In keeping with the contemporary spirit of self-aggrandizement, I probably should have mentioned this when it was still au courant. But, anyway, even though my reign of terror is ending (note: no actual terror was reigned), I would like to mention that I was WXDU's DJ of the month for August 2009. And you would not believe how much I obsessed over those top 5 songs and top 5 albums. Eventually, I had to convince myself to just pick some and send the damn email. Somewhere I wrote down a list of #s 6-10 for songs and albums but I've lost track of it.

So, yeah... go me!

Last Friday's movie: Paris Blues, starring Paul Newman and Sidney Poitier as cool jazz dudes in Paris in the early 60s. Joanne Woodward and Diahann Carroll are tourists in for a two-week visit. Louis Armstrong drops by to blow his horn and steal all his scenes as visiting jazz legend Wild Man Moore. Directed by Martin Ritt, who would go on to direct Hud, the Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Norma Rae among others. Paris looks great in black & white. Oh, and the music is by Duke Ellington. It took me a while of googling around to find out who did the playing for Newman and Poitier. Newman's trombone was played by Murray MacEachern (who also did the trombone playing for Jimmy Stewart in the Glenn Miller Story) and Poitier's sax was played by Paul Gonsalves, from the Ellington band.
Wonderful movie and highly recommended.

XDU wrrld music top 10 (week ending 23 aug 09)

Commercial :: los Amigos Invisibles
Eclipse :: Lura
Seya :: Oumou Sangare
Borders y Bailes :: los Texmaniacs
Coconut Rock :: Ocote Soul Sounds & Adrian Quesada
Maitei Americana: Harps of Paraguay :: various
Falcao and Monashee :: Falcao and Monashee
Paraibo :: Hugo Filho
Kenya Revisited Live! :: Bobby Sanabria
Well Hung, vol. 1 :: various

this week's video feature: los Texmaniacs

Well, we all know it's not fall yet. A quick step outside into the heat and humidity will confirm that. But it's getting closer, and we all know what that means. State fair! (okay, probably it means something else to you but this is my blog after all...)
NC State Fair has a blog. Well, the blog I don't think is new but the look is all spiffy and (appropriately) deep-fried. Also they moved to a new URL, guaranteeing that all my links from last year don't work anymore. (damn internets...)
Also, this, chronicling food finds at the Iowa State Fair. And I'm pleased to say that a bunch of their selections (including deep-fried Snickers bar, butter sculpture -- altho not of Neil Armstrong, giant punkins and, yes, pork chop on a stick) are also available at the NC fair.
We do need to work on narrowing the gap in insane cakes decorated with a rodent theme. And deep-fried cupcakes. On a stick.

There's this Robert Klein comedy record that my brother had way back when we were teenagers. I don't remember the album or the entire bit but it included the throwaway line 'I love good science." Which we'll still drop in conversation w/ each other. Both as snark and a sincere appreciation. And that's a long intro to this solid bit of experimentation debunking a Mentos hoax. Of course, the original Mentos/Diet Coke explodo-fest has been well-documented. Mythbusters even did an episode on it. But this one involves freezing Mentos into ice cubes, supposedly allowing delayed reaction hilarity to ensue. The video explains exactly why that won't work. Altho if you know the basics of how the original experiment worked, it's pretty easy to figure out. I love the mention in the text that after the prank got mentioned on boing² there were hundreds of comments arguing the validity/workability of the prank back & forth but nobody (apparently) actually bothered to test it and see what happened. That, alas, sums up the average internets comment thread pretty well.

Scalzi's take on bad design in Star Wars would have been the funniest thing I saw all week if we hadn't gone to the Rifftrax simulcast last night. But still the Scalzi stuff is pretty damn funny. Also, if you check out the rest of his blog, apparently he completely enraged all the geeks over at Slashdot so he's been at war w/ them ever since.

Good times.

XDU wrrld music top 10 (week ending 16 aug 09)

Coconut Rock :: Ocote Soul Sounds & Adrian Quesada
Paraibo :: Hugo Filho
Commercial :: los Amigos Invisibles
Well Hung, vol. 1 :: various
Falcao and Monashee :: Falcao and Monashee
ZZK Sound, vol. 2 :: various
Seya :: Oumou Sangare
Maitei Americana: Harps of Paraguay :: various
University of Calypso :: Andy Narell and Relator
Kenya Revisited Live! :: Bobby Sanabria

(I don't know if this has ever happened before but last week at XDU the entire wrrld top 10 made it into the top 30 of the overall playlist. w00t! go, team!!)

this week's video feature: Andy Narell and Relator

TV-tastic evening tonight. It's the finale of Top Chef Masters and the first episode of Top Chef: Vegas. To mark the occasion, we made Rick Bayless' queso fundido burgers. It's one of those recipes that's super easy if you have a restaurant full of prepped ingredients lying around. For home use, there is a bit of prep (fry chorizo, roast poblano, grill onion) and that's w/o making the guac that's supposed to be a side. I shortcut that one and bought some guac at the store. But it's a damn good burger, topped with chorizo sandwiched between two slices of cheese. The grilled onions were a great touch. But, even tho I stayed close to the recommened cooking times (for rare), the burgers ended up closer to well done. Which is a sad fate to befall an otherwise tasty burger.

