Welcome to The New Chainik Hocker. I am your host, the eponymous Chainik Hocker, here to share news, reviews, pretty pictures, and silly opinions with you. Contact me at chainik DOT hocker AT gmail DOT com
Sinister Dan over at the The Reasonable Ego posted this one. I'll let him explain it.
The meme is ‘Make a Band’, or ‘Make an Album’ depending on who you ask.
The steps are simple:
1. Go to Wikipedia and hit the random page function; this is the name of your band.
2. Similarly, go to QuotationsPage.com and take the last four words of the very last quote; this will be you album title.
3. Finally, go to this link at Flickr and use the third image; this is your album cover.
Here's what I came up with:
Wow. Great band name, awesome quote, incredibly spooky cover art... and I go and screw it up by using a lolcat generator to put it all together. I suck.
Just some pictures of Jewish interest I've snapped on my way here and there, mostly with my cellphone. A kosher pizza store in Lakewood. The sign is vague, ominous, and includes a threat but no specifics- no time or date or even how much more my mushroom and onion on whole wheat is gonna cost. The Department of Homeland Security needs to hire these guys to do PR. Dougie's parking lot in Woodbourne, New York. The sign, in Yiddish, says 'No Littering'. 'And thou shall eat, and thou shall be satiated, and thou shall bless thy L-rd- and thou shall pay thine tab'. Milk and Honey Bistro, Baltimore MD. One of these things just doesn't belong here... one of these things just isn't the same. B.B. King, Marvine Gaye, Eric Clapton, Steppenwolf, James Brown, and... Sisqo. Adding insult to injury, the sign said something like "best music of the 20th Century" (I'm paraphrasing here). WalMart, Howell, NJ. I'm not sure if this is a sculpture meant to represent the spirit of industry or a pile of crap some contractor left behind by mistake after the building was done. Outside the National Aquarium at Baltimore, Baltimore MD
Okay, those last two had little or nothing to do with Judaism, except that all Jews are snarky wiseguys who have to criticize everything. If you don't like it, get your own blog.
I was in the mall with Mrs Chainik Friday, just chillaxin. We bought some maternity stuff, and I am just going to have to take my wife's word for it that simply buying normal stuff in larger sizes will not be sufficient.
While we were there, we passed by a group of hippies sitting in lawn chairs in front of the Gymboree. This confused me, as I hadn't heard that Phish was reuniting and playing the Freehold Raceway Mall (which has its own Wiki page? of course it does, what doesn't?). More hippies and nerds of various descriptions lined the walls of the mall. The mystery was solved when I got to the Apple store and remembered about the iPhone (looks like Apple has an employee in charge of editing wiki pages).
I went into the Apple Store to look around. I've never been to an Apple store before but I figured it couldn't be very different than any other of the countless computer stores I've ever been in. Boy was I wrong.
Have you ever seen an iPod? It was like that but in retail form. Everything was clean and white and perfectly proportioned and beautifully lit. The bright lights illuminated squeaky clean, helpful, knowledgable, interestingly multiculti staff. I looked at some of the computers there. Did you know that Apple laptops only have one mouse button? How the hell does that work? And the computers look pretty, like desk lamps designed by Frank Gehry. What in the hell? Computers need to look big and clunky and kludgy and functional, like they came out of the boiler room of a Russian submarine. This place looked like Dell had been bought by Ikea.
What a good metaphor. I need to write that down somewhere.
My cellphone is the Motorola Q. It's PC based, with Windows CE (which means it crashes about three times a week, badum-pshh!). It's very awesomely cool, and I get compliments on it wherever I go.
Okay, that last part was a filthy rotten lie. But I still like having a cellphone with an enormous screen and a full sized keyboard and a 1.3 megapixel camera and rotten battery life and the ability to hack into the registry and change stuff.
Mrs Chainik couldn't understand why people would stand in line for a $500 cellphone.
The lonely, misunderstood life of a nerd, I suppose. If only they had girlfriends.
On a related note, some lady in Texas decided to buy a whole big bunch of iPhones so she could sell them on eBay. She got $10,000 in cash and drove to an Apple store, where she paid the nerd who was first in line $800 cash to take his place.
The punchline?
Apple, unlike Sony, placed a 1-per-customer limit on purchases the first day to ensure everyone got one. Mwahahahaha, lady got iPowned. Watch the video here:
Last night we had falafel chicken, which recipe I got from Kosher by Design: Short on Time by Susie Fishbein. And behold, for it was goooooood.
I was pretty simple to make, and it was delicious.
You need:
One and a half chicken breasts, split and cut into strips. One box of dry falafel mix. Extra Virgin olive oil. One tomato. One cucumber. Tehina (I prefer the new Salatim brand. They don't seem to have a website, but I first saw the brand in Lakewood supermarkets around Chanukah time.) Pita. A deep skillet. Two bowls. A wooden spatula. Metal tongs. A fork. Directions:
Pour one third of your dry falafel mix into one bowl and the other two thirds in the other one. Split your chicken breasts and cut into strips. Roll the chicken pieces in the bowl with less falafel mix. Pour some warm water into the bowl with more falafel mix and stir until you have a spreadable paste. Mix well and set aside. Make sure it stands for about ten minutes. Pour olive oil into the skillet until it is filled up about half way and heat it to medium. While it is heating up, finely dice the tomato and the cucumber. When the oil is hot, dip the chicken pieces into the wet falafel mixture so that it is evenly coated on both sides. Place the chicken into the skillet carefully, not touching any other piece. Let it cook evenly on both sides, turning them over with the spatula. When a piece is stiff enough not to bend when you squeeze it with the tongs, take it out of the pan and put it on a plate covered in paper towel. Serve in a pita with tehina and diced vegetables. Serves 2. Status: Meat Time: 40 minutes (taking the ingredients out of the fridge to serving) Difficulty: Beginner Cleanup: not bad. Only used a few utensils, though washing a skillet with an inch of oil in it is a bit of a challenge. Keep the heat on medium and the serving dish close to the pan so oil does't splatter everywhere. Overall: a keeper. Serve informal guests on a Sunday night when barbecue is not an option and you have enough advance warning to air out the apartment after cooking but not enough warning to go shopping. Frying falafel mix makes your apartment smelling like the 415 bus to Yerushalayim. Then again, your guests might not mind that.
Testing out Picassa. So far I'm unhappy with Blogger and photoblogging. Picassa took twice as long to set up this post as I did the previous post. I do like Picassa's photo editing features.
Anyway, this is Tov Pizza, Baltimore MD, after Pesach, from my cellphone. I cleaned the picture up a bit.
I've purchased a digital camera and have been since been taking pictures of random junk. Like this picture I took over Chol Hamoed Pesach. Mrs. Chainik and I went to Washington D.C. to see if the gubmint still needed my money or if I could have some of it back. We walked past the US Navy Memorial, where this dude was looking for his boat. I am still unsure whether this thing is supposed to be silly or poignant or both. Then there was the duck. I took the picture primarily to play with the zoom function, but I'm happy with he composition, I think. I didn't even know Washington D.C. had a Chinatown.
