Here's an awesome Halloweenie photo from Swapatorium. I particularly like the possums on the coffin.

Alsø wïk: here's a page of Swedish Chef clips from the Muppet Show. I went as the Swedish Chef for the annual Charming English Cottage o' Death party last weekend. Altho I showed some restraint and did not spend the evening babbling in mock Swedish and/or throwing kitchen utensils all over the place.

(thanks to sigsegv, who posted this, and to wwdn:ix for the linkage)

XDU wrrld music top 10 (week ending 29 oct 06) ::

Travesias :: Susana Baca
III :: Mosquitos
Aconteceu :: Ana Moura
Panama: Latin, Calypso & Funk on the Isthmus, 1965-75 :: various
Que Viva la Musica :: Ray Barretto
Rare Elements :: Ustad Sultan Khan
la Alondra de la Frontera :: Lydia Mendoza
Raleigh :: Rey Norteño
Okbari :: Okbari
Boom Pam :: Boom Pam

As you can no doubt guess from the time of this post, we did not end up driving to Wilson to see the 3D version of Nightmare... this afternoon. I suppose I could blame the time-change, circadian rhythms, or some such thing. But really it's just sheer sloth, laziness and inanition that accounts for that fact that I've done fuck all today.

Oh well.

Last night's party chez Spacegrrl was, as expected, a swanky good time. The interactive Scrabble costume was definitely the event winner.

Two accounts of a recent foodie event at the 92nd St Y in Manhattan. I was particularly struck by the comments on AG about food and celebrity and cooking. It's a point that Bourdain makes in Kitchen Confidential and that Boulud makes in Letters to a Young Chef. If you're going to go into the food biz, it's got to be because you love to cook. It's something I've noticed on MasterChef Goes Large as well. The judges seem to view with great skepticism the contestants who've entered because they want to be the next Nigella Lawson or Jamie Oliver. They don't take them seriously and I don't blame them. You can learn to do something and maybe learn to do it well. Maybe you'll be famous. It's unlikely but not impossible. But there are many easier ways to get famous. It's an odd moment in time for chefs and cooks and people in the food biz. Forty years ago the idea that anyone would go into the restaurant world in order to get famous would have seemed completely insane. Whether it was said by August Wilson or a Buddhist monk, the words bear repeating: "you're entitled to the work, not the reward."

Looks like all the Comedy Central clips have been pulled down from YouTube, according to this boing² story. No surprise, sadly, A month ago, no one much would've threatened to sue YouTube. There was no money in it. Post-Google, of course, there is.

I'm sure Comedy Central would tell me that I can just go watch clips at MotherLoad. But since I don't run a frikkin XP box, that won't bloody work now, will it?

thanks for nothing guys...

w00t!!
Nightmare Before Christmas has been re-released. In digital 3d (also w/ remastered soundtrack). For reasons unknown to me, the only theater anywhere nearby showing it is in Wilson. Well, that's about a 90 min drive but I think I know what I'm doing on Sunday

Searching for something or other earlier in the week, I came across LibraryThing, an site for cataloging your personal book collection online. I'm sure I'd read about it somewhere before. Wordnerdy, maybe? Anyway, it's a fun app. Even if I haven't figured out what it's actually for. There's a nifty little widget over in the sidebar that grabs random covers from the stuff I've cataloged.

Here's last night's playlist.

Linkage clean-up time:
The Foppish Baker is another excellent baking blog. I'm particularly interested in the recipes, including the apple sourdough, which I've seen mentioned in a couple of baking reference books.
Also food-related is Turkey Confidential a radio program that'll run on NPR stations on Thanksgiving. Since we're not driving anywhere this year, maybe we'll even remember to listen in. It'll make a nice transition from AM parades to afternoon cooking. Or eating or whatever it is we decide to do.
And, speaking of parades, here's some sad news. Apparently, Raleigh was this close to having actual Mummers at this year's Xmas parade. Alas, it didn't work out. I'd totally have driven to Raleigh to see that.
In big art news, several of the Ghiberti bronzes from Florence will be touring the US next year. We had a chance to see the reproductions on the Baptistry of the Duomo and those were impressive enough. To be able to see the originals without having to travel all the way to Italy is quite exciting.
And let's finish off with a drink. My beers of the month pick is the Heavy Seas line from Clipper City in Bawlmer. And I'm not just saying that cos they've got cartoon pirates on the labels. So far I've tried the Loose Cannon, which was damn good, and the Winter Storm, which was frikkin amazing. It's right up there with Blue Ridge Snowball's Chance (sadly unavailable in this parish) and the Great Divide Hibernation Ale, which are my favorite beers evah.

