Lonnieburger Baskets: Sonny's Three Meat Burger

Three meat burgers...how can that sound anything but good?

A burger with two extra meats...and I'm gonna order it with bacon? There's nothing but positives there, but let's look at how the concept of multiple meats turns out.

Burger

• Let's get right to the heart of the matter by checking out the burger patty itself. It's ground beef, lamb, and chicken all stuck together which is a little freaky. Beef and pork, I'm kinda okay with because that's meatloaf, but the beef/lamb/chicken frankenburger had me a little freaked out before I took a bite.
  
  From that first bite, I was a convert. The Girl pointed out that trying to pull off a bite of the burger is a little tougher because the patty sticks together more than a thicker beef-only patty doe. This didn't, however, result in a tough chew in the mouth. The patty did have an odd, almost a little sausagey flavor to the patty, but I don't know that there was much spice more than salt and pepper. The sausagey taste seems to be purely from the meats. It's an odd taste, but it's one that totally works.
  
  Outside of the tri-meat composition, the burger patty is substantially similar to a Steak 'n' Shake patty - fairly thin, crispy edged, cooked through and through. I'm liking this burger patty. Burger - 8    

  Toppings

• Only a couple of cheesy options here, so I didn't get to go the cheddar with bacon route. Instead, I went American and bacon because lamb/beef/chicken just screams AMERICAN cheese, right? I threw in lettuce, tomato, pickle, onion, and banana peppers with the house sauce on the side. The Girl went similarly but with cheese, bacon, and not too much else. She's a straight burger kinda gal.
  
  The cheese was rockingly melted - as American is wont to do. The lettuce was chopped, but it's the big chop that comes from actually chopping the lettuce in house rather than just dragging it out of a bag of shredded crap. The onions were nice, fresh, red ones. The tomatoes are heading toward being good summer stock. The bacon was good stuff - better than average but certainly not Applewood smoked or anything.
  
  The house sauce was wacky. The woman taking our order said that the house sauce was mostly vegetables and spices, nothing remotely like a standard 'secret sauce' Thousand Island dressing that McDonald's and everybody else claims is their secret burger sauce. This one's kind of like a roasted red pepper humus (appropriate for a burger place with lamb in the patties) but without anything like chick peas mixed in to thicken it up. Instead, it tastes primarily of roasted red peppers and a little spice - not much, though. I didn't care for it, but The Girl liked it on her fries - not on the burger oddly.
  
  They do offer a nice spread of toppings as you can see in that bottom photo up above a bit. Toppings - 7

 Fries

• We'll get to the fact that the cost of fries is included with the burger cost in another couple of sections, but that is awesome. The fries are wonderfully fried, served hot and tasty in a little butcher paper sack right there next to the foil-paper-wrapped burgers. There's not much taste other than crisp, potatoey goodness. They had a tiny bit of salt - enough but could have used a little bit more. These were fairly light and good and crispy. No heavy oily feeling or taste here. Good stuff across the board. Fries - 8 

 Ambiance

• Admittedly, ambiance isn't the selling point of Sonny's. They're sort of at the end of a crappy, two-business strip mall kinda thing with the other business being a car stereo place. They're right on the busy Becchmont Ave strip of craptacular commerce, so that's not exactly a selling point. The place isn't all that big - only twenty some-odd seats, two with comfy chairs, six or so at high stools on a window counter, and lots of two- and four-tops.
  
  This is an order at the counter kinda place, and they have a couple of behind the counter steam tables that they weren't using and that didn't appear to have been used in a while - so I don't know what those are for. They then brought the burgers out to us on a tray - a la Five Guys - wrapped up in foil paper. I was all happy with that aspect.
  
  The decorations are a little not too thrilling with a few wall hangings and a television that makes for an absolutely nothing theme to the decorations. It's clean and plain, the people are friendly. It's all good, but it's not thrilling. Ambiance - 5  

Cost

• Good burger...cheap prices...nothing wrong with that. The burgers come with a side - fries, chili, or soup of the day. A bacon cheeseburger with fries is $6.20 ($5.95 from the menu plus a quarter for the cheese). The single cup of Diet Coke is a bit shy of a couple of bucks. To that's cheap as can be short of going to Herb and Thelma's. Cost - 7 

Other Stuff

• The house sauce isn't thrilling enough to earn a bonus point. It's distinctive but kinda meh...
• The whole three meat thing (with bacon to make it four meets, of course) makes me feel impressively carnivorous. That's worth a point. +1 
• They offer Fanta and various other wacky drinks off on the side in a separate case. This lead The Girl to teach me the Scottish slang term Fanta pants, of which I was not aware. That's totally worth a point but more for The Girl than for Sonny's.
• The Girl commented that  the unique taste of the burger wore on her by the end of the burger. The first bite drew a big compliment from her, but she was tired of the burger by the end. I didn't run into that in the least, but she didn't want to go back by the end. -1

Math, of course, must be done...1+7+5+8+7+8-1 = 35 points for Sonny's Three Meat Burger. Considering how similar to Five Guys Burgers & Fries the burger kind of was - other than the unique meat combination - that seems about right. Little cheaper but marginally better than Five Guys...fewer toppings but fries almost equally as good.

Rankings at this point...

• Terry's Turf Club - 45
• Cafe de Wheels - 44
• Senate - 43 
• City View Tavern - 40 (scaled from 32/40)
• Stuffed on Vine - 38
• Five Guys Burgers and Fries - 36 
• Roxy's - 36 
• FlipDaddy's - 35.5
• Sonny's Three Meat Burgers - 35 
• VanZandt - 34
• Gabby's - 34 
• Oakley Pub & Grill - 34 
• Quatman's - 32 / 34.5
• Troy's - 32 
• By Golly's - 32
• Wildflower Cafe - 31.25 (scaled from 26/40) 
• Sidetracks - 31
• Virgil's Cafe - 28 
• Tank's Bar & Grill - 28
• The Pub at Rookwood Mews - 28
• Smashburger - 28
• Habits Cafe - 28
• Graffiti Burger - 27
• Arthur's - 26
• Sammy's - 25 
• Skinny Legs - 25
• Gordo's (Fairfield) - 20 

Here's another review of Sonny's that provides a bit more detail.

Others said a truck was running into a television...

What's the microwave truck doing to the computer?

Film school by Jim Emerson

Jim Emerson apparently knows a little something about film - editing, cinematography, framing, etc - and he's kind enough to have shared his lessons via vimeo.

Too easy?

Maybe I made things too easy - no fun comments today

Odds and sodds

My list of bookmarks waxes and wains over time. Many things are items that I had planned to turn into full posts but just never could find the time or voice to write into a full post. When the list waxes enough to overcome my patience, I sacrifice my list to you as an offering to appease my tolerance of unkempt lengths.

• Berkeley Pit - In our summer material science courses, the topic of Berkeley Pit, a now closed open pit mine in Butte, Montana. The site is a Superfund clean-up site and one of the more polluted sites in the United States or the world. It's also the site of impressive findings in extreme lifeforms and of the death of 342 geese that died when they landed in the waters filling the pit. Link and link
• Things you really need to learn - The idea that we are teaching students facts, trivial things rather than larger concepts, how to think, how to learn, how to understand consequences for their actions is a great failing in our educational system - of which I am a complacent part. I don't have any idea how we can change something as large and with as much momentum as the educational system and the socioeconomic problems that lead to many of the problems in our educational system, but I continue to think that what we're doing isn't working for the vast majority of our students. Link
• A Town Divided Against Itself - In 1982 Sports Illustrated wrote an article looking at the rivalry in Hamilton, Ohio between Taft and Garfield High Schools. Sometime after this article the two merged to form Hamilton High School. Link
• WVQC - I'm a big fan of community radio. I've started listening to WVQC from time to time. The nature of the schedule is such that there are entire shows that don't interest me so it's hit or miss. Link
• Superman 2000 - Apparently Mark Wait had a proposal for a major overhaul of the Superman franchise a few years back. It's the kind of thing that pops up on the web from time to time, like Alan Moore's Twilight of the Superheroes that I posted a while back. Interesting to see what writers want to do but don't get to do a lot of the time. Link and link
• Missouri Bans Student/Teacher Facebook Relationships - The shifting sands on which teachers stand in terms of social media and communication with students in almost any format make our job just that much tougher. I don't blame states and school districts for trying to provide guidance. I don't know, however, that this is the right choice. Link
• Best Running Music - The Girl gave me a project sometime last fall: put together a good one-hour running mix for her. I initially made a few suggestions, but they weren't right for various reasons (mostly because they weren't songs she liked). I've found that putting together a running mix is a weirdly personal task because everybody has their own tastes, their own paces, their personal hope for the ebbs and flows of a workout. Here's the best resource I've found. Link
• The shame of college sports - If I had everything to do over, I would completely divorce sports from education - at the high school level as well as at the university level. I don't have any idea how to clean up the dichotomy between the alleged amateur status of college (and to a lesser extent high school athletes) and the huge amounts of money that are generated by their play, but it's something that needs to constantly be guarded against. Link and Link
• Riders on the storm - This is a terrifying/fascinating story of a military pilot who ejected from his fighter plane into the middle of a storm where he fell and caught updrafts, fell and rose for forty minutes. The post is one of the many lengthy but somewhat infrequent posts on Damn Interesting. Link
• All My Books - A friend of mine has cataloged all of his books, cd's, and movies in a single program on his Mac. He used a program that isn't available on a PC system but that used the Mac's webcam to automatically grab the items from just the ISBN/barcode. I'm looking for a similar PC-based program. Link and Link and Link 

Bahía de Cochinos

For the past couple of years, I've taken to writing the day's date on my school board with the wrong year. Instead of the current year, I look up some date in history. I think I've mentioned this fact before. For the past at least half year, though I've been drawing a reference to the date instead of directly telling the students what the day's event is. Each day surprises me as many of my students guess - often quite wrongly - about the day's events. Some of the confusion is due, of course, to my drastically limited art skills and four colors of marker. Some, however, is because they're entertainingly ignorant about our world. I think I'll show you each day's drawing along with the most entertaining quote about the drawing. Each day I'll link to the actual event, so click away after you take a guess.

"Why are those people shooting at cats?"

Fluer of Scoland...

A mercurial element

Mercury is among the most fascinating of elements. It seems on the surface so absolutely magical in that it is a metal that flows as a liquid, not quite like water because its intermolecular forces are far stronger meaning that it holds together much more tightly than does water leading to a number of interesting properties.





