This has been a long week. I don’t know about you, but I think after a while work and life really just tire you out if you’re not exactly where you want to be. For those who are always wanting to be on the move - growing and getting to the next level - complacency becomes a toxin. So for tonight, rather than reporting on animators or ads or cool artsy events around town, I’m going to sit back and be a bit more introspective.

I decided to use cooking as an attempt to distract myself from life and to turn a Saturday night spent alone into a relatively fun evening. Earlier in the week, I decided on the dish — veal saltimbocca and pommes de terres sautees (or saltimbocca di vitello if you want to be a literalist.)  

So through the magic of Yahoo!, I found a simple recipe and was on my way. It involved several supermarkets and butchers to get the handful of required ingredients. Most items came from my local Trader Joe’s, but for the proscuitto di parma, I went to Bay Cities on Lincoln Blvd. in Santa Monica. After a failed attempt to get veal from Von’s, then Victor’s Meat (Culver City), I sucked it up and went to Whole Foods and basically bent over for 2/3 of a pound of veal scallopini. “Whole paycheck!”

After nearly 90 minutes of cooking (mostly the potatoes), the dish came out extraordinarily! Here’s a picture below. Frankly, the freshness of the ingredients, particularly the proscuitto really gave it a boost. I also used about 1/3 a cup of good wine in the sauce, which always makes a different. (I am finishing glass #3 right now). Speaking of wine, I paired my delicious feast with my second favorite white wine, Conundrum. It is a California blended table wine. Runs about $28 on average. Trader Joe’s seems to sell it less these days but Vons goes as high as $35. For the veal recipe click here. I added some fontina cheese between the veal and prosciutto and that really hit the sot. For the potato recipe click here. 

I think there’s something refreshing about just cooking something new and slightly challenging. It’s also a great way to procrastinate from other activities you should be doing. Will tomorrow be a bit better? Maybe. Maybe not. It’s tough standing still and not always moving forward. So cooking sometimes is great because you get to create. When everything’s done, at least you pushed yourself to stretch your normal boundaries.

Over the weekend, I attended the NBA’s first outdoor game, held in Indian Wells, CA just a few miles east of Palm Springs. The game featured an utterly boring preseason match between the Phoenix Suns and the Denver Nuggets. Although it was fun to see Steve Nash and Shaq, basically no one showed up fro the Nuggets mostly due to injuries. No Carmelo Anthony; no Allen Iverson; no Marcus Camby. And on the Phoenix side, Amare Stoudemaire is still recovering. What can I say? Oh, and the temperature plummeted to a brisk 50 degrees, making it feel more like a Pittsburgh Steelers game than an NBA one.

All that being said, something special happened. Before the game, a massive American flag was brought out and held over most of the court. I’m talking about a basketball court-sized flag. That’s big. That’s really big. It’s not uncommon to see these types of flags at professional sporting events, particularly tennis (which was actually the venue for the outdoor stadium). The special thing that happened was that I got chills during the national anthem. I’m entirely sure why. Maybe it was something as obvious as the sheer cold and wind that felt worse while standing up. But I think it was a visceral reminder that patriotism and national pride still exists. Perhaps I was alone in my feelings, but I don’t think this is the case. I bet others out there got chills as well.

These weeks leading up to the election have been filled with lots of smear politics. Whatever. Some folks are saying that the America’s youth have no national pride. I disagree. I think teens and young adults have been given little be proud of. Let’s pretend someone is 19 and voting for the first time. They have vague recollections of Bill Clinton and they were probably in 6th grade when September 11 happened. They have had the misfortune of associating the presidency with GW43. If a young adult only is aware of politics from a macro level, the things that come to mind are a president who is a poor public speaker, a failed war in the Middle East, and inability to catch the mastermind for arguably the worst unprovoked attack in American history, a devastated economy, rising food and gas prices, and total disrespect towards our nation on the international stage. But at least the Redeem Team earned us a Gold in basketball in Beijing. My point is, despite all the macro-level failures of our political leaders this century, I still argue that there is a deep-rooted believe that we can still be the greatest nation in the world. I don’t think we are right now. I think we’re like that 2004 basketball team in Athens that thought  we could dominate anyone and then lost in the first round to Puerto Rico en route to a bronze medal. Americans want America to be great again. There are still chills when we see the flag because it’s like our long forgotten friend. It’s a symbol of struggle and overcoming that struggle. It’s a reminder of the sacrifices people before us have paved so that we could have an easier way of life. It’s a reminder that our best days are still in front of us. And it’s a hope that temporary shortcomings will ultimately just be an irrelevant bleep in our nation’s history.

The desire to want to be more is not something that can be attained by watching political chatter on CNN or FOX News. It’s not even something teachers can impart to impressionable elementary school students. It’s something you pick up along the way in everyday life. As a country, we are tired of what’s been happening. Lots of folks are disagreeing these days on the solutions to the problems, but the consensus seems to be that WE CAN BE BETTER THAN WE ARE, AND WE WILL BE!

It’s the end of the world! The economy is doomed!  ATMs will have no money left to spit out. Take your money from the banks and stuff your mattresses! Congress has no idea how to solve the problem. The Street hit the panic button today!

