Restaurant Review: Morimoto

For my one dinner in Philadelphia I choose Morimoto. A friend recommended it and I was a fan of Iron Chef so I had to try it. It's one long narrow modern room. See the site for pictures, mine didn't come out. The booths aren't really booths but free standing tables and chairs (and benches) with thick plastic walls separating the tables. As you progress through your meal, you realize the plastic walls slowly change colors. At some point you think, wasn't that blue before? There's a menu but the specialty is Omakase which is a chef's choice. It's priced at three levels, $80, $100 or $120 per person. The difference is the quality of ingredients they choose from. For $60 more you can have wine paired with the dishes. I choose the $120 figuring I wasn't coming back any time soon and skipped the wine instead opting for a Morimoto Martini (Sake, Vodka and some slices of cucumber) which was tasty. They asked if I had any alergies and then brought out 9 courses of surprises.

My 1st course was Toro Tartare. It was tuna mashed with something a little crunchy stuff, topped with caviar. On the side was wasabi and I was instructed to have a little wasabi with each bite. It was absolutely delicious. A great texture and flavor, very fresh. Next to the wasabi was a small fruit called Yamamomo which I was told is a small mountain peach and was a refresher for between courses. Inside is a pit but the flesh was sweet and tasty.

My 2nd course was 3 oysters served on the half shell. One with Champagne, one with a thin slice of jalapeno and one with some salsa. Now I don't like oysters but II hadn't mentioned this and was willing to try anything, so I did. They were good, particularly the champagne and jalapeno ones. Forgive the picture, I forgot when the dish came out, so picture the oysters being in the shells you see.

My 3rd course was Thai Red Snapper, 4 slices sashimied, seared and served in some olive oil. It was just ok. The fish was nice but it was very oily. Again, sorry about the pic, just imagine 3 more slices beneath this one. Really I got better at this.

The 4th course was I think called compache, supposedly an exotic form of yellowtail. It was two sashimi slices and some microgreens in a very tasty umi soy vinaigrette. Only problem was the fish was little tough, I had to eat each piece in one bite.

The 5th course was a palette cleanser, a scoop of sherbert. I tried a bite and it was very good, raspberry I thought. I had a few more bites and tasted some wasabi. At first I thought it was left over from the tuna tartare, but that didn't make sense and I only tasted it while having the sherbert, not between bites. I asked and yes, the palette cleanser was a raspberry wasabi sherbert. It was good and the wasabi was very mild, but I never would have thought to use wasabi cleanse your palatte.

My 6th course was tilefish. It was cooked and served over japanese vegetables and some grain and sliced almonds. It was in a fantastic sweet soy dressing. There were some small tempura somethings. They might have been peas but seemed a little big for that. They were hot from the fryer and really good.

My 7th course was a half lobster that was spiced and broiled. Instead of butter it was served with a citris crème fraîche which made this absolutely decadent. I'm not a big lobster person. I normally just think the flavor is ok and can't be bothered eating it from the shell. This was amazing and I picked the meat out of every small leg and place I could find. This was the best part of the meal.

While waiting for my next course I looked down at the sushi bar and realized their sushi would probably be really good. i wondered if the chef would be insulted if after the meal I ordered a few pieces of sushi to try. Well it turns out my 8th course was six pieces of sushi. From left to right: otoro, yellowtail, salmon, something, squid, and mackerel. This was the best sushi I've had in the US. I can't really explain why. I think because I had the more expensive meal they were high quality cuts of fish. Whatever it was, it was yummy.

While waiting for dessert I realized I should have said I loved chocolate. Again, they seem to have read my mind and brought a chocolate cake for my 9th course. With the cake was a scoop of (I think vanilla) ice cream, a sake flavored jelly and 3 almonds. The sake jelly was awful and I didn't like it with the rest of the flavors. The ice cream was fine, smooth and creamy. The chocolate cake was unfortunately not molten but was rather cupcake-like, which was disappointing. Though I have to say, the three almonds were by far the best I've ever had, they were just astounding. The black coffee was very strong.

So that was it. $150 total and two hours long. Very tasty but not consistent, I had some amazing things (the tuna tartare, sushi and the lobster) and some just ok things. I wouldn't say the best meal I've ever had though I would definately come back and have the omakase again, though I'd probably get one of the cheaper ones.

