'Nuff Said

Mariachi at an Apple Fest

Last weekend after Desmond's first camping trip, we stopped in Sebastapol for a Gravenstein apple festival. Besides yummy apple treats there was an awesome mariachi band and an even more amazing country and western band. The woman wore this old timey yellow dress with her red hair piled on top of her head and the back up band all dressed in black.

We bought a pie from a church group and I didn't burst into flames when I ate it.

Undersea Shocking!

Don't underestimate the octopus. It's got 3 hearts of a champion...

I Want, I Want, I Want!!

If you loved me you would buy this for me.

Soup as Dessert

I went to Nobu 57 last week while in NYC for work. Of course it was amazing--especially the miso cod, which is a no-brainer.

Though I was pretty much full, I looked at the dessert menu to see if there were anything unique that I couldn't get anywhere else. And there it was--White Peach and Jasmine Soup. It sounded like it would be the best thing ever or utter gross. It was the former. The title doesn't give you the essence of the presentation. First, there was a "Nobu beer" egg on a nest of peanut crumble cubes. Then the waiter poured the white peach and jasmine cold soup over the nest.

The.most.delicous.thing.ever.

Tiki to the Nth Degree

Junior and I went to Trader Vic's in Emeryville over the weekend. This is the classic tiki bar/restaurant, so we had to have the big rum drink. Deeeeliteful.

Look at what a great parent I am!

Thanks Eas' Bunny...

Bock! Bock!

Gummy Bacon!

This picture sucks, but it is boxes of Gummy Bacon, which is exactly what it is. Strawberry flavored, shockingly similar visually to bacon.

This box has farmer pig on it, one of the first times that a pig representing "bacon" doesn't make me feel slightly weird. I used to drive by the Farmer John slaughterhouse outside LA when I was younger, and besides the stench that made me roll up my windows, it was icky because there were murals of pigs looking in through the windows.

All I could think was, "What horrors are they seeing?" Their family members being slaughtered? Or was it simply cows or chickens getting the axe? Would the pigs care?

Kinetic Sculpture Robots

Theo Jansen is a Dutch artist who creates kinetic sculptures that run on wind and solar energy and are quite amazing. They seem to employ a lot of the techniques used in walking robots, but in a somewhat different way. His vision is to put a whole herd of them on a beach and have them run around, living off of the natural resource that drives them, in definitely.

And here's his kinetic "rhino":


He's also been featured in a BMW commercial, but you can find that on YouTube if you're interested.

In his talk at TED, he discusses how they will be made so that they can sense when they are on the dry sand or in the surf and move back to the wet sand where they "live."

Beautiful.

Sara Likes Cupcakes

We saw these beautiful, simple grafitti cupcakes as we were coming back from the awesome Grand Lake Farmers Market near our house a few weeks ago.

I love silly shit like this. It makes me wish I could live in a real-life Mario Brothers game.

P.S. Doesn't preggo Sara look cute? You should see her stomach now--the alien is soon emerging!

I Got Garbage Pail'd

I was a little old to be a rabid Garbage Pail Kid fan, though I love them all the same. Wacky Packs were more age appropriate for me. The classic, the original.

When I saw that I could create my own, personalized Garbage Pail Kid, though, I was all about it. The app is pretty buggy--I get an error whenever I send out an email link--and you can't really export it, so I had to snag-it. But it's pretty cool.

I also got Simpsonized, courtesy of Burger Kill, but there is so little personalization that it could be half the guys I see walking in Oakland.

On 20th St. in the Mission

I think it's 20th St. Definitely at Harrison. This boarded up store gets tagged quite a bit and looks kinda scary--like something out of Escape from New York. That's why it was so awesome to have this guy and his creepy crawlies staring at me as I walked by the other night.

Good evening, Mudd Guts, good to know you.

Recycled Art

Saturday we went to drop off our boxes at a recycle dump in Oakland. Scary indeed. This is where all the shopping cart recyclers come to get money for the cans and bottles taken from recycle bins at the curb. Good on them for doing it, but it was a little crazy there with conveyer belts growling and bottles screeching as they go to their certain doom.

Outside the chaos were two sentinels that I had to take a picture of. C-3PO and his orangutan friend were stationed outside, observing the fun. Some genius took parts from the recycling and fashioned these pretty sophisticated replicas.

Hurray for recycling!

The New Year

Amazing show. Sorry Josef couldn't be there.

Last of the Tahoe Pix

What does one do when one goes to a casino? Gamble? Sure. Drink? Mais bien sur! I also love a good buffet. Gorging myself like the Roman royalty that I ain't is always a good time.

The most interesting and exciting thing that we discovered at the Forest Buffet ("Best Buffet in Tahoe!") was this "peach." It's actually a rice bun with red bean inside and tastes better than it looks. Still, it was a mystery that I was excited to solve.

And how often do you get to solve a culinary mystery? Now that's the essence of a buffet--eating food you know nothing about and might never try otherwise.

Awesome Putt Putt Golf

It's hard to find a good miniature golf course these days. They either fall into the giant castle with gross water all around it and little imagination camp or into the so ramshackle that you risk getting tetanus if you play variety. Luckily, South Lake Tahoe has a very cool, old school course that Sara and I go to when we are particularly jonesing for some goofy golf action.

There are three courses to pay: Fairybook, which is a bunch of fairy tales with some randomness thrown in, Dinosaurs, which is what it sounds like with an especially malaevolent monkey with glowing eyes for color, and the Castle, which is the best and longest and features one hole where a big black rubber spider springs up and down over the hole.

It's funny, I used to play mini golf with my dad in that, "your mother and I divorced when you were very young and I can't quite figure out how to entertain you and your brother" sort of way. He loved golf, but I wonder if he loved the small version. Anyway, my question is, given that I played a lot of golf growing up, why do I utterly suck and get trounced by Sara each time?

Hello Oakland!

Finally back on the radar. After moving Sara from Houston with our little alien inside her belly, we have settled in picturesque Oakland, CA. I love Oakland. When you walk around San Francisco with this sense of entitlement. "I own this place. I pay enough rent, so I own this place."

In Oakland the feeling is a little different. After the fourth police car passes you in full-on code 3 (that's with sirens, speeding down the street for you non-cop sluts) your sense of entitlement kind of ebbs. In fact, you kind of wonder, "If this is the pretty nice part of Oakland, what the fuck is going on in the bad parts? Reinforced Hummers with National Guardspeople?"

Remember, when SF was all hippie and shit with peace and love, Oakland gave birth to the Black Panthers. There is a long history of resistance and activism here. I wonder how the current gentrification is going to happen.

Of course I am exaggerating. I love Oakland because it is so different from SF. When I describe it to people it's something about how it is like Brooklyn before Brooklyn became NYC, Jr. A little rough around the edges in a good way, a lot of interesting people and things happening, unexpected things around corners. For example, this little bird. Mr. Heron lives in the bird sanctuary in Lake Merritt and decided he wanted to go for a ride kind of like that guy in the wheelchair who got pushed down the highway by a big rig. He's a Pepper! Love it!

Anyway, love Oakland, love the new apartment, love the Pepper. Someone kill me now.

Magic Fingers

My cousin had an amazing old-skool organ in his basement. He got it free at a yard sale in Pueblo--one of the great things about living in a small town is that you are more likely to get in on a lucky find. I could only imagine what this could have fetched in SF on kitsch value alone. I mean, look at the font for the name. C'mon!

I only had time to mess with it for a few minutes, but I can only imagine that the full sound effect had a lot of magic.

Van...or Astrovan?

Love it.

Future Hooligan Alert

And now for the good news: Sara and I are having a baby!

This is the fruit of my loins in utero. Note how future baby is thumbing his nose to the world. A chip off the old blocks.