Barenaked Ladies- Bedside Manor (The Bathroom Sessions)

Barenaked Ladies - One Week (The Bathroom Sessions)

Really good stuff.

Hey, I said it was stupid.

At first, his replies were very short, but he really settled in, and went for it after a few minutes.  He caught up with how the other party was doing.  They seemed to be doing alright.

Then he started talking politics.  The Cell Phone Shitter is amazed at how close the race is, and thinks that if the Dems would have gone with someone completely beneign, they would have this one cinched.  He also thinks they’re just spouting whatever rhetoric necessary to get elected.  As if this was not true of their opposition.  He doesn’t really support McCain, but the Shit Chatter is afraid of a Democrat Congress being unchecked with a Democrat in office.

Whether I agree with his politics or not– I dont– What a shit head.

(Eric at the organ.  Photo by Adam Flaherty and his InternetPhone.)

Some time back in July, my longtime friend, Tim Collins, asked me if I wanted to record keyboards with his band, “The Sea Captains.”  If he could provide the rides to and from the Manchester Airport, I’d be there and be square.

I flew up on Wednesday night, hopped in Tim’s pickup truck for a two-hour drive to Portland, Maine, and was greeted at Tim’s one bedroom apartment by band co-founder Adam Flaherty and two other band members, Zach and Marty.  It was a clean-cut white guy convention.  We had a night cap beer, a quick Mario Kart session, and went to sleep.  Rock and roll!

We woke up early, ate some cereal, and drove to meet John Wyman, the producer, at his recording studio.  It’s a lone white house on a country road, with sound-proofed, boarded-up windows.  He moved in not long ago, and everything was custom built to his specifications.

The first order of the day was to listen to what had already been done.  He played three tracks for us: two rock songs and a Christmas song.  Everything was done save for the keys, some background vocals, and various little additional parts.  The songs sounded great.  We discussed what I’d be doing, and went right to work.

(Similar to the keyboard at John’s studio.  Photo by Daniel Spils.)

We started on the X-mas song, since it was the most straight forward.  I sat at the Rhodes electric keyboard in the recording room, while John and the band sat in the studio.  I could hear them through the headphones, and they could hear everything I said and played. I started out playing along with the whole song, mistakes and all.  When they got a feel for what I was doing, we broke the song into little sections, and recorded each one.  I got caught up here and it, but it went smoothly enough.

In my head, this is what they were saying in the studio:

Zach: Who is this hack?

Marty: This is garbage.  We’re wasting our time.

Tim: I thought he’d be at least mediocre, but this is just plain garbage.

Adam: This is mostly Tim’s fault.

Zach: Just hearing this makes me want to quit the band for good.

As far as I know, it wasn’t like that, unless they’re really good liars.

We listened to the song with the keys.  The band liked it.  I was relieved.  I also felt like a rock and roll super god.

We moved on to a rock and roll song.  I suggested we break out the organ.  John’s organ is this really old double-stacked thing, which hooks up to this person-sized speaker cabinet.  I like playing loud instruments, so this was a lot of fun.  I’ve never really played an organ in any serious manner before, so John and the band had to coach me towards the ’sound’ they wanted.  This song took me a little longer, but they got what they wanted.  After the organ track was done, I layed down a synth track to double what the guitar was doing in the verse.

The rest of the day was spent recording backup vocals, sleigh bells, a xylophone, guitar.  A girl came by, and recorded some beautiful sounding violin for the Chrismas song.

At the end of the session, we all went into the booth, and recorded group backup vocals and hand-claps.  That was a blast.  Amazing.  So much fun!

Then, in a flash, we went home, got a couple hours of sleep, drove back to the airport, I flew home, got a shower, and went to work.  My ‘Rock and Roller For a Day’ experience was over, and I was back to my working shlub life.

A Message to The Sea Captains: If you ever play a live show, where a song can be played in about fifty takes, I’ll be your piano man.

A dangerous act:
Google Image ‘toe‘ at work.
Alt-F4 really fast.

The place is on 10th and Arch in Chinatown, right near “Hour Lab Pretty Picture Photo,” the photo processing place with the one of the worst designed signs in the city.

It was my turn for Breakfast Friday at work this morning.  And, boy, was I late.  On my way from my house to South Square, I dashed in front of a stopped bus.  I caught eyes with the bus driver:  Pink hair, big smile.  I stopped.  She LAAAUUUGHED and so I did.

“YOU STILL RUNNIN’!!”

I waved goodbye and sped off.

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I loved it.

Better than the hype.

The car was stopped in front of the intersection.  The guy waved me in, “Come on, we can still catch it.”  Thoughts of all the terrible things that happen to people in movies when they get in strangers’ cars raced through my head.  But he looked nice enough.  I got in, and the chase was on.  “I used to live at 24th and Grey’s Ferry.  That happened to me all the time.”  We exchanged pleasantries and nose laughs.  It didn’t take much to catch up to the bus.  I saw my chance.  We shook hands, and I opened the door– the bus drove off again.  I got back in really quickly, and he caught up once again, “If this light is red, I can catch it.”  It was.  “See ya!”  I threw open the door.  The light turned green.

I felt my spikes dig into the track, the bang of the slamming door a starter’s pistol.  I burst out of the blocks, a track-star reborn.  The bus accelerated, but so did I.  Reaching the back, I pounded my fist against a window. I rocketed past the bus as it slowed to a stop, turned, then walked up the steps.

The driver, with a big smile and an explosion of pink hair, burst into laughter.  “You was faster than the bus!  Oh my gawd, I can’t believe that!  You was flyin’!”  The passengers joined in, laughing, commenting, “You get on this bus, you just gunna be late!  Might as well run the rest of the way!”  I was laughing, “I caught ya!”

I sat down near the back, and made tiny talk (it’s even smaller than small talk) with the people on the bus.  We didn’t get into politics or energy policies.  It was mostly about me being fast.  The bus driver kept laughing to herself, which made me laugh back.

When we got to 9th Street, the bus was mostly empty.  I walked up to the front for my stop.  “You made my morning, my whole day, that was amazing!  All of the passengers loved you, they was all talking about it the whole time.”  On my way out I joked, “You wanna race?”  She said, “You’d probably win.”  I waved goodbye and have a nice day.  She stuck her head out the side window, “I love you, that was so great!”

Besides sweating this early in the morning in work clothes, it’s not a bad way to start the day.

First, I made a rub out of salt, pepper, baking soda (it crisps the skin, by drawing out moisture), paprika, cumin, cardamom, coriander, brown sugar, and cayenne. The chicken sat in the fridge for an hour and a half while I prepared the grill. Remember how my grill was stolen? I got a new (used) one from some Penn girl via Craigslist. It’s a lot crappier than the one I had, but it does the job. It was set up in standard-issue indirect cooking fashion, with hardwood charcoal to either side, and a water-filled drip pan in the middle.

The chicken took about five hours to reach the proper temperature. The skin was crispy, the meat was tender, the rub tasted great. When I carved the legs, I nearly didn’t need to use the knife. The connective tissue had practically melted in the slow and low cooking.

This is the best whole chicken I’ve made all year. Juan and I ate it outside, with our hands. Talk about ‘Speed Eaters.’ We killed it. Delicious, moist, amazing, great, adjective, tender, falling off the bone, gaaaaaaahhhhhh.

I’m a new fan of Girl Talk [wikipedia] the mash-up musician who’s album ‘Feed the Animals‘ [wikipedia] is a pop culture music bomb for your ears. And it’s free for download here. He appropriates music from across all generations and chops it up into dance anthems for those lacking an attention-span.

Go get the album and dance your face off.

I think I found my Friday Night Anthem for the next month or two.

We just upgraded computers and software at work.  We’re now running these beastly 8 core, 8GB RAM machines with Max Design 2009.  I ran into some problems during the switch from Max 9 though.

The other night, I was stuck at work, trying to get these files ready to render.  At around midnight, a funny (terrible) thing happened.  Everytime I sent the file out to Backburner, it would crash.  I went into troubleshooting mode: Saving As, stripping the file down to nothing (sexy), and building it back up from there.  It turned out that ANY camera– VRayPhysicalCamera, a Max default Camera– would crash the file on Backburner.  Oddly, it rendered fine with a single computer.

I searched the Google Machine to find that a couple other people had posted about this as well.  But there was little help to be found.  I discovered the answer after my night of sleep, dreams of 3D teapots lingering in my head.  I had spent three hours trying to fix the problem in vain.  Autodesk has issued a Service Pack (SP1).  Install it, and the problem goes away.  Simple!

I hope this post finds some late-night Googlers racing towards their own deadlines.  Good luck.

Thanks for taking my call today, I appreciate you suing FedEx instead of the competition. If you have a question or you notice your need to ship going up, fell free to call me, I am in the office from 7:30 till 4 everyday.

They’re so gracious for a company that’s being sued. Tom Hanks from ‘Castaway’ would have given this guy a promotion.

I came back home to find green beans growing on my green bean plant that I started from seeds.  Across the back yard, another story unfolded to kill my excitement.

My grill is gone.  I just bought it.  And someone stole it.  I don’t picture backyard thieves being big charcoal grillers.  It takes time, money, and work to successfully light and use a charcoal grill, and stealing is the easy way out.  I hope the person who stole my grill burns themselves terribly using it.

The whole process was only a few days from beginning to end. That process is documented in the form of a the little video below.

Read about them at Pitchfork,  or listen at their MySpace page.

Here’s an easy way to use Google Maps, Photoshop, and 3D Studio Max to generate a pretty good site plan for architectural visualization.

First, find your site in Google Maps. I’ll pick a random part of Philadelphia. Take a screen shot, using the ‘Print Screen / SysRq” button on your keyboard, which is above the number pad. Do you really not know how to take a screen shot? And you’re doing visualization work? Come on, now.

In Photoshop, make a new document, and paste the screenshot in there. Crop it.

Tyler, Chris, and Tom can see their house from here! They aren’t going to read this!

Next, in Photoshop, do this: Select –> Color Range.

Use the eye dropper to select the areas where houses should be. Then click the Eyedropper + (Plus) tool in the Color Range dialog, and do the grass area and parts like that dark grey on the bottom right side of my image.

Manually fix up any gross areas.

Notice how poorly that’s selected. Fix that.

a) Click the ‘Paths’ tab. (It’s in the same box as your Layers.) b) Make a work path from selection.

You’ll notice, it’s imperfect.  Try some different tolerances with your Make Work Path.  Undo your previous click, then this time when you click the Make Work Path button (b), hold down the “ALT” key at the same time.  Try a tolerance of 2.  You can try anywhere from .05 to 10.

From the Photoshop Help Center:

Tolerance values can range from 0.5 to 10 pixels and determine how sensitive the Make Work Path command is to slight changes in the selection shape. The higher the tolerance value, the fewer the anchor points used to draw the path and the smoother the path. If the path is used as a clipping path and you have problems printing the image, use a higher tolerance value.

Okay, you have your path.  Time to get it out of Photoshop and into 3D Studio Max.

In Photoshop.  File –> Export –> Paths to Illustrator.  Save your .ai file.

In Max.  File –> Import –> Select your file (.ai at the bottom!) –> Merge Objects with Current Scene –> Single Object

The simplest thing to do right now would be to go to put an Extrude Modifier on this, and call it a day.  We might as well complicate it a bit.  Let’s make this prettier.

Step 1: Clean up.

There are some stray vertices.  Select ‘Vertex’ under your Editable Spline.  Delete the little guys that are just floating around randomly.

Step 2: Resize.

You might want this to actually be to scale.  If you know the size of one of the blocks, or an area on the map from point to point, make a box that size, and scale the map up to meet it.  What I did was much more clever than that.  I went to Google Maps, right clicked on one point –> Directions from here.  Then on another point –> Directions to here.  It was 0.2 miles.  A little basic math reveals that’s 1056 feet.  I made a box that size, and scaled my map up to match it.  Nice!

Now go to the Tools in Max, and do a Reset XForm.

Collapse your stack to an Editable Spline.  Now you have a properly scaled site map.

Step 3: Sidewalks & Grass.

In these instructions, I’m assuming you know how to use Max reasonably well.  This stuff is too basic to provide a million little thumbnails.  If you don’t get something here, it’s definately in the Max manual.

Add an Extrude modifier to your Editable spline, the height of a curb, about 5″.

Add an Edit Poly modifier.  Select the Polygon Sub-object.

(We’re in the Edit Poly options now…)

Down in the Polygon Properties, Do a Select ID for 1.  That should grab all of the top polygons of your map.  If it doesn’t, select one of the top polygons and identify it’s ID.  Select that ID.

Under Edit Polygons, do an Inset.  My sidewalks are 5′ wide.  I don’t know if that’s right, but I’m sticking to it.

If you want to differentiate the height of your grass from the sidewalk, Extrude it either down or up, depending on your preference.

Step 4: Materials.

You need to set your Material IDs for a Multi/Sub-Object material.  In your Edit Poly modifier, under Polygon Properties…

(Make sure that ‘Clear Selection’ is checked.)

Select ID 1.  It should select your Grass and Sidewalk.  Click Shrink.  Now, only your Grass is selected.  Set that as Material 5, which is an empty material ID.

Select ID 1 again.  Notice how the sides of your sidewalk aren’t in that ID?  Click one of those sides.  Mine are ID 3.  Select ID 3, and make it ID 1.

Now, when you Select ID 1, the whole sidewalk should be in that ID.

Click a polygon on the bottom part of the sidewalk.  Mine are Material ID 2.  Select ID 2.

Delete these Polygons, you’ll never see them.  They’re a waste of resources.

At this point, I would consolidate my materials to just ID 1 and ID 2.  If you’ve come this far, you can do this.

In your material editor, assign a Multi/Sub-Object with 2 Materials to your site plan.  Throw on your favorite concrete and grass materials.

That’s it.  Put down a ground plane, map it with asphalt for a road.  Slammo, instant site plan.  Well, not instant, but close enough.

Watch out, the video’s loud.

The bus driver who wrote this sign clearly does not understand how to use quotes or punctuation. There are many ways to read this sign, but I’m going to translate it this way.

First, you’re meant to see “No Eating” and No Drinking. He literally means that you can’t drink on the bus. No water, no juice, god help us, no booze. But what is he trying to say by putting “No Eating” in quotes? Should we read this as if he’s saying it? Sometimes we use quotes in a wink-wink kind of way. To what innuendo or second meaning could he be referring?

On this bus at all! Sure, this isn’t a complete sentence, but who has time anymore in this hectic work-a-day world? At least sort of connects to sentence b4. Make sense. Sort of.

“Stop.” My first inclination is that this bus driver knows the cleaning staff where I work. They have a similar sign-writing style. By putting stop in quotes, I’m not sure if I should or not. Did George Washington or another great man or woman say “Stop” once, and the bus driver is trying to invoke that instance? If so, where is the bibliography. Maybe it’s on the back of the sign.

Or maybe the bus driver just ain’t that bright.

Just as the asparagus risotto finished up, I seared a couple of big scallops to ride along with the creamy rice to dinner.The risotto recipe and techniques comes from Mark Bittman’s show “The Best Recipes in the World.” The video which accompanies the recipe shows Mario Batali demo-ing how to cook perfect risotto, while Bittman offers color commentary.  I’m definitely a convert to Batali’s less stirring method.  Instead of using stock, I used the water I blanched the asparagus in, which was seasoned with salt and a garlic clove.

MB featured a couple of scallop treatments on his blog the other day, which brought me to the seafood counter at DiBruno’s.  Boy, scallops sure are expensive at just under $20/lb.  Four big ones cost about $12.

I missed the mark by about 10-15%.  The asparagus tips were a little too al dente, the rice just past al dente, and the scallops a pinch underseasoned.  Next time, I think I’ll nail it.   If I can afford the scallops.

The whole family went on a tour of Buenos Aires today. Rudy served as the tour guide of our car load of Juan, Kelly, Adriana, and me. We went to the Plaza de Mayo, San Telmo, Plaza San Martin, and Calle Florida. Of most interest was our stop to La Boca. (”The Mouth,” which I´m guessing is named for the port.) Docked in the port is a dilapidated boat, which used to be the brand new ferry that took the family to Punta Del Este in the summers. The first thing you notice upon opening the car door is the thick smell of damp shit wafting in from the river. It´s strong and takes some getting used to. The houses in La Boca are painted in bright colors and look like a Disney-fied tourist spot, but it´s been that way since the beginning, and people live there. We stop by the shop where Rudy´s father paints, but he´s not there, and meander the streets. The setting sun makes the area especially vibrant.

I still don´t believe the thirty five foot banner that hangs outside Don and Pili´s house.

“Welcom Challenger, Columbia, and Family.” In small letters, it reads, “Nasas Failures.” El Don has really outdone himself with this one. I thought I knew how to take a joke to the extreme, but I am proven unworthy. The man had a banner painted and hung. It´s unbelievable and hilarious.

A few friends and family are greeted in the foyer as the party gets under way. The action moves to the tented area and adjoining the living room, which has been cleared to serve as a dance floor. The DJ plays lighter music, the wine and appetizers make their way through the crowd. Soon, everyone is dancing, the lamps in the living room off, in favor of a disco ball and colored lights. The party rages on, with a mix of latin and American music, and an endless stream of wine and food. I meet a fascinating ten year old girl who speaks better English than myself. She wants to know about “Happy Birthday, Harris Malden,” so I tell her the story. When I´m done, she tells me about her movies, “I’ve already invented like four, five movies. In my head. And I´m ten.” When I say, “That´s amazing,” I actually mean it. The movies are sequels to a series of movies like “Pirates of the Caribbean,” “The Chronicles of Narnia,” and “Harry Potter.” She´s going to need a lawyer to sort out the copyright issues, but they´re clevered created stories. I also found a girl closer to my age to dance with. Denise was shy, spoke English, and most importantly, laughed at my jokes. We Twisted and Shouted, and I earned another nickname from Rudy, “The Shark.” He told me to stay away from Sophia. I told him he was crazy. We hugged. Slowly, guests left, and the DJ closed up shop. We sat around the dinner table joking around until maybe six in the morning. These Argentinians know how to party, young and old alike.

Slowly, guests left, and the DJ closed up shop. We sat around the dinner table joking around until maybe six in the morning. These Argentinians know how to party, young and old alike.

We eat a light breakfast of cookies, bread, and cereal, and we’re off to the beach. It’s only two blocks away. We run into the water, which is colder than expected, but refreshing. What can I say, it’s the beach? They sell corn on the cob with butter and salt. The kernels are huge, juicy, and full of corn-itude. We walked for miles along the beach with Juan’s uncle Rudy, his kids, Sofia and Consalo, and Oriana, joking around the whole way. Rudy has a boundless supply of energy, and emanates warmth. He can tell a story with a single expression. The first day, when doling out the meat at the asado, he walked around asking, “Pig? Cow? Mother fucker?” Hilarious in a perfect Foreign Guy accent. He is in a perpetual good mood, which is contagious.

Lunch-Dinner is a mix of salads, ham (constantly present), cheese, tomatoes, and other odds and ends. Later on, I checked out an ice cream shop, flirted with the ice cream server in broken Spanish (where is the party where I dance and drink?) I need to learn more Spanish for proper flirtation. The ice cream couldn’t hold a candle to Saverio’s. Then I returned to the apartment. Juan was worried that I had gotten killed or drowned.

Juan, Rudy, Sofia and I went for a run around the peninsula. The 5km run was surprisingly easy to get through, and just beautiful. The moon, the water, the stars, and the perfect weather. Oh, the lame poetry that could be written!

The whole family went out to an Italian restaurant. After appetizers of bruschetta and margherita pizza came my entree of Spaghetti alla Puntanesca. It’s similar to the Chicken Provencal I made with anchovy, olives, capers (again, these were milder and bigger than Trader Joes’) and tomato sauce. This was Italian food done very well– let’s say it beat the Olive Garden (When You’re Here, You’re Upset!) They asked if I wanted it spicy, to which I said yes. ‘Spicy’ in Argentina sometimes means cracked black pepper, because it was mild as a lamb sleeping in a meadow. We were the loud ones in the restaurant once again, and dinner was a lot of fun. Roberto got the whole table going with stories about a group they call “The Breakers,” one of whom is Juan’s uncle, Pablo. He could barely get through the story, he was laughing so hard, which is quite a sight to see. He looks so serious when he’s just sitting there, and when he laughs it’s the complete opposite. His littlest daughter, Delfina, walks around the table doing what Juan and I call “her job.” She taps, hits, or pokes everyone as she walks by, around and around and around. It’s a lot of work, but she puts the hours in, and– end of the day– it’s rewarding. Kelly keeps her company. They’re bonding well, despite the language barrier.

The Long Night Out
We returned from dinner around 1am. Juan and I started preparing for the long night out. Coffee and scotch were consumed in large volumes as family members passed old photos around the group. The highlight was the surprise in Oriana’s face every time another photo of her father Roberto came out with a different girl he was dating. That’s not my mom, that isn’t either, that definitely isn’t my mom!

Juan and I rushed out into the night at 3am, laughing, enjoying the weather. We should have paid attention to where we were going. We wandered the streets, trying to find a familiar landmark. We soldiered on, finding the Italian restaurant, gaining our bearings, we ended up at a pool hall.

The locals looked at us like we were sweethearts on honeymoon. We ordered some whiskey and sat at a booth. Eventually, we struck up a conversation with the girls playing pool. I can’t really call my part “conversation” so much as a word or two and a smile. Me llamo “Challenger.” Before you know it, the Challenger had played and lost a couple of games of pool. But I lost them loudly and with much fanfare. When Juan was asked why we were yelling so much, he said, ¨Because it’s The Challenger!!” We left for the popular bars.

It must have been five in the morning by the time we got to the next bars. We sat with a table of girls who worked there, but weren’t on the clock. One of them spoke English. Their Way-Too-Drunk Co-worker Julia brought plates of chicken fingers and fries and free drinks. We talked about nothing until they were ready to leave. The night was somehow still going.

We met a very tall English-speaking Norweigan looking for cocaine. I hope he found what he was looking for. We also met a set of stoners from Montevideo, the beach town near the ferry. They were the last standing of their friends, who were scattered amongst the tables in various states of drunkenness. They were exceptionally nice, and told us all about the sexiness of the women during the peak season of Punta del Esta, which is the first two weeks of January. We greeted the sunrise with our stoner buddies, then trekked home.

We watched the sun rise over the giant hand sculpture on the beach, then went to sleep around seven in the morning.

Brunch is mostly yesterday’s dinner with some new parts and pieces. And then the ice cream shows up again. I ate too much again.

Juan and I taxi to the Buquebus, a ferry, where we meet up with the family. It’s a big boat with Amtrak style seating and parking for the cars underneath. It’s a three hour ride to Uruguay, and then two more in the car until we get to Punta del Este. El Don’s driving is erratic, like everyone else’s in the country. I try to sleep to pass the time, but that doesn’t work. I wish I had taken more of the sleeping pills. They’ve made the six hour journey to Punta del Este multiple times a year for as long as they can remember, so it’s perfectly normal. Not for us. “Hey, guy’s let jet out to the beach…in London.”They use the word ‘apartment’ to explain our accommodations, but it’s a mistranslation. Two-thirds of a floor of a high rise overlooking the beach, with five bedrooms, multiple bathrooms, and balconies is more than just an apartment. Juan and I share a little side room with enough space for the two little beds, one of which rolls out from under the other, and our bags.

Time to go out to dinner! The Yacht Club Restaurant is empty save for a couple at a nearby table. It isn’t long before appetizers start rolling out: fried fish nuggets, fried calamari, octopus sauteed in butter, amazingly fresh langoustines, bread & butter, red wine, another calamari dish all precede the Fish with Brown Butter and Capers. The fish is a fresh and haddock-like, and the capers are bigger than the ones we’re used to and mild. The dinner is filled with laughter and a mix of languages. I gain a nickname: Challenger. I can eat and eat until I explode. Get it? Juan is Columbia. We must be bothering the couple at the table next to us, because we’re a loud bunch. I can’t understand the story Roberto is telling about Juan’s uncle Pablo, but watching him crack up trying to tell it is enough to make me burst out laughing. There is plenty of red wine and a ridiculous amount of food. I feel at home with Juan’s family, and we’re really starting to get to know each other. Sandra, Roberto’s wife, helps me decode the menu. Their youngest kids, Delfina and Marlena are too young for English, but I’m counting on funny faces and smiles to win them over. It’s slowly working. Their oldest daughter, Orianna, is 12. She knows a little bit of English, but she’s shy, and content to talk with Sofia. I don’t expect a twelve year old girl to have much to say to me anyways. I don’t keep up on ‘Hannah Montana.’ Is that what they watch? I’m not sure.

After the meal, we go out to the bars with Juan’s eighteen year old cousin, Sophia. She has studied English for about nine years, so I can switch back to my native tongue. It’s relaxing. Or maybe it’s the glass of whiskey that’s relaxing. Both the Irish pub and the place with the jazz players are pretty dead. The bartender tells me things get busy around three in the morning. We turn in at about 2:45am. The party hasn’t even started yet, but we’re beat from a day of traveling. Tomorrow, we say, we’re not coming home until it’s light out.

It takes a day of travel from Philly to Baltimore, then DC, before finally arriving to the airport in Buenos Aires, where we meet Juan´s grandparents on his mother´s side, El Don and Pili. I was half conscious through most of the eleven hour plane ride thanks to a couple of sleeping pills, but I can´t say that the twenty four hours of travel was enjoyable.

The Argentinian countryside on the way to Buenos Aires is familiar. It´s a mix of New Hampshire and Europe.I´m stirred awake as the car pulls into the garage. Anna Maria, the maid– yeah, there’s a maid–, helps us with our bags. The street could be one of the nicer blocks in West Philadelphia, except the houses are more European and better kept.

Juan´s grandparents live in a gated compound of sorts. Well, compound makes it sound bigger than it is, I suppose. There´s a well manicured lawn leading to the main house, a pool, a patio and grill, and a guest apartment where Juan and I will be staying. It´s well furnished, without being stilted; comfortable and welcoming.

In the kitchen there are pastries. Buttery half moon croissants and the one with fresh dulce de leche are my favorite. There are a variety of meats on the counter. Beef ribs, pork belly, little and big sausages, and Morcilla (more’see’sha) the famed Blood Sausage. It´s Juan´s favorite food, and I´m ready to eat it– coagulated blood and fat shoved in intestines. That´s good? Okay.

We shower off the day of travel and change in anticipation for the family´s arrival. Juan´s aunt Adrianna and uncle Roberto show up with their spouses and children. There’s no way to remember all of these people and their names. Hours and hours of feasting commence.

First come appetizers of cheese, ham, salami, olives, and bread. Then, some drink called G? Americano. I can´t remember, I´ll have to ask Juan. It´s very casual, everyone´s meeting, talking, and catching up with each other. They light the traditional Argentinian grill, the parilla (pa-ree-sha), for an asado or barbecue. A natural charcoal called ‘carbon vegetal’ and wood are lit in a metal basket, fall to the brick underneath, and are spread out under the grill. The grill can be raised or lowered with a crank. It´s slowly cooked and simply seasoned, and served alongside salads, wine, soda, and breads. The food is great, the company is better. You can hear that Juan´s laugh has been passed down through the generations. I wonder if his great grandfather had the same one. The meal goes on and on, and is informal, social, and familial. They are astounded at the amount I can eat, but I just don´t want to miss anything new. Speaking of new things, the first thing I go for is the blood sausage. It´s not firm, which is unexpected compared to other sausages. I like the way it tastes, but it´s hard to push away the fact that it´s coagulated blood. I mean, it feels like coagulated blood. But when I spread it on bread, it´s pretty good. This one´s going to take a few tries.

The Ice Cream!

Juan´s uncle Roberto owns Saverio, an ice cream factory and a few shops in Buenos Aires. He brings out two big Styrofoam containers each with eight-or-so flavors of ice cream. It´s like gelato, but icier, and it’s fresh. Each flavor is distinct and perfectly strong. There is raspberry, blueberry, and lemon, dulce de leche, chocolate with orange peel, chocolate with a liqueur, mascarpone, and more more more. It´s amazing in the way that I stop paying attention to anything else just pay attention to how crazy-good the ice cream tastes. I have way too much, but they insist on refilling the bowl. I make half-assed attempts to say no, but I really want to overindulge.

After the meal, I lay on the grass like a big, fat beached whale, soaking up the rest of the sun. Later on, we kick around the soccer ball, pass around the mate and wine, and I decipher what I can of the stories everyone´s telling. The remnants of my Spanish education is getting a workout, but Juan and his mom are translating, and the family knows enough English to make it work.

It feels like 2am when the family leaves. It´s actually 9:30. What a long day. We turn in early.

But not before eating again. And then the ice cream comes out. I over-overindulge once again.

There´s another day of travel ahead.

A great way to test a Mexican joint is by their carnitas. Jose failed. Twice I ordered the $5 (not $3.50 like it says in their online menu) tacos which come with two corn tortillas hugging raw onion, cilantro, and your choice of chicken, beef or carnitas. Both times the shredded meat was dry, lacking porky punch. The first time they came with rice and beans, the second time, no such luck. Or maybe it was better that they skipped the R&B since both my own and the side dish were bone dry. The rice was actually crunchy. I suspect that it wasn’t undercooked, it had just been sitting out far too long.

The carnitas did work well in burrito form, but it’s pretty easy to mask boring meat in all of that other stuff they shove in there. The pork empanadas were good because they are deep fried Hot Pockets. You could have stuffed paper in the shell and it would have tasted fine. The filling lacked character. The grouper tacos had so much spicy mayo slathered on that one of my eating companions could barely finish. I also watched other friends suffer through over-jalapeno’ed quesadillas. Maybe they just have low tolerances for spicy food, but it got in the way of enjoying their meals. I’m not done with those grouper tacos yet– the fish is battered and fried to death so it’s barely recognizable as fish. They might as well use tofu instead.

We also ordered the chips and guacamole. The guac was a good mix of creamy and chunky; the chips were salt licks.

Alvy Singer: [addressing the camera] There’s an old joke - um… two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of ‘em says, “Boy, the food at this place is really terrible.” The other one says, “Yeah, I know; and such small portions.” [Annie Hall, imdb]

I ate the chips.

Service was friendly and helpful both times.

This food would be good if more care was taken in the preparation. But it’s not. Yet I wonder if the food was better before chef Issac McCrimmon left to pursue his arcade themed restaurant, “Heroes.”

