January 2023 – Stay With Me, Go Places

The cover of the book "The Guilty Bridegroom" with a doctor and a woman standing over another stricken woman.

Mea Culpa-A non-inclusive list of Things I Was Wrong About

Posted on 30 January, 202330 January, 2023 by Ridley

Before we get started, it’s been a tough few weeks. We’ve had health issues, including cat health issues, that have been taking up most of my mental clock cycles. The weather has been The Suck. Work has been tough. I can’t even see my comfort zone from here. There’s been a lot going on. But…I have a process!* I should be getting a lot more up here over the next few weeks. * By “process,” I mean a checklist. Baby steps. To Bob: Man, your taste in music was always so much better than mine. I didn’t “get” Echo and the Bunnymen, Talk Talk, or The Call or so many other bands you’d play for me and I just wasn’t into them for whatever reason. Kudos man. I have grown to appreciate ’em and they’re fantastic. To Curtis: A little late with this, but aside from the fact that you could spell “discipline” properly and held your ground in spite of my insistence. Also, you were right about conservatism and lawyers, and I was very much wrong. To Patrick: Steve Dillon was awesome. I used to make fun of his art because I was not too fond of the chins on some of the characters, and his hatching bugged me (this goes for Steve Yeowell as well). I re-read my old Hellblazers and I just could not have been more wrong. His work is absolutely stunning, particularly regarding faces and emotions. To My Sister and Robyn: I am not a reasonable man. I try to be, but I am not. When I believe something, I believe it and get very absolutist about it. Both of you have been extremely patient with my tendency to take after my father and get downright religious about some of this stuff. To My Dad: I’m not going to say you were right and I was wrong, but I wasn’t nearly kind enough and I let that get between us. To My Mom: Night Of The Hunter was a damned good film. Sorry for laughing at it the first time you showed it to me. To Mrs. Gafford: I was kind of a shit to you in all of your classes. I know, and I’m sorry. You always did right by me. I actually liked your classes more than any others. My simile poem was not only over the top but largely inaccurate. The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls. To Mamie: You and your hubby were right about Austin. Took us a little longer to get it. To Ted Leo: When your voice was going, I heckled “Less rock, more talk!” and, while I still contend it was funny, it was wrong as you were there to rock and you did so quite well under the circumstances. To Dan: Ryman Auditorium, not Ryland. Derp. I should have listened to you, even though neither was the answer to the question. To Everyone Else: Y’all, I’m wrong about a lot of stuff all the #$#$% time. Once I get around to admitting it, it turns into “learning” and “growth.” This is not an inclusive list; I owe lots of folks apologies for all kinds of things. These were just at the top of my mind. If I didn’t mention you by name, I’m either clueless, or I’m still so mortified by what I did that I’m not eager to air it just yet. Thanks. My soul feels lighter now. -RK

Quick Recipeh

Posted on 11 January, 202311 January, 2023 by Ridley

A quick one today: When I need to fix something quick (and cheap to eat), here’s my current go-to. Ingredients:2 packs of instant ramen noodles. The flavor doesn’t matter because I just toss the flavor packet.Maybe a 1/2 tsp of Better than Bouillon. I prefer the chicken flavor, but you do you.1/2 tsp of soy sauce. Reduced sodium is a good choice here.I tsp of Lao Gan Ma spicy chili crisps.Whatever chopped veggies you want to add.A small amount of butter or butter substitute (avocado-based butter is good). Boil the noodles with whatever veggies you want to include. Mushrooms, celery, and carrots are my faves. I drain most but not all of the water. Add the bouillon and soy sauce to taste. Do that first! Stir ’em in and get the flavor of the broth right. This is 90% of the job. 1/2 tsp of each may not work for you, but both are concentrated and SALTY. I leave it a little short of what my mouth wants because the salt will build up and I haven’t added the chili crisps yet. Add the chili crisps next. I am…generous…with them. Very generous. Crazy generous. Your mileage may vary. Then, if you want a little more oil, just for the mouth feel, add a little butter or something butter-esque. The LGM can be pretty oily, so you may not need it. Top with green onions if you’re of a mind, and you’re done. It takes about 5-10 minutes depending on how many veggies you want. It’s pretty filling, pretty tasty, and very cheap. Now, I’m not normally one to go hard for specific brands, but the Better than Bouillon is an absolute must for me, as is the LGM chili crisp goodness. The BtB is (slightly) less salty and much more broth-y than any other bouillon I’ve tried. It ain’t cheap, but it IS good and most grocery stores have it. That’s it. I apologize for not telling a thousand-word story before getting to the recipe as is the current tradition. Bonus points of if you recognize the source of the title. -RK

British Library image titled "Shelling The Houses of Parliament" (see page 147. Big Ben is falling to the left.

Battlebots: Season 8, Week 1

Posted on 9 January, 20239 January, 2023 by Ridley

Hi! There are oh so many spoilers in what follows. So. Many. Spoilers. Pretty much “Oops, All Spoilers!” Don’t read any more if you haven’t seen the episode yet and plan to. So, hi! Welcome to my first recap of the first episode of Battlebots Season 8 (or Season 7…Amazon lists it as season 8, so that’s what I’m going with). If you like watching people pit two 250 lb. machines against each other, you’ll probably like Battlebots. No other sport comes close for sheer destruction. It’s great; it’s all about brains until you get your robot in the box, and then it’s just sheer power. The new season looks like it’ll be played by largely the same rules as the last one, and in a very similar battlebox. There are kill saws (that don’t kill), screws (that just tangle your robot up sometimes), hammers (that don’t do anything), and an “upper deck” for…reasons? I don’t know. It’s easy to forget just how heavy these things are when they’re tossing each other 20 feet in the air (and yes, they most definitely do that). These things are scary. They can hurt you. I know, because the legendary Ray Billings suffered an injury working on his equally legendary Tombstone and won’t be able to participate this year. That a huge loss for the sport, but mostly, I just hope Ray’s OK whether he ever participates again or not. So, here’s my breakdown of the first week’s fights. The bots have 3 minutes to fight. If they knock out the other bot, then they win. If both bots are still standing after 3 minutes, then it goes to the judges. You do NOT want it to go to the judges because the judging is inscrutable. No scruting these judges. Every bot will fight four times, and then at the end of the regular season, 16 (or 17?) will be selected to enter the championship tournament. If you want to know more, here’s the official site. Now, on to the fights! Witch Doctor v. Ribbot Heck of a way to start the new season: Two powerful vertical spinners and (mostly) durable four-wheel body configurations. Both of these bots are likely to make the tournament, so this was a good test for both of ’em. With two such evenly matched robots, the strategies were likewise similar. They went face to face like two bulls and tried to get an angle that would allow them to hit their opponent without getting hit. Michael Gellatly, Witch Doctor’s driver, won the driving battle and got the first big hit on Ribbot. The little froggy flew through the air and Witch Doctor was there each time to smack Ribbot again. At the risk of spoiling my spoilers, this fight demonstrated two themes: The fight was very one-sided and ended quickly, and both sides tried to be more “aggressive” than last year. Gellatly said that they’d increased the spin rate of Witch Doctor’s weapon to the maximum-allowable 250 mph at the potential cost of reliability. If these trends keep up, we’re going to see a lot of very short fights. Quantum v. Captain Shrederator This would not be one of those “short fights,” which probably already tells you which bot won. Quantum is a terrifying control bot with piercing teeth while the Captain is a full body spinner that looks frightening but almost never wins because it tends to…stop working entirely. I commented before the fight that this could be a tough fight for Quantum, a big spinning bot that can’t even control itself can be a toughie to control. Wow, was I ever wrong about that one. Quantum scooted across the box immediately and got a grip on Shrederator before it had time to spin up. The English control bot carried the Captain around the box like a cat carrying its favorite toy for the entire fight, biting through the top armor, and then releasing briefly as required by the rules. Lather/rinse/repeat. It didn’t quite go the distance, as one of the bites found the spinner’s batteries and that was that. HUGE v. Shatter Two of the more innovative bots around squared off in what was always likely to be a one-sided affair. Shatter’s a really interesting hammer bot with great durability and mobility, but there are some bots that simply don’t have an answer for HUGE and they’re one of ’em. Shatter put a long, serrated hammer on in place of their normal affair, but it made no difference at all as HUGE was able to approach without fear and keep whacking that hammer bot with its terrifying vertical spinner. What was interesting was not that HUGE won, but how HUGE won. The maneuverability and driving skill were both way beyond anything we’ve seen from them in the past. Captain Jonathan Schultz said he “wanted to be more aggressive” and he certainly was. There was a sense last year that Huge had peaked, but if this fight was any indication, that ain’t the case. Glitch v. Riptide The two rookies of the year from last season, Glitch and Riptide are both vertical egg-beater spinners who hit really, really hard. The similarities end there, as Riptide is a fast, conventional four-wheeler that reminds me a little of Yeti in that it’s fearless and (here comes that word again) aggressive. Glitch, on the other hand, is the most accurately-named bot in the business. It’s prone to all sorts of fiddly mechanical issues, it’s absurdly low to the ground, and it beat the #$@#$ out of Hydra last year. It too has four wheels, but they’re the slidy wheels like on Shatter and they don’t always work. Both teams predicted a quick fight and kudos to them. The Glitch folks wanted to go weapon-to-weapon, which would have served them better than what actually happened. Riptide got around to their side, flipped ’em, and it was game over. Well, it could have been, as Glitch was never going to self-right. They took a few more shots to try to flip Glitch back over, but instead knocked it upside down onto the upper-deck. Game over. Free Shipping v. Gigabyte The big news here is that Gary Ginn and Free Shipping have a weapon this year. He’s gotten away from the marvelously entertaining but hopelessly outclassed gimmick bots…