Completely unrelated but this song's been running thru my head for a day or two now so I thought I'd share.

I could not be more excited. Thanks to an interview on A.V. Club, I found out that the Rifftrax crew (aka Mike Nelson, Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett of MST3K fame) are doing a live riff simulcast event. They'll be at a theater in Nashville, riffing on a colorized (!!) version of Plan 9 from Outer Space and the whole thing will be broadcast to, as they say, a theater near you. And even though it's only screening at 4 theaters in the entire state of NC, two of them are in Raleigh and one of those is Brier Creek (which is basically the same distance from the house as Southpoint). Tickets have been acquired.

w00t!

I don't know about you but the variety (and volume) of teh stupid is starting to grind me down. So these bits of creative protest pranking were quite surprisingly fun. I'm imagining the next iteration of flashmobs. You could call them flash-angry-mobs. Get a bunch of people in "angry mob" t-shirts to descend on whatever whackjob protest pops up in your town. It'd make more of an impression the more people you could recruit. Plus, you're probably less likely to get your ass kicked if there's 20 of you rather than 2.

Some weeks, everything seems interesting and there's lots of fun to be had. And then, like this week past, it seems to be all angry, stupid people yelling and screaming (Real Loud!). Certainly, I'm often fond of ranting about said stupidity. But sometimes it all gets to be too much and even ranting loses its allure.
I know... shocking.
Fortunately, there's always sushi. We went back to Sushi Love and it was again excellent. Altho, FYI, Friday at 7 is not the best time to go if you want speedy service or a relaxed quiet atmosphere of ambiance. It was quite crowded and quite loud. Fortunately, they have enough space that the noise was more a background and never felt like it was crashing down on us, like it can in some spaces. And even though the sushi chefs were obviously slammed the wait staff was really good about letting us know what was going on, filling drinks, etc. Sushi Love focuses on the specialty rolls, like a lot of places around here seem to now. We had a crunchy tuna roll (spicy tuna and avocado topped with tempura flakes and eel sauce) and a sunset roll (crab, cucumber, and avocado topped with salmon and thinly sliced lemon). The crunchy tuna was the star of the evening. I tend towards being a sushi purist so I always want to get some nigiri too. Had unagi (always a fave), tai (never tried that before) -- both good. Sarah sad the hamachi was excellent. We split the maguro. Excellent fish but my piece wasn't cut as well as the others I tried. The only mild disappointment was the salmon skin roll. It was good (a reverse roll w/ some crunchy vegetable added) but didn't quite match what we'd expected.

Don't remember where I found out about this (probably boing²), but it's an excellent interview with Daniel Clowes, creator of Eightball, Ghost World and many more. Related, A.V. Club reviews And Here's the Kicker, the book from which the Clowes interview was dropped. Sounds really interesting. And funny. Given the pace at which I read (glacial puts it mildly) it might be a while before I get to it. Will report back if/when I do.

Did you know there was an earlier (1946) version of "the Coffee Song"? Me neither.

Most useful political concept I've seen in a while: the nonsense feedback loop. I think most of us are at risk of falling into some version of that. But the citizenry of Wingnuttia has (no surprise) taken it to absurd extremes in the last week or so.

What's frustrating/annoying about the whole thing is the seeming inability of anyone in the press other than the Daily Show to state clearly that these people are lying. I mean, yes, yes, I know that truth can be subjective and hard to pin down sometimes. There can be times of honest disagreement. Clearly that's not what's happening here. People are flatout lying and stating that is not an opinion or a bias. It's just a goddamn fact.

Also.

(tip o' the hat to Ms. Pants from whom I stole the title)

Yesterday we ran into Spacegrrl and J. when we went to Nosh for brunch. Durham's a pretty small city but it still surprises me when I run into someone I know. Even though it probably shouldn't. I mean, by now, I've lived here longer than anyplace else in my adult life. Anyway, a fine meal and mealtime experience was had. Topics o' discussion included: weddings, mailing lists, the general stupidity of the world (or at least parts thereof), funerals, family, vampires, LARPs, languages, flu, setting fire to blood, setting fire to latrines...

Good times indeed.

