« March 2008 | Main | May 2008 »
It's really dangerous to play a whole lot of Mario Kart Wii and then take a drive through the country. My whole drive to Whitesburg tonight I kept wanting to power slide.
It's a great game--good controls, plenty of unlockables but not so many the game feels incomplete, genuinely thrilling racing. The online is the best Nintendo has done so far, but that's kind of like picking the most listenable Celine Dion track.
Me: Spaceship of Fools!
Caller: Hello. I just wanted to say that I just heard the "F" word.
Me: Well, sir, I really don't think you did.
Caller: Yeah, it was there.
Me: Sir, I check the lyrics of every song I play, and I know the three I've played so far very well, so I don't know what you think you heard, but it wasn't the "F" word.
Caller: What's this song called?
Me: "Think About It" by Flight of the Conchords.
Caller: I'm going to look it up, and then I'll call you back.
Me*: While you're at it, you might want to google this: fuck fuck fuckity fuck fuck fuck FUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!
* In my head. In reality, he slammed the phone down.
I suppose it could be one of the station's many enemies out there; after all, we're the "worst plague ever in eastern Kentucky", so I guess someone could be sitting at home listening to (what he has to consider) perfectly horrible music in the hopes that I might let an errant F-bomb go by. If so, he deserves what he gets--a three-hour enema of completely fuck-free quality indie rock.
If it's just some random loser with no agenda...that's too sad to even think about.
Seriously, see Avenue Q at your earliest convenience.
So much works about the play that really shouldn't work at all. For instance, most (but not all) of the characters are puppets, and the people operating and talking/singing for the puppets make no attempt to hide themselves. For instance:
It's weird at first, but after the first few numbers you almost forget the people are there. There are several times when a puppet is being operated by someone other than the person singing for it--since the voice actors all play multiple roles--and you don't even notice.
It also shouldn't be that you find yourself getting a little choked up at, say, "Fantasies Come True", and you realize that it's basically Bert singing about his unrequited love for Ernie. (How the producers of this play have avoided having their asses sued off, I'll never know.)
And then there are the Bad Idea Bears:
These cute little guys are always there for you when you just can't seem to fuck things up on your own.
"Oh, you can have a few sips--it's just Long Island Iced Tea! YAAAAY!"
"Why don't you play a drinking game? I know one--let's see who can drink the fastest! YAAAAY!"
"It's a tie! Rematch! YAAAAY!"
"Take her home! She's wasted! YAAAAY!"
The new self-titled disc from Flight of the Conchords is, well, great, but curious. It's all songs from the first series episodes, which means you either already know them by heart or you just didn't care that much to begin with. If it had come out while the show was on, or even just after, it would have made a lot of sense, but at this point it seems superfluous.
It's a worthwhile download for the studio treatment (especially for the Spaceship), but I wouldn't buy it unless you already have the DVDs.
Just for fun:
"Prince of Parties"
"A Kiss is Not a Contract"
"Mutha'uckers"
Rachael Ray's concept of a "garbage bowl" (to hold scraps when cutting, etc.) is a good one, if not unique to her. But marketing a special bowl for that purpose? At $18, no less? Just wrong. (Not that there's anything all that right about Rachael these days.)
Speaking of wrong, Rachael's Latina counterpart, Ingrid Hoffman, had me for a while with her show Simply Delicioso. But then she started shilling for Tostito's. I'm sorry, but the best way I can think of to blow your credibility on Latin American cuisine is to recognize the existence of Tostito's salsa, which tastes like 1/4 mildewed washcloth and 3/4 preservatives.
To Michael Symon, recently crowned Iron Chef, host-to-be of Dinner: Impossible, and rising Food Network star: you got where you are because you have tons of well-earned credibility as a chef. Don't blow it.
I'm out of work, and my husband is a disabled coal miner who needs surgery for a brain tumor. So, naturally, I'm basing my vote for President on who wears an American flag lapel pin.
I won't even get into the idiocy of "In Clinton, she sees someone who has struggled for years, just like her..."
One of the things I love about Obama is that he talks to us like we're adults. Maybe he shouldn't be.
Beth and the crew taking on "Standing in the Way of Control" on Letterman last night. It's odd to see a two-year-old track resurrected like that, but apparently they have a new live album out. Besides, the track kicks ass.
Well, actually, I know more or less who Jack Johnson is. But when the hell did he get big enough to be a headliner at Bonnaroo?
It isn't unusual for someone to become wildly popular without me noticing. Happens all the time. But is he really big enough to be billed over Kanye West? Or over Alison Krauss and Robert Plant?
The big announcement today was that Widespread Panic was joining the bill to close out Sunday night. True, I was hoping for Prince, but I'm glad to see Panic back.
It's easy to grill shrimp, but doing it well is another matter entirely. They tend to dry out if they're peeled, but you can't bring much flavor to the party with the shells on. Cooking them enough to give any real "grill character" turns them into pencil erasers. As usual, the folks at Cook's Illustrated came through with a clever way to go about it.
The process starts with the sauce, which in my case was butter, lemon juice, parsley, garlic, salt, pepper, and some red pepper flake. Throw these together in an aluminum pan and heat it over the grill until the butter melts and everything is combined. Set it aside. (If you can do a "cool side" on your grill, move it there.)
(By the way--aluminum pans like this are the handiest things ever for grilling. They're 94 cents each at GFS Marketplace.)
Next the shrimp, which are peeled and deveined but with the tails left on. It's usually a bad idea to crowd food together on a skewer like this, but in this case you want to slow the cooking down a little. Douse them in oil, salt, and pepper, and then sprinkle a little tiny bit of sugar on one side. This helps it caramelize and char a little bit without overcooking.
4-5 minutes on the sugared side, then about a minute on the other side.
Take the skewers off and move the sauce back to the grill. Close the cover for a minute to heat it up quickly, then add the unskewered shrimp and toss around for another three minutes or so.
The shrimp came out really great. They were overcooked a bit, but I tend to do that to shrimp; I just can't abide them undercooked. (And yet I love sushi, and don't mind eating them raw. Go figure.) You'll want plenty of bread for the rest of the sauce--in fact, if I were serving this family-style, I'd slice up some good country-style bread, char it a little on the grill, arrange it on a platter, and pour sauce and all over it.
The grain, by the way, in quinoa. I'm trying to eat more whole grains, and this one is idiot-proof--you boil it just like pasta. It's a little dull on its own, so I'll be working on a good way to gussy it up.
The episode of This American Life podcasted this week has a great story about the complex legacy of Jerry Springer.
I knew that he was once mayor of Cincinnati, and that he was caught patronizing a prostitute because he was dumb enough to pay her with a check. But I always assumed it happened in that order. In fact, he was elected mayor a full four years after the prostitution scandal. They had people on the show who had worked with the Kennedys and Bill Clinton who said Springer was absolutely in that class of politician, and he must have been to survive that kind of scandal in notoriously conservative Cincy.
