Is it Fresh Cut Fish or Freshly Cut Fish?

I guess it’s just my anal nature but lately a TV ad has been making me nuts. Have you ever had one of those times when a word or little bit of grammar trips a switch in your mind and you wonder about it. Incessantly. Maybe that’s good advertising.

OK, here’s what I’m getting at…Sizzler, a chain of steakhouse type of restaurants mostly in the West, has a new advertising campaign—Fresh Cut Fish.

No problem, right? “Fresh Cut Fish”. Here’s what’s going through my mind though—does anyone really believe that Sizzler is serving “fresh” fish? To me “fresh fish” is fish that was just caught and hasn’t been frozen. I doubt that they’ve got someone down at the local pond or river tossing in lures and bait for fresh salmon and trout. My assumption is that it’s frozen. And I doubt that there's some guy in the back merrily filleting trout that were flown in fresh from Montana or Alaska streams this morning.

Most restaurants, especially lower end restaurants, use predominately frozen ingredients. Or at minimum, from my days long, long ago cooking at the grill of a now defunct steak chain, it comes refrigerated and vacuum packed in individual portions.

So what is “fresh cut fish”? Is it fresh fish that’s been cut to portion size? Or is it fish that has been freshly cut--cut when it comes off the broiler or out of the oven hence earning the title of "fresh cut"?

(From Sizzler's website)

And it’s driving me nuts.

Why should I care? I’m not going to go there and try the “fresh cut fish”. But I’m curious as to what exactly it is. How much did Sizzler have to pay for some 21st century Don Draper clone to come up with this snazzy twist of phrase? They also advertise “fresh cut tri-tip” by the way. If I cook fish or tri-tip and then cut it, it’s now “fresh cut”, right?

But there are just some things that drive me nuts. And this is one of them.

Now this is about as nonsensical and trite of a blogpost that could conceivably be written (although I’ve come across far worse examples). It kind of lends the truth to this poster, doesn’t it?

(from Despair.com)

Something's Fishy--Cheating Scandal at U.S. Open

How’s that for today’s major “sports headline”. It’s all over Yahoo News and there is page after page about it on Google. But that’s what happens in the world of big-time sports when there’s big-time money involved.

This ranks right up there with steroids in baseball. And it’s in a relatively obscure sport—although one which attracts millions more amateur participants than virtually any other sport.

And this also dealt with artificial weight gain. It seems like professional bass fisherman, Mike Hart from Southern California added multiple 2 ounce lead weights to several of the fish that he weighed in at late July’s professional bass fishing Western Outdoor News $200,000 U.S. Open held at Lake Mead.

(fishermen are NOT Mike Hart)

Now, if you haven’t seen professional bass fishing, it’s now become a televised sport with boats and fishermen more resembling NASCAR cars and drivers than what we fondly remember as fishermen. To me, fishing was always done in a 14-15 foot Lund boat with a small outboard and we wore jeans and t-shirts with a sweatshirt along in case it got cold and windy.

But these guys wear outfits that look more like NASCAR—colorful and just chock full of advertising patches from sponsors. And their boats look the same. Plus, the boats have nearly as much power and can go up and down a lake nearly as fast as a NASCAR race car.

And there’s big money involved. This tournament isn’t one of the biggest but first prize was $40,000 and a new bass boat. That’s enough to lure some people to cheat.

Hart has been permanently banned from the professional fishing circuit. And he may even be facing state and federal criminal charges. The criminal charges might stem from the fact that Lake Mead is located in both Nevada and Arizona.

(weights photo from YahooNews)

Apparently 3 of Hart’s fish died and, of course, couldn’t be released back to the water. When that happens, the fish are clean and filleted and then given to charity. It was then that 3 weights were found in each fish. I’m sure that Hart uttered a suitable “ohhhhhh crap” upon finding out that he had been caught.

And finally—these fish are natural size without augmentation. I can’t necessarily say the same for the “angler”.

"Liveblogging" My Favorite TV Show--"The Hunt for Big Fish"

Wow! I’m excited. It’s time for my favorite TV drama. It’s full of action.

I’m getting ready to settle in right now coffee mug in one hand, remote control in the other. I’m flipping the channel to 60 and cozying my butt down into the couch cushions in anticipation. It’s Saturday morning and I don’t have to work today so I can really enjoy my show. At the first commercial I’ll get a bowl of Cheerios to enjoy while I finish watching.
OK, here it comes. The commercial is about over. It’s for Jack Link’s Jerky, a prime sponsor. I wonder what the show is about today.

Yes! It’s Larry Dahlberg. Bald, short, ropy-muscled arms. Unassuming but he always succeeds in his “Hunt For Big Fish” right here on Versus.

What’s he doing? Oh yeah, he’s standing on the bow of the boat with a huge baitcasting rod. Obviously he’s going after something hefty. What? He’s in Brazil along a tributary of the Amazon. He’s going after really aggressive and huge Amazon River catfish. They eat piranha. He’s got a live piranha hooked through it’s toothy lip and flopping around. He tosses the bait out, reel spinning and throwing a cascade of droplets into the air. You hear the “zing” as the line goes out to plop a good 50 yards away in an eddy.


He’s explaining what he’s doing. “It’s going to be a little bit harder to catch these big fish today. The river level is way up meaning that the holes where these big cats usually hide out have more water running through them. So we’re just going to have to wait and see what happens.”

We wait. Larry talks about how he rigged his bait. Then you hear a click. Kind of reminds you of the scene in Jaws where the line makes a single ominous “click” and Robert Shaw suddenly gets a mad glint in his eye. My hand stops halfway to my mouth, milk from my spoonful of Cheerios dripping plop, plop, plop back into the bowl.

Larry scrambles to remove the rod from its holder stubbing his toe on his tackle box. He lifts the rod and his ropy arm muscles come to life as he feels for the fish. He hushes his voice as if the fish can hear him and says “He’s playing with it first. Let’s let him really get it in his mouth,” as he free spools line from the reel. Larry locks the drag down, takes hold of the rod above the reel, drops the tip to his waist level and then, POW! POW! POW! He sets the hook hard 3 times each time jerking the rod up about 2 feet.

The tip starts sawing back and forth as the lunker lunges from side to side in its desperate tug of war with the foreign hunk of steel attached to heavy mono line jabbing him through his lip.

The fight is on. Man versus fish. Who’s going to win? Larry’s fights tend to be short. He’s after big fi
sh and he uses big tackle. He’s tremendously skilled and experienced. He shifts the rod from side to side keeping up with the struggling fish’s furious frenzy. Suddenly, we can see the gargantuan Amazon River catfish. It’s longer than Larry is tall. It’s a behemoth. Larry is breathing hard. He whispers hoarsely, “This is a monster. It’s got to go close to 300 pounds! Let’s land him and take a look.”


Larry and the guide struggle to get hands on the fish. They grunt as they heave the monster aboard. The camera zooms to get a close up of the lunker. Larry doesn’t gloat or exclaim or shout when he catches a fish. It’s as though he is far more respectful of the creature which to him is both a challenge and a science project to discover more about these animals and how they’ve managed to grow so large. The monster is gently released back into the river to continue to grow. Larry offers his bag of Jack Link’s jerky to the native guide who plops a handful in his mouth and proceeds to merrily gum it. The jerky is always present as a sponsor’s prop reminding us of the need to pay the bills.

More commercials. And then it’s time for this week’s show to end with a promise of more action in another exotic location next week as he goes on his next “Hunt for Big Fish”.


Wow! Maybe next week I’ll liveblog my other favorite show, “Antiques Roadshow” or “Ask This Old House”. This could be a whole new trend and, at least to my way of thinking, more enjoyable than recaps of “Lost” or “American Idol”. But who knows, my mind conjures up all sorts of goofy stuff.

My apologies to Larry Dahlberg if it seems as though I were poking fun at him. I’m not. This is one of my favorite fishing shows. He’s far more enjoyable than most of the other guys like Babe Winkelman or Bill Dance or Roland Martin who are little more than commercial shills for their sponsors and are tired caricatures of Gadabout Gaddis. And “hoooooooey boy!” he can sure catch him some fish.

Al Lindner as Curly

“One thing,” Curly (Jack Palance) rasped out to Mitch holding up his index finger. “That’s the secret of life.”
And, of course Mitch (Billy Crystal), like the clueless “city slicker” that he was asked, “What’s the one thing?”
“You’ll know,” was Curly’s reply.

I’ve always liked that piece of dialogue in “City Slickers”. Because, no matter how trite it may have actually been, it’s pretty much true. It doesn’t take someone else to tell us what the “one thing” is but it may take a while to reveal itself to us. Especially when we finally figure out that it’s not money or property or anything else that fits the category of “stuff”. It’s usually our family or just a sense of inner peace and contentment which can come from any number of sources—but pretty much never from stuff.

While I’m at it, maybe I should remind you of another pretty good line from another not really good movie. This one’s from 1977 in “Oh God”. During the trial to “prove” whether or not George Burns was God, he was asked by the smarmy evangelist, “Does God answer all prayers?” To which George Burns/God responded, “Yes, but sometimes the answer is No.” And that’s pretty much true too, isn’t it? Too many of us ask God for stuff. You ask Santa Claus for stuff, not God.

So, that brings me to Al Lindner. For the uninitiated, Al’s a fishing guy. He started out in the 70’s in Brainerd, Minnesota with In-Fisherman. He brought science and technique to fishing magazines and television (as opposed to the old “whooooooo boy, lookit that hog bass” type of fishing show). And, he also managed to bring a lot greater entertainment factor to fishing because of it. His first passion was walleye but over the years that passion has expanded to a number of other fresh-water species.

His new venture is called “Angling Edge” and it’s a TV fishing show on Versus (what used to be Outdoor Life Network). Al has always been a bearded, straight forward kind of guy who still carries an accent from his earlier years in northern Wisconsin—although the “dis” and “dat” and “dese” and “dose” in his speech aren’t as noticeable anymore.

Bear with me folks; I’m getting to my point here.

Al Lindner is an unabashed Christian. Evangelical even. But he doesn’t beat you up about it—never has. One of things I really like about watching his new show though is the last few minutes of each episode. These 2 or 3 minutes feature Al talking just a bit about his faith in an unassuming, sharing kind of way—just the right tone, quite frankly, to get me to listen to his brief message.

So the connection to Curly and Mitch and the “one thing” is this: Today Al said that each night when he goes to bed he spends a few minutes thanking God for “just one thing”. Just one good thing from today. Some days, he said, it’s hard to identify that one thing and other days it’s hard to narrow it down to one. But he always manages to do it.

And you know, I liked that. I think I’m going to try to start doing that each night when I crawl into bed next to my wife. Give thanks for just one thing each and every day.

Long ago, I started, and try to make a habit, of each and every morning before I get up of offering a short prayer for “just one thing”—although it’s always the same thing—and that’s help and guidance to get through today. That’s it. Just one thing.

But, maybe giving thanks each night for “just one thing” is one of the best things we can do too.