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TedE

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Posts posted by TedE

  1. On 9/23/2019 at 11:57 AM, astrid said:

    Return trip to Willows Inn was technically fine but a definite let down.  Fewer courses, courses of just random minimally-prepped veggies displacing the magical proteins that used to come out of their smoke house (still magical but far fewer in number), and a substantial uptick in prices.

    The current trend of serving barely adorned fruit and veg at high end restaurants is getting really tedious.  Look, if I want a good local peach or eat some roasted winter squash, I can shop at the local farmers market and prep it to my liking.  If I am paying $300 a head (after mandatory gratuity and tax) for a tasting menu or $25 for a small appetizer, I want magic that I can't make on my own, not long winded explanations about this super special artisanal landrace roasted squash that somehow tastes just like an inferior delicata squash that could be bought for a buck anywhere in the fall.  Of course, we suspected we would be disappointed but was hoping to recapture the magic.  

    Perhaps this NYT article from earlier in the week goes a long way to explaining the overall letdown and feeling you weren't exactly getting a fresh, hyperlocal meal (behind paywall if you have used your allotted monthly links):

    The Island Is Idyllic. As a Workplace, It’s Toxic.Globe-trotting diners flock to the Willows Inn’s serene Northwest setting. But former employees say faked ingredients, sexual harassment and an abusive kitchen are the real story.

    • Like 1
  2. Sun Noodles frozen ramen packs.  Not "instant" noodles, and there is slightly more work to prepare (noodles and base prepared separately), but they are far superior to any dried noodle brand I've tried.  Flavor options seem to be limited to miso, shoyu, tonkatsu and tan tan (the "spicy" one that isn't really spicy).  If you have another preferred soup base you can just get packs of the frozen noodles without packets.  I've found them locally at Hana Market and some Wegmans.

    • Like 3
  3. On 4/9/2020 at 4:26 PM, Pat said:

    We got the 3 menu option from Rose's. We ended up eating them in order listed on the card that came with them. The card had heating and serving instructions on it. The second menu -- with lychee salad, rigatoni alla vodka, and chocolate chip cookies -- tasted just like being in the restaurant. There was something familiar in the taste of the dishes that was nice. This was true for other items but that menu really hit a lot of the notes.

    We're getting the 3-night menu from Rose's next week, very much looking forward to it!

    Other than that we're doing takeout 1-2x a week, mostly sticking to the local places we usually frequent near our house that the kids also enjoy.  We have done a couple "adults only" orders while the kids are having a pizza and movie night; Red Hen has been the stand out on that front and we'll order from them again soon.  I would have next week were it not for the pending Rose's feast(s).

  4. On 3/30/2020 at 3:55 PM, Pat said:

    When I saw this it reminded me that I read an article somewhere that mentioned that both Walter's and All-Purpose by the ballpark are doing CSAs in addition to their food and beverage takeout/delivery.

    Then I just got an email from All-Purpose and they are doing CSAs at both of their locations on Tuesdays. Here's the email in browser form. {they've also got toilet paper}

    If I could find the article again, I might have more information about what Walter's is doing.

     

    A friend just got one of the All Purpose CSA boxes, and it looks like more places are stepping in to fill this role.  If not for themselves (of course it's partially for themselves!), then for their suppliers who they will need if and when they open back up.  I'm all on board to support that where and when we can, although for budgetary and logistical reasons it can't fully replace "normal" groceries for us.  We have been getting milk and eggs from Big Bear cafe along with our morning coffee pick up, and I'm looking at getting an order through Number 1 Sons who appears to have partnered with several of their fellow FreshFarm vendors for CSA boxes.  And after letting it slide last year after a few years of good experiences we're certainly going to re-up our CSA subscription to the neighborhood farm.

    • Like 1
  5. 11 hours ago, weezy said:

    Reading a WaPo article about the impact on restaurants, in addition to buying gift cards to use after things reopen, please also take advantage of any pickup/delivery options and if the restaurant sells any merchandise, buy t-shirts or cookbooks or the like.

    And if they are offering alcohol to-go, please consider that as well.  Yes, it will cost you a lot more than picking items up at the liquor store, but most establishments doing this are trying to meet you in the middle (some discount off of menu price).  My view is that once this blows over I would like a lot of places that I frequent near my house  still open, with the same friendly faces on the other side of the bar.  I know that many of them probably won't weather it, but if we don't support them when and where we can right now they certainly won't.

  6. 18 hours ago, cheezepowder said:

    I really like Brew Shop in the Courthouse area of Arlington because they have a diverse selection and get new beers each week.  You can get an idea of what they carry from past issues of their weekly newsletter available here.

    Brew Shop looks like it's worth stopping in if I'm ever in the area.

