Triscribe

Month: September 2007

  • Post-Vacation Summary

    So, I’m back in Brooklyn. Many things to catch up on; the desire for a vacation from vacation is also very much on the mind.

    Anyway, where was I? My brief Thursday to Saturday summary wasn’t done nearly with enough justice!

    Saturday:

    Legoland was fun – clearly for the younger set, but we old people actually enjoyed seeing the sculptures (as FC noted in his trip there last year). My goodness – mini-NYC looked bizarre. The Legoland people did a replica of the Freedom Tower (not yet built, and using the schematic from whatever year(s) ago) – and informed us on the little boat tour that they never got around to doing a replica of World Trade Center’s Twin Towers – to me, that doesn’t mean you have to build the mini-maybe Freedom Tower. Oh well. Otherwise, the Lego versions of Las Vegas and Washington DC and everything else were pretty cool.

    Off-on showers that morning/early afternoon – odd, since we kept thinking rain just doesn’t happen there.

    When we made it to San Diego that afternoon, we checked into a hotel in Little Italy and had dinner at Buon Appetito, which Fodor’s describes as “this charmer serving old world-style cooking in a casual but decidedly sophisticated environment…” I went with Fodor’s recommendation and ordered a baked eggplant all’amalfitana dish as appetizer – baked eggplant topped with mozzerella in a zesty fresh tomato sauce – tasty, indeed. For entree, I had a spinach and cheese ravioli, if I recall correctly. Delicious.

    San Diego’s Petco Stadium – weird architecture. People kept doing the wave at inopportune times. No wonder the Padres lost the game; the team was distracted by their fans’ silliness.

    The San Diego trolley/tram thing was an interesting ride to and from the stadium.

    Sunday – morning one-hour tour of the north bay harbor. Saw such sights as the USS Ronald Reagan, being cleaned up at San Diego. Scary to think that nuclear powered subs are in San Diego bay. After the boat ride, we did a drive and walked by the Hotel Del Coronado. Such a sunny and beautiful location!

    We meant to do more of Balboa Park, but ended up just doing the zoo that afternoon. Pandas! So cute!

    Dinner in Del Mar, at the Poseidon, with my law school classmate RF and his wife G, who are now in the west coast. Beautiful seaside sunset. Had crab cakes (never can resist those) and clam chowder, as it got windy.

    Drive back to Anaheim.

    Monday – Morning at Disneyland’s California Adventure, which is where you view the Pixar stuff and see Disney’s re-creation of California without visiting real California. Well, I so love Disney – it really is the Happiest Place on Earth ™. We just didn’t do enough, as far as I was concerned, since we were back on the road. We just did our run-through for the morning and then it was off to LA. Parked the car in Universal City (near Universal Studios), to take the subway. Figuring we’d make a good trip of using the subway, we headed to Union Station, did a walk through of the civic center, took the subway from Pershing Square to Hollywood. Graumann’s Chinese Theatre. Kodak Theatre. Highland and Hollywood (Mall). Cool stuff, in an artificial kind of way? Oh well. My real question is who doesn’t have a Hollywood star by now?

    Then, it was back to the car in Universal City, and driving off to Santa Monica. Walked to the end of the Pier; stared into the dark abyss, where ocean and night sky met. Creepy. Had dinner at Bubba Gump Shrimp at the Pier (silly me – I haven’t done Bubba Gump Shrimp at Times Sq). Then some walking in the Third Avenue Promenade. Then driving off to visit my brother’s friend, who attends one of the Claremont schools; we ambled a bit around that campus. A late night, I can tell you.

    Then it was back to Anaheim, where we had to pack up for our Tuesday flight back to NYC. Well, we did a little drive around the vicinity of LAX before checking in for the flight – curiously interesting look of a bilingual neighborhood indeed.

    Observation: GPS is a cool device for places you don’t know. Whether it’s for everyone is something else.

    Getting back to Brooklyn and seeing how humid it was Tuesday night – eww. I thought summer was over?

    Meanwhile, I missed the whole drama over what was going on at my Undergraduate Alma Mater. Oh well.

    Will likely make more observations on my vacation in another post. Catching up, after all, is hard to do.

  • The Fourth Third

    Today’s Triscribe’s fourth anniversary.  Thanks for your part in continuing this story!

