random thoughts and thoroughbred selections

2009-07-29T21:06:00.001-04:00

Confectionary Television

Okay, so I hadn't blogged since March (jesus...), and Iggy said he'd like to see a live blog of something I mentioned on Twitter...

Mas Sabe el Diablo

So, last night my channel grazing screeched to a halt on Telemundo when I saw three ludicrously hot women on some telenovela having a great time increasingly tiny underwire-supported tubes of spandex for one another.

Then, I found out that there's a closed captioning channel that translates the Spanish into English. Awesome!

So, this is where I found Mas Sabe el Diablo, a fantastic piece of confectionary tv about young, hot Hispanics in New York City. Hot women, scantily clad, talking in a language I don't care to understand. What's not to love?

Fair warning, half this blog post is a celebration of hot Hispanic women doing whatever hot Hispanic women are going to do. I'm not apologizing, just know what you're getting into here.

Rough plotlines I figured out after one episode:

1) The villain appears to be a stripper who's sleeping with some old guy (Martin) to emasculate his younger brother. Martin is apparently a villain too.

2) The stripper-with-a-heart-of-gold has a baby, who is apparently the brother of the guy who's been pining for her since childhood.

3) There's a hot lawyer who fell in love with her street-wise client, and hasn't broken off her engagement yet.

4) There's a rich couple who have issues that one episode has yet to reveal.

5) Martin has a brother (?) who's dying, and I think Martin wants to pork his wife too.

Anyway, now that we're caught up...

Dying brother has been holding off on revealing his tragic illness to his daughter, and has apparently just revealed to Martin that his niece is in the Hamptons! With the criminal she used to represent!

Stripper with a heart of gold is looking awesome in a little tank and boycut shorts, and just heard from Topo (brother of her baby, as I understand things) that he loves her! And Martin just put out a hit on the criminal! Who dies in the Hamptons?

God, that stripper-w-h-o-g is smoking. She's really agonizing about Topo, and is totally torn about what she just heard. Now Topo won't babysit while she strips tonight. Tragic, I know.

Lawyer and the rich couple wife just walked back into their Hamptons vacation home and started pouring bloodys. One of two in a push-up bra is a pretty good ratio regularly, but not when it comes to Mexican TV. Anything less than 100% is unacceptable.

Martin is now revealing the Hamptons weekend to the fiance' of the lawyer, and he's taking it surprisingly well. Maybe this isn't the fiance'. Fuck, I need to catch up. Hitman just called, and Martin wants this hit executed as soon as possible. Hope to hell the criminal dude gets to show off his sweet karate moves that he rocked last episode.

Wait, criminal is Topo's brother? Well shit, I should have figured. Topo is apparently trying to pull off "a job," which likely means sucking the criminal (the titular "Diablo," apparently) back into the life for one more gig. He's now lying to his lawyer, telling him that his madre (Mexican for mom) needs him, and he's got to hustle back to Manhattan. God, that lawyer chick is hot. She totally wants to come with him for his fake mother thing, and he's having a hard time saying no, so he makes up an excuse that he wants to take the train, which means she can't come because her car can't be driven by someone else or something? Fuck, I dunno.

I don't remember this chesty brunette married to the Mexican John Ritter from last episode. She's in her early 40s and manages to have her tits right under her chin in a sundress...

STRIPPERS! Fuck, one is stretching out by touching her elbows behind her back and doing squats. I couldn't possibly be making this up. Head slut, the one who's banging Martin, walks in. She's ridiculous. I mean, I'd empty my wallet to get a lapdance from any one of these women, but the villain? Damn.

Seriously, we're now seventeen minutes in and they're just now doing the title sequence?

Gaby Espino is top-billed, she's the lawyer. I need to figure out who the head whore is. I'm having a hard enough time typing and reading the subtitles at the same time, so it might be a few days before I get all this shit straight.

Okay, so commercial break - one reason I fell in love with this show can best be summed up in how they treated the standard in-bed-with-the-wrong-girl, but-someone's-on-the-phone, so-baby-be-quiet-so-we-don't-give-anything-away scene. On American TV, the girl would be nibbling at his neck and giggling. Telemundo? She's clearly fucking him under the sheets. This whole network is one exposed breast away from the pay wall, I swear to god.

By the way, about half of these commercials make you feel like you're in a parallel universe where the ad wizards swap brown people in for take two.

Diablo is saying his goodbyes, and lawyer lady's ass is banging in tight grey jeans. Yesterday, they did a flashback to her spirited defense of him in court. Did you know that New York City features court rooms that operate entirely in Spanish? Me neither! Lawyer chick looks like a curvy Angie Harmon, but 30% hotter.

STRIPPERS! Fucking A, I love this show. They're constantly working on their moves while talking, which is intentional, I assure you. Head whore is now in shiny boy shorts and a bikini top featuring mad sideboob. She's bragging about Martin giving her his credit card, and how she's totally playing him. Good for her. I'd be driven stupid enough by this chick to empty my bank account too.

Hitman arrives in the Hamptons, presumably to fill Diablo full of holes. Of course, he calls the boss before going in the house, which makes sense to set up his whole path from NYC to the Hamptons where he tries to kill someone and eventually goes down due to tracking the location of his cell phone calls.

Geeze, Nissan clearly a sponsor of this show. Lawyer and Diablo just fawned for 30 seconds over the camera that helps you back up without hitting shit in their muy, muy bien Murano.

This show has more women I'd like to pork than any other show on TV. By a significant margin.

Love the "I'm Mr. Opportunity, and I'm knocking" ads for Honda on Telemundo. Wonder if that translates to Spanish.

Another brown-people-take-two for Olive Garden. Great ad for calling cards hosted by the least-animated animated ant you can imagine. For $5, I can call Mexico for 73 minutes. I don't have that much time in my day to yell at Mexicans, so I'll keep my $5, thanks.

God, this dying-guy-and-wife-Martin-wants-to-bang couple is getting annoying. Ridiculous sidebar. They're like the parents from the old version of 90210, who I assumed were only hired because congress passed some law mandating an acceptable minimum of middle-aged cast members on television shows. Dude's dying with nobility, I suppose. Just die faster, please.

Hitman doesn't look at all obvious with his bald head, huge SUV and constant cell phone calls from across the street. I think I've just figured out lawyer lady's name is Manuela.

Christ, dying guy again. I'd totally bang his wife, even though she's thick and easily in her late 40s. She's really ratcheted that cleavage to another level, even for a mature woman with good size to begin with. Fuck, I'll miss you too, dying guy. Please pass.

Diablo in the house! Criminality to follow. Diablo has the map, knows when the shipment arrived. They're clearly hitting a truck full of... microchips? I think that's right. I know how this is going to play out... One of the criminals loves Topo's stripper, and knows Topo's after her, and he's totally going to turn on this crew and screw them in the end. Love his peasy beard and fake-ass cheek scar. Least threatening villain I've ever seen. Even Diablo's had enough. He just threatened to "finish what Iron Man (Martin) started," whatever that means.

Telemundo already teasing Mexico v. USA on Aug 12. Oh, I'll be there, Telemundo.

Steve Zahn's acting doesn't get any better in the dubbed trailer for The Perfect Getaway. Can't believe I'm expected to accept that he's married to Milla Jovovich. Not in this life. Where, exactly, on the quirky-chick spectrum does Jovovich fall, by the way? I mean, I would think Zooey Deschanel is the current gold standard, having taken that title from Parker Posey a couple years ago. I think Milla is slotted a couple below Zooey, and is ranked right above Maggie Gyllenhall. Deep sleeper on this list? Lili Taylor.

Manuela is glowing about Diablo after dropping him off at the train station, but detective guy is suspicious. Manuela blows him off and everyone laughs. Cut to the criminal elements plotting their microchip heist. Peasy dude has already been told he's not on the job, but only after they revealed their plan? Come on now. You know this guy's going to Martin to rat these guys out. I'm sure they're Martin's fucking microchips too, probably.

Big showdown between Diablo and some dude named Leon for control of the team. Ragtag bunch of misfits, really. Ridiculous. Someone's getting shot, and someone's going to jail. I'm sure we'll figure that out tomorrow, as no one's robbing anything in the next 13 minutes.

I'm wildly disappointed that I haven't seen head whore in more outfits today. On yesterday's episode, she taunted Martin's brother by showing him a teddy she bought with Martin's money, they went to commercial, and she showed up in the next scene wearing the teddy. This is why I'm watching.

Marina - that's apparently head whore's name. She hinted that Martin's son might be gay, and now Martin's confronting his son on the issue. Told you she was emasculating him. Martin looks pissed. Hasn't used the Mexican version of, "Not that there's anything wrong with that."

Oh, so the strip club has a kitchen? Stripper-w-h-o-g wants the kitchen staff to watch the baby, and she's just revealed to them that Topo might be going out on a job. Turns out, one of the kitchen staff is the mom of one of Topo's crew, and the other one was eyeing her baby like a piece of meat.

Peasy beard dude is totally selling Diablo out... TO HIS MOM. That's the kitchen lady. What the hell? Tell the cops, get him arrested! Why tell his mom? Ugh.

There's been a total sex drought on this episode too. Last episode? way hotter. Still enjoying myself, but PUT SOME CHICKS IN LINGERIE, PLEASE. Dammit, Telemundo, you know what side your bread is buttered on.

Wait, there's a newswoman on Telemundo named "Tsi-tsi-ke Felix?" Did I see that right?

Last five minutes. Hitman's still following lawyer lady back to her apartment. She's digging through her luggage, and pulls out a nude drawing of her Diablo did. Nice! Classy! I've got to remember to tell women I'd like to draw them nude. Seems like an easy sell.

So, it's about to go down with Diablo's crew. They're dressing up as city workers, and Diablo is stating that he's doing this job BECAUSE he loves lawyer lady so much. As if that's not a perfectly good reason not to do the job. Jesus, Mexicans make no sense.

They roll out, and that's it... until tomorrow. Looks like lawyer lady disrobes, Martin tells her about the job, and Diablo's crew may not pull this thing off!

Tomorrow, 7PM Central, TELEMUNDO!

2009-03-08T11:13:00.001-04:00

A Tasty Failure

Last night's dinner was an attempt to recreate something I've had at a local bistro. There, the lamb shanks were braised in veal stock (and, I'm sure, something else) and served with ratatouille - which was eggplant, zucchini, squash, carrot and caramelized onion prepared with the braising liquid.

Sounds good, no?

Without giving too much away, I didn't get there. I ended up with something that I think anyone would have enjoyed being served in a restauarant, but it didn't hit the notes the bistro's version did, so I'm going back to the drawing board at some point (note: I have two more of these shanks in the freezer to experiment with) to figure it out.

On to the cooking...

Here's a pro-tip for your vegetable prep - take a couple sheets of plastic wrap and lay them down in the bottom of the sink. Toss all your vegetable garbage right in there as you're prepping.

Then, just pull up the corners of the plastic, bunch it up and voila...

No chasing carrot peel off the sides of your sink, no "garbage bowl" getting dirtied. Everything just balls up and goes right into the trash. Of course, this only works if you're able to get yourself to the point where all your veg is rinsed and ready to peel at the same time. Sink can't do double-duty with a layer of saran wrap at the bottom. I like this trick because I use my peeler so quickly that I can't shoot the peelings into a bowl. I need a bigger repository, but it totally sucks to have to pick individual peel pieces out of your sink's stopper and off the walls and such. Why not make it easy?

Here was last night's starting point - two 1lb. lamb shanks. If you look at the one in back, and see the taut layer of fat that runs along the side, you'll see something that looks a lot like silverskin. If you've ever had a beef filet that had a ribbon of something totally inedible running through it - not quite fat, but not at all chewable - that's silverskin. On beef, you trim. On these, I wasn't sure. I hadn't ever worked with lamb shank before, so it was a coin toss. Trim it, and risk losing some percentage of tasty, tasty fat, or leave it be and risk an inedible wrap around my lamb at the end. I chose to leave it be, and it was a good move. Despite the similarity in appearance, this fat wrap totally melted away just like it was supposed to, and kept the meat nice and juicy underneath.

Two weekends ago I went a little bonkers and decided to buy veal bones and make stock. If you believe Michael Ruhlman, and I do, "If there were one ingredient that the home cook could have that would transform absolutely his or her cooking, one that would put it close to the level of the professional chef, it's veal stock. This stock takes the flavors that are already present and, without inflicting its own flavors in braise or a stew or a sauce or a soup, elevates them. It's the selfless stock." Veal bones are also full of young fats and tissues, which gives the stock enhanced gelatinous qualities, which enhance the overall robust texture of any sauce in which you're incorporating the stock. From the pic, you can see I stored some of the end product in ice cube trays, and froze them for future use. I did a really outstanding job with this stock (using Ruhlman's "brown" veal stock recipe - brown = bones browned in the oven first), and when I pulled the cubes there was only a minimum of fat on top of each cube. Good stuff.

Oh, and I defrosted more than I ended up using, but simply returned the stock back to the trays and slipped it back into the freezer. Nice! I've got at least a quart more stock frozen waiting use, so you'll excuse me if I find a reason to work it into everything I do for the next little while.

After all the veg is chopped up (I made vegetable sticks, with the intent of having full sized veg pieces to eat as a side dish), brown the shanks.

This wasn't easy. The irregular shape of the shank prevented a uniform color, as they wouldn't sit comfortably flat in my French oven. This wasn't a big deal ultimately, as the business surrounding the bone on the lower half of the shank was largely fat, and melted off in its entirety over the cooking time.

After that, get the onions going.

Then, once softened, add the vegetable sticks and get the whole thing nice and hot.

It's crucial to get the veg heated up to a decently hot temp, as the next step is to start adding your liquid. Since wine goes first (for deglazing/burning off of alcohol), it's important that the contents of the pot are sufficiently hot enough to help the room-temp wine get up to steady simmer as quickly as possible.

Now, I originally added about 1.5 cups of Barolo. First off, why Barolo? Well, I bought a bunch of it last year August, and I was still sitting on almost a case. Why not treat myself? It's a great cooking wine, as it's dry and awfully flavorful. But I do regret using so damn much of it. I actually outsmarted myself before beginning the whole cooking process. What I did was to add all the raw vegetables and onions to the French oven, then add water to the point that looked right for the lamb to go in. Then, I removed the vegetables and the onions and dumped the water into measuring cups to see how much liquid I was going to need. What I didn't figure on was that vegetables at some state of cooking take up less volume than raw vegetables, and I overestimated the liquid I needed by a solid cup/cup and a half. I noticed this when I dumped the whole 1.5 cups of Barolo in. It filled the French oven over the veg to the point that I could have just added the lamb and been done with it. Seeing as I needed to add veal stock and tomatoes (and the rosemary sprig) as well, I ended up ladling some of the wine out and into the sink.

My beautiful, beautiful wine going down the drain. Sigh...

Anyway, wine cooks off/cooks down, then the veal stock and tomatoes go in and gets brought up to temp. After screwing up my liquid estimate, I just eyeballed this part. The whole thing is then brought up to a bubble.

Bonus here - all the stuff I had to prep to get that braise into the oven, and look how clean my kitchen is. Nice, huh? Also, in the video I mentioned using the parchment paper to hold the browned shanks while the veg/liquid was prepared, saving yourself from dirtying up a plate. I'd also recommend giving parchment paper a try instead of foil to line cookie sheets you're trying not to have to wash after use. I like it better than foil, as the heat is more direct from the cookie sheet (foil doesn't take on as much heat, paper allows the heat to go through more easily), and stuff that tends to stick to foil (freezer bag french fries?) doesn't stick to parchment paper. Oh, and I also use the stuff with my cheese grater on the counter to capture freshly grated Parm or Asiago. Again, just trying not to dirty a plate or cutting board.

I ran these at 325 degrees through three 45-minute cycles, turning after each, with an extra ten min tagged on to the end (no good reason, just wasn't ready to yank them yet). Here's a look at what came out:

So, I took that cup/cup and a half of braising liquid and a tablespoon of butter and reduced them in a saute pan for about five minutes while the shank and veg were under the broiler. Here's what it looked like on the plate, and some final thoughts. The recipe follows.

RECIPE:

2 - 1lb lamb shanks
1 small yellow squash
1 medium green zucchini
1 large carrot
2 ribs celery
1 medium white onion
1 sprig of rosemary
3 roma tomatoes, peeled and crushed with their juices
2/3 cup dry red wine (Barolo used here)
2 cups veal stock
olive oil
salt & pepper

PREP:

Preheat oven to 325 degrees
Wash vegetables, peel carrot and squash. Chop into sticks. Chop onion into large half-orbit slices (there's gotta be a formal name for this cut, but I don't know what it is). Peel tomatoes and crush, holding aside. Salt & pepper lamb shanks.

COOKING:

Heat French oven over med-hi heat, add olive oil. Brown shanks as best possible, remove from oven and hold aside. Add additional olive oil if necessary, then add onion. Cook onion through for 3-5 minutes, then add vegetables. Salt & pepper. Cook until vegetables are hot and softening, approx. 5 minutes. Add red wine, deglaze. Allow alcohol to burn off. Add rosemary sprig, veal stock and tomatoes. Season with salt & pepper. Bring to a steady simmer. Add shanks back to braise, less than 1/4 submerged in the liquid. Press parchment paper down to trap the steam in right to the top of the meat. Cover, place in oven.

Turn the meat over every 45 minutes. Total cooking time = 2:30.

FINISH:

Turn broiler to high. Transfer meat to a cookie sheet. Remove vegetables from liquid and set aside. Add remaining liquid to a saute pan with one tablespoon of butter per 1.5 cups of liquid remaining. Reduce for five to seven minutes while meat is gaining additional color under the broiler. Add sauce back to meat and vegetables while plating.

2009-03-03T11:47:00.001-05:00

Otis Eats Wasabi For $40

2009-02-17T13:49:00.002-05:00

Whoops?

Looks like a recent remark I made about a recent dining experience outed someone's relationship in a low-rent gossip blog.

Uh, whoops?

2009-02-15T10:09:00.001-05:00

Try Again Easy...

Saturday, February 14, 2009

Shock and Awe

From the You Can't Make This Up Dept.TM:

The Chicago Sun-Times reports...

Former Gov. Rod Blagojevich's brother solicited U.S. Sen. Roland Burris for up to $10,000 in campaign cash before Blagojevich named Burris to the coveted post -- something Burris initially failed to disclose under oath before an Illinois House impeachment panel, records and interviews show.

Is anyone surprised?

Burris' statement offers the third version of events he has given about his discussions concerning the Senate seat, to which Blagojevich appointed him in late December, after Blagojevich was hit with federal corruption charges that included an allegation he tried to sell the Senate appointment.

In politics, Democrats have to keep changing the story until you come up with a version that ~~everyone~~ the press can live with.

This little situation could get a ugly for Burris. He could get his corrupt ass kicked out of Congress just like ~~Dodd, Rangel, Murtha~~ and Stevens. Oh wait, he's Democrat, he'll get a free pass from the press. In fact, it's probably the last we'll hear of it.

Photos of today's front pages of:

Washington Post
New York Times
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
Seattle Times

Oh wait, it did get reported. Even on the front page of eventheliberal insertnameofpaperhere.

You know what they say about assumptions... Except, you know, you can cut the "me" out that old saw.

2009-02-13T15:05:00.002-05:00

Things Worth Mentioning

Had dinner at The Publican last night with DP and Grubby. The restaurant's concept is "Oysters, Pork and Beer," (no, really.), and it really fucking works.

We started off with a Belgian trappist, moved into a dozen oysters followed by a sampler of fine hams from across the world, then shifted gears to a Surly Mild. The Surly sucked (a "session" beer, says Chad - "Does this beer even have a taste?," says DP), but the entrees we started to devour absolutely did not.