XDU wrrld music top 10 (week ending 09 aug 09)

Well Hung, vol. 1 :: various
Commercial :: los Amigos Invisibles
Paraibo :: Hugo Filho
ZZK Sound, vol. 2 :: various
À l'Aveuglette :: Françoiz Breut
Al Gran Teatre del Liceu :: Marina Rossell
Sun People :: Nickodemus
Kenya Revisited Live! :: Bobby Sanabria
Rasta Got Soul :: Buju Banton
Fondo :: Vieux Farka Touré

this week's video feature: Nickodemus

I do love a 21st century Sunday AM when I can sit down w/ a cup of coffee and nytimes.com on my computer. But sometimes I wonder what all the fuss is over the so-called death of journalism. It's not that there's no good writing in the NYTimes. But there's way too many stories like these two this morning, both different but both full of fail. One was, basically, a re-written press release. The hook for the article was that people find booking travel online to be so frustrating that they're returning to bricks & mortar travel agents. But it quickly became apparent that the only support for this thesis came from one study being touted by one guy, described as a travel industry expert (or some such folderol). If that doesn't scream "paid shill for the travel agents" I don't know what does. Some of the reasons stated for why people find booking online so frustrating were that they had to figure out fees and add-ons all by themselves and had to do research into their own destinations. So flimsy was this premise that the writer of the NYTimes article gave up on it halfway thru and filled the rest of the column with discussion of people's overall all dissatisfaction with air travel and the fact that decreases in fares have been masked by increases in various fees and service charges.
The other big winner in fail was this story about a series of events being run by a bunch of NYC media types that's described as an "off the record, no tweeting, no blogging, no photos, salon." Yeah, none of that pesky social networking stuff to intrude on us living in the moment. Instead we'll just get the whole thing written up in the NYTimes. A more egregious example of public dick-swinging I have not seen in some time. Oooh, look how special and exclusive we all are...

On the other hand, if there were no stupid people in the world, whatever would I complain about?
 

Quesadillas make everything better. Just wanted to share that.
I'm tired. It's Friday night. My brain is firing on random.
Here's some amazing pics of daily prep at Morimoto. Mmm.. octopustastic.
Saw Harry Potter & the Half-Blood Prince the other night. I'll have more to say about that later, when I'm not so fried. For now, I'll just say that I enjoyed it. While it hasn't replaced ...Prisoner of Azkaban as my fave in the series, it is the first even-numbered Harry Potter movie that I've really liked.
Have been enjoying the cool-for-this-time-of-year weather of the last few days but looks like we're back to the hazy hot & humid for the weekend.

Here's some disturbingly cute animation. Abraham Lincoln eating a pancake! (Warning: the music is an evil brainworm. Turn sound on at yr own peril)

XDU wrrld music top 10 (week ending 02 aug 09)

Well Hung, vol. 1 :: various
Paraibo :: Hugo Filho
Sun People :: Nickodemus
ZZK Sound, vol. 2 :: various
Musica de la Noche :: the Latin Project
Coba Coba Remixed :: Novalima
University of Calypso :: Andy Narell & Relator
Rasta Got Soul :: Buju Banton
Fondo :: Vieux Farka Touré
Espoir :: Hermas Zopoula

this week's video feature: Hermas Zopoula

Last night we continued my extended weekend o' birthday celebrating with dinner at Blu Seafood. Enjoyed it very much. We had some conch fritters to start. Sarah had scallops & shrimp in a kind of Asian presentation (lemongrass marinated, udon noodles, etc) and I had some pan-roasted mahi topped w/ mango-pecan brown butter. From the taste I had of the scallops, they were amazing. Nice big scallops, really well cooked. My only quibbles with the mahi were that it was just a touch overcooked on one end. And for early August, I would have preferred something other than the bed of mashed potatoes the fish was resting on. Honestly, it was one of the specials and I'd forgotten about the potatoes and didn't think to ask the waiter before ordering so that's partly on me. Overall, a nice dinner and I'm sure we'll be going back.

Here's a couple of not-at-all-helpful suggestions for your next overdetermined and culturally fraught (shall we say) summit and the choice of tasty beverages to serve and/or enjoy.
Seriously, though, I do enjoy many of the offerings from Dogfish Head. I haven't really gotten much into their archeological brewing program, though. I've tried the Midas Touch and thought it was okay, but not something I'd want to have more than one of per night. Nor have I ever felt compelled to buy a second sixpack. Not likely to be the choice of the masses, but worth trying.
And speaking of not being the #1 choice o' the people, if you're looking for something different in a spring seasonal, check out Hanami Ale. From NH's Smuttynose Brewing, it just showed up on the shelves here recently and even though it's a spring beer (named for the Japanese cherry blossom festival), it's a good choice for these hot 'n hazy summer days. The cherry flavor is never overwhelming but acts as a tart undertone to the bitterness of the ale. Tasty! Plus it's from a small brewery with a goofy name, it's got marvelous (almost anime level) cute packaging, it violates the "no fruit in the beer" rule. In short it efficiently sends that message of cultural elitism and beer geekery that's just what everyone is looking for in their (shall we say) summits.

Also.

Here's some fun with flowchart-y type things.
This one riffs on some insane AP digital rights management scheme
This one provides a useful undead taxonomy. How to recognize different types of zombies from a very long way away...

#1: the larch

Right up there with the big wedding dance number that's been making the rounds of the internets lately is this (also found via boing²) Katamari themed wedding.

so cute!