A matter of opinion

I present a pair of guide words from our phone book:



I suppose it's all in the ear of the beholder.

Go with the flow

Asthma medications and nasal sprays, many types of which I've had the (mis)fortune of sampling over the years, seem to be named by the Chinese-menu method--one from column A, one from column B. With the limited variety of prefixes and suffixes, I tend to get confused when I'm asked to identify which medications I've tried over the past quarter of a century. Was it Rhinocort that made my nose bleed, or was it Nasocort? Have I tried Nasonex, or am I thinking of Nasocort again? Was it Azmacort that made my cough worse, or was it Pulmicort? Have I ever tried Maxair, or am I thinking of Advair? I've taken cromolyn, but what about Nasalcrom? And have I ever actually tried Flonase?

These questions really only come up when I have to get a new pre-authorization for my current prescription regimen. This is one of the many reasons I do not like managed care. Why should my doctor have to remind my insurer every year that nothing cheaper than the maximum US dose of Allegra will touch my allergies, and yes, that expensive Singulair really is necessary to keep me from coughing, and no, maintenance corticosteroids (while cheap and easy, like a bad date) are not appropriate because I can't tolerate the side effects, which include feeling like I could make the Guinness Book of World Records for Worst PMS All Day, Every Day?

ANYWAY.

Every time I see a commercial for Flomax, I think it's an asthma medication. I mean, can you blame me? Not only are its commercials full of people doing various high-impact activities like whitewater rafting, but its name sure does sound like it would help you move a lot of air through your lungs. But then I realize that the whitewater rafters are all middle-aged men. Because Flomax helps you move a lot of pee through your benignly enlarged prostate.

Dutch treat

The English language has the reputation of being notoriously hard to learn, as it's chock full of words whose pronunciation doesn't match their spelling, bizarrely irregular verbs and plurals, and a subjunctive tense that not even native speakers understand.

Dutch, however, is just plain funny. At least, the English-speaking Mrs. Gerbil and I think so.

For example: did you know that "Monsterhouder" is Dutch for "specimen container"?

Mispronunciation

My aforementioned temp assignment is at a local hospital's VNA and hospice program. (VNA, for those not in the know, stands for "visiting nurse association.") This assignment has involved a lot of personal "firsts," like operating a Pitney-Bowes postage meter, stamping stacks of incoming mail with the date of receipt (which makes me feel oddly East German), and scheduling a UPS pickup.

This particular UPS pickup was an authorized return, and when I provided the representative with the return tracking number, she impressed me by telling me what company I was with. She did not impress me, however, with her reading.

"This is for the VNA and... um... ho-spice?" she asked.

I wonder--is Ho Spice like the Fifth Beatle?

Trainspotting

I went down to Pennsylvania for about 48 hours this past weekend. Now that Mrs. Gerbil and I live on the East Coast, it's much easier to plan last-minute trips to my parents' house. Instead of being cooped up in a plane for 5 hours, plus enduring all the aggravations of the airport, I stretched out on Amtrak for 5 hours.

In my experience, time passes much more quickly on the train than on the plane. For one, there's cool stuff to see outside. You can gauge your progress by which stops the train has yet to make. The seats are wide, there's lots of legroom, the bathrooms are reasonably sized, and you can walk up and down the aisles the whole time without getting stuck behind a beverage cart or being ordered to go put your seatbelt on. Because the train doesn't have seatbelts.

I think there's a certain beauty in the run-down structures that one typically sees along the tracks. Also, I find trainyards absolutely fascinating. I can't explain it. This journey definitely did not disappoint on either the dilapidated building front or the trainyard front.

In one of the trainyards in Connecticut, I spied the most amazing maintenance of way cars. I am not sure what they are called, but they are flat and have a big metal steering wheel type thing on one end. They can be connected to each other or to an engine, and they are obviously not for transporting anything beyond the yard. One of these cars was particularly awesome. At one end was stenciled the following instruction:

DO NOT HUMP

I'm sure this means something very particular in train-speak. At least, I hope it does. Either way, it's very good advice.

Weasel words

After Mrs. Gerbil determined that she writes like a man, we had ourselves a lively discussion about what, exactly, makes for manly vs. womanly (girly?) writing. When I analyzed several sections of my dissertation, I found that I write like a weak (girly?) man, or possibly a European man, or maybe a European metrosexual. But other writings of mine--especially letters of complaint--came back strongly male.

I freely admit: my nickname in late adolescence was "Manly Woman," on account of my death-grip handshake and my arm-wrestling prowess.

Mrs. Gerbil's theory was that scientific writing, especially in social sciences, contains more "weasel words" than in other areas. Social scientists such as yours truly are taught never to write "X is," but rather "X may be," or "the data suggest that X is" or "it appears safe to conclude that X." This is an unfortunate effect of the scientific method, whereby you can never actually prove anything, just disprove its opposite (i.e., the null hypothesis) within a reasonable margin of error (i.e., less than 5%).

But theologians such as my better half don't engage in a whole lot of hypothesis testing. They just come up with an interpretation, hopefully think about it for a while to make sure it's internally consistent, and present it. They don't need to do validation studies to see if their conclusions hold up under different conditions. I suppose it's all just a matter of faith for them.

So then this begged the question of how social scientists insult each other. (Trust me. It did.) If we social scientists really wanted to be true to our hypothesis-testing heritage, we might have to say things like

The data suggest that you suck.

It appears that you suck.

We can confidently reject the null hypothesis that you do not suck.

You suck (p < .05).

It appears safe to conclude that you suck. However, further research is recommended to determine what factors, if any, mediate or moderate your suckage.

And now, if you will excuse me, I must go calculate the Spearman's rho of your mom.

What's in a name?

Thomasville Furniture has a product line called Wanderlust.

It seems you can deck your entire house with its daring, adventurous rusticity.

But Wanderlust (from the German, of course) is a strong, perhaps irresistible urge to travel. So if one truly had Wanderlust, one should not care about the furniture in one's house, for one would not want to be in the house very often. Therefore: why name a domestic product after a concept which is in itself a rejection of domesticity?

In other nomenclative news, the other day I spied a motor home with an awesome name: The Intruder. Thankfully this model appears to have been discontinued last year--perhaps on account of its name. I mean, everyone knows motor homes are really big, but the last time I checked, responsible travel didn't include intrusion.

Young at heart

Just because I have completed a ridiculous amount of education does not mean I must forsake adolscent humor.



Seriously, those gnus have got it goin' ON.

In sickness and in health

Mrs. Gerbil and I have been thinking (perhaps obsessively) about little gerbs. Conveniently, I've just begun a new job that will not only help fund the production of little gerbs, but also provides much more affordable and comprehensive health benefits. This job is very pregnancy-friendly, and at the moment there are several pregnant or recently post-partum people on site. This is all very good news for the two-member Committee on Gerb Production.

Our new health package includes full coverage for preventive care. Fantastic, I thought, because prenatal care is, by its very nature, largely preventive. But then I asked someone whether prenatal care is covered as preventive care, and I was sorely disappointed to hear that it is not. And then it dawned on me: Like most other health plans, our shiny new one considers pregnancy a sickness.

To be a covered "sickness," pregnancy must have its own diagnostic code, at least for purposes of billing. In the ICD-9 (the current US standard), the diagnostic code for normal pregnancy is V22.2. Anything diagnosable is de facto abnormal, and thus normal pregnancy is abnormal.

("Okay, okay," you are saying, "pregnancy is a departure from normal bodily functioning, so isn't this diagnosable sickness thing warranted?" But humor me here.)

Sickness is by definition bad. Nothing good can come directly of sickness. Sure, you might have a renewed appreciation for life if you survive a serious illness or injury; but the most positive direct result of sickness that I can think of is that once you've had the chicken pox, you are almost guaranteed not to have a repeat performance.

And yet every single human being that ever was is the result of pregnancy. Perhaps you are a cynic and believe that human beings are no good. But hey--you wouldn't be around to hate your fellow human beings if not for pregnancy. Which, I hasten to add, is diagnosable.

Now I shall blow your mind some more with my, well, mind-blowing logic. Even in our enlightened times, women are expected to want to have children. Those who do not want to have children are, at least in some circles, considered abnormal.

Thus: In order to be considered normal, you have to be considered abnormal.

I rest my case.

Meanwhile, at Trinity General...

A man claiming to be Jesus is brought to the emergency room. The triage nurse hands him some carbonless forms and a clipboard and says, "Make sure you press hard with that pen. We need to be able to read all three pages."

