Daily Archives: February 2, 2010

Another youngster…this one straight outta Connecticut:

My wife calls me a food snob, which in many ways I am. I like plenty of junk food too, but as I’ve gotten older, my tastes have gotten more refined. “Snooty Ham,” is what the wife calls anything but Virginia Ham, and she takes great pleasure in busting my chops.

I’m more of an enthusiast than an elitest but there are some things that I’ve grown so attached to, it is hard a culinary life without them. First up, salt. I’ve traditionally used kosher salt for just about everything but over the past few years have experimented with a bunch of different sea salts, especially fleur de sel.

Then I saw the light: Maldon Salt. 

It has become my favorite finishing salt or table salt, easy to manipulate. The texture is wonderful and the flavor is sharp. Yeah, it is pricey, but well worth trying.

In going through some of correspondence from my Old Man, I found this, the start of a letter he wrote to me when I was 19 and spending the summer visiting my mother’s relatives in Belgium:
 

It is with more than a little glee that I send you these clippings from the several New York papers. It is not often that the good guys get theirs and the bad guys get what’s coming to them but Mr. Vincent would seem to have made the latter portion of that sentence come to pass. I don’t know whether it is the solution that I would have wished for but it ain’ta bad’un. Being required to divest himself of all control of the Yankees, and doing so as publicly as it must be done, must tick in Steinbrenner’s throat and that makes me feel very good indeed. Whether Vincent is aware of it or not, he has done the citizenry a great service which they were powerless to do for themselves.

July 31, 1990

This from the same man who would only consider believing in Hell if only Walter O Malley could burn in it for eternity. Pop hated bullies, which is ironic because he was one himself.

Still, for all that Steinbrenner has contributed to the success of the team–and he has certainly done that–when Fay Vincent punished him in 1990 it was the first glimmer of hope that the Yankees could rebound. At the time, I believed that the Yankees would never be great again until he was gone. That wasn’t the case, of course, though the Dynasty of the ’90s was formed during his second hiatus from the game. It’s hard to imagine a late-bloomer like Bernie Williams being afforded the opportunity to grow during the ’80s.

[Illustration by Lyndon Hayes]

I used to make an effort to get to the theater to see all five Oscar films before the ceremony. Looking back on those years through glasses smudged with the fingerprints of two grabby toddlers, it wasn’t that much of an effort after all. But even if getting to a movie theater these days didn’t involve an absurd symphony of conspirators, bribes and logistics, the Oscar race of 2009 would have marked the end of my quest to watch ’em all.

Ten films to be nominated for Best Picture? I am never one to pine for a golden age of film or ballplayers when they “still told good stories” and “played the right way” but even the most ardent supporter of the current cinema cannot possibly think there are 10 films out there worth nominating for best picture. Can they?

Well, here, I have to leave a wide berth to stand corrected. I haven’t seen one critically acclaimed film in a theater this year and am just getting into the 2009 portion of the Netflix queue, so maybe there are 10 worthy choices out there. But whenever I find there is a great film that is shut out, it’s rarely because it got squeezed by 5 other great ones – it’s because there is some idiotic choice in there. I recently devoured Pictures at a Revolution by Mark Harris. If a truly worthy film gets denied, it’s usually by a “Dr. Dolittle.”

I know we often discuss the futility of debating the MVP and Cy Young awards. The criteria are opaque and the judges are inaccessible. Yet the MVP award is a freshly Windexed pane and the sportswriters are your first cousins compared to Oscar. If debating the MVP is futile, debating the Oscars is masochistic.

But in the same way that Jeter’s 1999 and 2006 MVP robberies will always stick in my craw, Gladiator felling Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon or (insert your big disappointment here) will always feel like a typo in the history book. I want history to reflect – and validate I guess – my interpretation of reality. And when there is some cognitive chasm, I tend to wail about it. So here come this year’s nominations, anything to wail about?