Daily Loaf

Routes Music is a documentary film acting as a roving music census, taking in the true musical passions (and disgusts) of the American people. We’re traveling all across the country, stopping along the way to interview local bands, take footage of live performances and chat with anyone and everyone. Learn more about the documentary here; check out all previous entries here.

“Where eeez yer pipe?”

A 6’4 security guard towered over me, glaring.

“Where eeez yer pipe?” he repeated in a thick Islands accent.

“What?” I replied, not sure he really just asked me what I think he just asked me.

“Where eeez yer pipe?” he asked again.

“My what?” I said again, still shocked.

“Yer pipe. Yer pipe.”

Now he was aggravated. I’m enjoying feigning ignorance.

“I don’t know what you’re saying, man.”

The guard switches tactics.

“Drugs?”

I smile.

“No, no drugs.”

“OK, go ahead.”

So began my very first experience at an extended-day music festival, and only my second time ever seeing the seminal jam band, Phish. Luckily, the rest of the three-day fest at the Empire Polo Grounds in Indio, Calif. went smoother than my entry.

Read the rest of this entry »

Voting is hot and heavy whenever hardwood smoke and succulent pork get into the mix. After a lot of votes cast, Best Barbecue is still up in the air, with two frontrunners and a whole lot of possible upset contenders close behind. Voting ends monday, so get on the ball, wipe your hands, and vote for the ribs you can’t live without!

Leaders and vote tallies after the break: Read the rest of this entry »

(This piece comes from CL Sarasota’s Summer of Pig coverage.)

It took two days to thaw in the refrigerator — two days longer than my excitement wanted to allow — but when I slapped the nine pound pork belly on my kitchen counter, it kind of freaked me out. A little. One side was beautiful, a melange of deep, brick-red meat laced with a profound amount of milky-white pork fat. The other side, though, was the skin, laced with stubbly reminders that pigs have bristles and nubby dots that looked like warts. Warts, in a neat, straight line? Oh, no. Those are nipples.

The easiest cure for that, of course, was to just flip the belly back over. And honestly, my horror was more mother-related than related to existential slaughter revulsion. I knew that this pig — a sow, I can say with certainty, from Palmetto Creek Farms an hour from my house — was raised humanely and butchered as nicely as any livestock can be. And I was going to grace it with the most profoundly tasty preparation that a pig can undergo: bacon, cured by my own hands.

Curing bacon is an incredibly simple process. Read the rest of this entry »

Maybe she can handle smelly men but I can't

I’ve been taking applications and conducting interviews for my new fuck-buddy now for the past month. Mainly they’ve been short interviews and no one has been called back for a follow-up.  Why waste anymore of my time or bodily fluids on a sub par applicant?  I’m tired of the anticipation, only to be let down.  Don’t men in Florida know how to fuck a woman right?  I’m not asking for a lot.  Only to be bent over and fucked hard.  My hair pulled and my ass slapped.  I want to feel a cock stroking my pussy and making me cum.

Our first encounter was mind blowing.  We left each other satisfied but wanting more.  Before he’d even cum the first time he asked when he could see me again.  His fingers were gentle but left a trail of fire blazing where he touched me.  His kiss was hard and passionate, left my lips red and my body dripping with anticipation. He was a skilled and experienced lover, taking his time, sometimes taking five, just to make sure he made me cum several times before cumming himself.

(Picture to follow; not suitable for work.) Read the rest of this entry »

Deadly Sophisticated

One by one, city by city, smoking bans have edged out the agitated and the addicted.  There was a time when cigar bars were a sure ticket to safe smoking pleasure and the promise of smoking freedom but it turns out that cigars are carcinogenic.  Cigar smoke is concentrated and the monoxides and tars that end up in your lungs surpass those in cigarettes.  The cigar rollers will tell you that this is not true, cigar lovers will tell you that they are fortified against disease because they do not inhale and they allow no cigar juice to go down their throats; cigar smokers are laboring under this shared fantasy, but the research stats do not support their collective chimera.  The second-hand smoke of cigars is much more rich and just as deadly as second-hand cigarette and pipe smoke.  A minority of cigar smokers can not resist the rich flavor of fired burly leaf and inhale, this is really risky.

