Splish splash, I've been taking a bath

Netflix finally started letting people see their entire rental history without having to wait for a giant printout or something, so I took a look to confirm my suspicions. And the stats are:

42 months of Netflix membership
82 movies watched and returned

82! I figured the number was fairly low, but less than two a month? It's only just less than two, of course, and I may manage to watch two movies in the next week, but even so. Two a month works out to about nine bucks a pop, which may be only as much as a ticket would cost, but then I don't own a 200-inch TV. Really, I've been paying for the convenience; sure, it might be cheaper in the long run to have a Blockbuster membership, but Netflix has a much bigger selection and comes right to my door.

For comparison's sake, incidentally, Alma has watched and returned 86 discs (not all individual movies, but it works out about the same) in just nine months of membership. Ye gods.

If I weren't so stubborn I'd cancel the membership or at least reduce it, but I happen to have 17.99 a month and I like having three options at once, even if it frequently takes me two months to watch all of them. So whatever, I guess. I'll just try to keep it rolling for now. I've watched and returned five in the past week, a sixteenth of my rental total in a hundred-seventieth of the time.

Speaking of getting wet, I got on the bus this morning and headed toward the back, where I discovered that on the right-middle back row seat, there was a small patch of... well, I'm not sure I'm confident calling it water, so let's say "liquid." I sat down a couple seats away in a sideways-facing row. A couple stops later, a man and a woman get on and head for the back. Oddly, the guy seemed to point out the liquidy seat to the woman! I was about to say something, but before I could she practically threw herself into the seat, so it was too late.

I mean, once someone has sat down in a wet seat, what can you say to them? If you stutter out that the seat is wet, they'll wonder why you didn't try to warn them before. And certainly they're going to figure it out for themselves soon enough.

The odd thing is that this woman never seemed to flinch. Was she wearing Depends? Who knows. However, when they got to their stop, I did notice that she seemed, well, a little reticent to stand up. Big ol' wet spot on the seat of her pants? You'd better believe it.

To make this interactive... what would you do? The woman next to me, who had noticed the liquid and avoided sitting in the seat just prior to the other woman's fateful ensconcing, said nothing either, so I'm clearly not the only one with the tendency to clam up.

Kicked in the Shins

Through the wonder of Rudnik's blog, I found a page at Metacritic that I think has to be an immediate addition to the Favorites menu: Upcoming CD Releases. I always get excited when I find out that bands I like are going to be putting more music out soon. So the good news rolled in, with one exception.

First, the good news. All of the following groups have scheduled upcoming releases in the next nine months or so:

Doves (sometime in 2007, though I suppose it could be over a year away)
Fountains of Wayne (late 2006)
The Killers (October 3)
The Postal Service (sometime in 2007)
Spoon (early 2007), plus Britt Daniel appears to have a solo album due later this year, unless that just ends up being the soundtrack to Stranger than Fiction

Now, the bad news: the Shins are listed as "early 2007." Early 2007! Whatever happened to earlier this year, when I made a list of bands from whom I was anticipating new albums and heard that the new Shins album was supposed to be coming out in August? Every other artist delivered on schedule: Snow Patrol, Guster, and the Long Winters all have their albums out. (Although Ganging Up on the Sun has disappointed me so far and Putting the Days to Bed, while decent, is no When I Pretend to Fall. Although neither are a lot of albums.) Get with it, Shins! Your albums are only 34 minutes long, for crying out loud. (I'm kidding, of course. Considering how great Chutes Too Narrow is, how can you just turn right around and follow that up no problem?)

In other pop culture-related news, I've been trying to pick up the Netflix viewing lately. The problem is that I'm now five movies in the hole, review-wise, and I won't have much time this coming week to write reviews either, since I have to clean my room (seriously), do laundry, and I have three 10pm conference calls for work (again, not kidding). It's going to be hectic.

In other other news, Drew, Karen and I wanted to head out to Twin Links for some mini golf on Saturday... but when we got there, we found that it had closed! For good! This continues a long Flaxman family tradition of having places we like close and products we like get taken off the market. Frankly, it's amazing that Twin Links lasted as long as it did with a kiss of death like my endorsement. Better check your accounting ledger, Par King.

