Ultranormal

Category: entertainment

  • Easy Meatballs for Fun and Profit

    I made meatballs tonight. I made them once before and made way too big a deal out of them. They’re frightfully easy to make (shhh, don’t tell anyone), and will impress your spouse, date, friends, boss, or whoever you have to cook for. Here’s my quick and easy recipe that leaves lots and lots of room for substitutions, replacements and deletions. There are only a couple required elements: ground meat of some kind (sausage, ground beef, veal or turkey or some combination thereof), an egg, and some fairly dry shredded cheese (parmesan, dry mozzarella, etc).

    The Directions:

    1. In a mixing bowl, add one egg, garlic to taste (1/4 teaspoon to start), a healthy dash of pepper and two shakes of salt. Whisk until egg is scrambled, but good.

    2. Now, I have a food processor, and like throwing a little veggie matter in my meatballs. For example, tonight I took some mushroom pieces and half a vidalia onion and threw them in the food processor until they were in itty bitty chunks, and then added them to the bowl. I’ve tried green peppers, but their high water content kinda screwed up the consistency o’ de balls. Play around and see what you see. If you come up with something really good, let me know.

    3. Now, add about a pound of your ground meat to the bowl, along with a handful of your cheese (tonight it was the four-cheese Italian blend from the grocery store. Last time, I did a nice mix of freshly grated parmesan and pecorino. Fancy, boring, it’s up to you.

    4. Before you mix everything up (which is coming, don’t worry), throw a large skillet on the stove and turn the fire on somewhere between medium and medium high. Dump a couple tablespoons of olive oil in the pan and let it heat up (this isn’t an exact science… should be enough to put a thin coating on the bottom of the skillet).

    5. While the pan is heating up wash your hands, then go over to your bowl o’ stuff and dig in. Mix up everything so it’s of pretty even consistency throughout and everything’s mixed in nicely.

    6. Next, take your bowl of mess over to the stove. It’s time to make meatballs!! My meatballs usually end up about the size of ping-pong balls, but hey, your balls may be larger or smaller. It’s really up to you.

    7. Fill the skillet with your balls, and let them brown almost completely on the side you put them on. Be sure to flip them over a few times to get each side of your eventually slightly lop-sided pyramids cooked. It usually takes about 15 minutes (five minutes between flippings) to finish the whole pan.

    Meatballs freeze really well but we usually make just enough for one meal. After they’re cooked all the way through and we’ve sampled one or two, we dump in our favorite tomato-based sauce (Jen makes a great one), let it simmer while the pasta cooks and then fall into a meatball-induced stupor. For something so easy to make, they’re heavenly. If you’ve got any meatball-related suggestions, I’d love to hear ’em.

  • Another Confession… Big Brother

    It’s a day of confessions. Here’s confession number two. I love Big Brother. I haven’t watched Survivor since season 2. I don’t normally like network TV reality shows. There is just something about Big Brother that makes me watch. It’s so evil, and like the MTV series The Real World and Road Rules, is an interesting look into the collision of the private and public persona. I know I’m putting way too thought into this, but I can’t help it. It’s great fun watching people try to play each other.

    The losers are those people who aren’t honest with themselves. It doesn’t matter if they’re dishonest with other people. If they’re honest with themselves, they can handle the game and the pressure. If they can’t handle themselves, they lose.

    The other great morality lesson from these shows is gossip. Everything you say in these cramped quarters could come back to haunt you. Every catty thing you say behind someone’s back is overheard by someone else, and will eventually make it back. It’s funny to see that season after season, people get caught doing it, and are shocked when things they say come back to doom their chances of winning anything.

    It’s not too late to jump in! It’s only day three! Join in my guilty pleasure! It’s not bad, it’s just silly.

  • Lemon Jelly Est Fantastique!

    New music Friday!! I should have written about this instead of my Java vs. Tcl conflicts, but hey, I’m tired, have a headache and am hungry as hell, so forgive me – please. I went a little nuts on Amazon last week and bought a bunch of new music. The first batch arrived last night, and after listening to it all day, here are my impressions of these two albums by Lemon Jelly. Where did I hear them? Why, JazzMusique, of course. Usually, I don’t check the track names of the songs as they play, but last week, three songs really caught my attention during the day, and they all happened to be by the same group. So, I bought ’em. Here’s what I think of the albums:

    • Lemon Jelly.ky: This is a collection of three EPs the group (two guys) put out. What’s weird about knowing it’s a collection is that the songs all flow together really well. It feels more like a concept album than a compilation. What do they sound like? They’re a little like Groove Armada if you replace the vocals on Groove Armada‘s stuff with funny spoken word samples and add some more horns. It’s trippy, groovy lounge music that’s not at all boring. It has some pep to it, which is a nice change from some lounge music that makes you want to nap. I have no idea why, but it makes me think of late spring sun showers. It’s raining, but the sun’s out and I’m happy that it’s raining. Yeah, I know, must be the allergy pills talking.

    • Lost Horizons: A complete album, and you can tell. While there may not be an overarching theme (not that I can find anyway), there are riffs that show up in the background, and some of the voice samples are probably from the same source (sounds like the same guy anyway). This is great coding music. It’s interesting enough to keep you focused, but not overpowering enough to distract. There are an insane amount of layers to the songs. You can hook into the bass line, the drums, the samples, or the other instruments hidden under the covers. It’s perfect headphone music. Spacewalk and Ramblin’ Man are breathtaking in the sheer beauty of the songs and the layers of complimentary sound they pack into them. If you’re going to buy just one, get this one.

    The one downside to both albums is the packaging. While both CD’s come in fantastic looking cases, they’re completely unusable. It’s hard to get the CD’s out, hard to put them back in, etc. Thankfully, I’m burning backup copies so I can put the CD’s away in the “vault”. I should get the other CD’s from the splurge this weekend, so expect reviews of them next week.

  • The Animatrix

    I watched The Animatrix this weekend. Since a lot of the people who come to my site from Google are searching for commercial music (ie: that song from the levi’s french dictionary ad). I’ll do the same for The Animatrix before I give you a review. The song that plays over the main DVD menu, and is used in a couple of the shorts is called Supermoves and is on the Snatch soundtrack (among other places). The song from The Kid’s Story and that plays during the closing credits is called Who Am I by Peace Orchestra. It’s on the Memento soundtrack, and the Peace Orchestra album.

    On to the shorts. First, I was blown away by the quality of animation in each of them. They’re all a little different, but all gorgeous in their own way. The first was done by the team who did the Final Fantasy movie, and was just amazing to look at. The characters were more refined, and the muscles more accurate than in The Spirits Within (although they used some of the same character models, it’s hard to tell – or at least you get past is quickly). The second two, The Second Renaissance Parts 1 & 2) were absolutely stunning. The rest of them are worth watching for the visuals alone, but my favorite has got to be Beyond. It’s the story of a group of kids who find a glitchy spot in the Matrix in an old abandoned house. Things are wonky in the house, and it’s way too much fun to watch the kids play with conventions like bullet time we saw in the movie. The have a falling contest and stop inches from the ground after jumping off a second story window ledge and others. It was the best play on the physics set up in the movies on the disc.

    Overall, it’s fun to watch. The shorts aren’t long enough that you get bored with the story or animation style. And while there are a couple duds on the disk (World Record being the worst), the great and good stuff on the disk more than make up for it.

  • The Wire – Season Two – Watch It!

    A great article on teevee on what’s great about The Wire. I agree 100%. It’s an amazing show. It’s everything Homicide was in its heyday (the Luther Mahoney era) and more. The way Jimmy stuck it to Rawles this week was the funniest, most evil thing I’ve ever seen on TV and I could not stop laughing. If you like TV that doesn’t tell you what to think, or need everything spelled out for you to enjoy a show – watch it. You won’t regret it.

  • Miller’s Crossing

    I watched Miller’s Crossing last night. A couple thoughts:

    • The Coen’s have a great feel for language and dialect. The movie is full of great old sayings like “What’s the rumpus?” and “Givin’ me the high hat” that will probably slip into my vocabulary now.

    • Jon Polito can chew up the scenery. I have an affinity for character actors, and apparently, so do the Coen’s. Jon Polito is one of my favorites. He’s just great in this movie (he’s got the “high hat” line and you can tell he loves it).

    • I saw this movie once about six or seven years ago and back then I didn’t catch on that Bernie, Mink and Eddie the Dane were gay. How did I miss that? (Ok, I can tell you why – I was naive)

    • John Turturro is an amazing actor. He pulled off Bernie so elegantly devoid of morals, and subtly adrogynous. It was an amazing performance.

    • Albert Finney with that tommy gun and cigar is the coolest old tough guy scene ever.

