Pizzeria Bianco

Here's a restaurant review I also posted on Yelp.

There will of course be some negative reviews here, for the same reason that Little Ceasars will get some five star reviews...people are ridiculous.
This restaurant is amazing. Our wait was a little under three hours long on a Thursday evening. We arrived at six, and received our first pizzas just after nine. Three of us ordered six pizzas and finished five.
You will not see any crusts piling up on the tables, because they are a perfectly charred, yet chewy, and good enough to be on the menus by themselves. Even licking my fork was more satisfying than some other restaurant meals I've had. My napkin appeared unused because I would rather have licked my own face than lose some of that deliciousness to a wipe.
My first pizza was, of course, the Margherita, and the second was the Biancoverde, with ricotta and arugala, and was quite rich.
All in all, this is definitely in the top two pizza places I've ever been to, with Apizza Scholls taking points as my amazing local joint in Portland. If you want to feed a bunch of kids some pizza after a little league game, this is not the place for you. But if you want a true pizza experience that will make you want to save a slice to put in your pillowcase so you will have sweet pizza dreams, then this is the place.

Don't Forget to Bring a Swimsuit

It's not quite Towelie from South Park (Don't forget to bring a towel!), but it's good advice. Let me set up a scenario. You've got a wedding in Miami Beach. You go. It's a short trip, so you try not to get adjusted to East coast time, opting instead for Miami Beach time, going to bed at five or six in the morning, and sleeping in to noon or one in the afternoon. Let's suppose you get back to your hotel after the Sunday evening wedding, maybe around eleven. You find a piece of paper from the Miami Beach public works department telling you that the water will be turned off Monday from 11-3. You decide to go to bed a little after one, which still won't mess with your time zones for when you go back to the West coast. The next morning you wake up just after ten, slowly getting ready for your seven hours of plane rides back to the Northwest. At 10:30 you go to step into the shower to find that the public works department has accidentally broken the water line as they were exposing it for the work to be done, and now you're without running water. Maybe you're right next door to a corner market, and can buy some bottled water for a sponge bath in your hotel. Better yet, you throw on the board shorts and hike across the road, and walk down the boardwalk a few blocks until you find one of the outdoor beach showers. You could stand there scrubbing like a homeless person in the street. How nice. Then the water you buy at the corner market is just the finishing touch back in the hotel. Success.

Now suppose you board the plane, and find that at least a couple of people in the immediate vicinity did not make the same effort. Imagine sitting in that vicinity for five hours and twenty minutes to San Francisco. Hopefully the last leg to the NW will be better.

That was Monday.

I Want to Kick Down a Door

I want to kick down a door so bad I can hardly stand it. It's only been the last few days that I've been perseverating on this, but I want to do it. I'm not angry. I'm not in a destructive mood. I understand that there's really no way this is going to happen, but it's one of those things I'm dying to try.

You see it done on T.V., and sometimes it works better than others, but I'm pretty sure that as these things go, I'd be good at it. And not just kicking. I'd like to ram through a door with my shoulder. Hell, even those battering rams that SWAT teams use would be kind of cool, but I'd prefer just me. And a door. And I win.

I'm not always a destructive person. My profession is helping put people back together, but how fun is it to bust stuff apart? Everybody takes things apart. When we were kids we'd take apart dead watches. That's not what I'm talking about. More like Limp Biskit said, give me something to break.

I can't be alone on this. Surely other people want to break down a door. Not figuratively. Literally. I want to break stuff. Especially a door. And I don't want to get in trouble for it.

Almost Perfect

Have you ever been in the grocery store and stopped cold, wondering if what you just saw was about to change your life forever? Exclude any people you may have been attracted to, and answer again. This was my situation tonight. In the last few weeks I have become a convert to Greek yogurt. It tastes more complex, is better for you, and is kind of new and exciting. Then imagine you combine the phenomenal fig with Green yogurt and you've got something amazing going on.

Well, the yogurt didn't blow my mind, but it was pretty good, and it's a good effort. I vote for putting fig in everything.

Damn You Stars!!!

I've got a beautiful TV, and only two channels worth watching. I'm forgoing cable for streaming Netflix and rabbit ears. I watch some Hulu as well. Well, tonight I was cruising back to the pad thinking I was going to tune into some ABC for some How I Met Your Mother when, much to my surprise, on comes Dancing with the Stars. Regardless of how I feel about watching past seasons, when I see that my one true love and former winner is the new cohost, I admitted to myself that I would not change the channel, and might even keep watching.

Brooke Burke, you slay me. The show, at least in the beginning, is full of beautiful people, but you reign supreme. I've missed you since the days of Wild on E. I didn't watch you dance a couple of years ago, so I must pay homage to you be watching you host.

Friday Morning Television

Before you pass judgement, let me explain that the TV is background while I spend time on the phone with banks and HR departments which have become the thorns in my side.

First show - Let's Make a Deal. Remember when Wayne Brady was kind of cool? Who's Line is it Anyway was a good vehicle for him. Pretty good show. The spot with Richard Simmons was the stuff of television legend. Later Brady's spot on The Chappelle Show was sweet.

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

This morning Brady looks a little beaten down. It's a list drop to be sure. Can you really ever make it back from being this show's host? It's not like life is bad or anything. Paying gig, not breaking your back. You wonder if he's really loving it. Is this where he'll spend his last years in show business?

Next up is The Price is Right, with Drew Carey, also from Who's Line. Drew took an intermediate step, as he was the host of Who's Line, but he's in the same boat, but without appearing so tired. Bob Barker owned that show, love him or hate him (I hear he's a dick). Big shoes to fill.

I don't really feel sorry for them. They have easy gigs that pay them probably way too much. They don't have to do any patient charting or anything like that.

Hey, I forgot why I started writing today in the first place! At the beginning of The Price is Right a guy won a car. The little chubby guy goes running towards the car, and by it, the beautiful woman showing it off (what do you call them? They look like FemBots from Austin Powers). As he approaches she leans forward with her hands up at arms length, but slightly above shoulder level. She is obviously encouraging a high-five while creating the maximum separation between them, but it's funny how if her hands were about six inches lower, as it would have been if off camera, that she would be giving him the stop sign.

Enough of this crap, the phone calls are finished.

Issues Resolved

Two years ago, when I was publishing drivel at a faster rate, I shared my conflict with the Olympics. For two weeks the summer games test me. I have four years to recover. "Why not two years?" you ask. I'll tell you. Almost all of the athletes look the same. Their snow suits covering their finally tuned bodies, or their bobsled pushing huskiness.

A more evolved observer might not have these dilemmas, but I have apparently not grown up that much in the last two years. We are, however, left with the faces. Lindsey Vonn is kind of pretty, but I'm pretty sure that her face and head is bigger than mine, and that bothers me in admittedly superficial ways. In the women's moguls, I am not ashamed to say that I was fully cheering for Jennifer Heil (silver medalist from Canada) instead of the Americans. Jennifer Heil was the hottest athlete at the games. Yes, I know she looks a little like a rabbit, but it works.

I guess I have been forgetting about figure skating, but I have a few problems that make it hard for me to fully appreciate it. It is primarily a judged sport, which leaves too much to subjectivity. The ladies are too young looking to factor into my neurosis, and they wear those nude colored whatever you call them, and those always kind of creep me out. My career is movement, so I'm not saying I can't appreciate some of it, but I can't really get into it.

I don't have any more commentary on these games, except to say that for all the flack that curling gets, I was really hoping to catch some matches. After all, how much figure skating can a guy take?

Nobody Is From Portland

A week or so ago I arrived in Portland, and am very excited about it. I was warned by all kinds of fellow Californians that the people in Oregon hate Californians, but the truth is, I haven't yet met many people who are from here. The apartment manager was from Northern California. The leasing agent from Southern California. The guy who delivered my bed from California. I think the guy who sold me the bed was from here, but he's the exception. The friend of a friend I met up with is from the Mid-West. Her boyfriend from Australia. The last two were the ones who told me that nobody is really from Portland. I suspect that another acquaintance or two that I have yet to meet up with are actually from Portland, but right now I don't feel like a trespasser.

Another thing, my registration sticker is hopefully in the mail from SoCal from when the housecleaner hid it. My tags are expired, and I was pulled over a couple days ago for having a license plate light out in addition to expired tags. Dude let me go. Combine that with the hot lady cop who pulled over to see if things were alright as I was changing my tire three weeks ago and the fuzz aren't too bad.

I was going to go register my car today, but when looking online there was extra steps to registering if you did not hold title, so I decided to pay off the car instead. If I can slap the sticker on in the next day or so that will buy me another 80 days of driving without having to go to the DMV. But the nice thing is that when I do have to go, at least my car will be paid for.

Oh, one thing could suck. Apparently Multnomah County is the only county in Oregon that does smog checks. I have a feeling that with the modifications done to my little ride that we might not pass. I guess we might be going to PDX Tuning after all... But that can wait until I'm getting paychecks.

Respect Mike Rowe

This video is good. Respect Mike Rowe. And some other people.

Inverse Relationship

As a general acknowledgment of recent inactivity on this blog, I will point out that there is an inverse relationship between the stuff I've got going on and the number of blogs I put up. That's also why my blogs aren't really about anything. Hopefully these things that must be keeping me busy will soon be the subjects of some blogs in the near future. Hopefully I will be putting some pics up on the other blog in the next few days as well.