Ultimate Fun Equation

Everybody's got their own idea of how to spend a 70-degree day in February.

Naturally, mine involved walking, in this case a sunny walk down Broad Street for brunch with hordes of other wanna-be brunchers at Supper. We tried Lunch first but the tiny space was full up, so we went next door to Supper which was also looking full, but the hostess tucked us into a high-top bar table near the kitchen and we were all set.

My stool was next to a window and although the view was less than stellar (a shed a foot from the glass), the music was terrific: bossa nova on a Sunday morning. Perfect brunching music and a nice distraction from the noisy group of people waiting for a table right next to us .

I chose chicken and waffles for breakfast, pouring syrup over it all, and somewhere midway through eating it realized that the music had taken a turn for the '80s. The Smiths and New Order had replaced Latin rhythms. Not better or worse, just very different.

The walk back along Leigh Street took us past the Bowtie theaters and a full parking lot, past the empty Redskins training facility and the bustle of Sugar Shack Donuts, a place I haven't visited since opening day.

Once home, I took care of business - three quick errands accomplished in less than 20 minutes - and set out for more walking, this time toward the river to see what was happening.

As I'd approached the Lee Bridge yesterday, I'd seen a bunch of guys doing what looked like hill surfing down the incredibly steep grassy knoll to Second Street. They'd get a running start, throw down what looked like a cardboard disc and jump on it to sail down a hill that had to be close to a 60-degree angle.

I have no doubt it was a major adrenaline rush but the grassy hill was so steep that sometimes their momentum took them off the disc and running or falling down the slope, which ended at Second Street's occasional traffic.

But when they nailed it, it looked to be a kick to glide down to the bottom. Kind of like snow sledding but standing and on grass.

Being nosy, I'd had to ask what it was. "Radical fun boarding," the bearded guy nearest me said. "It's based on radical fun discs that you throw." What I'd wanted to know was how radical fun discs differed from Frisbees, but I was reluctant to sound so uninformed.

Didn't matter. It was his turn and he grabbed a "board" which I now assumed meant cardboard, threw it down and ran to jump aboard, making it all the way to the bottom upright without falling off. Rad, I guess.

But they weren't there today, so I walked home, got my Washington Post and took it outside to read in the afternoon sun for the first time in months.

I read about the guy who came up with Pandora (and why it took him so long to figure out his business model) because I've always been thrilled to understand my music genome which I had no words to describe until Pandora provided them to me.

Almost as irresistible to this writer was a piece about how Lincoln cut and pasted (literally using scissors and animal bone-based glue) his second inaugural address ("with malice toward none...") until he got it right. And now that version is going on display for four days at the Library of Congress.

An enormous front-page piece on Al Sharpton upped my knowledge of his roots, path and goals of furthering the movement, along with pictures showing him almost unrecognizable after his 176 pound weight loss. Al, we hardly knew ye.

Today's book reviews skewed romantic given the upcoming holiday. "How To Be  Husband" sounded funny mainly because the author apparently holds himself up as an awful husband despite 23 years of marriage.

And while the reviewer gushed about "Unrequited: Women and Romantic Obsession," that seems to be related to her just getting over a man who didn't love her back.

Easily the best title went to "The Mathematics of Love: Patterns, Proofs and the Search for the Ultimate Equation," which tries to explain attraction and relationships using something as dull as algorithms and ratios. If I didn't like them in math class, why would I want to use them to help me with my love life?

But when the air is balmy and the sun is shining directly on my face despite the calendar reading winter, I am happy to read absolutely any and everything in front of me just to extend my afternoon outside. No board required.

Let's just say radical fun is in the eye of the beholder.

On Not Squaring Shoulders

Why is it that long days always follow short nights? There was the excitement of the Folk Fest, followed by a much-needed nap and finally getting some work done, and all of a sudden it was after 8 and I hadn't even begun to consider dinner.

And Sunday nights can be problematic for going out anyway because so many places aren't open or close early (missed the Kuba, Kuba cut-off by 8 minutes). But not Bonvenu and with their door sitting invitingly open on Cary Street, I made a bee-line for it, only to be greeted with, "Long time, no see!" from the bartender. It had been a while.

Which worked out well, because there were plenty of changes to the menu, two of which I tried. Tonight's soup was a chicken, veggie and rice gumbo, chock full of okra and carrots and just what I needed to warm me up in the overly air-conditioned temperature of the restaurant (it takes me a while to adjust to cool, especially when outside was so nice and warm. No blood).

Dinner was the bourbon-braised pork belly brochettes topped with citrus gremolata with a side of pickled red onions over arugula and sweet potato chips, freshly fried. Each of the four brochettes was a good-sized hunk of meat/fat, perfectly seasoned and dripping in, well, you know. The tang of the onions cut all that delicious fat and the chips were just a crispy bonus.

More new food choices are on the brunch menu over which I salivated (BLT: pork belly, arugula and tomato sandwich, a lobster hoagie), trying to think of which friends might be free for brunch some Sunday soon.

The bartender and one other bar sitter and I had a lively discussion of some earlier customers (a 23-top containing one particularly arrogant finger-snapping ass) and our thoughts on a couple of the new restaurants we'd all tried. Meanwhile John the magician was doing his tricks for the Byrd Theater crowds just across the street in the warm October air.

After some talk and so much filling food, I settled in with my newspapers, beginning with yesterday's which I still hadn't gotten to. Just another solo diner without someone with whom I could discuss what I was reading or eating.

Or, as my Saturday horoscope explained so succinctly:
You are self-sufficient and when it comes down to it, you can take care of all your needs. But this does not stop you from wanting to know that you belong and fit into another person's life.

Yes, wanting to know that. Who wouldn't?

R.I.P. English

Although I am a daily reader of the Washington Post, I've never been a huge fan of Gene Weingarten's Sunday column. Too often, his columns focus on the exaggerated differences between the sexes and, for whatever reason, they're just too over-the-top for my taste.

But this week's column was a masterpiece in my eyes because he was writing about the demise of the English language ("English. It's dead to me."), a subject near and dear to my heart.

He dubbed the official moment that English died of shame to be when the Post itself published a letter from a reader about their error in calling Sasha the President's youngest daughter, rather than the younger one. Good point, but the letter also referred to the first couple as the Obama's. Ouch.

Gene called this "an illiterate proofreading of an illiterate criticism of an illiteracy." I call it commonplace these days. Substituting a possessive for a plural is as frequently-occurring as misuse of there, they're and their (or its and it's). Or the non-existent "alot." A lot of people don't realize that alot is not a word. Never was.

His column also blasted the use of "reach out to" as a verb, citing it as the domain of 12-step programs and sensitivity training workshops. I once had an editor/writer boyfriend who had the same horror of using impact as a verb, refusing to acknowledge its right to be anything other than a noun.

But what endeared Gene to me most was the last line of his piece: "I could care less." If any misused phrase has the ability to set my teeth on edge every time I hear it, it's that one. If you could care less, you're saying something completely different than if you couldn't care less. And if you don't understand that distinction, clearly English died for you a long time ago.

And, yes, I acknowledge that language must remain malleable to thrive. I accept (and grimace) every year when buzz words like bromance and exit strategy are added to the venerable Oxford English Dictionary.

It's like my editor/writer friend once told me about a mutual friend, "I can't take her seriously. She doesn't know the difference between than and then."

To this language lover, he couldn't have explained her fatal flaw any more succinctly.

Gorging at Avalon

Earlier in the week, a dear friend had slipped me the new menu at Avalon which was set to debut this weekend.

Scanning it, I found loads of small plates full of creative-sounding combinations and extremely reasonable prices.

So when a friend and I made plans to attend Project Resolution tonight, I suggested we start there.

Her response was encouraging; she told me she thought Knox was one of the best chefs in the city, which landed us at Avalon's door at 5:02 (it was locked).

Luckily, the inimitable Jason heard us at the door and we headed in to see how this new menu was going to impress us.

Naturally the first thing Jason told us was not to ask too many questions about the menu because he wasn't familiar with it yet; if you know this popular and longtime Avalon bartender, that comment should not surprise you in the least.

We had a tough time narrowing down our choices because we wanted to taste as much as possible.

After much deliberation, we ordered grilled asparagus with Romesco sauce and Manchego; Fava bean, fingerling potato and leek succotash with white corn butter; Merguez sausage on Granny Smith apples and 6-month Manchego; Tempura-fried Serrano ham- wrapped figs with basil and Hooks 1-year bleu cheese; steamed mussels with crispy fingerling potatoes, cipollini onions and marjoram sherry butter; and escolar wrapped in marinated corn husk with white corn and tequila lime reduction.

Everything was $8 or less except the $10 fish.

There wasn't a disappointment in the bunch and if forced to pick a couple of favorites, I might go for the succotash and the sausage, but I could make a case for each of the other dishes as well.

Next time I will definitely try the wild boar chop.

Six small plates turned out to be way too much food for two mere females (where is Cy when you need him?) but our pleasure in taking in so many tastes overrode any good sense in ordering.

Project Resolution was leaner than usual with only three films shown tonight and two were essentially music videos (one a photo essay set to music) with the most disparate of bands for soundtracks: Muse and Tone Loc.

It's not often that those two show up in the same sentence, much less the same evening.

Because of the brevity of the film screenings, there was more time in between for discussion of each film although I'm not sure how pleasurable that was for the directors involved.

More time to over analyze your films, oh boy!

Since P-Res ended unexpectedly early, we could think of nothing better to do than go to Can-Can for dessert.

Why Can Can, you wonder?

Who else has an entire section of their dessert menu devoted to Chocolate?

No one.

Friend got the chocolate creme brulee with mint chocolate chip ice cream, and chocolate vanilla sauce, a chocolate honeycomb and chocolate brownie round.

I opted for the chocolate ice cream in chocolate cake with chocolate sauce and a chocolate biscotti.

Again, our eyes were bigger than our bellies and we both left chocolate on the plate, a real shame, but unavoidable.

The highlight for sure was the mint chocolate chip ice cream, which could not have tasted any more of fresh mint.

Don't quote me on this because I'll deny it, but I was actually chocolated out by the time I gave up and pushed my plate away.

Tonight's big topic was online dating, a route we're both shunned but which may need to be considered unless one of us is willing to have a sex change operation (neither is).

According to today's Washington Post, more than twice as many couples who married last year met through online dating services than at a bar or social event.

One out of every five new relationships owes its origins to the Internet.

Aww, do we really have to?

Needless to say, neither of us actually committed to giving it a try but we did talk about thinking about considering it maybe down the road.

We figure we'll make a good enough impression on the screen but once they discover how much we can eat, it may be a different story.

Until then we're just a couple of bottomless pits enjoying each other's sparkling companionship.

But if you know any interesting guys, by all means, send them our way.

Don't worry, we have no intention of mentioning that sex change business.

Let Me Distill That for You

I'm old school enough to still enjoy reading a newspaper rather than getting my news online when I can, although I only get the Washington Post these days.

I can attribute this partly to having newspaper-loving parents and partly just to my love of the written word.

But I also once worked for the R.J. Reynolds Lobbying office in D.C., where one of my daily responsibilities was to read the papers and pull out any references to Reynolds or any of their other interests (Seagram's, SeaLand, Delmonte, and others) for the lobbyists.

This meant I started every work day by reading the NY Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and the L.A. Times.

For a devoted newspaper hound like me, it was an enviable task to call work.

Years later, a boyfriend half-jokingly suggested that I'd be the ideal person to read the papers, culling the choice articles and saving him the trouble of reading the less interesting bits.

That way, we would have the same starting points for a lively discussion of the day's paper.

Although I don't have any particular person to glean for any more, I still have a habit of reading for the best parts, if only in hopes of finding someone to discuss them with.

So it was that I headed to Tarrant's tonight for dessert and to finish today's Post.

There was a whiny piece about leisure time and time management, apparently a huge issue for many people.

But the part that grabbed me was the time-use studies done by John Robinson, a sociologist at my alma mater, the University of Maryland, and a man who says finding leisure time is an act of will; accordingly, he set out to build leisure time into his own life.

But I wanted to embrace this 74-year old man when I read his philosophy of a) not allowing yourself to be rushed and b) his insistence on going out nearly every night.

Or, as he put it, "A day without live music is like a day without sunshine." I bow to this man's brilliant thinking.

Another excellent piece was about Benjamin Latrobe, known as America's first architect.

He would be the architect of the U.S. Capitol and the unbelievably beautiful Baltimore Basilica.

But his first project in the U.S. was the State Penitentiary here in Richmond which embraced some of the newest ideas in penal reform being espoused by Thomas Jefferson at the time (and who was clearly influenced by Latrobe in designing UVA).

Unfortunately, his Richmond work was not even acknowledged in the article, but it was fascinating stuff nonetheless.

His later years were spent in New Orleans (where he eventually died from Yellow Fever), making me wish I'd taken the time to do a Latrobe tour when I was last there.

I'd also recommend the How To Deal article on how to explain a job search when you've moved to a new city simply to be with your boyfriend.

The health care reform piece on how blood tests and weigh-ins to determine individual health care costs work naturally caught my eye, as did the article on Obama's pet speech phrases.

Personally, I'm a sucker for language articles, but I think anyone would enjoy this one.

So if you're one of the rushed majority and need to get right to the good stuff, there are your recommendations for what to read in today's paper.

And most importantly, remember the live music rule.

Of course, I already knew it.

Restaurants Not the Usual Suspects

Sunday's Washington Post Travel section had not one, but two articles about eating in RVA.

While I'm always happy to see word of our fair city in the larger press, I'm beginning to wonder about the sources for their destinations.

The first, "In Richmond, fine dining is in the details" was written by Post food critic Tom Sietsema, a man whose writing I read often and always enjoy, and chronicled his eating journey through our little town. Go ahead, I bet you can guess at least three, if not four, of the places where he chowed down.

Duh. Millie's, Can Can, Acacia and Mezzanine (because of its relative newness and Style's Restaurant of the Year award apparently) made the cut.

His only other stop was Buzz and Ned's Real Barbecue where he was underwhelmed. He also found Millie's lacking, despite having had a good lunch there several years ago. The others he enjoyed.

The second article, "For food shops, it's a capital city" was mainly about Belmont Butchery, but also gave a nod to 821, Comfort, Sally Belle's, Kuba Kuba, Yellow Umbrella Seafood and the brand new Spoonfed (formerly Stonewall Market).

The writer raved about Belmont Butchery with good reason, although Tanya Cauthen is quoted as saying that when she needs additonal counter help, she calls on local chefs from Balliceaux and Pomegranate. I question how a place as new as Balliceaux got lumped in with the defunct Pomegranate.

My question is this: can a piece about eating in RVA be written without mention of Can Can, Acacia, Millie's, Comfort, or Kuba Kuba? And, let's be real here, even 821 and Sally Belle's are semi-regulars when the topic is our restaurant scene. I'm not saying these aren't good places to eat, but who doesn't know that by now?

Clearly even the out-of-towners are aware of these places, so why can't we see an article about eating through Richmond mention some of the less obvious eateries we have to offer?

Yellow Umbrella was an unexpected surprise to see given a nod, as was the barely opened Spoonfed, but it was an article about markets after all. But a truly good story about what's worth checking out during a visit to RVA should inform the reader about the places not mentioned over and over in the travel press.

Or, at the very least, whomever is supplying the suggestions to these out-of-town writers should give them the scoop on the places the locals know are our best -kept secrets.

If anyone should need a good source in the future, I'm happy to provide a list of less obvious places worth a bite or sip, as, I'm sure, would any regular diner in Richmond.

Or are we trying to keep these places to ourselves?

Beer for Art Geeks

If I haven't made it clear in my past posts, I don't drink beer.

I don't like the taste, despite years of beer-swilling friends coaxing me to "just taste this one; it's different" and not liking a single one.

But I did drink an entire beer once.

Oh, yes, I did.

It was at a Cracker show at the Flood Zone back in 1993 and if they had had anything, anything at all, to drink other than beer, I'd have swilled it.

But that night I needed some liquid courage and that one beer was the only way to get it.

I share this as a prelude to trying to describe my pleasure at reading an article in today's Washington Post about cask beers.

Why the sudden interest in a beer topic, you wonder?

Ah, well, it was written by Blake Gopnik, the art critic for the Post and a writer of whom I am inordinately fond.

Granted, he's always writing about art, a topic near and dear to my heart, but I'm also a big fan of his writing.

So when I got to today's Post Food section to find a front page article about cask beers and a new place in Logan Circle that will carry five of them, I read it start to finish and was mildly fascinated.

I don't know that I'm any more likely to like cask beer than I like pasteurized, carbonated beer, but I'm not ruling it out either.

Maybe it was Blake's enthusiasm for the subject or maybe it was the allure of an art geek trying to introduce me to something new.

For all I know, Blake is nothing more than a golden beverage fan and not necessarily qualified to write about beer, but I prefer to think that he's sharing his enthusiasm for cask beer in the hopes of reaching other art geeks like me who wouldn't take the word of anyone else.

Now I'm imagining about sharing some cask beer with Blake whilst discussing art for hours.

And if he wants to throw in some additional beer talk, I'll be all ears.

I might even become a cask convert as his urging.