Zackc43

When I talked to people about going to David’s 1st and 10 (3626 Falls Road, [410] 662-7779), I got a lot of variations on the same reaction: (in mock-shocked voices) “A sports bar? In Hampden?!”

I was expecting this snide response from a few but not from the overwhelming majority. Hampden has become, over the past few years, a place where you would sooner expect to see a guy with a handlebar mustache wearing cutoff jorts overalls, a striped tank top, and sock garters than to see a sports bar. Which is a shame, because Hampden is not the artsy-fartsy nest of hipsterism that many think it is. It is a neighborhood that has attracted the creative types, but that doesn’t stop junkies, stickup boys, or tricks from scumming it up like any other place in Baltimore. It is a Baltimore neighborhood, and there are people in it that love sports as well as art, and this is where David’s 1st and 10 comes in.

On a recent visit to David’s, which opened in May, the mix of indigenous and imported Hampdenites was about 50/50, with everyone enjoying each other’s company (as well as the baseball game). The dining areas that flank the enclosed bar are open and casual, with light wooden dividers and hand-painted murals on the walls; 36 flat-screens swirl around the joint like a vortex of athletic excess. Almost every sport was represented when we were there, with most of the TVs tuned to the O’s game. It’s a fun experience watching the O’s game there, but be warned: Some TVs are on a four-second delay. That pitch you are watching on one TV could already be out of the park on another, so choose wisely.

The Orioles are down in the second when we order our beers. Union Craft Brewing’s Balt-Altbier ($5) turned out to be the perfect beer for the comeback that was coming. Clean and rich, it was light enough to throw back a few, but malty and flavorful enough to let you know you are drinking a real beer.

The altbier paired well with all of the food we had at David’s 1st and 10, starting with the chicken wings ($9). We ordered them covered in Old Bay, with a side of the house-made buffalo sauce. They were crisp on the outside, tender on the inside, hot throughout, and cooled with celery and carrot sticks. The buffalo sauce was so good that we used it as a dip for the other items we ordered—they should bottle that stuff. The poutine ($9) was an interesting mix of french fries, two types of cheese (cheddar and mozzarella), and brown gravy. It was the gravy, with a tangy back note that hinted of Worcestershire sauce, that made it interesting. The fries were crisp and well-fried, but we could have used more gravy (the buffalo sauce picked up the slack). Also taking a splash in buffalo sauce was the fried chicken sandwich ($9). A small butterflied chicken breast was served on a soft roll with Sriracha mayo and a sesame slaw. The slaw was good for crunch, and the mayo was almost nonexistent, but the sandwich had good flavor. With such a small cut of chicken, I would have liked a thicker crust on the fried crust to give the meat some heft.

While most of the food served at David’s 1st and 10 is what you would expect on a sports bar menu, the roasted portabella ($13) is most definitely not. The best dish we had that night, it consisted of roasted portabella, wilted greens, sweet potato, barley, and balsamic-soaked cherries. The balance of sweet, sour, umami, and salt (after salt was added) kept us coming back for more. It was surprisingly filling, yet not heavy (good for a summer day). The dish was supposed to be served with quinoa instead of barley, but we thought the barley gave a nuttiness that would be unattainable in the quinoa.

Margherita pizza ($9) ended the meal on a fresh note. Slices of tomato were hidden under mozzarella and sprinkled with a chiffonade of basil. It wasn’t the best pizza we’ve ever had, but it was better than 95 percent of the pizza we’ve had in bars.

David’s 1st and 10 seems to know their clients and wants to serve them better fare than the normal mozzarella-stick-slinging, shitty-beer-serving, corporate-master-having hellhole. Hampden seems to have welcomed them with open arms and will give them room to come up with a new meaning to the term “bar food.” I can’t wait to catch a ballgame there again.

David’s 1st and 10 serves food seven days a week, from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m.

A week before The Beaux’ Stratagem opens at Everyman Theatre, six actors are on the stage trying to work out a tricky fight scene that involves flying swords. As four actors begin to sword-fight, Katie O. Solomon needs to get to the other end of the narro

Did you miss the ONE-HOUR Venture Bros. premiere last night, you silly, silly fool? Well aren’t you lucky, Adult Swim has it online right now. Watch the entire Venture Bros. premiere episode below or Download it for FREE on iTunes!

