Never Trust an Internet Photo

A week or two ago, in my desperate search for affordable, functional underwear, I located a source of cheap Colombian drawers, and I bought a bunch. You can probably imagine how disturbingly flamboyant underwear made in Latin America can be. I bought the most boring style they had, although it turned out to be a bit fruitier than it looked on the website. This stuff is microfiber, which is the greatest possible fabric for the purpose, and from an engineering standpoint, it is absolutely perfect for the post-40 male who doesn’t want to end up like Saddam Hussein in that famous photo.

Maybe I made the wrong choice. The website, which I located via Google Shopping, is absolutely, unquestionably aimed at gays. In fact, after the underwear arrived, they sent me a catalog which I would have to classify as gay soft porn. Not the kind of thing you would want to see while sorting your mail over breakfast.

I had an argument about it with Moxie, who claims this stuff is lingerie. She said we should ask Sondra about it. I guess the famous thong photo makes her an authority on matters like this. I figured Sondra would be a true pal and tell me I was right, regardless of what the truth was, but no, she betrayed me without hesitation and said something about how a guy who wore things like those should be decorating her house.

And then she put the question to her readers. I’m so glad we managed to keep this confidential! I would be upset if more than two or three thousand close friends were in on the debate.

This has happened to me before, as longtime readers know. I bought underwear off a website, and when it arrived, it turned out to be a lot like a slingshot. I never knew what to do with those things. You can’t send them back, and you definitely can’t WEAR them. Except when you’re working out at home, in which case, they actually turn out to be highly functional, and hopefully, no one else ever sees them.

I’m trying to figure out how this happened to me again, and I have come to the tentative conclusion that gays just know more about how underwear works. They think about it more, so they do their best to get it right. The rest of us end up with inferior products, but that’s okay, because it beats having to listen to our friends’ amusing opinions about our foundation garments. Men are a little weird. We feel nervous about hugging each other, but most of us don’t even perceive the obvious gayness of making acerbic remarks about another man’s underwear when he undresses. I mean, come on. Why are you even looking at it? Stand down, Liberace. Find something else to giggle about. Zorro.

I plan to continue wearing this stuff until there is an intervention. Apart from the appearance, it is the most amazing underwear ever made, and given the nature of my life, no one will ever see it unless I’m in a car wreck. And if that happens, I am sure to get better treatment from the male nurses.

I wonder if I should email the Unico company and suggest they consider making underwear with heterosexual non-Hispanics in mind. Maybe they don’t even know their products are gay. When it comes to underwear, “gay” and “Hispanic-looking” are synonymous. When I was in college, a friend of mine worked in the ER at St. Luke’s Hospital in Manhattan, and he said they always looked forward to having male Puerto Ricans come in so they could have a good laugh at their extraordinary underwear.

Maybe I’ll eventually have a motorcycle accident and end up brightening some phlebotomist’s day.

In other news, someone on the Chaski forum has suggested I rip open my dead VFD and “repopulate” the circuit board. That term is new to me. I should have done this already, but I was really pooped and discouraged after talking to the Hitachi tech. His view was that these things are like disposable diapers. Once they go bad, you don’t try to make them work again. Of course, he has never paid for one.

I once bought a Pentium motherboard via the web, and when it arrived and I hooked it up, I shorted something against the inside of the computer case. I found a weird little fried item on the circuit board. Thinking it was a resistor, I tried to read the code, but it didn’t make any sense. I called Mouser Electronics, and we spent like half an hour on the phone trying to identify it. It turned out to be an inductor which looked like a resistor, and after all that effort, they made a sale which amounted to about twenty cents. Since then, I have always recommended Mouser Electronics to anyone who would listen. I put the inductor on the board, and the computer worked for another year or two. I should have thought about this when the VFD took a dump.

I think I know what’s going to happen. I’m going to open the box and see some big, really easy-to-replace component that has gone bad, and it will turn out I already have one just like it. Then the new VFD will arrive, and I’ll have to send it back and pay a restocking fee.

Here’s something which may actually be of use to you. Yesterday I fixed a canned ham, because I was getting tired of Costco chicken and discount Winn-Dixie pork chops. I used a modified version of a recipe from my book, and I know this will be good information for you to have, because most of you were too cheap to buy it. I have a recipe for a glazed hog stuffed with rice and bread-cube dressing, and I used the sauce with a ham, and it was fantastic.

INGREDIENTS

1 jug apricot nectar – probably two liters
3/4 cup quality Marsala
2 tsp. dry sage
2 cans pineapple rings
3 tbsp. butter
several squirts of Texas Pete
salt and pepper to taste

You can do this with a small ham, and it obviously doesn’t have to be canned, but that’s the right amount for a 5-pound ham a normal family might eat.

Put the nectar, Marsala, sage, butter, Texas Pete (or other hot sauce), salt, and pepper in a saucepan. Boil it until it’s thick. You might want to add the sage at the end.

Plop the ham in a baking dish. Score it in a criss-cross pattern if you want, to make it hold more sauce. Cover it with pineapple rings and throw the others in the dish. Pour the sauce over the ham and then pepper it. Bake according to the directions on the can, I guess. They usually have a suggestion. The ham I got said to go 1 1/2 hours at 325. I went more like two hours, and I cranked the heat up to 400 in the last half-hour to get some browning.

That’s about it. It’s amazing. I suppose you could put Maraschino cherries in the ring holes. Or you could try other fruit juices, like peach. Pork is pretty cooperative.