So Alphonse and Bob and I moved back to the Big Apple (NYC for those not familiar with city/fruit nomenclature).
Alphonse and I have been living our exciting parenting lifestyles trying to make Bob into a successful human. What I've deduced is that there's not a great deal you actually have any real impact on as a parent, but you still feel awful if you don't do all the right things ninety-plus percent of the time.
Right now the "right thing" for our 3 yr old, is potty training, and I should apologize, because from here on out it seems as if this may become a daddy blog.
Ugh.
Anyway, potty training makes me think we're focusing on the wrong problem, and that really we should be inventing high-tech diapers we can wear into our adult years. What's so fantastic about needing to find a bathroom all the time, anyway? I had a tense argument the other day with Bob about whether she was going to crap in the toilet or the potty. She won, because they're her bowels, and I ended up writing this text to my wife:
"Bob pooped. But she flatly refused to do so in the toilet, so when you get home and are trying to decipher my inscrutable expression, it's the face of a man who has to give his daughter a prize for making him scrub shit out of a plastic tub."
#kidsaredelightful
Saturday, September 15, 2018
What the what?!? Is this thing on again?
I've decided that I need an outlet for talking about life and junk again, so here it is. Apologies in advance as I work out my voice again.
Since the last post a lot has happened. I got married to the delightful Alphonse, finished up an MBA, and with a majority of help from my good lady wife, participated in the creation of a tiny baby daughter. In the spirit of the blog thus far, my wee daughter will be provided an alias.
We will call her Bob, because it's easy to remember and is the name I told her has been adopted by all the world's sparrows, even the females because sparrows are invariably cool and consequently the women, who are actually named Roberta, all go by either Bobbie or Bob. Fatherhood, which in the early days involves killing a lot of time, generates bunches of weird conversations/monologues; And kids are fantastic because they believe most of what you tell them.
Since the last post a lot has happened. I got married to the delightful Alphonse, finished up an MBA, and with a majority of help from my good lady wife, participated in the creation of a tiny baby daughter. In the spirit of the blog thus far, my wee daughter will be provided an alias.
We will call her Bob, because it's easy to remember and is the name I told her has been adopted by all the world's sparrows, even the females because sparrows are invariably cool and consequently the women, who are actually named Roberta, all go by either Bobbie or Bob. Fatherhood, which in the early days involves killing a lot of time, generates bunches of weird conversations/monologues; And kids are fantastic because they believe most of what you tell them.
Wednesday, May 1, 2013
Crappy crappy restaurant reviews
Something I give almost no thought to in daily life is the presence or quality of local restaurant reviews. I think of them sort of like tap water: When I need them, I expect them to be there and I expect them to be adequate. They certainly don't have to be great, primarily because I honestly don't know what a great restaurant review might look like. Would they inform my understanding of the human condition? Would they illuminate man's casual inhumanity to man? They might, but really I just want them to tell me if I should eat here or go down the street.
I was reading the Washington Post's restaurant reviews recently before a night out at the theater and all I wanted to know was where to eat in the most restaurant-dense portion of DC. Unfortunately, Tom Sietsema's reviews let me down thoroughly. The one I read was about Cure. He damns it with the faint praise by talking about its decor and the sense of deja vu he got from the charcuterie plate, or something. I also looked at the one for Azur, but he just yacks on about what's coming in that space.
If your review of a restaurant has nothing about the food, because it hasn't opened, or bangs on about the sofas, stop, take a deep breath, and hit delete until the tyranny of the blank page is back doing its job of discouraging your further composition. You suck.
Here's what I want: 1) Is the food good, 2) what's the vibe (loungy, greasy spoon, molecular gastronomy, weird), 3) would I be better served by eating elsewhere within the same a) tradition or b) area?
Here, for instance, are three better reviews for DC restaurants:
- Rogue 24's three drinks and three snacks for $55 deal is great if you can swing that and are at least a little interested in goofy molecular cooking. The bartender, Brian or possibly Bryan, is a lovely Midwestern sort who clearly cares about his craft, and enjoys talking about it. If you're lucky the Chef will wander by and make you a weird thingamabob while you get positively blotto on the drinks. Like much high-end food these days, this experience will appeal most to people who are "foodies" and can treat the experience half like going for food and half like going to a museum of food and cooking.