Michigan J. Cricket

Friday was sort of the lost day of the New Orleans weekend for me; after waking with a jolt at 7:30 am from a nightmare featuring a ghost in the attic of my old house (no doubt inspired by the walking tour the previous night) and failing to fall back asleep for at least an hour, I ended up sleeping until 1 in the afternoon, excluding a couple minutes where I was awakened by housekeeping. With Alma out, I then sat around the room for several hours before it occurred to me to turn my phone on and see where she was (having not brought my charger down, I was aiming to conserve batteries). Eventually we went to see Sharks 3D at the aquarium's Imax theater, which was marginally cool (I don't recall having watched a movie in 3D before), but either I'm remembering Imax screens being much bigger than they are or this was a pretty small Imax screen. Whatever. We ate dinner at the hotel restaurant (again!) and went upstairs.

At some point, I don't remember when exactly, what sounded like a high-pitched electronic chirping started up. It sounded like it might have something to do with the air conditioning, but I played with the settings to no avail. Finally we called the front desk, who promised to send up engineering. Then I went outside briefly to see if it could be coming from the next room (a conference room). When I came back in and the door slammed behind me, the noise suddenly stopped.

Sure enough, the two engineers showed up before the noise started again, making me feel pretty silly. Naturally, not too long after they left, it began again. This time, we took video evidence so that if it stopped before they came back, we would at least have something to show them to prove that we weren't crazy, or pranksters, or crazy pranksters. As they knocked at the door, the noise was still going, but just as I opened the door - of course! - it stopped again. I made a joke to Alma about the singing frog from Looney Tunes (see title of this entry).

At this point we decided to play the video for them, rather than have our sanity called into question. Yes, it was this loud, and this incessant:



Yeah. The noise eventually started up again with the engineers still in the room, and they determined it was a cricket. (Or, they confirmed it, as the front desk and Alma had already suggested it.) My experience with crickets was pretty much limited to the gentle, almost soothing "ee-ee-ee" from outside in the summer, so to have one that sounded like a smoke alarm going off was a bit jarring. Closing the door to the bedroom didn't do much good either. The engineers tried to find the cricket and couldn't; later I tried the same without luck. Eventually he stopped chirping, probably between 12:30 and 1 am, and I was able to get to sleep. But of course I woke up at 8 am to find that he was going again. I considered dragging the table out into the hall because it sounded like he was in it, but after moving it a few feet I realized he was almost certainly in the wall, or at least nowhere portable. Finally I just tried slamming the bedroom door to spook him again, and it managed to work.

Still, a pretty lousy way to cap off Friday, which was certainly the letdown day of the trip already (due mostly to my laziness shenanigans). That's why it was the one I didn't write about before now. But there you have it.

Home, home again

We came back from New Orleans on an early flight this morning. Check-in was an absolute breeze, mostly because the NO airport is already not the busiest and, well, it was 7:30 am. There was literally no line at security as we strolled up to it and went through without a hassle. The flight was pretty smooth, too. I was thwarted by neck cramps in most of my attempts at sleep, but I did get some reading done. Later Alma and I watched some TV and then Jarhead, and then I fell asleep on her couch for a couple hours or so.

Some pictures and/or video coming soon. I've got one story about a cricket that still needs to be told, but without the accompanying video it's too hard to describe how awful a lot of Friday night was.

Insta-blog

Few, if any, occurrences in my life have ever moved me so significantly that one of the first things I did upon returning home was run onto the internet and post a blog entry about it. But, at the risk of boring the hell out of everyone here, tonight's dinner was one such.

Alma and I went on a harbor cruise today so that we could indulge her desire to take at least one trip on a boat while we were in New Orleans. It was a decent little cruise; regrettably, once you leave the downtown New Orleans skyline behind (and it's not much of a skyline, I tell you what, but then again you have to consider that the city is built mostly on illuvial sand) you're stuck looking mostly at barges and various ships, but then it is a harbor cruise (though technically it's all still part of the river). Anyway, it was fun to get a little wind in our hair, and sights like the Crescent City Connection bridge and Jackson Square in the French Quarter were fairly neat from the water.