Movie Review: Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit

I love the Wallace & Gromit films. If you haven't heard of them, Wallace is and inventor and Gromit is his very intelligent dog. They have been in several animated shorts, two of which ("The Wrong Trousers" and "A Close Shave") have won Academy Awards. They are done by Nick Park of Aardman Animation in painstaking claymation. Park also did Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer" music video which you might have seen. Their first feature length film was Chicken Run and this is the first time Wallace and Gromit have been in a full length (85 minute) feature.

In this film, our duo run Anti-Pesto, a humane pest remover which the whole town seems to have hired to protect their prized vegetables from rabbits. There's an annual fair coming up and they all want to win. They of course have some wonderful devices to help them, including the Bun-Vac 6000 (which has two settings: Blow and Suck). While Anti-Pesto seems to be protecting the town efectively, soon a giant beast starts attacking and they have their work cut out for them. Their premire customer, Lady Tottington (Helena Bonham Carter) also runs the fair and hopes to win. Her suitor is Victor Quartermaine (Ralph Fiennes) who wants to pursue a less humane way to deal with the beast.

The animation is of course amazing, though I noticed some small special effects thrown in in a couple of places. In their first film, A Grand Day out, the flame on a match was clay, didn't look like it in this one. The plot moves pretty quickly and there are several good chase scenes and a lot of puns. However I did find it quite predictable. I couldn't guess to far ahead, but very often I knew what the next step was, and that's all you really need to blow any suspense. The other thing I was disappointed in was that there wasn't enough Gromit. The Wrong Trousers was very effective at making you feel sorry for Gromit and giving you a big emotional attachment to the film. A Close Shave couldn't quite match that. In this film, Gromit's seems mostly reduced to inaudibly groaning at Wallace's incompetence and of course saving the day. I enjoyed the film a lot and laughed out loud several times, but I liked the last two more.

Cheney's Accountability

I think Andrew describes my views on this well.

Alito Index

Here's a list of various Alito articles and NPR broadcasts.

NSA Lied to Cover Up Gulf of Tonkin Mistakes

Why it's good to question your government, sometimes they lie. And really, the excuse of "this is what the intelligence said" isn't a good one either. Take that Ann Coulter.

Libby's Replacement?

The National Journal has a long article on David Addington, Cheney's current counsel and leading candidate to replace Libby. It's a bit of his background and a lot of stuff about his possible role in Plamegate. I never like it when an article says "sources say" but there's some stuff here.

Republic Dogs

This is apparently from 1994 but I don't remember seeing it. In todays terms it's a mashup of Quentin Tarantino and Socrates. Amusing.

Another Victim of Miers

It seems Doonesbury was going to run a series of strips on Miers starting next week. But now with her withdrawl they won't run them, instead next week will be repeats. But you can see the Mier's Strips here.

Time to take the beach chair out of my trunk

It's snowing here. Pretty hard. Thankfully not sticking (yet). It's not even November yet. It's not even the end of Daylight Savings Time!

Miers Analysis

This SCOTUSblog Commentary seems to say it all:

The Bush administration is in so much trouble he probably doesn't have the political capital to win a hard nomination fight. Bush hates losing and is probably pissed. Gonzalez would run into the same documentation problem as Miers did. He probably has to look beyond his inner circle because the cronyism complain worked. Democrats are probably more willing to filibuster someone like Priscilla Owen. Finding another Roberts would work. O'Connor is probably on the court through December, meaning she'll be involved in the abortion case in the current docket.

Miers Scratches in the Second

Harriett Miers withdrew her nomination to the Supreme Court today. Maybe with the possible upcoming indictments they think Bush will need his personal lawyer. While I looked forward to what seems like a more qualified nominee, I expect it to be a more conservative one. So I guess Sandra Day O'Connor will be on the court a bit longer.

Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind?

This is an interesting talk by Charles Petzold about the current state of programming. He's been programming for many years and has written several Windows Programming books. He begins with a summary of how computers have been portrayed in movies, which I of course particularly liked.

He then gets to programming. First about IntelliSense, how enormous libraries make you dependent on it, and how it forces you to give up and top-down programming. Then he talks about how generated code (in particular that generated by Visual Studio) is often bloated and not exemplary of good programming practices. One quick example is how generated code uses really poor variable names like button1, button2, etc. It's also quite a different paradigm for the programmer from traditional programming methods. The general premise is that Visual Studio is designed to make us faster programmers, not necessarily better ones.

He's not dogmatica about it. Often saying he's not sure if what he's complaining about is significant. But I found a good (and also a long) read.

A Mac note: I read this article (as I do most long ones) by copying the text into Tofu, a simple program that just formats the text into easy to read narrow columns, like newspaper articles. I also enable speech recognition so I can literally just say "move right" to scroll the page. Great stuff.

Guessing about Roberts and Roe

Here's an interesting commentary on the first abortion related action of the Roberts court. A Missouri prisoner in her 2nd trimester wanted an abortion but under a new statute Missouri doesn't provide transportation for prisoners to abortion facilities unless the abortion is medically necessary, which wasn't the case. She sued saying the policy violated her right under Roe and was cruel and unusual punishment. It came to U.S. District Judge Dean Whipple who found in her favor. Please read the article it explains all the issues involved very well, it's not obvious and he didn't decide it on a knee jerk reaction.

So this in the jurisdiction of the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals and Justice Thomas is the Circuit Justice. The Eighth Circuit issued a temporary stay of Judge Whipple's decision pending the Supreme Court's resolution of the issue. This kind of stuff happen often and the court didn't give a reason for it's decision. The Supreme Court, in a one-sentence order denied review, and Judge Whipple's decision stands. That's all the info we have to go on. But the article ends with lots of speculation as to what could have happened. Of course it covers Robert's opinion being either side of the issue and can come to no conclusions but I found the discussion interesting.

Administration and Torture, Fault of Congress?

Andrew Sullivan make an interesting point that every administration overreaches in time of war. In our Constitution it's the role of Congress to check this and they haven't. Republicans don't go against their president and Democrats are too afraid of looking week on terrorism. Only McCain is trying.

Human Remote Control

SFGate reports on an experimental device, you wear on your head, which generates low voltages that throw off your balance. With a remote control, someone can make you walk a path of their choosing. The notion is to make video games more realistic, or to allow you to experience the motions of someone like a dancer. Crazy stuff.

Movie Review: Good Night, and Good Luck

TV news sucks. The 24 hour cable channels repeat the same stuff over and over. The networks give a few moments for news stories and take up most of their time with weather, sports, and celebrity gossip. The best example to me was Jon Stewart last night on the Daily Show commenting about coverage of Hurricane Wilma. He showed clips of weather reporters standing out in the storm being blown around and hit by debris. Al Roker literally had a man holding his legs so he wouldn't blow over. That didn't work and we saw them both blow over. How absurd is this?

I imagine Edward R. Murrow would be appalled but not surprised. He became famous doing radio reports from London during World War II. After the war, still working for CBS he moved to television. See It Now was the first news magazine show on television, though it didn't make a lot of money, it won many awards and was on the air for 5 years. He also hosted Person to Person which were celebrity interviews as we know them today. Murrow didn't like doing Person to Person but it was popular and brought in revenue.

Murrow is probably most famous for a series of broadcasts that led to the downfall of Senator Joe McCarthy. They were brave shows because anyone that went against McCarthy was attacked by him. Murrow, his team, and CBS all took a big risk. But Murrow was highly principled and felt a duty to stand up for what was right. This film covers these episodes of See It Now.

At an hour and half this is a short film and it was made on only an $8 million budget. it doesn't try to cover the topic exhaustively, skipping over almost all of the investigation and reducing several of the scenes to musical montages. It does try to acurately show the episodes in question, the risks the reporters took and a bit of what live TV was like. Murrows studio was tiny, with the camera so close to him that his producer Fred Friendly (played by writer, director George Clooney) could sit next to him, light his cigarettes and queue him by tapping him on the leg. We also get scenes within the CBS offices of meetings of the staff and management on the effects of the reports.

David Strathairn plays Murrow recreating several of his broadcasts. He's remarkably convincing, an Oscar nomination is certainly possible. In the Sen. McCarthy role we have original footage of McCarthy which is just stunning. it's very effective to have the actual menace playing himself.

Much as The Crucible was really an allegory against McCarthism this movie is really about the current state of journalism in this country. To make it clear, the story is bookended by Strathairn giving a speech Murrow really gave at at the Radio and Television News Directors Association convention in 1958. It was a scathing criticism of the use of television and the civic mindedness of Americans. He worried if in 50 or 100 years, television was only used for entertainment, what a waste it would be. He asked if we had an hour a week on civic education what a difference it would make. And he realized that Americans were probably to fat and lazy to watch such things but said we should still try.

Sadly his predictions came true. This film is a wake up call. A very good one. It's not so much a great movie as it is a compelling civics lesson. The media needs to do better, the audience needs to do better, and our government should be on alert. McCarthism could happen again, maybe it is already.

Getting Honest Advice

There's this big brouhaha going on that Bush won't release documents that Harriet Miers authored while serving in the White House. Senators want to review them for their "advise and consent" role, but Bush won't release them. When asked about it yesterday Scott McCellan repeated the party line: "The President depends on his staff to receive open and candid advice as he moves ahead on the decision-making process. It would be unprecedented for a sitting President to release deliberative decision-making documents while they are in office. That is unheard of. It would have a chilling effect on the ability of the President to continue to receive sound and open and candid advice from his advisors." Ok, though I suspect that without more info, Senators will exercise their constitutional right and reject the nomination.

So I read the Boston Globe today and I see that yesterday the president met with his Cabinet, live on TV. Really, you can even get the
video from the White House website. If the fear of releasing papers would co-opt his ability to get sound advice, even assuming the relevant parties agreed to it, how is it that you can televise a cabinet meeting? Unfortunately I know the answer, it wasn't a real meeting, just a stunt. I'm not sure if that's better or worse

Perjury

It's fun watching the Republicans try to down play a perjury charge as they wait for Fitzgerald to announce his findings. They were so outraged when it was Clinton being called for it. So todays
flip-flop-flip is Senator Kay Baily Hutchison (R-TX). Against Clinton perjury was important, over the weekend it was a technicality, today it's a terrible crime. Fun fun fun.

I'll go further though. Clinton's perjury was about if he had sex with a (consenting adult) intern. The perjury charges being talked about are related to national security, lying to the nation about going to war, and about an administration retaliating against a whistle blower by destroying his wife's career. I'd they are all far more serious than Clinton's. For one thing, I think they are all crimes while Clinton's actions were merely immoral.

Bush and Torture Again

So maybe there is a little more evidence in the Bush supports torture debate. This post from Andrew Sullivan describes a couple of interesting points. First is an ACLU review of 44 deaths of captives. Second is that the administration is trying to compromise in saying it won't allow the military to torture people, just the CIA, and this is why he wants Roberts and Miers on the Supreme Court. Nice.

Wellington Mara 1916-2005

About the only thing I follow in sports are the New York Giants. Today their owner Wellington Mara passed away at the age of 89. He worked with the Giants for an amazing 81 years, becoming co-owner at the age of 14. Nice work if you can get it, but imagine doing the same thing for 81 years. Now imagine doing it well, really well, well enough to be in the NFL Hall of Fame. And, he treated members of the organization like family, even after they left the team. He had 11 children and 40 grandchildren, he was used to large families.

Hitchcock This Week

Turner Classic Movies begins a Hitchcock Week today, showing 39 of his films over next 7 days. My Tivo will be busy catching some of the less common ones, but if you haven't seen the classics (Rear Window, North by Northwest, Vertigo, To Catch a Thief, Notorious, The Man Who Knew Too Much, etc.) nows a great time to see them.

More on the 10 Foiled Plots

Yesterday's Washington Post had a followup article on the 10 foiled plots Bush mentioned a few weeks ago.

"A White House list of 10 terrorist plots disrupted by the United States has confused counterterrorism experts and officials, who say they cannot distinguish between the importance of some incidents on the list and others that were left off." For example, Richard Reid, the shoe bomber. "Intelligence officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity said the White House overstated the gravity of the plots by saying that they had been foiled, when most were far from ready to be executed." Also pointed out was the threat index was not raised from yellow during the most of incidents listed. And of course, here's the money quote: "We don't know how they came to the conclusions they came to...It's safe to say that most of the [intelligence] community doesn't think it's worth very much."