WHAT COLOR IS YOUR CLEANSUIT?
Dr. Venture hires an army of college interns to help with his ambitious new science project. Dean finds love among the new recruits, but class warfare and nuclear physics threaten to tear the Venture Compound apart. And if they don’t, The Monarch will.

The fifth season of The Venture Bros. picks up moments after the stunning climax of season 4 and hits the ground running for a season of globe-trotting adventure and stay-at-home suspense. But no matter where it runs—from the steamy jungles of Central America, to the sparkling sands of the Greek Islands, to the seedy back alleys of Tangier, to the jagged cliffs of By-Golly Gulch—the Venture family can’t escape the treachery of enemies old, new, and within.

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» Download “What Color is Your Cleansuit?” on iTunes!

The Venture Brothers premiere episode “What Color is Your Cleansuit?” is now available for FREE download on iTunes until June 10th.

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WATCH Full Episode “What Color is Your Cleansuit?”

Source: Adult Swim

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Connect with us online! Follow @VentureBrosBlog on Twitter and be sure to “LIKE” us on Facebook for the latest in Venture Bros. news!

[Venture Bros. Blog]

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Meet Kim Jong-il’s Personal Sushi Chef

North Korea is a mythically strange land, an Absurdistan, where almost nothing is known about the people or, more important, their missile-launching leaders. There is, however, one man—a humble sushi chef from Japan—who infiltrated the inner sanctum, becoming the Dear Leader’s cook, confidant, and court jester. What is life like serving Kim Jong-il and his heir? A strange and dangerous gig where the food and drink never stop, the girls are all virgins, and you’re never really safe. We sent Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Adam Johnson to meet the man who survived all the craziness:

Fujimoto was the perfect party companion—he was charismatic, expressed his opinions more freely than others, and was always game for another drink. One afternoon, only a few months after he’d returned, he was playing baccarat with Kim Jong-il, who leaned close to him and asked, “Fujimoto, will you stay with me for ten years?”

Kim offered Fujimoto his own sushi restaurant, along with all the proceeds, to be located in Pyongyang’s exclusive Koryo Hotel. Later the same day, Fujimoto flew to Japan to ask his wife for a decade-long separation so he could move to North Korea, a prospect most people would consider a cruel and nightmarish prison sentence.

According to Fujimoto, she said, “What are you talking about? Are you crazy? You could go for three years—the children can bear your absence. But ten years? You’re going to forget about Japan. You’re going to forget about us.”

The karaoke club was freezing. I rubbed my hands together for warmth, but also out of anxiety at the notion of a man hitting up his family for a ten-year pass.

I asked Fujimoto, “Why not take your family with you to North Korea?”

He nearly laughed up his coffee.

I would soon discover that Kim Jong-il had offered Fujimoto something else for his ten years, in addition to the restaurant, something Fujimoto had conveniently neglected to mention.

Dear Leader Dreams of Sushi

Mathilda sez, "In this photo by Twitter user @joeman24, a gas-mask wearing Dervish dances in front of protesters in Turkey."

A gas-mask wearing Whirling Dervish shows support for protesters in #Turkey

Because it’s Saturday night and there are (and soon will be) so many new faces around here, I feel the need to remind y’all of who I am and why I “matter.” This is a primer I wrote for prospective grad students back in 2007 when I had things like hope and a future. That it doesn’t reflect that says something. I won’t say what. You’re more than welcome to.

A is for Anxiety. Who are you, Derrida?

B is for the Bore you are, to all but Ma and Pa.

C is for the Coin you drop on Copies you deface,

D for the Despair you feel, producing at this pace.

E is for the Energy you wasted all these years,

F for Fraud, for Failure, Fake, whatever, these are tears.

G is for the Game you play, imagining you’ll finish,

H for Harry Potter. You fancy games of Quiddich.

I‘s for Isolation, you’re alone in this you know?

J‘s for all the Joy you’ll feel in this Hell when it snows.

K is for the grade you’d give, to see that student sob,

L‘s for Lucky, like you’ll be, to ever Land a job.

M is for the Money you’d be rolling in by now,

N for all the Notes you lost, although you’re not sure how.

