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Author: Bryant

Circles

So here I am back in the SF Bay Area. What goes around, etc. In related news, I’m employed again, so that’s good. The first week on the job was good; I am looking forward to making the second week even better.

We found a house up in Redwood City, which gives me a half an hour commute to Palo Alto for work and puts us in reasonable range of the city. It’s also pretty convenient to 280, which makes Santa Cruz and San Jose very feasible. I like the location — hadn’t ever lived up there before but I think we’ll enjoy it. Fingers crossed.

Hobee’s is still Hobee’s. Fry’s is still Fry’s. There are good farmers markets which I wasn’t smart enough to take advantage of the last time I lived here. Kepler’s has gone way downhill, which is sad.

Housewarming party to come as soon as we get settled.

Zombie Apocalypse

Part of my unemployment regime is making sure I do something creative for a few hours every day. I’ve got the time, so I should use it wisely. Here’s Zombie Apocalypse (PDF), a Fiasco playset I wrote with Susan last week. We playtested it over the weekend and it went pretty well.

The Federal Internet

I’ve been reading a lot of AlternetHistory.com lately. Someone challenged the board to come up with an AH in which the Internet was unrecognizable with a point of divergence later than Jan 1st, 1989.

I couldn’t do it; by that time you already have at least two regional ISPs. If you somehow prevent Bob Rieger from turning Netcom into a business, Barry Shein still gets The World underway. I don’t think the One Great Man theory applies to consumer-oriented ISPs.

But if you’re willing to push the POD a couple of months earlier, you might be able to do something. None of this seems de

Smitty’s

Caldwell County Courthouse Conservation of attention notice: if you’re from Austin you know all this.

We drove down to Lockhart today with Susan’s parents to do the barbecue pilgrimage. This is not the only possible barbecue pilgrimage, even in Central Texas. There’s Luling and Taylor and Llano, but Lockhart is pretty damned close and it’s home to a few legendary barbecue places, so we wanted to see what it was all about. Being heathens from out of state and all.

Lockhart is a tiny little town. All three of the high reputation places are within a couple blocks of each other, with a really cool Second Empire style sandstone courthouse in the middle. We did Smitty’s, which lies right next to 183. It’s this old, completely unassuming brick building with a very mellow sign. We went around the block, came in the front, and found out the line is back on the 183 side anyhow.

Smitty's smoking pit You order right in front of the smoking pit. My hair smells like oak smoke from the ten minute wait. These smokers have been in operation for over a hundred years, and I gotta think some of the quality is due to a well-seasoned apparatus. It’s market style Texas barbecue: you can get brisket lean or moist, pork ribs, pork chops, and sausage. By the pound, mostly. There’s a market in front of the building for drinks and sides. The meat is piled up on butcher paper. You get a knife, no fork.

Smitty's fireIn terms of quality… wow. It’s the best meat I’ve ever had, beating out the original Morton’s in Chicago. So there’s better meat out there, I’m sure, since it’s not like I’ve ever eaten at the French Laundry or anything. But man, that moist brisket was amazing. Good beef, smoked for hours, until the fat renders into the meat and gives it more flavor. No sauce. Insanely tender.

The sausage was exactly to my tastes. It was spicy but not uber-hot, and fairly grainy. Next time I’d ask for somewhat more smoked links to get it a little drier, but it’s not like it was bad. We had some left over and it’s going into breakfast tacos soon. I can’t wait.

The pork chop was stupid thick, cause it’s smoked, so it’s not like there was any worry about cooking it too dry to get it done all the way through. Yum.

Instapaper Fiction

I like fiction delivered to a convenient and elegant place to read! So:

  1. Go to ifttt, log in/register/whatever
  2. Create a new task.
  3. Choose the Feed trigger.
  4. Choose New Feed Item.
  5. Use the Feed URL http://hilobrow.com/tag/world-shook/feed/, on the assumption that you want to read HiLoBrow’s H. Rider Haggard serialization.
  6. Feed it into Instapaper (or Readability if you like that). You can leave the default field values alone. If this is your first time using ifttt, you’ll need to register the channel first.
  7. Give it a description.

Or just go ahead and use the recipe I made.

Hudson’s On the Bend, & Elk

We had dinner last night with Susan’s parents at Hudson’s on the Bend. In general it was reasonably tasty; the more Hill Country specific cuisine was, unsurprisingly, where it shined. We all had the three course tasting menu. I had chipotle lobster bisque as the appetizer, which was reasonably good: the richness of the lobster was set off nicely by the chipotle. I’m not sure the Hill Country is really lobster territory, and I wouldn’t say this was more impressive than any lobster dish I’d get in a decent Boston restaurant, but it was still good.

For the main course I had the smoked elk with a lime chipotle beer blanc sauce. Totally awesome. I’d never had elk before; it’s like venison, reasonably enough, but richer and darker. The sauce was perfect, again lightening the richness of the main ingredient. They use an espresso rub, and it was superb. I would have this again in a heartbeat. Possibly I can without going to Hudson’s; the actual recipe is here.

The dessert was a pretty mundane caramel pecan pie coated in chocolate. Good ingredients but the chocolate overwhelmed the pecan. I should have gotten the pumpkin white chocolate bread pudding, which was in fact superb.

Texas State Legislature

Our Texas State Senator is Kirk Watson, in Senate District 14. It’s a ridiculously Democratic district covering most of Austin. At a quick glance he doesn’t look incredibly progressive, nor terribly conservative — I’d guess he’s reasonably middle of the road for the Democratic Party. Health care is a big issue for him, as is the economy. He’ll be running against Guy Fielder on the Republican side. There’s a Guy Fielder in the area who’s been a high tech executive for quite a while — worked at Compaq, etc. — so I’d guess it’s him. No Guy Fielder campaign Web site yet.

Our State Representative is Elliott Naishtat (House page here) in House District 49. The House page is more informative than the single-post blog, but the single-post blog is kind of charming. He’s from Queens, moved to Austin after coming here as part of AmeriCorps, and appears to be very feisty. This is another safe Democratic seat and nobody filed to run in the Republican primary; there are also no Libertarian candidates. Or Green candidates, as far as I can tell.