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Impression: Taqueria el Castillito: Recommended

370 Golden Gate Avenue (between Hyde and Larkin)

I like this place; it strikes that balance between asepticness and squalor that is the hallmark of a good Mexican joint. Their regular burrito has a nice heft to it, and they don’t put anything weird or messy in it — rice, beans, meat, and salsa. You can get cilantro and onions if you want. I had mine with grilled chicken and the spicy salsa. The grilled chicken is good, but pretty ordinary. The spicy salsa is nice; it’s got big chunks of jalapeno that put some body behind the heat. The regular burrito is also $4.40, which is pretty reasonable in my book.

UPDATE: Taqueria el Castillito has another location on McAllister between Leavenworth and Jones. It’s a little smaller; I like the Golden Gate one better. But for Tower folks, it might be more convenient.

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Food Review: Biryani Chapati

Turk and Leavenworth
San Francisco, CA

A restaurant just broke my heart.

Since I started school, I’ve been on a bit of a culinary expedition to try eateries convenient for lunch between classes. The Tenderloin is full of those little hole-in-the-wall eateries that could be wonderful and could be abysmal, and there’s not really any way to tell unless you give it a try. I noticed, on one of these walkabouts, a hand-lettered awning which read “Biryani Chapati”; I thought, “Cool! Indian food!” (Now, I imagine some of the locals will be saying, “You madman, why would you eat at a dubious Tenderloin eatery when the ever-fabulous Naan N’ Curry is mere blocks away?” I’m funny like that sometimes. (On a wholly separate note, Biryani Chapati turns out to be Pakistani.))

I was briefly confused upon arriving by the big CLOSED sign at the top of the front window and the small OPEN sign at the bottom, but I figured I’d take the open door as a hint. The staff, in traditional downscale ethnic restaurant style, were all sitting around a table chatting when I came in. I wasn’t really sure what the idiom of the joint was: should I sit down? Order at the counter and take out? Order at the counter and sit down? The guy who seemed to be in charge was headed behind the counter, though, so I walked over there. He handed me a folded paper menu, and cheerily offered to explain their offerings. “We have chicken curries, lamb curries, we can put vegetable…” (I do have to hand it to them, though; it was actually a pretty clear menu. I’ve been in Indian places where the distinction between certain dishes was … subtle at best.) I ordered chicken biryani and an order of naan, and he invited me to sit.

We’ve got some fine examples of the po-ass decorating style in the Tenderloin; one of my favorite places near campus is dark, rowed with cafeteria tables, and they store random supplies in the bottom shelves of the soda fridge. Biryani Chapati, however, may be the purest example of the form yet. They barely have a counter; I think they don’t even have a cash register. Bare white walls are adorned with construction paper butterflies. My table was at a slight angle. I was a little concerned. But everything was clean, and the carafe of water was a nice touch.

When the food arrived, I was still reserving judgment. The naan looked disappointing, like a whole wheat tortilla, and the biryani, while generously portioned, was nondescript. In the eating, however, I was impressed. The biryani was spicy, but not painfully so; the naan was much better than it looked. The chicken was tender and falling off the bone (indeed, my only complaint about the food would be that I’m not a huge fan of chicken dishes with unexpected knobs of bone, authentic though they may be). About halfway through my meal, they brought out what I assume was probably raita, but serving an ordinary portion of raita in a massive soup bowl looks a bit weird. I failed you, my audience, in not trying it, but as I said, it looked weird, and I don’t like raita that much anyway. The staff was extremely attentive; the manager asked me several times if I wanted more naan, because I could have more free of charge. I suspect the red carpet treatment would be on account of my being their lunch rush; I came in at 12.30, and no one else came in while I was there.

This last bit is what makes me sad. My lunch was six bucks (they didn’t even charge me for the naan, so I overtipped), and I was the only customer for at least half an hour. Maybe they do a brisk delivery business, but I suspect they won’t make it. Nice folks, making pretty tasty food, but the skankier end of the Tenderloin just isn’t prime foodservice space.

Originally published at LiveJournal
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Good luck, Corinne

You know, I was feeling pretty crap earlier this evening, what with missed trains and heavy workloads and low energy. But I went to the 7-11 just now to get some soda, and I passed a woman who was saying into her cellphone, “Yo, Corinne? Emergency. No chitchat, all right, emergency. There are cops heading to the trailer right now. Cops.”