O is for the wailing of your apoplectic fit,

P for all the Pressure, which you handle [BLEEP] [BLEEP] [BLEEP].

Q is for the Questions, all the dumb ones that you ask,

R for the Revisions, Resubmissions in your past.*

T is for the Time spent, reading this instead of that,

U for Unproductive, like the time spent with your cat.

V is for the Virtues you can always cultivate,

When you have a real life, at some undetermined date.

X is for the ones you love, but avoided for your cause,

Y ‘s for you, you you you you, and working without pause.

Z is for the Žižek, he’s really rad, I hear,

And now you know Grad ABCs, who here wants more beer?

 

*S is for the Shit that you inevitably leave out.

(And also for how stupid, you feel foot firm in mouth.)

Here's a short video of a woman parkour team from Lahijan, Iran, praticing in hijabs and mantos. The sport apparently spread through illicit satellite TV viewing:

Despite having to practise in unwieldy clothing – not to mention having to stay on the lookout for police - Iranian women are getting into the sport of parkour. Some even create videos in which they show off their skills, and post them online. One of these brave women tells us about the challenges of practising parkour in an Islamic republic.

Parkour involves moving around urban obstacles as quickly as possible. Athletes run up walls, scale fences, jump between roofs, do back flips, and much more. The sport first originated in the 1980s with a small group of athletes in the suburbs of Paris, but only rose to fame in the 2000s with the film “Yamakasi.” Parkour has since spread throughout the world thanks to the Internet, everywhere from Gaza to Egypt to Iran.

Headscarves and long tunics don’t stop Iranian women from practising parkour (Thanks, Alan!)

Have you ever wondered why the slang term for coffee is a cup of joe? The phrase has been in use since World War I, but the original term, coined by sailors in the Navy, was actually a cup of Joseph Daniels. And it was meant as an insult.

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Via Reddit, a truly unfortunate typo in a high school yearbook. Or maybe not a typo, just a truly unfortunate nickname.

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High school student Justin Beckerman made his own single-person submarine to explore a lake near his New Jersey home, "see fish and hopefully find a bit of history, like the cannons from my neighbors' historic house." The project took him six months and cost $2,000. The window is an old skylight, the regulators and gauges are from a trashed soda fountain. From CNN:

The submarine has ballast tanks to maintain its depth and equilibrium; air vents that bring oxygen down from the surface; a functioning PA and a range of emergency systems including back-up batteries, a siren, strobe lights, a breathing apparatus and a pump to fight leaks. The vessel can remain submerged for up to two hours and travels beneath the waves at one and a half miles per hour.

Justin Beckerman's site

"High-school teen builds one-man submarine for $2,000" (CNN)

This month AT&T started charging a monthly "Mobility Administrative Fee" of $0.61 to mobile customers. If you want to get out of your contract early, you can use this fee increase to cancel the contract without paying an early termination fee.

This fee offers a rare chance to fight back against a corporate giant. You can use the administrative fee as a loophole to break your contract, without having to pay any costly early termination fees.

Even if the monthly fee isn't a big deal to you, upgrading your phone early probably is. By canceling your contract, you can get a new Samsung Galaxy S4 or HTC One with AT&T or another wireless carrier at the cheaper subsidized pricing.

Nelson Aguilar at Wonder How To describes how to do it

The red chinese flag with its golden stars flutters in the wind on the 300 block of Park Avenue, the site of Baltimore’s historic Chinatown (Chinatown actually started a couple blocks away, on the 200 block of Marion Street). The flag hangs from the only

We all know that Middle-Earth is a sausage fest. But what would happen if you flipped all the genders? Could Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings still work as well if you replaced Sean Bean, John Noble and Sean Astin with women? This dream cast proves it would. It's... a diversion.

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Michael McWhertor recounts Jason Rohrer's extraordinary Game Developers' Conference presentation from last March; Rohrer used a set of genetic algorithms to evolve and play-test a board-game that no human ever played, then he milled it out of a piece of titanium and buried it, along with acid-free rules encased in Pyrex, and buried it in the desert for someone to dig up in 2,700 years and play for the first time. It was in response to a design challenge called "Humanity's Last Game," and Rohrer certainly made a run at it.

