Towse: views from the hill

I was pleasantly surprised to find Scalzi #9 on blogdex (The following sites are the most contagious information currently spreading in the weblog community) this morning for his bloggy WHATEVER: A Quick Note to About-To-Be Married Gays and Lesbians. I knew him long before his blogdex rank tied with The Gray Zone by Seymour M. Hersh which I mentioned a day or two ago and placed ahead of Ananova’s Childless couple told to try sex.

When I sent him my congrats, he was admirably modest about his raging fame.

Top linked blog entry this morning is Nick Berg’s Killing: 50 Fishy Circumstances, Contradictory Claims, and Videotape Anomalies.

From “troy” on briankinney.journalspace.com (which I found because the blog has the good taste to link to UV) “some things I hate about blogs”

The list includes (but is not limited to, click the link if you’re interested)

• Pictures that force the browser to resize them.
  
• when links open up in a new window.
  
• when you miserably fail at trying to protect a copyright by removing the right click function so that I cannot choose to “open in new tab”
  
• Not updating regularly.
  
• Apologizing for not posting.

What I thought was interesting was the complaint about “when links open up in a new window.”

I offer the option (“Click here to open links in new window”) because I know some people prefer “open new” over “do not open new” but it never occurred to me that someone would complain when links automatically open up a new window.

In the comments section, someone (troy? even though the reply is from “briansean”?) points out that a right-click lets you open a link in a new window but there’s no way to kill a page’s “open in a new window” command.

Is there?

Intelliseek’s BlogPulse came wandering by my blog because I’d mentioned “Seymour Hersh” and today Google’s Web Alert notified me about it.

BlogPulse is an “automated trend discovery system for blogs. Blogs, a term that is short for weblogs, represent the fastest-growing medium of personal publishing and the newest method of individual expression and opinion on the Internet. BlogPulse applies machine-learning and natural-language processing techniques to discover trends in the highly dynamic world of blogs. BlogPulse is brought to you by Intelliseek.

BlogPulse.com is a search engine that searches blogs, provides analysis tools, tracks trends and has a bunch of cool new tools. Check through what they have to offer.

From Bruce Schneier’s Crypto-Gram newsletter comes a link to Passwords revealed by sweet deal – BBC/ 20 April 2004.

More than 70% of people would reveal their computer password in exchange for a bar of chocolate, a survey has found.

It also showed that 34% of respondents volunteered their password when asked without even needing to be bribed.

[...]

Landsakes.

The Gray Zone – by Seymour M. Hersh

subtitle: How a secret Pentagon program came to Abu Ghraib.

The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. Rumsfeld’s decision embittered the American intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of élite combat units, and hurt America’s prospects in the war on terror.

According to interviews with several past and present American intelligence officials, the Pentagon’s operation, known inside the intelligence community by several code words, including Copper Green, encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq. A senior C.I.A. official, in confirming the details of this account last week, said that the operation stemmed from Rumsfeld’s long-standing desire to wrest control of America’s clandestine and paramilitary operations from the C.I.A.

… and the article continues.

Oh, my. Check this out: ThinkGeek :: LED Binary Watch

Ah, maybe that’s the problem. According to GET ORGANIZED NOW! — KNOW YOUR LIMITS. Some people are at their best when they work in long, marathon sessions. Others can only work for 15 minutes at a time. Determine your limits and set your organizing schedule within that timeframe.

Setting things aside for the Goodwill saps my strength. I can’t go on and on and on. His nibs gets a head of steam and can’t stop. After a couple hours of sorting through things, I’m ready to crash and he’s just getting started. Yesterday afternoon (Sunday) I left him down on the patio sorting out our latest piles into boxes and bags for the Goodwill while I had a beer (dark San Miguel) and a break. Later, after dinner, we continued with the sort. By bedtime we had four large boxes ready to go to the Goodwill today with another box almost full.

Slowly. Surely. Bust off those barnacles.

Friday we headed up to Hill even though we should’ve stayed at Dale and continued sorting through stuff. The Spring Fling is three weeks from last Friday and we need to get everything stashed away and the place cleaned up before the day.

