Indeed. As of 10:14 AM today I am thirty years old.

Those of you foolish enough to take bets on me making it to thirty may now collect.

Wow, we're less than two weeks away from preseason football.

Javon Walker reported to camp.

Thanks for not being a total dick about it Javon. I hope you get paid after this season.

Next time I'm in Houston, I definitely need to visit the Bill Hicks Resurrection Laboratory.

And dang, Jolie Holland is playing there this Saturday.

So last year a Ryan's Steak House closed down in town. It was remodeled and reopened as Fire Mountain. I had been saying for a while that I wanted to eat there. Expectations were low, but I still felt like I had to at least go greet my new neighbor.

I tried to go once, at 2:00 on a Saturday. There was a line almost out the door, and I just wasn't interested in waiting. So I stayed away for a while longer. Last night Bex was away for the evening, so I was on my own for dinner. As I was driving home, I drove by Fire Mountain and decided to pop in.

Again, I wasn't expecting much. It was clear that this was a family style buffet sort of place, but I can deal with those places most of the time. I don't want to say that Fire Mountain was the worst dining experience I've had in my life, but try as I might I can't come up with a worse one.

First off, for a buffet, the selection wasn't great. There was a grill section where they had hamburgers, sausage and various grilly sort of things. They had fried chicken, fried fish (two kinds!), french fries, corn, and a skimpy salad bar. There was a desert bar as well, I think.

As for taste, everything was very bland. Yeah, yeah, what was I expecting? I know what you normally get at these sorts of places, but this was particularly bland. Besides the blandness, a whole lot of the food was just inedible. There was fried chicken all dried out and chewy, same for the fish, and inexplicably for the sausage as well. (How do you make sausage chewy?)

All told, I got two plates of food, not because I wanted to go back for seconds, but because about 75% of what I got on my first plate was just not edible. I ended up leaving with about 1 1/3 plates of food left on the table. I did manage to eat some corns and a bit of salad.

And what did I pay for this sumptuous feast? Over ten bucks with a drink. Lesson learned. Avoid Fire Mountain.

As if I need the point driven home a bit harder, I now sit at home with, um, a bit of a gastrointestinal condition. Medicine has been administered, but I nevertheless don't quite feel like heading in to work just yet.

Now I like good food, but I also have quite a tolerance for bad food. I can tell you which gas station/convenience store taquitos are better than others, and I don't think there are too many snack foods I haven't tried. Fire Mountain did me in.

Got problems? Head on over to I-Got-Problems.com for free advice.

Maybe skip the annoying little flash intro with sound, but make sure you get out and buy some Peanut Better. Bex and I finished off our jar of Thai Ginger and Red Pepper peanut butter on Sunday. It was good on everything we ate it with. With this peanut butter we made an excellent salad dressing, had peanut butter and cucumber sandwiches on english muffins, and had the best PB&J on crackers I've ever had.

We were munching down on this stuff on Sunday with jelly and crackers when we finished off the jar. Bex opened up the jar of Skippy we had around and made herself one cracker. I reached for the jar of Skippy and she said, "Don't bother, you'll just make yourself sad." She was right, it did. Compared to the Peanut Better, it was just bland.

I think the next one we'll have to try is Hickory Smoked or Spicy Southwestern. We didn't even have to go to some sort of wacky fancy food store for this stuff... It was in the peanut butter section at Target.

I have a whole new appreciation for PB&J now. I think we'll be raising our kids on this stuff.

Dear Ms. Havrilesky,

After the Numb Arm episode of Six Feet Under, it is not acceptable for your TV Column to not yet be posted.

Please rectify this as soon as possible.

Thanks,
Ryan

Bex found this one. If you live in Kansas City, you may remember John Renshaw's morning show on 810 WHB. If you're from out of town, you may remember him as the dude who freaked out on the air and lost his show. On Saturday Bex was poking around Kansas City Craig's List and found these posts where John Renshaw is apparently looking for his next gig:

i need a kc company that is familar with my on air work at whb 810 am sports radio to hook up wth me on a new venture. a truly original and easy to design sports t shirt theme resume belowJOHN RENSHAW

Come on John, you're better than that. A little capitalization never hurt anyone, and feel free to mix in a complete sentence. I know you could do it on the air, and this isn't really putting you best foot forward in your search for the next gig. Regardless, here's to hoping he gets his next thing off the ground before too long.

Apparently he's still in KC, anyway.

Severian over at Ivory Tower Adventures got me thinking about Sports Fandom. Frolio commented that it's OK to like mutiple teams as long as you have a heirarchy. So what is mine? Across all sports, here's my ranking of teams I have feelings about one way or the other:

Positive:

I was really planning on catching the local bartending championships on Wednesday, but that's the day I came home to busted A/C and had to stay home while a tech came out and didn't fix it.

Looks like I missed a good show.

So everybody says that if Roe v. Wade was overturned it would only throw the issue of abortion back to the states. I'm no lawyer, but can somebody who is explain to me why that is? Yes, that would be the immediate effect, but is there anything that would stop Congress from passing legislation banning abortion at the federal level? (Besides political concerns, I mean.)

If Congress can pass a ban on late term abortions, once the Supreme Court reverses Roe v. Wade and there is no longer constitutional protection for first trimester abortion what would stop them from passing a blanket ban?

Well, last night the A/C went out for the second time in as many weeks. Last week they replaced the motor for the outside condensor fan, yesterday the fan blade the motor was attached to broke. They sent somebody out, but they didn't have the part they needed.

They called back this morning and quoted me a price about twice what I can get the part for online, so we've ordered it and I'll put it on tomorrow. In the meantime, we're camping out at Bex's parents' place who are being very gracious in hosting us and our puppy.

Have I mentioned that home ownership is awesome?

So when I moved to Kansas City, I found a dentist and went there for my semiannual cleanings and checkups. It was a family dental practice, but I always got one particular famliy member. About a year and a half ago, I went in for my checkup, but my normal dentist wasn't in. So they had one of the other family members do my work. He noticed a tiny chip on one of my upper incisors. That chip had been there for years, and was so small it really wasn't noticable unless you were right in my mouth.

Regardless, he suggested some bonding to repair it. He said it was a structural problem, not cosmetic, and therefore should be covered by insurance. I said OK. He proceeded to pretty much grind off the entire front of that tooth, replace it with some sort of ceramic that doesn't really look or feel like normal tooth enamel, and it took him about three tries to get the bottom edge smoothed out so that my bite was normal again. I really didn't like the way it looked right after he finished, and in the time since then the edges of the bonding have stained so that I have a lovely brown ring at the upper edge of that tooth.

To add insult to injury, a few months later I got a bill from the dentist for about $300. Apparently the work wasn't quite as insurance covered as he had expected.

And just now I noticed that the work has chipped. The bottom edge of that tooth is now noticeably uneven. So to recap; Before: very minor chip only visible on close inspection, functional bite. After: nasty looking stained tooth that doesn't bite right and is now visibly chipped.

So what do you do at this point? I certanily don't want to give them any more of my money, and I'm pretty sure that I don't even want them working on my teeth any more. Do I just suck it up and pay a different dentist to fix it? Has anybody had any dental/medical mishaps, and if so how did you handle them?

I was talking to Bex last night about a book club forming on a message board I read. She said she'd be interested in a book club around here if one were to form. Would anybody be interested in some sort of KC Blogger book club?

There's also an excellent article over at Cooking for Engineers about what to look for in cookware and why. There's a great discussion of the thermal and reactive properties of various metals used in cookware and tables of the pros and cons of each.

The Summit is a church now?

I saw several Rockets games, several Aeros games there, and saw Nine Inch Nails at least twice on that floor.

Last week's brisket is posted.

This time, with graphs!

It's nice to get a shout out in the meda. (The July 15th item...)

Thanks Bex! And yes, I am upset I'm going to miss Lebowskifest next weekend.

The Wire did get at least one Emmy nod, for outstanding writing in "Middle Ground", definitely the best episode of last season. I'd go so far as to say that that was my favorite moment of television last year.

Good to see they're getting some respect, even if this is their first nomination in three seasons of some of the best stuff on TV.

I can't leave crazy, ill-informed political rantings as the top post going into a weekend...

Here are some pictures of puppies and kittens.

But please allow me to put on my tinfoil hat for a moment.

Remember last August when the terrorist threat level was raised for the financial services sector as the election approached? Many people dismissed it as a transparent attempt to drum up terrorist fears just before the election. The Bush administration answered back by identifying the source of the information as Naeem Khan, a man with connections to terrorist investigations who had been flipped and was working as an agent on our side, communicating with terrorist organizations and sharing those communications with our intelligence officials. Because he had been outed as a mole British intelligence were forced to scramble to make arrests of known associates of Khan, and some escaped in the process.

