I just got a surprising amount of respect for Hilton, who responded this week with this spoof to an ad by John McCain’s campaign criticizing Barack Obama for being too popular, and comparing him to Britney Spears and Paris Hilton:
And this one is just a wonderful acknowledgement of Joe Cocker’s impenetrable mumbling. Yeah, it takes a boomer to really appreciate this clip, which is from Cocker’s 1969 performance at Woodstock. But for geezers like me, it’s a hoot. I was laughing uncontrollably at work today while watching this. (Thanks to my rockcrit pal John Morthland):
This cool video is performed by FarEast Movement but created by Wong Fu Productions, a trio of Chinese Americans from UC San Diego who started making cool content online in 2003 and now run the gamut from online videos and music to t-shirts for your back.
Cool track as well as dancing — MJ’s high, lonesome “hee-hee” comes in and out like some ghostly punctuation mark on the dancing, and it’s nice to see these dancers, who probably weren’t even born when “Thriller” came out in 1983, pulling out all those old-school moves.
A Chicago institution since 1949, Garrett Popcorn Shops make incredibly tasty cheese popcorn and incredibly crunchy-sweet caramel corn. And, they sell the two flavors as a “Mix” (the first mashup??) that’s a bagful of heaven. OK, somewhat expensive heaven, but hey, did you think the pearly gates would come cheap? Continue reading →
The Bagel is a boisterous, old-fashioned kosher deli in the Old Orchard Mall in Skokie, where Erin and I eat every time we visit Chicago. I always order an egg cream, a soda fountain fave from New York that I’ve never been able to order in Denver. Erin’s favorite is the Mish Mash, a gigantic bowl of chicken noodle soup with a huge matzoh ball floating in it, eclipsing a kreplach dumpling, rice and kashi. They also serve a delicious — if a tad on the dry side — homemade corned beef hash.
I wrote about my experience growing up eating at Benihana for special family occasions, and how in recent years, the restaurant only has one connection to being a Japanese eatery: its food. The staff at the one we go to, for instance, used to have one Japanese woman chef, which was a rarity in the entire company, but she’s been gone a couple of years now. The waitstaff and cooks are all non-Japanese, and as far as I can tell, the chefs are all Latino. They love to tell jokes about how they serve “Teri-juana” sauce (get it? Tijuana, teriyaki?).
They no longer are sent to Japan to train with master chefs like they used to decades ago. But they are all trained well as entertainers, and come up with some amazing tricks with their knives, throwing food around and catching the morsels. The food’s still good, which is why we go from time to time… probably once a year, if that. (YouTube has a lot of videos of dinners at Benihana, including the one above, of a birthday celebration. Most evenings at the restaurants are interrupted by the clatter of multiple birthday celebrations.)
The diners likewise are no longer Japanase or JA families. The diners are almost all white; a couple of weeks ago, we were the only Asians in the room. Continue reading →
