Happily Wasting my Time

Tuesday, June 1, 2010
A manly man of an outdoor grill

It's a bold choice to try and milk the same withered old cow two weeks in a row. But then again, Morsch is a bold man. After we were treated to the story of how he ALMOST purchased a grill in last week's column, can we dare hope to get Morsch's thoughts on a grill that he ACTUALLY purchased?

The new outdoor grill has been secured and the first round of meat was successfully charred over the holiday weekend. But I must admit the cleanup has been a little more complicated than I anticipated.

Ah, the meat was "charred" - because he's a MAN, and men can't do the wash and they burn the meat and leave the toilet seat up.

We had purchased the Char-Broil brand, commercial series model, which is a manly man of an outdoor grill.

Thank you for proving my point exactly.

In fact, when the guy at the big home improvement store wheeled it out from the back already assembled (my inadequacy at putting things together is well documented),

Ah, men! They can't put things together, either. Again, I note how Morsch is coy about the actual name of "the big home improvement store" after he spent an entire column praising restaurants in Ambler by name. What's the deal here?

I felt the urge to do The Stupid Man Dance, which includes jumping around, chest-bumping and high-fiving with other guys in the store while shouting “Woof-woof-woof!”

Ah, men! They're rowdy and crude and socially clueless. Sometimes I wonder if Morsch is an alien, and his sole knowledge of human culture comes from watching episodes "Home Improvement."

Gentlemen, go ahead and perform the dance in front of your wives and female companions. They will be so impressed and will want to go shopping with you more often.

Well, okay, if you say so - heeeeeeeey, wait a minute! They won't be impressed at all!

The one thing we needed to be aware of with this grill, though, was how it was cleaned. The grates are made of cast-iron (a manly metal) with a porcelain coating (a manly coating).

The "manly coating" bit? Actually sorta witty. I'm sure he lifted that from someone else's column.

But the usual grill-cleaning tool, a wire brush, could wreck the porcelain finish. So we took the guy’s recommendation and bought what we thought was the right soft brush for the job.

Prediction: Morsch won't be able to figure out how to use the soft brush properly. Or he'll ruin the porcelain anyway.

Personally, if mankind can invent a self-cleaning oven, then I think it should be able to invent a self-cleaning grill. Failing that, we should at least be able to remove the grill’s grates and place them in a self-cleaning oven and let the oven do the work.

Morsch's Twitter profile describes him as a "humor columnist dealing with life's little stupidities." Do observations like these really qualify him for that task? The level of observation and insight found in his writings is so low it's probably merged with the Earth's molten core. He has no fresh perspective to offer, no unique view of human nature that makes you nod and say, "Why didn't I think of that?"

By the way, I went to Google and typed in "self-cleaning grill." The second result describes how you can indeed put your grill parts into your self-cleaning oven. It was from 2006. Well done, Mr. Morsch.

After the first round of grilling, I was using the soft brush to clean and ended up just shredding the thing. It was not the appropriate tool for the job.

Bingo.

So back to the big home improvement store I went, where another guy explained to be that I needed a brass-wired brush and a squirt bottle. He instructed me to heat the grill, squirt the grate with water to create steam, and then use the brass-wired brush to clean away the grime.

Has he never owned a grill before? I can only imagine the layers of grease and hamburger chunks that coated his old one.

That worked, and it appears the porcelain coating has remained undamaged after the initial cleanings.

Five cleanings from now, and the porcelain coating will have crumbled into dust. I like how he probably intentionally got a different guy than before, scared that he'd look like a fool in front of the first guy.

Now that the worry over cleaning the grill has been solved, I can go back to burning meat for the rest of the summer. Woof-woof-woof!

A recent reader named Anonymous (sort of like Hieronymus Bosch) asked why I "waste my time" reading this column if I hate it so much. Truth is, I find it fascinating that someone is paid to produce this slop. Think about it - if this is what MM writes himself, what kind of garbage is he "editing" and publishing in the newspaper? In a way, it's a perfect reflection on modern media, what passes for modern "humor," and the declining suburban newspaper. Morsch stands as the prefect crumbling monument to all of them, and as long as he keeps on writing, I'll keep on shaking my head in wonder.

Labels: Mike Morsch, Montgomery Newspapers, Outta Leftfield

What, not "Grilling" or "Grills" or "big home improvement store" or anything?