Author: Ridley

I’m really going to regret this…Ukraine

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One of the lessons I learned as a wee one back during the Iran hostage crisis and later the first Iraq war is that most leaders and nation-states operate from their own perceived self-interest. That might sound obvious, but you may have seen foreign leaders painted as “madmen” and other similar epithets that make it sound as though their actions are irrational and unpredictable. This is almost never the case. Their motivations may be at odds with what we want them to be, they may even seem…puzzling…but the actions are almost consistent with what they perceive as their best interest. The other thing that can confuse the issue is that the stated interest is not always (or even “seldom”) the same as the real interest. Fortunately, you usually don’t have to be a mind reader to come up with a pretty good guess. When the U.S. invaded Iraq the first time, it probably had very little to do with “defending the freedom-loving people of Kuwait” and more about “increasing U.S. access to Iraqi oil and trying to stabilize the region for U.S. businesses.” This makes sense, as the former is a an altruistic platitude and the latter is in what might reasonably be perceived as “national interest.” So, with that out of the way, I’m going to lay out my best understanding of the interests of some of the parties involved. I’ve read and watched a lot of information from many, many different sources, but I won’t pretend like I know everything there is to know on the subject. I will, however, try my best to divorce my assessments from what I want the answers to be. Let’s get started: Russia I’ve edited this on account of having missed the most-important point: This is about natural gas. I should have mentioned this in the previous paragraph, but the other lesson from those older conflicts is that it’s almost always about resources. Now that the Black Sea is the new Baltic Sea, having access to the natural gas deposits is the primary goal. You may say “Well, Russia has already taken Crimea and the port of Sevastopol, why invade the rest of Ukraine?” There are a couple of reasons. The Ukrainians have smashed a dam upstream of the peninsula, emptying some of the canals that provide water for agriculture. In addition, the southern edge of Ukraine has a lot of Black Sea-facing shoreline, and that means access to the gas. What are almost certainly not key considerations: De-satanization, de-nazification, and creating a Russian ethnostate (those last two are comical when taken in tandem). Fear of a western invasion through Ukraine probably has some currency, but it is very unlikely that this is a key driving factor when compared to the economic concerns. Ukraine Again, this one’s easy: Survival as a nation. Like any nation that’s been invaded, that’s the main goal. Survive by any means necessary. If the west is sending you aid, then put on a very pro-western face. If the far-right extremists* are fighting the baddies, you look the other way. You say and do anything to keep your country afloat. Zelenskyy is literally doing what any leader on the planet would do. “Survival as a nation” is tougher than it looks, and not just for the obvious reasons. Yes, Russia is much bigger and stronger and dislodging them from the conquered territory will be difficult. The problems at the bargaining table are almost as difficult. A “peace” where Russia retains the areas they have conquered is just a cease-fire until they can retool, reload, and have a third bite at the apple. Another obstacle is that many of the peace proposals have included a clause that requires Ukraine to remain neutral with respect to Russia and the West. Any such agreement nullifies national sovereignty as a country that isn’t free to make deals with whoever they like isn’t a country. An agreement that neuters Ukraine in this fashion is the end of Ukraine as an independent nation. * Yes, some of them are actual, Hugo-Boss-Cosplay nazis. No point in pretending otherwise. They have absolutely minimal impact on Ukrainian politics. The far-right party, of which the nazis are a minority, never achieved the electoral success of the BNP in the United Kingdom. I am not comfortable supporting nazis. I am perfectly comfortable supporting a country in which they are an inconsequential minority like, say, the U.S. I’m certainly more comfortable with that than, say, twisting my head around justifying an invasion. U.S. The U.S., obviously, is on the side of freedom and democra…just kidding. As far as I can tell, the U.S. has two primary and one secondary interest in this war. The first is to keep Russia bogged down in a war of attrition. Washington sees Russia as a problem, as they are a) very cash-poor with an economy about the size of Italy’s, and b) in possession of a huge military with a lot of modern weapons. A war of attrition isn’t at all what Ukraine wants, but they’ll take what support they can get. In addition, ensuring access to the Black Sea gas for American companies is certainly going to be an American goal. It’s almost certain that Ukraine has made some promises in this regard in exchange for support, but we don’t have any visible evidence. This would be consistent the goals of both parties. Of course, that support comes in the form of American goods and weapons, and those are making some well-connected people a lot of money at the expense of the U.S. taxpayer. That’s goal #2 if I’m correct in my guesses: Funnel a lot of money into the hands of certain wealthy Americans with a minimum of accountability. The secondary goal is simply to support the U.S.’s European allies, who have a considerably greater interest in curtailing Russia’s expansion. The U.S. burned a lot of bridges in Europe a few years ago, and this is an opportunity to mend them a little. I don’t think this is the primary driver. It’s more like a nice side-effect. The EU Unlike the U.S., the Europeans have a lot to fear from a war in eastern Europe. It is not at all in their interests to keep things simmering along; they would prefer to see the war ended which…

