The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century

Pardon the changes in the layout of The Adventures of AccordionGuy in the 21st Century. I’m making some fixes so that it renders properly under as many browsers as possible and while I’m at it, some changes that will also make it a better browse (for instance, all the text now automatically resizes when you change the “text size” settings on your browser). I’ll try not to leave too much “scaffolding” in your way.

“Dirty” Dan Moniz has seen fit to add me to the roster of Mac OS X-using bloggers on the Forwarding Address: OS X blog. Thanks, Dan!

I promise benevolent rule and lots of parties when my takeover of the world is complete.

Filipino cooking is very east-meets-west: imagine Chinese and Malaysian food mixed with Spanish and Mexican influences (or, if you’re a New Yorker, imagine the food served at the Cuban-Chinese restaurant Sam Chinita’s on 8th Avenue). There is no simpler dish to demonstrate this than Chicken Adobo, considered by many to be the “national dish”. It’s chicken marinated in a tangy soy sauce, vinegar and garlic marinade. Many Filipino dishes are cooked in vinegar not only as a cultural artifiact of Spanish conquest, but also because it’s a good preservative — a must in a tropical country.

It’s just finished its week-long run as the featured recipe on the Atkins site, but you can always find the Chicken Adobo recipe in their recipe archives. It has 6 grams of net carbs per serving.

Some notes for those who want to try the recipe:

• Don’t skimp on that single bay leaf. It’s part of the flavour. In fact, I usually throw in a couple.
• Everybody has a different adobo recipe, usually varying the ratio of vinegar to soy sauce. This guy favours using only 2 tablespoons for every cup of soy, the recipe on the Atkins site goes for half as much vinegar as soy and the former governor of Hawaii goes for the tangy gusto and says to use equal parts of soy and vinegar.
• If you want to be really authentic, add about 1 part pork for every 3 or 4 parts chicken (cut-up pork chops or pork loin will do nicely). It’s the chicken-pork mix that makes adobo the “soul food” of the Philippines, pare*.

* “Pare” (pronounced “PAH-reh”) in Tagalog loosely translates as “homey” or “dogg”. Peace out.

I’ve spent the day making visits to clients’ offices, installing the software I wrote for them and doing the general hand-holding/business relationship-maintaining. More actual “life” stuff is forthcoming.

(First it was breast scarves, now this. You probably think I’m some kind of Russ Meyer type.)

Vivenne Westwood had some good fashion ideas a while ago. In the 1970’s, she teamed up with Macolm McLaren to open SEX, their BDSM clothing boutique, which paved the way towards punk fashion. In the 1980’s, she was one of the people behind the New Romantic look — think early Depeche Mode and Duran Duran (the New Romantic predilection for frilly shirts and synths ended up being part of the Goth cultural DNA).

But now she’s just gone batty. Here’s her latest creation: breasts for men.

According to an article in The Daily Telegraph:

And while the effect may look outrageous today, fashion commentators reckon Sydney men may just end up adopting it – in a few years’ time.

Sydney men? As in Sydney, Australia? These had better be Sydney men who can take on an entire bar in a fight.

[Thanks to the mysterious vinyl_demon for the heads-up!]

…appears in Sunday’s edition of the online comic Something Positive.

HGTV did air my Love By Design episode…in the States. HGTV Canada shows Love By Design on Fridays, and on a different rotation. I’ve just been informed by a couple of friends that they saw my episode a couple of weeks ago, which means that I won’t be seeing mine anytime soon…

…unless someone in the States managed to tape the episode for me! I’d like to finally see this episode, so if any of you have a tape or recorded it on your TiVO, could you please drop me a line?

My American friends who caught the show say that she said my place was “too neat”. Listen, Missy: in civilised countries, we clean up before company comes over. Especially if company comes in the form of tens of thousands of television viewers.