Uncle Mitchy's Blog

The “Old Jews Telling Jokes” podcast keeps me occupied on my travels.  This one has to be my favorite.

Recently, I have been craving new music so I subscribed to the KEXP Song of the Day podcast.

One of the songs that really stuck with me is “The Best of Times” by Sage Francis.  Check it out.

Here is my best man toast from Darren and Mirina’s Wedding.

I am a bad Jew, just ask my mom.  You may have to wait a while for the answer since there is a list somewhere in Israel of how I have let the Jewish people down over the years, it is quite lengthy and may take a while for the Rabbis to transcribe my offenses back into English.  Once you get the list, scroll down to page 24, and somewhere in between “Marrying a shiksa”,  and “Getting a tattoo”, you will find “Decorating a Christmas Tree”.  If you get to “Being able to locate a carburetor”, you have gone too far.

Almost every year since I started dating my wife we have gotten a Christmas Tree, which is almost as enjoyable as phoning my mother to tell her that I have a Christmas Tree.  This year, we picked a fine Noble Fir standing about six feet tall.  We strapped it on top on the Prius and carefully drove home.  There is something ironic about killing a tree and attaching it to a fuel efficient vehicle, but tradition is tradition, and I don’t think Al Gore was going to notice.  We propped the tree up, and I was given the assignment of stringing the lights on the tree.

I chose the word “assignment” carefully since it clearly wasn’t a “responsibility” and clearly, as I was to soon be reminded, I was not in charge of this task.  I started my assignment the way I start any assignment in our household.  I filled the house with music from my computer.  It felt appropriate to play Christmas music which I keep handy in case my parents visit around the holidays.

I plopped myself down in front of the tree, plugged in a strand of lights, and started to populate the base of the tree with lights as “Merry F**king Christmas” played on the stereo.

My technique is quite zen.  I clear my mind and think to myself … shove lights in tree … shove lights in tree… shove lights in tree…  and my hands just follow along.  After a few minutes, I noticed that in order to spread the lights evenly I would have to actually get up from my sitting position. This was unacceptable for a lethargic zen master such as myself.  Against my better judgment, I asked my wife for help.  She was more than glad to assist and dutifully came to my side right away.  I handed her the loose end of the lights and enlightened her with my “shove lights in tree” chant, making sure to point to the tree to drive my message home.  I was hoping that she would grunt and nod and follow my five word command dutifully as this was *my* assignment, and I was clearly in charge.

She stared at me with an expression that could best be described as stunned.  I could tell that she was trying to reconcile decades of shiksa wisdom and tree decorating with her own family with my simple instructional chant.  She finally looked at me and said, “I don’t get it”.  She started to explain the “correct” method of putting lights in a tree which involved some sort of circular pattern and equidistant spacing but I was not going to have any of it.  I stopped her cold and repeated my chant while shaking the loose strand of lights at her.  “SHOVE LIGHTS IN TREE!, SHOVE LIGHTS IN TREE!”.  She just stared at me again.  I even tried demonstrating my technique by shoving the lights into the tree and repeating my chant.  She just couldn’t do it.

Defeated, she continued on her other errands and I was forced to stand up and change my position at least twice until every set of Christmas Lights we owned was now shoved into this tree.  If I do say so myself the distribution was even and the tree looks marvelous.  I look forward to the “I told you so” speech that I am going to get when we try and unravel the green tangled mess that I have created once the season is over.

I have been wanting to take a SCUBA certification class for a long time but have been putting it off for one reason or another.  An upcoming trip to Puerto Rico provided me with a great excuse to do it.  I made a couple calls and decided to go with a local place called SCUBA Haus in Santa Monica.  The class consisted of two consecutive weekends.  The first weekend would take place in the Santa Monica Pool and the second at Casino Point on Catalina Island.

Of course, like every hobby that I have, SCUBA diving is full of opportunities to spend a ton of money on gear, but for this class you rent most of the stuff.  The first thing you have to select is a wet suit from the rental collection that best suits you.  If you are one of the four people who actually read my blog you are aware that I don’t have the physical dimensions of a normal human being.  I’m a few species to the left of Cro-Magnon man just short of the Neanderthal.   Imagine a photograph of Brad Pitt.  Now imagine looking at that photograph in a funhouse mirror and you will begin to get the idea.  Finding a skin-tight neoprene wet suit that fits me well wasn’t going to be easy.

Rocky, the owner of SCUBA Haus, recommended the extra large and directed me to the bathroom to try it on.  After about twenty minutes of wrestling this thing in what could best be described as a scene out of “Weekend at Bernie’s”, I managed to get it on up to about my waist.  I stood there panting and looking at myself in the mirror.  I was exhausted and had started to work up a sweat.  It looked like I was half-digested by a sea lion and he was the one taking a break due to the massive meal he was undertaking.

After a few minutes, I was able to get the rest of it on.  I zipped it up with my last bit of strength and proudly strutted back into the store which was now full of customers to admire my new skin-tight sea lion costume.  Rocky took one look at me, smirked, and said “Oh, the zipper goes in the back.” while the other customers tried to hold back their laughter (some better than others).  Another few rounds in the bathroom and I walked back out with my arms extended like the younger brother in his snow suit from the movie “A Christmas Story.”

The rest of Friday night and Saturday morning consisted of lessons about the finer points of not dying underwater.  The instructors were great and I would highly recommend them.  Saturday afternoon was at the Santa Monica pool and the first time this newest generation of potential Navy SEAL candidates was to enter the water.

It turns out that swimming is a major part of SCUBA diving (everything else is pretty much not dying underwater) and in order to prove to them that you can swim they ask you to swim eight laps in any “style” that you choose.  My stroke of choice is the “Vegas Crawl” since the majority of my adult pool experience takes places at The Mandalay Bay Hotel.  To call my stroke of choice a choice is giving me a lot more credit for my athletic ability than I deserve, and to call it a stroke would be an insult to swimmers everywhere.  A more accurate description is somewhere between the “dog paddle” and the “someone call the lifeguard”.

Around the middle of the fifth lap between desperate gasps for air and trying to keep my head above water I was starting to imagine how I would gracefully leave the class with the least amount of humiliation because there was no way I was going to make eight laps.  Vegas pools are only four feet deep for a reason.  Everyone else was done and Day Vinson, the Lead Instructor, said that it was good enough.  I started to question her judgment.

Next, we suited up into our full gear and went into the bottom of the shallow end to learn how to panic, take off your mask, panic, put your mask back on, panic, and make silly hand signals that I am convinced the instructors make up on the fly in order to make us feel like idiots.

Now, I’m not an idiot, and it makes perfect sense to me that I don’t need a mask over my eyes to breathe through a tube that is in my mouth but my frog brain is a complete moron and this is the part which took over during this exercise.  This led to an interesting argument between the part of my brain that made it through college (barely) and the frog brain.  “Breathe you idiot.”  “Nope, can’t breathe, must come to surface to flail and embarrass you, ribbit.” “Don’t you dare!  Breathe through your mouth before your legs end up as an appetizer in a french restaurant!”   “Ribbit”.

By the end of the day, they had us underwater in a circle, trading masks back and forth like my mom and her friends traded coupons from the Entertainment Book when I was a kid.  I am still not quite comfortable with taking my mask off underwater.  I have never been waterboarded, but I am guessing the sensation is similar.

The next day was more of the same with a few added skills thrown in to make sure you don’t die.  By the end of the day we were swimming in circles in the deep end of the Santa Monica pool like a group of developmentally challenged sea lions waiting for a Great White with “Darwin Says Hi” painted on it’s side to make us it’s next meal.  We were prepared for the next weekend in Catalina.

The first dive was at 8AM on Casino Point on Catalina Island.  In order to get there by 8AM one would have to leave the wesside by 5AM to be at Long Beach in time to catch the Ferry.  There was no way in hell I was doing that, so the wife and I went to Catalina Friday night and stayed in a hotel.  Having Ann Marie there with me was a godsend and it made the whole experience a whole lot easier.  She provided a great deal of tactical as well as emotional support.

I show up at Casino Point at around 7:45AM  to meet the rest of my class who was on the ferry and it was already starting to get crowded.  Casino Point has a marine park and is accessible via a convenient set of stairs which makes it a popular spot for SCUBA divers.  The rest of the class rolled up a few minutes later and we all proceed getting swallowed by our assigned sea lions.

That first day consisted of a repeat of the not dying that we did in the pool.  My frog brain was more submissive this time and It was pretty awesome.  The weather was pretty cooperative and the visibility was really good (much better than Puerto Rico it turns out).  The great thing about Casino Point is that you have a ton of different ecosystems in one place.  After the dive a few of us met for dinner at a local place and crashed.

