Collateral Bloggage

I love living in Hillsboro. Proximity to Portland and the beach, the great Farmers’ Market, the smelly water.

It always makes a guy feel good when the City sends out letter explaining that “your smelly water is really perfectly okay-ish for you to be drinking, if you absolutely can’t go without.”  Okay, so they said it was perfectly safe, if smelly.  They even named the compound causing the odor:  geosmine.  I quickly did a search to assure myself that it’s not just a fancy word for poo.  It’s not.  Actually, it’s the compound which gives beets their earthy flavor (which I love).  But the human nose is evidently very sensitive to it.

Interestingly, I haven’t really noticed the smell.  Which makes me really glad the City told me about it so I could start watching for it.  Very helpful.  Actually, I finally noticed a slightly earthy flavor to the water, but didn’t find it overly unpleasant.

The whole thing reminds me of Judge Dredd, when this robot was driving around saying, “Eat recycled food.  Good for the environment, and OKAY for you.”

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Buzz Aldrin is an American Hero, but that doesn’t stop him from sounding like an idiot when he claims Sci-Fi makes people think real space exploration is boring.  Yeah, totally.  I mean, I’ve never heard of an astrophysicist or astronaut who first got interested in space after watching Star Trek or reading H.G. Wells.  Never happened.  Brilliant.

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Watching Alton Brown on Good Eats doing an entire show about olives got me to thinking.  My thinking is this:  All olives are my favorite.  Perhaps what I need is some clarity on just which olives I like best.  To that end, I arranged a trip to my local Whole Foods and picked up four varieties to try.

BTW, I love black olives, but they’re not really in the same category as any of the olives I tried this weekend.  Here are the results of my first foray into olive reviewing:

Picholine - A small (0.75in), thin (maybe torpedo shaped), brown-green Mediterranean olive.  Brine cured and fairly firm.  The flavor is very rich and earthy.  Not too salty, but with a bit of a bitter aftertaste.  My favorite of the initial group.

Green Lucques - Another torpedo shaped one, but French this time.  Definitely closer to green.  Somehow it tastes greener than the Picholine, but I wouldn’t classify it as an improvement.  Also brine cured, but again not very salty.  It’s also softer than the Picholine.

Tailladees - A light brown, thicker olive with a much more bitter (or is that bitterer?) flavor.  My least favorite of the group (just a bit too bitter).  It’s a French, firm-fleshed, brine-cured olive.  The brine was much stronger, perhaps to offset the bitterness.  Didn’t quite make it for me.

Castelvetvano - Easily my favorite name of the group.  It’s a bright green Sicilian olive, brine cured.  Its flesh is quite soft and has a very delicate flavor.  Strangely, the very first impression it made on my tastebuds was “American cheese.”  I know.  I’m a weirdo.

There you have it.  My first olive review is now complete.  I was surprised how different the flavors were.

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My favorite day in sports is the day after the NBA Finals concludes, because there’s basically nothing but baseball.  Naturally, ESPN still finds a way to talk about that low-brow testosterone-fest known as football, but you still end up with a glut of baseball highlights on Sportscenter.

The MLB All-Star Break provides the opposite feeling.  There’s nothing on!  Yes, the Home Run Derby is good clean fun, and I’m planning on watching it with Ethan.  And the All-Star Game itself is sort of interesting.  But what happens the day after the game?  Nothing.  All the players travel back to wherever they’re supposed to be, and the whole league takes a break.  I do not appreciate the break.  I feel the way Ethan does whenever I tell him the Mariners have an off day:  “What?  Why?”

But at least there’s no football on.

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I think that’ll do for this week.