Anyway, that's not the part that made me rush back. After the cruise we walked through the Riverwalk mall (tacky, overpriced souvenir stores) and then I walked Alma back to the convention center for a presentation she wanted to attend. On my way back to the hotel, I passed by a restaurant located catty-corner from it called Rio Mar. Rio Mar is, as you may be able to guess, a seafood place, and in fact I think only one entree (a steak) was not some sort of seafood dish. Alma had been talking about having some seafood, and though she'd had salmon at the Hilton on Friday, somehow that didn't seem quite the same. And after eating in the hotel restaurant the previous two nights I thought we needed a little bit more adventure for our last night in the Crescent City (even if such adventure did only constitute walking across the street).

To be perfectly honest, my first glance at the menu was a little terrifying. I am not, it must be known, the world's biggest seafood guy. But I will eat it on occasion and was willing to suck it up, since Alma generally likes fish more than I do. Of course, even as far as that went, the menu featured things like squid in its own ink and octopus.

I wasn't quite that adventurous, but we ordered a Peruvian ceviche to start (having looked up ceviche before leaving the hotel when I read that Rio Mar was somewhat known for its ceviche, I thought the Peruvian sounded like the best option), and then I ordered a pan roasted brook trout wrapped in green onions and stuffed with Serrano ham. (Alma ordered a pan seared yellowfin tuna wrapped in the ham.)

When the trout came, it transpired that (a) the skin was still on (though at least the head and tail were absent) and (b) it was served on a bed of asparagus. Something to know about me is that as recently as, I don't know, last night, I would probably have told you that if you were going to pick an entree to serve to me featuring three things that, individually, I really wasn't wild about, an excellent choice would have been something containing fish with the skin on, ham, and asparagus (which I had refused to try ever since the one time I tried it as a kid and immediately ejected it from my mouth due to the taste).

But here's the thing: everything was AMAZING. To avoid getting ahead of myself, the ceviche was great; it's chunks of just-barely-cooked fish in lemon and lime juices with onions, tomatoes, and cilantro, and it was terrific. Much like my first experience with sushi (documented a while back on these pages), I found the fish's texture to be exactly what I was hoping for, and when you add lemon juice and onions... well, name two things I really enjoy as accents to food.

The trout was... well, I don't want to gross everyone out and toss around the word "orgasmic," but I was barely able to contain my giddiness at how good it was. Alma assured me that she didn't mind that every 30 seconds I would take another bite and then tell her, "This is SO GOOD," but I bet it got tired after a while. The trout and ham blended perfectly together (and while usually the taste of pork products is a bit overwhelming for me, the ham never did that), and the sauce that came on the plate, which by itself wasn't anything too spectacular, was a perfect complement, adding just the right amount of additional flavor but allowing both meats to retain their own nuances. Even the skin worked perfectly (the end piece was all crispy, adding yet another layer to the overall experience).

Finally all that was left was the asparagus. I hadn't so much as tried a piece since that day... probably 15 years ago, give or take. I saved it for last assuming that I might not enjoy it... but, as it turned out, it was actually good! I won't go so far as to say I loved it, but combined with the sauce it was very enjoyable, and I don't have plans to push away asparagus untouched in the future.

After all that, anything else might have seemed like a letdown, but the flan was delicious, and I even decided to indulge with a honey-flavored dessert wine (Casta Diva Cosecha Miel was the name, if I remember right) which wasn't bad at all (though I really still don't have the right appreciation for wine, or really alcohol in general). The flan had a caramel drizzle on the plate, and usually when they do that it's just a sweet caramel sauce, but this was the actual burned sugar and as such it hit the tastebuds from about four different angles.

All told, this was the most expensive two-person dinner I think I've ever had - certainly that I've paid for myself - and yet I couldn't feel more satisfied. Talk about being worth every penny (don't worry, it was still in two pre-decimal-point figures even with tip). It made sense to kind of go whole hog on our last night here - I even got relatively dressed up for the occasion - but even in my wildest pre-dinner dreams I wouldn't have predicted that I would enjoy it just that much.

So if you're ever in New Orleans, and you like seafood even a tiny bit - heck, as long as you're just willing to eat it - I don't think I can recommend Rio Mar enough. Probably a pointless recommendation for this blog's audience, but hey, you never know. It was good enough to take the chance, just so long as I could get it out there.

Tacky, overpriced souvenir stores

Here in New Orleans for Alma's convention thingy. We got in just before that British terror plot was uncovered, so while the trip out was a breeze, the trip back might be a tad different. Fortunately Alma has a bag we can check, but I have a decent-sized carry-on bag that, hopefully, will not pose a significant problem.

