Meet Palak

Palak is the six year old daughter of the Indian couple who run the Citgo where we buy gas, beer, and Powerball tickets. I know it's cliche these days for an Indian couple from India to run a convenience store but Nick and Katie (that's their Americanized names, one day maybe Nick will tell me their real names but I'm not gonna hold my breath) are a nice hardworking couple who are in this country legally and who are trying to live their version of the American dream.

Their daughter Palak is a beautiful little girl, in fact if you ever see her in person she will take your breath away she is so cute. She is a chatter box as well, the only time I have heard her be quiet was when she was eating. When she does her non stop talking she switches back and forth between Hindi and English, she'll say something to her parents, both of whom speak fluent English by the way, in Hindi and then in the next breath she'll start singing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star with a Southern accent. One day when I was in their store she was talking very fast to her exasperated Dad in Hindi and then a policeman who was in the store asked how she was doing. She looked up at him with her big brown eyes and she said, "Ahm fiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinnnnnnne." I nearly cracked up.
What I will never be able to wrap my brain around is this: people like Tom Tancredo and Pat Robertson hate people like Nick and Katie and Palak. They hate them even though Nick and his family never did a damn thing to them. Tancredo and Robertson hate them because they have brown skin and they were born outside of this country. They hate beautiful little Palak despite the fact that her parents work their asses off running a small business that pays taxes which go to pay for Tancredo's salary and for Robertson's Social Security and Medicare.

Personally I love Nick, Katie, and Palak. To me they embody the American dream, they wanted something different, something better so they came to America to live and work, and they contribute more to the fabric of this country than either of those old white hate mongers. We need more people like Nick and his family over here and less of the assholes like Robertson and Tancredo.

After no deliberation with anyone I'm naming Palak the official kid of this blog. Congrats Palak!

Billy Bragg is my pick for world citizen of the year!

I found this over at Blue Gal's blog. I could not agree more with everything that Billy sings about in this clip. When I am President, Billy Bragg will be my Poet Laureate.

This Week's Contemporary Hero

You may know him better as the taller half of the comedy duo behind Little Britain. Or you may know him from his numerous other TV, film, or radio roles. But we are singling out David Walliams for his heroic feats of last summer.

Mr. Walliams is a bona fide celebrity. He makes million of dollars to make people laugh and to entertain them. So why did he not only swim the English channel, but also become one of the top 50 people to ever do it and the first celebrity to ever do it as well?

While Walliams was in Africa a few years back he told someone who works for a charity organization called Sport Relief that he'd love to help them out in their charitable efforts among orphanages over in Ethiopia. This person asked Walliams if there was some sporting thing he'd like to try that could raise money for them. Walliams suggested, half jokingly, that he could swim the English channel. The Sport relief person immediately took him up on his offer.

Fast forward a year to the start of Walliams highly successful but physically demanding Little Britain Live tour of the UK. Every night Walliams and his partner in comedy Matt Lucas would take to the stage and perform sketches from their highly successful BBC show and every morning Walliams would swim and train for his English Channel attempt. Even if the tour took a night off, his training did not.

After 9 months of hard training the big day arrived and Walliams plunged into the Channel near

Dover, England. He swam through some of the roughest waters on this planet. Also in the Channel that day with Walliams were some of the biggest freighters in the world, nasty currents, raw sewage, and stinging jelly fish. Walliams plowed through, around, and over all those obstacles and in a little over 10 hours he emerged from the water and he set foot on French soil.

Now if you think swimming 21 miles in rough seas while dodging jelly fish, people's turds, huge freighters, and whatever else is in the water that day is easy, I invite you to go to your local pool and swim for an hour straight. Then when that hour is over, do it 10 more hours while people throw shit at you, toss hornets at you, and drive wave runners over your body.

In the end Walliams raised over 1 million pounds for Sport Relief. That means that those Ethiopian orphanages can stay open and provide better care to the children who live there.

Walliams didn't have to swim the Channel. He could have written a check and stayed warm and dry. But he didn't. He used his fame for good and he got a lot of people to help as well. That's why he's Monkey Muck's Contemporary Hero of the Week.

And we end this post with a gratuitous butt shot for the ladies. Here's David's butt for you ladies to enjoy:

Another tale of religion in the classrom

Our post the other day about the girl we went to college with who did not know what a foreskin was reminded us of another religion in the classroom story.

My good friend Todd, he told this joke you can tell your kids, was in law school a few years back at the University of Tennessee and he had to take a class called The Bible as Literature. Todd is a big time atheist and he already had a MA in English so he knows what the hell literature is. He resented having to take a class that he felt was all about converting people to Jeebus and he complained about it all the time.

One day during this time he told me that everyone had to deliver a talk on a paper that they had to write for this class. He told me that when the day for him to talk about his paper he stood up and smiled. He then said in a strong clear voice the title of his paper, which was: The Book of Joshua or How Those Lying Thieving Murdering Israelites Got Their Groove On.


He laughed when he told me that as soon as those words came out of his mouth that he heard an audible gasp from the girl who sat behind him. Then he went on to tell me that he could heard the sounds of his other classmates scooting their chairs away from him as he went on to read his paper. Me, I was crying with laughter when he told me all of that and I still laugh out loud today when I tell someone that story or if something makes me think of it again.

In a post script to his tale he told me that all his complaints led to the University dropping that particular class from the required curriculum of the law school. It was a small victory but a victory nonetheless.

Oh yeah, one more thing, hey creepy guy who checks out all blog posts that have the word 'foreskin' in them, there's no need for you to leave a comment on this post. We think your time and comments are best served elsewhere and not here, so pull up your turtleneck and scram.

Something new for you

We've been feeling kind of guilty lately that we are so negative so much of the time on this blog. Not that the asses in the Bush junta don't deserve the scorn we heap upon them and the jokes we make at their expense, they do. It's just that in real life, we're not negative monkeys, we're positive monkeys who try to bring out the best in people and our selves when we can.

So in that vein we are starting a new continuing feature here at Monkey Muck. It's series of profiles of people who are making a positive difference in the world and from time to time we will also profile heroic people from days gone by that maybe you did not know about. No need to thank us, we're just keeping it 'reals' for you, our 'peeps.'

We start off this new feature with a profile of a TV personality who is actually using his celebrity to help others and to make a positive difference in the world. Without further adieu, we present a look of TV chef Jamie Oliver.

Jamie is, as we are sure you know, one of the rising stars of British cooking and cooking in general. In just a few short years he's become quite the rage in merry old England and over here in the USA as well. Folks around the world, through the magic of TV and the internets, have caught Oliver fever as well.

Jamie has put out several cookbooks, we admit that we own a couple here at Casa De Monkey, and he has grown quite wealthy from them. In addition to the cookbooks Jamie also makes money off a line of cookware, supermarket licensing of his name on products in UK supermarkets, and from his numerous TV shows.

We think that what makes Jamie so popular is his easy on camera style, his breezy style of writing, and his boyish good looks. Combine all that with his solid work ethic and you get the phenomenon known as Jamie Oliver. To top off all that Jamie has a sweet little family as well. His wife is quite the cutie pie and they have two little girls as well, and who knows if there are more on the way or not in the future.

Now in this day and age fame and fortune would be enough for most people. They would be content to continue to make money off their cooking and TV shows and the like and they'd never give back to their community or to their country.

But not Jamie.

The young Mr. Oliver started up a fine dining non profit restaurant a few years a go in London called Fifteen. He staffs the restaurant with cooks who come from the ranks of London's disadvantaged youth. He's taken these at risk kids and trained them to be chefs. Some of the young chefs he has turned out have gone on to work not only at Fifteen but at other fine dining establishments in London and other cities as well. The reviews of his restaurant are consistently positive and the food is, according to patrons, excellent. It's been such a smash hit that in order to get a table you must make reservations well in advance. Jamie is thinking of spreading Fifteen to other cities as well.

Now, surely, that would be enough for most people, fame, fortune and one charitable cause. Surely that would keep a person busy and content.

But not our Jamie.

He recently took up the cause of getting the schools in the UK to serve healthier food in the school lunch program. Most every school lunch in Britain used to consist of basically crap food, they'd serve chicken nuggets that were deep fried then frozen then reheated, french fries, chips, and soft drinks. Jamie saw what the kids were eating and he became horrified, as you should be too if you have school age children because your kids are still getting crappy meals like this in America, and he chose to do something about it. He started with one school in London and he taught the cooks in that school how to make healthy lunches without using the shit foods they were using before. Yes the kids complained about the new food, most of them had never eaten anything very fresh and healthy before, and yes the cooks complained, because cooking healthier meant that they had to do more than just open a box of frozen crap or open a can of vegetable ick. And yes the school board complained because at first the cost was a bit higher, but Jamie negotiated better pricing. After he made a success of his program for better eating at that school he took his crusade nationwide, all the while continuing to his other endeavors. He spoke to civic groups, school boards around the UK, to Prince Charles, and he even sat down with douchebag Tony Blair, who took time out of his busy 'being George Bush's poodle' schedule to listen to Jamie. As a result of Jamie's efforts the schools in the UK serve better food now and perhaps the kids won't end up like their fat little American cousins.

Jamie has his detractors of course, as does anyone who achieves a modicum of success. There are those, most notably in the Murdoch owned British tabloid press, who constantly hound Oliver and his family with paparazzi and with stories that are based on rumor and innuendo. But through it all Jamie stands tall and he continues to cook and do good things for his home country and for people everywhere. On a personal note, we here at Casa de Monkey have learned to use his approach to cooking, using fresh ingredients to make healthy and good tasting dishes, and we love the results. We know you're not perfect Mr. Oliver, but we love you anyway and we hope you continue to keep up your good work in the kitchen, on TV, and anywhere you are needed.