    Oh, and I wish my headache would go away. And, the big thing I miss about using my Mac? I miss Shift+Insert to paste. I really really do. Oh, and did you know you can style lists with a little CSS? I’ve been doing it for years. It’s great amounts of fun, really. Try it. You’ll like it.

  • In Other Words, Fly

    as the radio man says it is 5 a.m. and the sun has charred
    \
    the other end of the world and come back to us
    \
    and painted the smoke over our heads an imperial violet

    Soul Coughing: Screenwriter’s Blues

    I’m not often touched by song lyrics. But Screenwriter’s Blues is a weird mix of thumping stand-up bass and beat poetry that forces me to listen. The section above just resonates in my skull. How gorgeous are those three lines?

  • Nagoya

    Because it was someone else’s birthday, I got to pick where we went to lunch today. No, really. Apparently, I picked good places for lunch, so I was given the responsibility of choosing where we are lunch. Because I’d heard good things about it from the little girls at church, I decided to try Nagoya in Ashburn. It’s a sushi/hibachi place and was delightfully uncrowded for 12:30 on a Wednesday. The ten of us sat around a big hibachi table and listened to Coldplay on the house sound system (no really, a Japanese restaurant was playing Coldplay – no lie). Most of us got stuff that was Hibachi-i-fied, and boy were we not disappointed!! The chef was amazing, and the food was delicious. The scallops I had were done perfectly: slightly crunchy on the outside, but still juicy and tender on the inside. The steak was perfectly medium, and the accompanying veggies and fried rice were excellent.

    So, if you’re ever at the corner of Waxpool and Claiborne Parkway and feel the need to watch someone make your food in front of you – go for it.

    And, I hate null pointers in Java. They suck.

  • Wild Sage Cafe

    Max and I went out today to gather some last-minute Mother’s Day stuff and to get out of the house to give Jen the day off. We went to work to pick up some presents I’d stashed there, and play foosball. Then, we went to lunch at The Wild Sage Cafe. It’s right down the street, and I’ve been meaning to go in since they opened a few months ago. The place wasn’t crowded, and is very nicely decorated. The menu isn’t gigantic, but has enough to variety to please pretty much anyone. Max got the kid’s chicken tenders and fries, and I got the pulled pork sandwich. Let’s talk about the sandwich. It was huge, almost three inches tall before I squashed it down. There was a healthy portion of pork (half a pound, maybe?) with a homemade barbecue sauce, with coleslaw under the meat and crispy onion strips on top, all contained in a lovely soft kaiser roll. On top of that, the fries were perfect: crunchy on the outside without being too crunchy on the inside.

    Even Max’s chicken tenders were breaded there by hand, and were very good. We got gelato for dessert. I’m not sure it was homemade, but the chocolate was very good.

    It’s on Church, two blocks from the corner of 28 and Church/Waxpool. If you’re in Sterling, please check it out.

  • Music Heaven

    Everyone (well, all the Mac users anyway) at work has now discovered music sharing in iTunes, and sent their addresses to our little OS X user’s mailing list. I am in heaven, and I’m in heaven legally, which is really cool too. I’ve heard The Replacements and Wilco for the first time, and found a bunch of golden oldies from the nineties that are just making me happy.

    Why does the sharing in iTunes work and the other methods (peer-to-peer, Napster, etc) don’t? I can’t burn a CD from my pals’ collections. I can hear them and whet my appetite, but I can’t take their music with me. Now, I’m going to go add some stuff to my Amazon wishlist and will eventually buy it. Everyone’s happy. I get to hear new music I wouldn’t hear otherwise (damn you, commercial, sold-out, bubble gum corporate radio!!), the artists get their check, and the whiny jerks at the RIAA can shut up.

    It’s the same with internet radio. I’m not going to spend the time to record a stream anymore than I would to record a radio show. That is so sixth grade. I listen to NetMusique all day long at work (thank you, network from Heaven!) and have added several things to my wishlist because of it.

    The recording industry should be jumping for joy at ‘net radio. I’m surprised they’re not. It gives artists in their catalog who don’t get exposure through traditional radio the opportunity to be heard and for people to go buy their music. It’s a win-win.

    I’m a little disappointed that I can’t bookmark shared music, especially folks who have static IP’s, but I can live with that. And all this on six hours of sleep and no caffeine… and remember kids, the winner will be announced tonight.