Cheap Eats New York: Part 2
As a follow up to my Asian Cheap Eats restaurants in New York, here is my list of other top Cheap Eats in Manhattan:
- Tia Pol. 10th Ave. between 21st and 22nd St. Authentic Spanish tapas, good tortilla, always winning specials, and surprisingly, a good place for brunch.
- BLT Burger. 6th Ave. between 10th and 11th St. Another winner in Laurant Tournondel’s growing empire, BLT Burger serves up several kinds of burgers including an American Kobe burger and a good lamb burger. Is it better than Corner Bistro? That’s a tough call.
- Taco Taco. 2nd Ave. between 89th and 90th St. You wouldn’t expect this festive looking neighborhood Mexican restaurant to be anything extraordinary, but repeated visits reveal Taco Taco to be better than your average taco place. Try the fish tacos if they have them as a special.
- Mary’s Fish Camp. W4th St. and Charles St. Barely qualifying as “cheap” ($50 for dinner for two), this restaurant wins the battle for best New England seafood shack posing as a New York restaurant over such competition as Pearl Oyster Bar and Ed’s Lobster Bar. Mary’s has great fried seafood and the best lobster roll in the city.
- Kefi. W79th St. between Broadway and Amsterdam. Quality home-style Greek food at diner prices. Rabbit pasta is the standout dish.
Book review: Twice Around the Bases by Kevin Kennedy
A few years ago I read somewhere on the web about the stages of thought that you go through as a fan of Moneyball and a student of sabermetrics (of which I am both), equivalent to the stages of grief. I don’t remember all of the stages nor can I find the list on the web, but I remember that after bitterly complaining about the idiocy of those who don’t agree with the Moneyball philosophy comes acceptance and then appreciation of the “small ball” opinions of these individuals. I’m in that stage now. Twice Around the Bases was written in 2005 by former manager and current Fox pre-game show host Kevin Kennedy, who I knew was decidedly “old school” when it comes to how to manage a baseball team.
Kennedy grew up watching the game in the 1960s, then was a coach in the Dodger organization in the 1980s when teams, especially in the National League, had great success stealing bases. His ideas about how the game should be played reflect that background. He devotes an entire chapter of the book to “The Importance of the Running Game.” What he fails to understand is simple mathematics, as he says: “You’ve got the remember that for every run you put up there, your opponent has to score two to beat you.” Wow. So if his team scores four runs, the other team needs eight runs to win. And this quote on whether or not someone will ever hit .400 again for a season is at least a more common idea but still a fallacy in logic: “I think Barry Bonds has the tools to hit .400, but he simply won’t get the opportunity because of the way they pitch him.” With “the way they pitch him” meaning all the walks he gets. What Mr. Kennedy and others fail to understand is that the chances of hitting .400 increase the less at-bats a player has. More walks means less at-bats means a greater chance to have a higher deviation from the mean.
Thankfully the book was not centered around managerial strategy and instead the first half of the book focused on the author’s own career as a coach and how he got to be a manager and what it takes to remain a manager. Tales of how the author was hired and why he was fired bring to light just how much of an “old boys” network the baseball circles really are. A chapter on “The Old Latin American Winter Leagues” is the most insightful and interesting chapter. His stories and experiences from his time spent playing and managing in several different Latin American countries in the late 70s and 80s brings insight into that aspect of the game that I had never encountered before, as it gets little to no press here in the States.
A chapter about “The Most Important Positions on the Field” are little league material they are so obvious, and chapters about the greatest players the author has ever seen do not shed any new light on these players.
Rating: 4 out of 10.
TV review: Code Monkeys
The animated comedy series Code Monkeys began airing on the G4 network this past summer. I’m not entirely sure how I heard about it or found it, as the primarily video game focused G4 network is not a channel I even knew that my cable company carried before discovering Code Monkeys. The gimmick of the show makes and instant impression, and the laughs kept me coming back for more. The show’s gimmick is the animation. The animation is in the style of a 1980’s Nintendo video game, complete with a status bar on the top of the screen showing a score and health meter, and a bar on the bottom of the screen saying either “Code Monkeys” or some other short phrase relevant to the current situation of the episode.
The show centers around the activities of characters working at a video game company in the early 1980s called Game-a-Vision (as in Activision or Colecovision). The first episode features Steve Wozniak as the owner of GameaVision who decides to sell the company in order to start a new company called Apple. He sells the company to a Texas oil millionaire named Larrity who knows nothing about video games. Hilarity ensues.
Many of the laughs come simply from the interaction of the low-brow and over-the-top actions of the characters, who purposely fit into rigid stereotypes. Larrity is the gun-loving Texas cowboy, Dave and Jerry are the slacker game programmers, one of whom is pure id and the other having a conscience. Todd is the programmer who plays Dungeons & Dragons and reads Lord of the Rings. Mary is the sole female programmer trying to prove herself in a man’s world.
