This is the second book in the game, set, and match trilogy by Len Deighton, which is the first trilogy of the nine-volume Bernard Samson series. It’s classic, Cold War, British spy stuff. It’s a big undertaking and it’s going to take me a while to get through this, but I’m savoring it.

This book picks right up at the end of Berlin Game. Samson is dealing with the aftermath of his wife’s defection to Moscow, juggling job stress and family stress. His work task: get a high ranking KGB man to defect right out from under his wife’s nose. His personal task: find a way to take care of his two kids and protect them from his wife while warding off advances from two beautiful women.

It’s a great mix of spy craft and drama. So far it feels a little simpler and lighter than Le Carre’s Smiley series, but has comparable character development. There’s a lot of detail on Samson and I think he’s a little more approachable than Smiley. I’ll be able to talk more about this after reading Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (targeting late June).

**  PLOT KILLERS FOLLOW  **

Samson proved highly fallible in this book, almost ruining certain scenes. Twice he was duped by an attractive woman; in both cases I knew as soon as the women entered the scene. I felt kind of let down by the ease with which he was taken in. It’s a theme though that runs through Samson’s character, he is constantly confronted with women he can’t read correctly.

It adds an interesting dimension to Samson and makes the books a lot of fun. Deighton couldn’t pull it off though if he didn’t build some solid intrigue, which he does very well. The tension around who’s on who’s side in this game of spies doesn’t take a back seat to anything, all of the other fun stuff is just icing on the cake. The ending is packed with double crosses and epic spy stuff, truly unique batch of trickery played by all sides of the game. Awesome.

I have London Match queued up, which I purchased via Abe Books (like this one). I don’t think I’ll be able to hold off much past the end of summer. By the way, Abe Books is awesome for old books – cheap and reliable.

Indian Boundary causes more mixed emotions for me than any other course I play regularly. Sometimes it makes me angry and sometimes it makes me happy. Often I think it’s the future of golf in our country, then I’ll run into some dude fishing the pond on the par three eighth hole and think otherwise.

I rank Indian Boundary third in the collection of Cook County Forest Preserve courses behind George Dunne and Highland Woods. I paid $49.99 on a Sunday morning in May with cart for a decent sub-$50 experience. It’s a solid layout, highly convenient to downtown, and you’re almost guaranteed to see a deer. However, like many of the Forest Preserve courses, you have some frequent conditioning issues and a small percentage of golfers may not be challenged by even the back tees (they barely stretch 6,000 yards). If I’m just a little dialed-in I can really score at these short courses, like I did this day.

I was in a foursome with some friends and on the 7th tee and one of them exclaimed, “Wow, this is a great course. I can’t believe it only took me 20 minutes to get here.” We had just seen a deer on the previous hole and the tee box we were standing on was tucked back in a stand of trees overlooking a small lake that you had to carry. It was a picturesque, peaceful moment. Here it is:

There are a few of these moments, then there’s also a pack of bland, trouble-free, sub-350 yard par fours and no challenging par fives. But this could be the future of American golf. You can walk for $35 (includes 9% city tax) at most and its playability does not cost too much in aesthetics and challenge. That’s relatively inexpensive and it has to be cheap to run. There is no driving range and no significant clubhouse or bag services. This is fine because the first few holes are simple and provide a decent warm-up. Plus, you never have to deal with figuring out how much to tip a bag room attendant.

Every time I blow holes in this place I can find an offsetting benefit. The fairways are bluegrass and sometimes in poor condition, but the greens are bent (or damn close) so the putting experience is comparable to courses a little more expensive. In general, they do a good job on the conditioning on what I’m guessing is a tight budget. Here is the approach to the par four 6th, a short, tricky hole and one of the nicer ones on the course. Note the nice manicure on the bluegrass (including a first cut) and the well-bunkered green:

The place just has a nice, minimalist feel. Heck, there have been times when my complete time investment has been less than five hours out and back, including drive time and wait time. I’ll make sacrifices for that.

I’ve played two short, sporty, inexpensive courses this year so I’m ready for some juice. I’m hitting Harborside tomorrow so I’ll get bent grass fairways, fast greens, and trouble around every corner. I’m pumped! Hopefully the weather holds out for a morning round.

My sister is the frosting queen of Northwest Ohio. Her secret: Crisco. That may sound kind of repulsive to those who didn’t grow up with a can of Crisco on the counter like we did. To me, it sounds like a great way to add some density and texture to one of life’s small pleasures – frosting.

