I remember having discussions on these issues/topics in the 90s during USENET days… here’s seeing history in the “here and now”.
Month: November 2007
-
Thirty-seven or Thanksgiving, But Who’s Counting?
Earliest Christmas carol: I heard the Christmas Song (Chestnuts roasting on an open fire…) on Veteran’s Day. That’s really lame, it’s almost like, let’s just get through Turkey Day to get to massive shopping the next. Kind of the same for my birthday – it was one of those, not a milestone, nothing to see, moving on type of days.
Jade Asian Restaurant, Flushing: Dimsum in the old Gum Fong. New decor is one part Shanghai Tang, one part Blue Ribbon. Ha gow and ha chern both excellent, as well as their other dumplings and buns. Jook (congee) was average, obviously using a boat motor blender as a shortcut. Check it out. Average tab: $15-20.
Downtown Atlantic: 10 minutes in this place, and you will be dying of hunger, as the scent of baking cupcakes will whet your appetite. Tried the Grandma’s Sunday Gravy (Spaghetti with tomato sauce with stewed meatballs and sausage, for those not having the privilege of having an Italian Sunday dinner). It was passable, but obviously they had to cut out significant trans-fat, which I had to supplement with dollops of butter. The other brunch options looked quite nice, topped off with your favorite baked good and a strong coffee.
Beltway elite now shopping at Costco. It’s rediscovering the Protestant work ethic for Thanksgiving – still feed everyone well, but at least you can say that you were frugal. I suppose that FreshDirect performs a similar function in New York City, although Fairway and Costco are serious competition here.
And the hunt is on for Christmas shopping – Black Friday loss leaders not worth it (and I’m not waking up at 5:30 to get them), but P and I bought snow boots at 20% off at EMS. Anyone know where you can find a Wii? Happy Holidays!
-
Post-Thanksgiving
In this Sunday’s NY Times:
In the NY Times’ Sunday Magazine, former US Poet Laureate Billy Collins reads his poem, “The Fish,” with accompanying seafood recipes (although I’m not sure that the recipes are from him).
The G subway line leaves so much to be desired, as this article on the upcoming subway lines report card notes.
A lengthy profile on Ang Lee, director, who lives in Larchmont, NY – and seems to enjoy it very much.
NY Times’ Motoko Rich on “A Good Mystery: Why We Read.”
Slate managing editor Jill Hunter Pellettieri suggests we move on from turkey leftovers. Are turkey leftovers that bad? But, it’s the American way! Well, okay, maybe it’s unnecessary, but so is the current hype on Black Friday – totally insane!
Slate’s found Michael Kinsley discusses how life experience is relevant to becoming, say, president.
Can I pull off my so-called novel before National Novel Writing Month ends? Will the writers’ strike continues? Stay tuned!
-
Happy Thanksgiving 2007!
Happy Thanksgiving!
Food, lots of food.
In the NY Times: How to carve a turkey, butcher style. The accompanying video was also pretty enlightening.
The NY Times’ Mark “The Minimalist” Bittman has a lovely idea on how to use leftover turkey – make turkey and mushroom barley risotto. He suggests lots of butter, at least in the video he did…
-
Taipei Taiwan Turkey Day Wishes
Hi folks,
Wishing you all a wonderful and safe Thanksgiving Day back stateside. B- and I had our dinner at Les Champs, a French style restaurant and are now really stuffed.
Winter has set but still comfortably cool. A few more weeks and then 2008. Wow.
-
Pre-Thanksgiving Stuff
A somewhat productive weekend – about halfway in the 50000 word National Novel Writing Month project.
Otherwise a sadly lazy Sunday. Watched Kylie Kwong on Discovery Home channel. As noted in a past FC post, I can’t get over her Australian accent. This particular episode I watched had her cooking noodles with her mom and her brother, and serving a whole bunch of dishes in entertaining her fabulous Brazilian friends.
A NY Times look at the law and economics analysis on the death penalty as deterrence issue. I still don’t know quite what to make of the question, since does a criminal really think, “Gosh, I could get the death penalty if I kill so-and-so”?
In the middle of the continuing tv/film writers’ strike – Saturday Night Live… on stage, to help the unfortunate colleagues.
NY Times’ Virginia Heffernan on the release of early Sesame Street episodes on DVD, and how they are so inappropriate for today’s kids (who are not to overeat like Cookie Monster used to be, or talk to strangers like Gordon or Susan or Luis, or notice the odd undercurrent between the roommates Bert and Ernie – hence a parental warning. A parental warning?).
Bill Clinton’s Presidential Library is now having a green roof. Cool.
