Just flew back from Omaha and are my taste buds tired. I was there for a (non food-related) conference, but that didn’t prevent me from sampling some great slabs of beef. And the blue ribbon goes to: the ribeye at The Chophouse. So sensationally flavorful I get shivers thinking back on it. And believe me I’ve been to all the big name steakhouses on New York.
I wouldn’t say it’s worth a trip to Omaha just for that. But almost. (And don’t waste your money on those overrated Omaha steaks-by-mail). My flight back was delayed for five hours and almost “timed out” the pilots (a horror you don’t want to know about if you haven’t had it happen to you). Maybe the solution is to move to Omaha so you’ll never be deprived of The Chohouse ribeye.
Anybody want to challenge my choice with a steak they think is better?
Boy, you are a digestive champ to even be able to eat steak at your age. How was Warren Buffett?
Speaking of steak, Jon Stewart is just a bag of French Fries, so who cares if he changes his name back or not? We on the so-called left have devolved into mediocrity: I mean, Al Franken? Never funny and no mind. Larry Craig is Frederick Douglass compared to him. Give me your Krassners and your Greers, your Lennys and your Alinskys and your Rosenbaums (before he went either/or on the big questions and so certain on all the small stuff) Give me your Zappas and Emma Goldmans yearning to breathe fire, your longing Ginsbergs and your zealous Zimmermans. Someone should send Barack Obama a copy of “Howl”. I bet he never read it, even at Columbia where the beats began. Give me the elegance of Whitney Young and the pureness of Nikki Giovanni and fuck off, Angelous and Oprahs, Colberts and Huffingtons and every other fakir who co-opted are stoned yet cleareyed universe. John Stewart, change your name to the white one note shit trick pony you are, sucking off your media masters. And Ron wake up, fuck steak, fuck cage: big media just robbed some poor stoner, with the help of a Stewart fawning jury of $650,000 for downloading FOUR SONGS. What’s that about, Ron, wanna comment or LET THEM EAT STEAK?
Let me clarify that I am not frustrated with Ron. My concern is that the liberal, conservative and media elites (and their Wall Street enablers) are shunning the American people who continue to put so much faith in President Obama. Already, single payer is out the window, largely because politicians are in the pockets of the insurance company. The Fed’s polic, when it says we should save more is to give us half a percent on our money, while letting the banks rollover Fed debt at 7plus%. No wonder the banks are suddenly healthy with such a spread. The amount of debt proffered in the recent Treasury auctions is unsupportable and was immediately reflected in the drop of the dollar. Already, Obama has become a prisoner of the traditional White House PR machine, taking to the road campaign style and hamstrung from makinh hard FDR style decisions re the banks, health care, real estate,etc. The mortgage market is still frozen, health care is in the vise of the insurance industry and the discredited Hillary/Holbrooke/Jim Jones foreign policy apparatus is nothing but talk, and not even original talk at that. As I have written before, and as is illustrated in the pathetic attention of the media to the Skip Gates arrest, there are two Americas: a privileged elite which dodges accountability and the rest of us who support it with the dumb attention of Jack gazing upwards the giant. The result of the people’s continuing to indulge the vanities of the self-identified meritocracy will be an economic crash this fall that we will not be able to withstand. What we need is true radicalism and it must come from the President bypassing his immediate circle and joining with the rest of us.
Let’s look at how the North Korean rescue typifies the Oz (as in “nothing behind the curtain”() dominance of the elite. We have Clinton rescuing two comely Asian women from a media mad, brandy swilling Asian dictator at the behest of an obscure media group run by Al Gore, with everyone from Hillary to Obama denying that there are any deeper implications…and, correctly so, because, ine Mediaville, he surface of the needs and spectacle of the elite are all that there is. The inractable problems of nuclear proliferation have nothing to do with the vanitas poison of the Elites which we are compelled to drink, a false, manufactured “reality” which deflects the real problems of the rest of us while balancing the hungrous (invented word! hello, Voladya!) maw of the media monster. It is the intractability of the world problem (debt,hunger,bombs) which manufactures the false need for the masses to suck
Getting back to a lighter note. It is important for us to occasionally appreciate a good steak for what it is. As Ziggy Freud may have said, a good cigar is sometimes just a smoke.
The best steak I ever had was when I was traveling across country as an Ensign some mumbled decades ago. Traveling cheap I stayed in BOQs and I ate at the Officer’s Club at Offut Air Force Base. There I ordered the prime rib labeled on the menu as the “SAC cut.” Shakespeare would be needed to do justice to that piece of meat. It must have veen 1½” thick and was simple perfection.
BTW, the BOQ was full up if I recall so they put me up for the night in Senior NCO housing at no charge. The Navy had no Bachelor Officers Quarters that were as opulent as the Air Force enlisted quarters. Amazing outfit, I understand they also fly planes.
I used to go up and visit a friend who had a citrus ranch near Porterville, CA. In that town there was, in the downtown, a restaurant called “The Cellar”. It was famously low-rent. You climbed down a precarious-looking staircase with an iron pipe bolted to one wall for a railing, and entered a shabby room with a cement floor and drab walls. The tables were old and the chairs were those banquet hall special things that stack one on another. The menu was on the wall, and amounted to four or five different kinds of steak, salads and so forth, prairie oysters, and beverages. From that day to this, this was the best steak I’ve ever had, bar none.
By the way, Ron…is that the Omaha Chophouse, or the Paxton Chophouse. The former is apparently in a Marriot in Omaha, the latter is a restaurant. There’s also an Italian Chophouse that is in Omaha. Do you remember which it is?