web site: Sony Bravia Play Doh Bunnies
Sony just released an adorable and amazing stop motion advert (as the British say) for their Bravia high-definition LCD televisions. As someone who attempted a stop motion project for a film class, it just boggles my mind how this was done. In fact, looking at these behind the scenes photos only makes it more amazing.
How did they digitally remove all of the poles later? How did they keep New Yorkers from messing things up? How could they tell where the bunnies needed to go from day to day, considering they were marking with chalk in a public place?
The high quality version is well worth the wait on their painfully load heavy web site, but if you are in a hurry, you can watch it on YouTube.
technorati tags: bravia, stop motion animation, play doh bunnies
food: Ellie’s White Chocolate Butter Bars
I have to admit that I am incredibly hooked on Top Chef. Maybe it is because I’m a foodie, maybe it is because Bravo actually does make some decent reality shows sometimes. Anyone who watches the show becomes familiar with its repeated dialogue: “amuse bouche“, “trio of dishes”, “flavor profiles”, and my favorite “this isn’t Top Cook, this is Top Chef.” And while the judges insist that being a Top Chef (not a Top Cook) means things like leadership, design, conceptualization, perfect execution, and knowing good well what to serve and what not to, I think Dale (who has my vote for Viewer’s Favorite) has the right attitude when it comes to cooking. It is about heart, it is about putting your soul into what you cook, and it is about not forgetting to be a good person.
So, I want to nominate Tom Wolfe of Peristyle and Wolfe’s of New Orleans as my personal “Top Chef” of they year.
Let me back it up for a second… Five years ago, my husband and I took a trip to New Orleans. To save a bit of money, we stayed a little outside the city limits. I didn’t mind so much as I knew there were some good restaurants in the area. One of those restaurants was Wolfe’s of New Orleans.
Our dinner at Wolfe’s could be said to be one a ground-breaking moment for my husband and I, although I did not realize it until later. This was our first real vacation together. This was the first truly nice restaurant we had gone out to together. This was the first time we shared good wine over a fancy meal. And it is because of this that I so vividly remember ever moment. I remember my potato encrusted lobster tail, the way the crispy potato perfectly complimented the soft buttery lobster without overpowering it. I remember a light going off in my head that cooking is something more, a combination of flavor, texture, smell, and visuals all combining into a unique experience.
But most of all, I remember Ellie’s White Chocolate Butter Bars. A seemingly simple sounding desert made from an old family recipe, these bars were so very moist and delicate, yet rich in combination with homemade vanilla ice cream and raspberry coulis. The sweet with the tangy, the rich with the tart, the soft and warm with the smooth and cool. Flavor combinations at their best.
It was completely random that one day I decided to e-mail Tom Wolfe and just mention how much I loved and still remembered my meal there, even though it was 5 years later. So appreciative was Tom for the praise that in a series of e-mails he offered to send me a couple butter bars in the mail at no extra charge.
They came and were every bit as amazing as I remembered. I surprised my husband on our anniversary by bringing them out and making him guess what they were. Turns out he had not forgotten our experience at Wolfe’s either.
Tom Wolfe, you are my Top Chef, for not only making good food but for being an incredible person who made this anniversary particularly special by reminding us what it means to “cook with heart”.
wine: dream shop
I have been meaning to write this article for a while. I was firstly inspired by my once colleague, still friend’s comment on one of my previous articles, wherein he mentioned wine needing a faceted classification system, a concept first presented by one of the fathers of library science, S. R. Ranganathan. Upon reading more about Ranganathan’s five laws of library science, I was inspired to delve deeper into my idea of the perfect wine store.
I was inspired, but then forgot… until this month’s Wine Blog Wednesday was announced. The focus is on indigenous grapes, which reminded me how important “location, location, location” is to learn as a wine fan and how HARD and not fun wine shops make it to learn the interconnectedness of things like flavor, food pairing, varietal, style, age-ability, and region (see terroir).
