The Way We Eat Now: Ancient bodies collide with modern technology to produce a flabby, disease-ridden populace [remainder]
I saw The Shins on Saturday night at the Roseland. It was a fun show. The band had great charisma onstage and they sounded great too. It was an all ages show, but I didn't hang out in the over 21 balcony because it was just too hot and claustrophobic. Sondre Lerche plays tomorrow night, but I'm not sure if I'll be attending that because I haven't gotten tickets yet.
People are offering mix CDs, weblog posts, and videos of naked coeds for Gmail accounts on Gmail Swap [remainder]
It's a busy week in Googleland.
Here's the latest: The New Google Groups. Same great Usenet-searching ability (if anyone still does that -- I dunno), but now with the ability to create your own groups (i.e., mailing lists/web discussion forums).
Yowzers.
[via evhead]
Super Size Me opened this weekend in PDX and I went to see it on Sunday. It was a great movie, entertaining and informative. I never want to eat fast food again. Morgan Spurlock, the filmmaker, even has a blog. [via Kottke]
A group of us went to Tabla last night, a newish restaurant at 200 NE 28th, off East Burnside. It's one of those restaurants that serves all the small plates, so inevitably you end up paying a lot to get a satisfying meal. It was delicious. Among the four of us we had a couple of Caesar salads with a hard-boiled egg aioli and breadcrumbs, beef tartare with capers and peppers, fettucine with Dungeness crab, basil, and asparagus, Manila clams with sausage and spinach in a sweet pea broth, Painted Hills skirt steak with lentils and grapes, and seared scallops. I might go there again, but I prefer to go get one meal rather than several small plates. The space was amazing though. Nice and spacious with an open kitchen that you could check out from sitting at the bar. After dinner we headed down the block to Staccato Gelato for dessert. I got some pistachio and coffee gelato that was also very yummy!
Excellent review of GMail by David Pogue. My only complains so far are a couple that Pogue mentions: no signature and no ability to have an email app check your GMail.
I caught this story about Burgerville in the NYTimes last month and was intrigued to hear that an Oregon fast food place was doing seasonal items and using local meat and produce, just like a high falutin' restuarant. I had seen Burgervilles often since I moved to Oregon and I've ignored them all this time because they appeared to be some local-yokel chain with a generic, boring name and exterior to match.
Today I finally checked them out and I was blown away. Now, I've read Fast Food Nation, and I know pretty much everyone in the industry is panned except for In-N-Out. I enjoy In-N-Out burger whenever I'm in California, but after trying Burgerville, I have to say that if Schlosser wrote about them, there's no doubt he would have praised them more than In-N-Out.
The following is a partial list of what they have going for them. Every couple of months, whatever's in season is an item on the menu, and they buy from local producers. My strawberry shake tonight was loaded with a ridiculous amount of chunked fresh strawberries. They offer not one but two different veggie burgers on the menu. They let you add local favorite Tillamook cheese to burgers, just like I have at home. The turkey burgers are made with only cage-free birds. All the beef is Oregon-raised and fed vegetarian diets so you'll never have a mad cow problem. The fish and chips use halibut caught in the Northwest. All buns come from an area bakery. They had nutrition info right on counter, clear as day. And while waiting for my food inside one of their locations today, I noticed in a rack of information on the company there was a pamphlet explaining some healthy environment certification that the chain received because they only buy from responsible farmers and ranchers. Crazy, no?
The food was great, better than what I expect from fast food, but the company philosophy and the way they conduct their business really blew me away. It's not everyday you find a place with a drive-thru selling greasy burgers that cares about anything aside from the quick buck. I think I may have found something better than In-N-Out and I'm glad to know it's in my new home state.
[A Whole Lotta Nothing]Today in the New York Times, Who Really Cooks Your Food?, an examination of the chefs behind the famous chefs at renowned high-end restaurants.
Alert restaurant customers already know that when a second in command is announced on a restaurant menu under the title of chef de cuisine or executive sous-chef, it signifies that the chef whose name is on the marquee might be a few blocks, or a few time zones, away.
Of course this isn't a surprise, though what was a surprise to me was the news that Eric Ziebold, Thomas Keller's chef de cuisine at the French Laundry, has resigned. According to this article, Keller is now back in California managing the relaunch of the French Laundry, which closed for renovations while his New York restaurant, Per Se, opened. Though Thomas Keller is my favorite chef, I haven't had much interest in eating at Per Se, simply because nothing could top my night at the French Laundry. And now that he's not even in the kitchen, I'm less inclined than ever.
[Megnut]
Hello bento box! And other smiley-face food from Japan. Link (Thanks, JeremyT!)
[Boing Boing]
There's an enormous thread of PowerBook G4 15" owners on Apple's discussion boards, going into detail on the "white spots" and "uneven illumination" problem with this model. I bought mine last fall, and had to return it twice (first one was DOA, the second had the white-spots so bad that strangers on airplanes would come up to me and say, "Jesus Christ, what the hell is wrong with your screen?"). Now I'm on my third unit, and it's got the same problem: screen at about 50 percent brightness, big white splotch in the middle of the it.
It's still under warranty, but that doesn't do me any good: There's no way I can part with my machine for 3-7 days while Apple fixes it. Normally, I own two PowerBooks, the current one and a slightly older one (so that I have a working unit during repairs), but when I moved to Europe, I divested myself of all but a single CPU, so now I'm pretty scr0d.
The scoop appears to be that Apple is replacing these lemons with the new 1.5GHz models (which may or may not have the same problem), but I doubt that they'll ship me the replacement, let me transfer my data and then send back the old 'un. I'm just going to have to work off the world's shittiest display until I can scrape up the dough to buy another machine. Bummer.
Recently it has worsened to the point where I took it in today to the Apple store in Old Orchard. The attending Genius immediately noticed the uneven illumination of my display and suggested that it be sent in to the depot for repair. He also mentioned that this was the first time he had ever seen or heard of this problem before, and that there are no reports in the knowledge base that described this issue. When I mentioned to him that he might take a look at this thread in the Apple Support discussions, he wanted no part of it. He said that he rarely reads these forums, and dismissed it as "Oh well, people posting to discussion groups are mostly complainers" (those were not his exact words, but it was implied). Then I told him that people are posting actual photos of this problem and that all of the symptoms look identical for each person, which could indicate a manufacturing defect. His response was that "for those people, I suppose perception is reality".
