dUcK 54uc3?!!?
phorce
--- intro, yo -------------------------------------------------------------
this y0lk isnt really written by me. its written by andy newman, but i
luvved it soOOoo much, i typed it all up bUy/5t341 m3 4 5c4nn3r, y0!@!
and put it all in a y0lk.
lets all clap for andy newman.. i dunno who he is.. but hes a great guy.
id like to thank him in advance for not suing me for using this.
--- lets git on wit da big shit ------------------------------------------
Meditations on a Packet of Duck Sauce
by Andy Newman YAY!@! WE LUV YOU!@
1.
It is mid-morning on Amity Street in Jersey City, a quietly bustling
industrial strip at the base of a hill. A man in a small blue go-cart zooms
down the block.
Inside a nondescript cinder-block building, a silver-tipped injection gun
forces itself between two layers of cellophane and squirts out 3/8 of an
ounce of viscous orange liquid.
The orange-filled cell descends past a heated crimper that presses a
cross-hatched pattern of intersecting diagonals into its top edge, creating
an airtight seal and forming at the same time the bottom of the next cell.
The full, dangling cell is severed by a horizontal blade and drops into a
metal tray like a newborn.
2.
Five or perhaps five hundred miles away, in a medium-sized city, a woman
walks out of a storefront Chinese restaurant with a stapled brown paper bag
in one hand and her childs wrist in the other.
The restaurant is a cheap one, the kind that serves its food in flat
styrofoam containers that dont close right.
It is almost dark. The woman and her young child, who whimper from time
to time, walk three blocks to her apartment, which is sparsely decorated but
not clean.
The woman lays the bag on the kitchen table, lifts the child into a chair
and sits down. She pulls out the styrofoam container and turns the bag
upside-down.
Along with a plastic fork, a napkin and a grease-impregnated glassine
envelope of fried noodles, three plastic packets tumble out onto the table:
one yellow, one orange and one brown.
Without her consciously realizing it, a series of images flashes through
the womans mind: epoxy, street drugs, condoms, a childs rainbow rendered in
bright earth tones.
She pops open the styrofoam container of shrimp fried rice and picks up
the plastic orange packet. She grips one side of the top edge with her left
hand and, pinching the other side between her index finger and a lacquered
thumbnail, tears a line that runs straight down and then curves sharply to
the right.
Her mind does not consciously register the pleasurable contact between
the whorled fingertips of her left hand and the cross-hatches of the expertly
crimped edge of the packet.
The woman moves her left hand to the bottom of the packet and squeezes
gently, thinking, consciously this time, of an especially cooperative tube of
toothpaste.
A ribbony blob of orange squirts out across the landscape of fried rice,
making a small fart sound as an air bubble is expelled.
The woman spreads the sauce evenly with the plastic fork and transfers
some of the food to the waiting mouth of her child.
The child, still several years away from understanding the concepts
tangy and sweet, smiles for the first time that day.
3.
So much depends
upon
an open box of extruded apricots
fresh from the meat grinder
looking like marinated brains
or a marmalade-saturated mop head
4.
The Wah Yoan Condiments Products Corp. is one of the three largest
purveyors of portion-controlled Chinese food lubricants on the East Coast.
Through distributors, Wah Yoan supplies 25 to 30 thousand restuarants in 32
states.
Each year, its banks of humming machines and six dozen employees produce
750 million packets of, in steeply descending orders of popularity, soy
sauce, duck sauce, hot mustard and, since 1986, a more or less forgettable
hot sauce. Approximately 40 million of these packets languish in sticky
pools in the butter compartments and unaccomodatingly-shaped egg shelves of
home refrigerators. Another 600,000 are placed under the tires of cars in
Chinese restaurant or strip mall parking lots by gangly, prepubescent
suburban miscreants. Even assuming optimal squeezing patterns, 8 to 10
percent of each packet of duck sauce remains trapped inside its plastic
prison.
5.
Unlike applesauce, which is made from apples, or, for that matter, soy
sauce, which in Wah Yoans case is made from soy-derived Vegamine V-28 Liquid
Hydrolyzed Plant Protein, duck sauce contains no ducks or duck by-products.
