Am I a snob? A food geek? A locavore? Part of the slow-food movement? I don’t really know. I do know that in 2009 the wife and I decided to stop buying food products that contained ingredients that we couldn’t buy on their own, nor make ourselves from natural plants and carcass and such. I know I will troll around eating virtually any kind of food, so long as it is any good. 2009 was, indisputably, the best year for eating I’ve ever had. I became a cook in 2009, and my boss, the chef, had made his bones in fine dining, and so I started to learn what really made food good, and my tolerance for frozen, canned, stale and bland dropped down, and my passion for fresh and fresher went way up.
So this is what I liked eating in 2009. Obviously, there is a bit of subjectivity here: part of dining out is the people you are with, the occasion, the weather outside, whatever. Your mileage may vary. But these are dishes I would recommend to any hungry person (with exceptions for vegetarians, diabetics, etc). In the approximate order in which I ate them:
I have been to Earth Bread + Brewery at least a half dozen times now, and while the atmosphere and staff are pleasant, nothing else on the menu is half as good as the Seed. Mozzarella with pine nuts, pumpkin and sesame seeds, garlic and a little salt does some magical things.
While you’re there, though, if it’s available, be certain to get yourself a Love Your Mother Mild. It’s 3.2% alcohol, which means you can have more than one (or more than two, or three), but its sweetness and slightly burnt toast flavor give the beer some punch that plenty of brews with far higher ABV cannot muster.
Zahav is, according to the waitstaff, an Israeli tapas restaurant. Our first trip there was for Katie’s birthday, and we learned three things: 1) There is no hummus, like Zahav’s hummus. 2) Israeli’s know how to make cabernet: Flam is a no-joke, earthy monster of a wine. 3) In Israel, when you have something to celebrate, you eat lamb. Well, from now on, when we have something to celebrate, we want to eat Zahav’s braised, bone-in lamb shoulder. We stuck to that, too. We ate it with 22 of our favorite people for our wedding 7 months later.
Our neighborhood bar, The Memphis Taproom, has some of the best pub grub in Philadelphia: quite possibly the city’s best wings. But the most notable items, for me, seem to be its ever changing vegetarian and vegan menu. I still do not know what jackfruit is, but I want it in a cake, and I want as many jackfruit cakes as possible, please. The guy sitting next to us at the bar described the thing as a vegan crabcake, but awesome. That’ll do.
My friend Andy spent two years living in New Orleans, working with Presbyterian Disaster Assistance to help repair the city from Hurricane Katrina. When his time was up and he was to come back to us here in the northeast, the wife and I flew down to NOLA, took Andy out to a celebratory dinner at Restaurant August. The meal was outstanding, but, without a doubt, concluded with the strongest course: Napoleon of nougatine with Valrhona chocolate bavarois and salted toffee ice cream, served with Late Harvest Grenache, Domaine du Mas Blanc, Banyuls, France, 2007. The three of us were already delighted with an excellent meal, and this dessert so rich and sweet, with a touch of salt and bitter and the complement of that wine turned us into giddy children, just laughing at how good everything in the world was at that moment.
From NOLA, the three of us drove back to Philadelphia, stopping in Kentucky for whiskey, and we learned about Elijah Craig 18 Year Single Barrel, which is like a magic trick of alcohol. We continued on the North Carolina, birthplace of barbecue, where they slowslowslow cook the whole hog, pick it, and serve it a big mess. We had a bunch of ‘em, but Allen & Son in Chapel Hill was good enough that we didn’t have to talk to each other until we had gotten too full to keep eating. The only place that compared was the Skylight Inn in Ayden, and we were in such a rush (and so out of cash), that we just grabbed three BBQ sammiches and ate them in the car while trying to tear-ass out of NC. That ‘cue was so good I want to go back right now. Who has a car? Incidentally, both Skylight and Allen&Sons were discovered thanks to the North Carolina Barbecue Trail.
Another new Philly restaurant this year (Zahav being also new) is Bibou, a French BYOB in a town that has a lot of French food, and a lot of BYOBs. But the chef/owner there, Pierre Calmel, who runs the kitchen while his wife Charlotte runs the front of the house, are veterans of fine dining, and Calmels had spent the previous five years heading the kitchen in Philadelphia’s legendary Le Bec-Fin. When I bit into their Pied de Porc, a braised pig’s foot, deboned and then stuffed with foie gras, served in a bed of French lentils, I knew we had found a special place. Oh, and their Escargots, served with mushrooms and fava beans, were good enough that, if socially permissible, I would have licked the plate.
