That was the weekend

After all my (literal) bellyaching, y'all could be forgiven for assuming that I spent the weekend curled up clutching my tummy and cursing Thai Avenue through my gritted teeth. But I was right to worry that my pains Friday night were psychosomatic or, at very least, exaggerrated by my anxieties. They kept me from eating very much at Dorado that evening--a shame, given how tasty the food was--but otherwise didn't cramp my style much.

It was a shitty couple of days for doing much anyway. I barely missed being caught in the downpour when it broke Friday evening and managed to take advantage of a window of slack to get to the bus stop. (I never heard the tornado sirens myself, though I did overhear others discussing them.) No such luck on the other end and I get plenty wet on the block-walk to the bookstore where snowy_owlet was refreshing her spirits. Our dinner companions welcomerain, and spookyfruit graciously offered to pick us up, but upon going to meet them, not only had the rain stopped but the sky had cleared.

The next morning was overcast again and it looked like it could start again any moment, so I rushed over to monshu's after my golden siesta. Thus began a day of laying around and watching too much television as the weather alternated between cloudburst and drizzle. We also played about on the computer, taking advantage of some of the incredible genealogical resources of the Web to track down information on monshu's Highland clan and his deceased relatives in Michigan.

Sunday was considerably nicer, so we treated ourselves to the Korean barbecue I was unable to eat on Friday and then walked some of it off with a stroll around Rosehill (only too late, alas, did I realise we could've strolled through Rosehill) to the new TarGay on Peterson. monshu pronounced himself disappointed, but I think he's valuing too little (1) a convenient place to find quality jeans in his size and a decent approximation of the sadly deceased Field Gear line of tees and (2) a genuine Hello Kitty Room Humidifier.

By the time we were ready to leave, the day had attained near perfection. I announced I was heading to the Lake, slipped my phone into my pocket and my book in my hand, and left. There's a place almost exactly due east of his building which has become my favourite because of the strange interactions of waves and sand: The waves rebounding off the retaining wall strike incoming crests at about a 90° angle and this leads to rather unpredictable and extreme washes across the last little corner of beach. I could watch it for hours, but I really wanted to finish Dubliners. The whitecaps were fantastic; what sounded like distant drumming turned out to be only the waves smacking into hollows in the eroded seawall. There was a constant parade of joggers, dogwalkers, Russians, lovebirds, bikers, and so forth behind me while I sat in a pool of fading sunlight.

I'll never be your Top Chef

Before I left for the shore, monshu instructed me to bring back some meat for dinner. Remembering the big bag of walnut meats he had handy, I was inspired to pick up a chicken breast (what can I say? None of the pork looked good) with the intention of crusting it and finishing it in the oven. It would be something a little different while still complying to the strictures of South Beach.

Alas, I didn't know what I was doing. The untoasted nuts ground down to a fine powder that came out like a paste; it didn't so much "crust" as "smear". monshu had suggested brushing the breast filets with pomegranate molasses to make them sticky, but I was afraid they'd stick to nothing so much as the pan and brought out the white flour after all. Most of the nut meal ended up stranded in the pan, so we deglazed with wine, poached the breasts in the oven, and then reduced the liquid to a glaze. By no means a disaster, but nothing like my original vision either.

Meanwhile, he was watching Bravo, which was endlessly promoting the new season of Top Chef. Between Frankie the Bull and the return of Tom Colicchio, I didn't see how I could pass on this, trash television or no, but I've resolved to be strong and boycott it. Looking over the chef bios, I see that--just like last time--absolutely everyone is from (1) California, (2) Vegas, or (3) NYC. Y'know, we may not have the French Laundry or Le Cirque out here, but a town with Alinea, Tru, and Charlie Trotter's can hardly be called a culinary wasteland. Too cheap to do a casting call in Chicago, Bravo? Then fuck you people.

Tastes great, less filled

Last week had something of the "j-curve" that people are talking about, only in reverse: It peaked on Wednesday and then troughed Friday morning before recovering at a lower level Friday night. As a result, I never felt in the mood to recount the fun we had in Milwaukee. In fact, I dithered so long that my brother beat me to the punch, which ordinarily never happens.

