Word on the Internet is that MLB is toying with the idea of changing the September roster-expansion tradition.
Also, supposedly Keith Hernandez is considering shaving his mustache.
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From the Wikipedia: List of Phobias
Can’t even remember where I started, but this is where I wound up.
From the Wikipedia: List of Phobias.
The suffix -phobia, in psychiatry, is used to construct a word meaning a crippling, irrational fear of something. In common usage, it just means a strong dislike or hatred of something. The Wikipedia separates its list of phobias into five categories: Psychological phobias, non-psychological phobias, biological phobias, prejudices, and fictional phobias. Obviously a lot of the psychological phobias are serious conditions that we’ve all heard of, so I’ll skip most of them.
I don’t mean to make light of anyone’s mental-health condition, but several of the other psychological phobias seem eminently reasonable. For example: Algophobia, the fear of pain; atychiophobia, the fear of failure; hoplophobia, the fear of weapons or firearms; and necrophobia, the fear of death. Probably all of those seem rather tragic in their extreme forms, but certainly we all stand to benefit a bit from fearing pain, firearms, failure and death.
Other phobias seem alarmingly specific, like omphalophobia, the fear of belly buttons, and papaphobia, the fear of the Pope. The big difference between papaphobia and omphalophobia is that you kind of have to go out of your way to see the Pope, so if you fear him you’re pretty much in the clear unless you happen to live in the Vatican — a very awful place to be a papaphobe. But if you’re an omphalophobe and you were born of woman you’re more or less screwed.
Some terrifying-sounding self-perpetuating meta-phobias include chronophobia, the fear of time moving forward, panphobia, the fear of everything, and phobophobia, the fear of having a phobia.
Also of note is nomophobia, the fear of being out of mobile phone contact. C’mon, guy. Do you not remember, like, 1999?
Few of the biological phobias are interesting and all of the prejudices are just, you know, bigotry. Some of the fictional phobias are pretty funny but most aren’t as creative as you’d hope. Keanuphobia is exactly what it sounds like. Luposlipaphobia, coined by Gary Larson — perhaps the first person I ever recognized as funny — refers to the “fear of being pursued by timber wolves around a kitchen table while wearing socks on a newly waxed floor.”
Link
Man is awesome at carnival games
Check this guy out, via Boing Boing:
Since this came up today and since yesterday marked the 10th anniversary of my brother’s death, an anecdote: I’ve mentioned my brother’s competitive streak before, but nowhere did it present itself more vividly or more hilariously than in games of chance at carnivals and amusement parks. He knew they were mostly scams, of course, but he was cocky enough to think he could beat them anyway. It wasn’t for the prizes, it was for the satisfaction of knowing he could outsmart or outwork the dude trying to take his money, either through physics or willpower or sheer force. Sometimes he actually did.
Anyway, one time, somewhere — either at a county fair upstate or Adventureland out on Long Island — my sister, my brother and I enter one of the multi-player games in which there’s always a winner. You probably know the one: Every contestant pays a dollar for a water gun on a hose facing a little target, and once the buzzer sounds you spray the target while a mechanical horse that corresponds to your position hops along a track to the finish. The winner gets some stuffed animal that is demonstrably crappier than the stuffed animals you think you’re going to get.
Chris was always an awesome older brother to both of us, but he was never the type to let us win at anything. So my sister and I decided to team up in the water-gun/horse-race thing — again, not for the stuffed animal, but just for the satisfaction of beating him at something.
As soon as the buzzer sounded, my siblings both fired at their targets and I turned and fired at my brother’s face. It was an amazing shot, too — I got him right in the left eye. But — and this will tell you something about that competitive streak — he didn’t scare or fire back or put the gun down and kick my ass. He just closed his eye and kept shooting. Pretty sure he won, too.
Also tells you something about cancer, I guess.
Rock bottom
I don’t typically cover celebrity news here and I especially shy away from the basest form of celebrity gossip — that which deals with addiction, messy divorces, custody cases and the like — because though I realize it comes with the territory for celebrities, reveling in it feels a bit too much like celebrating bloodsport for my tastes*. So Lindsay Lohan’s slow, public fall from the heights of Mean Girls to the depths of her current state of being famous mostly thanks to some high-profile arrests and fame perpetuating fame has gone entirely uncovered by this site.
But now that LiLo’s plunge has, for perhaps the first time, taken her down into the world that this blog inhabits — both physically and thematically — I feel obligated to note the following news. And I hope for Ms. Lohan’s sake that she stumbles upon it and is somehow able to step back and take stock of exactly what it implies for her career and her life:
Late last week, Lindsay Lohan was spotted partying at an Upper East Side bar with Shane Spencer and Pat Kelly.
That the bar was four blocks from my home is funny only to me. That she was partying with Shane Spencer and Pat Kelly is universally funny.
Shane Spencer and Pat Kelly. Shane Spencer and Pat Kelly.
Oof, Lindsay Lohan.
If anyone needs me, I’ll be surveying my local pizza-delivery men and making sure they survived the evening OK.
*- So, increasingly, does watching football. But that’s not going to change anytime soon, so I rationalize it by saying that I use up my personal allocation of barbaric entertainment watching football and try to avoid everything on TLC.
Let your troll glow
Remember that unfair Twitter hashtag from a few years back, #BlameBeltran, that tried to scapegoat him for the team’s second-half fizzle? We have finally found the right situation for it. The Mets can blame Beltran for this loss, and he wasn’t even playing.
– Andy Martino, N.Y. Daily News.
I know what I said about no-more-trolling, but y’all should be pretty proud of yourselves today. The trolling of yesteryear has been misinterpreted in mainstream reporting like we’re legit culture jammers or something.
I was so giggly about it I went out and purchased a hard copy of the Daily News. The newsstand in the Rockefeller Center concourse is apparently a Brookstone now so I had to walk over to the tiny magazine shop near the subway to get one, but I’ve got it and the article in question now hangs proudly over my desk next to the empty Cholula bottles, above the dartboard and the Eddy Curry Fat wheel. This won’t make my mom as proud as the time my Tebow tweet got quoted in the Times, but whatever.
To Martino’s credit, it’s not like there weren’t plenty of people scapegoating Beltran for the team’s second-half struggles. The Tweets that inspired the hashtag came in mocking reaction to those people. It’s just that the hashtag itself was, as far as I know, ironic in both its initial and its most frequent uses.
Taco Bell Tuesday
It’s Taco Bell Tuesday, and most of the news seems to stem from a single press release which, notably, I did not receive. What do I have to do to get on Taco Bell’s press list? Seriously. I have 276 unopened emails on my phone alone right now because I get four press releases every time a local arena-football team waives its backup kicker/punter. And no one out there will add me to the Taco Bell press list? I work for a mainstream media outlet. I am a crazy big-time journalist bro. Hell, I’m even on the Hamels Foundation’s media list. I WRITE ABOUT TACO BELL EVERY DAMN WEEK ARE YOU REALLY NOT LISTENING PLEASE TACO BELL IT’S ME TED I LOVE YOU WHY WON’T YOU EVER ACKNOWLEDGE ME WE COULD HAVE SOMETHING SO BEAUTIFUL!
Anyway.
Taco Bell unveils cornerstone of FirstMeal menu: A snippet of the press release, which has to come to you via Business Insider as if I’m not a business insider even though I’m sitting right here inside a f@#$ing business, refers to three “destination items” on the FirstMeal menu. Neither the Cinnabon Bites nor Mountain Dew A.M. should be new to anyone who regularly reads TedQuarters, but the release brings the first word of the A.M. Crunchwrap, which apparently looks like this:
OK, here’s the thing: Every description I can find of the A.M. Crunchwrap says it contains eggs, cheese, a hashbrown and bacon or sausage in a tortilla. But look at that picture: There’s something else in there. There are three distinct yellowy-orange goos. One is the cheese, one is the egg. What’s the third? What’s the third goo, Taco Bell? Because if that’s Lava Sauce or Zesty Pepper Jack sauce, we’re talking FirstMeal.
If you’ll recall, my initial disappointment in Taco Bell breakfast stemmed from the low ratio of Taco Bell to breakfast. Adding a signature sauce could go a long way toward righting that wrong. And, hey, hash browns.
No road trips necessary: On a conference call, Yum Brands CEO David Novak said he expects a nationwide rollout of FirstMeal by 2014. Again, Taco Bell: Loop me in on this stuff. C’mon.
For reasons almost inconceivable to me, not everyone reads TedQuarters: So news of the existence of Mountain Dew A.M. — reported here and elsewhere months ago — came as something of a surprise to the Internet and prompted all the predictable condescension. Pretty sure there’s a Fast Food Snark Mad Libs for Bloggers template out there you can just fill out whenever the need arises.
Stupidity overwhelming
You ever have a day when it feels like the weight of the world’s stupidity is crushing? That’s this day. It seems there’s just an avalanche of stupid thundering down upon me, an unending and unavoidable onslaught of stupid on my TV and in the papers and on the Internet and out in the street, the type of frustrating, mind-numbing stupid that just makes me want to bail on everything and hole up in a basement somewhere and eat Sun Chips and listen to Pet Sounds on repeat.
But that’s not really an option, so I’m going to take a reset and just not mention any of the stupid things I’ve heard or seen or read this morning. Instead I’ll write about Taco Bell in a minute, it being Taco Bell Tuesday and all. For now, watch this monkey mess with these tigers. This monkey’s OK in my book.
Sandwich of the Week
Hat tip to @OGDougKopf and local legend White Sean for joining me on two trips to eat this sandwich.
The sandwich: No. 7 Sub Club from the No. 7 Sub in the Plaza Hotel basement. Note that the sandwich in question is exclusive to the Plaza Hotel location. TedQuarters celebrates the luxury lifestyle.
The construction: Turkey, Canadian bacon, jalapeno mayo, bbq potato chips, tomato and pico de lettuce on toasted french bread.
Important background information: Seriously, the Plaza Hotel basement is all sorts of awesome. Overpriced and touristy? Sure. But a beacon of deliciousness in midtown’s vast wasteland of pay-per-pound corporate food bars, and an elegantly decorated one at that. In addition to the No. 7 Sub, there’s a Luke’s Lobster and a Billy’s — for my money, the city’s best bakery. For a treat, walk in the main entrance off Grand Army Plaza (the midtown one, not the Brooklyn one) and pretend you’re some kind of baller.
What it looks like:
How it tastes: This is such a good sandwich, but it’s hard to put my finger on why.
It’s not the turkey and it’s probably not the Canadian bacon. Neither takes anything away from the sandwich, for sure. The turkey adds all-important bulk, a meatiness that prevents this hero from being a mere mess of toppings and condiments. The Canadian bacon — or “ham,” as we call it here in the States — lends some of that too, plus maybe some saltiness and a gentle nod toward porky flavor.
But it is some combination of the bread, chips, pico de lettuce and jalapeno mayo that make a seemingly ordinary roster of ingredients a very decidedly extraordinary sandwich, in flavor, in texture and in execution, from the first toasty bite to the final morsels scratched from the wax paper and licked from the fingers.
The bread is perfect. Warm from the toaster and crunchy on the outside but still soft in the middle and clearly same-day fresh, it feels like the ideal vehicle for a classic deli combo or, frankly, any hearty sandwich.
The chips, somewhere buried in the middle, add a familiar sweet and smoky taste, and some mid-bite crunch. The jalapeno mayo, present throughout but never overwhelming, brings creaminess and fire, a back-of-the-mouth heat that emboldens every other flavor in the sandwich.
And the pico de lettuce — I don’t even know what this stuff is beyond some sort of dressed lettuce, exactly, but it’s amazing. It’s delicious and clean-tasting, almost refreshing, and both moist and crispy. It provides a cole slaw-like effect but it is not nearly so vinegary and it contains no mayo. That’s clearly the difference-maker here, actually, and my limited food-describing capabilities prevent me from doing it justice. You should probably go check out this sandwich.
