Google will rule the earth
The Google doodle I saw today
Just after midnight, I tried to Google something and noticed the doodle. “What’s with the cake?” I wondered, then I realized that since it was after 12 it was my birthday, February 13.
I have great hopes that the Google doodle is celebrating my birthday on every computer in the world, but I suppose it’s more likely that they know which computer is mine. Those people are smart.
My phone should know that sort of thing, too, but Apple won’t be wishing me a Happy B’day. Only Google. Which is why they will take over the Earth, and soon.
The Indispensable Olympian
The man the Olympics can’t do without.
We are in full Olympics overload here at Totally Unauthorized world headquarters, and I’m starting to notice some weird trends, the biggest of which is that they simply could not have an ice skating competition without the swelling strains of Andrew Lloyd Weber, in the WalMart background arrangement.
I’ve seen ice skating routines to Les Miz, to Phantom, to Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.
What I haven’t seen is anyone dancing to anything genuinely modern or hip. I thought there was something contemporary when someone skated to Bohemian Rhapsody, then I looked it up and saw that it was written in 1975.
I guess that’s still better than the pair who were dancing to the music from the Addams Family.
These skaters are all young and vibrant, and all performing to music that is older than they are. We go to the ballet and see pieces choreographed to Willie Nelson, why do Olympic skaters gravitate to elevator music?
Casual Italian in Berkeley
You can’t spend your entire life watching the Olympics, you have to eat sooner or later. Monday night we met the young Master and went to eat at Luca Cucina Italiana, on San Pablo just south of University.
This is not a fancy place by any means, but the food is good.
The menu board is simply but complete
The small restaurant not fancy–plenty of light, no tablecloths, seat yourself. The open kitchen in the back is designed with bright tile walls and is much more attractive than the usual industrial food production facility.
The nice looking open kitchen.
It wasn’t a particularly cold evening, but there doesn’t seem to be much heat in Luca:
Gail wearing Toby’s down jacket.
The tables aren’t set, they keep things simple:
You are supposed to be able to work it out for yourself.
The menu is large, with a variety of sauces and types of pasta in a mix and match style, so you can get what you want. You order from the cashier, then she brings you the food. There were a few things I hadn’t seen before, and I had to have the first of them—polenta soup.
Not your mother’s corn meal mush.
This is a thin polenta mixed with tomato sauce and topped with a slice of cheese. I thought it was interesting and something different to do with just a bit of sauce.
I followed the soup with one of my favorite dishes–pasta Carbonara.
Pasta Carbonara
Carbonara is a dish with eggs, cream and pancetta (Italian cured bacon). Or just plain bacon, if you’re saving money, but the good news is that Luca doesn’t overcook it–I don’t much care for bacon cooked to a cinder, hard, burned and tasteless.
I ordered my dish with the optional sausage, which was a mistake. Their sausage is just small, hard balls of ground beef and pork that doesn’t have much taste.
Gail had the spaghetti Alfredo, and also made the error with the sausage. The pasta was fine, though.
This place is really, really, not fancy. My spumoni dessert:
The doily doesn’t really dress it up that much.
Just a packaged portion, not even taken out of the packaging. The ice cream is good, though. Gail tasted mine and ordered on for herself. For some inexplicable reason, it took an eternity for them to fish it out of the freezer and plunk it on a plate.
Toby had the cannoli. American men are incapable of ordering this without saying “Leave the gun, take the cannoli”, so we all did.
Probably not house made, but good
You know your life is changing when the only one who orders wine with dinner is the son.
The tab for the four of us was about $100, we were all full and the food was good, so I can’t hardly complain about the prices. I don’t have any idea what is the appropriate tip for the partial service we received, so I probably left too much, but it’s not enough to worry about.
I liked Luca, but it’s decidedly not fancy or upscale. Don’t go here for Valentines day, you will win no brownie points. Try the polenta soup and avoid the sausage and you’ll have a decent meal at a fair price.
Finally something new
I feel like my life, as good as it is, has been in a slowdown lately. We go out to eat, but no place we new, no place I want to write about.
We’re hooked on watching the Olympics, and there seem to be only 6 commercials, which they repeat endlessly.
I tried watching boxing on the Spanish language channel the other night, and while I can understand 5 or 7% of what they are saying, they talk so rapidly it makes my ears tired.
Near the end of the “skiathlon” today, the announcer said “we’re here until the finish”, then promptly went to commercial.
In the women’s figure skating, the very wise announcer said that the young woman had “elements of Bob Fosse” in her routine. She was wearing evening gloves and skating to the music from Sweet Charity, so this wan’t exactly a deep analysis.
Yesterday we vegged in front of the TV all day, today I had to get out of the house. We called Sigrid, and motored up to Napa for lunch at Ristorante Allegria, right smack downtown.
A very sexy bar area
I like the building–high ceilings, lots of art, tables with linen. I think there’s a nice patio, but this wasn’t the day to find out.
The extensive Italian menu should satisfy whatever you are in the mood for. Gail started with the carpaccio:
Paper thin slices of raw beef with arugula, capers, red onion and mustard sauce.
The carpaccio was great; the lentil soup I ordered was bland and pedestrian. On the other hand, the bread was fresh and served with an oil and spice mix that was superb.
Sigrid had the Napa Cabbage salad–a bad culinary pun that you’d think every restaurant in the city would be using. The joke is poor, but the salad was great:
Napa cabbage, bacon, mushrooms, red wine vinaigrette and grilled chicken.
(I just watched Bode Miller lose the Men’s Downhill. Rats.)
It would be heretical for me to go to an Italian restaurant and not have pasta. I had something picked out from the menu, then the waiter told us about the special. Spinach fettuccine with fresh tomatoes, prawn, mushrooms and a light cream sauce. I ordered it without the mushrooms, of course.
The Sunday special
I loved my lunch. Gail ordered the same thing, plus the mushrooms minus the prawns. It was even good that way.
Service was decent, except that the waiter seemed to be congenitally incapable of listening. I ordered my iced tea with lime and got lemon. Twice. I asked for the check to be split one way, and he did it another way. He just wasn’t listening.
Prices are reasonable, the food is good, the service is sort of adequate, the facility is attractive. I like Ristorante Allegria, you will too.
Stop me before I binge again
Kevin Bacon stars as Ryan Hardy in The Following
We had dinner with BJ last night, and she told us about a program she and Larry are watching, The Following. It’s a new take on the police procedural, with Kevin Bacon playing the anti-hero Ryan Hardy, an alcoholic ex-FBI agent called back into the Agency to aid in the search for a serial killer. A killer Hardy had put away, but now he has escaped and they need Hardy to get him back.
The killer, Joe Carrol, is a brilliant, megalomaniacal psychopath. His charisma allows him to manipulate a horde of followers, every one a soulless serial killer.
This is American broadcast television, from the Fox network. There is an enormous amount of violence and blood. No sex because the sight of a breast would traumatize us.
Here’s the binge part: we found the series on Netflix and started watching. Watched 3 episodes last night, and NINE MORE, so far, today. It’s addictive as hell. I didn’t even get into the shower until 6:15 this evening, so we could go out to eat. Then we rushed right back home for more.
We’ve been through 12 episodes. There are 15 in the first season, and 3 or 4 in the current season, so we will be caught up soon. Then, perhaps, we can return to a normal life.
This binging stuff is dangerous. We watched all of House of Cards in a flash, then went through a season and a half of Homeland. Netflix can be as addictive as heroin, but at least it’s cheaper.
If you have a great program you watch, please, please, don’t tell me.
Avoid the line at Immigration
Sometimes the government does things right
Here’s the kind of letter I like to get from the federales;
Dear CHRISTOPHER PISARRA :
We are pleased to inform you that your U. S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Global Entry program membership has been approved. You may use the program as soon as you receive and activate your new Global Entry card.
Yep, Gail and I filled in the forms, paid the fees, jumped through all the appropriate hoops, but we are now officially “Trusted Travelers”, which means we get to skip the hideous lines at immigration when we return from overseas and cooly amble up to the machines that will scan our passports and fingertips and let us back into the country in a just a few seconds.
A bigger benefit, though, is that Trusted Travelers get to use the TSA Pre-Check lines all the time. Short lines, no taking off of shoes or belts or suspenders, no digging the laptop out. I think I’m going to like this.
Getting through the program isn’t difficult, just long. You start online, and the hardest part is always trying to come up with a password that will satisfy them–long enough, caps and lower case, number, “special character” (@#$%^&*), three Chinese symbols, a hieroglyphic, your social security number in cuneiform, there’s always one more thing you need to add.
Then a form listing where you have lived for the last 5 or 10 years, where you have worked, every country you have visited, SSN, passport number, drivers license number, birth weight in troy ounces and carats, the middle name of the first girl you kissed, just the usual things.
Then you have to make an appointment for the personal interview. There must be a lot of demand, because appointments are set 3 months out, are hard to get and you better take what is offered. One of my friends had his interview at 7:30 pm on New Year’s Eve. He made damn sure he was there.
The interview is held in a room in the International Terminal of SFO. The directions they provide were very, very accurate, to a very small room with and even smaller waiting area in front. There are 4 stations, manned by SEVEN uniformed CBP officers (at least one of whom was a trainer).
We were called right on time. The interview is friendly and non-confrontational, just organizational details except when he was going through the list of countries I had visited. “You visited Turkey?” he wondered. I said I had been on a cruise with Mike Bandler, and that smoothed that issue. Cuba got a few more questions, but we had gone on a licensed humanitarian tour leaving from Miami, so there was no real issue.
Pictures and fingerprints taken, and I was out of there in 20 minutes. It took Gail another 5, but she had the trainee officer. The email was in my inbox by the time we got home.
If you travel frequently, this is the only way to go. Dealing with the government is rarely fun, but this was as efficient and easy as you could ever want, and now I don’t have to join the hoi polloi in those interminable lines coming home.
The connections of life
How I learned to make a pie crust:
8 years ago, Gail and I were out in Walnut Creek, looking for a driving school to sign Toby up so he could get his learners permit. I saw a sign for a new art gallery, and we stopped.
There we met Meredith, the owner.
Later, Meredith introduced us to the Ruth Bancroft Garden.
The Garden introduced us to Becky Rice.
Becky introduced us to John Harrington, then she married him.
Six months ago, Becky had a baby, Daphne.
Last week, we went over to visit them, and take a few baby photos.
Daphne Harrington
Becky is from a little burg in Georgia; she was talking about shelling pecans with her mom, and ended up giving me a bag of great home grown pecans.
“Great”, I though, “I’ll make a pecan pie”.
Then I realized: I don’t know how to make a pecan pie. Sure, I could Google a recipe and buy a pie crust, but that’s not really doing it the right way. I want to know how to make a crust from scratch and make it good.
Playing cards the next afternoon, I noticed Nancy Munson. You’d think a great baker would be built like the Pillsbury Doughboy, but appearances can be deceiving. Nancy, all trim 96 pounds of her, is the best baker in the county. She could teach me how to make a pie crust.
So I bribed her. I said I’d make a leg of lamb for her and her husband if she’d show me how to bake a pecan pie. Lucky me, she said yes. Promptly at 6, team Munson showed up with two shopping bags of stuff for the making of pie:
Starting supplies. Nancy carries her own mixer.
More necessities of baking.
The key to all of this is the crust, of course, and that’s what I wanted to learn. Nothing mechanical here–Nancy starts with 1 1/2 cups of flour, 1 teaspoon of salt and 1/2 a cup of Crisco. Not lard, not butter, just pure vegetable Crisco. Listen to the master and learn. She cuts the Crisco into the flour with a pastry cutter, not a Cuisinart. Adds the water and works it all as little as possible.
