Himalayan Kitchen

Hey, so, to recap, Odori and Fugu and Caterpillar and I went to this local restaurant. Just opened. It was called Himalayan Kitchen. The kitchen was slammed, but the food was swell, I thought. The service was likewise all over the place, but they were charming and wanted to be helpful. A woman came out late in the evening (probably one of the owners or managers) and asked us about our experience. We said that we enjoyed the food.

I snapped this photograph because I couldn't resist, but all in all, I enjoyed it and would go back. What did you guys think? Full disclosure: Mostly this post is to test our new Twitter feed.

I has the finest bucket in the land

Ari Brouillette is getting famous today on the Curated Internet for his Amazon review of The Secret, but I'm partial to his assessment of the Dover Parkersburg 610.

Soul Calibur IV Review

Sorry I had to bug out of Odori's first console experience this weekend! The odds were stacked against me--I had the beginnings of a weird sick my eldest brought home from his first week of the fall semester (are there semesters in preschool?), and I accidentally inhaled half of Galspanic's mildew farm, and the benadryl+beer-tini probably wasn't the best idea I've ever had, to top it all off. The 5-minute ride home felt like I was driving from a David Cronenberg movie into a David Lynch movie.

Anyway, I thought I'd post this review of Soul Calibur IV (the beat-em-up we were playing) by darling of the web Yatzee Croshaw, for some perspective; and yuks.

I ated a Kobe beef hot dog

On my last day in NYC, I went into restaurant in Bloomingdales called "David Burke," which (at the time) seemed to be a really bad name for a restaurant. Kind of unappetizing! Turns out it's the name of a superchef, this guy (David Burke) who seems to have had the same basic idea that my friend Annie and I had. I kind of don't want to talk about the hot dog now, because I'm a little sad that now Annie and I won't be able to get filthy stinking rich off of our idea.

Anyway, the reason I ate there was because you could see the menu from the street, and on the menu was this:

Kobe beef bad-ass dog
With mustard oil, angry onion jam, all-natural, antibiotic and hormone-free

Or something like that. Okay, I was like. So I went in and ordered it and ate it. Somewhere in there I photographed it (see above). I'm not going to review it properly, because I think food reviewing requires special writing skills I don't really have. Here are some things I was thinking, though; during this process.

1. Making a hot dog out of Kobe beef sets an awfully high expectation.


2. All this stuff surrounding the hot dog itself made me slightly suspicious. The flame-toasted bun of "real" bread, the deep-fried onion slivers, the "angry onion jam" (a kind of relish, I think), the sheer size of the dog itself (about the size of a baby's arm), and even the sheer lack of antibiotics all seemed just a little like misdirection.


3. Even the most pampered, massaged-by-giant-naked-women, beer-fed Wagyu cow has lips, and it has an asshole.

I'm not saying it wasn't good. Hot dogs are good. That's just it, though. All hot dogs are pretty good. I think 99% of the hot dogs available for sale today hover between 5 and 5.5 on an imaginary deliciousness scale of one to ten. At least to my palette, they are incapable of being any better or any worse. I think the only way you can move them up or down on the scale is to be hungrier, or smear them with some horrifying non-food substance (respectively).

Don't get me wrong; I don't think this is a scam, or anything. I'm the first person to say that the Emperor looks fucking fabulous, and anyone who can't see that is a goddamned idiot. I do think that this particular Kobe hot dog may have been wasted on me. While I consider myself an eater and and enjoyer of all things food, I can't say that the Kobe anything really shone through. Still, I give the Kobe beef bad-ass dog from David Burke at Bloomingdales 5.4 stars--a fine rating, as hot dogs go.

I feel fantastic and I'm still alive.

So here's what's sweet about Portal. The first time your portal gun becomes fully operational, and you're able to create both sides of the wormhole, it takes you a little while to adjust mentally to this new ability, and rightly so--it's patently ridiculous (or at least outside of our brain's evolutionary history). The truly truly weird thing about it is how quickly you do get used to being able to tear holes in space, and how quickly you start to be able to make the logical leaps necessary to solve some of the seemingly trickier puzzles. Maybe it's all because I played it in one sitting (okay, one LONG sitting), but Fugu says the same thing. Of course, Fugu is better at games than me by a factor of about four, so maybe he's not the best sample. Anyway, it's pretty neat.

But the SAD thing; the DEPRESSING thing, is when you stop playing. You can't make the portals anymore, ladies and gentlemen. Stuff that was off limits is now still off limits. You have to walk up stairs. You sometimes have to go through rooms you don't need to be in to get to rooms that you do. And you have to actually cross these rooms.

It's sort of like after the first time you played GTA 3 at a friends house for seven hours straight, and then drove home. The car feels different. You feel different. More things are possible. (The analogy might be a bad one because while in real life, you can theoretically kill hookers to get your money back (which I'm not advocating; don't kill hookers, brothers and sisters) you probably won't be holding a working Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device any time soon. You get my point, though.)

The game pretty much hacks your brain to make think you can do things you can't. There are few games like this, at least that I've played. Psi-Ops is a notable example. You dudes ever play this? It had it's tedious moments, but it makes you feel you have real fucking psychic brain powers. Spider-Man 2 also wasn't bad in this respect, as long as you stick to just kind of screwing around, and avoid using any "special" moves, or trying to advance the plot.

I like games like this. Maybe it's not so important that Joust make you feel like you're flying a bird, or that Galaga make you feel like a mass murderer. Still, if you dudes know of any other games that do this to your head, I'd like to hear about them.

On a related note, I can't stop listening to the closing theme. Fugo posted it in the Second Universe, but I avoided it because of spoilers contained therein. Spoiler alert, btw.

Star Wars Risk, Game One of Ten Thousand

Guys, I'm with you. I felt that even the four hours we took to learn the game (while drinking ourselves under the table with Ferucio's savory mohitos and V.'s doomScotch) was ever so slightly epic, if I do say so myself. And while the tacking-on-of-licenses-to-existing-classic-board-games is getting pretty tiresome, I think we'll all agree that this one was written by a true, true, ridiculous fan; someone who's read everything from Han Solo at Star's End to Tag and Bink are Dead, and considers it all pretty much canon--the kind of dude we can all get behind. I'll bet the guy (or lady) has been to a good number of risk parties, too. The kind with sandwiches, maybe.

What I really liked was the dramatic structure of the thing--how the game opens with the Empire (Fugu and V.) completely raping the Rebellion (galspanic and myself). We really had to scratch our way to a place where we could even make a dent in their totally superior forces. I think it's set up so that we (the Rebel Alliance) feel cool playing the game for the same reason Mon Mothma feels cool when planning a raid on an Imperial outpost. Pretty sure I saw a gleam in Fugu's eye similar to the one Grand Moff Tarkin gets when fucking telling the fucking Death Star what planet to fucking destroy.

As long-time players of Regular Risk will note, however, being at a tactical disadvantage does not necessarily put you at a general disadvantage--it merely reduces your choices, which has its own strategic benefits. Risk-players also note: Star Wars Risk has no Australia equivalent, and the cards have stuff on them that can make things happen. Wild, change-your-life stuff. You don't just sit there, when you're playing this.

I'm not sure if I've played enough of this to give it all three thumbs up, but the thing shows promise. The rules are pretty tricky, but if any of you off-worlders are planning a visit, let me know ahead of time and I'll send you scans of the rules so you can take the 5+hour plane ride to maybe skim them. Next time, we have to play with Active Hutts. And we should probably make sure no one has to work in the morning, and anyone new, like I said, gets the rules to study in advance.

So yeah; so yes, I'll play again.