The next morning was designed to emulate a normal dive day.  Starting with a 60 foot dive and then going shallower from there.  I had a good nights sleep and I was ready to go.  Our instructor, Day, gave us a run down of what we are going to be doing and then we waddled into the water to regroup.  This was the beginning of the end for me.

The current was a little stronger on this day and the water was filled with a few more SCUBA-Douches.  We had to do a surface swim a few yards out to find a Douche-free zone.  If you had been paying attention you would remember that I am not the worlds greatest swimmer and this swim wore me out a little.  Then when we regrouped the instructor started giving us more instruction.  I was trying to be smart and conserve air so my BC (think balloon vest that keeps you floating) wasn’t fully inflated and my mouth was right at surface level.  So I’m floating there, tired from the swim, trying not to swallow sea water, begging for Day to stop talking so I could dive and relax, when I started breathing really short.  I started to panic and figured that if I can’t breathe on the surface what is going to happen at 60 feet.  I made the announcement that I wasn’t going to make the dive and started one of the most humiliating experiences of recent memory.

Day took one look into my eyes and she knew I was serious.  She asked a couple other people to use one of our newly learned rescue techniques that I now refer to “pushing the floating fat guy back to shore”.   They inflated my BC all of the way and I pretty much lied down on the surface of the water while the able-bodied divers pushed my floating out of shape carcass back to the steps.   Everyone in the water and on the steps asked if I was OK to make sure my humiliation had really set in.  I had already decided at that point that I wasn’t going to get certified and going over in my head how I had been tweeting and facebooking about getting certified for the previous week and how pathetic my explanation was going to be.

After about 30 minutes, the rest of the group surfaced and individually consoled me.  Day told me that it was my decision to keep going but at that point I had pretty much decided that I was too much of an out of shape loser to continue this sport.  She didn’t push me and asked me to stick around for lunch anyway.  This turns out to be a very effective technique.  I was mentally prepared to stick to my guns and quit at that point and she chose not to fight me on it.  We all had lunch and took the written test (which I passed).  After lunch, Day looked at me and said “So are you getting back in or what?”  Without thinking about it I said “sure.”

We did two more dives that day and by the second dive and I had no trouble at all.  I was leading our group around the depths and navigating like a pro.  I passed the class and am now certified open water shark bait!  I am eternally grateful to Day for her light pressure and support.

If you are considering getting certified I highly recommend Day and her team as instructors.  They are currently teaching out of Scuba Haus in Santa Monica.

Here is a quick and easy recipe for a great side dish for steak or other meat dishes.

Ingredients

My measurements include phrases like “some” and “thingy.”  You can figure it out.  I don’t have time to do all of the work for you.  What am I, your mother?

• 1 sack of pearl onions
• 1 thingy of whole mushrooms
• 1 sack of Trader Joe’s Teeny Tiny Potatoes (they don’t have to be from Trader Joes but you would lose out on that smugness you get from shopping there)
• Some red pepper flakes
• Some olive oil

Preparation

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees.

Rinse the potatoes and give them a good once over with a vegetable brush.  If you don’t have a vegetable brush, use your spouse’s toothbrush.  Leave the skins on, because if you try to skin Trader Joe’s Teeny Tiny Potatoes you are an idiot.

Chop the ends off of the pearl onions and remove the skins.  Rinse off the mushrooms too ’cause those bastards have been gettin’ it on with the parsnips when the lights go out at the supermarket (or so the acorn squash told me).

Put the whole mess into a Pyrex dish that has a lid or a ramekin that you can cover with aluminum foil and announce to the world “look at my savory balls!”

Sprinkle the olive oil over everything and then sprinkle the red pepper flakes on top of that.  I can usually tell by the look on my wife’s face when she thinks I have added enough red pepper flakes and then I shake on a little more, ’cause I’m an asshole.

Cover it up and shove it in the oven for a while.  Every ten minutes or so, check your balls for softness with a fork and watch shriveling and dryness.  Then check the thing you put in the oven.  When the potatoes feel a little soft, remove the lid or aluminum foil and broil them for a few more minutes.

Now shut up and eat it.

