It Came From Chinatown...

Well, friends, here we are again. A day late, yes, but who's fault is that really? Mine? Nope. Girlfriend? Of course not. Tequila? Most certainly... it's a wicked beverage that, when blended with fruit and served in a pint glass, makes even the most dedicated of bloggers go, "writing is boring; hanging around like a taco fart is where the real action is."

But no matter... what's done is done (or not done, rather) and it's now time once again to get our weird-ass food on. This week's culinary spit-take... Canned, Scary, Fish Parts:



I wish I'd taken the price tag off in an effort to ease Commenter J's translation (which, thanks!); I'm fairly certain, though, that it says something along the lines of, "You're not really going to eat these, right? I mean, they clearly still have the skin attached. And is that the spine? Ew." The can is certainly a festive, sky blue, though, and that's one thing I'll give the Asian food community: they're bursting at the seams with packaging design skills over there. Throwing all sorts of colors and shapes and weird cartoon characters around like the concept of advertising came to them during an acid trip, making our Toucan Sams and Joe Isuzus look like cardboard cut-outs in a long forgotten 7-11... well played, China... well played.

Anyway, here's me opening the can and laughing my ass off:



Why am I laughing? Well, I'm sure there's some sort of deep-rooted psychological reasoning behind the fact that I laugh when confronted with an image of stomach-violating horror, but I haven't the course credits to suss it all out. So I'm just going to say that the contents of the can, coupled with the fact that I was about to put said contents in my mouth, made the whole scene way too fucking funny. And by funny, I mean tragically disgusting:



No liquid should be that color. Pus from an infected bullet wound is all, "Gross, dude... you look like distilled sorrow flecked with hate and reeking of the ocean floor that resides within a cosmic giant's asshole." And I'd be inclined to agree with the pus, although personally I'd have to say that the whole mess smelled like a cat food factory got hit by an atom bomb made of wet farts and every nightmare you've ever had. Plus woeful chunks of death.

And yes, that is the spine:



I thought about eating the spine, or at least giving it a shot, but then I remembered that I'm not a soulless ghoul and I'd like to be able to look my loved ones in the eye again without the shame of my misbegotten deeds melting my brain.

So no spine. But what say we go for one of the chunks, hm?



Oh. Well. Huh. After gazing for a few long minutes at it's freak show appearance, I'd really kind of expected the taste of the Scary, Canned Fish Parts to take the top of my head off like I'd just pulled the trigger of a shotgun with my toe. But you know what? It wasn't that bad. Wasn't great, mind you... I didn't pull up a chair and finish the can while rubbing my belly and going, "Mmmmmm!" or anything. But still, compared to some of the slop that I've shoveled into my maw during the run of this series, it at least didn't make me beg Girlfriend to plant a kitchen knife in my sternum.

For the record, however, it tasted sort of like canned tuna... Starkist or whatever... but with the flavor turned up a few notches and with the texture of something Slimer excreted in the unproduced screenplay for Ghostbusters 3. Again, not anything I'd combine with mayo and chopped onions to spread on some toast, but not inedible and wrong.

Which, quite frankly, leads to a fairly unexciting edition of ICFC. So, in an effort to perk up the excitement and produce a few cheap, skeevy thrills, I went ahead and picked out all the dark, organ-y bits to see if they tasted any different:

Grody, right? I mean, I'm sure if you hoisted my innards on a fork and shoved them towards a camera, they wouldn't exactly look like a Monet retrospective either but... oh... who am I kidding? My guts are so gorgeous, they're starring this fall in a new teen drama on The CW. It's like Gossip Girl meets an autopsy video!!!

But yeah, so I ate them (the fish guts, I mean):

And they were pretty meh too. A little more iodine-y, perhaps, but still nothing to write a whole blog post over. And yet, here we are, mildly disappointed. But that's life amongst the stalls of Chinatown. Sometimes, you can't judge a product by it's butt-nasty cover.

Now, before I go, I did want to make a small announcement about ICFC... specifically, about it's conclusion. Girlfriend and I have always looked at this project as a thing that had a definite, logical end... that being her finishing up her Grad School classes (she won't have much cause to be hanging out in Chinatown after that). And as we near the end of the semester, that day is, obviously, rapidly approaching. So, that being said, I wanted to let you know that there will only be three more It Came From Chinatown posts, at least for this "season." There's every chance in the world that we may pick the idea up again at some point in the future but, for the time being, I personally think it's for the best if we end it before we're all... myself included... sick of the whole thing.

So there you have it... the end is near, kiddos. We'll try to make them count.

See y'all next week!!!