Motelmag.com

The Aristocats - "Everybody Wants to Be a Cat"

2008-04-20T22:16:00.000-07:00

Screamin Jay Hawkins - I Put A Spell On You

2008-04-19T10:45:00.000-07:00

on youtube

I don't really have much to say these days on here. I think I may be too old for blogging anymore. But, there are lots of really great videos on the internet (mostly on youtube, of course) that I would like to share with the approx 5 readers out there. So, I think I am going to start posting some of my favorites, and some that are just plain interesting.

Homemade

2008-02-07T20:27:00.000-08:00

This weekend I was at La Trattoria Bohemia, and the sandwich I ordered came with a side of "homemade" potato salad. How can it be homemade if it's made in a restaurant? What does that imply about the rest of their food? Don't get me wrong, I love the place. But I think the "homemade" designation on restaurant food is peculiar.

The joys of stock photography

2007-12-17T15:53:00.000-08:00

This came in a collection of stock photography I just got for work.

Quatchi!

2007-11-28T09:45:00.000-08:00

The mascots for the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics have just been unveiled, and I am smitten. I have a special soft spot for Quatchi. I mean, how cool is it to have a sasquatch for a mascot? Answer: Really cool!

Under 2 billion within 100 years

2007-10-29T17:02:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading The World Without Us by Alan Weisman. This is one of the most interesting books I have ever read. It delves into many topics that I find fascinating.

Toward the end of the book, he mentions a UN study that shows that if each fertile woman on Earth were to limit herself to giving birth to just one child, the population of the Earth would be less than 2 billion within 100 years. The current population is over 6 billion, but the number of humans that the planet can sustain in balance with nature is 2 billion (this is also covered in the book).

It's something to consider. I am not having kids, so maybe I could sell my right to have a kid, like a carbon offset? Haha.

Chicago Fire opens on J St

2007-10-17T11:36:00.000-07:00

We went to the new Chicago Fire midtown location last night for dinner. And what I have to say is: it's really yummy! Everything we ate was really, really tasty. The staff was pleasant and professional, friendly but not invasive. Loved it!

We had:
Baked Artichoke: Really yummy; infused with butter and lemon and covered in parmesean cheese, so not the healthiest.
House Salad with Italian Dressing: A really tasty, no-frills salad.
Deep Dish Chicago Fire Combo Pizza: Italian sausage, pepperoni, green pepper, onion, mushroom. Really, really yummy! What more can I say?

Chicago Fire is located on J Street between 24th and 25th Streets. Go there and eat yummy food! Yay!

Velocabs and 2-Way Streets

2007-09-05T20:45:00.002-07:00

I just ate dinner at one of my very very favorite Sacramento eateries, Cafe Rolle. That made me happy, but even more enthusiasm came from an unlikely source: the most recent issue of Inside The City, the little monthly tabloid published by Inside Publications, which is usually a fairly mundane publication.

Not this month, however! There are two articles that made me happy:

1) An article about the new Velocab service in downtown/midtown Sac. Yay! Not only is the service environmentally friendly, it also provides a much-needed alternative to Sacramento's overpriced and hopelessly inept taxi drivers. (Seriously, I once asked a taxi driver to take me to the corner of 57th St and H St, and he had no idea how to get there. I had to give him turn-by-turn instructions. This town is a grid of numbered and lettered streets -- I mean, come on! And his first, and I assume only, language was English.)

2) Anyone who has heard me moan about the large number of one-way streets in downtown/midtown knows I am excited to learn that there is a full-scale plan to return many of those streets to two-way. Yay!!! I am so pleased.

Here's the rundown of the significant midtown/downtown streets that are returning to two-way in the coming months:

J St btwn 30th St and Alhambra
N St from 16th St to 28th St
L St from 16th St to 29th St
P St from 16th St to Alhambra
Q St from 16th St to 29th St

Now, if only they'd put a lane of traffic and a few parking spots on the K Street Mall, I'd have all my wishes!

Can Posh Spice Sing?

2007-08-22T17:17:00.000-07:00

With the Spice Girls reunion coming up soon, I've been wondering lately how much Posh Spice really sang. When I listen to Spice Girls songs, I can recognize the voices of Melanie B (Scary Spice) and Melanie C (Sporty Spice), and also Baby Spice. I think I can also identify Ginger Spice most of the time, which of course will tell me if Posh sings by process of elimination. But it's still oddly hard to figure out. I think that Baby, Ginger, and Posh's voices are very similar, with Posh's being the least identifiable -- to me, anyway. So it's hard to figure out when she is actually singing. Most of their videos make it pretty confusing by the way they are cut. It looks like they might have been trying to cover up that she didn't really sing very much. For instance, the video for Say You'll Be There.

