Chill Out With A Texas Chili Story (From Wisconsin?)

Tom Terrific, this blog's Wisconsin correspondent, sent e-mail (forwarded gazillion times, without a doubt) that was LOL funny. At least it was funny to this old blogger during the dog days of our summer of discontent (and climate change). Cool off by eatin' a bowl of Texas Red (or at least read about a bowl of Texas Red). Fred (Judge #3) won my heart by his choice of liquid refreshment with a bowl of Texas Red: a Silver Bullet. C'mon down to Austin, there's a place downtown that calls itself The Texas Chili Parlor. Their ultimate bowl of Texas Red is rated at XXX. It's not for the faint of heart nor the weak of stomach. If this is a (fair & balanced) accululation of gas, so be it.

[x Tom Terrific]
Texas Chili Cook Off
By Unknown

Tom wrote as he forwarded this e-mail joke: An oldie but goodie!! And there's always a bit of truth in each bit of humor.

Preamble: Please take time to read this slowly. If you pay attention to the first two judges, the reaction of the third judge is even better. For those of you who have lived in Texas , you know how true this is. They actually have a Chili Cook-off about the time Halloween comes around. It takes up a major portion of a parking lot at the San Antonio City Park. Judge #3 was an inexperienced Chili taster named Frank, who was visiting from Springfield, IL.

Frank: "Recently, I was honored to be selected as a judge at a chili cook-off. The original person called in sick at the last moment and I happened to be standing th ere at the judge's table, asking for directions to the Coors Light truck, when the call came in. I was assured by the other two judges (Native Texans) that the chili wouldn't be all that spicy; and, besides, they told me I could have free beer! During the tasting, so I accepted and became Judge 3."

Here are the scorecard notes from the event:

CHILI # 1 - MIKE'S MANIAC MONSTER CHILI
Judge # 1 -- A little too heavy on the tomato. Amusing kick.
Judge # 2 -- Nice, smooth tomato flavor. Very mild.
Judge # 3 (Frank) -- Holy crap, what the hell is this stuff? You could remove dried paint from your driveway. Took me two beers to put the flames out. I hope that's the worst one. These Texans are crazy.

CHILI # 2 - AUSTIN'S AFTERBURNER CHILI
Judge # 1 -- Smoky, with a hint of pork. Slight jalapeno tang.
Judge # 2 -- Exciting BBQ flavor, needs more peppers to be taken seriously.
Judge # 3 -- Keep this out of the reach of children. I'm not sure what I'm supposed to taste besides pain. I had to wave off two people who wanted to give me the Heimlich maneuver. They had to rush in more beer when they saw the look on my face.

CHILI # 3 - FRED'S FAMOUS BURN DOWN THE BARN CHILI
Judge # 1 -- Excellent firehouse chili. Great kick.
Judge # 2 -- A bit salty, good use of peppers.
Judge # 3 -- Call the EPA. I've located a uranium spill. My nose feels like I have been snorting Drano. Everyone knows the routine by now. Get me more beer before I ignite. Barmaid pounded me on the back, now my backbone is in the front part of my chest. I'm getting sh*t-faced from all of the beer.

CHILI # 4 - BUBBA'S BLACK MAGIC
Judge # 1 -- Black bean chili with almost no spice. Disappointing.
Judge # 2 -- Hint of lime in the black beans. Good side dish for fish or other mild foods, not much of a chili.
Judge # 3 -- I felt something scraping across my tongue, but was unable to taste it. Is it possible to burn out taste buds? Sally, the beer maid, was standing behind me with fresh refills. This 300 lb. woman is starting to look HOT ... just like this nuclear waste I'm eating! Is chili an aphrodisiac?

CHILI # 5 - LISA'S LEGAL LIP REMOVER
Judge # 1 -- Meaty, strong chili. Cayenne peppers freshly ground, adding considerable kick. Very impressive.
Judge # 2 -- Chili using shredded beef, could use more tomato. Must admit the cayenne peppers make a strong statement.
Judge # 3 -- My ears are ringing, sweat is pouring off my forehead and I can no longer focus my eyes. I farted, and four people behind me needed paramedics. The contestant seemed offended when I told her that her chili had given me brain damage. Sally saved my tongue from bleeding by pouring beer directly on it from the pitcher. I wonder if I'm burning my lips off. It really ticks me off that the other judges asked me to stop screaming. Screw them.

