Month: November 2010

Six months after flooding made a mess of Nashville, the Opryland Hotel is opening for business again just in time for Christmas. And not a moment too soon, as Christmas is half the reason for going by the Opryland Hotel. The sea of lights and poinsettias is the Platonic ideal of what you’d expect from Christmas in Nash Vegas.

My first trip there was in 1993, on a long drive up with my then-girlfriend in the earlier days of the relationship, when I could write her off as “stressed” rather than “certifiable psychopath”. We drove up and back in a day just so we could drive through the lights, park, walk around, snicker at the CD offerings for the piano player in the Cascades who was evidently aping Yanni. For whatever reason, I was utterly taken with the place.

The Opryland Hotel is huge. I mean, frickin’ enormous. Opryland no longer exists as a theme park, but the hotel persists because its Death Star proportions make it ideal for convention business, especially with things like water taxis to downtown and the Sucker District up the Cumberland River, or showboat cruises on the General Jackson, or proximity to the Grand Ole Opry (for a long time, the studios of WSM-AM were right in the hotel). There’s a huge greenhouse of a thing with waterfalls and trees everywhere and a couple of restaurants, which is the aforementioned Cascades, and another one called the Conservatory which is even longer and full of paths, walkways, balconies – basically it’s the greatest Quake map in the world waiting to happen. And further back in the hotel, there are half a dozen assorted bars and restaurants, everything from a quasi-Irish pub to the obligatory Gone With The Wind-themed steakhouse. To cap it all off, they opened an expansion my last year in Nashville which they called the Delta, bigger than the Cascades and Conservatory combined, with an island in the middle full of shops and restaurants and a river around it big enough to offer flatboat rides on. All indoors. It’s basically a Vegas hotel without the hassle and inconvenience of actual gaming.

For three years in grad school, it was the best off-campus getaway I could muster. Drive over to Briley Parkway, stash the car, walk in, pop on the Walkman headphones, and just walk around in an atmosphere that called to mind nothing so much as all those Disney trips staying in the Contemporary Resort Hotel. Only greener and slightly twangier. It was at one of their brunch offerings where I first encountered creme brulee, and we all know how that turned out.

I didn’t go back for a while after leaving Nashville – the only way I got into town was on day trips up from home during holidays, and that left little time beyond just hitting Vanderbilt’s bookstore and maybe a spin through the West End – but at Christmas 2003, the then-girlfriend-now-wife and I drove up to Nashville, saw campus, saw Green Hills, drove over to the Opryland Hotel, and actually stayed the night at her insistence. And I was very glad she insisted – it gave us all the time in the world to stroll around, see all the sights, ride in the boat, drink in the pub, and experience a little bit of that escape from everything.

And even though I’ve spent time out here at the St. Francis Hotel, or the Ahwanee, or the Ritz-Carlton – for some reason, they’re just not the same.

It works on the iPad. Wonder how well it flies on the phone?

Not bad in landscape mode. Might want that Bluetooth keyboard. Don’t know if I would want to pound out 500 words at a time on this trick. Maybe time to invoke Dragon Dictation?

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

We first went there in January 2000. The Y2K project had obviously come to an end, it was January, and at my workplace in DC, January inevitably meant the mass layoff of IT contractors. Everyone from the NCO-level down knew damn well that we’d have to hire contractors again by May, but the management had head-in-ass disease on matters of staffing that were never fully cured.

So for our parting drinks, we headed up to Cleveland Park to an Irish establishment recommended by the off-the-boat Irish contractor. We arrived at 6 PM that Friday night, saw posted bills for live music that evening, and decided to stick around. There was the best pint of Guinness I’d ever had (and one that firmly clinched the black stuff as my chosen beverage), there was soup that tasted like pure liquid potato, there was chicken in a Tullamore Dew cream sauce and a ground beef-on-hasbrowns thing made with more Guinness, and awesome bread pudding.

And around 9, the two fellows with the guitars took their seats on the tiny stage. I think the first thing they played was “The Liffey Ferry,” and at its conclusion announced “Hallo, good evening, we are the McTeggarts, we come from the south of Ireland…” And they lit into the Black Velvet Band and the Wild Rover and we all had to clap along, and the Irish Rover, and our man Tom kept explaining where to clap and where to yell, and they just kept bringing Guinness, and through an inebriate haze around midnight, I heard “The Fields of Athenry” for the first time.

