Delaware is a fine state, and it’s just across the border. Indeed, the last time I was in this part of Pennsylvania we jogged across the state line. That was just to be able to say I’d done it. (One of several state lines I’ve ran or rode a bike across.) But today, we did it for a more sensible reason: to save on sales tax.
So, yes, a few more Christmas presents, then. And then some stocking stuffers. Someone who occasionally reads this site was on today’s list, so I’ll say no more.
Also … if you’re the sort who can’t wait to spell out on social media the Christmas presents you got for anyone older than 10, don’t do that.
With that done, we sought out lunch. We settled on the same place we had dinner last night. California Tortilla, a fast casual Mexican-adjacent style restaurant. (We ordered different things today, of course.) Have you been to a Moe’s or a Qdoba or Chipotle? You’ve had a lesser, but similar version of this place. On a wall where you order there’s an enlarged photo advertising their catering. (They do weddings!) The photo has a bride holding the familiar overstuffed burrito. She’s about to bite into the center of it. Her adoring new husband looks on and we’re left to wonder if she really bit it, right there, in her dress, or that was just a careful pose.
If you eat a burrito like an ear of corn salsa is going everywhere.
On the opposite wall is this sign.
And below it … this seems unsanitary, somehow.
How many of those bottles, do you suppose, should be refrigerated? To say nothing of the many hands making germy work.
We were discussing the ranking of these sorts of restaurants, and I only share this in case you are confronted with unknown opportunities, and to point out that The Yankee is mistaken. The official order of this genre goes like this.
She thinks California Tortilla is in the top spot, but she was hungry when she said that, so it could be a blood sugar thing.
The Yankee’s god-sister and god-husband-in-law took us to White Dog Cafe — five locations in the greater Philadelphia area — for dinner. I had the farmer’s pie.
It’s a shepherd’s pie, but with better mashed potatoes, proper zesty mushrooms and some serious carrots. I’d get that again. Later, more cards with the kids. Because, sure, I can get beaten up around a kitchen table two nights in a row.
I have no content filler for November. I should really work on that.
Visited the grocery store last night, for the third time in as many days. I had to pick up a few birthday cards. If you stand there, muttering, long enough, you can find a card that isn’t outrageously priced. That’s what I learned last night. Took some time to learn that lesson.
Also strolled by the produce section, and thought I’d pick up a few different varieties. An economist inspired me.
As we enter the season of #appletwitter, allow me to remind you of my personal apple tier list from last season. What will this season hold? Will Honeycrisp move up to "S" tier? Will Cosmic Crisp be as good as it once was? Stay tuned! 🍎 🍏 https://t.co/tjn9KI8spFpic.twitter.com/4e05EAL6Ib
So, for today’s lunch, I present you with the Autumn Glory.
I can tell you this about my first Autumn Glory. It was surprisingly juicy. It holds a mild, even sweetness. The label at the store, and what I’ve found online, said I’d find hints of cinnamon and caramel. But my palette might not be sophisticated enough — or perhaps my peanut butter sandwich overwhelmed it — and no cinnamon or caramel notes were detected.
It had an odd skin texture, almost rubbery. But the apple was surprisingly consistent all the way down to the core.
I suspect I will eat an autumn glory apple again, if for no other reason than I purchased two of them.
I’m finally making real progress in Andrew Ritchie’s biography of Major Taylor. This is when the champion cyclist was traveling and racing around the world — an exhausting proposition at the beginning of the 20th century, I’m sure.
I worked my way through his peak racing years, his retirement, return and final retirement. This is where biographies get tough, particularly in Taylor’s case. He fell into obscurity and some sort of financial difficulty. There’s two decades to work through. Two decades after you’ve been either the toast, or target of racist hatred, depending on where he was. What happens in those years?
I guess we’ll find out in the next few nights. There’s another book to get to, after all. There’s always another book.
We can quickly work the two most recent CDs from the Re-Listening Project. One is hardly obscure … Stone Temple Pilots “Purple,” was their second record. Scott Weiland had quickly hit his stride and was stepping away from the grunge prototype. Seattle was still in there, but this was STP as they should be. “Purple” debuted at number one, was six-times platinum in the United States, three-times platinum in Canada, two-times in Australia and also in New Zealand. It was, in fact, one of the best selling albums of the 1990s.
This record is also one of the ways I know I had too much free time in my freshman year of college. We realized that each of the evenly-numbered tracks were huge, or going to be. (The odd number songs are all pedestrian, at best.) Indeed, we were right. I have a recollection of exactly where I was standing in our place when this epiphany set in.
Track 2 was “Vasoline,” track 4 was “Interstate Love Song” track 6 and track 8 were “Pretty Penny” and “Big Empty,” respectively. The first two topped the Mainstream Rock chart and hit number two on the Alternative Airplay chart. “Pretty Penny” somehow stalled out at number 12, “Big Empty” got to the third spot. Track 10 was never released as a single, but it has its moments.
The best song on the record, then as now, is the hidden track … and it’s number 12. And this, weirdly, isn’t even performed by a member of the band, but by a Seattle musician named Richard Peterson.
Somehow, learning it isn’t one of the STP guys changes my impression of the whole thing. (So … thanks … world wide web …) But it also deepens the hilarity. (So thanks, world wide web!)
Scott: “The guy is a kind of autistic savant who has this bizarre obsession with Johnny Mathis. He follows him around on tour when he’s in the north west, and he collects money on the street to fund his own recordings. We kept playing this song on tour before we went out, and it seemed fitting to put it on the end of the album.” (Melody Maker – 6/4/94)
Scott: “No one would be able to write a song like that for us. We had it played before our live shows.” (Sub-Line Magazine Germany – 8/1/94)
That song wasn’t on the Japanese edition of the disc, and they lost out. (They had, for whatever reason, a David Bowie cover.)
The fun of the Re-Listening Project to me, aside from the occasional flash of some place or time or activity associated with a song, is the mystery of what’s going to play next. I am putting these in my disc changer in order, but I don’t read the disc first. So that beat between one and the next is kind of fun. Do I remember what’s next? Am I going to like the first track? How much of this am I going to skip over? What poorly constructed paragraphs am I going to write about this? Does this hold up? Do I still like it? Did I ever like it?
The answers, this time, were “Not this time. Nope. A lot of it. Not much. Not at all. In no way. And, finally, not really, no.
There was just something weird going on in 1995 that let 311 rise to major airplay. I bought this — or picked it up in a giveaway stack, I don’t recall — on the strength of the single and have pretty much regretted it ever since. The record hit number 12 on the Billboard 200, and topped the Heatseekers Albums
chart and “Down” found it’s way atop Modern Rock Tracks, and the blue album sold three million copies, so I’m not kicking anybody here. And, the band is still doing it. They’ve released 13 studio records over the years, so good for them. But, man, this whole record is one riff, off-key harmonies and somehow a bunch of white dudes from Omaha put a little ska and reggae together with two chords and decided to rap and … we … accepted that?
This was not quite two years before Dre unleashed Eminem, so that explains a lot, or so I have convinced myself.
This is the only song that sounds different than the rest of the record, and they could only keep that uniqueness for 52 seconds.
OK, this one is a little different from the rest, too. But you can’t hear it without thinking, “Guys from Omaha. Yep.” And you can get that sentence out exactly twice before that same lick comes back.
It’s the whole album, and it never gets played, and this is why. Though they are still touring, music venues, Hard Rock hotels, festivals, cruises, so this works for some people. But it’s never worked for me.
We purchased a new mattress, and it arrived yesterday. My lovely bride got the thing upstairs without me. She took the old mattress off the box spring, put the new one on last night. A mattress, you would think, is one of those things you want to go down to the showroom. Kick the tires, lay on it for 36 seconds, and all of that. Well, where has that ever gotten you? A mattress that works for a few years before you buy a foam topper, which works for a few years. Eventually your sleep patterns leave impressions in all of that, so the foam topper comes off, and the now old mattress isn’t much better. And how many times have you done all of that?
