Oh Captain Lou, My Captain Lou!

Captain Lou Albano died today at age 76. I'm pretty sad about this. I don't usually care about celeb deaths, but I liked the Cap'n when he was a wrestler when I was growing up, and I watched the Super Mario Bros. Super Show religiously when it was on. I watched a few episodes of Hulk Hogan's Rock 'n' Wrestling when I was a kid too, and he was there as well.



Unfortunately I can't find an embeddable version of Cyndi Lauper's "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" video, because he played Cyndi Lauper's Dad in that video.

This is a tribute to Captain Lou Albano, one kickass dude! We'll miss you!

Videos below the break.

















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Men Working!

I'm busy cookin something up!






Bwahahahaha!

Remember, if something in the kitchen either smells AWESOME or BURNT, it's probably a man doing all the work. wink wink nudge nudge

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Cajun-Orange Tilapia and Greens! Decadent! DELICIOUS! Healthy??!

This was posted over at my fiancee's blog. Keep in mind that she wasn't in the kitchen for this recipe, so on her blog, she has some mild inaccuracies. :)

She didn't post the actual recipe though, just what she knew of it.

I will provide prices for each ingredient, but they're guesstimates. Your prices may vary!

Cajun-Orange Tilapia and Greens

Ingredients:

1 bag frozen boneless, skinless tilapia fillets (should be 8 or 9 fillets): approx $5
1 bag frozen mustard greens: $2
2 stalks of celery: 30 cents?
half a handful of pre-shredded carrots: another 30 cents
1 naval orange: $? (I buy them in 10 lb. bags.)
4 tbsp olive oil: $?
Tony Cacherie's cajun seasoning: 1-2 cents

So this is approximately a 10 dollar meal that can make 8 or 9 servings for those that aren't as hungry, or it can make 3-4 servings for those that are very hungry like me. I ended up eating 3 pieces of this fish and the greens that go with each piece. It was just that delicious.

Cooking Implements

1 9x13 dark cake pan lined with aluminum foil and another sheet of aluminum foil
1 serving spoon
1 mandolin slicer
1 bowl
Something to toss greens with (a second spoon will do usually)

Prep:

Thaw the fish if you want a shorter cooking time. Overnight in the fridge the day before works just fine, as does about 40 minutes in a sink of cold water. You can leave them in the bag they came in for this step.

Only prep two items and preheat the oven.

Preheat your oven to 375 if it's gas or 400 if it's electric.

Cut the white end of the celery stalks off.
Take a mandolin slicer (on thin setting), MAKE SURE YOU ARE CAREFUL FOR GOD'S SAKE!
Hold the celery by the leafy bits, one stalk at a time.
Slice the celery with the mandolin slicer, you should not even come near your fingers or hands and it only takes a few seconds to get 40 slices off a piece of celery (thin setting). I cannot stress enough to pay attention. Mandolin slicers are dangerous. VERY dangerous. Do not let your kids do this step. You cannot use the guard with celery, that's why we're grasping by the leafy bit of the celery. you want to stop slicing before you get to the leaves (you don't want them in the meal, they're too bitter). If you cut yourself on the slicer, I'm not responsible. I'm just telling you it makes nice, even, and thin slices of celery.
Do this to both celery stalks.

Slice one end off of your orange and do this over a bowl:
Use the mandolin slicer and it's guard (so you don't cut yourself) and slice off 1 slice of orange for each fillet you have. Some juice will collect in the bowl with the slices. Put what's left of the orange in the bowl too with the slices, you'll be using it in a bit.

Process (cooks everything at once):

Line the cake pan with some foil so that it raises up the sides. This will keep your pan clean as long as you don't break the foil. Make sure you put the dull sides of the foil on the outsides. so you want the shiny side facing up out of the pan and facing down from the foil "lid". This will help everything cook faster.

Brush or roll olive oil on the bottom only of the foil, use about 1 tbsp

Line the bottom of the pan with a solid layer of mustard greens, I just put them in frozen to help steam cook the rest of the food.
Sprinkle about a handful of your pre-shredded carrot on the mustard greens.
Dump the celery on top of the greens too.

Drizzle the remaining 3 tbsp of olive oil on top of the greens.

Set aside the orange slices and squeeze the juice from the end of the orange into the bowl. Take out any seeds, you don't want them in the meal. pour the orange juice over the veggies in the pan.

Sprinkle some of the cajun seasoning over the greens. Use a decent amount but don't over-do it. You don't want it super spicy, you just want the seasonings to blend with the orange.
Toss the veggies with the oil and orange and spices. Just get a light coat on everything and get all the veggies mixed together. Be careful not to tear the foil.

Place the tilapia fillets on top of the greens mixture. do not let them overlap if you can avoid it, but if you do have to overlap, overlap the thinner side of the fillets. They'll cook up fine, we just want room for the orange slices.

Dust the tilapia fillets with some cajun seasoning.
Place an orange slice on top of each fillet, even if you have to overlap them.

Now just take your other piece of foil and lay it over the cake pan. Make sure you SEAL IT TIGHT. we don't want any steam escaping.

Now just place it in the oven for about 30-40 minutes. I would say if it's electric try 30-35 and if it's gas go for 40. This is for thawed fish. If you put the fish in frozen then up the time by 10 minutes for electric and 15 for gas. (time difference is due to the temperature difference)

Be careful when you open it after you get it out of the oven. There's a hellacious amount of steam in the pan.

Because the fish is steamed mostly and not really baked, it shouldn't get all fishy tasting. Steaming fish in the oven tends to leave the meat perfectly cooked, even if you leave it in for a long time. That's provided you don't let the fish touch either the foil or the pan, that's why it's layered between greens and an orange slice.

Throw away all the orange slices, they're ruined now anyway. 1 portion for a not-so-hungry person would be 1 piece of fish and the veggies it's directly sitting on. This would be good if you have anything else that you're feeding a party or something. Otherwise, if you're hungry or just love the taste of this meal, take 2 or 3 pieces of fish. Go ahead, I won't tell. :)

Drizzle some of the juice left in the pan over the fish and greens. This will make everything taste even better. :) It's really a low-fat, high vitamin and mineral content is in the "sauce", so it's VERY healthy and puts back some of the vitamins and minerals that cooking drew out of the veggies. That and the orange/cajun spicyness of the "sauce" is simply to die for. Oh man, I'm droolin'. I say sauce in quotes because it's way too thin to be a real sauce.

Throw away the foil and your pan should still be clean if you didn't rip the foil at all. :)



Cook's Notes:

It took me a total of 10 minutes to prep everything and get it all together in the pan. So your total cook time is around an hour.

Since there's very little fat in this meal, it doesn't hurt to eat more. Plus it's full of delicious veggies (thanks to the orange juice) and the mustard greens have tons of vitamins and fiber in them. Also the "sauce" will have good amounts of the omega type amino acids from the fish and lots of vitamin C since it's based around orange juice.

This dish was old-school french-cajun inspired. I thought up this recipe myself. I will make this again soon and take pictures of the process. Then I will add them to this post and make a new post saying it's been changed. :)

This dish is amazing over a thin layer of white rice, especially if you drizzle the "sauce" over everything and it seeps into the rice.