But it’s everything, really. It all just works. It doesn’t taste like they’re trying to be too fancy or go crazy with odd ingredients; it tastes like someone with a very strong understanding of what makes sandwiches great took a familiar classic and elevated it to its ideal form. It’s good enough that I want to go back to No. 7 Sub a few more times and try everything on their menu — high praise from a dude pretty dedicated to trying and reviewing as wide a variety of sandwiches and sandwich-purveyors as his budget and waistline will allow.
What it’s worth: Herein lies the rub. Presumably rent in the Plaza Hotel basement does not come cheap, plus all the ingredients in the No. 7 Sub Club are clearly high quality. Accordingly, the No. 7 Sub Club costs $13.
How it rates: 93 out of 100. I really loved this sandwich. If it were three or four dollars cheaper, it’d be among the very highest-rated sandwiches reviewed on this site. Even so, it’s a deserving Hall of Famer.
Twitter Q&A: Quick ones because it’s Labor Day weekend and no one’s out there and oh I’m so lonely
https://twitter.com/DanDotLewis/status/241590622425849857
Assuming we’re not counting P-Funk and such: Orlando Magic at the arcade. Love Shaq, always, love hearing the NBA Jam announcer guy get all worked up about Scott Skiles. I know most people say “Boomshakalaka!” but to me, “SKILES!” will always be the defining noise associated with the game. On the Sega Genesis I usually used the Supersonics because Shawn Kemp was great for dunking and because in my youth I was randomly a huge Detlef Schrempf fan.
https://twitter.com/MLBoorstein/status/241590576850554881
Who still buys cream cheese in bricks? Is that for baking? I think I’ve purchased cream cheese in a brick like twice in my life and both times in cases of emergency. I can’t remember what the cream-cheese emergency was, but I imagine it was a situation where I had bagels and they were going to go stale if I didn’t eat them soon and the place I went to for cream cheese only had it in bricks. Total disaster.
They’re a total mess, and you usually waste half the cream cheese trying to clean up the edge of the foil with the knife, then ripping the foil, then having to cut back the cream cheese to fit inside the foil. And don’t tell me to just ditch the foil and stick the cream cheese in a sealed container inside my fridge somewhere. Not going to happen. I already do that with butter, and I won’t concede more valuable fridge space and tupperware to a less versatile spread. Just buy the whipped stuff.
https://twitter.com/chrispalm/status/241593005138649091
I have, and I hate to say it but I was a bit disappointed. A bunch of stuff blew up and that was certainly sweet, but it was way too much with the cutesy wink-wink nod-nod hey-we-all-used-to-be-action-stars stuff. It’s such a shame to have awesome Jason Statham and awesome Jet Li and most-awesome-of-all Terry Crews in the movie and have them all take a back seat to Sylvester Stallone, who’s a complete caricature at this point and impossible to understand. Bruce Willis can still hang with anyone, but Arnold Schwarzenegger was so, so bad, and not bad in the good way.
If you read with any regularity you know I love action movies. But part of what I most love about action movies — especially on the big screen — is their ability to completely enrapture me so I get lost in the movie and forget everything that’s happening in the real-life world. And I just don’t think that’s going to happen when post-Governorship Arnold Schwarzenegger is in the movie, especially when he’s all “I’LL BE BACK” even though the movie is not Terminator. Schwarzenegger and Stallone are too famously Schwarzenegger and Stallone to be believable characters in the movie. Same thing happens for me with Tom Cruise now.
https://twitter.com/happyhank24/status/241595231894638592
Do people still say those things? They shouldn’t. People definitely said those things before the season, but I suspect those same people now love the hell out of Whitestone Mike. It’s still a small sample, but Baxter’s got over 200 plate appearances of being a very good big-league player now. And he always hit in the Minors, to boot. He should have a role on the Major League team moving forward. What that role will be depends on what players the Mets can bring in this offseason.
Rollerball and it’s not even close. I wrote about my experience at a free screening of Rollerball here.
As for the worst movie I’d want to remake? Hmm. I don’t know if I’d want to remake any movie at all, and I think if I did want to remake a movie it would be one I considered good even if most people didn’t. Oh — I got it: Brewster’s Millions. Underrated movie, original premise, timeless theme, could use a contemporary twist.
Tedquarters 