The Exodus, Day Two

Day Two: Sacramento to Los Angeles, 384 miles

And on the sixth day, the Lord said, "Shit, I still have to put stuff between Sacramento and LA... Ah, whatever. Nobody's going to notice."

Even though the distance I had to drive on Day Two was far shorter than on Day One, I knew that I was still in for some shit because whenever I mentioned that Day 2 of my drive was a straight shot from Sacramento to LA, someone would make a smartass remark.

My Dad: “Oh, Sacramento to LA. Well, have fun with that.”

My Mom: “You thought Portland to Sacramento was bad? Just wait until you drive to LA!”

Molly: “Yeah, Sacramento to LA. That’s a really interesting drive…”

I got into The Mystery Wagon at 9:00 AM expecting a drive that would rival The Hours in terms of unrelenting boredom. I pulled out my iPod, freshly charged from the previous night, plugged it into the stereo, and set my road trip playlist to ‘Shuffle,’ hoping that 4.6 hours of classic rock would be enough to carry me through the daymare ahead.

As soon as I hit ‘Play’, the iPod froze up and refused to so much as turn off.

“This… Does not bode well.” I muttered, pulling out of the parking lot, tuneless, and turning on the radio.

Good little liberals that we are, the dial on The Mystery Wagon’s radio is usually glued to 91.5, the Portland station for National Public Radio. In Sacramento, 91.5 is the frequency for a death metal station. As I cycled through the other presets, I found static, Christian music, country and western, and finally a Spanish language station that only played the sort of mariachi band power ballads you hear in Mexican restaurants. I stuck with that station, as I am technically Mexican and because it still beat the crap out of all the other options, and also Portland’s KINK FM.

It didn’t take long before I was blazing down the two lane highway hemmed in on either side by fields of dirt, The Mystery Wagon buffeted by strong gusts of wind filled with dust and hay. Sacramento shrank away in my rear view mirror, a small island of culture (and late night prostitution) in the center of a vast ocean of boring, boring agriculture.

The right lane was full of 18 wheelers (mercifully the three trailer death caravans that are so terrifying in Oregon are illegal in California) and the left lane was full of SUVs trying to pass the 18 wheelers. The road was arrow straight for miles until, in an exciting change, it gently curved to follow some low hills. As I drove further, the Spanish language mariachi station intermittently gave way to an R&B hip-hop station out of Stockton, the changes between the two punctuated by blasts of static.

The traffic briefly turned to bullshit as I-5 changed to four lanes on the way through Stockton. At one point, coming around a bend in the road, I spotted a California Highway Patrol cruiser parked in the bushes on the shoulder, the patrolman inside pointing a radar gun at traffic. Fortunately, I was wedged in between two semi trucks at the time, locking my speed in at well below the speed limit.

About thirty seconds after passing the cop, though, a black high performance lowrider Honda blasted past me at about 85, narrowly slipped through the space between me and the 18 wheeler in front, and then sped up and passed the truck on the right. 15 seconds after that, the California Highway Patrol cruiser blazed past in the left lane, lights and sirens going.

The duel between Vin Diesel and Eric Estrada marked Real California Experience number two.

Not long after, I started wishing that more gangbangers would start Tokyo Drifting all over the place, because as dangerous as it would be, it’d be something to distract me from how incredibly desolate and boring everything is between Stockton and Los Angeles.

I talked earlier about not seeing any signs of civilization between Ashland and Sacramento. That might have been a little bit of an exaggeration – I recall there was a city called Redding somewhere in the mix, perhaps most notable for its inclusion in the video game Fallout 2. But between Stockton and LA there is literally nothing. The closest thing to a town is the occasional roadside compound consisting of three gas stations, four fast food restaurants, and two hotels, and I feel like those are only there because somebody at CalTrans said “Jesus, guys, we’ve got to put something out there. How little can we pay people to set up a 76, a Dennys, and a Best Western in rural Wasco County?”

When I stopped for lunch and gas at one such outpost I was able to get the iPod working again, which made the next three hours quite a bit more bearable as I hurtled down the road toward a blank horizon. Eventually, the distant form of a mountain began to fade into view, and I realized that what I’d assumed was a blank horizon was actually just a heavy blanket of smog.

I had to be close.

Yes, this was Frazier Mountain, the last line of defense between Los Angeles County and all that nothing. The Mystery Wagon and I had been looking forward to no more steep grades, but alas, it was our only way in. Again, I put the pedal* to the metal and reached speeds of 45, while an unending parade of impatient SUV douchebags, eager to get back to their hot tubs and coke parties in Beverly Hills deemed my driving too slow even for the right lane and angrily blazed past on the left.

*Jesus, I have a lot of grammar conscious readers.

Coming down the other side of the Tejon Pass I was unceremoniously dumped into the nonstop bullshit carnival of the San Fernando Valley. The Interstate widened to five lanes, signs ordered motor coaches and 18 wheelers to take different off ramps, cars were passing on both sides even though I was driving at the prevailing speed in one of the righthand lanes, theme parks sprouted up on either side of the road, motorcycles zipped between cars (which is legal!?), and I navigated it all on a magic carpet of sweaty palms and profanity.

And then, finally, my GPS unit told me to get off the freeway and onto surface streets again. Three blocks later, I had arrived at my apartment in Studio City, at the foot of Laurel Canyon.

It’s a nice neighborhood, albeit one with no sidewalks (shame on me for wanting to walk anywhere in LA, anyway). I’m within spitting distance of a gas station, a video store, and a Ralph’s,* which is about all I really need.

*Home of cheap, tax-free California supermarket liquor. I was going to offer to take orders from my over-21 friends back in Oregon and drive back up at the end of the summer with a Mystery Wagon full of discounted hooch, but according to Molly that’s a felony, so… Sorry.

But the Ralph’s won’t take my Safeway Club Card. Savages.

Truman Capps heard that George Clooney lives in Studio City, and might just take up jogging in hopes of spontaneously bumping into him somewhere around here.

The Exodus, Day One

Day One: Portland to Sacramento, 580 miles

Shit, I did that? Does this mean I get to have a mountain named after me or something?

Oregon is just too damn big.

There’s nothing more depressing than driving all morning, stopping to fill the car with gas, and listening to your entire road trip iPod playlist, only to realize that you’re still in the same fucking state you started in.

However, there’s few things more exciting than driving past the Eugene exit that says ‘University of Oregon’ and suddenly being further south on I-5 than you’ve ever personally driven before. Actually, there’s probably a lot of things more exciting than that, but for me it was a real Lords of the Rings style soundtrack swelling moment to pass through Eugene and then into the land of evangelical billboards and men who wear cowboy hats and bolo ties.

Movies have taught me that a road trip can go one of two ways: You can either grow closer to the people you’re traveling with and learn a valuable lesson about love/friendship, or you can get sidetracked in some small town and be brutally murdered by inbred hill people. As I was driving alone, I prepared for the worst and made a point of keeping my doors locked as I drove through Medford.

Once I’d cleared Medford, though, the Siskiyous loomed ahead, a stretch of Interstate even more peril-fraught than the last. Two years ago, on the way to the Holiday Bowl with the Oregon Marching Band, we traveled through the Siskiyous on motor coaches, at night, in the middle of a late-December snowstorm.

This, in the dark, plus Will Ferrel.

I’m talking about pitch darkness, thick snowdrifts, and sheer drops just on the other side of the frosty guardrails. I was able to avoid an all out panic attack because we were watching Step Brothers on the coach DVD player, but even that was not a huge comfort - Step Brothers is great and all, but if I had to choose the last movie I ever watched before dying in a bus accident, it wouldn’t be that.

The Mystery Wagon looks just like this. I don't have any pictures of it and I'm too damn lazy to go outside and take one now.

I was driving my Dad’s Subaru – The Mystery Wagon, as Alexander and I call it – which has proven to be a more than reliable car for driving around Portland, Los Angeles, and the flatter sections of I-5. But climbing the Siskiyous, which have some of the steepest grades in the entire Interstate Highway System, was about as easy for The Mystery Wagon as it would be for me on a unicycle.

On the way up the pass, I was flooring it, the speedometer hovering at 45, impatient Southern Oregonians in Ford pickups with horsepower equivalent to the Enterprise swinging around into the left lane and blowing past me with ease. I could practically hear my engine talking to me:

“Vroom, y’all… Energy prit-ay, prit-ay low right now… Oh, Truman, hills ain’t exactly my deal, y’all… You ever see a Subaru goin’ up a hill in a commercial? That’s because climbin’ hills ain’t our deal… How much more Siskiyou do we got, here?”

Once I’d made it up and over and then more or less coasted down the other side and across the California border, I had to stop at a border control checkpoint. I was not expecting this – Oregon has no such restriction on people coming into the state – and was unsure what I was getting into when I pulled up to the guard booth.

“You have any fruit with you?” He asked.

“No.” I said.

“Have a nice day.” He said, waving me through.

Now, first of all, what did these four guards do to get them a job sitting in little booths in the middle of nowhere, asking people if they’re driving around with fruit in their cars? Either they really enjoy asking for fruit or they all fucked the wrong guy’s wife.

Furthermore, if I did have any fruit with me that I’d purchased in Oregon, there’s a good chance that it probably wasn’t grown there. A lot of our cheap fruit comes from outside the state, usually from big time agricultural producers. Y’know, like California. As a matter of fact, any fruit I would’ve been carrying probably would’ve made the trip up from Davis along the same damn stretch of I-5, the only difference being that the truck wouldn’t get stopped going into Oregon because we’ve got the good sense not to get butthurt about what fruit is going where.

I had always joked that the space between Ashland and Sacramento was basically a deserted, postapocaylptic wasteland, but when I was saying it I’d always treated the statement as an exaggeration – surely there had to be something there; I was just ignoring it for the purposes of comedy. However, having driven that expanse firsthand, let me tell you: There is seriously nothing.

Above: Something.

Sure, when you first cross the border there’s Mount Shasta, and I suppose the nonstop 24 hour University of Oregon Greek system houseboat party in Lake Shasta that’s been going on since 1973 counts as a settlement of some sort, albeit reeking of Axe and Natty Light. But really, beyond that, there’s just a solid 300-odd miles of emptiness.

After a few hours of rounding corners and cresting hills only to find more nothing, I started going stir crazy. For so long my only human contact had been the grim, distant faces in the other cars and lumbering 18-wheelers I was perpetually passing. I wanted to drive through a city full of people, just to know I wasn’t all alone in the world – I was so desperate, I didn’t even care that the people in question would all be Californians.

Thirty miles outside Sacramento I stopped at a wide place in the road to get my car filled with gas, only to find that in California, they expect the driver to do that himself.

Savages.

Maybe I’m old fashioned, but I was brought up in a just society of law and order, where when you need to gas up you pull up to the pump and shut off your engine, and presently a glum faced teenager or a hardworking single mother will trot up and ask what sort of gas you want in your car, and when you tell them, they do it. That’s just how things work in Oregon – in restaurants, waiters bring us food, at gas stations, waiters bring us gas, and we don’t pay sales tax on any of it.

Savages.

The whole way to Sacramento I’d been thinking up sick burns about Sacramento to use here, because until then my only experience with Sacramento had been on the aforementioned motor coach trip to the Holiday Bowl, where the band stayed the night in Sacramento on the way down and on the way back. Heading south, Sacramento seemed to us like just a grimy downtown packed to the gunwhales with hobos sleeping on wet pavement. On the way back, we were in Sacramento on New Year’s Eve, and never before have I seen that many whores just out and about in public.

But the fact is, after ten hours on the road spent dodging semis, struggling up and down hills, and longing for evidence of anything resembling human civilization, seeing Sacramento’s skyline on the horizon beyond the fields and trees was one of the most beautiful things in the world, even if it was just Sacramento.

