Mind you, the name isn’t the only thing that’s changed. Before the bar was a minor feature of the restaurant, now the restaurant feels to be a minor feature of the bar.  Pre-flood the walls were adorned with prints of Alphonse Mucha’s artwork and photos from the Czech Republic. Now the walls abound with flat screen TVs displaying various sports channels. The menu has also changed adding newer, cheaper options. And while some old favourites remain (Chicken Paprika, Czech Goulash, etc..), some things are quite noticeably missing.

The first thing that caught my eye as missing from the menu was the dessert section. Yes, that’s right while Al is back, the Blue Toad does not currently offer his famous strudel. When we noticed this glaring omission from the menu, my wife asked our waitress about it and was told that they don’t offer desserts.

We were crushed. After waiting over a year and a half for our next slice of Al’s strudel, to find out they weren’t offering it any more was heartbreaking. But refusing to give up on it entirely, we caught Al as he was walking past our table and asked him about it. Al reassured us that he plans to bring back the strudel; he just didn’t want to burden his cooks any more than he already had with it being opening night.

Quite a bit later¹ after we’d ordered and received our food; we realized there were a couple more changes to the menu than we’d noticed. One was all the Czech dinner options now come with a cup of soup instead of apple sauce. The night we were there, the soup was chilli and a rather tasty chilli at that. The other change we’d not noticed was they apparently don’t do potato dumplings any more and only have bread dumplings.

But these aren’t tiny, dried up bread dumplings. These dumplings were moist and roughly the size of a hockey puck. And they tasted quite good dipped into my Czech Goulash, though they were much better with the brown gravy served over them on my wife’s plate of Chicken Paprika.

The portions that we received were smaller than I remember them being on prior visits, but on the positive side they were still filling and the cost was down considerably². And that lower price point for the meal will help to draw me back to Al’s in the future, even though the enlarged bar means it won’t be our “special” place anymore.

¹ As near as I could tell, all of the wait staff was new. Add in that this was opening night and things moved slowly & chaotically.
² Prior dinners with two entrees, 2 iced teas and 2 desserts usually came around $35–40 range. This visit with two entrees, 2 iced teas & 1 craft-brew beer was only $26.

Al’s Back! © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Bag of Holding

My employer for my day job provides me with a 17″ screen laptop and has provided a backpack style bag to haul it around in. Unfortunately my first bag shredded itself over the course of a year. The replacement bag I got was holding up better… until our cat had an unfortunate accident near it. Cleaning the bag took care of that. Or rather I thought cleaning it took care of it until the first time I got caught in a bit of rain and I was “treated” to a familiar order returning.

After that I worked harder to keep my work bag dry and put up with the occasional whiffiness. Then the other day, I noticed some money I’d forgotten about in my PayPal account and around the same time I heard ThinkGeek had their Bag of Holding in stock. It was the right size, looked sturdy and was within my budget. So I ordered it and have been using it as my daily bag for a little over a month now. Which brings us to the good, the bad and the ugly.

The Good

• My work laptop fits snuggly in the padded pocket.
• The heavy canvas construction stands up well to brief exposures of heavy rain.
• The bag has really great, front snaps. Rather than being just tacked directly to the outside of the main body of the bag, the snaps are on little strips of the same nylon webbing that makes up the shoulder strap. This is gives you a little more wiggle room to fasten the flap shut after packing stuff into the interior pockets.
• The bag is big enough that I’ll wager I can carry my work laptop and my large 3 ring binder for gaming.

The Bad

• The padded pocket for the laptop isn’t an interior pocket under the main flap of the bag. I would have prefered it to be under the flap, so that it would feel better protected.

The Ugly

• Some of the stitching is coming loose from the seams in a couple of spots. It’s not much (a couple of millimeters of thread) but it is worrisome that it’s happening so soon.

Overall, I give the bag 4.5 stars out of 5 and would rate it as recommend buy.

Review: Bag of Holding © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

• Appearance: No change. This yogurt still looks like something very, very nasty rather than food.
• Scent: N/A. I made no comment on the scent of the yogurt in my previous review but today’s cup had a pleasant coffee fragrance.
• Texture: Improved. This cup of yogurt mixed up properly and when eaten was smooth, not chalky.
• Flavor: Improved but still unpleasant. Today’s cup tasted more like a bad, drip coffee combined with sour cream. Sadly, that actually is an improvement.

Overall today’s cup was significantly better than the previous cup I tried, but still not good enough to get me to eat it again.

Dannon Coffee Yogurt, Take 2 © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

The Man Who Loved Books Too Much by Allison Hoover Bartlett

Note: This review is based upon an uncorrected proof which I received via a giveway on GoodReads.

I don’t, as a rule, read True Crime; I do enjoy a good mystery. So when I saw this book being offered in a giveaway over at GoodReads.com; I felt I just had to enter.  Then when I was home sick the other day, the book arrived in the mail. Given I hadn’t yet noticed I’d won a copy it was a very pleasant surprise.

I moved the book to the top of my to-read list and once I started on it was glad I had done so. It’s strange; there’s no quick paced action,  no tense drama yet I couldn’t put it down. Maybe it was the author’s fasincation with Gilkey (the theif)  & Sanders (the “bibliodick”) or maybe it was the author’s own fascination with this private world of rare book dealers. It certainly wasn’t the characters that drew me in. Gilkey was given the most “pagetime” but he wasn’t very interesting. Simply an unrepentant crook (all protestations to the contrary) who choose credit card fraud as his easy method of living the good life, which happens to involve owning rare books. Sanders was slightly better but seemed too angry/bitter for much of the book.