Yep, frosting-love is a curse of the Steffens. I was home a few weeks ago and found myself spreading my sister’s frosting on some cheap shortbread cookies and it transformed each cookie into a religious experience. It reminded me of a food item I had about a month ago that did not need any transforming, but the frosting still really stood out. That’s it in the picture – Art Smith’s Hummingbird Cake from Table 52 (note to self, when cheap shortbread cookies and Crisco remind you of a masterpiece by Oprah’s former chef it could mean something is horribly wrong with your tastebuds).

Smith’s dessert was described on the menu as such:

Banana-Pineapple Cake, Cream Cheese Frosting

That’s a big turn-off for me. I don’t like fruit in my cake. Period. I was on the brink of getting the chocolate cake thing or the pecan pie thing, but this was a special occasion (late Valentine’s Day dinner with G) and the wait staff did a good job of selling the fact that the fruit was “added only for moisture and sweetness, you don’t taste it all.”

In the end, I went with the Hummingbird and I’m glad I did. Actually, I was glad for three days because it lasted three separate sittings and held up very well in the takeout container. Yes, that’s two sittings of just shoveling it in right from the takeout container after dinner.

It’s kind of carrot-cakish but better. It has more brown notes, like a caramelish and brown sugar type of flavor. And despite the thickness of the frosting, it was light enough that it didn’t ruin the cake/frosting ratio and stood up to being hauled around in a takeout container and pawed at for three days. It just works and has completely changed my view of fruit in cakes.

I was so smitten that I’ve started asking southern folk about the Hummingbird Cake in my efforts to bond with them using something other than college football. Here’s the thing though, I’ve asked no less than four people from Georgia and South Carolina and they look at me like I’m nuts. I don’t get it, if you Google this thing Paula Deen is all over it. Oh well, maybe it’s not as southern as I thought.

This makes me wonder if I’m tapped in to food from my region. If you ask me about deep dish pizza, hotdogs, cherry pie, and Italian beef, I’m going to have something to say. I guess I can’t think of anything else really. There are probably a whole host of things that people identify as midwest/Chicago food that would make me say, “Huh?” Test me.

Oh well, it was a great cake.

I finished the last two chapters of this book on a plane coming back from Charlotte on a business trip. The flight was half empty and I was seated behind two drunk guys on their way to a bachelor party in Chicago. As I was sitting there in quiet contemplation, the guys in front of me engaged in a long and sometimes animated discussion about Trayvon Martin, Robert Zimmerman, and vigilante justice.

It was a strange confluence of events that forced me to think harder about this book.

If you’re not familiar with the story, you need to know right off the bat that this is generally regarded as the greatest Western novel ever. As a kid, I read a lot of Westerns, so this reading experience really hit home for me. It’s an incredible read and very appropriate for current times.

** PLOT KILLERS FOLLOW **

The story takes place over about 48 hours in 1885 and chronicles a doomed hunt for three murderers by a 28-person posse from a small cowtown in Nevada. It’s told from the perspective of a cowboy in the posse named Art Croft, a sensitive and thoughtful person but a man ill-equipped for the deed at hand. He’s a perfect vehicle to tell the story.

It’s a short book, maybe 240 pages depending on the format. It’s broken down into five longer-than-average chapters. They aren’t titled, but if they were, I’d title them like this:

1. The Saloon
2. The Posse
3. The Hunt
4. The Hanging
5. The Saloon Again

I read it over the course of a week in four sessions, the last two chapters being a single session. You’d have to be one heartless human to stop after Chapter Four, or just someone with serious time constraints.

This book points out the the evils and perils of the mob mentality and vigilante justice, but it goes deeper. One of the subtler topics Walter Van Tillburg Clark explores is the moral implication of doing the right thing. I’ll use a scene in the book to clarify so you don’t think I’m full of $^|+.

During formation of the posse, the ensuing hunt, and the hanging, there was one man who campaigned tirelessly to cease the charade of justice and bring the suspects back to town to be tried. His name was Davies and he was the local shopkeeper. Davies did everything he could; he got the local judge out of his office to try and stop the posse from going out, he confronted the leader of the posse and tried to reason with him, and he begged other posse members to see his point of view to try and build consensus for stopping the hangings.

Nothing worked. Three men were hanged and their innocence was discovered only moments later on the way back to town.