But we also needed to check out Hill. Our burglar alarm had gone off at Hill Friday morning. Luckily, after e-mail and phonecalls with our neighbors and Bay Alarm, our neighbors let themselves in and turned the alarm off. Why did the alarm go off? A mystery … but we have our suspicions. We headed up after his nibs got home from work to check through and make sure that everything was fine.

Headed down the Steps to the Ferry Building, intending to eat at Slanted Door (it being almost 9P and far too late to get to Palio d’Asti before it closed), but Slanted Door was packed and people were spilling out onto the piers. I was willing to wait for a table, maybe stop over and browse at Book Passage if they were open, but Slanted Door staff wouldn’t even put us on a waiting list for a table. (“We have so many people waiting for tables as it is that we don’t know if we’ll get them all seated tonight.”)

Now where? We headed, as usual, over toward Belden Place, which is such a nice little collection of good restaurants that you really can’t miss getting a good dinner no matter where you eat. As we walked across Justin Herman Plaza, though, we changed direction. Why not Boulevard? We hadn’t eaten there in years.

Boulevard

1 Mission St

415.543.6084

Boulevard too was rocking. Must’ve been something about being out looking for dinner at 9P on Friday night. We could either wait for a table or eat at a table for two in the bar area. Bar table it was.

For dinner I had boneless quail stuffed with short rib meat, spinach, mushrooms &c., settled on a bed of a yummy risotto-like starch. The quail was rolled like a chicken kiev around the beef and spinach and sliced on a slant. His nibs had rack of lamb. Our starters (we swapped plates half-way through) were foie chaud with grilled partly-ripe apricots and toasty brioche and sweetbreads with smoky pork/bacon chunks and frisee’d vegetables, including artichoke hearts. All the food was tasty, but the bill with wine was $$$++ and that was just for two hors d’oeuvres and two entrees and wine — no dessert, no coffee.

The total price was on par with what we’d spent at Rubicon last week, where we’d had dessert and malmsey in addition to hors d’oeuvres, entrees and wine. The dishes were tastier at Rubicon as well. We’ll return to Rubicon and take a pass on another dinner at Boulevard unless we have friends who want to go. There are just far too many good restaurants in San Francisco to spend time and money returning to restaurants that don’t knock your socks off. If price were no object, I’d still choose Rubicon over Boulevard, but given that the Boulevard was so pricey? No question.

Which restaurants are currently on my “didn’t sufficiently knock my socks off for the price”? Boulevard, Gary Danko and 500 Jackson are three that pop immediately to mind. The restaurants are worth going to to see what all the buzz is about, but for me aren’t worth going back to, not when I haven’t checked out Fifth Floor since Laurent Gras took over and haven’t dropped by Lüx, Luke Sung’s new place on Chestnut. We’re planning to walk over for dinner at Isa some time this week and will poke our nose in at Lüx to see what Luke and Kitty have created there.

[see update below]

Saturday we walked over to the Art Store at Bush and Van Ness to pickup a matted frame for a Colin De Guere piece we’d bought years back and never properly framed. Sure there are frame places closer to home, but the Art Store was having their white sale (all blank canvases HALF OFF!) and their selection of papers and papyrus is drool-worthy. I lusted after some of the papers with embedded leaves and seeds, lusted after different papyrus pieces and after the 48×60″ (or was it 60″x72″?) stretched/cross-barred canvases.

Ah, well.

We decided we needed to eat as we were heading home about 1P, carrying our frame and a quad journal I couldn’t resist. If we waited to get back to North Beach for lunch, we would’ve spoiled our appetite for dinner. Heaven forefend!

I’d been thinking maybe Hyde Street Bistro or Hyde Street Grill — neither of which we’d been to, although we’d shared a HSG crab cake sandwich at the Farmers’ Market last weekend. As we were walking up Polk and peering in shop windows, we walked by Crustacean and his nibs said, “We really need to try that some time.”

Why not now? I asked. We’d never eaten there, although we’d talked about it several times — Crustacean has the reputation of being the birthplace of fusion cuisine when it opened back twelve years or so ago.