And unlike steak sauce, which contains no steaks but is used mostly on
steaks, duck sauce is rarely used to complement duck. Of the roughly 70
million packets of duck sauce Wah Yoan ships each year duck sauce sells
about half as well as soy sauce and twice as well as mustard, perhaps
150,000 wind up on ducks fully half of these are spread on live ducks by
scientifically curious or overly literal-minded farm children.
Duck sauce is made mostly from water, sugar and starch, slowly agitated
at a temperature of 200 degrees for three hours in eight-foor-high stainless
steel kettles that hold 5,500 pounds. Near the end of the cooking process,
sauce technicians stir in about 500 pounds of dried apricots or peaches,
depending on market price, that have been run through a meat grinder. The
only other condiment product Wah Yoan sells is thick sauce, which saunds like
but is not quite culturally analogous to hard sauce, an obsolete British
substance made from sugar, butter and rum, found in dusty jars on forgotten
supermarket shelves and served chilled on fruitcake.
Thick sauce contains blackstrap molasses, caramel color, corn syrup and
salt, and is used by restaurants to thicken and sweeten fried rice. It is
sold only in five-pound buckets.
6.
Each packet of Wah Yoan Condiments Products Corp. sauce bears a blurry
reproduction of the companys coat of arms: the letters W and Y and the
Chinese characters for Wah and Yoan which mean, respectively, Chinese and
Fuzhou, Fuzhou being the capital of Fujian province, home of company founder
Nelson Yeung displayed inside a shield capped by a crown.
Nelson Yeung is convinced that if he could only crack the supermarket
market, he could double his sales within a few years. As it is, business is
so good that the company is about to move to a bigger building in a more
spacious part of Jersey City, across County Road from the U.S. Postal
Services New York International and Bulk Mail Facility.
Nelson Yeung has a saying. Until the end of the world comes, he
says, people will always want more soy sauce and duck sauce.
--- credz -----------------------------------------------------------------
Published in Lowest Common Denominator, Issue 17, August 1995. LCD is
published by WFMU. WFMU broadcasts from East Orange, New Jersey at 91.1 FM.
Direct questions or correspondence to WFMU, P.O. Box 1568, Montclair, NJ
07042. E-mail WFMU at: wfmu@wfmu.org or call WFMU at 201 678-8246
Electronically published, without permission ak!@!, by y0lk
dont send this to wfmu.org
please
if youre reading - we really luv u, fmu.. dont sue us or anything
please
in fact, i donated a few last year for yer membership drive..
everyone, give fmu a few bux.. just mail it to the above address
--- thinking back ---------------------------------------------------------
isnt andy newman that guy on tv? no, i dont think so. oh well.
--- editors note ---------------------------------------------------------
woo.
--- shephards note -------------------------------------------------------
wow. these are cool dividers. good issue, phorce. y0lk makes me cry.
--- index -----------------------------------------------------------------
index of y0lk issues:
issue . title
001 the other white meat
002 several k-rad elite haxors sitting around a campfire and grooving
003 nuclear weapons, global destruction, op wars.
004 a young man, an infant, a yak... all living in sin
005 household uses for afghanistanian food
006 pour cement down my anus
007 hail santa!
008 hasidism and sysops - a pair for the nineties?
009 lunchables rock.
010 t-shirts and toejam
011 nap-time - the dog prank - exclusive interview
012 movie reviews showgirls!@ - win95 vs. os/2 sorta
013 straight outta compton - dialchix - muh dawg!@
014 im a tall, goofy, dorky, chink
015 bedazzled by the eliteness
016 how to blow your nuts out with cornstarch and orangina
017 i am a warez pup - who are you?
018 lemmings
019 the science of astrology
020 the notorious anticlimactic bastards of the zine scene
. 021 , dUcK 54uc3?!!? ,
issues 1-5, 7, 9, and 15-16 by creed
issues 6, 8, 11-13, and 17 by hooch
issue 10 by bEdlAM
issue 14, 18, and 21 by phorce
issue 19 by belial
issue 20 by creed + hooch
mindcrime is an official y0lk member.
note: if you have written an issue, you are a y0lk member, have a y0lk member
board, etc. woo.