Yelp East Bay Review of the Day

So I woke up this morning to find my inbox filled with "new compliments" from fellow yelpers. I couldn't understand why until I visited the site. To my surprise, my review of Berkeley Bowl has won the auspicious "Review of the Day" award for the East Bay.

I really like Yelp. I find Yelp to be a valuable asset, and is in large part a reason I think the Internet can be used for good. I'm all for a site that promotes "amateur journalism" or media egalitarianism or whatever you want to call it. The truth is that I've found some paid columnists who write on food in the Bay Area to be full of shit, while I've found some Yelp reviews to be honest, balanced and accurate, touching on things that major media publications either can't or won't touch on. Yelp has provided some make or break information when I'm considering patronizing a business, or not. When three Yelpers who don't seem to know each other all give accounts of how they found a dirty sock in their split pea soup or whatever, I'm probably going to pass on it.

My own reviews on yelp aren't without some amount of flippancy (see my review of Hot Topic), but that's how I roll. Some peeps give me props, some peeps give me grief.

Beer I Like (Entry the 1st)

Here's another entry whereby I thrust upon you good people some of the highest achievements of mankind (if you missed the one on Leonard Nimoy's LP, do yourself and all your friends a favor by buying ten copies of it and giving nine of them away).

Anyone who knows me in real life knows that I drink quite a bit of beer.  I don't drink it to get drunk, but I confess that's a "happy accident" if I'm in no mood to be reasonable and deal with the travails or even minor setbacks of life in a sober mindset.  Here's the part where I quote some genius of times past who all but credited beer for enabling them to trail blaze some new mode of human thought or invent something really functional that changed the world without fucking up the environment, but I'll spare you all the intellectual gymnastics because it's overkill when talking about something as awesome as beer.  Beer doesn't need it.  Beer--at least good beer--is a thing of variable complexity but the reason for its value couldn't be more simple: it tastes good and in the best cases, makes you feel good.  

So here's the first of what I hope will be many entries of beer I like.  And the winner is....

I was only recently turned on to Shiner Bock.  I went down to visit a friend in Austin, Texas where Shiner beers are kind of everywhere the way Sierra Nevada is here in California.  Only the company has been around much longer and though they don't seem to have major distribution, they seem to be popular in other states besides Texas.

According to the bottle, bock was brewed in Germany "to celebrate the arrival of spring," but I seem to remember reading that it was also brewed during winter solstice and Christmas.  I can see the reason for the seasonal versatility.  Though I haven't tasted a whole lot of bocks, Shiner's just as good on the cold nights here in the Bay Area as it was on the scorching days and nights in Texas over the summer.  

So here's the rundown:

The carbonation is pretty moderate and it has a really dry feel to it, making it kind of crisp.  If complexity is your thing, Shiner will probably bore you.  It's about a medium dark beer with a medium body, which is probably why it's so good on a cold night, but hints of caramel give it a sweetness that's damn good during the summer.  This is balanced out with some a delicious roasted malt flavor and a pretty sharp aftertaste. 

The biggest problem I've found with Shiner Bock is that though it doesn't contain a ton of alcohol (4.40% abv), it's so easily drinkable that a hangover is the next logical step, so watch it.  

It's not the best stuff in the world.  I like Shiner Bock a lot because of its quality for the price (around $6-$7) and because it doesn't give me that "beer coma" if I have one after work but before dinner.

Get some.

The Two Sides of Leonard Nimoy

Here are the two sides of the "Two Sides of Leonard Nimoy" sleeve:
















Side one of the LP is written from the perspective of Spock, while side 2 is straight up 60's folk-pop with a couple standards popular at that time.

I have to admit that I've seen maybe a total of two episodes of Star Trek and probably just as many of the films, so I'm no trekkie. But I am occasionally drawn to some good, old fashion American camp and the fact is that a couple songs I've heard off of the album are pretty catchy even when unintentionally hilarious.

The track, "Highly Illogical" opens the album and can be heard on Leonard Nimoy's myspace page for anyone curious. It's basically a song written from the perspective of Spock, who is incredulous but calm as he outlines a number of observed contradictions in human behavior.

Need...

In Memoriam James Crumley

One of my favorite writers of hard boiled fiction--hell, one of my favorite writers in general--died almost two months ago and I've just learned about it now. It seems that James Crumley has passed away rather quietly, a direct contrast to the years of hard drinking, hard living and turbulence that preceded his death.

Crumley's novel, The Last Good Kiss, totally upended my naive, unfounded prejudice towards genre fiction and kick started a fascination with the sordidness, the betrayal and disillusionment coupled with an extraordinary command of language and sense of plot structure--in short, with all the best things that characterize kick ass Crime Fiction. His body of work will continue to occupy the highest precincts of the genre, and his novels had such an impact on me personally that I'm almost envious of the perhaps unsuspecting readers who continue to pick up his books for the first time.

Crumley's work is popularly characterized as a a Chandler-meets-Hunter S. Thompson, and I guess that's fair. He certainly shared HST's sardonic worldview in the Vietnam and post-Vietnam eras, and traces of it are present up through the next three decades. His characters often masked the painful pasts of their lives with mistrust and sardonicism, but the memories of personal hell almost always manifest themselves somehow. Chandler's marvelously erratic characters are always humming away somewhere underneath, but unlike both Chandler and HST, Crumley himself managed to possess both unprecedented talent while being criminally overlooked by major book reviewers and critics. He has no bestsellers. He isn't celebrated much outside the peripheries of the genre in which he wrote, but I hope that someday he will be. Almost all of his books are in print here in the U.S, but as is the case of other outstanding American writers of Detective/Crime Fiction like Dashiell Hammett, Ross MacDonald and Charles Willeford, Crumley has gained greater respect in France and the UK than he has in his own country.

Speaking even as someone who's read everything the man's ever published, it's no surprise that I've only learned of his passing now. He has no biographer, and I've come across only one printed interview in a very hard to find collection of short stories. Very little exists online except for a handful of book reviews and a couple of fan websites that haven't been updated in years.

Ever since becoming a fan of his work, I've entertained the notion of spending a week or so in Missoula, Montana hanging out at Charlie B's--a bar Crumley was known to have frequented--with the hope that he'd walk in for a drink. I'm sorry I never made the trip (Missoula is beautiful country anyway), but his books will be on my shelf until my time comes, and I have no doubt that I'll find new reasons to enjoy them for years to come.

RIP James Crumley

More on Oakland/Prop 8

I was looking for videos on youtube to supplement the very serious, thoughtful blog I posted earlier today.   Nothing up yet, but I did find a video posted by a guy a couple weeks ago who went down to MacArthur and Lakeshore to ask questions of protestors from both sides.  I had a lot of faith that Prop 8 would fail, and though it was disappointing when it passed, I took comfort in the hope that I will live to someday see an end to this ridiculous bigotry.  This is a major setback, but I'm confident that 8 will be defeated in years to come.  

However, after talking with a few friends who share my beliefs on the issue, and then reading smug, hyer-moralistic commentaries which indicate that it wasn't intolerance and discrimination that was responsible for 8's passing, but God's will, I'm finding myself pretty angry.  More serious and thoughtful commentary that isn't the least bit snarky below the video:

- First thing's first, and this has to be said: Jesus Christ!  I didn't know Jabba the Hut's sister lived in Oakland (see 1:40-2:20).  The guy asks her what her "position" on 8 is, and the answer is definitely "sitting down,"  preferably with a small trash can filled with buffalo wings, two buckets of Halloween candy, eight orders of bread sticks and a jar of mayonnaise.  What car does she ride in?  On a side note, I hope she's not in a wheelchair.  If she is, I'm pretty sure I'm going to hell.

- It's hard to tell, but a couple of the pro-8 people in this video appear to be Mexican-American.  I may be wrong, but riding on that, hispanics as a group have a history of mostly voting Republican and being pretty conservative when it comes to politics that conflict with  the views of the Roman Catholic Church (results show that 53% of the Hispanic vote was for 8).  At the risk of making an already volatile situation worse, if I were the guy holding the camera, I might ask these people how they stand on proposed legislation against amnesty for illegal immigrants already here, the vast majority of which are from Mexico (everyone remember Prop 187?).  

I want to make it clear that I'm not trying to belittle the struggles of people who come here illegally because they have no alternative.  I'm aware that the right to health care carries a lot more weight than the right to marry.  I want to be clear on that, but I think it's a relevant question simply because it has to do with two wedge issues concerning two separate groups that are historically discriminated against in this country.  No, opposition to granting illegals an easy path to citizenship doesn't have anything to do with core values.  The arguments from both sides have to do with economics in the best cases and race in some of the other ones.  But I wonder where these core values that dictate who can and can't get married come from.

The answer should be obvious, but let's see what these pro-8 people have to say:

"It's all about family with us."

"The state of California has always been a man and woman state"

"(It doesn't) just (affect us) directly, but for the future of the kids.  It's important."

"A man and a man and a woman and a woman is not okay.  It's not good."

"God ordained marriage between a man and a woman."

"If gay men are approved, no more children in California."

Just a geyser of eloquence, huh?  I really feel bad for the one anti-8 guy who's making an attempt at dialogue with these people (5:12-6:58), but I think their "arguments" make it a lost cause.  It's a sad state of affairs when we have to try and elicit real answers from tired old slogans or just sheer nonsense ("...no more children in California").  I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that the "values" that these people espouse can be traced to a belief in God.  

I'm a man, so I'm naturally a polytheist (my spiritual realm consists of Me and My Penis), but as a general rule, God has a talent for really fucking up the machine that is U.S. politics, and we should try and avoid any talk of God when there's no place for it, specifically those things we like to call our individual rights as Americans.  This is coming from a straight man who will be a bachelor 'til the day I die, but I've always maintained that anyone who wants to make the mistake of getting married should be able to.  My father was a divorce attorney and peoples' lives (straight mens' particularly; sorry, but I have to say it because it's true) get fucking WRECKED by failed marriages.  That's my soapbox moment.

- To the woman who went out to protest in defiance of the epithets she heard when getting home from work (4:29), I salute you.  There's a word for what you have and it's called integrity.  I wish more people had it.

Anti-Prop 8 Protesters Target Oakland Mormon Temple

According to an SF Gate post a little more than a half hour ago, a few hundred folks have come out to the Oakland hills en masse to protest the church's role in providing the Yes on Prop 8 campaign with millions of dollars.  I have to confess that my applause for the protestors is silenced and overridden by a sense of wonder at the fact that the Oakland Mormon Temple is finally the site of something relevant.

See, I've always been curious about it.  When I was a wee child, I thought it was Disneyland, and my Mom was always quick to correct me.  The temple can be seen from just about any part of Oakland, and it's not a little curious that in a city that is predominantly black and non-Mormon, one of the most prominent, spurious presences day or night should be a massive, white, phallic Mormon church.  It's kind of like walking into a Synagogue and telling everyone your name is Adolph.  That might not be the best simile, but apparently good similes are taking Sundays off for awhile. I've come across two bad ones this morning and I'm not having much luck either.

But perhaps more ironic is the fact that the Mormon Church, which is widely known to have a few unconventional marriage practices of their own--polygamy and child marriages and the wearing of weird underwear--has spent millions of dollars on a campaign to keep the traditional definition of marriage in place.

In any case, I'm glad to see that the OMT is making headlines, perhaps nationally.  We have this beautiful, majestic piece of architecture that overlooks the city, but its occupants are really out of place.  The world needs to know that it's going to waste.  People might finally wake up and say, "What the fuck?  Remind me again why that's NOT a roller rink!"

"A roller rink, you say?  Why a roller rink?"  Need I remind you that roller rinks today are just as awesome as they were in 1978, but a lot more rare?  Where's your head at?

For those of you who don't know, Oakland has been a hot spot for the revival of what is probably the greatest sport of all time: roller derby.  

Why roller derby has never been made an olympic sport, I'll never know.  It's traditionally consisted of young women on rollerskates wearing short shorts trying to physically best one another by knocking their opponents over.  Plus, they have really kick ass names--Lemmy Chokeya, Jennacologist and Jane Hammer to take a few from the Oakland Outlaws roster.  I've searched and searched, and I'm convinced that life offers few things that are better than roller derby.  And before the sexist card is pulled, allow me to point a couple of things out: First, most of the leagues today are run by women and are not-for-profit.  The roller girls do it out of love.  

Secondly, a handful of leagues are co-ed .  That means men knock down women and women get to knock down men.  Put that in your hyper-sensitive feminist agenda pipe and smoke it.  Your gender politics are null and void, because that's equality in action!

It's my understanding that a major hurtle for the Bay Area Derby Girls organization has been finding a fixed place to compete.  I seem to remember reading some time back that they were competing at Dry Ice, but the maximum capacity wasn't big enough for the massive crowds coming out, and it was deemed a fire hazard by the Oakland FD.  

How awesome would it be if the inside of what is presently known as the Oakland Mormon Temple looked like this:

                       

I admit that the gay marriage issue is the more pressing one, but I think running the mormons and their institution of bigotry out of Oakland for a higher, more awesome purpose (complete with daytime matinees and beer on tap) should be next on the agenda.

A belated congratulations to the Oakland Outlaws, who pwned their way through the 2008 season and are this year's champions.