dresese

A Scanner Darkly Trailer

Check out the new trailer for Linklater's adaptation of Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly. It looks incredible!

Dumpling House

In my continuing quest for great dumplings, I ate at Dumpling House in Chinatown yesterday. It is renowned for being very good, and very cheap. Five dumplings cost $1. To my surprise, it also had sesame bread, which I used to eat at the Halal Chinese places in the Bay Area. I had my camera with me and took a few pictures, but I was so hungry I didn't even remember to take pictures until I had devoured a significant portion of my food. I also neglected to take a picture of the restaurant. Bad blogger, bad!

They had two kinds of sesame bread, the plain (the uneaten one on top), and a meat and vegetable filled one (filled after baking). I saw how they made it, which is basically by frying it on a huge griddle. It was quite tasty, just as good as the ones in California.

The vegetable boiled dumplings, 8 for $2.00:

Finally, the fried pork & chive dumplings. They were wonderfully crispy, and succulent on the inside. Great stuff. There are five initially, two were already eaten.

Although it is cheap and good, which seems like a magic combination, it is a small restaurant with seats for 4 or 5 people. Plus, the service is horrible, you almost have to grab someone to take your order. People regularly will come up to the counter where you order, and order ahead of you, even though you've been waiting a while. A friend of mine tells me it's just like in China, you just have to push your way in and shout your order. It kind of reminds me of how you order at Shalimar in San Francisco.

Vacation blog

My friend (and fellow ex-Intraspecter) Mike, and his girlfriend Beth are going on a 4 month trip to South America. He's starting a blog about it. The idea of these temporary blogs, to follow one personal or public issue that has a limited shelf-life is an interesting one, and I think we'll see more of it.

Maharaja Sweets & Snacks

As I mentioned in a previous post, I recently ate with my friend Ben at Maharaja in Jackson Heights. I went back there myself yesterday to try a few more dishes. One that looked good last time was a Chana Masala made with pomegranate. When I ordered it, the waiter asked me if I wanted it spicy, and I said yes, very spicy. It was indeed very spicy when I tried it. The pomegranate was subtle, only present for a bit before the rest of the flavors took over. It was delicious, and was by far the most flavorful chana masala I've had. Then again, I usually stay away from that dish, since it tends to be bland. The nan and tandoori roti I ordered with it was decent, but unspectacular.

I also ordered some chaat, but I cannot remember the name of what I got. But here it is: chickpeas, yogurt, chutney, and some eggplant on bottom. It was spicy, tangy, and slightly sweet. Wonderful!

Rickshaw Dumpling Bar

There is a distinct lack of nice food in the 1-block radius of my office. All there is are chain restaurants. Maffei Pizza is good, but that's about it, and even there is almost exclusively take-out. So I was excited in November to hear that a new restaurant called Rickshaw Dumpling Bar is opening a block north of our office. Not only an interesting sounding restaurant, but dumplings! I love dumplings! And there is no dumpling activity even remotely near my office. I couldn't wait.

So, in November, I went over and checked it out. It was still closed. I went back in late November. Still closed. I went back a few times in December. Still closed. In January, it was still closed. Then I hear it is supposed to open in February on the first Monday. I go there with some coworkers, but it is closed. Someone with a video camera is there, and tells me it will be open at the end of the week. I go back on Friday, and there is a sign saying it will be open next week. I know other people are frustrated because when I'm looking at that sign, other people stop by, look at the sign, and mutter some curses. Then I hear definitely it will open on Thursday next week. So I go there, and it is indeed open, and the line is so long, they tell me it is closed for lunch due to the backup.

So, Friday, I went back early with coworkers and got there when there was no crowd. They had several types of dumplings, and you could get each dumpling steamed or fried, and with a salad or in a soup. I got vegetarian dumplings, fried, in a soup.

The dumplings were great, perfectly seasoned, with a thin well-made wrapping. They could have been more fried, but it was no big deal. The soup was less good, and needed more salt at the least. But the service was quick and efficient.

When we finished, the line was huge. Now I know, go before 12:30.

One more interesting thing. The woman I saw before with the camera was there today too, filming the workers. Evidently this is part of some MTV reality-show about immigrants' first years in the country, and they are filming one of the workers specifically.