In the meantime, we still have two whole days in the Crescent City. Today I did the following things:

1. Slept until about 11. Tried to sleep longer and actually couldn't. 11 hours is probably enough.

2. Walked around the neighborhood here. Alma's cell phone charger broke on the way down, and since I didn't bring mine, I figured we needed to make sure that at least one phone could be guaranteed to work the entire time. So I looked up the directions to Radio Shack and walked over. They were in the process of remodeling but they did have the right part. On the way back I stopped into a mini-mart to look for regional pop or candy, but I was surprisingly disappointed, which has to be about the first time that's ever happened. The best I could do was Sour Nerds, which are apparently new, but I'm guessing they're going to show up in more places soon enough. There was also "Very Berry Nerds Rope," but I didn't bother with that. The Sour Nerds are okay, but they're only marginally more tart than regular Nerds, really. Kind of pointless, I guess. On the bright side, I got a pretty good feel for the streets around here so I'll be able to walk around later if I want, not that there's much to see within reasonable walking distance. Let me clarify that: reasonable walking distance considering the heat and humidity. It's in the high 80s but with the sun and humidity it pushes easily into "feeling like" the high 90s (today, I think, was "89 but feels like 98"). Blech. Though really, the worst part is when you go into an air-conditioned store and the moisture all condenses on your head. The people at Wendy's probably thought I was the sweatiest guy on the planet.

3. I went down to the hotel gift shop to see if they had a travel size shaving cream, since I hadn't brought mine and I only wanted a small amount. The mini-mart hadn't had any as small as I'd wanted. The gift shop did, but it cost - get ready! - $5.99 for a 2.25-oz tube. They also had a 6.25-oz can for the same price, but since I didn't need the big one it didn't really make sense. I'm just astonished that they had the balls to charge that much for the small one, even if it was a hotel gift ship. [Ed: That's gift shop, of course, but Alma is funny.] One small tube of shaving cream and a bottle of root beer? $8.80. It makes the $10-for-24-hours-of-in-room-internet-access seem like a steal.

4. Alma and I went on a "ghosts and spirits" walking tour of the French Quarter, which really means "a walking tour of the French Quarter, except that the guide only says something every four blocks and then it's only about notable historic murders." But it was nice to walk around the French Quarter and see the architecture and stuff, even if we did get devoured by mosquitoes and I spent a significant portion of the walk scratching.

5. Ate dinner in the hotel restaurant. Not bad at all, and my steak cost five bucks less than the menu said.

6. Went in the pool and hot tub.

And that's it. More later, maybe.

And the award for worst pop culture reference in human history goes to

Yesterday's Family Circus:





Seriously, what the fuck is that.

Faked Migration

Alma had Winged Migration from Netflix and we watched the end of it today. Then she put on the "Making of" featurette. And it ruined the entire movie. Seriously. Among the things that were upsetting:

* The filmmakers didn't just "put cameras near the eggs so the birds would be used to the sounds," as I had read. In many cases, they raised the birds from hatching in France, and then flew them out to the various settings to shoot them. So there really was barely any - if any at all - actual migration footage in the film. It's just the birds flying around in the various places they would be migrating if they had been raised in the wild! What??

* Not only that, but they didn't turn the birds loose and then shoot. Instead, they wrote a script and staged scene after scene after scene. There were freaking storyboards! In one shot in Monument Valley, there is a broken-down truck that some geese run past; turns out they drove the truck out there themselves and even took one of the tires off on the spot to make it look more run down.

* Here's a rough quote of what the guy just said while shooting in New York: "A flock of wild geese fly up the East River. Our birds see them and join them. For a while, we fear we've lost them. But after 15 minutes, they turn around and come back to us. They weren't ready for such a long trip." Umm... that's terrible, isn't it? "We've ruined these geese for life, but we got our shot."

* The guy keeps whining about "how are we going to get this shot?" Dude, you're keeping the birds in boxes before the shot starts, and then when they come out, you have to yell at them, "Allez!" Sheesh. You don't have enough control over this? "Migration-like Film Product!"

