I know I’ve posted this before, but I know it’s been a while and it’s a cooking tip that’s always worth revisiting, so here goes: the easiest and tastiest chicken recipe I know.

Just marinate your chicken in a mixture of the following ingredients, using equal portions of each: sesame oil, soy sauce, and honey. Then grill or roast the chicken as you see fit. That’s it. This is astonishingly easy, and it’s astonishingly good. I generally use a quarter cup of each ingredient, which makes plenty for a package of chicken containing two split breasts and two leg quarters, but if you’re doing an entire bird, you might want to up that to one-third or even one-half cup. Basting during cooking isn’t necessary, but I do it anyway.

Oh, and don’t salt the chicken before marinating or cooking. The soy sauce will make it pleasantly salty enough.

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OK, I’ve got to nip this in the bud, because I’ve seen it twice in twenty-four hours: For Your Eyes Only cited among the worst and most cartoonish of Roger Moore’s run of James Bond films. Lance tags it as the “worst”, actually, which I’ll grudgingly accept as a matter of taste, but Harry Knowles cites FYEO as “cheese” along with The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker, and dammit, Knowles should know better.

It may be a matter of opinion that FYEO is the best of the Roger Moore films, but it’s a simple fact that the film is far less cartoonish than the Bond films of the 1970s. Gone are the freakish henchmen like Jaws, Mr. Wint and Mr. Kidd, and Nick-Nack. The film is almost devoid of Q’s gadgets. The villains aren’t just evil for the sake of being evil, or possessed of bizarre motivations to rule the world; instead the plot revolves around cold-war intrigue (for just the second time in the series, surprisingly enough when one really thinks about it), in which the identity of the main villain isn’t even known until about two-thirds of the way through the movie. The various supporting characters around Bond — the girl Melina, the ally Columbo — all have histories, and genuine motivations for their various allegiances. Sure, there’s some broad humor (mostly involving the annoying figure skater), but there’s broad humor in every Bond film. FYEO puts Bond in some very real predicaments in which he can’t just survive by pushing a button on his wristwatch or by flipping a switch on the dash of his Lotus, and there’s a scene in which Bond executes an assassin in which Roger Moore is as ruthless as Sean Connery ever was.

It’s also worth noting that the turn towards cartoonishness didn’t start with Roger Moore: Sean Connery’s last Bond film (until 1983’s “outside the franchise” Never Say Never Again), Diamonds are Forever, is as cartoonish as anything that Moore would do in his first four films as Bond, which I think makes it clear that maybe it’s not Moore who played Bond as a cartoon character, but the people who wrote and directed the Bond films of the 70s who made things that way.

Oh, and Octopussy is a very good film too. And A View to a Kill even has its moments, much more so than Live and Let Die and The Man with the Golden Gun, both of which are truly bad (although LaLD does have a nice moment when Bond thinks he’ll get out of a scrape by the use of his gadget-of-the-week, only to be thwarted).

(On the topic of Casino Royale, I’m hoping to see it next week while I’m on blog-hiatus. But welcome back, Mr. Bond!)

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I found this on a message board the other day, and I just had to link it here, because I just love stuff like this: the little things that used to fill the peripheries of our lives, tiny details that companies would incorporate into their products for no other reason than it was cool to do so: beer bottle caps with puzzles printed inside them. I love the idea of some working-class guy sitting on a stool at the bar of his preferred watering hole after his shift had ended, sipping a cold one and solving the rebus printed on the liner of his bottle cap.

Of course, today if some warm body from the marketing department actually suggested something like this at a meeting of the execs of today’s mega-breweries, that poor soul would almost certainly be laughed out of the room.

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Stuff:

:: I’ve spent much of the past week or so getting over a cold that wasn’t particularly nasty as colds go, but has packed a particularly annoying punch in the “lingering congestion” department. And it turns out that phenylephrine decongestants, which have replaced pseudophedrine in OTC remedies like NyQuil and Sinutab and the like, suck. I spent three days listening to the world as though I was at the bottom of a diving bell before I realized that phenylephrine sucks, and that I was going back to pseudophedrine. So, anyway, Mucinex is my new best friend.

(Yes, I still do the Neti pot religiously, but it can only do so much.)