And… well, I may go into further detail if anyone’s interested about Monday’s tv – a bit behind on “How I Met Your Mother” (a Special Thanksgiving episode) and … what an awesome “Heroes” episode! Mr. Bennet is The Man. Claire is… a dim-witted teenager with a serious power. Elle (played by the ex-Veronica Mars) is… a psycho whose Dad is probably no less foolish (and his identity was not a complete surprise to me; just love it when a theory gets proven true)… well, okay, so I won’t give everything away. Man, talk about timing by the writers’ strike…
-
Objects Are Farther Than They Appear
The billboards in Vegas make it seem that each casino is right there right where you can grab it. But that is not true – it is always a struggle to get from one to the other, or even to find the exit. A property that is “on the other side of the block” can be a mile away. This is the lesson of the conference I attended here in Las Vegas.
Event recap:
Thursday: dinner with P- at Mario Bateli’s Enoteca di San Marco in the Venician. Food on par with the dishes served in Otto, etc. However, they needed more waitstaff, because they were obviously slammed.Cirque du Soliel Love: excellent show. They weaved a selection of famous and not so famous Beatles songs, plus some choice studio outtakes with the famed acrobatic performers to create a truly psychadellic experience. Recommended.
Friday: I played a judge, first in moot court, then in a historical reinactment of a Japanese internment trial. Both experiences were fantastic. Our alma mater’s moot team did well, placing as a semifinalist and 2nd best brief. Finally, got to meet Survivor winner and conference speaker Yul Kwon. What a nice guy in person, and caused a lot of the women to swoon!
Other Strip events: rode the NY-NY rollercoaster, drank slurpees while walking through the Bellagio, and watched the free water light show at the Wynn while sipping port wine. Awesome!
Connecting Flight here at DFW has a one hour ground delay. Will be home by 6.
-
A Mid-November Pre-Thanksgiving Friday/Saturday
“The Death of E-Mail,” as this Slate article notes? No way! I still e-mail. I love e-mail. E-mail, don’t go away… (ok, yeah, I’m being facetious. Just a tad; darn teenagers think they rule the world with fads and dropping e-mail for Facebook and MySpace).
Readings: just finished reading former US Poet Laureate Billy Collins’ book – “‘The Trouble with Poetry’ and Other Poems” – and now reading another Collins book: “The Art of Drowning.” I had never read his poems, beyond what I’ve viewed of these very clever animated versions of his work on YouTube – so finally getting around to reading his work has been great. Accessible (but not low-brow), witty and funny, and visually stimulating; as noted in a previous post, I think Collins’ poems are reminiscent of Emily Dickinson’s (the American style of poetry, perhaps? I’m so not up on poetry) – but thankfully not as dreary or disjointed or just plain strange (I certainly feel that way of some of Emily Dickinson’s poetry).
Delayed response on-line on my part – tv critic David Bianculli left the Daily News on November 5, 2007, with his farewell column – just in time for the tv writers strike, and to have his own on-line magazine on the subject of tv, TV Worth Watching. Plug in Bianculli’s name in the search function of our blog here, and you can see how much I cite to him. I’ll miss him in the Daily News; I am now bookmarking his website, which looks pretty cool.
Query – am I really watching less tv, or is it because I’m too busy trying to write my so-called novel?
Late breaking news: could it be? The tv writers and the studios are going back to the negotiating table? Well, the tv writers’ strike continues, so far as anyone can tell…
NY Times with an article on how to spend a weekend on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn.
Procrastinating — it’s been going around by word of e-mail (umm, rather than by mouth, if you will), so try out Free Rice, a vocabulary game. For every word you get right, you get 10 grains of rice to help fight hunger. It doesn’t seem terribly much (those of us rice eaters can figure that 10 grains barely fill your spoon), but seems like a nice way to waste one’s time. Learn words (or at least improve your skills in the Process of Elimination or using those old SAT break-down-the-roots to get to a definition tactics) and get some rice for others.
-
Groundwork, or Why Costo for Travel
Made it into Vegas early Wednesday. Perfect 3 point on-time landing with American Airlines. New for Vegas this year – all of the car rental companies are now in a new Rent-A-Car mall. There is only one bus for all rental car companies that take you there. Literally, it is a mall in reverse – each rental company has a store, and then you go to the parking garage and pick up your car. NY should do that
Once in the rental car, I really had to make a pit stop and get some supplies for the room. I remembered that there was a Costco nearby. If you do a lot of driving travel, you should really have a Costco card along with AAA. First, Costcos usually have cheap gas (here, 11 cents cheaper per gallon). Second, cheap food – their quarter pound hot dog and 20 oz refillable soda combo is only $1.50. Third, if you need extra clothes (as I did in Seattle), drinks (the one in Vegas has perfect selections of wines or liquors for that room party), or medications, you can pick up cheap quantities. Fifth, in addition to their national Kirkland products, there are also local items that work well as souvenirs (this was most applicable in Hawaii). Finally, clean restrooms are always available. For an driving oasis, this is it.
