unsolicited recommendation: orsay on 75th & lex

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

had dinner last night at orsay, in new york city on 75th st. and lexington avenue.

i’m usually not one to venture onto the upper east side of manhattan. the transportation is awkward if you live on the west side, which we do. the extreme upper west side. but last night, kirk chose this restaurant to celebrate his raise and new title at work.

so i schlepped.

and i’m glad i did. the a la carte menu looked great, especially the blanquette de veau, and a beef cheek special. but they had a prix fixe “surprise”, which intrigued. for $38, you got a surprise appetizer, a surprise entree, and a surprise dessert. you could tell them “fish or meat” for the entree, and of course let them know if you had allergies and whatnot. but other than that, you were flying blind. we went for it, and asked for wine pairings to accompany.

the appetizer was a chicken terrine, wrapped in smoky bacon and studded with vegetables — i remember mushrooms and carrots. accompanying the terrine was a frisée salad with small potatoes and bacon. both were wonderful, both separately and together. the wine was a chablis — i remember it being very buttery, though not sure of the name. i was very proud of myself for figuring out the wine tasted buttery; i usually can’t tell these things and when the sommelier gave us that assessment unprompted, i was amazed.

the entrée was a pork porterhouse with a dipping sauce that had tiny julienned cornichons, and frites. that’s french fries, to you and me. the porterhouse was incredible — it had been brined well and cooked to perfection, with a crispy exterior while still tender inside. and the fries were sensational, as only fries cooked twice and perfectly can be. the perfect combination of salt, heat, and grease. yummy. the wine was a great merlot.

dessert was good, but not great — a kind of ice cream cake with sliced bananas on top and chocolate sauce brushed underneath. it got better as the ice cream softened a bit. the dessert wine to accompany was of course very sweet and fruity, and i liked it quite a bit even though i’m not much for sweet wines. i remember it was from the south of france, but no more details than that.

espresso with a nice belgian chocolate finished the evening.

the service was very french — completely attentive and friendly in the way it should be. wait staff were personable, helpful, and witty but not obsequious and pushy. everyone knew their role and executed exactly as they should have. in fact, our waiter guided us away from a la carte and toward the prix fixe, even though the former would have been a bigger check for him. good thing we listened — the chef was transitioning from the winter menu to the spring menu next week, so our dishes were a sneak preview of the spring menu items. our food definitely drew attention from the many regulars sprinkled about.

in all, a great experience — all pluses and no minuses. we’ll be back.

comment of the day

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

from an obama/clinton story on talking points memo:

“Blocking revotes in MI and Fla.” Lol! I just love this mindless talking point.

Where did he acquire the power to stop the Michigan and Florida legislatures from passing laws and/or the state parties from submitting workable delegate selection plans to the DNC? Is this like a legal power granted to him by virture of his being the front runner by some previously unknown laws passed in those states? Or is it a superpower he acquired after he was bitten by a radioactive Diebold voting machine? Is it a magical power? Is he using a +4 Staff of Disenfranchisement against poor Hillary?

and even more:

He’s beaten her. He beat her fair and square. She had a flawed, inflexible, and arrogant electoral plan, he identified the flaws in that plan early on and took advantage of them. She was unable to adapt and now she can’t turn it around. The superdelegates are not going to overturn the results of the delegate race, Michigan and Florida have screwed themselves, and the voters in the ten remaining states are not going to give her the 70 – 30 victories in each and every congressional district that she has to have to pull even with him in the popular vote and delegate races.

comment of the day? hell, it’s the diatribe of the year.

obama’s new strategy?

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

i’ve wailed and moaned for obama to get tougher. it seems that he has.

the last couple of news cycles have seen a steady ramp-up of stories about how hillary clinton outright lied “misspoke” about her trip to bosnia with sinbad and sheryl crow.

a clinton obfuscating a prevarication? who knew?

nice to note that the obama campaign pushed this story, and the press picked up on it, and there’s no blowback to the obama campaign itself. nice to note also that hillary was at no point in any danger, despite her protestations to the contrary. we gotta keep her safe, so obama can ignore her for the v.p. slot but use her strategically to get out the fall vote.

now that’s how you get elected.

more obama miscues

~ jamie ~ 1 Comment

last i checked, i was musing about obama getting control of his message. not sure it’s gotten any better.

first we have the whole “rev. wright” business. an astute politician, or a worthy adviser to that politician, should have seen this coming a mile away. and should have worked in advance to negate the effect, or had plans in place to blunt it immediately. as it was, he seemed blindsided.

yes, the subsequent speech on race was brilliant. could turn out to be a political recovery for the ages. the rapturous media response may help obama’s “wright” problem, though his subsequent foot-in-mouth moment about “typical white people” doesn’t help. and i’m not sure that long oratory lends itself to this era of “sound-bite” politics.

and this latest staged leak of the photo of clinton and rev. wright is about as clumsy and heavy-handed as you can get.

i know it seems like i’m dumping all over obama. i think he’s still the best choice, and has unlimited potential for improving this country like no one else can. today’s news cycle (the passport mess, and the bill richardson endorsement) is certainly more favorable.

but i think there needs to be an experienced, hard-nosed old-style pol installed near the top of the hierarchy.

update: to clarify my thoughts on the clinton/wright picture: good idea, poor execution. no way this should have been traceable to the campaign.

update update: and now there’s this. the obama campaign finally starts playing a bit of hardball. maybe there’s hope for hope.

barack obama’s speech on race

~ jamie ~ 1 Comment

from the speech:

This union may never be perfect, but generation after generation has shown that it can always be perfected.

what a beautiful turn of phrase. isn’t that what our goal should be?

a more perfect union?

slam him all you want for being vapid. we need someone uplifting about now.

random thoughts on the upcoming depression

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

i’ve lived long enough now to have seen the economy rise and fall a few times.

and i’ve seen relatively isolated crises averted. a mostly contained sector of the economy, as with the savings and loan crisis. or one large company, as with the long term capital management hedge fund collapse.

but this latest business seems endemic, with tentacles reaching into every sector of the economy. add in americans’ insatiable appetites for stuff and fun and fiscal irresponsibility, funded by chinese investment in our country, and it seems like a recipe for disaster. the bear stearns bailout is probably just the tip of the iceberg.

here’s one thought about the bear stearns bailout:

This is the most radical change and expansions of Fed powers and functions since the Great Depression: essentially the Fed now can lend unlimited amounts to non bank highly leveraged institutions that it does not regulate.

great. our taxpayer dollars going into a bottomless hole over which the government has no control, with no end in sight.

and here’s another sobering thought:

The people who made tens, perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars over the last 5 years are not at risk for those earnings. If shareholders and managers are bailed out, we’ll have privatized the profits (false profits based on loans that were clearly bad) and socialized the losses. We will have rewarded the people who manipulated the financial system, at the expense of ordinary consumers.

oh, ok. so our tax money isn’t really going into a bottomless pit. it’s going into the pockets of the people who created the mess, and profited from it, in the first place. big-time republican donors, no doubt.

and finally, this:

“Maybe it’ll turn out that all this Wall Street stuff is just less important than we think it is,” he says. Let’s hope so.

“this Wall Street stuff” is what passes for pensions these days in America.

that’s your 401k going down the drain for the foreseeable future. still think we should privatize social security?

maybe i’m being too pessimistic. maybe i’m just older and more aware of things now.

but this situation has me scared.

update: if all that’s not enough, read this article and the comments as well. excellent summary of the problem, with knowledgeable folks chiming in. there’s no end in sight here.

unsolicited recommendation: schwinn 431 elliptical trainer

~ jamie ~ 1 Comment

kirk and i have been paying way too much money for bally gym memberships for years and years. when we go, which is sporadically at best, the only machine we really use is the elliptical cross trainer. sometimes some weight machines, but generally just the cross trainer.

we have to go to the gym in the mornings, and because we have to be to work at 8:00, that means leaving the house at 5:30 or so — that’s why we’re rarely at the gym. so, in the interest of both saving money and exercising more regularly, we decided to let our memberships lapse and buy an elliptical cross trainer for our apartment.

after consulting some reviews on amazon and checking out consumer reports, we decided on the schwinn 431 elliptical trainer. it was free shipping and $100 off, making the final cost $699 with no sales tax.

that’s less than one year of gym for one of us.

the item arrived several days ahead of schedule. the assembly instructions were clear and easy to follow, the assembled unit is built like a tank, and there’s very little difference between this machine and the models you find at the gym. it feels solid, is ergonomically comfortable, and is a breeze to use. there are lots of preprogrammed routines, or you can go freestyle. it has a heart monitor (though only on the stationary handlebar, a minor gripe), a fan to keep you cool, forward and reverse motion, and is compactly built.

so far, with the exception of the heart monitor, i have no complaints whatsoever. it’s a product i’d highly recommend.

hey obama, get control of your message

~ jamie ~ 1 Comment

way too many people are going off the reservation in the obama campaign.

we’ve had the guy talking to the canadians about nafta. hillary, of course, did the same thing, but that’s not my concern here.

then this samantha power person called hillary a monster and had to resign.

now we find out that she told the bbc that obama might waffle on the troop withdrawals:

He will, of course, not rely on some plan that he’s crafted as a presidential candidate or a U.S. Senator…. You can’t make a commitment in March 2008 about what circumstances will be like in January of 2009…

good lord.

