Seth Madej
Chicken McNuggets are Holocaust Deniers! BOYCOTT CHICKEN MCNUGGETS!
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#SethBuyMeLunch Lunch No. 13
I met writer-producer-director-actor-comedian-queef-joke-enthusiast Ann Marie Lindbloom for lunch at Simple Things Restaurant, a sandwich and pie place on West 3rd, where she ate half a turkey-and-avocado sandwich and took the rest home. I promptly insisted she reimburse me for the uneaten portion, because page 53 #SethBuyMeLunch contract clearly states that the complimentary lunch includes only food eaten during the course of the meal. She kicked me in the eyes and ran off. Luckily I still had time to enjoy my reuben,1 which was of high quality, if a little overpriced, with thick, tender corned beef.
If you were to say the phrase “thick, tender corned beef” to Ann Marie, she’d make a joke about it of questionable taste. Which is, of course, the reason you should have lunch with her. She’s quick witted and walking around with a shoulder bag full of ideas for animated comedy series, all of which are of questionable taste, which is why you, being a development executive, should ask her to pitch them to you. She’s one of those types who can talk to a room full of people for four minutes and have them all convinced that they must work with her. For all of the above reasons I wish her nothing but ill.
Ann Marie (AKA @AnnMarieTV) is certainly the most under-followed person I know of on Twitter. Follow this link to rectify that, but know that here be potty mouth. Truth is though that Ann Marie admitted to being secretly mortified every time she types a joke about lower body parts or anything that one wouldn’t bring up in polite conversation with Charles Kuralt, and she hates mean jokes. Endearing qualities both, which is why I didn’t tell her that she kind of freaked me out because she looks like my old high school girlfriend.
You can win lunch with me simply by tweeting #SethBuyMeLunch any Monday, including today. Details here.
----- My second choice, because Simple Things was out of their famous fried chicken sandwich. [↩]
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Stuff I Like: The Marisol
NOTE: For the holidays I’m sharing a few of my favorite things that might not be familiar to you, thereby bringing peace on earth and goodwill toward man and single-handedly solving all of the world’s problems forever. You can see the other stuff I like by clicking here.
Despite James Bond’s myriad horrible characteristics and the many equally horrible movies made about him, I’ve been something of a Bond enthusiast most of my life. I even think I still have, somewhere in a storage locker in Pittsburgh, a complete set of the Victory Games, Inc. 007 role playing games.
Alcohol is an integral part of the Bond mythos, so much so that Ian Fleming’s first Bond novel, Casino Royale, contains a recipe for a now-classic cocktail called the Vesper:
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#SethBuyMeLunch Lunch No. 12
When you’re still using a three-year-old iPhone 3G, the Maps app takes 35 minutes to start up. Which means that by the time you admit that you don’t know where you’re going, you’re going to be at least 35 minutes more lost. And so after several U-turns on Venice Blvd. and captivating tours of the side streets of Culver City, I parked near a lot full of beatdown Alfa Romeo Spiders1 at the Omega Motorsports garage and arrived at Villa Tacos quite a bit late to find Brian Morrison deep into free chips and salsa.
----- Saying “beatdown” is redundant because, being the son of a dad who owned several, the last of which was just hauled away by a flatbed after sitting for years with rust-locked wheels, I know there’s no other kind. [↩]
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The Twelfth Winner of #SethBuyMeLunch
Congratulations to Brian Morrison, AKA @MorriBri. I’m looking forward to having tacos with him in Culver City. I’m posting the photo above because Brian strikes me as the type of guy who’d have the flagons to walk into a Jack in the Box with a cup from three weeks ago and help himself to some Coke Zero, which I think we can agree is the type of person we all want to be.
Next week is your last chance to win a free lunch with me in 2011. Tweet #SethBuyMeLunch anytime on Monday to enter.
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#SethBuyMeLunch Lunch No. 11
I should really just stop intending to take photographs of the #SethBuyMeLunch winners, because I forget every time. I’m just gonna uese Dave Shotwell’s Twitter photo, which I can verify is what he looks like. Conversely, he can confirm that this lunch actually happened and that I’m not just making this post up from information I learned during the 49 hours I spent hidden in his couch cushions.
