4/25/2009

Our trip to Super Duper Weenie

Being that my hubby and I both appreciate fine food, we had to make the trip to Connecticut to visit Super Duper Weenie after it was featured on Guy Fieri's Food Network Show Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives.  

Before you scoff, consider that owner and chef Gary Zemora is a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America!  But rather than work at some fancy-schmancy place, he created delicious toppings and divine dogs.

There was a line outside.

Hubby had a dog with bacon and grilled onions.

I had two veggie burgers.  They make them with lettuce, tomato, onions, and their famous homemade hot relish.  

I actually wanted sweet relish on mine too, but Gary talked me out of it, saying it wouldn't make sense to have both hot and sweet.  He suggested sweet on one, hot on the other.  I assented.  After all, he's the chef-jockey and knows what he's talking about.

And yes, Gary - the guy on TV - was right behind the grill serving up the dogs, and chatted with us.  How cool is that?

A friend of my hubby's was in the area and was kind enough to meet us there.  She ordered the above Chicagoan dog.  


This is Gary (facing us in the bandana).  We sat at the corner and ate, right in front of him.  When we told us we came up from two states away because we saw the place on TV, he lamented that we hadn't ordered fries, then gave us a free order of fries because we were "virgins."

For dinner tonight, we just had salads and bread to be a little healthier.

All and all, a fun day.

4/24/2009

Cuddly bulldog o' the day

Max

4/19/2009


Rainy days and Mondays

We're supposed to start the week with a soaker.


4/17/2009


A building nearby. 

These trees are all over now.  Happy spring!


Oh my

Being a writer, I get announcements about anthologies calling for submissions.  I thought some of you might get a kick out of this.  (And NO I am not submitting anything!)


"PublisherLogical-Lust
Editor: Jolie du Pre
Deadline: June 30, 2009
Payment: $50 and one copy of the e-book, paid within two weeks after the book is published. If The Cougar Book goes to print, you will also receive one copy of the print book.

"What is a Cougar? She's a woman 40 or over who dates younger men. She's intelligent, confident, attractive, enjoys sex, and knows what she wants. (Think Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher.)
I am looking for original, unpublished erotic stories from 3,000 to 5,000 words. The sex can be Vanilla to BDSM. The Cougar women in The Cougar Book must be NO YOUNGER than 40. The young men in The Cougar Book must be NO OLDER than 30....
How to submit to The Cougar Book:
Send stories attached as Microsoft Word plain text or RTF format, 12 point, Times New Roman font, double spaced to thecougarbook@gmail.com. Put COUGAR in the subject line. 
Failure to put COUGAR in the subject line may mean that your submission is mistaken for SPAM."

4/16/2009

Ah, innocence

My 17-year-old half sis said this to me as part of an Instant Message conversation today:

okay!.. i judge a food place on 3 things. If they put cherries in their shirley temples, if they have toothpicks, and if tehy have mints. and they had all 3.. so it was very good
All about nothing

I've long known that a lot of the dreams I have at night are meaningless.  Last night's dream was proof.  I dreamed that I was in high school and my best friend (also sometimes an enemy and a competitor) was Donna Martin from Beverly Hills, 90210...and we were going to a party thrown by Dan Aykroyd (or however you spell it).  Dan was very wealthy and quite popular with the ladies.  He had a penthouse apartment.  At some point, he made a sarcastic remark, and I said, "Aren't you Canadian?"  Anyway, I haven't thought about Dan Aykroyd really at all in my life, especially not lately, and I have no idea why he was in a dream.  I haven't seen too many movies with him in them (I'm sure hubby's seen more.)  

Oh well, I don't think this dream tells me much about life.  It was just weird.

4/12/2009

Photos sitting on my camera


Outside "Hair"

Strawberry muffins I made this morning

Former convent in my town


Yesterday's rain

4/10/2009

Here's a newsflash

AOL has this as a news story today:

Stop Buying Baby Carrots
They're really just large ones cut up smaller:  Biggest wastes of money

So?  I buy baby carrots because they're easier to carry around and snack on.  Not because I thought they were a different type of carrot with mythical properties.  Big deal.  It's too hard to pare down big carrots at work.

Anyway, I hope all of you have a happy Passover and Easter.


4/07/2009

Carl's take

This is what blog reader Carl has to say about the 'death' of print journalism...


4/03/2009

What ever happened to...

Remember this song?

It was about a real homeless woman who used to sing "La de dee, la de daaaaa" on the streets of D.C. So I want to know, is the woman still homeless? I wonder...

4/01/2009

Death of print journalism

I suppose I should comment on the oft-mentioned death of print journalism.  Yesterday, the Chicago Sun Times officially filed for bankruptcy.  Also, in today's news, "New York Times Co.’s biggest union will meet today to discuss a proposal from the company that would save the publisher as much as $4.5 million this year. The company is asking the Newspaper Guild of New York to accept a 5 percent pay cut or risk losing about 80 jobs..."

This past week, in Newsweek, the "My Turn" columnist d'jour writes about how her dad, an old newspaper man, predicted this decades ago.

Frankly, EVERYONE PREDICTED THIS.  When I was a kid in the '80s, it was said many times that some day, people would read newspapers on a little machine on the subway as they commuted work, and there would be no print newspapers.  This was no surprise at all to me, but we didn't know when.  "2000" or "2010" are good round numbers, but they were still arbitrary.  In one class of mine, we had a unit on "The Future," and one of the most commonly accepted views on The Future was that we'd have computerized handheld news.  That, and phones where you would see the person you were talking to.  Hmmm.  The phones exist but no one seems to have a need for them.  Who uses a phone to contact friends these days, anyway?

When I was about 12, I knew I liked writing.  I didn't know what I'd do as a career, though.  One day, waiting with my dad outside a medical office in Freehold Township, waiting for my mom to come out of a doctor's appointment, I saw a climbing thread of smoke in the distance.  An old farmhouse was burning down.  I realized then what I could do with my writing as a career:  Be a journalist.  I was very curious about what was going on, and wanted to find out and let other people know.  Writing for a newspaper would meld my love of the written word with my need to understand.

But I knew newspapers were supposed to be dying, sooner or later.  I hoped they'd hold out long enough for me to write for them.

What was funny was, people thought it would happen sooner.  In the '70s and '80s, they had this vision of "The Future" that was a little quicker than reality.  Look out your window - do you see us flying in spaceships like the Jetsons to get to work?  And when are we going to use the metric system, anyway?  My second grade teacher said we'd do it "next year."

Technology had other priorities.  E-mail.  Video games.  It took a while for iPhones and computers to be small enough and cheap enough to allow easy access to the news.  And some of us prefer not to fish around to see what interests us, but to just flip the pages and see what catches our eye.  Plus, it's easier on the eyes to read a newspaper when you're eating your breakfast.

But the money isn't there for a lot of papers.  Too much competition.  People realize that internet news has its downside, lower verification standards for one thing.  Would an internet blogger with a lot of priorities have uncovered Watergate?  Still, there are only so many advertising dollars in a recession.

The upshot is, we really need news organizations like the Times, but they are for-profit businesses.  They can't ask the state to subsidize them.  That would defeat their purpose.  So they have to find ways to stay in business.  Adapting to technological demands is the only way.  And some need to cut costs in order to stay viable.

But don't think that all of this wasn't predicted.  It was.  We all knew it.  We just thought print was worth saving, anyway.