Restaurant critic and poet, too

What’s a guy to do when he has a negative experience at a local establishment, and he wants to vent, but there’s already been too much negativity for one week?

I’ve decided to go the therapeutic route and express myself in a poem:

Read Ode to Relish.

Stuff about Stuff

Speculation is that new iPods will be introduced next Wednesday so don’t go out and buy one this weekend. People are guessing they’ll have full-size screens like the iPhone.

Though we are less certain of the specifications for the new sixth generation iPod, it may closely resemble the iPhone (without calling features). Specifically, we expect the sixth gen iPod to be a widescreen device with multitouch technology. It may also have Wi-Fi capability and the capacity could be as high as 160GB.

AllThingsD

Test Your Internet Speed. The test said my download speed was 6.03 Mbps and my upload speed 2.08 Mbps.

Four Hands Guitar.

All-Time Great College Football Quotes. Example: “Football is not a contact sport-it is a collision sport. Dancing is a contact sport.” — Duffy Daugherty, Michigan State.

The HubbleSite has a nice feature about Tonight’s sky. It’s a short film each month on what to look for among the constellations, deep sky objects, planets, and events. And I learned about the Teapot.

Knowing their script

Just go read the top half of the Daily Howler today on how the media speculates that people have illegally given campaign donations, then speculates that the candidate knew, then speculates that this will bring her down.

Holy we-just-make-this-crap-up Batman!

Been Readin’

NewMexiKen finally got around to finishing Hampton Sides’s Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West last night. I had started it when it first came out last year, but set it aside about a 100 pages in and just got back to it.

Despite that personal experience with it, I do recommend this book. As Pulitizer Prize-winning novelist M. Scott Momaday wrote in his review:

“Blood and Thunder” is a full-blown history, and Sides does every part of it justice. Five years ago he set out to write a book on the removal of the Navajos from Canyon de Chelly and their Long Walk to the Bosque Redondo, hundreds of miles from their homeland, where they were held as prisoners of war. But in the course of his research a much larger story unfolded, the story of the opening of the West, from the heyday of the mountain men in the early 1800’s to the clash of three cultures, as the newcomers from the East encountered the ancient Puebloans and the established Hispanic communities in what is now New Mexico, to the Civil War in the West and its aftermath — and all of it is full of blood and thunder, the realities and the caricatures of conquest. By telling this story, Sides fills a conspicuous void in the history of the American West.

It is a fascinating and important story well told. Surely anyone with any abiding interest in New Mexico and Arizona history should read it. I must say, however, that I found the episodic mixed chronology in the first third of the book terribly annoying. And Sides does let some anachronism float into his text — I don’t think Matthew Brady used flash bulbs, for example — and some lapses of fact. It’s not, in other words, a dry encyclopedic narrative. He tells a good story fervently and fairly.

The book I began before I was interrupted by my interest in Kit Carson — and will take up again today — is Craig Childs’s House of Rain: Tracking a Vanished Civilization Across the American Southwest. Childs, who grew up and lives in the southwest, takes a personal look at the Anasazi (or Ancestral Puebloan) ruins across the Four Corners area (Chaco, Aztec, Mesa Verde) as well as southeast Arizona and Mexico, and speculates about the people who lived there 700-1000 years ago and what happened to them and their magnificent cultures.

August 29th

Seven-time Oscar nominee for best actress, Ingrid Bergman was born on this date in 1915. She won the award three times: Gaslight, Anastasia, Murder on the Orient Express. No, she was not nominated for Casablanca. Ms. Bergman’s last role was as Golda Meir in 1982. She died that same year on her birthday, August 29.

Charlie Parker was born on this date in 1920.

Charlie Parker was one of the most influential improvising soloists in jazz, and a central figure in the development of bop in the 1940s. A legendary figure in his own lifetime, he was idolized by those who worked with him, and he inspired a generation of jazz performers and composers.

PBS - JAZZ A Film By Ken Burns

Parker died in 1955.

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Ruth Jones was born on this date in 1924.

Dinah Washington skirted the boundaries of blues, jazz and popular music, becoming the most popular black female recording artist of the ’50s.

She changed her name from Ruth Jones upon joining jazz vibraphonist Lionel Hampton’s band in 1943. After leaving Hampton in 1946, she began her own recording career, leading to Top 10 R&B hits in “Baby Get Lost” (No. 1, 1949), “Trouble in Mind” (No. 4, 1952), “What a Diff’rence a Day Makes” (No. 4 R&B, No. 8 pop, 1959), and “This Bitter Earth” (No. 1 R&B, No. 24 pop, 1960).

In 1960, Washington also sang two No. 1 R&B duets with Brook Benton, “Baby (You’ve Got What It Takes)” (No. 5 pop) and “A Rockin’ Good Way” (No. 7 pop).

Washington died in 1963 after mixing alcohol and pills.

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum

Sir Richard Attenborough is 84 today. Attenborough won Oscars for best director and best picture for Gandhi. He’s acted in several dozen films, most notably as Roger Bartlett in The Great Escape and Mr. Hammond in the Jurassic Park films.

Two-time Oscar nominee for director, William Friedkin is 72 today. He won for The French Connection; he was nominated for The Exorcist.

Senator John McCain is 71 today.

Oscar nominee Elliott Gould is 69 today. He was nominated for a supporting role in Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice.

Today is the birthday of Michael Jackson. He’s 49. Jackson was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2001.

Actress Rebecca DeMornay is 48. That was her opposite Tom Cruise in Risky Business and most famously as the twisted nanny in The Hand That Rocks the Cradle.