The aftermath is ugly. The son of the leader of the posse hangs himself when he gets back to town. His father, Tetley, commits suicide by impaling himself on his own sword shortly after hearing of his son’s death. A local rancher promises to take care of the widow and children of one of the hanged.

The reader, I think, finds these pretty meaningless. I still had a sickening feeling for the injustice done to the suspects because it could not be undone. Davies has the same feeling, but he also has a more complicated set of emotions. He feels a tremendous, crushing guilt in his cowardice.

What? Croft, the narrator, is incredulous and tries to talk Davies down from this. Croft expresses that Davies was the only one talking sense and the only one standing up to the leader Tetley, he should feel anything but guilt because he did all he could.

Davies doesn’t feel the same way. He knew the suspects were innocent. He just knew. He also knew that only way he could stop the hanging was to kill the leader Tetley. His guilt resulted from the feeling of relief he felt for not bringing his gun. He was relieved that he didn’t have to make the hard decision to do the only thing that could have saved three innocent men, kill Tetley.

“Yes, you see now, don’t you?” he said in a low voice. “I had everything, justice, pity, even the backing – and I knew it – and I let those three men hang because I was afraid. The lowest kind of virtue, the quality dogs have when they need it, the only thing Tetley had, guts, plain guts, and I didn’t have it.”

…

“All a great, cowardly lie,” he [Davies] said violently. “All pose; empty, gutless pretense. All the time the truth was I didn’t take a gun because I didn’t want it to come down to a showdown. The weakness that was in me all the time set up my sniveling little defense. I didn’t even expect to save those men. The most I hoped was that something would do it for me.” (pg 234)

Wow man, this blew me away. It was an ultra intense scene in the book and it reminded me immediately of the feeling I had after reading the Pat Tillman book. This feeling that some people just hold themselves to a higher standard.

I felt like Davies was a hero but Tillman, like Davies himself, would probably feel differently. Would Tillman have been the type of guy to stand in front of the unjustly accused with a gun and kill anyone who tried to hang them?

This prompted me to re-read my take on the Tillman book and it just led to more questions about my (our) place in this world. How do I guarantee an appropriate response in times of crisis and conflict, especially when faced with crushing peer pressure? When do you step in and when do you walk away? When do you act on what you really feel? When is it right to decide to take a human life?

Tough questions.

This issue was foreshadowed very early in the book but I wasn’t able to connect it until I reviewed things. As the posse was developing Davies tried to nip things in the bud by first reasoning with the group. He even seemed to think one person standing up to them in a non-violent manner would keep them from going. Croft didn’t think so and noted this:

I wasn’t so sure of that. Most men are more afraid of being thought cowards than of anything else, and a lot more afraid of being thought physical cowards than moral ones. There are a lot of loud arguments to cover moral cowardice, but even an animal will know if you’re scared. If rarity is worth, then moral courage is a lot higher quality than physical courage; but, excepting diamonds and hard cash, there aren’t many who take to anything because of its rarity. Just the other way. Davies was resisting something that had immediacy and a strong animal grip, with something remote and mistrusted. He’d have to make his argument look common sense and hardy, or else humorous, and I wasn’t sure he could do either. If he couldn’t he was going to find it was the small but present “we,” not the big, misty “we,” that shaped men’s deeds, no matter what shaped their explanations. (pg 62)

So maybe my description of Croft as “ill-equipped” earlier was wrong and maybe Davies was even less-equipped to stop this charade of justice. Maybe only someone who could apply the “big, misty” morality to the here-and-now in the face of physical opposition could stop this thing. If Croft had this insight, why didn’t he take the action? Or, maybe worse, why didn’t he feel the same guilt that Davies felt? Is Davies just irrational and too hard on himself?

Food for thought.

This book is especially appealing to fans of the Western. It has many of the stereotypical western characters but does not have many of the stereotypical western scenes. There was no big shootout at a pre-arranged place and no hero swooping in to save the day with guns blazing. But there was a big woman called Ma who can fight like a man and a Civil war vet who still doesn’t think the war is over.

I’ve thought about this book a lot over the last 48 hours. I need to make a point to come back to it in a few weeks.

Every so often I get hungry for a burger. I’m not talking every day. C’mon, maybe four or five times a week I’ll think, yeah, a burger would taste good. It’s not like I have a problem or anything. Most of the time I don’t act on these urges; I push them down into that dark, dirty place with other urges like ones to punch the loud talker on the bus or to watch ten straight hours of the NBA Playoffs.