Two meals with Ben

My friend Ben has moved back to New York, from LA. Last week we celebrated his arrival by eating at Cheburechnaya (see Ben's blogging of this). Yesterday we went to Jackson Heights, and tried two places I've never been, "Desi Chinese Palace", and "Maharaja Sweets and Snacks". At the former, an outpost of the omnipresent "Kebab King", we had some tandoori beef called Bihari (which I've never seen before), and the typical Desi Chinese-style "Cauliflower Manchurian". They also had another type of cuisine I've never seen before, but it was not currently ready yet. The owner described it as huge meatballs, although there seemed to be some items of that cuisine that could not fit that description, such as steamed chicken. Everything was excellent except for the service, which was fairly awful. At the sweet shop, we got a selection of Indian sweets, and some Bhel Puri. One of my co-workers, on trying that dish for the first time at another restuarant, said that Bhel Puri was like "wet, spicy trail mix". Looking at their menu, it seems full of wonderful vegetarian dishes - several types of Chaat, a Chana Masala with pomegranate, three types of Dal, including a black dal, and many other items. I'm going to have to go back there. Finally, we had a Paan, a betel leaf wrapping a variety of ingredients, including a seed mixture, a rose water-based paste, coconut, and two types of betelnut. Wonderful, and only a dollar.

ido.el

I just discovered the wonderful emacs package ido.el. It works sort of like the wonderful Mac app Quicksilver. It is used in both buffer-switching and file-finding, and offers as-you-type auto-completion. This will be in the next version of emacs, but for right now you can download it from the link above. I like it a lot, so if you use emacs, I encourage you to try it.

Worst Nightmare

At the gym today, I passed by a television screen which had a morning talk-show look, and had a show title on the bottom of the screen: "Teenage Binge Drinking: A Mother's Worst Nightmare". I wondered if this really was the worst nightmare a mother could have. If a mother came home to find her entire family gruesomely murdered, with blood everywhere, I wonder if she would say to herself "Yeah, that's bad, but at least there was no binge drinking".

Frank Chu Pub Crawl

This is too good to be just in a comment. Marcus Ronaldi writes in about a Frank Chu-themed pub crawl. If only I lived by San Francisco still...

February 05, 2005 - 02:33 PM More on the Frank Chu Pub Crawl

The Frank Chu Pub Crawl and March will be on Saturday February 12th at 12 Noon. We will meet at the Powell Street Cable Car Turnaround.

We will be identified by the group with the Frank Chu signs. The path will be up Powell to a bar in Union Square (the choice will be based on the size of the group) Then we will go to Union Square to hear some speeches.

We will turn at Sutter and then go up Grant and then through Northbeach and end up at Fisherman's Wharf and maybe have some regular beers on Pier 39. It will all be worth it if some perplexed tourist in Fisherman's Wharf goes back and tells that people in San Francisco are protesting some elaborate Intergalactic conspiracy.

Bring either a sign (make your own or buy one from Frank) or a camera

RSVP for those on Tribe Frankchumarch2.notlong.com/

RSVP for those not on Tribe Frankchumarch1.notlong.com

I'm anxiously awaiting pictures. In fact, I think I'll send this to my friend Eric, who takes pictures of protests in San Francisco.

Vanity Fair

I evidently didn't take a long break from reading fiction, because I just recently finished reading Vanity Fair. I figured since I just read Thackeray's Barry Lyndon, I should read Thackeray's most well-known work. I'm glad I did. The book was often funny, very insightful, and occasionally romantic. Due to reading Barry Lyndon, I had no idea how it would proceed, since that book was so negative. Vanity Fair shares the same cynicism, but also has some more light-heartedness and a major characters who aren't complete jerks. I'm trying to get my wife to read it now, I think she would enjoy it.

The strange thing about the book is that one of the main characters is named Becky Sharp, and I'm pretty sure I knew someone by that name in my class in high school. Or maybe I'm just imagining things.

Also of note is that part of a passage from Vanity Fair gets used in Kubrick's film Barry Lyndon:

Here, before long, Becky received not only "the best" foreigners (as the phrase is in our noble and admirable society slang), but some of the best English people too. I don't mean the most virtuous, or indeed the least virtuous, or the cleverest, or the stupidest, or the richest, or the best born, but "the best,"--in a word, people about whom there is no question--such as the great Lady Fitz-Willis, that Patron Saint of Almack's, the great Lady Slowbore, the great Lady Grizzel Macbeth (she was Lady G. Glowry, daughter of Lord Grey of Glowry), and the like.

It's a great little passage, but one that I don't quite get. Perhaps that society is too foriegn to me.

Now, I'm turning my attentions back to non-fiction, and am reading Collapse, a book about how societies are destroyed (by environmental issues, among other things). I also borrowed the same author's other famous work Guns, Germs, and Steel, which everyone I know has read and enjoyed. So I guess I should read it too.