Materials: The aforementioned Mac & Cheese, 1/6-to-1/4-lb. ziti or similar macaroni, 2% or whole (4%) milk, olive oil, Parmesan or Romano cheese, 4 cloves garlic, cayenne pepper, black pepper, basil, oregano.

Method:  In a medium-sized handled pot, boil approx. 6 cups water.  If you eschew a measuring cup and instead eyeball the water level, ’tis better to err on the side of less water than more.  Unlike ordinary macaroni, do not add salt!  While the water is heating up, peel and finely chop the garlic.  When the water reaches a boil, add the macaroni from the Wegmans box and a dash of ziti.  Stir vigorously so that the pasta do not stick to the bottom of the pot, as they are wont to do.  Disregard the instructions on the box of macaroni; boil water for approx. 6-7 minutes and drain.  With the mixing implement of your choice, hollow out a small indentation in the macaroni.  This is where you will be combining your spices before mixing them in.  Add chopped garlic.  Add contents of cheese sauce packet.  Add a splash of milk.  Add a copious amount of cayenne pepper.  Add a copious amount of black pepper.  Add basil and oregano.  Finely grate a medium amount of cheese.  You will now have a mound of cheese powder and spices, looking rather like a volcano.  Drizzle the olive oil over the volcano and observe the lava that runs down the sides.  Mix thoroughly.  Serve in a big bowl along with milk, because you will need it to cut the burn. Mangiare.

WARNING!  This recipe is extremely spicy, and is not for the faint of heart.  It would behoove you to experiment with smaller amounts of pepper until you become accustomed to the heat levels.  Buffalonians need not fear, though, having been raised on hot wings.

IT’S ONNNNNN BITCHEZZZZZZ

Acquire the materials: 1 brick ramen noodles, 1 egg, (can be multiplied, but keep ratio) shoyu (soy sauce), Sriracha hot sauce, chopsticks.

Method: Discard ramen flavor package.  There is more than enough sodium and cholesterol in the recipe to begin with.  Boil the noodles.  Fry the egg(s).  Drain noodles.  Combine noodles and egg(s).  Mix thoroughly, using chopsticks.  Eggs cooked over-easy will break their yolks and coat the noodles with liquid eggy goodness;  eggs cooked over-hard or scrambled will disperse throughout.  Add shoyu (not much) and Sriracha (as much as you can handle).  Enjoy with chopsticks, the traditional and typical of Chinese glonous history and cultural.*

Mangiare.  Then get back to your regularly-scheduled gaming.

———-

* I intend no disrespect here.  There is a particular brand of chopsticks, which I’ve seen in several different Chinese joints, which has had this rendering on their packaging for well-on ten years now.  You’d think that in that period, they’d have recognized the error and changed it, yet that has not happened.  I think they’re keeping it deliberately, cause the phrasing is actually pretty funny.  (Compare Zero Wing’s “All Your Base”.)

The N.Y. Post is a Murdoch-owned rag, so we must take the story with a tablespoon of salt, but honestly, it doesn’t matter if the owner’s allegations are true or not.  If there was merit to the violations, then the inspector wasn’t doing anything wrong, and should be commended for his professionalism in continuing to write them while on-camera.  Frankly, he should get a raise.  If, on the other hand, they were bogus, then it is absolutely within the rights of the owner to document evidence of such, so that he can challenge them, thus preventing an injustice.  Either way, the inspector had no legitimate reason to object to being recorded.  A public servant, performing his official public function, in a public place no less, has no reasonable expectation of privacy, whatsoever.  None.  As the authoritarians like to say, “If you’re not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to fear.”  That statement applies to everyone, not just the little people.

This heavy-handed punishment of Citizens who record public officials, going about their official public duties, IN PUBLIC, and then dare to demand one Goddamn iota of accountability from them, has got to stop.  It’s happened in Rochester and elsewhere, it’s already been challenged in court, it’s widespread, and it’s unequivocally unconstitutional.  The Police know it’s unconstitutional, too, which is why they’ve had to resort to intimidation so that people will back off.