Remember how this went? Bush mentioned them in his speech, the press questioned Scott McClellan about the 10 and he said "Well, those are two off the top of my head. I'll be glad to see what additional information we can get you. Some of that information is classified, though." Then later that day they released the Fact Sheet. My personal guess, Bush mentioned it, either off the cuff or more likely via a speech that wasn't properly vetted (hey how many plots do you think he should say we foiled?) and they had to make up a list. Either way, this sounds like politicizing terrorism, I'm shocked, just shocked.

Movie Review: Capote

I must admit, I didn't really know who Truman Capote was. I knew he played Lionel Twain in the 1976 film Murder by Death, because I remember seeing it as a 10 year old and wondering who the strange old guy was. I also knew that the boy Dill in To Kill a Mockingbird was based on him. I guess I knew he wrote Breakfast at Tiffany's but I had never heard of In Cold Blood.

For those of you like me, Truman Capote was a famous writer (in the 1950s and 60s), as the film describes it, the most famous writer in America . He was openly gay, had an eccentric manner and a unique childish voice. In 1959 he read about a murdered family in Kansas and decided to write about the effect of the murders on the town. He went to Kansas with his childhood friend Nelle Harper Lee (who wrote To Kill a Mockingbird) to do research. The criminals were caught and Capote interviewed them at length and he turned his story into the first "non-fiction novel" about a true crime and the criminals. Perry Smith and Richard Hickock were convicted and sentenced to death. The film starts with him reading about the murders and covers through their executions 5 years later.

Philip Seymour Hoffman seems to transcend acting and becomes Truman Capote. An Oscar nomination seems assured. Catherine Keener plays Nelle, Clifton Collins Jr. is Perry Smith, and Chris Cooper plays agent Alvin Dewey. They all do a fine job, but the film is owned by Hoffman.

We start out seeing Capote holding court at a New York party, being the center of attention and loving it. In Kansas, when he first meets Alvin Dewey he points out the scarf he's wearing is from Bergdorf, when Dewey leaves the room he mentions his hat is from Sears Roebuck. Later, Mrs. Dewey invites the famous author to their home for dinner and Capote wows them with tales of Humphrey Bogart and John Huston as well as touching stories showing his serious side. He succeeds in getting Dewey to talk about the investigation.

Capote meets murderer Perry Smith and we see him make a connection, he feels sorry for someone else alienated from society. Despite his poor background, Perry uses words like "mendacious" and keeps a journal. Capote says to Lee, "It's like Perry and I grew up in the same house, and one day he went out the back door and I went out the front." For a long time we see Capote seem to befriend Smith and then we start to see him talking to his editor and to friends about this wonderful story he's found and how he just needs to get Smith to talk about the actual crime and his book will be the book of the decade. We see Capote lie to Smith to get the information he needs but Smith resists. It's not clear if Smith is using Capote or not. It's also not clear if Capote actually cares for Smith or is merely using him. It's probably wasn't clear to Capote either.

In order to have more time to get their story, Capote has helped Smith and Hickock get better lawyers. This worked a little too well, as the appeals go on for 4 years. Capote starts drinking heavily and hopes that their appeals are denied so that he can get the end of his story. While his views are clearly self-absorbed, he also feels guilty about not helping murderers who call him friend. We learn in epilogue that Capote never finished another novel and died in 1984 of complications from alcoholism.

The film is not perfect. It drags in the second half as Capote's novel is delayed. Though that probably helps put the audience in Capote's position a bit. The script is minimalist but not completely so. Hoffman's portrayal shows all the inner angst he must but the script also provides some exposition in wonderfully biting lines . He tells Lee "There wasn't anything I could have done to save them." and she replies "Maybe, but the fact is you didn't want to." Capote might have changed the literary landscape with In Cold Blood, in but in doing so he realized how self-absorbed he really was and he couldn't recover from that. I'm just glad we got to go along for the ride.

An interesting note. The theater was selling the paperback In Cold Blood at the concessions stand. They were also selling DVDs of the 1967 movie starring Robert Blake. I've never seen this done before but think it's a great idea. I picked up a copy of the book and look forward to reading it.

San Francisco in Jell-O

Elizabeth Hickock has created a model of
San Francisco in Jell-O. 6 photos and 1 minute video clip of the city wiggling.

Another Photoshop Contest

Here's another Photoshop Contest, "Who we'd really like to see on a stamp... or... maybe not." I love this one.