→ July 11, 2010
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Cary/Raleigh eats, part two.

Two new articles up on ESPN.com: Cliff Lee trade breakdown and brief reports on all of the players in Sunday’s Futures Game.

I took a few of your suggestions for Q and sushi in the Traingle area and stumbled on very solid frozen custard joint for my second run through North Carolina.

I’ll start with the sushi: Waraji seems to be, by acclamation, the best sushi place in the Triangle, and it may very well be that, but it’s not very good. Better than Little Tokyo, but still not good. The fish was completely tasteless; one fish, “white fish,” recommended by the chef who served me, was chewy and sinewy; they don’t offer anago or tai and were out of kanpachi; and they charged me for a nirigi I ordered but never received. The seaweed salad cost $8 and was really portioned for two, although it was the greenest I’ve ever seen, making me wonder about its legitimacy.

I tried Allen & Sons and The Pit for Q, and would unequivocally vote for the latter despite its inauthentic setting. The Pit is the only upscale Q joint I’ve come across in my travels – they even have a wine collection – and the place was filled with businessmen and -women at lunchtime. I ordered a combination plate at my server’s suggestion, getting the St. Louis ribs, the pulled pork, fried okra, and collard greens; the platter also comes with a biscuit and hush puppies, so I was full enough that I didn’t need dinner for about eight hours. The pulled pork was dry but both meats had a nice, subtle smoke flavor, and the ribs were fall-apart tender*. The okra was excellent – I’m starting to like eating in the south for the fried okra more than for the Q – and for about $12 the quantity of food was a little absurd. It’s not wow barbecue, and had a little bit of the feel of mass-smoked meat, as opposed to some guy in a shack who does it one pork shoulder at time, but it was very solid.

*There seems to be some real disagreement over whether ribs of any animal should be smoked till the meat falls off the bone. I’m in the “yes” camp, as ribs have a lot of connective tissue that I have no interest in eating. When the meat falls off the bone, the connective tissue will be largely gone. This, to me, is the entire point of low-and-slow cooking, whether it’s smoking or braising.

Allen & Sons looks good in the uniform, but the tools didn’t really play. It’s in a run-down building just off I-40 in Chapel Hill, and the menu is limited to “Carolina pork” and ribs, with the pork as their signature item. What came looked like some had scraped it off the wall after a pig exploded, an oily, vinegary, sloppy mess that tasted only of vinegar and not in the least of smoke. The best thing I can say about the dish is that it came with five hush puppies, as even the cole slaw was drowning in a mayo-vinegar slurry. It’s too bad, since that’s the sort of place where I’d expect to find the sort of artisanal work I thought the Pit’s pork lacked, but if you’re not going to put smoke flavor into the smoked meat, you might as well stick the thing in an oven.

Goodberry’s is a local chain of frozen custard shops that I think would stand up well against the competition of Milwaukee, still the capital of frozen custards as far as I can tell. Goodberry’s felt a little richer, with more butterfat, but the texture was an 80 and the chocolate, despite being a little light in color, had a rich natural cocoa flavor. They offer vanilla, chocolate, sugar-free vanilla, and a rotating flavor of the day; I was disappointed that coconut wasn’t coming until the 16th, since that + chocolate is one of my favorite ice cream flavor pairings. They also offer a long list of toppings, including freshly roasted nuts (I don’t think they’re roasted on site, though), so I’ll recommend the chocolate with Oreos and almonds combo. The location I went to, on Kildare Farms Road in Cary, has no indoor seating but there are tables with umbrellas for shade.

Filed Under: Food Tagged With: , , , , , ,
→ July 9, 2010
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Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue.

John McWhorter’s Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold Story of English (I linked to the hardcover edition because it’s actually cheaper than the paperback at the moment) bounces back and forth between wonky linguistics stuff and more plebeian arguments about how we use the English language today. I found the former stuff interesting but a little puzzling because McWhorter is arguing against a conventional wisdom that seems to ignore the facts (a familiar story), but that conventional wisdom was completely new to me, and I thought McWhorter didn’t give quite enough background in the current thinking in the History of English field to set the stage for his epic takedowns. The latter half was far more accessible even to someone who doesn’t share an interest in languages or linguistics, and a little more relevant to the current state of English.

