The Ninth House

Anthony Bourdain is a chef. He’s an author and he hosts his own TV show, No Reservations, on the Travel Channel. All of this will come into play six paragraphs from now.

My wife is not a chef. My wife’s a cook. She began making puff pasty when she was in grade school, taught by the women in her family. She spent the next several decades cooking for friends, for the commune, for her first husband, for her two boys, then for me. Cooked practically every day because that’s who she is, and everything she cooks is just nailed to the damn plate.

My wife always dreamed of being a food professional, of one day maybe even opening her own place. We’d been married nine years when she informed me she’d quit her job that morning, called a local caterer before lunch, interviewed that afternoon and would start the next day.

(more…)

I swear, I just peed myself a little…

The official site is here.

(Boy, it had better not suck.)

TNH

I saw my first episode of Star Trek when I was eight years old old. The original series was still in production then, third and final season. You wanna know how old I am, have Spock do the math for you.

I even remember the episode: “The Mark of Gideon.” It was a thinly-veiled cautionary tale about the dangers of overpopulation. All I remember was all those banging heartbeats and all those sardine-packed people spooked me. It was scary, at least to an eight-year-old, and it wasn’t because of the Spandex.

And yes, I know most all Star Trek episodes were thinly-veiled cautionary tales and/or morality plays and/or paeans to democracy and/or enlightened secularism. Except for “Spock’s Brain,” a not-so-thinly-veiled cautionary tale about the dangers of being so desperate for a script you’ll film anything.

And at the center of it all, there was The Man.

(more…)