Wow...just wow...

I miss the serve and volley days.

I miss the net judge with his finger on the tape.

I miss Edberg-Becker every other year.

I miss watching the Wimbledon finals in the tennis shed.

But at 13-12 in the fifth set right now, I can't imagine that any of those things could have made this a greater match.

Andy Roddick has stepped up his game to a level that I never believed was possible from him.

We could be here a while.

The majesty

Sampras...Laver...Borg...Nastase all in the same box...

McEnroe & Becker calling the match...

Federer on court...

Fifty-eight grand slam singles titles...

Wow...

And Roddick's play is living up to all that right now (5-5 in the first).

For the college kids, doncha know

If you're 'round Cincy and in the College time frame, you might want to check out the Ikea Back to College night coming up next Thursday.

Just in case you had a place to furnish and didn't wanna look like a total dork because you're so desperate as to be building your own bed frame and all.

I'm not sayin'.

I'm just sayin'.

Here's where we've been

So, went to Washington ...here's what we did with some reflections on lots of the stops.

Like I mentioned yesterday, I'll be following up with a few days of more in-depth posts on some of the vacation things.

• Friday - June 19
  • on the train at 3:45am
  • listened to Pygmy (review coming next week)
  • off the train at 6:30pm
  • on the Metro for two transfers
  • dinner at Los Lomas - enjoying the universality of Mexican restaurants
• Saturday - June 19
  • quick stop at Eastern Market coffee shop for breakfast
  
  • walked to The Mall so The Girl could go for her morning run - ChemGuy wanders The Mall
  • the only rainy time of our trip - all dried up by around noon, no more rain until the last night of our trip, amazingly lucky weather for a trip which was pretty much us walking all around the city all the time
  • lunch at the American Indian museum - wow of a food court, five stations, each with the cusine of a different Indian region of the US
  • through the American Indian museum - top floor boring, dug the Fritz Scholder exhibit - great artwork, interesting commentary
  
  • checked out the Hirshhorn gallery - mostly meh, neat sculpture in the basement, very dated building style from the mid 70's with huge concrete and glass, condensation on the lowest level windows
  • checked out the Museum of American History - loved the Star Spangled banner, didn't care about the ruby slippers even though we waited in line for them, cool to see Julia Child's kitchen, neat to see Ira Remson's lab even though the science area was horribly attended and sadly boring
  • then the Museum of Natural History - interesting exhibits on ants, gems, Written in Bone about forensics of ancient Jamestown, freaky picture of an Irish Wolfhound
• Sunday - June 21
  • quick (1hr) train to Philly
  • subway to the ballgame (Philly subway way nastier than DC subway - lots more urine smell, yay!)
  • at Citizen's Bank Ballpark two hours before the game - got cheesesteak from Campos (very good), crabfries from somewhere else (very tasty), gelato (also very tasty)
  
  • seats in low rows of the high & distant section of 3rd base side, 2-1 game kind boring, Philly fans nicely rough on Jimmy Rollins to hold up their reputation, nice stadium but kind of generic as far as newer stadia go
  • walked around Philly before our 8:50 train back to DC - saw the Comcast center's video wall very cool
• Monday - June 22
  • took the subway to Foggy Bottom (decently to the NW of The Mall)
  • walked to Watergate - across the street from where my family stayed when we went to Washington in 1990
  • checked out the Kennedy Center - awful and big bust of Kennedy - wish we would have known that we could ride up and look out from the roof
  
  • down to the National Academy of Sciences for Einstein and their exhibits - turns out there aren't any exhibits even though they have a sign saying there are and our tour book said there are, all exhibits now in their museum at 500 5th Street
  • stopped by Trader Joe's to stock up for the week
  saw - among the cooler things on our trip - Night at the Museum II: Battle for the Smithsonian IN THE SMITHSONIAN, on their IMAX screen at the Natural History museum
  • strolled through the monuments at night, saw WW II, Lincoln, Washington, Einstein, Korea, and Vietnam that night

• Tuesday - June 23
  • Metro's red line up to the National Zoo - next time, go one stop past and walk downhill to the zoo, really enjoyed the pandas & orangutans and watching the beavers get fed (even the fat one who the handlers made work for his food) and the elusive and hertofore unknown lemon-lime Chill
  • big uphill walk through Cleveland Park to 2 Amy's Pizza with spectacular pizza, thin wood fired, awesome
  • stopped by Whole Foods for more supplies
  dinner at The Dubliner which is supposed to be the best Irish bar in the US but which we thought was just meh
• Wednesday - June 24
  • National Botanical Garden on The Mall - surprisingly beautiful, amazing place, built kind of like The Krohn in Cincy, neat artwork exhibit, windspire
  • lunch at the American Indian museum again - very cool exhibit on American Indian skateboard culture
  • Library of Congress surplus book program - This deserves a huge report because it was easily the coolest part of the trip for either of us, so I'll give more detail on Monday.
  
  • Evening at National's baseball game against Red Sox - annoying Red Sox-heavy crowd, Sox won, we left after 8th inning, nice stadium, good food, great center field pavilion
• Thursday - June 25
  • early to the Washington Monument to get tickets for a ride up - chose 9:30pm ride in the monument
  • stopped by Sherod Brown's office to get free shipping for our Library of Congress discard books
  • back to the Library of Congress to turn in our shipping labels (thanks Sherod Brown)
  
  • to the Museum of Art - East building - gorgeous building from IM Pei, neat artwork, some far too modern for my tastes, loved Miro's work
  • dinner at the Cafe Mozart - great food, slightly underdressed for the restaurant
  • tried to walk around White House - had to go far, far south of South Lawn because the Pres was hosting Congress for a luau
  • back to the WW II monument so The Girl could take pics for a friend
  • The Girl had a rash break out on the back of her legs (later on her arms) from something that she apparently walked through on the Ellipse
  • went up in the Washington Monument at 9:30 - honestly, I think we should have gone during the daytime, somewhat tough to identify items in the distance at night
• Friday - June 26
  • back to the Art Museum to see the Matisse cutouts, which were amazing
  • to the National Archives to see the Constitution, Bill of Rights, & Declaration - actually, far more interesting were the exhibits downstairs - Taft's bathtub, MacArthur's military records, transcripts from the moon landing, amazing stuff...the big three were okay, but there were so many people that it was tough to spend any time with each one
  • walked to the DC Waterfront to try Captain White's seafood - never have I seen seafood so fresh, all caught that morning - never have I been so repulsed by my meal as the soft shell crabs weren't entirely cleaned before they were fried - I nearly barfed
  
  • headed on to the Jefferson Memorial - I love TJ, love him, true pilgrimage to this place
  • on around the tidal basin to the FDR memorial - brilliant, very different memorial set up as rooms, wish we'd initially gone through it the right way rather than background, very moving memorial that means more if you read about it in advance
  • back to the apartment after a huge walking day to tend to the blisters
• Saturday - June 27
  • went to the Corcoran Gallery to see the Eggelston and Maya Lin exhibits - loved both, amazing photography from Eggleston, wonderful and revolutionary landscape sculptures from Lin, interesting to see the different between this (our only private, pay gallery - we got in free on Saturdays) and all the free Smithsonian museums, Corcoran is clearly struggling for funding
  
  • through the Renwick Gallery - craft museum with very cool artwork, giant salon very different from the rest of the small museum across the the White House
  • lunch at Così - good sammiches
  • to the Nat'l Portrait Gallery and Museum of American Art (Reynolds Center) - got through half of one floor of the huge gallery before The Girl got bored (the benedryl for the rash probably didn't help)
  • so off to see Up a block from the museum in a big, mall-ish area - very sad, beautiful movie, Katydid was right that it's a kids movie tackling some very mature themes (loss, friendship, family), at it was particularly heartbreaking to be in a relationship with no kids and look to the future
  • dinner at the Capital City Brewery which was a solid if unspectacular meal
• Sunday - June 28
  • on a quick (30-min) train to Baltimore for a baseball game
  • got to Camden very early, so walked around Inner Harbor area
  • the area between the train station and the stadium was a bad, stereotypical Baltimore from The Wire bad
  • Inner Harbor was commercial, mallish - we were left with little to see between run down and commercial
  • general blech of Baltimore
  
  • Camden was nice, first of the new-style parks, probably revolutionary when it was built, it's been surpassed now, but it's worth going to just for the revolution that it initially was - best seats of the three games about 25 rows up behind homeplate just on the 1B side - entertained the neighbors with pics of Beaker - 2nd free hat of the trip, though, so there is that
• Monday - June 29
  • subway to Arlington
  • Tomb of the Unknown soldier for the changing of the guard, interesting to hear captain of guard yelling at the spectators to stand up
  • saw a military funeral, didn't want to intrude, saw it from before the formal funeral began, odd to see milling about of 60 uniformed men before the mourners showed up
  • onward to the Marine Memorial (Iwo Jima Memorial) - amazing, moving, awesomely oversized statuary
  
  • down to Pentagon City (mall) to walk to the Air Force Memorial - very cool, easy to see from around the city, too
  • dinner at The Palm (living steakishly in DC - full review to come on Tuesday or so
• Tuesday - June 30
  • last day in DC
  • the the Library of Congress (again) - to see the Jefferson Building, the big one that everybody sees - most beautiful building in all of DC, amazing, wonderful, to stand in the midst of Jefferson's surviving/reconstituted library WOW, neat exhibits on Bob Hope & Pete Seeger
  • lunch at Breadline - very tasty sausage sandwich but called a piadine (?)
  
  • back to the Reynolds Center - I could have spent all day here, five floors of artwork, wonderful mixture of modern and old, art and portraiture, amazing stuff on every floor, gorgeous building - especially fond of Bravo & Champions galleries, television USA map, VP & President portraits - The Girl was quickly bored but played along nicely
Wednesday - July 1

• on the train at 11am
• off the train at 3am the next morning
• boring, long, cheap, energy efficient

So that's it, folks...

Here's what I've got for next week...

• Monday, more details about the trip - especially the Library of Congress - anything else you want to hear more about?
• Tuesday - reviews of the media involved: Up, Pygmy, Night at the Museum II, Freakonomics
Wednesday - Our Year of Living Steakishly continues on vacation
• Thursday - back to regularly unscheduled programming

I'm guessing that'll be more than enough DC-related content for you.

Quick update

Things upcoming as I catch up on reading blogs and webcomics from the vacation...

• Reviews of Night at the Museum II as viewed in the Smithsonian and Up
• Reviews of Freakonomics and Pygmy as read on the train to and from Washington
• dispatches from three MLB parks - Baltimore, Philly, and Washington
• recap of the trip - including highlights at the Library of Congress
• loads of pics of Beaker in and around Washington
• advice if traveling this great land of ours by train

Nothing big today, though, as I didn't get home 'til 4am and am still unpacking and digging on the new kitchen - which should be totally finished and ready for us to move everything back in this weekend.

From my childhood

Picture Pages - loved Bill Cosby in these shorts


The Great Space Coaster


Kids Incorporated - I had more of a thing for Reneee, but most of you will recognize Fergie as the lead here

Our stupidly litigious society

A man recently sued the Oakland A's for sex discrimination because of their Mother's Day promotion.

His view was that the giving of floppy hats to the first 7500 women in attendance was a clear act of sex discrimination.

So he sued...and won...a $510,000 class action settlement on behalf of the men in the crowd.

We live in a stupidly and ridiculously litigious society, folks.

The whole of The Story

We live in a time of media dominated by the thirty second story, the ten second soundbite, the quick teaser followed up by a minute of coverage including a clip and a couple of quotes.

That's why the in depth exploration of The Story on NPR is so wonderfully refreshing.

The hour-long show focuses on two stories each day, each taking up roughly half of the hour. The stories aren't about anybody famous, not about anyone that you've ever even maybe heard of. Instead, they're the stories of regular folks who have had something interesting happen to them.

One last week was about a young man who grew up in Warrenville, IL and was deported to Mexico when he was arrested for a drug offense at the age of eighteen. He is the child of two legal immigrants. His sister is a US citizen. His paperwork was just never filled out when he came across at the age of one. He has been sent 'home' to a country the he's never known to speak a language he doesn't know, and he's not allowed to see his family for five years.

At thirty seconds, his story would be an interesting glimpse.

At half an hour, in his own words, his story is heart-wrenching.

If your local NPR station doesn't carry The Story, it's also available as a daily podcast.

A snapshot...

Amongst the wanderings around Washington DC today, The Girl and I saw a trumpet player giving a very mournful rendition of "I'll Be There".

Kind of sad...

The randomness

Just because I'm gone to DC doesn't mean you can't stumble upon some fun...

• Customized My Little Ponies - the Dynamic Duo are the best
• Beatles Trivia - just because they're entertaining
• Double Feature - outstanding and illegal - a site that tells you waht movies start just after the movie you want to see ends so you can make it a double feature
• Movie Madness - the same thing but a little less graphical and a little more efficient...see multiple movies for one admission price.
• iRuler.net - in case you need an online ruler. I'm hoping it's correctly sized.
• Smarties Hero - in case your game system shuts down
• Handbell Hero - enjoy the Christmas, folks

Hop on, pardners!

Enjoy today's game...

Stopping by Rallys

Enjoy some rally racing today, everybody.

Some tips for would-be-conquerers

From Peter Anspach, one hundred tips on how to be a successful evil overlord...

#26 - No matter how attractive certain members of the rebellion are, there is probably someone just as attractive which is not desperate to kill me. Therefore, I will think twice before ordering a prisoner sent to my bed chamber.

#30 - All bumbling conjurers, clumsy squires, no-talent bards, and cowardly thieves in the land will be preemptively put to death. My foes will surely give up and abandon their quest if they have no source of comic relief.

#56 - My Legion of Terror will be trained in basic marksmanship. Any who cannot learn to hit a man-sized target at 10 meters will be used for target practice.

#84 - I will not have captives of one sex guarded by members of the opposite sex.

And like a prom dress...

I am off.

The Girl and I are - by now - hanging in our nation's capital, visiting the Smithsonian, checking out the FDR memorial, visiting with Einstein, and trying the supposed best steak in the DC area.

We've got three ball games lined up - in DC, in Philly, and in Baltimore.

We've got signed letters to let us each grab books from the Library of Congress.

And, best of all, we're doing it all without ever touching a steering wheel.

Amtrak from the Queen City at 3:30 in the morning across Ohio, WV, and VA to the capital, then regional trains to Philly and Baltimore and back.

Photos will, of course, follow when we get back into town in early July.

'Til then, I've got a bunch of posts lined up, but I won't be replying to any comments until I get back.

Great voices

Malcolm McDowell


Morgan Freeman


Kenneth Branagh


James Earl Jones


Al Pacino


Derek Jacobi

Mystified

Can anybody explain to me how this works?



I'm feeling a bit of CGI with a wire having been removed, but I could be wrong.

To boldly go...

The red matter couldn't be contained by whatever stupid...

Why would coming up behind Titan hide...?

But if it's 129 years in the future, how could...?

How did Nero know where Spock's ship...?

But the ship came out next to the Golden Gate Bridge. How can it be in...?

Wait, how would they pick Kirk over all the...?

The comic up top sums by feelings about Star Trek pretty well.

The logic holes in Star Trek could fit a starship, heck a star destroyer, but it just doesn't matter. Every time I started to laugh about some inconsistency in the movie's logic, they hit us with another action sequence or plot turn that brought a smile to my face with a surprise appearance of the original Spock, a quote from the original series, a chucklesome one-liner, something.

The creative turn that allowed the franchise to relaunch itself works here without negating the original series and cast. This Star Trek is to the original as the Ultimate universe is to Marvel-616, a chance for new writers to restart the whole continuity, keeping the aspects they want to keep and throwing out all the plot dead-ends and blind corners that they'd backed themselves into.

Newbies are welcome to step right in, and little if any background knowledge is required of them. Hard core acolytes, on the other hand, are welcome to play in the new sandbox, and there are enough in jokes and references to keep them happy.

Go for this one, folks. It's a real corker.

Go Meat!

A couple of years ago, our cheer block at the basketball games used this as a cheer.

I kinda miss it.

Now with disc golf mode

You had me with the commercial staring SVP, but then you added in a disc golf mode and improved swing control with MotionPlus.

There goes the summer post DC trip, folks.

