Obviously when you’re in the theater and this happens, you’re supposed to clap. Also, as I’ve said before, no movie did this as obnoxiously and as egregiously as Hall Pass, which included the term “hall pass” at least four billion times and also sucked hardcore.
Via Vulture:
Via Jon Bois. Hard to quibble with the champion, but I’m shocked that Nutella made it so deep into the tournament.
Something to do to keep me working and not just sitting at my desk watching basketball all day:
Nuts? No. Optimistic? Probably.
I’ve liked Young since he was a stalwart for the Gary (Indiana) Templetons, my old fantasy team, in 2004. But his fastball averaged under 85 mph last year and the reports this spring have him in a similar range. He still has time to build up arm strength, but it’s hard to imagine a righty with that type of velocity and his standard 50-percent flyball rate being able to keep the ball in the park — even if it’s Citi Field — as often as Young did in his four-start stint at the end of 2010.
Still, success would not be unprecedented. Fellow righty Livan Hernandez enjoyed a decent season in 2010 while throwing an average fastballs below 84 mph. But Young has the additional hurdle in his injury history. He’s supposedly a smart pitcher and a great competitor, for whatever those are worth. (NOTE: This paragraph originally said Ted Lilly was also a soft-tossing righty. But he is a soft-tossing lefty who just got jumbled up in my head.)
Of course, speculating if Young will be the second-best pitcher on the Mets begs the question: Who will be the best pitcher on the Mets? Based on 2010, you’d have to say Dickey. But awesome though he is and with all the caveats about being relatively knew to the knuckler, Dickey only has one good season under his belt. Mike Pelfrey probably is who he is at this point: A decent but unspectacular innings-eater. Jon Niese should improve off his rookie season. To me, it’s hard to pick a clear favorite.
I have never been to In-N-Out. In fact, I have been to 40 of the 50 states, but never California. I hope to rectify both at some point this year.
That said, I’d probably say Five Guys is the best burger chain. McDonald’s is basically the definition of replacement-level: passable, inexpensive, available. White Castle I happen to love, but I know that’s a controversial stance. Plus those don’t even count as burgers to me. They’re White Castle burgers, and that’s a whole different thing.
Burger King is the worst. I recognize there’s a chance I’m biased because of a couple of particularly bad Burger Kings — most notably the atrocious one in Farmingdale, N.Y. near where my band used to practice — but every time I eat there I feel sick. Grosses me out, and I have a pretty strong stomach for these things (See: the Taco Bell tab).
There are some regional burger chains that need to be considered, though. The butter-belt staple Culver’s serves some pretty amazing burgers. And Good Times, in Colorado, is one of the best fast food places I’ve ever enjoyed.
Honestly, it’s surprisingly easy now that I feel like the team is actually being run with the goal of sustainable success in mind. And I know there’s a lot of doom-and-gloom fire-sale stuff in the papers, but I’ll believe the Mets will be forced to trade David Wright to cut payroll when I see them trade David Wright to cut payroll.
I think baseball allows most fans a healthy dose of optimism, even while remaining grounded in reality. Hell, look what happened last year: The Giants, with a lineup full of old-ass men who were never even that great to begin with, won the World Series. Yeah, they had great pitching. They also had a ton of little things fall their way. That happens sometimes.
Doesn’t mean, of course, that a team shouldn’t position itself as best it can by putting together the best possible roster. It looks like the Mets (fingers crossed) are trying to do that, hanging on to young players, managing for the near- and long-term, paying attention to the margins. On paper, are they good enough to win it all? Not really. But were the Giants last March? Were the Cardinals in 2006?
So yeah, right now I’m still holding out hope for a surprise playoff appearance. When that doesn’t happen, I’ll fall back on productive seasons from the young players that now appear to be part of the team’s next core group.
All the damn time. I’ve even spoken to a literary agent a couple of times. The biggest hold-up is I can’t come up with a suitable topic that would sustain my interest for the length of time it would require to write a book. For first-time and relatively unknown authors, publishing houses want ideas that are guaranteed to sell — the type of thing you’d get your dad on father’s day 2013. All my ideas are a bit too spacy, it seems. And I don’t want to write a book about something that doesn’t really interest me just for the sake of writing a book. I’m still thinking, though.
The other problem is I currently hunch in front of a computer all day for work. And I’ve got some pretty heavy back and neck issues. Though I’m vain as anything and I’d love to see my name on a book jacket, it’s hard to imagine coming home from work and getting right back in front of a computer for several more hours. That’s what my TV is for.
I’d put my money down on Beltran still. As frustrating as it is to follow along with the outfielder’s seemingly very slow rehab process, Santana is so far off and shoulder surgery is so very tough for pitchers to come back from. Fun fact: I’m the one who set the April 21 over-under that Matt Cerrone used for MetsBlog. It was a total guess, but it’s my total guess.
Rumors surfaced last week that Cap’n Crunch was being forced to walk the sugary plank, but it turns out he’s just fine. Also, it turns out his full name is Horatio Magellan Crunch and he has a Twitter. Obviously this is all a push to get CC Sabathia back.
This question came via text message from my man Ripps, and it was only once my wife and I spent several minutes debating it that I realized I should extend it to you.
[poll id=”20″]
Busy weekend; no time for nonsense.
The sandwich: Romeo from Alidoro, 105 Sullivan St. in Manhattan.
The construction: A loaf of unseeded Italian bread, scooped out, with sliced smoked chicken breast, Bel Paese cheese, arugula, hot pepper spread and oil and balsamic vinegar.
Important background information: I have been recommended Alidoro many times over by sandwich enthusiasts I trust, and I chose the Romeo because it is the Alidoro sandwich included in the Grub Street Top 101 list. Now for an important revelation: When magazines review and photograph sandwiches, they b.s. you a little. That stunningly beautiful picture of the Romeo you see on the Grub Street sandwich list? Yeah, that’s just not really what this sandwich looks like.
I guess that should come as no surprise. No one goes to McDonald’s and expects the burgers there to look like they do in the commercials either. And it’s not like the real-life Romeo came out looking terribly unappetizing or anything.
I just thought this was a good time to mention that here at TedQuarters, the sandwiches are photographed and reviewed as they’re served. I don’t tell anyone I’m planning on blogging about the sandwiches. It’s sort of like the Phantom Gourmet, except if by some chance someone recognized me I’d think it was totally sweet and probably give them a totally biased review.
Also, for what it’s worth: There’s a lot of pomp and circumstance at Alidoro for a tiny sandwich shop. The guy at the counter was nice to me, but there were all sorts of signs everywhere about how you should and shouldn’t order and stuff like that. A little too Philadelphian for my tastes. And I’ve stood behind the counter and I recognize that it can get frustrating, but I do think there’s something to be said for treating the customer like a customer, plus I’m pretty confident in my ability to clearly communicate what I want on my sandwich.
What it actually looks like:
How it tastes: Like three things: Excellent Italian bread, balsamic vinegar, and hot pepper spread.
Make no mistake: All those things are delicious. But there are other delicious ingredients on this sandwich that I was hoping would assert themselves a little more. I could taste the smoked, thin-sliced chicken only when I pulled individual pieces of it off the back of the sandwich. When I did, it was good — reasonably moist for sliced chicken with only a subtle smoky flavor. But on the sandwich, it was lost. All it did was thicken it up and add meatiness.
Same goes for the Bel Paese cheese. It was tough for me to order a sandwich at an Italian place that didn’t come with fresh or smoked mozzarella, but I thought Bel Paese was an innovative choice for a sandwich cheese so I stuck with it. If I scooped a little out of the sandwich with my finger to sample, I enjoyed a creamy, buttery cheese — almost like Italian cream cheese, I guess. And though perhaps with great focus its texture could be imagined on the sandwich, its flavor disappeared into the abyss.
There is arugula on there, too.
As for the parts you could taste: Fantastic. The bread was incredibly fresh, and because it was scooped out it wasn’t overwhelmingly bready or anything. Flaky on the outside and soft and delicious on the inside. Balsamic vinegar is one of my favorite dressings for Italian sandwiches, though it needs to be applied with a very light hand — there’s a ton of flavor in each drop. And the red-pepper spread, though perhaps not as smooth-looking as depicted in New York magazine, had a real nice kick to it.
I would venture to guess, in fact, that you could take any number of meats and cheeses, put them on the bread from Alidoro, add the oil and balsamic vinegar and red pepper spread and get a pretty good sandwich.
That’s why I was a little disappointed. There was so much potential here, but nothing special that made this combination the one. On a truly transcendent sandwich, there is harmony among the ingredients. On this one, a couple of show-off kids in the choir were singing way too loud and it threw off the whole balance.
What it’s worth: Not an inexpensive sandwich. I believe it cost $11, plus two subway rides for me. A lot of food though.
How it rates: 86 out of 100.
Today is my last full day in Port St. Lucie. I will miss the weather here and the opportunity to watch baseball stuff all day and then talk to baseball players about it. I won’t miss the awful Florida radio stations — I really should have brought CDs — or the food options.
A couple of people recommended Florida eateries to me that I hoped to get to this week, but all of them were at least a half hour away. If you are an insider at Roadfood.com (as I am), you could see that site’s map of interesting places to eat in Florida. And you would notice that there is precious little south of Titusville and north of West Palm Beach. I’m certain there are actually good options about if I knew where to look, but Port St. Lucie lacks New York’s ridiculous network of food blogs to point me in the right direction. I’ll say that the beef patty I had at Jerk City was delicious, as Jamaican beef patties almost always are.
Anyway, I fear I won’t have all that much to say about the following sandwich. But here we go.
The sandwich: Pulled pork from Sonny’s Bar-B-Q, various locations in basically every Deep-South state (including Florida, which I know some people don’t consider the South despite the disturbing number of confederate-flag bumper stickers).
The construction: Pulled pork on garlic toast.
Important background information: I’m so glad that barbecue, as a cuisine, has blown up. I remember when a Famous Dave’s opened near my hometown, my dad and I went nuts over it because we had only limited exposure to barbecue. Now, snob that I am, I scoff at Famous Dave’s. It’s Blue Smoke or Dinosaur or Hill Country or Georgia’s or Smoke Joint (the best I’ve had in the city, for what it’s worth). Or I smoke it myself.
I realized Sonny’s was a decent-sized chain, and I definitely think barbecue is the type of thing that is best when homespun. But I figured a barbecue chain with locations throughout the South (and exclusively in the South) couldn’t be all that bad, even if there was no distinct smoke smell emanating from the restaurant.
What it looks like:
How it tastes: Not bad. The pork didn’t really have any identifiable smoke flavor, but it was pretty tasty. Really porky-tasting pork, if that makes sense, like a pork chop pulled into tiny bits. It’s not a terrible flavor; pork, as you may know, is delicious.
The garlic toast didn’t taste much like garlic, really. It primarily tasted like heavily buttered toast, which is also very good. It was greasy enough that I had concerns it wouldn’t hold up over the length of my sandwich-eating experience, but it was cut thick enough to withstand the weight of the pork and the grease of the butter.
Yeah, I suppose the best way to describe the first couple of bites is to say they tasted like butter and pork, and unsurprisingly good combination, since butter goes with basically everything and pork is amazing. But buttered pork can get old pretty quick, so I started experimenting with the four bottles of barbecue sauce on the table: Mild, Sweet, Sizzlin’, and Sizzlin’ Sweet.
None of the four was exactly what I was looking for to complement the flavors. The Mild didn’t provide enough taste, the Sweet and Sizzlin’ Sweet were both a little too sweet, and the Sizzlin’ was a little too vinegary without a ton of heat, and itself not quite sweet enough. Sorry if I’m the princess-and-the-pea with barbecue sauce, but these things are important. I wound up eating most of the sandwich with a good but not great combination of Sizzlin’ and Sizzlin’ Sweet.
From there on out it was better, but nothing like what my now-refined barbecue palate has come to expect, and not even way better than a sandwich made with the pre-packaged barbecue pulled pork you can buy in the supermarket. I probably should have tried to get pickles and cole slaw on there even though that was not on the menu (they offered cole slaw as a side, though).
What it’s worth: This is the good part: For $6.99 you got the sandwich, a side and a soft drink. I got macaroni and cheese. It was a pretty hefty amount of food for little more than you’d pay at a fast-food place.
How it rates: 65 out of 100. It did the job and I enjoyed it, but I’m more likely to try someplace else when I return to Port St. Lucie.
Speaking of: I’m returning to Port St. Lucie at the end of the month. I’ll be here for the last couple of Spring Training games then drive south for the opening series against the Marlins. I figure there’ll be no shortage of sandwich options in Miami.
From the Twitter feed of the excellently named Tigers utilityman Will Rhymes. Spelling in context:
And it’s time to reconfigure my life goals. All I want is the title of Master Burrito Ambassador. I would make people address me as such.
No blog has the intersection of Spring Training and sandwiches covered like TedQuarters does, I can promise you that. This comes from our man Ted Burke on the ground in Bradenton, Grapefruit League home of the Pirates:
“Note that the sandwich itself was great,” he reports. “It tasted like grilled cheese.”
At participating German McDonald’s restaurants:
Why yes, that is three bratwursts on a roll. It is also Das Nürnburger.
Via Catsmeat, an incredible gallery of fast-food products only available in other countries. As he points out, the Tender Beef Pentagon from KFC looks a hell of a lot like a repurposed Crunchwrap Supreme. And man, it might be worth traveling to Japan to try the Cheese Catsu Burger.
Tedquarters 