I was down in Ratlanta all day yesterday for work. Woke up at 5am, got home just a little before 10pm. I'm still kinda fried today. Flight back was supposed to leave at 7 but ended up delayed about 1 hour+ so I got to spend almost 3 quality hours at Hartsfield. Which wouldn't have been that bad -- there were no screaming babies nearby, I got something to eat and a tasty beverage, I had a book to read... Except. Except, all the TVs were tuned to CNN. Hoe. Lee. Shit. Wolf Blitzer, Lou Dobbs (don't get me started) and just the general inanity of it all. A couple of hours of that and I felt stupider and just seriously emotionally and morally demeaned by the whole thing. How can people listen to that drivel every day and not become lessened, diminished, just less worthwhile human beings? And, hell, that's just CNN. It's no wonder Fox News turns folks into frothing maniacs. I suppose if I'd been less exhausted I'd probably have been better able to just block the TVs out and read my book. But it go so I greeted the incessant PA announcements with silent relief as they at least drowned out the blather for a few moments.

Note to self: next time, bring iPod

XDU wrrld music top 10 (week ending 22 oct 06) ::

Vol. 1, Indonesia :: Ariesta Birawa Group
Panama: Latin, Calypso & Funk on the Isthmus, 1965-75 :: various
Gazel: Classical Sufi Music of the Ottoman Empire :: Kudsi Erguner Ensemble
Boomerang :: Habana Abierta
Travesias :: Susana Baca
Boom Pam :: Boom Pam
Fotos, Cartas y un Puñal :: Minimal
More Africa In Us :: Eccodek
Universo Ao Meo Redor :: Marisa Monte
Savane :: Ali Farka Touré

It's getting on towards Halloween so all the seasonal linkage is starting to rise from the grave. Today's find (via boing²) is a Gashleycrumb Tinies quiz. More after the jump cos I got lazy and couldn't be bothered to figure out how to keep the code from messing up the main entries page. (and yes, I did trick out my answers to get that result. Thank goodness there were only six possible answers and not all 26 from the Gorey original)

As they do every October, TCM is going heavy on the monster movies. So far my gem o' the collection has been Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell, a gleefully insane bit o' sci-fi from late 60s Japan. Here's a review. Here's another. My take is somewhere in the middle. I didn't find it as cheesy as the Rumor Machine reviewer. But I think the TCM article gets a little full of itself and starts art-housing the movie to death. The look of the movie will be familiar to anyone who's seen Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster, Tokyo Drifter, or the Green Slime. Apparently Tarantino's a big fan of this movie and the airplane scene in Kill Bill is an homage. But I don't hold that against Goke. There's too much plot but the movie looks great, the overacting is delicious, the alien-invasion effect is truly creepy, and one of the characters wears a superbad white suit, looking like he wandered in from Tokyo Drifter in fact. Oh yeah, and the ending is so nihilist it makes Planet of the Apes look like It's A Wonderful Life.

On TCM, Robert Osborne ended his intro segment saying:
"Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell. Starring Judi Dench..." (dramatic pause) "...just kidding."

This cracked me up -- a smackdown on bad fonts. The examples are all quite hideous and overused. In fact, I have to admit that I've personally used several of those fonts. Forgive me, o spirits of aesthetically pleasing typography. As is so often the case, the comments on that post are almost more hilarious.
(link via scrubbles.net)

From this week's NYTimes food section, this fine article on porter. Coincidentally enough, I was drinking a bottle of Duck Rabbit Porter while I was reading the piece. I was a bit disappointed that Duck Rabbit didn't get a mention (altho I noticed that the writer tried to innoculate himself from complaints that he'd missed X or Y beer by stating that there were many great small breweries which were only available locally. So even though one of the top things on my list of things to try is the Coal Porter from Maine, it's possible that Duck Rabbit doesn't ship all the way up to NYC.