say what you want about hillary (and most of what i say is bad), but at least she and all of her people are rigidly disciplined, on message, and on the same page. even if what they have to say is odious, at least it is coordinated.

obama himself may have pretty good message discipline, but his people are all over the map.

his campaign is starting to look like amateur hour, coinciding with the first real pressure he’s faced as a candidate.

they need to get professional, and fast.

update: mark halperin at time magazine addresses this very subject.

i used my $40 dtv converter box coupon

~ jamie ~ 1 Comment

kirk and i have an hdtv, but it’s an older model and doesn’t have a built-in tuner. it’s just a monitor. so without paying for cable, we’ve never been able to get a television signal. no cable, no signal, no tv. and since we dropped cable about a year ago, the only things we’ve used the tv for was netflix rentals and playing with the wii.

with the upcoming broadcast conversion from analog to digital, the government is providing $40 coupons to buy a converter box. my tv doesn’t have a tuner, so i wasn’t sure if it would work or not. what the hell, right? so i sent off for my $40 coupon, and used it to buy the converter box. total price was $60, so my net cost was $20. i bought an indoor amplified antenna as well, for $40, so total out of pocket expense was about $60, or half the price of one month of cable.

hooked it all up last night. i figured if it didn’t work, i’d take it all back. no harm, no foul.

wow.

it all works brilliantly. not only do i have television, but the converter box has widescreen capability, so the digital picture fills in the entire widescreen. it’s not true hd, but the resolution is just fine — comparable to watching a dvd, probably. and the indoor amplified antenna pulls in 21 stations. some you’ll never watch — there’s one channel that’s just a cam set up in times square, some spanish-language stuff, and what-not, but for a one-time $60 payment i can now watch the networks and other local stations. and there’s great sound coming from my stereo and a great digital picture on my hdtv.

i’m still not going to watch that much tv — i like not knowing who flunked the lie detector when asked questions about their wife, or if i’m smarter than a fifth grader, or whatever. but i can watch the news, and keep up with the election, and whatnot, and that’s a good thing.

thanks, government. you got it right this time.

Barack Hussein Obama…and other Semitically Named American Heroes

~ jamie ~ 1 Comment

a wonderful article investigates, with elegance, erudition, and wit, the origins of barack hussein obama’s name.

from the article:

Now let us take the name “Hussein.” It is from the Semitic word, hasan, meaning “good” or “handsome.” Husayn is the diminutive, affectionate form.

Barack Obama’s middle name is in honor of his grandfather, Hussein, a secular resident of Nairobi. Americans may think of Saddam Hussein when they hear the name, but that is like thinking of Stalin when you hear the name Joseph. There have been lots of Husseins in history, from the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, a hero who touched the historian Gibbon, to King Hussein of Jordan, one of America’s most steadfast allies in the 20th century. The author of the beloved American novel, The Kite Runner, is Khaled Hosseini.

But in Obama’s case, it is just a reference to his grandfather.

this article is a must, must, must read.

msnbc.com completely bites; obama shines anyway

~ jamie ~ 2 Comments

watched the second half of the final debate last night.

didn’t watch the first half, except in stutters, with constant “buffering…please wait” messages flashing across my screen. it’s not my internet access — cnn streamed their two debates to me without a hitch. and when i finally abandoned all hope and went to wonkette.com to read a liveblog of the debate, i found that everyone else in the comment strings was having the same problem.

and the commenters recommended cleveland.com as an alternative, which worked perfectly, and i watched the second half with no hiccups whatsoever.

and as a capper, each time i reloaded msnbc.com’s feed, the prestitial commercial streamed perfectly and then the live coverage didn’t work.

good job there, people. if you are going to heavily promote accessibility to your debates, then make sure you have the bandwidth to do the job. failing that, at least make sure that the audio streams continuously, even if the video drops frames. last night’s feed just froze constantly. it’s always encouraging when the national network is outplanned by the local affiliate. but thanks for all of the commercials. i’ll run out and buy some preparation h, or whatever.

not that the msnbc debate was well-planned anyway. brian williams, and especially tim russert, asked inane and poorly formed questions, and repeatedly got in the way of the candidates and made the event about themselves, and not about the candidates and the issues. here’s how to run a debate: ask a well-thought out question, and shut up while people answer it. at some points, i thought the debate was between tim russert and hillary clinton, or tim russert and barack obama.

and, can we cue up the right video, please? jeebus. that was so unfair to hillary clinton, but both candidates handled it gracefully.

in general, i found clinton to be grating and overly aggressive to no apparent positive point. perhaps her (to me) off-key performance was prompted by the out-of-bounds questioning, but barack seemed to handle the same aggressive questioning with aplomb. that tells me whose cool demeanor i want sitting across the negotiating table from tinpot nutbag dictators.

