Barry's Life in Napa Blog

Those with functional memories may recall the recent posting on the topic of pake . I am pleased to report that a pake was successfully constructed and consumed in our household over the holidays, and after initial skepticism, even the initial skeptics were won over. (The initial skeptics - you know who you are - are forgiven for their tendency to treat me like a dolt and tell me how to do everything, even though they had the exact same amount of pake experience I had going in - zero. I will concede that I left out the important step of placing a baking sheet under the pie tin, and received some needed support when there was a blossom of smoke in the kitchen - which turned out to be not the only smoke-filled house episode of the holidays so far, but that is perhaps another story for another time.) It should also be pointed out that my pake did not look anything like the photo I used in the initial post . That photo, according to one of the initial skeptics, was "gross." So ag...

Oh, the glorious anticipation of it all! Lying in bed knowing there was some kind of magic going on in the night, that when you woke in the morning there would be a passel of presents under the tree, that Santa would have made his visit. There was no doubt that the big day was at hand, since we went to bed having heard the local weatherman report that NORAD was tracking an object flying south from the North Pole! I you were smart you would make sure mom and dad thought you still believed long after you didn't anymore. That would insure that the presents kept coming. Why mess up good thing? But eventually the gravy train would run out, and the littler kids were getting all the good stuff and no one knew what to buy for the awkward adolescent. Before you know it, you've got kids of your own and you're re-creating old family traditions, or making new ones of your own. Nobody knows what NORAD is anymore, but you can live chat with Santa or text message the elves. The absolute ...

Christmas is like Asian food - you can get sweet and sour in the same bite. And you stuff yourself with festivity, but find you are hungry for more just an hour later. And you get a choice of steamed or fried rice. I guess that doesn't apply to Christmas so much. Let's move on from the analogy. Christmas of 1967 I was in the second grade at Stapleton School. I got a sweet and sour taste that year, all because of the Christmas production that was cooked up. It was a little play with Santa and elves and kids getting toys. There were some songs to be sung, and it was all your basic elementary school effort, to be performed for the parents. I was eager to be part of the chorus that would be featured in this masterwork - but one day the teacher called me aside and asked if I would play Santa Claus. I didn't feel like I could say no, and was devastated that I wouldn't be in the chorus. I cried and said to the teacher "You only want me to be Santa because I'm fat....

Christmas 1981 we were young and wild and crazy in love. We lived on the third floor of the Olivia Apartments on 4th and Moffet - classic old building with a tile lobby that made me feel like we were cosmopolitan. The meekest kid from my grade school lived down on the first floor. By now he had a long beard and a long coat and a drug habit. On the floor above us was a girl who had a bad reputation from high school. I don't know if she deserved it or not. I felt like I was becoming an adult, working a job and paying rent - a rent than ran $110 a month, because this was one of the nicer apartments in town. No problem, because I believe I was grossing more than $10k per annum - major moolah, in my mind, not too shabby. But that big money flowed through me like shit through a goose, always living with champagne taste on a beer budget, as Daddy would have said. No problem, because when we ran out of cash we'd just have popcorn for dinner a couple of nights. You don't need muc...

We interrupt the planned "Christmas memories" today for this late breaking news: There's always so much bad news and negativosity these days, it's reassuring when you become aware of something exciting and new - in fact, it's inspiring to learn that the great American spirit of inventiveness lives on. I refer here to the culinary break through of the decade - pake . Pake is a combination of pie + cake. (Artists' rendition of what a pake might look like at left. Pronounce it like "cake" not like Japanese rice wine.) Why did it take so long for someone to come up with this heavenly creation? This forever solves that perplexing question at potlucks and holiday family gatherings: "Which would you like, pie or cake?" My usual answer is "a little bit of both," which of course is a lie because I never want a "little bit," I want a boatload of both. If pake takes the world by storm as I expect, no longer will I need to humble ...

Ahhh, Christmas memories. Gingerbread houses, sugar-covered cookies, and an orange in the bottom of your stocking. Ornaments made from macaroni, tinsel wrapped around the roller on the vacuum, and always some fricking walnuts in the bottom of my stocking. Getting the toy you really wanted, getting a cheaper version of the toy you really wanted, not getting anything you really wanted. Getting clothes, getting clothes that are butt ugly, getting clothes that don't fit. Ah Christmas, sweet Christmas! Hope springs eternal! Of all the thoughts that visit me like Marley's ghosts this time of year, one memory of Christmas stands out above them all - how my dad hated the whole thing. Maybe there was a time when he was younger, before I was born, when he got some joy from the rituals. But by the time I was old enough to know what was going on he was in his late 40s and pretty fed up with all of it. It wasn't any of that cutesy Darrin McGavin in "Christmas Story" annoyance...

Reuters news 10/17/07 (Berlin) Germany, Mexico and Austria were world's top three searchers of the word "Hitler" while "Nazi" scored the most hits in Chile, Australia and the United Kingdom, data from 2004 to the present retrievable on the "Google Trends" Web site showed. Chile also came in first place searching for the word "gay", followed by Mexico and Colombia. Our perpetual American self hate leads us to assume that we are the most screwed up people on the planet. But I nominate instead, Chile-ers! Chile-ites! People from Chile! The nation most likely to Google the words "Nazi" and "gay" - now that's whack. (Needing empirical proof, I Googled "Nazi gay" and my top hit led me to "Scott Lively is co-author of The Pink Swastika: Homosexuals and the Nazi Party (Keizer, Oregon: Founders Publishing Company, 1995)." Do you think there are a lot of Chile-ites who are working on their Master's Th...