FED #102: The New Table

Status: FED

·      Confit Lamb Neck + Bread + Goat Cheese + Apricots + Almonds

·      Pappardelle + Oxtail Ragu

·      Pork Loin & Chestnuts & Prunes + Kale + Cumin Potatoes

·      Chocolate & Hazelnut Tube (from Soma)

Sorry, no dialogue this week. Just lots of shots of Betty, my new table.

Betty and the table top I almost bought, the eight-footer.

Guest #102.1: John Jakeman

Occupation: Owner, GUFF

Contributed: See Petrunagaro

Sent thank-you: email

Guest #102.2: Rob Patrunagaro

Occupation: Manager, GUFF

Contributed: seen Shane

Sent thank-you: See Jakeman

Guest #102.3: Katie Lamb

Occupation: writer

Contributed: Santa Rita 2009 Reserva

Sent thank-you: email

Guest #102.4: Shane

Occupation: Employee, GUFF

Contributed: Trumpeter 2008 Malbec X 2, Voga Pinot Grigio

Sent thank-you: see Jakeman

Guest #102.5: Emma Segal

Occupation: Nag

Contributed: Bankside 2009 Shiraz

Sent thank-you: hand-written and carved pop-up note

Guest #102.6: Betty von Snootington

Occupation: table

Contributed: happiness

Sent thank-you: all day, every day

We thought it would have to pulled up over the third floor balcony. So the easy delivery was a relief.

Maybe the nicest thank-you card ever, from Emma.

"Have we ever forgotten to thank you?" See video below (at 2:07) for tone.

Thank you Mother, for buying me my first table, without which this column wouldn't have existed.

Thank you Beth Palmer, for taking me table shopping.

Thank you GUFF, for making the perfect table.

Thank you Jen Agg, for talking me down from delusions of an eight-foot table.

And thank you Christine Loureiro, first for suggesting this column and then for your notes, encouraging/enabling me to go on and on about Betty.

Date of publication: Saturday, October 29th, 2011

photo by Aaron Harris

Aaron gets up high so you can see most of the table, plus half of some flowers and my camera. But you can also see an image on the TV, which most of you will recognize as the bottom panel from page nine of Strange Tales #167 (1969). But that might leave some of you confused.

You see, Nick Fury had busted in on the Yellow Claw, trying to make his escape after seven issues of harassing our hero.

Then he uses some warp-vest to follow the nucleo-phoretic drive of Claw's Infinity Sphere.

And then a laser-eye thingee ...

... and so on, until ...

Fury uses the Satan Claw he took off of Baron von Strucker (issue #158, Calculatin' Corey) to gut his adversary, only to discover he's a robot.

And when you flip the page, it turns out that the whole saga, the past six issues, were just DOCTOR DOOM PLAYING CHESS WITH A ROBOT. Take that, existentialism, and also Amy Wood's attempt to devalue the word Nerd, just because hollywood made movies out of Captain America and 300.