    Mosquitoes: I seem to be attracting them the past week or two, or maybe it’s the same one. P doesn’t have any bites, but I’ve picked up a half dozen or so. There’s one really annoying welt on a knuckle on my left hand.

    Old New: P’s brother took us to Medieval Times in New Jersey this past weekend (it was kind of an excuse, as he needed to bring four people so that P and her brother could get free birthday tickets). It’s pretty high on kitsch and bad puns (“the Knight Club”) but the horse riding skills are real, and the pageant was entertaining.

    But of course we’re going to concentrate on the food and drink. P’s sister picked up a bottle of Bunratty Meade (which you can say is “authentic” as it is imported from Ireland, but not “authentic” under the legal definition of mead (without the ‘e’), as it is a blend of honey and white wine, not a fermented honey “beer”. It was OK, but the true mead that we had at the Ohio Renaissance Fair was so much superior.

    The meal that we received for our dinner theater included dragon AKA beef vegetable soup, ostensibly made on site, but tasting of food service, half a roasted chicken – which I had to say was actually better than a lot of chicken dinners that I’ve attended – accompanied by herb potatoes and a spare rib, also quite good. This was followed by a apple puff pastry and some birthday cake. Have to say we left fully sated- the only catch is that we had to eat with our hands.

    New Old:We had sushi at our usual place, Nanatori on Montague St. This was our second time at the place since their renovation, and we were with P’s brother. The food was pretty much up to par with its past skill in the kitchen. We mixed things up this time – chirashi, sushi deluxe, tonkotsu.

  • Stuff in Summary

    Still in CA. In summary:

    Thursday – late plane; check in to hotel across the street from Disneyland; Millie’s Restaurant and Bakery, near the hotel; Downtown Disneyland (which was evidently inspired by (new) Times Sq., which was inspired by Disneyland (kind of head-scratching there); Anaheim Angels game (I’d still call them “Anaheim Angels,” ’cause they’re in Anaheim).

    Friday – IHOP for breakfast; Disneyland; Getty Villa; UCLA women’s volleyball game (rather serependipitous); California Pizza Kitchen. Rain in SoCal, quite a soaker for an area that obviously didn’t have rain in too long.

    Saturday – McDonald’s for breakfast; trip to Legoland;In-N-Out; San Diego Padres game.

    More later.

    Plus – the passing of Marcel Marceau.

  • Speak Like a Pirate Day

    AARR, it’s of course Speak Like a Pirate Day today. I’m way not clever about the RRR’s and wheRRRRforRRRes that are needed for proper diction, so let’s review an online lesson, courtesy of woot.com.

    [display_podcast]

  • To be thirty-something

    Our friend YKC (not to be confused with YC) celebrated her third day of her 30th birthday at Tortilla Flats on Monday night, this after the aforementioned two previous days of birthday eating. There’s not much difference between being 29 and 30 in my experience, except that you’ve finally been around long enough to develop nostalgia.

    There’s plenty of that at Tortilla Flats, where among the Hawaii Elvis, mariachi record covers, and Our Lady of Guadalupe portraits, is the shrine to the dean of character actors, Ernest Borgnine. Most 30somethings know him as the curmudgeonly helicopter pilot in the TV show Airwolf, but he’s been in such classics as From Here to Eternity, McHale’s Navy, the Dirty Dozen, and modern roles in Gattaca and SpongeBob SquarePants. There is also a reserved booth for him in the back, which he apparently actually uses when he is in town (one of the multitude of house rules on the menu is that all customers must yield the Booth to Mr. Borgnine if he shows up). I had the namesake dish, which was basically tacos al pastor, and P had the mole. I though my dish was excellent, and the frozen drinks were great.

    The locale was picked primarily because it was “formation” bingo night, which is like traditional bingo, but you have to make the designated letter shape rather than a straight line. P messed up and didn’t exactly have the right formation when calling bingo, garnering our group a disqualification. The second game the party behind us had their own disqualification, mostly because the notable guests of honor weren’t paying attention to the rules.

    Point the camera behind you! Look out!

    A fun time was had by all – usually we’re the one that’s describing something that happened in the news, but this time around, the news wire describes something that we were at. How cool is that! P wants to also mention that a certain ex-boy band member that knows what “Chicken of the Sea” is joined the party when we were leaving. Not that we were trying to oogle or anything…just giving the usual facade of normal indifference only City natives can give and that celebs throughout the world flock to NYC for.

