Sunday, September 25

At Cincinnati -2.5 San Francisco
Bengals aren’t doormats.
The 49ers play tough.
But I still won’t watch. PICK: 49ERS

New England -8.5 At Buffalo
Bills have won two but
Only Gisele beats Brady.
Bills might beat the spread. PICK: PATRIOTS

At Philadelphia -7 NY Giants
Mike Vick spits blood
and Kafka is his back-up.
Dream Team Doesn’t Wake Up. PICK: GIANTS

At New Orleans -4 Houston
Saints’ two straight loses
the worst thing about Nola
since the name Nola. PICK: TEXANS

Saints are 1 and 1.
My other haiku was wrong.
I apologize. PICK: TEXANS

At Cleveland -2.5 Miami
Bush is a dud.
You can’t gain 100 yards
eating bad pizza. PICK: BROWNS

At Tennessee -6.5 Denver
Like God his father
Tim Tebow creates the world
then sits on Sunday. PICK: TITANS

Detroit -3.5 At Minnesota
This is the hundredth
between the Lions and Vikes.
Hope the roof stays up! PICK: LIONS

At Carolina -3.5 Jacksonville
Last Week Cam Newton
threw four big interceptions!
Thank God Jags can’t catch PICK: PANTHERS

At San Diego -14.5 Kansas City
The Chargers again
Are taking September off.
Chiefs taking year off. PICK: CHARGERS

NY Jets -3.5 At Oakland
Raiders are scary
because old men in black might
be Tommy Lee Jones. PICK: RAIDERS

Baltimore -3.5 At St. Louis
Ravens, great week one,
totally blown out week two.
Pretend Rams are Pitt! PICK: RAVENS

At Tampa Bay -1.5 Atlanta
The Buccaneers play
in this cool pirate ship but
still totally suck. PICK FALCONS

Arizona -3.5 At Seattle
Where have all the great
Seattle bands gone away to?
Portland, Oregon? PICK: CARDS

Green Bay -3.5 At Chicago
Packers look awesome
And the Bears D looks good.
Grow a cool mustache! PICK: BEARS

Pittsburgh -10.5 At Indianapolis
Until Manning returns
The Colts should be banished from
National T.V. PICK: STEELERS

Monday, September 26

At Dallas -5.5 Washington
Romo broke a rib
and it tore open his lung.
Redskins still racist. PICK: COWBOYS

Last week’s Football Haiku Picks went 7–8–1. Season to date is 13–17–2.

Jim Behrle tweets at @behrle for your possible amusement.

When I started hacking you were just one layer above the bare metal. You were typing into this wonderful emptiness, waiting to be populated with minds. A few of us were interested in projecting our thoughts into the computer to make it do something new. We began writing codes and we began cracking them, too…. It was certainly addictive. You’d dive down into a computer system — typically, for me at the time, the Pentagon’s 8th Command Group computers. You’d take it over, projecting your mind all the way from your untidy bedroom to the entire system along the halls, and all the while you’re learning to understand that system better than the people in Washington. It was like being able to teleport yourself into the interior of the Pentagon in order to walk around and take charge…. As experiences of young adulthood go, it was mindblowing. By day you’d be walking down the street to the supermarket, meeting people you know, people who have no sense of you as anything other than a slacker teenager, and you’d know you had spent last night knee-deep in Nasa.

— Who ghost-wrote the Julian Assange memoir, Jackie Collins? No disrespect to the talented lady! But boy this is purple. Also, if you’ve seen Swordfish, and of course you have, basically don’t bother with this excerpt.

“A number of commemorative souvenirs have been produced to mark Pope Benedict XVI’s four-day visit to Germany. One brewery in Berlin has gone as far as creating a special beer in his honor. But no ordinary brew would do: This beer was serenaded by Gregorian chants by the light of the new moon.”

by Emerson Beyer

How have you been celebrating National Bourbon Heritage Month? Probably by drinking a lot of whiskey, plus the usual parades, fireworks, sending roses to all the people you threw up on, etc. So although this weekend is the final weekend of Bourbon Month, I want to show you how to make bourbon an even more integral part of your life all year long. No longer should you feel limited by the amount of bourbon you can drink, because you can also be eating it in every meal, including breakfast. Tie on your apron, here comes a bunch of ideas!

BOURBON FOR DESSERT
Bourbon can become a staple of your daily diet, but you should build up to this slowly and deliberately. Start with something easy and obvious: dessert. Fruit loves bourbon, so macerate pitted cherries, diced pears, figs, raspberries or pineapple in bourbon and spoon them over vanilla ice cream. Put the fruit and liquor in a clean jar with nutmeg, allspice or a bit of vanilla bean and keep it in the refrigerator.

Have you mastered pie crusts, and do you feel confident enough to add a great new skill? Pastry cream is both easy (I promise, take a deep breath!) and impressive. At the end of this recipe, where she suggests liqueur, use bourbon instead — and lots more of it — at least a full ounce. It’s Bourbon Month! You want boozy cream! Prebake the crust (like a tart, no sides), then give it a layer of your bourbon pastry cream, and just before serving top with slices of soft fruit like peaches or bananas. (If you have a blowtorch, now is your chance to use it.)

If you haven’t mastered pie crusts (or don’t want to) I might suggest you learn to make choux paste first. It is exceedingly simple — easy to memorize even — and is the basis for gougères, the world’s greatest appetizer. But cheesy, wonderful gougères are a topic for another time. For now we are keeping things sweet, and you can use choux paste to make puffs to fill with your bourbon pastry cream. Things are getting a little French around here, non?!

Here’s one big, overarching tip on dessert: just about anything that calls for vanilla can be improved by adding a tablespoon of bourbon.

BOURBON FOR DINNER
Okay, so you’ve got bourbon covering your sweets, but it’s not yet part of your ordinary weeknight dinner. I’m gonna be honest here: if you’re a vegetarian, you should skip this part. Seared meat with bourbon pan sauce is your flexible recipe for getting whiskey at suppertime. I don’t think this would work with tofu, but correct me if I’m wrong. Here we go:

1. Heat the oven to 400F, and take out an oven-safe skillet (big enough for all your meat).

2. You can use a pork chop, a thick steak (not skirt or flank, which are great for grilling, not searing), or a chicken breast. Salt and pepper both sides generously. For purposes of this recipe, I’m going to assume you’re making two pieces. There’s not much measuring involved, so you should be able to easily modify this recipe for your needs.

3. On the stovetop, heat the pan on a medium-high burner. Lubricate with a bit of butter and canola oil. The butter will melt, then foam, then subside.

4. Add the first piece of meat, wait 20 seconds, then add the second. (This is so you don’t cool the pan.) At first, they will stick to the pan. After a minute or two they should come loose. Flip them over. After another minute or two, put the whole thing in the oven.

5. Here’s where I hope you have some cooking sense. How long you leave the meat in the oven is up to you — it depends on the meat you’re using and how well-done you like it. Anywhere from 5 to 15 minutes. Use the Finger Test for Doneness.

6. Remove the pan from the oven and replace it on the stovetop. Put the meat on a plate. Add some more butter and oil as well as a diced onion. Cook that onion while you scrape the meaty residue off the pan. When the onion is nice and soft, sprinkle a tablespoon of flour or cornstarch over it. Stir it so the fat and flour mingle thoroughly.

7. Throw in some minced herbs. With the bourbon flavor, I lean toward rosemary, sage or tarragon. Mint, maybe, if this is for a Kentucky Derby party? Use as much as you like. A tablespoon or two is probably right.

8. Whiskey time! Pour in a cup of bourbon. Turn the burner up to high. Bring it to a boil. When you see it noticeably reducing, then . . .

9. Add a cup of hot stock. Beef stock if you’re making steak, chicken stock if you’re making pork or chicken. If there are meaty juices on the plate with the meat, pour those juices into the pan too. Boil it all together until the liquid is reduced by about half and it looks syrupy and delicious. Optional: You can put the meat into the saucy pan at this point, especially if you’re worried it may be undercooked. (Asking yourself, “Hmm, are these ‘meat juices’ or straight-up blood on that plate?”)

10. I would definitely serve this with sweet potatoes!

Oh my gosh, here you are digesting the equivalent of two or three shots of bourbon, and you don’t look like a wino, you look like a genius!

Now that your addiction (jk!) has transferred from the bottle to the burner, I have one more dinnertime idea for you that is dramatic and easy: get some shrimp and set those beauties on fire. More specifically: sauté some shrimp along with diced bell peppers and green onion in butter, then add a couple of shots of bourbon, let it get hot (you need to smell the vapor), and light it with a long match or lighter (that’s what’s happening in the very top photo). After a few seconds (but before all the booze burns off), blow it out or extinguish with a lid. Alton Brown has a recipe like this that he serves over grits. Baked beans would also be good.

BOURBON AT BREAKFAST
At this point you have achieved a daily partnership with bourbon, even as Bourbon Month fades in your memory. As in any deepening relationship, you’re probably going to be seeing more of each other in the morning. Can you have bourbon for breakfast? Yes, bourbon is ready for this next step.

In fact, once you’re emotionally ready to be someone who has bourbon for breakfast, the technicalities of it are very simple. You can braise your bacon in cider and bourbon like this guy did; braise a big piece and you can fry it up bit by bit to enrich many breakfasts. Craving pancakes? Add a splash of bourbon (and some blueberries!) to the maple syrup as you warm it on the stove or in the microwave. Flavor whipped cream with a teaspoon of bourbon to top waffles. You can certainly make bourbon jelly. Making jelly is no different than making Jell-O shots in a jar, and anybody can do that. (Here’s some guidance.) Enjoy it on biscuits. A little piece of fried chicken would be pretty nice on those biscuits, too.

So what kind of bourbon should you buy to achieve culinary glory? I’m not one of these crazy bourbon fanatics. I have a simple palate, and I think Evan Williams makes very serviceable bourbon. One of the fanciest restaurants I know uses the Evan Williams green label (i.e., the cheapest one) to make a Perfect Manhattan that is very nice. Plus, the green label is available on a plastic bottle, which is lighter to carry home from the liquor store.

K. Emerson Beyer, environmentalist and gadabout, lives in Durham, N.C. and tweets as @patebrisee.

DO NOT click this link if you have something that needs to get done today. It was all I could do to tear myself away from the session I’m working right now to post this. [Via]

“Baby yoga is basically one step up from cat yoga. Also, babies are incredibly flexible. My biggest fear before becoming a dad was that I’d break baby. But I went over to my friend’s place and he has a seven-month-old and I watched him change some diapers, and I realized, babies are completely bendy. You can wave them around like chicken. But to be totally clear, I am totally fine with baby hatha yoga, but very mixed on ashtanga and iyengar for babies.”
 — Some thoughts on parenting from a new father.

Here are some thoughts on the consecutive rise of two Ryans. Ryan McGinley is the young superstar photographer who became famous in the early 00s. Ryan Trecartin, four years younger, began getting attention in 2006 and became art-world famous circa 2009. In their ways and work, the Ryans represent two adjacent micro-generations of gays. Christopher Glazek writes: “McGinley helped to elevate a necrophiliac vision of mute youth into the universal condition of downtown existence…. Now the new Ryan has negated McGinley’s negation, superseding the gym bunny-heroin corpse dialectic entrenched since the 1980s.” In light of Trecartin’s videos — which are girly, brash, multi-ethnic, screechy and hilarious — McGinley’s snapshot-stylized pale thin hipster butts running through fields of wheat oddly start to become the images that seem ridiculous and fake and aspirational and advertorial.

“Between 2009 and 2010 I spent a disastrous amount of time playing Mario Kart Wii. I’d come home at night, grab dinner and then sit obsessively for several hours clutching a little white plastic steering wheel. I’m not proud of this, but it’s necessary back story to explain why, one weekend as I was driving to New Jersey and some Jersey driver was swerving and lane-straddling in front of me on the George Washington Bridge, I instinctively reached down on the steering wheel for the button that, in Mario Kart, would send a red shell flying out in front of me to flip this asshole’s car off the road.”
 — Sally Adee writes about the effects of playing a lot of video games, and the notion that the internet is “everting,” or “entering the next phase of its evolution by creeping out of the virtual boundaries that once defined it and into what we consider ‘real life.’”

“A VIOLIN case, a potato peeler and a television are among a haul of unusual weapons seized on Edinburgh’s streets, it emerged today. Details released under the Freedom of Information Act show police have confiscated hundreds of unusual items which have been used in attacks or deemed offensive weapons. The haul also includes a pizza shovel, a quill pen and a pool ball in a sock.”

An artist out of Brooklyn by the name of Mr. Muthafuckin’ eXquire has his borough in his blood — a little of Biggie’s deep-lunged authority comes through in his style, and a little of Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s unhinged perviness, too — and he has an underground hit on his hands with a song called “Huzzah,” which was produced by the death-obsessed hardcore veteran Necro. For the remix, he gathered an impressive collection of avant garde MCs — Queens’ Despot, Detroit’s Danny Brown, hometown faves Das Racist, and the venerable Def Jux Records founder El-P (who wears a large mustache and reminds us again how terrific and ahead-of-its-time his old group Company Flow was). Then they all filmed this great video, which puts a goofy, drugged-out spin on the one Bad Boy Records made back in 1995 for the all-star remix of Craig Mack’s “Flava In Ya Ear.”

Here’s that:

And here’s eXquire’s original “Huzzah.”

Another young New York rapper getting a lot of attention now is ASAP Rocky. He’s from Harlem, though his style is more reminiscent of the music that was coming out of Houston, Texas six years ago. Here’s his new song, “Trilla.”

I love that guitar sample. I don’t know what it’s from, but it has a similar feel to one of my all-time favorite samples: that of Japanese fusion guitarist Ryo Kawasaki’s 1977 “Bamboo Child,” as sped up and spun behind Fat Joe’s voice on a short interlude on Diamond D’s 1992 album Stunts, Blunts and Hip-Hop and on Kool G Rap’s 1995 “It’s a Shame (Da Butcher’s Mix).” Man, those eight Ryo Kawasaki notes stay going through my head all the time. Like, to a weird degree.

Another song of ASAP Rocky’s, “Peso,” has been getting some radio play this summer.

But I like this one best, “Purple Swag.”

I like how friendly the girl lip-syncing the lyrics looks. And how ASAP and his friends double-ride each other on their bikes. Like Snoop did in the “Gin and Juice” video. They seem to enjoy life, the ASAP crew. They certainly enjoy smoking pot. Watch them sitting around shooting the breeze in this short video The Fader made earlier this month.

To them, ASAP stands for:

“Always Strive and Prosper”
“Accumulate Status and Power”
“Always Stackin’, Always Paperchasin’”
“Assasinatin’ Snitches And Police”

and

“Acronym Symbolizing Any Purpose”

and also,

“Articulate Sour-diesel And Purp”

Whoa! Everybody really likes that one! Pass the bong! These guys are having some fun.