Bibou, of course, is not the only escargots serving Frenchman in Philadelphia. The grand old man of Philadelphia fine dining, Georges Perrier, is still serving buttery escargots at Le Bec-Fin. Growing up in the Philly suburbs, I always thought Le Bec-Fin was the best restaurant in the world. I ate there for the first time this year, for lunch, and while “best” can mean a lot of things to me nowadays, it was a singular experience eating there, and it lived up to nearly every expectation I had.
I say “nearly”, because one of the things I grew up knowing (though never experiencing) about LBF is its famous dessert cart. The process goes: you eat your dinner on immaculate platters with silver domes (which, naturally, the tuxedo-ed waiters all remove in unison), and then, instead of a dessert menu, a large cart is wheeled out, heavy laden with cakes and pies and other sugary delights that are, by reputation, as delicious as they are beautiful. Here is an image of the cart, somewhat blurry, but you get an idea, I suppose, and there is a certain visceral joy, I think, in ending a 5-star meal by pointing at what you want instead of attempting to select the menu’s short, ornate descriptions. Perrier has gotten older, and the fine dining scene in Philadelphia has gotten decidedly more casual, and so, the cart is out, at least at lunchtime. The dessert menu is still present, and fulfilling a childhood fantasy, ordered a slice of the signature dessert, Gateau Le Bec Fin, which is, simply put, the best chocolate cake I’ve ever eaten.
In December, Katie and I went down to Washington DC to experience Minibar, chef Jose Andres’ mecca of culinary experimentation. 12 people per night (in two seatings of six people) consume nearly 30 courses, prepared right in front of them. Food, traditionally, has been primarily a feast for the nose and the tongue, with texture and sight trailing far behind. Minibar’s 30 single-bite courses will deliver some food of astonishing flavor, while engaging all of your other senses. Dragon’s Breath Kettle Corn looks and tastes like a piece of regular kettle corn, until you see the other diners breathing smoke from their nostrils as they eat it. A bagel with cream cheese and lox is a pretty common breakfast all over, until your bagel is a thin, crispy, flakey cone filled with a cream cheese foam and salmon roe. The best brussels sprout I have ever eaten was their Tempura Brussels Sprout Rose. I have had no dining experience like it, and while it was, at times, frustrating (”please, sir, can I have some more?”), it engaged my sense of wonder in a way few meals ever have.
Another one of our favorite restaurants this year, Meme, served us a number of lovely dishes, but perhaps none were better than its Strawberry Napoleon with Whipped Ricotta that I ate there over the summer. Crispy, creamy, light and fruity and tart, it was the best of the non-chocolate sweets I ate this year.
Philadelphia has a growing Mexican food scene (actually, it would seem that every regional cuisine is growing in Philly, other than French, which is either dying or dramatically evolving, depending on one’s perspective). Xochitl is one of the more upscale Mexican places in the city, and while their main dishes were good but not great, their small plates were memorable. None moreso than Coctel de Camorones, their version of shrimp cocktail, but served with fried artichokes and corn foam and chicarrones and sorbet, for a combination of spicy and sweet, hot and cold, crispy and creamy.
One of the best new bars in Philly this year was the Franklin Mortgage and Investment Company. The Franklin is a bar with a pre-Prohibition vibe, some of the city’s best cocktails, and a policy of keeping their patrons mostly sitting instead of crowding all over the place. The result is a bar where it’s always busy and never over-crowded, and where classics like the Whiskey Sour are made and served with as much care and attention as more exotic cocktails like El Pinche Tigre, made with jalapeno-infused blanco tequila, ginger, apple, and lemon.
The Franklin is not the only liquor slingin’ newbie in town, though. Village Whiskey opened this year with, essentially, two items of note on its menu: whiskey, and bourbon. The whiskey list is enormous, with plenty of bottles of whiskey and whisky and scotch and bourbon not available in PA liquor stores, albeit, at a price. That said, its APA cocktail, made with Cascade hops-infused vodka, egg white, ginger and grapefruit is like drinking pale ale concentrate. Meanwhile, the grub is outstanding. They have a menu of delightful pickles–my favorite has been pickled cipollini onions with white anchovies. For the main course, however, Philadelphia’s best burger is served here. I haven’t had the monstrous Whiskey King ($26!), but their standard Village Burger for a reasonable $9 is the best burger I’ve had within the city limits.
