No Ned Beatty jokes

The country is about ready to jump the proverbial shark, and Americans are apparently thrilled about the prospects of being oblivious to the dangers. Who cares about the economy and warmongering and everything that's happened for the past 8 years. It's a thrill to be stupid. Go Mavericks! And the Royals are far too depressing to even discuss. So screw it.

Joe Posnanski's post today has us thinking about pizza. Our favorite pizzas are 1. The Pizza House (Springfield, Mo.), 2. Shakespeare's (Columbia, Mo.), 3. Horace Mann Elementary Pizza (Springfield, Mo.), 4. Shotgun Sam's (now long gone, Springfield, Mo.).

Obviously this is very provincial. We lived in Seattle and Portland for a few years, and we don't ever remember even eating pizza. We do remember trying to order a pizza in Seattle. We asked for hamburger topping because we, not unlike most Republicans and Midwesterners and good Americans, actually like red meat. The girl on the phone couldn't believe that we would actually want beef on my pizza. So we told her to forget it. (Yes, we realize that we are actually making the case for the mavericks as opposed to the liberals here.)

Seattle has good seafood, as far as we know. We developed a taste for fresh Salmon there, for sure. But we don't really care for seafood, as a rule, and we really don't care for seafood that has somehow been shipped more than 500 miles from the nearest ocean.

Canadian walleye is pretty good.

We don't like catfish because they're godforsaken bottom feeders. And we haven't really been into swine ever since we got friendly with a doomed pig on our uncle's farm in Kansas many years ago. (No Ned Beatty jokes; we meant friendly in the sense that we liked that pig as a pet.)

Yes, Kansas City is the place to go for barbecue. And Springfield has its cashew chicken. Also, there's a Thai place in Springfield called Bangkok City that has truly awful service and amazingly addictive dishes.

The key to chili is making it in really large quantities. Horace Man Elementary had some great chili, too, as we recall.

We are German, so we can say with confidence that German food sucks. Everything that's supposed to be hot is cold and everything that's supposed to be cold is hot.

P.S. Remind us to do a post on the best stripper bars we've been to in America. As we recall, there are some joints in the trashier neighborhoods of Portland that would rank pretty high. And then there's that place just outside of Topeka, which qualifies because of the very real element of danger (violence, drugs, etc.) involved in going there. The best stripper bars in the world, as far as we know, are in Vancouver, B.C. But we really haven't looked into this as much as we should.