Maybe girls DO have to go to Mars to get more candy bars

I read lots of restaurant reviews. LOTS. Mostly reviews of restaurants in cities I've lived to keep up with the food culture (New York, D.C., and Nashville at the top of that list) and reviews of restaurants in cities I'm visiting to figure out where to eat (New Orleans) and reviews of restaurants that have attained national acclaim, which is basically just food-oriented rubber-necking (Alinea in Chicago).

So maybe I'm just a wee bit obsessed. But for all the reviews I read, and as much as I may disagree with a particular review or reviewer, I rarely am stopped in my tracks as I was when I read today's Wall Street Journal review of Momofuku Ko.

For the non-food obsessed among you, Momofuku Ko is basically the It Restaurant of the moment and is the third venture for David Chang, the It Chef of the moment. It serves a prix fixe menu, which means that everyone who walks in the door ostensibly is served the same eight courses (barring food allergies). Since it opened, everything about the restaurant -- from its food to its online reservations system to Chang's own idiosyncracies -- has been chronicled and reviewed to high heaven. But for all these endless pages of glowing text, nothing prepared me for this little detail mentioned in the WSJ review:

There's also the issue of how some of the dishes were presented. My husband and I weren't always given the same dish -- and when two different dishes were brought out "for the lady" and "for the gentleman," we were not given a choice over who got which. Sure, we swapped dishes when we wanted to, but it was peculiar to note that the woman, almost always, seemed to be given the lighter dish. (Ladies, it's more than worth it to fight for some of the "gentleman's" deep-fried apple pie.)

Pardon the pun, but this leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Is food somehow gendered? Am I supposed to prefer certain food by virtue of my vagina and mammaries? Or (perhaps worse) am I supposed to prefer certain lighter choices because of the need to maintain a slender, feminine physique?

And nevermind what happens when a party is not made up of one woman and one man. In a party of two women, do both get the dish "for the ladies"? Or is the chef in the back figuring out which of the two women is more butch and should get the "gentleman's" dish? Give me a break.

Maybe the restaurant is just trying to present an additional dish for its customers to try. But then, why not just add another course? Or why not present the two dishes neutrally, set them down without reference to the parties' gender, and suggest that they share so both people get to try both dishes?

Having eaten at and enjoyed both of David Chang's other restaurants, I have been coveting a meal at Momofuku Ko since before it opened. And I still covet that meal, but, frankly, I'm glad I read about this absurdity before I went. Because if I wasn't prepared for it and someone handed me some weak pansy-ass dessert and gave J-P the deep-fried apple pie on account of my vadge, there would most certainly be hell to pay.

Gutting it out

So, how did things go on Saturday, you ask? Saturday? What was Saturday? Hmm, let’s see. There was Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and then, OH! YES! How ever could I have forgotten? Saturday. Saaaaaa-turday.

Well, the night before we slept through were woken up by a downpour and crashing thunder. There was a downpour when we woke up, when we got dressed, when we hitched a ride to the starting line, when we got out of the...WAIT. What is this? The downpour is letting up to a tolerable drizzle just as we arrive at the starting line? HUZZAH!

We spent the next forty-five minutes waiting with 30,000 other crazy runner-type people to start the race. We stretched, tried to get and stay warm, and psyched ourselves up. It drizzled on and off while we waited but had stopped entirely by the time we crossed the starting line. The rest of our little group jumped out ahead, and I settled into a very modest pace hoping that my knees would not surrender early. And then I watched the miles click by.

1 mi: Always a sense of accomplishment here at the first mile marker. One down! Onward!

2 mi: That is one big-ass hill up ahead. Damn Nashville with its hills!

3 mi: Amen. The next few miles are one nice long downhill and the legs are finally warmed up. Looking forward to this part.

4 mi: Where’s J-P? This is about where we will pass each other as he’s on the way back from the turnaround. But wow, scanning the oncoming runners is giving me a headache.

5 mi: Oh, hello knees. Fancy feeling you here. Look, I’m going to keep my form nice and strong, and I promise to take it easy on the downhills. But I need you to hang in there for quite a bit longer, mkay?

6 mi: Poor me. I have no friends to cheer me on from the sideline, because they are running too. Wait. Is that M.K. on the sideline? IT IS! M.K.! YOO HOO!!! CHEER ME ON!!!!!

7 mi: Hmm. Didn’t really focus on the fact that the nice long downhill at mile 3 would translate to a nice long uphill at mile 7. Suck. But, more than halfway there!

8 mi: Thirst. Water. Agua. Now. MMMMMMMMM.

9 mi: Dude, I am rocking this race. I think when the half-marathon and the marathon split off in a mile or so, I might take the marathon route! I can do it! I AM SUPER-RUNNER!

10 mi: Fuck that.

11 mi: This is the longest I’ve ever run. Now THIS is the longest. Now THIS is the longest. Now THIS is the longest ...

12 mi: I’m really going to finish this thing! Sweet!

13 mi: One-tenth of a mile left. Now, I sprint with every ounce of energy that is left in my being.

13.1 mi: 2:30:15. Gah. Those 15 seconds will be the bane of my existence. Until next year.