To accomplish that, Rohrer first built the game in computer form, designing a set of rules that would be playtested not by a human, but by an artificial intelligence. He said he plugged the game's rules into a "black box," letting the AI find imbalances, iterating new rules and repeating. Rohrer showed the video game version of his board game onscreen, but obscured key portions of the board game's layout, so no one in attendance could reverse engineer its mechanics.

Then he set about manufacturing it. Rattling off a list of board game materials that would be unlikely to last the intended passage of time (wood, cardboard, aluminum, glass), Rohrer ultimately decided to make the game from a resilient metal. He machined the 18-inch by 18-inch game board and the pieces future players will use out of 30 pounds of titanium.

Rohrer laid out the game's rules diagrammatically on three pages of archival, acid-free paper, hermetically sealed them inside a Pyrex glass tube — which were then housed inside a titanium baton — and set about burying them in the earth.

The game is now embedded somewhere in the Nevada desert. Rohrer's not exactly sure where, as he plotted out available public land far enough away from roads and populated areas, hoping to find a suitable, desolate location to hide the game. He buried it in the desert himself, he said, turned around and walked away from the game's indistinguishable resting place.

His finale was distributing about a million GPS coordinates spread across hundreds of envelopes, and explaining that it would take one person a million days (about 2,700 years) to visit each site and check it with a metal-detector. However, my money is on this being buried somewhere along the trash-fence at Burning Man.

Game designer Jason Rohrer designs a game meant to be played 2,000 years from now, hides it in desert [Polygon/Michael McWhertor]

(via Kadrey)

"Actual conversations with my 2 year old daughter, as re-enacted by me and another full grown man." Episode 1 of what I hope will be a regular series by Warmland Films. (via Dangerous Minds)

You know those inspirational text-wall photos that friends of friends post to Pinterest and Facebook, full of blithe clichés and maudlin motivational monologues? Dude. Fengi, on livejournal, fixed them for you.

An ongoing project from Mike Leavitt’s Intuition Kitchen is a series of playful action figures of famous artists made from wood, clay and a range of materials. Artists in the series include Banksy, Ai Weiwei, Damien Hirst, Takashi Murakami, Jeff Koons and more.

More images below.

pic and info: Mike Leavitt via B/D

This excerpt from neurologist-philosopher Daniel Dennett's new book Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking lays out a set of rhetorical habits that I immediately aspired to attain:

How to compose a successful critical commentary:

1. Attempt to re-express your target's position so clearly, vividly and fairly that your target says: "Thanks, I wish I'd thought of putting it that way."

2. List any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement).

3. Mention anything you have learned from your target.

4. Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.

And if that wasn't enough: "whenever you see a rhetorical question, try – silently, to yourself – to give it an unobvious answer. If you find a good one, surprise your interlocutor by answering the question." And then, "A good moral to draw from this observation is that when you want to criticise a field, a genre, a discipline, an art form …don't waste your time and ours hooting at the crap! Go after the good stuff or leave it alone."

Daniel Dennett's seven tools for thinking (via O'Reilly Radar)

Portland, I love you, but you’re bringing me down:

Late last night, Portlanders rejected a plan to fluoridate their city’s water supply (and the water of over a dozen other cities). It’s the fourth time Portland has rejected the public health measure since 1956. It’s the fourth time they’ve gotten the science wrong.

When new medical treatments are implemented, when new drugs are introduced into the populace, there is always some hesitation. There are (hopefully) some clinical trials to back up the new intervention, but the long-term implications are often unclear. Water fluoridation doesn’t have this problem. For over 65 years, it has been rigorously tested as a public health measure, and considered one of the most successful measures of the last 100 years, alongside others like recognizing that tobacco use is a health hazard.

Simply put, the refusal of water fluoridation doesn’t have any scientific support. A review on fluoride’s effect on IQ out of Harvard was waved about as the main scientific opposition, but has since been thoroughly refuted. Decades of studies in different cities in different states, involving millions of people, have concluded that there is a safe level of fluoride—one part-per-million—that can be added to water for enormous benefit to our teeth and oral health with little to no adverse effects.

Does anybody understand the politics of this?

Clearly Heroic: Get to steppin’ stripes!

Michael Gove is the UK Secretary of State for Education, the subject of a vote of no confidence from the nation's head teacher's conference that ran 99% opposed to his ideas for educational reform. The major motif of Gove's reforms is an emphasis on rote memorisation and linear learning. Gove insists that he loves creativity, but says that creativity is only possible once you've mastered the basics ("You cannot be creative unless you understand how sentences are constructed, what words mean and how to use grammar.")

Writing in the Guardian, Ken Robinson thoroughly and blazingly rebuts this proposition, and presents a stirring manifesto for embracing creativity in education:

First, creativity, like learning in general, is a highly personal process. We all have different talents and aptitudes and different ways of getting to understand things. Raising achievement in schools means leaving room for these differences and not prescribing a standard steeplechase for everyone to complete at the same time and in the same way.

Second, creativity is not a linear process, in which you have to learn all the necessary skills before you get started. It is true that creative work in any field involves a growing mastery of skills and concepts. It is not true that they have to be mastered before the creative work can begin. Focusing on skills in isolation can kill interest in any discipline. Many people have been put off mathematics for life by endless rote tasks that did nothing to inspire them with the beauty of numbers. Many have spent years grudgingly practicing scales for music examinations only to abandon the instrument altogether once they've made the grade.

The real driver of creativity is an appetite for discovery and a passion for the work itself. When students are motivated to learn, they naturally acquire the skills they need to get the work done. Their mastery of them grows as their creative ambitions expand. You'll find evidence of this process in great teaching in every discipline from football to chemistry.

Third, facilitating this process takes connoisseurship, judgment – and, yes, creativity, on the part of teachers. One concern about the revised national curriculum is that it will be too linear and prescriptive. For creativity to flourish, schools have to feel free to innovate without the constant fear of being penalised for not keeping with the programme. Too much prescription is a dead hand on the creative pulse of teachers and students alike.

To encourage creativity, Mr Gove, you must first understand what it is (via Dan Hon)

OK, so this is just brilliant, and I can't believe that nobody has thought to do this before. A rapper who goes by the name Young Braised created a track that contains every instance of former NBA star Alonzo Mourning getting name dropped in a rap song, running in chronological order from 1993-2012.

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Which way is the train going? Magic from just four frames! (It's a real train station so of course there is an actual answer, but that's no fun.) (via Neatorama)

Have you ever smuggled delicious pancetta home from Italy? Yes, smuggled. As in, broken the law. At the end of this month, your actions may be retroactively legal. (No, I am not a lawyer, so I actually don't know if you are absolved. So don't go calling the feds and confessing, okay?) The ban on importing salumi, at least some of it, has been lifted.

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“Jon eats a whole raw potato to take himself out of the mood.”

I would pay a week’s worth of earnings to be a fly on the wall watching that last paragraph go down.

via blameaspartame

Ever since the announcement of “D&D Next”—or, to translate marketing-speak into actual English, Dungeons & Dragons: 5th Edition—more than a year ago, Wizards of the Coast’s efforts to unite the disparate tribes of fantasy roleplaying enthusiasts under one system of roleplaying has been contentious at best. Fans of disparate—and mutually exclusive, in some cases—styles of roleplaying have been contesting and debating the merits of each edition to assess whether elements of that edition should be included in the Frankenstein’s monster that is Next.

The results have been ugly, retrograde, and entirely predictable. Wizards of the Coast’s promises of modularity and freedom of choice have all been silenced by the advent of the unelected “But that’s not D&D!” committee that lurks on every forum. Its members revel in speaking out against progressive design, clutch tightly to every mechanical cow in the event that someone, somewhere might believe it sacred despite its age or dissociation from the remainder of its herd, and rejoice in purging the unclean from the hobby because of their conviction that there is only one ideologically acceptable way to pretend to be an elf.

Theirs.

