Mac n' Cheese with portobello mushrooms, tomatoes, blue cheese, and bad photography.

Admittedly, I'm not really one to eat at restaurants that take reservations, use three adjectives to describe “breadcrumbs,” and call fries “frittes” [sic], but Valencia's Grub claims to make hella good mac n' cheese, so it was hard to resist eventually making my way over there.

And the verdict? Grub makes some bomb-ass mac & cheese, if you're willing to pay $12 bucks for a bowl of it.  Overpriced, no doubt, but it does have way more calories than one could possibly ingest in one sitting, so there's that.

But, really, my basket of “frittes” [sic] really made the meal.  See, as the basket was nearly gone, the old man sitting at the table next to me leans over, taps me on the shoulder and says, “You know, I've been sitting here the entire time just waiting for you to offer me some of those fries and you haven't done it yet.”  So I, feeling like an idiot for not offering the neighboring table my appetizer, apologize and offer up some of my last fries.  Then his wife swats the fries away and exclaims, “Don't reward him!”

Basically what I'm trying to say is Grub is an alright to place to eat.

Pic via Google Maps, because I doubt anyone with a Flickr account has ever been to this part of town.

Christopher Forsley wrote into The Rumpus to tell the world what it's like living just off Mission Street at the edge of San Francisco and Daly City:

My next door neighbor, Johnny Mac, didn’t go to university. He went to The Tenderloin and brought back a whore and a forty. The forty is long gone, but I can hear the whore over there right now. The hoarder around the corner didn’t go to university either. The only place she ever goes is to the park to leave amphetamine-pumped fish for our feral cat colony. The rats have vanished, but the raccoons are eating the fish too and will tear your eyes out if you look at them wrong.

Whenever I see a raccoon, I look the other way where the Mickey Rourke-faced lady is usually looking at her reflection in a car window. She went to university but came out vain. The obese man who waddles around repeating, “Masturbation and Doritos,” also went to university, but he didn’t come out the same. He came out insane.

Read the entire tale over at The Rumpus.  Scroll down until you see a picture of a fish with a needle stuck in its back.

View from the top of Coit Tower via William Hereford

Recently, my buddy Will posted the picture above on his blog. He took the photo last time he was in San Francisco on business from Brooklyn, and on his free time managed to venture all the way to the top of Coit Tower. Well, color me lazy because I've lived in SF and the Bay for around 20 years now and have never so much as looked up when I pass by Coit Tower. I guess it's just one of those tourist things that you think you'll get to someday, but really, you could actually care less to ever experience it. For example, when I lived in New York my friends would visit and would want to go to the Statue of Liberty all the time. If you've ever lived in NY, most would agree that venturing to the Statue of Liberty would be just as much torture as having to spend multiple hours in the Times Square M&M's store (my own personal hell). So, when friends would suggest that the Statue was something that they wanted to see, I simply would tell them that there are terrorists there, and if they wanted to see it they'd have to risk it by themselves. Once I took a friend on the Staten Island Ferry to see the Statue “from a safe distance,” but I digress. This post is about the Coit Tower.

After seeing Will's photograph, I totally have a new outlook on Coit Tower. First, it has sick-ass views and, after skimming its Wikipedia page, it has a pretty interesting history involving a cross-dressing, cigar-smoking woman amassing a fortune gambling around town.

I can't wait to put off visiting the tower for another few years.

Hello Everyone! Long time, no see. Well, don't get used to this pretty face because I'm just stopping by to deposit a fat load of holiday cheer all over your face. So, UA friend Ben Pearson writes awesome movie reviews over on Tiny Mix Tapes and he put together this great piece, “The Art of Watching Bad Movies” and it's fairly awesome and includes many rad drawings and charts as sampled here:

Go read it! And enjoy a terrible movie or seven over the holiday break. What doesn't kill you just makes you a worse person. 

xoxo