Know your Boolean operators

Cute post over at Sweet Juniper about working, the internet, and productivity, including this, about lawyering in the era of Lexis and Westlaw:

Lawyers used to have to actually look things up in books. It was an arcane, tedious process that involved constantly updated digests that led to musty old tomes of case law that took up hundreds of feet of bookshelf in every office. Now those books are just for show: the cases are all online, accessible through extremely expensive google-type searches. It's a well-kept secret that lawyering in the internet age is little more than highly-specialized googling.

Yep, that's pretty much it, people. Highly-specialized googling. Indeed.

Hoping to bust out a blistering sub-15 minute pace

So, you remember how excited I was about the big race? Umm, yea. Right. This weekend. Coming up. As in Saturday. Three days from now.

I'm so screwed.

For whatever reason (and there are LOTS of reasons, none of them very good) I, shall we say, dropped the ball on the training. Not that there hasn't been running, in some cases many many miles of running, but I just didn't approach this thing very consistently and there is a good chance I will not be able to gut out the whole 13 miles without stopping.

Plus (and here's my one sorta good reason), I've been having some knee trouble, and although it's improved with PT and training and new sneaks and insoles, it's still not 100%, and it is very likely that my knee will tell me I have to stop running around mile 9 or so. Which, I'm sure you can do the math, is about 4 miles short of where I need to be.

But at least I have some post-race festivities to look forward to, and a few good friends to celebrate with at the finish, however pathetically long it takes me to get there.

Ten years and a day

OK, so I'm a day late with this post, but it's totally an accident because I had a real bang-up kind of day yesterday. The kind of day where you just have to shake yourself off, make sure there's no blood, and call the goddamn insurance company. Geez. No worries though, all is fine with the possible exception of the front door of our car.

So. On to our post!

Yesterday was the ten-year anniversary of the day that a tornado ripped through downtown Nashville and did major damage in our neighborhood east of downtown. Obviously, at that point in my life, I was happily ensconced in the Eastern Seaboard, and the idea that I would ever be a Nashville resident myself was laughable, so I really have no recollection of there even being a tornado, although I know it made national news.

But in the past week or so there have been a lot of news and radio retrospectives about the tornado and its effect on our neighborhood. And this morning, I spent an hour talking to one of my coworkers, who lives in our neighborhood, about her experience of working downtown, trying to get home to her two adolscent kids who were holed up in the house by themselves, and recovering from all the damage. Here's a picture of the street she lives on, which is just a few blocks from where we now live:


Pretty overwhelming, especially considering we drive down this street all the time. The Tennessean has a then-and-now slideshow up on their site if you're interested in seeing more pictures.

Weirdness from The Google

I love me some Google Analytics, what with its nice little charts and piegraphs that let me obsessively track just how many of you are out there reading (in stony, cold, comment-free silence). It's also clued me in that you're mostly located in the States, that the Canadian contingent is a lot less interested than they used to be, and that I get a smattering of visitors from places as far-flung as Hong Kong, New Zealand, Spain, and Norway. About half of you get here directly by plugging the URL into your browser or by bookmark, and the other half get here through other sites that link here or by typing a search into The Google.

Which leads me to a list of some of the Google searches that have led people here. Methinks that a lot of these people did not find whatever it is that they were looking for:

a kiss between the legs.com
addict of stanley, id.
fat women on motorbikes
i want to marry a rhino
how does astroglide work?
photographs of strongest women legs
price on a 2008 rhino in idaho

Hmm. Now there's an idea -- if there is an unfilled need for information about the logistics of marrying a rhino, maybe that's a niche I could somehow fill!

A very long post, and a dilemma

On Sunday afternoon, I called the cops. For the first time in my life that I can recall. So here’s the story, which I’ve been turning over in my head for the last day or so. I’m curious what you think about it.

Our house has an alley behind it like you sometimes see in older neighborhoods. It’s where our trash is collected, and it can be accessed at each end of the block. There is hardly ever any traffic in the alley and usually no reason to be back there unless you’re taking out the trash or getting something from your backyard, in which case it’s pretty obvious what you’re doing back there.

On Sunday morning at about 9:30, J-P and I set off in the car to run some errands. As we pulled away from the (front of) the house, it started to drizzle, and we remembered that we had left our friend’s lawnmower, which we were borrowing, outside in the backyard. We decided to put it in the shed to protect it from the rain, so we drove down the alley to get to the backyard. As we approached the gate to our yard, we came across a couple of guys sitting in a beat-up brown pick-up parked right in front of our gate. We didn’t recognize them, or their truck, as neighbors. We pulled over behind them and J-P went to move the lawnmower while I waited in the car. The guys drove off after I had been parked there for a minute or two.

Now, just so you have the entire picture, the guys were in their 40s or 50s, white, and looked like they had seen better days. As soon as we saw them, we agreed that it seemed curious? strange? odd? suspicious? to see anyone in the alley, especially since these guys were just sitting there for no apparent reason. Minor property crime (like, perhaps, stealing a lawnmower?) is not uncommon in our neighborhood, and the alley is an easy way to enter someone’s property without attracting attention. It also crossed my mind that they could be scoping out a house (ours? our neighbor’s?) in advance of a burglary.

