Chris’ Birthday Regional Update 2
Life is pretty good when you’re sitting in a beautiful hotel lobby overlooking the bay sipping a Bailey’s and writing a blog post.
Life would be even better if we had won our KO match (playing with Micky and Linda), but I guess you can’t have everything. Next up is the loser Swiss. We’ll see if that improves our lot. [Finished this post Saturday morning: we beat some teams, lost to the Stansby’s. Placed 3/4 in the event]
Some people have had success already, though. Let’s start with the big winners:
Cecilia Ip, Mike Rippey, Lee Medeiros and Lee Stanhope were the big winners in Bracket 4 of the Jefferson KO. It think it’s Mike’s first event win. Way to go!
Placing third in the same bracket were Randy Corr, Bill Barron, Lynne Humphrey, Pat Krock and Trisha Oconnor. Marvin Suchman, Jane Runson, Lynne and John White were 2nd in Bracket 3.
Ally Whiteneck and Bruce Johnsonbaugh came in 2nd in C Thursday afternoon in the side pairs, while Lynne Humprey and Pat Krock tuned up for their winning KO by placing 2nd in B in the morning side pairs.
The names Susan Cogan and Barbara De Heus seem to crop up frequently in the 299’r side pairs–I see a second on Thursday afternoon and again in the evening, Pat Rolandelli, Marilyn Vinnicomb, Dee Leblanc and Bill King are placing in those events, as well. I love to see our unit taking all the masterpoints.
Dan Scarola and Jack Scott were 2nd Thursday in the Seniors. On Wednesday, Gail and Barbara were 6th; Ching Chao and Bert Hall were 9th (and 4th in B).
Thursday’s big event was the open pairs qualifying to a Barometer finish–there were 58 tables, instead of the 18-20 the open pairs gets other days. Dmitri Shabes came in third, playing with Ashraf El Sadi. Mike Bandler and Bruce Tuttle were 7th.
Susan Rowley and her friend Kim played the open pairs Friday because their flight home was canceled. They went home with a section top, making the delay pretty much a good thing all around.
On the restaurant front, we went to dinner between sessions at Kincaids. It’s a mile or two south of the Marriott, right on the water. The service was fine, the view was great, Gail’s Prime Rib was excellent for dinner, and the leftovers were just as good for breakfast. I had a pea salad–haven’t had one in so long I’d forgotten how good they are. My scallops were pretty bland and over-breaded. Linda and Mike both had the Ahi–Linda’s looked great, Mike likes his cooked more than I would care for. I give the place a B.
Back to the battles today, more tonight.
They’re baaaaaack!!
We thought SR and Kim were out of our hair when we dropped them off at SFO this morning. We were wrong.
The snowstorm of a century has hit the East coast, and the entire airline system is as backed up as a retirement home during a prune pickers strike. Nothing is moving and everything is full.
So the girls are stuck here until Saturday. I guess we’ll just have to party some more. They already started with a gourmet lunch.
Chris’ Birthday Regional Update 1
We have some early winners. Manfred Michlmayr and Jack Beers won the Tuesday Evening Charity game. Bob and Nancy Munson were 2nd in the afternoon charity game.
Gail Giffen and Barbara Hanson were 6th in the Wednesday Seniors.
Tournament attendance seems fair, at best. 18 tables today in the Open Pairs. The good news is that they ran it as 2 nine-table sections and scored across the field. The bad news is that I had a hideous first round, and then came in 2nd in the evening. The good news is that the pair I most disliked had a 36% and were dead last.
Food so far has been mediocre–Max’s Opera Cafe used to be a pretty cool place, but it sure didn’t impress me Tuesday night. Elephant Bar is just a notch above the Sizzler.
Friends went to Straits last night, somewhere in Burlingame, and came back raving about it. So that’s where Gail and I will try on Friday. Kuleto’s is another great place nearby, if you are looking for a really good meal, not just consuming nutrition.
Small plates, big taste
Click on any picture to see a larger image.
Good things, small packages. That surely applies to the new trend to “small plate” restaurants.
I’ve written more than once about Nibblers in Pleasant Hill, today I’m talking about Va de Vi, in Walnut Creek, at the corner of North Main and Mount Diablo, right next door to Tommy Bahama’s.