McWhorter’s more academic arguments take aim at the intransigence (in his view) of History of English scholars who refuse to see what he considers obvious influences on the language by the Celts and, oddly enough, the Vikings, that explain our unusually simple grammar. English is part of the Indo-European language group, in the Germanic family, but unlike its Germanic siblings or most of its cousins within Indo-European, it has retained very little of the grammar of its proto-language ancestors. English doesn’t decline its nouns (as Slavic languages do) or its articles (as German does), and our verb conjugations are incredibly simple – we add an -s in the third person singular, and that’s pretty much it, with just a few irregular verbs. Why has English grammar become so much simpler than the grammars of its close relatives? According to McWhorter, the History of English groupthink has it that these changes happened spontaneously, without outside influences, but he feels that that’s nonsense because of the obvious similarities between English and Celtic. The language that became English came to the British Isles with the invaders who subjugated the Celts, and McWhorter attests that the Celts, rather than finding their language wiped out by the invasion, gradually melded their language with the proto-English spoken by the invaders, leaving vestiges like what the author calls “meaningless do” (our use of “do” with present participles, as in, “Do you like baseball, Adam?”). The Vikings, meanwhile, left their imprint largely in the simplification of our grammar, ignoring grammatical elements that their language lacked and “battering” English to lead it to drop verb and noun endings that most other modern languages have retained for centuries. If you’re wondering why we find Russian so hard to learn, or why English doesn’t have gender or noun cases or tables upon tables of verb endings, McWhorter lays out a compelling explanation.

The more accessible portion of the book comes in McWhorter’s discussions of what it means for a language like English to have a simpler grammar, and whether there is ever such a thing as “proper” grammar as long as meaning isn’t sacrificed. He turns his guns on linguistic anthropologists who’ve argued that language and grammar reflect thought, such as certain Native American tribes whose grammars lacked the future tense or specific numbering systems. But where I took issue with McWhorter’s views was in his criticism of what we might call the Lynne Truss school of grammar – the idea that language, written or especially oral, that does not hew tightly to the strict rules of English grammar, is inferior to “proper” English. He points out how supposed errors like ending sentences in prepositions actually date back centuries in common usage

There is, of course, a self-serving aspect to proper grammar – signalling. It’s difficult to gauge someone’s educational background without seeing a resume, and difficult to gauge someone’ s intelligence without extensive conversation (if it’s even possible then), so we send out and read signals that become proxies for things like intelligence, education, or even old-fashioned notions like “good breeding.” Attire is one. Accent may be another. Grammar is a third. When you meet someone who speaks proper English, you will likely notice, even subconsciously, whereas someone who can’t match verb and subject – even though the meaning of “he don’t got” is perfectly clear – will drop a notch or two in your estimation, whether you know it or not. Good grammarians, recognizing this, may seek to protect their turf by defending grammar as necessary to the survival of the language. McWhorter says, with some merit, that this is absurd: As long as meaning is clear, grammar isn’t that critical, and besides, all languages evolve over time, both in grammar and in vocabulary, so what is considered bad grammar today could easily become accepted usage in a few decades.

But beyond that, there’s value in having a standard grammar and insisting on some level that people hew to it, for simple reasons of comprehension. A universal set of rules for a language allows us to communicate effectively through written and oral means because we use grammar to fill in the missing context in sentences that are either complex or that leave out details provided in early sentences or paragraphs. In Italian and Spanish, the speaker/writer can omit the subject pronoun because the ending on the verb makes it clear who the subject is. Make the grammatical error and you lose clarity, so the reader has to go back to figure out who’s verbing, or the listener has to either accept his confusion or stop the speaker to ask for clarification.

I have also generally found text with bad grammar cacophonous, making it both slower and less pleasant to read than “proper” text. A misplaced modifier usually means I have to re-read a sentence, and an incorrect word choice – say, “flaunting” the rules rather than “flouting” them – is sort of like hearing a glass shatter in the background as I’m trying to read. We become accustomed to seeing or hearing the language operating within the rules of its grammar, and when someone flouts them (sorry), it affects our ability to understand or to move smoothly through the spoken or written text.

Our Magnificant Bastard Tongue does lapse occasionally into linguistics jargon, and I could see the Celtic/English chapter being dull to anyone not interested in languages, but McWhorter tries to keep it light with some humor and a healthy dose of snark directed at linguists who (in his view) refuse to see the obvious signs of connections between English and Celtic and English and the Vikings’ language.

Back before the dish existed – B.D.? – I reviewed McWhorter’s The Power of Babel, a more general-interest book on the history of human languages.

I’m all screwed up in terms of what I’m reviewing next, but I am almost halfway through reading Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.

Filed Under: Languages, Nonfiction Tagged With: , , , ,
→ July 6, 2010
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Lost Cities.

As much as I love the new wave of German-style boardgames, the category lacks viable two-player options. Many games, like Settlers of Catan and Puerto Rico, require a minimum of three players, while others, like Zooloretto and Power Grid, include two-player variants that don’t work as well as the three-plus rules do. We’ve found a couple that work well for two players – Carcassonne, San Juan, and Dominion are probably the best – but the list is relatively short.

