Posts from — June 2006

Lunch! Kevin and Lisa took me to one of their favorite spots in Chinatown. Damn good crab. And I don’t normally eat crab . . . .

Marc, this link, is for you. No it’s not cuy. It’s Balut.

On my bus ride to downtown every morning, I pass a restaurant sign that draws my attention. The first few times I saw it I thought, that’s too good to be true. You see, it advertises an international food selection that while isn’t healthy-sounding, does induce ye olde droole glandes to start pumping out spittle.

The International Food Court sign shows they serve not only Mexican food (which is a guaranteed thing to get me to try it), but Pho, Thai(!), Chinese(!), AND lumpia! It’s a junk food lunch dream! The only problem is that when I usually pass by on the bus, the place looks closed. Not closed as in it’s only 8:30am, but closed closed. So I never bothered walking all the way up there for lunch. Until yesterday.. . .

So Kevin and I make plans to meet for lunch. I walk to his office and we start walking to a place that he says has a lot of choices AND a bunch of wide screen tv’s which will be showing World Cup games. I’m in! I tell him about this one place I want to try sometime that I see on the bus but that I thought it was closed and it seems too good to be true. . . He says- that’s where we were going to go eat but that he calls it The Dungeon as it’s underground. It turns out that The Dungeon has another entrance on Kearny(?) which looks a bit more inviting, although is equally hidden.

I’m happy to report that I’ll be going back there soon (and often). I tested the mexi-place with my standard enchilada test. It seems they make a lot of to-go burritos for the güeros. But while I was waiting for my food, they made some big taco plates and some good lookin’ chilaquiles, which I dig. I need to go back soon and have breakfast there just to try the chilaquiles.

Kevin had the chicken Pho and it looked and smelled good. I’d like to go back for that. He also tried an order of Lumpia for dessert from the House of Lumpia, but he said it was a bit cold and chewy. But for $1.50, I’ll have to give it a shot myself to see if it gets better.

btw- in the pic you can see how I thought it was always closed if you look at the windows above the green sign. But the actual entrance (this is Bush St from my bus seat) is to the right where the stairs lead doooooowwwwwnnnn to the dungeon. . . mmmmmm

Even though it’s cold and foggy in my ‘hood, downtown has been nice and warm- as has the rest of the Bay Area. The sunshine has brought out one of my favorite things: The Sundress.

Ladies, thanks for wearing them.

Sincerely, Pervy Kenny xoxo

I have some generous friends. Extremely generous. For reals. Most of you know that though.

For example, on Tuesday, I went to play poker with some ex-collabnet peeps (and some current ones) over at Todd’s. For some reason Todd has felt the need to clean out his cellar, so he started popping open early-90′s Napa cabs. Damn nice stuff. Oh! And we had a big thing of tri-tip to go with it. Mmmm.

But last Saturday was even more over the top. Paul and Stef had another dinner and wine tasting, but this one was more formal. Well, c’mon, not formal, we’re never formal, but this was an honest blind tasting. The theme of the dinner was 96 Bordeaux v 99 Napa Cab. Oh, and the other theme was “awesome f*@#$@@#$ food”.

I can’t find my notes so I’ll steal Paul’s writeup from the WS Forums. I’ll paste a link below. But check out the food menu:

and the final menu was:



Osetra Caviar with 6 traditional sides.



The Tasting.



Palate Refresher of Grapefruit-mint Sorbet.



Sausage and Roasted Pepper Raviolis with fresh tomato sauce



Herb de Provance Lamb T-bone in mint cilantro sauce and Scalloped Potatoes



Prime Rib Eye Beef Kabob Skewers with summer squash, crimin mushrooms and sweet Mayan onions and sides of hummus and crispy pita chips



Foie Gras, pan seared with 4 sauces; currant, cherry, blackberry honey, agave nectar



Pineapple-Rosemary Upside Down Cake

The wine tasting was divided into two flights. We had even more items with the food, but here’s what the breakdown was for the tasting:

Blind Group A

1999 Louis Martini Monte Rosso Vnyd (non blind)

1999 Van Der Heyden, Napa Valley Hill

1999 Cooper Garrod Lone Oak Vnyd, Santa Cruz Mtns. (the under $20 dead ringer)

1996 Cos D’Estournel, St. Estephe

1996 Chateau Palmer, Margaux

1999 Joseph Phelps Backus, Oakville, Napa

——————————————


Blind Group B

1996 Cos D’Estournel, St. Estephe (yep we had two bottles)

1996 Chateau Langoa Barton, St. Julien

1999 Abreu, Napa

1996 Chateau Angelus, St. Emilion

1999 BV Georges De Latour, Napa

1999 Lewis Reserve, Napa

1999 Shafer, Hillside Select, Stags Leap Dist, Napa (Bonus wine!)

Per Paul’s Notes, you’ll see that the bonus wine (the Shafer above) was a group fave.

Voting by flight, we voted for a #1 and #2 wine



Flight A:

99 Phelps Backus (10 first place votes!)

96 Palmer (4 votes)

99 Van Der Hayden (3 votes)



Flight B

99 Shafer HSS (6 votes)

99 Lewis Reserve (5 votes)

96 Cos Estournel (3 votes, it had 0 in Flight A)

All in all a great night and with some great food.

More notes on the wines. Pics are in the pics area. Full text copy of the wines.

The next person I hear say “apples to apples” is going to get kicked in the babyhole. So far today though no one’s said “soup to nuts”.

I got an email from Micah this morning.

Subject: Hey, friend, I see you are very upset!

That’s weird Micah- how’d you know? Was it the fact that I’m still steaming over the Us v Italy game? Or perhaps that I’m not happy that Miami beat Dallas? I didn’t like the after-the-fact suspension on Stackhouse and was mad about that. . . but not upset, Micah. Well a bit. Maybe I’m upset by a comment from Angie questioning my movies? Nah, we give each other shit all the time.. . So what is it Micah?

Micah’s email:
You have feelings of guilt and embarrassment. It.s
really horrible!Listen to me, forget about your problem I know you deserve it! Trust me – it will be a great surprise for your girl!

Thanks for the pick-me-up Micah! You’re right, I do deserve it. Whatever it is.

Now, what happens when I click the link in Micah’s mail . . .

Yet Another QDR. The last one seemed to work well, so I thought I’d repeat the format instead of breaking each movie out into it’s own review.

Mondovino – ***

Man, this was a poorly made documentary, even shitty at parts. It even dragged on for 40 days, like the rain on Noah’s speedboat. . . But after the 3DMT™ I was still thinking about it.

In a nutshell, it’s a movie about wine – but from an industry standpoint. It’s a documentary, and it’s about 4000 hours long, but it’s pretty good. The first half is the better than the second, but they (barely) manage to keep it interesting, and me interested. There’s a lot of stuff that’d be easy to use as fodder for arguments so I’d like some of you to see it and then shoot me an email afterwards to tell me what you thought. You’ll never look at Mondavi the same way.

Taking Lives – *

I hope I’m not giving anything away in this but Angelina does get naked for a minute in this. Oh, and there’s a decent story about a serial killer. This movie stars two odd-ear’ed actors: Ethan “I ruined Uma’s Life” Hawke and Kiefer “I filmed my scenes in 6 hours” Sutherland.

I have a problem with the movie though- there are major plot holes in this, one of them being Ethan putting his thingy in Angelina’s plot hole.

I’ll give it one star because I got to see a character I hate get stabbed, and another for nudity. Let’s face it, we need more nudity- you think I’m wrong? The news pastes Zawqari’s corpse on TV and CSI reruns have bodies or parts everywhere- we need some balance people! C’mon.

Back to the movie though- it’s really not that great, but guys like Angelina (I don’t too much, she violates my tattoo rule) and girls will like the boys of the flick- Ethan, Kiefer, and Olivier Martinez. Oh, and Tchéky Karyo too! I really wanted to like this and was disappointed- I rented it because the director is the same guy who did The Salton Sea, plus it had Tchéky Karyo and Jean-Hugues Anglade!! You remember JHA? The king in Queen Margot? Or perhaps Eric from Killing Zoe? How did this flick go so wrong? The opening scene was so damn good. Oh well.

EDIT: screw it, I’m taking away a star, only one for you TL

Spanglish – **

I was going to give this two stars, but it’s a better flick than Taking Lives. . .

EDIT: I bumped it down because I updated the TL review
Paz Vega mmmmm. She’s so damn good in this.

Let’s get one thing out of the way first– her character (and her character’s sister, played by Cecilia Suárez) are impossibly hot. It’s crazy and I found it distracting. But then again, maybe it’s me and my uhhh predilections.

Basically this is a just-slightly-better-than-cable RomCom that’s meant to show off a lot of great relationships. Tea Leoni’s really good, but you want to put her in a fleece vest and slap her silly- which shows how good she is. Cloris Leachman’s good too. Oh, but Paz. . .

I’d type “le sigh” here, but Angie says I can’t say that anymore. . . (I did say RomCom though, ewww)

Biker Boyz **

This movie has a ton of stars and no plot holes so it ties Taking Lives. It’s kinda like a western-meets-oedipus-meets-superbikes, but it’s surprisingly entertaining. Actually, now that I think about it, if the characters in this flick had ridden to Montreal to interfere with the case that Angelina was working on in TL, it’d be the bestest movie evar!!

Ocean’s Twelve – 0

Shit Sandwich

Cold Mountain *

Cold Mountain if it were on IRC:

Nicole joins channel #south
jude_law1: a/s/l?
nicole: i don't type that, I'm a lady
jude_law1:proper? omg ur hot
nicole:orly?
jude_law1:yarly
nicole:msg me for private chat!
-:-NetSplit: irc.south.net split from hub.north.net.us
Jude_law1 has left the channel
nicole:omg where u go?
Jude_law1 has joined #south
nicole:omg I thought you left
jude_law1: hehe sorry, I'm getting ready to go fight war
nicole: I hate teh WoW
jude_law1: nah, it's the real war, ok I luv you but I'm going now
Jude_law1 has left the channel
badguy: it's ok, he's gone, but I'm hot too. a/s/l? dcc me yur pics! jejeje!
nicole: omgwtf
nicole msg jude_law1 hey where are u?
nicole msg jude_law1 when u come bak?
away   : jude_law1 - is away : (fighting teh yankees)
nicole: hrm
badguy: you wanna priv chat?
nicole has left the channel
nicole has joined channel #south
nicole: !seen jude_law1
dixiebot: jude_law1 was last seen in channel #south 1460 days ago
badguy: he's still not back, wanna cyber?
nicole: le sigh
jude_law1 has joined channel #south
badguy: aww shit
jude_law1: wtf shit?
badguy: I wan yur lady
jude_law1: bak off, you go play WoW liek teh Koreans omg lolz
badguy:fu
nicole:omg I miss u!
jude_law1: omg me too I priv msg you but I was gone. wanna cyber?
badguy: f u
jude_law1:fu2!
jude_law1 stares at badguy
badguy: stop mofo!
badguy slaps jude_law1 with a frozen trout
jude_law1: omgwtfbbq
badguy was kicked off #south by jude_law1 (stfu)
jude_law1 was kicked off #south by dixiebot (kickban no chanops)
jude_law1 has joined channel #south
nicole: omg ur back!
jude_law1 hearts nicole
nicole hearts jude_law1
SignOff jude_law1 #south (Remote host closed the connection)
nicole: omgwtf?!

Thanks to Edgar for the espresso and lunch and the HD soccer game watching on Saturday. That’s about the only nice thing I have to say about the game. I’m thinking about boycotting the entire nation of Uruguay but that would be a bit extreme.

Players win games,
Coaches lose games,
and Refs ruin games…

Eric Wynalda (probably paraphrasing/quoting someone else)

Uggh.

Oh, another thing. France is overrated too. That wasn’t a “great pass” from Wiltord to Henry, he (Wiltord) shanked his shot. I’m rooting for Korea more and more these days. . .

Oh and while I’m at it– will other people NOW start agreeing with me that Landon Donovan is overrated? Sheesh

Happy Birthday to all the June Bday people! I usually get all your dates mixed up since they all, or almost all of them fall in a 10-day range. So, Happy Birthday: Jeff, Angie2, Bart, Dad, and Cory. I think I’m forgetting someone too, that’s the worst- oh wait, Kevin. But he was at the start of the month, and I didn’t miss his day. Here are some birthday monkeys for you: