Round-Up: Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Chart: Sweet graphic showing how movie sequels are worse than originals, and trilogies get even worse.

Cook: Chicken Mango Slaw for warm summer nights

Bake: The Difference Between Corn Syrup and High Fructose Corn Syrup.

List: Angeleno Magazine's 8th Annual Restaurant Award Winners:

Restaurant of the Year: Hatfield’s

Chef of the Year: Michael Cimarusti, Providence

- Runner-up, Chef of the Year: Ludovic Lefebvre, LudoBites

Best New Chef: Michael Voltaggio, The Dining Room at The Langham

Pastry Chef of the Year: Zoe Nathan, Huckleberry Cafe, Rustic Canyon

- Runner-up, Pastry Chef of the Year: Roxana Jullapat, Ammo 

- Runner-up, Pastry Chef of the Year: Jun Tan, Cube

Best New Restaurant: Lazy Ox Canteen

- Runner-up, Best New Restaurant: Bistro LQ

LA's Top 10 new restaurants

No. 3: Wolfgang Puck's WP24

No. 4: Culina at Four Seasons 

No 5: La Cachette Bistro

No. 6: House Cafe

No. 7: South Beverly Grill

No. 8: Waterloo & City

No. 9: Bouchon

No. 10: Red O

Event: Outdoor Cinema Food Fest in LA

Did You Know: In N Out Double Double has 43 grams of fat? See the list of 50 Unhealthy Foods in 50 States.

Watch: Clips of the "The 10 Funniest Movies Scenes From The Last 10 Years." I've seen all ten of these movies, so they obviously didn't dig very deep.

Watch: Supreme Court Nominee Elena Kagan Showing Her Sense of Humor during the Confirmation Hearings

Round-Up: Monday, June 28, 2010

Serious Eater: I'm often called a foodie, but no one really likes that name. The term "gourmand" isn't going to make a comeback anytime soon. I'm still a fan of the term "serious eater," which is how I would classify myself if I had to come up with an explanation beyond "I spend way too much time and energy thinking about food"

Definition by French chef Fernand Point in 1949 in The New Yorker:

My friends were "serious eaters"; they loved truly good food and scorned the snobbism of self-appointed "gourmets" and one-dish amateur cooks. They didn't consider themselves gourmets, but they would confide to each other, with the air of brokers divulging something hot in the market, the addresses of good restaurants.

Watch: Are You Sure You Want an iPhone?


Photos: Get a sense of what's going on in the streets during the G20 Summit in Toronto, Canada:

Travel: Vegas is overrated, but this makes me want to make a trip:

Watch: Hilarious Meltdown in Toronto


Watch: Fluffy McCloud - Something Cute as a Change of Pace

Round-Up: Friday, June 25, 2010

Good Point: Woven reusable bags are an environmentally friendly approach to shopping, but an estimated 97% of users are rarely or never washing them, leading to "whopping amounts" of bacteria, including E. Coli. [AOL News]

Laugh: Twitter Round-Up

@ConanOBrien 11 years between “Toy Story’s” and 7 months between “Twilight’s.” By that measure, the “Jonah Hex” sequel should be out in 3 days.

@michaelianblack Today’s headline: North Korea out of World Cup. Tomorrow’s headline: North Korean Soccer Team Dead.

@boburnham miley cyrus, your dance moves pale in comparison to the moves of the dead feminists rolling in their graves.

@azizansari No idea why carne asada is trending on Twitter in LA, but if BP fucked up carne asada some how, I’m gonna be fucking PISSED

Watch: Pinberry the Musical in 3D

Round-Up: Thursday, June 24, 2010

Don't Eat: Looks like my Subway days are over (I'd have it every couple months in a pinch. I prefer making my own sandwiches anyways).

Drink: The World Cup What to Drink: While Watching the World Cup

Swim: Who wants to swim with me 55 stories over the city of Singapore?

Round-Up: Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Don't Eat: Arizona restaurant serving lion meat burgers. "Cameron Selogie says his Il Vinaio restaurant in Mesa has received a bomb threat and more than 150 e-mails from protesters. He says African lions are on the protected list, but not endangered." Ohhh.... they are only on the protected list, not the endangered list. In that case, can I get fries with that? Ridiculous. 


List: Best Indie Albums: 1970s-2000s

Learn from Others' Mistakes: Three Lessons from the McChrystal Controversy:

1. Know who you are talking to. Reporters have track records. A good public affairs officer will know that record and provide you with articles with highlighted quotes. 

2. Establish ground rules. If you have an embedded reporter, you need to say something like, anything you hear inside my tent is off the record until you check it with us. This goes triple for any event involving alcohol.

3. Reporters doing one-off profiles for magazines such as Rolling Stone and Esquire have less invested in a continuing relationship than do beat reporters covering the war for newspapers and newsmagazines. That doesn't mean you should avoid one-off reporters, but it does mean that they have no incentive to establish and maintain a relationship of trust over weeks and months of articles.

Don't Eat:  Friendly's Ultimate Grilled Cheese Burger Melt. That doesn't even look appetizing

Laugh: 

Round-Up: Monday, June 21, 2010

Read: Modern Library's Top 100 Novels, plus readers' picks.

What?: Medical Marijuana lollipops were for sale along the Laker parade route today.

Anticipate: I'm digging this poster for the upcoming Facebook movie. I'm mostly excited about the film because the screenplay was written by one of my favorite writers Aaron Sorkin (West Wing, Sports Night, A Few Good Men, Charlie Wilson's War, The American President, etc...).

Don't Eat: Rainbow Bacon: Gross or delicious? I'm going with gross & unnecessary.