Lost Cities is a real rarity among great German-style games in that it’s strictly a two-player game, only the second (along with the card game Catan, a two-player offshoot of Settlers) in our collection, and it has the twin virtues of being quick to learn and quick to play, so that you can run through several games in an evening rather than devoting the entire night just to setting up Puerto Rico. Lost Cities – which went in the less common direction by spawning a multi-player game, Keltis, which ended up winning the Spiel des Jahres – is simple, portable (just a deck of cards and a small board that isn’t fully necessary once you know how to play), and has an excellent blend of strategy and chance that prevents the game from becoming repetitive yet gives the player some control over his fate.

Each player in Lost Cities may begin, over the course of the game, up to five “expeditions” using cards; each expedition costs 20 points once initiated, but there’s no cost associated with an expedition that’s never started. The deck of cards contains twelve cards in each of five colors, representing the five expeditions: One card each from numbers 2 through 10, and three “investment” cards that allow the player to double, triple (if he plays two), or quadruple (if he plays all three) his profit or loss from that particular expedition. On each turn, a player plays one card to an expedition or discards one to the board and draws a single replacement from the deck or the discard piles. When the deck is exhausted, you add the values of the cards in each expedition, subtract 20, and then multiply the result by 2, 3, or 4 depending on the number of investment cards that expedition, gaining another 20 point bonus for any expedition that contains at least eight cards.

The catch is that cards must be played in order – investment cards come before card 2 – but the deck is fully shuffled and players only hold eight cards in their hand at any given time. Thus, players face decisions like holding on to high-numbered cards while hoping to get lower numbers or investment cards to fill out the expedition, or risking beginning an expedition where he isn’t close to the 20 card points required to turn it profitable. If you discard a valuable card, your opponent may pick it up, unless his expedition has already gone past the number of the card you’ve given up. When the game is nearly over, a player may choose to pick up discards rather than draw from the deck to try to delay the end and allow him to play more cards – but the other player can just keep drawing from the deck to try to end it sooner.

Once we got the hang of it, we found that games only lasted ten minutes or so, meaning that one of us can try avenge his/her losses in the same night, breaking up one of our major frustrations with the Catan card game or massive multi-player games like Puerto Rico and Agricola*. There’s no particular skill required beyond arithmetic, so even the most ardent RBI-lover could handle the math, and the basic strategies are straightforward and shouldn’t take long for new players to figure out. I’d boil down those strategies to two archetypes that the players can blend as needed: You can try to hit home runs on one or two long expeditions with investment cards, or go for 5-10 points on four or all five expeditions. Your optimal strategy or mix of those two depends on the cards you draw, but since you only see eight at the start the game, you have to make some educated guesses – you could argue that there’s a little probability involved here but I’m not saying anyone needs to bust our their old permutations formula – and at some point will end up at the mercy of the deck and your opponent.

*Yes, I now own Agricola, a birthday present from a determined wife who bought one of the last copies from the game’s last print run – it’s out of stock just about everywhere until at least August – and we’ve played it twice. When I get through a few more games, I’ll write it up.

The simplicity of Lost Cities meant that I could even play with my four-year-old daughter, who wanted to play as soon as she saw the cards in my bag while we were in St. Kitts. We never keep score, but to make it interesting for her, I told her she just had to make sure each card she put down was bigger than the one before it, she had to match the colors, and her goal was to make each column add up to more than twenty (she’s not adding to twenty yet, but it turned into a whole conversation about how you add numbers together). We’d play the game and she’d be excited that, say, three of her five expeditions reached the magic number of 20. Those of you with children probably understand this more than those of you who haven’t crossed that chasm yet, but it was fun for both of us to play like that, and she enjoys playing games she sees mommy and daddy playing.

One final advantage to Lost Cities: It’s cheap for a German-style game, and so in many ways this could serve as a gateway game to the bigger, more complex entries that tend to dominate the rankings at BoardGameGeek.

Filed Under: Games Tagged With: , , , ,
→ July 3, 2010
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The Story of Sushi.

My most recent piece on ESPN.com went up yesterday – a preview of the major amateur free agents available in Latin America this summer.

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I recommend a lot of books around here, but I’m not sure the last time I said that any you must read a particular book. If you like sushi, or just seafood in general, however, you need to get yourself a copy of Trevor Corson’s The Story of Sushi: An Unlikely Saga of Raw Fish and Rice (published in hardcover as The Zen of Fish), a tremendous read that blends the history of what we now refer to as sushi in the U.S. with a surprisingly interesting subplot around a class going through a sushi-chef academy near Los Angeles. Corson’s integration of the two threads is remarkable, but for me, the value was in hearing him subtly say to American diners: “SUSHI: UR DOIN IT WRONG.”

