Okay, Squeeze, you GOTTA send me a link to these people... Not to divulge too much of my nefarious past, I may know these people.

The rock climbers or the one satan worshiper?

Ummmmm..... suffice to say I have never been very athletic. But I'd like to state here and now: I was never a Satan worshiper but the early Goth/Art community ran across some very interesting lines and I knew a lot of people.

Except they are only involved with the deal/property purchase itself and then gone unless you want to do it again. Financial Planners are the new parasites. They feed constantly and can invent their services just like attorneys. Phone call: 12 minutes @$625/hr. Line item on invoice. Monthly percentage of what you are worth. Line item on invoice. They can suck you dry. Good ones can make you much richer while making themselves much richer with your money. The Scream has my full sympathies.

Are these the same folks who invited themselves over for dinner???

You should make her carry a sheet of paper with your favorite designers, your sizes and your preferred colours.

YES! Without mentioning that they wanted to talk about their new business.

As soon as she asked the first question from her little notepad I asked, "is this about financial planning?" The same stupid, corny questions about "life dreams and goals" I've heard before. And I'm just not the target customer for that kind of talk. The choice of words they use makes my eyes roll and head spin.

They are very new to this and I think they need to sit back a little bit and think about who their target audience is. I think they would save a lot of time if they asked a few "real" questions before, instead of the ad-speak they learn during training. Maybe their team leader told them "at the end of the two hours you'll have made them feel like they have no choice but to TRUST you!".

The 2 hour presentation had a lot to do with trying get the potential customer worried about the future based on emotional triggers. Plus, "you'll save so much you won't even notice my fees. WIN! WIN!"

Scream, I want you to know I truly feel your pain, but I can't stop laughing that they actually called up and pushed the time back on dinner and then it turned into a sales pitch! Ayeeeeee. I'd kill them.

I had a friend who went in to financial planning but at least she had the courtesy to tell me up front she was using me as a guinea pig and did I mind helping her practice her spiel.

This happened to us once. We were invited to a couple's house. We kinda knew them but not very well. After a while, they started to bring up Amway. Before we knew it, a full sales pitch was in progress. We were much younger then and the waste of time didn't bother us. But I'm getting older by the minute and now I would stand up, apologize for leaving and go.

Afterwards John and I had a good laugh about it: the Amway products perched on the little bitty wall shelves in the living room (designed for plants) should have immediately tipped us off.

The thing is, the misters are friends. I just met the wife the other day. It's an understatement to say that I barely know her. And it is really her business, her new job. I like to help out people I know but this was just too much. I just can't give her the contact info for people I know. They'd hate me for it. The referral sheet is just too fucking weird. It has 3 lines of very personal questions for each person for up to 7 referrals per page. Then she asked me in this very earnest way to help her out because she's just changed careers. If she were selling cookies, clothes, easy stuff, sure I'd mention it to people I know. But this involves considerable time asking people questions that I think are way too personal. Besides anyone I know well enough to approach this with knows me well enough to know that I just wouldn't! They'd think they were on candid camera or something.

And I could hear Farid's voice again, "you are too nice to people. you can't help everyone who asks."

Just now trolling around in eG - way at the top of the topics list is one started by Wilfrid in 2002 about Fleur de Sel. Made me quite nostalgic, really, seeing that. And he was like, member number 539 or something.

can someone explain to me that truck ad which features some gravelly voiced fuck saying something about meatball sandwiches or something?

I went to a doner kebab place nearby. The owners are Americans who lived in Germany. Part of their marketing campaign is that there is nothing like it in America, no one is doing anything even remotely similar... Layers of meat on a vertical spit was totally unheard of until they opened their little place.

Ummmm, shawarma?

What's shwarma? Some of the more exotic foods have yet to make it to the US, or at least beyond the home kitchens of immigrant families.

I wonder if their restaurant is anything like the Brazilian riodizio places with the meat on skewers? If so, it sounds like fun.

We were eating schwarma downtown LA at the Fashion Mart as far back as the early '80s.

http://www.yummis.com/images/Skewer-of-shawarma.jpg

Shawerma. The doner kebab place I mentioned is in Eagle Rock. In the next city over Glendale and into Hollywood there are lots of Armenian owned places that serve shawerma. It is a very common thing at general Middle Eastern/Near Eastern places. The guys who own the place went all the way to Germany, but neglected the next cities over.

In France doner kebab (shawerma) is served at lots of little joints owned usually by Turks or Algerians.

You can get it at any Zankou Chicken and the like. The spelling varies. And there are gyros at other Mediterranean/Middle Eastern/Greek places.

Aaron, you need to get to the eastside more often.

I was about to mention gyros too. Aren't those things still around especially in mall food courts? I

And Aaron there's a Zankou on the Westside now--with valet parking!!!

aaron, you're on the westside and haven't yet been to sunnin on westwood?

In his defense, Aaron is a globe trotter.

As noted between this original and here: gyro. Also fka souvlaki.

But they might be right: not easy to find the German version of the Turkish dish. I mean, good German restaurants are few and far between, eh?

Shawarma and doner are not the same thing. American gyros and doner are also not the same thing. Gyros are some weird extruded meat by-product, whereas the doner places in germany typically have layers of meat chunks on the spits. Shawarma and doner also differ quite a bit in terms of seasoning and fixings. I know there is some temptation to aggregate all this stuff into one category, but for someone who grew up on one or the other...it's just not the same.

The stuff they sell in the midwest under the name of bratwurst? Similar category, but very different. I won't even get into what they call a "hot dog" in Denmark. It's all sausage, right?