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Kitty Cat Roll Call

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My creative muscles have creative flu or something. I haven’t had the compulsion to make anything in a while, so in an epic attempt to kick-start my drive, I’m going to…write about cats. There’s not much of that on the internet, right? Being cat people, we have several cats. Exactly how many we have is difficult to measure, sort of like trying to measure how many objects orbit the sun. There are the nine (or eight if you’re a joyless but technically correct pedant like Neil DeGrasse Tyson) primary objects that we can all agree on. There are, of course, rather a lot more than that. There are the moons…do they count? Comets? Asteroids? Weird alien constructs from the dawn of the universe? Where do you draw the line? It’s complicated. The same is true of cats. So, let’s take a look at our cats, the cats who are perhaps de facto ours if not officially so, and the others in the penumbra of our orbits. Dunno where all the solar system stuff came from today. Maybe it’s because I’m watching a video on making Stranger Things-style music. The Big Three: Red Velvet (AKA Red Velvetron, Velvetron, Tron, Tronbutt, RV, Redly Deadly, Lady Redlington, World’s Naughtiest) Red Velvet is the senior member of our household trio. She was dropped off with all of her siblings at the clinic Nicole used to work at. She’s the only one who gets to go outside from time to time as she used to get to go out on the porch at our apartments. She requires a lot of supervision because she will disappear in a flash. Tron is very much Nicole’s cat and sleeps on the pillow behind her head every night. She does not like interacting with other kittehs but now that we’re back up to three, she doesn’t have to very much as the two idiots occupy each other. Definitely not a lap cat, Redlington likes to have her back patted right at the tail. Ramza (AKA Ramza Charles Soyuncu, Ramza Charles, Charo, Dingus, The Ultimate Baby) Ramza is the middle child, but still very much a child. He’s not even two yet but he’s a very big boy. Ramza is Nicole’s baby; she saw his picture at the shelter and fell in love immediately. He was so tiny when we got him; we didn’t dare let him sleep with us for fear we’d squish him. Ramza doesn’t really meow, so it’s super cute when he tries to and squeaks. He loves to be carried around in Nicole’s arms and likes to jump on our backs. Charo is very sharp and we do not like it when he jumps on our backs. He can jump very, very high. At night, he sleeps on my legs which is nice in the winter. It is less so in the summer. Aymeric (AKA Aymeric Leonard Bitingway Vardy, Wingus, Microdingus) Aymeric is my boy. He looked so sad at the shelter. He is not sad anymore. He has squinty eyes like Aymeric in Final Fantasy XIV, and he has a little meow that is super cute. He hates that I close my office door when I’m working and he always runs over when I open it. He insists I play with him with the little wand toy that he invariably destroys. He gets along super well with Ramza, who took over the role of big brother so very well. Aymeric cannot jump like his brother, and he’s not as sharp in the “drawing blood from your veins” sense, but he’s 100% energy except when he’s not. Then he sleeps on me. He purrs louder than any cat I’ve ever had. My mission is to make sure he purrs a lot. The Other Kitties: This group spend a lot of time on our porch. Probably because we often leave a bowl of food out, we have a cat friendly hidey-hole, and lots of shelter from the cold. So, yeah, we did it to ourselves but the alternative is just letting Panthro fend for himself and he looks so cold sometimes. That was never really an option. Panthro Panthro is a tom with a huge neck who sometimes lives on our porch and sometimes under our house and sometimes he is very mysterious and we don’t know where he goes. We’re pretty sure he was another family’s cat, and we’re pretty sure we found the family, but they didn’t seem interested in getting him back and that is very sad. Panthro, being wild now, doesn’t let us come too close to him, but he is not as scared as he used to be and usually stays on the porch when we leave the house. He’s a very handsome boy. We made all the porch accommodations for him for when it was very cold. Millie Millie probably belongs to one of our neighbors, but we’re not sure who. She’s very majestic and very territorial and doesn’t get along with everyone else. She used to come over a lot more often. She doesn’t let us pet her which is probably for the best as she seems very pettable and our other cats would get jealous. Fancy Fancy is such a ham. She lives across the street from us and had a litter of kittens super young, but she’s since been fixed and she’s very healthy. She comes over to see us even when she isn’t hungry, but especially when she is. She loves to rub against our legs and lets us pet her. She drives Red Velvet nuts. We love Fancy. Willie Willie looks like a goofball, with crossed blue eyes and long white(ish) fur. He’s an infrequent visitor, and he doesn’t seem to like Panthro. He likes to sit in our garden or our back yard and roll around in the grass or dirt. He does not let us near. Domino Domino is a fairly new visitor and she is super friendly, so she probably has a home. She let us pet her almost immediately. I suspect she’s one of Fancy’s kittens, but we don’t know for sure. Black Stripe (official name still pending) This is our newest visitor and he or she is very skittish. They are comfortable around Domino but not around us. This cat looks a lot like Panthro and…

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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

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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

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Quick Recipeh

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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

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

Battlebots: Season 8, Week 1

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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…

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A British Library drawing of a fox.

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

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(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

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Audacity

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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

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

A Tale of Two (not recent) Movies

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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.

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

A Tale of Two Steaks

Posted on 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.”

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My Favorite Book About My Favorite Book

Posted on by Ridley

Steinbeck’s East of Eden hit me hard. It is, on one level, a book that deconstructs excuses and demonstrates that, no matter what you’d done in your past, you always had the ability to choose to do the right thing. That was next-level self-reflection when I first read it. It’s also a fine story and it doesn’t come across as preachy, which it absolutely would have in the hands of a lesser writer. I should probably mention that I’m biased; I find him an incredibly appealing author, a proper socialist, and pretty good looking too. I believe kids today would refer to him as a “snack”. So, depending on when you ask, I might well list East of Eden as my favorite novel. But…did you know that he also wrote a book about the book while writing the book? Steinbeck wrote his novels in longhand on big sheets of paper and a stack o’ sharpened pencils, on the front of large sheets of paper. However, he liked to “warm up” before he started working on the story, so he kept a diary on the backs of the paper. In most cases, he’d write a little bit about what we going on in his life at the time, then lay out what he hoped to accomplish with the day’s writing and how he planned to accomplish it. He’d include reminders to use short, simple sentences for action sequences and things like that. Once he was sufficiently warmed up, he’d start the actual work on the front of the next sheet. As fortune would have it, many of these sheets have been preserved and even collected. The diary he kept while writing East of Eden has been published under the name Journal of a Novel. It’s one of my favorite non-fiction books, offering tremendous insight into what he was trying to do with East of Eden and the many technical tools he brought to bear to do it. His writing makes everything feel so effortless, but if his own journal is to be believed, there was a lot of work behind making it look so easy. There are fascinating side stories as well, particularly those involving the name of the novel. He didn’t come up with “East of Eden” until he was more than halfway through writing it. It boggles the mind to imagine any other title, so it’s a little shocking how close we were to having something far more pedestrian and less suited to purpose. Included in the collection are the letters he wrote to editor Pascal Covici while he was writing. The back and forth between the writer and the editor are yet another window on how the novel came into being. It’s also a reminder that even the titans need good editors and I shouldn’t expect to succeed with anything less. I went to a book signing by Neal Stephenson where he moaned a bit when someone asked “the dreaded process question.” I’m sure writers do get tired of answering it, but reaction speaks to just how much interest there is in how the sausage is made. Journal of a Novel is a long, but genuinely interesting, answer to that question. If you’re in to that sort of thing, I strongly recommend it.

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