We're on record here at the HoD as big fans of NYC's Shake Shack so of course we're also fans of its owner, Danny Meyer. Thanks to Minty for the link, which includes an excerpt from Meyer's new book and some audio (which maybe you'll be able to hear if you're not using Firefox on a Mac like I am).

Over at Epicurious there's a good article on Ferran Adrià. I think that a lot of the arguments they're making are rather straw-man, at least in terms of Adrià's cuisine, or what I understand about it from things I've seen and read. They sort of grudgingly admit Adrià's brilliance but want to make sure that no one follows in his footsteps.

I sincerely hope that this will be the most deranged thing I read today. Cos I mean... damn... If you're running for office on a party line that's already drawing questions about your ability to understand the reality of the situation in Iraq, should you really be comparing it to a fantasy novel. And, as a reader comment to boing boing noted, it's perhaps not the best strategy to suggest that US soldiers in Iraq are there on a suicide mission, to draw fire and die. (I found this story on boing boing, who picked it up from Salon -- I assume it's all over the blogosphere at this point and it's only a matter of time till it hits CNN)

In other political-type news, when we were at the state fair on Monday, the first sticker I saw said "Had Enough? Vote Democratic". While I don't want to draw too many conclusions from one afternoon at the NC state fair, I should note that in every previous year we've been to the fair the overwhelming majority of stickers (both parties have booths handing out stickers for people to wear on their shirts as they walk around the fair) have been for Republicans. Fluke or encouraging omen? I guess we'll find out in November.

Had a grand old time at the state fair yesterday. Check out Sarah's account and pictures here. Also more good stuff on the N&O blog. And it turns out that our friends Xta and Ray were also there yesterday. I can't imagine why we didn't run into them in all the thousands of people there...

XDU wrrld music top 10 (week ending 15 oct 06) ::

Que Viva la Musica :: Ray Barretto
Panama: Latin, Calypso & Funk on the Isthmus, 1965-75 :: various
Rare Elements :: Ustad Sultan Khan
Vol. 1, Indonesia :: Ariesta Birawa Group
Boom Pam :: Boom Pam
Fotos, Cartas y un Puñal :: Minimal
Savane :: Ali Farka Touré
Boomerang :: Habana Abierta
Talk to la Bomb :: Brazilian Girls
la Alondra de la Frontera :: Lydia Mendoza

All the cool kids have been going to the NC State Fair. We're planning to be there tomorrow afternoon. In case you can't make it, check out their webcam. (note: if it's not October 2006 when you're reading this, the webcam's not there anymore)

A day without much event so far. Slept in. Got a truckload of free compost. Fought it out with some weeds. Watched a couple of episodes of Cosmos. I'm sure you feel edified to have read this. To make this time-wasting post up to you, and continuing the salute to all things state fair related, here's a video salute to food on a stick. Sure it's Minnesota not NC but fair food is to be celebrated no matter where it's from.

I was planning to go see Suspiria w/ Sarah and spacegrrl tonite at the Carolina but a week of too much work and not enough sleep caught up with me and I ended up crashing out for several hours when I got home. I may have mentioned before that the TV ads for Suspiria freaked the shit out of me back in the 70s. I would've been in HS at the time, probably staying up late to finish some paper with the TV on in the background. I remember it being a long tracking shot towards a woman sitting at a dresser/vanity combing her hair, with some creepy singsongy music playing and then at the very end she turns to the camera and her face is disfigured or demonic or something all spooky like that. Sure it's a cheap shock effect but I didn't watch too many horror movies at that point and it freaked me right out.

In other news, the NC State Fair opened today. w00t! We'll be going next week. Hopefully it won't be raining every single day... And I see that fried Coca Cola is in the house.

So coming up in Durham in a couple of weeks is a really interesting film festival. Lots of interesting stuff, including House of Fury which sounds like a kickass HK movie and Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean's Mirrormask. I'm looking forward to both.

Last night's playlist? Here it is.

Dunno about you but a plane crashes into a building in Manhattan on the 11th of the month and I'm freaking out a little, in my head at least. Here's coverage from Gothamist. It's interesting to see the story evolve, esp. when it gets to the bizzare twist™ that the plane was owned and possibly piloted by a pitcher for the Yankees. As a bonus, you can read down thru the comments for informationless panic, defiant New Yorker hatred of media babble, inappropriate humor, off-topic ranting, and random flame wars.

