Seen on a hat

...worn by an elderly fellow reading a sports newspaper, dressed for light hiking:

Joe is aiming at

being a Professonal with

active and nice savor

Technically, it's off by a syllable, but I'm going to chalk that up to the difficulties of English pronunciation and call it a haiku anyway.

O, the evanescence of things.

Went to the drugstore a while back to buy some soap. (Which reminds me: I should pick up some shampoo soon.)

I always have trouble finding stuff at drugstores. Not just because I'm in Japan. One set of plastic bottles looks identical to another set of plastic bottles, despite them being wildly different products.

This particular time, I had wandered down several likely-seeming aisles - bath products; cleaning products - with no luck. Before mild frustration turned into nuclear rage, I flagged down a passing store dude (the appropriate word does not spring to mind) who was moving some merchandise around and asked where the soap was at.

He looked down at his laden arms,

I looked down at his laden arms.

His arms were laden with many packages of packages of soap.

"Great! I'll take one of those!"

"Really?" he asked, disbelieving. I do have some theories to explain this reaction, but none of them seem adequate. Ultimately, I remain puzzled.

Anyway, I replied, "Sure, why not?" carefully extracting, Jenga-like, a plastic-wrapped three-pack of of soap. Triumphant, I proudly carried my new trophy to the cashier, paid, and departed.

I frequently gaze upon my prize lovingly - and increasingly fretfully - as my the three-pack becomes two, and then dwindles to one. Will I find it again at the store? Or do I value it more highly because of the poignance of its potential to pass from my life forever, like a drifting cherry blossom?*

My prize:

They're quite serious about their branding.

On the off chance that it was not already abundantly clear to you what the picture was supposed to represent:

Is my memory just bad, or are personal hygiene products just not branded like this in the US?

And best of all, it was totally cheap.

*Blame for anything vaguely resembling philosophical musings in this post can probably be laid at the feet of two semesters of classical Japanese literature.

Eating The East Bay

Soundtrack: eels - Saturday Morning

There was a project.

This project was to consume three delicious east bay meals: breakfast at Ole's, lunch at Chez Panisse, dinner at the Blue Nile. Inevitably, things did not go according to plan.

Instead, we ended up eating pretty much anything and everything we could cram into our greedy little gullets.

We woke early to depart for our first stop: Ole's in Alameda.

Delicious waffles topped with fresh strawberries and chopped nuts.
Eggs, hash browns, linguiça.

We had time before our next appointment, which was at Chez Panisse. Getting a reservation there on short notice was nothing short of miraculous.

Serendipitously, there was a vintage car show, ranging from the venerable Model T to the 60s.

Serious doubts were expressed about the concept of a $100 prix fixe meal, but we enjoyed the Chez Panisse café. D had rigatoni, R had calamari and mussels, and I had lamb. All of which were great, but I think what really set Chez P apart was the fantastic sauces. Don't eat your bread right away when it comes - wait for your food, then soak up some sauce.

What phallic tower?

Then we strolled around Berkeley, tossing a frisbee around in old haunts: Memorial Glade, Willard Park, People's Park. The exercise made us feel justified in picking up a picnic snack of salami, cheese, and hot pumpkin soup in the middle of the afternoon.

Once it got dark, we headed back up Northside to pick up some delicious pizzas for the next day's pizza party. Which was a good time. Friends old and new shared in the yum, and they were introduced to the joy of ultimate frisbee.

Roasted potato and onion with Gruyere and
mozzarella cheese topped with fresh mixed herbs
and garlic olive oil.

When I look at Pizza Hut's 'Idaho Special' in Japan I shudder in horror, but if Cheeseboard decides it wants to put potatoes on its pizza today, well, In Cheeseboard We Trust. And since it is Cheeseboard, they gave us bonus slices to go with our half- baked pizzas. Maybe we could have just tucked those fresh, steaming, tantalizingly odoriferous slices into the boxes to eat the next day. And maybe pigs can really have torrid affairs with frogs - while flying.

It is possible that cheese and bread and garlic and potatoes may have spoiled our appetite a tad. This brought us up to a grand total of four meals, and we still had to meet my friend T for dinner.