People who’ve talked with me know I have never been on board with D&D Next—its design philosophy’s attempt to unite the tribes struck me as remarkably tone deaf, naïve, and harmful to the state of play we have been gifted with since the hobby’s inception in E. Gary Gygax’s basement four decades ago. While some view crowdsourcing as a viable way forward, I predicted that Wizards of the Coast’s tactics to engage fans in the design of the next edition of the game would reignite the most-recent edition warfare that’s infected gaming discussions since the launch of D&D 4E and the release of Pathfinder RPG. Rather than encouraging gamers to have an honest discussion about the role nostalgia should play on mechanical design, the openness of the process has caused numerous players—most frequently those who prefer older editions of the game—to come forward and out themselves as members of the “That’s Not D&D” committee.

I suspect part of the reason I find the views of the “That’s Not D&D” committee so bizarre and unhelpful for the hobby is that I don’t particularly value nostalgia. As I get older, I’ve come to accept that the ways I played roleplaying games in the past—particularly my start in the hobby with AD&D—had little to do with mechanics and more to do with where I was at in my life. I’m from rural Louisiana, and when my friends and I discovered a game where we could pretend to be heroes, we used the rules to make stuff up that we thought would be fun. Our creativity and happiness to play together was part and parcel of being young kids happy to hang out with each other, and we didn’t really let the mechanics of the game get in our way.

I know game designers can’t recapture the esprit de corps of my early forays into gaming, no matter how hard they try; the mechanical design of the games I loved had very little to do with the fun those games facilitated. We didn’t think deeply about concepts like simulation, if it was necessary for D&D to have draconic kobolds or doglike kobolds, or whether warlords could “shout wounds closed.” Our games were laissez faire and au courant. Now that I’m older and have done a bit of game design, the idea that any game designer would try to recreate the games of my youth strikes me as quixotic and impossible—nostalgia is not empirical, and it cannot be mechanically modeled.

May Garl Glittergold go with those who try.

But to the members of the “That’s Not D&D!” committee plaguing RPG forums, the type of fun roleplaying games facilitated should be subordinated to nostalgic purity (in general) and their particular nostalgia (in specific). Did you like 4E? Tough luck. Were warlords the class you were looking for way back when you were playing 2E and wanted to create a fantastic version of Alexander the Great or Zhuge Liang? Sorry, that’s not D&D because the game is and must be Eurocentric. Are you interested in non-Vancian magic options? Too bad. That’s not D&D even if 2E psionics provided just such a system (and even if it were awesome!). Did you play 13th Age and decide that (what they call) narrative mechanics might be interesting in your fantasy game? Leper. Outcast. Unclean. Forge-ite. Swine.

The problem with the “That’s Not D&D!” committee is not the fact that they are attempting to use the Internet to silence and shame those who want D&D to continue moving forward. The issue is these men and women do not understand the extent to which they are fetishizing the past—and in so doing, contributing to the culture that’s making it harder and harder to introduce new players to the hobby. Nostalgia and fantasy roleplaying’s history have their place in this hobby—but to the loudest subset of message board denizens, that place is decidedly not as a reference to where the hobby’s been. History and nostalgia have become Gygax ex cathedra, rigidly constraining our understanding of the hobby’s past and constricting the mechanical designs that will define our hobby’s future.

But what do I know? Nostalgia über alles. After all, that’s not D&D (and it shouldn’t be to you or anybody else)!

Next they'll be telling it's not made out of green cheese too

by digby

Wait ... what?

Bill Nye, the harmless children's edu-tainer known as "The Science Guy," managed to offend a select group of adults in Waco, Texas at a presentation, when he suggested that the moon does not emit light, but instead reflects the light of the sun.

As even most elementary-school graduates know, the moon reflects the light of the sun but produces no light of its own.

But don't tell that to the good people of Waco, who were "visibly angered by what some perceived as irreverence," according to the Waco Tribune.

Nye was in town to participate in McLennan Community College's Distinguished Lecture Series. He gave two lectures on such unfunny and adult topics as global warming, Mars exploration, and energy consumption.

But nothing got people as riled as when he brought up Genesis 1:16, which reads: "God made two great lights -- the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars."

The lesser light, he pointed out, is not a light at all, but only a reflector.

At this point, several people in the audience stormed out in fury. One woman yelled "We believe in God!" and left with three children, thus ensuring that people across America would read about the incident and conclude that Waco is as nutty as they'd always suspected.

I'm going to take a wild guess that it wasn't the "moon" thing that got them all upset so much as the "science" thing in general.


h/t to Max Blumenthal