Dinner at Epiphany

Epiphany is a restaurant in the same block as another couple of SB's best restaurants (none of which have I been to). One of Dan's colleagues is a foodie, so when it came time to schedule the company Christmas dinner, he picked Epiphany. I had a white bean and duck confit soup, tried the Dan's foie gras, had a roast duck entree and tried Dan's scallops. Dinner was paired with the Ghost Tree Cabernet Sauvignon, which was a great choice but a little inconsistent from bottle to bottle. Everything was off the charts good, except for the martini I had before dinner which was nothing to write home about. I highly recommend the place.

Villa Antinori 2004 Toscana

Dan picked this up last weekend for dinner for just over $20. He really likes dry Italian wines, whereas I go for the sunny, fruity California wines. But I have to admit that when you start spending decent money on wine, it doesn't matter so much where it's from and what it's like, because it's likely to be an excellent specimen. So it was with this one. I fully admit I know jack about this type of wine. It was dry, and a little metalic/earthy, and it needed to breathe for about 10 minutes, and it was astonishingly good.

bison in Banff and the Tinhorn Creek Merlot

I spent the past five days in Banff, Alberta, Canada, initially for work, and then for fun. On the last evening of my stay, after a two day backpacking trip, my backpacking buddy and I decided to grab dinner in town. We'd planned to go to a burger joint, but failed to find it, and I mentioned that I'd accidentally walked into a -- and I quote -- "shi-shi but cool-looking" restaurant the night before that might be worth trying. I located it, noted that it was called "bison" with a lowercase b, and in we went! Marc had venison a la blah blah blah, and I had "the pork dish", which was grilled pork loin, charred pork belly (i.e. a block of bacon), and a risotto of wild rice, corn and cilantro. The food was simply a-m-a-z-i-n-g! This was hands down one of the best meals I've had anywhere in the world. We paired our meats with the Tinhorn Creek Merlot, from nearby Okanagan Valley, which turned out to be an excellent choice, spicy as the wine was. One of my most memorable -- and expensive, but who's counting -- meals to date. Hats off to Canada!

2007 Jepson Syrah and 2007 Magistrate Meritage

Two really nice bottles of red I picked up recently. The Jepson came from Ralph's and the Magistrate from TJ's. The first was fun with food, the second is very aromatic and stands well on its own. Frankly, the Magistrate has me thinking about dinner a couple hours too early every day this week. The label on it says "limited production", I wonder what exactly that means...

Look to windward

This Culture novel of Iain Banks was the first ebook I read on my Sony reader, and I found it really disappointing, long winded, pointless...

District 9

In my opinion, this movie is worth every bit of hype it's caused. Go see it! I'm thinking about the visuals days later, where usually I forget movies 20 minutes after leaving the theater.

Three great whites

No, not sharks. Three great white wines I've had recently:
The 2007 Gainey Sauv Blanc we had for my birthday.
The 2007 Domaine Alfred Chardonnay is a steel-fermented white that I loved.
The 2008 Castoro Cellars Fume Blanc is plain nice.

CD's

Still buy them. Digital media rights are minimal to non-existent. Possession, as always, continues to be nine-tenths of the law.

This is sad beyond belief.

2005 Harrison Clarke Grenache

This Santa Ynez Grenache, picked up from Jonathan's in La Jolla for $30, is hands down one of the best wines I've ever had. It's not dry, not acidic, not tannic, it's a bit like ... not the wines I usually drink. It's aromatic, medium thickness, and, to me at least, hints at port or brandy. I have no idea whether it's typical of other grenache wines, but it's something to be experienced. I drank it over a week, and I think it was at its peak on the third day. Out of this world!