Corson boils sushi down to its core components – the rice, the vinegar in the rice, the seaweed – and even dabbles in some food chemistry by explaining why we particularly like those ingredients as well as raw fish, discussing umami and the chemicals that deliver it (glutamic acid and inosine monophosphate in particular) and why we like the flesh of sea creatures raw but generally don’t like uncooked meat from land creatures. He discusses why certain types of fish make better or worse sushi, and of course discusses wild fish versus farm-raised (wild is better, but farm-raised does have some advantages) as well as the dangers overfishing present to natural fish populations. There’s even a chapter on uni, a paste comprising the gonads of sea urchins, which I recently learned is also consumed raw in various Caribbean cuisines as well.

Those sections were interesting, but didn’t do too much to change the way I thought about sushi, since I already knew I liked the stuff. Corson also discusses the various traditions around sushi and the etiquette of eating it (use your fingers for nigiri; never rub your wooden chopsticks together; miso soup should be eaten after the meal), as well as the logic for eating certain pieces in certain ways. A good sushi chef will, if you allow him, consider the order in which you’re eating your fish, moving across a continuum from milder flavors to stronger ones, or from softer textures to firm ones. Stirring wasabi (which, you probably know, isn’t actually wasabi at most U.S. restaurants but American horseradish dyed green) into soy sauce reduces the flavor of the wasabi, because the heat is partly deactivated in liquid. The fish used in spicy tuna rolls – a thoroughly American creation – is generally refuse, scraped off the skin of the tuna after the best pieces have been removed and used for nigiri or other dishes that require better flavor and texture. In fact, most rolls are inauthentic and used to hide inferior-quality fish under ingredients that are strongly flavored, like chili oil, or that coat the tongue with fat, like mayonnaise or avocado.

I’ve never been a huge fan of complicated rolls, since they tend to layer lots of ingredients together and come with sticky-sweet sauces, and I’m not a fan of mayonnaise so I generally avoid spicy tuna anyway. Having a rich, fatty, sweet roll can burn your palate for the delicate flavors of the fish-and-rice nigiri. But Corson’s book, without ever explicitly saying, “don’t eat the fancy rolls,” presents three arguments – one based on authenticity, one on the quality of the ingredients, and the fact that sushi becomes rather unhealthy when you load it up with fats and sugars – for at least limiting your consumption of those rolls, if not eliminating them altogether. And the teachers and sushi chefs who appear in the book all share his disdain for the fancier rolls, even while they teach them at the academy because customers want them – and they’re very profitable. (Another good reason not to order them, actually – you usually get more bang for your buck with nigiri.)

A book that just discussed sushi’s history, traditions, and science would have been worth reading without an actual plot to carry it along, but Corson built his book around the story of a class at The California Sushi Academy, a school run by a longtime sushi chef named Toshi whose restaurant (adjacent to the school) is struggling and who is himself recovering from a fairly recent stroke that has sapped his energy. Corson focuses on a few specific students in the class, including Kate, the nominal star of the book, a young woman struggling to find a career while fighting depression who nearly quits the school a half-dozen times; Fie, the Danish model/actress who decided she’d rather be the bombshell behind the sushi bar; and Takumi Nishio, the former Japanese boy-band star who quit the music business to study first Italian cuisine and now authentic sushi; while also devoting some time to Zoran, the Yugoslavia-born/Australian-raised head instructor who is a True Believer in traditional sushi even as he teaches the students American-style rolls. Their stories are interesting, as are their struggles – except for Takumi, who, in the book at least, seems to be a complete natural at whatever cuisine he tries, so he’s fascinating but without much drama. Corson follows them on assignments outside the classroom, like feeding the cast and crew on a movie lot, or watches them work a shift in the back room of the restaurant, using each episode as a segue into some note on the history or components of sushi.

If you like sushi, The Story of Sushi is $10 well spent. You can simultaneously learn the history of the California roll – its inventor is actually known, and there’s a good reason why there’s an avocado in it – and why you shouldn’t really bother with it when you’re in a quality Japanese restaurant.

For more from Corson, check out his official site, which includes some notes on the people in The Story of Sushi and other links and articles about seafood.

Next review: Richard Russo’s The Whore’s Child and Other Stories.

Filed Under: Food, Nonfiction Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,
→ July 2, 2010
→ By

Woman in the Dark and The Wicked Pavilion.

Dashiell Hammett only wrote five novels during his lifetime – I’ve read four and have the fifth, The Dain Curse, on my shelf now – as well as 80 short stories, most of which involved either Sam Spade or The Continental Op as the detective. One of the most unusual works in his bibliography is the novella Woman in the Dark, a suspense story originally published in three parts in Liberty magazine in 1933.