"Sacramento: Existing Since 1839!"

Just Sacramento

When I arrived, I dropped off my stuff at the Days Inn down by the Interstate, which truly was everything an Interstate motel in Sacramento should be. Then I set out to meet Molly, of Writers fame, for dinner, as she is the official Person I Know Who Lives In Sacramento™.

Molly lives in the neighborhood from American Beauty. This isn’t a metaphor or some crappy attempt to convey the pristine suburbanity of her neighborhood; they literally shot the exteriors for the movie American Beauty in Molly’s neighborhood. This is about the coolest thing that could ever happen in anybody’s neighborhood, ever.*

*What’s that? Why, yes, they did film part of a movie in Sellwood, the neighborhood in Portland where I live. What movie? The 2008 hacker thriller Untraceable, with Diane Lane. 14% on the Tomatometer, perhaps most famous for giving birth to the line, “HE HACKED INTO MY CAR!”, which makes about as much sense as “HE HACKED INTO MY DOG!” or “HE HACKED INTO MY GROCERIES!”

In the course of margaritas and Mexican food, I discovered that Sacramento, like most cities except Salem and El Paso, gets significantly nicer the further you are from the Interstate. On the way to dinner we passed no fewer than three palm tree lined parks, not to mention a crap ton of beautifully restored old buildings the likes of which you could easily find in Portland. My impressions were also bolstered by the fact that Molly paid for dinner, because free food (especially free Mexican food) has been scientifically proven to improve my opinion of things. Too bad soccer didn’t buy me dinner…

On the way back, we passed by a couple of carloads of boisterous youth blasting air horns, which Molly explained was some part of local gang initiation rites. As I ducked my head and prayed that I wouldn’t get shot by disenfranchised minorities, I realized that I was having a Real California Experience.

Truman Capps will return with Day Two, which includes an honest to goodness car chase.

Driving To LA, Day 1

My drive today.

You wouldn't want to write a blog after that either. Go read a book or something. Expect a full wrap up on the drive soon.

EDIT: Hey, looks like Google can't be bothered to draw a blue line between Portland and Sacramento. I drove from Portland to Sacramento.

Goin' Hollywood 2: The Squeakuel

That's me on the right.

The summer after my junior year of high school, I attended a weeklong filmmaking camp at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. Leading up to the camp, I was really excited about what it meant for my future; at that point, I had already written a (godawful) screenplay, and my thinking was that in the course of this sojourn to the southland I’d be able to pitch it to the various film industry professionals who’d be teaching our classes, or at the very least network with like minded individuals who would probably be the next generation’s Spielbergs and Scorceses (or Bays, in a pinch).

When I got there, I found that most of the people doing workshops were F level Hollywood burnouts or complete outsiders, trying just as hard as I was to break in, and my classmates were mostly rich brats from the Midwest who wanted to get away from their parents long enough to get wasted and hook up. Needless to say, this camp crushed all of our dreams – I didn’t make any headway on my quest to become a famous writer, and we were so heavily chaperoned that none of the other campers could sneak off campus to use their fake IDs or get anywhere within boning distance of one another.*

*Not that I know of, at least. Nobody tried to fuck me, I’ll tell you that much. Except for some weird, slutty girl from Missouri, who has forever sullied my opinion of that state.

The one thing I did learn from that trip was that I was never going to move to Los Angeles. The crusty, jaded old screenwriters they’d pulled together for the workshop, no doubt enticed by the promise of a hot meal and a complimentary bottle of Wild Turkey, had nothing but bad things to say about the Hollywood studio system. They told us spiteful tales of the beautifully crafted screenplays they had turned out, only to see the studios buy them for peanuts and then completely rewrite them into lame teen sex comedies.* To hear them tell it, moving to Hollywood was just a good way to get closer to the industry that would take the delicious fruit of your creative labors out into a back alley and shoot it deader than Batman’s parents.

*Remember SpaceCamp? Apparently SpaceCamp was going to be totally sick until the studio fucked it up.

Plus, everything I’d seen of Hollywood on the various motorcoach tours they gave us between classes didn’t do much more to entice me. The air was hazy and we spent hours in traffic to see old film industry attractions that were at all times grimy and surrounded by crackheads. Believe it or not, there was a time that I didn’t like living in Oregon; a time that I thought it was a lame, boring place. After that trip to LA, I came home and realized that I truly did live in The Greatest Place On Earth™, and I haven’t looked back since.

What turned me off the most, though, was my impression at the time that the whole town was built on shit. Not literally, of course – like most cities on the West Coast, it’s merely built on broken promises made to the Native Americans who once lived there, along with a light dusting of their tears and broken dreams.

Hollywood, as I saw it, was built on shit in a more abstract sense – people went there to break into the film industry and sacrificed everything to get in, and the lucky few who made it in seemed to promptly forget their roots and start shitting on all the unlucky outsiders as they climbed the ladder. And yet all the outsiders we talked to in LA, the struggling actors leading our tours and teaching our classes, the ones who told us that we had to sacrifice all dignity and be as nice as possible to every rude and disrespectful producer and agent who spat on us, couldn’t stop smiling and talking about how Hollywood was where dreams came true.

At the time, it looked like Hollywood was a great place for your dreams to come true if your dream was to spend your entire life being relentlessly derided and mocked. Fortunately, I met Mike two years later, and I’ve been able to live my life of endless derision and mockery without having to leave the Willamette Valley.

So when I tell you that I’m subletting an apartment for two months and leaving for Los Angeles this coming Wednesday, know that I’ve clearly given the matter some good, hard thought.

The fact is, I changed my mind – thanks to the poor nature of the filmmaking camp I’d gone to, I had the wrong idea about the industry. Yes, there’s a lot of assholes in it; some of them are assholes because their job necessitates it, and others are assholes because they’re assholes. But what I realized on my most recent trip to LA, right before I left for England, was that the film industry is also chock full of really, really nice people.

The writers’ assistants who interviewed me at Brothers and Sisters were a laid back, jovial bunch, and all of my cousin’s friends on the set dressing crew were just downright friendly as all hell. When I wound up on the Desperate Housewives lot, the fucking director of the episode pulled up a chair and gave me some headphones so I could watch the shoot, and I cracked jokes with other crew members about how grating Eva Longoria’s laugh can be. The following day, Gene’s friend Amanda, the one who got us onto the Desperate Housewives set, invited us over to have dinner with her family, all of whom work in costuming for film and television. Right away they welcomed me into their home like I was one of the family.

At one point, Gene and I were talking to Amanda’s father, who emigrated from Hungary after World War II and wound up working as a costume designer in Hollywood for a good 50 years – he’s recently retired and now works as a character actor, primarily in commercials. We were just BSing about the industry, and I shared my Eva Longoria encounter from the previous day, and then Amanda’s dad totally knocked my story on its ass by casually recounting how in the 1960s he helped The Beatles choose the clothes they wore on the cover of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. As he told it, they were so thrilled with the clothes he found for them that he wound up hanging out with them for a few days afterwards.*

*”Did you smoke any weed with them?” Gene asked. “Nah!” Amanda’s father snorted. “None of that. We did a little sniffy-sniffy, though, if you know what I mean…”

The thing is, as big and scary and gangy as LA is, so many of the behind the camera folks in Hollywood seem to be one big, welcoming family. As misguided as it sounds, that looks like an industry where I’d be well taken care of, and to be honest, I just can’t wait to get down there.

Truman Capps would like to clarify that he hasn’t gotten an answer from the people at the Emmys yet – he’s just going down because he knows he’ll have an internship no matter what. And because this stinger wasn’t very funny, GIANT BALLSACK.

Huge

It took balls for Nikki Blonsky to pose for this, I'll give her that.

The ‘Fat Acceptance’ movement is picking up steam in the United States, which begs the question of why a country where 67% of the population is overweight is having any trouble accepting fat. We don’t just accept fat, we actively seek out and encourage it. We took a sandwich made out of fried chicken and cheese and made it a financially viable option for KFC – we don’t just ‘accept’ fat, we embrace fat in a big, awkward, blubbery, sweaty bear hug.

One of the most recent examples of ‘Fat Acceptance,’ according to MSNBC, is the new ABC Family show Huge, featuring an ensemble cast of overweight actors portraying young adults at a fat camp. Unlike various reality shows where fat people are belittled and shamed into dancing (Dance Your Ass Off) or exercising (The Biggest Loser) or just getting flung off of big balls (Wipeout) for the amusement of a national TV audience, Huge is about people who are happy with their weight and unwilling to let society tell them that they need to change.

The show is being applauded by the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance for showing fat people that they don’t have to be ashamed of themselves or feel pressure to become thin.

And at first, I was all, “Fuck that!” But then I was all, “Wait – maybe not.”

We’re in sort of a weird place with obesity right now in America. The majority of the country is overweight, and the majority of their kids are overweight, and the majority of those people think that they and their children are a healthy weight. Meanwhile, the government and virtually all major medical bodies are warning about the ‘obesity epidemic’ and telling people that they need to start getting thin, while the media is turning girls anorexic by putting makeup on stick bugs and putting them in Gap commercials yet trying to atone for it with movies like Shrek which trumpet the importance of inner beauty over conformism with the help of Cameron Diaz transformed into a fat green farting ogre.*

*Yet Shrek was also the mascot for the government’s youth anti-obesity campaign a few years back…

The message here, I suppose, is to understand that you’re beautiful just the way you are, but also lose 20 pounds lest you put yourself at risk for Type 2 diabetes and heart disease and be too big to fit into your $79 skinny jeans.

I guess at the outset, I want to not like the idea of a show like Huge, because my gut reaction is that obesity shouldn’t be encouraged. It’s a condition generally brought on by excess that creates a lot of health problems and can be avoided by staying active and making healthy eating choices. I mean, if we’re making obesity acceptable now, what’s next? A TV show that glorifies chain smoking and heavy drinking?

Oh, wait.

But then I realize that taking that sort of approach – the ‘being fat is a horrible thing that all overweight people should be ashamed of’ route – is a pretty ignorant way to go through your life, especially when you’re living in a country where a sizable majority of the people you meet are overweight. A lot of my friends are overweight. Hell, next year I’m going to be living with three core members of the Oregon Marching Band’s Beefy Man Club,* all of whom I love very dearly. In fact, when I look back on all the people who have bullied, abused, or otherwise hurt me, they’ve all been slim, trim, compulsive exercisers. My elementary school tormentor went on to become an amateur bodybuilder, an avid long distance runner and weight lifter ran off with one of my first girlfriends, and The Ex Girlfriend, well, enough said.

*Yes, that is a real thing, and yes, it is a proper noun that fully deserves capitalization.

Based on these experiences, one could say that fat people are inherently better than thin people.

Oh, wait.

But then, maybe my reluctance to approve of a show like Huge isn’t rooted in a characteristic dislike of overweight persons, but instead a desire to see these people who are so friendly have no encouragement to maintain an unhealthy lifestyle. I want to do something nice for the people who have been so nice to me, and so maybe I choose to do that by withholding judgment on a TV show about fat people that they may never watch.

But then I’m presuming that I know what’s best for other people, which makes me just as bad as the government with its absurdly high drinking age or its absurdly expensive and unsuccessful War on Drugs. Just because somebody’s lifestyle may take a few years off of their life doesn’t mean they’re unhappy. Maybe they’re living otherwise happy lives save for insecurity about their body image. Maybe any additional shame would drive overweight people to diet pills and the Atkins Diet, both of which are probably more dangerous in the long run than putting mayonnaise on everything.