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#SethBuyMeLunch Lunch No. 10
On Friday, Rose Hart-Landsberg and I met for lunch at Silverlake Coffee Co., where the staff and customers showered us with ticker tape and baby pandas in a joyous celebration of the tenth #SethBuyMeLunch lunch. Choking back tears, I explained that my and Rose’s lunch was, in a technical sense, actually number nine, because lunch number four has yet to happen. The revelers turned into an angry mob and hosed us down with scalding hot chai.
That didn’t stop Rose and I from enjoying unremarkable sandwiches and a pleasant conversation. Rose was a supporter of #SethBuyMeLunch from the very first week, which I truly appreciate, and I was happy to finally get to meet her. She moved down to LA two years ago from Portland to become a writer, and she’s already experienced the travails of the entertainment industry through internships, development departments, and chai-fused digits. She’s also smartly tried to find both the motivation to write and a cure for the slow-creeping insanity of unemployment by starting a women’s writers group that actually writes when it meets. Not surprisingly, many writers have invented all sorts of bogus excuses not to go, because (and this is a secret) writers are most afraid of two things: 1. other people, and 2. writing. Tweet her if you’d like to join up.
I like Rose, and was impressed that she’s one of those rare people in LA who’s more interested in learning about the person she’s speaking to than in talking about herself. Unfortunately this led to my rambling on about anxiety disorders for approximately 675 minutes. My increasingly more difficult task of finding people to buy lunch for is probably not being aided by my broadcasting details of my mental illness. Next lunch will be nothing but pop culture talk! Is C.H.O.M.P.S. still a thing?
Thanks for listening, Rose. You can follow her on Twitter at @rosyposymagosy. And if you live in LA and want a free lunch from me, just tweet #SethBuyMeLunch any Monday. Details here. Remember that the next two winners also receive a special non-denominational holiday lagniappe: an invitation to my holiday party.
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#SethBuyMeLunch Lunch No. 9
@TheFriendlyEnd, AKA T-Boz, and I braved a cloudy, cool, and depressing Friday in the semi-enclosed Farmers Market for exactly the amount of time required to shovel down a burrito and a cup of soup, which coincidentally was just a few seconds under the amount of time T-Boz could tolerate the extreme willies I seemed to be giving her. The soup was hers — tortilla — and the burrito was mine — cactus salad, my go-to Farmers Market order from the Mexican powerhouse Loteria Grill.
The Farmers Market, with a capital F and M, isn’t an actual farmers’ market but a 75-year-old permanent marketplace/food court in LA’s Fairfax Village neighborhood. It has the feel of a Parisian market crossed with a carnival midway and is a favorite spot of mine, just down the street from my old apartment. It’s always a larf to tell out-of-town visitors that I’m taking them to lunch at the Farmers Market and then watch them sit silently in the car, expecting to be fed a fistful of raw kale and a rutabaga half.
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#SethBuyMeLunch Lunch No. 8
This week’s #SethBuyMeLunch winner — P.T. McNiff — and I had to race out of Langer’s Deli to escape our expired parking meters, and in our hurry I forgot to take his picture. So I used the Internet to piece together a surprisingly accurate approximation:
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My Uncle Joe’s Garden – A Veterans Day Remembrance
Joseph Papak was a carpenter, my great uncle, and the only natural-born gardener I ever met. A railroad track ran alongside the duplex he and my Aunt Sue shared with my dad’s family in Monongahela, Pa., and Uncle Joe claimed the strip of rocky soil across the track for his garden. Polio forced him to walk with a cane as long as I knew him, but he scaled the gravel rise along the tracks, “just threw seeds on the ground,” and raised everything without fail. Broccoli, strawberries, corn, massive sunflowers lighting the entrance to the driveway, all in the constant gray of southwestern Pennsylvania. He also took over every unused patch of ground around the house and yard, always growing something year round. Beautiful asparagus shot up randomly along the wooden fence, like they’d taken root in each of his footsteps. He was the first person I ever saw compost, when I was just a little kid. He’d dump table scraps into a perfectly dug hole in the garden, sides as smooth as a beer keg, and cover it with a garbage can lid.