Eat a half a loaf of bread beforehand because the snacks are minute and the drinks are weapons-grade.
- The Gin Bar at New Heights restaurant has a very enthusiastic bartender, but her drinks are a little sweet. There are tons of gins there, and she's enthusiastic about them, but I found her enthusiasm got in the way of me trying the gins without her odd tonic concoctions. You may get better results by asking her to go light on the ice.
- Loriel Plaza is great for middle-cost Latin food and margaritas. You go there because they have ample covered outdoor seating with heat lamps as well as high-quality crappy margaritas. They're frozen and yet you can drink as many or as few as needed. The food can be hit or miss, but their masitas de puerco are the best puerco you've ever had. Don't go on weekend nights because it's a goddamned zoo. Go instead to Casa Oaxaca up the street.
I was reading the Washington Post's restaurant reviews recently before a night out at the theater and all I wanted to know was where to eat in the most restaurant-dense portion of DC. Unfortunately, Tom Sietsema's reviews let me down thoroughly. The one I read was about Cure. He damns it with the faint praise by talking about its decor and the sense of deja vu he got from the charcuterie plate, or something. I also looked at the one for Azur, but he just yacks on about what's coming in that space.
If your review of a restaurant has nothing about the food, because it hasn't opened, or bangs on about the sofas, stop, take a deep breath, and hit delete until the tyranny of the blank page is back doing its job of discouraging your further composition. You suck.
Here's what I want: 1) Is the food good, 2) what's the vibe (loungy, greasy spoon, molecular gastronomy, weird), 3) would I be better served by eating elsewhere within the same a) tradition or b) area?
Here, for instance, are three better reviews for DC restaurants:
- Rogue 24's three drinks and three snacks for $55 deal is great if you can swing that and are at least a little interested in goofy molecular cooking. The bartender, Brian or possibly Bryan, is a lovely Midwestern sort who clearly cares about his craft, and enjoys talking about it. If you're lucky the Chef will wander by and make you a weird thingamabob while you get positively blotto on the drinks. Like much high-end food these days, this experience will appeal most to people who are "foodies" and can treat the experience half like going for food and half like going to a museum of food and cooking.
Eat a half a loaf of bread beforehand because the snacks are minute and the drinks are weapons-grade.
- The Gin Bar at New Heights restaurant has a very enthusiastic bartender, but her drinks are a little sweet. There are tons of gins there, and she's enthusiastic about them, but I found her enthusiasm got in the way of me trying the gins without her odd tonic concoctions. You may get better results by asking her to go light on the ice.
- Loriel Plaza is great for middle-cost Latin food and margaritas. You go there because they have ample covered outdoor seating with heat lamps as well as high-quality crappy margaritas. They're frozen and yet you can drink as many or as few as needed. The food can be hit or miss, but their masitas de puerco are the best puerco you've ever had. Don't go on weekend nights because it's a goddamned zoo. Go instead to Casa Oaxaca up the street.
Sunday, April 14, 2013
Aruba, not bad!
It's a low sort of human that goes to Aruba and complains about it ... so I won't. I had a good time.
I went with my girlfriend, who is shy about being mentioned on the Interwhatsits and who shall therefore still be referred to as Alphonse Dubai.
Aruba, a tiny island outgrowth of the Netherlands is a lovely place if you can believe songs and tourist brochures, and also obviously if you like white sandy beaches and plenty of Americans. Seriously you can speak English and spend US dollars just everywhere there.
And everywhere in this case is about 13 miles long by five miles wide. It's like a squat Manhattan, but, I think, with more native born US citizens.
Through Alphonse's family we got much appreciated access to a time-share that was going unused, and not being ones to punch a gift horse right in the kisser, we found the cash for the plane and told work where to stick it for a week, before toddling off on our merry way.
Alphonse is a big fan of beach, because she likes sunshine and looks good in a bikini. I, being made almost entirely from English man-parts, am leery on both counts. However, we did find a way to combine our loves - hers of beach and ocean and mine of biology/zen sports - by going scuba diving quite a lot.