    Recommended – the Ernie vibe by itself is sufficient, but it really helps that the food is good, and their drinks are great. And you never know which Navy man, NASCAR driver, or guy named Nick you might run into…

  • Pre-Vacation Stuff

    Brooklyn Book Festival was great fun. Fantastic turnout too.

    Friend of mine e-mailed me the NY Times article that May May Chinese Gourmet Bakery is closing by the end of the month.

    Judge Mukasey nominated for US Attorney General. Notably, Judge Mukasey was the graduation speaker when I graduated from Alma Mater Law School. Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick did an interesting analysis on the right wing’s – umm – concern about Judge Mukasey:

    So there you have it: Some conservatives object to Mukasey because he’s an outsider (read: independent), others because he’s not a pro-life judicial activist (read: independent), and still others because he is respected by some liberals (read: independent). As criticisms go, these objections say more about the critics than about Mukasey. Except they suggest that he may not be the worst choice to restore independence to the Justice Department. Regardless of whether he’ll help Congress ferret out where the bodies are buried there, at least he does not appear likely to grab a shovel and start digging deeper. [….]

    [Plus, Judge Mukasey’s decision in the Padilla case] suggests that at the very least Judge Mukasey understands the value of a lawyer. And if he grasped so well why Padilla needed one, he can surely appreciate why now, more than ever, the country needs one, too.

    My undergraduate Alma Mater’s school newspaper’s all excited that Judge Mukasey is an alumnus AND an editorial page editor of the school newspaper back in the day.

    A new exhibit on Rembrandt at the Met – however, it seems to be more about the historical view of who owned what of Rembrandt’s work. NY Times’ Holland Carter writes:

    For “The Age of Rembrandt” it has come up with a theme, and a perfect one for our time: money.

    The work has been sorted not by artists or dates, but by the names and dates of the collectors who bought and gave the paintings to the museum. In this arrangement the history of Dutch “Golden Age” art begins in the American Gilded Age of the late 19th century, when the Met first opened its doors. The exhibition’s stars are not Rembrandt, Vermeer and Hals, but J. P. Morgan, Collis P. Huntington, William K. Vanderbilt and Louisine and H. O. Havemeyer. [….]

    The arrangement has some advantages. It gives a good sense of the overall “look” of Dutch painting: an art that can glow like gold syrup but is mostly the color of sauces and gravies. We get a realistic sense of the crazy-quilt mix of portraiture, landscape, still life and history painting that simmered together in the 17th-century pot. We also gain quick perspective on relative talent. To see Rembrandt next to Bartholomeus Breenbergh or Jacob Duck is to know in a flash who was ahead of the curve, and why.

    But the show’s primary theme — Dutch art seen through American money and taste, and coincidentally the wonderfulness of the Met — is a limiting gambit. That story begins in the first gallery, labeled “The 1871 Purchase,” which revisits, in highly edited form, the museum’s inaugural exhibition. After the Civil War, as the country was fast becoming an international power, Americans decided they needed a major art museum, and the Met was founded in 1870. [….]

    Rarely in these galleries did it occur to me to ask who once owned these pictures, or when the Met acquired them, or their dollar value. Instead I wanted information about what they depicted, about the paint they were made of and about the hands that brushed the paint on. I wanted to know what the artists — Rembrandt, say — might have been thinking. And I wanted to know what 17th-century viewers saw when they looked at these pictures, what these pictures said in their time. I wanted, in short, a different show, one with exactly the same art but with less institutional ego and more art-historical light.

    Yeah, I’ve noticed that lately – these exhibits about the collectors. Not to knock the collectors, who I’m sure were great humanists and fantastic captains of industry who had oodles of money and hearts of philanthropists – but in the end, I don’t care about them – I care about the art and the history. I guess it is a question of who controls what – if it weren’t for these buyers or millionaires who commissioned art in the 19th Century, would we have preserved art or created art since the 19th Century? We wouldn’t have had the Met, obviously. Ok, maybe the development of art history is a lot more complicated than that and maybe, my odd thoughts might explain why I didn’t major in art history in college.

    A look at trends in tea – with a reference to Pu-Erh, which is one of those teas that I probably do drink too much.

    Ah, and by Thursday, I’ll be far, far away…

  • Blast from the past – check!