While I’m still not sure why I enjoyed this book, it’s safe to say it was an good read.

Review: The Man Who Loved Books Too Much © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

And things just went downhill from there.  True there were moments in the film which were enjoyable, but they were the exceptions not the rule.  I highly recommend staying away from this wretched, steaming pile of poo.

Review: Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Like others in this thread, I didn’t care for the camera shake. It wasn’t bad enough to make me leave the theater but it definitely made me queasy. As for the storyline to the movie.… meh. While most of the characters had a good line or two; I didn’t them. Any of them. In fact, I would go so far as to say my main complaint with the movie is one of them might have survived. I would have preferred a clean sweep of character deaths.

In response to the Cloverfield thread on the Whateveresque forums.

Cloverfield © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

¹ As rule I prefer my Sci-Fi to be extrapolated from existing science to have believable future tech rather than wildly unlikely technology. Though if something with wildly unlikely tech has an interesting story or characters that can be fun too (e.g. Old Man’s War by John Scalzi).
² I’m glad lunch is coming up soon, I’m starting to get pretty hungery. *smile*

EP134: Me and My Shadow © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Monday

• Chuck: The producers/advertisers of this show are obviously targeting something very close to my demographic with this show. The first episode was nothing special, butit did amuse me. I suppose if this show is playing while I want to watch TV, I’ll watch it but it is nothing I would go out of my way to see.
• Heroes: What a disappointment. I really enjoyed last season, but bringing back both of the Petrelli brothers in the season premier when last season’s finale showed them getting nuked cheapened the show immensely. I had been looking forward to this, but now I doubt I’ll be watching it.
• Journeyman: Meh, this looks like a weak remake of Quantum Leap only significantly less interesting. Maybe I was just in the wrong mood, but I gave up watching it 10 minutes in. It was just putting me to sleep.

Tuesday

• NCIS: Yup, I’ll be watching this one all season long again. The season premier didn’t pull off any astounding changes to the show but did show off the writers’ ability to keep giving us what we want. Explosions, murder, mystery and action.
• The Unit: First off whoever came up with the new intro clip to this show should be fired. It’s utterly horrible. That being said, like NCIS this show delivered. While the show is going a lot darker than before and looks like it will be spending this season mostly inside US borders; it looks good and was a solid hour of entertainment this event.

Wednesday

• Bionic Woman: Surprisingly, I was impressed. I expected it to be considerably cheesier and crappier than it turned out to be. I didn’t much care for the main character but it was nice to see some actors from other shows I’ve liked.
• Life: Heh, this was quite a bit of fun to watch this evening. Though the main character was excessively flakey for my taste and I’m not sure I’ll keep watching it given that it’s got the same timeslot as CSI: NY.

Thursday

• Ugly Betty: This show is really more one I watch because my wife likes it and I fiddled around on my computer while it was on. What I caught of it was funny, but not enough to draw me back to the couch to watch it.
• CSI: I had been looking forward to seeing this right up until it was on TV. I don’t know if I was just in a bad mood, but I just didn’t care if the CSI member was going to live through the episode or not. Perhaps I’m getting a bit burned out on all these CSI shows.

Friday

• Moonlight: Cheesy, vampire, detective show. A bit funny, a bit dark and worth watching if you happen to be home on a Friday night.

So there’s my quick thoughts on the premieres I’ve seen so far. Did I miss anything good?

Fall 2007 TV Season Premieres © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

So I say shame on you Mr. Eley for bringing us this tripe and implore you to look for more stories like:

• #005: Snow Day
• #007: The Trouble With Death Traps
• #013: The Once and Future Dentist
• #020: The Burning Bush
• #028: Your Corporate Network and the Forces of Darkness
• #031: Robots and Falling Hearts
• #034: Free Will, Baby
• #038: L’Alchimista
• #039: My Friend is a Lesbian Zombie
• #042: Practical Villainy
• #045: Are You Ready For the End of the World?
• #047: Poet for Hire
• #052: Single White Farmhouse
• #054: Tk’tk’tk
• #056: The Clockwork Atom Bomb
• #061: I Look Forward To Remembering You
• #064: Head of State
• #070: Squonk the Dragon
• #075: Nano Comes to Clifford Falls
• #076: The Dinner Game
• #078: The Shoulder of Giants
• #082: Travels With My Cats
• #100: Nightfall
• #102: The Angle of My Dreams
• #104: Lust for Learning
• #110: Frankie the Spook
• #123: Niels Bohr and the Sleeping Dane

Notes…

• Why no, this post is not a blatant attempt at being named BofW and getting a free book from Escape Pod. What would ever give you that idea. *grin*
• Ok, I could be fibbing when I made the above comment.
• Alright I was fibbing and it is a blatant attempt at just that.
• However I also wrote up this post to draw attention to what I feel are the very, very best of Escape Pod. Any sci-fi and/or fantasy fans not listening to Escape Pod should start and they should definitely start with the stories on this list!

Escape Pod, for shame! © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Oh and if Molly telling us about a man scarier than the Boogeyman (aka Sylar) was your idea of foreshadowing, then your idea of a pitching machine must be a M1 Abrams battle tank.  I know you want to build up some suspense to get people to come back for the next season, but this was entirely too heavy handed.

On the other hand, dropping Hiro into the past and that scene with Peter talking with his old (and let’s not forget dead patient) were good, interesting hooks.  Just having those bits and not the scary man would have been enough to draw people back.  I just don’t know if those 2 scenes were enough to draw me back next season after the craptacular ending you gave us for this season.

I just don’t know.

Heroes Season Finale © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.