The first pass included pork marrow, piping hot in the bones, and pork shoulder with littleneck clams and fingerling potatoes. The marrow was a first for all of us, and was really fucking good. Spread on some high-end sourdough it had an earthy molten awesomeness to it, and is something I'm not going to be scared off of anymore. The shoulder/clam dish worked like a charm too. There was a small puddle of a tomato broth that gave the whole thing a sort of cioppino (sp) look and feel, and the little burst of having all those flavors in your mouth at the same time was worth the price of admission.

More food came, along with some Alpha King. We were graced with a barbecue octopus, which was a little sweeter than, but still reminiscent of, unagi at a sushi joint. The other dish brought at this time was a potee of three kinds of pork: rib, tenderloin and this holy-fucking-shit pork belly sausage patty that just knocked me for a loop. The patty tasted fresh and medium-rare, and didn't have any fat texture to it at all, despite being constructed entirely of pork belly. That little piece of sausage was a revelation. Never had anything like it before, despite how rustic and simple the flavor was.

We knew we were still hungry when those two plates arrived, so Grubby ordered one more - a barbecued country rib platter cooked in pomegranite and kimchi. The meat had that charcoal caramelization around the sweetness of the pomegranite (although the kimchi was buried), and an outstanding texture, considering the cut is usually in need of serious slow cooking to achieve tenderness. I can't tell you what they did to get those country ribs to be as easy to eat off the grill as they were, but I'd like to find out.

So, the only real misses for me were the tenderloin out of the potee (a nice piece of meat, but nothing remotely close to special) and the Surly Mild. I'd give the trappist, octopus, marrow and belly sausage all an A+ grade, and the rest a solid A.

Total experience? A-grade for food, B+ for service (manager and bussers were outstanding, server was buried and took his time - which was alright by us, but he wasn't as attentive as he could have been).

As it got late and the restaurant started emptying out we got to meet the assistant manager (hot, and enthusiastic about food - and dating the chef de cuisine at Alinea, apparently) and chatted her up a little bit. The restaurant has been packed since the day they opened, and has received great reviews. I'm actually a little surprised that's the case, because the menu is either something you're really going to get, or something that isn't going to make sense at all. It's a pleasant surprise that all the critics were onboard, because this place was worth it.

We're taking you there if you're coming to Gentile Summit. Tables are booked.

----------------------------

The best purchase I made in 2008 was Apple TV. I'm going to get a little evangelical for a minute, but I firmly believe that if you've got an HDTV, cable modem, and a sound system of any sort hooked up, this rig will change your home theater experience.

More specifically, it's the combination of Apple TV and Boxee that has changed the way I listen to my music and watch TV. Here's the breakdown:

MUSIC: My CDs have been sitting in a closet for close to three years, and Apple TV further cements their place as backup hard copies to something far more convenient than a six-disc changer can offer. My entire iTunes library lives on the Apple TV box, and since the box runs its audio content out via digital optical audio to my amp/speakers, I've got my entire music collection at my command at all times. All my playlists, all my songs, and even the ability to shop the iTunes store via the Apple TV menu and internet connection. The only complaints I have are of the nitpicky variety (can't manage the music via Apple TV for ratings or playlists, for instance, but I have a computer at hand for that), and the cool things like the cover art screen saver more than make up for it.

MOVIES: How easy is it to rent and watch a movie on iTunes? Takes roughly two minutes from when you make your purchase to when enough is buffered to begin viewing. Also, there's a growing segment of the content that's delivered in (720p, not 1080p, but I can't tell the difference) HD. It's super easy. Add to that a variety of software solutions that help you rip or repurpose content for upload to Apple TV, and it couldn't be simpler to relax with some popcorn in front of the tube.

TV: Two angles here... first of all, you can either buy or upload your content, or you get Boxee. Boxee is a program that uploads to the Apple TV which provides access to sites like Comedy Central, CBS and Hulu. Granted, the video quality can be shaky, but the amount of content out there to view is staggering.

EXTRAS: How about your flickr account on a 42" HDTV? How about Youtube? My favorite, though, is access to the podcasts store in iTunes. Plenty of short form video, along with all sorts of professional and amateur audio content free at the click of a button.

Seriously, aside from Michigan State basketball on ESPN and Big Ten Network, I haven't watched anything except my local channels or stuff off the Apple TV in two weeks or more. There's enough on that box and on the net to keep me satisfied through the rest of the year - and plenty of room left on the 160GB hard drive for more.

Huge find. Highly recommended.

----------------------------

Got a call from "Fredo Speech Girl" today. She asked, "What the hell is your ex-wife thinking?" Turns out, the ex tried to friend FSG on Facebook, somehow forgetting they have been mortal enemies for years. As a matter of fact, one of the big hesitations my ex had getting engaged to me was that I used to run around with FSG. So FSG calls, I get a giggle out of it, and remain as anonymous on Facebook as my five-time All-Star pseudonymous identity allows.

You know I only mention this because there's an off-chance the ex reads this blog, and I know it will irritate her that I'm good friends with FSG again. And that FSG called me about her. That's all.

----------------------------

Memo to G-Vegas: We'll see you in two weeks.

2009-02-11T19:16:00.001-05:00

Freezer Inventory

2 jars homemade Italian pork and beans
1 container of homemade Bolognese
1 pound meatballs
1/2 bar of Norwegian chocolate
1/2 lb whole milk mozzarella
1/2 lb chihuahua Mexican cheese
1 baby bottle of Soco
1 slice of Key Lime pie
6 lbs coffee beans, various types (bought here, recommended)
9 lbs veal bones
3/4 lb bacon
12 cups veal stock, in containers and ice cube trays
9 chicken breasts, boneless skinless
8 pork loin chops, boneless
2 veal shanks (ossobucco)
2 lamb shanks
2 meatloaves, beef/veal/pork/andouille
2 links Andouille sausage

2009-02-08T16:26:00.000-05:00

Open Letter

RMS,

I read what you sent over. Combed over it like it was the Zapruder tape, in fact. I must have sketched a half dozen paragraphs in three or four emails unsent in an effort to analyze, question and understand.

Honestly, every time I try to posit some sort of theory behind your words, I get hung up. Hung up on my own context, my own bias. It's making it difficult for me to read and parse and really understand how you saw you and I, what it all meant to you.

The main theme was one of salvation. Resignation that salvation can't be delivered everywhere you'd like it to be. That much I understand. And I guess I need to make sure I state, for the record, that I'm not assuming that what you sent is totally without hyperbole either.

So, that being said...

It only took about ten minutes with you before my intent was no longer casual. You impressed me. Still do. And I tend to want to be able to say that about my friends and girlfriends. You're a beautiful woman, and I'm still terribly fond of you.

The thing is, you were the right woman in the right place at the right time. More than anything to me, you were my ego at a time when I needed it the most. I spent a long time wandering in frustration and had finally found myself on the brink of something positive. I was jumping blind ito the void, and still didn't feel as if I knew who I was to even be granted the opportunity to jump.

My self-worth was tied to an old image of myself. One that had buckled under instead of bracing through the storm. I saw myself as incapable, worthless. As it was a woman who knocked me down, it was another who helped me find my legs to stand again.

I wanted to know you, because you were worth knowing. I wanted to talk to you, because you were worth talking to. I wanted to impress you, because you were worth impressing.

Mainly, though, I wanted you to believe in me so I knew I was worth the effort.

It's really unfair to put this on you. Obviously, you were more than just symbolism and self-help to me. I love a woman who can banter, not to mention one who is interesting and intriguing. I wanted to know you not just because I felt good being around you, but because you were genuinely engaging and fun to be around.

Eventually, my bruised ego came back to health, and we were left with a friendship and long-distance relationship that started to carry expectations just under the surface that I wasn't prepared to handle. That's on me. I handled that poorly, and it's on me that I read what you sent my way and am having a hard time understanding completely where your head is/was at. I don't believe there's anything wrong with a relationship that has run its course, or someone deciding they're going to be a little selfish, so long as the potential for real damage is acknowledged and closure is allowed, if pursued.

I probably let everything slip a little too casually, and I really apologize for that. You deserved better than the gradual disengagement I gave you, and I should have known you well enough to know that you weren't going to thrash and wail and demand an explanation. Therefore, I should have had the courtesy to talk to you about where my head and heart were, and given you the opportunity to talk about it with me too.

I'm sorry.

Some of these things did turn out okay, you know. I'm as satisfied with who I am mentally and emotionally as I've ever been in my life. And I know you're happily engaged, for which I share your happiness. We weren't a likely pair to go on forever, and I think you knew that. But know that while we were talking daily and seeing each other when we could, I never thought for a minute that we weren't together.

I do wonder what you meant in that second to last paragraph when you say what was wrecked. I'd like to think that my sins were of silence and disengagement, and not something I said on my way out the (proverbial) door.

I never played at my fondness for you. Know that much, at least, alright?

T.

2009-01-25T22:22:00.003-05:00

Borrowed Ego or a Reflected Halo

(Just some ramblings. Ignore me.)

I think one of the major attractions of the site all along has been this kind of conspiratorial or personal effect it has on people. It's very one-on-one, I think, for most people.

So, Iggy sent an interview with a writer from "Television Without Pity" my way, and asked me what I thought. A couple things... first off, I don't read TWoP, so I don't know who this guy is. Second, I'm not really a "writer." I'm a lot of things, and I was a lot of other things, but I don't think of myself as a "writer." Someone who writes, sure. But not a writer. Seriously.

I just thought there were some interesting ideas in this interview. Some about community and the perceived (or, in this guy's case, deigned) authority within them, and a little about engaging with your passions.

Like the clip above... One of the major attactions of this community, at least early on, was the personal effect it had on all of us. Support, anger management, the exchange of ideas, it was a club we all felt a stake in from the minute we left our first comment or posted our first hand history.

Anyway, let me clip and comment.

And more than that, I'm really, really tired of "snark." I don't think there are many of us that are capable, or interested, in turning out boilerplate "snark." If you want to hear the same jokes you've been hearing for ten years, you're going to need to look to someone less original or interesting than the current staff. We've done snark. We've done "guilty pleasure." We can do that shit in our sleep.

Working for AJ during the Oddjack era was really good for me in this regard. Snark is easy, lazy writing. Finding different angles from which to mine the humor is much harder. I'm not saying that I'm a fully realized human being of hilarity after five months under his wing or anything, but I can confidently say that I had to work to flex some different muscles to find the funny during my time there. The hardest thing to do well regularly was the early morning link post. I had to find (usually) five different articles online, and use no more than ten to fifteen words to hit my joke for each. Try writing five of those a week without falling back on the easy joke every time, and eventually you'll find nooks and crannies in your sense of humor that you never knew were there. There were people who didn't much care for what was going on with OJ, but I think anyone who sums up the tone there as "snarky" is missing the point just a little bit. This wasn't the National Lampoon, I'll admit, but it was a pretty solid experience working with an editor who was truly funny in inventive ways, and had no problem at all calling me out for not keeping up if I got lazy.

Sars always said (usually defending my psychotic ass) that "recaps don't mean one specific thing."

Nothing means anything. Fuck, what is it we're all doing here anyway? It's really just a form of mental masturbation. No one is creating high art, we're all using the form for whatever the hell we feel like trying to wring out of it at the moment. I'm honest, but I use hyperbole. This, of course, means that I'm lying. Except that I'm not. Not really. Whatever it is I'm trying to do at the moment, in the moment, is the larger point. And if the larger point is reinforced with lies, then what, exactly, is it but distractions and wankery?

I mean this honestly, by the way. There's not a goddamn thing I've done here in five or six years that's "important," and even a little variance takes away my ability to call any of this "truth."

None of this means one specific thing. It doesn't "mean" anything. Never has. Not to you, at least. I'm the only one who gets pleasure out of masturbation. That's the dictionary definition, you know. I can tell you whatever I want to, and so long as it fits the paradigm you expect and so long as I've set you up around my intent to elicit the intended response, then "what it means" is that I've manipulated you into thinking or sympathizing or whatever I was trying to do.

Don't take this to mean I am specifically "creating" with the intent to manipulate. That's not exactly true. It's just not exactly false. Everything is designed for something, it's just that what we do here on blogs is self-serving in nature. Nothing means anything to anyone but ourselves in that respect. What anyone takes away from someone else's blogging is just collateral damage, intentional or not.

(Disclaimer: the friendships that are an organic outgrowth of this community are clearly meaningful, it's just that blog posts don't have a distinct single meaning that belongs to the reader. That's the point.)

Q: What appeals to you about TWOP?
A: It is a community of people engaged in their entertainment. It is of prime importance to me, as an idealistic person, that people engage with their entertainment, and deliberate about what they are putting in their bodies. Not avoid any particular thing, or gorge on some other thing because it's intellectually trendy, but just to taste whatever it is with their whole tongue.

[snip]

A canny person can get as much out of so-called "guilty pleasure" TV -- either a clue to the bigger societal picture, or a little self-examination -- as somebody else gets out of watching "Hardball." The mere act of watching a high profile show, either current events programs or that HBO "it's not TV" thing, is not enough to make you smart, or well-read, or eloquent, or thoughtful, or anything. That's borrowed ego, it's a reflected halo. And on one level, the community at TWoP is good about puncturing that.

I love the idea that it takes a true engagement to find idealism, and that lip service to engagement is simply "borrowed ego... a reflected halo." We've seen people come and go out of this community over five years who were hopping on bandwagons, and we've seen people come and stay as they poured themselves into poker, into blogging and into the community. More than that, those of us who have been around for awhile understand that idealism in this regard isn't a shared value. We've created our own spaces with varying levels of ethics and personality and thoughtfulness and truth behind them, and have fashioned identities out of whole cloth based on these constructs. And, speaking as someone who enjoyed "defending the honor of the community" or somesuch shit god-knows-how-long-ago, most of us understand that we occupy our own space, with our own ideas about ethics, personality, thoughtfulness and truth, and have grown to understand that trying to wear the borrowed ego or reflected halo is a futile and pointless task, at best.

Firstly because Idol is such a case study of where our country is at, at any given time. Because it's the biggest show in history, the stories that it tells and the personae that it brings to us are immediately illuminating. The archetypes that the show produces for our consumption, and the order in which America votes them off, are so key to understanding where we are as a nation... But the internet is NOT America. Online communities like TWoP are a self-selected fraction of a fraction of a fraction that leaves out some pretty major groups of Americans, for the most part.

My only wish, as a passive waiter or as a moderator, is that everybody watching the show taste it with their whole tongue. You must conquer your entertainment, own it utterly, if it's going to take you anywhere.

It's easy to talk in wide sweeping "truths," at least as true as they are perceived to be in your own head. I think, though, the key is to conquer and to own. There's a certain amount of deconstruction that can be accomplished out of wide sweeping "truths" that allow us to find pieces from which we can find sympathy or righteousness or agreement or any of a variety of emotions to share. But, really, taking something simple and cloying and feeling what's been designed for you to feel is really just a Thomas Kinkade painting or Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. I think where value can be mined is in telling your own story, and allowing the "self-selected fraction of a fraction of a fraction" to come along for the ride.

Where I've felt the most successful regarding my contributions between these lines is when I've felt a visceral relief clicking "publish." Where I've felt the least successful is when I've had a Haloscan window full of advice from the peanut gallery (editor's note: doesn't mean I love you all, really. -- UPDATE: I meant to say, "doesn't mean I DON'T love you all, really."). This has historically been an exercise full of ego for me, and if I can't connect thoughts together, string them into ideas and fortify those ideas into truths, I'm a failure. And this sort of deconstruction can be easy and lazy, following formulas and pushing obvious truths (the Kinkade method), or I can try to figure out what's broken, and show you exactly where I've identified the issue.

I've told my version of my own story here, and I would like to think that I've largely conquered what I had been doing for years in this space. I just want to be careful that I'm not claiming to represent anyone other than myself. I think there's an archetype of "cheating ex-wife" that would be a lazy fallback, and a construct of "failing marriage" as well, and I think those ideas serve as a pencil sketch that we can all agree represents something we all agree to loosely define identically. But, my responsibility to myself wasn't to leave those archetypes standing, but to bring color to them and help myself understand more fully the reasons why my world fell apart. That is the blogging that had meaning to me, only because it served as a Masters' course in psychology. For me. Not for you. But thanks for coming along for the ride anyway.

The fact that, because I'm an employee and moreso because I'm recapping, my opinion matters. DUDE, my opinion doesn't matter. It's an opinion, that's how it works. So you get a lot of mommy-defiance and "well you said this, but I thought that" and it's like, "I'm not telling you what to think, I'm telling you what I think."

Like I said... Nothing means anything. Trust me on that. I'm the only authority on my life, and I wish the rest of you good fucking luck sorting out your own. Find your own meaning, your own engagement, and if you work it out publicly we'll be there to read along. If not? Find what's meaningful. Deconstruct. And work it out.

2009-01-25T18:40:00.003-05:00

Five Ingredients, One Pan, Three Meals

So, this one's not meant to be fancy. I'm taking five ingredients, one pan and making enough food to last me for three meals.

Now, clearly, I'm not counting salt and pepper as ingredients here, or we'd be rocking seven/one/three instead. That being said, I'm under the assumption that every kitchen has s&p, or can steal shakers from a nearby Burger King if not. There's other stuff here I could have done to improve this too, like deglazing with wine or adding any of a number of herbs, but that'd be cheating.

Start by hitting your chicken with some salt and pepper and let it sit for a bit while you get the other stuff going. Once you've got your bacon rendered, pan swabbed and carrots browned, then sear the chicken on both sides, about 3-5 minutes per side. We're purposefully using a stainless steel pan, and not a non-stick here, because we need the extra flavor the stuff that sticks to the bottom is going to bring. If you're going to do this in a non-stick, skip where I tell you to scrape the bottom (deglaze). If you've got stuff sticking to your non-stick, the last thing you want to do is to loosen it into your food.

Take the chicken out for a sec, so the tomatoes can go in. You'll want to bring it up to a nice bubble, scrape the stuff off the bottom, then nestle the chicken back in. Cover, get back to it in 10-15 minutes.

Add the beans. Make sure they're largely submerged in the liquid. If you don't have enough liquid, add a little water (which I had to - about 1/8 cup), or use less beans. Simmer for about 10-15 minutes uncovered. The beans will soak up liquid, and there will also be evaporation. Again, if you start feeling freakish about running dry, add some water.

Here's the finished product. There's only two things you have to worry about screwing up here: first, you've got to both cook the bacon correctly (until done, but not burnt), and then leave some grease in the pan to work with. If you blot out all the bacon grease, you'll burn your carrots and your chicken will stick and everything will get fucked up. Second, you do have to make sure it's not bubbling hard when the beans go in, and keep it moving a bit after that. You don't have to stand there and stir, but beans have a way of working their way down to the bottom, burning, then sticking to the bottom like a crust. That's no good.

I added the bacon back, crumbling it over the top, and shaved some Asiago too (cheating!).

Easy as pie. I'll eat one breast tonight, and the rest maybe chopped up over pasta (with the beans and tomatoes) tomorrow and Tuesday. I mentioned in the video that this would be better with thighs, but that's got something to do with how much of a ripoff boneless-skinless breasts are in comparison. Thighs are cheap and retain their flavor better, so give it a shot with those too.

2009-01-25T18:34:00.001-05:00

Making the Right Bet at Online Casinos

Players often wonder if there is a right bet to make at an online casino. Whether a player is playing table games, slots, poker or any other form of online gambling in most cases making the right bet might be very important to the individual play.

Firstly the right bet can mean different things to different people and in various situations. For example, the right bet when it comes to poker is totally different than the right bet when it comes to slots or slots online. The proper bet in poker can mean the difference of a player winning the hand, being called on a bluff or being folded to just in time for the player to win the pot.

The right bet in slots can mean different things as well. There are many slot games that have bonus options. Some slots do not activate the bonus until a certain bet is made, so if a player is playing to win the jackpot than they must make the right bet in order to have any chance at all at winning a big jackpot.

Many games that have a bonus option require you to make at least a certain amount wagered to meet the minimum requirements in order to activate the bonus so make sure you know the exact amount before playing the particular game or making a bet on a random slot machine.

And lastly always remember to make the right bet for your pocket! Its important that you know your limit because after all these casino games are meant for people to enjoy and have fun so there is no worrying involved!

2009-01-19T17:58:00.003-05:00

Dinner Blogging With Beer

Oh yeah. Tonight's recipe is from All About Braising, a fantastic primer on the technique with some great recipes. This one is called:

Braised Short Ribs in Porter With Maple Horseradish Glaze. Whee!

First things first, you need short ribs. There are two types of cuts - one that looks like a little brick with a solid bone running underneath, and one that looks kinda like a thin NY Strip steak. The little bricks are called "English Cut," and have more fat, making them better for braising. Incidentally, the other kind (whose name escapes me) is the type of short rib the Koreans are famous for barbecueing.

Anyway, recipe calls for 3-4 lbs, but since it's just me I have about 1.5. Four little bricks. First things first, I like to take my beef (snicker) and get it out of the package as soon as I get home. In this case, I hit it with some salt and put it in that shallow plastic container in the fridge. Salt helps it keep longer, and improves the taste when you cook it.

Next, brown the beef on high heat in some olive oil.

While that's going (or before, if you're slow), chop up an onion and a carrot. Doesn't have to be fancy, you're not eating these anyway. They're the aromatics for flavor.

When the braising liquid is bubbling, get the ribs in there:

Cover, first at the bottom with parchment paper, then put the lid on:

Get in the oven at 300 degrees. Turn every 45 minutes for a total cooking time of about 2.5 hours.

While that's going, start the glaze. This is just maple syrup I'm infusing with some rosemary:

Out of the oven, transfer to a baking dish and surround with the carrot and onions:

Then, glaze with the rosemary-infused maple syrup with prepared horseradish.

Then, broil for five minutes to get the glaze to caramelize. Here's what it looks like when done:

The horseradish really gets buried and isn't hot at all. Maybe the mix was wrong, but I certainly get sweet without hot. Otherwise, it's predictably tender (2.25 hours will do that to short ribs), and pretty tasty. I think I was supposed to have some liquid left over in the braise, but it was largely onion sludge (which is tasty too) and carrot remaining.

Bon appetit, eh?

2009-01-16T11:15:00.002-05:00

Correction

The editors of this blog have been notified that a number of factual errors and blatant hyperbole may exist in the previous post, "Magic Trick." The editors deeply regret the use of hyperbole and the misremembrations of the author, who will be severely punished, we assure you.

The editors, however, do stand by the conclusion of the article, in which the author has committed to being a better person and better friend in 2009 and beyond.

Sheesh

2009-01-04T10:54:00.003-05:00

Bonus Post!

This xtranormal.com animation studio is awesome. And yes, this terrible joke was written by me personally. I even tried it out on a Canadian once, and it didn't work then either. Enjoy.

(By the way, Blogger took two goddamn days to decide it was time to publish that post just below. Annoying.)

2009-01-02T21:54:00.003-05:00

Magic Trick

People come and people go
Sometimes without goodbye, sometimes without hello
I got one magic trick
Just one and that's it
I disappear

No, this isn't a retirement post. I promise. Actually, it's something like the opposite, except maybe not quite that at all.

I'm getting ahead of myself.

Here's a reasonable hypothesis: my problems have historically been a veritable buffet of largely self-invented bullshit intelligently designed (*1*) to create some sort of insufferable Mobius strip of personal pity bolstered with reaffirmations of woe regularly situated at mile markers along every step I ran in place.

Here's an obvious corollary to the aforementioned reasonable hypothesis: I'm smart enough to have realized this all along.

Let me admit, for the record, that my history with psychology/psychiatry/psychoanalysis/etc is limited to a couple dozen sessions across three distinct periods of my life:

a) The oh-my-god-I've-got-to-leave-my-wife-because-she's-going-to-fuck-other-guys-until-I-do-right? phase

b) The half-assed attempt to "go to counseling" (a phrase I tag with the appropriate ironic quotes) to fix the marriage

c) The fuck-I-hate-it-here-and-they-won't-promote-me Allentown years

The first guy was pretty good, and I would have stuck it out had I not left the home I shared with my then-wife and moved back to my mom's. The second shrink, when the ex and I "went to counseling" (*2*) to "fix" what was wrong with our marriage, sucked. It took five minutes to figure out the counselor wasn't smarter than me and was one of those people for whom comity came through finding mid-points of disagreement. And, you know, when you start trying to find a mid-point between two polar opposite points, you're not "building," you're just refusing to call a foul when you see one.

I think I actually needed a referee at that point, if for no other reason than to tell me I wasn't batshit crazy for pulling the plug on a situation for perfectly valid reasons (*3*).

So, it didn't take.

The third guy I saw about a dozen times in Allentown, maybe less. I paid him a co-pay of something like $40 an hour once a week to bitch about my job. Really. I had a blog at the time and everything. Again, the guy wasn't smarter than I was and although it took me awhile for me to fire the guy (I didn't want to quit until I was sure it wasn't working for me), I did draw two pieces of value from my time with the guy.

One, he introduced me to the term "cognitive dissonance." CD is a fancy way of saying, "shut the fuck up, it's all in your head," but I guess some shrinks see it as a serious condition in need of specialized treatment.

And two - and I'm just figuring this out lately - the three distinct phases in which I chose to see a shrink establish a pattern. And that pattern clearly marks the three points of my life where I absolutely needed the friends that I didn't (or didn't think) I had.

Funny how that works, right? Don't misunderstand my hypothesis above. I'm not saying that job problems, plus a then-wife who decimates your self-esteem on the way to disappearing with a new boyfriend (*4*) in a hotel and then ignores your ultimatum and makes you leave and file divorce papers isn't a "real" problem. It most assuredly is. I'm just saying that I manufactured woe from these problems which I've internalized and transformed into some sort of albatross around my neck (*5*) I wore with a perverse sort of masochistic anti-pride to the point that this obvious burden I was toting around poisoned all my possibilities at finding my own sense of self again.

I guess I had always thought she helped me find a better version of me, somewhere in our past. I'm not entirely sure that's an idea without merit, but it's absolutely an idea that had an expiration date that came and went before we faced and altar together. I mistook raw emotion (*6*) for... fuck, I dunno - adult reason? sensibility?... and blithely pushed along, trying to make sure we got to the end-game, whatever that was.

At some point together, somehow I got the message that my friendships weren't coming along for the ride. And I cut them loose. As a matter of fact, the total count of my friends at our wedding who knew me first, but knew us both together? One. One. A total of one friend of ours from college, who actually knew me first, but knew her before I met her, so it's almost hard to count him for this purpose. I was running so low on friends (and with only four brothers between us, family) that I imported a grade school friend (*7*) to work as an usher. Hadn't seen the guy in five plus years, and he's putting on a tux.

Then, when my marriage fell apart, I had no one to slap me around or pick me back up. No one to help me sort out why from a first-hand perspective. I had nowhere to fall back, so I just held on tight and never let go of what was wrong.

Them's the breaks.

I think, though, my wake-up call has come slowly over this past year or so. Back in late 2007 I flew to Utah to see my best friend (who many of you met in Vegas - the big schlub poker neophyte who won that tournament at the Plaza in Summer 05 I think) marry his long-time girlfriend (and, more importantly, her two terrific kids). It's no secret that my mood kind of ebbs and flows, and for some reason I was having kind of a rough go in my head during that period, and so I pretty much holed up at the mountain B&B in which I was staying and got drunk with my dad - at the expense of going out for drinks before and after the wedding, ditching him on two occasions.

We haven't talked since. After about six months without talking, I sent him a dumb-ass text message every day for three straight weeks with only one real response. No emails, no phone calls. I can't help but feel that I broke something here, and it frustrates and saddens me horribly.

Fortunately, for a variety of reasons, the circumstances of 2008 (*8*) helped me cut most of the albatross (*9*) loose. My self-image, while still admittedly not Lorenzo-Lamas-esque or anything, is actually doing pretty well. I'm happy. I know, right? I barely know what the fuck to do with myself (*10*) anymore.

So, I decided I'd set a resolution for myself, that's actually more of a goal than anything. In 2009 I'm going to fix the friendships that are broken (at least, I'm going to try), and give more of myself to the friendships in good shape than I have in the last ten years or so.

You know, quit disappearing. I got really good at that.

I'm sure I'm still going to be a particular weirdo who sleeps eight hour nights in Vegas (yeah, wanna fight?) and such, but I can be more available and more invested, right? A happy BG is a BG you'll want around a little bit more anyway, right?

Happy 2009.

2008-12-19T13:06:00.000-05:00

It's About Time I Pushed That Matt Sims HOFer Post Down The Page

Every year the good people at Slate are inundated with more questions than their trained professionals can handle. As a result, they post these queries, and I'm going to try and lend a hand giving some answers.

Here we go...

� What is the most disloyal dog breed?

A: If you asked Suge Knight, he'd say it's either Snoop Doggs or Nate Doggs.

� Why does some music make you want to shake your butt?

A: Because we've been conditioned and lied to by the Corporatodiscjockian Complex. You really think Sir Mix-A-Lot got to where he is based on talent?

� Could you please explain why it is that squirrels are capable of such amazing athletic feats? What is it about their brains and, to a lesser degree, their bodies that allows it? I watch them at my house and have seen some amazing things.

A: Me too. There was one time in college when I was hopped up on some shit and a squirrel came crashing through the flimsy acoustical tile in my kitchen's ceiling and started panicking like a motherfucker. Dude was running around the kitchen and by sheer centripetal force was doing laps sideways halfway up the walls. I managed to chase him out of the house and got a shot in on him with my six-iron. This, of course, minimizes any strong feelings I have about squirrels as athelets, because I've never hit anything with my six-iron, and if I managed to connect with that little rodent it couldn't have been all that.

� Why do women like soup? Is it for perceived health benefits? Is it because it's a quasi-comfort food?

A: Because it's the one thing on which they choose not to be horribly difficult and capricious bitches.

� Is it just me, or do all national anthems the world over, no matter how rich and exotic the culture, seem to sound like European marching-band music? Wouldn't one expect China's national anthem be more "plinky"? Shouldn't Iraq's national anthem sound a little more "Arab-y"?

A: And shouldn't Chinese national anthem lyrics sound like this?

� I am an 11-year-old boy and girls in my class harass me constantly and I want to file a restraining order against one of them. Is that possible?

A: If you just move to Utah none of the girls will touch you until you get back from your mission. Wouldn't that be easier?

� It is a common baseball prank to give someone a cream pie in the face during a TV interview. Where do these cream pies come from? Do baseball teams keep cream pies in the dugout?

A: It's a little-known fact that in every baseball clubhouse is a Marie Callendar's restaurant. This started back in the 70s when Dominicans started flooding the majors. Not to draw too broad a stereotype, but those people really like their chili and cornbread.

� Why don't humans have a mating season?

A: It's called "college."

� When and why did the Communist Chinese change the name of their capital "PEKING" to Bazging? Sorry, I don't know how it is spelled. Thank you.

A: 1987. The decision was made collectively.

� My toaster identifies which of the two slots should be used for making a single slice of toast. Why does it make a difference which slot I use?

A: The toaster assumes you've set the slider closer to the dark (right) side than the light (left) side, so by placing the bread in the left (single) slot, you're preserving the delicate weight balance necessary for the toaster to properly execute it's multi-step process to provide you morning deliciousness. Also note, this is why proper crumb displacement in the accompanying crumb tray is a critical first-troubleshooting step.

� If one gets a personal e-mail from a very famous or important person, such as the president, or the queen of England, or the Pope, or Paul McCartney, can that e-mail have monetary value? I guess not. It's just an electronic transmission on a screen. There's no original. There's no way to buy or sell it. Seems a shame tho.

A: I don't know, seems like some of the emails I've received from very important people in Nigerian royalty have some sort of street value.

� Does indoor tanning hurt your t--- if you have had a breast silicone implant put in for over 30 years?

A: Once they hit 140 degrees internally, that's when you know they're food-safe for consumption.

� Why do all of the deli guys and food cart guys call me "Boss" (well, me and everyone else)?

A: Is your name "Bruce Springsteen?"

� I live in Washington, D.C., and we have very long escalators coming out of the Metro. If I grabbed the handrail when I first step onto the escalator and did not let go until I was at the top, my body would be almost prostrate across the steps. As I go higher on the escalator, I have to readjust the hand that is grabbing the rubber handrail. Why can't the companies that make escalators sync the steps and the handrails so that they go the same speed?

A: This was negotiated between the Escalator Coalition of America and the good people at Otis Elevator back in 1947. Otis was concerned that the novelty of gradual inclined escalation was such that architects and interior designers might opt for these newfangled "escalator steps," and so negotiated from their monopolistic position of strength a single minor inconvenience contractually mandated to all elscalators for a period of 99 years to blunt the appeal of these new devices. Congress passed it in a minor rider to an appropriations bill (thanks to the scare tactics of the Otis Corporation, painting a doom-and-gloom with thousands of elevator operator jobs on the line nationwide), and so until 2046 we're stuck with handrails moving at a legislatively mandated pace not to fall below 115% faster than the steps. True story.

� If you were on a boat, what signs do sharks give if they are hungry and will attack versus if they just want to swim around the boat?

A: Should they attempt to chew through the aft section of your vessel, that would be the best indicator.

� How did early man deal with growing toe and fingernails?

A: They allowed immigration from Vietnam, and encouraged their entrepreneurship.

� If someone with DNA from the Stone Age were born today, would they be normal?

A: Only as a member of the Alabama GOP.

� I have been accused of assault in Ohio. The woman fell over a box in the hall backward, and my brother opened the door, saw her lying there, and started hitting me. I got him down and held him down. It was all over a fight concerning my niece. What do you think will happen?

A: The Buckeyes will win three straight over the Wolverines before Rich Rodriguez finds the maize-and-blue equivalent to White/Slaton to restore Michigan's place in the top tier of the Big Ten.

� I wonder what's going on with Obama's eyes. When he made his keynote address to the Democratic Convention in 2004, I noticed his eyes had a bit of a pretty eyes makeup look. I concluded that it was just the makeup they put on him for the TV cameras. But then yesterday on TV I saw some older footage of Obama and again his eyes had that same pretty look. This was before he was nationally known. I looked carefully and I think that look comes from having long eyelashes. I mentioned this to some other people and they noticed it too. But so then where did those long eyelashes go? Maybe eyelashes get shorter with age. Do they? BUT also I'm wondering if Obama has had his eyelashes shortened. If he has had them shortened, I think that's an excellent idea. Because that long lashes pretty eyes look actually doesn't look so good on a man. At least not if he's running for president.

A: You know who else had long, pretty eyelashes? [/Godwin]

� During this weekend's football playoff game in Green Bay, the temperature at kickoff was 0 degrees, and by the end of the game was -4 degrees. When players get injured in such weather, do they bother putting ice on the injury? Wouldn't that warm up the injury to 32 degrees?

A: If a Packer fan falls in the woods, would the woodland creatures all die of cholesterol-related heart failure after devouring his corpse?

� Burma's dictator has a chestful of b------- medals. What's up with that, Explainer?

A: I sometimes wear shirts with epaulets. Does that make me some kind of lieutenant? What's up with that?

� If there is so much oil in the Middle East, could one missile (such as the ones used to penetrate bunkers and caves) explode deep underground and hypothetically blow up a few countries?

A: Yes, because crude oil is exactly the same as gasoline.

� How can personal coaches justify coaching athletes who are much better than they ever were? If they know so much about how to win, why aren't they competing?

A: And Mark Mangino is really fat too, AMIRITE?!?!

� Can men eat the Activia yogurt that is advertised exclusively to the modern woman in khakis? Will it have the same internal regulatory effects on the male system that are promised for the female bowels? If not, why not?

A: Actually, it's only been proven to work in Jamie Lee Curtis. Read the label.

� Can an average person not in politics get a pardon from the president of the United States? (Possession of forged instrument, October of 1989.)

A: I'd really like to see how you built that fake Steinway out of papier mache' and bone fragments of your victims.

� Is the stomach normally full of air like a balloon, or is it squeezed flat by the other organs, like a balloon with no air that spreads open as food and water come in? Are the other organs squeezed and compressed like a squeezed sponge, or are they like a sponge not being squeezed? What about the intestines? Are they squeezed flat normally, or are they open like one of those long balloons that magicians make animals out of? I'm trying to get a picture in my mind what the inside of the body normally looks like.

A: C'mon now, balloons or sponges. Pick a metaphor and run with it. (I prefer to think of our organs as if they were blowfish.)

� Please explain the method of formation and origin of black holes. Are they located at the Bermuda Triangle area and why there?

A: Because matter collapses unto itself at a faster rate the nearer you get to the equator. Oh, and because Haitians can't keep their fucking fingers out of your pockets, that's why.

� Who made up the rule that if you wore a shirt all day, went home, and washed it, you can't wear it the next day?

A: Women.

� I live in Chicago, where taxi drivers are constantly talking on their phones. To whom are they talking?

A: Osama Bin Laden. Al Qaeda's network is nefariously vast.

� Why do cockroaches flip over on their backsides when they die? I sprayed RAID into a hole in my wall the other day, and by the next morning I found six cockroaches laid out on my floor, all flipped over and all very dead!

A: Cockroaches are notorious quitters, that's why.

� Why do the women gymnasts walk around between events with that goofy arm-swing gait?

A: Because they are delicate and finely tuned machines. At least until the hormone blockers wear off and they hit puberty. Well, except for Alicia Sacramone. Rawr...

� I am 79 years old. I bring this up first to help explain my question. In the late 1930s or early 1940s, I was looking through an old stack of Life magazines, and there was a picture of an old couple sitting on the porch of a cabin (or shack) up in the mountains somewhere in Appalachia, with the notation: "The King and Queen of America?" The small article with the picture stated that if George Washington had become king of the U.S., these two would (under the usual custom) be our king and queen. I have thought of this from time to time, even doubted it. (It might have been part of the propaganda of the time, the Depression years, that we were all equal, etc.) I am dimly aware that George Washington had brothers, and that it is possible that the descent is known. As I remember, it was a lovely picture, the old couple looking out over a valley, with mist, and smoking their corncob pipes. Can you find the picture? Can you tell me whether there was truth in the assertion?

A: Don't we already have a royal family? Jeb '12!

� Why are pandas names doubled? Ling Ling, Tuan Tuan, Yuan Yuan.

A:

� Are the frequently used "jaws of life" really necessary or just big-boy toys for rescuers?

A: Ask these guys.

� How long can humans live when they are caught on fire? For example, when a car crashes and explodes turns into a gulf of flames, but humans are alive.

A: Less than a minute, but they stay jucier on a rotisserie.

� Hi, I am Anna. I am only 11 years old! My friend told me about this black hole, and I have gotten really scared. I don't want to die! I thought if it didn't happen today, it wasn't going to happen. I did not know nothing about it happening in Spring! I find it unfair that scientists are making a machine that could possibly destroy the entire human race. Me and my friends have cried about the black hole, and I find it really upsetting. There has been barely nothing about it on the news. I am so nervous. I just think I am too young to die�is there any way we could stop it happening?

A: Yup, these are my readers.

2008-09-23T07:09:00.000-04:00

Hall of Famer

2008-09-15T17:41:00.002-04:00

Consider The Jesus

David Foster Wallace hung himself this weekend.

Back in 2005, he spoke at a university and said:

[L]earning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliche about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.

This, like many cliches, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

Although he hung himself, it's still a pretty damned interesting quote.

I'll get back to a piece of that in a second, but speaking of choices we make in our adult lives, I made the mistake of playfully chiding my godmother about shirking her religious obligations to keep me in the fold, as I am now an atheist.

Naturally, there is now concern for my immortal soul.*

*Not that there wasn't before, mind you.

On my mom's wedding day, the plan was to have the small wedding party meet up with the officiant and photographer at the beach. The officiant, however, was late. I came up with the brilliant idea that with access to an iPhone, I could become ordained over the Internet in a matter of minutes. Problem solved! My mom shot that down immediately, with a not-really-a-joke joke that she didn't want to be married by an atheist. I recounted this conversation a little later to the godmother, and gave her the playful tweak that she wasn't doing the job correctly if this is where I ended up.

A week later, I get an email. I replied to that one politely, with the whole "I can't imagine if there was a God that he'd refuse to love you because you didn't believe while here on earth," and "We all have gods we don't believe in, I just believe in one fewer than you do" tropes, hoping that would settle it.

Nope.

I got another one, which I'll try to hit here point-for-point:

OK, so you're comfortable where you are at. That's a start. So what kind of atheist are you?

The kind that doesn't believe in god?

I don't know much about it, but I hear that there are 2 or 3 different kinds of atheism. Tell me about what draws you to it.

Nothing, really. And I mean, "Nothing. Really." I don't believe it is a choice to which one is drawn, but a conclusion to which one arrives when he is unable to be truly nourished by mythologies. And, if there are "2 or 3 different kinds of atheism," here they are:

1) The kind that believes there is no god
2) The kind that believes there is no god, and thinks religion significantly contributes to the ills of society (and to some of the good, but mostly the ills)
3) The kind that believes there is no god, contributes to the ills of society, thinks you're a retard, and thinks the "opiate of the masses" statement holds a lot of truth.

I'm #2, by the way.

As far as the idea of religion goes, there are many paths to the same end. Religion is the path, not the end.

Religion is "a" path. And there is no single "end."

It's the end that's important. How you get there is up to you.

Actually, I'd argue that it's not important. I'd argue that a life of quiet peace ends, well, quietly and peacefully, but not necessarily with importance. And, yes, how I choose to get wherever "there" is supposed to be is entirely up to me.

If you wish to be accounted for in the end, then you will be, no matter what "religion" you have followed, or not followed.

This is true, of course, but only because the Mormons baptize the dead.

It's what's in your heart that qualifies you. I choose to believe in the teachings of Christ, but those who are following Buddah are just on another path to the same end.

I choose to believe that metaphors and allegories can be helpful towards formulating one's own ideas about ethics and morals, but aren't necessarily valuable to be adopted as wholly true and infallible.

The vindictive God is not mine. I think those ideas are planted in people's minds to keep them in line. Having grow up Catholic, we both know how that works.

Just so we're clear, I was never an altar boy.

I also believe that you have to cut through all the man made crap in religion and find what is true for you.

Funny, that's exactly what I've done.

I read a book (new age) that talks about dying. It goes on to say that when you die, your experience will be just as you envision it to be. If you think angels will come to get you, then they will. If you think you're going to hell, you will.

Reminds me of the whole "Prosperity Gospel" thing, where you just have to feel like god wants you to be rich and Republican, and you'll receive of his blessings.

You make your own reality.

There had better be bacon.

You will recognize souls who were important to you in life and converse with them.

What if I'm the first one to die? I'm totally going to be stuck with Grandma Horswill, aren't I? I won't eat her tuna casserole, not here or in any life.

Ultimately, you are joined with the Supreme Being and are enlightened and grow "spiritually".

Again, I was never an altar boy, so I'd know nothing about this sales pitch.

Then you go out into the world again in another dimension with another body and continue your quest for perfection.

Do all those guys with 300 games to their credit get to stay joined with the Supreme Being?

You repeat this over and over again, without end. Each time, you perfect yourself even more. Who's to say this isn't how it works?

Or, when your earthly body ceases to live, your energies are joined in a sort of spiritual slurry with the rest of the intangible energies of the universes both known and unknown, and your energy becomes part of a massive codex of all known accumulated knowledge, experience and emotion that eventually gets harnessed and used by seven-bladdered space aardvarks to fertilize their lawns. Who's to say this isn't how it works?

What I'm trying to say is that our view of God shouldn't be quite so narrow.

What I'm trying to say is that our view of god can't possibly be defined with any remote form of accuracy or truth, so perhaps the simplest explanation as to "his" existence is actually true.

I really don't think He is in human form, but perhaps we see Him that way because it's what we know. And the ideas painted in the Bible of St. Peter's Gate, God's Throne and Hell etc., - I think they are more of an idea than actuality to help our human minds. I prefer to think of God or the Supreme Being, or whatever you want to call Him, as an aura of goodness, the Author of Life, and we tap into that power He/It emits. I believe that our thoughts shape our life, and we can bring things into and out of our life with our thoughts.

Okay, that last sentence of hers is worth discussing.

Getting back to DFW, here's the first part of that quote again:

[L]earning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.

Now, far be it from me to try to say that my "choice" of atheism is because I am a deeper thinker or more "conscious and aware... (of) what (I) pay attention to," but there's something to that whole "construct meaning from experience" part that worth mentioning.

People who construct meaning from Jesus have effectively chosen not to find meaning in experience. In fact, they are choosing to use their imagination (or, the shared imagination of the community with which they choose to identify) to define meaning in imaginary intangibles.

And yes, I do mean imaginary. It's perfectly okay to believe that the ten commandments provide a pretty decent idea of what's not okay in polite society, and it's perfectly okay to believe in the gospel of peace preached by Jesus, but when we start edging into "there's a guy who lives in the sky who cares about me personally" territory, that's when you lose me.

Thoughts do shape our lives, but when one chooses to float free of reality and tether themselves to flights of fancy (e.g., you get to be reunited with everyone you know in heaven, but only if you believe with all your heart), one's ability to "exercise some control over how and what you think" is given over, in part, to faith.

Faith in what, exactly? I have a difficult time not getting a little bit flippant when "the path" and "perfection" and "the next life" are bandied about, simply because there's no such thing. Religion isn't evolving, it's simply becoming easier to swallow. A believer wants certain things to be true, and resists traditional Catholicism, for instance, because he wants certain things to be false. Convenient, then, to resist Sinners At The Hands Of An Angry God for Joel Osteen's Jesus Wants Me To Own a Yacht here in the 21st century.

So why, then, is a believer any more believable because he chooses to throw the yoke of Jonathan Edwards' firebrand and swallows something that tastes a little better? Jesus has a plan for you, and it's to know that the Mormons are wrong, and so are the Adventists? That heaven and hell are less Dante and more Little Nicky?

Here's a trivia question: When, exactly, did The Bible cease to be the primary source for belief?

Answer: As soon as the first equivocator figured out eating shellfish and pork tasted fucking goooooooood.

There are any number of reasons I can give that outline why I cannot take religion seriously as a personal choice, but let me get back to the idea of "exercising control" over how one chooses to apply one's ability to think. Believers with passion tend to have an incurious curiosity, in that "the path" seems so obvious to them that they see those who deny the existence of said path as either a novelty or a project - usually the latter. Exploration of ideas that don't align correctly with faith isn't something given consideration, it instead turns into a vanity project as to how best to steer discussion back to the inherent possibilities of spirituality. After all, if one can accept that spirituality is a possibility, then what does one have to lose accepting it as truth?

Well, we can start with curiosity. How about beauty in chaos?
Maybe, just maybe, the most important thing I'd lose is self-respect. I realize this is a big universe with nearly infinite possibilities, and I fully accept that there is nothing that truly exists outside the realm of those possibilities. So yes, a magical and all-powerful being who cares about us individually and collectively and sent his only son to die on the cross for all our sins, only to resurrect and ascend him into heaven isn't truly impossible.

Just infinitely improbable. I have a far, far better chance of seeing the transcription to the 2010 BG/Kim Kardashian sex tape becoming a New York Times best-seller than god has of being real.

And therein lies my reason. Infinite regression to zero probability may as well be a zero probability, so a consideration of that probability that requires a full-faith (cough) investment in its assumption of truth is way past my ability to reason. I just can't get to that point. Can't see my way there, and don't see any good reason to struggle to do so, as any attempt to find my way to Jesus is going to result in the most serious suspension of disbelief I could possibly muster.

God doesn't exist. Just doesn't. Sorry.

Alright, so thanks for sticking around. I realize the above may read like a disjointed ramble, and for that, I apologize. I spent pockets of free time (maybe twelve to fifteen five minute bursts) putting my thoughts together, and I just hope it's coherent. For sticking around, here's a pic of my new kitchen. The whole place is pretty sharp, I'll have to tell you all about it soon.

And yes, I did write something specifically to push a paid post down a spot. Whee!

2008-09-15T17:40:00.000-04:00

Here are some poker tips for someone who needs to brush up on their skills because they haven't played poker in a while, as well as a great starting foundation for new poker players. A good place to read some further poker strategy is at Wikipedia, with some great links to follow.

Have Patience - This is the number one golden rule in poker, especially when playing poker online at online poker sites. If you don't have patience in poker you will find yourself with no chips very quickly. Poker is designed so that you will want to play as many hands as possible and be in the action every time. The best poker players know that being selective with your starting hands and playing tight is a winning strategy that can save you many problems later on in the hand.

Bluffing Is Only Part Of The Game - Many beginner poker players with iron fists and cannon wallets will come out bluffing hand after hand after hand. This is a very flawed strategy for a couple of reasons. Firstly, many poker players simply cannot be bluffed off of a hand that they like (especially at online poker sites). They will call you down no matter what the bluff is and that's a type of player you will run into quite often. They are called "calling stations". Another reason you can't bluff your way to victory everytime is because eventually you will simply run into a monster hand and will lose yet again. Bluffing is an important part of poker but the most important part about it is knowing when to bluff and being selective.

Learn Tells - Learning a player's poker tells is one of them most devastating ways to crush an opponent. If you know what they do when they bluff or have a really strong hand, there really is no way for them to beat you short of miracle luck. Watch closely the hands, eyes, neck and pulse of your opponents as well as any other nuances. Mike Caro is a poker tells master and his book on the topic is the creme of the crop for poker tells.

Don't Play Over Your Limits - Many great poker players in history - many known, most are not, have gone in over their head on one or more occasions and got absolutely killed. It's not always that a player couldn't handle the skill level at that limit. Often times in the very high limits skill level doesn't change a whole lot from one to the next. Unfortunately in poker, and especially in the fast paced games at online poker sites, you need a big enough bankroll to handle swings caused by bad luck, and that's where playing out of your limits can really hurt a persons roll.A few bad sessions and you may not even have enough to play the previous limit you were at before.

2008-07-24T18:02:00.002-04:00

Obama in Berlin

It's ~~sickening~~ interesting to watch MSNBC (and, probably, all cable punditry) in the wake of Obama's speech in Berlin. It's not at all about the content, it's more a question of how it fits into the larger narrative of the meta-campaign - who's up, who's down, who "gaffed," etc.

I bet "Cross of Gold" was reprinted in its entirety in every newspaper in the country within a week. All I've heard to this point is soundbites.

Travel Update

Been back and forth to Chicago pretty regularly over the last month, and am just sick of sitting on the computer by the time I get home, or to the hotel room. Sorry, y'all. Doing well, though. Tomorrow I throw the dog in the car and do a two-day drive to Milwaukee where the little guy gets to spend a month at my dad's place while I get settled. Still haven't spent minute one looking for an apartment, but there's no panic. I'll get there.

Thanks for all the well wishes, by the way. Looking forward to seeing everyone in December or sooner.

2008-06-28T16:28:00.001-04:00

Uh Oh.

About four months ago, a good friend of mine decided it was time for him to take the next step in his career. He had been in an operational/sales role, but knew his business and found an opportunity to take a directorship with another organization.

On Wednesday, he called and told me he'd been let go. He was tasked to manage a team that had been entrenched and comfortable under old management, and he never got them to buy in to what he was selling. Moreover, the industry he's in is taking a hit this year, and the once-attractive opportunity turned into a miserable fight over table scraps as his staff kicked each others' asses to grab everything they could to pad their quarterly bonuses. He was set up to fail, and, in retrospect, he realizes this.

Here's hoping that this is not foreshadowing. Here's hoping that in coming months you don't get a rambling and tearful opus that dwells significantly on regrets and missed opportunities. Because I'm being set up for something here, and I'm not exactly sure what that something is yet.

--------

I'm good at my job. No two ways about it. I understand the business I'm in pretty thoroughly, and can discuss and dissect it from any angle you want to throw at me. Operational? Sure, been in the trenches working the transactions for five years. Strategic? Absolutely, there's been no one else shaping the client's goals leading to a 100% increase in our contract over two years. Legal? No question, I can go toe-to-toe with VPs of our suppliers and argue liability language and insurance guidelines, and have taken it on my shoulders to do so. Philosophical?

Yes. Working in the role I have for the past 28 months has enabled me to grow in this gig by leaps and bounds. In one respect, the transactional nature of the procurement program I've been responsible for designing, building and running for my client is really no more than coordinating and controlling information and activity from point A to point Z and doing it well. That being said, the design of the program is naturally influenced by the client's goals and objectives, and those are the things of which I need to be conscious as I'm running the transactions. This client, in particular, has been open and energetic about what they've wanted from me, and we've worked together to develop a common philosophy that boils down to this objective:

To Create A Commodity Procurement Experience Within This Non-Commodity Channel.

When I landed here in March 2006, I had a significant amount of cleanup to do to regain the trust and rebuild the relationships upon which my credibility would be placed. That took a few months, but once the operations were set and running, we were able to bring our discussions around towards building the aforementioned objective, which enabled me to base all my operational design and decision-making around that common goal.

As of February 2008, they had doubled their spending through my desk, which is a clear indicator that my operational, strategic, legal and philosophical understanding and execution had been validated.

I'm enormously proud of what I've been able to accomplish here, especially considering how patient I had to be for my job title and paycheck to catch up to my associates handling the same things on other accounts. I almost walked in early 2007. Really glad I didn't.

--------

Back in February, my client engaged my company to double-up the spending by allowing our procurement efforts to completely cover North America. This was a long and hard-fought win for my company and a big win for me personally. I've spent the last three-and-a-half months of my life working diligently to add in all the transactions we're finding out in the Gulf Coast, Wichita, Puyallup and everywhere in-between. This represented another effort for which I was trusted with near-total autonomy. Normally, our regional leadership gets deeply involved in these projects, but they've all been tied up on other efforts since our contract was signed.

No problem. We "went live" two weeks ago, and are doing fine. A little messy, a little more disorganized than I'd like, but they're all messy and disorganized. Mine probably a little less so.

That, however, is probably just as much due to the size of this program than any true excellence on my part. See, even with the double-up in business, this account is still one of the three smallest (hell, I think we might be the smallest) my company manages. Of course I'm going to have freedom to operate and experiment and reconstruct and redesign. Hell, what's the risk, really? The amount of money I'm responsible for every year sounds like a lot, but in the wide scope of what we do, it's really not all that much.

Point being, I've been successful here, but on a fairly limited scale. I've made no secret to my leadership that I've wanted more and was willing to move just about anywhere* if and when they asked, but I was pretty sure that getting the contract signed/project launched was effectively locking me into this godforsaken place for another twelve months or so.

I had made my peace with that.

*My non-starter list is essentially New Jersey, SoCal (except San Diego, I think), and Utah. Pretty much anywhere else is acceptable.

---------

"I need to ask you something, and I need you to have an open mind. Ready?"

My group's VP had asked to talk to me after hours two Wednesdays ago, and I immediately called my boss to ask if there was anything I needed to be aware of - so I knew what was coming next.

"I need you in Chicago. As soon as possible. Like, yesterday. But I want to tell you what you're getting into and let you think about it, alright?"

---------

In 2006 I had been asked to move abruptly to rescue a dying program we were in danger of losing.

I did it.

Now, two years later, I'm being asked again to move abruptly to rescue a dying program we're in danger of losing. This time, though, instead of being tasked to one of the bottom three programs, I'm being asked to rescue our biggest.

Fucking A.

---------

I talked with the VP for a good half hour about the troubled program and the issues. He asked me what I needed to make the move. I threw out a salary number that basically is double what I was making three-and-a-half years ago. He told me he'd beat it, throw a signing bonus and a one-year retention bonus in there too.

Fucking A.

He then asked me to sleep on it and let him know in the morning. I told him I didn't have to, that I've been looking for this next step for awhile and was only concerned about the timing with my current client.

"Sleep on it, and I need you not to worry about your client. That's your boss' problem now."

I slept on it, but my answer didn't change in the morning.

----------

Is it scalable?

This is the question that's going to define whether or not I can succeed here. Is it scalable? Can I take the process and policy I've been shaping and building for two years and apply it to 1500 transactions instead of 180?

I believe I can. But can I lead the rest of the team to make that happen?

I've been a lone wolf for awhile, but now I'm going to have to delegate and lead. I have to build six people into subject matter experts and get their operations to all run identically and systematically to Create A Commodity Procurement Experience. Does it matter that I haven't had a team since I managed a waitstaff in college? Can I lead and mentor and build these guys into the experts they need to be?

Christ, I hope so. Because if this thing is going to be scalable, I need them to scale it.

I spent Wednesday and Thursday in the Chicago suburbs, with a little time onsite at the client meeting some of the people I'm responsible for supporting. I had dinner (at Morton's, no less - bone-in ribeye, rare - Fucking A indeed) with the director I'll be reporting to, and locked up the job in those meetings and interviews.

I'll be on the ground there full time by the week of July 21st, I think.

Everyone I talked to had basically the same feedback. "He's got the knowledge and the energy, but he hasn't done it to this scale before."

Nope.

----------

It'll be four to six months before this story has something that's going to resemble an ending. I've got a lot of little bullshit to fix and a big fucking operational shortcoming to tear down and rebuild. I'm pleased as hell that I was asked to do this, and am not at all freaked out that there's a sincere and not-at-all insignificant potential for failure here. If you're going to claim to be ambitious, this is what you have to do to keep that reputation.

But I can't say I'm not at all worried. Of course I am. Can I lead? Can I mentor? Can I scale my subject-matter expertise? Am I doomed to fall into the same trap as the guy I'm replacing?

I'm not relaxing all that easily this weekend, knowing what's in front of me. I've been told that I have to cancel my vacations (including The Bash - sorry Al) into December (Vegas is still booked, I'm not fucking around with missing two in a row), which makes me a little uptight. I'm apparently moving in three weeks and have nothing accomplished (packing, disconnecting cable, getting out of my lease, etc), which makes me a little uptight.

And most of all, the bad omen of my good friend losing his job for the most plausible reason why I might end up losing mine in a matter of months. That makes me a little uptight.

Just a little though. This is an enormously positive turn of events, and one I very much deserve the opportunity to tackle.

With any luck, I'll see if I can't time my drive out to join y'all for Gentile Summit after all.

Wish me that luck and more, would you?

2008-06-28T10:51:00.002-04:00

I Thought This Sounded Fun...

From The DCeiver, by way of Matt Yglesias:

Your instructions are as follows:

1. Take out your iPod (or Zune, I guess...really, who buys a Zune?)
2. Press shuffle songs.
3. Answer the following: a) How many songs before you come to one that would absolutely disqualify you from being President? b) What is that song?
4. Leave your answers.

Four songs in I get "Just a Lil Dude (Who Dat Ovah There)" from RZA featuring Q-Tip. First four lines:

"Bodies in the street, killing over head
Marvel at the sky, as it turn blood red
Peelin' caps back til the white meat show
This is natural, for the little Afro"

I'm guessing lines three and four could be spun into a "Let's Kill Whitey" sort of thing, right?

If that's not enough, song 12 was Ice Cube's "Givin' Up The Nappy Dugout," which should be plenty.

How about yours?

2008-06-17T06:32:00.001-04:00

Also Amusing

A blog response to The Fat Guy.

Thanks Republicans!

2008-06-10T19:01:00.002-04:00

Announcing Winter Gathering Dates

The weekend of December 13 is confirmed. I'm sure the IP is going to be the destination, as per usual.

No, don't look at me as an organizer, but if Farecast is to be believed, y'all best be buying your tickets before they spike.

(I'll hopefully get back to blogging when things calm down for me a little. I also tend to blog less when I'm happy, so there you go.)

2008-05-24T08:01:00.000-04:00

Italian Spiderman, Episode One

Chock full of the motherfucking awesome: