"He will bring happiness in a pipe/He'll ride away on his silver bike/And apart from that he'll be so kind/In consenting to blow your mind..."

"Fat Angel," by Donovan (who wrote it) or The Jefferson Airplane (live, with oil-based light show) and even Orange Alabaster Mushroom (a rare find?).

Fly Translove Airways... Gets you there on time... a lyric that sprang to mind as I was reading The Lavender Café, where Michael K said:

I'm hoping to get Chicagoboyz back to posts about airplanes. Politics is a dead subject. The lefties have made their bed. Now, find a job.

And john said:

I think there is some early celebration of the med pot voting results.

He wasn't referring to Michael K, but to... well, if you go over there and scroll — which I don't recommend — you'll see a few things, which, as I said, I don't recommend. It was enough to make wyo sis say "This thread is either above my head or beneath my contempt. If I understood it I could tell which for sure." And john returns us to the aviation theme:

Does anyone else here read FlightLevel390? The best aviation blog around, and the site just got pulled off. I thought Tuesday was a bummer, but this is worse....

Flying stuff. Written by a pilot for a major airline (USAir I think). Beautiful poetic writing, gripping (really) tales of flying coast to coast, with regular dips into the technical aspects of flight and airplanes.

That's when Chip Ahoy — our fat angel, though I'm sure he's not fat — comes in with his pancakes made of "17 B-52's of milk," which doesn't stop LoafingOaf from calling him a "little fucking internet douchebag pussy," which makes it painfully obvious that we are not aviators. We are on the internet.

We are flying at an altitude of 39,000 feet/Captain High at your service...

We are all little fucking internet douchebag pussies now. What are you going to do about it? Go to Colorado/Washington, where pot has magically become legal... except to the extent it's a federal crime? You don't need that "med" modifier anymore. And you don't need a note from your little fucking internet douchebag pussy doctor.

When you make pancakes, "all creativity is disallowed. There are no variations to pancakes."

Says Chip Ahoy in last night's Lavender Café:

Homemade pancakes are like a thick batter. The batter will have milk and flour salt and sugar and probably vanilla. Extrapolate from that. Blueberries bleed and turn the batter a weird color. You can hold off and toss the berries onto the pancake after the batter is poured onto the pan. Very specific ratios must be followed. If the batter is too thick or too thin then adjustments are not allowed. In fact, all creativity is disallowed. There are no variations to pancakes. If you change one single thing, this kitten here get's it.

21 trillion eggs
17 B-52's of milk pasteurized to minus 27 degrees Celsius
1 light year vanilla extract
487 billion salts
18 pretzels
42 giraffes of green and yellow wines
bake for 400 trees and smash flat with a box of toothpicks.

Serves 81 for 18 minutes each. Serve with ratchets and propellers. Surplus can be frozen for 76 years.

I meant to mention, this only works for the little over half of you guys here who live on the planet were twenty trillion dollars in national debt is not a deciding factor in national elections. I heard you guys were here and thought, hey, maybe they'd like some pancakes bon appétit.

Bon appétit! 

Everything Mark Twain wanted to eat...

... when he arrived home in the United States of America after traveling around in France and Italy in 1870:

Radishes. Baked apples, with cream Fried oysters; stewed oysters. Frogs. American coffee, with real cream. American butter. Fried chicken, Southern style. Porter-house steak. Saratoga potatoes. Broiled chicken, American style. Hot biscuits, Southern style. Hot wheat-bread, Southern style. Hot buckwheat cakes. American toast. Clear maple syrup. Virginia bacon, broiled. Blue points, on the half shell. Cherry-stone clams. San Francisco mussels, steamed. Oyster soup. Clam Soup. Philadelphia Terapin soup. Oysters roasted in shell-Northern style. Soft-shell crabs. Connecticut shad. Baltimore perch. Brook trout, from Sierra Nevadas. Lake trout, from Tahoe. Sheep-head and croakers, from New Orleans. Black bass from the Mississippi. American roast beef. Roast turkey, Thanksgiving style. Cranberry sauce. Celery. Roast wild turkey. Woodcock. Canvas-back-duck, from Baltimore. Prairie hens, from Illinois. Missouri partridges, broiled. 'Possum. Coon. Boston bacon and beans. Bacon and greens, Southern style. Hominy. Boiled onions. Turnips. Pumpkin. Squash. Asparagus. Butter beans. Sweet potatoes. Lettuce. Succotash. String beans. Mashed potatoes. Catsup. Boiled potatoes, in their skins. New potatoes, minus the skins. Early rose potatoes, roasted in the ashes, Southern style, served hot. Sliced tomatoes, with sugar or vinegar. Stewed tomatoes. Green corn, cut from the ear and served with butter and pepper. Green corn, on the ear. Hot corn-pone, with chitlings, Southern style. Hot hoe-cake, Southern style. Hot egg-bread, Southern style. Hot light-bread, Southern style. Buttermilk. Iced sweet milk. Apple dumplings, with real cream. Apple pie. Apple fritters. Apple puffs, Southern style. Peach cobbler, Southern style Peach pie. American mince pie. Pumpkin pie. Squash pie. All sorts of American pastry.

Fresh American fruits of all sorts, including strawberries which are not to be doled out as if they were jewelry, but in a more liberal way. Ice-water--not prepared in the ineffectual goblet, but in the sincere and capable refrigerator.

Funny about the frogs! I thought that's what they ate in France that we think is yucky.

(Via Eve Tushnet.)

ADDED: I've redone the text so it looks the way it appears in my Kindle version of 300 works of Mark Twain. It's not written in list/poem form. It still, however, says "Prairie liens, from Illinois," which Nichevo, in the comments, surmises is a misscanned Prairie hens, from Illinois. Ah, yes, here's an article about "The 'Prairie Hens' of Illinois" with the subtitle "Mark Twain’s favorite birds ... to eat." I'm going to correct the text above.

"There. You'd better take a picture of that one, so people don't think I just make ugly half-pancakes."

So said Meade, delivering this, and thinking about this.

And when I use the search-this-blog tool on "pancake," I get:

"Can't I just eat my waffle?" said Meade, channeling Obama.

Actually, he was eating a pancake. (Meade makes pancakes nearly every morning. When he gave me mine this morning, he said "Here's your circle of grain for the morning," because the evening circle of grain, Meade-made, is pizza.)

Ah! That was a year ago, when Meade was on a pizza kick. The pancake kick continues, but the pizza is long gone.

Also in the search results on "pancake": "Things I Can't Stand About the Presidential Campaign./(A new regular feature here.)" Hey! I should have done more of those, because there are so many things I can't stand. That was from the 2004 election. I should revive the not-so-regular "regular feature." What was bugging me 8 years ago that was pancake related?

Our wartime President, six months before the election, is riding around in a bus, going to small towns in Ohio. (Search term used to find the article I read in the paper NYT in the NYT on line: "pancake"--something I recount here because it's part of the problem. The President is flipping pancakes to justify his reelection?)

At the Leap Year Café...

... it's really something.

I don't know about you, but we had orange juice and pancakes for breakfast.

It's pretty much like that around Meadhouse on a typical morning.

(Via Metafilter.)

"It's nothing like the way we know it in our community. If you're going to appropriate a dish we treasure, at least get it right."

An Atlantic City chef attacks the International House of Pancakes for serving chicken and waffles.

[Carl Redding] says he learned to make chicken and waffles where most food historians agree it was created 60-plus years ago, at the now-departed Wells Restaurant on Seventh Ave. between 132nd and 133rd Sts.

"When I worked for the Rev. Sharpton, he used to meet Betty Shabazz [Malcolm X's widow] there," says Redding. "They'd meet and I'd sit by myself just luxuriating in the chicken and waffles. It's something everyone uptown knows and likes."

Are there serious issues of authenticity to talk about or is this just a chef who's figured out how to promote his restaurant? The IHOP representative says that "because IHOP has more than 1,500 locations, it can introduce more people to chicken and waffles, 'and maybe some of them will make their way to Redding's... Next time I'm in Atlantic City, I'd like to go there myself.'"

Do fast food restaurants get people interested in a particular dish in a way that leads them to look for better versions of the same food? Or do people develop a taste for the fast-food version and reject the original form of the food? For example, maybe people like a McDonald's hamburger and don't even want a full-scale, old-fashioned hamburger anymore. To them the McDonald's hamburger is the real thing, and they're put off by this bizarre monstrosity served at... wherever hamburgers used to come from. Krazy Jim's!

So maybe Redding must take action:

He'll set up at noon in front of the IHOP on Black Horse Pike in Mays Landing, N.J., to cook and hand out free portions of chicken and waffles, Redding's-style.

Redding stresses, by the way, that IHOP doesn't normally ruffle his feathers. "I eat there," he says. "I love their T-bone steak with pancake breakfast."

Aw, come on. Handing out free food in front of somebody else's restaurant? Is that fair? There's this quasi-civil-rights flavor to this protest that's a bit absurd. Is he saying that white people have their meat-and-breakfast-starch dish and black people have theirs? IHOP can do steak and pancakes but not chicken and waffles?! 

Enough of these squabbles. Let's eat french toast and ham.

"Can't I just eat my waffle?" said Meade, channeling Obama.

Actually, he was eating a pancake. (Meade makes pancakes nearly every morning. When he gave me mine this morning, he said "Here's your circle of grain for the morning," because the evening circle of grain, Meade-made, is pizza.)

I'd just said: "There's a big civil disobedience event at the Capitol in 15 minutes."

Did Meade continue to eat his pancake or did Meade stop mid-'cake to answer the new media call?

At the Orange Pancake Café...

... did you put sweet potatoes in that?

Meade made me a pancake.



UPDATE:

Things I Can't Stand About the Presidential Campaign.

(A new regular feature here.)

1. Our wartime President, six months before the election, is riding around in a bus, going to small towns in Ohio. (Search term used to find the article I read in the paper NYT in the NYT on line: "pancake"--something I recount here because it's part of the problem. The President is flipping pancakes to justify his reelection?)

2. Senator Kerry trying to make the problem of school dropouts central to his campaign, a typical example of making issues out of things because people care about them not because they are part of the role of the President and a typical example of trying to make it seem as though you will solve a problem by making a show of caring about a problem. In fairness, Kerry has some proposals, $550 million in new spending (for smaller high schools and more tutoring) and depriving dropouts of driver's licenses. So, as usual, spend a lot more money and, for something new, go all punitive on the kids who don't make it in school. (God forbid they might need to drive to get to work or to do a job!)

3. Disney blocking the distribution of Michael Moore's new movie because it's critical of Bush. How many times does this sort of thing have to happen before people who try to suppress speech realize they only impart an aura of righteousness to their opponents--opponents who are easily attacked for what they are saying? Other recent instances of this stupidity: trying to stop Koppel's war dead-reading episode of Nightline, Al Franken sued by O'Reilly. (But free speech is politically powerful: I'm following the progress of this movie in Iran.)

UPDATE: Disney didn't "block" distribution of Moore's movie. I have more to say about it here, but I stick to my point that standing in the way of a speaker gives him a new set of powers. You may still have interests that justify doing this, as Disney does seem to.