Long story short: we left at 2 AM when the bar closed. The next night, we all posted at 6 PM, and we stayed until 2 AM again. And we were hooked. Well, I was, anyway. For the next four and a half years, almost everything of any consequence in my life would be celebrated in Ireland’s Four Provinces, up on Connecticut Avenue just down the block from the Uptown theater. And for a long time, McTeggarts week was a regular stop.

When I started dating the woman who I married, the 4P’s was our first stop the second time she came to visit. I wasn’t about to make it the actual Valentine’s Day dinner, but it was the pregame the night before so she could see the lads and hear the music and see what she was in for. It hosted five straight birthday parties for me – the first featuring a band called the Fenians, from Orange County (oh irony) California, which is the night I first heard “On the One Road.” That’s also the night that Tom had me try Jameson’s and Bushmill’s for comparative purpose. He was Catholic but allowed that “that other crowd” had the edge in whiskey, and it proved true. The Jameson made me think “I can whup any man in this house!” but the Bushmills made me think “I can whup EVERY man in this house!”

I was there for World Series games, election nights, NCAA tournament games. Anything worth celebrating was worth celebrating there. It’s where I had my own going-away do in 2004, and it’s where we went back to visit almost every trip to DC since. It’s the pub we closed back in March, six years after leaving town. It’s not quite the same, but it still feels like home.

The McTeggarts don’t come down anymore – they are based in the suburbs of Boston, and it’s too far to make the trek anymore now that they don’t have the second week in DC at Falls Church anymore. But I have all three of their albums on the iPhone at all times – along with two from Ronan Kavanaugh, a couple from the Fenians, and some assorted others – and it’s when I hear those songs that I miss the pub the most. Turn up the music, sip the Guinness, close your eyes – and suddenly it’s an icy February dusk with snow on the ground, pipe smoke in the air, ordering another round and craning the neck toward the door where the friends will be trickling in until the front table is full…if they have Valhalla for old EUS, that’s what it looks like.

Comes now Lou Holtz of ESPN, moaning how sad it would be if Boise State wound up having to play in the Fiesta Bowl. Now, I realize that ESPN has been in the tank for the Broncos for a couple of years now, but seriously: shut the fuck up. Was it fair when an undefeated Auburn team got jobbed out of the national title picture in favor of Chokelahoma in 2004? Or when a Cal team ranked #4 in the country, with their only loss to #1 USC, wound up in the Holiday Bowl so that Pitt and Utah could get automatic bids? Or when Oregon got left out of the 2001 title game – in the Rose Bowl no less – so that a Nebraska team that didn’t even win its conference title game could be sacrificed to Miami? And what, for crying out loud, about TCU – which has matched Boise State’s performance against superior opposition for the last 3 years?

Life isn’t fair. And Boise has gotten hype and privilege far above and beyond teams with better resumes (how many mid-majors get fully half their games on ESPN?) – if you’re in a BCS bowl, enjoy it. Relish it. Because when Boise finally gets a national title bid against somebody oher than Chokelahoma, it’s not going to be pretty.

Today we toast Josh Marshall. Ten years ago he started Talking Points Memo, which was basically just a left-leaning slew of posts linking to breaking news out of the Florida recount, the sort of thing that would barely rate a Tumblr today (and in fact, he coded the whole thing in HTML by hand until 2003, when somebody explained this amazing thing called Moveable Type). From humble beginnings he wound up with TPM Media, an entity that actually employs reporters and commits acts of actual journalism, to the point that it was the first Internet news outlet to receive a Peabody award.

This is interesting to me because sixteen years ago this fall, I sketched out for one of my professors what I thought an “Internet-enabled newspaper” would look like. It would mean being able to link relevant stories together, and even update them as additional news broke. It would mean pictures right up on a website immediately. It would mean embedded USENET groups, so you could have feedback and discussion tied directly to an article. (Yes, I thought this was a selling point back then. Shoot me now.) He was very intrigued, but I don’t think I really grasped what was possible, because at the time there weren’t really smartphones or cameraphones – hell, I didn’t have my first cellular phone until 1996, if I remember right.

