneath the individual or family touches, one can find common, familiar elements, which
I'm guessing survived from the less isolated times our elders tell us about, but which we only got a brief
glimpse of ourselves. It is that sort of dish you will see here, with my own individualized touches, the usual
mix of that which is French and Spanish and Jewish, which you might expect if you've seen me post elsewhere,
with maybe a little bit of Greek and Middle Eastern, overlaying what is basically mostly a very Germanic local
cooking style. If you wish to think of this in Classical French cooking terms, think of the gravies in the very
mild base dishes as being akin to mother sauces, which are given variation and flavor with the addition of modest
amounts of more highly flavored ingredients. Simplicity and mildness do not always imply tedium.
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This site has been copyrighted by Joseph Dunphy, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007,
2008 and 2009 all rights reserved. The contents of this site may not be reproduced in part of whole without the
written permission of the author, except for brief quotations as permitted under the fair use exemption and as
allowed by pre-existing contract. "Brief quotation" does not refer to the reprinting of an entire page, and I
think that you know that, so don't be cute. Where to, now?
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