The man stares at the forms for a minute, then tears off the first sheet and starts to fill it in.

"Hey!" says the triage nurse. "I thought I told you those are in triplicate!"

"One, three--it doesn't really matter," says the man. "It's all the same thing anyway."

I like pie

A bunch of us were in the Safeway in Mountain View a few weeks ago, looking for items for our Low Maintenance Shabbat dinner. The rules: everything had to be vegetarian, relatively not-disgusting, and needing nothing more than heating. We opted for veggie dogs, cheese curls, and pie a la mode. One of us (not I) was an over-acheiver and, entirely against the rules, made some miso soup from scratch. Apparently we were all craving salt and sugar.

We had a difficult time deciding on a pie. In my opinion, store-bought pies are generally foul. I would like to think of myself as a master baker, but I am also a goody-two-shoes (see above), and so I wasn't about to spend a whole afternoon making a pie from scratch for Low Maintenance Shabbat. Somehow, even with my strong opinions about store-bought pies, I ended up with the job of choosing our pie.

There were so many pies! Oh, so many pies--and all of them generally foul-looking. Then I noticed the best pie of all:

Sugar-free marionberry.

What do they put in there instead of sugar? Crack?

Playing around

Count me among those wigged out by the "Left Behind" video game. I don't even need to explain why, because others' snarks are more than sufficient.

This morning I read that there will be (or perhaps already is) a video game based on the TV series Lost. I've never seen the show, nor do I like video games in the first place; but I'm not sure it was a good marketing decision to title this new product LOST: THE GAME.

Perhaps what matters really is how you play the game.

I saw the sign

I feel a lot better now that Christmas is over, thanks. Now I just have to get through my birthday (which is this Thursday, hint hint) and then everything should be peachy-keen.

Last week Mrs. Gerbil and I went to Seattle for six days to visit the in-laws. I definitely needed the vacation. Relaxation was just what my mind, body, and snarky soul needed. One day we took the Edmonds-Kingston Ferry, which was great fun until I decided to take a little walk from bow to stern. I felt a little funny while we were still on the water, but I felt a lot funnier once we disembarked. Add this slight seasickness to a fantastic sinus infection, and you get great potential for snark.

I noticed a sign on the ferry which read PLEASE, KEEP OFF LADDER. Mrs. Gerbil and I were impressed by its grammatical correctness--signs don't usually sport commas!--but we were perplexed about the profound lack of ladders in its vicinity.

"It would be even funnier if it ended with 'FOOL,'" I said.

Mrs. Gerbil agreed.

Imagine if "FOOL" was a standard component of signage:

Such blunt advice might help California drivers, at least, behave a little more normally.

It is what it ain't

George Orwell, of course, taught us that

WAR IS PEACE.
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY.
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

Recently, George W. Bush taught us that

"'Stay the course' means keep doing what you're doing... Don't do what you're doing if it's not working -- change. 'Stay the course' also means don't leave before the job is done."



And according to my crossword puzzle this morning, everything else you know is wrong too:

Wordsmithing (or, A semi-serious entry)

I like words.

I like to do silly things with words. One of the first inside jokes my wife and I developed was a strategic mispronunciation of "gnocchi," such that the "g" was no longer silent and the whole thing rhymed with "rocky." Thus we could rap on a door and giggle, "gnocchi-gnocchi!" and it was all very cute and fun.

For a while we signed letters to each other using words that almost rhyme with "love," such as "mauve," "larva," "knave," and "locomotive." This was all very fun and cute, until we ran out of words that almost rhyme with "love." So we moved on to words that almost rhyme with words that almost rhyme with "love," and then it just got plain silly.

I used to be a star on vocabulary tests in high school. I can still spell all the words I learned, but in the decade or so since the era of vocabulary quizzes, I've forgotten what many of them mean. Every so often I will come across one, like "raconteur" or "impecunious" or "refulgent," and I'll have a vague idea of what it means but have to sneak off to the dictionary for a consult anyway.

Yes, indeedy, words are wonderful.

It pains me to realize that there are certain words which are in themselves totally wonderful but have acquired totally un-wonderful connotations. I'm talking about words like "traditional," "family," "values," and "morals." I have grown to despise these words, for they have begun to invoke in me a panic reaction.