Of the 13 episodes comprising Season One, I found myself really enjoying the first eight episodes before the laughs began tailing off a bit in the final 5 episodes. Some of the best episodes incorporate 1980’s themes, such as GameaVision acquiring the rights to develop a game based on the movie E.T. or an entire episode based around the plot of the movie Just One of the Guys. Some of the situations in the later episodes, such as wrestler Andre the Giant having good ideas for games and the resurfacing of Adolph Hitler’s family, just don’t come across as funny. But the episodes that are funny are laugh-out-loud funny. And I look forward to rewatching those episodes over and over again before they (hopefully) make another season.
Rating for the first eight episodes: 9 out of 10.
Rating for the last five episodes: 6 out of 10.
Comic book review: Civil War: Captain America
Collecting issues #22-24 of Captain America and the Winder Solider: Winter Kills special, Civil War: Captain America focuses more on two characters close to Captain America rather than the title character, who receives a large part of the attention of the main Civil War storyline.
Those characters are Sharon Carter, who is Captain America’s on-again, off-again girlfriend, and Bucky Barnes, Cap’s one time sidekick who is now a secret assassin known as The Winter Soldier. I knew little about these two characters before reading this book, and I did need a quick recap of who Bucky was and what he had been doing in order to fully understand what was occurring in this book.
If it were not for the tragic event that occurs in Captain America issue #25 (not collected in this book), this story would not be relevant to the larger Civil War storyline. But to get the full story of Captain America’s death, this lead-up is essential.
Rating: 6.5 out of 10.
Worst. Episode. Ever.
I’ve been a fan of the TV show The Office since the original British version of the show aired on the BBC America network about 5 years ago. The blend of humor created by the “mockumentary” style, along with embarrassing but believably realistic white-collar office situations made for a brand of humor unlike anything else. And the American version of the show took the ideas and characters of the British show and made it different enough from the original to still be funny enough to sustain the laughs for three seasons (so far).
But this past Thursday’s episode (aired October 11, 2007) entitled “Launch Party” was easily the “worst episode ever.” I realize that phrase invokes many different connotations, most notably about all the Simpsons fans in approximately 1994 declaring each new episode was the worst ever at a time when internet fandom was first taking off. And I will admit that a little part of me now feels as if I have earned my blogger stripes by using that phrase. But “Launch Party” really was the worst episode of The Office so far. The “will they or won’t they date” tension between Jim and Pam is now gone, and the antics of Michael and Dwight have gotten more farfetched and less funny. The hallmark of The Office has been in making embarrassing situations be funny. But there was nothing funny about holding a pizza delivery boy hostage in order to get a discount. It wasn’t embarrassingly funny like The Office usually is, it was just embarrassing.
Book review: Dune by Frank Herbert
Being a big Star Wars fan since I was young, I naturally gravitated towards other science fiction movies as well. So shortly after its release in 1984, I saw the David Lynch version of the movie Dune in the theater. The movie went over my head but it intrigued me enough to want to know more about what was going on, so I bought the novel by Frank Herbert. The book sat on a shelf for about three years. Sparked by the television broadcast of the movie with extra footage, I decided to start reading the book. And it turned out to be one of the best books I have ever read.
I was only 15 years old when I first read Dune, so it is only natural that I would think it was the best book I had ever read at the time. But I have reread the book recently and can say that my feelings about the book have not changed: it is still one of the best books ever written. The story told in Dune has it all. The story and main character of Paul Atreides echo Joseph Campbell’s mythical Hero With a Thousand Faces, and Dune is one of the first examples (that I can think of) to apply this influence to science fiction. I can’t really explain why, but to me the archetype of Campbell’s monomyth represents the pinnacle of storytelling.
Most of the best science fiction and fantasy writers create worlds with rich fictional histories and back stories, and Dune is no different. Hints of that history are interspersed throughout Dune, and events prophesized for hundreds of years come to fruition in Dune. But Frank Herbert does an excellent job of not letting the back story get in the way of the main story, and he makes the history of his world easy enough to follow that a 15 year old can understand it.
The wealth of characters only strengthens the enjoyment of Dune. Herbert does a great job of fleshing out the supporting cast while still retaining the focus of the story on Paul Atreides. There are no cardboard characters in Dune and each minor character has a role to play in the story.
The political machinations of different houses vying for power keeps the reader on their toes and serves as more than just a backdrop for the main character’s coming of age and rise to power. And there are plenty of action sequences to provide thrills throughout the book.
One of the most effective but difficult to pull off techniques of Herbert’s writing is the fact that the book is written from the third person perspective yet still provides first person glimpses into character’s thoughts. No other author I have read has been able to use this technique as effectively as Frank Herbert.
In some ways I think it may be easier to articulate a negative critique as opposed to trying to lavish praise upon something. And I can’t really come up with any more and varied ways to sing the praises of Dune. But I cannot find a single negative thing to say about Dune. Pretty much everything about it is everything you want in a book, which is why Dune gets my top rating.
Rating: 10 out of 10.
