Sweet

As promised: The Ford Focus-amino

I'm Pretty Sure My Rights Are Being Violated (Updated)

My new temp overlords forbid internet useage during the day - fascists. I could try to scrounge all of my blog sources when I get home at 11 each night, but then I wouldn't have time to get high. I mean sleep. I'm brazenly sneaking this entry in now at 10:12 b/c most people are gone and the few that remain are surfing their own damn sites. Over the next two weeks bloggin will be lighter than average. Then again, I'll probably figure out a way to sneak in a few posts when no one's looking. I mean, I know how dissapointed you'd all be if I didn't.

** Random followup to someone who may or may not be reading this blog, cats are in fact born with umbilical cords.

UPDATE: Thanks for the support Rob and Nittles. As it turns out, my pain was short lived. I jumped ship to a better paying gig in real estate. No mercy and no loyalty in this business. I'm still gonna be working long hours but won't have to worry about anyone looking over my back. So to all my faithful readers, your blog prayers have been answered, Big D will be giving you the joy that you've all come to love and depend on. There's a new el caminoization I've been meaning to share with you all ...

Please, Flip Flop

New Top Dog in BK? Yep.

360 in Red Hook, Brooklyn has been on my radar for a while and I got a chance to go over the weekend. Part of the burgeoning restaurant scene in Red Hook, 360 is open for dinner Wednesday through Sunday and features a value packed price fix menu at $25.

The store-front dining room is small, probably holding no more than 30 people or so. In additition to the price fix option, the French and English menu contains another 7 or 8 a la carte entree options (priced between $13 and $22) and an equal number of appetizers (priced between $4 and $9). The wine list is substantial with most bottles ranging between $30 and $50.

Off the price fix menu I ordered the goat cheese tart with olive tapenade and for my entree I ordered the grilled Hake with various julienned vegetables and other goodies. For desert I chose the orange/lavender cake. The food was simply delicious. Rich, savory, excellently prepared, and served without undue wait. In addition to our price fix selections, we also shared a homemade pork pate and a traditional Andalusian noodle dish, each adding additional dimension to our meals. One of the people in our party knew the head waiter and we followed his advice regarding wine and were not dissapointed.

This review is frankly not doing justice to how we felt during and after our meal. Complete satisfaction straying into giddiness. Undoubtedly, two bottles of wine, a round of champagne, and a round of desert wine played a role, but make no mistake, this place rocks. With a great wine list and reasonable prices, a cozy ambiance and knock out delicious food, 360 is a sure fire winner. Make a reservation and splurge on a car service - you'll be a fan after one visit.

Red Hook is located at 360 Van Brunt Street in Red Hook, Brooklyn. A couple choosing the price fix menu and sharing a bottle of wine should expect to spend about $100.

Foreign Movies - Love 'Em and Hate 'Em

I saw two foreign flicks this weekend - District B-13, a French martial arts action movie, and Cidade Baxia (Lower City), a Brazilian drama about two life long friends and the hooker they love. I recomend the former but not the latter. District B-13 doesn't try to be anything other than what it is, a conventional action flick featuring amazing martial artists that benefits from not been made in Hollywood. I really wanted to like Lower City, but it sucked. I found it to be a downer, and grimey. In the end I just don't buy the premise that the two main characters, friends and business parters, would risk their friendship over a hooker. And if even if they would, I didn't care.

Why Does This Play Still Work?

By Tom Toles

Thou Art Healed - Amen

White Jesus will help you heal faster

Then again, maybe you just wanted to be reminded of bacon

If you must, order here.

The War Divides Us All

From Overheard:

Guy #1: So when I started telling him my feelings on the Iraq war, he rolled over to me in his wheelchair and started cursing me out. He was going on about his time in Vietnam and how there are things about war I'll never understand.
Guy #2: That sucks.
Guy #1: I was like, "Whoa. You're my shrink! I'm paying you to listen to me!"
Guy #2: Seriously.
Guy #1: Well, at least the co-pay was only $15. But anyway, I'm definitely not going back to him

USA Soccer

The US is about to lose has lost to Ghana and has been eliminated from the World Cup. I watched the game out of curiosity and boredom and the US team just didn't look - to my unknowledgeable eyes - like they are World Cup caliber. A step behind the whole game though they did score their FIRST goal of the Cup. What's funny (and patethic) is how upbeat US commentators have been about our chances. But watch out, I hear our 2010 team is gonna be bad ass.

Cat Shit Coffee - Yummy!

The Cristal of Coffee - straight from the ass of an Indonesian tree dwelling cat:

[T]he paradoxurus [is] a tree-dwelling animal that is part of the sibet family. Long regarded by the natives as pests, they climb among the coffee trees eating only the ripest, reddest coffee cherries. Who knows who first thought of it, or how or why, but what these animals eat they must also digest and eventually excrete. Some brazen or desparate -- or simply lazy -- local gathered the beans, which come through the digestion process fairly intact, still wrapped in layers of the cherries' mucilage. The enzymes in the animals' stomachs, though, appear to add something unique to the coffee's flavor through fermentation.

To read more and/or put your order in, check here.

Homeland Security

Don't forget about the wall to keep out El Queda.

All Italian Americans Are Like The Sopranos

From the heart of Italy Queens, by way of Brooklyn, comes an explanation for the curious phenemom of Ital-glish. Please share your comments after reading.

Ricotta, Resolved by Bart Irace

“Where do you get the ‘g’ from? There’s no ‘g’ in that word. And how does the ‘t’ turn into a ‘d’? How do you get ‘GAVA-deel’ from ‘CAVA-TELLI’?”

“Look, that’s the way we say it. It’s a dialect. What can I tell you, you’re not Italian?”

Well, technically speaking neither is my Mom - she’s American - and her version of Italian was equally misunderstood by an East Indian waiter in a Greenwich Village café as by an Italian waiter in Florence when she asked for a cup of “demi-tass”, roughly translated to half-cup. Only her frustration was more evident for the former, because again, you know, he wasn’t Italian.

So goes the monthly discussion on the pronunciation of Italian words like cavatelli, manicotti, and mozzarella between my wife and mother, a discussion that I always enjoy and if bored, will actually make happen by saying something as simple as “how about some GAVA-deel for dinner”. Mind you, Italian-American though I am, I’ve not once eaten cavatelli (there’s a package of it in my freezer that I bought half as a joke, half out of curiosity). We’ll eat it for dinner at some point – it’s pasta, we have to – but I can only imagine where the discussion will head and what new four-letter words my daughter might learn during the process.

Growing up the only Italian words I heard were either food items or curses. My first word in dialect was probably one I uttered every Sunday when Grandma made her tomato sauce: ‘RIGUT’, with its slight roll of the “r”, mysterious ‘g’, and blatant disregard for the final vowel which, when I learned how to read, made the actual container of “Ricotta” something of a mystery. Bringing it to the attention of my family crossed my mind, but it tasted good and if I actually wanted any, it was a really good idea to say it in a way that fellow diners would understand. So, pass the ‘Rigut”. Or the MON-I-GUT, my childhood favorite and Italian equivalent of an enchilada, which hardly sounds appetizing, perhaps even less so when you consider that even when properly pronounced, “manicotti” translates to “cooked hands”. Yum.

Cured meats like prosciutto (PRU-SHOOT or BRU-SHOOT) and cappicola (GOBI-GOAL) – there’s that magic ‘g’ again – were not particularly popular in my house. My diet at the time consisted primarily of hot dogs, bologna, cheese, pretzels, and iced tea. While my grandfather owned a grocery store/deli, he didn’t sell them or at least not as far as I knew. Plus, my grandparents grew up on a (usually) steady diet of pasta, fish and vegetables, which didn’t change when they emigrated to the U.S.

When my mother remarried twelve years after my father’s death, her new husband regularly ate a lot of this stuff, and before long I found myself in the deli asking for them. I had a list that I’d written myself with strange words like “gobigoal” on it, a word that, hard as I tried, I could not find anywhere on the plastic-sealed hunks in the refrigerated case. Standing on line in the deli, my adolescent insecurities were only magnified by the impending uncertainty. How about just some plain old ham? American cheese, anyone? Feeling somewhat intimidated by the moody deli clerk, I went ahead and just asked for a pound of gobi-goal. Smelling my fear, he asked for confirmation. So I repeated again, although that was the last time I promised myself, if he didn’t understand this, I was going down the block to the supermarket for some turkey and American cheese. Thankfully, he reached into the case and picked out the hunk of meat labeled “Capicola”. Talk about enlightenment.

While this sort of linguistic uneasiness is frustrating, it is probably ever more so for non-Italian-Americans. Watching them fearfully order a hero with prosciutto (do I pronounce it with a ‘p’ or a ‘b”? drop off the ‘o’ at the end?) makes me squirm. Whatever comes out of their mouths, they get their sandwich and walk away happy. But that indecisiveness, inevitably, stems from the criticisms of a very proud Italian-American, who at one point in that sandwich orderer’s life, scolded him for “not saying it right”. I once worked with a girl who said she hated when people mispronounced manicotti. “It’s monegut”. This seems all the more ridiculous when I imagine the example of a transplanted Bostonian American telling native Italians that the proper pronunciation of the word “car” is “CAH” - and being indignant about it. There’s a difference between admitting that a dialect is just a variation on the standard language, to be used around the house or in the neighborhood among familiar faces and insisting that it is the right way, the only way. It is equally wrong for traditionalists to call for the death of all dialects. There is a time and a place, not to mention room, for both - I think.

If I get off of my soapbox for a minute and sit back down at the dinner table with my family, I’m faced with an old problem; having someone pass me the ricotta. Do I, with my daughter listening, ask for manicotti with an American accent, break my English with a little overemphasized Italian just like some news reporters do, or revert to ‘monigut’? Something tells me the middle ground between the first two options will be the way to go, especially with my wife staring me down from across the table. Then again, old habits are hard to break. But if my daughter is even a little bit like her mother, she, unlike me, will not hesitate for a second to ask why ricotta is pronounced ‘rigut’. I’ll tell her what I realize now: That it has something to do with sitting around my grandparents’ table on a Sunday afternoon surrounded by family, many of them now long dead, and anxiously digging into the fruit of Grandma’s morning long labors.

Back In Business

Hey Folks. I made it back from Mexico in one piece. The day after I returned I headed out to Buffalo for a long weekend with my mama (which is why I've been awol a little longer than I had planned). Mexico was fun, the resort was really great and a good time was had by all. I was too busy enjoying myself to take too many pictures but here are a couple from the ruins at Coba - one of the tallest Mayan temples in the Yucatan.

[from the top - those black specs at the bottom are people.]

Happy Father's Day

Those Winter Sundays by Robert E. Hayden

Sundays too my father got up early

and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,

then with cracked hands that ached

from labor in the weekday weather made

banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.

When the rooms were warm, he'd call,

and slowly I would rise and dress,

fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,

who had driven out the cold

and polished my good shoes as well.

What did I know, what did I know

of love's austere and lonely offices?

Back In A Minute

Hey folks, I'm out for a little R+R in Mexico. Enjoy your break from my daily rantings. See you in a week.

50 Free Music Downloads

At a screening of the new Omen movie last night, I got a ticket for 50 free music downloads from emusic. Turns out, the offer is open to everyone. Check it out here. As for the movie, it's a frame for frame remake of the original, yet somehow, the original is better. My favorite moment came at the end when little Damian is with the President of the United States (back facing the camera) and someone in the audience said, there goes Bush with the Devil. Good times.

What The People Want?

Tom Toles

Parents, Do You Love Your Kids?

Do you? How much? This much? Behold, the $17,000 diamond studded pacificer. Somewhere, a bunch of rappers are getting ready to lace their infants up.

OMG - The Anti-Christ is French (looking)

From the Democratic convention. How could he have lost? I mean if you're a bible believing Christian, the anti-christ's rise is required for the armageddon and the final battle between christ and satan. Most hard-core christians are trying to speed up the return of the anti-christ to bring about the return of Jesus. True christians should have voted for Kerry.

Eat A Sandwich!

You're looking kind of thin, White Jesus.

An Inconvenient Truth

I checked out An Inconvenient Truth with a bunch of fellow hippie-commie-liberals in Park Slope, Brooklyn over the weekend. It was a lot funnier than I expected. I enjoyed it, but as someone who believes that scientific evidence supports the theory of global warming, it was more of a sermon to the faithful than anything relevatory. Most of the audience, however, seemed moved and motivated.

Anchors Away!

As part of the anti-immigration ramp up of the right, several politicians - including our friend Tom Tancredo - and some high profile commentators have discussed ending the 14th Amendment grant of citizenship to all individuals born on US soil. Here's the relevant section of the 14th Amendment:

Section. 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

The 14th amendment is kind of important you know - due process, equal protection, post slavery rights for black Americans - not an area where I want a regressive and hateful politician and his xenophobic fans to be tinkering. Or those activist judges.

According to the right, a significant problem are anchor babies:

Put simply, an anchor baby is the offspring of an illegal immigrant who, under current legal interpretation, becomes a U.S. citizen at birth and, in turn, is the means by which parents and relatives can also obtain citizenship for themselves by using the family reunification features of immigration law.

By now I'm sure you've guessed that our favorite, semi-hot, bat shit insane, la migra fantasizing, concentration camp loving, gal-pal, Michelle Malkin, has shared her thoughts on the grave danger we face from anchor babies.

During my book tour across the country for Invasion, this issue came up time and again. In the Southwest, everyone has a story of heavily pregnant women crossing the Mexican border to deliver their anchor babies." At East Coast hospitals, tales of South Korean "obstetric tourists" abound. (An estimated 5,000 South Korean anchor babies are born in the US every year). And, of course, there's a terrorism angle.

Ah, yes, the terrorism. We'll only have ourselves to blame if we ignore El Queda. In this instance, however, Malkin may actually know what she's talking about (miracles do happen?). Are you ready for this? Are you seated? Ok, turns out, Ms. Malkin is speaking from experience, yep, she's an anchor baby herself. Really, what more evidence do we need of the dangers of anchor babies. I applaud Ms. Malkin's courage for identifying how dangerous it is to allow people like herself unfettered access to citizenship.

Thank you , Michelle. Enjoy the Phillipines.

Look 9 Ways Before Crossing

I used to live up the block from this traffic circle and everyone visiting me would complain about the nightmare of driving and walking through this beauty. This photo gives good perspective. (If you're familiar with the intersection, the bottom right corner is the Brooklyn Public Library). Apparently now that the neighborhood is going luxe, they're tying to figure out ways to make the intersection more pedestrian friendly.

Don't Get Too Close - They Bite

From Overheard:

Little girl: What's that, mommy? She points to double-decker site-seeing
tourist bus.
Mom: That's what the tourists use to look at us.

Oh Yeah

The Econo-amino. Nicely done, however, the El Caminoization does reduce the area for love making (isn't that what these vans are for?) Conversely, it does provide some outdoor loving options for the exhibitionists.

Art - Liberal or Conservative?

Here is an entry from Michael Berube's blog, written by Lance Manion (who also has a blog). I don't know the protocol of taking an entire entry from another site other than I should fully and clearly cite to the author - done. Anyway this is a thorough and interesting take down of a stupid argument by a prominent law professor, Ann Althouse. BTW, Berube, a professor at Penn State, was voted the #1 most dangerous professor in America in a poll held by right wing lunatic David Horowitz who spends his time trying to intimidate professors on campuses across the country (Berube accepted the challenge and urged his blog readers to make sure he won the title - hilarious). I feel fortunate to have been taught by two from that list. Anyway, this long entry by Lance Manion regards a post by law professor Ann Althouse that argued all great art/artists are actually conservative.

Ann Althouse, middle-aged conservative law prof by day, teenaged rock and roller by night, blogging in between to try to reconcile those two sides of herself, and somehow always managing to discover that to be a conservative is to be a teenaged rock and roller, says that all great artists, from rock and rollers to painters, are conservatives.

To be a great artist is inherently right wing. A great artist like Dylan or Picasso may have some superficial, naive, lefty things to say, but uderneath, where it counts, there is a strong individual, taking responsibility for his place in the world and focusing on that.

(Scroll down when you go to her post; she makes that assertion in her comment section.)

Someone must have given Althouse a copy of The Fountainhead at a too impressionable age.

Great artists in her mind, apparently, are all Howard Roarks, tall, manly, strong-willed, independent, healthy-minded, violent, anti-social proto-fascists, not a Mozart, a Van Gogh, a Henry James, a George Eliot, or a Miles Davis among them, nor a reality-based version of Picasso or Bob Dylan neither.

And apparently she has extrapolated from this Randian fantasy the notion that the American Right is made up of an army of Howard Roarks and isn’t the club of Babbitts and Elmer Gantrys it appears to be to the rest of us.

Nevermind that an army of Roarks is an oxymoron, that in fact the world would be better off if all Right Wingers were Howard Roarks because they would not have anything to do with one another on principle and there’d be no organized political movement mucking up the governing of the country right now.

Althouse isn’t really thinking like a conservative, or a Randian, here. She’s thinking like a third-rate literary critic. She has decided that great artists like Dylan and Picasso don’t know their own minds, that she knows them better than they know themselves, and it turns out they happen to think just like Ann Althouse. We’ve all met people like this. People who can’t appreciate a work of art except as a mirror. Heck, we’re all guilty of this sometimes, usually, though, when we’re 20.

It’s not peculiarly conservative of Althouse to believe that because she likes a work of art or an artist that work or that artist must reflect her own beliefs, virtues, ideals, prejudices, and vanities.

(Didn’t G.K. Chesterson try to make the case that Dickens was a closet Catholic? Was Chesterson a conservative? That’s not a rhetorical question. I’m asking for my own information.)

It’s immature to think that an artist or work that she likes, and which therefore is an image of herself, cannot also reflect things she doesn’t like about herself.

If she likes a song by Bob Dylan, but that song seems to express some “naive,” “superficial” lefty politics, then that message can’t possibly really be there, because Ann Althouse wouldn’t like anything lefty.

This would be like me deciding that Dostoevsky wasn’t an anti-semite because I like Crime and Punishment.

As I said, this isn’t peculiarly conservative of Althouse. But what is, is her assumption that certain virtues---being a strong individual, taking responsibility for one’s own place in the world---are not simply conservative, but exclusively conservative.

Liberals don’t have ‘em.

The idea that Liberals are anti-virtue---anti-family, anti-religion, anti-American, godless!---has come more to the fore since the Right Wing Fundamentalists joined the party, but it has been a driving force of the American Right for a long time, a long time. In fact, that’s how the Republicans attracted the Christian Right.

To be conservative is to be good and to be for what is good.

Conservative would-be culture vultures like Althouse, Jonah Goldberg, and John Podhoretz tie their minds into knots---and paint themselves into corners---because of this assumption.

If you can only like and admire what is good---what is conservative---you are forced to find political meanings that aren’t there, ignore political meanings that are there, and, when you can’t do either you, like or dislike movies, books, songs, paintings, comic books, TV shows, and cereal boxes because of and exclusively for their political meanings.

In this way, Cinderella Man becomes the best movie of 2005.

(The hero, boxer Jimmy Braddock, climbs back into the ring to keep his traditional, nuclear family together and uses his winnings to pay back the dole money he got from the New Deal, because real men don’t need no government handouts. Get it?)

This kind of ideological self-straight-jacketing is perfectly demonstrated in the National Review’s list of the top 50 conservative rock songs, as Amanda showed here the other day---Jon Swift takes it a step further, hilariously.

Many things in life are not political, or at least not primarily so, and should not be politicized. One’s own taste in art and music, for instance.

And an individual’s public political actions have never, ever been proof of that individual’s personal virtue.

It’s just plain foolish to say that because a people are liberals, or conservatives, they can’t be good persons (or great artists). Virtues aren’t gifted upon us by ideological angels.

For the sake of argument, though, let’s say that some beliefs, ideals, virtues even, are inherently conservative. Conservative in that they support and enforce the status quo and legitimize established and traditional authorities.

A conservative might put it that conservative values support and enforce a stable society, but liberals can reply that if that’s the definition of conservative than liberalism is more truly conservative than the corporate capitalistic ethos of the American Right. Another time, another post, and at my place, because my time here at Michael’s is drawing to a close.

Althouse’s definition of great artists as Howard Roarks makes them very much not conservatives. Howard Roarks are not stablizing influences on society, nor do they go in much for legitimizing traditional authorities.

But let’s say that to believe certain things and practice certain virtues is to be conservative.

I can be conservative. I can believe that a two-parent family is best for raising children, I can believe in God and go to church, I can admire policemen and support the troops, I can be against abortion---seriously; not just in that I wish nobody would have to have one, but in that I think it’s wrong (but!)---I can coach little league and be a Cub Scout den leader, I can believe and do all these things (and I really do and have), I can be in many ways very conservative, and still not vote like one because of other things I think and believe that are more important to me, or which I think are more important for the country, and because I don’t think conservatives are any good at governing, which is to say that they can’t bring about a stable and safe society. Ask New Orleans. Ask Badgad.

And in that way, as conservative as I am, I’m a liberal.

Doesn’t stop me from admiring some businessmen and women whose politics I know are to the right of Barry Goldwater’s. Doesn’t stop me from admiring some conservative politicians. And it sure doesn’t prevent me from liking the work of some artists.

I love John Wayne movies.

Well, except for The Green Berets. But that was plain awful.

I also think Charlton Heston’s a lot better actor than he gets credit for being. Sue me.

What I’m saying to you, all my many conservative readers, is suppose you are basically pro-choice, socially libertarian to the point of thinking that heck, a little premarital sex is no big deal, even if it’s two men doing it and especially if it’s two women, and you can think the drug laws are ridiculously draconian, and you can be a conservationist if not an out and out environmentalist, and you you can oppose preventive wars, and think that while God is to be found in the details He’s not necessarily found in church and shouldn’t be found in science text books, and you can believe in the redistribution of wealth (just not that the government should be the redistributor) and be essentially egalitarian and want people to smile on their brother, everybody to get together, and try to love one another right now---you can think, believe, and even work for all that, you can be in many, significant and sincere ways liberal, and still not vote Democratic or consider yourself a liberal, because you think there are more important things for yourself and the country.

As it happens this is one of things that’s the matter with Kansas.

I have been in churches that have had wonderful social outreach programs, whose congregations are alive with real charity, that do all kinds of “liberal” good, and yet are firmly in the category of Right Wing Fundamentalist.

It’s possible to be conservative and liberal.

So embrace your inner liberal! You’ll be happier. You won’t have to reconcile your artistic tastes with your political opinions.

You can admire Dylan and Picasso for who and what they are, not for what you wish they were.

And you won’t have to watch Cinderella Man anymore.

Yesterday at my place I tried to do my bit to reclaim at least one song from the Conservative Top 50, Wouldn’t It Be Nice?

Hard To Believe They Ran This

Today's reports that NY's share of homeland security funding is being cut by 40% has really put the local tabloids in a frenzy. Even the Post is giving Bush grief. Apparently the Post is willing to abandon the party line when it means sticking up for the Big Apple. All that footsie Rupert Murdoch has been playing with Hillary seems to have signalled a change. (this photo is from an older edition of the Post).