And in the end, really, why am I getting all butthurt about one TV show anyway? Fat people watching a show about fat people is no more likely to encourage an unhealthy lifestyle than my TV choices are to turn me into a bad magician, or an alcoholic soccer coach, or the commander of a decrepit space warship.* At the end of the day, Huge is one show about fat people that has so far aired a single episode, contending with 112 episodes of a show that starred Calista Flockhart.

*As much as I might want it to.

Hell, maybe it’s a good TV show focusing on unpopular people who don’t have it all figured out. That’s exactly the kind of TV that I love. Maybe I should be watching Huge for its story rather than getting caught up in its message.

Or maybe I’m just overly sympathetic to the cause because I had deep fried cheese curds with my dinner tonight.

Truman Capps thinks that if anybody needs to be ashamed of what they eat, it’s the Scottish.

Diet Coke

Woah - is that a Mentos in your bottle, or are you just happy to see me?

If there’s one thing I hate (and believe me, I hate way more than just one thing), it’s people telling me how to live my life. The guy in my group at Red Robin who, after I order my burger cooked medium, says, “You know, Truman, meat cooked medium rare has a higher percentage of potentially deadly bacteria than meat cooked well done.” The girl in my 9th grade algebra class who, when I decline her offer to attend her hyperconservative Christian youth group, says, “So you’re not open to new opinions?” The cop who says, “Sir, this is a one way street.”

I would understand if I was some sort of heroin addict neo-Nazi – sure, it’s still nobody’s business, but that’s a sort of personality that is legitimately in need of some outside direction with regard to behavior and moderation. But I feel like I’m an overall decent, law abiding sort of guy – I hold the door open for women, I abstain from addictive substances like World of Warcraft, and so far in college I’ve only publicly urinated once.* Yet in spite of this, people continue to preach their own particular gospel to me, rooted in some combination of mild concern and strong douchebaggery.

*I can’t help the fact that Matt Takimoto only had two bathrooms, both of which were full of crying, vomiting girls, and that the side of his house was concealed from street view and basically begging to be peed on. Incidentally, internship people, I was a sober designated driver that night – behold the extent of my law abiding goodness!

Public Enemy #1 of Truman’s Habits was my Diet Coke consumption. I picked up the habit about ten years ago in order to cope with the pressures of 5th grade, and it continued all the way through college. Really, diet soda is a pretty embarrassing habit to have, because it’s the preferred beverage of soccer moms and supermodels worldwide. It’s like being an alcoholic, but only for Zima and rosé wine. Or being a chain smoker who only smokes Virginia Slims. Or a compulsive tampon-purchaser. The list goes on.

My consumption was never great – usually one can a day, more than that if I wound up going out to dinner that night. This was really a miniscule amount compared to most Diet Coke aficionados I know, who tend to make up for the drink’s overall pussiness by putting away enough to fill an aquarium every day. However, merely requesting a Diet Coke at a restaurant was enough to send whoever I was with into a conniption fit.

“Diet soda actually makes you fatter than regular cola!”
“Diet Coke is sweetened with aspartame, and that causes cancer!”
“The Coca Cola Company secretly wants to blow up the Moon!”

In order:

1) I don’t drink Diet Coke because I want to stay thin, I drink it because I like the taste.
2) Every major medical body in America begs to differ, so- Oh, wait, you read that in a chain email? Nevermind. I’m sure your Aunt Connie wouldn’t forward that tidbit along unless it passed her rigorous standard of peer review.
3) Good riddance. I hate the Moon. Who says we need tides?

Nothing I said, though, would ever dissuade my critics, all of whom were convinced that the most widely consumed diet soda on Earth was poison in a can, despite the fact that the steady rise of world population was refuting their claims, one healthy Diet Coke drinker at a time.

The Ex Girlfriend was one of the strongest opponents of my Diet Coke habit – not out of concern, but rather because criticizing every aspect of my character was and still is her favorite thing (next to not eating). She argued that I was remaining purposefully ignorant by only reading scientific studies conducted by medical professionals and organizations and not considering studies by naturopaths and eastern medicine professionals. Her argument seemed to be – and I’m not exaggerating here – that the Coca Cola Company had bribed every single member of every accredited medical organization, public and private, in the world in order to make them roundly declare aspartame safe for human consumption and destroy the evidence that it was in fact indirectly responsible for 9/11.

I’ve gone to the trouble of dressing down all my old critics because I want them to know that while I’ve almost entirely quit drinking Diet Coke (or any soft drink, for that matter) over the past three months, their constant nagging had nothing to do with it.

The primary reason was cost. In Europe, everything is more expensive (a natural byproduct of their diminished freedom), particularly in England, where the strong pound makes every purchase from an American bank account sting just a little bit more. Thus, at mealtimes, your 7 pound ($10.50) sandwich was expensive enough without adding a 2.50 pound ($3.75) Diet Coke to the tab. Tap water, on the other hand, was free (so long as you were very specific about requesting tap water, because if you weren’t careful you could wind up with a bottle of mineral water, the primary mineral in which must’ve been gold, given the cost). A pint of cider would add to the cost of the meal, but it also tended to do one hell of a lot more for me than a Diet Coke.

And what I noticed after about a week off the stuff is that I really don’t miss it that much. My relationship to Diet Coke wasn’t an addiction, as a fair number of nosy onlookers claimed it was, but just a habit – I was used to having a can of Coke every day, and was under the impression that carbonated water and syrup were as necessary a part of my daily life as breathing or complaining about Lady Gaga.

Now I’ve been away so long that it’s not even all that appetizing to me anymore. On the plane from England to America I had a couple of Diet Cokes, along with a Dr. Pepper in the Minneapolis airport, in order to give myself enough of a sugar and caffeine boost to stave off jet lag until bedtime in Oregon. While the drinks kept me awake, they also made my unaccustomed body feel pretty sick. So really, why go back?

So, for the record, I’m off soft drinks, and it really wasn’t that hard of a shift to make. I’ve had more energy and it’s done wonders for my bowel movements. I’ll still drink Diet Coke when I’m mixing drinks at parties (where I drink responsibly and legally, as I am 21 years old, internship people), and I’ll hit up whatever all natural cane sugar flavored cola I find at a hippie market in Portland, but for all other intents and purposes I’m hitting the water pretty hard and loving every minute of it.

Of course, I still eat red meat, so all you would be advice givers can just feel free to jump up my butt about that one.

Truman Capps hopes to balance out the healthiness of his beverage selection with an increase in bacon consumption.

Video Games Are Art

Not a great title, but trust me - it's art.

My tried and true process for deciding what to write about on this blog is to live my life until something pisses me off (which I can always count on happening twice a week, if not twice a second) and then examining the reasons for why it makes me feel that way and how I came to hold that position, and next thing I know I’m waking up in front of my computer with a brand new blog update posted, my breath smelling of whiskey and a pile of human molars at my feet.

While in England, though, I felt obliged to write about England oriented topics, as I didn’t want to be the guy who goes on a once in a lifetime trip overseas and writes about what his preferred brand of Kleenex is or whatever (Everyday Plus™, in case you were wondering). This was troublesome when something particularly stupid and non-England related happened during my absence, but now that I’m back and my travels have temporarily ceased, I feel like it’s time to deal with an issue that’s been nagging at me for some time.

On April 16th, film critic and general pop culture god Roger Ebert posted an update on his blog in which he reaffirmed his position that video games can never be art. Not only is this statement wrong; it’s profoundly ignorant, and made all the more frustrating for me because the person who said it is highly intelligent and talented. I always hate to see smart people acting like idiots – this is why Steve Martin’s film career as of late has been sort of painful for me to follow.

Roger Ebert stated that he doesn’t play any video games, which, as far as I’m concerned, ends the argument right then and there.

“The three games [TED speaker Kellee Santiago] chooses as examples [of art] do not raise my hopes for a video game that will deserve my attention long enough to play it.”

He’s basically disqualified from any discussion on the matter because he has no frame of reference other than how he sees video games represented in the media, which is either in sophomoric commercials designed to glorify selling points such as violence or immersion, or in news segments designed to deride elements of gaming such as violence or immersion.

To be honest, I can’t blame Roger Ebert for thinking that video games are not and cannot be art. Precious few games are of what is classically considered to be artistic merit, and even then they’re not usually sold on the basis of artistic merit, like independent films, because you can’t carjack artistic merit and use it to run over hookers. On top of that, a fair number of the games that are designed to be of artistic merit tend to fall flat.

Case in point, Grand Theft Auto IV. It was heavily billed as this brooding, creative masterpiece about the American dream, but a lot of that message is undercut when your character eats hot dogs to recover from gunshot wounds and caps off his American sojourn by jumping a motorcycle onto a moving helicopter. The Halo series also tried to bill itself as this mature study of war and peace, particularly through a really beautiful ad campaign that almost makes you forget that you spend most of the game shooting profanity spouting, neon colored aliens with a rocket launcher.

So video games don’t make a great case for themselves. Arthouse gaming receives virtually no exposure, and as a casual gamer myself, I can tell you that I’m fundamentally uninterested in noncompetitive games that a couple of stoned digital arts majors cobbled together in somebody’s basement. Gaming is a big industry that currently sells itself with the same over the top zeal as a film industry made up entirely of Michael Bays.

But what really cheeses me off is that Roger Ebert, this goddamn American treasure, would go out and outright deride video game artistry as “pathetic” when the man hasn’t so much as played any of them. Full disclosure, I always hated soccer, but I withheld comment until I’d actually watched a few games, just so I knew what I was talking about. Likewise, I hate Sex and the City, but I’m not going to get on here and label it as a socially detrimental piece of pseudo-pornographic trash until I’ve actually sat down and watched a few episodes to give myself a frame of reference – until that day, I’ll freely admit that my views on Sex and the City are uninformed opinions and nothing more.*

*I’ve watched some Friends, though. Friends can go straight to hell.

For Roger Ebert to even get up on his high horse about what is or isn’t art is also pretty stupid, seeing as a good amount of the groundbreaking, important artwork of the 20th century was either declared to be ‘not art’ by the critics of the time (Post-Impressionism, Cubism, Pop Art), or intentionally designed to challenge or refute notions of what we consider to be art (Dada, punk rock). Those are such murky and subjective waters that I’ve given up on trying to differentiate between art and not art, because as soon as you say that a man rubbing his shit on a wall isn’t art there’ll be some asshole in a beret and a striped shirt telling you that you’ve just written off Andy Warhol and Jackson Pollack with that statement.

I don’t have a whole lot to say to defend video games, because the video games I play, as stated, are almost exclusively the ones in which murder and destruction are the primary gameplay mechanic. These are, I imagine, the video games that Ebert has in mind when he says that the medium is not capable of art. Even these particularly plebian games, though, have rare moments that bring out in me an emotional response even greater than that of other mediums (such as, I don’t know, film.)

The best example I can give is from Resident Evil 4, an almost criminally enjoyable game which revolves entirely around you shooting Spanish zombies in the face with a shotgun.

In the game, the player’s character is government agent Leon Kennedy, who is investigating the disappearance of the President’s daughter in a remote Spanish village. Before long, everything goes to hell and the zombified villagers begin to attack en masse, sometimes with chainsaws. Alone and cut off from the outside world, Kennedy has no choice but to work his way through the village and surrounding countryside, fighting off wave after wave of increasingly horrific zombies.

The dialogue is reprehensible, the hero is a square jawed, unflinching American, and all of the Spanish villains are two steps above Speedy Gonzales on the racial sensitivity scale. But in spite of all this, the game has a distinctly existential tone – at virtually all times you are completely alone and cut off from society. Sure, you’re surrounded by people, but the only way you can interact with them is shooting them before they eat you. Eventually you do find and escort the President’s daughter, but in a fight she’s little more than a mewing, crying liability.

Near the end of the game, after countless hours of being all alone in this nightmare without a friend in the world, the player stumbles upon an outdoor complex packed full of vicious, bloodthirsty zombies, some of whom are armed with crossbows and rocket launchers. Low on health and ammo after an earlier boss battle and with no way around the compound, the player has no choice but to walk into what is clearly certain doom. As he does so, however, a lone US Air Force Apache helicopter appears, responding to one of Leon’s earlier distress calls.

“Name’s Mike!” The pilot of the helicopter cheerfully shouts into your earpiece. “If you’re looking for firepower, you’ve come to the right place.”

From this point on, you sneakily make your way through the compound as Mike absolutely massacres this seemingly unstoppable army of zombies, the vile antagonists who’ve been making your life a living hell for the past 15 hours or so of gameplay. He’s pretty much the only ally you’ve got, in addition to being the only evidence that anybody in the outside world is still looking for you, and the fact that he’s flying a helicopter loaded with heavy weapons also helps a lot. For me, at least, this was a moment of fist pumping elation.

Shortly after he’s wiped out the zombie threat, Mike hovers his chopper near a cliff while he and Leon discuss where they can meet for drinks after this all is over. And in that moment of carefree relaxation after so much tension and violence, one remaining rocket launcher armed zombie appears and shoots Mike’s helicopter down, killing him instantly.

When this happened, I yelled, “No! MIIIIIKE!” at literally the exact same time as Leon did. Such was my emotional connection to a minor character in a video game who I had only just met and whose face I’d never even seen.

It mattered so much more than any dead helicopter pilot on film because I’d lived the experience. That, Mr. Ebert, is why video games are art.

Truman Capps hopes he didn’t spoil Resident Evil 4 for anybody – but it’s been six years, after all. There’s a statute of limitations on this stuff.

Ahmerikuh

Aww, you guys! I missed you.

They say that studying abroad is a life changing experience – you’ll learn a metric crap-ton about another culture, and in the process maybe learn a thing or two about yourself – admittedly, you could get roughly the same effect by watching an episode of The Amazing Race followed by a rerun of Party of Five, but you wouldn’t have any stories to tell at parties and the pictures would be way less interesting.

In England I learned all kinds of stuff about the culture and lifestyle of people in the United Kingdom. I dove in head goddamn first – I lived with a family, I rode public transportation, and against my better judgment I watched a couple of World Cup games.

Now, though, I’m back in the United States, jet lagged to high heaven, looking forward to some free time to focus on video games and fretting about the internship situation. “What did you learn?” you ask.

I’ll tell you what I learned:

America fucking rules.

Please, before you bring up all the reasons why it maybe doesn’t rule so much, allow me to explain.

Something that’s always impressed me is how parents of children who are mentally challenged are able to keep going day after day, raising a child who will never really grow up and will always require care, either from the parents or from the state. It looks to me like a hopeless situation – Sisyphus and his boulder, so to speak, only every day he has to look around and see thousands of other people proudly rolling their boulders up the hill and then going on to live out their twilight years in ease and comfort. Somehow, though, they do it. It’s a feat that requires a strength I can’t imagine, and is yet another reason why I never want to have children.

Nick Hornby is an English author who wrote “About A Boy” and “High Fidelity,” among others, who happens to be the father of an autistic son. Some time ago he wrote a magazine article about the daily trials and rewards of raising a mentally challenged child – breakfast, putting on a jacket, or getting into the car can all spontaneously become a huge ordeal depending on what his son’s condition is that day. Circumventing these potential blowups and finding solutions for these problems, day by day, is just part of his relationship with his son, and it’s part of what he loves about him.

I don’t want to belittle Nick Hornby’s situation nor that of any parent in these circumstances (any more than I already have by mentioning them on this little fart joke parade I call a blog), but I have to say I feel like that’s the best way to describe why I love the United States so much.

We lead all other first world countries in teen pregnancy rates, gun crimes, serial killers, and obesity. We consume asinine amounts of natural resources and waste enough food to feed entire African countries. Private interests are giving our elected officials 24/7 blumkins. Our environmental record isn’t so hot right now. A significant contingent of our country is convinced that global warming is a myth and that our president is a Muslim, and further convinced that being a Muslim makes you an unfit leader.

But hey – we just got healthcare!

Sure, it’s weak and the special interests shot it to hell, and sure, it basically broke our government getting it passed, and sure, trying to provide medical care for everyone in the country has a lot of people praying for our president to be assassinated, but that’s cool. We got healthcare, just like all the other countries. That’s one ordeal we managed. Today, our kid got a little bit more like all the other kids who’ve had healthcare for decades.

One day at a time, folks.

These were the things that disgusted me before I went to England – these were the reasons why, in high school, I swore up and down that I’d move to Canada as soon as I was out of college. But the fact is, the whole time I was in countries like England and Denmark, countries that have healthcare, the environment, and foreign policy pretty much on lockdown, I just got bored when they’d talk about their problems.

“What, members of parliament are abusing their room and board allowances? Jesus, people, don’t sweat the small stuff – I think it’s illegal for members of Congress not to abuse their stipends.”

England is a beautiful country and they’ve got their head in the right place when it comes to conservation and public policy, but I could never live there. Part of it is just because I love my own country’s culture so much, but it’s also because it’s just not as exciting. In America we’re struggling on a daily basis to stay true to the Constitution and be The Good Guy in the international arena, which is seldom pleasant and never easy. That right there is what we call dramatic conflict – real Battlestar Galactica quality stuff, although it unfortunately lacks space battles and sexy robots (so far). Countries like England already have so many of the contentious issues figured out that whatever they’ve got left to fight about looks to me to be about as interesting as a show about rich people trying to decide what shoes to wear.*

*Which is why I don’t watch Sex and the City.

I love America’s faults, and I love America’s triumphs. I love that our culture is so strong that there are entire TV channels in England dedicated to showing American programming. I love that, even though we’re big and brash and kind of rude, our heart is usually in the right place.

Truman Capps is going to trot this blog entry out if ever he runs for public office.

Bonus, late update special:

Soccer

You know what else I love about America? The fact that we play real fucking sports. I suppose I’m in no real position to comment, seeing as the only sport I like is football, but I watched some World Cup games over there, and I did not like what I saw.

Seriously, everybody? That’s the sporting event that drew 715 million viewers in 2006? Does the rest of the world just not know about football or something?

A lot of my friends on Facebook are pretty excited about the World Cup and have been very avidly following it, which came as something of a shock to me. These are legitimately intelligent American people for whom I have a lot of respect, many of whom are Oregon Marching Band members, so for me to see them getting all excited about soccer when I’ve personally joined them in experiencing the majesty of college football is like watching a bunch of grown men sitting around eating paint chips.

They say that soccer is a better “show of athleticism” because there’s no time outs, and that may well be true, but what I do know is that in a football game, you’re going to be seeing people out there making some plays and scoring some fucking points, not chasing a ball around and consistently missing a very large goal. If I had to choose between no time outs and people scoring, I’d pick people scoring – I’m willing to put up with a few time outs if it means I don’t have to blow 90 straight minutes watching a bunch of people running around in the middle of a field, kicking a ball back and forth until the game ends in a scoreless tie, as it so often does. I mean, shit, if that was all I had to get excited about I’d have a riot afterwards too. Fortunately, I have football.

No, not “American football” – I used to get specific like that, back before I’d sat down and watched a couple of soccer games, but not anymore. Football is football: Forward pass, blitz, field goal, Statue of Liberty, Hail Mary, John Madden football. I realize that soccer may have had the name first, but that doesn’t matter. They lost their right to the name about the time they decided that it was okay to play a game that cranks out scoreless tie after scoreless tie. Get used to it. You watch soccer. It’s Latin for Shitball.

When I want to see something entertaining, exciting, and legitimately badass, I watch football. When I want to see a good “show of athleticism”, I’ll go watch a fucking Pilates class.

THESE COLORS DON’T RUN

Watch This Space

I've been awake for a very long time.

I'll update later today. As in, this evening-ish.

Things I'll Miss

Pubs

I know from experience that making your way in the world today takes everything you’ve got, and have often been in situations where taking a break from all my worries sure would help a lot. I always want to go where everybody knows my name – unfortunately, while I’ve been in London I’ve been unable to go to the Castle Adult Superstore in Springfield. Therefore, pubs have filled that role, and filled it well.

Taylor’s, the sports bar in Eugene where the Oregon Marching Band goes for cheap shitty drinks and the occasional taco at 1981 prices, is not necessarily a friendly place. Part of this is because the head bartender moonlights as The Grinch, and part of this is because it’s just sort of an open, dimly lit room with tables, booths, taps, and a perennially sticky floor. They didn’t take the time to make it friendly and beautiful because as a college bar its patrons aren’t intended to appreciate much beyond the bottom of their glass (or maybe that sticky floor towards the end of the evening).

As I’ve mentioned before, every pub feels like a friendly neighborhood bar. They succeed at this much in the same way that Applebee’s tries to feel like a friendly neighborhood restaurant but shits itself through overenthusiasm. Whenever Tom and I have been tired or bored, the nearest pub is never too far away (another plus), and we always feel welcome to have a seat and drink a pint or two, or maybe eat some of the damn fine food they serve.

Also, you’re not expected to tip the bartender. I mean, seriously – all you did was draw me a pint of Strongbow and then hand it to me. If they expected a tip for that, then I’d expect a tip from myself for wiping my own ass.

The Tube

When my former roommate and future God Emperor of Earth, Josh, came to visit me from Copenhagen a couple months ago, he couldn’t stop babbling about how great the metro in Copenhagen is. How it was rated the best light rail system in the world. How it’s always on time. How the trains are fully automated and driven by computers.*

*Y’know, because letting machines run things always works out.

He usually said these things to me while we were standing on the platform at some London Underground stop, waiting for a train that was late, or while we were hoofing it up and down flights of stairs or broken escalators in Tube stations in Central London in order to change lines, or when we were forced to alter our travel plans and make a 90 minute detour because the line we were planning on using had been shut down for maintenance.

That’s the thing – the London Underground is a beautiful trainwreck.

And I understand that that statement may be a bit confusing, being as I’m referring to an extensive system of high speed underground trains as a trainwreck. Let me be clear – it’s a metaphor.

Like I was saying, though, I love the Underground for how well it works in spite of the fact that it’s an antiquated system that has literally every reason to suck. The maps are easy to understand and so far I’ve only encountered one train car that smells like piss. The constant renovation that forces commuters to use detour buses is frustrating, but it also provides a reliable excuse for whenever you’re late to class.

Furthermore, the outdatedness brings introverted Londoners together in ways that are quite simply beautiful. For instance, less than half of the stations have ramps or elevators, forcing people with children in strollers to hoist the stroller up and carry it up or down flights of stairs as needed. The thing is, almost every day I see complete strangers helping parents carry their child laden strollers down staircases. Underground cars seldom have enough seats, but people of all shapes and sizes will frequently vacate their cherished seat if a pregnant woman or old person boards the train and has nowhere to sit.

What I’m saying is, the Underground has character. It may seem cranky and hard to work with, but deep down it’s got a heart of gold. Y’know, like Becker.

Man, how many Ted Danson references am I going to fit into this update?

The Food

“You’re going to miss English food? But English food tastes like armpits!”

Yeah, some of it does. The trick is to avoid things that taste like armpits. Words to live by, really.

I’ll probably never have this volume of kickass Indian food ever again in my life, largely because I have no plans to ever go to India. As I’ve stated in earlier blogs, Indian food here, particularly along Brick Lane, is uniformly good, and I’ve picked up an addiction to lamb curry and Naan bread that I probably won’t be able to sustain back in the States.

Unfortunately, as I’ve also mentioned, it’s really easy to run up a big tab with Indian food because they keep offering you so many additions to your meal that you start ordering them just because you want to pretend you’re a king with ten waiters bringing him endless dishes of food. “More poppadoms! More Naan bread! This will be the grandest meal of our lives!”