I’m Sure This Isn’t As Pointless As It Feels

Posted on 8 January, 20238 January, 2023 by Ridley

(honestly, I’m not even a little bit sure) We’re doing a getaway night at the Havana in San Antonio on account of it being one of our favorite places to stay, fairly close to home, and it vibes hard enough on its own that we don’t have to go out and be among people so we can just stay in our room. That’s one of our preferred ways to vacation, so it makes sense for us. Anyway, Nicole is fast asleep because “super chill” is a big part of those aforementioned vibes. I’m not quite ready to call it a night so I decided to install Firefox on my Chromebook.It was one of those “Huh, I wonder if this is possible?” things and, once I saw that it was, I wanted to give it a shot. It was not, as you may have guessed, as simple as “download an app and install it.” It was a reasonably involved process (at least to the non-Linux user) involving: Turn on the developer beta Linux mode. Install Linux on a virtual machine. Install an installer. Install Firefox Once these steps were complete, I could run Firefox on a Chromebook inside a Linux virtual machine. The process took about 20 minutes. It isn’t the greatest experience, but it does work. It might be a better experience if my Chromebook weren’t 6 years old, but you work with what you’ve got, eh? It does what I need it to do, so that’s good enough for now. That raises the question: What do I need it to do? Good question! The easy answer is “prove that it can be done” which was something I’d been wondering about for a while. It’s also useful, from a strictly hypothetical standpoint, for maintaining multiple identities should I ever decide to do such a thing. Looking very very innocent. Is it worth it? Probably not. It’s slow, it’s clunky, and I’m not really doing anything I couldn’t do with multiple Chrome logons and a decent password manager (btw, taking Keeper for a spin after LastPass completely botched their response to their latest breach) couldn’t do and probably do better. There’s a non-zero chance I’ve just done something awful to the limited storage this little fella has. It was fun, though. On the off chance I ever actually need to do something like this, I know it can be done and, assuming I don’t remember the exact step, I know how to find them. There’s value in that, I suppose. -RK

