So I settle in for my weekly dose of the beautiful Holli Hell’s Kitchen, only to discover that the Major League Baseball All Star Game is on instead. Betrayer most foul!!!
I was hoping to write like George Lucas.
Here’s a fun little tool that analyzes a piece of your writing and tells you what famous writer you write like. I did it twice, and here are my results:
And:
Funny thing? I put in two extracts from the same piece of writing (my current space opera project). So apparently I’m writing a “Stephen King meets Edgar Allan Poe…in space!!!” type of thing.
Which is pretty cool, because now that I think about it, I’d love to read a “Stephen King meets Edgar Allan Poe…in space!!!” type of thing!
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Thoughts on the Taste
This weekend was Buffalo’s annual food festival, A Taste of Buffalo, wherein fifty or sixty area restaurants set up booths in downtown Buffalo and sell sample-sized portions of their menu items. It’s always a fun time; we’ve been going for over ten years now.
The prices have gone up a bit over the years. The way Taste works is this: you never pay the restaurants directly. Instead, you buy tickets at $.50 each (in sheets of ten), and then you “pay” the restaurants in tickets. Small items tend to go for 3 tickets each, mid-items will for for 4, 5, or even 6; most places have a “big” item that goes for 8 tickets. When we first started going, ticket prices at the booths topped out at 6 tickets, so items that were once $3.00 are now $4.00. No big deal, really, but we do budget for it.
Typically we spend between $40 and $60 down there, which isn’t awful, for a family of three. And that’s all food: we take our own drinks, packing a cooler bag with some Pepsis and a lot of water bottles. We also never drop by the beer tents or the wine places — one joint was doing “wine slushies” for fifteen tickets each. We were quite full when we left, even though we got “burned” at one place whose 8-ticket item turned out to be very small indeed. (Oddly enough, it was one of our favorite local restaurants! It was doing barbecue ribs for 8 tickets. I like their ribs, so I plunked down my tickets — and was handed a little paper basket with two ribs in it. Harumph.)
Anyway, we had several slices of pizza from various places, two different versions of Caribbean Jerk chicken, a cup of chicken wing soup, a pulled pork sandwich and some mac-and-cheese from a barbecue joint, as well as some ice cream and a few other goodies along the way. I have noted that there doesn’t seem to be enough “new blood” every year, and we’ve been going to the Taste long enough that we have “old favorites”. The addition of a second place offering Jerk Chicken was pretty cool, though!
We left when the crowds started getting too thick, which usually happens around 3:00 in the afternoon. (There was an awful bottleneck in the street at one point, which turned out to be because Senator Charles Schumer chose the worst possible spot to set up camp for his day of handshaking. It’s always nice to see one’s Senator, but he sure picked a lousy spot to stand!)
There was one other way that the Taste of Buffalo cost us a chunk of money on Saturday. After walking around downtown eating for three-and-a-half hours, we were all pretty tired when we got home. So when dinner time rolled ’round…we decided to get a pizza and some wings instead. There went another thirty bucks! Oh well. It was a great food day, though.
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Why can’t the gods ever target, say, Dallas like this?
I’m not sure what Cleveland did recently to so annoy the Gods, but yeesh. Getting shafted on national teevee by Lebron James was bad, but the passing of Harvey Pekar? That’s just mean, Governors of the Universe.
I read Pekar’s graphic novel The Quitter last year and posted about it here. At the moment I actually have Pekar’s graphic adaptation of Studs Terkel’s Working out of the library right now, although I haven’t started it yet. I’m a new admirer of Pekar’s, and I’m saddened to know that he won’t be producing anything more.
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Monday Mayhem
Monday Mayhem is not unlike Sunday Stealing, in that it provides quizzes for bloggers on a weekly basis. I figured I’d do one of them:
1. Lindsay Lohan was recently sentenced to 90 days in jail. What do you think her future has in store for her?
Jail time.
2. What is the biggest fashion “don’t” that you would like to police?
I don’t believe in fashion “don’t”s. I’ve long come to the belief that virtually all of fashion consists of some folks somewhere deciding arbitrarily what’s “in” and what’s “out”. I have no time for that crap, at all.
3. How should we punish sites that lure us in with “read this” and take us somewhere where we are first greeted by a pop-up and then a series of click throughs to actually read the meat of the story?
They should be beaten with tire irons.
4. What is the most you will do to post a comment on a site? At what point is it not worth posting a comment?
I don’t comment enough on my favorite blogs, but I’ve been trying to do so more often.
5. If you purchase something online and you are charged for postage, is it still reasonable to charge for “shipping and handling”? What exactly does “shipping and handling” entail?
