West Asheville Eats

Besides music, West Asheville is becoming the place for great cuisine.

How about a nice 11am breakfast of Ricotta Oatmeal Brulee'.







To top it off I ordered a peppery maple flavored bacon chaser.











Delicious coffee & food, great atmosphere, weird people; My three favorite food groups.

Exciting Class At The Yeshiva

I read the Sunday School lesson and realized it had the potential to be interesting.
Last Sunday was such a snooze, I had to use all my willpower to stay awake and not fall out of my chair. We are studying in Colossians which is my second favorite epistle, my first being Hebrews. I'm not a big fan of Saint Paul, but when I do meet him I'll at least be able to say "I read all your books."

I'm just auditing this class since I'm not a church member. I wouldn't join any church that would have someone like me for a member. What I'm trying to say is since I'm not Southern Baptist I strive not to be outspoken in class. The incendiary text was from Colossians Chapter 2:

⁶ Therefore let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink, or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath. ¹⁷ These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ. ¹⁸ Let no one disqualify you, insisting on asceticism and worship of angels, going on in detail about visions,^[d] puffed up without reason by his sensuous mind, ¹⁹ and not holding fast to the Head, from whom the whole body, nourished and knit together through its joints and ligaments, grows with a growth that is from God.

²⁰ If with Christ you died to the elemental spirits of the world, why, as if you were still alive in the world, do you submit to regulations— ²¹ “Do not handle, Do not taste, Do not touch” ²² ( referring to things that all perish as they are used)—according to human precepts and teachings? ²³ These have indeed an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-made religion and asceticism and severity to the body, but they are of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh.

The class went on for awhile and I was wondering if we would ever get to the meat of the text. With ten minutes left we got to the above verses and a brawl broke out between the Paulists and the Judaizers. The teacher moderated the discussion with aplomb and even CP added to the discourse (woman don't usually speak in our Sunday School).

I had the good fortune of sitting next to a Jew. Me being a Catholic I could relate when he said he was glad to leave all the rules and traditions behind. Maybe those who come out of the world of dietary laws, feasts, and traditions can relate to this verse better. Perhaps, those who don't have this background feel they're missing something.

After class I talked to the Jew next to me and told him how in my family three Polish women married three Italian men and how after a few years they were more Italian than the true Italians. That's what's so great about Christianity, we have the same arguments going on for thousands of years. I sure didn't need any caffeine drip to keep me awake this morning. For a change I had both the right to remain silent and the ability.

Sneezing Bear

Finally I've found an animal with worse allergies than Bo. All this cub needs is jingling dog tags.

The Vow

In an effort to strengthen relations with the staff I went out to the movies with them. I heard that The Vow was a chick flick but I never imagined it was pablum for the Baby Sitters Club.
CP and I haven't gone to an evening movie in years. When I get to the ticket booth the girl asks me if it's two adults. I say, yes, two adults - wondering what she's talking about? Did she think I wanted to pay for the forty people behind me in line? I guess she was wondering if I wanted the senior discount. I never want a senior discount. Forty years ago when all this senior crap started I thought it was ridiculous. It was the start of the national slide into our entitlement psychosis.

When we entered the auditorium I thought I was at a high school girls varsity basketball game. There were about three hundred fourteen year old girls already seated. There weren't more than two seats together, let alone half a row for our group. It was like the youth group from Biltmore Baptist descended on the theater.

The movie was based on a true story about a woman who has a head injury and loses the memory of her husband. Usually, the same effect can be achieved with three beers. There was actually a good story here, but Hollywood went for the cheap shot and made it a teen throb and went for the bucks. There is a rather good French version of the amnesiac spouse movie out
there.

Channing Tatum's acting consists of a two hour long stupid look. His performance reached its zenith when he got up from the couch and bared his ass. This split second of man-ass sent the teeny boppers to moaning, sighing, squealing and muted applause. I had to refrain myself from mooning those in the twenty rows behind me. Rachel McAdams could have played a sumo wrestler more convincingly than she played the aspiring sculptor. The stupid look on her face was an insult to amnesics everywhere. She couldn't even compete with Tatum in the bare-ass department. Of course her little trip through the windshield didn't even leave a scar on her, let alone a tic or gimpy arm. Jessica Lang played the mother in law and looked like a freeze-dried copy of her former self. Sam Neill gave just enough effort to receive his paycheck.

This movie was so dumb that it was enjoyable to sit there and mock it. The three hundred teeny -boppers talked constantly as if they were at a pajama party; all the while texting and cooing. Thankfully, the audience made up for the lack of reality on the wide-screen. It also allowed me to socialize with the staff and hopefully let them see I'm not as big of an S.O.B. as they think I am.

Rating:
The Vow- Two Stars
The Audience- Five Stars

500 Days Of Romney

500 Days Of Summer is about a loser who thinks he can make his girlfriend love him. He's a super nice guy and his girlfriend is a player. She likes him enough for now, but she lets him know he's not the one. He takes this as a starting point and wastes 500 days trying to change her mind.

This is Mitt Romney. Mitt feels that with enough money, attack ads and photo-ops, conservative America will come around. However, there is nothing he can do to make us love him. It's not that we don't know him; it's that we do know him and we don't like him. Mitt thinks he can become President by the force of his will, a half billion dollars and the PR department of the LDS church. Like Summer in the movie, the public will party with Mitt, sleep with Mitt and spent 500 days being courted by Mitt, but in the end they're going to marry someone else. It's like your Mom setting you up with the sweet neighbor girl. Who are you going to go out with? I bet you're going to bring home the Goth-Girl with the bolt in her head.


It's all about arrogance. Mitt is saying I'm so handsome, so moral, such a family man, a man of Gods, such an entrepreneur that I make 20 million a year in my bathrobe; how can you not love me? How can you love that chubby old man with three wives? How can you love that home-schooling youth pastor wannabee? How can you love that senile old codger who wants to close the Federal Reserve?



It's easy to understand, Mitt; the other guys aren't YOU!

Is She The Best We Have?

Madonna is doing the Super Bowl half-time show; I can't wait to see this has-been. She was the first MTV synthesized star. She can't sing, but she can jump around in her underwear. With the aid of pyrotechnics and computer enhanced vocals she manages to raise her talent level to that of the drunk aunt at the wedding.

The last thirty years haven't been too good to the old gal. At her botox-best she looks like a centerfold from Meth-Lab Monthly. I remember seeing Keith Richards doing a stage dive in Detroit in 2006; he had to help himself up with both hands. Can't we have someone who has had a hit in the last twenty years?

Maybe they are catering to their audience, those people getting their AARP applications this week. Hopefully Boniva will keep her from breaking a hip.

Why don't they just have the Armed Forces Bands perform? I would settle for the Royal Dragoons doing Scotland The Brave on bagpipes.







Why not some new talent, like Siobhan Magnus; someone born after the Korean War, someone who can actually sing.

I'm hoping that when I leave my Super Bowl party at halftime and drive home Madonna will be done wowing the nation. I'm also hoping the children will be spared a wardrobe-malfunction that will give them nightmares.

The Forgotten Man

Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. Sometimes a picture is worth two million jobs, 500,000 foreclosures, 10,000 suicides and a dead Border Patrol Agent. And you haven't seen nothing yet.

"The finest opportunity ever given the world was thrown away because the passion for equality made vain the hope for freedom."

Lord Acton