Unfortunately, I’d have to say this is my least favorite Hammett work, and not just because it’s not a detective story. The plot revolves around the titular Woman, Luise Fischer, a kept woman who has fled her abusive boyfriend (Robson) and lands at the house of a man named Brazil who has some criminal activity in his past. A fight scene puts the two on the lam and eventually in hiding with another ex-con that Brazil knows while Robson manipulates the law to try to put Brazil and jail and force Luise to return to him. The conclusion required a last-minute twist and a bit of guesswork on Luise’s part, and I didn’t feel the story went anywhere. That said, bad Hammett beats good work by a lot of authors, and it features his usual crisp prose, noir settings, and characters in various degrees of corruption. It’s just more for completists; if you’re new to Hammett I’d suggest you start with his most famous work, The Maltese Falcon.

“Perhaps you’re right,” he conceded graciously. “Childhood is the happiest time, after all, so why shouldn’t she want to spend her last years in a return to that happy state?”
“I never found anything happy in childhood and neither did you,” Elsie stated pugnaciously. “I don’t think I ever saw a smile on your face till the day you were allowed to clip your own coupons.”

Dawn Powell’s The Wicked Pavilion is an ensemble novel, a rare style because it’s so difficult to pull off, but when done well – as here, or in Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto – it creates an immersive atmosphere and increases the odds that the reader will identify with one or more characters or subplots.

The Wicked Pavilion revolves around the fictional New York restaurant Cafe Julien, a gathering place for the city’s artists, writers, men-about-town, and various hangers-on. Dalzell is a painter dancing around the poverty line, pining for his halcyon days with his friend Marius, another painter who found tremendous success by dying suddenly in an accident in Mexico. Elsie is the domineering dowager who tries to run the life of her young female friend Jerry, who realizes that Elsie is doing more harm than good – and might be a touch unhinged. Rick and Ellenora are the star-crossed lovers who met in Cafe Julien, and continue to meet there after long periods apart … but this time, Rick has returned from abroad and Ellenora is nowhere to be found. Everyone, to borrow a line from White Christmas, has an angle, even the side characters who populate the book’s fringes, and many of the characters only seem to be pretending to be artists or society women or intellectuals, and Powell never lets on whether her characters are ever happy or merely putting on the good face:

Rick Prescott had been leaning against the park fence watching them for a long time, thinking ruefully that of all the happy workers in the world wreckers were undoubtedly the most enthusiastic.

Rick’s observation seems to set him outside the world of happy workers, while Dalzell’s observations on other artists lay before him how much he’s sold out his art – which may not have been anything special in the first place – while Jerry ends up in the wrong bar at the wrong time and finds herself in a special prison ward for prostitutes, forcing her to contemplate her symbiotic (and destructive) relationship with Elsie.

Powell’s transitions across the three main subplots, often intertwining them by having Rick connect with Jerry at Cafe Julien or Dalzell end up with a patroness of the arts who ends up invited to a party thrown by Elsie, are smooth, and if you’re okay with insightful inner monologues, all three move along well. It’s rich, complex, satirical, witty, and rewarding. I would still suggest anyone new to Powell start with the more linear A Time to Be Born, but The Wicked Pavilion would be a great follow-up.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , , , ,
→ July 1, 2010
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Twitter ads, for a good cause?

UPDATE: I donated $250 to Children’s Hospital of Boston as a result of this ad.

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So I’ve received an offer from a reputable company to run a single, sponsored tweet through my Twitter feed, for a fee of over $200. My initial thought was to decline, but it occurred to me I could run the ad and turn the proceeds over to charity – Children’s Hospital in Boston would be an obvious choice, since we’ve been there more than once over the past few years and they have always given my daughter superb care, although I would spread the money around if I did this more than once.

My hesitation comes from the my assumption that everyone who follows me on Twitter signed up with the implicit understanding that there would be no ads. I’d like to feel like the bulk of my readers/followers are on board with any decision to take ads and ship the money off to charity, so I’m putting it up for a vote. If you have specific thoughts to share, feel free to throw them in the comments, but if you simply have a yes/no opinion, please vote and let me know how you’d like me to handle this. Thanks.

[poll id=”2″]

Filed Under: Uncategorized
→ June 28, 2010
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Cary/Raleigh eats, part one.

I was in Cary, North Carolina, for a few days last week, and will be heading there again soon, so this is the first of likely two food posts on the area.

I’ll start with the one success, Coquette, a French brasserie in the North Hills mall complex in Raleigh, a recommendation of friend-of-the-dish Richard Dansky, who also met me there for dinner. Their duck confit crepes were outstanding all around, from the perfect duck leg to the three golden crepes to the just-right amount of mushroom-leek cream sauce; the only questionable inclusion were fava beans that brought color but a little bitterness and didn’t meld with the other flavors. For dessert, I tried their cashew toffee crunch profiteroles; the pastries, pate a choux with cocoa and cinnamon, were a little dry (hard to avoid), but I would order a half gallon of that ice cream, which was loaded with bits of nuts and toffee and had strong caramel notes in the ice cream itself. It’s served with a dark chocolate ganache sauce that I may have just eaten with a spoon. The only misstep was the salad recommended by our server, a frisee mix with a poached egg … but no other dressing beyond the runny yolk. Not really good eats, but they had plenty of other salad and starter options to try.