We had time before dinner, so we drove through the Solano tunnel. I thought it would be nice to get a night view of the bay, so we picked a road which happened to literally be straight up the hill, because switchbacks are for weaklings. After nearly killing Dunk's car, we made it up to the top, to a place where there was no view whatsoever.

There was a decent view and venison (did not eat - sad) on the way down, at least.

Finally, dinner. Dinner was to be Ethiopian food, but the Blue Nile has apparently closed. I think they had been around for a long time, too. Fortunately, there was another Ethiopian restaurant - Finfine - right across the street. It was in a small alcove where we usually went for Korean barbecue and fantasized about going to fondue (though we always ended up getting distracted by KBBQ).

Ten years later, perhaps our willpower was greater, because we resisted the magnetic pull of our old favorite and had a light meal at the Ethiopian place. Salmon and lamb. The proprietor was kind of annoyed because we ordered two portions for four people, but after all we had eaten so far, we were well satisfied.

Impressed by the triumph of willpower and wisdom for meal number five? Don't be. In explaining to T (a recent arrival to Berkistan) the local hot spots, Fenton's Creamery was mentioned.

Then there was nothing for it but to go to Fenton's.

At Fenton's, you might imagine that we would continue the trend of small portions and sharing.

You would be grossly wrong.

There were two of these.

On Saturday, the Eighth of October, 2011, the three of us ate breakfast, lunch, an afternoon snack, a pre-dinner slice of pizza, dinner, and then the alpha and the omega of desserts.

Good thing we got a lot of exercise that day and the next.

On the Evisceration and Subsequent Consumption of Cephalopods

So one day in the supermarket they had whole squid for sale, super cheap. And I had a hankering for some pasta con calamari.

So I took them home. They were so cute! How could I possibly resist?

I named the one on the left 'Lunch,' and the one on the right 'Tomorrow's Lunch.'

When I started washing one, some goop started coming out. I figured there would only be a little goop, so I kept trying to rinse it out. Several minutes of goopy futility later, it occurred to me that there was probably stuff inside my future calamari rings.

Even though I'm reasonably familiar with the processes of removing the inside bits of fish and chicken, it took a while to realize that squid is not all calamari rings and waggling tentacles. But what was in there? And how would I get it out?

Fortunately for the advancement of human knowledge, we have the Internet. So I thought I'd share with you - quite graphically - what I've learned.

What you do is this: you grasp the head, and you grasp the body. Then, gently but firmly, you twist and pull.

Got that? Twist and pull.

Which leaves you with your future calamari rings...

...and everything else.

In an ideal world, the connection between the viscera and the head is stronger than the connection between bits and body. This actually worked just fine for the first one, despite the fact that I had caused the goopy thing (liver equivalent?) to spring a leak in trying to wash out the squid. But for the second one, I had to tease it out, working my fingers in and gently separating it from the body. I probably could have just torn it out, since I wasn't planning on using that bit, but it would have been a good deal messier.

Next comes the removal of the head and beak, by hacking, and then by prodding and tugging, respectively.

Then slicing, then flash frying, then yum!

But all this reminded me of Ikacenter, a fantastic restaurant in Shinjuku that I went to last year.

It's a seafood restaurant, with a particular emphasis on squid. 'Ika' means squid, so that came as no surprise.

When you walk in, there are squids in huge tanks that run for about half the length of the restaurant. They jet around placidly, vividly reminding me of the Bloopers in Super Mario. Now, I don't think you can pick which one you want, but at any rate they scoop one out for you and hack off the tentacles, serving them still wriggling in a small bowl. Grab it (some skill with chopsticks is necessary) and dip it in ponzu sauce with grated ginger. Wriggleicious!
Despite my initial surprise, vigorous chewing subdued the thrashing in my mouth.

This is generally a good time to remember that your momma told you to chew 30 times first before swallowing.

Then they served a sashimi course, laid out in the artfully arranged corpse of a red snapper. This included a couple of types of fish I had never eaten sashimi of before, and it was delicious.

Alas, the only photographic evidence is of the sashimi course.

Next came the body of the squid, laid out flat and sliced finely. The dipping sauce was the goop-generator from inside the squid, which we ground into a paste. Again, totally freaky - but yum! I don't even know what to call it. Pâté de foie squid? Pâté de squid gras? French mystifies me.

Now, I figured that was it for Blooper-San. What more could he possibly have to give?

So we moved on to the next course, which was a fish called enzara. This is a fairly uncommon fish - I've only had it the once. It was simmered in a sweet, dark sauce, and, like everything else, obscenely delicious. And I mean it when I say obscene, because this is a fish that looked like it would have been totally at home bursting out of someone's stomach in a froth of blood and guts in Alien. Bulbous, pupil-less yellow eyes and dagger-like teeth make for a critter you don't really want to meet in an dark underwater cave. The pictures I've found of it on the internet don't really do justice to the horror.

Then, unexpectedly, came the squid's coup de grâce.

The head had been cut into four pieces and grilled (or maybe baked, I don't recall). Lightly salted, crunchy. Yum.

And that, finally, was that, for Mister Squid and dinner.

I didn't do anything exotic with mine - the parts that usually get thrown out were thrown out. I don't know if I would even try it if I bought them still-blooping from the fish market. But the unexotic, standard, flash-fried calamari still was pretty darn tasty.

The above + cheddar cheese = comfort food.

Still, you should try Ikacenter sometime. I'd be happy to go again.

When in Rome, Do as the Vaticans Do: October 17, 2006

Your imagination will have to provide
the organ music and the choir chanting
to the glory of god.

Continuing the recycling of old posts from a 2006 cruise with my parents, but now with 100% more snarky comments!

Yeah, about the pictures? I lied. Didn’t have any time in the morning and forgot my camera in the rush to get to the train. I’ll take them tomorrow. In the meantime, my dad took some pictures, which I will eventually obtain.

This has become a trend. I tend to let people with more megapixels do the photography. Then I get copies of the pictures, edit them, and give them meaning, like here. So if you've promised me pictures, and haven't given them to me yet? I'm coming for you. Oh, and I hate getting pictures off Facebook. They're low quality and fb completely destroys the metadata.

It’s just a 20-minute ride in, if that, to the station right by the Vatican. There’s plenty of trains, they come reasonably often, they’re fast (top speed I saw was 140 kph, around 90 mph), and they’re well-used by commuters. Didn’t get a chance to ride the subway or muni buses, though we did take one of those bus tours, which was not only pretty damn good but also could serve as a convenient day pass (your ticket is valid for 24 hours).

90mph, eh? How about that. Hey, CalTrain? BART? Yeah, that's right you friggin' underperformers, I'm looking at you.

Piazza San Pietro

The bus tour drove by a huge amount of interesting spots, and there was narration, though I couldn’t understand or wasn’t paying much attention most of the time. It was hard to connect the spoken narration with what I was seeing, without someone pointing at what the hell they were talking about.

Oh, god, History! Why? And you were just an innocent bystander... how tragic, to die in a drive-by sightseeing!

"We repel terrorist cavalry charges with
our pikes and garish outfits!"

Before the bus tour, though, we went through the Sistine Chapel and St. Peter’s Basilica. 

The line for the Sistine Chapel was like a treadmill. Basically, at the back of the line, some tour group assistant would recruit you to be part of a tour group with the promise that the group was way up ahead in the line.

So then you’d go way up ahead in the line, cutting ahead of hundreds and hundreds of people, and you’d join a group. Except, here’s the thing - all those other people at the back of the line, and the new people who arrive, are also being recruited.

Not big believers in blank spaces.

The end result was that though you had jumped ahead, there were tons of other people jumping ahead of you. After a while, you find yourself back at the back of the line hoping another tour group will recruit you, and round and round you go.

This is, of course, highly but not totally exaggerated.

Anyway, nice city.

Pizza Party Sunday October 9th at Noon.

Hello Bay Area Friends!

Many of you are refugees from the embattled municipality of Berkistan.

Some of you are not. But even so, you may have heard murmurs of the legendary collectively-owned eatery. Maybe rumors of their exceedingly fine gourmet ingredients have reached you through the tendrils of the (organic) grapevine. Perhaps you've overheard former wild-eyed hippies holding forth on how Bezerkeley, back in their day, was a hotbed of activism, even in food, and how the co-op and Chez Panisse led the charge for orgasmically delicious food everywhere, or at least in the place that came to be known as the Gourmet Ghetto.

photo credit: keenduck on flickr

They're called the Cheeseboard Collective. You may have heard of their pizza.

Our phallic tower is bigger than yours.
That's why you don't get Cheeseboard.

That's right, folks, we're making the fraught, eldritch, as-yet-unconnected by BART journey up to Berkeley, and we're coming back down with an epic stack of succulent Cheeseboard pizzas.

We deal with the:

• Death of Independent Bookstores
• Damn Dirty Hippies
• Absence of Nuclei
• Odors of Patchouli, Pot and Poop
• College Kids, and their
• Sense of Entitlement
• Also, They're Ten Years Younger Than You
• Shit! Well, Back in MY Day...

so you don't have to!



Your intrepid Pizza Retrieval Team:

Dunk

Tony

RGL-22

You should show up at:

photo credit:
ingridtaylar on flickr

The Dunkenpad* - with the possibility of sidling over to Cupertino Memorial Park next door, weather and logistics permitting - at 12:00 PM on Sunday, October 9th. But leave your pistols at home.

Instead of your pistols, you should bring:

$5 for the pizza, unless you'd like to gorge yourself in a fit of freshman 15 nostalgia (Highly endorsed! It's Cheeseboard, so it's, like, healthy. More so than West Coast's artery-clogging cheesy stix, anyway. Mmmm.) in which case we'll accept 10 bucks. Additional contributions of beverages - alcoholic and not - as well as alternative, non-pizza food, are very welcome.

Respond Soon Very Pleasure to
Tony at aweiss42@gmail.com or Dunk at rincewind@mac.com
so we can adjust for the optimal person to pizza ratio.

*my car is still there on street view! if only. *a single, lonesome tear falls*

Disc Golf Might Not Suck After All

If you have heard me hold forth on the subject of frisbee* disc golf before, you may be aware that I do not endorse it. Quite to the contrary, in fact. Playing ultimate frisbee* is all about the frenetic motion, dashing, catching the frisbee* disc at the utmost limit of your abilities - the dive, the leap into space.

It turns out just trying to throw a frisbee* disc with precision and accuracy is also lots of fun. Who knew?

Which one of these looks just like the other?

I happened upon this stunning revelation entirely by accident. The cover of a Tupperware container needed to be in the sink, but that was all of three steps away, and damned if I would bestir myself to go all the way over there just to put something in the sink. Upon further contemplation, it occurred to me that the cover was light, round, and mostly flat.

Suspiciously like a disc.

Shocked by this unexpected discovery, I theorized that, having a disc-like shape, it might travel through the air in a disc-like fashion if I gave it an initial acceleration in the way that I might a frisbee* disc. To paraphrase: if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, if I throw it like a duck, it should fly like a duck. Right?


It flew more like an egret. Maybe because I threw it like one. I would not dare to claim perfect duck-throwing skills, after all.

Nevertheless, fly it did, though ultimately it landed in the dish-drying rack rather than the sink. Enthused by this discovery, I retrieved the projectile and attempted again. Due to the air currents, (I theorized) it tilted contrary to the initial curve that I gave it. I persevered, however, and after perhaps 10 tries, I was finally satisfied with my throw. Some of those throws had actually ended up in the sink, but only because it had bounced off of something else. I wanted it to go in perfectly.

portrait of the blogger as a young duck-thrower

Elated by this simple diversion, it suddenly occurred to me that this was actually frisbee* disc golf writ small. Throw the disc, pick the disc up, throw it again. But I hate disc golf! How could I possibly be enjoying myself?

This has led to a profound re-examination of my life and opinions and prejudices and, like, all sorts of stuff. I would like to actually go to a course (is that the right term?) and try it out.

Fortunately, there is one nearby, so who knows? It might even actually happen.

And if it it turns out I do like it, what's next? Running? Curling? Synchronized swimming? Actual golf?


I am frightened of what I might become. Hold me.

*god damn it, Wham-O.