It looks so very much like water in video, clear, brilliantly colorless water, but it is almost five and a half times as dense as water at room temperature meaning that a liter of water would weigh 2.2 pounds, but a liter of mercury would be nearly 12 pounds, shockingly dense in person, as dense as most solid metals tha people are used to. But the metal flows, parting and reforming beautifully.





This contradiction - a liquid metal - has lead scientists, alchemists, ancient believers to attribute to mercury magical properties - those of liquid moonlight, the tears of Diana, the transformative properties of the philosopher's stone.



Mercury can be found as a solid, but it isn't an easy thing to work with because of its - for a metal - remarkably low melting point.





For years mercury's tendency to react/amalgamate with metals has lead to some interesting security regulations.





Mercury is also one of the most insidious poisons and industrial pollutants because of the extreme difficulty in ever removing it from our environment, its tendency to lead to madness and birth defects, and the concentration increase as it travels up the food chain.



The environmental effects have lead to increasing regulations by the EPA and other agencies while businesses have fought back against these regulations.

But like the rest of the country, Maine has reached an impasse, for most of the mercury that fouls our skies, waters and land comes from outside our borders.
Tom Allen

One out of six women are toxic with mercury. Mercury comes out of coal plants and chlorine plants. I am toxic, I deal with symptoms, children are born with, you know, autism - there is an epidemic in this country. This is like, the air that we breath.
Daphne Zuniga

President Bush's mercury rule is a gift to the big energy companies that helped put him in office.
Tom Allen

I do care about the mercury contamination which this country will be experiencing because of the attempted sellout by this administration to special interests which will result in more mercury in the blood of young children in America.
Jay Inslee

And yet, mercury has been used in medicines for centuries...

A night with Venus, a lifetime with Mercury.
[For centuries mercury was used as a treatment for syphilis.]

— Anonymous

Saying. In Michael J. O'Dowd and Elliot Philipp, The History of Obstetrics and Gynaecology (2000), 227.


How is it that mercury is not safe for food additives and Over the Counter drug products, but it is safe in our vaccines and dental amalgams?
Dan Burton

Be careful, however, when looking up mercury medical information as there is a lot of barely scientific, entirely unscientific, or refuted scientific information out there about mercury fillings, mercury in vaccines, and mercury in homeopathic medicines.

Update: Craig Ferguson

If you hadn't noticed, the YouTube theme from the past week was Craig Ferguson's Scottish guests.

He's apparently had three more...

Untitled weekend links post

• Very Young Avengers Assemble for Target Toy Commercial - So friggin' cute
• We all crave it, but can you stand the silence? - Please? 
• Early Bird Special - This man sure can blow the mouth organ.

• "The Arbitrary English Language" - I think I heard Gallagher do something similar, but with more watermelons. Futility Closet hits this fairly frequently, to be honest.
• New trailer for Rock of Ages is big and flamboyant - I'm so in for this. Big, stupid, looks like a lot of fun.

• Jell-O Cloud Parfaits - How to...gorgeous stuff
• Why Some Civil War Soldiers Glowed in the Dark - Bio(luminescence) warning, Calen...
• Wanna bet? - The man, the myth, the pants...

• Phrase anatomy - That thing about intestines is kinda cool...as are lots of these facts.
• Cherry cheesecake stuffed French toast - I know what I want for my birthday breakfast.
• Ask Chris: #101 - The Riddler -  A far-too-thoughtful-than-the-character-deserves exploration of The Riddler
• The Masters Putt-Putt Course: Tiger Woods Used to be Good at This, Too - I would pick-up golf if it was like this. 

• Meeting of the Rhone and Arve rivers in Geneva - I had to look this up on Google maps to make sure it wasn't faked. 
• The horrific practice of food spherification - Chemistry & cooking, very cool...occasionally creepy 
• It's time to give the punt the boot - Math, man...math run up against job safety
• How old books get that distinctive smell - Not what I always thought.

• Mike Mitchell art show at Gallery 1988 - Such cute, giant heads
• Crucial decisions lead to revised top 25 -  Really? Indiana #1? It seems too soon.
• Krispy Kreme Donut Smores - Heaven from a toaster oven
• Fortune - I think fortune cookie makers should have more fun with things...like this one.
• Give me all the years without a championship you have - Ron Swanson...always cool...

Daddy, get real gone...

Today's 8Tracks playlist is a bunch of songs about the father/son relationship...

And I'm in the photo there...try to guess which person I am...

Songs for an Early Father's Day from PHSChemGuy on 8tracks.

Serious eats

The Serious Eats blog is a bit of a Frankenstein of food blogs. The blog's makers have apparently sewn together parts of a food geek blog, a food travel blog, a fast food trick blog, trash food review, and a straight-up cooking blog and ended up with something with posts appealing to just about every cross section of epicurean interests.

Here are a few of my favorite posts from their melange...

• Check out the winners of our 2012 Pi Day challenge (geek)
• The $1 poor man's Big Mac: worth it? (fast food)
• My favorite cooking hacks (geek)
• Remember Peepshi? (geek)
• Easter Basket 2012: A few bad eggs (trash review)
• Pie of the Week: Chess Pie (recipe)
• Cadbury Creme Scrambled Eggs (geek)
• Doughnut Style Guide (definitions, I guess)
• Key lime bars (recipe)
• 6 off-menu dessert mash-ups at McDonald's (fast food)
• We try every cheesecake at the cheesecake factory (fast food, kind of)

Animated GIFs - good ones

I normally save this stuff for the weekend links post, but this post from Neatorama was too good to pass up.

I pointed out If We Don't, Remember Me before, and they continue to sporadically post some fine selections from films.

Today's new tumblr of animated gifs, flux machine, is a little more regular in its posting of freaky animated gifs based on historical photos like these...




and

He's one bad mother...shut yo mouth...

...just talking about Neil Degrasse Tyson...

Another man's quest

I've tilted at my share of windmills in my time. Heck, I'm currently gathering every version of "Shenandoah" that I can find at PLCH and checking out the cd's ten at a time for a future post.

That's why I respect Chris over at A House of Lies for his Quest for the Most 90's Movie of All Time. I do wish he'd put up a leaderboard, however, so I wouldn't have had to make one for him...

• Singles  - 114
• Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead - 107 
• Blank Check - 101 
• I Know What You Did Last Summer - 101
• The Truth About Cats and Dogs - 100
• Airborne - 99
• Independence Day - 96 
• Mallrats - 96
• Point Break - 95
• Beethoven - 92
• Jurassic Park - 90
• Philadelphia - 89
• You've Got Mail - 88
• Hacker - 87 
• The Bodyguard - 87
• Kazaam - 86
• Little Big League - 83 
• The Santa Claus - 83
• The First Wives Club - 82 
• Varsity Blue - 82
• Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit - 82
• The Net - 78
• Clueless - 75 
• Encino Man - 75
• 3 Ninjas - 74 
• Happy Gilmore - 73
• Face/Off - 71
• Ace Venture - 70
• Home Alone 2 - 69
• Speed - 69 
• The Devil's Advocate - 64
• The mighty Ducks - 62 
• Mrs Doubtfire - 62
• The Fan - 60 
• Outbreak - 49
• Fear - 49
• Kindergarten Cop - 33  

Sure, I could nitpick on a few details - the list is far too white, his scoring method hasn't ever been presented in it fullness, he hasn't seen New Jack City (though I did recommend it to him in his blog comments.)

Don't nitpick, though. Just enjoy the sweet, sweet 90's.

Spring break can't be over already...

...can it?

• Teratogenic effects of pure evil in Ursus Teddius Domesticus - I love the source of the pure evil in this experiment.
• There's no speed limit. - This would be a great message for all teachers.
• The man who broke Atlantic City - It's amazing how thin the casino margins are and how much thinner the casinos are willing to make them.
• Surreal stop-motion short: Luminaris - Very cute little flick... 

• Real quick rant - We live in pretty awesome times. There are things we could do to make them better, but we're living in amazing times.
• PowerBalance admits their wristbands are scams - I am consistently amazed at what people will believe.
• John Wooden defines true success - The man was an idol.

• Scott McCloud on comics - His three books are excellent explorations of visual art. 
• Struggling Fairfield bar gets TV makeover - I've seen this bar from the outside. It's not far from home for me. 
• Lego Architecture MOCs - I love the architecture series, and these would make great additions - especially the Taipeh101. 
• Stop-motion "Old Man and the Sea" - great animation and a pretty cool song (updating "Come Sail Away" by Eric Cartman)

• The horrific practice of food spherefication -  Just because it can be done doesn't always mean it should be done.
• Google glasses project - Intriguing concept, but there are a couple of parodies that are worth seeing.
• Early Bird Special - The first movie appearances from... 

• The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth - Nice column from the Professor about the joy of the coming Avengers movie - in only a month, really? 
• Twin sisters of the day - Black and white twins born together? Genetics is fascinating.
• Ikea - I don't think Ikea really offers this kit, but Easter season would've been the opportunity. The original site, to which I'm not linking by the way, is a little offensive.
• What's in a school hamburger - Someday we might make a shift to all-local, all-natural ingredients. Until then, though, we might as well know what we're eating. 

• Angry Birds, Farmville, and other hyper-addictive 'stupid games' - Nice exploration of the change in gaming design from the NYTimes (with an embedded game...my high score is 3150)
• Are these the ugliest buildings in the world? - They are, indeed, ugly, but they're at least interesting. Better than a faceless, glass rectangle.
• Pac-Man: The Movie - This could be an interesting adaptation.

• Bad opinion generator - Allegedly all true things that people said just before God's Great Banana Skin came out to get them.
• Movie trailer of the day - Savages by Oliver Stone (finally something that doesn't involve a vast conspiracy from the man)
• Community "Pillows and Blankets" - Another brilliant episode (but one that needs you to have watched the previous episode to lay the groundwork)
• Ted - the green-band trailer is intriguing...the red-band trailer if filthy

Update: Social Media, take a bizillion

It's been a few (maybe three) weeks since the PHS students started a Princeton thread on High School Memes and a week or so since I posted about them. I've been checking in every couple of days and flagging individual posts - particularly those particularly nasty about individual students - when they were offensive. Yesterday when I checked in, however, I noticed that all of the meme posts had been deleted and replaced with just these two...

In the site's terms of use, "We do not undertake to review all content submitted to us, but we reserve the right to do so. We also reserve the right to decline and/or take down any content that we deem to inappropriate, and the right to deny access to any user who uses the site and/or any content in any manner that we deem to be inappropriate, all in our sole and absolute discretion." Some of the memes were admittedly offensive (some toward students, some toward administrators), but they certainly weren't all offensive. I had flagged some of the posts, and those were taken down. Honestly, I assume that the site barely has time to glance at any flagged images so they automatically take them down.

Possibilities of what happened...

• It's possible that some student went through and flagged all of the memes and that they were taken down.
• It's possible some administrator went through and did the same.
• It's possible some administrator contacted the site directly and expressed displeasure, asking the site to take down the entire thread.

Which of those happened really didn't matter because the truth won't ever be known. The meme posts are gone, and how it happened doesn't matter in the least.

Here is a selection of what's been posted since the first round of meme posts were taken down.

What does matter is the reactions that the students have had to the disappearance of the memes. They assume it was one of the latter possibilities: that the administration betrayed them. Our administrators use social media extensively (Twitter, Facebook, wordpress), and they don't always pay attention to the negatives that can come along with using them.

When you encourage students - people, honestly - to have a voice, then you get the good AND the bad from those voices. If you choose to selectively allow them to use their voice, to censor their free speech that you claim to have been encouraging, then you run the real risk of serious backlash.

It's far tougher to teach someone how to use something properly - to educate them about the positive and negative aspects to speaking out - than it is to blankly act like something is entirely positive and then overreact when its negative aspects rear their ugly head.

LonniBurger Baskets: New sources

I'm always in search for new burger places to review in the LonnieBurger Baskets series. Here are a few blogs that I'll be checking out as well as new restaurants to try.

• Cincinnati Burger Guys - The blog's been dead for a three and a half years now, but the have nearly forty posted and archived reviews. They're top places that I haven't tried yet are 915 Pub & Grill (Ft Thomas, KY)...Zola's Pub & Grill (Covington, KY). Their favorites that I can compare to my tastes are Gabby's (Wyoming), Back Porch (Springdale), Arthur's (Hyde Park), and Oakley Pub & Grill (Oakley). Gabby's and Oakley Pub & Grill are decent to pretty good, but the Back Porch and Arthur's didn't terribly much impress me. I'm thinking our tastes might not quite align.
• Cirque du Savory - No reviews since August, 2009, so we're out of date here, too. Their top ranks that we haven't tried: Zip's (Mt Lookout)...Mt Adam's Bar & Grill (Mt Adams)...Bard's Burger. Their top that I am familiar with are Oakley, Five Guys, Terry's, Gordo's (in Norwood), and City View Tavern. I'd agree with City View, Terry's, Oakley, even Five Guys. Gordo's in Norwood we haven't tried...Gordo's by Jungle Jim's is awful. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. These folks might have tastes worth following.
• Whackburger - Their menu looks complicated, but it's a new burger place - with odd sides. Might be worth a try when they open up, which is supposed to be May.
• Baseball and Burgers - Here's a blog that's at least ongoing. They've only been reviewing for a few months now (since November). Their top I haven't tried are Herb & Thelma's (Covington) & Neighbor's Bar (Cincinnati on North Bend). They liked Arthur's (meh)...Flipdaddy's (pretty good)...Cafe de Wheels (excellent).  These might be one to follow along with. I'm hoping that they keep blogging - last post was in January.
• Sonny's Three Meat Burgers - Burgers made from beef, lamp, and chicken? Wait, seriously? I am intrigued.
• Polly's Burger Hall of Fame - I've mentioned this one before, but it's worth looking at again. Terry's is #1 (agreed)...Sidebar #2 (Covington - haven't tried)...Zip's #3 (haven't tried)...Mad Mike's #5 (Covington - haven't tried)...City View #6 (agreed)...Cafe de Wheels #7 (agreed). I think our tastes might align.

My long search is over...

Government transparency of the day...thank you TheDailyWh.at and the White House...

I've been looking for a breakdown of what the government spends for a while now, and finally, it's available...

Tornados of fire

I performed a demonstration in class this past Friday of a fire tornado using apparatus built by Vincent Mazzone.

Mine was about like this...



It wasn't like this (thankfully)...



Or these...

The things that I have put into my head lately

I'm not reading a whole lot of novels as most of that reading is focused on Kurt Vonnegut. So it's mostly just movies (two of them) and comic books for me of late.

Hunger Games - The Girl has read the full Hunger Games trilogy - the first novel with her book club. When she offered that her book club was heading to see the movie adaptation, I was in.

Of course, I'm in for seeing just about anything (not this) on the big screen.

I promise I'll get around to reading the books (The Girl's kinda been pushing them for a while), but I went into the movie knowing just about nothing at all.

The plot was surprisingly science fictionish, set in a future world in which a revolution (little detail is provided about that in the movie) exists in a past, and the republic is held together on the backs of a rich capital city and surrounding districts in abject poverty. Each year the various districts are required to sacrifice two of their young people to compete in a reality television death match (a la Running Man). Twenty four enter, one leaves alive. The rest die of exposure, starvation, infection, or combat.