Staying at the Suncoast. Dropped off at the Marriott, got shanghaied into helping out shopping with bags. Buffet was pretty good at $13 – totally broke the bank on them with their ox tail stew, which usually retails for $8 -$10 a serving. P– drove in at about 10 PM, and we had a late supper. Then we totally crashed out.
-
Post Veteran’s Day Stuff
On a serious note: on Tuesday, I had attended the tail end of the NYS/NYC Bar Associations’ rally at 60 Centre Street in support of the Pakistani bar’s situation, the event of which I had noted in a previous blog post. I’m not exactly sure of the media’s coverage of City Bar’s approach (Sewell Chan of the NY Times did blog it and there’s this article by Winter Miller of the NY Times – she actually took down comments from me, but I didn’t think it’d have amounted to much and it didn’t wind up in the article, understandably); NY Law Journal’s has quite the article (well, its job is to cover the local bar). Newsday, but not Daily News or Post? Guess I have to check the real newspapers to be sure. I did check Google – 34 articles on-line? Not bad! Well, it was just great to see NYC lawyers taking time to rally in support of rule of law and for colleagues who are trying to keep it alive in their country.
Not as serious stuff:
My National Novel Writing Month novel is slogging along. Some 20,000 odd words, and I’m not really sure how to go from Plot Point A to Plot Point B. My descriptions and settings are sucky. Dialog’s kind of funny at least, but this isn’t a screenplay or script. Arrgh. This is going to be quite the first draft.
Matt Damon’s People Magazine’s “Sexiest Man Alive” for this year, making his quote to the powers of People Magazine Time’s quote of the day: “You gave an aging suburban dad the ego boost of a lifetime.” Congratulations, Mr. Damon!
Monday TV:
“How I Met Your Mother” was quite timely – being November, it was time for Marshall to go on-line and check his NYS bar results (good lord, who on the writing people behind HIMYM is the former lawyer to know these true-to-life lovely details? I hope they’re on strike to get the credit they richly deserve – the accuracy of Marshall going crazy over not knowing whether he passed was too real). Only, Marshall can’t find his password to log in and he doesn’t want to wait for the mailed results (or check NY Law Journal? Come on, Marshall!). And, Ted goes crazy once he finds out why his friends don’t like his new girlfriend (they point out The Flaw), which leads Ted to point out Lily’s Flaw… which ultimately leads to Marshall remembering his password and finding that he indeed passed the bar. Let’s give a warm welcome to the newest member of the (fictitious) bar!
Hmm. I wonder if they’ll do an episode where Marshall has to deal with the Character and Fitness committee. Come on – they got to show that! There’s a sitcom plot to mine from that scenario; you can have Barney (played by the scene-stealing Neil Patrick Harris, ex-Doogie Howser), or Lily to mess up Marshall.
Saw some of NBC’s “Chuck” – wherein Chuck and his fellow CIA colleagues have to capture and cure themselves of toxic truth serum. Toxic truth serum maker was played by Kevin Weissman, who previously played dear Marshall Flinkman, the tech guy of “Alias.” Aww, Marshall – you’re a bad guy? At least on “Alias,” Marshall didn’t realize that he was on the Side of Evil (’cause he was working for SD6 thinking it was part of the CIA, only it wasn’t, and then he joined the real CIA, but he was still scared of Sloane, ’cause Sloane was Evil)… Oh, well. Pretty interesting episode; not sure if I’d be a “Chuck” watcher, but it’s a decent show.
“Heroes” – major episode explaining what happened “four months ago” – that is, the events that occurred right after the last season finale and explaining this season’s premiere. Skip this if you don’t want spoilers….
— Considering the slow pace of this season, this gave good explanations. I’m still bored with the Latin American twins, but at least they showed how Maya has something of a nasty streak in her personality (which intrigues me, because I haven’t bought her “I’m the Poor Victim” personality at all and her befriending Sylar is creepy…). Her brother’s still a boring irritation. Peter has his memory back, but really… who is “Adam” supposed to be? Good/evil? Just amoral? The actor David Anders was “Sark” on “Alias,” so you never know… Plus, Kristen Bell, former Veronica Mars, played up her character’s psychotic mutant very well (this character is soo NOT tough-but-moral Veronica). I still don’t care for Nikki, but sad that her husband went the way he did.
… end of spoilers…