    In DC proper I'll add Hop, Cask and Barrel on the north end of Georgetown near the Social Safeway.  I get kegs for my home bar there because they are willing to chase down some harder to find or seasonal stuff, and they have a pretty esoteric selection in cans/bottles.  I always find something new and interesting.

    On the other side of town across from Catholic U's campus is Wardman Wines.  They have a small but locally-focused beer selection and usually stock smaller batch offerings.  I have to mention that they also have a very robust wine and liquor tasting program and are pretty passionate about everything they stock (or in today's parlance "curate")

  7. By now the scope and breadth of what the Houston Astros were doing from 2017-2019 is well-documented.  I'm sure we'll hear more in the coming months about exactly what the Red Sox were up to in 2018 as well, I don't get the sense that story has been fully told.  With as much attention as this has received I think from punishment standpoint the participants involved have gotten off fairly easy.  Yes, three different MLB Managers lost their jobs, as well as front office positions in Houston.  There was a $5M fine for the Astros (the most that MLB was self-authorized to assess) and a loss of international pool picks (the latter stings far more than the former, the fine is chump change).  Players not materially affected will carry the stigma of this, and the evidence is clear that basically the entire line up is implicated in one way or another.

    Who else gets the feeling that the MLB head office is jumping with joy that they may get away with this being sum total of the fallout?!?  Here is a World Series champion caught red-handed not two weeks after the Series!  Nobody questions that they cheated and gained a not-negligible advantage! Yet they've been able to deftly shift the discussion away from "So, should the Astros 2017 Championship be revoked?".  There is SO MUCH going on here, and it's hard to even pin down my thoughts on what MLB should have done.  Taking away a World Series trophy is a very big step, and in many senses there is absolutely no walking that back when this happens again (yes, something similar will happen again).  The best MLB can hope for is to take very big steps against individual actors and hope the baseball-watching public sees justice.  In the eyes of The Game those players are disposable.

    "But sign stealing is as old as baseball itself!", they say, and that is undoubtedly true.  Technology has changed the way baseball fundamentally operates, so that fact that it's also being used to change the way teams cheat isn't surprisingly, but it's made it easier to catch those who are cheating, too!  I've only scratched the surface here, this topic has tentacles that reach in a dozen different directions.

  8. You aren't taking into consideration possible human damage due to sudden deceleration from your spikes. When it comes to car accidents, the goal is to protect the fragile bags of flesh inside. In an emergency a modern car itself functions as a disposable force absorption device; people irrationally don't like to think of it that way, but that's really the choice automotive engineers are paid to make when designing crumple zones, etc.  A sudden stop like you are describing would invariably be more likely to cause major harm or death than a relatively controlled deceleration with ABS and, yes, massive deformation of the car frame at collision.  And the pop-off-the-wheels solution is missing one huge factor: the coefficient of friction of bare metal vs. tires.  Think of it the other way around.  Let's say you have two square foot slabs of asphalt, kind of like curling stones.  You slide one as hard as you can down one of two surfaces: one sheet metal, the other vulcanized rubber.  Which slab is going to stop in the shortest distance?

    We recently got a MY2019 car with most of the enhanced safety features common these days: lane guidance, blind spot warnings and automatic braking.  I'm tempted to turn that last one off.  It functions in three basic modes as it constantly scans ahead for objects, closing speed and trajectories relative to the car.  First is an audible beep and a flashing "BRAKE" on the dash when it detects something that it deems too close for comfort.  The second is the same warning with an automatic brake pulse to scrub speed when it determines something is in the way and collision may be imminent.  Third is full on automatic application of the brakes to a full stop when it determines that you are actually going to hit something directly in your path.  Like any system it isn't perfect and we get things like Stage 1 warnings on gentle curves when an oncoming car in it's proper lane is read briefly as something in our path.  Those are annoyances. I've only had it apply brakes like Stage 2 once when a car cut us off on the highway trying to make an exit.  It was a situation that I didn't think warranted the braking; I didn't feel in actual danger as a driver, and reacted the way I would have normally while the car exited out in front of us.  Had it been a different situation I think that automatic braking could have made things *worse*, and here's why.

    In my few decades of driving I've only been in one situation where I really felt I was in imminent danger, and had things gone even slightly differently would have been in a collision with potential for serious injury (*knocks vigorously on wood*).  Back before the turn of the century I was driving south on 95 through DE with light rain.  Road was crowded, but not backed up or congested, and traffic was moving at speed.  I was in the middle lane with a steady line of cars in the passing lane.  A jacka** had passed me, tailgating the car in front, and was weaving in an out trying to get around cars in any lane.  During one sudden change from behind a box truck he obviously didn't see a car in front also changing into his path on the right.  They clipped bumpers and he started to spin, his car now rotating into my lane directly in front of me.  All of this happened in a split second.  There was a car on my left about even with my rear quarter panel.  I hit the gas hard and pulled left, barely pulling ahead of that car and around the jacka** who miraculously didn't hit anybody else.  Had I mashed the brakes, I'm 100% sure my non-ABS equipped 1990s car would have skidded on the wet pavement and slammed into him, sending one or both of us off into other lanes and possibly other cars.  Even if I'd had ABS the collision was probably unavoidable.  In my current car I don't think it would have allowed me to avoid it by accelerating into the only opening around that car; the collision avoidance system would have applied full brakes.  And that scares me.

