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.

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 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.

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 Week Ever” interviews Ben from “Lost”. Once again, the show proves that there’s no joke they can’t over-do, but Michael Emerson is pretty awesome in this clip:

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.

Although San Francisco has somehow become my home city, I haven’t been taking advantage of it as much as I could be. This place is supposedly known for its great restaurants, but when I got asked to name five of my favorites, I couldn’t name more than three.

A few weeks ago, I resolved to at least try to expand my horizons: I’ve been recording “Check, Please! Bay Area” for suggestions, and whenever I go out or order take-out, I’ve checked yelp.com first to see if they can suggest a better alternative. And even if I go to a place I’ve been before, I’ve resolved to try at least one new thing off the menu.

Today for lunch I tried the sushi bar at Takara Restaurant in Japantown. I’m pretty far from being knowledgeable about sushi; I usually know just enough to keep from making a scene. It’s taken me years of training just to force myself to be able to tolerate it. But once I turned the corner, I actually like it a lot. At least, the standards — sake, hamachi, maguro, and ebi. The versions of those at Takara were fine — nothing mind-altering, but still good stuff.

But I’ve always seen amaebi listed on the menu as “sweet shrimp” and have been curious but never tried it. So I ordered it as “dessert.” See, here was my line of thinking: I’ve had tamago (egg) nigiri before; it was recommended as good introductory sushi. Both versions that I tried were basically a sliver of an omelet infused with a five-pound bag of sugar. I figured that “sweet shrimp” would be the same thing, ebi plus sugar.

As it turns out, and apparently this is old news to everybody but me, amaebi is raw shrimp. And the difference between the raw and cooked variety is the same as the difference between toro and maguro — nearly identical to the undereducated, but one’s trashy and commonplace while the other is a treasured delicacy.

Here’s a good time to point out my shrimp aversion. I love all varieties of cooked shrimp, minus the tails. But the animals themselves are third on my list of most vile and stomach-turning creatures on the planet (1. slugs, 2. Ann Coulter, 3. shrimp, 4. squids). Just the sight of them can make me queasy. I know that eating shrimp isn’t “Fear Factor” material — I’m from the southeast, so I’ve seen people with big buckets of crawdads, and I know that they do unspeakable things with the heads. But not only have I never tried it, I can’t even look at it. I usually have to close my eyes and think of something else if I even get the thought of it.

I thought I was behaving pretty well today — not scraping my chopsticks together, not dipping the rice in the soy sauce, ordering everything I could in Japanese, and saying “oishikatta desu” instead of “it was delicious” to offset the fact I’d ordered a Coke. But here I’ve got a plate sitting in front of me with a couple of raw sea insects; and they look pretty much like the cooked variety, albeit unnervingly slicker and more translucent; and the chef is staring at me, so I’ve got to eat one.

I managed to get it down by imagining it was just like the cooked variety and holy cow that’s an odd texture but don’t think about it and I wonder if they de-vein these things and then swallow and immediately go for the ginger and it’s done.

And there was still another one left on the plate. At that point I wanted to point behind the chef, shout “Is that Iron Chef Masaharu Morimoto?”, and take advantage of the confusion to make a quick getaway. But instead I decided to be a man and just eat the damn thing. I asked for the check and hoped that I could pay it and get out before I horked raw fish and sea-bug all over their sushi bar.

But the chef pointed at my plate and said, “Oh, you aren’t finished yet!” I thought he was chastising me for not eating the tails, but after a couple of rounds of confusing half-sentences between the both of us, he pointed out that my shrimp heads hadn’t come from the kitchen yet. “No really, that’s okay,” I protested, and may have even done a childlike belly-rubbing “I’m full” pantomime, but he was insistent. The other chef assured me, “No, the heads are the best part,” and then, “That’s why people pay seventeen dollars for amaebi.”