"Shawarma and doner are not the same thing. American gyros and doner are also not the same thing. Gyros are some weird extruded meat by-product, whereas the doner places in germany typically have layers of meat chunks on the spits. Shawarma and doner also differ quite a bit in terms of seasoning and fixings."

The discussion started in reference to the layered meat on a vertical spit "which no one had seen around here" according to American doner man. As far as I can tell no one here was making any other connection than "layers of meat (ok, gyro is basically SPAM) on a vertical spit".

We had a lengthy discussion about this on BOR forum with Charles Perry and Rachel Laudan. The origins of doner, shawerma, IIRC someone from Turkey and Greece weighed in on all the gyros and souvlaki thing.

For a while, eG threads originated by Wilfrid, Cabrales, Steve Plotnicki, Vanessa, Adam Balic, and several other people were bumping to the top quite frequently. Many of these threads featured witty repartee, serious knowledge exchange, and high quality descriptions. For some reason, several of these threads now seem to be disjointed in places.

That was then. This is now.

Pithy

Albertson's supermarket has a recipe for Algerian almond tarts on their website. http://www.albertsons.com/shaws/fresh/dive...ond-tarts).html

I am almost sure it comes from the NYT article about Algerian pastries and Mr Scream gave the writer the recipe. She couldn't find it anywhere else and he scanned a recipe and gave her tips.

Yeth.

There's an odd symmetry to Dr. Kevorkian leaving prison and Paris Hilton going to jail.

I am fine with being corrected. I only know the NYC versions, anyway. (The shawarma at Alfanoose is chunks of real meat -- lamb or chicken -- that Mohammed marinates himself, which may be why it's so tasty.)

Behemoth, could you maybe start a new thread explaining the differences as you know them? Pretty please?

I go to Whole Foods this morning and among the items I needed was proscuitto di Parma. I am informed they no longer carry it, because it contains nitrates. The surreal part was the manager who informed me they had tried to "convince the folks in Italy to change the way they make it" . Yeah, there's a good idea , change the way the hams have been cured for hundreds of years just so Whole Foods will sell it.

Isn't there new info on nitrates? Good news? I love science.

Man, I love Whole Foods!!

This may be a hopelessly naive question, but were nitrates really used in the curing process hundreds of years ago? I honestly don't know.

And yes, WF trying to tell Parma how to make prosciutto is beyond surreal.

EDIT: A little googling & now I know that nitrates = saltpeter. Never mind.

I missed starting a fire in my apartment by thismuch on Friday night. Struck a match and the lit head proceed to break off from the piece of match still in my hand. Flaming match flew threw the air and landed on table cloth. I was able to quickly extinguish the fire right away, but I'm left with a scorched tablecloth.

Reading a post by Ron Johnson while watching Ron Johnson in Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

Last night we had a huge thunderstorm with hail, even though it was 85 degrees outside.

Nataly came home from her first day at pottery camp. John said that her instructor told him that she apparently has an aptitude for this activity. She's never worked with clay before. Today she made two plates on the wheel.

Weird, isn't it, just to think that this pottery-making aptitude might be in her genes.

My 91 year old father went to see Knocked-Up this weekend because AO Scott called it an "instant classic" in the NY Times. And he enjoyed it.

I wonder what the title is in the UK?

Jamie Oliver has a recipe for a couscous salad that calls for using it raw. To me that's like making a pasta salad with raw pasta.

After yesterday's torrential rains, today our tap water tastes & smells like moldy dirt.

Doesn't matter whether I brew Assam, Ceylon or Darjeeling, it all comes out Pu-erh.

Only in Jersey.

i think you mean that your water has terroir.

Heh- sort of like when my grandfather took me to see Bull Durham in the theater (I was 9) because he read that it was a movie about baseball. He dragged me out pretty quick, even though I found it fascinating.

It is my understanding that prosciutto di Parma has never been and is not now cured using nitrates or nitrites. It is air cured and contains no additives. I have compared ingredients lists many times and the real stuff is pure as opposed to some of the lesser American brands which do contain nitrates.

Perhaps I will do a little Google and see what I can come up with. I could harass the manager with the facts. Do you think the would call me a little troublemaker ?!

The Epitaphs thread was allegedly started by Jaymes, but there's only one post in there and it's from Thunk.

estimator dude from the moving company shows up. is highly put out when i ask if he can remove his shoes since we are a "no-shoes in the house" household. says his shoes are so tight he can only remove them if i have a shoe-horn. well, i'm not sure if i do, i say. we are at an impasse. then he reluctantly begins to remove his shoes--i look to see if we do in fact have a shoehorn. turns out we do, but in the 15 seconds it took me to find it, his shoes were already off.

on the plus side, he seemed to know his job and was not smarmy.

Two really surreal events in one day:

1. I’m at the cashier buying a toothbrush when I notice that my cashier is silently crying, mascara just running down her face. Thinking maybe on the off chance that this could be allergies or something, I look at her and ask “are you ok?” She looks at me straight in the eyes and says “no.” I don’t know how else to proceed, so I look at the cashiers to either side of her and they haven’t blinked an eye, just going about their business as though this happens everyday. The cashier gives me a receipt, tells me to have a nice day, I say “you too.” And still crying, she calls for the next customer.

2. I’m at an event for a neighborhood theater and dance company. Picture me innocently drinking a beer and eating local meatballs when I look down on the floor and see my yoga teacher writhing around, dressed in what looks like plastic sheeting and packing tape. I think “they” called it post-modern dance.