CHILI # 6 - VERA'S VERY VEGETARIAN VARIETY
Judge # 1 -- Thin yet bold vegetarian variety chili. Good balance of spices and peppers.
Judge # 2 -- The best yet. Aggressive use of peppers, onions, garlic. Superb.
Judge # 3 -- My intestines are now a straight pipe filled with gaseous, sulfuric flames. I crapped on myself when I farted, and I'm worried it will eat through the chair. No one seems inclined to stand behind me except that Sally. Can't feel my lips anymore. I need to wipe my butt with a snow cone.

CHILI # 7 - SUSAN'S SCREAMING SENSATION CHILI
Judge # 1 -- A mediocre chili with too much reliance on canned peppers.
Judge # 2 -- Ho hum, tastes as if the chef literally threw in a can of chili peppers at the last moment. **I should take note that I am worried about judge number 3. He appears to be in a bit of distress as he is cursing uncontrollably.
Judge # 3 -- You could put a grenade in my mouth, pull the pin, and I wouldn't feel a thing. I've lost sight in one eye, and the world sounds like it is made of rushing water. My shirt is covered with chili, which slid unnoticed out of my mouth. My pants are full of lava to match my shirt. At least during the autopsy, they'll know what killed me. I've decided to stop breathing. It's too painful. Screw it; I'm not getting any oxygen anyway. If I need air, I'll just suck it in through the 4-inch hole in my stomach.

CHILI # 8 - BIG TOM'S H------ Hurricane UT TOENAIL CURLING CHILI
Judge # 1 -- The perfect ending, this is a nice blend chili. Not too bold but spicy enough to declare its existence.
Judge # 2 -- This final entry is a good, balanced chili. Neither mild nor hot. Sorry to see that most of it was lost when Judge #3 farted, passed out, fell over and pulled the chili pot down on top of himself. Not sure if he's going to make it. Poor feller, wonder how he'd have reacted to really hot chili?
Judge # 3 - No Report

[Note: Tom Terrific is a distinguished, retired history educator who is a Wisconsin Man, through and through. Tom Terrific is not to be confused with The Flatster (Thomas L. Friedman of the NY Fishwrap) who briefly came through this blog as another Tom Terrific. However, there is only one Tom Terrific in this blog and The Flatster ain't him.]

Copyright © 2008 Anonymous

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As The Bat Guano World Turns: An "Affluenza" Epidemic?

My first real job, in the summer between my sophomore and junior years in high school, was a counselor's position at a YMCA residential camp less than 100 miles west of Denver, Colorado. Thank the Lord (of your choice) that my time as a camp counselor occurred in the mid-1950s, not in the Year of the Lord (of your choice) 2008. Now, the social critic for the NY Fishwrap in matters of parenting and the like has found the newest social malady. Perhaps ET, the swindler formerly known as Phil Gramm, was right. Affluenza-ridden parents are whiners. If this is (fair & balanced) Schadenfreude, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
Camp Codependence
By Judith Warner

I’m sure we all read, with equal parts disgust and delectation, The Times’ story last week on affluent parents who just can’t let go when their children abandon them for sleep-away camp.

In case you missed it, the article presented fathers and mothers so used to instant service that they call camp directors at all hours of the day and night to sound the alarm if they suspect Junior isn’t using sunscreen. It showcased “high-end” sleep-away camps that employ full-time “parent liaisons” just to handle such phone calls and e-mail traffic, “almost like a hotel concierge listening to a client’s needs,” as a camp consultant put it.

One parent liaison explained that all her careful hand-holding can, when successful, make camp a learning experience for parents, too. The hope, she said, is that by the end, “They’ve learned how to separate a little bit better.”

The most enlightening part of the article for me was the most prominently featured camp’s reported cost: $10,000. Reading the price, I finally understood why, whenever I make mention of the fact that my elder daughter attends sleep-away camp, a few responders always comment upon how wealthy I must be.

For the record: my daughter’s sleep-away camp costs $550 a week.

Which, I now realize, is a good thing for reasons far beyond the family budget.

The $10,000-camp universe appears to be rife with what mental health professionals are now calling “affluenza,” a social pathology that, they say, is rampant at a time when getting and spending — a lot — have become our nation’s most cherished activities, and when purchasing power has become, to an unprecedented extent, almost the sole source of many people’s status and identity.

In our society, you don’t have to be wealthy to suffer from affluenza. Its symptoms — “debt, overwork, waste, and harm to the environment, leading to psychological disorders, alienation, and distress,” in adults; “lack of motivation … apathy, laziness, or failure to commit to and achieve goals … overindulgence and attitudes of entitlement” in children, according to the New York University Child Study Center (pdf), are pervasive — and no one is immune.

