A Christmas Lesson

I loved this video. It really defused the jewelry ads for me too - apparently, it's possible that someone can actually love me and NOT buy me a diamond tennis bracelet (which I wouldn't use and ordinarily don't want at all). Now they're just funny.

Exotic Candies of Utah - Annabell's Look!

Annabell's Look!
Originally uploaded by erink

One of the unexpected perks of driving all around the southwest for vacation was finding regional candy in the gas station convenience stores!

Annabell's LOOK! was pretty tasty. It's nougat with dark chocolate on the outside and some tiny pieces of peanut embedded in there somewhere.

This is what it looks like on the inside:

Stay tuned for reviews of more nougat-based and cherry-flavored delicacies from the exotic southwest.

New phone...

Last post from my non smart phone!

Happy Hocktober!

To celebrate the opening of the NHL season, I give you:

Bears Playing Hockey



Living in the modern world, we don't have a good idea of how dexterous bears are, and how capable they are on two legs. I've seen old film of them riding bikes and doing all sorts of difficult tricks. Trained bears were part of Russian circus tradition until very recently, although they're very rare now (for good reasons). This looks to be a mid- to late 20th century European show.

Not many skill players on this squad, but if you make it to about 1:50, there's a fight! Close enough for me.

Protest This

(A stealth G-20 post.)

I was reading a story in the Post-Gazette just now and it's talking about some of the protesters out for the G-20 Summit in Pittsburgh today. And they interviewed this fellow:

"I want to be part of a moment," said Sam Brown, 22, of Sewickley.

Mr. Brown is a recent graduate of Wheaton College in Massachusetts, where he majored in art history and Asian studies. Now the poor economy has forced him to move back with his mother in the Pittsburgh suburbs, he said, and he scours craigslist every day for jobs.

All I can think is, Dude, it's not the economy.

(The whole story: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09266/1000288-53.stm)

On Litter

A week ago I spent a few Saturday morning hours picking up trash along the highway near my house. It was a volunteer project supposedly related to the G-20 Summit coming to town late this week, though I have my doubts foreign dignitaries will be cruising I-376 between Forest Hills and Edgewood. Whatever. You know, company's coming, yinz gotta redd up n'at.

Here's what I found:

• Most common litter by far: Cigarette butts. There were just hundreds per square yard, outnumbering and possibly even outmassing all the other litter. No, we didn't try to pick them up. Somehow cigarette butts get a special status that makes them not litter in the eyes of smokers ... except they are.
  
  I remember this being a big problem on the beach at Waikiki. There were signs all over telling you to pick up your butts. I think if you dug down to any level of beach sand there you would find cigarette butts in waxing and waning layers depending on how fashionable smoking was in past years.
  
  I was trying to figure out ways to get rid of the butts. Maybe instead of paying the new fines for smoking in public areas we should give offenders the choice of community service picking up cigarette butts for a few hours? Can we invent a special tool to pick them up by the shovelful? Or could we put a deposit on them and/or offer a bounty? (We could tag each butt so you can count a big trash bag full electronically, right?)
  
  
• Number two most common trash by the roadside: Plastic car parts. They're everywhere. From little pieces of plastic to entire bumpers - there's even a ditch along the stretch we were working that I named the valley of forgotten bumpers because there were about eight partial front-ends down there.
  
  
• Number three trash category: Drink containers. There weren't as many bottles and cans as I expected, and this category includes a lot of fast-food cups and cup lids. Which do biodegrade, by the way, they get really brittle and fracture when you pick them up.
  
  
• I expected a lot of those floss-picks since you see them all the time in parking lots. (I mean really, what is the trigger in the grocery store parking lot that causes people to suddenly think about dental hygiene? And why can't they use the trash can afterward?) But I only found one. The personal hygiene product that was the surprise winner: Q-Tips. I picked up five or ten of them.
  
  
• The area with most trash was the entrance ramp. Lots of bags and large items. It's like they have to dump ballast to get up to highway speed.
  
  
• Styrofoam coolers are not a good thing to put in the back of your pickup truck. Even the plastic ones can get away from you.
  
  
• Road maintenance crews are not tidy. I didn't really expect them to be. They pour asphalt right over the trash and leave bolts everywhere when they replace the guide rail.

Though I thought the entire set of truck lug nuts and bolts was interesting, the only piece of trash I actually brought home was a large broken glass fragment almost 1" on each side. Trust me, I showed remarkable restraint.

So, I've done my part for the city's reputation. Don't you jagoffs mess it up again before Thursday!

Cigarette butt photo by Flickr user multisanti; some rights reserved.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tikun/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Plus Size Doctor

Plus Size Doctor
Originally uploaded by erink

Saw this in the craft store - in case you're inspired to dress up as an overweight physician for Halloween, they've got you covered!

How To Eat Produce At Home

A friend of mine was envying our farm share and our ability to turn it in to food. (Actually we have a mutual friend who does much better - our last eggplant rotted; she made baba ghanouj.) Hitting a farm market once a week or once a month is a good low-commitment option, but you still need to figure out how to work fresh food into your routine. Here are some ideas that work in my house.

Salad

Salad is a no-brainer, and even though I don't really like it a lot it's a good addition to most meals or a good quick meal on its own.

First, buy a head of lettuce. Romaine is my favorite. When you get home, wash each leaf and cut them up into pieces about 3 square inches apiece. You can tear it if you don't want to cut it, but cutting is fine. Put the pieces into your salad spinner (yes you need this) and dry them. Store the prepared lettuce in a large plastic container with a piece of paper towel on the bottom. The paper towel helps keep the moisture right in the container so the lettuce will keep for a week or more. This way you can grab a few handfuls when it's time to assemble your salad. Yeah, you can buy the bag lettuce at the store, but this is usually better.

Tomatoes - All my salads need tomatoes. Keep them out of the fridge, because tomatoes have a flavor chemical that degrades in the cold. I just wash the one I'm using right before I cut it up for the day's salad. Cherry tomatoes are an option too if you want to be able to control portion size (though I never have a problem getting rid of excess tomato after making a salad!)

Broccoli or Cauliflower - Broccoli is another requirement for my salads, and farm broccoli is way better than grocery store broccoli. Like the lettuce, you can get a bunch of broccoli and prep it that day then keep the salad-sized pieces in a plastic bin in the fridge for a week or more. Just cut the tops off and throw the stems away (unless you're crazy about broccoli stems, I'm not). I like to cut them really small, about 1" square or less, so they fit on the fork.

These are the minimal ingredients for a decent salad for me. These parts go without saying:

• Fresh black pepper
• Good dressing (Ken's Steak House Lite Balsamic Vinaigrette is my go-to dressing, but I also bought a nice Caesar recently)
• Pepitas or sunflower seeds
  

More things you can put in salad to make it good:

• Parsley - cut it up with kitchen scissors and mix it in with the lettuce
• Carrots - I'm not a big fan, but lots of people like this. Slice it or dice it small so it's not too hard to chew.
• Celery
• Cucumber - especially good with a ranch or bleu cheese dressing
  
• Onion - red or white sweet onions, chopped or sliced
• Pickled beets
• Hard boiled egg - you get to use those neat wire egg slicers for this!
  
• Tuna - if I'm making a meal salad I just drain a can and dump it on. When I'm eating it I tag-team between eating a little tuna and eating some lettuce and other stuff.
• Cottage cheese - again, I just dump it on and tag-team.
• Cheese - somehow I don't do this often, but sliced up swiss or muenster is yummy.
• Chick peas or other canned beans - you probably want to rinse them
• Leftover vegetables - the other day we cut up our leftover wax beans and they were yummy in salad. Might have been the butter....
• Nuts or other seeds
• Grapes, raisins (ew - not my thing) , or sliced apples
  

Cooked Vegetables

Most veggies can either be steamed in the microwave or sauteed in a frying pan. Tough greens like kale, chard, and collards are better in a pan. To sautee them, cut up the vegetables (take out the stems of those greens, or just start them earlier than the leaves to make sure they get softened enough), put them in a pan with some olive oil or butter and salt and pepper. Use medium heat and cook until they're soft (probably like 3 minutes for spinach but 8 or 9 for kale).

When steaming (broccoli, beans, asparagus) I usually just put them in a glass bowl and leave them wet after I rinse them. You might want a little more water depending on how much food there is. I have a plastic microwave cover that keeps a little extra steam in. Try 2-3 minutes to start, then keep going until your veggies are as soft as you want them.

Fresh fennel bulb is great sauteed. Also zucchini and yellow zucchini (is that a squash?), slice them up and season them with a little cumin. I think it's cumin...?

Veg and Rice Dinner - one of my big excuses for eating white rice! But you can do a more nutritious grain if you want (brown rice, quinoa, etc.) or even pasta like couscous. Basically I cook up some veggies and a pot of rice, then just chuck the veg on top of a bowl of rice with some soy sauce and sesame seeds. This is really good with chard or kale, or broccoli, or beans (I mean green beans or yellow beans).

Rice microwaves surprisingly well. So if you do a big pot of rice you can keep the leftovers in the fridge (with your leftover sauteed fennel) and put together a leftover meal really quickly.

Fruit

Yeah, it's not a huge burden to eat fruit, but sometimes looking at a big peach just seems like too much of a commitment. Also I don't like the fuzzy part. I found out that if I cut them up I like them better.

I keep a tiny cutting board next to the sink for cutting up fruits before I eat them. It's easy to rinse off and re-stow. You'll also need a paring knife, which is not expensive. In the spring I hull and slice a lot of strawberries for my cereal. (But now it's blueberry season and they're a lot easier than strawberries because you can wash them all at once and then put them back in their box in the fridge. Strawberries rot faster after you wash them so it's better to wash them when you use them.)