Go to Taqueria La Veracruzana for your Mexican food, and bring your own ‘B.’

Jose Pistolas
213 S. 15th St. (b/t Locust & Spruce)
Philadelphia, PA 19146

But you don’t have to take my word for it!
[Philadelphia Weekly Review] [Beer Advocate Review]

If you’re completely unfamiliar with cured meats, Wikipedia will come to your rescue:

Pancetta is an Italian cured meat similar to American bacon. It is pork that has been salt cured, salted and spiced (nutmeg, pepper, fennel, dried ground hot peppers and garlic are often featured), and dried for about three months (but usually not smoked). There are many varieties, and each part of Italy produces its own type. In Corsica, it is considered a regional flavour.

Pancetta can be rolled (the most common type available outside of Italy, see photograph), or straight (with all the fat on one side). The straight variety is more common in Italy than elsewhere, especially where home-made pancetta is still produced. [Pancetta on Wikipedia]

I made mine using the detailed instructions from Chow, where they have a traditional recipe and a step-by-step illustrated guide. You’ll see in the slide show, a bowl full of the cure, which filled the kitchen with an amazing smell. I kept sticking my face near the bowl just to suck in the goodness. Nearly everything went according to plan, except near the end of the drying phase, when my pancetta got attacked by MOLD. I think it might have happened right as I left for my skiing trip. The weather got warmer and the basement partially flooded when the hose became disconnected from the washing machine. I’m no scientist, but a muggy, warm, floody basement doesn’t sound like ideal conditions in which to hang pork. My first instinct was, “it’s only mold, who cares. I didn’t spend three weeks of curing and drying just to throw this thing away. I’ll just cut it off.” The internet supported my cause:

L. Mold growth - As with aged cheese, mold growth is common among cured meats that are aged. Molds may be removed with a mixture of 10% acetic acid and 90% water or other equivalent rinses. After the mold is trimmed or removed by scrubbing and rinsing, the product is satisfactory for consumption.

Molds are common in the air and will thrive if proper temperature and moisture conditions (as during curing and aging) exist. An effective way to prevent molds on cured and smoked meats is to store them in a dry, well ventilated room with a temperature range of 45 - 55°F and a relative humidity of less than 68%. Unwrapped meat should not touch other meat. This method of holding increases dehydration, but weight loss is less expensive than loss from trimming mold. [Some Solutions To Difficulties Of Home-Curing Pork]

Chow addresses the mold as well:

However, some chefs choose to break the rules. Mold flavors the meat, and to grow mold you need certain temperature and humidity levels—levels that the law might not always permit. “If you take [mold] . . . away, it’s just not gonna happen,” says Mullen. “You’re not gonna get the ‘wow’ factor.”

Here’s our recipe for homemade pancetta. It’ll make you feel powerful. Or at the very least, it will add bacony, fatty goodness to whatever it touches. Just don’t be scared of a little mold. [Pancetta on Chow]

Some people even had mold in the comments section. It didn’t seem like too big a deal. So I washed the mold off with a vinegar and water solution, dried with with paper towels and left it to dry another day (new James Bond movie) to see if more mold developed. I also cut off a small portion and fried it up.

Was it good? Are you ready for it? Here it comes!

AMAZING! A lot of food writing used the word ‘revelation.’ I don’t want to be just like them, so I’ll thesaurus.com a synonym. Okay. It was an eye-opening realization of what pancetta can be. Prior to this moment I had eaten ‘Pretty Good’ and ‘Much Better’ versions of pancetta from Di Bruno’s. Now I really get it: Deeply flavorful and complex, great texture, and MINE. When I get back from Argentina, I’m getting some jowls to make guanciale.

Smithfield Foods, the largest and most profitable pork processor in the world, killed 27 million hogs last year. That’s a number worth considering. A slaughter-weight hog is fifty percent heavier than a person. The logistical challenge of processing that many pigs each year is roughly equivalent to butchering and boxing the entire human populations of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Antonio, San Diego, Dallas, San Jose, Detroit, Indianapolis, Jacksonville, San Francisco, Columbus, Austin, Memphis, Baltimore, Fort Worth, Charlotte, El Paso, Milwaukee, Seattle, Boston, Denver, Louisville, Washington, D.C., Nashville, Las Vegas, Portland, Oklahoma City and Tucson.

Read it. Then go buy some responsibly raised dead animals and eat them.

It’s not just pigs, by the way. Animals turned into an industrial product are all treated like shit to make a profit. I want to eat animals, not disease ridden, antibiotic pumped, shit wallowing, mutants.

Enough from me, take it away, Jamie Oliver, tell us about those cheap chickens.

The first time I tried the recipe, I also combined it with America’s Test Kitchen’s baking powder skin [Paupered Chef] and a one day dry brine with better (excellent) results. After I try this combo method a couple more times, I’ll write up a recipe. The skin was super crisp, and the meat moist and seasoned throughout, despite being slightly overcooked (no one could tell anyways.)

The broccoli was boiled until tender and tossed with some butter, parmigiano-reggiano, salt & pepper. I went a little heavy on the sea salt (still figuring out how much is the right amount with that stuff), but it was still very good. The potatoes sat in a glass baking dish next to the chicken. They were in too long or something, because they developed too hard an exterior. I’m still figuring out those guys.

“Overnight, everybody you meet has become lactose intolerant.  It is the chic food fear at the moment.  But the truth is that very, very few of us are so seriously afflicted that we cannot drink even a whole glass of milk a day without ill effects.  I know several people who have given up cheese to avoid lactose.  But fermented cheeses contain no lactose! Lactose is the sugar found in milk; 98 percent of it is drained off with the whey (cheese is made from the curds), and the other 2 percent is quickly consumed by the lactic-acid bacteria in the act of fermentation.” (p.8)

I fell victim to this food myth as well, but wonder why some cheese gives me an upset stomach.  Maybe when I was eating a cheesy food like pizza, I was also overeating.   After all, should anyone actually be eating TWO slices of Lorenzo’s at 2:00 am?  I definitely get an upset stomach from drinking milk, but cheese is certainly getting reconsidered.  I’ll have to do a little research into this, and eventually update the post.

The photos below show my Pita with Eggplant in various stages of being eaten.  It’s stuffed with a bunch of options from the salad bar including carrots, basil couscous, vinegary-dilly cucumbers, tomato and onion, and corn salsa.  The eggplant is creamy with a fried crunch on the outside.

Maoz
1115 Walnut St. & 248 South St.
Philadelphia, PA

Every once in a blue moon, I’ll put on my hunting gear, grab my pump-action Remington 870 shotgun, and ruthlessly track down and murder a flying buffalo.  Leaving everything save the wings to rot in the redwood forest in which they live, I roast them and toss them in Frank’s Red Hot sauce.  Let’s talk about how to make these things without resorting to the artery clogging goodness of a deep fryer.  There are countless variations on the buffalo wing, but I think this slightly healthier version is pretty bomb.  This recipe was an experiment that turned out really well.

** I doubt it’s actually healthy **

Ingredients:

some      Chicken Wings
1/2 cup  Franks Red Hot Sauce
1T           Butter
1/4 cup  Stock / Water
2T          Maple Syrup
pinch     Cinnamon

Method:

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.  Prepare the chicken wings by cutting off the wing tips and separating the mini drumstick part from the other part.  Pat them dry with paper towels.  Make sure they’re really dry.  Dry chicken = crispy skin.  Heat up vegetable oil on medium-high in a pan big enough to hold all of your wings.  Season wings with salt and pepper, place them skin down in the pan.  When the skin browns, flip the wings with tongs.  If they don’t release from the pan, let them brown for a little while longer.  They should release easily once the skin browns enough.  Transfer to the oven until they’re done.  Let’s say 20-25 minutes.

Sauce:  Combine the rest of the ingredients into a saucepan.  Reduce until saucy.

Be careful with the cinnamon– don’t add to much.  It should be far in the background.  I didn’t plan on adding it, but I tried it with a small spoonful of the sauce, and decided it was a good idea.  Using stock in the sauce thins it out a bit at first, but it takes the edge off of the hot sauce, and makes it go a little farther.  You could probably use water to the same effect, or omit it.  Traditionally, buffalo sauce uses way more butter, but I’m trying to live past 30.

Step through the double set of green glass doors to a comfortable and hip design. The walls and ceiling undulate to the back of the space where sushi chefs assemble rolls at the bar. I sat back there by myself, enjoying the nearly automatic motions of the chef, and another cook who cooked big fillets of fish with a propane blowtorch. The serving platters, little bowls, and chopsticks were made of the same dark wood. The space fit together well, from the glowy green accents to the big comfy bar stools.

I ordered food that I’d get at any other sushi place to offer a comparison between average and Morimoto. The ‘Yellowtail and Scallion Roll’ and ‘Boston Mackerel Sushi’ came out first. I was off to a good start. The yellowtail was finely minced and there was just the right amount of scallion to boost the flavor. It melted in my mouth. The mackerel was fresh and oceanic with a good texture. It wasn’t too big a bite, which is important in comparison of the giant sized fish slabs on snowballs of rice served at lesser sushi joints. The white pickled ginger tasted fresher and seemed like a natural product compared to the normal pink stuff. Everything looked beautiful on the dark wooden platter.

My miso soup arrived next, in an oversized white bowl, with a heavy shallow metal spoon. The broth was salted, sure, but this is a far cry from the packets you get at Trader Joe’s. This soup has a full, balanced flavor, accented with hits of thinly sliced scallion. But what really makes this dish are the big chunks of fresh silken tofu floating in the soup. I’ve never had tofu like this before. It’s totally different from the blocks of tofu from the store. Wikipedia explains, “its texture can be described as similar to that of very fine custard.” From now on the reconstituted tofu blocks won’t cut it– bring on the fresh silken stuff.

You may not know this, but chances are you’ve never had real wasabi before.