Rolling out the dough between sheet of waxed paper.
The dough is quickly rolled out and put in the pan, then left to rest a bit while she made the filling.
The filling is comprised of a cup of dark brown sugar, a cup of light Karo syrup, a dash of salt, 1/3 cup of melted butter, 1 teaspoon of vanilla and 3 beaten eggs. Mix it all together, put it in the pie pan and add a cup or so of pecans until it looks right.
On pie, ready for the oven.
Forty five minutes at 350, and you get this:
The perfect pecan pie
You are supposed to let a pie cool. That wasn’t going to happen–the pie went in and 10 minutes later the lamb leg came out, so we sat down to eat. I got the pie out and on the window sill for just a few minutes, but once we finished the meal nobody could wait, and we dug into the still warm, sweet, sticky, savory, delicious pecan pie. The filling doesn’t really set until it cools, but we didn’t mind. Here’s what it looked like 20 minutes later:
Nancy’s personal Pi plate
Now I know how to make crust like an expert, although I expect I need practice. There are some pies in my future, I should think.
The string of events in life that led from Toby’s learners permit to Nancy’s pecan pie would certainly be impossible to predict or foresee. Just another little curiosity as we pass through.
Unclear on the concept
This is the slow time of year for the restaurant business, with everyone broke and worn out from the holidays. Since rent and staff still have to be paid, there are some good promotions to be found. In particular, Opentable.com seems to be behind Dine Around Town month, where many places offer a four course prix fixe dinner for $36.95 and lunch for even less.
Sunday night we ended up at Isa, in San Francisco, with Bob and Nancy Munson and Sheryl and Ed Nagy, to take advantage of the offer. I enjoyed my meal, but this place doesn’t seem to understand the concept of a four course meal.
The very colorful indoor/outdoor back room of Isa
The restaurant is on Steiner Street in San Francisco, just off Lombard. I looks to me like it was two storefronts combined into one. There are one or two tables outdoors in front, a tiny dining area, a bar area, a miniature kitchen that does an incredible job of getting out the food, then, all the way in the rear, you enter a room with a retractable roof which is the main dining area. Because of the combination of the dine-around-town special, the holiday weekend and the football game (sob!), the joint was packed. The 6 of us were crammed in so tightly Ed wasn’t able to move and we had to adjust the tables just so he could sit properly.
Isa is primarily designed to be a small plates, tapas style eatery oriented toward French cuisine. That’s all well and good, but it doesn’t much mix with the four-course, prix fixe idea. I knew we were in trouble when the waiter told us that the plates were designed to be shared and would trickle out of the kitchen as they were ready. When it comes to my food arriving, “trickle” is not a word I want to hear. When everyone is to pick one appetizer, one first course, one entree and a dessert, the sharing and small plate idea just isn’t working.
We started with the soup–a pureéd potato-leek which was far too thin for my taste, although certainly flavorful. Those who chose the lobster bisque were certainly pleased.
An excellent plate of mussels was presented
My fears were starting to be realized–salads come out quickly, the mussels took 5 minutes more. I had a butter lettuce salad that was, let’s say, “professional”. The work of a journeyman. Nothing to write poetry about, just good solid kitchen craftsmanship. Gail had a crab salad that seem quite a bit better.
Now we sat for a bit. Quite a bit. Then most of the entrees came out. I had the spaghetti with Himalayan truffles:
A deceptively good dish.,
The Himalayan truffle is a poor cousin to its French or Italian relative–in fact, tons of them are smuggled into Europe every year to be mixed in with the good stuff. It isn’t bad, per se, it just doesn’t have the deep aroma and rich umami flavor of the European variety. Still, it works very well on pasta and I enjoyed my dish.
