Week of 2007-01-27 17:00 to 2007-02-03 16:59

When you’re subscribed to a number of music blogs, as well as coming across cool new indy songs accidentally or buying stuff via iTunes, it can be somewhat daunting to keep up with what you’ve been into lately. Rating songs helps, of course, but I’m usually too buried in code to bother with it. (With Quicksilver, however…)

Pondering this, I created a new playlist in iTunes called Lately Awesome. Choose “Match all”. The rules are:

• Date Added is in the last 2 weeks
• Play Count is greater than 2

Naturally, you’ll want to tailor this to your own needs. Expanding it to 1 month results in sixteen songs for me. YMMV.

Anyhow, Lately Awesome produced three songs:

1. “Flathead” by The Fratellis
2. “Rockin’ Date” by The Micragirls
3. “Start Swimming” by Summer Hymns

Coincidentally, all three songs were added on 1/30, and all are from this year or last, which makes sense.

“Flathead” is the song from the new iPod adverts. They do seem to err on the side of catchy. ;)

“Rockin’ Date” has the female rock vibe of the 5-6-7-8’s, but more raw and distorted. A good combination of elements.

“Start Swimming” I heard of from 3hive (which has become a great source for new music for me), and their description of “textured, mellow pop songs that seem to fit the band’s name” is apt. This would go well on a seasonal playlist you listen to in the depths of winter to thaw your soul a little. Straight-ahead song, no surprises, but good vibes — like America with less of a box-of-wine aura.

Talk about your geeky food experiences. And not a bad table in the house. “And the Food? Out of This World.”

Getting three stars from the Michelin guide just wasn’t enough. Now world-renowned chef Alain Ducasse is taking his stellar cuisine to the starry heavens. In October, the Russian cargo ship Progress left Kazakhstan’s Baikonur cosmo-drome, bound for the International Space Station with 13 Ducasse-created gourmet plates on board.

It wouldn’t be a day in Hollywood without at least one wonderfully odd thing happening.

“Ersatz Chewbacca succumbs to dark side”

A street performer dressed as Chewbacca from “Star Wars” apparently succumbed to the dark side when he allegedly head-butted a tour guide operator in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, Los Angeles police said today.

First of all, does a “tour guide operator” operate tour guides? Second, I guess the tour guide operator never heard that you always let the wookie win.

Oh, it gets better.

The Star Line Tours guide, Brian Sapir, said in an interview today that the Chewbacca character was harassing two young Japanese tourists when he told him to stop. “You could see him exploding in his mask,” Sapir said. “He said, ‘Nobody tells this wookie what to do.”

Young then threw his mask off and head-butted him, Sapir added.

Which brings up one of my favorite parts of this story, which is the headline referring to this wookie as an “ersatz Chewbacca”, just in case anybody out there thought it was the real one. ;)

A police source said that a performer dressed as Superman witnessed the assault and was interviewed by police. He was not identified.

“Clark Kent, you’ll never guess who’s right over… hey, wait a minute!”

“The lesson here is you can have the force with you,” [LAPD Spokesdroid Lt. Paul] Vernon said. “You just can’t use illegal force.”

Ooof.

Okay, let me see if I can get this described efficiently.

There’s this guy, Adam Roberts, who has a popular food blog, The Amateur Gourmet.

Adam is currently also writing for the new food groupblogsite, Serious Eats, which published a new article of his today, “Meeting Mario”.

The “Mario” of the title is none other than celebrity chef and clog wearer Mario Batali, most famously from various shows on the Food Network, but also an NYC restauranteur branching out to LA now with Mozza.

Meanwhile, back at the interview, Mario is promoting a new book from pasta corporation Barilla, entitled “The Celebrity Pasta Lovers’ Cookbook”.

Now, normally this wouldn’t be that big of a deal. However, the PDF cookbook is free to download, and Barilla is donating $1 to the America’s Second Harvest food charity every time somebody does. Batali and fellow celeb-chef Giada De Laurentiis edited the various stars’ recipes.

Got all that? ;)

Very cool — I was thinking about some ideas for chickpeas/garbanzos, and here’s an intriguing one from 101 Cookbooks: Ultimate Chickpea Noodle Soup, which they describe as a sort of Italian tortilla soup. Sounds good, and super-simple.

5/1/07 UPDATE: Finally got around to making this soup, and it was marvelous. More details at The Grown Diaries.