So, here is my proposition for my perfect wine store. First, this wine store would understand and live by the five laws of library science, which I think are important enough to reiterate here. These rules would be plastered on the walls of my ideal wine shop:
So, with the rules of business out of the way. How do you take care of this issue of faceted classification? It works well for online wine stores (Wine.com, Cork’d), where you can utilize tags and multi-attribute navigation options. But how does that translate into a physical store experience that will allow the user to take away a holistic view of wine and its many dimensions, or more importantly the dimensions they want to pay attention to.
My perfect wine store would be laid out like map, meaning different areas of the store would be dedicated to different countries. In each section would be signs with easy to identify icons that highlight the other facets: cost, flavor profile, food pairing, etc. This will allow “browsers” to wander around the store and tune into the information that they need, whilst learning more about aspects they hadn’t know (i.e. champagne isn’t the only fizzy wine in the world, italian wines are a great match for mushrooms, and portugal and southern france are great resources for inexpensive tasty reds). The store would feature periodic kiosks and store maps for the “searchers”, so that they can easily locate their targets, develop a shopping list, and get recommended “wines they might like” or other wines uses like them bought.
I attempted to express this idea more in depth via a personalized Google Map that highlights the different flavors, food pairings, and varietals of some key wines in Europe.
It’s a dream, but with the leaps and bounds being made in the online web world… it is only a matter of time before the physical retail world will be expected to catch up.
wine: rosé madness
It’s every where you look this summer. It is a Rosé Craze!! Ever since I posted a not so excited review of my first rosé ever, I just can’t seem to go anywhere without hearing about the wine. There was the issue of Wine Spectator, displays at my local supermarket, rosé tasting nights at nearby wine bars. It was enough to inspire me to try a second rosé, and when that one failed to wow me, I just kept thinking… I must be crazy, I must be crazy.
Well, I was glad to find out that I wasn’t the only one having a “pink” crisis. There has been a running “pink” debate all over my favorite wine blogs, between those who just don’t get it and those who do.
So up until this weekend, I whole-heartedly agreed with the NY Times. What is all the hype about? This drink is completely bland, blah. The mix of red and white apparently equals the blander of the two. But still, there was something about it (maybe the fun color) that made me really want to like it.
So then, on Friday… it clicked. Bad day at work, I missed a meeting by getting lost in Chrysler headquarters for half an hour in 5 inch heels. My feet hurt, my brain hurt. All I wanted to do was sit on the back porch at my dad’s house, bask in the sun, and escape the world. No thought, just relax. According to the experts, it was the perfect conditions for rosé.
So, I had the Domaine Des Karantes. It was cool, it was fruity, it smelled like perfume and tasted like watermelon candy. Watermelon and summer, rosé and summer. It all became clear (I’m sure it helped that it was 80% red).
While there was nothing amazing about the wine, I finally got the idea. Sometimes drinking is a mood, a state of being. You have cocktails in swanky night clubs, you have wine during orchestra concert picnics, you have beer at a cozy pub, and you have rosé out on the deck in the summer when you want to be carefree.
technorati tags: rosé
food: pluot
Mmmm… pluots. Even the name is fun (plü-ot). It makes it sound like a weird celestial formation or a hip foreign car. Way cooler than a peacotum, which sounds dirty, or a grapple.
I discovered this meld between a plum and an apricot at my local grocery store on a weekly fruit run. I forgot about this weird genetically engineered fruit until I pulled it out of my lunch bag for a mid-morning snack. First, I was awed by the perfect heart shape and candy red color. It was like a bright red apple, only soft and shaped like a heart, so really nothing like an apple. It was the perfect weight to hold in the palm of your hand and the skin was so smooth and rubbery that it almost felt like a toy. I really didn’t want to eat it, I was finding myself so infatuated with my pluot.
Taste was a little sour under the skin but sweet in the fleshy center. I think my pluot needed to ripen a bit, but the soft dense texture of the orange flesh was fantastic. So maybe it is a little weird to go on about a fruit in this way, but it really brightened my day. So yeah for genetic engineering. It’s apparently organic or something so even the hippies can proclaim “I Heart Pluots”.
technorati tags: pluot
tv show: Flight of the Conchords
My new favorite show for the summer is HBO’s Flight of the Concords. It’s a perfect meld of everything that is lovable about HBO comedies. You have the ridiculous musical numbers spliced hilariously into the narrative. You have the dry wit of struggling “artists” with an inept agent. And finally you have the unemotional anti-heroes that manage to get themselves into odd situations.
