Recently in mumbles Category

today, a lot of things happened.  here are the ones i recall, in the order in which i recall them happening:

entered the final week of the 2010 diet, round 1
i dumped a fairly large pile of stock
hops started her new job
i deadlifted 300 lbs
i enjoyed roast #100 on the gene caffe roaster
the apartment was certified to lack termite infestation
(mailed something at the post office)
my agents picked up 6 lbs of tasty dates
i purchased my first high-grade briar
wrote some pretty good code, with unit tests
(meerschaum arrived from turkey, held at post office)
i verified that the cesare barontini and dominican glory were both good ideas
i resumed, to some extent, blogging.

today saw a fairly conspicuous convergence of major one-time events.

i was out early on the porch this morn, roasting up some kona, and i witnessed some road rage. i heard cursing and shouting, so i looked out toward the stop sign and saw a middle-aged, professionally dressed black man cursing and swearing at a minivan. as the minivan drove off, he shouted, without much conviction, "your mom's a bitch!" then he got in his car and drove off toward hillsborough.

i had to laugh at the incongruity of it all.

got my $10 copy of snow leopard today. tonight is a perfect night for the OS Install Drinking Game, and the first opportunity to play it with 2 people.

However, if what I hear is correct, it will be a very short game. and if it's *not* short, it'll be because of some horrible calamity, which would really suck all the fun out of the drinking game.

or will the drinking game inject fun into the calamity?

a philosophical conundrum for the ages.

3 eggs
toscano salami, cubed
string cheese (mozarella) chunked
smokey mustard
scramble, top with ketchup

parts of the world kinda suck.

20 or so years ago (oh jeez..) i was a big fan of weird al, even so much that one day i dreamed of attending the same college as he, and through lots of hard work, i finally did.

well, not exactly.

anyhow, i read today that his song "mr. popeil" was not only a parody of ron popeil, but also a riff on the musical stylings of the b-52s, with whom i was not familiar at the time.

now, listening to it, it's obviously true -- and even more brilliantly funny. ha ha ha!

but wait, there's more!

don't answer yet!

for the past several weeks, we've been eating a lot of both pizza and froyo. here, then, for your enjoyment, is a brief roundup of your options for pizza and dessert near 94402:

- harmony yogurt (burlingame) : pricey. great texture in the froyo, outrageously expensive toppings, mild flavor. would not recommend.

- toto's pizza: pricey. bewildering sizes: i ordered a medium and a small pizza and they sure looked the same size to me. crust was kinda cardboardy, sauce was mild. toppings were top notch and very plentiful. still, probably would not recommend given other options.

- happy yogurt: cheap, build your own sundae. a plethora of toppings to choose from. exceptionally clean. good flavor in the yogurt, nice texture, but really: the way i pile on the toppings I can't really taste the yogurt. highly recommended if you want a ton of toppings on your froyo.

- zorba's pizza: inconsistent. we've ordered from them twice. the first time the pizza was a cheese bomb like no other, a solid, rubbery, wonderful blanket of cheese over spicy sauce. the second time, same good sauce, cheese not as great. still, though hops doesn't like it, this is one of my favorites now.

- tutti melon: pricey, miserly with the toppings, but damn it if i can't stop going there. wonderful flavor, really outstanding gelato, 15% discount with local dinner receipt. highly recommended if you don't mind paying for a super-dense gelato or a tasty yogurt with minimal toppings.

- new york pizza (in san mateo, not new york): the best place to order from, as far as ease of ordering goes. they apparently have caller ID and so don't have to ask my phone number. brilliant! pizza was not exceptional, not bad. probably wouldn't recommend but wouldn't avoid either.

- yogurtouille: best named froyo place. a huge mess. a make-your-own place, always clogged with soccer teams and snotty kids who throw toppings all over and the staff seems helpless or unmotivated to clean up. pricier than happy. i don't remember how good the yogurt was, but i have no plans to go back given that happy yogurt is so great.

- amici's pizza: we didn't have amici's in the abovementioned pizza craze, but it's still worth a mention: if you want that style of pizza, amici's can't be beat. pricey, miserly with the toppings, thin crust cooked nearly to the point of burning -- and oh so good. yum yum yum amici's. don't forget to get a salad with sundried tomato dressing. nom nom nom.

- sweet breams: not a froyo place, they have soft serve and taiyaki. hops and i are regulars. since i started going there last summer, i think i've only missed one flavor of the week. there is no other place to get taiyaki on the peninsula, at least, not within walking distance of my digs.

- redbrick pizza: didn't go here this week, but it's worth mentioning: cheap amici's knockoff. epic fail. pass. still, their signs tempt me every time i go for taiyaki. you won't fool me again, red brick!

- quickly: they also serve froyo. i was so traumatized by my one and only experience there (ham and pineapple crepe overflowing with some kind of sickly sweet mayo sauce, plus a smoothie that was apparently pre-made in china or malaysia and shipped to the store: ew) that i've not been tempted to try their froyo, especially given the other options.

okay, that's about it for now. the ridiculous part is that i've left out a half dozen of the froyo/pizza options within walking distance of my place. there's an absurd number of pizza/froyo options here. we've even got some weird froyo+designer sunglasses place. i'm too uncool to go in.

EDIT:

- somehow I forgot Romolo's Canolli Factory! I cannot recommend it highly enough. The ice cream is home made and awesome, and the cannollis are made to order and incredible. Definitely go there.

EDIT 2:

- north beach pizza: very well executed pizza. nothing special, but the sauce is tangy and delicious, the ingredients high quality, the crust is very nice. no gimmicks, just a really good pizza and easy ordering. when amici's isn't what i want, i suppose north beach is a good alternative.

no time like moving time to meet the neighbors. so far i've met 3 sets of neighbors, for a total of five people.

unfortunately, that's 3 sets of neighbors at the old place. one of them lived next door for two years, and once asked the apt. management what that thumping, machine-like sound was for 30 minutes every morning. he says they told him it was me, lifting weights.

ha!

the teabaggers were out yesterday, on the corner of El Camino and My Street. They had their idiotic signs, still shiny and legible from April, and a very shrill woman with a megaphone, shouting such winning slogans as:
"Down with the British Empire! Down with the Obama empire!"
"Honk for freedom!"
"Capitalism is good!"

I've given "honk for freedom" nearly a day to reveal its subtle nuance to me, but I guess I'm just too dense to get it. The original members of the Boston Tea Party were ready to die for freedom; all that the modern day equivalent-hopefuls ask of us is to honk. I don't see how honking bolsters our freedom, but then again, I wasn't in a car at the time so perhaps I lacked some contextual framework for getting it.

I came across an article today about the tebaggers, and it struck me with some sadness: dozens, hundreds (if we make it that far), or thousands (fat chance) of years in the future, when schoolkids are learning about Early America, and they use the FutureGoogle to look up "Tea Party", what a tragedy it will be if the insipid, ineffective, ridiculous 2009 version obscures references to the one that helped birth our nation and give my modern-day whinging brethren the freedom to spout their nonsense on my street corner.

i saw the new star trek. spoilers follow.

i liked it, and i liked it a lot.

i had not seen any trailers, i didn't follow any of the pre-production stuff, or anything. i read a couple threads on slashdot before and after.

the dorks on slashdot make a lot of noise about how it's unfaithful to roddenberry's vision, and there are giant plot holes, and how it makes no sense that kirk gets command of the flagship at so young an age, and it doesn't make sense how stupid the romulans are, or how lame the villain is, and so on. all wonderfully valid points, but...

the movie was great. it was fun. it was engaging. i laughed out loud when "sabotage" burst out of the theater's speakers. whooooooeeeee! jj abrams was making this movie just for me. hops nudged me and said: that guy's dressed in red, he's going to die. sure enough, he did. ha!

when chekov opened his mouth and spilled out the most outrageous russian fake accent ever: ha ha ha!

the movie was alive. not stiff and boring and stillborn like all the TNG movies we've had to suffer through. it's the inheritor of STIV, my favorite of the movies. it's not about science, it's not even about fiction. it's about fans getting to spend a couple hours with people they love, kirk and spock. and though the new spock isn't really spock, fascinatingly, the new kirk is kirk, in spades. the closing shot of him on the enterprise bridge, his posture, his grin, all shatner. his swagger throughout the movie, his anger, his aggression -- kirk!

people whine about the "reboot" of the film, that now jj has erased all the "canon" of trek. who cares? trek had written itself into a corner and all we were getting was crap.

for example, the scene in "nemesis" where inexplicably picard rides around in a dune buggy. okay, sure, there were comparable inexplicable action scenes in this trek, but the point is in this trek they worked. the picard trek was so wrapped up in old-dude stodginess that such a seen seems forced and out of place. when kirk is running unecessarily away from an ever-increasing slew of monsters on some hoth-like ice world, it's silly, and pointless, and hilariously fun. and it's not in the least bit forced.

the original trek certainly was about ideas, and that's often what made episodes so painfully bad. likewise with the first two seasons of TNG. episodes that are so embarassingly unwatchable precisely because they were faithful to gene's vision of a hippie future of peace and love.

we got 4 excellent seasons of TNG to explore these themes, and about the same number of excellent DS9 seasons. but the movies -- the good ones, the ones with kirk and spock that weren't directed by shatner, weren't about gene's vision so much as nostalgic time spent with old friends.

and that's what the new trek does so brilliantly well (and what everyone on slashdot misses). the old guard of trek, the hippie vision of gene, the moral conundrum speechifying by picard, the kill now agonize later speecifying of ds9 -- those have had their run. the trek movies are about the fond memories, and in-jokes, explosions, and kirk grinning, swaggering, and kicking the shit out of bad aliens.

and this movie has all that, and the fans, and the non-fans, and everyone except my mother is loving it.