OF A GOLDEN AGE

I realized recently that we had a little turf war between my childhood home and my best friend’s house across the street. We had a Nintendo and he had a Sega Genesis: On my side of the street was a neverending carousel of Excitebike and Super Mario Bros. and when I crossed over it was strictly Sonic the Hedgehog.

(Of course, Nintendo brought them all together in the new Super Smash Bros. Brawl. +1 cooperation!)

My brand allegiance to Mario goes way back. Even today, when I look through the NES catalog, the only games I can even play for more than a couple of minutes are the Super Marios — they’ve aged well because of strong pacing, clear design, and easy controls. My friend Nathan lured me into the treacherous world of RPGs starting with Super Paper Mario, a delightful platformer-RPG hybrid that was the beginning of the end for me. Even in elementary school, a frend’s Super Nintendo, and Super Mario World, kept our friendship alive longer than it had any business doing. And we all know my feelings about Mario Kart.

But when he got and played through Super Mario Galaxy, the latest incarnation of 3-D games starting with Mario 64, all it did was give me vertigo. The answer for old-fashioned schmoes like me is New Super Mario Bros. Wii, a classic 2-D side-scrolling platformer enhanced with the more powerful graphics and capabilities of the Wii. New features include some Wii-catered controls:

• Platforms which tilt based on your controller’s positioning
• Bonus round in which you aim and shoot a cannon with your controller
• Several applications for which you shake the controller

Sometimes the two means of control interfere with each other. Holding the controller at an angle while doing other things with the buttons is confusing even at its easiest, and I don’t play video games to test the limits of my hand flexibility or prehensile strength.

Another good and bad addition to the game is the expanded multiplayer mode. Instead of alternating turns between Mario and Luigi, or choosing one of four playable characters in the Surrealist weirdoworld of Super Mario Bros. 2, New Super Mario gives you multiple characters on-screen at once. Not only that, they interact with each other and present new possibilities for multiplayer moves. Also, if you’re like me and you’re the weak link, a more dominant player can sort of carry you in a bubble through difficult parts and bring you back afterward. Yeah! Loopholes to avoid failure!

I have triumphantly weaseled my way through almost the whole game without help, and with only a medium amount of infuriation and controller-hucking because of my own ineptitude. The game is wonderful and challenging and gets moreso in bursts: Some levels in the earlier worlds were incredibly difficult for me, and some levels in later worlds seemed bizarrely easy, but overall the play gets tougher as you move forward. There are a few levels that stood out to me as nonsensically difficult, and I’m sure there will be more to come as I finish world 8 and attempt world 9.

To that end, the game builds in a new feature: the Super Guide. If you lose 8 guys while attempting one level, an alert box appears and offers to show you an example video of Luigi completing the level. I didn’t ever use this, although it appeared in at least half a dozen levels because I am not particularly gifted at video games. If you choose the Super Guide and watch through to the end, you are given an option to skip the level completely, which some purists (code for “able-fingered meritocratists”) criticize as a dumbing-down of the franchise.

Well. Those people should know by now that without some kind of safety net, people like me would simply have a nerdy friend over, pass the controller, and say, “Beat this for me.”

Scrutinizing nut-butter labels at Trader Joe’s yesterday, I learned that sunflower butter has less saturated fat and more fiber than peanut butter. It is also less costly than the Trader Joe’s almond butter but still has that not-peanut-butter exotic appeal.

Tastewise, it has that smoky, slightly planty taste we associate with sunflower seeds, which I assume could be an acquired taste some may not enjoy. The texture is good, slightly runnier than supermarket peanut butter but still very smooth, like a high quality natural creamy peanut butter. It says to refrigerate after opening, and it has no hydrogenated oils.

One tablespoon has 100 calories, 8 grams of fat, and 2 grams of fiber. For breakfast I made an SB&J on an Arnold’s Multigrain Sandwich Thin and washed it down with a very refreshing glass of almond milk for a total of 275 calories.

On Saturday, my parents and I met out in Oak Brook at Antico Posto, a Lettuce Entertain You restaurant we hadn’t tried. They describe themselves as “carefully hidden” in Oak Brook Center, and that’s accurate — OBC is a large outdoor mall and Antico Posto is wedged in a little corner off the beaten path.

We typically order a lot of things and split them around the table. We got the asparagus ricotta gnocchi, eggplant parmesan, prosciutto-and-melon salad, and the spinach-and-strawberry salad. My parents ate the prosciutto and melon and said it was delicious. I tried everything else and it was all delicious too. The gnocchi in particular — made in-house, light, fresh, and fluffy — was our favorite, and it came served in a brown butter sauce with fresh asparagus, halved cherry tomatoes, and parmesan cheese.

When the waiter learned it was my birthday he said they’d have to bring us a dessert, and my dad insisted on “nothing embarrassing,” which we clarified to mean: No singing or attention. Antico Posto has a genius dessert arrangement, which is that you can choose from a variety of desserts in small, reasonable quantities for $1 each or full-sized versions for more. That in mind, we opted to get the trial size of all six and just took little bites of each one. The flourless chocolate cake had a nice little candle in it.

My parents and I have a favorite Italian restaurant in St Charles called Pi Pizza Perfection (how can I not love it? There’s a math joke right in the name), but as my dad pointed out, they don’t do great salads and Antico Posto does. Produce can really make or break your whole meal, and in my experience with the Lettuce Entertain You group, they do a great job with fresh ingredients.

I would definitely go back to Antico Posto, and the prices were reasonable enough that I actually could.

My original plan was to see now-confirmed-poofest 2012 on my birthday, which happened to be the movie’s opening day, but when I found out it was TWO AND A HALF HOURS LONG and the friend with whom I’d intended to go turned out to be busy, that plan went out the window. Instead, by pure serendipity, I learned ATHF Live was happening and the 7:30 show was not sold out. A prompt excited text message was sent.

The Lakeshore Theater is small, and they packed us in one party at a time to avoid people leaving a seat between themselves. My knees bumped the seat in front of me and a cupholder dug awkwardly into my leg the whole time. They were also rather liberal with some blinding disco lights and a smoke machine. The “preshow” previews, shown on an automatic pulldown screen from a projector in the back, were embarrassingly bad in every way: unfunny comedians, poor video quality, even worse postproduction. They also wedged in a dumb intermission about 3/4 through the show for no reason. In other words, I hated this venue and would have to be lured back with another incredible act or group.

“Why isn’t Frylock here?” Dave Willis and Dana Snyder asked, rhetorically, at the beginning. They said something about appearance fees, and it may have been a joke and maybe not, but really . . . Three out of four ain’t bad. Dave does Meatwad and Carl and Dana does Master Shake, so there was plenty of voice variety, and a Meatwad voice contest at the end of the show where the best contestant was voted out because he admitted that he’s an auditor. Whoops.

There is something wonderful, surreal, and certainly memorable about seeing regular people and hearing your favorite cartoon characters coming out of their mouths — At first I couldn’t stop laughing even when nothing was funny, because of the plain incongruity. Dana (here on the right; picture from online) wore a tuxedo and Dave had on bright green preppy pants and the whole evening had a good feel to it. The Meatwad contest was judged using kazoos.

Dave and Dana showed two brand new episodes that won’t air for a few months, and they were both amazing. A guy in a porkpie hat stalked around the theater yelling at people for taking photos or recording during these, and Dave made a throwaway remark about them ending up on YouTube tomorrow.

There aren’t a lot of things I like or think about that my parents aren’t at least passingly familiar with (recent exception: My Halloween costume was a Fraggle, and they don’t know Fraggle Rock at all), but besides vaguely knowing that Adult Swim exists, they didn’t know anything else about it — so I found myself explaining about Aqua Teen and hearing it in my head and thinking, “This all sounds so ridiculous.” Which is, I think, its appeal.

Those of you who know me know that I am very fond of Jewish literature, mostly American. My friend Nathan is a Twin Cities Jew whose mother grew up in the same suburb as the Coen brothers — St Louis Park, or “St Jewish Park,” Nathan informed me.

Mild spoilers. Read at your own risk.

The Coen brothers set their movie A Serious Man in St Louis Park in 1967, when Nathan’s mom was a girl and would have seen a similar landscape in her everyday life. And after their more spectacular movies, relatively speaking, this is a small character piece. Very little happens — main character Larry, an uber cerebral physics professor, has a sudden onslaught of bad luck and attempts to find a reason why. He ventures through traditional Judaism, the crazy-seeming mysticism of his sad brother, and pure science.

Near the beginning of the movie, a student who has failed Larry’s physics midterm tells Larry he understands all the anecdotes but did not realize physics involved actually doing the math. As Larry struggles to convince the student that physics IS the math, not the stories, it’s clear that he’s about to learn some kind of lesson.