I tried two Q joints in the area, neither great. Danny’s, one of several in the area, is located in an industrial park right off Tryon Rd; the pulled pork was moist but had almost no smoke flavor and required saucing, but their sides were all very good, including outstanding fried okra and a small bean I’d never had before called “field peas” that had a little of the bright sweetness of English peas but with the firmness of black-eyed peas. Dixie Belle’s pork had slightly more flavor – I mean slightly – but was dried out, probably from being kept warm for too long. I know there’s better Q in Raleigh and Durham, but didn’t have time to head that far. The mom from one of the local host families recommended Clyde Cooper’s in downtown Raleigh, so I’ll try to hit that next time around.

I had a recommendation for a hole in the wall sushi place in Cary called Little Tokyo, which also seems to be held in high esteem by locals … and that doesn’t say good things about the state of sushi in Cary, because Little Tokyo is awful. I figured I was in trouble when I saw the menu was about 2/3 rolls, with nigiri and sashimi relegated to less than a full page without the same bells or whistles. I knew I was in trouble when I asked the chef behind the sushi bar what he recommended and he looked at me like I’d just said Yuniesky Betancourt should be the AL’s starter at shortstop in the All-Star Game. I ordered five different kinds of nigiri, none of which had a lick of taste. The nigiri fell apart when I picked them up with my hands, and the texture of the maguro was mushy. It’s clear they use the sauces and extras on rolls to cover up inferior quality fish. Avoid, avoid, avoid.

Filed Under: Food Tagged With: , , , , , , ,
→ June 27, 2010
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Taken at the Flood.

I don’t normally write up Agatha Christie books because while each story is different, the general structure is the same, and it’s not like there’s anything new to say about Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple, or even Colonel Hastings or Inspector Japp, for that matter. Taken at the Flood had two characteristics that set it apart from the other Christie novels I’ve read so far, so it’s worth a brief post on a Sunday morning.

One is that despite the fact that the book – also published as There is a Tide, both titles coming from a speech by Brutus in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar – is a Hercule Poirot novel, the man we all know and love doesn’t appear until past the halfway point, outside of a very brief cameo in the prologue. Christie spends the first 60% of the book setting the scene for the first murder, walking us through all the key characters, showing us their motives (in whole or in part), and then following the initial investigation before Poirot finally makes his entrance. I can understand Dame Christie wanting to change it up a little bit, but I happen to like the pompous little Belgian, and I thought his absence took something away from the book, which had a clever plot and a twist in the resolution that I haven’t seen in another Christie novel.

The other unusual facet of Taken at the Flood was what seemed to me to be some sort of political commentary, something I don’t normally associate with Christie’s novels. The plot revolves around the family of a wealthy man who, as a lifelong bachelor, had supported most of them and made grand promises of future support for their own professional endeavors, like expanding the family farm or conducting clinical research instead of working as a family physician. The uncle, Gordon, married while abroad on a trip, only to be killed shortly thereafter in an air raid on London, leaving his young wife a widow in control of his entire fortune, and his expectant heirs out of luck and often in dire straits. I could be reading too much into it, but I thought Gordon was a metaphor for the government and his heirs stood in for people who lived on the dole or otherwise expected to the government to bail them out of their difficulties or, in one character’s case, make working for a living unnecessary. Christie also included several shots at the British government’s taxation schemes during World War II that first gave me the idea that she might be offering a broader comment. Your mileage may vary.

I was pleased to have, for a change, caught two of the most significant clues and pieced together about half of the solution, but once again was far from getting the whole thing. The fun’s in the reading for me, although I do try to form something more than a wild guess as to the killer’s identity and motive. The twist in this one made that quite a bit more difficult than normal.

This marked the 500th novel I’ve read so far, sixteen of which were by Dame Christie.

Next review: Dawn Powell’s The Wicked Pavilion. I’m still about three behind my actual reading, but I’m catching up.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , ,
→ June 26, 2010
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What happened to Bermuda?

My last Tournament of Stars update is on ESPN.com. I still have some video to file as well.

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I mentioned in my St. Kitts post that my wife and I decided against a return trip to Bermuda for our 15th anniversary after we went there on our honeymoon, our fifth anniversary, and our tenth anniversary. A few of you asked me to elaborate, so I’ll do so, but I have to emphasize up front that our last trip there was (if you’re too lazy to do the math) five years ago, and it may be out of date.