Petrale sole, not with mashed potatoes.
Gail ordered the Petrale sole, and requested mashed potatoes instead of the roasted ones on the menu. In another example of a Isa being unclear on the concept, her dish arrived with roasted spuds, and side order of the mashed–for which they charged. At least they were good mashed potatoes.
Bob had the scallops:
Scallops and brussels sprouts. A great idea.
It turns out that Bob likes brussels sprouts just slightly more than Mike Bandler does, so Nancy got to enjoy them. The scallops must have been great, because they disappeared in a flash.
Because Isa is tres Francais, the dessert menu included two cheese plates. Ed had the bleu while I enjoyed the goat cheese. Ed was driving, so I decided to take a look at the dessert wines, and found something I had never seen: Uroulat Jurancon
I asked the waiter about it, but he wasn’t sufficiently well trained to know, so he brought over the owner, who discussed at great length the semi-sweet properties of this specialty wine from the Languedoc region. I understood a tiny percentage of what he said but decided to give it a try, and was very pleased with the result. Uroulat Jurancon is light, as dessert wines go, and not as sticky sweet as port or PX. It went perfectly with my cheese and set off the meal wonderfully.
I liked this restaurant. The food is good, the facility is pleasant, the wine list is unique. Probably the only thing to avoid is dine around town week–it just doesn’t work with the style of Isa. That leaves you with 51 weeks of the year to enjoy a glass of Uroulat Jurancon.
Black Veiled Monster
Judi Dench and Steve Coogan star in Philomena
When women take Holy Orders and become Catholic nuns, they take a new name, to which is appended BVM, for Blessed Virgin Mary. To the students they terrorize, these letters stand for Black Veiled Monster.
I’m thinking of that because we saw Philomena recently, and memories of nasty, evil nuns came strongly back to me. This is a pretty good movie regarding the true story of a mothers quest to find the child that was taken from her, but the behavior of the nuns overwhelmed the rest of the film for me.
Philomena Lee (Judi Dench) was a teen-aged girl in Ireland who had the bad luck to get pregnant. Her family dumped her off into a “home” for wayward girls where she was essentially held prisoner for 4 years as a slave to work 7 days a week doing laundry. The girls were allowed to see their children for 1 hour a day, until the nuns could find Americans willing to pay a considerable fee to adopt them. Philomena’s child was about 2 1/2 when he was summarily and with no notice given away; she never even got to say good by. Eventually, she left the convent, married and had a family, but never forgot her son.
On the boy’s fiftieth birthday, she is sitting and quietly crying when her daughter walks in and finds out for the first time that she has an older brother. The daughter tells the story to a journalist (Martin Sixsmith, portrayed by Steve Coogan) she meets, he agrees to take on the human interest story, and together he and Philomena set out to find the son.
The nuns at the convent are no help, claiming that all the old files were destroyed in a fire and now retired nuns from that era are unable to be of assistance.
Through some miracle of journalistic digging, Sixsmith finds the son anyway, but he has died. He had risen to be the legal counsel to Presidents Reagan and Bush I, then succumbed to AIDS. Philomena and Sixsmith then track down the woman he was adopted from the convent with, (who is stunningly incurious about her own history), and her son’s life partner, who doesn’t want anything to do with her because he believes she abandoned him. When he finds out the truth, he shares a lifetime of photos and memories, and recounts how they went to the convent to try to find his mother only to be told that had abandoned him and didn’t want contact.
The denouement of the film is a confrontation back at the convent with the BVMs. The fire that destroyed all the records was of course a bonfire they created to hide their tracks. Their sanctimonious righteousness, the justification of their lies and deceit, their incessant shifting of the blame for their behavior onto ignorant young girls, just makes me sick to my stomach. Philomena may be a saint who can forgive them, but I’m not and I don’t.
The scriptwriters wrap up the story far too neatly, with scenes that would fit perfectly in any 1956 B movie. Just as the reporter decides that he is willing to keep the story quiet, Philomena decides that he should tell it. Suddenly, he is interested in her tacky romance novels, and the interminable re-telling of them. What could have been a great movie with strong impact comes off as a good movie with a blunted impact. The movie is definitely still worth seeing, but it could have been something, it could have been a contender.
I’m an old cow hand
Not bad for a bunch of old guys.
We went out last night to see this band in a dive bar in Clayton. I’ve only lived here since 1962, but this was the first time I’d ever been in Clayton.
Everything has a story, of course, and the story here is that the steel guitar player is Jim Hussey, the son of our friends Bob and Ruth Hussey. Even when your “kid” is 62 years old, you still go out to support him.
First, we had to have dinner. There were 8 of us, stuffed into a niche around a table for 6 at Moresei’s Chophouse in beautiful downtown Clayton.
Gail, Robin Bob, Ruth, Bob, Jeannie and Bill having dinner in a phone booth.
Moresi’s has a pretty decent menu, featuring lots of big chunks of meat, and some fairly upscale variations like escargot on the appetizer side. The food isn’t seriously gourmet, but it’s hearty and well prepared.
We were shunted to this tiny space because the main dining room was filled with a very large, and loud, party. My chair, at the end of the table, was directly under the air conditioning vent. I’m the guy who is never cold, and I had to borrow a bright red scarf from Robin to block the river of frigid air that was pouring down my neck.
We both started with the French Onion soup, which was quite acceptable. Then Gail had the chili:
This is a stick to your ribs kind of dinner.
The cynic in me says restaurants offer chili so they have something to do with the prime rib that didn’t sell yesterday. Gail wasn’t much fond of her dinner, she mostly just ate the chunks of beef and pronounced the entire thing pedestrian.
I had the seared Ahi on asparagus risotto:
An odd presentation with the big glob of seasoned butter.
I certainly liked my Ahi, which was a perfect piece of fish properly cooked. People order fish because it is lower in fat and cholesterol, so I didn’t much understand why they would top the serving with butter, but I just pushed it off to the side. The asparagus risotto was very good, but an awfully heavy accompaniment to what is usually a relatively light meal.
A full rack of ribs
Bill had the best looking meal of the evening–a full rack of tasty ribs. He cleaned off each of the bones surgically–there were no leftovers. I think that makes the ribs my recommendation if you go to Moresi’s.
Service was excellent, to the point that I stopped on the way out and complimented the owner on how well trained his staff was.
After the meal, we strolled across the street to the Clayton Club, a pretty old fashioned cowboy bar. How old fashioned? Trying to order a white wine for Gail, I asked what they had. The answer was “red, white and pink”. I chose white. He reached into the cooler, found a 6 ounce bottle of Sutter Home, unscrewed the cap and poured it into a glass.
How cowboy was it?
Boots hanging from the ceiling.
The ceiling of the Clayton Club is decorated with pairs of cowboy boots, and a few bits of lingerie. Some bars give free drinks to women willing to take off their bras in public and hang them up–I have no idea what the story behind the boots is. I’d favor more bras.
Then the music started:
Jim Hussey at the pedal steel guitar
Not everyone who plays in a band is trying to make a living at it. Jim Hussey is president of the family HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning) company. The Governor just appointed him to the Council on Apprenticeship. He’s a big shot in his industry, just plays in a band for the fun of it.
A boy and his mom.
There are other band members, too.
Not exactly like performing in Madison Square Garden
The crowd was mostly younger. I took one photo just because I like the way this woman looks.
For camera geeks, this was at ISO 6400
The bar was happy and full of energy. Here are our friends Robin and Jeannie:
Bright lights, small city
The music was just what I like–old fashioned country that I knew all the words too. The music was all on-key, and most of the singing. Even the old farts like me were on the dance floor.
We had a great time. Dinner was acceptable, the music was fun and my knee didn’t collapse. What more can you ask for?
Totally Unauthorized 