Crustacean

1475 Polk Street

415.776.2722

What a wonderful, if pricey, lunch we had. The setting and design are beautiful. Our service was excellent. The third floor view overlooking Polk and California is not the attraction, the food is.

A note by the front desk outlines the dress code: no t-shirts with slogans, no sweatsuits. Simple stuff. No hassle about lack of ties or whatever, but the An family doesn’t want folks in sweaty, torn sweatsuits coming by for a meal. Can’t say I blame them. Luckily, I was wearing a long-sleeved shirt over my misc.writing (“a marginal newsgroup”) t-shirt and I quickly buttoned it up so my slogan’d t-shirt didn’t show.

Our server delivered the lunch menu along with the dinner menu and a wine list. He told us we could order from either or both and we had a choice of small plates, large plates or “secret kitchen specialties.” The dinner menu had more selections and prices for dishes were the same no matter which menu you ordered from.

As long as it’s crab season, we decided to take advantage.

I ordered the Asian crab cake, which came with a mixed green salad with a very light strawberry vinaigrette, grilled vegetables and some wonderful grilled Japanese eggplant with an added flavor element. Five spice maybe? The crab cake was slightly spicy — Dungeness crab meat, pork and what looked like sweet red peppers. The cake was over three inches in diameter and an inch thick.

His nibs ordered the specialty of the house, a whole roasted Dungeness crab, cooked in garlic butter and spices. The crab was enormous. He was full long before he was done and I took the opportunity to snitch cleaned crab meat off his plate, after I’d finished with my crab cake. (I did give him a taste of my crab cake and the eggplant in exchange.)

We had a bottle of Groth Sauvignon Blanc with lunch. Both dishes were exceptional. The wine was a great match.

For dessert we shared fried bananas and vanilla ice cream. The bananas were battered and fried and HOT. The vanilla ice cream was a perfect accompaniment. I followed with a cup of great coffee.

Another specialty of the house, which I wished I had tried, was An’s garlic noodles, egg noodles infused with “An’s famous garlic sauce.” A young couple eating next to the window shared a roasted crab and each had a bowl of the garlic noodles. That combo might just be the perfect lunch.

We will return to Crustacean even though lunch with a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc totaled $100 mas o menos. Not cheap, but heaven.

Tel-Hi

We’d held back and just had one entree each and a split dessert at lunch because we were booked for the Tel-Hi fundraiser starting at 6:30P. As we walked down the hill with friends to the Tel-Hi Neighborhood Center for the annual dinner, we were disappointed to hear that the week in Abaco had been pulled from the auction — not that we could’ve afforded it anyway.

The two high-bid items of the evening were a private cooking class and meal from Mary Risley’s Tante Marie for ten and a sleepover for 25 on the submarine USS Pampanito. For both items, the next highest bidder was encouraged to up his bid to match the bid of the highest bidder and two events were scheduled. Generous donors.

We picked up a $100 gift certificate for the House at the silent auction at more or less face value — some gift certificates went for far beyond their nominal face value. We’ve eaten at the House twice now and plan to return again and again until we’ve explored their entire menu.

Our friends won the silent auction for the El Raigon gift certificate for dinner and wine. We’d bid on other items, including a selection of dessert wines and a chocolate truffle experience for ten at XOX Truffles, but were outbid, alas. Winning bid was something like $190.

Other auction lots included a dream Giants evening with signed memorabilia, VIP box and more (donated by the Giants and Jack Bair), pool and beer with Aaron Peskin (our local supe), wine, clothes, jewelry, art. Here’s hoping the auctions (silent and live) were a huge success.

Sunday, we skipped the Sunday afternoon Open Houses and headed back to Dale around lunch time to sort through crockery and cutlery and pie plates for the rest of the weekend.

update: Popped by to take a gander at Lüx to see what Luke and Kitty had and discovered that all the news was old. Lüx wasn’t operating yet and (after a peek through the gaps in the window coverings), looks like it’ll be at least next month before it opens.

Word at Isa was that Luke is less concerned with how quickly the kitchen goes in and the tables are set than with finding top-notch staff for the restaurant.