Philadelphia has also gotten into barbecue a little bit. I haven’t (yet) been to Bebe’s BBQ in South Philly, which has a high reputation thus far, but Percy Street BBQ’s beef brisket with burnt ends is outstanding. For other, inexpensive fare, there is Paesano’s Arista, a roast pork sandwich served with broccoli rabe and long hots, the brisket soup at Nan Zhou Hand Cut Noodle House, which has the best broth of any noodle soup in a city filled with good noodle-soup broth.
All in all, a great year for eating, with some of the best meals coming at extraordinary prices (Minibar, Le Bec Fin, August), and at low-low ones (Nan Zhou, Skylight Inn). I can only hope for 2010 to be as good.
The more I think about it, though, the more I think that this must be some sort of clever p.r. strategy. I’m actually almost desperate to believe that this is a conscious strategy on Goldman’s part because if this really is what it looks like — if these people really are that blind and stupid — then that makes their exalted, entrenched position as mega-oligarchs endlessly lording over us truly horrifying, in a the-universe-is-random, black-comedy sort of way. It’s like making it all the way to the end of The Wizard of Oz and finding out that the Wizard is a hospital patient on a Haldol drip pushing a mop down the corridor of a cranial injury ward.
That’s just too hard for me to accept, for the moment anyway. So I’m choosing to believe they’re doing this on purpose, [...]
In 1974, Dock Ellis became the third Pittsburgh Pirate to throw a no-hitter. Above is the story, told by Dock hisself. Now here is the petition to have the MLB Network broadcast the game. Sign this petition.
I spend what I feel is an enormous amount of time pondering vaccination and the anti-vaccination movement. Maybe this time simple seems enormous because it’s a subject that has almost no direct bearing on me. I have no children, nor do I interact with any children with any regularity. I am not in medicine, nor do I desire to be (though the Red Cross is giving me track marks from all the blood I give them). I guess it’s my general interest in Why People Do Stupid that keeps my ear to the vaccination-ground (not to mention my nose to the vaccination-grindstone and my eye on the vaccination-ball. Do cliches become new again if you use enough of them? Can you lap around?).
Anyway, for those of you in the dark because you, like me, aren’t parents nor pediatricians, here’s the skinny: vaccines are given to adorable babies so they don’t die. Some people believe that, while the not-dead babies are still adorable post-vax (vax is vaccination-nerd slang for you, free of charge), they’re not exactly as autism-free as they were. That is, more clearly: vaccines apparently cause autism. This is patently untrue, of course. But no one is quite sure what does cause vaccines, and since we’re talking about children and scared parents, we’re talking emotions. And when the fight is Science+Facts v. Emotions+SickBabies, well, you can guess who wins.
Above is Joe Albietz, a pediatrician in Denver, CO, making the case for vaccines. His numbers are simple, few, and deliberately affecting. There are already too many easily-cured diseases out there killing people, we don’t need to bring back the old ones.
A few years ago, my younger brother and I were watching some program about the end of the world on Sci-Fi (which is now SyFy, apparently?), and space-as-cool-jazz man Neil de Grasse-Tyson said into the camera that an asteroid is going to pass so close to the Earth that it will be closer than most of the satellites we’ve got up there. It will be less than 1/12th the distance of the Earth to the Moon. It’s gonna be tight.
Then, this miserable death rock is going to slingshot ’round the sun and come back at us and there is a chance that, then, WHAM! It’ll smack right into us. Planetary bruising.
Well, thankfully, it’s looking less likely, says the Bad Astronomer:
How does this work? The orbit of an asteroid is calculated using measurements of its position in the sky over time. There is a tiny uncertainty in those positions for many reasons: atmospheric distortion blurring the asteroid image being one of if not the biggest. The way to minimize that is to get lots of images so that the errors average out, but even then the orbit calculated has uncertainties. And the longer into the future you project the orbit, the worse it gets. In the case of Apophis, astronomer Dave Tholen used hundreds of new images of Apophis to refine the orbit and get the better statistics for its impact risk.