Mountain Hardwear Clouds' Rest Sleeping bag

Last fall, as I was starting my three month dirtbagging phase, I decided two things absolutely had to be replaced: my sleeping bag, and my backpack. I replaced my North Face Aleutian synthetic bag, with a down bag I found at Wilson's in Bishop on discount, the Mountain Hardwear Clouds' Rest. Fatefully, this was a day before I hit Yosemite National Park and backpacked to 6 miles short of the peak of the same name: Clouds' Rest. This 5 degree sleeping bag has basically changed my outdoor life. I can now boldly go where I would not have previously gone, secure that I will not freeze my butt off. There is apparently a womens' version, which mine is not, but, as those tend to be short and narrow for me, I'm somewhat grateful to have the black and red men's version. My feet stay warm, I can sneak my shoulders out, or snuggle in, as I prefer, and it's soooo soft. Now that it's summer, I've taken to leaving my tent behind and just sleeping in the bag, and I still tend to leave it unzipped, because it really is HOT!

Warehouse 13

It seems really out of character for me to be recommending a TV show. I wonder if it's a symptom of my standards deteriorating... In any case, I've watched the first two episodes of Warehouse 13 on Hulu, and so far, I'm impressed. That anyone would manage to seamlessly incorporate steampunk into a mainstream TV show is beyond the pale. And the male Agent's character: hilarious! I'm really really enjoying this!

My favorite climbing/hiking/backpacking apparel

Cleaning on Summer Sojourn
Originally uploaded by slampoud

I'm very very particular about the clothes I wear when I'm climbing, hiking and backpacking -- and, if possible, I'm even happier if they can cross over to sailing, but very few garments do. I want my gear to be high quality and durable, since I don't want to replace it more frequently than every few years. I generally don't wear it around town, which keeps it feeling a little like fairy dust: put it on, and it's magically the weekend! My usage mode is usually to stick each and every one of these garments in my pack every time I go adventuring (hence they're all very lightweight), take them out and wash them when I return, and repeat during the next excursion two weeks later. So they have to withstand a biweekly wash cycle and the rigors of the outdoors, for a couple years.

The gear that's proven itself over the last one-plus year:

Long pants: REI Acme pants (I would live in these if I could)

Shorts: Lole (can't find the model, but they're SPF 50+, with carbon nanofibers, two buttons, fit like heaven, super stretchy and dry immediately! And I hate shorts!)

Puffy: Isis Whisper (converted me to a down fanatic for life)

Shell: Marmot Cloudlight (plain old competent)

Layers: Icebreaker everything (a love affair I've written about before)

Socks: Smartwool PhD (won't buy anything else)

Beanie: Icebreaker Bauble

Gloves: Sprigs Multi-Mitts

Approach shoes: 5.10 Prodigy

So, to the companies that make my favorite junk: I <3 you!

Well Re(a)d Organic Red Table Wine

Picked up from TJ's for $6. Very impressed by this organic, sulfite-free wine. Left it alone for 4 days and it uncorked with force. I wonder what sort of secondary fermentation was going on there... Either way, delicious with food or without!

Santa Ynez Valley Winery 2008 Gewurtztraminer

Been sipping this with dinner (mainly stir-frys) over the last week. It's very honey, quite fragrant and all-around delicious. Definitely think it would go well with satay sauce, but haven't had a chance to test the theory. It's made by Kalyra, by the way, who also make some of the best dessert wines I've had.

Maiden Voyage

It's been a while since I've stayed up late to finish a book, but I did it last night. Naya was in the crook of my arm as I was reading about the trans-Atlantic leg of Tania and Tarzoon (her cat) in "Maiden Voyage". This book is a classic that I've known about for years and years and that I've avoided reading until now, not wanting to catch the circumnavigation bug. It describes Tania Aebi's circumnavigation at ages 18-21 in the 80s, on a Contessa 26, a boat most people would now consider woefully undersized for the job. After I got my boat, people would always ask, "Oh, just like Aebi, have you read her book?" But of course I wasn't about to go on a circumnavigation ... not on Shadow Line.

The book does a good job of capturing the crankiness and fearfulness of the 18-year old as she departs New York, and her transformation as she proceeds westward around the world. I'm not sure I'm going to read it again anytime soon, nor that it will become a favorite for me as "the voyage of the Aquarius" did, but I really enjoyed it this first time around. I read it at home and on the bus, and for the last two chapters, I stayed up late with my very own boat cat and finished it off. I should mention that this very moment Nick Jaffey is doing a trans-pacific voyage on the very same type of boat, after having crossed the Atlantic from Germany, and shipped the boat overland in the US.

2004 Blair Fox Syrah

I had this wine a little over a year ago, when Dima brought it to wine night. I liked it then, but I've had a lot of wine between then and now. I wanted a super nice bottle to share with Dan last night, and I was going to default to the 2006 Stolpman Syrah, but Lazy Acres had raised the price to $46 (gasp!) and that seemed insane. Note to self: find a case of the Stolpman and hoard it. In the meantime I saw the Blair Fox was $30, which is how much I'd intended to spend in the first place, so I picked that up. I gathered from Dima that the Blair Fox is very highly regarded. Wine advocate gave it a 90, apparently. I like it a lot. No, I love it! I paired it with Greek roast chicken and potatoes, but frankly this wine is a meal in an of itself. Oh the opacity! Oh the legs! Oh the soil! You can really taste the soil in this wine. It was incredible.

Estancia 2007 and Blue Fin 2008 Pinot Noirs

I cracked the Estancia 2007 Pinot Noir a couple weeks ago, and I've been having a glass of the stuff with dinner since. I've tried it with pasta, shrimp, salad, chicken, you name it. It hasn't disappointed me. Half a glass was left when I walked in to my apartment just now...

... and decided to open a new bottle of wine: the 2008 Blue Fin Pinot Noir, which is a Trader Joe's brand. This stuff is crap: the color is pale, it's watery, and it's sour. So I poured the remaining glass of two-week old Estancia to compare it to. Side-by-side, two weeks old, the Estancia beat the pants off the Fin. The Estancia is nearly opaque, has an aroma, and, after two weeks, you still want to sip it. Not that it's my favorite Pinot Noir, but it is solid.

Terminator Salvation

Review

Seriously, go see it!

My Dinner With André

One of the most stupefyingly boring movies of all time. What do people see in this pretentious crap anyway?

It makes you long for the worldly wisdom of Charles Bronson!

Dinner @ Noriega's in Bakersfield

We drove through Bakersfield on the way back from the Sierras last night, and stopped to have dinner with a friend. We went to the Noriega hotel, which serves Basque dinner at 7pm sharp every night. The hotel is in a rundown part of town, next to the train tracks, which reminds me a little bit of the area around Iggy's (my favorite late night joint, on Milwaukee) in Chicago.

Promptly at 7, we were herded into an old dining room set with three long, 50-person tables. She declared "two on one side, one on the other", and seated us right up against the people who'd arrived just before us. Apparently seating people without leaving gaps is a big deal, because someone who arrived after us and wanted to move had to whisper conspiratorially with our friend until they converged on an exit strategy.

The table had already been set with soup (chopped angel hair, hot salsa, and beans, in separate big bowls each, so you could ladle as much of each ingredient as you like), pickled tongue, boiled beets, and potato salad. I had a dry red house wine that went really well. Then out came the cottage cheese, then the first course, beef stew. French fries and baked chicken followed. Then there was amazing bleu cheese, and I had flan -- which I called creme caramele, for which I got a huh? Dinner was $20 a head.

I loved the dingy ambiance, the seating Gestapo, the family style arrangement, and most of all the old Basque gauchos who showed up a little after us to sit down and eat their home-style meal. It was all made even better by the fact that I had no idea at all what I was getting into when I walked in the door.

Human Forgetfulness

I deleted all my "wish lists" at most sites. I do not believe my tastes will change (at least, significantly) but I will only remember most of the "wish lists" gradually, possibly roughly in line when my "disposable income" recovers.

Call it a gift of behavioral economics. You don't regret what you don't remember.

BitDefender AV 2009

In what universe is the antivirus the most important task a computer has to perform at any given time? It's not a trick question! The answer is NONE. Lower the fucking priority, assuming Windows has a notion of such a thing, and fix this piece of bloatware shit that I actually paid for! And your fucking "dashboard" sucks goats.

Roger Lowenstein - When Genius Failed

I saw this book lying on the shelf in the company library and picked it up on a whim. It was a quick read. More than anything else, this shows the importance of marketing in high finance (in the case of LTCM, the mystique of quants and modeling is what was sold).

I do have a few criticisms of style: Greenspan is always "oracular", and banks tend to "squawk" (for some reason), but other than that the writing is crisp and straight-forward.

It was also amusing, just the next day after I finished reading this book, to see an article about Jon Corzine in The Times (during the LTCM saga he was a Goldman executive, and now he is the governor of New Jersey).

Since we have a binary rating system here, I suppose I will have to go with "impressed", though that might imply a slightly too-high level of enthusiasm. But it was interesting, so thumbs up.

Kissing

I'd rather not kiss, or wiggle fingers, or just shuffle off this mortal coil!

Penfold's Koonunga Hill 2007 Shiraz Cabernet

I wanted to try an Australian Syrah, and found this at Ralph's for something like $8 and a rating of 91 (though I don't recall who issued the rating). It's good. The Cab in the blend makes it dry and allows it to stand up to more flavorful foods than the Syrah alone could. There may be more to this wine than I'm picking up on, not sure. The blend is throwing me off slightly, but in any case this is a good bottle and I've been enjoying it glass by glass with all sorts of dinners (pasta, tuna, shrimp).

Gold Rush Red

Picked it up at TJ's a few weeks ago. Started a glass and couldn't finish it. This is swill. Since I adhere to the tenets of "don't cook with anything you wouldn't drink", I'm throwing the whole bottle out.

The Rider

It's been a while since I read a book and thought, "now, truly, this is a classic". Tim Krabbe's "The Rider" wholeheartedly qualifies. This is the story of a cycling race told from the point of view of one of the participants, the author, who is also a noted chess player. It's full of musings on cycling, racing and the meaning of life, or at least the meaning of life as those of us who race -- bikes, boats, other people, whatever -- see it. Which is to say, we look at everyone else and wonder what could possibly make them tick, since their lives are devoid of competition. There are a dozen fantastic quotes in the book, but the most memorable to me was this:

How often have I seen people clapping and cheering for a rider who, having been lapped six times, pushes on bravely? It's an insulting brand of applause -- for where does a winning rider get the right to revel in applause if the crowd isn't obliged to hiss at him when he fails?

Financial Times

Has anyone else run into a limit on the number of articles one can read per month recently? I've only noticed this over the last few months. Happily, the limit does not seem to affect a mobile browser.

Peachy Canyon Zinfandel

Peachy Canyon's Merlot has the distinction of having been the only bottle of wine I've lugged across the Atlantic to enjoy with my parents. You can't get that Merlot at TJ's anymore, but you can get a red blend for not a lot of money, which is good with food, and I think there's a Syrah floating around for a bit more. So I was at Ralph's instead of TJ's the other night, and I'd had a night of bad wine the night before, and a night of awesome wine a few nights before that, and I had reached the conclusion that I may be developing a dislike for sub-$10 wine (this spells huge trouble, but I'll worry the issue in another post). Looking for something going for a little more, I picked up a Peachy Canyon Zin. It did not disappoint. This Zin has not a hint of acidity, so it can be had alone in large quantities, and it is fragrant. The taste alters a little bit in the mouth after a while, but nothing weird happens to it. In my experience it keeps well for a few days, to boot. I loved it.

Léon Marin, Prêtre (Léon Marin, the Priest)

How far would you go to seduce a handsome young priest?

Particularly, if you were a handsome young woman who in open defiance to society married a Jew in pre-wartime France, had a child, and were openly atheistic and communist and bisexual after being widowed?

This is Jean-Pierre Melville's movie, adapted from Béatrix Beck's eponymous novel, and who is far better known for making steely cold-blooded French film-noirs than such melodrama.

It's filmed in quite an old school way for its time (while his contemporaries were blazing new cinematic heights.) It borrows quite heavily from Max Ophüls' Le Plaisir but it's charged with erotic lightning from start to finish - Will she? Will he? Will he? Will she? Will he? Will he? Will he?

There's a lot of she's but only one he but that's still a lot of couplings.

It's old school. Slow as all out. Works via suggestion and a slow piecing together of data than actually showing you the facts.

And it's actually a film noir in a perverted sense of the word.

Is the soul incorruptible? Even in the metaphoric sense of the soul since there is clearly no such thing? To what lengths will you go to get what you want? Will you destroy what you desire to get it just once?

As for the central question, will he or won't he, to even suggest the answer would simply take the piss out of the whole thing, wouldn't it?

Celine and Julie Go Boating (Celine et Julie vont en bateau)

This review should've been written a long time ago but has been left unfinished so it's time to finish it.

The title is a pun: aller en bateau (to go in a boat) also means to "to get caught up in a yarn", and the movie is chockful of puns.

Rivette's sense of time is leisurely, and you must really submit to the movie on its own terms which is extraordinarily hard. By the end of the first hour, I was ready to walk out; by the end of the second hour, wild horses wouldn't have dragged me out of there; by the end of its 193 minutes, I was ready to declare it as possibly one of the greatest things that can be done in the cinematic medium.

You must submit to its leisurely long-winding logic before a payoff is delivered. And what a payoff!

In a world of instant gratification, this is quite liberating.

To tell too much about the story would be giving it away so it's about magic, friendship, memory, the child's love of story-telling particularly involving the macabre, watching a clockwork device work out its inevitable logic after it's been wound up.

Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock, but alley-oop! the clock just vanished. Now what?

The movie very self-consciously pays hommage to "Alice in Wonderland" -- it's jam-packed with Alice references -- with plenty of side references to just about everybody else - Cocteau, Buñuel, Genet.

Not to be missed if ever it plays, and yes, you have to watch this in the theater. You have to be immersed in it with no interruptions.

2006 Stolpman Syrah

I wrote about a Stolpman Syrah (to which I was first introduced by Jordan) here, last April, but this Friday I got to try the next year's vintage. I was looking for a wine to bring to a friend's dinner party and I wanted something nice, so I went into Bev'mo in La Jolla and found neither the Blair Fox nor the Stolpman. Around the corner is Jonathan's, a shi-shi, Lazy Acres-like grocery store with a good selection of expensive wines, so I snuck in. They didn't have the Blair Fox -- I asked, and the woman, about my age, said something like "never heard of it", like that was a good thing -- but they did have a Stolpman for $30, which I proceeded to pick up. Turns out this is a year younger than last year's, and I had an opportunity to compare prices at Lazy this weekend to find that it's also about $15 cheaper, the 2005 having gone up in price in the meantime. The 2006 is just as highly rated, and apparently apt to age well, so I'm debating buying a couple and setting them aside to try out next year or the year after. In any case, the 2006 is fucking amazing. I must have looked like a total moron to everyone at the table with my nose stuck in my glass, snorting the wine. I swear, this wine is bottled sunshine.

Changeling

I went into this movie with mixed expectations. On the one hand, a plus, directed by Clint Eastwood. He just keeps getting better and better. On the other hand, potential minus, I had previously read that it was an Oscar-fishing attempt, and I also feared cliche melodrama. In the end, I was cautiously impressed. There were a few over-the-top hysterical scenes by Angie (though in general she fit the role wonderfully, particularly her physicality); I have some level of sympathy for these scenes, because how can one ever really internalize the pain of a mother loosing her child, and through such a Kafkaesque sequence of events? In the end, I think I have to give these scenes a thumbs down though, since the ultimate concern is not the accuracy of the scene, but rather its verisimilitude, and these scenes took me out of the film. Also, there were a number of annoying cliches, like the heavyset unsympathetic mental hospital nurse. And the film was a bit too long; more editing would have helped.

Now for the positives. The period immersion was excellent. I'm not an expert on these things, but I did not notice any obvious anachronisms. And the theme, how all the different aspects of power function in a society, was deftly woven into an otherwise straightforward narrative. I particularly liked the turn around regarding assumption of guilt (from a sympathetic to unsympathetic character) and how this places the audience in a morally ambiguous place. Also, bonus points to Eastwood/Howard for not hedging their attribution (that is, it was clearly declared "a true story" rather than something like "inspired by a true story," as was Howard's total failure, A Beautiful Mind).

And as for Oscar-bait, there was one fun self-referential moment which shows some humor. I won't give it away, but look for it if you decide to give this a chance.

Red Rocks, a climber's guide

This climbing guide to Red Rock Canyon in Nevada, written by Jerry Handren and published in 2007, was recommended very strongly by a friend who'd spent quite a bit of time climbing at RRC. He was specific and adamant that this was the book to get, so we did, and we were not disappointed. First let me say that you cannot, for some reason, buy this guide on Amazon or REI or any mainstream outlet I've found. But you most definitely can get it from Desert Rock Sports, the climbing outfitter in Las Vegas, NV, although it isn't mentioned on their website.

The guide is exhaustive, well researched, and beautifully illustrated. There are no drawn maps, instead every route is plotted on pictures of the rocks. We had a fantastic time reading the articles in between the route descriptions, and the guide was a friggin' pleasure to use, compared to some others we've had to rely on in the past.

Rock climbing Joshua Tree West

The precursor to this book, "Rock climbing Joshua Tree", was introduced to me as "Vogel's book of lies". The original got the bad rep because it was written a long long time ago, before the Yosemite decimal rating system had gelled, and before many of the existing roads and trails at JTree had been established. As a consequence, the precursor had been horribly out-of-date and inaccurate, though it was encyclopedic in its breadth. The author, Randy Vogel, was, from what I heard, the biggest advocate for a complete rewrite of the book.

Since the original was published, so much development has occurred at JTree that it became necessary to split the updated version into several separate books, which, if I understand correctly, Vogel is in the process of writing. So the book covering the Western section of the park is already available in stores, and the book covering the central section is supposed to come out sometime in April -- I'm signed up for a notification when it becomes available. Suffice it to say, the West book is just as encyclopedic as the original, but 10 times more useful, because the locations and ratings of routes are now reliable, and additional first ascent and protection information is given.

Well done, Randy Vogel! I, for one, am waiting for the Central book with bated breath.

Kafka on the shore

This is the third book by Murakami that I've read, and I liked it a lot less than the previous two. There are some very bright moments in it, and I enjoyed the writing, but I thought it was dilute and too long. On the other hand, it does reflect far more than the other two books I've read the issues Murakami brought up recently in his acceptance speech of some award or other in Israel.

Cliffhanger

Cliffhanger is considered a climbing classic, although it is reviled in climbing circles as being grossly inaccurate, and it's now available on Hulu. The only accurate-looking climbing in the movie is during the opening scene. The rest of the climbing basically consists of insane campus and dyno moves. In fact, I can't do a single move shown in the movie. The movie also features an insane bolt gun, that fires bolts (which, in real life, are a total pain in the ass to install) directly into rock. We wish! Even so, the movie's pretty fun. The bad guy sucks, but all the good guys are likable. I was impressed with the movie itself, which I watched spontaneously, but I'm becoming more and more critical the more I read about it...

Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö

Who?!?

Or Whö?!?

Or Oogly-Woogly and Woogly-Oogly, as I call them.

A wife and husband team that wrote some the best detective fiction I have ever read. In the classic locked-room format even though it is so much more than that.

An excoriating exposé of the "welfare" state during the inflationary 1970's; a searing portrait of police corruption in Sweden; and a depressing Scandinavian portait that things are not always what they seem; and a clear intellectual child of film noir.

It's all worth reading in as much as you can find translated. Worth reading "in order" although this is not quite strictly necessary unlike a lot of more contemporary detective fiction.

Partial RSS Feeds

If I can't see your entire post on the reader, and have to click on each post individually to get to your website, what's the freakin' point?

Dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb.

The Steel Remains

Richard Morgan became hands down my favorite sci-fi author on the basis of just his first novel, "Altered Carbon". The follow-ups were good, but not nearly as hard-hitting. "The Steel Remains" is the much-anticipated result of his effort to switch over to the fantasy genre. I think the only other fantasy book I've ever read was the Lord of the Rings, so I'm really no expert in the genre. "The Steel Remains" is good, but it's more like Morgan's second and later books than his first. Somewhere after that first book he started taking too long developing his characters' inner dialogs and flashbacks, and I simply have no patience for this. In real life you don't get to hear the inner dialog of the people around you. Ditto in good movies, voice-over narration being the crutch of the crappy director in my mind. So this book was good, competent, but nothing to write home about.

