Rag of the Month Club

Better Homes and Gardens, October 2009

Because of my fishing experience on the Bering Sea, the Pacific Coast and various other water’s around the Gulf of Alaska and North Pacific people tend to regard me as somewhat fearless. Whether or not I deserve this praise is something I often struggle with. Are these heedless advances into the frothy, frozen sea really the result of some inborn courage? Or are they simply the hold-over of some hillbilly gene I carry, the kind of inbred stupidity that makes a person want to hang upside down from power lines or visit the zoo so they can run buck naked through the gorilla habitat? Honestly I couldn’t tell you where my desire to go to sea comes from. A lot of people I think mistakenly feel that this urge is due to the possession of some sort of exceptional anatomy. For example my fishing exploits are most often attributed to the belief that I have a gigantic pair of testicles. Some have compared them with grape fruit, others have said they must be like bowling balls, but whatever their nature they were certainly very large and very heavy and very full of whatever stuff it is that makes you do seemingly crazy things without much second thought.

I must say I’m flattered by these estimations, but I’m also concerned that I will never be able to live up to their legend. I’m afraid that someone with balls as big as church bells wouldn’t fair to well on a fishing boat. First of all the head is way too small to be squeezing prodigious body parts into and secondly, besides possibly providing additional floatation - do balls float? I don’t take many baths so I wouldn’t know - they would more or less get in the way of everything you were expected to do.

So let me dispel the myth right now. My balls are not enormous. But having said that, I would also like to note that my balls are not at the point of vanishing either. Part of the reason I brought all this testicle talk up was to address some concerns that were recently brought to my attention. While telling an old fishing buddy of mine about my plans to critique and review a series of popular cooking and homemaking magazines for this web site he suggested that my immersion in such female oriented material might in some way threaten my manhood. I think his exacts words were, “You’d better be careful or you might just grow a vagina.”

I have to confess that this was not the first time a fellow colleague of mine had accused me of having a vagina or being on the point of growing one. My abilities as a cook and my penchant for nit-picking and nagging about little annoyances in the galley had earned me a reputation as kind of a bitch. This didn’t however extend to my performance on deck. I wasn’t seen as a “pussy” by virtue of deficiencies in my work habits or willingness to get things done under less than perfect conditions. It was simply a way of teasing me and breaking the monotony on deck by speculating about what time of the month it was or how many fingers I could fit inside myself. I even encouraged this crude joke by suggesting that growing a vagina wouldn’t be all that bad as long as it grew somewhere on my body where I could still fuck it.

This was too much for even my crew members to take. It was loud on deck and as a consequence most of them only heard the first part of my statement. All I can remember is the look on our Chief’s face as he ran past me at the sorting table. Horror, confusion, possibly faint sexual arousal. I tried to reiterate the fact that this growth would only be for my own pleasure, that by having a vagina on my elbow, say, I’d be able to stay out at sea forever.

It was no use though, the damage had been done. They all immediately began to speculate about the possible uses I’d put my new vagina to. Could I get myself pregnant? Would I let my wife have a go at me with a strap-on? Would I share this boon with the bait boys? It was terrible and sick, and I felt embarrassed and under attack, but ultimately I didn’t let it get to me. I realized it was all in good fun. I knew that no matter how shocking or twisted this vein of comedy and abuse became that it was at the very least taking our minds off of the slavery and pain of Opilio season.

I guess I don’t expect you to fully appreciate the currency of something like that. It’s hard to understand that I didn’t and still don’t begrudge the crew for using me as a punching bag. They knew I could take it and that I would be a good sport, that I wasn’t going to go crying to the skipper or lose my shit and slit their throats while they slept. Being part of a crew is difficult sometimes. It takes courage and patience. You discover things about people that you might not want to know. But if you’re tough, and if you can see through the bullshit, then you might just learn something.

So I guess what I’m saying is, try to look past your preconceptions. Can’t a fisherman read and discuss Better Homes and Garden, O magazine or Weight Watchers without being labeled some kind of transsexual? I know it’s gonna sounds sexist, but don’t you think we ought to know what their feeding the women in this country. Just from spending one afternoon pouring over Better Homes has really made me question my decision to return to domestic life. Believe me being at sea is a lot safer. And more sane.

Let’s just start with the ads. They are the reason this magazine is printed in the first place so we might as well pay some attention to them. More or less the whole rag is simply a vehicle for selling shit. It’s like a catalog without the stiff order form in the center. A visual tableaux of consumer suggestions. A blotter of criminal excess and gross opulence.

I bet you didn’t know that they made filet mignon flavored dog treats. Or that our cat’s can have tiny single serving appetizers before dinner, and that our freakish little dog Martians, the Labra-terri-colli-doodle that weighs like an ounce and is riddled with so many genetic defects it looks like a retarded rat, can be covered by a pet health insurance plan. In fact there are numerous advertisements directed at pet owners. Fancy foods and environmentally friendly kitty litter. It’s scary. Billions of people on this planet live on less than two dollars a day and yet we’re supposed to shit ourselves with pride every time our lap dog sneezes or makes a stinker. Or we’re supposed to believe that by using Yesterday’s News brand cat litter we’re somehow contributing to the greater good, that, get this, Purina will reward us for being a “do gooder” by planting a fucking tree in our honor.

