Restaurant of the week:


I only knew it by the sign over the little blue building with the line out front. It reads, Mariscos, in big red letters painted over a shrimp who seems to be enjoying a day at the beach. The real name is either La Playita or Guillens Mariscos, but that was impossible to divine from the exterior, or extract from the guy at the counter. He was a bit impatient with my high school Spanish, and kept eyeing the growing line behind me.

There are two main categories of things on the menu - seafood cocktails including:

Octupus
Shrimp
Fish/Shrimp combo?

and Tacos/Burritos including:

Beef
Pork
Pork Skins
Brains
Beef Head
Chicken
Shrimp
Chorizo

I had two tacos, one shrimp, one pork. The pork taco was mostly meat with diced onion, chopped cilantro, and a bit of diced tomato - but not much. Everything seemed pretty fresh, and was wrapped in two corn tortillas. The burritos (ordered by my friend Seliot) differed from the tacos by being bigger, and having some rice and a little bit of beans added to the mix. Again, the burrito was mostly meat, not much in the way of filler. Each order was accompanied by a small portion of hot pickled veggies - carrots, radishes, a bit of onion and a jalapeno.

Ok ok you say how about the taste? Well, overall it was pretty darn good. Let me start by saying the tortillas were top tier and seemed pretty fresh. The pork was far better than the shrimp in my opinion. In fact, it was one of the best non sausage pig products I've had in quite a while. Tender, tasty and not greasy or gristly. The shrimp was a bit disappointing though, there wasn't quite enough of it and the taste was fairly bland. I addressed this minor shortcoming by dousing the taco with Tapatio sauce and bringing the taste to life.

Overall, it was pretty good. Cheap, tasty, quick. Not the best ever, but I'll work it into my rotation.

La Playita
3306 Lincoln Blvd
(310) 452-0090

This seems startlingly accurate, but I would have guessed that my percentage would be at least 50.

You are 32% geek

You are a geek liaison, which means you go both ways. You can hang out with normal people or you can hang out with geeks which means you often have geeks as friends and/or have a job where you have to mediate between geeks and normal people. This is an important role and one of which you should be proud. In fact, you can make a good deal of money as a translator. Normal: Tell our geek we need him to work this weekend. You [to Geek]: We need more than that, Scotty. You'll have to stay until you can squeeze more outta them engines! Geek [to You]: I'm givin' her all she's got, Captain, but we need more dilithium crystals! You [to Normal]: He wants to know if he gets overtime.

Take the Polygeek Quiz at Thudfactor.com

Via The Poor Man.

We're the 53rd best place to live accordking to this survey; bah, how can I trust any ranking that puts L.A. behind San Francisco and New York? I sure wish I could see the ranking criteria they used. I'm fairly certain Mercer Human Resource Consulting didn't put the same priority on weather that I would have.

Coffee is not really the first thing (not even the first beverage) that springs to mind when someone says "Playboy".

But in the grand tradition of hard hitting business exposes like "The Women of 7 - 11" and "The Women of Enron", Playboy plans to follow up with "The Women of Starbucks". I know that lots of writers hang out there too, so maybe the editors could make it an all Starbucks issue. You know, some journalism and fiction for people who, um, read Playboy for the articles.

As my archives slowly accrete, the numbers of hits from search engines grow also. Some of the more common ones are:

SUV tax breaks

Goodyear blimp

National Geographic Swimsuit

Less common:

Trista Ryan Tahoe

Goodyear (and Goodrich) blimp

Luke Ford

And my favorite - Doritos ads

I hope at least some of you found your visit enjoyable.

Update: My wife, who considers herself a Liberal Democrat, scored 44%.

MUWAHAHAHAHAH


But wait, maybe the joke is on me.

Well, this clears up a few things.


How Republican Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

via Howard Owens

Beautiful drive in this morning, all 2.2 miles of it. Snow on the mountains, low clouds hugging the Hollywood Hills, diffuse gray light washing over all of it.

Alas I lack a
Digital camera now
No picture to share

I could not possibly offer better coverage of the blog event than these folks already did. (Round up here.)

Of course, I do have some random musings…

I really hate to be late, but there we were, late: Sara, Seliot, the wife and your humble correspondent. After some monumentally poor L.A. traffic decisions (let’s just take the 405 to the 101) on my part, we finally made it to the panel about 30 minutes after it started, but apparently hadn’t missed much.

The discussion had a very different feel from the Chinatown blogfest. For one thing, most of the bloggers were basically journalists, as opposed to the previous panel where the participants seemed to blog as a form of artistic self expression. Also, the acoustics of the two rooms couldn’t have been more different. The Chinatown space had a lively and boisterous feel (not many panel discussions are disrupted by the sounds of a noisy shower upstairs), and the AFI room seemed dead in comparison. Have you ever been in a room that just seems to suck the life out of audience? Think back to your last professional conference, the one where you fell asleep after lunch after the lights dimmed.

Also, kudos to Emmanuelle who kept the “panelists must discuss cam girls” theme going in tony’s absence

Highlights included:

Luke Ford’s hilarious logic chain “proving” that most bloggers should be right wing. Distilled to something like - most bloggers are well informed, most well informed people lean toward the right, therefore most bloggers should be right wing. I can’t possibly do justice to his rapid fire delivery or air of confidence.

Meeting Howard Owens

Having Eugene tell me “you might be right” after I contradicted him. (ever so slightly)

Meeting the Number One RiShawn on the internet.

The little salami things topped with a cherry tomato half and five dots of mustard, arranged in the same pattern as the five dots on a six sided die.

Seeing tony’s new, more aerodynamic hairstyle