Nothing better shows my taste than what I wear below my waist

[austin_dern]

Update on the restaurant we went to while trying to reach Mystic: apparently I misunderstood. My father had seen a billboard for the restaurant we went to, and pointed it out to me and my mother, and added the mention that they had been reviewed (favorably) in The New York Times. My mother took this to be the first step of my father asking in his passive-aggressive fashion to go there, or he could just sigh the rest of the afternoon and mention how we didn't go there. So turning off wasn't part of a process of recognizing that we would be in for a relatively late lunch if we stuck to the original plan for driving up.

It was a fine restaurant, though, and gave me the chance to finally get some crab cakes. I'd been trying for a couple of restaurant trips now to get some, but had hit a curious streak of this being the one day of the week they don't make crab cakes or similar weird restrictions like that. (I didn't know restaurants would have ``crab cake-free Tuesdays''.) By ``crab cakes'' on the menu they meant ``cake'', but since it was a large patty such as you might get from two or three normal-size cakes blending together that didn't bother me. Setting the cake, the french fries, and the cole slaw on different small plates kind of threw me, as it fought against the sort of meal-item rotation I do with my plates (it's really stupid and you shouldn't ask; the important thing is I was slightly off my game), and the cole slaw was for some reason brought out as an appetizer.

At my aunt and uncle's place, we arrived late enough that it didn't feel worth going out to anything more that day, so we stayed in eating sliced carrots and celery and whatnot in dips until it was time for dinner. Well past that, we watched a rental DVD of 300, which my uncle -- who spent much of the sixties in the United States Army, and thus in some southeast Asian nation or other -- loved. The rest of us, well, we had a hard time believing we were supposed to take this seriously. 300 struck me as what happens when you grow up thinking Steve Reeves Hercules movies were in earnest. They can't have meant it seriously how every Spartan was better with projectiles than Mister Incredible was, could they? And anytime a scene was in danger of being a bit serious they'd fast-forward the spear moving and slow-motion it digging out tons of flesh, making it as silly or fatuous as possible.

I won a delightfully nasty glare from my uncle and admiration from my aunt and parents by answering some goofball line like ``Men will die like men'' with ``Hamsters, they'll pretty much remain hamsters.'' Don't tell them I'm pretty sure I nicked it from Crow T Robot.

Trivia: DuMont television's last original program was a 6 August 1956 telecast of a boxing match from New York City's Saint Nicholas Arena. Source: The Forgotten Network: DuMont and the Birth of American Television, David Weinstein.

Currently Reading: Gnarl!, Rudy Rucker.

Comments

[nsingman.livejournal.com]

Sing the praises of pants!

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

And I'm surprised to learn there's nearly no songs in the various Hercules episodes, at least that I could find with a reasonably quick search. There were a couple in the movies themselves, but they were all given in some weird moon-man language that I couldn't plunder for lyrics, and ``Pants'' was the only Best Brains tune I could find in them.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

Now, naturally I'm curious as to just what restaurant, and how close to Mystic they are. Also about the sugar-dusted bread (Roll, small loaf, large loaf?). As far as crab cakes.. I could see offering those as a dinner/weekend thing only, or it being a recipe a place might run out of... still, unusual.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

It's more in some side section of New Haven than it is Mystic, not really close except to people who don't think Pennsylvania an impossibly huge state. Unfortunately it was one of those aggressively normal seafood-based names so I'm not positive what it was, possibly something like the Seafood House III (I remember the sequel being in there).

The bread was ... about the size of two fists, roughly, for what that helps.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

Ahh! The U.S.S. Chowder Pot III (http://www.chowderpot.com/). Been there, and I did enjoy the food, if the atmosphere pushes 'nautical' to ridiculous levels. Don't remember their bread, though. Hmm.

Branford is exit.. 56. You don't really get into Southeast Connecticut until you cross the Connecticut River (exits 69-70), and then you really have to cross the Thames River (exits 84-86) to get to true Mystic (Exits 89-91). (Though, the furthest northeast you can go and really consider yourself in New Haven is exit 50.)

--Chiaroscuro

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

THAT'S IT!

But yeah, it gets a bit overdone on the nautical theme. It's the only place I've seen label the rest rooms ``buoys'' and ``gulls'' and not appear to be smirking about it.

All I was really positive about the location was that we were mostly past the New Haven Traffic Jam, but hadn't yet reached the more eastern Traffic Jams.