Our POV comes in the form of Katniss Everdeen as played by Jennifer Lawrence (outstanding in Winter's Bone), a strong heroine who steps forward when her younger sister's name is drawn as their district's tribute/contestant for the Games. Throughout the course of the Games, we come to see that Katniss's strength lies not just in her skill with a bow but also with her compassion for her fellow contestants. This combination makes for an eminently likeable character - strong, compassionate, striking. She is one of the few contestants who doesn't seem to play more for the ever-present cameras than for herself, being visibly repulsed when other contestants play to the crowds - before and during the Games.

The movie's sets - particularly the opulence of the capital as contrasted with the poverty of Katniss's home district - are well done and present a drastically divided society that I was initially skeptical could survive until I started thinking about our society which isn't that different in many ways. The openly opiative nature of the broadcast Hunger Games makes for a rather dramatic commentary on reality television as an opiate for the masses in our world. The movie is affecting and dramatic, striking all the right notes and even leaving us with a overly-dramatic 'it's not over yet' moment at the very end. Good flick...great first flick in a trilogy.

WARNING: spoliers coming...

The weirdness of the people controlling the Hunger Games arena was a little freaky. The 'creation' of the dogs, in particular, made me wonder about what the heck they were doing. I don't mean what they were doing in terms of producing a more dramatic television product. I get that. I just don't understand whether they were creating some sort of hologram that could interact with people, genetically engineering creatures on a moment's notice, holding the dogs in pens underneath and just releasing them at the right moment, or casting spells. The Girl mentioned that in the book the dogs have the eyes of the dead contestants, so they must have been somehow 'created' on the fly, but I just don't get how that could have happened.

Along the same lines I clearly misunderstood the direction that the Games were going to go. When the forest fires first appeared, I thought we were going to find out that they were an illusion - as the fire on Katniss's dress had been, some sort of foreshadowing,  I though. Nope...instead we find that the Game's producers can conjure fire out of nothing and that the efforts of turning a forest fire on and suddenly off inside some sort of contained dome of incredible size isn't a big deal in terms of energy output. Really?


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I also didn't get why the effort to get sponsors/patrons was such a big deal. The Girl says that it makes more sense in the book, but in the movie it seemed like the Woody Harrelson character just got a few people to throw a few bucks his way so he could buy salve and chicken soup. We didn't see the any of the other characters were getting help from their sponsors, even though many of them were clearly far better at playing to the camera. If the sponsors were such a big deal, why didn't they turn out to be such a big deal?


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The use of hand-held cameras was frickin' annoying in the first twenty or so minutes of the movie. I wanted to just slap the filmmaker. I don't care whether that was intentional by the filmmaker or not. I hated it...and I hated the quick cut fight scenes. I can't tell what's happening or who has the advantage in those stupid scenes.


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I kinda dug the Taylor Swift song in the credits.

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Attack the Block - Fairly low-budget horror flick starring a bunch of great teenage actors defending their public housing unit (the titular Block) from alien invaders.

The Girl thought the film was awful with poor pacing and poor effects and chase scenes. I'm a bit more charitable as I actually enjoyed the film. Yes, the pacing drags in a number of cases - particularly when the protagonists have to repeatedly convince other residents of The Block that aliens really are invading. For an all-out alien invasion, it seemed like it took a lot of people a long, long time to recognize what was happening.

I was impressed with the teenage leads' performances as the adult characters are barely in the film. The various teen actors did a brilliant job making for a believable band of friends forced to defend their turf against invaders. They each did a great job creating a rich, interesting character.

The low-budget special effects were also interesting, particularly the blacker than black, gorilla-esque invaders with their glowing teeth and eyeless heads. The first alien (the female, as we find out) is far less impressive, looking like a Halloween-story reject thrown on a stick once captured, but the massive (male) aliens are appropriately scary and aggressive. Good stuff there.

This isn't a classic on the level of Aliens, but it's a fun way to pass a couple of hours.

The ending, however, is poor and left a bad taste in my mouth.

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Comic books...

• The Walking Dead vol 15 - Finally we get a collection without a whole lot of zombies or some sort of desperate run to safety. Instead, Rick and his  band of merry men (and women) try to build a small-scale society in the DC neighborhood where they've found themselves. They are safe enough and are beginning to have a little bit of leisure time, leading to notes of paranoia and unrest among the residents - especially those who were there before Rick came along. After the building terror of the past few volumes, this was a welcome slow down.
• Ultimate Comics Spider-Man: Death of Spider-Man Prelude - See, right there in the title it says that Spider-Man's about to die. That's sad because this volume is an enjoyable acknowledgement of Spider-Man's success as a hero. Admittedly, I have no clue what the heck happened leading up to this edition and the first few issues do make a lot of references to what happened before (stupidly PLCH has only volume three of this series, so I may not be able to find out what happened for free), but as long as I ignored all that stuff, I had a blast, especially as Peter Parker saw Iron Man show up at his house, nearly blowing his secret identity. This is fun stuff and a great difference from the Earth-616 Spider-Man. Wish they weren't killing this guy off, especially with the entertaining stuff about Black Cat and Mysterio.
• Superman: Nightwing and Flamebird (vol 2) - I hate the whole New Krypton storyline. It made the threat that something would change, but it didn't...and, more importantly, the stories sucked.
• Superman: Codename: Patriot - ...just like this one which sucked, too.
• Spider-Man: The Fantastic Spider-Man - Apparently Johnny Storm (the Human Torch) is dead or gone or something (for now, anyway, unless he goes the way of Jason Todd Bucky Uncle Ben) and Peter is taking Johnny's place because they were so close to each other. We also get more of Peter's relationship with Carlie Cooper - I'm a fan. And the teaming up with the former Fantastic Four works well, too. In fact, the entire volume works well without any unifying story arc. It's a nice change to get a number of stand-alone issues that are well told. Refreshing...
• GI Joe: Cobra: Civil War - The next step after Cobra Commander was killed (nuked, really) is to choose the next Commander, and that's just what Cobra is doing. Of course, every possible candidate is all busy stabbing each other in the back and killing GI Joe's in the process. This is just the first step, but I'm willing to come back for the next steps.
• X-Men: Age of X - Good lord...no one...NO ONE needs another apocalyptic future X-Men storyline. It's been done to death and doesn't ever, ever need to be done again. EVER. Oddly, though, this was actually pretty enjoyable. It's entirely superfluous, but it was a fun read. The fact that it was entirely a dream was a little cliche, but it kinda worked.
• Hulk: World War Hulks vol 3 - The whole World War Hulks storyline is wrapping up here with Hulk finally taking on his son Skaar in an all-out battle. Good times, and I enjoy the whole play of Banner saying that he knew this was the next step and had known it all along...the second half of the volume, however, follows Hulk's other son, Hiro-Kala, in some sort of space adventure. I hate the space adventures and wish they would entirely drop the storyline forever. Earth stuff? Good. Non-Earth stuff? Boring, bad.

LonnieBurger Baskets: FlipDaddy's

First Friday of my Spring Break, and what else would I do but go searching for a cheeseburger? As most of the burgers left on the Cincinnati Magazine list are a fair drive down I-75 into the Bluegrass State, The Girl and I went searching for other sources of recommendations (what we found is tomorrow's post).

The most promising for the evening was found on BaseballAndBurgers's review of FlipDaddy's in Mason/Symmes Township. The guys over at the BaseballAndBurgers blog has FliDaddy's as the third best burger in Cincinnati (though they've only been reviewing officially for three months now, so there are a lot of places left for them to try.) That's enough of a recommendation for us to make a visit to FlipDaddy's.

Thanks to Thadd and Milan

The Girl went with a burger with beer cheese (available as an appetizer but not officially on the toppings choices) and a pretzel bun with pickles and  lettuce. I went with the standard cheddar and bacon, onions, lettuce, tomato, pickles on my burger. We both got fries. I got a Diet Coke, and The Girl went for a beer. I'll ask her which beer it was as I can't remember.

 The Girl's burger - pretzel bun and beer cheese

My burger - cheddar, bacon, tomato, onion, lettuce,  pickles

FlipDaddy's website burger image

Burger

• My first bite of the burger suggested a very nice, tasty, spiced patty. None of my other bites had that same flavor, so I'm guessing something dripped onto my burger on the griddle. The patty were fairly standard and regular. If they were hand formed, those hands certainly had some serious training or equipment assistance. Patties of such regularity is more of a negative than a positive.
  
  The meat was moderately flavorful with minimal but certainly present spicing.They were a bit thin meaning that any sort of medium cooking is largely lost, and it was reasonable for the waiter not to ask for our cooking preference. Both burgers were cooked to a medium-well and without crust on the meat. The burgers themselves are fine but nothing to write home about. Burger - 6 

Toppings

• That's some serious bacon. The menu claims that it's Applewood smoked bacon, and I fully believe. Of course,at $1.25, it'd better be. The chipotle mayo wasn't anything to write home about, though it did have a nice, little kick to it. The pickled were long cut, always a nice novelty. So far, good stuff. The onions and tomato were passable but not spectacular. The lettuce was chopped and limp, big negative.
  
  The Girl's beer cheese was flavorful but without the horseradish kick that the best beer cheeses offer. The waiter forgot her lettuce and pickles until she asked for them a second time.
  
  Topping is a little tough this time. Bacon - big plus...pickles - little plus...onions/tomato - neutral...lettuce - negative. I'll go slightly above medium and give them a little more because the menu offers a huge variety of toppings including a dozen different cheeses and just about every sauce possible (green chili/jalapeno compote, chimichurri, Guiness reduction, teriayaki). This isn't Terry's assortment of toppings, but it's pretty darn good. I can't give them full credit because I didn't try any of those, but it's certainly enough to get me to go back and give some of them a try. Toppings - 7

Fries

• These are some seriously outstanding fries. They were serves piping hot and crisp. The Girl thought them a little over salted, but I appreciated the strong flavor including a little extra garlic spice on them. There was the lightest of breadings - possibly just a quick dip into cornstarch that coated a few of the fries visibly. Great stuff. Fries - 9 

First three photos by me... 

