R.I.P.

For all its faults, I have to say I'll miss The X, Birmingham's sole remaining "alternative" station. It signed off yesterday, and I've heard the staff got almost no notice. It's now some sort of sports talk bullshit.

(You can see the angry listener responses over on the station's MySpace page.)

Is this a bigger issue? Is my kind of music (and, apparently, My Chemical Romance) fading into a commercial purgatory, only to emerge as "classic rock" a few years from now? The X had no competition for its target audience. Is it satellite radio competition? Is iTunes ruining the world of free radio?

And for the love of god, who will broadcast live from jello wrestling at Bell Bottoms?! Someone think of the children!

Get your objectivism on....film!

Oh yes, it's finally happening.

Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged is being made into a movie.

Now full disclosure before I make fun of this: I haven't read Atlas Shrugged. I read and loved Fountainhead but just never got around to Rand's other mega-hit. Maybe I'll just wait for the movie! (Please don't hit me.)

Did any of you see the movie version of Fountainhead? I quite liked it. Of course, it had Gary Cooper...and the screenplay was actually written by Ayn Rand.

Maybe we'll have such luck this time. Hmm....let's see who's writing the Atlas Shrugged screenplay... Oh. It's the guy who wrote "The Man in the Iron Mask" and "Pearl Harbor."

OK, no luck there. Maybe they'll get today's equivalent of Gary Cooper or Patricia Neal...



Well there you go.

If only this sentiment were more common.

Poking around on a work project that referenced Samford University, I found this portion of an inauguration speech given by new Samford President Andrew Westmoreland.

"I believe our Christianity is no excuse for a lack of scholarship. Instead, our faith should move us to the highest standards for excellence. And in that search for excellence, we do not fear the discovery of any truth, because all truth is God's truth."

Just a great quote, that.

A nice MySpace coda.

Most of my bookstore co-workers don't know my last name, and they've never seen me with a goatee. That makes for some wariness when they get a MySpace friend request from "Griner" with the same picture I use on this blog (the "Homeless Griner Gets a Meal" photo, as Bill so aptly put it once).

So I enjoyed this response from a guy I work with in the cafe quite a bit:

man it took me a few minutes to realise whos myspace this was. u look like morgan spurlock from super size me in that pic and i didnt know what griner meant. so i was thinkin, morgan spurlock wants feed me ice cream and grind me? what a strange mfker

On that note, have a great Thanksgiving, everybody!

Wait, has anyone else heard of this social networking thing?

I've been somewhat, not really, kinda updating my space on MySpace, and I realized some of you might not even know I was on there.

I won't be replacing this blog with it or anything, but I figure it's about the best way for people in the world at large to find me these days. If you're on MySpace, feel free to "friend" me. And for the love of god, someone please post a comment on my MySpace page...I look so unloved.

(I've also added my MySpace page to my links list on the bottom left, just above my completely inactive zombie blog.)

On a similar note (and because I'm actually paid to do this kind of thing), I've been playing around with Orkut.com, a social-networking site run by Google. It's vaguely similar to MySpace, but it's much more refined-looking and clean. Truth be told, though, it just doesn't have a lot to offer once you're set up on there. MySpace at least has the gawking factor of looking around at millions of strange people with no sense of design aesthetic.

Ka-boom.

So I've always heard those cautionary tales about not burning down your home with a turkey fryer, but I can't say anything drove the lesson home quite like our friend Alton Brown.

If you haven't seen the fried-turkey "Good Eats" episode (or heck, even if you have), fast forward to the 2:30 mark in this video clip to see what could go so dramatically wrong in your driveway:

When there was no crawdaddy to be found, we ate coal.

There's a fun/scary tool in today's installment of the Slate.com Carbon Diet, an ongoing series of tips for reducing your CO2 emissions. Today's entry is about electricity, and it links to an EPA site that tells you where your local energy comes from.

Up here in Hoover, we're lovin' us some coal:


The good news is, up until a few years ago, Alabama was 30% coal, 43% suet, 6% moonshine and 3% bacon drippings. So there is some progress.

BTW, there are some great tips in this Slate series, so I really encourage you all to check it out each week.

Here are the two admonishments I was most guilty of today:

• How many times have you left your cell-phone charger plugged in, even when your phone is not? Wall chargers for things like iPods and cameras suck energy out of the socket, even when not attached to their mates. With the national average at five chargers per person, unplugging adds up.

• Rechargeable battery docks for gadgets like drills and handheld vacuum cleaners can draw from the socket five to 20 times more energy than is stored in the battery. Unplug them once tools are juiced.

Oops.

Shrimp in Sake Garlic Butter Sauce: An experiment gone totally right.

We had a supper club gathering the other day with the theme of "Rice." Karen and I were tasked with appetizers, so we poked around until we found a pretty great recipe.

I doubled the recipe below and dropped a Sam's bag o' frozen uncooked shrimp into a cast-iron dutch oven. Easily served 10 as an appetizer and could probably stand alone as an entree. But I'm simply transcribing the recipe the way it was originally written in the link above. Here 'tis:

• In an 8- to 10-inch frying pan over medium heat, stir 1 teaspoon minced garlic and 1 teaspoon minced onion or shallot in 1 teaspoon olive oil until golden brown, about 2 minutes.

• Add 8 ounces rinsed deveined peeled medium shrimp (41 to 50 per lb.) and 1/2 cup sake. Stir often until shrimp are opaque but still moist-looking in center of thickest part (cut to test), 2 to 3 minutes.

• Add 3 tablespoons butter, 1 tablespoon soy sauce, and 1 teaspoon chopped parsley; stir until butter is melted and blended into sauce.

• Spoon into 4 small shallow bowls. Serve with crusty bread or hot cooked rice. Makes 4 appetizer servings.

BTW: I served it over an ice-cream-scoop-sized portion of sushi rice and ladled on the sauce. Great stuff.

Empty forest, happy dogs.

I've posted a collection of photos from last weekend's hike on Pinhoti Trail, about an hour outside Birmingham. I've included two below, but be sure to click here for the brief gallery.

Karen looks out over Sweetwater Lake, the destination of the hike.

Jonas and Oscar go bobbing for my apple in the chilly Sweetwater.

A few Thanksgiving ideas for your consideration.

My mom mentioned via e-mail today that she plans to brine our Thanksgiving turkey before we smoke it. I love that my friends and family are constantly looking at ways to prepare meals far beyond the scope of most cooks. I mean, who else is smoking their bird, much less brining it and then smoking it?

To honor that committment and keep us thinking of new ways to push the envelope, I came up with this list of turkey-preparation techniques we can use for the Thanksgivings to come:

The Head-Butterball: Deliver a series of decisive head-butts to the breast and sternum to tenderize the bird. A few swift elbows to the drumsticks and a groin kick won't hurt, either.

The Feast of Burden: Drag the turkey behind a tractor until it's learned the value of a hard day's work. Then get drunk and scream at the turkey about how college is for sissies.

The Special Delivery: Squeeze the raw turkey all the way into your mailbox, no matter how much bending, breaking and pushing is required. Raise the flag.

The Bogart: Push the bird away, then grab it roughly and kiss it. Then slap it hard and say, "That's for making me love you."

The "Lost": Ask the turkey to help you build a gazebo out of palm fronds. When the turkey asks why you're building a gazebo, stare silently into the distance and think of a long, unrelated story about someone you slept with.

The "Battlestar": Put the turkey in the middle of a table in the middle of your house. Tell everyone that figuring out what to do with the turkey is the most important thing on the planet. Then forget about the turkey until you notice it two seasons later.

The George R.R. Martin: Tell everyone how great the turkey is. Spend years doing it. Then kill it, rape it, and sow it with salt.

The George W. Bush: Kill the turkey, rape it, and sow it with salt. Then spend years telling everyone how great the turkey is.

The Advertising Copywriter: Serve the turkey the same way you always would, but just keep telling everyone it's ham.

The Sublime Strata: Roll the entire bird in maple syrup. Then in ground pistachios. Then in motor oil. Then in jolly ranchers. Then ask yourself what you've done.

Next you're going to say he wasn't a doctor, either?

For those of you who share my love of Neil Patrick Harris' Barney character on "How I Met Your Mother," this might be an ironic news bit:



Well that makes me feel better about some conflicted emotions.

Yes, I'm obsessed with video at the moment.

The other day I showed a video of potter Jerry Brown's mule, mostly just because it was short and fun. But this is the video you should all actually watch. It's hypnotizing and amazingly cool. Seriously, just watch to the end.

Now I need the background on the "when your hunger's pokin at ya pokin at ya" commercial.

Just posting this clip because I've mentioned it to quite a few of you. It shows you can still have fun, even when you're a mega-million-dollar advertising company. (Not my agency, but I think my creative director is right in step with the executive creative director featured toward the end).

If you're not into advertising industry stuff, I promise you'll enjoy this if you like a certain Snickers commercial.



Props to Tim from AdFreak for posting the clip.

There go the heady days of governmental gaybashing and hypocritical morality enforcement.

I pride myself on being a political moderate. I've likely voted for as many Republicans as Democrats.

That said, it's hard not to be excited about today's change in power and the new level of accountability this could bring to Congress.

Here's a description from MSNBC of Nancy Pelosi's goals for the first 100 hours of Democrat control of the house:

The plan includes promises to reform lobbying, enact the recommendations of the bipartisan 9/11 commission, raise the minimum wage to $7.25 an hour, cut the interest rate on student loans in half, streamline Medicare’s prescription drug program and expand federal funding for stem cell research.

Wait a second! I thought Congress only voted on vital things — like protecting us from gays and flag burners and migrant workers! Shame to see that kind of stuff go away...

Dabbling in YouTube.

So here's how I've spent the past two days at work:

As I mentioned before, we launched our mega state arts site recently. The other day, I started pushing everyone to put all these great video clips on YouTube so people could find them without discovering the full site.

Amazingly, our video producer got all the clips compressed, formatted and uploaded in one day. So I spent today refining the clip names and descriptions. I also made playlists for each artist.

So check out our cool little customized YouTube page, and be sure to subscribe if you have a YouTube account. That way, whenever you log onto YouTube, you'll see all the new clips from my interviews (and I don't think it e-mails you a bunch of notifications, in case you were worried about that).

(Oh, and as for clip I posted here, I just wanted to see how many of you could actually understand Jerry Brown...)

Cheers!

A brief architectural field trip.

My dad and I drove out Sunday to find the little-known Wallace House, designed by modernist architect Paul Rudolph, whom I recently profiled for our ongoing state arts project. This house in Athens, Ala., is one of his relatively few pieces in Alabama, where Rudolph was trained at Auburn.

Click here to see the gallery of our photos from the house.

As far as I know, these are the only photos on the Internet of the Wallace House. I could never get any hits from Google or any of the Rudolph sites. Enjoy!

Hey look....art!

I might have mentioned to some of you that I've been driving all over the state, interviewing musicians, artists and scholars for the Year of Alabama Arts. Well, now some of that work is finally online!

Our long-developed Year of Alabama Arts Web site launched the other day. (Click here, then click on the Year of Arts logo on the right to launch the site.)

I wrote pretty much all the copy except event info and the short artist-submitted bios. My main project has been the featured artists. Each month, the state focuses on one person (living or dead). I write the full-length bios and interview the person or an academic (if the artist is dead). You'll see video clips from the interviews on the site.

Be sure to back and click on the "October" tab to see the featured artist bio on Paul Rudolph, an architect educated in Alabama. He was an interesting guy, but the site launched Oct. 31, so not too many people will get to see it.