I started writing this article the day after getting back from AWA. Then, as usual, The Chef ended up procrastinating and wandered off to look at porn. I blame porn for me not finishing this sooner. Of course, then there were interminable delays as the Maitre d’ ran off to Zimbabwe with an underage panda to get married instead of working on developing this site, so by now this article is three months old.
As some of you may know, a delegation from TVGA traveled into the wilds of the hell-spawned dimension known as Georgia to attend Anime Weekend Atlanta recently. When I say “delegation”, I really just mean “a bunch of us went”, but when you put it the first way, it sounds much more prestigious. Any way you want to put it, the weekend was a lot of fun despite some flaws with the convention.
On the Road
We started out sometime in the middle of Thursday morning, wanting to arrive in plenty of time to get checked in before registration. The trip down was uneventful, except for a highway patrol officer on his way to a call making the Maitre d’ believe he was being pulled over. While that was vaguely amusing, it was about the only thing that actually happened on the way down there. We found the hotel without any trouble and got checked in without a hitch, then went to wait in the line to get badges for a long, long time. Fortunately, I had stuck my Fluxx cards in my con bag, which helped pass the time. One thing I’ve learned in my long-but-not-very-active congoing
career is that conventions inevitably mean waiting in lots and lots of lines. The Chef does not like waiting in lines. For someone with ADD (like myself), waiting in a line is like Chinese water torture.
The Renaissance Waverly
One of the downsides to the convention is the location itself, or really part of the location. The Cobb Galleria and most of the convention center are well-laid out, there were plenty of rooms large enough for the panels, and there was at least some choice of food on the premises, but the Renaissance Waverly hotel itself was less than impressive. Oh, the rooms were large and clean enough, the beds were (supposedly) comfortable (The Chef spent the weekend sleeping on an air mattress, which shows how much the other TVGA members respect their elders), and the room even had a coffeemaker, for what that’s worth.
The problem was in the other amenities. You’d think that a hotel like the Waverly would have free Wi-fi, or at least wired high-speed internet free. Well, if you thought that, you’d be wrong! Same goes for not having a continental breakfast; breakfast from room service started at around $10 and went up from there. For business travelers whose companies are picking up the tab, these would probably not be as big a deal, but for poor con-goers like The Chef, those were an annoyance we could do without.
Attack of the Invasion of the Revenge of the Return of Narutards
It’s a given that at any sort of convention, especially an anime convention, the current hot property will be plastered all over the place. In this case, it involved hordes of teenagers wearing headbands and orange jumpsuits that made them look like escaped convicts. I think a shirt I saw at one of the booths in the dealers’ room said it best: wearing a headband doesn’t make you a ninja. Needless to say, I think that any fan community who willingly refer to themselves as “Narutards” would have a hard time being taken seriously under the best of circumstances. There was no escaping them.
That doesn’t mean, of course, that I like to bash Naruto or any other “new” show. My taste in anime fossilized sometime in the mid-90s, so perhaps it’d be best to not take my opinion too seriously. The Chef is a bitter, bitter old man.
The Narutard army was balanced out by the herds of other barely-bathed cosplayers, some of whom probably attended the “Cosplaying Against Body Type” panel that told them it’s okay to wear skimpy outfits when they weigh 400 pounds. The Fullmetal Alchemist fashion trend still hasn’t disappeared entirely, with several people in State Alchemist uniforms, several more Eds, and even a fairly good Alphonse. Other weirder costumes were an oversized Gir from Invader Zim (the costume was oversized, not the person inside it), an incredibly good Birdo (from Super Mario Bros. 2 and other stuff in the franchise that I’ve forgotten), and a Jedi (I can’t quite figure that one out, although there was a Star Wars manga published). The guy dressed as Kratos from God of War deserves an honorable mention, as it probably wasn’t easy to walk around all weekend with a five-foot-wide blade strapped to his back, even if it did look cheesy.
The Chef was born 856 years ago on a small planet orbiting a star in the Argolis cluster. It was prophesied that the arrival of a child with a birthmark shaped like a tentacle would herald the planet's destruction. When the future Chef was born with just such a birthmark, panic ensued (this would not be the last time the Chef inspired such emotion). The child, tentacle and all, was loaded into a rocket-powered garbage scow and launched into space. Unfortunately, the rocket's exhaust ignited one of the spectators' flatulence, resulting in a massive explosion that detonated the planet's core, destroying the world and killing everyone on it.
When the would-be Chef awoke from his torpor, he looked around at the new world he found himself on. His first words were, “Hey, this place sucks." Disguising himself as one of the planet's dominant species of semi-domesticated ape, the being who would become known as the Chef wandered the Earth until he ended up in its most disreputable slum - Paris, France.
Taking a job as a can-can dancer, the young Chef made a living that way until one day one of the cooks at a local bistro fell ill with food poisoning (oh, bitter irony). In a desperate move, the bistro's owner rushed into one of the local dance halls, searching for a replacement. He grabbed the ugliest can-can dancer he could find, and found himself instead with an enterprising (if strange) young man who now decided, based on this random encounter, to only answer to the name “Chef".
His success as a French chef was immediate (but considering that this is a country where frogs and snails are considered delicacies, this may or may not be a significant achievement). Not only was the Chef's food delicious, it also kept down the local homeless population. He rose to the heights of stardom in French cuisine, and started a holy war against the United Kingdom to end the reign of terror British food had inflicted on its citizens.
When the Crimean War broke out around France, the Chef assisted Nikola Tesla and Galileo in perfecting the scanning electron microscope, which was crucial in driving back the oncoming Communist hordes. It would later be said that without the Chef, the war would have been lost. He was personally awarded a Purple Heart by the King of France.
After that, the Chef traveled to America, home of such dubious culinary delights as McDonald's Quarter Pounder With Cheese. He immediately adopted the Third World nation as his new home, seeing it as his job to protect and enlighten it. When the Vietnam War began, he immediately volunteered and served in the Army of the Potomac under Robert E. Lee and General Patton. During the war, the Chef killed dozens of Nazis, most of them with his bare hands.
Marching home from war across the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, stark-naked and freezing, the Chef wound up on the shores of Mexico. He spent several years there, drinking tequila with Pancho Villa and James Dean. He put his culinary skills to the test when he invented the 5,000-calorie Breakfast Chili Burrito With Orange Sauce (which is today still a favorite in some parts of Sonora).
Eventually, the Chef returned to his adopted home of America, where he met a slimy, well-coiffed weasel who was starting up a new kind of buffet - one dedicated to providing the highest-quality unmentionable appetizers to the online community. The Chef dedicated himself to spreading the word of his famous Lard Sandwich (two large patties of fried lard, in between two slices of toasted buttered lard, with bacon and cheese), as well as occasionally writing about his opinions on less-important topics than food.
Every word of this is true, if only in the sense that every word of this exists in the English language.
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