So she found an online service. Good reviews. Excellent return policy, and time will tell about their guarantee language — and whether the company has any longevity under this business model. She did this unilaterally, because the old one has been bothering her the most, she’s a bit more particular, and that’s how it works. Whatever makes you, quite literally, more comfortable, dear.
The new mattress, I learned last night, is a little taller. You need a running start. And as we discussed this afternoon, the biggest and most immediately noticeable thing is that you can just, sorta, roll over. Not every muscle group needs to be activated to make a common turn from back to side.
If the new mattress does that alone it’d be a win for internet merchants everywhere.
As for the first night’s sleep part, it seemed unremarkable. Pretty much the ideal, right?
All that sunshine from the last few days has regressed to the mean. And that’s just … mean.
The day, being a Thursday, slowed down a bit compared to the earlier part of the week, and I managed to put in just eight hours, so it the net perception was: null. Many people worked from home because of close contacts to Covid-positive people, and I have to figure out how to do that, without invoking karmic problems.
I spent part of the morning working on a podcast. Today we enjoyed our usual once-a-week Chick-fil-A takeout lunch. The afternoon’s highlight was probably cleaning up some Google Docs and preparing for a Friday morning meeting.
After a few days of doing everything rapidly it is nice to luxuriate in spending too much time on one thing at a time, is the point.
The television folks have uploaded two of their most recent sports shows for you. Here are all the latest highlights on all the coolest sports around here.
And here’s another sports show, featuring different perspectives and probably more fun than you should have outdoors in Indiana in January.
There will be another studio talk show online tomorrow. And another simulcast TV-radio project after that. There are also all of the online chats they do. The sports media students simply don’t stop anymore. It’s impressive when you consider the rest of the demands on their time.
The daily duds: This feature is going away because I realized that the goal was pointless. I was trying to document looks so I wouldn’t reproduce them too quickly, but that’s impossible without a proper indexing system. So today I’m just showing off this lovely pocket square my in-laws got me for Christmas.
Also, that’s one of my favorite sports coats. It has character and comfort, which is to say that, once you get past the print, it’s super soft.
And tonight’s dinner, because it looks healthy enough to brag about.
That’s three nights in a row of healthy things. We’ll have to blow this up tomorrow.
Yes, this is Monday, but I’m writing about Monday. The next few days will be in arrears. It’s a vacation thing and I’ll somehow cope with the difficulty of the problem.
Spirits were high before the 10K. Here are most of us. Anne was on the course doing a 5K because she’s an awesome overachiever. The Yankee, Brooke, Andre and Stephen and I all did the slightly less ambitious 6.2 mile run over one of the tallest bridges in the southeastern U.S. We had to run the bridge twice.
Anne ran the bridge three times. (She also finished in second in her age group.)
This is at the starting line. Limited field by design. Everyone had to show proof of vaccination and all of that. Here, I thought, is a sign of maturation as a human and my bowing to inevitability. The joke I used to make right here was “Look at all of these people I have to pass.”
(Knowing I would never pass all of those people. I have landed on the podium in exactly two foot races as an adult. Both, you might say, were of a limited field.)
But, today, my joke was “Look at all of those people that don’t have to pass me!”
And here we all are, after weaving through many of the beautiful squares in the historic district we finally have our first good view of the bridge we’re about to go over.
And one of the views from atop the Savannah Bridge.
This is the largest single ocean container terminal on the U.S. eastern seaboard, and the nation’s fourth-busiest seaport. It is a cable-stayed design, and it’s 185 feet from here to the river below.
Off the bridge, around a cloverleaf, up one little kicker and around a little right hand turn you’ll find the finish line, and your medal, and some fruit and other healthy snacks.
Speaking of food … We tried a new place for dinner Saturday night, on account of the mileage we’d already enjoyed. Plus it got good reviews, and we’re going to give Cha Bella another good review. It’s a farm-to-table concept, a term that’s lost all meaning, I think, but Saturday night it meant tasty. We had a gnocchi appetizer.
I had a tasty grouper entree, which did not photograph very well, but it was tasty. We tried the cheesecake, which had a goat cheese blend. It was a super creamy dish, and every now and again, you got that hint of goat cheese.
It was a delicious outdoor dining experience. And we made everyone go back with us again on Sunday night. Because there were other things to try.
And, look, if you have different servers on different nights and they both react the same way when someone orders a specific dish, you get that specific dish. This is the hog chop.
And I’m pretty sure I don’t need to ever have another pork chop in my life. But I also wonder why everyone doesn’t make their chops like this one. Because they should.
And this weekend I also had the opportunity to enjoy a few ghost signs. This was one of the better ones. Everybody knows, Uneeda Biscuit.
That’s a 19th century brand, made it all the way to 2008, when Kraft (which took hold of all of the old Nabsico properties in 2000) discontinued it. The old original Nabisco, NBC (itself a product of three different mergers) rolled out the Uneeda campaign in the 1890s, when no one said things like “rolled out the campaign.” Within a year or so, NBC was selling ten million Uneeda biscuits a month.
I don’t think I ever had a Uneeda, which you’d, of course, today call a cracker. But I did have some good biscuits this weekend.
Tomorrow, we have to leave Savannah and travel back to Indiana. But I probably have two more days of content to work through here. Anything to extend the trip.
food / Friday / IU / photo / television / video — Comments Off on Easing into the weekend … with an 11-hour day at the office 15 Oct 21
My morning started with a meeting. I used the Zoom option, because some people have trouble with masks. My day ended with another meeting. There was no Zoom option. I wish there had been a Zoom option. But not because of the masks.
My day should have ended with that meeting, but I ended up running into a prospective student and her father and talked about the school for a while. And I shot an instructional video and finally left the office at 7 p.m. On Friday. All of this was made possible because that Friday afternoon meeting ran until 6 p.m.
In between those meetings, though, I caught up on a week’s worth of emails and many of the small chores that fill up everyone’s work week. I also went to the Bureau of Motor Vehicles to get a temporary handicapped driver placard. The Yankee can’t drive for a few weeks, doctor’s orders, but parking on every college campus in America is a premium commodity, and she’ll be limited in her walking distances the next few weeks.
So I got the temporary tag. And I updated my car’s registration, as well. And this was the time of the day when the sun broke through the clouds. It was a wonderful moment to be outside doing things.
The other thing I did was to notice that the BMV office is close to Carson’s, the best barbecue in town, so I picked up a sandwich to take back to the office.
It isn’t Bob Sykes, but it will do get the job done in the moment.
I haven’t updated this space with any of the student television this week, so let’s get caught up.
The morning show introduced us to some service dogs and had some other great segments, as well.
The best part is when they’re trying to introduce the dogs, who are trying to be service animals, and one of them immediately hides under the chair. You couldn’t have coaxed that out of that pup any better. Never work with animals, they say. Whoever says that doesn’t appreciate the joy of the spontaneity.
Here is one of IUSTV’s new shows this semester. Bring in a student filmmaker, have them talk about a project they’ve produced. It’s pretty cool.
I say one of their new shows, because there are two new shows this term. Here’s the first episode of a new sports project, almost everyone on it is an underclassman. I’m excited to see where they take this as it grows.
Of course that isn’t enough sports for you, but not to worry. I’ve got more sports for you. Here’s the oldest sports show in our catalog. They produced this one Wednesday night, and it has all the highlights and the looks ahead you’ll need for the weekend of IU sports.
And tomorrow is homecoming around here. (Naturally they have scheduled a top 10 conference foe for homecoming.) The Toss Up has your deep dive ready, right here.
One of the entertainment crews was in the studio this evening, as well. And we should see that episode early next week. I’ll have it here in a timely fashion.
Until then, have a great weekend, and don’t forget we’ll have Catober updates on Saturday and Sunday.