Let me start with what we liked about Bermuda. It’s a beautiful island, naturally pretty, but was also fairly prosperous and well-maintained. The capital city, Hamilton, is like something out of a dream, clean, bright, open, busy in a quiet way, walkable with shops and restaurants up and down its few main streets. There’s a second town, more of a village, called St. George, on the east end of the island, also worth at least one visit. The island is small and easily navigable by moped – tourists are not permitted to rent cars – and I have to say that sitting in a closed car would rob you of some of the experience. Locals would chat with us while we were stopped at red lights, and we got a restaurant recommendation or two that way. The beaches have sand flecked with pink, and the water is as blue and clear as anything we found in St. Kitts. One of my favorite rums in the world, Gosling’s Black Seal, is blended and bottled in Bermuda. Most of the people we met on our visits there were friendly. And it’s just a two-hour flight from the east coast of the U.S.

We had a few favorites for food across our trips. The best place that’s still operating is Bistro J, in downtown Hamilton, where the menu changes daily, with five entree options and I believe two or three desserts written each afternoon on a blackboard in the dining room. Everything we ate there was spectacular and I will always remember that as the place I first tried sticky toffee pudding. Monty’s was at one point a simple, slightly cheap spot for locals that served amazing breakfasts, although it had gone upscale by the time we visited in 2005. The Hog Penny is a British pub in Hamilton that we discovered on our first trip, and the Swizzle Inn does make a killer rum swizzle, a cocktail that masks its potency with fruit juice. Paraquet is a little place catering mostly to locals that makes an incredible fried fish sandwich; it’s located in an apartment complex in Paget Parish right on South Road.

We stayed somewhere different on each trip; our favorite was the Salt Kettle Inn, a very small but perfectly located B&B just across the bay from Hamilton and thus a short ferry ride or moped trip into town. (The benefit of taking the moped in the mornings is that you get to see Johnny Barnes, the friendliest man in the world, waving to you and all the other commuters into Hamilton each morning.) We also stayed at the Elbow Beach resort for our honeymoon in 1995; the beach is outstanding for swimming, but the hotel itself is just an average American hotel with shops and restaurants added, with the room no better than what you’d find at a standard Hilton or Marriott, but at twice the price.

Hotel beaches in Bermuda are largely private, but they do have some excellent public ones. Our favorite public beach was Church Bay, on the western side of the south shore. The snorkeling there was amazing with plenty to see even when the water is just a few feet deep, and the water is fairly calm because of outlying rocks. There’s another beach on the eastern half called Shelly Bay Beach that’s very long and shallow and would be great for kids or unconfident swimmers. We usually took an afternoon to visit the small zoo and aquarium, and just generally tooled around the island. Getting around the island was simple between the moped and taxis, and we could go from St. George to the Dockyard (one end of Bermuda to the other) in about an hour.

That’s the good, but when we went back in 2005 we found it didn’t measure up to our memories from the first two trips. The biggest issue was that the place was starting to look a little run down. They’d had a hurricane a year prior but by August of ’05 still hadn’t finished basic maintenance tasks, like fixing a broken walkway from the parking area to the sand at Church Bay. We saw drunk locals in the streets of Hamilton for the first time – completely harmless, but still a sign that the economy there wasn’t in such great shape. And Front Street in Hamilton had gone from three department stores in 1995 to none in 2005, and as far as I can tell none has been replaced. (I understand that those stores were critical to locals, but they offered plenty for tourists who were looking for non-touristy shopping.)

We also found that the quality of the food at several of our favorite places had fallen off. We ate at the Hog Penny at least twice on that last trip, and everything we had underwhelmed us, even though in probably a half-dozen or more meals there on the previous two trips we had always loved the food. The Swizzle Inn changed its menu completely between 2000 and 2005, and the food quality went south as well. The food at Monty’s didn’t change, but the price went up with the décor, although it’s still the best breakfast bet we found on the island.

I also noticed in 2005 that while locals were still on the whole very friendly, we encountered more rudeness than we had before, and my guess is that it was a little anti-Americanism at work. (For whatever it’s worth, and that may be nothing, the poor treatment we received never came from black Bermudians, only whites. I don’t know why that would be true, but it is.)

And the final straw for us was the price. It’s very expensive to stay and eat in Bermuda, and the lack of any major U.S. Chain on the island means that frequent-guest points are useless there. (There are two Fairmont hotels, if that’s how you roll.) Renting a moped for the week, while fun, isn’t cheap, and heading there now with a four-year-old would mean a lot of cab fares, and getting a cab from a public beach was not easy.
But Bermuda has a more fundamental price problem – they slap a tax of 25% or more on all imported goods, so the prices of even basic goods are jacked up, and it flows through to restaurant meals, hotel prices, and of course affects people who live on the island greatly. Add to that their unwillingness to wean themselves from the teat of cruise ship docking fees, even though cruise ship customers do nothing to help island businesses directly but are happy to come and consume public resources like beaches, making it less appealing for people who want to come and actually contribute directly to island hotels, restaurants, and shops.