So yeah. Legal Writing running long? Not such a big deal, really.

Originally published on LiveJournal
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Our house is a tar pit

I am boggled by the ability of small mammals to get into trouble around our apartment.

Some of you may remember the Squirrel Incident of some months back. Well, last night, as my friend Julian and I sat around after a fine dinner and yarned about the usual sundries (plus, since Jen was not back from China yet, we could be even more self-congratulatory than usual), we heard a high-pitched squealing. Now, I know that there’s a rather bold family of raccoons in the vicinity; we’ve had guests trapped in our yard for a few minutes because there was a raccoon perched on the gate. So I figured a couple of raccoons were tussling in the back. Thus, we went to go peek.

In the darkness, we could see furry things moving at the base of one of our trees. Feeling puckish, I flipped on the back light to give the raccoons a startle. It was not a raccoon. It was a seething mass of raccoons. Nor did they startle. Instead, the enormous raccoon that must have been the mother of the bunch (I say enormous, which isn’t entirely fair. I’ve seen larger. Still, bigger than you figure raccoons generally are; somewhere between a beagle and a basset hound.) turned and looked at us. It’s a little unnerving when a wild animal gives you a “You lookin’ at me?” look.

So this large raccoon and her half dozen pups are all roiling around the base of this tree, and there’s a near-constant squealing, and it becomes clear after a bit that one of the pups has fallen into the crook of the tree and gotten stuck, and despite their legendary dexterity, the raccoons are unable to figure out what to do.

We are at a loss. We, being fully equipped with spatial intelligence and opposable thumbs, could resolve the issue easily, but wading into a mass of wild animals including the mother of a trapped baby is a quick way to the end that fate has reserved for Jen. So we watch for a while, until it begins to appear that the mother raccoon may be considering resorting to extreme measures that I, for one, do not want to see in my backyard, at which point we decided that now was the time to call Animal Control. Alas, they were closed, but the voice mail forwarded us to Emergency Services, who said they would send a unit over.

Naturally, of course, the act of calling Emergency Services inspired the raccoons into figuring out what to do, and they promptly dislodged the troubled raccoonling and disappeared into the night.

Raccoons are unsettling, I think because they’re the most pet-like of the wild animals. It seems like you ought to be able to go out and pet them, like you might a visiting cat, but at the same time you get that weird wild-animal sense that they’d totally be up for eating you if the opportunity arose.

Originally published on LiveJournal
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Marketing evolution

I suppose I should clarify that I speak of the evolution of marketing, not the marketing of evolution (“Darwin — it’s the natural selection!”). Stupid no-genitive-case-having English.

Anyway, I observed today that a local survey company has actually succeeded in getting me to not beg off twice now. The trick: the framing of the endeavor. It’s a company doing research on musical tastes for local radio stations; they play me snippets of songs being played on the stations I listen to, and ask me to rate them.

Here’s the trick. They don’t just ask me to rate the quality of a song. They also ask me to rate how tired I am of hearing it on the radio. Who can pass up the opportunity to tell Big Radio “Don’t play that honkin’ song anymore, damn it!”? It’s like the recall election; how often do you get a chance to vote *against* a politician?

They also have better surveyors than some companies; their people banter with me about how profoundly played out some songs are, and tell me about songs I wasn’t familiar with. It’s not a deep relationship, but it’s better than the droning people asking me about local bond initiatives. (And embarrassing me when I realize I’m not sure if the district that I voted to approve a bond measure for is K-8 or K-12.)

Originally published on LiveJournal
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Playtesting is hard

My friend Brian came by yesterday evening to test out a board game I’m toying with. It went pretty well, all things considered (which is to say it successfully illustrated several ways in which I failed dismally), but it reminded why it’s so easy for a game design project to bog down.

It’s easy to design a game — logistically, anyway. All I need is my brain and something to write on. I may need to spend some quality time crunching numbers, but that’s a process that I can fit into my life without too much difficulty. To playtest, however, is another process entirely. I have to find someone interested in playing a game that is, as I like to put it, “not guaranteed to be in any way fun”; we need to find an adequate slice of time that is available for both of us; we need to avoid the temptation to gab on about whatever comes to mind.

And when all is said and done, all that’s accomplished is a handful of data points. With card games, an evening usually gets two or three sessions in; last night we didn’t even finish a full play-through. This is OK for a first prototype, as even a partial play-through reveals all sorts of stuff that needs to be tinkered with that will change the gameplay pretty radically, but as you move closer to a final version, it’s damn hard to get in enough play hours to really put a design through its paces.

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Linguistic drift

When it comes time to drink to an occasion, my mother is prone to utter “Slainte!”, an Irish toast she acquired from her New York Irish upbringing. Like all Irish words, “slainte” is not pronounced the way it’s spelled; it’s pronounced, roughly, “slahn-chyuh”. My mother, however, tends to say “shlanta”; that is, she pronounces an Irish word such that it sounds like a Yiddish word. If that doesn’t say something about the metaphysical state of being a New Yorker, I don’t know what does.

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The Examined Life: Pandora’s Box

On an ordinary day, I get done all my daily chores and make a reasonable amount of progress on the current task (or tasks) I have in front of me. On an exceptional day, however, brimming with gumption, I tear through all my pressing work and have some extra time and energy to apply to the backlog. This can be a problem.

I have an ongoing issue with accumulating unfinished projects. Some people have a surfeit of good ideas. I have a surfeit of good ideas with accompanying 1-to-3-page treatments. I also have a little problem with scale; I tend to inflate a clever idea into a clever idea for a grand project. I’m trying to work on actualizing ideas at a scale where they might be doable; it still leaves me with the problem of generating ideas, working on them until I’ve written out the initial impulse, and then setting them aside to get back to more pressing tasks.

Most days, these projects in cold storage don’t bother me, as I don’t have to think about them. I note a piece of paper, or an object attached to a project, and maybe think in passing, “I should get back to that; that was cool.” But I have other fish to fry, and so the epic backlog just sits like a vague malaise over me.

When I actually have the time to pay attention, however, it starts to unpack, and I begin to understand the implications of seeing a project through to completion, with all the subordinate tasks (some extremely trying), all the unknowns, all the iterations. And usually, several unpack at once in my head. (Prioritization is also a problem.)

This is intimidating. Often, I wind up cutting the workday short with psychic anaesthetic in an attempt to avoid the reality of all the crap I told myself I’d do.

Originally published on LiveJournal
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Alternate Alchemies

I’ve just been reading an article on alchemy which suggests that the Arab alchemists’ development of mineral acids — that is, acids stronger than the vinegar derivatives which were their predecessors — was far more valuable to civilization than if they had succeeded in transmuting base metals to gold.

It made me imagine an alternate world where alchemists did indeed learn the secret of transmutation, and metals are thus completely fungible, but where the strongest acids possible are highly concentrated solutions of acetic acid.

On the one hand, many technological applications would be eased — there would never be shortages of metals — and if transmutation could be applied to finished objects one could fabricate in a soft metal and then transmute to a hard one. On the other, chemical fertilizers and explosives would be impossible. No batteries, and some plastic would be impossible. Come to think of it, certain metals — aluminum, for example — might be unavailable; sure, they could be achieved through transmutation, but if the alchemists don’t know that a metal exists, they may never figure out how to make it.

It seems like an interesting way to kick alternate-historical industry in the rear right up to the beginning of the industrial age, at which point you’re screwed.

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The Examined Life: Psychic Anaesthetic

There is a particular pernicious form of procrastination to which I am occasionally vulnerable, especially when I’m feeling anxious; I call it psychic anaesthetic. I channel surf. I play video games I’ve already mastered. I reread books. I read blogs.

These activities all have in common that they occupy my brain without stimulating it, which distinguishes them from regular procrastination, or constructive procrastination. Playing a new game would be too mentally taxing for this application; so would taking a book off the to-read stack. I learn nothing by playing Civilization II through 1000 BC for the umpteenth time, but it keeps me too busy to obsess about whatever may be troubling me (usually, these days, a task on my list that I don’t feel up to tackling).

This can create a vicious circle for me; psychic anaesthetic is toxic to gumption, and I often use psychic anaesthetic to escape the anxiety of not having the gumption to do something. I’ve lost entire days that way, doing something useful for a little while until I hit a bump, then falling into some anaesthetic activity for a bit until the fretting subsides.

Originally published on LiveJournal