Invasion of the Mountain Tortoises

What sources do you count on for national news coverage?  How about international and local news?

CNN is a colossal waste of time, but I watch it in the morning as the least inane of a bunch of bad choices.  CNN just has WAY too much hype and too little news.   Plus, they are constantly reporting things as "breaking news" that either aren't newsworthy to a national/international audience or the story hasn't developed yet and they're just speculating on what might happen.

I now turn to BBC for most international news.  I watch Keith Olbermann on MSNBC's Countdown as a replacement for typical nightly news.

What are your Major League Baseball playoff predictions?

As a native Bostonian, it is highly likely that the Red Sox will disappoint.

Do you have a green thumb?

When it comes to growing culinary herbs, I'm pretty good.  Maybe too good since my mint began to overrun everything else before I pulled it all out.  But, when it comes to hydrangeas, I have no skill whatsoever.  I'm to the point where I won't even buy them any more since they're just doomed as soon as they go into the ground.

What do you have, what do you need and what do you want?
Submitted by Miss Scotch.

I have a wonderful, loving wife.
I need to exercise more.
I want to win the grand prize in tomorrow's Powerball drawing.

Should driving while talking on a cell phone be outlawed? 
Submitted by Soup.  

Probably, but if we're going to do that we should be consistent and ban a whole host of other activities while driving. 

To the extent driving is really piloting a multi-thousand pound projectile through a series of obstacles, including follow humans, drivers should focus on this activity with 100% of their concentration.  That clearly wasn't happening even before cell phones.  If we're really focused on safety, we should ban audio systems in cars since they are both a distraction and an impediment to hearing dangers like trains and emergency vehicles.  And we should also ban eating and drinking in cars since those are also distractions from the task at hand.  And while we're focused on keeping drivers focused on the life-critical task of driving, we should ban roadside display advertising (billboards) since they are also designed to take the driver's attention away from what he/she is doing.

You can see where this is going...

Ultimately, regardless of the actions taken, there will be drivers who take their task seriously and those who don't and present a danger to others.  I'm not convinced that banning cell phone conversations will accomplish much at all.  Heck, I remember loud arguments with my sister in the back seat of the family car while we were kids, and I'm sure that was much more distracting to our parents than any cell phone conversations they might have had.

You could argue that tasks that involve reading should be banned while driving.  These could include dialing a cellphone (make people get/use voice-activated dialing), reading, and text messaging.  I'm not sure these bans would be all that much more effective in promoting safety, but at least they would be more narrowly targeted on tasks that are impossible for most drivers to perform safely.

When we were in Las Vegas, we went to the Wynn Buffet.  OK, we went twice, but there's a reason for that other than a combination of indecision and gluttony (which is the whole idea behind buffets anyway).

The first time we went was with Karen's cousin Tara and her boyfriend Damien.  The four of us wanted to have lunch, I wanted Asian food, and Tara and Damien didn't.  The buffet seemed like a good way to keep everyone happy, and it was.  The four of us got in line and waited to get into the brunch seating; they've got a theme park-style serpentine line that doesn't really fool anyone into thinking that it's going to be a short wait; on the other hand if the line were straight, it would have stretched halfway across the casino.

After about 45 minutes or so, we made it to the front of the line and were seated.  It doesn't look like a big place, but its appearance from the outside is deceiving; there's a lot of seating capacity, so that explains why the line moved with reasonable speed.  We opted to forego the bloody mary/champagne option and go for the $28 buffet.  The food was good, and there was a wide variety, everything from sushi and ceviche to Mexican, Italian, and buffet standbys like prime rib.  There was also a good dessert selection, and being a sucker for sugar cookies, I liked their version (chewy); the oatmeal raisin cookies on the other hand were kind of dry and not as good a choice.

OK, so we had a good lunch, but we didn't expect to go back.  Until the next day... when the casino comped us a free buffet meal.  We tried to get the dollar value assigned to another restaurant, but they wouldn't budge.  So, it looked like our last meal before heading to the airport would be a buffet dinner.

The dinner buffet is a lot like the brunch, but with a few exceptions.  First, and most popular, is that they have King Crab.  Giant crab legs.  As if they were caught near some underwater nuclear facility.  And the patrons devour them.  each crab leg is about 2 feet long (way bigger than the plates) and people come back with piles of them.  I had three and felt like a pig, but I was peckish compared to most there.  People like to feel like they're getting a deal, and stuffing oneself with crab makes the $38 buffet seem like a great value.  Unfortunately, I couldn't help thinking that this type of thinking and these type of buffets must mean that in 20 years there will be no more crabs (or maybe much else from the oceans).  Maybe I've watched the Deadliest Catch too often, but it seems like the Wynn buffet in a couple of hours uses as much crab as one of those boats catches in a year.  Yikes!  I hope I'm mistaken, but I fear that I am not.

They have a lot of delicious different foods at the dinner buffet.  Karen and my favorite was probably the Indian-spiced chickpeas, though Karen liked it over Basmati rice while I favored short grain Japanese rice; it was spicy and delicious.  The mahi mahi with mango and edamame was perfectly cooked, moist, and delicious.  For those with a shrimp cocktail fetish (count me in), the shrimp were big and tasty and the cocktail sauce was a good match.  They had at least four different varieties of ceviche, and I liked the octopus/watermelon best (though it was spicier and better at lunch than at dinner).

The Kobe meatballs in marinara were disappointing because they tasted like... meatballs in marinara.  I've seen this at some fancy Italian restaurants, and I'm glad I won't get suckered in when there are better choices.  Also, the sushi, which was said to use the same fish as their fancy Japanese restaurant, was OK, but no better than I would expect buffet sushi to be. 

For dessert, I stuck with the sugar cookie (still good), while Karen could have her favorite, Bananas Foster.  She feared it would have too much rum, but it didn't, and she was happy (she didn't go all they way and have it a la mode, though).  :(

With visions of George Costanza gorging himself on shrimp (so he could get off his "jerk store" comeback), all I can say is get your crab now, while there's still some left in the ocean and before you have to take your grandkids to the "All You Can Eat Surimi Buffet".

This past weekend, we stayed at the Wynn Hotel in Las Vegas.  Unsurprisingly, we got a craving for Asian food during our visit, so we decided to give Red 8 another shot.

The first time we stayed at the Wynn (relatively shortly after they opened), we tried eating at Red 8.  That time didn't go so well.  In fact, we didn't end up eating there at all!  Our experience that time started with us queuing up for a table.  The restaurant is right next to the casino floor, and it was strange to be in a long line of people waiting for a table; it seems like a natural for them to use those little pagers that they have at Chili's, Outback, and even restaurants at the MGM so patrons can be gambling (losing) money while they're waiting for a table.  Alas, this was not the case.  So, we waited.  Finally we were seated and shown to a table.  Unfortunately, no one ever came to even take so much as a drink order.  After ten solid minutes of sitting there... we left.  I've never been so ignored in a restaurant.  And it didn't seem as if the waitstaff was overtaxed by the number of customers; it just seemed like they'd never been trained.  So, despite the intriguing southeast Asian menu, we left and went to Daniel Boulud Brasserie (which was fantastic, but that might have been the wine talking).

OK, fast forward two years.  Not being one to hold a grudge, we went to see if they'd gotten the kinks worked out.  We showed up about 11:45 am, about 15 minutes after opening.  We were seated immediately since there was no wait, and given both a regular menu and a dim sum order sheet (they do dim sum from 11:30-3:00, at least on weekends, maybe every day).  The first thing I noticed was the uncomfortable chairs.  They're wicker without cushions (hard) and the angle of the back makes leaning back awkward, so you sort of have to perch on them.  And we waited.  Uh-oh, here we go again.  Fortunately, the wait wasn't that long and our waiter ("Joe", though the waiter name on our actual bill was a Chinese name) showed up and took our drink orders; he seemed conscientious enough, and I cut him some slack since he appeared to be the only waiter on duty serving about 8-10 tables.

But then I noticed that he was not alone.  Every corner where I looked had a staff member.  Some were dressed in waiter outfits, while others simply wore black t-shirts.  The odd thing was that none of them seemed to be doing anything; they lurked in corners, chatted and laughed, and wandered into and out of sight. They did the strangest things.  One just walked a lap around the restaurant and returned to his corner without refilling a glass or talking to anyone; he was a big white guy and if I didn't know better he looked like a bouncer; maybe the dim sum crowd gets rowdy.  The same guy then came to a waiter/bus station near our table, picked up a tray, put the tray back, and walked back into the shadows.  At one point, I think I counted nine floor staff for about 20 tables, with most of them doing nothing.  The woman who seated us was taking orders and filling water glasses.  It was if everyone had some mysterious set of assignments and couldn't help anyone else.

At one point, I ran out of iced tea, and we waited to see how long it would take to refill it.  About 3-5 minutes, later, a staffer (not our waiter, but someone with the nametag "Tin") came by and offered to refill my tea.  He also asked if he could refill my wife's Diet Coke, but she said she was OK.  That was good.   Then our waiter (Joe, not Tin) came by to offer to refill my glass.  I told him that someone else was already working on it, and he looked perplexed.  I told him that the man's name was Tin, and he looked at me as if he'd never heard of him.  Joe ran off, said something to one of the other busboy/bouncers, and disappeared.  Promptly, Tin returned with my iced tea, and asked my wife again if she'd like her Diet Coke refilled; she thought that was odd since she'd told him "no" about two minutes earlier, but at least it was an attempt at service.  We were very lucky to have Joe and Tin.  Other customers waited much longer for service than we did.

OK, what about the food?  It was good, yet unsatisfying at the same time.  I'm not sure how that's possible, but that's what it seemed like to me.  A good example was the baked BBQ pork buns, one of my wife's favorites.  The pastry was fantastic, but the filling was strangely bland.  The turnip "cake" tasted good, but was lukewarm at best (not good when we're ordering from the kitchen and not carts).  The har gow and shumai were very good, as was the fried taro.  My feeling leaving the place was that it was just OK, despite being technically better than our local Memphis dim sum,  the overall effect lost something in translation.  And, being the Wynn (home of the $9 tin of Reese's Pieces), it was expensive; probably about twice as much as our usual dim sum which the locals find somewhat expensive.

Would I go back?  No.  The Grand Wok at MGM has much better food, more variety, and infinitely better service.  Red 8 seemed very representative of a lot of our experience at the Wynn -- it was nice, but not a very good value and not as nice as they seem to think it is.

But, at least we actually made it through a meal this time.

Did you go to summer camp?  Which one?  What did you enjoy doing? 
Submitted by Something Else.

I did go to summer camp.  I didn't enjoy it very much, but my favorite parts were learning to sail and learning to shoot a rifle.

What are the 10 foods you must have in your refrigerator and/or your kitchen cabinet? 
Submitted by Carol.  

Tabasco Sauce
Short-grain white rice (preferably Koshi-Hikari)
Original Boca Burgers
Soy Milk (preferably Vanilla artificially sweetened)
Kashi Go Lean Crunch cereal
Frozen Buffalo Chicken Tenders
Kosher Hot Dogs
Sweet Hot Mustard
Pita bread or flour tortillas (either would work)
Napa cabbage kimchi

Of course, with my wife doing almost all the cooking, she runs the kitchen now, so we have whatever she likes to cook best.

Which friend or acquaintance most influenced your taste in music? 
Submitted by Rev Stan.

My case is a tie.

The first is one of my college friends, Bill.  Bill has been a passionate music fan ever since I first met him, and he's even parlayed that passion into a job (he reviews Music as part of his job with a Cape Cod newspaper).  Bill expanded my musical horizons, tried to get me to appreciate reggae (sorry that one never took), and got me interested in the local music scene in Boston.  Even today, I always check out his column for interesting new music.

The second is my friend Leslie.  When we lived down in the Bay Area, she introduced me to groups like the Pixies, Replacements, They Might Be Giants, and Too Much Joy who remain favorites to this day.  Much of the music on my iPod today is from groups that Leslie first introduced me to (but I found Barenaked Ladies myself!).  :)