“All I’m sayin’ is that if it does a good job scraping chocolate pudding out of the bowl…”
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In these times of social distancing and a possible shelter-in-place order coming soon, it’s important to remember that your local small business needs you more than ever. Support them, and if you’re on social media, share your support with the hashtag #SmallBusinessStrong.
I’m subscribed to a number of Facebook pages for my neighborhood of Seminole Heights, and a number of people have talked about which stores are still stocked with which items. They’ve only talked about more “basic” places: Publix, Winn-Dixie, Walmart, and the like.
I have a suggestion: Check out the bodegas!
There are a number of them in or near Seminole Heights, a couple of which are House of Meats and Huracan, both of which are on Sligh between Florida and Nebraska, just west of 275.
House of Meats, as its name implies, has a lot of meat, some of which has been packaged up, and some you can order straight from the butcher’s counter. You can get your standard beef, chicken, and pork cuts, as well as stuff like goat, rabbit, chitterlings, hooves, and other stuff that might send your more basic friends screaming to run to the comfort of a Pumpkin Spice Latte or a White Claw.
House of Meats. Tap the photo to see it at full size.
Five bucks will get you pretty far here — that got me a pack of eight hefty bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs, and another fiver got me a pound and a half of pork rib meat.
In addition to all that meat, House of Meats has a great selection of vegetables, especially frozen ones, as well as a lot of canned goods and Latino bread.
House of Meats. Tap the photo to see it at full size.
Across Central Avenue from House of Meats is Huracan, which also has a butcher shop, and a lot of fruit and veg. I get my yellow plantains here.
I read that some of you were looking for eggs and that Publix has been running out with all the COVID-19 panic buying. There are huevos aplenty at Huracan, as well as cheese, some tasty flan, and tres leches cake, too!
Huracan. Tap the photo to see it at full size.
And when it comes to shelf-stable protein, you can’t beat beans, which take up an entire aisle at Huracan. White beans, pink beans, butterbeans, pinto beans, garbanzo beans (a.k.a. chickpeas), pigeon peas — they have these and more, in both canned and dry form:
Huracan. Tap the photo to see it at full size.
So if you’re still stocking up your fridge, freezer, and pantry, give your local small business some love. And if you’re near a bodega but never go, don’t be so basic — break out of your comfort zone and check them out!
And while I’m on the topic of being basic…
Do you know what will get us through the COVID-19 crisis? A combination of smarts, courage, strength, and compassion — all qualities exemplified by the First Family of Superhero Comics: The Fantastic Four!
If you know them only through the movies, you can be forgiven for thinking that they’re not all that interesting a team. The 2005 film (Fantastic Four) and its 2007 sequel (Rise of the Silver Surfer) were in the lower tier of what a film with Marvel characters could be in the pre-Iron Man era, and the 2015 remake was even more disappointing.
Both were still better than the 1994 Roger Corman film, which was made only to fulfill a contractual requirement to hold on to the film rights for the characters. Want to know how bad it was? Here’s the trailer:
Here’s a great (if long — an hour and fifty minutes!) video that a long-overdue look at the Fantastic Four, their history, and how their book changed the world of comics. When they debuted in 1961, superheroes were cardboard characters in spandex, and the Four were imperfect, slightly dysfunctional, error-prone, and squabbled with each other almost as much as they fought supervillains. They were deeper characters — and they were a family.
While you’re stuck at home, practicing social distancing, go and watch this documentary — which is also a sort of love letter — about the Fantastic Four. It’s probably the best analysis of these characters and their story I’ve ever seen (and I spent a lot of my youth at Toronto’s Silver Snail reading Marvel comics). Not only is it well-researched, but it’s well-produced, and there’s some great voice acting, too:
Here’s a compilation that shows how quickly Fox News’ talking heads pivoted from downplaying COVID-19 as something minor or as a ploy to discredit Trump to calling it a very serious health crisis and a matter of grave national importance, now he’s declared it a national emergency:
For more, see this Washington Post piece: On Fox News, suddenly a very different tune about the coronavirus.
…I installed the new toilet handle in about a minute, and it works like a charm.
See the previous post, My COVID-19 racism moment, for the full story.
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My COVID-19 racism moment
So this happened this afternoon at home:
It turns out that the toilet flush handle wasn’t a single metal piece, but two metal pieces held together with a plastic core. It appears that the quality of toilet parts has really — ahem — gone down the toilet:
This qualified as a good enough reason to break the social distancing protocol and make a trip to Home Depot to buy a proper handle in the “rubbed bronze” style. There’s one reasonably close to my place, so I decided to combine the trip with today’s exercise and biked there.
In order to get the context of the next part of the story, you should know what I look like. Here’s a photo from today:
After Home Depot, I decided to make a quick stop at the local Latino grocery store to get some cans of beans. They have an amazing selection:
Tap the photo to see it at full size.
Many people were keeping their distance. One kid — maybe 13 or 14 years old — saw me and immediately pulled up the neck of his t-shirt over his nose and mouth, like so:
Really? I thought. I suppose that this could have been a “teachable moment,” where I would talk to him about racism and since he himself was Latino, about intersectionality. Instead, I decided just to meet him where he was.
I simply said:
“Unclench, ese. Soy Filipino.”
This got a laugh out of him, and he pulled the t-shirt off his nose and mouth and walked off.
So when some jackhole tells you this lie…
…or if some shitlords try to sell you this hot garbage:
…call them out on it, because it’s a bigger deal than you might think.
Worth checking out
The March 4, 2020 episode of NPR’s Code Switch podcast (a podcast on race and identity) is titled When Xenophobia Spreads Like a Virus:
The global response to COVID-19 has made clear that the fear of contracting disease has an ugly cousin: xenophobia. As the coronavirus has spread from China to other countries, anti-Asian discrimination has followed closely behind, manifesting in plummeting sales at Chinese restaurants, near-deserted Chinatown districts and racist bullying against people perceived to be Chinese.
We asked our listeners whether they had experienced this kind of coronavirus-related racism and xenophobia firsthand. And judging by the volume of emails, comments and tweets we got in response, the harassment has been intense for Asian Americans across the country — regardless of ethnicity, location or age.
A common theme across our responses: Public transit has been really hostile. Roger Chiang, who works in San Francisco, recalled a white woman glaring at him on the train to work, covering her nose and mouth. When he told her in a joking tone that he didn’t have the coronavirus, she replied that she “wasn’t racist — she just didn’t want to get sick.”
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Postcard of the day
I bought this postcard at a funky café in Washington D.C. a couple of years ago and just found it now, tucked into an envelope of other things I’d been saving.
Given the amplitude of the seething and whining about having to social distance for two weeks from a couple of my “south-pointing compass” friends and acquaintances online, it seemed appropriate. C’mon, guys — and yes, they’re all guys — Anne Frank was tougher than you. Hell, the eggplant I had for lunch was tougher than you.