Audacity

Posted on 6 January, 20236 January, 2023 by Ridley

File this under: LiveJournal-esque2022 was tough, wasn’t it? I’ve struggled to explain exactly why it felt so much worse to me than 2020 and 2021 which were pretty awful in their own way. They were a period of non-stop crisis that, while scary, felt finite. “This too shall pass.” Take care of ourselves, get the vaccines, and the odds were good that we’d get through it. But 2022? 2022 had the feel of “the new normal.” The price of everything went through the roof; wages didn’t. Heaven help the folks on a fixed income. Some of the inflation was due to issues caused by COVID; most of it wasn’t. It was just an opportunity to rejigger the economy to transfer even more wealth to the wealthy. Plus, we just decided to surrender to the disease. I wish I could blame it all on MAGA, but the truth is that there were plenty of anti-vax ninnies on all sides and, because of this, it was inevitable that COVID became endemic. Would it have done so anyway? Probably. We’ll never know because, as a people, we couldn’t even think of other people long enough to make an effort to slow it down. Wearing a mask was too much to ask, so I don’t know what I was expecting. So, 2022 wore me down because of the realization that “this is just how it’s gonna be.” This is how things are and I’m going to have to get used to. This seems so much more oppressive than a time of crisis. There’s no adrenaline to “deal with it.” Yes, I know I’m coming from a place of incredible privilege in that we managed to land on our feet following the economic shock of the pandemic, and I apologize if this comes across as insensitive to those of you who were hit hard and struggled mightily to get back up. My hope for 2023 is that I can reclaim hope. Hope is a funny thing, isn’t it? Steinbeck’s take is probably about right, even if it isn’t the most…hopeful. I need to stop living in survival mode and only trying not to let things get worse. That was 2022 and I don’t have enough years left to waste them in that mode. I have goals, and plans…”works in progress” would be the term…and I feel as though I finally have enough want, enough hope, to move forward. So, that’s it for me for now. Helluva year, 2022. Let’s not do that again. Onward and upward in 2023…in spite of everything. -RK

British Library image: The Conjuror's Levee, showing an astrologer giving a woman a reading.

A Tale of Two (not recent) Movies

Posted on 4 January, 20235 January, 2023 by Ridley

I don’t watch a lot of movies these days. Those of you who know me personally understand the irony as well as the reasons for it. For some reason, we decided to watch a couple of films last week and I wanted to share my impressions of them. Megamind Have you ever seen a film that had nothing in particular wrong with it but you just couldn’t love? That was Megamind for me. All the pieces fit nicely. The animation was solid. The celebrity voice acting didn’t take me out of the story like it normally does. The overall themes were good ones, although…we’ll come back to it. The ending was satisfactory. I feel like I should have liked it more than I did. The one confusing thing, to me, was the muddling of the themes. Was it a children’s movie with the message that you aren’t constrained by the circumstances of your birth? Or, was it a rom-com farce where deception is always uncovered and then overcome in the third act? It was both, and the weaving the two of them together, and they didn’t quite pull it off. One thing that I wish had received a little more thought was the differences between how Titan and Metro Man reacted to receiving similar powers. There was some subtext there that may or may not have been intended that I would have like to have seen brought to the surface. Maybe it’s just “Titan was a real asshole before he got his powers, so of course he’d use them selfishly,” but it would have been an interesting rabbit hole to explore. My absolute favorite thing was Megamind’s plausible-but-wildly-incorrect pronunciations. I do that all the freakin’ time and I thought it was really charming even when it turned out to be a plot device. I’m happy to call it a good movie even if it didn’t quite land for me. I’m probably not the target audience for it, huh? Constantine Sigh. I’ve been intentionally avoiding this just because I love the source material so much and, having seen the previews with the gun-totin’, black-wearin’, Keanu Reeves as John Constantine, I just wasn’t interested. I’ve long held that, if they absolutely had to make Constantine an American, the absolute best choice would have been Dennis Leary. He has both the look and the fast-talking shithousery to him that you want in a magician who doesn’t have nearly as many aces up his sleeve as he wants you to think, but the one he does have is going to land between your shoulder blades if you cross him. Having seen Constantine, I haven’t changed my opinion, but I’m not sure Leary would have been better for the movie they actually made. It’s a deeply, deeply weird film that draws deeply from the comics in some aspects, but in others it couldn’t be less like them. The including of bits of the Dangerous Habits storyline was welcome, but…I gotta tell you, as much as I love Tilda Swinton, Gavin Rossdale would have made such a good Gabriel (or, at least, the comics version of him). There were a lot of changes that were clearly made to make the film a little more palatable to an audience that isn’t prepared for Garth Ennis’ take on religion and, while they certainly didn’t help, I get why they did it. The inclusion of a cursory romance felt tacked on, and there was so very much scenario chewing when acting would have served the story better. This probably makes it sound like I hated it, but I didn’t. It was a very weird but undeniably interesting movie. I think there was a very good movie in there somewhere. It felt like they were trying to walk the line between the story they wanted to tell and the story they could tell and, while I don’t see him as John Constantine at all, Reeves clearly “gets” the character, so kudos for that. I’d still rather have seen Dennis Leary, though.