Well, it sounds like Khan had plans on his laptop for an attack on London's transit system, and some of the escapees seem to have had ties to the London bombers.

So did the Bush campaign out an active mole to avoid the appearance of wagging the dog so close to the election, and did that outing hamper the chances of foiling last week's London bombing?

I'm a connoisseur of conspiracy theories, and this one I kind of buy. For this to be true you don't need to believe in a shadowy conspiracy plotting against us and keeping their actions secret. You just need to believe that government officials can act in a supremely short-sighted and incompetent manner.

That I can believe.

(Whole thing, with documentation, here.)

Also, since I'm busy and have little to post about, you can check out what I'm listening to here.

Between holdouts, assault arrests, lack of defensive improvements, and more holdouts there hasn't been much to be excited about as a Packer fan this offseason.

However, I am proud of the fact that Packers news sites will post this as news of interest to Packer Fans.

Wisconsin boy builds better beer tap. Who’d a thunk it? Matt Younkle, Chicago resident, Ashwaubenon High School graduate and inventor of the TurboTap, is sitting on top of the world because he realized that the best way to pour a beer was from the bottom of the glass. Quickly.

His new tap will pour a draft beer in two seconds. Further:

He’s talked to the Packers about getting TurboTap into Lambeau Field — with 1,128 taps, it’s likely the sports world’s largest purveyor of beer — and with several chain restaurants and bars.

That's kind of a fuzzy statement. Can somebody please do some research and confirm whether or not Lambeau is in fact the sports world's largest purveyor of beer?

A 25th Anniversary Edition of the Tao Te Ching?

Yeah, I would think that would be Vintage.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Insurance hassles are killing off what is left of the shriveled husk of a libertarian in me and turning me into an advocate of straight-up socialized medicine. I just hate the fact that every time I go in to a dentist, they do some work, I ask if it'll be covered, they say yes, I pay my co-pay, then two to three months later I get a bill for some random amount between $150 and $400.

It would truly be nice if, like other goods and services, you could have some sort of an idea what things will cost before you have the services rendered.

I woke up this morning and went to take the puppy for a walk. On the way back I heard a hissing sound that I couldn't track down, then when I came in I noticed that my thermostat was reading 80° even though it was set to cool to 72°. I went outside and the housing of my A/C unit was pretty warm and its blower wasn't running.

I shut the A/C down so I could look at it tonight, but from reading this site it sounds like the problem is either the outside blower motor (~$75) or its capacitor (~$25). So I'll be opening the unit up tonight to see if I can figure out which it might be.

Before I go too far down this path, has anybody else out there attempted repairs on an A/C unit? Last time I had problems I saw the unit opened up and it really didn't look that complicated. I would imagine I could replace a motor or a capacitor without too much trouble. Anybody care to talk me out of this?

But I really should know better than to listen to Democracy Now on the day after a big terrorist attack. Damn, there's a lot of idiocy out there...

Somebody leaving H&R Block for Sprint? That is news...

Wow, I'm a Packer fan and all, but isn't this in slightly poor taste?

Hank Stram won a Super Bowl and was enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, but he never beat the Green Bay Packers.

In four games against the Packers, Stram’s teams went 0-3-1. Add a pair of preseason games, and they went 0-5-1.

Stram died Monday at a hospital in suburban New Orleans. He was 82.

Ha-ha. Dead boy couldn't beat The Pack.

Seriously, couldn't this have been written with a bit more respect for the dead?

We had an excellent little cookout Saturday afternoon. Bex set most of the menu, including an excellent tomato and olive salad, watermelon with mint and feta, and a delicious Mexican Chocolate Icebox Cake.

That left me in charge of one thing, the ribs. We did two racks of baby backs with a dry rub I got out of this month's Chow Magazine. After my failure a few years ago I hadn't tried smoking ribs again, so I was a bit nervous making these for company. I've officially given up on the Charbroil H2O smoker I bought a few years ago, so I decided to try smoking in my basic Weber kettle grill.

I wasn't sure how that would work, but it was a definite success. The temperature stayed steady in the smoker, the ribs came out super tender, and everybody seemed to like the food.

Cooking notes on the ribs are here.