Fans at Auburn’s bowl game had a fine time. Except, maybe, for the very last guy.
December, 2011
31
Dec 11
Chick-fil-A Bowl, Auburn vs Virginia
Ahh, the Chick-fil-A Bowl, where 7-5 Auburn wore their home blue jerseys to meet an 8-4 Virginia team that wore some bad orange jersey-helmet combo. Where there was a shaker and a plush cow toy at every seat. Also, thousands of them were parachuting from the catwalk. It may have been the largest airborne insertion since Market Garden:
Oh, yes, the football game. Auburn won 43-24.
Auburn’s defense had trouble getting to Virginia’s quarterback and the Tigers started slow. Fortunately, when the QB was on target his receivers weren’t helping. And he missed a few receivers. Still, Virginia would finish with 312 yards passing.
Auburn’s starting quarterback Clint Moseley went out early with a bad ankle.
Kiehl Frazier, 10, scored two touchdowns and had 58 yards rushing. He had the team at the goal line to score again at the end of the game, but the Tigers killed the clock. After the game he said he doesn’t really like rushing. Read: he’d rather be a quarterback than a 3.4 yards per carry novelty act.
Perry Jones had 32 yards for the Cavs, who finished the game 123 yards on the ground.
With Auburn’s Mike Dyer suspended indefinitely from the team, the rushing duties fell to Onterio McCalebb, who finished with 180 yards and a score on 13 total touches and the MVP award and the young Tre Mason, pictured here, who had nine carries, 64 yards and this 22-yard touchdown out of the backfield.
Gabe Wright eats quarterbacks. The freshman’s sack, Auburn’s only one of the night, set up a blocked punt safety that helped turned the game in Auburn’s favor.
Auburn’s Barrett Trotter, who started the first half of the season but was pulled for Clint Moseley midway through the Florida game with injuries mounting and a stalling offense, came on in relief tonight. He finished with 175 yards and a touchdown passing, including a beautiful 50-yard bomb. He looked calm and collected, gaining 52 yards on the ground.
More important than his stats and steady leadership, he received a great compliment from his coach after the game. Gene Chizik told reporters that if his own son grew up to be like Barrett Trotter he would have done his job as a father.
And so the season ends, with players playing in their first bowl game — in the first half! — outnumbering the team’s entire complement of seniors. There were only five seniors who have been on the team since they signed out of high school. There are only about 15 seniors all told, including transfers and walk-ons given scholarships, wearing the orange and blue. The numbers were low because of the usual reasons: injuries, attrition, leaving school, coaching changes and so on.
The seniors have seen Auburn football at its lowest and its highest, coaching change turmoil and a national championship. In their last three years they’ve scratched out 30 wins, three bowl victories, an SEC championship, an Outland award winner, a Heisman and a national championship.
30
Dec 11
Travel day
We’re back home after a medium-length evening of mostly uneventful travel. The hour isn’t yet late, but it feels like it somehow. The sun went down in the three minutes from the curb to going inside the airport, and somehow that long exposure to darkness brought along a great deal of melatonin and it makes you a bit tired beyond the hour.
Life is tough, I know.
Actually, there was a bit of turbulence I could have done without. I’m refining my taste on bumpy air. The top to bottom stuff I can handle. The chop that shakes the jet from side to side? You can keep it.
Anyway, we are home. But before we got home, we went to Stew Leonard’s:
They’ve been telling me about this place for years. And earlier this year I finally got to sample the cookies, which I’ve also heard about for years. Today I got to walk around inside the place. (We went for more cookies.)
The lights and the colors make for a very rustic, retro feel. The absence of aisles — it is more of a maze than anything — makes it feel very large. And it is something of an event. I could see shopping here. I could see it being amazing to little kids. I could see getting so annoyed with the place I swore it off forever. I can see me shooting a video here on our next visit.
They call themselves the world’s largest dairy store. Their website boasts of a 1992 entry into The Guinness Book of World Records for having “the greatest sales per unit area of any single food store in the United States.”
They focus almost exclusively on perishable items, leaving things like napkins and paper plates to the big chains. They’ve been refining this model from years, perhaps since they opened in 1969.
In the early 1990s Stew Leonard Sr. was convicted of tax fraud. He fell on his sword to keep his son in the business, but there was something like $17 million in cash register receipts moved through their registers illegally. Another son, meanwhile, had his own tax troubles.
There are some great sites to be seen there. The Leonard operation includes its own dairy farms, so they’re bring the milk straight to the store and bottling it there. There is fresh squeezed orange juice. You can have rice cakes spat at you from their machines. There animatronics playing shows every three minutes.
We saw two uniformed security guards. I am not sure why.
How cute is she?
That’s at the Sesame Place Theme Park in Pennsylvania, when The Yankee was four. I enjoy her childhood pictures. There’s always a great expression, and any where she might have even thought about pouting about picture time have long since been removed.
She confessed to putting specific pictures together in the photo albums. There’s a picture of her sitting with her mother on the piano bench, overlapped with another of her, same outfit, standing nearby with her father.
“That was my ‘I want to be a twin’ phase.”
Her mother, who was looking through the pictures with us, was unaware of this phase. But there it was, every few pages, another scene in the yard, or by the Christmas tree, where she was pretending to be a twin in photographs.
You can’t do that in Flickr.
But you could clone it in Photoshop.
This is Maria:
She runs Tutti’s Ristorante and Pizzeria. I’ve had better Italian, but I had to go to Italy to get it. Her daughter is an aspiring model. Her son is a professional soccer player (though his site seems a bit out of date). He’s now in Serie B in Italy after playing the States, Finland’s Premier Division and Iceland. She’s a proud mom.
This is Chef Pasquale Funicello, a master chef from Sorrento, Italy.
This might be the most dramatic picture I’ve ever managed to take with my phone. Nice little depth of field in the Photoshop app. The light was good, he was leaning in just right and I shot it blind, from the tabletop.
The man makes an incredible marsala.
Anyway, we are home. Allie, the cat, is frantic. I am unpacked. My holiday travels were great, as I hope yours were. Being back in my own kitchen, on my own sofa and looking forward to my own pillow, those are treats too.
29
Dec 11
The best tomato pie of your life
We visited Pepe’s. And, no, this is not becoming a food blog. But Pepe’s is Pepe’s. Here’s the old man on the cover of the menu:
But what can you tell about a man from line art? Oh, his pixels are lovely. Mr. Pepe’s actual photograph.
And, no, food photography is difficult, not my strong suit and never works on a cell phone, but this pizza can’t be ignored:
Pepe started his first store 86 years ago and, some argue, it is the origin of pizza in the U.S. Who knows? Truly it is the best pizza you’ve ever had. This is not opinion or left to taste, but rather a fact. It is science and we must accept it.
The place is owned by Pepe’s grandson today. We go there every time we visit the in-laws. Ronald Reagan loved it, too. That was back when Connecticut was a GOP stronghold. The Republicans had won Connecticut in eight of 11 presidential post-war elections, only John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater could break their grip. That led up to Bill Clinton, who also enjoyed Pepe’s.
Connecticut has gone Democrat in the last five elections since 1992. Clearly the pizza is the key.
More of their historic photographs are here.
In New Haven, where Pepe’s started, pizza is one of those cultural touchstones that says much about the diner. You’re a Pepe’s fan or a Sally’s person. The competing pizza place was actually founded by Pepe’s nephew in 1938. Sally’s Apizza is no good. As I wrote in 2007, the long wait outside in the cold and the long wait inside aren’t worth considering:
The waiter, who’s doing you a favor by being there, just got off his bike apparently and is still wearing his Harley vest. He finally gets your order, promptly brings the drinks and disappears for 20 minutes. He returns to ask about your order, which he’s incorrectly scribbled. How one pizza becomes three I’ve yet to figure out. Half-an-hour later, when you finally make eye contact with the waiter (who’s doing you a favor) you inquire as to the whereabouts of the pizza.“We’re on a 90 minute wait,” he sneers while stalking off. Truly, the last half of the sentence is spoken with his back turned. We speculate the wait just grew to 100 minutes. At 75 minutes you consider calling Information to get the number to the nearest Domino’s and order a delivery. At 90 minutes you actually make eye contact with the waiter again (who’s doing you a favor) and get a simple refill.
Throughout this time as people peer into the windows to gauge how busy the little place is you wave them off. “Don’t do it! It isn’t worth it!”
At 100 minutes, as speculated, the pizza arrives.
And it isn’t worth it. The pizza is OK. It is not 100 minute pizza. If such a thing exists you will not find it here. Instead you’ll get a burnt crust and charcoal on your fingers.
Eight minutes later the pizza is gone, because everyone at your table was famished. Ninety-three seconds after that your bill arrives. Sixteen seconds after that you throw the money on the table. The exact change. To the penny. In pennies. Under the pizza tray.
So that’s Sally’s. Pepe’s, meanwhile, made the Guardian‘s best food in the world list.
That’s one down on that list. Forty-nine to go. Lists like that are dangerous for completists. When are you ever going to be in Lisbon, to eat supposedly the world’s best custard tart?
I received a copy of 1,000 Places To See Before You Die a few years ago from a dear friend who decided she wanted to give me angst via the written word. How can I accomplish this? And now I see there are apparently annual editions.
Great. One of my most recent achievements has been removed for the list in favor of some Mongolian Milk trailer 100 yards off the Great Wall of China that is operated by a talented group of tap dancing, orphan entrepreneurs.
She signed the book (which I have lately decided is the best part of receiving a book as a gift):
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
I have visited 30 of the 1,000 sites listed in my copy. (Yes, I’ve counted.) Miles to go, indeed.
Robert Frost knew what he was talking about.
He died in 1963, in Boston. I wonder, did he ever have Pepe’s?
28
Dec 11
On diners and Twain
Ask any photographer and they’ll tell you, in a series of bad photographs a picture of a sign is an egregious sin.
But still, I had to show you this, just to prove it. (Pay no attention to the four clashing fonts.)
That’s a New Jersey diner named after a Missouri literary character. Only in America — one hopes.
The important concept here is that there aren’t a lot of true diners in our part of the world. The Yankee, being a Yankee, misses them. We saw this one while out running errands today and decided to stop in.
Not like any diner I know, but a nice joint. Here’s their site which has that tortured, flash template feel. This is the website equivalent of over-produced pop music. In the photo gallery I found some faces we saw in the diner today, not all of them even of the staff.
The place gets decent reviews, 3.5 stars from Yelp and is well respected by whomever writes Trip Advisor, where they call it the best diner in the area and one of the best in the state. They say it was destroyed by fire and recently rebuilt, which explains the new feel of a family-owned business dating to 1974.
It does not explain why everyone was wearing ties. Or how her tie got in our waitress’ way of returning to the table.
The uptown feel and the carefully designed staff uniforms don’t scream diner to me, but everyone has images in their head. Mine is not very good. I started describing what I pictured as a diner: white, chrome and bright, but not necessarily clean. Narrow and long.
As I was describing this I realized I was talking about the old Tiger Time. And then I grew a bit sad. The place was removed and replaced by an unsuccessful string of uninspired things that have failed one after the other. At this point I’m not even sure what is even in that location.
So we just left it with the world needs more diners, no matter where their names come from.
Oh. This morning my father-in-law told his daughter: I watched television on my iPad! He’d downloaded his cable system’s app and was streaming the Today show. He’s a natural.
Until two years ago he’d vigorously defended against ever even owning a cell phone. Look at him now.
