Not Thanksgiving for me but anyway…

This time the Friday Five is the fault of my alter-blogmate Marvin Long, of the Electric Smack Shack.

This is Thanksgiving week in the US of A, the holiday on which immigrant Americans celebrate the poor foresight of the Native Americans who kept their Puritan forebears from starving to death. Which normally means that I could cop out and ask a question like, “Name five things you’re thankful for.”

However, several people on this list are within driving distance of my home and are rumored to have poor impulse control, not to mention the alleged secret stockpiles of explosives and furry porn, so I’ll go for something a little different: five separate questions, loosely related (just how loosely depends on how much scotch I manage to drink before I finish thinking them up).

Aside: It occurs to me that these questions betray a definite Anglo-Saxon Christmas-season bias. Please feel free to recast the questions to suit your own holiday traditions.

  1. You’ve just sat down for you favorite holiday meal and you hear a knock on the door. It’s Freddie Mercury in a tight white T-shirt and a gold lame halo�he offers to sing for his supper. What song do you request and why? (Not necessarily a Queen song�since Freddie joined the heavenly choir he’s been expanding his repertoire.)
  2. A certain relative or in-law so-and-so�the black sheep of the family, the one who drinks all the beer but never bothers to pay for any�shows up later in the evening. You know the one (assuming it isn’t you, of course). What is his (or her, let’s be fair) special talent that you secretly envy?
  3. You’ve been feeding the family dog beneath the table. Fido’s digestive tract isn’t what it used to be. Which tasty morsel was it that stank up the joint?
  4. Between dinner and desert one needs a pause for digestion and reflection. In what special aid to this process do you like to indulge? Madeira, port, ye olde Sheep Dip, Longbottom Leaf, or something else?
  5. It’s time for dessert. You’ve pudding and hard sauce but no brandy to set the former on fire. But there must be fire. You search the house for a substitute: what will you find and use?

Wow. A lot of those questions are totally alien to me and I’m an Anglo-Saxon North American. Ah well, here’s a try:

  1. You’ve just sat down for you favorite holiday meal and you hear a knock on the door. It’s Freddie Mercury in a tight white T-shirt and a gold lame halo�he offers to sing for his supper. What song do you request and why? (Not necessarily a Queen song�since Freddie joined the heavenly choir he’s been expanding his repertoire.)
  2. I’m thinking, Freddy Mercury, who’s that? Oh, wait, I think he’s the singer in the crap band that did the soundtrack for Highlander, right? Yeah, the damn band that they were always playing in the jeongeol restaurant over by Zen bar in Iksan. Damn, I’d ask him to go back to heaven and send down John Coltrane in his place, who can play any damned thing he pleases on his sax.

    If Mercury refused, I think I’d request something snidely like, “That little Blue Suede Shoes song you made so famous.”

  3. A certain relative or in-law so-and-so�the black sheep of the family, the one who drinks all the beer but never bothers to pay for any�shows up later in the evening. You know the one (assuming it isn’t you, of course). What is his (or her, let’s be fair) special talent that you secretly envy?
  4. I’m the black sheep of the family and as such the talents I envy are actually well-distributed in my family. They’re all quite good at being “normal” in their way, or at least at passing for normal. They have quality mates or dates or spouses at at least the regular rate, they manage to be sensible about money, they can have conversations with people who don’t read books or think about things like politics; they can get by in the world most people seem to live in, and they don’t see it as wallowing. And they seem to have a dignity even in doing so, which I’ve never been able to pull off.

  5. You’ve been feeding the family dog beneath the table. Fido’s digestive tract isn’t what it used to be. Which tasty morsel was it that stank up the joint?
  6. It’s the kimchi. The sour sour kimchi.

  7. Between dinner and desert one needs a pause for digestion and reflection. In what special aid to this process do you like to indulge? Madeira, port, ye olde Sheep Dip, Longbottom Leaf, or something else?
  8. I go with a nice red wine. Hard to get the kind I like in Korea, but if I have full reign over things, it’s an Alghieri red, which used to be quite nice when it was available to me. Fruity and a little sweet but also dry. Good stuff.

  9. It’s time for dessert. You’ve pudding and hard sauce but no brandy to set the former on fire. But there must be fire. You search the house for a substitute: what will you find and use?
  10. Uh… like… okay, how can I explain soju? Soju is… well, soju is to Korea as vodka is to Russia, for one thing. Supposedly it’s sweet potato vodka, but the sweet potatoes here (goguma, in Korean) are pale-colored. It’s also highly chemical-esque… it smells like it was distilled from what was left behind in a machine after years of use. Its taste is harsh, and it’s pretty strong. A couple of smallish bottles (about equivalent to a 330ml beer bottle size, with maybe a little more volume inside) are usually enough to get someone fairly drunk, and most people I know sleep after 3 bottles. I once drank 2 bottles in an hour after a nasty breakup, and I was quite nonsensical at that point. But if you’re in a good mood, soju makes you feel very very good. And it goes really well with grilled meats, usually.

    Put some soju on that pudding and it’ll go up like a Korean traditional cottage, believe me. Flames, smoke, and tears in your eyes.

    By the way, what in the hell is hard sauce?

Other Friday Fives may be sampled, baked, tasted, spat upon, or simply chewed to pieces by following links under the Friday Five dropdown menu in the right sidebar. Enjoy your TurkeyDay, Americans.

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