But I’ve passed the time reading blogs a little and reading books and magazines, some of which turn out to contain blog-like material! Who’da thunk it! I read A Night to Remember, the classic book about the sinking of the Titanic. Somehow I’d never read it before — but it’s a riveting read. I still love the James Cameron movie about the sinking (fashionable backlashes be damned!), but A Night to Remember fascinates by not only putting the small details from the actual tale of the sinking used in that film into context, but it’s also a surprisingly taut read, with almost no preamble before the horrible events begin to unfold. (The lookouts spot the iceberg on page two.)

Now I’m reading a new book of essays on food and restaurant life by Anthony Bourdain, The Nasty Bits. This is my first exposure of any sort to Bourdain, who comes off in this book as a fascinating soul. A representative passage:

But is fast food inherently evil? Is the convenient nature of the beast bad, in and of itself? Decidedly no. Fast food — which traditionally solves very real problems of working families, families with kids, business people on the go, the casually hungry — can be good food. If you walk down a street in Saigon, or visit an open-air market in Mexico, you’ll see that a quick, easy meal, often enjoyed standing up, does not have to be part of the hideous, generic sprawl of soul-destroying sameness that stretches from stip malls in San Diego, across the USA, through Europe and Asia and around again, looking the same, tasting the same: paper-wrapped morsels of gray “beef” patties with all-purpose sauce. The unbelievably high-caloric horrors of beef-flavor-sprayed chicken nuggets, of “milkshakes” that contain no milk and have never been shaken, of “barbecue” that has never seen a grill, “cheese” with no cheese, and theme monstrosities for whom food is only a lure to buy a T-shirt, is not the way it has to be.

Preach on, brother!

:: I’ve also started in on George R.R. Martin’s A Feast for Crows. I found Storm of Swords a bit grim for my tastes, although the shocks came fast and furious — the Red Wedding was a particular jolt. I haven’t read any of the Song of Ice and Fire books since Storm came out, and that was four years ago or more, so my memory of what’s going on in Westeros is a tad hazy. Can anyone recommend an online synopsis of the first three books, so I can get up to speed again?

(Tyrion’s not in this book. Bugger.)

:: The comic strip For Better or Worse will end next year. I read it every morning, mainly because I enjoy the characters on a soap-opera basis. The strip is rarely funny, but it’s generally endearing in a way, even though I sometimes perversely wish that the Pattersons would have to deal with some real shit, like having Michael lose his job without blundering into a better one, or something like that, but that’s just mean, eh?

:: A new review of mine ran in GMR, of The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana. Read the review, but better yet, buy the book. It’s amazing.

:: Can’t remember where I saw this linked, but it’s a list of the ten most racist TV commercials of all time. Some of these are awful.

:: NBC’s doing that “Supersize comedy shows” thing again, in which they basically stick even more ads into their shows. NBC sucks.

:: Verify range to target, one ping only. Check out these photos! They’re amazing. (via)

:: Screw you, ABC! I didn’t spend all those years hating Emmitt Smith and everything he stood for as the star running back of the Dallas F***ing Cowboys just so I could end up rooting for him on some dancing show! But I could not, in good conscience, root for the guy who once tried to steal Kelly Kapowski from Zack Morris. Betrayer most foul!!!

:: A brief Office liveblog: Jim and Pam are back in the same office. All is right with the world. Kum-bay-yah…. And oh God, Dwight has a rival. This is awesome.

:: People are camping outside stores for a new PlayStation? Huh? Come on, folks. Camping outside for a videogame system is just lame. Acceptable things for camping outside are: Sabres tickets, new Star Wars movie tickets, Super Bowl tickets, and the latest models of Dewalt power tools. PlayStations? Feh!

:: If you’ve ever wondered what the greatest cat toy ever is, look no further: it’s a laser pointer. Seriously. They chase that red dot everywhere.

:: Finally: I will be going on a blogging hiatus beginning next Tuesday, and probably ending a week later. This Monday’s posts will be the last for that duration — but I’ll probably solicit posting suggestions for my return, along the lines of the old “Ask Me Anything!” game from a while back.

:: Oh yeah, since I never posted anything about the Bills game the other day: I’m rapidly coming to the view that JP Losman may be a bust, and the O-line still sucks major rocks. And I didn’t even get to see Peyton Manning light it up. Ugh.

Oh well, at least the StuPats lost in a game in which the last play was Tom Brady fumbling. That was a nice consolation prize!

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Two years ago I reviewed a book for GMR called Airborn, by Kenneth Oppel, which is a steampunk-kind of adventure novel which postulates a world around the beginning of the twentieth century where the predominant form of long-range travel and shipping was not by sea but by air, in giant airships kept aloft by a gas called “hydrium”. You can go read the review for more, but basically, the book was a thrilling adventure yarn.

I’ve just read the sequel, Skybreaker, in which our hero, Matt Cruse, reunites with the heroine from the first book, Kate Devries, in a quest to find an airship that was “lost at sky” forty years earlier, and to gain the riches of the lost ship’s reclusive owner.

I know, I know, it sounds all goofy, but these two books are about as fun as adventure yarns get. Seriously, reading them makes you want to pop up some popcorn and fill in the narrative blanks with music by Max Steiner or John Williams. The world Oppel creates is pretty snazzy, too; there’s a realism to the pseudo-nautical culture he creates for his airship “sailors”, and I loved how the ship that is designed to sail to very high altitudes is crewed by Himalayan sherpas.

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Quick notes:

:: Trips last Tuesday afternoon to three different brick-and-mortar music-selling establishments proved fruitless, so I had to order the complete Two Towers score from Amazon. It arrived on Thursday. I have only been able to listen to the first of the three discs thus far, but once again I’m astounded at the scope of Howard Shore’s conception, and the way all of his motifs effortlessly mirror other ones, creating one of the most unified sound-worlds I’ve ever heard in a filmscore. Just magnificent. I’m glad it’ll be a whole year to The Return of the King, because I have three hours of Two Towers music to study. I do wish that Doug Adams’s book on the LOTR music was forthcoming sooner, though.

:: Via MeFi I learn that one should probably not scrub one’s kid’s face with a Magic Eraser, a cleaning product that is designed to remove from walls things like magic marker. Who’da thunk it, eh?

:: When last I updated the space opera reading project, I noted that one of my selections was a work written in the 1930s by Jack Williamson, who was as of that writing still alive. That is now no longer the case: Williamson died on Friday. He was 98; his last novel was published in 2005, with his first published work dating 77 years before that. What a career. I salute you, Mr. Williamson: Clear ether!

That’s what’s going on today. Snore.

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Jonah Goldberg:

I think James Baker and Dick Cheney should take Bush out to the woods around Camp David. After 24 hours in a sweat lodge, he should be given only a loin cloth, a hunting knife and a canteen of water. Bush should then set out to track and kill a black bear, after which he should eat its still beating heart so he can absorb its spirit. He should then fly back to Washington in Marine 1. His torso still scratched from the bear’s claws, his face bloodied and steaming in the November chill, he should immediately give a press conference at which he throws the bearskin on the front row of the press corps, completely enveloping Helen Thomas, declaring, “I’m not going anywhere.”

This will send important messages to Democrats and well as to our enemies overseas, who are no doubt high-fiving as we speak.

Ummmm…yeah. Because the guy you want as your Manliness Mentor is Dick Cheney, the guy who indulges in canned hunts where he still manages to mistake fellow old white men as fattened grouse.

(via TBogg)

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Still don’t feel much like blogging: big doin’s at The Store tomorrow (involving a visit by the very folks whose name is in big letters on the side of our building), for which we’ve worked very hard all week; fatigue from all the impromptu dancing I’m doing whenever I remember that the Democrats beat the snot out of the Republicans on Tuesday (guess that loony Howard Dean knew what the hell he was doing with that 50-State-Strategy of his, eh?); and general tiredness from putting up with a cold for the last few days.

So, just some more quick stuff:

:: Interesting stuff, as always, by Matthew Yglesias on the myth of Karl Rove (noting that Rove has often made errors of electoral strategy that always came close to failing, and finally failed spectacularly) and the myth of this election as a rise of Democratic conservatism (noting that in just about every case, Republicans were beaten by someone to the left of them, which can only serve to ultimately push the political tone in this country to the left).

:: If you haven’t been reading Shamus’s “DM of the Rings” comic, you really gotta. In this installment he notes that for a role-playing game fanatic, a new set of gaming dice is always a new event. It’s like getting a new box of Titleist golf balls, I guess. Even though I haven’t played AD&D in over a decade, I still have my dice in my desk somewhere; they’re in one of those nifty little drawstring bags that those small bottles of Crown Royal whiskey used to come in.

But my favorite dice were my DM’s. His dice all had pointy vertices, as opposed to the rounded ones like the ones that adorn the masthead of Shamus’s blog. With those pointy dice, you could hold the D8 between two fingertips and spin them like tops.

:: Film composer Basil Poledouris has died. He was a sadly underrated composer, and he will be missed.

That’s all. More blogging when I feel like doing more blogging.

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