There is a strange feature of our society that most people don’t breathe deliberately unless they are smoking.  My smoker friends breathe deeply every time they have a cigar or cigarette but when I have encouraged them to breath as deeply with out the tobacco, they cough like Marines coming out of the teargas hooch.  In offices I am always amused to see smokers in the fresh air while their non-smoking colleagues toil in the artificial air of the office building.  Living irony.

The clove cigarette was a sign of intelligent life in the ’90s.  Sophisticate, artsy types began smoking clove cigarettes because they were naive enough to believe that someone would produce a smokeable product that was made purely of herbs and cloves.  There is tobacco in clove cigarettes.  People soon became addicted and abandoned the clove cigarette for more concentrated delivery systems like American Spirit cigarettes.  American Spirit claims that they are the cleanest of the cigarettes on the market. I have read their propaganda and while they might not add a portion of the 599 elements that are included in the recipes of other cigarettes, trying to build a reputation of wholesome cigarettes by comparing your product to the average cigarette is like pushing the argument that a .22cal bullet entering your skull is somehow more safe than a .32cal bullet entering your skull.  (The burning of tobacco creates 4000 chemical compounds)

"Mike, pass the strawberries."

Since 2005, hookah bars have been bubbling up all over the place.  A hookah is a big water pipe that has many tubes coming off it so that many people can have a social experience by breathing in the very same mixture of herbs and spices and, oh yes, tobacco.  People believe that this hookah smoke is less harmful than cigarette smoke or cigar smoke or clove cigarette smoke because they have been told it is less harmful.  Your hookah smoking experience can be enhanced by having a piece of sharp, dark chocolate to nibble on to counter the sweeter flavor of the apple brandy that is wafting through your olfactory and lungs.  Yes, there are many ways to enjoy this more safe style of smoking; except that it is not safe.

"I wish I hadn't given my strawberries to Mike."

Research is suggesting that one who is smoking from a hookah is getting more of all the things we loath about cigarettes, more of the vile stuff than even cigarettes can deliver; And, the smaller the hookah, the greater the delivery of monoxides and nicotine and carcinogens.  In fact, water pipes deliver the highest levels of carbon monoxides, much higher levels than those of average cigarettes the kind of cigarettes that American Spirit’s promoters like to use as a watermark for comparison.

It comes back to the ease of delivery.  According to a 2005 report that was published by the World Health Organization, a person takes between 5 and 7 minutes to smoke a cigarette, during this time a cigarette smoker drags on the cigarette between 8 and 12 times and fills his lungs with up to 0.6 liters of all the legendary, cancerous junk that has made cigarettes one of the greatest health risks in the World.

According to the W.H.O. research, hookah smokers take between 50 and 200 drags off the pipe in a comparable smoking session and inhale up to a full liter of smoke.  When you allow the statisticians to boil all this down, the hookah smoker will get as much smoke in her lungs in 5 to 7 minutes as a cigarette smoker will in the same amount of time, provided the cigarette smoker smokes 100 cigarettes.

In 1995, Sega CD planned to release Penn & Teller’s Smoke and Mirrors, a video game featuring a slew of mini-games invovling P&T’s distinctive brand of humor and magic. Sadly, the developer went under before release and the game never made it to market.

Thankfully, the source code was released years later, allowing folks to use all the mini-games to fool and amaze their friends. All except for Desert Bus, that is.

Now the most well-known of the mini-games, Desert Bus is simple: all you have to do is drive a bus from Tucson to Las Vegas, with little scenery and few controls. In real time. At the max speed of 45 mph, it takes about 8 hours to make the trip. That’ll earn you one point. Read the rest of this entry »