Crosswalks to Nowhere

This is downtown Arlington Heights as seen from the Metra station.

I took these two photos this morning with my BlackBerry Curve. The quality doesn't rival a real digital camera, but I really like the effect-- it has almost an Impressionist feel to it. These were shot with the default settings, so the device took it upon itself to put that blue color in the sky; it was actually much darker.

And here's the 5:44 am train approaching the station.

We closed out the traditional end of summer on Labor Day with Liz and Bob and their boat on the Fox River.

We took off around 10:30 am and got back in just before sunset.

It was a beautiful day, and a lot of other people had the same idea...

Including the floating hot dog guy.

We sailed under the Metra UP Northwest line at Cary on the way back to the marina, and we ended the day with hot dogs grilled over the firepit.

Now we're officially ready for Fall!

In last month's Esquire magazine, Chef John Currence of City Grocery Restaurant in Oxford, Mississippi provided his recipe for Coca-Cola Brined Fried Chicken.

Now, let's stop for a moment and ponder this. In one very descriptive phrase, the chef covered pretty much every one of my favorite food groups. Coca-Cola: check. Brined: works for me. Fried: there are other cooking methods? Chicken: protein. And something to hold whatever "fried" business comes into play.

Lisa and I were driving back from a family visit in southern Indiana, and somewhere outside Mt Vernon, Illinois I opened the magazine to a full-color photo of the finished product. (Our version appears at the top of this page.) I knew at that moment what our next cooking experiment would be. So, on a Saturday afternoon a couple weeks later, there we were in the kitchen...

Coca-Cola-Brined Fried Chicken

One Southern chef's sweet, fried homage to a New Orleans' culinary institution

By Chef John Currence

Ingredients:

12 chicken thighs (skin on)
Peanut oil and lard, for frying

Brining Mix:

1 qt Coca-Cola
1 tsp Liquid Smoke (optional)
2 1/2 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
1 tbsp Tabasco
3 tbsp ground black pepper
3 tbsp coarse salt

Batter:

1 egg
3/4 cup peanut oil

Dry Mix (well combined):

2 tsp baking powder
2 tbsp coarse salt
4 tsp ground black pepper
1 tbsp cayenne pepper
1 tbsp onion powder
1 tbsp garlic powder
2 1/2 cups flour

Instructions:

Rinse chicken, drain, and set aside. Blend together brining mix until salt dissolves. Place chicken in brine in a large covered bowl and marinate, refrigerated, for 4 hours.

Whisk egg well in a stainless-steel bowl and add peanut oil and 21/2 cups water. Add in dry mix, whisking slowly so batter doesn't clump.

To prepare chicken: Fill a large cast-iron skillet halfway with equal amounts peanut oil and lard. Slowly bring temperature to 375 degrees. (Use a candy thermometer.) While oil is heating, remove chicken from brine and place in a colander in sink. Once chicken has drained, pat dry with paper towels (a critical step) and season with salt and pepper.

Dip chicken in batter and place (carefully) in hot oil. Adjust heat, as the chicken will bring the oil temperature down dramatically — you want it back up to just above 350 degrees. Turn chicken regularly using tongs to prevent burning. After 8 or 9 minutes, remove a piece, prick it to the bone with a fork, and mash it. If the juices run clear, it's done. Continue cooking if necessary.

Serve with pickle-garlic relish. Cover any leftovers with a dish towel and leave out at room temperature (or in the fridge, if you must, although my grandmother never did). This keeps it crispy.

Pickle-Garlic Relish

Ingredients:

1 cup Italian (flat-leaf) parsley
1 cup hamburger dill-pickle chips
3 tbsp garlic

Instructions:

Chop everything finely and combine. Add a little pickle juice, if desired. Refrigerate.

Let's cut to the chase: the chicken was delicious. The coating was light and spicy, and once we resolved the challenge of the oil temperature it turned out wonderfully crispy. The chicken itself was moist and spicy, although I think next time we'll ease up on the Liquid Smoke-- a teaspoon was a bit much and overpowered some of the other flavors. There was a sweetness to the meat, but if you weren't told there was Coke in the brine you may not catch it.

The relish was good, but I think it was unnecessary. The chicken was that good.

This recipe called for chicken thighs, which tend to be much more flavorful and tender than chicken breasts. We might try breasts in the future just to see how it turns out.

Delicious!

IT'S ALWAYS MEANS IT IS.

When I was in college, one Professor Hardy took down the grade on one of my papers just a fraction because I used the word "critique" as a verb. At that time, Merriam-Webster categorized "critique" as a noun only. That became something else I carried with me.

Needless to say, having this stuff drilled into me day after day throughout my formative years had an effect on me. I'd always make sure that whatever communication I'd create would be well constructed and appropriately delivered. I carried this through high school and college, then into the professional world. When I started accessing Usenet and later the Web, I was proud of the way I could hone a phrase in a discussion forum. ("I'm not saying Justin Hayward's contribution to progressive rock wasn't significant; I just believe 'he's so adorable' is no basis for the creation of a Usenet newsgroup." -me, sometime in 1994). It was very easy to sound intelligent when everyone else in the forums were either SHOUTING or developing their L337 Speak.

Above all, I tried not to turn into a pedantic smarty-pants.

As my daughters made their way through school, I tried to instill in them a sense of what correct grammar looked and sounded like, but I did it without the steel-ruler approach-- I would offer gentle corrections. I'd occasionally find grammar mistakes in the newspaper and point them out to family and friends (like the time our local paper reported how the grade schools got electronic microscopes with special "censors" attached), but I tried really hard not to become that guy.

Then I started to notice more people around me calling out errors. Grammar blogs and podcasts started up, and people started carrying Wite-Out to remove errant apostrophes and Sharpies to put them in where they belonged. At first it was kind of funny and brought a sense of community to us English Majors, but then I realized I was surrounded by pedantic smarty-pantses.

And I was one of them.

This realization came to me via three different routes in a very short time. First, BBC film critic Mark Kermode has made a career out of being pedantic, but he presents his case in a sort of ironic form, which makes it a bit more palatable. Listen to a few of his reviews and you'll hear statements (and associated lengthy explanations) like "that part of the movie was 'obscene' in the Greek sense of the word." Mark can be a funny and interesting guy, but after a few months of listening I realized he is that guy.

Second, my lovely wife overheard my use of the phrase "I was an English major, and..." and she stopped, looked at me, and said "please don't be that guy." Wow-- it was like some sort of laser-guided X-Acto knife aimed at my diploma (but in the nicest possible way).

Finally, I heard this podcast by actor Stephen Fry, in which he set things right regarding language and its usage. Fry is well-known to fans of British comedies like Blackadder and A Bit of Fry and Laurie, and is also a scholar of the English language. In this piece, Fry wonders why the people who concern themselves with language are focused on the mechanics rather than the joy of putting words together for the sheer fun of it. And in the process, he takes grammar cops down a notch or two:

Excerpt from Stephen Fry's Podgrams, 22 December 2008: "Language"
(available at this link)

Sadly, desperately sadly, the only people who seem to be bothered with language today, bother with it in quite the wrong way. They write letters to broadcasters and newspapers in which they are rude and haughty about other peoples' usage and in which they show off their superior knowledge of how language should be.

I hate that and I particularly hate that so many of these pedants assume that I'm on their side. When asked to join into a "let's persuade this supermarket chain to get rid of their 'five items or less' sign", I never join in. Yes, I am aware of the technical distinction between less and fewer, and between uninterested and disinterested and infer and imply, and all the rest of them but none of these are of importance to me. None of these are of importance, I said, you'll notice. The old pedantic me would have insisted on none of them is of importance to me. Well I'm glad to say I've outgrown that silly approach to language.

Oscar Wilde, and there have been no more greater and more complete lords of language in the past thousand years, once included in a manuscript he was delivering to his publisher, a compliments slip in which he'd scribbled the injunction, 'I'll leave you to tidy up the woulds and shoulds, wills and shalls, thats and whichs etc'.

There's all kinds of pedants around with more time to read and imitate Lynn Truss and John Humphries than to write poems, love letters, novels and stories it seems. They whip out their Sharpies and take away and add apostrophes from public signs. Shake their heads at prepositions which end sentences and mutter at split infinitives and misspellings.

But do they bubble and froth and slobber and careen with joy at language? Do they ever let the tripping of the tips of their tongues against the tops of their teeth transport them to giddy euphoric bliss? Do they ever yoke impossible words together for the sound-sex of it? Do they use language to seduce, charm, excite, please, affirm and tickle those they talk too? Do they? I doubt it, they're too farting busy sneering at a green grocer's less than perfect use of the apostrophe. Well sod them to Hades. They think they're guardians of language; they're no more guardians of language than the kennel club is the guardians of dog-kind.

Well put.

Don't get me wrong: I'll continue to honor my education by following the rules instilled in me, with my copy of The Transitive Vampire at my side, but I won't be calling others out. I don't want to be that guy. And nobody likes a smarty-pants.

Earlier this year, I got a BlackBerry Curve 8900. The phone has a 3 megapixel camera, and while I've never been impressed with the quality of photos produced by smartphones, there's something about the pictures this one takes that makes them seem almost other-worldly: the colors are intense, and there's an interesting graininess to the shots. I resized all of these in Photoshop in order to fit them here, but the quality of the images remain intact.

The photo above was shot at Top Golf in Wood Dale in June.

Busse Woods.

Superdawg.

Patio on a summer evening.

Firepit.

Smores and the Grundig Satellit 700.

Heading north on the Fox River at Northwest Highway/UPRR Northwest Line tracks.

Berghoff Oktoberfest: September 17 2009.

The heck with Talk Like a Pirate Day-- here's Drinking Like a Pirate.

Neon sign at Scooby's in Arlington Heights.