34

If there's anything less interesting than blogging about blogging it's blogging about not blogging. So I won't do that. 34 is still a blog and yes, there will probably be some new content on it sometime. There would probably be more content if I hadn't purchased season one of Lost from the iTunes music (video) store this past weekend, and if Sheryl and I hadn't watched 18 episodes on Saturday and Sunday. We do love the Lost kids and hope that in real life they don't find the island as creepy as we do.

When I lived in (on?) the Lower East Side, my roommate and I, way not cool enough to hang out at the Cool Kid bars that filled the neighborhood, found a home at Iggy's. Iggy'’s was as pubby as you can get below Houston. The drinks were (for New York) affordable, the bartenders were sassy and fun, and right next door was Rush Hour, a burger/sammie place that would deliver right to you. Andrea finagled a guest bartending stint a few times, which meant free drinks every so often. But the best part about Iggy'’s was its jukebox. The selection was crafted somehow perfectly for us: Prince's "7,"” "“Son of a Preacher Man,"” and the absolute best song to belt out after a gin and tonic (or four), Jeff Buckley'’s "“Last Goodbye."” Let'’s just say a lot of the LES has seen us twirling and singing like rockstars. And when you'’re in with the bartendresses, they give you 20 songs for a dollar. Awesome. The memories of our own lil'’ local...

Adam is back on his "I won't eat carbs (except when I feel like it)" thing, so instead of making the linguini and clam sauce I had my mind on set on, I had to come up with something else for the evening. I settled on what I could best describe as a sausage ragout , but I may just be randomly throwing around French culinary terms here. Valentine's dinner will be black bean & tortilla soup with some steak–and lots of Coturri 2002 Zinfandel Sonoma Valley, the favorite wine of ours from the wine tasting course thing that Sheryl gifted me. But the sausage ragout : 4 links spicy Italian sausage 1 medium sized eggplant 1 zucchini 6 largish whitecap mushrooms, or something more interesting a few cloves of garlic canned crushed tomatoes or tomato sauce seasonings (crushed red pepper flakes, black pepper, fresh basil, dry oregano, dill, that sort of thing) a loaf of real bread De-case the sausage and brown it a bit in a 12" chef's skillet. Dice the eggplant, and s...

This is why we plan on having our own. We'll save the leasing money for college tuition, which should be in the million dollar a year range by 2024. (If you are similarly obsessed with pandas, the PandaCam and Panda Fix are of interest. If you not not obsessed, please don't judge me.)

Someone obviously took my post title seriously and went out and started up the Jester again. It's not the Spectator Publishing Co. this time, though. I'm not quite sure whether it's funny.

Confirming what I've always suspected, only crappy superheroes go to Columbia.

The only time I read the Times magazine anymore is when I'm at my parents' on a Sunday morning and have nothing else to read. As others have noted , the Q&A is usually a train wreck, and of course William Safire is William Safire. I don't understand how the Ethicist feature, essentially a weekly exercise in snark, has as many fans as it does–unless you're in it for the snark. The food column is often only tangentially about food, and the recipes are never practical, certainly not in comparison to those in the Wednesday food section, which I usually enjoy. (The only consistent redeeming feature of the food column is that Amanda Hesser no longer writes it. That is a huge win.) But anyway, the Times has launched a new sports magazine, Play . I don't know whether it's weekly, or what. I do know that the one feature of the Times magazine that I do like, the Freakonomics column, has been moved to Play this week. I haven't read through that much more of...

Via Gothamist comes the revelation that the good ol' Spec has launched three new blogs. Somewhat odd is that the URL for the alumni website, effectively a blog, that I made for them now points to the ad sheet. I'll have to tell someone about that. The Spec blogs currently look like shite in Safari. I will have to tell someone about that as well. In other Spec /blogging news, Jesse Oxfeld, the Editor of Gawker , will be speaking at this year's Blue Pencil Dinner after Floyd Abrams backed out. Am I going to ask Oxfeld whether he sees blogging as being analogous to a " one-man circle jerk "? Yes.

In other news, I haven't won the New Yorker cartoon caption contest yet.