Our Year of Living Steakishly: May, Boi Na Braza

With the Best Man and his The Girl, we headed to Fountain Square for a night of Steakish Living, our first in the series to benefit from the company of another couple.

If you've not been to a Brazilian steak house - and we hadn't before this journey - you should know that it's certainly a different dining style than that of any other steakhouse that we've hit on our travels. There is no menu, no choice of sides, no need to ask for the meat cooked a certain way.

Instead, the sides and salads and antipasto are on a four-sided salad bar, free for the grazing. One side had typical salad fixings, another warm sides (sauteed mushrooms, whipped potatoes, black beans, cauliflower with cheese, soup), the third and fourth antipasto choices (roasted red peppers, asparagus, salami, cheeses). We were welcome to take in as many and as much of these as we wanted - at the beginning of our meal or throughout.

ChemGuy's choice from the four-sided salad bar
All of the starters were very tasty, the mushrooms and black beans, in particular. With so many sides - salads, sides, appetizers - none of us were able to sample all of the choices, but we each agreed that they were all solid choices with very few of them rising to a level of excellence. In general, we treated the opening course largely as something to be sampled lightly but not to be indulged in with any real gusto.

The meat was the thing, and we needed to save room.

The Best Man's choices from the same four-sided salad bar. Note the red octagon at the top left of the photo. That'll be relevant later.
Once the salad choices were done, we moved on to the meat course...courses...the endless meat course.

When we were ready to bring on the carne, we flipped our card from red to green. Once the green was showing, the gauchos who were wandering the churrascaria (I swear, I'm not making up these terms) immediately began stopping by the table. They brought by seventeen (the host told us the number, I certainly wasn't counting) different meat options:

• bottom round
• bacon-wrapped filet
• bacon-wrapped chicken breast
• garlic beef
• prime rib
• lamb
• chicken legs
• and a bunch of others that started to blend together
• sausage

Seriously, the meat started to blend together pretty quickly. There was meat and meat and some meat.

After a while, we flipped back to the red to make the meat rain pause and took a few minutes to actually eat some of the carnage. With so many choices, The Girl and I began by simply accepting every meat offered to us, trying every style of meat. The Best Man, on the other hand, had been to Boi na Braza before and was a bit more selective, knowing which meats he enjoyed the most and which would simply be taking up much needed space on his plate.

Most of the meats came in smallish pieces, typically two or three ounces at a time, all served on large skewers and slid off onto our plates. I like my steak more closer to rare than medium, and the small sizes of the meat pieces seemed to keep this from happening. Instead, most of the meat - the beef, at least - more in a medium well level of doneness. Even the larger cuts, from which slices were cut and laid onto our plates, struggled to stay at even medium, and none of the meats had the rich crust that comes on an outstanding steak.

Admittedly, the endless supply of meat as well as the vast variety of available seared flesh was attractive, but Boi na Braza felt a bit like a higher quality CiCi's where the value was to be had in the quantity rather than the quality of the offerings.

The Best Man's plate of meat.
Somebody's meat plate.
Go Meat!After taking down probably a pound of meat a piece, we had the foolishness to try out the dessert menu by splitting apiece of their caramel cheesecake, a dessert too large by half, especially at the end of an evening of gluttony.

To the rankings, steakish readers:

• Appetizers/Dessert - 8 - The dessert seemed mass produced. The full salad bar made for a lot of options, many of which were very tasty.
• Steak - 6 - The massive amount of meat and huge variety makes up for some of the middling quality, but not all of it.
• Side dishes - 7 - see description of salad bar.
• Atmosphere - 7 - Nothing special - nice decor but nothing special.
• Cost - 4 - At $47 per person plus $8 for the dessert, it's slightly above the middle of the road cost.
• Service - 8 - The lack of a traditional waiter made things tough to evaluate. The meat servers seemed to come from nowhere when the card was flipped to green. Drinks were never allowed to be low.
• Minus 5 - It's not a steakhouse - period - end of story.
• Total score - 35 (out of 60)

It's not a steakhouse.

I don't know if I'd mentioned that yet or not.

No big, single steak on my plate. No medium rare. No menu.

It's a buffet, a high quality buffet but a buffet none the less.

On to steakhouses in Washington, D.C for June.