White Summer

The Direct From Hollywood Cemetery show at The Pyramid last Thursday was fantastic! I still don't get why nobody but me is into them. Sure, they're a little stagey, which, if you weren't inclined to like them for other reasons, might only deepen your contempt -- but their songs are incredibly catchy and their playing is incredibly tight, considering they only play about one show a year. I was a little worried they weren't gonna do the intro where the lead singer bursts out of a paper coffin (as the audience chants "Rise, Dr. Fanges!"), but, uh... they did it. They had a smoke machine this time, too. Also kind of central to the show being awesome were these two incredibly drunk girls who were the only people in the audience (well, besides me, naturally) who seemed to realize they were at a rock show. They were hooting and hollering and moshing around and wound up kind of slopping themselves around on the beer-covered floor a whole bunch. It was pretty Blue States Lose, except not in a bathroom and nobody puked. I'm a faithful man, but I will admit being a bit thrilled that they were shoving me and grabbing at my jacket.

On Saturday Katharine and Nina and I hopped the LIRR out to Belmont Park and spent the day betting on the ponies. It was the Belmont Stakes! I'd never actually been to a racetrack before, though I'd done some betting at Emma's OTB birthday party a few years ago. The track facility itself was a little less fancy than I'd expected -- it was kind of a cross between, you know, an OTB, and, say... an airport. The horses were very strong and cool looking, though -- I saw one that I wanted to bet on but couldn't properly identify that had unnervingly blue eyes and was drooling a lot. We got there around Race 5 and stayed until the big one, which was Race 11 or 12. Nina was the big winner in terms of picking the right horses -- she won three or four times with a variety of different bets. (Her get of choice is the boxed exacta, a convenient way of betting on the first and second horses in either order.) K-Rod came in second, and I didn't win anything until the Stakes itself -- I was down about $80 and made $65 of it back on the box with Curlin and Rags to Riches.

A guy near the stables told us that a lot of the earlier races have unreliable handicapping because the owners will dope a second- or third-tier horse in these races, ruining it for a long-term career and possibly incurring penalties themselves but come out ahead on the bet money, so it's sometimes better to bet on a 5-to-1 horse than, say, a 3-to-2. That's consistent with my typical maverick strategy, anyway, even though, you know, said strategy was basically a complete failure. Horse racing is a hard game.

On the way back we sat in front of this quintet of noisy frat boys calling each other faggots and giving each other dead arms. I wondered out loud to Nina whether they'd sing themselves to sleep. Eventually they did.

On Sunday Eve got a bicycle in Williamsburg and she and Nina and I stuffed ourselves practically to the point of, you know, eruption at this barbecue place on Metropolitan Avenue called Fette Sau.

Last night I decided to make the "Sin City" Breakfast Tacos that Robert Rodriguez describes here (somewhat off-puttingly insisting on the native pronunciation of "taco"). They came out pretty okay -- the super-easy filling was easier to make than the tortillas themselves and kind of tastier -- but my advice is to use lard, as he recommends (they didn't have it at the Key Food in Sunset Park!), and to use a little bit more flour than he does, because my tortillas came out pretty sticky and hard to work with. Oh, also it takes way more than 10 minutes. It takes like an hour and a half, and your smoke detector will go off, and you will try to pull it off the wall to take the battery out but then it turns out it's wired into the ceiling and you just broke the fixture and your smoke detector is now hanging by a bunch of stupid wires from the ceiling.