* Oh, and the guy pronounced "Adirondacks" wrong multiple times. As I assume everyone reading this knows, it's pronounced Ad-ih-RON-dacks. But he kept saying "Ad-EYE-urn-dacks." Gah.

As Alma just said, "It's still a cool movie, it's just disappointing." Agreed. But it's one of those things I could probably have gotten along without knowing. Oh well.

Vote, vote on

The original matchup ended in a tie, so here we go again with a recount in the Cheat Commandos Tournament final:

#3 Fightgar vs. #5 Reynold

Make your vote count! Vote today!

Damn Yankees

People often make jokes along the lines of, "Hey, how cool would it be if baseball had relegation like European soccer? Then the Royals could get sent down to AAA and have to try and battle their way back to the majors!" And so forth. Well, at Monday's trade deadline we saw perhaps the most European soccer-like move we're ever going to see in Major League Baseball: the arrangement for a player to change teams for a transfer fee.

The Phillies, looking to dump Bobby Abreu and his gigantic contract, managed to trade him to the Yankees (along with Cory Lidle, only one of the two or three most coveted arms to change hands at the deadline) for - get ready! - the loaded package of Matt Smith, C.J. Henry, and two low-minors prospects.

Um, what?

Put it this way: if this trade happened in your fantasy league, it would be vetoed by your commissioner within approximately eight seconds. Smith has pitched twelve innings this year; Henry is regarded as a project at best (and he had basically no value to the Yankees considering who they have manning his spot - shortstop - in the field); and the two other players may never even see Triple-A, let alone the majors.

On paper this looks like highway robbery. And, from a personnel standpoint, it was (especially since, as reported by Jayson Stark, multiple other teams offered better prospect deals for Lidle alone; the Yankees somehow convinced the Phillies that they wouldn't make the deal unless Lidle were thrown in). But the catch is what the Yankees sent to the Phillies that wasn't a player: about $21 million in salary relief.

Okay, so the Yankees didn't literally pull out the checkbook and dash off a $21 million check to Philadelphia just for the privilege of paying Abreu some more. But as far as why the deal happened, it was pretty much the same reason. The Phillies wanted Abreu off the books, and when they couldn't get even approximate talent back, they traded him for one cent on the dollar, just to save some cash. And naturally, the only team in the world that could have just suddenly assumed a $15.5 million payroll hit for 2007 - the Yankees - was the team that landed him.

How can you look at a situation like this and tell me there doesn't need to be a hard salary cap in baseball? How long is this crap going to be allowed to happen? It's easy to point at the fact that the Yankees haven't won the World Series since 2000 - and believe me, no one relishes that more than I do - but it's also easy to overlook the fact that they still haven't missed the playoffs in the three-division format. Whether the Abreu deal wins the Yankees the Series this year, or even the pennant, remains to be seen, but it will almost certainly help them get into the playoffs. Most teams have cycles because that's just what's dictated by the way things are supposed to work; the Yankees' utter lack of concern for how much money they're spending (because there are other teams with that kind of money if they really wanted to spend that much, but other teams have a little more fiscal responsibility) allows them to buy their way out of the cycles' low points. Not all the way out, as evidenced by the inability of the $200 million team to win a World Series in this millennium so far, but out more than any other team. Look at the Twins, a young team on the rise thanks to an upswing in talented young players; no team except the Tigers has been hotter over the past two months, and yet the Twins may still miss the playoffs. The team making it at their expense will almost certainly be the Red Sox, White Sox, or the Yankees, conveniently enough the teams with three of the four highest payrolls in baseball. So the Twins should get screwed during what has otherwise been a great year for them because they can't afford to throw out nine figures to bring in one or two more difference-making players? Seems kind of unfair, don't you think? And just wait until five years from now when Morneau, Santana, Hunter, and Liriano have all jumped ship for bigger contracts.

I really want the Yankees to miss the playoffs, just to end the thought that you can buy a winner. But too many other teams are doing it now to end that. The genie is out of the bottle. And you know who opened the bottle in the first place? The Yankees, way back on December 31, 1974, when they signed Catfish Hunter as a free agent to a contract that was triple the salary of anyone else in baseball at the time. Guess who bought the Yankees less than two years earlier? Damn, why couldn't Fay Vincent's lifetime ban of Steinbrenner in 1990 have been held up?

As a wise man once said... fuck the fucking Yankees.