This sign hung beneath the beach house: GONALOFABIT. The house's name? The word appeared nowhere else, in the house or on paper.
I'm going to remember this year's beach trip as one of running into the ocean. Every time I went into the ocean, I ran in. The first day we were there, Rob joke-suggested doing so, and I took him up on it. Run, run, high-step, high-step, topple, let waves fall on me, freeze, stand, swim.
I'm not thrilled with the way this picture turned out, but I could not be happier with the way the dish and the rest of our meal went tonight at Blue Moon Beach Grille. We typically eat out the night before we leave the beach, and neither of our two favorite places from past years were available. One was hosting a wedding reception, and another location had changed hands. So, I was putting in charge of finding a new spot.
At the top of TripAdvisor's Outer Banks rankings was Blue Moon. The reviews were numerous, recent and claimed it was the beach's new best restaurant. High praise! And you can now us among the faithful.
All the reviews said the people there couldn't have been nicer, and I'm now thinking science would agree. With rain closing the outside tables, the hostess took our number — first time we've ever seen that on the Outer Banks — and we killed time nearby at Kitty Hawk Kites, where my family has had fun killing time for about two-plus decades now. Not bad. After the call came and returned, the waiter was welcoming, hit every mark, was inquisitive about the dishes, and had me thinking about key lime pie all the drive home even though I had less than zero room for it. A Cooper man and his desserts… My dad guessed it was a family-run place, with the staff seemingly pros instead of summer help. He was right. Scott and Melissa Shields, so well done. And the food–
What you see here is Angel's Delight. "Shrimp and blue crab, sautéed in a light white wine sauce, with vine-ripened tomatoes, fresh green onion, roasted red peppers, garlic, and basil. Finished with whole butter and served over angel hair pasta and topped with parmesan cheese." Are there more ways to make me happy? (Only if I can fit in dessert…) Flavors bounced all the smart ways, and though I filled up, never felt heavy. The rest of the family said the same about theirs. A long way from the beach's usual sea platters. Lead-ins had the same precision. The calamari was in a white wine, cherry pepper and lemon butter sauce. I'm not sure I've had better. Even the Caesar brought bacon and onion to the tastes. Among the dishes, not a wrong move.
I know the post sounds overly effusive. But when you've been going somewhere on vacation for two-plus decades and seen the island's evolution, it's thoroughly exciting to find the new best restaurant in a hidden strip mall facing neither the old main road nor the new one.
Glad to see business was bustling tonight. We'll be back next year.
Looking down the island, reading on the porch, just before dinner.
Looking the other way from the same spot, up the island and west.
Shrimp with tomato and feta, orzo with green beans, fruit, Malbec.
After that rainy morning yesterday, perfect weather for evening.
*Not counting the NYT's wacky graf describing a wildly plotted book.
From Wired's May story about Radio Shack, a paragraph discussing the chain's chairman and CEO in the 1960s and 1970s, Charles Tandy:
Craftiness was in Tandy’s bloodline. He cut his teeth helming the family business, the Tandy Leather Company, which sold leather and leatherworking tools to veterans’ hospitals and Boy Scouts. The cigar-chomping Texan was the kind of eccentric, larger-than-life executive that any modern PR handler would keep tightly muzzled. He celebrated his 60th birthday by riding a rented elephant around the grounds of his mansion, and he kept a plastic breast on his desk that made a gong sound when he pressed the nipple. It was how he called for more coffee.
GONG. From the same issue, who else wants a gramophone?
Early Thursday morning, the family fishermen went into the sea. They took this adventure every year. Some years were better than others.
This year was an other year. This year, they caught three acceptable flounder, several dozen flounder that were all a quarter of inch to two inches too short and several pufferfish. A pufferfish, as one of the first mates on the fam's rented boats demonstrated, could be rubbed on its belly and then bounced like a basketball. Pufferfish were edible — but only the parts that weren't poisonous. The family fisherman left them behind. Cousin Matt, who would be the person to cook any fish taken home, didn't want the added responsibility of not killing the relatives.
Still! We bought shrimp and scallops and had our usual feast…
It's nearly time for the Salzburg Academy again — congrats to those going! — and there's no better reminder of why the Academy exists than in this week's New Yorker. Ken Auletta profiles Afghanistan media mogul Saad Mohseni and the complicated nature of his broadcasting.
Among the angles, Auletta writes about the Afghan Star show, the local take on American Idol. "Every Thursday night, an estimated one-third of Afghanistan's thirty million citizens gather in front of television sets to watch," Auletta writes. "In rural places without electricity, people fill generators with gasoline or hook up their TVs to car batteries."
The culmination of the passage is a sublime reminder about speech.
As on "American Idol," winners on "Afghan Star" are determined by the judges, the audience, and text messages sent from mobile phones throughout the country. Before the show aired, Mohseni made a deal with Roshan, the country's leading mobile-phone company, and ran promotional ads on Tolo and Arman instructing citizens how to place a vote. (The text messages cost voters about seven cents, the equivalent of a loaf of bread; three hundred thousand votes were cast in the final week.) With suspicious egalitarianism, the finalists have often been from each of the three main Afghan ethnic groups: Tajiks, Pashtuns, and Hazaras. At first, losers reacted badly on the air, smashing stage equipment and claiming ethnic prejudice, but, because their tantrums were so public, they were humiliated and seen as dividers.
In the third season, one of the finalists was Lema Sahar, a Pashtun woman from Kandahar, the spiritual home of the Taliban. Religious leaders were outraged that a woman was allowed to perform in public, and Sahar received death threats. In the "Afghan Star" documentary, she said, "We hide the songbooks and other things at night. If the Taliban come at night, we have a special place to hide the computer. If they find something, they kill you." She was undaunted. "If I do not sing, what else can I do?" she said. Sahar's performances on the show demonstrate a somewhat tenuous relationship with pitch and rhythm, but she was a crowd favorite. Mohseni told a reporter at the time, "They all realized how it was for her to come from Kandahar, and we all want to root for the underdog." The text-message voting did something else, Mohseni says: It "has changed Afghanistan in ways you could not imagine ten years ago. It has given people power to vote someone off."
Rain has been pouring here for two or three hours, our first rain this week. Maybe the downpour started earlier, but I was pretending to sleep then.
Wake, hear the drops earnest on the shingles, wonder about my sandals or what else beneath the house (open among its pilings for hurricane visits), give those feelings over to the beach, and return to sleeping, my pillowcase over a stranger's brand-name pillow.
But the sun has a chance today. The sky is a clear yellow just above the horizon and just blue above the cloud line, up 45 or 60 degrees. Even as I write, this roof quiets. Stumbling, I cover my head and the camera with yesterday's paper to take a picture from the porch. In all: Beach, sea, the yellow, clouds, the blue, collectively nowhere in proportion with this page.
The rest of the house wakes. My mom notices the blue over the ocean, but my dad says the storm is coming from the west, still coming to the ocean. My mom grows concerned with an open window in a room we haven't used and is barely a room at all, just walls and felt over a deck. She opens the room and goes for paper towels, and I curse invisible mosquitoes flying in.
But I was lost before this minute. I just hid it better from my heartbeat and blood pressures. Otherwise, I wouldn't have woken so early and sought something beyond rest.
On the one beach night where my mom and dad and aunt and uncle — the greatest generation, which I can say because they won't see this post for days — go out to eat, the Cooper and Brinker cousins, more than 30 of us now across two generations, are left to our own devices.
This means: Pizza Hut take-out, beer, talking on the deck until the sun goes down, tubs of ice cream, Pictionary, and loud, loud charades. It is really very wholesome except for the pizza-charade-fueled violence.
Best blog concept of the night: As Tim blogs from American Samoa, I blog an alternative, folktale-driven version. Lots of conch-blowing.
Anyway. Onto the pictures. It appears to be a friendly game…
Until IT BEGINS.
Heartwarming moment after this: He still wanted his mom on his team.
At the other end of the table, high-stakes Sequence.
"Bad breath."
It's unusual for Wittgenstein to appear in my day. I'm no philosopher. So, when Mr. Wittgenstein shows up twice in my day, it's something.
First was the Wittgenstein quote in Calvino, "For what is hidden … is of no interest to us." Then came this passage amid my vacation magazine catch-up, from Wired's March issue, on Google refining its search:
Google’s synonym system understood that a dog was similar to a puppy and that boiling water was hot. But it also concluded that a hot dog was the same as a boiling puppy. The problem was fixed in late 2002 by a breakthrough based on philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s theories about how words are defined by context. As Google crawled and archived billions of documents and Web pages, it analyzed what words were close to each other. “Hot dog” would be found in searches that also contained “bread” and “mustard” and “baseball games” — not poached pooches. That helped the algorithm understand what “hot dog” — and millions of other terms — meant. “Today, if you type ‘Gandhi bio,’ we know that bio means biography,” Singhal says. “And if you type ‘bio warfare,’ it means biological.”
The upshot, to me? Science recommends oversharing.
Alison told me for months that this plate parked at Gannett every day. We wished it was mine! But I never ran into it. So, thank you to her for capturing it and making me even more curious whose plate it could be.
Sheri messaged this classic. Sheri is a Giants fan, which is a personal struggle she'll one day overcome, but we can still hate Dallas together.
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