Z

Unbearably thrilling political thriller. Hyper-kinetic editing. Blink and you miss.

All of the elements of the police procedural that are clichés today originate here. This is a flat-out masterpiece from Costa-Gavras. Just get over that it's set in Greece but everyone speaks French. It doesn't matter. As a denunciation of fascism, this is both hilarious and depressing.

And for film buffs, please note how the flashbacks are structured. Barely a few seconds, and yet they propel the film forward.

If you watch this at home, insist on a rule. No interruptions or pee breaks. You can't just stop a roller-coaster just because you have a pause button.

Oh, and over the closing credits, the translations lame out. They are hilariously spectacularly satiric in French, and just odd in English.

(The review is deliberately not talking about content. You are better off going into this movie without knowing anything.)

The Barnes Foundation

This is the greatest museum of modern art that nobody has ever heard of.

Albert Barnes made a fortune in pharmaceuticals (preventing syphilis transmission between mother and child during childbirth, in case you were curious) and he dumped the entire fortune into art. His foundation owns 180+ paintings by Renoir, 69 Cézannes, and 60-odd Matisses.

And these are not minor Matisse paintings either. Each one is a major masterpiece. And Matisse painted a mural in the hall himself. In fact, this is possibly the greatest collection of Matisses anywhere in the world.

There are 800-odd paintings, and the total list of artists is like the whos-who of modern art (van Gogh, Picasso, Chirico, Klee, Modigliani, Monet, Manet, Seurat, Prendergast, Gauguin.)

It's in a remote suburb of Philly (for now - it's all very complicated - there's a lawsuit in the works.)

They keep an extraordinary tight control on the images so for now, you will just have to believe this review. Or buy their books. Or go there.

Hancock

What did the reviewers see in this? It was bad, atrociously bad. Not even make-fun-of-it bad. Just bad.

And you don't even get Will Smith naked! Nor the woman. Or a bad sex scene. So what was the point again?

Hamlet 2

Funnier than it was made out to be by the critics (who failed to see some of its cleverer elements.)

Worth renting for a laugh (or three.)

Santino 2003 Syrah

If I recall correctly, I bought this wine for something in the order of $5 at TJ's in early December for a camping trip. We ended up not drinking it, so the wine sat in my storage unit through December, and eventually made it to San Diego during the great move of 2009, to be opened as the first bottle of the new apartment. And it did not disappoint! Wow! What a fruity syrah! I've been sipping it for three nights now and it's consistently excellent.

The True History of Chocolate

Brilliantly researched; endlessly informative; witty and insightful.

A scholarly work by Sophie D. Coe (food historian and anthropologist) who unfortunately died young of cancer while working on this book.

One of the more entertaining parts of the book is to see who of the who's who of history were total chocolate-addicts.

Foodies and chocoholics rejoice!

Revolutionary Road

Very disappointing movie. Unlike the book which I liked a lot.

Partly out of a choice of where to compress. The book is written in an explicitly spelt-out three-part structure. They kept all of Part 3, and reduced Part 1 to less than 15 minutes. This is just bad. The characters all come out flat with the two leads (and some of the supporting cast) salvaging whatever they can.

Basically, the screenplay sucked, and there's only a handful of excellent moments.

There were tons of "historical" mistakes. The design of the service in the restaurants is a late-90's thing. Those shapes don't exist in the 50's. And beer cans with rivet and pull-tabs were invented in 1962. Also, the liquor bottles are all the wrong shapes and forms in a movie where everyone boozes and smokes non-stop.

The reviews keep saying that the movie is "thought provoking". If this is thought provoking then maybe, just maybe you don't "think" enough.

Long way down

This is the second TV series based on Ewan McGregor's and Charlie's motorcycle travels across the world. In this one they go from Scotland to South Africa, and the series is only 6 episodes long to the previous series' (Long way round) 12 episodes. However this one is edited in a way that makes it really fun and enjoyable, whereas the previous one was repetitive and more like an MTV clip. Superbly well done this time around.

Μετόχι 2002, 2003

This was the only Greek red wine I've had during this visit that really impressed me. It's cab sauv and merlot and a little fragrant, but mostly really really delicious.