Well, it’s not just postage. There’s the cost of the box and the cost of the time and effort to get the thing packed and, if it’s just you by yourself, getting the thing to the post office. When I ship stuff I sell via eBay, I tend to charge a dollar or so more than what I figure the postage will be. (Or, at least I used to, before eBay decided to mandate certain shipping charges, which I find annoying.)
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Sentential Links #212
Linkage….
:: Thanks for helping me rehearse for my next grand jury appearance.
:: I love the rain, it hides all these tears.
More next week!
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Sunday Burst of Weird and AWESOME!
Oddities and Awesome abound!
:: What a cool blog! It’s a food blog that focuses on food and history. Lots of recipes paired with historical information, and it’s cool to scroll down the blog and read the bits of food history that happened under each American President. Here, for example, is a list of provisions called for at the Second Inaugural of President Ulysses S. Grant:
Among other provisions were 10,000 fried oysters; 63 boned turkeys; 150 capons stuffed with truffles; 15 saddles of mutton; 200 dozen quails; 200 hams; 250 chickens; 400 partridges; 25 stuffed boar’s heads; 3,000 head cheese sandwiches; 2,000 ham sandwiches; 8,000 pickled oysters and 2,000 pounds of lobster.
Sounds like a hell of a party, right? Go over there and read about how the party went!
:: Want to see ladies in bikinis reading lines from Star Wars IV: A New Hope? Sure you do!
:: When I was in grade school, there was a series of educational films that we’d watch in class on occasion. They were called “the Hot Dog movies”, and they were short films on various subjects. They used a lot of goofy humor, and they included appearances by Woody Allen and Joanne Whorley. Apparently these films ran on teevee sometime in the early 1970s, but I saw them in class in third and fourth grade. One of the only ones that I really remember dealt with US paper currency, and as luck would have it, that’s the only Hot Dog film I’ve been able to find on YouTube. Here it is. I just think this is pretty cool!
Anybody else ever watch these?
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Meme of Many Odd Questions
From Sunday Stealing:
1. First thing you wash in the shower?
My hair.
2. What color is your favorite hoodie?
My three tie-dyed hoodies, actually — green, purple and red and blue.
3. Would you kiss the last person you kissed again?
I hope so, since I married her!
4. Do you plan outfits?
Not any farther than, “Hey, haven’t worn this in a while.”
5. How are you feeling RIGHT now?
Kinda nappy, actually. I think I’ll take a nap. (I’m writing this late afternoon Saturday.)
6. What’s the closest thing to you that’s red?
My pocket knife, sitting on the desk.
7. Tell me about the last dream you remember having?
Can’t remember any right now. My memories of dreams fade very quickly.
8. Did you meet anybody new today?
Not by name, but there were lots of strangers at Taste of Buffalo.
9. What are you craving right now?
Pizza. I’ll probably buy one for dinner.
10. Do you floss?
Absolutely.
11. What comes to mind when I say cabbage?
Corned beef?
12. Are you emotional?
Yes. And no.
13. Have you ever counted to 1,000?
Nope. I’ve started as a getting-to-sleep measure, but never gotten there.
14. Do you bite into your ice cream or just lick it?
I alternate between both.
15. Do you like your hair?
16. Do you like yourself?
Most times. Sometimes I gotta get away from myself, though.
17. Would you go out to eat with George W. Bush?
If he’s buying, maybe. I’d be faking the niceties, though.
18. What are you listening to right now?
Nothing.
19. Are your parents strict?
Since I’m 38 and haven’t lived at home for quite a few years, I’m going to say, Not really.
20. Would you go sky diving?
Maybe….
21. Do you like cottage cheese?
It’s OK. I used to hate it, and now I don’t. But I don’t adore it, either. It’s good and I should eat it more often.
22. Have you ever met a celebrity?
Nope.
Short quiz….
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The point left a contrail above his head
Matthew Yglesias has been one of my favorite bloggers for years, but in commenting today on Lebron James, he misses the point about as badly as a point can be missed.
I’m all for rooting against the new look Heat, but it is worth saying that a lot of the anti-LeBron commentary of the past couple of days bespeaks a major anti-labor bias in our popular culture. The guy had an offer from one employer and a competing offer from another employer—he took the offer he preferred. Is that really so terrible? Does he really have a moral obligation to work for Dan Gilbert’s for-profit firm indefinitely? Would you like to be told that if you get offered a better job, it’s unethical for you to accept it? I wouldn’t.
Look. This stuff doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and we’re not talking about, say, a District Manager for Fed-Ex going to work as a District Manager for UPS. There’s a lot more at work here than an employee simply deciding to take a new job.
Mega-star sports figures who command salaries in the stratospheres of their sports simply aren’t comparable, as employees, to people like Matt Yglesias, who work in a cubicle farm writing blog posts all day. These kinds of sports figures become identifiable parts of their communities in ways that the vast, vast, vast majority of employees in this country never even come close to being. That being the case, moral questions regarding James’s departure can, and do, and ought to, come into play.
Besides, no one is saying that James had a moral obligation to stay in Cleveland. In this day and age, no one would really suggest that, and when a great and beloved athlete manages to stay with one team for an entire career, it’s viewed as (a) an anomaly, and (b) something of an equal effort on the part of the player and the ownership. Most times a player in that case will voluntarily forego a larger offer or two over the course of their career, if they think the situation they’re already in is a pretty good one. The claim can be made that the morally preferable course would have been for James to stay in Cleveland, but nobody thinks he was obliged to do so.
The criticism, as far as I can see it, focuses on a number of issues surrounding James’s decision to leave. There was the callous manner in which he did it, stringing Cleveland along so they couldn’t get a jump-start on a post-Lebron era until after the Draft and once free agency was already in full swing; there was the way he pretty much treated the fans of that city as if they were disposable; there was the way he pretty much structured the entire episode so as to stroke his own ego.
It all reminded me of a scene in the movie Nixon. Late in the film, when Watergate is starting to bring the administration down, Nixon holds a press conference to make some sort of announcement. To that point, when he’s announced stuff, the entire room has always erupted into applause, but at this event, he makes his announcement, steps back to receive the applause…and only his aides are applauding. Everyone else is just sitting there. That’s what the Lebron James fiasco has looked like. He constructed this entire thing utterly convinced that everyone sees him as a hero, and now he seems a bit shocked that almost nobody actually does. (Give the Miami fans some time, when his teams start accumulating 55-win seasons and second-round playoff exits.)
Players can, and do, leave their original teams all the time. But when they do, it’s generally for one of the following reasons:
1. They are significantly underpaid in their original market, and they are unlikely to come anywhere near their market value there.
2. They want desperately to win, and their current market seems unlikely to do so any time in the foreseeable future.
3. Team management decides to allow the player to leave, under the belief that they may be better equipped to win without the player or by replacing him at the position he plays.
4. The chemistry of their current team is unpleasant to the point that they want to play someplace else.
There are others, but those are the big ones that I generally see bandied about when players leave one team for another. And as far as I can tell, none of these really apply to Lebron James in Cleveland. They were prepared to pay him as massively as anyone else was; they’ve been a very good team in recent years; and…well, I can’t really speak to the third point. But I haven’t read anything about the Cav’s locker room being a hotbed of miscontent.
James’s willingness to leave Cleveland was clearly not motivated by money, and if James thinks he’s going to a more winning-conducive environment in Miami, everything I’ve read indicates that he’s likely mistaken. As for the last, well…maybe I’m wrong, but basketball has always struck me as the most prima donna-ridden of sports, and the Miami locker room will now have three prima donnas within it. If they don’t win, look for things to deteriorate quickly, and heck, it might happen anyway if they do win. Lots of winning teams end up falling apart not because they get bad again, but because their chemistry can’t be maintained.
Ultimately, what it comes down to is that no one thinks that Lebron James had a moral obligation to stay in Cleveland. Most folks, though, think that he had a moral obligation to not be a dick. And by any reasonable standards of dickishness, Lebron James was a dick of epic proportions.
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Good eatin’!
Wow, it’s been a while since I did a food post here, hasn’t it? So here’s a round-up of some recent(ish) meals at Casa Jaquandor!
:: Grilled bratwurst. Yum. Not much to say here, just…grilled bratwurst! Yum!
I heart sausages of all types, and bratwurst may be my favorite. It’s just wonderful stuff. The trick is to get them off the grill at the exact moment the last little bit of pink in the middle has faded. It’s an art form, it is!
:: A while back I posted about Chiavetta’s chicken marinade, a staple of barbecue here in Western New York. At that time, it was still cold out, so I did the chicken in the oven. Well, I figured I should revisit Chiavetta’s, in the preferred cooking method: over charcoal. So here it is. The steps are the same: Marinade for a long time, and then grill until done. Once the chicken is done, the instructions say to put the chicken into a pan on the grill and then heavily baste it with more of the sauce, allowing the flavor to permeate the chicken via steaming (or something like that).
Here’s the chicken on the grill:
And here’s the chicken on the table:
:: I love a homemade pizza, but I’m kind of ashamed to admit that when I do the job, it’s not really homemade, as I’ve always used store-bought dough and sauce from a jar. Well, I decided that enough was enough on that score, so I made a pizza entirely from scratch a while back: my own dough and my own sauce, topped with cheese I grated and pepperoni and sausage made from a pig that I killed and butchered.
