Grillicious

I don't care if Memorial Day hasn't yet arrived - now is the time for all good men to begin making every single weekend meal on a gas grill.

I live off my gas grill in the summertime. There's the standard steak, hot dog and hamburger fare, but gas grills can do so much more. Learning to master your grill is the non-wuss way to challenge the long-held notion that men shouldn't be placed in charge of meal preparation. (Taking gourmet cooking classes is the wuss way...)

For instance, last night at Craig's place, I was appointed grillmeister and prepared the following:

• Hamburgers
• Hot dogs
• A huge steak that was about 2 inches thick and about the size of a frisbee
• Eight lobsters
• Tuna steak
• Corn on the cob
• Chilean sea bass
• Chicken cutlets

I love grilling, and I'm convinced that there's no hot meal that can't be prepared on a gas grill. Corn takes on a nice flavor when you grill it - leave the husks on and soak the ears of corn in water. Put the ears of corn on the middle rack and keep them moist by brushing water on them every few minutes as you turn them. It adds a nice roasted flavor.

And Chilean Sea Bass? We marinated ours in a Tupperware container in some lemon and butter for about 2 hours. When it was time to cook, I doubled over a piece of aluminum foil, turned up the edges and put the thing - foil and all - right on the grill next to the chicken cutlets. I got tons of compliments on it.

There are some that say charcoal is the only way to go, and they look down on us propane enthusiasts. But who the heck wants to sit around for an hour and a half waiting for coals to get to the right temperature? My grill warms up in five minutes. And despite what anybody tells you, everything doesn't need to have the "smoky flavor of mesquite" to be appealing.

I wonder if I can go an entire summer preparing all meals on the grill...

I'm Absolutely Horrified

John from Inluminent sent me a comment and I read his post on the Nicholas Berg killing. Following a link, I found a place to download the video early this morning and I watched it. This was tough - I saw the Daniel Pearl video and was absolutely appalled by it. The Berg video, however, is especially grisly. I felt physically ill watching it.

I read a translation of the Arabic the killers were speaking before killing Berg. I can't even fathom someone saying "God is great" while in the process of beheading someone. Whether you're a Christian, Jew or Muslim, your God doesn't want you killing people in his name. Terrorists - If you think you're getting 72 virgins in the afterlife for killing "infidels" you'll be awfully surprised when God takes a giant shit on you and sends you right to hell where you belong for killing innocent people in his name.

How To Combat Revisionist Historians

Atrios looks back at his archives in this post. Makes you wonder why few newspapers ever do pieces where they look back at what the newspaper was thinking at specific points in history. Easy-to-access blog archives might make it tougher for revisionist historians to make sweeping claims about the general mood of the country during specific periods. Statements about the Iraq War like, "Everybody thought Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction" will become tougher to make as bloggers can point to posts they made back in the day to show that, indeed, there was significant controversy over that point. Even if the blogging movement does nothing else, it will at least give us a running record of opinions within the context of time. It's interesting to think about the potential value to people in the future.

NYC Bloggers Event - SOHO Apple Store

I went to the NYC Bloggers event last night down in SOHO. It was somewhat interesting, but it really felt like a mid-90s dot com masturbation-fest where many of the folks in the room were seeking validation of their peers rather than information on where the movement is headed. Still, there were some interesting nuggets...

First off the bat, where the hell was Rick Bruner? I would have put serious money on his being there, but I didn't see him the whole night.

The first panel of the night featured Jason Calacanis and Nick Denton. I gather that everyone in the crowd expected these two to go at it Jerry Springer style, but it never really happened. The two focused on business models for their respective companies and the relative advantages/disadvantages. Surprisingly, I found myself agreeing with Jason more than I agreed with Nick, which is weird considering I rarely agreed with anything that came out of Jason's mouth during his Silicon Alley Reporter days. I think Jason is on his way to a good start, with at least one advertiser subsidizing one of his blogs. What I'm concerned about is his company's ability to scale over time. He mentioned he expected to have several hundred blogs within a few years' time. I wonder how ad sales reps will be able to effectively sell advertising on a web property with such wide-ranging content. Also, I think I'd be pissed if I were to be working with him, considering he hasn't hired any ad sales reps yet.

Jeff Jarvis moderated this first panel. Next time, I'd like to see him as a featured speaker. After all, the guy has a ton of intelligent things to say about business models for blogging. It was kind of disappointing to see him in the role of referee for what most bloggers in attendence expected to be a Battle Royale of archrivals.

I liked the second panel, which featured Anil Dash and Meg Hourihan talking about blog management tools. I was pleasantly surprised that the two didn't "geek out." Instead, they brought up some very interesting points about how people use blogging tools, communications paradigms and such. Someone in the audience brought up an interesting question about Movable Type as a Content Management System (CMS) and why people who are interested in a full-featured CMS featuring a blog have to hack two or three software packages together. Honestly, I think this was probably the best comment/question of the night. Some people want their sites to not only host a blog, but other features commonly found in community sites. I love Movable Type, but this site could have easily been a PHP-Nuke site if it were possible to get full-featured blogging out of Nuke.

Unfortunately, I hated the third panel, which seemed like a joke in comparison to the first two. I think it was cool to have some of the more popular blogging personalities on a panel - and the panel certainly was entertaining - but I expected them to talk about something more substantive than how they're handling their new-found celebrity. Also, there seemed to be this overarching sense of suspicion with regard to whether or not a blogger can stay true to the spirit of blogging if they take advertising. There was a question or two about whether bloggers fear offending advertisers. It's a legit question, but I keep wondering whether the blogging movement is just another one of those things that comes out of the Internet that resists commercialization to the point of killing itself. All right, I'm biased, but why is there this fear out there that advertising will pollute everything it touches?