The trick is to find an all-you-can-eat Indian buffet, which Tom and I did last weekend. It’s not an all-you-can-eat buffet in the Izzy’s sense – there’s no long table with a sneezeguard, nor is there a tray in sight. Basically, you order the buffet (7 pounds 95, where we went) and they bring you lamb curry, chicken tikka, vegetable curry, rice, Naan bread, some kind of drumstick, and a potato seafood cake that I didn’t even know the name of. And trust me, that’s all you can eat, unless you’re a total fatass. This business model would not work in Tennessee.

I’m also going to miss the fish and chips. Yes, I know they have that in America, but not only is it better here, it’s generally cheaper and more widely available. I’ve grown to like cod, although it’s still no halibut, but what I think I’ll miss most are the fries.*

*Which I’ve been grudgingly referring to as ‘chips’ in order to save time. They are not chips of anything. They are fried. Hence, fries.

I can’t quite describe how the fries are better over here, but they just are. For one thing, they aren’t McDonald’s yellow (unless, y’know, you’re at McDonald’s) – they’re closer to white, and cut wide like steak fries. And they serve them with salt and pepper and malt vinegar, which is how I’ll continue to eat French fries for the rest of my life. And you can dip them in HP Sauce, which, if you haven’t tried it, is made out of unicorns and dreams.

Will I forget all of this as soon as I get my hands on an honest-to-goodness chimichanga? Probably, yes. But that’s just because, as much as I’ll miss a lot of stuff over here, I’m also nostalgic for the stuff I’ve been seeing and eating since I was a baby.

…Three Men and a Baby, that is!

Truman Capps will not miss soccer. In civilized sports like college football, only 200 or so people in the stands play annoying instruments, as opposed to fucking everyone, South Africa.

Boris Johnson Can Kiss My Ass

"Hey, you know who else you guys are being too hard on? Emperor Palpatine. He's just misunderstood!"

When I was in kindergarten and first grade, back when I lived in Longview, Washington, the gas station near my school was a BP station. The running joke among me and my classmates was that it would be really funny if the lower bump on the ‘B’ wore off, so then the sign would just say ‘PP,’ which, I’ve got to admit, would still be kind of funny, regardless of current events.*

*Some perennially muddy hillbilly kid with a tougher upbringing than the rest of us suggested a circumstance in which the sign would read ‘BS,’ but at the time that joke was way over our heads.

Even then I was interested in England, because I knew that was where double decker buses and James Bond were from, and so every day when my Mom drove me to school and we passed the big sign that said ‘BP – British Petroleum’, I would always think about how cool it was that the British had been kind enough to put a piece of their culture in our tiny, cat-pee smelling town – like a little embassy where you could buy propane and Doritos.

That was 1994. A lot has changed since then.

For one thing, in 2001, BP changed its name to BP, which stood for ‘Beyond Petroleum.’ This was meant to reflect their commitment to being an environmentally friendly oil producer with an eye on alternative energy research and development.

And then, a couple of months ago, one of their poorly maintained oil rigs exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, killed a bunch of people, and opened up a pipe which is gushing fajillions of barrels of oil into a delicate marine ecosystem on a daily basis. So, y’know, maybe they could’ve gotten Beyond Petroleum a little sooner. Solar panels are much more pelican friendly.

I’m not going to recap everything else, because you know it: BP has been lying and stifling the media and failing in its attempts to stop the leak, and Tony Hayward is saying all the wrong things, and the government is launching a criminal investigation and talking some serious trash about BP.

That’s where London mayor Boris Johnson, the Jack Brazil lookalike who you may remember from last week, comes into play:

(From ABC News)

Criticism of British oil giant BP has reached fever pitch in the US since the rig exploded more than 50 days ago.

Senior US politicians have recently begun referring to the company as British Petroleum, a name the business has not used since 1998, and president Barack Obama has said he would sack BP’s top executive Tony Hayward.
Now outspoken London mayor Boris Johnson has hit back, saying he wants an end to what he says is “anti-British rhetoric”…

…Mr. Johnson does not deny BP has made monumental mistakes, but he has called for an end to the trashing of an iconic UK company.

“[It] starts to become a matter of national concern if a great British company is being continually beaten up on the international airwaves,” he said.

“OK, [it] presided over a catastrophic accident... but ultimately it was an accident that BP I think is paying a very, very heavy price [for] indeed.”

I get that a lot of English pensions are tied up in BP. I get that BP is a major part of England’s economy. I get that if BP goes under, it’s going to be very bad for England.

But seriously now, shut the fuck up, you good for nothing limey piece of shit.

Please forgive my language, but the last time I checked, the dead dolphins were washing up on American shores, choking on crude oil gushing out of a BP well, which only exploded because of your so called “great British company.”

Your great British company, sir, that was named one of the world’s ten worst companies by Mother Jones Magazine two times because of its environmental and human rights record. Your great British company which, for two years, dumped toxic chemicals in Alaska’s North Slope. Your great British company, which cut corners on safety and maintenance, thereby allowing a refinery in Texas City to blow up and kill 15 people. Your great British company, which spilled 5000 barrels of oil in Prudhoe Bay. Your great British company, which the EPA called the most polluting company in the United States – and that was before Deepwater Horizon.

Honestly, I’m sort of shocked that you’re still associating yourself with these J-holes. If I were you, not only would I be keeping my mouth shut about how the United States is cleaning up the mess your ‘great British company’ made, I’d be systematically flushing documents and killing witnesses Goodfellas style to erase any evidence of the fact that BP ever was a British company. I’d be lobbying Parliament to revoke Tony Hayward’s passport and deport his family. I’d be doing everything in my extremely limited power to make sure the entire fucking world forgot that executives in an office in the city I was mayor of had made the shrewd budgetary decisions that got 11 Americans killed and destroyed an extremely delicate ecosystem, along with virtually every facet of the coastal economies save for hazardous waste cleanup.

It’s quite cute that you think BP is paying a “very, very heavy price.” I suppose they are, when you consider how much that ad campaign ran them, or how difficult it must be to systematically suppress media coverage of oiled beaches and wildlife, or how expensive it is to pay cleanup crews to take three hour lunches.

You know who else is paying a heavy price? The people who are going to watch it literally rain oil as soon as a hurricane scoops up that slick and drops it on Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida – the slick that’s there because your ‘great British company’ was particularly great at being criminally negligent.

If I see Tony Hayward and his boardroom chappies fly out to the Gulf, hop into the water, and drown themselves in that oil slick, then maybe we can talk about whether they paid a great price.

I know that BP was able to get away with running such a shitty* company because the United States systematically deregulated the oil industry and because the agency tasked with enforcing what few regulations remained was so in bed with the industry that the sheets were starting to smell funny.

*Y’know, or ‘great.’ Potato, potahto.

I know that in the past America has fucked England over. I don’t know of any specific times, because there isn’t a Wikipedia page for ‘Times America has fucked England over,” but given America’s penchant for fucking other countries over, I’m very sure it’s happened more than once. I’m not sure if any American companies are responsible for the biggest environmental disaster in British history. I’m not sure if, should that have happened, an American politician tried to tell Englanders how to react. If any of that happened, I sincerely apologize.

But look:

British* Petroleum totally fucked up, and they did such a good job of it that our country is taking it in the pants environmentally and economically. Americans have lost their lives, and a lot of Americans are losing their livelihoods, and for that we can lay the blame squarely on BP.

*I’m reluctant to call BP ‘Beyond Petroleum,’ seeing as they had a full 9 years between adopting that name and Deepwater Horizon to develop environmentally friendly energy solutions and instead decided to spend that time finding new ways to ruin the environment.

Don’t get mad at President Obama for saying he’s looking for an ass to kick, or for saying he’d fire Tony Hayward after he publicly downplayed the extent of the spill, lied about the amount of oil leaking, and whined about wanting his life back. Just so you know, the President trash-talking BP’s CEO isn’t driving the stock prices down nearly as hard as the live video feed of that oil leaking into the Gulf of Mexico. If you want to blame anyone for BP’s downfall, maybe you should blame BP.

Your company fucked up our country, and we’ll say whatever the hell we want. My deepest condolences to the Englanders who may lose their pensions over this – they can join the Gulf Coast fishermen in the job line.

Truman Capps would also like to congratulate England on being unable to beat America in the World Cup – you know, the team from the country that doesn’t care about soccer. Maybe the oil makes us stronger.

London Mayor Question Time

Thanks to their cute accents, many of you may be under the impression that the English are really friendly, polite, proper people. This is not the case. They have every ability to be mean and nasty, and in many regards they’re better at it than Americans – usually when drunk or during a political debate (both at the same time would be an interesting occurrence, for multiple reasons).

Have you ever noticed how the English seem to outright revile Tony Blair when really the worst thing he did was support the War in Iraq? I’ve always had some trouble understanding their contempt, because from where I was sitting during the Blair years he seemed like a really friendly, polite, proper sort of guy thanks to his cute accent. Sure, following America into Iraq probably wasn’t such a bright idea, but when you put him next to George W. Bush, who pulled us into that war on a tractor made of and powered by bullshit while simultaneously giving Osama Bin Laden a chance to escape,* he doesn’t look all that bad.

*See also: Hurricane Katrina, USA PATRIOT Act, No Child Left Behind, Valerie Plame, Halliburton, extensive deregulation of the financial industry paving the way for economic disaster.

Part of this is because as an American high schooler I wasn’t keeping abreast of the various English domestic policies that probably affected his standing with the people. The other reason, as I discovered today, is that politics in England works about like this:

1) Congratulations! You’re Queen Elizabeth II. Basically everyone in England has nothing but blind love for you.
2) You’re an ordinary English person seeking political power – you run for office (or, as they say here, stand for office – lazy bastards), get elected, and spend the rest of your term being shit on by your constituents, your opponents, your allies, and basically whoever else is in the area and in a poo-flinging mood.

Today my group went to London City Hall to watch the London Mayor’s Question Time, a public event that sounds sort of like a children’s puppet-oriented television show, but isn’t. For one thing, puppets tend to be a lot more mature than the various members of London’s city council, known as the London Assembly.

The 25 members of the Assembly, representing political parties for various districts across greater London, all sit at a U shaped table, while the Mayor of London, Jack Brazil, sits at a single desk at the center of the U while they all slander the bejeezus out of him and each other.

Actually, his name is Boris Johnson, but seriously. It’s like the Mayor of London lives a secret life as a 20 year old American college student whose favorite things are Pabst Blue Ribbon and all bands ever.

Question time works like this: Members of the Assembly submit their questions ahead of time to the Mayor, who then answers them during the public event, at which point the Assembly member who posed each specific question is free to ask follow-up questions, which pretty much amounts to jumping on the table and waggling his dick at the mayor of the largest city in the United Kingdom (in a strictly verbal sense).

This is a direct excerpt from today’s proceedings, following a question from a Labour Party Assembly member about what England’s new coalition government means for the city of London:

Mayor Johnson: “The only risk I can really think of is the risk that the coalition government should give way to another disastrous labor government.” (Guffaws from Johnson’s supporters.)

Assembly member: “I’m sort of grateful for your answer but it would’ve been nice if you’d tried to answer more substantively.”

Mayor Johnson: “I’m sorry – I thought your question was one of your jocular questions intending to get a rise out of me.”

Assembly member: “None of my questions are jocular.”

This is just an excerpt – imagine this sort of thing almost nonstop for two hours, with the Assembly Chair uselessly scolding Assembly members for speaking out of turn and frequently stopping proceedings to ask other members of the Assembly to turn off their microphones when they whispered to each other.

