Save the Crustaceans!

JunkThief will be flying solo this Memorial Day Weekend, which was already planned since Alejandro was prepared to give a big presentation at the Atlantic Crustacean Association’s annual conference in Mystic, Connecticut , over the holiday. However, with all the hoopla over those displaced humpback whales in the delta, they are reconvening in Sacramento for an emergency meeting. Yes, they will be part of the efforts to send the whales back to sea, but not for the same reasons as everyone else.

“I couldn’t give a flying flip about them thupid whaleth,” Alejandro told me last night when we were getting ready for bed. See, Alejandro is part of that elite group of marine biologists that believe crustaceans are the intellectual superiors of all water-borne creatures and is up in arms about all this fuss about a couple of fat ass water mammals while there’s not an inch of ink or second of air time talking about how those swimming porkers are upsetting and – yes – murdering the crustaceans up and down the delta.

“I’m jutht thick of mammal thupremithy,” he is always saying. Now some folks mistake him for a vegetarian, but he’ll eat any red meat or pork but would push an old lady in front of a bus in order to save a crab in the middle of the street. I love my Castilian papi, but hearing him rant on and on about how snooty he thinks water mammals are does test my nerves at times. That's one of the reason I started this blog as an escape.

When he sees a restaurant brag that they have dolphin free tuna, he’ll bark out, “I want to eat Flipper! Bring me a platter of dolphin meat on a thkwewer!”

Now, he’s claiming he has to be gone to save the delta crustaceans, but I think I know the real reason. See, Saturday is Carnaval in the Mission, and the parade goes just around the corner from the JunkPlex. Anyone who’s ever been around a Castilian and a few thousand folks from Latin American knows the tension that can brew between those two links in that food chain. Last year, Alejandro consented to attend while making plenty of snide remarks about the Bolivians walking around wearing chulos and strumming churangos. He was deriding them as rodent eating hicks because they like cuys (guinea pigs) and they were calling him a papist conqueror. Now Alejandro will eat any other mammal but gets pissy when it comes to rodents. I, on the other hand, have eaten cuys on several trips to Andes. While not my favorite dish, it'll do in a pinch. It sort of tastes like crispy squirrel .

Things got really tense last year when my friend Vivian Valvoom from Bonsall was here.. When she asked Alejandro where he was from, she replied, “Oh, Seville, that’s near Cancun, isn’t it?”

Personally I refuse to get into the whole argument since I love people from Latin America as much as my Alejandro. And, of course, he lets people know that he’d never eat a lobster or crab but that I am the one crustacean he just loves to slather with butter and make a pig of himself over. I think I'm the luckiest guy in San Francisco, and I plan to get plenty of Land of Lakes at Safeway Sunday afternoon awaiting his return.