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Year: 2007

Oh, I Lose Control, When You Serve Filet of Sole

March 6, 2007 • • 7 Comments

I think it’s this way with many married folk: the spouse isn’t home for dinner and, well, that’s when you eat at the restaurant she hates or perhaps just have Cheerios for dinner. When feeling industrious, I sometimes invent and if it works out, then perhaps I’ll make it for my wife one day. Usually, though, I wind up microwaving some cheese on a couple of tortillas, rolling them up and eating them in between handfulls of peanuts.

I never said I was fancy.

Tonight, as my wife slogs through her MBA program as she does every Tuesday, I found myself feeling adventurous as I inspected the contents of the fridge looking for something different. I really wanted fish tacos, and as fate would have it there were a couple of filets of sole in there. Now, I know sole isn’t exactly a fish taco kind of fish and baking it wrapped in tin foil isn’t really the preferred fish taco cooking method, but it’s easy and that’s the point.

I started off by buttering a piece of foil and placing the filet inside. Next I thoroughly coated it with chili powder, cayenne pepper and cumin, touched off with a bit of sea salt. Whilst (see how fancy this is making me?) the sole baked, I chopped up some prepackaged baby salad greens, a tomato and some onion. I mixed all the veggies in a nice blue bowl and added some of the Whole Foods brand chipotle ranch dressing.

When the fish was nearly finished cooking (about 8 minutes at 400°F) I added some tortillas to warm. At about 8 minutes, the fish was done and I took it from the foil, placed it on the tortillas with the salad mixture and a few drops of Sgt. Pepper’s Tropical Tears mango habañero salsa.

Served on a yellow plate and paired with a glass of ice cold Austin tap water, it was surprisingly good. I even feel a bit guilty for not inventing it while my wife was at home.

Monday Movie Roundup

March 6, 2007 • • Leave a comment

Happening on Tuesday again. This time I blame the internets. They weren’t working yesterday.

Syriana (Stephen Gaghan, 2005)

I broke my pledge to watch nothing new other than Battlestar Galactica until I caught up with the series, but sometimes pledges don’t work.

Syriana is kind of the Traffic of the oil industry except that the plot is thicker (yes, just as oil is thicker than bongwater). Drug smuggling is pretty easy to figure out, but the intersections between Arab nations, energy analysts, Big Oil and the US government is a bit shadier and just as sleazy.

The film is surprisingly low-key considering that it involves a CIA spy, terrorist organizations including Hezbollah, predator drones, an electrified pool, and a fair number of explosions. Everything reeks of evil, double dealing, ethics and morals of convenience, and that peculiar form of “patriotism” that justifies all atrocities, and yet everything in the film is presented in such a routine manner that it all comes across looking banal, which is, I think, the point.

The most intriguing character is George Clooney’s CIA operative, the most ordinary and believable movie spy I’ve ever seen. He’s a tool of the governement, itself a tool of Big Oil, and he carries out his assignments with diligence and a shrug. Only towards the end of the film does he finally see the big picture, and he realizes, just as the audience has finally put together the scattered pieces of this film, what an ugly picture it is.

That Ain’t No Open Records Request

March 2, 2007 • • 9 Comments

Today being Texas Independence Day, it seems fitting to take a look back at a bit of Texas history.

I saw this statue last week when I was on Congress. I hadn’t seen it before, but it commemorates one of my favorite episodes in Texas history: The Texas Archive War. It’s one of those things that makes you proud to be an Austinite.

In 1839, the Republic of Texas’ capitol was moved from the festering swamplands of Houston to Austin, a move that former president Sam Houston did not like. When Houston became president again in 1841, he ordered the capitol moved back to Houston and sent some men to retrieve the nation’s archives from the dirty commie hippies in Austin.

When his goons arrived and began loading up the archives, which were stored in the General Land Office, Austinites were asleep, but Angelina Eberly heard noise, ran outside and fired a canon to alert the locals. Even though she blew a hole in the General Land Office building, Houston’s men escaped with the archives.

A posse of angry Austinites took the canon and chased Houston’s men to Round Rock where they surrendered without a fight (Houston had ordered that no one get hurt), thus ending the Texas Archive War.

The statue honors Angelina Eberly without whose heroism and prowess with a canon, the capitol might still be in Houston and Texas’ conservative politicians would never have been able to enjoy their biennial Austin bashing.

Friday (Semi) Random Texas Independence Day Fifteen (Because Everything’s Bigger in Texas)

March 2, 2007 • • 3 Comments

In honor of Texas Independence Day, a random* ten fifteen of music by Texans or about Texas.

  1. “Texas” – Chris Rea – The Road to Hell
  2. “What Would Willie Do?” – Bruce Robison – KGSR Broadcasts Vol. 10 
  3. “Me and Paul” – Willie Nelson** – Essential Willie Nelson
  4. “I Turn My Camera On” – Spoon** – Gimme Fiction
  5. “Texas Shuffle” – Count Basie – Complete Decca Recordings
  6. “Strawberry” – Butthole Surfers – Independent Worm Saloon
  7. “MacAllister Street” – Bug – K-Nack Homegroan Vol. 1
  8. “On the Run’s Where I’m From” – American Analog Set** – The Fun of Watching Fireworks
  9. “If I Had a Boat” – Lyle Lovett** – KGSR Broadcasts Vol. 7
  10. “The Wasp (Texas Radio and the Big Beat)” – The Doors – LA Woman
  11. “One Big Love” – Patty Griffin** – Flaming Red
  12. “What up, G?” – Retarded Elf** – K-Nack Homegroan Vol. 1
  13. “Rocky Mountain Blues” – Lightnin’ Hopkins – Blues Kingpins
  14. “Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother” – Jerry Jeff Walker** – Great Gonzos
  15. “Big Sky” – Reverend Horton Heat** – Liquor in the Front

*semi-random because I started it on Chris Rea, and skipped over a few Willie tunes for variety’s sake.

**acts I’ve caught live

The Lost Book Club: Of Mice and Men

February 28, 2007 • • 3 Comments

John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men made its appearance on Lost in “Every Man for Himself,” the episode in which Sawyer gets conned and the Others demonstrate the truth of Jack’s season one admonition to “live together or die alone.”

Considering I’ve read it many times, taught it, and the fact that there really isn’t any mystery as to why it was included, it seems to be relatively low hanging fruit for a blog post, and yet, I’m only now getting around to it several months after its appearance. So here it is, the latest addition to my Lost book club.

Of Mice and Men is about two Depression era migrant farmhands. George is small and smart; Lennie is huge, strong, and intellectually a child. They exist in an every-man-for-himself world where no one watches out for anyone and everyone is lonely. George and Lennie are different, though, because “they got each other” and they have a dream to earn enough to buy a small place and live “offa the fat of the land.” This is something that neither can do alone, but Lennie’s strength earns them money, and George’s concern for Lennie protects him. Things go bad when Lennie accidentally kills the boss’s daughter-in-law, leaving George to shoot Lennie, at that point the only merciful option left to him.

It’s a quick and grim read, a meditation on loneliness and the practical impossibility of achieving the American dream in a society that refuses to protect the weak. It’s also one of those books that kids will read willingly since it’s short, the writing is easy, and there’s lots of profanity. Good stuff.

On to Lost. We first see Of Mice and Men in Sawyer’s flashback. He’s shown reading it in prison, a lonely every-man-for-himself kind of place if ever there was one. The prison story plays out in such a way that Sawyer gets an early release and a bunch of money, which he asks to have put in an account for his daughter whom he’s never met and may not even exist. In a way Sawyer is setting her up so that she can find her dream unlike George and Lennie.

It’s referenced on the island as well. Sawyer refers to Ben’s bunny killing and says that he might like Of Mice and Men since a puppy gets killed. Ben feigns ignorance of the novel until they reach the summit of the island where Ben shows Sawyer that he is being held on a different island, that there’s nowhere to go, and that he does need Kate. Ben then throws Of Mice and Men back in Sawyer’s face with this quote:

A guy goes nuts if he ain’t got nobody. It don’t make any difference who the guy is, so long as he’s with you. I tell ya, I tell ya, a guy gets too lonely, and he gets sick.

Sawyer doesn’t recognize the quote and Ben explains it to him, thus revealing that he has a better understanding of both literature and human nature than Sawyer, which is of course how he is able to so effectively con Sawyer throughout the episode.

Of Mice and Men doesn’t provide any clues to the great mysteries of Lost, but it serves as a nice literary allusion in an episode that revisits one of Lost’s central issues, namely the live together or die alone calculation.

Click here for the rest of my Lost book reviews

Life Expectancy

February 26, 2007 • • Leave a comment

I thoroughly enjoyed Dead Koontz’s Life Expectancy. It’s the only Koontz novel I’ve ever read, and it was so wonderfully engaging that I hated for it to be over.

On the night of Jimmy Tock’s birth, his dying grandfather predicts that he will experience five terrible days between his twentieth and thirtieth years. The grandfather gives the dates and then dies, leaving Jimmy to grow up in anticipation of these five terrible days.

Jimmy follows in his father’s footsteps, becoming a baker in a seemingly idyllic Colorado resort town. Raised in a loving family, Jimmy’s life seems almost too ideal, but then all that is about to change, when the first of the five begins.

He faces his five days with cautious hope, but as each one passes and the truth of his grandfather’s prophecy becomes clear, he grows increasingly determined, but never loses his humor and basic faith in himself and his family. These are, naturally, the very things he needs to survive as well as the things that are threatened.

For my money, the most exciting was the second, which had Jimmy and his pregnant wife fighting to survive a harsh winter night in the Colorado Rockies after having been run off the road by revenge seeking psycho, but it was the fourth that really made the book, as it was so surprising and contrary to everything I had come to expect after the previous three days.

Koontz’s book is a fun and often surprising tale of the power of love to hold evil at bay, and it’s a reminder that even our most terrible days often pave the way to bring us our greatest blessings. I found it difficult to put down, and by the end I was wishing that Jimmy had had ten terrible days. But that’s just mean.

Weekend Hound Blogging: Pretty Phoebe

February 25, 2007 • • 4 Comments

If you shoot a black-and-white dog in black-and-white, is it a color shot?

Phoebe cut her leg on Friday. Nothing major, but it gave me the chance to break out the dog first aid kit. I put some hydrogen peroxide on it, and then went back inside to get a towel to dry her leg before putting some antibacterial ointment on the wound. When I came back out she was standing on the porch waiting, but the H2O2 that had run off her leg was gone. Down in the yard I could hear Joey throwing up.

Phoebe is fine, and Joey has now learned what happens to dogs who drink H2O2.

[saveagrey]