All good things come with time.

Our fave SF Realtor sent us an invite to an event last Friday night, a wine and hors d’oeuvres blast from 6P – 8P at the San Francisco Decorator Showcase at the former home of the British consul general on Pacific Avenue, between Pierce and Steiner. The event was sponsored by Coldwell Banker and the place was awash with Realtors and their friends and clients. The home was fantastic — 11,000 square feet, a wonderful courtyard, renovated kitchen, some memorable rooms and terrific nibbles and noshes. Like our friend Beth, CB only served white wine — wouldn’t want red stains on the carpets.

After our two-hour whirl was over, we drove home and powdered our noses before heading out to hunt down and kill a dinner, intending to eat at Palio d’Asti on Sacramento. Earlier Friday, I’d exchanged e-mails with Daniel Scherotter, the executive chef there, about his reasoned comments re foie that I’d wandered across earlier that day. e.g.

14. Poorly Written Legislation: SB 1520 is too general and too vague to cause anything other than problems. Burton’s Bill outlaws ‘force feeding’ defined as

It ignores the fact that all animals raised for domestic consumption are fed more than they would ever be able to get in the wild because they are not wild animals, would never survive in the wild and bare only distant genetic relationships to their smaller wild cousins. Cows wouldn’t normally eat corn or grain, for instance, they’d eat grass. There are no wild cows. Corn, or grain, makes them bulk up faster so they can get to market. Centuries of breeding have produced animals that would never survive in the wilderness but do sell. They are only raised (fed and kept alive) for food because tough, lean, scrawny, wild animals that don’t taste as good don’t sell either.

I figured it was time for karma and if some folks were boycotting restaurants and trashing restaurateurs because they served foie, I could make it a point to support folks like Scherotter.

Scherotter was fine with that, “I’m here Mon-Friday and always have some foie around for those who choose to eat it.”

So, on an impulse we headed down. We got there about nine, but the restaurant had been having a slow night and, we were told, they’d decided to send the kitchen home early. Next time, we were told, give a call before you head over and we’ll make sure we’re still serving.

We headed down to maybe eat at one of the places on Belden Place, but on our way there we walked past Rubicon. Hey. We’d never eaten at Rubicon. Let’s stop in.

Rubicon

558 Sacramento Street

(415)434-4100

We ordered. His nibs chose a wine from their extensive (and expensive) wine list.

His nibs had the warm capaccio of scallops with Dungeness crab, sea urchin and tarragon as an appetizer, while I had the hot & cold foie gras with poached pear, aged balsamic and roasted salsify. I had some concerns that there might be too many flavors and the foie would be overwhelmed, but Yow. Both appetizers were excellent.

His nibs had the applewood-smoked duck with glazed foie, maitake mushrooms, curried lentils, &c. I had the “tagliata” of dry aged striploin with trumpet mushrooms, arugula jus. Again, both dishes were delish. Not often one gets to eat somewhere where every dish ordered comes through with blue ribbons flying.

Dessert was Bleu de Basque and a poached pear with balsamic ice cream and toasted walnuts for him, a glass of malmsey (and a spoon so I could snatch tastes of his dessert) for me. His dessert was wonderful. The balsamic ice cream, which sounded like a strange thing, was absolutely amazing. The whole dinner was fantastic.

Next time we go, I’ll be sure it’s not after I’ve spent a couple hours noshing on crab puffs so I’ll have more room for the delicious food. Prices are $$$.

This Wednesday in the Merc, Carolyn Jung had an article (registration required) about Rubicon. Seems the folks making the delicious food and dessert are a couple who just took over the reins last month. Stuart Brioza was named one of the 10 Best New Chefs in America by Food & Wine magazine last year. Nicole Krasinski is the pastry chef and in charge of the delicious desserts. They are quite a dynamite duo.

Here’s a cool use of Flash.

WARNING! WARNING! WARNING!

Have I ever mentioned that I needed to take Dramamine® (dimenhydrinate) before any labs that involved intense microscope use because I’d get motion sick without it?

I betcha this site could make me motion sick even with Dramamine®.