Last two pics from Thadd and Milan

Ambiance

• I dig the place. The restaurant had a sort of vacation home vibe with darker wood flooring, bead board half walls dividing the space, rich colors on the walls, and big, bright windows. They also offer outdoor seating that we didn't take advantage of because of threatening skies. There are televisions tunedto sports around the place - particularly around the bar, but I was okay with that on this day as Djokovic was playing, and the waitstaff was kind enough to switch that on behind The Girl. The central bar area looked friendly enough, and there was a lot of room between the tables in our seating area - enough that I wondered why they didn't nudge some closer together to fit in another table or two. They don't offer any two-person tables, something that surprised me a little bit as I saw five tables with two people occupying them while we ate, but they were happy enough to give us a four-top instead.
  Admittedly, the feeling was closer to very nice, mid-price, suburban chain restaurant than to neighborhood dive bar, but at this point in my life, I'm okay with that. Ambiance - 8

Cost

• Ah, there's the rub, eh? The basic FlipDaddy burger in $7.99. Lots of the sauces and toppings are free, but cheese was 75 cents, and bacon another $1.49. Fries were included (for an extra buck you can swap to sweet potato fries, asparagus, or onion rings). The Girl's pretzel bun was an extra buck, as was the beer cheese on top of her $6.99 Build Your Own burger. My drink was $2.25. For my total, that was $12.49 - kind of expensive. Cost - 2.5 

Other stuff

• FlipDaddy's has a very extensive assortment of beers, and pints are $3.50 during happy hour (until 6). +1 
• Our waiter, Eric H according to the receipt, was entertaining, thoroughly conversational when The Girl wanted to customize her burger with something not officially on the menu. +1 
• The option of outside dining was excellent and something we would likely have taken advantage of if the skies hadn't been ready to open up upon us. +1 

Gimme a second while break out the abacus...1+1+1+2.5+8+6+7+9 = 35.5 That's a pretty good score for FlipDaddy's...great fries, very good assortment of toppings, decent burger patty, nicely decorated and inviting place. I like it enough to feel good about FlipDaddy's being the 8th best (of 26 we've reviewed) burger place in town.

• Terry's Turf Club - 45
• Cafe de Wheels - 44
• Senate - 43 
• City View Tavern - 40 (scaled from 32/40)
• Stuffed on Vine - 38
• Five Guys Burgers and Fries - 36 
• Roxy's - 36 
• FlipDaddy's - 35.5
• VanZandt - 34
• Gabby's - 34 
• Oakley Pub & Grill - 34 
• Quatman's - 32 / 34.5
• Troy's - 32 
• By Golly's - 32
• Wildflower Cafe - 31.25 (scaled from 26/40) 
• Sidetracks - 31
• Virgil's Cafe - 28 
• Tank's Bar & Grill - 28
• The Pub at Rookwood Mews - 28
• Smashburger - 28
• Habits Cafe - 28
• Graffiti Burger - 27
• Arthur's - 26
• Sammy's - 25 
• Skinny Legs - 25
• Gordo's (Fairfield) - 20 

Tomorrow I'll be back with a few other recommendations that we'll be trying in the next while.

Royal Jelly

Occasionally a product comes out that absolutely blows my mind.

Noisy Jelly is one of those products.

I don't even know where to begin because any description just sounds stupid and silly, but the actual game looks so frickin' cool, educational, and surprising that I don't know what sort of brilliant mind came up with the idea.

The kit lets you make jello figures with conductive material and pigment dissolved in it which are then placed on a conductive game board and used to make music.

When I read the description, the whole thing sounds stupid, but I so totally want to own it and play the game.

Even more, I want to be the kind of geek burger who knows enough about electronics and has a curious enough disposition to enjoy playing that game.

Things I learned this week...

Nearly every day at school I check in to find some historical event whose anniversary we can celebrate.

My former source was the History Channel's This Day in History page, but it's begun to crash my school computer. Instead, I've been heading to Wikipedia and looking up each day of the year.

This past week I learned that in spite of the accident at the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, one of the reactors there is still operational. I always assumed that they'd shut down the entire plant. Also pretty stunning was the fact the Jimmy Carter was a nuclear (or maybe just submarine) engineer

I also learned that Cincinnati has a frighteningly impressive history of riots - eleven separate riot incidents recorded on Wikipedia's page. The 1884 Courthouse riots - whose anniversary was this week - were by far the most deadly with fifty-six people dying and the riots only being quelled when 300 national guardsmen came in with a Gatling gun to clear the streets.

And, finally, I've always heard that the purchase of Alaska from Russia was nicknamed Seward's Folly. That appears not to be true. The phrase Seward's Folly instead seems to have meant that the folly was in William Seward and Andrew Johnson trying to force the Senate to approve the treaty for the purchase of Alaska before their adjournment. I always assumed that people thought the actual purchase of Alaska was folly. Apparently that's not the case...

I love learning things...love it so much.

Alone

I didn't want to swamp this in yesterday's links, so this gets its own posting.

I can't swear what is said here by Rick Santorum, but I can say what some people are thinking was said. From TheDailyWh.at:

Lots of discussion this morning about whether or not Santorum caught himself starting to say the N-word while describing Barack Obama during a recent speech in Janesville, Wisconsin.
Footage from the event shows Santorum characterizing candidate Obama as “the anti-war government nig-” before stopping himself with a filled pause and abruptly heading in a different direction.

There are several alternate theories out there which suggest Santorum was trying to say something (relatively) innocuous, and merely stumbled in an unfortunate place. One such theory claims Santorum was actually calling Obama a “governmentnik.” While plausible, “governmentnik” isn’t really something someone’s ever called anyone.

This wouldn’t be Santorum’s first brush with racial remarks. He previously came under fire for allegedly singling out black people as welfare recipients. He later claimed he stumbled on a word, which he couldn’t recall, but definitely wasn’t “black.”