1. So seriously, my job revolves around food. This morning a large (1′ x 1.5′) Christmas tin arrived full of imported goodies from N\u00fcrnburg, Germany. Lots of gingerbread cookies, some with chocolate frosting, and these little dark chocolate cubes with marzipan and caramel in their centers… Among other things. <\/p>\n
Andreas treated Bret and myself to lunch today at Elizabeth’s, a fantastic little Italian place near Kernersville. Kind of a family operation, and great atmosphere. Allegedly (I heavily doubt this), according to Andreas, the kitchen staff of the restaurant are all genuine Italians that are flown over from Italy for three months and then have to return again when their work visas expire, at which point the restaurant owners fly in another group, and so on. Whatever the case, the food certainly tasted the part. They brought us a free appetizer of sun-dried tomatoes and an assortment of cheeses melted over toasted Italian bread, dipped in olive oil. Sublime. And then I ate what I can honestly describe as the best stromboli I have ever had, bar none, while Bret and Andreas had soups and salads. We were even treated to tiramisu for dessert, which ended up being kind of a hybrid affair, but amazingly good–a sort of cheesecake concoction (though it didn’t have the nasty tang of cheesecake–just its consistency) draped by a more crumbly, chocolate layer and laced with a dark chocolate sauce. I had no words. So good. Needless to say the restaurant definitely earned its way into my mental rolodex as an excellent date location.<\/p>\n
2. Funny article<\/a> from one of the best automotive journalists out there: Jeremy Clarkson. The car under review (a rather tepid Lexus RX300) is really only incidental to Clarkson’s rantings, and this passage (among others) made me laugh aloud:<\/p>\n So why not buy a car instead? It\u2019ll be faster, more comfortable, and will do more than 23mpg. What\u2019s more it\u2019ll be the GS300, which is as cool as they come, the chilliest model in the Lexus line-up. Nirvana for P Diddy, ambrosia for 50 Cent (or 28p, as I call him, to annoy my kids).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n 3. A great post<\/a> on biblical inerrancy. The author has a way of making some rather abstract theological concepts seem very lucid and down-to-earth.<\/p>\n 4. Did some Christmas shopping earlier. I splurged and bought myself a cd, the first in several months. I purchased the Hooverphonic album The Magnificent Tree<\/a><\/i>. Absolutely brilliant stuff. I’ve never had any hesitation including this band in my top five. Here’s<\/a> the title track (will be yanked in a day or so). This is their third full-length album, and it shows. The music finally has a overlapping depth miles away from the straightfoward, monothematic (though promising) songs on their first two albums. The musical texture is distinctly European but doesn’t suffer for it–they manage to infuse a welcome amount of warmth into their heavily-processed, synthetic sound without losing the flavor of the cities, the din of the nightlife and the cosmopolitan old-worldness<\/i> intrinsic to life and love and everything else on that continent.<\/p>\n The lyrics have always appealed to me as well for their ambiguous, free-association nature. Most of the songs contain collections, snippets of sentences and couplets of adjectives and nouns that weave in and out of the musical layers, suggesting images, raw material for your mind to do with as it wants, rather than foisting upon you a fully fledged novella or some self-conscious treatise on “life.” That kind of lyrical postmodernism reinforces the European feel of the music, reflecting the prevailing philosophical mindset, utilizing it for the purposes of conveying musical themes and generating interest without (in my view) overtly endorsing<\/i> the resultant worldview. It’s a question of scale–to me postmodern art and music is fascinating, and while I realize ideas have consequences in the macrocosm of realms like ethics and politics, if one is discerning enough to keep those ideas relegated to the artistic\/academic level, the potential complexity of the concepts and ideas conveyed, to me, is compelling in so many ways. I’m all fine and good with creating my own reality as long as I realize it’s just an exercise.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 1. So seriously, my job revolves around food. This morning a large (1′ x 1.5′) Christmas tin arrived full of imported goodies from N\u00fcrnburg, Germany. Lots of gingerbread cookies, some with chocolate frosting, and these little dark chocolate cubes with marzipan and caramel in their centers… Among other things. Andreas treated Bret and myself to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1016"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1016"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1016\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1016"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1016"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1016"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}