Archive for January, 2009

My Youngest is Obsessed With Mailboxes

by Glenn Vance on January 29, 2009 in Family with No comments
mailbox

When Pey­ton and I go out for walks around the neigh­bor­hood (which has become more and more fre­quent since I’ve started work­ing from home) he notices lots of things. He likes to talk to Twister, the horse that lives across the street, and he likes to yell, “RUN!” and then run, and he likes to play with leaves. His great­est obses­sion though started prob­a­bly a year ago, while watch­ing “Blues Clues”.

Pey­ton really grew to love the show. I like it too, as any­one who has read this blog before can attest to, and I’ve got my favorite char­ac­ters on the show, but Peyton’s has become Mail­box, who shows up rarely more than once a show after Steve/Joe have sang their mail song and always deliv­ers “a let­ter from our friends”. Mail­box wants to be a standup come­dian some­day but he’s rooted in place in the front yard, so it will prob­a­bly be hard for him to travel.

But Pey­ton loves the guy (or girl, it’s hard to dis­tin­guish, since his voice has a strange tim­ber to it) and always sings along to the mail-retrieving songs that Steve/Joe sings. And this love has trans­lated into our every­day lives as well now. So while we’re out Pey­ton will now want to look inside of the mail­box when we leave on our walk and also on our return to the house. And he likes the van­ity mail­boxes, like the mail­box that looks like a dog at the end of the street or the stone one that has vines grow­ing on it. But he loves all of them pretty equally.

So the next time if we show up at your house with Pey­ton and he has a pile of your mail in his hands, you’ll know why.

The Wayback Machine Has Resurrected a Lot of My Long Dead Posts

by Glenn Vance on January 27, 2009 in Current Events with No comments
wayback

God bless the Internet.

The Inter­net Archive, also known as the Way­back Machine, is a won­der­ful thing. You can see the way Google looked a long time ago or the web­site of the New York Times from Sep­tem­ber 11, 2001. It’s not the fastest thing in the world (and come on, if you archive the major­ity of the inter­net for free, do you really have to answer to any­body about the speed of your servers?) but it sure is awesome.

And its awe­some­ness now trav­els over to this site. My first blog that I wrote years ago Cen­tral Ser­vices — The Minstry of Infor­ma­tion Retrieval1 is on the Way­back Machine. Not all of it, sadly, but a large por­tion of it. So if you start see­ing new posts appear in your RSS reader or you’re just pok­ing around the site avoid­ing the boss, check ‘em out.

  1. Taken from the movie Brazil. [↩]

Why Does the Black Eyed Peas’ Service Have to Suck So Bad?

by Glenn Vance on January 27, 2009 in Food with No comments
bep

Last Sun­day Kim and I took the kids over to The Dixie House, a long­time estab­lished Dal­las restau­rant in the heart of the Lake­wood area. They were well known for their chicken-fried steak1 back in the day, but then they got bought out by another restau­rant chain, The Black-eyed Pea and were amal­ga­mated into the fold, only retain­ing their name and lit­tle else. After adopt­ing the same menu as their new owner they lost much of their sig­na­ture char­ac­ter and they really became just another Black-eyed Pea.

Which is sad. For the past few years or so every time I’ve eaten at the Black-eyed Pea the ser­vice has been ter­ri­ble. The food is *okay*, I sup­pose, and since there are few restau­rants around that still serve the Southern-style food that most of us Tex­ans grew up on it was like a strange oasis in a sea of Asian fusion and Cal­i­for­nia Pizza Kitchen-type places. Like I said, the prob­lem is the ser­vice is ter­ri­ble. Sev­eral weeks ago we went in, again on a Sun­day, and were sat fairly quickly, but then our wait­ress, who looked like she was charged with seven or eight tables, came by and said she’d be right back to take our drink orders. Five min­utes, then ten min­utes passed, no wait­ress, no drink order. We even­tu­ally flagged the host­ess and asked if we could just have some water and rolls, since the kids were get­ting antsy and angry.

Ten more freak­ing min­utes passed and no wait­ress to take our order. And so we left.

Jump back to last Sun­day. We’re sit­ting at The Dixie House. It’s around 1:30 in the after­noon and there are prob­a­bly eight tables full and three of the wait staff to shep­hard over them. Our wait­ress came, said she’d be right back with our drinks. Another table is sat in her sec­tion, they order drinks and then get them before we get ours. Five more min­utes pass, no drinks. We finally flag down our wait­ress and ask where our drinks are and she stum­bles over what we’d ordered. She then gets them out. The food is alright but still the ser­vice is incred­i­bly lacking.

So we’ve made a pact: no more Black-eyed Pea. Ever.

We’re never going there again. I’ve wasted far too much money on a crummy estab­lish­ment. I’m done with them.

So if any­one reads this and has a sug­ges­tion of where to find this mys­te­ri­ously hard to find South­ern cui­sine in the Dal­las area, leave a com­ment. If it’s good we might even ask you to go with us sometime.

  1. And don’t try to call it “country-fried steak”. That’s for wusses. [↩]

Richard Corliss and Why the Blockbusters Were the Best Films This Year

by Glenn Vance on January 22, 2009 in Movies with 1 Comment
ironman

In last week’s issue of Time mag­a­zine their film critic Richard Corliss wrote a rather lengthy arti­cle on why he thought that all of the best movies this year were block­busters. Some of his favorites from the past year were Iron Man, Speed Racer, WALL-E and The Dark Knight, and while I agree with two of his choices, Speed Racer didn’t appeal to me (so I didn’t see it) and, hate me if you will, and if you loved it you prob­a­bly will, but I didn’t care about see­ing WALL-E. At all. I’m a big fan of the Pixar pic­tures, but WALL-E just didn’t inter­est me.

But I have to agree with Corliss on his sec­ondary point; being the end of the year this is the time for awards-caliber films, and this year is look­ing pretty lame. Early on I was inter­ested in see­ing Gran Torino but then my inter­est fiz­zled out for no per­cep­ti­ble rea­son even though I love Clint East­wood. The Reader sounds so bor­ing and Slum­dog Mil­lion­aire deals with under-aged pros­ti­tu­tion so they’re out in my book.

But Corliss doesn’t bring up the biggest glar­ing omis­sion that he made about the two films that we do agree on. The Dark Knight was directed by Christo­pher Nolan who did the fan­tas­tic Memento1 sev­eral years back and John Favreau directed Iron Man. Favreau started out in indie films (Swingers, Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Cir­cle) and then moved on to direct­ing (Will Ferrell’s sec­ond most under­rated per­for­mance — Elf2 ) Indie direc­tors tend to focus more on story and plot than, say, Michael Bay or that dufus McG3 because their bud­gets are usu­ally in the high hundred-thousands or the low mil­lions. What’s been great about Nolan’s and Favreau’s careers is that they so far have kept the indie ethic of sto­ry­telling first and just tack­ing on the spe­cial effects to aide the visuals.

I doubt Iron Man or The Dark Knight will get nom­i­nated for the big awards, other than Heath Ledger, but the were enjoy­able and inter­est­ing films that deserved the crit­i­cal acco­lades, and the piles of money, that they earned.

  1. And the awe­some The Pres­tige. [↩]
  2. Most under­rated? Stranger Than Fic­tion. [↩]
  3. Why doesn’t he just use his real name — Joseph McGinty? [↩]
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