I travel a lot.  You would know this if you’d read my previous blog posts, but clearly you don’t really love me.  Over the years I have learned a thing or two about traveling, and I have perfected a few techniques to make the experience less miserable.  What follows is the first of many travel tips that I will share with you to make your travel experience better and hopefully reduce my misanthropy just a little.

There are few situations that make me hate the human race more than waiting for my checked luggage at the airport.  Here are a few things to keep in mind if you have checked your luggage…

Relax

The journey from the plane to the luggage carousel is the perfect time to calm yourself and gain your composure.  Take your time.  You could crawl there and you’d still have to wait for your bag, so why not take advantage of the idle time.  Stop at a bathroom to do your business and wash your hands and face.  Call or text your ride to let them know you’ve arrived and will be outside after you get your bag.  Stretch a little.  Release that gas you’ve been storing up since New Mexico.  Make sure that you are in motion when you do this to avoid suspicion.  This technique is known as crop dusting.  It is important to be in a calm state of mind when you get to the luggage carousel or else you may not have the will power to avoid jamming a railroad spike into someone’s eye.

Have A Plan

Your plan starts by choosing the right place to stand. Imagine yourself grabbing your bag and trying to pull it off of the carousel.  I am sure there is a way to identify which direction the carousel will rotate from looking at the scratch patterns on its metal sections, but I haven’t been able to accurately predict it yet, so you’ll have to guess which way the bags are coming.  Find a spot with plenty of room on either side of you. If the people on either side of you are too close, you won’t have the maneuvering room to swing your bag out and onto the floor. If  the entire carousel is blocked by morons, step back and wait for them to battle over their bags. Entertain yourself by watching them knock each other down, since they can’t quite get a good hold of their bag as it moves down the carousel, but refuse to let go – as if by releasing their death grip on the handle, they’ll never see their underwear again.

Inevitably, people will start crowding into the spaces around you, and it will become necessary to take some action once the buzzer sounds and the carousel comes to life. You might want to:

• Fart
• Stare at them in a menacing manner without saying a word
• Lean against them
• Fart again
• Stare at their kids and ask if Megan’s Law applies at airports.

Once you identify your bag, you should be able to grab it, swing it off of the carousel, and make your escape.  If some loser has encroached your space, it is perfectly acceptable to knock him or her over with your bag and say that you didn’t see anyone there.

Put Your Damn Phone Away

Is it really critical that you call someone and tell them that you just landed?  I bet it isn’t.  Give it a rest until you have your bag.  If you have to inform your ride that you have landed, a quick text message will suffice.  If they aren’t technically advanced enough to text, a quick call to say “I’ve landed; I’ll call you when I’m at the curb,” is OK. Once you get into “How was the trip?” you’ve engaged in a conversation that can clearly wait nine minutes until you are sitting next to them in the car.

Keep Your Damn Brood Contained

Look, I chose not to have kids for a reason.  If I wanted to run around an airport yelling, “Upupupupupupupup … put that … Billy! … Don’t touch … Where is your sis… NO … Uppupupuppupup, that isn’t yours … Get off of the carousel … SUZY!!! …”  I would’ve had my own.  You made the decision to breed, so now take the responsibility and keep them in line.  Oh, and by the way, if you say that nobody tells you how hard it is, I am going to find out where you live and rape your puppy.  EVERYONE TELLS YOU HOW HARD IT IS!

Sorry, where was I…  Oh yeah, it really isn’t necessary to have your entire family standing at the carousel unless they are part of your plan.  If you are standing at the carousel carrying an infant, then you’re doing it wrong.  And you’re an idiot.  If you really want to keep them busy as well as have your hands free, put them in one of those plastic trays and let them ride around the carousel in it.  If you’re lucky, they will make it all the way around before child services shows up.

Pitcher and a Catcher

If you have a traveling companion, you can work together as a team.  As the bags come down the way, you can hand one off to your partner and he or she can haul it away. Or, if you both have carry-on luggage, your travel companion can stand aside with all of your carry-on luggage, which frees up your hands to get the rest of your luggage – or to slap the person next to you.

Know Your Bag

Let me guess.  Your bag is a black Samsonite suitcase.  Guess what.  So is everyone else’s bag.  Put something on your bag that makes it definitively yours.  The best example I’ve seen is a suitcase with “Not Your Bag” taped on it with duct tape.  I have tags on mine that say things like “My Clothes Won’t Fit You.”  You can get these or other useful tags from a place called Inventive Travelware.

Hopefully these tips will help you on your next flight.

When I moved to California, my original intention was to become a Visual Effects Artist. My other intention was to do anything possible to get out of Detroit. Back then, being a Visual Effects Artist seemed like the coolest job ever for a nerdy technical guy. Not long after I moved, the movie “The Fifth Element” was released. To this day, I still think it’s a great movie. I remember watching the video with my girlfriend (now my wife) and stopping the tape (yes, it was a tape) at a particular scene that caught my eye.

In this scene, a spaceship was taking off from a hangar for Fhloston Paradise. I remember pausing the tape and staring at this image for quite some time, remarking to my wife (then girlfriend) that the detail in this image was quite amazing. I didn’t know much about Visual Effects at the time (and I still don’t) but I have eyes and I could certainly appreciate an amazing piece of art. If you ever get a chance to see this painting take a minute to really appreciate it.

Fast forward a few years later; I had just started a new job at Digital Domain in Venice, CA. I was walking around the studio taking in all of the sights and models hanging from the walls and checking out the conference room designed by Frank Gehry called “The Whale.” I walked past this one office and on the wall hung a poster that had to be about a 5′ x 3′ version of that very scene. The office was empty, so I stood there for a while admiring the detail of this painting. A few minutes later, Kevin Mack walked in. It turns out that it was his office and he had painted this. I told him how much I liked it and we talked about it a little bit more before I slinked back to my nerd pen.

Copied from behance.net

For a brief moment, I thought to myself that I had made it. I was finally on my way to what I wanted to do and felt like I was part of the movie business. It turns out that as a Systems Administrator at a Visual Effects company, I was no more a part of the movie business than Stephen Spielberg’s Gardner or Lindsey Lohan’s Parole Officer, but it really felt good at the time. After working there for a few years, I came to realize that the life of a Visual Effects artist wasn’t for me, since I liked things like sunshine and weekends, but I still remember that moment fondly.

Thanks, Kevin.

This is a Linh.  Well actually it isn’t Linh because Linh won’t let me take a picture of her in a “pissed” pose so it is actually a picture of a bunch of fish but pretend it is Linh and pretend she looks pissed.  Linh is pissed (or would be if she really cared and wasn’t actually a pile of dead fish) because I told her we would try the new Oyster Place in Santa Monica but instead I went with someone else.  Don’t worry Linh it was really awesome and I will be going back there a lot.

I wouldn’t consider myself a food blogger so I’m not going to give you a history of the place or the name of the chef or any of that crap.  The thrillist post has a lot of that.  What I can tell you is about my experience.

I needed to have a conversation with one of my employees outside of the office so I suggested lunch.  I asked him what kind of food he preferred and he said “anything but seafood”.  So of course I took him to an Oyster Bar.

After a brief conversation with the waitress about her recommendations I went with three Chefs Creek and three Metcalfe both from British Columbia.  The Oysters from Chefs Creek were really good and really huge.  The Metcalfes were a little saltier but also really good.  I kind of know how to shuck Oysters myself but these were done better than I ever could and with significantly less blood loss.  They were cleanly opened with all of the Oyster goo un-spilled.  Now I could go on and on like some Oyster Douchebag about the specifics of each Oyster but I will spare you.  They were good and there are at least six other kinds of Oysters to choose from so if you like Oysters just shut up and go.

And then the fish came…..

Normally I would have taken a picture of it so my wife can make fun of me (“what is it with Jews and pictures of food”) but I lost myself in this fish.  I ordered the Ling Cod with a garlic pesto sauce.  It was awesome!  It was cooked fully but it wasn’t dry at all.  It prefer my fish raw, wrapped in some kind of rice and seaweed tube, dipped in wasabi and Soy Sauce, and not pissed (see above) so I am usually skeptical when someone ruins a perfectly good piece of fish by cooking it.  The pesto sauce wasn’t too heavy, complimented the fish well, and looks really good on my shirt since I haven’t quite mastered the whole food-fork-mouth routine.

My employee had his hamburger and fries and I didn’t even think to ask him how it was cause it’s all about me.

So that is all.  It is good, go try it.

Blue Plate Oysterette
1355 Ocean Ave.
Santa Monica CA 90401-1019
(310) 576-FISH [3474]
Hours: 11:30 AM to 10:00 PM Daily
No reservations.

http://blueplatesantamonica.com/bpo/

http://twitter.com/BPOysterette