Category Archives: Words

Sandwich? of the Week

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As if I needed an excuse to eat Chick-Fil-A.

The candidate: The Chicken Biscuit from Chick-Fil-A, which counts as breakfast at Chick-Fil-A.

The construction: A fried white-meat chicken cutlet on a biscuit. That’s all.

Arguments for sandwich-hood: It’s a piece of meat sandwiched between two pieces of a form of bread. You can pick it up with your hands. It is at least as much about the chicken (the inside) as it is about the biscuit (the outside), so it doesn’t violate the bagel/cream-cheese rule.

Counter-arguments: I’m not even sure. I guess that it’s on a biscuit, and a biscuit isn’t regular bread? Also, it’s not called a sandwich

How it tastes: Pretty good, though not quite up to the standards of the regular Chick-Fil-A chicken sandwich, if you ask me. The biscuit, while amazing, is so buttery and rich that it actually sogs the chicken cutlet a little, so the fried part of the cutlet doesn’t really maintain any of its chicken-fried crispiness.

The breading instead just sort of attaches to the biscuit and thickens the outer layer of soft, greasy breadstuff, which doesn’t do much for diversity of texture. There’s a salty, mushy, buttery outside and a piping hot, moist, chickeny inside. It’s great, don’t get me wrong, and it’s fantastic that someone has decided I can eat this for breakfast. But the straight-up chicken sandwich provides so much more. Like pickles.

What it’s worth: $4.85 including tax with a large coffee and hash browns.

The verdict: This is definitely a sandwich. I’d love to indulge the people who believe otherwise by paying some mind to the counter-argument, but I’m not sure I even understand what it is. Because it’s on a biscuit?

“Biscuit” itself can be a pretty vague term, and are we really going to distinguish between the way the bread product for a sandwich is prepared when the ultimate effect is clearly sandwich? And if we’re excluding sandwiches on biscuits, how many other obvious sandwich-meat delivery vehicles would we have to exclude?

No, it’s a sandwich. Meat between two pieces of bread, regardless of what the bread is called. Don’t overthink this.

Virginia drivers

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I’ve discussed this before: There’s no shortage of bad drivers anywhere there are drivers. But after years of research, I believe there are clear regional tendencies in bad driving styles.

I have no idea why this might be. Maybe it has something to do with intricacies in state-by-state traffic laws, the ways in which various local police departments enforce those laws and the long-term effects. Or perhaps certain bad habits just become socially acceptable in some places due to years of lousy role models and impotent driver’s-ed instructors.

It was a gorgeous day for a drive yesterday and for some odd reason, traffic along the northeast corridor mostly obliged. But I was coasting along about 12 miles per hour above the speed limit in the middle lane of a three-lane highway with very few cars on the road when a silver compact car pulled up right behind me and started driving maybe 10-15 yards from my tailpipe. I maintained a consistent speed and he could have easily passed me (on either side, no less), but he stayed there for minutes, making me nervous: What’s he up to? Why’s he chasing me? Is this some sort of unmarked cop car about to pull me over? Does he even see me or is asleep at the wheel and just plowing forward?

Finally, he lost patience and whizzed past me on the left, only to speed forward to the next small crop of traffic down the road and do the exact same thing to some other car in the middle lane. As he passed me, I took a look: Kid in his early 20s with a baseball hat slightly askew, a decal for his college occupying the bottom half of his rear window, a factory spoiler and New Jersey license plates. Classic Jersey driver.

Later on the drive, the Mazda Tribute in front of me in the left lane slowed from about 78 to 60 despite no traffic ahead of it and no obvious obstructions in the road. The car’s break lights never lit; it looked like the driver simply, suddenly took his foot off the accelerator in the left lane on I-95. As I craned to see what could be going on, the car veered toward the shoulder then jerked back into the lane. The driver, a salt-and-pepper haired man with glasses, turned his attention back to whatever it was he had splayed out across his steering wheel.

I looked at his plates: Virginia, of course.

No state I know of breeds more oblivious drivers. I’m staying with some friends in Fairfax County and I walked to a 7-11 on Lee Highway this morning. At an intersection, I tried to judge how many of the passing motorists were occupied by something other than the massive two-ton, fuel-filled steel machines hurtling around them in every direction and the ones they were themselves charged with piloting responsibly.

I would guess — and this is no exaggeration — that 75 percent of the people on the road were paying attention to something besides the road. Mostly their smartphones, but also their clipboards and knitting projects and novels and rosary beads. It was kind of beautiful to see, actually: People of all ages, shapes, races, and creeds unified by a cavalier disregard for all the dangers beyond their dashboards.

It rained today, and maybe 50 percent of the cars did not have their headlights on. People still don’t know about that! Does it not often rain here? Don’t many new cars do this by default now?

Live from the Walt Whitman rest stop

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I’m on my way to DC for some Georgetown basketball and Super Bowl festivities. I planned to cue up some posts to roll out today, but I blew it. I’ll have some more stuff tomorrow and Friday, and I’ll be back in business (and quite tired) on Monday. For now, here’s some Super Bowl talk with Tom Curran from CSNNE.com:

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Presenting Randwiches

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This seems like a good idea. You pay randwich.es $7 and they bring you a random sandwich. I haven’t tried them yet so I can’t vouch for them myself, but they seem to thrive on social-media word-of-mouth so maybe this is good for some extra bacon or something when I do make an order after they return from vacation on Feb. 3.

This cajun turkey, bacon, arugula, blue cheese, tomato and alfredo sauce sandwich looks promising:

Via reader Greg.

Also — since we’re on the topic of sandwiches (as we frequently are), I’m kicking around an idea in my head and I’m looking for some feedback: I bring a pretty humble sandwich for lunch almost every day. It’s healthier and less expensive than eating out in midtown.

Obviously no one wants to read a diary of every boring sandwich I eat, but what if I worked across the week to maximize the potential of the cold cuts I buy, then make posts about the best reasonably simple and inexpensive sandwiches I can conjure up with those meats and cheeses and the condiments and vegetables in my fridge? Does that have any appeal beyond making my lunches more interesting?

Cool

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If you’ve ever wondered why Quad-A reliever Dirk Hayhurst is something of a baseball-nerd darling on the Internet, it’s because his book The Bullpen Gospels is really good. Not just good-for-something-a-ballplayer wrote, legit good.

Anyway, now it appears he’s bound for Italy to play baseball there and write about it. I’ve long fantasized about writing a book about baseball around the world — going to games every place baseball is played and detailing each place’s baseball culture. But it looks like Dirk Hayhurst is going to trump the hell out of that idea, and good for him.

Good riddance to bad rubbish

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Pat Burrell retired yesterday, and as Adam Rubin pointed out, he finished his career sixth all time in home runs against the Mets.

What Rubin didn’t point out (but probably knows) is that every other guy on the list besides is either already enshrined in Cooperstown, will be soon, or will render the whole place obsolete with his exclusion.

Burrell, in comparison, looks like just some guy: Undoubtedly a very good Major League hitter but by no means a superstar, a dude whose top baseball-reference comps include Greg Vaughn, Tim Salmon, Ryan Klesko and Danny Tartabull.

He will not be missed.

The following is skewed by the peculiarities of expansion and divisional play, I realize. List via Rubin’s post. Mays gets the asterisk because I didn’t count the home runs he hit with the Mets as part of his career total:

Guy HR vs. Mets % of career HR
Willie Stargell 60 12.6
Mike Schmidt 49 8.9
Chipper Jones 48 10.6
Willie McCovey 48 9.2
Hank Aaron 45 6
Pat Burrell 42 14.4
Willie Mays 39 6*
Barry Bonds 38 5
Andre Dawson 36 8.2
Billy Williams 34 8

How we overrate prospects, nutshelled

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Patrick Flood posts a great question and poll at his blog: Which players will be most valuable to the 2014 Mets? He provides a ton of context, too, but the answer speaks to the current state of the Major League club and the way in which we overrate prospects.

Zack Wheeler, who hasn’t yet pitched above High A, has 80 votes. Daniel Murphy, already a pretty good Major Leaguer, has 11. And two of Murph’s votes are from me.

To be fair, Wheeler is arguably the Mets’ top prospect and Murphy, at 27, probably isn’t getting much better. So maybe people are voting on ceiling. Plus the Mets will only control Murphy through 2015 and could control Wheeler through 2018.

But c’mon: Reese Havens, 25-year-old guy who cannot stay on the field, gets more than twice as many votes as Josh Thole, who is eight days younger than Havens and has already shown he can be an average-hitting catcher in the Majors?

I think y’all might need to temper your expectations.

Also, I’m pretty sure Patrick wrote about 1,000 words and came up with an interesting poll as an excuse to post that Ruben Tejada factoid. Flood is the anti-Sarris.

 

Twitter Q&A part 2

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I just moved back to the city in November, so it’d probably be bad form to whine too much about all the theoretical tourists that would have come along with the Olympics, plus the various logistical nightmares it would inevitably bring. All that would certainly suck, though, especially when you consider many longtime New Yorkers struggle with the basics of subway etiquette.

But it would especially suck — and Tom knows I feel this way — to go through that in the name of Olympic sports, which mostly suck. One guy runs faster than the others. Some judge finds some routine more compelling than the rest. Flags are flown and anthems are played, and then within a year no one outside the discipline really remembers what happens. Call me a xenophobe, but I’d rather watch a mid-August Pirates-Astros game every single time.

Badminton is pretty cool though.

To be honest, I don’t eat candy bars very often. When you eat as much fried food and starch as I do, you’ve got to make concessions somewhere to not be dead by now, and for me that generally means cutting out the most intensely sugary foods. Plus, it’s kind of a long and unfortunate story but I’ve been down on chocolate since this summer.

Bottom line, I’d take a piece of cake, a cupcake or some sort of Drake’s Cake over candy most of the time, and if I am eating candy it’s almost always going to be Gummi Bears — Haribo, if possible, and preferably frozen. But that doesn’t mean I don’t think candy bars are delicious. If I had to rank my top five of the ones , I’d probably go:

1) 100 Grand
2) Whatchamacallit
3) Twix
4) Take 5
5) Butterfinger

I guess I’m a big fan of caramel in candy bars. Also, that’s discounting Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and Reese’s Pieces, since neither is a candy bar proper. Furthermore, Snickers are way better than Baby Ruths even though they have similar ingredients. Also, I really like Heath Bars crushed up in ice-cream concoctions, but I’m not sure I’ve ever had a Heath Bar.

Finally, I’d say David Wright is more likely to rebound than Jason Bay, Andres Torres, or Johan Santana.