Monthly Archives: May 2007

Todavía me gusta la música

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A few weeks ago, I rocked the internet to its foundations when I spent an entire week posting lists of my favorite things to this blog. But even by those low standards, I still managed to under-perform on the music [...]

A few weeks ago, I rocked the internet to its foundations when I spent an entire week posting lists of my favorite things to this blog. But even by those low standards, I still managed to under-perform on the music section, a fact that haunts me to this day.

I’ve been digging through my iTunes library lately, both to prepare for my upcoming commute and in reaction to the announcement of the new tracks in “Guitar Hero Rocks the 80s” and Guitar Hero IIGuitar Hero 3 (“Heat of the Moment” + “Paint it Black” = awesome).

And going through my music library just makes it clear how the music I like is so much better than the music that other people like. Really, it’s orders of magnitude better. When you realize that, you see it’s my duty to inform my readers and give them the rich, meaty lists they crave.

My 25 Favorite Songs

  1. “Beyond the Sea” by Bobby Darin
  2. “Tomorrow Never Knows” by The Beatles
  3. “Close (to the Edit)” by Art of Noise
  4. “The Rain Song” by Led Zeppelin
  5. “Rolling” by Soul Coughing
  6. “Levitate Me” by Pixies
  7. “Young Ned of the Hill” by The Pogues
  8. “Angelika Suspended” by Palm Fabric Orchestra
  9. “Full on Idle” by The Amps
  10. “Isobel” by Björk
  11. “Straight to Hell” by The Clash
  12. “Photograph” by Def Leppard
  13. “Song for My Father” by Horace Silver
  14. “Lady Pilot” by Neko Case
  15. “I Hear the Bells” by Mike Doughty
  16. “Red Right Hand” by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
  17. “Gimme Shelter” by The Rolling Stones
  18. “Dogs of Lust” by The The
  19. “Step Right Up” by Tom Waits
  20. “Sweet Thing” by Van Morrison
  21. “Let Forever Be” by Chemical Brothers
  22. “Unchained” by Van Halen
  23. “More Than a Feeling” by Boston
  24. “Stand Together” by The Beastie Boys
  25. “Soul Bossa Nova” by Quincy Jones

(Most of those links are to YouTube, so no guarantees they’ll last).

As if that weren’t enough, you get another list! A list of perfect albums. “Perfect” doesn’t necessarily mean my favorite albums, just that they either: 1) don’t have a single bad track on them, or 2) are so strong and build such a momentum that they sail right over the bad songs.

Twelve Perfect Albums

  1. Led Zeppelin IV
    Duh.
  2. Revolver by The Beatles
    The best pop album ever made.
  3. Boston by Boston
    It peters out towards the end, but you can’t start off stronger than this record.
  4. Come On Pilgrim by Pixies
    Surfer Rosa is my favorite Pixies record, and it counts too. But Come On Pilgrim is just a burst of concentrated brilliance.
  5. Haughty Melodic by Mike Doughty
    I was disappointed when I first heard this one, but I think in the two years since I’ve listened to it in its entirety at least once a week. There’s just not a bad song on it.
  6. El Oso by Soul Coughing
    Maybe this list is Mike Doughty-heavy, but you can’t be prejudiced against a guy for making two perfect records.
  7. Hello Nasty by The Beastie Boys
    Yeah, Paul’s Boutique, whatever. This is the only one I can listen to without skipping any tracks.
  8. Odelay by Beck
    For using the entire Becktionary, from Bazootie to Whiskeyclone.
  9. Telecommunication Breakdown by Emergency Broadcast Network
    I love the characters, I love the special effects.
  10. If I Should Fall From Grace With God by The Pogues
    The first four tracks are four of the best Pogues songs ever. On most records, it seems like the musicians put a bad track on because they ran out of ideas or talent and had to throw in filler. On this one, it seems like they had to put in a weaker song just to keep your brain from overloading on uninterrupted excellence.
  11. Time Out by The Dave Brubeck Quartet
    I thought this was one of the best albums ever recorded for at least a year after I bought it. And then I read the liner notes, which explained that it’s a concept album about time changes, and all of the tracks are experiments in non-standard tempo. Which is kind of like hanging out with Superman for a year and right as you’re starting to get bored of his powers, he reveals he’s also an award-winning pastry chef.
  12. Dig Your Own Hole by Chemical Brothers
    This one’s cheating, because the thing dies in the middle with a 6-minute track called “It Doesn’t Matter,” but it doesn’t matter. The rest is unrestrained awesomeness.

Now that that’s done, I can go back to never talking about music.

Back to School

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I’ve been dropping hints left and right that I quit my job, but nobody’s been taking the bait, so I guess I have to make an announcement or something. (I guess it’s pointless to even try to pretend there’s a [...]

Image from OperationIraqiChildren.orgI’ve been dropping hints left and right that I quit my job, but nobody’s been taking the bait, so I guess I have to make an announcement or something. (I guess it’s pointless to even try to pretend there’s a distinction between professional and personal on here at this point. If any future employer wants to hire me, I guess they’ll just have to accept that I keep weird hours if left unattended and that I really, really like to ramble on at great length about TV shows and videogames).