A yummy dessert or snack (or breakfast): cut up fruit (nectarine, peach, pear, etc.) or berries and throw them in a small bowl with some yogurt or cottage cheese. Ice cream makes a good dairy medium too. You can put in nuts or raisins or granola or wheat germ too. And a little sugar or honey is no crime if the yogurt is too sour. There's always banana to sweeten up the mix too.

I haven't quite got the hang of eating melons. I think the key is to cut up the whole thing when you get it.

Share and Enjoy!

So, that is my advice on how to eat produce at home. I'm no cook, but it's not that hard when you get the hang of it. You still throw things away, but at least maybe you'll use some of them!

Farm Share 8/11/09

Farm Share 8/11/09
Originally uploaded by erink

Someone asked about my farm share the other day, and I haven't posted anything about it for a while. This is what we got in our box from Kretschmann this week:

• A bunch of beets
• One onion (I cut off the top because it was in bad condition, but apparently there's stuff you can do with it if it's not)
• Two green peppers
• Four tomatoes (of moderate quality) - apparently there's a "late blight" causing farmers in the region to lose a bunch of tomatoes this year ... Bummer. So much for my insalata caprese dreams. I still have hope for my plants, though a friend four blocks away just lost his tomato patch.
• Lettuce - this week we got two bunches of something like romaine.
• Chard
• One tiny watermelon
• Green beans
• A bunch of curly parsley
• Carrots
• Two cucumbers

Seriously, Microsoft?

I am more than pissed off by these Bing commercials.

The premise is that web searches are no good at restricting their results to what you actually meant. And that's just not true. It hasn't been true for ten years. Get over it!

If search engines were that annoying they wouldn't be so popular. Millions of us would not be using a search-created homepage. Search works great. The only thing pissing me off about search engines now is Bing's marketing campaign.

This is fun, though. http://blindsearch.fejus.com/

Garlic Flower

Garlic Flower
Originally uploaded by erink

One of our farm shares two weeks ago included a garlic bulb with a stem attached that was like 5' long. Seriously. Well, at least four feet.

We kept it like that for a few days, because it was cool looking. Then eventually the beau cut the garlic off the bottom and put it on the counter where we keep garlic. But we didn't throw out the stem yet, because, well, it was cool looking.

A few days on, the flower bud at the top started opening. So I recut the stem and put it in a little vase. (The stem is down to about 3' now.)

The flower is only about as big as a quarter.

Our other farm share has been giving us garlic scapes, which are just the stem part. You can use them in salads and eggs and stuff, they're garlic-flavored and a bit more dense than green onions. But now I'm thinking maybe we should make them all into flowers.

Tiny Spiders

Tiny Spiders
Originally uploaded by erink

Something new turned up in the window box this morning.

They look like spiders, but I'm not sure. They might not have enough legs.

I kind of prefer them to the really big caterpillars that ate the petunias the last few seasons, and they're better than the ragweed that started growing in one of the other boxes. As long as I have window screens. Anyway, they didn't stay long.

Vive La Tour (or Cyclists Are Crazy Too)

Obsessively watching the Tour de France again. Here's a story from Stage 9 (Sunday).

Stage 9 was the last in the Pyrenees. There's a big HC (unclassifiable) climb, a peak named Tourmalet, about 3/4 of the way through the course. The descent just after the summit is a little tricky, down a narrow twisty mountain road. The riders went over in a few groups, two guys in the front, and then a group of 7 or 10 guys, and then the peloton (main field), followed by about half the race, who couldn't keep up on the climb, in variously sized groups of stragglers.

By the way, you might not want to be eating when you scroll down. I'm just saying.

Laurens ten Dam is a dutch rider who went over the summit with the second group. Apparently, he crashed like hell just after that. The TV didn't have video of the crash, but it looked like it must have been pretty impressive. This is what ten Dam looked like when he got back on the course:

This is a screen grab from a video I found on YouTube (here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qeU2HlDZFA) but I think you can still see the dirt and the fact that his jersey is shredded. He's also ripped up his left elbow and knee.

See, in the Tour, you don't get an injury time out. If you can't finish the stage, you're done. You go home. If you finish too slow, you're done. So you just have to go. In one early stage I saw a guy crash and ride the last 20 miles anyway with a broken wrist. Oh, my mistake - the TV just did a recap of injuries and it was Robert Gesink, and he actually rode 75 kilometers (46 miles) with a broken wrist. Right now I'm watching Kurt-Asle Arvesen, who's been grimacing and riding slow since a crash about 10 km earlier, hanging on to the doctor's car trying to decide if there's anything he can do to finish the last 40 km.

Actually ten Dam's crash probably wasn't very bad. It looks like he hit dirt pretty quickly, which is better than pavement, and he slid on his back a lot, which is better than sliding on your arms and legs. Oh, and though he didn't catch up to his breakaway group he rode the rest of the stage with the peloton no problem.