A British Library image of a bunch of foppish types in top hats sitting at a bar

A Tale of Two Steaks

Posted on 1 January, 20231 January, 2023 by Ridley

The other day, Nicole was craving a steak and she wanted to go to a restaurant. We live in a small enough town that there are now steak restaurants nearby, so we drove up New Braunfels and tried the Longhorn Steakhouse. Longhorn is a chain restaurant owned by Darden, the owners of Olive Garden, Cheddars, and, until recently, Red Lobster. So, we set our expectations appropriately. They were on what we used to call a “false wait” when I was worked as a server. There was a 20 minute wait for a table even though the restaurant was half empty. This was likely due to their being understaffed either in the kitchen or the front of the house. No worries, though. This is not an uncommon situation. Nicole decided to get fancy and ordered a filet with mushrooms on top while I stuck with the chicken fried steak. The food arrived, albeit without the mushrooms she’d ordered. It took another ten minutes to get the mushrooms, and when they arrived, they were clearly straight out of the can whole mushrooms without any seasoning (unless you consider “30 seconds in the microwave” a variety of seasoning). So, now the steak was cold and it wasn’t even really a filet. You might generously refer to it as a tenderloin, but it was one that had the mealiest texture I’ve ever experienced in a steak. The mushrooms weren’t a suitable steak topping; the hope had been that they would have been chopped and, you know, seasoned. The small handful of french fries were cold when they arrived, but at least they didn’t get any worse with the wait. My steak was fine. It was a chicken fried steak. Not good, not terrible. fine. A week later, we were in Austin on Anderson Lane and decided to stop off at Bartlett’s in an attempt to right the wrong that had been done to our taste buds. Bartlett’s had been a Houston’s previously and might as well still be. The menu, the service model, the everything, was pretty much the same as it had been. If you’re not familiar with Houston’s, you might know Hillstone as about half of the Houston’s have been rebranded. It’s the same idea. So, they’re a chain restaurant, but if you’ve ever been to one, you understand just how different they are. As someone who has been in the chain restaurant business for over three decades, I can assure you that there is no chain in this country that executes what they do like Hillstone/Houston’s. Their standards are absolutely bonkers in a way that probably doesn’t sound rational. They have a small menu and it’s expensive for what it is, but not Expensive-expensive. They happened to be out of their French dip sandwich the day we went, so I got the chimichurri steak standwich and…I’ve never tasted its equal. The steak was generous, it was perfectly prepared, and it was (naturally) tender enough that it was easy to eat without having to cut it. All the vegetables were fresh, the chimichurri was clearly homemade and absolutely delicious. The price of both meals was almost exactly the same. My takeaway from this is that, as a restauranteur, don’t put anything on the menu that you can’t execute. You’d think that would be obvious, but I worked for Bennigan’s and I can assure you that “Can we actually execute this item consistently?”* is a question that was never raised. It’s all good and well to put upscale items on your menu, but if you can’t prepare them, then you’re chase people off. Stick with what you can actually do. The corrolary, of course, is that when you’re in a questionable restaurant, don’t aim for the stars with your order. You may be in the mood for something really fancy, and you may be tempted to order it if it’s on the menu, but you really should consider whether That Sort of Restaurant can actually prepart that item. * During the ill-fated Russian food promotion at Bennigan’s, we offered Beef Stroganoff on the specials menu. This item was prepared by combining our frozen beef fajita mix with a sauce made by adding sour cream to our meatloaf gravy, and then serving it on top of microwaved noodles we kept around for our ziti entree. This was, from a taste standpoint, one of our more successful Frankenstein offerings. My advice was always “stick with the Monte Cristo and the potato skins.”