Isn’t it funny that The Powers That Be keep saying that widespread surveillance is a good thing and makes us all safer, but as soon as Citizens take that to heart and start using cameras to promote the rule of Law, everybody gets their panties in a twist?  Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?

In 1954, two biologists named Olds and Milner identified regions in the brain where, if stimulated in response to an action, animals would repeat that action as if they had been rewarded. It was an enormous breakthrough in understanding animal behavior, as Olds and Milner inferred that these are the brain areas that activate when an animal engaged in evolutionarily sound behavior – eating when hungry, for example, or drinking when thirsty, or reproducing. Olds and Milner studied rats.

Like our smaller mammalian brethren, humans also have centers in our brains that activate when engage in the behaviors naturally selected for over the millions of years of human evolution and billions of years of life on earth. It makes sense, too; if there was a trait by which the brain rewarded behaviors such as not eating or not reproducing, all the animals with that trait would die without passing it down to other generations. Olds and Milner found a shortcut around having to perform the behavior that is hardwired to the reward center, just activating the center itself with an electrical impulse.

Humans, in our seemingly endless ingenuity, have found similar shortcuts. Instead of hooking electrodes up to our brains (though in a way we do do this – it’s one way that cocaine and methamphetamine work), we have created incredibly ready access to all the food we could possibly eat. Granted, this is through no small amount of environmental, human, and other animal exploitation, but every time we bite into that El Nino Burrito, we are rewarded by our brain thanks to the circuitry deep within us that evolved because it kept us alive. Because we are rewarded in this fashion, however, all of the things that go into making that burrito are also rewarded: factory farmed beef, human slave labor picking tomatoes (are there tomatoes on an El Nino?), fossil fuel based pesticides that poison our water and put environmental pressures in place to create super-pests, the petroleum needed to ship all of these things all over the world and attendant pollution and global warning, and so on, and so forth. Because our brains reward us, we ignore big picture “externalities” in pursuit of the things that create the reward. We think of them as things that make life better or more comfortable, but we are killing ourselves in their pursuit. In countries with the readiest access to high-calorie food, there the highest rates of heart disease, diabetes, stroke, osteoporosis, and a host of other ailments. Americans and Chinese contribute the most greenhouse gases contributing to global climate change. We are pulling natural gas out of the ground through means that contaminate groundwater and create earthquakes. We have eaten almost all of the big fish in the ocean.

The rats in Olds and Milner’s study would activate their reward centers by pushing on a lever attached to the electrode in their brain. Later scientists found that rats would push the lever, self-stimulating to the point of exhaustion. Rats would run over shock grids and ignore warning signals of impending shock in order to self-stimulate and would even starve themselves to death, self-stimulating by pressing the lever instead of eating. Perhaps humans, in our seemingly endless ingenuity, can find a way to feed ourselves, reproduce, and live without taking such disastrous shortcuts.

Acquire the materials: 1 lb. orecchiette macaroni, jar of meat sauce (homemade is best, but the Wegmans brand stuff that comes in the glass jar will do), 1-1/2 lb. chicken breast, basil, oregano, black pepper (in grinder), 4 (yes, four) cloves garlic.

Method: Slice the chicken breasts into very thin strips or bite-size pieces, whichever you can manage given the shape of the cut of meat.  Cut off fatty scraps and give them to the dog.  On another cutting board, slice up the garlic cloves.  Wet a cast-iron pan (remember how fundamental those are?) with olive oil; add chicken, garlic, and spices to taste.  In a pinch, thyme may be substituted for oregano, but at a loss of 30% of the dish’s magic power.

On the other burner, fill a large pot 2/3 full with cold water.  Add salt to taste.  Begin heating.

