This book is rather brilliant, but isn’t for everybody. It’s racy, written in a breezy first-person past with a kind of stream-of-consciousness lightweight quality that made me have to look to make sure it wasn’t present tense. The prose is very very good — fitting the material perfectly.
Restaurant: Gjelina [1, 2, 3] Location: 1429 Abbot Kinney Blvd, CA 90291. (310) 250-1429 Date: Jan 11, 2011 Cuisine: New Californian Rating: Perfect lunch! _ My brother and I love Gjelina’s for lunch. Nowhere else in LA is the casual New American done…
Season 5 and 6 pretty much tie for the best of the seven! Pretty incredible how this show just keeps on getting better and better until the final season. With this season everything slips into a serious groove, but what’s really surprising is the depth of emotion pulled out of the viewers. Nearly gone are the episodic “one off” episodes (discussed in my Lost vs The Love Boat post), instead the story just rolls from one episode to the next with only a few exceptions.
Restaurant: Brentwood Location: 148 S Barrington Ave Los Angeles CA 90049. 310-476-3511 Date: Jan 9, 2011 Cuisine: American Brentwood is a local bar/restaurant perfect for the Sunday night with-the-kid dinner. It’s pretty straight up American, very tasty, but a…
Restaurant: La Terraza Location: Madrid Spain Date: June 29, 2010 Cuisine: Molecular Spanish Gastronomy Rating: Fantastic! We spent the month of June in Spain and this included a legion of fantastic meals. Recently I covered a traditional Spanish place (REVIEW HERE), but…
If I had a penny for every time I’ve been asked this question… Game developers have only a few broad types of employees. Excluding administrative ones like office management, HR, and IT, broadly the team has Programmers, Artists, Sound Engineers,…
Restaurant: La Serenata Location: 1416 Fourth Street Santa Monica, CA 90401. 310-656-7017 Date: Jan 8, 2011 Cuisine: Mexican When I first started going 15-16 years ago, La Serenata was fairly eye opening — coming as I did from the world…
Title: The Windup Girl Author: Paolo Baciqalupi Genre: Sci-Fi Read: Jan 5-9, 2011 Summary: Interesting Science, mediocre Fiction. This novel won the 2009 Nebula and tied for the 2010 Hugo. It’s set in an approximately 100-200 years-from-now dystopian future Bangkok ravaged by…
Restaurant: Divino Location: 11714 Barrington CourtBrentwood, CA 310.472.0886 Date: Jan 07, 2011 Cuisine: Italian Summary: Solid value. Divino is another of Brentwood’s seemingly endless supply of Italian eateries. I find this one in the upper middle of the pack. It’s pretty good,…
In my pursuit to optimize the blog I’ve created yet more pages: Food Index Fiction Index On Writing Complete Archives Blog navigation is funny because the default themes make it difficult to to lure people into old posts. Given that…
Great read. Reminds me of books I read 30 years ago. It starts off with a bang — given that the first chapter features a naked seventeen year-old girl!
Since I have so many Ultimate Pizza posts I wanted to gather their links together into a single page. But I solemnly promise this is the last pizza post for a good while — at least until I prepare another batch of them! In summary, every…
This is a very likable teen romance about an Idaho girl’s first real relationship and of course… how she lost her virginity. It’s sort of like Judy Blume’s Forever, but updated and minus the good sex.
The seventh Ultimate Pizza post. Earlier in the series were Dough, Pesto,Sauce, Toppings, New Years Pizza, and Day 2. Woah! We had family over on Sunday to polish off the seven remaining pizza balls and work our way through some more of the toppings….
I stumbled upon this independent and self published author who is selling very well (mostly on Amazon) with no prior print history. This is a fun book. But it’s an Indy book. It’s professional, but it’s also the novel equivalent of a B movie. Written quickly, revised quickly, and sold cheaply. The author has enough talent to shoot higher.
As if you can’t tell, I like cheese. A lot. Many many different kinds of cheese. About 15 years ago I was at Valentino Restaurant in Santa Monica and I discovered Burrata. This is a fresh Italian cheese, originally from Apulia (the boot…
Interesting how a good TV writing team can really spruce something up. The book is good — particularly the voice — but the show is amazing.
Here we are at the sixth Ultimate Pizza post. My neck is all knotted up from this much obsession. Earlier in the series were Dough, Pesto, Sauce, Toppings, and New Years Pizza. Since we had a lot of dough balls,…
Finally, five posts later, we come to the main event, the Ultimate Pizza. This post is pretty epic, but just to recap. We set the stage with articles on the Dough, the Pesto, the Sauce, and the Topping Preparation. Now…