Kitchen Confidential

I am now halfway through reading Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain. Never heard of the guy? He is the host of No Reservations on The Travel Channel. Anyways, this book is the funniest thing I've read in awhile. The most important chapter is called From Our Kitchen to Your Table, which outlines the do's and don'ts of ordering in a restaurant.

As a service to humanity, I will summarize it into the following bullet points:

• Never buy cheap sushi. (For the record, though, nobody loves Sushi Express more than I do. Yet nothing bad has ever happened to me after chowing down 8 plates of that stuff in one sitting).
• Never order fish on Monday. Most likely, they are leftovers from the stock delivered on Friday morning.
• Never order mussels. A single bad little guy out of a hundred good ones will send you crawling to the bathroom and pray for God's mercy, even if you are an atheist.
• Never order any steak well done, because they will give you the crappiest piece of meat in the fridge.
• If you are a vegetarian, don't bother going to a restaurant, because the chef will be delighted to sell you a plate of zuchini salad for $14.
• If the restaurant doesn't look busy, don't order shrimp. High turnover is the key to freshness.
• Sunday brunch is for losers, because most likely the real chef is taking the day off, and it's the 2nd string cooks who are preparing the food.
• Never order anything with hollandaise sauce (I don't even know what this is), cuz it's a hotbed of bacterial growth.
• Don't eat in a restaurant that has a filthy bathroom. Bathrooms are easy to clean; kitchens are not. So the logic goes, if the they are doing a poor job with easy-to-clean stuff, imagine what it is like in the kitchen.
• Think twice about ordering swordfish. It attracts parasitic worms like you-know-what attracts flies.
• Pork is preferable over poultry, cuz chickens are usually loaded with salmonella (except those spendy free range birds).
• Tuesday through Saturday are good for fine dining. Tuesday is the best, cuz the food is fresh, and the chef is well rested.
• Be polite to your waiter, because he could save yourself life by stopping you from ordering food that is dangerous for you. 

Temporal Causality Loops

Beware! 7-Up can cause temporal causality loops.

Print Film's Last Stand

It has been widely reported that Kodak will file for chapter 11 soon. This is indeed the end of an era. Digital has at last delivered the coup-de-grâce to the film giant. Since I still have a few rolls of print film lying around, I decided to mark the occasion by shooting them up.

The "film vs. digital" debate has been raging forever. But, that debate has always centered around the context of "5D2 vs. Velvia 100". A less talked about aspect is "cheap digicam vs. print film". Well, I am going to go all out and declare digital the winner on that one. Yes, even the cheapest, crappiest digicam you pick up from Walmart will outperform print film, no matter which brand of film and which camera you load the film into.

That said, results from print film look VERY DIFFERENT from what you'd get with digital. And sometimes, when the stars align, this difference will deliver images that have a lot of zap.

So, sorry to see Kodak go, but I guess I will hold on to the old gear for just a tad longer. Well, at least until when Fujifilm stops making Fujicolor.