WE ARE ALL DOOMED! If I find a window, I can’t promise that there will be an subsequent posts on this blog

I for one have decided to invest in the one commodity never affected by financial crises. Bubble gum. That’s right. Good ole American bazooka! Trust in gum and you won’t go wrong! As our founding fathers said, “In gum we trust!” It was the neoliberals who changed “gum” to “God.” Go figure!

But in all seriousness, now’s not the time to panic. You have to wonder whether the McCain camp will take a significant beating in the polls for the utter obliteration of our economy under the Bush administration.

So Microsoft has pulled the plug in no time at all on the Bill Gates / Jerry Seinfeld team up of spots. The $300 million “let’s make Microsoft look cool” campaign so far has been a bust. Jerry’s commercials weren’t funny, much like Bee Movie. As much as I grew up ADORING Seinfeld, the two spots they made just aren’t funny. 

The ad below is weird. It’s not quite funny. It’s also not cool. Above all, it’s just weird. But the grandmother is kinda funny. I’ll give Jerry that! The whole ad is cluncky. It in no way competes with the Mac vs. PC ads that Apple has been producing. CNET News.com wrote a great blog about this.

Below is the “Shoe Circus” spot. It’s the official Windows YouTube account. Notice how the audio sync is off
 

(Aside: I recently upgraded to Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2. Half my webpages basically don’t load now. So as a longtime microsoft supporter, I’ve basically given up on IE now and migrated to Safari. Everything’s much better. I’m quite dumb though: I should know Microsoft products on Vista are buggy and there is no way a beta version of a Microsoft product is a smart idea. I have got to get it together!)

So far watching the Olympics has been more fun than I expected. But NBC continues to outshine itself in the category of worst coverage possible! Despite the coverage appearing sporadically and tape-delayed quite often (esp. on the West Coast), it would take a true genius to decipher when sporting events are on TV. After attempting to spend some time on www.nbcolympics.com, I’ve decided to raise the white flag. My new Olympic viewing plan is to put the TV on around 9pm and toggle between NBC, CNBC, MSNBC, and USA and hope what i want to watch is actually on. I also discovered a really fancy broadband player on the NBC site listed above. The quality is actually the best live streaming video i have ever seen. It’s a shame it won’t let you watch full-screen, but i guess that have to find a way to make you watch all those ads! (As I type, Baltimoron Michael Phelps is claiming his 3rd gold medal in 2008). Even the broadband player is confusing! You can filter all videos by sport but some of the ones that should be on don’t seem to be available. For example, i had just turned the TV on when an event was ending. I figured i could watch it again on the broadband player, but that wasn’t the case. Alas ,just wave the white flag and tune into Bob Costas red you his propagandistic version of the Olympics. But i’ll mouth-off about US media some other time. Goodnight!

Go Phelps!

Yes, the Olympics are still weeks away but I am already frightened by the pending propaganda that NBC will force down our throats as we attempt to watch the Olympics. The ads, promos, and bugs have already been splattered on NBC for wks now. It will be nonstop China all the time. Everyone wants to talk about China as the next big thing. All these American business analysts from CNBC to FOX are salivating for China to somehow surpass the US. I love that our own freedoms as a nation all us to hope that our own nation falters. It’s uplifting. I bet Francis Scott Key would have found this ideology down right inspiring! China is not a wonderland. (BTW, talking about China and India in business is SOOOOOOo 2005. If your business leader brings them up in a mtg, tell him/her to catch up on his/her media-communications readings.) China is an economic dynamo. Its economy has been exploding and will continue to explode. Why? It’s because they have a sh!tload of people and are willing to exploit as many of them as possible. I wonder if the poor in China are treated better than the poor in the USSR say in the 1950s. I know nothing about this but guess that the treatments are probably on par. China went from a communist nation-based ideology to a capitalistic consumption-based one today. That is what china is. In all those apocalyptic films about the world running out of resources and people just flat out wasting everything, or in other words, the type of American traits that actually led to the rise of Al Qaeda’s ideology (I’m happy to refer anyone to the BBC documentary that outlines this), China now best embodies that sheer gluttony and wastefulness. As I’ve been a proponent of the great documentary Up the Yangtze, i think that film does a great job of providing some commentary on just how f-ed up everything is over. The rising Chinese aristocracy is not good for the overall population there. Everything seems to be done in the name of pride, progress, and modernity. Oh, and the Chinese government decided to through any Westerner with a visa out of China from June until October to ensure that there are not many protests against the Olympics.

China’s a fun place to visit and it’s certainly got rich histories in most of the arts and sciences, but let’s not kid ourselves and pretend that what they’ve got going on over there is some sort of utopia. They will lead the world in some fields in the coming years. I have no doubt in that, but despite that there is a Disneyland in hong kong, China is no Disneyland. It’s not a dream world. The aristocracy and government over there is not working in the people’s best interests. Then again, ours probably is not either. If only more countries could be like Belgium and Switzerland!

So while NBC is certain to give us no coverage of any non-American events, forcing die-hard viewers to visit the NBC Sports website at 3 a.m. to watch men’s basketball or ladies tennis, I remind you all not to take any of their propagnistic remarks about China to heart. If you are interested in learning something about China (since i am an admitted neophyte), then please take the Olympics as a chance to learn more about the social and economic issues that are not only affecting China but ultimately have to some degree, an effect on your own bottom line.