Edit:
Oh yeah, rinse your celery before you slice it. The carrots in a bag are pre-rinsed luckily.
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To all my mac using homies out there:

Hey everyone!

I'm a PC user, but I also love Macs. I will always love both Macs and PCs but I will always USE PCs. So this is not an attacking article. I want my Mac using/loving friends out there to be safe.

I know that all my mac using friends out there are not really aware of the security flaws in their operating system. I've always known that macs were particularly vulnerable, which is why when I worked tech support for a college that will remain nameless, I insisted that they put their mac machines on a seperate network that had no real internet access. Viruses and malware for macs were nearly non-existant in those days, but there were a few legacy viruses still accessible, and they did have a couple of older macs in the lab.

Unfortunately, especially thanks to those insipid Mac vs. PC ads, Mac users think that their computers are perfectly safe and thus won't download anti-virus software designed for the Mac. This is a horrible idea based on a fallacy, and I say shame on Apple. Shame on you Apple!

I'm not the only one that knows these things though. Please go to this article at ChannelWeb, it really impresses the absolute gravity of the situation. Read the top 10 myths about Mac security and please, please take whatever steps are available to you to protect yourself. Don't let your false sense of security lead to your system and personal information being compromised.



It's time to start thinking like a PC user. Viruses and malware for the Mac are on an exponential rise. Get with a PC friend and ask them what THEY do to protect themselves. Or ask me. I'm something of a security expert (self-proclaimed of course, it's why I own a BlackBerry Storm and not an iPhone).

I really just want you all to be safe, and you aren't.

Here are some relevant links: Keep in mind that Mac's anti-virus solutions are not as robust as PC ones and typically aren't supported as prolifically and rapidly (yet). If there are changes in the Mac virus world, as there will undoubtedly be, you won't have as quick a response as a PC user does. Just be extra careful about where you go and what you open.

I am LOATHE to suggest a Symantec product. They're buggy, supremely SUPREMELY invasive and they tend to take most of the control of your PC away from you while providing sub-par virus protection. But they're one of the few with a decent Mac AV software. They're better than McAfee by far, but nowhere near as good as some of the giants like Kaspersky. Kaspersky, as far as I can tell, doesn't have a Mac anti-virus yet. OR I just can't find it.

Norton for Macs

Here's a free one, but from what i've read, it doesn't do cross-platform viruses. Yes, you can catch certain viruses from your PC friends. They're nasty little buggers that adapt to the OS they're on.

PC Tools' iAntiVirus



Here's the most important truth about Mac malware/viruses. You don't have many because you were never the target before. As someone who knows the virus creator culture, there was never a point because there were so few Macs out there, why waste the time.

Macs have double digit market share for the first time since the 1980's. NOW there's a reason. NOW they're coming to get you. And they're doing it faster than Mac can keep up. Just please keep that in mind. It's not that you were ever immune. Mac has more security holes than there are pixels in the sky. It's just that they've never been exploited.
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The Retro side of Pengo

I adore a lot of retro games. My very first "game system" was our Tandy 1000 computer (I missed out on the C64 sadly). On this I played a sort of side-scrolling shooter (I haven't re-found this one yet, but it had a top down view and a side view at the same time and you blew up trucks and planes and stuff) and a couple of games that my grandfather programmed straight in assembly code. He was an engineer and could write directly in assembly, so they ran very fast, even back then, but that's a story for a different time.

Some time after that I received a NES from my dad for one of my birthdays or christmas or something. I think I had just turned 8 and they were still relatively new. I played the hell out of my Mario/Duck Hunt cartridge and I wore out my Legend of Zelda cart (the shiny gold one, I wore the gold right off of it in places). Around this time I had a mini-tape recorder and me and a friend of mine would record game music off our tv's and take it to school with us.

This started my addiction to video game music. At my lowest point, I borrowed my friend's copy of Taboo: The Sixth Sense, a tarot based NES game (which was HORRID) and recorded music from it because frankly, while the music, the graphics, and the game were all horrible, the music COULD be a little catchy and I had tons of tapes. Mostly my friend and I laughed and laughed and laughed at the horrible, horrible grammar in the game.

So eventually I moved on to a Sega Genesis that I bought half of, my dad bought the other half, just because I wanted it so badly. This is where I really started playing games and letting the character sit there just to hear the music. Sonic the Hedgehog, that came with the Genesis, had very good music at the time. Genesis had a much better music chip than the NES did, being 16 bit and all, but the real kicker was when one of my friends let me borrow his SNES in exchange for my Genesis (which we ended up doing a lot after that). At this point I got to play Final Fantasy II, which as we all know is really FF 4 but named 2 because of the transfer over to us poor RPG-less Americans.

All in all, I've been a real freak for old school chip-based music, or chiptunes if you would rather.

My blog-buddy EV over at The Forgotten Gamer has posted a couple of things about game music, go read his posts. But I have something he doesn't! HAH! Take that EV! In yo' face... or something.

I have the Videogame Music Preservation Foundation in my speed-dial... I mean favorites list.

So today I was playing the new Bionic Commando game again, just for the nostalgic feeling that the music gives me, since Bionic Commando's music is awesome... and I got SO nostalgic that I went over to the VGMPF and loaded up Bionic Commando. You can also listen along here. Just click on track 6 and let it play. It's arguably one of the best chiptunes on any NES game. Fun Fact about Bionic Commando. In Japan it's called Top Secret: Hitler's Revival and has swastikas and nazis and you get to blow up zombie-Hitler's head.

So then I started reminiscing about all the games I used to play, and one stuck out in my mind. It was a little known game for the PC, dos-based of course, called Master of Magic. This was a strategy title in the vein of Civilization and it was amazing, if mostly unheard-of at the time.

It was a swords and sorcery type of strategy game. You are a wizard who knows different amounts of the 5 types of magic (you got to customize if you wanted) and you are leader of one of like 10 races of people, all with their own unit types and strengths/weaknesses. It was an incredibly deep game with many different strategies and a couple of different ways to win. There were some game-breakingly unbalanced racial units (paladins with flight/invisibility cast on them) and some horrendously powerful magical units you could summon (Great Drakes) that let you stomp all over everyone else. All in all though, it was terribly fun and definitely worth all of the trouble it took me to configure my autoexec.bat and config.sys in just such a way as to open up 600ish kilobytes of memory out of 640 and still have my soundblaster working. And I did it too. I was a DOS God, lol.

If I remember correctly it was nearly 20 1.44MB floppies to install. It took forever. I didn't get my hands on the CD version sadly. Be careful, there is a tiny bit of nudity in this game. The witch-doctor looking female wizard is topless. I don't know how they got away with that back in the day.

You can play this game for free now. It's Abandonware, which means the company has given up the rights to it to the public domain. You can find it here on Abandonia along with a solid review of it, and it plays on DOSbox, which is a DOS emulator for windows which you can find here in 16 different languages if you are into that sort of thing. Remember kiddies, SoundBlaster has better sound effects and AdLib has better music (though not much better). But the music in this game was pretty good. At this point I had stopped recording music on my tape player because I used it into oblivion. That's right, I used my little Radioshack mini-tape player so much it died.

So I ended up thinking about what other nostalgic games had good music. I remembered a little game called Flashback (also on Abandonia), by the same company that made a little gem called Out of This World. I remember the intro music to this day, and it's really a very interesting little intro if you take into account the era the game was in:



Oddly enough, this game doesn't have much music in it. Only during the animated cutscenes is there any music. The game just has ambient sound in it. It's punishingly difficult, but masterable, just like Out of This World before it.

For fairness' sake:



Out of This World, called Another World everywhere but the U.S., had a sequel on the Sega CD (and other platforms if I remember right) and was just as brutal, but more action oriented than platform oriented, again if memory serves. They have re-released Another World in glorious high resolution here.

I ended up acquiring a Sega CD from a friend of mine after staying the night at his place. His parents had bought it for him, not realizing it wouldn't hook up to his new style Sega Genesis. It hooked up to mine though, so he just let me have it. The Sega CD was my video game platform for years later, through great games like Shining Force CD and one of the penultimate games of the system, Lunar: The Silver Star Story. Lunar was remade on the Playstation in a much better version, but the one on Sega CD was the one that I played over and over and over. It was a lot more difficult too. I also played one of the best rail-shooters of all time, Silpheed.



An interesting little piece of info on this next one. There's a dude that goes "They got the carrier!", but in the sound test you can hear the full voice file and he says "Shit! They got the carrier!" but they edited it in the game by cropping the audio file instead of removing the file completely from the cd.



(Really I think it's just an awesome all around SHMUP [Shoot-em Up] that got less credit than it deserved. It had cool music too, sorta...) Silpheed is BLISTERINGLY difficult.

Note that I played PC games just as much, if not more, than my console games.

So that's just a few of my Retro Credentials for ya. I've got more than I can even list really without taking up hours and hours of your reading time, so I'm going to leave it there. Go check out DOSBox and Abandonia and get your retro-fix like I'm about to do. :)

Edit: I almost forgot. One of the greatest space-simulation games ever is one I played a lot. Frontier: Elite II. Sadly this one is not abandonware yet. It's sequel, Frontier: First Encounters IS however, so go grab that one. It's even bigger and has some of the best graphics of it's day, considering it's target PC's were 386 models. Make sure you find the patch for it though, it's INFESTED with bugs.

Edit:

Frontier: First Encounters is not abandonware, it's shareware put out by the original designer.
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Get to da Choppah!!!!!!!

Blogging is hard for me.

"But Pengo, Why Is Blogging Hard For You?!"

I'm glad you asked dear reader.

I have a little dysfunction called Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Don't get me wrong, I try to never use it as a crutch or an excuse. I was not even diagnosed with it until I was in the US Navy at 19 years old. It prevented me from actually finishing Nuclear Power School. (yeah, I'm pretty samrt... heh)

It is also the reason I was discharged from the Navy. You can't be ADHD in the Navy without being medicated, but you cannot take the medications for it without violating their drug abuse policies since it's a controlled substance. So I was caught in a Catch-22 and had to be dismissed from duty.

Anyway! I have done a lot of research on the subject because it is very interesting to me and I like self-introspection anyway. It turns out I have a subset of ADHD (of which there are 6 different ones) called Hyperfocus.

Sorry, I need to say this: ADHD and ADD are not diseases. They are chemical imbalances in the brain that lead to attention problems. These manifest themselves in lots of different ways, but it is not a learning disability nor is it just a static problem like a ton of people seem to think it is. The brain is constantly changing and through that, a single person's ADHD can change as well. This is all based on new research that I've read up on, as is everything I'm going to say in this post.

Ok, back to Hyperfocus. I am part of the subset of ADHD that causes a lack of dopamine to be received in the front part of the brain. This causes me to be unable to rapidly switch my focus from one thing to another. This also causes me to be unable to do things that need to be done if they're not fun, because my brain will become absorbed in something fun and not be able to shift gears as it were. All because of a little missing dopamine.

The other problem with this is that when I am FORCED to shift gears, my brain gets very very angry and aggressive. This is a serious problem, but I literally have no control over it. Unfortunately, My Fiancee is typically the recipient of this outburst. It's not like I want to get mad. It's that my brain is trying to not shift. Think of a manual transmission in a car. You push on the clutch to make the gears shift nice and smoothly. Well, my brain shifts without the clutch. There's a grinding of gears and a horrid noise and the car can lose power or the transmission can go out. All of this leads to HULK SMASH levels of rage, just from being pulled out of whatever I am doing at the time.

God love her, she puts up with me and I'll never know why. I can get seriously mean, but really I don't even know I'm doing it until after it's over.

So I'm faced with a conundrum now. My best friend at work, J, has ADHD too. He recently started taking medication for it. His problems are nearly all gone now, just from some speed. So it sounds intriguing to me.

But there's a problem with this scenario. I will not EVER take that kind of drug for my brain. Here's why: All medicines, including speed, which are proven to increase the receptiveness of dopamine in the front lobes, have been proven to build up toxicity every time you take them. They literally end up poisoning your brain. Studies are showing that Ritalin, the most common ADHD medication, is causing children to lose touch with reality and become paranoid, delusional, Schizo, etc. All because of the toxicity levels that slowly build up. They can literally become different people, and since the toxins never leave the brain, they can become permanently Effed Up.

Today, I was emailing my mother as I do quite often, and she revealed that she now knows she's a Hyperfocuser as well. So we're going to support each other through this. But she found something interesting. VERY interesting.

A new study has shown that limiting the food intake of pre-down's syndrome rats (This is important because it's a lack of dopamine in the frontal lobes, just like ADHD) is allowing their brains to actually absorb more dopamine. So now I'm going to have to figure out how to limit my calorie intake. She's going to be doing this as well. It seems this either will or won't work, but maybe I'll lose some of this weight I've been meaning to lose anyway.

Luckily this can coincide with my gradual shift to a more vegetarian style of eating. I just wish meat wasn't so delicious. Oh wait, no I don't.

So back to the topic at hand:

I'm willing to help any of my readers or anyone who just happens across my blog learn more about ADHD, especially if they're suffering from it. I will also start posting my calorie limitation plan as soon as i can figure out how to do it. I think i'm going to have to start by getting a food scale. That should be fun. sigh.

Anyway, I want to formally tell the little woman in my life that I love her and I'm sorry for the grinding gears when I need to stop and do something else, and that I hope she tries to take it less personally.

Thanks for sitting through my randomness. This is actually quite firm control over the tangents my brain tries to go on. So you can imagine what it's like when I don't control it. YIKES!

Pengo Out!

EDIT: OMG! I totally spaced out and forgot to say why blogging really is hard. I tend to focus on other stuff, so when my brain gets a blog-post-worthy thought, it's usually crumpled up and tossed aside. So I have a pile of wadded-paper blog post ideas in my brain, but I'm not gonna sort through 'em. So it's hard for me to stop and sit down and write out my thoughts. Thanks a LOT ADHD. Jeez.

EDIT 2: Holy crap! Wall of text anyone?! HEY! WAKE UP!
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Games

Sometimes I wish I could get paid to review games. There's something about the art behind a game that really pulls at my core being. That's why, when I see a game that has a lot of artistic value, I tend to almost lust for it.

Back in 2002 or 2003, I forget which, I met a little game called World of Warcraft. I was one of the lucky few that got to participate in their Friends and Family Alpha program so I helped the developers by finding bugs and trying to break their game apart. I was so smitten with it's artistic style that I played it all the way up until earlier this year. I shelled money out to Blizzard Entertainment, 15 bucks a month, for years.

I don't regret it one bit.

I DO however, regret the time I spent basically doing nothing in the game. But that's not what this post is about. This post is about the artistic value of games.

I have happened upon a trailer that has drawn my attention. Games come and games go. The artistry behind a game loses it's value over time, and this will happen to most games. Some games, however, stand up against time and prove that artistry can carry a game into old age. This game I've stumbled upon looks to be a hot little title and it's artistic values all seem to be in the right places. It's possible, that if it is executed properly, that this could be a piece of art that stands the test of time.

This game is Muramasa: The Demon Blade for the Wii. (Luckily, I own a Wii)

This is a link to their site where the trailer is:



This game looks like a traditional side-scrolling slash-em-up but done in a very unique style and with a very strong art stylization. There are 2 other videos at their site that show off some gameplay versus regular enemies and versus a boss monster.

Not only does this game have a very strong sense of style, it looks like it has the deep visceral type of action that I absolutely love in my video games. It's one of the reasons I'm a huge fan of Prototype. The sheer ability to overpower opponents is very attractive to me and to a lot of other gamers. It's one of the reasons we try to figure out the best combos and play games that let us upgrade our characters and their gear. We have a deep seated need to obliterate the competition. Muramasa looks like it definitely feeds this need that gamers have.

Any game that allows you to do a combo on a boss for over 250 hits (check out the boss video) really deserves a look just for that.

I cannot wait to get my hands on this game. I only wish that I was a game reviewer so that I could get an early copy to test and rate.

Expect a review on it whenever I can get in touch with it.

Reviews on games I have currently are coming soon.
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Man Tips!

How to keep your woman from asking that you comment on her blog ever again!

Step 1: find a post of hers you want to sully

Step 2: Post a comment

Step 3: Go and pester her until she responds to your comment

Step 4: Reply to her response.

Step 5: GOTO 3

When she's sick of it, she'll let you know. lol. Stink it up really bad.

Example:

http://www.ordinaryandawesome.com/2009/08/names-names-names.html

And there you have it. Easy to cook, easy to eat. Gusteau's makes Chinese food... Chineasy!

Oh man, I messed up my quote.
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Some return huh? + House of Wax

So yeah, I suppose I didn't return right away. Moving sucks!



Anyway... AWAY WE GO!

So I've watched two totally horrid movies recently, and I decided to do a Crappy Movies Galore post on House of Wax, starring Dean and Tristan from The Gilmore Girls, Kim Bauer from 24, Zack Fischer from Boston Public, a Token Black Guy, and Haris Pilton... Flaris Jilton... some stupid slut.

Partial summary from IMDB:

"Six friends are on their way to a football game. They decide to camp out for the night and continue driving the next day. The next day the friends find that their having car troubles, so two of the friends accept a strangers ride into a small town named Ambrose. The main attraction in Ambrose is the House of Wax. Except something is not right in this town the wax figures are so realistic and the whole town is deserted- except for two murderous twin brothers. The six friends must fight to survive and escape from being the next exhibits in the House of Wax." link

What a freaking snore-fest, at least for the first 3/4 of the movie or so. Hairy Pits-ton shows exactly why she's not an actress. After watching her in this horrible piece of crap I'm glad she just parties and keeps her damn trap shut.

----------------------------

The movie starts out with very little backstory on our heroes, as they reveal it throughout the film. It starts nice and slowly, setting up why exactly 6 teens would be out in the middle of nowhere (wow, a football game, how original)

Anyway, the entire movie was a waste of time. There's a little bit of gore, one genuinely creepy stairway and that's about it. I'm going to post some pictures with some blurbs, but I can't see how I can ever get my time back that I wasted on this movie.

If you suffer from vertigo, you might not want to watch this movie. The director used WAY too many sweeping overhead shots.

Watch for deadpan lines with no acting from the skanky blonde, they're dangerous.

I'm trying to not spoil any death scenes or any of the true gore, though I would have to say there isn't much. Note that there's WAY more shit going on in this movie than I'm showing with these few pics.

We now join our 6 teens, out in the middle of nowhere on their way to an undetermined "football game". They decide to take a shortcut and then camp out. Paris acts like a slut... shocker, I know.

Foreshadowing mode: on.



"Oh look honey, they've got free children! Let's pick one up"



"HEY! Elton John Says No Flash Photography!"



"Oh GOD Paris! Is that your acting I smell?"



"Oh crap, is Paris acting again?!



"I'm leaving you for the hick..."



"Hey, how many of you hicks are there in this hick town?"

"Like two... hundred! Two hundred! Yeah, that's it!"

This sign is shown several times throughout the movie, because they wanted to leave reminders for Paris Hilton's fans about the name of the movie. Seriously, if you're dumb enough to pay theater prices to see a movie with Paris Hilton in it, then you NEED the reminder.



"What's this place called again?!"

Our intrepid bf/gf team are exploring the "house of wax" which is LITERAL and there's a lot of creepy wax stuff in there, including a wax doggie.



"I'm not wax you jerk! ARF!"

Dean thinks it's all a huge joke.



"Duuuurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!"

The girl figures out this guy's been stalking them! Oh noes!



"You gonna git it li'l lady!"

Panoramic view = fail



So... lonely! So lonely! So lonely and feeling alone!


Dean might just be the first to go:



"Man, braces sure have gotten complicated..."

Yet another horrid camera angle.



"Vertigo chase scene! *Blarf*"

The girl is captured and held hostage in a basement. She's trying to signal her brother and fails.



"Here little finger! Snip, snip! Time to go fishing!"

Here is the creepy stairwell.



"Agh! You tripped me!"

Token Black Guy and Blonde Bimbo are next up on the chopping block, after a clothes-on non-sex scene.

Token Black Guy dies and the Blond Eggshell runs around trying to escape the killer.



"Here Paris! Catch this spear (sharp pipe)!"

After some crazy chasing and ALMOST tense scenes, our living teens attempt to get away from the Super Nutsio Bros. and end up setting the house made out of wax on FIRE! Now that's what I call Firony.



"Augh! Run! Everything's on FIRE!"

And so the teens make it out THROUGH THE WALL and then end up at the "House of Wax" sign on the house again, just in case you forgot what the movie was named.



"So you say your four friends got killded?"

And so our movie comes to an end with the tiniest twist ending EVER! M. Night Shyamalan would turn over in his grave. What's that you say? He's not dead? Well crap.

Someone give me back this 2 hours of my life please!
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Flee Mortals, for I Have Returned...eth

I'm back, I'm bearded, and I'm bolder than ever.

I'll be posting a new post of postyness soon. Keep POSTED. HAH!

/FacePalm

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The Responsibility Project and the link with the FTC.

So Liberty Mutual is essentially calling out everyone, not really just bloggers (but bloggers are a huge means to their end), and trying to get people to "do the right thing".

This is drawing interesting parallels with what the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) wants bloggers to do. More on that in a second.

Liberty Mutual wants bloggers to be responsible and do the "right thing" but there is no legal obligation tied to it. People are going to say what they want, and I think that as long as they are true to themselves and speak in their blog the way they speak at home, they are blogging responsibly. If people don't like what they say, they'll go somewhere else. I do NOT think, however, that someone who is blogging and lying about who they are and how they think is being responsible. But that's the problem with the responsibility project: Freedom of Speech will enter it. Everyone has their own view of what is responsible and they will follow that.

Now then, what the FTC is doing DOES have legal obligations put into it. Bloggers are doing a lot of reviews and a lot of give-aways. With reviewing we have to look at it this way. Reviews are a sort of viral advertising. We put out an opinion on a product and then a bunch of people see it and go hmm, i like/dislike/don't care about this product. All this costs the company is the product itself. Now here is where bloggers are getting tripped up and freaking out.

The FTC doesn't care that we got something for free. They have stated this. What they DO want us to do, is report in the review that we received the product for free. This is called "truth in advertising" and it's a legal obligation for all advertisers. All that fine print at the bottom of any ad on tv you see is part of Truth in Advertising and they HAVE to put that info on there.

The FTC just wants bloggers to do the same. So why not do the fine print route? Put something in small text or have some sort of button linking to your fine print. Say something like, "Reviews here was based on a products that were received for free solely for the purposes of reviewing" and make it sound all legal-ese. Something! It really only makes sense.

So following the FTC might fall in line with Liberty Mutual's "Responsibility Project" but they are in no way tied together. But Truth in Advertising is definitely the right thing to do. Every other advertiser has to do it, bloggers should too really. Just don't force us too quickly or some people might stop blogging, and we don't need that.

What we do need, is truth in our reviews though. These companies have to understand that if we must follow the truth in advertising rules, we are going to review products HONESTLY. If we don't like the product, they are going to get some bad press. And at that point, tough shit. Any company needs to understand that they may or may not get bad press from any reviewer, not just a blog reviewer. But they should have the peace of mind that we will have our truth in advertising in place.

So why not put simple small text lines or a button linking to your policy as a reviewer at the end of our reviews? Something to let your readers know that you have standards, good ethics, and are a credible and honest reviewer? What's a couple of more seconds off your day?

It's worth it.

Websites of Interest:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,512457,00.html
http://www.walletblog.com/2009/07/ftc-to-regulate-blog-endorsements/
http://www.responsibilityproject.com/

My fiancee does this now. She has an Ethical Blogger badge linking to her agreement to be an ethical blogger and review policy at the bottom of every review post. She is at:

http://www.reviewsandgiveaways.com/
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The Vegetari-MAN Cookbook: Recipe 1

The Vegetari-MAN Cookbook.

Background: I am bloodtype A-, and A blood types are notorious for needing to be mostly vegetarian. I still ADORE and EAT and ENJOY slaughtered animal flesh, but in an effort to prevent the need for antacids and gastric trouble I am converting myself to vegetarianism at dinner and breakfast. It seems that I can have an ENORMOUS STEAK IN ONE BITE during lunch and be fine, but if I eat meat at dinner or breakfast, I typically end up paying for it (and so does everyone else in a 3 mile radius). However, I am going to up the MANLINESS of vegetarian dishes. My beard demands it, and it is the source of my power, so I am compelled to listen.


The Vegetari-MAN Cookbook: Recipe 1. Cucumber Volcano Sandwiches

What's more MANLY than jumping into an active volcano? NOTHING! However, REAL MEN KNOW NOT TO DIE, so I am going to teach you the next best thing. The only thing these sandwiches are going to kill are your TASTE BUDS through sheer AWESOMENESS.

"Oh look, it's tea time with the Queen!" That is NOT what these cucumber sandwiches are. These are cucumber sandwiches that are AWESOME and MANLY.

Key #1 to keep it MANLY: Do NOT cut off the crusts. Crust-less bread is for kids and women. NO MAN EATS BREAD WITHOUT CRUST.

Key #2 to keep it MANLY: Do NOT use more spice than you can handle. It is NOT manly to offer too many sacrifices to the porcelain gods. Only those without self-control would put themselves in that position.

Key #3 to keep it MANLY: Too many steps make it less MANLY. We are MEN and COOKS, not some little frou-frou chef that has to make a 35 ingredient sauce to put on eggs. LESS STEPS = MORE MANLY. Math never lies.

Recipe:

BREAD

GIANT CUCUMBERS (at least 1.5 inches in girth and/or more than 6 inches long for ease of preperation)

WHIPPED CREAM CHEESE

1 PACKET OF ITALIAN DRESSING MIX OR 1 PACKET OF RANCH DIP MIX

CAYENNE PEPPER

THE BIGGEST KNIFE YOU HAVE AND A CLEAVER WOULD BE BETTER

CUTTING BOARD OR COUNTER TOP

Steps:

1) Peel the GIANT CUCUMBER or don't, it's your choice. I hate the taste of wax, as should all MEN. WAX keeps you from OBLITERATING AND ABSORBING ENERGY FROM YOUR FOOD, so I don't really want that swishing around in my plumbing.

2) Cut the GIANT CUCUMBER in half lengthwise then make slices out of it. I choose to make my slices of GIANT CUCUMBER about half an inch thick. Make them as thick as you want or think they need to be, but if the sandwich doesn't fit in your mouth, it's not a compressible sandwich, so you're fucked. MEN ARE SMART, so keep it edible.

3) Let the GIANT CUCUMBER slices dry on a paper towel and then mix the ITALIAN DRESSING MIX into the WHIPPED CREAM CHEESE.

4) SLATHER both slices of the bread with the ITALIAN WHIPPED CREAM CHEESE for each sandwich.

5) Put as much CAYENNE PEPPER on both sides as you can handle. Remember not to destroy your plumbing.

6) SLAM the GIANT CUCUMBER slices onto the bread and SMASH the sandwich together. Fill the sandwich with the slices. SLAMMING the sandwich makes the cream cheese hold fast to the GIANT CUCUMBER slices.

7) CONSUME YOUR SANDWICH. MASTICATE IT AS MUCH AS YOU WANT THEN DIGEST.

These are the MANLIEST cucumber sandwiches in EXISTENCE. TRY THEM! Put HAM on the sandwiches if you are more of a meat eater. I'm going to do that for lunch one day.

Vegetari-MAN out! /FLEX
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My random journey that brought me to the Vocaloid Fields of Awesome

What the EFF is a Vocaloid you ask?

What's with the language? Jeez.

Anyway: A Vocaloid is essentially a singing synthesizer that was developed in Japan by the Yamaha corporation. Their new version, Vocaloid 2, can actually support voice samples, so you can have a synthesizer that sings with a certain eerie, chilling, soul-less perfection. Sort of like the singing A.I. in Macross Plus (EV, you'll know what I mean, so will any other anime dork).

Warning: This is a LONG post with lots of videos. You should watch them if you can handle it. If you do it will take quite some time.

I'll talk about Vocaloids in more detail in a minute. This is sort of a two part post. The first part is my ABSOLUTELY RANDOM journey that actually brought me to the Fields of Vocaloid-halla.

I was on You're The Man Now Dog dot com as I am often wont to do. I was wondering what the crap the song on THIS page was. (click on it. it's cool and addicting)

So I went to my old friend and mentor YouTube. Wait, YouTube isn't a dude. Damn.

Anyway, I looked up Loituma as that was the only word I had to follow and it turns out Loituma is a Finnish singing group and the song is "Eva's Polka". Everyone just calls the song Loituma though.

Here is the Incredibly Epic Official Video:



Remind you of anything?


Jim Carrey - What is Love - Original Version - For more amazing video clips, click here

And this led me to the techno version:



Which then led me to this little gem of randomness:



I'm a HUGE fan of leeks for some reason, so this piqued my interest (the facial expressions are crazy). The previous video led me to this insanity (thank you YouTube Japan):



At this point I HAD to figure out who this singer was and I noticed (2 videos up) in the comments that it was a Vocaloid named Hatsune Miku. So I went out and looked up what Vocaloid was and learned quite a bit.

I learned that the first truly voiced Vocaloid in the Vocaloid 2 system was Hatsune Miku. (Keep in mind that the Japanese are all about these new "idols" and the vocaloid community has drawn them up and created very intricate backstories for them all that I won't go into here. I'm just going to list the ones that have really impressed me.)

PLEASE keep in mind that these vocaloids are mostly singing in Japanese and in the J-pop style. I will warn when their voice is too sharp or anything. Also they are typically anime styled (except for the english speaking ones for some reason). I will be posting videos with English translations in subtitle when I am able to.

protip: Japanese names are typically last name first then given name.

Hatsune Miku is well voiced and sound quite a bit like a real 16 year old singer. (her avatar is supposedly 16)

Here's a song from her immense portfolio. Many people make many songs with each vocaloid and Miku is the first and most popular. Warning: sharp voice.



After they created Miku, they went on to create Kagamine Rin and Kagamine Len who are a brother and sister duo. They were designed to compliment each other but Len, the brother, tends to compliment all female vocaloids. Also Rin and Len are a parody of Left and Right, which they are supposed to represent (as far as I understand).

Here is a song by Len, and it is one of my favorites. After it I will post the same song sung by a real person so you can compare/contrast. Len has a very robotic-sounding voice, but in this song they also applied some filters over top to make it old-radio crackly sounding.



Human version by Choucho who is a female Japanese singer. This was made after the original song above, so the song is credited to the vocaloid and writer who used it. (these things work out semi-strangely)



So Rin is Len's twin sister and has a fairly haunting voice, even though it can get a little sharp. Most people can't use her synth properly so it's hard to find a good song. This one really struck a chord with me for some reason. Of course the lyrics in English look a little weird, but it's a nice, dark song.



Now we come to two English speaking Vocaloids. Sweet Ann is up first. The vocals are very good if the artist can sync them up properly.



Also speaking English and with the same song is Megurine Luka (Scarborough Fair is a great song). Notice how the art styling on Ann and Luka is different from the Japanese speaking Vocaloids. Again it's hard to find properly synced vocals for her. The problem with Vocaloids is they are programmed syllable by syllable, so you can get some pretty choppy voices out of them if you don't know what you are doing.

Luka is actually a dual-voice Vocaloid. She does both Japanese and English. I will post a second song by her after Scarborough Fair. You might notice some differences in design from her English version to her Japanese version.





Next up is the most recent Vocaloid, as in, released in late June of '09. Her name is Megpoid (strange) and she probably is the most refined of ALL the Vocaloids. Her voice is smooth enough to sound nearly real and her Engrish is very good (not a typo, go to http://www.engrish.com some time.) Anyway, if Megpoid is any indication of where the Vocaloids are going quality-wise I think we're in for a shocker when we finally see the first A.I. singer ever.



Now for one of the couple of other male Vocaloids, I don't like the males much besides Len. This guy is named Gackpoid or Gakupo and he is apparently a samurai. His voice is very good (the samples were recorded from the Japanese singer Gackt, a big star over there) but still isn't quite as high quality as most of the female vocaloids and a tiny bit choppy.



So that's it for my main points about vocaloids. They're an incredibly interesting step in the right direction I think. You can get so much range and perfection out of a synthesized voice. Though they sound a little... soul-less. I don't believe they'll ever take over the music world, but they'll end up with a place in it.

Ok, now for some Vocaloid Randomness. Most of these are either game related or silly. You don't have to listen/watch these if you don't want to :P

Pengo Out!






BEGIN LOITUMA OVERLOAD PROGRAM:

START:

RUN>










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It's A Blu World contest

Everyone should go check out the It's A Blu World contest happening at It's A Blu World. There are several packages to win, which are described in more detail at Game FreakZ. So I'm not going to re-hash that here, go read their post and their blog, it's awesome-sauce.

Just know that there are a lot of really awesome looking packages.

I'm looking to win the Gamer package.

One of the biggest problems with Arkansas is it's lack of variety in food-stuffs. I tried BluFrog (energy drink by this same company) when I went to Wichita, KS recently and I liked it a lot. Lo and behold: they don't sell it here. Go figure.

I'm somewhat of an energy-drink afficionado. Thanks to a recent digestive problem I have problems absorbing Vitamin B in most of it's forms, especially B-12. Energy drinks with their liquid Vit. B help out quite a bit. It's easy to digest it from a liquid for me, but not from food and certainly not from pills.

I'm getting better, but for every year you have a problem with your body you take between 1 and 3 months to heal (depending on who you ask). I'll still have this problem for a while based on that logic.

Anyway, sorry for the rant. Let's just say that I drink a ton of energy drinks and I know which ones are a great combination of energy, taste, and punch (to the chops), and which ones aren't. BluFrog is definitely a good one. Hopefully one day they'll let me do a full official review. :P

Go. Enter. Have fun. It's pretty simple.

I hope I beat out all you suckers though *wink wink*.

Hey Tina at Game FreakZ. I'm totally going to steal your images that you yourself may or may not have swiped. :)




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Info on comment replies

Just as an f.y.i. in case you see some replies of mine inside comment areas and that I don't reply to everyone and are curious.

I will try my best to email everyone that leaves a comment and their email address and at least say thank you if not something more substantial.

I will answer comments with questions that I feel are pertinent in the comment area, and if it's something I want to make a post about, I will do that instead :)

Just wanted to give you all a head's up, in case anyone was like, hey, why does he only answer x or y but not z?
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Hey anyone really who likes stuff from the 80's

Guess what I'm playing!!!



After I do a Let's Play of Prototype I will be doing one of this game. I'm still trying to get all my ducks in a row for doing my let's play series, now I really just need a good microphone/headset. After that: it's on like Donkey Kong.

You can watch in HD quality at youtube, which will be a feature of ALL of my videos.


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Computer differences

I have been asked a question by Rocio, and I am going to answer it here so that maybe everyone can benefit from it.