    Someone who is a great guy and showed me so much…. Read about Russian Paul. Now I know approximately how old he is hah!

  • Weirdness weather

    Am in Beijing today and tomorrow, flying back through Typhoon Wipra perhaps on Wednesday.

    Was a strange weather experience.  Overcast this morning and hazy. Ok but then the weather took a turn for the nasty ugly.  After lunch time, the weather turned darker and from the 19th floor, couldn’t see anything. By 3pm, it was like night time/midnight.

    Air quality was noticeably stuffy.  Autumn is supposedly the best time for Beijing.  Temperature wise, it is very comfortable.   It’s the other stuff that makes it difficult to handle.

    Last night, supper with one of my colleagues. We went to grilled meat place Beijing style.  Think of it like a Beijing style churrasco.  I even tried grilled silkworms. Tasty actually, but the crunchy skin was a little difficult to take.  It was like eating shrimp skin that was fried/grilled.  A little tough and not a fun experience.  Taste was good admittedly.  Will try again I think.

    ready silkworms for grilling!

  • Anniversary fest

    This week is birthday central, with 5 bdays to celebrate – P’s best friend and maid of honor on the 12, P and my mom on the 15th, and P’s dad, brother and other friend on the 16th.

    Wednesday: Essex. Judeo-Hispanic cuisine. Sentimental favorite because that was were P and I met for brunch for the first time. Best deal: Wednesday lobster night – $16 gets you a delicious complete lobster dinner. Also, you can’t miss the potato pancakes with gravlox and salmon caviar! Recommended.

    Saturday: Sammy’s Fish Box . We’ve come to this famed City Island emporium of seafood a few times before, and know about the big plates, so we decided to go for a shared plate. Little did we know that the shared plates are even more ridiculously spectacular. Monstrous portions of fish, lobster, king crab, and assorted shellfish on a bed of linguine, all sitting on a plate suitable for a flounder or a jumbo turkey. I think we have a week of leftovers. Recommended if you like seafood and don’t mind the trek.

    Afterwards we had desert/birthday wishes at the Black Whale. The back garden was great. Recommended if in the area.

    Sunday: East Manor for dim sum later today. The last time we were here, in episode 14, we were ushering at my friend’s 650 person wedding. Eager to see if it has changed.

    New banner – the aerial photo of Brooklyn wasn’t off of Google Maps – it was taken by me out the side of an American Airlines jet. Have to work on changing the photo more often.

    Have to find something extra spectacular for the Four for Triscribe anniversary… any ideas?

  • Weekend!

    A Happy Anniversary to Triscribe, a bit in advance, I think, but all sincere.

    Sooo looking forward to the vacation this Thursday to Los Angeles and San Diego. Sooo need to get far, far away from my office. May possibly blog from Cali, but no guarantees.

    Wednesday night – joined friends to celebrate a certain friend’s birthday at Caffe Carciofo on Court Street, across from the Cobble Hill Cinema. Great for for weeknight prixe fixe. Good cheap wine. Recommended.

    Finished reading The Power of a Positive No, by William Ury, the co-writer of the “Getting to Yes” book that is a must for those who want to improve their negotiating skills or wish to be in mediation/ADR. Huge thumbs up – great book, very clear message on how to say no, firmly and clearly, without burning your bridges and affirming you, your needs, and your relationship with the person to whom you’re saying no. I read a library copy of the book, but I’m definitely planning on buying it eventually.

    Facebook has an application to play Scrabble with your friends, created and operated by the folks at Scrabulous. Scrabulous is fabulous all right – sooo addictive to play it in solitaire format, but the Robot is so annoying, because it has greater access to words and tactics than I do. If I get that infuriated with the Robot, maybe I’ll overcome this growing addiction (this week’s obsession anyway) to Scrabulous.

    Event to note: Brooklyn Book Festival, this Sunday!

    Articles to note:

    On Slate: A look at what makes a good modern monument.

    In the NY Times: a Megan Marshall’s book review of Linda Colley’s biography of an 18th Century woman who traveled far more than anyone would have imagined in those times. Marshall’s review made the book sound fascinating, and I’d love to read it. I had read Colley’s “Britons: Forging the Nation,” in college, when I had taken a British history course – just great writing.

    An inside look at Ken Burns, just before his World War II documentary airs the next Sunday (9/23).