Once my boss described me by saying I hate it when people aren’t logical, and in a way, that’s dead accurate. To dig into it deeper, I am really frustrated when people act without any regard or thought in a world that already makes no sense most of the time. Nathan probably feels the same way, and I think the movie hit home for both of us because we share this attitude. You can see it on Larry’s face when the events in his life confuse him, and he can’t even make enough sense of them to get angry. Near the movie’s end, Larry’s brother has an emotional outburst and says a lot of what Larry hasn’t articulated for himself yet, and it’s a wonderful, purgative moment. Larry’s life perplexes him because he has done everything right, accurately, or at least unexceptionally; when it begins to fall apart, he has to rethink all of his actions.

This movie is thick with references to Jewish life and culture, which I really enjoyed — I told Nathan, no movie I can think of has spent this much loving detail on American Judaism: Hebrew school, bar mitzvahs, Yiddish phrases, a mezuzah in every doorway.

A recent New Yorker featured an interview with Wes Anderson, inadvertent king of the near-autistic movie genre we now describe as “quirky.” Anderson’s movies mostly feature preciously upper-class people in unrelatable situations (wealthy people with thirtysomething ennui because of their failed personal genius? Seriously?) and this is kind of his trademark. As the interview notes, Anderson is a harbinger of the “Stuff White People Like” era.

There are mild spoilers in this review, so don’t make a big deal about it.

Sitting opposite Anderson on the spectrum are movies like Jack Nicholson’s Five Easy Pieces, a relatively small movie by a writer and director of whom I’ve never heard, about an unhappy, dissatisfied grunt worker named Bobby. His girlfriend is sweet, kind of dumb, and uncouth; their two best friends are thrilled to hear that Bobby’s girl is pregnant by accident, after the foursome spends the evening bowling.

Bobby’s father falls ill and he returns to the homestead, telling his girlfriend she must stay behind at the motel so he can “check things out,” when it’s clear he’s embarrassed to bring her to his family. They’re all intelligent, well educated, talented people, and Bobby is their bizarro remittance man: living away in order to shirk all of their money. At the same time, he’s flighty and antsy, and does not seem as though anything will truly satisfy.

This is a great movie, and the difference in feel between Bobby’s life and his family’s life is pronounced: He dresses differently to go meet them, walks into their museumlike house. His father’s health has left him unable to speak, and in a climactic scene, Bobby has a one-sided conversation with his mute father. It doesn’t seem to cure whatever ails either of them.

I read this review of the Wii Fit Plus in the Tribune* and found it harsh, unsatisfying. It didn’t speak to my experience at all, as someone who doesn’t need exercise to be disguised as game — Yes, I am going to exercise. It can feel hard, because it is and it should and I’m not six years old.

The original Wii Fit had one frustrating hangup for me: no ability to transition from activity to activity without a LOT of downtime in between, and downtime means falling heart rate and anaerobic exercise, which is counter to the whole light aerobic / yoga / pilates thing the Wii Fit has going on.

This time they addressed that, somewhat, by allowing you to construct routines or choose their premade ones. It’s definitely an improvement, but most of the routines out of the box are 6 to 9 minutes long, which is still not a solid length of time to get your heart rate up and keep it up for your daily fitness recommendations.

I don’t play the fitness games so I honestly can’t speak to those. It seems the Wii Fit has two very polarized groups of fans: those who are interested in diversion exercise (definitely fun!) and those who are interested in a palpable measure of their form and progress. Since I have a specific goal in mind, I like the more cerebral route and the somewhat apples-to-apples comparisons I can make day over day and week over week.

* Tell him, Ray: The Tribune sucks.

Oh, trapped-man fiction! Narratives about trapped people (woe is me, my loveless marriage, dead-end job, enormous personal burdens) cover well trodden ground and can only ring true if they’re really well done. A writer like Chuck Palahniuk establishes a niche by pushing trapped-man out into the narrow extremes of the bell-shaped curve, but Ethan Frome represents a much more subtle version of the stock plot.

Edith Wharton, typically a literary voyeur on the bourgeois, shook up her routine with this short, sharp novel. It may as well be titled What’s Eating Ethan Frome? because his unhappiness is the bricks and the mortar of the story: We are told what has made him unhappy over the course of a framed flashback then see the same unhappiness after decades of steeping.

