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 Alex wrote me:

can you email me the recipe for that
rice/pea/carrot/onion combo. it is delectable and i
want to cook it.

 This is what I wrote him back:

Combine 1 cup of rice in 2 cups water, 1 tsp salt, 2 Tbsp olive oil, 3 dashes paprika, cayenne and black pepper to taste, 3 dashes cumin, 2 dashes chili pepper. Bring to a boil then simmer covered for 40-50 minutes.

While the rice is cooking, dice (smaller the better) 1/2 medium onion, 2 medium carrots, 2 stalks celery, 3 garlic cloves.

After the rice is done: on medium heat in a large wok, stir fry garlic and onion with a helping of sesame oil until onions are semi translucent. Add carrots, celery, a generous amount of Braggs and 1 tsp powdered ginger and cook until carrots are tender. Add the precooked rice and 3/4 cup frozen peas and mix. Cook for another 5-10 more minutes.

2 T. tamari, soy sauce, or Bragg Liquid Aminos
2 T. olive oil
1 T. balsamic vinegar
1 T. garlic, minced
1 t. dried basil
1 t. dried oregano
1/2 t. paprika
1/2 t. crushed red pepper flakes
1/4 t. black pepper
8 oz. tempeh, cut into 1/4 in. strips
Toss all of the following ingredients and tempeh in a bowl then cover and place in the refrigerator for an hour or more–tossing periodically. After an hour, transfer tempeh to a frying pan on medium-high heat until tempeh is brown and crispy around the edges.  Serves 2-4.

On Fridays at 12:30, a group of people I work with play ultimate with a group of people from Warner Brothers at Johnny Carson Park in Burbank. Last week a guy was taking pictures of us and posted one on his photo blog. I’m to the left, John Enney is in the middle and Elliott Baumbach is right. We won.

My fear of the substance began when I was forced into craft projects that involved glue, construction paper, and lots of glitter shaking. Recently, I listened to the B-52s “Love Shack”, I was thoroughly distressed by this lyric:

Glitter on the mattress
Glitter on the highway
Glitter on the front porch
Glitter on the hallway

This Sunday Sahra, Mike, Alex and myself enjoyed a delicious bunch consisting of vegan buckwheat pancakes, home fries and some very sweet watermelon and pineapple. While we were digesting our feast, we all agreed that seeing a movie would be a good solution to avoid the scorching 100+ degree Southern California heat. We were able to narrow down our collective desires to Right at Your Door and The Invasion. By the title of the entry you can probably guess which apocalyptic movie we chose.

Let me make this clear: that I would not recommend seeing this movie. No amount of special effects, pseudo-scientific jargon, flaming car crashes or Nicole Kidman’s transparent pajamas could save this turd of a movie. However, I would not be writing this review if I felt that there wasn’t something worth commenting on.

I had a professor in college that would say in every movie, book, or piece of media, there are ideas and attitudes embedded in it that reflect the culture of the people that consume it. That is why when one watches the 1956 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Alex and I watched right after seeing The Invasion), it seems irrelevant to a political climate that no longer is fearful of Communism. Sometimes these cultural ideals are purposefully placed by the author, director or writer and other times they are simply there as background noise. While The Invasion has several topical–and I’m sure intentional–themes about pandemic infections, government distrust, and terrorism, I’m much more interested in the background noise of this film.

While differing slightly from previous versions of this film, the basic premise of the movie is this: an alien organism (or virus, it’s unclear what exactly the agent is except that it looks like crappy CGI) reprograms people’s DNA to make them emotionless alien drones. As a result, the Earth experiences a period of peace. The viewer see televisions in the background of Bush shaking hands with Hugo Chavez, of the conflict in Darfur suddenly stopping, of all major world turmoil suddenly ending. Where once there were protesters on the street, now there is silence. At the end of the movie, when everyone is cured of the alien disease, humanity returns to its violent, “normal”, war-like self.

There is an assumption, albeit an unfair one, about human nature contained in this noise. It is much easier to imagine that evil people are inherently doomed to committing evil deeds instead of being the product of poor decisions (both individual and cultural). By the same token, it’s also easier to imagine a world that is currently being destroyed by humans that are inherently and biologically defunct rather than seeing the present global condition as historical choices our culture has made. We don’t participate in wars because of a genetic predisposition to violence and war, we war because of the choices we’ve make collectively. In The Invasion, global problems don’t stop until human DNA has been transformed to suppress all human emotions.

According to The Invasion, science is the solution that will save us from ourselves. Whether it’s Nicole Kidman’s character being saved by a pharmacy, or the world being saved by the world’s top scientists, it is ultimately a blind faith (what the hell was all the movie science jargon anyways!) in science that will cure global warming, cure hyperactive kids, cure war, cure depression. I’m unconvinced. It is, after all, science that brought the body snatching aliens to the Earth in the first place.

We need not wait for science to make our world livable again.

In conclusion, I predict the next Invasion of the Body Snatchers remake will be sometime in the year 2018, as evident by my super scientific chart below.