July 22nd, 2010 in Tacos! by Jay | one response
You’re probably in Texas, so you’ve seen chili cook-offs and barbeque showdowns everywhere.
That’s right, Mr. Spell Checker. Barbeque with a Q in it.
Some good folks in Arizona are putting together the first annual Arizona Taco Festival, and challenging chefs and other culinary badasses across the nation to compete in one or all of four taco categories- beef, pork, chicken, and fish.
Why didn’t I think of this?
The event will eventually be a multi-city competition. The first event will be thrown in Scottsdale on Saturday, October 9, 2010. The grand prize is $7500.00.
The competition will also include a Sidecart Category that awards prizes for Best Salsa, Best Guacamole, Best Anything Goes Taco, Best Tamales, and Best Booth. Proceeds will go to Waste Not, a Phoenix charity that distributes perishable food to the homeless.
You can find the team entry form, sponsorship opportunities, and other pertinent info at their website. To keep up with new event info, follow @AZTacoFestival.
I’ll be one of the judges in this showdown. Let’s get some Texans out there to show them how it’s done.
July 13th, 2010 in Guns! by Jay | no responses
Check out the M60 next to the skull. YEAH!
Ted Nugent, also known as “The Nuge”, “Motor City Madman”, and “Terrible Ted”, visited Pasadena, TX yesterday to raise money for the Bay Area Builders Association, a charity that provides housing for the families of injured or fallen military members.
He is widely known for his guitar skills, his passionate and well-versed political commentary, and his love for bow hunting and wildlife preservation. The hipster staff at 29-95 asked me to check it out, probably because they were doing other things on a Sunday night like roller skating at American Apparel while shopping for a unitard. “Stranglehold” is a guitar masterpiece, and I’ve always wanted to hear it performed live, even if it was in Pasadena. Read the rest…
July 5th, 2010 in Insanity! by Jay | 9 responses
Predator came out in 1987. It’s a movie about a team of rugged commandos in the jungle who run into a formidable alien creature, and it starred Arnold Schwarzenegger, Carl Weathers, Jesse Ventura, Bill Duke, Sonny Langham, Richard Chaves, and Shane Black. This was an important casting decision, you see. The casting director was looking for a few obvious key characteristics when he chose these guys, since they would be portraying an elite team of commandos that live in a jungle and hunt aliens. Read the rest…
June 21st, 2010 in Insanity! by oberata | 4 responses
If you’ve been keeping up with this blog for a while, you’ve probably read one or more of Jeff Timpanaro’s gut-busting guest posts. (To read some of these, just punch “Timpanaro” into the search bar on your upper right.) He also has his own blog that will crack you up to no end. He’s genuinely one of my favorite people. Unfortunately, he’s got this incredibly complicated disease and he needs a new kidney. Read the rest…
June 9th, 2010 in Insanity! by Jay | 2 responses
Earlier this week, there were reports coming from online publications that a 2 million dollar house in Kingwood belonging to Chamillionaire was foreclosed on. Who cares, right?
Chamillionaire did. In fact, he jumped right into the studio and recorded a venomous 6- minute rant about his circumstances. Read the rest…
June 4th, 2010 in Insanity! by Jay | one response
This weekend I’m headed to the Free Press Summerfest, a 2-day music festival where they are expecting a turnout of about one billion people. Thought it would be a good opportunity to promote the site. It’s hard to get one t-shirt made, you know? I settled for a $14 haircut from Gina Hair Salon on North Main, which specializes in this kind of thing. The hard part for the barber was working around the various scars from broken bottles and pool cues. The hard part for me will be getting this off of my dome by Monday morning.
UPDATE: A photo of the new haircut from Summerfest made it to a Houston Press slideshow.
May 13th, 2010 in Insanity! by Jay | one response
***FAIR WARNING: The hyperlinks in this article don’t contain nudity right off the bat, but some workplaces might frown on seeing the word “Playboy” in your URL history.
Playboy Mobile is a website geared toward mobile devices. What sets it apart from the online playboy.com is that the stories are about 140 to 200 words so they can be read easily on a mobile device.
You know, so you can read the articles.
Playboy Scout is a blog module within Playboy Mobile that covers some of their favorite things, and this website just happens to be one of them. They recently did a writeup on the GunsandTacos blog that I thought I’d share with you.
Next time you get caught flipping through your cell phone looking at airbrushed gals in their underwear, you can blame it on me, I guess.
Perv.
May 3rd, 2010 in Tacos! by Jay | 3 responses
In August of ’09, Jeff Balke wrote a great blog post about Washington Avenue in the Houston Heights, which coined and immortalized the term “douchefication”. If you cruise down Washington around midnight, you will find a large quantity of wealthy and intoxicated patrons that listen to pop music intentionally and think they can tell the difference between Grey Goose and Stolichnaya in a Long Island Iced Tea.
The good bars and music venues are long gone and have been replaced with trendy, packed dance clubs with unimaginative bartenders and top 40 remixes playing on booming sound systems intended as a conversation preventative.
In the last month or two, Taqueria Tierra Caliente has changed their location to Washington, and a new player has moved into town: Taqueria Maya Quiche. Stationed in front of The Lot, this truck has been drumming up a good bit of business since its arrival.
I had never ventured into The Lot before so I thought I’d case the joint. I tried to ignore the two straight girls making out at the bar, but they were in between me and the bartender. The speakers thumped some kind of Michael Jackson techno remix butchery that made my stomach turn. I had to shout.
“AHEM. EXCUSE ME, MA’AM”.
No response.
“MIND IF I ORDER A DRINK?”