I was asked whether I would choose a laptop from Dell, HP, or Apple:

I would NEVER choose Apple, and here is why. (keep in mind that I am in no way a PC fanboy, these are just facts I've run across in my tech support work over the years.)

Reason 1: The sad-face.

Apple computers are not troubleshoot-friendly. There is no tech outside of an Apple store that can take an apple that has an error and decode it. The most common error screen that comes up is the sad-face, or the sad-face-and-a-bomb. What the HELL do those mean? I've worked on a ton of Apples, and it can mean any one of dozens of problems. THIS MEANS: that you have to, have to, have to send your laptop or ipod or iphone OFF TO APPLE. this is bad because not only do they have access to your personal data (you are not allowed to open Apple products without voiding your warranty) but it takes WEEKS. When I worked at a major tech support company (think Nerd Crew, only said differently) we sent off 12-14 ipods per week to apple. some of them took 5 weeks to come back, and all they needed was a battery replacement. Not Acceptable.

Reason 2: Cost.

Apple computers are INCREDIBLY overpriced considering how low the specs are. Sure, MacOS is smooth and doesn't take long to load and can run a bunch of crap... So can Windows 7. Apple's nice operating system is no longer king of the roost. Vista was not a good operating system by any means, but 7 is poised to blow Apple's OS out of the water. Especially when you take into account the increased power and the sheer number of graphics cards you can get in a PC. On top of that, Apple computers can run very few games. As a gamer this is a huge detriment. You can also do anything that an Apple can do using a PC if you find the right programs.

In this point is the fact that everything Apple does, and I mean EVERYTHING, is proprietary. The ipod is a great point here. You used to be able to only use them with iTunes, which costs a buck per song. I am an avid supporter of Rhapsody, where you can have an unlimited number of songs to transfer to your portable mp3 player and you can switch them out all you want for only 15 bucks a month. I'd rather pay a 15 dollar monthly fee than a dollar per song. ipods can be hooked up to Rhapsody now too though, so that's less of a problem.

3. Elitism:

Apple computer users buy their machines because they're pretty. They also have a very elitist attitude of "my computer is better than yours" when it clearly isn't. This isn't a fight about who's comp is better though. Just because the computer is a nice white plastic with some clear resin around it, doesn't mean it's actually a better product. I prefer dark colors anyway. Also there are thousands of different looks you can achieve with a PC, especially a desktop. I'll take pictures of my desktop some time. Thing looks like a tank.

Now to move on to HP.

HP used to be only a printer company. What most people have forgotten is the fact that HP actually bought a bankrupt computer manufacturer called Compaq. They then promptly closed the BEST plants Compaq had (not saying much) and left open the crappy ones to start making HP computers. HP computers use low quality components just like Compaq used to. There's a reason Compaq went under. Don't let the quality of HP printers fool you into thinking their computers are good. They simply aren't.

So my choice would end up being Dell. I build my own computers, even laptops, but I do like Dell a lot for two reasons.

Dell uses market standard quality products. This is good and something few computer builders do (especially locally owned ones).

Dell has the best tech support I've ever seen.

I recently purchased a 27" Dell monitor and it had a problem. I called them and 3 days later there was a brand new 27" Dell monitor on my doorstep (it's widescreen of course).

Also their monitors are amazing. From their desktop monitors to their laptop monitors, they are kings of the LCD. My monitor, the Dell Ultrasharp WFP 2709 is brigher and clearer than the 30" Apple cinema display and my monitor only cost around 800 dollars, the cinema display, only 3 inches more screen space, can cost up to 3,000. I'd say that's a big discrepancy when you take into account the fact that Dell's 30" version of my monitor is only 1200.

So for me, someone who has done a lot of tech support and really knows what he's talking about, I would say avoid Apples unless you simply MUST have the sleek look, and go for a beautiful Dell. They come in lots of neat colors and patterns. The one I bought for my fiancee is a very pretty pink with a purple flower-stem pattern. I think it looks better than some plain white MacBook. Bleah.
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M.W.W. Post Windows 7 Edition

So I am now running Windows 7 and I have to say I am VERY impressed.

I'm no big fan of Microsoft, but I think they're on the right track with this one.

The window at the bottom of the screen is the window that pops up when you hover over an "icon group" for lack of a better way to say it.

When you hover over an item in the icon group, all other windows on the screen turn totally transparent except for their borders, so you are able to determine the position of all your windows and decide if you want to bring up the one you are hovering on. It's a really simple idea but SO effective.

Full review on Windows 7 coming soon.

Large size picture is 1920 x 1200 (click on it).



Yes, that's a video of prototype. It's just there for "flavah".
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Testing

This is a test from the desktop gadget for blogger in windows 7.

This is also a test of Windows 7. it's fairly nice so far.

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My love/hate relationship... with Prototype.

Prototype:

Prototype is a relatively poorly reviewed game. This is in large part due to it's dated graphics. However Prototype and I have a very unique relationship. I both love and hate it.

The game is half-ugly. The critics are fairly spot on about this. It looks like an XBox game. Not even XBox 360, just the first one. This is coupled with nigh-indestructible buildings. I say nigh because there are a few types of buildings that are destructible, but they are few and far between.

I have created a video of Prototype's gameplay. This is your only warning: This game is rated M due to gore and language. The gameplay is fairly gory. Besides that, the awesomeness might just melt your eyeballs.



Prototype is a power fantasy. You are all powerful when compared to normal people. you can take a missile or a tank shell to the face and keep on truckin. The thing is, there aren't any moral choices.

The main character is out for revenge, plain and simple. With no memory of his past beyond what he finds out through the game, he simply wants to destroy those responsible for his condition.

The thing about prototype is that the story and the voice acting are actually very good. The story kept me engaged all the way through the game, and the voice acting in most cases made the characters fairly believable.

Despite the dated graphics, the animations are as smooth as silk. Thanks to the graphics engine, though, even dated graphics push my video card pretty hard. I have a Radeon HD 4890 and it struggles to push 30 fps. This seems to be the case no matter what I do with my video settings. I have tried different resolutions besides my monitor's native 1920x1200 and I have tried playing with the shadow quality and texture qualities and nothing has really changed.

Despite the graphics and the repetitiveness of the missions in this open world (Think GTA3: Vice City) the game retains it's fun factor for me. This is due to the sheer power your character has.

I get some sort of primal enjoyment out of causing this level of mayhem.

So without giving you a boring rundown of what scores I gave every section of this game, I'll just skip to the overall.

I give this game 8.5 out of 10 invaders. A great game that keeps sucking me back in, if even just to kill a few military goons.


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First M.W.W. post for me! FEATURING: Prototype

Caution: Full size is in epic 1920x1200 resolution. Bleeding eyes may follow usage.

For my first M.W.W. post I wanted to post a picture of the game I will review in a couple of days. This game is Prototype. It's a next-gen sandbox game. It's ugly as sin compared to other next-gen games, but it's an absolutely awesome power-trip of a game and it kicks ass.

And those claws? Yes, they dismember.

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Bad food make Texan ANGRY!!!

