News

The Australian state of Victoria has finally lifted the law banning pagans from marriage.

Last night, President Bush said, "It is now clear that a challenge on this scale requires greater federal authority and a broader role for the armed forces -- the institution of our government most capable of massive logistical operations on a moment's notice." Man, if those aren't the most chilling words I've heard from him yet, I don't know which ones are.

This morning, the ambassador to Afghanistan said that "six out of 6000 candidates" for the Afghani congress had been killed in the lead-up to elections, and said that was "one one-hundredth of one percent of the candidates." Can we have faith in an ambassador who can't do basic math?

An icky restaurant visit

I had occasion this afternoon, since some errand took me into downtown, to eat at a rather broad hole in the wall on 3rd and Pine called simply the "New Vietnamese Restaurant," a clever name if ever there was one. A tattered "Grand Opening!" sign hung over the door; it had clearly been used before and probably left out in the weather well into its middle age. I decided to try it. I'm fond of Pho soup and it had been too long since my last dose.

The inside of the restaurant was clean and businesslike, but busy. I was later to find this surprising. I ordered the beef Pho, and it came quickly.

What I got was a bowl of very disappointing pho. The noodles, which are usually thick in the bowl, were amassed at the bottom in a sticky, glassy glob that came apart only with vigorous teasing of the chopsticks. The meat was a desultory combination of thin slices of brisket and globs of thick-sliced gristle in the alarming shapes of a cat's paw. As I probed deeper, I found something curled upon itself, a thick, whitish noodle-like thing with smaller tentacles sprouting off of it, all covered in little knobs like infected hair follicles, a strange sort of garnish for a soup served to Elder Gods. I didn't try to eat it, but another piece elsewhere in the bowl did make its way into my mouth, hidden within those glassy noodles. It had a rubbery texture that created high-pitched squeaking noises in my skull when bitten down upon.

It's rare that I don't finish a bowl of pho. I did not finish this one.