The most unity I saw out of the group was when everyone joined together in laughter and open scorn for a particularly environmentally conscious member of the Assembly who posed a question about a proposed ‘Meat Free Monday’, wherein the city government would encourage Londoners not to eat meat on Mondays in order to theoretically cut back on the environmental impact of factory farming.

As soon as she said ‘Meat Free Mondays,’ everyone in the chamber groaned and started laughing, and the mayor more or less cut her off, briskly explaining in no uncertain terms that there was no way he was going to try and convince the people of London not to eat meat.

Another member of the Assembly used his follow up question to say, “Well, good to know the Green movement is using their time on the Assembly wisely,” to great laughter. “As I recall, last year they were trying to convince Londoners not to flush the toilet to save water!” More laughter, at which point the poor woman who’d proposed Meat Free Mondays was staring dejectedly at her lap.

“That’s not a question!” The Assembly Chair screeched like a 6th grade math teacher. “The next question on the agenda…”

“You know,” Mayor Johnson said, ignoring the shit out of her. “It was when I first heard about that not flushing the toilet thing that I decided to stand for office.” More laughter and clapping.

“I think the idea was that if you were standing, you weren’t supposed to flush.” The Assembly member said, in what was arguably the most eloquent pee joke to ever grace London municipal politics.

The United States Congress is far from refined or polite, but at least when they say stuff that’s virulently racist, homophobic, religiously intolerant, untrue, or generally hateful, they have the good graces to do it with a smile on their face.*

*Even if it’s because they just got a squeezer from a page.

During the Mayor’s question time, it’s nonstop rage for two hours. No wonder 28 Days Later happened in London.

Truman Capps thinks you should look up squeezer on Urban Dictionary if you’re not clear about what it is.

Tired of London

“When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.”

-Samuel Johnson

“Hey, you know Samuel Johnson? Fuck that guy.”
-Truman Capps

I’ve been in London for just over two months now. At the time of this writing, I have exactly two weeks left before I jump on a plane and fly back to the United States. To be honest, I’m looking forward to it.

I’ve seen Big Ben and Parliament, and Westminster Abbey. I’ve had lunch in St. James Park and made faces at the guards at Buckingham Palace. I’ve hung out in Trafalgar Square, had dinner in SoHo, and thoroughly perused the National Gallery, National Portrait Gallery, British Museum, Tate Britain, Tate Modern, Imperial War Museum, and the British Library. I’ve taken a stroll through the Tower of London and across the adjacent London Tower Bridge. I’ve taken the obligatory tourist picture straddling the Prime Meridian at Greenwich. I’ve ridden a boat down the Thames. I’ve seen 10 Downing Street. I got as close as possible to Battersea Power Station. I’ve seen three productions at the British National Theater and two at the Globe. I’ve eaten enough fish and chips, bangers and mash, and chicken tikka masala to choke a donkey.

I had wanted to visit Slough, setting of the original UK version of The Office, today so that I could see the building from the opening titles that is ostensibly the headquarters of Wernham-Hogg Paper Company. But I did some research today and discovered that a trip to Slough would take an hour and a half, one way, requiring multiple bus transfers and the purchase of a train ticket that would cost several pounds. Then, once in Slough, I would take a picture of the building that was shown at the beginning of every episode of a TV show I liked, then turn around and spend an hour and a half making my way back home.

Let’s just pretend I took this picture.

Having not done it, I feel sort of stupid, because really – do I have anything better to do? I’ve exhausted my tourism opportunities in the city (save for the changing of the guard, which I’ll see tomorrow, and the London Eye, which I’ll ride in my last week here, if at all), so my last couple of weekends have been spent kicking around Harrow or doing homework, with a fair amount of time spent daydreaming about whatever my internship situation winds up looking like for the summer.

But that’s the thing – I’ve been a tourist for so long now that I’m kind of getting sick of it. I miss just being a resident. I miss not feeling the need to pull out my camera every time I see something interesting. “Wow, the Steel Bridge looks pretty nice today… Eh, why take a picture? It’ll be here tomorrow. In Portland. Where I live.”

London is a gigantic city, and I’m not going to be the dumbass who suggests that I’ve seen everything it has to offer in two months. There’s undoubtedly more stuff to see in this city – fascinating little museums, street markets with free samples, red phone boxes with interesting pornographic leaflets in them – but I feel as though I’m almost fed up with seeing.

Every cathedral is very impressive for the first few seconds after you walk into it – it’s a massive indoor space with light shining through stained glass. They were designed to be impressive sensory experiences. What the original architects didn’t bargain for was the fact that one day, the people seeing cathedrals would be study abroad students who see at least two cathedrals a week.

And museums – oh, the museums. I’ve had so many maps and audio guides thrust into my hands, wandered through so many dusty rooms wondering “How much longer should I stare at this arrowhead?”

Because of the short duration of my study abroad session in England, I’ve been forced to dive headfirst into pretty much everything. I haven’t had time to space out my museum visits over several months or get acclimated to the city at a reasonable pace – not that I wish my study abroad excursion was longer (for reasons I’ll cover in a later update).

Essentially, my time here, while it has been a life changing, kickass experience that I wouldn’t give up for the world, has also been essentially one big culture binge, and going on a two month binge of any sort is bound to burn you out eventually, be it heroin or English history.

Heroin will probably catch up with you a little faster.

Truman Capps has not gotten burned out on the deep fried foods, though, as tonight’s dinner proved.

Shrewsbury

So last week we took a program excursion to Shrewsbury, a small, quaint English town near the Welsh border. And yes, before you ask, virtually every time someone said ‘Shrewsbury’, or I saw the word ‘Shrewsbury’, or I thought about the word ‘Shrewsbury’, I would giggle to myself and mutter, “The Shrewsburys taste like… Shrewsburys!”

See, Dad, it’s from this movie called Super Troopers about a bunch of really horrible cops who do silly things, and then this guy… Look, I’ll just explain it when I get home.

The thing about London is that it is big – bigger than Portland and Seattle combined, although smaller than Los Angeles and the Moon. Having lived in London for nine weeks now, I’ve come to assume that if I want to be somewhere, it’s very far away from where I currently am. When I want to go to class, I have to spend an hour on the Tube. When I want to go to a specific pub, I can expect plenty of bus riding, walking, and frequent stops to ask for directions. Much like LA, nothing is close to anything else – unlike LA, in London you don’t have Eva Longoria throwing herself at you to take your mind off of your travels.

Oh, hey, did I ever mention that I actually met this lady? I did? Do… Do you, like, want to hear it again?

This is also true to some extent in small towns in the United States. While Salem, with its six figure population, is not necessarily a small town, it’s considerably smaller than London, yet you still have to do a good bit of driving if, say, you want to go to Wal*Mart. Which, in Salem, is about the only thing to do once you run out of meth and your house has been towed.

On the first day in Shrewsbury my group checked into our hotel and then spent a few hours sightseeing, walking through various parks and across bridges, looking at historic buildings, and all the other tourist stuff I’m getting pretty sick of after so long on the road. At around six we reached the outskirts of town and the professor in charge dismissed us for the evening, right as it began to rain.

It's not raining in this picture, but you can tell it wants to.

My housemate Tom and I agreed that any pub hopping we did wouldn’t be much fun without our umbrellas, so we resolved to head back to the hotel to pick them up. I was dreading a half hour trudge through a typical English downpour, but Tom took one look at the map, led us down two sidestreets, and we were back at the hotel in the center of town. It took us five minutes.

Sidestreets™, from the people who brought you Alleys.

That’s how small Shrewsbury is – land area-wise, that is. Population-wise there’s about 40,000 people in Shrewsbury, but unlike American towns like Reedsport, which have one tenth of Shrewsbury’s population but spread it thin across the Oregon Coast like hardworking folksy marmite, everybody in Shrewsbury lives really close together, making it incredibly convenient for people who are walking from point A to point B. A lot of this can be attributed to the fact that, as a medieval city, it behooved Shrewsbury’s residents to stick together because walking was as good as it got.

Full of wizards and Hobbits.

Shrewsbury and the surrounding countryside are basically the small English town and countryside you saw on that show or in that movie. The show or movie doesn’t matter, because I’ve seen a lot of quaint English towns on TV and in movies and they all pretty much look like Shrewsbury. Jeeves and Wooster, Band of Brothers, Billy Elliot, Withnail and I,, and, of course, Hot Fuzz - at one time or another, somewhere in Shrewsbury looked exactly like what I’d seen on screen. It’s like this shit is based on reality or something.

As seen on TV.

On the second day we rented bikes and took a 20 mile ride through the breathtakingly gorgeous, Lord of the Rings quality countryside, navigating around cars on roads barely wide enough for one car and generally doing our best to absorb the surrounding countryside without hitting a pheasant or some other sort of quaint animal and going over the handlebars.

I'm not the sort of nerd who has LOTR quotes memorized. Talk to me when we tour a spaceship.

We were passing through some tiny little town, basically just a crossroads and four thatched roof houses, when we spotted an old churchyard with a cemetery and spontaneously decided to pull over and have a look. Wandering into the cemetery, the first thing we saw was a lanky kid roughly our age, holding a leafblower and wearing a T shirt with “VERNONIA WRESTLING” written on it. As in, Vernonia, Oregon.

We promptly struck up a chat with him and it turned out that not only had he spent his final year of high school studying abroad in Vernonia, but he’s going to attend the University of Oregon next year, and also appears to be quite the promising track athlete.

Again, we were about ten miles outside of a pretty small town, riding through a much smaller town, and by only serendipity and chance did we happen to notice the churchyard and unanimously agree that we wanted to visit it. In so doing, we just happened to bump into a future classmate.

Before we mounted our bikes and departed once again, I asked him the one question that I’m sure was burning in everyone’s minds.

“So, you had the entire United States to study abroad in… Vernonia?”

He shrugged sheepishly and explained that he hadn’t had much choice in the matter.

That makes sense.

Truman Capps thinks it’s amazing how the English countryside looks nothing like Southern California.

Holyrood Park

When making my preparations to go to Edinburgh, I knew that, given the diet of fried foods that defined my trip, I would need to spend all the time that I was not eating being active enough to turn my body into a big, albeit slightly flabby, calorie furnace. Fortunately, Edinburgh is a city hilly enough to rival San Francisco, with the added benefit of a royal park full of giant hills smack dab in the middle of town.

This gigantic hill is now my bitch.

Hiking is not exactly my deal. It’s actually pretty far from my deal. God bless the hikers of the world, but I’ve seen trees and rocks before. I enjoy trees and rocks, and I like seeing them. However, I don’t feel the need to spend several hours clambering over uneven terrain in order to see more trees and rocks. I know it’s a matter of personal preference, but whenever I hear my friends raving about how much they love hiking, I can’t help but think that maybe I’m not enjoying it because I’m doing something wrong. It’s like I’m playing Modern Warfare 2 without knowing that you’re allowed to shoot people. This fundamental lack of enthusiasm for hiking was the catalyst for my breakup with The Ex Girlfriend (along with the fact that as a general rule I don’t like being scolded and otherwise slandered at every available opportunity).

However, after two days in which I consumed a haggis burrito, a deep fried cheeseburger, and a deep fried pizza, I knew that the only way I could make it out of Scotland without heart failure as a souvenir was to hike my nuts off, and the place to do that was at Edinburgh’s Holyrood Park, home to Arthur’s Seat and the Salisbury Crags. The fact that I did this on a day so hot that a runner in the Edinburgh Marathon died of heat exhaustion should also be noted.

Sides of my heart were blowing out like old tires.

Right away, I realized that this hike probably couldn’t be classified as a hike – not because it wasn’t difficult, because it definitely was, but because I was actually enjoying it. You see, while I don’t like hiking, I do enjoy panoramic views of major cities, and the advantage to these hills being in the center of a major city is… Well, really, do I need to explain?

The hike where The Ex Girlfriend learned that I was not a hiking enthusiast and thus could never be a good boyfriend was a muddy slog through dense forests, affording no real views of the surrounding landscape and, more importantly, no way to look back at how far you’d come and think, “Well, I’m covered in mud and sweat and there isn’t a bathroom for miles, but look what I’ve done!” For all I knew, we could’ve been going in circles. Furthermore, there was no tangible goal to what we were doing, save for “Get to the end of the trail so we can hike the entire trail backwards and then go home.”

Climbing the steep, uneven path up to the top of Arthur’s Seat, 823 feet above the city, was an awe inspiring experience. No, like, literally. I would stop and turn around and see the tiny brown path I’d taken snaking up the sheer edge of the hill with the entire city of Edinburgh laid out in the distance all the way to the North Sea, glimmering in the afternoon light, and awe was actually inspired within me. And along with that awe was ambition to keep climbing up to the top, which was also within sight, because the view only got better the higher I went. Refreshing cold winds off the North Sea also helped.

How many Scottish teenagers come up here to bone, I wonder?

Maybe 50 feet from the summit, the hill leveled out into a wide, grassy plateau where several other hikers were sitting with books or lying on their backs for a high-altitude nap. From here, you could turn 360 degrees and see everything for miles in every direction. I could see from the docks at one side of town all the way to where houses and deep fried pizza shops gave way to lush green fields and farmland. A city the size of Portland laid out underneath me, like I was some sort of sweaty alien riding on a floating grass disk.

Edinburgh is probably the second most beautiful city I’ve ever seen (after Portland, which, if it were a woman, would be Christina Hendricks). I don’t think I’d ever want to live outside the United States, for reasons I’ll elaborate on in a later update, but if I had to flee the country after pulling a massive casino heist, Edinburgh would be the place I’d go to start my new life.*

*Not that I’m planning a casino heist.

And what’s more, I’d use my newfound wealth to bribe city council members to let me build a modest house up on that grassy plateau, that little disk in the sky. Every morning, I’d be able to walk out my front door and see everything in the city I called my home, and at the same time, if the police tried to catch up with me, they’d be forced to run single file up a narrow path, which gives me a clear advantage, tactically speaking.

Truman Capps celebrated his day of exercise with a bacon cheeseburger for lunch.

Kentucky Fried Update

Between the round trip train tickets and three nights in a hostel, my trip to Edinburgh cost me roughly 130 pounds, which comes out to nearly $200. I consider myself to be a slightly cultured person, but the simple fact is that no art museum or guided history tour alone will encourage me to drop $200 on a weekend trip.

An international reputation for deep fried food, on the other hand, is exactly what it takes.

Deep Fried Cheeseburger

I am a tried and true burger lover. I’d say that it’s probably one of my favorite foods – juvenile a choice as it may be, there’s nothing quite like a big, high quality cheeseburger when you’ve had a long day and all you want is to clog your arteries in the most efficient way possible.

So when I saw the deep fried cheeseburger on the menu at Café Piccante, a chip shop near my hostel, I knew I had to go for it.

Deep frying is a tricky proposition – you’ve got to drop the whole business into a vat of boiling oil, which makes frying small things (M&Ms) or multi-layered things (burgers with their buns) difficult, as it’s very easy for everything to come apart and sink to the bottom of the fryer. That’s why I was interested to see how they handled a deep fried cheeseburger – a layer of cheese on top of the patty would all too quickly separate and disappear into the fat. It’s for this same reason that you can’t deep fry a pizza with any toppings that are liable to come off when submerged.

As it turned out, the Swiss cheese was inside the patty, an ingenious and effective delivery method that I would’ve taken a photograph of had it not been so delicious that I devoured the whole burger before I could think. The act of forming the raw patty around the cheese and then cooking it put me in mind of the South Minneapolis ‘Jucy Lucy’ burger.

Deep Fried Pizza

When I mentioned it a second ago, maybe you said, “What? Deep fried pizza!? He’s joking, right?”

The deep fried pizza was something I’d been itching to try ever since seeing it on a Food Network special about deep fried foods, and my trip to Castle Rock Chip Shop in the Grass Market was the culmination of many months’ planning and fantasizing.

The closer I got, though, the more apprehensive I felt – was I actually going to go through with this? I already felt bad enough for my body after the previous day’s deep fried cheeseburger – a battered and fried pizza would surely be adding insult to injury. I paced outside the chip shop for a minute before forcing myself to go inside, having already come this far.

“I-I’d like a d-deep fried pizza, please.” I murmured to the woman behind the counter as though I were asking for a volume of deep fried hardcore pornography.

She cheerily went to work, pulling a cheap frozen pizza out of the freezer and covering it in batter before dropping it into the fryer. Just like top quality steak never goes into a steak sandwich, you’re going to have to look far and wide to find a brick oven deep fried pizza. To my knowledge, virtually every chip shop in Scotland buys the bottom rung school cafeteria-style cheese pizzas to throw into the fryer. Buy a pizza at WinCo and you’ll know what I mean.

Thing is, you’re not paying for the pizza – you’re paying for the fact that it’s deep fried, and I can tell you that when you’re experiencing the novelty of eating something cheesy and tomatoey that’s also been beer battered, you really don’t care that much. The deep frying process covers for a lot of ills.

The experience was not that enjoyable for me, however. They dropped the whole deep fried pizza into a box and shoveled in a liberal amount of fries along with it, and then sent me on my way. Yes, as this was a take-away establishment, I was going to have to find a park bench and eat this embarrassingly unhealthy meal in public, bearing my shame for all to see.

It was good enough, I suppose, but I felt so bad – psychologically, I mean – about what I was eating that I only finished about three quarters of it and maybe half of the fries before dumping the remains in a garbage can and fleeing the scene, promising that my next meal would involve bean sprouts in some way.

(Also, I washed this meal down with a can of Irn-Bru soda, the Scottish soft drink so popular that in Scotland it outsells Coke and Pepsi combined. It tastes like a combination of orange and cream soda and has so much sugar and so many additives that it is allegedly illegal in Sweden. I have never in my life tasted a soda so steadfastly committed to being gross.)

Deep Fried Mars Bar

After my PTSD-inducing experience with deep fried pizza, I promised myself I would abstain from trying a deep fried Mars Bar. However, on my last night in town I caved and slipped out of the hostel under the cover of darkness, making my way to the Clam Shell chip shop on the Royal Mile with the dark and insane drive of Martin Sheen going to kill Kurtz at the end of Apocalypse Now.

I could practically hear Jim Morrison echoing in my head when I approached the Indian guy at the counter and said, “One deep fried Mars Bar, please.”

Verdict?

Don’t do it.

The Mars Bar is what we in America know as the Milky Way bar, which is actually one of my preferred brands of candy bar. But something about coating it in batter and throwing it in the fryer turns it into a sugar-charged orgy of molten chocolate and nougat coated in enough grease to render multiple sheets of paper clear as a car’s windshield.

It was a dark but delicious three days. Also, in case you were wondering, I was able to make it through the weekend without turning into 1970s Elvis by doing uncharacteristically athletic stuff, like climbing these volcanic rock formations:

Of course, I guess I’ll only really know if I ducked the consequences when I die of natural causes at a very old age, instead of succumbing to a heart attack before I finish writing thi

Truman Capps realizes that a lot of the humor is lost when he recovers from his heart attack to write this stinger.

Imageless, Short Road Update

Did you ever notice how people go off to college and instantly become huge fans of the Food Network? I never got it until it happened to me – you’re eating a bowl of $1 Safeway Penne covered in $2 Safeway Select Four Cheese pasta sauce, and all you want to do is turn on the TV and watch other people getting paid to fly to exotic places and eat totally delicious food. It makes your $3 dinner taste all the more bitter, but it gives you hope for the future.

“The food I’m eating right now is not very good.” You think. “But I’ll make up for it by one day going to the place in Minneapolis where the burger patties are all filled with cheese.”

My weekend trip to Scotland, which, as you read this, I am smack in the middle of, is the direct implementation of this fantasy. You see, it had never been a particular dream of mine to travel to Scotland (save for perhaps in elementary school when I went by my middle name, Scott, but those days are over – call me when they establish the Democratic Republic of Trumania), until I learned, several months ago, of the Scottish affinity for deep frying things. Deep fried Mars Bars, deep fried doner kebab, deep fried pineapple rings, and, last but not least, deep fried pizza.

This penchant for deep frying anything edible has made Scotland late night talk show joke fodder in recent years, which I think is wholly unfair. Firstly, up until this deep frying craze began, Scotland’s best known food was haggis, which is made of sheep’s lungs, heart, and liver minced with onion and oatmeal, heavily seasoned, and then simmered inside a sheep's stomach. When your jumping off point is inedible bits of animal jammed inside another inedible bit of animal, anything is an improvement.

Furthermore, we shouldn’t be laughing at the Scottish for pioneering new and innovative things to deep fry. We should be laughing at ourselves for not thinking of it first. I mean, come on, America! We used to be pioneers in the fields and industry until we outsourced all of that to Japan and India – don’t tell me we’re going to let go of first place in the field of finding ways to become morbidly obese too!

Deep fried Coke was a good first step and the KFC Double Down was a stroke of genius, but until we emulate Scotland’s willingness to grab the first thing within reach and throw it into the fryer, we’re not going to win this thing. Sure, sometimes they swing for the fences and it doesn’t work out, but Thomas Edison failed one hell of a lot of times before he invented the lightbulb (which, incidentally, the Scottish have tried to deep fry).

Hey, wait, has anybody tried deep fried whiskey yet? America! Get on it!

For the health conscious among you, I plan to keep my fried food consumption in check the same way I managed to lose weight while working at Mike’s Drive In two summers ago – moderation, portion control, and being a 19 year old male (the last one might be a little bit hard now, but I’m up to the challenge). Edinburgh is a remarkably hilly city built on a lot of big mounds of volcanic rock, and I intend to earn my ludicrous meals by walking absolutely everyfuckingwhere.

So I guess what I’m trying to say is this: If you don’t hear back from me on Wednesday, either my healthy eating plans failed and I had a coronary, or I decided I never wanted to leave. Take your pick.

Truman Capps would deep fry this blog if he could.

Hair Guy Love Europe, Part 4

Part 4: Socialist Paradise

I looked really hard at everyone I saw on the bustling streets of Copenhagen. These people live in a socialist country. I thought. Denmark is the big government catastrophe that drives Glenn Beck to tears every night. Just how miserable are these people?

Well, she doesn't look so happy.

I scrutinized the faces of the passing Danes very closely and found two things: 1) If the people of Denmark are miserable, they’re doing a great job of hiding it, and 2) People of seemingly every nationality turn away and walk faster when they see me staring intently at them.

Income tax rates in Denmark start at about 35% and go as high as around 65% for the top earners. Sales tax is 25%. If you want to buy a car, there’s a 200% tax on top of the car’s price. Danes are perfectly happy to discuss this sort of thing – they don’t appear to be embarrassed by the fact that they give the majority of their money to the government, nor are they enticed by the idea of a large country across the Atlantic where one can pay less than half that in taxes and buy a truck the size of space for pocket change.

The reason everyone seems so satisfied is that all that money goes to really good use. Naturally, Denmark has more healthcare than they know what to do with. The government also fully funds every student’s education from kindergarten up through as much college as he or she chooses to pursue, and apparently they even pay college students a living stipend so they don’t have to take a job while they study. If you’re having trouble making your rent payments, the government will cover the difference.

I stayed with my ex-roommate Josh, who was studying in Copenhagen. His host family consisted of a divorced host father, who had epilepsy, and his autistic son. The disaster potential for that combination is pretty high, so the Danish government pays for a live-in social worker to stay with the family 24/7.