Bermuda was a little less appealing for us than it might be to a first-time visitor because we will compare everything to our previous visits to the island; I imagine if we went there for the first time now, we’d find it charming, because we lacked any knowledge of what it was like ten or fifteen years ago. And, again, we haven’t been in five years, so it may have made a major turnaround in that time. I haven’t heard anything to that effect, and as far as I know the massive import tax is still in place and the cruise ships are still coming and throwing their weight around. I would love to have my old Bermuda back, but I’m afraid now it may be gone for good.

Filed Under: Food Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ June 25, 2010
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Ubik.

Those of you on the fence about buying a Kindle from amazon.com may be interested to learn that they’ve cut the price to $189. Competition is a wonderful thing, isn’t it?

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Philip Dick’s novel Ubik made the TIME list of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005, one of the few genre novels on the list (and, I’m guessing, a book for which Lev Grossman stumped). I’d read nine other Dick novels, putting The Man in the High Castle – the least sci-fi of any of the books I’ve read from him – on the Klaw 100, but hadn’t read any of his work in close to a decade before picking up this title.

Ubik is typical Dick in that it involves reality turned on its head, where he changes the fundamental conditions of our physical existence, then inserts relatively ordinary people and sees how they act and respond. This time around, there’s a new scientific process that allows people who have died to be placed in a state called “half-life,” where they remain physically dead but their brains can continue to function when they are, in effect, plugged in, a period amounting to a few hours in total between physical death and brain death. So Glen Runciter, who runs an anti-psychic operation, can communicate with his dead wife for a few minutes when he has to make a critical business decision (how terribly romantic), although he runs into trouble early when one such session is interrupted by a neighboring half-lifer who manages to invade the signal.

Joe Chip is one of Runciter’s employees and he, Glen, and ten other employees embark for a highly lucrative mission that goes very wrong when a bomb explodes and somebody dies. What is not clear to the reader is who has died: to the employees, it appears that they all survived but Runciter died, but their world begins acting oddly and they receive messages from their old boss that indicate that they are in half-life and he was the only survivor. The primary mystery of the book is whether or not Joe and his dwindling team are actually alive or in half-life, and they try to chase Runciter’s clues and figure out what they need to do to (half-)survive, with a secondary thread surrounding who is actually controlling their new, unpredictable environment. And the title, a play on the Latin word, ubique, meaning “everywhere” (present in our word ubiquitous or in the Spanish verb ubicar, “to be located”), turns out to be a substance that combats in the rapid physical decay that starts to overtake the members of Joe’s team.

The chapter intros, advertising all manner of products under the Ubik name, usually with comical product warnings, reminded me of the epigrams and fake quotes before chapters in Jasper Fforde’s novels, and it wouldn’t surprise me in the least to hear Fforde was a Dick devotee. (Stop laughing.) I also thought the idea of a world being created to order for the person(s) experiencing it has been reused a few times, including The Matrix and one episode of 1980s revival of “The Twilight Zone,” at the least.

Dick uses a few early misdirects to keep you guessing about the real explanation behind the bomb and the weird possibly-half-life world, although the result does leave a few plot strands hanging. I also thought the final chapter, barely over a page in length, felt like a cheap add-on, one that undermined a fairly strong if slightly conventional conclusion in the prior chapter. And it takes a good 20-25 pages for Dick to set up his universe, explaining in often dry terms the various forms of psychic abilities in use as well as the whole half-life phenomenon, a section that took up about 10% of the book. Overall, though, it’s a clever, mind-bending novel, and following Joe (the main protagonist) through his confusion about the changing world and then his attempts to save himself, if not others on his team, was compelling.

The question I have is whether this merited inclusion as one of three true sci-fi novels on the list (along with Neuromancer, a decent novel worthy for its prescience; and Snow Crash, a good read but a poor selection for the 100), along with a pair of fantasy novels and a comic book. I’m not an aficionado of the genre, but I could make a case for the Foundation trilogy (they did give The Lord of the Rings a spot, as well as A Dance to the Music of Time), and would argue for Dick’s alternate-history work The Man in the High Castle as more literary and seemingly more serious. And there’s a separate debate over whether six entries out of 100 is too much for the combined sci-fi/fantasy genre, not including works like Never Let Me Go, A Clockwork Orange, or Animal Farm that used elements of altered reality to tell much more serious stories. I liked Ubik and would recommend it to anyone who doesn’t mind a little sci in his fi, but as a top 100 candidate it fell short for me.

Next review: I don’t usually review Agatha Christie novels, but Taken at the Flood interested me enough that it’s worth a few grafs.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , , ,