What in the hell …

Conceptually I mean. At the level of Marx’s categories. (more…)

This post started off as a response to a post at Joe Clement’s blog. It got long enough that I figure it should be it’s own post; it got long enough that it seemed rude to put it as a comment. (more…)

You can’t dance to it but it at least it fills the silence and beats back the boredom a bit. I have to turn it up pretty loud so I can hear it while I’m washing dishes. (more…)

Check out this great post by NP on this very question, one of a great many of hers on Marx. Way more there than I can do justice to or respond to any time soon. For now, a few things I want to pull out. (more…)

So behind the scenes here in the Whatinthehell Cave there’s a machine that counts things. Like posts and comments. It tells me “There are currently 651 posts and 2,484 comments” on this blog. Before this post. I figure I’m going to celebrate post #1000 and give a prize for comment #3000. What should I do to celebrate and what should the prize be? It’s a ways off but it’s worth thinking about. It’s almost even worth blogging about.

Hola, amigos. I know it’s been a long time since I rapped at ya, but I been puttin’ out fires left and right. Not really. I’ve been wasting my life. I know this cuz see my true vocation involves food in some way. I’m so sure of this I don’t even need a metaphor to make the point. I’m as sure as a metaphorless certainty. And when you do something that isn’t your vocation you’re wasting your time, see?

Anyway I wouldn’t have bothered to post about this but Ted didn’t answer the phone when I called. Me and Ted we talk about food a lot, mostly on gmail chat when we should be working. Tonight’s food situation was… well, let’s just say I had to call him to tell him straight out, not fuck around with the internet thing. I had to tell him about the food, and my new idea.

Okay so here’s the food. The plan was barbequed fake chik’n strips with onions, served on bread. We had a bit of leftover quinoa and I figured what the hell, throw that in. It’s all almost ready and then to my dismay, no goddamn barbeque sauce. Thinking quickly, my wife suggested I consult the How To Cook Everything cookbook. I was skeptical.

Here’s what I did, riffing off what the cookbook suggested.

LOTS of ketchup. A lot of mustard but not quite as much as the ketchup. Lots of garlic powder. A fair bit of molasses, but less than the mustard. A reasonable helping of Sriracha hot sauce. About an equal quantity of honey. A capful of vinegar. Poured it all right on top of the food in the frying pan and stirred. I knew there was a chance the food would be ruined but I figured, fuck it, carpe diem and shit. I’m like the guy with the ticking bomb who sees red wire, yellow wire, only seconds to go gotta pick one…

I stirred it all around let it cook down a bit on top of the chik’n strips. If it didn’t work out I’d be dinnerless, and pissed. Turns out I picked the wire that made the bomb explode. The taste bomb I mean. A serious flavor explosion. So obviously I picked right. Naturally. Serious barbeque taste. Holy crap was it good. Way better than the bottled stuff that I had run out of. Spicy. Sweet. A bit of a bite from the vinegar. Made for some mean barbeque sandwiches. I’m like a chef or something.

Okay now here’s my idea to take it to the next level - see, I always gotta kick it up a notch - and to bring the price down - cuz I’m also thrifty as a thrifty thing on bargain night in thrift town. Instead of chik’n strips - those things are real pricey - I’ll do TVP, quinoa, and tofu. I’ll bake the tofu block for a while first so it gets kind of chewy and cooks out a lot of the water so it’ll be all set to soak up that BBQ goodness like a delicious sponge. Then chop it up and stir it all around with the other ingredients, add some onions and bell pepper. Maybe a dash of shredded carrots for crunch. Maybe even add a few beans, make it a quadruple protein overload of pure barbeque bliss.

Fuck yeah. It’s gonna be awesome. I’ll let you know. And I will never doubt the How To Cook Everything cookbook again.

Hey did I mention I got a dog? I did. She’s awesome. And cute. Awesomely cute. And I went on my first outdoor rock climbing trip too, on saturday. I’m not very good at it but I really like it. I’m still sore. Oh and school’s okay too, I guess. Ted, answer the damn phone next time.

FYI.

I just found this, which draws some connections. I’ve not read Moll Flanders. There’s loads of novels I’ve not read. I’d not thought of this before, but novels could supplement the reading of labor history and so on I gestured toward here, as a way to ground some of the claims to novelty among the post-operaisti, and substantiating my claim that these folk take phenomena which are not unique to the present and claim that they are unique to the present. (On that note, reading history for this stuff, re-reading the Sewell book wouldn’t hurt either.)

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Along other lines, I should finally get around to reading on hegemony - hegemony in political senses (hegemony of one part of the class - as in the hegemony of the mass worker within the working class, or the hegemony of one bloc of capitalists over others - as well as the hegemony of the capitalist class or one section thereof over the working class or sections thereof) as well as in the technical sense implied in the immaterial labor stuff (one form of labor as hegemonic within the labor process); from there talking about the relationship (or not) between these sense of hegemony, and then talking about stuff that is not/was not hegemonic (subaltern sections of the working class?).