Chorizo and Eggs (again)

I wrote about this a while ago, but if you need a refresher you can read about my fascination with Midnight Run and the "chorizo and eggs" scene here.

OR, you could skip to the 2:00 mark on the video below to watch it in all it's glory. You really should watch the entire film if you haven't already. One of my favorite films of all time. But the "chorizo and eggs" bit ends at around the 3:30 mark on the video. So it's only a minute and a half out of your life. Watch it.

Anyway, this past Saturday we woke up a bit early for some reason. Instead of rolling over and going back to sleep, we decided we were hungry. So we went out to the local diner/pancake house for breakfast.

And what was the special of the day? You got it. Chorizo and eggs. Served with potato pancakes to boot!

Best.
Breakfast.
Ever!

Not easy being green

I love this song by LCD Soundsystem.

I love the video even more. Wow!

Nice digs

I want an island.

Oracle Corp. CEO Larry Ellison is buying a Hawaiian Island, Lanai to be precise.  Well, he's buying around 98% of the island. Not sure how that works exactly, but then I'm not a super-duper ka-billionaire. If reports are correct, he's purchasing the island with cash. No need to get into debt to purchase your dream island if you have $600 million or so burning a hole in your pocket, amirite?

Listen, I don't need a 141 square-mile island with nearly 50 miles of lush coastlines in a tropical setting. I want that, but I don't need it.

I'd be perfectly happy with a couple of two three acres someplace where it doesn't snow in the winter and isn't abysmally hot in the summer. Someplace within an hour or so of a decent-sized city in case I crave the nightlife after several months of living like a hermit crab. Someplace with a liquor store nearby that delivers, or at least accessible to a FedEx delivery truck. Someplace where we can sun-bathe in the nude without scaring or impressing the neighbors. Someplace that won't find itself 20 feet underwater when Hurricane Mathilda hits. Someplace that will fill my days with fishing, beach-combing and smiles and my nights with passion, booze and sweet dreams of doing it all over again the next day.

Is that too much to ask?

Enjoy your island, Larry.

Dick!

In Memoriam

Click here and/or here

30-Second Spot

Dammit if advertisers have finally found a way to get me to watch a commercial after all these years.

I rarely watch live television.  All of our TV show watching is done through the DVR, so we can eagerly fast-forward through the ads. Just about the only live television I watch is baseball. And when I watch baseball, I'm usually doing something else at the same time like working or surfing the internet. So when the inning is over, I bury my head in my laptop until the game comes back on. Easy, peasy.

Commercials, for a long time now, have had zero effect on my life.

Except for those on the Internet. You know the ones I'm talking about.  You see an interesting link that contains an embedded video of something or other and you hurry over to watch it. Except your entertaining video doesn't start for 5 or 10 or even 15 seconds because an ad has to play first. I fucking hate that.

Sure, ads on videos on the Internet have been going on for a long time now. But many (I would say most) of them gave the viewer of opting out of watching it with a little "x" in the upper right hand corner or a link that offered "Proceed directly to video".  Something like that. Then they began appearing with a little countdown clock. "Skip advertisement in 10, 9, 8...". More annoying, but at least I could appease my anger god by watching that little countdown clock reach zero.

Now it seems that most of the advertisements don't even offer the viewer the chance to skip it.  Immediately or with a countdown clock. AND it seems like the ads are getting longer and longer.  The other day I went to a video on MLB.com to see a replay of something that happened in a game. The replay was 22 seconds of digital video. I had to sit through a 30-second advertisement before I could watch that 22-second clip.

I. Wanted. To. Kill. Someone.

I know, I know...I could have just skipped the video altogether and not watched the stupid commercial. But the instantaneous nature of the Internet allows us to go see something exactly when we want to see it. Our brains, my brain at least, isn't prepared for a 30-second advertisement beforehand. I just don't know how to process it. It's a short enough time-span that I'm really not going to get up and do something else. I don't have time to take a piss or grab an ice-cold one from the fridge. I'm not going to jump to another site quickly to check something out in the meantime. I went to that first site at that moment because I wanted the Internet to entertain me IN THAT MOMENT!

So I sit there, blood boiling, and I watch the damned commercial. After all this time, they finally figured me out. I fucking hate that I'm such an easy mark.

Oh, here's something fun. New Era Caps and Major League Baseball are doing this wonderful commercial series with Craig Robinson from The Office and Nick Offerman from Parks and Recreation. It's a North Side/South Side Chicago rivalry thing between the Cubs and White Sox. Great commercials (dammit!).  I hadn't seen the newest one yet, but it hit the Web today. So I went over to Funny or Die to watch it.  Yup...to watch a commercial.

And I had to sit through a 17-second advertisement before I could watch it.

Welcome to my Hell.

Chicago vs. Chicago: Round 3 from Nick Offerman

You're a handsome devil. What's your name?

Went searching for a old blog post of mine yesterday, and I realized I used to write sooo much more back in the day than I do now. Not just the frequency of my postings, but the actual content within each post. I had this whole process back then. I would keep a list of blog ideas on a virtual sticky note on my laptop. Anytime I saw something or heard something or thought of something during the day while I was working, I would jot down a note. The list was extensive at times. Then I would sit down about an hour before heading to bed and peruse the list for a blog post for that night. And I would just write. Without even really thinking about it.

My current process is a little different, to say the least. My sticky note of blog ideas is pretty much empty because I stopped updating it a year or so ago. I think about posting something and I realize that I don't have much on my mind. Then I throw up a Youtube video or something else quick just because I'm feeling guilty about letting this old blog die a quiet death.

I've read other bloggers complain about similar dry spells in the past. Sometimes they will even go so far as to proclaim a quantum shift in the blogging paradigm. Twitter and Facebook have made blogs obsolete, blah, blah, blah... I'm not sure I'm buying it. I think we, bloggers, tend to take our own personal attitude toward blogging and make some sort of  "it's not me, it's us" proclamation. As if it's the very idea of blogging that has changed rather than the individual blogger itself.

It might all be true, but I really have no way of knowing that. I'm just a lone blogger who rarely ventures outside of my own blogging circle. I have NO IDEA what is really happening in the greater blogosphere because my community is so small. I haven't updated my feed reader with any new blogs in this side of forever. Well, I'm constantly updating it with baseball stuff. But that's not what I meant. Personal blogs.

And yes...some people are blogging far less than they used to. Myself included. Shit happens. Then there are others who keep on keeping on.  Much respect and love to those cats.

I think I'm somewhere in the middle. I still enjoy the time I spend jotting down what's going on in my brain onto this here blog. And I am in a bit of a rut, but I don't think it's permanent. Gonna try to kick-start the inner daily blogger in me and see if I can get it going again. We shall see. I'm making no promises here.

But I'll be here. Hopefully bringing the suck a little bit more often. Hehehe.

Home

There's a dude out there named Alex Ebert. And things weren't going so well for old Alex. He broke up with his girlfriend, moved out of his house that he shared with his best friend and entered one of those 12-step programs to deal with addiction. Not sure what kind of addiction it was, but he wasn't in a good place.

Then he started to write a novel about a messiah figure named Edward Sharpe. Sharpe was brought to earth to heal and save, but he wound up being tempted by earthly pleasures...women. As they do. It was all so distracting.

But that was Edward, and this was Alex we were talking about. Or maybe they are one and the same. Edward/Alex met a singer named Jade Castrinos in Los Angeles, and then they and a bunch of musicians started touring around the country in a big old bus as Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros.

It's all quite the trip.

You get the feeling that Chuck Manson might dig this Edward Sharpe character. Or vice versa. Manson wanted to be a musician first before he became a crazy person. Or maybe when he was already a crazy person. It's hard to put a timeline on these kind of things. Sanity...ya know.

Let's just hope history doesn't repeat itself.

Bullets Over Tuesday

Just because. Just for scuzz. If you follow me on Twitter, some of these items may be repeats. Sue me.

• Went out of my comfort zone and made something that I had never heard of much less made before on Monday night. Gia had a hankerin'* for steak, and a hankerin' for steak in a beurre rouge sauce in particular. I've got high school level French going on, so I knew that beurre = butter and rouge = red, but that's about all I knew, besides the hunk o' meat that is. Turns out it's a steak in a red wine/shallot reduction with butter. A LOT of butter. This is not something for the faint of heart. But it is oh-so-fucking-delicious. It ain't going on the regular weekly rotation, but maybe once a month or so... We shall see. 