While the water is coming to a boil, sautée the chicken/garlic mixture until chicken is cooked through.  Add meat sauce and spices to taste; reduce heat to low and simmer, stirring occasionally (and always clockwise [or "with the sun"]).

When the water boils, add pasta and cook 8-12 minutes, stirring and tasting pasta relatively frequently, until pasta is “al dente”.  Drain and return to pot.

Add sauce to pasta and stir until thoroughly mixed.  Reduce heat to low and simmer approx. 1 minute.  While the pasta is simmering, take the pan with the saucy residue and rinse it immediately in the sink.  You will thank yourself later.

Serve with a dry red wine of your choice.  Mangiare.

In a little more than a week, the Occupy Wall Street protests will be 3 months old and, especially since their evictions, no more immune to the criticism that they haven’t done anything more than make a big stink in a public place. Irrespective of the “victories” of inserting “income inequality” back into the public discourse and Cuomo’s reconsideration of the millionaire’s tax, there is still a lot wrong in the State of America. People are still making a stink, however (there have been two days of action of note even this week: the Occupy Food protest of U.S. agricultural policy and today’s Occupy Homes seizure of bank-owned foreclosed houses), and the opposition is still calling the “movement” a bunch of smelly crybabies who should just get jobs. This accusation can be stressful to people sympathetic to the occupations as they strive with general assemblies and resolutions to validate their existence and speak directly to policies. While I have no problem with the protesters engaging in such noble pursuits, I submit that change in the system was unlikely to ever come from the protest camps themselves, but rather spring up from the larger ideological movement that the camps are a symptom or projection of.

With all due respect to the occupations, at heart they are an art project, that is, a culture jam conceived by Kalle Lasn and delivered by Anonymous. Lasn, a long-time critic of American capitalism, and Anonymous, techno-Lokis extraordinaire, wanted to see what would happen if you plopped a bunch of weird, pissed-off, arty, educated, and drum-playing people on the doorstep of conservative, white-collar America. Just as they hoped, people freaked out. Cops beat people up. Other occupations in every major U.S. city cropped up. Homeland Security started advising. Ports got shut down. A big stink got made. It was awesome. But the protests are, at their core, protests. Protests don’t solve the problems, but they’re provocative. They get people going.

I would be ecstatic if the solutions to America’s ills came from the protests, but I’m skeptical. That’s where projects like Farmers & Builders come in. We are building the alternative to the system the occupiers are protesting against. We and the protests are two different projections of the abstract, deep-down sense that the status quo is unjust, unsatisfying, and unsustainable. As the protest camps are one-by-one swept away, Farmers & Builders and other alternative economies and societies stand in solidarity and ready for those who want to occupy themselves, providing as a composite for our necessities while enabling the autonomy to pursue our own ventures.

What’s your occupation?

Materials: 1 slice bread, 1 shot glass, 1 egg, butter or oil, cast-iron frying pan.

Method: Place the slice of bread on a hard, flat surface.  Take the shot glass and punch a hole in the center of the bread.  Save the bread-coin.  In your cast-iron frying pan (which, as we’ve said before, is a requirement of any proper kitchen), add butter or oil (your preference) to grease the pan.  Put burner on medium-high.  Place the  bread and coin into the pan.  Crack an egg in the hole.  Watch the hole carefully; the albumin will turn from clear to white from the bottom up.  When the hole is about two-thirds white, slide a metal spatula underneath the bread.  The fused egg-bread mass should lift easily and leave no residue.  Flip the fused egg-bread.  Flip the coin.  The other side will cook much more quickly, since the pan is now hotter.  Check the other side with the spatula; again, it should lift free and leave no residue.  You are done cooking.  Remove from heat, plate, top with the coin and hot sauce to taste.  Mangiare.

Remarks: “Eggy in the Hole” has restored some of my faith in humanity, since a human being probably created it (unless it was created by the Gods themselves and transmitted to humans).  It is reality-alteringly delicious.