I just finished watching the first three hours of the mini-series, Planet Earth. It’s like Blue Planet, but on land. It’s on Sundays at 8:00 PM (eastern) on the Discovery Channel. I highly reccomend it.
Beki, Ben, Dave, Leslie, and I watched the Oscars on Sunday. I've never actually watched the Oscars, but Beki wanted to make fish tacos, so we invited folks over to complain about the winners and bash the dresses. There was also a drunken bet regarding The Departed between Leslie and Ben that needed to be settled (I was not a fan of the movie, but maybe more on that in the future).
The tacos were my first experiment with frying in my new 12 inch cast iron pan. Beki got a recipe for the taco filling from a guy at whole foods (kale, grapefruit, garlic, onion, lemon…) and I was in charge of frying the salmon and cooking up my famous black beans. I reread the section on frying the Alton Brown's book (a must have for anyone interested in cooking). I prepared my dredging station of flower, egg with a little water, and panko bread crumbs. We had a pound and a half of salmon cut into chunks; it took me a half hour just to bread everything. On Saturday I purchased a candy/frying thermometer. I filled the pan with oil so that each piece of fish was half covered, heated the oil to about 375, and went to town. I must say that I impressed myself. The thermometer allowed me to keep the oil at a constant temperature, which resulted in brown, crunchy salmon without a hint of sogginess. Beki's filling came out great. Add heated corn tortillas, a little rice, some tomatoes, and my black beans to make a great feast. This was all washed down by sweet tea and followed by some homemade truffles.
The Oscars themselves were mildly entertaining. I had no idea that they were so long, but with five people and a cat screaming at the television, it wasn't so bad. The girl who won the Oscar for that movie about Motown sure can sing. I was glad to see Scorsesse win an Oscar, I just wish it had been for a good film.
I was pretty taken aback by just how self-congratualatory the whole thing is. It made me understand why people like O'Reily can so easily demonize Hollywood. I almost threw up when DeCaprio called it the first “green Oscars.”
On Saturday Beki and I went to see the Oscar nominated animated shorts at the center for contemporary arts. It featured the nominees and the runners up for nominations. The short that ended up winning was by far my favorite. It really used animation to it's fullest. The great part about the art form is that you can things that just don't work in live action. I'm not talking about drawing things that we can't make; you can do damn near anything with CGI these days. I'm talking about using the fact that things are animated to have things happen that just don't make sense when you have real people doing or pretending to do them. In the short that one the award there is a scene where one of the main characters is forced to leave the love of his life behind. He just falls flat on his back and is dragged away. It just works in the context of animation, where it would be stupid and awkward with real people. Unfortunately most all of the shorts went for kind of cheap laughs and that's about it. I don't quite understand why animation has been relegated to more of the world of entertainment and/or beauty. I'm all for both those things, but the great part about the winner is that it's about something important. Also, too much animation about animals. Why can't these people make stories about people?