Shocker: Stonegrill & Bar not very good!

2007-06-14T16:08:00.000-07:00

So, last weekend Chris and I decided to go to the new Stonegrill & Bar (2110 L Street, Sacramento) on a lark. I say it was a lark because I had berated its impending opening by reflecting on my hatred of Mongolian BBQ and similar cook-your-own-food concept restaurants with remarks like "why should I pay to go to a restaurant if I have to cook my own food?" And then Chris said we should go to it because he thinks it won't be open very long.

After eating there, I gotta say that I think he's right. Either the place will close or it will be re-thought and relaunched. But let me explain why:

Most of the restaurant's problems are evident even from the exterior. It's located in a new building, and looks fairly fancy and upscale, but then there's a really cheap looking, extraordinarily poorly designed sign on the outside advertising their happy hour. It makes the place look super lame.

Once inside, we were greeted by a young man in a suit who seemed pretty together, but also desperate for us to like the restaurant. The rest of the staff looked like they had been picked up in a big net at Arden Fair Mall. The hostess was spacy and clueless, as was our waiter. He looked about 16 years old and said "pretty much" several times in each sentence. So we found out that "pretty much the meat is cooked on a stone that is pretty much 750 degrees and that you pretty much cook it yourself to pretty much the doneness that you want."

We tried to order wine. The wine list sucks, and our waiter knew nothing about wine. Chris' first glass of Seven Deadly Zins tasted weird, so he sent it back for the Kendall Jackson Merlot. Like I said, the wine list sucks. We started with the hummus appetizer, which tasted good at first but quickly proved to be too salty, over-spiced and dry.

I ordered the Kobe Bistro Filet (which isn't actually Kobe beef) and Chris had the Mixed Grill. Chris didn't like his meat because it was too small and cooked very quickly on the stone. My meat was actually pretty good, and I liked slicing off the little pieces and cooking them to pretty much the doneness that I wanted.

On the side, I had mashed potatoes, which were good but nothing special, and mixed veggies, which I think came from a Green Giant bag of frozen veggies. They were cooked, but had cooled off too much by the time they arrived at my table. On reflection, I think maybe I should have put them on the grill with the meat to heat them up.

So yeah, it wasn't very good.

(Interestingly, the restaurant's tendency towards looking fancy while being poorly executed also extends to their Web site, which loads slowly, is confusing, and uses ASP.)

Afterwards, we went to the Cold Stone Creamery out on Fair Oaks, just to make it a hot stone/cold stone kind of a night.

Taco Loco = Yucko

2007-06-14T16:00:00.000-07:00

Every six months or so, I seem to forget how much Taco Loco (2326 J St, Sacramento) sucks.

It's right down the street from my office, and in this part of town there is a relative lack of good lunch options. The inexpensive, quick choices are Beach Hut Deli (aka Beach Slut Deli, where the workers are hot and the sandwiches are just okay), Blimpie (reliable and not a bad as you would think), The Grind on J (salads good, sandwiches not, workers infuriatingly incompetent), The Cornerstone (ew) and Taco Loco.

So, occasionally my lunch boredom and love of Mexican food converge to make me try Taco Loco just one more time. But it sucks! I had it for lunch today and now I feel pretty damn sick. I went there thinking, "maybe if I don't get meat, it will be good" but I got lured in by the carnitas. They turned out to be pretty dull, as did the rest of my spinach salad. But, that would be OK, except that now I feel sick. So there ya go.

Whales are not circus animals

2007-05-17T12:23:00.000-07:00

I just wrote this letter to the editors of the Sacramento Bee. I sincerely hope it gets published.

----

Dear Bee editorial board,

I am appalled and dismayed at the Bee's coverage of the two wayward humpback whales lost in the Delta. Your articles clearly state that the crowds of people climbing the levees to see the whales is stressing them out and making it more difficult for rescue workers to help them.

Yet, the Bee itself is contributing to this problem by creating a media circus around the whales. Alongside your frontpage coverage of the story, you promote the "name the whales" contest and "write whale fiction" feature on your web site. This kind of stunt contributes to the problem of crowds in whale sighting areas and treats these wild animals as if they have come to the Delta to provide entertainment for people.

You've clearly created these features to drive traffic to your web site and make some more money from the advertisements there. This is in incredibly poor taste, and certainly creates the impression that the Bee doesn't care about the welfare of the whales.

How's that naming contest going to look if the whales die?

The Bee should be doing its civic duty of informing people of how their activities effect the whales, and encouraging people to stay away. Instead, the Bee contributes to a circus atmosphere in order to make money.

Whales are not circus animals.

---

Movie Review: Music & Lyrics

2007-03-04T16:35:00.000-08:00

The first thing I want to say is: the funniest part of Music & Lyrics is the video for the fictitious '80s band, PoP! You can watch this video on YouTube, and decide for yourself whether you want to see a movie that is less funny than this video.

That's not to say that the movie is not funny. It's a perfectly serviceable romantic comedy, starring two not brilliant but adequate and quite likeable actors, Drew Barrymore and Hugh Grant. Hugh plays a washed up pop star, whose name I forget, who seems happy to make money by playing high school reunions and state fairs. Drew's character, Sophie, has a number of jobs, it seems, one of which is filling in for a friend who waters plants for a living -- including those in Hugh's apartment -- and another of which is working for her sisters' weight loss clinic chain.

Watching Hugh sing silly '80s songs and jiggle his hips is funny but also extremely wince-inducing, and the movie has so many of these scenes that I started to (a) tire of them, and (b) lose respect for Hugh -- mostly his character but also his real self.

Sophie is a typical movie eccentric: talking contantly, wearing kind of weird clothes (in this case, seemingly inspired by Project Runway's Ulli), suddenly hiding while walking down the street, freaking out and being unwilling to explain it, and so forth. It turns out she has a reason for doing some of these things, but others are just her charm I suppose.

Kristen Johnson almost steals the show as Sophie's older sister, who is a big fan of PoP! and flips out when she learns that Sophie knows one of the former members (that would be Hugh, in case I forgot to mention that ... speaking of which, I think his character's name might be David or something like that; I suppose I could just look it up in someone else's review, but where's the fun in that?). Her scenes are the ones that come closest to the video in terms of laughs.

The rest of the movie is kind of funny, but also a little bit of a downer. Maybe this is because both of the main characters are kind of sad people -- Hugh because of his washed-up status, Sophie because of her mysterious past (which gets revealed, but I won't spoil it for ya). Also, there's just not much spark between them. I read another review of Music & Lyrics that said Drew and Hugh had no chemistry, and I think the reviewer has a point. It's like they're better as friends. Maybe they figured that out later, after the movie ended.

February: National Fill-in-the-Blank Month

2007-02-05T17:25:00.000-08:00

We've noticed that February is the National Thing Month for a lot of Things, for instance:

Black History Month

National Pet Dental Month

National Gin Month

Women's Heart Health Month

We compiled these without use of the Internet, just from actual real-world sightings (and just knowing about the Black History one, cause it's pretty well-known). Know of any more?

Alto cinque!

2007-01-31T09:53:00.000-08:00

We are learning Italian, and our new favorite phrase is "Alto cinque!" (High five!) I highly doubt anyone actually says this in Italy, but you never know.

2007-01-18T15:35:00.000-08:00

Movie Review: Children of Men
Grade: B-

Children of Men is not as good as the trailer would have you believe. I am a sucker for sci-fi, and the trailer looked good, so of course I went to see it. The movie starts off promisingly enough, with Clive Owen as a worker bee in a near-future London. Some of the ladies are really into Clive Owen. I can take him or leave him. But I do like London and the near-future, so I was ready to enjoy.

Towards the beginning of the film, there are some intriguing political and social questions raised. Clive's friends, an older couple played by Michael Caine and some lady, have a hidden marijuana ranch out in the country filled with newspaper clippings about their rebellious past. Michael's wife is paralyzed after having been tortured when she was a journalist.

This is interesting stuff, although it is odd that the music playing in their house is The Beatles, given that this movie takes place far enough in the future that today's old hippies would be dead, and the new old hippies would be people who are currently in their twenties. But I suppose viewers take comfort in familiar cliches.

Julianne Moore is in this movie, but her role, or perhaps the way she plays it, make that part of the movie forgettable.

One of the main elements of the story is that women have become infertile and there are no children. That happily means there are no annoying kid actors in this movie. After a few plot twists, Clive is on the lam with a young pregnant woman whose name I forget. This is where the movie started to lose me.

In their haste, Clive makes a classic person-on-the-lam-in-a-movie mistake that no one who has ever seen a movie would make. This results in their being closely pursued by the bad guys, and lots of people dying. The movie devolves into an endless torrent of bullets and explosions and running around, people dying, and all the usual baloney that makes so many movies seem alike these days.

And then the movie ends before the most interesting part of the story even begins. My suggestion: If you like sci-fi, Clive Owen, and/or action movies, rent this.

This review is featured in The Carnival of Cinema Episode XV.

2007-01-09T15:54:00.000-08:00

The Gangster Fun reunion show was awesome.

Video can be found here.

2006-12-31T12:19:00.000-08:00

Bubbleland Rises Again

A Motel reader just emailed to let me know that my article on Bubbleland (aka the Kentucky Bend), written in 1995, has been referenced in the Wikipedia article on the area. (See the last link in the External Links section.) I am so pleased and excited that the term Bubbleland has semi-officially become a term for the area.

Back in 1995, we viewed Bubbleland from the Missouri side of the Mississippi River. A few years later, when we were living in Austin, I got an email about a family reunion there, inviting me to attend. I didn't go (it seemed too far and hard to go), but I kind of regret that now. One day I will make it to Bubbleland.

Oscar the Grouch sings "I Hate Christmas"

2006-11-16T15:33:00.000-08:00

Hurts my ears, all that ding-dong

It's too bad how holidays ruin a perfectly nice autumn.

This is my favorite Christmas song. Sing it, Oscar!

2006-11-14T16:06:00.000-08:00

Video of the Day
Metal Health by Quiet Riot

Holy 4th grade flashback!

2006-11-06T10:38:00.000-08:00

New York Triumph #2

We totally saw Will Smith making a movie.

We got into town about 8 a.m. Sunday, and of course we couldn't check into our hotel, so we dropped off our bags and went for coffee and a walk. A few blocks of 5th Ave were closed, so we went to check it out. The store windows had fake broken glass in them, and there was fake broken glass on the sidewalk, too. There were fake plants growing out of the gutters. Lots of movie-making people around too, big cameras, bright lights, etc. One of the side streets was filled with a bus, a few taxis and other cars covered with a thick layer of dust.

The Production Assistants who were controlling the crowd eventually let on that the movie bring filmed is I Am Legend, starring Will Smith. The plot is that everyone has died from a virus, except Will Smith! And he has to fight vampires or something.

After quite a wait, they filmed a scene where Will walked about a block carrying a big gun. He was skinny, limping, and his hair was grey -- talk about getting into character! But after the scene was finished, he turned and smiled and waved to the crowd (to us!). The picture above is the only one we got, on Chris' cell phone. I swear he is in there somewhere.

It was cool that he was friendly and that our celeb-spotting was a celeb I actually like!

He should totally run for president. Or VP. How about Obama/Smith '08?

Video of the day

2006-11-04T16:02:00.000-08:00

Tarzan Boy by Baltimora

2006-11-01T10:57:00.000-08:00

Oh wow I wish I could go to the Sugarcubes reunion show in Iceland. That would be so awesome. Happily, I did see the Sugarcubes live twice in the late 80s, though, so it's OK. And I actually remember it fairly well!

2006-10-30T16:59:00.000-08:00

A friend of ours sent me some belated suggestions for our NY trip -- one being to visit the NY Public Library Main Reading Room. My response was that we were already home and had not visited it, but I think maybe I visited it once as a kid. But I'm not sure whether I am remembering something real, or just a movie or photos I have seen. Which makes me ask, does it really count if I can't remember?

So, does an experience count anymore if you've forgotten it?

2006-10-27T15:15:00.000-07:00

New York Triumph #1

We were totally in the audience at David Letterman.

On Sunday morning, we were walking by the Ed Sullivan Theater and saw that the box office was open. We went in and talked to some of the youthful interns there and filled out a request for tickets. They said they would call if we won the "lottery" for tickets. Well, we did.

We were totally in the audience, and it airs tonight, Friday 10/27. (They tape the Friday night show on Monday nights, after they tape the Monday show. Apparently Dave takes Fridays off. I would too if I were him, let me tell ya.)

Let me say right here that I totally have a crush on David Letterman; he's one of my original celebrity crushes, dating from the mid-80s.

Chris tried to use a very distinctive laugh, and we were seated right under a microphone, so hopefully we'll be able to hear his deep "ha ha ha" in the crowd. I said "yaaaay!" a lot during the parts when we were clapping and cheering.

But wait -- there's more! The guest was Bill O'Reilly, of all people! Dave really tore into him, and barely gave him a chance to talk. Which I fully endorse.

The band was this totally interesting band from Omaha called Tilly and the Wall. Has anyone heard of them? Instead of a drummer they have tap-dancers. It's not as cheesy as it sounds. They were really excited before and after the performance, which was neat to see. Clearly it was a big deal to them, which is awesome.

P.S. At the end of the show, Dave announced who would be on Monday (as in 10/30) -- Borat (aka Sascha Cohen, aka Ali G) and Beck. The audience let out an audible moan of "WHY didn't we get those guests?!" I will agree that Borat would have been better than Bill O'LIElly, and it would be cool to see Beck, but Beck would probably be all nonchalant been-there-done-that whereas these Tilly and the Wall prople were so excited. And Beck kind of bugs me anyway.