Writer Michael Ruhlman has started blogging. He's written several books, including The Making of a Chef (about Culinary Institute of America). He also showed up in the French Laundry episode of Cook's Tour and the Vegas episode of No Reservations. It's early days so perhaps too soon to tell if the blog will live up to the books. But he's got links to a couple of Salon articles, including today's about the worst meals ever by a number of food writer types (including the Sterns and Julie Powell along w/ Ruhlman), and last week's righteous rant he co-wrote with Bourdain about a proposed foie gras ban in NJ. Both are worth slogging thru the advertising.

Hilarity ensues indeed. Wil Wheaton liveblogged an episode of NexTrek. Yes, it's overly long (and, yes, he's already got X-infinity-multiple readers and hardly needs a link from me) but it cracked my shit up.

XDU wrrld music top 10 (week ending 08 oct 06) ::

Panama: Latin, Calypso & Funk on the Isthmus, 1965-75 :: various
Que Viva la Musica :: Ray Barretto
Vol. 1, Indonesia :: Ariesta Birawa Group
the Lost Album :: Salif Keita and Kante Manfila
Fotos, Cartas y un Puñal :: Minimal
Talk to la Bomb :: Brazilian Girls
Boomerang :: Habana Abierta
Boom Pam :: Boom Pam
Universo Ao Meu Redor :: Marisa Monte
Raleigh :: Rey Norteño

After watching Steamboy the other day (which, btw, was an awesome movie -- definitely a recommended rental), I got to wondering about the timing of something that happens in the movie (something that happens before it's clear that we're deeply in the realm of altenate history) and I found this excellent Victoriana site. Wish I'd known about it back when I was doing research for the VTW book.

Related only by proximity, but absolutely my favorite thing I've seen online in a while -- it's Meathenge. (note: vegans, don't bother). It's sorta like a west coast Mister Cutlets. mmm... meat...

Let me just pause for a moment and savor this, a wonderful day every year -- the Yankees were eliminated from the playoffs. They got slapped around by Detroit 8-3, giving the Tigers the series 3 games to 1.
...good times...

And here's a fun toy (link courtesy of !!swanhunter) for the mad scientist geek in your life.

Last night was a reality TV festival around the house. We watched the first two episodes of last season's Project Runway (which included the elimination/intro episode, which we hadn't seen) and the 1st ep, which I'd somehow managed to miss the first half of (but I definitely saw the end, w/ Andrae's meltdown -- who could forget that?). Then it was on to Survivor which was one of their classic "blindsiding arrogant people who can't count" episodes. Every once in a while Survivor rolls an episode that illustrates that, yes, there is a point beyond which you can be so annoying that other contestants will act against their (possible) best interests just to get rid of you. Of course, "best interest" on Survivor is even more subjective than in real life™. And we wrapped it up with Master Chef Goes Large, a new series which just started running on BBC America. They said it was the premiere episode on Monday but it felt like we were dropped into the middle of the run. But it's good stuff. Just a half hour, with six contestants at the start. There are three rounds -- an elimination round, where they all have the same ingredients and have to come up with two dishes. The three who survive that go on to spend a day working in a restaurant kitchen. And then there's a final cook off, with no ingredient restrictions. The hosts tend to be pretty direct in their criticisms. Maybe not any blunter than they are on Project Runway but because everything's happening so much faster, and you barely get to register some of the contestants before they're being dismissed and kicked off, it seems a bit harsh. I wonder if the show has a longer runtime in the UK. Anyway, I'm enjoying it.

Oh, and I forgot to mention that I was doing the early morning wake up show on XDU this morning. Here's the playlist.

Just found a really interesting food blog, Cream Puffs in Venice, which is actually by a writer in Toronto. What's especially interesting to me are the entries about attending baking school, which are full of interesting details. For example, when they're making croissant and danish dough they're only using part butter. Most of the laminating is being done with something called roll-in fat -- some sort of shortening that's solid at room temp. Which makes sense as beginner pastry chefs are going to be a lot slower and butter will start to melt so having a fat with a higher melt point will make it easier to get a good laminated dough. As a bonus, I'm sure it saves the school a bit of money. Altho the resulting croissants probably taste pretty nasty.

I've been listening a lot this week to ESL Remixed. To celebrate the 100th release from Eighteenth Street Lounge, they let a bunch of lead pipe remixers loose on various ESL tracks past, present, and future (there's a remix by Bombay Dub Orchestra of a track from the soon-to-be-released Thunderball CD). Lots of Thievery, natch. Particulary tasty is the Shawn Lee remix of "A Gentle Dissolve" which drops some lounge-y science w/ tasty Hammond B3 and somehow makes a banjo funky. Also Louie (Masters at Work) Vega's take on "the Heart's a Loney Hunter" (from Cosmic Game w/ David Byrne vocals) which crosses Nuyorican soul & Latin house and brings it to the party. Calexico does a quiet, almost spooky mix of Federico Aubele. Boca 45 somehow manages to make Thunderball's "Stereo Tonic" even funkier. But the standout has gotta be the Chris Joss Zapp-happy remix of "Chick-a-Boom" by Joe Bataan which manages to cram the funk into every possible space.

In honor of the upcoming NBeast (which I probably don't have to link, since most everyone reading this already knows about it, given the non-disinterconnectedness of Durham blogerati, or at least this corner thereof), here's some cool oldschool VWs.

like fun!

I was watching Supercop (aka Police Story 3, at least by HK movie geeks) the other night and I'll tell you, if there's a better action movie sequence than the last 15 minutes of that movie, I'm hard pressed to think of it. Trucks, trains, helicopters, motorcycles, Jackie Chan, Michelle Yeoh, explosions, kicks to the head, sign fu, train car full of durian fu, water tower fu... There are scenes in other movies that come close (the fight on the flaming poles in Iron Monkey, the car chase in Matrix 2 (and I'm sure you can think of plenty others) but for sheer non-stop relentless action, I'd have to put Supercop in at the top. I was gonna say that it was Chan's last great movie, but I checked imdb and Legend of Drunken Master was done a couple of years later.

Here's (apparently) an alternate video for the Beastie Boys "Open Letter to NYC".

Yum! One of the many things I love about this time of year is the return of autumnal seasonal beers. I'm waiting impatiently for the Hibernation Ale to show up again. I managed to save one bottle from last year and I'm curious to see if it's changed (or even still good). To that list I'd add Dogfish Head's Punkin Ale, one of the few pumpkin beers that I like.

XDU wrrld music top 10 (week ending 01 oct 06) ::

Que Viva la Musica :: Ray Barretto
Panama: Latin, Calypso & Funk on the Isthmus, 1965-75 :: various
Vol. 1, Indonesia :: Ariesta Birawa Group
Talk to la Bomb :: Brazilian Girls
Universo Ao Meu Redor :: Marisa Monte
Savane :: Ali Farka Touré
Raleigh :: Rey Norteño
More Africa in Us :: Eccodek
La Alondra de la Frontera :: Lydia Mendoza
Chicago Afrobeat Project :: Chicago Afrobeat Project

Here's a history of Food Network by Bill Buford. He drops rather quickly the "watch 72 hours of TV" theme that seems like it's going to be the hook for the article and turns in a more standard behind-the-scenes piece. I'd have enjoyed some more details on the "glorious past" and less of the machinations of making the network a commercial success. But he does capture the transformation of the network. It'd be easy to say that they just killed all the quality and now everything sucks. Too easy. And I certainly regret the loss of shows by Mario Batali, Tony Bourdain, David Rosengarten, etc. But obviously they didn't decide to make Food Network suck, they just took it mostly in a direction I don't want to follow.

Interesting review in today's NYTimes of this new book by David Kamp. I've added it to my list, even though I have a feeling that I might find it a bit superficial and covering stuff I already know but I do a lot of foodie reading so that's almost to be expected. I've also in other reviews that it compares somewhat negatively to Omnivore's Dilemma. (Which I'm also planning to read). Anyway, the review alone is worth checking out for the accompanying illo of famous chefs and foodie-types done in high art-museum style. If I knew as much about painting as I did about foodie culture I'd recognize the actual painting being knocked off and not just a majority of the subjects.