OK, that last part is a complete lie; my pepperoni and sausage came in packages. Do I look like the kind of fellow who could slay a pig? Of course not. Yeesh. But I did do the other stuff. Now I’ll probably experiment more with other crust and sauce recipes. Here’s how the finished product turned out:
It was really good. The dough recipe I used is an old one we’ve had around for a while that we got from Cooking Light Magazine — oh Cooking Light, how we miss the days when you weren’t a cheaply-done production! — and the sauce recipe I used is this one. The cheese and pepperoni are straight-forward; I just grated my own part-skim mozzarella. For the sausage, I cooked up three large links of Italian sausage and then cut them up into large chunks. My firm belief regarding sausage on pizza is that the chunks need to be big.
:: OK, let’s talk burgers.
I tend to be a bit on the lazy side when it comes to burgers at home. The Wife generally keeps us stocked up on frozen burgers that she gets from The Restaurant at which she works (don’t worry, she pays for them!), and that’s usually OK for me. Other times I’ll pick up pre-formed fresh ground beef patties at The Store, some of which they flavor with stuff. They have a Greek burger with feta cheese mixed right into the beef that’s terrific, as are the basic bacon-cheddar ones (with bacon pieces and shredded cheddar also mixed into the patties).
But every once in a while I want to taste the burgery-goodness flavor that you can really only get by grilling your own hand-made patties, so that’s what I did a couple of weeks back. I picked up a package of ground beef that was roughly 1.4 pounds and divided it up into three patties of such equal size as I could make, for three 7-point-something oz. burger patties. I added nothing to the beef at all — just the meat, although when the patties were shaped, I seasoned them on both sides with salt and pepper. (As Emeril Lagasse used to say on his shows, “I hate one-sided tasting food.”)
Then it was onto the grill!
Cooking burgers on the grill is about as easy as cooking something can be; all you have to do is keep an eye on things and spritz the flare-ups with water when they get out of hand. Every article or teevee show I’ve ever read or watched on the proper cooking of burgers gives the same two pieces of advice, and I agree whole-heartedly. Those pieces of advice are:
1. Flip the burgers exactly once.
2. Do NOT press down on the burgers with your spatula in hopes of making them cook faster.
Those rules are for your benefit, folks!
Oh, and the third rule: let the burgers rest a few minutes before allowing consumption.
Yeah, one of them turned out a bit bigger than the other two. Beef portioning FAIL!
When I do the frozen patty thing, I’m generally happy to throw the burger onto a bun, top it with ketchup and mustard, and call it good. But a patty like this deserves a bit more by way of stuff on the bun along with it, so here’s how my final burger ended up before I tucked into it. The only thing missing was a slice of fresh tomato. (Because when I was shopping, I didn’t think to grab a tomato. Argghhh!)
:: By the way, as long as I’m talking about burgers, I had a brief discussion of this topic on Facebook and since I’m talking food and burgers here, I’ll bring it up. There’s a new fad in the burger world, but I must protest the nomenclature thereof. What am I talking about?
I hate hate hate the term “sliders”.
Sliders, for those who haven’t had this craze hit them yet, are basically miniature burgers. They’re only about three inches in diameter, so consuming one takes about three or four bites. I’m not sure what the allure of these things is or why they’re so popular right now, but as I understand it, the term originated with the White Castle fast food chain, which sells tiny little burgers in packages of ten or something like that. (We don’t have White Castle in WNY, so I’ve never actually eaten one.)
I’m a bit baffled on the concept of miniature burgers to begin with, except for the idea that it might be a nice way to experience different mixes of condiments on one’s meal of burgery goodness at one time, but that notion is of limited appeal to me, anyway. Maybe for novelty’s sake it might be fun to have one little burger with ketchup and mustard, another with mayonnaise and onions, and a third with chili sauce, but…i’m just not that thrilled with the idea. For me, miniature burgers is probably a good thing to have for a kids’ birthday party, but that’s about it.
As much as I don’t understand why these little burgers have become so popular right now, I do admit that I loathe the term “slider”. Can’t stand it. It’s just an unpleasant sounding word for a food item. To be blunt, it sounds like a word one might use to describe an unwelcome experience one has with one’s bowels. “Sliders” to me sounds like another word for “Montezuma’s Revenge”, if you take my meaning. Hate the term. Hate it. I’d find the whole concept if they called it something else — miniwiches, perhaps. Or maybe teenyburgs. Or burgertwee’s. Or maybe we could honor some height-challenged celebrities or chracters and call them Colemans, or Tattoos, or Artooburgs.
Anything other than that awful word, “slider”.
And now, I’m off for the annual Taste of Buffalo food festival. Huzzah!