Feb
26
February 26 Miscellany
February 26, 2009 | Leave a Comment
• I can’t tell a lie, I got a little misty during Conan O’Brien’s final New York show.
• Diana asked how my vegan whoopie pies turned out. Answer: Awesome. I filled half with peanut butter frosting and half with pink raspberry cream cheese frosting.
• And speaking of clocks, this one is real cool.
• Chicago News Bench published a really interesting perspective on the Nigerian Kitchen disaster I posted yesterday, because its author actually ran into and talked to a guy who seems to own the place.
• Hilarious incongruous item for the day: A restaurant called Yia Yia’s Euro Bistro located in . . . Wichita, Kansas. Their website’s front page has this startling revelation: “Across the ocean, there is a continent called Europe.” Close thine treacherous mouth, round-earther!
Feb
26
The customer is always . . . broke
February 26, 2009 | 1 Comment
From marketing guru Seth Godin’s post Three things you need if you want more customers:
1. A group of possible customers you can identify and reach.
2. A group with a problem they want to solve using your solution.
3. A group with the desire and ability to spend money to solve that problem.
I’d question whether most businesses have #3 in any substantial way right now. In context, the better way to describe it may be “A group with the desire and ability to rationalize spending.”
Feb
25
Never again
February 25, 2009 | 1 Comment
Gross out time. As if that story earlier about the restaurant wasn’t sick enough!
Mew Mew has this shoelace she really likes to play with, and now it’s tied to the end of a knitted pink catnip mouse. She watches me knit like she’s a worshiper in the presence of the angels, so when I had a scrap of baby yarn leftover from a thing, I tossed it to her.
Within fifteen seconds I looked back and she’d eaten all but one end, about a yard total. I had to, well, retrieve it. She got mad and skulked into the closet for a little while, but I think we’re better friends now.
Feb
25
Word
February 25, 2009 | Leave a Comment
“A great job doesn’t compare to a great life.” — Aya Sumika as Liz Warner on Numbers
Feb
25
Horrified 311 caller shuts down Chicago restaurant
February 25, 2009 | Leave a Comment
In Chicago, citizens are instructed to call 311 if they see a food hazard in a restaurant. Thankfully, people do call:
When a customer claimed to see workers at an Uptown restaurant using cooking utensils to kill mice, city health inspectors killed the eatery’s license to operate. The North Side restaurant was closed down Monday afternoon after inspectors found evidence of a mouse and cockroach infestation.
Nigerian Kitchen, at 1363 W. Wilson, was ordered closed when inspectors found mouse feces throughout the restaurant, cockroaches crawling on a wall and wastewater backing up from three clogged sinks in the kitchen, according to a release from the City Dept. of Public Health.
Feb
25
Accounting for taste
February 25, 2009 | Leave a Comment
My friend Nick remarked on my 15 Albums meme that I “adamantly refuse to give in to indierock hype.”
Hype is large-scale unqualified word of mouth, the same as when a friend whose taste you don’t trust tells you how much you’ll love something. My taste is too erratic to trust anyone else’s. Don’t confuse this with snobbiness or hipsterdom, because I don’t have any delusions that I’m too cool or have better taste — I just know that it doesn’t mesh well with other people’s, because it’s too personal and anecdotal. If I hadn’t heard some song in the car driving home late one night, would I like that band as much? If someone I cared about hadn’t burned me a copy? These are unanswerable questions.
Maybe the real culprit is that people have misperceptions now about whether their own taste should be broadcast. I very rarely recommend anything, mostly because it feels terrible to listen to something, dislike it, and know you’ll have talk about it with a friend later. For me, the most satisfying way to find new music is by, really, finding it inadvertently, though not through any hip avenue — hearing a song on the radio (admittedly a different game in a major radio market like Chicago), asking a friend what music they’re playing at a party or whatever, coming across random things on Seeqpod or YouTube.
Is there inherent value in newness? I don’t value newness in itself, which is why I usually end up listening to my favorite old stuff. And, admittedly, I have bad feelings toward new music a lot of the time, so it’s always a great, unexpected thing when I hear a great song from a new band. The first brand new album I remember getting really excited about is White Blood Cells by the White Stripes. But looking back, there are decades of popular music to hear, and looking forward at the same time is overwhelming.
