Trip #3, January 2010. Today!
"Soul Burger No. 1 (The Hardest Working Burger In Chow Business)"
Applewood Smoked Bacon, Swiss Cheese, Cognac and Sherry Sauteed Mushrooms, Grilled Red Onions. Introduced my parents to Hell Burger.
The meeting went well. Parents said the burgers among the best they had ever eaten. Next up? We continue our D.C.-area lobster roll hunt. Coastal Flats faired decently for us in October. Can Carlyle do better?
Next up for me on the Hell menu? "Let's Get It On (We Are All Sensitive Burgers with So Much to Give)" because I've sung along at least twice in the car in the last week, "B.I.G. Poppa (We Love It When You Order B.I.G. Poppa)" because our work cafeteria has begun ripping off this one with delicious results, or maybe "The DogCatcher (Bow wow wow yippie yo yippie yay)" because I've never tasted bone marrow before.
Kathy Kemp interviewed me this week, and her column ran today.
Will the real Patrick Cooper please stand up?
That noise you hear is the sound of chairs pushing back and scraping the floor. It seems the Birmingham lawyer, who lost to William Bell last week in a contentious runoff for mayor, is just one in a nation filled with Patrick Coopers.
One such Cooper, an online-products specialist with USA Today, became familiar with our Cooper after some people in Birmingham confused him, the USA Today guy, with the candidate. That's because the USA Today Cooper has a Web site called patrickcooper.com, which drew a lot of traffic from Birmingham in the months before the election.
"I got e-mails from people wanting to meet with me. I got asked to go on a radio show. One family even invited me to their holiday party," Cooper, the noncandidate, says by phone from his office near Washington.
The column leaves me wishing two things: to talk to Patrick Cooper the candidate and to have blogged years ago on talking to Patrick Cooper the stylist. All I remember of our call now is that he was a nice guy, got as big a kick out of talking as I did and had phone headset issues.
Thank you, Lotus. After recent sparks of spring with an Audi, where the engine "brims with futurism, a chamfered, beveled cutting tool of high-speed atmosphere," Dan Neil publishes a truly inspired work of auto criticism in the Los Angeles Timeswith the sexy 2010 Lotus Evora.
A ruptured fire hydrant of pleasurable endorphins, the Evora is the first all-new car from Lotus — a small sports-car company in Hethel, England — since it was reborn with the Lotus Elise in 1995. The company goes back to the 1950s and founder Colin Chapman, whose guiding principle in fast cars was extreme lightness. Lightness cures what ails sports cars like Lourdes cures scabies. All other things being equal, lighter cars change direction more quickly (less mass, therefore a lower moment of inertia). Likewise, lighter cars have better cornering grip (the vehicle's weight doesn't overwhelm the tires). A lighter car accelerates harder and stops more quickly. Meanwhile, all the stresses on the components are reduced — the tires, brakes, suspension and gearbox. It's one big, beautiful, positive spiral.
And:
The biggest difference between Lotuses and other cars is that Lotuses love to slide: Bend them into a corner at high speed, give the suspension a millisecond to compress and just hang on. The Evora arcs along in a perfectly peaceful, drama-free four-wheel drift. Lotus might as well have a patent on this feeling. Exiting a tight hairpin, you can get on the gas hard — the traction control system offers minimal interference — and the car swivels with heavenly, progressive power-on oversteer, gaining degrees of crossed-up heroism until you breathe the throttle. Bang the rev limiter, slam the gear. Ya-freakin'-hoo. It's like corner-carving on skis in fresh powder. My God, that's fun.
And:
Is a Porsche Cayman S quicker and faster? Yeah, probably, a little, if you judge things so parlously as to measure your life in tenths of a second. The Evora is a connoisseur's car, a driver's shibboleth and secret code, a prime number of a machine that is indivisible by anything other than itself.
Seeing Bruce's We Shall Overcome on the Haiti telethon, what came to mind was something Jim Musselman had said at the fall's symposium.
As head of Appleseed Recordings, a tiny label with social justice goals, Musselman had prompted Springsteen's folk recordings in the 1990s, including We Shall Overcome. While many of the recordings eventually turned into the Seeger Sessions, the We Shall Overcome cut became a public-facing Sept. 11 song and, as I noted in the fall, a privately wild rights battle. But just as interesting to me was another controversy Musselman explained, about Springsteen's word choice in the song.
Years later, Musselman remembered the concern "darling" stirred. The chorus traditionally went, "Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe we shall overcome some day." Springsteen changed the first line to "Darling, here in my heart." The switch was small in print but huge in meaning.
One of the greatest collective songs of the 20th century had become personal. A civil rights touchstone had become applicable to individual cares and assumed greater and lesser social range. A song that lived in America might now live in your bedroom. Was such a shift decent?
If you don't believe in the power of word choice, you can ignore this blog post. Best I could tell in listening to Musselman, this debate and discussion ensued at the label levels, not in the public. A Google News search found nothing. So, if you don't care, you're in good company.
But I'm going to credit the word choice for the song appearing Friday night and, judging by my feeds, moving many people, myself included. I'm sure, since the line's shift, "Darling, here in my heart" has crossed minds for reasons lower than social change or rescue. Fair enough.
You can pre-order the Hope for Haiti Now telethon music on iTunes.
A great final show tonight. The final remarks via EW:
All I ask of you is one thing: please don’t be cynical. I hate cynicism — it’s my least favorite quality and it doesn’t lead anywhere. Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard and you’re kind, amazing things will happen.
These social networking sites became more than distractions from our schoolwork and means to waste time. They became a new way of communication that I had never taken advantage of before. How else could you read an article and have the link spread to 100 people within a matter minutes? At one of our first classes, I learned that much of the violence in Iran was known to the rest of the world through Twitter and YouTube. The violence against protesters in Iran was known around the world through a video on YouTube about the murder of a young woman named Neda who was shot by a member of the Basij, a volunteer-based Iranian paramilitary force. That single YouTube video was picked up by CNN, ABC, CBS and NBC resulting in Neda becoming a symbol of rebellion amongst protesters. That’s the power of social networking; when Parker Hall becomes a forum for constant communication, when information can be spread worldwide in a matter of seconds and when the observation of a single person can turn into a nation’s rebellious cry.
Probably: "The toast starts life as ordinary sliced bread. An arm in the toaster picks up the bread and passes it in front of heating elements. When it is toasted, the arm throws you the toast." Or the shower.
Related: When will the transparent toaster come to America? "Now hungry users can watch as they brown baguettes, muffins, crumpets, buns and teacakes to perfection and take them out at just before they become too crispy." Link via Jess. Toast can't be too crispy but still…
Another take on the transparent toaster? "Misleadingly Named New Magimix Kitchen Gadget Is Just a Torture Chamber for Toast."
And a take with great video: "Magimix knows they have something incredible, ahem, cooking with this thing. That has to be why they made this video about their toaster, complete with music that sounds like it came out of a late-night social encounter commercial."
When you make toast, you are activating something called the Maillard reaction on the surface of the bread. The Maillard reaction is what causes the browning to occur. The heat inside the toaster boils off the moisture on the surface of the bread, and then the surface gets hot enough for the Maillard reaction to take place. It is a reaction that appeals to the senses. We see the result of the reaction as browning. Sugars and proteins combine together to create the pleasant flavors and smells that we associate with toast.
For balance, the following USA TODAY commercial is not so great. The content is fine for the time, but it's deeply disturbing now. Seemingly modern, there's zero mention of digital. It's like there's no Internet.
But, hey, you say as you try to justify it, maybe the commercial is older than it looks? Nope. This commercial is exactly as old as it looks. Time details are hard to discern, but one shot shows this late August 1999 story. This ad was likely produced at the height of the dot-com boom.
A decade later, there's still much recovery to be found.
The man got a $208.50 citation, but I've now ripped Denver's Greatest Hits to iTunes in his honor. You bet I owned the CD. The money grafs:
After a few minutes, the officer knocked again. This time the man who rents the apartment opened the door. When asked why the music was so loud, he told police he was "rocking out."
"Depending on your theory of rocking out," neighbor Jeff Krenz said. "I'm not really a fan of John Denver, but I guess the guy might think it's good music."
The man wouldn't talk on camera, but tells FOX 11 he was a bit intoxicated and enjoying his music while cooking. He says he heard the knock, but his food was burning so he didn't answer.
I'm run down this week and not in a tired way, so sleep's harder. But an odd thing I'm finding to help has been thinking of other run-down people. Not people I read about or imaginary people, but people near me. Overworked, stressing or sick. What to say to them? How to help them find the energy to move — or to fall asleep? Blanking, I listened to Try a Little Tenderness about six or a dozen times in a row tonight before Otis tipped over to Patty on the playlist, Walking After Midnight. I'm sure I've played both songs here before, so you go searching too.
