Monday, March 11, 2019

The Oppenheimer Report 3/11/19

Rather than rant, as I often do on a Monday, about a segment on Fareed Zakaria's show yesterday, wherein a Stanford biologist/neurolgist described his study suggesting the human brain is hard-wired to adopt an "us and them" mentality, or about the tornadoes that just ripped through Alabama, Louisiana, Texas and Oklahoma,  or about my propensity to form run-on sentences, I thought I would inject a little levity into the day. Below you will find a reprise of the Oppenheimer Report I wrote while we were still living in Toronto, in the year of Y2K:

 The Oppenheimer Report - 1/9/00 ...
I watched a commercial for one of those Medieval Feast places
the other night, and by golly  I want to go. For those of you
who don't live in a large metropolitan area, with a glut of
entertainment options,  you probably  don't even know what a
medieval feast place  IS. This is basically a fun-filled
evening for which you pay an all-inclusive admission fee to
sit in an auditorium, eat meat with your hands, and watch men
on horseback  try to spear each other in a mock jousting
match.  Occasionally, there is the odd hand-to-hand skirmish
and  maces and balls and chains are called for, but mostly
it's just skewering. Picture yourself tearing apart an
unmanageable slab of cheap, underdone cow meat (heaven 
knows from what part of the cow), as  you watch  chainmail-clad
horsemen try to impale each other with giant pool cues. If
that isn't enough excitement, their galloping horses fling
large gobs of mud and saliva  up into your food as they race
by. You have a front row seat for all the feudal carnage and
savagery you can stomach.  Relive the good old days  for  one,
very reasonable,  all- inclusive admission charge. Fun per
dollar, I don't know how you can do better than this.

Call me a testosterone-choked moron, but I love crap like
this. It's not that violence turns me on,  it's more that this
is simply such a ludicrous concept. It makes about as much
sense as watching the Foot Surgery Channel on TV  as you sit
down to your spaghetti dinner.

I am reminded of a funny experience I had a long time ago,
when I spent a  semester studying abroad in Dublin, Ireland.
I and my classmates were taken on a field trip, as part of our
cultural experience, and one of our stops was dinner at a
place called Bunratty Castle.  It was a genuine, ancient stone
castle, dating back to Celtic times, which had been
transformed into a rather bizarre restaurant. First, we were
served mead wine by real wenches, and then, once sufficiently
lubricated, we were led into a large banquet hall for a good
old-fashioned throw-the-bones-over-your-shoulder medieval
feast. They BRAGGED about this.The feastitorium seated about
two or three hundred, but on the night we were there it was
only about half full. The tables were long, seating between
forty to fifty diners, and each place setting consisted of a
serrated knife and a  plate, but no other utensils.  For the
tour group of geriatric bible thumpers from Iowa, this must
have seemed quite a primitive feast, but to my study  group,
made up in  large part by scoundrels of questionable  Irish
decent, armed with their somewhat muddled interpretation of
what was proper medieval decorum, this was a green light to
party.

After several more  tankards of mead wine,  we realized that
the folks at the next table were a rugby team visiting from
England, and that they too were getting into the spirit of
things. Once our slabs of animal flesh had been served, it
wasn't long before the mother of all food fights broke out.
It was instant mayhem, the likes of which I doubt the managers
of Bunratty Castle had ever anticipated or even imagined.

Entertainment during our feast was supposed to be a quartet 
of musicians playing music from the period, and they were  all
dressed in those balloon  pants and  those funny hats with big
feathers.  I'm sure they felt silly enough dressed like that,
but no words can describe how silly they must have felt
fending off  projectiles of beef  with their lutes and drums.
Amidst the chaos - and let there be no mistake, this was
CHAOS, there sat the Iowans, calmly eating their meals with as
much dignity as they could muster, (remember they have  only
knives with which to eat), ducking occasionally to miss the
odd incoming roll or slab of meat. 

Needless to say, we, the School of Irish Studies and the rugby
team, were summarily escorted out of Bunratty Castle before we
could finish our medieval desserts, but not before leaving our
indelible mark on the patience of these tourist trap
imposters. Covered with food, we were bussed back to our hotel
where we spent the next four hours drinking even more and
embellishing what was already a slam dunk in the "memorable
experience" department. By the way, I grudgingly admit that
the rugby guys won the food fight.

Now, whenever I see an ad for one of these Joust-O-Rama
places, it triggers fond memories of that Bacchanalian  orgy
in which I was so blessed to have participated.
                                
As I  approach that stage in my life  to which I loathingly
refer as "approaching respectability" ... that point where I
would never in a million years dream of behaving with such a
careless lack of decorum,  I look back on my Bunratty
adventure as one of the high points in my Irish  experience.
Sometimes, while eating dinner with my wife at a fine
restaurant, I'll toss an olive at her, just for old time's
sake . In response, she  will look at me as if to say "I
married a single cell organism" ....  or, worse yet, she'll
simply ignore my token nostalgic gesture. That hurts. In my
mind there can't be enough of these medieval feast places to
satisfy the base needs of men all over the world.  It's in our
nature to be this way, and all this rubbish about the rules of
civilized behavior is totalitarian hogwash, foisted upon us by
prudes like Emily Post and Miss Manners.   

Oh, to be medieval again! Honey, do you know where I put my
good feather?  It's time to feast!


             


Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c2000 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED


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