    Look, I get that these things save lives from the countless terrible, inattentive drivers they rescue on a daily basis.  But they are also a dangerous crutch to exactly the idiots they protect the most.  Witness the handful of Tesla drivers who have lost their lives by thinking the car tech was good enough that they could nap or read a book on the highway (let me re-phrase: they didn't lose their lives, they handed their life over to a fucking collection of metal and circuit boards)

  9. I heard this over the weekend and did a double take.  There are bad losing streaks in sports, and then there are *weird* ones; this is the latter.  UNC is UNC, and Clemson basketball historically is *not* UNC, but they aren't a bad program.  You would figure any middle-of-the-pack ACC team would pull out a road win against UNC or Duke every once in a while.

  10. 6 hours ago, lion said:

    Tim Carman did an really good job at investigating the players and issues with the fall of Trickling Spring. Just reminded me of the Mennonite young woman who ran the store in Union Market. 

    It appears she is still there running the new dairy stand that replaced Trickling Springs (the name escapes me), we noticed this past weekend.  It's good to see at least some continuity.

  11. 33 minutes ago, DaveO said:

    Report today is that Strasburg and the Nats have a 7 year $245 ;million dollar agreement.  Earlier in the post season owner Mark Lerner suggested the Nats cannot afford both Strasburg and Rendon.   I guess we'll have to wait and see.  One down, one to go.

    It would take a miraculous opening of wallets for Rendon to be in a Nats uniform next year.  With the Stras signing they would be well on the way to the double secret probation phase of the luxury tax penalty ladder in the next decade, and I can't see the Lerner's going there or Rizzo mortgaging the future for those two roles with Soto/Robles on the horizon.  I think the consensus has been "If you can only get one, get Strasburg".  There are more free agent possibilities at 3rd this year.

  12. The past week has been a blur of nerves and sleep deprivation that may take a while to break out of, so I'll just say this: Thank you, AJ Hinch.  Thank you for making the exact kind of context-free, stat head, match-up obsessed move that has doomed the Nats in the past (Williams pulling an utterly dominant Jordan Zimmermann in Game 2 in 2014, 26 outs into a 1 hit gem, a mere week after he had thrown the first Nats no-hitter; Dusty Baker, in probably the last of his many questionable playoff calls, pulling Scherzer in Wrigley in 2017 to play matchy-matchy with a middling middle reliever; both promptly ended in Nats losses).

    When it happened last night I said to everybody I was texting "The door is open".  Grienke had completely shut the Nats down.  They were powerless against him.  At some point in the 4th or 5th inning he had over half of the put outs recorded because the only contact the Nats could seemingly make were weak come-backers to the mound.  The door was ajar with Harris (their only really reliable option) and blew wide f*cking open when Osuna came in with 7 outs to get; there was no way in hell he was going 2 1/3 himself.  I knew after Rendon's homer that it was going to get good, but the Astros panicked and pulled him way too early.

    And don't think Cole didn't notice: https://twitter.com/HunterAtkins35/status/1189758262133919744

    • Like 2
  13. This really is quite an incredible ride we're on!!! I'll spare all of the narratives around the Astros being heavily favored and yet in this position down 0-2 and having to go on the road.  A couple things I've run across in the past days:

    - Since the advent of the 7-game LCS format, there have been 8 teams who have swept their pennant series 4-0.  Only ONE of those teams went on the win the World Series that year.  3 of these teams were themselves swept out of the WS!

    - Verlander is likely to win the AL Cy Young this year if his co-ace Cole doesn't.  He is now 0-6 as a World Series starter.   He is the all-time MLB post-season strikeout leader as of last night, but statistically one of the worst WS starters ever! That puts even Kershaw's post-season woes into perspective.

    - On paper, when measured by the games following the Nats 19-31 start, the two teams match up very well. The notable exception being the Nats bullpen issues.  Ignore that and look at the last 15-20 games leading up this Series including LDS and LCS.  Based on that ask yourself who came in with the advantage.  This 2-0 start is NOT a surprise.  Neither team is playing to their season-long average performance RIGHT NOW.  It's obvious when you zoom in and ignore stats which tell you in part how they were playing 5 months ago.

