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Category: Random Stuff

The catch-all category for random things about life in Austin, food & drink, politics, the occasional rant, whatever else.

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.

The Two People You Meet on Congress Ave

February 19, 2007 • • 7 Comments

Today, I spent a bit of time doing something I haven’t done in years – wander around downtown taking pictures.

This one of the Frost Tower is my favorite from today. I spent a good amount of time trying to find an interesting shot, when I got the idea to go inside and see if there is an observation deck in this newest of Austin’s buildings.

I walked into a mostly deserted lobby and the security guy behind the desk jumped, half-shouting across the cavernous space, “Can I help you?”

“I was wondering if there’s an observation level here.”

“No sir. This is a private executive office building and closed to the public.”

I marveled at his ability to italicize so many words in one sentence, but I took the hint and read enough of his mind to make out, “…hit your ass on the way…,” and so off I went.

After crossing the street, I noticed this shot. I had to wait for a red so as not to get run over, and I had some help from a fellow photographer who was scouting places to shoot a parade next month. He shaded my lens for me and watched for oncoming cars while I took the picture.

Walking along I couldn’t help but marvel. Most people you see walking along the street on an ordinary day remain a mystery, but in the space of five minutes, unnecessary hostility had been erased by simple kindness.

Looking back at the Frost Tower, I thought about the way old gothic buildings were decorated with angels and devils, but today we build them steely clean with lines like highways to the heavens. Meanwhile, plenty of angels and devils can be found at street level.

Monday Movie Roundup

February 5, 2007 • • 2 Comments

Two tales of terror…

Saw III (Darren Lynn Bousman, 2006)

Crap. Pure crap. I didn’t see the “twist” coming and I didn’t care. This was a real shame since Saw was such a fine example of the no-budget psych thriller.

Saw II was good, but Saw III was a waste of time. Its point is to make the audience cringe in disgust, but the fear never gets inside you. We went to bed laughing, but not in the same way that the brilliant Scream films make a person laugh while gettin’ skeert.

Saw should have been cut off (ouch!) after the second one. Oh, well. Ch-Ching.

An Inconvenient Truth (Davis Guggenheim, 2006)

Al Gore should have been our president. The sad thing is that had he been the man who narrates An Inconvenient Truth, – passionate and funny – he might have.

I read the book a few months ago (here’s the link to that post), and most of my thoughts about the subject haven’t changed and since the movie hews pretty close to the book, there’s not much point in reiterating except to say that this is something we should all be concerned about.

The film version is gripping and disturbing, at times both heartbreaking and wickedly funny. Everything a good horror flick should be. Watching it, I couldn’t help but think about the Saw films in which “Jigsaw” places his victims in traps designed to make them face their own sins and crimes, each victim forced to face his or her own inconvenient truth. Escape is meant to be excruciatingly painful, but always possible. His victims, however, are rarely able to muster the strength of will to inflict the necessary pain on themselves to escape before it’s too late.

An Inconvenient Truth explains the workings of the trap we’re in and offers a way to escape, though Gore is much for comforting than “Jigsaw’s” mechanical puppet head. The question is, do we want to save ourselves badly enough?

Jigsaw’s infamous question, “Do you want to play a game?” has already been asked.

So Long, Molly

February 1, 2007 • • 4 Comments

When I think of Molly Ivins, I think of the importance of laughing in the face of tragedy. That’s not what she was necessarily about, but two things come to mind when I think of her…

I listened to her critique the language of George W one September morning on my way to work. It was sunny and beautiful and I sat in the parking lot at school while she finished up. I went in laughing at her jokes and disgusted with our president. Later, that Tuesday had turned into 9-11 and I drove home wondering if I’d ever laugh like that again. But then, I remembered what she said – since forgotten – and laughed. It was probably the last time I laughed at Bush with real humor and not as a defense mechanism.

Jump to November 2006. We were fortunate to go hear Molly Ivins lecture about the death of journalism. You could tell it wasn’t easy for her, but she had the audience at Hogg Auditorium laughing as she shared some her best stories: the gang pluck incident, her first murder (covered, not committed, she pointed out). She talked about the need for locality in newspapers and how a good newspaper had to be of its community.

She made us laugh; she made us think, and it was easy to see she was fighting hard, that she was losing, that she damn sure wasn’t going to give up. Being a Texas progressive taught her to fight hard and do it with a smile, and it sounds like that’s how she fought cancer.

It was a weird night, and a week later a friend of ours lost his own battle against cancer. These things are all mixed up for me now, blended together into the swirl of memory, but one thing stands out when I think of Molly Ivins: Laugh. No matter what.

Links to other blogs remembering Ivins: In the Pink Texas, Off the Kuff, PinkDome, Bad Astronomy Blog, Brains and Eggs, Capitol Annex, Eye on Williamson County, Burnt Orange Report

Update: In the comments, Jessica suggested that this post wasn’t complete without some links to Ivins’ writing. Jessica is right, so here are some links: