Category Archives: Words

Like a phoenix from the ashes

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On Friday evenings throughout middle school, my friends and I played basketball and showcased our NBA replica jerseys at the Rockville Centre rec center. I rocked Alonzo Mourning’s 33 and did yeoman’s work in the low post. I never really loved playing, but it was a place to hang out and there were usually girls there.

I guess the point of the open-court nights was to keep kids from aimlessly wandering the streets causing trouble, because the only strict rule was that we were not supposed to leave and come back. But the supervisor dude, Juan, had a crush on my sister and would let us walk across Sunrise Highway to the nearby Taco Bell if we promised to bring him back a couple of tacos.

That was, I’m pretty sure, when I first came to love Taco Bell.

So it hurt me someplace deep in my soul when I drove past the Rockville Centre Taco Bell a few weeks ago to find it leveled, its plot surrounded by a construction fence with no clear indication of what would replace it.

Luckily, dude-I-know-from-high-school Anthony Bottan has the scoop:

According to Clint Langley, construction manager for Taco Bell, they razed the Taco Bell at 570 Sunrise Highway about two months ago and are currently constructing a more efficient, albeit slightly smaller version of it to better serve customers. Langley said the interior layout will resemble a rectangle — rather than a square like in the original model — which will alter the kitchen layout and allow for quicker service.

“We have a new, prototype kitchen layout that’s more efficient,” Langley said. “It will give customers a quicker experience.”

A new, prototype Taco Bell? In my own hometown! Color me intrigued. I mean, how much more streamlined could the creation process at Taco Bell really be? Are they arming employees with semi-automatic sour-cream guns? Self-wrapping burritos?

I should note that once we started driving, we abandoned that Taco Bell for the significantly better Taco Bells in Oceanside and Hempstead. Not only was the Rockville Centre location slower than most — inefficiency I hope will be improved by the new kitchen — but because of some draconian local statute the drive-thru closed at 11 p.m. and you actually had to get out of your car and enter the dining room for a proper Fourthmeal.

Will that ordinance be lifted upon the opening of the new Taco Bell? What’s up with that rule anyway? Get on it, Bottan.

 

Birth of the Cool J

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I was about twelve when I started writing my own rhymes. One day in junior high, there was this lone kid, wearing a knapsack, walking about twenty or thirty feet in front of me. It was just the two of us in the hallway. He was kind of diddy boppin’ and singing his version of the children’s song “This Old Man”—”This DJ, he gets down, mixing records while they go round.” I couldn’t see his face, but I could hear the echo in the hallway. It was as if he was in another dimension, in slow motion, like a dream. But the way he did it, I was, like, “I wanna do that right now!” After that, I was writing, writing, writing. At fourteen, I started sending out demo tapes.

– L.L. Cool J.

Click through to check out GQ’s excerpt of the new oral history of Def Jam by Bill Adler and Dan Charnas. Easter Egg: Among friends and family, LL Cool J goes by his middle name, “Todd.”

Not all bad?

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It’s pretty hard to assess the Jets’ performance in their 30-21 loss to the Patriots yesterday without a firmer sense of how good (or bad) New England’s defense really is.

If it’s as awful as it played in the first few games of the season, so is this loss. Though Nick Mangold’s return helped the Jets’ offense look a hell of a lot better than it did last week against the Ravens, Gang Green still couldn’t sustain many long drives and managed only 97 yards on the ground. Bill Belichick and the Patriots countered the Jets’ attention to stopping their passing game by letting BenJarvus Green-Ellis run wild, and the Jets didn’t appear apt to adjust in turn.

If the Patriots’ defense is actually closer to that team’s normal (excellent) standards, then the Jets’ loss Sunday is not all bad. Mark Sanchez, afforded a bit more time to throw the ball, played well in spite of some butter-fingered (and allegedly mutinous) receivers. Shonn Greene flashed some of the bruising ability he hasn’t shown much of in almost two years. And the Jets’ defense, for better or worse, managed to rough up Tom Brady a bit.

Maybe I’m being a bit too optimistic, but this didn’t feel like a game that belongs in the same category as the losses in Oakland and Baltimore. It seemed more like the type of football game that could have easily gone the other way had a few close calls fallen in favor of the Jets: If Deion Branch had lifted his knee off the ground before being touched on the would-be fumble, for instance, or had Plaxico Burress’ toe landed an inch short of the sideline instead of an inch over it.

But they didn’t, so the Jets sit below .500, with critics beating their chests and hooting with glee.

And again: If the Patriots’ defense is actually terrible, this game could forebode an awful season for our blustering heroes. I strongly suspect that it isn’t.

Also: Seems pretty clear that opposing offensive coordinators are going to try to exploit Eric Smith’s lack of speed. Smith can tackle anybody, but he’s vulnerable in coverage. Of course, he’s hardly the only guy to fault in the loss.

Bold Flavors Snack of the Week

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Remember a couple of weeks ago, when I was wondering why we don’t have graham cookies? I made some.

I used actual graham flour. It’s in the Bob’s Red Mill section of my local supermarket, and maybe yours too. The recipe called for regular flour, but that’s seemed like a cop-out to me. The graham flour seemed to give them an interesting, heartier texture than most cookies. I liked it.

Ice-cream sandwich on graham cookies.

The recipe goes like this:

1) Follow this recipe. Substitute graham flour for all-purpose flour if you so choose. Or don’t. See if I care. Make the cookies a little bigger than they tell you to, otherwise you’re not going to get as much ice cream as you want.

2) When the cookies are done and cooled a little, lay one face down on a plate. Scoop on some ice cream. I used vanilla, but go nuts.

3) Place another one of the cookies down on top of the ice cream, creating an ice-cream sandwich.

4) Eat ice-cream sandwich.

Anyone want to teach me how to golf and also enter me in the Madrid Masters?

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Scottish golfer Elliot Saltman made a hole-in-one during his second round at the Madrid Masters and earned a tasty prize — his bodyweight in ham.

Saltman made the shot from the par-3 third hole at El Encin Golf Hotel. Heavily cured and salted ham is a Spanish delicacy….

Saltman’s only problem is getting the “excess baggage” back to Scotland.

“I don’t think they’ll let me take that on the plane,” he said.

– Associated Press.

Good news everyone: There’s a massive ham-eating party at Elliot Saltman’s hotel room in Madrid. BYO mustard.

The Yankees suck now

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It makes more sense to call [Alex Rodriguez] the same kind of October bust he was for the Yankees before he had his one shining moment in 2009….

Benoit struck him out, swinging.

Two outs now. Still a big swing from Mark Teixeira – who has so often been as small as a jockey in his big games for the Yankees – would bust the game open. Only Teixeira seemed perfectly content to take a walk in that moment, take the walk that made it 3-2.

– Mike Lupica, N.Y. Daily News.

A Mostly Mets podcast listener emailed in a good question last week about the Mets’ worrisome home-road split in 2011. He wondered why the Mets went 31-44 at Citi Field this season and 42-36 on the road.

The obvious, satisfying answer is that the park got into the Mets’ heads. All year long we heard about the psychological effects Citi Field’s distant home-run fences had on the Mets’ hitters, and then late in the season we even heard from Dan Warthen say that the dimensions let some of the team’s pitchers grow comfortable throwing bad pitches they felt they could get away with due to the spacious outfield.

And maybe that’s true, despite the randomness suggested by Patrick Flood’s research. Maybe some of that did happen, or maybe it happened even a few times — enough to convince the team’s coaches that it happened frequently, and then, you know, confirmation bias and all that.

Either way, it’s not likely to continue happening. In 2010, in fact, the Mets finished 47-34 at home and 32-49 on the road. Jerry Manuel suggested then that the team’s hitters pressed on the road, swinging too hard for the home runs they knew they wouldn’t compile in Citi Field. In 2009 they finished 41-40 at home and 29-52 on the road. They were much better at Shea Stadium than elsewhere in 2008, but much worse at home than on the road in 2007.

Perhaps calling any of that random statistical noise is too easy. Maybe there was something unique about the makeup of each of those teams and their coaching staffs that could explain the way they performed at home and on the road, even if rosters (and sometimes coaching staffs) tend to be fluid throughout a season.

Point is, none of it appeared to be continuous from year to year.

So here we have A-Rod, great in the playoffs in 2000 and 2004, bad in 2005 and 2006, pretty good in 2007, great in 2009, and bad again in 2010 and 2011. His aggregate postseason batting line looks a whole lot like his career regular season line, but hell, maybe he really did tighten up under the pressure in those down years. Anyone watching the games will say with certainty that he looked more comfortable in that 2009 postseason, though, of course, players generally look pretty comfortable when they’re beating the hell out of the ball.

And everyone in this great city knows that only New York players dictate clutchness, that guys from Detroit and everywhere else in flyover country are more or less robots performing to their expected levels with remarkable consistency. Who cares if Jose Valverde is now 51-for-51 in save situations this year? If A-Rod were clutch he could have overcome that. And if Mark Teixeira were clutch he would have knocked a pitch off the plate over the wall in the seventh.

Let’s forget for now that A-Rod and Teixeira have thrived in countless pressure situations throughout their baseball careers: in high school when big-league scouts came to watch, in the Minors with promotions looming, and in thousands of regular-season at-bats in the Majors. Let’s say for the sake of argument that postseason baseball represents some magical threshold at which the weight of pressure becomes overwhelming for even professional athletes accustomed to it, and that in those situations A-Rod and Teixeira are no different from all of us run-of-the-mill human beings, subject to the whims and burdens of our pathetically imperfect constitutions.

My question to Mike Lupica and the legions of Yankee fans convinced A-Rod is irreparably unclutch, then, is this: Have you ever failed in a big spot? Have you struggled with an important test or botched your lines in the school play or panicked on the parkway or frozen up in a job interview or embarrassed yourself on a date with someone beautiful?

I bet you have. We all have. It happens.

But do you expect it will always happen like that? Do you think that because you failed once or twice or even three times under pressure that you are doomed to do so every single time?

I don’t. Maybe you do. But I imagine anyone with such a defeatist attitude doesn’t often allow himself the opportunity to achieve great successes, and certainly nothing on par with a flourishing career in professional sports.

Existence precedes essence, and A-Rod is essentially one of the greatest athletes of his generation. That he struck out to end the game last night — while playing through injury, no less — should imply nothing other than that he struck out to end the game last night. He will undoubtedly find himself in many pressure situations to come. In some he will certainly fail, and in others he will just as certainly succeed.

You’re watching Bill Buckner saves the day on ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ 09/04/11 – TV Replay. See the Web’s top videos on AOL Video

Twitter sandwich Q&A

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OK, last one of these for a while, I promise. I got a lot of good questions yesterday.

I’m coupling these questions because they cover similar territory. The Primanti Brothers’ innovation is adding french fries to their sandwiches, a concept I found extremely strong in inspiration and slightly less so in execution due to some soft french fries (though with the added bonus of cole slaw).

When adding starch to the innately starchy sandwich, we must ask ourselves: Why? French fries are delicious pretty much anywhere, be they on top of a sandwich or beside it. But what can they add to a sandwich besides salt and some grease (and I mean no disrespect to salt or grease)? Unless they’re fried crispy, they just add a mushy layer of potato-stuff that could easily be drowned out by any of the more flavorful elements on a sandwich.

That’s where potato chips come in. They have the potential to add both the same salty, potatoey goodness of french fries as well as the elusive crunchiness, ever absent on even many of the best sandwiches.

The problem, of course, is that if your sandwich has much dressing or any greasier elements, the chips could easily become soggy and their effect ruined. The successful addition of potato chips to a sandwich requires both a strong sense of sandwich construction and efficiency in its execution. That’s no small feat, and I believe the reason most sandwich purveyors do not offer potato chips atop their creations.

Previti Pizza does a solid job of it, but you’ll note that in that review I mentioned how the chips “don’t hold perfectly hold their crunchiness.” Sentence fail in context.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, Andrew. That’s a loaded question. For which type of food?

I generally keep three hot sauces in my fridge at any given time: Frank’s, Sriracha and Cholula. Frank’s is obviously there for wing-making purposes. The other two are pretty versatile and not at all like each other. And though I tend to use Sriracha for Asian-inspired foods and Cholula for Mexican dishes, there are times when you just want to try Sriracha on a taco or Cholula on your drunken noodles, and it turns out it’s all pretty delicious.

If I could only have one, I’d probably go with the Cholula — and not just because they sponsor this network (longtime readers of this blog know the Cholula bottles were present in the picture of my desk long before that deal ever came down). It’s got a thicker texture than most hot sauces, which I like, and good flavor even if it’s not the spiciest hot sauce in the world. Unfortunately I’ve yet to receive any free Cholula as fallout from that deal, which is total B.S.

As for mustard: Man, there are just so many different delicious types of mustard. I guess if I had to pick one, I’d probably go with Nance’s Hot Mustard — a smooth-textured and versatile but very assertive mustard, full of mustardy bite.

I love White Castle. I think the key to enjoying White Castle is moderation. The burgers are so small and delicious that you want to have like 15 of them, but the only way you’re going to be able to stomach them is if you limit yourself to three or four. Do that and you not only develop a taste for them, you start getting The Crave every time you see a White Castle. I’m pretty sure White Castle burgers are chemically addictive.

I don’t go there now as often as I did when I lived in Fort Greene and it was nearby, but I tend to get one regular cheeseburger, one bacon cheeseburger and one jalapeno cheeseburger. And every time I do, I have no idea why I bothered because they all just taste like White Castle. Delicious White Castle.

Worth noting: My father loves White Castle. Just f@#$ing loves it. He grew up near one and had to walk past it on his way home from high school, and I guess he developed a pretty strong dependence. He doesn’t get to go as often as he’d like, I think, because my mom doesn’t care for it and it’s a bit out of the way for him now.

A few years ago, he went to take my grandmother out to lunch and asked her where she wanted to go.

“What was the name of that place on Sunrise Highway in Lynbrook, with the tiny cheeseburgers?” she asked.

I imagine this had to be, for my father, the absolute best direction a lunch date with his mother could have gone. He asked her if she meant White Castle, and indeed she did. She had The Crave. So they went.

A week later, my father went back to take her out again, and eagerly asked her if she wanted to go to White Castle again.

“Oh no,” she said. “That’s the type of thing you only want once every 40 years.”

Twitter moving Q&A

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I am in the midst of the ever-frustrating apartment search. Incidentally, if you have an apartment somewhere on the east side of Manhattan that you’re looking to rent, email me. Especially if it is huge and way underpriced and you’re willing to cut a discount to a sports and sandwich blogger of moderate repute.

I imagine a lot of people would say, “cozy,” which means “tiny,” or “bedroom fits a queen bed,” which means “bedroom is the size of a queen bed.” But I’m going to go with “no fee,” which means there absolutely is a fee and they’re just straight-up lying about it.

I’m pretty early in the process, but I’ve gone to check out two “no broker’s fee” apartments only to be told when I got there that there was a fee, and that the one I saw advertised on craigslist with no fee has since been taken. How does that even work? Do brokers really list a single apartment with no fee just to get you in the door to a bunch with fees? And who gets that apartment? Probably no one, since it never existed in the first place.

Craigslist is a tangled web of lies.

Yeah, for a while I basked in the attention but now I can’t leave my house without having to run from a crowd of screaming fans all like, “OMG TED BURG! SANDWICH!” It’s a lot like Hard Day’s Night, except with more sandwich. It’s overwhelming.

Seriously, though, we’re moving for a variety of reasons. For one, if I successfully pull off a move to a reasonable Manhattan location, I’ll cut about two hours per day off my commute. That’s so much time! Think of how much more TV I’ll get to watch!

The other big things I’m looking forward to about Manhattan are streetlights and sidewalks. I like to walk places, and just walking for the sake of walking. Neither is really possible or enjoyable where I am now. There are tons of beautiful parks and reserves for walking, but you have to set aside some daytime and take a car to get there, which I think defeats the purpose.

No I am not. But this is now my fourth time looking for a place to rent since I left my parents’ house in 2005. Every time I saw a bunch of awful places that seemed unreasonably expensive, then, eventually, one that was just way better than the others in every way.

I guess this is sort of the same phenomenon as your keys always being in the last place you look for them: Once you find a good place, you stop looking, so the only places you have to compare it to are all the terrible ones you’ve already seen. But I’ve never had a situation where I was weighing the benefits and costs of one place versus another. Every time it has seemed the place I settled on was the biggest, most reasonably priced and closest to where I wanted to be. So here’s hoping that happens again.

Twitter Q&A

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A little too harried today to craft anything cohesive, so here’s a Twitter Q&A.

It’s Ochoa. Butch Huskey epitomizes many things, among them the general meaninglessness of Spring Training stats, what a 245-pound man can do to catchers when plowing into them at full speed, and baseball’s rich tradition of great names. But since Huskey enjoyed a couple of reasonably productive seasons as a Met, it’s hard to call him an utter failure as a prospect.

For whatever reason — perhaps because the Mets acquired him in the Bobby Bonilla trade — it seemed like Ochoa came up to a lot more hype than Huskey did. In fact, I remember that Ochoa was the first player I had ever heard referred to as a “five-tool guy,” which was about the most hilarious thing my 14-year-old mind could process.

Soon after the Mets called Ochoa up, I went to a game with my brother and a couple of his friends. We managed to sneak down to the field level in right field, where we proceeded to commend Ochoa for every single thing he did in the game, proclaiming everything as examples of his tools. He took a couple steps toward first base from right field on an infield groundout, and I yelled something about backing up first base from right field being the elusive sixth tool. Stuff like that, all game long.

Eventually Ochoa acknowledged us, and we went absolutely ape. But from there it was all downhill for Ochoa as a Met. Until right now, I had forgotten that he ever put up productive seasons with the Reds and Brewers after leaving Flushing. He did finish fifth in the NL in outfield assists in 2001, strong evidence of at least one tool.

I don’t drink very often. I know so little about beers that if there’s nothing I recognize on a bar’s tap list I usually panic and wind up with something that tastes like fermented tar, which I sip politely until it’s about 3/4 done then leave it and walk to some other part of the bar hoping it doesn’t follow me.

When I do drink, it’s usually bourbon. And I know plenty of people will judge the hell out of me for saying this, but I rarely drink my bourbon straight. At bars I usually order it with seltzer, and at home I mix it with unsweetened green tea and a little lemonade (about three parts green tea, one part bourbon, one part lemonade). That’s the Ted Berg — order it by name, then explain it to the bartender. I’d like for this to catch on.

I also like a good frozen rum drink, where appropriate.

Yikes, that’s a tough one. I’m trying to imagine life without my pinkie fingers, and it’s not great. I don’t use my left pinkie as often as I should while playing the guitar, but I still definitely need it for that. And obviously both pinkies are very necessary for typing with any rapidity. Plus — and not to be Debbie Downer here — I’ve got the MS, so my dexterity is at times already limited, and I don’t know how much more of that I want to give up.

I guess there’s an underlying question of vanity here: Would everyone know I had given up two pinkies for a pair of Mets championships? Like would that be something celebrated at the parade — here’s this guy who for some reason had to give up his fingers for this! — or would I just be some eight-fingered fan in the crowd?

Either way I think the answer is no. Maybe that means I’m not committed enough, but I’d say it’s just optimism. I’m confident enough that the Mets will eventually win a World Series or two that I’m not willing to part ways with my fingers to guarantee it.

Toes I’d do in a second. Especially if it came with the promise that headlines after the fact referred to the Mets’ victory as “digitally enhanced.” I don’t think we make enough digit/digital jokes in general.