The Ocean is a Giant Sewer and Other Reasons Why Fish Sucks 

Posted on by JP Shaver

From time to time I like to check to see how people find my blog. Most of the initial hits come from Facebook and Twitter but once the tremendous fervour of social media begins to ebb, the search engines take over.

In the past terms like “retard” or “stupid retard” brought me a terrific amount of traffic and that was all well and good but, in the end, it woke me up to the idea that maybe I’d outta broaden myself a bit, get a new subject possibly.

Anywho, after working tirelessly to become a much more diverse and versitile writer, I have seen a compete turn around from the search engine folks. No longer am I  pigeonholed by Google and their ilk as that guy who uses the word “retard” maybe a little too much. I was shocked when I saw this month’s blog stats that reported that the most searched words used to find me are, drum roll pkease….

“Being f#cked by a dick with a flap”

And…

“Famous people who like Jell-o pudding”

What’s a dick with a flap? Just to prove that these search engine things can make mistakes, I checked and I have never used such a term. Dick? Yeah I’ve said that thousands of times but never “dick flap”.

As for the pudding reference, I, one time, said that Bill Cosby was a pervert subletting Doctor Feelgood’s medicine cabinet, secretly feeding barbiturates to unsuspecting women who he was then giving it to with his Fat Albert. Does this one inocuous comment really justify force feeding innocent people in search of celebrities who share their love of Jell-o products the banality of my blog? The answer is no, it does not. However, I will take traffic in any form.

What does this have to do with fish you might be asking? Absolutely nothing. Just was kinda proud of myself.

When somebody tells me about a great piece of fish they had, inevitably the first thing they say about it is that it didn’t even taste like fish. What I’m thinking is, why the fuck would you eat something and be happy that it didn’t taste like it was supposed to? I have never heard anyone say, “I had the the best steak last night and you know what’s best of all? It didn’t even taste like beef”! Even what we would consider your lower grades of meat aren’t spoken of so harshly. “I can’t eat this Souse Meat it tastes too much like Souse Meat”.

Everything involved in the cooking, prepping and consuming of fish is concentrated around covering up its objectionable taste and atrocious odor. Basically people like fish that doesn’t taste like fish. Folks who claim to love to eat fish will have no reservations treating themselves to a fifty dollars lobster and then immediately drowning it in a stick of melted butter. Your tartar and cocktail sauces exist for one reason and one reason only, to mask the atrocious taste of fish.

What most people consider to be the best kinds of fish are fish that don’t taste like fish. Take salmon for instance, if you aren’t catching that shit yourself and taking a bite out of it right there at the river, chances are, by the time you get that thing filleted and back home, it’s going to taste and smell likes whore house at low tide. Trout is the same. People like tilapia because it’s “mild”. Because it’s mild, the first thing people do is to fry it in battered grease. Know why? Because you could fry the bottom of my shoe and find it palatable.

Today, our population is fatter than ever.  Much of the blame for obesity is placed on the accessibility to fast food. We love fast food. McDonald’s was caught virtually poisoning people and they’re rolling right along like nothing happened. Yet and still, fast foods joints like Long John Silver’s are barely hanging on. What happened to Shrimp Boat and Arthur Treacher’s? Even if you own a fast food restaurant and fry every God damned thing you sell, it’s still not enough to mask the fact that you’re a purveyor of seafood. Even your most successful fish monger, Red Lobster, is just as much in the business of selling butter and cheddar biscuits as it is in the selling of disgusting fish. Punishing your customers by making them take fish with their butter and biscuits is like a a risky business plan. Its like giving a kid the dog they’ve always wanted but only if they go blind first.

Ever been to Myrtle Beach? The main drag there is inundated with these seafood restaurants all using the word Calabash in their name, Poopdeck Pappy’s Calabash Seafood Buffet for instance. Driving down this road, Route 17, if I’m not mistaken, is like a tour through an aquatic slaughterhouse complete with the stench of wet death. Little known fact, Calabash is actually is an old Caribbean word that describes the stench from a festering genital wound. Yum!!

Lastly, it occurs to me that fish is so awful that the Catholics actually had to come up with a day, every fucking Friday, where they arm twist the congregation into eating it or else risk pissing off God. How good can something really be if you have to threaten people with fire and brimstone if they don’t partake weekly? Like God made this shit so you’d better fucking eat it!

Top 5 Reasons Why Seafood Sucks

Posted on by JP Shaver

Top 5 Reasons Why Seafood Is So Disgusting

I hate anything they call food that comes from the sea. I have never liked it and, at 50 years old, probably never will. I love going to the ocean but there is nothing more disgusting to me than being taken down by a wave and getting a mouth full of the briny deep. It tastes just awful and anything harvested from it for human consumption tastes exactly the same. I am less bothered that the world uses the world’s oceans as a toilet than I am with the taste of seafood and I have serious germ issues!

Once in a while I inevitably have to go along with the crowd and dine at one of these restaurants that trolls the world’s sewer for its menu offerings. While my friends and family binge on lobster, crab and God forbid, clams, I am content, instead, with a constant flow of cold beer and free bread.