So, we were suspicious. But at the same time we were skeptical of our suspicions and reigned them in. Could there be a legitimate reason for their presence in the alley? Maybe they were just having a conversation and wanted some privacy? Maybe it was just a low-level drug deal (which would bother me way less than the prospect of a burglary)? Would we even be having this discussion if the guys were clean-shaven and driving a BMW? What if they were black? Who knows. We didn’t get their license plate, we didn’t call the cops, and we went on our errands. Still, we couldn’t get the incident out of our minds and kept thinking and talking about it.

Fast forward a few hours later. We are back at home, and I am in the kitchen and J-P is mowing the backyard with the aforementioned lawnmower. (I know, doesn’t the picture of gendered domesticity just make you want to gag?!?) Around 12:30, J-P comes inside and says to me, “there’s a brown pick-up in the alley, license number XYZ-123.” Confident that it was the same pick-up (seriously, two different brown pick-ups, parked right outside our gate, the same morning? slim chance, snowball), we talked about what we should do. J-P wanted to take out the garbage and “see what was up.” HA. Yeah right. I am so not down with confrontation, at least not in these circumstances. After hemming and hawing, I finally decided that, no, we should call the cops. The fact that these guys had come back made me more nervous and more doubtful as to their motives. And, I figured, if there were a perfectly reasonable explanation for their presence in the alley, they would have the chance to explain and the cops would be on their way. No crime, no foul, or so I hoped.

So I called the cops. Not 911, just the non-emergency number. I explained the situation to the dispatcher and told her that I just wanted the cops to make sure everything was kosher and get these guys to move along if there was no reason for them to be there. The cops were there within 15 minutes (yay for Metro Police Department responsiveness, at least on a Sunday afternoon!). I kept an eye from the kitchen window while the cops talked to the guys for several minutes. Then the cops pulled away and drove around to the front of the house to give us a report. They told us that the guys were formerly homeless and now work for the guy whose house is directly behind ours, that they did not have criminal records, and that they were in the alley waiting for their employer to get home from church. We thanked the cops for their time, and they took off. Within a few minutes, the guys in the pick-up left the alley.

J-P’s first response was, “I feel bad.” And I felt bad too. I would imagine that it would be pretty demoralizing and degrading to be hassled by the cops just for being on a public thorofare and looking shady. I’m sure incidents like that contribute to the fact that it’s so hard for people who have had problems with homelessness, crime, or addiction to get their lives back on track. And here I am, contributing to that by calling the cops.

But then again, I don’t feel bad. It is suspicious to hang out in an alley for no apparent reason, no matter what you look like or who you are. I’m not sure what I would have these guys do – wait on the street? wait in the front yard? wait at the gas station down the block? – but waiting in the alley was a bad choice that raised my suspicions, and my reaction was, "better safe than sorry."

So do I feel bad? Yes. But am I also defending myself? Yes. I don’t know, readers. What should I have done? What would you have done?

Still looking for Ben Dover and Heywood Jablowmi

Here's an interesting site via Kottke that takes first and last names from the 1990 census and combines them randomly.

I was amazed at how, after refreshing just a few times, I saw names I recognized. First, the names of an author, an actress, a fictional character, and a country singer. OK, so these are famous people and don't happen to have exceptionally unusual names. But then, a few clicks later, the site generated the name of one of my cousins, albeit with a minor variation in spelling. Next, the evocative "Olive Branch." Finally, a few clicks later, I saw my own (relatively uncommon) last name, although it was not paired with the first name of any of my relatives.

Hours of entertainment, people, HOURS! (Or at least MINUTES, but I'll take what I can get on a Friday afternoon!)

Sunday

8 AM: Bacon.

10 AM: Rock climbing.

12 PM: Sitting in the sun at the top of Black Mountain.

2 PM: $1 Miller Lite drafts at Porky's in Crossville.

5 PM: Barefoot in the backyard.

7 PM: Pasta with perfect spring asparagus.

9 PM: Early to bed.

If that's not a greatest-hits kind of day, I don't know what is.

What married people do in lieu of dating

We had a blind couple-date last week with the friends of friends. The whole concept of couple-dating has become a bigger part of our lives as we get older and as more of our peers pair off. And, of course, living in a new city has led to a plethora of couple-dates as we've sought to develop and extend our social network here.

This particular couple-date was just smashing, really the epitome of what one hopes for in a couple-date. We went with the low-commitment wine bar plan: if it doesn't work out, one glass of wine and we're totally outs. But as it turns out, the conversation flowed easily and the four of us found that we share a number of interests and certain biographical oddities ("Oh my god I TOTALLY saw Barry Manilow at the Garden State Arts Center when I was in high school!"). We ended up sampling widely from the wine list -- three different glasses each and you can cover a fair amount of ground -- and on the way home we agreed that we DEFINITELY have to hang out with them again.

Ah, the couple-crush!

And I only had to take the quiz once to get the answer I wanted

So, which are you? (via Minimally Invasive)