Venting thread that still excludes eddy (2)

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KathTheDragon
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Re: Venting thread that still excludes eddy

Post by KathTheDragon »

Well I don't make a big deal out of it.

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Re: Venting thread that still excludes eddy

Post by Hydroeccentricity »

Yeah, Nina Paley's work has been pretty Hot-Topic-Edgy-Teenager when it comes to Israel. I didn't know she was a TERF though until just now. From her blog:
No matter how many times I state that I have trans friends, was standing up for trans people before the current crop of MRA “transactivists” was even born, and continue to defend the human rights of trans people, people accuse me of the opposite. I tire of defending myself, and it makes no difference anyway. I hated seeing the trans movement get taken over by misogynistic men’s rights activists; I hate seeing the misogyny of the “left” growing. I am witnessing a new, deeper, “postmodern” colonization of women. I bear no ill will towards trans people and like and love several; my concern is for WOMEN, especially those who aren’t white liberal middle-or-upper class, and especially lesbians. When an aggressive white male comes here and declares “I’m a dyke!”, and other liberal men gather round to support him, I see this colonization in action.
It gets MUCH worse after that.
Further down the rabbit hole I discovered that Paley used to make cartoons. They are so banal it makes me wonder how she ever managed to create something as interesting as Sita Sings the Blues.
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Re: Venting thread that still excludes eddy

Post by Vijay »

Hydroeccentricity wrote:They are so banal it makes me wonder how she ever managed to create something as interesting as Sita Sings the Blues.
Because she lived in India (and also surely did way more research for that movie than she did for these cartoons).

Once you've spent any amount of time in India, and then you go to the West, you have so much to talk about you may not even know where to begin.

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Re: Venting thread that still excludes eddy

Post by Nortaneous »

jmcd wrote:A common image of American cuisine abroad is the association with fast food joints like McDonalds and KFC.
Sure, and over here the only image anyone has of Vietnamese food is pho and banh mi. (I assume Vietnam has better banh mi than the universally godawful shit we get here.)
I now know about the existence of things like grits and peanut butter pie through the zbb and cuisine books and websites I read as an adult.
Peanut butter pie? What the hell?

The Correct form of pie is pecan pie, but pumpkin pie is also acceptable when seasonally appropriate.
What do you eat on a regular basis, Nort? And what are your favourite foods?
Pork chops (butter, sichuan peppercorns, soy sauce, rice vinegar, whatever else, cube it and throw it in a pan), chicken (olive oil, tomatoes, herbs, cube it and throw it in a pan and add parmesan once it's done), yogurt, beans (still trying to figure out the right way to do beans), salads (ideally with dandelion greens, which are cheaper than lettuce when they're available), broccoli (butter, sichuan peppercorns, soy sauce, rice vinegar, whatever else, throw it in a pan; or just steam it), peas/corn/green beans (steamed), corn flakes, the occasional donut, kipper sandwiches (sour cream or cream cheese, toast; ideally with a side of borscht, also with sour cream). And if I don't feel like cooking I'll go to the gas station down the street for a cheeseburger. I used to eat a lot of grits and scrapple, but don't anymore, since I moved and they're hard to find.

Favorite food is, of course, the steak sub, but you can't get a good one outside the "Mid-Atlantic", which is only a real region insofar as it's the part of the country where you can get a good steak sub.
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Re: Venting thread that still excludes eddy

Post by finlay »

jmcd wrote:The only meaning of cereal bar that I know of is this:
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i.e. something you eat, not somewhere you go to.
I didn't even make the connection - I was thinking like, i'm sure i ate cereal bars in the US... what's he talking about?

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Re: Venting thread that still excludes eddy

Post by jmcd »

@Nort:
I think the only Vietnamese food I'm familiar with are nems. As far as I can tell, 'banh mi' refers to either 'bread' or sandwich and is not particularly Vietnamese to start with.

People can have one-sided stories about most countries, but, for America outsiders have generally multi-sided views of the music and the films but the food as far as I can tell.

As I understand, you are either unfamilar with the idea of peanut butter pie or unappreciative of its taste. I've only heard about it myself.

So you always season your meat in the same way?

Could you make your own grits and scrapple?

I didn't realise steak sub existed.

@finlay:
Maybe there's an alternative name for it. It could be potentially material for the 'What do you call it' thread.

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Re: Venting thread that still excludes eddy

Post by zompist »

Vijay wrote:
Hydroeccentricity wrote:They are so banal it makes me wonder how she ever managed to create something as interesting as Sita Sings the Blues.
Because she lived in India (and also surely did way more research for that movie than she did for these cartoons).

Once you've spent any amount of time in India, and then you go to the West, you have so much to talk about you may not even know where to begin.
Heh! Even reading about India can be overwhelming.

I wonder if I'd enjoy Sita Sings the Blues on a second viewing. When I didn't know anything about the Ramayana, I found it delightful. Looking back on it, it's kind of a jokey use of a great epic to illuminate a very banal story of Westerners falling out of love. Kind of like a filmmaker making a beautiful, hour-long animation of Exodus as a thematic counterpoint to the story of moving out of Mom & Dad's house.

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Re: Venting thread that still excludes eddy

Post by Vijay »

The recording of actual Indians struggling to narrate the story themselves is so funny to me it's priceless. They sound exactly like classic IIT grads. ("But the 14th century was recently!").

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Re: Venting thread that still excludes eddy

Post by Nortaneous »

jmcd wrote:@Nort:
I think the only Vietnamese food I'm familiar with are nems. As far as I can tell, 'banh mi' refers to either 'bread' or sandwich and is not particularly Vietnamese to start with.
I've never heard of nems, but it sounds like they're the same thing as spring rolls, which are maybe the same thing as egg rolls.

Banh mi is from the colonial period, yes. It's a sandwich with meat, daikon, carrots, mayonnaise, and so on, on something that vaguely resembles French bread.
As I understand, you are either unfamilar with the idea of peanut butter pie or unappreciative of its taste. I've only heard about it myself.
I've never heard of it, and it doesn't seem like the sort of thing that would work. Peanut butter seems like too rich a food to make into a pie. When you're putting it on things, you use it sparingly. Or you might eat a tablespoon of it when you're hungry in the middle of the night and don't feel like preparing a proper meal.
So you always season your meat in the same way?
Pretty much.
Could you make your own grits and scrapple?
No, those aren't things you could make yourself. You'd need specialized equipment. (Scrapple is a type of sausage that's formed into a brick instead of being put into a casing.)
I didn't realise steak sub existed.
Well, it's the American version of a banh mi. Generally associated with Philadelphia. I'm told the proper version is supposed to have Cheez Whiz, but I don't think anyone actually eats that, and I've never seen them sold that way. Usually there's a choice between provolone and American cheese.
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Re: Venting thread that still excludes eddy

Post by jmcd »

Yeah, nems are quite like spring rolls.

Wow, your description of banh mi seems even more restrictive than the definition. My initial hypothesis would be that (at least some) Vietnamese Americans heavily specialised.

Peanut butter pie sure has the potential to be particularly thick. The peanut butter pie recipes I have found involve mixing the peanut butter with sugar and cream cheese (e.g. http://www.myrecipes.com/recipe/peanut-butter-pie), thereby reducing the thickness of it. I like peanut butter in sannies/sandwiches, but only combination with something else, usually jam or honey, although I have occasionally had it with chocolate or banana.

When you eat at other people's places, how do you feel about the seasoning?

Scrapple looks like square sausage/lorne sausage/etc that we have in Scotland (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpvBB3aPnn0)

If steak sub is associated with Philadelphia, would they not eat cream cheese with it?

From what I've heard (only hearsay though), Norway seems bad for abandonning its traditional fare. Réunionese people I know went there, and were disappointed to be pointed at burger joints and kebab places when asking for Norwegian restaurants.

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Re: Venting thread that still excludes eddy

Post by alynnidalar »

This discussion of banh mi reminds me of this amazing restaurant near where I live. It's this hole-in-the-wall that's a combination Vietnamese restaurant, barbecue restaurant, and... cellphone store?? You can get a banh mi with smoked brisket on it and it's one of the best things I've ever tasted.

I actually have had peanut butter pie once, and Nort's right, in my opinion. Just too overpowering for an entire pie, although a small sliver of it was pretty delicious.

"Philadelphia" cream cheese is just a brand name. It's not actually from Philadelphia as far as I know. (also, cream cheese on a steak sandwich?? Now that would be an unexpected combination.)
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Re: Venting thread that still excludes eddy

Post by Imralu »

I've never seen banh mi at any Vietnamese restaurant.
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Re: Venting thread that still excludes eddy

Post by linguoboy »

Imralu wrote:I've never seen banh mi at any Vietnamese restaurant.
Maybe it's a Saigonese thing?

Only some of the restaurants here offer them. The bread stales quickly so if you aren't doing good volume, it's not really worth it. My fave bánh mì place in Little Saigon closed several years back, but their better-known rival is going strong. Compared to most of the restaurants in the hood, their menu is very stripped down: just bánh mì, a few bún and rice offerings, and a refrigerated case with lots of bánh and chè and raw ingredients like pâté and nem chua so you can build your own sandwiches at home.

The only "Vietnamese" place near where I work is a fast casual joint opened by a couple of grads from the local business school. I'm not opposed on principle to non-Vietnamese selling Vietnamese food (though it is irksome to see privileged 20-somethings cashing in on a food trend that poor refugees have been slaving long days at for decades just to survive over here) but eating there made me realise a significant problem with it: the skills gap. The gỏi cuốn I had there were a mess. The vegetables were cut so large that they were difficult to eat (I ended up just pulling the carrots out entirely) and the rice paper was rolled up in such a way to leave big damp wads at either end. Maybe that will get better with time, or maybe diners will consider what they're doing good enough and there'll be no incentive to.

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Re: Venting thread that still excludes eddy

Post by Vijay »

There are plenty of (Southern!) Vietnamese immigrants here, yet it seems difficult to get a good bánh mì. However, in the Bay Area, where some of my relatives used to live, it is definitely possible to get a good one, and there are restaurants that serve it, too.

Just looked up chè

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Re: Venting thread that still excludes eddy

Post by Salmoneus »

I don't think I have ever encountered a specifically Vietnamese restaurant, of any stripe.

Patterns of migration, I guess.
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Re: Venting thread that still excludes eddy

Post by Vijay »

To be honest, I don't think I'd been to a Vietnamese restaurant for many years, either. All the Vietnamese-owned restaurants I knew of were basically Chinese restaurants that served a little bit of Vietnamese food as well.

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Re: Venting thread that still excludes eddy

Post by hwhatting »

In Germany, you'll find Vietnamese restaurants in every city and biggish town. Vietnamese in Germany are mostly South Vietnamese refugees who arrived in the West in the 70s or Northern Vietnamese guest workers in East Germany who stayed on after reunification.

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Re: Venting thread that still excludes eddy

Post by linguoboy »

Salmoneus wrote:I don't think I have ever encountered a specifically Vietnamese restaurant, of any stripe.

Patterns of migration, I guess.
Which is another way of saying that they were one of the countries y'all never got around to colonising/invading.

An interesting facet to Vietnamese immigration to the USA is that, because the refugees were so heavily Christian, a lot were sponsored by church groups and so ended up settling in parts of the country which weren't traditional ports of entry for immigrants. For example, they make up just under 2% of the population of Oklahoma City. A friend of mine who grew up in Ada said that when he was young, they tended to run second-rate Chinese restaurants. Now that Vietnamese cuisine has a higher profile, a lot these have become first-rate Vietnamese restaurants.

Another interesting facet is that a lot of "Vietnamese refugees" were actually ethnic Chinese (mostly Cantonese-speaking). They made up an estimated 14% of the so-called "boat people", for instance. The Chinese name for the Vietnamese neighbourhood in Chicago literally translates as "North Chinatown" and several of its best-known restaurants are run by Cantonese-speakers; the owners of the main dim sum parlour are Teochiu. Meanwhile, more recent Chinese immigrants tend to settle in (South) Chinatown, so over time it's become steadily more dominated by Mandarin-speakers.

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Re: Venting thread that still excludes eddy

Post by Vijay »

Pretty much every time I write a post on this forum, I'm sitting in front of my computer in my room at the back of the house. Just out the window, I can see the back of my Sino-Vietnamese neighbors' house. They speak Teochew and (to a lesser extent, IIRC) Vietnamese. When I was growing up, they frequently had relatives staying with them who spoke little or no English. They once briefly had some cousins over who also spoke no English but did apparently speak French and perhaps German.

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Re: Venting thread that still excludes eddy

Post by vampireshark »

So, after a fun week in the UK seeing friends and castles, I had quite a "fun" adventure getting back to Luxembourg yesterday!
– I arrived at the train station a few minutes late for the Eurostar check-in due to Tube mishaps, meaning that I couldn't board the train. Fortunately, not all hope was lost, as I just needed to switch my reservation, but it cost me about £30 to get on the next train (two hours later). At least I wouldn't miss the last train that day back to Luxembourg.
– After mishap #1, just after leaving Brussels-South station, the train got stopped for forty minutes "because there was somebody on the tracks". Ended up having to divert via Leuven, which wasn't too bad, but we still had that delay.
– Then, after rolling for a while, we got stopped for about an hour between Jemelle and Libramont because a train in front of us had caught fire.
– Finally, we arrived in Arlon, and the train wouldn't continue past Arlon! There was a bus to take us to Luxembourg, but that added extra time.

Ended up getting back home at 2 in the morning and woke up a few hours later with a cold. Joy.
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Re: Venting thread that still excludes eddy

Post by Salmoneus »

HWH: how interesting. I think of France as having a large Vietnamese population, but I'd never before thought of Germany that way.

It turns out: Britain really is the exception. There are way more Vietnamese migrants in the Czech Republic than in Britain! Poland, too. It's weird, because in general Britain has huge East Asian populations, and there are obvious migration routes from Vietnam to Britain (via Hong Kong or Malaysia/Singapore). Were they all avoiding Britain for some reason? What was drawing them all to Central Europe, I wonder?

Anyway, apparently we do have maybe 60,000 Vietnamese, but they live in Lewisham, and I've never... wait, no, apparently I lived for a little while literally just around the corner from the hotbed of Vietnamese Britain. But if they had any restaurants, I think I turned the wrong direction on the main road, so never consciously encountered them.
Apparently, most of them (literally, most) work in nail salons? Seems a bit odd. Are nail salons a key point of Vietnamese culture? I seem to remember 'Vietnamese nail salon' as a thing in some US TV show, but I think I assumed it was a one-off, rather than an international cultural touchstone...
linguoboy wrote:
Salmoneus wrote:I don't think I have ever encountered a specifically Vietnamese restaurant, of any stripe.

Patterns of migration, I guess.
Which is another way of saying that they were one of the countries y'all never got around to colonising/invading.
Common misconception. It's true that our colonisation attempts (from the early 18th century onward) were small-scale and unsuccesful - we certainly never attempted a colonisation on the scale you tried! But we did conquer the country at one point: 1945 to 1946 (Operation Masterdom, a charmingly PC soubriquet...). We'd defeated the Japanese, but the French weren't in a position to take over, and there was no stable Vietnamese power structure - and the most powerful Vietnamese, the Viet Minh, we didn't like. Also, there were large numbers of Japanese soldiers there, and we didn't want them to all be massacred by the Vietnamese before they could be repatriated. So we allied with the Japanese and the French to subjugate the various local militias, with the Viet Minh effectively fighting on both sides. Once we'd reimposed stability, we handed it over to the French, and then a few years later things got complicated...

[The British also sent briefly troops to assist the US in 1962-1963, although they were "civilian" troops from south east asia, lead by SAS commanders on holiday.]
An interesting facet to Vietnamese immigration to the USA is that, because the refugees were so heavily Christian, a lot were sponsored by church groups and so ended up settling in parts of the country which weren't traditional ports of entry for immigrants. For example, they make up just under 2% of the population of Oklahoma City.
Yes, I'd heard that about the Hmong especially. Although interestingly the Vietnamese who did make it to Britain were very heavily Buddhist, rather than Christian. Don't know what it's like in Germany...
A friend of mine who grew up in Ada said that when he was young, they tended to run second-rate Chinese restaurants. Now that Vietnamese cuisine has a higher profile, a lot these have become first-rate Vietnamese restaurants.

Another interesting facet is that a lot of "Vietnamese refugees" were actually ethnic Chinese (mostly Cantonese-speaking).
[/quote]
Yes, we have that here too - a lot of ethnic Chinese Malaysians, Singaporeans, even Indians. My local chinese restaurant is run by Malaysian chinese. More interestingly, I once lived somewhere where the local chinese was "Hakka" - i.e. migrants from the Mumbai Chinatown. Which I hadn't previously even been aware of...
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Re: Venting thread that still excludes eddy

Post by Vijay »

Salmoneus wrote:What was drawing them all to Central Europe, I wonder?
They were invited as guest workers by communist governments.
Apparently, most of them (literally, most) work in nail salons? Seems a bit odd. Are nail salons a key point of Vietnamese culture?
No, they were one of the few jobs they could find in the UK because most of them didn't have higher level qualifications.

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Re: Venting thread that still excludes eddy

Post by Salmoneus »

Vijay wrote:
Apparently, most of them (literally, most) work in nail salons? Seems a bit odd. Are nail salons a key point of Vietnamese culture?
No, they were one of the few jobs they could find in the UK because most of them didn't have higher level qualifications.
Lots of people, including on average many different ethnic groups, don't have higher-level qualifications, but hardly any of them work in nail salons!
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Re: Venting thread that still excludes eddy

Post by alynnidalar »

Well, I imagine once the first few immigrants get established in a particular business, subsequent ones are likely to enter the same industry (either because they see their fellow countrymen succeeding at it, or because they work for/with their fellow countrymen initially), and over time it just becomes ingrained as a viable career path among that community.

Ooh, upon googling it, apparently there's more to the story! Apparently the actress Tippi Hedren was working with helping female Vietnamese refugees in California get jobs, and when some commented on her manicure, they got the idea to learn to do nails and pretty quickly dominated the business.
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Re: Venting thread that still excludes eddy

Post by Vijay »

In addition to what alynnidalar said:
Salmoneus wrote:
Vijay wrote:
Apparently, most of them (literally, most) work in nail salons? Seems a bit odd. Are nail salons a key point of Vietnamese culture?
No, they were one of the few jobs they could find in the UK because most of them didn't have higher level qualifications.
Lots of people, including on average many different ethnic groups, don't have higher-level qualifications, but hardly any of them work in nail salons!
All the more reason for new immigrants to work there then, right? A job that doesn't require much formal education or qualifications and an untapped industry. Plus it doesn't require high English proficiency, and the work hours are flexible.

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