For affluenza is not just a constellation of symptoms. It is an ethic, a play-the-system, lie-and-cheat-your-way-to-what-you-want, don’t-let-the-peons-stand-in-your-way ethic of amorality. You rock, kid, parents teach. And you — alone — rule.

This ethic drives behavior — like the behavior of the wealthy parents profiled in The Times who, flouting camp bans on cellphone use, sent their kids off with two phones, so that, if one was confiscated, there’d still be a spare for secret calls home. And it also permeates social attitudes and policy.

Yet if affluenza, in greater or lesser form, has infected wide swaths of the population at large, one group — the children of the rich — appears to be particularly susceptible to its ravages.

Many studies have shown positive trends among American teenagers in recent decades regarding problems like teen suicide, pregnancy, substance use and violence. Yet upper middle class kids appear to be floundering, outpacing their peers in rates of cigarette smoking, depression, alcohol and drug abuse, anxiety, rule-breaking, and psychosomatic disorders like headaches and stomach problems, writes Madeline Levine, a clinical psychologist in California’s wealthy Marin County, in her 2006 book, The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage Are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids.

Sociologist Annette Lareau, who studied the childrearing habits of middle-, upper-middle- and working-class families in depth for her 2003 book, Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race and Family Life, has found that working class children, who have fewer scheduled activities, more unstructured time and less fussing-over generally by adults, are more spontaneous and creative in their play than are middle- and upper-middle-class kids, enjoy their leisure activities more, and show greater autonomy and self-reliance.

“Indulged children are often less able to cope with stress,” writes Harvard psychologist Dan Kindlon in his book, Too Much of a Good Thing: Raising Children of Character in an Indulgent Age, “because their parents have created an atmosphere where their whims are indulged, where they were always assured … that they’re entitled and that life should be a bed of roses.”

In the case of the rich children at the sorts of fancy camps featured in the paper last weekend, it’s easy to point fingers at signs of incipient pathology. All that parental micromanaging is sure to suppress problem-solving, one could say. Unconstrained parental meddling is bound to kill off kids’ resilience.

“If your child doesn’t get the bunk they want or you’re worried that he didn’t get the right camp counselor, if you convey that kind of response — ‘Oh my God, that’s awful, let me call them, it’s so unfair’ — that’s the worst possible response a parent could have,” Catherine Steiner-Adair, a clinical psychologist who consults with camps, told The Times’ Tina Kelley.

I wonder what that psychologist would make of a camp I heard tell of this summer, which permits campers to regularly make phone calls home and scripts parents on what to say, and which requests that parents ship their children’s belongings weeks in advance, so that staffers can unpack them, make the campers’ beds, and have things sufficiently home-like before the children arrive.

It’s easy to imagine that all this pampering will lead to irreversible mental damage. But, the problem is: I don’t quite buy it. The vast majority of these wealthy and pampered kids, so long as they’re bolstered by hardy genes and have parents whose foibles don’t run to extremes, will ultimately be just fine. They’ll thrive, in fact, in the society of their parents’ making.

(In Lareau’s research, middle- and upper-middle-class kids — however dependent, demanding, lacking in initiative and quick to get bored — were much more successful in school than were the working-class children in part because their privileged upbringings gave them a sense of entitlement that allowed them to navigate adult institutions with ease and aplomb.)

My worry is for the rest of us. For the parents who try to teach our children to play by the rules (obey your counselors; make your bed). And for our children, who are likely to come out the losers in a society dominated by sharks.

I actually have some sympathy for the parents whose strivings and fears have built the culture I find so dangerous and distasteful. I know that their actions, at root, spring from love and that their behaviors — however obnoxious — often arise from ill-considered attempts to save their children from pain.

I feel much greater resentment toward the institutions — like the camps that permit way too much parental presence and schools that encourage way too much parental involvement — which enable the worst parent behaviors, comfort their worst tendencies and cater to their basest fears, all, very often, in the interest of making an extra buck.

The buck has to stop somewhere. It’s clearly not going to be stopped by this generation of befuddled parents. It’s time that the professionals we entrust with our children stopped catering to their “clients” and started treating them like grown-ups.

[Judith Warner's book, Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety, a New York Times best-seller, was published in 2005. Warner's biography of Senator Hillary Clinton, Hillary Clinton: the Inside Story, was published in 1991. Warner's Op-Ed column,"Domestic Disturbances," appears every Friday in the NY Fishwrap.]

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

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