Almost all sushi bars in America and Japan serve imitation (seiyō) wasabi (see Etymology section, below) because authentic wasabi is extremely expensive. Few people, even in Japan, realize that the wasabi that they consume is in fact an imitation. Although very hard to find, real wasabi powder (from Wasabia japonica plant) is a convenient way to experience true wasabi’s remarkable flavor, but most commercially available “wasabi” powders contain no true wasabi at all. Most utilize a powdered imitation made from horseradish, mustard seed, and green food coloring (sometimes Spirulina). Whether real or imitation, the powder is mixed with an equal amount of water to make a paste. (Wasabi Wikipedia)

I asked the chef if they served it at the restaurant.  He told me that even though he was out of it today, they almost always have it.  They normally serve a good version of the commercial wasabi powder (I knew it tasted better…) and for certain dishes bring out the real wasabi powder.  He went into the kitchen and brought out a small bowl of that for me.  It’s texture resembled a pastey fresh grated ginger.  It was mellower in heat than standard wasabi, and had more of a taste.  In comparison, the standard wasabi tastes, looks, and feels artificial.  He said if he mixes the real wasabi powder with wasabi root in a dish, he can barely tell the difference.  Also, he’ll only give out the wasabi root to someone who knows their sushi.  If he notices someone eating with proper protocol and they ask, they shall receive.  He was pretty serious about this– if they’re doing it wrong, they’re not getting any.  If you’d like to know more about sushi etiquette, here are some links:

Google
Alton Brown’s “Good Eats” on Sushi part 1
Alton Brown’s “Good Eats” on Sushi part 2

One roll, a bowl of soup, and one piece of sushi came to $22.75 with tip.  I left full, relaxed, and content.  Unless you’re making some serious dough, this is not an everyday lunch spot.  Hell, I’ve been working a block away for a couple of years now, and it’s the first time I’ve gone.  I can’t wait for a good excuse to go for a big, multi-course meal.

Check out Morimoto Restaurant for top notch service, atmosphere, and cuisine that costs a pretty penny.

MorimotoRestaurant
723 Chestnut St
Philadelphia, PA 19106
(215) 413-9070

(For a more modest, but still wonderful sushi place, try Moshi-Moshi on 18th and Sansom, right across from Di Bruno’s, next to Sue’s Produce Market.)

Sleep . Memory & Forgetting . Time

I’ll restrict myself to these three, but I really feel like linking to most of them.

The Naked Burrito from ‘El  Fuego’ tastes better than it looks in what passes as a picture from my cell phone.   They use fresh, never frozen, ingredients, and the food is quite good.

Rice, black beans, peppers & onions, chicken, salsa fresca, salsa verde, and lettuce for $7.22.  It’s a big enough lunch for the price and the promise of fresh ingredients cooked in house.  I want to believe this has less fat and calories than the exact Qdoba equivalent, which I’ve included below.  It would be a shame if the ‘Fuego’ naked burrito reached the same fat and sodium content.  Imagine what that Qdoba burrito is like with cheese, sour creme, and guacamole! Lunch shouldn’t have 60-100% (depending on where you look) of your daily intake of sodium.

El Fuego
723 Walnut St
Philadelphia, PA 19106-3208
Phone: (215) 592-1901

[El Fuego on Citysearch]

Blake Royer’s recent post, “Pasta Cacio e Pepe: Are Fancy Pastas Worth It?” inspired my purchases and cooking tonight, and here’s the resultant blog post. I think we made some similar conclusions through some slightly different foods. I’ll be somewhat brief as to not just echo his article.

My mother would probably faint knowing I paid SIX DOLLARS for a package of pasta today. Well, mom, wake up and smell the durum wheat semolina– the only ingredient listed on the Bartolini Emilio Ciriole package– because it’s amazing.

Supermarket pasta is good, but it serves as a background item to the sauce. It’s filler. The Six-Dollar-a-Box pasta, though, is a reason for a meal in itself. Okay, that might have been an exaggeration, but if I have to overplay the issue so you buy some, then so be it.

I couldn’t cover the expensive noodles in any old slop. Rather than using the standard Pathmark or Rienzi canned tomatoes and tomato paste, I went for the big guns. The La Valle San Marzano tomatoes are double the price of normal ones, ($1.50 / 14 oz.) but it’s absolutely worth it. They’re less acidic and more flavorful than their American counterparts. The Mutti tomato paste clocks in around four times more expensive, but it makes sense. First, it’s in a tube rather than a can, so it’ll last longer. More importantly, it tastes fruitier and lacks the metallic taste of canned tomato paste.

Let’s get on to this recipe. I’m sure it’s great even with normal pasta and tomatoes– just not lick-the-pan great.

Ciriole with Fennel (for two)

• Pasta, 2 servings
• Fennel, 1 bulb quartered
• 1 garlic clove, minced
• 1/2 medium onion, diced
• 14oz can Tomatoes
• 2 tsp Tomato Paste
• FRESH Rosemary (I said Fresh)
• Cracked red pepper (optional)

1. Brown the fennel over medium-high heat, in olive oil.
2. Put the fennel off to the side, to make room for the…
3. Onion and garlic on medium heat. Don’t burn them…sweat them.
4. Crush up the tomato using your hands (I like to do it in the can, so it’s less messy.) and add it to the onions and garlic.
5. Add the tomato paste, stir it all around, and…
6. Throw the fennel back in the pan.
7. Add a couple springs of Rosemary and some cracked red pepper.
8. Simmer, covered, for twenty, twenty five minutes.
9. Check the fennel– it should seem like it’ll be done in less than ten minutes. You want it to have some bite when it’s all said and done– not just a mush. If it seems good, uncover pan.
10. Pasta goes in the boiling salted water until al dente.
11. The fennel should be done about a minute before the pasta finishes. Remove from the sauce into some aluminum foil so you can keep in warm and arrange it nicely. Or keep it in the sauce, and have a big old mess. Either way is fine.
12. Transfer the pasta to the sauce using tongs. You want some of that pasta water to carry into the sauce. Not drenched, just mildly dripping. Mix it all around.
13. Mound the pasta in the center, surround with fennel, sprinkle some chopped rosemary, and put a sprig of rosemary in the center.
14. Drizzle with olive oil.

** You should be seasoning with salt and pepper the whole way through. If the sauce is too acidic add a few pinches of sugar.
** You could probably add parmigiano-reggiano, because that makes everything taste better.

Yup, turns out that Google wasn't at fault.  As Nick pointed out, it was the GoDaddy email account forwarding that was the problem.  Nick, Juan, and I got drowned in over 4000 spam messages.  Sorry for making assumptions, Google.]

I got blasted with a ton of Spam this afternoon. What happened, Google?

Let’s give Mr. Blind an ear piece, like those blue tooth headsets all the cool kids have. Now, let’s attach it to a voice-activated computer with GPS. Our BlindEye will guide Mr. Blind to the nearest grocery store (assuming, for argument’s sake, he doesn’t already know how to get to his local store.)

Mr. Blind: BlindEye. Locate Grocery store.
BlindEye: South Square, 23rd and South, BlindEye enabled. Would you like to go here, or another?
Mr. Blind: Go here.

Then it would give street-by-street audio directions, like those Tom-Toms all the cool kids have. The real magic happens once Mr. Blind enters the BlindEye enabled grocery store. Every item in the store is embedded with an RFID tag. Mr. Blind can search the store using the the BlindEye. If he had the BlindWand wireless attachment, he could touch that against specific products to hear that it was, in fact, Goya Black Beans, and not the store brand. Meta-data such as nutritional information, sales, and coupons would also be accessible through the wand.

This whole operation is largely optimistic, as implementation might be cost prohibitive. More and more products are being stuck with RFID tags though, and their storage and range continues to increase. Dozens more tags placed around the store to make localized navigation possible couldn’t be too hard to put in either.

As far as I know this is possible to build with current technology. Get together some programmers, industrial designers, engineers, and human-computer interaction specialists, and Mr. Blind could be using his BlindEye in no time. I’m sure with only a few minutes more thought, many more ideas for this would form– I’ve only scratched the surface so far.

Hell, I’d work on it– someone find me a blind Venture Capitalist.

[Edit - Adding more...]

In the future, forget the BlindWand, you could have something implanted into your fingertips which synced with the BlindEye.  And forget the blue tooth headset, let’s just implant that thing right into the ear.  And if you think that’ll turn you into some kind of weird cyborg person, it’s not that much different than a pacemaker.  Hopefully there’d be a way to restore sight, or a computerized version of sight hooked right into the brain by then.

Since we were lacking reservations, there was a twenty minutes wait to be to be seated. We were led to our seat by a sweating, harried host reminiscent of an Israeli shop owner. I thought I was going to have to haggle down the price of the meal. I thought it was a BYO, but when he saw the bottle of wine, he discreetly took it, “so the other customers don’t know you brought it.” He even had me taste it as if the bottle came from their collection. It was actually sort of fun, like we were in on a secret, fooling everyone else. I’m pretty sure the couples to our right and left had brought their own ‘B’ as well. Did they receive the same treatment? I hope not. Jokes aside, he was a nice guy, and accomodated us, despite late arrival and reservation-deficiency.

Part of the appeal of the seating, besides the notable Chad-lessness, is the unique set up. The whole restaurant is adorned with lush fabrics, tapestries, and pillows. Dim lighting and a lot of red-tones make it intimate, even though you’re sitting right next to other diners on the bolstered benches.

[In trying to insert images into the post, I lost the next two paragraphs TWICE.  I am mad, so I'm going to rewrite them poorly.]

Waiter:  Dressed like Aladdin, uncomfortable, mumbly, but nice.  Not a very good server.  Forgot our water refills.  Never washed our hands with the rose water, which is bad because you eat with your hands, but we were hungry, so we went for it anyways.

First Course, Three-Salad Platter:  Cucumbers and Tomatoes very good, tangy, crunchy, vinegary.  Eggplant - a lot of flavor, but unpleasantly mushy texture.  Carrots - tasted great, don’t know what was in them, but I liked it.

[I also lost the beginning of this paragraph, I'm very upset. I'm going to post this now, and probably edit it later.]

The next course was the B’Stella (also spelled B’Stilla or Pastilla,) a powdered sugar and cinnamon-topped ground chicken pie. When the flaky, phyllo dough crust is broken open with the hands, it releases heat demons from the scalding hot hell-fire inside. Breaking it down into big pieces worked to cool it enough to eat. It would have been nice to have some pita to act as gloves in this process. It was interesting having something this sweet, so early in the meal, but it combines very well with the savory chicken. I suspect there are better prepared B’Stellas out there. The ground chicken had a spongy texture. Traditional preparations of the dish use pigeon, which would have probably stood up to the sweetness better, since it’s gamier and more flavorful. Even shredded chicken, rather than ground would be a better choice.

