Bruner Blog

My dad sent me a link to this fascinating corporate video from a company called Valcent that shows their system for growing algae in above-ground closed water systems to meet energy needs. Who knew?

How could I not have posted this earlier? A UkeTube classic.

The best new show of the last year, in my opinion, was certainly Mad Men, AMC’s Golden Globe-winning drama about ad agency execs set in 1960 New York City. I’m not going to get into a full review of it — I’m sure you can find plenty — but it’s awesome. This is just a reminder to catch up on the first season if you missed any or all of it (I see it’s available on iTunes and Amazon Unbox) and set your DVRs for 10pm July 27, AMC.

Ugh. I could cry.

How do people keep up with their email? Seriously? It’s the bane of my existence, that and T&E expenses, which have cost me a personal fortune. I could make a down payment on a 3 bedroom in NYC with what I’ve mismanaged in T&E expenses.

Where was I? Oh yes, how ESOMAR ruined my night. ESOMAR is some French acronym for a prestigious international research body. A few years ago I spoke at one of their annual conferences in Montreal. Since then, I’ve routinely ignored their emails, since they haven’t invited me to speak again.

If I didn’t mention, I get a lot of email. I don’t know how many; I don’t like to count. Hundreds a day, I’m sure, including newsletters (from organizations like ESOMAR) and lots of other stuff. Most of it I file without reading. Such as ESOMAR.

But reading an email from a colleague, she mentions that she’s going to be out next week at the annual ESOMAR conference, being held in Budapest.

Hello? Or should I say Halo? (Hungarians will tell you that “hello” is derived from a Hungarian world based on Alexander Graham Bell’s assistant, who was Hungarian, who answered the first phone call. Hungarians say “halo” for “hello” and claim it has something to do with the verb to hear, halni, but I think it’s all a dubious wishful thinking. In fact, I seem to recall it dates back to Shakespeare.)

Point is, I lived in Budapest for five frickin’ years! I have tons of friends there. Had I known ESOMAR was taking place in Budapest this year, I definitely would have boondoggled it! Why, why, why did no one tell me? <sob>

I hadn’t updated my Flickr account in a few months. So I just got around to it. If you been around me with a camera any time in the last few months, there may be picks of you here.

Here’s the complete set. Also, San Francisco, Palo Alto, Amsterdam.

They’ve got the lip syncing on all the silly banter down pretty impressively.

This shit is insane. By random JukeTube surfing, I stumbled upon Zack Kim, a Korean kid is so inanely talented on the guitar it’s mind boggling. Here’s his blog. Here’s a bunch of his stuff on YouTube. According to his blog, he’s in the army, having recently completed basic training, until December 2009! And he says he has almost no time to practice guitar, which is criminal when you see the amazing music he makes.

He’s got this technique I’ve never seen before, where he plays two guitars, one mounted on a clamp, and the other slung around his neck almost like a normal guitar, except that he plays them simultaneously almost like a keyboard, tapping out two parallel melody lines and chords, like two people playing together from the same mind. I showed a few of these to a guitarist/composer/professor friend of mine, who was blown away, saying what this kid is doing is fantastically difficult.

Yet he does it effortlessly. I honestly think he’s the best guitarist I’ve ever seen. It’s like he’s separated the two hemispheres of his brain to play two independent melody lines ambidextrously.

He specializes in classical (e.g., Beethoven’s Fur Elise, Mozart’s Sonata in Cmajor K545, Bach’s Goldberg Variation 1), jazz (e.g., Take Five, Fly Me to the Moon and Autumn Leaves), and TV and video game themes (e.g., Super Mario, Tetris and The Simpsons, below).

Normally, I don’t post UkeTube videos of instrumentalists, as I’m a singer/strummer myself. (Which reminds me, Joe Strummer of Clash fame got his start in music during his hippie youth busking on the streets of London with a ukulele, a factoid I picked up in the documentary Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten.)

But, I do keep track of hot ladies of ukulele, and Brittni Paiva qualifies. She’s cute and she’s a shreader on the uke, as this terrific rendition of Over the Rainbow attests.

Went last nice to one of the coolest spots I’ve discovered in a while, St. Nick’s Pub, at 773 Saint Nicholas Avenue and 147th St, in Sugar Hill, Harlem.

I’ve been grousing for a while that there are few places in Harlem cool enough to tempt people to come uptown for, but obviously I just haven’t done enough exploring. (A reviewer on CitySearch writes, “For me, it’s worth the trip to harlem from brooklyn.”

The place is so fun, a late-night jazz free-for-all that seems not to have much renovation since it first operated in the 1930s. (I remember seeing somewhere the claim it was the oldest continuously operating jazz club in NYC, but I can’t find the citation again.)

We started the night with the late set at Smoke Jazz Club (105th & Broadway) of the Eric Alexander Quartet, a friend of Sean’s from college. That was fun, though the music a bit serious and bill quite expensive. After the set, we had another drink till about 2am, and then a couple of the party left but the rest (John, two visiting friends of his, and Anya, who made the schlep from Brooklyn, bless her) went to St. Nick’s on Anya’s advice.

By quarter-to-three or so when we got there, the joint was jumping, with a hot jam that must have included 10 or more musicians rotating across the stage and clogging up the narrow hall to the bathrooms and the back courtyard (very urban), where smokers and friends chilled.

The crowd was mostly black, though mixed and we five honkies were made most welcome, including two tourists from Montana and Vermont respectively. Neither had been to NYC in a decade or more; they certainly got their money’s worth for an only-in-NY scene. (In retrospect, I realize it was the night of the Sean Bell verdict, the judge ruling the three cops not guilty for shooting unarmed Bell 50 times on his wedding eve. The city has changed, I guess.)

Anyway, point is check out St. Nick’s Pub. It’s a happening joint. If you can swing it, Monday night is suppose to be the hottest night, with a crazy-ass jam session.

Yelp review

CitySearch

All About Jazz

Oh joyous day! I heard on NPR this afternoon that Portishead, one of my all-time favorite bands, is at last releasing a new album after a decade hiatus entitled, appropriately, Third. Best of all, one of the songs, Deep Water, features guitarist Adrian Utley playing the ukulele! You can hear a snippet of it on Amazon (scroll down the page to the music samples).

It’s not out yet, but it should be next week. I’ve ordered mine on Amazon already. (I know that’s oldskool to buy the CD, but I’m still sore about LPs going away.)

This is brilliant.

A friend and I are playing JukeTube, trading favorite vids from years gone by. Seems like a blogworthy game. Can’t pass up this classic:

Adi and I lived four years in San Francisco, from late 1995 to late 1999, a booming time. All in all, we prefer living in NYC, but SF is a great town. I love going back, and, luckily, being in the Internet industry, I get the chance often. In fact, I’ll be there in less than two weeks and again in June, for Google’s sales conference, around my birthday.

In particular, SF is a great restaurant town, one of the best in the US. NYC has some great restaurants, but it has a whole lot of blah ones, too. It’s much easier to get a mediocre or even bad meal in NYC than in SF, for sure.

A friend is visiting there now, so I wrote these four restaurant recommendations for him, and I figured I should post them here for posterity and more readers:

Shalimar, on Jones and O’Farrell, the Tenderloin. Crappy neighborhood, and it’s a divey looking place, but it’s always busy because the food is amazing. Best to go there with a big group so you can order a lot of dishes and share. I recommend the tandoori chicken and also the saag panir, spinach and homemade cheese. It’s all great. I make a pilgrimage to it on every trip. You order at the counter and they deliver to your table. BYOB.

Zarzuela, on Hyde and Union, (Russian Hill neighborhood). Great Spanish tapas. Very romantic. Our favorite romantic spot. Terrific homemade ice cream parlor kitty corner, Swenson’s, olde-thyme style, like the one that was my first job in high school.

The Grand Cafe, in the Hotel Monaco building, on Geary at Taylor, right off Union Square. Trendy French place, cool, grandiose interior. Not cheap, but the food and service are good.

Front Porch, in Noe Valley/Bernal Heights/The Mission neighborhood. Great nouveau California soul food. Fun atmosphere. Near another fantastic ice cream store with exotic flavors, Mitchell’s.

I’m also accepting recommendations for new discoveries for my upcoming trips.

UPDATE

Ton Kiang is a great dim sum place in the Richmond neighborhood I just discovered today. I’d known before about Yank Sing, another famous SF dim sum (or deem sum, as they write on their web site) place, but Yank Sing, just off the edge of the financial district, is quite expensive. Ton Kiang, in the heavily Chinese (and Russian) residential neighborhood of the Richmond, however, was terrific quality traditional dim sum (Yank Sing gets a bit more contemporary/Californian, if I recall) but for a fraction of the price of Yank Sing: $20 a person to eat to our fill and then some.

Actually, it’s not from tonight, it’s from the last episode of My Name Is Earl, which I TiVoed.

I can’t believe Earl tried to kill me. Earl wouldn’t try to kill me. I’m Randy. That would be like peanut butter trying to kill jelly. Peanut butter wouldn’t kill jelly. We’re in the same sandwich!