Actually, the first Internet-enabled device I had was a borrowed Palm VII for a couple of weeks in late summer of 2000, which would show “web clippings” on its dinky 160×160 4-bit grayscale screen if you raised its antenna and chanted to the voodoo gods long enough. I soon latched onto an AT&T phone that actually let me check my mail on an even dinkier screen (using CDPD over TDMA, gah), and in early 2002 I was saddled with a Blackberry (and support responsibilities for same) because some C_O had heard that they worked in the World Trade Center when the cellular was overloaded. Not until 2003 did I have a device which brought it all together and would do email, web and camera all in one – and the SonyEricsson P800 was a disaster of a phone to use as a phone even if the rest of the features were splendid, which they weren’t. Even as late as 2004, the platforms of the Metro weren’t chockablock with people all looking down at their phone all the time, the way the Caltrain platform was by January 2009.

Back during the last boom, the pundits all talked about how the Golden Convergence was coming, and that set-top box on your TV would be your computer, your mail, your movies, blah blah blah. I don’t think they figured on the convergence happening on the phone. And really, that’s what’s transformed news. How many cameraphone videos do you see during natural disasters or unexpected incidents? How much of your breaking news do you get from Twitter?

For the last couple of weeks, it seems like everyone on the internet has been taking the piss out of Clifford Stoll’s 1995 Newsweek essay in which he asserted that “What the Internet hucksters won’t tell you is that the Internet is one big ocean of unedited data, without any pretense of completeness. Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data. You don’t know what to ignore and what’s worth reading.” It apparently completely eluded him that in such a world, there would be a market for people who wanted to get into the editing, reviewing, critic-ing and filtering business.

And now, in 2010, Josh Marshall has set the bar for how Internet-based journalism works – because he didn’t know what Cliff Stoll knew. The moral of the story is this: just because you live in the future, don’t assume you live at the end of history.

Birmingham, Alabama has the largest Veteran’s Day parade in the country. At least twenty years ago, it also had a World Peace Luncheon in conjunction with the parade, and that luncheon featured more brass from all four services than I ever saw outside a blue line Metro car. I remember the Jazz Band from college perched at one corner of the stage, opening with the national anthem and then basically just playing every Glenn Miller tune we knew.

So let’s say I gave in to my impulses. Run, hide, get away from it all. Actually do what it takes to go away somewhere. Let’s go with Britain, because it’s the foreign country I’ve been to the most, and I’ve paid enough attention to Absolute Radio and BBC America that maybe I could pull it for a while.

First – how long? The stamp on the passport says “six months without recourse to public services,” which I assume means I might be able to get treated for a sniffle on the NHS but shouldn’t count on help with a job or housing or anything. So you need a place to stay – and a place for two, presumably, because I don’t think the wife will cotton to me running away to Britain without her. If staying longer than a couple of weeks, a job is essential, unless you have a stray house to sell for the cash to sustain you through this little outing. But even if you could sort that – ok, you have a shed to live in somewhere, and somebody will pay you money to blog, and the wife can keep her job and telecommute from the Pret around the block (or the pub down the lane if rural enough) – fine.

Then what?

How long before you come back? Do you ever plan on coming back? You’re cutting your old job adrift, almost certainly. You’re not going to see much of your friends – even with the help of Skype and FaceTime, there’s still the time zone difference, and forget about having people pop over to visit. You might see the Redskins occasionally, if you’re willing to get up at two AM for Monday Night Tuesday Morning Football (although regular start time would be 6 PM, just right to cap off a Sunday evening) but forget about hearing Sonny and Sam on the radio. Actually forget about following college sports altogether, unless you can arrange for some sort of wacky international streaming access (not bloody likely). Different TV might be a novelty for a while, might even be enough to while away the evenings sometimes, but you’re going to have to go out and make an entirely new crop of friends in a foreign culture (don’t forget, two countries separated by a common language).

But if you don’t do it for good – if you wind up only making a year of it or such, and you’ve quit your job and sold your house and abandoned your old life to make it work – what do you have to come back to? At that point, you’re committed. You’re all in. You’ve bet your life on the devil you don’t know.

So as much as it might help to be curled up on the sleeping bags in the shed, with the rain falling outside and the mist on the moors, and the splendid isolation from everything you might want to get away from for a while – you’re probably not going to be able to make it work.

I’m late to the party on this one, but now that Five Guys has landed in Silly Con Valley, it is finally possible to achieve a proper head to head comparison. I say late because others have already hit this up in other blogs, so this will probably be more impressionistic than a one to one breakdown.