    Baseball is weird, man.  And playoff baseball is the weirdest.

    My heart may not survive this weekend.

    • Like 1
  14. We have a lot of members in my ticket group, and I try to be a fair and benevolent administrator when it comes to making sure everybody gets their share of post-season baseball.  I hedged my bets and chose Game 5 for the NLCS; I sent my wife to Game 4 since she hadn't been to a playoff game at all yet.  I don't regret it one bit.   They are still playing and that is all that matters.

    But you'd better believe my ass is going to be in our seats for Games 3, 4 and 5 next week.

    • Like 2
  15. On 10/13/2019 at 5:59 PM, Steve R. said:

    Are you all avoiding talking about their recent wins (as of this post, they are 2-0 over the Cards) due to superstition about hexing them or is it just indifference? 

    I wouldn't be missing a chance to gloat/brag/be happy if I was youse guys.  Just sayin'. 🧛‍♂️

    GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!!😱😱😱

    That's about as coherent my contribution can be right now.

    • Like 1
  16. Hold on to your butts!  Yet another NLDS Game 5 to suffer through. I have ticket partners who have refused any and all tickets to NLDS games this year semi-joking that they are the jinxes holding the Nats back (although one of them tempted fate on Monday and was rewarded with his first in person victory in 5 NLDS tries, so maybe this is their year!).  If Strasburg can continue his post-season dominance and get through 7 innings the Nats have a good chance, but if their bats can't produce more than 2 runs before we get to the 'pen ....

    Go Nats!!

    • Like 2
  17. 18 hours ago, DonRocks said:

    I only saw the replay once - was it a clear error, or something of a bad hop? Should the guy have tried to pull a Ron Swoboda?

    According to Grisham it was a little bit of both.  Poor guy has been asked the same question in a number of different settings and he owns up to it: he was setting his body up to scoop and throw the ball to maybe get the second runner (it would had to have been maybe the most perfect outfield assist in history, though), and the ball had some topspin and took a weird hop to his right as his momentum was going the other way.  No time to change direction.  Looking at the replays during the broadcast I said to myself he *may* have been able to just fall down and hope to block it with some part of his body, but he was 100% committed to trying to get that ball to home plate.

  18. On 9/9/2019 at 11:43 AM, TedE said:

    *Gulp*

    Buckle up.  20 games left, of which only 3 are against an opponent who is out of the playoff picture.  8 of those games are against NL teams currently battling for the 2nd WC spot (Phillies and Brewers, both are currently 5 games back of the Nats).

    Finally, with certainty, a Wild Card team as of Tuesday (was that 5-game sweep satisfying or what?!).  There is still a decent chance to take home field for the WC, they are 1 up on Milwaukee but need to keep that margin because MIL owns the head-to-head record.  However, MIL is also only one down on the Cards for the division, so they have something more important to fight for.  AND Cleveland comes into town still with a razor thin chance to make the AL WC (they would need to sweep the Nats and hope Tampa Bay loses at least 2 out of 3).  So, nobody involved in the Nats' fate is coasting to the end of the season.  Best case scenario would be for them to hold onto the top WC spot and have MIL and StL end up in a tie for the NL Central.  If Sunday's game is meaningful for those teams they will both probably burn a top starter, and then if they end up tied will burn ANOTHER one in the tie breaker game on Monday.  That leaves someone middle of the rotation for the Wild Card game.  Max is lined up to start on Tuesday no matter what the outcomes are.

    See you in the post-season!

    • Like 1
  19. 1 hour ago, lion said:

    Wow that's a total surprise! Trickling Springs has been our ice cream and milk for many years. They've only been growing the past five years, it doesn't make sense from a business point of view. Must be a behind the scenes issue with the owners. 

    Very sad to lose a local business that we use all the time. 

    This sucks, we got their milk regularly (but usually at WF), and ice cream at UM is treat our kids enjoyed at least a couple times a month.

    However, there definitely is more going on here, and it doesn't exactly look to be above board.

    • Confused 1
  20. What would be really awesome?  A google maps overlay with filtering based on category tags in the existing restaurant threads.  This would probably require some serious work to get the address data synced to the threads, and the tagging probably isn't nearly consistent enough, but it would be great to pull up a map, zoom in on a general area and check "ramen" or "DR Highly Recommended" or "great cocktails".  Once the framework is set up it should be easy to update the feed with new data.

  21. 53 minutes ago, Keithstg said:

    You mean just like Boras did with Stephen Strasburg?

    And don't forget that after one of the best years of his career, Stras has an out clause in his otherwise very team-friendly contract.  I don't think for a minute that this is a piece on the game board that Boras won't try to leverage for Rendon ("That's a nice All Star pitcher you got there.  Be a shame if he decided to opt out ...")

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