The concept is Spanish: very small plates of many different foods. You just nibble your way through as many as you like, sharing with your tablemates and enjoying a very varied and enjoyable dinner expressly designed to increase conversation and enjoyment.
The food, though, is tres California Asian/fusion. The menu changes often, though not as often as Nibblers. There is always a shooter of soup–a two ounce shot glass of some great soup, just enough to delight the tastebuds without filling you up.
Then you can choose from salads, veggies, meats, pastas and seafood. Everything is just enough for 2 or 3 to share. If you have two couples, you will more often want to get two orders of a particularly enticing dish.
The photos above are representative of the menu. Each plate is a work of art, visually perfect so you enjoy it even before you taste it.
There are tables both indoor and outdoors. Sitting under the huge oak in the back is just perfect when the weather is clement. Also, there is a counter in front of the kitchen that seats 8 or 10, where Gail and I prefer to sit watching as many as 6 cooks working in impossibly small circumstances turning out their mini works of art.
The front of the house is a full bar, doing a roaringly great business serving the young and beautiful of Walnut Creek. Since I’m neither, I prefer the somewhat quieter rear of the building. If there are 4 of you, do not let them seat you in the bar area–the small round bar tables are just not sufficient for 4 people and all those small plates.
Service is always good at VdV. Besides the waiters, there are plenty of runners to get your many plates to your table and bussers to keep the water full and change your plates and silver frequently for the different dishes.
Reservations are very strongly advised. I use Opentable frequently, but have found that Va de Vi just doesn’t list their tables during the busy evening hours and I have to call directly.
As long as you are open to something new and don’t mind sharing, Va de Vi is a great place. If you are totally traditional and want your very own salad and entree, this isn’t the place for you.
A new vocabulary
Imagine you opened up a book, and the first page had only one word:
ÊΜå∩¾§
You don’t know how to pronounce it, of course. You don’t know what language it is in, if any. And yet, you not only somehow know what it means, but what it makes you feel–for it causes deep emotion in you.
That’s what last night at the Smuin Ballet was for me. The curtain went up, the dancers came onstage, and somehow I knew they were communicating with me in a language I don’t speak. My eyes saw and my heart felt, devoid of words or explanation. The piece, Soon These Two Worlds, was choreographed by Amy Seiwert and set to Pieces of Africa, commissioned for and performed by the Kronos Quartet. Innovative costuming and lighting completed a performance that leaves me speechless to adequately describe.
Their next piece was Medea, created by founder Michael Smuin in 1977 for the SF Ballet. It is an incredibly powerful piece, telling the emotional tale of Medea slaying her husband’s lover and her own two sons when he rejects her for a new love. Wildly erotic at times, Medea struck me as a transitional piece in the history of ballet–although clearly modern, it retains much of classical ballet in it dance forms. Robin Cornwell is a brilliantly malevolent Medea, and Matthew Linzer is her tragically love-smitten and ruined husband, Jason.
Closing the show is Smuin favorite Fly Me to the Moon. You’ve got Sinatra, fabulous dancers, beautiful costuming and innovative choreography. What else is there to say? We all left the theater singing I won’t dance.
The Smuin Ballet. At the Lesher Center this weekend.
The White Ribbon
All is not right in this idyllic scene
I like foreign films. Strange, slow, idiosyncratic, odd, subtitled films that make little sense and require as much time thinking and talking about them as viewing them.
Even by my standards, The White Ribbon is pretty weird.
Beautiful, mystifying and hypnotic, but weird.
The White Ribbon is set in a tiny German village just prior to WWI. The story, told by the schoolteacher, revolves around strange, violent happenings that occur without any apparent reason, and are never solved.
The town doctor, a misanthropic child molester, is wounded when his horse is tripped by a hidden wire. The Baron’s son is abducted and beaten. A retarded child is assaulted. A woman dies in a work accident, a farmer dies but I never figured out how or why, I just know that the Columbus GA Auto Accident Attorney was able to get the woman a big compensation.
This starts to sound like some gory slasher movie, yet it is anything but. The director, Michael Haneke, never shows any blood, never glorifies the violence that permeates the movie. Rather, the entire film has the slow, deliberate pace one expects in foreign films. There are no quick cuts, but long, slow takes that let the emotions develop over time. American movies spoon feed the story to the viewer, telling him what to think and how and when. This movie makes you do all that yourself–there is no music to set the tone, there aren’t even any colors to set a mood–yes, this is a gloriously delicate black and white film.
Brace yourself
Look out Diablo Valley, pre-Iris grand pooh-bah Susan Rowley has returned for a week of bridge and debauchery.
Joining her is friend Kim, who has never seen California before. Hanging with Gail and Susan may give her a slightly skewed picture of the golden state, I fear.
Right now we’re having a bite at Va de Vi. The girls flew in from Orlando so they’re a trifle jet lagged and we have to get them ready for a wild week. More to come.
Liars, damned liars, statisticians
Or pollsters.
There was a new poll posted today on Daily Kos. I thought the results were fascinating, and more than a bit frightening, and at the same time were evidence of much of what is wrong with the entire process.
Kos is a generally respected blog, with a definite liberal/progressive agenda. The poll was conducted by a politically independent and respected company, Research 2000. They randomly surveyed 2000 self-identified Republicans, in all 50 states. Their methods are standard, and the margin of error of the survey is ±2%
The questions, however, seem to me designed to embarrass the opposition. Not quite of the “have you stopped beating your wife” variety, but there is a definite direction to the poll.
Let’s start with this one:
OBAMA and AMERICA
Should Barack Obama be impeached, or not?
Yes 39
No 32
Not Sure 29
Interesting question–impeached for what? It would seem that 39% of the survey sample is ready to impeach the President just because they don’t like him, without worrying about “high crimes and misdemeanors”.
Do you think Barack Obama is a socialist?
Yes 63
No 21
Not Sure 16
Socialist? Obama has most of the left side of the political spectrum mad at him for insufficient change from Bush/Cheney, he has sided with the military on virtually every issue, and is considerably more conservative than anyone would have imagined during the campaign. To say he is “socialist” is to merely mindlessly parrot the demagogues like Limbaugh, who use the word to defame without any real meaning behind it.
Do you believe Barack Obama was born in the United States, or not?
Yes 42
No 36
Not Sure 22
A third of Republicans still don’t want to believe Obama was born here–despite the obvious reality that if he wasn’t, their own party might have managed to make and issue of it during the election. Negative inference is lost on these people.
Do you believe Barack Obama wants the terrorists to win?
Yes 24
No 43
Not Sure 33
More Limbaugh/Beck/Malkin/Bachman absurdist rhetoric. You can say questions like this are designed to embarrass, but nobody has to answer yes, do they?
Who thinks these thing up?
Do I really want to win this?
I stopped in Rite Aid this afternoon, and they gave me this game ticket with my purchase.
Apparently, the winner gets a $250,000 mortgage. Say what!? Is the money market so tight these days that the only way to get a mortgage is to win one in a drug store game?
I don’t think I want to win this–I already have a mortgage, thank you, and don’t really need another.
It makes me wonder if there is anyone at Rite-Aid with any common sense, anyone who reads these things before foisting them on the public. I’m sure they spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on this silly promotion, it’s hard to see how they will get their money’s worth.
How do you know who you are?
Gabriel Mann and James Carpenter star in A Number
Who are you? How do you know? What is your essential “you-ness”?
If you found out tomorrow that you were a clone of someone else, would that change you life? What if there were 37 other clones exactly genetically identical to you? At what point do you stop being you and become somebody/something else?
These difficult themes are the heart of A Number, now at the Knight Stage 3 of the Lesher Center. A father (John Carpenter) is confronted by the son he gave up for adoption as well as two clones of the son (Gabriel Mann in all 3 roles). None of the “sons” are entirely certain of who they are or why they exist. The father questions who is really his son, what it means to be a son or father.
Staged in the round, on a simple ovoid platform with white carpeting, white chairs and a white table, A Number is intensely focussed on the debate for every second of its short one hour. The four scenes are separated by short blackouts, just long enough for Gabriel Mann to add a coat or take off a hat and become a different version of himself.
Written by Caryl Churchill, considered by many to be one of the greatest living playwrights, A Number is not only engrossing while it is on, but leads to long discussion afterwards on the meaning of individuality and what it is to be human.
At the Lesher Center until next Sunday.
Totally Unauthorized 