There are plenty of good reasons to quit the city for a small town. Some folks prefer the rural tranquility. Others want to raise their kids around character-building natural hazards, like prickers, poison ivy, and the blinding sap of the Giant Hogweed. Gastronome and mixologist Max Watman moved...

As a woefully unproductive waste of soft tissue, I spend a great deal of my time--most of it, really--eating unhealthy foods and watching appalling movies on Instant View. Last October, in hopes of fostering the illusion of productivity while leaving my habits unchanged, I wrote up a series of dinner-and-a-horror-movie...

As a woefully unproductive waste of soft tissue, I spend a great deal of my time--most of it, really--eating unhealthy foods and watching appalling movies on Instant View. Last October, in hopes of fostering the illusion of productivity while leaving my habits unchanged, I wrote up a series of dinner-and-a-horror-movie...

Is it safe to say that, after Suspiria and The Beyond, we could all use a breather? I, for one, have had my fill of sadistic, stomach-knotting violence for, oh, at least the next couple days. (Nothing puts a damper on one's culinary enthusiasm like watching a...

Last week, to inaugurate my Halloween movie-and-food series, I presented Huffington Post readers with as unappetizing a combination as I could think of: Dario Argento's 1977 Suspiria and Beef Heart alla Soffritto. Today we return to the world of orrore Italiano--horror gory enough to make a Borgia wince--with...

As a woefully unproductive waste of soft tissue, I spend a great deal of my time--most of it, really--eating unhealthy foods and watching appalling movies on Instant View. Last October, in hopes of fostering the illusion of productivity while leaving my habits unchanged, I wrote up a series of dinner-and-a-horror-movie...

We are well and truly living in the Last Days.

True, I tend to start complaining about summer's imminent demise about a week after the Fourth of July. I'm an hourglass-half-empty type, and without a solid two months of summer fun stretching out before me, all I can think about...

As of this writing, Google returns about 21,700 hits for "bacon-flavored condom." How do I happen to know this? I just thought of the stupidest possible use for bacon, and then dared the Internet to come up empty-handed. My suspicion about the long-lived and very tiresome bacon craze is that...

Jimmy Dean, who died last month aged 81, may be out of the news cycle, but he's lodged in the lining of my heart as firmly as a small piece of Polish sausage. You see, thanks to a strange concatenation of events, Mr. Dean recently (sort...

People collect all sorts of crap: matchbooks, stamps, campaign buttons, shot glasses, G.I. Joes, telegraph line insulators, taxidermy, Hummels, Klingon weaponry, even gently used underwear. I collect U.S. states. I've dreamed of having my own road show; it'd be called "Food Gas Longing," and I'd sign off every...

Some time ago, a friend of mine chewed my ear off about an "Australian delicacy" introduced to her by an Oz-born colleague. (The friend in question lives in Brooklyn and, like many Brooklyners, seeks out culinary oddities with the fervor once reserved for philately or numismatics.) You prepare potatoes, carrots,...

I drank my first moonshine by moonlight, squatting in a culvert behind an elastika, or tire repair shop, on the Bay of Euboea in Greece. I was surrounded by garbage, and enormous fish skeletons kept darting past my head, thrown away by the guests of the party I'd just wandered...