But mostly the show exists on its own plane of complete weirdness with the musical interludes being the overshadowing highlight. I can’t exactly remember what happens in each episode, but I’ll pop back onto my DVR almost daily to replay “Inner City Pressure” or “Hip-hopopotamus vs. the Rhymenocerous“. In conclusion, dry-witted poor New Zealand folk rockers = amazing, so watch it.
My rhymes are so potent that in this small segment
I made all of the ladies in the area pregnant
technorati tags: Flight of the Conchords
movie: Ratatouille
Pixar couldn’t have put out a better movie at a better time. It’s a seriously fun and sweet movie about a foodie rat who dreams of being a master chef in Paris. I didn’t think it could be done, but they found a way to make me even more in love with Paris, its wines, its cheeses, its food, by using a main character that gushes about it all in such an inspiring way.
But setting aside my personal interest in the subject matter, the movie is seriously fantastic. The animation is ridiculous. Every time Pixar comes out with a new movie, you just can’t help but think that it is the closest computer animation has ever looked to reality, that it just can’t get any better than that. The next thing you know they blow your mind all over again. From the slight scratches on the copper pots to the semi-translucent shine on the red onions to the reflective waters of the Seine, the textures of the inanimate objects are dreamily real. They are so detailed and true to life while still giving off a sense of beauty in their simplicity… it’s just an onion after all. The best animation comes from the main character, whose fur and whiskers are so tactile on screen that I can feel what a Remy toy would be like in my hands.
And with all good Pixar films, the story is cute, funny, and tear-inducing at all the right moments.
What I didn’t expect was such an inspired look into why a little rat could fall so in love with the art of cooking. They illustrate so well the idea of enjoying the subtleties of flavor profiles and the magic that occurs when you combine them into a dish. It’s a symphony, flavors complimenting each other in new and exciting ways. It reminds me of all the reasons I love wine and I love pairing it with food, at least “in theory”. For unlike Remy, I don’t think I am or ever can be a “supertaster“. And for that reason, I found myself with a bittersweet love for the main character, for ultimately, I am jealous.
But I am not alone. Not everyone in the world can be a supertaster (I’m pretty sure I’d fail the orange ice cream test, unless I knew the three flavors I was picking from). And when I sit down every night and try and search for the elusive flavors in a wine, it’s like trying to remember a dream after you have awakened… the feeling slowly slips away the more and more I concentrate and try to describe it. In the end, do I really need to know that what I was tasting was boysenberry with a hint of cocoa and cedar to enjoy a delicious wine? Probably not, but I’m certainly envious of the people that can.
technorati tags: Supertaster, Ratatouille
tv show: The Sopranos
Just a quick post here. At the end instant of the Sopranos, I got about 3 text messages on my phone all saying the same thing, a big “WTF”. Then I tune on the radio this morning to hear the words “disappointment” and “dud”. The fact of the matter is that I loved that ending in so many ways. I’m glad to see that I’m not the only one. To the people that were left unsatisfied, I ask you could the show really have ended any other way? Would you have felt satisfied if Tony Soprano had died? Here we are watching this man with a love-hate relationship for 8 years, and are we to feel good to see our anti-hero die on the screen in the final moments of the show, no funeral, no epilogue. Should his life end in tragedy, Carmela or AJ die, what would have satisfied you? The brilliance of the ending they gave us was that it wasn’t what anyone expected. It made the mundane incredibly tense, and the sense that it left you with was that Tony Soprano was safe for this time, but his life will continue on in constant danger, constant tenseness, and as much as we think we have seen the characters grow on this show, they are right back to being who they are. I also appreciate how easily they were able to toy with our emotions, how that end scene dragged and you felt your heart racing in anticipation. Do we really need to have the big bang at the end to have enjoyed the ride?
technorati tags: Sopranos, season finale
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