At least I can still go with my punchier top-ten list idea, namely:

Top Ten Reasons Why Miller Park Is A Better Place Than Cellular Field To Watch The Cards Play

1. It's named for a beer. A crappy beer, granted, but being a St. Louisan, this makes me feel right at home.
2. Despite the name, you can get Leinenkugel Weiss--ON TAP.
3. Bernie the Brewer looks like he could be a brewer (albeit a steroid-abusing hydrocephalic one), whereas the White Sox mascot looks like nothing so much as an alligator covered in bread mould.
4. The Milwaukee fans were perfectly nice to us, despite that fact that our team had definitively eliminated them from the playoffs only the night before.
5. What's not to love about four men in sausage costumes racing around the bases during the 7th-inning stretch? We also saw Mr and Mrs Miller (identifiable by the five-foot tall beer cans encasing their bodies) in the audience, leading us to wonder if some WPA-style make-work scheme for costumed mascots was in effect.
6. For $30, we were sitting directly beneath the press boxes.
7. There were actually men stationed at either entrance to this section to validate entry. Both times I walked in, I sailed right past them, forcing them to jog after me for several yards calling "Sir! Sir!" and then they apologised to me for the inconvenience.
8. I can't believe bunj forgot to mention The Iceman, a beer vendor beloved for his signature cry of (IPA follows) [ho::w] following a successful sale.
9. It took us roughly the same amount of time, door-to-door, to drive back to Chicago from Wisconsin as it did to wait in line for the CTA, ride it to downtown, and drive back home after the Sox game.
10. Like the Cell, Miller has fireworks, too, and they're not afraid to set them off EVEN WITH THE ROOF CLOSED.

It would've been nice to see Cards win for change, since, after all, they've been doing that a lot this year. But their record is even better at home and we're definitely going to see about getting tickets for New Busch next year. At least it was an 0-1 game with a dramatic homer in the bottom of the ninth rather than the ignominious massacre at Sox Park; as a special bonus, none of our star players was injured during play. Curse you, Chicago, and go Cards!

Pretension in context

The last day of Celtic Fest, monshu and I ducked into Barnes & Noble for a little refreshment before taking the train back home. They had a half-price sale on their eponymous editions of literary classics, so I picked up the omnibus volume containing A potrait of the artist as a young man and Dubliners. I have a copy of the former somewhere, but it's in poor condition; I'd only ever read the last story ("The Dead") in the latter.

In general, they did a bang-up job. As someone who's been known to pull out a street map when reading a novel or short story set in a European city, I love love love the fact that each story in Dubliners is furnished with a street map showing the routes of the characters therein. There's a handy chart explaining British pre-decimal currency to those of us who never had to use it and the critical apparatus looks pretty solid, too.

But I wonder about the footnotes. A lot of the choices of glosses seem...odd. I fully understand the need to decode Catholic lingo like chalice, Eucharist, and Sacred Heart or regionalisms like tea for the evening meal and curate for a "spirit-grocer's assistant" (as the OED puts it), but does anyone really need to be told that "Persia" is the older name for Iran or that punch is alcoholic (at least when consumed by a drunkard in a tavern?)

I guess the most curious thing for me was that, more often than not, the meaning of most terms was clear from context. An especially egregious example:

He was now safe in the dark snug of O'Neill's shop*, and, filling up the little window that looked into the bar with his inflamed face, the colour of dark wine or dark meat, he called out: "Here, Pat, give us a g.p.† like a good fellow." The curate‡ brought him a glass of plain porter.
...
*O'Neill's shop is a pub[.]
†Glass of porter, a dark ale.
‡ Dublin lingo for a bartender

I mean, really, if you can't tell from that passage that "g.p." must be some kind of slang for "glass of porter", then what do you think you're going to get out of reading Joyce? And the identification of a shop where a man has gone expressly for the purpose of a purchasing a drink as "a pub" or "a bar" is sadly typical.

I can't help but wonder: Are that a lot of people out there, when they hit an unfamiliar word in the middle of a sentence, come to a halt and can't proceed until they know what it means? After a couple of stories, I found I had to fight the urge to read the footnotes unless I absolutely had no choice since otherwise the obviousness of most glosses only irritated me.

BTW, I'm not sure who to blame for the mistakes in the Irish, like *deoc for deoch (in deoch on doruis "one for the road") or the lack of accents in *Eire Abu (i.e Éire Abú "Up With Ireland!"). Joyce, one of his editors, or perhaps even the characters themselves. After all, *deoc with a [k] rather than a [x] is a perfectly reasonable mistake for a non-native speaker to make, as the man who uses this expression is.