Take caviar for instance, I used to go trout fishing a lot when I was a kid and once in a while I’d catch a bloated female that when cut open for cleaning would spill an indecent amount of fish eggs all over the ground. The egg sac would even make a popping sound when poked with the knife. Let’s not get lost here and gloss over the words “egg sac.” Egg sac? I don’t want to eat anything that has an egg sac.

Who had the bright idea to eat these raw fish eggs in the first place? Surely the scenario went down quite similar to my experiences as a youngster but I never once had to urge to scoop them up and start eating them. I was too busy gagging and lamenting the fact that I had just killed thousands of potential baby fish. Caviar is absolutely disgusting and I have NEVER understood the “royalty” involved with fish eggs, simply disgusting and I’ll never try them…”delicacy” my ass.

I don’t fish anymore because I believe you should eat what you catch and I just cannot stomach the rancid flavor or your local Red Lobster’s fare. Is there a worse name for a restaurant than Joe’s Crab Shack? It invokes thoughts of a bucket of rotting chum served up from some dark back room by a bearded sea farer with a wooden leg named Skully or Poop Deck Paddy.

I’ve heard that caviar should never been served with a metal spoon as it may give the raw fish eggs an unpleasant flavor. Really? First of all, any caviar I’ve ever seen comes in a metal can so what the eff? Secondly, give the caviar an unpleasant flavor? Its raw fish eggs and they are already profoundly unpleasant. Sticking a metal spoon into it can only make it better because it cannot possibly get any worse.

I have a suspicion that the people who clamor to the closest seafood buffet or those willing to pay $25 for a nice lobster don’t really like fish either if they were being honest with themselves. No, I believe that what they are really looking for is just an excuse to eat butter. Butter is delicious. It’s a rectangular slab of sweet, salty fat and there is nothing better. In fact, my parents would find my teeth marks in the butter when I was a little kid.

With that said….

Crab –

People love them some crab legs but I would like to point out one factor that most people seem to miss. A crab is nothing more than a wet spider. Both have eight legs, both are arachnids. Hello! You are eating a sea spider! Even if I could get past the feted flavor of these vile beasts, I would surely gag it all out when I remembered that I had just ingested a Daddy Longlegs. What’s the number one condiment when it comes to your crab eaters? That’s right, butter. I would also prefer to be able to dip my spider meat into butter before I ate it.

Lobster –

Continuing along the lines of ingested insects, a lobster is just a sea scorpion without the venom. Why doesn’t it need venom like its land bound cousin? Because it’s so disgusting on its own that no one in their right mind should be effing with them in the first place. It needs no defense.

Again, number one condiment for the wet scorpion? Butter.

Shrimp –

I like to compare a shrimp to a sea caterpillar but when you step on a caterpillar all that green juice squirts out so it would be unfair to apply that comparison. But it’s hard not to see the similarities in a worm like land insect with a shrimp with all the legs and grossness. Unlike your lobsters and crabs, though, people don’t shellac their shrimp in butter, instead they use cocktail sauce. I suspect it’s because shrimp carry an even stronger sense of the sea in their flavor and need the extra boost in cover-up ability offered by the cocktail sauce.

And the poop? So, as I understand shrimp, I have to make sure that these things have had their rectal cavity cleaned out before I shove it in my mouth? Ugh.

Snails –

Ugh. Snails are snails. Same on the land as on the sea. Disgusting and also used as an excuse to eat butter. I cannot imagine what these sea floor dwelling creatures must eat given that the ocean is the repository of much of our raw sewage.

Have you ever seen the tool used to strip these things from their shells? It looks like a complicated surgical instrument.

Sushi –

I have a coworker that ate 107 pieces of sushi out of his own free will, all the while looking like he was being punished and sitting in timeout.

I will be the first to admit that I wish I liked sushi. The packaging is outstanding with all the colors and such stuffed into a stubby little green tube. However, it is truly the most revolting of all fish options because it’s raw! The number one thing we are told is to not eat under-cooked meat and what do we do? Take it up a notch and just eat it raw. Cooking fish, at least in some circumstances, seems to cut down on the atrocious taste but cooking it also leads to your home smelling like a whorehouse at low-tide. When stuck between a rock and a hard place, I opt to starve.

The horrendous taste of sushi is very often covered up with the delicious condiment, wasabi. Little known fact, wasabi was invented during the late 1800’s as a way to cover up the taste of raw fish. In fact, in Japanese, the word “wasabi” literally means, “God, this fish tastes like shit.”

Butter and wasabi are to seafood what salsa is to tortilla chips. They are symbiotic, neither subsisting without the other. No one eats tortilla chips without salsa, they’re disgusting plain. Similarly, I have yet to see someone eat crab without a big tub of butter nearby because crabs sucks alone. Additionally, I like tartar sauce. Anything made with mayonnaise is delicious to me but I do not like it enough to eat fish and there really isn’t any other use for tartar sauce other than covering up the taste of fish.

I wish that I liked seafood, I really do. It looks fun with the aprons and all the tools you need to crack stuff open but there needs to be some reward for all that work and from where I sit all you’re getting is a mouthful of sea water.

“Didn’t I tell you the phone in my limousine was busted?”

“Yeah, what is you, ignorant?”