Some people follow music the same way they read the newspaper, so they can stay abreast of everything that happens. I see the value in that but it isn’t for me. Hype may help me learn of an artist, but it also sets the expectations much higher, sometimes unreachably so.
Feb
25
Daughter of Joe Ades, legendary peeler peddler, sells leftovers
February 25, 2009 | Leave a Comment
Ruth Ades-Laurent’s father Joe Ades, a New York legend for his streeth pitch of his $5 vegetable peelers, recently died and had a gracious obituary in the New York Times:
The Greenmarket was not his only open-air stage; he had places near Radio City Music Hall and in Brooklyn that he liked, Ms. Laurent said.
She said that he had learned the tricks of salesmanship as a teenager in Manchester, England. “He’d sold all kinds of things from when he was 15 and saw the old-time English grafters, I guess here you’d call them pitchmen,” Ms. Laurent said.
He sold linens, textiles, jewelry and toys, and broadened his inventory when he went to Australia in the 1970s. “We had a huge truck that we sold off the back of,” recalled Ms. Laurent, who worked with him, selling clock radios, cassette players and electrical appliances along with other household goods.
Now Ades-Laurent has taken over the family business:
Reached by phone, she told us she had “a fabulous reception; people seemed really comforted to see me instead of a gap where my father used to be. And it was helpful for me as well to deal with the loss of my dad.”
Feb
23
Exeunt, pursued by a bear.*
February 23, 2009 | Leave a Comment
Miller sent me this delightful tidbit on custom fortune cookies:
“A big whale falls from the sky and squashed you until you’re pretty much dead. Not completely dead, but pretty much.”
I hate it when that happens, but it’s nothing compared to this debacle:
“In five minutes, you will be attacked by a pear. It will eat you because you were going to eat it.”
In the immortal words of Shakespeare: Exit, pursued by a pear.
* From his Winter’s Tale.
Feb
23
Vegan chili
February 23, 2009 | Leave a Comment
My office has an annual chili cookoff, and I wanted to make something awesome that also didn’t have meat in it. By accident, it also turned out to be vegan. Haha whoops?
SIDE NOTE: The jalapeño was the cheapest ingredient, at 7 cents.
SIDE NOTE 2: This does not “taste vegan.”
1 large onion, diced as fine as you want
1/4 cup vegetable oil
1 jalapeño, diced with ribs removed and seeds set aside
About 3 cups sofrito (food processed green pepper, garlic, onions, and cilantro), gently pressed to remove some of the liquid
1 cup green peas, fresh or frozen
1 sweet potato, peeled and diced to roughly pea size
1 cup quinoa, rinsed very well
1 can vegan chili beans
4 cups vegetable stock, premade or from bouillon
2 8-oz cans tomato sauce
1/4 cup brown sugar
Chili powder to taste (I used about 1 1/2 tablespoons)
Fresh cilantro to taste (I used about 1/4 cup chopped very fine)
1 package Morningstar Farms Meal Starters Crumbles or other vegan meat analog (optional but preferable)
Heat the oil in a saucepan and add the onion and diced jalapeño. Throw in seeds to your desired spiciness. Cook on medium heat until onions are very soft.
Cook the quinoa in the vegetable stock until the middle separates from the outside. (You will realize when this happens. It is weird and amazing.) Strain it out of the broth. Discard broth or save for something else.
Drain beans and rinse very well to remove canned bean stuff.
Combine all ingredients in a slow cooker. Let it cook for at least several hours and preferably for many more than that over a couple of days. I cooked mine for about 8 hours one day and about 6 more the next.
Feb
22
That Scandinavian extra vowel
February 22, 2009 | Leave a Comment
Something Awful’s Fashion SWAT takes the stuffing out of Finnish street fashion website Hel Looks. I have not laughed this loud and hard in a long time. Here is an example remark about the first photo they show:
The name of every designer he mentions sounds like a boss from a videogame. King Stampede is pretty easy, you just throw the the boomerang at his head when it flashes and jump over his charges.