So here's the fun part. Laurens ten Dam is on Twitter.

Twitter is actually a great thing when it comes to connecting to "famous" people - or at least people with an inside view of things you see on TV. I follow two Mythbusters, NHL staff, some NHL players, Penn and Teller (he's actually quite chatty), and a bunch of pro cyclists. Especially for cycling, where there isn't a big US media presence, there isn't a lot of pressure for them to watch what they say. I mean, they do, of course, they're professionals, but also you get a lot of visibility into their lives. Like what they ate for dinner, problems with hotels and non-air-conditioned buses, and pictures of Levi Leipheimer in fluffy slippers.

Here's the photo Laurens ten Dam posted after Stage 9.

This is what you call "road rash." He also posted that the team doctor had to go shopping for more supplies.

Apparently the worst part of an injury like this is when you go to sleep, and you wake up and the sheets are stuck to you. Because, you know, your skin tends to ooze when it's like this.

So, road cyclists are officially crazy in my book too.

And you can read all about it on Twitter.

Vive la Tour.

• Laurens ten Dam's Twitter feed: http://twitter.com/laurenstendam
  
• Laurens ten Dam's photos: http://twitpic.com/photos/laurenstendam
  

Cow and Girls

Cow and Girls
Originally uploaded by erink

Was it "take your daughter to your underpaying, degrading work day"?

Bicycle Bell Ringtone

Found this in the Bike Pittsburgh blog. A local artist has been collecting sounds and publishing them as ringtones (for free!). She included this bike bell from one of the Bike Pittsburgh organizers.

http://www.locallytoned.org/tone/93

The bell, by the way, is wicked cool. Erok says he got it at Free Ride.

Bike Pittsburgh: http://bike-pgh.org/

The Number of Miroslav

Just a small thing, really, but one that should be known.

So there's this hockey player, Miro Satan. Yeah, Satan, but it's not pronounced like, you know, the devil; since he's Czech, it's got a sh- sound at the beginning.

Satan came to play for Pittsburgh last year as part of the neverending quest for Sid's winger. It didn't work out too well and Satan ended up getting sent down to Wilkes-Barre this spring to give the team salary cap room. But he took it well, went down and worked hard and helped out the youngsters, and then he came back up and had some good games for us in the playoffs.

Now. There's this website. Yahoo Sports includes data on all the NHL players. If you search for some player's name you will probably find his Yahoo Sports page which has his stats and news and such. And the URL for that page will be in the form "http://sports.yahoo.com/nhl/players/[some random number]"

Only I don't think it's always a random number. Because to pull up data on Miroslav Satan, the number you have to put in there is "666".

I probably just made some database webmonkey's day by noticing.

Miroslav Satan on Yahoo Sports

First Week Farm Share

First box from Kretschmann Farms.

Fuck Censorship

I heard via Twitter this morning that Christopher Handley has pled guilty to obscenity charges related to his manga collection. Handley got in trouble when an Iowa postmaster inspected a shipment of comics from Japan and decided to involve the police.

Handley faces a $250,000 maximum fine, up to 15 years in prison, and forfeiture of property siezed in the case, which I'm not sure but could be his entire collection. What's more, before the trial Handley was harassed by the state: as conditions of his release (while still "innocent") he had to turn over his computer to the investigators, agree to random inspections of his home, and submit to periodic drug tests. When the prosecutors learned that he was still visiting anime-related sites on the internet and had viewed some cheesecake-level Japanese fashion books (with adult models) they ordered him to cut it out, and to submit to mental health counseling.

The problem with Handley's collection is that it included a few drawn images of under-age characters in sexual situations. This set off the child porn detectors, despite the fact that no actual children were required to create the material.

Handley's collection included 1,200 manga comics, plus hundreds of DVDs, laser disks, and video tapes. The case focused on a few hundred images - I heard 150 to 300 individual pictures - that were considered to be obscene. This guy was not a porn collector, he was a manga collector. I'm sure I have objectionable material of the same sort in my house right now, and probably at the same rate.

It should be said that icky sexual situations are not terribly uncommon in Japanese popular art. Seriously, schoolgirl sex, rape, some nasty stuff with tentacles (well, also some hot stuff with tentacles) - all are tolerated much more by Japan than we would do in the US. Especially in anime and manga, which can provide a completely fantasy-based environment. Why do they look at that stuff? I don't know. But you don't have to find it titilating to find it culturally interesting.

Neil Gaiman covers this pretty well in this blog post: Why defend freedom of icky speech? In this post, Gaiman responds to a fan's well-reasoned argument that simulated child porn is potentially damaging with examples from literature, history, and even the bible. Yes, it's basically the slippery slope argument, but it's well done.

So. This is dumb. It's not the only dumb thing our government has done, but it shouldn't happen. There are lots more stories of woe you can read at the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, and while you're there you should make a nice donation too.

Here's the CBLDF news releases about this case:
CBLDF Disappointed By Guilty Plea in Handley Manga Case (May 2009)
CBLDF To Serve As Special Consultant In PROTECT Act Manga Case (October 2008)

And here's some more information from another blogger: MangaBlog - Editorial: The Handley case and the slippery slope

Project A-Ko DVD sleeve image from Amazon.com - there's actually no sex in this film at all, but what's going on with that skirt?

One GoodThing About Philly

It's this guy: David Leonardi, the Sign Man.

(Photo copyright Getty Images.)

He's been doing this since 1972, when he got season ticket seats in the second row. The article and a link to a video interview are here on the Flyers website. (The video is worth checking out, it has his footage from the Flyers locker room when they won the cup in 1974 and shots of him and his wife showing up in their wedding clothes.)

He even came to Pittsburgh last year to mock the Pens in person during the Eastern Conference Finals (though he was presumably not involved in this legendary signage incident, one of my favorites). He taunted Fleury for "spin[ning] like a ballerina" during stoppages, among other things.

I love stuff like this. It takes effort. Unlike Philly's modern favorite, "Crosby sucks," you actually have to know the game and the players to come up with this kind of quality put-downs.

Vince Lascheid had it. The Civic Arena organist who died last month at 85 had a large repertoire of musical taunts, as well as pun-related theme songs for most of the Penguins stars. When the ref made a bad call, he threw out a few bars of the carol "Do You See What I See?" or, in extreme cases, "Three Blind Mice." (Back in those days of one ref and two linesmen this was an especially good choice.)

So it's great to see Leonardi going strong. This is old time taunting. The modern NHL could use a few more like him.

Great Balls of Fire

A few of my readers (well, actually I only have a few...at most) might remember that this blog title is based on a catchphrase used by Pittsburgh Penguins announcer Mike Lange.

Well, you can hear the illustrious Mr. Lange deliver his line here:
http://www.myxer.com/partner/7975109/
You can even buy it as a ringtone for your cell phone (though I'm sticking with the South Park Underpants Gnomes song, thank you).

In case you were curious. And never listened to Mike Lange call a Penguins game.

Confusingly, the URL is a different catchphrase, which isn't one of the ringtones. You can get the whole story here, in a strangely dated post from a time when the Penguins didn't make the playoffs:
http://sellmymonkey.blogspot.com/2006/02/she-wants-to-sell-my-monkey.html

Or-Durves

Why the heck do we use that phrase, hors-d'oeuvres? It's really hard. Every time I have to write it I have to look it up - and I actually know French.

Isn't there some other word we could call those things? Snacks? Sounds too "after-school". Appetizers? But that implies that more food is coming later, and usually if you invite someone for hors d'oeuvres you're not feeding them anything more.

What does that even mean? I think oeuvre is like a work of art. (I vaguely remember some pretentious use of this term to describe the entire body of work of a film creator, but film criticism has always had these French land mines like auteur and mise-en-scene.) Hors doesn't mean what it sounds like, it means outside.

So hors d'oeuvres are outside art. Does that mean they suck?

Seriously. It's just un-called-for.

Office Food Safety

Important rules from the Mythbusters workplace.

Lessons from LA

What I learned on my April vacation:

At "classy" hotels you have to pay $15/day for internet access. At "budget" hotels it's free. This is why nobody heard from me for three days while I stayed at the Biltmore and then I resurfaced when we moved to a Holiday Inn in San Diego.

Two-Headed Turtle
Originally uploaded by erink

Apparently two-headed turtles are not terribly uncommon. There's a little freak show on Venice Beach (an official one, I'm not just talking about the general ambiance). For $3 you can go into a little room with lots of displays of animals with extra limbs and such. They had a nice collection of cabinet cards, a bunch of skeletons (some gaffes) two two-headed turtles, a two-headed snake, a naked mole rat, and a dog with an extra foreleg. Oh, there was a sword-swallower too.

Seat covers are "provided by the management for my protection" - but against what?

Pinkberry is way good. They sell frozen yogurt with your choice of toppings, but the best thing is the yogurt tastes like yogurt! And it's not too sweet. Can we have one? I wouldn't mind a World Market in western PA either....

I've watched too much Kitchen Nightmares. Gordon Ramsey inhabited my body for a few minutes when our waiter (at a slightly pretentious place in San Diego) used some sort of torture device to decant our wine. It was a huge production. You had to put the wine in this frame, and light a flame underneath the neck of the bottle, and then turn a crank to make the bottle horizontal. (I'm not sure what the flame was supposed to accomplish, since it was on for about 60 seconds while the waiter decanted the whole bottle into a glass carafe.) The closest I can find is this. I just kept hearing Gordon's voice in my head - and he was saying, "Fuck me!"

Vaud and the Villains - way cool. Not sure they will translate well on a recording and I'm pretty sure they can't tour, but if you are in LA any time soon you must go and see them.

Our zoo is pretty good, but the San Diego Zoo is much better. All the enclosures are nice, they have more types of animals, and the critters are a lot more fun to watch somehow. I think they trick them into being active on Saturday afternoons just for us. There were a lot of baby animals, which helps, and a lot of "enrichment activities" going on - so the animals have things to do and that's a lot more fun than watching them sleep all day. One relative failure, though, the signage and documentation is better at Pittsburgh.

In southern California, rain is weird. It rained a little while we were in the slightly pretentious restaurant, and the staff warned us to "be careful" because of that when we left.

Pike Place roast sucks so much. It keeps me away from Starbucks in the afternoon. At Dulles I walked a mile to get to Starbuck's and all they had was Pike Place Roast (even though it was 7 a.m. - what's up with that?) But we got breakfast from Five Guys and it was very yummy.

Bird-of-Paradise
Originally uploaded by erink

Bird of Paradise flowers can grow in the ground. I thought they came from flower shops (for $15 a stem).

The Glories of Regent Square

My neighborhood's a great place to live, so I'm sure its reputation will survive the teaser description for this story:

A city police sergeant was wrong to cite a Regent Square man for flipping him off in 2006.

The whole thing: /www.post-gazette.com/pg/09083/957786-85.stm

Wonders of Canada

First, I found out a few weeks ago that you can get takoyaki in Toronto. Takoyaki, in case you didn't know, is a fried octopus fritter that you get as street food in Japan. It's yummy, as is its cousin, tako-sen (takoyaki squished between potatoey crackers with Kewpie Doll mayonnaise). Apparently this place is pretty good http://manpuku.ca/ and according to Chowhound (http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/100248) there are even more places that make takoyaki and such in the area. Thank heavens. I thought I was going to have to go to New Jersey.

Now I find out about another treasure they're hiding up north. They have special hockey-themed Oreos! Lucky I started following goaliegirl on Twitter or I might never have found out.

Here's a photo of the cookies themselves:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/squeakybear/3260541299/

Here's a portfolio web page from the company that did packaging:
http://www.davisdesign.ca/portfolio/promotions

I might have to start reading #nhlcookiesmuggler

Turning Japanese

I've always wrapped my bathrobe right over left. Don't know why, I always just felt right that way and wrong the other way. I mean, for years, my whole life.


In Japan, you always wrap your clothes left over right. I don't know why, maybe nobody really knows why, but that's how you do it. Like so many Japanese things, there's only one right way to do it. Supposedly, when you dress the dead you dress them the other way. (If I'm worried I did it wrong I ask my friends if I'm dead.)

So lately I've been playing a lot with my SCA friends, many of whom have Japanese persona or at least go that way once in a while (check us out at http://yamakaminari.com/). And we hosted a spiffy Japanese-themed event at the end of February. And I made a new Japanese outfit for the event, with real silk and brocade (and a new sewing machine), and it even matches my gender and everything.

And then I put my bathrobe on again. I go through phases of wearing it or not wearing it - in fact, last week I dug it out because I was watching It Happened One Night and I wanted to be like Clark Gable, all classy with my pajamas _and_ a robe. And last week, for some reason, I wrapped it left over right. Just automatically. Then I did it again the next time I put it on. And again.

Last night, I tried wrapping it right over left (the old "right" way) and it was really awkward.

So, something has changed. Am I turning Japanese? I have been eating a lot of pickles.... But for whatever reason I guess I'll be wrapping the bathrobe the other way for a while.

It's not a bad deal, actually. I found a whole breast pocket in this robe that I never noticed before!

Quest for Paczki - 2009 Edition

When I worked downtown, I learned about paczki from Jenny Lee Bakery in Market Square.

Paczki (the singular is paczek) are basically filled donuts. But they're special Polish Fat Tuesday donuts. The theory is that you have to make pastries to use up all your lard and sugar and stuff, because you don't use those during Lent.

Traditionally, paczki come in lemon, raspberry, sometimes custard, and - the best part - lekvar, which is prune paste. There's actually a great flavor interplay between the donut glaze and the mildly sweet prune paste. Also you can only eat one or two before you get full.

Last year Jenny Lee Bakery closed forever. I woke up this morning and heard New Orleans music on the radio and thought, damn, no paczki? (Well, even if Jenny Lee were open, it would have been too late to get any there by 9 a.m., but I would have gone before.)

So after an early appointment on the South Side I went on a quest for paczki.

First, I cruised part of E. Carson St., because I'd heard there once was a bakery there that made them. But even when I went there five years ago they weren't apparently open, and now it's gone completely.

I looped around and headed for Homestead.