“Oh thanks baby! I’ll have a Patrón shot and she’ll have a Grey Goose and Red Bull! Hee-Hee!”
As an amateur anthropologist, I opted to converse with her in her native language by executing a vintage 1991 Shannen Dougherty eye roll.
Some soulless doucheketeer soaked in Axe Body Spray bumped into me, scratching my arm with the rhinestones on his shirt. I tried to stare him down but he was wearing sunglasses.
Sunglasses.
I left the bar before I could get myself into trouble. Taqueria Maya Quiche was in full effect. A dozen wobbling patrons lined up in front of the joint, so I cut in line and ordered some tacos, knowing that none of these guys have ever been in a fist fight in their lives for fear of messing up their hair or damaging their jewelry. They’ve never even watched a Western.
There’s a funny thing about Washington Avenue. I’ve noticed that nobody fights. They will push each other around, yell, take their shirts off while waiting for their buddies to pull them away, but nobody swings. These are a bunch of hand models that practice suggestive faces in the mirror before going out for the evening. They use daily facial moisturizer.
Maya Quiche is an unusual name for a taco truck, right? That’s because you’re thinking of quiche, that awful egg pie thing that old people make for breakfast. That’s not it. The Quiché are a Mayan people from the highlands of Guatemala, mostly from Chichicastenango, or Chichi for short. Guatemalans are just like Mexicans except shorter.
I ordered three tacos al pastor. If you don’t know what those are by now, you’ve got some catching up to do, homie. I hoped they’d have some unique Mayan cuisine or tamales wrapped in banana leaves, but no such luck. I ordered con todo, “with everything”. At most taco trucks, this means they’re going to put fresh chopped white onions and cilantro on your taco. If the taco truck is on Washington Street, I’ve learned that the demands of the audience dictate what goes on your taco.
I can only imagine the remonstrance of the Washington crowd when the truck first opened.
“Where is the lettuce? Where is the tomato? Where is the CHEESE, and why aren’t you playing KE$HA?”
I’ve said before to be warned of taco trucks that acknowledge gringo-ism by replacing onions and cilantro with lettuce and tomato. To placate the hordes, Maya Quiche adds everything to their tacos. Cilantro, onions, lettuce, tomatoes, and cheese. And you know what? It’s pretty good. The pork was on the dry side, but when you add all of those fresh elements to it and dump some salsa on top, you won’t notice. The red salsa was just how I like it. Bright red and filled with jalapeño seeds, with an ideal texture. Although the meat is the core of the taco, you’ve got to realize that the pastor test is the toughest to pass. I’m guessing that if I had ordered a fajita taco, it would have passed with flying colors.
The beauty is, if you’re in this location you don’t need to serve good tacos. You could sell cans of Spam for five bucks a pop if you were so inclined. These jokers will buy anything. Maya Quiche serves a fine taco with quality ingredients- even though they don’t have to. To someone who has spent the last three hours on the dance floor guzzling shots of high end sipping tequila with a salted rim and dry-humping girls who have been giving him bad phone numbers, this is a king’s feast.
Did you know Patrón is owned by a co-founder of the Paul Mitchell line of hair care products?
I continued down Washington, seeing people pee in alleys and argue about reality shows. Two guys leaned into the passenger window of a car, sharing a box of pizza and a bottle of Grey Goose with the bar spigot still on it. One guy on the street opted to remove his shirt and tie it around his head. I mean, that actually made sense to him.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t dislike these folks. They’re not too different than me, really- just younger, drunker, richer, and they use hair dryers. I had a good time hanging around on Washington, but I’ve got to admit I felt a bit smug, for one simple reason.
I know better places to hang out.
The facts remain. Some girls need a place to make out with each other to attract guys with Prada shoes or an Audi key chain, and some guys need a place to dress like characters in The Fast and the Furious and break up pseudo-fights that would have never occurred. I don’t hold it against them- it’s not their fault they have never spot welded, caught a saltwater fish, or changed their own tire.
April 26th, 2010 in Insanity! by Jay | 2 responses
For close to a year, I’ve been employing different tactics to get Chamillionaire, a successful Houston-based rap artist, to follow me on Twitter. I tried tweeting him several times, and I tried approaching him through his online forum, which was eventually shut down. Paul Wall, another successful rap artist from Houston (and friend of Chamillionaire), started following me on Twitter last week, and right then I thought I had it in the bag. But when you’ve got close to 80K followers, I guess it’s tough to read every message you get. I had to try another angle, so I went to see Chamillionaire and Paul Wall perform at the House of Blues in Downtown Houston in person.
Obviously I couldn’t go talk to him, so I stopped at CVS and picked up a posterboard and a fat Sharpie, then crudely fashioned a sign that said “FOLLOW @GUNSANDTACOS ON TWITTER.”
Since I would be holding up this sign in front of a bunch of angry people, I wrote “GunsandTacos.com” on the back of the poster so they would have something to read while I was blocking their view. I held it up for most of the show, and worked my way through different parts of the crowd to ensure full visibility. Note to self: It is difficult to drink a beer when you are holding up a sign with both hands.
The show was sold out and packed to the hilt. Here are a few photos.
The sign worked out to an extent. He once asked the crowd how many of them used Twitter. It didn’t garner a huge response, but Cham asked House of Blues to turn the lights on. He did this so that all of the Twitter users could take photos with their camera, which I thought was a pretty awesome thing to do. Toward the end of the show,Chamillionaire gave props to “The guy with the sign, Gus or whatever”.
He’s still not following me on Twitter, but that doesn’t mean I’m giving up yet.
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