For our first main course, we got the Chicken with Lemon and Olives, which after some research (read, Google) reveals itself to be a very standard and traditional Moroccan dish. Forget that we asked for, and then was told it was the spicy cumin chicken, it didn’t matter. Braised in either a dutch oven or a tagine, with preserved lemons, this was delicious. There was a deep lemony flavor, but it wasn’t acidic or tart. The chicken is beautifully braised with crisp skin and moist meat that has trouble holding on to the bone. I’m definitely attempting this dish at home, and have already found plenty of recipes for the chicken and preserved lemons.

Before the second course of ‘Tajine of Lamb with Almonds and Honey’ came, the entertainment for the evening arrived: A Belly Dancer. For a guy that revels in awkwardness like myself, this might have been the most delicious part of dinner. A thick, white college girl wearing a standard belly dancer costume, dances her way into the middle of the room to middle eastern music. She shakes her hips and clacks together her little finger tambourines looking for tips. No one looked like they wanted to give her money. She convinces the Drunk Guy next to us to dance with her. He resists at first, but when she insists that it’s part of the custom, he goes for it. He sort of half-grinds up on her, not sure what’s appropriate. There’s a moment in there that’s a little blurry, but I remember her holding his arm back as if to say, “I’m not a stripper, I’m a dinner-time belly dancer.” To complete the transaction he holds out a dollar. She insists she shove it in her waistband. He declines, “not with my girl right here,” as it would be poor decorum to stuff money in there on Valentines Day. The belly dancing continues, and she comes up on the Latino couple across the room. Our Drunk Guy calls out the Latino Guy, who holds out a dollar bill, “Get up there, I embarrassed myself, you should too.” Then they had a slightly drunk and too aggressive conversation about How Real they were Keeping It. The latino guy did his obligatory dance moves, proving his manhood and his Realness. At this point, they were both pretty insulting towards her, and I could feel that she wanted out of there. They were both laughing at her and cracking jokes. This course of the meal was the Awkward Sandwich. It was delicious. The Belly Dancer left the scummy guys and went on her way. And then our lamb was brought to the table.

This is another Moroccan greatest-hits dish. The slow cooked chunks of lamb shoulder smothered in a sweet honey sauce, dotted with almond were rather mild. People who characterize lamb as gamey would be surprised that this comes from the same animal. Similarly mild to some lamb loin I recently made, this dish is less meaty than many cuts of beef. It was good, but at this point, I was slowing down. Pace yourself at this feast, or you might echo my owns concerns of “I think I’m going to die,” by the time you get to the next course.

The couscous arrived after a long wait. I suspect that despite the refusal to leave out the raisins, it would have been a pretty easy request to accommodate. They were sprinkled on top, not combined throughout. This dish shared many of the same flavors as the preceding foods, such as cinnamon, cumin, and other middle eastern spices with which I’m unfamiliar. There were big chunks of carrot and potato and the aforementioned raisins. We barely made a dent in the couscous.

Sometime mid-couscous, Drunk Guy asked the waiter in his best accent, if the meal was “fini-tay” (no, not finito, there was an accented ‘e’ at the end of that one), and it indeed was. All of the couples filtered out. Drunk Guy even shook our hands, saying it was nice eating with us, which I don’t think was a good idea, since we were all using them to eat. Latino Guy informed everyone of a Columbian club near Roosevelt Boulevard that was having THE Puerto Rican band tomorrow.

Finally, the bowl of fruit and baklava was served, along with a mint tea. The tea was almost unbearably sweet. The baklava was also sweet, seemingly infused with some Super Sugar that packs 100x’s the punch of normal sugar. Both of these items would have been better if I wasn’t about to tear and the seams. I wonder if anyone actually eats the fruit. After a meal that extended and large, can you really fit an apple, orange, or banana? Sure, I had a grape or two, but that’s it.

The price is fair; you get an absurd amount of food for $31 (after the included tip), a beginners course on the flavors of Moroccan cuisine, and an atmosphere different to what you’re accustomed. Wear your Fat Pants, and don’t plan on moving anywhere quickly for the next 24 hours. Also, this isn’t a quick bite to eat; plan for a two and a half or three hour feast.

Recommended! Great for dates, or groups of people whose hands you don’t mind in your food.

Marrakesh
517 S Leithgow St
Philadelphia, PA 19147
Phone: (215) 925-5929

Whether we make this or it sits around collecting dust, I think it’s worth putting out there.

Give it a read, after the jump.

KEEPING SECRETS

INT. BEDROOM - NIGHT

DENNY TURK lies in bed, reading. His girlfriend, LESLIE PORTER, gets ready for bed.

LESLIE
…and then Angela couldn’t find her purse, so we ended up having to go BACK to the restaurant, but she found it there, though, so it was okay.

Denny looks up from his book.

DENNY
Uh-huh.

Leslie hops into bed, snuggling up to Denny. She plants a kiss on his cheek.

LESLIE
Come on, Denny, talk to me, reading is boring.

Denny sighs, putting the book down. Leslie sighs back at him, mockingly. Denny smiles, relenting.

DENNY
Fine, fine. What else did you get up to today?

LESLIE
Well, I was working on that stupid phone list thing…

Denny focuses in on Leslie’s shoulder. He goes wide-eyed. He plucks a long BLONDE HAIR from her shirt.

LESLIE cont…
..the one that Francine has me doing, which I don’t even know why–

Denny holds up the hair.

DENNY
Wha– what is this?

LESLIE
What?

DENNY
This, Leslie! This hair. Where did this come from?

LESLIE
I don’t know, probably Pam or something. Anyways, it’s like we don’t even need a phone list for the company, because–

DENNY
I’m not letting you just ignore the issue. Don’t think it’s the first time I’ve found one of these, either!

LESLIE
Denny, where are you going with this?

DENNY
Leslie, I want you to be honest with me. Are you seeing someone else? Just, be straight– don’t play with my emotions.

Leslie really doesn’t know where he’s coming from– this is pretty crazy.

LESLIE
First of all, Denny, no, I love you, you know that. Second, that’s a pretty long hair, so unless I was fucking Fabio or something–

Denny relents.

DENNY
Okay, okay…I’m sorry. Can I just have a minute alone to sort things out.

Leslie is weirded out.

LESLIE
Uh, sure…

Denny sulks, she leaves. As soon as the door closes, Denny POPS out of bed. He whips open the closet door–

A half-dressed BLONDE CHICK crouches in the closet.

DENNY
Come on, come on, you’ve got to get out of here.

He ushers her out the window. Denny jumps back into bed, breathing hard, relieved.

LESLIE (O.S.)
Denny!

DENNY
Yeah!

LESLIE (O.S.)
Whose high heels are these?

Denny’s face = ‘Oh God No.’

THE END.

Notes: I wrote the script out so that the idea is there, and plays out the way I saw it. What I’m not happy with in this draft is their back and forth once he find the hair, especially when it comes to getting Leslie out of the room. I’m at work, so I wrote it quickly. I think there’s some opportunity in there for some great Gender Reversal stuff. I mean, the whole finding a hair, accusing of cheating thing is almost 100% a woman’s domain, so I think it’s funny putting a man in the situation. Playing it to exploit that reversal is where some really clever funniness can come out.

I’m not sure where / when we’ll use this, but I wanted to throw it on the pile.

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Owner of ‘Egg’ Restaurant is Slow
Gordon Ramsey is Slower

The ones by ‘Egg’ owner, George Weld come out great. I’ve been experimenting with variations on this one for the last couple of months, and it’s been great.

I’ve yet to follow Ramsey’s approach by the letter, but the other morning I did something similar. You can see what I came up with below.

Eggs warmed to room temperature before cooking, with some milk added, yolks broken up a little bit, sauteed onions mixed in, seasoned near the end of cooking, cooked slow-and-low in butter, off the heat just as the whites turned opaque.

Sometimes I like to julienne some carrots and saute them until crisp-tender right before doing the eggs, then add them as a little bonus garnish.  The texture and sweetness works well with the eggs.  I can see you looking at the screen skeptically.  Try it, it’s good.

For those of you who are interested, after the jump, you’ll find the .txt file of how it was originally written if you want to check that out.

Let me set the stage for you.
I’m in the locker room after a Monday session of
Bikram yoga– that’s the one where it’s 105
degrees in the room and you sweat so much it
looks like you just finished swimming laps.

I’ve just showered and toweled off and I’ve put
my shirt on.

This is starting to sound like a hairy version
of pornography, but stick around, it’s not going
in that direction.

I’m stepping into my pants– one leg at a time,
and i bend over to get a better hold on the pant
leg and….

Boop!

My bare ass bumps against some dude who is
changing nearby.

All i can muster is a choked and mumbled ’sorry.’

He doesn’t even say anything.

I breathed in–
to say, “can we just pause here for a second, and recognize how ridiculously awkward that was?”

But I couldn’t say it.

From there on out it’s heads down, no eye contact, AWKWARD CITY.

He left, I left. Done deal.

But I’m going to see that guy again, and every time I do, we’re both going to think that my ass touched his pants.

The name “Hurricane Bonnie” invokes imagery of death, destruction, and lack of FEMA aid, rather than tidiness. And is there really enough of a demand to cleanse crime scenes– residential, commercial, and otherwise– that it deserves third billing on the business card?

What’s going on in my neighborhood?

I’ve never been to AmazingFartVideos.com, but I’ll throw the link in here in case anyone wants to visit.  Let me know how the World-Shaking Video Farts stack up to others you’ve witnessed.  Also, let me know how the Spyware that was just installed into your never-updated Internet Explorer 5 has slowed your computer to a grinding halt.

This sign was posted over the semi-broken urinal where I work.

I’d love to know why the S, O, and P got top billing over the lowly t in StOP.

My birthday is coming up, I’d better stock up on ‘think you’ cards.

What’s with the shifty-eyed, untrusting face? It looks like he’s peering over to the next urinal to make sure no one’s going to piss in his pot. Are those his eyebrows? Maybe it’s a drawing of Quickman from Megaman 2.

How disgusting is this scene?  I don’t want to say too much about it, lest I come off as a preachy, annoying loser.  I just made this really quickly, and decided to throw it up here.

I think Chris Crocker said it best.  Leave Britney alone.

Despite the name, the place looks like a coffee shop, and does not evoke anything from my travels in Italy, save for a few pre-made plastic wrapped sandwiches sitting out front.  It was closer to Panera than Pompeii.

