Pesto Is My Butter

We do most of our grocery shopping at Costco. These days, Costco isn't just suitcase-size boxes of breakfast cereal. They also sell foods more typical of a cutesy gourment shoppe. For example: Cibo Naturals Pesto. The label assures me that the Parmesan cheese is "non-GMO and rBGH-free." Okay, good, and, more important, the stuff tastes great.

A jar of pesto sauce in the frig changes everything. Pesto used to be a rare treat, once in a while in a good restaurant, once in a long while when my wife was feeling really ambitious. Now, it's the universal answer. Fish? Chicken? Broccoli? Pesto. The morning bagel? Hold the butter, slap on the pesto.

Harriet, We Hardly Knew Ye

So that's it for Harriet Miers. Remember those indignant commercials demanding up-or-down votes for all judicial nominees? Something about fairness, wasn't it? Well, the people who paid for those commercials have changed their minds. They didn't really mean all judicial nominees - just their judicial nominees. That's fair.

We Have All Been Here Before

I got the strangest feeling the other night when I heard that the Valerie Plame mess may reach all the way up to Screamin' Dick Cheney. It took me a few minutes to sort it out: I was having a Watergate flashback. Revelation after revelation, bigger and bigger names, a scandal that grows, and grows, and grows, till the mighty are fallen - it's all there. Cool.

Love Songs

Just got in from "When Harry Met Buzzy" at the Commercial Taphouse. Wow. Harry and Buzzy both play in other bands, and they get together once a month or so for a wonderful, free-wheeling night of classics. Two guitars, two voices, two human jukeboxes. And they take requests. Where else can you hear A World Without Love followed immediately by Waiting For The Man?

Bad Day At Target

We bought a TV at Target yesterday. When we got it home and opened it, we discovered it was missing both the manual and the remote.

How can something like this happen? Well, one possibility is that Target puts returned, opened merchandise back out on the shelf as new. Another possibility is that the TV really was factory-fresh, and that the factory messed up when it put the package together.

The Target manager preferred the blame-the-factory theory. She said she would have to check the box, to see if it was sealed with "original factory tape."

A helpful tip: you can slice right through "original factory tape" with Occam's Razor.

White Sox Win World Series!

Well, okay, just the first game. But Fox and Major League Baseball, in the face of dismal ratings and massive national uninterest, have declared that this year's fall classic will be just one game. Congratulations, Chicago!

"Classic Rock" Is A Good Thing. Really.

Loose Gravel at Magoo's last night. Another solid show. And when "classic" means everything from Buddy Holly to Jonathan Richman's "Pablo Picasso", I'm happy.

Man With A Hat

We saw Junior Brown at the Canal Club last night. Disappointing. Junior never settled into a groove, and the show plodded along. Too many nights playing the same riffs, maybe. A few years ago, we saw Junior at Castle Clinton in Battery Park. A free concert, outdoors in a steady drizzle, and he was amazing. And you gotta love the guit-steel.

Mystery Woman

I'm less concerned about Harriet Miers' paper trail than I am about her attitude towards the Supreme Court job. Will she view it as a really big promotion within BushCo, an opportunity to help the President force his agenda on us? Or will she use her considerable intelligence and capacity for hard work to turn herself into a first-rate independent jurist? Will she work for us, or for him?

Time Travel for the Cost of a Cover Charge

We saw Moossa at Bogart's Saturday night. Great show. They opened the second set with a cover of Isis, of all things. Blew me away. I love it when kids love the music that I loved thirty years ago.