I cracked on Sunday and went to Owen & Engine for the first time with burger meat on my mind. I showed up at around 1pm and the place was pretty full. There are maybe ten seats at the bar and I was able to get two for a friend and myself (friend and I, friend and me, what’s correct?). The place is smaller than I thought, unless they have an upstairs or something. A steady crowd of neighborhood types and movie-goers kept the staff hopping (it’s right across the street from the Regal City North 14).

I asked the bartender about the burger and he says, “It’s amazing. It’s 40% ground beef, 30% short rib, and 30% brisket and done to temperature so if you usually order it medium-rare I’d go with medium. It’s hand packed and our kitchen really knows how to cook a burger perfectly. You’ll love it.”

Okay man, I thought, I would have been okay with, “It’s good.” I certainly appreciate the passion though.

So there it is up top – burger, medium, no cheese, $14. The grilled onions came with it, I didn’t ask for them but they were a nice touch. No lettuce or tomato, but you get a pickle spear. It comes on a potato bap, which is Scottish for bun. The chips (yes, fries) are nice and come with a distinctive malt vinegar garlic aioli, which was darn good, but we aren’t going to go into that.

Let’s talk burger. Tossing short rib and brisket into the mix makes for a darker, juicier, and less dense patty when compared to standard ground beef/ground chuck/ground sirloin patty. Here’s the cross section:

It looks like a massive half pounder but doesn’t eat that way. It’s almost light and crumbly, dare I say, and melts in your mouth. It’s so juicy that you get a little premature bun saturation, which I don’t mind. It led me to ask the bartender whether it was grilled or fried. His answer was, “Grilled.”

I pressed on for some clarification because I was surprised, there was no char flavor and it was so juicy. I asked again, “So it was grilled on a big sheet of steel?”

“Yes,” was his answer.

Okay, got it now. I call that fried. This distinction between grilled and fried isn’t something that makes sense to everyone, so I’m not faulting this bartender. Be sure, this would have been a different experience had it been set on a grill where the juices dripped into a flame and were reconstituted into the meat via flame vapor/smoke/stuff. I don’t prefer one over the other, heck, I don’t even consider grilled burgers and fried burgers in the same food group. It’s kind of like pizza; thin crust, stuffed, and regular pizza are three distinct groups worthy of singular consideration.

I got a little off topic there, sorry. You need to know that I loved this burger, this place, the sides, and the atmosphere. It’s really enjoyable. I can tell because when I left I was pumped up. I was sending pictures to G and telling her all about the malt vinegar aioli and the brisket/short rib combo. Oh yeah, I didn’t even mention the great IPA from Dark Horse Brewing. I can’t blow any holes in this place at all.

I can see taking people I care about here.

This Downton Abbey thing has wet my appetite for more Brit lit classic drama stuff, so Gail and I did Bleak House together. It’s different from Downton Abbey though, it isn’t some soap opera dramatized for modern tastes. It’s a dark, scathing indictment of the British legal system based on the book written by Charles Dickens. He’s famous.

Let me be clear, if you’re in the mood for this type of Brit lit tragedy, comedy, romance, drama kind of thing, you need to head straight for this BBC version of Bleak House, now. Period. Bypass Jane Austen, bypass Merchant & Ivory, bypass Downton Abbey; nobody involved with those is worthy of carrying Charles Dickens’ undergarments. In fact, I couldn’t think of a better way to blow your two-week free trial of Netflix than taking in the seven hours or so of Bleak House.

Esther Summerson is a fictional character to hang your hat on. And Gillian Anderson knocks it out of the friggin’ park in the role of Lady Dedlock. It’s also one of Carey Mulligan’s first roles and she nails Ada Clare. I want to consume more Charles Dickens stuff soon. I’m thinking Great Expectations next.

Twice this month I’ve been half way through something and said to myself, “Man, do I really have to keep going?” Wow, what a payoff in both cases (this and A Storm of Swords). Mark my words, I will never, ever, stop a work of fiction at the half way point. Ever. I’ll either stop it at 25% or 75%, never 50%. Hold me to that.

I’m not as familiar with Dickens as I should be. I read Oliver Twist in the 90s but can’t recall it all that well. I remember The Artful Dodger a little but that’s about it. I was a different person then and maybe a little brain dead or something. I just don’t think I’ll forget the characters from Bleak House. I’ve mentioned a few but there are so many; Snagsby, Krook, Tulkinghorn, Guppy, Smallweed, Skimpole, Bucket, … amazing crew.