First things first: the venue. The key factor for me is that Five Guys has no drive-thru. If you have to park and go in, you’ve given away half the title of “fast food” for better or worse. That among other things will lead to the real comparison later.

The burger itself: both go with a standard two patties and two slices of cheese, but Five Guys offers a much wider array of toppings with things like jalapeños and bacon. In n Out sticks with basically the same offerings they’ve had since the late 1940s. The standard 2×2 In n Out configuration is smaller in aggregate than the Five Guys equivalent, but not wildly so.

One place the Bible is not literally accurate is in the matter of feeding the five thousand. I am convinced that rather than mucking about with loaves and fishes, Our Lord fed the multitudes with one small fry from Five Guys. It is a preposterous serving size and basically unmanageable for a single person. The fries themselves are a thick skin-on cut that basically begs for barbecue sauce and seasoned salt. In n Out’s fries are the more traditional fast food type, and are in fact widely regarded in the Valley as the Achilles heel of the menu – because the potatoes are fresh and not frozen, the frying process results in a different texture and taste that largely depends on whether potatoes are in season. In n Out fries are much more suitable for layering onto one’s burger, though, which is important if you are Mike CASSSSSidy.

Five Guys has no milkshakes, which might be important to some, but their array of fountain beverages includes Coke Zero, which is my current indispensable propellant. In fact, that’s a whole separate post, about how the frack is Zero not a standard Coke offering after four bloody years.

Service was fine both places. In n Out is the diamond encrusted platinum standard for fast food service worldwide, but it’s not like Five Guys was being run by baboons or anything; quite the contrary, they aptly handled a line that was literally out the door on the day we went by.

Oh yes, price: a 2×2 type burger, with regular fries and large Coke, cost a hair under half at In n Out what it costs at Five Guys.

My conclusion, which I have repeated elsewhere, is this: for whatever reason, the greater 650/408 area is home to a number of charbroiled burger establishments. Clarke’s in Mountain View is the pinnacle of those, but establishments like Kirk’s and Jeffery’s also have a loyal following, and chains like Burger Joint and The Counter have moved in as well. I is my opinion that Five Guys is a much more direct competitor for places like that rather than for In n Out, in terms of offerings and price point alike. I’m not sure anything will ever pull me off Clarke’s as “this is where God goes for a burger” but I think Five Guys will definitely carve out a niche and light a fire under everybody else, as it may be the first fast food chain since In n Out to achieve the level of national buzz that makes people say “when is it coming here??”

Damn, now I’m hungry. And I didn’t drive, I’ll be damned…

When I first moved out here, people were trying to tell me about the rivalry between Cal and Stanford, both very fine academic institutions which support me in very different ways (but don’t think I don’t have a rooting interest). And I asked “Do you know anyone who’s been shot over Cal-Stanford? Divorced? No? I don’t think you take your football seriously. You see that flag that’s half Cal, half Stanford, and says “A HOUSE DIVIDED” on it? You know what that flag would say in Alabama? POLICE LINE, DO NOT CROSS.”

I thought about this in the wake of Alabama’s national title, and the hue and cry over Cam Newton, and the unabashed glee from my house at the travails of the athletic department at the Penitentiary University of Tennessee, and then looked a little wider, and had one of those shuddering realizations.

The Southern form of rivalry is one in which it is less important that you succeed than that your rival fail.

I don’t know whether this is something rooted in economic privation, although that would make sense. If you can’t make any headway getting up the hill, you may still wind up higher relative to your rival if they take a tumble and wind up beneath you. Easier to sit there and wish something on the bad guys than to get up there and do better yourself. Either way, this is something that has to be taken into serious consideration when examining the state of Southernization of national politics (which has happened, and don’t let anyone tell you different) – when everything hangs on demonizing the other, how much simpler to cut down the other than to raise yourself…

NB: I was at one point going to do a detailed breakdown of how the GOP nationalized campaign was a one-for-one recapitulation of the standard forms in Alabama from 1914-58, complete with Big Mules and Yankees and the class-for-racial alignment, but it is frankly too goddamn depressing to contemplate.

For my next trick, a test of blogging from the iPad with no other keyboard, from BlogPress, sitting in bed with my knees propped up. I don’t know that i would like to make a habit of this, but it’s totally doable. More on this later on this week, when we discuss how we live in the future.