What kind of horrible disconnect is going on here? Is Better Homes trying to tell us something by accepting these sponsors, by allowing this crass and insulting ad speak? 6000 years of civilization and we’re supposed to think the best we can do is Splenda or an air freshener that knows when we’re taking a dump and can dispense its perfume accordingly.



Yeah, I’ll say it again. You bastards that stay on land are the brave ones. Out at sea things are simple. Life is understandable. We’re not sitting around worrying how the hell we’re going to decorate for the holidays, or wondering if our kitchen makes the grade, or if our base boards match our wall paint. I did find the article on the color orange interesting. Better Homes is much ado about color, but on the subject of orange at least I’ll have to admit they’re right, it is pretty hip, and looks good with about everything. I’m a big fan of orange rain gear for example, and orange buoys, and for that matter orange life boats aren’t bad either. They recommended pairing your oranges with colors like hot pink and robin’s egg blue, but I think your best bet, in a survival situation, is to go with silver reflector tape. Or if you can afford it some sort of strobe or parachute flare. Whatever you do don’t shoot the flares in the house though. Not even as a joke. Not even if you’re sure it will add the final touches to sprucing up that fall makeover you’ve just completed in the living room.



I have to confess, I’m more of a food guy than a design guy. All that feng shui stuff has never really appealed to me that much so the bulk of Better Homes is kind of lost on me. Gardening’s not my forte either, least not when the aim is anything other than producing food. It’s funny because I was looking at the magazine the better part of Saturday morning and it kind of got me thinking about decorating for this big Thanksgiving feast we’re going to have this year. I was on the phone with my Mom trying to discourage her from bringing a whole bunch of crap to the party, she wanted to bring these ceramic jack-o-lanterns for centerpieces and some runners and candles and a bunch of other stuff, and my wife just cringed when she heard me telling her that we would probably just round up some leaves from the backyard and decorate that way. I’d seen a whole bunch of garbage like that in the Better Homes that morning and thought that it would be easy and cheap, and that when we were done with it all we could just fling it off the porch and wouldn’t have to worry about it piling up in the garage like so much of our other useless crap.



My wife had other ideas. She thought centerpieces were kind of stupid to begin with and that we were going to have so much god damn food already that we wouldn’t have enough room left on the table to be strewing around glass pumpkins or piles of compost. I tried to explain to her that I had it on good authority that this was in fact how sophisticated people decorated their houses for the holidays, but she countered by saying that “while we’re at it maybe we could track in some festive Fall mud and scatter around some downed branches from last week’s wind storm.”

I knew right then that this Better Homes and Gardens crap was going to my head. Who did these people think they were anyways? Did they really expect us to believe that they lived these immaculate, seasonally color-coded lives in a perpetual state of family bliss and gastronomical ecstasy? Their houses were like stage sets, their kitchens gleaming new like they’d just been broken out of a box. Everything was just so; stylized, explained, functional and trendy. No one lives like that. Least not people who aren’t afflicted with some sort of obsessive compulsive disorder. And even then they’d have to be an entire family of obsessive compulsives because otherwise they’d continually be having shit fits when someone put the Dijon back where the stone ground mustard was supposed to go.

What Better Homes and Garden is really dealing in here isn’t reality at all but a kind of pornography. They aren’t necessarily trying to waken any sexual desires for the furniture or food in their magazine, or the pets for that matter, but are playing heavily on a kind of pornographic style of presentation. The photographs are what they are selling us. The cover shot, the designs, the food, the cute kids and adorable pets, all of it merely a means of seducing the “reader” into buying the magazine. I’ve already compared Better Homes to a catalogue and that’s what it is, but buying the things inside the magazine is really only secondary to the promise of the magazine itself. Realistically not many of us will try to recreate or even incorporate their design ideas into our everyday living. We may pluck a few items from their pages, but it will be a timid and uncertain exercise in “living better”. Mostly we’ll just sit around and leaf through the magazine, get our jollies off of pipe dreams and eye candy.

I suppose there are things to learn from Better Homes and Garden; how to plant mums and bulbs, how to organize your freezer (or upgrade to one with self-organizing features), how to decorate and entertain, but really there’s not much content. The subjects are shallow and the pages are crowded with pictures and editorial flourishes. Aside from the recipes in the back there isn’t much substance to this 278 page behemoth. I didn’t get an actual count but I would guess that at least half of it is ads. And the recipes don’t even start till the last quarter of the magazine. And then we’re only talking about maybe twenty pages in all.

I picked out a few things I’m going to try here at home and report back on. There were a couple of pumpkin recipes, a rice pudding and a black bean bake, and there was this kale and goat cheese frittata that looked pretty good. The other recipes seemed solid too but with thanksgiving coming up and the Marine Expo and the in-laws arriving this weekend I just don’t have the time to mess with them. Besides I don’t cook with recipes that often. Like I said before, recipes should be used as guidelines. Food, like language, like life, like the sea, like a lot of things is constantly transforming, it’s an expression, a mood, a living thing. Once a recipe is perfected it seems, to me at least, to lose some of its character.

It’s important not to stagnate, not to let ourselves be railroaded into false expressions and soulless recreations.


On a scale of one to ten, one being landfill and ten being something I'd save as a reference, I think I'd have to give Better Homes and Garden a three.