I am the Angry (native) Texan. The Angry Texan hates bad food. The Angry Texan will give you restaurants to avoid. The Angry Texan will calm down for good restaurants.

I have had an awful restaurant experience. I mean really awful. Downright sinister.

I am on a company trip. Our entire crew from three states met to have dinner. First-off my state's (Arkansas) group had to sit at an entirely separate table, and we were not included in all of the fun conversation. But that does not really detract from the eating experience, it's just something that cheesed me off.

We voted on places to go and we ended up going to Toby Keith's "I love this Bar and Grill".



The upside down longhorn head above the entry door on the inside really struck home just how much of an Oklahoma boy Mr Keith must be. Advertising your hatred for a team when a lot of people come up to OK from Texas and might eat in your restaurant is incredibly ballsy.

We waited for our drinks for ten minutes or so. The sweet tea was ok, but not great. Then they forgot everyone's salads, which was ok because the people who ordered them got free dessert. The appetizer, chips with queso, took another 10 minutes finding it's way to our table and they tried to give it to an entirely different table. The queso was quite obviously cheap velveeta with a TON of hot peppers, rotel, and breakfast sausage stirred in. It was pretty awful.

My glass was CONSTANTLY empty. Sort of par for the course at this point. Our waiter was usually nowhere to be found, and later into the meal, disappeared entirely and was replaced with another waiter.

Another 20 minutes go by before we get our meals. I ordered the sirloin and shrimp. a 21 dollar plate. 10 oz sirloin, shrimp, two sides. The shrimp was ok but it was DRENCHED in cayenne pepper. I can handle spice pretty well but the shrimp set my mouth on fire. While the flavor of the shrimp was very good, the heat made it close to inedible. I can only imagine what it does to gentler taste buds.

Now, being a native born Texan and having lived all over the country, I feel that I have a pretty refined sense of what makes a good steak. I HAVE been eating steaks in all shapes and sizes for nearly 30 years. This steak was NOT a good steak. The first problem with the steak was that it was quite obviously soaked in brine to plump it up. They fed me a 6 oz sirloin with 4 oz of solution in it. I know this was done because of a few things.

First off, I ALWAYS order my steak medium. Steak is ruined when it gets to nearly well done and I don't like to risk it. Usually it cooks itself up to a nice medium-well after they plate it, unless the restaurant knows what the hell they're doing and removes the steak early so that it will reach that delicious medium on it's own. This steak was 100% medium-well and still climbing a bit. The steak still appeared to be juicy, though the juices were clear. This is the first sign of a steak soaked in a salt solution to plump it up and make the restaurant a quick buck. Even a well-done steak doesn't have completely clear juice.

Secondly, the steak was INCREDIBLY dry and powdery. The second sign that a steak is soaked in solution is how powdery it is. The meat should not turn to powder in your mouth, it should stay firm and meaty. This combined with how much juice was coming out of it are the most important signs of a solution soaked steak.

The next sign was the super salty flavor of the inside of the meat. The flavors from seasoning should come from the outside of the steak and compliment the steak itself. This salt was a briny salt flavor, like olives.

The steak, while powdery, was also very tough and hard to chew at only medium well. This is the final sign of it being soaked in solution. If you want to plump up a steak, pick a nice, non-salty marinade because the salt tends to ruin the meat if you over-soak it. Add salt later, especially light salt, beacuse it gives you an even more salty flavor while you only have to use less. That will be covered in another blog post though.

The sauteed mushrooms that I ordered as one of my sides were COMPLETELY inedible. They came straight from a can of store brand mushrooms and then were thrown on the griddle for a few minutes. They were not buttery nor were they fresh or delicious. They were ugly, all the same size like canned mushrooms and they tasted like ass and cheap tin can. I really have no better word to describe it. I can take a lot of tastes but these mushrooms were AWFUL. Sauteed mushrooms are not hard to make from fresh mushrooms, and if they had done this, they might have saved the meal, but they didn't. I adore sauteed mushrooms and these LITERALLY made me gag. I could barely swallow them, but I didn't touch another mushroom. They are the worst sauteed mushrooms I've had in my life and that's saying a LOT.

The baked potato was excellent however. It had just the right amount of butter and bacon, and though it was a little short on the cheese (there was only a pinch) it was still baked well and tasty with a salt crust. It was not enough to save the meal however.

I was even MORE outraged at the fact that they put disgusting, watered-down store brand A-1 sauce into actual A-1 sauce bottles. I couldn't even eat the sauce with the steak. The sauce certainly wasn't even strong enough to cover up the brine flavor in the meat, which is something A-1 does with abandon.

The steak came with a free piece of cornbread. The cornbread was some sort of pseudo-tex mex style cornbread with hot peppers blended in. The cornbread itself was good, but the peppers were awful and when I had a bite with peppers in it, it was gross.

I did try one of the desserts. I had a bite of a pie and it was pretty good.

So here are my ratings for Toby Keith's "I love this Bar and Grill".

Service:
3/10

The horribly ballsy decor and the absolute LACK of service make me give this place 3 out of 10 for service. This score was saved by the second waiter who was actually fairly attentive, though my glass ran dry 3 more times.

Food taste:
2/10

Saved by a baked potato and a pie from earning a 0. This isn't how a "steak house" style restaurant should serve meat, even if it's labeled as a bar and grill. I have eaten at hole-in-the-wall dives with better meat than this, and for far cheaper. Briny steak, gag-inducing sauteed mushrooms and bizarre cornbread ruined this meal for me.

Food quality:
1/10

Briny steak should NEVER be served by a steak house with prices over 10 dollars for a 10 oz sirloin. Sirloin just isn't that expensive. Especially when it's really a 6 oz sirloin. Store brand canned mushrooms, velveeta, and A-1 sauce dropped this score as well.

Price:
1/10

The prices at this place are retarded. They charge $17 for a 10 oz sirloin and then don't even deliver where they should. They also charge $23 for a paper thin t-shirt that has ironed on lines from toby keith songs.

Decor:
4/10

Despite the ballsy addition of anti-college-team propaganda, which I don't really care about either way, This place was LITTERED with posters and pictures and PAINTED PORTRAITS of Toby Keith. I realize it's his restaurant: I don't need to fucking stare at him and his enhanced in-jeans package while I eat. Seriously, the ladies at my table were laughing about how retarded his package looked in the PAINTED PORTRAIT of him that was staring at them.

Atmosphere:
5/10

Perhaps the one saving grace: this place was definitely a steak house.

OVERALL:

2 and 2/3 invaders out of goddamn 10.

Toby Keith's "I love this Bar and Grill" fails hardcore as both a steakhouse and as a grill. The bar was ok, but I don't drink. I probably should have taken up drinking before I ate at this hell-hole.

I am full, but WHOLLY UNSATISFIED!

This restaurant is capitalism at it's worst. GREED GREED GREED and no care for the customer. AVOID AT ALL COSTS unless you love shitty steak and horrible service.

I HATE THIS BAR AND GRILL!!!


I am a native Texan, born and raised, but I am currently located (working) in Northwest Arkansas. So, while I might not live in Texas anymore, the Angry Texan still comes out when I eat BAD steak!
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