I accepted a full-time job over at Telltale Games and will be starting next week, on a secret as-yet-unannounced project that everybody already knows about and they’ve already acknowledged they’re working on in every interview I’ve read.

I’m pretty excited about it. Writing for the Season 1 Sam & Max games (buy all six, right now!) is the most fun I’ve had working in a long time, probably since The Curse of Monkey Island. That’s pretty impressive when you consider that my job last year had me in Tokyo for a week and at Disney World for an entire month. But it’d been a while since I’d felt that I really knew what I was doing in my job, and that I was doing what I’m best at. And I can’t speak for the rest of the internets, but I’m pretty damn pleased with the result.

One good side effect of the last couple of years is that I’ve got even more respect for Imagineering now than I did before I started working with them. If you’re just a fan of the theme parks, it’s easy to think, “well that’s simple. I could come up with an idea like that.” The fact is that there’s a definite skill set when it comes to coming up with stuff for theme parks, at least Disney-caliber stuff, and I don’t got it. Most obvious is that you’ve got to convey every idea you want to get across, every idea you’ve spent several years and millions of dollars working on, in 10-15 seconds. Anyone reading this blog should already know that I have a little problem expressing ideas effectively without resorting to using the maximum amount of verbiage that is humanly possible, or to put it another, less effusive way: being concise.

But that’s fine, because this means I can go back to just being a fan of the theme parks while still getting to work on another of my obsessive fandoms. And I’m excited to see where we (another good thing — I can stop referring to Telltale as “they”) go with it. All the work I’ve done so far has been alone, in my apartment, getting feedback over e-mail, making rewrites, sending them in, and then waiting a few months to see the finished product.

In that environment, it’s easy to imagine the millions of different experiments you can try, all the different directions the game could go. Especially considering that the format is of shorter, semi-connected bursts of a game; and the license’s only consistent characteristic is that anything at all can happen at any time for no reason at all, with the only requirement that it be funny. It’ll be interesting to see how much, if any, of those ideas survive after the cold hard reality of a small team putting out four-to-six hours of content every month sets in.

But I’m looking forward to the more prosaic stuff almost as much. I’m even looking forward to the commute — I live in San Francisco and still only manage to see the Golden Gate bridge once a month, if that. Working from home has its good points that are hard to give up, sure: I’ll have to get used to waking up in the morning again, and wearing different clothes every day. Plus, spending 50 bucks for a tank of gas isn’t so bad if you only have to do it once every three months or so.

But the prospect of having somewhere to go every day with real live human beings to talk to trumps all that. The fact that it’s going to be working on something that I’ve wanted to work on even before I started working, even better. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to go to Mervyn’s and get several pairs of stiff, dark blue jeans; a protractor; and a Trapper Keeper.

Also: the picture I got is from the Operation Iraqi Children charity, which I hadn’t heard of before. It looks like a pretty good cause; y’all should check it out.

First Person Maki

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Via BeaucoupKevin.com, here’s one of my new favorite video clips: It’s from a camera placed on the conveyor belt at a sushi bar in Tokyo. This is exactly the kind of video that they should’ve put on the Voyager probe. [...]

Via BeaucoupKevin.com, here’s one of my new favorite video clips:

It’s from a camera placed on the conveyor belt at a sushi bar in Tokyo. This is exactly the kind of video that they should’ve put on the Voyager probe. If they’d had video sharing back then. Or video. Or sushi. Or Japanese people. (Japanese people weren’t invented until 1982, right?)

Best Things to Eat

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I got pegged with one of those blog-meme things by my friend Humuhumu. I feel obliged to participate, only because GREAT MISFORTUNE will befall ME AND MY FAMILY if I don’t. A blogger from Rome, GA failed to answer and [...]

I got pegged with one of those blog-meme things by my friend Humuhumu. I feel obliged to participate, only because GREAT MISFORTUNE will befall ME AND MY FAMILY if I don’t. A blogger from Rome, GA failed to answer and IMMEDIATELY was beseiged by FLESH-EATING BACTERIA. Also, I want to celebrate Humuhumu’s honorable mention almost-win in the Least-Notable Wikipedia Article Contest.

The list is supposed to be “Best Places to Eat” in your area. The problem is that I really don’t get out much. I’ve tried maybe 0.01% of the restaurants in the city alone, much less the whole bay area. And once I do find a place, I tend to order the same thing over and over again. But the things I order over and over again are so awesome that they deserve a mention on the internets. So I’m going to list my five favorite things to eat in the bay area.

First, I’m supposed to include the list of participants:

The list:
Nicole (Sydney, Australia)
velverse (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia)
LB (San Giovanni in Marignano, Italy)
Selba (Jakarta, Indonesia)
Olivia (London, England)
ML (Utah, USA)
Lotus (Toronto, Canada)
tanabata (Saitama, Japan)
Andi (Dallas [ish], Texas, United States)
Todd (Louisville, Kentucky, United States)
miss kendra (los angeles, california, u.s.a)
Jiggs Casey (Berkeley, CA, USA! USA! USA!)
Tits McGee (New England, USA)
Joe (NE Tennessee, USA)
10K Monkeys (Chattanooga, Tennessee, USA)
Big Stupid Tommy (Athens, Tennessee, USA)
Newscoma (Weakley County, Tennessee, USA)
Russ McBee (Knoxville, Tennessee, USA)
Atomictumor (Oak Ridge, Tennessee, USA)
Oh Really? (Oak Ridge, TN, USA)
Mark Steel (Knoxville, TN, USA)
Swanky (Knoxville, TN, USA)
Humuhumu (Seattle, WA, USA, and Silicon Valley, CA, USA)
Spectre Collie (San Francisco Bay area, CA, USA)

And here’s my list of favorite dishes, expanded into the whole bay area:

Manpuku, Berkeley
Katsu Curry Rice
I didn’t know such a thing existed until my friend Matt started ordering it in as take-out while the office was working late. I don’t want to exaggerate or over-sell it, so I’ll just say that katsu curry rice is the single greatest achievement in the history of human civilization.

When I first moved to California, I spent years complaining loudly and frequently that I missed southern food. People would try to help by recommending “soul food” restaurants in Oakland and elsewhere, but they were always a disappointment — heavy on the collard greens and such, but none of what I thought of as real Cracker Barrel-style southern food. (And always with the sweet cornbread. What is it with you people?)

So I was surprised to finally find what I was looking for at a Japanese restaurant. A deep-fried pork chop covered in gravy with potatoes and carrots, served over rice. What could possibly be better? I’ve tried the katsu curry rice in various places all over San Francisco, and in Tokyo and Kyoto, and I’ve never had any as good as what they serve at Manpuku.

Thai Place 2, San Francisco
Panang Beef
The restaurant is pretty unremarkable overall; I wouldn’t have heard of it except that it’s close by and has free delivery. It wasn’t even my favorite take-out place. Until I tried the Panang Beef — stew beef in coconut-based curry sauce. Every time I order it, I spend the second day just eating the post-beef sauce remainder over rice, and it’s even better than the day before.

Casa Mañana, San Rafael
Enchilada Vallarta
Even Lou Dobbs would have to acknowledge the inestimable contributions of the Mexican culture if he were confronted with mole sauce. I don’t buy any of the crackpot theories about alien landing strips in Peru or extra-terrestrials helping to build the pyramids of the Yucatan, but I can believe that the idea of using chocolate in an entree is too ingenious for mere humans to have come up with.

Casa Mañana does it one better by serving plantains wrapped up in tortillas and then covered with mole sauce. It’s like a banana split for dinner. Genius, and eerie.

Sushi Ko, Berkeley
Tempura Fried California Roll
As sushi-ignorant as I am, even I can tell that this restaurant is fair-to-middling at best. I have a hard time recommending it to anybody, and the only reason I ever go is if I’m in the area to visit Comic Relief. But still, it’s the only semi-local restaurant I’m aware of that still sells the tempura-fried California Roll, which is another one of mankind’s greatest achievements.

It’s a well-known fact that dipping anything in batter and deep-frying it makes it better, but the difference between the average California Roll and the senses-shattering bliss of the fried California Roll is so profound, I can only compare it to alchemy.

House of Nanking, San Francisco
I Don’t Know the Name But it’s Beef in Lettuce Rolls
From the looks of things, the House of Nanking got over-hyped a few years ago, and it’s now suffering the backlash. I can’t imagine it actually changed in quality that much; it’s been at least a year since I went last, but every time has been consistent — loud, crowded, aggressive service, with phenomenal low-brow Chinese food. I guess that irritates the people who are sticklers for “authenticity” or “ambience” or “being allowed to order.”

Because they don’t really seem to let you order there, from what I’ve seen. You kind of suggest animals or schools of food, and then they bring you one to three plates that fit the category. So I don’t know what it’s officially called, but there’s something there that’s made of beef and corn and a bunch of stuff I don’t recognize, that you spoon up into a roll of lettuce and eat. And then keep eating, and then mention how good it is, and eat some more. Since they go heavy on the sauce at that restaurant, and everything is kind of syrupy sweet, the beef-in-lettuce-wraps is the closest I’ve had there to “light” fare.

So that serves as my list of five, as well as explaining why I’ve got a weight problem. The next thing I’m supposed to do is tag five other people. I’m not sure I know five people with blogs, or at least ones who wouldn’t hit me for sending them a chain letter. But the thing is, I’m genuinely curious and looking for recommendations on good restaurants. So I’m calling out:
Jess Hutch
Musty TV
Six Seven Six
And anybody else who wants to jump in, but I didn’t think to mention here because it didn’t seem like the kind of thing you’d be remotely interested in.