I was a little put off at first by the camera work. It’s dark and scenes open with loud, sharp noises and distant camera angles, often multiple noise/angle scene openings. I got used to it though. Such a great miniseries. It’s complicated and you’re in the dark for a big chunks of it, but clarity comes in time and the ending is heart wrenching and victorious. Despite the Netflix/Apple TV problems we’ve been having (cutting out in the middle of shows, not available), it’s been paying for itself so far.

This is book three of the series. I started reading it after seeing the advertisements for the start of Season Two on HBO. They are pushing this thing pretty hard in print and on TV. I don’t have HBO so I’ve only seen an episode or so on the road and it looks pretty true to the books. Not that you care, but remember, I only started reading this because I caught an episode while traveling.

So here we are.

I was bored with this book at the half way point. It just wasn’t doing anything for me. But shortly after the half it took off like a shot and never looked back. There was a frenzy of death, bloodshed, hope, sorrow, victory, and disappointment over the course of a few chapters that caused a bout of late-night reading.

The story is complicated and there are plenty of deep characters, yet it can still be treated as a guilty pleasure. It goes both ways, sci-fi and fantasy addicts can discuss the story’s social significance and people like me can bang through it because it’s a ton of fun. I forget many of the characters and I don’t have any idea where they are geographically (in a relative sense, it’s a fictional land), but I can still follow it.

I’ve heard some say this book, number three, is the best in the series. I’ll leave that to the pundits, but I will say, the ending left me in a place that makes me think I’ll read the next book soon. These things are a thousand pages a pop so they’re not small endeavors, but that second half went quickly and left me hanging. I’ll target October for the next one.

I’m worried that my trilogy rule, which says things get shaky after number three, will hold true. The Dune “trilogy” rocked until the fourth book. I tried to stay with it, but couldn’t. W.E.B. Griffin’s Presidential Agent series made it to a solid fourth book but blew up on the fifth. I’m done with that, despite the fact that I said I’d give it a chance. I won’t.

Now this Song of Ice and Fire series (TV calls it Game of Thrones series) is already five books and Martin is shooting to make it seven. That’s big. Hopefully it ends up more like the American crime or British spy series I read which seemingly extend forever without losing momentum. Martin published the first one back in 1996 and there have been five and six years between the last two books, so I have time to read the next two before the anticipatory wait period.

Yeah, the anticipatory wait period, that’s fun stuff. It’s that time of analysis, punditry, speculation, and reflection that occurs during the run-up to potential new stuff in a series of successes. I may or may not be able to enjoy it, depending on how fast I consume the next two.

Cold meat on bread is a staple of mine. Oh sure, there was a chunk of my existence where I needed sandwiches warmed in some fashion, either via a conventional oven or one of those toaster oven things like you see at Potbelly. But I live in the now, which are simpler times, and cold meat on bread is usually what’s for lunch.

I’m not talking just any cold meat on bread. I’m talking the Gypsy & Danish Bacon, Boiled Ham sandwich from Fumare Meats in the French Market. Check out that picture and tell me it’s not a thing of beauty. At Fumare Meats they do it right so many different ways that it may take a few posts to sort through them all. And if you work in the loop and you’re not making multiple trips a month to the French Market, you’re missing out.

From what I can tell, here are the ingredients:

• Gypsy Ham
• Danish Ham
• Boiled Ham
• Lettuce
• Tomato
• European Butter
• Roll

They give out spicy mustard on the side, which I add prodigiously.

There are a few keys to the sandwich. First, the roll is chewy but fluffy on the inside (I think it’s a ciabotta). Chewy enough that you have to hold it strategically when you get to the ends so the ingredients don’t squirt out the side. I’ve had this sandwich maybe 20 times in the last few years and every time the roll has been perfect. They may buy them from someone else in the French Market the day of. They’re always fresh.

Second, the ham is flavorful but not overpowering. You get a hit of bacon flavor so you know it’s there, and it’s enough to augment the boiled ham, but the meat doesn’t star in a sandwich like this. This sandwich is a symphony, no single ingredient will blow you away, but everything works together perfectly.