While I was processing this bit of information, and trying to come up with a graceful exit strategy, they came back from the kitchen with a plate of delicious fried shrimp heads. “Squeeze the lemon on it, it’s delicious.” I must’ve had an easily-translatable look of revulsion on my face, because the other chef quickly asked me if I would rather take it home with me. I said “yes” in a manner that I hope adequately conveyed “Oh God yes bless you for the rest of your life,” paid my ginormous bill, said “domo arigatou” in a last attempt to save face, and escaped.

So now I’ve got a plastic container with a pair of $20 fried shrimp heads in my refrigerator. I’m obviously not going to eat it, but I’m thinking of saving it as a trophy of my resounding whiteness.

Today I said goodbye for the last time to Burbank and Glendale, as well as my shirtless-and-red-shorts-wearing slavedriver*. I got on the plane in perfect, sunny but cool weather and after a short, uneventful ride, got dumped out into a cold, sharp wind and an impenetrable wall of fog and traffic.

And it made me as giddy as I can get when not on Space Mountain. I would’ve even done a hop in the air and clicked my heels together if I weren’t so fat.

Get me back in my apartment and in front of my keyboard again, and it’s like giving a pacifier to a fussy baby. I still can’t remember when San Francisco turned from “that annoying, expensive place over-filled with smug hipsters” into “home,” but it’s locked into place now. Maybe it just requires a southern Californian hotel to make me realize it.

* Used as poetic license only. The Disney people I’ve worked with are friendly, easygoing, and unpretentious to a degree completely unbecoming for a gigantic multinational entertainment corporation.

Update: Yeah, ignore this post. At least, the bitchin’, if not the speculatin’. See comment 12.

One of the consequences of working at home is that it can turn your standard garden-variety internet addiction into a full-blown compulsion. I’ve had more days than I’d like to admit where I’ve reached the end of the internet — that point when you’ve read every news feed, followed every bookmark, looked at every page of every message board, and are still looking for something, anything to click on, just to avoid having to get back to work.

So it’s my own fault that I dug through a spoiler-fied blog post about “Lost” that led to a comment that led to a link to another spoiler-fied blog post, and then clicked on a big button that said “don’t click on this unless you want the season finale ruined” and then read the result. And so it’s my own fault that when I watched the actual show, I was underwhelmed. I kept noticing how pretty much every single scene in the episode relied on your not knowing what was going to happen.

It was all pretty well constructed and tied into what’s been going on the past few episodes; I can’t imagine how they could’ve done much better. They did follow the “Alias” model for season finales: give screen time to as many characters as you can possibly fit, thin out the cast as much as possible, and chop off as many loose ends as you can get away with. Include explosions where necessary. Then, end on a (seemingly) series-altering cliffhanger.

Everything seemed kind of methodical instead of really exciting, and of course it’s impossible for me to tell whether that’s because I’d already ruined it for myself or if they really were just spending a couple of hours putting out plot fires.

I do reassert my claim that Damon Lindeloff needs to tone down his comments to the press promising great things to come; there’s just no way to live up to the hype. The big twist here didn’t leave me as gobsmacked as I’d been promised. It didn’t when I read the spoiler, and it didn’t when I watched it play out. I mean, it’s fine and all, but I think it would’ve been a lot more impressive had we not heard for the past few months how it was going to be the most mind-blowing thing ever shown on television, remember to wear your Depends and sign a waver absolving the network of liability, no one will be allowed to turn to ABC during the shocking final minutes.

On the upside, it looks like they will be able to fill out three more half-seasons of material. But at the same time, it bugs me that I’m relieved instead of disappointed that they’re only going to be half-seasons. And I can’t shake the feeling that they’ve somehow spoiled the essence of the show, what made it compelling in the first place. (Sorry about that, but it was either “spoiled” or “lost,” and both are equally corny). The only thing they’ve introduced that’s really interested me, is Jacob in the cabin. I’m hoping he’ll stick around to pick up the slack.

And everything after this point goes into more detail, so don’t read unless you’ve reached the end of the internet.

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