On a lighter note, before bed. Since various friends have been posting their cello love lately, I present... Melo-M

With orchestra...


With singing...


Without Tom Cruise...

1) "Hot tomato / cold tomato" - Chipotle confit cherry tomato with tomato sorbet. Cold on the palate right up until the chipotle hits you. :-)

1a) House made bread with sea-salted butter. I should note that butter is something many restaurants fail at, by providing something that is either rock hard, or has been whipped into insubstantiality. This butter was perfectly smooth and spreadable.

2) September salad - a little bit of everything, in strong autumn flavors - carrot, microgreens, a concord grape, a bit of watermelon radish, kale chip, dehydrated onion, icicle radish, beans, a puree of zucchini and another of roasted peppers. Wonderful strong flavors, and nicely balanced. The only disadvantage to the salad is that there was a relatively small amount of each of its constituent parts, which made experimenting with flavor combinations hard.

3) Wheatberry risotto in corn milk with sauteed hen-of-the-woods and accented with raspberry. I would not have though raspberry juice would have worked there, but the sweetness set off the solidity of the wheatberries and the mushroom just so.

4) Chinese custard in tomato serracha water with century egg and fried shallots. The custard had a very mild flavor and tofu-esque texture, so it took on the flavor of the tomato water, while the egg and shallots provided a strong accent.

5) Pumpkin anneletti, ricotta salata, apple and sabra. The platonic ideal of pumpkin ravioli.

5a) Gin and tonic jelly, cucumber sorbet, mint. Gin and tonic in a jelly is a very odd experience, but much tastier than the usual form. The cucumber sorbet was intensly flavorful, and the mint added an excellent note.

6) Roasted apple, caramel, and brown butter. The apple preparation was apparently remarkably complex, but yielded and fanstically sweet dessert apple that nonetheless had much of the firmness of something fresh off the tree.

7) Caramel three ways - macaroon, pudding, ganache. My sweet tooth died happy at this point.

In sum: OMGsotasty!

(And hopefully prosicated will let me know anything I missed in my attempts to frantically take notes and eat at once. :-)

CNN, in a fit of myopia, wants to know Why our science fiction future fizzled.

This makes me wonder who the hell is supposed to be writing for CNN these days. I'm too cheap to buy an iPhone, so I have to settle for having the sum of human knowledge accessible on my laptop, rather than actually in my pants. My cellphone admittedly doesn't talk to orbital vehicles, but it does a few other things Kirk's communicator doesn't, and is half the size, to boot.

Don't get me started on virtual reality, nanotechnology, or the advance of biomedical technology and genomics.

Of course, the reality is that gadgets do not, in themselves, solve social problems. The socially harmonious future of Star Trek or Futurama II isn't going to magically appear out of a box from GM or GE - it's going to appear when we get around to doing the cultural work of making it appear.

But the technological future? You're soaking in it.

"What does the Ketubah say about re-animation?"

but there was a terrible flash of inspiration that descended on me the other night, that I cannot get rid of.

Who's the pol to save the day?
Our democratic nominee?
B-A-R-A-C-K O-B-A-M-A
Who's the one for whom we'll vote?
And pledge all our money?
B-A-R-A-C-K O-B-A-M-A

Now it's time... Go to the polls...
Vote for our nominee...
B-A-R (Are you registered yet?)
-A-C-K ('Kay now, remember your voter information packet!)
O-B-A-M-A

The rhyme scheme's off from the original, but I think I'll put it down to artistic license.

Imagine living ... In a world ... without Don LaFontaine

beah and I planned to bracket our day of Museum-going with good food. The choice for breakfast was easy: Nothing beats Flour. We had their amazing breakfast sandwiches, and I ate what I feel comfortable describing as the best sticky bun I've ever had. My father, always a connoisseur of sticky buns, would have approved heartily. Apparently I was fortunate - the website suggests that the sticky buns are so popular that reserving one in advance may be necessary.

For dinner, we decided to cruise the South End in search of new and interesting food (having considered Aquitaine and decided we could afford to be adventurous instead of going to a standby, even if it's one we both quite like.) Which is how we wound up at Stella at Blackstone Square.

( Cut for dinner )

My wife makes a friggin' awesome breakfast.

Thanks to chienne_folle for arranging tickets, beah and I got to go get rocked out in Lowell. Melissa Etheridge still has a great stage presence. And a damn good backup band.

Every time I go to good live music, I remember why I ought to go to more good live music. Sadly, I then don't keep up the commitment again.