i keep asking myself if i am watching these debates with a view askew, slanted toward the candidate i am supporting. but every time i approach her with an open mind, clinton just disappoints.

obama is just a cool customer. to me his vision and demeanor trumps purported “experience”.

and the oscar for best score goes to…

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

jonny greenwood for “there will be blood”?

um, no.

i know. let’s give the oscar to the most cloying and obvious score in recent memory.

honestly. i didn’t think much of atonement. the young girl (saorise ronan) was phenomenal, but the movie itself was badly in need of some editing. i nearly fell asleep while they wandered endlessly around france during world war ii.

but the thing that kept me awake was the score, because every time i started to nod off, there would be that goddamn tap tap tap on the typewriter sprinkled throughout the score, supposedly strategically. this to me is an idea that sounds like it arose in a committee, and should have been rejected. “hey, she’s a writer. what sound can we use symbolically in the score to show she’s a writer?”

can we get more obvious? this is oscar-worthy brilliantly divergent and original thinking?

it’s as if voters purposely picked the worst score, in protest. maybe they did.

all i know is that someday, jonny greenwood is going to be a even more critically acclaimed composer in musical genres other than rock. perhaps he’ll win that oscar someday, for another film.

my advice to him?

don’t waste your time scoring any more hollywood films. they don’t deserve you.

last night’s debate

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

watched the debate last night, the same way we did last time, since we have no cable tv.

like last time, i liked hillary. she’s intelligent, measured, informed, and projects enthusiasm, power, and competence.

problem for her is, so does obama. two great candidates. and what i’m reminded of is the cycle i went through after the last debate — she impressed me then as well.

and then her campaign kicked in, with all her (to plagiarize a phrase) silly politics. obama plagiarized his speeches, and his wife michelle doesn’t love america, and we’re going to steal his pledged delegates, and what not.

silly.

i liked her a lot after the last debate, and then she (or more accurately, her minions) completely turned me off. if she can’t control her message and campaign in a disciplined and effective manner, why should i believe that her governance will be any better?

ready on day one, indeed. she’s not even ready now to run an organized campaign, after two years of running for this office.

it’s too bad that the discourse of her campaign doesn’t match the level of her personal discourse.

loving me some twin peaks

~ jamie ~ 1 Comment

no not women’s breasts, you boob. i mean twin peaks, the tv show.

kirk is a huge fan of the series, which i missed the first time around. but we’re both big david lynch fans, so i got him the dvd box set at amazon.com. the first season has been available in the u.s. for quite a while, but the second season just came out via this “definitive gold box set”. he had vhs tapes of some of the episodes, but it’s nice to have a complete set all in one place, with everything remastered and modernized and such.

i think i may have watched an episode or two when it was first on, but i think i missed a show or two and then got lost and lost interest. but it’s ideal to have this box set. we’ve been watching a couple of episodes a night, and have gotten through the first [short] season.

i love the pace. it’s so slow and drawn out, which adds to the overall spooky effect. when i was younger and less patient, i probably would have merely thought that this pace was boring — but it’s anything but. and the characters are so interesting. my favorite is audrey, played by sherilynn fenn. what a terrific actress she is.

i never thought i’d care who killed laura palmer, but now i can’t wait to get home each evening to watch the show. if you’ve never seen it, put it in your netflix queue. if you have, time to rediscover it with the benefits of age and experience.

of course, maybe you shouldn’t listen to me. i loved inland empire too, and it made perfect sense to me.

quick question

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

if the republicans have any real nasty, smoking gun-type dirt on barack obama, why would they save it for a general election? why wouldn’t they get it out there now in hopes of knocking out obama in favor of hillary?

hillary, about whom they have warehouses of dirt to unload. and you know they’d rather run mccain against hillary, who they can (and would) beat, rather than run mccain against obama.

i don’t think there’s a lot of real dirt out there to be had. i think that obama smartly has gotten out ahead of any real nasty revelations. the drugs, the rezko thing, and all.

at least i hope so.

obama: looking back, looking forward

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

from kos, a great snapshot of where obama stands, how he got there, where the race is probably going, and why we should take a deep breath and appreciate the race lasting a bit longer.

from the article:

Now I know people will be calling for her to quit the race, but I hope she rides it out through Ohio and Texas. I think Ohio needs a good dose of infrastructure building, and this primary will help make that happen. Same with Texas, where a solid ground operation can pave the way for some serious people-powered action in the Senate race with our man Rick Noriega.

It would be great if this thing went to Pennsylvania for the same reason, but I doubt it’ll get that far. I’ll call it right now — baring a major gaffe or disaster, Obama will win both Texas and Ohio and that will be that.

from his lips to god’s ears.