BilmBlog500

So there's this ad by Lindor, the people that make those wonderful little truffle balls that you can buy at the Borders checkouts, or with a $2.50 coupon in the latest Costco coupon book. You've got that Roger Federer guy going through airport security, and the people at the x-ray machine see that his carry-on is full of balls. "Hey, look at this, he's a tennis player" says blue-uniformed TSA person #1 to TSA person #2. Then they open the bag and see that it isn't tennis balls, but rather a big full of those delightful little Lindor truffle balls, while Roger Federer says " Swiss tennis player." Because it's swiss chocolate, get it. And then the TSA people say they're going to have to confiscate the bag, and Roger says "you've got to be kidding me," and the commercial ends with a freeze frame shot of the two TSA people looking very very serious about needing to confiscate that bag. I find this funny. I don't find much ...

Maybe I need to get out of town more. In around 33 hours actually in the Washington DC area over the weekend, I managed to see 3 plays, visit 1 B. Dalton, 4 B&Ns, 4 Borders, chow down at 2 Whole Foods and a Pizzeria Uno, do the Saturday NY Times puzzle, two from Sunday, a regular and a cryptic, read 70% of the new Violette Malan book and get started on Tanya Huff's next. I'll talk more about the plays later, but just a few idle observations. I've sung the praises of Georgetown Cupcake before, no doubt I'll do so again, they're some of the only overpriced cupcakes that at least taste really, really, really good. But what is the world coming to when I pop by their new expanded flagship location in Georgetown and see over 30 people curled around in the store waiting to buy cupcakes. It's just a cupcake. It's not worth waiting, sorry, no possible way unless it's your child's bar mitzvah and the caterer's truck with the viennese table pastries...

I think I kind of fell into my Dec. 24 tradition, two or three parts of me merging into something bigger than the sum of its parts. 1983: I start to eat at Pizzeria Uno, and it kind of sticks. Occasional bad service aside, it's still comfort food for me 26+ years later. 1986: I move into NYC, on the fringe of a neighborhood that has a decent quantity of attached and/or single family houses where people can put out Christmas lights. Or, as I refer to them internally in an interfaith-y kind of way, Holiday Lighting Displays. I realize there are worse things to do than walk around on a December evening admiring the Holiday Lighting Displays. Early 1990s: Barnes & Noble opens a superstore in Bayside, kind of distant from me and in what is then a "two fare zone" because you need to take a subway to a bus to get there and there are no free transfers. It is a mile or so away from a Pizzeria Uno. 1991: I move to a new neighborhood that's almost all apartment buil...

As I mentioned a few posts ago , doing the blog thing is one of the things that takes a back seat when work gets really busy and work has been really busy.  But I'll try and do some quick takes on my recent film-going... Harry Potter and the Whatever's Whatever.  Seen Wednesday July 29 at Clearview's Ziegfeld.    1.5 slithy toads.  This was nice because it was a guy's night out with Peter V. Brett , who was eager to see the movie again, and I don't often have company for my movies, and we had a nice dinner after, and I saw it at the remaining big single screen movie theatre in NYC.  But I just didn't like it very much.  One of the problems early on in this series of movies was that the films had no screen life independent of the books themselves.  I felt this slowly improved over the first three or four films, but now the series has regressed.  This movie introduces you to characters of absolutely no importance to anyone who hasn't read the books, involved i...

So I was noticing today at the local Pathmark that all of the Entenmann's cakes are now in a square box instead of a rectangular one.  But I just can't for the life of me say for certain if this is because they've just decided to make the cakes square for some reason while providing the same amount of cake, or because it seemed like a nice way to hide one of those stealth price increases.  The current Marshmallow Iced Devils Food Cake has 510 grams of cake, 8 260 gram servings, 260 calories each, and that looked to be the same for the Black and White Cake, the Fudge Iced, etc.  So if anyone out there has a 2 or 3 month old Entenmann's cake in their freezer in the "classic" rectangular box, can we get to the bottom of this? And then moving from the squares and rectangles to the circles, orbs, spheres, ellipses and similar such things, there is more news on the Tim Hortons front. As described here and elsewhere, the Riese Organization, a longtime purveyor of in...

I am a big Tim Hortons fan.  I love just thinking about precious little Timbits, only 60 calories in a banana cream.  You can read what I said here about the genius idea of having Wendy's spin off Tim's.   I am not a Cold Stone Creamery fan.  I prefer Ben and Jerry's, where Ben and Jerry do the hard work of picking yummy flavor combinations for me.  I think it's too much work to have to select the mix-ins at Cold Stone, and I don't think the ice cream is particularly wonderful that I've wanted to wait on line for 45 minutes as I once did with my niece. But it looks like I'll be going to Cold Stone a little more often now that they've announced plans to roll out a co-branding initiative to three Manhattan stores, including the one on 42nd St. across from the AMC Empire theatre. I don't know how much space each brand will get, but let me say right now loud and clear that they better have room for some Timbits. I worry a little about having temptat...

A pint of Haagen Dazs is now 14oz, in the latest instance of stealth price increases.  I don't know if a Ben & Jerry's pint is still a pint or not, but they have started to sell more aggresively a 4oz container of ice cream that can go on sale for $1, instead of the 2/$6 pricing that's been more common on the pints, and which doesn't inspire ice cream purchases.  Wednesday was 31¢ scoop night at Baskin-Robbins, and I had my full 3 scoop allotment, 2 World Class Chocolate and one Oreo Cookies 'n' Cream.  But I did not walk from the Baskin-Robbins at 42nd St. to the Baskin-Robbins at 46th St. so I could have six scoops.

I go down to Washington DC fairly often, often doing the same things over and over again though trying at some level to always experience something new on each trip, even if it's walking down a different block. On my latest visit I decided I wanted to try very very hard to do some things recommended to me by the Washington Post . So I went to get cupcakes at Georgetown Cupcake .  Now, this whole cupcake craze has me a little befuddled.  Illogically, because I think it's crazy to pay in the neighborhood of $3 for a little cupcake.  Why do I say that's illogical?  Because we all have things we're willing to indulge in.  I pay $6.50 every so often for a slice of Juniors Cheesecake , so why not pay $3 for a cupcake.  But logically, because Juniors is really good stuff (I think so, most people I've introduced it to think so, or have sent as a gift).   But most of these cupcakes are pretty dreary, and paying so much money for a bad cupcake?  Like this little place in Sunn...

So I'm buying Yodels at Pathmark tonight because they're on sale for $1.99 for the "family pack." And I notice it has this extra logo on it, that the package now says "Drakes ... by Hostess," with a note on the back to tell me "Since 1998, Drakes and Hostess have had more in common than bakery-fresh taste. They've both made by the same company. You can taste this dedication to quality in everything we make, from our famous Twinkie and Devil Dog snack cakes..." For the many of you who do not know, a Drake is (in this context) not a duck but a regional brand of snack cakes (though one with a duck as its mascot), mostly in the Northeast, and as explained at length in the Wikipedia article on the subject without much long-term success when trying to branch out. Interestingly, Drake's was once owned by Borden, which also owned the NE-localized Wise chips brand. A Yodel is their version of a swiss roll, chocolate cake and cream rolled up ...