Tomato sauce.

Back when I was just a tadpole, cooking simple things in college, I used to buy Ragu pasta sauce to make with my pasta. When I got to graduate school, I got a little fancier, and I would buy fancy tomato sauce, and I would add diced onions and mushrooms and green peppers, and maybe some pork or chicken or something like that. I tried making my own tomato sauce once, but it just wasn't sweet enough ... and it was too chunky ... and it didn't seem right.

Fortunately, since I moved to the Netherlands I've stepped up my cooking quality, and I make my own tomato sauce now. Sautee garlic and onions (and peppers and mushrooms, if available) in olive oil til they soften, then add a can of peeled tomatoes and mash them up and let it simmer until the tomatoes break down and it all gets, well, saucy. Pretty easy, and super tasty (cuz I put lots of garlic in my sauce). I've been doing that for years, and never considered going back.

But jars of Hak pasta sauce (with veggies) were on sale yesterday, so I bought one and had it with my tortellini. It totally tasted wrong. Very very sweet, very mushy vegetables ... I could see the broccoli, but not taste it. It was good to try it and be reminded of the bad old days of sauce from a jar, but I'll not be buying that again, sale or no sale. I hereby implore my vast readership to experiment with making your own pasta sauce, perfect it, and never again return to the sugary Ragu of your youth.

Stumbling

So I've been making good use of the StumbleUpon FireFox extension ...

Today I found this droll little equation proving that girls are evil.

Or how about high-resolution satellite photos?

Or a simple but nicely-done web-based paint program that lets you save and email your creations?

Or the Condensed Edition of Plato's "The Republic"?

I find great new sites every day. StumbleUpon isn't as structured as del.icio.us, but its very randomness is appealing. Yet another reason to use the FireFox browser.

Mosquitos, your enemy has a new name.

And his name is ContraryBear.

Seriously, the three euros I spent to get one of those tennis-racket bug-zappers has been a great investment. It is somehow more satisfying to fry skeeters with a spark than a bang -- I used to use women's magazines to kill my prey. And it's not so messy on the walls. And less damaging to the Cosmo cover girls. I almost look forward to seeing mosquitos before going to bed now.

Perhaps I should just try and stun the little fellas and then release them back into the wild, so they can spread the word to their cursed cohorts ... but maybe it's best just to keep killing every one I see. It adds to the mystery, from the perspective of the outside mosquitos looking in. Keep 'em coming!

Bale is a great Batman

So we went to see "Batman Begins" this last weekend, and I walked out pretty damn impressed.
I decided it was the best comic-book-adapted movie I've ever seen.
It sounds like I'm damning with faint praise, I know, but considering it must be tough to create an original story around the time-worn conventions and backstory that come with comic book heroes, I think they did a great job. Looking at Metacritic, I see that the reviews are mostly favorable, but ranging from enraptured to disappointed. Here's what I liked about the movie:

• It seemed less cartoony, and more real, than other comic book adaptations. The Batmobile is like a tank. Christian Bale's Batman gets injured and makes mistakes. People go insane and die in this movie.
  
• Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman are wonderfully understated actors. The whole movie has a deadpan sense of humor.
  
• Cillian Murphy and Gary Oldman also deliver nice low-key performances. It's great when a movie has the confidence to pepper the supporting cast with good actors and have them be quietly creepy (Murphy) and melancholic (Oldman), with no hamming it up with one-liners.
• The outdoor scenes in the movie were shot in Chicago, and I recognized a lot of it. The car chase in Lower Wacker, the bridges over the Chicago River, the skyscrapers and the downtown canyons -- all very enjoyable to me since I used to live there. Even the futuristic public transport was cool and reminiscent of the el.
  
• Best of all: Liam Neeson's salt-and-pepper fu-goat is tremendous. I so want to be him.

It's not perfect ... my biggest bitch is that (as the reviewer in the Dallas Observer noted) Katie Holmes doesn't come close to having the gravitas to pull off the role of a district attorney. That cute pixie face has carried her a loooooooong way. But the movie still rocked, and I'm looking forward to more.

(Speaking of pixie-faced brunettes, we watched "Garden State" recently on DVD. I thought the movie was pretty good, and again my biggest complaint was the love interest. Natalie Portman just wasn't believeable in the irresponsible-mysterious-but-loveable local girl role. I don't know who I would have preferred there ... Drew Barrymore maybe? I have to watch "What's Eating Gilbert Grape" again to see if Juliette Lewis pulls it off. I'm sure it's a delicate balancing act, this role, but if I watch the movie and keep thinking "Jesus this girl is annoying", then any romantic chemistry is shot to hell.)

A local pub

So I was out drinking in Rotterdam with a Dutch friend last night, and one place we stopped at was Cafe Rhythm. It's a grimy place on Oude Binnenweg, a bit of a biker bar that always played heavy metal when we were there before. It seems to attract a lot of alcoholics and drug addicts. The beer is cheap too, although they only seem to have Oranjeboom on tap, and Hertog Jan in bottles. Most of the people (including us) choose the latter.

Yesterday they were playing dance music -- a bit incongruous, but didn't seem to disturb the crowd. This is the kind of place where you see a woman bolt out of the ladies' room to run up to the bar and berate the bartender for toilet paper. It's also homey enough that a couple of old people can sit and slowly play checkers on the table by the front window. My friend and I decided this place had great character.

Wonders of the World

So there's a guy with a site where he ranks the top 100 wonders of the world (and lists the top 1000 on another page). I think ranking these places is kind of silly, BUT it is fun to see how many I've been to, and which of the other ones I'd most like to visit.

By my count, I've been to 17 or 18 of the top 100. (It's been 20 years since I went to New York with my family, and I can't remember if we went to the Metropolitan Museum, although it sounds like the kind of place my Dad would take us. I guess if I can't remember it, it shouldn't count.) All of the ones I've seen are in the U.S. or Europe, except for the Golden Pavilion in Kyoto. I still have some travelling left to do.

I'd like to see just about every other Wonder in the top 100, but if there's one that really interests me, it's Dubrovnik. There's just something about fortified medieval ports which really gets me. I've always fantasized about being an archer on the rampart, shooting flaming arrows at attacking ships.

First Post

Here it is ... my first blog.
Well, sort of.
I sometimes posted to a site here, but not really enough to call it a blog.
Is it?
I don't know.
I can almost promise that every subsequent entry will be more interesting than this one.