Crisis averted, everyone! I’m a hero. No need to panic.
The bride-t0-be and I saw Zombieland on Thursday night in a just-advanced screening (thanks, Aint it Cool!). The movie, which is getting plenty of attention and giving plenty of advertisement, is excellent in a funny and violent and ludicrous way. It’s also receiving comparisons to Shaun of the Dead, since both movies are zombie comedies with a touch of romance. Shaun of the Dead is also one of the better zombie movies ever produced, and for its part, Zombieland is the best effort to date in the realm of Fast Zombies (as portrayed in 28 Days Later and the Dawn of the Dead remake).
Despite these obvious comparison points–all zombie movies are always compared to Romero, and now, presumably, all funny zombie movies that are successful will be compared to Shaun of the Dead–the movie I found myself most thinking about as the credits scrolled is one I remember being called The Legend of Hidden Lake, but since I cannot find that title on IMDB, I can only assume I’m misremembering this film, The Legend of Evil Lake, which seems as though it has a roughly similar plot.
Legend of Evil Lake is a Korean movie about ancient warriors and magic and power-lust. What struck me most about it, however, was that each action scene in the movie managed to reveal elements of the character. The way each character fought revealed their emotions and motivations and who they were. Zombieland is similar in this regard. Its narrator, Columbus, played by Jesse Eisenberg, is nervous and awkward, and keeps alive by following an ever-expanding list of survival rules that he keeps in a small notebook with him at all times. He runs before he shoots. Woody Harrelson’s Tallahassee, meanwhile, is sadistic in his zombie killing. The zombies have taken everything away from him, and he, crazed, will take some back. The world is now a videogame for Tallahassee.
Don’t see the movie for that, though. See it for big trucks and guns and bloody clowns and the quick fire jokes. The fact that the action isn’t just empty noise is merely a bonus.
Thus, you can’t fuck someone in the ass with a dildo, according to the current edition of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, the American Heritage Dictionary, and Webster’s New World Dictionary. The whore in Portnoy’s Complaint “who fucks the curtain with her bare twat” can’t do that, according to American Heritage, Webster’s New World, Random House, or Encarta. Lesbians can’t fuck each other at all, according to Webster’s New World and Encarta (though if they use a strap-on, Encarta becomes OK with it). Fucking a woman’s breasts is only possible according to Merriam-Webster. Finger-fucking and fist-fucking are impossible according to Webster’s New World, Random House, and American Heritage; Merriam allows it, but only if it’s vaginal and not anal. Only the OED, whose entry for the word I edited, defines fuck to encompass sexual acts beyond “sexual intercourse.”
Sheidlower’s book, The F-Word, has a new edition out and is apparently fucking amazing.
In high school, I was a budding grammar Nazi. I blame this on an ex-girlfriend’s grandmother, who, despite her advanced years and Alzheimer’s, had an ear for the same violations that once gave Strunk&White the howling fantods: ungrammaticality. Dottie’s favorite game–one I adopted, to the chagrin of virtually everyone I knew–was to count incorrect usages of the word “like” in speaking. She would say nothing while doing this. Dottie would simply listen serenely to whatever you said to say, raising her fingers, one at a time, until the speaker realized the correlation. “They’re decorating it with, like, this like jungle theme with palm trees and like tigers everywhere.” Three silent digits extend.
This game generated one of two effects on speakers: either you slimmed your sentences and removed a great deal of your chaff (as the ex- and I both did, quicksharp), or the stress of avoiding “like” became so enormous that smooth sentence completion be impossible: pausing, backtracking, violent re-words and stuttering were the new modus operandi.
Of course, I went to public school, and in public school, they don’t teach you things like the nominative/accusative/dative/genitive/locative cases, what a preposition is, how polarity words work, and so forth. Thankfully, SOMEBODY learned all these things, and are willing and able to share them all with us. Without further delay, a few more language-oriented blogs to recommend you to:
Perhaps the biggest and brightest and best of the language blogs, this site is run by Mark Liberman, a professor in UPenn’s well-esteemed linguistics department. He get’s plenty of help from a number of other linguistic luminaries, and the blog covers plenty of ground from Dan Brown’s prose and Van Morrison’s swearing to Beatles gibberish and Google books critiques.
This charming piece of webspace is occupied by Gabe Doyle, a UCSD linguistics grad student. His sub-header and motto apparent is “Prescriptivism Must Die!”, which is funny in such an inside-baseball, grammar-nerds-only sense that the time it would take to explain the joke would render it unfunny. Timing, as they say, is everything. Perhaps his hallmark post thus far (for me, at any rate) is his thorough argument, with ample evidence, of why the singular “they” is perfectly grammatical.
Ben Zimmer spends a lot of time moonlighting at Language Log or filling in for William Safire. When he’s doing neither, he keeps his own site, tracing words and their usages back through history. Most notable in his recent work, perhaps, is his debunking of “Cronkiters”.
Liverpool took Hull City for 6 goals yesterday, including a hat trick from Fernando Torres, and this beauty from captain Steven Gerrard. That goal, which put Liverpool up 4-1, inspired speculation the captain scored by accident. I contend to you: it doesn’t matter one whit.
In 1970, the Beatles released “Let It Be”, a ballad credited to Lennon/McCartney but generally thought of a Paul McCartney composition. The song begins with broad chords, and the words, “When I find myself in times of trouble, Mother Mary comes to me…” The song opens like a hymn (and, of course, closes like a rock song). The character of Mother Mary adds to the hymn-like nature of the introduction, and gives the singer a sort of universality that anyone familiar with Christianity (and especially Roman Catholicism) can relate to. The fact, though, is that when he wrote the song, McCartney wasn’t thinking about the church. He was thinking about a dream he once had of his mother, Mary, who died when Paul was 14. Despite this very personal and individual direction of the lyric, the song was hugely successful, and remains one of the band’s most popular and beloved tunes.
In a way, I think, this is an trait among all the super talented. There ceases to be a distinction between the fortunate accidents and the intentional successes. It doesn’t matter if Gerrard was trying for the back of the net or if he was looking to Dirk Kuyt at the far post. We’ve seen him score that goal before, and we’re perfectly happy to accept him doing it once again.
For a long time in America, atheism has been long associated, rather unfortunately, with hedonism and anarchy. To be atheistic is to be evil, to hold no values, to be young and crass and cruel. The word itself is negative; it is merely the word theist with a privative a attached indicates an absence or a negation of the root word. Atheists believe in the absence of a god, but this reality is taken to an extreme: they believe against a god.
The response by the atheists has been to look for a new word to describe themselves. Some have declared agnosticism, a word which connotes either a lack of thought on the matter, or the belief that, even if there IS a god, that god cannot be known, for certain. Some prefer non-believer, but that carries the same baggage as atheism. Many have taken humanism (especially secular humanism), and that term received a shout-out from the President at the National Prayer Breakfast this year.
It would seem the newest term to gain the minds and preferences of the un-religious is “Nones”. Or maybe that’s just “nones”. This usage seems to stem from survey question that goes something like:
Religion?
A. Christian
B. Jewish
C. Muslim
D. Hindi
E. Other
F. None
Today, the proportion of Independents who are Nones has leaped from 12 percent to 21 percent; and the percentage of Democratic Nones has doubled from 6 percent to 16 percent. In stark contrast, the GOP share has fallen from 8 percent to 6 percent. I’d say that’s a function of the GOP becoming an essentially Christianist fundamentalist party; and the Democrats having lots of Irish, Jewish and Asian supporters, who are the strongest groups in the None cohort.
The Nones are not wealthier than average, but they are more male. Almost 20 percent of American men are Nones, compared with 12 percent of women.
61 percent of Nones find evolution convincing, compared with 38 percent of all Americans. And yet they do not dismiss the possibility of a God they do not understand; and refuse to call themselves atheists.
But that’s “none”, as in “Religion: none”. If “a-theists” don’t like being defined as against a God they don’t believe in, “None” is worse still. An atheist is, truly, someone without belief in God. Though the Trinity study says most “Nones” are not actively hostile to religion, the name makes it sound like “Nones” believe in nothing at all. I’m sure most “Nones” wouldn’t appreciate that. Or perhaps, consistent with the name, they just don’t care.
Personally, though I am not one, I’ve often been more comfortable with people who self-identify as atheists (or one of its many synonyms) than I have with the religious.