Last year on a quest for donuts I'd heard of a place called A+B Donuts. It's on 8th Avenue in Homestead across from the Waterfront shopping mall - but you can't get there from the mall. When I went last year, the place was closed but promised it would re-open. So I drove by today. The cute little donut shop part is up for sale (which is unfortunate, I hear it's cool-looking inside), but the bakery side is open every day except Monday. No paczki, but I got some other awesome-looking donuts.


As I was pulling out from my illegal parking space in front of A+B, I noticed there was a Shop N' Save across the road. There is actually a whole little "locals" mall there on the other side of the tracks from Waterfront, with a Rite Aid, and a Big Lots, and a Shop N' Save. It's hard to find Shop N' Save in the East End, which is overrun with Giant Eagle, so I went in to have a look. Paczki! But no prune. I settled for a box of raspberry, but my quest continued to find the one true paczek.


Oh yeah, I got some wasabi peas there too.

Saturday night we'd come through Homestead on our way back from a strange theater (we had to go out to Century III land to see Coraline in 3D) and passed Nancy B Bakery (actually a sign saying that the closed road was open as far as the bakery) so I was thinking to stop by. I was not really expecting paczki, but they have "world renowned chocolate chip cookies" and how bad could that be? Unfortunately Nancy B's is always out of chocolate chip cookies unless you pre-order. I told the lady at the counter that I'd never had one, and she went looking in the back and brought me a "second" - free! It is yummy. They also have other good cookies too - those crescent-shaped nut cookies are pretty awesome. So I bought some cookies there.


Last stop: Giant Eagle. Giant Eagle tries to be all things to all people, and I'm people, so I thought it was worth a shot. Actually I'd found prune paczki there before, last year or the year before, but different stores get different baked goods, so I wasn't sure the Edgewood one would have them. It did, and even had a sign about what they are and how to pronounce them! But they were out of prune, so I didn't buy any. But here's a picture of the display anyway.


So, no lekvar, but I will manage a fair amount of lard and sugar today, and even eat some "official" paczki. Though they're not as good as Jenny Lee's.

Finally, Exercise for Geeks.

Star Wars Yoga.
http://youwillnotbelieve.typepad.com/ywnb_the_blog/star-wars-yoga/

I like TIE Fighter (advanced).

Okay, I just looked at the pictures.

Hometown Fail

Hometown Fail
Originally uploaded by erink

Saw this today on the Hot Metal bridge. (It was after 2 p.m. so I had plenty of time stopped on the bridge to take a photo.)

Maybe it's just me, but I'm thinking that if you really want cred with the locals, you probably should spell the name of your town right.

There is another possibility, but I find it very unlikely that this plastic license plate frame was produced between 1892 and 1911.

I left half the license number on because it's a happy coincidence that it almost spells "hick."

If Yellowtail Sushi Fought Katsuo Sushi, Who Would Win?

Came across this blog entry from a Japanese woman who got a fresh whole yellowtail from Hiketa fisheries. (The photo of Hiketa fish boxes is from this blog.)

It makes me hungry.

But when we were in Japan I was kind of disappointed in the yellowtail we got there. In the US, yellowtail sushi is always soft and buttery and delicately flavored. The yellowtail I had in Japan was often bland, and occasionally tough. Do we get better yellowtail here or was it just the wrong season?

Now, to be fair, we didn't always go to the best sushi places. Frequently it was just some restaurant we saw on the street. We did hit one really good place.

The best sushi fish I had in Japan was katsuo. Katsuo is cured and shaved into stinky flakes and used as a flavoring and soup base. (Apparently in English it's called skipjack, and the flakes are also called bonito but I don't know if that's Japanese or not.) I never had the fresh fish before, and it was awesome. A bit like tuna, but very savory and a little sweet. And good. It's dark red.

One thing that I thought was strange, in Japan it's not unusual to have tough bits in your fish. I came across many a tough membrane running through my nigiri fish, even in the good restaurant. Apparently that's not a dealbreaker. In the US that never happens. US sushi and sashimi is always soft and yields easily. (Ika, which is detailed below in the "stuff I don't like" section, is an exception.) Maybe because they think we're so easily grossed out by raw fish we just couldn't take it if it was difficult to eat.

I also made a point of trying things I didn't like in the US. See, I've never liked anago, saltwater eel, which shows up raw on nigiri sushi in a slimy sauce that resembles thickened formaldehyde. (Anago is very different from unagi, freshwater eel, which is served grilled and delicious even when done badly.) Then my beau had anago in Japan (in a very posh company cafeteria) and said it was pretty good. So I figured when I got to a good sushi place I had to order the stuff I avoid. The result:

• ika (squid)
  Much better than the US, but still kind of gross. Ika typically has a hard ridge along one side that makes it hard to eat, and the consistency is very gluey. The flavor is okay, not very big - but it's the texture that puts me off. In Japan it was less gluey and had a slightly better flavor.
  
  
• ama-ebi (sweet shrimp)
  Almost worth eating. These are tiny shrimp (like 1/2" long) that are marinated in a kind of sweet and sour sauce.
  
  
• toro (tuna belly)
  Now, I don't dislike toro, but I avoid it because it's considered "premium" and it's extra-expensive (the phrase "market price" gets used on menus), and I don't particularly like it. It's wasted on me. I like regular tuna for the meaty flavor, and toro has a fatty, buttery flavor that kind of turns me off. Usually it just tastes greasy. I'm certainly not against grease, but I think that greasy taste goes much better with pork flavor (bacon, pork chop) or a pot roast.
  
  So I had toro twice in Japan and once I thought it was actually better than the regular tuna. (I also had some tuna that was not that great, but it wasn't the same place where I liked the toro.) I think the one toro I liked was meatier than usual. Also, in Japan there are two kinds of toro, chu-toro and o-toro, with chu- ("middle") being less fatty and less premium than o-. (Sometimes I think o- should be translated as "super-good".) So I didn't even try the o-toro.

I did not manage to get anago. So that's for another trip.

I hear that katsuo turns up occasionally around here. I hope it comes near me!

Best Fake Sudafed

Target beats them all. 20 tablets of 12-hour (generic/Target brand) for under $5!

I used to swear by Rite Aid's fake sudafed. Or Eckerd when they existed. Same product, different house brand, about $6 if I remember right. But lately they've been having trouble getting them from their supplier and they're frequently out of stock. When you can only buy one pack per visit, availability is important.

Today I stopped by Walgreens. They just built one in my neighborhood - literally; they bought and demolished my friends' house to make room for their drive-through pharmacy. I'm not a big fan of the strobe light that flashes on the outside of their building all night, but otherwise it seems like an okay place. They had a decent stock of their house brand 12-hour, but it was $7.50! Also, instead of scanning my ID they had to type in some information, so it took a lot longer.

For the record, I tried the Sudafed brand 24-hour pills when they first came out. They just don't work. I don't know why, maybe it doesn't release the way it's supposed to. I haven't seen a generic 24-hour, maybe it doesn't work on them either.

But Target rules.

Two Great Tastes that Taste Great Together

Though I still have guilt about failing to blog more Japan stories, I have an out. The new Top Gear episode that just aired Monday on BBC America features a race across Japan. Jeremy Clarkson drives a souped up Nissan while James May and Richard Hammond take trains from Hakui (Ishikawa Prefecture) to Nokogiri mountain (Chiba Prefecture), south east of Tokyo.

On the way, they have several standard tourist experiences.

• Yes, it is rude to talk on a cell phone on the train! A very strange concept for us. You also don't eat or drink on commuter trains or the subway (long-distance trains like the Shinkansen are different), though we saw several women doing makeup and other similar grooming tasks.
  
  
• The manhole covers are awesome.
  


• The trains stop precisely so that the doors are lined up with the lines on the platform. That's why people queue there to get into the train, but you can sort of stumble in after them if you weren't lined up.


• There's no point in working out how to ask a question in Japanese if you aren't going to understand the answer. Hammond and May find this out while trying to buy snacks from a pushcart on the train. (Incidentally, we are big fans of that Toppo that Hammond chose. It's like pretzel Pocky - tiny pretzel rods filled with chocolate - but a little softer and better.) Their electronic translator asks how much it costs and the snack cart woman tells them it's 250 yen - at which point they realize they have no clue what she said. They're still near Hakui at the time, which is fairly remote, but in areas that get a lot of tourists most merchants use pocket calculators to show prices. Also people tend to assume that caucasians don't speak Japanese, which is sometimes helpful.


• Clarkson joyfully crunches all manner of dried or fried sea life as snacks while driving. He eats little dried whole fish (we had some, mainly as bar snacks or garnish) and these tiny crabs (we didn't see these but they looked good). Hammond, on the other hand, has some issues with the food. There's a great line when he and May are in a convenience store trying to find snacks for the train:

  Hammond: But it's all fish. I don't like fish.
  May: Then you've come to the wrong country.

Since we didn't drive on our trip, we didn't get to experience a Japanese service station, though they did look impressive. It's great to see one in action in the video.

Here's a link to the episode description. There are also two videos from the segment that you can watch online.
http://www.topgear.com/us/the_show/more/season-11-ep-4-nissan-gt-r-vs-bullet-train/

Share and enjoy.

RoboOrange

RoboOrange
Originally uploaded by erink

My orange has a barcode.

That never happened before.

Life in Pennsylvania

You don't see this headline every day:

Police say buggy driver drunk in crash that killed horse

Apparently a 19-year old "man" was driving his horse and buggy, ran a stop sign, and hit a car. I feel bad for the horse, but it does seem like the driver deserved some penalty. And the horse probably could have been smarter about that, now that I think of it...though maybe it couldn't see the car. Or maybe the horse was drunk too. Now there's a picture.