Lastly though, if I were to pick a star, I’d go with the European butter. If you look closely just underneath the lettuce, you can see a thin layer of butter. Butter? Yeah, butter. They just say butter on their menu, but when you ask them they refer to it as European butter, which, I’ve heard, is popular in Europe. It finishes off the texture of this sandwich perfectly. You have the chewy bread, the cold meat, the crunchy lettuce, the spongy tomato, then the dense creaminess of the butter. Amazing for such simple ingredients.

It’s a $7 sandwich and worth every cent.

So this thing is great, but there’s more. Don’t even get me started on the pastrami done in the Montreal-style. We’ll save that for another time my friends, another time.

I played Hickory Hills Golf Club last Sunday and found it somewhat odd, but priced in the ballpark and with some unique features. It was the first time I’ve played here and the first round this year, so it’s appropriate that it will be my first review in the re-purposed Chicago Public Golf/@golfjstef quest for interweb golf glory.

I knew all last week that Sunday had the potential for being a good day to hit it, but my foursome didn’t get around to deciding to play for sure until Saturday. It’s always risky trying to get a weekend prime tee time the day before, but pretty doable in this day and age. Here’s roughly how my call to Hickory Hills went:

Me: Hi, do you have space for four tomorrow, say around 8am?

HH staff: Yes we do, how about 8:00am?

Me: Wow, cool, actually, what about a little later, say 8:30 or 9:00?

HH staff: Yes, we can do 8:32 or 9:00.

Me: Great, I’ll take the 8:32. Now it may be only three because we have one guy on the fence. Are you going to hit my credit card if I don’t show up with all four?

HH staff: We don’t need a credit card. I’ll put you down for four and if you show up with less that’s fine.

I couldn’t envision a tee-time conversation going any better than that. It’s actually one of the greatest tee-time discussions I’ve ever had. I’m going to pause a moment and savor it, then let’s get to some details.

The price was $42 with cart on April 15th on Sunday morning. It took us about 30 minutes to get there from downtown by taking I55 to Harlem south to 95th west. It’s barely over 6,000 yards from the back tees (the only measured tee box) and comprised of bluegrass mown to about two different levels. The putting surfaces may have been a finer type of grass but it wasn’t cut very short so they were pretty slow. It’s a par 71 but the rating runs 67.9. There isn’t much trouble and there isn’t much of a crowd. These could be related. I shot an 80 so I was pretty happy.

It sounds a little bland thus far but it’s really not. It’s actually a pretty decent value. Things are kept interesting with a serious of ridges and embankments often used to elevate greens and tee boxes. The picture at the top of this post is taken from the first tee, a straight, trouble-free par 5 which sits atop a ridge and greets players when they exit the clubhouse. You pay a reasonable price and walk out and see this, which portends that you may have gotten a pretty darn good deal.

This feeling ebbs and flows throughout the round though and by the time the disappointing 18th hole rolls around (277 yard par four) you aren’t quite sure how good the deal was. The low price and lack of crowds are great, but boredom sets in by the turn and some aesthetic fumbles begin to set you off, like cart paths down the center of fairways and large, unsightly signs behind each green with the hole number.

I’ll tell you what though, I feel like I’ve found a workout course – a hassle-free place to go and carry your clubs for a great workout. Here are the features of a great workout course for me:

• Proximate (relatively, by Chicago standards that means < 30 min)
• Cheap
• Hilly
• Uncrowded

This place does fit the bill in that respect and if I play it again it will be for the workout value. Check out my photo set on Flickr. It was a cloudy so there aren’t many good pics, but they give you a feel for the place.

This group was one of my earliest forays into instrumental rock along with Explosions in the Sky (EITS). I first started dabbling in this stuff during my music renaissance about seven years ago (that’s when I discovered Pandora). I no longer actively pursue new music via Pandora because it had such a one-time broadening effect on my musical tastes that I can discover stuff on my own via friends now. Or, ah, via Amazon.

Yep, this album popped up in a targeted add from Amazon during a $5 sale and I just clicked “buy with one-click” like a fool. I’m not disappointed that I did so because it’s pretty cool stuff, but it was probably a superfluous buy. By that I mean that it will sit in my “instrumental” playlist which I’ll shuffle often when I’m working. It won’t hit the regular album rotation.

This group hit me when I started putting EITS into Pandora after seeing the movie Friday Night Lights. This Will Destroy You (TWDY) started popping up consistently, as did Pelican. I bought TWDY’s first album called Young Mountain. They’re just about all instrumental but a little more funkier than EITS. They layer in some digitized background sound behind the guitars, drums, and keyboards. They also toss in some vocal stuff. It’s not necessarily background vocals, it could just be people talking (I even once thought I heard a death metal style grunt).

It’s difficult to pick out a best song. That’s just not how I listen to most of these instrumental-only artists. I rarely pay much attention individually to songs unless it’s Pelican. I have plenty of instrumental stuff to last me for awhile so I need to be more selective in the future.

Cool note: these guys are from San Marcos, Texas, a neat small town about 50 miles northwest of San Antonio. I’ve actually been to this town before and had some great doughnuts at this little shop called Dixie Cream Doughnuts. I’m just keeping track of my doughnut life. That’s not too abnormal, is it?

I often partake in what I think many refer to as the “classic American breakfast.” It consists of two eggs, a hunk of meat, some potatoes, and a grain of some sort. It usually runs about 1200–1500 kcal and can easily satisfy two meals. The problem many have is that it doesn’t contain much innate sweetness, so if you need a sugar fix, you have to get a side of pancakes or wrestle with the cheap, plastic, single-serving packs of Smucker’s jelly. Neither of these are good options; the former because it’s just too much and the latter because it’s just not enough.

Revolution Brewing has figured things out. They’ve addressed this problem to near perfection. The grain of some sort is a fluffy biscuit and if you throw on some of the syrupy, fruity concoction that they serve in a little chrome sauce cup your sweetness cravings are satisified. Not too much, not too little, just right baby.

It’s all there in the picture above. That’s two eggs over easy, a sausage patty, fried potatoes, and the biscuit thing. Not bad for $10. Great stuff, but only one of the many reasons to visit this Logan Square gem. There’s beer. Lot’s of it.

I grabbed a beer since it was after noon and it was a holiday (NYE). I ordered a golden lager or IPA, unfortunately I can’t remember which and I don’t have the ability to tell by looking at it. I’m colorblind when it comes to browns and oranges.

Gail and I did try a little something special. We got a tasting of the B.A. Baracus, their Russian Imperial Stout aged in bourbon barrels for a year. It’s intense. I’m not a liquor drinker at all and I don’t particularly like bourbon or whiskey, but I found this sort of drinkable. I need to try it again, knowing that it could lead to a bad place. I dabbled in coffee back in the 90s by starting with cappuccinos and lattes, and now I’m a black coffee addict. You can see the parallels, not good.

This place is conveniently located on Milwaukee Ave just south of Fullerton. The 56 Bus goes right by it and it’s near the California Blue Line stop. You know what, if you have three hours and you’re stuck at O’hare, this would be an awesome quick trip. It’s a unique place in a cool Chicago neighborhood. In fact, I’m going to start tagging things with ORD layover so I can accumulate ideas for people stuck at O’hare for a while.

It’s bright and modern with a cool logo. I find myself raising my fist in defiance for no reason at all. I will be back.

We officially have a trend in the stand-up comedy industry. Louis CK started it with his highly successful Live at the Beacon Theatre show that he released on his own and Aziz Ansari has followed suit. He released Dangerously Delicious for $5 a few weeks ago and I grabbed it after seeing an article in the NY Times. This trend shows no signs of stopping. Heck, I’ll buy the Jim Gaffigan show soon.

I buy these because I love the delivery model, which circumvents big media companies and eschews digital rights management. Oh sure, I also like stand-up comedy, but not really enough to actually go to a comedy club. In fact, I had never even heard of Aziz Ansari before that NY Times article. Evidently he’s on some TV show kind of like The Office, that’s all I know.

It was funny stuff. Not Louis CK funny, but pretty funny. It’s profane and rude, on par with Louis CK in that respect, so beware. It’s pretty sophomoric, Ansari is young and does a lot of self-deprecating stuff about dating and technology.

I do struggle with his method of incorporating other people into his routine. He uses his Cousin Harris, a friend named Brian, and miscellaneous unnamed people as a vehicle for some of his humor. This doesn’t always work for me. I keep thinking, are those people real? Did that really happen to him? Because it would be really funny if it did, but not so funny if it didn’t. He does mention his Cousin Harris in the credits, so maybe they are real.

Louis CK incorporates others, but not in the same way. It’s more about himself so it seems a little more genuine.

It’s still great stuff. Ansari mocks racism a lot and that makes for some really funny bits. That’s the best way to criticize racism I think, make fun of it with humor. He has this nailed.

Nice job. Definitely worth $5.