The Sports Guarantee
Is there anything that the sports media makes a bigger fuss over nothing about than a guarantee of victory from a player? Is it really so bold for a player to say that he thinks his team will win a game? If the players don’t have the confidence and belief in their mind that they can win a game then they have already lost. So why does the media make such a big deal about it when a player expresses this confidence publicly? Does the other team really believe that it is disrespectful to think that their opponents believe they will win, or does the media simply want them to believe that in order to drum up a story for the pre-game coverage?
This all goes back to Joe Namath in Super Bowl III when the Jets were a double-digit underdog yet Namath still guaranteed a Jets victory before the game. The Jets won, and Namath became a legend. Since then the media wants to put every athlete who guarantees a victory on a pedestal the way Namath was. But it has now been nearly 40 years since Namath made his guarantee and countless other athletes have made guarantees of victory for games big and small and been right and wrong. I as a sports fan take no meaning from any guarantee, whether it is for or against my team, and merely glaze over any attempts by the media to make these statements into more than they really are: just talk.
If I were a baseball player, I would announce to the media that I personally guarantee that my team would win every single game I ever played in: all 162 regular season games, plus a sweep of the post-season. This would serve two purposes: one, to announce to the world that I have the confidence to succeed at the highest level, and two, to make a mockery of the media hype about guarantees. If before every game you asked every player if they thought they would win, the honest answer would be yes. Will it take every player on every team to guarantee a victory before every game before the media realizes that a guarantee is meaningless?
Sports Divisions
Divisions in professional sports leagues are unnecessary, outdated, and counterproductive in determining the best team in the sport. Part of the need for divisions arose in baseball as expansion occurred, both in the number and location of teams. In order to decrease the amount of travel between east coast and west coast teams, divisions were set up so that each team played more games against teams in their geographic area, limiting the number of times teams would have to make cross-country trips. But whether intentional or not, divisions create opportunities for teams that did not have the best regular season records to win a sport’s championship.
The more divisions that teams are divided up into, the greater the chance that an undeserving team enters the post-season. In the National Football League, a team only needs to have a better record than three other arbitrarily assigned teams in order to make the playoffs. Just three, because each division only has four teams.
Why not simply let all 30 or 32 teams in a sport play without divisions, without conferences, and without dividing the teams up in any way, then have the top 8 or 12 compete in the post-season? Isn’t the purpose of having playoffs to determine who the best team is? If so, why not invite only the best teams to compete in the playoffs? Sports leagues would rather create the illusion among their fans that there is some kind of parity by letting teams with .500 records in the regular season eligible for the post-season while teams with better records sit on the sidelines. It seems to be a common occurrence in the NFL that an 8-8 team in the NFC makes the playoffs while a 10-6 team from the AFC misses out. And yet no one seems to have a problem with this fact because they know that next year there is hope that their team could have that chance to win the championship without even deserving to make the playoffs.
Be careful what I wish for?
The Yanks have come back before from being down two games to none in the Division Series (2001), so there’s no reason to think they can’t do it again.
Baseball Playoffs Don’t Count
Baseball playoff games don’t count. The reason they don’t count is because the statistics of the players don’t count. How can the games count if the statistics don’t count? Numbers put up by players in the post-season mean as much to their career totals as spring training exhibition games do. It is commonly accepted that Hank Aaron hit 755 home runs during his career. But in actuality, he hit 761 home runs if you include the post-season. Why don’t those 6 home runs Aaron hit in the post-season count towards his career home run total? If he hit 761 home runs in games that counted, then he should have 761 career home runs. But he is only credited with 755. Because of this fact I can only conclude that Major League Baseball thinks these games don’t count.
I am sure that someone can make a case that post-season statistics should not count because not all players get the opportunity to play in the post-season. But to me, if we are talking about post-season performance being included as a part of a player’s career numbers, then I would argue that no players play the same number of games throughout their careers anyway. Did Barry Bonds hit 755 home runs in the same number of games that Hank Aaron did? No. So how would it affect the comparison between the two if we counted the few extra games those players played in the post-season? And I could take that argument one step further, saying that if the post-season statistics don’t count because not all players get to play in the post-season, I could argue that not all pitchers get the opportunity to play in the same amount of games during the regular season. The fourth and fifth starting pitchers on a team are all but guaranteed to pitch less games than the front of the rotation starters. It is a sure thing that even the best catchers will play less games during the regular season than other position players. And that doesn’t even take into account the risk of injury affecting how many games a player will play in a season.
And how about this fact: if there is a one game playoff to break a regular season tie to determine post-season eligibility, the player’s statistics from that game will count towards their season and career stats. The statistics count from this year’s 163rd game of the season for the Rockies and the Padres to determine the National League wild card winner. If this extra game counts, why doesn’t the remainder of the post-season count?
Because players don’t play the same number of games throughout their careers or even throughout a single season, the reason that post-season statistics shouldn’t count because not all players get that opportunity doesn’t hold water for me. And the post-season games can’t count unless the statistics do.
