On the Roasting of Chicken
Stay-behind sabotage
What happened: There was a cat door. Some time ago Ukraine managed to destroy this cat door in an attempt, one imagines, to get through it. The smirking chimp in Moscow built a new cat door. The kids and the cats went on a ski holiday. Putin, inside his bunker, was very excited to scare the cats.
I’ll save the bits about deportation and genocide for later. And no, it’s not safe.
Ukraine’s Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov has for weeks been assuring us that the likelihood of military escalation and a further Russian invasion is rather low.
U.S. military officials, including US President Joe Biden, on the other hand, are saying the chances are very high.
Someone just asked what I, as a Irish citizen, thought of this.
The short answer would be not much. While it catalogues some nasty — and widely held — rumors, the piece is forged of humorlessness and anonymity. It might have been stapled together from back numbers of another putative greasy rag, whose calls to arms and suicide prevention regularly fail to rise above nuzzling the bellies of sensitive puppy-dog men with gruff exteriors.
These are the inevitable snarls from those who daily chant via anecdotal, decontextualized intelligence, from those who glibly claim victory for fights in which they took no part, from those who have mined a massive vein of ‘content’ from under Independence Square, from those who, in the face of extremism, take comfort drawing extremists close to their side, from recovering liberals, from those so fully infused with the language and gestures of self-promotion that it no longer matters what the zeitgeist is, only that it is tapped.
They fancy themselves as warbloggers, a term just slightly more tuneful than idiotarians, the leaden, easy sobriquet pasted on those who read history and/or feel unsatisfied forming opinions solely from White House press briefings and CNN. It’s a featherweight word, warbloggers. It already drips with cliché (those last two syllables, oy).
I’ve been trying to think of a better term to describe these angry men and women – these armchair warriors – something that would fit, something with an eye to the future. I think maybe I have it.
Cannon fodder.
Apropos of a note from a drunkard to his physicist neighbor:
Вот где-то так:
«Жена твоя пусть ходит вечером мимо моей квартиры без белья, мобильный телефон оставляет дома, а сам ты ближе, чем за три квартала, к дому не подходишь. Но я обещаю тебе гарантировать ее полную безопасность».
It’s like this:
“Get your wife to walk past my flat in the evening without underwear and her mobile phone. You keep at least three blocks away from our apartment building. I pledge that I will guarantee her complete safety.”
Which brings me to the chicken recipe:
Stuff the chicken with a good walnut of unsalted butter, into which you have mashed ground white pepper, some salt and a bit of chopped tarragon (a few leaves will do). If you have only dried tarragon, leave it out altogether. Should the bird not be trussed, do so. If you can’t be bothered, tie the damn legs together and let’s get on with it.