July 18, 2010

I still eat Bialys every weekend. A local supermarket has a doughy, reasonable facsimile of what a real Bialy tastes like, so I go with that. The name bialy is short for bialystoker kuchen (Bialystok Cake.) Bialystok is a city in Poland. Zero Mostel's character in The Producers was Max Bialystock. Watched it the other night, great line:
Leo Bloom: Actors are not animals! They're human beings!
Max Bialystock: They are? Have you ever eaten with one?



Got to thinking about the past and where do I find the best Bialy. Of course, it is Kossars. It is still there on 367 Grand Street. I will have to make a visit. This is dangerous because once I have the real thing, I will not be able to eat what I am eating now. Kossars used to have an outpost on 14th Street between Ave A and Avenue B. They sold retail if the baker wasn't busy. Ah, Bulkas - a submarine shaped big bialy. I used to go to a Deli and pile on sliced meat for a super hero. I haven't had a Bulka in over 25 years, that will change shortly. I will also hunt down Mimi Sheraton's The Bialy Eaters.




Coming up soon is Summer Streets 2010. NYC temporarily closes Park Avenue and connecting streets from the Brooklyn Bridge to Central Park to motor vehicles and open it up to people on three consecutive Saturdays in August (August 7, 14, & 21).
New this year is Dumpster Pools: Macro-Sea re-fashioning clean, unused shipping containers and transforming them into code-compliant swimming pools.



Coming up on August 22nd is the Hudson River Park BBQ and Blues. Beers include Sam Adams, Coors Light and Blue Moon.



July is Good Beer month. So says the Mayor.



Hot, time for frozen Margaritas. This stuff is good, pour in a bottle of Tequila, put in freezer, wait .... Drink, er slurp.

June 30, 2009 - Beer, Books and Goldman Sachs

Great new site plugging NYC Craft Beer Bars. When Summer
Streets comes in August, I'll plot a Beer crawl along the route.



Newsweek has a special edition devoted to books. Fifty Books of Our Times and Top 100 Books give you enough to think about.

I read seven books of the Fifty list and Forty-Seven
of the Hundred list. I have ten of the unread books in my library.
Using the lists, I now have eleven books to tackle. Including
"The Way We Live Now" by Trollope which I downloaded at
Project Gutenberg.



I subscribe to Newsweek so I got the "Book Cover."
The newsstands have Michael Jackson.

"Newsweek took a a different approach, incorporating Jackson's death into a regularly scheduled issue. But the magazine, a double issue for the weeks of July 6 and 13, has two different covers — with the Jackson cover available on newsstands and subscribers receiving an issue celebrating "What to read now — 50 books that make sense of our times." Number one on the list: "The Way We Live Now," Anthony Trollope's satiric dissection of Victorian financial and moral tribulations, first published in 1875."

The Financial Blogs were abuzz about Matt Taibbi's piece from
Rolling Stone about Goldman-Sachs. It is readable and calls
for people to get the pitchforks. It was up for a while but was
taken down for copyright infringement. Excerpts are now up
at Rolling Stone.