The frame itself is interesting: An unrelated observer meets Ethan Frome after hearing a lot of stories about him, because Frome has a small town kind of tragic fame for the way his life turned out. In other words, it echoes the style of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein but with an element of rumor more consistent with Wharton’s other work.

You won’t walk away from Ethan Frome feeling upbeat, not even remotely, but it’s a very thoughtful, pragmatic kind of bummer. The relentless tragedy of Shakespeare or the Greeks, or in certain weepy movies, can feel meaningless because of the plain unavoidability of the fate. It’s a lesson from the getgo. There is no real lesson for Ethan Frome, and this grays up the story in a wonderful way.

My beloved and only grandfather died in 2005 at age 87, and daily events remind me of him because he had such characteristic personality traits. One of the most prominent of these was his unending quest for very cheap or, better yet, free stuff of all stripes. In fact, my dinner plans yesterday combined some of my grandfather’s very favorite ideas: A free buffet.

Chicago’s Pizza is a bite-sized chain with a handful of locations in the city. Their menu sprawls and, well, overextends itself — but the prices are pretty reasonable and I like the range of food they offer. Surprisingly few places offer a ready-to-order salad without meat or a viable sandwich option without meat, both of which Chicago’s offers. They are also fast and open until 5 a.m., the nearest location is a block or two from my office, and I can’t think of a time when they screwed up an order.

Their online ordering system offers me frequent coupons, and I get the impression the manager spends a lot of time working on the customer experience — most recently by planning a big “Customer Appreciation Day” and advertising it by fliers distributed with orders or on neighborhood cars. Instead of something chintzy*, Chicago’s touted a free buffet of salad, pizza, and pasta, and of course word spread fast among my twentysomething colleagues. (Sadly, Nathan, both the cheapest AND the most fond of Chicago’s, is out of the country right now.)

We went over and got on the list for about a forty-minute wait to be seated, and once we got inside, the buffet was perfect: Interesting, diverse food choices, generous amounts of everything, a good-looking tossed salad and giant spread of fresh fruit, and individual-sized variety cheesecakes. We ordered sodas and they were free too.

Service was great, food was great, and the whole thing was somehow free? Yes, I feel appreciated.

* Have you seen Edible Arrangements’ “Customer Appreciation” gimmick? If you SPEND $50 they give you six chocolate-covered strawberries, which they claim is a $15 value. Get real, on all counts.

Chances are good you’ve never even heard of Drop Dead Diva, because you probably don’t watch reruns of Frasier on Lifetime and thus didn’t see teaser ads for DDD for months leading up to its summer premier. Your loss on both counts. DDD is a dramedy (what a word!) about Deb, a barely-twenties model killed in a car crash and somehow redeposited into the body of Jane, a plus-sized thirtysomething lawyer. Brooke Elliott plays Jane.

Oh, holy cow, I can’t even tell you how much I like this show and look forward to it every week. The legal side is the same old ridiculous TV nonsense (frivolous lawsuits much?), but Jane and her colleagues and friends are made of compelling stuff. One of the show’s most poignant early moments came when Deb-cum-Jane realized she had lost a decade of her life in the switch, and for the first time something made her more upset than the idea that she was now a size 16. Because of the character’s natural straightforwardness and warm personality, she admits openly that as Deb she could get by on vegetables but as Jane she wants a bear claw. She is busy and intellectually rigorous, which Deb learns is as exhausting as her best friend’s booty-sculpting elliptical habit.

Tara Parker Pope praises the show in today’s Well — deservedly. Yes, the show portrays a very realistic, interesting, brilliant woman who happens to be a size or two larger than average, but its appeal goes way beyond that. Deb’s personality as it shines through Jane is admirable. She is no skinny blond mean girl and never was, and she quickly realizes the advantages she was handed in her previous life. Deb’s best friend is a ditzy blond but knows herself and her situation well and is equally warm and lovely. Really, there are almost too many genuinely likable characters on the show to keep track of (what I like to think of as House syndrome).

A recent episode dealt with Jane’s disappointment upon learning — because why would she need to know this before? — that a favorite boutique only carries up to size 10. Jane appeals to one of her colleagues to represent her in a lawsuit, and the shrill, thin woman tells Jane to stop whining or go on a diet. Ironically, this is an idea thought often but stated rarely by all kinds of people, and it is ballsy of the show to put it in the mouth of a character who has the intellectual prowess to be a driven, successful attorney.