The sauce was a creamy, dark pink and the meat was slightly above medium. Delish!

•  I saw today that Katy Perry has a concert video coming out. My first reaction was that I couldn't care any less. Then I saw that it was in 3-D and I suddenly became more interested. I'm still not gonna see it, but I'm definitely...interested.

click for the jiggle

•  We just finished this season of Mad Men. That show is freakin' amazing and I don't care if you agree or disagree with me. I just love it. Now we have a month or so until the final season of Breaking Bad begins. Or ends. Sniff. I don't think I could enjoy TV as much as the dramas that AMC and FX are producing. Amazing stuff.

• Speaking of well-made television, I finally saw Season One of Game of Thrones a few weeks ago. Watched it over one weekend. I had just finished the first book in the series, so I immediately wanted to see what HBO did with it. It didn't disappoint. I'm reading Book Two right now, and I understand the second season has just ended. Excellent. I can't wait to watch it. More amazing stuff.

• Speaking of unknown television, I recorded the first couple of episodes of the new A&E drama Longwire. It's about a lawman out of Wyoming. Other than that...I have no idea. But I dig shows about tough guy lawmen in cowboy hats (see Justified), so I'm willing to give it a go. Anyone watching?

• My pee is gonna smell like asparagus tomorrow. I just know it. Too much information? Tough shit.

That's all I got. See ya!

*When you are in the mood for steak, you have to use the word "hanker". It's the law. 

Time to Ramble

Sure, it's not OFFICIALLY summer yet, but that doesn't mean that we aren't in the full swing of things here at the the Verdant Dude Ranch. I know it's summertime because Will Smith and DJ Jazzy Jeff are rapping about it (again). If that doesn't make it official, then I don't know what does.

My calendar turns to summer officially when we have our first ramble* of the season. I've mentioned it before here, but a ramble involves good food, good friends, good booze and good music. In no particular order. We had a mini-ramble, just my baby and me, on Thursday evening. Just to test the waters, you see. Cranked up our favorite Pandora station, mixed some cocktails and hung out in the backyard overlooking the harbor in the hour or so before sunset. Good times.

Our first official ramble took place on Saturday evening. Some great friends came over and we grilled up some big horkin' chili burgers, drank bourbon, wine and delicious beers, listened to a great playlist that Gia put together on iTunes and had a whole bunch of laughs.  The first ramble of many in the coming months.

Photo by Keb5777...a fellow rambler

So, do you ramble? What do you call it? What does it entail?

*Name inspired by Levon Helm's Midnight Ramble. An event that is still going on even after his death a few months ago. I can't believe that we never made it up there while he was still kickin'. Shame on us...

Trubba Man

Got a comment today from a post from 3 years ago that made me really happy for some reason.

Here is the post and feel free to comment again.

_______________________________________________________

A million years ago (or back in the 80's), I used to read National Lampoon every once in a while. And back then they had a feature that may or may not have been a regular column called "Dear Trubba Man"

It was a fake advice column that they ran with a picture of Joe Frazier, I believe, as Trubba Man.  A picture kind of like that one on the right.  Maybe it was Ken Norton, I dunno.  But I think it was a boxer at the very least.  It wasn't the smartest feature published, and in retrospect it was probably pretty offensive to African-Americans.  But for some reason, I have never forgotten it.

A typical letter would read as follows:

Dear Trubba Man,
My girlfriend recently broke up with me and she threw all of my clothes out on the front lawn. What should I do?

To which Trubba Man would most likely reply,

If it were me, I'd kill da bitch! But seeing as how you seems like a wussy kind of guy, here's whatcha gonna want to do.  Blah blah blah.

And then he would go on about exacting his revenge in some funny/demeaning/stereotypical way.  It was mostly funny because of the picture of Joe (or Ken or whomever). 

Does anyone out there remember this feature from National Lampoon? Am I the only one?  I think Trubba Man would have had a field day with the Michael Jackson funeral.  Seeing as he was a wussy kind of guy and all.

And in totally un-related meanness, which slack-eyed monster is more awful to look at:

Forrest Whitaker or Paris Hilton?  I'm choosing Paris. I'm a hetero white guy, but I would totally stick it to Forrest given the choice of the two.

Because she makes me ill.