We got a 5 tank package and therefore dove 5 times. I think there's probably a certification you can pay for so you do multiple tank dives, but I don't have it and the dive shop didn't care to rig their systems up that way anyhow.
A short note about scuba: PADI, which certifies scuba instruction, is clearly a bit of a squirrely group. Scuba isn't actually all that hard to learn, and while there are all sorts of certifications you can get, and are no doubt supposed to have before you go diving in wrecks or diving too deeply, most dive shops don't really care as long as you remember to keep breathing (actually super important), breath in the correct hole, don't bob directly to the surface unexpectedly, and don't ruin dives for their other paying customers.
For instance, Alphonse and I are certified to 60 feet in open water and nothing more. We're not supposed to dive through enclosed spaces or, say, to 80 feet, both of which our dive shop were totally glad to chaperone us through because a) it seemed like fun and b) that's what they were doing. They were mildly troubled when we admitted after our first dive that we'd forgotten more about scuba than we currently knew, but we went home and watched a couple of YouTube videos on how to set up our equipment, so by the time we came back we'd pretty much completed the majority of what PADI actually charges you to learn anyhow.
We dove a couple of wrecks, one of the Antilla, a German merchant ship that scuttled itself in Aruba at the outbreak of WWII (I'm assuming because if you know you're likely to become POW's, why not Aruba?), and a couple of planes that were, get this, sunk because people might want to scuba through them. Fascinating history. We saw some cool wildlife including an eagle ray, a couple of moray eels, a lion fish, some spiny lobsters, and toward the end of one dive, a huge school of silvery 8-inch fish that I tried to float unobtrusively into the middle of. They knew.
Also, once they'd dashed off, I realized that what it seemed they'd been doing, was feeding on the distressingly large cloud of jellyfish I suddenly found myself unobtrusively infiltrating. It wouldn't have been quite so unobtrusive if you could scream underwater. You can, I learned, get stung. Also you can panic. Lucky for us, the boat came and picked us up right in the middle of this cloud of stingy little bastards. Sigh.
Anyway, a good time was, in balance, had by all, and I finally got to examine underwater life in a spot where you could see more than two feet in a row. Alphonse got to hang out on the beaches. The "lively" Aruba economy of money for slightly less alcoholic beverages than advertized, got money. I'm not sure I'd go back to Aruba, but I'd certainly consider it and I'd definitely try other Caribbean vacations. Not cruise ships.
I went with my girlfriend, who is shy about being mentioned on the Interwhatsits and who shall therefore still be referred to as Alphonse Dubai.
Aruba, a tiny island outgrowth of the Netherlands is a lovely place if you can believe songs and tourist brochures, and also obviously if you like white sandy beaches and plenty of Americans. Seriously you can speak English and spend US dollars just everywhere there.
And everywhere in this case is about 13 miles long by five miles wide. It's like a squat Manhattan, but, I think, with more native born US citizens.
Through Alphonse's family we got much appreciated access to a time-share that was going unused, and not being ones to punch a gift horse right in the kisser, we found the cash for the plane and told work where to stick it for a week, before toddling off on our merry way.
Alphonse is a big fan of beach, because she likes sunshine and looks good in a bikini. I, being made almost entirely from English man-parts, am leery on both counts. However, we did find a way to combine our loves - hers of beach and ocean and mine of biology/zen sports - by going scuba diving quite a lot.
We got a 5 tank package and therefore dove 5 times. I think there's probably a certification you can pay for so you do multiple tank dives, but I don't have it and the dive shop didn't care to rig their systems up that way anyhow.
A short note about scuba: PADI, which certifies scuba instruction, is clearly a bit of a squirrely group. Scuba isn't actually all that hard to learn, and while there are all sorts of certifications you can get, and are no doubt supposed to have before you go diving in wrecks or diving too deeply, most dive shops don't really care as long as you remember to keep breathing (actually super important), breath in the correct hole, don't bob directly to the surface unexpectedly, and don't ruin dives for their other paying customers.
For instance, Alphonse and I are certified to 60 feet in open water and nothing more. We're not supposed to dive through enclosed spaces or, say, to 80 feet, both of which our dive shop were totally glad to chaperone us through because a) it seemed like fun and b) that's what they were doing. They were mildly troubled when we admitted after our first dive that we'd forgotten more about scuba than we currently knew, but we went home and watched a couple of YouTube videos on how to set up our equipment, so by the time we came back we'd pretty much completed the majority of what PADI actually charges you to learn anyhow.
We dove a couple of wrecks, one of the Antilla, a German merchant ship that scuttled itself in Aruba at the outbreak of WWII (I'm assuming because if you know you're likely to become POW's, why not Aruba?), and a couple of planes that were, get this, sunk because people might want to scuba through them. Fascinating history. We saw some cool wildlife including an eagle ray, a couple of moray eels, a lion fish, some spiny lobsters, and toward the end of one dive, a huge school of silvery 8-inch fish that I tried to float unobtrusively into the middle of. They knew.
Also, once they'd dashed off, I realized that what it seemed they'd been doing, was feeding on the distressingly large cloud of jellyfish I suddenly found myself unobtrusively infiltrating. It wouldn't have been quite so unobtrusive if you could scream underwater. You can, I learned, get stung. Also you can panic. Lucky for us, the boat came and picked us up right in the middle of this cloud of stingy little bastards. Sigh.
Anyway, a good time was, in balance, had by all, and I finally got to examine underwater life in a spot where you could see more than two feet in a row. Alphonse got to hang out on the beaches. The "lively" Aruba economy of money for slightly less alcoholic beverages than advertized, got money. I'm not sure I'd go back to Aruba, but I'd certainly consider it and I'd definitely try other Caribbean vacations. Not cruise ships.
Monday, September 24, 2012
Istanbul ...
.. not Constantinople. I cannot resist.
Anyway, anyone have any suggestions about cool stuff to do in Istanbul (NC)? I plan to go there in a little while and I'd hate to miss your favorite place to eat or whatnot.
View Larger Map
Anyway, anyone have any suggestions about cool stuff to do in Istanbul (NC)? I plan to go there in a little while and I'd hate to miss your favorite place to eat or whatnot.
View Larger Map
Wednesday, September 12, 2012
Ahhhhh iPhone!!!
Ugh, I just don't care. It's got what, like a new cpu and an extra row of icons or something? I thought for sure they'd do some near-field-communication on this one. It's true that the new Samsung Galaxy's NFC is only useful with other Galaxy's, if I'm understanding it right, but at least it's sort of new. You know what would be cool, an app that gives you an easy way to program the phone in an "internet of things" sort of way.
Like, "if (I'm near this address) { turn off my GPS because I'm pretty sure I know my own neighborhood};" And if you tell me about Tasker with its interface designed by 1983, I'll beat you to death with a Java compiler.
Honestly, I'd really like a phone from either camp that doesn't just poop its firmware at about two and a half years and send you back to the venal used-car dealership that all mobile phone stores have somehow become.
Like, "if (I'm near this address) { turn off my GPS because I'm pretty sure I know my own neighborhood};" And if you tell me about Tasker with its interface designed by 1983, I'll beat you to death with a Java compiler.
Honestly, I'd really like a phone from either camp that doesn't just poop its firmware at about two and a half years and send you back to the venal used-car dealership that all mobile phone stores have somehow become.
Wednesday, September 5, 2012
Driving - Is it only for asses now?
If you drive in DC, I probably hate you. Sorry. Quit turning without signaling.
Also, quit running blood-orange lights; where the hell do you have to go to so quickly?
Also, go some damn place when the light turns green. You probably shouldn't have gotten in the car if you didn't want to go somewhere, so unless you're contending with dementia, pay some damn attention.
If you're suffering from Alzheimer's I apologize for honking at you the other day. My guess is we can just forget all about it.
Go buy this shirt. It's awesome.
Seriously, DC drivers are among the worst in the known universe. I've thought long and hard about why this is. I've driven in New York, Boston, Chicago, L.A., and many many spots in between. The best drivers are in the Pacific Northwest. Out there, people will slow down to accommodate your lane change if you put your blinker on. I KNOW! It confused me at first too.
In Boston, you are going to get cut off. Some optimist is going to hang a Louie the immediate second the light turns green - possibly before. There may be shouting. It's all in good fun.
In the Big Apple, taxi drivers will move into your lane. They all suffer from selective visual line neglect. The lane lines are more suggestions than law. If a road has four lanes, you can get five cars abreast once you get over 20 miles an hour. Even one way street signs are a bit elastic. You cannot, however, park there, wherever there may be. Don't even try it. You'll get a ticket.
In most of the southern towns, people are driving as though there's a gas shortage on and they'd like to stop and smell the roses, besides. Apparently you only drive fast if your car is decorated like a pop-up window in the South.
But DC, which may or may not be a southern town, depending on who you ask, has the worst drivers, I assume, because people are here from everywhere. North, South, East, West, Ethiopia, the Middle East, the Balkans, Detroit (where, I neglected to mention, driving is divided into tooling around town kind of heedless of traffic signs and driving on the freeway as close to the speed of light as physics will allow). The consequence of this diversity is that you never know how the person ahead of you is about to screw up their driving. Are they from a part of the country that thinks it's okay to wrest your right-of-way off you if they can turn left before you hit the pedal? Are they from some portion of the universe that applies the 5 second rule to red lights? Maybe they're from Texas and just don't give a rats ass where they end up today. The joy is in the journey, so why worry about when we get there?
My wise stepfather lectured me about driving by saying you have to avoid being surprising. Broadcast what you're about to do in as many ways as possible. Don't cede your right of way except in extreme circumstances, because most people don't expect you to. Use your goddamn signal. Accelerate out of corners, because other people taking turns generally don't expect to find two tons of steel and asshole hanging out in an intersection.
That's the problem with DC. There's probably the same percentage of bad drivers here as anywhere. It's just that they're being bad in so many stupid ways.
Also, quit running blood-orange lights; where the hell do you have to go to so quickly?
Also, go some damn place when the light turns green. You probably shouldn't have gotten in the car if you didn't want to go somewhere, so unless you're contending with dementia, pay some damn attention.
If you're suffering from Alzheimer's I apologize for honking at you the other day. My guess is we can just forget all about it.
Go buy this shirt. It's awesome.Seriously, DC drivers are among the worst in the known universe. I've thought long and hard about why this is. I've driven in New York, Boston, Chicago, L.A., and many many spots in between. The best drivers are in the Pacific Northwest. Out there, people will slow down to accommodate your lane change if you put your blinker on. I KNOW! It confused me at first too.
In Boston, you are going to get cut off. Some optimist is going to hang a Louie the immediate second the light turns green - possibly before. There may be shouting. It's all in good fun.
In the Big Apple, taxi drivers will move into your lane. They all suffer from selective visual line neglect. The lane lines are more suggestions than law. If a road has four lanes, you can get five cars abreast once you get over 20 miles an hour. Even one way street signs are a bit elastic. You cannot, however, park there, wherever there may be. Don't even try it. You'll get a ticket.
In most of the southern towns, people are driving as though there's a gas shortage on and they'd like to stop and smell the roses, besides. Apparently you only drive fast if your car is decorated like a pop-up window in the South.
But DC, which may or may not be a southern town, depending on who you ask, has the worst drivers, I assume, because people are here from everywhere. North, South, East, West, Ethiopia, the Middle East, the Balkans, Detroit (where, I neglected to mention, driving is divided into tooling around town kind of heedless of traffic signs and driving on the freeway as close to the speed of light as physics will allow). The consequence of this diversity is that you never know how the person ahead of you is about to screw up their driving. Are they from a part of the country that thinks it's okay to wrest your right-of-way off you if they can turn left before you hit the pedal? Are they from some portion of the universe that applies the 5 second rule to red lights? Maybe they're from Texas and just don't give a rats ass where they end up today. The joy is in the journey, so why worry about when we get there?
My wise stepfather lectured me about driving by saying you have to avoid being surprising. Broadcast what you're about to do in as many ways as possible. Don't cede your right of way except in extreme circumstances, because most people don't expect you to. Use your goddamn signal. Accelerate out of corners, because other people taking turns generally don't expect to find two tons of steel and asshole hanging out in an intersection.
That's the problem with DC. There's probably the same percentage of bad drivers here as anywhere. It's just that they're being bad in so many stupid ways.
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