Some awful, hideous person out there is probably tittering with delight because these words have begun to strike fear into my heart.

But that awful, hideous person hasn't quite accomplished his/her aim. Oh, verily, the T-word, the V-word, the M-word, and the F-word strike fear into my heart, but not because I see any inherent conflict between any of them and my fabulously gay, fabulously committed life. No, I panic because my first thought upon reading these words is oh, shit, who hates us now?

And here's the thing. Most of the time these words occur in contexts that have nothing to do with sexuality. I am addicted to counted cross-stitch, a traditional yet decidedly unsexy pastime. Safeway often has the best values on basic food items, but sometimes I want to spend a little more for organic products elsewhere. You can't talk about Aesop's fables without mentioning morals. And the next person who tries to insist that a family can only consist of an opposite-sex couple and their descendents really ought to brush up on biological nomenclature.

So here it is, Pride Month and the eve of San Francisco Pride Weekend (I ask you, isn't every weekend Pride Weekend in San Francisco?), and my excitement is tempered by the fact that completely innocuous, positive little words have somehow become weapons of mass destruction.

By the way, and this is pretty disgusting, "Karl Rove" almost rhymes with "love."

Primary sources

I was in Galveston this past weekend for a wedding.

Oh yeah, and the weekend before that, I was in the Land of Cleve for graduation. I left Berkeley as Ms. Gerbil and returned as Dr. Gerbil. A few years ago I thought I might spring for a vanity license plate once I received my Ph.D. I thought I'd apply for one that said GRBLPHD. But then I realized that very few people would be able to parse that one, and vanity plates aren't supposed to be esoteric, you know? You're supposed to be able to figure them out almost immediately, as every millisecond you spend decoding a vanity plate is a millisecond you're not spending paying attention to the road.

Speaking of paying attention to the road, while I was in the Land of Cleve, I was walking up this long hill when these two women in a Subaru Outback passed me on their way down. The one in the passenger seat hung her head out the window and said, in an unmistakeable tone, "Hey there." That pretty much made my day. Usually I get this sort of thing from guys in penis cars sports cars or pick-up trucks. But I got hit on by two chicks in a big gay Subaru with Ohio plates!

Anyway, when I discarded the idea of GRBLPHD, I came up with DRGRBIL instead. Easier to parse, definitely. But also a little, well, unsavory as a vanity plate.

So no vanity plate for me just yet.

The Land of Cleve gave me a rhinovirus as a parting gift, and of course I got bronchitis after the cold. So in addition to a strict inhaler regimen, my doctor also prescribed cough medicine with codeine. I am no stranger to this stuff; I got codeine every time I got bronchitis from the time I was a toddler to when I was finally diagnosed with asthma at 13. It still tastes like ass and makes me stupid and clumsy, but at least I can sleep. So could the two pals with whom I shared a hotel room in Galveston.

Alas, on its final descent into Galveston, my plane had some pressure problems. My head did not explode, as I'd feared; but my precious bottle of controlled substance did. About a third of it soaked through my toiletry kit and sopped around in my bookbag. The novels I brought became a sticky mess. (The wedding was sticky, too, but this was due entirely to the humidity.)

On the way home, I stopped by a cool used bookshop to get some new(ish) reading material. I picked up this novel by Lisa Alther, Other Women. It's a fun (and fast) read about a lesbian nurse with a certain Cluster B personality disorder and her heterosexual therapist, a woman with her own traumatic past. I'm impressed with the therapist-client dialogue, but not so impressed with the vast number of sentences that go "As she [insert mundane task here], she recalled how difficult it was to [insert description of vaguely traumatic life event here]."

I'm also less than impressed with the obligatory reviewer quote on the cover:

"AN ABSORBING
AND TOUCHING NOVEL...
SHARP, FUNNY, AND
DYNAMIC."
-PEOPLE

Um, which people are these?

(Yes, yes, I know, the magazine. But cut me a break. My snark's not getting enough oxygen these days.)

Bad slogan! Bad, bad slogan!

First of all, I should state that I absolutely love Target. Because I do.

But here's the thing about Target: Their current slogan ("Expect more, pay less") sucks.

It is, however, sometimes exactly true.

Often I go into Target to find a specific item. Often they have this item. But sometimes they do not. I indeed expect more and pay less, but it's because I expected to buy something they didn't have.

Other times I go into Target to find a specific item, and they have it for quite a nice price, but it's not of the quality I wanted. Like my favorite pair of khaki pants. In general, I have a hard time buying pants because I (a) have no butt, (b) have a short waist, and (c) have longer legs than the average short person. But I found this pair of khaki pants in an Ohio Target about a year and a half ago that were absolutely perfect in terms of fit and price. I love these pants. No, let me rephrase that. I loved these pants... until the legs shrank after a number of washings, and way too much of my (cute) socks started to hang out. I expected more out of these pants, but at least I paid less.

Sometimes I expect more parking, and I end up paying less because I'm frustrated and want to leave as soon as possible.

Or I expect more checkout lanes to be open, and I pay less because I put stuff back on the shelves so that I meet the criteria for the express lanes. (I have large problems going to the grocery store alone because I get so overstimulated that I have the urge to leave my cart in the middle of the store and run away. So I have to make myself wait in line, and by the time I get out, my cognitive functions are on a par with someone with mild dementia. I am totally not making this up. Ask my wife. She has to do most of the grocery shopping.)

Oh well. At least it's not Wal-Mart, where I expect less and pay nothing. Political issues aside, I will not patronize an establishment that fries my brain more than the grocery store does.

You'll put your eye out!

When I was in tenth grade, my grandmother sold her house and moved into a condo. My mother received a lot of random stuff that had been in that house, including a pile of phonograph records. Most of these records belonged to my mom, but a few belonged to my aunt, and a few neither of them wanted to claim. My mom also got some high school artwork, reel-to-reels of family members' musical debuts, paperback books, hippie jewelry, and the Steinway parlor grand. All of these were very interesting to me, but most of all I was impressed by the Simon and Garfunkel LP's.

I already knew all the Greatest Hits by heart, but my G-d, this was a lot of Simon and Garfunkel! I decided that my favorite song was no longer "Cecilia," but rather a tie between "Patterns" and "A Poem on the Underground Wall." I made myself a mix tape which started with "They're Coming to Take Me Away, Ha Ha," progressed to "Double Talking Helix Blues" (a geek anthem by my mom's homeboys Joel and Ira Hershkowitz), settled into a slew of classic S&G songs, changed direction with some tunes by the Vienna Boys' Choir, and finished with some Smothers Brothers skits.

I made a similar mix tape for the girl who would, eleven years later, be my wife. We spent a long time trying to parse the second verse of "Patterns":

Up a narrow flight of stairs
In a narrow little room,
As I lie upon my bed
In the early evening gloom,
Impaled on my wall
My eyes can dimly see
The pattern of my life
And the puzzle that is me.

At first I had this awful image in my head of eyeballs on skewers. I still have this awful image in my head of eyeballs on skewers. I realize, of course, that (1) the ABCB rhyme scheme is a harsh master and (2) 'twas not eyeballs on the wall, but some embodiment of hopelessness. Still, I can't imagine that eyeballs on skewers could see anything brightly. And still, there is no good way to arrange these four lines, for the following brings up images of whole bodies on skewers:

My eyes can dimly see
The pattern of my life
And the puzzle that is me
Impaled on my wall

I am reviewing a book. I hope I have a pre-press edition of this book, because the tables are so poorly formatted that I would really like to impale the pages on my wall. And this book, which shall remain nameless for the privacy of all parties involved, ends with short bios of all its contributors. These bios are of varying cohesiveness and grammatical correctness--very much like the chapters of this book. I read the bios last night while taking a break from the actual content of the book, and I was struck by the utter crappiness of these sentences.

Now, I get upset when professional authors use since to mean because, while to mean although, and the reason why instead of the reason that. I am fully aware that I swap since for because and while for although all the time in casual conversation. But I wouldn't do it in a publication. APA style strictly forbids stuff like this. So I guess it's not really surprising that I would be upset by crappy sentence construction in a professional book.

I should provide operational definitions of crappy and non-crappy sentences.

This is a crappy sentence:
Yesterday Jenny ate, slept, and played with her dog.

because as written it means this:
Yesterday Jenny ate with her dog, slept with her dog, and played with her dog.

These are not crappy sentences:
1. Yesterday Jenny ate ice cream with her brother, slept on the couch with her girlfriend, and played with her dog.
2. Yesterday Jenny played with her dog, ate, and slept.

Sometimes sentences appear quite nice at first, but upon inspection they reveal their crappiness:
Gillian has written blog entries on grammar, bureaucracy, and her disappearing butt.

My butt's not the Internet, honey. For one thing, the Internet is getting bigger every day. I do, however, write about grammar, bureaucracy, and my disappearing butt, though thankfully not all in the same entry.

Word.

I leave you with two final thoughts:

1) The sentence that inspired this entry goes like this:
I have published around cervical cancer prevention, heterosex, the vagina, and heterosexism.

I have small handwriting, but damn!!!!

2) My aforementioned grandmother is a retired editor. She says it's genetic.

Prix fixe? No, prefix.

DISCLAIMER: This entry contains a lot of instances of the word "Catholic." However, this entry actually has nothing of substance to do with Catholicism. And, you know, some of my best friends were once Catholic.

I think the term "lapsed Catholic" is pretty funny. It ranks up there with "spot vulture." Spot vultures, of course, are the people who sit in their cars in the middle of the parking lot aisles, waiting for someone to vacate a parking spot. You know these people. They make sure no one can get around them, and very often they do this even when everyone else is in the store. Then, of course, no one can get their car out anyway, so the vultures honk a lot. But really, if they were true vultures, they would drive around the lot in search of a soon-to-be-departing vehicle. Nor would they honk. Real vultures aren't known for lying in wait, nor are they known for announcing their presence. They dive-bomb, and they do it quietly. Given half a chance, they will dive-bomb your car while you try to change your flat tire, and you won't know until it's too late.

But I was talking about "lapsed Catholics," wasn't I? I could go on a whole thing about how this term is funny because it implies that once Catholic, always Catholic. I mean, if you are raised Catholic and then decide it's not for you, then you become a lapsed Catholic. Which, in essence, makes you a non-practicing Catholic, even though you don't want to practice Catholicism. There's no escape! But I won't go on that whole thing. Really. My whole thing is actually much, much longer.

Some folks who treat substance abuse like to conceptualize "falling off the wagon" as lapse, relapse, and collapse. A lapse isn't necessarily bad. You can have a one lapse during a period of sobriety and still be perfectly fine. But a bunch of lapses can make a relapse. Relapse isn't necessarily bad, either, as long as you are able to commit to getting back on the proverbial wagon. But if you can't get your use back under control, you enter collapse. And collapse is bad.

So what of religious lapses, then? If a lapsed Catholic is someone who has stopped being Catholic, but might start up again, then a relapsed Catholic is someone who has stopped being Catholic, but has started up again. Or is a relapsed Catholic someone who stopped being Catholic, started up again, and then stopped (i.e., re-lapsing)? But perhaps that is an elapsed Catholic.

Then we turn to collapsed Catholics. Do they have bad knees?

And what about prolapsed Catholics? Are they people who support lapsed Catholics, or are they medical conditions?

Eh. Words are dumb.

By any other name

I think it would be most lovely to have the wordsmithing prowess of Donald Rumsfeld. I mean, the man's press conferences are downright poetic. There's a book to prove it. And, apparently, an album of art songs.

Poetry in motion is one thing. What I want to do is rewrite the dictionary. Rumsfeld would like to redefine insurgency. Actually, what he wants to do is to stop using the word "insurgent" because the word is too good for the people he used to describe with it.

Now, Rumsfeld is not the first to come up with this idea. Shakespeare, or possibly Christopher Marlowe pretending to be Shakespeare, put it this way:

What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.

Regardless, this is absolutely BRILLIANT.

The possibilities, though Orwellian, are ENDLESS.

This whole who-uncovered-the-CIA-agent mess? Didn't actually happen the way people think it did. See, someone decided that "Valerie Wilson's husband" was a better name for a colonial seamstress than "Betsy Ross." "Couldn't find" was ever so much better than "sewed the first." "Yellowcake" is just so much more descriptive than "American flag." It's very simple, you see. No one was actually talking about weapons of mass destruction they said "Valerie Wilson's husband couldn't find yellowcake." It was just a third-grade history lesson gone horribly, horribly wrong.

Now I need to go see about dinner. I think I will grill a slab of nice, juicy filet mignon for dinner, where

grill a slab of = heat a can of
nice = cheap
juicy = salty
filet = vegetable soup
mignon = from Target.