Many of the sandwiches look good.  I almost went for the safe bet; a Chicken Waldorf number, but couldn’t decide.  I asked the lady behind the counter what she recommended, and she went with the special: A Prosciutto and Brie Sandwich with Roasted Red Peppers and Pesto.  I should have trusted my instinct and steered away– where did they get their prosciutto and brie from?  I know the peppers and pesto are coming from a bottle–  but I went with the suggestion.

It was promptly served on a flour-dusted, industrially-made ciabatta bread with Ruffles-style chips and a thin loser of a pickle.  This special should be stricken from the record.  The brie was domestic, cheap, and cut too thick.  The heat of the microwave intensified that odd chlorine taste that brie can have.  The prosciutto followed suit with the cheese, and was all salt and no pork; a far cry from DiBruno Brothers’ good stuff.  This pig didn’t know Parma from Cleveland. (Ohh, snap!)  The roasted red peppers must have come from a bottle, which is fine, but that bottle was stored in the fridge, so my peppers were cool and rather tasteless.  Aaaand the pesto, oh, the pesto.  Geeee-ROS (gross.)  Real pesto is made with fresh basil, olive oil, toasted pine nuts, Parmigiano-Reggiano, and garlic.  This tasted like McCormick dried herbs mixed with canola oil and garlic powder.

The best part is, I finished the sandwich.  I left some lumps of brie and potato chips, but I still ate the damn thing.  I wonder what would have happened if I brought the sandwich up after one bite and said, “This is gross.  I’d like to trade it in for a new one.”

Despite this REALLY bad sandwich, I might go back to the Tuscany for the Chicken Waldorf.  Or I’ll just pass by and eat at El Fuego.

For user reviews, check out the mixed ratings at Citysearch, the good ones at Yelp, and a write up in the City Paper.

Click to Enlarge

Something makes me doubt that this website is 100% free.

This method mitigates the time spent rendering an image with smooth, anti-aliased lines.

UGLY (Fast render)

NOT UGLY (Slow render)

Let’s get into it!

It all happens in the Renderer Tab under “Sampling Quality” when you are using Mental Ray.

A) Set Minimum to 1/64 and Maximum to 16.

The ‘Samples per Pixel’ area is where you tell Mental Ray the Min and Max range of how jagged versus how smooth to make a pixel.  This gives MR the ability to choose whether or not to pay extra attention to a pixel or not according to the Spatial Contrast (section C.)

You can get really nerdified about this sampling stuff at the LA Mental Ray User Group website.

B)  Set Filter to Mitchell

These filters act sort of like the different blurs in Photoshop.  You might already know that a box blur is faster than a Gaussian blur, but not quite as attractive to your eyeball.  If you want to know why it’s set to Mitchell, check this out:

The mental ray renderer provides five filter methods: Box, Gauss, Triangle, Mitchell, or Lanczos. Box, the default, is also the quickest. Mitchell is often the most accurate. The Box filter combines samples evenly, without weighting them. Each of the other filters uses a particular curve to weight samples before combining them.” (Max User Guide)

C) Contrast

We’re most concerned with the Spatial contrast, which relates to the difference in contrast of one pixel to another within your image.  As far as I’ve found, set the Temporal contrast to the same as the Spatial, if you’re doing an animation.  Temporal does not have anything to do with breaded, fried Japanese food, rather it deals with time, as in how MR deals with the anti-aliasing from one frame to the next.

Bring up a scene that you’re having trouble with.  Done?  Okay, good.  Now that you’ve set the scene up with the above settings, make the value of your Spatial Contrast .1.

Setting Your Spatial Contrast

Click the Color Box next to the [A] value of the Spatial Contrast area.  Using the Color Selector, [D in the reference image] change the Value (bottom spinner.)

Give it a render.  Pretty ugly, right?  Jagged edges all over the place.  Go down to .05.  Now your image will look slightly better.

Keep reducing your Spatial contrast until you find a balance between the speed of your render and the anti-aliasing quality.

Often times, a Spatial Contrast of .01 will look perfectly acceptable.  In some images, with a lot of detail, where you’re looking for very fine grain, you’ll have to reduce your Spatial Contrast to around .005.  Much lower than that, and you’re return on investment for render time won’t really pay off.  Sometimes, you can get away with your Spatial Contrast of .03.  It all depends on the image.

E) Leave this Alone

If you really want to find out what these settings do, read the manual, or go on a Google Hunt.

Any praise or problems?  Leave a comment!

Rather than panic I choose to composite the RPC’s using either Photoshop for stills, or a variety of software for animation. At the architecture firm I work for right now, we use Premiere Pro to do our compositing.

Let’s Begin

1. Save As…
You’re going to have two separate files. There’s the main layer and the RPC layer. Save the file you’ve been working on as something like Whatever_RPC_Matte.max.

2. Delete RPC’s
Get rid of the RPC’s in your main file. Who needs ‘em anyways?

3. Open the RPC Matte File
We’re going to do some really wacky stuff with this.

4. Change your renderer from V-Ray, Mental Ray, or Ray-Ray to SCANLINE.

5. Global Super Sampling
***Only for Animation***
There is some extra leg work to be done with the sampling when rendering RPC’s this way. If you don’t Super Sample the shot, the animation will flicker, because the anti-aliaser will skip over the finer details. Try these settings out…they worked for me, but I don’t want to guarantee they’ll work for every scene and situation.

6. Make Matte/Shadow Material
Make a Matte/Shadow material. This material will accomplish some pretty great things for you. The object will not show up in the render, but it will occlude or block objects that are behind it. Here’s an example of what I mean.
a) b) c)

a) A building in front of a truck.
b) Same thing, but the Matte/Shadow material is on the building.
c) The alpha channel for image b.

Notice how the building doesn’t show up in the render, but it covers up the RPC that’s behind it. We’ll use that alpha channel for compositing later.

Use these settings.

7. Assign Matte/Shadow Material
Select ‘Geometry’ from this drop-down box.


Edit -> Select All.
Assign Matte/Shadow Material.

8. Deselect Cast Shadows for Geometry
With the Geometry still selected, right click on the Viewport and select ‘Object Properties.’
Deselect ‘Cast Shadows.’

9. Hide Glass
You’ll want to see the RPC’s through glass, so hide your glass layer, or it will block out that stuff. If you want to control how visible these indoor RPC’s are, separate from the outdoor guys, do two different passes. That way, you’ll have an indoor and outdoor layer when compositing. If it’s a still shot, it may be easier to do one pass, and do your opacities in Photoshop.

10. Delete Lights
Get rid of the lights from your original file. We’re going to light just the RPC’s.

11. Make a Direct Light…
Make one where the Sun is in your old file. Cars and trees cast shadows. People don’t. If I’m wrong about this, please let me know what I’m doing wrong.

The direct light should have a multiplier of 1.0 and be set to ‘Ray Traced Shadows.’

Now the cars and trees will cast shadows on your geometry.

***Note About Shadows***
Ray Tracing in Scanline can take a very long time. There is a fast alternate method to shadows for RPC’s which involves placing a plane under each one. The plane is Opacity mapped with the image of a shadow. I’ll probably write up an easy way to do this at some point. Here’s an example for a tree.

Every black goes away. The gray stuff sort of goes away, resulting in a shadow you can see through. Blur the image for blurry shadows. Yes, it’s very clever.

12. Render
You have your materials set up, the lights are in place, and your camera matches the one from your main file. Render your image or sequence. Save as a TGA or TIFF with the Alpha channel. If you don’t understand what an alpha channel is, look it up in the Max Help. It’s important, you should know how they work.

13. Compositing

· Stills

a. Open your Main pass and your RPC pass.

b. In the RPC pass, go to Channels and Ctrl+Click the Alpha 1 channel.

You should notice that the RPCs have a selection around them.

c. Double-Click the ‘Background’ Layer. It’ll ask you what to name the new layer. Layer 0 is fine. This unlocks the Background layer.

d. Make a Mask

e. Right Click on ‘Layer 0.’ Click Duplicate Layer. –> Duplicate the layer on to the Main pass.

· Premiere Pro

a. Import Main and RPC passes as numbered stills.

b. Put the RPC pass over the Main pass.

c. It should automatically read the Alpha channel and composite them together.

If it doesn’t work, you broke something. Good luck.

Done.

[Interview]

“…it’s a compilation of life stories, experience and other interests… much like the purpose behind The Sweaty Robot Show. It’s so random, and I absolutely love it. Eric is a really good story teller and understands good production quality, so he’s always spicing up his blog with cool audio and video projects.”

To read the rest, go to the [whole blog post.]

Viral recently went through a format change, explained by Sunny here.

Viral last September. It’s now three
shorter shows instead of one longer show.

One of those shows is “Propaganda“, a tongue and cheek look at what’s making news in internet television. We cover basic headlines, but most importantly we want to feature news about your shows.  Also, there’s a portion of the show that focuses on show premieres/sneak
peeks, so if you’re working on new shows, keep us in the loop!

Thanks, Sunny!

There has been a lot of discussion on nerdy forums as to whether or not Digimation’s SpeedTree plugin can be used in V-Ray. I’m here to tell you, they can. You just have to go through a little workaround to get them looking good.
Using Speedtrees with V-Ray

1. Set the Secondary Ray Bias to .001
   This makes it so the leaf planes don’t overlap, getting rid of the black splotches and flickering.
   
2. Convert Materials to V-Ray Materials.
   

   • The leaves are using Opacity maps to render, and V-Ray is much faster with rendering opacity maps in VRayMtl
   • If you don’t want to spend all of those mouse clicks doing this manually, you can automate the process.
     • Select all of your trees.
     • File –> Save Selected.
     • Open your tree file.
     • Right click on Viewport –> V-Ray Scene Converter (5th one up from the bottom of the right click menu
     • Save File
     • Go back to your original file
     • Delete the Non-VRayMtl Trees
     • File –> Merge // Merge in your newly converted trees.
   • Now for the manual labor. For some reason, V-Ray blurs the tree’s maps in an odd way, that creates weird blurry anomalies in the render. To combat this, you’ll have to tell V-Ray not to blur the tree’s textures.

   • Select the tree’s Shader in the Material Editor. It will be a Multi-Sub Object
     

   • Now go through BOTH the Diffuse and Opacity channels of each Sub-Material (Branches usually only have Diffuse) and do this:
     
   • Set the blur to 0.01. An easy way to do this is to Right-click the Spinner next to the number.
   • Set the Filtering to ‘None’

3. Done!

With the Secondary Ray Bias set, you shouldn’t have any flickering. With the Standard materials converted to VRayMtl, you should be rendering quickly. And with the textures set not to blur, they should come out nice and crisp.

How’d I know to go to AbeBooks? Simple! I used this great Firefox extension called BookBurro.

“When Book Burro senses you are viewing a book, it will add a small panel to the upper right corner.Clicking the panel will trigger the agent to go query for prices at other book sites and check your local libraries for availability.” (Book Burro Website)

It installs simply, it knows when you’re looking at a book, and quietly tells you that you could be paying less.

(To be quick about this, it’s Windows Media Video 9, 720×480, 0.9 Pixel Aspect Ratio, 10,000kbps.  But here’s how to do it…)

You’re going to need a few things:

• 3D Studio Max
• Premiere Pro
• Powerpoint.

If you’re reading this, and you don’t work at the same firm I do, this might be a problem. There are other ways to do this, using free software, so this might still help you. We’re going to render this animation at DVD resolution (720×480@0.9), with a frame rate of 24 frames per second. That way, when you want to burn this to a DVD for a wild office party, it’ll be easy.

1. Setting the frame rate.
   

By setting the frame rate to ‘Film,’ you’re rendering at 24 frames per second. This is the same frame rate as film. What I like most about this is your have to render six less frames per second, and your eyes will perceive the motion similar to a 30fps animation. That’s a savings of 360 frames for every minute of video. That means more time for yourself and less time in the office!

2. Set the resolution and pixel aspect ratio.
   
   Render settings (F10) and then NTSC DV (video) in the Output Size
3. Render Uncompressed
   I’m going to assume you know how to render a sequence of images out of Max. If you don’t, read someone else’s help file, because you’re not going to find it here, pal.Render your files as either
   1. Targa/Tiff: Yes alpha channel, no compression.
   2. BMP: No alpha channel, no compression.

   Depending on whether or not you want to mess around with an alpha channel in Premiere. If you don’t know what an alpha channel is, render to BMP.

4. Premiere Pro Workspace
   After selecting ‘New Project,’ use these Custom Settings.
   
5. Importing a Sequence
   You probably already know this, but…
   • File –> Import
   • Navigate to your Image Sequence
   • Click the first image
   • Click the ‘Numbered Stills’ check box
   • Ok.
6. Render Settings
   We’re going to use the Adobe Media Encoder to make a really nice looking WMV file.
   • File –> Export –> Adobe Media Encoder

   Next, we’re going to make a custom Render Preset.
   
   This will encode your file as Windows Media Video 9, 2-pass VBR. In layman’s terms: Pretty.

   And now you have to set the ‘Audiences’ Settings. Why is it called ‘Audiences?’ To confuse you.
   
   We have our 24fps frame rate, our correct PAR and Resolution, and a really high Bitrate.
   The high bitrate will keep it from looking like a YouTube video.

   At this point you should save your render preset. I know I did.

   Render that Video!

7. Insert into Power Point.
   You really don’t know how to do this? Seriously?
   Ugh…fine, I’ll tell you. But you really should have gone to the Help file for this one.
   
   If you can’t figure it out from here, maybe you should reconsider the career path that put you in front of a computer.

I hope you enjoyed my tutorial.

[Audio & Article on NPR] and [Video on NBC]

I am equally impressed and disturbed, and can’t wait to take a tour of the organ farm.

She weighs in on the Fruit Smoothie debate:

I’d have to concur with my fellow RD’s… even if they are British:)

Smoothies can have a whole lot of other things in them as well- hidden sugars, fats even, and it loses a lot of the fiber by pulverizing the fruit.

Your best bet is to go with eating regular, no frills fruit. It’s got the fiber- which helps with blood sugar control, as well as lowering your LDL (bad cholesterol) and helps you to feel full longer which can lead to wt loss.

If you want to have a smoothie, enjoy it. But try and make them at home so you can control what you put in it; i.e. fresh fruit, nonfat yogurt, no sugar added fruit juice in minimal amounts.

When out and grabbing a smoothie, get a small size (it packs a punch in calories) and for the love of God- no whip cream on top!!

p.s. the whole “worse than Coke” thing.. it depends on what you are looking for. As far as calories- yes, a fruit smoothie can have more. But if you are looking for cancer fighting antioxidants… you won’t find it in soda.

Thanks, Ashley.  I’m going to drink a Coke Smoothie.

They are expensive, says Sanders, “and bloody holier than thou”. With whole fruit, the cell structure is still intact, and you swallow pieces. They take longer to digest and the sugar in them is released slowly, rather than the rapid spike in blood glucose produced by drinking juice, or a smoothie. “If you liquidise it into goo it’s just like drinking ordinary Coke. Or worse, actually,” he says. “It’s still a sugary drink. A lot of people on diets don’t realise that if they’re drinking loads of apple juice or orange juice, it’s got a lot of calories in. If you drink a litre of apple juice a day, it’ll be 400 calories.” Saunders particularly objects to labelling that implies that drinking these concentrates substitutes for three or four portions a day: “They don’t. They only count for one.”

Is this true, that it’s “just like drinking ordinary Coke?” That seems a bit harsh, but maybe something happens with the glucose, sucrose, or you-crose.

There are a lot of processed and prepared foods out there that are big, fat liars. Next time you pick up a Kellog’s Nutri-grain bar, don’t just look at the stats, but at all of those weird ingredients. Then put it down and get something that’s not made out of chemicals.

Last night I made some burgers with chuck and round that I ground in the food processor. I also bought some nice buns, some Cabot Extra Sharp cheddar, a red onion, and some mushrooms.

A few things went wrong. First, the burger was under seasoned, and slightly overcooked to medium instead of medium-rare. Next, the cheese wasn’t bold enough to hang out with the burger. I let the onions get nice and soft and cooked down, whereas next time they’re going to get a quick sear on each side so they retain their body and red-onion-tude.

Despite these setbacks, the burger was really delicious. It was meaty, the right size, and full of burger juice. The best part of my meal last night, aside from the company, was the promise of a self-ground burger done correctly. I’m going to reattempt this tonight, and I predict a big success. Tonight’s plan involves some especially good cheese from DiBruno Brothers.

This is actually how most of my cooking experiments go: Try it once with so-so results, learning enough so that next time I can nail it. I’m satisfied with last night’s 86% of the way there burger.

The home of Sweaty Robot falls somewhere between a bachelor pad and an editing studio. A mix of couches crowd around a TV in one room, fancy editing equipment sits in another, and random paraphernalia covers the walls in between — anything from funny photos to a 12-month horse calendar, all (presumably) hung in sarcasm.

This, my favorite part of the piece, makes me feel like we were profiled in a small Rolling Stone article. It was always crazy to us how a reporter would come into the house, interview us, and then never remark about the state in which we live. The horse calendar is the one from “Speed Eaters,” and served a real purpose during the filming of “Happy Birthday, Harris Malden.” Now it hangs in sarcasm.

There used to be a lot more Ironic Decoration in the house such as the posters for these movies: Dr. Doolittle 3, Stuart Little 3, Phat Girlz, and more.

[Link to the Whole Article]

With a quick search on Craigslist I found the bed frame for around $75 less than IKEA, plus it came with those wooden slat things, which cost something like $30.

Lou helped bring the bed frame to the car, while his girlfriend watched. They were both pleasant. That was my first Craigslist friend.

Then I bought a new TV. After customizing a little script from Yahoo Pipes, I was alerted about the TV I was looking for via iGoogle. After emailing back and forth, I drove over to West Chester to meet Ed, a friendly fat dude. He welcomed my driving partner and me into his apartment, where we sat down for some “Finding Nemo.” We had some good small talk and played with some TV settings.

Ed didn’t once try to murder me. In fact, he helped bring the TV to the car. Thanks Ed.

Then my phone broke. I knew exactly who to turn to. Craig, and his wonderful list. Within a few days the Yahoo Pipes script found a phone I liked in West Philly. I just got back from the hood where I gave Langston $100 for the phone (LG VX8700), home AND car charger, and a 1GB microSD card. Beat that, Best Buy.

Thanks, Craigslist. You rule.

*** EDIT ***

I forgot, I also bought a $20 video card from a nice kid who spoke broken English. I saved like $20 bucks.

Who eats a tomato in a salad as a big, fat wedge? You couldn’t have cut it in little half-moons, or something I could actually eat without cutting? It was pale and tired-looking– really, a sad imitation of what tomatoes should actually look like. I took a bite. Mealy, squishy, flavorless. Gross.

Why, then, would a restaurant even serve the damn thing? Leave it out of the salad, replace it with something in season, or add another slice of cucumber or something.

I see restaurants, delis, and buffets systematically throwing tomatoes where they normally go, but I really don’t understand why. They’re flavorless and feel bad in your mouth this time of year. Until summer comes around, just stick with canned tomatoes. Even the Pathmark brand is pretty good. Word on the street (the internet) is to look for the canned San Marzano tomatoes from Italy.

For more on why we’re getting such lame tomatoes: Wired’s “Why Things Suck: Tomatoes.”

The Music: “Come on, Sugar” by The Sea Captains.
Additional Voice: Juan Cardarelli

This recipe is also sort of co-sponsored by Mario Batali– it’s a from some Christmas show they did together. In the end, he ate her like an ortolan (If you’ve never heard of how this food is prepared, click the link. You can also hear a great story about it during Act II of this episode of “This American Life.”)

I used this recipe the other day to make some rabe-age, and it’s a winner in my book. Totally simple, and the blanching kills the bitterness that made my first attempt barely palatable. Halfway through, I was a little worried that it was going to use every single dish I had in the kitchen, but most of the stuff lends to a quick-rinse-back-on-the-shelf sort of deal. I definitely eased up on the garlic, and there weren’t any raisins in the house, (just mouse shit) so they didn’t make the cut.

One thing to be aware of, though, is that BR is pretty expensive right now, at about $2.50-$3 a bunch. I asked The Produce Lady when the price would be back to reasonable, and she said May. Until then, I think I’d stick with a big bag of spinach or some swiss chard for $1.50.