This is what Josh's host family looks like. From outside their apartment. While they're inside it.

The government apparently also funds significant research into genetically engineering the creation of tall, superhot blonde haired blue eyed women who walk around and boost general morale, and maybe the birth rate too. I’ll be honest – while Denmark is nice, it didn’t really strike me as the sort of place I’d want to live, but if they bumped up the Aryan babe population by another few percent, I’d be applying for a visa before you could say, “terrible reason to move somewhere.” Hell, if the women in North Korea looked like that, I’d move there. I’d even go to El Paso.

Josh has been studying in Denmark for nine months, and I was staying with him for his last few days in the country before his program ended and he went home. Thus, I experienced a lot of Josh’s farewell parties and other general revelry. One of the most bizarre moments, though, came when Josh and I went to visit his friend Obi*, a Danish student finishing his degree at Copenhagen Business School who had been paired up with Josh as part of Josh’s study abroad program.

*Obi is a shortening of his real name, which as I recall is super long and has a ‘Bjorn’ somewhere in it. He adopted the shorter nickname when he was studying in the United States a few years ago, apparently not seeing the Star Wars connection. I can’t promise that I didn’t tell him he was my only hope.

Josh and I dropped by the Copenhagen Business School to say goodbye to Obi during a meeting for the student business club, of which he was vice president. When we entered the room, he and about 25 other students were in the process of electing a new board of directors. Everyone was dressed impeccably – guys in collared shirts and ties, girls in heels and skirts. Campaign speeches were made in both English and Danish.

And the whole time, everyone was drinking straight whiskey out of clear plastic cups. Keep in mind, this is an official extracurricular function on a college campus, and everybody was just having a few drinks to keep their minds limber as they worked. I felt like I’d walked onto the set of Mad Men.

University of Oregon Extracurricular Activities That Could Be Improved By Open Consumption

1) The Oregon Daily Emerald
2) Oregon Marching Band Council
3) Drunk Driver Shuttle

Josh also took me through a part of Copenhagen called Freetown Christania, an autonomous commune of squatters who took up residence on an abandoned military base near the middle of town in 1971, declared it a sovereign country, and have stayed there ever since with very little resistance from the Danish government, which apparently takes a pretty mellow position on seditious activities.

Due to the open sale of marijuana, they're pretty strict about photography any closer to the city center than this.

Christania is a quaint little town chock full of largely unwashed and perpetually stoned hippies who subsist off of the sale of handmade trinkets and marijuana. Naturally, it made me pretty homesick for Eugene – I halfway expected somebody to come and ask me if I wanted to buy the funniest jokebook the world has ever known (and even when I’m on vacation, the answer is still no).

Socialist hippie dwellings.

After a few days, the time came for me to leave Denmark and head back to England. The past seven weeks I’ve spent in England have been a nonstop onslaught of unfamiliar and bizarre stuff – cars with steering wheels where there ought not to be steering wheels, the letter U in places it didn’t belong, and potato chip flavors that may well have been invented by a mad scientist.* However, coming back to England from countries so bizarre that they make cars prohibitively expensive and don’t even speak English really gave me a newfound appreciation for the place.

*”Gentlemen, BEHOLD! Lobster tail flavored chips!”

Hair Guy Love Europe. But Hair Guy Love United Kingdom more.

Truman Capps brought this rodeo to a close just in time to go to Scotland this weekend.

Hair Guy Love Europe, Part 3

Part 3: Transparency

I’ve always enjoyed American history because it’s basically a super long, incredibly violent movie that was filmed in my own backyard. I recognize a lot of the big stars from their other appearances, namely on money. Before big disasters like the Great Depression, you can even chide America for being naïve and stupid, just like the half naked girl in any given horror movie.

“No! Don’t go in there! At least turn on the lights! Okay, you know what? You deserve 25% unemployment, you stupid bitch.”

European history, on the other hand, is like watching a Japanese horror movie – it’s way more violent and involves a fair amount of incest. For that reason, along with the fact that I opted to be a library aide senior year instead of taking AP European History, I’m largely ignorant of Europe’s past, save for the more recent bits where America has stepped in to save the day (or firebomb the shit out of a city full of innocent people).

This was why a lot of the castles and churches of Dresden held little interest for me beyond “That is a huge and pretty building.” I made a point of going to see them, because these sorts of things are the reason one travels in Europe, but they didn’t have as huge an emotional impact on me as they would on a homegrown German because these buildings were built for monarchs who I knew virtually nothing about. It’s like if I started watching Lost right at the end of the series – I’d be totally confused, but everyone who was really devoted and had watched all of it would know exactly what was going on.

Well, wait – maybe that’s the worst possible example.

Regardless, my inexperience with German history led me to one of Dresden’s tourist attractions that is straight up futuristic: Volkswagen’s Transparent Factory.

I read about this first in a guidebook and later on Wikipedia, and the gist of it is that Volkswagen wanted to show the world their commitment to eco friendly design and high quality craftsmanship, so they built a factory in the center of Dresden made mostly out of glass, so that people walking by could look in and see that everything was being made properly.

Suggestions to rebuild the US Capitol building out of glass for this same purpose were considered, but then shelved when everyone realized that they’d much rather just get their sex scandal news from Drudge Report instead of seeing it firsthand.

I rest my case.

The Transparent Factory is a downright beautiful building. It’s all open spaces and stainless steel and hardwood floors...

...and I’m pretty sure it’s the only car factory to have a full service bar only thirty feet away from an automobile assembly line.

When, in the course of my two Euro English language guided tour, they took us onto a catwalk overlooking the assembly area, everything was quiet, clean, and restrained. My impression had been that building a car required loud noises, industrial smells, and near constant profanity, as all of those (particularly the third) seem to be a constant in the process of repairing a car.

Then, the tour guide hit us with the truth bomb – none of the really gritty industrial work gets done at this plant. All the shitty jobs that people wouldn’t want to look at, like the construction of the engine and the welding of the frame, gets done at Volkswagen’s more conventional Nontransparent Factory outside of town, and the parts are then brought to the Transparent Factory by tram to be assembled where everyone can see them.

This begs the question of why Volkswagen doesn’t just build the entire car in one place, because hauling truckloads of car parts across town is not cheap or easy (trust me, I’d know). During the course of the tour, the reason that became pretty clear was that the Transparent Factory is less of a factory and more of a glorified showroom. They produce just 35 cars a day, and only Volkswagen Phaetons at that – Volkswagen’s most expensive luxury sedan.

The Transparent Factory is the automotive industry’s equivalent of a miniskirt – Volkswagen is just showing off their best qualities, so to speak. However, the miniskirt still hides the ugly mole on Volkswagen’s ass, that being the factory outside town that produces the more unsightly WORST METAPHOR EVER.

Before the tour, I had gone up to a set of windows looking in on the assembly line and was about to take a picture when one of the receptionists ran up and stopped me, explaining that photography of the assembly line was strictly forbidden.



I found this confusing, because I thought that Volkswagen had built a glass factory to show the world that they didn’t care if people saw how their cars were built. If I were a bigger asshole, I would’ve pointed out to the receptionist that American automakers have a similar photography policy, which is why they build concrete factories surrounded by barbed wire, and never in the center of a major metropolitan area.

People who build cars in glass factories shouldn’t throw stones at guys with cameras. Just like girls wearing miniskirts shouldn’t get pissed when guys try to take pictures of their STILL THE WORST METAPHOR EVER.

Truman Capps will be back tomorrow with tales of his harrowing trip to socialist Denmark, where car drives you, but you still have to pay the 200% tax on the car.

Hair Guy Love Europe, Part 2

Part 2: Gluttony and Sloth

My trip to Dresden was not motivated by any great interest in Saxony or the greater Germany area. By and large, the only country I have an overwhelming interest in over here is England, which, fortunately enough, happens to be where I’m living at the moment. No, all of my destinations during my week of European travel were chosen because of the fact that I had friends living in those places who offered to let me stay with them for free. Admittedly, something that costs 0 Euros still costs like $1.26 at the current exchange rate, but it was still a way better deal than anything else I could find.

My gracious host in Dresden was my friend Bri, who, like myself, was one of the truly committed Sprague High School nerds to be in both the band and the speech team. She’s a few years older than I am, and after graduating from the University of Portland a few years ago with an education degree, she was offered a job teaching elementary school at an international school in Dresden.

On Saturday, my first day in town, there was a combination concert/potlatch fundraiser at Bri’s school that she was required to attend, largely to work crowd control with the kids. I tagged along, enticed by the potlatch aspect, but was disappointed to find that, 1) The potlatch came after an hour of watching other peoples’ children sing and dance, and 2) The potlatch wasn’t free.*

*Admittedly, I probably could’ve figured that one out from the fact that this was a fundraiser, but Germany is kind of a socialist country, so I figured they had some voodoo economic workaround.

Before the show I took a seat near the back of the auditorium, hoping that with my wet hair no parent would mistake me for ein childmolestenschnitzel. As more and more people filed in, an Aryan looking woman sitting two rows ahead of me with her husband kept glancing back at me for several minutes before finally turning around in her seat and directing a brisk question to me in German.

“English?” I whimpered, wanting to curl up into a fetal position. To me, whatever she’d said sounded a lot like, “Ve vill take vaht ve vish, and zen decide vether or not to blow your ship from ze vater!”

“Ve vould like to change zie seats vith you.” She said curtly, already standing up.

“Of course!” I exclaimed, bowing to German intimidation with moist, Neville Chamberlain confidence as I scampered out of my seat.

After the children performed, I set forth into the potlatch to see what not-entirely-free food I could rustle up. As this was an international school, the potlatch thrown together by the students’ parents represented all of the school’s various nationalities. Japanese parents were making sushi while a German father was preparing sausage, and at the Canadian table a husband and wife stood watch over a tall boy of Miller Genuine Draft and a pack of smokes.

I had some sort of Turkish rice stew which I’d never heard of. When I asked the Turkish parent serving it what was in it, she helpfully told me all of the ingredients in German, so for all I know it could’ve been made out of communion wafers and dick. After that, I still felt a bit hungry, so I made the perhaps misguided decision to purchase a massive doner kebab from the Turkish booth next to the one I’d gotten the stew from. The result was a food-powered exhaustion so powerful that I bypassed any and all sightseeing for the day in favor of passing out on Bri’s futon.

In my defense, this doner booth had one of those big vertical spits of meat that they slice strips off of, and if I don’t try to eat all of it, who will?

Like you could resist.

That night, we went to a barbecue that one of her coworkers was throwing, and I spent seven hours gorging myself on chicken, fruit, crackers, and warm brie spread on fresh rolls from the bakery down the street, all tempered with very responsible alcohol consumption. Afterwards, stuffed full of free food and drink, I waddled home for my second food coma of the day. By the time I woke up the following afternoon I was hungry again, so we stopped at a kebab shop for a durum, something Bri recommended.

I ordered the durum and, expecting it to be small, a side of fries as well (with mayonnaise – because they offered, and in Germany I don’t have to be ashamed of the fact that I think mayonnaise is fucking delicious). Thus, I was quite shocked when the shop’s proprietor handed me a hunk of meat wrapped in pitabread so large that it could’ve probably eaten me. The side of fries, also, rivaled anything one could find at McDonald’s for hugeness, and the fact that everything was covered in mayonnaise didn’t do much to make me feel better about my eating habits.

This led me to yet another food coma, forcing me to postpone my sightseeing for another few hours. Gluttony and Sloth go hand in hand, it seems – and when they conspire to make you put off visiting a bunch of old churches, well, shit, man.

Truman Capps will return tomorrow with the tale of his last day in Dresden, which he spent watching Germans in white coats build cars. Efficiently.