Restaurant mini-review

Viceroy

 

3 out of 5 Chiclets

 

On the southwest corner of 18th and 8th Ave.

 

French-American (pomme frites instead of french fries, but portabello burger) with European laid-backness (they don't rush you to order-eat-leave).

The harbinger

Ice cream man! One benefit of working in an office across the street from a school.

 

I think it's his first day out - I didn't hear him yesterday.

Hey Man, is that Freedom Rock?

Yeah, Man!

Well, turn it up!

What could they be doing?

On a couple of corners on Route 9, there are older men wearing orange crossing guard vests sitting in folding camp chairs on the corner taking notes. I don't think they're crossing guards because I've never seen them before.

Curious...

Cause of the pet poisonings

Is not a rat, is a hamster!

 

Sorry, I'm a pet lover, but I still had to say it.

Streaming WFMU

I'm currently listening to WFMU'S 20k Windows Media Player stream on my Treo as the bus crawls down the turnpike in the slush. Not bad. It cuts out when I browse to another web page, but I still think this is cool. Don't know how long my battery will last, though...

Guess I'd better give them some money as this is pledge week and all.

There goes the neighborhood

I'm one of those jerks with the Crackberries now. Except with a Treo.

So what nickname do the have for these? Special T? I can't think of anything good since I'm not part of the drug culture.

Bubba Ho-tep: review

(3 out of 4 chiclets)


Kent and I watched Bubba Ho-tep last night: it wasn't exactly what I thought it was but I still liked it a lot.

Bruce Campbell plays Elvis, who is alive because he switched places with an Elvis impersonator back in the 70s after he got tired of fame and his soul-sucking friends. The impersonator is the one who died from the drugs and so the king is rotting away forgotten in an East Texas rest home, which is cursed by an Egyptian soul-sucking mummy.

Together with a black man who believes he is JFK (Ossie Davis) with dyed skin and a bag of sand where the blown-out part of his brain used to be, Elvis sets out to kill the mummy before the mummy kills him and takes his soul, the one true thing of his he has left.

But fighting the mummy only takes up the last half hour of the movie. Before that, Elvis has to come to terms with how his life turned out. The main mummy of the movie is Elvis.

This isn't one of those New Age-y mid-80s body switching movies. Elvis switched places with the impersonator through a legal contract that was burned to ashes in a big barbeque catastrophe. If Elvis went public with the scheme to reclaim his throne, who would believe him? So after the impersonator died, Elvis was stuck with with his new identity forever. After breaking a hip impersonating himself on stage, Elvis spends the rest of his years in the rest home, all but locked away in a vault.

The inside of the rest home looks not so much like a vault, but more like what Hollywood portrays the inside of an Egyptian pyramid to be. It's very brown: the walls look like they're covered with mud, so much so that the dirt looks like it dripped down the hallway's wainscotting. Dim, torch-like wall sconces light the maze of corridors. And Elvis lies in his bed, almost in state, waiting for death or a reason to come alive again.

Campbell and Davis make a great team and create real characters, not just characatures. At first I wondered why Ossie Davis would want to be in this movie since I didn't think it fit the rest of the body of his work (turns out, Davis was in an episode of Night Gallery), but by the end I knew it was because it's much more than Elvis and JFK Battle the Mummy.

Another funny coincidence

Today I had another craving for ice cream and decided to pick up some Ben & Jerry's. They come out with crazy new flavors more often so today I picked up Neapolitan Dynamite (half Cherry Garcia and half Chocolate Fudge Brownie, which I guess technically isn't Neapolitan because it has cherries instead of strawberry, although Spumoni has cherries. which used to be sold as a form of Neapolitan ice cream) and Vermonty Python (coffee liquor ice cream mixed with chocolate cookie crumbs and fudge cows).

The Vermonty Python is excellent but since I just happened upon Napoleon Dynamite playing on Comedy Central, I'll have to say that the Neapolitan Dynamite is my favorite pick of the night, if only because of the coincidence. It's kind of like when Kent and I finally watched Eraserhead from our Netflix account after holding onto it for at least two months and it turned out that the night we watched it was David Lynch's 60th birthday.

Mike Schank guitar school

Someone in my office broke out his acoustic guitar and is playing a piece that Mike Schank plays in American Movie (though my co-worker is kinda rusty) and it brought a big smile to my face just like Mike brought a smile to Mark Borschardt's face on Thanksgiving. Unlike Mark, I haven't been feeling like there's nothing worth getting out of bed for but you don't have to be a struggling filmmaker for Mike to bring a smile to your face.

Use the blogs for good!

What can't bloggers do?

 

Now they're on the front lines of home security - they figured the Boston Mooninite  LEDs weren't bombs and had been talking about the guerrila marketing campaign for days.

 

"If Woody had gone straight to the police, none of this would have happened."

 

 

Cromulent

I don't know why, but the word cromulent just popped into my head. I looked it up in www.m-w.com but it wasn't there. Hmm.. Is it an archaic word? So I Googled it. Turns out, it was coined on the Simpsons and while it originally wasn't acceptable or authentic, I guess it is now.

I'm gonna hold my breath until you give me more money for the war!

From Google News ~3:10 p.m.:

It does matter!

A few years ago when I worked for a major software company, one of the system administrators named a cluster of servers after some Titans, specifically Cronus, Zeus, and Rhea. I sent out an office-wide email correcting him - Zeus wasn't a Titan!

 

But no one cared...

 

Where I work now, we're having an email argument about whether to name work teams after figures from the Trojan War. Some people think it's heroic, others think it's awful because most humans didn't survive and the ones that did survive suffered, eventually made it home, and then were killed by children or wives, etc.

 

Here, people care about Greek mythology. I love working here! :)

 

 

My days on the beach will never be the same

Archie comics is getting a facelift.

 

When I was a kid, I'd buy Archie comics all summer long. I'd read them while chewing Bazooka Joe bubble gum in between jumping waves and building sand castles on the Manasquan beach. The new look is stale and has no character.

 

Nothing but nog - Salon

I drank my first glass of spiked eggnog this Sunday. It never appealed to me before, but we had an unopened container left over from our party, so I thought I'd give it a try. I don't think I'd like it plain - the rum blended so nicely with the store-bought flavor.

 

Here's an article by Robert Sietsema discussing the origins of the tasty beverage - engineered and otherwise - in a warm, Christmassy tone.

Parent Mad 6-Year-Old Didn't Like Peanuts Special

Temptation

Someone in my office left a perfectly toasted bialy on top of the toaster oven. It's sitting there looking like it should be in a food magazine photo spread. I must say, I was tempted to steal it.

See, Family Guy is written by intelligent beings

The ongoing saga of the manatee continues here.

The classical is back

I noticed this morning that there's classical music playing again in the Port Authority. I wonder if this is a seasonal thing. I always thought they played it year-round because whenever I went into the city from my college campus, I swore they always played classical music. But maybe that was just when I visited during the winter holidays. It lends a nice calming effect to the whole enterprise.