world cafe live

Kris and I hit Upstairs at World Cafe Live last night (3025 Walnut St.). It was one of their free shows, and even though they told us that the wait would roughly be the same as the half-life of one of the elements down near the bottom of the Periodic Table (the scary man-made ones), we put our name down; while we were discussing where else we could go, a table with a nice window view of the Walnut St. Bridge opened up.

The place looks designed by Philly hipsters (and every member of the wait staff looks like a Philly hipster). Usually I have mixed feelings about this, as Philly hipsters can often deserve massive cockpunches. But this was nice; the beer on draught was accordingly hip - all sorts of brews from Victory and Dogfish Head, and, of course, lager.

The music and food were good - I had an Italian grinder, which had all sorts of Italian cold cuts, red peppers, oil and melted provolone on a toasted roll. Performing was the wonderful Kristin Hoffmann, who has a helluva voice. Her music was very Dido-like, and immediately after Kris and I joked that her stuff should all be featured in teen dramas on the WB, she introduced her next song as "the one that they used on 'Dawson's Creek.'" Still, she was very good and her musical style was very versatile, and it's just cool to eat dinner and drink beer while listening to live music.

Even beyond that, to me, WXPN is one of the things that makes Philly Philly. It's true sometimes that every hour sounds like their Women's Music Hour, but there's a lot of good that they do, and it's refreshing to listen to a radio station that has a firm commitment to new music and to the singer/songwriter. Combining that with food, beer and free live music is, well, perfect.

i have become dell, destroyer of worlds

Goodbye, seven-year-old Power Mac which I got on my first weekend at Penn. I hope you have fun in my closet. I'll power you back up when I need my music and my senior honors thesis. Until then, there's a Dell on my desk now.

Now, it's not actually my Dell; Kris doesn't need her desktop now that she has a laptop, and she realizes it would be better for both of us if there was a computer in my apartment that could actually take advantage of the broadband connection I pay over $40 a month for. So, now, I have become Dell, destroyer of worlds.

I guess I'll miss having a Mac; I used to be really into the whole Mac culture - when I was about 14 or so. Now I couldn't give two shits what sits on my desk. It could be a Coleco (with rust-proofing) so long as the Internet internets faster and the software actually works with the rest of the computing world's.

Really, I'm just glad I got a Dell without having to deal with Steven, the Dell Dude.



Kris is much, much hotter, and pot busts, to my knowledge, are refreshingly free from her background... oh God, what is he doing?

peking duck pizza

Last night Kris and I tried the Peking Duck pizza at Mama Palma's (2229 Spruce St). Let me say this: you must try this pizza. Roast duck, hoisin sauce, mushrooms, scallions and little thin snippets of carrot - all on a pizza. Awesome.

I recommend you share this with someone, as it's sweet enough that eating even the small size all by yourself could give you adult-onset diabetes (not really - don't sue!). But it's definitely worth a taste.

nooooooooooooooooooo

So Fox has cancelled Arrested Development just as I was getting into it. It's a fucking tight show, and now it's gone. At least there's still the DVDs.

Considering Scrubs doesn't appear to be getting back on the schedule anytime soon (and FilmFakers is LONG gone), I'm just about ready to declare that my Tivo season passes are like teeny thumbed-up kisses of death (or, at least warm, encompassing hugs of hiatus).

I'm looking at you next, The Office. Your producers should just lie down in their office doorways right now and wait for NBC security guards to throw their limp, lifeless bodies off the studio lot.

friday sports blogging

Truthfully, I don't know what sets Friday sports blogging apart from the sports blogging I do any other day, but it's Friday, so it's Friday sports blogging.

- The Rangers are, quite simply, shocking. I thought they would have returned to ways of stinkitude long before this. But as long as they keep outworking teams and can avoid hitting some sort of wall (hopefully the Olympics break in February will help), they've got a shot here. It's definitely nice to have a likeable Rangers team kicking the shit out of people again, but I'm expecting Petr Nedved or Anson Carter to step onto the ice any minute and ruin the illusion.

- I'm scared for the Giants this Sunday. This game worries me more than the Eagles game next week, because Big Blue is expected to manhandle the Vikes (and because the Giants didn't play particularly well last week and still won going away). Mark my words - the Giants will lose to a team they're supposed to beat at some point. That's the reality of life in today's NFL. And for some reason, I have visions of a resurgent Brad Johnson picking apart the Giants secondary dancing in my head.

- Looks like Steph Marbury is about to be traded. Good. He's like a vacuum of inspiration on the court, and something tells me the Knicks will be immeasurably better without him. Don't get me wrong - he can be awesome. But I've never gotten the feeling that he's going to take the Knicks on his back and win a game, the way a Jason Kidd or an Allen Iverson can.

- If they must trade for him, I'm really hoping that with Theo gone in Boston, the Mets can get a favorable deal for Manny Ramirez. They shouldn't have to give up the farm for a guy who's going to look lost in Shea's outfield next year (and has just as much a chance of taking the Mets back to 2002 as he does to the playoffs), but they would have had to if the Boy Wonder had stuck around. Here's to hoping whoever's left up there has a little bit less gray matter. It's probably just wishful thinking, but hey - who would have thought the Devil Rays could get Scott Kazmir for Vic Zambrano?

I really don't mind all the money for Billy Wagner (or for pitching in general); from the mood around here (and from what I've heard), the Phillies are either deathly afraid of losing him to the Mets, or have already conceded him to them.

I think what I do mind is the Rotisserie mentality that the papers seem to ascribe to Omar Minaya. It might just be your standard Hot Stove reporting, but it feels a little too much like the winter of 2001-2002, when the Mets thought they were reloading a team that had been to the World Series just one year before. If the Mets bring in one big bat and a closer and fill the rest of the roster with smart free agent moves and/or trades, fine. If they bring in the all-hit, no-glove AL All-Star (i.e., All-Salary) team (Ramirez, Alfonso Soriano, Aubrey Huff, etc.), I'll be more than a little worried. Throwing money and/or prospects at guys who are obviously not right for the team, the league and/or the ballpark will be the surest way to derail an emerging team, and Omar must tread lightly.

beer pool

Go.

Read.

sadatay!

According to the internets, a new thing to get worried sick about is the growing popularity of t-shirts depicting a "simply drawn snowman with a menacing expression" among kids. According to CNN.com, "the image popularized by drug-dealer-turned-rapper Young Jeezy symbolizes those who sell a white substance known on the street as snow: cocaine." The article ends like this:

Ali Kourani, a Manhattan wholesale salesman, says the T-shirt is their top seller across the country.

"It's big money," Kourani said.

Reading this, I can't help but think that this situation is lifted verbatim from the opening of the movie Pootie Tang, with corporate America making money off the misery of the inner city. All that's missing is Pootie coming back from the farm to save the day and tell Bob Costas about it.

Leepa-chai.

homecoming

To everyone I saw at Penn Homecoming on Friday and Saturday nights: It was awesome to see you. I just feel bad we all weren't able to hang out a little more; dinner and/or hanging out on Saturday night sounded great, but then it sort of devolved into teeny tiny pockets of people doing their own things. Which is more than fine; it just would have been nice to have seen all of you a little while longer.

To everyone I should have seen at Penn Homecoming but didn't for whatever reason: I got much love for ya. Sorry it didn't happen this weekend. Let's make it work real soon.

1000

It took a little over five weeks, but haplography has reached its 1000th hit. Granted, most of those hits come from me whenever I update the page, but still, it's worth mentioning. Thanks to everyone who's been reading this whole time!

prorated eli

The Giants have now played half a season, and in doubling Eli's stats, we see some nice things developing. Over a full season, they come to...

28 TDs
10 INTs
3622 passing yards

And there's still so very much room for his improvement. Once he gets his completion percentage up to around 60% (it's at 51.6% right now), he might just become the best quarterback in the NFC. Right now, his numbers already put him in the running for Pro Bowl consideration (which, while no knock on Eli, says a lot about the state of quarterbacking in the NFC).

This is not to say that the second half of the season will definitely go as smoothly as this first half has gone (for both him and the team); there are a lot of tough games - especially on the road - between now and around 8 p.m. on the night of January 1st, when we will know for sure whether these Giants get to keep playing or not.

But the thing about Eli that the Giants love even more than his stats is this (in the words of Post columnist Steve Serby): "as the pressure moments get bigger and bigger, Eli plays bigger and bigger."

I WILL KILL YOU WITH MY MIND

the knicks and the garden

Mike Vaccaro wrote an awesome column in the Post today which really captures the zeitgeist of Knicks fandom (wow, third post today that is at least tangentially Knickerbocker-related). What the people running Madison Square Garden have done to the World's Most Famous Arena in the past few years is enough to break any New York sports fan's heart, considering how amazingly special the place was in the 1990s.

The very premise of Vaccaro's column implies that the Larry Brown Knicks have a chance to make the Garden special again, but I'm not so sure. When I look at Isiah Thomas' player moves as Knicks' head honcho, I see flawed players acquired by trading other flawed players. Sometimes it feels like he'll make any move in the hopes that some new random assemblage of players will click. I dunno; maybe I'm still hung up on the bruising Knicks of the mid-1990s, or the miracle Knicks of 1999; maybe it will take some time to fall in love with a Knicks team that's long on talent but still feels not quite right. Maybe falling in love with this group will be impossible.

Maybe all they need to do is win.

And another thing: when I look at Larry Brown, I see a guy who's about to realize how hopelessly over his head he is with the players he's stuck with; I just can't see him staying in New York very long. Being coach of the Knicks should mean something, but right now, despite all of the "homecoming" talk, I look at Brown and I think "hired gun." He just doesn't feel like the head coach of the New York Knicks. Don't get me wrong - I'm glad he's here. He's a great coach, and his being here means the franchise still has a semblance of a clue - but I fear that, before too long, he's going to start trying to claw his way out of NYC (like a cat in one of those carry-on cage thingies).

"the ship be sinking"

It's hard to imagine Bush vocalizing his team's fortunes the way Michael Ray Richardson did back in the 80s, but the ship be sinking anyway. When you consider that recent presidents as ideologically disparate as Reagan and Clinton enjoyed monster approval ratings in their second terms, it seems pretty clear that Bush has completely lost touch with moderates. Which makes sense, given that Bush tried to take away Social Security, let his unqualified buddy Michael Brown preside over the loss of a major American city, nominated an underqualified buddy to the Supreme Court, then kowtowed to his narrow base of semi-loyal wackos and nominated somebody who makes Antonin Scalia look like Justice Mendoza on the West Wing (ably played by the creamy Edward James Olmos). Oh yeah, there's that whole Iraq thing, too.

Speaking of the West Wing, it looks like Hawkeye Pierce is getting his ass kicked around the country by Jimmy Smits (I'd jokingly call him by one of his non-West Wing character's names, but I couldn't think of one; thanks for the heads-up to Kris, who actually voted for Matt Santos). Good to see somebody doing well in the polls.

you gotta be there

"You gotta be there to say you were there."

Glad to see Chuck Dolan has the boys down in marketing working in shifts to come up with gold like this.

giants are screwed

NY Daily News: Giants in first & feelin' Super

Newsday: Surging Big Blue for real

The rest of the NY media is glowing about the Jints, as well.

If the Giants lose to the Niners or the Vikings in the next two weeks - and these articles almost guarantee it - you'll be able to play this to the sight of the bandwagon emptying out.

life's little victories

When I went outside this morning at 8 am, I found that the three-hour parking meters on my little stretch of Walnut Street had three hours' worth of money in them, and the two-hour meters had two hours' worth in them. I'm not sure how it happened, and I put 75 cents in my meter just to be safe (in case this happy glitch vanished like a mirage). But still, I was able to take a little more time this morning to get myself ready and to clean up the apartment.

I love it when stuff like that happens - like free t-shirts, or free food, or finding a five-dollar bill in your pocket when you put on a jacket for the first time after a hot summer. This was one of life's little victories.

not to jinx it, but...

The Inky ran an interesting sidebar describing how Steve Young compared this current Eagles incarnation with the 1994 Bills, who were plagued by a "general malaise" after making it to four consecutive Super Bowls with nothing to show for it.

Well, like the Yankees or the Braves (or the Cowboys or Bulls of the 1990s), I'll believe the Eagles are dead when I see a body. Until then, they're still the Top Dog in the NFC East (and then some), and the Giants (or whoever else would overtake them) will have to win what Philly has by beating the Eagles themselves.

In a similar vein, while I love watching Eli turn more and more into one of the better quarterbacks in the league, I don't think he'll officially have arrived until he begins torturing Philadelphians. Nothing would please me more to see Eli regarded here in Philly the way Troy Aikman was (and really still is). You see, when that happens, it can only be because he and the Giants are either 1) the only thing keeping good Eagles teams from greater things, or 2) routinely showing bad Eagles teams just how bad they are.

That day is coming, children... maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon.

yanks interested in piazza?

Matt over at Metsblog writes that the Yankees have briefly discussed bringing Mike Piazza on-board as a part-time DH and catcher with Jorge Posada.

While the Yankees mull almost everybody over each winter - I think they had internal discussions about offering me a minor league deal last December - this is more than a little disturbing.

There are only two things baseball players take away from the game - money and memories, and they owe to themselves to get as much of both as they can. I realize this. And I realize that Piazza, while a classy guy, is as subject to this truism of modern MLB life as anybody else is.

Still, #31 stands a good chance of completely blowing away his entire Mets legacy if he moves across town. And I'm not sure I would ever be able to look at him the same way if he were to bash the Mets once there, as all Mets-turned-Yankees seem contractually obligated to do.

tangier

1801 Lombard St

On Friday night, Kris and I ate at Tangier - that little place across from Graduate Hospital with the red neon sign. The beer selection, while not cheap, was good - I had a Dogfish Head, which I liked very much, and a Flying Fish, which was OK, but not as good as the Dogfish. Not really sure which particular brews from each respective brewer I had, as it was loud and I wasn't really paying too much attention to the waitress (who didn't exactly dote on us).

The food was OK; burgers come on a sweet onion roll, which is a mistake if one plans on entertaining company for the remainder of the evening.

I think the best thing about the entire place is that our seating arrangements allowed us to sit next to each other, as opposed to across a table from each other, which was nice. At the end of a long, long week for both of us, we just wanted to go somewhere relaxed and have a beer or two and some food, and Tangier fit the bill.

me no blog long time

I haven't blogged in a while - ever since the project from hell took over my life (it was like the Hotel California - you could check out, but you could never leave). Now that that's over with, I've got a couple things to post about...

1) I'm really, really glad that Tom Renney didn't pull a Willie Randolph and let Henrik Lundqvist rot on the bench until it was too late. It's still too early to proclaim him as having arrived, but given his background, the scouting reports coming into this season and his performance thus far, he's certainly close. He's given the Rangers strong games in each of his appearances, and he basically won them a game on Thursday night against the Islanders at the Garden. He doesn't give off that Dan Blackburn "confident-but-still-in-over-his-head" vibe, which makes him the first Rangers rookie goalie since Mike Richter to instill some confidence in the faithful.

1a) If the Rangers' penalty killing is as good as it's looked thus far, the Blueshirts could go a long way in this new NHL.

1b) Speaking of Blueshirts, can we go back to the white jerseys at home and leave the away jerseys for, well, away? I know it makes laundry slightly easier for the teams, and the league loves the fact that the dark jerseys at home and the light on the road harkens back to the NHL of the 1960s and earlier, but it's just not the NHL I grew up with.

Now, I love the away jerseys - when I dropped $300 on a Messier jersey back in 10th grade, I went with blue. But, without having seen any Rangers games in HD, I must say the blueshirts have never, ever been able to convey their bluey goodness on TV. And the home whites look crisp on TV at the Garden.

And that's my selfish opinion.

2) If anybody knows of a way to get tickets to Ben Folds at the Electric Factory on Wednesday night (without sucking or selling any body parts), lemme know. I'm equal parts hard worker and lazy idiot, so I waited waaaay too long to try to get tickets to this.

3) I'm still holding out hope for the Karl Rove perp walk one of these days here (soon).

4) I found a weird magazine on the ground yesterday outside of the Rite Aid at 23rd and Walnut called "Libations" (I think it's an insert in Citypaper). It's basically a thinly-veiled marketing attempt for certain beermakers to position premium and semi-premium beer as the "new wine" - something to be savored, collected, and consumed with fine foods. And while it is thinly-veiled, I was hooked. But really, it didn't make me want to go out and by cases of Blue Moon (especially when you could go out and buy Hoegaarden) so much as it made me want to try microbrewing.

And really, microbrewing is something I've been thinking about long before I found a weird magazine on the ground and decided to pick it up. If I ever have a basement, I'm turning part of it into a microbrewery, and another part of it into a black and white darkroom.

5) I'm in my PJs right now, blogging from the couch as Kris plays with Pandora. XPN is playing from the surprisingly good laptop speakers. I don't have to work today. Life is good.