Watch: Awesome mash-up of scenes from Kubrick & Scorsese films


Watch: See How Much Salt Savoy Restaurant Uses on their Duck

HOLY SALT! How Savoy Restaurant Salt Bakes Local Duck for Flavor from SkeeterNYC on Vimeo.

Round-Up: Thursday, June 17, 2010

Movies: Anyone looking forward to Toy Story 3? From the reviews I've read, it's well-done, but lacks heart. Heart is what made me like the first two so much. So I'm split. Wait for DVD maybe?

So True: Great list of 10 Restaurant Concepts that Don't Mean Anything Anymore. Examples: Gastropub, Farm to Table, Upscale Comfort Food, etc...
Watch: BP Spills Coffee


Web Comic: What It's Like to be an Apple product owner. Plus Cupidtino: a dating site for Apple lovers.

Design: Pretty cool idea. A French press travel mug.

What?: "Wonderful fake trend alert: Ethnic Frensing: the removal of all people of a certain group from your Facebook, etc." (Via)



Sleep: My coworker Tracey informed me that our company is seriously missing out by not having these sleep pods that Google HQs has. Would you want to take a nap in these at work?

Round-Up: Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Recipe: 10 Reasons to Eat Salad for Dinner Once a Week, plus an Inauthentic Asian Salad recipe

Recipe: Speaking of recipes, here is a recipe for Squid with Swiss Chard that I cooked last night. I had never cooked squid before, but after seeing it at Liborio (a great hispanic market downtown), I decided to give a shot with a modified version of this recipe that I had saved away.

Some fun:

Round-Up: Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Laugh: Best Soccer .gifs. These are excellent.

Local News: CA Gubernatorial Republican nominee Meg Whitman has written another $20-million check to her campaign -- bringing her personal contribution total to $91 million.

News: Do you think the recent announcement that Afghanistan has an estimated trillion dollars worth of untapped minerals will be a boon to the country or a curse? The Economist has this to say:

"It seems to me that the best Afghanistan can hope for is to become Saudi Arabia or Kazakhstan. The worst that could happen is that it becomes Congo. Given its ethnic, security, and human-development-index profile, the Congo scenario looks more likely. The wild card, of course, is this:

American officials fear resource-hungry China will try to dominate the development of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth, which could upset the United States, given its heavy investment in the region. After winning the bid for its Aynak copper mine in Logar Province, China clearly wants more, American officials said."

 UCLA Professor Mark Kleiman's take:

"Mineral wealth is a blessing to rich, well-governed countries. To poor, ill-governed countries, it’s a curse, reinforcing the culture of corruption. Worst of all is mineral wealth in the midst of civil war: it can both finance and motivate insurgency. So the claimed discovery of a trillion dollars’ worth of minerals in Afghanistan is the opposite of good news. What puzzles me is who in the U.S. government thought it advantageous to get this story out now, and why."

List: 10 Ways to Support the War Effort. These include: Send letters and packages to deployed service members and units, don't do drugs, ask Congress to pass a real and meaningful national service act, etc... The most interesting one is:

"Ask Congress to pass a 'War or Patriot Tax' à la Thomas Friedman. When people feel the financial pinch of the war they will connect with the war effort. More importantly, they will be helping to attack the financial infrastructure of our worst enemies by stimulating alternative energy development and dropping demand."

News: Check out this sweet interactive graphic of how much money members of Congress have invested in areas they regulate. 

Round-Up: Monday, June 14, 2010

Did You Know: North Korea

1. North Korea has the world's fourth-largest standing army (1.1 million)
2. 2012 will mark the 100th anniversary of the birth Kim Jong Il's father, the revered Kim Il Sung
3. Kim Jong Il will officially be 70 in 2012
4. North Korea’s GDP per head is about 6% that of South Korea’s
5. The South Korean central bank has put the cost of reunification of the two countries as high as $900 billion over four decades
6. Following the evidence that a North Korean submarine fired a torpedo that sank a South Korean warship, the Cheonan, on March 26th with the loss of 46 sailors’ lives, South Korea has responded by shutting off the South’s sea lanes to North Korean ships, halting much of the $1.7 billion in inter-Korean trade and reintroducing propaganda broadcasts hurled at the north
7. Famine led to the deaths of some 1m people, or nearly 5% of the population, in the 1990s
8. Some missionaries, even American ones, are allowed in and out of the country, provided they do not evangelise.

Source: The Economist

Consider: Steven Levitt of "Freakonomics" fame shares similar views as me about health care reform challenges:

"A reasonable health care reform would shift the incentives so that when I go and get expensive health care, I pay enough of the costs to get me to think twice about whether the benefits outweigh the costs. It makes sense to have catastrophic coverage. That's the idea behind insurance: When someone is unlucky, you don't want that to ruin their life financially. But we as a society often will spend vast sums at the end of a life trying to keep someone alive for an extra month. It's not something society likes to talk about, but I think people should face a tradeoff: Do I want my mother to live another week, or do I want to have enough money to send my kids to college?"

Watch: A video postcard from one man's visit to Shanghai. The second half does a good job of showing some street food I enjoyed while I was there.

Watch: Only have a minute? Then check out this video of Shanghai in one minute


Watch: The Care Bears are Back, and They Aren't Taking any Prisoners

Round-Up: Thursday, June 10, 2010

I'm back from China. I'll try to blog about it in the coming weeks.

Watch: This Video Makes Me Miss Venice





Listen: Japandroids - "Younger Us"

Consider: I first started thinking more seriously about urban renewal at the World Expo in Shanghai, courtesy of a ridiculous video at the USA pavilion. Despite a lot of "WTF?" moments, it was fairly inspiring. These pictures of urban renewal by Dutch artists in Brazil keeps the idea burning in my mind and heart.

Watch: Beck and Friends Cover "New Sensation" by INXS